Podcast appearances and mentions of mark absolutely

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 29, 2024 41:49

Remember, we welcome comments, questions and suggested topics at thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com Suntree Retreat 2024: https://theapsocietyorg.wordpress.com/news-and-events/suntree-retreat-2024/ Season 5 - Episode 3 ----more---- Yucca: Welcome back to The Wonder Science Based Paganism. I'm your host Yucca, Mark: And I'm Mark. Yucca: and we are back in another year. To talk about that February holiday and the Wheel of the Year, Mark: Yeah because this is the first holiday after a spate of activity that is reflected in mainstream holidays like Halloween and Christmas and Hanukkah and those sorts of things. And this one, you know, this one we fly solo as pagans, right? Yucca: right? I mean, there is an associated Catholic celebration at the time, but, you know, that's that's not the whole mainstream culture, Mark: right, it hasn't been secularized the way so many other, you know, holidays have been, that have been turned into sort of generic practices that nearly everybody does. Yeah and here in the Northern Hemisphere, there is noticeably more light now. I was noticing yesterday there was still light in the sky at quarter of six. Yucca: Oh. Mark: that was pretty cool, because, you know, at the solstice, the sun goes down at about 425, Yucca: hmm. Mark: so there was, that's, that's a big change, and it's, it's still wet and cold here because this tends to be the coldest time of the year, really, Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: But, you At least the days aren't so incredibly short and those long, long, long, long nights that we get in the deep of winter. Yucca: Yeah, well, it's so different in different places, what's going on, right? We've talked about this before, but you know, for some people, for me, this is the most bitter time of the year. January, the beginning of February it's actually quite funny, last night, my kids really wanted to do a campfire. And We've been talking about it all week and we had finally rusted out our campfire bowl. So we have a, because we have to be very, even in the winter like this, we have to be really careful about fire safety. So what we have is we have this Like a, a ring of stones with gravel, and then we have one of those fire bowls that's lifted up that you can put a lid on. But we had finally rusted out the bottom of the one that we had had for years, so we had to get a new one and wait for it to come. And, you know, they wanted to do the, the, the first fire and the new bowl and all of that. And it was a full work day for me, so I get out of work and we go outside. And it starts snowing. Mark: Ha ha ha Yucca: And so we're out there trying to get this fire to start in the snow, and the way we ended up finally doing it was putting a hat of foil on top of the fire to get it to go. So because once the fire started, as the snow would come close to it, it would heat up and melt and evaporate and would be fine. But when you're trying to start a wet fire, it was, it was quite, quite a an event to do so. But I was thinking about how, for us, this is the, we will quickly move into spring in a few months, but this is the coldest, most bitter, you know, we had over the past few weeks, we had single digits in Fahrenheit. So, you know, we're, and for those who do Celsius, we're talking about, you know, negative 15 degrees Celsius, and those sorts of temperatures, the ground is frozen. But for other people, This is a holiday in which they're celebrating, oh look, the little flowers are starting to peek through the snow, and spring is here, and everything is brightening up, and I'm like, it's cold. That's what it is here. It's cold. So, and of course, folks who are in, you know, Florida, it's a completely different experience for them, or Southern California, or Anywhere even closer to the equator is just radically different. Mark: One of our community members was talking about how right around now is when it's most tolerable in Florida because it gets so hot and muggy in the summertime and so this, which, you know, would generally be the coldest time of the year, is actually quite pleasant, Yucca: Yeah. Mark: That's the time when you go outside, so it really depends on where you are. Where I am, it's been raining long enough that the hills have all greened up, and so the, and the first wildflowers are coming up. Of course, because of climate change, we've been watching this happen progressively earlier. You know, with the years and Narcissus and daffodils are up. They're they're not fully blooming yet, but they are up. And it's and they're wildflowers like milkmaids and paintbrush and a couple of other of the early ones. Yucca: Our daffodils won't be till April or May. Mark: yeah, yeah, exactly. So, um, so yeah, I mean, this, this brings to mind, you know, how, how in, in atheopaganism we talk about crafting your own wheel of the year, right? Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: Because there is, unlike in a situation like Wicca, where you're kind of celebrating the climate of the Yucca: hmm. Mark: in the 1940s. Because all of that's changed as well. This is more where you craft something that is that reflects what you see around you. And so it's more about connecting with the cycles of nature that are happening where you are. I really like the name that was created by a member of our community for this holiday which is brightening, because that's a little more universal. Yes it may be freezing, but the days are longer. So, there is at least that. Yucca: Yes. Yeah. I think that this holiday really lends itself To that crafting your own wheel of the year, much more than some of the other ones like solstice or hollows might because there isn't the same tie in to mainstream secular culture, where there isn't anything, I mean the closest thing I guess, Valentine's Day? Right? But that really doesn't, that's, that's a few weeks later, that feels really different, I don't know, maybe some people do connect those two things, for me they've been, they've Never had anything to do with each other. That's a totally separate holiday. But there's just nothing else, really, this time of year to, to draw on. So it really is, draw from what's going on in your environment. And, you know, maybe the Wicca influence, which works again for some people who live in a similar climate, but my climate is Very, very different Mark: Right. Yucca: that part of the world, so, Mark: And mine is too, because I'm in a, in a Mediterranean, a quasi Mediterranean climate, more reflective of what like the South, you know, Southern Italy or something like that would be like, Yucca: mm hmm, mm Mark: because of the coastal influence here in Northern California. Yeah, so One of the things that I find about this sort of create your own adventure approach to the Wheel of the Year is that I can take elements that I like from the, the kind of traditional pagan Wiccan model of like the Irish Brigid holiday, You know, at the beginning of February you know, I can adopt some, some metaphorical ideas around that. Like, you know, as we've talked about so many times, one of the things that I do in my Wheel of the Year is to map the course of a human life over the cycle of the Wheel of the Year. And so this holiday is infancy and it becomes associated with with dairy, with milk products. And with sort of nurturing and, and, you know, planning for the future, not that, not that dreaming, imagining, visionary kind of thing that you have at the at the solstice in the deep dark of night, but more like, um, this is like, you know, the dawn waking up early in the morning and going, okay, here's what my day is going to be like. I've got, I've got tools to sharpen and I've got lists to make and I've got seeds to buy and all that kind of stuff. Yucca: So much more concrete planning, can't get your, you can't really get any of those tools actually in the ground yet. Mark: Nope. Yucca: But you can think about, do you have the right ones? What are you going to need? Mark: Right. Right. Yucca: And of course, we're using the metaphor of, you know, planting and all of that, which some you might be doing, but for a lot of people, it's really metaphor about what's going on in the rest of our lives. Mark: yes. And your thoughts about what your aspirations are for this coming cycle, Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: Those, those ideas that we talked about at the beginning of the month, at the beginning of January you know, those, those themes For the new year well now you're starting to move towards concretizing those, right? And so you pull your tools together and maybe your tools need some maintenance, so you take care of that. And You know, you know you want to plant a garden and the ground is solid, but you can still peruse the seed catalogs and order your stuff and start seedlings indoors if you want to for things that take a long time to grow, like onions and so forth. Yucca: Mm Mark: Um, so, and I've been hearing that from, from gardeners in the community and in our mixers and stuff, we've been talking about, you know, people being very excited about their seed catalogs. Um, so, yeah, I, I think it's just, it, and then there's that other aspect of just celebrating the infants and small children in the, in the community, you know, doing, you know, doing stuff that's very nurturing and very kind. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: to, to them and to that part of ourselves. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mm hmm. It's beautiful. Mark: Yeah, it can be I do have a little bit of dissonance around some of the things that I, that I still maintain from when we used to celebrate. I was celebrating with the broader pagan community around this holiday for example, I have a little anvil and sledge that I love the ringing, the repetitive motion and the ringing of the hammer on the sledge and associate it with this time of year. We used to do rituals because, you know, Brigid was a goddess of the forge among many other things, poetry and, you know, a lot of stuff. But we would. Take a length of chain and have one open link. And at the proper time in the ritual, each person by turn would go to the anvil and pound that link shut, creating a loop of chain that would be sort of a symbol of the magic that they were doing for this year, and they could take that home with them. We usually had ribbons threaded through them as well, so they were colorful and pretty. And I still like doing something with that anvil, even though I'm not quite sure what it means metaphorically. Yucca: hmm. Mark: Um, I just like it, and I associate it with this time of year, so I keep it. Yucca: And things like that might change over time, right? So what does that metaphor mean to you? You know, maybe when you do it, or how you do it, can adapt depending on what, where you are in your life, in terms of what life stage you're in, but also where you are in the world, because people, some people stay in the same part of the world their whole lives, and other people move from very, very different climates and change where they are, and so life changes a lot, and all of those symbols and those things change when you go from You know, Miami to Buffalo, or wherever you're talking about. Mark: Presuming your body survives the shock. Yeah, Yucca: move during the summer. Mark: yeah, exactly. I was just thinking, yeah, if you, if you move from Miami to Buffalo in January, you're really asking for trouble. Yucca: But people do it, right? And so when that does, you know, what does that mean to you? And things will shift and you're still trying to figure out you carry with you what you had from before. And you don't necessarily have to just throw that all out because you're suddenly in a different climate. It's going to take time to adjust. Mark: Absolutely. Of course it will. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: and Yucca: Mm Mark: this is a good time to kind of celebrate that transition, too. You know, this is one of those light at the end of the tunnel sabbaths, where it's like, yes, it's cold, yes, the days are still really short, but they're not as short as they were, and it is going to warm up. You know, by, by the time of the next holiday, the, the spring equinox, it will be noticeably warmer than it is now. So, and that's pretty universal, I think. So It's a, it's an opportunity to sort of contemplate persistence and the repeating of cycles, you know, because one of the things about the winter solstice, of course is that idea of making it through the longest night, you know, huddling together and, and, you know, persisting. Well, this is the point at which you kind of start to see the light at the end of the tunnel. And, and so you can celebrate that persistence as well and be kind to yourself as, as a result. Um, you know, a lot of us, we were just talking about this before we started recording, a lot of us have been going through a lot this January. been, it's been very, it's been hard, it's certainly been hard for me, and I know it's been a lot harder for other people in our community. And The idea of a holiday where we, where we sort of look around and say, Hey, we, you know, it looks like we're going to make it. We, it was, it was touch there for a while, but we, we think we're going to make it and, and, you know, persist through another cycle. I think there's a value in that too. Yeah. Yucca: And another perspective on that is This is the time, this is the time that we were preparing for, for all of that other stuff, right? At least in my climate, for us, when we're in the solstice season, we've only really just gone into winter. For many people, it's mid winter, but for us, no, we really, you know, we jumped really quickly from fall into winter. We still have A full stock of, of wood, right? We've got all our fire, we haven't been going through it yet, you know, we still have all of our stores of food, you know, both physical and, and metaphorical. And this is when things aren't quite producing yet. This is when the animals are about to calf. But they haven't quite yet, right? And just knowing that this is the, so this is a time for us when we focus on the things that we depend on. That we are very much part of. You know, we're very bovine based, so we're thinking about the dairy, and the meat from the cows, and the fur, and all of those things that, that we depend on, that are part of the system, of, that without, we couldn't be, right? We need those things. And so recognizing our connection to those, and how important that is, and that, once again, another year. We've been carried through, right? And we can, and we're going to do it again, but there is a place of, of kind of vulnerability and, and surrender to that this time of year. Which, there's something kind of somewhat reassuring about that. I know you wouldn't put the words vulnerable and dependency with reassuring together, but there is sort of, they just actually really do go together nicely. Mark: Yeah. I, I, yeah, I, I really resonate with what you're saying. Yeah, because January, February. Up until the cows and sheep started to give milk are, those are the fasting times. I mean, all, all the stuff that was perishable that you got to gorge on at the solstice, that's all gone. And now what you've got is, you know, root vegetables that are You know, covered with eyes and stuff and stuff like that. All the goodies have been eaten now and now it's just a matter of really kind of toughing it out until nature starts to produce some food in your area again. It's not a surprise that eggs are associated with the spring equinox because, you know, birds are laying then and you could eat them. Yucca: Yeah. The light starts to come back and, I mean, if you keep chickens, that, yeah, depending, your hen might produce a little, lay a little bit during the winter. And unless you're putting artificial lights in there, she's not going to. She's gonna wait till the spring comes back. Or she'll do a few here and there, but really you just don't get, and then all of a sudden there's enough light and it's like, you know, then you hear them making their calls. Mark: Yeah. Yucca: Egg announcement! Everybody know! So, and same thing with the, with the, the wild birds as well. So, oh, and I love the colors. Look forward to that with spring, the flashy colors that they have. Mark: all the mating plumage and stuff. It's so cool. Yeah and that actually reminds me, this is, this is the time when I do my spring fast. My birthday is January 3rd and I take the, and so from the day after my birthday until the spring equinox, I give up something. and it's not a penance thing, it's more of a what is it like to live without Yucca: hmm. Mm Mark: Um, because I think that's That has valuable lessons in it. And I've done various things in various years, but I usually do alcohol, and that's what I'm doing this year. So, it's just, I mean, it's, it's a healthy thing, for one thing, it's good for your liver to stop drinking for a while. And more than that It's kind of a reminder. It resets any habits you might have had. If, if it's like, okay, work is over, it's six o'clock, work is over, time for a beer. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: That sort of pattern that kind of gets locked in where it's like, some days, maybe I don't really need a beer, but I still crack one, right? So it interrupts that pattern and gives you a chance to reset and then be more conscientious about whether or not you want that beer. Yucca: Right. Mark: So that's a Yucca: is the thing that works for you, but, you know, for other people, it might be something completely different, Mark: Oh, sure. Yeah I did sugar one year. God, that was hard. Um, uh, Yucca: I've quit a lot of things in my life, and I have to say sugar is by far the hardest. Mark: yeah, yeah. Oh, man. Yucca: yeah. You know, and some people might do some things like some, some actual, Like, fasting, as well. There's a lot of tradition, many different religions from all over the world have incorporated that, and there's a lot of really powerful potential with that, Mark: Yes. Yucca: you know, done in a mindful, safe way, of course, Mark: Yes. Yeah. Mind, mind your health. Stay hydrated. You know, you don't have to be fanatical about it. But, Yucca: just do your research on what you're doing beforehand. There's a lot of resources but it doesn't have to be, I know there's a lot of focus these days about it as like a weight loss technique or something like that but it can also be just Really wonderful for the mental clarity and the reminder that you get to choose these things and practicing that I choose right now, this is what I'm doing I'm not having that beer, or no, I'm not eating until noon every day, or whatever it is or if you decide to do a five day or whatever, you know, there's just Yeah, Mark: yeah, I mean, I think it's empowering to be able to make those kinds of decisions. And and there are, let me just say right now, the odds are very good, if you're listening to this, that you don't need to lose weight. There are some people who, you know, may actually have health impediments and, and losing weight might be beneficial for that. But the overall obsession with losing weight is a pernicious lie. And you're fine how you are. So fasting is not dieting. It's not recommending that you, that you deprive yourself in order to get smaller. That's not the point. The point is to understand that you do have choices, as you say, Yucca. And that you are in the driver's seat when it comes to things like what you put into your body. Yucca: yeah. Mark: So why don't we talk a little bit about how we observe this season. If you don't want to listen to this part, you can listen to last year's, or the year before, or the year before, or the year before. We just counted, this'll be our fifth. Oh no, it's fourth. Yucca: So it's our fifth year, but we started right after so I think we were, I was looking back and we started right at the beginning of March. So I think we had just, we recorded, we had this wonderful idea when we started the podcast that we would get together once or twice a month and record multiple podcasts and then go about our business. But that didn't end up working out. I think part of it is that it was just so nice to get together weekly Mark: Yeah, Yucca: and just be like, Mark: enjoy it. Yucca: let's just get together and talk and upload, you know, record it a day or two ahead of time and then upload it. But I think that we had tried to record. A few episodes before we launched, so that's why we were thinking that maybe it had been really, literally the week of, so, but yeah, five years. Mark: yeah, man, Yucca: eventful, very, very eventful years, Mark: very eventful years. I'm, time for a tangent, tangent warning. There are a couple of eventful things that I want people to know about that are happening in the atheopagan community. The first one is, if you go to the Atheopagan Society website, Which is TheAPSociety. org. There's a banner right there at the top you can click on to register for the Sun Tree Retreat. Yucca: Really coming up soon. Mark: it's, it's, it's on Labor Day weekend, it's at the end of the summer, so it's not so far away. The, we're working on the program now. Our colleague Michael is putting a lot of work in on that and people have submitted presentations and workshops and rituals that they want to do that we're going to fold into that program. But just be aware, registration is open, please go, you know, if you can't pay the whole amount now, put down a deposit just so that we know that you're coming and we can reserve a space for you. So that's one announcement and the other one is that at the last At the Atheopagan Society Council meeting, we agreed that we are going to start a scouting program for families and children. Yucca: Mm Mark: Um, this will be through the Spiral Scouts program, which is a pagan based scouting program, but it has a lot of the same kinds of badges for outdoor activities and camping, and Crafts and disciplines and all that kind of stuff we will be able to create our own badges, like we could create a critical thinking badge, Yucca: hmm, mm hmm, mm Mark: um, and families will be able to do these activities together and then we'll get together by Zoom so families can interact and kids can interact with one another as well, or if you live close enough to other People, you can be involved and we're going to open this to people that are not atheopagans so that people can do activities with, with their friends nearby. So that's really exciting and there's a survey open right now that we'll put in the show notes. To to gain information about people's interest in participation, how many kids they have that they would like to be involved, all that good kind of stuff, but it's exciting. I'm, I'm really thrilled that we're doing this and shout out to Robin our colleague on formerly on the Atheopagan Society Council, but who's really active in the community, who has done the heavy lifting on researching this and figuring out how it could work, so. Yucca: yeah. Mark: you. So those are my two tangents. Yucca: Those are good tangents. Mark: yeah. Exciting. Yucca: are very excited about both, especially the badges. Mark: Yeah, yeah. We get badges? Well, you have to do stuff to earn them, Yucca: Well, that, that is, well, that makes it more special. There actually really is something about, you know, that, that, the effort and the, the earning it part. Like, yeah, I did it. Mm. Mark: Yeah, it's interesting to me that Spiral Scouts designed itself where they don't have rank. Yucca: Mm Mark: don't elevate in rank the way that, like, the Boy Scouts do, where you're a Tenderfoot and then you're something else and something else and then eventually you're an Eagle Scout. There's no rank in Spiral Scouts. There are categories of age groups. I believe we're gonna start and this is still under discussion, but I believe we're gonna start the Sun Tree Circle, which is what the atheopagan scouting program will be called. I believe we're gonna start that at six years old, because it's pretty hard to gain attention, you know, to have younger than six be able to pay attention on Zoom. Yucca: hmm. Mark: But we're, Yucca: I would imagine that there would be an exception for the, you know, the five year old who really is able to do that, right? That it's more about what is the The expectations of the individual's abilities more so than what's the calendar Mark: Right. Right. Absolutely. Yucca: if you're, you know, five year old and eight months is, you know, they're not left out because of, because they're not quite there yet in Mark: Right. And it's really the parent's call, you know, you know your kids better than anybody else. So it's a matter of you deciding, do you think they've got the capacity to focus, to be able to do these kinds of things? And if they do, well, bring them along. So, As I was saying, there are no ranks in Spiral Scouts. Everybody is equal. It's very egalitarian, which we really like in atheopaganism. But you can earn these badges and do activities together so that you all earn a badge at once. Then you can put that on a sash. Or they also have this cool, like, cowl thing. Yucca: mm Mark: it's called a crepuscular or something. I don't remember what it's called. But it's, it's like a, it's like a hood with a sort of a layer of cloth that hang, that's cut in an oval that hangs kind of over, down over your chest. And you can put badges on that too. Yucca: okay, Mark: So it's, it's just a matter of, you know, which uniform piece you choose to, to do it with. Um, I mean, honestly, I've looked over this stuff and a lot of them are like, well, I want to do that, it sounds really fun. Yucca: hmm, Mark: So, Yucca: right. Mark: what do we do for, for this Sabbath? Oh, what do we call it? We didn't talk about what we call it. Yucca: All right Mark: Go ahead. Yucca: so, second winter, Nosquilváir for us those are usually, I mean, Bridget's Day or Imblic when speaking to people in the broader pagan community, usually second winter. Mark: Mm hmm. I have called this holiday river rain my personal wheel of the year because it really is the holiday of water. This is when all the water in the world is falling from the sky at least in so called normal years because of course we've had drought in the west a lot. In the last 15 years or so because climate is changing. But this year it seems to be pretty good. We've had quite a lot of rain and last year of course was record rain and snow. It was, it was tremendous. So the creeks are all babbling and the hills are green and we get these big tides at the ocean and it's just It's just the time of water, and so I do a lot of celebrating of, of water in, at River Rain. But I also like that term brightening because of its universality. In, in my books, I'm using brightening, and, and then dimming in August which is when we're coming off the summer solstice and it, the days are starting to get noticeably shorter. Yucca: Right. Which is another one of those that I think really lends itself to being really customized and specialized to your environment. Because again, it's one that doesn't have that strong pre existing secular association. Mark: right? Right. Yeah, and climatically it can be so different for people. I mean, where I am you can't see this because we're recording over Zoom, but my background today is the Golden Gate Bridge. In San Francisco, and San Francisco, of course, is very famous for being completely socked in with fog all summer long. And I'm 60 miles north of that along the coast, and we are very, very frequently socked in with fog in the summertime. So, you know, the idea of the blazing sun, you know, of llamas, and it's like, well, where is it? Yucca: Yeah. Mark: So it's just, it's different for everybody and you really have to, once again, choose your own adventure. So are there particular ritual things that you do, Yucca, at this time of year? Yucca: Well, we do take all the furs that we have and brush them out and care for them that way because if you're, you know, sleeping up against it or being up against the furs throughout the year, they start to kind of mat and tangle and so it's just a time to take care of the things that we have. Mark: Mm hmm. Yucca: so that's one. And for the last few years, we've done painting of pine cones, which has been really lovely. Yeah. So where we are, we have two different kinds of pine cones. We have the, the big ones that you would picture when you think of a pine cone from the Ponderosa pines. And those are, you know, those are big, like the size of your fist. And then we have little Pinyon pines, and they make little pine cones that are about golf ball sized, that look like little flowers when they open up. And so we'll go around and collect those and we're starting to make some of the, we'll focus on this a little bit more as we get closer to the equinox, but we'll make little bird feeders with them Or, you know, you dip it in the whatever your fat is, the lard or whatever, and coat it with the seeds. But when you paint the pine cones, it actually takes a much longer time than you would think, because you have to do each of the little nubs, right? And then you string them together and you get these just really beautiful looking decorations that you can hang about. And it doesn't feel Christmassy. Maybe it's because we're not doing like red and green we're doing more like whites and blues and, and things like that. Of course, sometimes the kids want to do different, you know, every single bit has to be a different color so they've got their rainbow ones or Mark: Huh. Nice. Yucca: those are some of the more craft things that we do. Mm Mark: Cool. Very cool. I have, on my focus, my altar, I have a chalice that I, that is my ritual chalice. I use it for various things, pouring libations. All that kind of stuff. It's, it's blue and white with sort of a grapevine design around the outside. And it sits on my focus, and it's always full of rainwater. Because water is life, right? You know, gotta have it there. But since last year, it has also had a coin in the bottom. Yucca: hmm. Mark: Because I got this idea about, you know, water and hopes and wishes and all that kind of stuff to do a wishing well for ritual for this time of year. And so I was we, the group that were doing it, we were, you know, pitching special coins into a, a cauldron. Yucca: hmm. Mark: Full of water, special water, a little bit of water from Glastonbury Tor, and from Bath, and then rainwater, that kind of stuff. And so I took my coin out and I put it in the bottom of that chalice and it's been there ever since. So that's, that's another kind of ritual thing that I like to do at this time of year is create the wishing well. Yucca: Do you fill it up throughout the year? Or are you so, okay. I Mark: just Yucca: be shocked if you were going to be humid enough that that wouldn't evaporate Mark: No, no, no, no. It, it evaporates all the time. And every once in a while I have to clean, you know, scrub it to take, all of the salts accumulated from evaporation off of the chalice. But it's pretty, and it's, it's there, and I use special coins, I've got a it's a French five franc coin from before the Euros, and it's, so it's, it's silver or nickel or something around the, the out part, and then the inner part is bronze or copper or, you know, something with more gold in Yucca: colors. Wow, nice. Oh, Mark: I have two of these that have an amazing backstory that I won't go into, but I have Algerian coins, are octagonal, and have this amazing Arabic script all over the front of them and they just, to me they look like Dungeons and Dragons coins. You know, they look like exotic loot from some ancient time that you would find in a chest somewhere. So, I use one of those two coins when I do this wishing well ritual. Yucca: that sounds fun. Mark: Yeah. it is. Yucca: Do you get together with your circle for this holiday? Or more the big four. Mark: Used to, but we don't anymore. We engage with one another more than we used to because we do a Zoom call every Friday evening. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: So we see one another and check in and stuff on a weekly basis. But as we've gotten older, the distance travel just becomes harder and harder. And so we get together at Hallows and at Yule and and that's, and then usually one other time. Maybe around May Day and, but the, the Live Oak Circle, our Northern California Atheopagan Affinity Group, is getting together more frequently, and we're going to do one of these rituals next Sunday, no, not next Sunday, the Sunday after, the 11th of February, so that'll be fun. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: this, folks. Yucca: Yeah. And they're closer, easier to get to. Mark: Well, it's still a 60 mile drive for me. And it's a little further than that for the folks from Sacramento, but then we've got people from San Jose who are in the south of the South Bay, so the East Bay is a good convening point, and it's only every six or seven weeks, so it's It's not, it's not too bad, and I drive an electric car, so you can feel okay about it. Yucca: Nice and quiet, right? Mark: Yes, it, it, it sings. My car sings. It goes, oh, so great. Yucca: Mine goes so so so so so so so so. I go over dirt washboard. Mark: yeah, yeah, I Yucca: I think even electric car would go so so so so Mark: I, I think so, and probably worse, Yucca: I would not be very happy. Mark: because they're very heavy. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: batteries are super heavy, so. Even though they have a lot of get up and go, that's just because the torque on an electric motor is so much higher than on an internal combustion engine. Yucca: Mm. Mm Mark: Um, yeah, it's a funny thing, I, I mean, I don't really care much about fast cars, but I do get irritated by rude drivers, and, and they seem disproportionately to be drivers of BMWs and Mercedes and Teslas. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: So, what I like to do is to, when the light goes green, I like to leap across the intersection far faster than your incredibly expensive car, sir. Just to kind of make the point that, you know, my car's quite a bit cheaper, but it'll go. Yucca: Mm. Very mature, but Mark: It's satisfying and completely immature. Absolutely immature. Um, you know, there you have it. None of us is perfect. So this has been great, Yucca. Thank you so much. This has been a great conversation. I wish you the best of the season. Yucca: Likewise. And to all of you, thank you. So, here's to another year! Mark: another year. Here we go. Off we go. All right, everybody. We'll, we'll see you next week.

New Year

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 25, 2023 41:39

Remember, we welcome comments, questions and suggested topics at thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com ----more---- Introduction and Welcome --- Yucca: Welcome back to The Wonder Science Based Paganism. I'm your host, Jekka. Mark: And I'm Mark. Reflecting on the End of the Year --- Yucca: And today we are talking about the end of the year and the beginning of a new year. So once again, here we are at the end of a year, Mark: Yeah, so it's a good time for reflecting on what the, what this round of the cycle has been, and then looking forward into the next year we were saying before we started to record, we're still in that, that kind of held breath in the middle of, of the winter solstice season, at least in the, in the northern hemisphere, where Everything seems to kind of stop for a moment, even though there's this frenzy of activity in your personal life, most, many people are not working. There's just a kind of suspension of ordinariness, and there's this moment of what can be a really reflective still time, as well as a very festive time, Yucca: right? This episode should actually come out Christmas morning. So, early Christmas morning, Mark: always a tranquil and reflective time. Yucca: Yes, very relaxed, there's nothing going on. Discussing the Timing of the New Year --- Yucca: Before we get into all of that, let's talk about the timing of the New Year. Okay. Because we're talking about the calendar switching New Year, which many people count as the New Year. For me, that's usually what I go with. That's the turning of the calendar. But for some folks, it's actually at Hallow, some people it's the Solstice, some people change at the Equinox, right? When's New Year's for you? Mark: I have two tracks for that, and they're offset by about ten days. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: For me, the beginning of the sacred cycle of the year is at the winter solstice. But then there's the calendar year, which, you know, as we say, when you're dating something, what number do you put at the end of the of, of the date that you're writing, that changes on January 1st, and so January 1st is also a hinge point, a moment when there's a transition, and that gives us the opportunity to do what we're doing today, which is look back, kind of review what that's all been like for the past cycle, and then imagine and dream forward into the new cycle. Yucca: Mm hmm. For me it's very fuzzy because since I don't have, typically I'm not working on the 31st or the 1st. The exact moment there isn't really a switch over, it's just this sort of fuzzy time period where it's like, oh yeah, it's the new year. I think, kinda, now I gotta get used to writing this other date, but it hasn't really happened yet. it Really takes about until February to get used to it being a different year. Mark: Mm. Reflections on the Past Year --- Yucca: So, and some years just don't feel like they happened, especially in the last few years because of how things were so different with COVID, where some years just, like, feel like they're missing. Mark: Yeah, 2020, I mean, when it happened, 2020 felt like the longest year ever. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: And then 2021 was like a continuation of the longest year ever, it was just more of the same. anD when the various Restrictions were relaxed, it almost felt like, it almost felt like that hadn't happened at all. Impact of COVID-19 on the Perception of Time --- Mark: Like, it was just this sort of separate time when we were all indoors and staying away from everyone but it was outside of history somehow. Yucca: It was almost like we went from 19 to 22. Mark: Mm hmm. Yucca: Like, those, those years, I mean, they're there, but they're not in some ways. It's very, very odd. And this year So much has happened. It's actually quite difficult to keep track of what happened this year and what wasn't this year. Just thinking about what happened within this calendar year. It's, it's been a very full year. Mark: it really has. I mean, everything from floods and earthquakes and volcano eruptions to, you know, political happenings here and there and wars and humanitarian crises, you know, and of course that's what the news feeds us, which is all the bad news, Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: BuT I think it's fair to say that this is a very uncertain time for a lot of people. Yucca: Mm hmm. Changes in the Work Environment --- Mark: I think about You know, in the, in the business world, in the economy, there's this huge movement of companies that are sort of hanging on by their fingernails to their old model and wanting to go back to 2019, and insisting that their workers come back to the office, and the workers are saying, actually, no, thank you, Yucca: Mm Mark: uh, this works much better for me in my life, and I'm not going. And it's, it's a very interesting standoff, Yucca: hmm. Mark: And it's one that I think the, the labor force, the working force is winning. I, I don't think that this idea about you have to be sitting in a chair in a cubicle in order to do your job is, is gonna succeed over the long term. Yucca: Right. At least within certain sectors. There are certain ones that are in person. Mark: Oh, service industries, for sure. Yeah, I mean, those people have to be there and doing their thing. I'm thinking specifically of people that were in an office. Yeah, people who were in an office and then were able to leave, which of course is a tremendous privilege. Challenges of Remote Work --- Mark: I now work fully remotely, and although there are things that are hard about it, like, for example, the fact that you could not register an organization to receive federal funding through, like, a cost sharing agreement or something like that, or a grant with the federal government if you don't have a physical address. Because the Patriot Act regulations consider that dodgy. So I, in order to prove that we really exist, I'm going to have to change the address on our bank account of my employer to my personal address, print out the, the, the bank statement that shows that address, and then change it back to the P. O. box that we have. Because we're a fully remote company and we don't have an office. So, it's just silly. Yucca: Wow. And you're not gonna, you don't have any zoning problems that are gonna come from that? Mark: No, Yucca: Okay. Yeah. Because there's certain areas where you gotta watch out for that, that you're not allowed to have particular businesses Mark: a Yucca: areas and, you know. Mark: I'm sure that that's true, but considering that it's going to last for less than 24 hours I don't really think it's a problem. The primary issue is, I think, they want to know where they can go to find a human being who is working for this company. And has some responsibility if they need to come after us for some reason. And I, there wouldn't be any reason they would need to come after us. I mean, we're a nonprofit organization. We can't even get in trouble with them for taxes. Yucca: Mm hmm. Yeah. But, but they can't go to a P. O. box. So. Mark: right. That's right. So we have to, I'm going to paint a target on my door and, and invite them to come find me. Reflection on Personal and Global Events --- Yucca: So, this year, though, there's things that have been happening on a big scale, Mark: yes, Yucca: and our personal lives, of course, are interwoven with that, right? But at the same time, a lot of what happens in our own lives really doesn't have a lot to do with the outside workings of, you know, what's happening with floods and hurricanes and wars and, you know, life just goes on. for listening. for regular folk. Looking Back and Looking Forward --- Yucca: And so each of us, you know, us, you and me, Mark, and everyone listening, we've all had our own years, our own lives that have happened, and I, we were talking a lot about this last week, about the, about solstice being this wonderful time for reflection. I think that's a, we can continue that in, and, and think about the whole year. And what has that meant to us, and what are some of the lessons that we have learned? Because we have learned lessons, right? And what are those? Mm Mark: of those lessons are things that have crossed our minds consciously, right? Like, okay, this is a situation that doesn't work for me, this is a situation that does work for me this is an activity that really feeds me and helps me to feel energized and happy. thIs is something that is a total waste of time that I've been doing for my entire life, and I'm gonna stop, you know, those kinds of things. But then there's also the sort of the subconscious part, the, uh, the reflection on what can be called shadow work, you know, where you look at All right, there were certainly challenges this year. I mean, I don't think I know of anyone who didn't have a challenge this year. Did I ride those out, and what did I learn from them, and what did they tell me about myself, Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: right? What do they tell me about who I am? Because I think that one of the things that people are really struggling with right now is that we've been through a bunch of hardship with the pandemic and the Trump years and just a lot of really, Yucca: with the economy, Mark: yes, all that stuff. And you know, people, people still feel kind of beat up in many ways and very uncertain. And so, kind of digging down to find out, well, how do I live with that uncertainty? Am I doing okay? Am I, am I kind of walking, wounded, depressed right now? Not, not in a, in a So much a debilitating sense is just kind of a muffling sense, where you don't feel things as much as you used to, and the kinds of things that you enjoy doing, maybe you don't enjoy doing them quite so much. The Importance of Self-Reflection --- Mark: I think it's a good time for sort of a diagnostic take on, on how our mental health is going, and what in life is really serving us, and what in life is not. Yucca: Right? Setting Goals and Intentions for the New Year --- Yucca: Yeah, and thinking about that, the choice and intention that we have in that, right? What do we want? What is serving us? And what, what do we want? How do we want to be in this life? Is that something that I choose or you choose to continue to do? Because it is When it comes to how we're responding, it ultimately is a choice, right? It's not a choice whether, to us as individuals, whether who's in office or what wars are happening, right? But, but how am I, how am I going to respond is something that I have some influence over, and this is just a good time to think about that. Yeah. Mark: Yes. How am I going to show up to reality? Yucca: Yeah. Mark: And a perfectly legitimate approach to that, by the way, is a nice dash of escapism. You know, play your Dungeons and Dragons and watch your Netflix. I mean, checking out for a little while is something that can actually help support you at times when things seem a little overwhelming or unbearable. I mean, you probably want to curate those experiences so you're not watching super depressing movies. Maybe that's not the road you want to follow. Yucca: Unless that does it for you, right? My, my partner will look at things that are like, will get on Reddit and, you know, see the, the terrible relationships and the like, am I the asshole threads and go, wow, my life's not that bad. Mark: life is good, yeah! Yucca: that to be very, like, helpful. Now, if I look at that stuff, I just get it. so worked up and it makes it worse for me, but for some people that really does help. So it, so, you know, know yourself on that. Does that help? Does that not help? You know, what are you consuming? And is that, is that leading you in the way that you want to be developing yourself right now or not? Mark: absolutely. Yeah, that's well said. So, I think there's an opportunity, I mean, one thing that I do on New Year's Eve is I have a dark mirror. Which is a piece of, a circular piece of heavily tinted glass, which I then painted black on the back and put in a frame. Actually first I put a piece of cardboard in the frame and then the glass over the top of that so that there would be some, some backing so that it would be less likely to break the mirror, um, but then I also drew various sigils and arcane symbols and stuff on the cardboard before I put the glass on top of it, so they're, they're down in there somewhere. Yucca: So there's these layers. Okay. Mark: You can't see them at all through the glass, but they're there. And what I like to do is to sort of, you know, light a candle and contemplate my face in this dark mirror on New Year's Eve. I've only done it for a couple of years, but it's a cool thing. You can see this shadowy outline of your face. And if you just keep gazing into it, it all sort of dissolves into geometric shapes. And you just Then you find your mind wandering to particular places and things and ideas and thoughts and, and it's a It's an opportunity to check in with the subconscious, to sort of dip in a little bit and find out, well, what's going on down there? So, that's something you could do, I mean, by candlelight, you could do that with a regular mirror. Yucca: And then you get that lovely flickering with that. Mark: right, yeah. So, something to think about, or some other form of, you know, so called divination, like reading Tarot, or whatever those are. I like the ones, for this kind of work, I like the ones where you work essentially with random imagery and then see what your mind makes out of it, right? Like serumancy, dripping candle wax into water, Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: and it creates shapes as it, you know, cools. And you can see different animals and symbols and all that kind of stuff. Yucca: Yeah? Mark: Yeah. Yucca: Mm hmm. I like the imagery of that. Mm hmm. Mm Mark: So that's looking back. That's, that's the work of reflection, which I think every person who really wants to be happy and wise has to do some of that. You know, you got to look at yourself. You got to look at the world. And there's, uh, you know, there's, there's a level of simply coming to terms and saying, okay, that's real. Yucca: Right. Mark: another level of going. And I'm grateful for all this other stuff that's going on, right? So, you know, the world is a very complex mixture. It's not like thumbs up, thumbs down, and the same is true of ourselves as individuals. And just coming to grips with all of that and having a level of acceptance and gratitude is very helpful, I think. thAt goes back to that thing about the three big lessons that I talk about. The big Okay, the big thank you and the big wow, Yucca: Right, so there's the reflection component there's the looking back and there's also the looking forward. Now I think the looking back, you've got to be able to do that, I think that really does need to come first, or part of it, to be able to look forward to What is it that you want, right? Mark: yeah, Yucca: And as we talked about last time, we're kind of in this dreaming period. We may not really be planting those seeds yet, but we are deciding what are those seeds that we might want to plant. What do we need to do to prepare? Mark: right. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: And that goes into the ritual things that people do at the New Year around resolutions and all that kind of stuff, right? Because I mean, A New Year's resolution is rooted in an imagined self that has changed. It's like, okay, I picture myself and I do not drink six cups of coffee a day. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: And that's great. You know, it's great to have a vision for where you want to go as a person, whether it's something minor or something major. Personally, I don't do New Year's resolutions, and the reason that I don't do them is that the popular framing of them is kind of like the little drummer boy game, where it's like once you lose, it's over. Yucca: hmm. Mark: And if you're really trying to do something hard to change yourself, you have to give yourself some slack. If you're trying to get sober, and you do that for a week and then you have a drink, you don't quit trying to get sober, you just start over, right? Yucca: Right, you get back up, dust yourself off, and keep going. Yeah. Mark: Yeah. Yucca: So I think that one of the things that sometimes we are very good at or don't have a lot of practice in is that, that getting back up part and planning in how, what could go wrong and how am I going to respond when it does go wrong. Mark: Good point. Yucca: And I think that If you are incorporating that into your planning, whatever it is, whether you're planning your financial future, or the process of quitting smoking or drinking, or all of those, any of those things, you are, you're being more realistic, first of all, about the world that we live in, because mistakes do happen. You're, you're building in resilience to being able to better achieve whatever that is. So I think that's a really important step that we forget to do. Mark: Yes. And the self compassion step in there as well. Not excuse making, but recognizing that we're all fallible and that any kind of real personal transformation that's the kind of thing that a New Year's resolution might be made about is not easy, right? It's just not easy. And, um, it is remarkable the degree to which our behaviors as humans are. The Power of Habit and Routine --- Mark: Habitual. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: You know, we have routines for our day, we have routines for making our coffee, we have routines for, you know, what we do about lunch, we have just lots and lots of routines, routines, you know, when we're getting ready to go to bed. Yucca: And there's a very, very practical reason for all of that. So that all of that isn't taking up our space for the other stuff that we need to be doing. For all the other stuff we need to be thinking about. We're not, every time we make our coffee, we aren't going through those steps. We're not giving it the mental energy. Mark: Right. Okay, Yucca: something else. Mark: water. Yucca: Yes, oh wait, when I move my hand, yeah, that's all, that's all just ingrained so that we can do other things and pay attention to the things that might matter more. Now there's today probably not a tiger about to getcha, but we needed the space to be able to be aware for a possible tiger to get to. Now we're thinking about the interaction that we're going to have with our colleague or whatever we're going to tell to our uncle when they say that super offensive thing. But, yeah. Mark: Yeah. And so, because, because so much of what we do is this sort of pre programmed pathway of habit. It can be very hard to reprogram that stuff, because once you start the process, the rest of the steps are automatic. You do this, and then all of those other things just naturally follow. And to be able to be self aware enough in any given moment to say, wait, I'm not going to go any further with this. I'm going to do something else. That is an effort, and it, it requires some real focus, and if you're not able to do it all the time, it requires some real compassion with yourself, so that instead of feeling like a failure or, you know, a moral degenerate, you just feel like someone who is trying to do something hard and is learning how to do it. Yucca: Yeah. And another component is that, that doing those hard things is a skill, um, and sometimes we try to jump to, to a bigger task than we might be ready for, than a bigger change, right? Sometimes we might need to make some smaller changes, get good at practicing. That change before we go to something even bigger. Mark: Yeah. Yucca: And that's just going to depend on whatever it is that you're working on. Mm. Mm Mark: So, having said all that, I'm not a big fan of New Year's resolutions because, as I said, the idea is that it's like a piece of glass. It's like, if it's broken, then it's no longer of any use. And, So, to me, that's just, it's a very, well, frankly, a very Protestant way of looking at things. It's got a lot of judgment folded into it, and it just doesn't really work for me. Setting Themes Instead of Resolutions --- Mark: So what I like to do is to set themes for the new year that are kind of areas that I'm going to pay attention to and work to foster in my life. Yucca: Mm Mark: So, like, last year, My theme this year, actually, my themes were prosperity and security, um, because I hadn't had a job for a year and eight months at that point. I needed to get a job. Yucca: Hmm. Mark: you know, and I did get a job and now I'm working in it and it's lively. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: It's if, you know, Folks that are listening to the podcast that have been on the Facebook or Discord communities know that I am about to be appointed as the Interim Executive Director of the environmental organization that I work for, and there are crises that we are dealing with that are very challenging, and they're going to land in my lap when the previous Executive Director leaves, which was already planned before the crises happened. So, it's not his fault, but still it's, it's a very lively time, and I'm not getting time off at the holidays that I expected to get because I've got to work through the end of the year when he goes. So, but I got a job, and it's a good job working for The protection of wilderness and, and wild places and biodiversity hotspots. So that's, that's pretty cool work to be doing. Yucca: Yeah, so you like to set themes instead of resolutions. And is that something that you do, um, at the same time as your dark mirror ritual? Or is that a separate thing for you? Mark: That's kind of a separate thing. And it doesn't necessarily have to happen like on New Year's Day. Usually I, I do it in the first week of the year, something like that. Just as things are starting to get rolling again, the, the normality is reasserting itself after the strange, still frenzied window of the holidays. Yucca: Mm Mark: Um, so yeah, that's, that's generally when I do it, and I'm still not clear about what my themes will be for the coming year. Um, but I've started thinking about it. Right? Yucca: hmm. Mm Mark: Uh, I, I do have the, the advantage of not having, I mean, I'm going to my Ritual Circles Yule Gathering today, which is sort of my big social Christmas y, Yule y thing. Um, but, I have no plans on Christmas Day itself, so You know, at least that I get off, uh, and I don't know, I'm, I'm gonna try to pry out some more time next week if I possibly can, but it really just depends on what's going on. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: How about you? What are your New Year's practices? Yucca: It's not particularly formal. I, I do like the resolutions it, as long as it has the what we were built, we were talking about built into it where it isn't like a, oh well, I messed it up and can't try again. But I'm, I'm more of a fan of making choices and resolutions. When I, when it comes up, right? So I think that this is a really important time of year to be doing reflection, but I try and do that throughout the year. aNd I'm a little hesitant about the doing anything where I say, oh, I'll wait till Start it on Monday, or start at the beginning of the month, or start at the beginning of the year, because that stuff actually means you don't really want to do it, right? You're not going to do it. If you're really going to do it, start now. Not tonight, not tomorrow, not Monday, now. So I'm kind of in that camp of just like, if I'm going to do it, yeah, I'm a kind of cold turkey person, right? Or pull the band aid off, where just, I'm just going to do it. But know that sometimes I will slip up. And then I have to be, and I can't do the whole, oh, well, I guess, you know, I slipped up, I'll, you know, I'll just do it again and start better tomorrow. Nope, you just gotta be on it. And that's just my particular personality that I've Mark: Huh. Yucca: Some people are very different with that. But I do like the idea of there being a time where people are reflecting on what they want and actively deciding to make a change. Whether that ends up working out or not is a different thing, but I think that it's really important to have that. So I value that that's something that our culture does. I think we could work on the skills around that. Mark: Yeah, that, that's, that's a good point, too. The, yes, there are skills required to have that kind of discipline and, and self compassion. You know, the other thing I wanted to put a word in for is We tend to think of New Year's resolutions as always being something that's like, you know, taking your medicine. It's some, you know, I'm going to abstain from something or I'm going to Yucca: Well, the classic one is I'm going to go to the gym every Mark: Yes. Yucca: the going to the gym is the classic one, right? Yeah. Or losing that 20 pounds. Mark: Yes. Whereas It's also possible to have resolutions that are about good things that you want to add into your life, right? You know, you, you, you could certainly say to yourself, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm gonna carve out Sunday afternoons and I'm gonna go for a hike every Sunday afternoon. That's what I'm gonna do. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: And that's good for you. I mean, that, that, that would be a pleasurable experience that you'd be doing for yourself. You know, something that's additive to your life, you know, it could be I'm going to start having date nights and I'm going to have more sex in my life. It could be I'm going to make sure that I get to that restaurant that I love so much once a month. You know, any of those things. Yucca: And let's, let's take one of those as an example. Let's say it's the going for a hike on Sundays, right? Planning for Success in the New Year --- Yucca: If that is the thing that you're thinking about, well, you can go, okay, well, What can I do right now to help set that up to be more likely for me to be able to do that? And for me, that would be, I'm going to put it in my calendar right now. It's pretty easy to do that. I have a digital cal I like, I have a physical and a digital, but my digital is my main one, then I copy it onto my physical and go, okay, I'm going to see that on my calendar every day. Mark: Yeah. Yucca: And then I'm going to think about, okay, well, what am I going to do If the weather is XYZ, right? Okay, I'm going to set it up right now that I have the equipment that I need to be able to do it. So if it's raining, I'm not going to go, oh, I guess I can't go out because I don't have a raincoat. I just got myself a raincoat, so I can go out, right? I've looked up places that I can go. So when you're in this, like, I'm, when you're in the moment of deciding that that's what you're going to do, you've got energy around it. Think about how you can set yourself up to succeed in that. Mark: Yeah, I mean, in the hiking example, I think one thing that you can do immediately is go get yourself a pair of hiking boots. Yucca: Yeah, right? Get yourself the hiking boots and figure out some of the places. Maybe find a group, if that's what you want to do. Maybe you don't want to go with a group, but is there a group that That is doing it, that you could, that you could join with and then have the positive peer pressure component to it, right? And we always say peer pressure is like this bad thing, but sometimes it's really helpful, right? Like, we've said it before, if this podcast was just one of us trying to do it, Wouldn't have worked, right? Because each week I know, oh, Mark's gonna be there waiting for me. Okay, I'm gonna do it. Whereas if it was just me by myself, we would have gotten a few episodes in 2020 and that'd be it. Right? Mark: Well, yeah, there is something about being accountable to other people. And creating whatever it is that you're trying to do to build some accountability expectation on the part of other people. I know meetup. com tends to have lots of hiking groups and, you know, people that like to do various outdoor things, so that's a resource that you can look for. Yucca: Right. And of course, whatever your goal is, I just grabbed that one because that was an easy one to talk about, right? But, but the point of it is to think about what's going to help me succeed, what might get in the way, how can I respond when that does happen? Because it, there will be a day that the weather is off. There will be a day that you're feeling sick. There will be, those things will happen. So, what are you going to do when they do? Mm Mark: right. And the good news is that as you start doing the thing and enjoying it, since we're talking about things that are additive, that are, that are, you know, that are pleasurable in your life, Um, it will feel weirder and weirder not to do it, because we are creatures of routine, right? And you can get that routine making pattern on your side if you just build up some consistency. Yucca: hmm. Mark: So starting at least with a social group, and I find that a social group is good for hiking. I mean, I like solo hiking a lot, but One thing that a social group is good for is that interactions with other people will tend to distract you from whether your body is hurting or not. Yucca: Yes. Mark: know, if you're having a conversation on the trail and your legs are starting to hurt, you'll, you'll tend to tamp that down to continue the conversation on the trail. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: So, you know, while you're building strength. Yucca: Right. All right, well, Mark, are there other things that you can think about for this turning of the year? Mark: You know, not really. My birthday is two days after New Year's Day, and so the two of them often, you know, they kind of get mushed together. And So the reflection piece tends to be, for me, it tends to be not just the last year, but also, like, life, Yucca: Right. Mark: What have I done? What am I doing? Where am I going? You know, all those kinds of big questions. So I do like to consider those as well, but I think that's really more of a birthday thing. You could do that at any time of the year, Yucca: Right, Mark: but a birthday is a good opportunity for it. Yucca: yeah, I think all of what we've been talking about is great for birthday whatever time of year your birthday is, Mark: Yeah. Even the resolutions, it's like a gift to yourself, right? You're gonna improve something. Yucca: new year, it's not the calendar's new year, but you're starting again, Mark: Right. Absolutely. Yeah. And yep, and mine actually falls on a Wednesday, like the day I was born this year. Yucca: Oh, I was also born on a Wednesday. Mark: Where are you? We're full of woe! Yucca: Yes. I've always liked Wednesday because when I was little, I learned to spell it as Wed nest day. And so every time I write the word, I say Wed nest day in my mind, even decades later. So I've just always enjoyed that day. Mark: That's great. Yucca: So, just the little things to make. Make things fun and enjoyable, Mark: Sure. Yeah. Closing Thoughts and Farewell --- Yucca: Well, we will see everyone again. I think our next episode will be the first. So we won't see all of you until the 2024. Yes. Wow. That sounds like a sci fi date. That doesn't sound real. Mark: God, it's, it's, well, you know, there's so, Yucca: Shouldn't it be like some Book series, or like, sci fi action should be named 20, 24. Mark: You know, there are times when my partner Nemea and I, we look at some of the technological things that are happening and we just say we're living in the future. You know, we remember what it was like in the 70s when a Texas Instruments TI 30 hand calculator was both expensive and rare and, and incredibly powerful, right? And now, you know, now we're doing custom gene based healthcare for people. Yucca: Yeah, Mark: It's like, it's amazing. Yucca: it's a cool time to be alive, right? That's something we should say, it's been, for all the challenges that are world is facing and that we're facing and the crises and all of that. It's also really, there's a lot of cool stuff Mark: there is, Yucca: and just the things we get to learn and the tools we have to study with and, and the opportunities that just didn't exist before. Mark: Right? Right. Yucca: Yeah, there's a, there's a lot, there's a lot to be really grateful for. Mark: Absolutely, and there's, of course, a lot of improvement that needs to happen on many fronts, and that's our responsibility as people who want a better world, um, but I mean, I've known some activists who have fallen into this terrible hole of everything is awful and they're just cynical about everything because it doesn't meet their perfect dream. I don't remember who said it, but something like inside cynic is a frustrated optimist. aNd, uh, no, a frustrated idealist. That was it, a frustrated idealist. And I really work hard not to have that happen, because I think it's such a narrow view of the world. The world is amazing. Life is an amazing ride. And yes, there are terrible things in it, and that's just how it is. The big okay. Yucca: Yep, Mark: Yeah. Well, Yucca, thank you so much. I wish you a Merry Christmas, um, Yucca: and a happy new Mark: a Happy New Year. Yes whatever your celebrations are over the course of the next week I hope that you enjoy them and spend them loved and warm and cozy. Yucca: and we'll see y'all next year.

Winter Solstice 2023

Introvert Biz Growth Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 18, 2023 34:11

2020: https://thewonderpodcast.podbean.com/e/the-winter-solstice/ 2021: https://thewonderpodcast.podbean.com/e/winter-solsticeyule/ 2022: https://thewonderpodcast.podbean.com/e/winter-solsticeyulemidwinter-2022/ Remember, we welcome comments, questions and suggested topics at thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com TRANSCRIPT:----more---- Introduction and Welcome --- Mark: Welcome back to The Wonder of Science-Based Paganism. I'm your host, Mark, Yucca: And I'm Yucca. Mark: and it's that time again. Discussion on Winter Solstice --- Mark: We're going to talk about the winter solstice and all the different things we call it, and what the themes of the season are, and how we celebrate it, and all that good kind of stuff. So happy solstice to everyone. Yucca: That's right. Happy solstice. it's, we're here already. Mark: End of 2023 already. Hard to believe. Yucca: Yeah. So, and the Reflection on the Show's Journey --- Mark: Does that mean we're going into season five? Yucca: we're going into season five. That's right. Mark: Whoa. Yucca: Yeah. On the one hand, it feels like forever. It feels like it's been a decade. On the other hand, I can't believe it. Mark: Yeah. Yucca: start doing this last year? Mark: Yeah. Something like. Yeah. Understanding the Solstice and its Significance --- Yucca: Yeah, well, let's talk about the solstice, and we'll link to some of our previous episodes of the solstice as well, because since this will be, we're going into Season 5, right? We've done this particular one, you know, several years before, and that's one of the lovely things about the Wheel of the Year, ? It keeps turning, and we keep coming back to it, Mark: Right. Yucca: again, and again, and again, but every year it's a little different. Mark: Mm hmm. It's a spiral rather than a circle. Yucca: Yeah, it's like those, you can look up animations of the solar system, but from the perspective, instead of having the sun stationary, having the sun moving through the galaxy, because it is moving just depends on what you're using as your frame of reference, but the planets all going along for the ride as well we're Orbiting the sun and moving with the sun as it goes through the galaxy. This reminds me of that spiral that we do. Mark: Huh. Huh. Exploring the Themes of the Holiday --- Yucca: So, but let's start with themes. So, Mark, what do you call this holiday? Mark: Well, that is a bit of a moving target. For many, many years I've called it Yule. I called it Yule in my book. Yucca: hmm. The Transition from Yule to Midwinter --- Mark: But I'm moving off that into midwinter. Yucca: Mm The Cultural Significance of Yule --- Mark: Um, for a couple of reasons, one of which is that Yule is still a cultural reference. It's a, it's a Scandinavian word that references a winter solstice y kind of holiday that happened around this time of year in those cultures. And I've been very careful not to be drawing from any cultures in my practice. Yucca: hmm. Mark: midwinter, you know, it's the corollary to midsummer. At the summer solstice, and so that just seems like it feels pretty appropriate to me. Yucca: Nice. Okay. Mark: How about you? The Personal Connection to Solstice --- Yucca: uSually solstice, just the winter solstice or solstice sometimes first winter. I don't use midwinter because it's not midwinter for us. Mark: Mm hmm. Yucca: The, it certainly isn't the start of winter the way it's shown on like the calendar in terms of the astronomical seasons, but it's been winter for a month at this point, ? But we will not be into midwinter until, midwinter is more, you know, January, you know, end of January for us where we'll really be in the middle of winter. So, yeah, usually solstice, I've never really connected with the name Yule. I think it's pretty. It's on cards that people send. But it, just I've never had that connection with it. The Separation of Solstice and Christmas --- Yucca: I don't know, it, it, also you'll me, it still has more of a Christmas association. Like, it's still very Christmas. And even though Christmas is happening around the same time, for me, the solstice and Christmas are two very separate things. Mark: Yeah, I guess in my case, because I've really just, I've abandoned Christmas. So I have a lot of people around me, of course, who are celebrating it at work and so forth. The Celebration of Solstice --- Mark: But I, I just adopted solstice celebration and that's what I do now. So I have a tree for that rather than for Christmas, for example. We were just putting lights on it and discovering that the new lights, there aren't quite enough of them. So now we desperately have to find some more and get them delivered immediately. So that'll be fun. They're, they're LEDs. that have a phone app where you can adjust the lights and the patterns and Nemea really, really is excited about this. Yucca: Okay, nice. Mark: Yeah. Yucca: Lovely. Mark: yeah. Yeah. I haven't seen it at night yet, but it'll be pretty, I'm sure. So, yeah, I'm moving away from Yule. Yule seemed like kind of a harmless name to use. When I was writing my book, as opposed to, like, the Celtic names and stuff like that, that feels appropriative to me, and not really relevant to who I am and where I live and all that kind of stuff. Yucca: But in retrospect, it's seeming a little appropriate to you right now. Well, Mark: believe you can appropriate from a dead culture. So I'm not so worried about appropriating Scandinavian stuff from a Norse Worshipping tradition that didn't exist for a thousand years or so after Christianization. But, Yucca: still a lot, depending on where, like in Iceland, and there's still there's still some that is around today, Mark: oh, absolutely. Yucca: not necessarily in the same maybe strength that it was or, or prominence, but there's still aspects of that around. Mark: Well, and there's a resurgence. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: I mean, I think that if we had looked at things in 1950, we probably would have seen a few folk practices, but not really anything that was as organized as, you know, a religious practice, for example. But I, I don't know enough about it to say for certain one way or another. In any case it's safer to simply abandon that name and move with one that's more more generic and English. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: But, you know, when I first came into paganism, everybody called it Yule, and that was okay, and Yucca: That was just what you were around, yeah? Mark: Yeah, um, so whatever you call the winter solstice, and you may call it midsummer if you live in Argentina or, or Brazil, um, whatever you call it we're here to talk about celebrating it, and why don't we talk some about some of the themes that come up at this time of year. There's so much with it. Iconography to this season, you know, with the trees and the Santa Claus and the reindeer and the on and on and on and on. Yucca: You know, I wish that everybody could see the backgrounds that we both came in with today, because there's a huge difference. So, Mark, you've got this scene with this, the pie. I don't know what trees those are back there, but you're Your conifers with the snow on it, and this little night scene, and this little house and it's these dark, you know, blues and grays. And then my background, and this was not planned, is the sun. And it's an up close of the bright bright sun with all the convection cells and Mark: and prominences bursting off the limb. Yucca: of it. The Symbolism of Light and Dark --- Yucca: Yeah and I think that that reflects a big theme for this time of year is the the relationship between the light and the dark and the sun and the night and all of that. Mark: Ooh, nice, nice segue. That was great. Yeah. Yes the whole question of how we relate to darkness. is very much up at this time of year, because there sure is a lot of it in the Northern Hemisphere. And boy, the days are short now, and they're going to get even shorter. Yucca: At my latitude, we get about 14 and a half, almost 15 hours of night at solstice. Mark: wow. Yeah, Yucca: north it's even more extreme. Mark: I think we get close to 16 hours. No, Yucca: No, you can't know not that much, but yeah. Mark: Yeah, 16 and a half hours. 15 and a half hours. Okay, third time's the Yucca: hmm. Mm hmm. Mm The Importance of Rest and Reflection --- Mark: yeah, so, waking up in the dark, finishing work in the dark I, I feel a lot of empathy for people who have commutes during that time, because of course I've done that for many years of work at home, so that's a, that's a relief. And the whole piece about how we fear the dark, and Metaphorically how we fear the darkness in ourselves, the, the, the not so nice stuff. The, uh, the sub, the, the submerged stuff that we've pushed down. tHis is a time of year that's often associated with dreaming and with ghosts and. I see that as useful fodder for contemplation, um, you know, trying to get more of a handle on, well, what am I pushing down? What am I ignoring? What am I afraid of in myself that I'm, that I'm repressing? And maybe it's stuff that needs repressing, that's okay but I'd still like to be aware of it. And, you know, be making conscious choices around all of that. So that's, that's a part of how I come to this season when it relates to light and dark. How about you, Yucca? Yucca: Yeah, I mean, the dark of this going in is a big theme for me. The peaceful, restful night in which you have the deep self reflection and there's a stillness. about it this time. Although, yes, we have so much happening in the holidays like we were talking about last week, but this solstice for me is a really, really contemplative, quiet, inward experience in a lot of ways. And it really is, I mean, I just keep wanting to say going back to this going in, I really, Picture, like, going deep into a cave, down deep into the earth, slash, me, to really kind of understand and reflect and see what, what quiet seeds you have waiting, sleeping there, and, you know, what will become. It's not, things haven't woken up yet. It's what is going to be waking up. What have we been planting? What's there? And there's something much more vulnerable, much more visceral in the dark, away from the light. Mark: Mm hmm. Yeah, I think that's very well said. That whole, that kind of journeying piece about Going down into the dark which is so often a theme of, of guided meditations and solo journeying, inward work. It's a good time for doing that stuff. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: the, the body's circadian rhythms are really oriented towards sleep and it's it's a good time for dreaming. For, and I, I, when I think of, when I think about this in the, the context of the life cycle, and the context of a human life, it's a time for dreaming new stuff, Yucca: hmm. Mm Mark: uh, you know, dreaming new life, dreaming new ideas just starting to get those first glimmerings of what might And that's it. The what you plant next year and work to achieve. Yucca: Yeah, Mark: soon to get firm on those plans. It's all just Yucca: you can't be doing anything with the soil yet. It's, it's, whether there actually is snow or not, it's sleeping under that snow right now. Mark: right, right. Yeah, so it's, it's not a time. I mean, one of the things that I do appreciate about this holiday in the overculture, and there aren't very many things that I appreciate, but one of them is that for a week or so The world seems to hold its breath, at least for Christmas Eve and Christmas, those two days when commerce mostly finally stops, and people are at home with their families, and there's just, there's a silence in the world that I really appreciate, and that seems to persist to some degree through to New Year's. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: Most people are not going to work and I would imagine that Yucca: School's out for, Mark: School is out, Yucca: Yeah. Mark: all that sort of stuff. So, there's that, that withdrawal into the darkness that I really appreciate. The Connection to the Forests --- Yucca: Mm hmm. The other theme, uh, for me is the forests. So I see the, the Wheel of the Year, the different stations at it, or seasons, often celebrating different Types of ecosystems or components that are really connected to how we experience the world as humans and who we're connected with. And this half of the year is the forests. there's a, there's association with the, the forest there, particularly the the pine. Yeah whereas on the other side, we've got the grasslands, ? In the summer and the autumn, there's the grasslands, but now it's, it's the forests and the forest creatures and the and we'll get more into, you know, some of the, the bovines and ungulates and things later, but there's something very Very, for me, kind of ancient and primal about that, too, that kind of pulls back to, you know, different, some of my different roots in terms of my ancestry and that kind of connection with the forest. Mark: Sure. The Celebration of the Sun and Stars --- Yucca: And for a lot of people, it's also a celebration of the sun and of stars, ? And our sun as a star as well. Mark: Huh, yeah, yeah. I like that historically, the forest was a scary place to go into, for one reason, because it was dark, right? So, you know, you built your little island of civilization in your farmstead or whatever it was, but out beyond those fences, there was more uncertainty. And so going into the woods, you never knew what you were going to encounter, and there's more of that mystery, that going into the darkness. Yucca: But it's also necessary. Mark: Well, yes, Yucca: also where the, that's where you would go to hunt, ? That's where you'd go to gather your medicine. That's where you'd go for that. There's, you can't just stay out of it, ? You've got to go back in and be part of that whole system. Mark: which is very much like human psychology. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: You, there are layers and layers and layers of things. There are things that you may think you're over and you may not be over them. There are things that have been profound enough in your life that you may never be over them. You have to revisit them over and over again. You know, I have quite a number of things like that. So I really like, at this time of year, to kind of take a step back, reflect, imagine, do all that sort of soft path under the surface kind of work, Yucca: Mm Mark: um, it just seems like an appropriate time when it's so dark and it's cozy inside and feels relatively safe to contend with some of that stuff. Yucca: Yeah. The Coziness of the Season --- Yucca: I really like the coziness of just really getting into the coziness of this time of year. We, I use a diffuser with different oils in the house, and I don't buy into, like, the, you know, magical properties of, you know, this particular oil does this or that. I'm like, I like the smell of it. So I use it in the house, and I change those out throughout the season. And right now, you know, we're doing a lot of those very kind of Spicy, yummy cedars and cinnamons and all of that, just very cozy stuff this time of year with the big blankets and the cuddling with the kitty cat and all that, the warm drink and all that stuff. Mark: Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, I, I really like to lean into that stuff, too. It's I mean, I suppose it really should be thematic for the next and a half months, something like that, Yucca: Oh, we'll, we'll, Mark: time. Yucca: yep, we'll lean into that a lot. Yeah, and we'll, when we talk about the next holiday, we'll get into that more too. But, um, yeah. Mark: that, we'll talk about slog. Yucca: Slog, yes. So, and I think we said we were going to at some point come back to doing a darkness episode, probably sometime in January or something like that when we're really in the, um, kind of the thick of it. Mark: The deep cold, yeah. Yucca: yeah. Now there's some parts of the holiday too that you were talking about, like doing a tree or things like that. What's that like for you? Mark: Oh boy, I have so many observances at this time of year, so many traditions that I do, other than just redecorating my focus. We do do a tree, we have collected a set of ornaments over the years that are very thematic, a lot of, a lot of wildlife some antique. Glass ornaments from the 40s, 50s, and 60s that, you know, remind me of childhood. Some of the few happy memories that I have of childhood are evoked by the scent of that tree and by, you know, these old ornaments. And don't really buy presents for one another because we have too much stuff as it is. But what we do is put Cozy, appealing, charming things under the tree to sort of celebrate our abundance and so forth. We just got a bunch of internet, we went to, there's a store called Cost Plus here, I don't know if it exists elsewhere. Yucca: Yeah, we've got that here. Mark: it's a, it's an import store and so we got German cookies and English figgy pudding and a bunch of different things like that for the holiday and have those sitting under the tree right now. The Tradition of the Yule Log Ritual --- Mark: We do a Yule log ritual on the solstice night where we decorate, actually what I do is I take the lower half of the trunk of last year's Yule tree, which I sawed off and kept, and of course now it's dry. So what I do is I use some kind of natural fiber twine, like sisal or hemp or something like that, to tie that to a larger log, because, you know, Christmas tree trunks generally are Yucca: Not very thick, yeah. Mark: in diameter at max. And then we decorate that with holly and pyracantha berries and fresh boughs from the, from this year's Yule tree. And then, and we put candles on it. And then we tuck little notes into, under the twine and in amongst the branches and stuff that are wishes for the coming year. And when that's all done and we've done our Booga booga ritual stuff over it. We take it out and we burn it in our fire pit outside. And that's just, It's a cool thing to do. Yucca: hmm. Mark: My ritual circle does a ritual every year where we turn off all the lights in the house of my circle brother and sister. We go outside, you know, we get cold we have a little cauldron with some fire burning in it in the middle of us so we have a little bit of illumination. But we sing songs and really get ourselves into the whole mood and then each of us takes a taper. Lights it from the fire in the cauldron, and we go into the house again, and light every candle in the house, all throughout the Yucca: Oh, nice. Mark: bringing the light back. And that's a ritual that I really enjoy as well. Yucca: hmm. Mm Mark: How about celebrations at your house? Yucca: hmm. Well, we don't have a tree. They, we've got a, at their grandmother's, a Christmas tree. When we lived in the city, I did take I would take branches. Instead of taking the whole tree, I'd take branches and bring them into the house. And part of that was just I, just, I'm not a city person. It was hard for me to be in the city. So I just wanted any, like, I just craved that. The connection with the land that, and we weren't like smack in the middle of the city, we actually kind of on the, you know, a nicer part of town that did have a few trees and a yard and, you know, that sort of thing. But, um, so I would bring stuff in, but now, you know, we're, we're out. You know, out in the country and it doesn't, I don't miss it all in the same way because we're in, we're surrounded by it all the time, so I'm not, you know, feeling that thirst to bring stuff in as much but we do have, we do have some lights we have some like little solar LED Christmas lights that I think are meant to go out on your fence or something like that, but I just have the solar panel sitting in the window. And it does it well enough, and you know, it's a dark time of year, so it doesn't charge a lot, but it'll just go on as soon as the light sets in. Natural light fades and it runs for a few hours and we've gone to sleep at that point. So in terms of sort of the more traditional stuff, we do that. And again, for us, the Christmas and solstice are two different times. It's all related. And we've talked about how, you know, the, the history of, you know, why Christmas is on the day it is and the weird calendar switching stuff that happened and all of that. But when it's solstices and equinoxes, I like to set an alarm for the actual moment, ? Because that is an astronomical moment that happens, not just the day. And so this year, I think it's gonna be 827 p. m. our time. So I've got an alarm set so that when it does happen, the alarm can go off and we can go whoo and put our hands in the air. It's much better than when it happens at like 2 or 3 in the morning, because I do wake the kids up for that. We go whoo and then they go back to sleep. But this time I think it's nice that it's going to be during the day. night when we're still awake, but it's, it's been dark for a few hours at that point, so that'll be lovely. Mark: That sounds great. The Celebration of Solstice in Different Cultures --- Mark: A friend of mine is doing a party that he used to do before COVID. This is the first time since the arrival of COVID, which of course isn't over, but Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: we're doing parties again. So, he's doing a winter solstice vigil, which is an all night party that goes until dawn, and then you greet. Sun at the, they climb up to the top of the hill in San Francisco and greet the, greet the sun. I'm going to go, but I am not going to stay all night because the next morning I have to be in Yucca: isn't it? Solstice is a Wednesday night Mark: I thought it was Thursday. Yucca: I think it's the 21st this year for North America. It'll be the 22nd for Europe. But anyways, it's a Mark: Yeah, the 21st is the Thursday. Yucca: Oh, it is a Thursday? It's not Wednesday? Okay. I just had to Okay, great. Mark: That's good because I took Thursday and Friday off, and if it was on Wednesday , I would feel kind of silly. So. Yucca: Oh yeah, so it is the 21st. I said the day's wrong in my head. All right, so you'll have to, Mark: that next morning I have a part in a Unitarian Universalist solstice service, and so I'm not going to stay up all night, greet the sun, then jump in my car, drive 60 miles, and do that. That that sounds like dangerous to me. Yucca: I don't know about you, but I can't do the whole stay up all night thing. I have not been able to do that in years. People do it for New Years. I'm like, nope, not doing it. I'll Mark: but I don't choose to very often. Yucca: If I need to be up at midnight, I'll go to sleep at 6 and I'll wake myself up at 11 30, but I'm not gonna. Stay up till midnight or one, yeah. Mark: huh. Yucca: Getting Mark: you're a mom, so sleep is really at a premium, Yucca: I like my sleep, yeah. But even before I was a mom, I do not do the staying up. I am not a good person to be around when I'm not rested. Thinking about all that self reflection, we do this type of year. Yeah, I've learned that. Like, nope. Need my sleep. So, but I think for people who that works for, I think that's lovely. I certainly remember being younger and feeling that, like, that kind of altered state of having stayed up all night. Mark: Yeah. More emotionally vulnerable and yeah well, this is a separate topic, but the fire circle rituals that I've been to many of, they go from typically eleven at night until dawn. Yucca: mm hmm, Mark: And there's the same kind of feeling, and you do them three nights in a row, Yucca: mm Mark: and catch some sleep during the day, but of course you don't get a full eight hours, so you are really sleep deprived by the last night, and everybody's just really tender and open, and it's, it's beautiful to be around a ton of people who are like that, but what you don't want to do is operate heavy machinery after having that experience. It's not, not safe. Yucca: Right. Heavy machinery, including cars. Just a Mark: That's, that's what I was meaning Yucca: Oh, yeah. Mark: yeah, cars. And I am 60 miles from San Francisco, and I don't want to have to drive on, you know, being awake 24 hours, Yucca: Yeah. Mark: back up to Santa Rosa. So, yeah, so I'm going to go to the party for a while, and then I'm going to come back, uh, and it'll be great to see some friends down there, but it'll also be great to catch some solid Zs, uh, on the morning before I have to do this other thing. We're we're having a, we're recording this on the 16th? Is Yucca: Yeah, it's Saturday the Mark: Yeah, Saturday the 16th, and tomorrow the Northern California Atheopagan Affinity Group is getting together for a Yule celebration. Yucca: Oh, yay. Mark: Yeah I'm driving down there and we're having a fire pit and sharing delicious, you know, cozy making food. There's a good chance it may rain. So I'm bringing stuff from mulled wine and we can sit inside and listen to the rain and drink mulled wine and Yucca: Lovely. You know, Mark: So are there other things that you do at this time of year? The Evolution of Family Traditions --- Yucca: it's still kind of evolving just as the, my kiddos are getting to an age where they can be part of creating those traditions, we'll see what happens over the next few years, right? So. Mark: Yeah. Yucca: Yeah, Mark: Yeah. I mean, and it's wonderful to let yourself kind of be led by their interests in this as well. Yucca: yeah, Mark: you'll develop traditions that are just your families and that's very cool. Yucca: right, yeah. And who knows, maybe, maybe that'll go, they'll, they'll remember that and do that with their families, or something different, or just it's one of the lovely things about what we were talking about in the beginning about it, just that spiraling back around to it. You know, each year there's something familiar but different, and over time that might change to something very different, but still have some of those same roots. Mark: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's that's this sort of balancing act that happens in, in modern paganism, where on the one hand, it's very DIY, and you can create your own rituals, and those can all be unique. On the other hand, there's something to be said about tradition, about having these things that you do every year at a particular time of year. Just to acknowledge that it's that time of year and to create a particular feeling that you associate with that kind of, that time of year. I really enjoy both. There have been times, well, like, for example, my ritual circle, Dark Sun, does the same Hallows ritual every year. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: and I've talked about that before during those episodes. And there have been times when I've had, like, cool ideas for a hallows ritual, and I would have loved to do it with them, but nope, we're doing the traditional thing. So, I think there's both sides to that. The the to be creative and the desire to create tradition. Yucca: Yeah. Here we are. Conclusion and Farewell --- Mark: Here we are, once again, at the darkest time of year in the Northern Hemisphere, and the brightest in the Southern Hemisphere, so if you're enjoying summer, uh, have a wonderful time, you know, go swimming eat some ice cream, do all those things that one does in the summertime. For those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, we wish you a meaningful and joyous and warm and cozy solstice celebration and time of year. And we will be back next week. Yucca: Yep. See you next week. ----more----

Ethical Pricing

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 1, 2023 49:15

Join me and guest Mark Silver in a deep dive into ethical pricing, dissecting models like "pay what you can" and the intriguing "pay from the heart." Mark, drawing from his new book "Heart Centered Business," emphasizes the crucial elements of transparency, balance, and assertiveness in pricing. The discussion explores ethical selling, treating clients individually, and a holistic, heart-aligned pricing strategy for sustainable business practices. In this episode, Patrick and I talk about his 'pay from the heart' price model as well as: His view on what money is (and it's NOT energy!) How to price ethically The elements of a successful ‘pay what you can' approach Who should adopt these models? Why neediness is not a bad thing Client sovereignty And so much more Ep 178 transcription Sarah: Hello, Humane Marketers. Welcome back to the Humane Marketing Podcast, the place to be for the generation of marketers that cares. This is a show where we talk about running your business in a way that feels good to you, is aligned with your values, and also resonates with today's conscious customers because it's humane, ethical, and non pushy. I'm Sarah Zanacroce, your hippie turned business coach for quietly rebellious entrepreneurs and marketing impact pioneers. Mama bear of the humane marketing circle and renegade author of marketing like we're human and selling like we're human. If after listening to the show for a while, you're ready to move on to the next level and start implementing and would welcome a community of like minded, quietly rebellious entrepreneurs who discuss with transparency what Works and what doesn't work in business, then we'd love to welcome you in our humane marketing circle. If you're picturing your [00:01:00] typical Facebook group, let me paint a new picture for you. This is a closed community of like minded entrepreneurs from all over the world who come together once per month in a zoom circle workshop to hold each other accountable and build their business in a sustainable way. We share with transparency and vulnerability. What works for us. And what doesn't work, so that you can figure out what works for you, instead of keep throwing spaghetti on the wall and seeing what sticks. Find out more at humane. marketing forward slash circle. And if you prefer one on one support from me, my Humane Business Coaching could be just what you need. Whether it's for your marketing, sales, general business building, or help with your big idea like writing a book, I'd love to share my brain and my heart with you, together with my almost 15. Years business experience and help you grow a sustainable business that is joyful and sustainable. If you love this [00:02:00] podcast, wait until I show you my Mama Bear qualities as my one-on-one client. You can find out more at Humane Marketing slash coaching. And finally, if you are a Marketing Impact pioneer and would like to bring Humane Marketing to your organization, have a look at my offers and workshops on my website at Humane. Hello and welcome back Humane Marketers to the Humane Marketing Podcast. Today's conversation fits under the P of Pricing and I'm so happy to have a returning guest Mark Silver from Heart of Business and we're going to be talking about Ethical pricing. If you're a regular here, you know that I'm organizing the conversations around the seven P's of the humane marketing mandala. And if this is your first time here, you probably don't know what I'm talking about, but you can download your [00:03:00] one page marketing plan with the humane marketing version of the seven P's of marketing at humane. marketing forward slash. One page, the number one and the word page. And this comes with seven email prompts to really help you reflect on these different piece for your business. So it's not prescriptive, but really reflective. Everything we do here at humane marketing is questioning our. Assumptions, what we assume and what we think we should be doing in marketing and question those assumptions and then come up with our own ideas. So before I tell you a bit more about Mark, allow me to invite you to a special week of events that is hosted by our community, the Humane Marketing Circle. Expo. We're calling it the Expo because we're exposing many different workshops and events that are all hosted by the members of our [00:04:00] community. It really truly is an unsummit, a different kind of experience that is organized and held by our community. And why an unsummit or what is an unsummit? Uh, it's because it's not just about what you'll learn, but how you'll experience it. Really, we decided that for this event, connection is our guiding star, and we believe in a different kind of learning. One where human connection is just as vital as the knowledge gained. So, our expo is about real conversations. It's shared experiences in a participating atmosphere that emphasizes the power of community. So it's not just about getting in as much content as you can and watching hours and hours of recordings, but really attending live. You can expect workshops, discussions, and connection calls that are aimed at fostering a sense of togetherness. And it's not just about [00:05:00] being passive, but an active member. About sharing, learning, and growing together, the activities range from a LinkedIn profile makeover to doodling for stress relief to data analysis, the human way we have grouped the different offerings into four areas that we believe make up a humane business and they are being. Relating, thinking, and doing. So please join us for free at the humane dot marketing forward slash expo E X P O. And while it's free to join, we'll ask for a small donation to attend the workshops because all revenue goes towards the fundraiser of the first ever real live meeting of our community in Sicily in May, 2024. So I hope to see you at the expo. The link again is humane. marketing forward slash expo and humane is with an [00:06:00] E at the end, humane. marketing forward slash expo. Okay. Back to this week's episode with Mark Silver. Since 1999, Mark has worked with heart centered entrepreneurs to help them realize that Every act of business can be an act of love. Mark is one of the pioneers in integrating real spirituality with the nitty gritty of small business. He founded Heart of Business Inc in 2001. A designated master teacher within his Sufi lineage, he has received his Masters of Divinity. As a coach, teacher, and spiritual healer, he has facilitated. Thousands of individual sessions with entrepreneurs and has led hundreds of classes, seminars, groups, and retreats. His weekly writings and teachings are followed by thousands of people around the globe. A fourth generation entrepreneur prior to heart of business, Mark ran a [00:07:00] distribution business, turned around a struggling nonprofit magazine and worked as a paramedic in the San Francisco Bay area. So in today's episode, we talked about Mark's view on what money is, and it's not energy according to him, how to price ethically, the elements of a successful pay what you can approach, who should adopt these models, why neediness is not a bad thing, client sovereignty, and so much more. So let's dive into this conversation with Mark Silver. Hi, Mark. So good to have you back. Thanks so much for indulging me again and, uh, uh, taking another round and another shot at this conversation. We had some tech issues the first time, so thanks so much for coming Mark: back. Oh, yeah. Oh, my goodness. If I think of all the times I've had tech issues or problems over the last couple of decades. No worries. [00:08:00] Part of it. Sarah: Thank you. Thanks for being here. So we're hosting this conversation under the topic of ethical pricing. You've been on the podcast on a previous episode where we also talked about pricing, but, uh, a different aspect of, well, part of ethical pricing, which is this, uh, thing that you often talk about, which is pay what you want or pay what you can model. So we'll address that as well, but I feel like we could have easily called this episode the, um, ethical business, uh, episode, because you just wrote a book called Heart Centered Business, right? And so I, I read it and I, I'm going to kind of pick your brain about certain questions that came up for me, if that's okay. Mark: Yeah, I'm delighted. I'm delighted to dig in. Sarah: Wonderful. So quite in the first pages of the book, you talk about money. And I think if we talk about ethical pricing, well, [00:09:00] obviously we need to talk about money, right? So this idea that often kind of makes it circles in the spiritual realms is this idea of, uh, money being energy and you make a very clear statement that money is not energy. And so I'd love for you to unpack this and explain, uh, yeah, your approach to it and why money isn't energy. Mark: Yeah, so, um, thank you. It's a, it's a, it's a really good question. So this whole idea that while money's just energy, um, is something that I've seen make the rounds, as you said, in a lot of like spiritual business circles, and it's very often used, I think, as a bit of a, of a bypass, meaning, you know, not really POSITIVE pinpointing. You know, as taking permission to not really look at what's going on. Um, the truth is, it's true. Everything is [00:10:00] energy. Everything is divine at its essence. However, money only exists as money in the physical world. And when something is present in the physical world, it abides by. The, um, constrictions, the restrictions within the physical world, you know, it's like I look out my window and it's, you know, we're moving very close to winter. All the leaves are off the trees. This is not a time to try to plant tomatoes. You know, it's like, it's not going to work. Um, it is a time to plant trees, however. So it's like, Thank you. Because trees need to be dormant in order to over the over the winter. I don't need to get deep into regenerative farming and planting, but I did not know that. So thank you. Yeah. Yeah. You can plant them in the early spring. We could spend the whole episode on trees. I love trees. Anyway, um, so. When we talk about money as energy, it's really important that we're not thinking that that's an excuse [00:11:00] to bypass just being responsible with the, with how it works in the world, you know, it's, you know, there's, we have to pay attention to it. We have to account for it. We have to care for it if we want it to be in our lives. Now, It's also important to say that the economic systems that are in place in this world are extremely unjust there they've been manipulated they've been set up to benefit certain people and to harm others and so it's not like we just want to be. Um, unmindful of questions of justice or ethics or morality when we're dealing with money, but it does behoove us to really open our hearts to dealing with the real world aspects of what is needed to make money work in our lives. [00:12:00] Yeah. Sarah: What comes to mind is, is the, um, I'm missing the words that, you know, the movement, um, that manifests anything, the, yeah, I can't remember the wording right now, but, but basically this idea of that, you know, if you just wish for it hard enough, then it will appear, um, kind of thing. And I, my. Left brain has just never been a big fan of that idea because it, like, I have a hard time actually understanding it because I, I do believe money is physical as well. So it's like, well, how, how is it just going to end up? And then again, sometimes, yes, you know, it does happen. Some weird circumstances make it, make it happen, but I don't think you can just sit back and. And manifest everything, anything and everything you want. Mark: Yeah. So, you know, as a spiritual person and someone who's had a wide [00:13:00] variety of experiences in this world, I've witnessed miracles. I've witnessed things happen. Um, you know, You know, the, because the opposite isn't true either. Everything doesn't have to be hard work. You know, again, going back to, um, the land, like, you can set up, um, regenerative agriculture. You can set up permaculture. So the plants care for themselves. You can set up your business. You can set up your money so that it's easier to do. And it's not so much hard work. However, in the physical world, yeah. The physical world is limited and we're asked to care for one another. We're asked, you know, it's like a one person, you know, if we have a pie, somebody takes the whole pie, nobody else gets to eat. Right. We have to, we're here to share and we're here to care for one another. Right. Sarah: Yeah. So, so if we take this idea of money being physical, so what does that then mean for our ethical pricing? How do we [00:14:00] apply ethical pricing with physical money? Mark: Yeah, it's a really good question. And I, I looked at it very closely in particular in my industry, um, around business development and business coaching and business training. And I have seen for. For years and years and years and years, I mean, since, you know, 20 years, 23 years, I've been doing this now. I've seen people charge. Very high, very, you know, five figures, you know, 10, 000, 20, 000, um, to offer business training for people that are in the very beginnings of their business building. And when I think about ethical pricing at that level, there is no way that a brand new business just starting to take on. Learning about business is going to be able to generate the kind of income and revenue, uh, that is going to make that kind of investment worthwhile. Um, there's no [00:15:00] way that you can jumpstart. You know, it's like a plant takes what it takes to. To grow i've i've watched you know over the years we've seen really clearly that it takes two to four years for a business to go from creation to momentum if you're really focused on business development it doesn't happen in six months it doesn't happen even in twelve months although you can make a lot of progress and gain. Um, and gain traction there, but so ethical pricing is when the investment is balanced. The price that you're paying is balanced with what a reasonable outcome could be. You know, not, um, the, the home run, you know, people who, who do a variety of programs like to point out the stars. It's like, oh, yeah, they did my program and they quadrupled their income. And now they're making 6 figures easy. And 1, they're often hiding. The background of the person that that got those results [00:16:00] and what we really want to see is but what is the average person because you want someone who's doing a program most people are going to get average results and are those average results which can be great average results are great are they are the average results worth the investment or are you hoping on a lottery ticket that you're going to be the one person that gets the home run. We have to pay attention to that. Sarah: I think it's all about honesty and talking about results with honesty. Right. And in humane marketing, we talk a lot about this idea of being transparent and honest marketers. And, and so what we usually see is exaggerated pricing with exaggerated results, like the worst of both cases. Right. Yeah. Like, yeah. And, and so, and the sad thing about this is that. Then people start to [00:17:00] expect miracle results, right? And if you as a humane marketer show up and say, I can't promise you 10 clients within 3 months of working with me. Um, then there's like disappointment or they're like, well, this other person promises this and that. And, and so it really feels like we need to have this conversation that there. Is no miracle solution. Yes. I also believe in miracles, uh, Mark, but in terms of business building, especially if you just start out, well, there, you know, the leaps usually happen a bit later, but in the first year, it's very, it's very seldom that you get these leaps. And especially you can't believe that you. Just because you invest 20, 000, you're going to get these leaps, right? That's exactly right. Honesty conversation we need to have. Yeah, Mark: we do. And the, and the miracles which can come, I've seen people like, you know, they, you know, they, uh, you know, they [00:18:00] suddenly get a slew of clients, but if they don't understand where those clients came from and how to repeat it, then that's not really, you know, that's, that's not really what the, um. That's not really the cause of whatever program you're taking, right? It's like, you can, you can be set up to receive those clients. I've seen people be on the receiving end of miracles, but their business isn't structured to receive people. And then that definitely can create a problem. Like, you know, like, I think of a client, I think of clients who suddenly got big media exposure just because of that. By luck, but then the people that came towards them, they didn't know how to handle that. So, you know, I've worked with clients who say, oh, my goodness, I'm getting this big media exposure happening. It's going to be coming in a couple of weeks. I'm like, okay, let's ABC, like, let's handle these things so that your business is ready to receive whatever comes towards you. But, um, but you, you do need to, um, not. Pinned on [00:19:00] miracles and home runs for your business to work. Sarah: Yeah. So let's talk about this, uh, idea of the sliding scale. So this, um, kind of accessible pricing in order to serve as many people as possible. That's kind of at the opposite end of the spectrum, right? Um, I do notice myself also, um, after having had discussions with colleagues, Having strong emotions with that scheme as well, because I do feel like, well, if we're selling that as an ideal business model, then that is not necessarily the beginning point for everybody either. Because otherwise you're going to burn out and, you know, if you start by just giving away your stuff for like really cheap pricing, then how are you going to get create momentum? So I'm really curious to, to [00:20:00] hear your thoughts on that. Mark: Yeah, I think it's really important to understand that most of us. You know, we've been exposed to this, you know, large scale capitalist model, where it's like, we sell a lot for cheap, you know, the, the Walmart or Amazon or whatever model, and it's not healthy, you know, all of the small businesses, micro businesses are boutique businesses, you know, you can't, you can't. You can't sell 10, 000 or 100, 000. It's not realistic that you're going to get there very quickly. It takes, you know, if that's your business model, there's other things that we need to put in place. And we should talk to make sure that's really where you want to go. However, I'm very actually against sliding scale. And my pay from the heart model is significantly different than just a plain sliding scale. What I observed years ago with people using sliding scales was that there were, uh, Two things generally going on. [00:21:00] One was that there was this genuine desire to make their work accessible. Beautiful, beautiful. It's really important. There are people who can't access services, and it's wonderful to see people make attempts to make services available to them. However, what most people who were using sliding skills weren't doing is facing their own money issues. And so. Instead of facing their own money issues and coming up with something that works, they were unloading their money issues on somebody else and saying, Oh, I'm struggling to name a price. So you name a price. And when that works, when that happens, one, people do tend to go to the bottom of the scale. Um, just because. You know, struggling on their own in whatever ways, but, um, what also happens, which people didn't really realize till I started pointing this out to some of my clients was that if someone is struggling with money [00:22:00] issues themselves and everyone in this culture. Is if they have to choose the price they might choose not to buy it all because it's such an emotional struggle between i want to i want to care for myself i don't have a lot but i want to pay what they're worth it's too much to decide i'm just going to leave right yeah exactly exactly and overwhelmed so when we talk about pay from the heart there's a whole structure around it because, you You do need to, you know, I encourage people to really get clear on what your own business needs are and make that really clear to people. You know, we, we've just opened up a new course and, um. And we have, uh, our suggested price and we have a minimum price, and then we have a way for people to pay less than the minimum. But we make very clear that, oh, this [00:23:00] is for people who are going, who are struggling with food or shelter people that are, you know, like, it would do you a lot of harm. This is not just pay whatever's comfortable. Right? Because we need to be supported also. And so it's, it's much more of a collaborative process than just letting people choose whatever it is they want to, whatever they want to pay. Sarah: Yeah. And I highly recommend we'll, we'll put the link in the, in the show notes page to the initial, the earlier discussion we had was only about that. And what I remember you saying, and I kind of gave this picture to my client of the, the star yoga pose, you know, take up space. I remember you're saying that I'm like, Oh yeah, that's a good way to put it. It's like you need to take up space as well and take up the space to explain things. You know, usually people just say, pay whatever you want. And then, like you said, they usually pick the lowest price. And if you [00:24:00] explain it well, then they'll understand. Um, And that takes you kind of showing up with, with confidence and space. Yeah. Right. Mark: And we, and we made a mistake with this, um, in that we had launched it and we were way on the generous side. Going, you know, if you're really struggling, you know, et cetera, um, and people were paying below our minimum way more than was sustainable for us. And we're looking at it going, what's going on? And then we looked at our language. We're like, Oh, we're not taking a strong stand. And ever since we've taken a stronger stand, um, kind with kindness and with love and compassion, but including our business in the compassion with one of our offers, um, people really responded. And we really started seeing a market increase people, people care, you know, our clients are adults. You know, if [00:25:00] someone's paying you, they're going to be an adult, even if you work with kids, even if your business works with kids, the people paying you are the adults somehow, and they know that your business needs. You know, that you need to get paid, like, they know that it costs money to access services. And so you're not going to be surprising anyone when you put out what your financial needs are around and off. Right. Sarah: So, so, yeah, this idea of neediness also comes up. In the book, and I guess that's what you meant by it, right? This, this are that our business has needs as well. And of course, as individuals have needs, but that in this case, neediness is not a bad thing. Um, is there anything else you want to add to that point of neediness? Mark: Oh, my goodness. So this is a huge spiritual topic. And it's one of the core [00:26:00] things that we like to help people with. And in fact, our one of our flagship courses, the heart of money and power is really at heart about coming into a relationship with healthy neediness. We're all needy. We're all needy. It's this culture that has Told us that neediness is not healthy or not right, but we often aim our neediness in a wrong direction in a way where we're not going to get our needs met. And I'm, I mean, I'm needy. I can't manufacture the air that I'm breathing. I can't create the water that I drink. I can't force food to grow. You know, I'm needy on so many people doing their part in our culture for, you know, to survive. And so. When we can embrace our neediness, then we can be in a healthy relationship with it. We can be appropriate with it. When we try to [00:27:00] shove our neediness down and not embrace it is when it comes out sideways. You know, that's when it comes out in the sales conversation or comes out in our marketing. And it has this weird feeling of like, Oh, please buy for me or I'm not going to make it. And that feels horrible. To you as the business owner and it also obviously feels horrible to the client, but if we can just slow down and allow our heart to be fed our heart to drink in the love to drink in the care to know that we're cared for deeply. Then that allows us to feel grounded and solid and then we can start to provide a refuge for people and our clients can then lean into us not feeling like we're trying to extract something from them. Yes, we want to get paid, but we really want to care for people at the same time and it becomes a [00:28:00] much healthier interchange and it allows us to get at our marketing and our sales in a way that can feel really good in the heart. Because we're not trying to get something from people in that same kind of twisted way. Sarah: I feel like our, both our work is so aligned. You, you talk about sacred selling. I talk about selling like we're human. I have this visual of having a conversation with your client in the serene garden, right? So this groundedness is very much there. And, and I, yeah, I really hear you with what that means in terms of the neediness. But then there's also this other aspect of the client sovereignty, which you also talk about in the book, right? It's kind of this counter piece almost, uh, where yes, we have needs, but we also want the client to be sovereign and, you know, make their own decision and respect their decision. And their [00:29:00] timing and all of that, which is not what we're usually told in marketing or selling. We are told to push at any cost. So, um, yeah, what's the sacred selling look like for you? Mark: Well, it's, it's so interesting because when I, when I. If my former career was as a paramedic, or 1 of my former careers was as a paramedic in the San Francisco Bay area, and I did it for some years in pretty intense environments like Oakland, California. And I, um. When I came into business more came back into business, I should say, I found that I was really good at sales and I was like, how does this may even make sense? And I realized that because I was a really skilled paramedic, I was skilled at doing rapid assessments and chaotic, chaotic environments where people were often scared or upset. I was good at. Caring for people and [00:30:00] assessing that that's basically what sales is. It's this assessment that, um, we're trying to get to the bottom of what is it that they really need. It's interesting. Another interesting thing that I discovered was that in, uh. English the word to sell the word cell comes from an old English word cell gen. I'm not pronouncing it correctly. I don't speak old English. Um, but the original meaning is to give something to someone in response to a request. So if you were to say, hey, Mark, can I have that pencil and I handed you the pencil that's selling. I would have sold the pencil to you because you asked for it. That's the heart of what we're trying to do is just get people what they need, not force people to make a decision that's entirely on us. So one of the, one of the keys of selling, uh, successfully is actually, and I. And I, I think this can be counterintuitive [00:31:00] sometimes for people that are hard centered, is that it's a numbers game. Um, you, you want your business to reach enough people that your need to have business and clients, which is totally legitimate. Of course, we need business and clients doesn't put that pressure on any one individual person that you're talking to. You can't really help it so much and it takes a lot of spiritual work and heart soothing in the beginning of business because you don't have such a wide network yet. You know, to not put that pressure, but as a business develops part of what happens is that. You naturally start to gain a larger audience i mean you work towards it you develop it you put things in place that help grow the audience and i don't mean tens of thousands of people i just mean hundreds of people or maybe a couple thousand that your business is reaching. So that when you have an offer, there are people that are naturally ready to [00:32:00] step forward and you're not putting pressure on people that aren't ready. And you can easily in your heart, give people space when they're not ready. Sarah: Yeah, that's a really good way to, to put into perspective why we, I don't, I'm not a big fan of the word audience, but in this case, it makes sense, right? Why we need our work to reach. Several people, not just the ones that we talk to, and then we feel like we have to push our services onto them. So, so to me, it's always been such a gift when I put out an offer and then people resonate with that offer and come to me, right? That's such a more natural way of, of then having this, uh, humane, uh, gentle sales conversation. Mark: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. And I'll tell you why I. Do you like the word audience? Um, I think that, and there may be other words. I'd be interested to hear what your [00:33:00] language is around it, but audience for me has an element of honesty about it, you know, so for instance, heart of business, we reach thousands of people, you know, our emails. When we send out our Wednesday email, or if I'm on social media, there's thousands of people I don't have, I have a warm relationship and anyone who steps forward to talk to me, we have a warm connection. But I don't have an in, we do as a business. And for me as a, as the, as the head of the business, I don't have a warm, uh, I don't have an intimate. Relationship with each person on the list and, um, I care, obviously, you know, we care. It's not to say we don't care, but until someone steps forward and wants to have a deeper relationship, you know, joins our learning community or joins a course or something, then it becomes 2 way relationship. And until then, it really is a relationship. With an [00:34:00] audience, um, with, uh, you know, that's more or less a one way communication, unless someone chooses to reach out and email me, which I always, I mean, I love to get those messages, but the truth is the vast majority of people don't. So, Sarah: yeah, no, and I get that. I think it's, it's, it's more the. Again, it's one of those buzzwords that has gotten a bad reputation because once you unpack the word, yeah, that's what the word means, right? And there's nothing bad with that word. But the problem is that, um, the guru marketers, you know, they tell you to scale your audience and grow. And so it becomes this negative thing where, again, we make. People feel like they have to have this giant audience and, you know, not everybody wants to have the same kind of business module like you do, or some of the other, um, marketers do. And so that's why to me, when I work with one on one coaching clients, for [00:35:00] example, they're like, I don't have an audience. What is an audience? Right. And so when I explain it to them, what it means, then. Then they get it, right? So it's all a matter of making sure that we speak the same language and understand Mark: each other. It's so important because these words do get really twisted. Sarah: Yeah, yeah. Wonderful. Well, let's come full circle and come back to pricing. Um, any kind of, um, thoughts, actions that you'd like our listeners, watchers to, to take and just to. Go deeper into this ethical pricing. Mark: Um, I think so. Arriving at a price is a little bit of an alchemical process. Um, you know, you need to have some knowledge. Like, I really encourage people to figure out what are your financial needs? You know, what are the needs of the business? You know, what is it? What is a price that a That you don't [00:36:00] have to be overwhelmed by clients in order to make a living and at the same time we need to be aware of our somatic body of our of our heart resonance because especially when we're newer in business i like to see people prioritize getting energy flowing through their business as opposed to like sticking to their guns and quote unquote charging what they're worth which doesn't make any sense that phrase doesn't even, You Make any sense. Um, and so oftentimes people begin, you know, we encourage people like, what is the price that you feel in your heart, in your body? You can say without shaking that you can put out there and feel really solid about and feel comfortable welcoming people in, even if it's lower than what you really need. Because what happens is, is that yeah. You know it's it's it's never only the price that's keeping people from saying yes [00:37:00] there's all these other pieces that need to be looked at in terms of how are you communicating and are you reaching the right people and you know and a lot of other things and. If all of those things are true, you know, and you get all of those things in alignment, then finding the price feels resonant in your heart. Even if it's lower, we'll start to get the flow going if your business is newer and you don't have a lot of flow. And so, um, and then that builds up your container. You start to go, Oh, I like working with clients. Oh, I've gotten to practice the sales conversation. I've gotten good at that. Oh, I like, I see that my offer is working and I've managed to tweak it. And once those things happen, generally, we start to feel comfortable at a higher price at a price that may be, you know, more sustainable. On the other hand, yeah. There may be people who have been in business for a while, and [00:38:00] they're actually not charging enough. And that's part of why their business is struggling. And, you know, and I'm talking about ethically in terms of being in alignment with themselves. We, I, I've had clients who said, you know, I've learned from this person, they've been doing it for 40 years, they're a master, but they're only charging this much. And so how can I charge more than them? And I, I often say, you know, well, they're, you know, they may be really good at what they do, but maybe they haven't worked on their money, money issues, maybe their pricing is stuck in a somatic memory from the 1980s instead of, you know, present day and, um. And a lot of times people in those positions don't realize how they're affecting everybody downstream. And so there's like an ethical need to embrace sustainable pricing, you know, sustainable pricing for the business owner. I think ethical pricing. We often look at, okay, are we [00:39:00] doing harm to the client? And that we do, we need to pay attention to that. But I also, you know, Notice that a lot of, uh, people that we work with see the systemic injustices, see the ways that people are struggling. And I'm saying, and I like to tell people, you cannot make up for systemic injustices on your own back. It needs to be a collective response and, um, and often our economic, economic system is asking, you know, exactly the people who shouldn't be giving yet more free labor, you know, women, people of color, um, queer folks, people who are disabled. Always the good people, right? Right. The people, the people who are, who are already being taxed by the system, who are already being asked to give more and to do more. And. These folks, and, you know, you need to have, um, sustainable pricing. Sarah: [00:40:00] Yeah, I'm so glad you brought up this other side, which I, yeah, I truly believe in both sides and I do, I kind of see the same thing happening as in the sustainability field where there's so many good people, you know, putting. Themselves and, and, and their work into making these changes that we need to make, but they're not taking care of themselves, right? They're burning out in masses and, and that is not humane, uh, either. And so that that's not helping anybody. And so it's the same for the, for the humane business owner. Well, we need to actually first have you take care of yourself. Uh, once you are sustainable and you feel like I've taken care of myself without working day and night, right? A humane best business, in my opinion, is a business where you do actually have time to be human. We need to have this. Time to [00:41:00] to, yeah, create spaciousness for being human again, which we have, you know, forgotten how to do. You're talking about, you know, um, uh, plants and things like that. Well, we don't do that anymore because we're working all the time. But, um, so, so, yeah, I could go go on and on about this. This is like. One of my passion topics right now, but it's so true that we need to listen to, to both of these things. Yes. We want to be ethical towards others, but also towards ourselves. Mark: Absolutely. Yeah. Well, and I think it's important for most people to, you know, people come into the field seeing, Oh, Hey, you know, come into their business thinking, Oh, I want to do this. You know, I want to make it accessible. I want to, you know, And I'd like to remind folks that most businesses, the business model that they're ultimately going to be successful with is not a business model that is accessible when they're in the very beginning of their business [00:42:00] and, um, you know, our pay from the heart model for our learning community. I couldn't even even created the learning community back in the beginning of our business. I didn't have the material created. I didn't have the solidity and the knowledge and the clarity that I have now on how to help people without having my hands directly on their business, you know, 1 to 1. And so it's quite a natural progression to, um. Start with getting the business on sound footing and then as you're, as you evolve and as you gain knowledge, and as you get clear on your work and your body of work, then to start to think about how can I shift this business model, not only to make it easier for me, but also to meet some of the goals I have around making it accessible to others. Sarah: Yeah, that's a good strategy. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much, Mark. Why don't you tell people where they can find. About [00:43:00] you and also your book and maybe tell us about who the ideal reader is for your book as well. Mark: Yeah, thank you. Well, I mean, we live at heart of business dot com, uh, you know, if you're interested, you know, you may want to just start with our email list and make sure that, you know, I, I'm, I'm actually who I say I am and that the. Stuff that's coming out is consistent, you know, and it make and it makes sense on practical on practical level. Um, you can on our homepage if you scroll down, uh, uh, get an excerpt from the book, um, to read the 1st chapter and to see the table of contents. And, um, again, that's a good way to get it. Get a sense of it. Um, it's interesting when you write a book, it's definitely for, you know, heart of business. We specialize in working with micro businesses, which is people that are self employed up to, you know, maybe a double handful of people involved in the business, you know, from [00:44:00] people that are just trying to replace the professional salary all the way up to, you know, small businesses that might be struggling. Yeah. Making high six figures or low seven figures. That's kind of our range. Um, but I've been told by a lot of people that work with much larger companies, that the book actually applies very beautifully to people working in large corporations. And, um, um, and, uh, and so, yeah, um, we're just trying to get as much support. I'm really grateful. You're doing the work that you're doing, Sarah, because, um. We need as much love in the realm of business as we can get. There is so much healing and so much change that's needed, uh, to, um, undo the damage and to have a much more humane, much healthier, much more heart centered approach, uh, to being in business in this world. Sarah: For sure. Yeah. Thank you. I [00:45:00] always have one last question, Mark, and that's, what are you grateful for today or this week? Mark: Oh, I am so grateful for where we live. Um, I get to, I know a lot of people don't have access to this and I'm just grateful to have access to, um, the woods and, uh, and the land around our house where we can grow food and where we can walk the dogs and just be in connection with nature. And it's just, um, it's just a, it's a balm on my soul. Sarah: Hmm. Wonderful. I'm grateful our internet connection worked for this conversation. Mark: Yes. That too. That too. Sarah: Thanks so much for hanging out, Mark. Mark: Yeah. Thank you for having me. Sarah: I hope you got great value and insights from listening to this episode. You can find out more about Mark and [00:46:00] his work at heartofbusiness. com. And of course, go over to heartcenteredbusinessbook. com to get a free excerpt of the book and some other information and of course, also links to buy the book. If you are looking for others who think like you, then why not join us? During the week of December 4th to 8th in our community, we're hosting an expo. We call it the Humane Marketing Circle Expo, and we'd love to see you there. At the expo that is hosted by our community members, we prioritize connection as a guiding principle. This means you'll find engaging workshops, intimate discussions, study groups, and even a walk in nature. We believe in the power of a Collective wisdom, learning together and creating a truly participative atmosphere. The sessions are curated into four themed categories, being, relating, thinking, and doing, and these [00:47:00] are all addressing spectrum of topics that engage both our left and right brain, our masculine and feminine energies. So would you like to be part of that? Well, go over to humane. marketing forward slash expo and join us for this week of Humane Business Offerings. It's free to join, and we just ask for small donations to attend the workshops and the raised funds all go towards our first live event of the community in Sicily in May, 2020. You find the show notes of this episode at humane. marketing forward slash H M 178. And on this beautiful page, you'll also. Find a series of free offers, the Humane Business Manifesto, and the free Gentle Confidence mini course, as well as my two books, Marketing Like We're Human and Selling Like We're Human. Thanks so much for listening and being part of a generation of marketers who cares for yourself, your [00:48:00] clients, and the planet. We are change makers before we are marketers, so go be the change you want to see in the world. Speak soon.[00:49:00]

Interview: Lauren of The Atheopagan Society Council

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 9, 2023 51:01

Revolutionary Witchcraft- Sarah Lyons Rest is Resistance by Tricia Hersey Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit Emergence Magazine podcast https://www.ejnet.org/ej/principles.pdf S4E32 TRANSCRIPT:----more---- Yucca: Welcome back to the Wonder Science Paganism. I'm your host, Yucca. Mark: and I'm Mark. Yucca: And today we are honored to have another guest. So Lauren, who is a new member of the Atheopagan Society Council. So, welcome, Lauren. Lauren: Thanks. I'm so glad to be here. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: We're really excited to have you, so thank you for taking the time to come on the show. Lauren: Yeah, no, my pleasure. Thanks for inviting me. I'm so tickled to be here. Yucca: Yeah. So, Lauren, will you tell us a little bit about you and your, I guess, so we were saying atheopagan origin story? Lauren: Sure. And you know, I think like a lot of these stories, it's a little long, so forgive me if I get kind of long-winded here, but I hope that, you Yucca: so much fun. We love to listen to it, so. Lauren: I'm glad. Yeah, I'm sort of hopeful that some of what I talk about could just help someone else. So I figured I would lay it all out there. So yeah, I'm I'm from New York, I'm from New York City, and I grew up in a, I would say, fairly Catholic family. We went to Mass regularly outside of just like Christmas and Easter. I was an altar girl I had my first communion, sort of like the whole, all the steps that you do as a child in the Catholic Church. And I really loved it, like I loved being an altar girl, I loved, being part of rituals and ceremonies and made me feel important and special, and I really loved the community that we had in the church as a kid. But as I got a little bit older when I was sort of like in early adolescence, my mom came out as a lesbian. And, as you can imagine, this was like the early 2000s being part of the LGBTQ plus community, and the Catholic Church didn't really mix, so, we left that community. And at the same time, again, early 2000s, there was a lot of just like witch stuff happening in pop culture, like the Harry Potter books were like exploding, all this stuff was going on. And I expressed an interest in that. And an adult in my life was like, Oh, hey, you like it. Thank you. Witchy things, like let me bring you to this New Age bookstore. So, I went to this New Age bookstore and I bought a couple of books on Wicca, and it was just like a complete revelation for me. I was so enamored with, with Wicca, with Learning about this whole religious practice that was, it, it felt magical and empowering and, you know, feminist and accepting and all of these things, and I was just still a really deeply faithful person like, you Completely believed in God, and I remember reading a passage in one of the books that I got that was like, you can imagine God as a diamond, and in Christianity, you're just looking at one facet of the diamond, and this was a way to like, look at all of these other facets, and I just loved that. So throughout my, my whole teenage era, I had this like fairly serious solitary practice. I never tried to build any sort of real life community. I think the stigma was just like too high for me to ever even try, but I would like read stuff online and, and I would do ritual by myself. When I was in my, I guess, around 20 years old late teens to, to 20, sort of two things happened that kind of pushed me to a different place. So, unfortunately I had this tragic experience where my best friend from childhood passed away. And that triggered like a classic crisis of faith where it's, you know, why does God let bad things happen to good people? And I couldn't find a satisfying answer to that question. And I also met the person who would become my, my life partner and now spouse. who just moved at that time from the UK to the U. S. and I think sort of found himself in this place of like, wow, like, everything is really Christian here in this way that I feel really uncomfortable with. And he was sort of one of the first, like, loud atheists that I'd ever encountered. So for the rest of sort of my early 20s, I just I was in this process of deconstructing, and I remember being about 25, and I, I totered around like those same books I bought from that New Age shop, like to all these different apartments, all these different moments in my life, and I recycled them because I couldn't reconcile the idea of hanging on to that stuff with just not believing in God anymore. And I cried, like it was a really painful moment, but it just sort of felt like this is what I have to do to be. to not have that cognitive dissonance in my mind. So that's where like this other big thread of, I guess, my origin story picks up, which is like the environmental activism piece. So I've, I've always been involved in social justice movements of various kinds, like basically from childhood. I'd always done environmental and sustainability work through like high school and college. And then I was living in New York City when Hurricane Sandy hit in 2012. And for people who aren't particular, aren't familiar with that particular climate disaster, it was really devastating. So after that, I, I was trying to figure out how to make climate action my job and how to like make a, a career fighting for a livable planet. So, eventually, it took me a couple years, but that led me to law school, and I decided to try to become an environmental lawyer. I started law school in the fall of 2016 in Washington, D. C. And people listening from the U. S. probably remember that we had a liberal election that year, and Donald Trump was elected basically right as I started law school. So... I spent those three years that I was in law school just like completely burning the candle at both ends, 110 percent in on like all of the things. So during the day I was like interning at environmental law organizations and taking classes. And evenings and weekends I was like, if you can think of a way to take like civic action, like I did it. I attended protests. I organized at least one. I called Congress. I worked in Congress. Like, I just did all of those things. It was a really crazy three years, but I think a lot of us who were in law school, in particular at that time in DC, felt like we had this huge responsibility being physically there to, like, do everything we could both on the democracy front and on the climate front. So, I was, I was glad to be there and glad to do it. So after I graduated, I spent a year working for a judge in New York. We were trying to come back to New York and we were able to do that. It's this thing called clerking, where you spend a year working for a judge. And when you're clerking, you're not allowed to do any political activity at all. And You could do a whole separate podcast about why that's like unfair and a little bit silly, but it is what it is. So it was this strange sort of pause in my life where I couldn't do all of the things that I had been doing, you know, basically for the previous decade. And then in the spring of my clerkship year, COVID happened. So it was like a doubling down where it felt like You know, I think maybe in some ways, particularly where we were, right in the heart of it for many months, everything was falling apart and I felt like I could do nothing about it. And that was really hard. I was, I think, tired and scared and I remember saying to my partner, like, I, I need to pull on something that is not myself. And I don't know if that makes sense outside of my own head, but... It was this moment where I think I was really longing to like turn to prayer like I would have when I was a person of faith and I just like couldn't do that. So it just tugged me back towards paganism and thinking like, is there, is there any way that I could work this back into my life in a way that feels authentic? The other thing that was sort of happening that year too was we had just gotten married and we were thinking seriously about starting a family. And that raises all sorts of questions too about like, well, how, how are we going to raise this kid? And we're two people who don't believe in God, but we want community around our kid and thinking hard about those questions and the sort of life that we wanted to build in that way. So I just started poking around on the internet and I think, you know, many Googles in, I found the sass Reddit page and On some, some post, I saw a comment that mentioned atheopaganism, and I like, found the community from there. So, I guess I've only really been in the community, I think it's been like, less than a year, but I've just been, you know, it was such a wonderful moment when I found it, because it's like, oh my gosh, not only are there other people who like, believe how I believe, but... They've like built a community and a whole thing and just the more I read the more excited I got. So, I've just been really thrilled to be here even though, you know, it took me a long time to find it. I'm really glad that I'm here now. Yeah, so that's my origin story. Yucca: That's wonderful, Mark: that is, that's a great story, wow. Myself, I got bitten by a radioactive spider, but that's, we'll, we'll talk about that another time. Yucca: For those who aren't familiar, Stas. Lauren: Oh yeah, I think it's something called, it's something like skeptical atheist and science seeking witches. So it's folks who are into sort of, Rituals and practices to help them develop themselves, but they don't believe in what I would call like Harry Potter style magic. It's sort of the magic of working with your own psyche. So that, that really resonated with me. And I think there's a fair amount of crossover, like folks who are in that community and folks who are in this one. Yeah. Mark: yeah, yeah. Yucca: And what were some of the things that when you found the atheopagan community that really stood out to you, that you were like, Oh, this is, this part is what I'm connecting with. Lauren: Yeah. You know, I think just sort of the basic framework that we are all folks who are here because we think the earth is sacred. Yeah. And we want to find ways to celebrate that and celebrate life and community and, and just a rejection of things that aren't verifiably real in a way that didn't feel, I guess, demeaning or, or like there was any ridicule. And that mattered a lot to me because like some of the most important people in my life are people of like deep faith and I've, I've never been super comfortable with the sort of like, let's all just like make fun of. Christian sort of tact. And I didn't feel like I saw that here a lot. And I was also really struck, like, when I joined the Facebook group, there are those three screening questions that basically, I think, are designed to, like, weed out folks who, you know, are not ready to say, Black Lives Matter, or to, you know, be willing to live their values. So the fact that those were right up front, I think, immediately put me at ease. Yeah, it's, you know, probably not obvious to listeners, but I'm a Black and Latina person, and I think, you know, the pagan world, as I've encountered it, it's like a fairly white space, so there's a little bit of guarding that I have coming into any sort of Pagan community. So there were signals right off the bat that like, this was a place where it was going to feel comfortable. And I think once I kind of got past the screening questions, all of that, that held true. Mark: I'm, I'm really delighted to hear you say that, because it's a really important priority for us. You know, we're, we just had our quarterly meeting of the Atheopagan Society Council, so you had your first meeting there, and we're working on our strategic plan, and our number one goal of the three goals we've identified for our upcoming couple of years is a focus on belonging, equity. Diversity, inclusion, justice. The, the activism element of atheopaganism is something that that's really important to me, the idea that we're not just doing this to be the best people we can, but also to make the best world we can. You know, to redress wrongs and to live in sustainable harmony as best we can with, with the ecosystem the biosphere. Lauren: yeah. Mark: I'm really excited, you know, to hear you articulate, you know, all that political passion, because I have a ton of it myself, and it's, it's just, it's just so important at this time. Yucca: Hm. Lauren: Yeah, I think so too. And I think something that has been so wonderful for me coming into this community I think I didn't know it, but I was really looking for some way to both soothe my own eco anxiety and, and climate anxiety, and, and sort of elevate the work that I do, like during the day and sort of the organizing I still do in the evenings, as something sacred and something that, you know, wasn't just an intellectual exercise. Mark: Yeah. Lauren: I was always... During like the Trump D. C. era of my life, when I would go to actions that were led by, you know, like progressive Christian groups or, or sometimes indigenous folks, and they would bring that element of a spiritual connection, I think there was Like a longing on my part that I felt those things too, but I had no, I felt like I couldn't lay claim to those feelings in any way, and being part of the atheopagan community I think is a way to sort of, like, say loud and proud, the earth is sacred, and we all believe that, and we're here for that, and Thank you. Thank you. And you can do that without appropriating anyone's culture or sort of claiming things that aren't yours to claim, but by, I think, acknowledging what's, what belongs to all of us as human beings it's a framework to access that, and I really appreciate that about this community. Yucca: Hm. Mark: Ah, yeah, it's wonderful to hear you say that. I just kind of like to sit with it for a while, it's the because we're living in quite a time, you know? It's gotten very late on, on a number of fronts, and and it's been far too long on other fronts, and it's just, A lot of things are coming to a boil now at the same time, and so being active participants in that is just so essential. I've been really encouraged to see how much interest there is in, in the community, in, you know, standing up for those principles, standing up for for, for inclusion and for environmentalism and for feminism and for the LGBTQ community and the BIPOC community and, you know, really saying, you know, drawing a line in the sand and saying, this is where we stand. Lauren: yeah, it's really great and really special. And I think one thing that I would love to bring to the community as in part of my role, I guess, on the council is just helping people. Find their voice if they're having trouble doing that, or otherwise facilitate or provide opportunities to act on our principles. I don't know, I don't know if I said this at any point, but, you know, in my day job now I am an environmental attorney. I bring, thank you, it's, it's pretty awesome, I'm not gonna lie. I do a lot of legal work to try to protect communities facing environmental racism or to try to protect ecosystems and I think that As an attorney, part of my job is to make sure that people who aren't attorneys know that the attorneys can't do everything, right? And not that I'm accusing anyone in the community of having those sentiments, but sometimes I, I worry a little bit, but it's like, ah, someone will just sue and it'll be fine. Like, no, it won't. And there are a million ways that everybody has to stand up for, for things they care about and places they care about. And those places aren't just like the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls or whatever. They're like that polluted block down your street or, you know, the water coming out of your tap. I mean, there is, there is something to protect and fight for wherever you live. You know, I don't exactly know yet how I can be that sort of resource in the community, but that's, that's my intention, I guess, just starting out now. Yucca: And you've also been active in the affinity groups, right? Lauren: Yeah, so, I noticed that we had these things called affinity groups when I first joined, and that there wasn't a BIPOC group, so I, I guess I started that. You know, I think that in predominantly white spaces, often, At least, you know, speaking purely for myself, there's this sort of impulse to be like, Alright, where are the people of color? How do I find them? You know, because it's, it's sort of a, it's another layer of like, signal that like, this is an okay place to be if there are already other people there who look like you. So, I didn't really know how to do that without an affinity group, so I just made one. And it's been really great. It's, it's a, it's a great community of folks. We're reading a book together now, which is, is fun. And we're hoping to do sort of a book club type meeting soon. I will say like, you know, speaking particularly as a Black person, I think that atheopaganism has this particular appeal as like an explicitly modern creation. And. think, you know, again, speaking from a distance, I've never been in a community like this before, but I see a lot of hints of sort of pagans meticulously recreating their own genealogy to, like, figure out what gods they should worship or what practices they should have or whatever trying to reconstruct these, like, ancient practices. And if you're a Black person in America, odds are that's not even an option for you, right? There's only so far back you can go. So I think that there's a, there's a little psychic relief that I found and like, oh, well, I don't even have to worry about my ability to know, you know, exactly what corner of what place my ancestors came from to like use these tools. I can just focus on the now and focus on the land that I'm on. And I'll say too, now I'm just sort of riffing, but Mark: hmm. Lauren: you know, I would really love to just serve as an example that, That this space isn't just for, like, crunchy white people, and I think that that is a stereotype of paganism that I've encountered in the Black community, personally, that, like, you know, it's, it's just a stereotype that's out there. Like, we have just as much need and, and right to access these practices as anyone else. So, I think there's maybe some unlearning that I had to do and, and some unlearning that lots of us have to do to be Anything we want to be and not just what society says we should be or should stay away from. So, I like to, I would like to think that I can help just make explicit that this is a path that is open to everyone no matter what your origin, no matter what your skin color. Mark: Absolutely. And I was so grateful when you created the BIPOC Affinity Group, because I really wanted there to be one. Obviously I couldn't have anything to do with the creation of that. And other people in the community were just too busy they, they, you know, they weren't going to make the lift in order to make that happen, but it was so important that it be there. I will say a thing about what you were riffing on, which is that when I first created atheopaganism, it was just for myself. As, you know, an American who doesn't have any, like, family legacy of English or Irish or Scottish things, just kind of a person plunked here on Turtle Island with a relationship with land, but no inheritance of culture other than capitalism, and so I, you know, I crafted it with the idea that it would be modern and informed by modern values. But there are people in the community for whom, you know, like Indigenous people, for example, you know, for whom drawing back on those cultural threads is really important. And so, it's not... It's not that you can't do that, it's that you don't have to. You can still have a powerful practice that's very meaningful to you, starting from modernity and your own life and your own experience. Lauren: Yeah, Mark: yeah. Lauren: yeah, I completely 1000 percent agree. And I should say, like, the, you know, some of the folks in the BIPOC group are like reading a book about hoodoo, which is a magical practice developed by people who came to America through enslavement. And, yeah, I definitely see value in looking back and drawing on, on traditions and, you know, white, white American culture in the last 400 years, that's a culture too. And there's, there's stuff to draw from everywhere. I think that, sorry, I'm losing my train of thought here. No, there, there's something to draw from. And, and there, in every culture, right, there are magical traditions in your, in your family tree, right? And often for people of color, I think they're a little bit overlooked. One great little fact that I read in trying to educate myself more about these traditions in the African American community was that when folks were escaping slavery on the Underground Railroad, they would carry magical totems with them to give them bravery. And I just love the idea that You know, sure, there, maybe there's no quote unquote real magic there, but the bravery is real and the political action it led to is real, so, yeah, I absolutely don't mean to say, like, working, looking backwards isn't, isn't good or isn't worth it or anything, but I, I really appreciate the, the emphasis on modernity and, and that you can make this what you want, whether or not you have access to looking back in your own ancestry. Mark: Mm hmm. Yucca: And we've been using the term BIPOC, I think that might be a little bit new for some people. Some people are familiar with it, but can you define that for our listeners who haven't come across this term before, or have only seen it written? Lauren: Absolutely. Thanks for that flag. Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, BIPOC. That's what that stands for. And I should say too, you know, our community, the BIPOC group is, is small, it's still developing, as it should, and I think that we aren't necessarily committed to using that term forever. There are Interesting debates happening within various cultural groups in, you know, I can only speak about, I think, the U. S., but within the U. S. about what umbrella term we should use to refer to ourselves and, and those things are in flux. So that name isn't chiseled in stone, but it's a handy shorthand, I think, for racialized groups in the United States to, to come together in this moment for the purposes of this community. Yeah. Mark: Yeah, that's great. Thank you. You know, I, I was just in DC a few weeks ago on a lobby trip. And I had the good fortune of getting a reservation to go to the National Museum of African American Culture and History. I've I mean, honestly, I think every American should be marched through there the, it was profound and infuriating and tragic and inspiring and just an extraordinary experience and I really recommend it to anyone who doesn't feel that they have a grounding in, in what that experience is, at least to the degree that I can get my mind around it as not being that kind of person Lauren: got the chance to go before we left DC and it's, it's an amazing museum. Hard recommend. Yeah. Mark: So, you're now on the Atheopagan Society Council and you've talked a little about, you know, some of your, some of the roles that you kind of see yourself as playing within the community. Where, where do you see us going? What I mean, we're, we're relatively recent. We I, I published the essay that became the book in 2009 which is now starting to be some years ago but time is slow that way Yucca: council's been around four years at this point. Mark: right, right, the, we only just got our non profit Thank you. You know, status a couple of years ago and but that was an important step to say this is more than about individuals that are working within this community now. We want to create a container and a vehicle for these ideas, you know, to be sustained into the future. So, you've, I know you've been to one meeting, but do you have Yucca: a member of the community for quite a while now as well, Lauren: Yeah, yeah, a year ish or so. Yeah. Man, I, I guess my hopes are really simple, that it just keeps growing, and it stays inclusive, and that it We become a place where folks from all walks of life feel comfortable. I should say I'm also part of the parents affinity group. I have a young child and we've been talking about some really cool stuff, like maybe a scouting program. And... I think that there are so many people who are in a similar boat to me, where like they're, they're parenting, they didn't necessarily grow up with a pagan, much less an atheopagan, orientation towards things, and they're trying to figure out how to raise kids with these values, so I hope that that space in particular continues to grow. I think I've, I've heard you, Mark, maybe on another episode talk about a book of rituals that you're coming out with. I think it would be wonderful if... We start seeing folks sharing examples of how they celebrate the seasons and, and life transitions, and I know that like some of that is out there already, but I think for, for lots of people, including myself, there's both. There's like a path paving there that can be really helpful to see examples of how you actually like do atheopaganism. And. And also a sense of community when you know, you know, of course, like, you know, a ritual for me here in New York City probably wouldn't relate with the land and in the same way that it would for either of you in different parts of the world, but it's nice to think about some commonality, because I think You know, Mark: mm hmm, Lauren: when you're in Catholic Mass and you know that this Mass is really similar to a Mass happening hundreds of miles away, that, that builds that sense, so, finding common threads if we can, I think, would be a nice way to keep the community cohesive, even as it continues to grow and, and spread and, and morph based on the geography of, of the particular atheopagan or atheopagan family. Yeah. Mark: Yeah, now that you mention it the idea comes to mind, I mean, my book is coming out in April, and it's much more of a how to book than the first Atheopaganism book, which was, the first half of which is theory, really and then the second is about the principles and, you know, doing rituals and the holidays and all that kind of stuff. But maybe another project would be editing a crowdsourced ritual book. Yucca: like an anthology, Mark: Yeah, so, you Yucca: out to the community and getting Mark: yeah, Yucca: not everybody, but whoever wants to share their insights and sharing that, that could be really, that could be amazing, I Mark: That could be really good. Yeah, I mean, the other thought that I had that I floated a while ago, and it just seems that nobody has the spoons for it, is a parenting book that I would edit. But I can't write because I'm not a parent. Yucca: Well, I am really interested in that one. It just needs to, gotta get the timing to work on that if other people are interested as well. Mark: I really Yucca: I can't do the whole book, but I think that there's some sections that I'd be able to do. Mark: great, yeah, and I mean, I, I think the, one of the things that we are presented with now as an opportunity is the whole question about families and kids and how we engage families and, you know, basically build Culture within family units, right? Which I just think is so exciting. And I know John Cleveland Host, who's currently the chair of the Atheopagan Society, I mean, his, he kind of stumbled into all of this because of wanting to have culture for his children. So, yeah, it's that really presents a, a great opportunity, I think. Yucca: And we're getting folks now with different ages. I mean, his kids, his oldest are probably going to be off to college soon, right? And a lot of, I know there's a lot of us with real little ones, but there's a good range of... of ages as well. Mark: Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah oh, I'm just, I, I can see the book sitting on a shelf right now, and it's not, it's not very thin either. There's a, there's a lot in it. Yucca: Well, and even just within the, the umbrella of paganism in general, there aren't a lot of parent books. I mean, there's Circle Round, there's, Lauren, can you think of any others that Lauren: I mean, when I was pregnant, I looked and I have Circle Round sitting on my bookshelf. Mark: too. Lauren: I think there's I'm, I'm blanking on the title, but there was another book with sort of like things for, you know, stories for kids. Of course, I think there's all sorts of. of material for kids to engage with the seasons, but in terms of actual parenting tips or, or guides, no, family practices, no, no. I don't think there's, if there's stuff out there that I haven't found it, so I would be really grateful for some sort of anthology coming out of the community. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: Gotta happen. Yucca: And then, of course, I don't think there's anything specifically from an atheist point of view. Right, there's plenty of like you were saying, the seasonal kind of secular stuff that's like, yes, it's fall and the leaves are changing, but not really something that is, that's coming at it from that angle. Mark: right. Lauren: Yeah. And I know that Like I know some folks who are involved in like Unitarian Universalist congregations, and I think they might have some curriculums and things for kids, but, so there, and I think the Humanist Society, I don't know, they might have some stuff. So there's probably like things out there that we could draw from, but nothing that weaves together all of the pieces that make the atheopagan community special. So I think it would be neat if we could make a contribution like that. Yucca: And I like books, I like to have a book in my, like I appreciate podcasts and blogs and all of that, but there's something very different in terms of the experience of turning a page and sitting on the You know, sitting cuddled under the blankets with the kitty cat next to you as you, like, turn the pages and sip your warm drink. It's just a very different experience. Yeah, Mark: Yeah, Lauren: yeah. And I will say I think Mark mentioned the John Cleland Host and Pagan Families episode, and Arwen, I think you were on that one too, right? Yucca: it was, Lauren: I bookmarked it and listened to it several times because, like, oh, there's so much in here! Yeah, I think that there's, there's endless wisdom that folks who have been parenting in the atheopagan community could pass on to folks like me who are just starting out and it would be wonderful to have it as a book that you could cuddle up with for sure. Yucca: How old's your little one, by the way? Lauren: He's one and a half. Yucca: and a half. Oh, Mark: tiny. Yucca: That is a Lauren: little. Yucca: so fun, though, right? Everything is opening up now. Lauren: yeah, tons and tons of fun. Yeah, we're, we've been really happy as parents and Yeah, I just hope that we're able to raise him with a sense of community and I think we have that in lots of ways, but I would love for him to feel a connection to this community if that feels right to him and to you. To give him the good parts of being raised with religion that I received without any of the baggage would be, would be great if we can figure out how to do that. Mark: One of the things that I'm really excited about when I think about atheopagan parenting is giving kids the skills to do rituals themselves so that they can work with their psychology. We don't really give kids very many tools in terms of emotional regulation and, you know, kind of changing your mental state, your emotional frame, all that kind of stuff. We just, we don't see that modeled. And, you know, I just... I'm really excited at the prospect of a 12 year old who decides, okay, I'm going to light a candle, and I'm going to contemplate that candle, and it's going to calm me down, and I'm going to be okay about what Marianne said at school, you know, that kind of thing. So, Lauren: Yeah, like you, you know, as your brain is developing in those teenage years, that's when you need those tools the most in some ways and I think that's why I was so drawn to it as a teenage girl myself and You know, I have read a fair few, I guess, gentle parenting type books that, that, talk about introducing things like breathing techniques to your kids. So I am hopeful that some of that stuff that we might call rituals and other people might call, you know, just mindfulness practices, Mark: mm hmm. Lauren: are making their way into parenting culture with folks who are becoming parents now. There's, there's so much more that could be explored and could be articulated for kids and I would love that for my own child for sure. Mark: Yeah, because the world of ritual, it feels so good, and it can be so... Enlightening with a lowercase e in terms of understanding yourself, seeing what your proclivities are and what your core beliefs are, and kind of understanding what your lens is on the world, and maybe seeing some of the limitations of that, and being able to better understand how other people see the world. There's just so much in it, and, you know, I've been a pagan since 1987. And Yucca, of course, you know, you were raised pagan and I still feel like I'm only kind of nibbling at the edges of all of the things that it can do for me. Yucca: Yeah Mark: and the richness that it brings to my life. Yeah, I think so too, Yucca: we're really, you know, sorting through that. Mark: yeah. Lauren: Yeah, Mark: That was one thing, you know, when I thought about, okay, you know, how we're going to merge atheism with paganism, how is that going to work it occurred to me that the big piece that comes with the paganism is 50 or 60 years of experience accumulated in how to do effective rituals. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: Because the atheist side didn't have that. We, we have lots of folks that come into our community and they're like how do I get started? What do I do first? I, I, I get it with all the values and the worldview, but how do I do this practice? Yucca: Yeah. Lauren: yeah. Yucca: One of the things that I really value about that from the parent perspective is that one of the things that we're doing for our kids is helping them to develop skills. And then when they grow up, they're going to go in the direction that they went, right? How many people do most of our community were raised in different religions than their parents, right? And that's okay, right? People make different choices. But I want my kids to have whatever religion they end up being. Whether they stay in the pagan community or not, I want them to have those tools to be able to calm themselves down, to look at themselves, all those things that you were just talking about, Mark, and have the, those ritual skills, even if, you know, I would, doesn't fit me, but if they decide they want to become theists and they believe in a god, then, then great, they have these skills that they can use within that context that's going to help them live a happier, more fulfilled life. Lauren: Yeah, Yucca: it's really beautiful that we're trying to do that as, as, you know, atheopagan parents. Lauren: I think that's beautiful, too. And, you know, while we're on this topic and we're talking a little bit about practice, it just occurs to me to name that I, I really found the, the tools that I had available to me through my practice to be so helpful in getting through like pregnancy and the newborn stage and, and birth. And I had a really tough childbirth experience and it took me a long time to sort of bounce back from it. I found the newborn stage really hard and like, man, if there's ever a time when, like, you've got to lean into your, your meditative or your, your safe place exercises, it's like those first couple weeks postpartum, right? It's just, it's really tough stuff. And If there, if there's anyone who's out there who's, who's pregnant and thinking about making space for this in their life, like I, I could not give enough of a thumb. Obviously, you know, postpartum, also do all the things that you need to do for your mental health, the therapy, or whatever other support systems you need, but I think that this is, Yucca: too, Lauren: and the physical stuff, absolutely, like this is, you know, I'm, I'm not trying to say anything that discounts, like, Traditional Western medicine or, or psychotherapy or anything like that, but just having another set of tools, I think, really helped me in early parenthood and the sort of the transition between pregnancy and birth and parenting. I'll also say that I think You know, for folks who are trying to figure out ritual practices and maybe are also parents of young kids, like, it doesn't have to be an hour. It doesn't have to be like, I don't have an hour. It's a lot of my practices are just extremely short. You know, Yucca: 45 seconds with the bathroom door locked? Lauren: Exactly, you know, or picking up a, I do a lot of sort of like, I guess I'd call them like totems, you know, I have particular little objects that help put me in a particular mindset, you know, it could just be as simple as picking up that particular ring and putting it on your finger, you know, and, and that's enough to shift your mindset. So I think talking about ritual in an abstract way can be a little bit intimidating, but it can be as simple, as simple or as elaborate as you want it to be. Mark: Yeah, I find that the things that I have on my focus are all, they're things that have stories associated with them in my mind. So they have an associative meaning, right? It's not just a seashell. It's a seashell that I found when I was 11 on the Costa del Sol in Spain. You know, it's, it's got a, that was stirred up by a huge storm that Brought all these shells up onto the beach. So, the charging of items... Which obviously isn't really a physical process. It's a psychological process. It's building a strong association between a thing and a state of mind, right? That's a very, very powerful practice and it's one that anybody can do and it's, and it's a way to do a quickie ritual, right? Yeah, you pick up the ring, you put it on, okay, now I've got my bravery ring. Lauren: Yeah, exactly. And I guess it occurs to me, I don't know if totem is like a word I'm accidentally appropriating from some group, maybe I should say talisman, but yeah, the idea of having an object that just has that story. I think that can be really powerful and it's really short and simple but isn't enough to sometimes turn your day around or give you that extra boost and I think a lot of my practice has been, you know, especially sort of before I had a kid. It was all stuff to just, like, make me work harder or make me braver in, in political action, and I'm trying to have a more open mind these days about what I can use it for, that it, it isn't just a thing I should use to help me churn out another couple pages on a legal brief. It's like something that I can use to just, like, expand myself or, or heal myself or just have fun or, or whatever it is it, I think I'm trying to broaden my mind and, and encourage other people to have a broad mind about what it can do for you. Mark: yeah, one of the pieces that we That we often, it doesn't get talked about in the pagan community very much is how pleasurable ritual can be. It just feels good. And that, in and of itself, is a perfectly fine outcome. That's a great outcome, right? You know, you're in a bad mood, so you go and you do a thing, and then you're not in a bad mood. Well, that's wonderful! Yucca: Or you're not even in a bad mood to start with. Mark: No, you're just Yucca: You're just, yeah, it Mark: messing around with candles and incense and cool objects, and it just feels really cool, and you feel sort of wizard y, and it's all fun. Lauren: Yeah, it's inherently fun, often. Yeah. Mark: It's play. It's a form of play. Lauren: Yeah. Mark: Well, Lauren... Yucca: there resources that you, you'd mentioned that you had some resources and things you wanted to share with the Lauren: Yeah I do, I have a couple of things. So the first takes like a little bit of explanation, but I don't know if listeners are familiar with the concept of environmental justice or environmental racism, but Environmental racism is the disproportionate impact of environmental hazards on people of color. It's a term used at least in the U. S. and I think also internationally. And environmental justice is the idea that basically in short you're going to stop poisoning people, period, all people. Yucca: Sounds like a great idea. Lauren: it does, doesn't it? Nice and simple. And that definition is from a website called ejnet. org. And there... On that website, and I can share the link for the show notes, there's a list of principles of environmental justice that I find really inspiring, and it was written by a group of people of color, environmentalists, environmental activists in 1991 at a convening. And the very first principle of the, I think it's, yeah, 17. Yucca: And is that environmental justice action? Is that what Lauren: This is ejnet. org is the website, ejnet, yeah, I can, I can send a link, but, the first principle in that document reads, environmental justice affirms the sacredness of Mother Earth, ecological unity, and the interdependence of all species, and the right to be free from ecological destruction. So I just think it's really, really special that In my mind, part of what atheopaganism is doing is affirming that sacredness of Mother Earth and opening up a path for all people to do that, that really aligns with this foundational document of environmental justice. So I just think that's cool. Yucca: Hmm. Lauren: Yeah, Mark: up a little bit. Lauren: it's really beautiful. Mark: it is. It's Lauren: yeah, it is. And I encourage everybody to, yeah, check out those principles and, and to get involved in environmental justice wherever you are. Yeah, just a couple of books that I feel like have sort of helped me in this intersection between action, political action, and pagan stuff. There's a great book called Revolutionary Witchcraft by Sarah Lyons. Mark: Yeah, Lauren: A short book. I can't remember if there's theism in there, so sorry if there is, but it's really great. It's short. Everyone should read it. There's another great book called Rest is Resistance by Tricia Hershey that I just read, and it was one of those real aha books. It just talks about... Ways to honor yourself, honor your body, and kind of break free of what she calls grind culture. So this idea that you have to be productive all the time, that's a product of like capitalism and colonialism, and it's something that I really struggle to resist. So I thought that that was great. Two more things. There's this book called Hope in the Dark Solnit, I think is how you say it. Really short book that just sort of emphasizes Don't give up hope that we can make the world a better place. The world is really complicated and Things can and do get better even when they seem really bleak. And then the last resource I'll share is this wonderful podcast from Emergence Magazine, and I think that's actually the name of the podcast. And it has episodes on all different topics that explore the connections between culture, spirituality, and ecology. And they've had like Robin Wall Kilmer on all sorts of, of authors exploring this intersection. And again, some of it might be sort of more like a little bit more woo than some of the folks who listen to this podcast like, but there's a lot of really great stuff there. Listening to each episode is just like a gift, so I recommend that as well and I can, I can share like links and, and all of those, those names and authors in case people want to look them up. And then the last thing I would just say if you'll indulge me in this like quote this quote I really love I'm not a teacher, only a fellow traveler of whom you asked away. I pointed ahead, ahead of myself as well as you, so please, like, I offer everything I've said with humility. I'm working all of this out myself, and I'm really happy to be working it out with other folks in this community. Mark: that's really beautiful. Thank you. You know, fun fact. The first pagan ritual I ever went to, when I was invited by a friend back in 1987, was to a coven which included Rebecca Solnit's brother. Lauren: Wow. Small world. Mark: Yep, very small world. Lauren: Well, I guess that's another example of these connections between the activist world and the pagan world run, run deeper and are everywhere. Mark: Yep, they are. Well, Lauren, Yucca: so much. They're saying the same thing, but no, really, this is so exciting to have you here with us and part of the community and just everything you're saying is just, just yes. So wonderful. So thank you so much. Mark: and thank you for your work. Yucca: Yeah, Mark: You know, those of us that are in the environmental field can feel really beat up a lot of the time, and the organizations we work for, even the big ones, are under resourced relative to the industries that they're up against. and the headwinds politically that they're up against. And so, thank you for all the effort it took to get the credentials that you needed to be able to do the work you're doing and for the work that you're doing in the world. Thank you. Lauren: That's very kind and it's, it's my pleasure to do it and I'm really grateful for the opportunity to just come on here and, and riff on all these things and You know, thank, thank you both for creating this community that's been such a source of, and for everyone really who's involved, who, who are co creating this community that's been such a wonderful space. It's, you know, after a hard day of doing hard stuff and thinking about pollution on long timelines, it's such a wonderful treat to just like listen to an episode of this podcast or check out the Facebook group. It's been a tremendous source of, of solace for me, and I hope that it is for everyone. for other activists who might find their way into this space. So yeah, really, really grateful all around. Mark: Well, thank you so much. And with that, I think that's a good place for us to stop. Gratitude is always a good place to land on. So, thanks once again. Thanks to all our listeners. And we'll be back next week with another episode of The Wonder of Science Based Paganism.

covid-19 united states christmas america god american new york history black learning new york city culture english google donald trump uk man washington society christianity gratitude diversity dc lgbtq spain black lives matter african americans congress irish harry potter color dark catholic resistance reddit council mass indigenous scottish latinas environmental costa rituals catholic church sol new age bipoc grand canyon pagan mm mother earth national museum niagara falls underground railroad wicca hurricane sandy witchy enlightening stas turtle island rebecca solnit unitarian universalists arwen catholic mass african american culture yucca markit mark one mark you circle round mark no sarah lyons mark yeah mark well mark so traditional western humanist society lauren yeah mark absolutely

Interview: Susan of The Atheopagan Society Council

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 7, 2023 43:56

Remember, we welcome comments, questions, and suggested topics at thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com. S4E31 TRANSCRIPT: ----more---- Mark: Welcome back to The Wonder, Science Based Paganism. I'm your host, Mark, Yucca: And I'm Yucca. Mark: and today we are fortunate to have with us Susan, who is a new member of the Atheopagan Society Council, and we're interviewing the new members of the Council over the next... A couple of months or so the ones that, that want to be interviewed, just to get to know them and find out what their thinking is about all this stuff we're doing. So welcome, Susan. Susan: thanks for having me on. Yucca: And some of you who watch the YouTube channel may recognize Susan from there, who's been, who's part of the media team, and has been making excellent videos. Mark: Yes, yes. Susan is the glue on of the media team. She holds us all together. Yucca: which is not always easy appreciated with all of the emails that have been chasing us down to make all our schedules work, and yep, Susan: I try to balance it so that everybody doesn't think I'm super annoying, but helpful, not annoying. Mark: So far, so good. So, Susan why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and what brought you to atheopaganism and, you know, all that good kind of stuff. Susan: Yeah. Well, the short answer like it seems a lot of people is COVID brought me to atheopaganism. I, and I do have a short video, I think it's the first one that I did on the YouTube channel if anybody wants to check that out of my, my non theist upbringing and, and this kind of channel, so I'll, I'll make it a short version, but I live in the Midwest, in Ohio, and I've lived here my whole life, and I was raised without religion, but also not specifically atheist either. It was just sort of, we didn't talk about it. I didn't know the difference between a Republican and a Democrat until I was in high school because it was just, you know, I was left to my own devices. And I appreciate that for, for some things. There's definitely parts of me where I'm like, well, it'd be nice to have a little bit more direction. And I, we're kind of taking that track with our, with our daughter. I am, I'm married and I have six, soon to be seven year old, and kind of navigating that that space. My husband was raised Catholic, so we're kind of marrying together. He, he likes to call it ethnically Catholic, because he doesn't believe any of the stuff there, but so yeah, we, I, from a, Medium age started dabbling in stuff about the time when I was, you know, I'm an 80s baby. So by the time I was in high school, it was late 90s. And all of the witchy stuff started showing up all over the Barnes and Nobles. I'm like, Ooh, what is this? And especially the tarot card section with lots of stuff to touch and play with. So I I explored that area and the pagan, which at that time, at least, you know, Wicca was the super dominant thing in, at least that was publicly available. And so I dabbled in that for a while, and I kind of got It's like, this is fun, but I also don't really believe in this whole, you know, people try to rationalize it with, oh, it's the energy, and you're affecting the energy, and I was like, yeah, yeah, that, that makes sense, sure, and I, you know, doing the little, the little lie to yourself thing for a while. And then I kind of walked away from it for a while and just didn't, didn't bother with my, my spiritual life for a while until I got married. And we wanted to have a community for our child to grow up in so we joined a UU congregation, Unitarian Universalist, and they have, in our particular one, a fairly decent showing of pagan folks. And so I kind of picked that back up and we had a little bit of a range from full capital W witch to people who I think, you know, if I talked to them long enough about atheopaganism, that would be more up their alley but didn't, you know, know the words for it at that time. So it kind of came through there and then COVID hit and, you know, that community was sort of, sort of gone. But I was on the board and I was doing all of these committees and doing all the, I was doing all the work of being in a community, but not getting the community out of it. It was also right after we had merged. So my, my group went from 40 to 60 members to 200 and some people. And I didn't know all these people I was doing the work for and it just kind of, I kind of drifted away and was I was focusing more on what is it that I do believe in, since I had spent so much time just defining what I didn't believe in, and I found, kind of simultaneously, Druidry, which is something I'm, I'm pretty involved in, is my personal path, but also atheopaganism, and actually found I found out about atheopaganism through a blog whose, I can't remember what the blog was about but there was sort of an about me page and the person was describing, yeah, I don't really, you know, believe in the metaphysical part of this, but I still think it's really helpful check out atheopaganism, I'm like, yes, thank you, I will, and signed right up on the spot and I remember I read the, the principles And I don't know what bits of the, of the pages, but I remember running to my husband and being like, oh my gosh, I found them. I found my people. They're here, they exist. , I found it. I didn't know this was the words I needed, but I needed the word these words, you know, there's the validation of other people Yucca: was that during lockdown or was that a little bit afterwards? Susan: That was, I think, during lockdown 'cause I remember. We had still the the Earth centered group at my UU congregation was trying to do monthly Zoom get togethers, and I remember one of them, I was just, like, very excited to share with people that I had found both atheopaganism and the Druid organizations that I had joined at the same time, so. Mark: Well, that's very cool. I, I always love hearing these stories 'cause people, you know, people come to us through all different kinds of ways and and there is very commonly that I found them. They, they exist. I'm not the only one I am feeling which. I actually share, even though, you know, I, I wrote the essay in the book and stuff, because when other people started showing up, I, similarly, I was like, oh, I'm not the only one, there's more of us. This is great. So, very exciting. Well, it's great to have you with us, Susan. Thank you so much. So, You've just joined the Atheopagan Society Council and and you've been helping with the media team for a while. You're a very organized, get it done kind of person, which is really great. Susan: Thanks. Mark: so, I don't know, what are your thoughts about this community and where we're going and, you know, what things would you like to see happen? You know, like new programs or any of that kind of stuff, if you've thought about it. Susan: I think my main thing that I want to see is that I hope you're going anywhere soon, but, you know, I want to make, I want to show up so that down the road we don't trickle and fade away when, you know, you, Mark, or, you know, the, the original set of people doing the council you know, are gone or, or, you know, have to be pulled away for whatever reason. I just don't want it to, to fade and be the thing that, that used to be really great for a while and then just nobody could keep up for it, keep up with it. And so that's something I'm interested in is, and I don't know what that looks like. I don't know what infrastructure we, you know, are going to end up with to make that be something that really sticks and stays and has standing. I imagine it'll be Getting a lot of volunteers and getting a lot of structure in place for volunteers so that people, you know, we don't avoid burnout. And that's I know, that's one of the things that we're talking about at the council meeting coming up. But that's, that's kind of my priority. But I am excited about the idea of getting more, not necessarily content, but getting more things in place for people to do in person, even if it's not with other people, but just more of an idea I was in a sorority in college and it was a One of the things that I thought was fun about that is that there were certain things that you did and you're, you know, it's, you know, a secret and secret rituals that everybody does, but you knew that even though you went to a different school than this person that you maybe met down the street and they went to school. different school, but they were still part of the same sorority as you. You knew they had the same ritual as you, Mark: hmm. Susan: and I love that we have so much open endedness of, you know, build your own adventure within atheopaganism. I think it might be fun to get something in place that is something we can all share, or those who are interested can all share, and like, I don't know if that looks like a standard ritual format or something, which is what some other organizations do, like some of the druid organizations, I mean, what they have. Here's our official format, and I don't know that that's something that we would really want, but something that has that feel to it, that essence of, hey, here's how you can feel a part of this, On your own, but still together kind of a feel. I think more of those kinds of things would be. And I think that would help a lot of people who seem to be clamoring for structure, you know, there's definitely the people in the community who are like, I am totally happy to do this by myself and come up with my own thing. And that's great. But then there seemed to be a lot of people who want a little more hand holding with their practice too. Mark: Mm hmm. Susan: So that's kind of, Yucca: of the insights that you have that I've really appreciated is that you're a fellow parent with, with a kiddo in the same age range and it's been nice to have someone to bounce off some of that, you know, how do we make that feeling available for, for kids who are growing up in this community? Because that's something that, for me, growing up as a pagan kid, there wasn't really anything for us. It was like, it was all the grown up stuff, and we were just sort of, you know, put it at a third wheel, right? And I think that it'd be nice for our community to have something a little bit more, more community for the kids as well. And I know that not everybody has kids in the community, but that's something that... There definitely are, there's quite a few of us, so, Mark: hmm. Sure. Susan: yeah. Yucca: something that you've brought that I've really valued, Susan. Mark: Yeah, I mean, I don't have kids, but I, I absolutely support that. I think that having activities for families that that work for the adults as well as for the kids is something that I really would like to see us have more of. Yucca: Mm Susan: Especially for parents who maybe only one of them is into it. My husband is very supportive and so, Mark: Mm-hmm. Susan: I, I know that I'm lucky in getting the amount of participation that I do, and there's plenty of people who are parents who it's very one sided and, you know, they may not get the, the family feel, like we can, I at least can say this is what we're doing as a family, but if you don't even have that, it can, it could be really nice to have. That feeling with other people, Mark: Mm-hmm. Yeah. We're gonna be talking about some ideas for that at the upcoming council meeting on Wednesday. Yucca: And those are quarterly meetings. Mark: yes, Yucca: We do them after each solstice and equinox. Mark: yeah. So I'm, I'm pretty excited about some of those ideas. Some of them could be a lot of work to implement. But once they kind of got up and rolling, I think there would be so much excitement about... The activities themselves that that there would be a lot of, that that momentum would create the excitement that would create the volunteerism to keep it going, if you know what I mean. So, let's see first of all, I guess, do you have questions for us? Susan: man I feel like I'm trying, I'm trying to think of questions you haven't already answered on the podcast before or things that Mark: Oh, don't worry about that. Don't worry about that. You're, you're, it's okay if it's been asked before, that's, that's perfectly all right. Susan: No, I just mean, I'm like, I feel like I'm like, no, they said they answered that question for me before because I've, I've tried to keep up on it. I don't know that I've listened to every episode, but, Yucca: we certainly do have folks who've done every single episode, but we have a lot of people who kind of come in for a few episodes, and then out, and then people who just find the podcast, and lots of different listening styles, or people who've listened for every year. But how many years are we at now? Mark: We're in season four, Yucca: Yeah, Mark: so. Yeah, I mean, that's, that's closing in on 200 episodes, I think. So it's, it's a, a chunk of work and time if you really wanna listen to all of them, which is why we, we do an episode for every Sabbath every year. We don't just say, go and listen to last year's, you know, Mayday episode. Instead, we do a new one every year because we've got people that are new to the podcast and you know, the stuff may be new for them. Uhhuh Yucca: Well, and it's a Susan: And hopefully there's something changing. Yucca: I'm curious to go back and listen and be like, did I even say remotely the same thing? Probably. But, Mark: you know, Susan, you were talking about a shared ritual. And what immediately popped into my head is the pouring of a libation, which is a very old, I mean, the Greeks used to pour libations, you know, in honor of their gods and stuff. And I wonder if we might have something like that, that would be kind of a shared atheopagan ritual that everybody would do to do that kind of offering to the earth. That might be kind of neat to put some, put some ritual trappings around and turn into something that we all share. Thank you. Susan: Yeah. And maybe I'm thinking do it on a, have it as a day that's not necessarily one of the spokes of the wheel, if you will. So it's, we're not interrupting anybody's already scheduled programming for this thing, like an extra, maybe it's on Earth Day or something, you know, like a, Yucca: Pi Mark: Huh. Susan: people won't already have their own set Mark: Huh. Yeah. Yeah. I'll think about it. I love the idea. Yeah. The equivalent of an atheopagan secret handshake. Uh Yucca: Hmm. Susan: Another thing I've been thinking about that I would be, I would love to do, at least for myself someday, is there's been a lot of chatter in the community lately about atheopagan saints, and I'm, I recently picked up from my friend who's in one of my druid groups, a Celtic Catholic set of prayer books, and it's kind of like a daily prayer thing, and I know that, I don't know a whole lot about Catholicism, but I know there's like a saint for every day, and I think it would just be fun to have a, like a solid atheopagan devotional kind of a thing, right, with Like, oh, today is, and I was, I started collecting things, so there's a day in February, I don't remember which day, it, of course, because everything, you know, gets mushed around with, over time and history, but I want to start celebrating Fornicalia in February, and for the Thank you. ancient god Fornax, who was in charge of baking bread in ovens. And it's like a day that you clean your oven and bake bread in it. So I'm like, Ooh, this might actually motivate me to do the thing that I don't want to do if I make it into a holiday and say, this is the thing that we're doing. Yucca: Very practical, right? Mark: you said Fornicalia, I went in an entirely Susan: Yeah, that sounds fun. It's less fun than you think. But bread Yucca: that day is in February, isn't it? The 14th? Isn't that day already in February? The 14th? Susan: Fornacalea is like the Like the 28th or something. I'll look it up and put it in Mark: think you may be thinking of Lupercalia. Susan: I'm going to find it. But yeah, it's, I have it as the 17th in my calendar, but you know, Mark: The day to clean your oven and bake bread in it. I love it. Susan: Yeah. Now I just need another one, you know, six months hence, so that I clean it more than once a year, but that's optimistic Yucca: Could there be, could there be one for air filters, too? Susan: yeah, right. That can be our shared ritual is clean your filter Mark: is replacing your, your air filters. Yeah. I love that. I, I love, I love the idea of I mean, I have so many regular observances that I do just for myself, and I never, you know, I'm, I'm very careful, I don't, I don't want to prescribe them for anybody else, you know, it's like, this definitely is a choose your own adventure kind of thing. Thank you. Religious path. It's like build what works for you, but it would be nice to be able to offer to people, you know, here's this compilation of, I don't know, five days every month or something that are special days that are the birthday of some significant, you know, scientist or innovator or creator in history and little bit of history about him and something that you can do, pour out that libation. You know, in honor of, oh, I'm spacing on the name. I just shared on Facebook to my friend group a a biography of this woman who actually figured out that the universe was mostly made of hydrogen. And I don't remember her name, but she's responsible for us understanding what the universe is made of. And she didn't even get any credit for it. Her somebody else published the results. You know, pretty typical for women scientists in the, in the Susan: hmm. Yucca: Yeah, yeah, I don't know, I don't know who that is, right? Which, itch is a problem that we don't know that. Mark: yes, yes, well, I'm going to look it up right now. So this, Susan: yeah, people really liked the 13 different atheopagan principles applied to the moon cycles, and that's great. It's, it's an offering, not a prescription, and, and people are just like, oh yes, thank you, give me, give me ideas. Yucca: yeah, maybe, I mean, when you were talking about those things, like a daily Right? Like a book that you read about, your little paragraph. I know a lot of different religions do that, and things that are totally secular, too. Like just a daily something. You know, I certainly use those in my practice that are just, they're really nice, right? It's just like this little thing, and it's like, oh, okay, cool. Just kind of think about this for the day, Mark: little Susan: Mm hmm. Yucca: right? And you take it or you don't take it, but it's kind of nice to have, to see how it just fits into whatever your experience is. And even if you use the same book more than one year in a row, like, by the time you get back around to May 14th or whatever it is, like, you've had the whole experience of a year and you're gonna see it in a different way, it's gonna fit into your life in a different way. Mark: mm hmm, Cecilia Payne, Yucca: Pain, okay. Mark: Cecilia Payne. Since her death in 1979, the woman who discovered what the universe is made of has not so much as received a memorial plaque. Really amazing. Susan: Well, that's an idea for if we for, for listeners, one of the things we're thinking about maybe doing is the scout program. If we have that, we can have that as the capstone project for somebody Yucca: Yeah. Susan: her a plaque. Mark: Yeah. Yeah, that would be great. Some kind of a memorial. The person who figured out what the universe is made of probably deserves some kind of recognition. Yucca: Do podcast. Susan: Yeah, I don't know if it's a good idea. Yucca: And I know we have, there's not, like things aren't set in stone, but what, when you say scout, like, what are you talking about? Susan: yeah, well at least it was sort of talked in the community about this. I think it would be fun for adults too, but like, it's hard to, as a parent for me at least my husband was an Eagle Scout in the Boy Scout program, but I know, and I know that they have made some reforms and some steps in the right direction, but for me it's still not enough to feel comfortable enrolling my daughter in it and I have reservations about Girl Scouts for different reasons. Capitalism, and genderification, and just different things that I'm just not, there are certainly troops that I'm sure do a wonderful job, and there are certainly troops that don't but Yucca: A lot to navigate though. Mm-hmm. Susan: It's, yeah, it's a hard thing to navigate and I don't want to start it and have it come crashing down on her. So, and I think we sort of chatted in the community about this being a common thing and I had posted a few things a few months ago asking people about spiral scouts, which is a more pagan oriented group. And so now the, the scuttlebutt is, you know, maybe we can be an atheopagan chapter of that. Maybe we can create our own thing, like what is and what would be a nice thing. But a lot of parents have commented on it and said, Oh, yes, please sign me up. Dude, let's do this. Mark: hmm. Susan: We can't necessarily do things in person, not for logistical reasons. I'm very fortunate that I have A handful of atheopagans right near me. It's really great. I think I'm the only one with, with kids that I'm aware of, but it's not the case for a lot of folks. Mark: Yeah, I mean, we are, we're spread pretty thinly. So, our, most of our opportunity for face to face stuff comes through mediation like this, like Zoom. But that said if there Thanks If Spiral Scouts can be done in a way where there's like, kind of a learning chapter set of activities that get sent to a family, either as a PDF or in a physical package or, you know, however that works, and then, you know, all the different families that are doing it can do that and then come together over Zoom and kind of share their experience and show off their cool thing that they made and all that, I think that would be a really wonderful thing both for kids and for parents. It'd, you know, be a real, you know, wonderful thing to share with, with your kids, I would think. Yucca: I know my kids are definitely excited about the idea of badges , because they see that in, in the media of, there's so many different things where it's like, where it has that setup, like, oh, the comic, you know, the, like lumber Janes for instance, and there's like badges in that and the oh, what's it called? The, there's a Netflix show. Susan: Hilda? Yucca: Hilda, yes, with this, with the I'm forgetting the name of their scouts, but they had, it was named after a bird, right? And so they see that and they're always like, I want badges for that, right? So I'm sure they would be very enthusiastic about anything badge related. Mark: I really like that the Spiral Scouts has kept the badges but gotten rid of ranks. Yucca: Mm. Mark: So there's, there's no hierarchy of, you know, in the Boy Scouts you start out as a tender foot and then you work your way up through all these levels until you're an Eagle Scout, right? And, you know, some of the stuff in there is very useful and wonderful stuff to do. I mean, you have to do a community project in order to become an Eagle Scout, and those are, you know, it builds a sense of responsibility to the broader community, which is great. But the rank thing, I mean, I was big into Cub Scouts. My, my Cub Scout shirt looked like a a Latin American dictator from the 1950s. I had so many pins and badges and medals and it was ridiculous. The thing must have weighed five pounds. And I was really into that. But when I got to Boy Scouts, suddenly it was like paramilitary training and I just didn't want any part of it. It was, you know, it's like lining up for inspection of your uniform and stuff like that. It was, Hmm. Not, not my idea of a good time. So, no ranks in in Spiral Scouts. Just skill attainments. Susan: That's what I think my little one would be interested in too is just the gamification of learning life skills. Mark: Mm hmm. Susan: That's what I would love badges too. I would love a an adult 13 principles and four pillars set of badges and you do, I don't know what it is, like you do a small project for each one and you get a badge or, I don't know, honor system. Mark: we should absolutely do that. Just, just create a, a checklist of things that you do for each of the, the principals and then, you know, we'll have badges made and or, you know, or people could download the the... The software for the patch sewing machines, and then they could go, go to a local producer and have the patches made for them bunch of different ways we could do that. Well, I really have my mind spinning around all this now. It's going to be terribly disappointing if we decide we can't do it. But Yucca: Well, there's also, we can always, you know, spiral back around to ideas too, because we have to, we have to look at what, you know, what can we currently do, and what are the priorities of the community at the time, and see how things go. So, so Susan, if you were talking about the future, right, what would be your fantasy for 50 years from now? What would you hope to see? What would atheopaganism be in, you know, 50 years? It's, it's not us on the council anymore, right? Definitely other Mark: And I'm dead. Yucca: Maybe, hey, you might hang in there. Maybe, Mark: 50 years from now, I would Yucca: maybe medical technology will change. Mark: eleven. Yucca: Oh, that's a great Bilbo, right? Okay. Susan: As my, my daughter says, when you're 100, you're compost. Yucca: so what would you hope? Just, just fantasy, right? What would, what would we look like? Susan: I mean, I would love to see us be at the scale of, like, UU, where maybe, you know, there's not necessarily Church building on every corner kind of a thing like you get with, you know, your Baptist churches and your Catholic churches and all that kind of stuff, but I would love to have expanded enough that we have so much in person opportunity, and maybe it's not, you know, a congregation where everybody comes together on Sundays or that kind of thing, because I don't, I don't know that that's a right fit, but just to have, I don't know, your local atheopagan community center place that everybody comes together for their monthly meeting or whatever it is, but just more, just more. I think I would just love to connect with more people, because I think there's so many, there's definitely people, at least in my life, who are happy just being atheists, and that's fine for them and that's great, they can enjoy that, but I think that there are a lot of people who I know who could benefit from something like this, and anybody that I've talked to for more than two minutes Where I've been had a chance to answer their questions about it because you just say the words and they're like, that doesn't make any sense. Why would you do that if you're an atheist? Right? Then they're like, Oh, okay. Yeah, I can see that. I understand. I understand why you would want to do that. And I think maybe a lot of people who are trapped. who feel trapped by atheism or who feel trapped by more traditional religious practices would find peace and joy with us. And I think, I don't know, I'm sure everybody feels this way about their own religious path, but I feel like if there were more of us, then the world would be a nicer place. But Mark: Yeah, I like to think so. We're we're, we're, we're about people being happy and the world being a better place. It's kind of hard to go wrong with those as your touchstones. It's God, it's, you know, we're doing this strategic plan in the Atheopagan Society, which by the way we created so that atheopaganism would have a container that could persist past me or anybody else, any other individual. You know, that's, that's why the society exists. And my book, I'm, I'm willing the rights to my book to the society. So, you know, that will always be available to atheopagans in the future. But I was saying, we're doing this strategic plan for like the next two or three years because it's hard to imagine much beyond that. So thinking about Yucca: So I said fantasy. Yeah. Mark: yeah, 50 is like mind blowing. I can't even, can't even get my mind around that. Yucca: I have a 20, Mark. Mark: 20, 20 years. What would happen? Well, for one thing, we would have enough of us that there would be opportunities for regional gatherings in a lot of places, you know, maybe two, three regional gatherings in Europe maybe one in Australia and so more opportunities for people to meet in person and You know, because that's really the gold standard of relating, right? I mean, it's wonderful that we have these tools to be able to communicate across distance, but there's nothing like being able to actually just sit down next to someone and have a conversation. I'm hoping for a lot more of that. Speaking of which, we have the Suntree Retreat coming up again in 2024, and we will soon start taking deposits to reserve space. Yucca: That is less than a year away. Mark: it looks like, yes, it's less than a year away. It's about 11 months away. And so we're working on what the content of all that's going to be. So that's locked in place. And now it's just a matter of, you know, figuring out the pricing on everything, and looks like the admission prices for, for the event and all the meals combined will be about 250. And then lodging. And lodging is as cheap as, and it can be more if you have a space in a cabin. Yucca: Mark, we're losing you into the robot. Mark: People should be able to do this event. How's that? Can you hear me now? Yucca: We can hear you now. You're frozen. Yes, now we can hear you. If you'll start again with people should be able to. Mark: Okay. Go to this event for less than 400 plus transportation. Yucca: Okay. Than 400 plus transportation. Mark: yes. Yeah, that, that's, I'm sure that that's going to be possible. In fact, it'll be... It's possible to go even less if you tent camp, so it's a good, good time to go tent camping. Tent camping only costs like 20 bucks for lodging for the whole three days. So, you know, if you set up your own tent or we can accommodate I think one RV Yucca: And that should be late summer, early fall weather wise, so that's a good time of year for it. Mark: Yes, yes, and, and unlikely to be, to have any rain. We actually got really lucky in May of 2022 because it snowed at La Forêt the week after we were there. Yucca: Wasn't it snowing several hours after we finally left? Mark: I don't know Yucca: I know I was, as I was coming, I thought there was snow and then certainly as I was coming down, headed south down by the Rockies, it was raining, which was blessed because it was, we'd been having those horrible fires in New Mexico at the time and it was just raining the whole way Mark: Mm hmm. Yucca: But I think that they were getting more rain than I was getting as I was driving down, or I was driving up, but down south. It's confusing. I think. Susan: yeah, Mark: Well, we have the big the big hall, Ponderosa. If it does, that isn't a problem, but the weather should be beautiful. I, I looked up the, the average weather in Colorado Springs that first weekend in September. I think the high average is 75 degrees or something. It's just perfect. So, Yucca: Yeah. Mark: should be really great. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: we're already talking about what all the content of things is going to be, and we'll put out a call for presentations and workshops in a couple of months, and before we know it, we'll be in Colorado Springs. It'll be, you know, with, with, with the gang. Yucca: Ball's rolling. Yep. Mark: Yeah, Susan: excited. I've already planned for it. So Yucca: Will the kiddo be coming? Mark: That's great. Susan: I think it's going to be all three of Mark: Yeah, is your hood Susan: they're not going to do all of the things, but Mark: There are beautiful places to go right around there. Garden of the Gods and Rocky Mountain National Park. Just gorgeous, gorgeous places to go. So if they like hiking in the outdoors there are lots of opportunities for them to enjoy that as well. Susan: yeah, and we might do, we might do tent Mark: Yucca, were you saying something? Yucca: oh, I was gonna say my, will at that time be five, almost six and eight year old will be joining me. Last time it could only be the, the older, but the, the youngest is, is excited for that rite of passage to get to go to, they call it the Ponderosa Pine, so, cause of the lodge, Mark: Huh. Nice. It's so great having her there. That was just wonderful. Yucca: Well, she'll be excited about the idea of more kiddos. I think there were other parents who had, who were there last time who were like, Oh, I should have brought mine. Right? But they didn't know that it was gonna, there were gonna be activities. So we'll have more activities for little people next time. So we'll have a little gang of them running around. Mark: Huh. Yeah, I think for some of the parents, because it was a first time event and they didn't know what to expect and, you know, pagan events can be pretty raucous sometimes, they kind of wanted Yucca: Yeah, we lost you again, Mark. You said they kind of wanted. Mark: to do, you know, reconnaissance first, go in and check out what this was going to be like. Can you hear me now? Yucca: Yes. We can hear you. Okay. So you were saying some parents, sometimes they can be a little ruckus y. Ruck that wasn't the word. Mark: Well, yeah, I mean, you know, pagan festivals can be, you know, kind of uproarious and sexy and, and, you know, lots of, you know, carousing, and I think some parents were kind of leery of that and wondered what the tone of this was going to be like, and, you know, after having been there and discovered that we were able to have a good time without things sliding over into inappropriate conversation. Boundaryless mess that that it's a fine place for their kids to come, and I, I really encourage parents to come. Tickets will be actually, I think we said that Attendance was free for those 10 years old and younger, and tickets are discounted for those 16 and younger, or under 16. So, yeah other than having to get a bed for them if they're, if you're not tent camping kids should be very affordable to bring, Yucca: Was there anything else that you'd like to talk about or share, Susan? Anything you think that people should know about you? Mark: anything you'd like to say to the community. Yucca: Yeah. Mm Susan: I guess I'd like to say, tell us what you want to see, because You know, I think you both have mentioned this before about the podcast, but it's true of the YouTube channel too, is there's only so much creativity, the same, and there's so much overlap with both of you being on the the YouTube media team as well, like, there's only so much creativity we all have, so please tell us what it is you want to know about, what you want to hear about, what kind of content You, you want to see so we can get that out there you know, I, I generated when we first, when first I first got involved with the YouTube channel, I generated this big old list of, oh, here's a bunch of ideas and now I don't know if any of them are in the comments. Not resonating with me, or at least I'm like, oh, I'm not the right person to talk about that particular topic, but I'm like, what am I, I'm supposed to write a video. I don't know what I want to talk about. I guess that's, this is why maybe some of the days, even though I'm the glue on, my things are a little bit late later than they're supposed to get to, to the right people. But yeah, let's, let us know what you want to hear about. I'm, I'm happy to I'm Write stuff or record stuff or be in front of people and but I don't know what it is people want to hear about so Tell us Mark: Yeah, yeah, I really echo that, because after four years of producing these, new topics can be challenging. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: It's, when we think of one, it's like, oh, oh, a new topic! We can do that! It's very exciting. It's a little easier in October, because we've got Ancestors and Death and Dying and Decomposition and Hallows and all those things. But for much of the rest of the year, we're... We could really use input on, you know, what kinds of things you'd like to hear about. Yucca: Especially like in July, like, hmm, what do we talk about? Mark: Yeah. Yucca: Because this time of year, yeah, October, and then we're going into solstice coming up, and yeah, Mark: Mm hmm. Yucca: busy next few months. Mark: Well, Susan, thank you so much for joining us today. It is wonderful to have you on board and to have you be a part of the community. And Yucca: Thanks for all the cool ideas today, too. Susan: Thanks. Yucca: think about. Mark: Absolutely. Susan: I'm good at ideas for fun things and not so much the follow through, so. Yucca: Oh, that's not true! You make the follow through possible! Mark: Even if that were true, it's still a really important role. You know, being, being a creative person who comes up with cool ideas, that's really important. So, we need cool ideas. Susan: I'm hoping that, you know, eventually we're going to hit a critical mass of people in the community that somebody, you throw out an idea and somebody's going to grab it and just run, who, you know, has the skill set and. I hope. I guess that's another thing I want to tell people is if you feel like you want to contribute something, please do. Like, I just showed up one day and was like, hey, I can help with things and now I'm on the media team and now I'm on the council. So don't be scared. Mark: Absolutely. Yucca: Well, thank you so much, Susan. Susan: Thanks for having me. Mark: Yeah. Thanks so much. We'll see you next week, folks.

Religion and Politics

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 25, 2023 47:28

Remember, we welcome comments, questions, and suggested topics at thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com. An Atheopagan Declaration of Policy Values (2022): https://theapsocietyorg.files.wordpress.com/2022/03/an-atheopagan-declaration-of-policy-values-2022.final_.pdf S4E30 TRANSCRIPT: Yucca: Welcome back to The Wonder, Science Based Paganism. I'm one of your hosts, Yucca. Mark: And I'm the other one, Mark. Yucca: And today, we're talking about religion and politics. Mark: Yes, but don't turn it off. Yucca: Yes, we were saying, what should we call this? What should we call this? But no, this is, this is important. This is what we're going to talk about. And there's a lot to say here. But today it was inspired because, Mark, you just got back from a trip, which you got to do some pretty cool politicking. Mark: Yes I went to Washington, D. C. as a part of a fly in delegation by the Conservation Alliance, and I'll tell some of those stories later advocating for protections for public lands, including the designation of some new national monuments. So, I, as I said, I'll, I'll talk about that stuff later but yeah, just got back from a lobby trip, Yucca: Yeah. So one of the things that... It is very common to hear in pagan circles, and I think probably not just pagan circles, but a lot of new age things and kind of, mini counterculture sorts of groups, is, you know, don't bring politics. into this, right? Don't, don't bring politics into my religion. Don't, you know, we, we aren't going to talk about that. We're not going to be this is separate, right? Let's be, let's be off in our realm or our magical experience and leave that other stuff out. Mark: right? And there is so much to be said about that. I mean, it has a nexus with toxic positivity. This idea that, you know, we should only talk about happy, shiny stuff, and that, you know, we're going to have this nice, warm, glowy, serotonin oxytocin experience by doing our, our spirituality, and we're just not going to engage with anything that doesn't stimulate that. It has to do with the toxicity that we see in the societies around us where the mainstream religions are engaging with public policy and they're doing it for really destructive and antisocial reasons. And so that becomes sort of the poster child for why you wouldn't want you to have politics in your spiritual space. But a lot of it, in my opinion, is simply... We don't want to think about any of those issues because they might bring us down. Yucca: hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah. But, and there's just so much to say because there's, it's going to depend on every different kind of situation but I think that if we think about the values that We often claim to have that we value the earth, that we think the earth is sacred. You know, we may have different interpretations on, you know, whether divinity is involved with that or not, but hey, we're agreeing, we think that the earth is important, we're agreeing about believing that love and freedom and all of these things are important, then I think that... If we really believe that, then we have a responsibility to those things. Mark: Yes, yes, we it's because they won't happen by themselves. You know, there are interests which are destructive interests and are not filled with love and are not about advancing liberty and are not about supporting the biosphere in a manner which is consistent with biodiversity and with the sustaining of humanity. And they're out there advocating for their stuff every day. And if we absent ourselves from the process because we think that it is too negative or too gross or too demoralizing, then we are leaving the field to those who would do us harm. And it's just not, there is no logic to it that makes sense to me, other than at the most sort of Self indulgent, I just want to feel good for me kind of place, where it makes sense to say, I'm not going to vote, I'm not going to advocate for what I care about, I'm not going to be interested in any kind of activism. I mean, everybody's circumstances Yucca: become informed about it, Mark: right. Yucca: right? Mark: Everybody's circumstances are different, and not everybody can be a big activist, right? You know, if you're, you know, you're raising kids, or, and you're, you know, scraping by, and, you know, there's a lot of different, I mean, poverty is a social control strategy. Yucca: Yeah, Mark: So, it is, it is one way that people who have the common good at heart are kept limited in the amount of power that they have. So let's, let's not mince words about that. But even with the limitations that we have, I have always felt that it was my responsibility to do what I can to try to advance the values that matter to me. And I'm pleased to say that the community that's grown up around atheopaganism is very much the same way. We're gonna, we're gonna put a Link in the show notes to the Atheopagan Declaration of Policy Values, which came out last year and was developed by the community with tons of community input and editing and all that kind of stuff. Yucca: There was a lot of back and forth and lots and lots of people participating and, you know, wording things just for, it was quite inspiring, actually. Mm hmm, Mark: the level, level of collaboration with the minimal amount of argument was very inspiring to me. And so now we have this document, and it can be downloaded from the Atheopagan Society website. So we're going to put the link in the, in the show notes so you can download that. But that's an example of the community speaking out on issues that really matter to us, and saying, this is where we stand. This is what our activism is going to be built around. This is, you know, we... We embrace LGBTQ people. We do. And it's not just, it's not just You know, so called virtue signaling, we genuinely do, we want those folks, we want people of color, we want indigenous people in our community, you know, we want them to be safe, we want them to be seen, we want them to be heard as, as an example. And similarly, along the environmental axis, along the axis of personal liberty and autonomy, bodily autonomy, all of those you know, the importance of critical thinking and science all of those pieces are a part of what our movement is about. And so, when we talk with the public, That is, that is core to what we express. Yes, we're here for happiness. We're here for people to feel good. We're all for that. But as one of the atheopagan principles says, you know, responsibility, social responsibility is one of our principles. Yucca: right. Mark: It is an obligation that we have. Yucca: And so those values, they're not just about talking about them, they're about, those are what inform the choices that we're making. Mark: Mm hmm. Yucca: Right? And being able to reflect on what those are, right? is really important. Have conversations about that, because we're not, there's going to be nuance, right? We're not always going to see eye to eye on things, and being able to, as individuals, talk about that with each other, and as a community, be able to, to talk about that and, and, you know, have that conversation is really important. Mark: Absolutely. Absolutely. And we learn from one another, right? I mean, that's a really important piece because As strongly as I feel on a value level about supporting people of color in the LBGTQI plus community I'm not one of either of those groups. And so I have to listen a lot in order to understand, well, what is an appropriate statement to make in support, right? How do I show up as an ally and as and as an advocate? Or a supporter for their advocacy, you know. So, you know, it's not as simple as just having a laundry list of policy positions. And it has to also recognize that we live in a world of subtle differences. Right? Subtle gradations of change throughout the whole natural world, and that includes humanity. So, I get really kind of bent sideways when I hear the lesser of two evils, or I'm not going to vote for that person because of this one little position, when the alternative is so much worse on every position. The best analogy that I've heard is that voting isn't dating, it's selecting, it's selecting the best possible option off of the available menu. And the available menu only includes people that actually have a chance of getting elected. It's not just some fringe outlier who tells you what you want to hear. Yucca: mhm, Mark: that can actually get into a position to make change in a positive direction. Yucca: mhm, mhm, mhm. Mark: So, we had a bunch of stuff on the outline for this podcast. What else have you got? Yucca: Well, certainly the, the issue of privilege is definitely Mark: Oh, yeah Yucca: and this is something that I think comes up where people will be unaware of the place of privilege that they may be coming from to be able to say, I don't want to deal with this. I don't want this coming into, you know, my religion or my, anything about that, because that, that isn't the position that most people are going to be in that situation, right? Yeah. Mm Mark: Yeah the, I think the clearest way to express that is that if you have the luxury of saying, Oh, I don't want to vote that just encourages them, or I'm not going to consider any of those issues because I just want to be on my, you know, spiritual path of lightness and joy thing. Is that people that are marginalized and endangered by the way our society operates, they don't have the luxury to do that. If you look at voting rates, for example, African American women vote astronomically in high proportions in the United States. And the reason for that is that the interests of the community that they are in are, are, are stark. The, you know, the threats that certain people like a Donald Trump and the people that he brings with him present to that community are so real. They're not, they're not theoretical. It's not just something where, where as a white person, you look at it and go, Oh, gee, that's too bad. This is life and death for them. And they turn out to vote. They're organized. They're knowledgeable. You know, these are people who are, are leveraging the power that they have absolutely as much as they can. And when I hear people say, you know, oh, well, I'm not going to vote because blah, blah, blah. What I, what I really hear is, I am so cushioned from the impacts of the policies that get made by people that I don't... Agree with in theory that I can just skate on this and ride on, on the, the, the privilege that I enjoy in the society in order to avoid having to deal with something that I might find icky. Yucca: yeah, I'm being served by the system, fundamentally. Yeah. Mark: So, you know, I'll give an example. It's like, an argument can be made that the certain proportion of people who in, in key states who supported Bernie Sanders, And then refused to vote for Hillary Clinton may have given us Donald Trump. It's not that they had to agree with everything that Hillary Clinton said because they didn't, I didn't. But the appointees that she was going to make, the appointees to the Supreme Court, the appointees to the, the cabinet positions, the appointees to federal judgeships. All of those things were going to be head and shoulders above any of the things that Trump ended up doing. And it's painful to say, but those people needed to look at the big picture and go and vote for Hillary Clinton. And they didn't. And it's that, it's that, that sense of privilege, that sense of it not mattering that much that I really think needs to be interrogated on the left. And I am on the left, right, but I'm on the left that seeks to achieve progress because I'm a progressive, and progress happens in incremental steps most of the time. Progress isn't a home run. Progress is a base hit, and electing Hillary Clinton would have been a base hit on the way towards achieving better policies. And instead, we have what we have. So, you know, and I realize that there are going to be people that are going to be fuming when they hear me say this but seriously, look at the playing board, and look at what we got, and You know, think about, well, what does this mean for the next election? Where, where should I be putting my support? Yucca: Hmm, yeah definitely was not expecting that, I was not prepared for that direction of the conversation. That's something that I would have to really think a lot on. I understand some of the sentiment behind it, but I would want to look more at some of the numbers. And some of the assumptions about who is entitled to what vote, and whether those, I think that there's a lot to that situation, and I don't feel comfortable, I mean, you certainly have the opinion that you want, but necessarily agreeing and and um humming without really looking at that particular situation. I think that there's a lot that was going on there. But I've certainly heard that argument a lot, and one of the things that I have been uncomfortable with is, and I'm not saying that you're saying this, but this is something that I have heard often, is the sense of entitlement of those people's votes. That, you know, somehow this party was entitled to people's votes. What about... So, you know, do the numbers actually work out of how many Democrats voted Republican in that situation versus how many Independents voted one direction or the other? I think that there's a lot to really look into there. Mark: Sure, sure. And I have looked into it some. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: I should be clear, I'm not saying that Hillary Clinton deserved anybody's vote, or was entitled to everybody's, to anybody's vote. I'm saying she deserved them from a strategic standpoint. Yucca: hmm. Mark: That when you look at the playing field, And what was the right next move, that that was the right next move. And in certain states like Wisconsin there were, there were enough votes that dropped off. That the argument can be made, but, but let's, Yucca: Yeah. Mark: let's make the whole thing abstract, okay? Rather than talking about that, that election in specific, let's talk about elections generally. When you have a situation where somebody who you agree with 50 percent is running against somebody who is agreeing with you 10%, And then there's somebody out there who agrees with you 100%, but they have no ability to be elected. And it's clear Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: You know, I need to go for the 50 percent because, again, I'm a progressive. So I want to see things advance, even if they're going to go a lot slower than I want them to go. Yucca: Right, well I think in some of that case it's going to depend on what are the particular changes that, and what are the things that you are placing at highest priority, right? And if one of the things that you're placing at high priority is trying to do something about the monopoly, then that the two parties have, I can see the logic of making a different choice there. But I think that the point, I think the point where we probably agree is that when you're voting, it's something to be very strategic about. It's to look at what is the situation where you are and what are the possible outcomes and thinking about You know, what are the values that you are, that you are fighting for in that case, right? What are they, right? Mark: and the key takeaway that I would, that I would leave this particular rabbit hole with is that not to vote is to vote. If you don't vote, you are Yucca: is voting, yeah. Mark: It is voting. So it is you know, you, you don't get away with your hands clean just because you don't vote, right? You, you bear a responsibility for election outcomes just like everybody else does. And that's a really important thing for people in democracies to understand. And I'll talk a little bit later on about democracy and the degree to which we have it and all that good kind of stuff. Yucca: And This is just one area, right? This is an area that we happen to be talking about because this is an area where, where this is something that there's some strong opinions on, and this is an area where people do have influence, but of course there's a lot of other things. As well, in terms of you know, commercial choices and lifestyle choices and all of that kind of stuff that we can but one thing I really want to highlight, and you touched on this a little bit before, but I think it really deserves its own section of the podcast as well, is that being able to spend large amounts of time on these issues is a form of privilege itself too, right? And this is not something that everyone has. And you don't have to be guilty and beat yourself up and you're not a bad pagan because you've got to do a 9 to 5 plus your two side jobs to even be able to Barely make rent, right? That's not, so we're not sitting here saying, oh, shame on, you're failing because you're not fighting oil rigs in the, you know, gulf and how come you're out there? Like, that's not what we're saying at all. And I think that it's really, really important to think about and balance in our lives the self care component. And, that sometimes, yes, it's, sometimes it is okay to just have your celebration and to not necessarily be talking about, you know, let's raise money for this, this particular candidate at this time, or something like that, but know that it does, that this stuff does have a place in the community, it is important, but it isn't, The, you don't have to be doing it all the time, if that's not what your, what your mental health needs. Mark: No, no, definitely not. And it's important for those of us that have the privilege to be able to engage the system in that way, either from the outside or the inside, that we recognize that privilege and use it. Right? You know, those of us that have the bandwidth, those of us who have You know, the thick enough skin and that have the energy and sometimes the money even just to travel, to go somewhere. I mean, the trip that I just took, I didn't pay for because otherwise I wouldn't have gone, right? But but it's, it's, that kind of privilege is very visible. It's like, The D. C. is a very, very African American town. It's a very Black town. Lots and lots of Black folks, and, until you get into the Congressional buildings, and there it whitens up considerably Yucca: Mm Mark: with the lobbyists and the, you know, the constituents that are going not, not universally, of course but noticeably, and it is incumbent upon those of us who have been there. The privilege to be able to engage, to do what we can to improve justice, and to speak for the things that we care about so that they can advance. Yucca: hmm. Mark: So, I could talk about my trip. Yucca: Yeah. Yeah, you were just talking about D. C., so, Mark: Okay, well. So, I got sent on a fly in with the Conservation Alliance, which is a consortium of businesses which was originally founded by REI, the North Face Peak Design, and Patagonia. And they came together to create a unified voice for speaking up for the outdoors, for for wild lands and outdoor recreation. That was a long time ago, and now they have 270 businesses from a variety of different sectors, and what they do every couple of years is they gather a bunch of the leaders of those businesses along with, and they make grants, right? They pool their money and they make grants to organizations that are doing organizing and advocacy for the issues that they care about, and the organization I work for, Cal Wild, is one of those. Yucca: mm hmm. So that's how you were able to go on this trip? Mark: Yes, CalWild was invited to send a representative, and I was selected to go, and so I went. This is not the first time that I've been to Washington to lobby, but the last time was in the 90s. So it's been a while. And everything has changed, of course. I mean, technology has changed everything, and 9 11 has changed all the security. So, it's, it's just a completely different experience. So, so I went and I was going to speak on to, as a grantee, to speak as a content expert about the positions that we're trying to advance. My organization right now is working very hard. for the creation of three new national monuments in California. My organization is limited to California, so that's why, you know, that. But we're also advocating for some policy changes at the administration level, which would affect the whole of the United States. And I should say, you know, we're talking a lot about kind of American politics in this podcast, but if you have a representative democracy of any kind, the things that we're talking about are really applicable to you too. Yucca: Right. Yeah, we're just talking about our experience with our Mark: the stuff we know about. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, the idea here is not to get everybody all plugged into American politics. It's to use that as an example of what citizen participation or resident participation looks like and why it's important. I go on this trip and I go to Washington and I meet with the team and we have a training briefing and all that kind of thing, and my take, we, on the first day, I had two meetings with administration offices with the Department of the Interior and the Council on Environmental Quality of the White House now when we're meeting with staff, we're not meeting with the people that are in charge in those agencies, we probably would have met with the Secretary of the Interior, but it's Climate Week in North Northern New York, so she was away at Climate Week, Yucca: Mm Mark: Um, so, and there was something going on with the Department of Environmental Quality such that we had the staffer that we had. But these are sharp, smart, influential people that we're talking to, and the sense that I got, and then the second day we had meetings with California delegation members both to the Senate and to the House of Representatives, including my congressman which I had a very interesting experience with talking to my congressman's office in Washington, so I'll get to that in a minute. Yucca: hmm. Mm Mark: The main takeaway that I got from, especially from meeting with the administration, was that they want to do what we want them to do. Their, their hearts are in the right place. And they are delighted that we are coming to Washington and talking to people, and organizing on the ground in local communities, because they need the political cover to be able to do what we want them to do. Yucca: hmm. Mark: And in that Yucca: like that's charging them up, right? They want to do it, but they need to be charged with the power of the people. Mark: yes, Yucca: Yeah. Mark: Exactly so. And... It gives them something to point to when opponents say, we don't want that, Yucca: Mm Mark: right, they can, you know, they can point to the organizing that my organization is doing and say, well, the people in the community who live right next door want it, you know, the elected officials of the county where the expansion of the National Monument is proposed, they want it. So, You know, those are their representatives and they elected them to office to make those decisions, so why shouldn't we do this? So it's really important to be doing that kind of community organizing and talking to other people about the things that you care about in a, you know, in a focused way. So that was really gratifying to me because, of course, American democracy has taken a beating over the last 20 years, but it's still functioning. Thank you. The elections are kind of messed up, and we could certainly do without gerrymandering and and all the dark money, and I could go on, but as well as the occasional insurrection, which I really, really think we could do without. I walked Yucca: that's not an, let's have that be a singular thing, please. Mark: yes. I walked several times, because the house office buildings and the senatorial office buildings are on opposite sides of the capitol. I walked back and forth in front of where the insurrection took place a bunch of times. And there it is, you know, large is life. And, you know, there are the windows they broke, that's how they got in, you know, there's where they hung their banners, you know, all that. So, that said it was encouraging to see that at least under this administration, There was a commitment to listening to constituents and to hearing, you know, they were very appreciative of the businesses that were represented there, you know, in, you know, speaking up on behalf of protecting public lands so that their ecological values last forever, their recreational opportunities there, all that kind of stuff. Yucca: Actually, is that something you can, I know that we're talking kind of more process here, but for a moment, you were, talking about trying to get more national monuments. Why are those important? Mark: Oh, good. Very, very good question. My organization focuses on conservation of wild lands on public lands. And a lot of Yucca: you keep going, can you define conservation? Because that is a term that has a lot of different baggage attached to it. So what do you mean when you say conservation? Mark: man protection of the land so that it will not be developed in certain ways. And management of the land for the resource, for the benefit of the resources that are there, of the ecological resources, cultural resources in some cases historical resources, and recreational opportunities for people to go camping or hiking or whatever that might be. So, one... One misapprehension that many Americans have is the idea that public land is protected land. And it is not. Most public land in the United States is owned by the Bureau of Land Management or by the U. S. Forest Service. And those have been managed primarily for extractive purposes like logging and mining and Yucca: Oil is big Mark: and oil exploration. Yucca: yeah. Mark: Yeah, very big. So we're advocating for chunks. of undeveloped land to be protected in perpetuity and managed for the benefit of those values. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: That's what a national monument does. Or a National Wilderness Area, which is declared by Congress. We're not asking for a National Wilderness Area in the areas we're focusing on because Congress is broken, and there's no way to get anything through it. the President can use the National Antiquities Act to declare a national monument. He can do that on his own. Yucca: So, by taking , these areas, you're setting aside, you're allowing ecosystems to stay intact, right? So that you can have the populations of these animals and plants or whatever. Particular kind of species you're looking at, they have a place to be, they can continue to play the roles that they would play in a hopefully healthy system and to help manage for that, Mark: Right, and that helps us to accomplish a couple of important things, one of which is, you know, we have a biodiversity crash problem, you know, the, the biodiversity of the earth is the, which is the number of different species and the number of individuals of those species are both on a steep decline. Having habitat is necessary in order for, you know, organization, organisms to live. And but not only that, this is a very interesting one. One of the things that we're advocating for is the expansion of Joshua Tree National Park. Yucca: hmm. Mm hmm. Mark: And the reason for that is that because of climate change, Joshua trees are migrating out of Joshua Tree National Park. Yucca: Interesting. Mark: Over time, they're moving north because it's too hot Yucca: Because it's warm. Yeah. Okay. Mark: Yeah. So, it... Protecting these areas also enables the natural systems of the earth to do what they do in terms of adaptation, right? So, there's a place for the Joshua trees to go as the southernmost of them die because of excessive heat, and conditions become better for them outside of the park to the north. So that's just one example. Yucca: And may I add that we of course want to protect these for simply the innate value of that being , has any right, as much right to be there as we do. But they also, the functioning system performs ecosystem functions, which is like cleaning the water and the air that we all breathe. So it's, it's not just that, oh, we like there being lots of animals and plants and fungi. It's that there needs to be. these plants and fungi and animals for life as we understand it to continue to function, Mark: right, exactly. And that requires, because everything is so fragmented now, it requires some level of active management in order to protect from invasions by invasive species, for example, which will wipe out all the biodiversity. Yucca: right? Or in my area of the world where we're missing keystone species, so we're missing whole ecological roles, there used to be these animals that aren't there anymore, and if you just take your hands off and you don't touch it, you fence that area off, that area will starve, quite literally, right? If you don't, if humans don't try, because it's kind of like the voting. No management is management. Mark: yes. Yucca: Right? It is a choice that we're making as well. And so we have to really be thoughtful about and understand the systems that we're dealing with. Mark: right. And there is so much science. I'm not saying we know everything, because we don't. There's an awful lot that we don't know, but there is a tremendous body of science about how to manage lands in order to improve biodiversity at this point. Yucca: And we're getting better at it. Mark: One of the things that we who work in the conservation sector, in the environmental sector, actually need to fight against within our own ranks is the group of people who still advocate for putting a fence around things and leaving it alone. Yucca: That's why I asked you a little bit about how you are using the term, because where I am, the term has been kind of changing a little bit, where we have kind of two different camps, which are the restorationists and the conservationists. And the conservationists are the people who, who are, you know, an anti gras, who are like, don't touch anything. Don't just fence it off. Don't know people know nothing. And then you've got the people who are going, well, let's look at the way the whole system works and maybe we do need to, you know, one, let's not keep kick the people off. 'cause you know, It's been here for 20, 000 years. But also, like, what, you know, what about the animals? What do we do for the, you know? So that's why I was kind of asking a little bit about that terminology there. Mark: here's a great example in California. There were devastating wildfires. that ran through Sequoia National Park. And in Sequoia National Park are the giant sequoia trees, these, you know, huge, vast, amazing, amazing Yucca: Amazing. Mark: awe inspiring. Well, because humans had been suppressing fire in those forests for a hundred years, when that wildfire ripped through, it burned much, much hotter than it ever would have otherwise, and killed a lot of those trees. Now, there's a big debate. The Park Service wants to replant seedlings of giant sequoias. in the burned area. And there are environmental organizations, self styled, that are saying, no, you can't do that. You just have to let nature take its course because that's the right thing. But we have been suppressing fire for a hundred years. We have been doing the most invasive, destructive thing that can be done to that ecosystem for a hundred years, and now you say we're supposed to leave it alone? That's ridiculous. You know, reseeding giant sequoias in that area is absolutely the right thing to do in order to keep the species from going extinct. And, I, I don't know, I mean, obviously this is what I believe. Yucca: I'm smiling as you're saying that because I used to work in stand management in the Jemez, and we had very, very similar, like, I can hear the two sides right now and it's, People get, have very, it's very emotional, right, and one of the things that happens, I think, is that people have very strong emotional connections without having some of the background to understand what is happening. And that goes back to what we were talking about before with some of our responsibility, I think, is that we have a responsibility to become informed about these Issues and learn about them and and be able to, if you're going to be involved in making choices about how these If this land is going to be managed, you need to understand the ecosystems that you're dealing with. Because our system, our ponderosa pine systems are very similar in terms of the fire ecology. You know, people become very, people are very concerned about thinning and controlled burns and things like that, and I think that they're coming from a good place. Their hearts in a good place in it, but are very, very misinformed about what the results of their actions will be if we do that. Mark: And there are two big pieces there that I think really are takeaways from all of this. The first one is that they are coming from a good place, but it's a romantic place. And we need to recognize in ourselves when we are romanticizing something rather than basing our decisions on facts. Yucca: Mm Mark: The second is... We have seen a terrible onslaught on the appreciation for expertise over the course of the last 40 years or so. And we need to respect the people who have letters after their names and understand deeply how things work. We need to listen to them. And they don't all agree with one another, that's fine. But in generally, in most cases, there is a scientific consensus. To some degree about what is the right course for these sorts of decisions. And we need to be listening to people that have devoted their lives to understanding these questions, rather than just thinking that because we like trees or we like nature, that we are in a position to make those kinds of decisions. Yucca: hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah. Mark: I'm speaking to you and you're in the process of getting letters after your name. Yucca: I have plenty of letters. I'm getting some more letters, but yes. Yeah. . Well, I had cut you off when you, in your story, to ask you to explain a little bit about the monuments, of why that was such an important issue for you to go across the entire continent. to talk about. Mark: That was a really important question. And as you mentioned this, yeah, it's true. I mean, there are a few reasons that I would put myself into an airplane at this point because of the impact on the atmosphere, but this is one that feels like on balance. Yucca: Potentially for your lungs, too. Mark: yes, yes, that's true boy, although I came back here and oh my god, the smoke, we're, we're really, we're really buried in, in wildfire smoke right now. So, Going to, and, and, you don't have to go to D. C. in order to advocate for things you care about. First of all, a lot of decisions are local, and you can go and talk with local officials, or organize a contingent to go and talk with local officials. But also, your congressional representative has an office in your area. You can go and talk with them and let them know what you feel about things. Yucca: Well, and state level as well, Mark: state level, absolutely. Yucca: right? And it, you know, it's going to depend a lot on your state. The experience in a smaller, population smaller state it may be A lot easier, like in my state in New Mexico, going down to the roundhouses is super easy you just walk in and there's everybody and you just go up and talk to them. I would imagine in a more populated state, it's a little bit trickier, but it's still possible, right? Mark: The culture contrast between, you know, California, of course, is the most populous state, almost 40 million people and the culture in Sac, yes, between Sacramento, our state capital, and D. C. is really stark. When you go to lobby in Sacramento, If you're a Democrat, you almost never wear a tie. I mean, registered lobbyists will probably wear a tie. But if you just go as a constituent or as an advocate for, you know, one of our groovy left enviro positions, You can wear an open shirt and a sport coat, a pair of slacks, I mean, and, you know, you don't have to hide your tattoos and your piercings and all that kind of stuff, it's great. You go to Washington, it's a suit for a man. You wear a suit, you wear a tie. I left my earring in, but that was my one sort of concession. And and you're right, it's very organized and very regimented in Sacramento, just because of the sheer volume of people that are, that are traipsing through there. Yucca: hmm. Mark: But I, I really, I want to come back to this idea that elected officials are there in a democracy to represent you, and they may not know what you think, Yucca: hmm. Mark: so go tell them. You know, get informed on an issue and, you know, go tell them what you think, what you, what you would like them to do. It's more powerful when you've organized more people to be a part of that voice. And that's why the Conservation Alliance exists. And that's Yucca: many other organizations too, Mark: yes, yes. That's why that's why community organizers exist. To gather the voices of... Individuals into a collective voice that's able to make change happen and that's true in any representative democracy, so it's, it's well worth, you know, you know, sticking a hand in, and the people you're talking to are just people. They don't bite. At worst, they will frown. That's, that's Yucca: wrinkle their brow at you. Mark: Yeah, that's, that's about the worst of it. I didn't have any Republican visits this time, so, we were very welcomed and just very encouraged, and I think there are going to be some declarations coming up here in the next few months that will make us very happy. So it's bringing all this back around politics is How we as a collective society make decisions about what's important, what's not, and what's going to happen. And if you care about your world, and as atheopagans and naturalistic pagans, I believe our listeners do care about their world and about their fellow humans then it's incumbent on us to say so, and do things that make things better. Yucca: I keep having the image of Mary and Pippin sitting on Treebeard's shoulder and shouting, but you're part of this world too! Mark: Yeah, yeah, there's, because there are things in this world that are worth fighting for. Right? Yucca: Yep. Well, we could certainly go on for a long time, but I think this is a little bit of a longer episode, so we should probably finish up here. And we are going into October, and we have some fun, and some spooky, and some great episodes coming up. And Stinky, and all of those great things that we love to celebrate, and recognize, and all of those things, and this great Time of year. And happy autumn, everybody. Mark: Happy autumn! Yeah, Yucca: So, thanks, Mark. Mark: yeah, thank you so much, Yucca. It's a pleasure talking with you, and I'm still obviously really kind of jazzed about this trip, so thanks for welcoming a conversation about that into the podcast. Yucca: See y'all next week. Mark: All right, take care.

Ep056: Taking Business to New Heights with Mark Walker

Building Texas Business

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 6, 2023 31:51

Listen in today's episode as entrepreneur extraordinaire Mark Walker shares Direct Digital Holdings journey. Mark reveals how laser-focusing on people, processes and credibility grew revenues from $6M to $120M in just five years. His insights on genuine networking and understanding capital raising are invaluable. We also explore leveraging AI for personalized ads and how concentrating on small wins propels growth. Mark's servant leadership style emphasizes collaboration in decision-making. Transitioning from private to public, Mark outlines assembling experienced boards through professional connections. Continuous learning, reading and informed networking develop strong leadership. This glimpse into Mark's exemplary journey offers a treasure trove of strategies for success. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS Mark Walker, the co-founder and CEO of Direct Digital Holdings, emphasizes the importance of people, processes, and credibility in scaling a business from $6 million to $120 million in revenue within five years. He explains that adopting an "it's okay to fail" mindset and involving every team member in the hiring process can lead to a more efficient and collaborative team. The unique sales strategy of Direct Digital Holdings is shared, which involves dividing their sales groups into hunters and farmers, contributing to their remarkable growth. We discuss the significance of focusing on small wins and leveraging AI for personalized ads in accelerating business growth. He mentions that his leadership style is rooted in servant leadership, emphasizing collaboration in decision-making. Walker explains his strategy for assembling a board of directors to transition a company from private to public, highlighting the advantages of collaborating with law and accounting firms to recruit experienced board members. He stresses the importance of continuous learning, networking, and staying informed in maintaining effective leadership. Walker reveals his love for Gatlin's Barbecue and his dream of taking a 30-day sabbatical in Asheville, North Carolina. He explains that maintaining a genuine network of connections before needing something is a valuable tool for success. Walker also shares the importance of a company culture based on integrity, service to each other, and accountability. LINKSShow Notes Previous Episodes About BoyarMiller GUESTS Mark WalkerAbout Mark TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Chris: In this episode, you will meet Mark Walker, co-founder and CEO at Direct Digital Holdings. Mark shares his views on how the importance of focusing on people and processes will help accelerate and manage the growth of your company. Mark, I want to thank you for being here today and being a guest on our podcast. Mark: Yeah, thank you for having us. Chris: So let's just get started by you telling us, tell us, direct Digital Holdings. What is that company? What are you known for? Mark: Yeah, very simply, direct Digital Holdings. What we do is we help companies buy and sell media and we leverage technology to do it. We have a buy side platform where we actually work with roughly about 250 different clients all across the United States, focused on the middle market, and when we look at the middle market, there are companies that are five to 500 million in revenue and we help them purchase media in order to drive our way of performance for their company. The second half of our business is Colossus SP, which is a supply side platform, and that side of the business we help publishers such as USA Today, gannett, hearst, brands of that Nature actually sell media in an automatic or programmatic way throughout the digital ecosystem, and so we work with about 26,000 publications, helping them sell media online and that's everything from digital banner ads to CTV, ot, streaming audio ads and help them generate revenue for their publications and for their websites. Chris: That's great. So what was your inspiration to start this company and grow it to where it is today? Mark: Yeah, absolutely. My business partner and I. We actually worked on another publisher, ebony Media, and while we were at Ebony we saw how the value chain of the programmatic ecosystem and media buying was changing. We saw that publishers were having difficulty specifically multicultural publishers were having difficulty getting connected into the programmatic ecosystem because their websites were too small and typically the larger players in the marketplace would want to work with publications that had 10 million unique visitors Well, anyone less than that. They didn't think it was worth their time giving them the technical expertise, know how, wherewithal, to connect into the programmatic ecosystem and purchase media automatically. So we saw the opportunity to buy two nascent platforms. One was Huddle Masses, which was the initial buy side platform. The other one was Colossus, which was the sell side platform. We put them together underneath one brand direct digital holdings and we started off with roughly about $6 million in revenue, and this year we're projected to grow to about 120 million in top line revenue over the course of these five years, and we've been really blessed and honored that many clients and partners have decided to work with us over this time. Chris: Yeah, I get a meant remarkable growth. Let's talk about a little bit. So this is your first stint at being an entrepreneur. Mark: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah it's myself and my business partner, Keith Smith. It's our first time really stepping into the role of operator. Previously I worked at startups. That's really where I first got my digital expertise and worked at Deloitte, worked at NRG Energy here in town and then also at Ebony Media. So all the while I've been working in the digital space, but this is my first entree into entrepreneurial space, really around the digital platform. Chris: So what were some of the lessons that you've learned, starting basically your own company and taking on that leadership role where everything you know, the buck stops with you? Maybe explain to our listeners, maybe, some of the things that that you've learned along that journey. Mark: Yeah, you know, I would kind of frame it up into three different categories. Chris: One one. Mark: It was about building up credibility in the marketplace. Having a good name, having a good reputation, having a network that you could lean on, I can tell you has been categorically valuable. That network is what I've leaned on for board members, what I've leaned on for contacts, relationships all throughout my career and really it's been 20 years of building up relationships that has come to fruition through this organization. Chris: That's number one. Mark: The second was really building up the credibility as well as the connections, but really the credibility of learning a craft and an expertise. That's been the second thing. And staying inside of the digital space and having 20 years of experience, it just kind of gives you secondhand knowledge of how things are gonna operate and how digital operates and flows. And then the third piece is understanding how to raise capital and put capital into the ecosystem. My business partner he came from private equity, worked on Wall Street and so he had the expertise and really brought that to bear, and so really it's been the culmination of those three things that we made a good partnership in bringing all three of those together. That's actually allowed us to have the success that we've had today. Chris: Yeah, it makes sense. I mean you can't, I think, overemphasize the importance of building really good relationships throughout your career, because you never know what you're gonna need to lean on them. Mark: No, that's exactly right. Yeah, my buddy, he gave me a saying a long time ago. He said network before you need something, and so I kind of lived by that ethos and I thought it was actually a good way of thinking about relationships. And usually if you do something good or nice for someone, even though you don't know how it's gonna come back to you, nine times out of 10, it always comes back when you need it, and that's really has been the story of our career and also our experience working with direct digital holdings. Chris: Yeah, I like that Network before you need something which said in other ways be genuine, right, build relationships in a genuine way, and then, yeah, it's always nice to help people out, and then if you do that from a point of genuineness, then it gets returned. It always gets returned somehow. So let's talk a little about your growth. I mean 6 million to 120. What are some of the things you feel like you and your co-founding partner have done to help kind of manage that growth, Because sometimes rapid growth can destroy a company. Anything that you can kind of share with us, that you think you all have kind of put into place to kind of manage this growth so that it's a healthy growth and that the company is sustainable. Mark: Yeah, absolutely, you know. It was really, you know, going from 6 million to roughly we did. God took about 30 million through an acquisition and so that was a good push for us and then, from that 30 million, really the next trunch from 30 to 90, which is what we did last year we really started working on processes. I can't stress enough in my experience back at Deloitte as well as with NRG really emphasize the importance of process people. You can't grow without people and you can't grow in an organized fashion without processes. And so we internally have been focused for the last two years really building up the processes and bringing new people into the organization to work specific tasks you think about when we look at organizations inside of us, inside of our organization. Part of the training had incorporated is you look at the functional first. Remove all the bodies, just think about the functions that need to be executed, think about the KPIs and the accountability, and then you start assigning the right person for the right role within those functions and understanding that each leader can only manage roughly four or five people effectively. So, we've definitely have had an emphasis and a focus on people, processes and accountability in KPIs inside of our organization. And that's really has led us really to take it from 30 to 90 million. And then we're putting more processes in, more what we call our third and fourth layer of employees inside the organization for us to really take that growth from the 90 to the 120, hopefully from 120 and beyond. Chris: That's great. So totally agree process and people, especially people, are the most important right. You can't no chance of achieving that kind of growth without good people. So what are you doing? And I don't know, how's your employee head count grown when you were at the six and even maybe the 30 to now? How many people are we talking about? Mark: Yeah, so back when we were at six we had probably eight, nine people total. Today we're at 85. So definitely like 12x growth from where we started off. The good thing is we've hired a significant amount of people with experience, a wealth of experience inside of the industry. So that really cuts down on the learning curve. And then the next piece is giving people the distance and direction where we're trying to go, and give them the guide rails. We'll let them figure it out. The thing I try to say internally is if I had to tell you how to do your job, then one of us is not doing their job effectively. So my goal is to hire people who understand and aren't afraid to fail. Put them inside of a structure, give them the distance and the direction of the resources that they need to try to accomplish a task and hopefully, get out the way and try to remove boulders when necessary. That's been kind of our leadership philosophy inside the organization and we think we empower our employees to actually accomplish a task that we put in front of them and hopefully we can celebrate at the end of the year for them achieving it. Most of the times nine times out of ten they actually outperform. So we think if we set up the right structure, giving them the right resources to help, them and then giving them the proper distance and direction and get out of the way. usually that's an effective way If you hire the right people, for them to be effective in their jobs. Chris: I like that. So, going with the people theme, you got to get them in the right seat, give them direction. What are you doing there at Direct Digital to foster a culture and so that people want to stay? Let's talk a little bit about that. Mark: Yeah, the culture that we really try to foster is one based on integrity. So if you're going to say something, follow up and do it. If you don't do it, take account of it before it. That's number one we try to foster that. We also foster service to each other, and that's the biggest one. My job as a leader is really to be of service to the employees, so take it serious to try to provide service to them and getting them what they need in order for them to execute effectively, and so we try to instill that inside of our leadership team and view it as it's not you doing what I say. It's about you enrolling in what we're trying to accomplish, and then let me help you get there. And so, even though we give big goals to our employees, we feel like it's all of our jobs to own that goal. And so I'm right there making phone calls. I still go on sale pitches. Last night, I had a client dinner we're still out here boots on the ground and if I'm not the number one salesperson trying to help generate sales and leads for the team, then I feel like I'm not doing my job. So that's kind of how we think about it. And when we try to hire employees, the word we termed as we want strategic doers. I like that. Yeah, we don't. We, you know, we're very deliberate that, especially in the growth phase that we're in, I need a strategic doer, someone who can be strategic but someone who doesn't mind rolling up their sleeves and getting dirty and running a report or making a sales call or generating leads. We need everybody doing it and then if you do effective job, then hire more resources underneath it. You can start moving into the strategic role. Yeah, Every employee starts off that way. We think it's a bit of an effective way for us to grow. Chris: Kind of that mindset of do what it takes to get the job done. Yep, well, it sounds like you know a lot of collaboration to kind of a team, teamwork, team, teammate mentality. Yeah, but you talked about you know just your hiring process, anything that you guys were doing there. Do you think they're somewhat innovative in how you go about the hiring process to make sure you're getting the right people? And maybe any challenges you faced in the last few years, given the environment and the economy? Mark: Yeah, when we come to the hiring, what we adopt as our philosophy is everybody touches them. So if the team is going to interview, if the person is going to be working on team, everybody on team has a say. Everybody on team has veto authority. And then the one thing I try to remind the leaders is the problem is going to be the problem. So if one person identifies a weakness, another person identifies a weakness, then that's probably the weakness in that person and it's not going to change. So then you have to ask yourself the tougher question Is that weakness detrimental in this role, or is that something that can be covered up or managed? And so that philosophy has been very instrumental in us being effective and we've been very. When we have our debriefs after we interview someone, everyone comes together. One person feels like I don't think they're going to be a good fit or I don't feel comfortable working with them. Then that's a no across the board. So very rarely have we made a decision that the collective wasn't comfortable with that person coming into the organization. Maybe it's my old fraternal approach to things, pledging a fraternity, and my business partner he actually played football at UT, but feel like a team and a collaborative approach is always the best way to try to find the best candidates and make sure you can protect the culture of the organization. Chris: Yeah, no, I couldn't agree more. I think that you've got that cohesiveness. You just can't put a price on it. And one person you hear it a lot in sports right, but a bad apple in the locker room or can destroy a good team, or quite the opposite. Maybe not a group of the best stars, but they get along. They can play above their natural ability. Mark: Yeah, absolutely. Chris: And. Mark: I love that yeah. Chris: So let's talk about a setback that maybe you've encountered in the last since starting at the company. Explain, maybe a setback you've encountered, what you did to overcome that, maybe what the learning was and how it's made you or the company better. Yeah, absolutely. Mark: You know, in moving and growing this fast, sometimes you miss processes and you know the way that we view it. One person didn't miss a process. We all missed the process. So for us you know, we've done that before where you know you have might be a process set up to protect the organization and you missed it. Sometimes you got to go in and everybody has to rally around and say, okay, guys, let's figure out what happened. There's no fault to be assigned, but really what it is. Let's figure out where did the process break down and we're all collectively accountable. So, that's really the approach we've taken, what I think it actually helped us. It actually helped us Really identify are there any other holes that we have in the organization we need to plug up? You know, you know what you know, but you don't know what you don't need. You don't always know what you don't know Right, and so it's that piece that, unfortunately, usually errors get pointed out and that's the correction that you have to go in place. But we try to take an attitude of it's no one's fault, it's all of our problem, let's all own it, let's take accountability for it, let's fix it. Chris: I'd have to believe that helps foster that it's okay to fail type of mentality you talked about earlier. Right, that if everyone's kind of you feel like everyone, that's your coworkers are in it with you, then you're more likely to take that risk, knowing that failure is not going to point fingers at you as a result. Mark: Absolutely, and that usually usually helps, because if everyone's in there with you together, then you're okay. You know you got coverage. Chris: Yeah. Mark: So that's the best benefit that you have. Chris: Switching subjects a little bit, let's just when you think about what you guys are doing and both sides of your business, anything kind of innovative that you all employed, that you think has really helped the trajectory of the company and this growth you've seen. Mark: Yeah, I would say a couple things. One, we bifurcated our sales groups, so we have lead generation and then we have our sales closers. That has been instrumental. Let the hunters be the hunters, let the farmers be the farmers and let them both work collectively together. That has been instrumental to help us grow. Specifically on our buy side business, we've been growing solid 10-20% year over year. That's a tougher business to grow but the level of growth that we've been able to see has been very effective for us. Very proud of what we've been able to accomplish on that piece On the sell side of our business, which has been growing 100-200% year over year we've been able to really foster an environment where a lot of companies will go in and try to get the big whale. We play a lot of small ball inside of the game, so a lot of fruit what I call was low hanging fruit had gotten left by our competitors. We called, we made calls, not to the highest level person, to the lowest level person, told them to test out our platform and, sure enough, we were able to grow that business that way. Our business leader was very innovative on that approach, calling what we call fingers on keyboards those are the decision makers, the day-to-day decision makers to get them to try out our platform and through those efforts we were able to grow effectively. So sometimes, especially when talking to other entrepreneurs, sometimes look for the slow hanging fruit. Don't try to hit the home run, try to hit the single. The single will get you on base and that gets you actually in the game. That's kind of the strategy we've taken. Chris: I think that's great advice for some of our listeners out there that maybe trying to grow their company they just started is. You know, you don't always have to hit the home run of the Grand Slam right, you can start small and let that momentum build. What about AI? How do you see AI playing into your business model and what changes do you think are going to be coming down your path where you may need to make some adjustments? Mark: Yeah, no good question. When it comes to AI, I think what you're going to start saying is it's definitely been around for some time, or some level of machine learning has been around for some time. We think of it in two different counts. We think of behind the house and then in front of the house. Behind the house, that's the stuff that you really don't see, but that's really inside of the processes. That's stuff that we're taking advantage of right now. We're taking advantage of a lot of different algorithms. We're incorporating AI into different pieces of it. You won't be able to see it, touch it, feel it, but it's actually making our systems run much more, our technology run much more efficiently. On the back end, that, I think, has been around for a while and we're definitely in that space and moving more advantageously in that space. Behind the house. In front of the house is where I think all the excitement is actually coming with AI. The fact that you can do words with image imagery, natural language, learning, things of that nature I think we're going to start seeing in the next two years is a personalization of ads. Right now, you do a lot of ads. You might come up with 16, 17, 20 different recipes, trying to hit different segments. I think you're going to see a lot more personalization. On the data side, we have a significant amount of personalization of understanding what people like, what they dislike, their behavioral, demographic, psychographics all that information is already there. Now you're going to start seeing the creative reflect that, because creating new recipes of ads is going to be a lot easier leveraging AI technology than when you don't have AI technology. You have a human who has to replicate 20 different ads of the same idea. I think that's really the next evolution that you're going to see. I think that's going to be the exciting part coming to our space in probably the next two years. Chris: Wow, that'll be before you know it. Mark: Yeah, it'll probably be here sooner than later. Chris: Yeah, let's talk a little bit about leadership. How would you describe your leadership style? Mark: I think it's more of a. As I said before, I try to serve all of my team members. On the personal, we all think of more of it as a collaborative approach. We think of each other as a work family. We try to foster that type of environment of a work family. If you go to our office space, there are offices, but the main area, about 3,000 square feet, looks like a house. It looks like a kitchen, has a TV, has couches. We try to foster a work family environment. We want kids up there. We ask employees bring your kids. We have X-pots for them to play. It needs to be a collaborative approach because we spend probably more time at work than we do at home. Chris: Yeah, no question, right, so you might as well enjoy it while you're there. Mark: The other way that I would say is my leadership style is I try to really believe in trying to be a servant leader, so every problem is my problem. If my team has a problem, it's my problem. I try to own it. I try to help people solve through it and work with them and try to hold them accountable for the result. But no one's held accountable on their own. We're all accountable, so everyone pitches in to try to help out. So that's what we try to do with the environment, that we try to foster Type of leadership style that we have. My team probably would say I get into the weeds a little too much. Sometimes you can't help it right. Chris: Yeah, but I enjoy getting started. I get that. I get that there's some value, as long as you can regulate it to your team, seeing you willing to get in and get dirty get your fingernails dirty from time to time, right, and they're like, okay, you are in this with us, yeah, let's talk about. So. You've got your co-founder, keith Smith. How do the two of you manage the leadership roles in the company to be aligned and kind of maybe not contradict one another or step on each other's toes? Mark: Yeah, so the way we operate Function is we both bring two different experiences and we actually did bring two different personalities to the equation my business partner, keith. He's definitely more on the finance side. So when it comes to the finance, when it comes to the administrator, when it comes to the legal, he owns that, that's, he takes the leadership piece on that and I'm more than happy to step out of the way. All those pieces we got to do refies. We're going through the IPO process. He definitely took the lead on how to get that whole structure and organizing. Yeah, that expertise and experience for that. Chris: When it comes to the operational side. Mark: that's the piece that I bring more of my leadership style to, and so we meet in the middle. So when those two come together we meet in the middle. So it's really kind of clear lines in how we are structured. When it comes to investors, he takes the lead on talking to investors and stuff like that. If they need to hear from the operator, then I step in and have those kind of conversations. Chris: But that's pretty much how we structure the organization and it works well that way, so clearly delineated roles and responsibilities, and then everyone in the organization understands that as well, how it shapes up. Mark: Yeah, and then personality wise we make a good match, because I'm probably more of the passionate one, he's probably more of the sub dude one, so we meet in the middle that way. Chris: Okay, yeah, that sounds like a great team. The results speak for itself. What about mentors? Any mentors you've had along the way? That kind of help get you to where you are, shape your leadership philosophies, your work ethic, etc. Mark: Oh, absolutely, I had a thousand. You know a lot of them Some of them have been independent entrepreneurs. I call them my own personal board of directors. Reach out to a lot of them one-on-one to have conversations with them and get feedback and thought. Some of my mentors and leaders actually have joined the board, okay, and they're on our board of directors, and so definitely get a lot of leadership and good guidance from our board of directors, very happy with what they provide and the expertise that they deliver. And then they definitely help shape the organization and also give me and challenge me to think through different either opportunities or also different risks that are out there. So definitely got the board, got my independent individual board of directors as well. Of friends that I actually call on that I've known for 20 plus years. Some are in the industry, some are outside the industry, but they haven't been shaped by all of them. Chris: Let's talk a little bit about that. You know the board and board composition, etc. When did you and Keith decide to form a board of directors? Was it right out of the start or was it as the company was evolving and growing? Mark: Yeah, so we started our when we were from 2018 to 2022, we were actually privately held, so we're probably I'll do as myself, keith and we had a third business partner who we ended up buying out, so we made up the constitute the board and, trust me, it was 100 times easier as a private company yeah. Because you look at Keith and I look at him and say what do you want to do? Chris: Yeah, Right, which is typically how the small, privately held entrepreneur starts out. Right Exactly. Mark: Yeah, and just kind of kind of keeping moving. When we ended up deciding to go public, we had to actually form a public board, and so then we had to start recruiting people with actually board experience and expertise and you know some level of ground toss and all that. And that's when you know, we had to start tapping into our own connections, our own network. Our lead director we worked at Deloitte. We both worked at Deloitte, didn't know each other at that time but we knew mutual people and mutual friends and so we recruited her to come on the board as our lead director. She's been absolutely phenomenal. But really thought through, what did we need to help us grow to the next level? So we knew we needed technologists. We knew we needed someone with finance background and a strong experience and accounting around audit committee. Then we knew we needed someone with industry expertise, specifically from the agency side. So we're very strategic about who we brought on the board, why we brought them on the board and what value we were really looking to get in expertise. So you know, my advice on performing a board is really to think through. Don't think about where you are today, but really think about where you're trying to go tomorrow and try to bring the people who have that experience and expertise to come on the board. Now I will say for us to recruit one of those members, best place to go is your law firm and your accounting firm. They know good people. They know people they probably worked with on other boards. My first piece of advice go to your attorneys and go to your accountants and see if they know of anyone who might be a good board member. That's how we started our recommendation process, yeah. Chris: And I think you're right in picking those disciplines that you have again as a mentor or resource to bounce ideas off of, get direction from. Yeah, and you don't have to be a public company, a privately held company trying to grow can that entrepreneur can benefit from those resources. Mark: Absolutely Firmly believe that and then build the right culture even inside the board. You want to collaborate on board who can think through problems collectively and come to a solution. Chris: Yeah, what about? You know we all, we all try to continue to learn and grow. What are some of the things you do to kind of keep yourself sharp, to keep learning, to be that servant leader? You know the type of person that you want to emulate in the company. Mark: Yeah, a couple things. One definitely mentorship. So you know, one of the pieces of advice I give is get into a CEO group, because everybody has problems. Chris: Right, then you can learn from other people's problems before they become yours. Mark: Before they become yours. You're like, let me take note of that problem. That's number one. But I would also say you know I read a lot. Yeah, every morning I'm reading, every afternoon I'm reading, I subscribe to God knows how many publications. So you really try to absorb information and I have to say you have to get out of the ivory tower and get out on the street. Yeah, I'm a firm believer in, you know, hearing kind of the qualitative information. To me, if it's in the news, it's already too late. It's really the qualitative information that you get from networks that really kind of give you insight on where the trends are going. So I always try to keep my ear to the street. By getting out and meeting with people and taking people to watch, I get a lot of good information that way. Chris: These are great pieces of advice as far as how to kind of stay in tune with things, and I think you're right. These days there's some great publications, you know I think Bloomberg does since two meals a day, one in the morning, one in the evening, and all that where news is coming at you fast. Mark: It's coming at you and you gotta be on it every day, For sure You're absolutely right. Chris: Before we change subjects, one or two things that you would say to some of our listeners that are trying to start, or maybe just start, a new company about here. If you're about to embark on this journey to pursue a passion on your own or with a couple partners, here are one or two things that I think you should absolutely do or consider doing, as you kind of embark on that wisdom there. Mark: You know, the one piece of advice I would give is be all in Like entrepreneurship. I will just say two things. One, it's not for the faint of heart, but you gotta be all in. And so I think there is something about failure and success. The risk of failure will drive you to success. But if you kinda have one foot in and I'm still doing my job, but I wanna do this then you're not wanting to be an entrepreneur. You either gotta be all in, ready to risk it all, or you don't. That's probably the one piece of advice I would give Pretty much everyone. And if you're not in the position to get yourself in the position to and then go all in, Don't think you can do it half in, half out. It won't work. Chris: That's great, great advice actually, and very true. It's funny that's a pretty consistent theme of the guest I've had. Is that all in mentality? And the second is it's not for the faint of heart. Mark: Right. Chris: So just know there's gonna be tough times and you just gotta muscle through it. So let's go a little bit on the personal side. What was your first job? Mark: First job in high school was a sacker at Randalls. I used to sack groceries when I turned 16, over off of Jones Road and, yeah, you made good money. If I came home with $40 after a cycle, I was pretty happy. Chris: Yeah, and in the hot Texas heat. Oh absolutely, yeah, okay, so your native Texan. I always ask all my guests you prefer Tex-Mex or barbecue? Mark: Barbecue hands down Gavils barbecue. Chris: Oh, okay, there we go, no hesitation, and applaud for Gatlins. I love it. It's pretty good stuff. They've gotten a lot more competition now, but Gavils gonna win, yeah. So let me ask you this so if you could take a 30 day sabbatical not that you would, if you could where would you go? What would you do? Mark: If I could take a 30 day sabbatical I would probably. You know, I really wouldn't mind going to Asheville, north Carolina, getting out in the mountains and enjoy some of that, especially in the fall I'd be out there all day Just out in the woods and hanging out. Chris: It's a beautiful area. Oh God, it's gorgeous. Yeah, it's got a sketch right out there. Well, mark, I wanna thank you again for coming on. Congratulations to you and Keith on what you've built and are continuing to build. Love hearing your story and the insights you shared. Mark: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Pleasure being here. I appreciate your time and thank you for having us. Special Guest: Mark Walker.

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Truth and Reality

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 28, 2023 58:09

Remember, we welcome comments, questions, and suggested topics at thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com. S4E27 TRANSCRIPT: ----more---- Mark: Welcome back to The Wonder, Science Based Paganism. I'm your host, Mark, Yucca: And I'm Yucca. Mark: and today we're talking about truth and reality. Yucca: Yes. So, there's a lot to talk about here. Mark: There is, there is, and that's, that's why we chose this topic, right? Because a lot of the places where we come into friction with other parts of the pagan community, and certainly friction with other religious perspectives other than atheism, is in the question of what is real and what is true, right? Yucca: hmm. Mm Mark: And I think what I want to start out with... The problem is that we have terrible language for this stuff. Yucca: hmm. Mark: Very imprecise language that uses one word to describe a lot of different things. Yucca: Right. I want to start also with with a little story from something my father used to say when I was little. And I don't know where he got it from, but when he would tell a story, and I would ask him, I'd say, Dad, is this a true story? He would say, Yes. The events didn't happen. But this is a true story. Mark: Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah, like fables, Yucca: The Mark: Fables that illustrate moral principles. The moral principles may be something that we want to subscribe to, but that doesn't mean that the story about the chicken that was afraid that guy Yucca: sky was falling, or that nobody would help her make bread, or... Oh, there's a lot of chicken ones. Mark: are there? Yucca: Yeah, right? Mark: You would know more than me. Yucca: But, so, when we say that word true, It can mean so many different things, right? Sometimes we mean it as, is it correct as in, you know, a mathematical problem, right? Is 2 plus 2 equals 5? Is that true or not, right? But we can also mean, is it true in that more, does it have importance, does it have meaning? So, Mark: or even in very broad philosophical senses, like, is it true that supply side trickle down economics benefits everyone in the society? And some people will say yes, that's true. I think the evidence is that it does not, but ultimately it comes down to what you believe and what your, what the underpinnings of that belief are, what your philosophies are, right? So when I see Truth. I used to just mean the objectively factual, the verifiable, right? Yucca: right, so sort of like a positivist approach to truth, right? So what is real can be verified empirically, and the best approach to find it is the scientific method. Right? That would be our positivism, yeah. Mark: that is true of phenomena in the objective universe outside of our skins. The earth is round ish, it's not flat. Doesn't matter what you believe about it, it's still round ish and not flat, right? We have overwhelming evidence that this is the case. And so, it's not 100% sure, because nothing in science is ever 100% sure, but there's so much evidence that it's not considered an open question at this point. It's considered settled science. It's a fact, right? But when you get to truths like... Justice and morality and good. There are truths in there too, but they're much more rooted in the philosophy and belief system of the person that's expressing them in the culture that they grew up in Yucca: Mhm. Mark: than it is about something that can be measured and factually checked. against other alternatives, right? Yucca: Right. And while we're giving things labels that would be more of a constructivist philosophical approach, right? That those beliefs are constructed from the society that you're part of and your experience and your species and that all of those things are building on each other to create reality or to create truth. Mark: Right, right. Your, your familial ideological context, all of those, all of those things accrete to form something that more or less hangs together as a, as a philosophical belief system, right? So, that I think is a part of the reason why it becomes very difficult to talk about what is true. Because as you say, the story, the events, May not have happened, but the story can still be true, and that's why myth is so important to us. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: You know, we are the storytelling apes, as we've said before, and telling stories, even science tells stories, science, you Yucca: Oh, absolutely. That's what it's about. There's very strict rules about how you tell that story, but that's what we're doing. Yeah. Mark: it tells, you know, chronological procedural steps, events that take place, where, you know, something becomes something else, or something comes into being and, and so it's important for us to recognize, I think, The value that storytelling has for us in the abstract, Yucca: hmm. Mark: because just because something is not objectively factual doesn't mean that it can't be emotionally moving morally instructive eye opening in perspective, Yucca: hmm. Mark: You know, broadening your, your understanding of the human condition and the life that we live. So, all of those things are, are true, right? And none of them is, you know, can be subjected to a grass, a gas chromatograph. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: You can't, you, you can't measure those kinds of things. Yucca: Right. Mark: So, I actually made a little Venn diagram using the wrong tool for making Venn diagrams. I used Microsoft Word earlier today. And I've got four circles. I've got objectively verifiable facts. I've got believed truth, cultural truth, and then what overlaps all three of those is personal reality. Yucca: How are you distinguishing between the believed and cultural? Mark: Well, here's a good example. The cultural truth of the United States is Christian. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: It is, you know, that, that is, You know, the cultural truth is what I would call the over culture, Yucca: Mm Mark: whereas the individual's personal reality might vary from that, the believed truth. You know, so we don't subscribe to many of the values or or even cosmological beliefs of the cultural truth. But we do. And so we have our own believed truth. Yucca: Okay, Mark: That make sense? Yucca: does, yeah. So just getting a sense of how you're using those words. Mark: Yeah. And this, once again is where language is just really not very useful. I mean, having to use all these qualifiers for words, words like truth and real and fact and things like that is, it's frustrating. And because I have spoken a couple of other languages, I know that it's not entirely capturing what I'm trying to say. Yucca: right. Mark: We don't have quite the right words in our language to capture what I want to say. Yucca: So I don't know if any language, some might have words that are, that are better fit, but, but language is just something that we're trying to to, to communicate these ideas, but the ideas are, language isn't enough. Right? And so I think that it's helpful for us to try to articulate it anyways, because that forces us to clarify our thinking around it, right? We can't just throw a word on it and say that's, that's what it is, right? We have to really think about what are we trying to actually say. And that's tricky, because we're trying to think about, we're trying to think about our own process of thinking. Mark: Yes. Yucca: more challenging than it sounds like on the surface and then put down, and think about other people's approach to it, and of course we are just these limited, limited beings, right? We don't experience everything, we only get to be around for, exist for a very short period of time, and most of the time that we're existing for, we're not even conscious for. Mark: Right. And our brains constantly edit, massage, invent fill in the blanks. of our perceptual array filter our perceptions in order to create an inner model of the universe that we can interact with, right? And so we can determine that things are true when there's very little evidence that relates to them. Even, even people conclude that things are objectively true, like ghosts and... Spirits and gods and stuff like that with very little evidence, but they will conclude that it's true because they have experiences that are filtered through their own filtration process that will make what appears to be evidence for them. Yucca: Right. Mark: And while I tend to be very, very skeptical about those kinds of processes and skeptical, you know, when I have an experience that strikes me as violating the laws of physics, and I have had a few, Yucca: Mm Mark: um, My immediate question is, okay, you know, what went wrong with my sensorium? You know, how am I, how did I misperceive this and misinterpret what it meant? Others may not do that. Yucca: Mm Mark: And one thing that I also wanted to talk about today is the way that we relativistically value certain kinds of truth relative to other kinds of truth, which is a cultural thing, and I think that, particularly in the West, with with our domination of of science and technology and, you know, the, the kind of linear thinking. What's the word I'm looking for? When you take things apart. Reductionist. That's what I'm looking for. The, we, we tend to, Yucca: reductionism. Mark: yes, Yucca: Yeah. Mark: We tend to place that which can be verified up on kind of a pedestal. As being somehow more important than the other flavors of truth, the other varieties of, of truth Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: that we experience in our lives. And what's weird about that is that in an actual human life, that's not how it works at all. I mean, yes, when you're young, it's useful to be able to determine, you know, what a fire is so you don't burn yourself with it. But as we get older, the questions that we ask ourselves are, what does this feel like? Yucca: Mm Mark: You know, does this feel like the right thing to do? Is this, is this moral? Is this just? Is this kind? Those kinds of questions, and those are things that there is no meter to measure. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mm. Mm Mark: So I think, for example, about, like, take the Lord of the Rings, right? This is a semi sacred text to many people you know, there, there are lots of folks out there who read it every year and are, you know, deeply steeped in the whole lore of, Yucca: My family read it every single year. Mark: Huh. Huh, you know, just immersed in the beauty of and the drama of Tolkien's imaginary world. Now, Middle earth doesn't really, I hate to break this to you, but Middle earth really doesn't exist to our knowledge in any material sense. Yucca: Right. It was, you know, loosely based off of Europe, but not in the sense that of an actual book. You can't go and say, oh, you know, Mount Doom is Vesuvius or something, like it doesn't actually line up. Mark: Right. Yucca: It was meant more to be spirit, right, than in physical body. Mark: Right. Right. Right. But it can be profoundly impactful on us emotionally and even in terms of our thinking about Ethical questions, moral questions, you know, what would Galadriel do? So I think that the discounting of the mythological, the, you know, the fictional, but still containing kernels of, of meaningful human knowledge, narratives that we have, And certainly the the the culturally developed principles like fairness and justice and so forth. I mean, these are very important. And what, even though you can't measure them, they're, it's still very important. And I think that we, especially as atheists, we can get accused of over, overemphasizing the, the material positivist verifiably, Extant stuff Yucca: Right. Mark: relative to the rest. Yucca: I think there has to be a balance, too, though. Because so many times we have seen people's that reality that approach being valued over some of what's objectively happening, right? We think in ecology, right, there was a cultural belief about predators being bad. And we went and got rid of the predators. That did not help the ecosystem, though. Objectively, the predators had to be there. Same thing with the grazers, right? We take the grazers out, we take the predators out, the system falls apart. No matter how much you believe about, oh, the poor little deer, Right? Like, the system still falls apart if you take the predators out. Mark: Absolutely. Yucca: so I think that it's a tricky balance when looking at and trying to, to figure out how to make choices how to balance what knowledge we're looking at, what, how are we approaching the, the cultural versus some of the objective, and not saying that one is better than the other, but that there are places for each of those. Mark: Yeah, that, that's exactly where I'm going with this, because what I'm, what I'm expressing is that I think that we need to elevate the value of the mythic, but that's not an excuse for scientific illiteracy. Yucca: Right. Mark: You know, we having a good story about the nature of reality is not the same thing as having good knowledge about the nature of reality. And, unfortunately, there are an awful lot of people out there who simply choose, okay, I'm gonna go with this story, I'm gonna go with this story about, you know, this resurrection and original sin and virgin births and all that kind of stuff, or I'm gonna go with a story about Odin, or I'm gonna go with a story about, you know, anyway, name, name your divinity of choice, right? Yucca: Well, and I and I would like to say that I don't think it's just within believing in deities or things like that. But people will also do things, stories that don't really line up with current scientific understanding, but is they like their version of, and I see this with a lot of like the really a great aggressive atheists who like they get this idea of like, this is what science says. And it's like, yeah, that's That's like an 18th century understanding, like, science has progressed, you know, significantly since then, but you're going with this one story and you're deciding that that's what it is and not deviating. Like, that's not, that's not how science works. Mark: And similarly, many critics of science will point back to scientific thought and statements from a hundred, a hundred and fifty years ago and say, well, science is just racist. It's a colonialist, racist ideology, and that's all that it is, so you can discount it. Yucca: Yeah. Which is, no, it, the people who were doing science Existed within a cultural context and sometimes abused the tools to their own end yeah. And that's happening today too, right? But our responsibility as informed citizens and as scientists is to not let that happen Mark: Mm hmm. Yucca: we see it, hmm. Mark: Absolutely. And so, as I am so fond of saying, the solution to bad science is more and better science. It's, it's not to throw that whole system out and say, okay, let's just go with the story we made up. That being said, and understanding that You know, deliberately choosing to believe in a world that is populated by invisible beings and has, you know, invisible forces that you can manipulate in order to affect the course of events and stuff like that. I mean, I can understand why that's attractive in some ways. It's very um, romantic. That's exactly the word. But it doesn't really reflect what we understand. And. My paganism, my spirituality, is deeply rooted in the idea that I want to be here. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: I love the stories, I love the movies, I love the, you know, all that stuff, but I want to be connected with the reality of what this life experience is as best I can and to celebrate and be wowed by that. Mm Yucca: Right. And that's something that we've talked about a lot on the podcast, and we should do another Wow and Wonder episode, right, where we share some of that stuff, but that, that our reality is unbelievable. It is amazing. It's whatever scale you look at, it, I mean, just wow. Mark: Mm hmm. Yucca: Right? And you can just go down and down into the single drop of water, and all of the complex, incredible interactions and creatures that exist in that single drop of water, all the way up to the scale of the observable universe. It's just, there's so much, and we could spend every moment of our waking life discovering more and more, and still not even begin to scratch the surface. And it's just... It's incredible. Everything that, every day when I learn a new thing, it's just amazing. It's just, wow, wow, wow. This is, so personally, I don't feel like I need the invisible beings. Like, and if they're, if they're there, that's cool. Like, could, I'd love to discover them. But in the meantime, like, I'm, I'm pretty happy with tardigrades. It's pretty amazing, right? Mark: they sure are. Yeah, I feel, unsurprisingly, I feel the same way. The... If there are, if there is a supernatural dimension to reality, Yucca: Mm Mark: or a dimension in which the kinds of things that theists and believers in magic subscribe to, whether or not it's natural, you know, maybe there are other physical laws that apply in that context or something. There's little enough evidence for it that I can ignore it. I, I will cheerfully pay attention to the stuff for which there is abundant evidence. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: You know, I don't, I don't have time in this life to go sifting through all of that, much less deal with stuff that may or may not be there. So, I mean, it's, it's a, it's a very sort of pragmatic decision to make as well as a, as a philosophical one, right? It's just like, well, you know, I wouldn't want to spend a whole lot of time on something that turned out not to be there. So I'm, I'm. I'm just going to look at this gigantic pile of amazing Yucca: hmm. So, pragmatic critical realism? Is that where we're getting into? Mark: something like... Yeah, something like. But I do want to say that I think, I mean, part of the problem that we have, I think, with religiosity at least certainly in the United States, is that people are subscribing to religion and then, and then turning off any curiosity and, and deliberately resisting any curiosity from a scientific standpoint. You know, how does this work? What makes this that, that way? And they just, they've got this. There's a magical wand that they wave at it that said the gods did it, or God did it, and what that enables them to do then is to fill their, their world perspective with stuff that clashes vehemently with the evidence that we have, like people that are climate change deniers and, you know, flat earth folks and, you know, those kinds of things. Yucca: The second one is the one that always just makes, like, I can understand the first one about the climate change one, right? But the flat earth one, like, like, you, you can see it, Mark: Only if you believe that we've ever launched anything from earth. Yucca: but, like, you can see the horizon. Mark: Yeah. Yucca: Like, that's the, that's the one that I'm like, well, but you can literally see it with your own, like, the climate stuff, you've got to like, you've got to trust that the data that's being collected is, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? But, but you can use your own eyes to verify that the Earth is not flat, that it's not spherical, right? And that's the one that I've just... It gets me. I'm just like, it's just, y'all, this is not, Mark: I, Yucca: that you're saying that you don't want to trust all of these, like, crazy, that we're all in on some huge conspiracy to, like, trick you and make Photoshop documents and stuff, but, like, you can do the trick with a laser and, like, shine it over distance, you can see through the horizon when you're at the sea, like, you can go up in an airplane, like, you know, it's, you can see it. Mark: yeah. I think that what Flat Earthism is about fundamentally is just a rejection of science as a whole. Yucca: Yeah, and getting attention. Mark: yes. Yes. The whole idea of expertise, right? Like, I'm not going to believe those people. I'm going to do my own research, and my own research involves, you know, digging two pages deep on Google as opposed to spending years studying meticulously the, the, the data and the analysis that's been applied by people who are very knowledgeable in these subjects Yucca: For thousands of years, by the way, Mark: For thousands of years, yes. I mean, not, not just in the context of Western laboratories and stuff, but I mean, indigenous people know how all the plants work because they did trial and error and experimented and figured it out, Yucca: yeah, Mark: you know, it's, the, the idea that the scientific method is something that doesn't belong to all people just doesn't hold up very well in my, Yucca: no, the scientific method is a, is based on human, the way that humans instinctually, all humans think, right? It is, it is grown out of that and there are, there's a specific Western tradition, right? But that is one tradition. Out of the thousands, right, that led to, that just gave names, right, like, okay, we've got some Greek names that we're using, but it's not like, you know, here in the Americas, we weren't using those same methods, right? Mark: right, right. And, mm hmm. Now, now we get into the trouble about, well, what do we mean by science? Do we mean the scientific method? Do we mean the accumulated body of knowledge that has, that has been accreted by the scientific method? Or do we mean institutions that that are scientific? And the institutions certainly have been, they, they've had their problems. Yucca: absolutely, Mark: they, they've been informed by cultural biases and, Yucca: And they still are, Mark: And they still are. And in some cases, they've been influenced by where their funding comes from Yucca: yes, Mark: which is another problem. And, you know, I think it's important for all of us to acknowledge that and to apply critical thinking and skepticism to what we see. But critical thinking and skepticism doesn't mean I reject the opinion of all experts, Yucca: yeah, yeah, Mark: or I'm going to find experts who confirm what I already wanted to believe. What it means is Having knowledge about how methodology works, understanding what actually, being able to parse out whether a conclusion that's drawn in a paper or a statement actually has any meaning. Coherence with the, The findings? Yucca: you would be really surprised at how often they don't. Mark: I wouldn't. Yucca: Well you get, Mark: But, but I think many would. Yeah, Yucca: many, and there's certain fields that it's more of an issue in than others, but you read the conclusion, then you look at the data and you go, that's not no If you were my student, I'd fail you. How did you get published? Mark: you didn't, you didn't prove that. And then usually there's a sort of clickbaity headline in the title of the paper or certainly the press release that is sent out about the paper that then further distorts the conclusion that was drawn by the paper. Yucca: So yeah, , the science journalism is an area with some real challenges. Right now and there's so much that goes out there. It's just like, that's just not, it's, they're just falsehoods. This is not what was said in that paper, first of all and, you know, just, so I, I, I understand where some of the frustration with the science as the institution is coming from. But then it just gets, and I think that the way that social media is structured right now doesn't help it because it will, people kind of get wrapped up in this, these groups that are forming identities around objecting to science or othering some particular group or some, you know, kind of extreme position or You know, things that are just not supported by the science or are being represented as science, which really aren't scientific, get incorporated into the mainstream. And people go along with these beliefs about, oh, this is what the science says, and it's not. Mark: Right. Yucca: me a single paper. Nope, you Mark: Well, and, and you, you, you complicate and extrapolate that when you have leaders who are hucksters, who, who articulate these falsehoods, like from the pulpit, Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: and encourage everybody to disbelieve in anthropogenic climate change, encourage people to, you know, not to believe science, not to believe in evolution, these kinds of things. Yucca: And then you have got folks using a lot of that for whatever their particular platform is. When it's not, you know, where they're making certain claims or exaggerations that isn't really supported by the science. Mark: Well, one thing that, one thing that I have thought about recently is that we really need to make a distinction between skepticism, which is a process of inquiry, and cynicism, which is just the desire to tear everything down that isn't consistent with what you wanted to believe in the first place. Yucca: Hmm. Mark: And there's an awful lot of people out there including in the atheist community, many of them, who call themselves skeptics, and what they really are is just cynics. You know, they're, they're not even trying to have an open minded inquiry into what's likely to be true, so much as they are just trying to tear down everything that, that they don't like. In our lives. In our, you know, in our entertainments, in our in our politics, in our in our religious rituals, we, we do something that we often call suspension of disbelief. But I think what it is more is suspension of skepticism. We choose to turn off that analytical lens that says, like, have you ever sat next to somebody in a movie and they're like, no, the, that light angle isn't right, this was done with CGI. You know, they're, they're constantly, like, breaking the, the spell. Of the movie? Very frustrating. Yucca: My partner won't watch sci fi with me for that reason. Mark: oh, Yucca: I have to keep my mouth shut. I'm like, nope! Gravity doesn't work like that! Stop it! Mark: I, I mean, Yucca: not to do it in a movie theater, though. Mark: okay, well, good, good. Then we can still be friends. Yucca: My lip, but... Mark: all right. So, suspen suspension of skepticism. I do that when I do my, my atheopagan rituals. I certainly do that, you know. In that moment, I, Who am I? You know, I'm a wizard. I'm a, I'm a manipulator of grand forces in the world, you know, who's making, you know, who's expressing wonder and awe and gratitude for this amazing life and putting out that I hope that these things will happen in the world. And that doesn't have to be undercut by all the little niggling voices that might try to cynically suck all the juice out of that moment, right? You know, I don't go to the Grand Canyon and think, well, it's only a hole in the ground. Yucca: Huh. Mm Mark: That doesn't, it doesn't feed me in any substantive way. And so I think that the, the excessive elevation of the technological and the scientific in certain circles anyway I mean, it may not be quite as bad as the elevation of uninformed religiosity, but it's still. Generally, you know, reason, rationality science are, generally in our society, they're viewed by important people, by the, the people that are, that are in the newspaper and are telling us the news and all that kind of stuff as being important. the mythic, and the mythic is not given that as much. Yucca: Right. I think there's irony in that, though, that I think that there's overall very poor scientific literacy within our culture, Mark: Yes, Yucca: right, and so we do elevate that, you know, the science and the rationality, but that I think that we do so in a way that puts it more in that, like, Mark: mythic? Yucca: in the mythic box, right, Mark: Yeah, because we don't understand how it works. Yucca: Yeah, so we just like, you know, switched what the particular thing is that we're being told to believe. And said, oh, it's because it's science, right? But without really understanding, without understanding science in any of the three ways that we just used the term, right? Mark: yes. And certainly there is little effort to foster scientific literacy in the United States, certainly. I think that's less true in some other places. And so we're kind of forced to treat science as this magical black box that answers questions for us and that technologies fall out of that we then get to use and buy and enjoy. Yucca: fonts and colors associated with it, and yes, and you know, beep boops and sounds like that, right? Mark: Huh. Yeah, absolutely. And we insist on that, right? We, there's a particular kind of look and feel to a computer that will sell a computer, and there's a look and feel that will not sell a computer, and the people that make computers know very well what the difference is. Yucca: Right? And if you are... If you're a college kid going into one of those fields, you are expected to look and behave a certain way and, Mark: Right, Yucca: Not another way, right? And that gets taught to us from when we're itty bitty. Mark: Yeah. Yep. Well, and, and this is part of the challenge, because we have accumulated enough knowledge now that no one can Encompass all of it. Yucca: Mm Mark: It's just not possible within a lifetime in one human brain. So you kind of have to specialize, especially if you're really going to go into a subject, you have to specialize. But for a general scientific literacy, it's... It's a work of many years. It's a work of a lifetime, honestly. I mean, you, because there's always new stuff being discovered. So, you know, I'm always reading sciencedailyandnature. com and scientificamerican. com just to kind of keep up with the very tiny crust on the surface of all the stuff that's being done out there. Yucca: Hmm. This is actually the subject that, assuming that they approve it, that I'm doing my dissertation in for my doctorate in STEM education is... Scientific literacy, public literacy, yeah. Mark: cool. Yucca: So there's not as much research in the area as you would think there would be. Mark: Huh. Yucca: When I started looking into it, I was like, oh, this is, this is gonna be a saturated field. But it's not. There's very little. Mark: Well, new paths to scientific literacy would certainly be welcome. I mean, I know that you're a very strong critic of the traditional American education system. I am too. But the question is, how then do people absorb Yucca: Right. And I'm definitely looking at it from the... Mark: Ah. Yucca: So, because we do most of our learning as adults, Mark: Mm hmm. Yucca: right? Certainly, most kids in this country go through a school system, and there's a lot of people working on that, and, you know, we could do a whole episode on that. critiques that I have of the system of school itself and how we've confused that with education and, you know, what the purpose of it is, but as a, as a scientist, I learned a few things in school, right? I learned some, how to do some processes and things like that, but the vast majority of what I know happened just because I was interested in the topic and just continued to learn it. And I think that most people learn. That way as well. Mark: Yes. Yeah, that's certainly true for me. I mean, you know, it's all been about deep dives into stuff that I, that I'm curious about. I mean, one of the atheopagan principles is curiosity, understanding that there's always more to be learned, right? And learning is a wonderful process. It's a pleasurable process. It's not only that it informs you more, but yeah. It's, it's joyful. Yucca: yeah. Mark: And joyful things are things we're in favor of. So, Yucca: Right. Mark: go out and learn something today. Yucca: Well, learning is something that we continue to do no matter what. We are humans and that's part of what we do, but we can be intentional about it or unintentional about it, right? So Mark: Yeah. So, talking about truth and reality Yucca: you did, before we started recording, you did, we were talking a little bit about quantum mechanics and you said you wanted to touch on the idea that measurement Mark: oh yes, yes, this is, Yucca: how we, I don't know how to tie this in Mark: You can hear the exasperation in my voice as, you know, when this comes up because there are so many people. There are people in the pagan community, people in the New Age community, people in in, you know, various other kind of religious communities for whom quantum mechanics, which they usually call quantum physics, is a Yucca: in for magic? Mark: Yes, yes, it's a, you know, you, you wave your hands vaguely in a gesture at this, and what you mean is we don't understand it and therefore it is the cause of the thing I want to believe in. And one of the, one of the experiments and findings in quantum mechanics that is most misinterpreted is the idea that an observation affects The, the, the decoherence of a superposition particle, particle, wavicle phenomenon, Yucca: Mm Mark: um, and that's not what observation means in physics. What an observation means in physics is a measurement, and a measurement necessarily requires an interaction, and that's what causes decoherence. That's what causes A quantum body to be affected is interaction with its environment. So it's not that your consciousness is changing anything in the quantum world. We have no evidence ever that that is true. It's that in the act of trying to figure out what one of those particles is doing, you have to interact with it. Soon as you interact with it, it decoheres. Yucca: right. Mark: then, you can take a measurement, but You're not measuring the thing that you originally were reaching towards with your measuring stick, you're measuring what it became after the interaction. Yucca: So let me give a kind of an analogy on a larger scale. So I want to know, I want to see where something is, right? Well, in order for me to see it, Light has to bounce off of it, and that has to go into my eye. So it had to interact, that photon had to interact with it in order for me to be able to see it, right? So that's on a bigger scale, but that's going to apply on our small scale as well. Mark: Exactly, exactly. And unfortunately, there was quite a lot of gobbledygook published about quantum mechanics early in its history, which has sort of, Mucked up the waters and created a lot more of this sense of, wow, quantum mechanics is very weird and mysterious. Well, it is weird and mysterious, but it's not nearly as weird and mysterious as a lot of people seem to think it is. We've, you know, we've learned a good bit about it. The big mystery, of course, is where's the theory of everything? How do you get classical physics, you know, relativistic physics, to, to work with quantum mechanics because they clash? Yucca: right. Mark: So, that's the big mystery. There's a lot of very smart people working on it, and maybe someday we'll know the answer to that. Yucca: It's delightful because each of those different approaches are very very good at explaining specific Phenomena, but completely fall apart when trying to explain other ones, so we know they're both wrong, Mark: Yeah, Yucca: right? And that's delightful, that's really fun to think Mark: We know that both of those systems are flawed, and to the degree that we understand them at all, we understand that they don't mesh. Very well, they contradict one another. Yucca: But they are still useful, Mark: Oh yeah, Yucca: right? And this happens in physics all over the place, you know, we're going to calculate the path of the baseball that I throw, and I'm not, like, I'm not including all of the different Little pieces of information. I'm not going to get it exactly, but I'm going to get it close enough to what I need for it to be useful, and I'm just going to use, do what I need for it to be useful, right? Mark: So Yucca: I was going to say, Mark: oh go ahead, Yucca: what you were saying with the, you know, a lot of the gobbledygook that's been published about it, there's also a lot of things That, that I come across, especially when teaching, where there's a lot of confusion between what are some really cool ideas, like when people talk about like multiverses or things like that, that, like those are very interesting ideas, but they're not science. Right? And there's a, you know, and do we know whether string theory is correct, or things like, you know, or a few months ago, you know, the, speaking about the bad reporting, saying that, you know, oh, scientists created a black hole, and it could, like, no, they didn't. There was a computer program that they ran with, conditions that were slightly different than our universe, in which they were able to simulate and show that a black hole would... form under these conditions. Right, like, so, there's a lot of stuff out there that is science fiction that may one day become science, right? But it's not science until it's falsifiable, right? Can't falsify, but it's not science right now, and it gets treated like it is, right? And it's and it, it can be so, so confusing. Mark: yeah, exactly, and when you have a population of people who, to begin with, aren't very scientifically literate, but are looking for an answer. Kind of mysterious forces that might serve as an explanation for things that they choose to believe in. Well, quantum mechanics is a pretty good candidate because it has a little weirdness about it. And it's, it's at a scale that's invisible to us with the naked eye, so we don't actually have to deal with it at all. We can just sort of use it as this placeholder for the magic thing that I wish existed. Yucca: And there are a few things that, when you hear about, they kind of do sound a little... Magick y, you know, quantum tunneling sounds pretty magick y to me, right, when you think about it, or you're like, okay, yeah entanglement, that sounds pretty Mark: yeah, Bell's theorem you know, the, the simultaneous snapping into identical spin of particles that are separated by parsecs, right? So, yes, I mean, there are things that are, that are mysterious and weird, and they, they point in the direction of new learning that we need to do, Yucca: yeah. Mark: If the data's good, because it's possible that our instruments are not perfect, too, Yucca: Or that we're, that we're missing something, that we're really, we're interpreting something in the wrong way, Mark: Ah Yucca: is always possible. So, something that I think a lot about is are you familiar with the idea of the ether? It's luminiferous aether. Okay, so we used to think, it was quite common to think that there had to be some sort of substance that light was traveling through, because all the other waves that we knew of went through something, right? Sound goes through the air, ocean waves go through the water, so what's light going through? So there was this assumption that there was this something permeating. And I'm trying to remember the names of the two gentlemen who set this up, I'm going to look this up real quick so that I get the name of it right. So, okay. The Michelson Morley experiment. Right? So, it was trying to measure the relative motion of the Earth in the aether. And they did it over and over again, and they kept not finding the aether, because we don't think it exists today. Right? And they said, okay, maybe we need to make it bigger and bigger and bigger, maybe, you know, it's just too small. That experiment is... The setup for it is almost identical to how LIGO works, which is the gravitational wave observatory. So, if we had somehow been able to make it large enough, that it would have been able to pick up gravitational waves, we would have interpreted the gravitational waves at the time as being evidence for the Mark: Or the ether. Yucca: So, who knows, today, what we've found that we're interpreting as being evidence for one thing, which is, is something completely different. And we're just, we're going off in some direction, and we're totally wrong about it. You know, science is a self correcting process, so at some point, hopefully, we'll circle back around and correct it, but I personally suspect that most of what we think we know we're wrong about, but we don't really have a way of knowing that yet, so. But that particular example just delights me that, you know, if we had been able to make it four kilometers long, we would have detected gravitational waves instead of ether, Mark: Huh. Yucca: so. Mark: On a completely unrelated note ether is a very useful trope in steampunk Yucca: It Mark: design and fiction and all that kind of stuff. My partner and I did a an etheric explorer's ball party, Yucca: Ooh, Mark: party that was so much fun. This must be 10, 12 years ago now, but oh, God, what a good time. Yucca: I think I've seen some photos of you in your outfit Mark: Oh yes, Commander Basterton, Yucca: Yes, oh, that's a great name. Mark: conquered Mars for the Empire. Yucca: Mmm, Mark: Yeah, Raleigh Houghton Basterton whose men call him Really Rotten Basterton. Yucca: that's great. Mark: Yeah, pretty fun. I have, I still have some of the business cards. You know, Commander of Her Majesty's Imperial Ship Improbable. Yucca: Mmm, that's a good one. Yeah, well there's a lot of, there's a lot of good material for sci fi out of all this stuff. Mark: Yeah, yeah. And once again, that's the mythic. I mean, one of the things that's great about speculative fiction generally, science fiction and fantasy, is that it, it speculates, right? It it reaches out into the future or into alternate realities that. Put human or human like figures into different contexts and and then conjectures about well, what would it be like? What, what would happen? What, you know, what, where would we go? And those are wonderful rides to take and they're often very illuminating. When you, when you take those rides and you learn something more about humanity itself by seeing it reflected in that kind of a mirror. Yucca: mm hmm, mm hmm. Mark: So I guess, you know, because we've been talking for a while now I guess to sum up, I both feel that we need a lot more emphasis on the verifiably, factually, objectively true in the way of increasing scientific literacy and curiosity, but we also need to elevate the mythic and the emotional and the passionate, you know, there's so much discounting of, I mean, you know, arguably the rudest thing you can say to someone is you're just being emotional, right? Yeah, I'm being emotional, I'm angry! Yucca: yes, which is so interesting when we, because it's one of the things that And of course, other animals, turning out, seem to share most of the, the closer they are to us, the more things they seem to share with us but that's one of the things that we pride ourselves about, oh, that's being so human, right? And then, oh, look at you, shame on you for being so human Mark: yeah, Yucca: but I, I think that we, that it would really benefit us to focus more on thinking about thinking. Mark: yes. Yucca: Whether that, whichever type of thinking or the purpose, but just being more conscious of, what our beliefs are, why we have those, and, you know, learning to reflect upon those. Mark: Well, yes I mean, Socrates, right? Know thyself. Self inquiry is, for one thing, it's an amazing journey. Because each of us really is unique and you will discover unique and amazing things about yourself, right? And since we don't come with an operating manual, it can be very helpful to know what your predilections are, what your prejudices are, what your confirmation biases are and to work Yucca: that you want to change them, You've got to know what they are to be able to make those, to direct the change of them. They may change over time, they probably will, but if you want to influence where they go, you need to be aware of them. Mark: need to know what they are. Yeah, it's, it's the full denial of inquiry that I think is the... Really the pernicious problem that we contend with, and it's not just among, say, fundamentalist, you know, evangelical Christians. It's, it's among some in the pagan community as well, you know, who know what they know and are not asking questions anymore. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: I'm, I don't know, I can't stop asking questions. I'm just too curious. Yucca: Yep. Well, this is fun. I think this is a topic we should circle back around to in the future. And I think it'll, it, it's related to so many things we talk about, but it's important to think about, you know, what is, what do we mean when we say real and true and reality and, and what's all that stuff? Mark: Yeah. Because it's, it's at the core of everything, right? I mean, we act based on what we believe is real. You know, what we believe is likely to be the, the truth of the outcome that we project. We, we get ourselves scrambled and confused most when we do something and we get a completely random response that we can't provide. Doesn't fit our projection of what we thought was going to happen, Yucca: Right, Mark: So knowing what we believe and knowing why we came to believe it becomes very important. Yucca: right. And if we want to change it, Mark: Yes. Yucca: how do we, knowing that it's there so that we can, we can choose and have that, that agency in our own lives, and not just be, you know, being blown along. The path. All Mark: It's a, it's a choose your own adventure, either that or you can just be washed around. Yucca: Just trademarked, by Mark: Is it? Yucca: the way. They yeah, the company goes after people for using that. So it has to be choose your own story, or write your own adventure. So. Mark: Oh, man. Let's not get started Yucca: All right. Well, Mark, this was fun. Mark: that's a whole other topic. Ha, ha, ha, ha. Alright, well, it's great spending time with you as always, folks. It's great spending time with you, Yucca. And we'll see you next week. Yeah.

Comfort in Your Own Skin

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 21, 2023 30:58

Remember, we welcome comments, questions, and suggested topics at thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com. Inner Critic episode: https://thewonderpodcast.podbean.com/e/the-inner-critic-1612153312/ The Jewel ritual: https://atheopaganism.org/2015/03/05/the-jewel-a-solitary-ritual/ S4E26 TRANSCRIPT: ----more---- Yucca: Welcome back to The Wonder: Science Based Paganism. I'm your host, Yucca, Mark: And I'm Mark. Yucca: and today we are talking about psychological freedom. So, to do your practice, to feel, to be vulnerable, all of that good stuff. Mark: Yeah, because this is so often a challenge for folks who are first coming into naturalistic pagan or atheopagan practice, especially if they're deconstructing from other religions that are much more about conformity and obedience. Yucca: Right. Mark: There's that feeling of being watched. There's this sense of shame about either doing it wrong or that you're doing it all at all. There's Yucca: Just that judgment, all of that. That icky judgment all over the place. Mark: it's just a real minefield, and so we wanted to talk about it and make some suggestions and just normalize that this happens, right? This is, yeah, this, this is a real thing. There's nothing wrong with you if you're feeling it. And maybe there's some things we can suggest that might make it a little better. Yucca: Right. Because this is something that comes up a lot in different words but a thing that people deal with, right? Mark: hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Especially when they're first entering the practice, there are a lot of people who are like, Well, I don't do rituals, but I go for walks in nature. And that's fine. That's perfectly fine. If your experience of a ritual is going out for a walk in nature and having that kind of communion, there's nothing wrong with that, and you don't have to do anything else if you don't want to. But there is something about investing a place in a moment. in deliberate psychological manipulation of yourself in order to get freer and happier and wiser. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: And that really is what our, our path is about. And there are so many voices in our society and especially in the mainstream religions that discourage you from being freer and happier and wiser. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: That we We want to help facilitate movement in that direction. Yucca: Right. So there's a lot of different things that could be contributing to this. One of the things may be the critic voice. And we've, it was quite a few years ago but I think one of our best episodes where we talked about the critic voice, and I'll put the link to that in the show notes if anybody hasn't listened to it before but that critic, that, that voice has a, a function, right? It, it came about trying to protect you and there, there may be some of that happening when you are When it's, okay, so, when you get a wound, let's say you get a cut it, when you need to clean that cut out, you need to do it, because otherwise you're gonna have dirt and sticks and whatever it is inside that wound, but it hurts, and so you have this instinctual response of pulling your arm away, not putting your arm under the water and washing it out, and sometimes that critic is Is the, that instinct to pull the arm away and not let that happen, protect, stop it, don't let it happen. So I think that's going on to a certain extent, and then also, we aren't, we don't really learn in our culture how to really check in with ourselves and be really honest with ourselves, especially when it is the vulnerable. Right? We're taught to just kind of look the other way and, you know, man up or, you know, whatever the particular phrase is for whatever your gender or culture is, but it's, it's like, we are encouraged to be soft and be okay with the parts of us that are soft. Mark: Right, that's absolutely true. Particularly for men, but, but, it's true for everybody. Yucca: Right. That's why I use the man up expression, Mark: Right. Yucca: Which, you know, it happens with women as well, but it, but it seems like the pressure is, looking from the outside, it seems like the pressure on, on men and, and young boys especially is much, much stronger Mark: Yeah, the vice that is applied to those that identify as men is so compressing that the only emotions permissible are anger and the only response that's available is violence. It's just really, really challenging to step out of that and say, no, actually, my feelings are really hurt. Yucca: And I am a whole human who has all of these feelings. All of these things are human and I, I get to be and have all of these things too. Mark: right. And it's ironic to me because there are many who point to ancient cultures like in the Norse Eddas or in Greek mythology, and there are men who weep in these stories. Right? Who, who are, you know, devastated by events that happen in the stories, and they weep, and somehow that just kind of gets ignored in the modern drawing forth of these, Yucca: Right. Well, I think it ties back around to something that you mentioned at the beginning about the more controlling religions. Mark: Yes, Yucca: are, the religions are part of a larger framework for, of culture and that we, we're, We have a lot of cultures right now that are really on there being a group that controls another group. Mark: yes, yes. The, the largest and most powerful religions in the world, and this is not just Christianity, it is Christianity, but it's also Islam, and it's also Buddhism, and it's also Hinduism, is Orient, are oriented around obedience, Yucca: Right. Mark: around supplication to what we believe is a mythical, supernatural presence, Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: and And self flagellation in so many ways, you know, I'm unworthy, I'm a sinner, all those things. And emerging from that, which is, let me just say right now, a tremendously courageous act. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: We see people coming into our, our community who, I mean, we have people that were pastors. They come into our community that were not only, you know, following that, that path, but had all eyes of a congregation on them to encourage them to toe the line. And they said, this is wrong. I'm gone. I'm leaving. Yucca: Wow. Mark: And that is extraordinary. It is just extraordinarily courageous. But it carries a lot of baggage with it. Just because you say, I'm not going to do this anymore, doesn't mean that its frameworks and its mental habits don't come with you. And so, Yucca: got a lifetime of habits and unconscious beliefs. Mm Mark: exactly, exactly. And so, we've been talking in the Facebook community recently about, for example, that sense of embarrassment at being observed while doing your atheopagan practice. And so, You know, even having someone in the house or just kind of, you know, it's like a soap bubble when it's new, right? It's just so fragile and precious and you don't want it destroyed by critical eyes and the critical voice in your head. And that is absolutely a legitimate experience and feeling, and I want to start there. Yucca: Absolutely. Mark: you're, there's nothing wrong with you for feeling those feelings. It absolutely makes sense, Yucca: they're there. They're, they came about for a reason. Yeah. Mark: especially if you are accustomed to being in a religious community where everybody watches everybody else to make sure they're conforming, Yucca: Right? Mm-hmm. Mark: which is not ours. That's, that's just not what we're doing. It's radical, and it's different than the mainstream, but it's what we're about, and if that's what you want, then we welcome you and encourage you to, to find your path. Find, find what's meaningful for you. I can guarantee that there is no focus in the world, no alter in the world. I use the word focus that looks like mine and that there is no spiritual practice of athe paganism that looks like mine. And that's great because Yucca: Even though you've literally published books on it. Mark: yes, absolutely, because I want it to work for the people that choose to embrace it. I don't want them to do it like me. I want them to do it like them. Yucca: Right. So starting with the acknowledgement that that, that, that feeling, that soap bubble feeling is, is valid, right? Mm-hmm. Mark: Absolutely real. And so the question is then, well, what do we do with that? Right? And Especially when you're in the context of having had a lot of pain, pain of separation, pain of castigation by former community members who call you an apostate or a heretic or whatever it is, an infidel, whatever they label you. It's really easy to feel like I just, I can't do this either. I just. I just have to wander away and just have this kind of very gray, unexceptional life, because when I try to be me... It just sets off all these alarm bells that are really, really hard. And I think this is certainly true of our marginalized community members. They understand what that is like. You know, our queer members, they understand how hard it is to stand up against the mainstream culture and say, Sorry, this is who I am. I'm going to be me, and you're going to deal with it. And that's how it's going to be. Yucca: Well, and especially when you're figuring out who me is, right? When you, when you got the sense of, I know that's not me, but I also still am figuring out what me is. Is and trying to have that, the, the space to do that and giving yourself the grace for that in the face of this very oppressive trying to, what's the word? Force conform, conforming on you. Mark: Yeah Yucca: yeah. It's a, it's a challenge, right? Mark: Yeah, and our impulse as humans is to move away from discomfort, Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: and that's... Natural and normal, I mean, you know, as mammals, our thing is generally move away from the pain, as animals generally move away from the pain, move toward the pleasure, right? But that said, Yucca: 600 million years later because of it. Mark: exactly, it worked really well, but humans are complex, and we have choices that go beyond the simple animal choices that are built into us, right? Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: and so what that means is that at first, you may have to simply say to yourself, this is going to be uncomfortable. This is, this is not going to be completely, completely okay with me because it's going to churn up all this sentiment that's been laid down at the bottom of my self. Yucca: Right. Mark: that's gonna bring up experiences and pain and memories and all that kind of stuff, and you just have to kind of sit with it. And my recommendation for the first thing to do to address that is ritual activity around self esteem. There's a ritual called the Jewel that I've referred to before that's on the Atheopaganism blog, and it'll be in my forthcoming book. The, and we'll, we'll put a link to it in the show notes. And what it's about fundamentally is looking yourself in the mirror and realizing this is a good person, this is a person of value, who's unique, an absolutely unique snowflake of the universe. There's never been one like you, there will never be one like you, and that's terrific. Everything about that is wonderful. And so, living in the fullness of that, walking through the world with your shoulders back, understanding that you belong here, that's, that's the mindset that we're hoping to get to. Took me a long, long time to get to it, and sometime I'll tell the story about all the things that were necessary for that to happen because I came out of a very abusive, very difficult childhood. But having gotten there, having gotten to the point where there's a core self esteem of just knowing that I am a person of value, no matter what happens around me, no matter what somebody says to me, it changes everything. makes you able to make choices that are in your own best interest. Yucca: Mm hmm. Hm. Mm. Mm hmm. Yeah. And working on that, doing one ritual about that, don't expect yourself to just switch some, flip some switch, right? This is a continual process, this is, this is a lifelong thing but the process itself is worth it. Mark: Yeah. We live in a very instant culture. We want immediate gratification for things. You know, I'm hungry, give me the fast food. I'm bored, give me the entertainment. And so it's easy to just sort of assume that There must be some kind of a magical activity or pill or something that can make everything okay. that's not the world. The world is sometimes things are work. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: And if you can just stay steady and love yourself enough to know that you're worth it, and gather community around yourself that you can see yourself reflected in their eyes and know how valuable you are. Then the change can come. Yucca: So, first, doing some work on the self esteem and that, just that recognition that you know what you're doing is, you've got a right to be doing it, right? This is, it's, you get to do the things that are going to help you. To feel better and work towards your goals and visions and, and that's, that's okay, right? Mark: yes. And, I mean, I don't know how you feel about this, Yucca, but I go pretty far with my understanding of what that kind of thing means. I want people to be safe, I want them to make sound decisions for themselves, but sometimes, in order to get where they're going, it involves drug experiences, or periods of promiscuity, or something. Something, right? Sometimes you have to just kind of break the boundaries of your self definition Yucca: Mm Mark: so that you can become the butterfly that you're in the process of becoming, Yucca: hmm. Mm hmm. I think Mark: I'm not recommending either of those things. I'm not saying you should go, you should go right out and find some drugs. That's not what I'm saying, but what I'm saying is the moral constraints. Of the mainstream culture that lives around us, they're not built for your happiness. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: They're not built for anything other than your obedience. Yucca: Right. Mark: don't have to do that. Yucca: I think for each person, it's going to be a really, really, really individualized path, right? And so for some people, maybe some of like what you were talking about with some sort of substance that might be really helpful, but it may also for someone else, simply the act of, of stepping out of that obedience is a, is just a radical, Act, Mark: Mm hmm. Yucca: So I think it's really going to depend on, on each person, but in both of those cases I think it's really important to look at what you need in this situation to make it safe for you, right? So yes, breaking through something on that real emotional level, but also remembering that you are a human being, you are a squishy little breakable animal on the physical side with pretty complex tangled up messy emotions on the inside. And that you've got to take care of yourself and not damage yourself in that process. Mark: And that's, that's why I said safety is paramount. And it's, it's tricky, it's paradoxical, because sometimes being a little unsafe is kind of the thing that you need in order to break out of the boundaries of your solid little life. But, but not, Yucca: your limits, right? Mark: right, right, Yucca: That's just to go on a slight tangent with that as a parent, with kids, letting them make Take risks, right? Because they have to learn to be able to do that. They have to learn what the, you know, if they're gonna climb that tree, or they're gonna do that thing, right? They, they need to be able to figure out where their body's limits are, where they're, all of that. And if you don't take those risks, and you don't get a little bit hurt, then it really stunts you in the process, but at the same time, your job is to make sure they don't die, right? And so, I mean, I think sometimes it's helpful to think about ourselves in the same way that we might want to, we need to parent ourselves sometimes, and that, and recognize that, yeah, we've got to take those risks but we also need to recognize that, okay, if you're going to climb the tree, don't climb it over the sharp, Rocks and the cliff. Like, choose a different tree, okay? Practice off a different tree than the one that's gonna, like, be a 50 foot drop. Mark: I think that's really well put yeah, because as I say, it's this. Walking a knife edge between pushing your boundaries, being a little transgressive, and also keeping yourself safe. And that can be really challenging for people, but, I mean, we're talking about edge cases now, but in some cases it's just... Lighting incense when somebody else is in the house, you know, or playing your ritual music loud enough that your roommate will know that you're doing something witchy in there. And, and getting to the point where it doesn't matter to you anymore, where you're like, yeah, this is something I do. I own this. It's good for me, and I'm proud of it, and you're welcome to your opinion, but it doesn't have a lot of traction with me. Yucca: Right. Mark: Unless you think it's great. I'll let it in if you think it's great. Yucca: Yeah I really, I really appreciate that. And there was something in there that you said about, you know, we're talking about edge cases. I want to circle back and say that another thing that we tend to do in our culture is to downplay our own experiences and say, oh, you know, I don't have it that bad. Right? I've, you know, oh, I'm not worthy of this sympathy because, you know, there are, you know, there are children in Africa or whatever, right? And no, what you are going through is what you are going through. You don't have control over other people's experiences, just yours. Right? And whatever you're going through, it's valid. Mark: It counts. Yucca: counts. You count. Those experiences count. There's not a, there's not a trauma that's too little or a trauma that's too big. It's, it's you. And you got this. Mark: Yeah. And, and people that have repeated to you that you don't really have anything to cry about, those were not your friends. They, they were not your allies, they were not, they were not telling you what you really needed to hear. Because, Yucca: Well, they, they may have been someone who loved you, but was, was deeply wounded themselves as well. Right? That in most cases, people probably weren't trying to hurt you in that, but that, That they also didn't know. That was what had happened to them, and that was how they were dealing with the trauma. Right. Mark: Right. And it bears saying, you know, to zoom out to the 30, 000 foot level and look down, this whole thing about being, being yourself as an individual, it's been evolving steadily since the 18th century, but it really only took off about 50 years ago. Yucca: Mm Mark: And so our generational wounds that we inherit. from the behavior of our parents and our grandparents and all that. They're very real. Yucca: hmm. Mark: You know, those, certainly, parents and grandparents of my generation were not taught to grow. Yucca: Mm Mark: They were not taught to to have kindness with themselves. And so, to the degree that you have suffering around this kind of issue, it's not your fault. You know, this, a lot of this stuff just rolls downhill, and it's slowly, slowly eroding out because we're getting better. Yucca: hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mark: And that's the good news, right? We're getting better. All of us, collectively, we're getting better. And what atheopaganism is about, in part, is getting better. Yucca: Right. I love it. I'm glad that we're doing this. Mark: yeah, I need to... Me too. It I feel so much freer in this community, even to stumble and fall down than I have in any other context in my life. And, you know, sometimes I, I'm wrong and I get, I get called out for being wrong, and that's great. There's nothing wrong with it. It's... It's fine. But most of the time, what I hear from this community, and what I see other people hearing in this community, and what I keep saying in this community to other people is, You're great. You rock. I want you to be, you just keep doing you, because you are cool. And, I mean, that's how I feel about you, Yucca. Yucca: Likewise, Mark. Mark: It shouldn't be so damn hard to learn to be happy. But it is, and this is the work before us. Right? So, so let's get to it, you know? Let's... Let's take those walks in nature, and do those rituals, and listen to the music that makes us dance, and do the things that make us happy, and kiss the ones that we love, and Yucca: And live. Mark: be those great people in the world, you know? I mean, all of us have met somebody that just shone like a beacon, you know? They just had that glow about them. And if you're truly at peace with yourself, and you truly want the best for others around you, That'll be you, Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: you know. As quiet a person as you may be, or as loud a person as you may be. It'll still be you. Yucca: Yeah. And the process of becoming that person is wonderful as well. Mark: stories, oh my god. Yeah, all the, all the adventures, all the, all the internal transformations, the revelations. I remember once... I must have been 25, something like that, and I had terrible self esteem and a critic's voice that was louder than anything else in my head. It was, I mean, I was just chronically depressed and self destructive and, I mean, I cut myself and I stepped out into traffic suddenly and I smoked cigarettes and I just did all these things. And I suddenly had this brain revelation one day that, If I was really a bad person, it wouldn't matter to me that I'm a bad person. Yucca: hmm. Mark: I wouldn't care. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: fact that I was so worked up about whether or not I'm a bad person meant that I wasn't one. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: And everything changed. Yucca: Hmm. Mark: It didn't solve everything, but a big piece of weight fell off of me just in that moment because I'd come to understand the insanity of self hatred. Yucca: Wow. Mark: Well, listen folks, Yucca: Hmm. Mark: We really care about you, Yucca and I do. We want you to be happy. we want this path to, or whatever path you choose, You know, whether this is just a way station that you're on your way towards moving into something else, that's great too. But we want you not to be cruel to yourself and to be proud of who you are and bring that out into the world because we need so much more of that, Yucca: Yeah. Mark: so much more of that in the world. And we'll see you next week. Yucca: Take care everyone.

practice africa christianity walking greek natural force comfort act skin islam rocks buddhism lighting mm hinduism inner critic hm orient yucca markit mark you mark yeah mark well mark yes mark right mark they mark absolutely

Happy Atheopaganism Day!

Introvert Biz Growth Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 7, 2023 44:10

Remember, we welcome comments, questions, and suggested topics at thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com. S4E25 TRANSCRIPT: ----more---- Mark: Welcome back to The Wonder, Science Based Paganism. I'm your host, Mark, Yucca: and I'm Yucca. Mark: and today we are celebrating Atheopagan Day, which is the anniversary of when our community first started. Yucca: Online community. Mark: yes the the founding of our Facebook group, which is where most of our engages online was on August 5th, 2012. So as we're recording this, it's the 11th anniversary of the founding of that community. And so we're going to talk a little bit about the history and how things have changed, what we're doing now and what we're looking towards in the future. Yucca: that's right, and it's been a lot, Mark: Yeah, it really has. It's it's, it's been, and it's been such a beautiful ride. I mean, obviously there have been setbacks and frustrations and all the rest of that, but. Mostly, it's just been so heartening to see and feel this community come together in all the wonderful ways that it is. Yucca: Yeah, and it's 11 years is really hard to believe. That's, that's a lot. So, Mark: I was saying before we started recording, in neopagan years, that's even more. It's like dog years or Yucca: yeah, Mark: Because the culture evolves really quickly you know, in, in the time that I've been involved in, in Neopagan Circles which started in 1987, we've had at least three distinct phases Thank you. of development within the community in terms of changes in perspective and paradigm just really transformational things that have happened from the sort of loosey goosey still, you know, not very clueful about things like consent late 60s all the way up to today. Yucca: Right Mark: pretty, pretty cool. 11 years, a lot can change. Yucca: yeah. And I think a lot, really, in the last four years, five years, at least, that I've been witnessing it seems like there's been such a shift in a lot of, not just within kind of our smaller subset of the pagan community, but the larger pagan community, and also a little bit of the, the general cultural attitude towards something like paganism. There's definitely been a big shift since, you know, since I was a kid, you know, thinking back on, it's just, it's a normal, in a lot of ways, it's a very normal thing now. I know there's a lot, definitely areas of the country that that's not the case, but on kind of a big scale, it's, it really has the, Level of acceptance has grown. Mark: Yeah, and I think there are, I mean, there are certainly entities and figures that that are not us, that we, that contributed heavily to that. I mean, like the Lady Liberty League, for example, which pressed The U. S. military to recognize Wicca as one of the symbols you could put on a gravestone in a military cemetery. Getting them to recognize any pagan religion was really like pulling teeth, and they pushed on it for about 20 years before they finally got it. Yucca: Yeah, right, Mark: And more representation in mainstream media, all that kind of stuff has really helped. Yucca: yeah. So I think it's fascinating to see, or to really reflect on, the changes within our community and how those are influenced from outside sources and, you know, the influence that we've had as well and all of that is, I mean, somebody should do their somebody should do their dissertation on that. I think that would make a fascinating one. Mark: yeah, me too, me too. Yeah, there's just, there's so much to say about it, but why don't we go back to the beginning, Yucca: Right. Mark: And start there, and just kind of, you know, work our way forward. So, atheopaganism started out as an idea that I had for myself. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: I had had, I'd been involved with the local pagan community for a very long time, had some really off putting experiences in the late 90s, early 2000s that reinforced to me how much capital B belief had become important Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: in the pagan culture, and which had not been true when I first joined. Yucca: hmm. Mark: And as an atheist pagan, I was feeling really oppressed by this and then it got to the point where I was offended by it because there were a couple of circumstances that I saw where the will of the gods was used as an excuse for some really horrible behavior. Yucca: Right. Mark: And I left. Yucca: Mm Mark: But within six months, I mean, I was depressed. I, I missed my rituals, and I missed my altar, and I missed my friends, and, you know, I missed celebrating the seasons, all that kind of stuff. So I started thinking, well, what is a religion really, and what do they do for us, and how can I get that stuff without having to subscribe to a bunch of supernaturalism? Yucca: hmm. Mark: And I started working on an essay, and this was in 2005. And the essay was done in 2009, and that was what eventually became my book that came out in 2019, Yucca: Mm Mark: about, first of all, about kind of my journey through this and the science You know, the neuroscience and the confirmation bias, the various fallacies, apophenia, and, you know, all those phenomena that tend to make us fooled by our senses. Yucca: hmm. Mark: And then the second part of the book was laying out, okay, well, taking as a given that the value that, for me, is going to be about revering the Earth. How can I practice a pagan practice around the wheel of the year that doesn't involve anything supernatural or culturally appropriated? Yucca: hmm. Mm hmm. Mm Mark: And so I wrote all that up, and it was a 40 page essay, and and I was ready to happily go trotting forward, you know, using my little model for myself. Yucca: hmm. Mark: But I had conversations with friends, Yucca: So the essay had been just more of a way of you to, to clarify your thoughts, right? And work through those ideas and you just, just the writing of it was how you worked through these ideas. Mark: That's right. I mean, I'm a writer and that is the way that it's like having an internal narrative, you know, as I explored these ideas on paper or in bits Yucca: as you explored in Mark: in, in, in writing new ideas would occur to me, new connections would occur to me. And so that's just the modality that I use in, in kind of framing my, my thinking about things. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: And so, as I said, I was ready to go trotting forward with my, my little practice that was for me, but when I had conversations, and so I re engaged the local pagan community. Understanding that I was going to be myself, and not to be rude about it, you know, if I go to somebody else's ritual and they're invoking gods, I'm not going to say anything about it. Yucca: Sure. Yeah. Mark: But the rituals that I conduct, that I invite people to, were going to be, you know, godless, non supernaturalist kinds of rituals. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: And in the course of these conversations, I started having people say, well, don't tell anybody, but actually, that's really kind of what I believe, too. Yucca: Yeah, Mark: and you really ought to put this essay up on the internet and, you know, have, get some comments on it, have, get some discussion started around it. And in 2009, I did that. I put it up on Scribd. Yucca: Remember that. Mark: remember that? It still exists. But there was a time when Scribd was a place that you went for papers and documents and Yucca: Yep. It was the place for a while. Yeah. Okay. Mark: And started getting some feedback and stuff. You know, having more of these conversations where people were confiding in me that, you know, a non theist or non literal theist way of orienting to paganism was, was theirs. And this particularly skewed towards people who were scientists, who were educators, who were engineers. You know, a lot of folks that had that grounding in the scientific method and critical thinking, they were the ones that were not subscribing to supernaturalist myths so much, interestingly enough. So, what happened was there, there ended up being enough of these people that I started realizing, you know, there's, this thing has legs. It's not just for me. It's resonating for other people, and they should have access to it too. And I need to stop here and say, I had a major research failing during the time when I was researching all the stuff for this essay, because I am not the first Nons, supernaturalist, pagan. There are other people that were doing that and that were on the internet, and I just didn't find them. Yucca: mm Mark: So I kind of reinvented the wheel. And that's an interesting thing about non Theus paganism is that it seems like that happens quite a bit. People sort of come to this conclusion on their own. Yucca: That was the family, that was what I was raised with, right? But it had never, there was no like, there was no word or identity to distinguish, that was just what we were, Mark: Yeah. Yucca: And it had never occurred to me to, to search that up, something like that, until a little bit later on, which we haven't quite gotten to that the story yet, but, but encountering. That the belief part where, you know, later on I'd be publishing things you know, making YouTube videos or things and having people just, just furious with me that like, how dare you call yourself a pagan if you don't believe in Mark: yeah. Yucca: the gods, literally, and just being completely perplexed because that was not the paganism that I had grown up with. Right, I was just like, what are you talking about? I have no, like, what? Mark: right? Yeah. Yucca: Wait, you're, you're taking this literal? Are you sure? Okay. Right, that was where I was coming from with that because I hadn't, you know, I, I mean, I'm interrupting you a little bit with this, but you talked about like the three different phases or like the epochs that you've seen. And I think that one of them was this influx of a lot of new people into paganism, bringing with them. These expectations from some of the more mainstream religions in which faith is a major component. I think that Christian faith idea was brought in. Mark: Absolutely. Absolutely. And that came in the late 90s, up until around 2000, and that really, really changed how paganism was practiced and conceptualized within the community, at least as I experienced it. Mm hmm. Yucca: And I, and the atheopaganism was... I mean, it was still happening on the internet a lot, and when the group was founded, that was still culture of paganism as a whole, like on the big scale, there's lots of people being really into the literal belief, but I think we're moving out of that to a certain extent. But that's, there's still areas that believe that, there's still... Like, traditions in that way, but that the larger community overall is less worried about that. Mark: Yeah, I think so, and I certainly hope so. I mean, one of the things about paganism is that it tends to be very inclusive and tolerant and pluralistic. And so there are lots of different kinds of practices and perspectives that fall under the pagan umbrella, Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: And I think that increasingly, especially over the last four or five years, The idea of non theist paganism has become yet another one of those identities that's just accepted as being part of the bigger Yucca: know. Mark: Yeah, Yucca: I mean, there's still people who get very, very upset about it and want to do their gatekeeping, but it, it I definitely saw a shift in the last few years that I was that the Pagan Perspective channel was running. Like, in the first few years, it would, I would get a lot of... of real, like, really upset commenters about it, and then in the later years, more people being like, Oh yeah, that's, I do that too. Yeah, yeah, me too, me too. Mark: huh. Yeah. Yeah, I really think that's so, and, I mean, of the core questions, I mean, maybe we can do an episode at some point about validity and the nature of realness, because this is often the argument that's made, well, it's not real paganism, or it's not a real religion. And to me, those are meaningless questions. Yucca: It just comes down to how you're defining it, like, you're just gonna choose to make it real the way that you, like, Your way of pagan is the real way, right? I remember having disagreements with people going, well, if we go back to, you know, Rome, and this is where, you know, the history of the word pagan, well, the people who were the, the pagans, they believed in, in multiple gods, and, but my argument would be, okay, but why are you making that? Your criteria. Why aren't you making the criteria that they lived in the countryside and spoke, like, Latin? Like, how about, why is that the criteria? I mean, because we've had so many different criteria for what makes somebody a pagan over the years, like, you're just selecting that one specific thing to say that that's what makes somebody pagan. Why isn't something else also valid? Mark: right. Yucca: Well, I mean, the answer is because then they don't get to gatekeep it and feel special, Mark: right, Yucca: you know. Mark: right. And particularly this goes to the The sense on people's part that old traditions are somehow more valuable or more valid or more real, right? Yucca: hmm, Mark: And that's just a principle that I reject. I think humans have been evolving culture and ideas and technology and skills for our entire existence. And there are things that we can gain from modernity that we don't find in ancient cultures that are of value. Thank you. Yucca: right. Yeah, that Mark: So, Yucca: Value isn't inherent in whether it is old or new or whichever, right? Is it relevant to, to us now? Right? Mark: which is one of the reasons why I reject the Bronze Age, you know, Christianity models is that I don't think they fit very well in a modern society, Yucca: yeah. Mark: And the more people try to shoehorn modern society into it, the more oppressed we get, so, you know. So, anyway. This was starting to be a thing. It had legs. And it seemed like the next natural thing would be to find a convening place where people could come and be together and discuss this stuff. Facebook was the natural choice at that time. Yucca: Right. That was the main, there weren't as many of the other platforms as there are now. Right, that was basically the social media platform for being able to have conversation. Other than perhaps Reddit, maybe, but Reddit has its own kind of interesting culture. Mark: it does. It does. And the thing about Facebook was that you could create a closed group, a private group, so that you could have some control over what kinds of folks came in, so you knew that they were actually people who shared your values and were there for a legitimate exploration of, you know, what this practice is, what this philosophy is, all that stuff. Yucca: So you weren't getting trolls as much, or Mark: No, Yucca: coming in from different religions that wanted to prove a point, or something like that. Mark: in the 11 years since the Facebook group was founded, we have had precisely two people who have slipped in and started proselytizing Christianity, and they have been quietly removed, and that's been it. Yucca: Okay, I've never noticed them. Mark: Yeah, they didn't last long because we have moderators and the moderators, you know, our philosophy is to use a light hand and to be encouraging and guiding rather than oppressive. But nonetheless, when somebody comes in and starts proselytizing, that is a hard no in our rules. And off you go. Yucca: Also, just to chuckle it, I've always thought the strategy of let me quote from a book that you don't believe in at you to try to convince you. Mark: As evidence. Yeah. Yucca: Like, okay, cool. Mark: It's so circular and they don't see it. They just don't see it. Well, no, no, this is God's word. No, it's not. Yucca: But if I don't accept your premise of there being a god to begin with, and that this is his word, like, why would that hold any weight for me? Mark: That's right. That's right. So, so, August 5th, 2012, the the Facebook group is created, and I invited a handful of people that I thought would be philosophically aligned out of my friends within the pagan community, and then we started to get knocks on the door of people who wanted to join. And we had application questions that we could review, you know, we asked them why they wanted to be a part of the community, we stipulated what our value set was and said, do you affirm these values, you know, we're pro feminist, pro environment, anti racism, anti fascist, pro environment, you know, those kinds of things that we've listed. And, you know, we make them sign, yes, I, I will affirm these values. I think that's probably kept a lot of right wing trolls out of our group because they aren't willing to sign on to that. Yucca: hmm. Mark: We, it's not infrequent that we get applicants who will answer the first and third question, but not, not the one about values, and they don't get admitted. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mark: That's just how it goes. Yucca: I have to admit, I don't remember filling any of that out when I joined, but I clearly had to have. I think I joined in, like, maybe 16, 20 16 or sometime around there, and I just don't remember. I'm sure I did. I just have no memory of it, like being a, like, I must have just been like, oh, of course, of course. Yes, yes. Because I don't remember it being a thing. Mark: Facebook questions, I think they only allowed one Facebook question for a long time, one admission question, and it's expanded to three now, so there may only have been one. But I'll, Yucca: through it and went like, of course. Great. I'm so excited. This is, this group exists, so Mark: And I knew who you were, so I admitted you right away. Yucca: yeah. Mark: So that, you know, that helped. So, the group began to grow, and it became 100 people, and it became 200 people, and it became 500 people, and it became 1, 000 people, and now it's close to 5, 000 people who are interested in this path, and we have very high participation. In a given month, usually 2, 500 to 3, 000 of those members will do something in the way of reacting or commenting or posting. And of course you've got your lurkers, but it's very common for somebody to jump in and say, Hey, I've been a lurker for three years, but, you know, now I have a thing to say. And it's just a lovely environment. It's safe. People support one another. There's kindness. There's very thoughtful discussion. People post really interesting stuff. It's just, it's worked out really well, and now, of course, we've spun off into having a Discord server as well while growing the movement in a bunch of ways, like this podcast. Yucca: Right which we started talking about together at the end of 2019. We didn't, we didn't get it going Mark: we waited, we waited for the pandemic and then got started. Yucca: We had like a few, we had a few episodes and then it was Two or three or something, but it was, it was Mark: It wasn't many, yeah, it happened really fast. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: And, ironically, the pandemic actually forced us to do some good things in the community. We started doing Zoom mixers, first once a week, and now twice a week, and there are other gatherings as well. Yucca: That's when a lot of growth of people coming into the community happened, too, because people were searching online for that connection, because they didn't have the in person things. And then, wow, here was this community, and that's, so much happened during the pandemic. Mark: Yeah, yeah, the population really mushroomed. And, of course at the same time, at that point, I had been working on atheopagan stuff from the beginnings of the... of the essay. And then in 2019, late 2019, my book was published, which was an expanded version of the essay with more Yucca: is when our... Friendship had kind of started, because we'd met before, but do you remember I helped you with the formatting on that? Mark: I do, Yucca: Because I took it out of, they weren't accepting whatever format it was that you had, so you had it in Word and I put it in InDesign and reformatted Mark: yeah, Yucca: it and exported it. Mark: right, yeah, which I Yucca: why we got the connection to then when we started talking about doing a podcast, it was like, oh yeah, yeah, this is a good connection, let's try this. Mark: Yeah, yeah. So the book happened, Then the podcast happened, and by that time it had been almost 15 years of working on this in one way or another for me. Yucca: Mm hmm, Mark: And I was looking at this community that was now thousands of people, and thinking, well, okay, clearly this is something that has some real resonance, and it needs to not be about me. It needs to be... You know, a self governing, self evolving thing, Yucca: hmm. Mark: and so we created the Atheopagan Society, the non profit organization of which both Yucca and I are council members and Yucca: of 2020 was our first meeting, Mark: yes, early July of 2020, and You know, that was approving bylaws and articles of incorporation and blah blah blah. There's a lot of technical stuff that has to be done to create a group like that. But we got recognized by the federal government as a religious organization. Donations are tax deductible. Yucca: Mm hmm. We did all that stuff of so much paperwork and figuring out bank accounts and Mark: Yeah, getting a bank account open turned out to be really kind of a nightmare. Yucca: ridiculous amount of like weird information that they needed. Mark: I think it's Patriot Act stuff. I think they're concerned about non profits fostering terrorism. Yucca: And therefore they needed your social and income and Mark: Yeah. Yucca: All kinds of, you know, Mark: Yeah. Yucca: yeah, it was intense. Mark: just weird. But we did it. We got it done. And the council started doing stuff. There, you know, there were various initiatives. The the library initiative online that Robin did, for example, to create a library of resources for Ethiopia Pagans that they can download and, and look at, and or, you know, lists. Yucca: package as well, Mark: all the, all the clerical and guidance as Yucca: great. Mark: And the system for ordaining. clerics online because we believe that everybody should have the right to conduct marriages and so forth. And so we had an automated system on the website for people to be ordained, which is currently broken because MailChimp changed its system. But if you want to be ordained, you can use the contact form on the Atheopagan Society website, which is VAPSociety. org. Send a, send a message through the contact system, and I will get back to you and get you ordained. Yucca: Yeah, and eventually we're going to have that back up and running as an automated system, but there's just a lot of things that are getting juggled at the moment. Mark: there are. There Yucca: There's a, yeah and just also want to clarify the, this is all volunteer, right? You know, people are, are doing this out of a sense of a desire to, So, we're really trying to, really help in whatever ways we can, and and we'll talk about this in a little bit. I mean, the, the getting everything set up for being able to have more volunteers is one of our major focuses. Mark: Mm hmm. Yucca: But just trying to figure out what, what each person's strengths are and how we can best. How we can help the community and how we can best serve the community has been a big focus of what we've been trying to do over the past few years, so. Mark: Yeah. Yeah because it's all about, you know, supporting the people that are within the umbrella of this, this community in being as fulfilled as they can be, as happy as they can be, as self actualized as they can be, as effective as they can be, which is what atheopaganism is really about. It's about being happy, being effective in your life. You know, we don't believe in an afterlife or any of that. Nobody's keeping score. It's, it's all about just joy and joy and service, right? And so, you know, with that spirit, there's a real joyfulness in the work as well. I mean, when we work together, there's a sort of, oh, we're doing a great thing here Yucca: Yeah, I mean every single, so the council meetings are quarterly, and every single time it's just like, wow, it, y'all are amazing, this is awesome. Thank you so much. Oh, I'm so lucky to know such cool people. I can't believe we're doing this like every, you know. Time after time after time and it's just, it never gets old, it's just amazing each time. Mark: Yeah. And when we held the Suntree retreat, the in person retreat in 2022, and there were 50 of us there, that was the same experience. It was like, wow, every one of these people is super cool. I would like to be friends with every one of them. Yucca: yeah, my oldest who came with me to that was like, why isn't it a week long? Why isn't it two weeks long? Can we just live here? I'm like, aw. Mark: So, things have evolved over that 11 years. I've written another book that's coming out next year. I've written in my will that the rights to my atheopaganism book are going to go to the Atheopagan Society, so that it will always have access to that material for future people that want to practice atheopaganism so there'll never be any argument about, you know, who has the rights to any of this stuff You know, we've just, we've done a lot of, we, we launched the the YouTube, Yucca: So we've got the media team working on this, yeah. Mark: right? Yucca: And I want to say the, the story, so you've told your, your thread of the story, Mark: Yes. Yucca: But this is a, this is a community of thousands of people now, and we each have our own thread of this story that's weaving together, right? And together we're making this larger thing. And I really value that, the, the wisdom in going, okay, let's make sure that this isn't just about one particular personality. This is All of ours, right? And again, that's one of the things that the council's trying to figure out how to do is how do we make this something that is sustained, that keeps going, that lives past just any of individuals of us? Mark: hmm. Yes, yes. And, and it's very egalitarian, Yucca: yeah, Mark: where we, we're not going to have, you know, different degrees or levels or priesthood or any of that kind of stuff. When people choose to be ordained and become what's called an atheopagan cleric, that's a service role. That means I've committed to provide particular kinds of service in my community. It doesn't mean I'm a muckety muck now and I get to tell other people what to do. We don't have that, Yucca: right. And same thing with the council, right? Again, the council is just, it really is a service position, just because somebody's on the council and someone else isn't on the council, the person on the council, they're... They're not more important than anyone else, they're just in a position of that volunteer. Mark: right? We don't. Right. So, you know, we've built so much over this time. Oh, and I want to mention, because we have two wonderful volunteers that are doing it, Instagram as well. We've you know, that are part of the media team. We've got a couple of folks that are doing wonderful Instagram stuff as well. And someone created an atheopaganism Reddit, subreddit, Yucca: Oh, nice. Mark: the blue a person who I didn't know. And that was kind of miraculous to stumble across. Yucca: That's great. Mark: Yeah, sort of propagating itself out into the world. Yucca: And we don't have an official TikTok, but there are some folks from the community who are on on TikTok, and you can find, you know, you can search through the hashtag of Atheopagan, you'll come up with, you know, Robin's channel, and a couple of other folks who have that conversation. Mark: We do have an account, Yucca: we, yes, Mark: but we never post anything. Yucca: and if that's somebody's passion, hey, talk to us on the media team, we'd love, you know, each of the different platforms kind of have their own system and culture and all of that. So yes, thank you for pointing out, we really, we have one, we just don't, aren't doing it on a regular basis at this point Mark: So, Yucca: we have to do is figure out that we are, in fact, human, and have a limited amount of time and space and spoons as they say, and where do we use them. Mark: right. Yeah. And that's actually a perfect opportunity for me to thank you, Yucca, for your three years of service as the chair of the Atheopagan Society Council. You did a tremendous amount of work and modeled a tone and a can do kind of, attitude and a level headedness that I think just really served us so well. And I totally understand that it was time for you to step down and John has stepped up and that's all great. A, a, Yucca: honor, so thank you. Yeah, it's really, and I, and I look forward to continue to serve in different ways in the coming years, so. Mark: Yeah, yeah. So, all these things have happened, all these incredible things over the last 11 years, and now we look to the future. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: The Atheopagan Society is creating its first strategic plan, Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: And a strategic plan is basically just narrowing our focus down to a few goals. That we're going to pursue over, that we're going to seek to accomplish over the next couple of years. And that's where we're going to invest our time and our energy and our money in order to accomplish those things. Our money, vast. Yucca: yes, our vast resources. Mark: yes, I think we have 5, 000 right now. I think that's something like Yucca: don't think we quite have, that's what we did last time, but I think we've, we've had quite a few expenses Mark: that's true. You're right. Yeah, we have had expenses. So yeah, it's probably more like 4, 500. But it's enough because we, you know, we operate. We operate with volunteers. Yucca: yeah, and donations. And so Mark: Yes, Yucca: who donate on a regular basis and that, that makes doing those things possible, right? So we really, really value that. Mark: Because we do have regular expenses. We have to pay for things like Zoom and MailChimp and, you know, all that Yucca: Hosting for, you know, all of that. Yeah. Mark: for the blog. Yeah. So, the strategic plan is going to be finalized at our Autumnal Equinox meeting coming up. After September 21st, I think it's October 5th, I think is the next meeting. Yucca: We'd have to look at, yeah, it's somewhere around Mark: yeah, somewhere around there. Yucca: Do you want to mention the three? We're finalizing it, but we've got the idea of what our goals are. Mark: we've, we've narrowed the goals down to three things. And they are, first of all, Diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. We want to make sure that we're doing everything we can to make our spaces feel safe and inclusive and welcoming to everyone. As long as they share our values. If they're Nazis, we don't want them to feel welcome. We want them to go somewhere else. But... You know, certainly for people in marginalized communities, we want to make sure that we're really uplifting those voices and making sure that people feel safe and welcome in those spaces. Yucca: And just being really really conscious about that. And really clear about that, yeah. Mark: So that's the first. And the second is what is the second? Yucca: Well, the steady engagement and growth, yeah. Mark: right. The fostering of engagement between Ethiopia Pagans. So more more in the way of online opportunities like the conference, the vi virtual conference that we held this past spring in person opportunities like the the sun retreat that we're gonna do another one of in 2024. Yucca: which is a little less than a year away. 'cause it's in September this year. Right. Mark: Yes. So it's a little more than a year. It's a little more Yucca: Just a, you know. Mark: Yeah. But Yucca: On another full moon, I believe. Didn't we end up getting another full Mark: We did. So we're going to start working on that, you know, right after Labor Day. The, the issue there is really, and also I didn't mention this, but we have a program of affinity groups now. Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: some of which are geographically based, so they can get together in person. Because they, they all come from a particular region. Some of them are interest based, like there's an LGBTQ group, there's a BIPOC group, there's a gardening group, there's a crafting group, things like that, right? So creating opportunities and providing resources to help like Affinity Groups to get together in person, build interpersonal relationships, because, you know, community is a big thing that religion is about. And as wonderful as online community is, in person is better. And we, we'd like for people to have opportunities for that if they want them. Yucca: Right. Yeah, so for both, right? And there being a steady component and we'll talk about this in the next goal as well, but we don't want to kind of explode and spread too quickly and then collapse. Right? So we're really working on how to do this in a way that is sustainable. Mark: Yes. And that's the third big area, which is creating infrastructure and support for volunteers, so that we don't have burnout. We're always, you know, drawing in new leadership and new voices and new participation, so that nobody has to sit in the same position for 10 years and get real tired of it. And, I mean, that's just good for us in all kinds of ways, because You know, having a variety of different perspectives, it just helps our approach to be that much more nuanced, that much more considerate. It's just good for us, all the way around. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: So those are the three big areas, and you'll notice that none of them involves some big, huge growth initiative. We have never been a proselytizing spiritual community, and we're not. My philosophy around this is I would like people to be aware of this as an opportunity that they can take if they want to. I would never tell them you should be an atheopagan. Yucca: Right. Mark: I would never say that to any. Yucca: Yeah. Because it's, I think it's a wonderful option, but it's not the only thing out there. Lots of things work for lots of different people and I'm just grateful that we've got a community of incredible people who really love and care for each other and work together and can, you know, share these values and use a similar framework. And yet, as we've talked about in so many other podcasts are also so very different in so many delightful ways. Mark: Right, and we encourage that diversity, right? Like, you know, there isn't this mandated wheel of the year where, you know, the symbols are all the same and the rituals are all the same. No, you create for yourself what's meaningful for you and relates to what nature is doing at a given time of year where you are. So there's, there's a tremendous amount of freedom. Within atheopaganism, it's meant to be facilitative and supportive and kind of informing rather than directive. Yucca: hmm. Yeah. Mark: So that's where we're going. That's, that's the idea there. Yucca: And it's a fun process. Mark: it is. It is. And fun people to do it with. So that's, that's all to the good as well. I mean, having not had any comprehension of Arriving here 11 years ago, I have no idea where we might be 10, 11 years from now. It's just, it's hard to, hard to imagine what that could be like. Yucca: Oh, we'll be an ancient group in neo pagan years at that Mark: that's, oh, that's true. Yeah, we'll be almost Bronze Age. Yucca: Yes. I guess then we'll be, then we'll be legitimate, right? Because Mark: Right, well, yeah, we'll, we'll be Silicon Age, and by that time it'll all be, you know, molecular computing or or quantum computing, and then we can look back nostalgically at our silicon chips and and yes, we'll, we'll be the old established Version. Yucca: That's quite funny to think of. Mark: It is. It is. Yucca: but yeah. . Alright. Mark: So, yeah I'd like to thank everyone that has played a part in or participated in or joined, you know, for however long, because some people have decided that it wasn't for them and gone off to do something else. All those people who have played a role in where we've arrived and what we've been able to achieve in serving people, in, in really working to help people be happier and help the world be a better place. Yucca: Yeah. Thank you. Mark: Yeah, so thank you to all you listeners, that counts. Yucca: Absolutely. We are so grateful that you are all here and Yeah. Mark: Yeah, it's Yucca: Spending this time with us. Mark: yeah, it's a real honor and we know that Of all the things that people can donate to a movement or a cause, time is the most precious. You know, the number of people that will contribute to an organization, for example, is always much higher than the number that will volunteer for the organization. Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: So, you know, when you give us 30, 40 minutes a week out of your day that's a very meaningful thing and we, we recognize it and we appreciate it. Yucca: right. Mark: So, with that, here's to the next 11 years! Yucca: And we'll see you next week.

god time tiktok earth zoom friendship christianity diversity lgbtq rome nazis discord reddit latin labor day donations bipoc mm arriving mailchimp wicca patriot act bronze age scribd indesign autumnal equinox yucca theus markit mark yeah mark so mark yes mark right suntree mark as mark absolutely

The Importance of Community in Marketing

Play Episode Listen Later May 19, 2023 57:35

Today's episode features a special guest, Mark Schaefer, a globally-recognized keynote speaker, futurist, business consultant, and author. Mark and Sarah delve into the significance of community in today's world and its role in humane marketing. They explore the difference between a community and an audience, the importance of letting go of control as a community builder, the struggles of building a community, and the potential synergy between AI and human communities. They also discuss effective strategies for attracting new members, common mistakes made by community builders and how AI fits into the picture of community. As entrepreneurs, understanding the essence of community building and the benefits it offers can help us create meaningful connections and grow our businesses sustainably. He studied under Peter Drucker for three years and has advanced degrees in marketing and organizational development. Mark holds seven patents and is a faculty member of the graduate studies program at Rutgers University. His blog and podcast -- The Marketing Companion -- are at the top of the charts in the marketing field. Customized for every audience, Mark's inspiring and memorable programs specialize in marketing and strategies for digital marketing, social media, and personal branding. His clients range from successful start-ups to global brands such as Adidas, Johnson & Johnson, Dell, Pfizer, The U.S. Air Force, and the UK Government. Mark is the bestselling author of 10 path-finding books including the first book ever written on influence marketing. Mark's books are used as textbooks at more than 50 universities, have been translated into 15 languages, and can be found in more than 750 libraries worldwide. In this episode, Mark and I discuss: Why community is more important now then ever before The difference between a community and an audience The role of the ego for community builders The struggles of building a community AI and human communities: can they work together? And much more [00:00:00] Sarah: Hello, humane marketers. Welcome back to the Humane Marketing Podcast, the place to be for the generation of marketers that cares. This is a show where we talk about running your business in a way that feels good to you, is aligned with your values, and also resonates with today's conscious customers because it's humane, ethical, and non-pushy. [00:00:23] I'm Sarah z Croce, your hippie turn business coach for quietly rebellious entrepreneurs and marketing impact pioneer. Mama Bear of the Humane Marketing Circle and renegade author of marketing like we're human and selling like we're human. If after listening to the show for a while, you're ready to move on to the next level and start implementing and would welcome a community of like-minded, quietly rebellious entrepreneurs who discuss with transparency what. [00:00:52] Works and what doesn't work in business, then we'd love to welcome you in our humane marketing circle. If you're picturing your [00:01:00] typical Facebook group, let me paint a new picture for you. This is a closed community of like-minded entrepreneurs from all over the world who come together once per month in a Zoom circle workshop to hold each other accountable and build their business in a. [00:01:15] Sustainable way we share with transparency and vulnerability, what works for us and what doesn't work, so that you can figure out what works for you instead of keep throwing spaghetti on the wall and seeing what sticks. Find out more at humane.marketing/circle, and if you prefer one-on-one support from me. [00:01:37] My humane business coaching could be just what you need, whether it's for your marketing, sales, general business building, or help with your big. Idea like writing a book. I'd love to share my brain and my heart with you together with my almost 15 years business experience and help you grow a sustainable business that is joyful and sustainable. [00:01:58] If you love this podcast, [00:02:00] wait until I show you my mama bear qualities as my one-on-one client can find out more at humane.marketing/coaching. And finally, if you are a Marketing Impact pioneer and would like to bring Humane Marketing to your organization, have a look at my offers and workshops on my website@humane.marketing. [00:02:30] Hello friends. Welcome back. We arrived once again at the seventh P of the Humane Marketing Mandala. Today's conversation fits under the P of. Partnership. If you are a regular here, you know that I'm organizing the conversations around the seven Ps of the Humane Marketing Mandala. And if this is your first time here, you probably don't know what I'm talking about, but you can download your one page marketing plan that comes with [00:03:00] the seven Ps of Humane marketing@humane.marketing slash one page. [00:03:06] The number one and the word page, and this truly is a completely different version of the seven Ps of marketing that starts with yourself. It comes with seven email prompts to really help you reflect on these different Ps. And so, like I said, today's. Conversation fits under the seventh p the P of partnership, and clearly that's a new P that I added. [00:03:32] It didn't exist in the original sixties version of the seven Ps of marketing. In today's episode, I'm joined by my colleague and fellow marketer, mark Schaffer. Mark is a returning guest as I've spoken to him twice before, since we're fellow introverts. And so he came once to speak on my. Previous podcasts, the one, two podcasts before. [00:03:58] So not the [00:04:00] gentle marketing podcasts, but the one before that, and where I was mainly talking to introverts. I'll dig out the episode. Link so you can go listen to that. So mark spoke to me about being an introvert in business and marketing, and then I had him come back also to talk about his book Marketing Rebellion which actually came out just before. [00:04:22] Weeks before marketing like we're human, which was then called the Gentle Marketing Revolution. So clearly we're kindred spirits, not just personality wise, but also otherwise how we think. Again, we didn't talk about this, but he came out with Marketing Rebellion and for me it was marketing Revolution. [00:04:45] So I'll tell you a bit more about Mark in just a moment, but. Since today's topic is all about community, I want to take a moment to tell you about our community, the Humane Marketing Circle, and what we've been up to in the last [00:05:00] few weeks and months. So the Humane Marketing Circle is a growing community for quietly rebellious entrepreneurs. [00:05:08] Here's the theme again, with the rebellion or the revolution. So we're a community for quietly rebellious entrepreneurs who are ready for something different, something fresh and new, a new way of marketing, and a new way of business building, and also a new way of being in community. We now have. Four monthly gatherings, two meetups in which we discuss marketing, one 90 minute business or marketing related workshop with an expert or someone from the community. [00:05:40] So I always try to find experts within the community because we're all experts. And then every now and then if I don't find someone in the community, I'll go and look outside. We're also starting this month with an. Extra call we, that we call net weaving, so it's not networking, but [00:06:00] net weaving which we focus on, in which we focus on forming friendships between members that then lead to new business op. [00:06:08] Opportunities, collaborations, referrals, et cetera. But the main focus is to be human in these net weaving calls. Really just let go of the mask and show up as humans in our comfy clothes and on our couches and sofas, and just build friendships that then eventually lead to new business opportunities. [00:06:31] Here's how our community meetups work. So those are the two regular monthly meetings that we have. One of them I lead and one of them is led by one of our three community ambassadors. In the first half of the call, members bring their questions and we have a conversation about what. It works for us in marketing. [00:06:54] For example, one of the last calls we talked about AI and we share [00:07:00] tools and discussed benefits, dangers, overall ethical questions. We also, just on the last call, we talked about the gentle sales path and what members are doing in terms of bringing new people into their gentle sales paths. And so we take turns, we raise our hands and take turns and everybody. [00:07:19] Is really a leader in the, in their chair, and they get to learn from others and also share. And in the second half of the call, we go into breakout rooms and we have a more intimate conversation with other heart-centered entrepreneurs, which is super valuable because we don't often get this, you know, brainstorming and kind of feedback from other entrepreneurs. [00:07:46] And for example, this month our topic is the P of people. So I always bring a question for the breakout rooms and We discussed, for example a limiting belief that holds our people back. So [00:08:00] what's a limiting belief that holds our clients back? And then we took turns in sharing that in the small breakout room. [00:08:07] So that's the format. Of our meetups. Then we've also successfully transitioned to our new community platform on Kajabi, and I have to say I'm super pleased with it. It's such a lot of fun. We had our first live call directly. In our live room, in the community, so not on Zoom but directly within the Cajabi community, which makes it really safe and it feels like you're really unique to us. [00:08:37] So rather than being on Zoom, which we kind of all use, but it, it has become this tool where. We somehow we show up in our business mindset where if we're all of a sudden in our own platform and we have a call, and it just really felt like, oh, this is, this is our [00:09:00] home. We're hanging out in our home. [00:09:01] And that's what members also mentioned. There's still a few bugs that were working out, but All in all, we love this new community platform on Kajabi, and we're just truly embracing it. And then, as I said, Eddie, our community facilitator will lead his first NetWeaving call really a, a fun call to foster friendships between members that then lead to business opportunities. [00:09:27] I'm super excited to have him on board. It's interesting because Mark, you'll hear him say in. In our podcast episode, you'll hear him say that it's good to hire the youngest member you can find, or the, the youngest person you can find. And so that's exactly what I did with Eddie. He's a millennial probably even. [00:09:48] Younger than millennial. Millennials are now kind of like, oh, they're, you know, they aged as well. So he's, he's 27 and he just brings such a new perspective, such a [00:10:00] different way of being in community, which yeah, which we all love. So it's been great. So I created a, a special may coupon code for you if you'd like to join us now and save 15% on your monthly membership rate for as long as you stay. [00:10:16] So if you feel like now's the time, you can use the coupon code may gift. So, m. A Y G I F T on the checkout page by going to humane.marketing/circle. And this code is valid until May 31st, 2023. So with that, let's go back to our conversation with Mark. About communities. But first, let me tell you a bit about Mark. [00:10:46] So Mark Schaefer is a globally recognized keynote speaker, futurist, business consultant, and author. His clients range from successful startups to global brands such as Adidas, Johnson and Johnson, [00:11:00] Dell, Pfizer, the US Air Force, and the UK government. Mark is the bestselling author of 10 pathfinding books, including the first book ever written on influence marketing. [00:11:11] Mark's books are used as textbooks at more than 50 universities have been translated into 15 languages and can be found in more than 250 libraries worldwide. In today's episode we talked about why community is more important now than ever before. The difference between a community and an audience. [00:11:34] The role of the ego for community builders, the struggles of building a community, how hard it is really to get people together and host the space. And finally we also talk about AI and the role of AI in human communities and how they can work together, cuz that's actually the third part of Mark's new book, belonging to the Brand.[00:12:00] [00:12:00] Let's dive in with Mark. [00:12:34] Court. Good to see you, mark. I, I just said, let's just hit record because we're already sharing all, all this, this good stuff. So we are, we are excited to have you back on the show here. Really looking forward to talking to you about community. Your latest book has a lot of bookmarks already. [00:12:57] Definitely excited. Belonging to the [00:13:00] brand by community is the last great marketing strategy. So let's dive right into it. Most people on, on my show already know who you are. So I'm not gonna go into tell me who Mark Schaffer is and all of that stuff. Why is community so essential and why now? [00:13:18] Mark: I think that's, that's the question is, is, is why now? [00:13:22] Because community has, has always been essential. There's a great quote in the book. From a, there's a great marketer. He was with Coca-Cola, he was with Airbnb, Jonathan Milton Hall, and Jonathan said, look, when our ancestors were gathering around the fire, it, it wa it, it was to create this sense of belonging. [00:13:44] We've always longed to belong a lot of the social structures in our world today. You know, have, have just collapsed, especially here in America. A lot of the ways we used to gather and, and find that community are gone. A lot of that [00:14:00] was made a lot worse during the pandemic. Now I wanna go back a step and assure people this isn't like a touchy-feely, fluffy book about, you know, You know why we should all be in a community. [00:14:14] This is a business book with, I think, a very strong business case of why businesses should view community as part of their marketing strategy. Community isn't new from the first days of the internet. Businesses tried to create communities. Most of them failed because they were set out to like sell more stuff. [00:14:39] People don't really want to gather to buy more stuff, so they didn't really work. Most of the communities today, about 70% of the communities that actually work today for businesses are focused on transactions, customer self-service, which is fine, but the point of my book is that. [00:15:00] The, the purpose of branding is to create this emotional connection with our customers. [00:15:05] A feeling, a meaning that keeps them connected to us. And there's no more powerful way to do that than community. And I show a lot of data. I have a lot of case studies in the book that kind of prove this while we're focused on. You know, customer self-service, which is what most communities look at, look at today. [00:15:28] We're missing bigger opportunities like collaborate, collaboration, co-creation, customer advocacy, sharing information quickly. These are all massive benefits that are going away in other marketing channels. So number one. This is a business book about marketing that works. But I also point out this is marketing that heals, which is a unique aspect of this idea. [00:15:57] Mm-hmm. Because as we talked about, we've got [00:16:00] this mental health crisis going. Everywhere in the world. I don't know what it's like for you in Switzerland, but here it's in the news every day, especially with our young people today. And so we're longing to belong. We need to belong. And if businesses would look at really effective communities from the brand marketing lens, it not only works, but it can actually have a very positive impact on our customers and even the world. [00:16:31] Yeah. [00:16:32] Sarah: And it's so interesting because in our pre-recording talk, we, we discussed, You know, I, I mentioned that I was gonna actually go all in and create a live event, and, and I mentioned that I have a place in Sicily, and you were like, oh, I like Sicily. And it reminded me of one of the stories in your book, and I think it's in the beginning of the book, where you talk about this store, this shop that I think it was actually led by a Sicilian, or [00:17:00] originally Sicilians, right? [00:17:02] Yeah. Mm-hmm. That, and they still have this. Shop. Yeah. So tell us the story about, because it it, and I tell you what I told my husband and, and really that's still the feeling that we get in Sicily. Like it really is still like that. Yeah. So tell us that story. Well, we don't [00:17:19] Mark: have that. It's, we don't have that feeling in a, in America or most places, so, yeah. [00:17:23] So. You know, when when I was a little boy, it was always a special occasion when my grandfather brought something back from, he, he would call it the Italian store. And so I, I got to go back. This store has still been there since 1903. Three brothers. Came to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and they started making pasta, handmade pasta, and now they, it's still in the same family. [00:17:53] Mm-hmm. And the family members make a point to be there in the store, you know, interacting with [00:18:00] customers. Mm-hmm. If you, if there's any, they, they also do like a lot of Shipping and stuff of their specialty products. And if there's ever a problem, I mean, one of, one of those family members is paying attention to it. [00:18:12] You know themselves, well, I, I, I was away from this store for like 40 years, came back, visited Pittsburgh and I, I went to this, this area. Which used to be like a, a, just like a warehouse area, you know, really kind of busy and, you know, dirty Now it's a, it's a big tourist area. Mm-hmm. And the store is still there. [00:18:34] Same old wooden floors. This, all the signs are handwritten all over the stores and, And you know, I walk in and they've got this huge class case with 400 different kinds of cheese, just magnificent and smoked sausages and all these things that they're bringing in from Italy and, and you know, most, mostly Italy, but some other parts of the world. [00:18:58] And I go there and [00:19:00] the people at the counter. Know the customers and they're asking about their, their family and their husbands. And, and one lady was there and her husband had had a health problem and the lady said, well, we just got his favorite kind of cheese. Let me wrap that up. Take it home to him, you know, that maybe this will make him feel better. [00:19:20] And then the lady looked over to the corner and there's some, some of her friends sitting there, she went over to talk to them. And I just felt so sad. Because I've never experienced this. Hmm. And I'm just one generational away, right from this is how all business was done. And I just longed to, to, to walk in a place where people would know me and connect with me and to me. [00:19:49] Shopping is just anxiety. I, I, I don't even, I don't want to go anyplace. Right. You know, it's just a process for me of being overwhelmed and disappointed. So I'm, you know, that's [00:19:59] Sarah: [00:20:00] the introvert in us, right? We're [00:20:01] Mark: like, no, thanks. Yeah. You and I, you and I had a special show on that a few years ago. Yeah. Right. [00:20:06] Yeah. Yeah. After I shop, I just wanna go home and crawl under a blanket. Oh yeah. So so, so it, it's this idea of. We've always had this inside of us. This it's, it's in our D n A, it's this tribal sort of thing is on a deep psychological and sociological level. We have got to belong. And Sarah, this was one of the elements in my life that. [00:20:35] Provoked me that drove me to write this book. A few years ago, there was a headline in the New York Times that said The Loneliest Generation. Mm-hmm. And was referring to Gen Z. And it just, it just broke my heart how our children and these teenagers, they're just suffering. Suffering. They're so isolated and lonely and depressed. [00:20:59] And[00:21:00] as I said, look You know, this is a business book, but it's also a way I think we can at least. Be aware of these issues in our world and think about how this can have a positive impact on, on, you know, everybody today, not just young people. Young people. They're finding their own communities. I talk about this at the end of the book. [00:21:22] You know, they're, they're, they're moving into their own communities and to the extent that. Companies, and not just companies. Why I say companies. It could be a nonprofit, it could be a university, you know, it could be, you know, whatever. A, a un an insurance company, a symphony, whatever, a nonprofit the, I think the com, the, the organizations that are the most human, which I know is something close to your heart. [00:21:48] The companies and the organizations that are the most belonging. How, how would it look like in your. Company in your culture, in your marketing, if you thought we're gonna be [00:22:00] the most belonging company, it, it, it, it sort of, you know, presents an interesting idea of how you might approach marketing in a, in a different way. [00:22:11] Yeah, [00:22:11] Sarah: absolutely. So, and, and that story about this Italian shab, it's not just a beautiful story, but it's a, an excellent business case. Yeah. Cause. You know, how hard is it for a small shop like that to survive and them still existing after 40 years? Well, It has to have to do [00:22:30] Mark: something. Community. It's, it's been well, they've been there since 1903. [00:22:36] Oh, yeah. Yeah. Not just, I was Generat four. Yeah. It had been 40 years since I had been there. Right. Yeah. But it's it's the same store. Yeah. They, they, yeah. It's, it's bigger now, but yeah. It's the same, it's the same store. [00:22:50] Sarah: Yeah. No, absolutely. I, I have a feeling like reading the book and I so resonate with this. [00:22:58] Because just like [00:23:00] anything in marketing marketer, marketers have a tendency to grab the latest Conta concept. So let's just say, okay, mark Schaffer, yay. He writes about communities, right? Yeah. And six months later, that's the latest marketing thing, right? It's like, just like we did with authenticity, just like we did with vulnerability, marketers are really good at jumping on these words and then abusing the crap out of them. [00:23:30] Yeah. And so what I really liked about your book, and you mentioned it several times, is this concept of letting go of control that. You cannot control a community growth. You cannot Yeah. You know, somehow market or Yeah. Kind of manipulate a community. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, talk to us about that. [00:23:56] Mark: Well, that's probably something you've learned [00:24:00] firsthand in your community, but, you know, give you a story that so when I started my community, I have a community On Discord, which I didn't really wanna be on Discord, but my community said, we wanna be on Discord. [00:24:12] So I'm giving up control. So here we are in Discord, thought, well, this is a community. This is a community that, you know, I kind of brought these people together and they're interested in the future of marketing. So they're probably interested in things I'm talking about, like personal branding and being a professional speaker and writing books. [00:24:34] So I created. My own little chat rooms thinking, oh, this is where we're gonna have interesting dialogue about these subjects. Now those rooms are the emptiest rooms on the whole site because they, they didn't wanna go there. They took it in completely different direction. They said, look, we wanna talk about the metaverse, we wanna talk about web three. [00:24:58] We wanna talk about chat, [00:25:00] G P T and artificial intelligence, and. They were right. We need to be talking about those things, right? They've taken me a whole new direction. It's, but that community has become my university. I'm learning from them. Almost every blog, post, podcast or speech I give the, a lot of the information and stories are coming out of that community, right? [00:25:24] So they're keeping me relevant because they're spread out all over the world. You know, teaching me what they're seeing is, is, is going on out there. [00:25:33] Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. So, so that, that letting go of the control and, and almost like letting the community taking over that is Yeah. That is so big and it's, it's so, I think against what a lot of us business owners or marketers have learned where we, and I, and I also. [00:25:54] Remember you or mentioning that a community is definitely not an audience, [00:26:00] right? That distinction is so essential and yet, We see probably 90% of the people using the words interchangeably. They call a community, they, they say they have a community where they actually just have a free Facebook group where they sell their [00:26:16] Mark: programs. [00:26:17] Yeah. And I think the distinction is important because that's where the real power is. Right? You know, when people have an audience, And they say, this is my community. I say, well, the do do the people in the AU in your audience, do they know each other? Do they connect to each other? And the answer is no, cuz they're an audience. [00:26:37] Now I'm not. I mean, an audience is really important. I mean, I have an audience, right? And those are the people who buy things from me. So, I mean, audience is great, but. When people know each other and they build relationships, connections, and they collaborate and they do things together in new ways, that goodwill and [00:27:00] that emotion transfers to the brand. [00:27:04] This is one of the profound lessons I think in the book. I mean, I did a deep dig, deep dive on a lot of the psychology of community, the sociology of community, and almost suggests that, and this is hence at your point, that leadership in a community is like upside down compared to traditional marketing. [00:27:27] Yeah. You know leadership. And so instead of building the connection between the brand, And our audience. It's about building the connection between the audience members to create this community, because if you do that, it creates this layer of emotional switching costs. Mm-hmm. Like, these are my friends, this is my community. [00:27:49] I can never leave this brand cuz I never wanna leave this community. Right. So it, it, it, there's a lot of. Non-intuitive things about [00:28:00] community success That, that I'm, I'm learning firsthand. Yeah. [00:28:03] Sarah: And, and that's where I think you brought in the live event. And that's when I'm like, I. I'm a hundred percent convinced because I've been, you know, I had my community probably two, three years now, and I, what I've been learning is that there's a lot of unlearning first of all for the leader of the community, but then also for members of the community because I feel like as marketers we have kind of brainwashed. [00:28:34] Clients and customers into these membership site type things where people just come to consume content rather than to actually show up and Yeah. You know, express themselves and say, this is what works for me, what works for you, and collaborating, and so I've been kind of like, Yeah. Empower, giving power back to the people and saying, no, I [00:29:00] want you to show [00:29:01] Mark: up. [00:29:01] Yeah, that's a, that's, that's a really, really good point. You know, I, I had this conversation with a friend of mine last week. He has, has a community, but it's really an audience. Because it's, it's the, you know, he's, he's like creating content and it's premium content that you only get if you're in this community. [00:29:24] Right. And it, it, there's not really a lot of focus. I mean, that's a [00:29:28] Sarah: membership site. Yeah, it is. I think that type, yeah, that those three words, they're kind of like Yeah. Creating, yeah. [00:29:35] Mark: It's a membership site. Mm-hmm. You know, in my community. It is, it's free, it's open it, you know, it's, it's, it's like, you know, everybody is welcome to, to come in and give it a try. [00:29:47] You know, I, I do have like a, like a v i p section where it's like a small amount of money every year. And then, you know, we get, we have meetings with like legendary, legendary marketing people [00:30:00] and And that's a lot of fun. But I mean, at least 90% of the community is just there. It's free and we're just helping each other and it's very generous and very kind. [00:30:10] And you know, I made so many new friends and no many new connections. And of course, as I said, it's just become my number one place to, to learn about what's, what's new. I mean, I was really early. In the in the AI generated content around art, like mid journey and I mean, it was like people in my community said, have you seen this? [00:30:35] Get a membership, try this thing. And it was just like, oh my gosh. I mean this, like my, my jaw just dropped on the table. It was so unbelievable. And that, you know, I was early on chat G p t again because my community's like pulling me into these things, right? And, and, and I think that's a big part of being relevant today, not necessarily being an expert. [00:30:58] In everything, [00:31:00] but knowing enough to at least ask the right questions about everything. Just, you know, dabbling in the metaverse and web three and all these new things, and that the community's helping me remain relevant. What, what a gift is that? Now think about what that means to a big brand. Yeah. Is, is, is, you know Sarah, I saw this amazing quote. [00:31:21] Oh, I, I, I got hung on this. It was probably four years ago now. There's a quote by the C m O of Pepsi and he said the days of the big brand are over the big brand campaign. Campfires. Bonfires are over. And today it's about. Being relevant in cultural moments. And I thought that is fascinating, but what does that really mean? [00:31:54] How does that show up? And if you watch what some of these brands are doing now, they like, if there's like a [00:32:00] big award show like the Grammys or the Emmys or the Oscars and or, or there's like big festivals. One of the things Pepsi did for example, was there was some big like cultural festival. In, in New York and they created a soft drink, especially for this festival. [00:32:22] It tasted like zindel or something, right? I mean, I can't imagine how bizarre that would be, but it was a in a pink can. But you know, if, if you play this out, how can you be? What would be the platform to be relevant in these cultural moments? What would be more powerful than a community that's taking you into these moments? [00:32:45] Mm-hmm. Exposing you to these moments. Yeah. And, and I, I, so I think big company, small company solopreneur it, it, it, it's something that must be considered really for any kind of business right now. [00:33:00] Yeah, [00:33:00] Sarah: I absolutely agree. And, and, and I think one y you did say, okay, this is a business book, but business is so human today to come back to my favorite topic and, and yeah. [00:33:12] And so those are those humanizing moments, right? It's like, we're not, and that's why the. Let me build a community so that I can sell more stuff. Doesn't work, because that's not why humans gather. They don't, right. They don't come into a community to buy more. And so I think brands need to be super careful with that, you know, thing they, they can go completely wrong if they start selling into the community. [00:33:41] Mark: Yeah. That, that's the number one. Right. Reason why communities. Fail Yeah. Is because they say, okay, well, we'll start a community, but you know, this is gonna help us meet our, our quarterly sales numbers. And, you know, a company has to do that. I've, I've been in that world for a long time, but that's, that's gonna [00:34:00] drive your community away. [00:34:01] And it, you know, I, I think one of the gifts of this book, I hope people see this as a gift, is in chapter 10, I look at measurement. In an entirely new way. I mean, community and measurement. This has been just a, a thorn in the side of communities forever and. I give a case study in the book about these big sports drink brands, Gatorade versus Powerade, and I show the power of brand marketing where you sponsor events and you're, you know, you get connected to cultural moments and you know, maybe you sponsor the World Cup. [00:34:44] Well, okay, so if you sponsor the World Cup and your brand is everywhere. Does that sell more products? Yes. Can we measure that? No, [00:35:00] probably not. So I make this distinction between brand marketing and direct marketing. And what I'm showing is that almost every community is trying to manage it and measure it like direct marketing. [00:35:16] But if you do that, you, you miss the whole thing about trust. And loyalty and emotion and love and co-creation, collaboration and advocacy, you're missing the main event. Mm-hmm. And so you, if, if, if the community reports to the marketing department, which understands what brand marketing is, we kind of take that pressure off and, and we look at other measures. [00:35:43] That may not necessarily be directly tied to the bottom line, but we know it's a leading indicator of, of the bottom line. One of the biggest communities in the whole world is Sephora. Now Sephora is a cosmetics company. Do you have [00:36:00] Sephora over there? And We do. Yeah. They're, they're, they're based in Europe, I think. [00:36:03] Yeah. And they're French, right? I think maybe French. Yeah. They've got brick and mortar stores. In, in many, many countries, every major city in America has just a forest store, but 80% of their sales come from their online community. And their number one measure in their community is engagement because they see engagement as the leading indicator to to sales. [00:36:34] Mm-hmm. So it's, again, this goes back to what we were talking about earlier. It's like, This turns the traditional marketing mindset kind of upside down. But this, I think this is where the world needs to go. I think 20 years from now, maybe 30 years from now, we're, we're gonna, the, the young people leading businesses today are already moving this direction. [00:36:59] They're [00:37:00] already moving to community. 85% of startups today are leading with community as they're. Main marketing idea. 30 years from now, the world's gonna look back at the period we're in now. And we're gonna say, remember those days we used to spam people. We used to interrupt people, intercept people. We used to bother them. [00:37:22] We used to fill their mailboxes with all this direct mail that wasn't even relevant to them anymore. What were we thinking? Okay. I'm so happy we read Mark's book 30 years ago. [00:37:36] Sarah: No, I, I have to say, like, I, I really feel like you pivoted or you kind of. Created this new path with Marketing Rebellion already. [00:37:46] Yes, exactly. Right. And now this is like, you know, for whoever is ready for the next. Paradigm, basically. I'm, I'm glad you picked up. I'm so glad to have you kind of, you know, forged this [00:38:00] path for people like myself, because that is the, I wanna cry, like, this is the biggest pushback I always got is like, you can't measure it. [00:38:08] You can't measure humane marketing. Yeah. And I felt like saying, so what? You know? Yeah. Right. This is the only way we gotta go. Yeah. And, and so now to say, well then if you don't listen to me, listen to Mark [00:38:21] Mark: Schaffer. Right? Yeah. I mean, it is, it is. And look, I'm like, I'm a measurement junkie. You know, I've, a lot of people don't know this about me, but I actually have the, the equivalent of a master's degree in statistics. [00:38:33] So, I mean, I'm all about the numbers. But you know, there was a very powerful quote from Marketing Rebellion that I actually repeated in, in the new book, and it's this idea. That you can either keep, keep pace with the, with the pulse of our culture, or you can measure, you probably can't do both. I mean, I, I, I, I think Sarah, there, there's [00:39:00] no business leader. [00:39:01] Anywhere right now that can't be feeling a little overwhelmed by the by the amount and velocity of change. Mm-hmm. And so, you know, you, you've got to, to, you've gotta make that leap at some point to say, We've gotta go to market a different way. We can't keep holding. It's, it's a sickness. It literally is a sickness that we're holding on to this scaffolding of the old ways, you know, our, our relationships with ad agencies and producing, you know, glamorous television commercials. [00:39:35] Cause you know, cuz we can win an award for this and, and, and, and it, it's hard. To change our, our, our, the culture of our company to start embracing these new things. I think every company today should be taking at least 10% of their marketing budget and experimenting maybe on things you can't measure. [00:39:58] You have no, have no hope of [00:40:00] measuring to move more toward this human-centered. View of, of marketing. Because just because you can't measure it doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. I mean, there's a lot of things we can't measure. We can't measure, you know, wind, we can't, me, well, we can measure, we can't measure love, right? [00:40:19] We can't measure love. We can't measure. How good we feel on a, on a sunny day. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't go to the beach, doesn't mean we shouldn't fall in love. We need to take advantage of those things. And there are many things in marketing today, you know, we are in the early days, in the early stages, and especially young people today have entirely different expectations and of, of what they want from businesses and what they want from marketing. [00:40:47] And we've gotta start moving that way now. Gen Z. They're not babies. We just had the first member of Gen Z become elected to the United States Congress. Mm-hmm. [00:41:00] They're consumers, right? In the next five years, they're gonna be our leaders, right? And our procurement managers. So, and, and, you know, great entrepreneurs. [00:41:10] So, I mean, we need, we need to wake up. We really do. Yeah. We need to get rid of this, these sick, these sick, antiquated practices and, and wake up to, to, to deliver. You know, we're gonna stop doing things that people hate. Just stop it and then double down. How do you feel? [00:41:29] Sarah: Yeah. How, how do you feel about, so these, you know, the marketers that are out there now in, in, let's say in bigger companies, but even entrepreneurs, like, besides you, you reading your book, how are they, how are we gonna get them up to speed with these skills? [00:41:48] Because unfortunately, Unless they have the luck to have you at their, at a lecture in their university, they're still being taught marketing from the sixties. Yeah. [00:42:00] It's, it's such a big mismatch. And, and I see that in, in the online marketing sphere as well. We're still being marketed to like 20 years ago with all the shaming and manipulating and [00:42:12] Mark: on the lot. [00:42:13] Yeah. Well, you know, it's interesting, Sarah, that a lot of the problem right now is actually even in the universities. I mean, the universities many universities are so far behind. Mm-hmm. You know, it, it, I, I think I. The slowest moving. Most bureaucratic organizations I've ever worked with are, are universities and these are the institutions sad that we're, that we're counting on to, to keep our, our students relevant. [00:42:42] And there's many young people coming outta universities that are, you know, connecting to me saying, I'm totally unprepared for the world. All this stuff I learned, nobody's even doing this stuff anymore. Yeah, so there's a lot of problems. There's a lot of issues. But here's the thing that gives me a lot of hope. [00:42:59] I. [00:43:00] First of all, there is change happening. Absolutely. Sarah. There have been people that have taken my Marketing rebellion book and said, this is the new framework. This is the way we're gonna go forward, not just small companies. There's a Fortune 100 company that, that contacted me and said, this is the way we need to go forward. [00:43:20] You know, how can you help us do this? So that's number one. Number two. I think the best leaders today, they wanna stay relevant. You know, to, if you are managing a brand, here is your mission. A brand is a never ending journey of relentless. Relevance, relevance, relevance, relevance, relevance to now, to this moment, to this year, to this culture. [00:43:49] That's it. That's your job. Yeah. And, and to be relevant, you, you, you, you, you've gotta move away from some of these things that people just see are [00:44:00] not relevant anymore. They don't even work anymore, right? So we've got to start reaching out. We've got to start experimenting. And I think what gives me hope is that, look, any, any. [00:44:12] Great professional today. They know this. They wanna be relevant, they wanna be relevant in their careers, they want their companies to be relevant and, and so I think my message is, is is gonna connect because it has to connect. [00:44:26] Sarah: Hmm. Yeah. I do feel also always come back to Covid, but I do feel like it has helped with human evolution and of consciousness and people like, you know, never. [00:44:41] Like before they, they're like, we're done with this spammy marketing stuff. Like the, the kind of, I call it the bullshit The word is escaping me, but, but like the trigger, you know, is likes meter. We know, we can tell that this is all fakes and that that's so, [00:45:00] so I do feel, yeah, there's this gap between consciousness that has risen and some of the, the marketing stuff that is just so outdated. [00:45:09] But yeah, like you, I totally believe in humanity and, and I be believe that people. Feel it, like you could just feel it that there's this craving for, for belonging and, and so [00:45:21] Mark: I'm just Yeah. Oh, that, I mean, you talk about measurement that is documented. I mean, it, it, it's, it's just coming at us in every, every day, in every way. [00:45:32] It's, it's all over the news here in America. And I mean, just like two weeks ago I saw this statistic that was just incredible that. Of the young people aged 18 to 24, 50 1% of them had sought medical treatment for a mental health issue. Hmm. The average for every other generation, including, you know, my generation is 24%. [00:45:59] [00:46:00] Wow. Yeah. For young people today, it's 51% and the average for every other generation is 24%. There's something really wrong here going on. Mm-hmm. And you know, look, my book is not Pollyannish saying, Hey, start a community and change the world. I'm saying, look, There's a, there's a real marketing urgency to consider new ideas like this. [00:46:26] And oh, by the way, it's, it's gonna do some, it's gonna do some good for the people in your community. [00:46:33] Sarah: Yeah. I, I really feel this more so than in other, in, in the other books that, that you come from this place of. Let go of the ego and tap into the love. That's there's some warmth, you know, even though it's a business book, I feel like there's some warmth reading this. [00:46:51] And then, yeah. And that's also the, the thing that we need. Now it's like, you know, how can you have a community that is Cold and [00:47:00] based on Eagle. Well that's not gonna work. So there definitely has to be yeah, the warmths as well. I wanna tap into also kind of the bridging it to the technology piece to, to wrap up, because it could almost be like a paradox, you know, it's like, wait, wait a minute, okay. [00:47:18] We have this problem with technology, young people, too much technology, and yet, You are talking about technology and AI and in web three in the last part of the book, so draws this picture, how do they fit together? [00:47:35] Mark: Well, first of all, thank you for reading all the way to the end of the book. [00:47:40] Sarah: That was a test, you [00:47:42] Mark: know? [00:47:42] And you know, I'll tell you some of the, some of the most interesting. Things I have in the book are at the end and, and I thought, gosh, maybe I should put this up more towards the beginning so people can make sure I make sure they see that well. So there are [00:48:00] two big issues I, I talk about at the end of the book, technological changes and sociological changes. [00:48:06] They kind of go together that. Are suggesting there are gonna be very new kinds of communities in the future, and businesses need to be waking up. Whether you have a community or you just want to tap into a community, a certain demographic of consumers, you've gotta be aware of what's going on. Number one, on the technology side. [00:48:31] We hear these mysterious words like Web three and NFTs and Metaverse, and the irony is there isn't really a good definition for any of those things. Maybe NFTs come, come closest, but you know, people have really wild, wide, varying ideas of what the Metaverse is gonna be or what Web three is going to be. [00:48:52] But when you cut through all the jargon, What you really end up with is new ways for [00:49:00] people to belong and especially young people today, are just surging into these areas. So we've gotta be aware of what's happening, what's going on there, how these communities are being created, and consider if that's one of the ways we need to be relevant. [00:49:18] On the sociological side, young people today, they want to be. Invisible. They don't wanna be found, they don't wanna be discovered. They don't wanna be criticized and bullied and and marketed to. So today, much of our marketing is dependent on social listening platforms that tap into Twitter and LinkedIn and Facebook. [00:49:45] Well, guess what? Young people today, they're not there. Mm-hmm. They're not there at all. It's amazing to me. Sometimes I do guest lectures at, you know, universities. Even like people in graduate school today, they're not [00:50:00] on LinkedIn. You know, it's, it's, it's crazy. So where are they? They're on Discord, they're on maybe they're on TikTok. [00:50:10] They're on you know, communities in the Metaverse, they're on Fortnite, they're on Twitch. Guess what? Social listening platforms aren't there. The, you know, millions and millions of people are having brand conversations in places we can't see, right? So, Just like you mentioned, marketing Rebellion was a bit of a wake up call. [00:50:34] I think this book, you know, part of it is a solution and part of it is a. You know, knock on the head as well to say the world is changing in rapid and unexpected ways, and we don't have all the answers right now, but be aware of what is going on. And, and like I said, gen Z, they're not babies. They're consumers, right? [00:50:56] With growing, growing, you know, [00:51:00] economic power. So this, this is not something to put off and we really need to think about this now. Yeah. [00:51:07] Sarah: Yeah. And, and, and I do also see this theme of letting go of control, right? The, the Gen Z doesn't want control, and so they want this connections of trust with the, with the not Bitcoin. [00:51:21] The other one. The, the NFTs blockchain. Yeah, the blockchain, you know, kind of like, okay, I can trust this connection because it's decentralized and, and so all of these topics that for us right now, I. They've most markers I would assume kind of sounds like Chinese. And so they have to, really, what you're saying is basically almost, you have to have one person per department stay on top of the new stuff, right? [00:51:51] It's like, yeah, yeah. [00:51:52] Mark: Go. Yeah. I, I, I, I think, you know, if you've got that kind of luxury, I mean, Sarah Wilson is someone I feature in my book. [00:52:00] She is former Facebook, former Instagram writes for Harvard Business Review, sort of looking at Gen Z culture and Zen Gen Z marketing strategies and, and she says rather boldly in the book, she said, I think it's time I. [00:52:16] Just to find the youngest person in your marketing department and say, pay attention to this because I don't understand it. [00:52:23] Sarah: Yeah. I saw that quote and I was like, lucky me. I have two sons, 16 and 19. They tell [00:52:29] Mark: me all the insights. Well, yeah. I, I, I, I mentor my, my kids are grown, but I mentor young kids. Yeah. [00:52:36] And I mean, I'm always asking them, what are you doing? What are you seeing? Exactly. Let me, Let me watch you play Roblox. Why did you do that? Yeah. Yeah. Why did you buy that? [00:52:47] Sarah: Yeah. And all the ad blockers, just like you said, right? It's like everywhere. Yeah. [00:52:51] Mark: I wanna, I, I gotta watch my, my kids I mentor play Fortnite cuz I die every time I can't. [00:52:57] It's like, what's the use? I die [00:53:00] immediately, which makes them laugh, but, you know, so I've gotta watch them. I gotta watch them do it. Yeah. [00:53:06] Sarah: Yeah. Wonderful. Well, I really appreciated this time with you, mark. I, I'm totally with you. Community is, is the way to go and I think we have a lot to learn from the communities, especially the marketers who think, you know, you just throw up a website and a pay button and then there you go. [00:53:26] You have your community. I think it's time to step back and come. Yeah. Step back from the ego and come with this humble learner approach to say, okay, what can I learn from this community? Yeah. That's the way I look at it. And it sounds like you do too. [00:53:42] Mark: Absolutely. Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Sarah. It's always delight. [00:53:46] Yeah, likewise talking to you. It's nice to find such a, I, I think we're of one mind and one heart when it comes to marketing, so it's for sure good to find. It's good to find an ally out there. [00:53:58] Sarah: Thank you. Thank you. Do you [00:54:00] mention the names of your books again and your website so people can [00:54:03] Mark: find Yeah. [00:54:03] The books we talked about today are marketing Rebellion. We didn't mention known, but you know, we, the book on personal branding I think is extremely relevant today. I think personal branding, when you get down to it can be. It's, it's everything in, in many ways when it comes to our careers and marketing. [00:54:23] And then my new book is called Belonging to the Brand. My Community is the Last Great Marketing Strategy and you can find my blog, my podcast, my books on my social media connections@businessesgrow.com. [00:54:39] Sarah: Wonderful. I always have one last question. Mark, what are you grateful for today or [00:54:43] Mark: this week? Right now. [00:54:46] Well, I'm grateful for so much. I'm grateful for, for my, for my health right now. I've, I've gone through a, a, a week of of of illness here and I'm I'm grateful for we talked a lot about community, but I'm also really grateful [00:55:00] for the, your audience, my audience, the out there that, that supports me in so many ways. [00:55:05] That's, that's just incredibly humbling just to be interested in my work and support my work. So I'm grateful for, for you and your listeners today. Thank you, [00:55:15] Sarah: mark. Always a pleasure to hang out. [00:55:18] Mark: Yeah. Thank you, Sarah. [00:55:27] Sarah: Whether you are a community member or are thinking about creating your own community, I hope you found this episode with Mark. Really, really helpful. I know I did find out more about Mark and his work@businessesgrow.com and check out my two favorite books from him, marketing Rebellion. And belonging to the brand. [00:55:49] You can find them on his website or directly at Amazon. And if you're looking for a community of like-minded humane marketers, then why not join us in the Humane Marketing Circle? [00:56:00] You can find out more at Humane. Dot Marketing slash circle. You find the show notes of this episode@humane.marketing slash H 1 64, and on this beautiful page, you'll also find a series of free offers, such as my Saturday newsletter, the Humane Business. [00:56:19] Manifesto and the free, gentle confidence mini course, as well as my two books, marketing like we're Human and selling like we're human. Thanks so much for listening and being part of a generation of marketers who cares for yourself, your clients, and the planet. We are change makers before we are marketers, so go be the change you want to see in the world. [00:56:43] Speak soon.[00:57:00]

covid-19 america new york amazon community tiktok europe conversations uk ai social marketing french young new york times opportunities zoom chinese italy brand italian speak suffering pennsylvania revolution twitch fortune oscars clients millennials grammy partnership court bitcoin cold human fall in love nfts created web idea shop companies world cup pittsburgh gen z businesses airbnb discord ps switzerland sustainable shopping air force invisible empower emmy awards coca cola fortnite rebellions metaverse belonging reason pfizer previous eagle adidas younger exposing pepsi manifesto shipping harvard business review paradigm mm rutgers university relevance campfires conta us air force roblox gatorade sicily bonfires sephora johnson johnson uk government humane sicilian customized united states congress peter drucker mama bears kajabi schaffer croce provoked sarah wilson mark schaefer powerade markit marketing rebellion mark yeah mark well sarah yeah humane marketing sarah thank sarah no netweaving mark absolutely

Interview: Rana of the Atheopagan Society Council

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 13, 2023 35:33

Remember, we welcome comments, questions, and suggested topics at thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com. S4E6 TRANSCRIPT:----more---- Yucca: Welcome back to the Wonder Science-Based Paganism. I'm one of your host Yucca. Mark: And I'm the other one, mark. Yucca: And today we are excited to have a very special interview. So we have Rana joining us. Rana: Hi. Thank you for having. Mark: Welcome Rana. Rana is a member of the atheopagan community and serves on the atheopagan Society Council. And we are, this is part of our series to help people in the community to become. A little bit more familiar with who's serving on the council and you know what their vision is for the future and all that good kind of stuff. So we're delighted to be able to talk with you today, Ron. Rana: Thank you for having me. I'm really looking forward. Yucca: Yeah. Thanks for coming on. So I think, I mean, maybe a, a good place to start here would be with what brought you to atheism. Rana: Yeah, so I was raised without religion and I never really related to when people talked about God or religion or having a faith. I didn't really have a reference for what that meant. My parents are not religious, and I remember them, you know, having negative views of religion due to hypocrisy and news scandals and stuff like that. I'd been to a few churches as a kid for weddings and events, but I never really felt like I fit in there, didn't feel like it was something for me, and just didn't understand it really. And on top of, you know, Being the child of an immigrant from the UK and an immigrant from Iran, there have been a lot of places and times in my life that I felt like I didn't fit in, and religion just definitely felt like one of them where I accepted that I just, I don't understand this, it doesn't apply to me. And I mostly felt okay about that. Many years later, I discovered the term atheist, and for a long time I have felt apathetic towards Philosoph. Phyla, sorry. Philosophical and theological debates about the existence of God or not, because it feels like it just doesn't matter to me. Bio. I like that term atheist, like an apathetic atheist. I was really drawn to the paranormal as a child and I watched a lot of stuff related to that. I'm sure I saw a segment somewhere about witchcraft or Wicca or paganism, and I'm sure that embedded itself somewhere in my mind. , I was definitely drawn to witchcraft as a team. Many team girls seem to be, I've noticed, and it made me feel seen in a certain way and had a really big appeal for me that I couldn't quite put my finger on, but it just felt like something that I liked. Now that I'm older, I can see it a little bit differently that I think it's about power and autonomy. It's about discovering yourself, your body, your sexuality, how you process feelings, you know, getting into the psychological aspect of it. And so I only ever did things on a very casual, solitary basis, and I think I liked the sensory aspects more than the frameworks themselves. I really enjoyed going to my local new age store, and I felt, I remember feeling really calm and curious when I was there. It just, it always felt like such an experience with the smell of incense and the gentle bells and calming music and being surrounded by books. It was just perfect for an introvert, shy, like kid like. and it also felt like a place full of this esoteric knowledge, and I've been a very eager, lifelong learner. So the whole thing just really appealed to. , but I also feel like I spent a lot of those younger years searching and never quite finding whatever it was I was looking for. I never became involved with any other people or groups, and I always just remained on my own. And in retrospect, I'm kind of glad about that just because I've heard so many mixed and negative experiences about folks getting involved in groups, especially as a young person. So, . You know, it's hard to say what it would've been like if I didn't get involved with the group, but that was just how it went. I spent quite a bit of my twenties being out of touch with anything spiritual. I held onto some interest in ghosts in a vague sense of paranormal, and I just kept this agnostic take on it. But perhaps there are things out there we don't yet understand, but I can't say for sure either way. What is the ultimate answer, ultimate truth. Yucca: Hmm. Rana: I slowly became a more skeptical thinker, and I had one particular partner who really modeled that for me, and I'm very grateful to have adopted that mindset over the years. He was also an atheist as a rejection of a Christian upbringing, and I noticed a lot of my friends had a similar path. as I continued to grow and really just broaden my perspective of the world, I became very existential and got a starker, for lack of a better word, materialist picture of the universe, and that really strongly has defined my worldview. Going forward, I realized I was an atheist and I felt an overall sense of clarity about that. Like it didn't feel like a bad thing to me. It, I felt good about it. But I didn't know any atheist spaces where I felt like I belonged or felt comfortable. It always felt like there was a larger interest in being angry and logical tends to be very male dominated, and there was just. Felt like more debating than a feeling of building a community or building shared meaning together. I, I never quite saw anything like that happening. Many years passed, and then at the beginning of the pandemic, I sort of had a reckoning where I realized how important critical thinking and rational thought are to me. There was a driving force behind it with all the pseudoscience and conspiracy theories that were going around. The uncertainty of that time also brought witchcraft to the forefront as a trend again, and got me thinking about it a little bit more. And I started following some content creators. But I have a hard time trying to make that separation of just ignoring the things that I don't connect with. And you know, like discussion of d d isn't magic for me. , it's, it's not very interesting to me, Yucca: Right. Rana: and I found myself searching for ways to learn the taro. Without the supernatural aspect, and I didn't even know what to call that. I remember googling secular tarot, and I think I found one blog and it didn't seem to have a lot of content, and so I thought that just wasn't a thing. I actually started to wonder if I should make it a thing . I was like, is nobody doing this Yucca: mm-hmm. Rana: because I, I feel like I'd heard of the tarot being a psychological. Like having a psychological aspect to it. And I wanted to learn more as using it as a psychological tool and not for divination. I started joining some witchy subreddits and I eventually found the SaaS witches subreddit, which was forgetting what it stands for, all of a Mark: Skeptical, atheistic agnostic and science seeking witches, I, I think is what that stands for. Rana: Yeah, that's right. And I remembered seeing either a post or a comment about atheopagan and the name itself made me pause, like, whoa, I've never seen those two words together. What does that mean? So I looked into it and I saw that there was. The community and I joined the Facebook group and I was just really blown away to have both of these things that I was interested in suddenly crystallize and come together in this singular idea, which also had a whole community attached to it. It really never occurred to me that these two parts of myself could coexist together. . And since it was the beginning of the pandemic, it was also a very particular time Yucca: right. Rana: And, you know, I remember challenging myself to just go to one of the mixers, peck it out, and I distinctly remember having a feeling of familiarity and feeling like I was in the right place. It's a little hard to describe. But it's not something I feel too often. So it was notable. And you know, those video chats really became a very meaningful part of my routine, especially in the earlier parts of the pandemic where there was a lot of uncertainty and fear and a need to really process what was happening with other people. And so I was really grateful to be able to do that. Like-minded folks who were grounded and rational and but also had warmth and just a sense of comradery. So, you know, overall finding the community was just this really big and refreshing change for me that gave me access to a community as an atheist and let me, Have my witchy interests, but stay aligned with science, logic, and reason, while also keeping the warmth of wonder and humanity, and I have yet to find that in another space. Yucca: Hmm. Mark: Well, that's wonderful. I, I'm, I'm always excited to hear the stories of, you know, how people found us and what it seemed like when they got here. Yeah. That, I mean, from the, from that first mixer, it was really clear to me, you know, oh yeah, this is one of ours. . Yucca: Yeah. So were there certain values that. that you saw that atheopagan had or the community had that really attracted you to it? Or, you know, what, what was it specifically that really pulled you in? Rana: Yeah, I know I mentioned like rational and critical thinking a little bit. I really respect the group's commitment to doing better and not doing things out of the name of tradition. I really love the social justice aspect of the group that everyone is on board with that, and I really appreciate that. I've seen a lot of healthy communication. Positive healthy debate and also good conflict resolution and having that modeled for me and framed in a way that we're all learning and growing together. So having a little grace with each other, you know, cuz none of us are perfect. I also really value that it's a larger social space where our conversations start from having a shared world. like that isn't necessarily safe to assume from a lot of other spaces and sometimes I do forget that. I love that we're encouraged to question everything and overall there's this sense of a desire for knowledge and I love learning and hearing the things that other people are learning about and sharing. Cuz a lot of the times it's something I would've never encountered on my own. Yucca: Mm. Mm-hmm. Rana: I also very much value it being a space to be vulnerable. You know, along with atheist and agnostic people, often not having a shared space with minded others and forming a connection. . I think there's a real lack of spaces to be vulnerable just in general. And a place to share life's highs and lows with people who share your worldview. And you know, plenty of people find this through friendship, myself included. But I think it's different to have a larger community based on this. A community feels like a space where you're exposed to people you may not otherwise have a friendship or other connection. and I think those other connections are really valuable to expose us to the wider variety of people out in the world and subsequently their interests and knowledge. You know, like I said previously, I've seen. and felt a lot of vulnerability within the Ethiopia Pagan group, and I find that really meaningful to have a space to share and process things with others, knowing that they won't judge you and they may even have resources or similar experiences to share. I love that Ethiopianism. Specifically death and pleasure, positive space. That feels really important to me since death and sex are fundamental parts of the human experience. And again, I just feel like we lack healthy spaces to process thoughts and feelings about that. And it feels like we're. Pushing back against the over culture, you know, like we've, we've talked about before, just this overarching, the overarching social norms, especially of the US and we're just doing our best to live our values and also modeling another way of living. I've also seen how religious groups tend to give people a connection to community. and I've always kind of envied that as a non-religious person, it felt like something I didn't have access to. And I see how those communities sometimes really bring someone through a time of need. And you know, I think there's, thinking ahead a little bit, there's also a sense of vulnerability that comes with. I've noticed people become more religious as they age, and it gives them that connection and support from other people. But I also see this larger epidemic of loneliness in this country, and I think that can become worse frankly, as you age and especially. The people I know tend to not be having children, myself included. So for myself, I'm the only child of immigrants who is not having children, and it feels really important for me to establish chosen family and meaningful social circles around me Yucca: Mm-hmm. Rana: ensure that I have that community around me as I continue aging. And I really want to be part of that support for other people as well. Yucca: Hmm. That's really beautiful. Mark: yeah. That's wonderful. Rana: Thank you. Mark: So. Yeah. I mean there's, there's just, there's so much there that you're, what you're expressing is a reflection of what I really hope for, for this community. You know, what, what I want it to be. And it's not that I don't think that it is, it's that, you know, being in the middle of it, I, I can't necessarily trust my own perceptions. So it's very validating, you know, to hear you reflect that back. You're, you're serving on the atheopagan Society Council now have been since last summer, and you have some other volunteer roles in the community as well. What do you see as your roles for the community? Rana: So, first I wanna say I was really honored to be asked to be on the council. I didn't. And I honestly didn't really understand what the council was until we talked about it more, and I got a pic, a better picture of what it means to be as a registered religious organization and what that entails. I decided to join because I wanted to be a part of creating a stable future for this community that I've come to really care. For myself, I feel that I have a quieter form of contribution. I like to work in the background and I intend to contribute through planning, designing, strategizing, and creating structure. I have some experience with that from managing a small business, and I've seen quite a bit of crossover in how small businesses work and how. The organization is growing and, and needing some processes figured out and things like that. Mark: So as a member of the council what, what is your hope to bring then in terms of values, vision, I guess, I guess this can go into our next question, which is, you know, what is your vision for this community? Where do you see us going? What do you hope for us? All that kind of. Rana: Yeah. My vision is for the community to stay centered on the needs and desires of the community as it continues to grow and change a little bit. I think it's really important that it stays adaptable as it scales because it will become more complex and I'd hate to see. Anything fall apart just because there isn't structure there. So this feels like a really good time that we're building that structure in really keeping things set up in an egalitarian way like we have discussed, and communicate our efforts to the community and make sure they're aware of what we're doing as a council and as leadership in general council and moderators for the most. Currently make up the leadership and really keeping the conversation open. And I think staying open to new ideas and ways to go about this. I know we're not reinventing the wheel by doing what we're doing in terms of having a decentralized community that. Is trying to create that structure and I'd love for us to look at what other groups have done and see what's worked and what hasn't, and examine that and do our best to adapt that for ourselves. I've seen atheopagan have organic growth, and that's fantastic. People are coming to the community, they're connecting and resonating. And I think that's great. So from my perspective, the focus is really on just creating those robust systems to maintain what we have. Create that really solid foundation and be able to continue to scale and grow. You know, we're an online community and the fact is, online spaces are always in flux. You know, imagine if the group started on Live Journal or MySpace, or even I, IRC chat. Because I've been a part of communities that were on those platforms and they're now defunct most part. And I think it's, it's just important that we remain adaptable in that sense, like technologically. And I think that will be an ongoing exploration for us. And it's not just us too that are considering. Mark: Yeah, I, I love your big picture thinking. You know, you, you, you managed to click back up and look at things from a high level, and that's so important. You know, it's, It's really easy, especially when things are happening so quickly, it's so easy to get kind of caught up in the minutiae and not, and not see that big picture. And I, you know, I really appreciate that you, you bring that for us. You know, another thing that I was going to mention is that on our, in our adult salons that we do once a month, you've really been a rock with. Tremendous resources and a real wisdom that you bring to talk about all kinds of, you know, relational issues and just variety of stuff. It's, it's really been great to have you in those spaces. And, and I know that you feel very strongly about how important it is to have those safe environments to talk about adult topics. So, just wanted to kind of. Give you flowers for that for you know, cuz I really appreciate, you know, how you've really taken that on. Rana: Thank you. Yeah. I really value having that space and that directly ties back to what I said about vulnerability and something I didn't even get to touch on too is the idea of play. I really love that Ethiopianism is also about embracing play and levity and. Making sure we have that in our lives as adults. That's something that I've found is really important for my mental health play. Can also relate into pleasure, but not necessarily. And I think it's just important to have that, that space for each other and, and that idea of a. Space is also something that's difficult to access sometimes. And I think sometimes people don't even know how to express what it is that they're looking for, but I think sometimes it's that, and especially having that with other adults where you can speak frankly and ask questions and not be judged. Mark: Mm-hmm. . Yeah. That's certainly the vision of those spaces. And Once again, you've just been really remarkable with, oh, I have a link, I have a website, I have a paper, I have a guidebook, I have a book recommendation, I have a video recommendation. You know, it's like whatever it is we're talking about, I can count on you to , have something really, you know, quality, value stuff to bring to the table on it. And it's it's really great. It's just really a great thing We Rana: I'm honestly sorry. Mark: We missed you last week. Rana: Oh, I missed you guys too. Yeah, it's honestly really lovely to have a space to share all of that random stuff that I save and hopefully make a meaningful difference for someone else. Mark: So, I mean, we've been working together in a variety of contexts for a while, but I was gonna ask Do you have any questions for us? About anything Rana: Oh, I wasn't prepared for that question. Mark: I wasn't either. It just showed up. Rana: I don't think so. I mean, honestly I mean I haven't interacted as much with you Yucca, but I know Mark, I've spent many of afternoon of mine with you in the mixers and, and the adult salon and all of our like, various events. So nothing is immediately coming to mind. Yucca: Just wait till we stop hitting the record button and then it'll all come Right. Mark: Right Yucca: you wake up in the middle. Oh, I should've. I should've asked. Yeah. Mark: Well, at any time, honestly, it doesn't have to be now. Any, any time. Rana: Did you have any other questions for me? Mark: I didn't, how about you, Yucca? Yucca: Well, earlier on you talked in the beginning about different content that you had started watching and getting and interested in kind of before you had found the atheopagan community. Are there still are there particular content creators or platforms that you still really enjoy that you'd wanna share? That you can think of, Rana: That's a great question. I do find value in some of them. I am not sure that I would share them just because they think Yucca: sound like you're Rana: has a different. Yucca: Mm-hmm. Rana: Yeah, and everyone has a different comfort level with a level of animism or I hesitate to say woo. Some of it touches on that sometimes. I think it would make more sense for me to share it in like a more context dependent way, but yeah, I've occasionally found things here and there that I do have an easier time connecting. just because I know that Ethiopianism exists. Like I've found my corner right? Because it, it felt a lot more lonely to be like, man, I like some of this, but some of this is just not for me. And. It's, it's just, it's really nice to have a place that I don't have to have that. Yeah. But feeling of needing to ignore certain parts of it because it kind of ruins it to a degree, you know? Yucca: kind of increases that lonely feeling you were talking about, right? Rana: Mm-hmm. Yucca: almost fit in, but you don't quite fit in, so it just kind of makes you feel a little bit more lonely, cuz you found the, you found it, but then it's not really, it's not really quite right. Rana: and I've, I've felt like I've balanced between the poles of many identities over time. And so, like I said, it, it's always notable to me when I'm pretty distinctly feeling like, oh, I belong here. This is my, this is my place. So, Mark: You know, I was, I was thinking about that feeling and that, you know, that that sort of like octagonal peg with a round hole feeling where it's like, you can almost get in there , but it's, it's not quite right. And it occurs to me that one of the things I think that makes atheopagan more able to be more of a complete fit for people than many other Pagan spaces is that we have articulated principles that, that we've got written values that we all cohere around. Because, you know, if you just run up, if you run up the Pagan flag and hold an event, You know, the, the value sets of the people who show up may be radically different, and in some cases, you know, they may just not be people that you want to hang around if they're neo-Nazis or whatever. So I, I kind of feel like, you know, we've, we've got this nice walled garden and we keep inviting more and more and more people in, but at least, at least there's an understanding. You know, what you're expected to value. You know, valuing, respecting people and valuing critical thinking and you know, all those kinds of things. And I think it may make it a little bit easier for people to find that sense of belonging than some other spaces. Rana: Yeah. I think that is where structure is really an asset to this group. I think you're really right that the principles were something that I saw quickly off the bat. When I learned about the group, it became very clear to me what the group valued and outright the rules of the group, and it reminded me of the principles of Burning Man, which are a little bit different. That was a community that I was involved in and was really meaningful to me. And when I think back on it had a similar parallel of trying to find meaning and make meaning with other people without religion being a part of it. And I have felt that the increasing interest in events like that are. Possibly because a lot of younger people are not interested in organized religion, and I think it's very natural for us to find those spaces to have connection and meaning together in a way that's bigger than consumerism Mark: Mm-hmm. Rana: bigger than. Even just a, a friendship, which I'm not devaluing a friendship in any way, but like I said, I think, I think having a larger group community space is just a very different asset. Yucca: Right. There's different ways of relating. There's, it's a different kind of connection. Yeah. Rana: Exactly. Yeah. Mark: Yeah, there's a whole, I've thought about this a couple of times and I've never written about it, cuz I can't quite get, I can't get a grip on it yet. I don't, I'm not entirely sure what I want to say, but the whole phenomenon of transformational festivals, Is a thing that's happening all over the world in Burning Man. And the associated regional burns are an example of that. But I mean, it grew out of like rave culture in the nineties and it's hybridized with neo paganism quite a lot. There's a lot of people in those circles that are also involved with neo paganism. I just, I think it's very interesting. I, I. Especially younger people are looking for meaningful, transformational, joyous, ecstatic experience, and they can't have that if they follow the rules of the over culture, cuz the over culture doesn't want them to have it. Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: So communities like ours that give people permission to seek pleasure as long as it doesn't hurt anybody I, I think, are, are a part in a way, even though, you know, when we had an in-person event in Colorado, it wasn't a rave. But even so, I think communities like ours are kind of ongoing, lasting examples of how those kinds of values can be promulgated, and that's one of the reasons why I'm excited about. Yucca: Hmm. Rana: Yeah, I've been very optimistic seeing so much increased conversation and discussion and normalization of things like chosen family, having a really intentional community of people around you and. Things like queer relationships, polyamorous relationships, and really building your social circle. And I think this is really kind of an extension of that and an opportunity to connect with others to keep building on that. I very much value the friendships and connections that I. Through the Ethiopia Pagan community, and I don't know how I would've made those kinds of connections without it really. Mark: It's good, it's it fit. That's just good. It's, it's, Yeah. I, I, I feel like we did something good. Rana: We're definitely on the right path, I think, and it's a matter of. You know, like we're discussing right now with the council, coming up with strategy, figuring out what to prioritize in terms of I apparently need to think about this. Yucca: Well, where to, where to put the, the energy that we have as, as volunteers that we've got a limited amount of energy, right? And, and where can that do the most? Where can that help the most? Where can that serve the most? And that's what we're looking to do, right. Mark: right. Rana: Exactly. Mark: Well, and one of the things that can really endanger organizations that are kind of in the startup phase is too many opportunities. You, you can have death by opportunity if you kind of go chasing off in all different directions. Reminds me when I was a kid, I have sisters who are twins who are 10 years younger than me, and inevitably when we were out in public, they would run in opposite directions you can, you can kind of get your energy scattered that way if you don't have priorities and a strategy for what you're trying to achieve. So I think it's really timely that we're doing that now. Yucca: Mm Rana: And like you said, yakka, we're, we're making the most of having limited volunteers and, you know, always looking towards onboarding new ones. So creating a process for that and, and moving, moving towards that. Yucca: Yeah, Mark: Well this has been a great conversation, Rana. Thank you so much for coming on the, on the podcast and, and for everything that you're doing for us. It's it's really a pleasure to, to serve with you and to Yucca: and inspirational. Mark: with you in the community. It is, it's really, Yeah, that, that big vision is really inspirational, so thank you. Rana: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me on the podcast. I really enjoyed listening to this throughout the pandemic, and I always felt like I was listening to friends sit and chat over tea. Like it's really. Lovely, and thank you again , for the invitation to be on the council and to officially become a part of leadership. It's been really wonderful to be able to contribute, and I'm really looking forward to seeing us grow and move forward. Mark: Absolutely. Oh, I, I have to put in, I have to put in one plug. We are, we are doing a, a calendar project in the atheopagan communities on both Discord and Facebook. It's being coordinated by a community member named Ren, and we are accepting. Submissions for the calendar. We're going to print calendars as a fundraiser next fall. So, if you are interested in contributing to the atheopagan calendar email us at the Wonder Podcast Queues the Wonder Podcast qs all one word@gmail.com and we'll put you in touch with the the people that need to, you need to be connected. Yucca: Yep. Okay. Thank you. Mark: Okay. Thanks so much. Yucca: Bye everybody.

god uk space society colorado positive iran nazis discord council saas bio felt lovely myspace pagan burning man mm philosophical reminds tremendous wicca submissions cuz irc philosoph livejournal yucca markit phyla mark you mark yeah mark well mark so mark okay mark absolutely

Samhain/Hallows 2022

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 24, 2022 44:12

Remember, we welcome comments, questions and suggested topics at thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com S3E37 TRANSCRIPT:----more---- Mark: Welcome back to the Wonder Science-based Paganism. I'm your host, Mark, Yucca: And I'm the other one Yucca. Mark: and welcome to the Halloween season. This is the season when we celebrate Hallows, or whatever you choose to call it. It's a wonderful witchy holiday that we, pagans really enjoy. It's both fun and and kind of wacky and creative and as well as deep and meaningful and solemn. And it's just a really good time all the way around. So, this is our episode to talk about how we celebrate that holiday and what it means to us. Yucca: Right. So welcome. So there's a lot to this. Mark: There is. Yucca: Yeah. So I guess we should start with what and when is this holiday? Mark: Ah, right. Okay. Well, you first, what do you think it is and when? Yucca: Well, I, for me, it's, it's a little fuzzy on both levels. So there are two holidays that overlap with each other. For me. There is Halloween and then there's Hollows or second Autumn or sowing. I'm not really sure. What name? It's a little bit fluid there. But there's the, the kind of secular Halloween, which is just a celebration of the autumn spooky candy, you know, family fun stuff. And then there's also the, the season that we're in, which is this time. Remembering the ancestors honoring of death of the sunset of the year. Really this going into truly going into the cold, dark time of the year. And I know that when we were at Solstice, yes, we kind of flipped over or the Equinox is, is getting closer, but now it really is the cold of. In my climate, we almost always get our first snow as the kids are trick or treating That's what it happens, right? Is the kids are out trick or treating and it snows on them. So it, it's, it's a, Halloween is the 31st, but the other holiday is kind of around that time when it feels. When it feels right for me, right When we, we kind of do the holidays at the closest day, that works for us. We're not too worried about getting the exact moment because it's not like the solstice where the solstice I set an alarm for, right? The moment of the solstice and you know, sometimes that's gonna be two 15 in the morning. I'll just wake up, see some solstice and go back, sleep or, you know, that kind of thing. But with this it's a little bit more wiggle room. So what about for you? Mark: Well, I, I think we have some similarities, but some differences. I have a little bit more formal definition of when the holiday is. I consider this holiday to be a week long. Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: And it extends from the 31st through the seventh of Octo of November, which is when the actual midpoint is between the Equinox and the solstice. Yucca: It's my littlest birthday actually. Yes, he's our little saw and Mark: so, so official sown is, is is when your little one's birthday is. That's great. So, and I agree with you. On Halloween, we celebrate the secular holiday, which is the candy and the costumes and the, but it's still got all those thematic pieces wrapped up in it, right? It's all the death imagery all of the sort of scary monsters, most of whom have to do with coming back to life after being dead, which is something that we have a, a real aversion to apparently. Yucca: Discomfort. Yeah. Mark: Yeah, there, that's, that's just not supposed to happen. Yucca: Yeah. There and there's that transformation both in like coming back from the dead, but the Halloween, the costumes and stuff have this, You get to be somebody else as well Mark: Right, Yucca: Yeah. Mark: Yeah. You get to be somebody else. And often the way that that expresses itself is as. Kind of the darker side of your personality or the sexier side of your personality. Things that you don't feel necessarily comfortable to express all the time, but there's this day when you're given permission to be able to do that kind of stuff. And that's really important. I mean, I feel like we need more days like that. And people can dress up weird and not be judged for it. So. The, that's the secular part with the, with the candy and the decorations and all that kind of stuff. But then the rest of the week is the more solemn, kind of contemplative part where there's time to think about those that have died and are gone. And there's time to reflect on my own mortality and update my death packet, which we talked about a couple of weeks ago. Do all that. Mortality oriented work that that I just feel is necessary and this is the right time of year to do it. And then on the first weekend of November, which is typically, I mean, it's typically like the sixth, seventh, fifth, somewhere in there is when my circle holds its sound ritual. we've, this will be our 33rd so, and Ritual in a row one of which was online because of Covid. But other than that, we've done them in person. And and I'll talk about that when we talk about rituals, but that's the more solemn observance really kind of encounter with death. Yucca: Yeah. And this doesn't seem to be for either of our practices, but for many pagans, this is also the new year. Mark: Right, Yucca: So there's different points at which you can start the year, and for some this is, is that that point? Mark: Right. And, and I think that from. I mean, certainly from the standpoint of my orientation to the Wheel of the Year, there's a real logic to starting there because, you know, the, the process of decomposition and then reassembly of new life is metaphorically represented by the the Hallows holiday, right? So this time between now and Yule is the time when the decomposition and recomposition is happening, and then Yule is. Yucca: Right. Mark: So there's a logic there, but for me it's just too hard to try to address new New Years in November. Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: so much easier just to say that my new year is at the winter solstice, which is only about 10 days before the the secular. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: Calendar New year. It just is a lot easier to deal with. If I have a New Year's Eve party on November 6th, everybody's gonna look at me funny. But if I have a New Year's Eve party somewhere, you know, in the neighborhood of the solstice, then that makes a little more sense. Yucca: Yeah. Well, and, and I can also certainly see the logic that people have for us, it, it doesn't feel like that as much because this is the time of the year where we've been getting ready for this time of the year. We have the. It doesn't feel like we're starting new yet. It's like this is what we've been preparing for, right? This is, we've got all the harvests, this is stored up, and as we keep going through the months, well then, you know, we get to, to using up our stores of wood and our stores of food and, and that's quite on the literal side, but we could use that metaphorically as well. And so for me, starting anew when things are kind of bare. You know, either the calendar year or even more towards spring really starts to feel like a new year to me. Mark: Mm. Yucca: So, Mark: Yeah, I, I can see that. And of course the thing is time is time is linear, right? Time just goes on. So, you know, we, and the earth, because of our seasonal cycles, it moves in cycles. So there's any point that you put down on the, the 365 and a quarter days that we have in a given revolution around the sun and say that's the beginning has, is inherently arbitrary. Yucca: sure. Mark: I mean, it can't be any more arbitrary than January 1st, which makes, Absolutely has no astronomical relation or anything. I'm sure there's something about the conversion from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar that moved New Year's Eve from Yucca: Well, that's why Christmas and solstice aren't on the same point. Right? And then, and then the way that the months shifted, right? Because the astronomical months, like in terms of lining up the zodiac with our months, they don't quite fit. And then we have to remember. You know, Earth's orbit isn't actually circular in terms of how much we spend in each of the constellations and so I don't know why, but Mark: Yeah. I mean, it's my point being that it's all kind of arbitrary and so, you know, whatever works for you. That's great. For me, doing New Years now just doesn't make as much sense. Especially because this holiday is so much about endings, you know, And I, I think it's a little, it's a little abrupt and peremptory to say, Okay, we're done with endings. Happy New year. I think this, this season is important enough and the processes that it commemorates are important enough that having a whole, what is it? Seven weeks, between seven, eight weeks between the holiday and you'll Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: to really kind of let this, the meanings of this season settle in, you know, to reflect on them, to write about them, to think about them. You know that that miraculous process that's happening in the soil right now, which is all of the decomposers are going nuts with all the leaves, the leaves they're being fed, and the water they're getting that they weren't getting before and all that kind of thing I think speaks to a level of being appropriate to recognize decomposition as really what? What's the main gain happening at this time of year in the temperate zone of the Northern Hemisphere? Yucca: Right. And I'm glad that you that you bring that up, right? Because we are speaking from, even though we are from different climates, we're still from this closer to each other. So we're both in temperate, northern hemisphere. Whereas, you know, life is gonna be very different and tropics or southern hemisphere, or if you get farther towards the poles, like it, it really changes over earth. So every place that you are is going to be d. So, Yeah. Mark: Yep. That's, that is so, so that, that's when, and and what we call it I mean, I've heard some other names for this season, but, and I prefer halls because it's not, it's just an English word. It's not Halloween because Halloween is kind of the secular holiday with trick or treating and all that kind of stuff. And Hallows sounds much more sort of solemn and goy, I guess. Yucca: Yeah, but it still is similar enough that there's the, those same sort of themes going on. Mark: Right. And I don't use the, the Celtic word because I'm not of that derivation, and I'm trying not to, in my particular practice, I'm trying not to draw on any particular cultural frame. So I'm not I'm not appropriating I'm just. Just doing something that started in around the, around the turn of the 21st century with some old folkloric practices kind of drawn in and one item of appropriation, which is the Wheel of the Year, which was invented in the 1950s. So I don't feel too badly about it. Yucca: well invented, but but heavily drawing on multiple. Different cultures, traditions, right? They, they took you know, some of the Celtic festivals and Germanic and you know, and they, and the names themselves. You look at their, their mixes from lots of different languages. So, and then that was just sort of stuck together. Yeah. Mark: Yeah. And, and that's all, you know. Fair enough. I mean, I, I think, I think the success of the Wheel of the Year as a kind of near universal, I mean, I can't speak to North Heat folks or etic folks or whatever, but in my experience of the Pagan community of North America, the Wheel of the year is a near universal cycle of holidays that are celebrated Yucca: Well, I think because it's so grounded in. What's happening with the Earth? Mark: in reality. Yeah. Yucca: it's not just arbitrary, right? We don't just pick a day, you know, this day it's, well, why we've got the, the solstice, we've got the equinoxes, we've got the transition between them which is, John has talked about often about it being, you know, the, the temperature shifts rather than what's going on with. Tilt Mark: Right, Right. Yeah. And so that's why I think it's so successful because it is grounded in reality. And I wouldn't have adopted it for AOP Paganism if it wasn't grounded in reality because my whole thing was, let's do a paganism that's grounded in reality, Yucca: Hm. Yeah. Now there's wiggle rooms though, right? When you talk about the particular dates, right? When we are saying May 1st or October 31st, you know, those aren't necessarily the actual midpoints and which midpoint are we using, right? Are we using the, the midpoint in the orbit or are we using the midpoint in the days? Like how are we doing that? So there's, you know, there's wiggle room. Mark: Right, For sure. So having established that the whole thing is kind of fuzzy. Let's talk a little bit about kind of themes and practices and all that good kind of stuff. Yucca: Yeah. So looking at Halls in particular, are we gonna talk about Halloween first? Mark: Well, I suspect that our listeners probably have a pretty good grasp on what Halloween is about. Yucca: I think so, yeah. Mark: And I'm, and I, I mean, I love Halloween. I just, I think it's wonderful. I love all the decorations and the, the, the imagery and all that good kind of stuff. So, and I love dressing up in costumes and I love, you know, playing characters and all that kind of stuff. So it's, it's definitely been a holiday that resonates a lot for. But I think it makes more sense to talk about the, the more solemn and kind of reverential side of this holiday season. You know, we, we just had an episode about ancestors and recognizing ancestors and and about death, about confronting mortality and You know, remembering those that are gone. In our, and we've, we've talked about this before in our naturalistic approach to cosmology, we don't see compelling evidence to believe in an afterlife, Yucca: Yeah. Mark: so we don't believe in one. And what that means is that that death is it's the. Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: a very serious thing to contemplate. You know, we have these lives that are so precious to us, and knowing that they're going to end sets the stage for everything else, it creates the context for all the decisions we make. Yucca: Hmm. Yeah. So as we've been talking about for the last few weeks, these. Themes that we're thinking about both our own death, the deaths of others, the those beloved dead that, that are gone already, right? Mark: Right. Yeah. And so, You know, this, this is the time. Like, and not, not necessarily just in the last cycle. I mean, certainly if you've had losses within the last cycle that the, the herd of that is most vivid because it's most recent. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: And so, you know, lighting a candle or lighting candles, you know, for those that you've lost is, it can be a very meaningful thing, you know, reviewing the pictures. Of of the, the people that you've lost and remembering the times that you had with them together. And in this case, I'll say people in a, in a very general and vague sense, people, you know, including cats and dogs and, you Yucca: Yeah. People, not just humans, but people. Yeah. Mark: I mean, I have a practice that includes some recognition of that on an, on an ongoing basis because of my evening ritual where I light a candle on my underworld focus and say the honored dead every night. Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: And that is as much to remind myself that I'm going to die as it is about anyone else who. It's, it's really just about keeping me grounded in the fact of my mortality and that I need to, if there's stuff I want to do, I need to get going on it because time is short. Yucca: Right, And as we said so many times, we don't know how much time we have. Mark: Mm-hmm. Yucca: We know that it's limited, but we don't know if it's tomorrow or if it's in 20 years, 50 years, whatever it is, Mark: Yeah. I have an acquaintance who three months ago, Suddenly got a diagnosis of stage three pancreatic cancer, Yucca: Wow. Mark: and so he's gonna be gone really soon. Yucca: Yeah Mark: barring, barring an extremely unlikely Yucca: it's, It's very rare. Yeah. Mark: Really rare. Yucca: That's how my father-in-law went. Mark: Oh Yucca: It was just, it was a matter of months. Mark: Mm-hmm. . Yeah. So, And, you know, I mean, he had some, he'd had some dietary complaints and some you know, kind of abdominal discomfort, but nothing particularly serious and went to the doctor and next thing he knows he's dying. So these are things that can happen to us. They, they happen to people and we are people. You know, one of the things that is really important to try to get your head around in contemplating your mortality is that you're not special indifferent when it comes to mortality. I know you've been the protagonist of your, your movie since the time you were born, but the truth is that life will kill off the main character. That's just you. Yucca: all, all stories end. Mark: Yes, con consider life to be, you know, the, the process of life to be the George r r Martin of of your personal movie . Just, just cuz you're an important character doesn't mean you get out alive. Yucca: So that's one of the really big themes here, right? And that and remembering our own and the one and the people close to us that sometimes feel almost like us. At times, right? Mark: Yes. That it's unimaginable that they could ever be gone. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: And my encouragement at this time of year is well imagine it, you know, Yucca: that won't make it happen sooner. Mark: won't make it happen sooner, and it won't, and it probably won't make it any less painful when it does happen. But it will make you more able to grapple with it when it does happen. I mean, I've known people who have been impacted by the death of a parent, and they've just been so crushed, just so devastated that like inconsolable When the truth is, if you live to be a decent age, this is something kind of to be expected. You know, we, we, we all run outta time and they do too. So, you can help yourself by by these contemplations. I know the, the Tibetan Buddhists have elaborate meditations. your own death about the death of those around you, about I mean the impermanence of your society. They, they're nothing if not thorough. Yucca: I think that, that all of this just for me highlights just how precious life is, the moments that we have and, and helps to, to act as. It's almost like a filter to help us filter out what matters and what doesn't. What am I wasting my time on? And so, and also having some comfort in the memories, right? Thinking about the, whoever it was and the, in the wonderful things of that, right? So there's, there's the solemness to it, but there's. There's also a little, this, this quiet joy underneath it. Mark: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I think about the Irish tradition of the wake and there's a lot of laughter at awake, Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: you know, because people are telling stories of the the one who's dead. And a lot of those are funny stories, happy stories, Yucca: What happened at the pub, right? Mark: exactly. So you remember that time when and and that's. That's all very very much to be embraced and encouraged because grief, I, I heard a great synopsis of grief once, which is grief is love with nowhere to go, Yucca: Hmm. Mark: and I think. When we revisit those stories about the people when they were alive, we're able to feel some of the love that we have for them, you know, there for, for an instant there because we're living in a memory rather than in the current moment. There is a place for the love to go and I think that that is very helpful when we think about funerary rights. Which we talked about when we did a right, A Rite of Passage Yucca: Oh, it's been a couple years at this point. Mark: been a long time ago. We might wanna revisit Yucca: I think so. Yeah. Mark: of passage again. Yucca: I think that probably is still in 2020, Mark: Oh Yucca: right? This has been quite a while. Mark: that is quite a while cuz we're numbing up on 2023. Yucca: Yep. Wow. Mark: yeah. So, Yeah, when you think about that and we think about funeral rights, those are for the living. Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: Hopefully they're conducted in accordance with the wishes of the one who has died. But in some cases, you kind of have to overrule the dead person. In my opinion, particularly when the dead person says, I don't want any ceremony, I don't want any memorial, I don't want, you know, any, anything. You know, the reality is the people who survive you, they need that. And whether or not you wanted something or not, it's probably a good idea that somebody organized something like that. Yucca: Yeah, Mark: So, Yucca: funny thing is at that point, it's not actually about you anymore. Mark: that's, You're the subject or you're the object, but you're not the subject. Right? You're, you're no longer capable of being a subject. So it's it's important, you know, that we, that we revisit those memories. And one of the things that we can do at this time of year is to revisit memories of those that we've lost and what we've lost in the way of relationships. Career steps things that we loved in our life that are no longer there, or that we feel like it's time to put down and move away from. Th this is the time to do it. And so there are lots and lots of pagans all over the place. Casting casting what they are finished with into fires, either metaphorically or. Yucca: Or quite literally Mark: Written on paper or Yucca: in a cauldron. Mark: in, in, in a flaming Cauldron. Yes. And, and there will be during that week between Halloween and the first weekend in November, all over North America. Certainly. Yucca: mm-hmm. Mark: It's good to have a time of year that is for that. Because so much of the rest of the year is really focused on growth and goals and Yucca: Doing, doing. Mark: and then harvesting, which is a bunch more doing, and, and all of that is so important because right, we need, we need to do things in our lives. But there also comes a time when, you know, you recognize that the crop didn't. Or it basically failed and you cut down what is there and you composted. Yucca: Yeah. And that it's okay to rest it's time. To rest, and that's the other half for us, is in my family's tradition, is that we look at this as the, the beginning of night, the end of the year, the sunset. Right. It's the end of the year, but it's not the beginning of the new year Mark: Hmm. Yucca: Right. It's okay. The, the annual season is, is gone now it's time. The, the plants are dying back many. Our annuals and they die back, and the perennial ones are going dormant, and it's just time to go, Okay, the day is done, the year is done. I accept what was and what Mark: Mm, mm-hmm. Yucca: here I am now. Mark: Right? Right. And that, that. Corresponds exactly to my way of viewing the year as mapped along the arc of a human life. Right. You know, middle age is at the autumnal equinox, and then, or I'm sorry, Elderhood is at the autumnal equinox and then deaf at Halls. And then there's this period leading up to Yule, which is the part that we never see of the life cycle, cuz we're not alive during it. Or if we're alive, we're in a, you know, a zygote form. And not conscious enough to be aware of anything going on. But but there's all kinds of amazing stuff happening there. I mean, we're going to, we're, we're gonna talk about decomposition here, coming up I guess in our next episode. Yucca: Yep. Next week. Yep. Mark: And the disassembly of what used to be alive and the reassembly of it by life into more of itself is it's this astounding trick that life does here on earth. It's, it's, I mean, you know, we think of, you know, the, the incredible scientific leap of Dr. Frankenstein, right? Who's able to, Take what's dead and turn it into something living again. Well, that's what life does all the time, Yucca: Yeah, that's what it is. Mark: all the time. That's, that's, that is life. That's what the process is. So it's, it's a great time to recognize that, you know, death comes and, you know, then it's, it's time. It's the end. Time, the, the day is over and it's time to either go dormant and wait for another cycle, or it's time to be disassembled and created into something else. And so going dormant and taking that rest time is really important. I think about all the Scandinavian countries that have these traditions of, you know, huddling up and putting on a fire and reading books. I, I know Christmas Day is a day of reading books in Iceland. Yucca: Hmm Mark: it's traditional to give one another socks. So you have nice, warm feet and there you are, and you sort of huddle up and read books and it's, and that just sounds like a great time. Yucca: That's, that's what we do with the whole Yule season. I love it so much. Every day is about warm, fuzzy socks and hot, you know, nice hot bone broth and the fire crackling and Mark: Mm-hmm. Yucca: cuddling kitties. So yeah, looking forward to that. There's always that, that bit of looking forward to the next season to. Mark: Yes. Yes. Yucca: enjoying this one, but going, Oh, put just around the corner. We have that, That wonderful. The snuggle season. Mark: Right. Right. Yeah. And so that's another thing that sort of sweetens the bitter pill of, of the Death Sabbath Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: is knowing that, well, yes. Okay. We're facing some very, very hard realities right now. Which we need to because we are mortal beings and you know, if we're gonna have a reality based practice, I go back to that again, then we're gonna acknowledge that we're temporary and that this is gonna happen to us. But just on the other side of that season is this wonderful celebration of family and connection and friends and loved ones. You know, eating sweets and eating too much and drinking too much, and just having a, a lovely, a lovely time kind of stowing in the last calories that we possibly can before the super cold arrives, Yucca: Right. Hmm. And if your, if your climate gets it, the snow, Mark: right? Yucca: so yeah. Mark: We get a little bit of snow on top of this. The, the peaks around. Every four or five years. But that's it. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: Who knows what's gonna happen with global warming now? Yucca: Yeah. We get, Yeah. Go on. Mark: so why don't we talk about rituals cuz we haven't actually talked about what we do specifically at this time of year. And I, I was gonna tell the story about my circle sow and, but I was wondering what do you do for your, for your hallows ritual or sown ritual? Yucca: Yeah, well, I have a, a personal one that I do, and we haven't really developed a full family one yet. And that, that I think is developing, you know, as, as the kids get older, they get to a point where they can. Different parts of life and reality kind of start to, to set in. And so we'll, we'll see what happens this year. But it's also an extremely busy time of year for us. Lots of birthdays and, and following itself and, and all of that. But so in, maybe in next year or the year after, I might have something different to say about what we do with the kids. But for me, I choose an evening around this time, and this is really the, the, the big one for me where I go out and I sit outside in the garden. And at this point it's crispy. Right. The guard. There's, there's not, maybe there's a few of the leafy greens kind of trying to peek out. But I leave, I leave it all. I haven't cleared it out. And I leave a lot of the, the plants till the spring anyways because of, that's where a lot of the insects will over winter. Right. And I wanna, you know, leave that habitat for them. But I'll sit out and I do not like to be cold . I'm one of those people, you know, if you're seeing the, the recording here I am sitting in my sleeping bag with a little hot water bottle at the c at it with my sweater on. But I'll go out without my big coat on. And so that I am cold. And I will feel that cold on my skin and sit down and, and have a, you know, a personal kind of meditation or journey and just allow myself to feel that cold as the sun setss and just be out in the that cold. Brown crinkled garden, watching the very first stars come out as the sun sets away and just let myself, let all those things go, all those things that, that it's time to let them go from the year. Those fights that I had, that, you know, I've been holding on to and the things that, that didn't work out, the dreams, that didn't work out, the, you know, all of that stuff and just. Let it go. It's, it's gone. It's going. It's dead. It's going to bed. Whatever's happening to it, I've released it and accept it. Yeah. Mark: That's wonderful. That reminds me a little bit of a thing that we do at UL every year, which is to sit out with a cup of something warm, but. To, to sit out in the cold for about a half an hour or so and just feel the air temperature feel, Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: feel the cold and dark before we bring the light back into the house. So my circle, as I said, has been getting together for since 1991, this will be our 33rd. Sow and ritual, which is just shocking to me. I don't know how that ever happened, but everybody who was in the circle to begin with is still there. And plus a couple more. Three, three more. And this, we've done some variety of this every year for many, many, many years. The circle started on, on Halloween night. In 1991. So it's, it's also, Yucca: work for that? Mark: Yeah, because I mean count, count 1, 2, 3, Right? It's like this will be the first, Yucca: I was born in 89 and I'm 33 now, but I guess it's because this is the final anyways Mark: is the, this is the next Yucca: year. Yeah. So this is the next, Okay. Mark: Right. This is, this starts the next cycle. Yucca: Okay. Mark: Yeah. So it's 33. The, and what we do is we build a focus, a big altar next to a, a fire circle where there's a fire laid but not lit. And the, the focus has jackal lanterns on it that are. Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: So it's glowing and there's all these symbols and bones and skulls and things all over that. And previously we, it was just a raked circle that we made. This is, this is at the home of friends of ours who have forested land, Redwood land. And this is an open clearing where we do this behind their house. And, and previously we just, you know, raked the circle and set it up that way. In recent years, it's a circle of chairs, Yucca: Sure Mark: Because we've gotten to the point where many of us really need a chair and are not gonna stand up for Yucca: Well, we had an episode about that recently, right? About thinking about who is part of your ritual and what are the different needs of the people in that Mark: Exactly. Yeah. And it I mean, I have to say it did feel like somewhat of a concession at some level. To me it was like, Oh boy, we're getting old, but we're getting old . So there's not a lot to be said about it. Yucca: Didn't you say you were the youngest or Mark: I am, I'm the, I'm the youngest. I'm the youngest in the group. And the oldest is 86, 85, Yucca: Okay. Mark: something like that. So, yeah, I mean, and most of the folks are in their sixties or seventies, but you know, we, when we first got together, I was in my twenties, so it's just been a long time. So we get together and then we we do a ritual that's about kind of letting go. Letting go of the things that we no longer need. Letting go of life, letting go of letting go of our physical, you know, letting, letting go of, of, be, of existing in essence. And then, Yes. And we sing a couple of songs and we love to sing together and we harmonize together really beautifully. So it's really an enjoyable thing that we love to do. And then we, when we're ready, march down to down through the forest and it's very dark down to a dark place that we've designated as the land of the. And there we call out to those that we've lost and want to communicate with, and we talk to them. We, we tell them that we're sorry to lose them, and we tell them that we miss them and we tell them that we love them and all those kinds of things. In most cases, when my father died, it was a little different. We do that for quite some time until the, the cold starts kind of seeping into our bones and it starts to feel a little too comfortable being there in the land of the dead. And that's the cue that we need to get up and get out of there. Because otherwise we might stay and that wouldn't be good. So, we make our way back to the, to the fire circle and we light the fire. I use a sprigg of U Tree that I've gathered from a cemetery nearby on Halloween the previous year. So because you know, if I use this year's it would be too green and it wouldn't actually light. So the last year's U Spri is sitting on my focus right now drying and that's what I'll use to light the. And then we share chocolate and wine and pomegranate and sing some more and sing about how happy we are to be alive. And we come back into the joyfulness of this existence, temporary as it is, and how glad we are to be with one another. And then, you know, after, after a while that all kind of peters out and we go inside and have a great big, huge. And enjoy each other's company. And we do that as a, as a stay over event. So we all Yucca: drive home or Mark: right. Exactly. We can, we can hang out and get in the hot tub or whatever and just have a really nice time with one another for that whole, that whole weekend. Yucca: Oh, that's amazing. Mark: It's so lovely and so transformative and you wouldn't think that after doing it so many times that it would be. But every year there are different losses, there are different things to speak to, different circumstances, and we change right from year to year as people we change. Yucca: Yeah. Well, thinking three decades of change. Mark: yes. Yes. So it's, it's a really profound thing and it's not a complicated ritual. And you can, you can, you could do this ritual without having a dark place in the forest to walk to. You could do that as a visualization. Do it as a guided meditation instead. So just, you know, if you, if the space you have is a living room, you could do it right there. You could do it, you know, start in total darkness. You know, do your early, you know, except for maybe, you know, a jackal lantern lit with an l e d candle or whatever. If you don't wanna set off your smoke alarm and you could then do the voyage to the land of the dead. And you could, you could embellish that much more than we can in real life. You could row across the river, sticks to the island of apples and, you know, meet your ancestors and stuff. There's all kinds of cool things you can do in a mental journey. Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: So, there's nothing proprietary about what we're doing. If this ritual sounds like it's appealing to you, go ahead and. Yucca: Yeah. And really anything that we share on the podcast, that's, that's, if it's works for you and it sounds like it's something that you wanna try out, please do. Mark: Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, the reason we produce this podcast is for you, the listeners, to provide ideas, resources, thinking opinion. Take it or leave it, you know, whatever, whatever value you can get out of what we're providing, you know, we're, we're happy to, to provide it. So that's, that's hellos, that's, that's the, the Halloween sew hellos sab it season. Yucca: Yep. Mark: And we hope that you have a, Happy, cheery, spooky, goofy, sexy, solemn, reflective Yucca: chilly. Mark: silly, meaningful passage of the season because it is and can be all of those things at one time or another. Yucca: Yeah. Well, thank you everybody. Mark: Thank you. We'll see you next week.

DEATH

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 10, 2022 41:23

Remember, we welcome comments, questions and suggested topics at thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com Death and dying workbook: https://atheopaganism.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/death-and-dying-workbook-blank1.docx Freewill.com S3E35 TRANSCRIPT:----more---- Mark: Welcome back to the Wonder Science based Paganism. I'm one of your hosts, Mark, Yucca: And I'm the other one. Yucca Mark: and today we are going to talk about death. Yucca: death. Yep. It's, well, it's October. Although it's a topic which is relevant every day, every moment. Right. Mark: That's right. But particularly we're going to talk about the naturalistic, pagan perspective on death and approaches to death. And talk about some things that we can do to prepare for our own mortality and just about the perspective that it gives us generally. Because death is. Arguably the fact of our lives more than anything else. It's, it's the thing that's hanging out there, setting the context for everything else that we do or, or that we contemplate doing. Yucca: Right? And it happens to us. Mark: Mm-hmm. Yucca: Right. There's no, Doesn't matter what religion you are, what gender, where you live, what kind of living thing. If you are living, then eventually you stop. Right? Mark: right. And that's why it's been called The Great Equalizer because it doesn't matter how wealthy you are, eventually you are going to kick it. And there's, you know, you can do all kinds of medical things to try to extend yourself probably with a great deal of suffering associated in most cases. But eventually it's going to end. And so at this time of year this is the time of year when pagans often contemplate their mortality and their their relationship with the fact of their death. And so we are dedicating this show this episode to to that, to talking about exactly that. We'll have other episodes later on in the month about sort of other facets. Yucca: Like ancestors and decomposition and you know, that kind of stuff. Mark: right. All those kinds of great, halloweeny wonderful topics. But this, this one is just about the blunt fact that we're gonna die and so are you. And we all have to come to terms with that in whatever manner we can. Yucca: Right now, I wanna emphasize though, that this isn't all a doom and gloom, you know, sad, negative kind of thing. Certainly many of us are quite uncomfortable with the idea that one day we will not exist, right? But as we're gonna talk about, there's actually. Some real upsides to that. Right. And there's some really, I think that there's a tremendous amount of, of beauty in that. But a good place to start actually is how naturalistic paganism differs from some of the other branches of Paganism when it comes to our views on death, or at least on what's after. Mark: Right, right. As naturalists, we use the scientific method and critical thinking to assess what is most likely to be true. And given, given that the evidence is that there is no afterlife, that when we stop, we stop our brains stop maintaining the, the neural net of information that constitutes our personality and memory and all those things. And that heat radiates away from our body that that energy radiates away from our body as heat Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: and the body cools and we're gone. Yucca: And the, the pieces that were us, they break apart and become part of other things. Right. Mark: Right? And that's the decomposition story, which is. You know, stay tuned for that cuz it's actually so exciting. Yucca: a Mark: It's so exciting. Yucca: yeah, and it's, and that's the, that's the death that's happening always. Right. There's, there's the death at the end, right? Where like you just stop completely. But the, but the, the little, the little hundred deaths every day are more than hundreds. That just is part of being life is is this a really cool one to talk about? But yeah, we don't, we don't see the body as not us. Mark: Right. This is an important distinction. I'm, I'm glad you brought that up, because the idea of dualism what's sometimes called Cartesian dualism after Renee Decar, who first postulated it in a. In a philosophical kind of way, the idea that there is this spirit or ghost or soul within us that is separate from the body and that persists after the body dies. There really isn't any evidence to support that, that I'm aware of. And. Yucca: But the idea is, is embedded very, very deeply into our culture, into our language and it's, it's, it's all around us. Mark: It is. It is. It's, it's, When we talked about dualism in an earlier episode, we discovered that we don't even really have good language for talking about the understanding of the self as a unified hole. It is the body, You know, we say my body as if it was something different than, My mind. It's, it's all the same thing, but we, the, the way that our language is set up makes it very difficult even to articulate that concept. Yucca: Right Mark: So the body stops working for whatever reason. Maybe a disease, maybe an injury maybe just the accumulation of a a thousand tiny Yes. Or, or a thousand, just tiny errors in cellular copy copying over time. So you know, you're 105 years old and things just finally give up. They just stop and then we cease existing in our, in our opinion, in our estimation, we cease to exist. And that can be a very terrifying prospect for some people. But I don't find it that scary myself because I realized that for 13.7 billion years, I didn't exist either. And it didn't bother me in the least. I wasn't there to be bothered. It was okay. And we were talking about this before we recorded. We've also had some experiences where we've been put under general anesthesia. And that part disappears too. I mean, that's just time chopped out of your life where your body was still there, but your consciousness was suppressed because your body was, you know, under the influence of these chemicals that were introduced to it. And there wasn't any suffering during any of that either. I just was absent. Yucca: Not that I recall. Mark: Yeah. Yeah. Yucca: And, and that's what, not what was described to me by those who were conscious at the time. Right. But yeah, that, at least for me, those are times that are just like, it's just gone. Mark: Yeah. Yucca: Right. Look at the clock. And it's different than when it was when I last remembered looking at it. And that's not quite the same as as sleeping, because with the sleeping, there's a, sometimes there's a missing chunk there, but it's a very different, there still is some sort of awareness there, a very different awareness. But it, it's, it has felt like a very different experience. Mark: Yeah, I've often thought of, of during sleep the, the sort of dreaming process as being kind of like the brain running a screensaver. You know, you get all these images. You, you know, you have these sort of very, you know, strange and magical kinds of na narratives and stories and snips of scenes and things like that. And there's definitely something going on while you're sleeping most of the time. It's not the same as just winking out the way you do under general anesthetic. Yucca: Well, this is maybe a topic we should come back to at another point, because I don't think we've ever talked about lucid dreaming. Mark: Oh, we haven't. You're right. We Yucca: that's something that, that I do. And I don't know if that's something you do, but that would be a really, really interesting topic. So let's write that down. Mark: good. Yucca: maybe that's a good mid-winter topic that kind of, I associate, you know, mid-winter with the dreaming and the dark and, and all of that. So, Mark: a good one. Yucca: yeah. But with death it's, at least it seems like it's, that's it, right? Mark: Yeah. Yeah. Yucca: So what's that mean for us now? Right. We're not dead yet. We will. Mark: right, Yucca: this moment we're not. Mark: right. I would like to say one more thing Yucca: Oh, yeah. Mark: the, the way that other. Other religious traditions and particularly other pagan traditions, do approach the fact of death. Many of those are dualistic. In the Buddhist idea, for example, the idea is that we are on this wheel of karma that we're trying to get off of. And so when we achieve enlightenment, then we leave the wheel of karma and there's no more suffering and so forth. Which. So my mind has always been a very dark way of framing reality. It's the, you know, that the world is endless suffering. Well, the world is endless joy too. How, how come, How come we're paying all the attention to the suffering So that's, that's just been Yucca: does it, does it have the same connotation, the the word suffering when said in a Buddhist sense as it does. In a kind of conventional sense. Mark: That's a good question. I believe it does, but I can only speak from my experience having been married to a Zen Buddhist for 10 years. Yucca: Hmm. Mark: I, I can't, I, I have not done a ton of reading in the Buddhist arena and I don't know that much about. But I do know that it is once again, built on that dualistic idea that the body dies. But there is something else that persists that goes forward. And it may not be exactly you as a personality, but it's some intrinsic Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: quality of you that's in the process of being polished up in order to, you know, attain this, this enlightenment. Of course the, the mainstream monotheisms, they've all got. Sort of punishment or reward afterlife idea. And that doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me either for lots of reasons that we don't need to go into. But it's a pretty cruel framework in my opinion. Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: You know, it's, it's extortionary and it, it threatens people and it terrifies little children. It's a, you know, telling children about people going to hell is a horrible. Yucca: Right. Mark: But in the pagan sphere, what we see very often is a more generalized idea of reincarnation. It's very codified in Buddhism where like, okay, you know, if you've done these particular things, maybe you'll come back as a cockroach. Yucca: There's particular, yeah, there's particular levels and yeah. Mark: right. In, in the Pagan sphere, it does not appear to be as well defined in that sense, but there is a broad a broad credulity in the idea that you do come back in some manner. I've been told by people that people that are in their family where once related to them in other ways, in a past life, those sorts of things I don't know where they get that information, but they believe it. So, you know, those are, those are other approaches to the fact of mortality that I feel really sort of skip the important bits of what mortality can give us. Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: Knowing that we're going to die is actually a tremendous gift Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: approach it that. It, it contextualizes our lives. You know, it's this thing that's hanging out there. We know we've got a limited amount of time, and that means that our time is very precious. We need to be careful with it. We need to make judicious decisions about what we're going to do with our time and what source of goals we're going to pursue. Yucca: Yeah. And really think about what matters. Really What, Because if I've, I have a limited number of days. You have a limited, We each have a limited number of days, Mark: Yes. Yucca: and on top of that, We don't know the number of days either. Mark: Right, Yucca: Right? We hope that there will be many, but this could be the last one, Mark: right, Yucca: or it could be in thousands, right? Mark: right. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: Yeah. And knowing that, knowing that they're wheeled on a day when you're not in it really does give it, It gives you pause, it gives you it, it gives you an opportunity anyway, to think very carefully about what matters to you. About what your values are, about what you would like to be left behind in the wake of your life, in the way of legacy. And of course, that's one of the Ethiopia Pagan principles, right? Legacy. The idea that we are responsible to subsequent generations, not only of humans, but of the fabric of life on earth in general. And so. I mean, I very deliberately have made my career around environmentally and publicly beneficial work. That's, that is the, the work that I've chosen. And there have been costs associated with that. A lot of them financial because working in the nonprofit sector, especially for smaller organizations, just doesn't pay as well as a lot of other things. I have never been able to get my mind around doing some of the things that some people do for money, knowing that all that, that's all that's going on. There's just money making happening there. And I, I can't apply my time to something that seems so meaningless to me. I, I. I need to do something that's more substantial and fulfilling than that with my time. And I'm not criticizing anybody else's decisions. You know, they're, they're, well, you know, they're sovereign beings. They get to make their own decisions about what they consider important to do in their life. But for my life the, the environmental work that I've done, the, the social services work that I've done and the spiritual community work that I've done are all really important pieces to me that I hope have persisting impact after I'm gone. Yucca: Right. Yeah. And of course there's sometimes things that we need to do that we would really rather not be spending our time doing, but that That that are things that have to, that have to happen, whether that's dealing with, you know, illnesses or taxes or just, you know, having enough to, to be able to, to feed your family or things like that. But I think that, that the recognition and the, the memory that the, of our death that's coming can help us to. Put all of that in context, right? And think about how we're going to choose to live as we do those things that we don't want to be doing. Right. So we can on, on the big scale, really work towards the things that, that are meaningful to us. But know that every moment, even the moment when you are, you know, scrubbing the toilet, that that's, that's one of your moments, right? Mark: Right. Yucca: And how are you gonna live that, So, Mark: So finding ways to be joyful and finding ways. To take deep satisfaction in living becomes in the context of a, of a life without an afterlife, it becomes essential, Yucca: mm-hmm. Mark: right? This is all that we've got. So we must then find ways to, to derive happiness out of it, to derive as much joy as we possibly. In a, in a conscientious way. Obviously not at the expense of others. Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: Which honestly, I have a hard time imagining how you can have much joy if it's at the expense of others, but Yucca: Right. Mark: maybe, maybe someone can. Yucca: Well, if you are aware of it, Mark: Right, Yucca: right, as long as there's that awareness piece, Mark: right. That's like the the Ursula Ursula Gwen story. The people who leave Oma. Yucca: I'm not Mark: you know that Yucca: that one. Mark: It's a, it's a utopia. Oma is a city and everyone is happy, and everything is beautiful, and it's all magnificent except once a year, every citizen, they're all paraded through this dungeon under the city where there is a poor, neglected, starving child. Yucca: Mm. Mark: Whose suffering is necessary in order for all the happiness above the surface to happen. And there are a certain number of people every year who leave the city. They go because they won't make that deal. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: So I like to think that I would be one of those. Yucca: Dr. Hub borrowed that concept for one of their episodes. There was a space whale. Mark: Hmm. Yucca: City of London, I think was based on that, was suffering. So that, so the, the plot there sounds pretty much the, the same, Mark: hmm. Yucca: one of the new ones, not one of the old ones, Mark: Okay. Yeah. Okay. That was your tangent for this week, folks. Yucca: Well, at least number one, we'll see. I don't know, that's all. Maybe we've sort of done a few already. We went into dreams, so, Mark: that's true. Yucca: Yeah. Okay. Mark: okay, we're, we're gonna die and we're going to live well as a result of this knowledge. That's, that's where we've gotten to so far. But there are some things that we can do to prepare for our deaths that are great. Kindness is to those who survive us. Yucca: Mm-hmm. and for us in the process, depending on what kind of death you have, , Right. Some deaths. You don't know that they're happening and some you do. Mark: Yeah. Yucca: So, yeah. Mark: So those include things like advanced health directives, instructing decision makers about how they. What your wishes are in terms of do you want to be kept alive on machines in a vegetative state? Do you not want that? If it's unlikely that you will ever recover to a point where you're able to care for yourself? Do you want the machines to be turned off? All those kinds of questions. Knowing that medicine is a for profit enterprise and that end of life is the most profitable part of that enterprise in the United States. They will keep you alive on machines if you don't tell them not to. Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: And it's important to do that if that's not the way you want to go. Yucca: Right? Mark: There are other financial things a will or a trust or you know, some sort of arrangement for what's supposed to happen to your money and your stuff. Yucca: Mm-hmm. And your dependence, if you have. Mark: Yes. Including, you know, what goes to which dependence and, and all that kind of, and, and your dependence. If, if you, if both you and your partner or partners Yucca: If you have, if you Mark: are suddenly killed if you, if you have them. Are suddenly killed, then the question of where your dependence go becomes really important. And that needs to be written down and enshrined somewhere, not just something in your head. Yucca: And this may not just be your human dependence, but if you don't have children and you have pets, that's something to think about as well, so that they, they don't just end up at the shelter. Right? Mark: right. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: There are other Sorts of things that are very helpful for people when there is a death that can just ease the process a lot. I mean, all of us that have been in grief know the kind of brain fog that descends when there is a painful death. It's hard to concentrate and feelings keep welling up all the time and to be asked at the same time to go digging through someone's desk to find a life insurance policy is, It's an almost insurmountable demand Yucca: Right, And to be on the phone and being told that, No, we can't give it to you because you're not the person and you're going, Yeah, but they're dead. But you know, all. Mark: And then you have to go and get a death certificate and provide that to them. And I mean, there's just so much adminis trivia that goes into the processing of a death. having all of that information together in one place in what I call a death packet Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: is a tremendous gift to those who survive you. Passwords, passwords to social media accounts, to your online banking to your, your 401k or whatever, you know, retirement accounts you might have. All of that stuff is essential in modern times to be able to do the things that you want to do. A list of people who should be notified with their contact information. Yucca: right. Mark: There's, there's a lot of different things that go into this. But the good news is we have a workbook Yucca: Yes. Link in the in the show notes. Yeah. Mark: Yes, you can download a blank of the workbook and fill it out. And it, it has everything in it. It's got a, a section for filling out all the information that would be necessary to write an obituary, for example. You can make your preferences known about what you'd like done with your body. What kind of services, if any, you would like to have happen. To recognize your death. And it, it may sound scary and creepy to do this, but as I always like to say, just like talking with people about sex doesn't make them pregnant, working on the fact of your mortality doesn't make it any more likely to happen soon. Yucca: Yeah. It just means that when it does, it's gonna be an easier process for the, For your loved ones. Yeah. And this is, this is a great time of year to be going through and doing this because we're thinking about death. And it's seasonally and we're seeing it around us, and and it's nice to, to have it on the calendar to be able to go back and review that, right? Mark: Yeah. One of the elements of my death packet is a farewell letter, Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: and I revisit that every year at this time of year just to make sure that, you know, everybody that I want acknowledged, want to be acknowledged is acknowledged. And that Yucca: If things have changed in terms of what you wanna say or not. Mark: all, all those kinds of things. Yes. So it's. And it, it's a great opportunity just to pull the thing out and review all the information. It's like I noticed the last time I went through it, I had moved and I hadn't changed my address. Yucca: Mmm. Mark: So that was necessary. I had to make those changes. Once again I can already think of some things that I'm gonna need to change for this year as well. Yucca: Right. Mark: so, but once you've done the big task once. Then it's just a matter of updating little bits of information here and there as you go along, and it's not very hard to do. The important thing is that loved ones know where to find your death packet. If you have like, a filing cabinet with legal papers and Yucca: fire safe chest that you have and you Mark: That's, that's a good place for it to live, maybe in especially colored folder so that people know, you know, they can go directly to that folder and pull it out. What I do is I keep a paper copy, a printed copy in my desk, and then I keep the soft copy, The Microsoft Word file on the desktop of my computer. Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: So it, and it's labeled My Death, that's the name of it. So, with a cute little skull icon that I put on Yucca: Yeah, is your paper one you could put in a little folder, you know, this time of year you can find like the Halloween themed folders and stuff in the school section. Mark: Uhhuh. Yeah. It's a good idea. Yucca: little dancing skeletons or something like Mark: Mm-hmm. , I like it. Yeah, so. I strongly encourage our listeners to, to take on this work. It's it can be a little intimidating you know, to sort of take a deep breath and go, Okay, I'm gonna die. What do I want done with my body? What do I, you know, what? Yucca: Yeah. Mark: What, what, what are the answers to all these questions? There is a tool that's available for download online. It's something called the Five Questions that you can look for and that, that walks you through some similar kinds of planning questions about how to organize your, your death planning. But the workbook that you can download from the link in the show notes is really very thorough and it, it contains spaces for all of the different kinds of information that you're likely to need. Yucca: Right, and, and you could make a little thing of it when you do it. You could make it a little. Self party for the afternoon, right? Pick out, get your favorite drink, get your favorite treat, and carve yourself a pumpkin and sit down at the table with it. And there might be things that you won't be able to do right away, like gathering certain pieces of information, but you could start working through it and starting that process. Or you could do some of it in ritual, you know, make it. Make it an enjoyable thing that is maybe a little bit less intimidating to approach just so that you, that you do it. Because any piece that you do will be better than having not done it at all. Mark: right. Yucca: Right. And so maybe, I mean, I encourage everyone to, to go through the whole packet and do everything, but maybe you just wanna start with, Okay, I'm just gonna. I'm just gonna get a will in place. Right. And I'm not, you know, I, I don't have the, the mental space right now to write a letter to everybody, but I can get the, the will in place, or I can make sure that I have beneficiaries on my bank accounts or whatever it is that you need to do. Right. Just starting with so, Mark: I want to tell people about another resource that's available online for free, and it's a, it's a resource called free will.com, and literally that's what it is. It's a wizard that walks you through the steps to create a will for free, and then you can download the. Documents and print them and have them signed and it's legally valid Will Yucca: Do you put in what your state or country is in Mark: you do? Yucca: laws are different about how many witnesses you need or that sort of thing? Okay. Mark: It's only for the US and Canada, unfortunately. Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: But. Yucca: I would suspect there's probably similar resources though for different countries. Mark: many other countries. I would agree. I would agree. But it's a, it's a pretty nifty little thing. I, I went through it and I thought, you know what, what came out the other end was, it had a lot of legalese in it, but it definitely included everything that I wanted to, to be included in my will. Yucca: Mm-hmm. , right? So that's a great, a great place to start. Mark: They also do advanced health directives. There's, there's a wizard for that as well. Yucca: Okay. Right, Because again, many of us probably aren't at the traditional places in our lives where that's something that we would be starting to think about. But as we've said, we don't know. We don't know how many days we have, Mark: Nope. Nope. The odds, the odds may be low that you are going to die soon. But they aren't zero. They're never zero. Yucca: Right. Mark: As long as we're alive, we are subject to death. So we have to be prepared to as great a degree as possible, both for our loved ones but also for ourselves. I don't want to be in a semi-conscious state on a ventilator Yucca: Mm. Mark: for. Days, weeks, years. I, I, I really, really am opposed to that. There's pretty good evidence that there is some brain activity in a lot of the people that are in that condition, and that just sounds like hell to me. I don't want it. And I'm very, very clear in my directives that I do not want that. I, I want you to pull the plug, if that's the state that I. Yucca: Right. or for me, I wouldn't want to be in my last moments worrying who's gonna take care of my kids. Mark: Right, Yucca: Right? Mark: right. Yucca: Oh, how, you know, being, having to be stressed about these things that I don't wanna leave undone Mark: Mm-hmm. Yucca: for, for others. Mark: Yeah. Yeah. So I, I'd kind of like to leave this on a, on an upward note. I feel like one of the things that is very hard about death in, certainly in American culture, but I think this is true in the West generally, is that we're so phobic about the subject that we don't talk about it and get ourselves comfortable with it at all. We don't even try to do. And there is a movement the, the so-called death positivity movement that is happening now that's working to overcome that, that's working. You know, we conduct death salons in various places for people to talk about their feelings, about their mortality, their fears, their their concerns, what they'd like done with their bodies, all those kinds of things. And. I just feel that that's a very important movement. To some degree the denial of death is the denial of life Yucca: Yeah, and that's one we'll definitely come back on when we talk about death on a kind of larger concept. Mark: Right, right. And to me, embracing what this is that we are. Here on Earth is necessary in order for us to honor it, as sacred as it is. Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: And so I really encourage you to look at this as a great opportunity. You know, when you, when you really sit down, you know, across the table from your death maybe, maybe you have some life priorities that you want to change. Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: Maybe, maybe there are certain things that you absolutely have have been dedicated to the idea that you're going to do someday, and maybe you need to move up the schedule on those to make sure that they happen, Yucca: Right. Mark: right? Um Yucca: Well, and to think about how you are living today, because how you live today is how you, that is your life, Mark: mm-hmm. Yucca: right? That is your life that you live. And I find it very helpful In my morning ritual, I remind myself, I say out loud that I remember I will die, and that actually is so uplifting and motivating because it goes today matters. This, my experience, this tiny, I get to be this tiny sliver of the universe for this short period, which I hope will be in the triple digits. That's my goal, but that's still tiny compared to the billions of billions of years of the universe. And here we are and we get this moment. And because we die, it is so precious and so special every. Mark: Absolutely. I like that I may steal it. I, my morning ritual does not include something like that at the moment, although it does include a death acknowledgement in the evening. The Yucca: I stole it from the stoic . They have a whole thing about it. Mark: So yeah, look at, honestly, look at this as an opportunity. Folks. Being in denial about our death isn't gonna stave it off. It isn't gonna change when it happens. One second. So, taking a clear look at, taking a clear look at everything generally is a good idea, but particularly Yucca: of this podcast, Mark: it kind of is. Yeah. It kind of is. Let's, you know, let's, let's not gussy things up with, with fantasy. Let's, let's do what we can to know what's true. To look at that very clearly and then make our decisions based on that. That's kind of what we're about. So, especially in this month of October, which is, you know, the, the, the spooky witchy month really encourage you to take that step if you haven't already, or also like to congratulate those of you who have done a lot of that planning. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: Good for you because it's, it's generally good for all of us. When people do that, among other things, what tends not to happen is that people tend not to get gouged for thousands of dollars by funeral homes because, you know, people will put much more modest wishes in their, in their declarations, in their death packet. and that's good for all of us because that industry really needs to be reigned in. It's very destructive and it, it, it needs to change. Yucca: Well, and, and whatever your particular wishes are you. You can assure those, or at least you can make it more likely that that's what's going to happen, right? By, by voicing it. So whatever, whatever your particular desires and approaches and, and all of that and if it's something that, that you honestly don't care, let let your loved ones know that, right? Let them know, I seriously, I'm dead. I don't want the casket. Mark: Yeah. Yucca: I don't care. Save the money. Right? If that's your approach or if, hey, it is actually really important to me that there be this coming together of the, of the people in my life and this moment. And you know, you know, you can say that and you can think about that and, and I think that you can learn a lot about yourself too in having that honest conversation with yourself, that exploration. Mark: right. As you explore what the options are, you may find that some things that people assume are true are not. For example, you are not required to have your body involved. And it's a terrible, toxic thing that we do to the Earth that I really don't want any part of. But I mean, you can, if you want to, that's fine, but you are not required. Some states require that an un embalmed body be buried within three days after the death, Yucca: Yeah, there's so different states are gonna have different regulations you're gonna wanna know. Yeah. But that's one of the things that you can do in your October. Death visiting. I don't know what we could call it. Mark: I like that. Yucca: yeah, and if you mo, if you move states or, you know, you just check up on, okay, so what's, you know, what is it like here in Montana versus Connecticut, or, you know, whatever it is. Yeah. Mark: right? Yeah. So there's a, there's a body of knowledge and there's kind of a world to explore there of how to, how to get exactly what you want out of this, or at least to tell your loved ones what you want. And of course after you're dead, it won't matter to you. So Yucca: Yeah. Mark: they, if they don't do what you want Yucca: You won't know. Mark: you won't know, and the worst thing that will happen is that somebody will probably say, This is not what they would've wanted. Yucca: Yeah, so well, this has been good. Mark: Yeah. Yucca: it's inspiring to, to come back to this each year and think about it and, and just again, remembering this is our little sliver. This is our little moment. Mark: Right. So do what you can to have a good death and as smoother transition as possible for those around you who survive and and live well. Live well and happily. Yucca: Yep. All right. Well thank you everyone, and we'll, we'll see you next week. Mark: See you then.

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ALPS In Brief – Episode 65: Saying ”Hell Yes” with Megan Hottman

Financial Investing Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 5, 2022 32:42

In this episode of ALPS in Brief, Mark sits down with Megan Hottman, the Cyclist Lawyer. At the age of 29, she did what people told her was not possible — she hung her own shingle and formed Hottman Law Office (HLO), aka "TheCyclist-Lawyer.com." This practice, she says, "is the perfect combination of passion and profession — love of cycling and legal education culminated in this practice; I'm doing what I was meant to do." Hear how Megan blazed her own trail, what's next, and how to know when to say "hell yes." Transcript: MARK BASSINGTHWAIGHTE: Hello, I'm Mark Bassingthwaighte, the Risk Manager here at ALPS, and welcome to the latest episode of ALPS In Brief, the podcast that comes to you from the historic Florence Building in beautiful downtown Missoula, Montana. For those of you that have listened to my various stories and podcasts over the years, I had a short series called, Listening to Your Life. And that was telling some stories about cycling. I've done a fair amount of cycling over the years and it's a way I stay in shape and so enjoyed it, particularly in 2020 when we had the shutdown. And boy, that's how I dealt with cycling, or the shutdown, just getting out and putting on a lot of miles. That summer I put in, I think it was over 2,200 miles. So that was quite a summer. I also have an interest in niche practices. Years ago, I spent many, many years doing some consulting work and have worked with over 1200 firms all over the country. And one of my favorite practices was a niche practice of guy up in Alaska that specialized in dog sled law. And I actually pulled up to the firm in the summertime and there was maybe two parking spaces, but there are about 15 spaces for dog sled teams. It was just an interesting, interesting story, or I should say, interesting experience. So all of that kind of plays into my guest and conversation we're going to have today. I'm so pleased to be able to welcome Megan Hottman. She is an attorney in Colorado, but I really want you folks to have the opportunity to hear and enjoy listening to Megan. So Megan, please welcome to the podcast and if you want to take a couple of moments and just share anything and everything about yourself. What do people need to know? MEGAN HOTTMAN: Well, thank you for having me. What do the people need to know? Well, everyone wants to know how I became The Cyclist Lawyer. And the truth is that I was a cyclist and a lawyer and I became someone who wanted to represent cyclists in my law practice. So that unfolded really just a confluence of events, you might say. I was a baby lawyer, kind of fresh out of law school and I was also an aspiring bike racer chasing the professional bike racing dream. And I wasn't sure how to put the two together because both are very time demanding and energy demanding. And long story short, people that I raced bikes with and against at events knew I was an attorney but had no idea what area of law I practiced in. But a few of them would ask me at events, "Hey, I was hit by a car while I was training. I have no idea what kind of law you do, but is that something you could help me with?" And I realized that working for people that shared this passion of mine for two wheels, life on two wheels, was very compelling and interesting to me and helping them try to get back in the saddle after having been involved in a collision with motorists. That really is how the practice unfolded back in 2010. And I was scared to death, of course, to start my own practice. I was 29, I'd been out of law school for five years and people said, "Well, you can't start a practice of your own that soon. That's not how this works." And I just felt that to do it the way I wanted to do it and to simultaneously be able to chase my bike racing dreams, I really couldn't work for someone else and be on someone else's schedule, I needed to be on my own schedule. So that's how this whole adventure began. And here we are, 12 and a half years later. MARK: That's really interesting because again, I was referring to this dog sled lawyer and a fascinating guy, but it was the same kind of thing. He was a racer, passion, enjoyed it. And other people, he got to know that the circuits and well, I have this problem or that problem in racing. And it's just this kind of organic evolution. And I love that. Folks, this is obviously an audio podcast here and I've had the pleasure of meeting Megan in Missoula at a corporate event earlier this year, but I am so struck by the joy and the passion that you see in her face when she talks about what has happened and her life. And why I think that's important, I like that you were taking risks and really wanted to go this way. But when I hear your story and interact, I'm trying to remember the name of that, there's a Disney movie where a guy goes out and plays baseball. It's a true story, Disney eyes, but he's a high school coach down in Texas and he ends up trying out for the majors and makes it. But as he's in the minors working up to the majors, he just talks about, "I can't believe. Guess what I get to do today? I get to play baseball." And I see that in you. It seems to me you very much enjoy what you're doing and have found. The one thing I want to say folks is Megan took some risks, but they were so calculated and good risks to take because of the interest and the passion. And I just want you to hear, because I believe niche practices can be very, very successful. Not only financially, but in terms of the lifestyle, the wellness. Would you tend to agree with that, Megan? MEGAN: Yeah. I don't even know so much that it's a niche practice conclusion so much as it is doing something that really lights you up more than just the billable hour or the money in the bank. And that's true for everyone, whether they're an attorney or someone else. And even if your job doesn't light you up, having hobbies outside of your job that light you up. I think it's critical more than ever now these days, more than ever. And I'm a big fan of Dan Buettner's work, the Blue Zones, and he talks about what some of the common factors are among people that live to the age of 100 and are in good health. And one of the big ones, in addition to healthy diet, daily movement, a community of people that you are close to, is having a sense of purpose. And so we can all go to work and punch a paycheck, a pay clock, and work our nine to five or whatever, and that's important. Sure, we need to pay for our homes and our meals and support our families. MARK: Absolutely. MEGAN: And I felt the calling to it needed to be more than that for me to be successful. In this profession, it needed to be really compelling and important to me. And in addition to serving these cyclists all these years it, I think, understandably grew into a desire to make cycling safer and really within a couple years getting that clarity that my ultimate goal is to put myself out of business. And if we've made cycling so safe that cyclists aren't hit anymore and don't need lawyers like me, that would be the biggest win and the biggest victory ever. MARK: Yes. MEGAN: And like you, a lot of people came to the bike or came back to the bike during COVID. We really saw this massive bike boom. Actually worked part-time at a bike shop in 2020 just to help one of our local shops out. And the lines of customers were around the block on both sides of the building. MARK: Wow. MEGAN: Couldn't believe it. MARK: Yeah. MEGAN: And we had hoped that COVID was going to be the rebirth of cycling for the US and a re-appreciation for how it can be not just a tool for fitness and recreation, but for transportation. And it gave us a lot of hope. And instead, we've unfortunately seen a real change in motorist behavior and everyone is sensing it. There's just an increase of rage and frenzy and anxiety. People are driving fast and reckless and maliciously and we've actually seen a huge uptick really since 2021 in this area, unfortunately. MARK: Yeah, that's sad. It doesn't surprise me. My wife and I were in Montana for many, many years and just within the past year we've moved down to central Florida and I still try to ride and I get out, but I will tell you... And I've talked to, we found a physician down here, a really nice guy, and he bikes a little bit, saying, "This is a very, very dangerous area to bike," and for this very reason. The drivers are just crazy. And I see some folks out going, "They need to take a course from Megan because this is not where you want to ride." Just, oh my gosh. Well that's, talk a little more about the evolution of your practice. MEGAN: Yeah. MARK: You have these two passions and there's this organic kind of start. How did you though really finesse that to move from, this is an idea, this is a passion? And I think I know the answer based on some of the things you've just been sharing. But it's one thing to have people say, "Can you help out a little bit and do all that?" and turn that in to a full-time practice where you can pay the bills and where you can... I assume you have some staff or others that you work with. Are you solo? MEGAN: Yep. Nope, I did have a team. I'm in the process of scaling down, but we did have a team. I was the only attorney, but support staff. Yes. MARK: Okay, so how do you get there? MEGAN: Well, whether you're in a niche practice or a niche profession or not, one thing I quickly realized was you still want to be really intentional about who you're serving. And early on in our startup, as anyone is in startup mode of any business, you take whatever comes in the door and you're just thrilled that people want to hire you. And so you're a bit of a basket case, you're responding to everything and it's, "Oh, you want me to jump? How high?" kind of mentality. And that's fine for the first couple years. It's not sustainable, but that's part of any startup. And then at least for me, I started to get some clarity on, okay, yes, I want to represent cyclists. But within that group of people there's a subset, there's a specific type of case or a specific type of client that we really want to represent. For example, I don't find certain types of bike injury cases compelling because I'm so focused on changing motorist behavior that I tend to be less interested, let's say in a cyclist on cyclist collision, on a bike path. That can still be very bad and still someone's at fault, but that is less interesting to me because I'm really more concerned with how do we change the motoring public's perception of cycling. Or if someone rides their bike into wet concrete in a construction zone for example. There's definitely a claim there and someone probably made a mistake. I don't find that interesting because again, I started to get clear on what are the bigger changes and impacts I wanted to have. And even drilling down within that subset and saying, is there an opportunity here to mobilize the media for the greater good? Does this case lend itself to us going to the legislature and asking for some new laws on this particular topic or in this type of instance? Does this lend itself to us leveraging state or city financial resources to put in new infrastructure to prevent this type of thing happening again? And so just getting really clear on, yes, this particular client certainly deserves their compensation for this horrible thing that has happened to them, but can we make the impact broader than just that client? And then all along the way, sort of taking stock of, okay, have I let myself now get so spun up and so caught up in the business frenzy that I'm no longer living the life that I want to live myself. And that's easy to do too. I don't care how passionate you are about the subject matter, you can take the entrepreneurial mindset and you can let it get totally out of hand and then it can consume you. And suddenly, you wake up and you say, "Whose life is this that I'm living?" I'm making more money than I ever thought I'd make. I've reached all my goals. This is exciting and amazing and oh my goodness, this is so exhilarating, and yet I'm not riding my bike suddenly. Or my health isn't good, my sleep is breaking down, I'm not managing my own stress very well. What's going on here? So I think it's important to ask those questions too. MARK: And I agree. Wellness is a big issue for me in terms of what I do and what I've seen. So many people, attorneys and non attorneys alike, when we talk about malpractice, they want to know, "What are the big mistakes?" And those are important things to look at, but it's not the right question. I'm more interested in why the mistakes occur. And that gets into wellness. There are so much of the malpractice and even the disciplinary issues that are out there have some, more often than not, have some impairment component. MEGAN: Yes. MARK: Whether it's dementia, stress, burnout, addictions, all kinds of things. That's why the clients might have got neglected. I struggle with depression and on and on, and all these different things. So how did you balance all that? Were there things, as you start to ask yourselves these questions, am I still living the dream or is this getting a little cloudy? MEGAN: Great question. MARK: What did you do? What was your response? MEGAN: There's a couple prongs that I'd like to respond to in that. One is I noticed I was drinking too much. Nothing that affected my work, thankfully, but more than I wanted to be drinking myself. It certainly was affecting my ability to perform as an athlete. Even if you just go to social events and you have a couple glasses of wine, it totally makes your sleep garbage. And then you're just a dull down version of yourself the next day. So just noticing that I was less sharp than I wanted to be, I was less of an athlete than I wanted to be. I just really realized, my goodness, I am diminishing my own capacity with this thing that is such a central pillar of this profession. Between lawyers and entrepreneurs, everything is alcohol centric it seems. And just decided I wasn't going to engage in that kryptonite for myself anymore because I live a pretty clean, healthy life otherwise. And especially with my focus on getting good sleep, which I do believe is the foundation for a good human existence and experience, here I am undermining even my own sleep with this socialization around alcohol. So I quit drinking in the end of 2017, very much on purpose with those things in mind. And no surprise, 2018 was an exceptional year business wise, bottom line sword, I rode 10,000 miles on my bike that year. MARK: Wow. MEGAN: I competed in numerous big bike events, a lot of them on a single speed, 150, 200 mile gravel bike events. And everything went exceptionally well that year. And I thought, wow, this is what it's like when I'm actually firing on all cylinders. This is really great. And I still don't drink. And I preach the sort of alcohol free life. Not in a sense that I think alcohol is bad per se, or I'm not trying to be the fun police, I just do think it's important for us to call into question why we are so socially accepting of something that is so damaging. And in this particular profession, that 2016 Betty Ford study, that's been many years now already, that's six years old, one in three lawyers is a problem drinker. That is terrifying. And yet, when I am at legal events, I have to tell you, I conclude the same thing in my observations. MARK: I absolutely agree. Yeah, it's been my experience too in a lot of the things, you get involved around the country, the annual conventions, bar conventions and whatnot, you bet. MEGAN: You see it. So on that note, really where your question I think was going was how do you stay in alignment? MARK: Right. MEGAN: And for me, I personally, I'm not a psychologist, I am not a substance abuse professional or expert, but I personally believe that the reason our substance abuse is so high in this profession is because there's a lot of things that we are not acknowledging and addressing as lawyers and as a profession that inherently drives people to numb out because it is so overwhelming and it is so hard to face. One thing I've really become keen on observing and noticing and learning more about is secondary trauma because I work in the personal injury space. We observe people's trauma in these horrific situations. We don't just cut them on the emergency table, stitch them up, and then go on to the next patient. We live with these clients and their stories for years and we have to convey it effectively as a storyteller at trial. And so we take on, whether we mean to or not, a lot of that trauma ourselves, vicarious trauma, secondary trauma. And no one's teaching us this and no one's even telling us, here are the warning signs that you're getting too much of that in your life, in your practice. So it does not surprise me that a lot of lawyers turn to substance to try and just numb out for a little bit. And I'll finish this thought by just by saying I pride myself as being someone who doesn't really numb out, especially once I quit drinking. It was like I'd rather confront stuff head on and say, "What's really going on here?" And as my practice unfolded into year seven, year eight, a lot of that trauma started to catch up with me. A couple cyclists that I knew very well were hit and killed, and I'm involved in their cases. And then that became really overwhelming. And I thought, "What's wrong with me? Why are other lawyers seemingly managing this far better than I am?" And it really started to knock me down pretty hard core. I was planning to take sabbatical at the beginning of 2020, but that's right when COVID started. It was supposed to be March of 2020. And I knew that I needed to punch out for a little bit because I could tell that things weren't okay. That was before I knew about secondary trauma. And what I've come to realize since, because I was hit by a car this June 5th and very badly injured, was in a wheelchair and relegated to a walker, there were no walks, there were no bike rides, there were no yoga classes, there was no van adventuring, all the things that I really love to do that light me up worked, it's full stop. And I realized in part that those things are a bit of a numbing behavior for me. That is kind of how I escape the stresses of this work. And so when you strip all those numbing agents away and you really are forced to confront the discomfort. What I've concluded is most of us will go to great lengths to avoid that. It's very uncomfortable. We will look to anything else, whether it's shopping or what have you, as a distraction. And so my advice for lawyers would be to start honoring those nudges because there is something in us that knows when something's not right. And if you're tempted to say, "Oh my God, I really need some wine, I've had a horrible day," or "I can't wait to take the edge off" or what have you, you can still go do that if you feel called to that. But first, ask the question why, what's going on inside me that's got me stolen knots, and pay attention to that. MARK: Yeah, yeah. Well said. And I absolutely agree. You had talked too a bit about getting involved in education and trying to do some things to change laws. And I believe there's been some charity work you've been involved at too. Was that intentional, in terms of even if just an organic involvement? I'm not sure else to describe it, but it was that part of the growth of the practice process? Was that part of just a desire to give back? Was that part of trying to keep things, and I really don't like the word balance, but to try to maintain sense of purpose and well-being? How did all that come about? MEGAN: Sure. Early on, when I started my practice and started to realize some success, it's incredibly exhilarating to make great money. We're not going to candy coat that. That's why we went to law school, most of us. We'd like to live the lawyer lifestyle. And when you start cashing in on big cases, that's incredibly exhilarating and affirming and it's quite a rush. And for me, that was really great for a few years of just saying, "Wow, this is cool." This has this capacity and I got really involved in real estate and I'm super passionate about real estate stuff. That didn't last very long for me. Yes, you still need to earn money and pay the bills for sure. But then I started to say, well I've now had 20 or 30 or 40 clients hit in bike lanes. What the hell's the point of having a bike lane if we're not going to offer any legal protection for people in bike lanes as one example. And that really climaxed when I got hit myself in a bike lane in 2019 and I thought, well we've gone to all the trouble to put this on the road and paint the lane and paint it white. And yet, I still got hit here in broad daylight. We need some legal protection. So that prompted myself to partner with one of our legislators to write a bike lane bill here in Colorado, which says that motorists must yield to cyclists in bike lanes. So duh, but the law didn't exist before that. Similarly, with some of my other clients, just starting to observe, we're not being treated fairly by the district attorneys. There's no real prosecution happening of these drivers. No one's losing a driver's license, no one's getting any real punishment, there's no lesson being learned. These drivers aren't suffering whatsoever for the carnage that they're leaving in their wake. And so started getting more and more involved in the criminal and the traffic cases of my clients, even though that's not part of my civil representation, that I'm not being paid for that part. But as far as the greater good, if there's no prosecution of drivers who harm cyclists, what are we doing here? For me to just move money from insurance companies into client's pockets, yes, that's part of the process, but it needed to be more than that for me. So started to get involved in educating law enforcement, teaching them what the rules say. Whether they agree with it or not, this is what our legislature has decided. And taking that into teaching bike shops and bike teams what their obligations are so that we can be following the laws as cyclists, talk to several driving schools to teach driving instructors what the laws require as they're teaching our youth how to drive, trying to approach it from all angles of let's make safer cyclists, let's make safer motorists, let's make safer roads. And the truth is that there's advocacy organizations whose entire purpose in all day, every day is focused on lobbying and getting money for the infrastructure in our cities. And so that's the lane that they swim in. I don't need to be in that lane. That's what they do. So I decided to focus on the legal side of things and either writing the laws or dealing with the punishment in the criminal cases because that's of course more uniquely suited to my skillset. MARK: Well, as a guy out there on the road at times and enjoying as a fellow cyclist, nowhere near your level, but there's just something about riding. MEGAN: Amen. MARK: It's a quiet place. And when you're out, really just riding. Around here, I'm still learning and I'm going to have to get a bike rack till some other trails get built. What's coming is going to be awesome, but we're a few years away yet. MEGAN: Gotcha. MARK: But also thank you for the work that you do. I've always said to even our kids, we can't necessarily change the world, but boy, we can do something in our little corner of it. And if enough of us work on our little corner of it, we can accomplish some great things at a larger level. MEGAN: That's exactly right. MARK: So that's awesome. Well, you had talked a little bit about slowing down a bit. May I ask, what's next? Where are you going? MEGAN: Yeah, great question. I remain open to what the universe directs me towards. It's really cool how just being open, it does open doors to things. I think it's really fun too to just say, why not be curious? Rather than immediately disregard things that seem impractical, why not just see what comes in and what I can call in for myself. I just got off the phone a few minutes ago with a lawyer out on the East Coast that wants to hire me as a bike expert in his case. And I love doing that work, helping other lawyers improve their case for the cyclists that they represent. And adding my unique expertise as an expert for them has been great. So I'm doing some of that work. And I'm also coaching other lawyers, specifically those who have formed their own firms, to really help them try to get clarity on what their ideal life and how they want this to look and how they want this firm to serve them in the hopes that I can help them avoid some of the pitfalls that I've mentioned for myself, where we get so spun up in it, we kind of forget why we started. So I'm coaching a handful of lawyers and I really enjoy that. And as you mentioned, I got to speak at the event for you guys in July. I really enjoy doing keynote speaking and those things seem to pop up once or twice a quarter and that's really fun. I do still have my current caseload that I am still in the process of finishing up, and whether I fully withdraw or retreat or not is not clear to me just yet. But I have felt really called here in the front range of Colorado, just the summer specifically, to take on a few cases pro bono, some really heinous hit and run cases. MARK: Oh my gosh. MEGAN: Two very serious injury cases and one a death case where we have drivers hitting cyclists and leaving the scene, which is just so appalling. I can't even conceive of that. And unfortunately, does often involve impairment of these drivers. So they're not in their right minds, but that's not an excuse. So trying to help those families through the process has been really rewarding for me as I've been recovering from my own collision. MARK: And is cycling still in your future? You're going to come back and get back on the bike and keep going? MEGAN: Absolutely. Yeah. You probably have to cut my bikes up into little tiny pieces to keep me off of them. One of my favorite things in life is to bike commute. I've really designed a life for myself here in Golden, which is a little subset of Denver. It's a little kind of small town feel, home of Coors and the School of Mines. It's a great place to live if you want to ride your bike everywhere. And so I really, within a 10 mile radius, can do basically everything that I need to do in my life. And that's been one of the things I've missed the most from this collision and these injuries. And I don't know what that looks like going forward because commuting does involve quite a bit of being on the road. I've grown to just love my e-bike for commuting. My car sits in the garage. Like you mentioned, being on the bike is just such a special time. And then to be able to pair that with a trip that you need to make anyway is just so fulfilling for me. Right now, I am cleared to do a little bit of e-bike rehab. So I've just been doing that on the bike paths, just to keep the knee continuing to come back full strength. MARK: Good. MEGAN: And that's great for me right now because there's no cars and I can enjoy that. But the truth is that bike paths don't usually get us most places that we need to go and want to go. So it's more of a joy ride. MARK: Yeah, I get that. Well, I really appreciate your taking a little time out of your day to visit with us. I will give you a chance, if you have any additional final thought in terms of wisdom you'd like to pass along, you want to share any information about your book, contact info. Whatever you feel comfortable sharing, you've got the last word. MEGAN: Okay, cool. Well, my Instagram is where I put out most of my content. And so if people are interested in following along, my Instagram handle is, @cyclist_lawyer, or my website is meganhottman.com. Megan, M-E-G-A-N, Hottman, H-O-T-T-M-A-N.com. Those are great places to find me and contact me if something I've said is calling to you. As far as words of wisdom, I think I would say yes, we go to law school to be lawyers. That's usually the outcome, that's the objective. But if someone in this profession feels that it's no longer serving them, I would encourage them to give themselves permission to say it's totally okay to pivot. And everything that we learn in law school and everything that we learn in this profession is so beneficial in so many other lines of work. We've really moved past being a population that picks the one thing and sticks with it for 50 years and then retires. We're really not that anymore. And I don't think lawyers need to expect that's the way either. So if you're sensing that something's not right and it's getting louder and louder, I think what I would also say is that the universe will get your attention. And if you choose not to listen, usually the outcome can be quite drastic. And so it's important to listen to those nudges when they're the size of little pebbles or little rocks before they grow into boulders and meteors. There's something in you that's trying to get your attention and it typically doesn't go away until you acknowledge it and face it full on. MARK: And you're a perfect example of the success that can come in so many ways, choosing to listen to your life. And that's how I have said it over the years. But that's wonderful. Well, I wish you all the best in your recovery and whatever the coming chapters in your life hold. I look forward to hearing in future how this all evolves. MEGAN: I can't wait to find out too. MARK: I get that. All right. Well folks, thank you for listening. I hope you found something of value and I encourage you to check out Megan on Instagram or her website. There's just a lot of really good information on her website, I'll tell you that too, as a risk guy. So that's it, thanks for listening. Megan, it's been a pleasure. MEGAN: Same with you. Thank you. MARK: Bye all.

FIR 156: Real Estate Returns Too Good To Be True? The Land Geek...

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 6, 2022 25:06

Today I had the opportunity to speak with "The Land Geek". Fascinating conversation. He's got over, well over four and a half million downloads on his podcast. He's got some interesting ideas and insights on investing with land that the returns higher than normal, I guess normal, what's normal, higher than, you know, eight 10% return, if you will, returns on these investments. So I'm very excited to have Mark here with me today. Thanks for joining us, we learn the secrets from the land geek. Everybody welcome to another episode of Financial Investing Radio. So I have been chasing this person for some time. He is super busy and has an amazing profile. I hope you take the opportunity to look into what he's done. We're going to be having conversation today with Mark, Oh man, Mark. I didn't even ask at a time. Podolski! Mark Perfect pronunciation. Grant Did I say that? Okay. All right. Very good. Mark. Welcome. Thank you for being here today. I appreciate it. Mark Grant Larsen, an honor. Privilege. Thank you. Grant You know, we found out that we are not too far from each other geographically, which is a real treat. There's some neat, neat things about the part of the country we live in for sure. Mark Absolutely. We've lost our complaining privileges living in Scottsdale, Arizona. Grant That's right. That's right. That's right. Even when it gets a little hot. I've learned to quit Quit complaining about it's not a Houston hot right. Mark Houston hot. It's 80 degrees in the pool. Grant Yeah, that's. That's right. It's fixable with the pool. That's right, right. Okay, so the land geek, you are known as the land geek, you've done a great job getting your name out there as land geek, not only getting your name out there, but proving a framework. But we'll get to the framework here in a moment. Because what you've done is pretty unique compared to other real estate investing strategies that are out there, of which I actually participate in some of those others, right, but I won't get to that yet. So I'm interested to learn more about what you do here. But let's back up. You were doing what what got you started to say I'm gonna go after land investments in this way. Mark So if we rewind the tape now, to 2000 I was a miserable micromanaged. 45 minute commute to work and back investment banker specializing in mergers and acquisitions with private equity groups. And grant it got so bad for me. I wouldn't get the Sunday blues, anticipating Monday coming around. I'd get the Friday blues, anticipating the weekend going by really fast. And having to be back at work. On Monday. I was pretty much yeah, really blue. So I first hired this guy, and he's telling me that as a side hustle, he's going to tax deed auctions. He's buying raw land, pennies on the dollar. He's flipping them online, and he's making a 300% return on his money. Grant. I'm looking at companies all day long. And a great company great has 15% EBIT on margins are free cash flow, average company's 10%. And I'm looking at companies all day long, less than 10%. So of course, I don't believe them. And I've got three grand saved up for car repairs. I go to New Mexico with them. I do exactly what he tells me to do. I buy 10 Half Acre parcels and average price of $300 each. I flipped them online. And they all sell for an average price of $1,200 each. It worked. So I went to another auction and in Arizona, where we live. And again, this is 2000 There's no one in the room. I'm buying up lots of acreage or nothing. And I sell all that property. You know that what auction I made over $90,000 So I go to my wife. She's pregnant at the time. I said Honey, I'm going to quit My job and become a full time lead investor. And she said, Absolutely not. Yeah. Grant What do you say? And what are you doing on? Mark Yeah. So it took 18 months for the land investing income to exceed the investment banking income. And then I quit. I've been doing it full time ever since. And I absolutely love it. Grant That's incredible. So you just sort of stumbled into it, someone happened to say, they'd already sort of figured this out. Now, it sounds like what you did with that is after you've done this for a while, you've created a system out of this, then is that right? Mark Yeah, I mean, after a while, you start picking up things, and you start seeing, okay, well, how do I make this job, myself. And, really, my whole philosophy is, I can always make more money, I can't get more time. And so we want to use three levers to scale and grow a business, other people's time, software and automation, and other people's money. And so once I combined all three of those, I was really able to grow and work really about 30 minutes a week, in my business. Grant What, 30 minutes, you're at a point now where you work 30 minutes a week on your business? In the business? Yeah, that's amazing. Wow. But it took that scaling, right, took that automation to figure it out the team around you to help take care of certain aspects of it took all of those pieces, as well as other people's money. That's interesting. That took five years. Oh, that was gonna ask you so five years to get to that point, learn the lessons, learn the business processes that you should automate, and so forth. Right? Mark Well, five years just to start getting myself out of business, probably another five years, to get to my point where I can work 30 minutes, 30 minutes in the business, rarely, I'm just meeting with my Acquisition Manager. And we're looking at the numbers and saying how many deals are pending? How many offers went out? How many deals will be closed? How can I support you? Grant So when it comes to finding these opportunities is the auctions is that your main input, or source or how well find these. Mark So Grant, I'm going to walk you exactly through how I do it. So you live, I'm gonna use these as a case study. You're in Scottsdale, Arizona, but let's assume that you own five acres of raw land in Texas, and you owe $200 in back taxes. So essentially, you're advertising two important things. Number one, you have no emotional attachment to the raw land, you're in Arizona, the properties and taxes in Texas. And number two, you're distressed financially in some weird way. Because we don't pay for things like our property taxes, we don't value them in the same way. As resolved, county treasurer, keeps sending me notices saying, Grant, if you don't pay your property taxes, you're going to lose that five acre parcel, tax deed or tax lien investor. So all I'm gonna do is look at the comparable sales on your five acre parcel for the last 12 to 18 months, I'm gonna take the lowest comparable sale, let's say $10,000 and divide by four. And that's gonna give you a Warren Buffett would call a 300% margin of safety. So I'm gonna send you an actual offer on your five acre parcel for $2,500. Now you accept it. Why? Because for you $2,500 is better than nothing. In reality, three to 5% of people accept my quote unquote, top dollar offer. But now that you've accepted it, I have to go through due diligence or in depth research. I have to confirm you still own the property. I have to confirm back taxes are only $200 I have to make sure there's been no breaks in the chain of title. There's no liens or encumbrances. And because it's only $2,500 investment, I outsourced to my team in the Philippines, connected to an American Title Company. It cost about $11. I was investing $5,000 or more, I wouldn't take any title risk. You have to close traditionally through a title company. But since this is a smaller deal, everything checks out. And now I'm going to sell your five acre parcel 30 days or less and make a cash flow. So I have a built in best buyer grant. Do you know who it is? Who is the neighbors, the neighbors? So I'm going to send out neighbor letters saying hey, here's your opportunity. Protect your privacy. Protect your views. Know your neighbor. So oftentimes the neighbors will buy now if the neighbors pass a gun to my buyers list, if they pass. A good little website you may have heard of, it's called Craigslist is the 15th most trafficked website United States. I'll go to one I know you've heard of called meta, or Facebook, buy sell groups in the marketplace, and then I'll go to the lands land moto.com lands of america.com land and farm.com land flip.com Land hub.com These are platforms where people buy and sell raw land. But the way that I'm going to do it is the secret. I'm going to make it irresistible for my next buyer. All I'm going to ask for is a $2,500 downpayment, to control this five acre parcel, and then I'll make it a car payment, let's say 297 a month, for the next 84 months at 9% interest. So it's a one time sale, I'll get my money out on the down payment. I could go six to 10 months out. And now I'm getting a passive income of 297 a month, next 84 months. No renters. No rehabs, no renovations, no rodents. And because I'm not dealing with a tenant, I'm exempt from Dodd Frank RESPA. And the SAFE Act, all this owners real estate legislation. So grant, it's a simple game, can I create enough land notes where my passive income exceeds my fixed expenses? And now working? Grant Because I want to not because I have to guess you have to? So on those numbers, then Mark, when you look at that, and what's the percentage of those that carry all the way through, you know, you're obviously I love, I love how you have the profile for that best buyer, how you create that, that passive income, what sort of risks does that put on your shoulders, where there's potential for them not following through on the cash flow, any issues there? Mark We don't mind it, because we use a land contract. And a land contract means that we can we still own the underlying asset, while they make payments. If they default, they have 30 days to cure their default. If they don't, we keep the down payment, we keep the monthly payments, our cost basis goes lower, we resell that property, we get a new down payment, we get new monthly payments, and extends out a return on investment is... Grant Oh, that's awesome. Mark So I've been investing my wife and I invest in real estate, but it's it's on. It's with the tenant model, right? It's, you know, creating sort of the cash flow on that site. And it has some of the challenges and headaches you're talking about. Right? It's I deal with property management organizations, I deal with tenants that aren't following through blah, blah, blah, blah, all that. And so this is appealing to me to be able to say, hey, you know, I don't have to worry about about that. Grant Is there a return that you felt like is higher taking this strategy than taking that sort of tenant based model? Mark Well, our average return on cash is 300%. And on terms, it's 1,000%. Grant That's crazy. Because we you know, typically fight for eight to 10 or 15%, right? In this in this renter model. So that's, that's fascinating, fascinating approach. So a couple things here. The average hold time. So you'd mentioned 30 days, are you literally flipping these in a 30 day timeframe? Is that the average? Mark Yeah, that's average. Now, if it's more than 30 days, something has to change. Maybe we have to raise the downpayment, maybe people think it's too good to be true. Maybe we have to lower the downpayment, maybe we have to raise the price, lower the price, change the interest rate, change the terms, something needs to change, maybe it's as simple as the headline is conducting. So that's our litmus test for what's wrong with our app. Why did that? Why is this not selling 30 days? Grant What's the what's the benefit of turning it into that passive cash flow as opposed to just flipping and taking the cash right now all of it out of the deal and walking away with that in your pocket? Mark Well, cash is a problem, right? Because now I've got to do it all over again. And I've just created a really hard job for myself. So I'd rather buy the asset one time and hold it for as long as I can and have a cash flow rather than flip a tax. Hopefully, I get another deal flip, pay tax, the market could turn on me. Right? I've been I've overpaid and I'm stuck with an asset. Grant Yep, makes makes total sense. So I noticed on your on your on your YouTube channel here. I noticed on there you you've been creating quite a nice playlist for a long time describing some of the challenges the hurdles the things people might deal with some tips and techniques around that. You've been publishing for quite a while on this. If someone were to get started on your YouTube channel itself, you've got this nice entry YouTube video right there passive income without headaches explained. I love that as your entry one. I watched that and you walk through much of the framework that you just described here today, what would be some of the hurdles that you think people will run into? Or that you've seen people run into where, where this doesn't work? Mark Well, you know, the biggest hurdle I think, for people who get started is they think, can I do this in my backyard? Well, if you live in San Francisco, no, no one's gonna sell you an infill lot. 25 cents on the dollar, they're gonna go the biggest, baddest land broker in town. If you live in Manhattan, same thing. So we're looking at properties an hour to three hours from the nearest town. And also, there's 3007 us counties like where do you start? So if I live in Iowa, let's face it, nobody wakes up next boy, I'd like to buy some land today in Iowa, unless you live in Iowa. So to get your biggest buyer pool, you want to be the southwest, little bit the Northwest, California and Florida. These are the sunshine states. These are fast growing states. And there is just a plethora of inexpensive raw land. Grant Okay. All right. That's fascinating. The other thing that I think you wrote your book was in 2017, did I get the date? Right? I think 2018 and 2018. Okay, dirt rich, dirt Ranch is out on Amazon did a review of that awesome book. Tell us about that? What does that cover? Mark So Dirt Rich gives you the basics of how to buy and sell raw land, it also tells my story. So you don't make the same mistakes. I did. And then Durbridge two is coming out very soon. The next plot how to scale your business. Grant I love that the next plot, there's a play on words right there for sure. You're also out there on medium.com. I see you being referenced and talked about there. As well as you got your website, check that out as well land geek, the land geek.com, right, the Land Rover COMM And I'm assuming that is I reviewed that what I noticed about what you have here is this is where people can come to your organization, if I understand it, right and say, hey, I want to get trained in this. I want to get skilled and how to create my own business. I'm assuming this is where you take your years and years of expertise. And you condense that into a program, if you will, that take all the lessons learned rather than take 10 years to learn it. You'll learn it and you know, how long, what is sort of the up ramp for people in terms of amount of time and effort? Mark I mean, can really get going in about 16 weeks. Okay. Yeah. Grant That's, that's amazing. It's amazing. Have you do you participate in any sort of real estate investing other than raw land? Mark No, because I don't have an advantage in any other real estate niche other than raw land. So I'm a inch wide, and a mile deep. So and no one can really get my returns, it would be nice to get depreciation because land lasts forever. But that being said, I don't have to deal with the depreciation like there is depreciation for reason I don't have to deal with any physical structures. So I like the headache free piece of it. And I got it 90% automated with software and expensive virtual assistants. Grant That's incredible. So tell me about your, your best type of client that would come to you and say, hey, I want to participate in building passive income with your program. What does that look like? Who do you know? Mark You gotta have a burning desire to change your life? Right? You don't have to grit. So anything we're doing in life is inherently hard. And so it's kind of like hockey, right? People who play hockey, really love hockey, because they love it enough to get their teeth knocked out and get back up. It's the same thing in business. You have to love what you're doing enough to get knocked down and get back up. And so if you have a burning desire, give me that more than somebody who has cash. So I always say commitment over cash. It's, that's really all it takes. Grant How much cash did you have when you got started? I mean, it wasn't a ton. Right? Mark I start with $3,000. My buddy Durant's are $800. We think that, you know, 5000 is a is a really easy number. We have some clients who start with $500. Grant So you really don't need a whole lot of cash is needed that commitment or that grip that that desire to move forward with it. Okay, very good. So, any other tips that you'd want to share with our listeners on on doing this? Mark Well, if I were the listener, I would be thinking, well, Grant. It's so great. Why is Marc teaching it? Grant That's gone through my mind. I mean, You're talking Yeah. 300% To 1,000% return. Mark Right, right. So to answer the question, because when I started teaching that my wife asked me the same questions like, aren't you going to create your own competition? And it's a very valid question. So I started putting on my investment banker hat. And what's the first thing, investment banker looks at? How big is the market, and there are billions of acres of raw land available in the United States. And there is literally do you couldn't think of a more boring niche, like you could go on HGTV or the DIY Network and think, Oh, I'm gonna watch flip this land. The before pictures are all in the after pictures are all in. Plus, there's no hedge funds, there's no private equity groups. So you meet a million people can be in this niche, will all run out of money, before we run out of deal flow. Grant Plenty of opportunity for sure. So is some of this sort of altruistic in terms of you know, you want to give back, you want to see others sort of experience some of the same benefits you have is, is there a component to that that's driven yet to create these systems? Mark I mean, that really is my, my purpose, honestly, because, you know, buying and selling land is great. It's helped five people, really, my family. Yeah, that being said, nobody ever bought a piece of land for me, you know, called me and said, Mark, you changed my life with this land investment, but being able to help people retire their spouses, so they could spend more time with their children, being able to have people replace their income, and really get out of what I call so economic dependency, which means that they're personally not working. They're not making any money, so that they can move up Maslow's hierarchy of needs, into self actualization, and solve not just their money problems, but their time problems, to explore their highest purpose in life. That has been the most gratifying thing for me, professionally. And I absolutely love waking up to that idea every day. Grant This is the "why" of your journey. Right there. That last sentence, isn't it? Yeah, it's helping them to get out of that solo economic dependency for sure. You had mentioned at one point, or I saw when I was doing some reviews on you, five reasons you should be creative, Pat, you should be creating passive income in raw land. What are those five reasons? Mark The first reason is, it's just so simple. All you got is a piece of land and a buyer and a seller. So you know, juxtapose that to like, say multifamily, where you've got to raise millions of dollars, you have to get private capital, you have to get investors, you could spend a million dollars just on due diligence alone. So it's just a much simpler way to go. The other issue is there's just no headaches, nobody's calling you up at three in the morning saying my land is leaking. So you get to go to bed every night, knowing that you don't have to deal with the typical headaches of real estate, tenants, termites, toilets, that kind of thing. So you know, another reason would be that it cash flows. So why not have this passive income come in, and get total freedom in life. So you can work when you want, where you want, and with whom you want. I think another reason is just that there's no limit to it. So you can grow as big or, you know, you can get to a point where you kind of like the Mexican fishermen, you have enough type of thing. And then I just think the other reason, it's a lot of fun. It's a lot of fun. And it's not building another job for you, yourself if you just automate it. And I think that's great. Grant Yeah, yeah, that is great. It's interesting that you found this niche. I love how you described it. It's narrow and yet very deep, you become very specialized in this. That's awesome. Mark. Thanks for taking the time with us today. Any final comments or tips you want to share with our listeners? Mark I always love this quote from Zig Ziglar. If you'll do for the next three to five years, what other people won't do, you'll be able to do for the rest of your life. What other people can't do. Grant That's a very enabling. I love that for sure. Gosh, that's awesome. Mark. Thanks for taking the time, "The Land Geek". I appreciate you doing this. And everyone thanks for listening to another episode of Financial Investing Radio. And until next time, check out thelandgeek.com

CAIR 75: Real Estate Returns Too Good To Be True? The Land Geek...

ClickAI Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 6, 2022 25:06

FIR 153: Tax Saving Secrets From An Insider

Financial Investing Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 30, 2022 25:47

In this episode, I have the opportunity to sit down with someone that has digested and synthesize the tax code and brings the tax saving secrets to you. Grant Hey, everybody, welcome to another episode of Financial investing radio. So today I have with me someone that just barely met. But as I review, his biography, his profile what he does, it is in one of those places, which I admittedly know so little about, I lean on so many people for help in this area. Now I get to meet with and speak with an expert in the area of how to take it to the tax man. All right, let me welcome Mark Meyers here today. Welcome, Mark. Mark Hey, thank you so much, Grant, I'm excited to chat with you about this. And, you know, hey, if you can keep more of that hard earned profit. It definitely helps in the wealth accumulation realm for sure. So this exciting topic. Grant Boy, for sure. You know, when when you think about taxes and talking about taxes, you know, it's probably right up there with flossing your teeth, right? It's like, oh, everyone should be doing it. Right. But oh, my gosh, do I really want to talk about taxes. Turns out, as I was reviewing some things that you have done to help people, individuals, businesses, really reduce their tax burden. And putting that money, like you said, or leaving that money back in your pocket, suddenly, it becomes really an interesting topic to address. But before you give away any secrets, let's back up. How is it that you got interested in taxes? What is it that even got you to this point? Mark Grant, you know, it's an interesting story, because I started out my career at the University of Florida, with as an undergrad in exercise physiology, get my Master's in sports management, moved to New York City to manage health clubs, and then moved to Los Angeles to edit, manage more health clubs. And in the process of doing that, I helped a really large high end brand, open a number of different locations. And in that they were they went from a 10 clubs to over 100 clubs. And in that process, I really learn to be an owner operator, every club that I would open or go chant, you know, help return around, I'd have to really be mindful of driving revenue, minimizing expenses, putting the operations in in place, you know, the best practices in place to get the best output. And of course, I was compensated on EBIT margin, so I'd get a base, and then I'd have cash bonus based off of how profitable is the company process, I realized, you know, hey, I might be running health clubs. And I might have a background here, but I have a knack for running companies. And I know there's a lot more opportunity in the financial markets in the financial world, particular to consulting with business owners, that's when I said the light came on after, you know, working well over a decade, you know, 365 days a year, and these clubs are open from, you know, five in the morning till 12 At night, you know, they never got hit. So I'm like, Okay, I'm going to shift gears here and do something fun that can ultimately help other people, and also helped me kind of increase my income opportunity here. Get out of this glass ceiling environment. Grant Yeah. So So you are living this life of just constantly being on right, the lights on, right, because your clubs are on right, the gyms are open, and so you're trying to optimize as much as possible. Talk about school, hard knocks, right? I mean, you learn the lessons along the way, for sure, right? Oh, for sure. Mark I mean, it's one of those things where you know, every penny counts, particularly in that industry. And of course, I worked in a higher end layer. So it was, you know, we're looking at 200 plus dollar a month memberships with spa packages and training and Pilates and Yoga. But at the same time, you still have to be mindful of your margins. That's really, really important. So it was it was a nice experience. It was a nice way to understand how to really learn the p&l, learn the people, learn the drivers, and then of course transitioned over to say, hey, I can speak to business owners, I could speak to those that are looking to, you know, increase efficiency. And there's a lot of opportunity there. So that's kind of where this all kicked off. Grant So in the course of doing this, you start uncovering, I'm assuming, oh, here's a little secret about how I could save a little more money or take some out of the taxes. I imagine over a period of time you started to build up this cadre, or list of or selection of wait, here's some best practices of actually taking the tax back from the tax man and leaving it with you. There's it was it was it that it was a 10 year journey that you invested in to build up that knowledge base? It sounds like, Right? Mark Absolutely. And you know, you really said something important, and it was very accurate in that my, my getting to where I am now didn't happen overnight. In particularly shifting gears, I'd say the last seven or eight years is when I really really shifted gears, to not just talk about can I just not consult with with individuals on their businesses and help them with maybe some financial planning, really shifting gears and saying, hey, there are a lot of different opportunities to reduce tax. And I just went out there. And just like in the past, in my first few years of this, I was kind of more of an advanced insurance specialist and consultant to business owners, and I could go out there and work with any insurance carrier. And I could basically look and say, you know, this is the carrier need for this solution. And this is why this is I realized I could do the same thing in the tax realm, there's just not 100 different, you know, tax savings providers out there, there's probably about 20 to 30 that you want to do business with. And these are small groups are generally fairly boutique, they're not huge. And they offer something very, very specific. And it's somewhere in the 70,000 pages of tax code. And they just so happened to analyze it, apply it. And basically, that's their gig key. So I have a lot of different tools in the tool chest, I have a lot of different relationships with groups that do these things. And I break when I do consulting work, I just put all the pieces of the puzzle together. And it's really cool. I'm not a CPA, I'm not a tax attorney, I'm really literally I call myself a tax savings architect, I've just developed this ability to consult, oh, that's a great title. Grant Wait, say that title again, you're a what? Mark A tax savings architect, Oh, I love it together, I just build I build the plan. And then I bring the vendors in, right, the right team on the on the coach, I'm bringing the right team in to put the right plays in at the right times. And then the implementation goes, you know, off, you know, from there. Grant So, what I want to highlight is you have developed this by doing it again and again, maybe making a mistake fixing it again and again, oh, learning more again, and you put in that 10 year effort to gather and build that experience and that that's the value platform that you bring to the people so they're not off doing 10 years of learning the lessons, right? Mark Oh, for sure. Grant, I'll tell you, these are types of things that, you know, people don't have time, even the best CPAs right. And you can think about any CPA out there, you've got out of every 10 You're gonna have to my experience, you're gonna have two out of 10 that have developed their practice in a way that they'll have forward looking have a forward looking approach. And they'll have more bandwidth than just, you know, recording and tracking and filing right most of them record track and file. Do you have any more expenses? Are you sure you don't have any more you know, you can buy this capital, we get section 179 it so why don't you spend $1 to save 35 cents? No, that's, that's really a good idea if you need what you're buying. But two out of 10 are forward looking right? They're actually stepping outside of the box and seeing what's out there. They're 70,000 pages of tax code. So this is where the key is at 10 years, you're talking about their 70,000 pages of tax code you if you're going to win a championship. If you're a team think about a just a collegiate team or a professional team. They have multiple coaches. They have strength coaches, they have quarterback coaches that are talking about football they have offensive line coaches defensive line coaches look at businesses the reason why Amazon and Microsoft and General Electric and Nike and DuPont the reason why they pay significantly lower taxes than the average individual is because they have teams they have accounting teams, more than one CPA, they have attorneys they have business strategists. So this is what I really do is I bring that team approach to the small to medium size business owner or you don't even have to be a small to medium sized business owner to have tax savings you can be a high income earning executive. Oh really how to Matt navigate the tax code. There's things that you can do to reduce your tax. Grant Okay, so that gets the the question I was gonna ask around who is this for? Definitely the business owner. But if you're, if you're in the High Net Worth areas and individual this is applicable to you as well. Mark Absolutely. There's three there's three He kind of avenues, business owners. And the reason why is business owners are great to work with because they have control over their income, they can determine how much salary they take, they can determine how they take their income. It really they have the control. The other side would be high income earning executives that maybe don't have as much control but they're they're looking at, you know, half a million dollars or more of taxable income per year. I can work with business owners with much less I mean, they can have as low as 250 or so in taxable income, okay, because the more there's more flexibility. And then the Third Avenue is people that are selling highly appreciated assets, once a lot of crypto traders or somebody that had a stock portfolio, but they didn't have this huge blend, it wasn't like a qualified account, it was just a brokerage account, they had positions that just blew up, and now they're sitting on, you know, $5 million with Apple stock. Well, if they pull the trigger on it, they're looking at, you know, if they're California 37%. Grant Yeah, goodbye to that. Mark Yeah, well, I can help them, you know, really take care of that as well either eliminated or different depending on what solutions we're looking at. Grant So, okay, what about what about on the, on the inheritance side, same same sort of story. In other words, let's say you inherited something is you have techniques that helps with that group as well. Mark Well, on the inheritance side, I don't spend a lot of time there, because generally, that should be done prior to and a lot of the work that I do actually blends in with maybe some estate planning attorneys, because you really want to solve that equation prior to the need. If you don't, then unfortunately, if you're above the exemption rate, the estate tax man will come take, you know, 60% of that from your kids, right? Not from you, but from your kids and your loved ones. And they might even have to be, they might have to sell appreciate it like this is a real estate high net worth real estate holder, they're selling off real estate just to pay the estate tax, which is never a good thing. So we when it comes to the gifting and the you know passing on to heirs, we generally integrate that into our planning, but we're doing it prior to so that way the kids and their loved ones can breathe, you know, sleep well at night and not have to worry too much about worrying too much about about that sort of thing. Grant So so let's take the scenario of you're a small and medium business owner and you've got the you've got this tax burden on you. Do you need to be doing the work ahead of time? Is this a whole year of effort that the business owner goes through? Whether they have to be intentional throughout the whole year? Or do your practices, techniques allow you to just sort of come in at the last minute and who 30% off? Thanks, Mark. Have a great year? Mark Yes, well, I would say a little bit of all apply. But proactive forward looking is always the best. The best approach is a forward looking approach. Now I can do hindsight foresight, and then give you insight. On the hindsight we're always looking at, well, what did you miss that you can go back and pick up a lot of people don't realize, particularly in business, there's tax credits that they can pick up in previous years. Currently, right now for the next few months. There's the employee retention tax credit. So there's there's r&d credits, there's there's trends for investing in renewable energy, they can go backwards and pick up previous taxes paid, it's always look at the hindsight, what can we pick up that you paid in the last year or two or three? Ford, Ford sight? Or, you know, foresight is okay, what can we do to change the trajectory of your current income? Because right now, the way we're always looking at pathways, how are you taking your income, because what we need to do is look at creating new pathways. And if you have different pathways to receive the same income, there might be a different taxable situation. But those pathways aren't going to save you. You can't save any money until the pathway is created. So the foresight we're always looking at, well, this is how much money you're taking in now. And you've taken it in one pathway, or maybe two pathways, and this is your taxable outcome. But what if we created two additional pathways? Now you have four pathways, and we're not talking about deferring it. And putting into qualified accounts. I'm not talking about any of that, obviously, that's been going on for years and years and years is there's arguments as to whether or not that really is saving them anything. At the end of the day, we're talking about really taking tax law and the tax code by the horns and saying, hey, the tax code says I can do this, therefore, this money is not taxable. Right. So now that you have this money in your hand, that's not taxable you and you've lowered your adjusted gross income because you took a portion of your money that the tax code says is not taxable because of the way that you've structured it structure that we've just just decreased your taxes and you're like liquid, like the money that you save is liquid, it's in your pocket. If you want to use that for investing you can if you want to use that to recapitalize your business you can if you want to use that to go to Vegas, you can. Grant Yeah, your choice and that's the whole point. It's your choice rather than Uncle Sam. So the strategy seems to be tell me if I've got this right. It's don't fire your CPA because you're going to keep The CPA as a business owner, because you're not the CPA, but what you are bringing is a way to be more productive as you work with the CPA, right, you're bringing in additional knowledge or insight that will then be brought into those conversations with the CPA currently have is that close 100%. Mark And what I always like to tell business owners, and right off the bat is, you know, let's, let's not put your CPA on defense mode, right? They, there's no CPA out there that has the bandwidth, to have this time to vet and research all these different ways to save taxes. I mean, they know a lot, but because they may not know everything that I'll bring to the table, that's okay. So the first thing is make sure that they're not on the defense. And also, I'm not looking to take over any bookkeeping, your tax filing or tax prep, I'm just looking to add additional layers that usually increase revenue for the accounting because it usually does increase their need to maybe have an additional filing each year, or maybe some additional bookkeeping to take to oversee these new solutions. Grant So it's all day for you as a partner in it, your they don't see you as Oh, I'm here taking business from 100%. Mark Most of the time, when I'm speaking to the right CPAs. And I'm introduced to them by the taxpayer, I get introduced to three or four new clients that the CPA has, because they're like, this is great, I have you know, four or five, or depending on the CPA, they might work with a higher net worth individuals, they might have more, but I like those relationships, because they open the door for more opportunity. Now, I will say there's going to be out of that regard every 10 CPAs, there's two that are for thinking. And there's eight that are really just doing the numbers really doing the prep the recording and filing and prepping. Sometimes the eight, there could be some resistance there. And it's it's, it's only because they don't know what they don't know. So in those situations, hey, I always say it's up to you. It's up to the taxpayer, that you're the decision maker, the CPA is not the decision maker. And I have you know, I never want to pry someone away from their CPA, but if they really liked what I'm talking about under CPAs, just very resistant, doing anything that they're outside of their norm was to have dozens and dozens of CPAs all over the nation that would be very happy to interview you. Or you could interview them because they know the solutions and their clients use them. Grant Yeah, I was gonna ask you. So how does you know? What's some guidance for our listeners on? How do you pick? How do you find those two out of the 10? CPAs? Right? What are some of the key things that someone's looking for? to vet your CPA or while you're searching for someone to say, now you're you're part of the 80%? It's you you're actually not going to help me as much I'm looking for the 20% What What are some tips you have? Mark Yeah, first thing Grant is ask them if they do quarterly meetings. If the CPA or the tax preparer for you is not meeting with you quarterly, they are not forward looking, they're likely going to say hey, let's meet in might not even be before the end of the year, it might be in like January or February to say tell me what you have, is that all the expenses you have? Are you sure because we need to file. But if they even if they're only meeting once per year, at the end of the year, and just trying to figure out, okay, we need to shove a little bit more in the qualified account. And maybe you can have any more, you know, maybe you can buy some more capital equipment. That is not, you know, I'm not saying that's well, let me just say this, that is not the accounting, that that someone needs as they're climbing, the echelon of income, if they're still using that CPA, when they're climbing that income bracket, they are going to be paying retail taxes. When everybody else that has reached that level. When they get to a certain level of of success. They figured out how to pay wholesale sales, no different. There's no different there's a retail price, and there's a wholesale price and the people that pay the wholesale price go above and beyond and look for the coupons where the coupons they're in the tax code. Awesome. The IRS is not saying I'm giving out all day. Yeah, they're not putting a flyer out your mail. Grant Wait a minute, are you saying there's no mobile app that they could the tax code mobile app with coupons? I think we should build that. That's a great I should yeah, that's my app. Mark Together Grant. Grant Let's go build that. I bet there's a market for that. Mark Okay. I would bet there is as well. Yeah, absolutely. Grant I love that idea. Okay, so there's something I saw on your profile that intrigued me many things intrigued me and one of those. I just gotta read this off here. Because when I read it, I was like, Where do I sign? It? It was it was learn how to get the IRS to fund a portion of your retirement 100% tax free. So like, right next to the mobile app. We just talked about developing there's this also. Okay, tell me all right. We want the IRS to fund a portion of our retirement 100% tax free any secrets you can share on that? Mark You know, there's a I'll, I won't give everything away, right? I want people to want to ask me some questions. But I will say this, there's a few different ways to do it. One of the ways is when you find these tax savings, right, when there's that when you're applying the code that's going to basically give you a deduction, right? Because there's codes I can actually, you know, there's a little golf tournament. Here's a nice secret out there. A lot of people know about this, but let's a lot of people don't as well, golf tournament out there. It's been going on for years and years and years. And the winner gets a green jacket. I'm not sure if you're a golfing fan. Oh, sure. Or Yep. If you know, who gets the green jacket every year, you know, there there is somewhere in Georgia and a little town. That's right. And it's a very prestigious golf tournament. So about 60 years ago, the higher net worth individuals that lived around that, that golf course realize that they could rent their homes to the corporation's coming in that were or anyone coming in that wanted to, you know, watch the tournament, and they could rent their homes for significantly more than they would you know, what would cost them to go have a little nice vacation? So in that process, they said, Well, these are our personal residence. This is not a this is not an income property. So they lobby to the their friends and Senate and said, Hey, we're not renting our this is not an income producing property. But we're not getting any deductions on this. We're not getting any tax benefits. But so can we have some benefits. So they basically the Congress, and there's two tax codes that validate this, you can rent your personal residence for up to a certain number of days per year. And the dollars that you receive for that rent is tax free, as long as you don't rent your home for over a certain number of days. Now, here's where it gets fun grant, because some people don't want strangers in their house. Right? So even if they could rent their house for significantly more than they could go do something else. They don't want to Airbnb their house, what if they're a business owner? Well, can they rent their business? Can they rent their house to their business for business purposes? Using the same tax code? Absolutely. Now, we just have to determine what the value is, and put it in your bot and your minutes and ultimately integrate it and know, now when you create those deductions, right? Because if you're renting your house, from your business, and you create a deduction at the business level, but didn't cost you anything at the personal level, or the business level, maybe there's a, you know, maybe the meeting you did was whatever, you know, lunch, well, you just created deductions with no cost, no cost. Now that tax savings now the tax savings is getting to you from that's where you're funding your retirement tax free from the IRS because those that those dollars are non taxable. Now, if you get them into a Roth, if you get them into a cash value life insurance policy, you're never paying the taxes again. So now you're looking at never even paying taxes again after you didn't pay the taxes on it to begin with. Okay, that was one little nugget. Grant That's you know, would you just drop the mic on that? You're not holding in my car? Yeah, yeah. Mark No, but if I dropped it, it might fall off my desk. Grant I might, I might fall off that. Yeah, I tell you, Mark, that that was awesome. Just following that flow of what you articulated. I think that's a beautiful thing. Okay. So let me ask you this. With all that you're doing, and with all that people are coming to you for? How do they engage with you? How do they dial it? How they interact with you? How do they how do they say I'm a good candidate for you? Where do they go to find out more about you? Mark Great question, I always just invite him to my website, Grant, I just PeakProfitSolutions.com. And as you know, peak as in a mountain peak, P-E-A-K Profit Solutions, plural PeakProfitSolutions.com. On that you can have, there's places where you can go get case studies, I click here for some case studies, there's a link that says, hey, book an appointment with me, and 20 It literally only takes me 20 minutes to have a conversation with someone to determine if they're a good candidate for any one of the dozen or more solutions that I can bring to the table. That's really the best thing though, the most important thing to know is, you know, just take a little bit of time, even if it's 20 minute phone call, you don't have to come super prepared. They don't have to come with their entire balance and their their previous tax years and their p&l Like just come and say, This is what I how I'm structured. This is how much I'm making every year. I'm writing a lot, you know, just all they need to do is do that. And I and from that point forward, I can determine right out of the gate if they're a good candidate for the architecture to start. Grnant The tax architect. Mark Architect, tax savings, architecture, tax savings architect good building. That's right. Grant That is awesome. That is awesome. Excellent. Mark, thank you for your time today. Any final comments? Mark No, I just appreciate being on the show. Appreciate your, your hosting style, and of course, all the interviews that you've done on your channel so are fun to listen to. So thank you. Grant I'm having fun. It's a fascinating world, right? There's just so many great people doing so many cool things. So when your profile came across me as like, Oh, I gotta talk this guy. He's got some secrets about reducing taxes. Okay, yeah, he's in. So thanks for doing that mark for thanks for taking the time everyone. Thanks for joining another episode of Financial investing radio. And until next time, go check out go check out Peak Profits Solutions. Thank you for joining Grant on Financial Investing Radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback.

university amazon california new york city master apple los angeles las vegas talk secrets microsoft yoga financial congress saving airbnb senate pilates insider cpa irs roth dupont general electric uncle sam cpas high net worth ebit mark grant third avenue mark you mark no mark yeah mark well mark oh mark yes mark okay mark hey mark absolutely

CAIR 72: Tax Saving Secrets From An Insider

ClickAI Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 30, 2022 25:47

In this episode, I have the opportunity to sit down with someone that has digested and synthesize the tax code and brings the tax saving secrets to you. Grant Hey, everybody, welcome to another episode of Financial investing radio. So today I have with me someone that just barely met. But as I review, his biography, his profile what he does, it is in one of those places, which I admittedly know so little about, I lean on so many people for help in this area. Now I get to meet with and speak with an expert in the area of how to take it to the tax man. All right, let me welcome Mark Meyers here today. Welcome, Mark. Mark Hey, thank you so much, Grant, I'm excited to chat with you about this. And, you know, hey, if you can keep more of that hard earned profit. It definitely helps in the wealth accumulation realm for sure. So this exciting topic. Grant Boy, for sure. You know, when when you think about taxes and talking about taxes, you know, it's probably right up there with flossing your teeth, right? It's like, oh, everyone should be doing it. Right. But oh, my gosh, do I really want to talk about taxes. Turns out, as I was reviewing some things that you have done to help people, individuals, businesses, really reduce their tax burden. And putting that money, like you said, or leaving that money back in your pocket, suddenly, it becomes really an interesting topic to address. But before you give away any secrets, let's back up. How is it that you got interested in taxes? What is it that even got you to this point? Mark Grant, you know, it's an interesting story, because I started out my career at the University of Florida, with as an undergrad in exercise physiology, get my Master's in sports management, moved to New York City to manage health clubs, and then moved to Los Angeles to edit, manage more health clubs. And in the process of doing that, I helped a really large high end brand, open a number of different locations. And in that they were they went from a 10 clubs to over 100 clubs. And in that process, I really learn to be an owner operator, every club that I would open or go chant, you know, help return around, I'd have to really be mindful of driving revenue, minimizing expenses, putting the operations in in place, you know, the best practices in place to get the best output. And of course, I was compensated on EBIT margin, so I'd get a base, and then I'd have cash bonus based off of how profitable is the company process, I realized, you know, hey, I might be running health clubs. And I might have a background here, but I have a knack for running companies. And I know there's a lot more opportunity in the financial markets in the financial world, particular to consulting with business owners, that's when I said the light came on after, you know, working well over a decade, you know, 365 days a year, and these clubs are open from, you know, five in the morning till 12 At night, you know, they never got hit. So I'm like, Okay, I'm going to shift gears here and do something fun that can ultimately help other people, and also helped me kind of increase my income opportunity here. Get out of this glass ceiling environment. Grant Yeah. So So you are living this life of just constantly being on right, the lights on, right, because your clubs are on right, the gyms are open, and so you're trying to optimize as much as possible. Talk about school, hard knocks, right? I mean, you learn the lessons along the way, for sure, right? Oh, for sure. Mark I mean, it's one of those things where you know, every penny counts, particularly in that industry. And of course, I worked in a higher end layer. So it was, you know, we're looking at 200 plus dollar a month memberships with spa packages and training and Pilates and Yoga. But at the same time, you still have to be mindful of your margins. That's really, really important. So it was it was a nice experience. It was a nice way to understand how to really learn the p&l, learn the people, learn the drivers, and then of course transitioned over to say, hey, I can speak to business owners, I could speak to those that are looking to, you know, increase efficiency. And there's a lot of opportunity there. So that's kind of where this all kicked off. Grant So in the course of doing this, you start uncovering, I'm assuming, oh, here's a little secret about how I could save a little more money or take some out of the taxes. I imagine over a period of time you started to build up this cadre, or list of or selection of wait, here's some best practices of actually taking the tax back from the tax man and leaving it with you. There's it was it was it that it was a 10 year journey that you invested in to build up that knowledge base? It sounds like, Right? Mark Absolutely. And you know, you really said something important, and it was very accurate in that my, my getting to where I am now didn't happen overnight. In particularly shifting gears, I'd say the last seven or eight years is when I really really shifted gears, to not just talk about can I just not consult with with individuals on their businesses and help them with maybe some financial planning, really shifting gears and saying, hey, there are a lot of different opportunities to reduce tax. And I just went out there. And just like in the past, in my first few years of this, I was kind of more of an advanced insurance specialist and consultant to business owners, and I could go out there and work with any insurance carrier. And I could basically look and say, you know, this is the carrier need for this solution. And this is why this is I realized I could do the same thing in the tax realm, there's just not 100 different, you know, tax savings providers out there, there's probably about 20 to 30 that you want to do business with. And these are small groups are generally fairly boutique, they're not huge. And they offer something very, very specific. And it's somewhere in the 70,000 pages of tax code. And they just so happened to analyze it, apply it. And basically, that's their gig key. So I have a lot of different tools in the tool chest, I have a lot of different relationships with groups that do these things. And I break when I do consulting work, I just put all the pieces of the puzzle together. And it's really cool. I'm not a CPA, I'm not a tax attorney, I'm really literally I call myself a tax savings architect, I've just developed this ability to consult, oh, that's a great title. Grant Wait, say that title again, you're a what? Mark A tax savings architect, Oh, I love it together, I just build I build the plan. And then I bring the vendors in, right, the right team on the on the coach, I'm bringing the right team in to put the right plays in at the right times. And then the implementation goes, you know, off, you know, from there. Grant So, what I want to highlight is you have developed this by doing it again and again, maybe making a mistake fixing it again and again, oh, learning more again, and you put in that 10 year effort to gather and build that experience and that that's the value platform that you bring to the people so they're not off doing 10 years of learning the lessons, right? Mark Oh, for sure. Grant, I'll tell you, these are types of things that, you know, people don't have time, even the best CPAs right. And you can think about any CPA out there, you've got out of every 10 You're gonna have to my experience, you're gonna have two out of 10 that have developed their practice in a way that they'll have forward looking have a forward looking approach. And they'll have more bandwidth than just, you know, recording and tracking and filing right most of them record track and file. Do you have any more expenses? Are you sure you don't have any more you know, you can buy this capital, we get section 179 it so why don't you spend $1 to save 35 cents? No, that's, that's really a good idea if you need what you're buying. But two out of 10 are forward looking right? They're actually stepping outside of the box and seeing what's out there. They're 70,000 pages of tax code. So this is where the key is at 10 years, you're talking about their 70,000 pages of tax code you if you're going to win a championship. If you're a team think about a just a collegiate team or a professional team. They have multiple coaches. They have strength coaches, they have quarterback coaches that are talking about football they have offensive line coaches defensive line coaches look at businesses the reason why Amazon and Microsoft and General Electric and Nike and DuPont the reason why they pay significantly lower taxes than the average individual is because they have teams they have accounting teams, more than one CPA, they have attorneys they have business strategists. So this is what I really do is I bring that team approach to the small to medium size business owner or you don't even have to be a small to medium sized business owner to have tax savings you can be a high income earning executive. Oh really how to Matt navigate the tax code. There's things that you can do to reduce your tax. Grant Okay, so that gets the the question I was gonna ask around who is this for? Definitely the business owner. But if you're, if you're in the High Net Worth areas and individual this is applicable to you as well. Mark Absolutely. There's three there's three He kind of avenues, business owners. And the reason why is business owners are great to work with because they have control over their income, they can determine how much salary they take, they can determine how they take their income. It really they have the control. The other side would be high income earning executives that maybe don't have as much control but they're they're looking at, you know, half a million dollars or more of taxable income per year. I can work with business owners with much less I mean, they can have as low as 250 or so in taxable income, okay, because the more there's more flexibility. And then the Third Avenue is people that are selling highly appreciated assets, once a lot of crypto traders or somebody that had a stock portfolio, but they didn't have this huge blend, it wasn't like a qualified account, it was just a brokerage account, they had positions that just blew up, and now they're sitting on, you know, $5 million with Apple stock. Well, if they pull the trigger on it, they're looking at, you know, if they're California 37%. Grant Yeah, goodbye to that. Mark Yeah, well, I can help them, you know, really take care of that as well either eliminated or different depending on what solutions we're looking at. Grant So, okay, what about what about on the, on the inheritance side, same same sort of story. In other words, let's say you inherited something is you have techniques that helps with that group as well. Mark Well, on the inheritance side, I don't spend a lot of time there, because generally, that should be done prior to and a lot of the work that I do actually blends in with maybe some estate planning attorneys, because you really want to solve that equation prior to the need. If you don't, then unfortunately, if you're above the exemption rate, the estate tax man will come take, you know, 60% of that from your kids, right? Not from you, but from your kids and your loved ones. And they might even have to be, they might have to sell appreciate it like this is a real estate high net worth real estate holder, they're selling off real estate just to pay the estate tax, which is never a good thing. So we when it comes to the gifting and the you know passing on to heirs, we generally integrate that into our planning, but we're doing it prior to so that way the kids and their loved ones can breathe, you know, sleep well at night and not have to worry too much about worrying too much about about that sort of thing. Grant So so let's take the scenario of you're a small and medium business owner and you've got the you've got this tax burden on you. Do you need to be doing the work ahead of time? Is this a whole year of effort that the business owner goes through? Whether they have to be intentional throughout the whole year? Or do your practices, techniques allow you to just sort of come in at the last minute and who 30% off? Thanks, Mark. Have a great year? Mark Yes, well, I would say a little bit of all apply. But proactive forward looking is always the best. The best approach is a forward looking approach. Now I can do hindsight foresight, and then give you insight. On the hindsight we're always looking at, well, what did you miss that you can go back and pick up a lot of people don't realize, particularly in business, there's tax credits that they can pick up in previous years. Currently, right now for the next few months. There's the employee retention tax credit. So there's there's r&d credits, there's there's trends for investing in renewable energy, they can go backwards and pick up previous taxes paid, it's always look at the hindsight, what can we pick up that you paid in the last year or two or three? Ford, Ford sight? Or, you know, foresight is okay, what can we do to change the trajectory of your current income? Because right now, the way we're always looking at pathways, how are you taking your income, because what we need to do is look at creating new pathways. And if you have different pathways to receive the same income, there might be a different taxable situation. But those pathways aren't going to save you. You can't save any money until the pathway is created. So the foresight we're always looking at, well, this is how much money you're taking in now. And you've taken it in one pathway, or maybe two pathways, and this is your taxable outcome. But what if we created two additional pathways? Now you have four pathways, and we're not talking about deferring it. And putting into qualified accounts. I'm not talking about any of that, obviously, that's been going on for years and years and years is there's arguments as to whether or not that really is saving them anything. At the end of the day, we're talking about really taking tax law and the tax code by the horns and saying, hey, the tax code says I can do this, therefore, this money is not taxable. Right. So now that you have this money in your hand, that's not taxable you and you've lowered your adjusted gross income because you took a portion of your money that the tax code says is not taxable because of the way that you've structured it structure that we've just just decreased your taxes and you're like liquid, like the money that you save is liquid, it's in your pocket. If you want to use that for investing you can if you want to use that to recapitalize your business you can if you want to use that to go to Vegas, you can. Grant Yeah, your choice and that's the whole point. It's your choice rather than Uncle Sam. So the strategy seems to be tell me if I've got this right. It's don't fire your CPA because you're going to keep The CPA as a business owner, because you're not the CPA, but what you are bringing is a way to be more productive as you work with the CPA, right, you're bringing in additional knowledge or insight that will then be brought into those conversations with the CPA currently have is that close 100%. Mark And what I always like to tell business owners, and right off the bat is, you know, let's, let's not put your CPA on defense mode, right? They, there's no CPA out there that has the bandwidth, to have this time to vet and research all these different ways to save taxes. I mean, they know a lot, but because they may not know everything that I'll bring to the table, that's okay. So the first thing is make sure that they're not on the defense. And also, I'm not looking to take over any bookkeeping, your tax filing or tax prep, I'm just looking to add additional layers that usually increase revenue for the accounting because it usually does increase their need to maybe have an additional filing each year, or maybe some additional bookkeeping to take to oversee these new solutions. Grant So it's all day for you as a partner in it, your they don't see you as Oh, I'm here taking business from 100%. Mark Most of the time, when I'm speaking to the right CPAs. And I'm introduced to them by the taxpayer, I get introduced to three or four new clients that the CPA has, because they're like, this is great, I have you know, four or five, or depending on the CPA, they might work with a higher net worth individuals, they might have more, but I like those relationships, because they open the door for more opportunity. Now, I will say there's going to be out of that regard every 10 CPAs, there's two that are for thinking. And there's eight that are really just doing the numbers really doing the prep the recording and filing and prepping. Sometimes the eight, there could be some resistance there. And it's it's, it's only because they don't know what they don't know. So in those situations, hey, I always say it's up to you. It's up to the taxpayer, that you're the decision maker, the CPA is not the decision maker. And I have you know, I never want to pry someone away from their CPA, but if they really liked what I'm talking about under CPAs, just very resistant, doing anything that they're outside of their norm was to have dozens and dozens of CPAs all over the nation that would be very happy to interview you. Or you could interview them because they know the solutions and their clients use them. Grant Yeah, I was gonna ask you. So how does you know? What's some guidance for our listeners on? How do you pick? How do you find those two out of the 10? CPAs? Right? What are some of the key things that someone's looking for? to vet your CPA or while you're searching for someone to say, now you're you're part of the 80%? It's you you're actually not going to help me as much I'm looking for the 20% What What are some tips you have? Mark Yeah, first thing Grant is ask them if they do quarterly meetings. If the CPA or the tax preparer for you is not meeting with you quarterly, they are not forward looking, they're likely going to say hey, let's meet in might not even be before the end of the year, it might be in like January or February to say tell me what you have, is that all the expenses you have? Are you sure because we need to file. But if they even if they're only meeting once per year, at the end of the year, and just trying to figure out, okay, we need to shove a little bit more in the qualified account. And maybe you can have any more, you know, maybe you can buy some more capital equipment. That is not, you know, I'm not saying that's well, let me just say this, that is not the accounting, that that someone needs as they're climbing, the echelon of income, if they're still using that CPA, when they're climbing that income bracket, they are going to be paying retail taxes. When everybody else that has reached that level. When they get to a certain level of of success. They figured out how to pay wholesale sales, no different. There's no different there's a retail price, and there's a wholesale price and the people that pay the wholesale price go above and beyond and look for the coupons where the coupons they're in the tax code. Awesome. The IRS is not saying I'm giving out all day. Yeah, they're not putting a flyer out your mail. Grant Wait a minute, are you saying there's no mobile app that they could the tax code mobile app with coupons? I think we should build that. That's a great I should yeah, that's my app. Mark Together Grant. Grant Let's go build that. I bet there's a market for that. Mark Okay. I would bet there is as well. Yeah, absolutely. Grant I love that idea. Okay, so there's something I saw on your profile that intrigued me many things intrigued me and one of those. I just gotta read this off here. Because when I read it, I was like, Where do I sign? It? It was it was learn how to get the IRS to fund a portion of your retirement 100% tax free. So like, right next to the mobile app. We just talked about developing there's this also. Okay, tell me all right. We want the IRS to fund a portion of our retirement 100% tax free any secrets you can share on that? Mark You know, there's a I'll, I won't give everything away, right? I want people to want to ask me some questions. But I will say this, there's a few different ways to do it. One of the ways is when you find these tax savings, right, when there's that when you're applying the code that's going to basically give you a deduction, right? Because there's codes I can actually, you know, there's a little golf tournament. Here's a nice secret out there. A lot of people know about this, but let's a lot of people don't as well, golf tournament out there. It's been going on for years and years and years. And the winner gets a green jacket. I'm not sure if you're a golfing fan. Oh, sure. Or Yep. If you know, who gets the green jacket every year, you know, there there is somewhere in Georgia and a little town. That's right. And it's a very prestigious golf tournament. So about 60 years ago, the higher net worth individuals that lived around that, that golf course realize that they could rent their homes to the corporation's coming in that were or anyone coming in that wanted to, you know, watch the tournament, and they could rent their homes for significantly more than they would you know, what would cost them to go have a little nice vacation? So in that process, they said, Well, these are our personal residence. This is not a this is not an income property. So they lobby to the their friends and Senate and said, Hey, we're not renting our this is not an income producing property. But we're not getting any deductions on this. We're not getting any tax benefits. But so can we have some benefits. So they basically the Congress, and there's two tax codes that validate this, you can rent your personal residence for up to a certain number of days per year. And the dollars that you receive for that rent is tax free, as long as you don't rent your home for over a certain number of days. Now, here's where it gets fun grant, because some people don't want strangers in their house. Right? So even if they could rent their house for significantly more than they could go do something else. They don't want to Airbnb their house, what if they're a business owner? Well, can they rent their business? Can they rent their house to their business for business purposes? Using the same tax code? Absolutely. Now, we just have to determine what the value is, and put it in your bot and your minutes and ultimately integrate it and know, now when you create those deductions, right? Because if you're renting your house, from your business, and you create a deduction at the business level, but didn't cost you anything at the personal level, or the business level, maybe there's a, you know, maybe the meeting you did was whatever, you know, lunch, well, you just created deductions with no cost, no cost. Now that tax savings now the tax savings is getting to you from that's where you're funding your retirement tax free from the IRS because those that those dollars are non taxable. Now, if you get them into a Roth, if you get them into a cash value life insurance policy, you're never paying the taxes again. So now you're looking at never even paying taxes again after you didn't pay the taxes on it to begin with. Okay, that was one little nugget. Grant That's you know, would you just drop the mic on that? You're not holding in my car? Yeah, yeah. Mark No, but if I dropped it, it might fall off my desk. Grant I might, I might fall off that. Yeah, I tell you, Mark, that that was awesome. Just following that flow of what you articulated. I think that's a beautiful thing. Okay. So let me ask you this. With all that you're doing, and with all that people are coming to you for? How do they engage with you? How do they dial it? How they interact with you? How do they how do they say I'm a good candidate for you? Where do they go to find out more about you? Mark Great question, I always just invite him to my website, Grant, I just PeakProfitSolutions.com. And as you know, peak as in a mountain peak, P-E-A-K Profit Solutions, plural PeakProfitSolutions.com. On that you can have, there's places where you can go get case studies, I click here for some case studies, there's a link that says, hey, book an appointment with me, and 20 It literally only takes me 20 minutes to have a conversation with someone to determine if they're a good candidate for any one of the dozen or more solutions that I can bring to the table. That's really the best thing though, the most important thing to know is, you know, just take a little bit of time, even if it's 20 minute phone call, you don't have to come super prepared. They don't have to come with their entire balance and their their previous tax years and their p&l Like just come and say, This is what I how I'm structured. This is how much I'm making every year. I'm writing a lot, you know, just all they need to do is do that. And I and from that point forward, I can determine right out of the gate if they're a good candidate for the architecture to start. Grnant The tax architect. Mark Architect, tax savings, architecture, tax savings architect good building. That's right. Grant That is awesome. That is awesome. Excellent. Mark, thank you for your time today. Any final comments? Mark No, I just appreciate being on the show. Appreciate your, your hosting style, and of course, all the interviews that you've done on your channel so are fun to listen to. So thank you. Grant I'm having fun. It's a fascinating world, right? There's just so many great people doing so many cool things. So when your profile came across me as like, Oh, I gotta talk this guy. He's got some secrets about reducing taxes. Okay, yeah, he's in. So thanks for doing that mark for thanks for taking the time everyone. Thanks for joining another episode of Financial Investing Radio. And until next time, go check out go check out Peak Profits Solutions. Thank you for joining Grant on Financial Investing Radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback.

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Adversities?

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 6, 2022 44:18

Remember, we welcome comments, questions and suggested topics at thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com S3E21 TRANSCRIPT:----more---- Yucca: Welcome back to the wonder science-based paganism. I'm one of your hosts Yucca. Mark: And I'm the other one. Yucca: And this episode, we're talking about adversity. So some of what's going on in the world right now, personal adversity, how we can deal with that, address that, and, really all those topics surrounding that. Mark: Yeah, every week as we talk about what we're going to discuss. The, the challenge of these times really comes to us. And it's not that other times haven't had their own challenges because they certainly have, but the challenges that face these times that we're living in right now are so extreme and so severe. And so ubiquitous that even, even. People who are generally pretty privileged are still impacted by them. Only, only the, the fabulously wealthy are able to sort of skate on being impacted by the things that are, that are putting pressure on us humans, as we try to live our daily lives. And so we thought. That it would be good to kind of come at this head on this week and talk about adversity and approaches to it and how our spiritual and ritual practices can help us with that. And just kind of trying to map out the territory a little bit on what it feels like when you feel threatened, when. When bad things are happening and they hurt and they scare you. And and you're, you're challenged in knowing what to do. Yucca: Yeah. So one of the things that we could start with is thinking about when you are faced with adversity, with taking a look at. And really honestly, examining what's going on and what components you have control over and which ones you don't, because we can take things really personal sometimes that, you had no control over that forest fire or that hurricane or. Realistically the, the state of the economy, you as an individual, that's what the Stoics would call inconsequential. Right? Not that it doesn't matter, but that you don't control it. You don't have direct influence over it. But there are some things that you do have control over, your responses. Yeah. Mark: Right. And being able to make that differentiation, having the discernment is really important. And some of what's required for that is to be able to step back emotionally a little bit, kind of call them the, the, the panic feelings and, or, or the hurt feelings. Yucca: Which takes practice. Mark: It does take practice. And, you know, the grounding procedures that we've talked about here on this podcast, many times are super useful for that meditation entering into ritual, trance states. All of those things can really help you with. Being able to step back and take a dispassionate, look as much as possible at the circumstances that you're in and then really try to sift out, Okay. this is stuff I have some impact over. This is stuff that I can influence. This is stuff that's beyond my control. And I, I either that, or it's only very marginally within my control. And so as I approached this adversity, I'm going to put most of my effort into the things that I actually have a lot of influence over. Right. I can affect my own behavior. I can affect my own mentality. And part of what, what is required to get to that decision is to abandon narratives that have to do with personal failure, personal lack of worthiness or, or a general sort of despair at the nature of the world, because all of those are very disempowering. You know, if, if you're, if the place that you're stuck in confronting an adverse situation is why does this always happen to me or It's hopeless. The world is just like that. Then it's very difficult for you to be able to make any changes that are going to improve your situation. So that involves working with that inner critic voice and with your own, self-esteem all the kinds of things we've been talking about throughout this podcast. You know, relationships feed us and the relationship that feeds us more than any other is our relationship with ourselves. Yucca: Yeah. It's comes from a Christian tradition, but I've always been quite fond of the serenity. And modified it. So the, it goes may have the serenity to accept the things that I can not change the courage to change the things that I can and the wisdom to know the difference. Mark: There it is Yucca: Yeah. Mark: Reinhold Niebuhr. Yucca: Right. And so that was a slightly modified version. Cause I don't want to start with oh God and heavenly father, because I don't think it's coming from anyone else. Right. This is, this is coming from inside. This is coming from us and our, our view on the world and our view on ourselves. But I think it's a really useful framework for that. Mark: And part of what it does is it. It calls on certain capacities within us, that all of us have, right. We all have the capacity to be serene and dispassionate. We all have the capacity to be courageous and we all have the capacity to be. Right. And those are the kinds of things that. we need to bring to bear when we're in an adverse situation. So really at the very beginning, there's that, there's that winnowing out of what can I do and what is unlikely to be influenceable by my actions. And this is a place where we differ quite a bit from. Rest of the pagan community because in the, in the mainstream pagan community where people believe in gods and in literal magic, they think they can influence stuff like decisions in Congress by having, or a decision at the Supreme court, by having a ritual and praying to their gods. Yucca: Now, I think those things can be influenced, but with act with action, right? Not necessarily ritual. Mark: Right. And we, in our naturalistic non-ferrous pagan science-based pagan traditions do not believe that we have super powerful beings to appeal to. It's all about us. We're we're here on earth. And when, when these things happen or change, it's going to be because we make them do that. We meaning humanity writ large. Yucca: Okay. Mark: So this is an important distinction, Right. And to my mind, it's an empowering distinction to often have I heard in the pagan community? Oh, well, that's up to the gods. Which is a dereliction of responsibility. In my opinion, we do have a responsibility for the kind of government that we have. We do have a responsibility for for the kind of world and culture that we're building. And that from everything from the way that we treat one another, all the way to. Our specific activism in favor of policies that are more kind and more inclusive And more just. Yucca: Right. going back to what you, to what we were talking about before, though, another way of talking about this, that is all true, but none of us are the chosen one. Right. There is, there's not a chosen one who we individually are going to make that happen. And because the Supreme court makes the decision that we don't want, that doesn't make it our individual fault that we need to have shame about because we didn't work hard enough. We didn't do enough. We didn't, you know, we weren't enough, enough enough. This is something that we as humanity, we as a community have influence over, but we're members of the community. We are. All of humanity individually. Mark: Yeah. That's the flip side of this is not over imagining the degree of power that you have. Each of us is a powerful person, but we're also just. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: And so not having exaggerated or inflated ideas of your own personal influence or underestimated and discounted ideas of your own personal influence, I think is very important. We talk a lot about paying attention. In this podcast, paying attention to the cycles of nature, paying attention to what creatures are, are thriving and living and going through their life cycles at any given time of the year, paying attention to what's going on inside you so that you can grow and learn and and become happier and freer. And. You know, a more actualized person and that kind of paying attention is also necessary when it comes to understanding our limits, as well as our capacities. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: Where are we now? We we've talked about adversity and the discernment process. Do we want to go into, then what we can do, having, having sifted out the things that we have influence over? Yucca: Yeah, I think I mean, there's definitely, there's so many different directions to come at this from there's different kinds of adversity, right? There's, there's personal, kind of individual challenges. There might be the interpersonal relationship between you and your partner or family member, but then there's kind of, there's other scales of things. There's job loss and sickness and. Those sorts of things. And then, and then really big scale things that are impacting everybody with like climate change and fires and hurricanes and, global economics war. So there's all of these different scales. But a lot of the things that we can do. On an emotional kind of spiritual level are going to be very similar responses to those in terms of how we can take care of ourselves. But one of the places we could start with is talking about preparing oneself to face adversities, because we're going to, you don't know what it's going to be in your life. Maybe, maybe you're going to be lucky and it's only going to be. The challenge, interpersonal challenges, right. But maybe you're going to have to evacuate in two years. Maybe there's going to be a car crash and not to be fear-mongering here, but these are, these are possibilities to think about. Mark: Right. These are things that happen to people. Yucca: yeah. Mark: And they're the reasons why people buy insurance. The. Where was I going with this? The, the step I think we can take after having made that discernment is to having identified what we don't have much influence over. We don't abandon that. We put it aside. So when an issue like climate change, yes, we don't have much influence as individuals over it. And. Believe me, if you've been sold this idea that it's all up to the consumer to solve carbon in the atmosphere, please disabuse yourself of that because there's about 500 companies in the world that produce something like 70% of the carbon pollution in the world. It's their fault. It's not our fault. And we really need to be active to be reducing those emissions because that's where the big problem is. Yucca: All right. So, so focusing. Where are the points, where are the places that's going to make the biggest impact, whether it is looking at something like, okay, how do we tackle carbon emissions? Where do we put the majority of our focus? But that could also be okay. My family is going through financial struggles right now. Right? Where can I put my focus in a place that it's going to be the most impacted? Right. There may be some things that you'd normally wouldn't do you normally wouldn't let them have screen quite as much as they're having or something like that, but what what's going to make the big impact. So if I may on just a very practical level, something that actually, this is what we were doing in the house this week. This was our inventory week where we were going through and looking at all the stuff that we have. And we'd like to have about six months worth of, if we couldn't go anywhere for six months, would we have enough water? Would we have enough food? Would we have it? And you know, that took us years to get to that. We didn't just, buy six months of stuff all at once. Cause we, we're low income, tick a lot, but going through and going, okay, what do we need to, what do we need to be preparing for? Right. Do we have, we live in an area that has forest fires. So do we have a bag in the car? That has stuff for everybody, do we know where the, do we know where all our documents are? Do we know where there's cat food? All those things and getting all of that together so that, we don't want there to ever be a situation in which we'd have to stay home for. But Hey, that actually just happened right. years ago, we couldn't go anywhere. Or, we don't want to be in a situation where we'd have to pack up and leave. But if we are, we want to be prepared for that. And not like from a fearful place, right. We don't want to do it as like, oh no, we're scared. Or, that sort of thing, but from a place of, of wanting to take care of ourselves, but also. Wanting to take care of our community from a social responsibility place. Because if, if we don't have to take the resources, there's a limited number of resources for when disasters happen. There's only a limited number of first responders. There's a limited number of that. We don't want to be taking those resources that could be for somebody else who needs it more than us. So I really encourage people to have a little bit, you know, even if it's just a few, just look at. Whatever it is for your situation. Maybe it's just four or five days of water and food, things like that. Do you have a flashlight, those sorts of things, just to be prepared in the case that something happens, you're going to be in a better place. So you have that physical side that we talk about a lot in terms of self care, we talk about the health side, how do you take care of yourself and your household and your, and your community and your, your loved one. Before that all happens. Mark: Right. And I think it's important to notice as we talk about that kind of preparation. That means you're already in adverse. The disaster hasn't happened, but the pressure that the possibility of the disaster puts on you means you're already in a situation where you're dealing with adversity, right? Because if, if unlike either of us, you lived in an area where there wasn't a danger of wildfires, then you wouldn't have to do that kind of prepper. Right. There might be something else like tornadoes or hurricanes or Yucca: floods Mark: earthquakes or. whatever. But you you're, you're not concerned about wildfires because that's just not something that happens in your area. So I think that. Being aware of the places where we feel those pressures is really important, you know, understanding, Hey, it's, it's wearing on me that in the back of my mind all the time is this possibility that w is really negative for me. So. I've been talking about this almost a year ago, I lost my job and I've been looking for a job ever since. And just this past week had another job where there were two final candidates and I'm not the one who got the job. And I'll be talking more about that later in the podcast in terms of what I can do relative to what's out of my control. It is in my mind all the time, all the time that we're broke, we don't have money. We, we, we don't know where the money is going to come from to pay for July's rent yet. We, you know, we're in danger and that danger is in the back of my mind all the time. And that's stressful. It puts stress on us. So be aware of the stressors that are in your life, even if they feel like maybe long shots, you feel enough urgency to do some preparation against something happening, it means that it's stressing you. That it's possible. Yucca: Yeah. So we've been talking a little bit about some of the. Practical things one can do, but there's also the practice side, right? So there is the practice of practicing grounding, right? Really just taking those deep breaths, kind of letting that tension out or whatever it is that you do. Some people use visualization with that, you know, imagining a tree or things like that are very, are very common ones. Getting in the habit of having something like that or having a meditation practice or having your daily moment in front of your focus, those sorts of things can start to build up some emotional resiliency so that when you are facing, whether it's those, those Those kind of in the background, low key ones that we're just talking about, that pressure in the back of your mind of, is there going to be a forest fires are going to be, this is the, the food prices, whatever it is you can be addressing those, but then if something does happen, if you do have to evacuate, if you have lost your job, if you do have that, blow out, fight with your spouse or whatever it is, you've got something that you've been practicing. That you can, that you can go to, that you can use. Mark: It can help bring you back to see. Yes, because we don't make good decisions when we're not centered. And often that can compound a bad situation and make it worse. So you really want not to make decisions when you're in the heat of the fear or the anger. That's just not a good time to be making decisions about how to approach the challenges in your life. Yucca: Right. Mark: I find that my atheopagan practice serves me in three different ways. As I contend with the adversity in my life. The first is that it helps me feel better connected with nature. And nature is a tremendous solace to me, even though it is, you know, so beleaguered and besieged by all the damage that has been done still, the fabric of life on this earth at some level is thriving. It's, you know, there's still life everywhere. It may not be the life that we would like to be there in terms of endangered species of invasive species and so forth. It's still life and it's still turning its leaves to the sun and making sugar and feeding those webs of life all over the world. And to me, that's a very beautiful thing and it helps give me some perspective about the temporary and small nature of my problem. The second thing that it does for me is direct psychological calming. The, the ritual practices that I have, like, seeing my atheopagan rosary, for example, it's, it's good for my self esteem. It's good for my sense of the world. It's good for my relationship with my fellow humans. It just helps. Those kinds of practices and then the third method. And I think this is something we should expand on a lot is because it makes me a part of a community and. We talk a lot in the United States, especially about how alienated people are in this culture, families, splinter and scattered to the far corners of the country or the world. Families are not particularly intimate with one another. And often in fact, they're really at one another's throats. People don't tend to make friends after school, after college, which is something that was shocking to me because I have lots of friends that I've made after college. But in fact, I don't have any friends from college that that chapter has come and gone, but The sense of being alone against it all is really prevalent in our society. And that's just terrible. The way that humans have contended with every adversity historically through our evolution has been collectively as a group, you know, we've solved problems together. And we've supported one another in solving those problems. And so being a part of the atheopagan community, even though we mostly meet online, that has provided a tremendous sense of belonging and support and shared worldview to me, you know, a common set of values that really. It helps me to feel held and valued and seen all of which are just so important for us psychologically. So, and, you know, being a part of the pagan community generally, which is a, you know, a larger subculture similarly helps me to do that. The. The, the upshot of what I'm saying is that if you, if you're alone, if you're really alone, if you don't have people in your life with whom you can talk about your deep experience, that's something to work on because honestly, that's your lifeline. That's, that's the. That's, those are the relationships that will save you when you need saving and that where you can save them in turn. You know, this is what people go to mainstream religions for all the time. You know, there are plenty of people attending churches out there who are not necessarily believers in either the supernatural stuff in their holy texts or or in the values that are being espoused from the pulpit. But. It gives them a sense of belonging to a group of people who share something in common and can therefore speak a language that alludes to those things that they have in common and share cookouts and picnics and potlucks and study groups. And. All those kinds of things. You know, belonging is so important for us humans and American culture has just shattered us into these individuals. And individualism is a, it's a particularly pernicious aspect of our culture. It's not that it's not that we shouldn't develop ourselves and actualize ourselves. Individually to the greatest degree possible, but we need to do that in the context of a group. Yucca: Hmm, it's a, how do they say a mixed can, right? It has some really really very helpful, positive things to it. And there's some others, like what you've been talking about this isolation there's, there's a lot that we lose from it too. Mark: Right. Right. And, and, you know, in its extreme, you know, like political libertarianism, that kind of stuff, it turns into this very adversarial us versus them. You know, kind of mean-spirited, I don't care about you. You've got to take care of yourself, sort of mentality. That honestly doesn't serve anyone. It doesn't serve the people who espoused and it doesn't serve the people who are around them. It doesn't serve the society as a whole. It's just not, it's not helpful. Yucca: Hmm. So that's one of the things that we can do though, is the seeking and building really growing and cultivating community. And that's something that can be helpful. Before during and after. Adversity. Because some, sometimes there's a lot of, of trauma that you're going to come out with and healing that in recovery that is needed and ritual practice, we talk all the time about ritual on this podcast, right? That's an incredible tool. And then also having that love and support and that sense of belonging that in itself can do so much to. Help with the process. Mark: Absolutely it, and what's amazing is that it can help with the process, even if it's not helping with any of the practical considerations. Like if I go to my community and I say, You know, I'm desperate and I can't find a job. There are some practical things that they can do, like increase donations to my Patrion, which people have been doing lately, which is a wonderful thing. And I'm so grateful to all the people that have pitched in on that. A lot of the things that they can do or things that aren't practical and they're still absolutely important just simply by saying, I see you. I understand your struggle. I, I empathize with where you are. I'm here to hear your, your, your struggle, your sorrow, your fear. I'm here for that. And. Too few of us have that in their lives. I think even within intimate relationships, certainly for men. I mean, I, you know, heterosexual men, I don't think are going to their partners very often and saying I'm scared, Yucca: Yeah. Mark: or I really need Yucca: done as a culture to our men, I think is just so it's so painful. Mark: It's tragic. It really is. And as somebody that works very hard, not to be a part of toxic masculinity and that's always a work in progress it's like trying to be anti-racist right. It's like, it's you never get there. There's always more to be learned and done. But one of the things that I am very grateful for is that I. I have many people in my life that I can go to, you know, with my deepest feelings and tell them and know that they will be received well. And in the spirit in which they were intended. Yucca: Yeah, what a difference. Yeah. Mark: it, it makes a huge difference. And I think. You know, I was reflecting on this about the century retreat recently because I've particularly a couple of men who were there, were talking about it afterwards as an unprecedented experience for them. And I believe that part of the unprecedented experience was the degree of personal disclosive, Venice. The people were sharing their, you know, the degree of emotional openness. And I just think that's sad and what's w and what's hard is then they have to go back to their lives where they don't have that. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: And I just feel like there's so much work to be done. But it can be done so much more effectively if we do it together. And that's why I invest a ton of effort in building community. Like-minded community, because if we can rally around a set of understandings of the nature of the world and values that we consider to be just in kind and, and right. And practices that we share together in order to enjoy and, you know, contend with this complicated life, then I think we're really getting somewhere. And that's why I do this podcast. It's why I do a lot of things. It's, it's why I'm in the nonprofit sector. Professionally, because I want to contribute to a society that is kinder and more just, and more sustainable rather than making widgets or selling widgets or transporting widgets. So. Processing widgets. So I just drew a complete blank. I had something and it left. I hate it when that happened. Yucca: You had mentioned wanting to talk about your bigs. Mark: Oh yeah. This is something that occurred to me. It's gotta be more than 10 years ago now. I was thinking about wisdom and wisdom is an awkward word. I've, I've actually, I'm working on I've been working for more than a year on a blog post that will eventually be published about wisdom. Wisdom is an awkward word because it's kind of cringy. When we talk about wisdom, people get uncomfortable. They're like, oh, wisdom, you're going to whip some wisdom on me. It's used more sarcastically than anything else, but the truth is that as we age, as we grow, as we have experiences, as we learn things, as we discover more about ourselves, we become wiser. We become. Better able to make the Right. decision to say the right thing at the right time to extend the right kind of kindness to another person and to live our lives in a manner that facilitates our happiness and our growth rather than contravening it, or fording it. It occurred to me that much of my perspective on the world comes down to three axiomatic, big things. And I'll explain what those are now. And I, I just believe that if you can really get at a deep level, these three big things, your life just gets a lot better. So here they are. The first. The big. Okay. And the big, okay. Is simply acceptance of the world as it is. This world is filled with beauty and horror and everything in between. And at some level we have to stop resisting it saying, oh, I wish it were this way. Or I wish I'd done that. Or. You know, you didn't do that. You did something else and the world isn't as you wish it is as it is. And at some level we simply have to accept it in order to be able to encounter it and navigate through it. Now that doesn't mean that we have to accept all conditions. We can still struggle for justice and for equality and for kindness and for sustainability. All of those things are important. So I'm not saying, you know, that in this very Buddhistic sort of sense. We should just, you know, have universal acceptance of everything as it is, but we have to at least acknowledge the fact that that's the way it is. Right. We have to, you have to at least cop to the fact that, you know, like it or not, Donald Trump was elected president. You can argue about what the electoral college process is and all that, but like it or not, that's a fact. So that's the big, okay. And the next is the big, thank you. Which is gratitude for having been gifted. Highly improbable life that each of us has, the odds are astronomically against any one of us in our unique genetic combination and epigenetic experience of being raised would become the person that we are. And it is a treasure. It is the treasure of our existence. And so being able to get to a point of gratitude and seeing all of the many, many, many gifts of beauty and grace and generosity and kindness that we experience in our lives, everything from somebody moving over on the freeway to let you into a lane. To the blooming of a rose in your flower garden in, you know, on a given day. Yucca: Well, and all the billions of things that you have, that, that died for you to be alive. Right? All the, every little sprout you ate every animal, every egg, every, all of it. Mark: All those sacrifices. And so thank you. Thank you to all of those things. Thank you to everything that contributes to my being here and thank you for all the things that helped to make it beautiful. So that's the big, thank you. And then the last of the three big lessons that I think that if you get them deeply, it helps you to be. A happy person on a path that that will help you to grow consistently is what I call the big. Wow. And that's just all at the nature of the universe. It is in and of this world, particularly the biosphere, it's just all inspiring that this is going on. Yucca: Yeah. Look at your hand. That's exploded star. Mark: Yep. It is. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: And it's got a a condensed ring of exploded star around it, of supernova product, because you don't get gold without those kinds of pressures. Yeah. The big, Wow. is something that I come back to again and again, and that feeling of awe is. Well, we named the podcast after it, the wonder, right? If you're missing that in your life, go find it because this is amazing. All of this that's going on is just amazing. And you know, I was a pretty depressed kid, but I remember at four years old going to the grand canyon because. Oh my God. Oh my God. The grand canyon. And there's no image that can do it. Justice. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: It's just simply our inspiring. It. It is, it is breathtaking. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: So those are my three big keys to finding a way to settle into life where you don't feel like. Where you don't spin your wheels on hypothetical's. You know what, if I had done this, what if, what if life weren't like this? What if this person wasn't like that? You know, that's a lot of energy that you can burn on stuff that just makes you feel bad. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: And my atheopagan practice helps bring me into contact with those three lessons a lot. I feel a lot of gratitude in relation to my connection with other people in the community and my my conversations with you and my The, the welcoming that I receive for my, the products of my creative gifts there, and just the simple listening and being there, and the fact that I can help to hold a space where new people coming in feel welcome. And at home. There's this something really lovely about all of that when I'm doing my daily ritual or celebrating one of the Sabbaths around the wheel of the year. A lot of what I reflect on is that, that sense of, okay. Thank you. Wow. Yucca: Yeah. Well, I think that, that those three big, those three bigs, the, okay. Thank you. And wow. Are a good place to wrap up for today. Mark: Okay. Okay. There's, there's so much more to be said about circumstances of adversity and we're all feeling it. Honestly, we've got COVID we've got the rise of this. The mean-spirited right-wing, which has infiltrated our Supreme court and is threatening to take our rights away. We've got severe economic dislocation and many people are really struggling economically, including me. We've got We've got issues of systemic racism and systemic homophobia and systemic transphobia that continue to burn in our culture and stubbornly do not go away. There, there, there is adversity in the world there and it's Yucca: of that. Okay. Mark: yes, yes. Not okay. In that, I think this is acceptable. Yucca: We're not condoning it. Mark: No, but okay. As in, yes, I recognize this as true. Yucca: All right here. It is right Mark: now. What, are we going to do? Yeah. Yucca: yeah. What, what, what can I do as an individual and what can I not? And the part that I can't that's okay. Right. Not as a way of making an excuse to not be active, but, but understanding that we're, again, we're part of this community, we're part of the system. We are the entirety of it. Mark: Yes. Yes. And when I, I, I will say this when contending with adversity that threatens your survival, it. isn't reasonable to expect somebody to drop everything and go advocate on climate change. Because you have to eat, you have to be sheltered. You know, you, you have to take care of your family. We understood, you know, we understand all of that. It goes to Maslow's hierarchy of values and all that kind of stuff. Right. S creature, and that includes humans will pursue its survival before it pursues other goals. And that is part of what is really challenging about the climate change issue, because in late stage capitalism, where all the resources have been sucked up to the 1%, everybody is struggling and they don't have the bandwidth to address the crisis that's in front of us. Yucca: Yeah, which ironically is what it's going to make it a lot harder down the line for all of us. Right. Mark: so kudos to everybody. That is a climate activist. Thank you. Thank you for all the work that you do and to the elected officials that are on the right side on that issue worldwide. But also don't beat yourself. That you're not solving the world's problems when you have your own problems directly in front of you. it's not helpful and it's not kind to yourself. And if, if you don't take anything away from this podcast episode, other than this be kind to yourself. So thank you, Jaco. Yucca: Thank you. Mark: a good conversation. Yeah. Yucca: next week we will be back already with our it will be our souls to sewed, right. Mark: Yeah. The Midsummer episode, for sure. Yucca: Cause we always try and get it the week before. So it's not the episode isn't coming out the day of. So, that gives people time to kind of think and reflect on what they, what they want to do and all of that. So, We're halfway through. Mark: Yeah. Amazing. We've reflect we've remarked on this before how the last two years seem like they're simultaneously 30 years long and like, they just went by in an eye blink. It's Yucca: yeah, Mark: very odd. Weird. Anyway, folks, thank you so much. We'll see you next week. Bye-bye.

covid-19 united states god american donald trump wisdom congress weird families practical honestly adversity supreme venice processing professionally maslow midsummer stoics jaco adversities sabbaths yucca markit patrion mark no mark yeah mark oh mark yes mark so mark right mark all mark okay mark absolutely

How Did We Get Into Paganism

Play Episode Listen Later May 30, 2022 41:10

Remember, we welcome comments, questions and suggested topics at thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com S3E20 TRANSCRIPT:----more---- Mark: Welcome back to the wonder science-based paganism. I'm your host Mark. Yucca: And I'm Yucca Mark: And today we are going to ask one, another questions about our practices. What have they been like in the past? What are they like now? What are they likely or how would we like for them to evolve in the future? Basically just do sort of a Q and a back and forth between one another, to learn more about the details of how our spiritual practices go. Yucca: Right. And how there can be very different approaches. I think that you and I share a lot, but we also come at things from, from pretty different perspectives as well. Mark: We do we do. I mean, particularly in the way that we envisioned the wheel of the year, I think is, is, you know, markedly different Yucca: And also just one of the things I love about our conversations is that there's a, there's a pretty big age gap between us is a pretty big just family style, lifestyle gap, you know, gender differences. So I've really valued these conversations. Thank you. And I, I hope that that is interesting to, to all of you listeners as well. Mark: yeah. I hope it is. And I hope that it's worthy of spending the next half an hour, 40 minutes of your time. And I really value these conversations too. This is a, this is something I look forward to every year. Yucca: Yeah, likewise. So, I mean, I think this is a really interesting chance to see how practices can kind of change and evolve over time with the person. So we've, we've talked about it a little bit before, but how did you get into this pagan thing? Mark: Oh, Yucca: went from, from an atheist to a pagan, right? Well, you're still atheist, but you know, to an atheopagan Mark: Right, right. yeah. I was raised in a household that Just didn't have any religion and it was never discussed. So it's not like we decided that we were atheists. It's just that we were never anything else? Yucca: Just we're okay. Mark: my father was a scientist. My mother was a nurse. Science was the way you, you learned things. The universe was interesting and full of stuff that was knowable and discoverable and and it was really prized to learn stuff and know stuff. So. In relation to all matters, kind of spiritual and religious. I became one of those sort of snotty atheists because I thought that, I mean, every religion that I encountered was filled with nonsense, utter nonsense, talking burning bushes and resurrected people and parted oceans and. You know, 11,000 virgins in heaven and just crazy, crazy, crazy stuff to my mind. And excuse me So I dismissed that entire aspect of human behavior and culture out of hand and had nothing to do with it. My only encounter with it was when I sang in a church choir when I was in high school, which was basically because all of my music. Gang friends also saying in the same choir and the, the brilliant director of music at my high school was also the director of that choir at the church. So I just went there on Sundays and sang and that, and then a subsequent experience with seeing early music taught me a lot about. Christianity and Christian theology because of the words of all the songs and particularly translations from the Latin of medieval and Renaissance music, you learn a great deal about kind of the mentality and all that. As well as the study of history, because this, the study of Christianity the study of European history is in large part, the study of Christianity and its various fractions. Competitions and all that sort of thing. So really wasn't interested in any of that. And out of the blue, a friend of mine who had been, he'd been a roommate when I was in college and we'd stayed in touch. He was considerably older than I still is considerably older than I am. Invited me to a, an autumnal Equinox circle. That was being held by his coven Yucca: Yeah. Mark: and. I don't know why he invited me to this thing. I honestly, I don't have to this day, I have no idea why he invited it to me. I guess he just thought that I might get something out of it. And I don't know why I went, but I did. And it was really weird in the one hand. I mean, with people standing in a circle, holding hands and drumming and chanting. You know, speaking to invisible presences and, you know, like gods and elements and directions and things like that. And that part was all pretty weird. But there was also something that was very compelling about it. I realized it's the autumnal Equinox. That's a really important milestone in the year. I'm a deep environmentalist. I am really, really committed to. To nature and to the biosphere and to the health of the biosphere. Why don't, why am I not aware that that's happening? Why don't I know what phase the moon is in all the time. And I realized how disconnected I was in many ways, and this was a valuable way of observing these things that would. Bring me into a closer alignment with the cycles of nature and that's how it started. And from there I went to I was invited to go to the reclaiming, the big reclaiming spiral dance in San Francisco which I've attended several times, but this was the first time it was a long time ago. It was in the eighties when it was still held at the women's building in San Francisco. And so I had an experience of a ritual of hundreds of people as well as experiences of smaller group rituals, I went to a UL ritual and there was kind of a vigil all night to wait until the sun came up and watched the sun come up. And by that time I was kind of hooked and set up an alternate. Started doing observances on my own. And within a couple of years, I was leading rituals and writing chants and being a leader in my local community. To some degree I think because that's the sort of a natural trajectory. And also, cause I have some leadership capacity and Yucca: Sure. That's part of your personality. Mark: Yeah. it's just kind of how I'm built. And that, that's how I got. That, that honestly is how I got here. And I, it never crossed my mind to actually believe in the invisible presences that they were talking to in the circles. And I didn't really discover until much later that people were literally believing that those were invisible intelligence self-aware beings out there in the universe. Well, how about you? Why don't you talk about your. Rival into paganism, which was very different. Yucca: Yeah. So I, I grew up this way pretty much my, and I'll be a little bit vague for the privacy of the people who are alive today. But it, my family, my parents were different. Deeply loved each other got along great, but you know, had different religious beliefs there. My mother was a Christian and that her, her faith was really important to her. And that was something that she definitely gave to the older siblings. So my family has a pair of older siblings, a big gap, and then younger sibling. But she ended up dying when I was fairly young. So the younger siblings, we were raised more by our dad, whereas the older ones had been raised, by, by both of them. But my dad had arrived at paganism. From Catholicism with a little bounce into Quakerism you know, kind of stepping stone there. And we just, I also I grew up in Santa Fe, which is kind of a new age Mecca. There was just grew up around lots of lots of everything, right? A lot of the kind of traditional Wu stuff. But there's a lot of different people there and just an interest in that kind of stuff. So that was just normal. That was around me. There were pagans around me. There were there were all the Tibetans stuff and then way G shops and and then also. Heavily very, very old Catholic communities as well. And the, the Catholicism of Northern New Mexico and the rural Southwest is very different than the rest of the world. Because if you just, it's a really interesting history to get into. But the church was kicked out. For awhile. And the people continue to practice and kind of developed their own just continue to practice. And so there, there are little non church legs in this big church, sanctioned little sun patios and things like that. So I know this will be kind of offensive to some. People, but the Catholicism here is very pagan and a lot of ways, very, very earth centered and very kind of into the land. But we. Rural and paying a lot of attention to what's going on with our land that we were living with. My father was really careful about the types of words that got, you know, we don't live off the land. We live with the land and paying attention to th the solstice is we're having a lot of the words whenever really used. Right. We weren't calling it Yule. We weren't calling it the Equinox, but, but we'd joke about, okay, well, if you know, the, the light, the sun is going in the right direction now, right. As it starts to get sunny again and, and all of that. And it was really important to him that we be raised also with tools with mental tools and emotional tools that could help with. In the world. So being able to meditate, that was just something that we were taught grounding. I remember doing like the visualization, practicing, breathing, and practicing the, the bubble or the egg protection and, and those sorts of things. W just were really important that they'd be passed on to us kids. And at some point, I don't know where I picked the words up, but we're talking early teens. I just started using the word pagan. I don't know. I just, that, wherever that came from was how I, I mean, there were other people who were pagan, but that was just, I started to use it. If I was ever filling out a form of. Wicked down. I never really considered myself wicked, but that was the thing that I thought would get closest to what I was on a, on a list. So it's like, okay, that'll kind of represent what I am, cause I don't want to put down other, right. I guess it could put down other, but, or, none of the above. So I put that down. And. The same with, for you? I, it never, it never occurred to me that people literally believed in like the God stuff. Like I was kind of into, like, I liked some of like the goddess stuff. I thought that was really cool. I liked like the image, you know, some of those like old, like, Like figurines, like the Venus figurine and those sorts of things. I thought that was really like interesting. And I had read the all like the mist of Avalon series and, and all of that stuff. And it was just an enjoy that, that quite a bit. And again, it really wasn't until. In my, probably early twenties when I had been doing the pagan perspective for years and just reading people's comments, that it just dawned on me that wow, these people are literally taking these. It was like actual beings. Like I thought that's just like, Like the Christians did. And like I thought that was, I thought that pretty much the only people who did that, and I know this is quite naive, but I thought that was really the Abrahamic religions and that nobody else really took it literal. And then of course being educated more, I found it. Oh, okay. So actually there are other religions too, that, that think of their gods as literal beings. But for instance, the Hindus that I had been exposed to. Talk to me about it being metaphors. They hadn't talked about them as being literal beings. And I also grew up around permaculture and all of that sort of thing. And so I actually ended up as a teen six, I think I was 17. Probably. I went out to your part of the world and did some. Permaculture stuff with star Hawk that was of course blended in with the paganism and activism stuff and and came back home. And there's a lot of that happening here in Northern New Mexico as well. And it just was this really good fit, this natural fit. And then I went into the life sciences and just kind of hung out in there and Continue to just have that as being part of my, yeah, this is my identity. This is, who I am or what I like to do, how I view the world, but it's always been very interesting because there is kind of that split in the family where there's like the half that is definitely quite Christian within the like immediate family. And then the half of my, my closest sibling and father and stepmother and like that side. That's sort of pagan and we just don't ever talk about it at family meetings when we're all together, just don't say anything. So that's since it's very, it's evolved very organically, I've never have really seen a separation between where there was a moment where I'm like, yes, I'm pagan. Now just kind of always was. Mark: Well, so let me see would you describe. How would you describe the evolution of, well, actually it's your turn to ask me a question that just occurred to me. Yucca: Hmm, I think I'm going to steal your question. So, mark, how would you describe the evolution of your practice from when you. Entered into it to today because you've got quite a bit of big journey between there and here. Mark: Yeah. Okay. I should have thought more about my answer to this question before figuring it out for you. The, I was always a kid who wanted to live in a museum. I made my rooms like museums with displays of minerals and seashells and feathers. And. Other natural objects. Right. And as I got older, that turned more into kind of the museum of ethnography and natural history where I have various kinds of ethnic art that I find just so alive and so compelling. As well as the natural objects and artifacts and all that kind of stuff. And so it became very natural for me to put together an altar with precious objects that had meaning to me, the idea of objects that tell stories. When I look at them was just something that I got very instinctually. And so. that that's my understanding of what a magical item is. Right. A magical item is one that has a sentimental value to you because it has a story behind it. So it kind of started there and with going to these rituals, which were all group rituals, it, it bears saying, because. Paganism has fragmented a lot, even as it's grown a lot in the time that I've been involved with it, most of the practitioners are solitary and there are reasons for that, that we can get into. But at the time that I got into it, it was a group activity and You know, I, I went to this belt teen festival on this sacred land, up in Mendocino county, and we ran around naked and raised a maypole and danced around it and danced around a fire and had all these wonderful experiences. There were, there were problems with that community that came to the full. After a while, but my early experiences with them were transcendently freeing and beautiful. So that is kind of where my experience started from. So after I took on more leadership responsibilities, I started to settle into more of a sense of myself as a, as an active exponent in a community rather than. You know, somebody that just got invited to events and was a participant. I, I participated more in organizing events and just started to see myself in a somewhat different context that way. And my circle of friends grew and grew and grew because one of the things that I saw in the local pagan community any way was that they were some of the most amazing and interesting people I had ever met. They were creative and thoughtful and growth-oriented, and generally speaking had really you know, progressive and kind politics. Were just lots of reasons to, to, to way deeper into this, the subculture. And my practice began to change around the time that that climate began to change in the, in the mid to late nineties, was a big influx of folks into paganism that were former Christian. And it changed the culture. They brought a lot of their frameworks with them. I, they didn't intend to, Yucca: but like the idea of. Mark: yes. The idea that, Yucca: like practice versus faith. Mark: right, right. The idea that you had to have faith in the, in literal gods was something that I had never been confronted with in the whole time that I had been practicing and. Suddenly there it was. And there were these debates about, you know, the nature of the gods, whether the gods existed at all, all this kind of stuff. And I withdrew from attending so many group activities. And particularly, even though I went to Penn via con the big convention every year, I worked there as a volunteer. So most of my time was taken up with my volunteer duties and that was okay because I was there to visit with my friends and go to parties after hours and all that kind of stuff. The workshops themselves were almost entirely just stuff that I didn't believe. Yucca: Right. Mark: Just things I didn't believe in. And it became increasingly clear to me that a lot of what people were doing in the pagan community was stuff that I just didn't think was real. It didn't seem reality grounded to me. And so, and I've told this story before, so I'll kind of skip over it. I, there were some unethical things that happened that were excused as the will of the gods in around 2005. And I quit the community and that's when I, about six months later when I was missing it and really seeing that there was a lot of value that I was getting out of religious practice, even though. I wasn't a believer that got me onto this whole investigation about what is religion? What does it do? What's it function for us as humans? How can we get that function without having to believe in a bunch of stuff for which there's no evidence. And that led eventually to my writing, the essay that became the book. Atheopagan so much. Practice has been much more solitary in recent years, but it's starting to turn again with the advent of the Northern California affinity group for atheopagan ism. We're, we're having in-person rituals and we're planning another one for the summer solstice. And it's exciting. It's a really cool thing. They're wonderful group of people and. It's feeling like a really exciting new chapter. Yucca: Have well, and you have had your ritual circle many years as well. Mark: Yes. That's true. Yes. I've been a part of dark sun for 31 years. This this coming sewing Hallows and Yucca: And y'all usually do the, the wheel of the year, right? You aren't getting together, every weekend, but you get together typically eight times a year. Mark: About eight times a year. Yeah. And they, they generally focus around the time of the wheel of the year holidays. The most significant rituals That we do though, are for Hallows and annual. And it's a lot more free form around the rest of the year, which I've always wanted to change, but I never have changed. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: Yeah. Yucca: That does sound very similar to many other picking groups as well, but it kind of seems to be the most excitement around those two particular holidays. Mark: Yeah. Yeah, I think so. So. So that's how my practice has evolved up until now. And there's some glimmers of things. Th there are things that I really miss about the paganism that I first encountered in the eighties that I want to say. There were things that were really screwed up about that paganism that I wasn't really aware of at the time. There were real problems with with lack of consent. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: Particularly in behavior of men, towards women there were, there were problems like the ethical one that I encountered that caused me to leave the, the community. There were people who had set themselves up as a high muckety muck of some pagan church or organization. And then. Be charismatic narcissists who are shitty to other people and there'd be financial mismanagement, and there'd be no preferential treatment for people who are young and pretty and just, just Yucca: All that. Mark: stuff. But that. said there was a beautiful freedom in being able to go out into the woods and. Maybe take some mushrooms and just be free and alive in nature and celebrating these rituals with other people of like mind. It was very beautiful. And I, I miss that and I, I hope to go back to it maybe without the mushrooms. But but I hope to go back to more of that kind of practice because that's really what got me into it in the first place. It's not an intellectual exercise. It's something that feeds something much deeper in me. And those beautiful experiences are what I treasure from my memories of my pagan life. Yucca: It's beautiful. Mark: Thank you. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: So how about you? How, how have things evolved since, say since, since you were out on your own. Yucca: Yeah. It's interesting to think about because a lot of it, I mean, has. Just changed with me as my particular needs have changed. Right. What's and I think that's this, everybody's doing that to a certain extent. It wasn't a lot of it. Wasn't me sitting down and saying, I have a practice. What can I do for my practice? It was what's going on in my life. And what are the tools that I have to try and be living the life that I want. And so that's, at various times certain things would be more or less important. And I definitely experimented a lot with things like. We actually were chatting a little bit before the recording about things like elements. Right. I think we both said that, we had both kind of tried using the classical elements at some point in our practice and kind of moved away from that. And, had sort of tried out using, you know, the goddess or the triple goddess, things like that in practice. And just been like this, this isn't really working sort of moved away from that. I've had something very interesting over the last, I guess, about more than 15 years now, I made my first YouTube channel. I guess it was 17 years ago at this point and started sharing things. And I'm a very, a lot of my practice has been very solitary and telephone. Having my family and then it's become more of a family practicing for awhile. It was a little partnership practice and then adding in, the kids. But because I did get online and start sharing, I had originally started sharing on YouTube is just kind of a. There was a very different YouTube community at the time. It was its own company. Actually, it didn't even belong to Google or any of those things. And there was like this interesting little pagan community there where like, we would just kind of share things back and forth. And then, I started building the channel and then eventually I got onto the pagan perspective. And then I was on that for about. Well, until it shut down, like, I guess it was 10 or 11 years. And Th that was, it was kind of in the way that we, you know, we, you and I talk about different topics every week. It gave me a nice like point to come back to every week and think about this new topic. But almost every week was just a challenge because they were like, so what do you think about ghosts? What do you think about this? God, and heck a tie in that. And, and, I'd want to try and come up with like a very diplomatic way of, of saying. And like, I don't buy that, but, but still have something of value to say. And it was, it was definitely challenging to be on the, the channel. I had a lot of conflict in the background and kind of felt, kind of picked on and attacked by a couple of the, you know, the more strong, like vegan fronts and stuff. But I felt it was really important to be on there because I mean, that's actually how we met. You made a comment on one of the. Videos that just, said, no, you don't have to believe in God. That's cool. He can be a pagan and I don't believe in gods. But I just had so many people make comments. They're like, I'm so glad you made this video. Like, I, I felt so alone. I didn't know that that was a thing I'm so glad that like there's other pagans like me. I kind of felt, although I enjoyed that, I felt like a little bit of an obligation. Right. And I had like this one wanting to serve to be like, I want to provide. And get this word out here. Even though. You know, it might not be the best kind of emotional thing. But there was that really wonderful, the value of the thinking and the connecting with people which is another reason I'm just so grateful for what we do here, because there's no like secret tension. no like mark and I are not arguing and fighting in the background. Right. That's not happening. And, but still get to feel like. Contributing to a community and, and offering to a community and sharing to this kind of wide world. That's, that's been really important in that in the last, I guess, decade and a half is to be able to contribute that way. I'm not sure exactly where I'm going with this, but it's just been very interesting to be a very kind of private person with a very. Kind of solitary practice and yet be talking about it to the world all the time. Mark: Yeah, that is, that is interesting. Yeah, so your, your practice has been solitary, but there's been this kind of public window into it, but by your own descriptions of how you practice and what you think, and those kinds of things. Yucca: Yeah. And I think that helps. Well, I understand that I really want to be part of a larger community and that's, I guess, kind of what we could maybe go into is, where do we think we're wanting to go from here, but as my own kids grow and as I'm in a very different life stage than I was before just feeling like. More community. Right. I want to open up to the world and, and be not just, I haven't felt like my twenties, right. I'm 33 now my, my twenties were about. Oh, goodness. Get some feet under me, survive, get through this, just kind of this scramble and now I'm feeling like, okay, no, and I, you know, put some roots down. I want to start to grow and flourish and of course the, my practice is part of that. Cause that's just the, the practices is how do I live my life? Mark: Sure. Sure. Yeah, that absolutely makes sense. So what's your next question for me? Yucca: Well, you started to touch on it a little bit. But you know, what, what do you think right now that, that you're. Maybe missing and working towards, you know, where do you see? What, what are the things that the places for growth that you see. Mark: there are a lot of different dimensions to that because the atheopagan community is a growing community. And as, as the founder of the path that presents challenges and opportunities to me. A lot of which at this stage have to do with finding ways to get out of the way, finding ways to let go and let other people take on. Significant pieces of, of what needs to be done. I'm in communication with a woman who is interested in taking over the editing of the atheopagan voice newsletter, for example, which would be wonderful. I mean, I would still contribute content and stuff, but I wouldn't have to do all the work of pulling it together every month. Yucca: You put, I want to interrupt you for just a second. Mark does a tremendous amount. Of work for the community. It's really, I'm really grateful. There's just so much you worked on putting, helping with the retreat. You're on the council, you do the atheopagan voice. You've been on multiple different subcommittees and getting the Facebook group going and this podcast and everything. So it's just really, really amazing. Mark: Well, it's a, it's a labor of love and I, I appreciate your recognition. And at the same time, it's like, When I first created this path that I called atheopagan ism, it was just for me. And I didn't really expect that it was gonna take off, but it turns out there's So. many people out there who are, you know, science grounded, and they don't want to believe in a bunch of superstitious stuff. What they still want to celebrate living. They still want to celebrate the magnificence of the cosmos and the world. They still want to have community and meaning, and to live a good life, according to some virtuous values. And I just kind of came along at the right place at the right time, I guess. But the community is growing and, and we're doing more. So part of what my hope is to do is to. Divest myself of some of those responsibilities so that they can kind of, you know, fly on their own. And then to sort of rededicate myself to my personal practice a little bit more Without falling into the fallacy of the good old days. There is a lot that I miss about the sense of wonder and beauty that I had when I first arrived in paganism. Because it was beautiful. It was a beautiful vision for the world. It was a beautiful way of interacting with one another. There was an openness of heart that the people that were attracted to it generally speaking, really brought and all of that was. Back for me by the century retreat, because I saw it once again, you know, people being vulnerable people being courageous and, you know, doing the work to grow people just generally being really good. Good, amazing, interesting, fantastic people. So I would like to continue building this community by finding new ways to connect people. And, you know, so that's fostering the affinity group program. That's, you know, we're, we're talking about the possibility of maybe doing a, an online conference at some point so that more people could access it, that weren't able to come to the century retreat. And of course, we'll do another century retreat in 2024. Community building and then turning back and taking a look at myself and saying, okay, well, who am I now? How has this changed me over the last, what, 12 years now? Something like that, that Ethiopianism is benefiting. And where do I want to grow next? Where, where do I. What what's the next piece for me. And if some of that ends up pointing back to running around naked in the woods, I wouldn't mind observers might mind, but I wouldn't mind. So. How about you? What, what do you see happening in the future? Yucca: Yeah. Mark: And I should also say Yucca also does a lot for our community. She chairs the atheopagan society council. She's our media cleric. So she's directing the The revitalization of our YouTube channel and our Instagram account. There's, there's a lot going on for a mother of two young children. So I'm super, and of course this podcast, so I am super appreciative of everything that you do. And I so value our relationship. Yucca: Thank you. Yeah, well, this is definitely, this is a big component. It feels really good to have that, that community piece. Right. A lot of my focus is there. I know with my practice, another component is bringing. Back in, we talk about this one a lot, but the self care component, I know that that's one that, I talk a good talk, but you know, I'll get into it for a while and then it'll kind of slip out of it, and, and being better about there's some things that I'm really, really, you could say religious about right. Getting outside every day by. Taking time to myself and doing a little meditation, you know, that that doesn't always happen. And when it does, I feel just so much better and I'm just like a better person, a better, I work better. I'm a better parent, all of those things. So. I'm looking, looking towards growth and looking towards towards the balancing in that area and more effectively. Right. And so, being able to. Let myself not just be the care giver because that's a role that I've really been in my whole life. Really, even as a kid, I was always the, the person in the background who was, doing, taking care of everybody else and I'm comfortable there. Right. I prefer again. Do this weird thing where like I talk to people on a podcast on YouTube, like I actually prefer to be in the background. I actually prefer to be doing that background work. And just taking care of everybody else, but working on, Hey, maybe I could be one of those people I take care of. And, so that's, really the, the directions that I see that kind of growing out and the growing down into the ground to that, that rooting. Mark: Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. I can, I can see that for you. Yeah, that's good. So do you have another question for me? Yucca: I do have a question for our listeners. Which is what topics all of you would like to hear? Because we, before we know it, we're, we're coming up on solstice already. So we're going to be talking about the solstice soon, and we've got topics that we want to be discussing, but we also really love hearing from you. What topics that maybe even if we've covered it before, I mean, we're in three years now of topics of what are the things that are really meaningful to you that you want to. So we'd really invite that. Any of your comments or questions on that, that area? Mark: Yeah, that would be great. You need to understand that from our standpoint, we've been doing this for more than two years now on a weekly basis. That's a lot of subjects. That's a whole lot of subjects, even though eight of them every year are taken up by the wheel of the year holidays. And we always do an episode on each of those holidays. Yucca: There's another 47. Mark: Yes exactly. That's, that's just so many different topics. And we are creative people, but we are not infinitely creative people. So there are times when we, you know, arrive at the time to record the podcast and it's like, Hmm, what are we going to talk about? So your help with this and letting us know what you would like to hear our thoughts and input about would be really helpful. And you can of course reach us@thewonderpodcastqueuesatgmail.com. That's the wonder podcast, Q s@gmail.com. And we hope to hear from you soon. It only takes a second to shoot us an email. And so please do that. Yucca: Yeah. And do we, do you know, really appreciate you being here? This is, it's been, it's just amazing to see. And, the downloads and listens and the emails that we get from all of you. So you're a real big part of our lives. So we appreciate that. Mark: Absolutely. I'm, I'm always, I'm always So thrilled when I, when someone says to me, oh, I heard you on the podcast. And it's like, oh yes, they heard me on the podcast. Yucca: So thank you all. Mark: Yeah, thanks everyone. And thank you, Yucca. Great conversation.

Yuri's Night and Wonder of the Cosmos

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Play Episode Listen Later Apr 11, 2022 50:14

Yucca's Science TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@space_stem Atheopagan TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@atheopagan Remember, we welcome comments, questions and suggested topics at thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com S3E13 TRANSCRIPT:----more---- Yucca: Welcome back to the wonder science-based paganism. I'm your host Yucca. And this week we are talking about probably I'd say my favorite topic. It is almost Yuri's night. So we're going to be doing an episode on. Space exploration, nature, all of that Mark: Yeah, very exciting. There's a lot going on right now. And of course, space is a fascinating place that tells us a lot about the nature of the universe and about. The nature of our planet, Yucca: and ourselves. Yeah. So, so I think a good place to start would actually be talking about. You are his night is, and, and why it could be a really special thing for pagans. Mark: And this is something that we would probably know a lot more about if it wasn't for the cold war between the Soviet union and the United States that lasted from the end of world war two through 1990 because the first human ever to enter space was. he was actually he wasn't rushing. I think he was Georgian. He was a cosmic, not who went up in the Soviet program and succeed successfully orbited the earth on on the first attempt, which is amazing. The American program tried several times to get someone into orbit and did not succeed for a while. But in 1957, Yuri Gagarin went up into space And orbited the earth and Yucca: And safely returned. Mark: Safely returned to earth and you know, setting setting a reasonably high bar for that kind of enterprise from the very beginning. And so Yuri's east night is the 12th of April, which is the anniversary of that orbiting of the earth. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: if you're Russian, you know, that. Because you learn this in school. It's a, it's a really big deal. If you're a scientist, you also probably know it because science, museums and technology, museums, and observatories all very commonly have. Open houses or parties or other kinds of celebrations on Yuri's night as kind of a celebration of space exploration And all things. Space science. Yucca: And it's something that is now is international, right? So it did, you know, did start in Russia. But it's something that people of every nation all over the world who just are appreciative of. Of the exploration and the knowledge and achievements and all things nerdy to find a lot of overlap with you know, with some of the fandoms and that celebration. Mark: Right. And we should be clear that while the, the exploration of space in the late fifties and early 1960s was pretty much the purview of white men. And that was true of both the Soviet program and the American program. But now you have scientists from all over the world, working on space exploration. You've got the European space agency sending rockets into space and sending probes, packages of instruments out into space. China has developed its own space program. So, and they're assigned. That have been trained from everywhere in the world that have gone to university become astrophysicists or other pertinent scientists, and then have gotten involved with space programs. So this really is a humanity scale effort. Yucca: Right. And I think that, that even when it was. Several of the large superpowers. There has often been a sense of space exploration as being an achievement of humankind. Right? So w when Apollo 11 happened, people all over the world were saying, we did it. Right. There was, of course there was a lot of, you know, American pride around that, but you know, the folks in Spain and in South Africa and all over there's, this is something that is about humans and humans reaching out and exploring. Yeah. And I really appreciate you pointing out that it's not just about white dudes now, right? Even being able to explore space as astronauts, but the people on the ground working in the space fields were incredibly diverse. And so, yeah. Mark: And even back in the 1960s, when the only people who were allowed to be astronauts were white men in the United States. It's important for us to point out that at that time, because computers were so primitive calculations for those moonshots were done by hand and they were done by hand mostly by black. And it's, you know, they they're, they're unsung heroes. They don't get the credit that they should for their role in the, the attainment of humans reaching the moon. There's a very famous picture of one of these women that I wish I could remember her name, but I don't standing next to. A printout of the calculations that she had done for the Apollo missions. and it was taller than she was Yucca: yeah. Mark: it's this gigantic stack of paper. And of course, all of those calculations had to be correct. And they had to work properly with the computer equipment that the. That the astronauts took with them. So I mean that, it's, it's, it's a mind-boggling achievement when you think about it. And I just want to make sure that we you know, we provide a shout out to those folks as well. Yucca: Yeah. And, and even before we got to the era of actually sending people and things into space actually the original term computer did not refer to a machine. It referred to two people doing the competent computations and those usually were women. So the computers and so. You know, we've had a long history of Benning being involved and there's all kinds of wonderful science heroes that you can look at that, you know, had to fight their way to get to be at universities and get their names recognized and, and all of that. So we're, we're, we're not all the way there yet, but it's a lot, it's a lot better than it was, you know? So, Mark: right. Yucca: But. This is this holiday that we're talking about is a celebration of all of those achievements that have been made by, by everybody. And also just delighting in the incredible things that we're learning. It's really a celebration of, of knowledge and science. Mark: And, and of that. Inquisitive imaginative spirit, that humanity, hats we are, we're curious, little monkeys. We, you know, we wanna, we wanna know how it works and we want to figure it out and take it apart and, you know, understand things. And that impulse in us has led us. Far beyond the solar system with the Voyager missions. And Yucca: to the edge of the heliosphere Mark: yes, to the heliosphere. Right. And. Has taught us many, many amazing things about our solar system, just in my lifetime. I mean, the impression that we got about the solar system when I was a kid and I was really into space when I was a kid, because the Apollo missions were going on. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: so I was getting up early in the morning with my family to watch the Apollo missions launch. Yucca: Oh, how Mark: And I, and I remember, you know, the Apollo 11 walking on the moon. It's, it was very, very cool. stuff going on then, but still our impression of the solar system at that time was mostly Moonlight lifeless rocks revolving around these planets that we didn't know very much about. And now of course, you know, we've got Enceladus and Titan and EO and you know, all these, all these amazing, really strange and interesting moons of of the planets that we've, we've discovered much more about and taking pictures of and You know, in some cases have actually, you know, done atmospheric dives to get some samples of atmosphere. It's, it's just, Yucca: We have. Mark: incredible. What's happened. Yucca: Class of planets that turns out as are the dominant class in our, in our solar system. And we didn't even, I mean, we had some hints that, you know, series and Pluto's existed, but we didn't know about all those other ones. You know how Mia and Maki Maki and all of those just amazing other objects. Yeah. Or the solar wind or well now leaving even our solar system, talking about things like exoplanets and other, which by the way, a big achievement, we just crossed over 5,000 confirmed exoplanets that we know of. Yeah. So, I mean, we suspect that within our galaxy alone, there are literally trillions of planets, but we can't confirm that yet. Right. We, it actually takes quite a bit of time to look at a star and determine whether that star has planets and it's only, we can only see a certain there's a threshold that we can't see. Underneath. So we can, we're really good at finding really big, massive close planets, but not so good at finding little low mass and faraway planets. So we've been only working on this for a few decades and we went from, from scientists thinking it would probably never, we'd never be able to see a planet around another star to knowing a thousands of. Mark: Yes. And that brings us to the big news of the past year or so when it comes to space exploration, which is the James Webb infrared telescope which. Successfully launched successfully unfolded itself in 350 discrete steps successfully calibrated and is now ready to start doing science. Yucca: Yeah, we're getting Mark: of, and one of its primary objectives is the identification of exoplanets. Yucca: Yeah. Well not, it's not for finding the exoplanets primarily it's for studying those that exist that we can't, that we can find them through other techniques. Right. So transit photometry or radio philosophy. I was basically looking for when the planet passes in front of the star, does it dip in brightness? And the other one is looking for the red shift when the planet is pulling on its star. So we know that there are stars there, but usually seeing them with the other telescopes that we have are very difficult because they get lost in the glare of their star. We're trying to look at it in visible light, but in infrared light, it's much easier to see that. And. Get a lot more details. We can also do some spectroscopy with infrared that can give us clues to what kinds of materials are in those atmospheres. And that allows us to look for certain certain types of chemicals that we would only associate with life. So those would be our, our biosignatures basically that we can look for. And of course we're interested in other planets, not just for the possibility of finding life, but that's one that a lot of people are interested in. Are there other people out there, Mark: right? right. Yucca: is there other life, but we're also interested. Are there other civilizations? Mark: Yeah. And there are some compounds that are actually pretty rare in, in as far as we can tell. They're, they're pretty rare in the universe except when they're assembled by life. So we can look for those. I mean, you know, we look for methane. We look for ammonia Yucca: Well, those ones are ones that have a lot of, of a biotic, but first for instance, foster things. So that was what the whole excitement with Venus I guess a year or two ago at this point it turned out that that was probably measurement error, but we were really excited that look, there are these phosphenes and yes, there may be some ways to make them a biotically so not life, but here on earth. The vast majority of it is made as actually by microbial processes. So when we were finding or thought we were finding it in the Venetian atmosphere, How, how is this possible? We don't know of any way that this could geologically be produced in these amounts. Again, unfortunately it turned out that that probably wasn't the case, and that happens a lot in science though. That's part of the process, right? One team put this forward, said, look what we found. And then the other teams looked at it and went, Hmm, well, actually we see some problems in your methodology here. No dark. That doesn't mean that there isn't life there, but that particular clue. It might not be a valid clue, Mark: Yeah, it's it's there it's questionable data, so it doesn't necessarily tell us anything. But this is the value of peer review, right? You know, when you have peer review by experts, then you get data. That's more likely to be true. And. You know, this is something that we go back to in naturalistic or science-based paganism and atheopagan ism all the time. Using the scientific method gives us a better sense of whether or not something is likely to be true. And that's a very, it's a, a markedly different approach to knowledge than the experiential approach to knowledge that much of the pagan community tends to rely on. But. It's also one that we can have higher confidence in our, our perceptual systems are so subject to error and glitch. And this is very well-documented. So, just putting in a quick plug for critical thinking and the scientific method you know, these are, these are important concepts for us as science-based pagans. Yucca: Right. And, and even if we aren't doing science, isn't not being professional scientists in our little. I think for everybody it's really important. So Mark: because we are bombarded with information now and a lot of. It's nonsense a lot. A lot of it is logically fallacious advertising. That's supposed to make you feel bad until you buy a product or associate something really wonderful with, with buying a product or a service. Yucca: Or just to get your views so that it gets advertising money, Mark: right. Yucca: right. Just make it sensational enough that you engage with it. Mark: Yeah. And if it. confirms your biases or angers you, then you're more likely to be riled up by it and therefore to pay more attention to it. And these techniques are well understood and they are used by Google and Facebook and all those various Yucca: now. It's not. Yeah, those are the big guys, but, but it's happening all over the Mark: It's everybody. Exactly. And so our capacity for parsing, what's likely to be true from what's likely what's less likely to be true, becomes a survival skill in this time. If we want to be people whose relationship with reality is grounded in credible data. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: So that's, that's one reason why all of this is very much of interest to science-based pagans, but I was going to ask the other question, which is why is all this space stuff? Pagan. Yucca: Yeah. Well, I do, I do want to circle back around and just to the James Webb before we go there. Cause Mark: Oh, good Yucca: question, but we, we mentioned one tiny thing about the James Webb. I mean, it's huge, but it's only one tiny part of, of the mission. And if I could just run for a second with this, Mark: Sure. Yucca: there's a lot of excitement about the James Webb. But it's not always explained like why it's such a big deal and one, it is yes. The largest telescope that we've ever actually launched and put into space. And with telescopes, the bigger the mirror, basically the more resolution you get, the better you can see. So it's kind of a joke, but bigger really is better. Right. But it's also infinitely. And light. When we think about light, we're thinking about visible light most of the time, which is the type of light that our eyes are sensitive to, but humans actually only see a tiny part of the spectrum of light and there's way more colors. So. Different wavelengths correspond with different colors. And we can go all the way to gamma rays down to radio. Radio is actually a form of light, but infrared is a form of light that is a little bit redder than red, right? Infrared below red. And it sees. I think it can see through certain materials, right? Certain kinds of light, light, visible light goes through the glass and your window just fine. But doesn't go through say the wall x-rays, which is light goes through your skin, but not through your bones. Well, infrared's really good at seeing through things like dust, but it's also going to be very useful to us because the farther. Way that you look with a telescope the further back in time, you're looking because light isn't instantaneous, it actually travels at a finite. To us on earth. It feels instantaneous because these distances are so short, but something like the sun is eight light minutes away. It takes light eight minutes to get to us. So if we look at something that's a thousand light years away that took a thousand years for that light to get to. But what we think is happening with the universe is that as time goes on, we believe that the universe is actually expanding. So as light travels through the expanding universe, it's getting stretched out. And so this is stretching those wavelengths, redder and redder and redder, and some of the early. From the only a few hundred million years after the, the big bang has been stretched so far into red, that it's passed out of visible light. So we can't see it with a telescope like the Hubble, because the Hubble doesn't see an infrared it Susan visible and a little into ultraviolet. So this telescope will let us see. With light. See these earliest time periods that we've never been able to see before. So we should be able to see galaxies at the earliest stages of formation. We should be able to look and see, you know, are quasi stars real? How do they form? Can we see the first population of stars? So it's opening up a whole. It's not even like a new chapter, but it's a whole new book. In our understanding of the universe. And it's probably going to throw a wrench into so many of our different accepted theories. They were like, oh, that doesn't make sense. The data doesn't support that and all kinds of new things. So in addition to studying the nearby things like exoplanets, we're going to be able to see the distant past in a way that we have only ever dreamed of being able to. So that's why I just want to put that plug into like how amazing of a, of an edge of a frontier that we're standing on right now with, with science, with space lines. Mark: Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you for that. And it should, it also bears saying that. Younger phenomena emit ultraviolet light as well. So we'll be able to see phenomena in the, in the, the, in the infrared. spectrum as well. Yucca: That's right? Mark: you know, we'll be able to look at stuff that's newer and capture images, which can then be false colored and differentiated into different wavelengths. So there will, there will be some very dramatic images from the James Webb. I'm sure. Yucca: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Mark: so, you know, we've all been so wowed by the Hubble. I think we can expect, you know, literal order of magnitude 10 times. Yucca: More, so, yeah. Mark: More so, with these images from the James Webb. So it's, it's a very exciting time and the calibration just happened in the last couple of months. So we're only we're, we're just starting to crack the book. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: a little. Yucca: Hopefully early summer is when we should start getting some science returned for, from it that's if everything seems to be going on track. So, you know, it's we're right there. Mark: And there. were so many things that could have gone wrong. Yucca: yeah. Mark: I mean, there were so many things that could've gone wrong. This, this project was first envisioned what? 19 86, 89. Okay. And Yucca: So the year, the wall came down Mark: yeah. Yucca: back to what we were starting with, right? Yeah. Mark: you know, when the, when the Soviet union collapsed and the cold war was over Yucca: was several years before Hubble launched. Mark: right, Yucca: Yeah. And it, and it went through a lot of different changes over the years. The initial launch dates, I mean, what were those supposed to be back in the early teens? 2012 or something Mark: Yeah. Yucca: yeah, but unlike the huddle, it's not in low earth orbit. The Hubble is in Leo so that we actually were able to go and make repairs when those needed to happen. The James Webb is in a, in a special orbital kind of island where it's actually orbiting the sun, but matching the matching Earth's orbit called L two. And that's, we're talking roughly four times the distance from the earth and the moon. So Mark: It's about a million. It's about a million miles away, a little short of that. Yucca: Yeah. So something goes wrong with that. We're not going out to fix it. Humans have never actually been beyond the moon. Right. I don't think we really. The capability of launching people there at this point. So everything had to be absolutely perfect. And it was this huge international effort, right? It was, I guess, primarily a NASA project, but there was ISA involved in the Canadian space agency. I think it was Jackson involved as well, but there were a lot of agencies that were in this. Mark: Honestly, I don't remember. Yucca: Yeah. I think the UK space agency was as well. Mark: yes. Yucca: So yeah. Mark: So it's very exciting and it's going to continue to be exciting. And now I'm going to loop back around to why is this exciting for pagans? Yucca: Right. Mark: And my answer to that, my really short answer is that as we have alluded to so many times and. Specified articulated on this podcast, paying attention is so important to our paganism, you know, understanding the world of nature around us. And even though we can't see it except at night because our atmosphere scatters the blue light and puts this sort of shell over the top of us, we're in space. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: We're we're, we're interacting with space stuff is raining down on the earth from space all the time. Radiation is coming into to the earth from space and, Yucca: Well, the things that were made from wood stellar processes, right? Stars had to form the heavier elements and supernovae, a neutron star collision and all of those things just to make the literal earth and in our bodies, which are just extensions of the earth. Mark: So there's, there's the wow factor of that. The sheer wonder of it, the all at the fact that all of this is connected, it's all interacting and it's all expanding and evolving as it has from the moment of the big bang. But beyond that, I think there's something about the human project. That makes this an interest to pagans. And this may be tough for some folks because you know that the romantic conceptualization of nature in Western culture, wasn't really a very good framing of, of reality. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: Because there was this idea that there was nature and then there was humanity and you sort of had to vote with your feet if you were So, or you were Henry Walden, the I'm sorry, Henry Thoreau. Then you, you voted for nature and rejected humanity. And if you were, you know, someone who is. You know, involved with governance and culture and those kinds of things, then you, you voted with humanity. Yucca: False dichotomy set up there. Mark: Yeah. it really is because we're. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: What we're doing is natural. Everything that we do, everything we've made, even the artificial chemicals that we've created that do not exist. Otherwise in nature, they're still natural because they follow the laws of physics. Yucca: Right. You wouldn't call formic acid, not natural because ants made it. Mark: Right. Yucca: So the things that humans make, those are natural to. Mark: Yeah. Now that's not to say that humans aren't well out of balance with the biotic systems of the earth we are. But framing this as a war or a battle or a competition, and then picking a side is both grossly oversimplified and. Not a very helpful way of framing Yucca: It's not useful. Yeah. Mark: it It's it's it's no, it doesn't really. Yucca: us up for failure, right? Because you're never going to like natural processes will never quote unquote win against that. Right. So if you set up your wind condition as having defeated natural processes, you can't, you will never win. Mark: Right. Right. So while Yucca and I are. Big environmentalists and have both worked professionally in the conservation fields, you know, both at a public policy level and in the Restoration. context, the implementation on the ground I think I can speak for both of us. When I say we feel very strongly that the human project is of interest to pagans and you know, the success of humans who are these remarkable beings, each of which carries around one of the most complex, interesting and mysterious phenomena we are aware of in the universe, which is a human brain. Is is something that's relevant to pagans. Not only because we want to grow ourselves and live the fullest lives, we can and build the deepest relationships we can with those that we love. But also because humanity itself has a value and we, we can hope for some level of success. For humanity. And one aspect of that success is in scratching that curious, itch, you know, learning the things that we are so curious about. And we've, we, we stumbled over time on to a really fantastic method for, for learning those things. It's not a perfect. Nothing humans create is perfect. Yucca: Right. Mark: But it's a very good method. And the peer reviewed scientific process is a very good method for learning even very complex things. Yucca: Yeah. Let me think about all the things that. The very complex and complicated things that we know about those have been learned through science, right? Being able to do things like send people to the moon or B have a little remote control Rover, not actually very level, it's pretty big on another planet. Right. And all of these things or going to the bottom of our ocean. Right. Exploring the hydrothermal vents or flying or any of these things. It's because we did science to do it. And that's a self-correcting process. Mark: Yes. Yes Yucca: Yeah. Mark: and no. When we first did it, we didn't do it very well. You know, the Wright brothers were up for what 120 seconds I think was, was the figure. Yucca: I don't remember what it was, but it was, it was short, Mark: It was Yucca: it was something about right. Mark: Yeah. It was powered flight heavier than air. And it was a start, it was something. And within 50 years, Yucca: We were on another planet. Mark: or, or ordinary people were buying tickets on commercial aircraft to fly from continent to continent. That's how fast it all happened. It is. It is extraordinary to live in this time. Yes, we have incredible challenges. And most of those challenges are of our own making, Yucca: Yeah. Mark: That we didn't intend to make them. But intent and impact are not the same thing. And that's what we always need to be aware of. When we think about when we hurt someone inadvertently, if our impact is different than our intent, we still need to apologize and make amends, Yucca: Yeah Mark: because good intentions are not enough to excuse behavior. That's harmful. Yucca: right. Mark: But as pagans, thinking about these big issues, thinking about the sacredness of it, all understanding it is a part of admiring it, Yucca: Yeah. Mark: understanding it as a part of embracing it for the wonder that it shows us. Yucca: And helping us to be able to make more informed and responsible choices. Mark: Hmm. Yucca: Right. There's often something that I hear echoed over and over again is, you know, why should we be spending money, exploring the universe and exploring space when we have so many problems here on earth and I'm sympathetic to that, right? We have so many things that we need to work on. But I think that the exploration and the, the, everything that we learn from that. Can put us in a better position to make better choices, like thinking about studying, why go to Mars or go to Venus? Well, comparative planetology lets us understand our own world on a level that simply would not be possible otherwise. Mark: Right. Yucca: Because B as we can. Do a controlled study on earth, the way you could do a controlled study and in the lab and you put the, this, this condition and that you can't do that with the planet. So their next best thing is to learn as much as we can about the things that are similar to earth. Right. And just try and make decisions based on what we learn. And, and so many things we it's really hard to see how it's all connected, but yeah. That there is always a connection back to picking something that we learned for one from one field and be able to apply that to another. This is a really simple one, but photovoltaics. Right? So although that wasn't developed specifically for the space program, the space program really did do a lot of development on it. And what that contributed to the, the field back here on earth allows us now to have. Solar power, right? This, this is being recorded right now. You are listening to this podcast because that's the power that's powering my house. There is no electricity in the part of the state where I live. It's not there. It's not available unless you use photovoltaics. And so it's, you never know how it comes back around. Mark: Right. And all of that is true and important and valid. And I also go back to the piece that I wrote in my book, which I think is so important to acknowledge because the, the, the proselytizing atheists like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris. They tend to miss this piece, which is that humans are not just rational thinking creatures. We are also emotional aspirational creatures. We have hopes and dreams and and optimism and pessimism and you know, and, and romantic aspirations. And. The voyage to the frontier is something that has been inherent in humanity. At least since somebody decided to leave Africa, Yucca: Yeah. Mark: We've been, we've been going, we've been, we've been going from, you know, we've been making boats and going to Australia. We've been. You know, we've been moving around and interested in seeing what's over the horizon. And the horizon now is space. And I feel that there would be without space exploration and the learning that it provides us. I just feel. To some degree, the wind would go out of the sales of humanity. We, you know, if we turned back in on ourselves and I'm the first to say, I want to see everybody fed housed healthcare closed. I do not consider these to be competing priorities, Yucca: Yeah. Mark: but where we should be mining, the resources for that are not from these not very well-funded space programs. It's from the gigantic piles of resources that billionaires have accumulated that they don't need, that they just don't need. Nobody needs that much. And so that's, that's where I am with it. And there's room for debate over all of those things. Of course, they're complicated issues and there are a lot of factors that go into them. But I don't think you excuse a poor set of social values and social priorities by pulling the plug on your feeding of human curiosity. Yucca: Yeah. It's it gets people. I mean, ask, not every single seven-year-old, but most seven year olds you ask them, what, what are they really like? What are they curious about? And how many of them are going to tell you? I want to know more about space. Mark: It's space or dinosaur is one or the other, Yucca: Right. Both. Awesome. Could we combine the two? Mark: Awesome. Yucca: actually my littlest is really well. He's not into dinosaurs. He's actually into pterosaurs and he's really, really like particular about the distinction between them, which is Mark: okay. Yucca: but yeah. But right. So pterosaurs and space. So I liked that idea. Mark: Huh. Yucca: But yeah, but, and then that's one. So let's just say. It's all connected, right. And the exploration of our own past and our own future and the context that we're in. I think it's a beautiful thing for us too, to be able to explore that. So. Mark: Absolutely. And I mean, you can hear. In our voices, how animated we become when we talk about these things. And, you know, I think about the public scientists that are out there. And I mean, it was, it was a considerable effort for Stephen Hawking to be able to communicate excitement. You know, that, that was, that was very challenging for him. And yet he still could because his excitement at what was being discovered in his. Burning curiosity about the nature of the universe came through even his terrible affliction and disability. You could just, you could feel it coming from him and you know, one of the. One of the atheopagan principles, one of the 13 principles that we, we work to live our lives by in, you know, amongst those who are atheopagan is curiosity. And the answer, they, the, the feeding of curiosity feeds are all and reverence, which is the second principle. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: The awe and the reverence are what give us a sense of meaning and purpose and beauty and joy in living. And the curiosity is a means to the end of that as well as a means to the end of bridging that huge gap between ourselves and another person, and really trying to understand what it's like in their world and what their needs are And how we can best work with those. So it's cool. It's really cool. Yucca: And I want to put, it's always hard for me to do self promotion, but I'm going to make myself do it for anyone who does want to hear me talk about space a lot. And if you're on Tik TOK, I do have a tech talk channel. That's all about space and, and all of that. So that's space underscore stem, S T E M like science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. So I'll put a link. So if you're interested in that and you just want to. You know, talk about what's a quasar, what's it? This ask questions. All of that. You can find me there if you're Mark: followed that Yucca: the dude speak. Mark: yeah, I, I set up a Tik TOK account for the atheopagan society and it's, it's just a placeholder now I'm following a lot of people, but I haven't put any videos up there, but I, I wanted to capture. The atheopagan label before somebody else took it. And although there are quite a number of Yucca: Oh, there's some Mark: Videos on that are tagged atheopagan or atheopagan aneurysm on Tik TOK. I, you know, It's. really an interesting thing because my first. Impression of tick talk was not positive. It was like The stuff you're feeding me is really vapid. And I don't know why anybody is sticking with this, but as the algorithm starts to get to know you, there is some amazing feminist content anticapitalist content, environmental content, political content. Yucca: talk is really is awesome. There's some really awesome creators. I mean, I actually would, even though I'm on Tik TOK, I would suggest to anyone, if you are not there, you don't need it. It's it it's really, really good at what it does. And you will look up three hours later from your phone and go, where did my day go? Right. So if you ha, if you're already struggling with street with screen addiction, it's not a great, it doesn't help you. Right. I kind of think of it like, you know, I don't want to be giving like advices on great new beers to somebody who's struggling with alcoholism. Mark: That's a good point. Yeah. Yucca: But if it's something that you already are being able to manage and are already there on Tik TOK, like I'd love to have come check it out. And for people who want right. What you're saying, mark, about developing the atheopagan channel. Like if people have ideas about that we would love to hear Mark: We'd love to hear it, especially now that, the permissible length of the videos has increased somewhat. I mean, it's, you can do a short little overview in, in three minutes, but now that it's expanded to 10, it's really possible to do some things. I, I think. Yucca: most people still don't have 10. They just kind of randomly give it to some people and not Mark: Oh, really? Yucca: But everybody can, everybody can do three. But they we'll see, we'll see if the 10 sticks, a lot of people are upset about. Mark: Ah, interesting. Yucca: yeah, it's, I think it started at 15 seconds though. And they like slowly went up. I use every second of my three minutes, I have to edit out to go in and edit out what I say. I'm like, oh, do I really need that? That's in there because three minutes is so hard to say anything. And, Mark: It is, it is. Yeah. I mean, especially when you're talking about stem content, I mean, that's because there are a lot of moving pieces to, you know, to, to that kind of education and winnowing it down to a single point is. Yucca: Yeah. I ended up doing a lot of multiple series where I'm like, okay, we talked about protoplanetary discs this time. So now we're talking about this, watch my video on that. And then, you know, 20 people in the comments linking them, say, watch, watch the first video, like I said, but they're, they're working on it. So, it's a, it's a great platform for connecting with people, but it is, it's a bit of a black hole. Mark: Yeah. And, but my feeling is, you know, if, if this is where younger people are going I want to be there with them. I, I, you know, I, I want our community to be there with them because otherwise we're, you know, we're, we're just in this sort of hide bound capsule of people who are getting steadily more gray. And that's. That's not really community building it's it's unproductive. Yucca: Yeah, Mark: And I mean, as I said, there is some, there's some really sharp thinking out there on Tik TOK. Yucca: Stuff. Mark: there really is extremely sharp thinking. Lot of incredible anti-racists stuff, the indigenous stuff. is very good as well. Yeah. Yucca: There's a yeah. And, and, and pretty much any of the scientific fields are interested in like, there's somebody from that field doing it. There's a ton of astrophysicist on there. And like, there's this lady who does like CRISPR that I follow and like all kinds of. And people who do history. And like, if you get to that side, you've got to purposely go and search out that content. And then the algorithm starts learning that that's what you want rather than wanting like the. Whatever there's, there's all kinds of stuff. Right. But it doesn't, you don't have to see any dances if you don't want, I mean, there's some pretty cool dances too, but if you'd like to not be watching dances on picked on, you can, you can get to the side of tick-tock that doesn't have that. So, but yeah, so that that's the plug. So space under store, underscore stem. If people are interested in. Mark: Cool. Very cool. Yucca: why don't we, we talk a little bit before we finish up today about the coming month or so in the night sky. Mark: Good idea. Yucca: Yeah. Because we are for, for those of us in the Northern hemisphere, we're moving into the time of year where it's comfortable to be outside. After dark. I know that at least in my area, in the middle of the winter, and it's, you know, nine degrees Fahrenheit out. You don't want to be out there, but now that you know, you're not freezing, there's some. There's a lot of really fun things coming up. The first thing is not right now, but next month there is going to be a total lunar eclipse for north America. Yeah. So for north America at a fairly reasonable time, the one that happened in November, Was in the middle of the night for most people was like two or three in the morning, but this one should be depending on where you live between like seven and nine. So I think a lot of people can stay up for that. Mark: And that's on the night of Sunday, the 15th. Yucca: I think so. Oh, let me see here. Yes. So yeah, for, in that, for, in the states, it's going to be the 15th. So universal time you might see on calendars, it's saying the 16th, but on calendars, that's always going to tell you in universal time. So you just have to know what your time is relevant to that. Mark: Yeah. Yucca: So, so that'll be. That. And that'll be the weekend that we're at century retreat for anyone who'll be there with us. And, and we will be bringing some telescopes and stuff to that event for anyone who wants, Mark: well, you, Yucca: well, I will, yes, I, I, in my little one, who's coming with me. So, and. We're going to be moving into times where there's more meteor showers. The last few months, there wasn't a lot going on meteor shower wise, but we have the lyrics coming up. They'll still be a bit of moon for that, which makes it hard to see. But that kind of sets off the whole media shower season. So most nights of the year, even if there's not a specific shower going on, you can usually see several meteors. That's pretty typical. If you've got dark skies, if you're on right in the middle of the city, it's going to be a little bit trickier to be able to see it. Right. Mark: Yeah. Yucca: Oh, and the other one is that if you are a morning person, all the visible planets and for the rest of the month, they're actually lining up in the morning. It's like a diagonal line across the sky in the pre-dawn hours to get up like half an hour to an hour before Dawn. And you can look out and just see this beautiful little line of like piercing, bright planets in the sky. And then maybe stay up and listen to the birds, start to sing and the Dawn come over the sky. So, Mark: Well worth it. A good thing to do once in awhile, even if you're not a morning person, Yucca: yeah. Mark: which I am not. But for some reason, a couple of years ago, I started waking up very early in the morning and I've been doing that ever since. So, I don't know, things change. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: I wanted to put out a brief shout out we, or I'm sorry, not our podcast, but atheopagan ism gut name-checked. On the podcast, go home Bible you're drunk which is a well well-known skeptic atheist podcast. Yucca: I haven't heard of this one before. Mark: Yes. So, and they're, they're great. For the, for the X van Angelicals who are among our listenership for the folks that are recovering from from particularly from Christian religion, that. Don't feel good about, they go into some detail about particular sections of the Bible and how they contradict one another, or you know, why they don't make any sense in a modern context, any of that kind of thing. So go home Bible you're drunk podcast very nice people and they gave us a nice shout out. So that was cool. Yucca: That's awesome. Mark: Yeah. Yucca: Great. Mark: Well, this has been a Great. conversation. I know We could talk about space for the next three hours. But we have to stop it somewhere. Yucca: We do. So just encourage any of you to, if you've got any planetariums or museums in your area and you're comfortable going out check out, see, maybe if they're doing something or there'll be a lot of online events too, you'd be able to find some, some cooler areas night celebrations, or maybe you could do a little bit of your own, you know, maybe put on some old episodes of cosmos. So yeah. Mark: And that could be as quickly as this, this podcast is going to drop on the 11th, which is the day before your is night. And It may be on the following weekend. It just depends on when. Yucca: It's often on the weekends, right. Because people that, that works better for people's schedules usually. So that's good. Really good point. So. Well, thanks, mark. This is great. Mark: yeah. It Yucca: Thanks for nerding out a little bit. And we didn't talk about ice volcanoes, but maybe we'll be able to talk about Mark: Oh, the ice volcanoes. That's right. Oh, Yucca: Yeah. So search that Pluto ice volcanoes. So, all right. Mark: Cool. All right. Take care, everyone.

VRTAC-QM Manager Minute: Get in and Get er' Done! How California Makes VR Work for Customers!

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 11, 2022 38:18

Joining Carol Pankow in the VRTAC-QM Studio is Mark Erlichman, Deputy Director, Vocational Rehabilitation Employment Division, California Department of Rehabilitation. In this episode of Manager Minute, Mark covers the idea of Rapid Engagement. The idea behind it is to get customers in and move as quickly as possible to succeed. The California DORS Team has a variety of initiatives that they are working on. Mark and Carol will chat about a handful of those projects. Learn about California's expedited enrollment process, resource navigators, and the sector-based service teams. Listen Here Full Transcript You can find out more about VRTAC-QM on the web at: https://www.vrtac-qm.org/ Please stay up to date by following VRTAC-QM on Facebook and follow us on Twitter @VRTAC_QM About VRTAC-QM Partnering with State Vocational Rehabilitation Agencies (SVRAs) to enhance service delivery and maximize outcomes through quality program and resource management. The purpose of the VRTAC-QM is to provide training and technical assistance that will enable State VR agency personnel to manage available resources, improve effective service delivery, and increase the number and quality of employment outcomes for individuals with disabilities. The VRTAC-QM provides TA and training in VR program and performance quality management, fiscal and resource quality management of the VR program, and general quality management of organizations. You can request technical assistance from the VRTAC-QM by contacting your TA Liaison directly, contacting any member of the Center you wish, or by filling out the information on our main websiteand clicking on submit. While on the main website, join our mailing list to receive updates on training and new activities occurring within the Center. Full Transcript VRTAC-QM Manager Minute: Get in and Get er' Done! Making VR Processes Work How California Makes VR Work for Customers! Speaker1: Manager Minute brought to you by the VRTAAC for Quality Management, Conversations powered by VR, one manager at a time, one minute at a time. Here is your host Carol Pankow. Carol: Welcome to the manager minute, joining me in the studio today is Mark Erlichman, Deputy Director, Vocational Rehabilitation Employment Division with California Department of Rehabilitation. So Mark, thanks for being here. How are things going in California? Mark: Thank you so much for the invitation. Things in California are going about the same way they're going across the country. We're coping, we're managing, but I'm excited that we're continuing to look at improving. So in spite of the pandemic, we've been able to stay open and we've been able to sell, serve our consumers. Carol: Glad to hear it. I'm glad to hear that. Well, today's topic covers this idea of rapid engagement, and the idea behind that is to get customers in and move as quickly as possible to succeed. You'd spoken to me a couple of weeks ago about the saying you like to go by. Our customers are and must feel more important than the process. And I hear a lot of Joe Xavier in that statement and eager to talk more about the variety of initiatives that you have in California. I believe that you have a list of over 20 projects that you and the California DOR team are working on, and so we're going to just chat about a handful of those today. So Marc, can you tell our listeners a little bit more about you, your career, the agency, like how many customers you're serving? Mark: Sure, thank you. As you mentioned, I'm the deputy director and our employment division here. So we provide services to the general consumers when you have a blind field services division that worked with individual or blind, but we work with pretty much everybody else. And so in any given year, we probably serve somewhere between 80 to 90 thousand participants. So that includes our potentially eligible students with disabilities. So we have about thirteen hundred staff. We work out of about 80 dedicated offices and dozens of other locations, including one stops now called American Job Centers. So I started my career as a counselor way back in nineteen ninety four the dark ages pre-internet and it was right out of college, got my degree in rehabilitation counseling. But since I started, I've been very fortunate to move up within our department and I became a supervisor, a manager, then a district administrator. And then I joined the executive team in about 2012 as an assistant deputy director. And since 2019, I've been the deputy director and like I mentioned and responsible for VR Student Services and also our Business Services team. Carol: I love to hear that I love it when people are kind of grown up through the system, and I think it's really cool. We've got that good opportunity working with Joe Xavier. I think a lot of him and his really awesome leadership style and his innovativeness. Mark: Yeah, he's great. It's actually kind of fun working with him because typically I felt people try to be cautious and push back when you're trying to be innovative. Joe actually pushes us in the other direction. If we're not being innovative enough, we hear it. Carol: Oh yeah, that's Joe for you. He pushes all of us, even if we don't work for him, makes the whole country better. I love it. So you told me when we were having our conversation before that consumers never more motivated in their life than the first moment that they engage us. So can you talk a little about your expedited enrollment process and what that entails and how that's impacted your data? Mark: Sure, absolutely. And you're right. Our approach to customer service really starts from day one. When I was a counselor working with consumers, I realized, like you mentioned, that there never really are going to be more motivated than that very first time they make the decision to go back to work or return to work. They look us up or they find a department, they make an appointment, they make arrangements for transportation. They may need to make arrangements for childcare. They may take two or three buses to get to our office. Then they sit in the waiting room. They may sit through an orientation and then they're given a stack of forms to fill out and told to come back later. And they go through all of that just on faith alone because they don't know where there's actually anything in it for them. And we did ask that question is when is that individual ever going to be more motivated than at that point? So rather than putting them off by telling them we have 60 days to find you eligible, so don't expect to hear from us, what we do is we actually try to do everything we can that very first day. So we really look at what a consumer or an applicant wants. They really want answer to the three questions, which is how can you help me? Can you help me at all? And when can we get started? So what we decided to do, recognizing that we want to keep that momentum going is that we wanted to make an eligibility determination and start the process, keep that forward progress and keep their momentum going from the very beginning. So about three years ago, we began rolling out what we call expedited enrollment. This process supports our train rehabilitation counselors and they are all trained. All our counselors have master's degree. We use their professional judgment to make a determination about somebody's eligibility, and we started with the understanding of the federal regulations. Support this, then there's never, ever been a requirement for medical or school records to be put in the case file. There's never been a requirement for additional evaluations or sending somebody for testing. So what our counselors do is whenever appropriate, and it's almost quite frequently appropriate, our counselors make a determination based on a readily apparent decision. Ability that they have a disabling condition and through a skilled interview that they can benefit from services for us, one of the things we took a look at is what is the inherent risk in doing that? We found out that less than two percent of our consumers have ever found not eligible for services due to the severity of their disability. In those cases, we would have to do a trial work experience anyway. And the vast majority of individuals come in and are great historians about their disability. So we did a statewide rollout to all of our offices that included staff training and set the expectation that expedited enrollment or finding somebody eligible based on counselors observation is our standard method of determining eligibility and requesting lengthy records or ordering testing or further evaluations will always be the exception here. So we did statewide training. Like I mentioned, we included Joe and we conclude our directorate. Many of US executives went participate in the training, and we even had a staff attorney come out to assure staff that this is consistent with the regulations and nobody's going to get in trouble. We reinforce the message and continue to reinforce the message through a couple of things. We changed our services application form to reflect the enrollment process, recognizing the consumer is the best historians. So we asked them How can we help you? We generate reports of utilization and expedited enrollment, so we see how many individuals are found eligible using this process throughout the state. And we're also going to be updating our regulations to clearly and unmistakably reflect that this is the process that we use. As I mentioned, the counselor has always been able to make that eligible determination on relevant professional judgment. And if they have a readily apparent disability, we just help define that. So how are we doing? You asked. Carol: I did ask, How's that going with the data? Mark: All right. So even though cultural change and changing old habits is really difficult, we are actually in that as of the end of December of 2021. So as of this last December, about two thirds of all of our applicants are being determined eligible for services using expedited enrollment, and we're defining that as being found eligible within five days of application. Carol: Wow! Mark: In fact, 40 percent of the consumers that apply for services in December were found eligible on the actual same day of application. So they're actually everything was put into the system, including their eligibility determination. And for us, Carol: that's fantastic! Mark: Again, from where we were to having two out of three consumers are found eligible within the first five days is tremendous and we did look at the data. I do believe that that's fantastic. But for me, that really isn't enough because a consumer doesn't really care about eligibility determination. That's our process. And like we mentioned, the person should always be more important than the process. It really is about how quickly can we get somebody from interest to services? And so we've also been keeping track of planned timelines, how quickly somebody gets from eligibility to plan, and we've seen a reduction in that as well. So not only people have been found eligible more quickly, but their plans are also implemented much more quickly as well. Carol: Well, I want to underscore what you're saying because I know a lot of agencies are really struggling with this area. There's a lot of old practices and I remember it even being at Minnesota Blind and people were requesting this medical report and all of that. I'm like, Listen, like you are a trained professional rehabilitation counselor. You can see this impairment as individuals coming in the door. You're going through that skilled interview, you're being able to assess that. We're able to benefit them. Like, why are we running people through these other paces? Because I think sometimes in VR, we're almost exhausting. Like it's exhausting for the customer, right? Mark: And I don't think any one of us would want to go through the process that we put our consumers through. To me, that's always the best test of where you need to go. Would you accept that for yourself or a family member? Carol: Absolutely. So how staff have they embraced this? Like, are people really like they're seeing what a change this has made? Mark: I mean, universally, no. But the vast maj ority of our staff are seeing this as a tremendous boon to their jobs. I mean, they really like making that consumer feel like they're the most important person that they're working with. And really those individuals that are hesitant in this counselor and sometimes have been hesitant. It's been really around habit and it's been around fear. And so as we address those, we're seeing more and more people embrace this, and we did learn some lessons from the very beginning. We thought that everybody would be excited. And after a while when we recognize that there are some counselors that weren't, we went back through and generate a report. Change your application to really got communicated clearly that it's the expectation so people should feel comfortable. Carol: That's excellent. And I feel like it's putting back kind of that professionalism into VR that counselors may have felt was stripped away from some of the more case management aspects of WIOA and all the data entry and all of that. It's like, this is a classic example of using your skills and what you learned in your graduate degree and making something awesome happening and making such a connection with that customer right off the get go. Mark: Absolutely. And would also really help was communicating to the counselors that we're trusting your professional judgment and the operative word here is trust, and you're not sure that you can still request. Records, you can't still work with the consumer and do further evaluations. You don't have to and you shouldn't have to. But once councilors understood that it's their judgment and so for us, two out of three is great. I'm looking for more than that. We don't know what the exact right percentage is, but we do know that whenever possible, that momentum that we talked about, that momentum should continue for all of our consumers. Carol: That's awesome. I love it. So let's shift a little bit to talk about another project you have cooking with your councilors, and that's the councilors getting in and working immediately with those customers at risk of losing their job or needing to retain their employment. So what does that look like? Are you seeing some success with this? Mark: A great question, actually. I think what you're referring to is what we call our Rapid Engagement. And so I think that's kind of the theme of this, and we just try to find a catchy name for it. But in simple words, it's kind of keeping with Jo's message and Jo's message to us and we've ever heard, and it's been very, very clear that we need to meet our participants where they are. It doesn't matter where we are, we need to meet them where they are. And we're not just talking about physically because that's important too, but we're really are talking about where they are in their lives and in their job search and or in their employment. And so recognizing that not all applicants are at the same place, some could be employed right now. Others may have been unemployed for a long period of time, but they're all in a different place. We wanted to stop making everybody go through the same linear sequential process, which is again, process shouldn't Trump person. And so our pilot involves assigning a specialist counselor within a district to what we call a Rapid Engagement Caseload. So their primary responsibility is to assist individuals that will meet at least one of the following criteria. There were a former QR consumer. We still have available that information from their former case, so we're not starting over or is a referral from a public or private organization that serves individuals with disabilities like a kind of behavioral health program or a rehabilitation hospital or an agency serving the Blind or the Deaf and Visually Impaired? Clearly, they've already been determined that they have a disability or they have a readily apparent disability, which is that we have then go through Expedited Enrollment. So it's one of those conditions, and they either require assistance in regaining employment because they just recently lost their job due to a reduction in work hours or to a layoff. They require some type of job retention services because their personal conditions have changed or their employment conditions have changed. They may have an exacerbation or they may have gotten promoted, or the job duties may have changed and they need some assistance or that there require some services from us to promote within the same business. And so they clearly are eligible for services and they need services immediately. Why wouldn't we treat them a little differently and really expedite their services? And so what the counselor does is using Expedited Enrollment, they are found eligible and typically at that same time, they write the plan because what do you really need to know if somebody wants to keep their job? There's not a lot of planning involved. The effort in the it should be OK, what services do you need? But you're not doing job search. You're not doing research into the occupation. Where you really are doing is you're helping somebody, as you know, if you need to keep your job, you probably can't wait two weeks, three weeks or three months. Carol: Right. Process shouldn't Trump, person? I love that. I just have to say that statement. Mark: Absolutely. Carol: That's awesome. Mark: And the consumers have been extremely grateful. I mean, the feedback that we've gotten from the counselors and the notes and the thanks not just from our participants, but some of the employers have reached out as well that to thank us for how should I put it in a nice enough way because I'm government, we didn't act like government, Carol: Which should be the goal of all we are. We don't want to be that bureaucratic government, even though we're in the government. Very cool. So are you seeing some good success from that then with people as far as your numbers, then with helping individuals to retain employment or regain employment, is that playing out in your data? Mark: Well, we're not seeing anybody drop out pre-plan, which is always fun because it's always so discouraging when you see somebody who comes out to request for services and then before anything even gets started, they change their mind or they go away. So we don't see that for somebody goes online right away. And we're not seeing people drop out of their plans due to lack of contact or which is typically the most common. And so the success rate. And again, this is relatively new, relatively new pilot. So I can't say, look, we have a 65 or 85 percent success rate, which is I'm guessing that's where we're going to end up because of what we're seeing. But what we're seeing is the consumers are much more engaged and the services are getting at the consumer much more rapidly. So we're hopeful. And from what we're seeing, this isn't going to be a pilot for long. Carol: Well, that's half the battle. I mean, I think the whole country is struggling with this because artists say they will hold up their statistics in a fall or spring CSAVR conference. And you're like, Oh my gosh, you know, all the people exiting before playing and people closing because you can't find them unable to locate and all of that. And so how do you get at this piece? I think there's going to be states definitely clamoring for your number later to try to talk to you about what you're doing because I know I've talked to many people and they're really. Struggling around this area, Mark: And we continue to as well, that's where we're trying, and we don't expect that out of the 20 plus efforts that we're trying to modernize, that they're all going to work and I hope they don't because if they all work, then we're not trying hard enough and we're not being creative enough and we're not pushing the envelope. We're hoping that some of these do stick for us. It's important to keep data and to track these. In the past, we would try these efforts and never ask the question, is it working? And we're trying to approach these projects totally differently. They all have project charters, they all have evaluation plans, and the expectation is that we do more of what's working and stop doing things that aren't. Carol: I love that. I love that. I think that's the message right there. Underscore VR, end of our conversation. Listen to Marc, let's do this. I like that you guys are trying a lot of things. I think sometimes people are really afraid and they've been stuck. You get stuck in patterns of doing things. It's taken that step back and taking a look and going, Why are we doing it that way? It is not working. It's not working out. So that's really cool. I know you have another newer pilot, you have a million of them, but this one with some positions that you added to your five districts, I think you called them Resource Navigators as part of a response team. So how does that pilot work? Mark: We're calling it our Community Resource Navigator position, and we've got 14 districts in the state, and so we're piloting in 5 of them. And these are 5 districts that were particularly hit hard by 1 of our many or a couple of our our many disasters in California, particularly some of the fire impacted counties. And so these Community Resource Navigators and gauge applicants can eligible participants really early on the process. And again, that early engagement, we may not be able to do a Rapid Engagement in terms of providing them plan services because there's still some planning that needs to occur. For us, it's important for the consumers to continue that momentum. And so when our staffing engage with our applicants and our or eligible consumers, the plan is to help them gain the support and assistance that they may need down the road. It's not just telling them, here you need to go. Apply for financial aid if you want to go to school or here's the county welfare program. Or here's the Medicaid office apply for health care services or here in Snap or Food or Nutrition Assistance Program. These are the things you may benefit from. These are the supports that we think would help you matriculate into your employment program. There's no reason to wait to apply for them. And by the way, we're not just referring you there. The Sierra has actually walked the individual through and help them with the application process, and so they get to know your local welfare staff. They get to know the nutrition, the food stamp. When we call our peer the Snap program and they get to know the housing authority staff and they work with our consumers or applicants to help them apply for those services, they'll connect them with Independent Living Center. And so the idea is if somebody is coming to us because they absolutely have immediate needs and we know the hierarchy of needs, you know, if you don't have shelter or food, employment seems really far off. So we have some consumers that'll come. We'll help them. They'll actually get get on some financial assistance, then we'll get some housing assistance and they'll say, OK, let me stabilize and I'll come back so they don't start a plan, then decide that they're not ready for employment. They get the support they need right away. And those individuals that continue with us will have the support and the wraparound supports. And really, it really is what we call the application that whole person approach, which is it's not just about employment, it's about the whole person. So when we're talking about evaluation for us, we're evaluating the crowds by the number of individuals that are closed unsuccessfully. We want to see a reduction of applicants that go through the process just to drop out. And we are we're seeing, I think for us started this about a year and a half ago. So we're starting to see some of the first evaluations. And what we're seeing is there is a dramatic reduction in the number of individuals that were closed out successfully that received the CRN services because they didn't drop out because, well, they didn't have a place to stay. They didn't drop out because they had an exacerbation to their health and they became dependent on family support again and they connected them in the living services. So we are seeing that and I think we're optimistic that that's one of these things that we're talking about and say, Yeah, we'll do more of that. Carol: I think that's going to be exciting. I think when you look longitudinally at that data and you go, you take it out now you're out a year and a half, you start taking that data out two and a half, three, four, five years. I think you're probably going to see some probably amazing results because like you say, the person doesn't have food. It's hard to worry about. Like, I'm going to get this job, but I don't even have anything to eat and I'm starving, and I have to go to an interview and try to be on my best foot. Or I didn't have a place to wash my clothes or I couldn't take a shower or do any of that. It's getting back to that. Yeah, Maslow's hierarchy of needs, like you said, very important. That is super interesting. You also have staff that are embedded in business. I thought this was really cool and you were talking about some staff embedded within an HR department. Can you tell me a little more about that? Mark: Absolutely. Recognizing that business is a customer of our system, again, that was have been, but it's really emphasized through WIOA. We reached out to employers and said, OK, ask them, what do you need? So we. And one of the things that came back is that they wanted our assistance, they wanted to ask questions, but they wanted a single point of contact because they don't have to call a new person every day. They don't want to hear from multiple people reaching out to them. So we said, Great, will for this business, here's a single point of contact, and that's where we're talking as we were brainstorming. One of my managers pointed out saying, Well, we really are looking at more outstations and we really are looking at more of a mobile workforce and this is pre-COVID. So we actually were meeting people in person. And so the single point of contact and approach that employers saying, would you be interested in having a person come out and spend time with you? And they said, Yeah, that would be great. I mean, would you be willing to give them some office space and say, yes, we would be happy to do that and give her some office space in their HR shop. And this is a really, really very large employer. It's a military contractor. They've got thousands of employees in their facility in that county. And for us, that's ample opportunity to kind of make a difference there so that started with two days a month of office hours. And it's kind of quiet start because nobody knew she was there. And then when she introduced herself, they have a disability affinity group.So she started attending that and talking about rehab and rehab services. And so their employees with disabilities or family members of employees with disabilities became informed about what we did and why we were there. Managers who had issues or questions about disability or accommodations, they would have started approaching her. And so in the first 3 months after about the first 6 months, then COVID hit and then now we've been providing that same support virtually like the rest of the world. But in the first 3 or 4 months, we got six referrals from that employer. There are other self-referral or they're referred by one of their managers. All 6 were found eligible. Developed 5 plans within just within a few days of application because we just met them there at the employment side there, right and the 6th applicant that we didn't write a plan for or we worked on a plan, but we didn't actually implement. The plan was because their supervisor and the employee said, Oh, we can do that. We don't need you. We don't need your help. Thank you for the information. And they went ahead and provided the accommodation as the employee and that employee didn't need our services and the other 5 were serving. And really, we offered them services, job retention, job promotion, but really marketed in two ways. One, we can help them with their hiring needs because this counselor can also set up hiring events, and we want to help your employees remain productive for you as the employer. And so they really appreciated that. Carol: Everybody's looking for that. I mean, they're looking at ways to retain their employees. And if they're struggling, you may love that where your counselor is able to go in and maybe they're struggling, they don't know the right thing to do. And even though they might have like a disability specialist on staff, sometimes I find those folks really aren't, you know, the people that are kind of charged with that role. So you're bringing this other lens in and really helping support those individuals so they can keep their employment. That is excellent, really awesome. Mark: You're totally right because we found that most of the time where their disability expert is typically somebody who is a diversity person, and so they've got a wide range of responsibilities. And for us, we like our niche. We are really good with disability and they don't have to be experts because they have access to that expert and really become a really good partnership. In fact, that employer has several other sites in California, and they're asking for the same. There was another really large employer in the Southern California area that we started talking with right before the pandemic, that we have a follow up meeting later this spring to do that as well and were literally looking at having somebody there every week. Carol: That is super cool. I bet that has to be really rewarding for that counselor again, looking at ways of developing work differently so the counselors they feel engaged in and excited about their work and want to keep working for VR and not leaving us for the VA or whatever else. But that's gotta be super Rewarding. Mark: And absolutely anybody is thinking of this for us. Just bringing in the employer was really enthusiastic and we actually had to sign non-disclosure because the military contractor, there's a background check. But just offering that free, you know, free service to them and free support to them, they're extremely grateful. And if you want to change an employer's culture, make it really easy for them to hire, promote and employ and recruit individuals with disabilities because that's what changes it isn't wanting to be more disability accessible and more disability friendly. It's actually having the experience and having the employees that reflect the world for us, the rest of the state. Carol: Yeah, you're spot on. I know when I talked to joe on a previous podcast, I love Joe because he was telling me the microscope and the telescope, you know, be looking down and looking ahead. But he mentioned something really cool that you guys were looking at Sector Based Service teams. So how do we learn a little more about that and how that works? Do tell. Mark: Really excited about this. We have this concept. We've started working on identifying how we would roll something like this out, and we actually applied for one of the Disability Innovation Fund grants and we got it this year. And so we have a five year grant. And so this allows us to not just take the concept we wanted to try out, but actually create a real research study and bring technical assistance and tools to bear on to see how this may impact really our. And our consumer success, the grant name is the Pathways to Success program, but it is that Sector Based strategy. Carol: Are you doing it alone or are you in a collaborative with another state? Mark: Oh, we're doing it on our own. Carol: Ok. Mark: We figured we had ample consumers to work with in California. Carol: Yeah, that's awesome. Mark: And we started laying the foundation because we started working on the process. But having the ability to have this a set aside with a study and web have the university partner with San Diego State University and we have other partners as well. We got 15 letters of support across the state, including from our labor agency and our workforce partners, so we're really excited about that. The way I explain the sector based strategy is this typically a consumer is served by somebody from our program based on their proximity. So it's a consumer zip code that typically dictates who they're working with and sometimes through specialization. So you may have a counselor for the deaf, or you may have a counselor that works with supported employment caseload, but typically that's it. If I'm your consumer is because you're my zip code or because you're specializing in the school caseload. And so I remember working as a counselor and I had a transition aide, youth caseload of some migrant farm workers, justice involved individuals and those in support employment. So I had a variety of consumers in my zip code. So I was expected to be a disability expert. So, you know, went to school, you know, got that and learned that the consumer is the best expert in their disability. So, you know, so I didn't have to be an expert in every disability, but it was also my job to help the consumer prepare for employment, and I needed to then know about all these occupations. So at one time, I think I had a butcher, a teacher, a janitor, a software technician, a security guard, dental hygienist and a bank teller. And I think maybe even a line cook. Those are all plans that I had. And so I was expected as a brand new counselor to figure out how a cook gets a job and how a teacher gets a job, or what does a dental hygienist have to go through to get a job? And what is the security guard need? And I did it every time we had to do research, and I was never, never became an expert in anything. I became a generalist but never became an expert. And so writing a really, really good IPE with someone really is a challenge. And so we said, what have we have rather than the proximity? Because that's not really that important, particularly not nowadays, because you can work with people remotely and that's part of our sector based program. Carol: Absolutely. Mark: So we said, OK, what if we look at what are the high wage, high demand sectors in California? There were employers are clamoring for employees and why don't we prepare them a workforce by understanding exactly what they need, developing relationship with the sector employers and then having everybody that is interested in those specific occupations work for that same counselor. And so since we can use technology that can be located anywhere in the state because, for example, we have a health care specialist who's working with consumers across the state and helping guide them through how the Irvine Medical Center hires or how Kaiser Permanente hires. But actually doing it because they know somebody for Kaiser. They know somebody at Irvine Medical Center because they've told them this is how we hire. This is how if you want to get in the door, this is the credentialing or this is the training that you need. And here are some programs. So they become experts. So this pilot or this actually this grant now, so we have five specific sectors. One is health care, advanced manufacturing and green energy with information technology and communications and with biotechnology. Those are high demand, high wage sectors in California, and we have one specialist counselor that works with each of those sectors. We call our sector the business consultants that actually work with the employers and develop paid work experience. And we wrote in a component that almost everybody, if they don't have experience in the field already, they're actually all going to get paid work experience in their field. And the employers are willing and we set aside funds to do that because there's nothing better than try it before you buy it on both ends because we know how great our consumers are. We want our employers to find that out as well. Carol: I love that. I love that. So that's only probably been going a few months now. Mark: This summer, we put a framework together. We got the grant started October one. We're actually working on our contracts for some technical assistance because we want these jobs to be available to everybody, regardless of disability. So we're working with some specialists that are going to provide technical assistance and training to work with individuals on the spectrum and also individuals with intellectual disabilities. Because we believe skilled manufacturing is skill. I mean, that high wage here in California, we want to make sure that everybody has that opportunity. And it was really interesting. Even though it's been a few years, a few months, we're already seeing quite a few exciting things happen. They've really built up their reputation with the employer. So we're actually seeing some of the employers referring people to us to prepare them for that employer so they know somebody. And so one example is there's actually we actually got a consumer who wanted to go to medical school but didn't have the resources she was working. And so she going have the resources to go to medical school. She heard about us and actually, it's really fun because the question we're getting now is we understand that you're looking for people to work in health care or a nurse and not have a disability. I want to go to work. I hear you're preparing people for these types of jobs. And so when that consumer or that, well, now she's a consumer. But when she applied to us, she didn't really know about it, except. For we prepare people to get into the medical field. She has a significant disability, so clearly right in our wheelhouse, and we wanted to work with her, so we actually found her eligible virtually. They have never physically met. They met virtually through Zoom. The counselor worked with the consumer and actually wrote a plan for a doctor. And so she's actually a medical school now. She wrote a really nice note to her accounts. They're saying for the first time, she actually feels like she belongs somewhere. Carol: Oh man. Mark: I got chills because that's exactly what we want. We want people to feel like they belong. Carol: And you're talking professions, too, that are not food, filth and flowers. You know, it's you're talking above that and really family sustaining wages careers. That's what VR is all about. Mark: I can't think of a more fantastic role model if going to a physician with a significant disability and recognizing yourself in that physician because, well, I've been going to doctors for a long, long time and I've never really seen somebody who reflected the people that I work with. Absolutely. That's really cool. This cancer, her experience now she can work with anybody in the state, is interested in medical school, nursing a school or other careers in the health care sector. Because not only does she know about it, she also has the connections now. And one thing that's really cool about this when we talk about sector based, if you align all these consumers by their vocational goal in their sector, there's another thing you can do that's kind of fun. And for us, part of the project part of the grant is we're developing some electronic tools, and one of them is a web based online learning management system where the consumers that are, you know, let's say, health care consumers, they're all we've got twenty five individuals looking for nursing jobs and they're nursing. They can actually sign up, become a cohort and like a classroom, and the counselor can share information and job leads with them. But they can also speak with each other and kind of create their own network because we know that's how people get jobs. They can voluntarily put in their own name and communicate to the degree that they want. They can share resources, they can share their experiences and hopefully they build their own network and we're going to allow them to continue to be on that forever. Even though a case is closed. If you're somebody who worked through that and you're a nurse, maybe you can be a mentor. Maybe you can be a reference, maybe you can be a resource, or maybe some day, maybe an employer, one of the consumers that is going through that process. So we're going to roll that out this year. We're going to try that as well as some other things, and we have five years to try this out. We're hoping that over the five years that we're going to serve these 13, at least 13 other individuals that we're going to see if this makes a difference and we really believe it will. Carol: I know we'll see you at a CSAVR conference down the road talking about all of the outcomes from this very cool project. I do want to get to one other thing because I know you have like maybe 14 more, but I wanted to talk about how you are opening up your operations to serve customers seven days a week and you're looking at outside of kind of the normal eight to four or nine to five type of hours. Tell me a little bit about that. Mark: Yeah, thank you. And now it's great because we're looking at some of our future initiatives and we've actually started having the conversations and looking into and putting together the proposal to roll this out. And really, this is just one of our continuing initiatives to improve our customers experience with us. And so since we have now through October, we had this force evolution where the world of work has changed and we have technology and we have a great percentage of our staff works at least part time from home. For us, there's no reason to believe that that concept won't allow us to do something else. And even though we are huge state and we've got hundreds of miles in each direction where consumers could live and interact with our staff, the ability to work virtually allows us then to cover the whole state for somebody that could be located in the middle of the state or in the north part of the state. And so currently we're serving participants predominantly between eight and five p.m. a Monday through Friday. Sometimes, you know, there's some wiggle room. We have some offices may start at seven or seven thirty, but typically it's between eight to five. But we know that people who are in school or they're working, that's probably at the same time as they're in school or working. And so it's really hard to connect. And we also know that emergencies, they don't keep an eight to five schedule either. And so using technology and recognizing that people are able to work from home, they can text, they can use FaceTime and Zoom. We want to expand the availability. So we're putting out the option for our staff, for counselors and for our support staff to change their schedules, to work Saturday and take a weekday off so they can work Tuesday through Saturday, or they can work Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. So for us to start with opening Saturday and having five or six or seven, depending on utilization, we'll figure out what the right number of staff are. And through our website and through what we're building our portal out and through our portal or through our website. Anybody who has a need or a question can actually connect with a counselor and actually get services on Saturdays as well. And so we're going to take a look at that Saturday in terms of getting the technology and the systems to work and see what the utilization is. Plan is, whether it's seven or seven thirty in the morning to seven o'clock in the evenings, and again our staff would be able to work from home. The idea, again, is that if somebody needs something that they should be able to get a hold of somebody, an actual person next month. Actually, we're rolling out our consumer. Payment card is instead of having checks or other processes to get services to consumers, they'll actually going to have their debit card that we issue them. And the way we set it up is that upon ordering it, we can refill that card within 30 minutes of us requesting it from our vendor that if somebody needs books, supplies transportation or they're starting to work on Saturday and they need their work boots, or they need to get something for a work uniform that they can contact us, the counselor, like our counselor of the day, would during the regular week would be able to do the authorization, work with our office technician and then sponsor the card so they can get services on Saturday as well. And the goal for us really is and all these efforts is to both modernize and to improve our customers experience with us because we need to meet them where they are. And this is another one of examples of where we're trying to do that. Carol: Well, I'm sure many of the things that you talked about today are going to pique some of our listeners interest. So I just wondering what is the best way for someone to get a hold of you if they just want to get a little bit more information about one or more of the things that you've mentioned today? Mark: I'd be happy to connect with anybody. I mean, we started meeting with several other states, both we're taking information from them and we're sharing with them about some of our initiatives. If anybody else has any questions, probably the best way is, you know, just shoot me an email and I'll be happy to respond. And likely I will connect you with the experts in this because I'm talking like, I'm doing all this hard work is really my team and my team is phenomenal, and I connect with the experts and people are actually living this and be happy to participate as well. Anything I can do and any information I can provide or answer any questions. Really happy to do that. And we recognize that even though we're California, we're all one family. So across the country, we share resource information and we hope successes with all our other programs. Carol: I've always appreciated that about California. You guys have always been really willing. I know I reached out many times in my time when I was Minnesota. I would reach out for different ideas and just to get more information. And I've appreciated that you guys have been super open and really responsive because I feel like when we lift each other up like it lifts up the whole country. So can you give us your email address? Mark: Yeah. So it's mark m A r k period Erlichman e r l i c h man at D as in dog o r C A dot Gov. Carol: Well, I appreciate that Mark. I really appreciate you spending time with me today. I know you're super busy, so thanks for being on the show. I'm definitely going to check back to see how some of these new initiatives are going down the road. You'll have more metrics and fun things to share, so I hope you have a great day. Mark: Really appreciate it. Thank you. And have a good day. Speaker1: Conversations powered by VR, one manager at a time, one minute at a time, brought to you by the VRtAC for Quality Management, catch all of our podcast episodes by subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening!

covid-19 california success donald trump conversations change zoom food minnesota plan va blind southern california struggling vr records customers google podcasts snap payments ability managers gov facetime pathways qr deputy director medicaid rehabilitation developed deaf maslow rewarding san diego state university kaiser permanente california department visually impaired business services quality management crn ipe mark you mark yeah mark well wioa mark oh mark so mark thank independent living center mark all joe xavier mark absolutely

DIY Religion

Retirement Planning - Redefined

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 9, 2022 44:43

SLOGG Holiday Episode: https://thewonderpodcast.podbean.com/e/holidays-1610325700/#more-16200342 Introduction to SLOGG: https://atheopaganism.wordpress.com/2018/01/03/introducing-slogg-the-winter-demi-sabbath/ Remember, we welcome comments, questions and suggested topics at thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com S3E02 TRANSCRIPT: ----more---- Mark: Welcome back to the Wonder Science-based Paganism. I'm your host Mark. And today we are going to talk about do it yourself, religion, because that's really what our naturalistic science-based pagan paths are about. It's really about tailoring a set of practices and activities and observances to your own personal needs. And we're going to unpack all that in this. Yucca: That's right. And a good place to start. Is talking about, what's the point? Why, why are we doing this? We're white humans, not just us, but why do humans do this religion thing in the first place? And what need is it filling? Because it certainly is. We're all doing it in some form or another. Mark: Right. Or at least certainly many of us in the modern world, many of us are doing it. But when you look all over the world, you see that every culture historically has had religious traditions of one kind or another. And not all of those have been pointed at the same purpose. So we wanted to be really clear about what we see as the appropriate purposes for a naturalistic pagan. This, for example, in Christianity, the goal is to reach salvation, right? Your stained by original sin and whatever sins you've accumulated. You have to get those all washed out of your soul and then you go on and hopefully you go to heaven, right? That's that's the whole end. You do that through the intercession of Jesus and so forth. That is not at all, even remotely related to what our religious practices are about. So, another example is in most kinds of Buddhism the idea is that you want to balance your karma so that eventually you can step off of the wheel of time. Into something else. And I'm sure that there's a definition of what that is, but I don't know what it is, but the idea is to leave material reality, you keep coming back to it in reincarnated forms until you've balanced your karma and then you leave. right. We don't want to do that either. We don't really believe that that's what's going on here on planet earth. Yucca: sure. Yeah. So that's not our goal, right? Our goal isn't enlightenment or. Going to heaven or things like that. And you know, we're saying our, but it is also very personal. So we can talk about in general paganism, we can talk about naturalistic paganism in general, but it really also comes down to the individual. So although mark, you and I have a lot in common what each of our. Practices are going to be like, are going to be slightly different because we have different goals, different values, different experiences in the world. Mark: Sure. Yucca: And that's a starting place. Mark: But I think that the commonality is what I would focus on in terms of the purpose of naturalistic paganism, which is to enhance happiness. Yucca: Agreed. Yeah. Mark: And what makes a given person happy will vary from person to person. But what we want our practices to do is to contribute to the happiness of the practitioner and those around them, and to contribute to making a better world. And I mean, I think that we can say that in, in a general sense, right. Yucca: Think so. Yeah. And those second two are almost requirements for the first time. Mark: It is. I mean, if you make everybody around you miserable, it's very to be happy. Yucca: Yeah. Right. And, and, you know, we do have a choice about how we respond to things, but it also is really hard to be happy if you're starving and everyone around you is starving and everything is, you know, burning and all of that. So, you know, we're, we're part of a larger system. Mark: And part of what we acknowledge as science-based pagans is that we are social creatures. We fit within ecosystems. We have responsibilities beyond to ourselves, to the broader fabric of the context that we live in. And I think that what people find is that. As they move away from that individualistic idea of, you know, I've got this soul and I've got to take care of it. And that's my only duty and job in life as they move away from that kind of idea. And they start to understand themselves in a reciprocal relationship with the world and their fellow humans. I think that enhances happiness a lot. But it also, of course, Provides more of a sense of responsibility to, to act well. And in accordance with a better world, this more sustainable world, a kinder world, a more peaceful world, Yucca: Right. Mark: more just world. So when we talk about the, the goal. Those are, those are the general things that we're talking about in terms of our naturalistic paganism. Now, theoretically, I could imagine that there might be a naturalistic paganism that has some other entirely different goal, but I have a very hard time imagining what it would be because if you're really informed by science, You understand the predicament that humanity is in Right. now in relation to the ecosystem and you understand the majesty of the ecosystem. And given that, I think it would be very hard to have a very selfish kind of naturalistic pagan path. I mean the self is important. This is the only life we get. You know, we want to be happy. We want to thrive. We want to achieve the goals that we have, but at the same time, there's that other sense of of, you know, needing to lift those around us and needing to relate to nature in a way that's, that's appropriate. And. Yucca: Right. so given that, I think though that each individual is going to have a different way of going about meeting and achieving that. Mark: Absolutely. And I think that the primary indicator of that. The atheopagan path and other naturalistic pagan paths is that we encourage people to develop their own rituals because different styles of rituals and different kinds of activities are going to be effective for different people. And so instead of going to mass and having, you know, communion, which is this thing that. You know, it's like a machine, everybody goes through exactly the same process. Right. Instead we really encourage people to cultivate the art of ritual development and the ritual skills to be effective, going into a, a ritual state of mind, like drumming and singing and chanting and dancing and you know, all of those kinds of things. So I just to start with that is the very first thing that, that turns this into a DIY religion because we really do want you to do it yourself or do it with your fellow people in, you know, in a, a planning group rather than just. Taking a, a ritual out of a book or or cribbing it from some other culture, which of course is appropriation. Yucca: Choosing in the first place, what rituals and why you want to be doing, because what, there, there's definitely going to be some themes, right? Thinking about seasonal observances and types of rites of passage, that that is common to many humans. But what your going to feel the need for a ritual in your specific life and your specific practice is going to be different than someone else's and that's not only just okay, but that's good. That makes complete sense because what's the point of going through a ritual that isn't going to serve you. Mark: Right. Yucca: the motion, right? Why go through the motion? If it's not going to do anything for you, if it's not going to bring you closer. To that goal that you have Mark: Right. Right. And what that means though, is that ritual arts become part of your personal toolkit. You know, you don't have to wait around for. A Sabbath On, the wheel of the year or a or a particular cycle of the moon. I mean, you, you can wait for those things if you want to. I mean, you don't have to wait very long for a particular part of the moon. I mean, the longest is 28 days. Right. But don't have to, if you feel really stuck in your life, for example, and it's weighing you down and it's depressing, you, you can pull those ritual skills out at any time to create a ritual, to help yourself get going and feel better. Kind of do some repair on your self esteem and, and set some clear, a clear path for where you're going to go. And honestly, I really wish everybody had that toolkit with them. I feel that, you know, these ritual arts have been developed over tens of thousands of years by humans. And it's only very, very recently historically we've lost them. You know, it's, it's only in the last. Thousand years, 1500 years, something like that. Really? Not very much time at all that maybe 2000 years when the ritual started being taken away by priests and no longer belonging to the people in, in the Yucca: where yeah, we're in the world. Mark: Yeah. Depending on where you are. So that said, one of the things about being a naturalistic pagan is you develop ritual skills, right? You figure out what works for you, and you learn how to do rituals. That fi that feel meaningful and good and pleasurable for you. And that's a great thing because meaning and pleasure are good. We always say that meaning and pleasure are good. We are four. You're having those. Yucca: Yes. So those are some great tools, but there are other tools we're using this framework of your DIY religion that we have. So we can talk about ritual as a tool. But we can also talk about things like daily practice. That's something that we mentioned a lot on this podcast, right? Mark: Yeah. I mean, I have my daily practices. I know you have your daily practices. And those can really vary depending on who you are. If you're a night owl, you know, maybe waking up to watch the sunrise every day is not a part of your daily practice. It's Yucca: Sure. Mark: you're just not going to do that. Right. Yucca: And depending on where you live too, if. Mark: right. Yucca: You're in the middle of Seattle, that might not be the most rewarding thing, right. Might not be possible. Maybe you're going to tune in with something else that fits your, your location in your, your rhythms and cycles better. Mark: right. Rather than waking up to watch the fog slowly start to glow Yucca: He Mark: the morning. And just assuming that there's a sun back there Yucca: Yeah, not to say that that might not. Beautiful in its own. Right. But it might not be the same experience that somebody on the top of a clear mountain top is going to get Mark: exactly. Yucca: yeah. Mark: So once again, as we've said so many times as you start to figure out your daily practices, we come to the fact that ours is a religion of Place. right? Yucca: Place. Yes. Mark: It's a, it's a religion where you relate to the landscape of where you live and to the ecosystem of where you live and to the, the sky phenomena where you live, the clouds, the sunsets, the sunrises, the intermittent, the, the moon cycles, the intermittent things like meteor showers and comments and stuff like that. Some of those will be universal. When there's a comment visible, it's visible for half of the world. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: when some of the, but moon cycles are the same, right. For everybody. Yucca: Yes. Although that does look different depending on which hemisphere you're in, Mark: Yes, it does. Yucca: which is quite well, which is quite fun. Mark: So it, it becomes it becomes a matter of first of all, building that relationship through greater understanding of what your context is, and then choosing those daily practices, both in relation to yourself and maybe in relation to your family. And in relation to the world that are fulfilling and give you a sense of of connection and meaning and contentment. Yucca: Right. Yeah. And, and, and spiraling it and seeing what those different units that you're a part of is part of developing your particular practice. Right. And seeing where. You know, maybe I could, I could think of a situation in which it might be self partnership, family extended family, neighborhood, community, you know, there's different ways or it might, you know, you might jump straight from self to family or not include family or whatever it is. Right. And again, that's just going to be based on what your particular situation is. Mark: Right. If you're a person who feels sort of pressed in on by the demands of your family quite frequently, maybe what you want is a personal practice. Maybe what you want is something where you are able to block out a little chunk of time and space every day and say, this is about. It's about my growth. It's about my development. It's about my happiness. And so I'm going to do this thing, you know, and it can be very brief. My daily practice, I think I probably spend two minutes in the morning and maybe as much as three minutes in the evening, honestly, that little of course the candles are. In the evening. And so they continue to burn and I come back and contemplate them once in awhile. Yucca: But in terms of active time, it's sort of like when you're doing a, a recipe, there's your active cooking and then there's the, oh, it's in the oven or it's cooling. Like those are two different times. Mark: exactly. That's exactly. So, so a personal practice is. It's a really important way. I think, to do a number of things for one thing, a personal practice can just be very influential over your psychology. It can really help you to feel like, you know, I'm living a meaningful life here. I'm living a life where I'm acknowledging the relationships that I have and my responsibilities as well as the benefits that I have out of those relationships. And I am. I am a person who is seeking to grow and become wiser over time. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: And that's really important, you know, that's that is. Core to living a fulfilling life. When you, I was referred a, an article recently about the, the five regrets that dying people often express. And typically they are around not having paid enough attention, not having sought to evolve. Having spent too much time on work, not enough time on relationships. And a relationship with yourself and with the world is every bit as much a relationship as your relationship with your partner, your relationship with your ecosystem, any of those, you know, knowing who you are and having that evolve over time is really essential for human happiness. Yucca: And that daily practice is a moment that you can take to check in with yourself and make sure you're not just on autopilot. Right to, to stop for a moment and evaluate what you're doing and if that's what you want to be doing and just do a little bit, of course, correction, because sometimes the things, those, those things that you were just talking about, those regrets, those are, those are big things. Those are big life style. Habits. That's not just something that you decide one day like, oh, I'm, I'm just going to be more present. And then all of a sudden you are like, that's something that you practice and have to make adjustments for over and over again. And that what we've talked about so far ritual and daily practice, those two tools combined is one of the ways to allow that to happen, Mark: Huh, Yucca: whatever it is that you're working towards. Mark: absolutely. Yeah. So that's personal practice. And experimenting with different kinds of things that you might do with that. And that's, this is a really important point to make about experimentation. I think because if the point of this is to be happy and fulfilled and have a healthier relationship with the world around us, then expecting ourselves to do some huge pile of. Observances and rituals and you know, all that kind of stuff. When we really don't want to do them, that's not helping. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: And on the other hand, not doing anything isn't really helping either. So there's this point of experimentation in the middle where it's like, okay. Daily practice. Yeah. I'll take that. I'm going to do a little thing to start with in the day and maybe that'll grow from there. Moon observances. Well, that sounds a little frequent to me. Not sure I want to do something every month. Maybe I'll put that aside wheel of the year observances. Well, those are important to me. That's every six weeks, so six and a half, seven weeks. And and I really want to acknowledge the passing of the seasons and all the metaphors that those mean to me. So I am going to do those. So there's this. There's this sort of picking and choosing from a menu of options that I think each of us is empowered to do on our own. And that that's by definition, that's a DIY religion, right? It's do it yourself. Here's a, here's a big menu of options. You, you know, select as many as you like from columns, a, B and C. Yucca: Yes. And something to add onto with that, that I think is, is really important to bring up. But when we talk about choosing the things that worked for you and the things that don't work for you, that sometimes it's going to take, sometimes the things that are going to work for you might take practice to get to there. And they might not be comfortable at first, if you're not used to doing a daily practice, making yourself do that every day. It might suck a little bit, but there's benefit from doing that. It's sometimes you've got to get past the uncomfortable part to get to the benefit. Like if you, for anyone who's learned to draw. Think back to how uncomfortable it was to be behind the wheel the first time, just your heart racing, or if it wasn't driving, riding a bike or doing whatever it was that you did the thing about just how terrifying that was in the beginning. But now you don't even think about it. You just do it, but it's worth it because now you can drive yourself where you need to go or ride wherever you need to go or whatever it was. Right. Mark: And not only that, but once, once you do fall into a groove with a daily practice, you'll find that if you miss it, it bugs you, it, it just, it, something feels a little off and you'll find yourself going back to it because it, it adds something positive in your life and you don't want to be without that positive. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: So it's, it's kind of a funny thing. It's like first it may feel a little forced and you have to deal with the critic voice, of course, which we've done an episode about before. And we've talked about many times that critic voice inside you, that's saying, ah, this is stupid. Why are you doing this? You have to contend with that and push past it. But there will come a time when that all calms down and it becomes very normal, very normative to to do these activities. And when you don't do them, you feel like there's kind of something missing from the day. I, I, I wish I had done that. And then you'd go back to it the next day. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: And there's no, you know, we don't have like concepts of sin and, you know, Stuff like that. So there's nothing wrong with missing a day. Yucca: We were joking before recording that there aren't any pagan police coming to get you because you forgot your full moon ritual or something like that. Mark: I promise I'm not going to give you a phone call. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: So, you know, you select those pieces. Yucca, you mentioned before we were recording meditation is a great example. if you decide that you want to start a meditation practice, even if it's a very brief one, even if it's like five minutes, five minutes of meditation, for someone that hasn't done it, it can be very uncomfortable. Your mind Yucca: haven't done it in a long time, he used to do it. And you dropped the practice for five years coming back. It's rough. Yeah. Mark: is in your mind will spin all over the place and you'll find yourself sitting there thinking I'm not really meditating. This is not meditation. I'm not getting where I'm supposed to go. And the truth is you're going to have to push through that for a while. It's just like any other skill, if it's really rusty or if you never developed it, you're just going to have to do it badly for a while until you start doing it better. Yucca: Yeah. So there's, there's a balance to take a look at between looking at what's what's working for you. What's worth working to make it work for you. And, you know, what is it that you really want to be doing? Mark: right. Yucca: So, yeah. Mark: And that goes along very well with the overall goal, which is happiness. And growth, right? Because we are dynamic systems, we humans. And if we stagnate, we're not happy. If we're, if we're stuck in a, in a particular rut, generally we will not be happy for long. So growth becomes very important and the way that humans grow over time and as they become wiser and that teaches them to be kinder to themselves and to others and to be happy. To find the happiness in life. So it's this, it's this trade-off early on between doing what's comfortable, which is the easy part and doing what forces growth, which is the lessee's T part. But it's worth it. Yucca: yeah. So another thing that many pagans do is a seasonal practice. And of course, this looks different depending on where, where your place is. Mark: Right. If you have seasons, Yucca: If you have season, well, everyone has seasons, but it's what seasons do they have? Right. Mark: And, and the, the transition of seasons care can be very subtle. We have some folks in the community who live in Florida and Louisiana, and yes, they have seasons. They don't have extreme seasons really? They, they kind of go from hot and humid to warm and a little less humid. And then back to hot in here. Yucca: And then in that case, Again, looking at whatever your place is, the, what you focus on for your observations of the year might shift somewhat. You might have a little bit more of a night focus than a day focus, or it might be focused more on the types of creatures who are migrating through at the time and all of that. I mean, there's just so much you certainly don't have to be in. You know, Britain or somewhere that has the sort of stereotypical seasons to people to have a practice of paying attention to the world around you, because that's what it's really about is paying attention to those cycles in the world, around you. Mark: That's right. That's right. And then of course there are also layers of metaphorical meaning which can be placed over those as well. And we have episodes about creating your own wheel of the year and about cellar and episodes about each one of the seasonal. The solstices equinoxes and the points between those. So you can go back into the archive and listened to episodes that did go into more detail about Yucca: this'll be our third year going through the the holidays. Yeah. Mark: that's right. Yucca: So. So you can check us, see if we said the same thing each year or we're totally different. Mark: Well, hopefully we've said somethings that are different. Cause I like to think that my practice is growing and deepening and I'm discovering new things. So, hopefully it's not all exactly the same. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: So yes, seasonal observances are things that we can do. And and that is often a big focus of a pagan practice. Speaking of focuses, another thing we can do is we can create altars, which in the atheopagan tradition and we call focuses because we associate the word altar with sacrifice and Yucca: And worship. Yeah. Mark: and we're not really doing those things. Yucca: But a focus. It brings your focus in that's what you're choosing to focus on in your life. Mark: Yes. And we've done episodes about that as well, but it bears saying that's one of the things that's on that big menu. Some people don't want to build a focus. For many of us having one or more focuses in our home. Really helps us to remember, oh Yeah. I'm living a spiritual path here. I'm a, this, and it's this time of year. And these are the meanings that, that means for me. And there's a shell that I picked up on the beach when walking with my lover and I, that was a beautiful day. All the. All these stories that the objects on the focus tell to you because of your memories that are associated with them. So it's, it's a concrete way of having a presence of your practice in your home all the time. whether you're feeling it or not, Yucca: Yeah. Mark: you know, that that's part of what's helpful about it. Yucca: And it can help create that physical structure. Right? That's if you're, if you've got a daily practice and you go to your focus or altar everyday for that. And during, during your seasonal observances, you're changing it out. You know, it creates a little bit of that structure that is just helpful to have something that. That doesn't just have to have you remembering in your brain all the time that there's something built into your environment that just leads you into doing the thing that you want to be doing. Mark: Yes. I mean, for me personally, having a focus is really important. I've had one for 30 years, even during the time when I left paganism, I didn't take my old altered down. I just let it collect dust for about five years, but I couldn't quite bring myself to take it apart. It was just too meaningful to me. So. So that's another piece, another, another option that you have as you develop your DIY religion. Right? And then there are other kinds of observances other than seasonal observances, like moon observances, we just mentioned. Right. And people. Often associate the, the new moon or the first little Crescent of the moon as being a time for new beginnings for for starting new projects for brainstorming and maybe doing divination around new. Directions for themselves. And in many cases they see the fullness of the moon, the full of the moon as the fulfillment of those things. And then as it wanes the departure of those things. So you can pick the time of the moon that you want to celebrate a particular thing going on in your life. According to that map, Yucca: Sure. Yeah. Or. Yeah, meaning you find with it Mark: And the kick, you know, that can be as simple as just going out and watching the moon for a while. Maybe leaving some like a, a pretty bottle of water in the Moonlight to quote, capture the Moonlight unquote so that you can use that water on your altar later on. And it feels like special water. Or I mean, they can be complicated, you know, complex rituals could be as little as just going out for a walk under the moon or singing a song to the moon. Really depends on you. But the good thing about having some kind of a lunar practice is it gets you out under the sky. Yucca: Yes. Mark: It, it connects you into that cycle. You always know what time of. What's part of the cycle the moon is in, right. And it's just healthy. It's healthy to get out under the nighttime sky and observe what's going on. Feel that incredible sense of smallness in relation to all those stars. Yucca: And don't, don't miss out on the new moon period because when the moon isn't. You can see the rest of the cosmos better. Right? So we make a point. We go out every single night for at least a little time. That's part of our daily practice is some Sun-Times and star time. But when there isn't the moon, that's when you can, if you live somewhere away from light pollution, that's when you see the Milky way, right. That's when you see the stars that you don't normally see, that's when you might catch a meteor, that's when. It reveals more, the new moon it's the full moon is beautiful itself and it lets you see the ground better. It lets you see the little creatures moving around and the wind going through the plants and all of that. But it's just both of those times of the month are just so, so different depending on whether the moon is there or not. Mark: Yes. Yeah. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: So that's a lunar set of observances, and that can be something that you do every month or even more often than every month, if you want to celebrate different cycles or it can be something that you only do when you have some work that you want to do on a particular issue that's happening in your life or thing that you're struggling with, or it can be something that you just do once in a while, because you feel like celebrating. Yucca: Right. Or because it's warm enough to, Mark: Yeah, Yucca: yes. And if you perhaps live in Ontario, maybe you don't want to go out to look at the moment in January, Mark: but you might, Yucca: perhaps. Yes. Mark: if it's clear and there's Moonlight on snow, that is some beautiful, Yucca: Yeah. Mark: that's really beautiful. Yucca: Well, they do say there's no such thing as bad weather. Just bad clothing. Mark: Yes. I think that's a Swedish thing, which totally makes sense to me. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: I maybe Icelandic? Yucca: I don't know where it's from, but I, I hear I, I appreciate it when I hear it from different folks. That puts me to shame. Sometimes I go, well, I'm pretty good about getting outside, but sometimes, you know, I need to just say. Gets warmer clothes on and get myself out there instead of hiding inside, although hiding with the cat and some cocoa and a book is pretty wonderful too. Just maybe not every single day. Mark: perfect segue. Yucca: That's right. Unintentional. Mark: Yes. but a perfect segue because the next thing for us to talk about is invented holidays. Yucca: Yes. Which is why we chose this topic. But this week you have one coming up, right? Mark: I do next weekend on the 15th, which is the third Saturday in January. I celebrate a holiday called slog all caps, S L O G G. And it is the winter Demi Sabbath of coziness and silly hats. So it's a time when you, you know, you put on your really good woolen socks and a silly hat, and you, you get yourself all nice and cozy indoors and you make mold wine or cocoa or hot cider and and enjoy reading poems and singing songs. And Jeff's. Just have a really nice cozy sort of communal time of defying, the horrible weather that's outside. Yucca: That you've just been tapping to slog through. Mark: exactly. So, and we'll put I, I wrote a blog post about this a couple of years ago, and we'll put a link to that in the episode notes. But there are lots of other invented holidays and you can invent your own. Some of them are based in historical events, like, Einstein's birthday, for example, which is March 14th, which is also PI day, because 3.14, right? And that is often celebrated by atheists as sort of a celebration of science and mathematics and critical thinking and skepticism and all that good kind of stuff. I like it for the PI. Yucca: Yes along those same lines. There's URIs. And a little bit, little bit later on, we have may the fourth. Mark: Yes. which is star wars day, may the fourth be with you? URIs diet is the, the night that the, the anniversary of the night, that URI Geiger, Irene first orbited the earth, Yucca: Yeah. Mark: the entry of humans into space. Yucca: So it's kind of a celebration of just all that cool space science, nerdy, wonderfulness. Mark: Yeah, a lot of planetariums and science museums have celebrations of Yuri's night, Yucca: yeah, Mark: which can be really fun. I mean, they have, they have exhibits and they have dancing and it's just a lot of fun. Yucca: yeah. Oh, what are some other ones? Mark: Wolf Inuit. Yucca: That was, yes. Oh, that one's too cute. That was, that's a pretty new one too. Mark: Yes. It was invented by an eight year old apropos of pretty much nothing, I guess, just decided we should have this holiday and you celebrate it with a cake shaped like a moon, and it's a day to be nice to dogs. You give, you give presents to dogs. So it's a celebration of our relationship with the canine world. Yucca: And they've been with us for a while. Mark: They have Yucca: really have we've, we've changed each other in many ways. Mark: we have there I just read recently about a new burial that had been found. And I think it was, I want to say 15,000 years old and it was a burial of both a person and a dog together. And there were some grave goods. So it was clear that there was really a you know, a recognition there of that relationship. Yucca: Then, of course there's ones that could be from one's cultural heritage. Right. So. You know, St. Patrick's day or St. David's, you know, even though they've got the St in there, but you know, their celebrations of UN's Irishness or one's Welshness or, you Mark: or, or Hogmanay on new year's Eve which is a Scottish celebration burns night. Yucca: And I'm sure that there are many other groups might have similar types of days. Just not being a member of them. I'm not sure what, what they would be, but Mark: know that many atheists also celebrate Darwin's birthday because evolution is so pivotal in our understanding of the nature of life. Yucca: yeah. So there's going to be, there's lots to choose from and with like the eight year olds or like mark, if you see a need. Well, you can create one. Mark: And you'll, you'll be, you probably won't be surprised, but you still may be very pleased by how. Responsive people around you will be to the suggestion of having a holiday for no apparent reason. People, people are always looking for an opportunity to have a good time and, you know, especially at this time of the year, when it can be so bitter I just felt like it was necessary to, you know, waiting around until the, the, the seventh or so of February. Roughly the mid point between the winter solstice and the spring Equinox. It was just too long. I needed a holiday in the middle. Yucca: Yeah. Well, especially coming out of, just back to back holidays Mark: Right, Yucca: end of the previous year. Yeah. Mark: right. So I think maybe what we can do now is just to loop back to. You know your initial question, Yaka. What's the point? We, we do this. Not because we're under some obligation too, which is how it is in many other religions. You know, that we are tasked with this work that we must do in order to fulfill the spiritual requirements of whatever the religion is. That's not us. This is optional. Right. But. It'll make your life better. It will, it will help you to be happier. And in my experience, as a happier person, it helps other people around me to be happier which just makes for a more pleasant life generally. And if I'm looking for reasons to be happy like flowers, blooming, or the pattern of the clouds in the sky or any of those things Yucca: migrating or, Mark: Yeah. All the goldfinches at my bird feeder right now. It's really cool. Then I am, then I'm experiencing more of those happiness neuro-transmitters right. The dopamine and the serotonin that just help us to have a more pleasant experience of our lives. And it, and when we are happier, We're also more empowered. Yucca: We're more effective Mark: We are. Yucca: We do a better job at whatever, whatever it is that we do, whether that's a traditional career or parenting or, you know, being a good partner or a good steward of the land, we're just better at it. Mark: Yeah. Yeah. because we're not burning our bandwidth on stress. Right. I mean, stress is incredibly consumptive of your internal resources. And if you are under stress as all of us are at, you know, at some level all the time and with COVID and so forth, we're all under, pretty severe stress right now. This is a way of counter contravening. Some of that. Of helping us to say yes, there are stressful things in my life. And yet look at that tree blowing in the wind. That's amazing. And getting that little sort of, ah, feeling that comes from those neuro-transmitters. So we invite you, especially if you're new to the practice. To, you know, consider the options in the menu that we described in this podcast episode go and visit other podcast episodes as resources. And there's a lot of stuff on the atheopagan ism blog as well. Atheopagan ism.org. How to create rituals about occasions for creating rituals and daily practices and all that good kind of stuff. There's no better time to start than now. Hey, it's Steven the new year. Yeah, So, you know, might as well, if you've been thinking about this, you might as well put a toe in and see how it feels. And even if it's a little awkward at first, you know, give it a chance, give it a chance Yucca: worrying. And just, just remember those times when you pushed through that Mark: yeah. Yucca: when it has worked out. Mark: Right. Okay. Well, this has been a great conversation as always Yucca. Thank you, so much, Yucca: Thank you, mark. Mark: everybody have a great week.

Ep 38: Financial Mistakes Couples Make

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 2, 2021 19:35

Getting husbands and wives on the same page with their retirement plan can often be a challenge. Let's talk about some of the things that couples often mess up. Helpful Information: PFG Website: https://www.pfgprivatewealth.com/ Contact: 813-286-7776 Email: info@pfgprivatewealth.com Disclaimer: PFG Private Wealth Management, LLC is a registered investment adviser. All statements and opinions expressed are based upon information considered reliable although it should not be relied upon as such. Any statements or opinions are subject to change without notice. Information presented is for educational purposes only and does not intend to make an offer or solicitation for the sale or purchase of any specific securities, investments, or investment strategies. Investment involve risk and, unless otherwise stated, are not guaranteed. Information expressed does not take into account your specific situation or objectives and is not intended as recommendations appropriate for any individual. Listeners are encouraged to seek advice from a qualified tax, legal, or investment adviser to determine whether any information presented may be suitable for their specific situation. Past performance is not indicative of future performance. Transcript of Today's Show: For a full transcript of today's show, visit the blog related to this episode at https://www.pfgprivatewealth.com/podcast/ ----more---- Mark: Everybody welcome to the podcast. Thanks for tuning into the show. As we talk about investing, finance and retirement here on Retirement Planning Redefined with John and Nick. And we're going to talk about couples this go around and some financial mistakes couples often get into. Because John, I don't know about you, buddy, but my wife and I are on the same page about everything all the time. John: Yeah. Sounds like you go by the motto happy wife, happy life. Mark: Yeah. Not so much. No. She would disagree with that. Something fear. She's like, "If I could ever get you to agree with me on anything for happy wife, that'd be good." But no, this is a joke people make all the time. Couples that definitely do not see eye to eye on a lot of things, and finances is certainly one of those. John: Finances and kitchen remodels, definitely. So... Mark: Kitchen remodels, Nick, what's going on with you, buddy. How you doing? We don't want to leave you out. Nick: Pretty good, just staying busy, happy that football seasons here, NFL season is here. I'm looking forward to fall weather in Florida. Mark: Yeah. Well it's on its way, hopefully. So we're into September when we're taping this. So let's get into it and talk about some stuff. I imagine you guys see a lot of different things when couples come in, and you see a lot of different people on, whether they're on the same page or different pages or whatever the case might be. And many times as much as couples might think they've talked about this stuff, I imagine you guys probably see that they didn't talk about it as much as they should have, or maybe as a depth or they just really glossed over the subject. Mark: So let's dive into a few things and see if we can highlight stuff for folks. So when they do come in and sit down, maybe they're a little further along in this conversation, and you guys don't have to wear your marriage counselor hats along with your financial advisor hat. So number one, making the wrong choice on how to handle the spousal benefit option, if you're lucky enough to have a pension, I talked to a bunch of guys advisors and stuff, fellows over the years that have said, "It's amazing how many times somebody will take that without even talking to their spouse about it, just because they see that higher number." Nick: Yeah, it's interesting that a lot of places have put some restrictions from the perspective of the paperwork where they'll have to be a notary sign off or things like that, but we've seen them without, and there's definitely a misconception or misunderstanding on how these pension payouts will work. And so this could be a mistake that it's typically a one-time decision. So for anybody that has substantial income, that will be coming in from a pension, this could ultimately be the most important decision that they make, and it's something not to overlook. And just to be a little bit more direct, oftentimes they will see the single life option, which you would referred to as the highest payout, and not realize that if something happens to them, then nobody gets any remaining benefit. Nick: One of the ways that we'll try to phrase that to people is, no matter what, I've never met anybody that wants to have worked for a company for a long time, and even if there's a divorce situation or something where if something happens to them that nobody gets any of the benefits that they would have been due for the rest of their life. So on making sure that those options are understood and making sure that they're correlated and tied into the rest of the decisions that they've made for their planning it's super important. John: Yeah. And a big thing to that, Nick mentioned single life, is understand the different joint survivor lives. You can have a joint survivor where one passes away, they still get a 100% of the benefit. And then there's a couple of different options where you get 75 and 50%, and it's always good to reference the plan to make sure if one person passes away that the plan basically is still intact and that surviving spouse can still hit all their goals. Mark: Absolutely. On those conversations, if it does happen, I can't imagine that the other person's too happy about, "Hey, wait a minute, why did you take the wrong one and leave me out?" So, you want to make sure that you're doing those for sure. Number two is the coordination on the social security strategy, social security is that horse that we're going to beat constantly, because it's a big component of people's retirement plans, and the money that's out there. But we can't get into this rush to just go turn it on without really thinking about a strategy, especially if you're married, because there's a lot of strategy involved. John: Yeah, there is. You hit it perfectly when you said it's a big decision. I believe social security equate for like 30 to 40% of someone's household income in retirement. So you want to coordinate it right, and the biggest mistake we typically see is once one person retires maybe early at like 62, 63 64, they're just going to go ahead and turn it on, while the other spouse is working, but there's definitely a lot of different strategies that you can implement. Nick and I focus heavily on planning, and it really all does come back to the planning cause everyone's situation is different, but you really want to look at what's best for your situation. Does it make sense to defer the higher amount for survivor plan down the road? We just talked about pensions. Is there a current pension in place? Which will make the social security decision even more important to really coordinate that with any pension or any other guaranteed income stream. Mark: Strategy is key, and so many things for retirement planning, but certainly in social security. And again, that's why the podcast this week is really about mistakes for couples. Because again, we can kind of talk through this stuff in generalities and sometimes we just kind of barely touch on it, but there's a lot of minutia to dive into, and that's where an advisor really comes into play. And here's a simple one guys, and I don't know how often you guys encounter this, but I talked to many advisors who say, "It's pretty surprising. People will come in for the first time. And they really haven't truly talked about what they want to do with their actual time in retirement, what they want to actually do with retirement. And yeah, they say the general things, well, we want to travel, well, he wants to play golf or whatever, but it's like, well, what does that actually look like? How much golf, how much travel? Where to? So on and so forth." So that stuff really is important in what you guys do to help them design a plan for that. Nick: Yeah. This is something that I've been really trying to focus on with people, with clients. And one of the things that I've found is that, for so many people that are retiring recently or very soon, looking back, one of the things that I've found is that many of them, even if we were to rewind five, six years ago, we've had this huge run-up in the market. So now you have people that have a lot more money in retirement than many of them thought that they would. And so some of the options that they have in some of the thought processes that they can have is less of a scarcity mindset and more of a thriving mindset and really trying to focus on things that they really want to do. Nick: An example recently is a plan with clients that had retired within the last year. And so they're plugging along and the plan looks really, really solid. And so, I really tried to start drilling down. It's like "Now that you've been retired for a little while, now that you have a feeling of what it feels like, what are the things that you really want to do?" And then using planning to help them figure out if we can do it from a financial standpoint. So, one client wanted a larger property for their primary residence to be able to work on cars, that was the kind of hobby. And so it goes. We've kind of talked about the fact that the sharper they stay, the more engaged they stay, whether it's hobbies, whether it's volunteering, no matter what it is, as long as you're staying engaged and sharp, their life is going to be probably longer realistically. And the brain's not going to really rot away. Nick: And so helping people dial into those things that they want to do, I think is probably one of the most enjoyable things on our side of the business, but it takes a while and quite a bit of repetition to really get them to visualize it and see it. Mark: Yeah, indeed, because again, you might talk about some basic things you want to do, but you really start to have to dive in and dissect more because you got all this free time now. And of course you hear all of the funny stories, maybe the Mrs. Will say, "Find something else for him to do get him out of my house." John: One thing we've noticed is that when we do the planning, we'll ask that question and one spouse will say something and the other one just gives a look like "What? I didn't know that." Mark: First I've heard about it. And that's the point of really even though they think maybe they've communicated this. And again, I think that's really where great value comes into play from what you guys do, because you get to be this... Maybe that's not always the most fun thing to be in the middle, but you get to be this mediator a little bit, or this sounding board where to that point, John, when somebody is like, "Wait a minute, this is the first time we're talking about it." Now they're going to hash it out and you guys can help them walk through it. So hopefully it's good in the end because they're getting through to the details they really got to get to. So these are, again, are mistakes that couples can get themselves into when planning for retirement. Number four, not coordinating other accounts. So how important is it guys to include or incorporate coordination amongst his 401k and her IRA and so on and so forth? John: So this is a really important one. And again, we sound like broken records, but this is important to the plan itself, as far as once both people are retired, and you're looking at how much income is needed from the nest eggs, where is that money coming from? Whose accounts? And once that's determined, that will dictate how that money should be invested. So this is really important and often overlooked if someone has not gone through a comprehensive plan, whether they've done it themselves or working with an advisor, but this could be a really big mistake if you haven't coordinated this correctly. Mark: And coordination is the key, getting on the same page is the key. I started off this podcast by joking about my wife and I are always in agreement because that's how spouses are. Yeah. Right. So, at the end of the day, we tend to see differently in a couple of ways, opposites attract kind of thing. Right. So how often, and how much do you guys deal with managing the opposites in their personalities with risk? For example, that's a big one, obviously. Because many, many times I think we're going to see people where one person is like, "Hey, let's take some risks, let's take some chances." And the other, one's not so comfortable with that. And maybe they haven't even been as honest as they might be in front of you guys saying, "You know what, now that we're sitting here, I don't want to take that much risk." So you guys have to figure out a way to get them in a neutral, workable ground. Nick: I think one of the ways to do that, that we found to be the most effective, is to try to double down on embracing the differences and letting them know that. And even if we go back through the plan and say, "Hey, look at these two decisions that you made, really help the plan in this way." And then, these two decisions that the other spouse made really helped the plan in this way. So they compliment each other. Nick: So, let's focus on moving forward. What are the things that we do to earn the next step? And what I mean by that is, so there's a couple of things, we try to continuously emphasize the fact that we don't really care what their brother, sister, neighbor, dog walker/former coworker does. And then we'll rattle off four or five things that are immediately different about their life then all of those people. And so they start to get that. And then as we further drill down and we'll say, "Okay," we'll look it, "Hey, I know that you're feeling a little bit concerned about the market, but remember that we've got two years of cash in the bank. So that's your pass to be able to do X, Y, and Z." And so almost just walking them through and helping them understand, like, "Hey, we've done this, and so we graduate to this level. We've done this, we graduate to this level." And so we keep moving up the ladder and that all of these decisions are tied together and correlated. Nick: And we try to emphasize the fact that, when we make these recommendations, it's not like we make these recommendations for every single person that we work with, these recommendations are specific to them. And so I think that helping them understand that, to embrace those differences and to make sure that we've done things, we've put things in place. So maybe the spouse sets a little bit more aggressive, we point out, "Well, Hey, look it, we've got 15 to 20% of your assets in this Roth IRA. And this is where we're taking the majority of the risk in your portfolio, because the upside is tax-free." And then maybe the other spouse is more conservative and we say, "Hey, remember that you have your social security, you got a small pension. And we put this annuity in place with guaranteed income to satisfy that risk that we perceived." And so all of these things are working together to try to balance it out. And usually it's just kind of rehashing that over time. And then people start to get it. Mark: Yes. The multiple pieces of the pie. So you're going to have these different things in there that are going to hopefully help address multiple concerns. That's why there's a lot of financial products and vehicles out there to be used. And it's not any one thing is the right fit, any one thing is the wrong fit. It's a matter of finding the right vehicles for the right situation and then plugging and playing those in for the different person and their scenario. So that's some places financial mistakes couples can get into. Of course you want to make sure you don't get into those by working with a good advisor or a qualified team, like John and Nick and their team at PFG Private Wealth. So if you'd like to drop by the website and send us an email as well, pfgprivatewealth.com. Mark: If you've got a question, we take those from time to time pfgprivatewealth.com is where you can go. All questions get answered, not all get asked on the podcast, but we do have one this week. So let's see what we got for you guys, Christopher, he sent this one and he says, "Hey, John," but I'm sure he means either one of you, but he says, "Hey, John, I'll be turning 70 at the beginning of next year. And I'm getting annoyed about having to think about taking money out of my IRA, because I'm not going to need it. I'm sure you have some tips for circumventing this rule. What are they?" John: Christopher, good question. So just to update you, the new RMD Required Minimum Distribution age is now 72 versus 70. So that was just seven and a half, that was just changed a couple of years back. But now that this comes up often, one of the things that we currently do for our clients is we'll actually set up a individual taxable account where we'll basically just, if there's a 15, $20,000 RMD, that's unneeded, we'll just transfer that right into it. And go ahead and invest in exactly what they're invested in before, because it really just needs to come out of the IRA, it can go right back into the market. Another strategy we've done is if a client is doing some charitable contributions, you can actually make charitable contributions from your IRA to your selected charity. And that will avoid taxation of that. And again, we always have our disclaimer, talk to your tax advisor if you look for tax advice, we're not tax professionals, but that's a really good strategy to use when you're trying to avoid the RMD taxation. Mark: Got you. Well. So the good news, Christopher, is you got a little bit more time. It's 72 now. I love when people say, "There's got to be ways around this," there really isn't, either don't have an IRA or there's not really a way around it. You're going to have to give the government their share, which is why people have been doing things like conversions. There've been converting money out and doing so on and so forth so they can reduce the amount in there to avoid having to pay that by not having the account. But that's really about the only way, correct? Nick: Yeah. The conversions can be helpful to reduce the amount that's going to have to be required to come out. But at the same time when the window is short and they realize that, "Hey, I'm just going to have to pay. I'm going to have to pay taxes on that money now when I convert versus, a portion of the amount that I would take out down the road." Or that, it's like, "Hey, well, you are going to pay tax on it, but still our plan's recognizing the taxation and you could see here in the planning software, this is what your total tax obligation is going to be. And we can reinvest some of that money. So it may have less of an impact on, on you that you think." Nick: I think one of the things that we've seen is that obviously taxes are a hot button and nobody likes paying them. But I would say that probably 90% of the people that we interact with overestimate, or assume that they pay a lot more in taxes than they actually do. So that's always a good exercise for us to remind people that in the scheme of things, many of them are paying a lot less than they realize anyway. So it's one of those things where in theory sometimes the move can be good, but oftentimes in their mind it's better than in actuality. And of course, just like anything else, we try to test that out through the planning. Mark: Well, Christopher, so there's some good news in there, like I said, there's some more information for you. Obviously they showed a couple of ideas, but hang onto your hat. Because as of right now, stuff's going through that we're tying at the time we're taping this. There's more things to possibly be passed. So there could be some changes again, coming as well. So we'll do an updated podcast on that once they go through or as we have more information, but for now, that's going to wrap it up this week here on the podcast, Retirement Planning Redefined with John and Nick. Guys, thanks for hanging out as always. Appreciate your time. And folks, if you need some help, reach out to them at pfgprivatewealth.com, that's pfgprivatewealth.com. Don't forget to subscribe on Apple, Google, Spotify, iHeart, Stitcher, any of those platforms. You can certainly find it that way. You can find all that information at the website and subscribe from there, again, pfgprivatewealth.com, for John and Nick. I'm Mark. We'll see you next time here on the podcast.

spotify google apple nfl llc investment stitcher guys couples iheart roth ira rmd financial mistakes john christopher john yeah john one john so because john mistakes couples make mark yeah mark well mark so mark yes nick yeah nick so mark absolutely nick one

Here's What You Need To Know About Investing In St. Louis, MO

The Remote Real Estate Investor

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 27, 2021 29:40

Looking for a new market to invest in? How about St. Louis Missouri? In this episode, Roofstock Certified Agent, Tellee Warren from 314 Property Solutions Group joins us to tell us about the St. Louis real estate market. Tellee gives us the scoop on the competitive environment, the common price to income ratio, the particularities of this market, common risk factors to consider, and his perspective both as an agent there and with his past experience as an appraiser. Tellee Warren, 314 Property Solutions Group warrentellee@gmail.com , 314-753-4503 --- Transcript Before we jump into the episode, here's a quick disclaimer about our content. The Remote Real Estate Investor podcast is for informational purposes only, and is not intended as investment advice. The views, opinions and strategies of both the hosts and the guests are their own and should not be considered as guidance from Roofstock. Make sure to always run your own numbers, make your own independent decisions and seek investment advice from licensed professionals. Michael: Hey, everybody, welcome to another episode of the remote real estate investor. I'm Michael album and today I'm joined by my co host, Tom Schneider, and Mark Woodling. And today we are chatting with the Roofstock Certified Agent out in St. Louis, Tellee Warren, and he's gonna be telling us all about the St. Louis market, why it's a hot place for investors, and some things you need to be aware of, if you're gonna head out that way. So let's get into it. Tellee, thank you so much for being with us here today. Really appreciate you taking the time out of your busy schedule to hang out with us for a little bit. Tellee Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it. Michael: No, of course, it's our pleasure. So I want to come out with a big swing and question right off the bat. I'm an investor I invest all over the country. Sell me on St. Louis, why St. Louis, the best market in your opinion? Tellee: Well, St. Louis, we have I think some of the best price points. The we have very affordable homes with great rents, which you know, make we have fantastic cap rates. We have I mean, we're working right now with with investors from from all over the country and from other countries that are flocking to the St. Louis market to buy rental properties. Because the price point is is so good. And the rents keep up with that to make the cap rates high a great place for investors to hang their hat here. So.. Tom: Love it. What would you say those ranges of what you're talking about price point like where would you say kind of different ranges or buckets of price points that you can get into and the corresponding rents, Tellee Some of the great areas, I think for investing in St. Louis, the price range, North County area, we've got 100,000 to actually have about 120,000 - 250,000 price range. And that's that's for your average three bed, two bath, you know, probably 11- 1200 square feet. rents are 12 to $1400, on average there. And then you get you get into Western St. Louis County, the there's some areas there that are still great for investing price points are a little bit higher. They're in the 200 to 250 range, I would say rents are also higher, I mean, you got you know, you have rents 18 1800 to 2000. Some as high as 21- 2200. And then you move even further west into St. Louis County, and then you get to the to the higher price points. 400 Plus, probably so… Michael: Awesome. So you're saying in North County, you can still find 1% properties, properties that meet the 1% rule? Tellee Once in a while. Yeah, absolutely. We're still seeing plenty of that seven to 10% cap rate, which is, which is the sweet spot? I think anyway, I mean, it's it's where investors are looking to be Michael: Totally, Tellee: So yeah, I mean, we still can find the one percenters once in a while. Michael: For all you haters out there that spew hate, you know, online everyday, there's no such thing as what percent property, reach out to Tellee go check out St. Louis as a market. That is awesome to hear. Tellee: That's right. Yeah. We have him here. Michael: Tellee. I'm curious to get your opinion and kind of thoughts around what makes St. Louis, a great market independent of the price to rent ratio, what's driving the economy there? Why are people moving to the market? Or do you see them moving away? Kind of give us an overview, if you could, and help folks understand what St. Louis is all about? Tellee: I mean, reasons for people moving to the area. I mean, some of the some of the larger businesses. I mean, we have I mean everybody knows Anheuser Busch, you know, we're known for our beer here in St. Louis. We have Boeing, Purina, Enterprise rental car is all here. There's some some pretty good sized companies that are in the St. Louis area that bring a lot of jobs to this market. Mark: And also there's a ton of colleges out there is what I've been seeing and does that retain a lot of the the millennials are recent college graduates to really retain those people versus just go to college there then then leave town? Tellee: I think it does. I mean, you talk to a lot of people that have been you know, that have attended college here, Washington University. St. Louis University, University of Missouri St. Louis. I mean, there's there's several big colleges right here. And like I said, he talked to a lot of the people that are out in the workforce now that actually did attend college here too. So… Tom: Awesome. So let's, let's talk a little bit more about the economy in St. Louis. So, as we know, there's some established companies, why don't you kind of tell us a little bit about the different sectors and different types of industries that are within St. Louis? Tellee: As I mentioned before, I mean, we have Anheuser Busch, Boeing, you know, manufacturing industries, Purina, we have Enterprise, which is one of the largest car rental companies. Tom: Yeah, blue chip, blue chippper Tellee: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. We have, you know, there are some some technology companies that are starting in St. Louis square, is is one of them. And they're hiring like crazy right now. Bringing a lot of people to the area, which is, which is great. Yeah, I think there's some other technology based companies that are that are also getting going here in the St. Louis area. So… Tom: It makes sense with so many colleges around there, that you know, you get, I love the exposure that you have to both kind of the older industry, you know, the the blue chipper, Anheuser Busch, enterprise, and then you have the you know, with all these colleges, you're just bound to have a bunch of startups in the area. That makes it right, makes a ton of sense. Tellee: And we also just got a huge, they just, they just built a huge Amazon facility here too. Which is great. Tom: That's, that's fantastic. On some specific investor related questions. So I'd love to hear about, you know, there's this concept that people talk about with investor friendly, right, be it property taxes, be it with if there happens to be an eviction or any of those types of functions. Where does St. Louis fit in that spectrum of investor friendly as a city? Telle: Yeah, sure. So property taxes on the Missouri side are, are great. I mean, they're, they're some of the lowest in the country. Now, it's a different story across the river in Illinois, you go over there, and it's darn near doubled. What it is, here on the Missouri side. We don't work over on the Illinois side, we're on the Missouri side. But yes, our city is is split right in the middle, partially Illinois, partially Missouri. But the real estate taxes on the Missouri side are much, much lower than they are on the Illinois side. Like I said, I mean, some of the some of the lowest in the country, some of the most affordable taxes in the nation. Michael: And you see rents differ much between the two sites, Tellee: No rents or rents are similar. Tom: Yeah, I think those are such interesting. You know, look at where you have these cities that sits on on two different states. Do you so you guys operate specifically in the Missouri side? That's correct. Tellee: We do yes, we only do Missouri. Tom: Got it? What a kind of a boon in that, you know, you have all the employment opportunities of just going across, but you can take advantage of those lower property taxes. How about any other aspects of being a landlord and rules around that? In Missouri, or perhaps even comparing to the Illinois side? Telllee: I'm not? I don't know, specifics on the Illinois side. As far as that goes, just because I don't I don't work over there. I know you had asked about evictions, things like that. And that's been an issue in the, in the St. Louis area during this whole COVID thing. You know, they've been on hold for so long. They finally took a hold off a couple of weeks ago, and then they put an end to that again. So the hold is back on. Lots of mixed feelings about all that. I think, you know, but But yeah, it's it's an ongoing issue. Mark: What do you think the pre COVID I mean, has it been relatively friendly? Would you say as a landlord friendly state, or is the eviction process rather difficult? Tellee: Oh, no, you know, it's it's pre COVID. It was fine. I mean, it's a you know, usually 30 to 45 day process. But they were carrying out the evictions regularly on a 30 to 45 day. timeframe, which is good, I think. But now Not same story. Michael: So I'm curious if you could give us some insight or listeners some insight into some call it a colloquialism into specifics around the St. Louis market that folks should be aware of. So for example, in California, we have earthquakes, if you're not from earthquake country, that might scare the living crap out. So what are some things that you have that occur regularly in St. Louis, that people should be aware of that are just kind of par for the course? Tellee: Yeah, so I would say the biggest thing is, is our tornadoes, a lot of hail, when things like that, you know, in the spring, summer, a lot of storms, and then in the wintertime, we get a lot of ice, we don't get a, we don't get a ton of snow, we're just kind of right in that area, to where we get a lot of snow to the north rain to the south. And we're kind of right there where we get the ice so. So that's a factor in the wintertime. But I would say the biggest thing would be the hail storms, tornadoes, things like that. Michael: Okay, great to know. And we were chatting with another agent in a different market around some commonalities around inspection reports. And something he said was, hey, in my market, we just have termites. That's just kind of how it goes. So expect to see termite damage. Are there any things like that, that you see in the St. Louis market of things that we should just expect, as again, kind of par for the course with regard to home inspections? Tellee: Hail damage on roofs is a very common one. We also have a lot of termites in the St. Louis area, we always recommend a termite inspection be done. They're very, very common. In this area, too. I would say another thing would be foundations. I mean, we have in this area, most homes have basements. That's one of the common things that comes up on an inspection report. Michael: Okay, great to know. Mark: Yeah, Tellee, I always like to call out some of the most common inspection issues. So it sounds like with, you know, with these basements that you do see a bit of water intrusion, like it can be common, are those things that you feel maybe really should be looked at even closer? Or do you find that, hey, these are simple fixes that are really going to come up more often than than not on these inspections that you can help address with any buyer that's buying a property? Tellee: Right. And it really, here, it really kind of depends on the area. But for the most part, I mean, we see a lot of these older homes, like in the city, almost every single one of them is going to have some kind of a trickle of water, you know, during a heavy rain, I mean, they're their old homes or old basements that they're going to leak. I mean, I always tell everybody the same thing. I mean, it's like, expect to have some kind of water in the basement. I mean, I'm not talking to feet of water, but but a trickle of water, at least, you know, coming in that shouldn't shouldn't alarm you, I mean, it's very common in the area. Now, when we start to see huge cracks in the foundation, especially horizontal cracks. With displacement, I mean, then, you know, there's some, possibly some structural issues to the home, things like that. Mark: Cool. And, and so for the listeners who want to know more about you, as a certified agent, you're you're the one hand picking many of these properties that are in the St. Louis market that are Roofstock Select properties. So maybe give us a little idea about what you're looking for, you know, when you're helping identify properties to be listed on our website, you know, maybe you're billed as their square footage, Bed Bath count, you know, to help us get get an idea of kind of what you look for and why? Tellee: The sweet spot is is the three bedroom two bath home that is, you know, in the 1000 to 12-1300 square foot range. finishes don't have to be top of the line. They can be average finishes. When you're looking for investment property or rental property, there's some things that aren't as important when looking for those that they are, you know, like when somebody is looking for a primary residence such as garage, some of the exterior of amenities like you know, decks and and then even like fireplaces, things like that. And we some of that stuff doesn't doesn't matter as much on the investment property. And those are kind of the properties that I look for. Also, I look for homes that have been on the market or I tried to find homes that have been on the market for a minute because there's you know, there's some of those that People that are looking for a primary home or skipping over and but they still may be great homes for an investor for rental property. So sometimes those are great candidates for Roofstock. Tom: I have my final question for me and I love food big, big food and guy so I'd love your your input on if I was going to go to St. Louis and I was gonna get two different meals. One of them is fancy date night, you know, taking the wife and the other one is Oh, I need something greasy. I want to get my hands messy. What would you recommend those two to restaurant meals be? fancy date night and the down home goodness. Tellee: Fancy date night, I would say we have an area here in St. Louis. It's called The Hill. It's an old Italian neighborhood. And there are some incredible Italian restaurants down there. Very authentic. Amazing. And it's a neat little area too. But there are several restaurants right there that I would recommend for a fancy date night for sure. Tom: The Hill I like it. Tellee: The Hill. Yeah. You know, St. Louis is known for toasted ravioli. That's a good greasy food. So Michael: That sounds great. Tom: I love ravioli., I love toasting, sounds like a match made in heaven. Michael: It's a beautiful marriage. Tellee: Right? Yes, pretty darn good. Michael: Tellee, my last question for you is, granted for everyone listening. We're recording this mid August of 2021. How are you seeing all cash offers play in the St. Louis market at this moment in time? Tellee: I don't think that cash means as much right now as it as it used to. We submitted a cash offer, say against an offer with a with financing. It'd usually is going to to win. I mean, even if it's you know, a little bit less, the risk is a lot less. But now I mean, we're seeing cash offers for, you know, that are being treated the same as as offers that are financed. I'm not seeing a big advantage to that. I mean, it's cash is always King. But I don't think it's as much of an advantage as it used to be. Michael: Okay. Great to know, Mark: How about competition out there, I always love to ask the question about, you know, are you seeing eye buyers? Are you seeing a lot of institutional investors are, you know, coming in as a roof stock buyer, you know, what should they what should they expect in terms of competition? And how do you advise them on maybe where to come in on price point, relative to list price on any offer? Tellee: We're starting to see it maybe led up just a bit most of these areas. The list price to sale price ratio, I would say it's at about 104 to 106%. So I'd say four to four to 6% over list prices is about average, what a home selling for right now, in these areas in most of these areas that we're finding the investment properties in. Mark: Sure, so when a buyer comes in and wants to make an initial offer, how do you approach that do you like to come in and kind of warm up or you say, hey, make your highest and best up front? To really make sure you get the attention of the listing agent and the seller? Tellee: Well, I usually like to, to feel out the situation contact the listing agency, how many offers they have? I mean, usually the you know you're not getting they're not going to tell you how much the offers are for but you can find out how many they have kind of gauge it that way. They usually base it off of that. I mean, if they don't have any, you know, we may be okay. Closer to list price, if they have a few. It needs to be strong. So.. Michael: That's great to know, I know a lot of people, I talked to members of Roofstock Academy get frustrated with paying over list price. But I always tell them, hey look, go back to your numbers. If your numbers support a different price that's above and beyond list price, great. You shouldn't feel bad about that. Because you're still hitting your marks the same token if you can only offer less than this price, but you've got to offer based on your numbers. So get specific get good at running the numbers, and then your answer will will appear to you almost like magic. Tellee: Right? I mean, it is what it is. It's all yeah, it's all in the numbers. Michael: That's for sure. Yeah. You know, Michael: That's great Telllee: You can only do what makes sense. Mark: One more question in terms of competition. I like to look at it kind of in the inverse directions I heard last that you have about a month or maybe greater in inventory on the MLS. And that means it you know, the inventory that's available would take one month to sell versus an average market at any given point is about healthy market call it average healthy is about six months. What do you see is the current inventory level now? And how do you see this really impacting, you know, how a buyer needs to react to making offers? Tellee: I think that's starting to increase just a bit. But I mean, I would say it's, it's probably still between a month and two months worth of inventory. And offers have to be strong. I mean, there, there's a ton of competition. I mean, we're seeing it almost on every deal. So. And that's, and that's the biggest issue, I think, is that people aren't, you know, we're not making the offer strong enough, that we're getting beat out a lot, which I mean, I know it's happening everywhere. And everybody's writing a ton of offers right now and getting a ton of offers declined. That's just the way this market is. Mark: I have some stats that I pulled that I think would be good to just throw out there and see if Tellee wants to talk to any of these points. But I was just looking through that John Burns real estate consulting data that he puts out every single month Roofstock is one of the clients so we have access to this data that's not typically available to the open market, I would say. But here's some cool stats I found. So Tellee, stop me or like go into any detail you want about this. But I saw St. Louis had employment growth that was 5% year over year, starting this July, looking back a year. Appreciation in home prices. The median home price was 194,500. This year, compared to 179,000. Last year, rent growth was 4.5%. year over year looking back one year from July 2021. The cost two for an entry level single family home on a monthly basis is $1434 versus $1126. to own so use me $1434 to rent $1126 to own there's a good night. Yeah. Inventory was one 1.2 months I saw as a December 2021 occupancy was 94.8% for single family rentals. And the census data last showed that 56.6% of St. Louis was renting versus 36%. nationally. How about that? Tellee: Wow. So you see… Mark: rapid fire numbers. What do you think about all? Tellee: St. Louis is the place to be right there. The proof is in the numbers? No, I think Yeah, Mark: Absolutely. Tellee: Fantastic. Mark: I love occupancy, you know, high percentage of renter's, you got the cost to own a home is actually cheaper than what people are paying in rent, year over year market rent growth, great appreciation, and then I always look back at job growth. Right. Those are, those are those big drivers. And I know looking back a year, the market was in a state of turmoil a bit more in terms of the job market, but still to see things, you know, growing and climbing at a rate of 5%. Still pretty dang good. Tellee: So yeah, Mark: What do you think overall Telly if you were talking to investors, you know, what are some kind of final pieces of advice that you would give an investor coming into St. Louis, specially from out of state? Tellee: Yeah, I would say give it a try. I mean, take a look to what we've got here. You're gonna find that your cap rates are great. You're I mean, it's, it's, it's a great place to, to buy investment properties. You'd be happy here, that's for sure. So. Michael: Awesome. Mark: Good cash flow. Nice appreciation was kind of the the two two solid things that you're looking for. That's great. Well, we appreciate what you're doing for the certified agent network and bringing the select properties to roof stock Telly. So thanks for all you're doing. And I would say our buyers are going to be interested in connecting with you. So maybe give them a little idea about how you would like to be connected with maybe via email or even phone. Tellee Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, you can contact me at email. My last name warrentellee@gmail.com. Or a phone number 314-753-4503. We are 314 Property Solutions Group in St. Louis, brokered by Keller Williams. Awesome. Michael: So I'm curious to get a little bit of background on you as an individual as an investor as an agent because we talked about the market as a whole but give give our listeners a little bit of insight into who you are. Tellee: Sure. Yeah. So I have Been in the real estate business in some way, shape, or form, I guess for the past 20 2021 years. I started off in 2000. As an appraiser, I'd always wanted to get licensed as an agent. And I finally I just never never had the time to do it really, finally, made myself do it in 2015, I think I got is when I got licensed. And then I eventually switched over to just selling and I don't do appraisal any longer. Michael: That's great. And I'm curious to know, your track record, having been a former appraiser, when you when you're consulting with clients and saying, hey, this is I think, where this is gonna come in? How close are you typically? Tellee: Well, actually, I'm, I'm, I feel like I'm pretty close most of the time. Um, that's one of the biggest values that I that I bring, is, is being able to, is Property Valuation. I mean, I'm pretty good at that. And I think that helps out, you know, it can help out a lot. So I think there's a lot of agents that are not nearly good enough at it. And that can really put a client in in danger. So. Michael: Yeah, big time, but we'll call that your superpower. Tellee: Yeah, there we go. Mark: And how about if if values come in too low from an appraisal for, let's say, a lender? You know, what's your success rate there and challenging some of those values? Do you do you find that happens? These days with values going up? Or, you know, what do you see nowadays? Tellee: We're seeing some issues with appraisals. A few, but not not near as many as I expected to see. Which is kind of a surprise. And of course, I mean, we always try to, to rebut those, whenever we do get alone and try to hit him with as many comps as possible and all that, but it's it does. They're not overturned very often. Michael: Okay, Mark: Got it. But that's always a challenge when real estate prices are going up, you know, an appraisal comp is looking backwards, right? So you're looking at prior sales. And when the markets moving so quickly, you know, some of those sales haven't even closed, they're just under a contract. So, you know, that's good to know that there, there isn't this huge valuation challenge that's going on, because a lot of times the, you know, the lenders are trying to mitigate their risks, so they cap their number and, you know, values are moving so quickly, you know, just means buyers may have to come to the table with a little more cash than anticipated. Tellee: That's right. And that's, that's why it's, I mean, it's very important right now to, you know, typically on an appraisal or in a normal market, you can, you know, they're comparing the home to properties that or maybe six months or even a year, you know, that was sold, six months out, or even a year out. Where now, it's very important that they use sales that are within a month or two, just because the market is changing so quickly. Yeah. Michael: Yeah. Interesting. Seems like the country's on fire. It is like I gotta be careful how I say that. Well, right. In Flames, so yeah. Awesome. Any other questions for Tellee guys? Mark: I'm good. This is this is insightful. Thanks for your time Tellee. We always appreciate it and getting some local knowledge. Tellee: Absolutely. Thanks for having me, guys. Michael: All right, awesome. Well, Tellee, thank you so much. This was really really insightful. Very excited to see the St. Louis market and all it has to offer and for anyone interested, feel free to reach out to Tellee. Thanks again, man. Hopefully we'll we'll catch up with you soon. Tellee: You bet. Thanks so much, guys. Michael: Alrighty, everybody that was our episode a big big big thank you to Tellee if you're interested in learning more about the St. Louis market definitely reach out to him. He is a wealth of knowledge, especially with his appraisal background. As always, if you liked the episode, please feel free to leave us a rating or review. If you're checking us out on YouTube, hit the like and subscribe button right below you. And we'd love to hear about episode ideas for things you want to learn more about. Thanks so much for watching. Happy investing.

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How the Roofstock Select Program Works and Where It's Going

The Remote Real Estate Investor

Play Episode Listen Later May 18, 2021 23:43

In this episode, Roofstock's Director of Local Market Growth, Mark Woodling explains the new developments with the Roofstock Select program, how it works, how to make the most of it, and where it's available. --- Transcript Tom: Greetings, and welcome to the remote real estate investor. On this episode, I'm joined by Michael: Michael Albaum, Mark: Mark Woodling. Tom: And today, we got a fun topic. So we're actually going to be talking about the Roofstock select program. And this is a really neat program that Roofstock has that merges our technology, as well as our awesome local broker and agent network. And today we're going to talk about that with Mark who leads the program. Mark: Thanks for having me on guys, this is really a cool opportunity because Roofstock is growing. And we're growing in many different directions. But one of the things that most buyers are starting to see on our website is that there's more properties that are coming from MLS. And so we really want to make sure buyers understand, Hey, where are the properties coming up? Number one, what markets then number two, how are those properties coming to roof stock, right Roofstock doesn't go on the market and cherry pick these off of MLS, we actually have what we call our certified agent network. And those agents are the ones that we work very closely with, by vetting them, number one to make sure that they know what they're doing that they're you're really top agents in their industry. But secondly, that they have the experience really understand the investment side of the world. So these agents are the ones going to MLS and identifying quality investment properties, underwriting them using Roofstock tools, and then posting them to Roofstock.com. So buyers can sift through properties that are also on market. Michael: So if I'm a buyer market, I'm on the website and I see a roof stock select property, does that mean that somebody or investor from the agent has already put eyes on it and identified it as a potentially great investment opportunity? Mark: Exactly. So roof stock has provided these agents with underwriting tools where they can go in and identify properties on MLS and look at the pictures, you know, really get into what the estimated market rents are because many of these properties are vacant. So they'll come up with a market rents. And then they'll actually have an idea of what the cap rates look like, and can study our neighborhood scores. So they understand what Roofstock buyers are looking for, because we've done a lot of coaching to give them that direction. And so anything that makes it to the site has been touched by the agent, and then they have the authority to push those directly to Roofstock. So we go in QC and make sure that you know, these are some quality properties. But with all the training that we're doing for him, the ones that are hitting the market, they know as a local expert that these are good buys. Tom: This is great. So just to paraphrase a little bit, so you know, within Roofstock properties for sale, they have these exclusive properties that you're not going to find anywhere else. But they also have these properties that are listed in the MLS that these local experts using Roofstock technology have identified for people to be able to acquire through roof stock. And I understand that correct Mark? Mark: Absolutely. As you know, buyers like to look through the roof stock lens and see all the analytics and the details from our neighborhood score to cap rates and just long term equity opportunities. So this is a place to be able to identify properties using the Roofstock lens. But what's cool is that when a buyer makes an offer, they're always going to get the inspection contingency. So they can make an offer. In fact, Roofstock is going to pay for that inspection. And we're going to help them with a certain part of the transaction. But they're going to have the local agent that understands what is absolutely necessary to compete in that market to make sure their offers are competitive. But also you really need to make sure that the buyer is handheld when that inspection comes back, you know maybe how to renegotiate if there's a few things that need to be fixed up. But mostly it's about really interpreting what's local and customary in that market. Because all markets from Austin, Texas, the Dallas area is hyper hyper competitive. But now you have the ability to have an agent may help make that offer, and then walk you through all the steps all the way through the closing process. Michael: So Mark, something I hear constantly from Roofstock Academy and Roofstock users are how great the guarantees are that come with Roofstock property. So the lease guarantee on vacant properties that 30 day money back guarantee. Are those applicable to Roofstock select properties as well. Are those only for the exclusive? Mark: Yeah, absolutely. Because when you look at the Select Properties, you're going to see about 90% of the properties are actually vacant. Unlike Roofstock exclusive about 90% are tenant occupied, right. So the guarantees absolutely apply. In fact, it's almost better when you purchase vacant because you know that's where the roof stock guarantee applies when if there's any missed rents after the 45 days. So those are absolutely in place. In fact, that's really the reason why buyers like to come back through Roofstock and continue to purchase even if they could go directly to the agent. They know that the guarantees are in place Roofstock is going to cover the inspection and then we also helping keep those agents really, you know, communicating with us. So we know, their friend center, they're very present with especially the roof stock buyers, and we just have a good partner relationship. So we can be very influential and making sure that Yeah, they are delivering the best customer service. Michael: That's great. Tom: For any agents or brokers that are listening that are interested in applying and going through the application process, I'd love to hear kind of just talking over some of the benefits and why it would make sense for an agent or broker to apply to this program. Mark: Part of Roofstock magic is really working with the buyers, right? It's doing what you guys do every single day with a Roofstock podcast to webinars. And we have our buyer advisor team that's helping helping buyers really come up with their plan, right, it's about getting comfortable with investing step one, and then really narrowing down and getting to what markets are available, what inventory is available, and so forth. So agents love that we are doing so much of the vetting and qualifying an education piece of on the investment side. So when a buyer is ready to make an offer, they've been through the education and they really are ready, willing and able buyers. And we do require when an offer is made, that there's a pre qual or proof of funds letter. So when the offer comes through, agents love it, because Roofstock has done so much work on just making sure that these are really quality buyers, and that they're actually ready to make an offer. And that the lead that we send to these agents being this, the buyer has all those documents, but more importantly, they found a property that they're really interested in making an offer on. So when it comes to a buyer being ready, and an agent ready to intercept that there's a deal ready to be done. So agents just love that, you know, we go through all those steps get the buyers ready, Michael: That makes total sense. So what should agents do or brokers do if they are interested in becoming Roofstock? Agent partners? Mark: Absolutely. So we have a website, it's joined dot roof stock.com/certified-agent. And you can actually fill out an application there and provide us with a little more detail. But you know, going back to why this program is so important to us is that we want to make sure that we're working with the best of the best agents out there. So we do want to take an application and know that agents who have five or more years as a full service real estate agent and have done 50 or more transactions would be the minimal qualifying factors, you know, to really bring on some of these agents and even begin the conversations. And just so everybody knows as well, you know, we're only picking two agents per market and we may grow to three, we want to make sure that these are really agents that we have relationships with that we have done hands on training, and that they really have committed to understanding Roofstock, and just have a better idea overall of what's happening in the investment community. So the reason why it's small as you get better quality versus the quantity, otherwise, it becomes quite difficult to chase down that many agents because they are busy. And they're independent contractors, and they don't work for Roofstock. Right. It's just a partnership that we have. So I think just having fewer is going to bring more equality to the buyers. Michael: I'm curious mark, from a buyer perspective, or from a transaction flow standpoint, if I go to make an offer on a property that's either a select or an exclusive on the website. From my perspective, it's all the same same. But from a transaction flow standpoint, what actually happens after I hit that make my offer button on a select property? Mark: Great question. So when you make the offer, the buyer is going to fill out the basic details that you need to really populate a purchase and sale agreement right. In these cases, we're we have to use the local purchase and sale agreement. So if you've bought a property on Roofstock, that's an exclusive property, you use a different contract that's very direct just for tenant occupied homes more than likely. So using the local state promulgated forms is important. So we collect the basic information, you upload that proof of funds or your pre qualification letter. And then we're going to send not only an email confirming that that's been received, but we're going to send an email with a DocuSign, which is a contract to the agent. And the agents actually get to have the ability to intercept that review the terms and then reach out to the buyer directly to make sure that they can quickly fill out the rest of the details and get that offer back in the buyers hands for signature. So maybe a buyer made an offer for $100,000. And the list price was 100,000. Well, there could be multiple offers, but a Roofstock buyer doesn't know that it could be a multiple offer situation. So the agents going to have first hand knowledge based on their MLS access, and they can coach the buyer on Hey, what are the next best steps To make your offer the most competitive. So really working with that agent for these on market deals is super critical. And they know how quickly they need to act. So the agents are gonna really coach the buyer at that point. But having that contract in hand, they're ready to go. So they have pretty much all the information from the buyer, ready to fill out that contract and submit that offer. Michael: So just to paraphrase, after I hit that button that says make my offer, it goes into really a review phase by the agent who's then going to turn around and bring it back to me for final signature before it ever gets submitted as a official offer. Is that correct? Mark: That's correct. That's correct. Michael: I was gonna ask a question, but I think that kind of answers it for me, I was gonna ask him, folks reach out to the local partner agents ahead of making their offer to be coached in how to make a competitive offer. But it sounds like that's already going to happen, once they, quote unquote, make their offer, because then it's going to get reviewed and get sent back. Mark: Exactly. If they found a property, you know, go ahead and enter in the offer information. But you're always going to have that ability to really get coached in that final step before it gets submitted. So we always suggest talking to the buyer advisor team that works at Roofstock, to really, you know, find the markets really get coached up and make sure that you're ready. And when you do make that offer, by the time it gets to the agent, they know that you're ready to go, because we all know properties are moving less than 24 hours being on market these days for on MLS properties and a lot of Roofstock properties too. But to be able to move this quickly. It's an advantage to the buyers to be able to identify the property and say, hey, what questions do you need for me? Otherwise, let's rock and roll. Michael: It makes total sense. And I'm curious Mark geographically? Where is this program going? I know we're in a bunch of different markets right now. But where are we setting our sights for future growth? Mark: That's a great question. We have really taken a lot of the information from Roofstock's exclusive program and said, Where do buyers purchase today based on the data that we can collect and analyze. So we're opening up in St. Louis, Kansas City, just as of recently, even like Augusta, Georgia, in markets where we know there's a lot, there's quality cash flow, right, we know there's appreciation opportunities in those markets as well. So we have the ability to open up in any market where we can find an agent, and we have a property manager partner. So we really just need to be able to get the MLS data to put you know, to really connect to our systems. And we do that through the local real estate certified agents. So you know, the sky's the limit, you know, if somebody is interested in buying an Anchorage, Alaska, hey, we get enough interest, we can absolutely do it for probably steer people back towards the mainland, but we absolutely have grown tremendously. And we have. So we're in 24 markets today, in a lot of those markets are just coming on board today, because we're training up the agents and like the Tulsa, Oklahoma's we just brought on, like I said, Augusta, Georgia, we're bringing on a second agent in Jackson, Mississippi, because we're getting so much interest right now, we just signed up in Gary, Indiana. And I can put together a full list to make that available. But you know, just check back to Roofstock. If you go into the filter section, you can actually filter under the More button just for just roof stock select properties. So we'll be doing a lot of these announcements, you know, as we go forward, and really making sure that we give a shout out to the agents who are participating and, you know, who are really trying to bring as much inventory to Roofstock knowing that we have so much demand right now. So overall short answer is we can go anywhere, but we're really focused on the markets that we've seen success, but we're ready to go into new markets. Like, you know, Colorado Springs is one that we're trying right now, we did open in Austin, Texas, cap rates are, you know, 2-3-4 percent, you know, there's some in the fives. But that's just how competitive it is because prices have have really jumped. But at the same time, you know, property taxes out there tend to kill the cap rates a little bit. So it's good for buyers to see real properties on the site and those markets and really understand what is available on the market, especially as properties are getting snapped up so quickly. Tom: This is awesome. I like learning about this for a few reasons. One, you know, one of the things that I've always seen in Roofstock that I've wanted to see more is more listings available. And now by tapping into these local experts I mean that solves that problem where we're getting basically any listing that's listed anywhere you're able to layer on Rootstock's technology and services that they provide and certifications and warranties, all that good stuff and just opening it up to to the world of any market. Right? Mark: That's right Tom: Fantastic. And then also like kind of a win win both for the broker agent side and at the end of the funnel that you know where they're meeting where they're connecting with these buyers. It's at the point of making that you know that final push on the you know, either price setting or final property selection and on the buyer side, you're getting This sort of certified agent that's that's been through the wringer that Roofstock's done and getting them on board. So yeah, really a triple win or quadruple, I don't know, anyways, I fired up about it. I'm excited about this program mark that you're working on. Mark: The one thing I want to say about these agents are, you know, I'm hand selecting these agents and making sure that they really understand technology and companies like roof stock that they believe in us. So last month, we had one of the agents. His name is Matt Crawford, we hope to have him on one of these podcasts. It really just talked about what's happening in Columbia, South Carolina. But he posted 275 properties in one month from MLS to Roofstock. And he's just hustling and making sure that he can put new builds up, right, something that buyers are accustomed to seeing, but they may not be able to see it through the roof stock lens that often because a lot of properties you see on Roofstock are exclusive listings, right. So now we're starting to open up and get into higher price points where you know, there's gonna be less overall maintenance, right, but you're gonna have higher appreciation in some of these kind of trending school districts, let's say that they're building. And so it's a great way to see a variety of properties, and really dabble without Roofstock having to do this extensive business development to go find those listings. But again, give that taste to the buyers. Michael: I'm curious Mark, how this will play with the bring your own property program that Roofstock has, as well with getting now agents and property management partners in these new markets, does that then allow for the ability for folks to submit by BYOB submissions as well? Mark: The two overlap perfectly right. And that's really where the certified agents are the ones that a buyer will work with if they submit a BYOB property, because really, the markets that we're working on BYOB are the markets that we have certified agents in. So if you submit a property Roofstock is actually kicking those over to the certified agent and saying, Hey, we do have a property, please underwrite this in our broker portal. That's the technology that we use that really analyzes the deal, and kicks those over to the buyer. So the buyer now has a private link, right? Nobody else is going to see this besides the person that submitted through the BYOP program. And then they're going to have the ability to go through the same process, they would for any other select property. But it's the fact that the buyer found that property, and now they're the ones that say, Hey, I can still take advantage of all the roof stock guarantees, get the free inspection. And as long as it really, you know, fits the condition criteria that we're looking for Roofstock, well apply all those guarantees, right, it's not guaranteed to have the guarantee, I guess you would say, but at the same time, we want to make sure the property is in good condition or that seller or the buyer may fix up that property in order to get that guarantee. your Roofstock just doesn't have the confidence if a property's falling apart, or, you know, there's a foundation issue that you know, somebody is going to want to rent that property out. So we do have those conditions in place for that. But yeah, the BYOB program has been a great success. And again, it just folds right into this master plan of how we're growing out this certified agent network. Michael: Oh, man, that's so exciting. Because I hear all the time of you know, folks ask, you know, I found this market, you know, when can we open it up. So this is really exciting stuff. Mark: And one thing on that I'll just note is off market deals are still an opportunity as well, we actually have our system set up. So if a buyer wants to make an off market offer, because maybe they were playing around on a Facebook group, or they found a lead that just came from a different source, but it is not on MLS, you can still submit through the BYOB program. And the agent will still underwrite that property send the same link that you would see the BYOB or select link. And then you can transact from there. We want the buyers to know that it has to be on market, you can't just make blind offers on your next door neighbor's property because it may be poor judgment call may as well just go knock on his door. Michael: Right. Oh, interesting. But there's a true listing for an off market property. Those are fair game on BYOP? Mark: Fair game, absolutely. So hey, that's the type of market we're in. Right, you have to look far and wide. And what other people don't know is available could give you that edge. So something definitely to consider. And again, if you see a property that's on our website that's in a select program, those are the markets we're open in. But we'll work on really making a select web page in the very near future. So a buyer will know where they can shop. And maybe maybe they want to start shopping just for select. That's going to be an opportunity, Michael: Man, this is great. Tom: Awesome, Mark. Awesome. Thank you so much for jumping in any final…? Mark: So the markets that were opening in no particular order, actually by alphabetical order, so let's just start there. Atlanta, Georgia, Augusta, Georgia, Austin, Texas. Birmingham, Alabama, Cleveland, Ohio, Columbia, South Carolina, soon to come Detroit, Michigan, Greenville, South Carolina, Houston, Texas, Huntsville, Alabama, Indianapolis, Indiana. Jackson, Mississippi, Jacksonville, Florida, Kansas City, Missouri, Las Vegas, Nevada coming soon. Memphis, Tennessee, Montgomery, Alabama, Orlando, Florida, Pittsburgh, San Antonio, St. Louis, Tampa, Tulsa, waco. So I could go quicker if you wanted me to. But that's those are the markets. Michael: That's awesome. Tom: Great, great coverage. Hey, Mark, what are some of the words of wisdom to maximize this opportunity? Mark: Sure. It's a great question, because it does make sense for a buyer to say wow, I can just reach out to these agents and you know, go to Rootstock's website and see who they are. But working through the Roofstock process is actually really important, because you're going to have a Roofstock on your side, especially in the event, something may happen afterwards, you say, Hey, Mark, I have a few questions or, you know, is this the right property manager, or do I need to exercise my Roofstock guarantee? In summary, I would say it's really important that a buyer continues to work through roof stock, where we can send the lead to these agents, because that really shows that you are ready to make an offer, the buyer agent or the certified agents are really ready to engage with you knowing that you've done your homework. And then of course, you're going to have the Roofstock guarantees. And the Roofstock guarantee doesn't just end, if you're collecting missed rents, but it continues Roofstock wants to stay involved, keep the relationship with with our buyers, and just working through us is gonna give you a lot more value, especially when it comes to education and, and other things that we're able to do for buyers. So yeah, stick stick with us stick with the process. And these buyer agents will be in contact with you, especially once you make that offer, you know, they're going to be ready to take you to the next steps. Michael: Mark, this was great. And I guess my final question is for the BYOB and the Rootstock select, for Roofstock Academy members, do those properties also qualify for their cash back? intentive? Mark: Absolutely, we treat it all the same. So you know, I think it's a Roofstock select shouldn't feel too different to the buyer, which is important because we put the safeguards of the inspection contingency in there. And you know, the Roofstock certified agents are going to step in as well. So there's actually a lot of value. So yeah, we want to treat these all the same. So Academy members should definitely kick around and get to know the agents. We're going to be coming out with agent website soon. So you can see, you know, a 15 minute interview to learn about their market, just learn about who they are and get more comfortable with them. So we see there being a lot of engagement with the academy members with the the certified agents. Michael: Fantastic, man, I am just super pumped. I'm super pumped. Mark: Yeah, thanks for having me on guys. And yeah, we'll do this, again, we'll highlight some of the agents in the markets that are really producing. We call them the hustlers, right, the ones that are just putting in the effort and they want to see Roofstock really thrive. So we'll get them on and let them really walk us through their their markets and what's happening because the market dynamics are changing every single week. It's getting crazy out there. So let's hear from the local experts. Michael: Awesome. We're very much looking forward to having them and you back on the show as always. great seeing you man. Tom: Mark, thank you so much for jumping on. This is an excellent episode learning about the Roofstock select program. As always, if you enjoyed the episode, please rate us please subscribe. Tell your friends about us. We appreciate that greatly. And as always, happy investing

Relating to Food

Play Episode Listen Later May 10, 2021 47:03

Atheopagan Zoom Events: https://atheopaganism.wordpress.com/2021/05/04/please-join-us-for-zoom-events/ Food psych podcast mentioned, by Christy Harrison: christyharrison.com A few food and sustainability podcast resources: Sustainable Dish: https://sustainabledish.com/podcasts/ Regenerative Agriculture Podcast: http://regenerativeagriculturepodcast.com Remember, we welcome comments, questions and suggested topics at thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com S2E17 TRANSCRIPT: ----more---- Food Yucca: Welcome back to the Wonder Science-Based Paganism. I'm one of your hosts Yucca. Mark: And I'm the other one, Mark. Yucca: And this week we are talking about food. And there's a lot of different directions to go with this topic, but it was actually inspired by the topic from this mornings atheopagan zoom mixer. So do you want to touch on that Mark? Mark: Sure be happy to the atheopagan Facebook community holds a zoom in-person mixer every Saturday morning at 10:15 Pacific time. And it's It's something that you, as a theist pagan are welcome to check out. If you go to atheopagan ism.org, there is a post up right now that invites you to various zoom mix, various zoom activities that the community is doing. And so the links are there. Yucca: I'll put a link to that post in the show notes Mark: perfect. Yucca: so that everyone can click on that. Yeah. Mark: We We didn't really have a pre-set discussion topic for today's mixer, but we stumbled into this conversation about our personal relationships with food and with eating and all of the sort of issues around that. And the reason why that is pertinent from a pagan standpoint is that paganism. To a large degree is about liberation from the over culture. It's about getting those kind of disempowering authoritarian anti pleasure. Anti-sexual anti-women anti gay, anti black. Frameworks off of us to as great a degree as we possibly can and being liberated as people as a result. And so this conversation. I mean, it was just really lovely and everybody had something to contribute to it. And we don't really talk about our relationship with food. Very much. We get bombarded with messages, but we really don't talk about it much. And so I thought that for Yucca and me to have a conversation today about that would make an interesting post an interesting podcast for you folks to listen to. Yucca: Yeah. And so I wasn't present for this conversation this morning. But I think in addition to what you've just said, Mark, about, about paganism often being about this liberation, there's also a component of it being about connection. Connection with our world with the rest of nature. And food is one of those ways that we are connected. This is the primary way in which we relate to the rest of the biosphere food webs that's and no matter what choices we're making, we're tied in that way. And so there's a lot of. Really interesting directions to explore with that. Mark: Yes, I think so too. And we, I mean, we really only scratched the surface too, to some degree, much of what we were talking about in the mixer this morning had to do with people's individual feelings around eating. And we touched some on the dreaded D word dieting and the. You know, how hungry people feel. At various times, some people don't, aren't very able to detect when they're hungry. I'm one of those, and I'll talk about that more later. Other people feel hungry all the time and have a hard time differentiating when it's that their body really needs the food. And when it's that it doesn't. So there. Are some there are just some very interesting ways that all of this can go. And we're going to explore some of that today. Yucca: This topic could be its own podcast. It could be its own weekly podcast of paganism and food, but we're going to try and handle it a little bit today and jump into that. Mark: There is actually a podcast that I'm going to mention later that was brought up by someone in the zoom. I'm opening the chat now and I'll find it and we'll post it in the in the in the notes. but it's about. it's by a woman named Christie Harrison. And it's just a very sensible, healthy common sense, understanding about food as something that your body needs and people have different body types and they shouldn't all be trying to tailor their eating in order to achieve that body type. Just a very healthy perspective on on eating and food. Okay. Yucca: Great. Yeah. So we'll include that as well. So, Structurally let's start with the big and how to narrow down. Maybe we let's talk a little bit about food's role for humans, its role in society, its role in community. Mark: Well, where would you like to start with that? I mean, I tend to think in terms of social messaging and culture, I mean, there are a lot of, you know, just sheerly logistical things to talk about in terms of food, with the industrialized agriculture that we live with maintaining us and our population. And there are all kinds of problems with that things to talk about, but Yucca: And both of us actually professionally have some connection to this. Right. My background as an agro ecologist. So I work in primarily restoration ecology now, but that intrense was into agroecology and our relationship as humans with the rest of our ecosystem. And how do we construct and how do we work with the natural processes instead of. The trying to fight against them, which ultimately won't work out for us. Doesn't work out for us. And then you work in a food bank. Is that correct? Mark: I do a food bank now, but I worked for seven years for a wetlands Conservancy that also was working with land owners and working to develop sustainable agricultural practices. So, and performing restoration projects in the wetlands adjacent to these agricultural operations. So, I have a background in that as well. The. There's just so much to be said about the ways that our agricultural system needs to be reformed. And that could be a podcast of its own. Honestly, it could. And I'm sure there are some out there that are exactly about that, Yucca: There's some great ones. Yeah. Drop some links to those too. This will be a link heavy show notes. Mark: lots of different directions you can go with the subject of relationship to food. But what I tend to think about societaly in relation to, you know, this kind of big picture understanding of our relationship as individuals with food as part of a society. Yeah. Is the kind of poisonous pornographic kind of media bombardment that we get constantly. Of advertising, mostly of food that appeals to people when they're already hungry or malnourished. So it's heavy on fats, heavy on sugars highly processed and fast, right? That you can continue your maniacal capitalistic work load without taking too much time to actually enjoy. Yucca: And these are all what we call hyper palatable foods that have been literally engineered to be the most attractive to us possible to what is coded into us evolutionarily, whether it's good for us or not. It's what it's getting our bodies to really want it. And it becomes very addictive on many levels there. Mark: Right. Many snack foods, for example, are engineered such that you cannot be satisfied in eating them. It doesn't matter how much of them you eat. You could stuff yourself with Doritos and you. They'll want more Doritos because their flavor has been engineered in such a manner that the hit of dopamine that you get from the taste of that particular combination is in itself addictive in the same way that gambling is addictive and other sorts of, you know, pleasure. Creating sensations are addictive. So it's really a problem. I mean, capitalism has taken on food in the way that it's taken on everything else. And it's decided that the best way to create a market is to create addicts. And that's not the healthiest way for us to eat. And addictive behavior is a pretty good model for understanding the way a lot of us relate to our food. Yucca: And it's not something that we can walk away from. Are certain addictions that you can cold turkey. Walk away from the cold turkey, walking away from food. Isn't going to, isn't going to last for very long. However it ends. Mark: try it. Yucca: Yeah. Well, there's it. And you end up with bulemia and And well, the word is escaping me. It begins with an Mark: a Yucca: a anorexia, Yeah. Mark: And binge eating and then starvation cycles. all of that is just so, so hard on the body and it can have this tremendous psychological impact in terms of shame and And guilt that leads to secrecy and terrible and distorted body images associated. There are just so many different ways that this addiction provoking non-health encouraging a propaganda machine really hurts us in terms of our relationship with our bodies and with food. Yucca: Yeah. And so that's bringing in another whole realm to that is the body image. And that has other elements as well in terms of our attitudes towards, Oh, we'll just get up and do some exercise or something like that. And often those messages are really not grounded in. In reality, they're often manipulated for advertising purposes or well-intended individuals who have it lucky in some way, projecting a judging upon others and placing value of the person based upon. Appearance and body type and confusing things where it's things are a symptom of a deeper cause when we start to talk about things like obesity that. Placing blame on the persons as they have some moral failure because they have obesity or because they have this or that and ignoring the actual causes and all of this, these yucky destructive messages that just get sent and taught sometimes spoken out loud and often. It's below the surface and just being communicated and taught to us and we're enforcing it ourselves, even if we don't agree with it throughout our whole society. For sure. The. The ubiquity of this, the universality of it, and the perniciousness of it is something that none of us can walk away from because. Even when we try to think about how do we solve this stuff? The first thing that comes to mind is some product that somebody has tried to sell us, whether it's eat yogurt and you two will be, you know, a slim blonde yoga mom, like, like the ones that are always selling you yogurt Or become a vegan or become a carnivore or whatever. Yeah. Mark: Yes. You know, some. Very over-simplified by my program, by my podcast, you know, all that kind of junk. And it's just very hard to get away from. It is there are tens of thousands of opinions of varying levels of credibility about what constitutes a healthy diet. The truth is that one size does not fit all. What we really need to be able to do is to listen to our own bodies. And we are not taught to do that. And in the case of some people like me, for example, I can't do it because I'm on medications that make it impossible for me to tell whether I'm hungry or not, until I am ravenous. And then I finally twigged to the fact, Oh yeah, I haven't eaten for 12 hours. Yucca: Yeah. And th and there's many other situations where there are. Or hormonal imbalances where there's different forms of metabolic syndrome going on that get in the way of those natural signaling processes. That, that have been broken since childhood or even from when we were in the womb, because a lot of this we're discovering has much of the functioning of our bodies in relation to food and our metabolism is inherited epigenetically. So the, what was the, what was happening with our mothers bodies and even with our grandmother's bodies, when they were pregnant, has a huge impact. So. The idea of listening to our bodies is I think really key, but that's another one of those messages that gets sent out there as it's just like the solution. Oh, you should just listen to your body. Well, it's just, it's not as simple as that for many people that listening to your body is part of the process, but sometimes like you were saying, the body's not sending the signals or we haven't learned to speak the same language to be. To speak in a metaphor there. Mark: Sure be clear. I mean, we're speaking in a very dyadic kind of way right now about the body and the mind and the body and the mind are the same thing. They're all an integrated system. And if we have very strong opinions or fears or phobias or complexes or beliefs about eating and food and what we should be doing, that's going to color the signal. Those that we get from our body about what we ought to be doing. Think about it for a minute. Think about humans as they evolved on the African Savannah, did they eat three meals a day? Probably not, they probably just kind of browse throughout the day as they found food sources and gathered them in some cases when they wanted to treat them with fire. Yucca: We probably had large meals. After a big key, a big kill that went on for a long time. We had a lot of it. And then we had to wait till we got that next kill or that next animal that we were built to scavenge and steal from the more competent predators than us. Mark: Sure. And in the meantime, we chewed grains and ate fruits and, you know, whatever else it was and tubers and whatever else we could find that were nutritious to us. So that's kind of what we were built for. And. The separation of productivity from the home into a workplace, which was one of the big innovations of industrial capitalism, forced meals to be compressed in time because we had to do work, right. We had to do work to get money to survive. So now we have this kind of codified three meals during the day thing. And for a lot of people, that's not the healthy way to eat. They need to eat a snack in the middle of the morning, in the middle of the afternoon, they just, they need to keep some calories going all the time. Yucca: Or actually the other direction as well. Some people find it very helpful to have more of a compressed eating window. So getting into the realm of, and of course this is. Neither of us are medical doctors. We can't be giving medical advice. But some people have found intermediate fasting to be very beneficial. That's something that has worked really well for me personally, is actually cutting back the number of snacks and the the kind of fast sugars out of my diet and finding that makes a tremendous amount of. Difference in terms of feeling level, blood, sugar wise brain fog, all of those things, but some people, depending on it also depends on your life stage. You know, are you pregnant at the time? Are you doing all kinds of things? And you know, what are the, what are you doing? Activity-wise what is your general macro balance? You know, it's not, it may not. B does the three meals or six meals or there's so many different directions to go with that. Mark: Sure. Yeah. And once again, this goes to, you know, what exactly is the goal, right? to my mind, the goal is to be healthy. And to understand health, not in terms of a body type ideal in the conversation this morning, there was, you know, around dismissal of BMI as a legitimate measurement. There are people that are stocky. There are people who are skinny. There are people, most of them over 40 who have bellies. I'm one of them. That is a natural thing that happens when your metabolism slows down and you start to accumulate calories. Cause you're not quite as fleet of foot as you used to be. Yucca: Or if you just look at athletes that are going to have incredibly high BMI's, right. Because they've some of them and there's different types of athletes, but they may be, they may look really wirey and mean, but it's all muscle. Mark: right. Right. Exactly. So they weigh a ton. Yucca: Oh, yeah, that was the case for me before I had my kids, I was doing Olympic lifting. Which is by the way not, it was not in the Olympics, Olympic lifting as a type of lifting. And I was, I'm 5'5", and I was about 160 pounds. And you wouldn't have looked at, you wouldn't have seen that with me. If you looked at me, I would not look that way. I was sitting in eights. Right. But my BMI was crazy because right. And that's, Mark: It's just not a measurement. That makes much sense. It tries to apply a single standard to people who are all over the map, genetically and in terms of their frame size and their metabolism and their genetic background. So, and there are actually some indications that there are some racial components to this as well. BMI measurements tend not to be as favorable for black people, for example And you know, this idea of making the generic person, a white person, probably a white male. You know, we see this Yucca: a whole story with temperature, with room temperature for that, by the way. Mark: Oh, is there. Yucca: Yes that is based on the ideal room. Temperature is based on the comfort level of white middle-aged men and it doesn't work for most other people. It works for that. Group, but other people's like, now it doesn't work. Mark: Yeah. Yucca: anyways, I. Mark: We see this in science and in standard setting quite a bit. I mean, the good news is that at least there is some people talking about it now, so that hopefully we can evolve those behaviors, but. My, my fundamental point at bringing it up is to free yourself from expectations around the BMI. The BMI is not a valid measurement in any sense. And even if your doctor is trying to sell it to you you know, push back, tell him, look, I have broad shoulders and big hips. I'm not going to fit your, you know, your entered for skinny people. Yeah. Yucca: I mean with, so like all of this, that there's context though, right? If Because we're certainly not saying ignore the health advice of the professionals that you're working with or what, you know, if you have the sense that honestly I'm carrying extra weight, it's not helping me. Like, we're not saying just ignore that. Right. We're saying but Hey, step back and take a look at the. The expectations, which are create the assumptions, which are creating the societal expectations around that. Is that legitimate? Is it actually valid to say that you're, you should be looking like whatever the supermodel is and by the way, that changes over the decades in terms of what the ideal body type is anyways. So, so again, we're not saying don't. Work on your health. Don't take these things, these biometrics in don't just completely ignore them but understand that they have a whole context. Mark: Yes. And that it's a cultural context. It's not a scientific context. I mean, you talk about ideal body types. I mean, who were the big supermodels in the 1960s? They were people like Twiggy who, I mean, they call her Twiggy for a reason. I mean, he's built like a twig. Yucca: Yeah. And if we do any, even the surface level research on her, we'll find out that there were, there was a lot of body image and health challenges that she was having. Mark: and, you know, skip forward five decades and look at Kim Kardashians, The absolute diametric opposite in, in body shape in every way. So these ideas of these ideals. Are not things that we can measure ourselves by. They're not there. They're arbitrary standards. They evolve over time. There's no such thing as an inherent beauty standard and trying to shoehorn ourselves into those can be really harmful. It can hurt yourself esteem. It can hurt your social relationships and it can hurt your health. Yucca: Yeah. And for everyone too, we just gave some examples of women. We've been talking about a lot about women when it comes to the societal expectations, but it's everybody right. It we, haven't gotten to a point where we're talking about that very much with with men and boys and masculine presenting individuals but it's there as well. And it's. And it's really toxic as well in terms of the messaging that we're sending everybody about that. Mark: Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean advertising for food stuffs for men, everybody is ripped with, you know, with six packs Yucca: Yeah. And those photos they're wearing makeup, you can look up how to do, to contour your muscles, to make it look like you've got that. And then those pictures are usually touched up anyways, afterwards. I mean, it'd be unheard of for those pictures to not be touched up. Mark: Yeah, because otherwise they would be unhuman monsters. Yucca: And even on your Instagram and Tik TOK videos and all of that, those people are makeup and doctoring themselves up before they get on and make their video. Like, that's just the, it might feel more candid and real, but now this is their business. That's what they're doing to make money. And that's what a lot of this is the advertising around it. It's the making money, but then it becomes part of our beliefs and our worldview. And then we're pushing it on everyone from every direction and on ourselves. Right. Mark: So let's step back for a second and talk about the relationship with food in the household. Within, you know, family groups or, you know, groups of people who live together because that can be a source of a lot of stress for people Yucca: tremendous amount. Yeah. And a lot of directions when people have different needs, but people also have very different beliefs. When we get into the realm of diet, that's a place where some of the beliefs around diets are. I mean, it becomes religious. Just like, there can be some really extreme beliefs and there's a tremendous amount of misinformation that gets spread and really poorly done science that gets blasted by the media. So you can have this disagreement and uncomfortable relationships between people in the house and then people with very different needs as well, because although we're the same species within that. Humans can be very different. Even within very closely, genetically related humans. We can have different needs. Mark: sure. Because you're among other things, your microbiome can be very different. Yucca: Yes. Mark: even living in the same household, even being all members of the same family, you know, genetically related to one another. If your microbiome in your gut has developed differently with different organisms that are processing your food, then you're going to need different food. Yucca: Yeah, and that's a really fun new frontier in science right now is the microbiome is just amazing. A delightful, so that deserves its own topic and its own podcast. So, so there's that social interaction between the individuals there's also in terms of the talking about the level of. The kind of need for liberation. There's a lot of pressure with, especially on young parents on, on, you know, mothers, fathers, other kinds of parents, but it's, but at least from where I see it a lot with the mothers about this virtue signaling and the Like this pressure to get it all right. And as long as you do it, right then everything's going to be perfect. And your family, if you all eat the perfect diet and you all eat together every time and you eat this food and that food and the, then everything's going to be great. And I'm not saying that we shouldn't strive to be really healthy, right. And to be, have a really. Nutrient rich environmentally responsible diet, but the expectations there that get that we put on ourselves I think it can be really counterproductive that they can, we can really end up hurting ourselves more in that strive for protection for perfection. Then the, this, the strive for balance. Mark: Yeah. I mean, I think that's a general rule. it's not just a rule in to our relationship with food and you know, how we feel that we're supposed to be parenting the whole idea of absolute standards that are supposed to solve all problems and which, if you deviate from them, there's something, you know, some level of failure that is associated that's just for one thing, it's not pagan, it's very authoritarian. It's very sort of religious and kind of. It's a moral code about moral success and moral failure. And that's really not. What we're about. What we're about is living lives that are healthy and virtuous and empowered. And by virtuous, I mean adhering to virtues, things like integrity and kindness, right? Not obedience to an arbitrary set of rules and to the degree that we are imprisoned by arbitrary sets of rules. We're not liberated. So it's important for us to be asking these questions, you know, when my in-laws lean on me about, you know, some way that we eat in my household am I going to succumb to that? Or am I going to push back and say, this is what's working for us? And that's the important thing Yucca: Yes. So this is an area where I think that actually there's the potential for. A lot of empowerment and joy, and that's certainly how and in our household, there is a lot of joy around the food. And it's a place where we really find a lot of our connection with the rest of the biosphere. It's a place where that's really As we were talking about at the beginning, that we all are connected to everyone else through the food web. And this is, that's a place of celebration for us. Mark: Okay. Yeah, I can really see that. And I feel that myself, I mean, I'm grateful when I eat and and I don't feel guilty about it, even if what I'm eating is kind of crappy because sometimes I eat stuff that's crappy. I mean, I think pretty much everybody does once in a while. I don't feel guilty about that because I've seen what happens when chimpanzees find a beehive. You know, they go nuts. They eat every last possible molecule of sugar that can be had out of that experience. And that's fine for them because they're not going to find another beehive for another six months. It's not hurting them to go on a sugar binge that one time, because it's a moderated presence in their overall diet. Yucca: But the challenge for us is that we are now in an environment that is different than our evolutionary context. And. This the well wonderful framework for understanding this is ancestral health. That's something that I've found very empowering and might be something that people would be interested in looking into, but as looking at, okay, let's look at humans, the animal, and let's try and understand us in terms of. How did we evolve and understanding that evolution does not stop evolution has continued. There are changes that have happened in only the last few generations. There are changes that have happened in only the last few hundred generations that have significant differences. But there is a really strong mismatch between the ways that we live today. It's like we live in captivity in so many ways in terms of our Light cycles. We've talked about this a lot before on the podcast, in terms of the light, but also in terms of the food and the availability of the food that we have, that now, at least for those of us in the industrial world, that we basically have access to anything that we want any time, but our bodies are programmed to want specific, you know, we really want to eat all of those berries. Because those berries are only available for a short period of time and that's great. We get that food, but then we would have these long periods where we wouldn't have access to that. So it's okay that we would binge on the berries, just like you were saying with the chimps and the honey. And then also when we get into the exercise component, we evolved within a context in which we had to move around. We were very active. And, but so the desire to lay down underneath that tree or in today's context, hang out on the couch or in front of the screen, that makes sense contextually. But today we're in a very different environment. So, so there has to be some, we need to make some systemic changes or conscious choices around trying to help ourselves be more balanced with what we know. What we know the little that we know, cause there's so much more to learn about ourselves our past, but to match that natural cycle with our, with what we're doing in our industrial world. Mark: Right because our impulses are often wrong. Our impulses are often too, you know, piling tons of sugar and fat and salt because it made total sense in the wild. It made total sense for us to pile those in because they were rare and they were valuable and it was really good to get them. But now we have sugar and salt and fat surrounding us 24 hours a day and available with a phone call. So it. It's different. And the same as you say is true with exercise where our impulse to be slothful and conserve calories totally makes sense for an organism. Yucca: Our ancestors alive. That's why we're here today. Mark: Sure. Why would you burn calories? Extreme for random reasons, like running on a treadmill? When. Then you just have to go out and find more calories, but in a context where all the calories are there all the time, then it totally makes sense to need to get some exercise as well. So, so this brings us down to the individual, to the personal and station this morning, I found very moving because it really was, didn't take very long before everybody so sort of started. You know, talking about their own personal situation with food and the feelings, you know, these are not mild feelings. These are intense feelings around relationship to hunger relationship to diet. And then it goes directly to the whole question of body image again, because. In our culture, we have come to conflate eating with how you appear and how you appear with how much you're loved with your value, with how much you loved. And for one thing, that's, it's just a toxic formula. It's a completely poisonous formula because people should be valued, not for what they look like, but for their inherent worth. But I think that it's. A really useful thing for us to be looking individually at what do I think about food is my need for food annoying. Do I find myself irritated by my constant need to eat? I know I feel that sometimes it's like, Oh God, the food thing again, it's just relentless. It never ends. Yucca: If I could just do the bar right. And for as much as I think about food and all of that, I would just be happy if I could just have like my little food bar and all I had to do was eat at once a day and then I was done Mark: Uh huh. Yeah, because, cause we're busy, we're over busy in, you know, in industrialized cultures. There's a tremendous pressure on us to produce and food, especially healthy food is time consuming. And energy consuming. I mean, if you actually want to prepare something that's healthy from fresh ingredients, then it's going to take you awhile and that's time and energy being taken away from other stuff. And it's yes. And it's particularly hard when you're already hungry. But if you're like me and you can't really tell when you're hungry until you're starving, then the urgency of getting some food right now becomes really high. And then it's even harder to make healthy choices. Yucca: Yeah. And then there are our folks for which food has all of these emotional connections in terms of it's the, you know, they have, that's the way that their parent expressed. Their affection and love is that they would make the pancakes or go out for ice cream or or the food is become a way of an emotional coping mechanism. Right? You're feeling a little sad. You're feeling a little down, you're feeling anxious and there's that food. And especially when it's the hyper palatable food then it creates this dependency. We also have. Mark: when we were talking about this before we started to record that that when you eat food, that is really pleasurable, that really pushes your. Sugar fat, salt buttons. You get a spike of dopamine, the pleasure, neuro receptor, a neurotransmitter. And that is exactly the same thing that happens when a gambler pulls the handle on a slot machine. It is that momentary The you take the action and then you get the spike of dopamine and then you want another spike of dopamine and another spike of dopamine. And it becomes very hard to differentiate between I'm hungry and I'm conducting this addictive behavior because we're built to be addicted to food. That's a natural thing, right? I mean, our bodies were designed. To have an affinity for going after calories because otherwise we'd be dead. Yucca: presumably there, there were some of relatives of our ancestors that were programmed differently and now they're not here. Right. So, yeah. Now. Food though, you know, we've been talking about a lot of the challenges around food, but there's also so much opportunity for the deep connection with our household, with ourselves, with the, if you're the garden or the little pots of herbs that you have in your tiny little window or whatever it is for forming these really strong powerful. Connections and really strong senses and experiences. So there's a lot of potential for working with food. Very intentionally in ritual. We've touched on it a few times before about certain smells or tastes and having that move you into a certain state. There's so much potential there. Mark: for sure. Yeah, because this is a, it's a root level human function, right. It's not option. Yes Yucca: not even just human but animal, but yeah. Mark: Yes. The it's not optional. It's not however much we might wish it was going to be optional. It's not right. And so it becomes something that we need to be embraced that we need to embrace as a part of our animal selves. One of the things about we pagans is that we do understand that we're animals. We're not telling ourselves that we're some other thing that you know, was created in a separate category with a different moral structure than the rest of life on earth. Yucca: Where we used to be animals, but we're not anymore because we somehow ascended to beyond them or higher than them or something like that. Mark: We're no longer animals because we invented steel and guns. Yeah that, that's not really a pagan understanding of what we are as beings. Now, what I want to say to our listeners is there is no whatever your body is like. It's not wrong. There is no moral failure in. Having a body, a particular way. Your body is fine. No matter what it is now, you may have health considerations that lead you to want to make changes. That's fine. That's great. You can work with your medical provider and you know, anybody else to help you to do that, but there is no moral failure in the way you are right now. You're fine. And that's. That's a hard piece of work for a lot of folks, a lot of folks really need to work around that message for a long time, do ritual around it, meditate on it, work on it in therapy, because when you free yourself of that expectation about what your body is supposed to be like, and I'm not saying that I've done this entirely, but I feel like I'm enough free of it that I can kind of see what it would look like. Then your relationship to food transforms because it's not about serving your moral failure or serving your moral success. It's about doing what's best for you. As a living, being a living organism, the stakes are a lot lower because it's not about your self-esteem, it's not about your value. Yucca: It comes easier to think clearly around it when it no longer is about your value as it is it as an entity. Yeah. Mark: yes. Your value as a person. So I mean, I wanted to spell that out really super clearly, because it's so important. It's just, it's a really big deal kind of thing. You know, in the same way that when we talk about sexuality, I want to tell people, you know, whatever it is you're into. There is no such thing as a fought crime. You, you are allowed to desire, whatever you want to desire. Even if what you want to desire is illegal. You're allowed to desire it. In some cases, you're not allowed to do it. And those are two different things, but it doesn't make you a bad person to like a particular thing. Doesn't make you a bad person to have a particular kind of body. Yucca: Or to eat a particular thing or to not eat a particular thing or to eat the thing that you think that you don't want to eat for whatever reasons when you slip up a little bit. Right. That might be, yes. That might be Contrary to your goals, your health goals overall, or your environmental goals or whatever it is, but it doesn't make you bad or you a failure or you, whatever. Mark: Right. And making changes in dietary choices for health reasons. It's not like it's not like, virginity where it's like you blow it once and it's gone forever, which I don't even Yucca: I, yeah. I think that's a weird concept anyway, is Mark: I do. I do too, Yucca: very heteronormative and yeah. Mark: Absolutely. It's more like sobriety. You fall off the wagon, you get back on the wagon, it's it. You know, and if you're conforming to whatever those guidelines are, the you're trying to meet 80% of the time. You're doing great. You know, it's not an all or nothing proposition and you don't need to construct every time you don't conform to whatever regime you're trying to. To implement as a failure, it's not a failure, it's just a choice he made. And now he can make a different choice, Yucca: Yeah, it comes back to that idea of how useful is guilt, right? It's if you're beating yourself up over and over, you know, what is it achieving? What guilt is there to do now? It's just making you feel bad. Mark: Yeah. Yeah. And we're against feeling bad. That's that is a characteristic of our religion that we need to say over and over again, this life is the life that we get and we want people to be happy. That doesn't mean you're going to be happy all the time. I had a loss this week, my cat died and I feel really sad about that. But We want people to be able to live lives of contentment and occasional joy and effectiveness and autonomy and agency in the world and getting into right relationship with food is one of the ways that we do that for ourselves at a really deep level. Yucca: Well, this was fantastic, Mark. Lot of food for thought so to say, Mark: I'm wearing my food for thought. T-shirt that's the name of my food bank. Yucca: Oh really? Oh, that's great. Mark: Yeah. The, yeah, this has been a really great conversation and I really appreciate having it with you. we will put various resources in the notes and welcome your feedback. this is You know, these kinds of topics are really pretty juicy and chewy for us. And we're, we welcome more of them to talk about. So, you can reach us at thewonderpodcastqueues@tgmail.com. So the wonder podcast, all one word, and then Q s@gmail.com. And we look forward to hearing from Yucca: All right. Thanks Mark. Mark: Thanks, Yucca.

tiktok work olympic games walk food drop humans sugar honestly connections extreme pacific kim kardashian activity appearance contrary temperature bmi relating doritos placing frameworks oh god nutrient conservancy twiggy christy harrison structurally yucca markit mark yeah mark well sustainable dish mark oh mark so mark yes mark right mark okay mark thanks regenerative agriculture podcast mark absolutely

The Four Sacred Pillars

Play Episode Listen Later May 3, 2021 41:52

Remember, we welcome comments, questions and suggested topics at thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com If you enjoy the podcast and would like to help us reach more ears, please consider leaving a rating or review on iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-wonder-science-based-paganism/id1501228156 S2E16 TRANSCRIPT: ----more---- [00:00:00] Mark: Welcome back to the Wonder Science-Based Paganism. My name's Mark. And I'm one of your hosts. Yucca: And I'm Yucca. Mark: Yeah. And today we are going to talk about non theist pagan values. And specifically we're going to be exploring the value framework within atheopagan ism, which are called the four sacred pillars. But first we're going to have to talk about what is sacred mean. Yucca: And that's a big one. So. One of the things that pagans often get asked is, well, how do you know what's sacred? Or how do you decide what's sacred? If you don't have a book to tell you that, or if you are part of a tradition in paganism that doesn't have a set, defined belief around that, how do you do that? Mark: Right. And one of [00:01:00] the criticisms that has been leveled at modern Neo paganism, mostly by, you know, conventional monotheists, but also by some other people who are closer into that community is that it doesn't have a robust ethical framework. There is. You know, w we're accused by conservative Christians of having no values and no morals and therefore, you know, being able to be rapists and murderers because there's no God to punish us and threaten us with hell. Now as a skeptic, just on the face of that, that's a pretty remarkable set of claims that I would love to see some real evidence for, but beyond that I think that it's fair to say that because the modern neopagan movement grew in association with counter-cultural movements, that there has been a real emphasis [00:02:00] on rights and freedoms and not nearly as much emphasis on responsibilities. And what what an ethical framework outlines for you is what are you responsible to? What are you responsible for doing what is a value? What deserves service what kinds of behaviors are acceptable and what kind of behaviors are not? And pagans, to be honest, don't have much of that. There is the three-fold law, which is roundly rejected by many pagans. The idea being that whatever you put out into the world comes back to you times three, which. It's very loosey goosey to begin with. I'd be real interested to hear an explanation of what the mechanism of that is supposed to be. And more than that, it's still doesn't really hold you accountable for specific kinds of behavior and specific responsibilities to other beings. [00:03:00] Yucca: There's also the do no harm, you know, and if you do no harm, do you will something along that? Mark: Right. And every action creates change and some of that change will be negative to some actor involved with it. So the idea of not doing harm becomes almost irrelevant because it's meaningless. Yucca: Yeah, well, you get into the, what is harm and to whom, right? What are, who are you talking about? What you've got to really start defining what you're talking about. So something like that is just so broad that it, as you're saying becomes somewhat meaningless Mark: Yes. And of course there are many pagans who simply reject both of those rules to begin with and their whole deal is I'll do whatever I want, according to my own value judgments in the moment. And. There's nothing inherently wrong with that [00:04:00] necessarily, except that situational ethics without any kind of guidelines can really get you in trouble sometimes because all of us have confirmation bias towards what we really want to do in the first place. Right. Desire is a thing. So it's it becomes problematic that if you haven't actually explored this question of what's important. What kind of person should I be? How should I interact with others? What is my broader responsibility to the society I live in to the ecosystem that sustains me to future generations, all of those things. If you haven't explored all those, then having to make that call in the moment won't necessarily lead to the best choices. Yucca: Well, and you have the values, whether you're aware of them or not. And those what those values are, could be inherited from what you grew up watching on TV as a kid, [00:05:00] or from your super. Racist homophobic aunt or whatever. And, but when we really start to look at them and be really present with ourselves, we have that opportunity to examine them, see what they are and choose different ones. If we want. Mark: Yes. In my experience, pagans are. A little hypersensitive around discussions that have to do with right and wrong. For one thing, because the predominant religions look at right and wrong as a binary and right. And wrong are inherently a spectrum. The question is, who is it right for? Who is it not right for? And to what degree? Yucca: What context. Mark: Exactly. And so situational ethics are really the best way to make those decisions, but not starting with a blank slate, starting with a set of frameworks for understanding the world helps a lot. [00:06:00] And so when I was first writing the essay that turned into the book, atheopagan ism and started framing this religion for myself. And I need to emphasize again, when I started doing this, it was just for me, it wasn't, I didn't think anybody else would even be interested. So it's been surprising to see the enthusiasm When I first started thinking about, well, what is a religion and how can I get those functions that I found so fulfilling about being involved with the pagan community back into my life. And the second of the three elements that I saw as being components of a religion was a value set. And I do think that it's fair to say that most pagan paths are a little weak on the value set, characteristic. The other two components are a cosmetology, a description of the world which can be anything from the world as [00:07:00] described by science, which is what I believe in to a Yucca: yup. Pantheon and. Mark: Wheel of karma, we're trying to escape or heaven and hell and a great judgment or taking your heart and weighing it against a feather to see whether you go on to an underworld, all those things. So that's the cosmology. And then of course the third element is practice Yucca: Yeah. Mark: because a religion is not a philosophy. It's not just ideas and thinking. It's activity celebration observances prayers, offerings creation of alters or shrines or other sort of sacred artwork, all those kinds of things. Yucca: So the distinction, there would be a philosophy as a way of understanding, thinking about the world, including that cosmology in it, but there is no practice or. [00:08:00] Mark: my contention. My contention is that you don't have, you don't have a prescribed set of holidays. And ritual practices as an existentialist. you You have ideas, you definitely have a framework for how you view the world and what you think is important. You have a value set. All of those things are true, but there's an implementation, a social implementation. So for yourself, and then for your fellows who also practice the same path that I think makes the difference between a religion and a philosophy. And I know there are people who disagree with me about that, so that's okay too. Yucca: Yeah, it's just another one of those ones that you'll see, particularly from the theist side of paganism, loving at non-theistic and say, this is, if you don't believe in gods, then you're not. Religion. And of course, we've talked about this so many times on the podcast before about, so not just within paganism, but all the other [00:09:00] religions that don't have gods either. Mark: Exactly. If what we're doing, isn't a religion. It certainly bears all of the characteristics of a religion except for believing in supernatural beings. And we are sure, spinning our wheels and burning a lot of energy and time and attention and caring and love on this thing that Apparently isn't a religion. I don't know, it's working for me. It's helping me to be happy and more effective in the world. And Yucca: And a lot of folks it's really quite lovely to see the community growing online and. Hopefully soon again, in, in person, as we've been talking about, the vaccines have been rolling out and the, some of the restrictions are lightening up. So this has been a joy to see over the past few years. Mark: I have been Amazed and delighted because among other things I had assumed as I started to frame this naturalistic nontheistic pagan path, for one [00:10:00] thing, I did a lousy job of research to start with because there were other people that were already doing that. And so, and I just, I didn't find him when I was looking around. I did not find their stuff. And so I don't claim to have invented non theist paganism by any means. I just developed this path. It's got a specific set of values and principles in it and a specific set of practices and a bunch of people apparently like it. So, I'm pretty psyched about that because one of the things that religion is good at is bringing people together. Yucca: Yeah. So before we get into those specifics, why don't we talk a little bit about the idea of sacred, what that is? Ways that we define it and how that differs from related, but different ideas like divinity and worship and things like that. Mark: Yeah. As I [00:11:00] started thinking about, well, all right. You've concluded that you need a value set. Well, what's it going to be? The first thing that occurred to me was that the axioms that religions build their principles on or. Principles of sacredness. They are about what is most important. If you're a Christian, there is nothing more important than God. God is right at the top of the pyramid and God is sacred and everything about God is sacred. Right. And what we mean by sacred is, you know, that it's an opinion. It's a conclusion that we have drawn that this particular. Element of the universe is of such value that it deserves to be treated with reverence and respect and caring. And well I said reverence, but reverence is the word that keeps coming up for me. And so I had to think about, well, what do I think is really deserving of reverence here in this big whole universe [00:12:00] and. I draw, I drew it down to four. What I call the four pillars, the four sacred pillars of atheopagan ism and they are truth, love life and beauty. And there's a difference between those opinions of what is sacred and say the idea in pantheism that everything is divine. Because that when you say everything is divine, what you're really saying is that there is a quality called divinity, like radioactivity or a temperature that can be measured in every thing that it contains. And it can be determined to be there. And. [00:13:00] I don't believe in divinity. I don't think that there is a quality called that. I think that there are things that we think are so sacred that it's easy to confuse them with being divine. Yucca: so the idea being that this would be some innate quality that was independent of the person perceiving it, that whether he, whether a human was there or not, whether are who else is out there in the universe than just us here on earth, that whether or not we were looking at it, it's still. Divine it's still. And then what I'm unclear on it with the, with pantheism is that, is everything define or do are some things more divine than other things? Mark: to my knowledge, and I need to acknowledge now that there are two major branches of pantheism. There is. Pantheism full-stop which ascribes divinity to everything in the universe. And [00:14:00] then there is scientific pantheism, which has a naturalistic cosmology, but whose value set is that everything in the universe is sacred. So there, there are, or distinctions between those two paths. I think you said it very well that. In a universe in which divinity was ubiquitous. It wouldn't matter whether there were any observers. To draw any conclusions about the universe. It would all just be kind of glowing with divinity because that's how it's made that has this intrinsic quality built into it. That it, it does that. Whereas sacredness, as I keep saying is an opinion. The example that I used in my book is that if I get two pieces of four by four lumber and I bolt them at right angles to one another, suddenly I have a symbol that is very sacred to about a billion people on the [00:15:00] planet, because it's a cross to me it's still just lumber. But to them, it's a highly sacred evocative symbol that carries with it, all of this meaning and all of this sort of theological. Burden and legacy, all that kind of stuff. So we have differing opinions. And what that means is that it's not about the lumber. It's about our opinions Yucca: yeah. And that can be shared with people like you were saying the billion or so, who would share that perspective. And also not what I hold sacred might be different than what you do Mark, or although I suspect that there's quite a bit that we have in common. Mark: I agree. Yucca: but that, that sacredness is something that we assign. That we understand that we give to it. It's it's about our [00:16:00] relationship with whatever that is. Mark: Yes. Yes. At root, I think when we decide that something is sacred, what we're really saying is I have decided to conduct myself in relation to this thing in a manner that is deeply respectful because I consider it to be so important. And that brings me back around to those four pillars. Truth is. Impossible to navigate the world without, and people who try to navigate the world without truth, find themselves in really messed up circumstances. And we see this in the United States a lot right now where we have the entire Fox news Q Anon. Conspiracy theory, right wing. That believes things that are demonstrably untrue, and it takes them into positions of paranoia and in some cases, violence, and it causes deep rift in our [00:17:00] society. Right now, if those folks. We're more into critical thinking and skeptical interrogation of their positions. They would change those positions and they wouldn't be stuck in this kind of whirl of imaginary dangers and mysterious enemies. Yucca: And then could focus on the very real concrete challenges and problems that we're facing as a civilization. Mark: Yes. Exactly. So, and now is the time when we need to be doing that. And part of the great tragedy of the propaganda machine that began with Fox news and right wing blogs, and that kind of stuff is that we really don't have any time to waste on those imaginary dangers. We've got plenty of real dangerous that we need to address now. So truth. So truth is important. Speaking. The [00:18:00] truth is important. Seeking the truth is important. Yucca: The pursuit of truth. That's what science is doing, using a very specific framework, but seeking that truth and trying to spiral in closer and closer to truth is one and important. At least for me, those that's one of the things that I consider sacred, but also deeply practical. Just incredibly practical. It allows for the world that we live in for us to be able to be doing this podcast from hundreds of miles apart, looking at each other at screens, and then recording this and sending it out to all to the air buds of all of the wonderful listeners. Like without the pursuit of truth, this wouldn't be possible. Mark: that's right. That's right. And so, yeah. I mean, the pursuit of [00:19:00] truth has been core to the human experience for as long actually prior to the advent of modern humans. I'm sure because problem solving is our superpower and you solve problems by understanding them and by finding solutions that actually work. Now, sometimes you have to go through a bunch of iterations of things that don't actually work. Yucca: most of the time. Mark: Yes, but that doesn't mean that pursuit of what is true. Isn't what is most important at the core of that whole endeavor? So. That's just one of them. I considered truth to be sacred. And I consider that speaking. The truth is really important, even when it's uncomfortable. I think it was Carl Sagan, although this is a little sharp for him because he's, he was such a kind man, but I think it was Carl Sagan. Who said, if it can be destroyed by the truth, it should be destroyed by the truth. We don't have time for delusion [00:20:00] Yucca: Yeah. Mark: in this world anymore. We don't have time for it. So Yucca: who that quote was. Let's see. Mark: might be Neil deGrasse Tyson, but I thought it was Carl Sagan. Yucca: Being attributed to Sagan. Yeah. Mark: Okay. Yeah. Well, he's not wrong. He's not wrong, honestly. And that can sound harsh because being confronted with the truth can be very painful for people. You know, the truth is that we don't really have any credible evidence to suggest that there are invisible. Intelligences with powers to, to affect the physical nature of the universe in the world. you know, the idea of gods and spirits and demons and all that. We don't have any credible evidence to suggest that those things are real. And what that means [00:21:00] is that if we apply some skepticism Ockham's razor, we clued that the odds are good, that they don't exist. And so we can move on to talk about things that do exist, like we do here on this podcast, but that can be an incredibly painful thing. For people that have. Fervently believed in those kinds of beings. Yucca: Yeah. And also with truth, sometimes it turns out the things that we thought were true. Aren't we get new evidence. Is there new clues? And sometimes we gotta let go of the old way of. Thinking about things Mark: And interpersonally, it's really important to note here that the truth, when it comes to an interpersonal dynamic between people can contain paradoxes. One person's perspective may have validity for [00:22:00] them in a way that doesn't square with the opinion of another person in the interaction. And. There's still some validity to both of those perspectives, even if neither one reflects the exact truth of what words were said or who did what? Because interpersonal dynamics have layers and layers of emotions and motivations and Yucca: There's such complexity and it's incredibly complicated as well. Yeah. Mark: Very much. So Yucca: And then we can get into the fun stuff of relativity with both perspectives, being true at the same time and all of that. And that's one of the things that was very uncomfortable when being first presented and still is found quite uncomfortable to our human brains to even think about them. But. We get so much from trying to tease that apart [00:23:00] and try and figure it out and honoring that pursuit. Mark: Yes. Yes. And so to kind of wrap this portion up, I consider truth the pursuit of the truth, the articulation of the truth and action, based on understanding of the truth to be a noble pursuits, to be. The actions of a person of integrity and the truth, therefore is sacred to me. The next pillar I don't have a particular order that I just say them in whatever order occurs to me at the time, but let's talk about beauty because that's one of the most misunderstood of the the atheopagan four pillars. Yucca: I'm guessing you don't mean photo-shopped magazine ready when you talk about beauty? Mark: No, not talking about physical beauty standards, conventional attractiveness anything that has to do with the shape of human bodies or the color of them or anything else I'm not [00:24:00] talking about. Any of that, what I'm talking about is the beauty of the natural world. Because what I have seen a lot happen, having worked in environmental protection for a long time, is that the first thing that goes out the door is the aesthetics. It's like, well, yes, that's a forest, but it could be timber. And then the argument turns into, well, but we have to produce, we have to preserve biodiversity, which is a good argument. It ignores the fact that when you mow down that forest, you make a God awful eyesore. And that in and of itself, the magnificence of the world is inspiring to us. And I find that sacred in and of itself, the way that mountains look, the way that waves break the way that. That creeks, turbulent Babel across rocks, the the vistas of the stars than the various celestial bodies that are up there. The view of the earth from [00:25:00] space, these things they're profoundly moving and because they're profoundly moving, they count Yucca: and not just sight, but also the sounds and the smells and the, all of the perception, the way that we interface with everybody else. Mark: of nature. Maybe I should have called it that instead. The experience of nature is itself sacred. So, It's really important for me to explain that because it didn't even cross my mind in, you know, inimitable, you know, kind of clueless, white, straight guy fashion. The way that word beauty can be weaponized and has been weaponized against people. And that, isn't how, I mean it at all. It never was. And I just think that it's important for us to recognize that [00:26:00] it's not enough to say, well, it's only a desert, so let's dig a big hole and get out the uranium that, that violates my sense of the sacred arrangement of the world. Yucca: That's something that I suspect is quite shared by many humans. You look around our world and work. We're constantly seeking that. And different people experience and express it in different ways. And, you know, that's changed between individuals and cultures and but there is also, there's something about that connection that we have with our world. Mark: Yes. I mean, think about it. How many people flock to go to the beach all over the world. Right. And they can be of all different kinds of cultures. This is not a particularly Western or thing or Eastern thing, [00:27:00] or it's just, people want to go to where there is surf breaking over beaches. Yucca: Especially at sunset or sunrise, something about that interaction with light at those angles and Oh yeah. Mark: because it's beautiful and beauty is not, it's not an also ran characteristic. It's not a a disposable or dispensable quality to me. It's sacred. Yucca: It's part of that, all that wonder. Okay. Mark: Yes. So, truth. We talked about beauty. We talked about let's talk about life. Yucca: Life. Yeah. Mark: This is another one where we can have misunderstandings. Yucca: Oh, as in some folks might think you're talking anti-choice when you say Mark: Oh, well, Yucca: Oh, okay. Mark: option, but There are, there's a lot of misunderstanding when I say life. I [00:28:00] mean life with a capital L I mean the biosphere, Yucca: You biosphere. Yeah. Nature, right? Yeah. Mark: The engaged interpenetrated systems of organisms and forces that constitute life on earth that is sacred and deserves difference, reverence service even sacrifice. It's like, no, I'm not going to do this thing. That would be really fun and cool because it's too destructive to the environment. Yucca: Yeah. So, but not necessarily that you're not going to do anything that might harm a single life because as, because life is a system. That continues even the individual doesn't, but in order for there to be life, there has to be the death side of it. The life that is in our bodies, whatever your dietary choices are that comes from other life. And that life [00:29:00] came from other life that came from other life that came from other life. Okay. Mark: Life at root is an assembly disassembly, reassembly process at every level. That's what life does it assembles itself into recognizable organisms? It reproduces, if it can then it's disassembled those component parts are rearranged into new organisms may be the same kind. Maybe not. Yeah. And that process just goes on and the disassembly is every bit as sacred as the assembly, honestly. Yucca: Yeah. And we talk about this a lot in the autumn, but any time of year is it just is really important to, to see that life with a capital L is both. It's all of it. It's the creation and destruction. It's the rearrangement of the you're taking those Legos and you're pulling them apart near making your spaceship and then you're making your couch bed or whatever it is you're making next with it. [00:30:00] Yeah. Mark: right. And the more I learn about it, the more awestruck and Reverend I become about it I mean, that's the root of earth-based paganism, right. You know, fundamentally we're just wowed by the extraordinary fact that this is happening here. That it may be happening. Other places almost certainly is. But it's happening here. It's happening a lot here. I mean, you know, you can go meters and meters down into the soil and you will still find it happening. The earth is absolutely lousy with life and and it's. It's magnificent. It's so beautiful. And it's so fragile because these chains of activity that lead to the creation of these new organisms are often very attenuated. It only takes one interruption or two interruptions to prevent that from happening at all. So we have to tread so lightly and we're so bad at that. Yucca: Yeah, because it's so interconnected. All of [00:31:00] it in, I would challenge somebody to find two organisms and not find a connection between them. Mark: Yes. Yucca: It's okay. Between that organism and pretty much any element up to a 92 that isn't somehow connected as well. Right? Mark: Yup. Yucca: Like it's just Mark: 5 billion degrees of Kevin bacon. Yucca: so. I mean that's for me that's the core or that the other, what we've been talking about is also so important, but the bios spear life itself, that is, that's the first place that, to me, I mean, it's hard put a hierarchy on it, but that to me, I would think of is that right? Most sacred because without life, well, yeah. No truths. Right. And no, and we haven't talked [00:32:00] about it yet, but love, but yeah, those things that life is the prerequisite for anything else that we value. Mark: Yes. I agree. I agree. And that then leads to the fourth pillar, which is love and love is so intrinsically. Inherently human. Not that other species don't have an effect amongst themselves because they absolutely do. Yucca: Sure, but something can be a quality of us and others can also have that quality, but it's still, it doesn't make it less in us just because somebody else has it as well. Yeah. Mark: And when we talk about not what is labeled love, which is sometimes abuse or control Yucca: Or obsession Mark: or obsession When we talk about genuine love, genuine wishing for the wellbeing of the other, you know, genuine feeling of kinship to the degree that when [00:33:00] someone else is hurt in some way, then you yourself are hurt as well. That kind of affinity is such a magnificent. Manifestation here on earth. I mean, it's it's the sort of thing where Yucca: Right. Mark: It's the emergent complexity, right? It's not the sort of thing that could have been predicted by looking by investigating Beatles and figuring out how they were going to evolve, how we were going to evolve from there. It's a leap in a way. And. It contains such power for us as humans power to heal power to create safety power to create joy. And so I consider love to be sacred no matter who it's between. Genuine love. You know, that is truly loving and it doesn't [00:34:00] matter if it's straight or gay or Yucca: We're not even romantic or yeah. Mark: or because there's frankly, I mean, it's a pretty crappy word. Love. We use it as a catchall for about 15 different kinds of relations. There are other societies that had many more words for those different kinds of relationship feelings. And I think that would be helpful for us to adopt if we were able to. But since we're presented with the big basket, I call the whole big basket sacred. And that means that I don't have any right. Ever to. In any way, criticize or real love as it exists between people And that a part of my responsibility as a social being is to foster the opportunities for love for other people. Yucca: Yeah. And actually, can we pull the conversation [00:35:00] back to, you said the word, your responsibility. And I think that when we talk about sacred, it really is tied in with the responsibilities that we have, right. That if we believe something is sacred, We're acknowledging some sort of responsibility that we have to it's, if it's sacred to us, it's something that is worth protecting or it's something that is worth being in reverence of. Mark: And in service to, and so I, I mean, I feel that I have a responsibility to live in service to all four of these things. You know, it is not consistent with my value system to countenance untruth because somebody doesn't want their rock turned over and everybody can see what's underneath. No I think. The truth matters. I think that beauty matters and I [00:36:00] have spent quite a bit my career working in environmental protection, not only because of biodiversity and climate and pollution and environmental justice and all those considerations, but also because of the sheer aesthetics of nature and how magnificent it is and how moving and necessary it is for us to have the experience of nature. Likewise in my voting, in my personal interaction, all that kind of stuff. It's my job to foster love. And that means that I don't have much time or patience for people who have various kinds of bigotry against particular kinds of love, because they have been ginned up by some hateful mean-spirited preacher somewhere. Yucca: Who's just using it as a way for control. Mark: And fundraising don't forget fundraising. Yucca: Yes. Mark: And then finally, there's life itself. There is the remarkable fact that we're here and that [00:37:00] we are a part of a process. And that process is as close to magical, even though it doesn't have any magic in it as. Could possibly be determined or described. And it is it's sublime. It's beyond description. I mean, I don't use this word ever because it's been so, so rundown, but it's awesome. Life on life is awesome. It is all inspiring. Yucca: Yes. Clarify. When we talk about these things that are sacred to us, this isn't us saying, you should believe the same things that we do. That's for you to decide. And I wouldn't be surprised if some of these were things that you shared too, because as we've been talking about, they are pretty awesome, but these are things that are. Quite [00:38:00] worthy of seeing as sacred, but there are things that, that we may have missed or interpretations that we have that, that vary and that's okay. And the discourse around that is valuable. That's where we all learn and grow from that. Mark: Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, I always go back to this and I'll go back to it again. When I first created atheopagan aneurysm, it was for me, it wasn't to tell anybody else what to think, what to do, how to behave any of that kind of stuff. It was more the exercise of all right. If there were a religion that really was going to work for me perfectly, what would it look like? And I'm not everybody I have encountered a few thousand people now in the world who seem to find this to be, you know, pretty close to working for them. But ultimately your path is your own and you can make whatever adjustments changes, [00:39:00] new creations that work for you in navigating your own world and making what you feel are ethical and responsible choices. Yucca: Yeah. And that, that, that process is it's worth it. And it's valuable. Mark: Yeah, we aren't really encouraged to think about big philosophical questions, very often in this culture. And that's a shame. It's not a surprise because we live in a society that is heavily invested in control, mostly by commercial voices, but also by political voices and religious voices. What, let's be honest. Yucca: how often those are overlapped. Mark: Yes. That is really remarkable how much the money thing and the religion thing and the authority thing I'll get wrapped up in each other. So, so have that conversation with yourself and with your friends? I, Yucca: once. Right? Cause that's something that you're going to find new [00:40:00] things. Each time you look and maybe it's changed. Maybe your understanding has. We change. We don't, we're not static. Mark: Yeah, that's right. That's right. So, where are we now? What else do we have to. Yucca: And I think this is a, I think this is a great place to wrap up today knowing that in the future, we're going to come back and talk in more detail about some of the principles, as well as our. Seasonal topics and whatever comes up, which matches with what's going on in the world. So Mark: Great. That sounds good. This has been a really fun, lively conversation. I've really enjoyed it Yucca: me too. Thanks, Mark. Mark: and you're very welcome Yucca. And we'll see everybody next week.

Setting Boundaries

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 19, 2021 43:16

Remember, we welcome comments, questions and suggested topics at thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com If you enjoy the podcast and would like to help us reach more ears, please consider leaving a rating or review on iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-wonder-science-based-paganism/id1501228156 S2E14 TRANSCRIPT: ----more----Mark: Welcome back to the wonders. Science-Based Paganism. I'm your host Mark. Yucca: And I'm Yucca. Mark: And today we are going to talk about boundaries. Really important concept for relationships and for our mental health, a really important concept for a practicing rituals with one another. Just basically an important concept to be aware of and to have tools in the kit to be able to manifest when necessary in your life. Yucca: Exactly and something very important to keep in mind. As we move into the season of Beltane. This is something that can come up maybe a little bit less this year when there will be fewer in-person gatherings, but still just to a critical concept. Mark: Right. And in my experience in going to festivals in the pagan community and so forth there is that kind of American mistake of being really amped about our rights and freedoms and maybe not so focused on our responsibilities. And I feel as though the way that we can have healthy lusty play and all that kind of stuff is for people to get really good with the concept of boundaries. Very, very clear about the concept of consent, Yucca: Yes. Mark: Because what consent is saying this behavior that we are engaging in together is within the boundary of what I consider to be okay. And that's very different than, well, I'm going to figure that out later or, Yucca: I'm just not going to think about it. Mark: going to think about it. Yeah. All of those kinds of things, which are very problematic and fundamentally mean that that whatever behavior you're involved in is not consensual. Yucca: and before we go any further, I think that it's worth mentioning that someone else's boundaries is not a reflection on your worth. Right. What's somebody else's comfortable with what they want with their, how they are treated their emotions, their body, despite what decades of social programming tells you, that's about them. That's not you and your worth. Mark: Right. And it can be very hard to be rejected in some way and not take it personally in that sense. And that's why it's really important that we work on our self-esteem because it helps us to get through those moments when we're not getting what we want and it doesn't feel so great. Yucca: So maybe a good place to start would be talking about what are boundaries and what are boundaries not. Mark: Okay. Great. Great. Well, the fundamental idea of a boundary is literally what it sounds like. It's like a fence around you, right? you define a certain amount of personal space and that can be physical space. It can be emotional space can be psychological space and there's a fence around it that you don't feel comfortable letting anyone in without making a deliberate agreement to do so. And if someone pushes their way past that fence, it feels uncomfortable and you feel invaded. and. So it's really important for us to understand what are our natural limits? what are the places that feel comfortable for us and the places that don't feel comfortable as well as how do we articulate those with other people and how do we, what are the techniques we can use to assert that? And we'll be talking somewhat about that later on. So when you think about boundaries what kind of definitions do you use? Yucca? Yucca: Sure. Well, there's lots of different kinds of boundaries. There's physical and emotional social, all of those. But I tend to think of boundaries as what you are establishing is not okay to do to you, not what you want somebody to do to you, but what is not okay for them to do to you. It is a boundary to say it's not okay to call me names. Right. It's not okay to use derogative terms. It's not okay to, it's not okay for you to stand that close to me. Thank you. Right. That it's you are using the term limits before, right? That you've got limits there. And it's about your personal safety and that it really is about the individuals about you choosing what your limits are and what your boundaries are. Mark: Yes. And you can tell when your boundaries have been invaded, when they've been violated by the fact that you don't feel safe. if you feel in some way coerced or threatened or uncomfortable and kind of icky any of those feelings that tells you that somebody has pushed in past your boundaries in a way that you didn't agree to let them do. And that be then becomes a good time to assert your boundary and say, I'm not comfortable with this, or could you stand a little further away or, you know, could you please lower your voice? while we talk about this thing, that's really hard for us to talk about because I'm not going to be screamed at I'm just not. Yucca: Yeah. Or towered over, Mark: yes. Right. and What this leads to, however, is that we need to understand what those limits are. And one of the challenges of asserting healthy boundaries in our culture is that our culture is not about healthy boundaries at all. Not even a little bit. We are invaded by advertising trying to sell us stuff in every possible way, all the time, such that we consider it and we don't want it, but it's done to us anyway. And we're so we're accustomed to having things done to us that we don't want, and that we're expected to accept. Anyway, Yucca: And advertisements that's a great example. And we could look at other examples too, like the way that we're taught from very young age that you have to give that family member a hug, whether you want to or not, or if grandma wants to kiss and squeeze your cheeks then they get to, and yeah, I don't know if this happens with men as much, but you know, with women, we get told to smile and to, you know, the way that we present ourselves, we get told how to be in what to do. And that's just. Mark: it's normal, but it's screwed up. And it's really not, it's not the kind of normal that we are working to try to build in the world because the world that we would like to live in is a world where people are mutually respectful. And that means that they acknowledge the limits that other people put around themselves. And that means that if a toddler doesn't want to hug grandma, then they don't have to. They don't have to. And it's really on the adult who has who should have a much clearer understanding of all this stuff to go that's okay. Yucca: Yeah, Mark: that's Yucca: that's fine. Mark: yeah it's I'm not going to take that personally. I'm not going to assume that I've been insulted I'm just, you know, it's a toddlers whim and the toddlers whim is their right to assert and off they go. So that brings us into this conversation about challenges. I think that the biggest challenge facing people in. Kind of Western cultures and I just can't speak to other cultures. so I'm not saying that it's better or worse. I just know that it's Yucca: it's yeah. It's outside of our experience. Yeah. Mark: is that there is so much encouragement to please one another. That and particularly for women to please men and for children to please adults and, you know, for people on the lower end of a power dynamic to do stuff that pleases the people that are at the higher end of a power dynamic that it can become very difficult to know what your own boundaries are because you're so busy trying to throw satisfying behavior at that other person. And it's a very unhealthy dynamic. It's really just not, it's not the way that we best work together. Yucca: Yeah. and it gets reinforced because there is reward out of it. Right. You get a little bit, get a little bit back in that power dynamic, but never quite enough that you ended up being equal. Mark: Right, right. And it establishes establishes patterns. We're now. Okay. Now we're in this, this reciprocal economic relationship, where I give you certain kinds of attention and allow you past my boundaries in certain ways, because because I don't dare say anything and you are nice to me, right. That's that transactional kind of relationship is very unhealthy and ultimately unsustainable, if you're going to be a self-aware grounded mentally healthy person in my opinion so. let's look at some examples of ways that boundaries can be difficult to establish or that unhealthy boundaries can be set up. we were talking about pig and festivals and I dunno how many of our listeners have been to pagan festivals. But I'm assuming a good number have and they to be pretty lively. Party-like affairs where you'll have a big bonfire and people will be dancing and it'll be in, people will be drinking or using other substances. And and it's all very Dionysiac which is fine. It's great. People enjoy all that kind of stuff. It's fine up until the point where somebody approaches somebody else who doesn't want to be approached. And at that point, there is the need to assert a boundary and there's the need to receive the assertion of a boundary in a respectful way. Those are the two sides of boundaries. It's not just asserting them. It's also being able to respect them when they are asserted for you. Yucca: yeah. And recognizing that the boundaries can change. Right. What started out feeling okay for somebody might shift and it might've started seeming like a yes. But the moment that there's a no, that's it's a no Mark: That's right. That's right. Yeah, it has to stop. And so, you know, if you're at that bonfire and someone approaches you and says, Hey, would you like to go to my tent? And at the time you're like, yeah, this sounds actually like a super great idea. But halfway to the tent, you realize, what am I doing? I don't even know this person which is not necessarily a bad thing either, but for many people it's a criteria. And I'm going to change my mind about this. The only acceptable response to that is. Okay. let's go back to the fire. Oh. Yucca: Yeah, This is on a kind of extreme level. It doesn't have to be something like we're going to have sex or not. It can be how close you are to someone. What kinds of things you're talking about in the conversation? Are you demanding that they be telling you personal details or sharing their feelings around something or any of those sorts of things? You know, it doesn't matter how. W what you think of the boundary? That's another challenge that I think is in our culture is that we sometimes look at other people's boundaries and then judge it as being worthy or not to be a boundary. And if we don't agree with it, then we think it's okay to cross that boundary. And I don't think, I think that's okay. I think that the boundary is for them to decide. And not for us because we're not in their head. We're not in there. We don't have their experiences. Mark: Well, not only don't we have their experiences, but because we're pagans, we're really in a different framework than say people who are Christian or Muslim or Jewish. because those religions of the book have a list of acceptable and unacceptable behaviors that you're supposed to hue to. Yucca: You have absolutes. Yeah. Mark: they have these absolutes and like, so if your boundaries are too loose, then you're permissiveness. and there's just, there's no debate about that. That's just how it is. There's this judgment that goes with it. But in the pagan framework, we choose our own morals. We choose how we want to engage with one another in the world. And that means that we take personal responsibility for how we do that, rather than just pointing to a book and saying, well, that's my marching orders. The good news about that is that it gives us a lot more latitude. You know, if someone is promiscuous or some other word, that's not as negatively connotated than that. If somebody is very active sexually the community doesn't necessarily turn to them and say shame, shame, shame. You're very bad. instead. the only judgements that I've seen happen have been around. Well, how healthy is this? You know, are you safe? Are you responsible? Do you respect other people's boundaries? Do you you know, do you leave hurt feelings behind you or do you not, you know, those kinds of things. So it's really more a matter of meeting some standards than it is than it is following a script. And if someone is asexual and just, doesn't, isn't interested in engaging with someone at all or with anyone at all, then we also say, okay, that's great too. You know, that's perfectly fine. there's Yucca: they're interested in many people, but you are not one of them. That's okay. Mark: That's okay, too. Absolutely. You know, particularly in this kind of festival environment, where there can be a lot of sort of sexual vibe going on and face it, there are quite a number of people that are looking to hookup in one way or another. Yucca: themes for many pagans of the holiday. Mark: Yes. Of, of yes, of Beltane of May Day specifically. and you know, for many that is really a sacred thing. you know, it's a part of their acknowledgement of the sacredness of sexuality and of the whole role that it plays in reproduction here on planet earth. so, but it all goes to hell if the boundaries aren't good and I've seen a lot of that and it doesn't help when people are inebriated because if they're. If they're too inebriated, they just, they aren't capable of consent. They just, they, Yucca: That part of the brain is not present. Should I? Yeah, it's off. Mark: whatever is coming out of their mouth is not reflective of whether they can actually give consent or not. So let's say that at the outset, beyond that You know, someone who's had a beer or two is still in a situation where the paths get a little slippery. It just, it becomes a little easier to be less inhibited and pay less attention to the boundaries that you ordinarily have. And then you can find yourself in a situation where you actually did fully consent, but you regret. And that's a, just a real unpleasant situation to be in. It's just doesn't feel good. Yucca: Yeah. So on the topic of challenges, another direction to come at this from is some of the challenges that we have when asserting our boundaries. And being really clear and honest with ourselves on whether what we're calling a boundary is actually a boundary or not, because it's a boundary, when you talk about how, what somebody can't do to you. But it's not a boundary to say that they have to do X, Y, Z to you, or they have to call you by a certain name or they have to do this particular act for you or something like that. And otherwise, if they're not doing this, then they are violating your boundaries. Well, that's not what a boundary is. Mark: I want to step in for a second though, because I think there are a couple of exceptions when it comes to calling somebody by a particular name, Yucca: Yes, Mark: trans person, Yucca: Correctpronouns Mark: should not be dead named. They should be called by the name that they choose. and honestly, I mean, we've just seen an example of this with the first lady of the United States. She's insisting on being called Dr. Jill Biden with all, you know, with all valid reasons. She is Dr. Jill Biden and she's not, there was some chatter on kind of right-wing news for a little while that she should take the doctor off because she's a doctor of education and that doesn't really count. Yucca: that's ridiculous. That whole line is ridiculous about what's a doctor, not like, yeah. Mark: It is. So I do feel that it's important. and I have friends who have changed their names from the name that they were given by their families and their families refused to call them by the names that they've chosen. I think that's a legitimate boundary on the part of the person who's changed their name. Yucca: Yeah. You know, that's a really good, a good point. That's maybe not the best example for what I'm trying to communicate, because that's, that is a really good point. Mark: On the other hand, if somebody insists that you call the Lord somebody or blah, blah, blah, blah, Yucca: That's kinda what I was trying to get at. Right. Mark: Priestess. Yucca: that, yeah. but basically where somebody should be asking you to do things outside of your own boundaries, right? That, that, that gets into a really tricky place. And that are you setting boundaries as a way of trying to control or manipulate somebody else or are you setting them to try and Be safe and our use. And another challenge is are you setting these boundaries in order to not look at the painful part of yourself that you maybe don't want to admit is there, right? Is this actually a defense mechanism to be like, well, I'm just going to not have this conversation with you. because I don't want to look at that part of myself. Right. So that's a place where there's a pretty big challenge. Mark: Yes, because there's a distinction between having boundaries and being defensive. and being defensive usually means you're defending a wound of some kind and you are you're ensuring that nothing happens that might poke at it. That's not necessarily the healthiest way to approach a wound. Usually the best way to approach a wound is to give it open air, clean it out, and then let it heal. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: And defensiveness doesn't do that. It kind of wraps itself around the wound and preserves it in its current state. Yucca: And speaking of wounds and boundaries, if somebody doesn't want to open up their wound with you, that's their boundary. Mark: Absolutely the nobody owes it to anyone else to to have to process with them about the events of their childhood or any of that kind of stuff. This is something that has That has happened in initiatory traditions I know. Where the priesthood of the initiatory traditions as a part of the process of the person going from say first degree to second degree or whatever it is insists on sort of a psychological process with that person. And if you don't feel comfortable with that person, you shouldn't be forced to do that. In the same way, the sexual initiation is totally inappropriate. In my opinion, you know, nobody should be, it should never be mandated that anybody have sex with anybody ever. I mean, that's a very blunt way of putting it, but that's what I believe. Yucca: Yeah There's another word for that. It's called rape. Mark: yes, exactly. even if you believe that you are consenting. Even if you believe that you're consenting simply because the rules were set up the way they were here, you are your second degree. You want to become third degree. You've gone through all this, you know, learning and a year and a day of, you know, whatever the heck happens in there. And now there's this idea of this sexual index initiation with your high priest or priestess. That's just uncool. it's just, it's not okay. And I know that there are people that will disagree with that. And I vehemently disagree with them. Yucca: Yeah, I think it becomes very, very treacherous when there's those sorts of power relationships where it's a power over situation. Yeah. Mark: So we've been talking about what some of the challenges are in terms of asserting boundaries. And Yucca: Maybe some of the benefits. Mark: Well, certainly benefits. Just something that we should talk about. but I think that there are some core requirements in order to be able to assert your boundaries. And one of them is you have to know yourself well enough to know what your boundaries are, and we're not really encouraged to be terribly introspective, you know? Self-examining creatures in this society. And that is a terrible shame, I think, because a part of the great adventure of being alive is in discovering who you are, you know, who the universe be the thing. And it's me, what is that thing? what can be said about that thing? I know that. It's not only for purposes of healing and recovery and and growth that I, that I work on myself, but it's also because it's interesting, you know, it's you develop a voice. In your head, this very removed sort of voice, which will occasionally say, Oh, wow, look at what he's doing. Isn't that interesting? or, wow, he's suddenly six years old, you know, and acting out of something that happened when he was six years old. This is something we need to work on. So I think that having a a religious path, a spiritual practice, having a set of principles and values and, you know, conducting rituals that bring you into contact with yourself so that you're learning more and more about yourself all the time is a part of the way that you come to be grounded in your, in yourself to feel like you've got both feet on the ground and then you're in your strength to assert boundaries that protect you, that keep you from being invaded in ways you don't want to be. Yucca: Yeah, just to be aware and present enough in yourself to be able to feel those out. Right. And not just be going along with the assumed boundaries of whatever situation you grew up in. Mark: Right or what you see around yourself. And this, I think is a real problem in the pagan community when it comes to these festivals, because you get newcomers who, since this vibe going on, and there's a lot of this sort of party thing happening, and they may emulate the behavior of other people that they see around themselves. Because that's what humans tend to do when you drop them into groups of strangers, they tend to imitate whatever other people around them are doing. And it's so important at times like that to remain true to yourself and solid in your understanding of what's okay with you and what's not, and what you want and what you don't want. Those are just, they're really basic, fundamental pillars that help hold us up and take care of us. So let's talk about benefits. Yucca: Yeah, well, happier, healthier, more present in oneself. And that's pretty, those are some pretty big ones. but also the space and energy. Earlier, you were talking about the tendency to yes, man, that we have, and we can do that to a point where we exhaust ourselves and really. Get ourselves to such a point where we're so exhausted, so fatigued that we can't be doing the things that we really value. And we can't be present for the people that we want. Right. We get to the point where I've said yes, so many times that I can't take care of that person that I am saying yes to in the way that I want to actually take care of them. Mark: And there's a level of exhaustion too in, in being a yes man, especially if you're being a yes, man, to somebody who is at a higher position than you are in terms of power. there's a way that is it's a tiny, every time you do that, it's a tiny self betrayal and it just kind of chips away at your self-esteem. You know, here I am, you know, saying yes again, even though I don't think yes. I'm betraying myself and you, it just shrinks you as a person and it may be very frightening with somebody that you have a yes man relationship with to say, you know, I don't think this one is right. I don't. We should talk about this. Cause I don't really think this is going in the right direction, but yeah. Well, once you've done that, then you really see what you're dealing with. If you get an explosion of rage in response, then this person that you've been engaging with, doesn't really have your self-interest at heart at all. And that's important to know. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: Really important to know. Yucca: And hopefully you can get out of that situation soon. It may be a situation where they're your boss and you are in a financially stuck in that situation and for the time being but being aware of that is really important because then you can start to take the steps to emotionally protect yourself and eventually work towards towards getting out of that situation. Mark: Yes. the other big benefit. I mean, we talked about, you talked to Yucca about the benefits to ourselves internally of having good boundaries, because we feel safer. We feel more protected. We feel more assertive. We feel more true to ourselves. but there are also tremendous benefits to our relationship because relationships that feel invasive. They inevitably go sour sooner or later. You know, if your engagement with someone keeps feeling like they're overstepping their bounds and they're demanding more than you're willing to give, sooner or later, that's all going to come out. And it's better to assert a boundary and say, you know, I know we've always done it this way, but I would be much more comfortable if we did it this way. And once again, see what the response is. If the response of the person is, Oh, I didn't realize that made you uncomfortable. okay. let's do it that other way then you know, that you're dealing with somebody that genuinely cares about you and wants you to be comfortable. Yucca: And if the response was, Oh, you're too sensitive. That's a pretty big red flag. Mark: Yes, it is. Yucca: You are too sensitive. You're too emotional. You're too. Whatever. Because that's a way of breaking past and pushing past your boundary anyway. Mark: Exactly because it discounts the boundary. That's what it's doing. It's like, Yucca: It's not a valid boundary. Yeah. Mark: No, I'm not too sensitive. I'm sensitive. so, you know, those, just those two things that, you know, improvement of your internal landscape and your relationship with yourself and your improvement of the various relationships that you have in your life, that can be a total game changer for your quality of life. Yucca: Yeah. Massively. Mark: Yes, it really can. And I don't know. I mean, I just, I can think of so many different circumstances where the application of appropriate boundaries just makes so much of a difference. and that extends even up into like international diplomacy. You know, there are. There are so many countries that don't like one another, but are not at war because they've been able to negotiate mutually acceptable boundaries around not only borders, physical borders, but you know, military levels of buildup and diplomatic activities with third parties and economic activities and all that kind of stuff. You know, the art of creating the boundary is it's not just some sort of groovy new age California speak. It's It's a fundamental and pivotal skillset of humans in the world. so let's talk some about techniques. People can use. Yucca: Sure. Yeah. Mark: the big challenge that I have when I'm in a situation where I need to assert a boundary is that I'm usually really revved up by the time that comes along. You know, I've already been triggered. I'm already ready to say something that's going to be hurtful and not productive. and so the technique that I feel is most useful is stalling for time negotiating for time. You know, when I'm in that kind of a state, what I, but what I want is not just, we'll talk about this some other time, because that is not the assertion of a boundary. That's kicking the can down the road. And it's a totally different thing. But if I say I need 30 minutes so that I can climb down off of this big adrenaline spike and, you know, get myself into a more calm and reasonable place. That's asserting a boundary. And if the person that you're engaged in this dialogue with is unwilling to give you that well, that tells you something. Yucca: Now that sounds to me like you'd be talking about asserting a boundary with someone that you have a closer relationship with in your household or work or something like that, that's not something that you would do with some person that you encountered at a festival or on the street or at a bar or something like that? That's a more intimate kind of? Mark: You could, I mean, you could say, I don't feel like I can make a decision about this yet, but I'm open to considering the possibility. let's keep talking and we'll figure that out. And a half an hour or so. Does that make sense? Yucca: that does. So just adjusting the time or adjusting the, you know, depending on what kind of boundary or how charged things are at the moment. Mark: Right, right. I certainly think that when it comes to, you know, people negotiating some kind of intimacy after not having known one another for very long it's, it can be very helpful to just say, you know, I'm interested, but I'm not there yet. Let's keep talking. I want to find out more about you. Yucca: So another technique we've brought it up before. Which I think would be helpful on both sides, right? Because there's the side of I'm going to establish boundaries, but also the side of boundaries were just established with me. And I got to sort through my feelings of that is, is the practice of Grounding and being able to come back to that in a moment, which is probably a pretty charged when you need to establish those or. You've had someone do that and you got to deal with the feelings of rejection or anger or whatever it is that's coming up, is to be able to take that breath and work through whatever your visualizations are with that of, you know, letting that flow down into the earth, through your feet or whatever it is that you have. And then from there, You can be a little bit more clear-minded in coming up with saying whatever it is that you're going to say. And also having just a moment for that self-reflection to be, to try and be honest with yourself about what you're feeling and what's going on and how much of it is you and how much of it is them. Mark: Right. And also being able to not take personally what isn't necessarily intended personally to just go, Oh, well, okay. Ouch. That hurt that, that was a rejection. And, you know, some of it obviously is about me because if I was somebody else, then maybe it wouldn't have been hard, but but mostly it's about them and what they want. And so that's okay. So I can live with that. Ability to sit with uncomfortable feelings is something that our culture doesn't teach at all. In fact we're taught to drug ourselves we're taught to have sugar or alcohol or Canterbury or Facebook or, Yucca: We reached for a moment, any quiet moment, any slightly uncomfortable moment. And we reached for that phone. Mark: right, Yucca: for that dis that distraction, whether it's a chemical distraction or a screen distraction. Mark: Yes, absolutely. But the truth is that life will often present us with things that don't feel good, and it is so much more productive to be able to sit with those feelings and sort of tease out, you know, what can I learn here? What don't, I think is fair, but it doesn't matter because it's their opinion. and what's their stuff. What's, you know, some mysterious reasons that they have nothing probably have nothing to do with me and I don't need to worry about, but the ability to sit with yucky feelings is it's hard come by it. The only way to learn to do it is to practice a lot. Yucca: yeah, just got to do it. And don't worry, you'll have opportunity. Mark: Oh, yes. life will present you with those opportunities. It certainly will. Yucca: Yeah, but with that practice, you get better at it. And something that might tear you up for days that after learning to be with yourself on that level might be something that you'll be able to in the future, feel it and let it just pass on. Which I think is pretty empowering. Mark: Yeah, I do too. I mean, it's certainly better than kind of the way that I used to do things. When I had really low self esteem, I would just sort of accumulate this ongoing case file of all these reasons why I should feel lousy about myself. And so every engagement that I had was someone that felt in any way, negative or rejecting was just more piled onto that mound of evidence. And now that I don't do that anymore my life feels a lot lighter and better, and I feel like I make decisions less out of a place of woundedness and more out of a place of power. Yucca: Yep. So I'd hope that would be one of the real takeaways from this episode is the how healing and powerful, healthy boundaries can be. Mark: Yes. You will be happier when you have them. you. You will avoid experiences that you didn't want to have of all various kinds. I mean, that, that can be everything from, you know, your friends call you on a Saturday night and they want to go out and you don't want to go out, but you feel like your friends are kind of telling you that you have to, but you say. You know, I mean, I'm in a stay in state tonight. I'm in my pajamas and I'm not going and they may give you an ear full, but you won't find yourself miserable out at some sort of carousing thing that you don't feel connected to at all being dragged around by your friends and resenting them because you did what they wanted, which isn't really very fair to them. When you think about it. Cause you made the choice. So this has been a good conversation. Yucca. Thank you. Yucca: thank you. Yeah, I think it's a very timely and I look forward to discussing. May Day, Beltane,, whatever you call it with you next week, Mark. Mark: Absolutely. It'll be great. Have a great week until then. Yucca: You too.

ALPS In Brief – Episode 54: The ALPS Vision Was, In Hindsight, 2020

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 24, 2021 44:44

Accountability, integrity, commitment. These values provide the lens through which ALPS realizes its vision. To live these values requires a culture of authenticity, a place where people can be true to themselves. In this episode of ALPS In Brief, ALPS President and CEO David Bell meets with ALPS Risk Manager Mark Bassingthwaighte to reflect on how the company navigated the pandemic, the success of which David credits to the company's healthy culture and its ability to remain transparent. Join them as they discuss the implications of 2020 and their effect on ALPS in 2021. Transcript: MARK BASSINGTHWAIGHTE: Hello and welcome. I'm Mark Bassingthwaighte, and you're about to listen to the next episode of ALPS In Brief, the podcast that comes to you from the historic Florence Building in beautiful downtown Missoula, Montana. Over the years, David Bell, the CEO of our company and I have got together and chat periodically about what's happening internally, looking at vision and just trying to share some things. And the point of it has been... I think it allows you as the listener and our insureds to learn a little bit more about us each time. And I also hope to have the discussion of vision and what ALPS does, in this regard educate lawyers as to the value of, and a little bit about the process of creating a corporate or a firm vision. So before we jump into it, I'd like to spend a little bit of time here and introduce David a little more formally than I have in the past. David Bell is the president and CEO of ALPS Corporation and ALPS Property & Casualty Insurance Company. David joined us here at ALPS in 2012. Prior to that, he was previously with Allied World Assurance Company, and that's a publicly traded global reinsurance company. David was a founding executive and served as the chief operating officer. After graduating from the University of Montana in 1996 with a degree in finance, he began his career with the Chubb Corporation. David also co-founded and serves on the board of Grateful Nation Montana, a first of its kind in the nation organization that provides tutoring, mentoring, and college education for the children of Montana soldiers killed while on active duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has also appeared on NBC Nightly News, Fox & Friends, and numerous other television and radio outlets talking about the need to make funding education for the children to fallen soldiers, a national priority. And that's just an outstanding and excellent organization David has been involved with you. I'd also like to share that that David has recently been appointed chair of the board of the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Center. This is a center that promotes better understanding of Asia and of U.S. relations with Asia. And we'll talk about that a little bit here shortly. So David, always a pleasure. Welcome to the podcast. DAVID BELL: Thank you, Mark. I appreciate you taking the time. I always enjoy our conversations about life and business. MARK: It has been fun and I've been surprised, pleasantly surprised and I'm sure it's... these visioned podcasts have had a lot of attention over the years, so it's always a pleasure to get back into it. I thought I would start out. In a prior podcast we set up 2020 and going into 2020, we had a vision and a strategic plan and things were rocking and rolling. And then, the rest of the world, we got hit upside the head with an unexpected global pandemic. I would... Let's start out. How did ALPS survive? How did we do in terms of how did this impact the vision? Let's just explore the impact of all of this. DAVID: Sure. Well, certainly 2020 was not what any of us envisioned. As we began the year, this time, last year, the year threw us a lot of curve balls and the nation and families and everyone, curve balls. And it's been an interesting, at times tragic example of what can happen unexpectedly. But in terms of the company, 2020 was and is closing to be a very good year both in our strategic objectives, largely having been accomplished, not withstanding COVID and our financial objectives as well. And so I think it gave us an opportunity to put some of our core values into practice. They look great on paper and they were fun to talk about when they're not being tested. But a lot of what COVID included necessitated really leaning on those core values as our employees had unexpected needs, as our insureds had unexpected needs and how we had to kind of plan for those and around those and line up in partnership with our different stakeholders. So it was definitely an interesting year. Now, I certainly feel grateful and for us as an organization, that we are not in the type of business that would have been directly in the cross hairs of some of COVID more problematic after effects. And that's frankly... it has as much to do with luck as it hasn't to do with anything else. So, 2020 almost saying with the tone of guilt was a really good year for the company. MARK: Did it impact where we go in 2021? Did it make some changes in terms of how you approach the corporate vision, the strategic plan? DAVID: In terms of the strategic and financial milestones and our vision of where we're taking the company, I really don't think that it played a meaningful role in any detours. MARK: Mm-hmm (affirmative). DAVID: I think it did forever change the landscape of a lot of aspects. Internally, I think the way that we had to rearrange our business, where we did it from- MARK: Right. DAVID: ... to how we handled the various different circumstances that our employees had and have had to co-exist with. Some of those changes will be permanent and so I think that it certainly wasn't a business as usual year by any stretch of the imagination. But I do think we will emerge better in a lot of ways as a company. And I can't really think of any ways that we would come out of 20 and into 21 weaker. MARK: Mm-hmm (affirmative). DAVID: And that was... Again, I attribute a lot of that to the fact that we just aren't in the many types of businesses that have had such a profoundly problematic impact. MARK: Yeah. DAVID: And I think our employee base... I'd like to believe that our employee base is stronger in 21 than in 20, because we experienced some pretty profound things together. And I think for evidencing that core values comment, when people have an opportunity to see some of those values put in action, I'd like to believe that they emerged from the other side of that with a stronger bond with one another and more confidence in the organization that they work for. MARK: Well, let me comment about that because speaking as one of these employees that has gone through all of this, I absolutely agree with you. My own personal experience was such that, this transition to the remote work setting for all of us for quite a while, we had to accelerate new tools, using Microsoft Teams as an example, and the communication ability and in terms of just being able to see each other talk. I felt closer now to everybody in the company than I have in... I'm coming up on 23 years here. So it really is... I do want to underscore that it's been a good thing. Initially my response was, everybody's coming. Wow, this is... We've got to get used to it. I used to walk into our world as some of us there have been remote all along, but now it's, I truly do, I feel much closer as part. Okay. Maybe a quick moment, since we're on the topic, do you want to share a summary of your own observations about what we saw in terms of the population we ensure that we are in service to? Any thoughts about that? DAVID: Sure. I mean, we've seen the results of COVID impact our insured firms at both ends of the extremes. For some firms they have seen overall, the COVID dynamic result in more business and more growth. MARK: Right. DAVID: On the other end of the extreme, particularly when the courts are closed and the economy is frozen up, there is not the commerce occurring that creates billable hours. And it has created significant challenges in... and has created a great deal of fear financial and otherwise by particularly some of the smallest firms. And so we've had to... We've reacted based on what our insured partners are coming to us with. We came out for example, for those that that found a reduction or virtual for time, virtual elimination of billable hours revenue, right? We came out and had opportunities to postpone premium payments. And well before the state regulatory bodies entered the scene and started to require insurance companies to do that, we did it. I'd like to think because it was the right thing to do. MARK: Right. DAVID: Right away when we saw that it was going to be necessary, it was clear in the very early stages of COVID, that this was going to create a problem for blocks for lawyers and a problem paying premiums, both because of financial constraints and because of just the tactics of being in a whole office and not being worried, your mail comes and all of that type of stuff, so that part of it was interesting. And I think the survey results that we've gotten back as we survey our insureds based on their experience that they've had with us each year, would suggest that our folks here who bring a great deal of compassion and empathy, many people, and I hope so lawyers themselves, had been in the shoes of our insurance. And so, I'm pleased that by all accounts, it seems we've done that well. On the landscape of what our insureds are seeing from a claims perspective, we definitely saw what I call a significant reduction in the volume of claims. MARK: Yes. DAVID: And we've actually seen a reduction in the severity of the claims that we did get. And so, that will clearly be a temporary phenomenon, right? MARK: Yeah. DAVID: When commerce has stopped and the courts are closed, then it's... You don't need to be a rocket scientist to figure out that you're going to have at least a temporary lull in claims activity. Now the big question is, as this thing ramps up, will it hockey stick up? And as businesses fail coming out the other end of COVID, and tragically as marriages and other institutions fail, we effectively "make up" for lost ground on the claims picture. I think that there are pretty reasonable predictions on both sides of that ledger but it's an interesting dynamic to be looking at- MARK: It is. DAVID: ... and talking about. MARK: Yeah. Well, time will tell on that one. When I think about how ALPS has survived or navigated through the pandemic thus far, and seeing wins and losses in terms of some of our insureds from struggling in some ways, and profiting very much in other situations, I really start to believe that the... One of the ways that we navigated this so well, was because we had a solid strategic plan. We had established core values that people understand and live by. Our culture is important. And so to the degree that sharing some of the insights about what we've done, I guess I'd say... How do I say, I'd like to talk about some of this stuff as a tool, as a way to give firms that may be struggling a little bit, one path to try to move forward and come out of this. So if we could take a little bit of time, just briefly, let's start with this whole concept of core values. Can I just... What does that mean to you and where do they come from? And perhaps let me share,folks, the core values that drive us, that David has talked about already here today, as are driving some of this conversation. We ask, is this the truth? Is it fair? Does it benefit our people and the company? And does it help us make a profit? So, those are our core values. So again, David, how do we get to them? Why are they important to you? DAVID: Sure. Well, I think the core values are kind of the went through, which we all hope everything else that we're doing is filtered. And we didn't hire consultants to- MARK: Right. DAVID: ... I'm sure these could be worded differently. I'm sure there are core values that could be added and there are ways that we could word the ones that we have better. I've been in the learning sessions that many people listening to this, have been with great companies that have come up with very different ways to approach this and I'm convinced that there's no right or wrong way to do it. I felt like there was a lot of the golden rule kind of baked into this. MARK: Yes. DAVID: And our stakeholders include the people inside this company who labor every day on our common mission. It includes the people who we insure, right? We make a promise to transfer the risk of something bad having happened, the financial risk of something bad having having happened from their balance sheet to our balance sheet, right? MARK: Mm-hmm (affirmative). DAVID: And so we need to make that promise clear in the contract. We need to represent it accurately. We need to fulfill it justly when our claims attorneys are working on the claims. And we need to have the financial stability to be able to fulfill the promises as well. And then of course we do have shareholders too, and so we have kind of different stakeholders. But I think these four points which we've repeated so many times, I think most people probably know by memory. But is it the truth? It's kind of self-explanatory- MARK: Yeah. DAVID: ... a bit self-evident. I do believe that relationships are the headquarters to everything, including financial and business transactions. Without a healthy relationship, it's very difficult to get anything else constructive done. And without truth, it's almost impossible to have a healthy relationship. If you have reason to believe, but the person on the other end of your negotiation or discussion is being dishonest. MARK: Mm-hmm (affirmative). DAVID: I mean, I can't imagine how you can have anything constructive come out of that. And so we have to ask ourselves, is it the truth? Is what I'm telling my employees the truth? Is what our people are telling our insurers the truth? Right? MARK: Right. DAVID: And so that is in some ways, so obvious that it could be glossed over, but boy, is it essential in just everything that we do. The second one is, is it fair? Is it fair? Is it equitable? That's trickier because it's obviously a subjective question, right? Fairness to one is not seeing the same as fairness to other, and so when I look at that is, it's kind of thinking about it from my own perspective, as a leader, as a flawed human being who brings the bias of my experiences that I've had in my own life, into my decision-making. Many of those biases being unconscious, right? And so, the question that I ask for me and the decisions that I'm making, and then I would ask others is, are you in pursuit of fairness and of equality? And it doesn't mean that you'll be perfect all the time. It doesn't mean that everybody... When you feel that you've done something fair, it doesn't mean that everybody else will feel that way. In fact, I think a truism of leadership and arguably one of the ways that you can know whether you'll be successful in leaders, if you're comfortable with the fact that something that you believe is the right thing to do, will not be shared by other people who are important to you. MARK: Yeah. DAVID: We're just going to have people who believe differently about this. But I think if we say, Hey, look, I'm trying my best, I'm going to be truthful and transparent. I'm happy to explain the reasoning for what I'm doing. And I'm using my best efforts to seek fairness and equality. I think if there's a genuine, recognized effort to do that, there's room for shades of gray, as people have their own interpretations. MARK: Yeah. DAVID: That's number two. Number three, as you pointed out, is, does it benefit our people and the company. By the company, obviously it means our insureds- MARK: Right. DAVID: ... and the various people, right? But we don't want to do something to serve people outside this company that hurts our own people. And we don't want to do something that helps or enriches our own people at the expense of folks externally, who we serve as well. And that's also a prioritization question, right? I mean, there's a lot of things to distract us. There's a lot of places that we can spend time and money. And I think sometimes we just need to ask ourselves, is what we're about to do going to benefit our people and the company? Because if the answer isn't an unqualified yes, maybe that's not the best allocation of time or financial resources. And then fourth, which I include unapologetically but also intentionally include last, is, does it help us make a profit? MARK: Right. DAVID: We're a for-profit business. Our ability to fulfill the promises that we make now and in the future, is entirely dependent upon us being a profitable company that is financially strong. But that being said, it's not profit above all else. There are clearly numerous ways that this organization could have, and could today make a lot more money than it is making. And if this were number one, there might be an organizational temptation to do that. Profit is important. It is not the most important. MARK: Right. Yeah. DAVID: And I think if you do everything else well, profit will come. It might not come as much or as fast as some people would like but it is a function of where it sits in your order of priorities. MARK: What I like about this, and it's something I've learned as a result of my experience as an ALPS member. I think a lot of companies, when you sit down and they talk about core values, and they list, these are the things we value and it becomes this thing you put on the wall and you want to advertise, and sort of pound your chest a little bit. These are not things that are symbols. What I like about these values, I've transitioned from a list of things that we value, to a list of things that enable us. They become the lens if you will, of how we view the vision, how we view who we are, how we view what we're trying to do. And I think that distinction, at least for me was very, very important. And I just share that with all of you listening, to approach core values from this perspective of, how do we want to set the view of where we are going? Of who we are? That's what core value is. It's defining us, not defining what we value in the sense of making a profit or... and that's important but we value diversity. And again, I'm not trying to dismiss any of that as relevant, but in my mind, there's a distinction there, I've set up the food for thought. Culture, let us just take one or two minutes. How is culture important in this process from a CEO perspective? DAVID: I've actually evolved as I've gotten older in years and had more experiences, made more good decisions and made more poor decisions, and lived with the consequences of both. I've always been a very metric driven person and would probably define my default management style as in a kind of a KPI terms, right? Key Performance Indicators. I've recognized over the years that if you had to pick, culture is frankly not only more important than the financial metrics, but the financial metrics are more dependent upon a healthy culture to produce them over the long-term, then the people realized that, then I probably appreciated it in the early chapters of my profession. And I'm really... We've hired quite a few people in the last year or two as the company continues to grow and expand in different parts of the country and write more business and in States all around the country. Culture, I think is sometimes the most misunderstood word that's commonly used. And people say, well tell me about your culture. And I say, I can give you kind of my culture speech, but if you want to know what the culture... If people have the opportunity to come to the company, we're not all but most of the employees are based and you walk around, the question that I've asked people to observe for themselves without any ability by me to influence it, is walk around, look at the way that people engage with one another, do their mannerisms show that they are genuinely interested in the discussions that they're having? Are they smiling? Are they able to have a little fun? Are they self-deprecating? Is their energy... Is it a library or look at where it feels like a professional salt mine? Or is it a place where there's vibrancy and laughter but it's also professional and it's very intentional. And so I think that if you have an organization where people feel safe, which has a lot to do with these core values, right- MARK: Right, right. DAVID: ... They feel safe because it's not politicized, there is an expectation that what you hear is honest. Then I think it gives people the ability to be their unguarded cells and be comfortable. And to me, that's culture, that's the culture you want. Because that's where you start to get true performance out of folks- MARK: Right. DAVID: ... because they feel that they can spread their wings, take some risks. And sometimes the risk for somebody who's just putting themselves out there to suggest something, where that might be not in their default picture. MARK: The way I describe this as again, a member of the ALPS family, culture in my mind... A healthy culture encourages, enables, allows, et cetera, mutual investment so that all of us regardless of position, are able to increase to invest in what we're doing as a group. But the organization also invests in us. It's a two-way street. And perhaps it's another way of saying, I think, culture when it's really working, is the... So I've talked about the lens. Core values is the lens that we look at vision, all this. The culture is living the vision. It is walking the talk of what our values say at our... and it is moving towards something, a common goal. Now, I'd love to hear your comment on vision planning in general. ALPS is a corporation. We don't all sit down, all of us and get together. And what's the vision. How do we get to our vision? Can you just give a brief overview of the process? What does that look like? DAVID: Sure. I mean, I think in order to have a vision that you can communicate in order to get the people who you depend upon to make the vision a reality on board, you first have to have a very clear and honest reckoning with where you are right now, right? You can't portray yourself as something other than what you are, or other than the state in which you are in. And so when you say this is who we are, this is where we are. And then this is where we're going. And this is why, right? Because I think, in private enterprise too often, the objective is more. MARK: Yes. DAVID: More is a lot of things, but sustainably inspiring to an employee population. It is not, right? People need to understand what's in it for me? Why, should I be as excited about the vision casting and where we're going? You've told me where we are, you've shown me where we're going. You've outlined some way station milestones in between here and there. Tell me why I should be fully bought in to this pursuit, because it is easier to just do what we're doing right now. Well, and not really venture out with all of the risks and work that are involved with going out onto the vision timeline. And so, I think one of the key approaches is to bring clarity to what those points look like and bring transparent explanation for the reasons, because you are asking people to do more and, or do different than what they are doing right now. MARK: Right. DAVID: And people need to know why they should do that. MARK: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Mm-hmm (affirmative). And I can also share, it includes, sort of measurable metrics. It's one thing to say, well, my vision is to be the most profitable family law firm in greater Montana or something. But if you don't have a pass, we need to sit down and I can assure you folks, we do. That's part of this strategic planning process. David, I want to give you a little bit time, if we still have some time to talk about the Mansfield Center. But before we get to that, can you just... Share what you feel comfortable sharing. What does the future look like for ALPS? DAVID: Sure. We are- MARK: In terms of your long-term vision? DAVID: Yeah, well, so ALPS, it's got such a great three decades of history. MARK: Yeah. DAVID: It started in the wake of the S&L crisis, when there was a genuine crisis of a complete lack of availability for legal malpractice insurance, particularly for the smallest firms. MARK: Right. DAVID: Right? ALPS was one of a handful of kind of white Knights that were created by State Bars in order to solve this problem. Obviously the market has evolved in different cycles over the last three decades. The crisis went away. We've had times when it's been very, very competitive and at times where has been very problematic from a loss perspective. And so, what ALPS has always been is, a direct carrier, a direct insurer of legal malpractice, the GEICO or Progressive, of lawyers malpractice. And it's far more common to have these commercial lines of insurance traded through brokers or agents. And I do believe that brokers and agents provide an important value proposition- MARK: Oh, yes. DAVID: ... for midsize and larger commercial risks in general. But they add a very significant cost as a percentage of the full transaction. And so I think one of the reasons why we've been as successful as we have been particularly in the last five to 10 years, is because we've been able to take the economics that traditionally go to brokers and agents, and share those economics between insureds and the company, really more to the benefit of the insurance. We didn't make this up. It's how Progressive and GEICO- MARK: Right. DAVID: ... permanently disrupted the Personal Lines Industry several decades ago. So, we are not pioneers, I think we've done things differently- MARK: Yeah. DAVID: ... and in many ways done things better as it relates to Commercial lines. But that's been our journey. So, in brief, Mark, to answer your question, the States that we are not in, we need to be in, now there are only a very small number of States that we have no appetite to be in, right? But for the 47 States where we do have an appetite, the States that we're not in, we need to be in. The States that we are in, we need to have critical mass in. MARK: Yes. DAVID: There are States where we're in, but we're not a substantial player. I mean, there are States where we are the undisputed largest- MARK: Right. DAVID: ... LPL carrier by policy count in the state. And there are multiple States where we are that. But there are also a lot of States where we have a very small market share. We need to have critical mass. And then eventually, as we gain more critical mass in places where we don't yet have it, we can start to look laterally and offer products other than legal malpractice. Right now we do legal malpractice, Cyber and EPL, Employment Practices Liability. But our attorneys who buy from us, arguably, the most important risk transfer product that they buy, they trust us directly with. And so we can bring to them offerings of other insurance products whether or not our balance sheet specifically is protecting or not, that's a step. And then eventually, we have ambitions to get into other lines of commercial business beyond legal malpractice. It could be accountants, it could be miscellaneous errors and emissions. I mean, we are now... What I'm describing now, I would put in the intermediate to long-term time horizon- MARK: Yes, right. DAVID: ... not in the short to early intermediate. But those are... When we have vision, I have a timeline illustration that I'm sure both of you and I are picturing in our minds right now, because we've both seen it, that shows for the purpose of employees. These are the steps along our path, going to this place, here is why we're doing this. This is why we think it's important. And I think just as important as that, and I guess, I think the next observation that maybe the final one that I'll offer will kind of wind in almost all of your questions. For me, I think it's important to acknowledge what we are and what we aren't. I think some companies love... And I'm not criticizing this, it works for them. They create almost a cult like atmosphere right there, where you just bleed the color of the company. And I think that that's great and cool, and for some companies. I don't believe that for what we do, right? We are a lawyer's malpractice insurance company, right? So we are not ending homelessness, we are not feeding- MARK: Right. DAVID: ... hungry kids, right? To be sure, the money that we're making enables us to be generous to others- MARK: Absolutely. DAVID: ... and that is a significant priority for us. I think we've had the ability to do a lot of really wonderful things- MARK: Yeah, yeah. DAVID: ... with that, but our core business isn't digging wells in impoverished nations. And so, I think it's not only okay to me, it's important to say, this is a job, a career, it's a place to labor alongside of people who you trust and hopefully who you enjoy. And I think the reason why people at ALPS, why we have so little turnover and why by all of our measuring techniques, people seem to have a very positive perspective of being here, because they can get up and look in the mirror and whether or not legal malpractice was necessarily the job they dreamt up when they were a wee lad, they can nonetheless look in the mirror and say, "We're doing great work." Right? MARK: Yeah. Yeah. DAVID: We create our product honestly and ethically, we sell it transparently. And the instructions that we get from the top on down is, if we owe it we pay it, if we don't know we fight it. We don't really have to get much more complicated than that, right? MARK: Right, right. DAVID: If we've made this promise, keep it. If we haven't made this promise, then we have a responsibility to the other stakeholders to dig in. And so we do dig in and do battle, on occasion. So, that I think is an important aspect of who we are, because it lets people feel... It lets people contextualize the purpose of their role here. I tell people often that I view, I love my job, I love the people who I work with. I look forward to it every day. It is not my life. I take vacation. I largely view the time that I spend here as giving me the means and the ability to do other things, and with other people who I care deeply about. MARK: Yeah. DAVID: So, if you are here 24-7, and on the weekends, you should not be- MARK: Yeah, I agree. DAVID: ...right guys? This should not be your life. MARK: Right. Yeah. DAVID: It should be an important part of your life because of the hours we spend together. But it should not define who you are and it definitely should not be your identity. So, those are kind of, some of the aspects of life under the ALPS umbrella. MARK: Yeah. We're kindred spirits in this regard. If we have a little bit of time and if you need to go, David, you need to go, but I would love if you have a few minutes, you were sharing prior to starting lists, the Mansfield Center. And I suspect a lot of people really have no clue what the Mansfield Center is, and what incredible stuff is happening here in Montana. So, I would love if you could just give a few minutes and share what you'd like to share and fill us in a little bit about what's going on with the Mansfield Center. DAVID: Sure, sure. I mean, I've been on the Mansfield Center Board for probably 15 years. Mansfield Center was created... Mansfield Center and the Mansfield Foundation was created by an Act of Congress, actually. MARK: Oh, wow. DAVID: Senator Mike Mansfield was, I think still to this day, the longest serving Senate president in U.S. history. He and I actually probably don't share ideologically many of the same priorities, but that's the beauty of this whole thing. I mean, Mike Mansfield was... He had kind of epitomized the good old days of bipartisan friendships, deep lasting friendships with people who felt very strongly in opposition politically to aspects of Mike. I recently became the chair of the Mansfield Center Board. Mainly I had a ton of time for the Executive Director. She's wonderful. And I believe that we're in a very... We all know that we're in a precarious time in our country. We all know the dangers that are around us. MARK: Yeah. DAVID: But I also think that there is a national yearning for bipartisanship, for civility, for cooperation. And the Mansfield Center is an ideal national and regional too in the Rocky Mountain West, but national vehicle to channel those types of things. So for example, we have, Dr. Fauci coming up in event that we've planned. We've got the chair of the Problem Solver Caucus, chairs. And if you're not familiar with the PSC which goes under "new labels" sometimes, it's worth a Google. PSC, Problem Solver Caucus, 50 Republicans, 50 Democrats in the house. They are a force now, four key legislation really needs to involve the Problem Solvers Caucus. And you have... It's just such an under-reported wonderful example of what is actually going on, which is, the two chairs, a Republican and a Democrat, who probably don't agree on anything politically, but when you listen to these two people talk, it's very clear that they definitely trust one another, that they, I think soundboard and value the opinions of one another as much, or in some cases more than the members of their own party. And so, they are opportunities, I think to harness this yearning. I just did a call with the U.S. Chamber. I'm also on the board there, and the Mansfield Center. And so, my hope over the next 24 months, is to try to play some small role in tethering together organizations like the Mansfield Center and the Chamber and the Bipartisan Policy Center. And these organizations who have this, we have to work together mission, because I think there is an opportunity right now even where people, even who aren't interested in politics, recognize that we have to start to treat one another better. We have to start respecting the opinions of people who we don't agree with more. We have to talk about things. And so, that's why I'm currently kind of somewhat jumped in the deep end of Mansfield Center activities. I think that there's a good opportunity, and I'm privileged to be a part of it. MARK: Well, I'm really pleased that you shared all of this. I absolutely agree with you in terms of the political situation we're in and the amount of discord is going on just crazy. But just hearing this, it brightens my day. I mean, it so does, it's just... I can just speak as a citizen at this point and say, it's hard, it really is hard, to find the bright spots of hope. And this is one, so I really appreciate. DAVID: Yeah, hopefully we'll see more example. I believe that media, social and mainstream, is the greatest threat to our nation's mental health that exists today. And so I just, I hope that there will be more and more opportunities to witness the current examples of healthy bipartisan dialogue that's going on and more, perhaps just as important, lots of opportunities to create, make, and be a part of new ways for people who have been camped for a long time to extend a hand, to be friends. It doesn't mean you have to agree. MARK: Right. Yeah. DAVID: Right? It just means that you have to just listen for a bit and maybe a little give and take, negotiations. Everybody listening to this podcast, they're likely in a profession where negotiation is a central part of what they do. And give and take is an absolute essential ingredient. We need more of that- MARK: Right, right. DAVID: ... political discourse as well. MARK: Yeah. DAVID: It should not be whoever's in control when the pendulum swings that way, as an absolute. So thank you, Mark for that. MARK: Well, you're welcome. And thank you. This is where we're going to need to leave it folks. I know David has got quite a busy day. David, it truly, it's always a pleasure to get together and spend a little time chatting. I thank you for fitting us in today. Folks, I hope you found something of interest and value in this podcast. And as always, if any of you have any additional thoughts about podcast topics or something you'd like to hear about, someone you'd like us to try to visit with, please don't hesitate to reach out. You may reach me at MBaaS, M-B-A-A-S @alpsinsurance.com. So that's it folks. Bye-Bye. Thanks again, David. DAVID: Thank you.

Brightening (Imbolc)

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 25, 2021 35:07

Remember, we welcome comments, questions and suggested topics at thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com S2E04 TRANSCRIPT: ----more---- Yucca: Welcome back to the Wonder Science-Based Paganism. I'm your host Yucca. Mark: I'm Mark. Yucca: And this week we are already talking about this February holiday Imbolc or Candlemas River Rain. Is that right? Mark: Yes. Yucca: Or for us Second Winter, Nos Gwyl Fair. It's got a lot of names. Mark: Yes exactly. It seems that the cross quarters always accumulate this big pile of names, whereas the solstices and equinoxes just usually have one or maybe two. But this is this is a pretty important holiday for many pagans. And so we'll be talking about what it means and what kinds of ritual practices we have associated with it and what our metaphorical associations are with it. And this marks, the last of the solar holidays that we are doing a podcast about For the first time, this is the eighth. We started at the Spring Equinox last year. And so we've come all the way around the Wheel of the Year to the February Sabbath. So that's pretty exciting. And thank you for taking this journey with us. We really appreciate our listeners and we're glad you're here with us. Thank you. Yucca: Yeah, thank you. And. the emails that we asked for some last time and got several responses from all of you. And that always is just incredible and wonderful. And we really appreciate that. Mark: Yes. Yes. And your ideas are really helpful to us. So keep them coming. Yucca: Yep. So we've got several that we've been able to put onto the list for that. Mark: Yeah. Yucca: So let's start. What's going on in your climate? Mark. Mark: In my climate, what I have, I've usually named this holiday River Rain, which is the festival of water. And the reason for that is, is that it is usually raining torrentially at this time of year . January and February are the wettest months of the year. And all of the Hills have turned green. Occasionally we'll get a cold Arctic storm and there'll be a little dust of snow on the tops of the mountains. But it's generally about rain, everything greens up and the creeks are all fendering then there's just that sort of inward cozy staying in at home kind of feeling, but not the same as at Yule because. It's evident now that the light has returned quite a bit, the days are definitely longer. The the sunrise is definitely earlier. So. It's a time to notice, Hey, the years getting on. And even though it may be a little early for say, planting a garden or something like that, because we're still likely to have freezes it's a time for planning and getting your tools together and learning whatever skills are necessary to approach the work of the coming year. How about yours? What's happening in your environment? Yucca: For us, this is the coldest time of the year. I am in a desert, but we're a high desert right at 7,000 feet. And so we get real extremes at every night is freezing. And most of the days will come up above freezing, but it's still pretty bitter and we're moving towards the wind. There specially in the next couple of months, there'll be a lot of wind that we'll get that really accentuates that feeling of coldness and bitter. is Second Winter for us. It's not spring. Spring is not in the air. There's nothing springy about it, except that change in the light. So there's a beautiful quietness. There's a sense of waiting a little bit what you're talking about with the planning. It's still winter. We've moved away. It's not Yule anymore. But. But there's still a restfulness this time of year. And I think in some ways, this is perhaps the only restful time of the year for what's happening in my climate. All the other times, there's always this growth happening in the rains coming and the harvest and the planning and all of this stuff. But now it's just quiet and cold and waiting. And actually it's probably not picking up on the mic, but it just started to hail here. It was snow a moment ago. We'll get hail all the way until June actually, but not much will stick we'll get a little bit. And then, because we only get about 12 inches of precipitation total throughout the whole year. So, so I hear the night, the wind and the hail coming down and it's chilly it and cozy. So, yeah, Mark: Nice. Yeah, it's like, this is actually the coldest time of year for us too, in that it, we do get some freezes at night occasionally but what that means, I mean, the days are still. I mean even the cold days are in the high forties. And the warm days. I mean, especially now with climate change, we just had a week ago we had a day in the seventies. It was ridiculous. And of course people love the warm weather, but at the same time, it just feels really creepy. It's just so wrong for this time of year, but finally this week we're getting some good rain. I don't know if I mentioned this. We're supposed to get about nine inches this week. Yucca: Good amount. Mark: It's yeah it's a good amount. Yeah, rain and so Everything is greening up. All of the fresh green grass is springing up and the bare dirt. So the Hills are all turning green from the gold that they were with the brown grasses. It's still not quite time for wild flowers which this is where I actually see real spring starting. I consider this to be the beginning of the spring season. But it's usually a few weeks into it that we started having the wild flowers come up, which is when I start looking towards the Spring Equinox. And I don't know whether you know this, but California, when it was first encountered by white settlers, was this dazzling display of wild flowers before the European grasses were introduced. And what was here were bunchgrasses rather than carpet, grasses and. Yucca: Than your sod formers. Mark: Yes. And a tremendous volume of different kinds of wild flowers. So there are tons and tons of native wild flowers here, and there are still places where you can go that are carpeted in California, poppies or paintbrush, or, other plants like that. So it can be a very beautiful time of year as you get into March and April. So. We've talked about this before. Besides the metaphors and symbol systems that I associate with the Sabbaths that have to do with the climate and the agricultural cycle. I mean, traditionally, this holiday is the holiday of getting your tools together, sharpening your agricultural tools and figuring out, how your garden's going to get planted this year and laying in seeds and all that kind of stuff. But beside that, I also map the Wheel of the Year on to the cycle of a human life. And so this sabbath. I associate with infancy, kind of the infant toddler sort of range of human life. And because this is the time when you're accumulating lots of knowledge and skills that you're going to then use later on in the cycle. Just as babies do with this incredible, information flood and figuring out how to use their bodies and just how to navigate this world. So that's really interesting too. I mean, I know that a lot of pagans associate this holiday with the Irish goddess Brigid. And they, there's a tradition where you make a little baby Bridget and put it in a cradle as a part of your ritual for the year. And I do something very similar. Although what I call the little corn Dolly that I make rain baby and the rain baby is a witness. To all of the Sabbaths going forward from this time until we get to Hallows or Samhain. And when the rain baby is burned in the Samhain fire to call the rain back. And then the cycle begins again at at River Rain or the February Sabbath. Right. So that's, those are the sorts of things that I associate with this holiday. There was someone in the Ethiopian Facebook group who termed this holiday Brightening. And I really like that term because it's so much more universal. I mean, anybody in the Northern hemisphere is going to experience that the days have gotten longer since the winter solstice. So I may start using that more, but for my own local regional celebrations, it's still all about the water for me. How about you? What do you associate in, how do you celebrate. Yucca: Another name that you'll often hear is Imbolc, which. I don't speak Irish, so I'm probably not pronouncing it correctly, but that's how I hear a lot of the other folks with pan American-ish accents pronouncing it. And that I believe comes from the lambs milk. This is the milk of the sheep. But for us, there is a parallel there because we celebrate along with what is happening seasonally in our land. So this is Second Winter for us, but we also look at each season at some part of the larger ecosystem that really influences our life. There are some of the holidays in which we celebrate the main terrestrial biomes, like Yule we look at the forests, specifically, the pine forests and those evergreens and on other side of the year, we've got the grasslands that we're celebrating. This is for us, the time of a celebration of our hooved companions. So of our bovine and caprine companions, who we rely on so deeply. For so many things, not just us as a family, because as a family we have a bovine based diet. But also as as the connected back to the grass biomes, they're such an important role. Whichever, whatever part of the world, whether you're looking at your Buffalo or any sort of wherever you are that those large grazers have such an important role. And this is a time when we're really honoring that role, but also honoring that they are, that there's, that, that exchange that we get. The milk and dairy and everyone in my family were all lactose and casein tolerant. So that's a thing that we consume a lot of it and enjoy, and the meat and the furs and all of those products. And so this is a time of honoring that. This is a time of year to just these past weeks where we order our animals for the year. They won't be ready until later, but thinking about that relationship and that tie that we have on this very on a symbolic level, but also on that just really down to earth exchange of body. So that's a big focus for us. Mark: Sure. Sure. And that falls again into that theme of planning for the future, of looking forward to what the need is going to be and anticipating that need and then planning for it so that it will be met at the time that you encounter it. Yucca: And a lot of ways, this is the pre-dawn. Hours. It's still night. kinda, it's almost morning. I mean, it's the, we call it the am, but I'm someone who gets up before dawn and has a few moments before the Sun gets up and that quiet period that planning and this time of year feels like that. And it also is similar because that's the coldest time of the day. And for us, this is the coldest time of the year as well. Mark: Sure. Sure. So the Equinox then would be dawn. Yucca: Yes, I think so. That would be dawn, but still it's not time for annuals to get going yet. Annuals do not come until after may day for us. Our last frost is the average is the 15th. Annual season is short and get at it. Mark: I I did a backpacking trip in grand Tetons once way high elevation. And obviously much wetter than where you are, but you know, very high elevation. And I was there in August and it was spring. There were wild flowers everywhere. It was just spectacular. But it was very clearly a place that had been slowed way down by cold temperatures and high elevation. So, and, there were still many patches of snow on the ground and so forth, so a wonderful trip. And it reminded me that the window for wind spring is very short for some places. Yucca: My my brother is a Yellowstone ranger and the last few years we've gone back and forth about, he's got this little postage stamp of a yard to work with and he wants to grow things, but not only does everybody eat it, but there's just no time. I mean their season has even, especially cause they're in between those mountains. So. Mark: Right, right. Yucca: so much shadow the folks farther North at, in higher elevations. There's just so little time. Mark: Yes. Yeah. He might be able to do root .Vegetables. Yucca: that has been radishes pretty much been all. That's been working out Mark: maybe potatoes. Yucca: potato maybe. Yeah. I mean, potatoes take, it depends on your kind take awhile, but the radishes I think have worked out too, because fewer animals eat them because they've got the space to them. But yeah. Mark: Yeah. Yucca: So petty ways. Mark: Yeah. So one of the things that I associate with this time is the ring of a sledge hammer on an anvil. I've done back when I was, still not believing, but basically circling with people in a kind of wicked esque sort of way. This festival was the festival of Bridget. And she is also the goddess of the hearth. She's got us have a lot of stuff. She's got us a fire and the forge and poetry craft childbirth. It's yeah, it's pretty, all inclusive actually. Yucca: I suspect that there were more figures that got folded in. Mark: Probably so, but I have a little anvil maybe eight inches long. But it's in the shape. It's in the traditional shape of an anvil and a small, like two pound sledgehammer. And we've done wonderful rituals where we've hammered out like hammered chains together. We had chains with an open link and we've hammered those together in order to seal the magic in right. Of what we were doing. One year we threaded colored ribbons through the the chains to symbolize the different things that we were planning for the coming year. And we did that all together so that everybody was connected by the ribbons. And then we cut them. So everybody could take their own little loop of chain with ribbons home. And I still have a couple of those. There's something very potent about that ringing sound and that, that action of the hammer on the forage. And so I like to do something at this time of year that involves that. I talked about making a corn Dolly for the rain baby this year, and I think I'm going to try to make her a little miniature key for her belt on the anvil, which is the key to the future. So that's what I'm planning on doing with that particular piece? I just, I like the way that it echoes back to sharpening sides and hammering out agricultural tools and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. It's there's something very visceral about it about, that, that work with the hammer and the anvil. I highly recommended if, I mean, you can get one of these little anvils for quite cheap, actually like Harbor freight hardware or something like that. They come from China and they're not very good, but but they worked for ritual purposes and actually my partner Nemea was taking an art class for a while and did some jewelry-making and the the instructor got all excited about our anvil and polished up parts of it to make it work properly and all this kind of stuff. So it is a functional tool. So the other piece that I'm thinking about in terms of Brightening is, and of course this is a complete accident, but it just happens to be true that we. have a new administration now in the United States. And it is not made up of petulant tantrum, throwing resentful children. It is made up of adults who appear to have the public interest in mind and to have competencies in the jobs that they are being appointed to. And that's a huge change. And of course it's less than a week old. And I know that there are things that are really going to make me angry over the course of the next four years. But Yucca: and that we can't get lazy. We've got to keep on them. Mark: yes. Yucca: you. Yeah. Mark: Yes. If there are things that you want to see, I mean, at least we know that there are open ears now to hear. That are willing to be convinced that something is in the public interest. If we can make that argument effectively and who are willing to do things that are in the public interest. So. I have felt a tremendous lightening over the course of the last week. I did not realize what appal the past administration had really cast over me every day, looking in the paper, I would flinch. Over, ho what are they doing now? And I'm not having that experience now. And it makes a huge difference. So that's another form of Brightening that's happening in certainly in my life. And I think in the life of many others right now, Yucca: I've certainly been experiencing that. It's similar to, if you've been next to a really loud noise for a long time and you've tuned out their consciousness, you're not consciously aware that it's there, but when the noise goes away, like there was that truck that was sitting next to you next to your house for hours. And there were the fumes coming out and the rumble of it, and then it drives away and it's quiet all of a sudden. And your shoulders drop about two or three Mark: inches. Right, right. This whole stress thing, just flushes out of your body. Yucca: Yeah. So definitely share that. And it's a big relief. It's. Mark: it is. And I mean, it's not like we had four years to spare in working on issues like climate change, we, we needed every instant that we can possibly work on it. But rejoining the Paris climate accord, and re-engaging with the international community around this issue and making it one of the top four priorities in the administration is it's just such a shift and it's. .. Know that what we're going to get are going to be half measures because that's what our system is designed to deliver are half measures. But even those half measures I think could be profound. Yucca: That's the part that, that I found myself getting teary the other day, looking at it and going this isn't. Yeah, everything that's in here is an everything I wanted, but my goodness, somebody is doing something Mark: Yes. Yucca: it's something's happening. Mark: And science has returned to its rightful place as the authoritative voice for how to direct our policies. Yucca: Yeah. I liked that. That was the symbolic reason behind putting Franklin of painting of Franklin up in the oval office. Mark: Yes, exactly. So Yucca: I found it very interesting. What was picked for the symbols of what was, what's going to be in the backdrop of all of those press releases and shoots and all of that. Mark: right. Yup. And he got rid of Andrew Jackson and Winston Churchill and that's all fine by me. Yucca: So yeah there's a lot of real interesting parallels right now between the season that we're in on the Wheel of the Year and some of what's happening in the world around us Mark: Yes. Yucca: that, not just around us, that we are a part of. Mark: this time of year. I've always found this time of year to be a very hopeful time. It's like, if Yule is the time when you dream of the new. Then River Rain or Brightening is the time when you plan for it and hope for it. And then you start to implement it after it warms up enough that's practical and you can start to work your way around the cycle. And Yucca: Seed catalogs are going out. Mark: the, certainly our seeds are selling out left and right. Yucca: are. Yeah. Mark: My my organization that I work for is going to do a plant sale in April. And so we have volunteers who are going to be growing starts for us, and we had to rush to get our seed orders in for those plants. Because so many things are just being sold out. So many people who are stuck at home now are gardening, who weren't gardening before. It's actually noticeable in the market for seeds. Yucca: And just a quick note for folks in most places you can buy your seeds with EBT. Mark: That's right. Yucca: they're set up to do it, you can get your seeds that way. Which makes sense, Mark: Yeah. Yucca: that's to help you with food and that's what seeds are for. Mark: Right. Yeah. I mean, you can't buy seeds for like Dahlia's, but but for food crops, he certainly can. And And it's actually a super efficient way to generate food for yourself. Yucca: And is efficient. So cost-effective efficient and gets you a little bit, probably healthier in most cases and gives you a little bit of that connection with the rest of nature, which is something that in our modern lifestyles, we often struggle with having that connection. Mark: Just getting your hands into the dirt and breathing those microbes, getting that feeling of wellbeing that comes from engaging with soil in that way. All of that I think is super beneficial. Yucca: I have several large flower pots when I say large, they're like, Two foot flower pots that we brought in to the, we brought our other house plants into the kitchen for the fall, but I just brought some that were just soil so that the kids can actually get their hands down in and dig around. And the day they were showing me that they had found the little roly polies. Pill bugs are so bugs and that they're just a little itty-bitty and getting their hands in there and smelling that. And, that's a trick by the way of something that if you, especially, if the winter's really tough for you bringing some soil in and keeping that soil alive throughout. The winter, you just water it. Like you would water a plant just a couple of times a week, give it some water and then you've got something to stick your hands into and smell that yeah. Smell and Mark: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All of that is good. Very good. There's such anticipation at this time of year. It's all coming, but it's not happening quite yet. And There's something that's very wonderful about that. I mean, on the one hand, you can plot your schemes and, draw your diagrams and, pull all your tools together and all that good kind of stuff. But as you say, there's also an opportunity for a lot of rest. You can do that. And then you can take a break and there's nothing that suddenly demands that you go running off to work a 12 hour day under the Sun, because there is no 12 hour day under the Sun. And actually in my work, this this fits very well with that model. I'm a fundraiser I'm in charge of fundraising for a food bank and January and February are the they're the fallow times in the fundraising season. People do lots of giving at the end of the year. And so you don't ask them for awhile and you do your planning and you do your analysis of what your numbers were last year and what all that tells you about what's happening with your programs. But it's once again, and once again, it's a time to just assess and plan based on that. And so it all tucks together very neatly in my world. And I have to say that, especially since last Wednesday I'm feeling good. Life is feeling good. Yucca: Yeah, that's so interesting that it follows the agricultural year so well Because this is the hunger gap time, right? This is when you might still have a few of your winter squash leftover, but. They're going pretty quickly. Right. And you're not making your spring greens yet. For the most part. There's a few lucky climates that are, but most of us are not getting anything fresh from the garden yet. Mark: Sure. So you're looking for that. Ewe's milk Yucca: Yeah. Mark: and waiting for the chickens to start laying again, which is why eggs are associated with the Spring Equinox. Yucca: Yep, exactly. Which we'll talk about in a few weeks. Mark: Yes, we will. Yucca: but yeah. Mark: Yeah. It's a little bit different in the fundraising cycle because it culminates in December, whereas the agricultural cycle, really the big harvest time is September-ish. Yucca: That's true but you're still feasting into that Mark: Oh, yes, Yucca: Right. There's lots of get together. It's dark. Goodness. What else do we do? Mark: Let's eat everything before it goes bad. Yucca: that's right? Yeah. That thing with those, the the squash, you gotta eat those, right. That's. We were talking about eggnog a few episodes back, Mark: right. Well Yucca: use up those eggs Mark: Yeah. Pile in those calories because you're going to get skinny by the time March rolls around. Yucca: yeah. And alcohol is a good way of preserving things. So add alcohol to everything. Right. That was the thought. Mark: Right, right. So what else. Yucca: So other traditions this time of year is a time where we do maintenance on things like our going back to the bovine and caprin connection. Like we brush out our lambskins that we have. Right. Brush those out any of the furs the big bedding things that we have, our quilts and blankets and all of those things, getting those cleaned up and that you were talking about the sharpening of the tool, Mark: right, right. Okay. Yucca: And if you are doing management on forested properties and you're in a wetter area, This can be a good time to be getting in there when you're starting to get more light, but the ground is still frozen. So you're not going to do as much damage if you pull your truck in there to out a particular stand or do some sort of maintenance. So there are some outdoor activities that are really well suited to this time of year where it's cold, but you still have light to actually work by. Mark: Sure. Sure. Yeah. Although, I mean, where I am construction has really pretty much ground to a halt by now because of sediment, runoff. Every, everything has to be weatherized and. hardened against rainy erosion by the 15th of October. And I believe it's the 1st of May, when those regulations then. Turn off Yucca: So it's actual regulations. It's Mark: Oh yes. It's not just best practices I'm here. And I'm proud to say that I had a lot to do with this in my County. We have a vineyard development ordinance and that got expand it into an overall erosion control ordinance. That affects everything because we have endangered salmon bearing streams here. And sedimentation is one of the worst things that can happen to a salmon bearing stream. They just, they choke to death. So yeah, so th once again it's another case of, there are people with their blueprints and their plans and their budgets and all that kind of stuff, but they're probably not going to get going very much until later in the spring. Yucca: Strategize, what orders things are happening in. And Mark: Right. Exactly. So that is the February Sabbath, whether you have a name for it, of your own, or whether you call it in bulk or ewe milk, or Bridgid or Brightening that is that's our overview on what it is and how it works and what the metaphors are. And of course, all of this is to the point of leading richer lives better connected with nature. Having more of a sense about the profound slow changes that happen around the course of the year that color everything about our existence and yet which somehow we're able to ignore a lot of the time. So it's about being more aware and more connected. And therefore more happy and more wise, and able to spread that out into the world to make the world a better place. So it's a, it's an ambitious agenda, but this is the time of year for ambitious agendas. Yucca: And it's worth it. Right. Mark: Absolutely. Absolutely. It is. Yucca: Thank you, Mark. Mark: Thank you, Yucca. Great conversation. Thanks so much.

ALPS In Brief — Episode 51: You can't spell DIVORCE without COVID

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 30, 2020 30:56

It's no secret that society has seen an uptick in divorces since the start of the pandemic, but there have also been some silver linings in this unlikely space. Katie Mazurek is a Bozeman, Montana-based attorney with Element Law Group. Focusing on family law, Katie brings a different approach to the way she guides clients through the divorce process. In fact, she recently co-authored a book called, Divorce Better Together, with a former client who helped shape a more collaborative, team approach that is now leveraging technology like Zoom to facilitate her work. Mark was able to sit down with Katie to talk about her approach, her book and how her practice has evolved to help clients discover a healthier way through this often messy process. Transcript: MARK BASSINGTHWAIGHTE: Hello, I'm Mark Bassingthwaighte, the Risk Manager with Alps. Welcome to Alps In Brief, the podcast that comes to you from the historic Florence Building in beautiful downtown Missoula, Montana. And I'm excited about today's podcast. I have someone that some other folks at Alps had the pleasure of meeting in person and was so impressed. They said, "Mark, we've got to reach out and have some discussions here for the podcast." And I absolutely agreed. Today I have with me, Katie Mazurek, and I believe Katie you're practicing in Bozeman. Is that correct? KATIE MAZUREK: Yes. I practice in Bozeman and we have offices in Helena as well. MARK: Okay. Very good. When I first sort of reached out and looked a little bit about what you do and who you are, I was struck by the name of your law firm. Well, actually, before we get to that, let's take just a few moments, and can you share a little bit about yourself to our listeners? What do you feel is important that they know about you? KATIE: Well, thank you so much for having me today. I'm really excited to be able to talk with you. I think one of the things that's really important for people to understand about me is that I am a person who really understands pain. I've been through some significant things, including my parents divorced when I was 15, a cancer diagnosis when I was 33, when I had two kids, and right, actually when I started Element. KATIE: And so my whole kind of purpose in life is to help people through their suffering. And so that's probably what I'd want people to understand the most, because I know that interfacing with a lawyer can be really scary and really overwhelming and really foreign. And I would hope that if people can see me as just another human who understands what they're going through, that that makes them feel a lot more comfortable and normalizes their pain a little bit. MARK: And may me ask you, I know that at least the bulk of what you do, if I'm understanding correctly is divorce work, but are there other practice areas? Or are you exclusively in the divorce space? KATIE: We're primarily in the family law space. So divorce, custody parenting. We obviously help, if our clients come to us and they're comfortable with us and they want us to help with the business or something like that, some minor estate planning, we do those things as well. MARK: Okay. Very good. And again, I was struck about the name of your group, Element Law Group. I suspect there's a story here. I'd love to hear it. KATIE: So Element came about, when I created the firm, I wanted our clients to have a very different experience than the typical. And what felt at the time was pretty antiquated law centric, law firm experience. I wanted this to be really based on the family and the individual. And so that the term element came from the idea that we're all made of the same basic things. On an elemental level, who are we? Well we're people who need love and care and support and guidance. And so the name Element came out and I think it identifies or signifies, who we are pretty well. MARK: I love that. That really speaks to me too. That is just very cool. I think that's awesome. KATIE: Thank you. MARK: Can we take a moment, in my... We are living in really unusual times, there's discussions in terms of COVID and all of this happening, geopolitically all over the world here. And in other words, it's not just COVID, but these 2020 is a crazy time. And there are some descriptions of looking at this as sort of, we're entering a new normal, and I'm not one that buys into that. I think what we're going through is a period of rapid change, dramatic change, but change is always present. But we are in a crazy time where change is just, wow. When I think about the divorce space, the family law space, are you finding that these times... Is that changing? Are the needs of your clients... How would you describe what's happening from your perspective? KATIE: Sadly, there's been a big uptake in our business, and we've all talked a lot about what the causes and the factors would be that have caused this real surge. And to the best of our guessing, we think it's this stress and the uncertainty and the fear. And it's just kind of in a weak relationship, it's created the pressure point that's broken the system. But interestingly, it's also, I think, a bigger conversation about what's happened to the practice of law with this COVID and having to adapt. And I think it's, in some ways can be looked at as a really exciting time because it's forcing the law and practitioners to come into the modern era as far as how we're practicing and how we're interfacing with each other. And that's something that Element has been pushing for a long time is to say, "Look, there's all these technological pieces that can make our lives easier and should make our lives easier." And I'm kind of excited to see that happening on the larger scale. MARK: I know you have written a book, I believe it's called, Divorce Better Together, and you coauthored this, is this with your partner? KATIE: This is with a former client of mine. MARK: Oh, really? KATIE: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Rob Irizarry. MARK: Wow. How did this come about? KATIE: Well, Rob started as a client in the collaborative process and for people who are the uninitiated, the collaborative process is a team approach to a divorce. We use two lawyers, a neutral mental health person and a neutral financial person. And that creates a professional team that helps a married couple divorce in a more amicable, fully supported way. KATIE: So Rob was my client in a collaborative setting. And unfortunately he was actually... He says he was my first failure. He and his wife fell out of the collaborative process pretty early on. And so he was pushed into the litigation path and his experience there and mirrors my experience with the compare, contrast the litigation world with the collaborative world. And he felt very passionately about the importance of collaborative and the value of collaborative. And he and I struck up a friendship and have been very close friends ever since, and he wants to change the world like I do. And so we coauthored this book. MARK: Is the book somewhat of a description of how you practice in your space? Is it a guide book of where you'd like to see the law go? Can you fill me in a little bit more about? KATIE: Sure. It's a very short, easy read and the intent is just to get collaborative in the minds of people who are starting to contemplate which divorce process is right for them. So it really is the personal stories. Rob's personal story of being in the collaborative process and then litigation and my personal story of watching my parents really suffer through a nasty litigated divorce and what that did to my family. And then now as a practitioner practicing collaborative. So it does explain the process. It's definitely informational, but it's also meant to connect with the reader on that kind of emotional journey and experience of divorce. MARK: I liked what you were talking about in terms of looking at COVID and seeing this in so many ways as an opportunity, are you finding, first courts are closed, is this an opportunity to really accelerate the collaborative process? Are you able to do more of this? Can we sort of flesh out what's happening? KATIE: Oh, sure. I think the collaborative process is always going to... It's so flexible and it can adapt to whatever situation that we need. And what we have found is really interesting is that the collaborative sessions that are held through Zoom or whatever video conferencing platform, they're really great. Because there's the side channels and things that the practitioners can type to each other privately, I can type to my client privately. And so I wouldn't say that necessarily in terms of volume or anything, we still have the access that we need on the litigation front to the courts, but the whole drive of collaborative is to put the divorce process in the family's hands. And certainly these times are a call to action for families to really embrace that opportunity where it exists. MARK: Yeah. Yeah. Do you find... I can appreciate, and I really need to go pick up your book and by the way, I believe it's available... Just to, if others are interested on Amazon? Or it's not? KATIE: Amazon. Mm-hmm (affirmative). MARK: Yes. And I just want to be clear for everybody Divorce Better Together. And it's by Katie Mazurek. And I'm sorry, the name of your coauthor again? KATIE: Rob Irizarry. MARK: Rob Irizarry. So folks, just to let you know it's out there. Do you find... I'll go back and say, my wife and I we're both second marriages. So we've been through the process. My wife's divorce was a litigated divorce that went all the way to the State Supreme Court. And it was just one of these crazy [crosstalk 00:00:11:17], horrible kinds of things. Mine was more of a... We didn't use the collaborative process, but we did sit down between the two of us and really work through most of the issues. MARK: And honestly just had one lawyer between the two of us, be mostly a scrivener, we stayed in the ethical bounds, to put it that way, say the lawyer that assisted us. And I think we divorced well. I would say post-divorce, there were some issues that I think a collaborative process might've helped us avoid, but I share all that because what I'm curious about is, is part of what you're trying to accomplish with the book... Are you writing to lawyers or you're writing to people? You see where I'm going? Is the challenge here to create awareness and appreciation of the collaborative process to the clients? Are we trying to sell this process, you see? KATIE: We're trying to educate people, families really. So parents and married couples that this process is available and that this process is available at any point in your journey. And so, like in your case, if there were... Did you have children? MARK: Yes. Mm-hmm (affirmative). KATIE: Okay. [crosstalk 00:12:58]. And maybe I don't mean to pry. MARK: No, it's fine. KATIE: So it could be, we see people who have gone through the litigated process and then they have these children whose needs inevitably change. And the dynamic inevitably changes. And we have new parties coming on as significant others and things like that. And so they can adopt the collaborative process after a divorce and just get the support they need around some of these bigger decisions or even smaller decisions. But really what it comes down to, and I think most relationships come down to this, is communication. And so you have a team that can help facilitate and model healthy communication. And then also give you good information to make better decisions. MARK: Do you find most people when they have an opportunity to learn a bit about this process and what you were doing, are they pretty receptive? Are you pretty successful moving people in this direction? Are you finding some resistance to it? Does it work better for some and not others? KATIE: So the collaborative process was started in Minnesota about 28, 29 years ago. In 2013, two practitioners, myself included, went to Arizona to get trained in this. And since then, we've cultivated the collaborative community here in Montana. And now there's collaborative practitioners all over the state. And what I've noticed since bringing it here way back in 2013 is that collaborative is the answer that clients were already for, but didn't know existed. KATIE: And to further answer your question, absolutely, there are people that are better suited for collaborative cases than others. But I don't want to kind of perpetuate a misconception, which is that couples who are high conflict or when there's difficult issues in a case that they're not appropriate for collaborative somehow, that's been proven false repeatedly. Really what it comes down to in my experience is the strength and experience level of the team that is helping the family get through this. MARK: So it seems what I'm hearing is, part of what's going on here and part of your interest initially, it's the collaborative process is going to be less painful, more positive, better outcomes. So you started, you want to try to help people through pain. And a divorce process is certainly a painful process. I've never seen a situation that was just roses all the way through. Do you find as a practitioner using this process, comparing yourself to the traditional divorce lawyer that does a lot of litigation, is there a wellness component to this is? Would you encourage other lawyers... Because to me, I like how you've described some of this and looking even now in the midst of just this global pandemic, looking at an opportunity, and I think that's such an incredible way to move forward through any change. Always looking... We can't change what has happened. All we can do is define ourselves by how we respond to it. But with courts being closed, is there a message here? Would you have a message to other practitioners and say, "Look, this can create less pain for you as a practitioner too. And your wellness can help others." I'm I understanding this correctly? KATIE: Well, I think so. I struggled a lot when I started with litigating family law cases, because what's a win in a family law case. Is it a dollar award? Is it more time with the child? It's really kind of a, almost a [inaudible 00:17:46] concept to think about it, when you're talking about human life. And so I really struggled with like, "What am I doing here? What value am I bringing? What is the long-term outcome for these families? When I've just put on this testimony, that's just biting and terrible towards another party. This is what we have to do or I feel what you have to do." KATIE: And so the collaborative practice is the hardest work I've ever done, but it is far and away, the best I've ever felt about something that I'm putting forward in the world. When you go to these conferences, you see mostly practitioners in their 50s and 60s. And the reason for that is they just got to a point where they couldn't do the litigation, the burden of litigation, the toxicity of litigation. And so they had to do something different. And I want to be clear. It's very hard work. It's very hard work. Because at least with litigation, you can say, "Hey, that's not what the court's going to consider. We're not going to talk about that. I'm sorry that happened to you." And kind of have the appropriate amount of empathy, but move the case forward because you're working within that strict legal lens. MARK: Exactly. KATIE: And then the collaborative process it's, the law is just a framework and what the family builds within that is completely up to them. And so I kind of, the analogy I use is, look, the law, the framework is going to say, "You need to build a car. And that car has to have four wheels, an engine and steering wheel." And whether you build a porch or a dump truck, that's up to you. And so that kind of freedom for us practitioners who are used to being in these really tight roles that can be really uncomfortable for us. And that's why we have a team. MARK: And so what drives the... You say this is the hardest you've ever worked. It's clear just, the audience is just listening, but we're viewing each other here and you're very passionate about this. It seems to be very fulfilling to you, very important, but what is the challenge here? Why is this so hard? Is it trying to keep people invested in the process? Is it the emotions of all that's going on? Is it crazy tangential issues that the traditional path isn't necessarily going to deal with? Why is this such a challenge? And challenge have to be a bad thing, this is what I'm trying to get across to our listeners here. But why is this so hard? KATIE: Well, you're taking two people who are in conflict and you're asking them to listen to each other, to meaningfully listen to each other and to communicate better. And that is exceptionally hard. People come into the divorce process with a feeling of scarcity, of, "Oh my goodness, I'm losing, I'm changing." We took one whole, and we're making it into two, which is never as much as half. If that makes sense. MARK: Yes. It does. It does. KATIE: Right? So because you lose the economy of efficiency and going into two households and things like that. So a real scarcity mindset, and it's very hard to get positive work out of people who are rotating around the access of fear and not enough and uncertainty and, "What's going to happen to me?" And so in the collaborative space, we really meet them in that scarcity feeling, whereas in a litigation setting, I can just say, "Ah, I know that that thing happened to you, and I'm so sorry, but that's not on the view or the horizon for the court." MARK: Right. Right. KATIE: And so we make space for all of that in the collaborative model, and that's what's kind of messy and hard. And when you're trying to help people move forward through that, it's a lot. MARK: So how do you stay sane? KATIE: Right. That's such a good question. Well, we lean on the mental health professional quite a bit, and who helps us understand like, okay, this is in your box and this isn't. Part of the really hard thing about collaborative is that I feel like I'm invested in the family and in a much different way than I am in litigation, just by virtue of the differences of the process. And so I guess I'm still working on that, with every single case it's different and I'm still figuring it out. But it's always been worth the effort, the outcomes are really incredible. MARK: Yeah. Yeah. I want to be very respectful of your time here and appreciate the chat we've had. I don't mean to put you on the spot and I think you're up for this. We have, obviously, the listening base here are all legal professionals. I'd ask for two comments maybe, in terms of closing comments. One would be, what would you have to say to encourage lawyers that are more focused on the traditional litigated model? What would you say to them, say, be open to this? Why should they move in this direction, at least at times? And then the other piece, or the second half of this would be, there are lots of lawyers, because not all clients are to want to do this. So still need to stay in the litigated space. Are there learnings or takeaways from your experience in the collaborative space that might be beneficial to help if you jump back into the litigated space. And any other closing comments you'd have, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on those two sides. KATIE: The most important lesson that I've learned about working alongside the traditional litigated attorneys is to have a relationship and try to have an understanding between the two very different practices. So my first part of that would be an invitation that, if you're a litigator and you're listening to this and you're thinking, "Oh, that is never something I would do." That's fine. The world absolutely needs really strong litigators who are responsible- MARK: Absolutely. KATIE: ... in handling families. But also let's go to coffee and let's talk about what I do so that we can compliment one another. But for the practitioners who are thinking about, who see litigation, the issues with litigation, and maybe have some heartache of their own about how they're practicing, the collaborative doors is always open and you can get trained relatively inexpensively and join a practice group and try it out. And maybe it's for you, maybe it's not, but it's still a great way. You're going to get some [inaudible 00:26:06]. You're going to get some really great information. KATIE: It's going to challenge your worldview, which kind of goes to your second point, which is we address these family law cases in a very lawyer centric, law centric way. And what I've really learned is one, active listening. I've learned to ask more questions and dive deeper into the answers. And I am shocked at how much more I've learned and repeatedly have used that skill in my litigation practice, because the last thing any of us wants is to get up in front of a judge and be in the middle of a hearing or a trial and get caught flat footed. And when we make that investment and time and energy into our clients, I think it yields a better outcome and a better experience for them overall. KATIE: So I would say that that's kind of the compliment between the two worlds and I don't see them as completely divergent and separate and apart, I see them as working together and kind of the left hand and the right hand. MARK: Yeah. Yeah. I love that. And your comment of active listening really strikes a chord with me. I think at times it's too easy, regardless of what sandbox we're in, as lawyers in terms of practice. Just to, this is how it's always been done. We think we know what's right. We think we understand what people want. There's a lot of assumptions. When I was practicing, there was involved in situation where I really thought it was all about the money. We had to get the most amount of money. And when I finally learned it had nothing to do with the money at all, because I wasn't listening, the matter resolved very, very quickly, and it was a great outcome for everybody involved. So I simply want to underscore that and thank you for saying it that, let's put aside at times some of our assumptions and really take the time to understand and listen, what is the need of the client? And we are here, we are in someone else's employ. KATIE: Right. At service. MARK: Exactly, and thank you for that. That's sums it up perfectly. And we are in service of others. And we can't forget that. We need to be an advocate at times. And sometimes in the litigation space, very, very strong advocates. There are situations where people need that because they can't advocate for themselves. But that doesn't mean that we get a pass on just really trying to understand who is this person, how do I best serve them? So I've just tried to summarize some things that I'm taking away from this conversation. KATIE: Sure. [crosstalk 00:00:29:01]. MARK: And I think it's, I'm thrilled to see that you have taken such a role. And a lead position here in Montana to try to really expand and bring this new, or a slightly different, less adversarial model into Montana. Thank you for very much. I just think that you're doing some wonderful, wonderful work. Do you have any final closing thought that you'd like to share? KATIE: Oh my goodness. Well obviously thank you so much for having me. If there are attorneys or other professionals, even clients, potential clients listening to this. If you have questions or you want to have a conversation about this, my contact information is easy to define, that's elementlaw group.com. MARK: Yeah. Yeah. elementlawgroup, one word, elementlawgroup.com. So there you go. And I invite folks to go out and take a look at the website and go take a look at the book. Well, again, Katie, thank you very much. KATIE: Thank you. MARK: For those of you listening, I hope you found something of value today, and it's always a pleasure to take a little time and visit. So if there's anything else you'd like in terms of topics, questions, concerns, you do not need to be an Alps insurer to reach out to me, feel free at any time. My email is mbass@alpsinsurance.com. mbass@alpsinsurance.com. Happy to help in anything at any time. If there's ever anything I can do for you. So thanks for listening again, folks. You all have a great day. Stay safe. Stay well. Stay connected. Bye-bye.

covid-19 amazon zoom arizona minnesota divorce focusing mine montana element spell mm alps bozeman missoula state supreme court risk manager markis mark no mark yeah mark oh mark so mark yes mark right katie it mark do mark for mark okay katie so katie oh mark absolutely

How to Build Out an Accounting System Using Automation with Scott Scharf

The Remote Real Estate Investor

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 28, 2020 44:55

On‌ ‌today's‌ ‌episode,‌ ‌we‌ bring back ‌Scott‌ ‌Scharf‌ to talk about‌ ‌how‌ ‌to‌ ‌build‌ ‌out‌ ‌an‌ ‌accounting‌ ‌system‌ ‌using‌ ‌automation.‌ ‌ Scott is the Co-Founder of Catching Clouds, an outsourced cloud accounting service for e-commerce businesses. Topics: Why accounting is a daily, weekly, and monthly endeavor. The best accounting software. Setting clients up for accrual. Understanding the technological ecosystem. Switching from cash-basis accounting. Refining the process of cash flow projections. Why cash is king. One thing to increase optimization. Transcription: Joe: Mark, I said many times that I actually fell asleep in accounting class in college. And unfortunately, it was Northeastern University and there were probably 200 people in the room. I was sitting near the door. So 199 people marched out with me there, my head on my desk, drooling, and then the next class came in yet somehow I'm in the position over the last eight years of really revealing a bare minimum of 5,000 profit and loss statements. And I get on my soapbox and preach about this; how important good clean financials are, not only for an entrepreneur's ability to analyze his own business and make sure they're driving towards their goals properly, but to be able to even just get in the room with highly qualified buyers. Once you get in the room, there's a ton of other things, but the P&Ls will get you in the room. And I understand you just had another conversation with our good friend Scott Scharff from Catching Clouds about building automation into accounting so you don't have to actually do this yourself day in and day out, week in and week out by building some automation into the process, either through QuickBooks or Xero. I understand Scott has preferences for both and good things and bad things to say about both. Mark: Yeah, so you're not the only one that fell asleep in accounting class. I did as well. If you looked at my grades, you'd wonder why I'd talk about accounting so much. But you know this Joe I've been working my way through some biographies of various titans of American business. I went through John D. Rockefeller. I'm now in the middle of a biography on Andrew Carnegie. And you know what one thing they both have in common? They were religious about their books. In fact, that was one of the big advantages that Carnegie brought into his business, was detailed books that they could optimize. I just find it fascinating that we can see that this is the case all the way through history what the people have been super successful. Their books are up to date. They're clean. They use them to optimize their businesses. And Scott and I talked a lot about how to do that with an Amazon business. I'm not going to lie, it was overwhelming, partly because Scott is crazy intelligent when it comes to this stuff and he has his systems all set up and he starts throwing around this system, that system, you just hook this up and you do that and then the other thing happens. And in my head, I'm thinking, how can anyone even start this? And at the end of this episode, you'll hear me kind of say that to him. I'm like Scott, this is overwhelming. How do you even get started? But the idea is simple and it is you just get started. He said something in this episode, which I didn't call out in the middle of the episode, but I think is really, really key. He said that of all the financial records that he sees people put together, he will see sometimes accountants that don't know the Amazon world trying to do books, and then he'll see some owners doing their own books. He said both are typically a mess but the ones done by the owners are less a mess than those being done by the bookkeepers because the bookkeepers don't know anything about Amazon. Joe: That is CPAs you mean, right? Not the bookkeepers. Mark: Yes. Joe: Yeah, I'll agree with them a million percent because CPAs do taxes, bookkeepers manage books, and owners try to manage books as well but never quite as good. So I think he's spot on. Guys, listen, and by guys, that's a unisex term. Pay attention to this. I know I preach on it sometimes and I'm so sorry, but it's because I'm here to help you. I'm here to protect you. We are entrepreneurs, we're advisers, we're brokers, we're mentors, and we're your friends, and we're sharing this information for you to help you build a better business and have a better exit someday. Even if that someday is 20 years from now, if you've got automation in your books like Scott is talking about here with Mark, it's going to make your life easier and help you make more money. So with that, let's move to it. But before we do, I want you all to send an email to Mark to discuss whether Carnegie is pronounced Carnegie or Carnegie. Mark: That's a really good question. I go both ways by the way. The author of this; it's an audiobook, he's saying Carnegie so I'm saying Carnegie now. Joe: Okay, Carnegie Hall is where I've been before, but I don't know either. I actually said we have a client that is a one, two, three, fourth remove descendant of Teddy Roosevelt and I pronounced it Roosevelt because I Googled that. Mark: That's wrong. Joe: I know. It was dead wrong. Mark: Carnegie, Carnegie Accounting, let's do accounting. Joe: There we go. All right. Here we go. Mark: Scott, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast. I know you are on the podcast a while ago. I think we talked about the ultimate seller's checklist about the things that you have to do, both leading up to a sale and then after the sale, closing on the business but I'm excited about today's conversation. We're going to talk a little bit about bookkeeping and the reason I'm excited about this and I know people in the cars or wherever you're listening at would be like I need to stay awake, I want to talk bookkeeping. I hop on this all the time. Bookkeeping is so important and there's so much data in your books if you keep them right. I had a conversation with somebody just the other day who is ready to sell. He's got a great business that's growing like crazy and he's going to have to put things on hold to flip over to accrual because that's what we require now. And so I want to talk to you about this because it's what you guys do over at Catching Clouds. Why don't you just kind of give a quick introduction for those that are listening to you for the first time? Scott: Okay, cool. Thank you. That was a while ago and that was a good conversation. So Catching Clouds, we provide outsourced cloud accounting services to e-commerce businesses. So our whole focus is only working with businesses that are selling a physical widget on Amazon, eBay, Shopify, Bigcommerce, TrueCommerce, House, Wayfair, Wish, Amazon Canada, CO, UK. Really most of our clients are those more complex multi-channel sellers and we're working with the larger established businesses and the one to fifty million dollar range. But the main value we offer is we provide the bookkeeping, accounting, and controller level review of their financials and we do all the work. The clients get read-only access to the financials. They threw everything over the wall to us and we leverage technology to pull everything together and then we turn that into accurate financials. And we just consider ourselves part of our client's businesses. Were just part of their team. Mark: Why? I mean, let me just start off with kind of an obvious question and one that I think if somebody is not at the million-dollar revenue or fifty million dollar revenue level, why are companies at that level hiring and spending money on a company like yours? Why is it that their financials are important enough to have that controller level service like yours? Scott: Yeah, so the main thing is that they feel out of control. And we have talked all about management accounting, not just year-end for taxes; we're like a clock, strike twice a day. And otherwise, you only know; and if anything it is extended, you only know if you're profitable in September for the whole prior year. And our whole focus is accountings at daily, weekly, monthly piece and that the owners at a minimum have to stop, take a step back and look at their financials and adjust their gut feeling so they can make great decisions on a daily, weekly, monthly basis, which are all those decisions you have to make so that your business runs better. It's more efficient, it's more profitable, and better to sell because it's managed well. But if you don't get that feedback where we have people; sellers that will go, wow, that was my best month ever and we're like, yeah, you lost a bunch of money. And they're like, wait, what? Well, you spend all the money on this and you didn't pay attention to your marketing spend and you spent through all your profit on the marketing spend. And if you don't see that, it doesn't do any good to notice that six months from now. So it's those kind of things. Or when they're looking at any of the many real-time tools, there's a big difference between real-time tools to do re-pricing and high-level reporting and you can use to make real-time decisions on re-pricing product or what to buy and all that stuff, and then double-entry accounting that accounts for everything. And then we help them adjust they're gut. Hey, this tool always shows you your sales numbers 10% too high, and then they can adjust to it and make those real-time tweaks. But the real value is they're serious about being entrepreneurs. They understand and they hate doing accounting. Most of these businesses didn't go into business to pay sales tax or do accounting and they want somebody else to do it, but they want somebody else who can talk the talk, who understands where the FBA is and FBA reimbursements and inventory and accrual and landed costs. And they don't want to have to train the accountants on just the terminology, let alone what are all the crazy things Amazon does, what's the settlement statement, and all that crazy. So that somebody that they can trust is taking care of those financials and then it's our goal to educate them on how to read the financials themselves and provide insight. Mark: Yeah, I think you talked a lot about kind of those boots on the ground sort of decisions, those granular decisions. I think financials and getting comfortable with reading your financial statements there's two levels. I'm a big picture type of guy and I actually just recently did this with Quiet Light and with another company I own where I took a look at my financials over the course of the last year and I just simply broke down the expenses as a ratio of revenue in the big categories and where are we? And with Quiet Light one thing I want to do is up our data game. We've got a lot of data that we built on over the years, but it's not organized as well as it could be. It's not point and click we could pull this data up. It requires some work. And you know what? It shows in my P&L because we historically had a large tech department that's changing. With my other company, we should be more marketing focused and it was this kind of bigger directional sort of CEO sort of thing and saying, hey, you know what, we really need to double down on the marketing. So I think the financials have that kind of dual-level play of you get the big picture, but the granular boots on the ground sort of decisions too is important if you know how to read them and understand them. You guys help with that. You help laicized some of it. Scott: We do. And one of the key values we do is each of our controllers who are CPAs we don't do federal and state income taxes, but they understand accrual accounting, gap accounting, and everything else. But each one is supporting at least 10 sellers and we never share confidential information, SKUs, or whatever but we can look across all of our clients and say, hey, wow, you're spending three times as much on your Google ad spend as we've seen with our other clients and we're not seeing that show up in your income. And they're like, oh, I just launched a new product, in four weeks I'm going to cut that back. And then our controller as from an accountability puts it on the calendar, calls the seller and say cut it back so you can start making profit. It's okay to ramp up your marketing spend and burn through your profit for whatever number of weeks to launch a product but sometime you've got to back it down. And if you forget all your profit is flowing out. And so it's that comparison and we can do that common comparison, kind of small data, big data across our client base because they're all consistent because we have no restaurants or which would be bad or nonprofits or other things. So it's that insight of being able to see multiples and your business too, you have the same benefits of the fact that I've looked at over a thousand seller's books. You guys have looked probably at least that many if you get that when you're in this niche and you focus on these areas, you really understand the nuances and you see the different scenarios and then you can provide that feedback. Mark: Absolutely, specialization especially for what you guys do. It makes a huge difference. Let's start with talking about different types of software, because Joe Valley, the co-owner of Quiet Light he often, says Excel is not accounting software. Unfortunately, we see a lot fewer Excel books these days than we used to, although they still come up every once in a while. The two dominant ones seem to be QuickBooks and Xero. I have seen other systems thrown in there from time to time. I know you've dealt with NetSuite to an extent. What's your favorite, why, or are they equally good? Scott: So Pepsi, Coke, they're great. It's so great that they… Mark: I'm a pop guy. Scott: Okay, yeah. Mark: Oh no, I'm joking. I'm not, I don't drink pop or soda. Scott: Yeah, I know. So in general it's great that they're both out there, they're both heavy competitors, Xero does much better internationally. Intuit has a much bigger footprint here; a much, much bigger footprint here in the US. But because Xero came along and has been in the cloud and about six years ago, got 200 million in VC funds Intuit went uh-oh we better fix our cloud solution. So that helped anybody that was on QuickBooks. So today they're both feature consistent. Okay, so if you pick either platform one or the other, you're going to be okay. We prefer Xero. We think Xero is a better cloud platform. It's better with multi-currency. If you're doing multi-currency, it is by far significantly better. And then our view is that Xero is a better company. Intuit is a shareholder driven marketing company and that's all they care about. They don't care about accountants. They don't care about small business. I mean their marketing says they do. They are a big, big business. And Xero even though it's much bigger, is still only a few thousand people. It started in New Zealand and is very much about supporting businesses and being engaged in everything else. And they're just really upping the feedback always. Mark: Yeah, I've got a soft spot in my heart for Xero. I put my other company on it for a while. I actually had to take it off because I didn't like their PayPal integration at the time and that other company had a good amount of PayPal sales, but I just like how they set up the system philosophically. It just felt tighter. It felt like QuickBooks you could have all these loose ends kind of floating out there and Xero, like their name kind of alludes to, wants everything zeroed out and they wanted all the balance out. And philosophically, it felt better. What about NetSuite or other third-party systems? Are there other systems that you think are good to work with? Scott: Not really. Really it's in that small; even if you're a startup, you should start on Xero and QuickBooks and you should be doing accounting from day one even if you have no idea what you're doing. And every business owner, entrepreneur, you have to wear every hat in the business so you understand it enough so when you delegate it, you can oversee it. So you can start at that level and the only reason we would expect anybody that would outgrow Xero or QuickBooks online or us at that 50 million or whatever stage is when their supply chain gets more complicated. So we can talk about cloud inventory tools but the idea is need and I'm a big believer in best of breed; so Xero for cloud accounting, Gusto for payroll, A2X for Amazon and Shopify income, Hubdoc for document management, Bill.com and others and Veem for international wire. So we've got these set of tools but then the cloud inventory tool really has to be specific to the client. Almost all of them suck in different ways but there are some that are getting to be pretty good that you can use. But if you outgrow those or you can't find a tool that you need that will meet your supply chain and the number of 3PLs you have and your manufacturing process, then you might have to grow up to NetSuite. And if you're a larger business and you want to be able to; you're buying a lot of international stuff and you have customs invoices that show up six months after you've done a sale and you want to back-calculate all of your COGS into the past, the only way to do that is on NetSuite. Because we do monthly snapshot accounting so if there's an adjustment six months later we posted in that month, we don't go unravel everything and put it all back. So if you need that sophistication or you need a more advanced one but you're going to pay for it price wise and you're actually going to pay a penalty that in my opinion, not great integrations to pull data from these sites and it makes it difficult to impossible to at least reconcile Amazon working with the different NetSuite integrations. Mark: Well, let's talk a little bit about that because I want to talk about some of the automation of this because I think the biggest challenge with a lot of the software is figuring out how to pull in the data in an efficient manner and we especially run into this problem with accrual accounting. This is why so many bookkeepers mistakenly or misguidedly tell their clients you should just do cash basis, because for them it's a lot easier, right? You see the purchase order, you enter it in, and going through to an accrual, you need to check your beginning inventory levels at the beginning of the month and ending inventory levels to figure that out. And it's just more work than they want to do, frankly. How do you set your clients up? I want to talk two questions, one would be how do you set your clients up for forward-looking moving forward we're going to be on accrual and keeping that automation in place. And then secondly, what are easy ways if there is an easy way to go back and get those historical COGS on a monthly basis for an Amazon business? Scott: Yeah, the two sides income. I mean, the first piece would be the automation we look at is first making sure you're posting your income properly. If you sell a hundred widgets that you get paid for 100 widgets and so we use a tool called A2X accounting to post the Amazon income. We've been using it for six-plus years. If posted a penny, it breaks up a hundred plus Amazon fees and follows the accrual method by posting a summary invoice. Because the main thing we recommend for everybody, unless you're doing B2B or direct manual sales on turns, every other sale can be summarized on a daily or weekly or monthly invoice and A2X will post Amazon and Shopify income. For Shopify, it will post Shopify payments every day that matches the payout every day. So the first thing you want to do is be able to get all the income into the system properly and then A2X breaks out based on our design. We're their close partners. We're using it for a year and a half but we were in Alpha for about six months, but they'll post and our standard is to post all the income by payment processor. So on Shopify, if you're using Shopify Payments and Amazon Pay and PayPal and Globally and Sasol and Afterpay or whoever else. It'll break out each of those posted invoice for each of those merchant providers and then you can reconcile it. So that's how you get your income and it's going to post it in the right period as to when the sale happened, not when you got paid. The difference between accrual, you track everything. And in our opinion and accrual, not only do you need it for valuation, not only do you need accrual to make sure you have a balance sheet so you can see your inventory and your assets versus liabilities but it's also easier to look at that if you have these huge expenses that you pay for or you're buying a ton of inventory and you pay $100,000 this month in shipping charges you want to spread that out and as you sell the product, pull that out not pull it together. Now for COGS and inventory, if you're looking for your values, the best tool is just you can't do it on spreadsheets. Just like you can't run accounting on spreadsheets, you really need a cloud inventory tool. You need the automation so you have a structured process to purchase products through a purchase order so you know what you're paying for. I mean you're constantly updating your costs, you're receiving that inventory. So whether it's fraud or they forgot to put a case; you bought 20 cases and they only put 19 in and they were just going super fast, which is usually the problem not so much someone's trying to rip you off. And if you can't catch that in controller control, you just have money that's just leaking because inventory is just cash in a different form that you're trying to turn into more cash. And so you really need those tools that are pulling in every order because all of that detailed data doesn't have to live in the accounting and it shouldn't. Xero and Quickbooks online are not set up to pull in every Shopify transaction, every Amazon transaction. They're not. The idea is you want that summary information and then you want to make sure that your cost of goods sold aligns with the income. So you have to have a consistent process. For Amazon, we upload costs into A2X and it'll post cost of goods sold so the same orders that were in your income even if the settlement statement splits over the end of the month all get posted in the appropriate month, and then you can do the same thing for Shopify. And then for our clients that are on cloud inventory, you can run as long as the tools provide in our focus, which would be cost of goods sold per channel so you can see your profitability per channel on the financials is really the piece you want to make sure that you can get that number, be able to validate it, and everyone's like, oh, that's this big accounting thing. I'm like no your whole world is operations; its purchasing product and shipping product out. Everybody will know we did 422 orders last month and they'll go, okay, and there's all the data for it and that needs to get applied to the accounting and then you need somebody who can do that properly. Mark: You said something just a little bit ago here which I find; it tends to be a mindset shift among a lot of sellers and that is your inventory is just cash in a different form that you hope to turn into more cash. And this is where the switch from cash to accrual changes and people that are on cash basis tend not to see this, right? They see their business bleeding cash and they see a cash in, cash out and when they spend all the money on inventory, they see that as losing value but it's not. You're just transitioning one asset cash into another asset inventory. And I think this is, again, why this topic of discussing books excites me because it causes you to think of your business in a different way; in completely different ways, as a blend of assets. Most of what you said, I already know our listeners are going to listen to this and be like that is way too complex for me to go through and do. Can I connect these things directly? Can I just plug and go or do I need to hire somebody to do this? Can I train somebody to do this? I mean, how do you actually go about implementing this? Scott: So there isn't one tool that will connect all the different pieces. Now Xero and QuickBooks online and A2X for an Amazon-only business gets you a long way along the method because if you're all FBA A2X will get you most of the way there. But for anything else, there's no secret process. So someone's like, oh, I'll just use what Logility and use their reports, they connect everything. I just did a deep dive review of them again and we couldn't figure out how they were posting the data and then we couldn't rec because we were evaluating we were trying to implement it. So you have to have a consistent set of processes to know you're doing your accounting on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. We do cost of goods sold monthly. So it's an hour or two per client per month because we have a standardized process that we follow through that shakes out vendor deposits and the other details. So the first process is what are you doing, what are you trying to accomplish, and just break that down, whether you're doing it yourself. Look at resources. We have some online courses. We have a bunch of YouTube videos to make sure we educate people. But then we still have a manual process for Walmart and eBay and Etsy and House and Wayfair and all these other channels where we download the data monthly, pivot it to post the income, and reconcile it. But we use the exact same data to apply a cost to post COGS. So it's a matter of that. Now, there are consultants out there that will help you set up the cloud inventory tool which we don't do, or you can work with the vendors to implement it and then you either have to manage it yourself or hire someone like Catching Clouds or another e-commerce accountant that understands the technology, the e-commerce space, and accounting. Mark: I think this is why it's so tough for so many people. Because as an entrepreneur, I have an idea, I've invented a product or I've identified a niche I want to go after and I'm good at that but now you're asking me to understand my financial reports. And then on top of that, you're asking me not to just understand my financial reports, but to understand the technological ecosystem around these financial reports to make them all work without hiring somebody who's going to cost me $10,000, $20,000, $30,000 a month just to be able to do this and suck up any profits that I do if I do have. That's why it is so difficult for people. The whole ecosystem is complex and difficult to understand. But I do know once you do get it set up, it is just a few hours a month. So you put in the effort of what am I selling, what are my processes, and then how can I get this into the system the right way? Once you get that setup, then maintaining it isn't as difficult as the initial setup. Is that fair? Scott: That is correct. Once you get those processes in place and you've got a defined process, you're just not assuming you can set automation and set and forget it, you're there. And then I would put the same due diligence that everybody puts into outsourcing; I mean, e-commerce sellers, the big things they outsource, except for the few that decide to buy a warehouse and want to invest in property and that's important to them being an entrepreneur and that's part of the journey. But that's, in my opinion, a very small percentage of the sellers, everybody else is working with 3PL warehouses or FDA or Walmart fulfillment service, Shopify fulfillment network. The same due diligence that anybody puts into that and understanding their supply chain or their vendors or who they're purchasing from, you just need to decide the financials are a priority for that order and then go through the same due diligence where you know nothing as an entrepreneur about whatever and then you start. But it is absolutely possible to put these systems in place or outsource the work like most sellers outsource and one thing I recommend every seller do is outsource sales tax. Don't try to use a tool like TaxJar or Taxify or Avalara. Just hire assault consultant or have someone like Catching Clouds, which we do it only with our accounting services because it's so complex. We're filing over 5,000 returns a year and even if you do everything right, the states generate notices and you have to deal with all of that. And the same thing applies to outsourcing your 3PL and your fulfillment. And then I would recommend outsourcing your accounting and finance because unless you're 30, 40, 50 million, it's really expensive to hire a bunch of accountants and manage them and train them and make sure they stay on top of the technology and all that other stuff. Mark: You know this is the sort of field that if you fall behind, is that much more work to get caught up. And I know we've referred some business over to you in the past that need some cleanup. We refer them to other partners as well that need clean up. What does that process look like? I'm saying, okay, I've fallen behind, I've been doing cash basis accounting for the past forever and now I want to go back three years to do this right and get moving forward. What sort of workload are you typically looking at to be able to get that caught up? Scott: Yeah. So in general, unless they were using A2X and it's very, very rare or they were doing things right or in a lot of cases it's interesting if the owners are involved, they don't know all the things in accounting and what they do they're very particular about so they do less wrong. Invariably when we see other accountants that don't work with any other e-commerce businesses, they're just making it up as they go and they make it worse and worse. 80%, 90% of the time we have to start over with a brand new Xero file even if somebody is on Xero because there's just tens of thousands of bad records in there and you can't get to it. So we set up a new Xero file. You import all the bank and credit card transactions for that time period. You categorize them and you reconcile all those accounts. Then you post all the income and then you go through accounts payable through all that time. And of course, once you just identify the data and even if they have another system, we can rip all that out, put it back in, but then make sure that no, no, this invoice was paid this month, but it was from the prior month to make sure that the bills are in the right period to get all that going. And you just do those accrual things and then we can post the income per month historically and then do the cost of goods sold per month. And so if it's 12 months or; and so we have to go back to either 1120 or 1119 to the prior tax return or back to the beginning of the business and run that and that's what it's going to take. We have looked at; we are Xero expert experts. My co-founder, partner, and wife Patti teach Xero experts how to do cool expert things in Xero and we have all these tricks to clean up the accounting. And I've got a whole list of things that I want Xero to do to allow us to make it so we can just take what's already in Xero and clean it up because the bank feeds and the fundamentals for Xero are great it's just when you connect all these apps and push in data, you end up with whatever. So it's really a process for us. It's about four to six weeks for one to maybe a little bit longer but it takes time. It takes time to set up the systems. It takes time to pull in the data. It takes time to get through it all and redo it and then validate things with the client go away. Hey, I bought a forklift. That was in inventory. I don't sell forklifts. You go, oh okay that doesn't go in inventory. We'll move it over to a fixed asset and off you go to the races. But it just takes a fair amount of work to understand to pull in all the data and do it. But for the most part, you just start with a new accounting file, get all your data; bank, credit card, bills, income, and COGS, and repost it following the accrual method. Mark: Yeah, I get that. I've been there. I've had to do that before. And you're right, going back when you have thousands of transactions can be a nightmare. I want to know where's the balance between good enough and probably not good enough and too much. And here's what I want to bring up to you, there's a well-known accounting company, which I will not name names, that has a cloud-based service that I know does cash basis and then at the end of the year does an inventory adjustment so basically giving you a full yearly accrual basis. And I've seen these financials before where all of a sudden December looks like the worst month ever because they're doing this massive adjustment at the end of the year. So that's one extreme and for a lot of owners, they'll say, well, it's good enough, I'm getting some high-level understanding of my sales and maybe my some cost, but not COGS. That's one and I would say that's not good enough but that is the attitude. On the other end, you and I have talked before about entering sales down to the individual sale, and being that's ridiculous you don't need to go to that level of detail. What is the balancing point from a controller standpoint being able to look at financials and be able to understand these books and be able to get both those kind of big picture decisions made, but also those granular decisions of look you're over overspending here. This is not a profitable product line or you need to stop ramping up your expenses in this area. What's that balancing point for you guys? Scott: So, yeah, there are a lot of people that really look at their financials and that other method is good enough for a tax return. It's not good enough to make those decisions to understand what's in your business. And it's just making sure that you're doing all of the accounting, not everything, right which means every bank. And the most common things we see when we review books is that they're not reconciling every bank account and credit card every month. Because if you think your system; you downloaded whatever data and you think you have $50,000 in the bank and the bank thinks you have 10, they win unless you've caught the error and fixed it. And it's typically just a data error so if you're not looking at the end of the month settlement for every bank account, credit card, and merchant account to say, hey, this is where we have clients were like, you had $30,000 disappear. Oh, it's a reserve. PayPal's got a reserve or Strike has a reserve which has been happening a lot recently. So we want to have those triggers but you want to make sure you're doing those reconciliations so that you know about all of those expenses and all the things flowing through your credit cards. The other thing is make sure every account's on there. If you're using a personal credit card from the owner because you don't have an Amex, Plum, or whatever in your business, and as long as it's dedicated to that business, it should be on the books. You should be tracking those expenses and then it's just do; and then you pay it off and it's just payments to the owner and it all works out from an accounting perspective. And then, like we said, you just want to make sure you're posting the income in a summary fashion and you could just decide to do it all monthly and know that I'm going to take four hours a month, I'm going to post the income and figure out COGS and get that done and it's good enough and if there's any adjustments. And then the last thing is you have to make sure that the balance sheet balances, which means all the numbers and the liabilities and assets. If the balance sheet doesn't balance you can't trust the P&L. You can't trust your statement of cash flows. And so it's kind of a do those core things and then go make sure you have somebody; an external party that's reviewing what you're doing at least monthly or quarterly to say, yeah, this is right or no, you have this write off or hey, you have this big hundred thousand dollar adjustment leach let's go see if we can figure out what's going on in there. Mark: It sounds like there's two steps here, right? There's the validation of your financials, but there's also an understanding or review of those financials. And maybe they're kind of linked together in the same thing where when things don't add up right that's a sign that you need to be digging deeper into something. Maybe you have an inventory leakage or you're leaking money because not all the inventory has been shipped or accounted for. And you would recommend that on a monthly basis then? Scott: Yeah, at a minimum, it's hard to do. We try to do as much of the accounting daily as possible. We believe that to stay on top of a dynamic e-commerce business, you have to be pulling in the bank feeds from yesterday today. You need to be looking at accounts payable and bills you know oh, I did a $30,000 prepayment on a $100,000 purchase order and I owe $70,000 in six weeks when it ships. Like if you're not paying attention to those things on a daily basis, then the owners are constantly pulling money out when they have to pay bills out of the business; their personal bills, and then the next week loaning the same amount of money or more back into the business and you just go do this swing if you're not staying on top of it. But if you're smaller and you're ramping up and everything else, at least do it monthly and then start doing a little bit more weekly. There is more automation that's coming over time around bank feeds and AI and other stuff, but it's going to take a while to get here. Mark: You know, one of the things that I think can really help once they start getting the stuff together is the ability to forecast. And I'm not talking about even on the sales side, that's kind of the second level of forecasting. But on the expense side, because you just brought it up right now, right? You have a bill of $70,000 that's going to come due. Have you planned for that or is that something that's gotten lost with all the craziness of the rest of your business? Or you want to launch a new product line what do your expenses look like over the next three, four, or five months? You can't do that if you aren't living to some extent in your financials on a fairly regular basis where you understand what's coming up. Do you guys get into much of forecasting even on the expense side? Scott: Not long term forecasting, but cash is king and cash flow projections. So we're just refining our process. So we have some clients that we'll do it for a daily for a short time when they've got lots going on at a specific time frame. And then we'll just provide kind of a weekly cash flow that's always that four to six-week view; here's where payroll comes out, here's your expected income, here's what the Amazon payments come in if you're not using Payability or something that lets you cash out every day so you can manage cash flow but it's really all about that. And we just haven't chosen to extend it for a longer period of time because our focus is daily, weekly, monthly but the idea is that the owner should take a step back and look and say, oh, because what we're trying to always get to is to say, here's how much free cash flow you have to buy inventory, pay for marketing, invest in the business, new products, new design, new people, whatever and then hopefully there's something left over for the owner as well. Unless you're in that I'm continually investing that's great but you need to know how much that is so you're not constantly doing. And that cash flow and that availability can include you have a $100,000 Amex plan card. That's just capital to you because most e-commerce sellers love racking up points and that's not debt. That's not a long term loan. They're going to pay that Amex bill probably every two or three times a week to keep the balance down so they can keep buying product to keep up with demand. But you need to know where those numbers are, where are those thresholds? When you're starting to push out against them if you're growing and your sales are growing, which is what's been happening for a ton of sellers in this big new world that we're in where everyone's home and everyone's buying online and that's all ramped up you need to know when you're hitting those limits and that you either need to invest more money as the owner because you're going to turn that cash into more profit; into more cash. Or you're looking at different lines of credit whether it's with a bank, which is usually the most painful way. But there are other alternative ways that aren't quite online loan shark and you find the balance between those to post that in. But it's really cash is king. If you're not looking at it; there's so many businesses that are profitable on paper, profitable on their P&L that go out of business because they didn't manage their cash. Mark: They didn't manage their cash or the cost. And you said costs are king what do you mean by that? Scott: Cash is king. Mark: Cash is king. Scott: Well, actually, costs are pretty important. If you don't have a good handle on your costs, you're going to run into the situation where you don't know what the value of your inventory is. And the most important thing is you don't know how to price your product. So if you have a product that you buy in the US and you buy in huge volumes and that your suppliers don't charge you shipping, you can use your buy cost. It's pretty straightforward. But if you're buying a product, either whether it's being manufactured or shipped internationally and it costs you a dollar per unit, but it costs you nine dollars to get it live in Amazon FDA or your warehouse, you need to know your cost is $10 is your landed cost after shipping and customs and insurance and even inbound into Amazon. So you know your all up cost to know what that is. And if you don't have a good handle on one of the first things we do with just about every client is revalidate their costs, identify the ones that are wrong, and then look at what they're selling it for. And they think they're averaging some margin and it's usually a lot less because they're not aware of their full cost for their product. And that's understanding that landed cost and landed cost is a key accrual process where you pay for everything and then you take that shipping and it gets added to inventory and then as you sell, it comes out and it's value. And that can make a huge difference on client's business. We have clients that are close and they're using landed cost, but they're not doing that last accounting bit monthly to do a journal entry to take hey, I spent as much on cost, customs, tariffs, whatever, and moving that all into the inventory account. And then you go, oh, I really have spent two million dollars on inventory and shipping and everything else, and I'm pulling out 200,000 a month in cost of goods sold. I have not just the number of quantity of units, but you can see the money flowing in and out of your business. Mark: Why don't we have you on monthly to the podcast? I don't know I feel like we just scratched like the first quarter of what you put together as far as the list of things we can talk about. But we are up against the half an hour, so I am going to cut it here and ask the best way to reach you; obviously CatchingClouds.net. You guys have courses available. Is that on Catching Clouds? Scott: Yeah. So if you go to our site, we have a contact form if you want to talk to me, especially if you're a larger business, I'm happy to talk or email and interact with anybody. I just enjoy interacting with sellers. Then we have our YouTube channel, which we have over a hundred YouTube videos, and we'll start adding more next month on basic topics. Now it's all my wife mostly who can explain things better and doesn't talk as fast as I do, but we're really there. And we have so much more that we want to push out onto those YouTube videos because we're happy to share the basics; how to read financials, and all these different things. We just want to help those sellers that are smaller than a million and or do it yourself. And then we also have a Facebook group that supports that for sellers and accountants for providing answers and questions for people that take our courses and just have general questions and then we have our outsourced service. So if you go to our contact form, reach out and I'm happy to interact and have a conversation. And most of my focus is really where your biggest challenge is and if I can help them figure out the top two or three cloud inventory tools that would be there or a developer that would do automation and build zappy integration to improve their efficiency or point them in the right direction, I'm happy to do that. And then our big services, we'll just take it all over, clean it all up, and then run it. Mark: Yeah, I think for those that are listening here, especially those that may not be in that one to fifty million dollar revenue range, the one thing I can say just from my experience is the companies that get there have books in order for the most part, much more so than smaller companies. And part of the reason that they've gotten there is because they have taken the time to put together good books. And it does give you insights into the business that you can't get otherwise. That doesn't mean that we haven't seen companies in the one to 50 million dollar range that don't have their books together. But all the more reason for those companies to make sure you're are doing this because if you aren't, I can almost guarantee you're bleeding cash somewhere and you're lacking optimization somewhere. I think the biggest thing; let's end with this cut, people are overwhelmed by this, they may be not sure how to start. What's one thing that they can do today? If they think that they're under optimized with their books right now, what's one thing that you would suggest that they do today? Scott: I mean, it really usually just comes down to education. So whether it's our YouTube videos or books like Financial Intelligence for Entrepreneurs is a good book. It's looking at that and then our big thing is process. So if you're not documenting your process for receiving inventory and dealing with returns, just take a whiteboard and put it on your wall and start building those things. So it's called the combination of education and then it's just organization so you can keep track of your to-do list and you know, oh, I've got to block out this much time every day or week or month for accounting. It's more about that discipline and then just get an accountability coach. There are other things you can do, like profit first for a different way to look at profit. Or you can hire someone for EOS entrepreneurial operating system and the traction books. So there are actual structured processes that you can join in where it's not just you have to determine it ahead of time, but it's kind of education. Have coach as partners, whether that's Quiet Light who gives out I know great advice. Even when they're talking to people two or three years from when they're selling and they may never sell to say, no, these are the smart things to do because everything they're telling you to do smart to sell your business is the same guidance to run your business profitably. And then get those external resources, find your peers out there and talk to them and share best practices, and just continue to evolve as an entrepreneur. Mark: Scott, it's really good to see you again. Thanks so much for coming on. Scott: You're welcome. Thank you. Resources: Catching Clouds Catching Clouds Contact Form Catching Clouds YouTube Channel Catching Clouds Facebook Page Quiet Light Podcast@quietlightbrokerage.com

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Ask Us Anything #2: Scaling, Wholesalers, Auctions & Foreclosure Sites, and Roofstock Market Selections

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 27, 2020 39:06

In our second Ask Us Anything, Tom and Michael bring on guest host, Mark Woodling to tackle listener submitted questions on buying from wholesalers, the difference between auction and foreclosure sites, preferences between umbrella policies and LLCs, tax liens, how Roofstock selects markets and more. --- Transcript Tom: Greetings and welcome to The Remote Real Estate Investor. And today's episode, we're doing another ask me anything. And on today's episode, we have myself, Tom Schneider. We also have one of our hosts, Michael. Michael, say hello. Michael: Hey everybody, how's it going? Tom: And we also have a guest host today with some special expertise in the auction world, as well as some experience on tax liens of wholesales and all that good stuff. So we have Mark with us today. Mark Woodling say hello. Mark: Hey, thanks for having me on. Tom: All right, let's do it. Theme Song ♫ Tom: Welcome back. We have another ask me anything episode, super excited about it and let's jump right into it. So, as we mentioned before, with some of these questions that we saw, you know, they might not be in our wheelhouse, so we wanted to bring in experts and that's why we are fortunate to have Mark Woodling on today. So, Mark, do you want to give the 32nd kind of pitch on all the interesting stuff that you've done in the real estate space to give a little bit of background? Uh, you've been on an episode before, but maybe a brief reminder to folks who haven't listened to that episode. Mark: Sure, sure. Thanks for having me on guys. I work as the director of local market growth for Roofstock. So really it's a unique role where I work on opening up new markets and how we can really bring new supply into those markets, but it's kind of a unique role. So having a unique background was really why they picked me for this cause I used to go around the country, traveling to tax lien, auctions. I would go and bid for a private equity firm around the country about 26 different States every single year. So a young buck out of college really had no limits, I guess you could say, but learning the real estate game, I've also worked at Fannie Mae in the recession. I was there in their auction group. So we're selling about 18,000 properties a year, just through auction in all 50 States in DC. And then after that worked at a company called Xome X-O-M-E and was their chief auctioneer and with selling glide, the Countrywide portfolio that was kind of leftover toxic asset group after the recession. So, you know, became licensed as an auctioneer in 27 different States and it was doing everything online. So have a bit of a marketplace background as well as just a ton of unique kind of distress real estate background. Tom: Awesome. Love it. Well, well, let's jump right into it. So our first question we have came in from LinkedIn. This is from Dave and Dave asks, what's the best way to scale your portfolio in the smallest amount of time. And let's see, Michael, do you want to take the first pass at this one? Or do you want me to lead the way? Michael: Yeah, I would say just get a bunch of money. Tom: Honestly. The way that I was thinking about this question is kind of twofold. It's like if you have a bunch of money, that's a different answer, right? So if you have a lot of money already, like, okay, getting into portfolios, just buying portfolios outright, or, you know, building a fund with an actual like employment of like acquisition folks like that works really well, but let's go ahead and assume this question is if you don't have a money machine in your basement and you're just scaling and scrapping, what would be your feedback on the quickest way to scale in the shortest amount of time with the limitation on funds? Michael: I think that there's going to be no quicker way to scale than by partnering with people that have what you don't have. And so if money is tight, you don't have the money go out and make a name for yourself as someone who can put deals together and acquire doors. And I would rather there's this very famous, I don't know how famous it is, but a lot of people say, you know, I'd rather have 50% of one deal than a 100% of no deals. And so if acquisition scaling is the name of the game, go find people that don't have the time or the knowhow or the ability to put deals together and bring them to those people who are looking to get into the real estate game and have the money to do so. That would be my advice. Mark, what do you think? Mark: I think you're right in line where going to portfolio route really is the easiest way, because then again, you're dealing with one property manager in one city, you know, if you're spreading yourself too thin, you can buy a lot of properties in different markets, but then again, you're having to manage all these property managers and that takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of resources of your own. So I think if you're going to get right to it, you really need to focus on a concentrated area of figuring out diversity, maybe within one market or a few markets, and really figuring out, you know, how to leverage your time when you only have so much time. Tom: My last little tidbit I'll add on this is the best way to scale your portfolio. My recommendation is really tapping into your, any appreciation and equity that you have in ramping up your leverage as much as possible. Now there's some downsides and risks. If values go the opposite way. And you're only planning on holding these a short period of time. There's some risks for getting under water where the loan is worth more than the property. But if you're trying to squeeze as much dollar as you can into scaling and building acquisitions, it would be basically getting the most leverage that you can. So every single dollar of equity you can have, you're using to scale scale scale. So excellent. Let's go on to the next question. And we have a shout out to Michael on this question, Michael, why don't you read this question? Michael: This next question comes to us from Ricardo from Walnut Creek and Ricardo is a good buddy of mine. So the question is what's up Roofstock, shout out to my boy, Michael Albaum. This question has to do with working with wholesalers, from what I've seen, you can get some pretty spectacular deals with less competition, but it seems you assume much more risk as far as condition of the property, as well as constraints with financing. What has been your experience working with wholesalers? And what advice would you tell to a new investor who are the wholesalers and what do they do? How do they make money and how do you find them? So, Mark, do you want to take a stab at this one with your background? Mark: Yeah, absolutely. I go to a lot of mastermind groups and you know, these mastermind groups are really for more advanced real estate investors and many of them are actually wholesalers, but they also and hold. And then, you know, they have their fix and flip models and so forth, but wholesaling could be a very lucrative business because when you put a property under contract, right, you're tying up the contract, that buyer who tied it up under contract is then going to sell their equitable interest, right. They're selling that contract and assigning it to someone else. So they really don't have a specific range of, you know, how much they can make and they don't need to be a real estate licensee. So anybody could be a wholesaler. Really so if you want to get to really who the wholesalers are and what they do, you need to go find guys that are doing this for a living. They go really find great properties that are going to be marketable to the masses. And they will tie up that property. They'll sit down, visit the property, take pictures, you know, run some after repair value type values. And then they present it to the market as off market deals. So, you know, their job is really go out there when I call bird dog, right? They're the boots on the ground. They're spending a lot of money on marketing and then tying up these opportunities to then sell it without having have any risk or money down besides a small earnest money deposit. So it's not that they own the property ever. They only have it under contract and how they make money. So they'll say at closing, I'm going to make a certain amount of money or they can say, Hey, you're going to have to put $5,000 down and I'll give you my contract. And so they're going to make money one way or the other. And the thing is, you're never connected to the person actually selling the property at the beginning. So, you know, things go a different direction, you know, it can get kind of sticky. So you really need to know who you're dealing with and really have some trust and not just chase after deals because the property may not be in great condition. And you may never even see the property before you tie it up under contract by how you find them. I'll just finish up on that. You know, the interesting part about that is you can go to Facebook and get on investment groups and say, Hey, I am a qualified buyer. I have cash rate of spend in a specific market. And here's my email address, put me on your buyer list. So you're kind of putting yourself out there and into the worldwide web a little bit and exposing yourself, but that's a great way just to get on these lists and see what kind of flow comes through. But again, these don't sit on the market for very long. So you really need to be able to act quickly in order to take advantage of those opportunities. But yeah, wholesaling's a wild West game. So, you know, proceed with caution. Tom: Sure. I'm going to paraphrase a little bit. So at a super high level wholesalers, they're out looking for distressed or people need to sell right away. That's right. And they basically get it in contract this wholesaler, and then they sell that contract and never actually take ownership. Right. They almost, it's almost like an arbitrage position. Am I accurately depicting that? Mark: Exactly. That's exactly the way to put it. Tom: Awesome. Michael: Tom, have you ever bought a wholesale deal, a deal from a wholesaler? Tom: I have not. You know, I definitely have been approached to sell to wholesalers. Their marketing is relentless. Michael: We buy homes for cash! Tom: We buy ugly homes. Those guys are all the wholesaler ecosystem. And it's funny, the list of people that they're looking to potentially buy from. It's a kind of a rough list. They're like looking for death divorce, like whatever, kind of like quickly to sell. So, you know, as an investor, there's some potential to buy some off market deals from wholesalers, but you know, to Mark's point, you know, you got to still have a really good diligence process and know the deal. Yeah, no, your buy box. Awesome. All right. So this next question we have is from Andy Dobbs in New Jersey. So Andy asks, does Roofstock provide property management or do we need to find one ourselves? Mark, do you want to take the lead on this guy? Mark: Sure. So Roofstock doesn't actually provide the property management, but we do guide you through the process of how to find really qualified property management companies. So we take a significant amount of time when we bring on what we call our preferred property managers, we certify them and vet them to make sure that they really do work well with outside investors. So, you know, being an investor from out of state, you do have a different level of expectation with property managers because you will never see that property. You, you may not even be able to drive by it, right? So they can really be your eyes and ears. So we establish that network. So that really transitions to investors, having higher levels of confidence. So we will always guide you in that direction and have great profiles on our website, but you are always free to manage with an outside vendor, but you know, these are always great vendors that we're dealing with on a massive scale. So we do see, you know, how they're acting around other investors and that's great data to make sure that we're always working with the best. Tom: Yeah. And you know, I think it's great that Roofstock does this initial diligence, but I highly recommend as an investor doing that extra step and giving them a call and asking for some references and making that decision and you don't have to use one of Roofstock's property managers that has gone through this process. It's just available for you as a resource. And if you want to, you can self manage or you can find a different third party, property manager, you have options. It's just kind of giving you a step ahead in that process. Excellent. So this next question we have is from Steve in St. Louis. So Steve asks, so he's seen auction sites, auction.com, an example Xome where Mark used to work at are these sites like actual foreclosure sites and how do they different? What are considerations if I were to buy on one of these auction site, could I use financing? Is there contingencies? What are some of the unique risks? So Mark, this is right in your wheelhouse. So do you want to spiel for a little bit on some of these different auction platforms? Mark: Absolutely. This is an area that I stumbled into my first job, right out of college back in 2001. So, you know, there there's a lot of different types of auctions in the sense of there's tax lien, auctions. There's an actual foreclosure auction, which is what most people will understand what the courthouse steps. And then there's also REO options that even retail auctions. So kind of walking through, you know, the foreclosure and the REO, meaning real estate owned. That means the property has already been foreclosed on when it's an REO, it's typically bank owned, but what's happened in the last, last real decade is that, you know, after the recession that banks were realizing that there was less inventory available. And there earlier on in the process of buyer can kind of get the edge to buy that property the quicker they can get it off their books. So again, if a property has been foreclosed upon it, typically in certain States will go to the courthouse steps and you can buy it as a foreclosure. The actual auction is like the final step of the foreclosure process, but in this instance that it doesn't matter there. Then it would go back to the bank and then they can sell it with full ownership. So let's just go into, you know, the foreclosure aspect. If you want to go to the courthouse steps and buy, I mean, it's a great time to be able to buy, but typically you're buying sight unseen. So you really don't know what's on the other side of that door and you cannot use financing. So there may be some really creative ways to get financing, but you're going to need to pay for that property, either at the courthouse step with a cashier's check or you put a certain amount down and then pay the rest soon after. So that part you're going to have to be really buttoned up for. And these are nowadays being conducted even by auction.com, Xome or Hubzu, which are actually at the courthouse steps and working as a third party to really replace the attorneys who are doing these foreclosure auctions before. So you may see like the full on auction going on, where there's a big tent, big TVs, you know, there's a level of organization that's happened in the last, I would say five, six years to really make those more friend link to anybody coming in from the outside so that they actually have customer service representatives there to answer questions. So if you're really curious about those, I always suggest go, it is fun. It is really exciting. And there may be multiple auctions, like I'm in Dallas. So in Texas, they have what they call super Tuesday and you go to the courthouse steps. There could be four different companies out there doing four different auctions. So it's really something that you need to get comfortable with and ask a bunch of questions that you'll meet people there they're wholesaling, you'll meet people there they're buying for their own. And then you'll have major institutions that are there and they probably won't talk to you about their strategy. That's kind of holding the cards close to the vest, but I would just say coming from an auction background, the risks, that's really something that you need to understand your own risk appetite because there's online auction portals, where you could go in and bid on properties that may have either been foreclosed upon or are just about to get foreclosed upon. And they're trying to sell it before it goes to foreclosure. So if you are going to take the risk, really understand, you know, what kind of websites you can go to and dig in deep, because if it's going to foreclosure, there may be other liens, whether it's federal liens or just other kind of sticky liens that you may have to navigate through. So you really need to be prepared for that. But most of the time at the foreclosure, you know, any other liens are wiped out. So study, study, study, understand your risk, understand buying sight unseen, you know, have numbers in mind, don't get caught up in the auction. Cause that's something a lot of people get caught up in because it's that active bidding. It's a lot of energy. That's what the auctioneers do. I come from that background. I only have done online, but I have watched and studied the live auctions and they are entertainers. They want to squeeze money out of you. So go in, know your numbers, understand your risk, understand your rehab, know your numbers, know your numbers, know your numbers, and then proceed with that strategy that you've been putting together. Michael: Mark, I've got a question. Did I hear you right in saying that the banks might want to get these things at auction before the final step of foreclosure, but did I miss hear you? Mark: Yeah, well the banks have a few different plays sometimes. So if they bring it to foreclosure auction, they get to set a bid and they are the ones that say here's the amount that I would be owed and that I would set as the reserve. And so if they're going to go in and they are there and somebody is going to bid on that property, they need to meet that certain amount. And if that amount is not met and they can foreclose at that point on the property and then bring it to sell any other way that they would want, they could put it into a retail platform like MLS, or they could bring it to another auction site and try the auction again, because typically these are properties in distress situations, but the bank's goal is typically to sell the property as early on in the process. So they don't need to do all of these asset management post foreclosure, which means they have to have staff. You know, they have a lot of costs to get the property cleaned up and presented and ready for market. So they typically want to dispose of that as early in the process. And some of them don't even let it go to foreclosure auction. They'll sell alone in a 90 day delinquency just to say, Hey, I'd rather sell this off to someone else rather than have to go through this longer timeline, even though they could potentially make more money. It just makes more sense to them to take the money and, you know, let somebody else take care of the risk. Michael: Got it. Thanks. Tom: All right. This next question, I think is a good one for Michael here. Gilbert, from LinkedIn asked, what parts of the team should in can be local and what doesn't really matter in your, in your own state, or just thinking about locations of that real estate team that you have, where they should sit. Michael: Yeah, that's a great question, Gilbert. So I'll just share kind of how my team looks on a personal level. And so I've got property managers and agents and insurance agents local to the property out where the property is physically located and my CPA and my attorney are in California. And so that's kind of how I've set up shop. Now. I was chatting with an attorney, uh, excuse me, with a CPA. We had Joel Jensen on from Tax Sentry on the podcast a few episodes ago, and he's out in Utah and prepares returns in all 50 States for investors. And so I'm realizing now that you know, more and more of your team can likely be remote. I think having an attorney local to where you live in your state, because you're going to be subject to local laws. If you're setting up LLCs in your state, I think it's important to have an attorney locally, but it could also be beneficial to have a local attorney to where the property is since if you are going to get pulled into a lawsuit resulting from that property, the local laws to where the property are, are the ones that are going to be applicable. So understanding how to cover your bases in that state is I think important as well. Tom: I think an interesting point you make is having the insurance agent be local to the property. I'd love your thoughts on that. It's just, you know, being able to squeeze out the best deal on insurance or Michael: Yeah just having access to local markets, which isn't the case across the board. So for example, I work with a company in California that doesn't write that, that doesn't write insurance in the Midwest. And so the, a lot of the Midwest insurance agents just have access to different carriers and these carriers are gonna know the markets inside and out. There's a reason why the California insurance companies aren't participating in the Midwest because they don't know the market. And so very similar to having a local lender to the property. They can often be more creative because they know the market better allows them to be more competitive. So again, that's another part, a team member that I left off is lenders. So I have lenders local to the property in which the property is located. I also have lenders that work on the national level and I give them both a shot at it and whoever can come up with the best terms and financing usually gets the cake. So I think it's important. Your property manager obviously should be local. Your real estate agent, I think should also be local, pretty much everybody else. It could go either way. I think it's very beneficial to have local people to the, so at least you can ask those questions as a comparison to the folks that you have locally to where you live. Tom: That makes sense. You know, one of the markets that Roofstock operates in, in Florida and for properties that go through our certification process, we come up with an insurance quote that is an insurance quote. That will be, that is bindable, right? That a company is willing to agree to. But oftentimes we found that Florida, the national provider that we use is rates are a little bit higher than some of the local ones. So I guess in markets work and be a little bit more tricky and there's more potential liability on the insurance side really worth going in and getting the local quotes. And even if it's not that tricky, I like that. That's a great point. This goes in very nicely to the next question that Corey from Austin is asking. So, Hey, Roofstock a long time listener. First time caller. I'm about to acquire my third SFR with you guys. Awesome. Congrats Corey. And I'm wondering when is hazard insurance enough versus getting an umbrella policy, a related question that we got from somebody else as well, a good umbrella policy help replace the LLC. And I think kind of the hardest question is, you know, at what point do you start kind of bundling properties into umbrella versus like individual? So Michael this is right in your wheelhouse. What are your thoughts on this? Michael: Yeah, I would say Corey again. Great question. We just recorded a podcast with actually my California attorney and we asked this exact question. So I would say, definitely give that episode of listen. That episode should be released in about two weeks or so, but so again, I'll just share kind of my personal anecdote. When I first started investing in single family homes, there was a couple thousand dollars in cashflow a year coming off each property and to have an LLC in California, it costs $800 a year just simply to have it. So that expense wasn't justified given the amount of cashflow these properties were generating. So I bought three properties prior to opening up an LLC and then put everything, wrapped, everything up, did a quick claim deed and transferred everything to the LLC. Now there's two very distinct camps. There's the pro LLC camp and the no LLC camp. And the pro LLC camp argues that, Hey, if you can bundle everything, put it into a silo and segregate your assets from your personal stuff. That's really great. The no LOC camp argues that you can get that same type of coverage, that same type of asset protection with a high liability insurance policy and an umbrella policy. Who's right, will only be determined once there's a lawsuit. And so it's all comes down to your comfort level, your comfortability, you can get very high liability insurance limits on the underlying policy itself on each specific property policy itself. And couple that with an umbrella policy and umbrella policies are very inexpensive for the amount of coverage that you're getting. And so you've just got to decide for yourself, Hey, how much do I have personally? And how much am I going to be putting at risk with this investment property that will often lead you down the right decision path to what makes the most sense for you? But I think a lot of people really hung up on is, Oh, I need an LLC though, they're pro LLC camp. And they think I need an LLC before I ever start investing. I would say that soften backwards. And I would say focus on getting the property first, making sure that the property is a good fit, then look to see how that LLC plays into the picture. And what's important to note here on this long soapbox rant is that a lot of lenders won't lend to LLCs if they're purchasing single family homes. So have a conversation with your lender, have a conversation with an attorney about what's involved with setting up and maintaining an LLC in your state. And just look to understand what the implications are of having one and have not having one. And then look to make your decision because it's really not a one size fits all approach Michael out. Tom: Well, you know that the benefit of the LLC is you can name it something. Cool. Did you name yourself a cool LLC Michael? Michael: I named… no. I just, well, it's tough because a lot of the cool names are already taken. And so you've got to make sure that it's not a, you know, that name is available. All the cool ones like surfer dude23 was already taken. I was pretty bummed. Tom: Sounds like your AOL chat bot. Michael: That's how I got my inspiration from. Tom: Awesome. Our next question is from front of the show, Bobby from Seattle asks, I've heard of investors making money, buying tax lien. What does this really mean? And is this a viable strategy for investing in real estate? Mark Mr. Tax lien? What are your thoughts there? Mark: Yeah. Right up my alley. Gosh, you've teed up these questions very nicely. I'm going to sound like the smartest guy. Well, here's really what it comes down to a tax lien is, you know, a municipal tax lien means that you owe money to the government. And that's really what when tax liens are purchased, it's typically because somebody didn't pay their County taxes. Right. And what's interesting about tax liens is a tax lien is a municipal tax lien sits in front of any other liens, like a mortgage. Okay. Now, you know, there's a caveat to that. Like federal tax lien, that's a whole nother story, but most properties don't have a federal tax lien if they have delinquent County taxes. So really what happens is every single state has different state statutes of what they're supposed to do with delinquent taxes, right? Because the County needs money to pay for schools, to pay for police officers, to pay for so many more things. So they need that money and they sell off those tax liens just like at the County courthouse. And the person that buys them basically is paying the delinquent taxes on behalf of that homeowner. And in turn, they're going to earn a percentage of interest off of those tax liens. And so when you buy a tax lien, you don't just buy the property, but you're sitting in that first position, even beyond a mortgage. So in the event, let's say the, what they call redemption period. It's typically one, two or three years when that redemption period goes by. And if you're still the tax lien holder, you have the right to foreclose on that property and own the property. So when you used to hear about all these old infomercials about buying properties for pennies on the dollar, I guess they would say that's what the tax lien buying was all about. So what people don't realize is that probably 99.5% of the time, somebody has got to pay off those tax liens. And you can earn anywhere typically between eight to 24% on that investment. And so look at it as almost like buying a note where you're very passively investing in real estate, but the kicker is you may have the ability to foreclose on that property, take ownership and own that property for potentially pennies on the dollar. But again, those stories are the rare ones it's like watching Storage Wars and finding that, you know, old school Bronco sitting in, you know, if the storage unit, you're the guy that bought that yeah. That is made for TV, but it does have, so the tax lien industry, um, it can be safe in some ways, if you're doing your due diligence and really understanding, Hey, if this property takes two years to what they called redeem, or when that redemption period expires, is it going to be in good enough condition where they're still valuing the property? And if you feel comfortable, you can invest knowing they're going to probably get that interest. If not, you could potentially foreclose on that property and own it for very little. Michael: So we should have a new segment on the show called confessional corner. Tom: Yeah. Michael: So I did this, I purchased tax liens, read a book and thought, Oh, this is easy. So I've purchased some tax liens out in Arizona. And the auction is while it was an online auction. And so I did some due diligence and understood, okay, what counties and, and Arizona, what States I should be looking at. So I decided on Arizona. And so I ended up purchasing a bunch. I ended up winning a bunch of these tax lanes and probably 80% of them paid us. And I was like, this is the easiest money I've ever made. This is so awesome. But so what I'm wondering Mark is, so the 20% that haven't paid off, this was probably three, three and a half years ago that I did this. The ones that haven't paid off, I think the redemption period in this County, Arizona is two years. What should I go do now? Because my understanding is that if I decide to for clothes in order to, for clothes, you need to pay off all the existing liens on the property. And so if someone had purchased the tax liens from four, five and six years prior to me, there are still these existing liens on the property that I would need to pay off in order to foreclose on the property. Is that accurate? Or do you know, what do I do now? Mark: Yeah. So two things I would do. Number one, I would send somebody out there to look at the property. Number two, I would, you know, really understand what the timeline looks like and understand if it's a judicial or administrative state where, you know, when the foreclosure happens, you know, like let's say you can actually file to get the tax deed. You need to know, you know, what all those steps are. And sometimes it's an admitted straight of approach. It's just paperwork. But if you have to go to the judicial approach, it means that you would have to actually have to go before a judge in order to earn those rights and earn the tax deed, where did that person would lose the property? So for you, you just need to understand what positions are out there, where do you fit in? And so a title search would show what other liens are out there. Or you could go to potentially, yeah, I would say run a simple type of report, but also understand the condition of the property because it's something that you're like, man, I do not want that property. I want to I'll even pay my own taxes off. You can get yourself out of that position. If you happen to be the front runner, I would say, or if you happen to be in a position kind of buried in the middle, you may end up getting paid off at somebody ends up foreclosing and taking ownership of that property plus the interest, of course. So I would just understand your position and then if you need to spend some money to go out there and take a look at the property, because there's a chance you may get it. I would know what you actually are holding the golden ticket to. Michael: Sure, sure. And let's just say as a thought experiment that I'm in first position that they paid their taxes prior to when I purchased them. And, you know, I decided that I don't want to foreclose on the property. It's a mess. It's something I don't want to get involved in. Is there any risk to me having paid those taxes and kind of being that first position lien holder that I need to then do something or pay additional fees as a result of being that first lien holder? Mark: Yeah. Every state's going to be so different. I mean, these are state statues written back in like, you know, this 17, 18, 19 hundreds, like early, like way back when, so.. Michael: Four score and seven years ago.. Mark: It doesn't hurt to pick up and review on your own and really get to know, Hey, if I am the first lien holder, you know, and there's no other mortgages and this thing is clear to go, you know, what do I need to do? Do I want this? So there's a lot of questions that come with it. But I mean, if 80% of paid off, you'll probably find as it gets closer to actually redeeming during that period where you could potentially take the property, most of the delinquencies get paid off. Right, right. At the very end. So it may turn into that 99% kind of statistic that I gave you before. So there's a lot of who knows at this point, but as you get closer, I would definitely want to know more information about, you know, what the condition is, where you fit in, in the front runner position. And it could be something that you could be that a half a percentile that ends up really good. So you never know. I mean, the story I used to tell people was we ended up doing a tax lien in Hilton Head, South Carolina. And it was a condo sitting on the water. I think we had 35 into it with this private equity firm and the kids that they have just lost a father who owned the property. None of them wanted to pay the property taxes there. They were just had a fight. Well, it went all the way through the foreclosure process. We ended up with a tax deed to that property and had 50, I think it was 58,000 into a $700,000 property. It happens, but don't expect it to happen. Michael: Right, right, right. I think there's a, I just had a couple aha moments. And the vast majority of them is that I had no idea what I was doing and for those listeners, but go get educated. Good. Don't do what I did. Tom: What is it like, ready shoot aim? Michael: That's right. That's right. Yeah. That was a good learning experience. Tom: Gosh, love this tangent right here. All right. Well, we're going to jump into the question. Michael: Great question. Bobby. Tom: Bobby K the man. Last question we have from Jessica out of Boston is how does Roofstock choose their markets and a related question, why is restock not available in all States? Mark, do you wanna take a quick pass at this guy? Mark: Yeah, absolutely. This is a kind of what I work on every day, just for those listeners out there. Uh, you, but Roofstock when we started, they really went to markets with a specific intention and that was around cashflow. Right? That's what most of our investors are always chasing is really quality cashflow. But what we're realizing is that, you know, appreciation may be a different play that other investors are more interested in and, or maybe even a blend of the two. So as Roofstock went to markets from like the st Louis is to the Cleveland's to Memphis and Birmingham, kind of the typical suspects, right? Those are just very highly demanded markets because investors require a certain amount of cash flow. You can get 10% plus cap rates in some of those markets. But what we're trying to do is really balance out different investment strategies for all the different, uh, investors out there. So when it comes to, how do we choose our markets? We want to go to markets where we feel the real estate economy is definitely going in the right direction. That not only from a macro level, but also from a micro level, that there's really healthy local markets where the risk and return really feels good from, you know, the areas compared to what you can make in that cashflow. But we're also looking at kind of expanding that logic where we're saying, Hey, let's just make sure we're going to markets where there's enough supply. Right. And there's some affordability because certain markets like here in Dallas, I mean, it's gotten really tight. And so there's just not much supply that we can source because there's so many other exit strategies that I would say are more geared towards owner occupants, right? So fix and flippers are sourcing properties and going towards those exit strategies rather than investors, because they think they can get more money. So being a marketplace, we have to really grant it, we have to react to the market and let it ebb and flow where we're trying to be the guys in the middle where supply and demand meet. Right? So that just goes to the whole, whole logic of it. You know, we're not available in every state, you know, Washington state, Oregon, California. Those are very much appreciation markets and you're just not going to have the same level of demand from investors. So we're always trying to cater to our network, but please reach out, be vocal, tell us where you want to go. And it really is a conversation point between what Tom and I talk about all the time. And he gives me a lot of feedback where the demand is. So if there's enough demand, the markets make sense. Like we're about to open up and De Moines, Iowa in Richmond, Virginia. And we feel really good about these markets. They're kind of economics. Those are areas we want to go to, but we want to hear your feedback so we can open up in more States and cities like that. Tom: Love it, love it. And opening up new markets all the time. Excellent guys. Well, thanks for the questions that everybody's been sending in and please continue to fire them in and don't be shy on how either advanced or how novice the question is. We're going to bring in the right folks. If we can't answer the questions ourselves, I think that's a fun thing about this network that we have. And Mark, thank you very much for joining us today. Mark: Thanks for having me on always a pleasure. Michael: No, the pleasure is ours. Tom: The pleasure is ours. Storage Wars. That was such a great show. My favorite part is when they, that one guy Darren. Yeah. And he's like, Oh, that's a $3 bill or, Oh, that's a $50 bill or a nonsensical bill. $50 is a real bill, like a $45 bill. Anyways. Okay. Enough of that. All right. Mark: I'll leave you with a good story if you wouldn't mind. So talking about storage Wars. So I had to go to auction school to become an auctioneer, right? And they actually have an auction school where you show up and for eight, you have to do 80 hours in Texas. And for two hours every day, we had to do tongue twisters and we had to do, you know, counting up, counting down five, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30 to 35, 40. What do you do around the rough and rugged rock, the ragged rascal ran, right. And do it all day long. And I'm just scratching my head like, teacher, I'm going to be an online option that really make a difference. So funny enough, but they always did a charity auction at the very end. And guess who walks into my auction school in Texas? It was Walt Cade of Texas storage Wars. I'm like, get out. This is, this is like living in a weird world, but the auctioneer world is really interesting, different real estate to watches, to tobacco and cattle. And there's all kinds of things you learn. But again, I kind of raised my hand, like I'm just here for the real estate online course. We don't have that. Get back to your tongue twisters Mark. So if you really want to talk about some funny stories, it's a great world. Auctioneer's are fun, but you know, there's kind of a new regime coming through more online auctions, which is a fun way for people to kind of get comfortable with, you know, buying from anywhere in the world. Very much like what Roofstock is doing with our marketplace. So yeah. Full of fun stories, but had to share that one. Tom: Awesome. Michael: So cool. Michael: Alrighty, everybody. That was our episode for today. Thank you so much for listening in a big, big, big, thank you to Mark Woodling. Always a real pleasure to have him on as always. If you liked the episode, feel free to give us a rating or review, or even if you didn't like the episode. No, don't give us a rating review if you didn't like the episode, wherever you listen to your podcasts, we look forward to seeing you on the next one. Tom: Happy investing. Michael: Happy investing.

tv love california texas washington west arizona seattle market dc new jersey oregon utah iowa llc states cleveland south carolina wars midwest birmingham richmond scaling cpa tax mls sites tvs aol selections bronco ask us anything auctions llcs fannie mae foreclosure wholesalers hilton head reo loc auctioneer sfr walnut creek storage wars countrywide markit roofstock tom schneider michael yeah mark yeah michael so michael mark michael albaum tom yeah mark hey xome michael sure mark thanks michael hey hubzu mark absolutely remote real estate investor

Top 5 Ways for Buyers to Gain Instant Equity

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 23, 2020 35:43

Inspired by a video course that we had to re-record this week, we are going to discuss the top five ways buyers can gain instant equity. Tune in to hear these great tips on how to maximize your business. Topics: Why an Ecommerce business may be undervalued. What makes it hard to identify gross profit trends. Rewards vs. cash back credit cards. The less-than-obvious ways to gain instant equity. Examples include: Renegotiating costs. Net 90 terms. The China Magic Mastermind's methods and why they're so effective. Transcription: Mark: So, Joe, recently Chris Moore, our chief marketing officer, came up here to the Twin Cities. He rented an Air B&B and he and I sat down for a day to record or rerecord the course that I recently put together on how to sell a business for six, seven, or eight-figures. I got to tell you, I'm not a fan at all of recording things at least in video format. I know you're a natural at it. You used to do commercials; direct commercials? Joe: I wouldn't say I'm a natural. I've seen you and I've seen me and I think you do a great job. Mark: Well, that's very political of you. But you know something during the course that I wanted to get across because I was going through some of the tips that we've talked about for sellers about how to maximize the value of their business and one of the points I wanted to make is that a lot of maximizing the value of your business isn't so much taking an accounting trick and it becomes magically more valuable. It's more about not artificially or accidentally discounting your business because you just don't know what you're doing, right? Or you don't know how to run the right financials or you don't know how to do an add-back calculation. Well, on the buy-side; this is two sides of the same coin. On the sell-side we want to make sure that we aren't artificially discounting our businesses and that we're taking advantage of some of the really natural, low hanging fruit that we can do to make sure that that we're getting full value or capturing full value for the business. But on the buy-side sometimes there are opportunities when somebody doesn't want to put in the work, for example, to switch from accrual to cash, which we've had. Some people say it's just not worth it for me to take that time. So today, I think you and I, we're going to talk; I mean I'm going to bug you and pester you with questions and grill you as much as I can about ways that the buyers can add some instant equity, get that instant jump in valuation by buying a business with certain characteristics. Joe: Yeah, and then for sellers it's important to listen too because if you ever think you're going to sell your business either through Quiet Light or on your own; especially on your own, you need to pay attention to this because you don't want to be taken advantage from by the buyers that are listening to this. If they're listening now, they're going to learn some things and potentially buy your side, they're going to learn some things that if you hang up halfway through you're not going to understand and make sure you're maximizing the value your business. And every time I say that I feel a little wonky. Really what you're doing is you're not jacking up the seller's discretionary earnings, you're actually getting what you deserve. You're learning to understand the true value of your business, which is your most valuable asset more than likely so pay attention to it and make sure you understand what they are. So it is just Mark and I on this podcast and we're going to talk about maybe five things that buyers can do to gain instant equity in their business. And the first one that; and this is me thinking if I'm out there buying on my own, which I'm not given the role that I'm in, but if I were, this is what I would do. And the first thing I would do is look for businesses that are presented for sale on a cash basis. Now, it has to be a business that's growing rapidly, and let's talk specifics here. This is a physical product e-commerce business that's growing rapidly and using cash accounting. I don't love accounting either, folks, but it's one of the most important things to pay attention to when you are buying a business or when you're selling your business. If the business is growing rapidly, you're trying desperately to keep up with inventory needs. And in doing that, if you're buying it on a cash basis, you are continually taking money out of the business to support the ever-increasing need for inventory volumes. So you may be spending $10,000 this month on inventory but you haven't sold it yet. That's going to depress your net income or your seller's discretionary earnings. It gets to a point where; I sold a business recently, it was Brian and Janine, they were on the podcast three or four weeks ago. They went from something like 270,000 in revenue the first year to 1.5 million the second year to 5 million the third year. And Janine kept writing bigger and bigger checks, they're actually wiring more and more money to China and kept saying to Brian where's our money? We keep giving everybody else our money, but we're not taking any. And it was because rapidly growing businesses like theirs was such a cash requiring machine. So if I'm a buyer, I'm going to look for a business that's growing rapidly and is presented on a cash basis because discretionary earnings is going to be artificially depressed, it's not the right way to present a business for sale. On the flip side, if a broker is listing a business for sale with declining revenue on a cash basis you're overpaying for the business because it's not requiring as much cash to buy inventory because it's less and less inventory. It's just the opposite. So you've got to look for businesses if it's presented properly, is going to be accrual accounting, if it's not presented properly they're doing cash. You could gain instant equity by buying the business on a cash basis. Mark: Yeah, I'll take on it and say absolutely, a quickly growing business in the e-commerce world on cash basis is typically going to be undervalued for the reasons that you stated. But the two warnings that I would give on this would be one that you already said, and that is if it's declining and particularly if the seller or the business owner has decided to take their foot off the gas; they're not looking for more inventory. The inventory that they're having in stock is either aging out or running out and they're not reordering. Now, you're going to have an artificially high gross profit on this business because they're not buying more inventory. The second thing that I would just caution people against is on a cash basis, you can't really identify what the gross profit trends are, except by taking some really large timelines and using that. So take a look at unit cos1ts at that point to see what the trends are if you can get that level of detail just to make sure you're not in a business where gross profit margins are getting squeezed by huge amounts because that'll be the other risk and the other major downside to cash basis accounting is you just don't get the same insights into your gross profit margins. Joe: We're going at math here. I know it's nauseating but real quick math folks, I've just seen a jump in discretionary earnings flipping from cash to accrual by $70,000, $100,000 in some cases. And so the instant equity here is if you're buying a business that you find some inexperienced person selling on a cash basis and it's depressed by even just $20,000 because it's cash instead of accrual and you're buying it three times, you've just gained $60,000 in instant equity in the business; simple math. Mark: Yeah, and I think one of the objections to this and I've heard this from buyers that are evaluating e-commerce is okay that's great but why would I want to buy a business with paper profits and really no cash? The cash basis is the amount of cash coming in and out of the business. And you brought it up Joe that you were speaking to somebody recently that said where is my money? I keep giving everybody else my money. But what I think a lot of sellers miss and I would encourage sellers to think about this as they're growing and evaluating an exit and for buyers as well, as far as what's a good entry point is that there does seem to be a transition point in the growth of many of these businesses where they stop becoming these cash hungry machines and the growth levels off a little bit and you get to a certain size where even if you are still growing and still investing disproportionately in inventory, you start seeing some of that money accumulate in a bank account. It does happen. There is a pivot point. Have you seen that as well Joe? Joe: Oh, yeah. There's no question about it. I've said way too many times that when you're working the hardest in your business, you're usually making the least amount of money. It's usually in those early years. At some point; I guess it's that tipping point, the business starts to generate more cash flow. It's not as much of a cash sock because the growth has actually slowed, strangely enough. But it's bigger. It's larger, and you're able to take more cash out of it. I definitely see that change. I want to move on to number two here, Mark. The number one thing that I see people miss when selling or buying a business is cashback money from credit cards. And I think the reason they miss it is because they think they're being sneaky and cheating on their taxes so they don't want to talk about it. And the reality is that the IRS doesn't know how to tax cashback from credit cards. It's actually a discount on your advertising. So you spend a million dollars, you get one and a half back on your cashback credit card. You've got $15,000 there that you're sliding with your personal account that's not on your P&Ls. That's $15,000 owner benefit cash in your pocket and you're thinking I don't want the IRS to know. The IRS doesn't know how to tax it, first of all. And I've talked to my CPA about this. Most people will miss that. So there's $15,000 that winds up in your bank account. That's real money somehow. Mark, is that an add back or an owner benefit and should be on the P&L in your opinion? Mark: Absolutely. Joe: Right. Most people don't put it on a P&L and that's okay because the IRS don't know how to tax it anyway. But when you sell your business or buyers when you're buying a business, look at the advertising spending. I talked to someone the other day. They were spending about two million dollars a year on advertising. They had an agency that was doing it for them. It was all Amazon FBA stuff. And I said, well, what kind of card are you using; how are you paying for that spending? They're like, what do you mean? I'm like well, how are you paying for advertising? We just let Amazon deduct it from our account every couple of weeks. Once we get to a certain level, they just deduct it from our deposits. I'm like that's very kind of you to let Amazon do that but what you're missing out there is two million dollars in ad spend, 1½% cashback, $30,000 cash to your bank account. So you've just lost $30,000 a year. Then you sell your business; this was a sizable business with incredible growth, probably I'd call it a simple math three-time multiple or might be four but now you're at $90,000 to $120,000 lost value on the business. So buyers look for these types of things. If you are buying a business and they're spending lots of money on advertising, even if it's a million dollars in advertising, you're buying it at 1½% percent cashback. That's $15,000 cash in your pocket times a three-time multiple so it's $45,000 instant equity. So between number one and number two, there's about $100,000 in instant equity depending on the size of the business. This one is the one that is absolutely most missed. Mark, you and I just switched company-wide; we just switched to American Express gold cards because we get four times the points of $250,000. We use points and rewards instead of cashback because we go to events and we travel and it's going to help pay for the team to travel. Mark: We don't go to events and travel right now. Joe: That's right. We're recording on June 16th, 2020. We're absolutely not going to any events. But there's often the question about, well, what about the rewards? How do I calculate the rewards? I love doing that instead. And I've talked to Jeremy from eCommerceFuel, that's what he does. And he thinks it's funny that people take the cashback because you can get a lot more value with rewards. But there's a conversion to the rewards, right? I think with American Express it's 1%, right? Mark: Mm-hm. Joe: So you might lose some if you do the conversion to other rewards. You can still accumulate the rewards on a monthly basis and do the conversion calculator of 1%. What you cannot do is say, well, I upgraded my plane ticket to international first class. The cost of that is $10,000 therefore I want a $10,000 add back. You can't do that. But you can do the cashback amount conversion. So for buyers, yeah, absolutely if you're looking for a business to buy and they're not utilizing the cashback benefit or the reward benefit and converting it, you can find some instant equity in there as well. Mark: Yeah. I want to speak to my people real quick. My people are the people that don't like details and don't like to sit there and calculate your tip down to the penny. That's my type of person. That's who I am. I can't be bothered for that. When I go to dinner with a bunch of friends, I'd rather pick up the tab than sit there for five minutes trying to figure out who owes what down to the exact amount. And so for a long time, this whole discussion of cashback and points and everything was just like, forget it, I don't want to be bothered with this. I mean, we're talking 1%, 2%, who really cares? But here's the thing about this, there are people who delve into this and understand the conversion ratios and they understand how to game this system and maximize it out and they do think of it just as a game. And then there are other people who are going to take advantage of it to some extent. And what I would just say is this, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good here. If you're the type of person who has bigger fish to fry and have bigger things to do, this is really low hanging fruit and if you don't get the absolute perfect optimized setup with cashback, that's okay. But from a buying standpoint and what we're talking about here; how can you gain instant equity into a business this is one of those areas that you absolutely can gain instant equity. You can instantly gain extra cash flow for your business as well by just putting something in place, even if it's not perfect, and then you can optimize later. Or you can hire a consultant and you'll pay them some money but the long term is that you'll benefit from it more than you pay them. So if you're one of those people like me, just do it. Don't sit there and get all frustrated by it. Just do something and then refine later on. Joe: Yeah, definitely take advantage of whatever you can there; simple math. I'm with you on the tipping, by the way. I just round it up to 20% and I'd rather pay the bill than figure out who owes what. Let's jump to; I think we're up to number three here. We've given a couple of good options in terms of how buyers can find instant equity, and it's important for sellers to understand that as well so they don't get taken by buyers if they're selling on their own or having an experienced broker. But why anybody would ever go to Quiet Light, anybody but quite if they're listening to us right now it would be confusing for me. But here's one that I've seen recently. One question if you're buying direct or from another firm; if you're a buyer listening to this podcast and you really want to buy from Quiet Light because we do an amazing job putting packages together, building trust, making sure that you're making a good investment and our buyer is getting a fair value and our seller is getting a fair value as well. It's got to be a win for everybody. But in the event that we have not produced enough listings that are going to be a good fit for you, one of the questions you always want to ask is when was the last time you renegotiated cost of goods sold on any of the SKUs, have you done that in the last 12 months in particular? The reason for this is because it's instant equity if they have but did not do an add back adjustment. I guarantee you if you're buying direct from somebody and they're not selling through a broker or a qualified experienced adviser, that there's not going to be an add-back adjustment for that. And here's the simple math, they're selling a thousand units a month on a product that costs $10. They renegotiate that down to $9 but they just did it in the last two months. They're so excited to; yeah, no, absolutely, definitely we renegotiated two months ago and that's why you should buy this business, profits are just that much better. And then they put a period at the end of that sentence. What they're missing is the add-back of the previous 10 months of a thousand units a month or 10,000 units at that dollar savings. So it's another $10,000 that is instant equity to the business. You're buying that business. And the reason is because that expense that was there before that's not; I know this is confusing. There was a dollar expense per unit for 10 months on the P&L times 10,000 units that's not there anymore. That expense is not going to carry forward to you, the buyer of the business. Therefore, it is an add back. So it's a $10,000 instant equity if you ask that question and you see it there. And it's boosting the value of your business when you go to sell. I think it's really important. I think most people don't ask that question. They don't look at it. They focus more on the top line. And what is it that Mike and Dave say from Ecom Crew, revenue is vanity profits are sanity I think. Most people don't focus on the profits. They just talk about how big their business is and how much revenue they did instead of actually focusing on things like renegotiating cost of goods sold. So that is instant equity and it can be found if you're buying a business. It's the work, obviously, that the seller might have done prior but you can always ask about those questions if they've ever renegotiated cost of goods sold or even how often they've gotten on a plane to go visit their manufacturer wherever they are in the world. Mark: Well, again this is something that even if you don't ask, hopefully, shows up in the P&L as well. You should be able to see some of these changes when you get down to some of the granular stuff, assuming that the P&L is good. And the only thing I'll add to that because I think you made a point well, Joe, the only thing I would add, though, is don't look at just the vendors providing products. Take a look at all the vendors that are out there. It can be anything from an accountant or bookkeeper or the person providing the cardboard boxes if you're not using FBA or one of those avenues. There's a lot of vendors for every type of businesses. It's not just the people or the products and there's a lot of places where you can get some of the additional equity, especially if it's not been worked into the overall financial picture used for the valuation at the end of the day. So that's a great tip. The next tip, so that's three, right? We have look for cash-based P&Ls and quickly growing businesses. Two, take a look at companies that either are not using cashback points on credit cards or have not added it into the valuation because that's money that just simply hasn't been captured in the valuation picture. Three, renegotiating costs of goods or negotiated vendor services that are ongoing expenses would be another area where once again that's not captured in the valuation process. The next one would be flying to China if that's where the vendors are or meeting their vendors. And not every vendor is in China. I just had a great call with somebody yesterday; a UK person who found her vendor in the UK and they had a Canadian sister company as well so pretty cool there. But meeting with the vendors in person and taking that opportunity to discuss potential renegotiations, not necessarily on price but that's a natural area to go but also on terms to make the cash flow of these businesses somewhat friendlier. I know oftentimes vendors that have good relationships or long history are willing to offer net 30, net 60, net 90 terms, which can really be a huge relief on a quickly growing business. Joe: You don't take what Mark just said and send an e-mail off to your vendor saying you want net 90 terms. It's not going to work. There's a process to get through that. It's something that anytime I'm talking to buyers they ask me how flexible is your seller on the price? I'm like you know what? I don't know. I determine the price. We agree on it together, but they're never going to tell me their bottom line. Well, do you think they'll accept X? I don't know. What you need to do is get on a good conference call with the seller. Get to know them. Have a good relationship with them. Have the call end with them going man, I love that person. I just really want them to be my buyer. And then you can ask for what you want and at the very least, you'll get a counter. When you ask for something and they don't know who you are and you don't have a relationship, the answer's always going to be no; as simple as that. So that's why you should if you can at any time get on a plane and go visit your vendor face to face; your manufacturer. I have a client right no; they're still my client. They're my friends. I sold their business in January. They bought a business since. I talked to them the other day. They were on their way to Ohio, move driving from Massachusetts to Ohio because they're going to meet the manufacturer of one of the products that they sell. This is talking about getting a plane to go to China more than anything else. There's a couple of podcasts that we've had recently that focus on this specifically. One was Dan from Titan Network talking about how to work with your Chinese manufacturer and renegotiating terms. The reason you do that is, number one for this cost of goods sold, but also because it improves your cash flow. And when you have more cash flow and you do get the terms that Mark just talked about you can spend more money on advertising. And when you can spend more money on advertising you're going to get more cashback so these are all tied together and they're all critically important. One is not more important than the other; all critically important. It's little details but they all add up to a lot. The other one that we had a podcast recently was Athena Severi from China Magic. She's also associated with Titan Network. And she talked about the China Magic trips that they do. Of course, again right now no one is going to China, but it will resume again in 2020 we hope; I'm sorry 2021, where you're able to get on the plane and go and meet with the vendors directly, get to know them, spend some time with them, do the renegotiation that Dan talked about but with China Magic, they're talking about exactly how to work with your vendors and how to communicate with them. And then they have Masterminded events every single night for everybody that's there. They bring experts on the trip to talk about how to work with your vendors and get the most out of the trip including the cultural aspect but in terms of building that relationship. So you want to do what you can to build the strongest relationship possible with your vendor, get to know them, have them really understand what a strong entrepreneur you are. As a buyer, this is after you buy the business, of course, what you bring to the table and how important terms are so that it increases your cash flow and you can spend more money and buy more products. It's all tied together. You can't do it right now, of course so, Mark, do you think any of this is happening via Zoom and Skype and that a lot more of this is happening that way? Mark: Well absolutely. And look I mean everybody has the same motivation and that is growth. So I would say obviously you need to make that personal connection and you want to make a personal connection with your vendors. That's going to help you, in the long run, to know that you can trust them and they can trust you. But you can also pitch growth. I had a client who negotiated these types of terms and was able to explain some of the growth that they had in mind; this expansion to Europe that they were going to be rolling out or other growth plans, new products that we know are going to be a hit and we want to place them with you Mr. Vendor; the vendor that's been working with us and in manufacturing our product. We want to place this with you and here's what we need to be able to get there. We really want to invest heavily in this so that we have a good supply going on in this area so it plays in their benefit as well. And right now Zoom or Google Hangouts or whatever you want to use for your video service, it's there. People know it. So making those connection is absolutely huge. Joe: Yes, so that's tip number four for instant equity and it's more about renegotiating cost of goods sold and the terms on your payments that will increase your cash flow. This business is growing rapidly, cash flow is tight and squeezed and that cash flow will help you spend more money, which ties back to tip number two, which gives you more cashback on your credit cards. Number five is interesting. You touched on something a little earlier, Mark, which was when I talked about renegotiating COGS on number three, you said, go beyond that. Go look at your vendors, look at the services that you're spending money on, the bookkeeping, the accounting, that SaaS product times 10 that you signed up for that you forgot about but they're kindly charging your credit card every month. Trimming the fat is really instant equity. We always ask what type of SaaS products are you using, what are you subscribing to, what's the purpose, and how much is the cost every month? And the reason for that is that a lot of it's just wasted. And sellers will say to me, well, I don't use that can I just make that an add back? I'm like yeah when you stop paying for it and prove that you haven't used it for a period of time. Buyers can use math and logic here and look at the different services that the seller signs up for. We all try new things, right? I signed up for The Monthly Fool and I'm not cutting on The Monthly Fool; this is more me. They offer great services. I paid for it. It's an annual renewal. I'm going to forget about it. Except that I put a reminder on my Google Calendar next April to cancel it. I signed up for it two months ago. I get the e-mails. I don't have time to look at them. I'm not going to be that investor that's going to make decisions on my own. I have an advisor for that. But if I'm not careful, I will add up 10 or 15 of those things. I try every year, often without great success, to go through my SaaS subscriptions on a personal level. We do it occasionally, Mark, on a business level and just sort of trim that fat a little bit. I think that's a good way to gain instant equity. It's not a huge instant equity, but it does add up. Every little bit of this adds up. Can you think of any other areas where you trim some fat? Mark: There's a lot of these little areas and you kind of have to be creative in looking for them and not discounting any expense category as being too small. So, for example, if you're selling overseas, internationally, international transfer rates and what are you getting there? What are your merchant processing or transfer rates? And there are a lot of services out there that are designed specifically to maximize that for you and reduce some of those expenses. Secondly, understanding Amazon's FBA storage fees and the various fees related to that or processing, sometimes you can gain a lot of instant equity by using an Amazon FBA pre-processing center and other 3PLs that will work in that regard. You talked about canceling different SaaS subscriptions. The other element I'd look at would be wasteful ad spend. We all have it. And look, how many times are you going in and checking on this? Now you might say, well I have an agency. I guarantee that agency is not looking after the account as closely as you might want them to do so. So I would say the advertising spend and last I would say would be just taking a look at the fat with SKUs and ASINs on the account. I have worked with several buyers who have looked at larger ASIN companies with a larger library of products and said the first thing we're going to do to grow this business is get rid of 20% of the products because we know that these products are making very, very marginal gains. If they're taking up cash flow for adding new inventory, they're taking up cash flow for advertising that isn't really paying out. And we can put that effort into either new lower hanging fruit on new products that will have better margins and really focus on those instead. So number five is kind of this grab all and it's don't count any category on your P&L as being too small to really look at and optimize. Keep in mind, when we're talking about adding instant equity, we're talking about the value of your business so we're talking about a multiple of this. You add $10,000 in earnings by removing $10,000 in expenses you're adding $30,000 to $40,000 of valuation to the company itself. And oftentimes with these businesses that are doing one million, five million, 10 million, 20 million in revenue, these small changes, these small percentages that we're shaving off here and there translate to quite a bit on the bottom line for you. So kind of a catch-all. That's a cop-out, right Joe? It's a cop-out on our part. Joe: It's not. It's real dollars. The trimming advertising spending we are really focusing in Mark, that's really, really hard because you've got an expert telling you that you need to spend all this money on long-tail keywords that over the course of 36 months, you're going to make a profit on that keyword. It's just going to take 36 months to make a profit and it's agonizing. We had Rocky Kliburn on the podcast. A tough name like Rocky he bought a jewelry business, right? Low cost, lightweight product, shipping thousands of them every single month. The first thing Rocky did was renegotiated the shipping rates. Actually, he changed shipping companies. I think he switched from FedEx to USPS and got the packaging for free and shipped it off. Essentially, he saved about $2 a unit. It's Rocky Kliburn he was on the Quiet Light podcast at least a year ago. But Rocky ships, 2,000 or 3,000 units a month times $2 we're talking about $75,000 a year in savings instant equity. That is simple math, simple logic. I would focus on all of those things first. The advertising thing is critically important but we've talked about my story when I got mad at American Express because they back in the last economic downturn; I think we're going to have a pretty big one here coming up but my average spending went up. I was spending 60,000 a month on PPC and they said, oh, we're going to freeze your account to pay off your balance because your average is higher than the last three months. Are you kidding me? And so I went in and I slashed advertising because I was mad at America Express. I'm like I'm going to show them. I didn't do it very wisely. There are wise ways to do stuff like that. So you remove the emotion. And that's why I always talk about math and logic is because of emotion. Emotion gets us up in the morning, as an entrepreneur, we get excited about our business but with these little details, all these five ways to gain instant equity as a buyer in your business really requires a lot of math and logic. So focus on those and if you're a seller and you've gotten all the way through this and listening don't let somebody take advantage of you because you didn't pay attention to these little details. They all weave together. They all are tiny. As Mark talked about in tipping what is it? The details are for the greater good; I forgot exactly what you said, but pay attention to all of it at times. Don't get so ingrained in it that you get lost completely on it for a thousand dollars a year. But if you can add up those numbers and multiply it times three or four, you will find more value in your business that you do deserve. And buyers, you're going to get some instant equity that's going to make a big difference in terms of buying your business. Mark: And you are like about all five of these tips show? None of them require that you grow the revenues. None of these require that you just magically grow the business. Because we all want to have a better ROI with our acquisitions, that's the entire reason that we do these things. It's to get a return on our investment and maximize that return on investment just like with a website and conversion rate optimization services, which is a great way to grow revenues if you have a traditional website, is really focus on CRO. This is just optimizing the financial picture. That's really all it is. And look for those of you on YouTube, if I were to have my camera go around my office, what you would see is just a lot of little clutter that's kind of built up over the years that I've grown comfortable with. And I think with businesses, you have to do the house cleaning. You said that we do it once in a while with Quiet Light Brokerage in our SaaS subscriptions. There are areas to optimize businesses all the time, but you kind of lose sight of that when you own a business over time. You lose sight of it because you focus on the big picture. Well, as somebody acquiring a business, it's a great time to clean house, get rid of some of that wasteful spend, optimize some of those terms, and without growing revenues, at all, you can buy a business for 3x and get an effective multiple lower than that by a significant margin at the end of the day. So I love these tips. I love the fact that we're focusing on this topic as far as how to grow a business without changing the revenue picture at all. Joe: It's a great way to sum it up, folks. Obviously, Mark and I didn't have a guest here, so we've responded to some of your requests that Mark and I talk about some of these things in more detail ourselves. If you have any topics that you want us to talk about, please shoot an email to either of us; mark@quietlightbrokerage.com, joe@quietlightbrokerage.com or if you have a guest or you think you can contribute to the podcast, either as a seller, a buyer, or talking about some of your experiences or somebody that could help other listeners or the audience reach out to us. We're happy to help. Thanks for all the feedback on the podcast and the good reviews. Resources: Quiet Light Podcast@quietlightbrokerage.com

amazon europe china uk canadian zoom chinese ohio massachusetts pl roi skype ecommerce emotion buyers saas cpa irs rewards fedex american express usps cro twin cities ppc vendor google hangouts amazon fba google calendar pls trimming fba skus chris moore cogs asin renegotiating 3pls air b b asins quiet light brokerage quiet light joe it mark yeah joe you mark well joe yeah ecommercefuel joe so instant equity ecom crew mark absolutely

Selling Your Online Business at the Right Time With Serial Entrepreneur David Wolf

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 30, 2020 36:06

Today, we talk with Jason Yelowitz and his client, David Wolf. David could best be described as a “serial entrepreneur”. We discuss the sale of David's business and Jason's role therein. Tune in to hear our discussion about David's successful sale, knowing when it's the right time to sell, and business in the time of the CoronaVirus. Episode Highlights The efficiency of the marketplace. Why cash is king. Incentives for having payroll employees. Why Dave decided to sell. Knowing when it's right to sell. Is selling at a loss the wrong move? If the pandemic has slowed down or changed deals. Is this a good market for first time buyers? How to keep your business stocked and afloat during the pandemic. Transcription Mark: All right this week we don't have Joe with us. We have Jason Yellowitz with us because Jason had one of his previous clients, Dave Wolf, on the podcast to talk about the sale of his business and some of the lessons and looking back on how that sale went. I always find these conversations interesting because after you sell a business, you have the chance to finally be somewhat introspective into what that process was like and maybe what you would do differently. Jason, I know you have Dave Wolf on who you work with for quite a while. You guys had I think two different LOIs that you had to work through in order to get to a closing. How did that conversation go? Jason: Yeah, it was really interesting to catch up with Dave. We got his business sold. I want to say it was around August of 2019, so it's been a while. He feels happy that it was sold. It was a very; at least to me it looked like a very good business. It had a general manager in place that was running the day to day. In his case, it really wasn't taking up his time but there's always that bit of mental focus that you can't let go of. And Dave has his fingers in so many different businesses that I think for him he needed to let up on the mental focus and then I think also he reallocated some of the capital. He really ends up buying a fair number of distressed kind of assets and for that kind of thing, you need cash in your pocket typically. Mark: Yeah, I know. Absolutely. I know you guys went through two different offers on this and I'm sure you'll get into that a little bit on the podcast. Did you guys discuss what happened with that first one that didn't go through? Jason: I don't know if you got that into it on the podcast, but it is an interesting sort of lesson for potential sellers. When we had first listed the business, we got multiple offers. And like most people, the seller gravitated towards the one that had the highest headline price. The challenge that sellers should remember is the market is pretty efficient. A lot of times if someone is bidding more than others, the reason they're doing it is because they're already aware that they are less likely to get the financing necessary to close the deal, and therefore they're willing to bid it up a little bit. Whereas someone that comes in in the middle of the pack might have a much higher chance of closing, but they know it and they're not going to pay up as much. So what it comes down to I think is don't get wooed simply by the headline number. You have to think of it holistically if you're a seller of what's most important to me; hitting a certain dollar amount or walking away versus a higher likelihood of closing. And there's not a right or wrong answer but the lesson is, don't deceive yourself into thinking you can have it all. There's usually some sort of tradeoff. Mark: Absolutely. Now the market is strikingly honest. It's always very, very honest, very direct, and you can't really fool it so I think that's a good lesson. Well, let's get into the episode and I can't wait to listen to this one. Jason: Hey everybody, this is Jason Yellowitz from Quiet Light Brokerage and for today's Quiet Light podcast, our special guest is David Wolfe. David is a serial entrepreneur. He's got his hands in all sorts of businesses. And it was probably about six months ago that I represented him in the sale of an online e-commerce business he had. Dave, welcome, how are you doing? Dave: Hey Jason, how are you doing? I'm pretty good. Jason: Good. So are you sitting there in some tropical location, I can see palm trees blowing in the background. Dave: I wish. I wish I was. Unfortunately, it's just a cool background trick for Zoom video because I'm sitting at my house quarantined like everybody else. Jason: Yeah, well, you mentioned quarantine. Obviously, we are in the heart of the COVID-19 coronavirus situation so if you don't mind, maybe you can just tell viewers just quickly what are the businesses that you're running and what impacts positive, negative, neutral have you seen from the coronavirus? Dave: Well there's definitely a lopsided negative for this; for what we're dealing with right now. I'm in several different industries. So we are in some direct to consumer automotive space online. I have recently, after the purchase that you represented for, I got into some brick and mortar stuff doing fencing installation and some manufacturing of fencing products; vinyl privacy fence. And then we're also in real estate lending and a few other places. And it's pretty drastic across all industries. From what I can tell the online businesses are faring just immensely better than just about anything else. So some of the brick and mortars, we're dealing with a; when I get off this call, I've got to deal with one of my managers needs to self-quarantine. So he's showing symptoms. He's not in a terrible situation. But now we're looking at we're already planning on going down to a minimal staff while this was blowing over. And so now we've got to see okay well, now it's zero because we can't have him at the shop at all. So these are just normal things. On the plus side, I think as most people I've talked to; as I'm sure you have a lot of different business owners in a lot of different industries just because of what I do. And because of the people that weren't in a good position, there is, unfortunately, going to be some business fatalities from this. I talked to a bankruptcy attorney the other day that was representing me in purchasing some assets and he was just the ground is already starting to rumble with the volume of business that's going to be occurring from that. And so I think there's going to be a lot of opportunities for people that; everything is going to work itself out but the reality is if you know how to run a business if you have sound principles in operating businesses, there is going to be a lot of opportunities. It's going to totally switch from a seller's market to a buyer's market. It was basically overnight I feel like. I think you would agree when you were working with me we had talked about it. For the most part, it's kind of a seller's market. There's a lot of capital out there. It's easy to get. And now we had; the institutional lenders aren't even lending on in our hard money lending business, which would be considered about us. We've dabbled and had conversations about that space. It's a very secure asset. Even they're holding off on buying more assets. So what that tells me is cash is king, right? So if you have money to buy a business and I would say you have the bandwidth and you can afford to wait, you don't need the cash flow right away, I think there's going to be some unbelievable opportunities in the next few months. Jason: Okay, that's a pretty interesting perspective. From our end what we've seen is the economic; obviously, there's the human and health toll. And I feel sorry; I've got a lot of empathy for your manager who is showing symptoms. On our end what we're seeing is the economic impact is really hitting different businesses differently. Some of them are way down. Others are way up. We've got a number of online businesses where their sales literally doubled versus the previous year in the past 12 months. What's not clear is whether it's a temporary blip or if there is long term enduring changes in customer behavior. For instance, I've got a client who sells a security device on the internet. His sales have doubled and his theory is more people are staying home and they want to feel safe at home. And without a crystal ball, that sounds as plausible to me as anything. So let me ask you this question. You mentioned that you believe there's going to be some golden opportunities for buyers, especially cash buyers. I think as of about an hour ago, I read a lot of headlines that Congress and the president were very close to passing a historic stimulus bill. And my understanding is that's inaudible[00:09:56.6] to fund a lot of money to the Small Business Administration. Do you think that that money will get to people that want to buy businesses or is it mostly going to be used to shore up existing businesses or do you have no opinion? Dave: Well, one of the things I think is going to happen. I think that you're going to see and I guess you can't quote me on this, but you're recording this so I guess you're going to. So normally and you think; I don't know if you've had this conversation, but typically the kind of par for the course for purchases of at least smaller businesses is an asset purchase agreement where you wipe out and start again. Well, there might be some people willing to take on some of the risks of a previous business if it means that by having the established business in place all of a sudden it makes it tremendously easier to be able to get capital from some of the pipelines that's going to be coming through. I mean, I think they're probably just going to be throwing; it's either they're going to be difficult to get because it gets bogged down in bureaucracy and that's going to be a disaster for the country or it's going to be they're just writing checks and throwing money at people that have a business and primarily a business with payroll employees. I guess that's one of the things that we've kind of; a lot of company shy away from that and try to stay lean and online. But there's going to be a lot more incentives for having a payroll more than likely. Jason: Yeah, that's what it sounds like. It sounds like most of the incidents are tied to maintaining a payroll. So maybe we can; let's go back in time six months, you had sold a business, what month did we close; was it October? Dave: August is when we closed; very end of August I think. Jason: What was going through your mind at the time? Why did you choose to sell and are you happy that you made the decision that you did? Dave: Yeah, well, so I definitely am very happy that I made the decision I did. I wish I would have just had all the money sitting at a bank account. But like an entrepreneur, we put a lot of it back to work afterwards. But, yeah I'm very happy that we sold. We would just kind of look at it as I wasn't focused 100% on that business and I knew that there was some opportunity in it but I needed somebody that looked at it the way that I did when I bought it five years before that could take it to how do I 3x this business and it was. It was a solid business. And I knew it was because you have had several side conversations with me where I was like do I really want to let this go? And in talking with them that business is one that's kind of about where it was, they haven't really been too badly negatively affected by the issues that we're dealing with right now even after a slowdown, which is good for them. But it allowed me to free up my time and focus on new things and kind of you had said like I was able to find plenty of things to focus on to grow. And I was reinvigorated by having that newness to it again where I was kind of tired. It wasn't that there's anything necessarily fundamentally wrong with that business it's just that I was seeing opportunities or make investments to grow it and it just didn't excite me. I wasn't doing it. I wasn't pushing like I was. And so a new owner came in and he has that same; it's new to him so he's making changes and making moves and improving the business and I think they're doing a good job. And I'm taking that renewed energy and I'm putting it toward something totally new and so I think that's a real win. So I'm definitely happy. I have no remorse for selling the business whatsoever. Jason: That's a really interesting point that you bring up, because at this point I've been brokering for 10 years and what I've acknowledged is a lot of times when I meet a seller, their first instinct is how do I get the absolute most money out of the business? And the obvious answer is grow it to its utmost potential and then that'll translate into cash flows and you'll get a multiple on those increased cash flows. The reality I find is usually when people want to sell it's not specifically for the cashout. The cash out most people consider that's the fair market value of what their business is worth today. So the decision comes down a lot more to personal things. Most of my sellers, there's a personal reason; marriage, divorce, buying a house, I have to move, I have to support my in-laws, anything like that. And then on the business front, it usually boils down to some version of what you just said, which is I know how to grow this business I just find that I knew how to grow it six months ago and I didn't. Clearly, I'm lacking the motivation and the sort of excitement that comes from new business ownership so maybe I'll hand it off to someone else who's got that level of motivation and excitement. So the way I think of it is each party takes the business to whatever is the highest level while counterbalancing all the other things going on in their life and how much attention they can put to one versus the other. What would you recommend to someone who wants to sell their business now? We are probably at a peak uncertainty. We don't know if the coronavirus is going to infect millions or hundreds of thousands in the US. We don't know if it's going to make another round around the globe. I mean, the truth is, we just don't know. What we do know with some confidence is the central bank and the US government is putting a lot of firepower into trying to keep the economy going. But we don't know what the facts are so what advice would you have for someone who they had their plan, they were going to sell this year in 2020; maybe in June, maybe in October, and then boom, coronavirus. Dave: Well, I mean first it has to be a scenario where you have a willing and able buyer. So if you don't have a buyer already then it's a totally different story. And it really depends on what your consequences are of not selling I would say. I mean I have a lot of assets that I have for sale in the market right now that aren't business-related. And this could totally be; I mean I don't know when you're going to publish this podcast; a week from now this might be irrelevant. But in this very particular instance while we are quarantined in the house and just I'll give you the; I'll let down my guard here so that you guys, you know, it's a this is just for inaudible[00:16:36.4] the house. Jason: They're not quite as nice as the beach. Dave: Yeah, right. I'll go back to the beach. I think that it's obviously not the best time to be in a transition flow for the assets. Now, that doesn't mean that it's a bad time to sell. It depends on what does not selling mean. I mean in some cases, even selling; I mean I'm going to go to the extreme, even if you had to sell at a 50% discount to what your business would be worth a month from now, if not selling is going to cause you even more financial damage because of the foreclosure on a large property or something like that, it may still be worthwhile. It's kind of the lesser of two evils to sell your business. Jason: You know what's interesting to me about your statement was you said a week from now this might all be irrelevant. It was about a week ago we had an all-hands meeting at Quiet Light to say what are we seeing in the market and I was taking the same point of view that you're taking today, which is the values are going to come down. It's going to be all distressed sales. Strangely, in the last week and a half, we have gotten reports of a number; I think we've closed four deals in the last week. None of them were significantly different to my understanding from what the letters of intent said. And as I mentioned in the beginning, we've seen some businesses that have really; their financials have really gone down. And for those sellers, I would say if that's where it is you need to decide for yourself are sales coming back or are they permanently down? If they're permanently down you need to get very real very quick with what the market will bear. If you think they're going to be back, your best bet is to wait until that happens. But then the other side of the coin which Dave this is really surprising, some of the businesses are going off the hook up and those are the ones where I think the sales are closing and the buyers at least it seems; I've gotten this mostly second hand, it seems to me the buyers are feeling that their golden opportunity is that with behavioral changes worldwide more is shifting possibly to online, possibly to certain sectors and they want to get in on that now so that they want to close. So it feels like the market is changing but not necessarily in the static way that many of us would have predicted. Dave: Yeah, I mean a good example is I think that this is going to accelerate the move from traditional brick and mortar businesses to online. People that have never done insta-corridor like Amazon Prime delivery and stuff like that are now ordering their groceries and they're using Zoom video to chat. I mean this accelerated technology, the adaptation or adoption two, three years easy. I mean the stuff that we're seeing, people that have never used that technology are figuring out how to do those kinds of things. They're ordering food, they're doing; so day to day habits that typically don't change that fast have completely changed. I just bought a set of gymnastic rings to work out at home because I usually go to the gym. I like to go to the gym but I can't go to the gym so I was like, all right, well, I'm going to buy something and my routine just totally changed. I might continue with that. I actually really liked that so I'm looking at doing some other upgrades that go along with that. Maybe like putting some bars up in my back yard and doing a couple of other things. So that's happening across the board and I think I'm starting to see some adaptation from businesses as well changing and pivoting. But I think that's pretty simple as if it's just I guess as a buyer or a seller you really have to categorize yourself in are you a person that buys off of past success or are you comfortable being a little more speculative and focusing on future potential speculation like you said in a sense that I had a letter of intent on a project and I saw the sales skyrocket and because of this I'm more than happy to close. It's obvious that the effect of this has already impacted that business in how it's more than likely going to in the short term so you're not really too concerned about that. And then again the same thing I would be very worried if I was in LOI and the business fell off a cliff in the short term or had to shut down entirely and you have to start with a terrible cash flow. And then how is that going to affect the annual cash flows on the back end of that? I think there's ways around that. I personally; I mean like you said, most of these LOIs fast purchase is 30 to 45 days. I don't necessarily think it's a bad time to be shopping for businesses if you don't have to spend all your time focusing on making sure that yours isn't on fire because if you go into LOI you have plenty of time to do the due diligence on before you have to close to make sure that you do, in fact, want to go through with it. Jason: Do you think this is a market for first-time buyers? Let me give you an example. Let's say we've got somebody in their mid-30s who has worked in corporate America for the last 12 years, risen up the ranks to middle management, is not excited about their day job but as of today, they still have it and they want the excitement of being an entrepreneur but they've never thought or run their own business. They've been part of a much bigger organization. Is this the time for them or do you think it's only the time for more experienced buyers with the larger risk appetite, a larger balance sheet, and a better ability to forecast or better confidence in their ability to forecast? Dave: I actually think it's a great time for a first-time buyer to come into the marketplace. I mean in contrary with the right outlook you have to be able to have a long term outlook and you have to have enough cash to be able to weather an uncertain future for at least a few months, if not a little bit more. Because the reality is that if you can get a good value like I think there's going to be opportunities for lower valuations out there which allows somebody to get into a business that couldn't otherwise get into. I mean people say like, oh, well, it's a bad time to buy a business because this stuff is happening but you could get the same business that potentially four months ago would have cost you 1.5 million. If they have cash flow issues and they have a bunch of other stuff, there might be one out there that is 750. It's really the same business. Maybe it needs $60,000 in cash infusion to survive what's going on or $50,000 in additional cash to survive what's going on for the current process but I think for most businesses, this is a temporary liquidity issue and not necessarily a fundamental the business is just completely destroyed. Jason: So going to your example, I mean, you just gave an example of a business where because of what's happening hopefully temporarily; obviously, none of us has a crystal ball. In your example, the business value dropped in half. It kind of seems to me that if you're going to buy in that environment, you have to kind of know yourself. How did I react in 2008 when I saw my 401k drop in half temporarily that kind of thing? It feels like it's more of a risk tolerance question as opposed to a more simple decision. You have to know yourself, how you react, how you're going to sleep at night. Would you agree with that? Dave: Oh yeah, definitely and that's there's so many caveats. I mean, you'd have to pick a much more specific type of business and I would imagine if I've never been an entrepreneur and I've had a regular middle management or upper management job and I'm just going into entrepreneurship this would be; it's going to take some cohunes to pull the trigger on something right now in this environment just because of how many unknowns we're going into as to if it is in quick recovery, what's the long term economic impacts from a potential but hopefully not recession and some of the other things or we could come out booming. I mean, there's going to be a lot of pent up demand for every service after this is done. Jason: I was thinking there's going to be a line around the block at your barbershop. Dave: That's funny, I actually did; I did okay do I get myself a haircut. Yes. Jason: No, it's nice. Dave: I'm going to show you the back. That's a little; but yeah, I actually talked to a salon owner today that I used to do marketing for and I was telling her; she was like what do I do? She's got a good business but I pay everybody and lose 25,000 and then pay my rent when we're closed. And so she's in a much better position. She's got plenty of money laying around and she had no debt. And we had a conversation and I said look, if I was you, you've got these lines of credit that aren't used, the bank may close those down soon because I have talked to several banks; smaller banks that are concerned about not necessarily lending on new businesses, but really more they're concerned about liquidity without this stuff coming down from the federal government where they can't do; I have a loan for a new primary residence I'm doing and the guy was on it's a portfolio loan, which if you guys don't know what that is, it means that the bank is going to hold the note versus handing it off to Fannie or Freddie Mac because my taxes are very difficult to do because I have seven or eight businesses and all these different things. And they said they're not doing any portfolio loans because they have 60 million dollars in commercial credit lines that have not been pulled down yet that if those were pulled, they have to have enough cash to be able to provide that liquidity to those commercial lines and so that's affecting them. Jason: That's pretty interesting. I was looking at online savings accounts yesterday and I was expecting that the interest that they pay savers would have dropped down to a couple of basis points. In fact, it was still up in the 1 ½ to 1.7 range. Dave: That's the reason why. The reason why is because they need depositors because they were concerned about whatever happens. A lot of commercial credit lines were closed in this type of environment because really the banks aren't afraid of everybody; every customer defaulting. What they're afraid of is every customer maxing out their line at once and taking all the liquidity from the bank. So that's one of those issues and so I personally had some large, large lines that I just pulled out all and put it in a checking account. And I'm happy to pay the interest on the short term so that I have access to capital, particularly because I do plan on; even though I'm pretty busy I do plan on being a buyer of business assets here in the next couple of months. I don't know what they're going to be. I just know that if you do have cash, if you were fortunate enough to have money sitting on the sidelines due to just serendipity or it just being the right time and place, there's just going to be some unbelievable opportunities. And I mean you can see them everywhere. I told my friend that was a salon manager; I said, look there's going to be a lot of salons that are closing down or people that just need cash and they pay their day to day bills with that money. Call them and see if you can buy all their color product that they have sitting in their salon that's not being used for like 10 cents on the dollar. Jason: That's a pretty interesting idea. One thing I've heard with those small local service businesses that have been put into a shock so hard is to reach out to their regular customers and ask if you'd be willing to prepay for the next haircut or the next meal. I think there's a lot of community spirit of none of us wants to see the small businesses in our town collapse so many of us who have the means are willing to prepay just as a sign of good faith. So as always, anytime I talk to you it's a fascinating conversation, as kind of that final piece I would love it if you could give a synopsis right now; let's see today is March 25th, so with the caveat that at today's speed of news cycle. Dave: 1:35 PM. Jason: Yeah, anything can change. So at 1:35 PM Eastern on March 25th, 2020 in the middle of the coronavirus I would love to get just your little quick snippet advice for buyers, advice for sellers, and final thoughts. Dave: Okay, so let's start with the advice. I would say, advice for buyers go ahead and go out and look; I would say go out and look as if nothing has happened. Remember that when you're putting LOIs out, you're doing your underwriting afterwards. So if you're looking at a business, you say I like this business in normal times let me go ahead and look at this and place the offer with a condition of you can stipulate obviously always you understand, hey, I'm kind of concerned about what's currently going on, but let's go ahead and get this going. So remember that doing an LOI doesn't mean that you can't do your due diligence and confirm the underlying fundamentals because this month's cash flow is probably more than likely either going to be significantly better or significantly worse than it was last March or last April. And I suggest you just got to have to understand that. It doesn't mean you got to close right away. As far as sellers are concerned that would be my number one piece of advice is to keep moving forward up to the point where you do have to make the commitments. You can still try to get the SBA financing, get all your ducks in a row, and then once you have everything in place, you can decide to make the final decision based on where things are at that time. Because by the time; like you said in 30 or 45 days we could be in a drastically different economy. But you might have started a deal when nobody else was bold enough to put out the LOI. You might have an exceptional value on a business that's right back to being extremely healthy. And as far as sellers are concerned, it's really just assessing. Maybe it's possible if you have to sell, you really need to determine what your best alternative to a non-agreement is. Are you willing to go back and run this business for a year inaudible[00:31:29.8] or mentally are you done? You don't necessarily have to tell the buyer that. But if mentally you're done and you have an offer that comes to the table that's lower than what you're expecting, you're really going to have to grapple with the decision of are you going to stick this out and do the work to make sure that this business is healthy again so that you can get your higher valuation or is it time to just accept a lower offer and realize that they're not gouging you? That it's just most of the buyers are buying off of the cash flows of that business and significant disruption in cash flow is a very reasonable thing to reduce the purchase price of a business. I mean, I saw that when I sold mine. I won't get in the numbers, but I had a higher number and then we had a small hiccup because we lost one contract and still very healthy business but it had a material impact on what our future cash flows for expected without having to make changes. And I totally understand that. In principle, we agreed to a multiple which just unfortunately for me it's a lower purchase price when you use the same multiple if you lose $5,000 in monthly cash flow. And so it happens but again, on the other side of that, being somebody that had a higher offer that then wasn't able to for whatever reason didn't go through; there's no fault of my own and then going to another offer that was lowered because of something had happened. I think we were dealing with the China tariffs and all that stuff during that time which looks like a child's play now with what we're dealing with. I resulted; I ultimately made the decision to still sell at a lower purchase price and looking at it now, I don't regret the decision. So if you're just looking for what; instead of me giving you empty advice as a seller all I can do is tell you that of what I did and what I decided to do. And now looking forward, I don't regret making the decision to accept an offer that was lower than what I originally wanted for the business. Jason: Are there any brokers and brokerage that you personally recommend? Dave: Anybody with Jason. Jason: Anybody but me, okay I got it. Dave: I'm very happy; I was very happy with Jason's advice. I think it was spot on and yeah he was just a very level head with a lot of experience on how to get a deal done. And really without railroading you, I think one of the really comforting things is Jason is going to be one of those guys that will tell you, look, if this doesn't feel right, just don't do the deal. You probably won't get to pry out his financing, but I can tell you that he does not need the check from your sale to survive. So he's my; yeah, I don't want to like let the cat out of the bag there but he's not going to push you into a sale specifically to get a commission check and that's something that is very nice to see in a broker. He does this because he likes it and because he's very good at it and likes the transactions of the business. And I was very, very happy with the work that I got done at Quiet Light. I can definitely see; from a DIY-er, I have no problems with the commission brokerage that I paid with Quiet Light at the end of the day. I think it was well earned and I would be happy to do it again Jason inaudible[00:34:48.8]. Jason: Wow, well that's ridic; I have to end it with an endorsement so I think with that I'm going to say thank you so much for your time and your thoughts, you're obviously a very experienced entrepreneur. You've bought, you've sold, you've built, you've experienced setbacks, and here you are with the beautiful fake background of a beach. It's phenomenal. So thank you for your time, everyone. This was Dave Wolf. He owns too many businesses to list. But obviously, he knows what he's stocked up. Thank you, Dave. Resources: Quiet Light Podcast@quietlightbrokerage.com

covid-19 america china coronavirus zoom selling congress diy amazon prime online businesses right time incentives serial entrepreneurs sba strangely loi small business administration freddie mac david wolfe david wolf quiet light brokerage quiet light jason yeah mark yeah jason you jason so dave yeah dave well dave wolf jason good dave oh jason they mark absolutely jason do

How to Cultivate an Exitpreneur Mindset With Joe Valley

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 3, 2020 37:49

What is one of the surest paths to substantial wealth? Grow and sell a business. Today's episode is all about Joe's book project, “The Exitpreneurs Playbook.” Joe has over 8000 stories to tell about what it's like to buy, what it is like to sell, and ways to outsmart the typical entrepreneur process. Mark is interviewing Joe about this upcoming project, his motivations behind creating it, and how getting to the writing process carried its share of challenges. Joe believes that an exitpreneur should have the tools in hand to start, run, and grow their business for better decision making later on. He is not telling anyone to sell, he is offering them the strategies they need in order to be ready if they do. Episode Highlights: Joe's idea and the process of putting it into book format. Why he wanted to write the book. Reasons exit planning can be challenging for the business owner. The differences between an entrepreneur who is considering a sale versus one who has actually prepared an exit. How businesses often outgrow the founder and smart moves to make before that happens. The importance of reverse engineering to the goal for a better exit strategy. The difference between the entrepreneur and an exitpreneur. How Joe came up with the book title. Transcription: Mark: So Joe I was at an event recently in Salt Lake City and it was in just general kind of a conference meeting room for about 50 people or so and they had a lot of books in this place. And I was intrigued to just kind of look around and see what was there and you'll never guess what book was up on the shelf. Actually, do you want to guess? Joe: Yeah I want to guess. I'm looking around my office, Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss? Mark: You know what? It actually was in there. Joe: It was in there. Mark: Not the one I'm referring to. Joe: The ONE Thing by John Keller? Now, wait let's call out one of our friends; Superfans by Pat Flynn? Mark: You know I don't know. There were a lot of entrepreneurial focused books so maybe that one was there; I don't know. Joe: Okay. Buy Then Build by Walker Deibel? Mark: Buy Then Build by Walker Deibel; yeah absolutely, that was on the shelf. In fact, they had multiple copies of it. They were giving that book away. And today; what is it? It's February 11th so we're a little bit past a year since Walker launched that book and it spent a year as number one on Amazon Bestseller in this category which is pretty fantastic. I mean obviously, we're super happy for Walker. He won an award for being the thought leader of the year through a major alliance of mergers and acquisition advisors. Joe: Huge. Mark: That is huge. He's had professors from Ivy League colleges come up and talk to him about the book. All of this leads me to something beyond just the accolades and that is the information that's out there in this space about what it's like to sell, what it's like to buy. Walker is talking on specifically which is the buy-side and how to use this as an investment vehicle, how to outsmart the Startup Game as he says and reduce some of that risk. But there's also a whole on the sell-side as well where people don't really know that their business is sellable or they don't think about it. But just yesterday I was reading something on the fastest way to build wealth; what is the fastest way to build wealth? And the conclusion that they had is the fastest way to build wealth is through building a business and selling it. This is one of the quickest ways to actually building wealth. And I know you've had guests on the podcast here who have talked about this process or you call it your Incredible Exits series. I'm really, really excited that you're writing a book on this and you're not calling it Incredible Exits despite everybody else's opinions that you should but it's these stories behind the scenes. Joe: Yeah I'm excited to be writing it finally. I sat down with some friends a year ago probably around a fire pit; maybe a year and a half ago because it was summertime. We're recording this in February of 2020 and I said look I'm making an announcement, I'm writing a book, I'm telling you guys to call me out on it and then I didn't do anything but I tried. I tried to write it. I tried to outline chapters. I tried to follow up… Mark: Hold on one second. You made this promise right on a fire pit with friends? Joe: Yes. Mark: How much did you consume before you made this promise? Joe: I'm a 2-drink maximum kind of guy, that's just the way I am. Mark: Okay. Joe: It's like giving myself an injection of the flu when I have more so it wasn't much. But I didn't get it done. It's a lot of work. So I followed the original book in a box method and didn't get it done at the scheduled time. I was at Brand Accelerator Live with our friend Scott Voelker last September and one of big Scott's announcements was that he actually wrote a book. And it is also here on my desk somewhere; where is it Scott? It's the Take Action Effect. I just turned my head away from the microphone, sorry folks. And I met his scribe; a young lady by the name of Brennan and I connected with her during the event and talked with her and said okay this is it I'm done. I'm hiring a scribe and I'm going to write the book. And I've talked to a number of people about it and let me just cover the process and then answer the question as to why the heck I'm doing this because it's a massive undertaking. The process is instead of actually writing a book myself with written words and a keyboard I get interviewed for I think it was 8 2-hour sessions; so 16 hours in interviews. First, we outlined the chapters and go through the whole process and instead of talking about; I mean writing an article or a chapter on seller's discretionary earnings and add-backs and the three levels of add-backs and all the different things that we talk about on a regular basis Brennan interviewed me. She transcribes the entire interview through UberConference and Rev.com for those that really want great transcription services. And now we're in the sort of lull between all of those interviews and me getting my first draft. They're going to give it to me in thirds. So the first one I will get will probably be I want to say mid to late March and then they'll drip it out in thirds every week for 3 weeks. They want to overwhelm me in terms of reviewing and editing. I still have a lot of technical stuff to add to it but it's really kicked the process into high gear. It's not cheap, let me tell you that. It's an expensive undertaking but I think given what we do for a living and how many people we're trying to help I think it's well worth it. Why am I writing a book? Walker's been an inspiration, very successful with Buy Then Build and the amount of people that he's been able to reach and help on the buy-side. We work with sell-side brokers or sell-side clients for the most part and I've done the math Mark, does it sound inconceivable that I've talked to 8,000 entrepreneurs over the last 8 years? Mark: Not at all. Joe: Yeah and that's probably a conservative number. I'm not saying I've had an in-depth evaluation with 8,000 of them but I have without a doubt talked to 8,000 and that does not count standing in front of a room with 3, 4, 500 people. And the challenge has been we've got to reach them one by one and I know that Walker's book has been as you said best seller. I think it's probably sold over 10,000 copies at this point. Mark: It's over 15 at least. Joe: 15,000 copies? Mark: Yeah, I actually talked to Walker about it a while ago. Joe: I think he told me something like 99% of books sells less than a hundred copies that are published. Now Walker, correct me if I'm wrong but it's pretty impressive. So to get what we share on those valuation calls into somebodies hands before, during, and after they have a valuation call and when they're in an audience that will give them every possible detail that we've developed over the last 8 plus years of doing what we do and sharing that in writing so that they can essentially change their mindset. And that's the goal of the book, it's to change their mindset from reaching out to us when they're sick and tired of running their business or they've had a bump where things get tougher and they say Gosh how can I sell this business? A buddy of mine told me I can get X multiple. I'm going to call Mark and say Mark how much can I sell my business for? I want to change people's mindsets. Instead of saying how much can I sell my business or more often they say how much is my business worth, I want them to say I want to build wealth like you said at the beginning and I want to sell my business for X dollars. I want to do that in 4 years. In order to do that, they need to understand where they are today. And the book is going to help them reverse engineer the path from where they are today to that exit so that they can do a partial valuation, get comfortable with brokers, and drive that path. I had a conversation with Mike Jackness recently and Mike talked about the fact that about what we do sometimes entrepreneurs just don't want to hear it because the idea of exit planning is so beyond what they're trying to do when they're just trying to keep the wheels on the bus, right? They're running out of inventory, they've got competitors coming at them from every angle, they're trying to do cash flow planning and it's just so hard that they can't see out the front window. The objective of the book is to sort of clear that window, have a clear path to an exit that they understand and it's a much better ride. I've been through it myself personally. You did it for me back in 2010. I could see nothing, understood nothing, we had a call, we had several calls and the light bulbs went off and I knew exactly the path to take and I'll tell you what operating my business became a lot more fun and exciting even though I was sick and tired of it after 5 years. Mark: You know the more I experience the business and grow as an entrepreneur the more I'm learning. With anything dealing with a goal really the best way to achieve these things is what you've said, reverse engineer it. Rather than just kind of impulsively decide that I'm going to do something figure out where you want to be and then reverse engineer. But in order to reverse engineer it, you need to understand the mechanisms that are going on to create that value. You're trying with this book to create a shift in the mindset of entrepreneurs, right? By the way, folks if you haven't figured this out we don't have a guest; Joe is the guest. I'm going to interview Joe about the book and maybe we'll talk a little bit about what it is like to do what Joe and I've been doing and everyone else at Quiet Light. Joe: Right, we're co-guests. We're co-hosts and co-guests today because I want to grill you too. Mark: Very good. Alright, I want to start out by saying okay let's talk about your experience. You've been doing this for 8 years. You've done literally tens of millions of dollars of transactions on your own within Quiet Light Brokerage. Joe: I'm fastly closing in on 100 million. Mark: That's right you are. You are; absolutely. Joe: Inaudible[0:11:17.8] 12 to 18 months; pretty shocking. That's amazing. Mark: Absolutely amazing. Talk to me about the mindset that you often see or most naturally see in an entrepreneur that comes to us to sell versus those rare cases of somebody who has planned to sell and what is the difference in the actual process value and stress levels I would say for everyone involved. Joe: Yeah. Look all the success stories that you guys hear about on the Incredible Exits for the most part those are people that had the mindset that they wanted to determine and plan out their exit. They got an education, they figured out what their exit goal was and they called Mark, myself, Jason, Amanda, Chuck, anyone of us and reverse engineer the path to that. They didn't call and say what's your fee, okay I want to list. It was this how does this whole thing work and then we worked with them over a 6, 12, or 18 month period sometimes even more. Those are the success stories that you're hearing about. The people you're not hearing about never sell their business because they call. They might have a call like this or I was just at eCommerceFuel last week as an event and kudos to Andrew Youderian and all the guests and all the people that are there; brilliant, so many smart folks. But even with that high level of entrepreneurial success and drive I still get e-mails like I've gotten this week which is a great chat last week, great presentation. I did a presentation with Mike about the sales of ColorIt. You've really inspired me to sort of try this path to an exit. And then I said okay well this is what I need. Yeah, I don't know I'm so busy with adding SKUs and I'm not really there yet. I'm not ready to sell yet. I'm not ready to think about selling yet. Whereas the yet it should be now regardless of where you are in the business. These people are already doing; the 2 that I'm thinking about where I got the e-mails like the one I don't know his growth. Well, I could do the math on his growth but the discretionary stands out that he's close to 600,000 in discretionary earnings and it is 5 to 6 times more than he ever made in his prior day job. And so he's trying to work towards an exit and retirement. The other was doing nearly 10 million in revenue and had a 25% decline. He's young, he's under 30 years old. And neither of these guys are really ready to exit. Of course, they're not ready to exit but I want them to set a financial goal. I don't care if it's 3 to 5 years from now. Set that goal. I need to exit for X in order to exit. And then figure out where they are, get the education, and work towards that. In 5 years if they're not ready to sell then move the goal post, move it 6 years down the road or 7 years down the road. That is as you said at the beginning the surest way to real financial wealth. But we're not talking about them yet because they're pausing, they're hesitating, they're not going to do it. Those are the stories that I talk about a little bit in the book. There's somebody that was my first million-dollar listing back in the day at Quiet Light. I remember it well. I'm not going to name names. We'll call him Big Mike. That's not his name but we'll call him Big Mike. He had no financials; none whatsoever. And I remember sitting over Christmas break taking all of his bank statements and I actually created the profit and loss statement myself. That is a no-no. We do not do that anymore. No. But I did it. I got it all detailed and accurate and listed the business for 1.1 million. I got an offer for 800 from the gentleman that you sold his business once upon a time. It was actually a good offer because the revenue trends were in decline. And Big Mike said to me well why would I accept it all I have to do is XYZ over the next 12 months and I'll make a quarter of a million dollars and then we can sell the business for 1.2, 1.3 million. And I had a great deal of experience in paid advertising at the time as you know because I just sold my business. This was probably 2012 or early '13. And so we walked through all the possibilities, what to do and how to do it and off he went. The problem was that Big Mike's heart was not in it anymore. He had run up all of his personal debt and personal expenses; his overhead was very high. He lived the life of a very, very successful entrepreneur and his business was no longer trending that way so money was getting tight. He didn't have the ability to pull money from the business and put it into the ad spend that he needed to to reverse it. And so every year for the following 3 years I got any mail from Big Mike that said something along the lines of hey my revenue and profit is at XYZ, can we sell the business for this? And each year it went from that offer from Tony of 800 to the value really was in about 600 the next year. And then the next year he sent me an e-mail it was really based upon what he had given me, about 500. The last time he sent me an e-mail it was about 400. Every single time I replied with based upon what you've given me which is just an email with numbers and I'd say your business value was probably X. Please run a profit and loss statement out of Quickbooks or Xero and export it to Excel with a monthly view. Silence, nothing for 12 more months because he didn't take the necessary steps to do what you have to do in protecting your most valuable asset, in his case his business. And so he's probably got a job, unfortunately. And that's the path unfortunately too many people go down or they learn from the mistakes and they hang up their hat on this particular business. They can't sell it and they move on to another one and hopefully learn from that mistake but it's a painful one. I just want to see people learn from that and therefore the painful process of writing a book. Mark: You know it's great to focus on the success stories. We like success stories. I like talking about success stories that make me happy. But for all these success stories that you have shared so far through the podcast that you'll be sharing through this book we also have the stories like that. And I could probably rattle off a number as well. Maybe I'll start a new podcast or write a book called Unincredible Exits or Nasty Exits or something like that. It will be real depressing and no one will ever want to read it. But you're absolutely right in; that example is really good. That example shows what we see so often from entrepreneurs where they're running; they're used to the hustle, they're used to the grind, they're used to being able to pull themselves up by their bootstraps to be able to correct something but sometimes when a business gets mature especially after you've run it for a while doing that can be really, really difficult. I also think it's; I want to re-emphasize something you said which is the picking number, reverse engineering, and getting to that number doesn't mean that you have to sell at that point. We've been pretty public and I will continue to be public by saying that the best scenario for you is to create a business that you can own for your life, right? Because it's difficult to start a business; the cash flow that they build is great, the value that is in them as assets is also fantastic. So I'm a big believer in building and holding or buying and holding and growing but that doesn't mean that exiting shouldn't be an option. And so when you hit that number, if you're not ready to sell you can always move the goalposts as you suggested or create a new goal. But something that I know you've told me in an email where we were discussing this book is you said one of the goals is to not allow the business to outgrow its founder. And boy this is an issue that comes up time and time again that we see and that is business owners were really good at starting, really good at founding something and even growing it to a certain extent getting to a point where making that next shift is difficult. I always describe that the growth path of a business is a series of climbs and plateaus. You climb to a point and it starts to plateau and then you have to change the business a little bit. Maybe you have to add new people; maybe you have to add a different structure to the business. And once you do then hopefully you start climbing again and then you hit another plateau and then it's another shift or another restructuring of the company or maybe a new initiative. What point and is there any examples that you've seen where somebody has hit that point where business is just about to outgrow them and they were smart enough to be able to not let it do that? Joe: Yeah the climbing the plateaus, by the way, let's not forget the valleys, right? Yes, my name is Joe Valley but… Mark: Don't forget the valley. Joe: There are two valleys here, right? It's a climb, it's a plateau, and then boom there's a really nasty valley right there and you're in it. You got to climb out of it. That's why I think it's important to actually do something that you like; something that you enjoy a little bit. It could be something that you're passionate about because when those tough times come and as an entrepreneur they will unless I'm unique and nobody else has tough times. I don't think I'm unique. You're going to have to fight and climb back out of that valley and on the other side there's a mountain, a peak; not a plateau hopefully. And those are great success stories to tell and very sellable businesses. But the idea of a business outgrowing the founder is not original, right? I mean this is something I've seen throughout my own entrepreneurial life where I used to do radio advertising. I owned a radio direct response media buying agency back when there were 800 numbers associated with 60-second spot ads. I could have held that business and grown it but it would have required more and more overhead in terms of people. I don't like managing a lot of people. I tell you what your job is and how to do it and I expect that you're going to work hard and do the best you can. If you don't I'm kind of blunt unfortunately and fortunately in some ways. So if you're in a situation and I see this a lot where buyers sometimes naively say well if it's so great why are they selling it? And it is because the business more often than not has outgrown them. They wanted to live the 4-hour workweek. It turned into 30 and that's okay. And they've got 5 VA's and that's okay. But in order to take it beyond just a SaaS business that's doing 2 million in revenue, they need to hire 3 more developers. They don't want to go through the headache and hassle of that. Or to take it off of Amazon they need to learn SEO offline or email marketing or whatever it might be and that's not their skill set. Or it's hiring people and that's not their skill set. And they learned that one of the greatest ways to earn wealth is to sell a business. Now people that buy Walker's book have learned that they can; a different breed, a different mentality of an entrepreneur comes in. They're not the startup entrepreneurs. They come in and they take over where that startup entrepreneur left off. The business has outgrown them and they hand it off to somebody like Matt Howeth who can. He comes from the corporate world. He's always had lots of travel, lots of staff, and lots of hours. He gets it. He can take it and bring that business in and have a team of employees, a team of VA's and manage it and take it up to the next level because that's his passion. That's what he does. He gets it. The startup is not his passion. It's not his skill set. So one of the things that I think is critically important and sometimes this only comes with age and mistakes and failures and successes and that is to figure out who the hell you are. What kind of entrepreneur are you? Mark: That brings in mind 2 clients I've worked with in the past 14 years now. And one of them; I've quoted this story before but he came to me with a business, I've never talked to him about sharing his story so I won't say what he was selling. But he was selling a physical product. He had initially acquired this business for 5 figures, like a mid-5 figure level and immediately grew the business significantly to the point where it was doing 7 figures in top-line revenue, mid-6 figures in discretionary earnings and so when he gave it to me to sell one of my very first questions was why are you selling? You've been growing year over year, you're only adding value to the business, this looks like a fantastic business, you've got great rankings, great positioning great pricing; all these things working in your favor and he said well right now I store all of the inventory in an external garage on my property. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, my son and I go out and we fill orders. It's really nice. It's like I don't have any more room for inventory and if I wanted to get another space I'm going to have to hire somebody and then I'm going to have to hire more people to handle the marketing. I just don't want to do that. I would rather cash out and move on. Meanwhile, another entrepreneur that I've dealt with, he was a CPA by trade and loved being on the buy-side and what he really, really enjoyed was taking a business that was somewhat complex, somewhat messy, somewhat inefficient in the way it was run and simplifying it. And I love; I've sold a couple of businesses for him, I love taking a look at where his businesses started. Their P&Ls were these super long crazy messes and by the time that he was ready to sell they were consolidated down into less than 30 lines because he simplified these businesses, really focused on this principle of 80:20 and said I'm going to just focus on what really makes sense and I'm going to get rid of all the rest of it. For him the act of cleaning it up was great but he would; unlike with Walker's book which is a lot of buy, build, and grow, his was I'm going to buy make more efficient and then I'm going to sell. And he did this several times and it was really fun to watch because he knew who he was. That first seller that I had, he knew who he was. He knew he didn't want to have a staff he had done that and didn't want to do it again. He loved running the business with his son. The second entrepreneur, he was a buyer, he knew what he liked, he also didn't want to have a large staff. There are other people out there that do want to build that team. There are people out there that say I want to have 100 million dollar exit so I'm going to buy a bunch of these businesses and build something or I'm going to acquire 15. They're all different types of entrepreneurs and everyone has different skill sets. Knowing who you are I think that right there is a great bit of advice but going back to what you were saying earlier Joe if you're so busy and in the weeds constantly and just running and hustling and hustling and hustling and never taking a moment to step back and to think about either the exit or about maybe this topic here of what type of entrepreneur are you, where do you want to see yourself in the next 5 years, what type of business operation do you want to have it's really hard to know where you're going and then your business drives you instead of driving your business and your career drives you instead of you driving your career. Joe: Yeah. Walker's book takes the mystery out of buying a business and the how-to and building it beyond that hence the title Buy Then Build or what he coined as acquisition entrepreneurship. My book The Exitpreneurs Playbook is going to take the mystery out of selling your business and setting those goals on what your exit is and reverse engineering a path to that. Now that I've said the title can we make fun of me in terms of predicting I don't know the future doom and gloom of this title because I did the opposite of what everybody told me to do? Mark: You know what? I like it. I remember doing this when I picked the Quiet Light Brokerage logo. I did 99 designs and I had everyone vote on different types and I hated what everybody chose. So I'm like well it's my business so I'm going to do my own thing. Joe: And you know it's a check, check, send something; I don't know, it must've been fall of last year and email out something about the Quiet Light logo and how it has stood the test of time so kudos to you. Yeah so I sent an e-mail out to a couple of dozen past clients that I sold their businesses and they're going to be part of the book. So part of the book is education and part inspiration; inspiration with them sharing some golden nuggets, wisdom, experience things that they wish they did differently. So I sent it out to them and then another say dozen of influencers that are in the space. People that we know well like Mike Jackness, Greg Mercer, Andrew Youderian, Ezra Firestone, things of that nature; people of that nature. And I think out of roughly 25 people Jason Yellowitz is the only one who said he liked Exitpreneur. Everyone else said Incredible Exits, Joe, it just rings, it rings. And there's been something about the term Exitpreneur that has stuck with me during the interview process and the more I said it out loud the more Brennan and I, and again she's my scribe, the more it just felt natural. Because that's what people are becoming when they sell their business, they're exitpreneurs. The difference between an entrepreneur and an exitpreneur is an entrepreneur is somebody that runs their own business but an exitpreneur is somebody that runs their own business and they have the knowledge and a plan. And I want to give them that knowledge in order to devise a plan and become one of those people that generate most of their wealth from an exit. So fingers crossed on that. Can I do a shameless plug right now for the Quiet Light Podcast where I think we're about 25 minutes in and just a little bit of a shameless plug? I have to tell you… Mark: I felt like this whole thing was a shameless plug for your upcoming book. Joe: I know but I don't even; I haven't even put up a website yet. There's no Facebook group. Really what it is, is a plug for education because part; in truth, I've said the same thing 8,000 times over and over. Maybe I'm just tired of saying it so I'm… Mark: With that Joe when I was on this trip recently I was in the airport and thinking about Mission, Vision, Values for Quiet Light Brokerage and I don't have the vision statement out yet but this component of education, if it's not part of our main vision it's definitely one of our core values and really something that I've built up. I was speaking to somebody just this morning before we recorded this about one of the goals or one of the mission; I'm sorry one of the core values of Quiet Light is to give entrepreneurs the right education and the right set of tools to be able to make good informed decisions. Because when I sold my business I didn't feel like I had that. I felt like I was misled. I felt like I was put in a position where somebody wanted to get me in an exclusive contract, promised me big bucks, and then when I went to go sell I was completely unprepared. I didn't know what was happening and so when I started Quiet Light the goal has been from day one not to tell anyone to sell but to give them the tools so that they know what their business is worth today, what it could be worth in the future, what's driving its value so that you can just make a good decision. That's your decision. So the education piece and I joke about this being a shameless plug; the reason that I'm excited about this, and I genuinely am excited that you're writing this book is because that education piece needs to be out there. And I love the idea; more than the idea, love the opportunity that we have to educate entrepreneurs of what's available to them if they transition from an entrepreneur to exitpreneur, understanding that, the bulk of the wealth that you build in your lifetime for most entrepreneurs will be at that exit. That might be 2 years from now, that might be 20 years from now, either case it's fine but having that plan to maximize that value and keeping the process smooth is important. Sorry, I totally cut you off of that but I want to emphasize that the education piece is really what I'm super excited about. Joe: Now we were going to do 2 parts of this podcast, a little bit on the book and a little bit about the philosophy behind Quiet Light's foundation and how you built the company and the entrepreneurial approach. So let's do a; I think we should do an entire podcast on this business and how it's built with entrepreneurs helping entrepreneurs just to educate people more about who we are, what we do, and why we do it because I think it's necessary and you've done an incredible job with the model. But in terms of the education, I got a voicemail yesterday and this is the type of thing I want everybody out there that thinks they don't have time to do it and they're just keeping the wheels on the bus so to speak, take the time to make time for planning your exit using the educational tools that we provide whether it's this podcast or articles or Walker's book on my eventual book or having a conversation because that's an education tool. Have a conversation with an adviser at Quiet Light. Really do it. But I got a voicemail from somebody who I sold businesses for, very, very well off financially, runs a family office now, bought a business from Walker for around 8 million dollars in 2019. And he heard the podcast on product innovation, product development with Zack at Gembah. And he just left a voicemail yesterday saying hey man I just want to let you know on the way back home from Austin I got a chance to meet with Zack and we're going to go ahead and do some product innovation, product expansion, adding a number of new SKUs and accessories to the brand. I really appreciate it. I don't know if enough people tell you that we actually use the tools that you share so thank you. It's great to hear that. So thank you sir; I'm not going to say your first name, for reaching out and letting us know. For the rest of us this is the shameless plug part and I've said this, I said this at Blue Ribbon Mastermind and I said it in eCommerceFuel, Mark you and I have done now I think it was 114; I checked this morning, podcasts. So that's how many are up on iTunes. We've got a total of 31 reviews. They're all huge close to 5-star reviews. Thank you, everyone, who has given us reviews. I wasn't aware that we had any at all because we hardly ever plug it. And so I was at Blue Ribbon Mastermind talking to David Wood who will be a guest on the podcast in a few weeks. He's a personal coach and a good friend of Ezra's and he said something about he was on 70 podcasts last year and he chose which ones to go on based upon the number of reviews. So I checked ours. We have 31; pleasantly surprised. I checked the EcomCrew, Mike Jackness and he's got 81. So I stood on stage at Blue Ribbon Mastermind and I said everybody come on now Mike's not here, I want one more reviews than Mike has. He's been doing; I think he's done 3 times as many podcasts as us so we're doing okay. But please if you enjoy the podcast, if you like the podcast take a minute and go to iTunes or Stitcher or wherever you're listening and pop in a review. We greatly appreciate it and share the information and wealth with all the others that need it. Mark: Yeah. There's a video out there and I don't know if we're going to be posting it on our YouTube channel but there's a video out there of you making this plug at Blue Ribbon Mastermind and Ezra is standing there with you and he's thinking this is what you're using the stage time for? Like you have the opportunity to talk about what Quiet Light does and all you're doing is trying to beat Mike Jackness and like absolutely I'm trying to beat Mike Jackness that's it. Joe: We won't be sharing that video. That's not ours to share but I shared it with the team and had a good laugh at myself because of it so no doubt about it. Mike's a great guy. Ezra is a great guy. We don't mention people that we don't like obviously so if we've never mentioned you oh boy that's a long list; oh no, I can't say that. Let's just say thanks; final thanks, Mike Nuñez. Thank you, Mike. Mark: Yeah, Mike Nuñez, absolutely. I think that's a great way to end up this episode here. Let's do one in the future about the building of Quiet Light Brokerage and I'd also love to get feedback from people that have listened this far through this episode and are listening right now. Are there topics that you'd like to hear us talk about outside of bringing guests in? And we can bring on people within Quiet Light Brokerage, bring in Walker on the podcast again or Chuck or Brad or any of the many entrepreneurs that are working with Quiet Light Brokerage. Anything you want us to talk about specifically when it comes to buying or selling? We'd love to know, we want to produce content that you guys wanted to hear so feel free to hit me up Mark@QuietLightBrokerage or Inquiries@QuietLightBrokerage as well. Joe: Awesome. Thanks, everyone. Links and Resources: Quiet Light Brokerage

christmas amazon vision talk mindset mission tools silence va values rev seo stitcher titans saas cpa salt lake city excel cultivate ivy league tim ferriss xyz amazon best seller quickbooks pat flynn superfans xero big mike david wood skus ezra firestone markit quiet light brokerage joe valley greg mercer quiet light mark you scott voelker walker deibel startup game joe it mark yeah mike jackness mark how exitpreneur uberconference andrew youderian joe yeah gembah ecommercefuel john keller joe there mark don mark okay mark absolutely joe now quiet light podcast brand accelerator live

Using Standard Operating Procedures to Level Up Your Documentation with Trent Dyrsmid

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 28, 2020 37:54

We often discuss is the importance of the person behind the business. When leaders learn the value of their business and set goals for success they are positioning themselves to profit, whether they plan to stay in or sell. Today we are discussing standard operating procedures for leaders that run different types of ecommerce businesses. Our guest realized from day zero of being in business that creating SOPs helps business owners stay in the game longer with a focus on working on the business rather than in it. Trent Dyrsmid is the founder of BrightIdeas.co and host of the BrightIdeas podcast, where he has interviewed numerous CEOs, marketers, and entrepreneurs and has gotten them to share the processes they use to achieve results. Trent is also the owner of an Amazon ecommerce business and creator of a SAAS tool called Flowster, an app that helps business owners track, manage, and delegate business processes. Episode Highlights: How Trent got his start and how Bright Ideas got an INC 5000 254th fastest growing business ranking. The Amazon reseller model and how Trent makes it work via SOP. Trent's mantra of “document and delegate” and when he realized this was the key to success. Feedback loops he employs to optimize the procedures. Hiring challenges and how he's affronted them. How Trent's app Flowster was born and how it works. Ways to introduce new elements in the existing SOP for any workflow. Flexibility in the SOP templates. Implementing SOP with a team not accustomed to this type of work culture. Advantages of SOPs for sellers and buyers Transcription: Joe: So Mark one of the things we always talk about is how important the person behind the business is when they do eventually sell. And the fact that when they learn to value their business it actually becomes much more fun to operate and run because they've got some goals set out in the future. And one of the things that helps them are SOPs and above that, we had Norm for our own podcast, it was quickly shot up to the top 10 podcasts that we've done. And I understand you've got back to that and had Trent, and I'm going to get his name wrong, Trent Dyrsmid, is that how you pronounce it? Mark: Dyrsmid; yeah. Joe: On the podcast and he's got some great SOP stuff both for people that run SaaS, content, Amazon businesses, all sorts of different aspects. What was the general call about? Mark: Yeah. I saw the Norm for our episode and that was one of the ones that we did early on that really took off because Norm was running an eight-figure business largely on the backs of SOPs and virtual assistants; VAs which is really cool to see somebody be able to do that. Well, Trent Dyrsmid is very similar in that regard. His company was ranked on Forbes 5000 as the 254th fastest-growing company in the US. Joe: Wow. Mark: Amazon based business, reselling other people's products and just exploded and I asked him and I said when did you start to realize that you need to put SOPs in place? Day 0; it's like I don't have any special talents other than being the big idea guy and picking the direction but as far as executing those things that's on my team to do and my job is to give them the processes to be able to do that and to give them the tools to be able to execute on these ideas and this general direction. A really, really disciplined entrepreneur in this regard. He's not just an Amazon seller either he's got his own podcast. I was actually a guest on his podcast BrightIdeas.co. He's got a SaaS company Flowster.app which is an SOP software. I've played around with Flowster, a pretty cool SaaS product here where you can develop and roll out to your team a complete operating procedure for pretty much anything. So you can create this nice collaboration but what really sets it apart is there's this entire marketplace what he found was happening among both when he started his company and also once he started coaching some other people is they're asking how do you do this part of your business? What's the process that you use here? And instead of writing it down in word and all that sort of thing and trying to transport over he said well there should actually be a marketplace where people can collaborate and sell their best processes to each other or give them away for free. Most of the stuff in this marketplace is free so it's kind of cool on that. But what we focused on Joe is not a pitch for a Flowster; I think there's a lot of ways, you and I talked about just put a video together as just kind of a minimum type of SOP. We talked a lot about how do you write an SOP that is specific enough to really tell people how to do things, will be adopted by your team. How do you make it adopted by your team, and how do you create it general enough so that it can absorb differences when people are seeing maybe exceptions to what the standard process would be. Why is this so important in the process of building a company and can you actually scale a business to eight figures like he did very quickly without them and the answer is no. Joe: Yeah, and that's why so many people sell because they take it as far as they can and then they have to bring on staff and get into areas they're not as comfortable with and I think these SOPs will help those folks hold on longer and get a higher value. I think SOPs will help buyers as well when they buy a business and take it over and if there's no SOPs in place they can do that and instill more confidence in the next buyer and grow that business to the next level. So let's get to it. Mark: Trent, thank you so much for coming on the Quiet Light Podcast. I'm super excited to have you on. I recently appeared on your podcast. Somebody actually reached out to me recently about that episode as well so that's always an encouraging sign when people contact you after appearing on some of these podcasts. But I'm excited to have you on today because you've got so much experience in the world of online business and you cover a lot of materials. We're going to be looking at just one area that you covered pretty heavily and that would be SOPs; procedures and operating procedures to implement things. But you cover a ton of territory and a lot of the bases of what you do is based on your success with your company. And congratulations on Inc 5000 ranking that you had recently. Why don't we start; just give us a little bit of background on yourself and also where your company was ranked recently in Inc 5000? Trent: Sure. So the company was ranked number 254 which was a very pleasant surprise. And as you might guess it's a wonderful bit of social proof to kind of reinforce what my whole brand message is about which is systematizing your business so that you can delegate a lot of the work that you really shouldn't be doing to other people on your team. And the net result of that, of course, is an accelerating growth rate. So how did all this start for me? I've been an entrepreneur for two years now. When I started my first company back in ‘01 I really had no idea what I was doing. I knew how to sell but that was it. And I figured everything else out over an eight-year period. And it was pretty painful but thankfully I was able to get a seven-figure exit out of that business. And that put me on a track to have a bit of time and bandwidth and so forth to figure out this online business thing and I've been making my living online now for about nine years and roughly just over three years ago I switched from being a service business; I'd been running a digital agency for a number of years because my podcast built an audience and people would reach out and can you help me with this and can you help me with that and we were making a decent living doing that. But the last couple of years have been just a stratospheric kind of change up the hockey stick and it started with this e-commerce business. So we started a business three years ago where we would partner with US manufacturers to sell their products on Amazon ideally as one of their exclusive sellers. So in doing so, we were able to avoid all of the risk of launching our own brands and the time that it takes to do that and I like low risk. I love Warren Buffet's number one rule Don't lose the money and rule number two is see rule number one. And so the reseller model is a very, very low-risk model because you're buying proven products. But the problem with the reseller model is there's lots of sellers on each product and so oftentimes the margin can go away. So instead of making money you just end up kind of getting your money back which is pointless, so by forming these relationships with the brands directly and getting them to kick off all the other sellers or having a very small list of approved sellers that actually can be a very profitable model. The challenge is finding these suppliers require a great deal of grunt work; massive, like you, can't automate it all. There's just a bunch of labor because you need to send hundreds of emails a week to hundreds of suppliers. And what made me a little bit for lack of a better word famous in this particular industry was just how quickly we were able to scale the business. We went from doing 0 to over $100,000 a month in five months. We did at one point one million in the first year and we grew at 20% per quarter for eight consecutive quarters which was a huge contributing factor obviously to being 5000 at Ford. And how did I do all that? Well, that's the secret sauce. And essentially what I did was I realized I can't be the one doing all this labor. So when I launched the business rather than sitting down to do I sit down to document. And as soon as I'd created documents for all these; like I would do it one time or maybe two times and I would make my operating procedure while I was doing the thing and we would delegate the thing and never ever do it again. And that was a huge, huge advantage over everyone else in the space who was really kind of trying to do it all themselves. Mark: Yeah and I know we've got an episode a while ago with Norm Farrar. I don't know if you know Norm but the entire episode was how he grew an e-commerce business to over 10 million dollars on the strength of doing exactly what you're talking about; hiring the VA's and putting in strong SOPs in place so that the procedures are what you're working on rather than trying to master every little aspect of your business yourself and run the day-to-day. And I think procedures; in my world, in my opinion, I think a lot of entrepreneurs see procedures as important but they don't necessarily put the time into the procedures with a business so I want to delve into that a little bit. When you're growing this business when was the moment where you switched over and thought I should really be putting my time into writing awesome procedures for people to follow? Trent: Day 0 because I'm not a first time CEO, I had started to drink the Kool-Aid back in my very first business that I started in '01, somewhere in maybe '03 or '04 or it could have been '05, somewhere in that period of time I read E-Myth by Michael Gerber and my life as an entrepreneur was transformed at that moment. And I said to my co-founder at the time; I said I want a written procedure for absolutely everything our engineering team does. And then I handled writing procedures for what I was doing on the sales and marketing side and that business was twice ranked as a Profit 100 fastest growing company in Canada. And so I got a decent exit out of it for a relatively small business. And so for me having documented procedures was just kind of normal. So when I started my business on Amazon I never thought well I'm just going to go and do this and get really proficient at it and then maybe I'll make a training video or maybe I'll have a training session for somebody else. I don't think that's an efficient way to eliminate and delegate it all for a whole bunch of different reasons and so procedures were written literally from Day 1. Mark: So tell me how you go about writing your procedures and starting this and my first question is if you're not proficient in it how do you write it? Trent: So thankfully I did have a bit of a mentor in really a bit of a mentor; not really a bit of a mentor, I had a mentor in that business. I'd interviewed a guy by the name of named Dan Matters on my show and that's how I discovered this whole wholesale model and he has a training course which is a really high-quality course for me. So I had access to his material and I also had access to Dan because he'd been a guest on the show. And so I foundationally understood what I needed to do. And so as I mentioned before I would just start doing what his training told me to do and then I would document it as I was doing it. Mark: So when you're developing a procedure for a new task I mean you obviously we're staying off somebody else's work to some extent; I mean you were taking some inspiration but if you come across something that you haven't dealt with before especially like in the Amazon world I'm sure there are elements there that you needed to come up with, what sort of feedback loops do you employ or do you employ feedback loops to be able to maximize and optimize some procedures? Trent: Yeah absolutely we do. So a perfect example of that is I recently for my software company, a content marketing SEO is a huge focus as a part of our growth. And I've never been an SEO expert and so I wasn't really a keyword research expert and I had never used this tool called Ahrefs before; Ahrefs is a wonderful tool. And they provide training videos. So I would watch these videos but rather than just kind of sit and consume it and take sort of random notes over the period of the video I kept hitting the pause button, pause button, pause button and I would take screenshots of what they were explaining in the video. And at the same time in my Flowster software which is where I create all my standard operating procedures, I'm literally typing out the instructions that they're giving me and then I'm taking screenshots from the videos. Because my goal is this I want to; I don't about you but I can't watch a ten-minute training video and remember all the details, it's just too much. Not only that I only want to do it once or maybe twice and then I want to delegate it. So what am I going to do; ask somebody else to watch the training video and they have the same problem as me and what if they interpret the video differently than me? Because the training videos they kind of give you guidelines and I have to choose of those guidelines well how exactly do we want to do it? So by the time; a 10-minute training video would probably take me an hour and a half to turn that, to repurpose that content into my standard operating procedure which is a checklist essentially, it's a step by step by step do this, here's how you do this and do this, here's how you do that, do this, here's how you do that. And by the time I was done now I had a way that I never had to watch the training video again. Anyone that I was going to delegate that task to never has to watch the training video because the procedure is broken out so clearly in the document. And so that's how you can create a standard operating procedure for something you've literally never done before. Mark: Right. So you would start with somebody else's training video. Break that up into basically an outline and a step by step process in order to do that. When you're delegating procedures how do you identify who you're delegating something to? For example, I've talked to entrepreneurs who want to delegate a task but it just doesn't seem to fit the current team member and hiring somebody new for that doesn't really make sense. What have you done in the past when you've run into these smaller jobs and tasks that should be delegated but maybe they don't have a great home? Trent: It's an interesting question and I don't know that I've really run into that scenario because I live my life every single day thinking about what can I eliminate from my workflow and in order to eliminate it I need to document it and delegate it so I don't really think; I don't see anything in my business aside from; so as a CEO I see my job as working on the business. I'm the one who's supposed to go get the Big Ideas. I'm supposed to come up with the big vision. I'm supposed to build the team and help them to define and execute on a strategy. So that's the high-value activity and the minute I get sucked down into working in the business that high-value activity suffers. So I'm a delegating theme. So you said well what happens if I can't find somebody? I'll find somebody. I'll hire another virtual assistant or I'll hire an employee or I'll give it to an existing employee; like for most of the day to day, repetitive processes that are part of working in the business somebody else can do it. Like I'm not the genius of the universe that oh I'm the only guy that can do this; I don't really see it that way. Now, are there occasionally tasks that are somewhat non-repetitive, like they only happen every once in a while and they require judgment that comes from experience in addition to following a process? Well, I'm less likely to delegate those to somebody else because the return on investment of doing so is going to be slim. But for those highly repetitive tasks that are every day or every week if you spend that; in my case, I spend an hour and a half making a video for how to use and do keyword research on Ahrefs, well guess what? How many times is that going to get done for every single blog post that my software company publishes which is three a week? Just think of how much time I saved myself. Mark: Yeah. Oh absolutely. I mean that makes a lot of sense. That makes complete sense. You mentioned earlier; I want to go back a little bit to what you mentioned with Flowster and also how you got started. You leveraged knowledge of your mentor and some of the procedures that he put together to be able to scale up pretty quickly. And this is kind of the idea behind Flowster and I know this is a full disclosure, this is your business, this is something that you're growing right now a really cool software that really focuses on workflow especially in the e-commerce realm. Can you tell us a little bit about Flowster and how you can use Flowster to be able to leverage other people's experience? Trent: Sure. So the thing about like when I very first started out to create my procedures they were in a Google Doc because I didn't know any better. I thought well that would be a great place for them. They're easy to update and I can share them and so forth. And then over time we realized that that wasn't terribly efficient and so we moved our content into a competitor software application. And then as a result of speaking at an event I ended up becoming someone that sells SOPs. I was speaking to one of Dan's events and there was hundreds of people in the audience and I'm talking about SOPs and they all say hey I love it, I don't want to make them though can I buy yours? So we started selling ours and that's why Flowster got created. And the functionality of the software is really; because really you have two pieces when it comes to workflow process management. You have your content which is the set of instructions. Think of it like the recipe book. You want to bake a chocolate cake it's on page 68, flip to page 68, bake the cake. But what happens when you have multiple cake bakers baking cakes and they all have different due dates and they all work in different places so you have some issues about workflow management. And so what the software does is it allows you to say; so we have in our vernacular we have what we call an SOP template and then we have a [inaudible 00:19:02.3]. So the SOP template is like the master copy of how to do the thing. So we'll call it in my world one of the things I produce a lot of these podcast episodes; like this SOP template for podcast episodes well in the week that I recorded episodes, I might record 4 or 6ix episodes. So now that's 4 or 6 workflows each workflow being for one episode. Well if I have; and I have various people on my team who are involved in the post-production process of taking those raw recordings like you and I are doing right now and then turning it into an episode and then getting it on social media and running ads for it and do all of the things that we've got to do. So that's all defined in the workflow and then various portions of that workflow get assigned out to various people on my team with differing due dates. So the software provides you the ability to do all of that delegation and give deadlines and so forth and everybody gets notifications in their inbox or they can just look at the calendar and see what to do. Because the more people that you have on your team and the more concurrent workflows that you have going like how do you manage all that? How do I know Mark if I've delegated something to you and I've told you I need it done by Thursday; if I just sent you an email saying hey reference the Google Doc, see the instructions, make sure it's done by Thursday if you don't finish it by Thursday I'm not going to remember that by any stretch of the imagination. So I need us closing the loop system. So that is one of the primary pieces of value that the software does. But aside from that I actually have one thing that I like even better and I call it the magic button but it's really the edit button. So remember I mentioned how my job's to go and get the big ideas etcetera, etcetera? So I'm not a mastermind weekend this past weekend in San Diego and I'm getting a lot of big ideas and some of those ideas I realized I need to implement those in my workflow because they're really great ideas. I don't want to forget them. Without the software and without the standard operating procedures I would be faced with the challenge of having to change the hardest thing in the world and that's people's habits. I'd have to sit down. I'd have to explain to them and have meetings and tell people that this is the way they need to do it now and then hope and pray that they actually make that happen which as you well know the human habit is really hard to change; that would be difficult. Thankfully in the software so I learned that I wanted to create; I'll give you a specific example, for my podcast I want to now create a little 1-minute ad and I want to retarget my audience on Facebook to say hey I just recorded this episode with Mark and it was really awesome because of this, this, this, this, and this. So I fire up my SOP template for producing a podcast, I hit the edit button, I go and I make those changes, I hit save, the software says would you like to update all the active workflows based upon this change? I say yes. Well, guess what? That new idea is now going to get implemented in every single workflow that is active at that point in time. So with essentially no effort on my part this new idea or the strategy of this process has literally been pushed out to everybody in my organization just like that. And for me, it's the best part of the software because you're able to have your team collectively get more efficient, smarter, and more effective over time. Those ideas that you pick up don't get lost. They don't just stay in the notebook they actually become reality. Mark: When implementing a new idea like that do you find it ever causes confusion among your team? Or let's say that they've been doing the blog production workflow for the past two years and they know the steps that they may not even need to consult the software because they've done it. They know that I do keyword research and then I do this and then I do step 3 and step 4 and so maybe they're doing this independent of the software. Have you ever run into a situation where your team trips up on something like that? Trent: They're going to have questions. So it's a part of our culture and it's a part of our DNA. People know that the workflows are always changing and they're always being updated and it's just like in our company no one would go and try and drink a glass of water without a cup of water. You'd just be weird. The same thing with our workflows; everybody understands that everything happens by logging into the software first. Looking at the workflow, following the workflow, you're not supposed to do anything by memory. Now does that mean that you're not going to get questions? No, you're absolutely going to get questions. And all questions means that you didn't provide clear enough instructions. So when I get questions I then think okay well how can I update my workflow or my SOP template and in turn the workflows so that that particular question doesn't get asked again. And if you've written great procedures and you've provided enough detail you really won't get very many questions. I like to think of it like the mom tests or all of our moms are not particularly tech-savvy when I'm writing workflow I think to myself is there sufficient detail not only in the what to do but how to do each of those what's that my mom go through this and probably get it all right without asking me any questions. Mark: You answered my next question a little bit here but maybe we can expand in that a little bit. In the world of programming there is this idea of coupling, right? You can be either loosely coupled or tightly coupled. And what it basically means is a program can either be loosely coupled; it's very broad and allows for a lot of different possibilities and tight coupling is very specific as to how you do things. And there's benefits and drawbacks to both. You want to be somewhere in the middle in the world of programming probably my old days when I used to write code here. But I love these kinds of; writing and SOP I would imagine that there's something similar there, right? If you're too specific and they run across an exception they're going to wonder what should happen here because the SOP is specific. If it's too broad then you end up getting people doing things all sorts of different ways. Do you have any tips to find that sweet spot in the middle of where you can be nicely of both sides there? Trent: So the SOPs themselves are pretty tightly coupled. However now we go back to the whole hiring aspect. Ideally, I'm looking to hire people especially in the more senior roles who have a higher level of expertise in a given topic than I do. And the loose coupling as I say to them look you now own these SOP templates in your department. It is your job to improve them over time so that the people who report to you when they are doing these workflows that they're able to follow them and you're able to improve them over time and that has worked very well for us. And it also, of course, frees me up from having to be the guy that writes every single SOP. Because there's lots of stuff like for example in my e-commerce business that my wife runs on a day to day basis, there's lots of stuff I've never done but we have SOPs for it all because somebody else wrote them. Mark: Yeah well on that one of the things; so I've played around with Flowster app and one of the things I love about it is the marketplace that you have. The ability for people to contribute in SOPs that have worked well and for somebody else to come in and say you know what I really need right now what I could really use well right now but let's go use an example, how to use Ahrefs for keyword research. This is one of the SOPs with new marketplace. So if you've never done this before and don't want to sit there and write your own procedure or you don't know where to start you can use this marketplace. In your past, growing the businesses that you've grown; I mean you've grown e-commerce businesses, Amazon businesses, SaaS businesses, a podcast, I mean you've got a really wide range of online experience here, how much have you been able to draw on other people's materials? What role has that played would you say in the growth of some of these properties? Trent: Oh massive. Honestly, my secret of being a podcaster is yes it is nice to have an audience and as I'm sure you're already well aware it's the world's best networking tool and it also allows me to get free advice from really smart people in other areas. So yesterday was a perfect example. Yesterday I interviewed a woman by the name of Erin Corn. Erin worked for Facebook. She worked for Instagram and she worked for Amazon. So do you think she's got some skills? Absolutely she does. And particularly in the area of online advertising which is one of my big focuses for 2020. So at the end of that interview, I'm saying to Erin, hey Erin I think we should collaborate. And I think you should develop a whole bunch of SOPs around advertising on Facebook and Instagram; something I am not an expert in. We'll figure out how we can monetize that knowledge to your benefit and to my benefit going forward. So the whole idea of the marketplace is when people come to Flowster nobody wants to build an SOP from scratch. It's just a lot of work. And I was willing to suffer through it but not too many other people are. So the marketplace allows to come in to buy; so there's free ones you can download and then you can edit them to your heart's content. If you're a creator like me you can put your own in the marketplace and you can sell them to other people. And I've generated millions of dollars in the last two years in sales of SOPs for Amazon sellers. So there is a huge market for pre-made standard operating procedures and that's the big reason why we created the marketplace. I thought to myself there's all these other experts, there's all these other companies who would benefit from having SOPs that they could either give away or sell to their audience like a software company. We've formed partnerships with software companies for example. We've got one happening with a major player in the Amazon space by the name of Viral Launch because I said to them; I said look if you're only providing training videos to your new users you're putting a pretty significant burden on them because much like me with Ahrefs I had to watch the videos over and over again and I got to take notes and it just sucks. It's not an efficient way to learn highly detailed processes. So we're now collaborating with them to create standard operating procedures for how to get the most out of their software. And they're going to tell their 200,000 email subscribers about those. So how does that benefit us? Well it benefits their users, it benefits them as a company, and it benefits me as a platform. And so if anyone is listening to this who runs or owns a software company or you're an expert in a particular niche I definitely invite you to reach out and talk to me about some type of collaboration because that's a huge part of our growth strategy going forward. And for everyone who comes to Flowster the more and more content that's there; think of it a few years down the road like the Amazon of SOPs. No matter what business that you're in you can come there and you could SOPs that they might not be perfect but they're 80% good enough and you can hit the edit button and tweak the areas that aren't exactly the way you want and you're off to the races and it's so much better than creating it from scratch. Mark: Yeah I mean especially if you've never written it before and don't know. We talked about the idea of this loose and tight coupling; how do you find that sweet spot, well, follow somebody else's lead like somebody who's written one that's really successful. And I think for the audience listening here I know a lot of you guys have SOPs in place, why not share some of these and also use it as a revenue-generating aspect to your business especially if it's something that's tried and true. Of course, unless you think the SOP is something where you want to keep it proprietary but there's a lot of common SOPs that would be really good to share. Trent: There really is and if someone's running an agency as an example let's say your minimum retainer is $5,000 a month and you're on a classic line or like well we can't really afford that. Well if you don't have a down-sell they're gone; you generated zero. But if you say well you can't really afford that I'll tell you what we have a collection of SOPs and you can buy those for 2,500 bucks or we'll pick a number out of the air. At least you're giving the opportunity for A. to capture some revenue that's going to be 100% gross margin because it's kind of like selling software, build it once sell it a thousand times and B. more than likely as that buyer or that customer starts using your stuff you're at least giving them the opportunity to come back to the trough later on and say well actually now we're ready to put you on retainer because these are great but I don't actually want to do all this work and I want to hire people to do this work and you're opening a door that wasn't necessarily previously open to you. Mark: Right. Just a couple more questions for you. And this one here I think would apply to a lot of the people that are listening. You said that you were SOP heavy from Day 0; I'm sorry not Day 1, Day 0. How do you implement in your experience and maybe you haven't had to do this; maybe this can be difficult to answer but how would you implement SOPs with a team that is not used to following SOPs especially when you have a step by step software and you want them to live in that SOP on a day to day basis? Trent: So yes that will be more of a challenge because there is a cultural shift and I think the way to do that; there's a couple of ways, first and most when the SOPs, so you got to get the SOPs created. So as the boss I mean maybe you could create them all yourself but that wouldn't necessarily be the most efficient. But you might start off with creating SOPs for your direct reports and you're just saying hey look this is how it's done. I'm going to start assigning you these things; this weekly recurring thing or whatever and you're ingraining your direct reports into using and becoming dependent upon the software. And then you tell them alright so now for your subordinates who have to do this, this, and this over the next 30 days you have to develop 8 SOPs or 10 SOPs and if you don't you're just not going to fit in the company and you're going to get fired. That would be the way I would do it because I'm a pretty direct leader. If I have my culture and you're not in my culture then you're not on my team. Other folks are probably going to take maybe a softer approach to it and I don't know that I'm the best; I know then I am not the best expert on leading cultural change because I didn't do this with 50 people on staff already and then saying okay guys we're going to start drinking this SOP Kool-Aid. Mark: Yeah I just like to wrap up here and then ask you one final question but you mentioned early on that a big influence for you was Michael Gerber's book E-myth and I read that book and I can; everything you're talking about stems from what he wrote in that book and so it makes complete sense. So if you want to delve deeper into why SOPs and really I think sort of a philosophical look at how you build and scale a business and the hiring models that you would follow there, that would be a good foundation for anyone that's really going into this world. I think the product itself is fantastic. We preach a lot at Quiet Light Brokerage when talking about building value in an online business. One of the key pillars that we talk about is transferability. What's really important with transferability? Well having procedures written out. And for a lot of people it's intimidating so we just say just do a video recording if nothing else; just kind of a minimum [inaudible 00:34:21.6] product but how much greater would it be if you actually had everything written down in steps with timelines, with due dates and you could apply it to a team and literally just plug and play. A fantastic product and something that would really increase the value of a business just based on the fact that that you have all these procedures written and a buyer doesn't have to come in and try and figure out processes on their own. They already exist. If somebody wants to check out Flowster what recommendations or do you have anything for them to check out first? Trent: I do. I put together a page just for your audience. They can get to it at BrightIdeas.co/quietlight and on that page, I will put a promotional code and along with a couple of links. So there's one of our products that we sell in the marketplace, we sell it for $299 and it's what I call it the blogger content production pack. So any company that is producing blog content or video content or podcast content would highly value this collection of SOPs because there's my SOP for podcast production, there's my SOP for video production, there's my SOP for text blog post-production, for webinars and for email and obviously, the email is specific to one particular application. So if you don't use that same application you would obviously have to make some edits and so forth. But if you go to BrightIdeas.co/quietlight all that good free stuff which we normally sell for 300 bucks we'll be there for you. Mark: Yeah and just disclosure I actually have that workflow because I was checking out Flowster. It is so detailed. Like the SOP that you have here is great. It really does; when you're talking about being a little bit more towards the tightly coupled sort of SOPs, it is. I mean there's just on the weekly broadcast email I'm seeing 29 steps here labeled out which is fantastic. I mean that that level of detail makes sure that nothing is getting dropped. Trent, thank you so much for coming on. It's definitely a pleasure to have you on the podcast here and thank you for the offer. That's really really generous for our clients. I appreciate you offering that over to them. So we'll link to that in the show notes everybody so that you can take a look at it. I'd highly recommend you check out the app, it's really cool. And if you haven't implemented SOPs now's the time to do it. If you don't know whether or not you want to, read E-myth by Michael Gerber first and then you can build up from there and start implementing some SOPs. Trent: Yeah and I think mentioning the E-myth you asked me how would I transform the culture? I would hand E-myth to everybody on my management team and I would say you got two weeks to read this thing and we're going to sit down on our future. I think that because that way you're using that third party reference. You're not saying hey I'm the expert. I'm saying this has been proven to work in every industry on planet Earth. This book has been a bestseller for years etcetera, etcetera. Mark: Absolutely. Okay Trent, thanks for coming on. Trent: Thanks very much for having me, Mark. Links and Resources: Bright Ideas Flowster QL Listener Offer The E Myth by Michael Gerber

Five Successful Entrepreneurs Share Their Tips for Making a Profitable Exit

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 10, 2019 48:52

One of the privileges we have as the owners of QLB is that we have a panel of experienced entrepreneurs that act as advisers and also happen to be our brokers. On today's episode, we are hosting our first Podcast Panel, these in-house experts are here to answer key questions regarding buying and selling. Jason, Bryan, Amanda, and David have a combined 40 years of experience in brokering e-commerce businesses and are here to share some great insights into their first-hand transaction experience. The discussion today focuses on the sell side and how human behavior can influence a transaction, balancing being a good seller without being a pushover, and finally on valuation and managing expectations from the seller side. Episode Highlights: Can a seller increase their sales amount just by being a good seller? How to handle challenging sellers and tips for approaching the negotiations with them. Thoughts on where seller behavior fits into the entire valuation process. Some of the principals of a good seller and behaviors they should avoid. Where the line is between two being too private and being proactive as a seller. Ways certain SaaS elements can be revealed in due diligence without giving away too much before the handover. Specific contingencies that sellers can hold onto until the signing. The importance of the buyer/seller face to face meeting. Things sellers tend to put too much emphasis on during a transaction. Staying on for extra consult periods as a way to earn buyer trust and confidence. How to temper unreasonable valuations or unreasonable expectations for what market can bear on the part of the seller. Transcription: Joe: So Mark one of the privileges that you and I have as owners of Quiet Light Brokerage is that we have an unofficial board of directors and highly successful entrepreneurs that are our advisors slash brokers. And we joke often that most of them are more experienced and smarter and more successful than we are. And I think with the panel that you put together in this upcoming episode it's absolutely true. We've got Jason, Brad, Amanda, and David all sharing their experience as advisors, brokers about how to be a good seller and beyond that with the entire transaction. How did the overall panel go? Did everybody behave and give nuggets of wisdom throughout the whole podcast? Mark: Well, naturally I started this all first well it was a pretty interesting idea. I was talking to Amanda about going to a conference down in Austin where she lives and she was invited onto a panel and she said that she'd be really interested in doing stuff like that. So I thought well why don't we do a panel here at Quiet Light and bring forward some of the advisors that have been working on deals. I mean I think the combined number of years on that panel alone was something like 40 some odd years of experience combined. Joe: As buyers or entrepreneurs? Mark: I didn't even get into the; I have no idea how to calculate that. That'd be a much bigger number. My math abilities stop after about 40, 45. Joe: So everything is 40 years of experience for you. Mark: Well I become 42 so yeah everything is; that's going to be the limit. Every year I add one number to my math abilities. The panel was pretty fun. I didn't know how it was going to go. I didn't know if it was going to be too many people on the panel. I was hoping for some discussion between them and we did get into that. We got some great discussion between people who have been doing this for a really, really long time. I wanted to keep the topic pretty simple and just kind of dig into their actual experience in doing deals. I wanted to find out what are they seeing on the sell-side specifically and working with people; humans that can really influence a transaction by their behavior. How much are they seeing that actually come into influencing the price? Jason right out the gate is like look we can sometimes influence the price but the bigger worry here is having a primary effect. If you're a crappy seller you might make this an unsellable business. And that kind of launched off this conversation of what is it; how can you be a good seller? How do you balance this idea of being a good seller who is open and proactive? David talked about being proactive as a seller. How do you balance this proactivity and openness versus being a pushover? What elements should sellers also not necessarily open up on their business right away? And where should they stick their foot down and say we shouldn't be sharing this? A pretty interesting conversation on that front to see what other people's experience was in these different questions that came up. I didn't lay it out right away. Joe just to let you know I asked them to pick out a URI moving forward for the company and I won't tell you what the result was of that. Joe: So I have to listen to this to get the answer. What was the question again specifically and what wiseass comment did Jason make because I'm sure that's exactly where it came from? Mark: You're going to have to listen. Joe: Alright. What was the question though? Mark: The question was choose Joe or Mark. Joe: To do what? And you're like hosting the podcast so you could totally edit it out and tell them no, no, no, no, choose me so it's…for the audience, I want to know Mark has full editing control of the podcast so whatever negative things said about him were completely edited out. Mark: Well, that's actually not true. I don't touch it, in fact, there's a point in there and I'm hoping the editors… Joe: See he's fabricating he's making this up. It's totally true. Chris and Podcast Motor; they do what he tells them to do. Mark: They're the only people in my life that do what I tell them to do. Joe: You man have seven children, that's the way it is. Mark: Yeah, I guarantee nobody in my household does what I tell them to do. Joe: There is teenagers. Mark: There is a point in there; I hope the editors catch this where Amanda cuts out and I awkwardly interject so we'll see if the editors catch that part. If they don't just bear with it because she's actually giving some really good advice during that point in the podcast. Joe: So you and I always joke about or I always joke about the fifth pillar. You always correct me and tell me it doesn't exist. And for those that don't know the pillars, it's growth, risk, gross transferability, and documentation and I always say there's a fifth. It's an invisible fifth and it's the person behind the business. Who you are and how you behave and what you post on Facebook and what's your LinkedIn profile says and it's silly pictures and things of that nature. It has an impact on the overall value of your business. People are going to stroke a check for enough money that is going to make a difference in their life savings and the risk they're going to invest in their future. They need to like you number one, they need to trust you number one; both a number one. That is so so valuable so I love this topic. I absolutely have to listen to see how quickly they all said your name instead of mine. And then I'm going to have to have another panel on with the other four advisors and see what they say. Mark: Sounds great. Mark: Okay, welcome everybody. We're having our very first podcast panel or panel podcast. I don't know what we want to call this but basically, we have a bunch of people on this podcast here. We have Amanda, Jason, David, and Bryan all joined me for a conversation. We've never done this before so we're going to see how this actually works out. The format is going to be pretty simple, I'm just going to ask questions and pick out different people and see what sort of conversation comes from those questions. So, guys, I'm just going to start off with a very simple question. You've got to pick one personally Joe or me; me or Joe? No, don't answer that. I'm just joking. Don't answer that because I already know what the answer would be. You guys would want Joe. Alright so let's; I want to focus this panel on more seller questions because we obviously work with buyers. I know a lot of buyers listen to the podcast but we work with a lot of sellers as well. And so I want to focus a lot on that. What is it like to sell a business? What are some of your experiences? You guys have a ton of experience working with sellers, preparing their businesses for sale, helping them go through that really difficult emotional complex process of exiting their companies so I wanted to try and tap into your collective wisdom here, get some good information and insights into sellers and that process of actually selling a business. And I want to start out by looking at how much influence a seller can have on the value of their business just by how they act with their business. Let's start with you Jason because you are the longest-tenured member of QLB here so I'm going to start with you. I'm going to ask you just a pretty basic question here and that is do you think that you can increase the amount of money; can the seller increase the amount of money they get out of the exit of their business by being a quote-unquote good seller? Jason: Absolutely 100% but it may not be in the way that you're thinking about it. I don't know that your value goes from a million dollars to a million one because you're a good seller. I think it's more binary. I think it's either a million dollars or zero. Meaning if you're not a good seller I think it's likely to spook a buyer to the point where they simply don't want to complete a deal. So I think it's incumbent to be a good seller, to be ethical, to be honest, and very very important to be transparent. So like any little thing about the business that in the back of your mind you think gee I really don't want to talk about that, that's exactly the thing that the seller should talk about with the buyer. Get it out there. Mark: Yeah. Amanda, I know over the years you've also been with QLB for a really long time, we've worked with all sorts of different people. Some people are really easy and a joy to work with and while not dumping on any previous clients, some people are a little bit more challenging. And I want to take a step back and just say something real quick. When we talk about challenging clients, difficult people to work with, the one thing that's always important for us to keep in mind is I get why some people are somewhat challenging. They've built a business, they have a valuable asset, they want to make sure the deal goes through well. So they have a right to a certain extent to be a little bit more challenging. But what has been your experience, Amanda, when you've dealt with a client that might be a little bit more difficult to work with and maybe a little more abrasive in the negotiations? Have you seen that impact the deal that they're able to get? Amanda: Absolutely. I think it's important to actually take those clients and take them aside and say it's really important to look at the feedback that we're getting from buyers and to be reasonable with their expectations. Otherwise, we're not going to deliver for with the deal successfully because the buyer's feedback is super valuable. If you get a lot of feedback that's consistent and a seller is not willing to hear it, it makes it very difficult to take those items there that could be actionable, make them happen, and then get a deal done. I think that also working with abrasive sellers can rub buyers the wrong way because obviously after a deal is done they have to work with the buyers. The buyers work with the seller for extended period time for training and support and it certainly is concerning if a seller is not easy to work with and has a difficult time getting along with the buyer for that matter. So yes it definitely can impact the deal. Mark: Yeah. And I think Jason your point about it being somewhat binary I think is interesting. At the end of the day obviously, we're valuing the business not necessarily the business owner and so Bryan what are your thoughts on what Jason is saying as far as it being somewhat binary? Do you agree with that or do you think that the seller is just one other element of the entire business mix? Obviously, we're valuing the business on its own to a certain extent where does the buyer fit in; I'm sorry, where does the seller fit into that entire valuation process? Bryan: Yes. So I think Jason makes a really, really good point and I'd like to touch on his point about honesty first [inaudible 00:11:30.1]. I think that's probably the most important quality that a good seller can have. But in terms of sort of being a good seller, being more binary than affecting the valuation I think it can be like this and if the seller is really difficult to deal with then disconcerting there is something that's not happening. But I think that being a really good seller can actually also increase the ultimate value that the seller gets out of the transaction simply because being likable and getting along well with buyers is in my opinion likely to induce better offers, induce better conversations that lead to better offers, and thereby can lead to a better and more profitable deals for the seller itself. Mark: Yeah, I think the only issue that I would just if I'm going to comment on this here would be that the buyer is going to look at a business and look at the element of risk. There's always a perceived unknown of what am I actually getting into here. And if you have a seller who is shifty, if you have a seller who is maybe withholding information or is being just kind of; I think Jason to what you're saying, if they're being really abrasive or just mean or whatever yeah that becomes a very binary sort of situation where if I'm a buyer I don't want to get into that because who knows what's going to happen after the sale. Jason: I find in the real world though it's not necessarily that that a seller is abrasive it's more the word you used is good shifty. A buyer just gets the sense there's something that the seller is not telling me. Are they planning to start a competing business the day after they sell? Do they know that this industry is about to hit a brick wall? Are there issues with the supplier? It's that shifty element more than the abrasive element is what I find in the real world. Mark: I would agree with that. I mean the thing that I think people on the sell-side need to understand is that from a buyer's standpoint risk plays into a valuation perceived or real. It doesn't matter if the risk is real or if it's perceived it's still there. And so if you are giving off a sense of risk to a buyer that's going to play in the valuation that you get. So I guess we can put this out there as a plea to be a good seller; to behave correctly. But what does that actually mean to be a good seller? David I'm going to throw it over to you because I haven't got you in on this yet. And sorry, I didn't get to turn in you in the first question here but I want to ask you what are some ways that you've seen from sellers that make them good to work with and things that maybe sellers can do to maybe reduce that element of risk; that perceived risk that they might give out otherwise? David: Yeah, it's a great question. For me, it comes down to three core principles and the guys have touched upon perhaps the most important one right away which is honesty. And then after that, I think it's diligence and knowledge of your own business to the extent that they understand their own numbers in great depth. They understand the reasons, the trends, the way things happen, the problems that they've had; like fully understanding then business. When you have that and have someone with that level of knowledge come on the call with the buyers it's incredibly reassuring that they have this gross knowledge about their own business. And then to a company both that depth of honesty with expertise in their own business. And you know that's not taken for granted because sometimes many entrepreneurs are running multiple businesses and they haven't had the time to focus a lot on one specific thing. So when you have that knowledge it's really helpful. And then the third piece, of course, is productivity. I think that it's easy to come into a selling process perhaps when you are quite emotionally spent even being in the business for a while and to underestimate that a lot of clients will ask some questions and they will want to go back into past historic information and having like a positive mindset about putting that information and realizing that it's also the benefit of the ultimate end goal of the transaction which is to get the best deal terms. Going at that formula very proactive and positive perspective really just creates that like perfect cluster I think of the best seller like proactivity, positivity, honesty, and diligence. Mark: Yeah, that can be a really difficult line to draw because from a seller's standpoint you hear some of these questions and you think I don't want to share this. But at the same time, you don't want to appear shifty. I mean where do you guys think that line is for a seller when they're going through; especially like initially, right? We put up the listing out to the market. I think Brad who is not on this call recently put a listing on the market and had like 300 inquiries on it. We had to shut things down and that client is going through multiple calls one after another after another. And some of these buyers get on and they start asking some pretty pointed questions pretty quickly. What do you think the line is? Amanda I'm going to throw it to you, what do you think that line is where between being a shifty yet still open and honest and proactive as David says? Because I agree with you 100% David that being proactive makes a big difference. So where would you put that line, Amanda? Amanda: I think it has to do with creating expectations for when you're going to open up certain information and letting them know upfront what you're comfortable with. So there are certain things obviously that you want to keep pretty close to you like your suppliers or certain proprietary information that you just don't want to open up to everybody. And so possibly you say okay I'm going to give you all this information; my financials, this is how I do this, this, and this but creating a timeline of when they'll have access to that information based on certain steps being in place and finalizing the deal. And keeping some of that information towards the end I believe has worked really well for most sellers and buyers because if you have that trust level that you built between the two along the way and then you're just basically following the course of actions that have been set out ahead of time then I think that creates a nice flow. And obviously, that's what we want. We want sellers and buyers to both be comfortable through the entire process so that we can get to that finish line. And so I think it is obviously definitely a fine line. But also when a seller and a buyer are working together and they're meeting in person I think that makes a huge impact in what information is shared because you can just feel whether a person is trustworthy or not and what they're going to do with that information. It often comes across just in energy and so oftentimes the seller will let their guard down just when they get to know the buyer a little bit more. But upfront I think obviously you don't want to give 300 people everything you have for obvious reasons. Mark: Yeah and I think for… Amanda: It's about creating expectations. Mark: I would agree 100%. For the buyers that are listening to this, I think the insights that you can take away from this as well is understanding that. Amanda your suggestion is something that we use quite a bit here at Quiet Light during the due diligence process of ordering your requests and understanding some items are going to be more sensitive than others is a really good tip there. It does a great job of helping that seller get put at ease and from the sell-side is a great way for you to protect your more sensitive data by promising this saying I'm more than happy to share this with you but let's first go through these other items first just in case that torpedoes the deal. Bryan, I'm interested to know what your thoughts are where you think the most sensitive sort of data is that sellers might want to consider maybe safeguarding a little bit more than others. Obviously, different sellers are at different levels of comfort. Some don't want to share a single thing about their business and other people are like I don't care. You can't replicate what I did because I got the magic sauce. What sort of information do you think sellers is kind of the main stuff you would probably want to hang onto until the end? Bryan: Yeah, that's a great question. I think it depends a lot on like I said an individual seller. It also depends a lot on the type of the business and the business model, to begin with. So I think with that with an e-commerce business the most closely guarded secrets so to speak might be like Amanda mentioned the vendors with any any business that depends entirely or for the most part on a single or a couple of traffic sources the seller might hold the details of those traffic sources confidential such as for instance in indication of PPC traffic they might not feel comfortable disclosing their full keyword lists and that copies and so forth in the early stages. So it really depends on the business model. It also depends on the business itself and how defensible the business is. Like you said there are some business sellers who are happy to open up absolutely everything because they are fully sourcing that nobody can replicate the business no matter what they sold on but businesses are different and so does comfort level is different. Mark: David and Jason I'd be interested to know from you are there any elements that you have ever run across that have been off-limits in a due diligence process and if so how have you handled getting around that? For example vendor names, customer names, talking to employees; if you're able to share any details on that please do. And I didn't prep before this so if you're not we'll just move on to the next question. Jason: No, that's fine. Well, one thing if I may I just want to add onto what Bryan said. He mentioned about whether a business is replicable. One thing sellers hopefully are aware of, any buyer that's going to see the information has signed I think it's about a five-page non-disclosure agreement which specifically says they're not allowed to scan for ideas to steal. So if a buyer did that they would be blatantly violating their NDA. And a seller would potentially have legal recourse. So hopefully that will give sellers a little more comfort. In regards to what information is truly off-limits, the thing I found is by the time of closing it all has to come out. But some of it does come out essentially at the closing table. So one of the big areas of sensitivity I found is if a business has employees a lot of times the seller doesn't want to mention the sale to the employees literally till the last minute. The reasoning is it could really make them panic and look for other jobs if the deal doesn't go through. The buyer who might be inheriting these employees will have some obvious consternation. They're going to want to know who's about to work for them; are those people planning on sticking around? That can be a really sensitive area. And I've had situations where it feels like we're a lock on that or some other small issue and it always seems to get resolved at the closing table at the 11th hour when finally everyone feels confident that the deal is actually going to happen. David: Yeah and I think to add to Jason's point it's something that comes to mind a lot. Me over the years that's owing a lot of SaaS deals you can imagine the code base is just a really cool secret sauce component of SaaS business and the buyer very naturally wants to see that annotate to see what kind of code quality is annotations and see what kind of architecture is and that creates a lot of shrikes naturally in the owner right away. And it was an interesting bridge trying to think about how we could do that in a very safe way to get to that point that Jason is talking about which is the eventual reveal at closing. And what we did that's worked very effectively over the years and what we do at Quiet Light is show a snapshot of that code base and just provide enough insight and then a high-level like architectural look so that they can see how this sort of modules are put together. And then just a small snapshot so they can analyze the code based on a very discrete basis. Or also consider using a third party due diligence advisor to come in and review the code base and that way the owner is never really hands-on with it. It's being reviewed by a third-party specialist and there's a non-disclosure agreement in place and so you really can actually go into something that looks like quite a difficult issue and something to verify with a lot of credibility and integrity. So that's one of the ways that we've done most to do that with SaaS. Mark: Yeah I think one of the things I've learned over now 13 years of helping people through this is that during the due diligence process oftentimes a buyer comes in and says I need to understand X. And rather than saying in the due diligence process that I need to understand X they say okay I need to understand X and the way to do that is Y. And so what they say is let's do Y. And the seller says I can't do Y. And then the buyer says well what are you trying to hide, right? And so one of the tricks for you guys that I know you guys have done so well over the years is figuring out what is that X; what is the person actually trying to achieve through this request? What are they trying to learn through this request? And David to your point I'm glad you brought up [inaudible 00:25:11.7] because I was going to bring that up. That's one thing that I would consider to be kind of a non-negotiable. If I had a SaaS business and a buyer came in and said I need to get the codebase I would say no. I don't think that that's reasonable mainly because we can satisfy the same information that you're seeking in a way that does not involve handing over the entire code base through a third party due diligence requests or otherwise. I think there are other elements that could be non-negotiable such as if you have a business that has only five clients. And if the buyer wants to speak to those clients there might be a reasonable request there. But it can also be pretty dicing so how do you overcome that sort of friction in a due diligence process. Jason, it looks like you have something that you want to add onto that. Jason: Yeah I mean just touching on that. One thing we were talking about earlier was being a good seller and the corollary is being a good buyer. But one thing I've encountered on occasion is somebody will have experience with having done other deals in the past; either business acquisitions or dispositions or real estate or something. And a person might have an attitude of I've done a lot of deals; this is the way it's always done. And one message I would try to get out to people is just because you've done a deal in a certain way that's not the way it's always done. This panel has done literally hundreds of deals and probably in dozens and dozens of different ways. So I think Mark what you're saying is try to figure out the core of wants and then get creative about how to supply it is probably the most appropriate answer rather than being rigid and saying this is how it has to be. Amanda: I also think to David's point about bringing a third party to do due diligence and possibly a financial audit or an audit of some technology or code it brings a lot of value because it gives the buyer some time to focus on actually what they wanted to do at a business point or it takes the nuances of the financial load because it's so tedious when you're going through financial due diligence or looking at code. And to have somebody else do that who's professional and experienced with that while the buyer can focus on future opportunities and getting prepped and ready for your transitioning into the business then I think there's a ton of value in doing that. And oftentimes it helps the seller feel more comfortable sharing that information with a third party as well. Mark: I'd be curious to see what experience each of you has had with conditional purchase agreements. I've used them sparingly and just I'm going to take a step back, whenever we do the podcast I introduce something that is a little bit outside the normal. Oftentimes I hear from you guys they're saying why are you saying that now everyone is going to want a conditional purchase agreement. So I'm not necessarily encouraging this but I've used it on occasion when somebody really doesn't want to disclose vendor names or really doesn't want to disclose something else. So we say alright let's put together a conditional purchase agreement where basically this thing is binding conditioned on a very specific term. Have any of you others worked with those? Jason: I mean I think like I said I've had some deals where it really seems like it's either going to close or fall apart at the closing table and they've always closed. It's always whatever is that one condition has been revealed right at the very end. Mark: Yeah, and I think I'm going to wrap this up. Amanda, I think one point that you made that I kind of went right on over is meet in person. If I could give one bit of advice to anyone doing an acquisition on the buy-side or sell-side, get together and meet in person. It solves so many problems. If you can spend a couple of days with that person in the same room going over some of the due diligence materials I think it solves a ton of problems or it creates a massive problem that deals shouldn't happen anyways. And that's an outcome that might be okay if the deal is going to be bad anyway. And so a meeting in person is a great suggestion. It's something that I would definitely recommend. Alright, I'm going to ask and move on to another topic here. Bryan I'm going to move this over to you here and that is talking about what's important in the negotiation. When somebody is looking to sell their business oftentimes what we do is we think well I want to get money out of this. I want to get X out of it. I want to get as much as I can possibly get out of it and forget that there's a lot of elements that you have to negotiate. You have a non compete agreement, you have an employment or consulting agreement on top of that. And there's literally probably about a half dozen different things that get negotiated through the process of selling an online business. What are some areas that you've seen maybe a wrong emphasis from sellers in the past where they might put too much weight on one element of a transaction? Bryan: Yeah there is definitely a lot going on in terms of what makes an offer than just total price of the offer. There are things you mentioned and there are seller notes, equity rules, you mentioned an offer can be structured in so many ways. In terms of wrong emphasis, I think sellers are often a little bit perhaps too much against carrying a seller note especially if it's a small seller note. I've seen this sentiment changing over the recent years though and it used to be the case years ago that most sellers would basically only want to want to deal with good cash offers. It's now getting more and more common for sellers to be okay with a 5, 10, or 20% seller note. And the reason why I believe a seller should be more okay with carrying small notes is because that's what I often explain to sellers themselves is that oftentimes those offers that they get that are structured this way are actually going to have bought them more money at the end than a full cash offer route to the extent that they can even easy to consider the seller note to be sort of a bonus on top of what they get anyway. So they can keep pushing for an all-cash offer but it's likely that this all-cash offer would actually go to turn out to be lower than the cash part of the offer that might go to small notes. Mark: Yeah to that we have a podcast I think it probably would have aired a couple of weeks before this episode here with Shannon Stewart who's a tax advisor on the sell-side. And she has an example of a business that sold for 11 million dollars and that she was able to; the net proceeds increased by 43% largely through deferring some of the payments that came in. And when you're talking about an 11 million dollar deal a 43% increase in net proceeds is not a small amount of money. So I would agree, seller notes and knowing how to structure those the right way is is something. Jason what would you say; is there any element that you think sellers tend to overemphasize when they're negotiating? Jason: Yeah I mean I think like Bryan said headline price gets a lot of focus when in reality it's more about how much are you going to get overtime after-tax that you get to keep. And then I think another thing that gets way too much emphasis is multiple. I think a lot of people get hung up on multiple both buyers and sellers and it kind of boils down more to bragging rights than to a discernible business reasoning meaning ohI sold my business for 4X or whatever so I can tell my friends. The reality is okay let's say you pushed the multiple for your particular industry; let's say you're selling an e-commerce business and they normally sell around three times earnings and you managed to push it to four times like you're taking a lot more risk to get to four times you had to accept an earn-out and it's depending on performance and this and that and the other. Even if you collect it all you're earning what you would make in four years anyway. You wouldn't be selling the business if the sole reason was the money that you're getting paid. There are clearly other reasons otherwise you're better to keep the business. So the big advice I give to sellers is the market will determine the value of your business better than anyone on this panel, better than you the seller, better than any individual buyer. We have thousands and thousands of buyers and for most businesses, we get multiple offers. That's the market. If you're not willing to accept what the market will bear you're better to keep the business than to sell it or to try to push the market beyond what it will bear because it very likely could backfire. Mark: Well Jason you're begging me to go into a question that is also on the list. I'm not going to go there yet because I want to stay on this one here and then we're going to get over to that question to wrap things up here. David, I'll be interested in your thoughts on this as well here. Are there elements; I mean you've got a ton of experience in working with sellers just like everybody here, what are some things that you see people often negotiate maybe more heavily than they should and what advice would you give to them on that? David: Well I think certainly on the emphasis question I would say to sellers when they're reviewing any offer that 50% of the decision; only 50% of the decision should come down to purchase price and terms and the other 50% should be based on the execution certainty of the buyer that's actually presenting the offset. Because there's an ocean of difference between coming out with an LOI for your business and actually closing it. And I think it's part of the; well a huge component of hiring a broker and an advisor to help you take that bridge from there to there and I think it's for me sellers that have been really receptive to guidance and advice at that point whether they should take the focus off the headline price off the headline multiple that Jason is talking about and consider the wider context that is this still going to close because the buyer has experience, for example, they have a readily available source of funding their due diligence requests are miles and miles long they're not reliant on any kind of outside financing [inaudible 00:35:22.8] all of these things introduce risk into the deal and ultimately that's risk needs to be looked at properly in the context of the whole deal so I think that's really important. Negotiating terms, one thing that I always recommend for sellers to be open to is the prospect of keeping the window open for like the minority kind of consulting arrangements after the sale. Honestly, we had enough every business through a standard transition period and depending on the size and complexity that can vary. But I think one thing that's actually really good for sellers to think about is maybe staying on to do like an hour or two a month to just say six months longer with the sale and that goes a huge way with buyers knowing that they just have a slightly longer line which the owner has to ask a half an hour-long question in four months time. And to that point about getting the trust and getting the deal over the way, that's a huge point that I think sellers are sometimes like they're spent and they never really want to spend more time on the business. But just that tiny little time investment for just a few moments goes a huge way towards getting a deal on the way and a great value. Mark: Yeah I would agree to that 100%. I remember when I sold my business now a long time ago they asked me to stay on for six months afterwards and they paid me for it; so a regular monthly consulting fee and at first I was like man this is going to be a pain but what I found pretty quickly is it wasn't. It was really easy. It was very easy money that I was bringing in as a result of that. And it really helped with their transition as well. Alright, we're at 35 or about 30 minutes here on this so we're going to round it out with one last question and this is one that is pretty important to me because I think it's what we all do here. We all earn a living in some capacity through helping people exit their businesses and from our standpoint it can be really easy to treat people's businesses as inventory that we're simply moving. And obviously, we don't ever want to go there because we're all business owners ourselves. We've all been through that. We know what work it takes to build these and then how difficult it can be and how stressful it can be to sell them. So one of my pet peeves that have grown over the years is just hearing people say oh man is this seller I was approaching them I wanted to buy their business they weren't selling it but I was doing outreach and I asked them how much they'd sell it for and man his expectations were crazy. It's a pet peeve of mine so I'm kind of implanting here the answer that I want to hear. Amanda; we're going to go left and right on my screen, Amanda, you're first here. Do you think that there is such thing as an unreasonable valuation or is it only really unreasonable expectations of what the market can bear? Amanda: Well I think both actually I think unreasonable expectations for where the market can bear; I mean when we're seeing that right now. Certainly, we're seeing a lot of growth in multiples over the last two years and there's been a push to constantly drive that multiple. And I think we've done a really good job of doing that. But sellers, of course, have their own expectations on what they think that multiple should be because they hear things from other sellers or they possibly got an offer four years ago from a strategic and they decide to pass that. And that has dried up and gone away and is no longer a viable option. And so I think the market evolves really quickly. And I'm actually one of those people who may have unreasonable expectation professional with expertise and proper data to bring somewhere like that back to reality. And I think that that's; actually, the core of it is having realistic expectations with what the market is; the ability of the market at this time because obviously, that may change in six months for better or for worse. I think that whether the expectations are reasonable is less important than the seller being able to be open to the feedback and coming back down to reality. And I think that makes a lot of difference because we see that quite often where sellers will come in and they think their business is for X multiple but then they're open to hearing what we're experiencing, what we're seeing because we do a lot of volumes and then having those realistic expectations is super important. Mark: Yeah and I think one thing I've been trying to remind people as well especially in the sell-side when we get up into the high seven and eight-figure territory; you brought up Amanda that the seller might have gotten an offer from a strategic years ago but obviously never went through or they heard about so-and-so who got a 6X on their business what they never really hear when they hear these big prices is what was the composition of that offer. How much was there actually cash? How much was equity that can be the phantom value? Jason, I know you have a lot of stories about phantom values in equity, right? And so that's something that we don't hear about. It's like the sports contract of oh my gosh they got o120 dollars but it's only 10 million dollars guaranteed and like it's so much in incentives. Jason, what are your thoughts on this aspect of unreasonable expectations on the part of sellers? Jason: I think part of it depends on how you define unreasonable because I look at myself as an example. Most people say I've got very unreasonable expectations of the value of an hour of my time and I will concede absolutely positively. What I expect to earn is way more than what my job will provide and all that means is I need to adjust how I use my time in order to achieve it. So if you're a person who believes your business is worth a lot more than the market will bear, that's perfectly fine. I just think don't be a seller because the market won't provide it. It's important to understand the people on the other end of the transaction are buyers. They're seeking a certain rate of return. You're comparing your business not only to save alternatives like or I mean to a spectrum of alternatives and various safety like bonds, stocks, municipals, real estate. They're also comparing it to other businesses for sale that earn roughly the same amount. You might have roughly the same growth plans. And it can be really frustrating if anyone is banging their head saying no, no, no, no, my business is special and deserves more when the market simply won't bear it out. I think most of us on the panel have kind of learned that there's a range. There's a spectrum where a valuation could be within a certain range depending on certain factors. Sometimes it's worth it to test the market to put out something at a bit higher valuation just that so you see the seller understands that the odds are going to go down the harder you push. And then one other kind of important point I want to bring up, we talked about this on an internal email the other day. A lot of times a seller will call multiple brokerages; they'll call Quiet Light and then two or three of our competitors and that's perfectly fine. We want you to talk to whoever you want to talk to. But one common thing I'll hear is a seller will say to me how much is the business worth and I'll quote a price. I'll say I think it's worth about a million dollars for the sake of argument and they'll say well wait I just talked to Brokerage X and they quoted me a million two, can you get me a million two? My answer is I don't know and neither do they. It's not the broker that's buying your business. It's a buyer that we've not yet identified and all that all of us are doing is giving an opinion. And in some cases, it can be really detrimental to the seller to try to play brokers off each other because the broker's tendency might be well gee if these three other people told you it's worth more maybe I'm wrong and the price gets bid up in the sellers head. And then when you get to market the buyers; the people that are actually writing the check for the business are like what are you talking about you're way out of bounds? So it's really important to remember who's the decision-maker. In my mind the decision-maker is always the person that's writing the check for your business; sometimes that's the buyer, sometimes that's the banker who's funding the buyer, but you always have to cater to that ultimate decision-maker to figure out what's the true value. Mark: Absolutely. So in regards to the value of your time Jason I appreciate you putting it on a payment plan for this little podcast panel because it is pretty crazy. Alright, David, over to you I want to get your opinions on this. David: I think Jason said absolutely the best. I think the market ultimately informs everyone to pick up on what Amanda said it's all about receptivity to that. I mean you can continue on as a business owner with a maybe like a grand ass perspective of the value of your business for a long enough period of time and as Jason said potentially go with the broker that's gone for a particularly inflated valuation. The problem is as Jason and we all know here is that if you come out way too high you will flop in the market and it will be a long long period of time before you then eventually have to come off the exclusivity pulling down the listing and then return back to market at a later point in time often with another advisor and how many times do we see that at Quiet Light with people coming to us from a very correct or whatever having spent an awful lot of wasted time and to cut in to Jason's point all of our time is valuable and we love the perception of it. If you're a business owner with a great business that you want to exit your time is especially valuable. So that decision right out the gate in terms of your receptivity and so what the market will bear is arguably the most important decision when it comes to respecting your own time and getting a process done and completed and money in the bag. Mark: Yeah, I remember probably about a year ago I was recording a potential client and then he came back and said another broker quoted me and said that they could get me this much and it was substantially higher than what I was going to; what I was quoting him at. He said and he's going to reduce his commission to this. I looked at it and I called him and said yeah you should sign with them. How do you counteract that, right? You couldn't really counteract that too much other than say if you really think they can get that and are being less commissioned then you should sign with them. He ended up signing with me later and we ended up getting a really good deal for him. But I think you guys point about valuations being a predictive exercise is on point. Alright, Bryan, I saved the best for last. What are your thoughts as far as these unreasonable expectations or is it just unreasonable expectations for the market? Bryan: I think Chris and David both absolutely nailed it. And I'm glad that they took the conversation the way they did. I think the market is always going to be brutally honest and any valuation mistakes that are being made, any unreasonable expectations are going to be corrected by the market. But I think the one most important thing on this is it is going to be the market who will buy the business it's not going to be the broker. There's no point negotiating the valuation of your business with the broker because it's not in the broker's power to value your business it's the market that values your business ultimately. Mark: Absolutely I'm going around this out and close it up by saying one thing and that is Jason, you said this in what you brought up, if the value of your business in your head is 10 million dollars but the valuation of the market is 1 million dollars just don't become a seller. That's kind of the result. As far as Quiet Light Brokerage, look I know where the value of Quiet Light is. If somebody came up the street and offered me the value; the market value of Quiet Light I would say no. If they are offering me two times the market value of Quiet Light I would say no. If they offered me three times I would still say no because the value of my head for what this business is worth to me right now is way more than what the market value is. I'm not a seller; not going to be a seller for a long long time. And that's totally fine because I love this business. I love working with you guys. Thank you so much for coming on this podcast panel. Guys give us feedback on this. Let us know what you think. If there's something that you want us to do a panel on as far as topics let me know. If you want it to be specific in industries such as e-commerce or SaaS or content sites we can do that as well. We've got a wealth of experience here with the advisors and we're about to be able to tap into them more with these podcasts. So again, thanks everyone for joining this. Let's do it again hopefully sometime soon. Bryan: Thanks, everyone. Amanda: Thank you. David: Thanks, Mark.

staying meaning honestly exit guys saas profitable negotiating ppc successful entrepreneurs nda loi uri 4x 6x podcast panel ohi mark david quiet light brokerage quiet light mark you david yeah mark yeah joe you mark well podcast motor shannon stewart joe so david thanks mark they amanda it joe there mark okay mark absolutely

How to Optimize Your SaaS Sales Strategy

Play Episode Listen Later May 14, 2019 35:36

When they've gone door to door to sell a product for any amount of time, a salesperson truly learns what they can take. Being a good sales rep can absolutely be nurture over nature and with the right processes in place, any company can turn out a good sales team and garner great results. Today's guest, Ali Mirza, comes from a pure sales background. These days, he is mixing his true old-school sales experience with expertise in the online world. He started Rosegarden consulting about 8 years ago and now focuses on helping SaaS businesses build out their sales processes. Rosegarden helps set up a salesforce that does what they need to make the sales while following a set of parameters that can be repeated over and over again. Each of his custom sales processes is tailored for the client to achieve consistent, long-term growth. Episode Highlights: Ali's sales background and how he got into his current business. His beliefs on natural-born salespeople. How to find and hire rockstar salespeople. Where Ali starts in creating sales processes for the client. How much the process changes from client to client. The amount of flexibility given to sales reps within an organization in order for them to be able to do what they do best. The correct balance of product knowledge for the reps who are selling the SaaS product. How SaaS business owners can achieve continuity between the sales reps and the backend team. When a business should start to think about systematizing their sales processes. How the process is measured by Ali and his team. Some standout successes Ali and his team have achieved Transcription: Joe: Mark I understand that our friend John Corcoran referred someone to Quiet Light to be a guest on the podcast; Ali Mirza. He's from Rose Garden Consulting. First of all, John thank you very much and if anyone else has suggestions for a great guest like Ali please send us an email. We'd love to have some people on that can help you grow your business or sell your business or even buy your business. Now as I understand it Ali is in the SaaS world helping people optimize that sales process, that onboarding process which is kind of challenging and critically important in the SaaS area right? Mark: Absolutely and John and Jeremy I think they're just going to become our new podcast guest sourcing agents because they've been referring so many awesome people over that have really added to the podcast quite a bit. But Ali comes from this traditional sales background and he and I talked quite a bit about this because that's my background as well. When I was a teenager my very first job was a telemarketing job. Yes, I was one of those guys. And then I also did B2B door to door sales for long distance optimization. I mean talk about some of the most brutal conditions for learning basic entrepreneurship. Ali comes from that background; he's really good at it. He's a killer sales person and so what he does now is he works with SaaS organizations to help optimize their onboarding processes. And how do you set up a sales team that is both free to do what they need to do … is it not this tight like script that a sales person has to have but still have these processes that are repeatable and can be optimized so that you're not losing money through your onboarding process. It's the same thing as like CRO; Conversion Rate Optimization. So many people have these leaky conversion funnels and just by optimizing those they can increase the revenue substantially. This is the same thing with any group and any SaaS business that has an onboarding process for potential clients. So kind of an old school soul … young guy but old school soul when it comes to the sales process and mixed it in with the online world. Joe: I'm looking forward to listening to this one myself, let's get to it. Mark: Ali, thank you so much for joining me I appreciate … first of all your patience because I cancelled this podcast on you twice both for totally legitimate reasons. My mom's basement was flooding the first time. I was literally like outside shoveling snow when I was texting you saying I can't make this one and then the last time was I a little bit lost my voice. And it's still kind of gone but thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate it. Ali: No problem. I appreciate you having me. Mark: Do me a favor and let our listeners know basically why I'm having you on the podcast; what's your story and what do you do. Ali: So what I do I'm still trying to figure that out half the time but my story … so I got in the sales when I was 19 years old. So I was a guy that would go door to door at Sun Life insurance. I did that for four years. I built up a team. I was the number one agent in the country and handled about 50 sales reps under my belt. Things are great and all but as a true entrepreneur, I knew that that wasn't exactly where I wanted to be for the rest of my life and obviously my [inaudible 00:04:19.6] wasn't fulfilled. Long story short we have decided to start my own company; Rose Garden. That was almost eight years ago now. Originally we started off as kind of like a hired gun. I didn't like the bureaucracy and all that stuff that came with selling insurance and so I just hey I'm a salesman just let me sell that's all I want to do. So we'd go into companies, you put us on retainer and we could sell for you and when we close the deal you pay us bigger. That worked out great for a while; 2 ½ years or so then one of my clients this is great but if you get hit by a bus tomorrow we're back to square one. And I said yeah you're right about that and then he said well why don't you write down what you do for us. I said well that wasn't our original engagement so why don't you pay me for it? And so he said yes. And that's kind of when the light bulb went off and I understood that wait hang on, building people sales processes is infinitely more scalable than me actually selling for people. So that's about five or six years ago or so we pivoted. And since then we've almost exclusively been building out sales processes for our companies. Mark: That's awesome. So I actually come from that direct sales background as well; like I cut my teeth my very first job. And most people's first job was like McDonald's or something like that right, fast food? I think at the age of 12 or 13 I made a promise to myself I would never work in fast food and so my very first job was a telemarketing position. And boy you learn pretty quickly how to deal with that and I think probably … I'll put this as my worst job because I was kind of burnt out at this point. I was in that for about five years of doing telemarketing in some of the worst stuff out there too. I did door to door business, door to door telephone long distance service sales. They would send us down, it was a team of us, we'd go down in like teams of three and we would really hit like a downtown area and some small town, knock on doors to come see a long distance bill. All these are … oh my gosh man that was brutal but it was an awesome experience as far as learning how to A. be an entrepreneur but also B. how to sell. Ali: Yeah. Mark: A great background for an entrepreneur. Ali: Yeah I know I mean going door to door that will put some hair on your chest. And once you do that I mean you don't really fear things anymore. I think a lot of what holds people back as entrepreneurs is the fear of what could or what realistically what will happen right? If I take this risk will it pay off with, will it break me? I don't have that anymore. When you have to knock on someone's door and try and sell them some life insurance it's … all inhibitions … when you do that for a few years all inhibitions are gone. You just have enough wee care anymore. Mark: Yeah you learn how to laugh off the nose and actually appreciate the guys that just like in telemarketing the best thing that we could have happen is somebody hangs up on us right? Because that's a very quick no, I can immediately get on to that next prospect. And you get kind of this cold like I don't care if you do that. There was one guy at the door to door telephone long distance company where he actually had somebody throw a wrench at him so that's actually a little bit more aggressive. Hopefully, that doesn't happen but yeah you're right that puts hair on your chest. You learn very quickly to lose that fear. So alright today I want to talk … you do a lot of consulting for SaaS companies and helping build their sales processes. And this is obviously really important for just lowering that cost of acquisition. If you have a more efficient sales team you're going to be signing up more people. So I want to get in that. I'm going to kind of open up with a question here that … I don't know maybe it's a softball question but aren't there natural born salespeople? I mean isn't it really coming down to … and I know what you're going to answer on this but doesn't it come down to … again I did a little show prep; thanks me. Doesn't it come down to finding just those rock star sales people? Ali: So those are two different questions right? So a natural born sales person in my opinion and my opinion is always right of course. Mark: [inaudible 00:08:11.9] Ali: Yeah exactly, right? I would do it. I think it was the Charles Barkley book where it was like I may be wrong but I doubt it. But in my opinion, there's no such thing as a born sales person. The only things that are born are baby boys and baby girls. Sales people are trained. No different than there's no lawyer gene, there's no doctor gene, all these other things. There's no sales gene as much as people would like to believe. A lot of what we attribute that to is people that are just outgoing, charismatic, extroverts. That's learned. That's nature not … oh, I'm sorry that's nurtured not nature. So it depends on external environment built, factors and things of that nature of what your personality ends up to be. That doesn't necessarily guarantee that you're going to be at closing and actually bring money in the door. We know lots of extroverts that just talk, talk, talk, talk, talk and burn deals. So there is no such thing as a born sales person. Now, looking for a rock star that's a different thing; you're looking for someone that's … you may not know what you're asking for but really what you're asking for is somebody that's already trained that someone else has put the work into and now you're going to … you're fixing to benefit off of their work. That is more reasonable than looking for a natural born salesperson because at that point what you're really saying is someone that doesn't have sales training but just going to sell. And so looking for a rock star is someone that has that sales training that you can vet their experience. Now that being said that's incredibly difficult to find especially in today's market. I mean if you can sell your … sales is the only money side of the balance sheet. Everyone else is an expense we're the only income, right? So sales … when someone can sell someone's picking up your company, you're not going to let them go. So good salespeople are golden handcuffed in. Of course, there are founders and companies that drop the ball with great sales people but the likelihood that you're going to find that person on the open market is next to none. They know people that know people that don't land on their feet pretty quick. Mark: Yeah I think one of the problems I see with a lot of companies especially as they're scaling is the founder might have that ability to sell the product but they can never really expand beyond that. And I actually have this problem with Quiet Light when I started initially. I went through … I think it was probably within the first year of Quiet Light, I went out and I hired five people that I thought were going to be really good at this but they ended up not really working out. Some of them did a little bit but not really, they all kind of phased out. It wasn't until Jason joined the team that I stumbled upon I would guess in your world the sales process. And I never really thought about in terms of a process because we don't think about in the same way here at Quiet Light but I'd like to get into this a little bit as far as finding out what that process is for your company. I would imagine depending on what you're selling and within the SaaS world specifically as well. The process is going to differ quite a bit from if you're selling say a $300 a month SaaS product versus … I think I just talked to somebody yesterday where his average price upon is $20,000 per year with three year minimum commitments. So what does that process look like when you're going into an organization and you want to start to identify A. the characteristics of that sales process and am I even putting this in the right way or do we talk [crosstalk 00:11:35.1] skill process? Ali: That's exactly what we do. So every sales process we build is custom and unique. Now at the surface level or at the face value after the fact there's only so many ways to skin a cat and so I could just turn around and be like oh you know what Company A sales process looks quite a bit like Company B but we can't start there, right? So we have to treat everything unique and custom from the beginning. And then it may end up looking somewhat similar to someone else's but we arrive at that independent of that. So we're not trying to predetermine. Yeah, so our process of how we do that is first thing we do is we do an assessment. So we'll actually go in there and spend a day on site and work with their sales leader, the founders, work with the sales team and really understand everything that they're doing right that they need to continue doing, everything that they're doing wrong that they need to stop or change, and everything that they're not doing that they need to be doing. And so we start at a very high level, they walk us through their process, they walk us through their typical deal flows and cycles and so we start to really pick out things from there. I'll get them into one of those three categories and then from there we get very granular and look at all the tactics. Then we build a report and say step by step right if I was your VP of sales or if I was the founder of this company or you know I had to build a process this is what I would do. So you get a little diagnostic and I basically can walk you through it step by step. It helps you understand what you need to do in what you do. Because sometimes even if things that we're doing is right it's just having that extra validation from someone who sees it from … we've seen hundreds of SaaS companies do it the right and the wrong way. I've seen crazy growth, I've seen two, three, 400% month over month and I've seen one or 2% year over year. So you can pick out patterns pretty quick. Mark: Yeah. How much has that sales process changed though from one organization to the next? I mean for example Quiet Light Brokerage, when I hired on those first five people as brokers I took on somebody who was really good at relationship based sales and was fine with taking that sort of long term sort of approach and then I also hired somebody who is the number one salesperson for Quick Books Online but he was much more close. He was a closer and that's what he wants to do and frankly, he struggled a lot and didn't really do so well. So at one point and more specifically for the people listening here and they're thinking about the sales team that they have how much do you look at the company, what do you look at with a company I should ask to start to determine okay this approach is right versus this approach is wrong as far as what they're doing? Ali: I mean you got to start with who they're selling to because even within a particular company between the service, offering, product, solution, whatever it is that they're selling depending on which market and depending on who is buying that sales process very well could change. So I'll give you a perfect example, one of our clients a SaaS company sells into the education or is an education platform. Let's call it an online education platform that sells to large organizations. But they also have individuals, freelancers, people like … let's call them hobbyists coming in there and buying their solution as well. So it's an online learning platform but their goal is to sell large organizations packages and number of seats but they also have one offs coming in as well. So the sales process is completely unique for the one offs and the people that are buying less than five seats, a small organization that has one, two, three, developers or just someone that wants to up level their own development game. I'm not a developer so I don't even know if I'm using the right terminology but that's irrelevant. Mark: It sounds great. Ali: Yeah exactly there isn't enough coloring right on a black screen with green— Mark: Just like the Matrix. Ali: Exactly, yeah. So the sales people what we have to do with them was we have to get that stuff off the sales people's plate because we're paying our sales people too much, in my opinion, to sit there and sell a $49 a month deal. It's pointless, right? We were losing money at that point on that sale if we had to not only pay the sales person salary because there was some cost to fulfillment even though it was SaaS and then pay him a commission off of that and then it was just annoying the salespeople. Now you got to look at opportunity costs. So what we did was we segmented them completely because the guy that's buying one or two seats is going to ask maybe not all of the questions but they're going to ask a fair bit of the same questions that the person that we're selling one to 200 seats too and I want all my sales people focused on that. So we have to segment that out, we have to change up the sales process, there was a lot of things that we did there. So even within the organization, the sales process changes. Now again we had to build that unique for them and we have to look at their … we started with their who's buying, what are they buying, why are they buying, how are they buying, etcetera and reverse engineer the sales process that way. And you could look at that sales process and probably compare it to 10 other clients that I have and say well there's a lot of similarities. Well yeah, there's only so many ways to skin a cat but at the end of the day, if I had been like wow who does this client remind me of, it reminds me of this person let me bring this in here then you're … it's like renovating a house. I mean yeah you can put lipstick on a pig but at the end of the day, it's still a pig. Mark: So how much of that sales process vary within an organization, the concern I would have would be having a one size fits all sort of a strategy when different clients are going to be coming with different needs. So how much latitude do you give the sales people within an organization to be able to freelance that process or even within that process at certain steps? Ali: A lot, so here's what we do if you don't have anything to benchmark off of how will you ever measure success? How will you know that … if you don't have a control group you will never know whether you're picking up all the money off the table? With that being said I'm not looking to handcuff and put my extra salespeople in a straightjacket so we give them parameters. We tell them here's what you need to do. And again what it's really used for is making sure that at first 18 months of a sales person they have more than paid for themselves. After 18 months, after someone's been working … selling for a year and a half in a company they've pretty much worked most if not all types of deals that walk in and they know what to do. What I don't want is oh you know this person … we say hey just go sell. What are they going to do? They're going to burn deals and they're going to flush out within six months so you have to give them something. But again if it's too tight they're not going to close or they're going to look for ways around it. And your best salespeople, that same part of the brain that it takes to kind of see the seams and run that route and through a sales process, the same part of the brain to get to that and score a touchdown is the same part of the brain that does it internally and tries to figure out okay how can I max out my commission, where do I need to sandbag, what do I need to do, what leverage do I need to pull to maximize it for myself? And sometimes … a lot of times it ends up being very detrimental to the company. So don't give your sales people enough rope where they're going to hang themselves with. So give them a process because they're going to go outside that process so anticipate that and say look here's what a typical process looks like you go from A, B, C, and D. Understand though if circumstance 1, 2, or 3 arises this is where you can jump to, this is what you can do, this is how you can do it. And now you're starting to turn their brain and you're designing where they can cut corners because they're going to do it anyways. So you at least design and you account for it. I always do … figuring out when your P&L six months later after John's left and be like oh shit all of his deals are about to fall through and we just … yeah. And then that happens all the time as much as … no one brags about that right? None of your entrepreneur friends are going to sit around and be like oh yeah I just got shafted for $50,000 of commissions that I paid some guy three months ago and now he's gone and all his deals are about to fall through, I'm about to lose a lot of money. No one brags about that. Everyone brags about the logo that they closed. But that stuff happens all the time I get to see it from the inside. Mark: Yeah absolutely and keeping that process, you're absolutely right. I hated it when I was in sales especially in telemarketing. Telemarketing is really churn and burn, get through as many numbers as you can and if I did a telemarketing job and was handed a script I guarantee you I freelanced because you know … you hear it, we all get the call … those annoying calls and the person can't pronounce your name and they can't really even … they're tripping over the script and all that sort of stuff and that's an extreme example obviously but having that looseness. Now with a SaaS product, obviously there's a certain amount of expertise that somebody has to have, how important do you see that in the process of developing a sales team to make sure that you're front end people doing product demos and everything else know that product in and out and how much emphasis should SaaS owners be putting on that part of the sales training process? Ali: It's a fine balance. So here is the thing, knowledge is ammunition and the more ammunition you have sometimes you might use like a tank to try and kill a mosquito because we see that all the time; it's the show up and throw up right? But on the flip side if you don't know what you're selling how are you going to sell it so it's a fine balance. Here's the way that I like to position in and I don't want anyone to get this confusing but I would like to teach my sales people everything they need to know about the product but also more importantly is teach them how to position it. It's more important than teaching them what it actually does and when to bring it up and how to bring it up. Because I think that that's important and once you start explaining that it prevents a little bit of that throw up and show up type of thing but on the flip side and this … everyone's going to freak out when I say this but you need to know this much more than a prospect in order to sell. I have sold things that I have absolutely no clue what I'm talking about for one reason and one reason only subtext. It's not what you say, half the time it's what you don't say. So if you're a really good salesperson you don't need to know anything about anything you just show up I mean not to toot my own horn but I mean like my head is already big enough as it and as you can tell I'm … no one is more impressed by me than me but I've closed seven figure deals not knowing what it was that I was selling. Because if you can ask the right questions not only are they going to tell you everything you need to know but they're going to answer their own questions and all … you just have to know so little and position things. And sometimes it's just as simple as nodding your head and be like “yup, uh-huh, yup” and it's just answering their questions. And then they're like you know what Ali I think I need to move forward with it. People do not understand the importance of subtext. Most sales people will never be able to master that so, as a result, it's very important that you need to be able to teach them. You need to not only teach them what the product does but then how to position. I think that's more important than the product knowledge itself but if we're going to get really philosophical with it in my opinion subtext is far more important than anything else. Mark: The most valuable lesson I ever learned in sales was learning how to shut up. Honestly and I think it was in a Zig Ziglar book that I read way back in the day where he talked about that active listening and just being quiet and more importantly not just being quiet and looking and kind of blankly not listening but listening to what the prospect says and then being able to simply when you're invited to that point to respond, responding to what they actually say. And we've seen this at Quiet Light and this is completely unintentional, we have a pretty soft approach with our sales process. But what I've found in the past is that when I tell somebody not to sell their business which we tell people a lot because I honestly think it's in their best interest; oftentimes when we tell somebody not to do something the opposite starts to happen. They end up becoming more determined to do it and part of that is just dealing with entrepreneurs where all the smartest people are in the room and they wanted to … okay, I have one more question for you. I have two so if we can fit two in we'll do it but one more big question and this is something that I find to be a problem with a lot of online service based companies and SaaS companies and that is the continuity between the sales person upfront and the back end team; so pretty simple sales person is over delivering, over promising what's going to happen after. Do you consult in this area at all and how can business owners, SaaS owners look towards that continuity between their upfront sales person because not having to do the account management necessarily after the sale? Ali: See both of that are training, right? A lot of times … let's call me an optimist in this and I believe that most sales people don't typically want to lie and so if they know that they're lying they'll probably shy away from it. Unless you get a shady sales person then all bets are off type of thing but I'd say the vast majority of sales people don't want to lie and it's just because you haven't taken the time to properly train them on what actually happens after the deal is done. So for us, it's very important to sit with customers of SaaS and really understand how because that's really how we create the pitch. So we sit with costumers of SaaS, we see what people are saying, how they're saying it, we interview customers, and once we understand that we reverse engineer the pitch. Once you give someone the pitch it's black and white; what we do, what we don't do, how we do it, and if you're going off script it's very easy to call you in and be like hey brother what's going on here? You're supposed to say we do X, Y, and Z why are you saying one, two, three, and then it happens a couple of times and you help them transition out. But you're 100% right it's all about setting expectations on the front end from a sales person with the prospect so that when they do become a client it's not a problem but you as the founder, business owner, VP, whatever, the sales leader have to also do that. You have to set expectations with the sales people because a lot of times you're like oh … and a lot of times this also happens, I'll be brief with this is the founder is this visionary, delusional, optimist who thinks their product is the best products since sliced bread and is pitching it that way and the salesperson gets all jazzed, full of piss and vinegar, gets excited and says the exact same thing to a prospect then the prospect comes and finds out that half the widgets don't work. I see that all the time too. So just be reasonable. Mark: Yeah I know. I mean I dealt with that with a service company recently where the sales person showed me graphs and all these beautiful things and I'm like this is so clear like if they can deliver on half this and then I got into the account management stage and there's a lot of tampering of expectations. Ali: That doesn't work at all. That's on our roadmap for Q4. Mark: Yeah I'm like well at this point you need to just kind of sit back and just kind of wait for … that's not what I saw, that not what I was told upfront. At what should somebody be thinking about putting in the sales process and I'm thinking again about really early stage people here they're maybe just coming out of beta, they're starting to go off for a launch and they might be hiring one maybe two sales people here. When should somebody be saying we need to start getting this process honed in? Ali: I'd say first few sell. As the founder, you need to sell. After you've sold a few and you've kind of figured out what happens, what's good, what's not good I'd recommend hiring two sales people; let them battle it out together. Let them feed off each other, learn from each other. The goal is not the strongest survives the goal is both of them steel … was it steel, sharpen steel or whatever. Get back going and before you go and hire employee number … or salesperson number three, four, five, six, ten, that's when you need to start the process. So after the first two people have started to prove it out then go from there. That's when you need to start building it out and systematizing and documenting everything. And now you have become … it makes your life so much easier after that because again sales process is not something that you build once and that's it. It's a living breathing document that's constantly being iterated but you need you to be the foundations start off of. Mark: How do people measure this? I mean do you set up milestones along that sales process that you're going to be measuring kind of like a funnel or are you just looking at inbound and out as far as inbound calls coming in or prospects and actual conversion rate. Ali: I mean it's both. I mean you're doing a qualitative and a quantitative. So overall you … I look at the quantitative just so that I can have … it's like a measuring stick but I really believe it's more qualitative. You've got to listen to the calls because there is no perfect closing percentage. And I'm always concerned when someone has too high of a close percentage. When they're like oh I close 80% of my deals I'm like something's wrong there. So you're either selling it too short or you're dequeuing people that you shouldn't be dequeuing, all of this other stuff. So the quantitative will only tell you what you're prepared to understand and what you're prepared to understand is filled in by the qualitative. So you got to listen to calls. You've got to figure out did we sell that for as much as we could have, was that too easy, was that too hard, what was going on in there. You got to figure all those things out and data can't tell you that. Data can only tell you if that improved or didn't improve and if you're not doing the qualitative you very likely are leaving a lot of money on the table. Mark: Absolutely 100%. Alright I want to talk about some of the success stories that you guys have had at Rose Garden Consulting because really when you start to look at this again I think two of the lowest hanging fruit areas of any business would be conversion rate optimization and two if you have a sales process where you have this on boarding process and you're having that customer interaction improving that process as well because you don't have to do anymore as far as bringing in the inbound traffic, you're just optimizing what's coming in. So I'd love to know more about some of the successes that you guys have had. What are some of the things that kind of stand out in your mind as far as kind of eye popping numbers? Ali: One of our clients in three weeks we … their average deal was 35k, within three weeks just changing out their process we closed three deals that I think is just over 70 something and then it just kind of stayed there. And it was just by changing up the way that they spoke to their clients. So right there from the qualitative standpoint, we 2X in less than a month. That was a good one. One of our clients and the cases are online and so one of our clients we took from 5 million ARR to 12 million in one year and rank 500 in the fastest growing company. We've got several stories like that but for me the numbers are great and all but for me, it's really … I just like going in there and proving things wrong because the best are the stories in where hey everything is great, we just need to go from 5 to 50 reps and then you start to find things that hey why are we doing it this way, why are we doing it this way? And all the sudden instead of going from 5 to 50 reps to hit their goal we go from 5 to maybe 15 and we're hitting their goal because there was so much money on the table. So those are the ones that I really enjoy. Mark: Yeah just making the existing team that much more efficient and being able to find out areas where like you said some of that qualitative stuff, they might have a high closing rate but they're disqualifying people way too aggressively or they're just not selling for it as much as they possibly could be. This is fantastic information. Where can people learn more about you or reach out to you if they are interested in getting somebody in to take a look at their existing sales processes? Ali: RoseGardenConsulting.com is our website. You can always email me at Ali@RoseGardenConsulting.com rose like the flower. My podcast is For The Close; that's ForTheClose.com so anywhere shape or form hit us up I'm always happy to help and talking sales is my jam so I really enjoy it so anytime I can help I am always happy to. Mark: And a huge shout out to Jeremy and John from Rise25, they connected us over at Traffic and Conversion. You're actually the second guest that I'm having on who they hooked me up with. Ali: Second, how am I not the first? You got me right in my fiddles there. Mark: You know what you're not the first because I had a delay. I had to cancel on you twice. Ali: Who is number one? Who is first? Mark: I just talked to him yesterday and you put me on the spot man so who was it? Oh the guy from Sourcify. It's a completely different area and he's talking about sourcing products from all over the world and manufacturing products and a fascinating, really smart guy. He made me feel like a complete idiot. But— Ali: [inaudible 00:32:31.5] on me. Mark: You know what I like about having you on is that you're a sales guy cut from the same cloth that I came from and so that's just … I don't know manufacturing like that other guy did. I feel like I could talk more with you although you know infinitely more than I do about scaling up these sales processes and I appreciate you coming on and sharing some of this information. I think you and I are probably going to talk for a full hour just because I could talk about sales forever. I think it's fascinating but yeah thanks for coming on. Ali: Yeah, no problem. Thank you for having me, brother. I appreciate it. Links and Resources: Rosegarden Consulting Email Ali For the Close Podcast

data sales mcdonald matrix pl honestly b2b conversion traffic saas optimize cro charles barkley arr zig ziglar sales strategies 2x rose garden telemarketing conversion rate optimization john corcoran sun life rise25 markit company b quiet light brokerage quiet light mark you mark yeah ali mirza mark how sourcify mark so mark do rose garden consulting mark absolutely

Master the SBA Lending Process

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 22, 2019 45:08

Another one of the top 10 guests of 2018 is returning today to review the SBA process for both buyers and sellers. We'll discuss what's changed and things buyers and sellers need to look out for in 2019. Stephen Speer of ECommerce Lending, based in Florida, is a specialist in eCommerce acquisition deals. He offers a superior financing experience to buyers and sellers. Stephen urges sellers reach out to him to get their game plan ready and advises buyers to get pre-approved in order to get the ball rolling in the right playing field. Episode Highlights: What Stephen looks for in a business when prepping SBA on the seller side. Why co-mingling of multiple business can be problematic for a seller. His recommendations for cleaning up and consolidating financials when preparing to sell. What the the “debt service coverage ratio” (DSCR), also known as “debt coverage ratio” (DCR), is all about. Where the add backs come from and where Stephen's team looks for them. He advises companies to use an external bookkeeping outfit – for a great ROI! How Steve and his group think outside the box when it comes to SBA lending and refinancing in order to make the purchases happen. What he looks for in an SBA financing candidate. Just because you can write a check doesn't mean you don't have to be likeable. Situations or factors that can stop an SBA loan. The importance of reaching out to Stephen before starting to shop for the business that falls into your price range. Stephen reveals his lending sweet spots – the floor, the ceiling, and his averages. All the financing details – down payment, terms, and interest rate. Why sellers and buyers both need to go through the vetting process. Transcription: Mark: Joe last week we aired the episode with Shakil Prasla and we started out the episode with me basically having you fess up to the fact that I have the number one most downloaded and listened to episode. Joe: You're amazing Mark. Let's just say it right now you're incredible. Mark: But you're [inaudible 00:01:07.9] with Stephen Speer and at the risk of becoming a rethread podcast where all we do is bring back our top guests. We are having back one of our top guests this week again. Joe: Stephen Speer that's right. He's an SBA lender which is interesting in that the top two podcasts that we had had been about buying online businesses and we're brokers that sell online businesses. But hey … look you are amazing and you started this company 11 years ago and your focus was education and helping buyers understand the process and helping them as much as the sellers. So it's worked. And the fact that our top two podcasts are about buying online businesses has proven out that theory. We had Stephen back because last year there were a lot of changes in the SBA policies and guidelines. The dollar amounts came down a little bit, seller financing wasn't required on certain deals, and we recapped some of that and we reviewed the process both for if you're a seller what you need to do to get yourself in good shape to be SBA pre-qualified. And if you're a buyer out there looking to build that portfolio of businesses or buy your first one what you need to do in order to connect with someone like Stephen and get yourself in a position that you best be able to act quickly when that perfect business comes along. Mark: So yeah these rules do update on a yearly basis but fortunately this year it doesn't sound like there's a ton of new changes. With that said there's a lot of good information in this podcast because we get these questions over and over and over again about what does it take to qualify. And I think one thing that … I know we talked to Stephen the other day as a company. We had him and a couple of other SBA lenders come into the company and just— Joe: Yup. Bruce from [inaudible 00:02:47.2] bank, yup. Mark: Yup. Bruce from [inaudible 00:02:48.8] bank. You know I think it's important for people to understand that there is SBA guidelines. Yeah, that's one thing, but then outside of the SBA guidelines, there are some individual bank guidelines as well. And to understand that even though these rules and these guidelines that we're going to cover in this episode might be out there they're not hard and fast when it comes to finding an individual lender. Did you cover any of those guidelines from Stephen's group with the podcast? Joe: Yeah, we went over some specific things that he looks for and his firm looks for. He's with Bank One now … or I'm sorry First Home Bank but some of the topics that we touched on on the podcast and even when we talked to him separately and that you and I talked about is why is it important to pre-qualify your business for an SBA loan? Sellers may be thinking well it doesn't matter why should I do that. And the answer is because it casts a broader net and not a broader net of buyers. There are definitely some buyers out there that only want to use SBA funds because that's … they only have 10 or 15% to put down. And then there's another pool of buyers that could stroke a check for one, two, three million dollars but they're building that portfolio like Shakil and using SBA money so they're only putting 10 or 15% down each time. So it's really important from a seller's standpoint to understand the value of clean financials and getting prepared so you're pre-qualified for an SBA loan. And from a buyer's standpoint, it's a great way to go if you're comfortable with that option. Mark: Absolutely. All right let's get into the episode, let's find out what's changed in 2019 and then also recap some of the rules and some of the things that both sellers and buyers should know about SBA loans. Joe: Let's go to it. Joe: Hey, folks, it's Joe from Quiet Light Brokerage, today I have one of our top 10 guests back for 2019 Mr. Stephen Speer. Welcome back Stephen how are you? Stephen: I'm doing great. Thanks for having me Joe I appreciate it. Joe: Awesome. Man, well listen I want to go through all of the SBA lending practices, what it takes to qualify for a business, what buyer's should be looking for, and I also want to get an update on you and your team. I think you made some changes in 2019 … I'm sorry '18 I want to cover those as well. But for those that have not listened to you in the podcast in the past can you give us a little summary, a little background on yourself? Stephen: So I have an e-commerce lending team at First Home Bank. The bank happens to be located in St. Petersburg, Florida. Our team are lending throughout the country. As a matter of fact very few of our loans are actually in Florida but I made a transition months ago with the privilege of being able to grow my e-commerce team and we provide a level of support as we go into the new year. So I'm pretty excited about that. Joe: Yeah, it's exciting and I know that we've done a number of deals together and you've done a lot of work with Quiet Light and some of the other website brokerage firms. How big is your team going to get to? Where are you at now and how big are you going to be compared to where you were before? Stephen: So my team comprises of four people. Myself, a gentleman named Bill [inaudible 00:05:55.9] who is kind of my right hand man along with my underwriter and closing team. So I'm pretty excited about that. I plan to add an additional person in Q1 and another person who I have identified for Q2. So I plan to have three people do what I do. In other words, myself and two more and then stick with my underwriter as well as the closing team. Joe: That's huge. I always worried about you getting hit by a bus. Now you can get hit by a bus and we'll be fine. Stephen: Well yeah, my wife would love to hear that so. Joe: We don't want her listening to the podcast [inaudible 00:06:32.5] buy a bus and start driving around looking for you. That's great man, that's great. One of the things that I want people listening to this to understand is that we've dealt with a lot of SBA lenders over the years and you're a … you're not a banker. You don't come across as a banker. You don't have certain boxes that you must absolutely check every time when you speak our language. And you hang out with e-commerce entrepreneurs which is great. Let's talk a little bit about what it takes to qualify for an SBA loan from the sell side of the business. What do you look for from a business? When I send you a listing and say “Hey Stephen will this qualify?” what things are you looking for? Stephen: Well, first I'd like to … I would say I'd request financials. So first what I look for is what type of business is it? Is it FBA driven, is it 3PL, or do they provide their own fulfillment? So I look at that. If it's a product based business I look at the number of SKU's, type of product. I really do dive into that because one thing I try to avoid is having … trying to finance a single type business that's [inaudible 00:07:45.1]. So that's one thing I look at. So once I get past that I really kind of dive in to the financials. When I mean financials, the holy grail of financials are the tax returns. So for example now that we've entered 2019 I look for tax returns for 2017, maybe 2016 [inaudible 00:08:05.5] year, solid tax return for 2017, and solid year ending financials for 2018, and as we continue down the path of Q1 obviously 2018 tax returns. So basically back to your question a wrap up of … in 2016 of the business, solid year of 2017, and a strong trailing 12 month or strong and the word strong – Joe: Lots of people listening that are on their business will say “Hey that's not a problem. I got tax returns. Everybody files tax returns.” and then they give you a tax return and it's co-mingled with four other businesses that they're selling and they're only selling one … I'm sorry four other businesses that they run and they're only selling one. That's a problem isn't it, the co-mingling of multiple businesses under one tax return? Stephen: That is a problem and unfortunately, it's a problem that seems not to go away despite your best effort and your team's best effort as well as my team's best effort. They just seem not to follow that advice so that is a challenge. Now I do … with that coming up so often I do have a set of things I'm able to put in place, for example, I direct this seller back to his or her accountant and be able to income streams and expenses done in a professional manner. It can't just be Quick Books and I've been able to still get financing for businesses that do have co-mingling within a tax return. Joe: Does it just take a little bit longer to get those worked out and closed? Stephen: It does take longer. Generally, it adds roughly two months to the entire process. Joe: Woah. Stephen: It does take time depending on the responsiveness of the accountant. Especially as we enter Q1 and then start working on returns and start getting buried because [inaudible 00:09:52.5] season. It does take a little bit of time but it's not something that's not doable. The biggest recommendation I have either if you're thinking about selling a portion of your business now is to get on that and have your accountant provide or put together what I call consolidated financials. And basically what we do is we take the tax return and compare it to the consolidated financial which show a delineation of the different businesses and we're able to perform. Joe: Okay so for the sellers out there listening to that and going well I don't have to have an SBA buyer I can just sell to a cash buyer. You're absolutely right, there's a ridiculous amount of money out there in the landscape for people buying online businesses. The reality is though that you want to cast this broad of a net as possible for potential buyers. And we see this over and over again somebody that's from another country that is selling a business if it's a multi-million dollar business but you're not US based, not filing US tax returns. It is more difficult to sell because the buyer pool is not as large. There are buyers out there that I know personally that have the ability to stroke a check for five million dollars but they're smart and they don't want to. They want to keep as much money as they have … as they can and buy multiple businesses and maybe use someone like Stephen and SBA lending and only put down 10 or 15%. So you do cast a broader net if you can do the consolidated financials. If you're just starting off in business your best approach is to have one LOC for that line of product that eventually you may sell. We had Syed Balkhi on the podcast as well and Syed has a number of different businesses and every time he says “okay I'm done with this one” we're able to list it and sell it very, very easily. And the last one I think we did cash … actually, I think we did two SBA loans and it was very easy because he files separate tax returns for each business. That's the ideal situation. How do you feel Stephen about someone selling a business and they're coming to you with Excel spreadsheets for their profit and losses versus Quick Books? You don't really care about that you're looking at the tax returns and a P&L anyway that's in excel format right? Stephen: Primarily if we're talking just a single business, single return, single P&L's yeah that is fine. So that's not a problem at all. Obviously, the more … accounting is all about substance over form, it's kind of an accounting term. That is true but it can't be hand written or something very unprofessional I mean because ultimately underwriters look at that. If that's just kind of run together and it doesn't make much sense it's not done by someone who knows how to do a P&L or a [inaudible 00:12:47.0] but as long as it looks presentable that's fine. Joe: Well, you and your team are betting on the future success of the business. So first you want to see that the business is run properly. And if somebody is not using Quick Books or Xero or some form of accounting software it's an indication that it's not being run in as professional a manner as possible right? So that … okay, and the buyers look at that that way as well. And I could tell you from a brokering standpoint when you're using Excel spreadsheets for your financials and co-mingling it's much more difficult to get maximum value for it because no matter what things are missed. I had a call this morning where there was several thousand dollars that was buried inside of a marketing budget that was actually a personal thing. We had to dig very, very deep to find it. And that times three adds nine, ten thousand dollars up to the value of the business. So ultimately your view is you want to make it a safe investment in financing this loan and make sure there's a success down the road for the future. Is there a … some sort of multiple barrier that is a ceiling for you? Is it … how do you … it's … I can guess you call it debt to income ratios right? Stephen: Debt service coverage. So let's say … okay, so debt service coverage is primarily what we look at. We really don't look at EBIDTA multiple. I mean we do and we don't. The valuation piece definitely we look at that but primarily we look at a debt service coverage. So for example, if the overall loan is the obligation, annual obligation for a loan is $100,000 let's say, the bottom line number on the tax returns needs to reflect at least $115,000. Giving us a debt service coverage of 1.15. Now a lot of sellers run their similar personal expenses through the tax returns. I'm able to add those back so you can't just take a tax return and say okay it's a bottom line of 115,000. You got to take whatever the bottom line number is and then their add backs. Standard add backs would be interest, [inaudible 00:15:02.7], depreciation, amortization, those are primarily some of the add backs. Some of the seller discretionary add backs might be … especially if it's an FBA setup type business where there's run expense, well, the new owner probably will just run it as a home based business, some people add that back. Some people tend to run their car expenses through even though it's a home based business. I'm able to add that back. And any one time expenses, the revamping of a website or other ancillary things or a one time they could add those back. And I take that number and determine the means and debt service coverage. Joe: Do you pull those from our spreadsheets because we have add backs and do you look at those or do you dig into the tax returns for the add backs? Wouldn't it be hard to find them in tax returns? Stephen: Yeah so both, I look at what you provide in terms of your spreadsheet but some of those I'm not able to add back like typically insurance would be really hard. It'd be hard fought to have an underwriter add back insurance expense for example. Joe: It shouldn't be added back. I agree. If it's an expense that's going to carry forward it shouldn't be an add back. Stephen: Yeah and really those … so of your add backs, the ones you reflect typically on your spreadsheet I'm able to add most of those back and those … I use that spreadsheet as a roadmap. But I do go into the tax returns and make sure that the numbers are aligned. And then I'm able to really dig into a tax return and see if there's any other type of add backs that I'm able to find. Joe: Okay, so from a seller's perspective they want to do the best they can not to co-mingle multiple businesses under one tax return. Obviously, have tax returns and a good financial so we can dig into the add backs and make sure that debt to income ratio is going to work, anything else that they should be considering? I think you said obviously you don't want a business that's balanced on just one SKU doing 90% of the revenue. Ultimately the bottom line is you want to make sure that the bank is going to get paid from the person buying the business and it's going to be a success right? Stephen: Yeah and another thing we look at if there's any sort of declining revenue or a blip where … for example I had a client last year that completely lift Chinese new year and didn't have inventory to sell. So there was a blip but I was able to explain that to an underwriter. And obviously with the new buyer who felt that this business [inaudible 00:17:38.3] little bit higher. He was able to avoid any blips in the coming [inaudible 00:17:42.9] for example. So it's also an explanation there. The key for sellers is even if you're not considering selling your business now get these things in place so when you go to sell you're going to get the most amount [inaudible 00:17:58.5] of your business. I had a lot of sellers come to me and it's kind of like they want to list now and their financials are a disaster now. So I recommended that buyers kind of get on the ball. Maybe it's a new year's resolution to fire your current accountant and hire a good one and to really get the financials in place and put certain financial things in place now or pay dividends in the future. Joe: Yeah, I'd refer people to certain e-commerce bookkeepers, two or three of them on a regular basis and have them go back … they'll go back in this case to 2019 and import all the bank statements and vendor invoices and everything and get things updated and accurate. And Quick Books actually helps the CPA do their job better. On a go forward basis, it's the best thing in my experience for a decent sized business to use somebody else. Let them focus on the bookkeeping and you focus on running the business and doing … driving revenue and maximizing profit. I think that's really going to work. Stephen: Oh absolutely. And the return on that investment Joe, I mean you had a podcast recently that— Joe: I'm touched. Stephen: The return on that investment is enormous. Joe: And it's incredible. I've seen it happen firsthand where we've had P&L's in Excel spreadsheets and the deal fell through three or four times and then the guy took the same information, hired a bookkeeper, they put it into Quick Books and we sold the business for 50,000 more of that … I think we had again three or four LOI's and it sold quickly which is fascinating; a fascinating study. Let's talk a little bit Stephen about you. About e-commerce lending and your group and how you think outside the box. Because I want to talk about this a little bit. Not all lenders are created equal. You and I have a transaction going on right now where you had to really think outside the box. And I'm going to summarize it and I want you to then just talk about what your thought process was and how you approached it. We have a buyer at Quiet Light Brokerage that again has the money to stroke a check but he is in a situation where he's building a portfolio of businesses and he's using the SBA lending process. Buyers can take up to what … five million dollars in money right? Stephen: Primarily. Joe: So somebody could buy five … I guess that would be one million dollars I'd then be putting in loans right? They're liable for up to five million. So he's buying multiple businesses— Stephen: One loan or 10 loans it doesn't matter. Joe: Okay perfect. So he has two under a letter of intent with Quiet Light Brokerage now and mine is in the process first. And he's got the wherewithal but I think he had some pretty sizable loans that threw off his overall debt to income ratio. How did you work that out? Stephen: So … and that definitely took a lot of out of the box thinking in the sense that he had … he has an Amazon loan and I can't divulge too much personal information but the monthly payment on the Amazon loan was staggering. It was five figures on a monthly basis. I looked at debt service coverage and throw in a very large five figure monthly payment through all the numbers ROI. Joe: And this is on a separate business that he owns. Stephen: Separate business that he owns. Joe: Right, okay. Stephen: Because it does affect what's called global debt service coverage. So on a separate business that he owns which happens to be an online business. Joe: Right. Stephen: He has very large payment and then he purchased a bunch of inventory and financed it through Amazon. So it threw all the numbers off. So you kind of have to dig deep and say okay how about we refinance at that, take that monkey off his … that large knot off his back and be able to incorporate, be able to reduce that monthly payment and still get the new purchase done. And that's what I'm in the process of doing. His new purchase, his loan on his new business acquisition was just approved and I'm going to process at refinancing his Amazon loan. Joe: Now the Amazon lending loan is very prevalent these days with Amazon based businesses. And you and I have done just for the record content site, SaaS business, all sorts of [inaudible 00:22:00.5] certainly not just Amazon. But in this situation, this particular individual had several hundred thousand dollars in loans and the money gets withdrawn out of their Amazon deposits. Do you recall what the interest rate was then? What his payments were? What the interest rate was and compare it to what you're going to be able to do for him? I just want to emphasize you thinking outside the box and how much money you're going to save this guy on a monthly basis. Because he's thrilled right now I got to tell you he's thrilled. Stephen: So his monthly knot with Amazon was 48,700 and something. Joe: Holy cow, okay. Stephen: It's going to be a couple of grand. Joe: No way 48,000 down to $2,000 … that's amazing. Thank you for thinking outside the box. You're helping him and you're helping a couple of the sellers of the businesses that were doing deals on now. That's fantastic. Stephen: Yeah, and you touched on something really important now. I do have a fair amount of buyers out there, actually, currently 347 buyers out there looking for businesses to buy. And quite a few of them can easily [inaudible 00:23:03.5] for a two three million dollar business but they're building a portfolio. So back to your comment about portfolios a lot of buyers out there right now are building portfolios. They want to buy two, three, four different businesses … online businesses for the course of the next two or three years. And they don't want to use up all their cash. And the fact remains is that when you're trying to scale a business cash is king. You need cash to scale a business. You need to buy additional inventory. You need to grow it. And if you're cash strapped it's really hard to grow an online business. So I'm helping several of those buyers accomplish that. So an SBA loan is not just for the person who needs a little bit lower barrier to entry. An SBA loan is also for the person that could easily pay cash but chooses not to, to stay in line with his or her business goals Joe: Absolutely. Well, let's talk about the buyers a little bit and what you look for in a buyer? You and I have never had a situation where we brought a buyer and you said yes and then it turned out they weren't qualified. But I had a situation a few years ago where I had a couple of Harvard MBA graduates. They literally just graduated a month before from Harvard. They got their Master's in business and they decided to partner on an investment in an online business. And they had some funds. One of the graduates had some funds from a parent. It went through the process. They're pre-approved from a different lender and then underwriting said these guys have absolutely no real world experience we're not betting … I think the deal was two million dollars. We're not betting two million dollars on these guys. Yeah, their pedigree is good, their education fantastic but no and the deal fell apart. What do you look for? Are you looking for real world experience? Is there a certain asset value that they need to have? How do you handle it when somebody comes to you? What do you look for? Stephen: So first I look at … I try to determine and I do interview my buyers. So once you refer them to me I do interview them as you know and one of the first things I really touch on is experience; so first determining if they have direct experience or indirect experience. And then as I mentioned in a previous podcast it's almost like going for a job interview, even if you don't have direct experience you need to make the person real comfortable with hiring you. The same goes with a loan is that even if you don't have direct experience what business … what skill sets do you have that's transferrable and also who's going to fill the void of having direct … let's say SEO experience or direct experience in the space? So those two things I look at. So if the person has direct experience, pretty much a no brainer. A person that doesn't have direct experience it's putting together the narrative like paying underwriter even though here she doesn't have direct experience but indirect experience in these categories. And additionally, they're going to have support via an employee or a contracted employee that that fill a void. Joe: I got you. Stephen: So I'm able to … I've never … honestly, I've never had a deal where an underwriter has said gosh that's great they went to Harvard but they have no direct experience. Joe: We had a situation … I'm going to name a name here but I'm only going to use their first name; a guy named Rocky. Rocky was I think he was in his 60's. He retired and ran a General Manager for some car dealership something … somewhere in the country. I loved the guy. I thought he was amazing. Just as a broker, as a lender you just … you connect with somebody like I want to help this guy. I want to find him the ideal business. Although let me say I told him he's crazy. He didn't need to buy a business. He was retired. What for? You have plenty of money I'm like you're crazy just go play golf or something. But he ended up buying something from us and he didn't have any direct online experience. He was a GM for dealerships that yeah they had websites but he didn't run them himself. I find there are a lot of people in the corporate world that are putting in 60 hours a week that look at the e-commerce entrepreneurs that are selling a business when they're working 20 hours a week and they're making more money and they want to live that life. They want to spend more time with their family, with their kids, travel. Are a lot of the folks that come to you these types of people, and is that in direct experience still okay? Stephen: Yeah so to answer your question yes a lot are. Be it Rocky or any other, they don't have direct experience. So the thing about Rocky is that … first, off he is incredibly likable, incredibly well spoken, and have a very strong resume. The guy was successful in his professional career. Joe: Yeah. Stephen: And then unlike somebody working at a low skill job the guy ran the car dealerships which he was 60 hours. Or he was probably working 90 hours a week now but with a transferable skill set. And also he filled that void of not having direct experience in running an online business but was able to fill that void by bringing somebody in. So we felt very comfortable with that and he ultimately was approved. And the last time I talked to him he's doing very well. Joe: Yeah, I think he bought a business from Amanda. I didn't have one for him at the time but Quiet Light, in general, had one. And I think Amanda loved working with him as much as you did. So the likability factor that Rocky had, when buyers come to you is that important? Do you have to like them to do business or? Stephen: Well not like … I think— Joe: Make a difference with human right? Does it make it a better—? Stephen: They are human. So an underwriter is human and if they have a good dialogue with the buyer, for example, Nathan was incredible as well. Joe: Yeah. Stephen: One of the reasons Nathan's loan sailed through is because he was very well spoken and had the incredible background to be successful. So yeah it does. Joe: Okay so we're going to just touch on that thing that everybody knows but they don't talk about and that is if somebody comes to me, if somebody comes to you and they want to buy a business we want to sell you a business. But if you are 10 times more difficult than the next person and they also want to buy a business, my client … my seller is going to say okay well I've got an offer from each which one do you like more Joe, talk about the plus and minuses. And we've got to do that. And in your case you just said you've got something like 354 buyers on your list. They're looking for a business, they're not buying it from you, they're buying it from the likes of Quiet Light Brokerage. Stephen: Right. Joe: But you still have to work with them on a regular basis and you still have to go through the process with them and be likable. Simple thing guys, everybody listening just be likable. Just because you've got the ability to stroke a check doesn't mean that you can push a guy like Stephen around. There's lots of people that are trying to buy a business, lots of people that are trying to sell businesses and being likable is so-so key because this is an online world. We're not sitting across the table from each other and it makes a huge difference being likeable in the process. Stephen: We've kind of touched on that. I was recently … I have a buyer who's been looking for a year and a half. Not to scare new buyers out there but sometimes it does take a while. But he's not likable. Joe: Okay. Stephen: And he was on a phone call … I was on it as well with the seller and he was beating up the seller on the phone in front of me like I wasn't on the call. I don't know but … and the seller chose another buyer. Joe: It's not hard. I'll talk from personal experience. When I sold my business I remember being on one of these buyer conference calls. I had three or four. Jason Yellowitz here at Quiet Light sold my business way back in 2010. And I had three or four calls with potential buyers before it went under contract and sold it. But I remember sitting … I was in the car on a call and I'm sitting in a parking lot and I've got this guy just belittling my business and talking about all the negative things and I'm just to all I can do to end the call. It's you know … to not end the call and to be polite and it was really hard. And even if he made me a full price offer … all cash, full price offer I have to take into account, sellers have to take into account how difficult that particular type of buyer is going to be in due diligence and in the training and transition period. There's a cording, a relationship it's … it ends at a certain period but you're going to be in a relationship with that person and you want to make that as pleasant and as enjoyable as possible. So being likable is critical without a doubt. Stephen: Absolutely. Joe: What are the top two or three qualities that you look for aside from good financials from the buyer? Like, do they have to have a certain debt to income ratio? Do they have to have certain assets in order to buy a business? Stephen: As I would say assets it's more present driven unlike buying a house. I think we definitely look at what's called post-closing liquidity. For example, when all the dust settles is it broke after closing or still has a fair amount of cushion. So we definitely look at that. Is there outside income? Does [inaudible 00:32:09.5] have a … what I call a day job to … for outside income? That's another thing we look at. So those are two very important variables. Credit score is important but it's not like buying a home where you get to really perfect your lending terms. It's pretty much either get a loan or you don't get a loan in the SBA world. A recent issue … if the person is being down with a ton of personal debt that's something that we look at. Generally, that's a character … it's the ones living beyond their means that's generally not liked. So those are just some of the variables. And also what I look at is does this person have the skill set to be able to scale a business or is the business going to go stagnant as it transitions over to him or her. So that's another thing we look at but [inaudible 00:33:00.5] just some of the variables. Joe: So when someone comes to you and says I want to buy a business part of what you do is you look at their financials. You look at all those variables and you say okay great you qualify to buy a business up to a certain amount. Is that the process? Do you say okay … do you give him a guide as in terms of you can buy something up to a million or two million [inaudible 00:33:19.8] like that? Stephen: Yes and a lot of the determining factor is based on their … is it direct, do they have direct experience or indirect experience? So that is going to move— Joe: Noted. Okay. Stephen: Secondly, post-closing liquidity that's really what I focus on. If the person is trying to buy a million dollar business he has to inject or put down a hundred grand and he has 110,000 in the bank that's not going to work. So we kind of have to move the needle down. Joe: And in that situation, they wouldn't … it's not that they don't qualify to buy a business but in that situation, they wouldn't qualify for a million dollar business maybe a half a million dollar business. Stephen: Right, it would move the target price down a little bit. Joe: Okay so just let me clarify that so that somebody has a $110,000 and they want to buy an SBA business and put 10% down, for those listening that's generally the number 10 to 15% down, 110,000 you're going to be left with 10 grand; not going to work. So you got to look at a half a million dollar business. Stephen: Or 800, 750 something like that. Joe: Yeah and then you look at their debt, what they have, what they need to live off of and that smaller business is not going to cash flow as high especially after the debt service from your loan. So you look at all of that and help them with what they're capable of buying first and foremost right? Stephen: Yeah, most of my buyers have what I call a day job so most of their … in most cases their day job covers their personal debt so that's rarely a real factor. Now I do have an individual recently who didn't have a day job and had tons of personal debts so that kind of blew her out of the water. But generally we do look at that. So again back to post-closing liquidity what I do is … so for all of you out there once Joe refers a client to me for pre-qualification I'm able to have an interview with that person on a scheduled call and ask some questions and also they provide me what's called a financial statement. And then I'm able to in most cases issue a pre-qualification and give them a target amount. In the case … in the example that was well over 800,000 for example. And then that person goes back to Joe and says okay I'm pre-qualified with Stephen, he told me to look at businesses around 800,000 let's go. Joe: And then they have a path which is the most important thing. Somebody that doesn't know what they're looking for, doesn't know what they're buying capabilities are is less qualified from our view. So one of the things we want you to do folks if you're out there as a buyer reach out to someone like Stephen and get pre-qualified so that it will help you narrow your focus. And then the next step is to look at as many listings as possible from the online world and figure out what you like and don't like about the business. When you find the right one if it's a great business you want to be in a position where you're already prequalified to act quickly. Because if it's a great business guess what other people are going to be looking at it and making offers as well, really important there. Stephen: Absolutely especially since there are a lot of buyers out there and if you snooze you're going to lose. So you need to kind of get your house in order before looking. Joe: Absolutely, I agree 1000%. So let's talk quickly about the qualifications of the buyer. Do they have to be a US citizen? Stephen: They could be either a green card holder or a US citizen living in the United States. Joe: That green card holder or US citizen living in the United States, the business itself does it have to be a US citizen or a green card holder filing US tax returns? Stephen: In most cases yes depending on the structure of the business. Joe: Okay, there's always a sort of gray area in the situation. Stephen: Yes, it depends on the structure, you kind of different components as in the past few company on the foreign entity— Joe: Right. Stephen: Things that does affect that answer. Joe: Right. Okay and then your business and the size of loans that you guys generally do, are we're looking at you're looking for a half a million and up two, three million, where is your sweet spot in terms of lending? Stephen: So generally my personal loan floor let's call it is half a million dollars. But obviously, if it's a client I've been working with and happens to just look at $800,000 businesses I would grant one for 400,000 on that person. My average loan amount is about a one and a half million dollar range. So … and you know looking at my 2018 numbers that's close to 60 million, 40 transactions, that's about that number. Joe: I got you. I think we have 38 of them that were directed at me I think right? No, I'm kidding. Stephen: 41. Joe: So you're loaning on the value of the business. And what about if it's an inventory based business are you loaning for the value of the inventory as well? And then working capital … does somebody, do you always loan … give working capital money so that they— Stephen: Always. So a very good topic here so obviously I'm going to finance the business itself. I'm also … if the purchase price of the business does not include inventory I finance the inventory, the on-hand inventory. And what I do is I work with you Joe in determining what that number is going to be at closing. So I finance that. I also include working capital. And that working capital I generally work it into a loan in a sense that I'm able to include it in your market … not directly your market, so okay of that 100,000 working capital 50 is going to be for additional inventory above and beyond what's being purchased with the business. And the other 50 is going to be marketing campaign or advertising campaign, it could be for hiring support staff. Joe: Okay and then lastly I want to talk about the term of the loans. We're talking five years, 10 years, 30 years, what are we looking at? Stephen: It's a 10 year loan and of all those components, by the way, it ends up being all in one loan. It's not where you have separate loans for each. So it's all incorporated into a 10 year SBA loan. Joe: Okay and 5, 6%interest rate somewhere in that range; five to seven? Stephen: Base prime plus two and three quarters, right now it's 8.25. Joe: Prime plus two and three quarters. Okay so for those that want to run their own numbers 10% down, 10 year note, prime plus two and three quarters, do the math on that. Stephen: Yeah. Joe: The seller note in 2017 and prior to that in most of the transactions that we did or did together you required some sort of seller note. And that changed in 2018 so for … got a business that's a million and a half and somebody wants to put down 15% are you requiring a seller note on a deal of that size or are you not anymore? Stephen: So up to 2017 a seller note was required by the SBA and not by the invidual lender. Joe: Okay. Stephen: So typically it was 10% down payment let's call it from the buyer, 15 from the seller or vice versa in terms of the seller note for a total of 25% down payment rejection. Joe: Okay. Stephen: In '18 the barrier to entry was lower. The overall requirement paying on a deal is the minimum 10%. In terms of what lenders require, some lenders require a seller note. We do not. Sometimes I incorporate a seller note to strengthen the loan especially if the buyer does not have direct online experience. So it gives kind of the underwriter warm fuzzies in the sense that the transition will most likely go smoother. The seller has a little bit of skin on the game. So there are situations where I do incorporate a seller note for approval purposes. Joe: So for buyers, sellers, even other brokers listening to this, this is you know you're hearing Stephen say I incorporate this or I incorporate that to help the underwriter feel better about the loan and make sure it goes through. What I do personally is when I have a deal that's pre-qualified by Stephen or someone like Stephen when I get an offer on the business A) I want to know if Stephen knows who they are and if they're working with him and how they look qualification wise. But B) I really like to send the deal structure to you Stephen and say this is the deal structure is this going to float with your underwriters? And I think that's critical to the ultimate success of the loan and the transaction process. Because the last thing that we want … it's happened once or twice and I don't recall if it was with you or not but … where you've … actually no it was with you where the underwriter looked at something and they had to tweak it just a little bit, had to increase the seller note by 5% or something like that. That's not what we want to do so now I run everything by you prior to having a letter of intent signed. I recommend everybody to do that if they're going to do an SBA loan through Stephen and e-commerce lending. Stephen: Absolutely, so that's a very good point as we continue down the path of e-commerce lending I am constantly tweaking the way I do things. And that's one thing I do is I bet really hard upfront so there aren't changes on the backend. Fortunately some of my buyers don't [inaudible 00:42:26.4] the businesses that they're looking at prior to signing a letter of intent. It's kind of an after they do that they come to me and say hey I just bought this business and here's the deal structure I want you [inaudible 00:42:38.3] well that's not going to work. Joe: Yup they don't do that with Quiet Light they have to [crosstalk 00:42:41.7] so the whole process we require that conference call. Because we … it's not, we don't want people to go under a letter of intent just to tie it up and then make a decision. We want them to make the decision, go under letter of intent, and close and go through that process. It just saves everybody a lot of time and hassle. Stephen: It really does. Joe: Okay, any last thoughts about … you want to share with the buyers or sellers that are listening to the podcast today? Stephen: Yeah in terms of sellers even if you're not selling a business now please reach out to me in general and have us put together a game plan for future sale. It's really, really important and again it will be dividends on the backend. And then for you buyers out there reach out to me. I'm more than happy to pre-qualify you for a business. You can reach me at stephen@ecommercelending.com and the first name is spelled ph or call me at 813-766-4524. Joe: Thanks. I will put that on the show notes as well. The last thing I want to say is just to reiterate what you're talking about there with the sellers and it's called choose your pain. Go through the pain of getting your financials in good shape now and having a great transaction and a sale or don't do it and you're choosing your pain later because it's going to be difficult. You're going to be … you're bank account is going to be in pain because you're not going to get as much value for your business. So make the choice and hopefully you'll choose that first one. It's not fun, it's not exciting but it's the right thing to do. Do some valuation exit planning, reach out to Stephen; reach out to anybody at Quiet Light. Go to inquiries@quietlightbrokerage.com myself, Mark, anybody on the team is happy to help you even if you're not planning to sell your business for another two, three, four years. That's what we're here for. Stephen, you're awesome as always. Thanks so much for your time. I look forward to a great 2019 with you. Stephen: Absolutely, Joe. Thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to it as well. Joe: All right man, talk to you soon. Links and Resources: ECommerce Lending Email Stephen Call Stephen 1-813-766-4524

united states amazon master man giving chinese simple harvard gm seo credit pl roi general managers ecommerce buyers saas cpa excel sellers situations generally petersburg sba quickbooks loi syed xero fba sku loc harvard mba 3pl dscr dcr quiet light brokerage shakil quiet light sba lending ebidta joe it joe you syed balkhi bank one mark so joe yeah joe let joe well joe so joe thanks joe do joe all stephen speer joe absolutely mark absolutely joe now stephen it

Wrapping up the Year and Looking Ahead to 2019

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 25, 2018 11:34

Merry and Happy Holidays to everyone listening! We thought we would take a chance on this mini-episode to say thanks to everyone who has supported Quiet Light over the past 11 years – especially over the past year with this podcast. We're also taking this opportunity to go through a year in review and look ahead to 2019. It is truly our pleasure to do what we do and provide you the expertise you need to buy or sell your business. We have plenty more in store in the upcoming year! Episode Highlights: Highlights from the past year. Looking ahead to 2019 with exciting guests queued up. 2018 was a record year for Quiet Light Thanks to all our brokers and veterans at Quiet Light. Quiet Light's referral program. Hear about surprise guest coming up. Success stories are also coming up on the podcast. Transcription: Mark: Merry Christmas Joe. Joe: Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to you Mark. Mark: Happy Holidays, thank you for being so politically sensitive. I really appreciate it. To everyone listening, Happy Holidays … Happy New Year. This is Christmas Day when this is being released so if you're listening to this turn it off, it's Christmas. Actually, listen for about 10 minutes and then you're going to turn it off. We're not going to do a regular podcast episode today because it is Christmas and we want you to be able to spend time with your families and friends. And if you don't celebrate Christmas be able to take a day off while everybody else does as well. We thought we would take advantage of this episode today just to give a quick thanks to everybody that has supported Quiet Light Brokerage over the past 11 years but especially over the past year that I've been supporting this podcast and do a mini year review. So Joe how has your year been? Joe: It's been fantastic. Yeah, I want to say thank you to everyone as well. Thank you to the folks listening to the podcast. This is our first full year right … 2018 we started late in '17. The feedback that you're giving us is fantastic and we feel like the guests that we've had on are really helping which is the most important thing. One of the things that I want to do for 2019 and beyond is do some of those sort of under the hood calls like Mike and Dave do and what the Ecom Crew would do for people that are looking for valuations so we can dissect your businesses in recorded calls. Keeping it confidential, not naming the business but having people see what it's like to go through a valuation because the most important thing I think is to understand what the process is like to someday sell your business. But it's been a great year. Look we've brought Walker Deibel on … Walker and his folks and we like to joke about this recently about Jason's chops about his Bathroom Millionaire book but Walker is truly a bestselling author. He wrote Buy then Build that launched in the fall; a fantastic guy, honest, hardworking, a great addition to the Quiet Light team and then Brad Wayland as well. Brad is unbelievable in terms of what he's accomplishing in terms of the volume of transactions and people that he's helping. These two are going to essentially replace me very quickly in terms of the volume of work that I've done over the years. But then the rest of the team is all coming together and we're just still that. You and I have swapped … talked about boutique brokerage firm. We are in a sense but it's been a great year where we've grown tremendously. Mark: Yeah we don't publish our numbers. I know this is something that some businesses choose to do to publish their numbers publicly. I've always opted not to. No particular reason other than I just haven't seen the specific advantage compared to some of the drawbacks. But I will say this 2018 was by far a record year for Quiet Light Brokerage. We more than doubled in growth this year in terms of the volume of deals that have been done both in total deal value and also in the revenue that Quiet Light Brokerage has brought on board. A lot of this is due to the new brokers that we brought on board over the past few years. It's also due to some of the vets that we have on the team now as well such as Amanda and Jason. Joe and I were just talking before this podcast about how nice it is to have those two on board who have been doing such a phenomenal job. For such a long time they seem to understand this industry just instinctively at this point where they know how just to find a good deal. And that's kind of what being boutique is in a way right? Being able to be selective and knowing what you're taking on board. And I'd be remiss not to also thank Bryan. Not only is he bringing good deal flow and he does a great job for his clients but he also has been helping Quiet Light here on the backend with some projects to help us get better organized, create better business summaries, in continuous to find ways that we can improve our fishing seas. You know when I started Quiet Light Brokerage … about six months after I started Quiet Light Brokerage I went out and I hired five sales people. And I was just looking for people with sales experience because I thought well we're selling businesses I need somebody who can sell. And they all flamed out pretty quickly. Some of them had moderate levels of success, some of them flamed out very quickly, and one by one they kind of dropped off. And it wasn't until Jason came on board and literally bugged me to come on board as a broker that I'd literally stumbled upon this model of having entrepreneurs who have all been there done that and have been successful on their own right. And the result has been pretty amazing because Quiet Light Brokerage is this group of entrepreneurs where I get feedback all the time. Sometimes I really want to tell everyone to shut up but at the end of the day, I get really awesome feedback about what we can do better at Quiet Light. Joe: That feedback is from the brokers, not the buyers and sellers just for clarification purposes. Mark: Yeah, thank you. Buyers and sellers you can tell me anything and please do tell me whatever you want. It's from the different brokers you know because as entrepreneurs what we do? We always find problems with other people's businesses or we think how we could run it better. But it's pretty phenomenal, it's like a built in board of advisors. Joe: Absolutely. Mark: So yeah and guys like Chuck, he gives us great feedback. And Chuck has been with us for a year and a half then. He's one of the best connected brokers that we've brought on in terms of the industry and the relationships that he has. So you're absolutely right it's an incredible team, a board of advisors. Maybe this podcast is turning into a thank you to our team more than anything else. Well, I was actually going to move on from the team because I do want to say thank you to the team. But I just want to say thank you to our past clients and also our buyers and those out there who have been referring business to us. Honestly the referrals, when somebody comes to me and says “Hey I was talking to so and so and they said I should talk to you” it doesn't even have to be about selling their business, it can just be I have a question about my business. Look that's completely something where it's flattering to hear that we're a referred source. So thank you for thinking of us as a resource. For those of you that are referring potential sellers over to us keep in mind, we actually do have a referral program where you can get paid on that referral. I know most of you … the vast majority of you, you don't do it because of that because most of you don't know it exists because we do a terrible job of actually advertising this. But we've received lots of referrals from people where we've done sent them a referral payment and like woah I didn't know this was coming. Joe: But you do that intentionally. You don't advertise it. We don't put it out there. We don't have it on the website because it's kind of fun to have someone refer a client to us, we close that transaction and then we send them a wire form saying “Can you give us your wire details we're going to send you $23,000?” that's kind of fun. Maybe it's selfish on our part and we should talk more about it on the podcast. Hey, we do referrals folks, we pay referral fees. Mark: We do referrals. Just let us know if you give it. Again we know that's not why you're doing it. We don't want you to refer us just for the referral fee we want you to refer us because you think that we're high quality. So thank you and then also to people that took the survey a few weeks ago, thank you for that as well. That's the thank you's unless you have anybody else, Joe. Joe: You know I just looked at Facebook last night and one of our clients posted something of a photo of about five years ago when he was in an airport and he was stuck in the airport with his four year old son and they couldn't afford the taxi fare to get to where they needed to go. Their flight was canceled and they couldn't afford to go back somewhere so they stayed in the airport for the night to catch the flight the next morning because they couldn't afford it. We sold his business for almost 9 million dollars last summer. And for those folks that are in situations like he was 5 years ago stick with it. I had a conversation with somebody this morning that's throwing their hands up in the air and is about to give up. Stick with it. Have faith. Listen to this podcast and the experts that we bring on, the people that are here to help, our entire team. Have a conversation. Pick up the phone and say I'm not ready to sell but I want to get better where should I go? Who should I talk to? What should I listen to? That's … strangely enough yes we get paid to do what we do but for me to read that story this summer and know that I had an impact on that person's life means more to me almost than the job itself. So thank you for allowing us to help you guys make differences in your life and grow and change and impact whether you're a buyer or a seller because that's what we're doing. I think more than anything else Mark is we are having an impact on people's lives and I get a lot from this. So thank you, everyone. Mark: Absolutely. All right let's look ahead real quick to 2019 first in terms of the podcast, the podcast we have some good episodes cued up. I know I have a few really exciting guests queued up ready to go including our number one ever listened episode … downloaded episode. I have that guest coming back on for a reappearance just like to try and take the top two episodes. We'll also be doing an updated SBA in 2019 episodes soon. But I need to get on the calendar still with whoever we're going to bring on for that episode. And then I have a surprise guest from a pretty big company, founder of a pretty big company and we're going to get him on board here for an episode which I think will be pretty exciting for everybody listening. Good stuff coming up Joe. I know you probably have a stable of episodes coming up as well. Joe: Yeah I've got a few coming on with their success stories either as buyers of businesses that they've bought through us and just to look back in the first six months on under ownership, what it's been like and people that have sold. I want some real actionable items and experiences that they could take away from the podcast. And a little bit more of what you're talking about, big guests that have big names but I really should inform or impact. You and I on a whim we didn't have a guest one week and we decided let's just talk and we ended up talking about the things that can improve or plummet the value of your business and now it's in the top 10 podcasts. We need to do more things like that that are actionable and that's one of the goals for 2019. Mark: All right so moving forward we're getting long on this and I want people to get back to their holidays or if you're listening to this the day after be able to get back to families affairs. Families are still in town. So I'm going to wrap it up and just say once again thank you for everything. We're looking forward to 2019 very very much. Our pipelines are very very full so I expect a good amount of deal flow coming out early 2019. Everything continues to seem to be pretty strong right now. Yeah definitely looking for 2019, thank you for 2018 and always feel free to reach out to Joe or myself or any of the members of the team with any sort of feedback; good; bad; otherwise. Direct all bad feedback to Joe all great feedback to me and I think we will be good to go. Joe: All good feedback about me to me that's fine. Mark: All right very good. Merry Christmas. Happy Holidays. Happy New Year. We will see you guys in the next year. Links and Resources: https://www.quietlightbrokerage.com/ Listen and suscribe on Itunes

christmas success happy new year merry christmas happy holidays families honestly christmas day buyers year in review looking ahead wrapping up sba quiet light brokerage quiet light walker deibel joe it mark yeah joe you mark so mark all joe all ecom crew joe absolutely mark absolutely

The 101 Acquisition Plan with RJ Jalichandra

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 4, 2018 49:55

Is really possible to acquire 101 Amazon FBA businesses in 2 years? At least once a month we receive a query from buyers and sellers about the company this week's guest founded, 101 Commerce, asking who is behind it and if they're going to be able to pull off what they say they will. It is hard to undertake, but of all the people that we've worked with here at Quiet Light, RJ would be the one to do it. He is here today to talk about what that process looks like so far. Richard Jalichandra, known as RJ, got his start in digital entrepreneurship back in 1994 and has been working in the space ever since. He is a CEO five times over, has held senior executive positions, and has generally been around the digital block several times over. While getting ready to retire – which of course hasn't happened – he founded 101 Commerce under the premise that he and his group would buy, invest in, and relaunch 101 niche private label brands on Amazon. RJ has the experience, the funds, and the team in place to make it happen. Stay tuned. Episode Highlights: RJ shares a few of the impressive businesses he's been involved in launching and growing in the past. How he got involved with 101 Commerce. Why the FBA business model attracted him the most. The 101 acquisition plan and how it came together. RJ stresses that this is not a fund, but an operating company. How 101 commerce is striving to create a next-generation CPG company. What top 3 things RJ and his team look for in a business to purchase. Why the person and the story behind the business matter immensely. How long Richard projects it will take to acquire all 101. RJ stresses the importance of the seller's over package and presentation of a well-run company. Why he recommends using brokers and seasoned experts for efficient due diligence and transaction processes. RJ's shares thoughts on brand expansion potential and tariff hikes. Why solid, prosperous deals need both a good seller and a good buyer to make them work. Transcription: Mark: It's probably at least once per month that I get an email about a certain company in our industry that seems to be making waves and the general question that I get … and actually I've just got this email a few days ago from somebody else that has been our podcast and I won't say who it was but asking who are these guys over 101 Commerce and are they going to be able to do what they keep saying that they're going to try and do? Joe I know you talked to RJ over at 101 Commerce, people that we know pretty well at this point and you talked about what they're doing. Joe: Yeah you know it's pretty incredible. His ability to network and we've done a podcast on networking and I'm telling you just a year ago I spoke to him and he came out of the blue and called me and said this is what we're trying to do and I told him that he was nuts. We laughed a little bit. I really should have looked him up on LinkedIn before I told him he was nuts because he's one impressive guy. What he's accomplished, what he's achieved in the companies that he's built I had him rattle them off after he did his intro. And I said stop being humble name names here and everybody listening will know some of the names that he named. But yeah they're pulling it off. Their goal is to buy 101 Amazon FBA businesses. They love the platform. They love the fact that it's got built in traffic and easy advertising platform and all they have to do is focus on a few things versus driving traffic which Amazon does for them. And I think they're going to pull it off. It's not going to happen in 24 months which was the original goal but they're well on the way. I tried to nail him down on the time frame and he was a little wishy washy on the amount of time it would take. Mark: Well I know the question I get from people on this all the time is isn't even possible to do what they're doing? Buy 101 companies within 24 months or even if it's 36 months. I mean could you buy that many companies? And my experience in this has been that I've seen people try to do this in the past, I've seen people try to acquire multiple businesses and roll them together and build this portfolio and they always end up running into buying a dog here and there. Or having an issue come up or trying to expand the team that quickly. So my response to people, who's pretty much universal … and RJ if you're listening to this, hopefully, you're listening to this, I'll tell you exactly what I tell everyone. It's really really hard to do but out of the people that I've met, he's probably the one person I would bet on being able to do this. And so I'm like a lot of other people I kind of grab my popcorn and I'm sitting back and I'm watching because this is really fascinating to watch them go through. How many are they up to right now as far as acquisitions that they've completed? Joe: I think the last time we chatted and we didn't get into specific numbers on the podcast but the last time we chatted I think it was about 14 brands and they're trying to get their systems and their processes in place and bring on more and more people. We ended up doing I think eight businesses for 14 brands with a total of three people. And then they realized we need to have some operations here and build some systems and processes so they've been hiring like crazy; and some really really talented people. So I'm with you. I think if anybody can pull it off … there's a few that I think could, but I think RJ and his team are one of them. We've had some other folks that are doing similar things as you know that have purchased a couple from us; Brad, in particular, has sold two to them recently but I think they'll pull it off. I think it will take longer than the 24 to 36 months. And I'd be betting on more from beginning to end maybe a total of 60 months. It's a big undertaking. Mark: Yeah and folks I want to say that again how many in how long? Joe: 101 businesses. Mark: No how many have they done so far? Joe: Oh 14 brands. Essentially eight purchases but within that there are … I believe there are 14 brands. And that has been less than a year. I think the first one happened early in the summertime. So it's really less than six months. Mark: Absolutely incredible and we're seeing this from a few different places. I know we had Shakil Prasla on quite a while ago now. I'm talking about how many he's bought, and he's bought more since we had him on. At that point, it amassed eight different companies … acquisitions that he had done over just a few years. So there are ways to do this. And by the way, Shakil's method is different than what RJ and 101 is doing. So there are a few different paths towards building up this portfolio and really scaling up pretty quickly. A fascinating example of somebody doing this at scale within the industry and definitely I'm sure this going to pop up there as one of the more popular episodes. Joe: So let's you and I stop talking about it and hear what RJ has to say. Mark: Sounds great. Joe: Today's guest is Richard Jalichandra … actually RJ. How are you doing today RJ? RJ: I'm doing great Joe. How are you? Joe: I'm fantastic. Good to see you. Hey, let's do the thing where you tell everybody about you instead of making me read the script. Can you give everybody some background on yourself? RJ: Yeah I'm an old digital entrepreneur. I dig my gut onto the internet in January of '94 building my first website for an agency client and I've been doing it ever since. I've done a whole bunch of different things. I'm a five time CEO now but I also hold senior executive positions at a whole bunch of venture and PE backed companies. So I just kind of have been around the block for quite a while. And then I tried to retire last year and then something I think you're probably going to ask me about kind of like I got a bug in my ear and back to your podcast got in my ear a few times and maybe influenced my current gig. But yeah recently we founded 101 Commerce and essentially what 101 is doing is we're buying, investing, and launching theoretically 101 niche ecommerce privately. We're running it on Amazon and we're a little bit into it as you know. Joe: A little bit. I remember that first conversation we had. Some guy named RJ called me out of the blue. I should have looked you up on LinkedIn before I told you you were nuts because that's exactly what I said. Do you remember the conversation? RJ: Yup. Joe: You're nuts. You're going to buy 101 Amazon businesses and you're going to run them, operate them, build a staff around that. You're crazy. RJ: You weren't the only one. Joe: You might still be crazy but you're pulling it off. Well, listen you're being very humble here in terms of your background. Come on share some of the businesses that you started and you rank them. Its name dropping please do it so that everybody knows. RJ: Well some of the ones that are … I mean depending on what your flavor is whether it's fitness or video games or … yeah let's see a couple, I mean I've done a bunch of things but the one that have seemed to kind of ring a bell on everybody, the video game space I was one of the senior executives of the company called IGN Entertainment where we ran a massive gaming network that have reached 50 million dudes; 13 to 34 year old dudes at the month. And famously of all the acquisitions I did, they are the one that always delights people at cocktail parties with Rotten Tomatoes. So I did a bunch of acquisitions there but Rotten Tomatoes is kind of the one that I can throw out there. And also everybody is like wow you did Rotten Tomatoes. I'm like no I didn't found it but I did buy it. I'm really good friends with the founders of it still today. And then let's see … I ran something called Technorati which at one point was a social media darling until a small search engine company in Nutview did some things that made it very hard to compete from other search engines. And then I ran- Joe: [inaudible 00:07:56.2] name. RJ: No we won't name any names but yeah, just some small company in Nutview. And then let's see, after that, I did a fitness company called Map My Fitness which was then sold Under Armour. I mean that was a really successful fitness set of apps Map My Run and Map My Ride [inaudible 00:08:14.8] doing the cardio, a lot of people touched those at some point. And then I did a company nobody ever heard of. I was an enterprise media space … advertising media space; I'm running behind the brands. I sold that in 2014 and then I tried to retire then. And then I decided to do one more fitness gig and was the CEO of BodyBuilding.com and then that led to my second retirement attempt. Then here we go. Joe: Maybe the third time will be a charm. I think the list of businesses you just mentioned probably touched on 90% of the people listening know of at least one if not more of those especially the Map My Fitness and all that good stuff. All right so about … what 18 months ago now? Or no it's less than a year ago or about a year ago you and I had a conversation and you said hey look I'm reaching out, we're putting together a fund. We're going to buy 101 Amazon businesses. Why? Why are you focused on Amazon? Why are you not retiring like most sane people would do when they have the ability … no, I'll skip that, why are you buying 101 Amazon businesses? What's the theory? What's the plan? What's the concept? RJ: Well I'll back up a little bit and kind of tell you how I stumbled into it. Joe: Okay. RJ: So I mean I was going to try and retire. I'm still young enough though. I figured at some point I might jump back into a CEO chair or something like that but I promised my wife I was going to take two years off. No W2ing, just literally going to play golf, mountain bike, have some fund, raise my daughter, advise, maybe do some angel investing. And that was kind of the plan but I was also I go and I ever do want to get back in the chair will be kind of hard to do. I just was really on the beach for two years and not really educating myself. So I had this idea that I was going to buy a solopreneur 4-hour workweek business which I'm sure you've heard that one a few times in your job. Joe: A couple of times. RJ: A couple of times today but that was literally the goal. It was to buy a 4-hour workweek gig. Joe: Yeah. RJ: And so hence I wanted something that was at least a couple of years old. So somebody else has already done all the hard work, done the early stage startups. I know how hard they are to get things off the ground. I wanted something that was more matured and seasoned where I was more twisting knobs than actually lifting heavy boxes. Joe: Yeah. RJ: I looked at a whole bunch of stuff, not just Amazon businesses. I looked at SaaS, content; I have a lot of experience in content. I sold a SaaS company. I looked at lead gen, affiliate, and I looked at digital content. I was on the board of a company called Click Think which a bunch of your listeners have probably heard of as well. I was the chairman there so I knew a lot about NAT ecosystems. I was looking at all whole bunch of different things and I kept coming back to Amazon FBA. And the more I dug in on it I was just kind of blown away by the operating leverage that you get out of Amazon FBA. I mean essentially as I explained it to people when I'm trying to fish investors or just tell people I'm doing this you know my last real job we had 800 employees, 6 fulfillment centers, 500 people on the warehouse and you have to generate your own traffic. We had to spend tens of millions of dollars on advertising and all that. Essentially with Amazon FBA, you outsource all those hard things. You don't have to worry about fulfillment. You certainly don't have to worry about traffic because you have 300 million of the highest converting consumers there are. So … and then, of course, the advertising platform is built-in. The customer service system is built-in. So basically I kept meeting and hearing about and listening to [inaudible 00:12:01.8] podcast including yours, people who are essentially running these really good businesses had really good net margins. And I wouldn't be shocked you know there's a plenty of people kind of running sub 1 million dollar businesses but every once in a while I meet somebody running a 15 million dollar business and was essentially a sole proprietor with a couple of VA's and they're running at 30% net. I'd scratch my head and go wow that's a way better business model than setting up your own ecommerce site and got in your head against you know Google and Facebook and trying to get traffic as well as having to compete against an Amazon itself why not lean into it, take advantage of that operating leverage, and see if you can build something that was incredibly profitable at scale. Joe: What about the risks? A lot of folks that I talked to are saying no, no, no, I don't want to buy an Amazon business. I think there's too much competition. It's too much risk and Amazon might pull the rug out from underneath me. They may just decide someday they don't want any more seller accounts or third party sellers. What do you have to say to those folks? RJ: You're right. Just go away. Don't look at Amazon businesses. Leave them all for us. Joe: You know what my answer is there are people out there like RJ that are a lot smarter than me that are doing it so there must be something okay with it. RJ: Look I mean there is no doubt there's proper risk of course. But when I was out in the open web there was platform risk as well. I've had Google like I said destroy one of the highest profile companies that I was at. Oh did I say that name? I shouldn't have said that. But I mean in other places and I've seen it happen and- Joe: It's okay don't worry about it. RJ: Okay, all right. Joe: The panda update, the penguin update they've all have affected … those have affected probably again 90% of the people listening so it's okay. They're probably happy. RJ: So everybody knows what I'm talking about. Joe: Yes. RJ: There is platform risk wherever you go. And even in today's thing where Google doesn't have quite the sway they used to, now you have Facebook and Instagram risk because those are the big traffic drivers of other third party traffic sources and stuff. So you're always going to have platform risk. And I just got comfortable with it because the FBA and the marketplace ecosystem on Amazon is literally what's driving its growth right now. I mean if you look at all the stats behind the curtains or whatever, it's driving the growth. And if you look at 20 years of operating history and behavioral study on Jeff Bezos he usually doesn't throttle things that are growing like a wheat. Joe: That's true. He doesn't. That's a good point. That's the answer I'm going to use from now on when people ask me about that risk. All right so in terms of- RJ: But I will make it clear there's a lot of stupid things you can that gets you into trouble and then there's some inadvertent things that could happen to you that do present risk. I don't want to make it sound like- Joe: It's not risk free. RJ: It's not risk free and we certainly are going into this with our eyes wide open knowing that even the best laid plan, buy 100 of these things who knows what happens. There's a portfolio theory and it goes both ways; good and bad. Joe: Right now Mark had an expert on from a PE firm in the last podcast maybe and I actually listened to it yesterday. By the time this this airs it's probably 3 or 4 weeks ago and the concept was buy them at a certain multiple pull them together and it's worth more automatically. We've all talked about that concept. Is that what struck you initially in addition to the scalability because of the platform itself? RJ: Well the first thing you should do is you should introduce me to that guy and we should get to know each other because there may be something we could do. The second thing is … I mean there's more to it than that. If it was just a financial arbitrage I probably wouldn't be that interested in it. There's a lot of places where you can do financial arbitrage. I love ecommerce so first off that just gets me from a personal standpoint. But what I like is just knowing that they're with resources, working capital, domain expertise, specialty expertise, how much you can grow these things is really kind of what interests me. I guess I'm not just interested in the financial arbitrage. I would correct something else that you said kind of the outset that we raised a fund. A lot of people think that's kind of what we do because they don't understand the PE and venture markets. But I would absolutely categorize us not as a fund. We are absolutely an operating company that works closely with venture and private equity funds. Joe: Yeah it's fine. We're trying to put a label on you recently and what you do and what some other folks are doing and it's … I mean it's … well, what is the label? You're just a company that happened to get some that you went out and raised money and are investing it in Amazon businesses. Is there an official label for your type of organization or is there not? RJ: Well what we're trying to do is create a next generation CPG company. Joe: CPG stands for? RJ: Consumer Packaged Goods, more than a CPG because Amazon obviously sells more. But essentially what we're doing is we're putting together a portfolio … a wide and broad portfolio of niche private label brands that sell predominantly; not exclusively but predominantly on Amazon. And that's really what it is. It's a multi-brand platform. You could think of it as any multi-brand consumer goods company like a Procter & Gamble or something like that. Joe: Okay so not unlike our friend Bill D'Alessandro at Elements Brands and what he's doing but it's a little bit more specialty niche and- RJ: Absolutely. Joe: That's what you focus on on Amazon. Okay. RJ: No and I love what Bill's doing too but it's very similar. He has a multi-brand strategy although he's taken a little more narrow focus than we are. Joe: Absolutely. Okay, let's talk for the sellers that are listening what is it that you and your team look for? What pops out to make you go I love that opportunity? Is it brand, is it gross margins, is it workload, is it … what three or four things do you generally look for when you're looking at one of these opportunities? RJ: I mean the first three things that we look at when we're just doing the highest level screens like when you send materials out we're just looking for a couple of really broad things. Because there's a lot of this for sale, between your guy's brands … absolutely a great deal flow. Joe's probably going to work at the Senate at some point but of our first cohort, almost 50% of the deals set were from Quiet Light so thank you for that. You guys do a great job. Joe: Thank you. RJ: With that said, some of your competitors also do a really good job putting together great materials and all that. So we're evaluating stuff. We're trying to screen just the sheer volume of things that come through the door. So we look at gross margin and net margin that tells us kind of a lot about the health of a business and what the opportunities are. But of course on Amazon the currency there is reviews so we're looking for what we term review restructure. It's not really a good phrase because what it really means is your relative strength, the velocity of reviews, quality of the reviews, how the reviews were generated. But right up the bat what we're trying to do is look at those three broad metrics to decide if we want to dig deeper or not. Joe: Okay and once you find a business that checks all of those boxes do you then go and jump right to the financial conversations with the sellers or do you say okay what platforms, are they selling in the US or can I expand internationally? Is there something else like a growth opportunity that sort of takes it over the top? RJ: Well one of the other things I love about what the materials you guys send us and some of … again some of your other- Joe: Include the competitors because this isn't about padding Quiet Light Brokerage. RJ: No, no, no I mean- Joe: And I won't pull a quote out of this just for the record. No, I'm kidding I- RJ: No, I'm good sorry. It's not just you but the other top brokers and guys that really put together quality materials and stuff. It really does save us a lot of time because normally you got to do a screen call before you even want to setup a call with somebody. Because of the interviews that you guys do you get to hear a little bit of the narrative. I think this is something that people forget when they're trying to sell businesses or sell anything; story and narrative is really important. If you basically have a very good narrative for everything from how you originally … what you did before you even started the business and then how that morphed into a business that narrative is really important for me to hear. And it's really important when I'm out pitching our investors as well. There's a lot of investment opportunities, a lot of money floating around and whatever but they want to know … they kind of want to hear your story and how the whole thing kind of morphed into what it is. And the same thing when I'm looking at even the smallest Mom-and-Pop business I've ever bought, I want to know about them. Where they're from, what they did in the previous career, and then how all of a sudden this thing kind of caught fire. Because that's really the moment like most of the things that cross those three bars, the first initial bars. Joe: Yeah. RJ: Somehow or another they've gotten some critical mass. They figured something out. In spite of the fact they might not have a working capital, they might not be a rocket scientist or an expert on PPC or fulfillment or something, they figured something out and that's kind of what we want to hear in that narrative. Joe: And the person behind the business I think is what you're saying matters tremendously it's not the numbers. RJ: Absolutely. So in addition to that narrative, the way they present that narrative tells you a lot about them whether or not … and again you can get this just by reading your memorandums. You can kind of get whether they're out for a quick walk or they're kind of at the end of their line and maybe just running out of gas and it's time for them to kind of move on and hand it to somebody who has even more gas. And it's also part of that narrative is getting me excited about the product category or something like that. But it tells you and then, of course, you're going to get to the … I know you're going to ask this but by the time we actually get on the phone with somebody or in video or whatever one of the most important things that I understand if a person is … a person integrity. Are they honest? It's often kind of like when you get on that first call, it's usually not in the books. Occasionally it's in one of the books but usually, on that first call a really honest person is telling you okay here's all the warts, here's all the things that aren't going well, you need to be addressed, I wish I could do better that kind of thing. So I think that's really important. So narrative and then the integrity comes out in that and then certainly I want to know … don't ever try and kind of hide the bad stuff because if you tell a great story and then you get indulgence and then all of a sudden the warts start appearing and you're like well you didn't tell me about that then there's an integrity. Joe: Yeah and you lose that trust. And this is not rocket science for the maybe the other brokers that are listening or people that are trying to sell their own business on their own. It's important to act with full disclosure and ask those questions and answer them thoroughly so that when you do get on that phone call that trust is continued to be built. And as I say … look creating a great package is not the hard part, connecting with great buyers like yourself RJ is not the hard part. Going at a letter of intent is not the hard part. The hard part is getting from letter of intent all the way through due diligence to closing. And if you do everything right, free LOI that becomes easier. Things still go off the rails. You and I had one go off the rails a little bit this summer and it got back on but it helps tremendously with full disclosure and trust being built and the people behind the business acting with integrity. It's not just the numbers. RJ: Right and the other thing you get and by those disclosures too is we also start operating the business pretty close. And I think that's a really important thing. I mean you're not operating a business but you're starting to think like the operator. Joe: I was going to say we don't … you don't get any control of anything- RJ: No but you're mentally putting yourself in the shoes of having a steering wheel in your hip. Joe: Right. RJ: And I think that's really important because it gives you a lot more confidence to get to the finish line. Joe: So let's talk about that and 101's operations. When you buy a business from a solopreneur or someone who has a small staff or VA's are you generally … and I know the answer to this, are you generally taking it over completely or are you bringing them on to help operate the business with you? RJ: That's a TBD I mean it really depends on the entrepreneur and the situation. Frankly, there are some people that they're just done. They want to go do something else. Joe: Yeah. RJ: This was their side hustle. They really love what they're doing. They may have financial reasons that they want to get out. We are looking for the rare entrepreneur and then the other thing is they can even want to jump on our boat but they may not have the right personality to be in a really high speed tech thing where you got to work as part of a team and any time we put more people together. They're humans and things don't always work right when humans interact even with the best of intentions. So it really is a TBD thing. If there are … in our first cohort we were probably looking to just take the businesses and actually create kind of a sandbox with these where we can build what I call platformization of the company; people, processes, frameworks, technology that allow us to go do this another hundred times and a hundred times after that. So with that said the first eight businesses that we bought we now have … I wouldn't call, I call it two principals have joined us from those eight. One was an owner and one was literally the guy who's like the GM who is running the business. Joe: Okay. They're going to help you with the other … what 93 that you buy, is that the plan and the goal? RJ: Yeah. 93 is the next milestone and then we'll see what happens after that. Joe: You're going to do that in 2019 or is it going to take a little longer? RJ: It's probably going to take a little longer then. Joe: Okay, I'll help as much as I can. RJ: I know you will. Joe: Talk to us about the importance of having a good presentation at package together before you ever get on that phone call in terms of … look I mean to be blunt you and I talked about you coming on the podcast a while ago and I said no. I said it didn't make sense because I didn't want people reaching out to you directly. And then I saw you up on the stage at Brand Builders Summit, you advocate now of a few different things. One is working with brokers because everything is handed to you kind of on a silver platter but then I think also you've talked about specific attorneys and things of that nature. What are those few things that you say now that you've learned and you've got a certain amount of deals under your belt that you're going to sort of also not just in terms of the business three check boxes but your processes going forward for somebody that is also maybe building a portfolio even if it's a smaller content site portfolio things of this nature, what certain things are you trying to put in place like working with brokers, like working with certain attorneys, and things of that nature, anything? RJ: Yeah no gosh you just hit on the mother lode there. Let's go in no particular order but let's start off first with the broker no broker question. So people heard about what we were doing, the word kind of got out there and frankly, we had hundreds of leads that came in through our website. A very few of those were for a surprising number that would have crossed kind of our minimum thresholds and something we would have been interested in. But when we do a deal like that we have to do a heck of a lot more work. A lot more work. And it's kind of hard pressed to sift through that. If they don't come with their own package, financials, a really good narrative, good transparency, it's going to be a lot of work for us. And most people don't know how to sell a business. I mean let's just call it like they make selling business hard. So we're happy; very happy to work with brokers because we feel there's a couple of things that brokers do. You validate a deal for us. I mean basically, you're not just going to take … your time is valuable; you have other opportunities and things like that. So we know that you're already in a little bit of a quality … you're checking a quality box. And then, of course, you help in put together really nice financials and things like that; things that you know are going to make it really fast for us to kind of do that. And then I'd say another really important thing for a buyer to consider and then we're going to link with a lawyer or other professional services because frankly brokers pride in professional service. When you're selling a business for the first time or even a second time, third time, fourth time, fifth time, but certainly the first time … if you've never done it before it is going to be emotionally traumatic. Joe: I know you're going to go there. It is so emotional. RJ: And it's your baby. It's your baby and guys on the other side of the table they're professionals and they do this for a living or whatever and it's not that you're going to feel like you're outmatched. It's just you've never been through it before and it's incredibly stressful. And some buyers are going to ask … they've got investors and they require them to check a whole bunch of boxes before they actually write a check. So they're going to ask you to check all those boxes too and that can be incredibly stressful. So having a shoulder to cry on i.e your broker and play- Joe: Or vent to. RJ: It's not … no that's it, a lot of it is just like I cannot tell you … I mean I have bought a small business once, probably 15 years ago … 14 years ago. I bought a small business that wasn't represented by a broker and I am not exaggerating when I tell you I hired him a therapist. Because otherwise, we're not getting … neither of us is going to get what we want because the guy is going to fall apart. And so I have a feeling a lot of people probably underestimate just how hard the emotional side of getting a seven figure deal done. There's a lot at stake on both sides of the table and [inaudible 00:30:59.4]. So there's a lot there. Of course, you guys do a lot on just the sheer process side that is there but I would say that's an underestimated really big value thing. Just being the therapist through the whole process. Joe: Yeah it takes a good buyer too; a good broker, a good buyer. But what about the attorney side of it? You've had some experiences with great attorneys and maybe some tough ones too. What is your view in terms of that aspect? I think you actually … you and I talked to at one point where you're going to do … are you still considering requiring your sellers to work with a select group of attorneys that you know have ecommerce experience? RJ: Yes. So and before I even get to that I would just give this is a huge bit of advice to any seller. Do not use your family attorney. Joe: Well there's … I mean I have an unwritten rule that if somebody comes to me and they want me to sell their business I ask them point blank do you have an attorney and are they related? Is it your mother, brother, father, sister, cousin, aunt, uncle, etcetera? Because I had an experience where I had someone that was a few years out of grad school, they started a business in college. We got the business under a lot of intent, over asking price and it was a few years ago so I was fairly new RJ. But his mentor in grad school was an attorney, my trade. His fiancée was in law school and his mother and father were attorneys. The deal blew up. It was a one sided contract and there was absolutely no way to fix it. And the buyer was fantastic it was very fair. It was fantastic, it blew up, went away and I learned that lesson. So what you're saying right now to anybody that wants to have a relative as an attorney it's a really bad idea because they're going to fight like rabid dogs for things that don't necessarily matter and kill the deal for you. Is that what you- RJ: Yeah … no, I would take it even a step further. I actually wouldn't mind if they were your family attorney if they happen to be an ecommerce lawyer because the domain expertise is also really important. You can't just take somebody even if they've done M&A that they sold dry cleaner chains or something like that. Ecommerce and digital assets are just different and so if you don't have a lawyer who has the domain expertise we're probably going to have issues because we're going to have to spend a lot of time educating. So I would highly recommend … and look Joe can recommend, most of the brokers have their stables of good recommended lawyers. But just because you have a lawyer, maybe you have a good business lawyer don't necessarily use that one. Look for somebody with the exact domain expertise of what you're getting into. And then the last thing I'd say about lawyers is lawyers love to point score. I mean this is kind of what they got graded on in law school when they're doing all that. They like point scoring and the one thing … a bit of advice I give to anybody who hires a lawyer is remember the lawyer works for you, not the other way around. So you need to watch whether they're going into point scoring mode just for the sake of wining points. And you have to understand it's not 100 points in a deal. It's usually like four or five that matter. And yet there's the long contracts, it's four or five that matter and then may be one or that lean or important to you and that's kind of what you need to focus on. Make sure you that manage your lawyers so that they know what's important to you. And they're not worried in section 17 and 19 where it's [inaudible 00:34:40.3] and crossing tees and that some warranties and things. Joe: I agree 100%. If I could look back at all the transactions, for the most part, the buyers are good people, the sellers are good people, and if we lived in a different world they could shake hands and the deal would be done. RJ: Yup. Joe: You do have to have contracts. We do have to have attorneys but it needs to be a fair and balanced deal for both parties. It's … I've only had one deal fall apart because of the attorney and it was, in fact, that situation that I just mentioned. Let's talk for a minute and jump over to owning an Amazon business for the people that are buying. We talked about what you look for from sellers but from people that are buying what are your thoughts on if it's 100% US based Amazon business and they've got the capital? In your opinion and experience now should they look at either expanding these skews in the US or maybe looking at the EU and different market places or does it simply depend upon the brand? RJ: I think it's highly contextual. Every situation is going to be very different. There's a ton of these Amazon podcasts that say skew expansion and international expansion which both require working capital. I don't think it's as simple as that. I think you really have to kind of look I have met people literally in the last month where they tried to go overseas and failed miserably because their product category just wasn't appropriate for European market or whatever market. So I think it really is highly dependent there. But it's certainly worth investigating. One of the things I like about Amazon is that you can experiment relatively cheaply for thousands if not low tens of thousands of dollars where you may not get hurt too badly if you made a big mistake. Essentially taking existing products and doing a small MOQ and launching it in Europe, if it fails miserably again if you have the right gross margin structure you're probably not going to lose money [inaudible 00:36:36.9] an opportunity cost. But look if you're going to be successful … I mean you've said this on your podcast you got to take some swings at the play and you're not going to always hit the ball. Joe: Got you. All right let's talk about another big fear given that you're an expert in this space now and you own … I'm not going to say exactly how many and neither are you probably, let's say more than 10 brands and FBA businesses altogether. How big is your fear of potential tariffs getting your individual brands? Does it keep you up at night? Does it hit every single brand or certain categories? Can you just touch on that as an owner in the space now? RJ: Sure. It's really also is highly dependent on your exposure to Chinese manufacturing. So yeah … so we certainly have our fair share of products that are manufactured in China. It's certainly something that we are monitoring and we are thinking about. At the same time … and Joe you know this personally, we've expanded rapidly into Europe. We own two European businesses now and so we will look at it later to expand it even more with Chinese based products as we go into Europe. Look I mean- Joe: [inaudible 00:37:47.1] Europe and not being impacted. Is that … okay, and will you have an opportunity? Have you done the financials? Does it make sense if you do that and shift from China to Europe to then import from Europe to the US and avoid the tariffs or is that just simply too much cost shipping wise? RJ: Oh that's a great idea, Joe. You should come work for us in our supply chain. Joe: No thanks I'm not that deep though you've got smarter guys than me. I know one of them … a lot of them actually. Is it something you guys are already working on and something you've crunched the numbers on? Come on I know you probably have. RJ: I think it's still early days and look we're thinking about it a lot. We're thinking about well … I mean it's too Wednesday about it. Everybody gets it. Everybody is all level playing field but it's not that simple. If it changes the price dramatically where there's price elasticity of demand issues in the category that can just impact overall demand. So look we're worried about it. We're hoping that it gets resolved and most of the time what you see in these geo political things is they usually the small period of exposure and everybody actually finally sits down and see when we get to the problem fixed. So that's what we're hoping for knock on wood. Joe: Let's both do it. Everybody else do it now as well. All right let's talk about a first, at least a first for me and I think a first for Quiet Light Brokerage although we've got a second in place now and it may happen before we close. On a transaction that we did together we actually instead of selling or transferring control of the Amazon seller account entirely we tested and successfully moved a brand from a well-established existing seller account took VA's in and tested it in another account that you happened to own. Can you talk about that a little bit for those … and I'll tell you why, because there's always a fear. Some people want to keep their seller account in particular over in the European markets. For some reason, some people are a little bit more fearful in some other countries. For some it's a legitimate fear, others I would say not but we tested that and it … can you just touch on that and what you did there and what you prefer whether it's buying a brand and moving it into your own seller accounts or buying the seller account entirely? And what the difference is between the two for you got. RJ: Yeah no, no, no, we'll just talk about the actual experience. So yeah we were certainly … we had our own questions, the exact process that we used was we did a test. So we didn't move all of the Asense over at once. We took three Asense, a top selling Asense, a medium selling Asense, and actually, it was two medium selling Asense and one longer tail Asense. I didn't want to jeopardize or risk a top selling Asense and until we moved into this other seller account. It was not equal. It wasn't too far behind. But it was definitely a smaller seller account than the one where they originated from. Joe: Were the reviews on the second seller account that you moved it into were the seller account reviews better or worse than the one you were moving it from? RJ: Worse. Joe: Worse, okay. RJ: They weren't bad but that's a worse- Joe: 4 ½ to 4 or something, okay. Sorry I had to clarify. RJ: Yeah I think it was like 2000 like 1200 or something overall reviews. Joe: Okay. RJ: But look the product reviews go with the Asense. So that's a really important thing in a seller account. If you are selling 3rd party products, you're selling Nike's and there are 20 other vendors on Nike's and you're fighting for the buy box, then your seller rating is a heck of a lot more important than the case for your private label. I know that's important- Joe: The big mystery and big unknown that so many experienced Amazon sellers people that are doing half a million or a million dollars a month is we don't know how important those seller account reviews are. When you … I mean obviously they're important in some way but when you go from 4 stars to 4 ½ and 4 ½ to 5. So, in this case, you moved some of the Asense over, obviously the review … product reviews carried over and if … was it a … I think we did a three week test and talk about how it turned out and we ended up closing the transaction. RJ: It was a 15 day test and then we extended it for a couple of days so it was just under three weeks and the seller was awesome. He is super cooperative. We were also risk averse as he was risk averse. We are risk averse so we really cooperated well to see if we could make the test as well. The other thing we had to replicate is GPC campaigns so they were identical. Joe: Yeah. Was that an automated process or a manual process? RJ: I didn't do it myself Joe so I can't tell you the exact process. I try and keep my hands where they're good and that's not one of them Joe: Okay. RJ: But from what I understand the seller actually created these campaigns for us and literally proved that it was a cut and paste. And then our team put it into our seller account. And then he had access to our seller account too … or viewing access or whatever so that he could make sure that it was setup. Because like I said he always intended to make it work. Joe: Yeah. RJ: So he wanted it to work and we had a couple of checks in there on our side to make sure that there's no way [inaudible 00:43:15.2] the situation even though we didn't really have any fear with him in particular. But it is something that you want to like at least have a couple of safeguards that somebody is not running a big Facebook campaign and juice in the results or something like that. Joe: All right so just for point of clarification for everybody listening the typical way that an Amazon business transfers is that the entire seller account transfers. Generally, in asset sales, the new owner takes control of the seller account and you're left with an empty shell of your corporation. What we did in this situation was move the Asense from one seller account to another. All the product reviews carried over. The seller account wasn't as high quality. We tested it out for a few weeks in a few ways and duplicated the sponsored account. And it turned out great. The seller has to help and it's in their best interest. And this is the big picture thing here Richard, it takes … and you talked about it throughout here, it takes a good buyer and a good seller to make a deal work. It's … nothing is cut and dried, there is lots of emotions involved in the process when you're selling and even for a first time buyer. Some people are putting their life savings on the line and they want to make the right choice so emotions run high all across the board. And it's never a winner take all situation, both a buyer and seller have to be happy at the closing table. It begins way back at the initial call and building a good package and managing your own personal brand and reputation. Doing the right thing as a seller and thinking someday maybe you're going to exit; maybe you're going to pass it on to your kids. Either way, you want to pass on something really great because if your kids take it over you want them to be successful because it may be your retirement money. And if you pass it on to someone else you're willing as a buyer Richard … RJ to pay more for a company that is really tidy and neat and you're able to just take off with it as opposed to sifting through the details and fixing things first I would imagine, right? RJ: Yeah and I'm going to say something that my team would probably kick me into shins over but I fundamentally believe this. And my mentor who kind of trained me in my career he always said always be willing to overpay for a great asset because the good ones are hard to find. And as you were saying that … so again if somebody is really running a great business we're not going to get in a pissing match over a couple of tens of a multiple or something like that. Because ultimately that's a great asset, we know what we're going to be able to do with it downstream and those are going to be rounding errors or something when we look back. You mentioned as you were saying that one of the things I'd like to remind sellers too is that I'm sure you kind of educate them as you bring them on board but there's a lot of these businesses out there. In 2017 Amazon announced that there was 20 thousand 501 million dollar sellers so there's a lot of choices; even if we're only trying to buy 100 of them. Joe: Did you just read Walker's book? What's going on here? You just quoted him exactly. And maybe you guys are reading the same stuff. Walker Diebel has published a book called Buy than Build. RJ: Yeah. Joe: Yes Buy than Build, you're not quoting him you're just quoting- RJ: No, no, no, if you read my narrative you would hear that. But I think what I'm getting at though is don't be a pain in the ass because we've got that 400 businesses in 60 days and we put … in that first 60 days we put eight in the LOI and then we bought a few more and whatever. My point is that at some point in this when we had a couple of your early ones get difficult, I remember being … Keith and Chris, they're sitting there I'm listening to a conference call with a seller and a broker and I literally got up on the whiteboard and I got in giant letters and I wrote NEXT! and that became kind of a mantra. If you're not acting your job well … it's not even if you're a jerk or whatever but if you're not acting that you have your buttons up there's a lot of another choice out there. And the same goes if you're a really good asset there's a lot of choice for you to who you sell to as well. If you're a really well run business and you're dealing with a jerk tell your broker find me the next one. Joe: Well let me say this you're saying to the sellers don't be a pain in the ass. To the buyers, the seller does have choices. The first time I was on a conference call with Keith we were on the call late at night with Max. Max was over in Europe and Keith was so professional, so good, so likable to the point where when the call was done my seller wanted to Keith to be the buyer. He did calls with other buyers. He wanted Keith to be the buyer and 101 Commerce. That is what you want to accomplish buyers on those conference calls. You want that seller to go I choose you because you're not alone and the one that wants to buy a great business. And that's hopefully what a lot of folks listening that are owners of the Amazon FBA business, and ecommerce, and SaaS businesses, content business in general. It really doesn't matter if you want to build a great asset and build a great reputation for yourself so that guys like RJ and Keith and other great professional buyers are willing to pay you maximum value for your business in a seamless, painless, exciting process so everybody prospers at the end. RJ you're awesome. I look forward to working with you for the next 24 months no more because you're going to buy 93 in 24 months and then you're done right? RJ: Yeah [inaudible 00:49:05.2]. Joe: All right I'll work with you as long as you choose to work with us here at Quiet Light Brokerage. RJ: Or eventually at some point, I'm going to find somebody smarter than me to run this and then I'll come work with you guys. Joe: There you go. Well, it's a privilege talking with you. Thanks so much for your time. RJ: Awesome. Joe: I appreciate it. RJ: Okay, thanks, Joe. Take care. Links and Resources: 101 Commerce

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How to Avoid Email Marketing Mistakes

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 27, 2018 38:19

Multiple streams of income bring more value to your business. One stream of income people often forget about is email marketing. Today's guest Ken Mahar, founder of Email Broadcast, has been in the sales and email marketing arena for many years. Business owners nowadays are quick to find an expert in other media marketing channels, but when it comes to email marketing, they often implement it unprofessionally, ignoring the potential for campaigns to generate income. Ken's company sets about optimizing your email marketing strategies by carefully preparing them months ahead and sticking with them, therefore nurturing that ongoing relationship with the buyer. Email marketing is the dinosaur of digital marketing tactics, yet remains one of the best. Ken has over 18 years of email marketing experience, going back almost to the dawn of the online space. Ken's experience, along with the expertise of his team, helps clients launch and maintain successful email marketing campaigns. Today he's sharing some of the mistakes people make and valuable ways to avoid those mistakes. Episode Highlights: Common mistakes people often commit with their email marketing strategies. What content planning takes place between the firm and a client before starting a campaign. How Ken helps clients bring a lead through the funnel. How often he refines the client's automation processes and tracks the campaign's performance. The importance of segmenting your audience. How personalization is important – to a degree. Tips for learning how to implement the technical side of an email campaign. Why outsourcing the email marketing side of your business can pay off. The importance of grabbing that email address! Why business should always offer something that people want (and not something they don't). Transcription: Joe: Multiple streams of income bring more value, right Mark? Mark: Absolutely. Joe: All right. One stream of income so many people forget about because it's hard, you have to learn things and it seems so old school is email marketing. But I understand you just had Ken from Email Broadcast on the podcast and he talked a lot about the benefits of email marketing. Mark: Yeah. One of the things he started out with in the call which I find to be just really poignant to so many entrepreneurs is we are really quick to hire people that are specialists in Facebook marketing or AdWords or different paid media but when it comes to email marketing a lot of us just say I'll take care of it. And then we make it like this after thought, right? It's kind of out there or is like okay we're going to send out a couple of broadcasts e-mails. In fact, the number of people I talked to that own businesses and we talk about their different marketing mix they tell me oh yeah you know if we would be using our email list that would be a huge opportunity for growth but we just haven't really done that yet. It's staggering the number of people that are doing this. And I think the reason why we are not necessarily using our email lists the way we should is because it's actually kind of tough to do. It's easy to send out a broadcast to our list of potential clients or customers that are signed up for email notifications. But it's really hard to actually sit down and say okay I'm going to segment that list. I'm going to set up automation sequences. I'm going to set up follow up sequences to these people. And I'm actually going to be intelligent about how I'm emailing my list. And so much of us just kind of give it this kind of head nod of like okay we're doing something with our email but it's not really optimized. And Ken from EmailBroadcast.com, that's what his group does entirely. They help people set up an email automation sequence, email broadcast like editorial calendar months in advance so that you're intelligently talking to your customers and your newsletter subscribers in a way that could actually nurture those relationships. One of the tidbits that he gave me which I absolutely loved was this idea of going to a conference. How many of us collect just dozens of contact cards at conferences and then what would we do with those? Maybe we send out an email after … maybe; most of us don't, saying it was nice to meet you but what Ken does is he takes all of those and he drops them into a sequence with his email system. And so we talked a lot about these ways that we can look at email marketing in probably a more sophisticated way than most of us are doing. And if nothing else this is a pitch to saying you have an email list but you probably aren't using it the right way. And so I thought it'd be good to have him on since this is all his firm does to talk about some of the mistakes that they see in how entrepreneurs are running their email lists and what we can do to start to actually implement a few changes today and actually start utilizing that email list more appropriately. Joe: Yeah, I think people that are running their own internet businesses or buying one and wanting to grow it should seriously look at this. You know I've probably done a thousand valuations over the last six years and there are only a few … a tiny little handful, a fraction of a percent of people that focus on that and it makes a difference. Michael Jackness is one of them and he now travels around the country, actually sometimes the world giving presentations on his email marketing campaign that he does for one of his coloring books. It really is something that you can and should do and the customers actually when it's done right they appreciate it. When it's done wrong it's a problem. We are imperfect ourselves in this regard Mark. I think you've sent out some emails in the last few weeks where I get it and it says that it's … it's to me, to joe@quietlightbrokerage and still says it's dangerous, right? So doing it on your own even though it's coming from Quiet Light to a Quiet Light email address stuff like that can still happen so I think doing it on your own is … it's a gamble. So hiring somebody like Ken unless you've got the resources to really study it up and do it is a pretty smart idea. Mark: Yeah I mean just to bring it up into different sections; you have the technical side which is what we were running into. I had to setup the SPF and the DKIM records- Joe: What? Mark: Yeah right. Joe: I'm so glad you do that and not me. Mark: Exactly. So we had to go there but then you look at okay you have an email list but you don't just treat it as one big blob of people that you're talking to. You need to actually set up and start to segment that list. And then how are you actually interacting with these people. These things multiply. So if you segment your list into four segments which isn't that much. And then you would consider okay these four segments are going to get distinct emails and there's going to be an eight email sequence between this four segments. Now you have to write 32 emails in order to get all of these sequences in place. And then you have to measure and go back and do these and continually improve. It's a lot of work and honestly the fact that we're doing a lot of this on our own as entrepreneurs, is it a good idea? Maybe … maybe not; maybe it's the time to hire somebody out but I think if nothing else think about it. Think about what you're doing and how you're using your email list. Are you treating this audience as one big blob of people and sending them all the same message? If so you're leaving a lot of money on the table. Joe: I agree. If you can get a 2 or 3% lift in your discretionary earnings because of email marketing as long as it's a profitable lift; it's important. That adds a lot of value to your company. Jackness I believe you a little 50% of his revenue for his website comes from his email marketing campaign so that's something serious to consider for people that have the right type of product. So let's go to it, let's see what Ken has to say. Mark: Sounds great. Mark: All right Ken thanks so much for having me. This is Ken Mahar. Did I pronounce that right Ken? Ken: Yup. Mark: Awesome. Thanks for joining me. You come from EmailBroadcast.com so this is going to be an episode really focusing on email habits, some of the mistakes people make with email marketing, and we'll also wrap into this episode hopefully things that maybe what you should do from sell side to be able to prepare for selling your business and making sure that that part of the business has good opportunity and is well set up. But let's start out real quick, Ken, if you can provide everyone just a background or a bio on you. Ken: How much time do we have? I'll try to keep it short I guess. I'm Ken Mahar. I'm the founder and CEO of Email Broadcast. I've been running this company for 18 years so back before email marketing was really even a thing was when I got started. I actually have a sales background and I used email marketing for my own sales efforts. I found it to be tremendously helpful and successful. Itched it to some other businesses that I had worked for before, I'm saying you should guys really do this and then they're like we don't know how to do it so I started serving them. So yeah my background in sales is everything from retail to business to business. And then I got into inside sales for a high tech firm, I took over a territory. It was 11 states. We sold direct and through the channel. So I've kind of done everything there is in the sales arena. And the reason that I am still running Email Broadcast is because I found that email marketing is one of the best channels to impact sales. And so I kind of combined my expertise in the sales arena along with delivering email marketing from my entire team. We have the technical aspect; the writer's, the operations and all that stuff and then I do my part on the sales and the strategy part. So I guess that's a quick background on me. Mark: You've had the company for 18 years? Ken: Yeah. Mark: Holy cow man that's ancient in the world of internet businesses. You've seen a lot. Ken: Yeah. In fact I thought about naming my business Constant Contact or they ever existed and I just thought that sounds a little too aggressive so I didn't do that. But Email Broadcast is a pretty good name. Mark: Constant Contact aka we're always going to be in your inbox is really really what we're saying. Ken: Exactly. Mark: All right; pretty cool. You've seen a lot, 18 years is a long time. I've been online for about 20 years myself … actually, 2018; 20 years. I've been online for 20 years. I started my first site back in 1998 so that's a really long time; cool. All right, email marketing; there is a lot that goes on with email marketing and I want to get from you some of the common mistakes that you see people do with email marketing. Everybody knows that you should be doing it. I know here at Quiet Light we recommend pretty heavily that people establish a good list and use this as a channel to acquire more customers. Primarily because out of all the things, all the customer acquisition channels that are available out there email is one of the only ones that you actually own and have the ability to control. Google you can't control. AdWords you can't control. Facebook you can't control. Amazon you definitely can't control. Email you can, so let's sort out some of the common mistakes that you see people make with their email marketing strategies. Ken: Sure. Yeah, I think strategy is a good place to start. I think the big picture that I see people make mistakes around is thinking that email is about them. And what I mean by that is they look at email as just another channel for them to promote and to use their sales messages. When in my mind email is more of a relationship builder and a two way communication channel. And so I see a lot of people these people do a lot of mistakes made … in a strategy where people say okay let's talk about what we want to do in our next sale and our next promotion and us, us, us, us, us, and it just becomes a channel for commercials. And if you think about it email is a media channel. And in media channels you should have content that people are interested and excited to hear; whether it's educational or inspirational or whatever. And then you might have a commercial message every now and then. But if you are only commercials how long would you listen to that radio station? And people treat their email like that. They just promote, promote, promote, and they don't add any value to their audience's lives. So one of the big paradigm shifts that our clients go through is to realize this isn't about you, this is about your audience. What do they want to learn? What are they into? What inspires them and to get them to think in that perspective. So I think that's a pretty big mistake. What else? I think the second biggest strategy mistake I see is that people think that copy writing is email marketing. And they say oh yeah we need to get an email out, we haven't had one for a while. Let's get one out today and let's make it really good. And that's just a terrible, terrible strategy because the chances you'd be coming up with a great idea, creating great, well written, well researched content; actually having something so valuable to your audience that they're willing to forward it to someone … you know one of their friends, getting your … making sure that every single link works, making sure that it's grammatically perfect all like in 24 hours is just a recipe for disaster. So we look at it and go you should be planning this stuff out weeks or months ahead. My team is already done with November and we're scheduling December messages right now. And we've been working on the November stuff for a while already. So planning ahead and having like an overarching strategy is a big mistake that people make. Mark: Let me go back actually to your first point. Mark: Yeah. Mark: We had Mike Jackness on the podcast several episodes ago and he talked a little bit about their email marketing that they do. They see crazy open rates of 30% plus on their stuff and they're emailing their members almost every single day. So it's a pretty heavy and intense email marketing strategy but really the key behind what he's doing really isn't a surprise. And he's trying to offer ridiculous value with every single email so that people look forward to it. And your point about making it all about you, there's a great BuzzSumo article where they analyzed 100 million headlines to see what got shared the most. I love this blog post. I actually go to it once every few months just to revisit some of the concepts in this. But one of the big things that they do there and I found that these headlines is that headlines that get shared, the headlines they get opened, the emails that get opened are the ones that promise something to the user. Who is the person that's actually opening this? Is there a promise in that headline? And when you decide with this headline I'm going to promise something to the user that's a much better reason to open it up. Nobody really cares about your big news for the day all that much but they do care about what they're going to get if they're going to open that email. Ken: Yeah, it's funny when people put on their email marketing hat they're like … they disconnect from their own mind about what do I want in my own inbox, right? Mark: Right. Ken: It's something that I would really appreciate in value and go wow that was really good. And in fact, that's kind of our litmus test where we ask ourselves is this so good that you would forward it to a friend? And if that's a yes then you're probably on the right track. Mark: Right, so you got to start with that value prop, make it into something about the other person and let your subscriber know what are you going to get from this is email. If you take the time to open it if you're going to take the time to click it if there's a link in there you've got to get something in return and you got to make that promise up front. I'm sorry to step all over what you're saying. Ken: No, it's okay, and I think … and this is a really important point. So it's you take a page out of Gary Vaynerchuk's book right? Jab, jab, jab, right hook. Of course you're doing email because you have a strategy in mind and the strategy is you want a return on your investment right? But you need to think about the ratio, and 3:1 is a good ratio. Do you give, give, give between each ask or are you ask, ask, ask, ask, ask and maybe give once in a while, right? Mark: Right. Let's talk about that strategy of you guys just finished November and for a reference, for people that … because this probably won't actually air until maybe first day of November, it's October 25th today. So we're not even done with October. You guys have finished out your planning for your clients all the way through November. When you're planning that out are you looking at sort of like this rhythm to the emails as far as … like you said give, give, give, sell, give, give, give, ask, or is it also kind of moving along with holidays? What sort of planning are you doing on behalf of your customers to plan that far out in advance? Ken: Right. Yeah, so that actually opens up another great strategy idea that I think people blow it on. One of the first things we do when we onboard a client is we come up with … in fact I got a meeting in about an hour on this where we come up with 50 to 100 different content ideas before we even get this campaign started. So we have this giant treasure trove of content ideas. Once we learned about the audience we think we know who they are. We think about what would be important to them. And we come up with a lot of ideas. Some of them are just plain nuts but we document everything; we put it in a document. And so as we work with our clients, the November emails aren't just planned, they're actually planned, executed and already scheduled. So they're in the can just waiting for the days to tick by until they get released. So we actually started working in November last month. So yeah probably another big mistake that people make beyond if like not thinking of content ideas ahead is not planning for email work. And it is weird people will just kind of go oh dude I tried to sneak it in between something else because that is blocking out real time and saying this is an important part of my business, it's a huge channel for me. I've got to schedule time for this and they continuously under estimate how long it takes to write brilliant copy, have a copy edited, come up with great images, get it scheduled, think about how they can enhance it. And it's one of those things that if you put it aside for a second and then you come back to it you have fresh new ideas, a fresh perspective and you can always make it a little bit better. So scheduling that time, getting on a rhythm, and doing it ahead of time is big paradigm shift for a lot of people. Mark: Yeah let me ask you, I don't want to divert too much from kind of the thread we have going here but in the world of email marketing, we have a couple of different concepts as far as when people receive emails. Well if you start off at the very first contact with somebody who just joins your email list they might automatically be put into a campaign where they're going to get different emails at certain times versus your … maybe your entire block of subscribers where you might just be sending out broadcast to those subscribers on a regular basis. I want to ask you a little bit about that. How much emphasis do you like to put on one versus the other? In other words if I come to EmailBroadcast.com and you have a lead magnet there and downloadable resource or something else, how long are you going to put me in a pre-defined process where you're going to lead me through an arc and trying I guess funnel marketing right here but bringing you down that funnel to a certain point versus taking me out of that campaign where I've got this ready written emails that everybody else has received earlier and now I'm in your general kind of flow into your general broadcasts. Ken: Yeah well, I'll speak to exactly what's happening right now on our campaign. So we have a year-long champion going on right now that is a story format. We have some brilliant writers … in fact actual published and award winning authors and so we've tapped that and we've written out a fictional story about a guy who owns an RV lot and has a huge competitor move into town and is trying to figure out how to handle it with his marketing. And so right now when you sign up on our email list we kind of thought of it as kind of a Netflix situation where you binge on episodes until you get caught up. So right now when you sign up you get an email from us once a week until you're caught up and then we do a monthly broadcast. So I'm not sure that completely answers your question but it still kind of depends on when you join but I think we're in episode eight or nine right now. So for seven weeks in a row, you would get the next chapter of the story and then once you're caught up it comes out monthly. Mark: Yeah, that makes sense. So it sounds like again when you're planning out your broadcast schedule here for November and December as you go get into those months you really need to think about the fact the person that's been with you now through that time they've already been through that. In this case a year-long journey, that's pretty significant and they've already had that exposure to your company. And so you're going to write and create that general broadcast strategy with that in mind that these are not people completely new to who you are. Ken: Right and then what we've done is we did have an interruption in the story, like a commercial interruption like the old school radio shows or something. But we had a message on like July that was like hey here are a couple of things you might think about and there were something promotional. There was a blog post. There was a different value ad but it was just kind of a little interruption in the normal sequence. So if you think about it we actually planned … the emails that are going out on November and December we planned last year; last fall when we outlined our storyline and figured out what chapters were going to go when. And so right now we're working on our 2019 campaign which is going to be all different. We've been working on it for a month and a half or so and we're kind of finalizing our strategy around that and so we hit the ground running in January. Mark: Yeah so much of marketing and I don't think really matters what the format is whether it's AdWords or Amazon Ads or email marketing, so much marketing seems to be this idea of measuring, refining, repeating. So you're going back and you're taking a look at what worked, what didn't work, you're testing things against each other. How often is your team if you have a client on board and you've drafted this this kind of initial sequence that people are going to get when they enter into one of the many different funnels that you have set up. How often are you going back and refining that for them? Ken: Well, we look at it monthly. It's part of our process where … it's on our checklist to go and review the automation for instance. So if we've built an onboarding series or a welcome series for a client we look at it monthly and we kind of track the numbers and we start and we look at it. If it's not performing to our expectations then we'll think about tweaking it. And so we'll dig in in the messages and think okay what are people on the activity that we are getting what are people most interested in? Which of these has the best open rate? What clicks are … what things are people clicking on and maybe we should refine the message a little bit. So we look at it once a month. There's a danger at looking at it too much. It's like looking at your stocks every single two hour period, things go up and down and so you want to avoid the small sample bias and look at it over time but we look at it monthly. Mark: Okay. Let's talk a little bit more about some of the mistakes people make. I'm going to throw one in and then you tell me if I'm spot on or if I'm off base here. I would say one mistake that I see is people taking a one size fits all approach to their email list. So everybody gets the exact same emails regardless where they came from. Ken: Yeah and a good example of that is we are on boarding a new client in the cosmetic medicine practice which serves 90% females but we are … and so part of our strategy is that we're going to ask people to identify their gender when they sign up for our email list. And if they do say that they're male we're going to have a completely different first message for them making them feel very welcomed as a man in what is otherwise a woman dominated consumer market. And we think that's going to be a big deal. It's going to grow their practice through male audience without much effort at all. So yeah not segmenting your audiences is … you're right it's another big mistake. People think oh I'm just going to broadcast to everybody. Okay well, there are certain messages that are good for that and that maybe most of the time but really you should be thinking about your email lists thinking about what segments can I target. For instance, another example we have a large furniture retailer in Louisiana, Arkansas in Texas and we came up with this idea that we should target the people who have their private label credit card. And we also identified another sub market of people who are on their … so private label credit card is for people with pretty good credit and then they also have a kind of a buy here pay here market. So we get a different message to each of those segments. It turned out combined they were only 7.8% of the list but in one message to each of them we ended up driving $430,000 in new sales for the weekend for just that one segment. So by targeting a message just specifically to them with a specific offer that was really relevant; that we had huge response. Mark: That personalization is a huge issue right now. I saw one thing that was really cool. It was somebody who is qualifying their email subscribers before they signed up through a quiz. And the quiz was kind of fun and it was actually in the cosmetics field. So it was what's the shape of your face? And it just had cartoon characters. It wasn't offensive or anything like that. What's the shape of your face? What's the tone of your skin? And they went through probably about six, seven questions but then you were able to break out into this really cool like super segmented this is a female with this skin tone with this shape of face with this size of eyes this sort of thing and you can really cater the messaging. And this was more than … they were doing email marketing but also some other recommendations that is super super cool. Ken: Yeah, the danger around that … well, not the danger but the recommendation is don't ask for anything you're not actually going to use. So a couple of things around like I see a blast for last name in their email sign up forms and I think that's like one step too far of getting a little too personal a little too quickly off the bat. And unless you'd actually have a use for somebody's last name why are you asking for it? Even … but also people take that in the wrong direction as they say here sign up for our email list and all they ask for is the email address. Okay well, that's not enough, right? It's like at least get their first name because if you don't you're giving up on a huge personalization opportunity with putting peoples name in the subject line and addressing them by name and actually creating a relationship. When you're saying give me your email address what you're really saying is I'm going to blast you like I do everybody else on my list and I don't really care who you are or anything about you. So there's a check for your listeners if you're only collecting email address you're doing it wrong. Mark: Yeah and I'm going to make a plea here as well, this is turning into my great show here but one of the things I can't stand with email marketers when they're … when I get on a list is the hey buddy buddy sort of approach that comes without me even knowing who you are. Like there's a point where you got one of the so corporate and stiff to the point where it just feels stale and separate. But if you come in and pretend like we went to college together that's equally off putting to me. I want to have somewhere in the middle where I can get to know you a little bit and again kind of test out to see do you have value to offer. But I guess that's where that copywriter comes in, having a copywriter who's done thousands of these emails before. Ken: Yeah, and I would actually say that I would rather somebody do that if that's really their authentic voice and that's really who they are where they want to be buddies with you and if you're not ready for that then fine get the hell off my list. I think that's a better approach than trying to please everybody. You know I'd dig into authenticity around email marketing, it's one of the things that we really drive home with our clients is to say I want people to know who you really are not who you're pretending to be. So if you've only got six people on your team let's celebrate that. You're feisty and small and responsive and adaptive versus trying to pretend like you're some mega-corporation. But yeah everybody's different and you have to realize that. So really you should concentrate on attracting the people that you want to attract. Mark: Yeah. Ken: So if that's important to somebody that they'd be buddies with you and you didn't like that then maybe they did themselves a favor by not winning your business; who knows. Mark: Yeah, absolutely the authenticity is definite. I see sometimes with these people also lack of authenticity trying to win me over by being a little hokey. But if it is authentic to me then well so be it. The rest of the people buy me dinner first. So I want to shift gears really heavily here because I want to get to this before our time is up and I want to talk about the technical side of this. Ken: Yeah. Mark: This is just the hairy issue. There's a lot of systems out there. We use drip marketing at Quiet Light Brokerage. I like the system but we also have an external CRM which means we need to get these two things to talk to each other. What tips would you have for people on that technical side? I know that's really an open ended question but I'm going to have to throw it in your part as far as just the tips of working with the technical side. How much effort should people be putting into that sort of that technical side setup? Ken: Yeah, this will tie back into the strategy question too. One of the most under-utilized aspects of email marketing is the use of automation. When you can define what your sales process is and know where people are falling out of your funnel or use an automation series to take people from not step A to step B but from step D to step E. You know there are all kinds of opportunities to use email to kind of leverage your time. Basically having the platform do what you would do if you had a million hours in the day and all you did was write emails all day. Setting up the platform to do that is important. But you're right that does take some technical integration stuff. So my tips, I would say work with the bigger players in the market is probably a good tip because they've been around for a while. They likely have the integrations for some of the bigger … so if you're trying to choose an email marking platform and a CRM go … I wouldn't go with a guy that's brand new yesterday because he probably doesn't have a very well developed API and it's not a plug and play situation. So if you're trying to save yourself some headaches go with bigger players in the market that have been established that have an API that already potentially connect. Look at the integration possibilities. But I'd also say that it's generally worth it, right? There may be some pain involved in trying to figure it out but don't give up. Get help, hire somebody and figure out how to get those things integrated because it can really make a big difference for you. You mentioned the CRM right? So we've got ours dialed in so I can fill out a single form and it populates both my email marketing to start a drip series but it also sends that exact same data to my CRM to save me from double entry. So yeah integration is the key. There is a lot to integrate; getting your sign up forms cracked on your website, getting the email thing dialed in, connecting your CRM. We're going to be connecting in a medical records system for this latest client that we did and getting an API expert on that and we have that in house so we do not have that problem but it's important. Mark: Yeah, so when we get into the actual set up of these things … I have another company that I own, I know those folks that listen regularly probably know about it but we use a lot of automation on our email side there. And even with that I mean you talked about the multiplying effect here, right? Let's say that what you are going to segment your audience into just three different segments and then you're going to set up automation sequences with a series of 10 emails in each. Well now you're writing out 30 different emails with different email copy and on top of that you have your broadcast emails that are going to go out. And on top that may be some other campaigns and you have to try to make sure that these things don't duplicate where people are receiving multiple emails because they're accidentally subscribed to two different campaigns within our system and then figuring out how to make all the technology work together. So this is the part where I'm going to just make this quick pitch for the stuff that you guys do over at EmailBroadcast.com which is you guys do all of this. You are the full service sort of provider for this email automation of marketing right? Ken: Yeah, I have a team of people and I think that's the key thing because each of my team members is a specialist. So I have an engineer that thinks in bits and bytes. I have copywriters. I have a sales strategist which is me. I have an operations manager to help keep things on track and then an account coordinator. We designated an account coordinator for each account so they truly understand who our client is, what their business is, what their goals are, what they're trying to accomplish, and can really feel like a member of their team. So in effect, we are an email marketing department. Imagine a Fortune500 firm that had an entire department to handle email marketing. Well, we are that but for much smaller businesses who can get us for the cost of a part time employee. So yeah we handle everything from strategy to the copy writing, to the design, to the engineering, the mobile optimization, integrating it with the CRM, integrating it with medical record systems, setting up all the automation. Making sure things aren't overlapping and you have people getting multiple stuff and somebody looking at it; somebody thinking about your campaign a month in advance. Thinking about the seasonal stuff like Q4 for us is heavy so we've been thinking about Q4 since July about how we're going to get ready, which of our clients are going to want to do extra messages. That's the value we add. We're the people that you wish you had an entire department … and I think this is a different … I think this is an important point because some people go okay great this email something I'm going to outsource and I'm going to look for that one guy. Well, I've been doing this for 18 years and I'm not even that one guy. I'm not … I can't be the best copywriter, the greatest sales strategist, the engineer to integrate everything, the operations manager to get it all done. I mean maybe that person is out there but you're certainly not going to get them for a song. And so I think dividing the labor … you know divide and conquer and having each person in a team that's used to working together is a great solution. And a lot of people don't realize that this kind of solution is out there. They think that email marketing is something they have to do on their own even though they struggle. They've written the messages a bit inconsistent, the branding is not where they like it, they're doing stuff last minute, they know they're abusing their audience's trust, they have low engagement, they're like hell and they know there weren't any other options. So we are out there. Mark: Yeah, fantastic. Regardless of whether or not somebody is going to use an outsource solution like what you guys offer which would be like an outsourced email department as you said it is something that I think people need to really pay attention to that aspect of the business. And you're right, I look at a lot of businesses … I look at the health of a lot of businesses and see where they're putting their time and efforts. And sometimes I see this really just beautifully built out Facebook campaigns, this really beautifully optimized Ad-words accounts, but it's only been on a rare occasion where I see that applied in the email world. And when I do see it applied though it tends to be sort of a cash machine, right? All these other customer acquisition strategies are able to just funnel in there. And once they funnel in there those people are in because the systems are set up and ready to go. It does take time to plan. It does take time to refine. It does take time to go back there but this can be one of the biggest customer acquisition channels for pretty much any business that's out there. So I think the work that you guys are doing is awesome. I love some of the tips that you had in there. I know that there are a lot more tips that we didn't cover. I mean on one of our conversations you talked about hey what are you doing with the conference cards that you get? Do you actually follow up with them and is it just kind of one quick follow up or do you drop them into a sequence of some sort where they end up getting a series of emails; that's brilliant. There you go, look at that you- Ken: I just attended a conference so I'm holding up a fan of contacts that I have and I … you know we walk or talk. I put these people into a segment in our email list and we've already emailed them twice which is more than anybody else who went to that conference has done. We have a third message already scheduled so yeah that and we advise people about their offline activities. Like we have customers … I had this customer one time, he literally interrupted my … our phone call to take a call. I only heard his part of the conversation. He sat there for five minutes helping this person out, they sell this rooftop tent deals and I'm like how many conversations like that do you have a day and he's like I don't know 15, 20. I go how many people are you getting emails from? Zero. I'm like wow okay huge opportunity for you. Ask for their email address after you just spent five minutes helping somebody. They're going to give it to you. Put them on your list and now you've got a chance to market to them and then they'll buy a tent. So yeah there's a lot to email marketing and I hope your audience takes it to heart and really goes after it and figures out how can I add value? How can I make this amazing? And don't worry about the immediate payoff. Trust me it'll it will pay off in the end. What can I offer people that come to my website to actually get on my email list? If you're saying sign up for my email okay you need to rethink that. What value is there? People don't know what your email is. They probably haven't defined how often it goes out. They don't know what they're going to get in return and so sign up for our newsletter you know who wants to do that? But if you can give me the top five tips in selling my business in the next year oh okay yeah that's why I came to your website, that's what I want to know about. So that's the kind of thing you need to offer. Mark: Awesome so if people have questions about this or just want to bounce ideas off with you how can they reach you? Ken: Yeah, ken@emailbroadcast.com the phone number is 805-316-3201. And if you want a little branding tip or just have some fun call that number just to listen to our auto-responder. It's pretty funny that we put together. You could go to our website at EmailBroadcast.com and on there there's a pretty easy to find that you can schedule a 20 minute call with me free of charge just to be asked about your email. I can give you a couple of ideas, find out if … work out something that might be right for you but kind of get your head in the right direction. So hopefully that helps. Mark: Yeah absolutely. I'm actually going to call that number because that's a pretty good tease to get them to call the number. Well put links to that on the show notes page so feel free to go to the show notes page and you'll be able to see those links as well as contact information for you Ken. Thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate it. Ken: Thank you, Mark, it's been a pleasure and I hope everybody here is reinvigorated to do great email marketing. That's why I exist in the world, to get people to up their game around email marketing. Good luck. Links and Resources: Email Ken Mahar Email Broadcast Website Call Email broadcast @ 805.316.3201

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Ezra Firestone Talks Work-Life Balance, Giving Back and Profiting

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 18, 2018 45:59

I've seen Ezra Firestone speak at events, online, and in his “how to” courses. But until I got to chat with him one on one for 30 minutes about work/life balance, did I realize he's the next Tony Robbins (OK, of the ecommerce world, and without the banana hands.) No kidding, Ezra is inspiring and full of passion. And he does what he does (rock 30 million a year in revenues without breaking a sweat) while giving back to others, focusing on family, and taking care of his health. If you're are a corporate exec wanting to live the ecommerce lifestyle, Ezra's approach is spot on. If you are an ecommerce owner and want to be the “navigator” of your business instead of the jack of all trades, listen and try to really hear what Ezra is saying. It will make a difference in your business, your bank account and your family life. Episode Highlights: Highlights from Ezra's unique upbringing and how he grew up with e-commerce. We follow the journey of his professional life from poker to yoga to where he is today, earning thirty million per year in revenue. Ways the apprenticeship model can be beneficial to young entrepreneurs. Ezra reveals the pivotal moment where he understood the freedom he could achieve from acquiring a skill and mastering it. How Ezra found his “mastery” in e-commerce after trying several things. Every type of e-commerce business requires the same kind of marketing. All the marketing that goes with the product: before, during and after is what smart marketers need to focus on. The easiest business to run at scale is the physical product in e-commerce. The importance of going premium in e-commerce. There are buyers for every level of the market. Why Ezra chose not to sell on the subscription model. Using consistent ongoing marketing content in customer communication can generate revenue by sending the customers back to the website over and over. Ezra describes how he made the transition from driver to navigator. The importance of setting boundaries. Work will fill the time that you give it but it is necessary to scale in order to create balance. Balance as an entrepreneurial leader allows you to give the autonomy to those around you to step into roles that they can be motivated to succeed at. Ezra runs his business based on the practice of permaculture. Serve the world unselfishly and profit, that is his philosophy. Transcription: Mark: I saw an ad on Facebook the other day Joe and it made me think of our guest today. The ad was for anyone … any guy who has just a regular hairdo like I do and it was a man bun attachment. You could actually buy a man bun attachment to put on the top of your head if you wanted to have a man bun. Joe: Don't say his name now, don't say his name. Mark: I want a minute here and think who in the industry … in the world of marketing is known for his man bun? Joe: You know when we had Syed Balkhi on the podcast I actually went out and bought myself a Florida gator hat to wear during part of the podcast. I seriously thought about going on Amazon and ordering a man bun and putting it on for this podcast. That's what I wanted to do. But you know what I don't know the guest well enough. I've seen him at events and we were a host, we're not a sponsor on his last event. Today we're on this podcast is the first time I really got to sit down and talk with him for 30 minutes or so. I guess we can say is name now is Ezra Firestone. If you don't know his name where the hell have you been? Because essentially he is … in my view he's the Tony Robbins of the e-commerce world without the banana hands if you've ever seen Shallow Hal. He's very impressive. When he starts talking you just sit back and listen and you go “What? Really, wow that's incredible. That's incredible.” He's so full of energy and so passionate about what he does that you would think that he works all the time. And that's kind of the takeaway from this podcast for me. There are lots of great insights to how to run a more effective e-commerce business in different channels and philosophies that someone like Ezra applies. And look he's doing 30 million dollars a year in revenue growing month over month and does incredible things. He does not get out of bed … well, I shouldn't say bed; he does not start his day until 10 o'clock in the morning. And that doesn't mean he works until 10 o'clock at night. He works maybe till 5 o'clock unless he's out doing events; like he's going to be at Blue Ribbon Mastermind next week which is just incredible … doing 30 million a year in revenue and not working 40 hours a week; a really impressive guy. Mark: Absolutely you know I have a confession to make. You know these courses, these e-courses online that are super expensive, I usually look at these and I'm like yeah who in the world would ever pay for this? So my confession is this, I've actually bought one before and it was one of Ezra's. It was on Facebook Marketing which is a little bit off from what you're talking about. But I can honestly say it was worth every single penny. I think those who have actually gone to Ezra's events and listened to his advice bought one of his courses and have followed him. He's big. He's known because he's a real deal. Starting work at 10 AM is an awesome testament to the idea of this work life balance and making sure that we're working so that we can live our lives. We're not living so that we can work our lives. That's awesome. I want to hear this because right now I'm working so much and Joe I know you are too. So hopefully you did pull away a few things from this as well. Joe: I did. I did and people don't want to hear you and I anymore so let's just go to Ezra. Mark: Let's go. Joe: Hey folks it's Joe Valley from the Quiet Light Podcast and today I have Ezra Firestone on the line with me. Hey Ezra how are you doing? Ezra: Happy to be here man. Thank you so much for having me on the show. I love doing stuff like this. Joe: So so glad to have you here. You and I have … we've been to a couple of events together, I've been to your Smart Marketer and Blue Ribbon Mastermind but we've never had a half hour to talk to each other so I'm loving the fact that I got your crew to schedule this. So thank you first and foremost, I know you're a busy guy. As I mentioned earlier we don't do a fancy introduction so for those that don't know who you are if you could tell us a little bit about yourself and your background that'd be fantastic. Ezra: Sure. Thanks. I am currently sitting in a presidential cabinet room, so that's my current location in the world. Joe: For those listening and not watching, get online and look. Ezra: Yeah get up take a look. This is actually an off … my wife and I bought 76 acres of land about 20 minutes from here that we're intending to sort of develop and build a home on and have kids on and stuff. We're renting this home and the person who lived here before was like some kind of a lawyer or something. And this room … it's all cabinets and for me for some reason that is confronting. Like I don't know why but I walk into this [inaudible 00:05:02.0] in my office and I love … I love it. I love that I have a space where I can work but all the cabinetry it kind of freaks me out because it's very not … much not my vibe. So I'm like putting in plants, I've got like a skateboard over here. You know I'm kind of trying to make it feel a little less intense. Anyways a little bit about me business wise is I never went to college. I went straight from high school to New York City to play poker for a living which I did really well as a teenager and into my early 20's. I was really fun but eventually, I sort of came across the concept of not trading time for money and began looking at building systems to generate revenue and resource for me without my direct time input all the time and sort of fell into e-commerce. Because you know e-commerce was really coming up in society at that time. We're talking 2004, 2005, 2006. It was my first years in e-commerce and I've been fortunate enough to grow up in this industry. And this was a time before events and before podcast and before this industry was … everyone, when you said you were an Internet marketer they thought you were into porn or gambling. Joe: That's right. Ezra: It was not looked at as a good thing. And so long story short is I've been doing e-commerce full time for about 13 years. I have grown and sold several companies. I currently have four different brands that generate about 25 million a year in revenue and 70 employees on my team around the country. And I'm just a guy. I'm just some random guy who loves this stuff. I really really love it and I think timing wise I came into it at the right time and fell in love with it at the right time and have been putting my full energy and attention in the direction of online businesses and e-commerce in particular physical products. Although I do have other business models e-commerce is my most successful model over the last decade. Joe: That's impressive. First and foremost the fact that you didn't go to college and you went right to life and you're a professional poker player. I don't tell my kids this, as I mentioned before I've got two boys, 14 … oh almost 15 and 17, some of the most successful people I know didn't go to college. One of the guys I worked with up in Portland Maine, Rob Graham if you're listening, absolutely one of the most successful people I know and he just … he got it. He worked hard, he was smart, he used common sense and intelligence which you have to have a combination of so kudos to you. Ezra: Thanks, man. By the way, you can't give me too much credit for that decision. There were no colleges that would take me with my problem. I just didn't fit the mold. I sort of always had this idea, you know I haven't … I had an alternative lifestyle. I grew up in an intentional community in the Bay Area of California with flower children hippie parents and so I kind of had some alternative views on life from my upbringing. And one of them was that the school system really felt like a system that was farming me into a model … into a workforce that I didn't want to join. You know sitting at a desk for eight hours a day and then you'll be trained to go sit in the cubicle eight hours a day. And I believe that in life you get what you want from people who have it. That's how … you find someone like you Joe and you learn about how to sell businesses from someone who is doing that. And I have always sort of believed in that apprenticeship model. And you know I looked around at college, I mean I attempted to get in, nobody would take me but there was like nothing there for me you know. The teachers didn't have anything that I wanted. I couldn't really see a future for myself there and I was a very good hustler. I always had little businesses and I was the guy at school … I almost had, I would have to go on to those stories but I always had something going on to make money because we weren't rich. We grew up without much means and I always had this goal of generating resource so that I could use it for causes that I found noble like taking care of my family and taking care of my community and participating in the world in ways that you can only do when you have access to resources. So I always kind of had my attention on that and yeah I fell in to entrepreneurship sort of because of that. Joe: So if people are reading in between the lines and the threads and lines here, we've got somebody that … you used the word hustle, you know I think the harder you work the luckier you get. You take from people who have it, in other words, you associate from … or with people that they can help you and you're in turn helping them it's never a one sided- Ezra: Totally. Joe: -you would think. And the noble cause is giving back. I have to ask though when you give the visual of 76 acres that you and your wife have bought, you're going to build a home and when … I just what state are we talking about? I keep hearing New York and Hawaii but I think you're up in New York. Ezra: Yeah so I live in upstate New York now, about two hours north of the city and I grew up in Hawaii and California. Moved to New York at 18 to play poker and just fell in love with the East Coast. I met my wife when I was 20 and this is kind of where our life is and where our community is and our friends are and just sort of I'm a big fan. I love it, it's a really really good place and yeah we got our problems, we got ticks and we've got the winter and like there are things you know. But it's like anywhere you go there's going to be stuff. Joe: Well you can have your events in the southern regions of the country so that you can get out of New York when it's 10 degrees and 18 inches of snow out there. Talk to me about that transition that you had from okay online poker or playing poker up in New York is not cutting it and you wanted to step into the e-commerce world, did you … was there a day, a moment, a person that you met that made a difference and you said okay this is the path I think I'm going to try it? Ezra: Totally. I think that entrepreneurs, in general, are chasing some form of freedom; financial freedom, location freedom, freedom of where they can spend their time and they're running away from pain in general. And then you kind of reach different levels of entrepreneurship that I'll talk about in a minute as I've gone through all the phases of like I started … my wife didn't like the idea of me being out all night sleeping all day under fluorescent lights with a bunch of degenerates just eating Butterfingers and just being like a New York City underground poker scene guy. I mean that is not an attractive package so she wasn't to excited about that so I took what I call a square job where it was one of my first ever jobs where I actually worked for someone else running this yoga studio in Manhattan. And this was at a time when Bikram Yoga was still in its heyday. It just kind of like we're talking 2007, I was running this studio. It was the biggest Bikram Yoga studio in Manhattan. I was the manager, the youngest manager. I was 21. I ran the whole thing and this was before everyone found out that Bikram was a creep and a rapist and the whole kind of Bikram thing fell apart. It was sort of as yoga was going main stream in society and that was a really fun gig being in service that … you know in the world service running a studio. But man I would be there 60 hours a week and I didn't like not having the … not being able to have choice in where my time was spent. And so that was the initial sort of pain point that pushed me towards man the poker gig was better than this because I had more flexibility of where I've got to put my attention. And I think that in life what you put your attention on grows and what you ignore gets smaller. You put your attention on your health it gets better, if you ignore your health it gets worse. If you put your attention on your relationship it gets better. If you ignore it, it gets worse like … just where you're directing your attention is everything. And I think that really as a human being the skillset you want to develop is the skillset of mastery which is simply the willingness to put your attention in one area consistently over time. Pick up the instrument for 30 minutes a day after a month you're better at it. It's a willingness to place attention and direct it consistently over time and I think that … so I kind of was playing poker for a living and I met a guy. Now, this guy was a really fascinating guy and he was a coach and a coach of coaches before coaching was mainstream. So now you know about relationship coaches, health coaches, life coaches, business coaches, coaching has really penetrated society as a mainstream concept. Back in '04, '05, '06 it really was not that big and this guy was an early life coach. He'd started the International Coaching Federation one of these things he started that was a life coaching sort of governing body. And the thing about coaching is there is no real governing body, any schmoe off the street can call themselves a coach and start charging. And that is both good and bad, right? You end up with access and to opportunity for people but also some people are you know schmucks and not so good at it or they're selling you stuff … you know they're not qualified. Anyways long story short this guy … we're talking '05, he was selling business opportunity information products, e-books, digitally delivered courses, DVD sets, and these were how to become a life coach, how to start a life coaching business, how to make your own money and have a practice as a life coach. And the way that he generated visibility for this offer was with the search engine optimization which was the traffic source of the day for internet businesses. You would rank on Google and you would buy query based traffic from Google Ad Words when someone typed in a search query like how to make money he would show up. And so I taught him how to play poker and he taught me search engine optimization. And that was like my first foray into … you know this guy worked from his laptop, he was making a bunch of money and I was like men his life and his production cycle is a much more effective production cycle than mine. If we're looking at like we both have the goal of generating wealth, the way he is doing it is far more appealing than the way I'm doing it sitting behind a desk selling people water and coconut water and being yelled at about how we don't have any towels. It was like your hustle is smarter man you got to teach me this. So I taught him how to play poker he taught me search engine optimization. I ended up taking over his business and running this life coaching information product business, learning about things like landing page optimization and conversion rate optimization, sales webinars, and product launches, and upsells, and just like traditional direct response internet marketing as it relates to the sale of information. And this was really where I cut my teeth as a marketer and I love that business. It was a lot of fun. And ultimately once I had developed the skill set of the ability to generate visibility for an offer which was not that hard back then, it was buying Ad Words and doing article marketing, link building, and SEO, I thought to myself man selling information is wonderful but it's got a couple of downsides which is you're reliant on a single influencer. You are only as … you only have as much value as the next month's cash, it's not … you can't sell the thing. It's not an asset, it's a cash flow business by its very nature because it's built around, in general, a particular persona and you can't ever sell that. And there's a number of reasons why I wanted a different model and I tried a whole bunch of them. You know I had a seven figure services agency. I currently run a multi seven figure software as a service business. I did coaching and consulting. I did development for people. I've done all kinds of models and e-commerce appeals to me as the number one model and has been my most successful model and the model that I've enjoyed most for a number of reasons and I'll go through those now. I don't even know if this is the answer to your question. I'm kind of rambling. Can I tell you about why I like e-commerce? Joe: Keep going, please I love this. Ezra: So if you look at the three main areas that result in a business's success … now I will determine a business at scale as a business that's doing between half a million and a million dollars a year and has at least three employees and consistent processes. I'm going to label that as “scale”, so being someone who has run probably 10 different business models, you know affiliate marketing … I've done everything in the last 15 years or so. At scale, e-commerce is my favorite for a number of reasons. When you look at what I believe to be the three things that you've got to have in place to scale a business there's … the first one is product. You need supply chain; you need the ability to produce this product at scale in a way that is not going to take over your life. So if you look at e-commerce, I literally sell tubs of goo. Okay this is not a tub of goo this is a stick of goo but basically, it's a plastic stick there's some goo in it. I mean and you can see here on the visual this is very very good goo, it's handmade goo. Joe: It's like fantastic all natural goo. Ezra: Yeah, it's really really good but it's like I got a tub and I got some goo and I got some labels right? At scale I buy more tubs, I mix more goo and I have more labels. Now let's look at product and supply chain at scale for software as a service which are also sold at scale. Software as a service I need front end engineers, back end engineers, QA's, I need to actually be creating new code and updating the product and integrations all the time. Like the product is morphing every single week; it's not the same product. It changes every week and then whatever I change breaks and then once I develop the product I have to document what I did for the people who are actually using it. And then I have to train and now we move into the second pillar; support. So you have a product you want to ask me something about that product? Joe: I want to point out that the products that you have in your hand also they get used up and reordered and auto shipped so it's a key differentiator between selling a water bottle [inaudible 00:18:06.6]- Ezra: Hey smart marketer all right. Joe: -versus a tub of goo. Ezra: [inaudible 00:18:12.7] is I mean obviously subscription based revenue things that are consumed is really really phenomenonal. If you look at information marketing the beauty of the product side of selling information is you create it once and then you don't have any more cost of goods. Every time I need to buy another one of these it cost me six bucks. When I create an informational course, I create it once and I can continue to sell it but the product goes bad after about six months to a year because it's outdated information. It's not self-help. I mean I sell very specific here's how you run Facebook ads that might need to be updated every six months. So it's very hard to keep that product up to date. Services, I struggled with the product side of setting boundaries. I had a multi seven figure consulting agency doing advertising for e-commerce businesses back in '09 and my problem was always around where does the service end? People would ask me for more. I would then do it like I just didn't have a … I wasn't good at boundaries and so I found that product very hard to fulfill on and as much as I had a very hard time. And this is maybe not other people's issues, I had boundary issues and it's therefore I failed as a services agency and I did well but like the model was not super profitable because I could not figure how to set boundaries. So as far as the product goes e-commerce has been the easiest one to scale without my direct involvement. And I'm looking for the ability to generate wealth and resource and have the most pleasurable model possible. And when you look at the most pleasurable models to run for me it's e-commerce. Let's talk about the support side because as your business scales you have to engage with and support your customers. And with software as a service, those support people need to be very high level. They need to understand the software, the highest level and be able to talk to customers about it. It's way more intense than support for e-commerce where it's like what's in the product, can I get a refund? You know I mean like the support is not anywhere near as high level for e-commerce. So if you look at I have a 1.5 million dollar a year in annual recurring revenue software as a service business that I launched about 24 months ago it will be about 2 million this year and 20 something but the point is that business at 2 million dollars a year has double the amount of employees that BOOM! does at 20 million dollars a year. Double the amount of employees at only 2 million a year because I need people for the product; i.e. front end, back end, engineers, QA people, project managers, I need more support people for the number of customers than I do for BOOM!. So support is something that you have to figure out and support on the agency's side if you're running an agency is very difficult because you got to get on the phone. You got to talk to people; you got to show them results, you're the punching bag when things don't go well. It's very difficult to be … do services well and on the support side it can be really tough. So support for e-commerce is easiest for me in my experience of every model that I've been involved in. And then the one thing that e-commerce requires is marketing. Every other model requires marketing as well, that's sort of the third pillar right? Product, supply chain, support, and marketing; I mean really this is like what we are doing at the end of the day. I mean there's other stuff but like everything kind of is an offshoot of one of those. So the marketing side which is storytelling, sales funnels, content, copywriting, social media, all this kind of stuff is what I excel at; that's my real specialty. It's one of the reasons why every model that I've engaged in I've done some kind of well at because I understand how to comment on a collective experience. And so this is my frame for it. I feel like every business that I have is serving a particular group of people who are having a collective experience and my goal as a marketer is to comment on that experience in a way that resonates with that particular group of people who's having that experience and then push them in the direction of my products ultimately. And so the example you know this product line is sold to women over 50 who are all having the experience of aging and everyone telling them that that is wrong. That's the group of people and that's the collective experience they're having and then I comment on that with my marketing. And so that for me is the same with every business. Every business requires the same kind of marketing; creating videos, amplifying them via advertising, creating sales funnels and technology stacks that push people through a 60 to 90 day sales cycle with retargeting, and then once they buy having content marketing and engagement to keep their attention and then up sells and cross sells after they've consumed with constant content post purchase all of that stuff. And so since that is what I excel at is the marketing side and then I'm looking for okay you know and some people struggle with that but that just happens to be my particular skillset. The model that I am most in love with and I think is the easiest to run at scale is physical product e-commerce because the supply chain is easy and the support is easy and marketing is the same level of difficulty as any other business at scale. Joe: That's a good point. You know I never thought of it. I was at a Mastermind a year and a half ago, someone got up on stage, talked about importing from China and she went into such detail about how important it is to determine the thickness of the corrugated box when you're importing from China. For when it's on that container ship, when it gets to UPS, when it gets to the fulfillment center and all of it … I got to tell you I practically fell asleep and said to myself I never ever want to own any physical products e-commerce business again. Ezra: Don't import from China. I don't. Joe: Don't import from China. I didn't. I had nutritional supplements and it's all US based. So I think it's the ideal business model if you're an e-commerce is something with a consumable product recurring revenue that is manufactured here in the United States. Ezra: I would agree and I would also argue that if you look at e-commerce you might as well go premium because there's buyers for every level of the market. Let's say you have supplements that cost $10 a bottle versus supplements that cost $90 a bottle. I'm always going to sell the $90 a bottle. The reason is it's about the same level of difficulty to generate the sale. And if you go premium you have much more margin that you can then reinvest back in to better product, better score, and better marketing. And so I fall more and more … and you look at the companies that are scaling, Purple Mattress like a lot of these companies have discovered all birds shoes for example by $90 … $5 a pair, it cost them like 10 bucks, they got $80 of margin to spend on growing the brand. So I really believe in premium, consumable … and it doesn't have to necessarily be consumable but line expansion, so if you are selling water bottles also have water bottle coolers and you know what I mean like [crosstalk 00:24:25.2] expand the line but- Joe: And an expansion of that line that is something that can be shipped on a continuity basis. Ezra: Yeah, ideally for sure. I mean listen I don't sell subscription. There's no subscription in my brand though 40% of my revenue comes from repeat customers. Joe: So why the choice not to sell subscription? Ezra: Well, you don't necessarily need to actually have someone on a credit card ding every month to have a high level of repeat business. All you have to have is really good marketing. And my particular demographic is afraid of subscription. And as much as they've experienced a whole bunch of people not letting them off subscription when they get on subscription … so I get all questions every day like is this subscription? Can I cancel my subscription? People don't want to feel obligated, they want to come back and buy when they want to buy. And my view point is that you can have … and my experience is that you can have a recurring business model without actually having people on subscription programs like I do with this product if your products are worth it. Joe: And the product in your hand and this is from experience, not everyone's going to go through that product in the same amount of time. And so that 30 day renewing charge to the credit card is going to be too quick for some, just right for others and too long for others. So you're an expert at reaching out to them and giving them what they need is hey it's time to reorder at click, reorder … that's your … instead of auto shipment you're reaching out to them with I would assume an automated email campaign or through a messenger or something like that. Ezra: Well, we do consistent ongoing content. So we're always sending out videos and articles and so we could generate a lot of revenue just from sending people back to our website. Joe: You mean you're helping customers? Ezra: Yeah, we're adding value to their lives by commenting on the conversations that they're already having. Joe: So to the newbies out there listen to that, adding value to their lives by helping them with the information that they have and making their lives better. That's ideal marketing right there. Ezra: And every six weeks we run a sale event. And I would say about 70% of our revenue from repeats comes from those sale events every six weeks with those sale events and 30% comes from just the random content emails. Those sale events work a lot better when the audience is engaged in ongoing content. So then when we do ask them to buy something, they've been hearing from us, they've been engaged with our content, they've seen our videos on Facebook and their feeds that are just interesting fun videos that are about beauty and help and stuff like that. And then they see this oh they're having a sale, I like these people, I know these people, I engage with their content every now and again. So the ongoing content strategy actually acts as a supporter of our ongoing sales. And when you do the sales every six weeks without the ongoing content they don't work anywhere near as well. Joe: You know it's almost like you just said how do I help more people not how do I sell more product. Ezra: I want to do both but yes. Joe: By doing the first you're doing the second. So it's more of a mature, seasoned approach to growing a brand where you're helping more people and generating more revenue. That's the end result and I'm saying this in a way that sometimes I see businesses from all shapes and sizes, we're doing four to five valuations a week and there's a team of eight of us here at Quiet Light and so we see a lot of different variations of businesses. And the toughest ones to sell are those that are just trying to make a quick buck. They've built a little … slapped their brand on it and they're to get it out there and they're going to get eaten up alive by guys like you in time. They can make a little dent but it's not going to last. What you're doing is something that I think is going to last and eventually will build a much bigger value and someday have a lifetime … if you ever choose to a lifetime event sale where you can say okay I'm done. I don't really ever need to work again but it sounds like you're full of passion, you'd probably be working for a long time. Ezra: Yeah, I feel like if you like what you're doing and you're enjoying it and you have a nice balance … because the problem that most entrepreneurs experience at some point and I can recognize this from across the room at an event and everyone goes through it at some point in the entrepreneurial journey or at least my experience has been like everyone I've talked to and I've talked to thousands of entrepreneurs that have gotten to this place at some point which is burn out. Joe: Yeah. Ezra: They're overwhelmed, overstimulated, they've taken on too much responsibility, and they feel at the mercy shackled to their production cycle … shackled to their business operation. And you know my big transformation in the last two years has been going from driver to navigator. So you know I spent my career driving on the road, taking turns, doing everything and as I've scaled I've seen that really like my most valuable skillset is that of the person who navigates the ship. If you're on the road making the turn you can't see the mountains in the distance. And so at some point you have to make the transition or at least part time the transition to a person who is setting strategy, who is reviewing what's going on, who's going out and meeting new people and bringing in deal flow, who's actually like holding the container and the vision for the operation. And then reviewing what the team is doing and delegating responsibility and giving autonomy and freedom to the people around you to step up in the roles like lead copywriter or lead advertiser or lead project manager or you know all the stuff that you might be doing yourself. And I think that when you are able to do that it affords you the ability to relax a little bit and kind of have a little bit more space for your business. The other thing I will say that people don't do enough of is set real clear boundaries around their work life. Because as an entrepreneur, particularly as an internet entrepreneur your business is with you at all times. I've got my cellphone on my hand but if you … you know it's like your wallet, just always with you and so you don't end up with separation between your life and your business. And when you look at the people who are burned out you find that oh they've been ignoring their bodies and their health. Oh, they've been ignoring their relationships and their intimacy and their connection and their social life and their hobbies. Oh, they've been ignoring like the home front. Like it's … the burnout stems from lack of balance between production cycle and other cycles. And work will fill the time that you give it, it really will. It will fill whatever time that you give it. So I don't actually put my attention on work until about 10 AM and I stop around 5:30 or 6, that's my time frame. I wake up, I move my body, I meditate, I hang out my wife, we have breakfast, we do our little morning thing. It's super fun. A couple of hours in the morning where I'm just partying and having fun and then I start out my work day and I'll work for a couple hours and then I'll have lunch. I'll put in a couple more hours and then I'll stop and that'll be it. And I'll enjoy my evening and my … I do that four solid days a week, sometimes five, and sometimes I don't work at all Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, sometimes I do and it's like you might think oh like my business is to crazy I can't actually do that. I promise you if you do not start working until 10 and you stop at 6 everything that important to get done you will get done. And that's so much working time that is your whole life man, 10 to 6, four days a week it's like you are asking too much of yourself if you're trying to put more of that in your production cycle. And then look I understand that sometimes you've got to run 14 hours a day for four weeks in a row because you're doing a product launch. It's like okay … cool but that … it's a marathon, not a sprint. [inaudible 00:31:25.8] explain this thing you're going to fail. And I can tell you that as someone who has gone through the stages of entrepreneurship from working off the couch with a full time job moonlighting the business to now running an eight figure set of brands with 70 members and a lifestyle that I really really enjoy. I've been there and you really … if you don't set the boundaries and don't set the container it will not exist and the work will permeate your entire existence and you will have no separation from it and you have no relaxation and no space. And a lot of times your best ideas come when you're not working. When you have space and you're enjoying yourself. It's like it is necessary to scale to set constraints around your work life. And people are unwilling to do this because they feel it will be a detriment to their success. But actually in my experience and the experience of everyone who has done this that I know it works the opposite. Joe: And a lot of folks that come from the corporate world when they're putting in 50, 60 hours a week traveling all over the world and they just want to get out of the rat race and they want to be an entrepreneur. And they buy an online e-commerce business and they feel like they need to put in 40, 50, 60 hours a week. And I said look the guy that you're buying it from has been working 15 hours a week, you've got some learning to do so just maybe cap it at 25. But don't work to the point where you're trying to fix things that are not broken, just learn. Go to events, go to Smart Marketer and things like that. You just don't have to work that much and you've worked so hard that it's time to take care of your own health and wellness as well. Ezra: And I think that totally and like hey go for it put in a full eight hour day or 10 hours a day multi work weeks as you're getting in to the game but like at least have the goal of setting some boundaries and containers around your work life because you will be a happier person. And like what is the point of all of this? Is the point just wealth creation because mine certainly is not. I would love to generate as much resource and I'm using resource as a lingo word to describe generating wealth so that I can then direct that resource towards causes that I find noble. Take care of my community where I grew up, take care of my family, provide a lifestyle for my wife that she's really excited about and our family, do other things that are … that have meaning to me like saving lands and all kinds of stuff. So not a lot of people have figured out how to generate resource, everyone is failing at this. Everyone thinks that success is the goal and they're running in the direction of success and most people are failing at it and most people are miserable. And it's like the goal … fun is a much less popular but more fulfilling goal than success. So if you can figure out how to have fun and enjoy yourself which means setting fucking boundaries around your work life and having hobbies and having a social life and taking care of your body you will have more success. You're guaranteed to be a winner if you're chasing a good time and fun. You're not guaranteed to have fun if you chase success. So it's like what the hell is the point? What are you doing person? I want to grab you by the shoulders and smack you around and say listen, stop it. Focus on enjoying your life. And yes but obviously focus on the production cycle and the success. Joe: We're not talking about being poor and happy we're talking about a combination of both [inaudible 00:34:37.5] which are successful businesses with recurring revenue models and a very happy and healthy home life. I think it's amazing that you really generally don't start work until 10 unless you're out at an event to a sponsorship or something like that and then you're walking away. Do you actually put that device down and walk away; that phone that's in your hand? Ezra: Oh yeah. There's no phones in the bedroom dude. Turn off the computers, get off the digital medium. I mean you're shackled to it, man. You're on it all day every day, give yourself a freaking break and all of a sudden you feel better and life is better. And you hop on in the morning and you respond to the emails and the slacks and then you start creating. I kind of use my morning time for my creation, strategy, content you know I create a lot in the mornings and then like throughout the rest of the day I'll be … I'm at a place in my business now where I have a lot of reviewing and talking to people about what's going on. And my job is a lot of like sort of directing, hey okay yeah this is good let's move it over here. I'm doing a lot of like kind of holding and sort of directing things and if you don't have the visual of my hands [inaudible 00:35:39.8] but … and that I find is so easy to do in the later parts of the day. And in the early parts of the day, I do my creation. Joe: Creation as in … you like, what does that mean you're? Ezra: Well creation as in like for me- Joe: Like creating content? What is it? Ezra: Yeah. Well for me it's like thinking about marketing campaigns, looking at strategy, thinking about what we should be doing, thinking … anything that involves thinking of new stuff or doing new stuff or like you know I do a lot of … for my SaaS business and my information marketing business I do a lot of content creation and blog videos and webinars and sales videos and writing scripts. And I do a lot of creating things and also creating strategies. And I find that that is easiest for me in the early parts of the day and then in the later parts of the day reviewing stuff that other people did, talking to them about it, directing things just a little bit. I know it doesn't require as much focus. I mean it's still focused but it's not like I don't have to be fully locked in I could kind of be doing other stuff and you know. Joe: I got you. Hey, you mentioned the word meditation I want to jump right in to that if you don't mind. Just are you up and meditating every day? Did you read a number of books? You've been doing it for a lifetime; I would imagine based upon the way you grew up. Ezra: Yeah I mean you know this hippie commune that I grew up on was not what you think of. It wasn't like crunchy granola, everyone meditated and you know we didn't have animals. It's very different than what you think. It wasn't one of these places where you had to subscribe to some ideology to be a part of it. A lot of these intentional communities in order to get in them you have to be a … you have to hold a certain set of viewpoints. I describe the difference between an intentional community and a cult in these ways because a lot of people are like oh you grew up in a cult like the group of … any time you get a group of people living somewhere with different viewpoints people call it a cult right? So let's just let me give you my description for this, from my perspective a cult is something that is easy to join and hard to leave. An intentional community is something that is very hard to join and very easy to leave. It's like hard to get in to the party and then if you want to go at any time you could get out of here. That's sort of the difference between those two models. And particularly in the place I grew up it wasn't like built around a hey you must believe these things to live here. It was like a bunch of hippies who sort of wanted to step away from traditional mainstream society and focus on how to live pleasurably in a group and do cool things like run charities. And yeah I mean there was definitely some alternative viewpoints and they definitely teach courses on things like communication and relationships and all kinds of stuff. It's a really really cool place but meditation was not like a part of my life as a kid. I was just like … I went to normal, I went to high school normal school. I was a normal kid. I just went home to a different place than most people and I didn't go home to the suburbs. So you know I kind of came across meditation through my wife. She was a yoga teacher when I met her. And she was all into this sort of Eastern philosophies and stuff. And we go through phases where we will be meditating 30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes at night and then we won't do it for a couple months. We kind of like … I think that people think that they're failing if they don't stick to their routines. And it's like routines are meant to be broken. Part of the fun of having a routine is breaking it and coming back to it. It's like the goal is not to just do the same thing all the time. You notice if you work out and you do the same work out over and over your body gets used to it. So we go through phases where we'll do it a lot and we won't do it that much. I do find that when we are doing it I feel better. I feel clear and I like it. And you know when we restart we'll start with just like 10 minutes in the morning, and then maybe like 15 minutes, and then we're like 20 minutes, and I actually found this really cool meditation seats on Amazon. They're like a tiny little plank with a cushion on it and two short little legs and you kneel on them. And man they've been awesome because they keep you upright. But yeah I like meditation; I'm a fan of it. And I think that really it's less about the specific formula that you subscribe to and more about the intention to take time for yourself and take care of yourself. Have a bath in the evening, pay attention to what you're putting into your body, move your body. It's like … it's more about the intention of wellness rather than the particular formula that you are subscribing to for wellness has been my experience with it. Joe: Yeah. Ezra: Because … different strokes for different folks man. Different shit works for different people. Joe: Absolutely. We're running a little short on time but I can talk to you for another hour and a half but I want to talk quickly about the helping that you do in terms of the Smart Marketer. Because the people out there listening they've heard you mention a few different things. I first met you at the Smart Marketer conference in Austin last year, I was just at Blue Ribbon with you in Denver which is your Mastermind group and then I think you're going to Capitalism next week in Austin as well? Ezra: Brand Builders, are you coming? Joe: Brand Builders, yes we'll be there as well. Ezra: Hey, maybe we could actually talk to each other in person. Joe: I know, how about that? That'd be awesome wouldn't it? But you know with Smart Marketer Mark actually bought your Facebook program but you know I'm constantly talking to people about what they're doing within their e-commerce businesses and where to go what resources to look at. Can you just talk briefly in terms of what you do and what programs you have in there and what resources are available for those people that are listening that are e-commerce folks that want to grow their businesses but at the same time do it in a shorter day like yours is. Ezra: For sure let me introduce to you the concept of permaculture. Are you familiar with that concept? Permaculture, it's a farming term. Joe: No. Ezra: What it means generally … what kind of the high level meaning is to reuse all of your resources to their greatest benefit; so capture the rain water, water the garden, take the chicken shit use it for your compost. Reuse of resources. So I spend all of my time with my focus on innovation in the direction of e-commerce and I do a really good job at it. And then with Smart Marketer I document whatever is working and I share that with my community of business owners through my free blog and through educational courses where I have how we run Facebook ads or how we do conversion optimization on our website or how we run project management for our brand or how we run social media for our brand or whatever. I have all these different courses but what they are is they're a direct documentation of what's worked for me and my brands. I then take the money that I make from Smart Marketer and I reinvest back into the e-commerce businesses. And in my e-commerce businesses I'm also developing software. I'm developing things to make them function better. So anything that works really well I open source that and share it with my community of business owners in the form of software as a service. Any money that software as a service brand makes I dump back in to e-commerce. So all of these things sort of work together. The e-commerce is the heart that pumps the blood to the information which then takes revenue and puts it back into e-commerce which then lets me do developments which then I use for my software as a service brands so kind of all works together and Smart Marketer, in particular, is do and then document. And I only have two products, I have digitally delivered courses … digitally delivered educational courses in the forms of videos, PDF's, and handwritten notes on what they are that teach you the things that I have found to be most effective. Paid amplification, how to run Google traffic and Facebook traffic to your website, project management, how to run your e-commerce business with systems and processes at scale and hire people, social media, how to have ongoing content and engagement for people who bought from you in the past. I have all these different courses and they're on my website but I have digitally delivered educational courses and I have a Mastermind. A Mastermind is only for million dollars sellers basically. If you're doing 500 grand minimum most people are doing five million, 10 million, etcetera … then this group is for the high achievers; the people who have really made it. It's a more intimate intense program where it's like very high level 100 people all really kicking butt. So I have that Mastermind and I have the digitally delivered courses. And that's all Smart Marketer is. It's just my personal journey being documented and open sourced for business owners and thankfully for me, I think again timing was a big issue … a big thing here. I was the first you know. I was the kind of first e-commerce influencer and as much as I started a blog about my e-commerce journey before people were doing it really really and it got real popular early on. And I've kind of continued to put energy towards it because I love doing it and I feel really fortunate that people care about what I have to say. It was like really awesome that people want to hear this stuff because for me it's like you have to be a total nerd to be interested in this. It's like kind of dry content, it's not like … it's not dry but it's like if you're not into internet businesses you're not going to be interested in this blog. I mean yeah I talk about relationships and lifestyle and stuff like that too and that's fun but I think that like the real sort of core to base of subscribers are internet business owners and e-commerce business owners, and so that's that model. Joe: That's fantastic. I'm always impressed when you speak. I'm always impressed with your energy, your enthusiasm, and the fact you'd really really trying to help people more than anything else. And it comes back to you. It's not like you're doing it for free and whatnot. Then you're not trying to earn a living for you and your family and whatnot. Obviously, you are but you do it in a manner that is beneficial to others that comes back to you which I commend you for. Ezra: Serve the world unselfishly and profit; that's my motto in business. Joe: And you came on here not even knowing fully what we were going to talk about. It wasn't a pitched Smart Marketer or any of your services. Really it was to talk about work life balance which you laid out very very well. I loved your journey. I love your approach. I love your philosophy. And I'm really hoping that people go back and listen to this again and actually read the article that will be produced from it as well so that can really hone in on what you do and focus on it to, maybe get out to see you at some of these events that you put on and get to Smart Marketer and get better at what they do. Ezra: Thanks man, and I would totally share this. Let me know when it comes out I'll put it out. Joe: Absolutely. Thank you for that. We'll put it down and I'll put all the details on how to reach you and how to reach your courses and whatnot down on the show notes. And I will reach you when we get it wrapped up and ready for the world. Listen to it and watch it and thanks for your time, Ezra. I appreciate it. Ezra: Thanks man, talk to you later. Links: Smartmarketer.com Free Facebook Video Ad Training Full Course Selection Blue Ribbon Mastermind Ezra on Twitter Ezra on LinkedIn

Scaling from $100 Million to $1 Billion in Revenue

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 11, 2018 39:17

If you want to know the value of your business and where it comes from, do the work. Take the time to collect the data, then hone in on what is the right fit for your company. Prioritize figuring out what makes your business tick in order to grow a sustainable brand. The bulk of Babak Azad's body of work lies in growing the Beach Body brand from 100 million to over 1 billion in revenue in eight years. Now working as a consultant in marketing for multimillion dollar businesses, Babak and his team focus on customer acquisition, retention, and the power of customer experience. Babak is here today to talk to us about building a lasting brand by helping business find a few channels that work well and hitting those home. Episode Highlights: Babak shares his unique way of looking at customer acquisition in every type of business he touches. Why business metrics are not as difficult as people think if they start with the basics. Start somewhere and then refine over time. The importance of knowing what a good customer is worth in any business. The things business owners should be tracking at a minimum. Look at the levels and the patterns. Get things right for a few to start off before rushing around trying to scale up too quickly. It is crucial to your success as a marketer to seek out and hone in on the best channels for your business. What your strategy should look like once those channels have been targeted effectively. Use service marketplaces such as Fiverr and Upwork to find small ways to find qualified staff to collect crucial data. How Babak helps clients discover the right intersection of branding and direct marketing then infuses that with customer sustainability. Why it is so important to start taking care of the customer. Hear Babak's 4 pillars of brand building. Transcription: Joe: So Mark I know that amongst all the Quiet Light Brokerage, Jason is probably the fittest. But I occasionally do get my butt kicked by someone online with beachbody.com. Most recently a young lady … I can't remember her name but I keep going back to it. I love the program and I love the story behind Beachbody's success. Because as you know I'm an old radio spot ad, radio infomercial, TV infomercial guy and that is where Beachbody started; I believe. And you had them on the podcast is that right? Mark: I did. Yeah, I think pretty much everybody has heard of Beachbody at some point or another. I mean it's a huge brand; huge name. I was able to talk to Babak Azad. He was the Senior Vice President for Media and Acquisitions; really fancy title, big companies … that comes with the big companies are fancy titles but his role at beach body was to figure out their customer acquisition strip. And this is what he does now. He's no longer with Beachbody. He did leave a little while ago. He's now with Round Two Ventures and they help e-commerce companies eight figure or nine figure, primarily e-commerce companies hone in on their customer acquisition strategies. What was great about this discussion is seeing as at scale, seeing what a … somebody who's in charge of a business that when he came into to Beachbody they were doing 100 million dollars in revenue annually. That's a lot of money. Joe: It's a lot. Mark: When he left in just a few years later they were doing over a billion dollars in annual revenue. Joe: Wow. How long was he there for? Mark: I don't know. I would have to take a look to see but it wasn't more than a few years. So he's really responsible for the explosive growth. I mean again a lot of people have heard about Beachbody or remember hearing about them. Way back when I was in college which unfortunately is too long ago now, so I remember hearing about them then. Now I mean everybody knows Beachbody. Everybody knows the brand and that was because of his customer acquisition strategy. We talked a lot about what that was and we talked a lot about problems and mistakes he sees especially in seven figure e-commerce businesses and even eight figure e-commerce businesses as they're trying to grow. I'll leave some of the mystery for the actual episode here but a couple of things that I pulled away from this that I thought were really good; one, he said that if he comes across a company and they have more than four main acquisition channels that he's guaranteeing they're wasting money and that they are completely … not doing what they should. Some people get all worked up and you know they think oh I need to be on Pinterest, I need to be on Instagram, I need to be on Facebook, I need to be here or there and everywhere. And he said that's not how it works. He said find a few channels. He says it should be no more than four. Ideally, it should probably be maybe three or even two to start. And do those well and just milk those for what they're worth. Really hit those homes. That was one thing that I really pulled away and the other thing I pulled away was his emphasis on data collection. And I run into this problem since that I own all the time as I always want the data collection to be perfect. And then I get kind of lost in the weeds, right? You get all the state in front of you. You have your analytics. You have all this stuff coming in and you're like what do I do with this? And his response was what I've heard from so many other successful entrepreneurs, just start doing something with it. You know he said go out and hire a college kid, go out on Upwork and have them put it into Excel and start analyzing the data. He said the data will start bubbling up from that by itself and start giving you insights and then that can direct you into what you should actually be collecting; a fascinating conversation from somebody who's done some pretty big time stuff. Joe: Yeah. It sounds like the data will speak to eventually. And even though when he left it's a billion dollar company I think that the lessons that he's learned along the way are incredibly valuable for those doing six and seven figures in revenue. You know a few weeks ago we had Ryan Daniel Moran on the podcast and he said: “find your customers”. Find your customers and then send them to the least half of resistance to ordering. So it's going to be interesting to see how those two things jive with … back in what he said here in the podcast. Let's get to it. Mark: Absolutely, let's go. Mark: Babak Azad thank you for joining me. Babak: Thanks a lot Mark, glad to be here. Mark: Did I butcher your name? Babak: You did not. You did it well the first time. Thank you. Mark: We literally just rehearsed this. We rehearsed it and then I hit record. I'm like I'm so going to screw this thing up. Cool, I … thank you so much for joining me. I know you and I talked about a year ago for a piece I wrote on entrepreneur.com and I'm super glad to have you on the podcast right now. We have a little bit of a tradition here at Quiet Light where we have our guests introduce themselves because hey you're better at knowing what your background is than I am. So why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself real quick? Babak: Sure. I live here in LA with my wife and two boys. I started out as a math major investment banking business school. I kind of came from that route. I started a magazine here in LA which failed miserably; best 25 grand I ever lost. I needed some humble pie, what I read that point of my life and then spent eight years in Beachbody. So the bulk of my professional experience was there; built analytics and then oversaw media and customer acquisition. So P90X, Insanity, 21 Day Fix, Shakeology, all that. Those efforts are for eight years and we kind of had a nice clean 10X. I already got there at 100 million so there's already substantial scale; really I obviously helped to push that thing to over a billion when I left three years ago right when my second son was born. The simple version of it, I have to start something, the team fell apart really quickly and then I started working on building a consulting business. So that's what I do right now; help generally seven and eight figure businesses, sometimes nine on … heavy on marketing, support around customer acquisition, retention, and analytics and really much more recently heavily infused with customer experience and really how to … I'm leading to writing a book about it too but really just the power of customer experience that's very much consistent with performance marketing approach but also really layering in building a lasting brand. That's really where my focus is today and I love what I'm doing. I have some great clients and yeah … so I'm having a good time with it. Mark: I love that you lead with the fact that you had a magazine startup that failed and then you just kind of glossed over the fact that you were part of the team that grew Beachbody from 100 million to a billion dollars. You know just a small footnote in your career history there. Babak: Yeah it's a … you know I have a … I appreciate all the experiences. You never want to go through those negative ones. I think we all have gone through them and just … I had to say I'm not sure I'm as humble as I need to be at times but [inaudible 00:07:25.5] as I mentioned it was an important thing of learning what it's like. I've been really much more of an analyst at that point. And then yeah I mean Beachbody was awesome. I had a great experience and … but it was time for me to go. You know eight years was a long time there and I grew a lot. I met my wife through one of my best friends there and [inaudible 00:07:41.6] me up for kind of this next chapter that I'm in right now. Mark: Cool we're going to be talking today about customer acquisition and also building a brand and some of the lessons that you pulled away from Beachbody and are now doing at Round Two Ventures is that right you're doing this at Round Two? Babak: Correct. Mark: Okay. I will link to Round Two Ventures and then your personal blog in our show notes and anything else that you want us to link to in the show notes. But … so we're going to talking a little bit about customer acquisition, lifetime value, and this intersection of branding. You have kind of this unique way of looking at this customer acquisition strategy, maybe we could just kind of start with kind of a general look at your philosophy when it comes to customer acquisition in the e-commerce but also in the SaaS world. You know I think metrics, being really metric heavy on customer acquisition and lifetime values, this is really kind of a SaaS world sort of conversation but you take it towards e-commerce and towards every other type of business as well. Babak: Yeah it's funny because I started really with physical products and given that distinction which I mean physical products, we sold DVDs and multi-vitamins at Beachbody. And that's really where a lot of my real marketing and just … I would say professional experience came from. And so this distinction of physical versus info versus SaaS really was nothing I ever really considered until I started frankly getting out of that world and talking to other folks. You know when I was at Beachbody and then started to learn about this but yeah I mean … so first off I was a math major but you know I wrote a piece a bunch of years ago saying business metrics are not college math, [inaudible 00:09:12.7] barely high school math. And I think that's the first thing is … I think I know a lot of people who are intimidated by the metrics or surely daunted by how do you do it or their systems. And you know I'm a firm believer first just to start with something. I think Peter Drucker you know said what you don't measure doesn't get better and so with the opposite is very much the case. That what you do measure, what you report on, what you send in an email or whenever it's your phone because it's fun to mine you just start to pay attention. So there's always a bit of grounding of just the basics in fundamentals. And that's really I think my approach. I'm not a shiny bright object guy. I believe that if you get the basics and fundamentals then much of what you need to do starts to take care of them itself. But really when it comes to customer lifetime … I mean I look at e-com and frankly all of the businesses, you know fundamental is I grew up as a paid media guy in marketing. And I think it's evolving over time but you know from a Beachbody and beyond heavy on TV, heavy on digital, you know that was what I knew. And certainly one of the core 10X. If you're going to run paid is you've got to know what a customer is worth. You know people sometimes ask like what's a good CPA? It's like I don't answer that question because I don't know your business. I don't know what a customer is worth. You know are you … do you have business constraints around needing to be casual positive on day one, on day 30, ideal business goals. There's so many factors that come in so this but really my belief is … and I just don't know any other way is especially when you're running paid media you need to know what a customer is worth because you need to know how much you can afford to pay for them. That sounds really basic and fundamental and hopefully for a lot of folks that is. But you know that's the core of it because ultimately it's how do you know if you're going to spend more or less? How do you know if your numbers whether in Facebook or otherwise are good or not? You have to have some of that measure. So a lot of the core work that I do with folks … and really I'd write about and all that is really if you're going to be running paid you need to understand those basics around customer acquisition. And then again start with whatever you have even if it's all customers that's … you're not dissecting by ad said or by Facebook versus Google. Just start somewhere and then you start to refine this overtime. Mark: All right. I love these conversations because I go into them sometimes not knowing what I'm going to ask and then after the first two or three minutes I've got a list of questions. So let's start with basics, you said start with the basics and fundamentals. What are those? What should somebody be tracking at a minimum? Babak: So let's assume [inaudible 00:11:39.2] whether you're a SaaS business, info product, physical product you know certainly from a from a traffic side the core stuff of spend, click through rates, CPC's, [inaudible 00:11:50.5], cost per click, conversions, cost per acquisition … whatever that means for you; for some folks, that's if your lead gen versus you're loop driving to an order. Those are just conventions and so the philosophical stuff and the strategic stuff applies to both. Certainly, you want funnel metrics, how many people hit your site whether it's landers or blog pages … you know get through the funnel and so whether you have one step or a five step process I would say again start with … if you have GA set up or you have others tools set up, what kind of just basic tracking of how many people are hitting pages, what's your conversion rate, average order value, and then ideally over time … and whether it's someone converts on day zero or beyond, what is the value of those people over time. So I generally try to look in ice sized chunks of day one … day zero, day one to 30, 31 to 60, and then beyond. And depending on your risk profile, your business goals, all those things you may determine how long you want to look out and how much you want to apply towards customer acquisition. Mark: Let's talk about that a little bit here because this is something that I've run across a few times recently. You know looking out over these different strata of periods of time; zero to 28 and then this kind of second up to maybe around 60 days; why are you taking a look at that? And you're taking a look at this in terms of the value that client is going to bring to you right? Babak: Right. Mark: So why break it out into those different groups? Babak: Well first and foremost depending on the business goals and constraints, that can oftentimes going to define how you're going to approach managing. Let's say … I mean I'm going to talk about paid media for a moment, that's going to manage that because if you look at … if you need to be breakeven based on credit terms, cash flow, whatever that is; if you need to be breakeven by day 30 or day 60 then you need to know what that customer is worth. And so based on a margin basis not just certainly on a revenue basis but on a margin basis you need to know how much you're making by day 30, by day 60 cumulative and that's going to help to define what your CPA targets are. And then it's … again for me, there is no right and wrong whether you're managing to a breakeven, to a margin percent, and if you are just revenue driven and you've got venture funding and you need to be driving those are not for me to say. And I never have a perspective of right and wrong … it's those are personal and business decisions but you need to understand that. And then frankly once you have some of these base lines then it's a matter of how do you start to improve those things over time. So if you know what day one, day 30, 31 to 60 then presumably someone in your team whether it's the owner, the single person, or someone on the team is spending time testing to say how do we actually start to drive this and improve that. And again different models you may need to look at 180 days, you may look at a year … I mean I work with folks that have a one year break even because they can afford to do that; some folks breakeven on day one. And so different businesses and different models can allow for that and some it's much more difficult. So you just have to understand the nature of your business and then what kind of things you're trying to constrain with. Mark: Yeah, by the way, some example … so something that I've run into in a business recently where we had a solid lifetime value number, and we were able to calculate it pretty well by taking a look at customers that had … this was a subscription based business, we took a look at customers that have canceled over the last six months and looked at their average lifetime value. And you know the number was something like I don't know $130, $140 but the average ticket value for any single sale was maybe about $30-35. What we found was that there was these whales and there right? These whales in there that were spending $3,000 and it took them years to be able to get to that point. So when you take a look at that lifetime value analysis we say okay that they might be worth $140 or $130 whatever the number was but was in order to do that you need a couple of these whales to wait for three, four years before you can actually get that value back. Babak: Right. Mark: So we had to kind of take a look at that from that kind of strategic way [inaudible 00:15:50.3] okay actually what are we getting from clients on average in month one and then in month two and then a month three and beyond that. We're not going to care too much about the lifetime value because it's going to take too long to recoup that cost. Babak: Right. Yeah and some businesses may not be able to afford to wait that long for those whales to kick in. And really then it means A. you're managing your risk in a certain way. Again, whatever is appropriate and then you're basically operating at a higher margin than maybe you could operate if you could tolerate that and maybe you want to take some of that and spend it into media. But if you can't wait that long and there's just too much risk and it's too small of a percent and too inconsistent then that may just be the way you run it. I think I get in some ways the same question when you're first starting, it's … that's great if you have five years of data and you have a much more sophisticated and robust [inaudible 00:16:37.1] data in your business. But if when you're just starting you probably need to start more conservative right? An owner that has bootstrapped the business knows that you start with what you can afford and then as you learn, as you develop and have this history… the history in the business then you start to understand your customers better; what they're worth and then maybe you can start to manage your media and how you think about that better and surely hopefully concurrently you're optimizing the funnel so your customers are worth more, you're converting better, all these types of things right? But that's just the nature of again where businesses are in there maturity and how long they've been around. Mark: Yeah one of the common objections I hear from people … because we ask people who are selling their business all the time what's the average lifetime value of a client? And one of the biggest objections I get to that is I have no idea because customers are still with me. And you said something at the beginning and that is just start. There's a lot of models out there, just start with something. Do you have a basic model that you like to follow? I know for myself I just like to take a look at okay I might sell if a customer is with us and from the Quiet Light perspective we can say the same thing. Our business is typically one off but we have people who have sold two, three, four businesses. All the same, we don't want to assume that, we're just going to take a look at what … the lifetime value I spend right now with the assumption it could grow. Do you have a recommended model for people that are saying I don't know how to [inaudible 00:17:58.7] for these people that are still with us? Babak: So the fact that a customer is still with you for me is not a reason to not understand what a customer is worth. And so let's say they've been with you for … let's say the businesses have been around for a year and you've got 20%, 50% of the customers have been around that long. Do the average based on how ever long that cohort has been around. And if the other ones are … you know seem like they're directionally going that way then great. And then as you get more information you can start to build your model and add to it. But you know I think part of the thing also to be careful over depending on how long the business has been around is how many people are you looking at? So if you've got 100 customers versus 10,000 you trust more volume, right? And then the other part is just looking at I like to break things down into monthly cohorts. Let's assume it's just purchase, so I'm not lead gen but it's purchase, I like to look at who are all the people who first transacted in January, and then in February, and then in March and look at their relative month one, month two, month three revenues and certainly again margin and then start to see what kinds of patterns start to form and then again. And starting really that at that level and then you just start to refine this thing and as you get more data and … then great then you start to layer in. So worst case you're being conservative because you have customers who are going to stick around a little longer but that's a good thing and that's a good worst case to have as opposed to certainly the opposite where you may be overestimating or you may be overlooking at one group that's worth a ton and everyone else isn't remotely tracking towards that super high value group. Mark: I think a problem that people run into a lot is they've up the perfect be the enemy they good, they want to get that perfect model and if they think they can get it then they don't do it. I know I've fallen victim to that quite a bit as well. I want to [inaudible 00:19:41.4] Babak: Quote I have on my phone that shows up is perfect … done is better than perfect. And it's really easy to get stuck in that analysis paralysis perfection like … and also frankly this idea that everyone else has it better. I think a lot of people think that bigger companies or those using better tools always have better data but is definitely not the case. Like a lot of times the bigger companies they have too many legacy systems so I think oftentimes that comparison can pull people back because they think I'm never going to be able to achieve what someone else is doing or all that big data stuff. I mean just start with what you got and literally it could be Excel with a college kid and then you start building from there. Like literally it can be that that can be very very effective and I've seen it be that way. Mark: Yeah that's a good lead into my next question because you know you started at Beachbody with 100 million in revenue right? So you guys wanted to go ahead and start digesting data, you put a million dollars towards hiring on a new team just to be able to digest data. The entrepreneur who has an e-commerce business doing three million, four million bucks that's a lot more of a challenge for them to bring on that much of a team. Excel, analytics, are there any other programs they may want to look at or systems that you know of that might be a good starting point or would you even recommend going out and hiring a college kid or going onto a place like Upwork to be able to have somebody to crunch numbers? Babak: Yeah I mean so first of all when I joined again it was seven, what you think maybe a hundred million dollar business has in terms of systems and processes I would say first of all the tools today are so so much better. But I looking back, I work with some hundred million dollar businesses now that have dramatically better systems and reporting frankly because the tools are just much easier. So you know it took a year or so for me to get correlatively cleaner data and not even clean. So first of all even back then it wasn't like everything was so dialed in, that's kind of part of my point. And then second again like depending on people whether on Shopify or Magento or whatever your platform, honestly the basic thing is do a data dump. I've hired for multiple clients someone part time on Upwork to basically do some slicing and dicing; basic stuff, get some things in place. And we're not talking … so first of all even if you hire someone full time and let's say that person is 50,000 a year just picking a number, your exposure to that person is not 50,000 because within 90 days you should know whether that person is going to be working out or not. So let's say it's a quarter of that plus maybe a little bit more so oftentimes first people think about if you're going to bring on someone full time that that annualized cost that's really not what it is. You should know I think within 90 days that you're getting what you need and they're on a path. But at the very least there are definitely folks on Upwork and really just looking for someone who's got some similar work; I put people through an Excel test to make sure they can do the basics. It's all made up information and yeah you start with that and I've literally had college kids help out just … who were good at Excel. They don't need to know that much, they just need to know how to slice and dice some information. And maybe it's an MBA, I'm not saying you have to go there but certainly Upwork, Excel, using again basic tools. You do not need certainly anything remotely close to enterprise so you get stuff going. And I will say I do, I run some numbers for some of my clients and it's literally … I did one about a week ago, Excel, Hubspot, Shopify, GA piece it all together and we had a pretty rich view. It took some time obviously but we then had a pretty rich view of what those customers look like. Mark: So with somebody who has a Shopify store or an Amazon store where you can't really track customers as well with Amazon, but let's say Shopify store where you can track your customers, or a SaaS application or anything else where you're tracking those customers would you literally just go out and do a dump of that data of the customers and go back and start to calculate okay this is what … you know graphing it out, these customers are worth this much in those first 30 days and then it starts to look like this when we move out? Babak: Yup that's exactly. I mean … so and that's what we did. Let's say you're looking at 2017 data it's literally [inaudible 00:23:52.4] all the new customers and that's part of the thing is making sure they're new versus repeat. But let's just say you can identify that hopefully relatively easily; who are the new customers who purchased for the first time in January of '17, February of '17, March of '17 and literally track those people. Look at their February orders for January, look at the March orders for both like you know January and February and really that's literally started that way. And you can then start to slice and dice by traffic source, by product, by offer, by ad set. But that's next level, for some folks they just want to get the pure basics. Just start with that average thing and then once you have that and then you start to refine over time. But literally it's a data dump and you know if you can marry it with GA or with your CRM or ESP then great but at the very least start with the overall, start with maybe one line and then you just start to get better from that point. And frankly again that's what I did with Beachbody, that's what I do with my clients. And whether it's me or working with their teams you just start and then you start to refine over time. Mark: All right so let's go to the other side of this conversation. We started to get a good sense for our lifetime value and what a client brings to us in terms of different time frames; the first 30 days, the next … the first 60 days and so on and so forth and we know our cash flow requirements. Again, people listening, you have to keep in mind if you're going to spend $50 on a client and they're not going to pay you $50 until month six you need enough cash flow to be able to get to that payback period. Let's build a strategy, what does the strategy look like then at that point from acquiring the customers and going through different channels? I know obviously with Beachbody you guys did television, you did radio, you did a lot of media which was hard to track. And we see this a lot with … you know online platforms are really good right now at tracking with view through conversions and everything else but there's still some of those mediums out there that aren't great and imperfect. How does that sort of factor into your decisions when it comes to acquisition channels? Babak: Yeah I mean so no matter what channel you're in attribution is the bane of everyone's existence. A very very few people have it down and like oh I know what that means to have it down. You want to get to the point where you feel like a level of comfort and confidence. You know these days again most of the work … I have one client that I work with on TV and it's a very rare exception of how good their attribution model is but let's say that for the most part, most people are doing … I mean it's digital heavy. So for me, I basically focus and work with folks on really only a few channels so Google … which for me is Google and Bing. I mean people always forget about Bing, it's another 5, 10% and my joke is if you don't want that 5, 10% can I have it? And I'm joking but no one ever says yes. But it's using higher ROI's especially when you're talking slightly older demos. But Google and Bing, Facebook and Instagram, your internal e-mail and affiliates, and frankly just … and I said just but if you focus there I've seen plenty of businesses go well into nine figures; focus there. And then certainly you can layer on radio and podcast, TV, direct mail; but honestly Google, Facebook, affiliates, e-mail and internal … you know that's really where I put a lot of time and attention. And I'll say even then attribution is a bit of a mess because Facebook and Google don't talk to each other. So they're each one who takes some credit … you know or using GA last click, what's happening are people opting in through Facebook and then converting through e-mail? But you really just have to start to piece together things, at the end of the day again depending on your business model your PNL and bank account are the true measures of it. And so that sounds like a totally average overall view but yeah that's again I work with folks that have that and then they've got to a certain level of sophistication. So you start with … you know start and piece together what does Google say, what does Facebook say, like if you add up those two do you even have that many orders? You're going to have to be very careful about double counting but you just start to piece together this … the data starts to tell a bit of a story. I would just say one thing you mentioned view through, I am a very very very conservative on view through so the point of it I basically I ignore it; certainly from a GDN side and really even from Facebook. I just think unless you prove it I'd rather start with a [inaudible 00:28:07.2] and it doesn't work. I mean you got to prove it as opposed to just proving it. But I know that you know 28 day click one day view on Facebook is the standard set up. I moved most people to 7 day click not because it's right but mostly because it … we got to account for double counting, AdWords, what's going on in email, things like that. So there's … again there's no right and wrong but that's one of places I've kind of dialed in a little bit is looking at 7 day click. But honestly my biggest … the biggest mistake I oftentimes see with people with channels is they have too many. And so I think if people say oh I heard someone's doing something on Pinterest or YouTube or I got to do this, frankly if I see people who have four channels where it's 25% in each, that says actually something is not being done well enough. And usually, it's people who are really scaled, I kind of have this thing of two offers two channels, most businesses that have scaled substantively they've gone deep and hard in a couple channels which basically means they're left probably some money on the table elsewhere maybe but it means they're focused. And that means they're exploiting where things are working. And so I think that's one of the things, people think I got to be in so many places, I don't … I have not found that to be the case at all. And even though it sounds like you're concentrating your risk it also means you're exploiting an opportunity. And that's really I think oftentimes what you're really trying to do. Mark: How do you know when to give up on the channel if it's not working or would you? Babak: You know it's a good question I think at some point you have to make a call so it's … I don't have a rule around it and I put it that way hard and fast. I think it's … first of all, I like modeling off of other people; not copying but modeling. And so it is … it can be dangerous because you can see all these other people seemingly running a bunch of ads and yours may not be working but you may not know what their goals are and their goals may be different than yours. So I think it's always … you got to be careful about comparison but you know I think at some point you have to take … just like a lot of things you have to take an honest assessment and say do we feel like we've given this a fair shot? How much time and money have we invested? Frankly, what is it pulling because we all have tradeoffs whether you're a six figure business or a nine figure business everyone is resource constrained in their own relative way. So you have to pick and choose your battles and really where you think now. I guess … and sometimes the market maybe telling you something too that it may not be the channel but maybe the way you're executing on it right? Which may be kind of the same thing for you but I think that's one of the things too is really you have to take an honest assessment of what have you done, what have you tried, have you talked to people, have you pulled in whether experts or friends or done some research and you know. I think then it's relative to other things that you have in front of you, where is your time, your capital, your resources is better allocated. Mark: Yeah all right that's awesome. I told you before we started recording this that we were not going to get to the one thing I really wanted to talk to so I'm going to get to it now. And that is something I find fascinating about your approach to direct response marketing because direct response marketing we often think about in terms of the money that goes in we want to make sure that we're getting a positive ROI out of that and we're just measuring that and that alone. And we see it almost as this opposite of brand marketing which is splash it out there splash it out there and splash it out there and it's kind of a long play. But you have this intersection and you do this a lot with Beachbody as well, you have this intersection of brand and also the direct response. If somebody is focusing on those four that you put out, the Facebook, the Google, affiliate, and internal e-mail, what can they do to start building a brand and why is that important? Babak: So I think the first distinction is around something you said and I think a lot of people will latch onto which is brand marketing. And so really what I focus on and try to talk to folks about is building a brand. And so for me the distinction is brand marketing oftentimes is associated with you spend a bunch of money on media marketing whatever that's basically non-trackable and that is trying to build brand awareness but without necessarily tying it to some kind of metric. And I say that as opposed to focusing on building a brand. For me, that really comes down to the customer experience. And so those are totally can be integrated with a performance marketing direct response model. And really that's about how do you start to take care of the customer and treat them frankly like you would want to be treated if you were the customer. So I think it's less about brand marketing initiatives and it's more about this idea of does the word in the Lexicon around building a brand, about building something that's lasting; how often does that come up in the organization? I had breakfast actually with a friend this morning and we're talking about the idea of what's on brand versus off and what that means. But really at the end of the day, it's are you building something that's got some sense of sustainability? And I think oftentimes especially when you're earlier on the idea of shortcuts of doing things that are maybe … whether it's not as clean or not as brand building, I get that everyone's got to make their call all around those things but ultimately if you want to build something that's got some sense of scale and got some sense of sustainability I do believe you have to be focused on building a brand. Because when you do that you start to treat the customer better. You start to invest more in your product. You start to invest more in the kinds of media and frankly, that kind of stuff can be infused in your acquisition efforts. Did I mention that I'm writing a book on customer experience and that really came from how do you start to bring DR and brand together and really things like tapping into a sense of identity in community. That's not just brand marketing that's non-trackable, you can start to build that into your video ads on Facebook, Dollar Beard Club … now The Beard Club and they've done a phenomenal job of there's this sense of identity in association with you're a man with a beard. And so they tap into that and who you are, what that means, and so that is one layer of customer experience and building that brand that is clearly tied to performance marketing but it starts to infuse that. I would say two things like … you know so my four categories is really around the human and emotional stuff; there's product, there's the transactional experience, and then there's content like video. And they're not mutually exclusive [inaudible 00:34:16.0] stretch. But I'll say like with subscription businesses whether online … I mean media, SaaS, or physical box, one of the best places or best examples I see people have make some mistakes is around order notification. So this is not brand marketing, this is are you treating the customer better? Are you letting them know that next order is going to ship, that next feeling is going to happen? And oftentimes I see people say well if I send an email before that billing my churn rate is going to go up and my response is absolutely you're correct but also you know what happens is your customer is actually aware of that billing. They're not annoyed. I mean I think we all faced that thing where whether it's a meal subscription or otherwise, a billing happened and we didn't know about it we're annoyed we got to go cancel. We tell our friends, we post. That kind of stuff actually has an impact on the brand. And honestly one of the best examples I've seen of how to use that notification positively is Dollar Shave Club, they send a notification but they use that as a promotional opportunity to say your order is about the ship do you want to add something to it? And so whether it's their shaving cream or any of their other products they use that … and again 20 or 30% of people are going to open your email if you're lucky. So it's not everyone but you get the brand benefit of notification but then use that as a promotional opportunity and say do you want to add something more. And I would much rather be playing in that kind of world rather than trying to sneak in what you think is a one or two more orders but it's very hard to quantify. But you absolutely are hurting the brand if you're playing a longer game when you're trying to sneak stuff in and not be as clean and upfront. And yes Netflix and Direct TV don't do that but again those are very very different businesses than subscription boxes or something that you start on a risk free trial that frankly doesn't get the kind of use that Direct TV and Netflix would. Mark: Could you repeat those four categories again? Those are great. Babak: So the first one is really I talk about as like the human and emotional aspects. So that's things like identity, community, exclusivity, things that are raw human needs and traits. The second is really product, and there are multiple layers on it but I think it's kind of crazy that I have to focus and emphasize it but the number of people that I see that don't have the attention to detail on product. I've talked to people who's starting they want to private label fine but the better your product [inaudible 00:36:35.0] part it doesn't always win but a better product gives you a better chance at that. Third is the transactional experience, so how do you take people through your funnel, what is it like to get a refund, what it's like to get … I talked to customer service those kinds of things. And the fourth is content, so how do you use video, music, spokesperson, or a character. I mean really each of these things, there are plenty of examples of companies that are using all of them or just one of them to really start to enhance that experience and really start to rile their customers. That's the [inaudible 00:37:05.3] kind of thing but you basically need customers these days to be blown away. It is … you know I like to say it like it's … when people say it's the easiest time to start a business because generally the tools are easier but it's also like that means it's brutally difficult to compete and to differentiate. So you've got to be just a ton better than everyone else. And my experience is that customer experience and these kinds of things is really what you need and again it's infusing this idea of playing the longer game into performance marketing and direct response. These two are not at odds. Mark: Cool. All right you got a book that you're writing right now do you have any idea when that's going to be done? Babak: Best case is Thanksgiving time but I've started … I mean I'm happy to post a couple of links to some of the things I've started to write about whether in LinkedIn or in Twitter to just to kind of go a little bit deeper into these and show some specific examples. But yeah we're still talking a few months out. Mark: Okay I know we've had a couple of other people that are reading books and we always get e-mails after saying “Hey can I get notified when that book is out?” So do us a favor one when you do have that out send me a message and I'll make sure I update everyone that wants to be updated on that. And then where can people learn more about you? Obviously Round Two Ventures, any other place? Babak: Yeah I mean my business is Round Two, it's Round Two Partners. Visit the website. But yeah the same thing and it's like a holding company but my blog is the easiest. It's just my name, it's Babak Azad B-A-B-A-K-A-Z-A-D.com And that's what … I put a lot of content there and then frankly there and LinkedIn. I'm @BabakAzad pretty much on everything other than Gmail of all things but … another Babak Azad stole that from me but … he was earlier but yeah I'm on pretty much every platform. But my blog and LinkedIn are the two easiest platform. Mark: Fantastic, this is great. So thank you so much for coming on, I really do appreciate it. Babak: Thanks a lot Mark I'm glad to be here. Links and Resources: Round Two Partners Babak's Blog LinkedIn

tv amazon netflix thanksgiving google media mba ga billion dvd pinterest roi revenue scaling senior vice president saas cpa excel crm esp prioritize shopify insanity bing gmail acquisitions hubspot 10x fiverr upwork round two cpc pnl adwords beachbody peter drucker lexicon dollar shave club magento direct tv babak shakeology quiet light brokerage ryan daniel moran quiet light day fix beard club joe it mark yeah mark how gdn mark so joe yeah mark let dollar beard club mark all babak azad mark okay mark absolutely

How to Use Humor to Increase Conversions

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 4, 2018 33:17

Lianna Patch is funny. Not everyone can stand up in front of 150 entrepreneurs and make them laugh, respect her, and want to hire her all at the same time. Yet – that's exactly what she did when I attended the Blue Ribbon Mastermind event in Denver last month (August 2018). When Lianna shares her passion, which is writing copy infused with humor that converts, people make more money. How? Their customers stay on page, get engaged in, and actually read what you write. Oh, and then they buy your product, write reviews and spread the word about your brand. Humor makes people like you. So why not write copy infused with humor? Because you are not funny. Me neither, at least that's what my kids tell me (what do they know…). It is a skill we don't all have, clearly. Episode Highlights: What Lianna does to help clients who come to her with the need for something new. How her techniques to boost add-to-cart conversions as well as purchase conversions. Why it is important to message-match across the board, through the entire purchase and follow-up process. The importance of building the relationship so that if the product is a one-off perhaps that client will be swayed to purchase other items. Lianna shares the biggest mistakes people make when writing online copy. Steps business owners should take to improve copy and what should be first on the list. What makes certain checkouts places that people want to revisit again and again. The importance of grammar and how intentionally not using perfect grammar can work if done the right way. Why Lianna thinks being buttoned up is a thing of e-commerce past. How to grab people's attention with web copy content. Transcription: Mark: Joe you spent a lot of years in the direct response world specifically within the agency world and buying radio ads right? Joe: Yeah. Yes, I did brought a lot of copy. Mark: Brought a lot of copy and this is an area that we're going to talk about today, writing copy. I find for myself when I have to actually write copy it's a completely different mindset from pretty much everything else and it can be difficult to do. Lianna Patch and she is a professional copywriter for specifically conversions right? Joe: Yes Lianna Patch did a presentation at the Blue Ribbon Mastermind in front of 150 entrepreneurs and she writes copy that conversion … calls herself a conversion copywriter which I think is brilliant. I'm sure it's a phrase that lots of people have heard but for some reason, it is brand new to me. Although that's what I did, that's what my contractors did back in my radio days and my online days. But what she did was she infused comedy into her presentation and she infuses comedy into her clients' websites, their emails, their … all of their different campaigns and Mark it works. I'm telling you the presentation was fantastic she gave some examples of what the before and after copy was like and it just made me want to read it. When you go to her website it just makes you want to stay on the website and poke around and look at different things. And throughout the whole podcast, I keep going back to her website and giving examples that I think are just hilarious and make me want to keep reading. And I don't think enough of us e-commerce entrepreneur or SaaS entrepreneurs whatever you want to call yourself infuse the human factor and a little bit of comedy into your content so that people realize you're not just some big corporation that's sending your standard email. It makes a big difference I think. Mark: Absolutely, any time you can get somebody to laugh that's going to loosen them up and also to disarm them a little bit from that and accessible as well. That's fantastic. You need to make sure you send me her website so I can take a look and enjoy some of the copy as well. Joe: Yeah there's some great ideas there you can get right from her website. But this is important stuff, right? Our first line of engagement with our customer is content. There's going to be some visual stuff but there's usually some content as well. So anyone listening that has any online presence or hopes to buy one and do better than the previous owner I would strongly recommend they listen to this entire podcast. Mark: All right, well let's get to it. Joe: Hey folks it's Joe Valley at the Quiet Light Podcast. Thanks for joining us today. Today I have a very special guest, her name is Lianna Patch. Lianna, welcome. Lianna: Thank you so much for having me. Joe: You are apparently funny, you're from Punchline Copy. I saw you … I know you're funny because I saw you at the Blue Ribbon Mastermind. There's no question about being apparently funny. Lianna: Okay. Joe: You said some pretty vulgar sayings in front of a big crowd of entrepreneurs and you could have fallen flat on your face or they all could have laughed out loud. And you did it within like the first 60 seconds and I- Lianna: I did. Joe: We all laughed out loud so thank you. Lianna: I'm so glad. Joe: It made us very comfortable being audacious ourselves so thank you for that. And I've looked at your website and I want you to tell folks about yourself but then I'm going to just like comment on a few things as well. So the for the folks listening instead of me doing that introduction, that fancy thing, why don't you tell us who you are, what you do, and what you're all about? Lianna: Sure. So I'm a conversion copyrighter which basically means I don't just make stuff up I base my copy on customer research and what people need to actually hear. And on top of that, I use humor as a tool to help mostly e-commerce stores and bootstrap software businesses connect better with their customers and retain customers longer. Joe: Conversion copywriter, wow. Lianna: Yeah. Joe: I love that. Did you make that up? Lianna: I did not. Joe: Somebody else coined that phrase? Lianna: I believe we can attribute it to the great Joanna Wiebe. She is a fabulous copywriter. I'm pretty sure she came up with the term conversion copywriting. She's the most well-known one. Joe: Okay. Lianna: And I met her in her first copywriter mastermind. Joe: And we will attribute it to Joanna Wiebe. But conversion copywriter really stands out and tells people exactly what you do. It's pretty quick and pretty direct to the point. Lianna: Yeah. Joe: And you infuse it with humor so I just want for people that are not watching this video on the home page of your website … where is it, it says… oh, I've got to scroll down a little bit, where is it. All right there's something that says something along the lines of … oh my God it's gone I'm on the wrong page. Really. Anyway, it says something along the lines of blank blank blank AF and it's right there in your face funny as AF. And for those that don't have teenagers and don't understand … I'm sorry for those that don't understand what that means ask your teenager because they do. You have a knock knock joke on your website as well and it says “Knock knock who's there and the answer is a shitload of money.” It's all good. It's all funny and it converts. So tell us about some of the experiences you've had with people that have terrible copy and how you fixed it and what kind of impact it has on their end mind revenue which is what folks are really looking for. Lianna: Yeah. My favorite type of client to work with is someone that comes to me and says okay we did the thing where we hired a professional copywriter and we come off like really cool and corporate and solid and we hate it and it's not working and we need to be more personal and funny please help because they already know the value. They already know that humor is going to help them connect better. So one example that I have been talking about a lot lately because it's exciting … and it's an e-commerce brand that sells wedding rings, it's called Manly Bands. And I came in and worked on some of their product descriptions. And they already have a super fun brand. They were already using humor throughout. I like to think of them as like the Dollar Shave Club of wedding rings but their product descriptions were very short. And they were kind of funny but they weren't really converting. So I went in, wrote longer descriptions, which is funny for some people because they think oh short copy is better. People don't like to read, people will read if you give them a reason to. And we made them funny and we made them personable and kind of weird and they boosted conversions almost across the board; both add to cart conversions and purchase conversions. So that was a really great test result to just be able to point to and say “hey look it works”. Joe: That's great it's a … you know I'm old school direct response, I used to sell stuff on radio. We'd write a 60 second spot ad that had to convert with someone actually calling the 800 number. I started in 1997 as I said before but you have to write copy that converts and get an action. So I love the conversion copy and it's measurable. You also talked about not just on the website where people are looking at the product description, not necessarily in the cart things of that nature. But you really if you have a client and can touch every aspect of their branding campaign do you hone in on the and if yes what kind of things do you do? Lianna: I do try to so I work more on the … I work closer to the purchase and post purchase for attention. That's kind of my jam. So I do a lot of emails. And I really feel like emails are one place we can use humor the most because it's the ability to build that one on one connection. You can be so personal, you can be so weird and funny in email and people will … you know even if it's coming from a brand they'll be like I like this. It feels like a real person in my inbox. Of course, it's top of funnel, sometimes you can scare people away with humor if you go about it the wrong way. It just depends on your brand and how willing you are to test those kinds of things. But if I can I'll address all of those touch points because they should be cohesive. There's got to be a message match between the ad, the landing page, the follow up emails, you know the eventual sale or whatever it is that you guide people to. Joe: I think the instinct of an entrepreneur that's building a brand is to give the impression to the end customer. The first impression is to that hey we're a real company, we're doing things in a very professional manner; which kind of may be boring. I just had a business that won on a contract fairly quickly with multiple offers and his customer service emails and responses were “hey thanks for helping the little guy we're here just taking care of my son join us and really … really appreciate it” that kind of thing. Lianna: Yeah. Joe: I think that does resonate. I think using the word feel, it feels like a real person behind the email. Lianna: Yeah. Joe: And really reaches out and helps them quite a bit. So you will touch all aspects of it from … if you can. From the website to … I mean from the email to conversion, would you do follow up emails after the sale as well and work out as well all aspects of it there? Lianna: Yeah. That's actually one of my favorite things to work on. I was just talking to my friend Val Geisler, she's an awesome email strategist about this and we were talking about especially with e-commerce businesses so many people are neglecting the long term post purchase follow up sequence. So someone has bought once and then they just get thrown back into this regular newsletter or sales email cycle. And there's no like follow up and say like hey do you want this product that sort of corresponds to what you bought. You get the review ask emails every now and then or take a survey but there's like two to three emails max after the purchase and then you just get lumped into existing customers. There's no specific long term nurture track to get you back for that second purchase. So that seems like a huge opportunity for most e-commerce stores and for humor because again they've already bought from you once. Now is the time to build the relationship more. Joe: And it's not just spamming them with emails if you're writing good content that's funny and enjoyable and they like reading them. They're probably not going to unsubscribe. Lianna: Right. Joe: Perhaps. Lianna: Right and you can test your sending limits like if you start to see a higher rate of unsubscribes back off; that's not rocket science. Joe: So I did a podcast early in the week with a guy named John Warrilow and he's written several books and he has something called the Value Builder System. And it's all about creating recurring and repeat revenue in your business and I would think that what you're doing is helping build the relationship with the customer so that if they sell a one off product … you said earlier you know hey maybe you might be interested in this too, that follow up email sequence keeps them engaged and maybe perhaps will help them become a repeat customer and buy an additional product along the way. Lianna: Yeah. Joe: [inaudible 00:10:58.9] Lianna: Yes and even if it's something that they might not need to of … I hear this a lot from mattress companies, I've worked with a few mattress companies you know A. they have other product lines. They have bedding and pillows and things like that accessories. But B. even if you move into a different business completely, if you've built those crazy rabid fans they'll follow you to whatever you do next. Joe: So you've mentioned Man Rings was the first one or something like that. Lianna: Manly Bands. Joe: Manly Bands, I love it. Lianna: It's great. Joe: And a mattress company, so I mean very very diverse product categories here. What other kind of physical product companies do you work with? So that people listening can say oh yeah okay she can help. Lianna: Oh yeah, clothing … I like to work with clothing. Honestly, any consumer product I think is really fun. I have to obviously believe that there's a benefit to it. I've had people come to me. Especially in the supplement world, I'm a little skeptical sometimes of actual benefits. So I like to try the product first and say can I get behind this? And if I can then I'll happily write a copy for it not that I can't but I will. Joe: You know I wish we met …. what is it a decade ago now right? I sold my company in 2010 and boy you would had fun with that. I sold a colon cleansing product. Lianna: Oh great. Joe: We started selling colon cleansing on radio back in 2002 and a TV infomercial in 2003. It went 100% online in 2005 and ultimately built a digestive wellness center around it. Lianna: Okay. Joe: But boy you would have had some fun ones. Lianna: Is that like colon cleansing from the outside in or from the inside out? Joe: Well that's from the inside out. Lianna: Okay. Joe: No it wasn't [inaudible 00:12:39.2]. Lianna: That's easier to sell. Yeah, okay. Joe: And it was … you know for those listening I mean you can't … you think what's fun about my product? You can't … you have to be serious about it something like that. We try to be serious about it and I think it was okay. We got lots and lots of testimonials and people would actually love to be … strangest thing ever people, when we produced a TV infomercial we had a producer travel around the country following up people to give testimonials and they'll actually get on camera and talk about their bowel movements and it's just crazy. And you would have had a great deal of fun with it and we could have made more fun of it and made it more enjoyable for all I guess. But I mean you can … from what I've seen [inaudible 00:13:21.0] for your presentation you kind of make every little aspect of it fun so that the entire feeling of the company is joyful and fun. For instance, the 404 redirect that you put up on the screen at Blue Ribbon Mastermind, can you describe that for the people? Lianna: Yeah so that's one of my favorite places where people aren't expecting humor, to just give them a joke or something weird. And this is … what was it called? I think it was eventcenter.uk or something. The site's not there anymore but it's oh no you hit the wrong link this isn't here choose one of our developers to fire. And it's four guys and if you click one of them he puts his head down in his hands and the rest of them looks relieved and then it says oh no he's only been working here for six months. He was just an intern like you're so horrible. And then it redirects you back to the homepage. Joe: Keeps people on the site versus you hit a 404 redirect … oh my god, this guy is terrible and you leave. Lianna: There's so many great ones, NPR has one too that's oh there's nothing here but here's a bunch of other articles about missing things. And there's an article about like lost luggage, Jimmy Hoffa … you know our retirement, things like that. [inaudible 00:14:28.0] for them like. Joe: That's fantastic. What would you say from your experience and the clients that you've worked with, what would you say are some of the biggest mistakes that they make when writing copy? Lianna: One of the biggest mistakes no matter what industry you're in is making the copy all about you. One of the easiest ways to fix that is to go through it and say how many times do we say we or I versus you the reader because they should always know what's in it for them while they're reading. Joe: Ok so back on the focus of the customer, what kind of things have you seen happen when people … if they want to take one, two, or three steps and try to improve their own copy? Is that step number one? What are the things should they do to try to make a big change and what areas should they focus on first? Is it the tagline on their website? Is it the email? Is it something in the cart? What do you focus on first? Lianna: I'd like to focus on whatever is closest to the actual purchase. So that's going to have the biggest effect on revenue if you can improve your checkout, not just copy but UX. If you're using something that's not an out of the box thing like Shopify you might have some serious UX issues in your checkout that you don't know about. What else- Joe: You're infusing humor in the copy in the checkout? Lianna: If I can. Joe: If you can. Lianna: I was just talking about this this morning. It's interesting how things connect. I think it's Shopify doesn't really let you change the form instructions or form auto-fill like the placeholder text in the checkout but that can be hugely persuasive. And it's a great place to run tests because you can just change something like email address to your email address or your favorite email address and that can have a huge impact on conversions. And obviously changing copy on the buy button can have a big impact too. But all of those things come standard or you can't tweak them unless you're a custom coder. And I think even then it's hard to get that stuff developed so I don't know that's been like a pet peeve of mine with certain checkouts. Joe: You want to be able to touch everything and change it and make it better. Lianna: Yeah because there are … I've been through some check outs that are just delightful and it makes you want to keep going even if it's a multiple screen checkout. There's a … do you know Cards Against Humanity? I've mentioned that at the talk. They have actually a fortune cookie company. Joe: Oh they do? Lianna: It's called OK Cookie and the fortunes are horrific. I have one over there that says you will die at an Arby's in Columbus, Ohio. That's the kind of fortune you get from them. But their check out process is just written the same way that all their other copy is which is very informal. Like pop, your email address in here hit this button to whatever and it can be as simple as a verb change to make people think oh a real person touched this. This isn't just a robot that's going to take my money and maybe not send me these cookies that will make me sad. Joe: Again going back to how the end customer feels in the process. Love it. You talked about grammar and that it's not always best practices to have proper grammar. I think … you know I was in the remedial English class in high school. I didn't have Mrs. Henderson I had Mrs. Lane and she was a step down so my grammar is always kind of poor. We were at a friend's house, I've got 14 and 16 year old boys and the neighbor was copied on an email because … it has something to do with the kids, the kids who are here and she asked my son if he'd already sent that. And he said yes, she goes oh there was a grammatical error and blah blah blah. And it's still read very well, it felt good and it was like from a teenage boy. And you can tell it was from a teenage boy. And the intent was good and I never would have corrected it. And she tried to after the fact you intentionally will misspell things and misspeak or misspoke whatever the case might be from what I can hear and what I've seen is that correct? Lianna: Yeah. Joe: Can you talk about that? Lianna: Yes and if it's a weird thing to say because I spent so long as first a copy editor and then a content editor. So I've been like in the nitty gritty line level proofing and the overall structural editing for so long and I was such a stickler for such a long time. And then eventually I had to let go because my heart rate was getting nuts. It just wasn't … that was great for me physically. But I think it's important to do it intentionally so that it doesn't come across as an oversight. So for instance, if you're going to put in a misspelling like I just said gonna, I didn't say going to. Technically you know that's an allusion it's mashing two words together, cutting off the end of a word, that's intentional. It comes across as intentional. Misspelling a word in a subject line can be intentional done the right way. The example that I gave was spelling M-O-R-E more as M-O-A-R because that's kind of internet speak. That's obviously intentional. Even when subject lines do go out with actual unintentional typos they tend to get higher open rates. I just saw one from Wistia they're having an online conference called CouchCon. And there's a subject line with “its” and there should have been an apostrophe in “its” and I marked that unread in my inbox for days because I was like I want to know if they did that on purpose. I don't think they did. Joe: I don't think- Lianna: They got a bunch of replies. Joe: I don't think I would have known if it was proper or not but did I just hear you say that subject lines that have misspellings or grammatical errors actually have a higher open rate? Lianna: Sometimes I mean every … like if you're talking to any conversion copywriter they're going to be like it depends no matter what you ask them. So I have to just give that disclaimer right now; it depends. But I personally have seen it. Lower case subject lines often get a higher open rate because that's the kind of email we receive from our friends and family. We don't bother capitalizing subject lines, especially not title casing each word which I think that's officially dead now in the email marketing world. I haven't seen a ton of emails in my actual inbox so definitely in my spam folder. Joe: You've never inquired on a Quiet Light listing because I know that with my follow up drip campaigns I will capitalize the first letter of each word in the subject line. I need to stop that is what you're saying? Lianna: [inaudible 00:20:21.1] test for you just … yeah start running an alternative version of each of those emails with A. more [inaudible 00:20:26.2] well, if you were to do a true test you would just uncapitalize the rest of the sentence but you can try more conversational subject line. Then I could do a whole thing on subject lines so I like them a lot but yeah making- Joe: So it's the first point of contact- Lianna: Yeah. Joe: And it never occurred to me to chill out a little bit and be more casual even though you know we were … and hopefully anybody listening will take this and apply it to their own business but we are online business brokers. We're selling businesses for a million dollars or whatever the case might be and sometimes we think we've got to be buttoned up and serious. We're working with entrepreneurs. We all work remotely, around the country, around the world in Brian's case and we try to be professional and serious but we can be professional and casual and funny at the same time. Lianna: Yeah. Joe: [inaudible 00:21:09.9] on our subject lines. Lianna: There's a scale I think you don't have to go- Joe: Are you telling me to loosen up? Lianna: A little bit. I mean you … do you have that top button undone? Is that a- Joe: I do. Yeah. Lianna: See we're great, yeah, no tie. Joe: It's hot. Lianna: I don't think [inaudible 00:21:22.6] video so I just look like garbage so you know. Joe: I'm in North Carolina, Lianna is in New Orleans did I say that right? Lianna: No. I'm going to … no. Joe: Say it, give it to me. Go ahead. Lianna: New Orleans born and raised. Joe: You actually have to enunciate it? Lianna: Not New Orleans. New Orleans. Joe: New Orleans not New Orleans. Lianna: [inaudible 00:21:42.3] people say New Orleans. Joe: All right it's New Orleans. Lianna: Never New Orleans unfortunately. Joe: Okay all right. Well, we're both hot and you know figuratively anyway. And that's why I have my top button undone. What other things can people focus on besides of the subject line, some of the stuff in the first point of contact with customers, what other little weird places do you think that they could focus on and try to be a little bit funny or a little more personal that the average person wouldn't look at that you've seen? Lianna: One of my favorite places to look at is copy surrounding a call to action. So any time you're going to ask somebody to do something you should probably be addressing their objections and previewing what's going to come next. And it's really nice to see a human and funny touch around the ask. So I can't member if I mentioned this when you saw me speak but I wrote a call to action to start a free trial for a software product. And normally underneath you would see small text that says no sign up required or credit card required or whatever your information is safe with us that kind of standard objection reducing stuff. We wrote … oh I wrote a copy there that said we do ask for your credit card but it's just because we love online shopping. It's just a little reward for someone reading to feel like okay all right we're good. And obviously, that person has to have a sense of humor because if they take it seriously then they're not going to sign up but who is your target customer is that a person without a sense of humor? No. Joe: Again personalize it, make it feel better. I'm looking at your site now and I must have moved my mouse off the screen and something popped up and it says I'd love to email you and there's three O's in the word love. Lianna: Yes. Joe: Now what is down below there, it says subscribe now and then nah, fam. Lianna: Nah, fam? Joe: What does that mean? Lianna: It's a no thanks, it's another way to say no thanks. So you can just … it's good to know that it's not coming across entirely clear to everyone. Joe: Well. Lianna: It's like you can sign up or no, fam. Joe: But I can tell like a human wrote this which is again exactly what is supposed to happen. And for those again listening and not watching so this … all of you have this exit intent … exit pop ups on websites. This one is personal and funny and I'm actually reading it. Normally I just X out, but now I'm reading it because you spelled the word love wrong, no fam; I don't know what that is. And I believe it's you in the image. Are you drinking coffee out of a box? Is that what's happening there? Lianna: Drinking box wine. Joe: Yeah. So there's a picture of Lianna sitting at her desk, her laptop is open and she's got a box wine up above her head and she's boozing it up. It's very very entertaining and it made me stop and look at it where I go to all of your websites whenever I'm doing work with you and if there's a pop up I generally just quick X as quickly as I can. So very cool just one other- Lianna: Yeah that's a great place the exit intent pop up is so hard to get people's attention and people often think like you know I have only two sentences or I have to cut my offer just $20 off and it has to be no longer than that. But I worked with a client we … this is for my other business SNAP Copy so it's me and my business partner James Turner, we optimized his opt in offer to get people on his list for free planning. He runs a productivity website and the headline that we ended up going with was hey don't leave without your goodie bag. And it was boosted opt-ins by 129% and there was some additional copy and it was a pretty long paragraph of what they were going to get when they signed up. But people read it and signed up a lot more than they did when it said get free planners. Joe: Hey don't leave without your goodie bag and it was an online thing just to get people to sign up and was there like I [inaudible 00:25:19.8] a goodie bag as a swag bag when you go to an event like Blue Ribbon Mastermind. What kind of goodie bag was it? Was it just something you could get electronically? Lianna: Yeah it was a digital goodie bag. It was like free weekly agenda or a free monthly planner. He has a lot of free resources like that. Joe: But he didn't say free gift it said hey don't leave without your goodie bag? Lianna: Yeah. Joe: Simple. You think it's simple but it's- Lianna: Yeah. Joe: People get too buttoned up I think. Lianna: Finding new ways to say also the things that people are already accustomed to because we've seen free gifts so much, we've seen claim my deal a lot. I feel like that's kind of … it's still working because it's very clear but if you can find another way to say something that doesn't obscure the meaning of the copy then it'll get people's attention. And they're like oh I haven't seen that before. Joe: Okay. So pretty simple stuff but not something I think everybody can do. You have a special skill. You're funny, you actually do stand-up comedy as well right? Lianna: I do. Joe: You do. Are you funny? Of course, you are right? Lianna: People … you know I feel like I want to write a bit about that but it might be to hack because there have been better comedians writing bits about that. But someone did that to me the other day she was like so I don't get it you do stand-up but like you're not funny right now. And I was like maybe I'm not inspired. Joe: Ah. Lianna: You're not a good audience, I don't know. Joe: I'm glad I didn't say that. I think what you do is fantastic. You know back to my radio direct response days I would write 60 second ad copy and we would be able to get direct responses; how many people called in when we gave out that phone number after 60 seconds. And so we knew exactly how well the copy worked. You're a conversion copywriter so you found a way to do the same thing and boost conversion when somebody visits a website or open emails and things of that nature. Do you find your clients doing split testing with your copy against with the original copy or things of that nature or did they just say this is really good it's funny let's go ahead and just put that in place and then they see how it works for a week or do they do an actual split test? Lianna: If … so this is like this is where the cobbler has no shoes because I should be making sure that they do that but sometimes my clients are in that stage between small and medium business where they don't really have the team to split test appropriately or like they don't want to learn how to use Google Optimize, Optimizely, or any other split testing tool. So usually it's we see how the control over the original copy was doing then we implement the new copy and it sort of functions as the test and we see what the lift is; the uplift or downlift usually. Usually up. Joe: Usually up, okay. Well, I had an experience many many years ago where we had … when we take the phone calls and someone didn't want to buy the product we would get their name and address and would send them out this simple little trifle brochure. Really simple, black and white or I think there was blue and white and you could tell that it was somebody stuffed the envelope and we hand wrote it and it went out. It was from that person that you talked to on the phone. We had a consultant come in and say oh that's not very professional, we need to step it up, we need to get a multi unfold brochure, colors and charts and graphs and all this stuff and of course we have to print out the addresses and make a professional. And conversion dropped by at least 50% and it was a real eye opener because it was in that personal touch and feel. Lianna: Yeah. Joe: And so I think everything that you said up on the stage at Blue Ribbon Mastermind made me want to have you here because I've seen it firsthand and I know how much a word here and there and a feeling here and there converts. And it's really tough online, it's getting easier and you know hopefully some of your work is being tracked with before or split tested and so your clients know. But I think that all I know is when I go to a site like yours I want to stay on it and I want to look. Lianna: Good. Joe: As opposed to a pop up like I know you got a rubber chicken being cut in half and blood spurting, it's cute and funny so I love it. I think what you do is fantastic. How exactly would people reach out to you? Is it simply punchlinecopy.com? Lianna: Yeah. Joe: Can they get a sort of assessment? How do you work with your clients? Lianna: Yeah so I have different product test services on my site. Sometimes people just need … they want to use me as like an ad hoc email copywriter for instance. They'll come in and like buy one or two emails and they'll say rewrite my abandoned cart email because again it's close to purchase. Or rewrite my welcome email so I get fewer unsubscribes when I add someone to my list. So I have one off emails, I have something called upper cuts which is where I do an audit of your landing page from my heuristic perspective. So I'll take any customer research data that the clients have for these kinds of audits; the more the better. But I'll just look at it and say like this UX is garbage like this photo doesn't open, I can't zoom around the product, the call to action isn't visible enough from far away. And then I'll rewrite the copy line by line. And then I also do custom projects and I've got an intake form there. Yeah, there's a lot of ways to work with me. Joe: Can you be funny in a sponsored ad or a Google ad? Do you work with anybody in those regards? Lianna: I don't do a lot of top of funnel acquisitions. Joe: It's a little tricky. Lianna: I've tried … I mean I've done it. I haven't run ads for my own business in forever. I probably should but I'm the first result for funny copywriter so who needs to? Am I right? Joe: So one other simple clean example is again … and people could just go to your website and go oh that's cool, that's cool, that's cool, and get some ideas. Again punchlinecopy.com but you know folks you probably have a chat now talk to us little thing down in the lower right hand corner of your website so somebody can chat with you. Lianna's has a picture of her. Lianna: It's a bit [inaudible 00:30:59.5]. Joe: A caricature of you and it says you there and it has you looking up over the little pop up bubble as opposed to the standard stuff which is great. Again it's personal and makes it me want to click it just to see if you are there. Lianna: Awesome. I'm not because I'm doing this but I just- Joe: Everybody go to Punchline Copy and click you there and see what happens. Lianna: Or send me an email. Most of the stuff on my site that I think people like the most is just stuff that makes me laugh because I thought it was hilarious to have that little thing pop up in the corner. Joe: I like it. I like it all. Well, I think it would be great if some folks can use your sevices. Lianna: Yeah. Joe: And we have people on that I think can help more than anything else whether that's somebody that is in the process of trying to grow their business and make it more valuable or some of that's going to buy one and tweak it and make more valuable than what they bought it for. And I think copy is so essential because if it converts you are a … again conversion copywriter that just gets them more value for the money that they spent on advertising. Lianna: Yeah. Joe: So it is fantastic, we will put your details in the bottom of the show notes so people can reach out to you and any last minute thoughts on copy that people should think about [inaudible 00:32:18.1] got here? Lianna: I mean I always want to challenge people to just try a joke somewhere. Like take your most boring email in any of your series and go in and add a joke or add an aside, you know add a PS that's kind of weird and see what happens. Joe: Just to see what happens add a PS; I like it. Lianna: Yeah. Joe: Well PS folks thank you for listening to the Quiet Light Podcast, I appreciate it. Lianna, thank you so much for your time. You are awesome. Lianna: Thank you. And so are you. Joe: Well I appreciate that thank you. Links: PunchlineCopy.com Punchline's Facebook Page Lianna on LinkedIn

god tv love english google ohio north carolina new orleans humor ps npr honestly columbus lower saas knock af shopify ux technically arbys punchlines cards against humanity jimmy hoffa dollar shave club wistia optimizely increase conversions james turner value builder system use humor google optimize joanna wiebe joe valley val geisler quiet light misspelling joe it joe you john warrilow joe yeah lianna patch joe well joe so mark all joe all joe somebody mark absolutely joe now quiet light podcast joe just

Learn the Key Financial Metrics that Increase (or plummet) the Value of your Business

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 7, 2018 43:14

Combined, Mark and I have reviewed thousands of profit and loss statements over the years. What we've seen and learned in that time, is that certain key financial metrics can make or break the value of a business. In today's podcast we cover all of these metrics, including one that could cost a seller hundreds of thousands in value, and give a buyer huge instant equity. If you think the financial metrics and details are boring, wake up! You work night and day and risk everything to build your business, and it is more than likely that your business is your most valuable asset. Having deep financial details will bring more you more value, peace of mind, and maybe someday help you create a “lifetime event” sale and an exit that will change your life, and the lives of your descendants for generations to come. Episode Highlights: [:10] How long does it take to do a valuation? [2:35] What are “clean financials”? [4:02] YOY trends tend to be the most important financial factor. [6:12} We always look at a monthly view of the financials. Not just quarterly or annually. [9:15} Revenue by Channel show a deeper view of overall revenue trends (and reveal gold, or roadblocks). [14:40] Any channel that has you “own” the customer brings more value. {15:20] After total revenues, Mark views gross profit margins next, as do many buyers. [17:20] COGs should not include 3rd party fees! [18:41] Gross profit margins below 20% make Mark nervous. [20:10] Joe loves to see advertising expenses by revenue channel (this does not have to be in the P&L). [23:14] When you “get” the metrics right a business value can instantly jump by hundreds of thousands of dollars. [25:31] Trust offsets risk. The lower the risk is the more value your business will bring. [27:03] Don't hide negative trends…if you've recovered. A recovery shows how resilient the business is. [28:23] Drilling down to specific expenses and their trends tell a fuller story of the business condition. [30:19] QLB brokers Advertising, Saas, eCommerce and other business models. [31:01] Certain metrics are key with SaaS and Subscription based businesses. [33:49] Discretionary earnings equals net income, plus add backs. [34:06] Discretionary Earnings as a percent of total revenue “comfort levels” vary depending on the niche. [38:01] Revenue by SKU can show huge built-in growth if some were launched in the trailing 12 months. [39:55] Joe & Mark get into the weeds. Go there with them and learn how to increase the value of your business by hundreds of thousands of dollars, or buy one and get instant equity. Transcription: Mark: All right Joe you probably know this from your experience here at Quiet Light Brokerage but how long does it take you … when you're talking to a client for the first time or somebody who's requesting a value of the business, how long on average do you think it really takes you to be able to get an estimate of the size of the business and the value of their business? Joe: Yeah there's really no short answer to that. I feel like you want me to tell you five minutes but the answer is it's at least an initial call you get a ballpark range. And then you got to look at the financials and look at the trends, know your trends and look at the details of the financials. It's so much of that answer and the time frame around it depends upon how good their documentation is and how much they know about their own books. Mark: Sure and just you know I want you to answer whatever you want to answer. I'm not going to feed you answers; answer the truth. Yeah, well I think that's true. We've been looking at businesses for a while. We've looked at a lot of businesses in the roles that we have. And so I thought it would be good for us to have a discussion today to talk about some of the things that we look at in a business's financials to really be able to determine its value pretty quickly. What are some of the things that you with your expert eye from all the deals that you've done, what do you look at when you look at a company's financials? Now I know every buyer out there listening to this you probably have the reports that you look at. We have the advantage of working with lots of different buyers. We see the different approaches that different buyers have made. And I know that over the last 10 years I've expanded and changed what I look at and probably look at more things and things maybe that wouldn't concern me as much directly but I'm looking at to try and anticipate what buyers would want to see. Joe: So what is … what's the number one thing you look at first? You're always looking at this one thing what is it? Mark: By the way, if anyone is wondering no we don't have a guest so you have to live with Joe and I for the rest of this episode. But we'll try to make it entertaining. Okay, so what do I look at first and foremost? I have gotten very addicted to looking at trends. Trends to me to it's one of the most important thing with somebody's financials … outside of whether or not they're clean of course right? They've got to be clean if I'm going to … if we're going to be able to make any real valuation. Joe: Can we define clean? What do you mean by that? Mark: That's a good question actually. Joe: Somebody in the audience was just asking it they just [inaudible 00:03:03.7] through to my head. Mark: You're anticipating what people are going to be asking weeks from now; I love it. What are clean financials? So clean would be separated from other businesses. And that doesn't mean that you have to have completely separate tax IDs. That's ideal … you know separate tax IDs and separate books. I would love it if that's what you had but at least within QuickBooks or Xero or whatever you're using, some way of identifying this is for this business. This expense goes for this business and that expense goes for another business if you have multiple businesses running. Also actually having that tracked clearly and so that you're not just taking estimates on things and finally not mixing in a lot of personal expenses into it. In the episode that I recorded with Brian we talked about some of the warning signs. We saw in financials … and that episode is aired by now so go back and take a listen to that, but one of the warning signs that we often see are round numbers. Joe: Oh yeah. Mark: Round numbers are … yeah, these are not clean financials; these are estimates. Joe: Unless it's payroll but if you've got expenses of advertising of $1500 a month or your phone bills … you know $2300 a month yeah the round numbers are always challenging. But clean financials are so important because it allows us to look at things from an analytical eye and from the buyer's eye. And you yourself you say you look at trends, which trend specifically do you hone in on? Mark: Well the number one trend I like to look at would be year over year trends. So there's … when we're looking at trends just as in general for a business there's two main approaches that people take. One would be a month over month so are we doing better this month than we did the month before and was that month better than the month before that and how does that look. And maybe you spread that out and do like a quarter over quarter analysis. I like to take a look at businesses more from the year over year analysis. So if I'm taking a look at July of 2018 I want to compare that against July of 2017. Or if I'm going to do it on it like a quarterly basis I might take a look at quarter two of this year and compare it to quarter two of the year before and of the year before that. And the reason that I do this is I think people have seasonal businesses without knowing that they have a seasonal business. Obviously like Halloween … you know I've sold a number of Halloween sites in the past, that's an obvious seasonal business, Christmas obviously a seasonal business. Gardening and supply store a little less obvious but when you think about yeah it's a seasonal business. I think those aren't too far off stretches. But when you take a look at a company like Quiet Light Brokerage we also have seasons. We have our busy seasons, we have our a little bit less busy seasons. Summer, it tends to slow down a little bit. It's not appreciable. It's not like one of those things where you can look at and say it's going to be absolutely dead. And I wouldn't call us having a seasonal business but in the books, it does get reflected that way. So I like the year over year financial analysis because it controls all of those variables and also some of the variables for having a few extra days in a month or a few less days in a month. Joe: Yeah I think you've got to specifically look at that month over month analysis because of the seasonality. You know some will say well is there the best time to sell my business and it's really the time that's right for that particular individual. But when you're comparing December of 2018 to December of 2017 that is what is most relevant. It's not necessarily all of 2018 against all of 2017 because if you just look at the annual numbers of '17 versus '18 it's only going to paint a partial picture. We're always looking for monthly trends beyond that. We can … we look at that bigger picture and that's what we can talk about, that big picture in the teaser where people are going to see the listing for the first time. You know 60% year over year growth or whatever the number might be. But you've got to drill down into that month over month. How does December … I guess it's year over year December of '18 looked to December of '17. Because you could have had a great first three quarters and then in the fourth quarter of 2018 it could have fallen off a cliff. It still may look like 60% growth year over year but the most recent quarter could be down dramatically. And that dramatically reduces the value of the business because of the risk going forward. Mark: And the other thing that I found and I wrote a blog post on this a several years ago, we'll link to it in the show notes and if you and I were professional podcasters I would have done like actual show prop and been able to have this example at my fingertips. But I did this blog post years ago on how to perform a year over year financial analysis. And then I put together some dummy data and this actually kind of randomly happened when I put it together. Where at from a month over month standpoint the business looked like it was growing and growing at a good clip. But when you took a look at it at a year over year financial analysis what you're able to see is that the growth was slowing dramatically on the business. And that was extremely valuable in that and again it's a pretend scenario to be able to see the actual trend. What is … where is the direction of this business going? The other thing that I want to point out about this and I don't want to spend [inaudible 00:08:10.9] of time on this specific topic of year over year financial analysis but I think the one thing that we need to kind of pull back on with online businesses is we tend to really take a microscopic view of the financials. We'll often take a look at just the past couple of months and consider that to be a trend. Starting to broaden out our timeframes I think is a good thing to do especially from a buying stand point and understanding what is the context of the earnings of this business. When I started Quiet Light Brokerage in 2006, 2007 well most companies were just a few years old. Now we're seeing businesses that are 20, 25 years old on the long end and so we have more history to work with. And I just think year over year is a better solution for that. So that's my number one thing that I look for. Joe: I agree and I'm going to drill down beyond that and the next thing that I would look at but you know not being professional podcasters shows that we're human which is exactly what we are. Okay, that's too much ego there, sorry folks. What I do when you talk about a particular blog and we're not prepared for it, all you're going to do is Google Quiet Light Brokerage and year over year analysis and boom there it is. So for the record, you've done a great job on the last decade. Beyond the year over year comparison, month over month comparison what I drill down into next is revenue by channel. Because a buyer is going to look at it and see what's happening in the most recent three months compared to the same three months last year or year to date things of that nature. And so that shows the trends of the business and which way it's going. Beyond that what I like to drill down to and this goes to documentation is revenue by channel. So is it … let's say it's in a physical products business am I getting 60% of my revenue from Amazon, 25% B2B, and 15% from a new Shopify store. And then beyond that what are the trends within those channels? For instance, I had a listing awhile back where it was it was 100% Amazon and they like most started out on Amazon.com and then expanded to Germany, UK, Canada, Japan, Italy, and those countries took off and were really growing at the same time the US started to trend down. So they put all of their efforts into the new countries and stopped putting efforts into the country that was generating the most revenue. Overall if you look at month over month numbers as a whole we were still up, year over year we were still up, but there was a concerning trend within all of it and that was that the biggest revenue generator was dropping and then it was being replaced with other channels. So overall I guess if you just look at the broad picture it was okay but when you … you want to drill down into those things to get a really clearer picture of it. And that goes for Shopify channels [inaudible 00:11:11.5] or Shopify whatever it might be and then the B2B side too. These are if you're selling physical products. Same goes for content sites or SaaS sites, whatever they might be; advertising sites or SaaS sites. If you've got different methods of advertising and revenues whether it's straight up sales from your website or affiliate revenue you want to break that out in your financials so that you can see them. So you can see what you're doing right and what you're doing wrong but also so that your broker, advisor, exit planner, and your buyer can see it as well. Because you have some great things in there … you know if you started a Shopify store nine months ago and it's already at 15% of your total revenue it's only nine months out of the trailing 12 so you've got built in growth there and that is a really exciting thing for buyers. Mark: Yeah I dealt with a client recently where we were having a little bit of trouble moving his business because it was not on a decline. And he had a lot of revenue but there was a couple of problems with the business where it was sick in a few ways. And what I found is out of our buyers … and we had lots of inquiries on this business because we put it up at a pretty low multiple, most buyers backed out right away when they saw the trends they just kind of backed out and said “No I'm not really all that interested in this business. I don't want to turn around but I have you.” And the buyers that we've grown to know over the years that they're really successful at what they're doing they took a little bit more time and the first thing that they started to do is exactly what you're talking about. They started to take those financials and some of those summation numbers that we see in financials and they started to break them apart. They started to really dig into those numbers and see okay what makes up this revenue. And when we started to break these apart what can we find in here; what's sick and what's healthy? And is what's healthy sustainable and is what's sick is that fixable or is it something that we can just get rid of? And so they started looking at that on a per channel basis but they also started looking at it on a per SKU basis as well in running an analysis. And one of the things that we found with this is that you could actually lighten up the workload of this business and actually increase profitability significantly by removing a large number of the SKUs because they were not all that profitable. But again the front is still the multi-channel analysis that you're talking about. But I think this general principle of when you're looking at revenue especially with an e-commerce business that can have multiple channels of revenue don't just take the summation number, start to break it apart. And from the sell side, if you're selling don't be afraid of reporting those numbers either. There's opportunity in those numbers that you can show potential buyers and I think a little dose of humility for all of this goes a long way. Sometimes somebody is going to come and take a look at your business and be able to have an observation that maybe we've been missing for a while. And from a selling standpoint that's your opportunity if a buyer comes in and notices something that you missed. And so give them that data, give them that opportunity to make that sort of observation. And I think that's a good thing for people to look for. Is there any channel in your opinion that you like better than others or that you look at and you would weight as more valuable than others? Joe: Oh yeah I mean any channel you own the customer. If it's just your own website where you are owning the customer completely and you can remarket to them and upsell them and reach out to them socially via email, whatever method you can. But absolutely owning the customer brings more value than … you know in Amazon platform for instance. Amazon is growing like crazy so don't discount it if you're selling physical products. You have to be there in my opinion. You're missing out on a tremendous amount of revenue if you're not there. But owning the customer is the most important thing in terms of overall value. One of the things I want to jump to Mark is … it's on our list here to talk about in terms of the year over year analysis and drilling down and getting below that total revenue line to either gross profit as a percentage of total revenue or discretionary earnings as a percentage to total revenue. Which one do you look at first? Mark: I look at gross profit first if it's an e-commerce business and just because it's a simpler number to digest. Now there's only really one thing that's getting thrown into that gross profit number you've got your revenue, you've got your landed cost of goods sold and that's pretty much it that's going into the gross profit number. So it's an easier thing to really understand and really at the core of an e-commerce business is that you know what is the cost of your product, and what are people willing to pay for it right now, and how is that trending. And I think with e-commerce businesses specifically because price competition is a real thing with e-commerce businesses and most niches you have to really pay attention to how is the profitability of this industry holding up over time. Is it becoming more competitive? Is the competition happening on a price front? Or are suppliers becoming more aggressive in their pricing as well? So that's one of the first things that I look at when I start to really dig into those financials. I want to see how is that gross profit margin holding up over time, is it getting more expensive to do this business or is it holding up? Joe: You know it's funny I think I agree with you that what you should have in your expenses above the gross profit line are your cost of goods sold, your landed cost of goods sold. But I often see them in from bookkeepers and they include in some cases fees associated with third party platforms. I don't know if there's a right way or a wrong way but you got to dissect to that a little bit when doing the analysis. Is there a particular percentage of profit that you look at and you're like no, your cost of goods sold are just simply too high, the margins are too tight, this is going to be really hard one to sell. Do you ever run across any of those? Mark: I do and I'll get to that in just a second I'm going to chide all the book keepers out there that are including fees in there as cost of goods sold. The technical definition for a cost of goods sold has to be … be involved in the actual production and sourcing of the product itself; the transactional cost. So if you're keeping your books that way it's a minor issue and a crawling issue that I won't fight too hard but it's supposed to go on the regular operational expenses instead. Joe: I fell asleep in accounting class. I just focus on what I focus on. I told you this story before. We work with Scott of Catching Clouds, Matt of CapForge, Fully Accountable is a recent one that's come across my desk and all three seem to do a really solid job. And having a great bookkeeper brings a windfall of cash when you go to list your business for sale. Mark: Absolutely and one of those guys might disagree with me and then we can whip out our pocket protectors and have a pen fight over that. Joe: All right yeah … let's keep the people awake. We don't want to talk about that. Mark: All right, move on. So percentages absolutely, you want to see a healthy gross profit percentage. I talked to one buyer and I won't say her name because I don't know if she wants me saying this but she told me that she wouldn't look at a business that had less than 50% gross profit margins. I wouldn't go that far. In my opinion, when I'm looking at the business from a broker standpoint I start to get nervous when gross profit margins dip below 20% is when I get nervous, 25% and lower I'm a little uncomfortable with that but you know I think that's doable. I think the average that I'd see would be right around 35%; 30-35% would be the average. Obviously the higher you can have it the better. There are certain industries, electronics being one of them that tend to just have really low gross profit margins and you know the problem with that and just thinking about it I have basic basis if you're … say you have a 10% gross margin which for a lot of electronics that's where you're at, you're looking at having a million dollars in revenue to be able to generate $100,000 in just gross profit. That's a lot of money that you have to generate in order to get some gross profit. So my rule is about 20%. Joe: It doesn't count your advertising; it doesn't count your payroll or anything like that so. Mark: Or your transactional fees [inaudible 00:19:26.7] marketplace. Joe: Exactly as it should be down below that gross profit line. So that's going down that P&L you know you've got total revenue you've got gross profit and then you've got all these expenses in there. One of the things that I always look pretty closely at if I have the detail up above is the advertising channel. Do you ever get to see advertising expenses by channel in a P&L? Mark: By channel … I'm trying to think if I've seen it. With Amazon, you'll see it. Sometimes you'll see Amazon advertising expenses broken out separate from- Joe: Wouldn't it be amazing to see it there? Just for those bookkeepers out there and those people that are doing it themselves. Mark: Oh my gosh. Joe: If you've got revenue by channel up above the total revenue line why not have advertising by channel down below? It … you can do it in QuickBooks and Xero you just got to have a subset of it. In the exported P&L it may say just total advertising but you can show that separately. And the reason I love to look at that is because it can show too heavy of a weight in one particular channel again in the advertising dollars. This is airing in August of 2018, as many people listening know there was an algorithm update in Facebook in April. And a lot of people got hurt by that and if they were overspending on Facebook advertising and they might have found themselves too heavily weighted on one channel and that advertising didn't work as well anymore and their revenues might have dropped. Or they had to pick up the ball somewhere else and it took a while. So it goes to that detail. The more detail we can see the more we'll understand those trends and a buyer can make a more informed decision. If somebody's stroking a check for 100,000, 500,000, a million whatever the number is, they worked hard for that money, they saved it, they're smart, they're intelligent, they're going to get through those numbers eventually and it's better to do it upfront in advance so that once you're under a lot of intent you get all the way through the closing. So I'm always trying to drill down into those details. I would love advertising by channel. I don't always get it but it's a question that I'm always asking and is that spending by channel going up or down. I think if you can again diversify by channel and if it's Facebook, if it's Instagram, if it's AdWords, if it's inside your sponsored account or whatever it might be, if you're selling SaaS products, affiliate whatever you might be doing; having that level of detail is truly ideal and I'm always looking for it if I can get it. I can often get it out of just a P&L but generally, there's enough detail in the back end for the client … the person owning the business to be able to share that. Mark: Yeah I've used an analogy some time … and by the way, real quick just kind of a public service announcement here if anybody is listening to this in your car it's late at night you've been driving for a while put this on pause go put on like a really exciting song for a little bit and then come back and finish it. Joe: Come on. Mark: No just … all right so I- Joe: This is huge. This is all huge that just- Mark: It should be exciting. Joe: You and I do this all the time and it's exciting for a client when we go through these numbers and we find something and all of a sudden they realize that if we do this right their business … they don't have to generate any more revenue but their business when properly presented is worth a quarter of a million dollars more. So that's pretty exciting you don't have to generate more revenue. Mark: Well absolutely. So I'm actually going to bring this to Botany of all things. I think its Botany or probably not but the study of trees and tree rings … you're looking at me like I'm crazy. Joe: I am. Well, you are. Okay. Mark: Yeah well I am a little bit crazy but one of the cool things that I learned years ago about the tree rings, you know when you slice a tree and you can see all the rings and stuff like that. Scientists are able to tell all sorts of information from those rings. They're able to tell if there is a fire a certain time in that area, or if it was a drought year or if it was heavy rains that year, and the average temperature as well. You can find all sorts of information like and the reason I bring this up … there is a point here besides me just talking about the fun things I learned on the side outside of work, is that financially I'd look at financials in sort of the same way. It's the record of the business and its quantified what's happening to your business in other ways. Facebook's algorithm change is an actual change in your customer acquisition strategy and it shows up on those books. There's very little that happens in your business that's not going to show up somewhere in your financial records. And so when you keep detailed financial records what you're doing is you're keeping a story of your business in a quantified way. And for buyers who are trying to evaluate a business, you know buyers look at this from all sorts of different ways; especially experienced buyers. They're going to look at your business from an ROI standpoint. They want to understand can I make money from this? But they're also going to look at it from the story of the business and try and get in the head you as a business owner and what it's been like to run it for the past number of X years. And so your point about keeping more beautiful records and breaking advertising down into channels AdWords or Facebook, we've messed around with Pinterest for a while if you've done some Quora advertising or have you. That's part of the story of your business that you can tell when you really start to break down financials historically. Joe: Yeah and I think it's important to understand that all of those details are important to be able to share. Somebody listening that's planning on selling their business they may want to say I don't want to share those negative trends, I don't want to talk about that fire that I had back in June of 2017. It's going to come out so you might as well get those details out there and ready and available for your buyers because trust … when you lay it all out there it builds trust. And trust is important because it offsets risk a little bit. And again when you offset that risk a buyer is willing to pay more for your business. And it's all important … it goes into your social media accounts too you know. I've had … and I'm going to tangent but … and I won't name names but I had clients that are selling their business and I pop into their social media account and their profile picture is them on the beach topless with a beer on their hand and chugging whatever. Those are men topless by the way. And I'm like it's great but just put a shirt on for a little while, just change your profile picture because we're trying to build trust and respect in who you are. Buyers want to buy from client sellers that they like and that they trust more than anything else. So that's why you want to share all those rings of the tree and tell the full story because they'll look at the mistakes that you've made and the expertise that they have that you don't and go opportunity. I have capital to not run out of inventory and you did, I'm smarter than you are, or I have more money than you are. That's really really critical stuff to have. Anyway- Mark: With the negative trends in the past by the way I just want to say one quick thing. It's not a bad thing if you have a negative trend in the past. In fact, I like it when I see a business that has had a decline and recovered. I can go to a buyer and say look how resilient this business is. Joe: Exactly. Mark: They ran out of product for two months and they're still chugging along great; it didn't kill them. Joe: That's right. I actually had a situation where a client had a patent infringement claim filed against them. And not just against that particular client but against everybody that was selling a similar product. And it turns out that everyone else stopped selling that product period. My client hired an attorney, fought the infringement, won, and ended up being one of the only sellers of that particular product anymore and that just … the revenues shot up, gained more market share. And it's an ugly thing … a patent infringement; you don't want to talk about that right? No, you absolutely do because odds of it happening again incredibly low and in this situation, it turned out to be very positive as well. So I say expose all the rings of the tree in your analogy in botany. Let us know if botany is not … I think it is the right phrase but- Mark: I think it's like the big family. I think there is probably a more narrow specialty. Somebody- Joe: We are sitting in front of computers; you want to drill down a little further? We've talked about advertising by channel what would you look at next in a let's say a financial presentation or a profit and loss statement? Mark: Well you know I'm going to start getting into these specific expenses and I want to take a look at what the individual average … or what not advertising, the individual expenses are to see are any trending higher. Basically, is this business getting more difficult to run, is it getting more expensive to run? And the other thing that you can see from just kind of an expense profile would be attempts at growth. You often see expenses ramp up when people expect growth so you can get the sense for where the business is arcing from taking a look at individual expenses. So I would look at staffing costs, they really ramped up. Are you seeing a lot of professional legal fees ramp up? That will be something that you wanted to begin to and try and get a little bit of explanation into. But really trying to get in … again some of those individual expenses and see spikes and anomalies. You know things that kind of stand out because those again are going to be the big stories that you want to get into later on. So we move a little bit away from trend analysis when we start looking at that … when we start getting into just kind of that anomaly analysis of a financial statement to see what questions do we need to be asking on this particular business. Joe: Yeah and it's not just anomalies where there's spikes in revenue but sometimes expenses disappear. And when they disappear for the last two or three months of the trailing 12 and now they want to sell their business they're just … either they made a mistake or just forgot to put it in. But they're just cutting costs to increase their discretionary earnings. So we always … we drill down into all of that, every buyer will and we do it for them, ask those questions and get it exposed so that it's a good investment for a buyer and the selling achieves their goals as well. Mark: Something I want to ask you about Joe, you know we get talked a lot … Quiet Light, in general, is pegged a lot as kind of like the e-commerce broker like that's what we do but we actually sell a lot of SaaS businesses. Joe: And content or advertising business. If you look at the revenue on close transactions here to date it's an awful lot of SaaS an awful lot of content in there as well. Mark: Right and I explain to people it's actually not a majority of e-commerce it's a plurality for us as we're less than 50% of our deals are e-commerce it's more around 40, 45% percent. I want to get into subscription based revenue and how do you look at that when you're evaluating business. What are you … you've done a number of SaaS businesses or a certain number of SaaS businesses, how do you evaluate subscription based revenue? Joe: Yeah anytime someone's looking at the subscription based businesses to buy you know the eye that I look at it with is what does it cost to acquire that customer and what is the lifetime value of that customer? Could they have different terminologies for it churn rate and so on and so forth … you know how [inaudible 00:30:20.7] if you get 100 new customers how many are churning every month, meaning how many go away? You want to keep that very low. Well I was looking at that churn rate but the simple way to look at it is … from a buyer's perspective is if you've … you know I just closed a transaction it was a software as a service business, it's been around for 14 years and it was created originally as a solution to a developer's problem. The developer created it and then it just sort of grew organically. And 14 years later he had a very successful business but he didn't have any data. He was only spending about literally like $300 a month on advertising. I'm like okay well what is the cost to acquire that customer with your advertising and then how long does that customer stick around? What is their lifetime value? So that a buyer wants to look at it and go okay it costs you $100 to acquire a customer but the lifetime value of that customer is $400. My margins are really strong that means okay I can spend more money on advertising dollars and I can double the revenue of this company. They're always looking at that aspect of it from a subscription based business. And that could be physical products or software as a service. That churn rate is really really important, lifetime value, and repeat customer. Once you've gained a customer and if you've got the ability to offer them additional products and upsells that's something that I'm always looking for if you've got that model where you can add to it. The percentage of repeat customers that monthly recurring revenue; always looking at those numbers. I mean just saying that there's a monthly recurring revenue of $60,000 right away you just do the math on that that's $360,000 of revenue that you're not putting advertising dollars to because it's already recurring and there's a fixed margin there. That stuff is really exciting and if you're an owner of software as a service business or a subscription based model box business you've got to have those numbers because that's what buyers are going to look for. They're going to want to know how much does it cost because I'm bringing a whole lot of working capital I'm going to blow this thing up and they want to know the cost to acquire that customer and lifetime value; two most important things in my opinion. Mark: [inaudible 00:08:10.9] things? Joe: We got a couple more. Mark: We have a couple more? Joe: Yeah drill down to the bottom discretionary earnings we know … hopefully, everybody knows discretionary earnings is your net income plus your add backs. Net income of the bottom of a profit and loss [inaudible 00:32:44.9] statement add back to the personal expenses you run through the business that are your own benefits and one-time expenses. So you get net income plus add backs equals seller's discretionary earnings. Where do you feel most comfortable, where do you see buyers feel most comfortable in terms of that discretionary earnings as a percentage of your total revenue? Mark: Boy that's a great question and I think it depends a little bit on the business itself. So SaaS companies tend to have higher SDE to revenue percentages. Content sites can have … depending on how they're set up can also have a higher percentage. E-commerce tends to have a little bit lower percentages relative to revenue. So I'm not sure if I've looked at this in terms of percentages as far as SDE to a percentage … I would assume since you asked the question that you have. Joe: I have and you know 10% percent you could have at least I think. I can tell you what I don't want and I've turned away businesses I just simply won't list them because they're not going to sell are those that have 1 or 2%. You know look I'm not talking they're doing three million in discretionary earnings off of 30 million in revenue. That's a sellable business no question about it. But when you're doing 1 or 2% of your total margins you're spending a lot of money on advertising dollars, you're carrying a lot of working capital and inventory, you make a mistake a half a percent one way or the other and your profit drops dramatically. And any time I've looked at those, anytime we've listed things that have a smaller percentage margin there in discretionary earnings buyers get really nervous and they look at it from that point of view. So you've really got to do that math and not go oh yeah it's 200,000 in discretionary earnings. You've got to go okay it's 200,000 and what percentage is that of my total revenue, and how do I improve that? And then you drill down into those expenses. Dave Bryant who's part of the e-commerce podcast … EcomCrew Michael Jackness, he was our client and a year before we sold his business he did that. He looked at that bottom line sellers discretionary earning as a percentage of the total revenue and then drilled down into certain SKUs and looked at the profit margin of those and either renegotiated the ones that were not profitable enough or got rid of a few and added about 40,000 of discretionary earnings to his business and about $120,000 to the list price of the business. So I … you want to get at I'd say shoot for 10%, 5% gets a little you know depending upon the business and how large total revenues are but it's always a case by case basis. [inaudible 00:35:18.2] get down to that 2, 3% range I get really really nervous as do buyers. Mark: I do think that part of it is revenue dependent. I've found with businesses that have kind of eye popping revenue numbers that even if the discretionary earnings is a very small percentage as you point out … if the business is doing 30 million dollars in revenue per year and it has really low percentage of discretionary earnings it's still a sellable business because you got 30 million dollars of revenue per year to be able to play with. It's when you get in those territories of say you have $500,000 of revenue and your discretionary earnings is just 10% of that so it's $50,000 that's not a lot of room for error before you're at negative territory and you don't have a lot of extra room in capital to be able to really pull into the growth of that business. So I think that's a good thing to be able to look at. I think a lot of it depends on the size of the business. Joe: Yeah I completely agree. Look we didn't start … we didn't time this podcast, we have no idea how long we've been chatting for but I want to touch on one more thing that is really important I think for buyers to look at in terms of opportunity and for sellers to track in terms of again opportunity to get more value for your business. Buyers in terms of if they're not detailing it and you can figure that out you'll see built in growth and that is revenue by SKU. And that is whether it's a physical products business or a subscription business; again, box or software as a service. Because sometimes software as a service they offer different packages and what not. If you've launched a SKU, a new product in the last 12 months and I've seen this before and let's say you've got a dozen SKUs and six of them are only … they're under nine months old and staggered within there, you've got built in growth. And so what I like to drill down to if I can get it is revenue by SKU for the trailing 12 months. Because if a SKU was launched six months ago but it's already up to 18% of the total revenue that's huge because you've got six more months and it's growing. It's absolute built in growth and it brings more value for a buyer. You can push the value of the business a little bit higher and if you can share that detail with the buyers they're going to get it. They're going to look at it and go yes I get it I understand it. Classic example of that is Kent Renner. We had him on here on the podcast early on back in December right? 300% year over year growth and he only owned the business for six months. The business had a total of 16 SKUs when he bought it. Nine of them had been launched within the trailing 12 months and represented about 40% of the total revenues. So it's absolute built in growth and Kent's took that business and it was doing a million in revenue when he bought it to three million in total revenue inside of it … a total of 12 months. And that was because that revenue by SKU detail that Evan the seller was able to provide and sort of built in past to growth for it for Kent to take over. Mark: Yes so I'm going to make a point here in this but beginning way to into the weeds on this topic here but I'm going to just venture in there anyways and just as an advanced tactic for buyers to look at I think what you're saying there is absolute gold. And again I've seen some of our top buyers do just that. They really get into the SKUs and these are particular get it. So let's get into a situational analysis here and say you have an e-commerce business that recently launched some SKUs within the past year or two years and … now I'm saying this because I have this case with a client, they're keeping their books on a cash basis. From a buying opportunity, in my opinion, this is like absolute gold because their costs relative to the revenue is going to be very very high. They're building up inventory in a product that is growing in sales but it isn't really there yet and so you have super depressed or understated gross profit which is going to pop very soon. This is like one of those signals that you're like buy. Like if you know what you're looking at buy this thing because it's going to pop in the next year and you're going to see that massive growth. You get maybe too much of the weeds there. Joe: Yeah getting into cash versus accrual accounting with cost of goods sold way into the weeds but I'm telling you right now as a buying opportunity if you're looking at other brokerage firms … which hopefully you're looking at everybody. Any experienced broker is going to take a listing and go yeah okay there's the discretionary we'll do a few add backs and here's the multiple on that discretionary earnings. An experienced broker is going to take that same profit and loss statement, a physical products business and make sure that the cost of goods sold is presented on accrual basis. That discretionary earnings number … most often with the business, it's growing rapidly where you're taking excess working capital and putting it back in the inventory that discretionary earnings is going to pop. And I've seen a quarter of a million dollar increase in the value of the business because of it. Let's see if I can do some simple math. Imagine you have in the trailing twelve months a cost of goods sold of a million dollars on a cash basis. It's a big number but I'm trying to do round numbers. And let's say that on a cash basis you're over inflated by 5%. If you flipped it to accrual instead of having 35% cost of goods sold your real cost of goods sold is only 30% but because your cash your 5% higher. 5% times that million dollars that you've got there on the books is $50,000. If your business is worth three times that's $150,000 added onto the list price of the business. Or if you're a buyer and it's not presented that way it's $150,000 of instant equity when you're buying that business. Mark: Right so for those of you listening you know need to fact check out some of the not … botany is the right field of science and also if Joe's math is correct on that because I don't know if it is. But we'll go with it and the point is there. I think the general rule of thumb that we follow here is a growing business that's kept on a cash basis is going to understate their discretionary earnings and their gross profit generally speaking. And a business in decline that is on cash basis generally overstates their discretionary earnings if they're not putting money back in the inventory at that point. So those are the basic rules of thumb. Keep in your mind there's exceptions; there are always. I think this is been a long podcast right now. We have not been timing it. We're probably around the 45 minute mark. Joe: Hopefully you guys are still awake. If there's any questions that came up during the podcast shoot us an email inquiries@quietlightbrokerage, mark@quietlightbrokerage, joe@quietlightbrokerage, anybody's first name for the most part @quietlightbrokerage.com. Mark: That's right and this format of an episode … normally, of course, we'd like to bring on guests and the friends of Quiet Light Brokerage onto the show and we have more of those coming up here in the near future. We've got some pretty good guests coming up. But we wanted to start spring cleaning some of these episodes where it's just Joe and I talking or maybe we'll talk with somebody else within the company not to really give a background on them but to give insights or some of the ways that we attack some of the issues that come up when buying or selling an online business. Give us feedback on this, please. We'd love to hear it. You can send an email like Joe said to mark@quietlightbrokerage or joe@quietlightbrokerage or if you don't want us to know and you just want to complain about us send it over to jason@quietlightbrokerage.com and he's god at keeping secrets so you can complain to him. Joe: Sounds good. Thanks, Mark I appreciate your time. Links: Learn the Value of your Business www.quietlightbrokerage.com inquiries@quietlightbrokerage.com joe@quietlightbrokerage.com mark@quietlightbrokerage.com

christmas amazon canada halloween trust business uk starting japan germany italy financial scientists pinterest pl roi advertising ecommerce b2b kent revenue classic buyers saas gross shopify gardening metrics subscription ids quora quickbooks drilling adwords botany xero yoy plummet sku skus cogs discretionary sde markit quiet light brokerage fully accountable financial metrics quiet light mark you mark no joe it mark yeah joe you mark well mark oh mark yes mark right joe yeah joe so mark they learn the key mark all joe all joe somebody mark absolutely joe come

What 10 Years in the Brokerage Industry Taught Bryan O'Neil

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 31, 2018 35:35

Today we welcome Bryan O'Neil, one of our very own, to discuss owning and running a brokerage firm and being a top advisor to buyers and sellers. Based in the United Kingdom, Bryan is joining us today from Costa Rica, where he is living the true traveling entrepreneur lifestyle. His career has had him in the mix for over 10 years and he has seen a lot from the many angles of the acquisition process. Before joining Quiet Light, Bryan was one of the original co-founders and a director of Flipping Enterprises, as well as a co-founder and the concept creator of Centurica – the world's first website due diligence agency. He was also a consultant at Flippa.com and was responsible for the launch of their brokerage service, Deal Flow. Today we tap into his wealth of experience as an entrepreneur and pioneer in the internet brokerage industry. Episode Highlights: What Bryan finds exciting when starting with a client and the signals that he looks for right away in a potential transaction. The importance of paying attention to the soft side of a deal and the personalities brokers are working with. We discuss the burnout rate for the online business broker. How brokers develop a sixth sense for what is going to be a smooth deal and how hard or easy it will be to work with a seller or buyer. How the relationship between the owner and the prospective buyer is one of the most important aspects of a transaction. The broker's valuation is merely the prediction based on the marketplace. Which niches that Bryan gravitates towards in his work. What red flags brokers look for in transactions. One thing that buyers don't look at enough in the valuation process. Why buyers also need to look beyond the transaction. Something buyers focus on that is sometimes an impediment to the transaction progress. Transcription: Joe: So Mark, I understand you had a conversation with one of our very own who probably has more experience than most of us combined in terms of owning brokerage firms and being a top advisor as well. Mark: Yeah within Quiet Light Brokerage I am obviously the most experienced broker since I've started the company. I've been doing this for ten and a half years now but Bryan and I started off our conversation just kind of reminiscing on his career arc. When you take a look at our little industry that we have here within this kind of online business brokerage [inaudible 00:01:27.0] when you take a look at the companies that have sprung up and really kind of made their mark on the industry you typically see that Bryan has been somewhere right in the mix of all of those companies in that startup phase. So he's been at this just as long as I have. He's been doing this for about ten years now and his resume is impressive. Joe: It really is and he's been the easiest to work with because he really doesn't need any help which is pretty great given the level of skill and experience he has. But it's funny with Bryan it seems like every time we talk to him he's in a different country. You know he lives over in the UK but I think the last call we had he was actually in Cuba and working really literally from anywhere in the world like the true lifestyle entrepreneur. Did he get into specifics about the companies that he's started that are well known in this industry? Mark: He did. Yeah absolutely and people that listen to this you guys are [inaudible 00:02:22.7] of companies we talked about the companies. I'll save it for that. And by the way he was in Costa Rica now when we actually did this interview. So he was doing it from his hotel room and asked me in advance “Do I need to shave, is this going to be video?” I said “Yeah Bryan you should shave it and you know comb that hair and all that.” So he did and the audio … because it's a hotel room the audio is a little bit echoey. I'll apologize for that but … and then if you're like me I can't listen to accents very well. We make fun of Bryan for his British accent all the time. But what he has and his observations in the industry and he's seen a lot from a lot of different angles. And so in this one of the things that I want to tease for you guys to listen to, we talked about the things that he finds exciting when he's dealing with a client. You know that up front call and Joe you and I know about this, when we have somebody calling to us that they are starting to explore that possibility of selling you develop a really quick sense for what's going to be a good opportunity and what's not. So I wanted to see if I could kind of haul that out of him, what are some of the signals that he looks for right away that makes him go yes this is going to be a really nice client to work with. Joe: So the signals are being not just the client but the business itself that buyers are going to be excited about is what you're talking about. Mark: Well we talked about both and I will reveal this one thing, we talked about this so often the theme just came up again which is we also have to look at those soft sides, the personality; are you reasonable to work with. Those sort of things just naturally come up. Whenever you talk to anybody who's experienced this industry that part comes up. Joe: Let's get right to it we don't to give too much away. Mark: Awesome let's go. Mark: Bryan how are you? Bryan: Hi Mark, doing good thanks. How are you? Mark: Good, thanks for agreeing. I know you're in Costa Rica right now right? Bryan: Oh I am indeed. So I'm going to be here for a couple weeks and I'm actually traveling a little bit right now so yeah I'm seeing a few new places. Mark: We have a game here at Quiet Light Brokerage which is try and guess where Bryan is in the world at any given moment and if you can get it down to the quadrant of the globe that's usually pretty good. So [inaudible 00:04:25.1] world traveler. You are our European representation for the company because you live over in England correct? Bryan: Yeah I'm mostly based in England and [inaudible 00:04:35.5] but yeah because I'm kind of traveling quite a lot but yeah I'm keeping a base there. Mark: I got to ask you a question completely unrelated to any of this but it seems as if British people travel a lot more than pretty much any other culture I know. It seems like just popping out to the States for a quick visit is no big deal for most British people. Is this true or am I just completely stereotyping? Bryan: Oh I should [inaudible 00:05:04.2] of your place to Europeans in general. I mean it's probably true but the fact that we've kind of grown up that way. Because you know living in Europe … it's never really a big deal to travel to a different country because from pretty much any place in Europe … any other place in Europe you can get in a matter of hours. So like from Helsinki to Milan you would have a two and a half hour flight. So I've kind of started the traveling from quite young. Same with everybody who's grown up in Europe and then I suppose that kind of sets the mindset for later. Mark: Right. I find that fascinating. I mean if we plan a trip to Europe, its multi month ordeal to try and plan. For you, I just find out like oh I decided to come over to the States next week or I'll be over in the States the most. I was amazed so … good to have you on this side of the globe though. Of course, even though you're down in Costa Rica I know you'll be up here in the States real soon as well so … cool. So out of the Quiet Light Brokerage team … for those listening, Bryan you've been with Quiet Light now for over a year now. A little bit more than … I think about two years now, I think- Bryan: Yeah yeah. Mark: A couple of years, so for those of you that are keeping track which I don't anticipate as too many but we have a number of people here with Quiet Light and the assumption is typically that Joe is the most senior, most veteran broker on the team. The reality is out of experience outside of myself, you have by far the most experience. And in some ways, you have more experience than I do at the Quiet Light team. What I'd love to do is just kind of go over your background real quick as to how you get started in this industry. Bryan: Yeah sure. So I think we have to go like back to 2007, 2008 something like that so I think 2007 actually. So I suppose my sort of segue into this was when I first started building some fairly simple Google ads and sites and stuff like that. I think that was about … yeah even earlier actually so that must be like 12, 13 years ago. And you know I was also doing that so I had a few sites and then at one point I wanted to sell one of those sites. And it was back then there weren't really too many options because there weren't pretty much any growth [inaudible 00:07:26.7] facing an online businesses that Quiet Light started that just after that time. Most of the others started at quite a lot after this. There was, however, Flippa or what later became Flippa that kind of started emerging so it was- Mark: It was the same platforms at the time right? Bryan: Yeah it was like an Australian developed web forum and they started a little section that was there for people to buy and sell websites and that's what later turned into Flippa. So I found that I sold them my site and then it said hey you know there's quite a lot happening over that. And then that's got my interest and I started buying some sites. And then what I started doing this essentially back then the content of flipping sites was quite bare and profitable. So pretty much before I knew it what I started doing was I started picking up sites that could do with some quick improvements and I would do that, so I would improve those sites and I would sell them off anywhere from a couple of months later to a couple of years later. And that basically got me to a place where other people at one point started reaching out to me asking hey you know you're doing a really good [inaudible 00:08:45.5] you've got a lot of fair above listings and then you're getting good prices can you help me sell my site? Can you draft the listing copy sort of guide me through the process and so forth? I thought hey you know why not. So yeah I charged a small percentage and helped these people and that … this was myself and my business partner back then and we kind of started doing that to the extent that these at one point became the main thing. So we kind of for a long time we never really formally became website brokers, but then at one point think it must've been a year or so we did, we said hey that's a business so we better turn it into business and that's when we started a company that was then called Flipping Enterprises. Now they're called FE International. And so that was kind of the start. Mark: Right and just to be clear so Flipping Enterprises was the original version, they've reincorporated and changed significantly since then but that was back in 2009 I would say. Bryan: That's 2009 yeah. Mark: Yup, okay so yeah and Quiet Light started in October 2007 if I remember right. So that was a few years later; fascinating. Okay, then you moved on from Flipping Enterprises to … which one was it? You were … I don't know you're a co-founder of Centurica and then you're also part of Flippa, which one came first? Bryan: Centurica first. So yeah a couple years in I think that must have been 2011 or 2012 I kind of cited that I've had enough of that part of the industry for a while anyway. And at the same time I saw a need at … for sort of buyer education and due diligence services in the industry. So obviously back then the industry wasn't arguably still ease. The journey has been very very young and there aren't really many resources available and the one issue that I run into quite a lot in speaking to buyers is that they didn't have any professional to turn to when evaluating a web business to purchase. So yeah that's when myself and my two other business partners Justin Gilchrist and Kaspars Peksens started Centurica. And yeah that took of quite quickly and was really really well. I think with regard in the industry and so we built that up over the course of couple of years and at that point, I exited from Centurica first and then about I think six months later the whole company have sold to the guys who [inaudible 00:11:26.5]. Mark: Right that would be a [inaudible 00:11:28.3] over with Rhodium as well. I remember when you started Centurica, I was at Affiliate Summit East with Jason Yellowitz who was speaking at that conference. I ran into Chris Kite who was a friend of ours and he had mentioned what you guys were doing and I had heard about you before as well with Centurica. And I remember telling Chris I said these guys are absolutely insane. I would never want to do by side do due diligence for anybody due to liability issues. But I … one of the many times I've been proven wrong over the years and the companies well over the years have been a very good resource. I know that those that listen to a lot of our podcast so that we refer or recommend them a decent amount. I think [inaudible 00:12:15.5] does a really good job and is a good person. But I remember hearing about you guys at first and thinking you guys are crazy, who would actually want to be in that position of liability, but it's a good resource. And Justin Gilchrist, that's a name I remember. When he first reached out to me and I was thinking oh man just another person trying to get into the space and it turned out to be a giant in the industry. Justin if you're listening we miss you in this space, feel free to come back anytime you want. So you left there and you went on to another company within the space. Bryan: Yeah. So from there, it came my sort of a company idea with Flippa. So I guess I got into a discussion with the guys of Flippa who back then wanted to sort of break through into the brokerage industry but with very little success thus far. So what we ended up doing was … I essentially ending up quote unquote consulting them for what was supposed to be a year, it turned out to be two and a half years. And I went there to build out their brokerage platform called Leadflow. So yeah close and short this put it that [inaudible 00:13:29.9] nicely and by now that part of the company is actually separated from Flippa. And my good friend Jamie whom I basically hired as the main guy there and the main senior broker has now taken over running Leadflow and managing it. So they've kind of spun off from Flippa but yeah that was another interesting two year career. Mark: Yeah I get asked sometimes how large is the industry that we operate in. And I try to explain to people it's pretty small but there's good money in it. When I look at your career arc your fingerprints have been over pretty much every major ebb and flow of the industry that we're in. You've definitely been around and seen a lot of different changes and influenced a lot of the changes. I know when Flippa was starting their deal flow a lot of the brokers just out there were paying close attention because Flippa had such a large audience or has such a large audience still. And so there was a real … and so a little bit concern but also just kind of curiosity. How are they going to change from a marketplace into a brokerage? And it's fascinating to watch the changes occur over the years. And then you joined … you left the brokerage industry, I tell people when they want to come on as brokers I tell them that burnout in this space is real, it's not easy. I probably … I think the average years or the average about time before somebody is just completely frazzled was probably around five years if you're really really good. So you took a break for a while. Bryan: Yeah I kind of. So well … not so, not really for very long but I think that at the time that I had between Leadflow and when I joined you guys was probably about half a year maybe, maybe first a two year. So there I kind of needed to … knew the break from [inaudible 00:15:24.8] to concentrate on the other stuff that I was doing … I'm then doing. This is stuff like I think that entrepreneur syndrome anting up here that I can never sit still and do one thing. So yeah that's the kind of break but yeah I thought that we would give up and get off in this industry. And it is very much a real thing and very few people can last for a long time and at the same time remain sane so yeah. Mark: I took time off so I mean I wouldn't say I was brokering solid without any break for about eight years and then I took over a year off before I took on another client. But there's something weird about this space where it kind of becomes an addiction even after you leave- Bryan: Yeah if you say those I can- Mark: Yeah it is there's something just super fun about it when you actually do start doing deals and are able to help people. But then once you get into it a lot you do get burned out and Joe and I comment sometimes that you know that you're reaching that burnout stage when somebody comes to you with a fantastic business and you feel like it's a burden. Like oh please you know that makes more money and you're ah I felt that I don't want to deal with this right now. Bryan: I think we've all been there. The highs are really high and the lows are super low once they've set. It's kind of like … but it's nice because it's a … I think it sort of evens out because I can be really burned out at some times but at the same time when I then do a deal where everything goes nice and smoothly and I worked with people who are good to work with and you know I can see that we're helping the seller, we're helping the buyer, everybody's happy with everything then that's the kind of feeling that sort of very nicely balances out the few negative experiences. Mark: Absolutely. So I want to talk about … I want to get into that here and hopefully, this will be the real value part for people listening. You know with your or my experience combined that's 20 years of doing this and it'd be interesting for us some time to see if we could estimate what our total closed amount is between the two of us. I bet it'd be a pretty big figure there. But what I want to talk to you about you know when you're in this space of brokering and you're advising people every day it doesn't take very long before you develop a sixth sense for what's going to be a good deal and what's going to be a really difficult deal. So I want to see if we can kind of break out some of those things and I'm going to ask you this and see if you and I kind of agree on some of these points here. But I want to start with the positives, so somebody calls you out of the blue or you got a valuation requests coming through the website and you are in charge of it, you got on the phone with them, what are some things that you look for or if you hear immediately you know those signals start going off this is a great deal, this thing is going to … people are going to love this thing; what are some of those key figures or key indicators? Bryan: Well I think sort of objective stuff aside such as you know what that business is and what their numbers are and so forth. I would say that I get really excited when I talk to a seller who's clearly easy to work with and on the same page with us. And I think I can't really quantify this to a large extent but it's just sort of the gut feeling if you will that you and I … I'm sure that you as well kind of just get even after a couple minutes into meeting somebody. And I can kind of tell that having probably spoken to over I think two, three hundred sellers in the last 10 years I've sort of developed like I said a sixth sense of being able to tell whether somebody is going to be easy to work with or difficult to work with later on in the process. And when I say that I don't really mean so much the future relationship between the owner of the business and me the broker but also that often translates into the relationship between the owner of the business and the eventual buyer of the business. And that's a super important thing because as you know Mark relationship quality if you will between the buyer and the seller is the one thing that can very easily make or break a deal and that's probably the most important thing when it comes to [inaudible 00:19:45.4] any transaction. Mark: Yeah you know I think that that sort of intangible comes down to … at least for me, it comes down to the reasonableness that I see from somebody. And it's when we have a discussion and I want to explain where I see value in the business and maybe where I see some problems in the business you know are they absorbing that information or are they fighting me with that … with that information right? So if you say oh you know the trends on the business are kind of negative and we want to make sure that the trends are going in the right direction. If they come back immediately and say well you're not looking at the right aspects of my business in order to value it. At that point, I'm almost hearing that they're not listening to what we're saying there and just trying to fight us and trying to convince us into a higher valuation. And you know the reality is the marketplace is brutally honest. You know I could say whatever you want me to say it's not going to change that the reality of the marketplace at the end of the day. So that's sort of are they there to listen, are they there to absorb, and of course, I'm there to listen and absorb and learn the business as well. But I think it's that touch of unreasonableness that's one of the soft signals right? Bryan: Yeah and I think this is actually the one thing that's, unfortunately, a lot of people speak to us and get wrong but we're not the people that they need to convince regarding the legend of their business because we're not paying them the money. It's our job to take the business to the market and I just set them up basically, to be honest. And contrary to the belief that some people have what we say or in what words we describe a particular business is not going to influence the valuation of the business because the vast majority acquires at far more sophisticated than that and they look beyond the [inaudible 00:21:31.9] if you will. So there is really very little we can do to influence the value of the business all we can do is reflect what the market at least came to be. Mark: The one thing I try to explain to people is that our valuation and the valuation approach is a predictive value. And that said I had a conversation with a buyer this is probably a few months ago where they took a look at a business I was representing and looked at the valuation approach and he came back to me and said well you know I was looking at this valuation book and I think we should really be using this approach to place a valuation on the business. And of course, you know being a buyer he wanted the price lower, understandably so. And so his valuation approach significantly discounted the business and I had reply that was said that I don't care what sort of formula you use or approach you use, you can use whatever formula or approach you want, end of day we're just trying to predict the marketplace and what one buyer in that marketplace is going to be able to do or be willing to do for that business. The same thing with that on the sell side is just that. What sort of niches do you tend to like when repping a business? Bryan: That's a really interesting question I think that's changed over the years quite significantly. And interestingly enough I think if we would to go back about five years then ironically I hated e-commerce. I really and truly hated e-commerce because it was difficult. There were always issues with stuff like transferring over tangible inventory etcetera etcetera. But that has actually changed 180 degrees and nowadays I would say that I actually have grown to like e-commerce. And if we took all of my closed deals then I think e-commerce has actually easily been the majority. And that kind of adds up with what Quiet Light is doing as well because if you look at the industry in general then you can kind of see certain soft specializations and for Quiet Light that specialization is quite easily e-commerce even though we obviously represent businesses across pretty much all business models and niches. But yeah I think e-commerce nowadays is where our collective expertise and most of my expertise lies in over the last four, five years. Mark: That's fascinating. I know our numbers break down and just under 50% of what we do is e-commerce so that'll be a plurality, SAS comes in second; probably behind that. And then we get into the different types of sites that can really break out from there; completely unintentional. You know I didn't set out and say I'll then become have this soft specialty in e-commerce but by any means. That's fascinating. Well, let's talk a little bit about some of the things that when you're doing an initial valuation call are a kind of those warning signals or kind of those oh man this thing is going to have difficulties selling. I know for me I'm super focused on trends. Trends are probably the number one thing I would look for but I'd be interested to hear what you look at and what some of the big red flags you look out for would be. Bryan: No absolutely I can feel them, trends are a big thing. And I think that the most common sort of warning signs that something might be off would probably be either a significant drop in revenue as of late. So if we see the business being just stable growing for a year or two years and then over the last three months you have a sudden drop in revenue then that certainly indicates that something is very likely off there. Or in the same bane if I see continuous decline over a longer period of time even if it's a slight decline then that also indicates that something might be wrong and there may be some sustainability issues with buying that particular business or the industry that the business operates in or something along those lines. And I think apart from this another thing that is a little controversial because it often results in false positivities if business books are really messy then that can be a warning sign. But also that's when we come in because it's a … that first stage is for us to determine whether that's a true warning sign or if it's just somebody who has never really paid attention to keeping clean books and running that part of the business properly. Which happens quite often because in our industry we often see businesses that have grown essentially out of hand for the owner of the business, they just started a really really small business not worrying about stuff like proper accounting and things like that. And before they knew it the business grown tenfold or a hundredfold and that part of the business has been neglected. But you know in those situations we always try to figure out what's actually going on behind the scenes and whether those things can be fixed and if it's just a case of some negligence or if it's a case that the seller is in fact trying to hide something and got to the books which we do come across I mean on the end as well. Mark: Yeah the books obviously would … are something that we focus on first and foremost. And I think for me it's … messy books don't scare me as much. It's the overly simplified books that scare me. When I get a P&L that's only in Excel and it's a total of 15 grand lines in there I'm thinking something is not right with this. Bryan: Yeah this happens often as well. I kind of put the two in the same bucket, maybe I shouldn't but yeah they sort of go in the same bucket because if someone has taken an hour to put down some numbers in an Excel spreadsheet and it doesn't really have anything firm up there and that can definitely issue. I actually saw a P&L just a few months ago where I noticed that for some reason all the revenue numbers were round numbers. I'm like that's not right, that it cannot be, I mean I'm listing up one client and there are you know two clients and you charge them $7,000 a month each then that just can't be the case. And then it came out that yeah I was just taking some approximates because I don't really track the actual figures so based on what I know how the month was I kind of put that down. No that doesn't really work like that. So if you want to sell your business then you have to have the exact figures and know exactly what the business has been doing. Because even if a broker exists who is happy to list the business having something like this then you came be a 100% in that you're going to run into issues the moment you have a buyer or actually before that. Mark: Yeah round numbers and P&Ls are always a warning sign. I've never had round numbers or very very rarely. All right, I'm going to put you on the spot; I didn't prepare you for this question. But what is one thing that you think buyers need to pay more attention to that they currently don't pay attention to? Or maybe let's put it this way, out of the reports that a business could offer what do you think is one report or one thing that the buyers really don't look at that might provide more insight into the businesses that they're evaluating? Bryan: That's a really good question I think in terms of reports I'm not sure if there is anything major about that. But I would say that I've noticed quite alarmingly that a lot of buyers don't really look beyond the actual business that they are evaluating. And when I say that what I mean is that they don't look at the industry as a whole. They don't kind of pay enough attention to the competition, to where the industry is actually going; whether the industry itself is likely going to be growing for the next five or ten years or the kind and sort of the external stuff like this. And I, myself included actually when I started buying businesses years ago then I later on noticed that I was guilty of the same thing. I was just concentrating on that particular business and the trends and the books of that business that I completely started ignoring everything else, everything that was around it. And I got burned a few times so I learned. I wish I learned before getting burned. Mark: Yeah I think that's fantastic advice, looking beyond seeing if there's room for growth within the industry itself. I had a conversation with Jeff Hunt and asked him a similar question and he said knowing where your customers are coming from which I thought was fantastic advice. You know understanding that the process of you're looking at a business, to acquire a business and you see that it has customers, understanding fully how are these customers being acquired. So I think those two bits of information might be quite useful. Okay, so we'll bookend this and I'll have this as the last question here for our conversation. What would you say is the one bit of information you see buyers frequently look at and you think is probably not as important as they think it is? Bryan: That's a good and very difficult question. I'd say that it doesn't happen very often but I think the reason why I say this is because over the last few days I've actually had two separate conversations in the thing where I've been asked for things like the company's liabilities financial and balance sheets and things like this. I think that's due with a little bit of misinformation. So you know exactly what I mean but just so all the listeners know, the vast majority of the deals that we do in this industry are asset purposes. Which means that what you're buying is the website, any trademarks, any Amazon accounts you name it but you're not buying the [inaudible 00:31:27.9] which means that you're not buying any liabilities, you're not buying any entities themselves, any contracts, etcetera unless they're transferred over. Which if I close because it makes things simpler and … a lot simpler to both buyers and the sellers and this often means that in terms of the information required in such due diligence as a buyer you don't have to spend your time and money making sure that corporate entity itself is in good order because that's never going to be your concern or your liability. So that's something that I've come across a few times just recently. Apart from that, I don't really think there are a lot of things that happened too often. Maybe at times getting a little bit too granular with old stuff is something that I would rather not spend that much time on. Obviously looking at … you know spot checking certain months or certain periods is something that can easily be very beneficial because if there's anything funny then the stakes will come up this way. But I wouldn't necessarily go back to 2015 or 2016 and start asking questions about why it was there a small bit in revenue in March 2016 because [inaudible 00:32:49.8] seller doesn't even remember it or if they do and if they can find out then that information is really quite irrelevant right now. Mark: Absolutely getting to that granular detail years ago could be an absolute pit fall for buyers. And I think there's obviously buyers who wanted to protect them against risk as much as possible as do we. We want to make sure buyers are protected from risk but you can spend all your time looking for what's going to get you and then end up losing out on the big picture sometimes as well. So that part is a balanced net. Cool. Hey, this has been fun. With our team being spread out all over the country literally all over the world we don't get a whole lot of opportunities for a face to face. So this podcast and the video portion of this is an opportunity for you and I to have a face to face conversation which is always fun. And whoever is listening can either I guess benefit or suffer through that conversation. So all right any last parting words of wisdom for the listeners? Bryan: Well not really but I think if there's anything then I'd actually like to go back with … go back to where we started off which is if I had one piece of advice over to the buyer and sellers is be a nice person, be good to work with and that's something that is always going to pay off. If you're making yourself difficult then any eventual deal is likely going to be difficult as well. But if you keep an open mind and remain realistic then likely you're going to enjoy the whole process working with us, working with the other part of the transaction and everything is going to go nice and smoothly. Mark: Absolutely I think our listeners have heard this from us before. You know these are financial transactions but they're also human transactions. Bryan: Exactly. Mark: And you've got to get all parts right, cool. Bryan thank you so much for joining and yeah we'll be talking and I'm sure. Everyone that wants to reach out to Bryan you know how to contact him you can find his contact information on the site. He's got a ton of experience. So I'll offer what I offer for myself personally and that is if anybody has questions or want to run something by Bryan just reach out and it works as well. We're here to help and more than happy to talk to anybody who wants to ask us a few questions. Thanks, Bryan. Bryan: Absolutely, my pleasure Mark. Links and Resources: Bryan's Website QuietLightProfile

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What Harvard is Teaching MBAs About Acquisition Entrepreneurship

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 17, 2018 38:49

For decades, Harvard's MBA program has been primarily focused on the traditional model of entrepreneurship. In the past 6 years an elective course on the acquisition of established businesses has been attracting as many as 30% of the program's candidates. We had the pleasure of sitting down with Royce Yudkoff, who teaches the course “Entrepreneurship For Acquisition” at Harvard Business School's MBA program. Here at Quiet Light we've also had the honor of collaborating on the course for the past 5 years. Today, we delve into the details of how Harvard is sending experienced professionals out into the business acquisition marketplace with hands-on experience that is invaluable to their success. The trend toward real-life marketplace experience as a replacement for textbooks has taken hold in Harvard's MBA program. These case-study and field guide learning modules are teaching candidates the key ways to enter and be successful in the acquisition arena. The course Royce teaches alongside Professor Richard Ruback is focused on how to screen potential acquisition targets, do the financing, negotiate the typical deal terms, and do due diligence when buying a small business. Episode Highlights: Harvard MBAs are on average 28-35 years old so all they come into the program with professional experience. The course works with real life companies and case studies so students learn about how companies succeed in buying existing businesses. The course follows the entire arc of buying a small business from the search, to the financing, through due diligence, and up to the transition of ownership. The participants are learning how weaving good business practices from the very start of the process leads to better chances of ROI and growth. Royce explains how the candidates are taught the best financial practices for buying for a business, whether through traditional bank or private equity investment. The course follows students through the program and beyond by performing surveys and gathering statistics on success rates for those who go on to acquire companies. Royce shares the single most common contributor to the success and non-success in the search and acquisition process and what he advises all buyers to look for in a potentially successful business. Transcription: Mark: Joe did you know that a dream of mine that has gone unfulfilled in my life was to attend the Harvard Business School? Joe: I didn't know that knowing that your nickname was slacker in college I would think that'd be the last dream you could ever have. Mark: Well, we technically changed my name my last year mainly because I had a t-shirt that said slacker on it. And it made a terrible first impression when you walked in the class the first day the professor sees that. You get targeted pretty quickly. Joe: You know we did a tour of Stanford last summer because I have teenage boys. We happen to be there, my kids probably won't get in; I understand 3% do. And when I graduated from college, I went to Northeastern University in Boston, when I was done I was done. I never wanted to go back to college. Touring a campus like Stanford or I imagine Harvard just at any age would make you want to go back. Mark: Yeah it's a fantastic school. I love their MBA Program there because they do things a little bit different. It's not textbook based, it's case study based. So a Harvard MBA student, when they attend that school first of all the school pretty much requires that you have real world experience. Not 100% but it's really hard to get in if you don't have any real world experience. They want people who have been out there in the field doing stuff. And the entire class structure itself is also based around case studies. So you end up with a group of people that you do these case studies with and you study real life, real business scenarios and go about how … figure out how to address those real world scenarios. It's a way of trying to replicate some of the things that they're going to actually experience when they leave Harvard Business School. So yeah a few years after I graduated college and had a job and I thought well it would be a lot of fun to attend that. I really liked the idea of it but life got in the way. Bad grades got in the way and it never was something that I actually was able to pursue. I went so far as taking a GMAT but I never actually applied. But I bring this up because for as you know for the past five years we've been working with Harvard at Quiet Light Brokerage. They have done what a lot of people that listen to this podcast know, they have really started to turn their focus towards entrepreneurship acquisition or acquisitions and entrepreneurship and the combination. And they have a whole course that they teach on it; how to build … sorry how to buy a small business and lead an entrepreneurial life through acquisitions. And for those five years, we've actually been working with them, they approached us to see if we could support their class with some supportive materials and me being the closet Harvard fan boy that I am was like absolutely that sounds really cool. Joe: Excellent, excellent. Well, I'm excited to listen to this podcast. I know that they did some studies that show the people that go through this course and the success rate that they have. And it's really more about buying versus building which is a little follow up from almost with the podcast with Walker that you had so I'm excited hear it. Mark: Yeah absolutely so there are some statistics in here, people ask us this all the time you know what percentage of buyers are successful. Well, Harvard is actually tracking that. They're taking a look at the kids who go through the courses … and I shouldn't say kids these guys are 30 years old with tons of experience. But they're looking at people who go through the courses doing acquisition and they're tracking to see how they're successful. Also in this episode, we talk about what they're teaching on the course, what they're guiding their students as far as how large of acquisitions they should be making, how to do the financing on these large acquisitions. So it's really a chock full of a lot of information that's been taught at the highest levels at one of the leading institutions in the world. Joe: And all of it hopefully and an awful lot of it can be applied to the businesses that we're listing. Because I'm going to just throw some numbers out there for those that haven't been to the website recently, we've got listings of really all shapes and sizes. But we've got a couple up there in that I think minus under LOI just under nine million dollars. Brian's got one at twice that amount. And then, of course, anything from a couple hundred thousand dollars up to that 80 million dollar range. So these larger listings that take more funding from Venture Cap money or from a larger SBA loan are really becoming more prevalent. So I think everything that these guys talk about and the book that they published as well can be very helpful to the audience here today. Mark: Absolutely let's get on to it. Mark: All right Royce, how are you? Royce: I'm great it's a pleasure to be with you today Mark. Thank you for organizing this. Mark: Oh my pleasure. I'm so glad to be able to actually finally talk to you and see you in person as well. We've been working together I guess sort of indirectly now for what four or five years? Royce: Exactly and you've been a big help to our course in Harvard Business School so we're very appreciative. I should start with a big thank you. Mark: Well it was always my dream when I was in college and then shortly after college to get my MBA at Harvard. I started looking at the GMAT and I took PEP courses for that and then life happened. And I never got around to actually doing it. I actually talked to a Harvard recruiter at one point, sat down with them and was going through that but then it never did happen. So the fact that I actually get to participate in you guys program is kind of like a dream of mine come true that I get to actually work with you guys at least indirectly if not directly as well now. All right so the Harvard Program, how long have you guys had this Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition Program? Royce: That program is now in its 6th year Mark, and for decades Harvard has had a large program teaching people about traditional entrepreneurship; what I refer to as rubbing two sticks together and make fire, meeting … going into startups. But about half a dozen years ago we started teaching about the idea of buying an established profitable company usually from a retiring founder and the idea has really created a lot of excitement at Harvard. About 30% of all of our MBA students take these courses to try if this is a potential career and learn about it; which makes us probably the largest elective course on campus. Mark: Wow, that's fantastic. Now you do this and one other professor Richard … is it Ruback? Royce: Yes Richard Ruback. So Rick and I created a course and we co-teach it and it's really become our … the center of our professional activity. Including following our students closely who go down this path. We stay very connected to them after they graduate from the program. Mark: Yeah I know that's great. So I want to make just one point about Harvard's MBA Program and again I know this because I looked at potentially participating in this program but you guys are a little bit different than other MBA programs in the way that you set up your courses right? That it's a lot of this case study sort of approach to everything is that right? Royce: I think the two differences in our programs from what most people think of as MBA is this first exactly what you said which is we do not lecture, we do not have textbooks. The whole two year program is set up around cases which are sort of short nonfiction business stories. And the discussion the faculty elicits about the decisions they require to be made. And the second difference is our students typically come to us at about age 28 and graduate at age 30. So they have six or seven years of mid-level, junior level, executive experience before coming into the classroom. So they're not kids; they're young professionals by the time they leave. Those are the two distinctions I highlight about HBS. Mark: Yeah and one of the things I love about that … so one of the knocks against university especially among the entrepreneurial community is that a lot of entrepreneurs see university degrees and MBA degrees as being almost wasted money right? Because a lot of them have become successful. But what I love about you guys program is the fact that you do require that experience is not textbook learning, its actual looking case studies. Delving in deep into these actual cases and amplifying a real world experience in the classroom setting. Royce: Yeah you're exactly right. That's the purpose of the case studies. In addition, the faculty is routinely engaged in a commercial world too and thus expecting to bring that into the classroom. And we also utilize experts like yourself Mark, and bring in work done by experts or even experts as guests into the classroom. So we try to stay very engaged with the practical commercial world. Mark: That's great. That's absolutely great. I absolutely love that. Now you guys have also … you and Rick have also put together a book. And for those watching at YouTube at … this is the book here, HBR Guide to Buying a Small Business. And you put this out two years ago is that right? Royce: Yes we'd put it out two years ago and it's been very satisfying. Our goal was to produce a very practical handbook that walks people through each step in buying a smaller firm and to try and reach beyond campus to the thousands of people who are thinking about it or wanting to do it and give them something that's just immensely practical and we've been very gratified. I think almost everyone who goes down this path ends up reading this book and we get lots of comments that it's been helpful. Mark: That's a really good book. I mean I've thumbed through it before and you know I've learned a lot in this industry by doing and that has its learning curve. Frankly, a book like this to start out would have been really really useful in shortening that learning curve. So it was a really good book and I assume that you can get this on the HBR website correct? Royce: The HBR website and even more conveniently on Amazon, so it's just an easy thing to buy and a kind of quick easy read as well. Mark: It is a quick easy read. There's large margins in there as well so that people can take notes alongside it; which is super super helpful. So all of you out there that are readers and soak up as much information add this one to your list; for sure it's definitely one to add. You're getting some good information here. All right so let's do this, let's get into some of the material that you guys actually teach in the Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition Course. What is the format and what is the structure or maybe what is the syllabus that you would look at for a typical is it on a semester basis or is it a full year? Royce: Yes it's a full year course and we start with an overview of the small firms market. Sort of what are some of the management issues in running a small firm, how do you buy small firms. And we let people sort of figure out whether this is of interest to them generally. And then the course gets really really practical. We kind of follow each step in a small firm acquisition beginning with how do you source opportunities, how do you evaluate them, how do you do due diligence, how do you finance them, and how do you negotiate the legal documents and then we move them to sort of a transition because almost always after a firm is sold the seller stays on for a while at least part time teaching the new owner the ropes. And that is somewhere between three months and 12 months part time for the seller but it's a key part of making these purchases successful. So that's how we [inaudible 00:11:59.1] we like to say we're following the arc of the small firm acquisition. Mark: Now the arc is something that our listeners are probably very familiar with. It's something that we have laid out on our site as well. I want to ask a broader question with the popularity of your course. When people think about Harvard Business School I think a lot of them think about graduates going into large financial firms you know working in Boston, working in New York, and really kind of working with a Fortune 500's out there. Do you see a lot of your students now pursuing this more entrepreneurial path? Royce: Yes I do and it's a great comment you made because I do think Harvard is viewed that way. And one of the reasons this program is important is it's highlighting the fact that the business school makes a difference in ways that help ordinary Americans. In other words we send our well trained, smart, energetic graduates into cities all across the country and they create jobs for regular people that make their lives better. I'll give you a quick example, one of our students … and this is very representative is a woman named Jennifer Rouse. She spent about five or six years as an engineer at a couple of leading manufacturing companies in the Midwest. Came to HBS to be trained as a general manager. Fell in love with the idea of running her own company. Instead of getting a job out of HBS she searched and bought a revenue cycle management company in the Pacific Northwest that essentially handles the billing for municipal ambulance services to insurance companies; very specialized complicated set of procedures. And she's grown the business from about 40 employees to 70 employees over the three years she's owned it. So it's been an enormously gratifying experience for her and profitable one. It allowed an entrepreneur who wanted to retire to get his just reward and take cash out of the company. But it's also created a lot of good paying jobs in that mid-sized city. So kind of all the way around it's exactly what our business school ought to be doing, we think. And that's what we're trying to do in this program. Mark: You know one thing I think that people don't understand about our industry and when I talk to them for the first time, they often ask “Who buys an online business?” And one thing I've found is the synergy that exists between the bootstrappers and the startups, these guys that are really really good at the hustle and they can create something amazing out of practically nothing. And then they grow up to a certain size where it now needs management and now needs … it kind of enters into that phase two and a lot of these entrepreneurs don't want to do that because they don't want to be managers. They don't want to do that additional growth step of now managing lots of people. Royce: Yeah and I think that's exactly right. These businesses reach transition point where once they needed someone who is not only energetic and smart but knew service they were providing incredibly well and 15 or 20 years later it's more about a trained manager who's got a certain managerial skills. I'll also add to your comment that there's a life cycle to entrepreneurship. You know the 60 year old entrepreneur who's made a lot of money in their smaller firm quite likely might not want to work as hard as they did when they're 30 years old. And that's a very sensible decision that the business may have a lot more potential in it in the hands of a 30 or 35 year old who's willing to put in those 60 and 70 hour weeks. And that's another transition that makes sense for everybody. Mark: Sure. I remember one client that I worked with. He had … he was selling … well just say durable goods, I won't go into exactly what he was selling, but he was sourcing all the inventory putting it in to a secondary garage and fulfilling all the orders on his own. I mean he was working 45 hours a week and have really maxed out and I asked him I said “Why are you selling them?” because business is growing, it's growing rapidly. Why not hire on some people and kind of expand to an actual warehouse. And his answer was probably the simplest most logical answer I've ever heard it was because I don't want to. Yeah, I don't want to manage people. I like doing this on my own but that's the obvious next step. Royce: Yes. Yeah, exactly and it's a very human thing and the right answer is to put the business in the hands of someone who's going maximize it. I think conversely from the perspective of a young entrepreneur through acquisition, I see this opportunity as so much lower risk than starting a company from scratch. Because you're buying an established proven profitable business with a business model that really works and an owner who will sort of do an orderly transition with you. So it's a way to express entrepreneurial desire without taking the enormous risks of a startup or having to have some idea. Mark: Right you're absolutely … and I think this is something we talked about in a recent podcast and that is the difference between buying versus building a business and how you can get that leg up and get that initial startup so much faster. There's much less friction in working with something that's already established like that. So let's do this, let's follow the arc of the deal that you had talked about a little bit earlier and let's give the listeners here and the few viewers just a little flavor as to what this arc looks like. And maybe some of the things that you guys teach in the course as well. Let's start with this how do you source your deals? This is a problem for so many buyers out there. I've talked to some buyers that are looking for a year and a half, two years for a good business. And the good ones frankly I know from experience when we put something out that's good we're going to get a lot of intent on that within four or five days and so it can be really tough. So what do you guys teach as far as sourcing deals and some of the tips that you would offer there? Royce: You're exactly right. You know sourcing is immensely difficult in a small firm space. First of all, there are two paths people go down. One, which we certainly recommend is dealing with the intermediary professionals in the small firm space. As you know there are hundreds and hundreds of these across North America. And you're required to just do an enormous amount of outreach because unlike say with real estate where there are multiple listing services, confidentiality is extremely important to these owners of smaller firms. And so you only get to see these firms by establishing relationships with reputable intermediaries. So it's a great deal of work to establish that kind of dialogue. And then on top of that, once you have done that, the majority of businesses that are for sale are not high quality businesses. They're average at best and a few of them are really good businesses. So it's an enormous outreach and sourcing process that frankly takes from the time someone starts sourcing to the time they close the average time is about 18 months to find a good quality business negotiate diligence it and close that. So … and that's 18 months of full time work. Probably the question I get asked most often by aspiring entrepreneurs through acquisition is “Is this something I can do part time?” because it would be so great to do it part time right? You could keep a full time job, earn income, and you imagine you might be able to do it next on weekends like rebuilding an old car or refinishing a basement. But the truth is I've never seen anyone do this part time. It is for everyone who goes down this road it is a demanding full time job to source, evaluate, diligence, negotiate and it takes an average of 18 months. So it's hard. Mark: What are some ways in your opinion that people can speed that up if they're really anxious to get going? Like their working a corporate job right now and they want to get out of that corporate job. Do you have any tips on how they can speed that up? Royce: Yes we see that a lot of people that have worked in a corporate job they just find it unsatisfying and they want the professional independence that comes with this kind of entrepreneurship. You know it's hard to make this go faster. I've seen people close quickly because we've seen scores and scores of people do this, I've seen people buy businesses in as little as five or six months. But I have to say my conclusion after years of doing this is that those are just flukes; that in the same way that the person struggles on for two years is a fluke. That you get some outliers but it's just really hard to make the process go faster. And one reason for that is out of those 18 months probably the last four months are spent in that deal you'll close on. You know doing that signing the LOI, diligence, financing, closing. So really you're talking about a little over a year of searching before you finally get to that deal that makes. I wish I could hurry up this process. But it's one of the reasons that I suppose this space hasn't been beat up or overcrowded is that someone has to really want this. Mark: Sure and I think that's really good advice. You're right there's some luck of the draw right? There's just some pure luck on the draw. I talked to one person years ago I was … when we first tried to do the podcast and it didn't really work, but I talked to one buyer who said that he was ready for that sort of 18 month time period and within two months something just spread across his desk and it was perfect. But he didn't have a financing lined up for it and so he had to let it go. But it was that luck of the draw. It came to him perfectly; right away if he was ready he would have been able to move on it. That actually leads well to my next question which is financing. What are you guys advising your students and what are you seeing them actually do in terms of financing some of these deals? Royce: Yeah so the typical acquisition is financed with about two thirds debt and one third equity. And let me deal with each of those. On the debt side in the small firms marketplace, it is almost universal for the sellers to take back some amount of seller paper usually 20 to 25% of the purchase price is taken back in what's on average at four, five year subordinated note. There are few exceptions to this but it's a very large percentage of the transactions. And about 45% on average of the transaction is funded by a senior bank loan. And this comes in two flavors; one, is just a regular way, a commercial bank loan will typically finance a little under half of the deal and it will be repaid over five to seven years usually from a local or regional bank. The first candidate being a bank the company has an existing relationship with. The second path is the Small Business Administration has a terrific program called the 7(a) Program. I'm sure you're familiar with this. It's administered through banks. Most of the banks that lend commercial loans also will do a 7(a) guaranteed loan. It is a wonderful loan product because they will lend against businesses that have no tangible assets; service businesses that just have cash flow. They lend up to 80% of the business. They lend over 10 years. There are no covenants. It's a very very attractive loan with a single exception that you are required to sign a personal guarantee on it. So it's something for very thoughtful consideration by the entrepreneur. But those are the two sources of debt. And as I said with the salary debt they cover the two thirds of the purchase price. One third is usually raised from friends and family. And most common is that these prospective entrepreneurs will go around and raise money in $100,000 here or $200,000 here from anywhere from six to 15 individuals and they will cut a deal to divide the prospective profits between their investor group and themselves. Because this typical small business that we see … when we talk about a small business we're talking about a company with one to two million dollars of EBITDA that might sell for five times EBITDA or 10 million dollars of which three million dollars might be equity. And so it's not that difficult to raise that amount of equity by passing the hat. Mark: I think one thing that a lot of our buyers that come into us feel is that they can't reach that level of a transaction right? They can't reach that 10 million dollar acquisition and so they start out a lot with these $200,000 or $300,000 businesses and then they find that they've effectively buying that job. So it seems like you guys are really pushing a lot of your students to think a little bit bigger than that and do … in buying a business as well. Royce: Yeah I think that's exactly right. You know I think they are … when you get to a very small business and you are the entrepreneur you're showing up every day to process out that day's work and that's that $200,000 EBIDTA business. You know when the business gets to be a million dollars you usually have some department heads who report up to you and you're coming in thinking about the week's objectives or maybe the month's objectives. And then when you get up to a business with say two million dollars in EBIDTA, you're really managing a little further it than that. So the jobs are very different along the way and so with that we tend to point our potential entrepreneurs towards the larger end of that spectrum. But entrepreneurship can surely be expressed anywhere along the spectrum. Mark: Yeah, I think a big phrase that we hear all the time in our space is work on your business rather than in your business. And it's a transition point for a lot of people. But it seems like you guys are really pushing people to start with a business that you would work on because some of that infrastructure is going to exist already. Royce: Yes I think that's right. That is our goal. We recognize that people have different resources including experience in managing and opportunity to access capital. Mark: Right. Do you have any tips for people that might be considering reaching out to friends and family? How do you get over some of the discomfort maybe with asking friends or family for investments? Royce: Yeah I get that question a lot so I do have some recommendations. I think the first recommendation is just a psychological one which is when you go to someone to ask them for an investment you really have to make yourself feel that you're not asking for a favor. It's not like you're asking for personal loan, your presenting an opportunity to that person. And it's one you believe in so sincerely that you're going to dedicate the next five or seven or eight years of your life to it. So it's very important to really be in that psychological headspace. My second recommendation is to actually start with the people who know you best. Because they're going to be really inclined if they respect you and like you to line up behind you and then it's going to make it easier to go to people who know you less well. My third recommendation is the time to approach people for investing is when you start your search; it's not when you find your company. Because what you want to do is collect a group of people who might be interested in investing and update them across the year or year and a half that you're searching. Because when you do this, it allows them to get to know you better. It shows them that you have lots of energy, it shows them your street smarts, you talk to them of that deals you looked at but ended up rejecting which gives them a sense of your high quality standards. So when you finally approach them with a deal in hand they've been expecting this and now you're making one sale, not two. You've sort of sold them on the idea that you're a hardworking and street smart entrepreneur who is being highly selective and now you're simply selling them on the merits of the business. So for that reason, it's tremendously important to approach them early and get them to follow you. It's also a much more comfortable discussion than showing up with a deal in hand because you're able to say look if you're sincerely interested in this I'll make the investment and inform you about my journey and you'll have plenty of time to decide. It takes a lot of pressure out of that discussion. When you approach the types of people I see are entrepreneurs approaching … and here you should think about people who are partners in law firms, entrepreneurs have their own small businesses, these people don't have … while they are wealthy people by normal standards they don't have the resources to invest in private equity funds. They can't just throw up a check for two million dollars or five million dollars that private equity fund would expect. So when you come to them with the opportunity to participate they would essentially as a private equity investment; it's very additive to them. It's not an opportunity they see every day to make the kind of returns you can make buying a private business. Mark: Yeah and I think … tons of really good information in there. You're right as far as that relationship is concerned when you're asking somebody for money, building that relationship over time makes that discussion a little bit easier and also gives you the flexibility. That example I brought up of the guy who started his search and didn't have his funding lined up in advance, he actually gave me that exact same point. He said had I been having these conversations with friends and family in advance I would have been able to do this deal very very quickly. But it was just way too much for him to try and call in together an investment group within a few weeks. These things don't happen in a week, they happen over months and even a year. Royce: Absolutely and as you know from your own professional experience in those last eight weeks before closing the entrepreneur is sort of fighting on multiple directions. He's dealing with a lender, he's dealing with lawyers on a purchase agreement, he's finishing his due diligence, he's dealing with investors; you just don't have time to sort of raise investment capital from scratch. Mark: That's great. All right let's talk a little bit about the transition stuff and then we're going to be rounding out as far as our time here is concerned. Now there's some stuff obviously that happens in between, we've talked about ways to search for a company and source those deals. It can take about 18 months on average depending on a little bit of the luck of the draw, talked a little bit about the finances and some of the vehicles there. So let's assume now that you find that business, you find a good opportunity, you've gone through negotiation. And I know there's a lot that we could talk about just through the negotiation stage but I want to talk a little bit about the transition period and plan. How important do you think it is to keep previous employees, previous key people, previous owners on staff and what other elements do you think are really really kind of you should almost always take these steps in a transition? Royce: The advice I give entrepreneurs through acquisition is twofold. First, the first and most important advice I give them is in your first six months don't make any important changes. You'll have lots and lots of decisions to make but if an important change is one that is expensive or hard to reverse hold off on that. Because you will be a different person at the end of six months than you are on the day you walk into that company. And if it's the kind of enduring profitable business we hope people will buy, it certainly can wait on these decisions. I also find that transition periods can be relatively short. Three to six months is usually all you need in a transition period with some occasional access to the seller after that. By the way, this is another reason why having a seller subordinated loan is important because you want the seller to be financially on side with you after the purchase. That that seller is going to introduce you to his or her important clients. They're going to make an endorsement of you as the person they're entrusting the business to. They're going to answer a lot of process and historical questions that in a small company aren't written down in any textbook. But for most of these businesses that transition can take place well over three to six months. And after all, you want to buy a business that is not so centered on the selling entrepreneur that transferring it isn't easy. In other words, if that transfer is really really really hard that might not be a business that you want to buy. So I think that's a consideration you want to have before you step in and commit to the business. But a three to six months transition I've seen works pretty well. By the way, it might be helpful as long as we're sort of at this point in the arc of buying a small business if I shared a little data we collected over the years of that success in this path. Mark: That was my next question, so perfect timing. Royce: Okay. Mark: Yes let's go there. Royce: Well we've had the chance to survey a fairly large number of entrepreneurs through acquisition and what we've found over that six years that we've been doing this is of the people who embark on a full time search to buy a company about 70 to 80% of them end up acquiring a company and closing on it and about 20 to 25% try it, give up, and go back and get jobs that are pretty much like the jobs that they had before they embarked on this path. Of course, they've spent a year or to a year and a half doing this and that hasn't been a profitable use of time except in terms of experience but they go back and get a job that tends to look like what they had three quarters of them end up closing on a company. And then we turn to the question of is this successful? It's harder to get that data because these are all private companies but over the years Rick and I have had the benefit of actually getting some very active investors in these type of small firms to share with us their financial history of all their investments. And we've collected about 60 different transactions made by a handful of professional investors and what we found is that approximately 80% of those are profitable and about 20% are unprofitable; which is a really high rate of investment success. I mean if you think of that investing in the stock market and do you get four out of five investments profitable, I mean that would be a tremendous bar of success to have. And of the investments that are made both winners and losers the average rate of return to the investors has been about 22% annually; which is also a very high return consistent with what you would expect in private equity investments. Very importantly these results don't tell any specific individual what their results are going to be. I mean you could find a company or not to find a company, you could be successful or not successful. But I think it suggests that the area is a reasonably fruitful area to try and achieve success in. That's what I take away from the data. Mark: That's really good and I get these questions all the time so I actually now have something to go back to people with. This is great. I am curious on the 20% that are not successful; do you guys have any data as to what's leaned to do at not being profitable? Royce: Yeah. Well, of course, there's always a huge element of chance as you and I have talked about earlier in this. But yes I think that there is a single most common contributor to success and non-success in the search. And that is when an entrepreneur through acquisition start searching on their very first day looking at their very first prospective deal they quite rightly set their standards unbelievably high. In other words, nothing would get them to buy the first company they see because they want to learn what's available in the market. And as they see more and more companies they gradually bring down their standards into what normal market is for a small company. In other words, they start to say okay I'm going to raise the price I offer into the range that companies transact that. I'm not going to require that this company be absolutely perfect. It's okay that it has some flaws like every company. And their quality standard gradually moves to market. How quickly they were able to learn what a small company really looks like determines how successful they're going to be. Some people never get there. Some people it takes a year to get there. Some people can do it in 60 to 90 days and they have a much better chance of buying a company in the time period. By the way Mark just as in the side the same thing is going on with sellers as I'm sure you'd recognize that person who owned a business for 30 years enters the market with a price expectation. It is well above market and as they get feedback from the market they're gradually bringing their expectations down to market or they're leaving the market. What you're looking for is the collision between those two forces entering the zone at the same time but that speed of learning is the difference between being highly likely to succeed entrepreneur through acquisition and not. Mark: A lot of the work that we do at Quiet Light Brokerage with sellers is that sphere of expectations in trying to bring them to that place. Or more importantly I guess advising them to only enter into the marketplace when their expectations have moved because it's got to happen, right? Royce: Exactly. And it's a delicate conversation as I'm sure you've experienced many times. Mark: It is you know we try to be very just blunt with people. My personal background is before I started Quiet Light Brokerage I got really good advice from an intermediary who told me to wait but then when I actually went to market with them they actually blew my expectations up higher and when I got those first offers and it's how people at the marketplace is brutally honest. You know I might be nice the marketplace isn't, they'd just be honest and blunt. And when I got those first few offers it was like a punch in the gut. Like wow okay I'm not even in the same neighborhood of what you guys are talking about. I want to leave with this question, if you were to be talking to a potential buyer and you were to give them one or two just solid pieces of advice and that's all you had time to be able give them because that's also all the time we have left, what would you tell them? Royce: I would tell them to look for an established, slow growing, slow changing company because for a first time entrepreneur having an enduringly profitable business is the most important thing. It will allow them to make the kind of mistakes a first time CEO makes and still be successful. Sometimes people are enamored by fast growth but fast growth means change, competition, new customers. So something that's established and slowing growing and proven is what they want to look for. And it's okay that it is in a quote boring type business, you'll find plenty of excitement as being a CEO. That would be my number one piece of advice to a potential buyer. Mark: Well I wish I had talked to you before I did my first acquisition. I think that would have been helpful. Royce: Yeah. Mark: Royce, thank you so much for coming on here. Again I've been completely enamored working with Harvard Business School over the past several years. I hope that we can continue to work with you guys and someday maybe if it works out for your guys you'd be able to come out there as well and I'll meet you guys in person so thank you so much. Royce: Thank you and we're very grateful for your participation. Links and Resources: Harvard MBA Program Entrepreneurship through Acquisition Course Royce's Book

ceo new york amazon americans teaching entrepreneurship north america fortune harvard mba midwest stanford small business roi sort pacific northwest fell acquisition harvard business school touring delving pep sba northeastern university loi small business administration ebitda hbr hbs harvard mba mba programs gmat markit quiet light brokerage quiet light hbr guide mark you ruback ebidta mark yeah harvard program joe you mark well mark oh mark yes mark right acquisition entrepreneurship mark all mark now mark absolutely

Acquisition Entrepreneurship: 4 Models of Building Value

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 13, 2018 34:42

We welcome Walker Deibel as the latest member of the Quiet Light Brokerage team. He's joining us today to talk about startup failures and how what he calls “acquisition entrepreneurship” can help buyers learn to grow value in their business after they buy it. Walker has acquired 7 companies in the past 10 years, both on and offline. By his third acquisition, he found that he was looking for businesses that had the right infrastructure and management already in place. Walker is here giving his insights into buying versus building your next business. From a stint in digital printing at the dawn of the digital age, a film production “hobby” that has him listed on IMDb, to a failed startup that seemed to have every ingredient for success, right up to his current successes buying established businesses, Walker truly has experience in every aspect of the business building and acquisition spectrum. Perhaps there is no right or wrong way to come into business, but there are advantages and disadvantages to each approach. Episode Highlights: Not every business should be bought. If you have an idea that you think can fly go out and by all means get that VC to get it started. You can have the best idea, the best team, and all the hallmarks for success yet still fail if you miss the mark on one key aspect. Take an existing infrastructure, finance the purchase, and from there go to work. If you succeed you have a great chance for high ROI. Buyers need to find the right business for them based on their strength and weaknesses. Acquiring an established business means you are free to focus on the particular parts of the business that most need attention, aiding the growth of the enterprise as a whole. Walker discusses what he calls the 4 Models of Building Value once you buy. Owners can get themselves out of the operation side and really work as an investor. A lot more can be accomplished by working on your business rather than in your business. Everything in business up until now has been about hitting the home run. Sometimes growing businesses should just aim to hit some doubles and triples. The buyer and seller relationship is a key element in the acquisition process. There are good buyers and there are bad buyers. The relationship is beyond just the transaction. Try to communicate with to seller why you are the perfect fit for that business. Transcription: Mark: All right Hey Joe How are you? Oh you're not Joe; Walker. Walker, how are you? Walker: I'm great Mark how are you? Mark: Good, good. For anyone watching or anyone listening obviously we do not have Joe this week. Joe is off exploring the eternal city of Rome and I am sitting here just a pile of jealousy wishing that I could be there. So … but good for Joe he definitely deserves the break. He works really hard. I will never say this publicly with him on the podcast but I will say it here and trust that he's not going to listen to it so his head doesn't get too big. But I do have somebody here, Walker Deibel right? Walker: Deibel. Mark: Deibel, I've been pronouncing it Deibel for a while. Walker and I know each other from a past transaction he bought a listing from me, a business from me a few years ago but Walker is also going to be joining the Quiet Light Brokerage team here in about a month. Maybe less by the time that this episode airs and so he is somebody to get to know as well. From that regard we're going to have a good conversation today mainly because your background Walker is super extensive. Like a lot of the people that work with Quiet Light Brokerage, you have that direct experience in buying, building your own online businesses. So let's do this, let's go back and have you introduce yourself a little bit a little bit of your background. Walker: Sure. Gosh where to start, I guess I think I've started a few companies and all of them tend not to do very well. And that's not something that I'm prideful about but I think that it's a common theme that you hear from entrepreneurs which is you know fail. Fail often; I've done that plenty and statistically that's what startups do. Conversely I've had tremendous success in actually buying existing companies and growing them and over the past 10 years I've been able to acquire seven companies in all. Some of them offline some of them online as you've discussed and I just want to take one moment and say that having looked at hundreds of offering memorandums I became a very early fan of Quiet Light Brokerage. I just think that what you've been able to build at Quiet Light is very special. You work with sellers, you list them at the right time, and you think about it in the same way that buyers would. So whenever I look at a listing from Quiet Light I'm just absolutely thrilled with the package and excited to be on with you now because of that. Mark: And if anyone's wondering I do pay by the compliment so [inaudible 00:03:37.5]. So your background is in buying and you bought a number of companies you said … how many was it, 10? Walker: Seven, I bought seven over 10 years yeah. Mark: Okay over 10 years, I thought it was seven. And not everything has been online you own a couple of different offline businesses as well. Walker: Sure. Mark: And you're back and before that was publishing right? Walker: It was printing so yeah we … I, my first company I bought pretty much because when I was in graduate school, when I took in my MBA our startup failed [inaudible 00:04:07.2] something we called Avatar, it came out with the real 3D and we had that real 3D technology in point of purchase advertising and had a great team and had some real interest and it all just kind of got hung up in legal. I guess the people in the technology decided that they would rather build Avatar after that startup kind of washed up and I actually went and bought a book printing company. And it was a time when print is dead was a common headline. You know Amazon was sort of moving in, the Kindle was coming out, the iPad was coming out, and bookstores are going out of business left and right. And what I saw Mark was opportunity, it was one of these things where the industry was fragmented there was a lot of players, a lot of let's just say legacy teams doing the wrong things in the industry at that time. And so I bought a book printing company, all of our customers were publishers and you know they too were fighting the same things that we were seeing. And so although the offset book printing industry was declining, the digital book printing industry was climbing at a rate of about 28 [inaudible 00:05:17.8] was pretty clear when it happened. But yeah trying to get that business online and produce those short run digital products for authors and companies trying to manage their inventory levels was the challenge ahead. Mark: Awesome, lots of experience there. And then you also have a little bit of experience in movie making and documentary and production right? Walker: That's right. Yeah I consider that more of a hobby than a profession. But yeah I've probably been involved with about 10 films over the last five years and most of them were lucky enough to premiere at Sundance, South Buy, Toronto's from the biggest festivals out there. Print the Legend was … we thought was going be the first Netflix Original it turned out to be the 2nd and now we just released Bill Nye: Science Guy as a documentary. Mark: That's you? Walker: Yeah I was involved. Mark: That's right you told me about that I forgot about that I've seen that pop up on Netflix right? Walker: Yeah yeah yeah yeah. Mark: That's fantastic. And you know that I can't let this go but you are IMDB listed and I always joke about how you are just three handshakes away from Kevin Bacon. You know as you come on board with the Quiet Light team and head up to conferences[inaudible 00:06:32.6] you could be 4th in line to kind of- Walker: [Laughter] Mark: There is that and there's also a couple movies that you're in which if anybody wants to have a good time go ahead and read the reviews. Walker: That right there is a great example of why you should buy instead of build from scratch okay. In other words when I get involved with movie production, I look for teams that are already assembled that really have all the variables that are critical to success. And what we did early on was basically pull together a bunch of people who wanted to be filmmakers. Very analogous to people who want to be running a successful company and what came out was let's just say that we got it, we got an exit, we got a … we sold the film but it was pennies on the dollar in terms of the budget. And all you need to do is read the reviews to figure out the outcome of that recipe. So a lot of what I do is look for teams with directors who have the … they've got the right resume to elevate to the next level. Someone on the team usually has an Academy Award and I come in and pull some money together either from myself or from other people and help finance the whole thing. So it's very similar to business acquisition. Mark: So a lot of times we link to resources in the show notes. I will spare you linking to the IMDB movie reviews and have listeners look that up and if they really want to read it they can read it and do the work. All right let's actually get into the topic though. Walker: Let's go. Mark: Buying versus building because this is an ongoing discussion, obviously everybody who has bought from us in the past understands the value of buying a business. But I think there is often a question in a buyer's head especially when they're looking at an opportunity. So they come across a business that we have for sale and they see it and like this wouldn't be that hard to build versus buying it. So I want to explore that a little bit and go into your experience on both because you've had startups. You've had startups that have failed and you're also successful with buying some businesses as well. What are some of the key benefits of both in your opinion, and what is from the drawbacks of both, and why at the end of the day and this is a big question so I'm going to just logoff from much of the talk in the next half hour; why in the end of the day does buying in your opinion win out over building? Walker: Okay great. So okay let's start just by saying that in my opinion not every business should be bought. And I don't mean that to say like the businesses aren't sellable, what I mean is just the opposite. If you've got an idea that you want to start up I think that most times it makes sense to buy an existing infrastructure and go from there as opposed to starting from scratch. But there are some ideas out there that absolutely that's not the path okay. And so if you have an idea that's right at the beginning of an adolescent market you shouldn't be buying. You need to go get VC capital and go. And have a very clear understanding that 75% VC back startups actually fail okay. So it's still not … you know you might be getting 40 million dollars but Jason Yelowitz I think was a perfect example of that; it then happened with him. Mark: It did, yeah. So anyone that wants to read his book Bathrobe Millionaire he talks about how … he bad, he was worth lots of money on paper and it disappeared. Walker: Right and so that's actually more common than the opposite which is the Uber and Facebook story that we all love. That buying businesses in most cases is a better avenue to start. Now let me just give you a quick example; we had a company that we fully funded okay. We had a majority investor was a former CEO of a Fortune 500 Company, and we had a proven dev team that was already building mobile software for the military and special forces. Proven we had it was a … it was a Share Point, A Mobile Share Point application. We had recruited and secured the head of Microsoft Share Point Services as our CEO. We had the CTO of another Fortune 500 Company working with us. We went through on the top 10 accelerator programs in the country. We had beta programs that big corporations right, like all the hallmarks and less than 12 months later we were out of cash. We had no paying customers and it basically we were able to sell it for again pennies on the dollar to a company that I think is going to do really well with it. But it's a perfect example of when everything's right you still got to get that product market fit before the time runs out. After that I had worked with a broker who was about 3 ½ hours away from me and he called and said hey how's that startup going? And I said actually it's a little rocky and he said good because I've got such a great business out here that I really want you to come take a look at. And I went out there and I looked at it and long story short I end up working with a partner on this project and we looked at it and what we saw was a true opportunity to take the customer base and basically upgrade the entire experience to an online ordering system. And so I bought the company, we used the cash flow of the business to create a proprietary e-commerce storefront and we then rolled it out to almost 20,000 users. So the company is doing from the minute we walk in the door it's doing seven figures in revenue which by the wae coin at Verne Harnish it's scale up is 4% of companies United States are selling seven figures in revenue. So you already are walking in the door and one of the most successful companies in United States all right. Funding does not take 24 months and running around and selling stock; you go to the bank. They finance the majority of the purchase and you come in with your own investment and go to work. Everything that we achieved by buying this company in sort of a second tier market in Missouri was everything that we were trying to do at this well-funded start up with an all-star cast. So it's just a perfect example of sometimes you seem to think differently about what it is you're trying to achieve and take the short cuts to get there. Isn't that what entrepreneurship is all about? Mark: Absolutely. Well, I loved what you said about the offline businesses, Ryan Tanzim and I did a podcast episode several weeks ago and he talked about that. He talked about somebody that he knows locally, I think they were doing air conditioning and they are really bringing online but what they are doing is they're using online … they are using the SEO tactics and SEM tactics that you would usually apply to an online business and he's applying it locally. So he actually bought this air conditioning repair company with the idea that they were just going to actually crush it online. They're doing super super well; I think there's a ton of opportunities for buyers in that space. Walker: Can I jump in right here like so- Mark: Yeah, please. Walker: So one of one of the things that I do, I've got kind of a model that I have put together to help people find the right business for them. And what you just said is a perfect example of that because the first question I get is do I have the right what it takes, do I have the right attitude to actually be an entrepreneur? I don't think that the listeners of this podcast need that, I mean that's not where they are. The next one is what are your strengths and weaknesses? What are the actions that you want to be doing every single day? And it sounds like this is an individual who says look I know online marketing, I know how to apply it and you look at the vast number of companies that are coming online to sell and actually not online businesses at all. You've got all the baby boomers retiring at 9,000 a day and they own more companies in any generation ever in history. And they haven't done much since the internet came out. So Internet marketing has clearly passed the point of adaption. I mean it's the way now but not everyone has caught up and you've got a huge amount of opportunity to do exactly this. Move and buy an offline business and basically apply online skills to grow it in a whole new way. Mark: Let's talk a little bit about this because I know that you are in the process of writing a book on buying businesses. What was the book about specifically? Walker: Yeah basically everything I've been talking about. It's called Buy Then Build, why entrepreneurs should buy existing companies rather than starting from scratch. And it's really everything that we've just been talking about. So the argument is that not only is buying businesses a better way to start, despite the popularity of entrepreneurship we haven't engineered a better way to make startups succeed. And I think that the answer to that question is to buy existing companies with existing cash flow. And if you look at buying a small business compared to just as an investment pretend you're not an entrepreneur that's going to move in and use your skill set to grow it [inaudible 00:15:31.2] buy it like a real estate investment or anything else. The returns that you can generate on something like that, the ROI is not really comparable to anything that I've seen. Especially if you want to maximize the ROI and use a lot of leverage that opportunity is there. I mean the SBA is lending … I don't want to over speak so I'm not sure an online business as without you know but you can quote as little as 10% out in these kind of instances. So I mean you can be up and running and off to the races very very quick. Are you seeing that in online businesses as well Mark? Mark: I've seen what specifically? Walker: Like 90% leverage on some of these deals. Mark: It would … currently yes. I mean historically that's higher than what we've seen in the past and that's the rule change as of 2018 so- Walker: Okay. Mark: So in the past it was 80% though which is still … yeah 80 to 75% which is still crazy amounts of leverage. Walker: Right we're right and you know 90% leverage. What I am saying is that if they choose to do that and if it succeeds they're going to have a great ROI. Mark: Right. Walker: Pretty much incomparable to anywhere else. But there's obviously inherent risk in doing something like that. So just understanding the model and being careful. However the odds of success are ridiculous compared to a startup of the same caliber. Mark: So your book is called Buy Then Build which you know often when we think about build then sell obviously. But obviously a big part of what you're talking about here is also that act of building on top and I think in an area where a lot of buyers, especially first time buyers struggle is identifying how do I build on this; what do I look for? And so when I talk to buyers, especially first time buyers that are looking to get into this for the first time they start thinking about well I want something that already has a history of growth. Or maybe they're looking at the opposite side I want something that has a history of not [inaudible 00:17:21.7] you know because I don't want to lose on the business. How should in your opinion and maybe you specifically how have you attacked that build portion of the equation? You've obviously bought and I know it did the one business you're talking about you saw a way to be able to look the entire customer experience up. What are different ways that you think buyers can look at building after they buy? Walker: Yeah. I've been calling this acquisition entrepreneurship. I mean it seems to make sense and so basically I think that there's four models of building value in a company after you buy it. Some people will say … I mean the market will very quickly jump to exactly the opposite and say like oh no I want a company that's a complete disaster. Like I want something that I can go in and put in lean operations and fix it up because then I can buy a cheap, create immediate value by improving all of the internal systems and then exit or run it or whatever. So that's the sort of turnaround kind of mentality and those are great in my opinion if you know what you're doing. I mean if you already are an operation … great at operational excellence that's going to be something that's good. Others will look at you know you get these sort of like there are these two models the guys over at Harvard wrote a book on how to buy a business and they buy what I believe they call internally profitable businesses. This is a bad example here but it's one that I always think of which is I always think of like snowplows or something like that. Like something where there's no obvious technological innovation that's going to get rid of the need for snow plows. And so it's going to be a slow growth but you know something you can hang your hat on. And I think that the way that they grow … they build value is really for the owner in that instance and just through equity build up. And so you're putting you know say 10% down and then over 10 years building up the rest of that value that way. The other model which I'm getting to the point sorry but the other model that scares me a little bit as you look at these high growth companies like the ones you're talking about and what maximizes a sale price are things like growth, revenue, earnings. I mean these are the things that people want. I mean it's a very marketable company but by doing that it's almost the opposite of the turnaround. The risk is a little separate like it needs to continue growing as fast in order to make sure you're getting the right deal. So that's something that in my opinion you have to know what you're doing to navigate that properly. Then you've got this sort of Platform Company and a platform is something where you take your skill set and apply it to the existing business in order to take it to the next level. Now it might be accelerating what's already happening or it could be simply diversifying. So in other words the first online business … so I bought a company from Quiet Light Brokerage and when I looked at it I really liked it because it was taking this sort of like old economy product and it had a kind of innovative twist to it. And so it was still on known in the US market and so as that awareness grows the company continues to grow. However what I acquired in this business was not only the cash flow, it was the infrastructure. It was all the people. I had an entire customer service team. I had a reliable PPC guy. I had SEO you know I've got … now I've got all the tools and all the things that I need to do this. And so what I've done is I've started building other sites as well. And so I'm not quite to the point where I've built a seven figure site from scratch that you can list for me. But I'm hoping to do that and I'm doing it the actual infrastructure that I acquired through Quiet Light. Mark: That's fantastic. Of course you'd be able to sell that business on your own when that day comes. Because you'd be working with us and you'll just put it up for sale and it all will be like oh this is great, Walker owns this, I trust him completely. Walker: Absolutely. Mark: Well you know what you've done though recently in anticipation of coming on board I know that you have been working your way out of your companies as an operator and really working as an investor. And I know this you know talking to buyers one of our most popular episodes was with Shakil Prasla who has bought eight companies in two years and he does this all the time. He does not work in his businesses. What was that process like for you or what has it been like to get yourself out of the operations of the business, and how did you go about doing that? Walker: Yeah it was kind of a slow evolution. Like in other words the first company that I bought I had a key man, woman actually that I worked alongside with very closely and she did … all of my time was spent on marketing sales and really strategy like taking the company to the next level. And you can do a lot more what do they say work on your business and serve in your business. And so I fell in love very quickly with the freedom that comes with having other people you can rely on in your company. As a result as I continue to move forward I always look for business opportunities and people that I know whose skill set matches up with the growth opportunity for that business. And so the 2nd company I bought it was more of a partnership and I learned the hard way that … how do I say this without being, I was messing the company up. It's one of these where he had his hands on everything that was going on, I would show up, you know I would drop in I was there about a day a week. I had relationships with major customers and walk in and just kind of I'd see something that I thought was wrong and I would fix it or give instruction or whatever else. No matter how minor it was it was still the left hand didn't know what the right hand was doing. The employees didn't know who was in charge. And so it was one of these I've got to remove him or remove me kind of situations. And so I've tried to put the emphasis where the skill is. And the other thing that comes out of that is by not operating in the business you can actually scale the number of businesses that you own. And that's what your other guest was doing if I recall correctly. He was actually interviewing and hiring managers. I typically do it with people that I know already so it's not … you know I network and find the people and then I wait for the opportunity as opposed to kind of trying to scale up that rapidly. It got to the point where the 3rdbusiness I acquired I was buying specifically because I had a manager to grow it. And it's working now because that's at a point where I think last year we grew 38% year over year so that's working. And I think the hard decision comes from entrepreneurs at every step of growth where they say okay I'm the one doing this and if I actually pay someone to do that then I make less money so I'm not sure I want to do it. But then the second they hire it out they have all this other money that you know whatever the difference is that's coming to them for essentially doing nothing or essentially moving to that four hour work week model. But if you have a four hour work week kind of company you can go buy 10 companies. Mark: I do. How do you get over the ego part though? You know for example I am in my opinion the best content marketer in the world. Walker: You are. Mark: I'm not. I mean this is the reality but when I'm dealing one on one with people, when I'm dealing one on one with somebody who I've hired to do that I micromanage. I get too involved in what they're doing. How do you get the ego portion out of this so that when you go and visits … do you visit that company anymore? Do you do- Walker: Absolutely. Oh, absolutely. No I'm very involved in everything. I think that … well I should speak carefully there, what I'm trying to say is just I'm not involved in the day to day. The truth is I'm probably more of like a chairman but I don't have enough gray hair so I don't call myself that. I have a baby face so … but it's you know I work more on a strategic level and looking at metrics and talking to the managers every week if not more often if something comes up. So the ego, I think Mark what I would say to that is there's certain things that okay it's twofold. There's certain things that you're not going to be able to let go of. And you feel like they have to be a very very precise thing. Those are not the things that you want to let go of. Especially to use your example like content marketing; content marketing is something that makes Quiet Light exceptional. It's something … you know Quiet Light both stands in with the best of the best but then they stand out by doing exceptional work. And that content marketing piece is so critical to what makes Quiet Light Quiet Light that that might be a driver that can't be outsourced. It's something that has to be precise. It's something that has to come from your mind or your advisors' minds and that piece might not be there. That said here's the answer your question, you're not going to like it, and I have a good answer for this. But here's the thing I have three children, they're seven, five, and three and they make mistakes. They made the same mistakes that I made when I was seven five and three and you have to stand there and watch them do it. And often with my managers I wanted to go over their mistake and then I realize it worked it just wasn't the way that I was going to do it. It's not a mistake at all. Or it's the other way and you've just got to end up paying for that mistake and so it's just that you've got to get that balance right. Partnerships are a good answer for it. Partnerships are like marriages and you just have to figure out how you work and how you communicate. And if there's something that you fear isn't going to work because it's not being rolled out the way you want to do it, I think that what I do is I just make that clear at the beginning and then we put metrics in place to make sure to watch it and measure it and then kill it if you know feel quick. If there's anything I have learned it's if you're going to fail do it really quickly because you save money. Mark: Right. Walker: So I think that's the way to do it. Mark: Right fire quickly, hire slowly. Walker: That's right. Mark: Yeah Chuck recently was talking to me about that so and the need to be able to do that. Awesome well you've covered a lot of ground in this and I really like this discussion of should you buy, should you build, what's better and I think you're right. Absolutely a lot depends on the type of company that you do have and what are you trying to build. Some companies did not lend themselves to being bought or to going that route but if you're looking for that cash flow, if you're looking to get into entrepreneurship a faster way to return investment is going to be that buy-in route. It's a lot faster and a lot more sure than the VC route. I think I was talking to a VC, this was four or five years ago now and he was really coming around to this idea of buying online businesses. And one thing that he told me he said you know with my angel investing with the VC investing that I'm doing everything is about hitting the homerun, it's like … and with that we're hit … we're striking out a lot. We're taking big swings, we're not hitting the home run but when we do hit the home run it's really really good. He said but I'm starting to wonder now maybe if we should just aim to hit some singles and some doubles and some triples instead and just play station to station. And I think that's a huge difference here like if you have the money to be able to go in there and swing for the fences and go for it, sure okay you know what go ahead. If you have the time, the resources, the desire, or an idea that you think really can take off absolutely. If you're looking to hit a single or a double you know that … it's a risk profile; what is a risk profile look like in buying for as risky as buying an online business can be and people should be aware of that. It's certainly a lot more safer than trying to build something from scratch. Walker: So in an early version of my book and I think I just cut it out actually it's … we're trying to get it done this summer but I actually call that entremetrics. Which is stop swinging for the fences and just get on base, based on that savermetrics, you know money ball right? Mark: Yeah. Walker: And that resonates with me completely. That's exactly the point. I think that you know VC again if it was a Harvard Business Review really sort of 75% of these companies are like going to zero. So being able to fast forward, you ask earlier hey I've got … I'm a potential buyer, I'm looking at this company I can build this. Like this isn't that hard, fine go build it. But like looking at it as an investor you've got that cash flow tomorrow. I mean it's you know and what's your time worth and what's the … what's it going to cost to build and you've got to put all those pieces together and yeah go build it and then bring it back to Quiet Light and we'll sell it because these are good investments. So yeah I think it's a simple way to get to the goal faster and to your point you're getting on base. You're engineering success right from the beginning so that you can move to second base on your own. Mark: Yeah, awesome. So your book is coming out sometime this summer maybe in the early- Walker: Hoping for late August. Mark: Late August all right. And at that point you will hopefully be a part of our team fully and we will be able [crosstalk 00:30:13.1]- Walker: I hope so. Mark: The book so when we do pay attention that. I'm sure it's going to be just one step above that Harvard Business Review which I actually have that up my shelf. They sent me a copy and a good stuff; it's seriously good stuff though. And right now eventually people be able to reach out to Walker at a Quiet Light Brokerage email address. In the meantime if you want to reach out to Walker contact me mark@quietlightbrokerage.com and open to have contact with him. He's got a ton of real world experience both in as you said some failures but a lot of successes as well and always a good person to talk to. Any final parting thoughts? Walker: You know there … one thing forgive me but there is one thing that I thought we would talk about and it just didn't come up and that's normal but I spent two and a half years trying to buy an acquisition target when I was at Corley. And we looked at 27 companies in depth talking with them. And what I learned along that path is that there are good buyers in there are bad buyers. And I just mean that from the perspective of the seller, and when you're trying to sell a business, how do I say this, the buyers it's almost like the first thing you want to do when you're just starting out is you want the seller to like come in with a slide deck like a startup and pitch you. Like here's what you're going to get and here's why you should buy my company and that's just not the mentality at all okay. I guess that somebody's built something and it's usually like yeah the timing is right I'm considering it but it's not like I'm trying to sell you something you don't need and so trying to go … I try to go out of my way to understand the business, understand the drivers, and really communicate to the seller why I would be the right buyer for that business. Because trying to get that emotional connection established at the beginning is so critically important. It's very emotional and everyone starts second guessing everything they're doing at one point or another and trying to build that bond at the beginning and getting on the same side of the table to acquire a common goal is just critical in the whole process. So it's something that I did learn that we can talk about I want to share. Mark: Well I'm glad you brought that up because I've used you as an example in countless presentations, I think at this podcast as well. Walker: That's right. Mark: Many of you have heard me use this example before about a buyer who after we submitted an LOI, you submitted the LOI and we had our very first call in due diligence and you stopped. And at the very end you said I want to take a moment and thank you for agreeing to sell me your business. And I tell this story because it was … it had a seismic shift on the way that entire transaction went and it established this common working goal and understanding that I think a broker definitely needs to have. I think a buyer should have as well. The sellers work for years to build something valuable, something that you want to acquire and take in. Showing some basic appreciation for that and yes they're getting well compensated through money, there's appreciation in that as well. But showing that verbal communication of hey I really appreciate and respect what you've done up till now, even if it's a distressed sale but that makes a big difference at the end of the day. And it really helps get through some of the tough spots that will come up doing due diligence. Walker: And they have a choice. As a seller they have a choice especially at Quiet Light. Quiet Light moves a lot of inventory really fast and I think we ended up closing on the 3rd deal I looked at and so there was a couple of deals that went to other sellers and I just didn't went out for whatever reason and they've got a choice. I agree, it's important. Mark: Yeah Walker thanks so much for coming on, I really really appreciate it. Walker: No, thank you Mark. I'm really looking forward to the next chapter. Mark: Well, we're looking forward to have you on. So again if anyone wants to reach out to Walker feel free to contact me mark@quietlightbrokerage.com if you guys have ideas for guests please let me know. I'm always looking for new guests. So we'll talk to you next week. Links and Resources: Contact Walker Buy Then Build – Why Entrepreneurs Should Buy Existing Companies Rather Than Starting from Scratch. Walker's book is coming out this summer!

united states ceo amazon netflix toronto entrepreneurship fortune rome 3d harvard uber fail mba partnership missouri seo roi academy awards ipads avatar funding buyers models cto vc owners kindle scratch print imdb acquisition proven sem harvard business review sundance kevin bacon acquiring ppc sba netflix originals bill nye loi corley verne harnish markit quiet light brokerage quiet light walker deibel mark yeah deibel mark well mark so mark right mark let acquisition entrepreneurship mark okay mark absolutely

How To Calculate The Value Of Your Online Business

Play Episode Listen Later May 23, 2018 42:34

Your online business is likely your MOST VALUABLE ASSET. And calculating its value is critical to setting goals and knowing your net worth. “But I never plan to sell” is something we hear often…and as entrepreneurs most of us @ QLB have said the same thing. Yet each of us has built, bought and sold our own online business…even the ones we never planned to sell. When I sold my web-based business in 2010 I was a novice. With what I know today if I could go back in time I would have planned my exit and likely sold my business for 2-3x more than I did. Instead…I waited until I was emotionally tired of the business, and sold it when the numbers were half what the once were. Not smart. Don't be like me…listen to this Podcast and implement our suggestions. You risk everything building and running your business, and you should get maximum value if/when you exit. The first step in getting max value is understanding the valuation process and being able to calculate your Seller's Discretionary Earning (SDE). Mark and I joke about falling asleep in this podcast due to some of the content…we're joking…and the material here is incredibly valuable. Episode Highlights: Learn the basic web based business valuation formula. Get to know what parts of a business swing the value range up or down. Net Income, plus Add Backs = Seller's Discretionary Earnings (SDE). What's an Add Back? Learn what are acceptable and unacceptable add backs. How add backs boost the value of your business. Using accrual accounting vs. cash for COGS…critical to understand for both buyers and sellers. Learn the typical multiple (value) ranges for an online business. Why a larger business fetches a higher multiple than a smaller ones. Inventory is SOLD SEPARATELY. If you own a physical products business, while listening to this Podcast your inventory levels will change. Including it in the list price artificially inflates the multiple of the business and results in an unstable list price. Transcription: Mark: Hey Joe how are you? Joe: I'm good Mark. How are you doing today? Mark: I'm good. Today we have an unusual guest at least for our podcast. Joe: That's what my wife calls me unusual. Mark: Well that's because you are the guest right? And in Quiet Light Podcast fashion, I'm going to have you introduce yourself to all of our listeners who have no idea who you are. Actually, they know you probably better than you may know yourself at this point because they've listened to you so much but I want to provide just a quick introduction for yourself. Joe: Wow this is how our guest feels. Now I'm on the spot. I hadn't thought that you were going to do that to me. But who am I? Self-employed since 1997, I'm kind of an old guy. Can you see that? A gray hair. 52 years old. Built box sold own online businesses, sold my last e-commerce business for a company called Quiet Light Brokerage. Jason here was my broker; you were the first guy I talked to. I loved the process in transactions so much. I reached out to you and six months later I said you know I'd love to be a broker and you said yeah let me talk to Jason. Jason thankfully said yeah talk to this guy. I came on in early 2012. You and I are now partners now. You're the majority and I'm just a small guy in the process but since then closed what approaching 30 million in total transactions might get 50 by the end of this year depending upon what happens, been around the block a little bit; lots and lots and lots of transactions of all shapes and sizes. Mark: And I think it's safe to say that you have built a name for yourself in the industry quite a bit. People know you. And I think for the first time in the history of the company we had a client you are working with and your plate was getting a little bit full so you thought about trying to hand him off to me and he said “No, I don't want to work with the founder of the company. I'd rather work with you, Joe.” And that's never happened. I'm totally happy about that though not that I don't want to be working with a client but it just goes to show the reputation that you built in the industry. Joe: Or how your represent…reputation is now destroyed. I'm not sure. Mark: Probably, now the word has gotten out. Well, he's not actually as good as we thought compared to Joe or Jason or these other guys. Well, we did a podcast episode a while ago with Chuck Mullins and we're going to be doing more of these words “Meet the Broker”. We also did one with Jason. So those you can find back in the podcast history but we obviously don't want to just talk about you and your background as fascinating as I'm sure that might be. You've got lots of years of wisdom to share with everybody. But we want to actually talk about a specific topic and I…and today we're going to talk about specifically how to calculate the value of your web based business or any web based business and what is the process that goes on behind the scenes to calculate that value. I know you gave a presentation recently, I think back in January out in California on this and it turned into a lot of questions about the actual valuation process. Like just the formula itself and how do we arrive at a certain number. So for those listening, we are going to talk you through this. But for those that are watching we will have something up on the screen a presentation that you can follow along. If you're listening in your car and you want to come back later you can find this on our YouTube Quiet Light Academy or on our podcast page at Quiet Light Brokerage. So tell us a little bit about the presentation Joe and how you kind of spent so much time just on the first half of this presentation. Joe: Yeah the presentation is really supposed to be about you know the pillars of growth. There's generally four of them and I put planning in there as a fifth. It was supposed to be about the pillars of maximum value but in order to get to that, I had to talk about how to calculate your seller's discretionary earnings in the value of your business and then it got into add backs. I really was going to do about a five minute presentation on that, about a 40 minute presentation on the rest, and then 30 minutes at Q and A. It turned into about 45 minutes of Q and A alone on calculating the value, in particular, the add backs. What was acceptable, what was not, and then the multiples and ranges depending on the net. So today in this first episode I want to touch on how to calculate the value of your business and then we'll get to the four pillars of value after that. So simply put Mark it's an easy formula. There should be no confusion about it. If you're looking at the screen there trailing 12 months seller's discretionary earnings times the multiple equals the list price of your business, simple; right? 300,000 in discretionary earnings times three you got a list price of a business of 900,000 in the key plus the landed cost of good saleable inventory on hand at the time of closing that. All of that language is really critical. Now I've been a guest on podcasts as well as you on other people's podcasts and we've talked about this formula at the beginning of the podcast and then literally 15 minutes in the host will say “So how do you calculate the value of your company again because it's simple but really-really confusing.” So I want to go through it. So we know this formula it's up to the screen again for listeners it's your seller's discretionary earnings for your trailing 12 months times A multiple equals the list price plus the inventory if you've got a physical products business. But the problem here is calculating the seller's discretionary earnings. We'll get to how to figure out what your multiple is but the most important thing is how to calculate seller's discretionary earnings. So it's up there on the screen now. It's simple if you use accounting software which is kind of important. Right, Mark? Mark: Very very very much important, yes. Joe: One of the four pillars. It's net income plus add backs equals your seller's discretionary earnings. So if you run a profit loss in Quick Books or Xero it's going to give you a net income number on the bottom. But every entrepreneur, for the most part, sometimes partnerships have better books…cleaner books. But most entrepreneurs, if you take a small salary, if you have a car that you ride after the business, you have your mobile phone as run through the business, all these things are personal in nature and then there's some one-time expenses as well. Those are considered add backs. So if you run a business and your net income is zero, that doesn't mean your business is worth zero. You could take a hundred thousand dollar salary and that's an add back as it's a personal benefit. Makes sense? Mark: Makes sense. But I'm going to back up just a minute here. Joe: Okay. Mark: Go back to the previous slide. Joe: Yup. Mark: Now where we're talking about the formula that we're using to calculate value. In that formula again, just to drill it into people's heads, it is the trailing 12 months seller's discretionary earnings which is close to a bit in most cases but not always. So we take that we times it by a multiple and that's where we come up with the asking price or the estimated value of a business. But let me ask you or to give an objection that we hear a lot from sellers when they see this. Isn't this too simple, what about all the other aspects of their business? What about the unique relationship that they have with the supplier or the upward mobility or upward scalability of the business and the trajectory of it? Isn't this just looking at the income only and not paying attention to all those other things? Joe: Yes and no. Right? And that's the answer is that we come up with a value range it's not a firm number, it's a value range and your business may swing in that range depending upon some of those things. If you've got a five year old business and you've got 30% year over year growth versus an 18-month old business, one is more valuable than the other. If you've got a patent on a particular skew that you have that prevents other people from competing with you that brings more value. If you have diversified revenue streams, you know Shopify, or your physical…your website, Amazon…different Amazon countries, Jet, Walmart, Daily Deal sites that's diversified revenue. Diversify…diversification means less risk. Less risk means higher in that multiple range. So all of those things come into play but as I say often we can't take an email list of 10,000 and say each email address is worth five dollars and do that math and add that to the value of the business. What it does simply is boost the value range of the business itself. Mark: Right. Joe: I think another way to understand this as well is that although our formula has two main parts the trailing twelve months seller's discretionary earnings in one part and in multiple being the other part, that doesn't mean that is…we're looking at two things. As we're going to go into both sides of this the multiple and the trailing twelve months are summations of bigger calculations. So when we could get to the SDE, when we're calculating that seller's discretionary earnings, we're going to go over that in this podcast episode, there's a lot involved in calculating seller's discretionary earnings just as there's a lot that goes into understanding what makes its multiples. These things kind of summarize the business and all of those intangibles as well. And I think a lot of people that do know this formula they focus a lot on the multiple. But I love the fact that what we're going to do here is we're going to unpack this seller's discretionary earnings number and see what goes into building that. Because this is actually an area where there is a lot of opportunity for optimization [inaudible 00:12:44.4]. And once you understand this aspect of it and you plan in advance sale of your business you're never to sell but someday you may wake up and want to move on, you understand the value you're going to have a much more valuable business down the road. And you know I think we were at a presentation together where someone got up and said adds are the most valuable asset that you own as your business and if you don't take care of it and you don't understand it's value you not really maximizing it; so really important. You know the key point here is Mark the trailing 12 months. It's not the trailing three, trailing six times two or anything like that; the trailing 12 always takes into account the seasonality of the business and we do every…a year over year comparison when working on that multiple valuation as well. Mark: Yeah and just one last [inaudible 00:13:32.3] on this, this is one formula that is used. It's used in this industry for online businesses which is why we use it. It is not the only way to estimate the value of a business but what I would tell anybody out there that wants to look at different valuation approaches they all essentially do the same thing. Some do it more complex than others and at the end of the day, these are predictive formulas right? I'm trying to predict what's base trying to pay. So anyways on with the next line, I took us back a little bit but I did want to get in to that a little bit. So add backs- Joe: Keep doing it I do this every day and it's simple language to me now but it is not simple, it's pretty complex. Mark: Right okay so let's get into the seller's discretionary earnings if I'm going to Quick Books because everybody I know that's listening is using Quick Books or Xero or a professional accounting software right? Everybody's using that I'm sure nobody's using Excel. Where can I go in Quick Books to calculate or see what my seller's discretionary earnings are? Joe: You can't. Mark: That is not in Quick Books? Joe: No. Mark: What is that, what is seller's discretionary earnings? Joe: It's your net income what you get out of Quick Books or Xero plus the add backs. That's what you call seller's discretionary earnings. So the big question is what's an add back? And this is why it took 45 minutes in the Q and A session that I did. So when you get to add backs and I'll go to the next slide here this is a lot of information but really an add back is something that is a personal benefit to the owner of the company or a one-time expense. Now there are always exceptions to the rule and you always want to use math and logic. But an example is owner payroll, if someone takes a payroll of 128,000 dollars to maximize their social security, that's an owner benefit and if your business is doing net income of 500,000 dollars, you add back 128 to that so now your discretionary earnings should be 628. Simple round numbers if you're doing 50 in net income and you take salary of 50 you're discretionary earnings becomes 100,000. And so if your multiple is 3X on the net income it's only 50, on discretionary earnings it's 300,000 big difference. Mark: Right. So why are we adding back these expenses? Because basically what you're doing is you're going through, you're taking a look at a company's income statement or profit and loss statement and that's something that you can generate in Quick Books or Xero or any professional accounting software. And you're going through those expenses and you're looking at some and you're saying okay we're going to add…and right now this is acting as a subtracting number to the revenue and that's how it would get to net income. But you're saying we're going to actually add that expense back so effectively take it out. Why are we taking out these expenses? Joe: They're personal in nature and they're personal benefit but you need to in your terminology taking it out you have to go with full disclosure to the buyers. They want to see every cent and so you don't go into the Quick Books accounting, you delete these personal expenses. You leave them there yet you run the report you export it to Excel and then below that net income you create an add back schedule and you go up to…okay this one's personal mail and entertainment travel or what you did a website redesign you spent 10,000 dollars three months ago. That's a one-time expense, for the most part, we could add that back. And you had an employee that did outside sales and she tried, she was only around for three months it was a 15,000 dollars expense she produced zero outside sales commissions is that an add back? We could talk about in some cases it is. But there's a lot of that today goes deep deep deep in the conversations with the owner of the business in order to get to the most important number which is a seller's discretionary earnings. Mark: All right very good. So when we're doing these add backs what we're doing is we're taking out these expenses because we want to present it to buyers and show them what the business operates from a standard starting point. So we call these discretionary expenses and we call them discretionary expenses because their expenses that the owner is spending at their discretion could be circular about it. So how do you go about or I'm going to hand back over to you, what's the next step for going through and explaining and understanding these add backs? Joe: Let's just give some example, some things that people brought up and I just pop something up on the screen you know question. Can I go to the gym every day? You go to the gym pretty often right? You try to get out and you might run it after your business is that a personal benefit you tell me? Mark: Yeah. Joe: Absolutely. So if you spend 50 dollars a month for the gym that's an add back, it's 300 dollars a year. That's a thousand dollars added to the value of your business if your multiple is over three times. Your car, your meals, and your entertainment; a big one that you and I and the entire team talked about recently was as an entrepreneur you may travel to different events. You may go to the Prosper Show that we were out in March. You may go to arket a conference. You may go to Seller Con, whatever the case might be. Can you write those things off as an add back? And we collectively said yes. Because it's a personal choice of the owner, in most cases you can learn those things online but you're going for the camaraderie and it's helping with your business in some ways but it's not a required expense that carries forward to the new owner. And that's the most important thing; it's not an expense that carries forward to a new owner. Mark: Let's talk about that trade show example because I think that's a really good example where we can get in and show how understanding what gets added back and what doesn't get added back and be somewhat nuance. So let's take two different scenarios and start with…well we'll start with Rhodium we talked about them a bit and we like the guys in Rhodium quite a bit, it's a good community. I would go to that event just for the camaraderie and the networking alone without necessarily have any business…there's always a business interest with what we do but my main reason would be to go there for the camaraderie. Looking at Quiet Light Brokerage would that be considered an add back yes or no? Probably because we're not necessarily selling our services at that point but if we display a pub con, if we get a booth display there, we're making out to contacts would you consider that an add back? Joe: Well let me tell you, let me correct you if you will on Rhodium. When we go to Rhodium and we are sponsoring the event, so it's an expense to us, we stay in hotels, we have meals, we have entertainment, and we produce revenue from it because we build relationships with those people who then come to us to list the business for sale; and that produces revenue. So when you've got an expense that produces revenue it's not an add back; simple as that. But an example of someone going to Rhodium…a real example, someone went to Rhodium recently and her husband decided to go as well, didn't go to the events but was there and then they stayed an extra week and called that their honeymoon. Went on a helicopter ride that…all sorts of different things and it was a complete business expense and write off. Absolutely a write off, she can't tie a revenue to that expense. So it's an add back. There's always math and logic with these, sometimes the buyers are not going to see it the same exact way that the seller or the broker will see it but we don't push them. It's got to be crystal clear because and full disclosure because once you're under [inaudible 00:21:01.9] we don't want any surprises. An example that is not an add back that someone brought up they said well I'm using an ad agency to do all my Facebook advertising and I pay them 15% and I spend [inaudible 00:21:14.4] a thousand dollars a month. That's 150 dollars a month expense. I'd like to add that back because my logic is if the new owner has those…that experience that doesn't need that ad agency then they're not going to have the expense so it doesn't carry forward right? Well, no it's an expense that that ad agency spends money, it produces revenue, you can't…it's a big leap of math and logic. We don't know if that particular buyer has that experience or not. If they do, good for them it's a savings on their part but we can't add it back assuming everybody has that experience. Makes sense? Mark: Yeah absolutely. I think there's a common sense factor here and that is what we want to do is we want to look at the expenses that have been used for the normal operations of the business, so expenses that's been used for normal operations they stay. The elements that are outside of normal operations of the business those are the ones that are typically going to be added back, so personal benefits, those one-time expenses that'll be outside of normal operations because it's…it is part of normal operations but it's such a rare occurrence. We want to show buyers what's their expected ROI from this business if they were to acquire it. And so you can't…you have to have a common starting around and that's where you end up getting into the add backs and taking out those discretionary expenses. Joe: Yeah. Let's talk about one more sort of not black and white example just to talk about what you said which is common sense. So I listed a business last fall and the owner of the business really literally worked five hours a week. He had a full time person doing inventory planning things of that nature customer service…doing inventory planning and design and then he had someone that he had do customer service. That someone that he had do customer service was his brother and he paid him 30 dollars an hour for customer service work. The customer service work involved canned responses and canned responses and email canned responses in a pop up chat. He was grossly overpaid doing that kind of work, 30 dollars an hour. My advice at the time and you laughed at me and called me a Scrooge at one point [inaudible 00:23:24.5] was fire your brother. Okay, you're paying him way too much. I think the total amount that he might have been paying him was roughly 30,000 dollars a year. When in reality he was paying him too much money was paying him for hours that he didn't really work. So he should have fired his brother, hired somebody with half the cost, it made up the difference of 15,000. Let six months pass and he would have…his business when it was listed at 3 ½, so it would have 3 ½ times 15,000 dollars which would have been added to list price. He wasn't willing to be a Scrooge because that was just before the holidays. He didn't fire his brother. So we went with math and logic and we presented an adjustment in the add backs accounting for his brother going away. Mark: Okay. Joe: It wasn't ideal, it was a little gray but the math and the logic made sense and it worked. We had multiple offers under LOI closed with no issues with that add back mostly because it was right there in black and white and detail that talked about prior to the LOI. Mark: Right. So it does work the other way as well too. I've actually had the opposite scenario where somebody had a bunch of friends and family helping out in their business and they were grossly underpaid because they were doing favors. And he was like the Uncle Vido or someone like that was doing the books for almost no money whatsoever. And in that case would go the other direction and we would actually inject a cost into that P and L that will basically say hey they're here in a sweet heart rate that's not going to continue we need to see what this role is important but necessary and here's a pretty reasonable market rate for math and logic once again. Joe: Yeah, it's math and logic in there as well. Okay, I have a look at our time here Mark and where we are but a really really important thing for physical product owners is in the valuation of the business is the thing that put me to sleep in college. Literally, I fell asleep in the classroom and the new students came in and I was asleep in a classroom. It's accounting. Okay if you're driving pop a couple of no doze for this part but it is so vastly critical and this is critical for buyers and sellers. For buyers listen to this closely because if you find a broker that lists something that is growing like crazy, physical products business and they don't do accrual accounting or flipped it to accrual, you're getting that business at a discount because it should be accrual. When it's accrual the business is…it's the right way to do it first of all but the discretionary earnings is higher and the business is more valuable. Mark: Hold on accrual? What are you talking about here…we're just doing something excel at this point. So what is accrual and why is it so important? Joe: You're selling a widget, so let's say you're selling a widget for 10 dollars and your landed cost of goods sold on that widget is two dollars, 20% landed at your 3PL at your Amazon FDA. That's a cost of goods sold of 20% that…that's accrual so that when you sell that widget in the month of June that cost for that widget is applied to that month of June, so it's 20%. So your cost of goods sold…landed cost of goods sold shouldn't be roughly the same every month, month in and month out when it's accrual. If it's cash you're going to see that 20% go to 60%, 102% down to zero back up again to be all over and what it's going to look like on the bottom line discretionary earnings is that your earnings are all over the place; up and down, up and down and it's uncomfortable for buyers. The way that they look at these things and the way that we train them to look at these things is discretionary earnings and then have some working capital for inventory. When you purchase inventory moving up to 4th quarter, if you are cash basis and you're wrapping up inventory and normally you've got 50,000 dollars' worth of inventory but all of a sudden your stroking checks and you've got cash out of the 150,000 dollars that depresses your net income and your discretionary earnings and the value of your business if it's presented on a cash basis accounting. Does that make a little bit of more sense and not put you to sleep? Mark: Yeah, that does make more sense and what I would…the way I've explained it to some people as well is that when you move to accrual basis accounting it's kind of like going from a two dimensional picture to a three dimensional picture because it looks at your business and where its value is in all places. So instead of just taking cash out when as you said your 4th quarter you're stroking checks because you've got to stock up that inventory you're expecting a busy Christmas season so you're writing all sorts of checks out. Instead of saying okay I've just lost that much value of business, no you haven't lost much value you're just taking cash and converted it over to inventory. So accrual says hey you still have value in your business because you have all those inventory, you just exchanged cash for inventory. And then when you sell that product now you recognize the expense of that individual item. Joe: That's the key when you sell that product that's when you recognize the expense. And a good bookkeeper can set it up for you. And trust me if you spend a little bit of money a couple hundred, 300, 400 dollars a month on a good book keeper you will make that back multiple times over in the sale of your business because buyers will have more confidence. Brokers will be able to do a better valuation with less complexities and you won't pull your hair out during the valuation process. And I've seen people do that it's really-really hard to go back and do it. We do it more often than not we do it right Mark? We have to go back and flip it from cash to accrual then and I want to show you how to do that. So right now up on the screen, I've got a sample profit and loss station, a sample statement. Net income you can see there we're going to call it 425,000 dollars. Again, we've got an add back schedule below it for those listening here is some of the add backs; we've got interest expense that they had a loan, legal and professional fees for a patent for example or a trademark those are one-time expenses, meals, and entertainment, office expenses you work from home but you've got your kids' school supplies that you [inaudible 00:29:33.0] your business, your own payroll and I've got vehicle expenses here. So we take that 425,000 in net income plus the add backs on 120 and we're not at 545,000 in change in terms of discretionary earnings. So again you just say a three time multiple we added 360,000 in value to this business just for the add backs. But when you look at this gray line in the cost of goods sold the cost of goods sold as a percentage of total income goes as high as 97% and as low as 5%. It's all over the place. In the next screen, I'm going to flip it down so we know that that's cash because it's all over the place so here we flipped it from cash to accrual. Mark: So this is the same company? Joe: The same company this is the same exact P and L but within the Excel spreadsheet there was exported from Quick Books or Xero or in some cases produced, we've flipped the cash to accrual on the total cost of goods sold line only. We don't change those numbers in the cost of goods sold expenses the only thing that's changed is that total cost of goods sold line. You see sometimes those total doesn't add up to the individual things it's because we flipped it to accrual and we work with a formula on that. So there's more than one way to do almost anything but we work with the seller on calculating new accrual and we'll go into that in a minute but the key difference is when you look at this we went from cash to we were at 425,000 in net income right? Now we've flipped to accrual you look at that net income line that's jumped from 425 to 485,000 so we've added 60,000 dollars in discretionary earnings just by flipping it to accrual. Let me repeat that for those that are almost asleep because we're talking about accounting. By not producing any more revenue, by not hustling any harder, by not renegotiating cost of goods, by not doing anything other than good accounting we've increased the net income from 425 to 485. By you know proper accounting. Mark: [inaudible 00:31:45.6] the question is this dishonest in any way? Joe: No. It's the absolute right way to do it. It's standard acceptable accounting principles. The other way is the ready fire aim approach that unfortunately most of us take, me included because I didn't know any about Quick Books or accounting, I fell asleep in class, I never had a bookkeeper. This is actually the right way to do it. Mark: All right so that [inaudible 00:32:09.8] both cash and accrual are acceptable ways of filing your taxes and doing books. That gap does recognize both, however, accrual for a product space business is going to be more accurate and more thorough and so what you're saying is that the cash basis actually undervalues the business when you record your books in cash basis. Joe: If the business is growing rapidly absolutely because they're taking almost every expendable dollar that they have and putting it back in inventory. So an example is you know you and I talk about this valuation a lot, I had a client that went to every other brokerage firm. They really needed to sell their business because they had a house under contract contingent upon sale of their business. It was for an income they lived in New Zealand they had an Amazon US Business. They had to sell the business [inaudible 00:32:58.7] tough situation to be and a foolish situation to be in. They went to…got different valuations and every broker is trying to push that multiple high to help them achieve their goals. Too high for that 18-month old business, [inaudible 00:33:13.4] we did the proper accounting flipped, we did it in accrual. I was able to push that multiples down and other brokers like 3 ½ it was never going to happen. We were able to push it down to about 2.7 yet the value of their business was a couple hundred thousand dollars higher. So we had a higher value and a lower multiple more attractive to the seller more attractive to buyer. We had a buyer that was really good at accounting, really good entrepreneur, fully understood it, bought it, went through to do diligence, really happy. Both buyer and seller happy. So there's just huge value. Mark: This is actually really good I guess pro tip for people buying as well. If you come across an opportunity that's now with Quiet Light because we are going to almost always be pushing our clients simply in order to accrual in pretty much every circumstance for an e-commerce business. But if you come across an opportunity as a buyer and you see cash based books for an e-commerce business, take a look at the trend of the business. If that business is growing as you point out Joe the net…then the cash basis accounting is going to undervalue the business. On the other hand, though if that business is shrinking and they are not adding new inventory, they are going to have inflated or apparently inflated margins because they've stopped by an inventory, they've stopped recording expenses and you could actually end up over paying for a business if it's on the decline. So that cash basis accounting just for a product based business it's unreliable because of the fact that it doesn't take into account when the expense of the item when it's sold and so you really have to pay attention to the other aspects of the business such as this trend. Joe: Absolutely and you know cash basis accounting is okay for SaaS business and things that don't have accounts receivable…things of that nature. But for a physical products business accrual is the way to go. Buyers will be aware if it's cash especially as Mark said if it's declining buyers get excited. And it's growing unlike crazy as cash basis you buy it hold it for a year or two and then you do accrual based accounting and your value is instantly higher. So in this example again to move things along we've added 60,000 in discretionary earnings if by example we were at a three time multiple that's 120,000 dollars…I'm sorry 180,000 dollars added to the value of the business by not selling a single widget more. Really [inaudible 00:35:34.3] so how do you calculate accrual? It's really complicated, to be honest with you and you've got to have a good history and records to do it. Again, start with a good goalkeeper but the formula is simple beginning inventory plus purchases minus ending inventory that equals your cost of goods sold. And this should all be landed and this is ideally on a monthly basis. Now you can do it, right? If you haven't done it yet you can't do it. So what you got to do is go back in history and figure out what your cost of goods sold are with different formulations and calculations and it's different for each client that I work with. Absolutely doable I get two listings in the last two months where we had to do that and couldn't do this. I'll be honest with you most of the times we can't get to this. It's ideal if we can but more often than not we have to go with another method which is take all of those purchases take all of the shipping cost average out the shipping cost times the number of units that your shipping…it's complicated and I can't tell you exactly how it is because every situation is different. But that's the formula. The end result again when you put to accrual is a higher value. Again going back quick review before we put too many people to sleep with this your most valuable asset is more than likely your business. You should know what the value is within a certain range 10% I hope and then the question is okay I know how to calculate seller's discretionary earnings, the final thing is what kind of multiple range do I put on it? And what I've got here up on the screen is for physical products businesses and I'll talk about content businesses and SaaS businesses and so on so forth as well. So a larger business is more valuable and in what ways Mark? Mark: Large businesses are more valuable. And at today's podcast episode that actually launched today was on that very topic is buying big better than buying small, I'll go back and [inaudible 00:37:27.9] that one fun episode. Larger businesses are more valuable because they are more stable. You have more resources available to hire out work or to reinvest in the business. So generally speaking businesses that have higher earnings and higher revenues end up getting a multiple boost just because they are more stable and have more room for or investing in and changing the format of the business. Joe: Right and the other thing is odds are we've been around a little bit longer too or they have multiple streams of revenue balanced less…essentially they are less risky therefore they're worth more. So in the examples, I've got up on the screen and we'll talk about [inaudible 00:38:10.6] for listeners. If you have seller's discretionary earnings on a physical products business of less than 700,000 you're going to be in the 2 and I'm going to do a broad range 2 ½ to 3 ½ multiple range. So if your business is 100,000 dollars in discretionary earnings, the value big range 250 to 350 plus the landed cost of good saleable inventory on hand at the time of closing. Again as Mark said at the beginning we take all of those other factors, how many streams of revenue do you have. do you have any patents, how do you launch new products, do you have a big social media following that proves that your margins are done without discounts or advertising. All of those things come into play and could push a multiple higher or push it lower even below this 2 ½ times in the even when we do that client interview we do the valuation process, let's say that you have a patent infringement issue and it's still something that's scary and hanging out there. That might push the value down a little bit. Or if you're trends are going down that's definitely going to push the value down a little bit. So again, less than 700 in discretionary earnings 2 ½ to 3 times plus the landed cost of good saleable inventory on hand at the time of closing. When you get that bigger more valuable business with discretionary earnings that are north of 700 and again these are great numbers by the way again nothing here is in black and white but the value is going to be higher. Because it's more established, less risk that somebody is going to pay more because their money safer. That value range is going to jump instead of 2 ½ to 3 ½ you're going to go from 3 ½ to 4 ½ sometimes possibly higher. Mark: And if anyone is listening to this a few years down the road and have dug back in the Quiet Light Podcast archives and are now listening up. Multiples do change over the years as well. So this is where the market is at today and always check with us to see where multiples are if you're listening to this at a different time. Joe: Got it. SAS businesses. SAS businesses is in the last 12 months good ones that are trending well that have a reasonable [inaudible 00:40:14.7] and have a good handle on the metrics, I'm going to talk about that in the next episode, you're in the four to five time range. Content sites again and much of the same dollar ranges here. Content sites probably 2 ½ to 3 ½ times unless you're much larger. I've got one with multiple offers that's between four and five times because of the size of it and because of the growth. It's discretionary earnings are well north of a million dollars. Affiliate sites, same thing. The real separator here is I think the SaaS business because it's generally B2B recruiting revenue and the value is a generally higher at least felt…buyers feel as though they're worth more. Buyers are usually right no matter what Mark and I and the seller thinks. Buyers [inaudible 00:41:03.1]. Mark: And we're going to be doing another episode of talking about multiples and how do you determine the multiple of your business because that's a pretty complex valuation as well. Where there's literally dozens of factors I know I wrote a guide…I think it's on the website right now called The Ultimate Guide to Website Value. I wrote it three years ago. I think maybe four people have read the whole thing because it's long. It was around 30,000 words of all the different things that can really impact the value of a website. I should probably go back and update that because I'm sure there's some things in there that needed to be updated now, a few years later. But there are a lot of things that can influence that multiple up or down. Joe: Let's leave the listeners with this Mark and it's something that we talked about a little bit. If you look at your own values and your own assets, anybody that's listening and you own a business, think about the different things that you own: your bank account, your retirement portfolio, your house, your car. Do you know what the values of those are plus or minus 10%? You probably do but do you know the value of your business plus or minus 10%? You probably don't. Hopefully, this podcast will help a great deal. But even with all the information we've shared you really can't figure it out until you do a proper add back schedule and do all those details. I've had calls, we've had lengthy calls with buyers, we've gone through it all and if I…yeah on my values about 850 and then we get to P and L it turns out their value is at 1.2, really important to get the details down. Get a handle on it even if you don't plan to sell the business either ever or six or 12 or 18 months down the road. Mark: Very good well if you made it to the end of the episode here congratulations and we really appreciate you while listening in. I'd be interested in hearing feedback what do you think about episodes like this where it's Joe and I or maybe we'd bring Jason on or Chuck on again and we delve deep into some of the things that we do on a day to day basis. Are these helpful for you? Do you like them? Did I put you to sleep? Do they…are they things that you would want us to do more of? Let me know send me an email mark@quietlightbrokerage.com if you absolutely hate it then email Joe at joe@quietlightbrokerage.com. So anything left to…anything more to say here? Joe: No, that's it. It's a lot of information it's a bit overwhelming and just digest it. We'll have a link to this presentation in the show notes so people can download it. You'll get a little summary video of it as well that we can share [inaudible 00:43:32.2] can go through their own process. And then one more thing I guess yes I do have something. I have a client recently that I've been talking to for 18 months and you know I said: “What's the one takeaway after all we've gone through?” And she said “More than anything else if I could convey and share something with people that are trying to understand the value of the business and might sell it is don't be afraid to talk to a broker, get a valuation, figure out those things that you need to fix so that 12, 18 months down the road, the business is more valuable and you're prepared.” That's the key thing. Mark: Absolutely we do have resources on the site, articles that break down how to do a seller's discretionary earnings calculation. We'll link to those in the podcast show notes. So if you want to get deeper and couldn't follow along everything in this episode there are some articles that you can refer to which will be easy to follow as well. so thanks for listening and we will be talking again in a week. Links: PDF Version – How to Calculate the Value of Your Business

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The Biggest Takeaways in Ecommerce for 2018

Play Episode Listen Later May 1, 2018 35:11

Andrew Youderian is the founder of eCommerceFuel, a private community forum for six to eight figure eCommerce sites. After getting out of finance and buying and selling two eCommerce businesses, Andrew saw the need for a platform for the 7-figure eCommerce community. Looking for a space where this group of exceptional entrepreneurs could bounce ideas and information off one another, he started the website and has never looked back. In addition to the forum, eCommerceFuel holds a live annual event, publishes a yearly “state of the merchant” report, and now hosts a job board exclusively for the eCommerce domain. We spend this episode discussing the results of their 2018 state of the merchant eCommerce report. Episode Highlights: This year there were about 450 survey participants with an average store income of $2.3 million. Andrew shares the three big takeaways from the survey. Which niches are growing versus which are stagnant or shrinking, according to the survey. The fastest growing stores have a high component of Amazon revenue to them. A strategy that some bigger merchants are taking is to use Amazon as a way to help launch a brand, then taking the cash and momentum generated from Amazon to help build offline presence. We discuss top trends in shopping carts, email marketing, help-desks, and product reviews. We learn that eCommerce revenue values seem to be generally going up across the board. Which business models are experiencing the most growth and why dropshipping may have made a bit of a comeback last year. What the fastest growing eCommerce categories are among the survey takers. Who the favorite entrepreneur was from last year from among the top in the world. Transcription: Mark: Hey Joe, how are you? Joe: I'm good Mark! How are you doing today? Mark: I'm doing good, I've been busy these past week doing a few interviews. Joe: You have? You have been slacking and then picking up that slack and doing it more yourself. Thank you! Mark: I think anybody who's been listening to our show knows that you're not a slacking on this, but I'm just trying to play catch-up here to your three(3) episodes to everyone that I have done. But, I've been catching up this week and I'm really excited about the someone guest that we have coming up weeks. And one of the first ones is Andrew Youderian, whom we both know well from E-commerce field. Joe: I do! You know I tell the story often. The first time I went to an E-Commerce field event was in Nashville, I think it's 3 or 4 years. but I remember saying specifically that when I got back, you know, I talked about it. I heard more intelligent E-Commerce conversation in 24 hours than I heard in previous 24 months. It's an exceptional group of entrepreneurs and they help each other on a regular basis which is incredible. Mark: Yeah, I think, there are couple of groups out there which I have zero hesitation endorsing and have told people that they need to be a part of it. If anyone listening is in E-Commerce, E-Commerce Fuels is a private form that requires that you apply in order to get access to it, you have to have a business of a certain size to be able to get in. Some of the most intelligent that we know in the space and the most successful people that we know on the space are members of that form. It's a really, really good community. They have an event that they put on every year which is one of our favorite events to go to, all the E-Commerce feel alive. So, one of the things Andrew does every year though, because he's got all his members, you know, several hundred members who have successfully E-Commerce stores, is he surveys them and he puts together a full on report called ‘State of E-Commerce' or ‘State of the Merchant'. Can't remember the exact name of it. But this entire interview, he and I are talking about this report because the data in here is awesome! It's really, really cool! You get to see how fast are businesses is growing. What percentage of businesses are Amazon. We get to sift through (2.55) revenue side. What is the typical breakdown by channel. And one of the cool businesses data in the report this year was what niches are growing versus what's shrinking. For example, one of the cool things that got pointed out when we talked about a little bit is, men's clothing and accessories was among one of the fastest growing sectors. Conversely, women's clothing and accessories was one of the ones that was stagnant or declining. So, we go into, what's going on there! Lots of really cool data in that report. Joe: Interesting! Interesting! Andrew is a super nice guy! Full of integrity and character in the whole E-Commerce Fuel Group is a reflection of him. I believe so, let's just jump to it, see what he's got to say! Mark: Absolutely! Hey Andrew! Thanks for joining me! Andrew: Yeah! Thanks for having me here in Mark appreciated. Mark: Alright, you are joining me from a van obviously. Andrew: Yeah, look like a total sketch fall hair. It's kind of a old Mobil office I have. I'm on the road with the family and when I need to do podcast or interviews or phone calls, I usually come out here coz it's little quieter. As you know, we got kids, it can be tough to do inside with kids and ah.. Yeah, so here we are! Mark: I love it! Yeah, you're not the first guest to actually show up in the vehicle. We had Chad Annis on a while ago and he was on his RV. He's been doing it for nine months, just living the RV life for nine months. But I know you're out there, just kind of traveling around and on a vacation, so to speak, with your family, right? Andrew: Yeah! We're just kind of doing, doing a little trip. We love to get out of Montana. You're from—you'll appreciate this. I mean you're from Minneapolis, you know the winters can be a little brutal up north. We're in Montana and trying to get out of town and get us some more climate, you know, 2-3 months, the winter and work along the way but trying to get a little more vitamin D in the body, so that's what we do. Mark: Yeah! Our winters been super long here, my wife has told me that if it's goes on for a few more weeks, were leaving, she doesn't know where, were just going to go. Not move, were just going to go somewhere. I'm going to come home and she's just going to say, “get in the car.” So, see this, you and I know each other from E-commerce feel but I'm going to let you introduce yourself to our listeners and kind of your background and what you do. Andrew: Sure! So my background is- I'm trying to get from the beginning as brief of a story as possible at my points. Got on a school, working finance for couple of years and kind of invest in making world and learned a lot, got a lot of great experience but decided that didn't want to sell my soul to the corporate world, so quit and was looking for an opportunity to start a business and only enough, got into E-commerce, started selling CV Radios. I ran that business for a number of years, kind of two years into that. Start a second business, selling trolling motors, knowing E-commerce space, drop shipping business and couple years after that I just found that I was meeting a lot of people doing similar things that I was and it's kind of interesting very isolated, entrepreneurs in the E-commerce space. You know it'd be really cool if there was a community for these group of people so, started, it was called E-Commerce fuel which ended up evolving into a community for a high six (6) and seven (7) and eight (8) figure E-Commerce store orders. So I've since sold both of those moving E-commerce businesses. Now, my primary fulltime gig is running that community which in the ways, I try to add value in our team choice. To add value is through light events which Mark you and Quiet light has been generous enough to sponsor and support so thank you. Through live events, through a private forum that we have, kind of curated [inaudible 0:06:11.1] forum of people with experience in space and then through some proprietary software's that we've built. So that's my story and what I do. Mark: Yeah, and for anyone that is not familiar with the E-commerce fuel and the forum they're associated with, really, really valuable. I don't anybody who's a member of that forum who doesn't consider to be one of their top resources. And the conference put up every year, it is phenomenal. We go to a lot of conferences, absolutely love E-commerce fuel. Here in the E-commerce space we have a store that's six (6), seven (7), eight (8) figures. I don't know where you are with your registrations or what you're doing for accepting your memberships but tough work in the resource. Andrew: Well, thank you. I appreciate it. Mark: Yeah. So every year, you do a survey of the members, performance survey of the members of your forum and it's the State of the Merchant Report. Tell me a little bit about that and how you put those report together and what it talks about. Andrew: Yeah, so, I wanted to try to get a sense of what was happening with Merchants and that sudden figure range, 'cause you–Forbes will put up reports about, you know, the fortune five hundred (500) and you hear these stats about your target in Amazon and that's interesting but it's a very different world when you're in that kind of size business that I was in, that our members are in. And so every year, I put it together like you mentioned and just– it's a survey of about 50 questions. This last year we had about four hundred and fifty (450) people respond. The average size of the store owners responding was about two point three (2.3) million and we put together a lot of stats. Everything from— We put together everything together from: where the people are from, and what type of businesses they have , conversion rates, revenue growth, how Amazon is impacting their business, all those kind of things. So, yeah, that's the kind of the survey in a nutshell and there's kind of three big take aways that I can go into or if there's something else you wanted to talk about first , we can do that too Mark. Mark: Yeah, so let's go onto the three big takeaways and for anyone looking at this, there's –this is freely available online, the ecommercefuel.com and we'll link to it in the show notes. And probably, I hope for a member, I'll link to them an e-mail that I'll send out people as well about this podcast, but lot's are really good data in here. So you do this every year, you pour over the data and you take a look at the– you know, what's important, what were the big takeaways for you these year? Andrew: Yes! So the big takeaways, let's say for the last 2018, really 2017 but published 2018 was this incredibly strong year for growth for kind of that seven (7) figure store owner demographic. Revenue, year over year, revenue was up, thirty eight (38) % and only about eleven (11) % of stores didn't see any growth at all, so like last year- you know it was in it's high twenty's (20's) or twenty five (25), twenty six (26), you look at E-commerce in general it tends to grow in a twenty (20), twenty two-ish percent range. But this year was just an incredible year, really strong growth. That was one. The second thing was, was that Amazon was a driver for a lot [inaudible 0:08:57]. This isn't surprising but it's you see, how much Amazon is contributing to merchant's revenue. So, last year, the year before this, Amazon was supposed to be responsible for about twenty (20) percent of overall revenue so let's say, you know- of a someone who's near a million dollars in sales for an average store. Two hundred thousand of that would've been generated from Amazon. This year was up to twenty-eight (28) percent so this year, two hundred and eighty (280) thousands of their million dollars in revenue was coming from Amazon. So Amazon's definitely making up a bigger portion of merchant's pie. Counterpart of that though is, Amazon also is generating more headaches and complaints for people so we looked at the number of people every year who say that- you know, we ask them what their biggest challenge and struggle in their business is, and this last year, the number of people who said Amazon is the biggest struggle or one of them was to almost 3X. And this wasn't just people complaining that Amazon was killing their business, saying that they were drop-shipper and “Oh no, all my sales are dying because Amazon was stealing them” that was only a small fraction. Probably, you know, twenty (20) percent of people complaining, thus majority of them were complaining about things like Amazon's being more competitive, I'm too reliant to, I'm tired of dealing with some of their terms of service and policies or things like that. So Amazon's more up to a greyer revenue but also there's also additional overhead burden with that. And finally, the last big takeaway was that conversion rates increase dramatically across the board for all sellers. The rates were up about twenty five (25) percent- you know, year over year. So, last year conversion rate on average was at 2.10 percent this last year it jumped up to 2.664 percent, right on that range. And, you know that was, probably the most surprising step for me for the whole survey because, it's difficult enough to bump up your conversion rate by twenty (25) percent across a single site but to see that across a group of twenty (20), four hundred and fifty (450) stores on average and I thought maybe, you know maybe what we were saying was that you can be seeing more people shift to manufacturing or product labeling which tends to have a much higher conversion rate than let's say drop-shipping. But I saw that conversion rate boost across all different store types from drop-shipping to just reselling, to manufacturing and so, hard for me to explain, I kind of hypothesize that perhaps our community is getting a little bigger and merchants are maybe getting a little more advanced; the economy and the US particularly has done well this last year. Whatever the reason something back there, those were probably the three biggest takeaways that I have to work for. Mark: Alright, so one thing that I've always found interesting about your report is the percentage of sales that Amazon takes from some of your largest stores. What are the data show–if you remember of hand, I don't know if you have the report in front of you, but what are the data show from your largest stores and how much they are actually getting from Amazon? Andrew: Let me see here if we actually calculated that this year, so I don't think we actually– Let's see, we have– we measured a couple things, we didn't get the actual revenue from, you know, what percentage of the revenue Amazon was generated by stores that had a lot on Amazon but we did measure was kind of revenue growth for different stores if they weren't selling on Amazon, if they were selling on Amazon, or were Amazon was sixty (60) percent of their revenue. So when you break it down that way, Amazon, you know, stores aren't selling on all on Amazon, they're growing in about thirty (30) percent. Stores they're selling a little bit on Amazon, you know some of them are growing in about forty one (41) percent and stores where Amazon is, you know, makes up to sixty (60) percent plus of their revenue, they're growing at fifty one (51) percent. So, you're definitely seeing the fastest growing source, definitely have a very high component of Amazon revenue to and the same thing too for income growth, it follows kind of lock step with the income that people are seeing as well. Mark: Right, now I'm just going to go through this here, one chart that I see is the Amazon dominance trance. Amazon as a source number channel, looks like you have twenty six (26) percent there? Andrew: Yep, so that's twenty six (26) percent of merchants listed Amazon as their number one channel up from twenty (20) percent last year. Mark: See, that number right there, actually is almost staring 'cause it seems like with the restore I see, it may have started flying with the website and then they move over to Amazon and Amazon took up all of the revenue. This is showing what seventy four (74) percent are still have other channel as their dominant channels or maybe they're just so diversified, What's the story behind that? Andrew: That's good question! I think it's a lot of our members are, I would say probably three quarters of them for whatever reason don't– are not a primarily–they have a very good presence off of Amazon as well and maybe, I don't know if that's just culture or part of it's to the [inaudible 0:13:20.7] silver screening and who we kind of bring in to the community but I think that might be more of–a bias of our community as to maybe just a general market thing 'cause you see, as you said, a lot of–it's probably under what you've expect to see. So I'm not exactly sure, I think part of that might just be a demographic work community report. Mark: I think it's fast– I think it's useful data, especially for people that have an E-commerce businesses who're think that they want to make Amazon their pear play. I've talked to a few business owners they've said wildly, “I'm going to focus my attention to-on Amazon because, it's for the money, yes, and why would I take away my other efforts from Amazon and make as much money.” But it appears as if you do have a number of stores that are doing that seven (7) and eight (8) figure revenue almost, without Amazon being that dominant channel. Andrew: yeah definitely and I think what a lot of the savvy merchants that I see in our community doing in any kind of floss and secret to Amazon is, it's hard to pass up free money and easy money and granted that Amazon's getting harder but still it's a pre-power form and conquering opportunity even in 2018. But their mindset much of the time is use Amazon as a way to help launch a brand, to help generate some cash flow and then use the momentum you can generate from Amazon, Use the cash you can generate from Amazon to help build your off Amazon, your own dot com, your own web store presence, because all fully that's the asset that you own and i's much less rescue than being be-haunt by Amazon going forward so I think that's a strategy a lot of us, as bigger merchants are taking. Mark: That's absolutely see as well with Amazon is that launch process tends to be. You want to be testing your products and been able to launch a brand so much faster because of the size of the market place. Let's talk real quick about software. You guys have a very cool part of your community where your community rates software that they're using and it's feedbacks. So you have like a star rating. If somebody wants to find like a good shopping card or what shopping card they should use, or maybe help desk software. You guys have a whole record of software within the community that rates that, right? Andrew: We do, yeah, and so part of it is the ratings like you mentioned another part of it, and maybe more telling is– is the usage stats. We have about a thousand members in our community and our software goes out and crawls all of our member's stores on a weekly basis and uses an integration we've built with to be able to tell what all of the members are using. So we can tell in a real time that “Oh, you know, forty four (44) percent of our members are on Shopify this year versus, you know thirty seven (37) percent last year.” Whatever it is. So we can get stats on what people are using but also people– our members who rate the software as well as, with essence, what's– you know, what people like. Mark: That's– that's pretty cool. So what software would you say is really– sum of the people should be paying attention to in 2018? What's really been growing quite a bit over the past year? Andrew: I'd say, you know, search shopping biggest one's and that's probably become as a surprise to people but Shopify just dominates in this area, you look at that thousand-ish area in our community and I think probably about forty (40)– Four hundred and twenty (420), four hundred and thirty (430) of them succumb, you know, over forty (40) percent close to forty five (45) percent use Shopify and the number of people we've seen switch to Shopify from Magento over the last two (2)- three (3) years is just unbelievable, they've done a really good job capturing that market shares. So, on a shopping card side, that's when I'd say, the other four well kind of three that we have within the– still the merchant E-mail marketing, Mailchimp is the number one. They've got two hundred and eighty two (282) out of our top one thousand and Clivio's to seventeen of our top one thousand. So both those are kind of the leaders there. Fairly close. Help desks, we've got Zendesk- is the top to use, sixty one (61) out of a thousand use them, but help scouts pretty close behind there and they get slightly better ratings. And I would be surprised if we didn't see a flip-flop of that seen help scout come on the top over the next year. And for product reviews, Shopify parse based on the facts that people use, Shopify is reviewed, built on reviews the system has most popularly used. YAGPO used to be that number one spot but they dropped to number three (3) this last year. Partially, they got great functionality but I think a lot of the kind of experience that I've heard from stores is just their pricing is getting quite a bit more expensive. And so you see, companies like Stem Dot ayo who offers similar functionality at a much lower price might come in, they'd jump up significantly this year up to the number two (2) spot. So, those were kind of the trends I'm seeing. For disclosure we've had the Claygo sponsor of our podcast. YAGPO use to sponsor us and Shoprite sponsored us in the past. Mark: Right so that might be infusive but I'd want to share something, cause I think you'll actually appreciate this. I'm working on a client right now and hopefully, let's say business here soon, tell me last time you heard this: He's on Yahoo! shopping card. Andrew: Well occasionally we get somebody on the forum saying “Hey, I'm on Yahoo! stores, should I migrate or how do I migrate.” It's always an entertaining thread to read. Yeah, that's– curious people laugh. Mark: When they told me that, It's like “Woah, I haven't heard that for at least like five or six years. It used to be the gold standard that everybody used. Andrew: Well, I think- I mean, if you look in the cell that's probably a decent positioning stand point for someone who's careful of migrations and reason. I'd still say “Hey!” but you know, I'm sure there's some incredibly converting Yahoo! store sites out there but you can probably modernize and probably get thick enough conversion, it's a rebrand, it's a nice value out of your– if you're going to buy this thing. Mark: Yeah, that's an interesting listing, which I'm sure a lot of people will be looking at once it comes out but yeah. So , let's talk a little bit about Magento and fact that there's– I seem I heard a little bit, my only foreign in E-commerce that I wrote a blog post on this years ago but it was kind of disaster for myself. My foreign in E-commerce side, what with Magento and– My goodness, I had so much trouble with it. What do you think the problem is with Magento. Are they just losing out at Shopify or are there problems that are kind of inherent at Shopify. Andrew. It's– I think it really depends year-use case. It's–Magento's incredibly powerful. They've got a decent eco-system for a lot of their extensions but it's just so complex. Like I've been on multiple shopping cards; Zencard, Shopify, Magento. And by far, the hardest one to customize was Magento. Even just changing layouts around on the homepage was a nightmare and I– so I think, I think the problem is, is that it's-it's very powerful but it's much more complex than your average store owners specially in the seven (7) figures is going to need. When you look at the benefit of having full customization verse's the benefit of ease of administration and up key maintenance Shopify or another Host solution just makes, just makes more sense. And I think that there, when you think about it, if you do actually need to have access to the code base to be able to fully customize your site which is definitely–there are definitely stores out there that would be able to create custom functionality, be able to put together custom integrations that you can, with maybe some hosting solutions if the IPI's would allow it. If you need a hundred percent customization there are other cards out there that maybe– a little lighter way or quite as heavy and resource intensive and hard to customize as Magento that are probably a better option for people on that seven (7) figure range. Mark: Yeah, alright, cool. I want to go to the first point that you brought up, and that is, that revenues are up across the board from a review that you've seen, which this is something that is seen across the board as well with the business that were selling right? The business that you're selling, the values just seem going up, up, and up. And I don't know if this is a maturation or the industry just businesses that have been around longer and now are a richer skill or– really what's behind it? You make a point in your report here about– where is it? That would be the margins, the cross margins seem to hold up as well. Can you come on a little bit on the margins that you're seeing on E-commerce. I think the margins here– seen: growth margin, average of 39.2 percent and that margins of 17.4 percent. What is the trend to start with bend with that and over the past few of these revenues growing that's all same level? Andrew: Yeah, So this is something that surprise me, with how much Amazon is growing and how, you know much it's supposed to talk about. Our margin bends this opportunity. You would expect that margins to come on with more pressure this year. What I found was that they didn't slide as much as I thought they would've. Tiny bit but not very much, like you mentioned, the growth margin was 39.2 percent I think last year was a little bit higher, like 39.7 or 8 percent so it sled like a tiny bit but not much and same on the net merchant this year it was 70.4. I think last year it was 70.8 or 9. So it came down a little bit but nearly as much as I was expecting to see and if you look at the margins of stores for selling primarily on their own platform versus that are primarily selling on Amazon. This might be interesting for people, the growth margin for people primarily signed on Amazon is thirty six (36) percent versus 40.4 percent selling by their own store. And neither I expect that because Amazon takes a fee and new work fees that pays on top for Veer store. But even when you count for all the fees and the advertising you get bend your own store versus Amazon. You're still going to set a better margin selling on your own stores 17.7 percent after all said and done versus Amazon which is 16.6 so that's kind of hell of margins broke down this year. Mark: That's fascinating! Something that I feel being of interest with a lot of buyers is this average growth by business model and the format. So obviously with E-commerce you have a lot of different ways that you can do E-commerce and I'll get buyers sometimes say “Men, I want to buy a business.” “What are you thinking of?” “E-commerce.” “What type of the E-commerce?” I don't know. Okay– You have to understand like, in E-commerce there's some significant differences. Drop shipping had growth of 32.7 percent recently 27.6. I'm actually a little surprised to see more growth in the drop shipping category than in reselling category. Andrew: I was too. I was very surprised to see that. And one of my guesses about why that was, just a guess but this last year, Shopify bought Oberlo, I believe it's that pronounced, the integrator with Ali Express. You kind of have seen a significant up taken in people using that drop shipping from China via AliExpress model this year or last eighteen (18) months and I wonder if that– part of that is a responsible fact 'cause looking back at last year's report, if I remember correctly, drop shipping was– had the lowest growth. I think our selling beat it out. So, I wonder if that is what potentially changed the tides on things. Mark: Yeah, possible. And in all fairness you list here the percentage of stores that are also have flatten beckoning revenues and drop shipping seems to be just kind of split right down the middle here. You have thirty three (33) percent, basically growing thirty three (33) percent that are flat or declining so they're also– although they're doing okay there is a number that are also in a hurting category. Andrew: Exactly! yeah, Exactly, about a third of drop shipping business is at either flat or in declines. So last year, again surprisingly it's–I was– seeing the numbers, having a drop shipping business myself, whether reasons I sold that business was because I saw they had wins with drop shipping, it's pretty much more difficult with Amazon and with some other forces and last year you stated, the merchant fifty (50) percent of drop shipping stores were either flat or declining. And that's come down significantly where you're only thirty three (33) percent or in that category now. So I think part of that is potentially or below, I think part of that is just an improved year. But when you look at the stores in the other categories in rough shape, either stalled out or shrinking, you'll see much smaller numbers. Any more from fifteen (15) to twenty (20) percent for all the other categories, reselling private label, manufacturing. So yeah, so definitely some stronger areas, I think still drop shipping– there is still drop shipping business I think that work well. It's just a much harder nut to crack and you really have to be able to have a good way to add value outside of the product because you're resetting commodities and come on in and sell this as well. So it's just trickier to get right at it. Mark: Right! And I think there are some industries back with the shoverey I had into E-commerce with doing gun safes. It's going to be not very realistic to the warehouse. Gun safe in most cases once you're doing very large volumes just because the shipping cost or so, so high regardless what you're doing. Andrew: Right. Mark: So there are some businesses that land themselves to that. I think it should be no surprise to anybody that private label and manufacturing seem to be the biggest winners with forty three (43) and forty two (42) percent on every forty three (43) percent both the categories were growing and only twenty one (21) of fifteen (15) percent of those categories respectively were shrinking. Andrew: just to clarify mark, that's– so for private label and manufacturing that's the actual revenue growth rate per year. So private label will be growing like forty three (43) percent and manufacturing growing in about forty two (42) percent per year. Mark: Okay! Good! Good clarification. Fastest growing category. Is this something that we could ask all the time or what businesses are hot now? Which should I be looking for a buyer or looking to buy something? At the top of your list pet supplies which isn't a huge surprise whenever we get a business that deals with pets. Oh men, I think just flies out the shelf when I get someone with inquiries on that. But I'm well surprised about food. Andrew: And I'll put on a disclaimer on here. We have forum of fifty people respond, you break down, let's say twenty (20) or thirty (30) categories. We do not have growth bust to this as I would love and I imagine that if we got– if we have five (5) thousand, I'm sure that this numbers might be a little bit different. Take this with a little bit of a aggression that if we didn't have–we had almost no data points, these are coming off to history businesses to come off you know. It's nine (9) or ten (10) or more businesses so-. But yeah food is on there and I've seen, and I told you, a handful of businesses doing well in the food space over the last year so, That was little surprising but yeah, definitely nonetheless. It was coming in about fifty six (56) percent year over year. And again another carry up for this is again our stores are in a small in a high six (6), seven (7) figure range a lot of them so, you probably want to see high gross rates here than you would, just across the board for any businesses but still strong show food. Mark: Yeah! and probably one of the most eyed- piece of data that I've seen in to support in again. I'm focusing a lot on this one category because I think it's going to be interesting for a lot of our buyers. Men's clothing, thumbs up! Women's clothing, not growing as fast. Such an interesting this really. Andrew: Yeah! I mean it's not even-it's a huge gap. Fifty three (53) percent, men's clothing and accessories versus twenty eight (28) percent in woman's clothing and accessories and I think it's– I think part of that is just you have– I mean woman's fashion, I think is more saturated, more– just traditionally. And I think you're starting to see more interesting kind of men's apparel come out. Specially direct to consumer, men's apparel and– yeah it's almost current twice as fast 'cause I just think there's more room than there is much competition. There's still, I mean your apparel, not an easy place to be in but men's versus women, I think men's probably much easier place to make money right now. Mark: Yeah, absolutely! So, last, put them in a do with the steadily commerce– clocking pretty quickly, I think this is probably the funniest question I've seen, anybody ask on survery about your favorite entrepreneur. How did you select these four entrepreneurs. And the four that you choose likely just set anyone, let's see: Ian Moss, Richard Branson, Mark Cuban, and Jeff Basels. Some of those makes sense, how did you slot those four? Andrew: Oh, I got to have Basels on the right 'cause he's the you know, king of E-commerce. The other, I was just trying to come up with, with four well-known billionaires, the idea of being cool, do you know what billionaire who you want to have lunch with and just top up of my head once that came to mind that were worth the billion dollars at least is Ian and kind of just came to me quickly was those four, kind of those than that. Mark: I'm actually surprised Ian Moss by large margins. Andrew: (laughs) You want to be the– Almost thirty (30) percent it was Richard Branson, second was twenty five (25), Cuban twenty three (23), and Basels. Surprisingly or maybe not so surprisingly given this is an E-commerce survey and– some people in here, a little help with the others as well, was Basels with 22.2 so– Mark: I'm not surprised at all. I was really hoping back think we are can you get to it this time, so maybe we can do it at future episode, I was really hoping to talk a little bit about you're experiences on your own businesses, your own E-commerce businesses and what that was like because you self-sold, you didn't use appropriate off those and I think the first one you did– Didn't you do a public auction with that? Andrew: First one? I did and it was kind of strange and I think you were kind enough to retouch me after that and give me some tips and talk to me about it in a real gracious way. I did it was reverse auction, so the way it worked was like I listed the site– well first it was– everything was publicly transparent as you know most of the sales that you do, fairly quiet about the financials, the instance, the data. And I– the options, I published all the financials, all the key things, there was a few things I held back that might have been easy to rip-off the business with but ninety (90) percent, for PINO balance sheet, all I can have set, I made public and– so that was one part. Second part was I do the answer, reverse auction and so the price started at a hundred and ninety to eighty five thousand dollars, and then every week would drop by ten thousand dollars until somebody decide they wanted to buy it and I had someone, I think at the first week of before evening drop, and take it up. So it was kind of a very unorthodox way to sell a business and only the first one to say I think I lacked out on getting a great buyer from the out set that we work well together and close the deal. I very much could've blown it in my face, but -yeah. A little bit different. Mark: If somebody wants to look at that, you can do a search on Google for E-commerce fuel and sign E-commerce business. I believe it actually come up in the third results, if I'm not mistaken or we can make it easier and link up our show notes, and some one will like the post . Andrew: Also, new link for the show notes and also if you could Google E-commerce fuel reverse auction or reverse auction “trollingmotors.net” That's the name of the business that might pop-up as well. Mark: That's right, remember that new E-mail do you have? I mean it was completely selfish forums on my part, I just wanted to be in front of the audience so– Andrew: (laughs) Mark: But see you got a lot of really cool resources available in E-commerce field obviously there is a form which is you have to apply for in order to get in to say no that you're going to get high quality members there. You guys also have a job board that you release in week. I think it's so , discretion it's so often to people who buys site and who want to have fines with good confidence and help. I don't really recommend anything to people but you guys just recently started up a job org. Andrew: We did, yeah! That something we saw was a both kind of a gap in the market and also just like you said, something our members are having a hard time with was finding a really good quality E-commerce talent. and our job award is focused on E-commerce directors or managers kind of high level. You know people they can run an entire operations for an owner as well as exceptional marketers PPC, E-mail Mark any things like that and exceptional customer service reps so people that are really good on customer service over the phone or email or chats. So that's our job board list in the positions we really focus on, and try to– try to build a community, a job board that's healthier so that when you run a store, you know where you can go to get in front of an audience of people looking for dispositions and if you're lucky to get the E-commerce world it's a great place to going to be able to find an opportunity, hopefully to get plugged in and you can actually find that at ecommercefuel.com/jobs. Mark: you're going to owe me a lot of thanks, I'm going to send them, all on the show notes. Andrew: , So Mark, I will happily send you as many links– [inaudible 0:32:58.6] I bet that won't be a problem. Mark: Of course, it's been an awesome state of Merchant report, this is your second doing it, is that right? Andrew: Second year doing it, hope to do it every year. And yeah– this is the second year. Mark: It's also lot of work to put together but there's few things I look forward to. As one of those things I look forward to, I think there's actually really good data insights in this report. Anyway that's been invite, or anyone who's in E-commerce space in general. This is something that you want to check out for sure. If you are not familiar with the E-commerce fuel I would definitely recommend checking them out and I know I'm completely endorsing you, this is not something I normally do but I really do believe we should do in over there at E-commerce fuel. I know so many members there that they become friends of our company and personal friends as well. I like to brag about things that I think will actually help people and honestly your group is out there helping a lot of people in space. Andrew: well thank you, I appreciate the kind words, Mark. And one thing I wanted to mention just on a say the merchant if you're a daily geek and you want the add the numbers or your smarter than me which is almost certainly the case and one plots some more insights from these, we make all of the data just openly available so you can go to the webpage for this post and download the full data set so by all means a stats measure or try to do the best I can but if you want to -if you have insights you can plot of it we do make whole data set available for people so, Mark: Yeah! and if you pull on any insights send an email over to Andrew, just let him know. I'm sure he would love to see it. Andrew: I'd love to hear about it, yeah , please do. Mark: Cool, Andrew thanks, so much for coming on, I hope to have you on some time in the future. Really, really appreciate it. Andrew: Mark, thanks for letting me, you know, the invitation and for the support that you've given the- to our fans, to our community over the years. Appreciate that as well Mark: Cool, alright, well hey, enjoy that vacation! Andrew: Thanks appreciate that! Links and Resources: eCommerceFuel State of the Merchant 2018 Story of Andrew's first eCommerce site sale eCommerce fuel job board

women amazon google china men state story guns nashville drop forbes minneapolis montana quiet ecommerce revenue yahoo rv cuban fifty shopify richard branson stores fastest mark cuban merchant conversely ppc mailchimp merchants pino mobil fairly partially 3x zendesk aliexpress biggest takeaways veer magento counterpart shoprite ipi markit ian moss oberlo mark yeah joe you andrew yeah okay you andrew youderian mark so mark right andrew oh ecommercefuel andrew well andrew thanks mark see mark okay mark absolutely andrew sure

24 Due Diligence Tools Reviewed

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 17, 2018 52:18

Today we are talking to Chuck Mullins all about due diligence. An internet business veteran who is now a part of the Quiet Light team, Chuck purchased his first internet business while still in college and was more successful at 18 than some of the most seasoned entrepreneurs. For both the buyer and the seller, the due diligence process is one of the most difficult parts of buying and selling an online business. Fortunately, there are a lot of tools that can be used to simplify the process. In this episode, Mark and Chuck look at over 20 different due diligence tools and explain how you can use them in our due diligence processes. Episode Highlights: Chuck guides us through a group of tools that can be fundamental to any well thought out due diligence plan. Any buyer knows that this is the most important thing you can do to make sure that no stone is left unturned when preparing to make that purchase and hit the ground running. Try using a due diligence consultant service. We don't advise leaving it all up to them but they can take some of the work out of your hands. Never just research the business but remember to also research who is selling the business. Google trends is very powerful. Google Trends lets you read the trends that any given business may have experienced. Be sure to be aware if your acquisition is “trendy” or “evergreen.” SEM tools can provide insight into the business potential and the size of any risks. Website crawling tools are used to determine customer and market trends. Social media tools are an additional way to gain insight into connections for that business and also the business owner's niche interactions in their niche. Lessons from Due Diligence: For first time buyers the best advice Chuck offers is that you don't know what you don't know. Due diligence gives you the answers. Know what a tool is good at, put it in your due diligence toolbox, and use it correctly. Surround yourself with the types of people who can help you. Be careful to use your lawyer for law and your accountant for money. Always remember that you as the buyer ultimately make the business decision. Don't be afraid to ask questions! Keep good records of what you have looked at. Work off a checklist and be meticulous about it. A seller is as interested in you in the success of their business. Transcription Mark: Hey Joe, how are you? Joe: Doing good Mark, how about yourself? Mark: I'm doing well, I'd talk to somebody that we both know well and that's one of our own Chuck Mullins. Joe: Mr. Chuck Mullins, good man he is. Mark: He is, yeah. He joins us on the interview on the video part push on the interview wearing his Quit Light shirt which he had embroidered. The only person at Quiet Light that has one. Although, He didn't tell me that he made one for you. And I haven't seen you in it yet. Joe: He did I almost put it on today. It's just, it's a little big so I [inaudible 0:01:16] it. I need to put on some layer, run it through a two cycles of the dryer. Mark: It would have been so appropriate because, you know, he's wearing his shirt in this interview and you've been wearing your shirt in, and he's getting, make one for me though of course. Joe: He should. You're the founder of Quiet Light Brokerage. Mark: Absolutely. Joe: You should have like a logo on the back of your office chair that says Quiet Light Brokerage, what's wrong with you? Mark: I thought about it but. Most of my office is really a mess. If you seeing this on video and we'll talk about this one a bit. My office is usually a mess. It's all about angles, right? My angles a little bit of center today because I don't want to show you the rest of my office. So, yeah. But this actual episode is going to be great for a video. If you're listening in your car, if you're listening on the podcast, you'll still get a lot of value out of it. But I'd recommend at some point checking out the Youtube channel. We are separating our channels, so we will have a new channel, just for the podcast episodes. And this episode will, going to kick that off. So make sure you'll go there and you subscribe. And the reason that is a good one to watch on the Youtube channel is because we're reviewing due diligence tools in this episode. We actually go over 27 different due diligence tools. We bring them up on the screen and you can see, we kind of browse around and fumbling around on somebody's sites. As we talk about how you can use this in your due diligence process. Any buyer out there who is looking to acquire a business in the next few years or so, you know due diligence is probably the most important part of that process for you making sure that you're checking under every rock and every hidden area to see is there anything wrong with this business that I need to be aware of. Well Chuck and I go over 27 tools that he has used personally in his past of buying businesses. So we bring real interest in episode from that stand point. He brings a lot of experience in buying and selling businesses for.. Do you know how long he has been doing it? I can't remember off hand. Joe: In 1997 I think. He was self-employed in college, making more in one month the most people make in a year when he was in college. Mark: Right right and then, He and I have been presenting at Pubcon for 7 years. We go over this video a little bit but we've been presenting for 7 years at Pubcon together and people always come to see Chuck and then hopefully I can pick up a couple of the scraps to come off the table when presents. So it's a great presentation on a how to go about buying online businesses. Joe: And just a point out of the obvious remaining, not so obvious. Technically we represent the sellers in what we do. Well we can't help them and help them while unless we also help as many buyers as possible. So it's, many people would think that what you're about to present with Chuck is in contrast to what we do. But we're always about full disclosure, always making sure that buyers are making good investments and so that both they and the sellers are happy to closing table and it's successful transaction down the road as well. Mark: Yeah, absolutely! Again, we going to do represent the sellers, but if our seller's getting sued, 3 or 4 months later that is a pretty bad job on our part. So it's important that both buyer and seller walk away from a deal, happy and when you know that deal. So that's the goal. We get a transaction wins. And part of that process is due diligence. I say, I hate like throw a due diligence. When I first started Quiet Light and I got like, you know, a monster due diligence, I would kind of [inaudible 0:04:31] and be like, Oh man, this is going to be a pain. Now when I see a well thought out due diligence, it's makes me happy because I know that, that buyer is going to be really happy and that deal is gone go through. Because where they're going to really inspect that business thoroughly. Joe: Yeah, well thought, that was important. Not just a massive list but a well thought, that was specific to the business that's being purchased. I've seen blank at due diligence less come through where somebody clearly copied and paste it. But I'm excited about this episode Chucks a really, really smart guy and successful entrepreneur and I think a lot of people would learn some good stuff here. Mark: That's good, very good. Let's get to it. Mark: Hey Chuck, how are you? Chuck: Doing great. How are you Mark? Mark: I'm good. Thanks for joining me on the call. I see you have your nice Quiet Light shirt on. You're the only one at Quiet Light that has that shirt. Chuck: That's because I took the initiative to have it made. Mark: Right. We'll get them for everybody else eventually. Chuck: Actually, I think I bought Joe one. But he didn't want it. Mark: Oh really, I got to start getting on him so he wears it from the Podcast. Chuck: Yeah Mark: Yeah, anyway for this Podcast, if you guys are listening to this in your car, this would be one of the once that I would recommend over going to Youtube and we've set up a new channel on Youtube just for the interviews. We're going to put all our interviews on that channel. I'd recommend looking at that because we're going to review a bunch of due diligence tools. A little bit of background between Chuck and myself. Chuck and I have been presenting at Pubcon. What? 7 years I think? Chuck: Yeah, I think so. Mark: Yeah, a very long time. Chuck invited me to speak within that Pubcon a while ago. We've been doing it ever since we've had all the people join us occasionally, to talk about buying and selling websites. But he and I have been talking about that night. Typically we talk on the sell side and Chuck was talking on the buy side. And the result was that more people are interested in what Chuck had to say than I was ever had to say. So I figured, it would be good to have you on here. Both, so I think we can get to know you a bit better. I'd also review some of the due diligence that you've use in the past in buying online businesses. So let's just do a quick introduction for you as far as your background. What's your background in buying and selling online businesses? Chuck: So, I started my first website back in 1996. Through the few years, made a bunch of money in college just a kind of doing really well. And made more money than you know, than I was living on. So I start looking at doing various investments. So, start looking at real estate, franchises, I was looking at car washes, and a storage facilities, and a Laundromats. And nothing ever, just kind of, really worked for me or really peaked my interest enough. You know like, I dabbled in real estate. But everything just kept kind drawing me back to the internet business. So then, you know, I made a few websites that were successful. But I started thinking about you know, what if I could acquire somebody's company and then just build upon that and stand on somebody else's shoulders, instead of trying to prove out a model myself. You know, use a model that has been proven by somebody else. And then just take all the knowledge I had, and expertise, and grow that. So I start doing really well, and at a certain point I just fell alive, you know presenting at a conference, and kind of just, giving back, and then that's when I reached out to you and I think my initial presentation I gave was with Jason, Quiet Light, we did it at affiliate summit. I don't even know, 8 or 9 years ago. Mark: Yeah, I remember that. I was in the audience for that presentation and then, that was January. I remember specifically because it was really cold at that conference in Las Vegas. The fountains were frozen when we got out of the hotel. I was kind of surprised about that. So it's cool! So yeah, you've been doing this presentation for a long time and I know whenever we do the presentation, when we get to the slide on due diligence, whereas all the phones in the rooms go up to take pictures, because people are really interested to know what's our tools they can use to do due diligence. So we're going to review some of these tools here, as well as talk about some of the principles, buyers might want to apply when you're doing your due diligence. As always, we'll just throw out the blanket; cover your tails sort of a disclaimer here. Due diligence is ultimately a buyer's responsibility. Make sure that you're doing it, make sure that you are bringing in professionals. What we're going to do is were going to give some advices to things that we've seen work, but by all means, this is not complete when you're talking about due diligence. Wherein you need to apply a complete process to the business that you are looking at. So I'm going to share my screen here and open this up, and I'm just going to share the full screen, and hopefully on my [inaudible 0:08:56] of so that people don't get those. But can you see that chart does that come up for you? Chuck: Yeah. Mark: Alright. Good, good. So here we go, where going to just get started right away with this list of tools and I'll be browsing to the website as you talk about the individual ones. The first one that we're going to talk about is Centurica and they're full service due diligence firm. They are the only one of that sort that we have on this list. So why don't you talk a little bit about Centurica, what they do and why they made this list. Chuck: Sure, So Chris Yates is the owner of Centurica, they've been around for quite a while and Chris runs a buying and selling website conference called and Rhodium. Rhodium Weekend I think is kind of, the official name. I ran into Chris way back when I started to look at buying and selling businesses. he was the first person.. I'm always looking for knowledge where I look into learn more. So doing some searches and came across his conference and went to it. Kind of on a whim, because there was no information about the conference because that was the first one that they've had. So it was like, trying to figure out and I thought well, for the money, maybe I'll pick up something and if not, it's not a total lost because you know, I'm just come and go to Vegas to hang out. You know Chris is really a smart guy and I ended up I think I was probably the first one we, to get into his master mind group. So I'm going to master mind group with Chris and a bunch of other entrepreneurs and he does this great due diligence product were he just kind of takes it over from you. Will do like a full blown due diligence review on a business that you're going to acquire and I would never say that you should handle fully the [inaudible 0:10:33] somebody else do the due diligence. But you should allow, if you're going to hire somebody, do it in parallel with them. So that way you're just getting, you know, a second, third set of eyes on a due diligence and on the business that you're looking to acquire. So they offer various levels and, so it looks like they've got something from 59 dollars right there and all the way up to, I think a 5,000 dollar package. That's kind of like a suit to nuts version. Mark: Yeah and just look at the website; they have a whole team of people here that are associated with them. A lot of these people, you and I know, we know them through Rhodium Weekend and through that master mind group as well. These are some really smart guys, good guys, to be able to just get on the phone with and get their feedback. In fact, I'm seeing n a few guys here, Mike Nunez, he has been on a Podcast with us before and a super smart guy. Well, these guys are [inaudible 0:11:24] really good contact as well. These are people that you can arrange calls with and bounce my ideas of. The amount of money, 5,000 dollars, some people might [inaudible 0:11:35] sort of price tag, but what do you think? Do you think that's worth spending that much money on due diligence support? Chuck: Yeah I mean, with Quiet Light, we're generally not dealing with the lower end deals, right? We're generally dealing with mid to high six figures, mid to low seven figure deals, so you know, five grand and that's their highest package, right? They got stuff that's cheaper, but how could you go wrong, you know, spending.. If you're on a million dollar deal, what's five grand, is what? Half a percent? I think it's probably money well spent. Mark: Yeah, absolutely I agree. The only assets that you put an end, this is, that whenever you are hiring somebody on the outside to potentially look for problems, understand that, what they're going to do is they're going to find problems because that's what you're hiring them to do, and they should do that. So this is not a criticism or some trick or by any means or attorney that's looking up for liability issues. But as the buyer, understand that you need to take that information, process it, through a business decision that you're making. Any sort of due diligence tool? I knew the ones that we offer here, that's the way that you should be going about using that information, that fits into the larger scheme. Alright, let's move on, Centurica is a good service. If anyone wants an introduction pres, it's either Chuck or I can provide an introduction pres as well. The next two are related obviously, Google.com and Google Trends, everybody knows what Google is, I'm sure most know what Google Trends are. How would you use each of these sites in a due diligence process? Chuck: Sure! So with Google, right? I mean, it's just a matter of Googling things either about the business, about the person, if you're buying the business, Google the terms around the business, and look for red flags, right? Look for if they've got one star review, average one star review, maybe that tells you something about the business. You know, look for complaints, things that are negative about the business, right? It's kind of one of those, you'll catch all due diligence place where you just, kind of sorting through all of the information that you can find on a given business and/or a person. Never just research the business, always research the person who is selling the business as well because, you could find out a lot of stuff and make sure that you're avoiding, potentially avoid some of the pitfalls, if somebody has done some sketchy stuff in the past, and find that out. Mark: Yeah, absolutely. You can learn a lot about their background as well, and all you have to do is search for all of the places that I have written for, come up, but years ago, I was involved in a lawsuit in those couple of pages. And so, anyone that was doing research on me, I would often get those sort of questions, “What happened then?” everything was fine. I didn't mind the questions, but people that were being smart and doing due diligence would ask about that. Chuck: And don't just look at the first page of Google. Look at the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, right? Because anybody can hire a reputation management company that will push some of those negative reviews, you know, to the 2nd or 3rd page. But they'll be there generally, still, just maybe a little lower. Mark: Right, Now if anyone wonders and are looking at the screen, I did not play hockey. Even though I'm from Minnesota I'm not a hockey player. There's a couple of them, that's out there that have gotten their name out there. Google trends, what search term I put in there? Chuck: Yeah so type in Paleo Recipe, or Paleo Diet I mean, because Paleo is a little different. So, if you look at the screen. Mark: You changed the date range? Chuck: Yes I changed the date range. That's, in January, you see that giant spike. Because that's when everybody is getting into a diet mode. Check that out even further. Mark: So we're looking right now. Let's set 2004 to present. So we'll do the entire history in Google Trends. There we go. Chuck: Sure, so you know, if you're looking to buying a business, and you're seeing.. Well use Google Trends to figure out what the trends are. Here you'll see is like a giant up peak that just kind of went up, and then all of a sudden it just kind of, trail off, and you're going to find things like this. Then you'll also notice that there is like ups and downs, like inter year, so that would be like the seasonally of the business, right? So just because you see, like this one giant peak, which correlates with January, and then you know, throughout the rest of the year it drops until December where December is at it's low, around Christmas time then it spikes immediately back up. So you're going to look for not only seasonality but you can look for long term trends. And when you're looking at businesses, think about whether the business is a trendy business first, it's an evergreen business. So, diet in general is a trendy business. If you look almost any diet, you'll see that there's a, it goes up, up , up, up and all of a sudden it tails off, right? There's something made it go up, usually it got unpopular, and then it'll trend off. I personally, one of the businesses that I bought was a Paleo website, and I managed to buy it exactly at the peak market, and then.. Mark: Right about there right? Right around January of 2013, early 2013. Chuck: Yup, definitely it's like, it was going up, up, and up, I'm like, great! Then it went down, down, down, and it was less great. So, luckily, we were able to so a little bit of magic and kind of keep the revenue going by trying to grow the business but it's another story. Mark: Something else that you can do with this, so as many people know, I own CatholicSingles, and the turn chart out for CatholicSingles doesn't look that great, when you look at it. Something I've learned from this chart from a few other places is, if you think that you're buying a website that gets lots of natural search traffic, be careful to make sure that it's not branded search traffic. So what's happening here is, the previous owner was losing out to a competitor who was beating him in a brand search, and so, the site still gets lots of natural search traffic to a keyword that still has a lot of relevance. But he lost a lot of brand relevance as well. So you can, if it's a large enough property you can often pick up on brands trends and what are not, you're going to have to compete on that [inaudible 0:17:34] as well. You can type in competing services and see what their trend is overtime as well. And you can actually compare the two together. So you can see how competition is playing along with. Maybe what you're looking at acquiring. Chuck: And then if you scroll down, you can do it by region as well. So what are the countries that has something popular. So maybe it was a US based company, and you see “Hey look! It's doing well in Canada and South America” or I guess none of that case was in South America, but Australia, and I think it was Mexico maybe. So maybe you expand into some of those other countries. Mark: Right, right. Exactly. Yeah Google Trends has some good date out there, I recommend again putting in your, whatever, competitors you know of, and comparing the traffic and the trends for the competitors and get the sense for, how those are working together. Chuck: And one additional point would be, Google trends is the search volume of a specific keyword, so it's not some magic formula, it's how many people are searching for something. So sometimes, people search, the way they search for things changes overtime, so you just want to, kind of remember that. That just because, you know. People might have been searching for, I don't know, Blue Widgets but now they're calling it, instead of Blue Widgets, they're calling it Blue Fuzzies, right? So it doesn't always mean that the actual market is declining at it. Sometimes it can just be a change in the way people are searching. Mark: Yeah, I think an example, that would be internet marketing has pushed toward in digital marketing. And so you see, the phrase you use to refer to something, is slightly different overtime. So, that's a good point. Now let's move off this chart because it's sort of depressing. State business websites, this is one that I haven't really seeing people a whole lot of, but it's a really good idea to use state business websites. Chuck: Yeah, I mean it's just the basic of going to whatever state the company is in, doing a search for the business, finding out who the owners are, and if there's any kind of red flags that maybe appear on that, just some basic due diligence there. Mark: Yeah, that one's not coming up here, but when you do the search, what will happen is, you'll see the records with the state, whether or not if filed in good standing, any other possible red flags that would come up. It's really just checking their box, making sure that everything is on the up and up with that business search. Maybe we can get back to this, if that comes up again. BuiltWith is a really cool tool and it shows all the technologies that a website was built with, right? Chuck: Yeap! Absolutey! So if you want to look at, like the technologies that go.. Is your internet out? Mark: No, I just typed it in wrong. Chuck: I guess your internet wouldn't be out, considering we're.. Mark: Right, right. So we could take a look to see what Quiet Light Brokerage is built on. And you can see that we have Googled conversion tracking, you can you see the whole technology stack and all the services that are used. When this might be useful as if you're looking at the P&L and you don't see a subscriptions but you would see here Drip. And you know that Drip is a subscription based service maybe that's not their P&L. That would be something to catch and maybe ask them about to find out what's going on there. Maybe they just start using [inaudible 0:20:47]the website. Chuck: Absolutely! And you know, one of the things you want to do as part of getting ready to acquire a site is make sure that you have the people and place to take over any kind of service that you need in advance. Right, so, if you have no idea how to use Drip and you're taking it in purchase in your company, maybe you need to has somebody in place who does know how to use it or request a standard operating procedure so that you can learn how to use it. So I would definitely have a list of like all of the kind of aspects of the business that you're not proficient at. And make sure that you have people in place that can help you with that [inaudible 0:21:26] running when you do take over the business. Mark: You know something that, speaking of Drips, I talked to Rob who sold Drip to Leadpages a few years ago, and he talked to me about how Leadpages was completely ready and able to switch over to a new website surely after they closed. They were making plans and building out technology as they were going through due diligence so that they can hit the ground, running right away. Something that might you want to do as you're going through a website's technology stack is take a look at what services are you using. If you are going to the Quiet Light website you'll notice that we have Hotjar, for example. Now I haven't tracked anything with Hotjar on the website in a while. We use it for surveys once in a while, but this would be a service for, maybe those report that you want to ask for during due diligence. Maybe some heat mapping that would just be useful information for you to be able to see and as you're making plans. Or OptinMonster, asked, have you run these campaigns before? What was the conversion rate like on these campaigns? And you can start getting really prepared as you're doing your due diligence to make that transition. Of course some sellers may not be eager to share some of that information with you, so go about that with some level of sensitivity understanding that they might be ready to open up all the books to you, but knowing what's there can help you request different reports. And Chuck you said something before in one of your presentations, probably multiple presentations and that was ask questions. Ask lots and lots of questions. Chuck: Yup, absolutely. I always say ask, ask, ask, and even ask questions you know the answers to. I feel like that's like some kind of weird tactic that people do. But they ask questions regardless of whether you know the answer because you almost want to get a seller to lie to you, because then you know how trust worthy they are right? If somebody's going to lie to you about something, it's a red flag. So, I've seen a lot of people that will ask the same questions in multiple ways. You don't want to be annoying right? Like, don't ask stupid questions but definitely ask. I shouldn't say, you don't want to ask stupid question because almost no question's stupid right? But we all understand there are all stupid questions that you shouldn't ask, that's just, are irrelevant. But don't feel like, if it's relevant to you then it's not a stupid question. So, ask everything. Because the time to ask is before you buy it. Right? You don't want to have a bunch of questions after you've inked the check. So, ask early and then ask often. Mark: Then the other thing too is you can get more callers on a particular answer. I know when I talk to some sellers and ask them why are you selling? They'll give me an answer one day and had talked to them another day and they give me s slightly different answer. And it's not that they're lying. The reasons are complex. There's more than one reason going on there and you gain caller, you gain more information about what's really going on behind the sale. By asking the same question, and looking at, in different formats, I know when you started to do video interviews or recording interviews of some of our clients and part of the reason for that is because people talk about questions differently then they might write them out. So this could ask a lot of those questions. Chuck: Yeah, absolutely! Archive.org. Mark: This is a great one. So if you're doing some due dilligence there's a whole industry people who just buy expired domains, stir a new content on it and then run with the site. Some of the amazing firm like [inaudible 0:24:38]some of them are buying like big sites, or what used to be a big site and for whatever reason, site's no longer so, this will give you an idea like in 2008. What was the site look like? Was it a brokerage site or not back then, you know. It's not always a bad thing but if it was something spamy back then, It might still have some problems moving forward. So it's also good just to see if you had some ideas of you wanted to try this or try that. And getting an idea for some of the things they've tried in their past or looking at previous screenshots of what the site was like one, two, three, four years ago? Mark: Yeah, I think one of the big challenges that you always have as a buyer and.. Sellers as well have this issue, right. Sellers know their business intimately because they've lived with it for so many years. As a buyer, you're coming in and trying to compress knowledge that they've gain over the course of sometimes 20 years now. And to a decision that you have to make within or week or two. Going back in the scene, what the history of the site was, just kind of, again it adds color, it adds more information into what does this person done in the past for the business. Like you said maybe we can see some things that they tried and you can ask them about that, if you're looking at the Quiet Light site, yeah, you might see that we sold some domains in the past. And if there's someone looking to buy us they could ask a question on that, you know, why don't you sell domains anymore? And we could go into that whole discussion. Chuck: Something else to look for is to look for gaps in the years so you know, you can put something on your website, right? And your like, your a [inaudible 0:26:14]telling a way back machine not to cross your site anymore. So if there's like a three year gap, why is that gap? Most legitimate sites aren't blocking the way back machine. From calling their site, so you know, that might raise a red flag and might be something you want to dive in on a little deeper. Mark: Awesome, alright let's move on at Trademarkia.com. Chuck: Yeah, you know it's a, if you're, if they told you to have a trade mark, search for it, figure it out. If they have told you they don't have a trade mark, search for it. See if somebody else has a trade mark right? Make sure that they're not infringing on somebody else's.. What's the word I'm looking for.. Somebody else's IP. You don't want to buy a business if they're infringing on other people's stuff. Mark: Yeah, and this can also be a very useful in search results if you're advertising on Google and you have competitors that are stepping all over that brand search. If you get that trade mark and you have the ability to get a trade mark you can keep all of those guys off, and brand is usually a very cheap way. But if you have competitors branding against it, that's [inaudible 0:27:16] your IP, so, searching for that trade mark is a useful thing to do. Alright, moving to the next set of tools and these tools here seem to be more of, search competitive intelligence and taking look at a site's search profile and I should just say probably maybe SEM. All [inaudible 0:27:33] right? Because this still include adwords as well? Chuck: Yeap, yeap! So organic and paid, my likes spy for a lot. It's a.. You can look at people's history of what kind of ad campaigns they did. As so, if somebody says “Oh we've only ever run one ads set and haven't done much testing” and then you look back at, and shows you. Well actually they ran a hundred different variations of this ad. Cross, you know 5 years and blah blah. So you will able to see a.. Verify some of the information they said. You can also check and it will show you, like literally shows you, what paid ads they ran. And like detects in them. So if you think, “Oh I wonder if they try this”, so you're going to look back and see what sorts of ads they've run. It's kind of interesting, you can also use this right here, like you see their competitor. So that'll show you overlap, so if you know some of, some competitors, you'll be able to see like what keywords they have overlapping using this venn diagrams. It's some really cool stuff and then you can look for opportunity, for words that they're going after, that your knots. They also have they a tool in here somewhere that will allow you to look at specific keywords over time and then it puts it over a timeline and has the Google updates. So you can see like, ok they had this key word was, you know, rank number 1111, and then drops off to like number 7, and [inaudible 0:28:57] Google get an update right when this happen so you can potentially know why they dropped off, it's because, well, Google did this update. So seeing what people are using like a private blog now, where to get a bunch of links and it's like doing really, really well then everything drops off a cliff. Because of Google did an update and it affect it, or, the reverse is true where they went from having nothing to all off a sudden number 1 rankings, just like overnight. And you can see, okay, well nobody just all send this from zero to number 1 ranking for 20 different keyword terms so then you know, Well, they must have done something to have that spike and then you can dive into what they're using like, blog that works for paid links or whatever. Mark: Yeah, any sort of quick changes in these results are going to be something to watch out for. So that's over all a good tool. And a lot of these tools out here, Moz, Open Site Explorer, Semrush, Magestic, AAtraps, I personaly like AAtraps. These are all really good tools, using in combination. It's going to give you a sense for how the data all adds up. Understand that when you're looking at data, in any of these tools, they have to use third parties to estimate what this is, for example, they're estimating for Quiet Light Brokerage, where estimated adwords budget is 3,000 bucks. Actually not too far off from that, but it's not accurate. Just understand that these are useful for trends, these are useful for getting another point of data, nothing's going to replace first hand tracking, it should be Google and Linux, or whatever tool people are using to analyze something. But you can use all these external tools in combination as well to try complete picture of what a website's doing and how it's ranking. Chuck: It's a bit [inaudible 0:30:45] That was I think only Google adwords, so if not taking your account, pay traffic, whether it's Facebook or other things. Right? Mark: Yep, yep! Absolutely that's right! Let's move on to a.. You like Spy for the best from all of these? Chuck: They are all kind of different. So there's like different reasons to use different ones, right? Some are for keyword research, some have like keyword difficulty tools, so part of due diligence isn't just looking at what the site has done, but where you can go with it. So I like to use a couple of them to do keyword research. See where their gaps are, you know, opportunity for me to grow the business. They're all kind of hit, different things to different things well. So I don't have one favorite. I do like SpyFu, I like Moz in the past, [inaudible 0:31:31], Majestic. And then on that list, we kind of didn't point it which I'm guessing maybe you thought I put in a wrong spot, but the alexa.com won. I haven't actually used this yet, but it's apparently a new tool that they rolled out. It's a competitor to all these other ones, Moz and Majestic. So they're doing a paid tool just like all these other guys. So, I haven't really dove into it yet, but it'll be interesting to maybe see how their data looks. Mark: Yeah, I actually just saw this the other day. And was intrigued by it. I haven't dug into this at all. But you would imagine that Alexa's by Amazon. You would imagine that they have some pretty good access to tools to be able estimate this information, with some level of accuracy. Chuck: And you know they've been around, since when, like early 2000 or earlier. So they've been crawling off these sites. So who knows what kind of information they've stored. I see [inaudible 0:32:34] has really good info going pretty far back. Mark: yeah, I know you're right on that. I think actually Alexa may have been the first competitive intelligence tool. That try to rank websites. Maybe there was somebody else before that. But they were the first one's who really gain attraction. Or that for a long time, everybody I knew had their Alexa bar. Up in their browser and you can see what, aside Alexa ranking was along with its paid rank. Right every marketer back in early 2010 and those two things, up in their tool bars. Chuck: It's fine, so I went to the site yet the other day, just checking it out and looking for their little site ranking. I could find it anywhere, so I'm not sure if they still have it or not. Mark: Yeah, I don't know. I try to look that up recently as well and I wasn't able to find it. I was behind actually this pay wall which is how I came across [inaudible 0:33:24] they are now offering this. Chuck: Yeah, yeah. It didn't, for a long time, like, right Google paid rank and the Alexa ranking have been dead like nobody uses those as a real stat anymore . But I just wanted to check it out. Mark: Yeah, yeah I know it's always interesting stuff. Alright let's move on to page 2 here. We're going to get into 3 tools here. [inaudible 0:33:46], deepcrawl.com and Copyscape. What do these tools do? Chuck: Yeah, The first two are pretty similar to each other. And what they do is you can plug in a domain name that it will crawl the entire site and it will look for all kinds of things. Like errors or not errors. Right, so it can show you just by crawling to the site. It will crawl every single link on the site from every single page. So it shows you like if there's dead links so if there are stuff that's going for like 404 pages, no errors, 500 errors, it will show you the redirects. So what I've used it for in the past is the one finding those dead pages or the 404 errors and then also finding the redirects and sometimes you'll see like stuff gets layered, where it will be redirected to this page, which layer's was then redirected to this page, which layer's then redirected to this page. And ultimately, what should you be doing is just going back and linking from the first page to the last page. And not using all of these bounces because with each bounce you have the a, potentially you're losing some of that authority has being passed through. Mark: Yeah, and there are the futuristic will do an on-site SEO analysis for even, one that I've used in the past that all definitely throw a, [inaudible 0:35:01] to be Orange Fox, Jacob Hagberg, has done some reports from Quiet Light Brokerage. and a lot of these tools do is, what these services work, will do, they just to analyze in a condensed manner. Because they look for opportunities and they also look for potential issue. Like you're saying, if there's tons of redirects in there, that's a problem, you are losing out an authority on those pages. 10 pages , 404, broken images. Images without all tags, accessibility issues. These are all things that you want to be looking for. Not necessarily as like major red flags but you know, a buyer beware, but also as opportunities that if you start to fix and clean these things up, there's going to be a natural lift in rankings on its long tale keywords that maybe you're on page 10 to 20 right now for, maybe that will bump you up to the first 10 results . So wait for you to just grow some opportunity. When you're looking at these 3 tools Chuck.. Chuck: The first two are very similar, right? Screaming Frog, is one that you have on your own computer, and then it use your internet connection to then crawl the site. DeepCrawl, they are running it from their servers, the Screaming Frog is relatively cheap. I forget the amount but it's hundred to 200 bucks a year. The DeepCrawl one is fairly pricey so, I would always recommend this Screaming Frog but the other one is a good service as well. Just cost a bit more. It's a 150 pounds a year. Mark: Right. They do have a free version? I've used the free version to be honest it's worth just upgrading to a paid version. Free version will give you just a flavor of what they can do. But if you really want to dig deep and really figure things out. Yeah, again, here's a 500 URL limit, most websites are going to blow through that 500 URLs because you have all their images, you have everything else connected with an individual page, so you'll go through that 500 pretty quickly. Copyscape is a bit different from these two though. Chuck: Yeah, it's different. I threw it, kind of witness just because it's one of those things, where again, you're looking for problems, so you type in your domain and It'll give you list of you know, places that content made and stolen from. So kind of, similar, but different. Mark: Right. This can be useful to see if you have people that are maybe trying' just scrape your pages entirely or if the page you're looking at for some reason is built on a shakey ground. This was something that was used a lot more probably, I don't know, 5, just 7 years ago. I know Copyscape has a really big issue on a really big useful tool for duplicate content issues. A lot of that is going away now. But I would imagine you would find copies of content that somebody's publishing their blog contents, say, on Medium or LinkedIn. I imagine this would probably pick up on that. Chuck: Yeah. I believe so. And you know when we talk about the duplicate content issue, where talking about like, right for organic search but there's also the duplicate content issue where, “Hey everything on this website was stolen from somewhere else and you're going to get sued because you stole our base content.”, Right so, I would be checking to make sure that people aren't stealing other people's content. You know, so I think that's a good part of due diligence. Mark: Yeah, absolutely! Alright Public WWW. This is a tool I have not heard of. Chuck: Yeah, that's a great tool. It kind of isn't a vain, of like, a Google right? But what's cool about it is instead of like.. If I want to search for something on Google. Google looks at what is this plate on the page meaning. If I search for Chuck it's looking for.. If somebody would look at a web page and see the word Chuck on it, then it might come up, right? But with this website, it's actually looking at the source code. So if somebody had a comment that was Chuck, it would potentially come up there. So, anywhere from the word Chuck, right? It's more for if you want to look a analytics code, or if you want to find somebody's affiliate ID. So if somebody's says, “Hey, I'm just running AdSense on this site, and I don't have it anywhere else.”, So we could took.. Put in the AdSense number, and it will show you all the sites that are using that same AdSense ID on their website, right? So you can look for, maybe they're doing some competing stuff, maybe they just, you know, they're driving more income through the AdSense, but having a multiple sites vs the one. And it's not complete, right? There's, it's only as much as they crawl so they're only going to have as much data of the websites they crawl. But you can definitely find some stuff. You can also use a little tip here, would be.. Let's say you have an affiliate product your promoting, right? And you're making some money off of that, and say, you found a new product you want to promote and it makes 10 times the amount of money for each one you sell and you know that like, “Oh! This product, if I switch it to this one, I'm going to make 10X.” Or you could look for everybody who is promoting this old product, and then you're going to try to acquire those sites, and switch them to the new affiliate product and 10X the revenue. A lot of different things you can do with that. Mark: I've heard some of people ask about that, specifically with affiliate sites. You know, “How do I know that this is all coming from the site that I'm buying.”, and so that would be one tool that you could use. The other thing I could see this being useful for is if you have a tool for it. This would be a pretty rare case, but if you're buying a business as a tool, that's using on outside websites. WordPress plugins site, WordPress themes site, or any other tool like that, you could start to get some ideas as for the installation volume. Using the tool like this. Alright, SpyOnWeb.com. Chuck: So similar right it's a looking for people's AdSense IDs and things like that. It's not as complete, with the other one you could search for a lot more different types of things. But still a useful tool. Mark: Right, it gives you some machine information as for our tools also sharing this IP address, DNS server. So again, not [inaudible 0:40:53] information here, but just acquiring [inaudible 0:40:56] this. We have our [inaudible 0:40:58]. So If you want to find out what the [inaudible 0:41:02] rank is, just go to SpyOnWeb and you could also see the page rank which is saying Quiet Light Brokerage just a like a question mark for page ranks. So that would be an information. That would have scared me about a 6 or 7 years ago. Alright, DomainIQ. Chuck: Yup, so DomainIQ and the other two that were listed. This are for finding out information about a domain name. So when was it registered, how many times has the DNS changed, has the ownership changed recently, what other domains are on the same server, or same IP block or same IP address, so if you know, if you're buying something from somebody, and they say it's the only site they have and then you look start looking up and down the IP range or looking on the server or the same IP and you see there's other domain names that are the same thing and are not disclosing it you, you know, that's potentially going to be an issue. You can look up who is the owner, so if it's like similar registration name or similar email address used to register the domain, it will show you all of the domains they own. That are using that registration information. These are all for the most part paid services. So if you want to get, like the good data, you got to pay for it. But they do give you a basic level of information for free. Mark: Right. I don't think anybody has to use all these tools. You pick 1 or 2 out of each of these categories that you want to use. The only one that I would recommend maybe use in multiples one would be in this search intelligence the SpyFu, Moz, and SEMrush. I think it might be worthwhile having upwards of three maybe four depending on how lights would turns out those services. Because like you said they all do slightly different things. Chuck: It's a matter of like what they've indexed right? So they each have their own crawlers, and none of them are going to crawl exactly the same subset of the internet. So, it's just, you're going to find different things while using different ones. Mark: Right, and they all have different levels of accuracy you could see here DomainIQ is [inaudible 0:43:04] to be higher than the last one. And also, few other bits of information that I would say are incorrect but again you use these points of data… Chuck: That was 5,000 dollars? The appraisal value? Mark: That was [inaudible 0:43:17] it's less than 500 dollars. And we have more than 24 backlinks, but again, all these tools are to be used in combination with each other to put together a large picture. Obviously a tool like Google Analytics or [inaudible 0:43:31] you'll going to want to use that first. And then, these tools are been used to fill in the gaps. Chuck: And also like know what a tool is good at, so like last one, you're not going to use that tool for the appraised value right? Like, that's nonsense. But if you scroll up, scroll up a little bit. If you click on, click on the ownership record in the blue, the blue button is there. Let's see if we'll.. Mark: We got gears turning here.. There we go Chuck: Okay so just search who the owner is, when is the last time you updated, when it expires, the age of it, right. So you've owned it for just about almost 11 years, you're using Cloudflare, here's the “who is” info…. Mark: It's kind of a bad corporation name, I got to update that. Chuck: Well there you go. And go back one more time on it, I'll click on one more thing… Mark: All these tools take too long to load up. Let's move on, because this one's getting a little bit longer. Let's get it on to a Bannedcheck.com. Chuck: Yeah, so this one is a, and it's not 100% right. But you can type in AdSense account and I'll tell you if the AdSense account has been banned. Again, not 100%, but if it's says it's banned, that's probably a good indication. I'm sorry not the AdSense account number but the actual domain name. Right so, if somebody says, “Oh! I switched monetization methods, because I didn't like AdSense and I was making a bunch more money with this.” Well, maybe that's not the case, maybe it's that they got banned. So, this is a good one. They can tell you whether they've been, not a 100% right. But if it's says that they've been band, then they've probably have been, right? Mark: Good news with this, I'm making money with Quiet Light Brokerage because it came back and it says that it's not banned for Google AdSense. Chuck: I wonder how that helps with our value of the 500 dollars. Mark: Hopefully, this is a little bit, so all you buyers that are looking to buy a business, we're going to require that you click on an Adsense ad. Because I think that's completely [inaudible 0:45:16] with our terms of service. Mark: socialmention.com. Chuck: Yeah, so just you know, you type in various things here and it will just tell you where it's being mention as far as social goes. So just a good tool for doing some basic due diligence. Mark: Yeah, let's repeat, useful to do, using combination with a Google trends to be able to see. Google Trends is measuring the data on Google itself. Looking at how the different social media networks are also processing the data. It's going to have a different look than just what Google has. On that note, I would say BuzzSumo, which is not on your list. It's another tool that I would recommend adding and it's a page where they do the free option but you can take a look to see what content has done really well on a particular domain name. As well as what content in that specific niche also does well. So you can really got a sense for how popular [inaudible 0:46:15] and what's getting shared and what's not. Well for then Google but also within the social media. It seems fantastic. Chuck: This one definitely should've been on my list then I'm not sure why it wasn't but I actually like this one a lot better. Mark: Will add this to the list. For people who want to download it. Last one it would be just going direct to the source of Facebook LinkedIn, Twitter, etc., etc. Almost every websites these days has presence on all the social media networks, visit their pages I assume that's kind of a lesson there. Chuck: Yeah and again, with like a LinkedIn, right? Looking at the person's profile looking how many connections they have. Are they in a niche where they should have 500 LinkedIn connections and they've only got 3, Maybe that tells you something, right? Why are they connected with all of these hackers or whatever, right? It's just a matter of again, researching the people and not just the business. So I think it's a good tool for researching people. Mark: Awesome, right. So that's a lot of tools that we just went over. Let's talk just a some couple of lessons, and we're running pretty long on this Podcast. So, we'll talk just a couple lessons about due diligence. I'm going to turn off the screen sharing here and talk about couple lessons about due diligence. What would you say for somebody who's going about due diligence the first time? What couple of lessons would you, or principles, should they really use in their due diligence efforts. Chuck: So I think one of the biggest things, is first in for most you don't know what you don't know. right, so having people to help advice you on what to search for and what to look for can be critical. So don't just think you know everything! Because none of us know everything especially when it comes to different tricks and tactics people can employ to inflate the numbers in what they're doing. What else, do you have any idea you would suggest? Mark: I would, and so on that note, obviously bringing people like an attorney, bringing an accountant, as I said before that be careful when you do so because they are being brought in with their specific purpose in mind, that are being brought in to look for liabilities, for being brought in to look for problems, and you are the business owner trying to make a business decision. Your accountant that's trying to make an account decision. Your lawyers try to make in legal decision. And so, you have to take their advice and put it into a broader framework business . It's a good business choice for you. You use their bits of data as [inaudible 0:48:41]data. And create a whole picture with that. The other thing that you said, where you cover this one's ask, ask, ask. Don't be afraid to ask for questions and then the third thing that I would recommend is keep good records of what you have looked at. And I'm working through the due diligence for the client, if a buyer comes back and ask for the same documents that they may have already received earlier on. Extremely annoying for a seller who doesn't understand why they even needed it in the first place. And a lot of sellers get skeptical buyers. They think this person isn't really serious about it. they're just looking fishing for information and if you end up passing the same documents 3 or 4 times, even twice. It start to grow those seeds of doubt and to bigger than just seeds and it cause a lot of problems really later on. So be organized in your due diligence just as you want your seller to be organized. Even your documentation. So that you'd know what you have and work off a check list, where be the last thing that I would ask. But don't be afraid to add to that check list as you go through. Chuck: Sure and something else I would add, kind of similar, not a little different, is with the seller. They're interested in knowing that you're going to do well with their business and whether they realize it or not, the questions you ask them are important to them. Almost always. So if you're not asking good questions, they're going to think that you're not serious or that you're not going to do well with the business and we often see that buyers, or sellers won't always sell to the person who offers the most money often times they're selling to the person they think who's going to do best with their business or somebody that they like. I see it time and time again. Recently I had a nice 7 figure deal, I was working with and every time I get off a call, you know, I do a wrap up call with the seller, “Okay, what do you think? and he went like, “Well that person didn't ask any good questions like, I don't want to sell my business to them.”, So make sure that you're doing some due diligence upfront, you're looking into these things and you have good questions that you're asking that are relevant to the business. Mark: Yeah, absolutely! Do not research ahead of time, not wasting your seller's time on the conference call is important. A lot of good sellers, when they go to sell a business, within that first week, they're going to do half of dozen to a dozen conference calls and it's exhausting to do. So if they get into a call and somebody asks, ask them question that was covered right up front. There's a good place to ask questions that have never been answered, and there's obviously you haven't done your homework, sort of questions. So do have basic homework ahead of time so that people know about, that you've put in that upfront research. One thing I'll add at that fellows, is if there's something that you're not familiar with, ask them about it and don't be afraid about that. And at the end of the day, as a buyer you want to protect your money, but make sure you're not making a bad investment so, don't be afraid to ask those questions. If you ever have questions about, “Can I discuss this or what do you think?” Use the broker. We're here to advice with the buyer and the seller through that process, we want to see a good deal done for our client. Chuck: Absolutely! Mark: Alright, this has been really long, but I think, good information so, Chuck thanks so much for coming on and maybe down the road, we'll do another one of these. Chuck: Sounds good. I appreciate it! Mark: Cool, thanks! Chuck: Alright, thanks everybody! Links and Resources: Centurica offers a full blown due diligence services. Google Google Trends Builtwith Archive Trademarkia.com SEM tools: Spyfu moz majestic alexa semrush Website crawling tools: screamingfrog deepcrawl orangefox copyscape Publicwww is a source code search engine Spyonweb for looking for peoples adsense tools. DomainIQ provide information for domain pages Bannedcheck.com Social media: Linkedin Buzzsumo fantastic sm network tool.

christmas amazon canada australia google social las vegas lessons work mexico state cross tools medium seo id pl south america spies ip images sellers wordpress archive surround sem linux technically paleo drip google analytics majestic 10x googling due diligence dns googled urls cloudflare verify laundromats moz google trends semrush adsense leadpages chucks hotjar drips google adsense buzzsumo rhodium markit pubcon screaming frog quiet light brokerage quiet light mark you mark no spyfu mark yeah joe you mark oh builtwith deepcrawl mark so joe yeah mark right chuck it centurica chuck yeah mark all copyscape chuck so magestic rhodium weekend mark absolutely chuck they chuck sounds chuck doing

SaaS Buyer Purchases Multi-Million Dollar Site & Shares Secrets to Beating All Cash Offers

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 3, 2018 29:37

If you've ever wanted to sell or purchase a SaaS business, listen to this Podcast because Nathan Singh has done both. He sold his own SaaS business in early 2017, only to turn around and buy a bigger SaaS business in December of the same year. He's a former NASA Scientist who out-negotiated a full price, all cash buyer to win the deal and close on a multi-million dollar SaaS website. In this interview Nathan shares how he approached his listing review, initial seller conference call, due diligence, navigating the SBA process and the transition after the sale. Nathan also shares why he feels SaaS businesses are the right fit for him, and what other types of website business models he looked at during his search. Episode Highlights: Learn how to make a buyer love you – and want to sell to only you. Interviews should be conversational, friendly and flow naturally. Nathan shares his SaaS due diligence process for this business. Seller was meticulous using Asana and Dropbox with SOPs and a streamlined process. How to navigate the SBA process and the team he worked with. What was it like to take over a remote team that was loyal to the owner. How he took over the business, worked for three weeks and then went on a three week vacation. SaaS Businesses produce recurring revenue without product working capital. Seller worked part-time and Nathan is planning full-time to expand and growth the business. Nathan purchased this SaaS business with an SBA Loan. Tax returns matching the P&L is great, but not always the case for solopreneurs. Keeping the sale confidential is critical until the APA is singed. https://youtu.be/yj_XkpWdRKs Transcription Mark: Hey Joe, how are you doing? Joe: Doing great today, how are you doing today Mark? Mark: I'm still under the weather. Joe: I had somebody tell me at the prosper show recently that they obviously enjoyed the podcast they came out to pay this compliment, but that he could tell we were in different parts of the country. I'm not sure how, I said “Did you watch” he said “No, I listened”. And he knows that we're in different parts of the country. So where are you in the world just so people understand? Mark: How in the world did he know that? Joe: I don't know. It's your funny accent I think. Mark: I'm up from Minnesota, although people think that Minnesotans have an accent, we do, but especially up north. Not as much in the city. I'm in the Twin Cities the Saint Paul side. If anybody's ever coming to the twin cities just drop me a wine and be happy to get together. Where are you? Joe: I'm just northern shell at North Carolina out in Morris zone North Carolina, and the more people I talk to, there's lots of sellers around here, lots of buyers around here and I've connected to just quite a few so anybody in this area, reach out. Mark: I thought down in North Carolina you guys supposed to have a bit of a twang accent, aren't you? Joe: No, not from here. [inaudible 0:01:47] from here. Everybody moves here because they're too darn cold up north. I grew up in Maine. We fled to the south back in 2006. Mark: Ah, ah. Whoever that was that knew we were in different parts of the country, I want to know how. That's pretty good. Joe: Not only did he know that, he came up to me to thank you and me personally for doing the Podcast, number one, and doing it with Norm Ferrar on SOP's because he got to connect with Norm, and it helped take his business to the next level, and he said it has made a huge difference in his business and his life. Mark: That's fantastic! Joe: Yeah! It's a feel good moment at that time. Mark: We got to be careful; our heads are going to get really big. Joe: I know, I know. Let's talk about somebody who doesn't have a big head but should, because he's a really impressive guy. That's Nathan Singh. He bought a multi-million dollar SaaS site for a million. He has also been a client. We sold his SaaS businesses before. You remember Nathan well, right? Mark: Absolutely! Joe: Well, Nathan is one of the nicest guys, very humble. Former NASA scientist, NASA engineer, and turned entrepreneur. We worked together first on the sale of his business last spring, and then he purchased a multi-million dollar SaaS site I've closed in the fourth quarter. And in review, we're sharing on this Podcast a lot of the things that he did right to make a great impression on the buyer, to out-negotiate all cash buyers to work with the SBA and lender to literally, quote, Nathan is one of my favorite clients of all times from the SBA lender, and the under writer as well. He instilled confidence in everyone all along the way that made him the choice to be the buyer that they approved him overlooking at other buyers as well, and he has just done a great job. Getting the business sold and then he talks a little bit about what he has done since purchasing the business including going on a three week vacation within three weeks of buying a multi-million SaaS business. Mark: Wow that's pretty brave! I don't think I could've done that. Joe: He had it planned, he took it and things went well, and they continue to go well. Mark: That's really good. So I'm excited to listen to Nathan. Nathan is generally, one of the nicest guys I've dealt with in 10 years, and I've dealt with a lot of nice people but he rises at the top of the list of one of the nicest guys. I'm excited to see him in the video, because I don't think I've ever met him in person. Also, more importantly, listen to what he has to say. Mark: Let's go to it! Joe: Hey Nathan welcome to Quiet Light Podcast! How are you today? Nathan: I'm doing well, thanks for having me. Joe: Excellent man! We haven't chatted for a while. I know you've been traveling so welcome back. Listen, we've talked about this briefly but the tradition on the Quiet Light Podcast is that we don't read scripts and do flowing introductions of our guests. We'd rather hear it straight from you so, for the folks that are listening today, can you share some background on yourself as an entrepreneur and where you come from? Nathan: Yes sure. So, before I was even an entrepreneur, I started off doing software engineering, and mostly high level stuff on requirements and project management. Work on department of defense for a couple of years and then moved on to their space operation. So while I was there, I really got the bug, for trying to start my own business that we knew we have an idea what I was going to do, but I just happen to run across somebody who was selling an app and basically started his app and it was a screenwriting program called Scripts Pro, brew that out for a couple of years and then it got acquired, and I was like “I want to do this again” so it just rings and repeat. After that I had an online ordering platform called Order Zen and had the same with that. At that time was actually easy to broker. So I brew that out till what I can do, and then we got that acquired, of course with a seller for that one. Pretty much after that, we became very tight, and I monitored your listings specifically, very closely, and then we came across the listing for Envira Gallery and that's kind of have [inaudible 0:05:57] Basically, that's pretty much the background that I had since industry extinct and that's why I [inaudible 0:06:02] it over to this senior entrepreneur acquisitions have been online businesses. Joe: I think you sort of lightly flew, touched over the fact that you were a NASA scientist. I mean, come on, that's a glowing thing to have in your resume. Let's not make that too light. It's an interesting transition from a scientist working at NASA to becoming an entrepreneur. I guess once you get the bugs, you will get the bugging, and you can't stop. So that's great. So I want to talk a little bit about the process that we went through, and you in particular, went through in buying Syed's business. Syed was a guest on the Podcast as well, as you know. In terms of how it works for you and what we looked at, can you, for the people that are out there looking at businesses and building portfolios of online businesses, can you talk a little bit about your vetting process and how you went about it? Then we'll jump into how you handled the call of Syed and the whole process right through the closing. Nathan: Yeah, absolutely. So the good thing, I mean I had some pretty good time between the time that I sold my last business and the time that I was working. So I got pretty acquainted to what was in the market, multiples they were going for, and the kind of business that sell out. So predominantly I was looking at SaaS businesses. I've been it in before. I love the fact that it was recurring revenue, there's no product I had to deal with, so I really zero in on that as my primary, well, it's more left open to great businesses that had good year over year return, and Syed just sort of filled all those checkmarks. They had great in over a year return, it was growing. In his case there was kind of a lower owner involvement which is great because that allows me to come in at full time and really push at the growth. So those were some of the main key characteristics. But one of the biggest ones, I know that you're familiar with this one. First question I'll ask you is, “Joe, is this taxable?” and I wanted to make sure that was it, because I wanted to leverage my money as much as possible. It may not be for everybody but we certainly list, so I've been trying to pursue SBA business and the loans for a while, [inaudible 0:08:04] And as you know that's not been easy for the last, however many years. But I would say within the last year too, I've seen more qualified banks and qualified SBA folks come in and be able to really take that sort of thing with ecommerce businesses and SaaS businesses, know what they're talking about, and present it to their credit department, and make it happen, and I actually solve with Stephen Speer, he's not even a competitor, he's a guest as well. Joe: That's right Stephen Speer from BankUnited, for those that haven't heard the Podcast, he was a guest. Very informative, as far as lenders go, I'd say Stephen is top notch, the best, and he's an entrepreneur, sort of, himself. Yes he's a lender with BankUnited but he works from home often, more often than not, and lives our lifestyle which is really unique, and he understands ecommerce and so he is underwriter, really important. So for those not familiar with the SBA, it's Small Business Administration. If you're buying a two million dollar business for instance, you don't have to have two million dollars. You can have 200,000 dollars and really leverage your money. But note, is Austin a ten year note which obviously works very well in terms of these online businesses. Let's jump to the first call that you had with Syed. Nathan, can you talk about your objective was on that first conference call would start? Nathan: Yeah, so the objective is pretty much similar as with most sellers, you try to get a feel for the seller and knowing the business with its seller personally. You're going to be working pretty close to this guy or girl. So, the main thing is, I want to understand what Syed does day to day, what is his outlook for the business, you know, kind of that more, the regular things that you'll for even if you're buying a house, and how the thing was maintained. So with Syed, it was really, we talked about this before. He knew early on that I was a gator so that kind of help me knock a little bit there too. Joe: What do you mean gator? What does that… Nathan: For the gator, so quarter gator not [inaudible 0:10:11] it's seminal, it's two different things.. Joe: Did you see the Podcast by the way? Nathan: I heard the Podcast with Syed. Joe: I put the hat on and I have a gator said hold up… There it is right there folks.. Nathan: But yeah, it was really bad to understand, you know, kind of gains and knots in the businesses. I was a buyer, one of the specific things you're looking for is, is there anything I'm missing that wasn't in the perspectives, in terms of, what is the seller doing that if I remove him from this equation, will I still be able to do this? Because that taught something that you will rarely see at perspectives and even on conversation. You're kind of feeling out for that but at the main time, at the main thing, what I would advise, anybody that's listening that's looking to buy a business, because I've been doing this for a while, in terms of talking to sellers, and back and forth, and I've been selling my own business. You don't want this to be a stringent interview where you're just running through all these questions, you want to be very conversational and let it flow. I've gotten a lot of good results by doing things that way. I think that was the main thing, is that we kept it friendly and conversational instead of, “I'm trying to figure out why you're selling this because I don't trust you.” It was just a totally different approach. Joe: I can tell you that, with the conversation that you had with Syed, he has told me that on that call he wasn't looking forward to it being over. He enjoyed the conversation and the things that you had in common like the gators, but more along the line of taking care of the customers, and taking care of your people or your staff first, and he really enjoyed it. Where some of the other conversations that other seller have, they can't wait until it's over. I had that experience with one of the people that called me when I had my business for sale back in 2010. He was rude, he was abrasive, and I did all I could to stay on the line and be polite, and just wanted the call to be over. Even if he made me a full press offer I would have a hard time selling him the business. So that makes a huge difference, I think when you ended the call with Syed, his thought was, “Man I really hope Nathan makes an offer, loves to do business with him, and the people that are using my services and products, and the staff that I have in place, will really enjoy working with Nathan and thrives with him as the leader of the business.” Is that kind of what you were shooting for or it's just natural that you did that? Nathan: You know I think it's a little bit of both, I've sold being on the opposite side and being on Syed's then while I was selling my business, I've come across different buyers and newer party's conversations, when you just talk to them, you're like, this is not the right fit. Even if this guy came with a complete cash offer or whatever it could be, this may not be the right fit. With Syed, I kind of guessing here, I think he was sort of looking, not so much about the deal or the money but he was looking for a right fit because he was worried about his folks that were, i mean these are all permanent employees with no contract, there's really in this business, five of them, and so he really cared about them and he really cared about the customers. A lot of it came from me just doing things that were customer centered, I've always run companies like that, I've run teams that way, and I just sort of mentioned that, I was like, I don't know who else your other buyers are, but this is the way I do things, so I don't know if that fits within your battle, it just happen to be that way, and then I heard later on that these were his core values, and those are my core values, and we just sort of mesh over that. Joe: Yeah, it was exciting factor in choosing you over the, technically, two other buyers. Let's talk about, jump forward to your due diligence process, what was your goal in due diligence, how did you approach it, and how long did it take? Nathan: You know, it's funny. I've done more due diligence in past businesses that was much smaller. I'll sort of elaborate it on line. So the initial due diligence I've coarsely didn't know, returns on profit and loss versus statements and all that good stuff, what you're supposed to do. I did not do as deep with due diligence solely because of the talks that me and Syed did have, and just the reputation that Syed had. So his influence in the WordPress community, he has got a lot on the line. So I didn't really have to worry about him ripping you of and stuff like that. He was really worried about, they going to the right buyers, versus me worrying I've got the wrong seller and the wrong product and… Joe: But you still verified that financials that was to make sure… Nathan: Yeah, the basic stuff was all done but I didn't lose any sleep worrying if it's something was going to happen because, again, there's still background that you've parked over this. When you see that the tax returns are completely reflective with the P&L that got submitted and the perspectives, that right there gives me the warm fuzzy I need as I go forward. I don't have to kick and [inaudible 0:15:00] as much, trying to figure out where am I getting ripped off. You're going more with the mindset, okay the basis is there and everything else should just work flow and it did. But that was the main stuff, it's just making sure that everything wind up with ways that it was. Joe: You only note on the tax returns, for those buyers and sellers listening, Syed had a business partner, so often time with partners, the tax returns and the P&L's are very very clean. When you are a solo entrepreneur, your more things, personal things with the business, it can get a little bit messier. The SBA looks at the tax returns, first and foremost, they'll use the P&L's if it's halfway through the year, and three quarters went through the year, thanks for that nature. But the tax returns are first and foremost, and what they do, their valuations off of. So don't be completely afraid if you're a solo entrepreneur, that you cannot sell a business, then have it be, financed with an SBA loan because you absolutely can. With the lenders that we've worked with, they understand the add tax schedules and the personal benefits that anyone takes, and so do the underwriters within the group that we work with there. So, you didn't worry too much about the due diligence process, naturally, you verified the financials, you had several calls with Syed, and you went through the process with the SBA. Let's jump to that for just a moment, what was it like going through the SBA process and what did you had to do? Nathan: Yeah, the fun thing is that I had actually been through this process with previous businesses before, and so I've actually gone to that fun part of the business. We just had issues and pulled out. I was familiar going in. So first of all, kudos to Stephen, kudos to you, and kudos to Syed for just being an awesome team for making it all happen. That's probably why we had them work speedy close than what's usually expected. But you know, aside from that, I think having everything ready to go, I mean, Stephen was good about that, and pretty much gave me more or less the stuff that I needed in terms of, “These are things on the checklist, you should probably have this done because from my experience I know that it's more of that likely go through”. That helps, because a lot of times, there's always [inaudible 0:17:17] going on, a lot of times the buyer takes a long time to get stuff back. So we didn't really have that issue here. But you know, again, it really mattered. I've worked with SBA bankers before, and it really matters on who it is that you're dealing with. With Stephen's case, he just had everything down. He's done ecommerce, he's done SaaS businesses, there is no “Well how does this work or where is the? So tell me where the hard assets are in the business?” There was none of that. So that kind of straight lined the process really well for all of us. But I think just having that stuff done upfront, that's what helped us get really done at speedy line. Joe: You said that Stephen and myself and the underwriters all worked very well together and Syed and so on and so forth. I happen to have dinner with Stephen and the underwriter that worked on your business, they were both in Charlotte a couple of weeks ago, and they both talked about you being one of their favorite buyers. So for anybody listening, this stuff matters, Nathan brought a business, would that note to the seller, when somebody else made and all cash offer. The seller chose Nathan over that all cash offer at the same purchase price, because he liked Nathan and what he stood for. The SBA lender and the underwriter, both said that Nathan was one of their favorite buyers of all time which makes process easier. They're going to work harder for you when they like you. It's human nature, so really really important to understand that aspect of it. Let's jump now on to closing, training, and transition, and what's taking place since then. I think we closed just before Christmas. By the way it was probably from letter of intent to closing about 50 days which is fairly short for an SBA loan, and we had a full week of thanksgiving in there, so call it 45ish. What's transpired since you close, how was it going, what was training and transition like and so on and so forth? Nathan: Yeah, again, comparing it to the past businesses I've had and worked with the past sellers, it's been night and day. The great thing is that because of the level of business, you know that will add the seven figures, because Syed runs seven and eight figure business above, he's very meticulous. So the first thing he did was setup, you know when they found a project in a drop box to view list. With all other things that his team needed to do for me, everything I needed in there. So that made it a lot more extreme ride then. Again if you're selling your business and you're getting to that point, make sure you have something like that in place, because that's the other warm fuzz and that lets you know that “Okay it's stuff I'm not thinking about as a buyer, the seller informed about for me” and we kind of running through those checklist. So, you know, I would say the transition went pretty smooth, I mean not really that he cuts.. You know, I talked to the CTO, I talked to the CFO, we all had these one on one's where we talked about what they did, so I made sure that I knew exactly what each person role is because I was taking over a couple of people's roles… Joe: How did they feel by the way, the staff, with you coming in and taking over Syed's role? Were they excited? Were they scared? What was that like to tell them that news? Nathan: You know, I think that initially they were, like most transitions, they were maybe a little one sided, just because, there was a lot of grey areas up until the actual deal was inked. So they were a little one sided, they were a little confused about what was going to happen now, they are getting the impression at something else or did I keep the same things they've had. So from my end, it just took a little bit of, getting them all on, talking to them face to face and letting them know, “Listen, everything stays the same, I've liked the way that Syed have done business, I've planned to keep those same things in place, let me know if there's something you're customed to and that is done because those things have all been accounted for” and so I wanted to do it and make sure I went above and beyond what they were expecting what happened after this transition and just kind of talk them down on the fears of what naturally happens when there's a transition even in corporate out and serious stuff. We're good to go now and that's what kind of passed that. Joe: While we kept it confidential, we didn't want to let the staff know that the business was even for sale, until everything was finalized, inked, and really truly going through. That's something all sellers struggle with, when to tell the core people. In my case, when I sold mine, I think I waited until the asset purchase agreement was signed, because she was valuable to me and I wanted her to stick around for me and for the new owner of the business. So that's what we did here, and I know that Syed said you did a great job instilling confidence in the staff and making them feel comfortable. One of the attractive things about this business is it was one of many businesses for Syed so he wasn't working full time on it. How was the workload then for you, taking over the business? Are you working full time early on or you're finding yourself with more than full time? You're working less? What's that situation like? Nathan: Yes, I'll say initially, at first two weeks, just like any transitions, it was pretty much full time. But I had a pre-planned vacation that's about three weeks long, that I have to go to India. So for me, that was a big deal to make sure that I would be able to leave and just do the minor stuff in the background and have some question, to get things while I'm abroad. Joe: So just, you bought the business, we closed, and then you had two and a half weeks of being around and then you went to India for three weeks? Nathan: Correct. Yeah. Joe: And everything still ran smoothly. Nathan: And everything is still smooth. I mean, that was mentioned to me early on and that was again, that was a really attractive factor to know that. You know, I think you've mentioned that you could move and go to the Far East and come back. That's kind of what I did. So, it was good to come back and see that everything was still in place, that the team was, the team was phenomenal, that Syed did assemble. Each individual player plays a major part in what they do, and for that reason they're also very turnkey. That's a turnkey business, turnkey team. So, that's why when I saw where am I inserting myself, it was kind of learning the role to what's already being done. How can I improve, how can I make things better for them, and be the leadership that Syed has been able to provide and do his other businesses. Joe: Okay, so where do you see your workload now? You were working really busy, after just a couple of weeks you went away for three weeks… Nathan: I would say that corporate atmosphere, it's like still checking at 8:00 to 9:00, I'm out by 5:00 – 5:30 and I'm told, you know, the employees do the same thing. Let's not make this a full 12 or 14 hour a day, and I want to balance that, that work-like balance too. Because I came from that kind of environment and I know it pays good. I usually work the eight or seven hours, sometimes nine whatever it needed. Rather than that, at a certain time before my wife comes home or whatever, I'm usually done, closed out, and I'm trying not to think about it. Joe: Well, what are you working on? Syed didn't work in about a few hours a week on the business and now you're working 30-40. Are you fixing broken things or are you working on to projects and growth opportunities? Nathan: Now the great thing is he built a solid foundation so what I'm really doing is I'm working on the stuff that he wasn't able to do, which is the marketing advertising taking that further gain, the PPC's setup, optimizing on the SEO getting the right content writers in to put that detailed information that we really liked, that's been attracting the other folks and traffic. So it's been really centered around the business development, the marketing and advertising stuff, which has really been done, because again, he's got great and recurring revenue, we've got a great organic traffic through Google, so from that right now, it's the going above and beyond the PPC stuff. The stuff that he didn't have to give and didn't really have to focus on because the business is really self-sustained. Joe: Right, so you want to grow the business, you didn't buy it and just collect a check every month, you're trying to grow it so you're putting in more hours. Nathan: Aside from just the business development, it's also providing that the one on one with these folks. I mean again, these are not contracted. These are folks that have certain benefits and they've liked that type of attention and focus from a leadership. So that's what I'm enable to do, I'm enable to gear about the product road map, provide my input to that where we want to go, instead of just kind of them doing whatever, it's done and just see that the money reach the bank, it's not really that. Joe: As far as much, one thing we haven't touched on is where they work from. You've got five employees, are they all working from an office or they're all remote? Nathan: They are all remote, they have been doing that for many years, so again, I tried to focus and know what side has all of you been doing, since Syed has 40 plus employees, they've been doing this for years, and I think Syed began and has been doing it for 14 to 15 years. So I liked that idea, and I liked the fact that they're able to do this with milestones. I don't know, there's no… You know a lot of times, I would just set a meeting yesterday, but some other guy, they own a company here in Houston, and they were like, how do you keep track? I was like, I don't. There's a lot of trust involved, and there's milestones that are set, and as long as these milestones are being set, I don't care where they're working that 40 hours. Joe: What's your favorite software? What system are you using to communicate and track what they do and work with them? Are you using Slack or what are you focused on? For people that are running remote staff that are having trouble with it, what would you recommend? Nathan: Yeah for Slack it's been awesome. I'm pretty new to Slack, I used Skype on my last business. Slack is way better than that so I highly recommend that. We use Zoom, we do a lot of this, the face to face meetings. I think that matters a lot with the remote staff, was getting at Facetime, and again, letting them know you're just not an employee behind the computer that's just in another state. We're talking to each other, we're going to do once or twice a year meet ups. So we do team building activities, that's super important too. Yeah I would say that Slack, the Zoom, and also Asana. Those things are big key to really help with the project management and the milestones we've set, and Github as well for the developers. Joe: Okay, awesome. Alright Nathan because we're running out of time, how do you see the future of the business? What are you looking over that 12, 24, 36 months? You're going to hold to stay, you grow at 10%, you're going to grow 50%, what are you predicting? Nathan: Yeah, you know, I hate to throw a prediction at it right now, I'm happy if we're over the double digits, anywhere in the double digits will do triple digits in over a year growth, I'm a happy, happy camper. I think when possible again, got a great business, great team in place, and there's nothing but upsides so, I'm looking forward to it. Joe: We'll going to have to check in, in the future and see how it turned out. You have any last minute thoughts for multipliers and sellers? You've been in both shoes, you sold, you offer your services, business, you bought one, any last minute thoughts in terms of what they should do or focus on? Nathan: Yeah, I would say the huge takeaway from this and for me has been, you know, when you're doing these buyer and seller conversations, no matter what side you're on, keep it conversational. It's great to have your question beside, but don't run through it like a machine gun and keep it just robotic and mechanical. Because there's a huge human element here involved and this was a prime example that actually happened. Joe: That's great. Nathan, pleasure doing business with you twice now, I'm looking forward to hearing some great news, great success, with Envira Gallery and so on and so forth. I hope that really works out and maybe we can check in, in the future and do another Podcast update and let the folks know how you've been succeeding. Nathan: Yeah, I would love to. Joe: Awesome man, thanks for your time today. Nathan: Awesome, talk to you later Joe. Links: Nathan Singh – LinkedIn GitHub Stephen Speer @ Bank United for SBA Loans Asana – Making Teams Work

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Episode 7: We Can All Use a Champion