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In this episode, Brian is joined by Mark Keiser, President, Development for Viceroy Hotels & Resorts. Currently with 9 locations in the United States, the Caribbean, Latin America and Europe, Viceroy hotels offer provocative design, intuitive service and imaginative art encounters, and each Viceroy hotel is a reflection of the local culture and a uniquely authentic experience. Tune in to hear who Mark Thanks for helping him along the way.

https://www.llewellyn.com/product.php?ean=9780738775364   Season 5 - Episode 7 ----more----   Yucca: Welcome back to The Wonder, Science Based Paganism. I'm your host, Yucca. Mark: And I'm Mark. Yucca: And today, we have an episode I'm actually really quite excited for. It's going to be a little bit different. Mark, you have a book coming out in less than a month. So, yes, at long last, and we're going to talk a little bit about that. So I'm going to ask you some questions, and hopefully this is something that our listeners are going to be really interested in. So, can you Tell us what, what book. Mark: Well, the book is called Round We Dance, Creating Meaning Through Seasonal Rituals, and it's coming out from Llewellyn. It'll be released on April 8th which is also the day of the eclipse, the solar eclipse that's happening here in North America. And Yucca: Get your glasses, Mark: yes, get your Yucca: of totality, you'll still be able to see it if you're in the lower 48. Mark: Yep. Yeah. I have already gotten my glasses. In fact, I ordered them after the last time we talked about this. So, that's, that's the book. It's kind of a follow on book to the Atheopaganism book in some ways. But it's also meant for a broader audience. Yucca: Okay, so it's not branded specifically as atheopagan, but is it, it's branded as pagan in general? Do you say that's Mark: Well, it's, it's, it's not even really branded as pagan in general. Now, in the text of the book, I talk about Atheopaganism. And it's values and practices and ideas among other things. But the book itself is really intended for anyone who doesn't have a spirituality in their life right now and really wants one. You know, for, for folks, for example, who belong to the so called nuns. The, the people that express no religious affiliation, maybe they've left Christianity or Islam or, um, or they're, they're just atheists or agnostics many of those folks who come into our community, the atheopagan community find that they're, they want something that gives their life a sense of meaning and a sense of connectedness to what's happening here on earth and in the universe. In some cases, they want to have a value set that they can impart to their children, Yucca: hmm. Mark: You know, and ritual practices that they can conduct with their families. This book is for those folks. Yucca: Okay. Mark: You know, basically, it's a book for anybody who wants to develop a ritual practice. Yucca: Mm. And what about people who They already identify maybe as atheopagan and are just getting started or looking to deepen their practice Mark: Oh, for sure. Yeah, this, this book, it'll, it'll serve as a great resource for folks like our listeners. Who you know, they have you know, it's like we have the equinox coming up right now, right? So, you know, you can turn to the section about the spring equinox in the book and get some ideas for themes and ritual activities, recipes, craft projects And that's true of all of the Wheel of the Year celebrations. It's true of all of the Rites of Passage. So it, it really goes into some, some degree of extensive coverage of different ritual techniques and reasons for having rituals. Yucca: hmm. So this sounds a lot more like a how to book than your first book, right? The first book you were really digging into the, the what and the sort of intellectual side of things. What's this all about? And this is the how to practice. Mm Mark: That's right. The first book was mostly an idea book. It essentially told the story of how I had gone through, An internal exploration about, you know, what is a religion, and how can I get the benefits of religion without having to believe in the supernatural? You know, how could that work? And then the second part of the book, the first book was about describing atheopaganism as one implementation of a non supernatural religious path. That was focused on the, on the earth. This book is much more, as you say, a how to. It gives lots of examples and and it also talks about, you know, crafting your own individual rituals, ritual skills, like we talked about last week, a week before last. Talks about you know, personal rituals for your, for yourself when you need them, when you want to be confident or you want to be focused, those kinds of things you know, what, what some folks in the pagan community might call spells as well as the seasonal and rites of passage celebrations. Yucca: Great. So how is this structured? Because I've heard you talk about different holidays. Is it based on the wheel of the year? Or do you have a larger structure around that? Mark: There are sections that are about each of those areas. It starts out with kind of an idea section that's called a primer, and it's, talks about what spirituality is and why people have it and about rituals and then it goes into the basics about developing rituals and developing a practice for yourself. And different skills and art forms and so forth that can be used in the course of a ritual practice. And then the second part is about rituals in practice. Occasions for celebrating. Some of those are on the calendar. They're seasonal things. Some of them are like stations in life, particular passages that we make in our lives. There's a section on working with the dead and dying. Personal and healing rituals, building community for sharing rituals and then about just living a life that's consistent with the spiritual practice that's described here in very broad strokes, because everybody's going to have their own implementation of this, right? It's, this isn't a dogma book this is, this is a book of examples and ideas. To help inform people as they craft their own individual practice. And then the last section is called resources. And that is your craft, your recipes, guided meditations, recommended ritual music glossary, a bibliography, those kinds of things. Yucca: Fun. Okay. Mark: Yeah. Yucca: Yeah, Mark: Yeah. So there's, there's, there's quite a lot to it. I'm really very proud of this book. I think it came out very well. And and I've been waiting forever for it to come out. Working with a publishing company working with Llewellyn has been great. Let me say my editor has been great. And, you know, the marketing people and all those folks have been really great. But still working with a publishing company is a lot slower than self publishing. Yucca: right. Mark: know, once you've got a manuscript and you've got it all laid out, you can do a print on demand really quickly and, you know, start to get your book out there in the world. So, I actually finished the manuscript on this more than a year ago and I'm, and we're just going to see it April 8th. So, I've been anticipating this for a long time and I'm really excited about it. Yucca: Yeah. So in terms of the writing process, was that very different for you than when you self published? Mark: You know, it was because the, my first book, the Atheopaganism book, that was an expansion of what started out as an essay. There was about a 40 page essay that I wrote as the concepts of atheopaganism were developing in me, as I was discovering things, as I did research about the nature of religion and the evolution of the human brain and all that kind of stuff. I wrote an essay because that's, that's kind of the way that writing is the way that I have a dialogue with myself. Yucca: Mm Mark: So I wrote this essay essentially to kind of get my own thinking straight about, you know, what am I doing here? And what's the rational underpinning for it? And what does that look like? And so I had that essay already, and I was able to bulk that out with a lot of stuff from the blog and additional writing. It wasn't a sit down, develop an outline, and then write to it kind of thing, which this second book is. It's actually my third book. My second book is a collection of poetry called A Red Kiss. But this third book, Round We Dance. I would lock myself in my room and pound away at the keyboard day after day after day until it was finally done. Yucca: And did you have an editor that was waiting for pieces on a deadline or things like that Mark: No, they, they wanted the whole manuscript. So, we made, yeah, we made an agreement. When was it that I had to deliver it? Actually, no, it was longer ago than a year. I think it was the end of October of 2022. Yucca: Mm Mark: Yeah, it was the end of October of 2022 when I delivered the first manuscript. And then, of course, there's editing and grammatical and, you know, reorganizing various sections. As recommended by the editor, there's, so there's a lot of, a lot of pieces that, a lot of processes that go into that. But we've had pretty much the finished thing since last fall, and it's just been a manner of getting to the point where they can print. Yucca: Right. So, they've got other Mark: And the copyright, Yucca: go to the press and everyone who's test to go through it. And yeah. Mark: and you know, they've got to develop the cover art, all those various things. I collected testimonial paragraphs. For people who read the, the advance copy, the, the advance proof you know, with their feedback on it so that they could print those on the back cover, all those sorts of things. I love the cover art. You listening on the podcast, you will not be seeing it, but it's, it, it's really a very handsome book. I'm super pleased with it. Yucca: Yeah. So, what was your favorite part? If you can choose one favorite out of all of this, Mark: Favorite part. Oh boy. All right. I'm going to look at the Yucca: or maybe two, maybe a couple of favorites. And I suppose we should Mark: you know, Yucca: why, why you wanted to make this particular book, right? Because this is quite a different one than your previous works. Mark: sure, sure. I think, you know, one of the things that I really that I really like about the book is at the very beginning where I talk about spirituality and why that's important. I go into the atheopagan principles there as an example of a value set that people can embrace. for their lives to be happier and more meaningful and more kind. So those things I'm, I'm happy about. And also towards the end of the book, before the resource section when I talk about, you know, living the spiritual life engaging with the community and kind of beyond the ritual behavior building community and embodying the, the kind of practices that, and meanings that, that I talk about in the book. So, you know, both of those I think are, are good sections. I, I like them. But of course I would because I wouldn't have submitted them if I didn't. So, your mileage may vary. I really and, and Yucca, you've read the book because you wrote the foreword. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: So you may have your own opinions about these things. But let me, let me read a little bit from the introduction. I'm going to do that. Humans thrive when they feel meaning in their lives, joy in living, and connection in community. These days, those things don't just happen. They have to be cultivated. They have to be created. Too often in our modern world, we fill our time with busyness, acquisition of money or possessions. or pursuit of fleeting pleasures. Those can provide a momentary sense of happiness, but they don't last. They're empty calories that soon wear off, which is why alienation and loneliness are so often cited as top concerns in polls about mental health. I've lived some of those struggles. I grew up in a hostile environment and have suffered chronic depression since grade school. Thankfully, it's been in remission for 10 years with good medication and practices. This book is about finding more sustaining nourishment that brings deep contentedness with our lives. The celebration of moments, large and small, that help us to understand our lives as worthwhile and joyous, to feel connected with our fellow humans and creatures, to feel a worthy part of the magnificent universe of which we are a part. A powerful means to these ends is to have a spiritual practice. Maybe that involves activities you perform daily, if that's what you like. Or maybe just a handful of times every year, but having them, practices and rituals that you bring, that bring you into the sense of meaning and connectedness, can mean all the difference between a rather hollow life and one overflowing with moments of joy. Yucca: Beautiful. So that's right at the beginning, right? Right. Mark: kind of what's, what's the point of this book and who's it for? and and I'm very clear in the book that this is This is, this is a book for anybody that's looking for the answers to those kinds of practical questions about how, how can my life feel better? How can I feel more of a sense of purpose and a sense of belonging in life? And I provide examples from atheopaganism, but I'm very clear on multiple occasions in the book, you don't have to do this. You know, you can, you can use all the stuff about the crafting of rituals here to create something that's very, very different than what I have or what atheopagans are practicing. So it's a, it's a more generalized book, I would say. Yucca: Okay. So people could plug this into different kinds of traditions. They might be a member of another tradition that it's about the tools and resources, not, they don't have to necessarily buy into the non theism component of it or things like Mark: Sure. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't talk about theism particularly because that's not my thing but The various techniques, for example, like guided meditations and solo journeying kinds of internal meditations and the various phases of developing a ritual all of those things will work for anybody. I'm actually reading a really good book right now about ritual. called Ritual, How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living. That's a great complement to this book, I think. It's by a cultural anthropologist who's specialized in studying ritual throughout the world. And I'm only partway into it, but it provides a real, it and my first book provide a real sort of theory, anthropological underpinning to why the techniques in Round We Dance. Are effective, and why we as humans are the ritual making species, and we're one of the ritual making species. There are a lot of others. And so, you know, we're built for this. Every culture on Earth has ritual practices. And we've lost a lot of that in modernity, and it's good for us to go back to some of it. I don't think it's good for us to go back to it with a lot of supernatural belief around it. That's my personal take but having those kinds of meaningful practices, it just helps people. It helps them to, to live better. Yucca: So is this a book that people could jump into with no background in the area? Could somebody give this to their sister or their cousin or something like that? Mark: yes, yes. And, and that, that is definitely, was definitely at the forefront of my mind as I wrote it. It was not intended to be something where you had to read the atheopaganism book in order to get what's going on in Round We Dance. Which is why I've synopsized some of the material from the Atheopaganism book in Round We Dance, so that it's a standalone volume. My motivation in writing it, other than simply to say to, you know, a much broader audience, Hey, you know, there's something here, there's something here that people are finding of value. You don't have to make that great irrational leap into the supernatural. in order to embrace this stuff in your life in a meaningful way. Um, but also in my mind, there's sort of a, an amorphous idea of kind of an ecosystem of, of informational resources for atheopagans and non theist pagans and so forth. My first book is an example of that, as is this podcast, the Atheopaganism YouTube channel, my blog. The Atheopagan Society, all that kind of stuff and so part of that is kind of a list of books that I, I want to wish into existence for our community that can serve as resources for people and this was the next one on the list the and it incorporates a number of the Things that I think are really important, like it talks about death and dying and working with the dead and the dying and funereal rituals, as well as like naming rituals and passages into adulthood and all that kind of stuff. And so, for example, we've mentioned a couple of times the idea of an Atheopagan Families book. And, you know, that I just think there's a real need for that book. It's just kind of hanging out there waiting to happen. And but this book was the next one. This, this was the the next one that I felt really needed to happen, Yucca: Yeah. Well, that is really exciting that it is. Just around the corner. So it officially releases on the 8th of April, right? But it is available for pre order. Mark: It is. If you go to the Llewellyn website, and we can put a link directly to the page in the show notes you can order it for pre order it's 19. 99. And you'll, you'll get it in the mail in April. Um, I, Yucca: The moment it's just a physical book, right? There isn't an audio version. Okay. Mark: That's right. And to be honest, I don't know that an audio version of this book would be all that useful because so much of it is instructions for craft projects and recipes and, you know, things like that. Where just reading it out loud, probably people are not going to get a lot out of it. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: I don't know, maybe. mean, the first Atheopaganism book had a bunch of that stuff too, and the audiobook is paired with a PDF of downloadable resources that go with the book. that's, that's a way to approach it. What else was I going to say? Oh, I'm, I'm working on organizing a book launch party in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area. And I'm planning on doing that on the 13th of April, which is a Saturday. Yucca: So that's the Mark: I don't have a location. It's the week after it comes out. Yeah. And presumably Llewellyn can get me books by then. And I can sign books and sell books and do a reading and know, schmooze with people and talk about what the purpose of it is and all that good kind of stuff. But I haven't found a location yet. I haven't really tried yet. So, watch my blog, atheopaganism. org Yucca: something here on the podcast, too, when you know, right? Mark: great. Great, good. It's it's funny, I've dropped into interviewee mode. So, oh, you'll do that. That's great. Thank you. Yucca: Yes. No, we'll make sure to include that, along with the reminders about the Sun Tree Retreat, and other things that are coming up so very, very soon, because this year is slipping away already. Mark: We are in the last month of the first quarter of the year. It's Yucca: It's almost equinox. Mark: over. Yucca: Yeah. That's amazing. Mark: is coming around. And as we record this isn't true in all places, but tonight, we're recording on Saturday, the the 9th. And tonight is when the clocks spring forward and everybody gets all cattywampus for Yucca: Yeah. Mark: of days while they're adjusting to this completely unnecessary aberration in our plot. Yucca: Which, by the way, does not change at the same time as Europe or Australia. They're all different, which is for when you, I teach a lot of classes online and it's just, this whole month is havoc because this, this country doesn't change and this country does, and it's at a different time, and it's, ugh. So, and then, in a few months we'll have to do it all again. Mark: right, Yucca: Because it's not like it's a nice even six months. So, Mark: No, and I sure wish it was. I mean, one of the things that I appreciate about where I happen to be is that the The daylight savings change back in the autumn happens right on top of the midpoint between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice. So right at hallows time suddenly you're plunged into darkness. And there's It's just kind of cool. You know, suddenly everything, it's like, welcome to the dark time of the year. Boom. There you are. It's dark. Not so much with spring. Yucca: Spring is harder. Mark: I wish that we were, it is. Yucca: Oh, yeah. Mark: Yeah. Yucca: I'm sure people can remember every year I complain about this. I just want us to do away with it. I don't care which one we stick to. Let's just stick to one of the times and knock it off with the going back and forth. And I mean, as a kid, I appreciated the fallback, because for those A couple of days before your body got used to it, it felt like you got to sleep in a little extra before getting up in the cold and getting on the bus and everything, but now I'm just like, no, no, this is just too much of a hassle. Let's, let's all do, like, Arizona. Mark: and it serves no practical purpose. It doesn't increase productivity. It doesn't It doesn't save energy. It doesn't do any of those things. The study on it is, is really assiduous and it does not do any of the things that it was proposed to do when it was first imposed. Yucca: Yeah. But we've got the momentum of it, and changing that is, that's the tricky part, and I think it's hard for one state at a time to do it. I think it just needs to happen on the national level, and then, Mark: Yeah. Well, there are a lot of states that have now passed laws, California is one of them that say that if the federal government changes it and gets rid of Yucca: Then this is what time we will be. Mark: Yes, we, we will go along with that. So, because states can independently change their mind about that. They can make their own time zone rules, which is one of the weird things about our system of government. Yucca: Well, our, our state, every year we have a bill, it makes it pretty far through the legislature, and then it ends up getting blocked by the folks from CRUCIS, because and because they're so close to El Paso, they don't want to be Like, sometimes, like, yeah, they don't want the clocks to, yeah so, Mark: politics is local. Yucca: yep. So, but yeah, I would rather we just stick with Arizona the whole time and then we'd be good. We could just be our little, our little friends. Mark: one of the only ways in which I can think I want us to, like, be like Arizona, but other than the beautiful landscape, I mean, Yucca: I was gonna mention, they have some amazing, yeah, that's a whole different conversation, but some amazing, Mark: we've had our tangent, we've already had our tangent for the for Yucca: I know, I thought we weren't because this was going to be an interview one, but we had it anyways. So, is there anything else that you'd like to let people know about the book, or Mark: You know, Yucca: coming up? Well, Mark: the book, or I closed the kind of narrative section before you get into the resources with a poem called Ecstasy, and I think I'm going to read that as kind of a close. Ecstasy, ever more open, arms flung wide, let the warm, wet wings of your chest be spread. Until barehearted there, only the longing of joy is with you. The sweetness of life's unfolding generosity. They are all there, the great and tiny miracles daily given. A breath, a golden pebble, a scarlet cloud at sunset, the voice of the cosmos singing out to cold space, out to blackness and beginnings, all whirling and singing and spinning, sacred, ever changing. The glory of the world in your heart's red petals there, where first it placed a red kiss in your mother's womb, saying welcome. And that's, that's the life I invite people to share, to build for themselves. Yucca: thank you. Thank you for putting all of the time and energy and love into writing this. So I'm really excited to see it come out to the world. Mark: me too. Well, thank you for having me on. I really appreciate the opportunity. Yucca: Yeah, thanks for joining us. We should do it again. All right. Well, I think next week will be equinox already. Mark: Yeah. Yep. We'll be talking about the equinox. So, so onward it goes. Yucca: On and on. All right. Well, thanks, Mark. Mark: Thanks, everybody. See you next week.   

Jason Rasmuson (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonrasmuson/) is a Massachusetts-based writer with more than 20 years' experience writing for the technology industry. He's been self-employed for the last 15 years with experience in the cloud computing, cybersecurity, FinTech, HR/workforce management/talent management, and other specialized areas in high tech. He recently relaunched his business to offer a new take on writing: content delivered as a service. This new model helps clients produce more content each month, yet in a much more flexible and cost-effective way than retainers or per-project engagements. You can learn more at www.runningstart.co Transcript Mark Reed-Edwards: Welcome to this episode of Confessions of a Marketer. I'm Mark Reed Edwards. We're back with this mini series of Talent Showcase episodes that focus on people in marketing, communications, PR, and allied fields who are looking for their next opportunity. My guests will share their stories, successes, and how they can help their next employer or client. Today, I'm joined by Jason Rasmussen. Jason is a Massachusetts based writer with more than 20 years experience writing for the technology industry. He's been self employed for the last 15 years with experience in cloud computing, cyber security, fintech, HR workforce management, talent management, and other specialized areas in high tech. He recently relaunched his business to offer a new take on writing content delivered as a service. This new model helps clients produce more content each month, yet in a much more flexible and cost effective way than retainers or per project engagements. Mark You can learn more at runningstart.co (https://www.runningstart.co) Jason, welcome. Jason Rasmuson: Thanks for having me, Mark. Really looking forward to our conversation. Mark: Same here. You and I crossed paths several years ago and we reconnected on LinkedIn. Can you tell me a little bit about yourself and your background and career path? Jason: Yeah, sure. So I--probably like many of us--was slightly better at the kind of English major side. When I got out of school, I was lucky enough to join Kronos now UKG, which is where I believe we met. So I was able to join as an house writer. You know, marketing collateral and things like that. And was really pretty happy in my role there. And at a certain point, just wanted to grow a little bit. So I. I got an MBA and moved from job to job a little bit. I had a couple stints at local software companies. And, ultimately the Great Recession in 2009 resulted in layoffs that were probably the push I needed. Because I ultimately did want to start my own thing and kind of work for myself. So, since 2009, I've been kind of a one man band here supporting the technology industry, and marketing teams in tech, with a lot of content--kind of the typical things you'd expect, I'm sure. Mark: Yeah, yeah. So what is one of your most important career accomplishments? Jason: So I would say, boy, I mean, the MBA for me was really big. As someone who was an English major and thinking that I was kind of predestined to only go down one path, being able to get my MBA was really a big achievement for me. But I would say just in general, I think maybe a lot of writers or creative people tend to be introverted. So I would just chalk it up to the fact that I've been able to make it work in an industry where you need to be outgoing or salesy or relationship driven. Mark: Yeah, if the world was full of extroverts it wouldn't be very fun, would it? Jason: Yeah. Right. My wife thinks it's a character choice and a character flaw on my part. But we're wired the way we're wired, I guess. Mark: So, if you've got a client coming your way, or hey, you decide to take another full time job, what do you think you can offer that next employer or client? Jason: So a few things. The good news is because I'm as old as I am-- experience, certainly in technology and specialized areas such as cyber security or fintech. And that's come from doing it for a little bit. But the other thing that I'm really excited about at this point in 2024 is much more of a partnership approach with tech going through some slowdowns. I lost one or two clients, probably the way we all have, and I've kind of reimagined my business. And part of that is trying to be much more proactive in being a kind of a virtual team member and a partner. So I think it's really paying off. I'm pitching ideas more proactively. I'm doing a little bit of research for clients and things like that where I'm able to come up with ideas that they might not have necessarily thought of -- they're busy people too. So I'm really happy to see how that's unfolding at this point. And I just have anecdotal evidence, but one of my clients has appreciated me coming up with project ideas. Mark: So, it's a partnership that you offer. Jason: Yeah, I think so. I really hope to continue it because I think it is a valuable piece of the puzzle here. But it's certainly a little bit of a new thing for me. And it's, it's probably because things are a little bit slower. But I think these are the times when, you know, maybe we do reinvent ourselves a little bit. And so for example, I'm owning one client's editorial calendar and pitching ideas. This particular client, the person who was in charge of kind of outsourcing and managing creative resources came up on the design side. So she's very talented and wonderful and a great client, but I think sometimes the idea of content, certainly like business- level writing , you know, she might be more focused on design and brand and things. So I think, in relationships like that, it's a good opportunity to do a little bit more for clients. Mark: Great. Well, Jason, thanks for joining me for this overview of your career and what you can offer your clients and employers and I hope this helps you find your next gig. Jason: Yeah. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. And I've been looking at your success with Confessions of a Marketer. So I appreciate the chance to be here. Mark: Thanks so much. I'm Mark Reed Edwards. Join me on the next Confessions of a Marketer.

Ben Bradshaw (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-bradshaw-9366a04/) is an experienced brand and marketing leader in energy and cleantech. He helps progressive businesses in the Energy Transition create a standout brand, and marketing that powers profitable and sustainable growth. He has 25 years' experience as a marketer in the UK energy & cleantech sectors and particular strengths in marcomms, brand, strategy, planning, insight for B2C, B2B, corporations or start-ups. Ben has held Head of Marketing positions transforming brands and building teams - with a passion for sustainability, brand and culture. He is now seeking his next senior marketing role with an ambitious pioneer in the clean energy sector. Transcript Mark Reed-Edwards: Welcome to this special episode of Confessions of a Marketer. I'm Mark Reed-Edwards. It's been a while, but we're back with this mini series of shows I've dubbed the Talent Showcase. These episodes will focus on people in marketing, communications, PR, and allied fields who are looking for the next opportunity. My guests will share their stories, successes, and how they can help their next employer or client. We have about five episodes lined up and today I'm joined by Ben Bradshaw. Ben is an experienced brand and marketing leader in energy and clean tech. He helps progressive businesses in the energy transition create a standout brand and marketing that powers profitable and sustainable growth. He has 25 years experience as a marketer in the UK energy and clean tech sectors and particular strengths in marcomms, brand, strategy, planning, insight for B2C, B2B corporations or startups. Ben has held head of marketing positions, transforming brands and building teams with a passion for sustainability, brand and culture. He's now seeking his next senior marketing role with an ambitious pioneer in the clean tech sector. Ben, welcome. Ben Bradshaw: Oh, well, good to meet you, Mark. Thank you very much for inviting me on the show. Mark: Yeah, it's great to have you here. So can you tell me about yourself, your background and career path beyond what I just shared with the audience? Ben: Yeah, sure. So as you said, I've been in the energy industry—UK-based—for over 25 years and I've got a personal passion in sustainability and got a career in marketing. Really I've brought those two interests of mine to create a career to support the growth of renewable, sustainability, clean technology. So we're talking about EV charging, solar panels, battery storage. And I'm really excited about the opportunity here because it's growing massively. And I, I was really involved in sustainability from the start from my environmental engineering over almost 30 years ago now. And I've already dedicated a career in supporting businesses to further their brand and to develop marketing to really grow, take up an interest in these new products and services. And I've worked in the last four years in early stage businesses, startups, establishing a marketing function a brand and a team within those businesses that are rapidly growing for the first time. So, really, for me, it's looking at my next opportunity. It'll be in the space of energy and clean technology. And I'm looking for head of marketing positions. And really helping those businesses power growth, whether they're early stage startups scale ups, or established corporations who are diversifying into sustainability services. Mark: And you're based in the UK. Ben: I'm based in the UK, I'm based in Nottingham but the hybrid working arrangement now means that where I could work is broadened out. Mark: So what is one of your most important career accomplishments, do you think? Ben: Well, I mean, I've been in the energy industry in the UK for, as I said, over 25 years and seen huge change moving from it being, you know, just gas and electricity powered by fossil fuels, all the way to, now, renewable energy and growth in that space. I've also seen huge change in terms of consolidations. And that was one of the areas that I got involved in. So, I was working for Powergen. It was one of the largest energy suppliers in the UK. And the global energy provider, E. ON, bought out Powergen as a route to access the UK market. I led the strategy and the rebranding from Powergen to E.ON and really supported the growth of the E. ON brand via a gradual transition strategy moving from Powergen, a household name back in 2006 and in three years rebranded to E. ON and move from a 10 percent awareness of, Of of of Eon to a 65 percent brand awareness in three years, supported, of course, by investment into the brand TV -led campaigns the sponsorship of the F. A. Cup and new products. And I was really delighted to be involved in that three year strategy and leading it to success. Mark: So thinking about all that, and my introduction to you earlier, what do you think you can offer your next employer or client? Ben: Well, I think it comes down to about four things, really. And there's quite a lot within each of the four. One is powering growth. When I say growth, I'm talking about really using marketing and branding to engender more engagement and more interest into the product or the brand. And that drives inquiries, that drives interest, that drives revenue growth, and ultimately profit. So that's the first thing, driving growth. The second one's really, and again, about driving growth, but probably more so on, in the medium to long term. This is about setting a standout brand, defining a strategy, an identity, for the brand that allows that business to grow, particularly understanding the needs and interests of the target audience and really, and really building that. But it also supports the engagement and motivation of all the employees as well, of course. The third one is related to growth, but it's the commercial performance. It's making sure that the marketing is delivering the return on investment it needs to, making sure there's the investment needed into the brand, and demonstrating how that's delivering a return, whether it's in the short term, or medium, or long. And then the final point, I think I mentioned it, was really developing a culture. Brand is such a, an all pervasive notion that impacts not just customers, but also employees, investors. Partners and particularly for early stage businesses, getting that right and defining the right culture to enable that growth and ensuring there's alignment between the brand, the culture and the customer experience. Because ultimately a great promise can be great, but it's got to be delivered through the entire process. So those four things kind of characterize the things I'll be looking to offer my next employer. Mark: Yeah, that's a great list and I think you've shared your background really well here and, Ben, I really want to thank you for joining me and I hope this this little time that we had together will help you find your next gig. Ben: Absolutely. And if anyone is interested to get in touch, I'm on LinkedIn. Be more than happy to respond to any messages and take it from there. Mark: Thanks, Ben. I'm Mark Reed Edwards. Join me on the next Confessions of a Marketer. Ben: Thanks, Mark.

Remember, we welcome comments, questions and suggested topics at thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com   S3E32 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 talking about transitioning into the autumn or the fall. That sort of nesting and collecting of your acorns, metaphoric and, and all of that. Mark: Yeah, because. I mean, if you're like us, the autumn is a, a really lovely time. It's just, it's a time to be enjoyed for so many different reasons. And as pagans who like sort of the products of nature, right. There's a lot of stuff out there. There's leaves and there's. Pine cones and there's late flowers. And of course there's all the stuff pouring out of the gardens. so there's just, there's a lot of opportunity to decorate and celebrate and kind of button things up for winter around our homes. So that's what we're gonna talk about. Yucca: Right. Well, and there's also a lot of those practical things that we're doing that are a wonderful opportunity to invite more meaning and ritual into our lives as we're doing those things anyways. Right. Mark: Yes. Yes. Yucca: So Mark: Yeah. I mean all that food preparation stuff that, I mean, it's practical, right? Because it's food preparation, but it's, it's pretty witchy stuff. When, when you, when you get down to it, you know, the brewing and the pickling and the drying and all that stuff, it's all very witchy. Yucca: Yeah, well, and, and even things also like you're switching out, you're bringing your sweaters out, right. Bringing those out and, and going through and making sure the moths didn't get into them and putting the there's the heavier blankets on the bed and, and all of those sorts of things, you know, there's, there was an episode we did. Few years back at this point about the kind, bringing the magic into things we talked about. Like, you know, when you're putting the shampoo on your head, it's not just shampoo, but it's your, your magical potion of charisma or whatever it is. You know, there's so much of that, that this time of year, I think there's just a opportunity for, Mark: Yeah. There's at, at least in the temperate zone, there's so much of a sense of transition. There's kind of a magic in the air. The weather is changing. The character of the light is changing. It won't be long before. In most places. Daylight savings thing changes. So the whole sense of the length of the day changes and that's just a really ripe canvas for for doing our creative ritual activity around Yucca: Yeah. So last week we did talk about the Equinox. But there, are there any things that you have been doing? Since then in the, in the last week or so, or things that you will be doing that fit in with this transition theme that we're talking about? Mark: Well, one thing that I did was my Northern California atheopagan affinity group, which calls itself the live Oak circle went camping last weekend. And that was really cool to, you know, to do, to do an Equinox ritual in person with people. And we're still getting to know one another and still kind of feeling our way. So, you know, that, that will, that will mature over time, but it's really a lovely group of people. Very diverse, very interesting. And I just, I had a wonderful time And so that was something that I, I did for the Equinox season that I'm really happy about. Go ahead. Yucca: is, is camping during the winter a, a possibility, or is this really your last camp of the, the year? Mark: It's a possibility, but you're gonna get rained on Yucca: Okay. Mark: and I don't mind snow for camping very much because it's dryer. Yucca: Mm-hmm Mark: But rain can really be a pain. Yeah. I mean, it's, everything's all muddy and it, it can really be a pain. But that said the I've gone camping in say February, which is the wet month of the year for us. And it's been glorious. It's, I've gone out to the coast. The, the waves are all stormy and there are not many people out there because it's not tourist season. So you can really have a wonderful experience doing that. Yucca: Mm. Nice. Mark: Yeah. Yucca: And I'm sorry. I think I had cut you off. You were starting to say something else as well. Mark: Probably, but I have no idea what it was now. So that's something that I did. And my partner NAIA brought home a an armature for a reef. This made out of grape vines this week that we're going to put seasonal things on and hang on our door. So that's another thing that hasn't been done yet, but will be we have to go out and collect some leaves and pine cones and things like that. Because it's just, the leaves are just starting to turn here. I mean, week before last, we had. We had temperatures from the high nineties to 117 over a space of about seven days. Yucca: so hot. Mark: And so now I think the trees are figuring out that, okay, we're done with that now. It's it's time to start shutting down. Yucca: Right. And some of that is, is cued by the light more than the temperature. It depends on the species, but the, the light can really play a role in, in what they're doing. Mark: Mm-hmm Yucca: Hmm. Well, we don't have a lot of trees that do change in the autumn. We have a few but for the most part, you can still feel it in the air here. But the flowers have really changed. This is the end of our monsoon season. So we had a lot of. Flowers. And this past week, the, the kiddos and I went out and just gathered a whole bunch of flowers. And we had a dear friend with us as well, who showed the kids how to leave the, the flowers and they made flower crowns. And even though that's something that is more associated with spring, On like a larger level for us, it's more of a fall thing because that's when we actually have the flowers, right. We have like some little tiny things in the spring, but they're just, but usually the, the end of winter is very dry for us. Right. When we do get snows, it's more in, in the beginning of win, like more in a January, February time. But by the time we get into March and April, there's not much moisture. So there really isn't a lot in the spring, but in the autumn, we've got these All kinds of MOS and sunflowers and Veria and all of these beautiful things to, to weave in and add. And we were talking about be before we started recording, I was showing mark the, the photos from it. And mark, you suggested, and I love this idea of putting, if you had leaves putting leaves in doing leave crowns. You know, the cone pine cones and, and whatever it is, that's in your environment. That is, that is fall or autumn for you. Mark: Sure. Yeah. I mean, one idea that you could do as a part of your Equinox celebration actually would be to have to crown like an autumn king and an autumn queen or autumn royalty of whatever gender, Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: To kind of oversee the feast. Right. And it'd be really cute if those were kids. Yucca: Yes, Mark: so Yucca: the kids with, with flower crowns and leaf crowns is just cute. Just too cute. Mark: you bet. So that's, that's something else that you could do, theoretically. I. I mean, there's, there's so much that's so aesthetically pleasing about this time of the year to bring it into your house and make it clear that there's less of a division between inside and outside, I think is something that can be really valuable for us. Yucca: yeah. Some of that, depending on how far north or how far cold your climate gets. It is a little bit of a last chance this time of year for some of the outdoor stuff, because when the snows do come, when the bitter cold does come, there's a lot more of that. Just staying nestled inside. So I think of this a lot as like a nesting time getting ready, right? Just like that's what I see the animals outside doing the ones that stay here. We still have a few that have not left. I saw some hummingbirds today and I'm going, Hey. Get going get going. You're not gonna like it here. But the ones that, that stay here, you know, all of our little rodents and the Jays and things they're busy as can be right now, just packing away their cheeks, full the Jays. It's so funny. They can have multiple, we leave sunflower seeds out for. Which they've now planted everywhere. But they can fit multiple ones in their beak at once. So you'll see them going by with like three or four seeds in one beak and then the, all the squirrels and chipmunks with their faces just stuffed full of whatever it is that they can find. Mark: Nice Yucca: and so I, I kind of feel like that, right. Just stuffing, you know, it's time to stuff, things in, but it's a good time also for a fall clean. We have a spring cleaning as a Mark: Mm, Yucca: in the larger culture, but it's a good time to do that. Fall cleaning and clean out all this stuff from summer, that's gone. Right? You're getting rid of that stuff. You don't need that anymore. And bring out, you know, bring out the things that you do. What are your, the boots, if you're in a, I'm sure this is for your environment. You probably have some big boots. The rain boots Mark: nice rubber Wellingtons. Yeah. Yucca: You know, maybe put those flip flops away, bring out the wellies. Mark: Yeah, for sure. Yeah. And I, I think of it this way. We're gonna be spending a lot more time indoors now. Yucca: Mm-hmm Mark: Uh, going forward for the next six months or so. Right. Because the conditions are going to get more inhospitable outside. So let's make the inside a place we wanna be, you know, let's make it cozy and comfortable and pretty and practical and all those different kinds of dimensions of what makes a real home. Yucca: mm-hmm yeah. Mark: And there are ritual things that we can do that can contribute to that, which is, can be fun. I think, you know, assembling that reef and putting it on the, on the doorstep, I think is gonna be a great thing. I. Also getting dried squashes and pumpkins and so forth to, to decorate the front area just. Yes. We, we were talking about this before we started to record. Yes, it's true. Pumpkins tend to be associated with Halloween and Hallows, but they're available now and they're actually pouring out of the gardens right now. So, you know, grab a few. Yucca: Yeah. And there are some, some really fun ones. If you haven't grown them, that's one of the ones I really encourage you to try. Because squash are pretty forgiving for, for being grown. And you can grow in a five gallon bucket and get one of those. You can, you can grow maybe one plant, but you could do something like one of those, those little Jacky littles. Have you seen those little pumpkins? They're about the size of like your fist? Mark: Oh yeah. Yucca: Yeah, those are a great one. And some of the smaller ones, you could grow a big one, but those are ones that you could do in your window. If you don't have any backyard to put it in, if you do, but you gotta have your big container, right. You can get away with one or so, and then they'll just take over. But the smaller, the smaller, the winter squashes, the more of them you're likely to get. If you're trying to grow one of your, like your huge, like fair winning pumpkin. You're not gonna be able to pull that off indoors or on a balcony, but something little you might be able to. And they're usually pretty easy to save seeds from too. So if you go to the, the farmer's market or even the grocery store, and you see that really weird pumpkin with all the like bumps on it and those strange colors and stuff. Just save one or two of those. Right. And see if the next, next year, maybe you can get that to, to grow in your house or on your porch or, and if it doesn't work, then would you lose Mark: Right. Yeah. Yucca: You're gonna, Mark: You, you, you had the pumpkin anyway, so yeah, it's what you lost was one bite of toasted pumpkin seeds. Yucca: Yeah. So, yeah, so pumpkins And depending on how far along they are in your climate, the dried sunflower heads. Mark: Huh? Yucca: those ones. Mine. They're not in my area. They're not quite ready. We need another, another couple weeks. But for the big, like the mamma sunflowers and they're just so beautiful, you see that spiral pattern of the seeds, assuming you can get to it before the birds. Mark: right, Yucca: Yeah, but if you pick it before the seeds have developed, then you're, they're not gonna develop on the, the head. Right? So if you, if you wanna save one of those, let's say you have several flowers, you can put a paper bag over it, as long as it's still attached to the, the plant, but it won't fully develop. It's not like some of those little grasses and things. If you cut those off early, then they'll just ripen really quick. There's just not enough time for those big sunflowers to do that. Mark: that makes sense. Yucca: So, yeah. Mark: Yeah. Yucca: So. Mark: and of course, you know, we're talking about produce. And so even if you don't have your own garden, this is the time for the fruit stands and the vegetable stands. And, you know, it's, it's a time, even, even if you do most of your shopping at a market, you know, if that's where you get most of your food, do some exploring, find out what the local varieties are of things. You know, play around with some new vegetables, because there are gonna be weird things that you just don't really recognize or understand how to use. And of course you can pick up things for preservation, which is a big part traditionally of this time of year. As people work to save as many calories as they possibly can for the winter, when. When the food systems are not gonna be producing, Yucca: Mm-hmm Mark: so, Yucca: And this is a fun time of year to, to try with the pickling and the fermenting. Speaking of those sort of witchy looking and feeling things you'd have those nice jars. That's definitely fun to do. Mark: Yeah, get some local honey and do a quick bead. That'll be ready by hellos. You can do some of that.  Yucca: Yeah. Mead and insiders are really easy. They're not like they're not like beer that is much more finicky and you need more equipment and stuff Mark: and there are so many more steps. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: For for beer. Beer is really actually a pretty complicated chemistry experiment when you get down to it making the, the wart so that the food for the yeast is absolutely perfect to create a particular flavor is really, you know, an art. It is, it's an art and there are people that are very good at it. I'm not one of them because I discovered that. There's all this fantastic beer available for 10 bucks, a six pack and I don't have to learn to be a master. Other people have, have done that for me, Yucca: Right. Mark: but I do like Yucca: gonna be, if it's something you're gonna be consuming a lot of versus something you're making just a small amount for. Just sort of the joy of it, you know, you have different considerations. Mark: right. Yeah. I mean, if you're only doing the five gallon. Car full, then that's a pretty easy project. Yucca: yeah, Mark: So it's something to look into it's and, and there is definitely a sense of pride and accomplishment. When you make a nice beverage like that and people enjoy it and appreciate it, and it gives you an opportunity to be creative about bottle labels and all that kind of stuff. It's fun. Yucca: another one to, to look into if you're interested in making things like that, but you don't want as high of an alcohol content is kombucha. Kombucha is really easy to make. And when you make it at home, it can have a higher content than what you would buy in the store. Still not gonna be very much though. Like if you wanna have an alcoholic kombucha, you've gotta try, you've gotta go out of your way to make it that way. You're not gonna accidentally make it as high content as your CIS or wines, beers, things like that. So you'll get a pretty low amount. That's a really fun one that also, if you're looking for something to feel super witchy with, like it makes this SCOBY on top that it makes is this bizarre, bubbly looking. It's really cool. And if you've got kids, you can, that you can lay on poke it and stuff and it's, it's fun. So,  Mark: another option, which is fully non-alcoholic is to make what are called shrubs. Yucca: mm-hmm. Mark: Shrubs are syrups that you add to sparkling water. They're made with vinegar and sugar and various kinds of herbs and fruits. So like strawberry and basil is, you know, one combination. There's, there's lots of recipes on the internet for making shrubs. I know it's a weird name. I didn't get it either, but that's what they're called. They're called shrubs. And they used to be very popular in the 19th century. They were, they were very, very common. And so you make these concentrated syrups and then you mix it with sparkling water and it, and maybe toss in, you know, another basal leaf or something for some fresh aromatics. And there are these very complex, interesting things to drink, but they don't have any alcohol in them. Yucca: Yeah. That sounds like something I'm sure that somebody is really passionate about and has their, their blog or channel on the boat. Mark: yep. Yeah, absolutely. Yucca: yeah. Well, pivoting away from the kitchen in the home, there's also things that That we might be doing like the buttoning up of the windows. Right. You're making sure that your windows seal properly and that the, the door isn't, isn't letting a draft through or something like that. And so that's, that's really a lovely time to maybe do a, a home. Kind of protection ritual or cleaning ritual or something like that, where maybe you're checking the window for the drafts, but you know, maybe there's something that you wanna be meditating on at while you're doing that or sprinkling some salt as well. Right. You're gonna protect from the drafts, but also, you know, protect on, on just sort of the symbolic level. Mark: Right. And you can be very specific about that sort of thing. I mean, what occurs to me is you can dip your fingertips into some rainwater that you've saved and then sort of flick it at the front door and it doesn't go through. So the, the point being, you know, we're rain proofing the house, we're demonstrating that this. The weather's not going to get inside. Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: Putting salt at the corners of the house is of course a traditional protection thing as well. There are lots of various witchy sorts of activities that I think can give us more of a sense of comfort and solidity and security in our, in our homes. Even though, you know, they're just symbolic actions and we know that, but that, that doesn't matter. They still affect us. And there's a good feeling about kind of taking care of yourself that way about going through all of the gestures that are necessary in order to feel like you are in a secure and happy, warm, and cozy place. Yucca: Mm-hmm . Yeah. Hmm. Yeah, this is just, this is just one of my favorite times of year. I just wanna say that, right. just, oh, the chill and the it's still hot in the middle of the day for us, but in the mornings and the evenings, it's got that little brisk and, you know, so there's just so many lovely things. And as always, we really love hearing from all of you. And you tell us about some of the things you do.  Mark: Yes, especially if you're in other climbs because you know, there's a, there's a woman who's on the atheopagan council who comes to the Saturday morning zoom mixers pretty frequently. And she was just saying this morning that it's just barely starting to be tolerably. Cool there now it's still pretty hot and she's in Tampa, Florida. So she's actually in the subtropics. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: Which is, it's just, it's a whole other deal, right. You know, the, the dreaded season is not the winter. The dreaded season is the summer. Yucca: right. Mark: it's very hot and very humid and just not very hospitable full of bugs. Yucca: Mm-hmm Mark: Um, so Yucca: we're ready for the mosquitoes to take a break. Mark: are Yucca: really ready for them to Mark: I, I see, okay. Yucca: yeah, but I'm sure their mosquitoes are on a different level. Mark: Yeah, well, because of all the moisture everywhere, right? There's just there's enough moisture to support so much growth. So all the plants, all the animals, they really go to town. Yucca: yeah. Mark: What else I'm trying to think of what else? I mean, this is a real season for paying attention, just watching what's happening with the sky. You know, noticing the branches of the trees against the sky as they get more and more naked and lose their leaves.  Yucca: And in some places that's a, that's an overnight. It's amazing how quick things change. Right. And in others, it's a slow, kinda drawn out process that, oh, what are we going through? And it just hap and then others, it just happens. Mark: Right, right. Yeah. Yeah. To me. The the time change is always kind of slamming the door on the remnants of summer and, you know, really, you know, bringing winter on board. But the time leading up to that, you know, the whole spy month of October and, you know, I mean they're Yucca: have some good topics coming up for October. I Mark: oh, we do. Yucca: October. Mark: Yeah, me too. There's just, there's so much to be said about not only our practices as pagans, but just living a life. You know, the, the kinds of considerations that we have at that time of year are so profound thinking about mortality and about ancestry and all those kinds of things. But this is the, this is the onset of that. This, this moment right here is when we slip from summer into this different transitional kind of state. And I, I just really enjoy it. I find myself even more attentive to what's going on outside and around me, because it's so beautiful. Yucca: Yeah. Hmm. Mark: So I hope that wherever you are, you're having a similar experience of Of wonderful arrival of autumn wherever you may be and feel free to drop us a note about how you're experiencing that or what any of your traditions are for the autumn and going into going into that. October season you can reach us as always at the wonder podcast, QS, gmail.com, and we always enjoy hearing from you. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: So thanks everybody. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: Thanks. Thanks for being with us. We always appreciate so much that you listen.    .

Mark M. Bello is an attorney and also the author of the Zachary Blake Legal Thriller Series. In 1982, Mark was one of the first attorneys to sue the Catholic Church in a case of sexual abuse by clergy. In this podcast, Mark discusses his books, the Catholic Church case, the Zachary Blake character and how attorneys can get started writing. Mark is also the co-host of the "Justice Counts" podcast. Bello draws upon 44 years of courtroom experience and a passion for justice to write captivating novels and hard-hitting commentaries. You can visit Mark's site here: https://www.markmbello.com/. The "Justice Counts" podcast is available here: https://www.spreaker.com/show/justice-counts_1. See all episodes or subscribe to the Personal Injury Marketing Minute here: https://optimizemyfirm.com/podcasts/. Transcription: Welcome to the Personal Injury Marketing Minute, where we quickly cover the hot topics in the legal marketing world. I'm your host, Lindsey Busfield. Living in a world that is so focused on what we do and how we do it, it is important to sit back and reflect on why we do it. As children, we all had a grand idea of what we wanted to be when we grew up. Firemen, lawyers, SEO podcast hosts. Well, maybe that was a later dream. Nonetheless, we saw ourselves as the heroes and heroines of our adulthood. Many of you probably dreamed of becoming lawyers when you grew up. To do so, you traversed law schools, student loans, fierce competition, regulations, and naysayers. You sacrificed time and money into becoming a lawyer most likely because you wanted to help people and contribute to the greater good. And while the day-to-day operations of lawyer life probably don't make you feel like donning your red cape and flying about town, it is important to listen to that calling that is still inside, cheering you on, summoning your inner hero. Mark Bello knows legal heroes. In fact, he wrote one into existence with the Zachary Blake legal thriller series. In this novel series, Zachary Blake is a lawyer who combats social justice issues that are prevalent in our government, churches, and society today. Thank you for joining us, Mark. Mark: Thanks for having me, Lindsey. Lindsey: Well, for starters, give us a little more information on the series as a whole. Mark: On the series as a whole. Well, I've written eight novels starting with Betrayal of Faith and the eighth and most recent novel is You Have The Right to Remain Silent. It is a departure from the prior novels, because as you mentioned in your intro, most of them have been based on newsworthy topics or what the press likes to call, "ripped from the headlines." The last one is a straight whodunit. It's not a "ripped from the headlines" novel. So, I took off after seven novels from my political, legal soapbox and created a different type of novel. But the topics, as we'll probably discuss, have gone from clergy abuse to white supremacy, to school shootings, to police on minority shootings, to the Me-Too movement in the Supreme Court, to a bigoted president, a businessman who gets elected and does bad things to the country. Sound familiar? To the immigration crisis. So, I've written about topics that are related to the news. The first book, unlike all the rest, was based on a case out of my practice and that remains the only one that I took from my practices. Lindsey: So all of these cases that you're talking about, they all feel very new, they all feel like they are very relevant today, but you've actually been writing for quite a while. So, when did you start writing the series and what exactly prompted you to do so? Mark: Well, it took me probably 25 years or so to write the first novel. I had a law practice to run. I had family, I had four children and nine grandchildren, although I didn't have them back then, all of them. But I was one of the first lawyers back in the '80s, that's the 1980s,

Tonight we continued with Hypothesis 19 on the importance and value of obedience. I think it is safe to say that this is some of the most beautiful writing on the subject - one can only imagine because it arises out of deep experience.  Obedience is presented to us not as a kind of slavishness or something that leads to the crushing of the personality. Nor is it something that is infantilizing. What we find in the Fathers is just the opposite. Obedience is the prime good that we are to acquire because it casts out pride and it creates humility within the heart. Christ loved obedience because he loved the Father. It is in his incarnation that he was, by providence, obedient to his heavenly Father unto the cross and death. He obeyed the Father in love even though he was in no way inferior in greatness and dignity.  Obedience and love are intimately tied together. Divine love is vulnerable. And nowhere is this seen more fully than in Christ giving himself over to the Father's will without question.  Such obedience also brings us healing and freedom from the danger of falling into delusion. Protected from pride, we never see ourselves and our lives as abstracted from God and his will for us. --- Text of chat during the group: 00:07:33 David Fraley: I always have snacks!   00:10:42 Anthony: "City a Desert" on YouTube is how I found him.   00:13:54 Debra: I didn't get any email today, regarding the commenting   00:24:02 Mark: Sorry… incredibly distracted on my end… what page are we on?   00:24:14 Anthony: 146   00:24:34 Mark: Thanks   00:32:21 Anthony: So this is what fundamentally makes our anthropology different than the Cathars.  They make ascetism a mere act of will.  We realize we have disjointed psychology that must be put aright.  And that is by grace and synergy of the will with grace we reorganize the soul/mind/body.  And this synergy is individual and communal.   00:37:56 Mitchell Hunt: I saw that. Very profound. Quote was from Elder Aimilianos   00:42:02 Ren: Didn't one of the Fathers we read even talk about revealing ones thoughts to ones angel? It might have been in the context of the hermits, and I think they were able to see their angel, but I think it is still a lovely thought that could apply.   00:54:42 Anthony: I think that is a sentiment shared by Seneca the Stoic.   01:06:21 Ren: This paragraph really serves as the proof of the hypothesis: Obedience is most valuable because it defeats pride, and gives birth to humility and love of God - all without the danger of delusion. Amazing. Also helps to explain why the chapter on obedience is the longest chapter in the Ladder. Strange that the only time we really talk about obedience in the life of the church is little kids doing what mom and dad say.   01:11:16 Anthony: My discipline is political philosophy. Since the Reformation, and especially the American Revolution, we have a worldview of opposition and "I have the truth, I will separate from you."  This is immature and selfish and even Marxist, looking at life through a framework of parties being in perpetual opposition.  But classical political philosophy has a worldview based on love, friendship, patronage, "the ties that bind."  That is the Classical worldview upon which our Catholic ethics are based.    

In this episode Brendan Hill talks with a special guest that has something a bit different to offer our SME marketers and businesses. Our guest is pro surfing legend, Mark Matthews.Mark has made a living achieving the unfathomable: crossing the intersection of danger and excitement. He knows all too well the crippling grasp of fear.While in Tasmania, fifteen feet in front of a cliff in cold, shark infested waters, Mark hit a reef and instantly blacked out. Terror engulfed every inch of his being. Neck braced and hospital-ridden, he didn't know if he could ever surf again. At that moment, Mark made a decision never to allow fear to overpower him again.With his presentation business ” Life Beyond Fear”  has him deconstructing, fine-tuning, and personalizing emotional resilience techniques to successfully strengthen one's mindset and sustain long term performance.These techniques have helped him win an unprecedented three consecutive Oakley Big Wave Awards and cement him as one of the best big waves surfers in the world.  In this episode you will learn: How Mark overcomes the fear of surfing 50-foot waves and how you can apply these techniques to areas of your businessHow to get out of your comfort zone to get the experience you need to create that new comfort zone where new opportunities lieHow to build a personal brandHow Mark became a world-class keynote speaker when he couldn't even speak in front of a room of people at the beginningAdvantages of keeping your pitches raw and unpolishedHow to make your business more authentic and attract customersWhy having a high level of authenticity in every aspect of your business increases your chances of successHow to improve your presentation skillsWhy you need to have a plan in place for all business scenariosThe powerful moment that changed Mark's mindset after being told by doctors that he'd never surf againThe importance of building your own audienceHow studying standup comedy can make you a better public speakerResources Mentioned:Mark's Instagram AccountRed Bull Cape Fear (see Mark @ 48 seconds)Pragmatic ThinkingUpworkLinkedIn HelperMasterclassQuotes: When you push yourself through that fear and anxiety, usually the experience, feeling, result or success on the other side feels like that Holy Grail. You get that intrinsic reward and the external rewards that make it feel like a Holy Grail - like life's worth living.Talk to your audience like you're talking to one person, like you're talking to a friend and carry that tone. Match it to how you would just speak to a close friend, because you speak to your closest friends with the most authenticity.When you build your own audience you become like a small marketing agency yourself.There will be people that enjoy watching you do what you do. That's my model. Just stick to what you like. It's too tiring trying to be someone that you're not.What Business would you build on Mars?"It would have to be indoor wave pools. And surfing sells itself. All you got to do is offer a few free surf lessons and when people experience that feeling, what else is there going to be to do on Mars than ride a few waves? It will sell itself."Get in touch with Mark:markmathews.comMark on InstagramMark on LinkedInTranscript:Brendan:Mark, welcome to the show.Mark:Thanks for having me, Brendan.Brendan:You have an amazing LinkedIn profile, that's where I first found out about you. Can you tell us more about big wave surfing?Mark:Big wave surfing, I mean, that's my life. It's been my life for the last 15 years. It was my avenue to build a career out of the sport of surfing, even though I wasn't quite good enough or talented enough to be a competitive or a world champion level surfer.Brendan: Right.Mark:It was just this different avenue that I found that I could manufacture myself a career out of the sport that I loved.Brendan:Wow. When did you come to the realization that you could follow your passion and make that your career?Mark:It happened when I was about 20, so I was working, actually, here in Sydney, down at Darling Harbor, making coffees and cocktails at night. Out of the blue, I got asked to go on a surf trip down to Tasmania to surf a new wave that had been getting talked about in the industry. It was being heralded as one of the biggest and scariest waves that another had ever seen.Brendan: Wow.Mark:And no one had really photographed it at that point in time. And no part of me wanted to go and surf it, because I'd never really surfed big waves and I was absolutely terrified when I got the call. And it was funny because I couldn't figure out why they were calling me because I was kind of a no one in the industry of surfing.Brendan: Right.Mark:I found out down the track they probably called about 30 or 40 other surfers before they got to my name at the bottom of the list. Everyone politely declined because the waves sounded so scary, but I didn't have the chance of saying no. If I had said no, I would never have got my career off the ground because at that point, I didn't have the major sponsorships. Anyway, I went down to Tasmania, one thing lead to another and I ended up surfing waves bigger than I'd ever surfed before in my life.Brendan: Wow.Mark:And the photos and footage of that trip went around the world and I got my first surfing sponsorships and then that basically gave me the blueprint of what I needed to do to make a career, it was travel around the world, chase down the biggest waves I could find, surf them, create content, let that content get in the media and based on the media value, I'd get the sponsorship dollars.Brendan:Wow. So how big are these waves that we're talking about?Mark:Down in Tasmania, that first time, it was in the 15 to 20 foot range, but the way the waves break down there is what makes them so spectacular and dangerous. So super deep water waves breaking on a really shallow rock ledge, which magnifies the power and the spectacular nature of the waves. To me, way more dangerous than say, if I go and surf waves in excess of 50 feet, but break in deep water, while they look and are a whole lot bigger, it's nowhere near as dangerous or spectacular.Brendan:So in terms of taking that first step, I know that one of your mantras is life beyond fear, the other side of fear. So taking that first step. A good example, I just finished watching Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade on Netflix and when he's walking over that invisible gap to get the Holy Grail-Mark:I know the one.Brendan:Yeah, it's that first step. And I can imagine these massive waves passing by and 15, 20 feet, I mean, up to 50 feet, as you say. Can you tell us more about that first step and how to overcome fear? Because I mean, it has parallels in business as well. That first step is always the hardest.Mark:100%. And that's the interesting thing, because as scary as big wave surfing is, and the thought or the reality of maybe drowning, for me, I find public speaking and keynoting that I do now more stressful. I get more anxiety from it, it wears me down more than big wave surfing ever did.Brendan: Wow.Mark:So that's where the corelation is between what action sports people do and what business people do because fear is fear. It doesn't matter whether it's a fear of physical danger or harm or a fear of failure or not being good enough or making mistakes. The way your body reacts is exactly the same. So across the board, I think that's where the relationship is. And then like you said, the Indiana Jones reference is perfect.It's like the steps across the invisible bridge to the Holy Grail, in my head, it's so terrifying to get out of your comfort zone to get the experience you need to create that new comfort zone where the opportunities are, whether in business or in the sport of surfing. But when you do that and you push yourself through that fear and anxiety, usually the experience or the feeling or the result or the success on the other side feels like that Holy Grail. You get that intrinsic reward and the external rewards that make it feel like a Holy Grail, like life's worth living when you push yourself like that.Brendan:Yeah. It's interesting that you say that you get more anxiety now about public speaking than big wave surfing, validating what Jerry Seinfeld always says, "Public speaking is the number one human fear, followed by death at number two." Big wave surfing, I can imagine, wouldn't be far behind these monster swells.Mark:Yeah, I think Jerry is definitely right. For an introvert, anyway, I'm highly introverted, so public speaking is the scariest thing in life for me.Brendan:So what made you jump into public speaking after your career in big wave surfing?Mark:I had a sponsor who sponsored me from when I was in my early twenties, his best friend was in the world of corporate training and had a background climbing mountains and brought that to the business world and then he had said to me, years ago, in my early twenties, that this is the career path that you should look to take while you're still big wave surfing, so that you can build it then and then be able to carry it on down the track when I'm 50, when I can't surf big waves anymore. 60, maybe. I'm pushing for 60.Mark:And at the time, I was like, "There's no way I'm ever doing that" because for me, I couldn't even stand in front of a classroom when I was a kid and read from a book, I would stutter so bad, I'd have so much anxiety, so it took a lot for me to be able to do it. Spent untold amounts of money doing every speaking course under the sun.But eventually, it was exactly like learning to surf big waves, the exposure and the experience just builds up and then you build that new skill set so that it doesn't matter who you stand in front of, who I'm standing in front now, I've got the tools and the skills to dig into my bag and perform on stage and I don't have to feel too anxious about it now but originally, it was tough.Brendan:Yeah. Do you remember your first big keynote speech?Mark:I do. I was in Hawaii and it was for an insurance company and I got offered the talk two weeks before the event and I didn't have a keynote at all.Brendan: Wow.Mark:So I wrote the keynote in the two weeks before. The only person I said it in front of was my mom.Brendan: Wow.Mark:And I did the keynote in front of her and she actually features in the keynote because she's one of my big motivators in life to be successful. And she had a tear in her eye when I told her and that was kind of enough, I was like, "Okay. We'll see how it goes." And if I look back on the delivery of the keynote that I gave, the delivery was very average, but the bed of the keynote has almost stayed exactly the same. That's what I deliver today. And the feedback that I got from the audience was amazing, off that first keynote.Brendan:Right.Mark:I had the bosses say, "This is what you've got to do in life." And they just enjoyed, I think, the fact that I was so raw and real on stage because I had no other choice but to be that way. And it wasn't really too polished.Brendan: Right.Mark:And I've always taken that as I've gone on in keynote speaking, never to become that over-polished speaker that's talking to a track, because I think for the audience, you have to remember that they're seeing you for the first time, they want it to be real. Even though I'm telling the same thing that I've told a thousand times, it needs to feel real in that moment and the connection has to be real with the audience for them to even remotely take in what you're going to say.Brendan:Yeah. It's a interesting point that you touch on there, authenticity. So I guess that's part of your brand, being really authentic and not being too polished. I mean, when we go on social media feeds, like on Instagram, everyone is looking very polished. How can businesses become more authentic and tell their real story and start to, like yourself, really resonate with their audience?Mark:Ah, man, I think it takes courage to do that and it's tricky for businesses. When you have all these insurance factors and regulators and all this stuff hanging over the top of you and then investors, and depending on what size business you're running, to really let people know authentically what's happening within the business, where you're planning to go and all that, it takes courage, but I find that if you looked into some case studies on it, it is worth while to do.And especially small businesses and small business owners needing the motivation to do what they're going to have to do to be successful in small business, which is such a small amount of people pull that off, the authenticity level has to be there where you have to really love what you're doing and believe in it and there has to be deep meaning in what you're doing for you to go that extra level to the extent that you need to to be successful.So this authenticity on both aspects is how you run your business internally, but then how you speak to your customers, I think, both of them take some courage, but worth while.Brendan:And in terms of speaking to customers, you touched on presentation skills. Obviously very important in every day business. People are presenting on the phone, presenting in their content marketing, for example. What sort of tips can you give early stage businesseslistening on at home? Obviously, you had to learn from the ground up with your presentation skills for your keynotes. You did a lot of courses. People just starting now or wanting to improve their presentation skills, where do they start?Mark:I think the best tip that I got as far as tone, when you talk to someone, is that talk to your audience like you're talking to one person, like you're talking to a friend and carry that tone. And you've got to practice it and then watch yourself on video and see if you're carrying that tone because it's really hard to do initially, because when the camera's in front of you or the audience is in front of you, naturally, the anxiety shifts you into a different tone with the way you're speaking to people. But I think if you go back and watch what you look like and then try and match it to how you would just speak to a close friend, because you speak to your closest friends with the most authenticity, you know?Brendan: True. Yeah.Mark:And then if you can keep that tone, I think that helps a lot. And then by far, the most important thing is to be prepared. Unbelievably prepared. Nothing beats the fear of public speaking like preparation. You've going to have, for me, it's the same as surfing. So when I go and surf big waves, I'm ready for every worse case scenario that could possibly happen. I have a really detailed plan put in place.For example, if I blacked out under water and I had to be resuscitated, they had to restart my heart and then I had to call for a helicopter, we have the whole plan in place. So it takes some of that fear and that apprehension that you get in your mind in the lead up to scary moments away because I'm prepared for it. So the same way, if I'm going to do a keynote this afternoon, for WordPress, actually, here in Sydney, everything that could go wrong, I know exactly what to do.The whole power can shut off and I have to do my presentation without any photos or footage or anything like that, but I'm ready to do that.Brendan: Amazing.Mark:Or if my mind goes blank, which it does in front of an audience, if something happens, I've got a line and a story where I can go straight into at any point in my presentations.Brendan:It's a good idea. Yeah.Mark:Yeah. And then give myself the time to get back on track, so overly prepared is the key todealing with that kind of fear.Brendan:And speaking of scary moments, what was the scariest moments in your big wave surfing career?Mark:I've had a recent one where I dislocated my knee surfing down the South Coast of Sydney, five hours South of here. I hit the reef on about a 10 foot wave and completely dislocated my knee, tore every ligament and tendon.Brendan: Wow.Mark:Tore the major artery that runs through my leg. Major nerves. The pain that I experienced when I did that, I knew that something really bad had happened. And then to wake up the following morning in hospital after emergency surgery, and I was basically told that I was going to have a disability where I can't move my foot, I can't lift my foot anymore for the rest of my life.Brendan: Wow.Mark:So it was the doctors telling me, "Your surfing career is over."Brendan: Right.Mark:So that, by far, was the scariest, hearing that news was the scariest thing that I've been through within surfing. But managed to prove them wrong and I'm getting my surfing career back on track. It's taken me about two and a half years, but it's getting there.Brendan:Wow. So can you talk us through that mindset from being told you'll never surf again to rebuilding your career?Mark:I have to admit, the first six weeks to two months when I was stuck in hospital in the big metal frame brace, with my big wounds from the surgery on my leg and I couldn't get out of bed at all in the worst pain I've felt, nerve pain, by far, I've had almost every other injury youcan do, broken bones and stuff, but nothing compares to nerve pain. And yeah, in that two months I got really depressed. Not on the level of depression like suicidal depression, that's something completely different, but depressed in that I didn't want to see anyone. I'd given up hope of surfing again.Brendan: Wow.Mark:I wasn't sleeping because of the pain or they'd give me ridiculous amounts of medication to try and combat the pain, so it was that. All these things just lead to me being so unbelievably unhealthy, physically and mentally. It's interesting because it wasn't until, I'd like to say I just snapped myself out of it, but I didn't.It wasn't until I actually met a young guy in hospital who reached out to me on social media. And he said, "I've been following your career since I was young. Big fan. I'd love to come up and meet you and get a photo." Because he read that I was in Canberra Hospital and he was actually in there. And I didn't want to see anyone, so I didn't even reply. It was my wife who saw the message and wrote back to him and said, "Yeah, no worries, come up and get a photo."Mark:So this kid comes up probably three hours after I'd seen the message. He gets wheeled into my bedroom by his brother, he's a complete quadriplegic and had broken his neck about six months before I hurt myself and the moment that I shook Jason, his name was, hand, and I don't know if you've shook someone's hand who's a quadriplegic, it's confronting. They can't control their arm, anything. And he stuck out his arm with a big grin on his face. And the moment that I shook his hand, it was the craziest shift that I've ever had experienced in my life where my perspective or mindset about what I was dealing with did a complete 180.Mark:So I went from being really angry, full of self-pity for what had happened to me, blaming other people, the victim of this wipeout and this injury and just done with it to just feeling like the luckiest person on Earth because if I'd had hit that reef any other part of my body, I could have so easily been dealing with what he was dealing with. And his injury's a million times worse than mine and he's dealing with it that much better. So I was overcome with gratitude, feeling lucky. And from that moment onwards, it was like that feeling of feeling lucky about my situation was the catalyst to get me back on track. Everything fed on from there.Brendan: Wow.Mark:And now, two years later, after all the rehab, I've figured out how to surf good enough withthe disability that I can get back out into big waves. But I think meeting him and that shift in mindset was the saving grace for me in dealing with that.Brendan:That's an amazing story. So tell us about the first time after this accident that you got back on the surf board.Mark:I surfed a couple of times, probably a year down the track, but I would barely call it surfing, compared to what I've been doing. It was on a longboard, I could only just stand up. I could barely turn the board and at that moment, I was like, "It's nice to be surfing again, but this is ... It's nice to be out in the ocean and the water, but it's not really surfing for me."It took about another eight months after that to where I rode a wave and got my first barrel, say inside the barrel and caught a wave. Not a big wave, just sort of eight foot wave on the Gold Coast and that moment was just a game changer for me. All the hard work paid off because I could surf good enough just to do that, to get barrelled. It wasn't big waves and get my career on track, but that was enough.I was like, "If this is it, then that's fine." But then, my surfing ability just kept getting better and better after that, just up until about six weeks ago, I got to compete in the Red Bull Cap Fear event, a big wave surfing event down in Tasmania at that first wave that went to and I got my first big barrel there and that was the icing on the cake. That's two and a half years of rehab. Yeah, it was a good journey.Brendan:Yeah, amazing journey. And can you speak more on your mom being a major point of motivation in your life?Mark:Yeah. She's just on two different levels, but she's always been the type of person who has that internal reflection and thinks about who she is, what she's like and how she can be better, and she's always had that. She eventually does a lot of meditation and has lived in ashrams around the world and became a yoga teacher, so I think that rubbed off on me.How valuable it is to know yourself. Figure out who you are and try and work on your flaws and be better. So I think that rubbed off on me a lot. And then the other part is that I've just always wanted to, down the track, when she retires, support her, be able to buy her a house one day. It's the image that I always use in my head.Before I'm about to do something scary or when I got to get up early and go to training or when I've got to say no to eating that shit food and eat this boring food. All those things, I've just got this clear picture in my head of the day I get to buy her a house and I can see the excitement and that big smile on her face in those moments. So it's those two parts that she's only inspiring to me.Brendan:Yeah, amazing. So focusing on your business, now. Your brand that you've built for yourself and you mentioned that you went around the world chasing content. So talk us through, Iguess, your content strategy. You got the footage of you surfing the big waves. What did you do next?Mark:Yeah. It was interesting because from the start of my career, it went through the whole digital media revolution.Brendan: Oh, really?Mark:The first surf trip we did was on film, with cameras and photos. And then it was just going out into mainstream newspapers and stuff. And then we just tracked through the whole evolution of digital media in that time. So it's like having one of the first blogs in surfing that people could follow.Brendan: Wow.Mark:Because in my head, I had to make up for a lack of talent as a surfer by having the business smarts and how I could get the exposure and then that would make me as valuable as the other more talented surfers out there. That was what I always had, I was always looking for different things of how I could do that.And the digital media revolution was the game changer because then it wasn't up to the print media and surf magazines who had a stranglehold on the industry on who was successful. When you build your own audience and then you could show them and you've got your own audience, you become like a small marketing agency yourself.Brendan: Yeah.Mark:So by having that business smart, I controlled my destiny a little bit more. And yeah, I think it made that career, I could extend it longer also as well. So yeah, there are so many nuance things within that, how you do it, but it's the same core principle. Just show people what I love about what I do. Show them that and there's that many people out there on social media in the digital world.There will be people that enjoy watching you do what you do. That's what's my model. Just stick to what you like. It's too tiring trying to be someone that you're not. I could have gone down that path and you try and do the things that people like or that the big celebrities are doing, but to me, that seemed exhausting. It's just like, just show what you love about surfing and then see if people like it.Brendan:Yeah. It comes back to your point about talking to your best friends when you're doing your keynote.Mark: Yeah.Brendan:Focusing on that one person.Mark:Exactly. Yeah and then it keeps you authentic in a way.Brendan:And what channels are you using at the moment? Have you gone head first into video content as well? I imagine a lot of GoPro footage and ...Mark: Yeah.Brendan:Is live streaming possible in big wave surfing?Mark:It is. GoPro is a major sponsor of mine. I've always worked with them and that was just about me wanting to use the best cameras for what we did in action sports. I was always so interested in how can I make my audience get as close to this experience as possible as what I get inside the barrelling part of the wave. If you can help them try and experience that. The tiny point of view camera is where you can give that field and then the GoPro Fusion that shoots the 360 and virtual reality type content, they're awesome tools to be able to do that.And then on the live streaming front, when the technology became where it became possible to be able to set up these high production live feeds at the drop of a hat, because the difference in surfing as a sport, in big wave surfing as a sport, compared to say, live streaming a football game is what we do is all weather dependent. So I teamed up with Red Bull in that regard to create Red Bull Cape Fear, a big wave surf event.Brendan: Right.Mark:And it's the only company that, again, has set aside that kind of financial amount on the possibility that we may get big enough waves that year to run an event. I couldn't find, there was no other company out there that would just go, "Yeah, here's this much money" eventhough the event might not happen. You might only have a 50/50 chance of it happening. Yeah, so now we're able to do that in remote locations, so we could do that down in Tasmania, which is in the middle of nowhere where this wave breaks.Brendan: Wow.Mark:And we streamed it live to, I think, the numbers ended up being about 1.5 million people across a live feed and the first replay because it happens just when it happens, so people aren't prepared for it.Brendan: Right.Mark:We give them a 24 hour window.Brendan: Okay.Mark:Because that's when we got to take that the event's going to happen and then we send the production crews in, so yeah, that's been an interesting experience. I think that's been the latest frontier in regard to that digital media revolution and the way to bring surfing and big wave surfing to people.Brendan:Yeah, that's an amazing strategy. And what's next? What problems are you working on now in your business?Mark:For me, because I've been injured for the last couple of years, my main focus is keynote speaking in the corporate training world and establishing myself within there and really researching what companies and their employees and everyone needs to manage that hectic paced life of that corporate world. Because there's that sort of disconnect where companies want so much out of their employees.They want them to work ridiculous hours and the employees are getting burned out because of that but the world's so competitive that if you don't put up with that burnout, you'll lose your job because someone else will put their hand up and try and take it on. And so it's how can I equip those employees to still do the workload or the hours but not be as drained or affected by it? So it's how can you take on that and not have it rule their life where it destroys their relationships and their personal life? And I think that's, at the moment, within the corporate world, the Holy Grail of figuringthat complex web of its meaning for the employees to want to take on all the stress, they have to find that meaning and the company has to align with them to be able to do that. And then the physical aspect of being able to cope with the crazy work hours, so there's that physical element, whether it's diet, exercise, sleep, those parts.Mark:And then the relationship aspect of their work relationships and their personal relationships because that emotional side and that relationship side is the other big part of taxing you as a human. So it's a complex web, but I love it. For me, human performance on any level is amazing.I originally loved the freak performers who were the world champions at a given sport and how they did what they did, but the more you dive into that, it's like, usually once they're best of the best at something, they're freakishly genetically talented, which isn't that interesting to me.And then if they're not really good at one thing and really good at something completely different, then it's like the tools they're using to be good at one thing might not be transferrable to anyone else.Brendan: Right.Mark:Yeah. But when you see people that can go and be the highest level in one aspect of life and another aspect of life and another aspect of life, it's like whatever's working there is then transferrable. And that's what I've tried to find with surfing.I can conquer fear in the world of surfing, but do those same techniques and rules apply to public speaking or to developing business or to just all these other aspects of life? So I've just been testing them and I'm slowly coming up and still tweaking different programs and workshops for corporate.I deliver a keynote which is more on the inspirational side and then a more detailed workshop, where if I can get anywhere from three to six hours with an audience, then you can deep dive into it and make more lasting changes with people than a keynote can.Brendan:Yeah. And how do you find these companies to do the workshops, are they through their keynotes?Mark:Yes. There's lots of work out there for keynote speakers, if you're a half decent keynote speaker, the companies are coming knocking at your door.Brendan: Wow.Mark:And that's been the case, but because it's such a short amount of time, the companies don't mind giving you that little bit of time with the audience, because it's not as big an investment for them. Because the money that they pay you is not the expense, it's the investment of having a hundred employees sit there listening to you and they're not doing whatever other work they're supposed to be doing.So to then ask for three hours or six hours or a multi-tiered program over a year, where you make a radical culture change in a company, that's a big investment, money-wise and time-wise for them. So yeah, you've got to give to get, so it's like, "Here, we'll do it for you like this for a lesser amount and you'll see the results." And then now I've got the testimonials from certain companies, then the other companies can come aboard because they can believe what you're doing.Brendan:Yeah. And can you tell us any stories of the changes in culture and the results that you've seen in some of these companies?Mark:Yeah. To me, the interesting ones or the radical ones are usually the stress reduction ones, that's huge, and where you dive into stress programs. But then, if that's the main set of programs that you're doing, but then the offshoot of managing stress and creating resilience is say, a workshop around how to have tough conversations in an organization.Because that, to me, is probably one of the main relationship emotional factors that drain people in companies because there's animosity being carried around by employees because they're not speaking up and they can't have a tough conversation with their boss or with their peers without rubbing people the wrong way. And then they just live in this world of constant stress and social pressure.Brendan:Yeah, the conflict avoidance.Mark:Yeah. So we built, a company called Pragmatic Thinking, that I work closely with, they've got the best tough conversation program or workshop that I've seen. I can do a keynote, have all this stress reduction stuff and bring them and we'll do a tough conversations piece there.Brendan: Great.Mark:And then you see radical shifts because just that small number of skills, if you can criticize someone without tearing their whole ego apart, there's an amazing ride along effect from that because you can then give criticism without destroying someone. And then that just plays out. And once a whole number of people in your team can do that, the culture change in a year's time and the progression as far as the way the team works shifts hugely.Brendan:Yeah. That's amazing. So speaking of tools now, I like to ask all the guests that come on what marketing tools they use for their business. So what's been the best investment that you've made tool-wise?Mark: Marketing-wise?Brendan:Yeah, marketing-wise.Mark:Outsourcing with Upwork, for me, having a really small business, is amazing. The talent of people out there around the world that you can access at the drop of a hat is phenomenal. So probably that, as an outsourcing tool. I probably shouldn't say this, but I had a LinkedIn helper tool that was phenomenal.Brendan: Oh, yeah.Mark:But I think it might have just got shut down recently, so I have to go back to the old way of running LinkedIn. But yeah, any of those tools that can automate things that you do but automate them in a way that it doesn't seem like things are being automated, then it's super valuable.Brendan:Yeah. And are you a big reader, Mark?Mark:More listen. I like podcasts. I do like to read, but I just recently did an IQ test and my language comprehension skills are so low. It's ridiculous. So reading for me is time consuming whereas I love to listen to different podcasts and especially when you can get two experts debating on something, I find that the most valuable way to learn.Brendan:So more of the longform podcasts?Mark:Definitely longform podcasts or lecture series. A lot of universities and professors out there put their lecture courses online, like on YouTube, so you can access almost anything these days.Brendan: Yeah.Mark:And there's amazing learning platforms, like MasterClass and a whole bunch of other ones. To read is amazing if you're a good reader because it's really good for your imagination as well, but to just be able to have the highest end quality YouTube learning video or MasterClass platform or whatever like that that can just teach you through five different mediums at once, for me, that's way more beneficial. Yeah.Brendan:Yeah, I was on MasterClass yesterday, actually, some amazing courses.Mark:Amazing stuff, yeah. I think I did one of the value ones. I did Steve Martin's comedy one.Brendan: Oh, wow.Mark:Just for public speaking. And when you see the way they break apart jokes in telling jokes, you can then learn to refine the way you would deliver a keynote because the emphasis on how much ... I heard Jerry Seinfeld say this too. He can spend a week on one line.Brendan: Yeah.Mark:Writing and re-writing one line and pausing in different places and it can make or break a joke. So as a keynote speaker, if you can dive into that level of detail on what you deliver, it's interesting. But you just got to be bothered to give it the time.Brendan:Yeah. And I know Seinfeld has another statistic, I think it's one week for every one minute of content.Mark:Oh, that's perfect. Perfect.Brendan:How long does it take you to do one minute of one of your keynote presentations, preparation-wise?Mark:It would depend, it would be in that realm, but I find, for me, the preparation and learning is every time I deliver a keynote, then watching it and then re-structuring some part of it. Yeah, it would be in that realm, I reckon. Probably less. I think comedians, it's so much harder than, I think, any other form of entertainment.Brendan:Well, you have to get a laugh every 15 secs, I think it is.Mark:Yeah. I think that's the hardest version of entertainment there is. They're re-working a minute, compared to what I do with keynote because I can tell a story and there's five or 10 minutes of content and I don't have to spend that much time to get that story, I bet it does make a difference when you get some detail in there and do some work on the delivery.Brendan:And what about online education, is that an area that you've looked at for your workshops, for example?Mark:Yeah. I've built, just recently, for a client, a big software company, a video learning series.Brendan: Right.Mark:The feedback from that's been awesome. Yeah, it was a big investment, so it was just because the client specifically wanted it that I ended up going down that track. I was thinking more in a future plan of what I'm doing, I would do that, but I just ended up doing it because the client wanted it. And they really liked it. And it's matching a simple lesson that works across the board, whether it's in the corporate world or what I do as a surfer to a surf story.Brendan: Right.Mark:So it's just an entertaining way for them to see the same lesson that they're going to see on any other learning platform or internally, they see it all the time, but when you can match a surf story to it and what's going on in the business ecosystem of professional surfing, it just anchors the message a little more. It's a good way to bring a different world to it and then for me, I know it's working with a client is when the staff start using surf examples for what they're doing. It's like, "Ah, this is just like when Mark decided to chase a virtual realityopportunity over going to chase a new market production in China for a new sponsor." It's like these scenarios, so if they're talking in that way, I'm like, "Yes, that's working."Brendan:So Mark, wanted to thank you so much for coming on. Wide ranging conversation. So many inspiring stories and tactics as well.Mark: Thanks.Brendan:But before we go, we like to ask our guests two abstract questions. So are you ready for abstract part of the show?Mark:Yeah, my dumb brain is trying to figure out what abstract means. That's my language problem in the IQ world. But yeah, fire away.Brendan:So the first question, if you could have a billboard, it can be anywhere in the world, what would it say and where would you put it?Mark:What would it say? Oh, man, I had this quote I read on the plane this morning. It's something like, is high performance is more like a cobweb than it is an organizational chart? It's something like that.Brendan: Yeah.Mark:Yeah. And it's just like that complex adaptive systems theory where everything affects everything. And it's the same way companies run, it's the same way your physiology in your body runs, but it's more so intertwined that if you leave out one aspect of performance, then all the others suffer. But if you take an entire system's approach to fixing performance, regardless of what it is, then you get crazy results.Brendan:Yeah, it's awesome.Mark:So it's cobweb versus, I think it was organizational chart or something like that. It'd be a long-winded billboard, that one.Brendan:Yeah. And the final question, you are on the first flight to Mars, with Elon Musk and the first settlers aboard the SpaceX starship Rocket. So what business do you start when you land on Mars and how do you promote it to the new Martians?Mark:It would have to be indoor wave pools, I think.Brendan:The first time I ask-Mark:And surfing sells itself. All you got to do is offer a few free surf lessons and when people experience that feeling, what else is there going to be to do on Mars than ride a few waves? So it will sell itself.Brendan:Definitely. So Mark, once again, really appreciate your time today and the value you've dropped to the audience. Is there anything you'd like to say before we wrap up and how can people get in touch?Mark:Thanks for having me first and thanks to the listeners for listening. If anyone wants to get in contact with me, my website is www.markmathews.com. And Mathews with one T.Brendan: OneT.Mark:Yeah, or on LinkedIn or social media, it's @markmathewssurf, so feel free to reach out and I'd love to work with your company and figure out this whole complex cobweb of performance, stress, energy, all of that stuff.Brendan:Yeah, amazing. We'll put all the links and resources Mark has mentioned in the show notes. And Mark, thanks for such a fantastic conversation. And I'll also put up some of your big wave surfing photos in the show notes because they're absolutely mind-blowing and hard to describe on air.Mark:Yeah. I think when people look at that, they'll be like, "No, we're not listening to this crazy person."Brendan:No, it's an awesome mission that you're out on changing many people's lives. So yeah, I want to thank you for that and thank you for coming in today.Mark:Awesome. Thanks for having me. 

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.

Remember, we welcome comments, questions and suggested topics at thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com https://atheopaganism.wordpress.com/2015/03/05/the-jewel-a-solitary-ritual/ S2E05 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 talk about the critic voice. You know, that voice in the back of your head that says this is stupid, or you shouldn't be doing this, or this is a bad idea, or you're really dumb for trying to do this, or you're really bad at this. All those, you know, self disempowering aspects of our own psychology that. That everyone seems to have it one level or another, Yucca: And that's sometimes not so in the back of the head and they have a pretty large presence sometimes, especially when just starting out with moving into a ritual practice. Mark: Yes. This episode we think will be of particular interest to folks who are atheists or other kinds of skeptics and are just starting to move into a ritual pagan practice because you know, it lights up all those warning lights on your dashboard. Oh, what am I doing? This is silly. This is this doesn't do anything. Why am I doing this? And we all have to wade through that. We all have to work with it. But there are great rewards on the other side of it, when you come into a healthier relationship with that voice. And so we're going to talk about what it is, how it can impact us, and then how to come into a healthier relationship with that voice today. Yucca: And thank you for framing it that way as a healthier relationship, because we're not setting out to try and banish it or get rid of it or treat it like it's this bad evil thing. But to recognize that it has a role, it has a purpose. and sometimes that it can go beyond that and become very unhealthy for us. So we need to bring that back and work with it in a way that it does serve us. So I think that's a good place to start actually is in an ideal scenario. What's the purpose of this voice? Why is it here? Mark: Well, as I understand it this voice arises very early in human development and it's an internalization of a parental voice that says, you know, you're going to hurt yourself. Be careful don't do that because it's not good. And so initially this sub routine built into our psychology is something that's there to protect us. It's there to keep us from getting into situations that are harmful. It's there to take care of us. Right? So when the parent isn't around, we have the internalized parent who can run interference for us and make sure that we don't get into potentially harmful situations. So that's a good thing, right? Yucca: And And not just the parent, but also the community as well. It's a way of maintaining community unity in terms of behaviors that you might have that well, if I get caught lying, if I am stealing these things that the community's voice is in your head going no. You're going to get, that's going to be shameful. That's going to be upsetting. That's going to be whatever it is. Mark: Right, right. And this voice has some weapons. It is able to make you feel embarrassed. It's able to make you feel ashamed. It's able to make you feel guilty. All of those are very unpleasant experiences for us. They tear down our self-esteem and they make us feel like we're not good people. And they hurt. Yucca: And very physical responses as well in terms of what it, what is happening with your heart rate and what is happening with your temperature? What does it feels like to be in your body. Mark: Sure. I mean, think about. Think about what happens when you're really embarrassed, your face flushes, your heart is .Beating. There's this kind of sick feeling in the pit of your stomach. It's a very physical reaction. It's not just a thought pattern. It's a full system response to this sense that you've done something wrong. And so. What we're talking about today is how do we best work with that in order to have it not disempower us from trying new things or trying things that that might seem silly or or frivolous or embarrassing, or even useless because those are all the kinds of words that the critic will use to try to keep us from doing stuff that's new or experimental or out of character. Yucca: Yeah, it uses that fear of failure to really control us . Mark: Yes. Yes. Which is ironic because in almost all circumstances the impact of failure is just learning. That's all it is. I mean, you know, unless you're, you know belaying someone else down a mountainside or something most of the time, the only impact of failing at something is that you get better at it. Yucca: Well, and certainly when you're doing ritual work and you're working with your own patterns and your own awareness, there's like, you're saying you're not helping someone down a mountain or trying to dress a wound on a hurt companion. So Mark: Right. Right. One of the things that the critic voice is very able todo is to make it seem like the stakes are much higher than they really are. Because it will start with, this is silly. We shouldn't be doing this and it will extend that into everyone's going to laugh at you and you will be shunned by society and you will die alone and friendless under an overpass. Yucca: In the next 10 minutes. Mark: Yes, that kind of catastrophizing is a part of the way that the critic voice maintains its power. Yucca: Yes. Mark: And so, you know, we have this function that is. Potentially they're originally there to serve as sort of a bodyguard, right? Just to kind of help you make decisions about which way you go this way and that way, but it gets hardened into this sub-routine that just generally says no to anything new or risky or or potentially exposing to some kind of harm. It's way of keeping you safe is by keeping you in a box. And that's not where we want to be as humans. Right. We want to explore and we want to grow. Yucca: And some of this may be coming from the interactions that we've had with others throughout our lifetime. What our interactions, our relationship with our parents and our siblings and our teachers and all of that. And that I think is very useful to go back and maybe find where some of it comes from, but know that however it appeared it's here today. Right. We can address it and work with it today. And that it's not. It's not set in stone. It's not something that we can't then go and change. You can always change a relationship and it's a relationship with yourself, but you can still change it. Even if it is deep from your childhood in times, you don't even remember. Mark: Right. Exactly. And the good news is that because we are dynamic organisms, which continue to evolve throughout our lives, we don't necessarily have to go back and rediscover all of those injuries from way in the past, in order to develop a new, healthy and more constrained relationship with this critic voice that says very clearly. Okay. Now you're helping now. you're not helping and I'm not going to listen to you right now cause you're not helping. Right. Which is a very adult way of approaching, you know, criticism of any kind. It's much healthier than getting defensive or flying into a rage or you know, bursting into tears, any of those kinds of things, which are perfectly legitimate, natural, emotional responses, but they don't help in the face of a figure like the critic voice, which is so implacable, it's just there all the time. And it's not going to flinch. If you cry, it's going to think, Oh, I win. Yucca: Yeah, that's empowering it. That's giving it more more influence. Yeah. Mark: So let's talk a little bit about how this how this can impact people that are coming into a science-based pagan practice because one of the things that I hear a lot on the atheopagan ,group Facebook group, from newcomers is I'm trying to get into this ritual thing and I'm really attracted to it. I love the aesthetics of witchy stuff. And I love all that, but there's this yammering voice in the back of my head saying, this is stupid. This is stupid. This is stupid. Why are you doing this? Yucca: Or you're making it up. Mark: Yes. Oh, you're making it up. That's such a terrible thing. Isn't it? I mean, it's not like humans have ever made anything up in their history. But. Here on this podcast, we encourage people to be critical thinkers and to be rooted in what science tells us about the nature of the world. And it is a fact that manipulating ritual tools is not going to make something happen 20 miles away. In so far as we have evidence available, it does not appear that waving a wand in the air in chanting an incantation is going to make any effect on anything other than our own psychology, but it has a profound effect on our own psychology When you think about it, that's the most personal kind of transformation there is. And that's why it can often send the critic voice into a frenzy. Don't do it. Don't do it. Don't do it. Don't do it. And the reason that we're doing this podcast episode today is to really encourage those of you that are experiencing that to push through it, to, to persist. Because ritual work has real effects. It will affect your ability to focus your intention on what you want to see accomplished. It'll affect your level of courage. It'll affect your level of fear. It'll affect your level of of persistence in the face of adversity. It will affect your morale. It will affect your self esteem, all of these things that are so important to us to be really, you know, effective and happy people. All of those things are profoundly effected by ritual work or can be so trust the process. You've you, you may have this, you may have this voice in your ear. That's saying this is all just made up and it's LARPing. And it's just not real. And that voice is not correct. It's not telling you the truth. And this is one of the saddest things about the critic voice is that at some point it learns to lie to you in order to keep you in place. It will tell you things that simply aren't true like that you're going to end up sleeping under a bridge because all it has is talk right. All that it has is an ability to talk to you to evoke emotions in you so that you will stay frozen within the pattern that you're in and not change. And one of the deepest. Powers of a ritual practitioner of any stripe is the ability to transform themselves. The ability to help themselves grow and ritual work is a very powerful way to work with our own psychology so that we can evolve and grow. Yucca: So we've talked a lot about what, how it can stop us or how it can try to stop us as we're stepping into ritual and not just for somebody beginning, but at any stage in your practice. Why don't we talk a little bit about some of the things that we can do to address that and to respond to that? Mark: Sure. And now there's all these different possibilities that are in front of me at the same time. And I'm trying to figure out which one to talk about first. Yucca: Well, I think that we already have just by identifying it, first of all, helps to be aware that it's there and sometimes just giving it a name. Right. And this is making it up, right? It's not actually, we're talking about it is if it's somebody separate than you or somebody separate than us, it's not, it's part of us, but giving it a name and hello critic, how are you doing today? I see that you've come to to watch me. Would you please sit over there, that little bit farther? Thank you. Okay. I'm going to continue now. Mark: Set out a chair for you here. You can wait over there, you'll be comfortable. And that sounds like just a bunch of play acting and it is just a bunch of play acting, but what do we know about play, acting it? When we suspend our disbelief, when we go to the theater, for example, or we go to the movies. We know that we're just sitting there in a chair, watching images on a screen or watching performances take place on a stage. But what we are doing is we are voluntarily relinquishing that awareness so that we can go into the world of the story. And humans are storytelling creatures, and we can tell ourselves stories that empower us. And one of the things that we can do is say, okay, I'm going into do this ritual now. And critic you sit over there in that chair. And. I'll be back to get you in a little while, but right now I am, I'm going to be doing this thing. And that doesn't necessarily mean that every last little vestige of that critic voice is going to go away. And you won't have any of that nattering in your ear, but it will help. And over time it, it can improve. I know of some people who have had a particular piece of jewelry. That they have put on to as basically sort of a protection amulet against that cynical skeptical voice so that they can be more empowered in the course of doing their ritual work. These and that of course in itself is a piece of ritual work. That's a piece of psychological magic right there. Yucca: Other great imagery. One that I've used that I use for thoughts when they're coming at me, instead of trying to block it is if the thoughts there and I try and block it and I start actually engaging with it, it always feels like it just gets stronger and louder that I imagine. An aikido master and it's like, the thought comes at them and they just pass. They just take the, that, that person's movement towards them. And then they just. Push them by I'm trying to I'm talking with my hands here. I'm trying to show you the movement. But they just flow right by, they just take their energy and throw them to the side and they keep going like down the river. Or another one is ina lot of the old star Trek episodes they'd have where the, somehow the crew members got off phase from each other. And they weren't quite on the same dimension. And so you just walk right through them. We just say, okay, I'm going to change the fit my phase right now. And I'm just out of step. And so the critics going to come at me and talk to me, but they're just going to walk right through me. It's okay. I'm aware of them, but they can't touch me. Right. They're a ghost and I'm solid or something like that. Mark: And we need to talk about self-esteem as a part of this whole complex, because what the critic voice tends to do is it tends to wear down your self-esteem in order to get you to obey it's instructions and having strong self-esteem is core to being able to be ineffective and a happy person. So if you have challenges with self-esteem if you suffer from depression, for example, or if you've been abused and really have questions about your value as a person doing this kind of work and getting out from underneath that critic, voice is really essential work for you. It's so important. And I speak to this from the standpoint of experience Having been very depressed and having very low self-esteem for a big chunk of my life. We are able to be only what we allow ourselves to be. And as long as we're constantly second guessing whether we have value or whether our ideas have any merit or whether our emotions are important, it's just going to be very difficult for us to square our shoulders and walk into the future in a happy and productive sort of way. So Particularly if you do have challenges with this and I'm not just saying, you know, you can do this ritual work and then you'll be fine. Therapy is a good thing. I, you know, if you need help and kind of a sounding board for what your experiences have been and what those feelings and thoughts that you have are Avail yourself of that, find it and find the right fit. And Yucca: That's important. Yeah. The right fit. Because the first person you see might not be a fit. That doesn't mean that the whole concept won't work for you, but. that person didn't right. Did you end up with your first crush? There might be a very few of you out there who did, but most of us went through quite a few relationships before we ended up with someone who worked for a while. So I think therapists can be very similar and techniques to what type of therapy you're using and be like that too. Mark: Yes. So you know, we all work with these critical voices to some degree. If you feel really abused and kind of beaten down by yours, then you may need to avail yourself of help in order to bring that more into balance. But there are some things that you can do for yourself. Like we've been talking about that can help you to work with this voice in a way that will empower you and help you to feel better about yourself. There's a. There's a ritual on the atheopagan blog's site called The Jewel. We'll put a link to it in the podcast notes. That is basically an it's a ritual for enhancement of self-esteem and working with a mirror. And it's very powerful. It's simple. But it's incredibly powerful and I strongly recommend it to anyone. You are the protagonist of the story of your life and you need to be you need to be the most important thing in, in that story. So. Oh, there's so many different possible ways of the, that you can approach these things. One of the very common ones in pagan circles is drawing a circle, right? Defining a perimeter boundary that all of the. All of the stuff that wants, that doesn't want this ritual to work stays outside that boundary. And what's inside is only that, which is enhancing cooperative, facilitative, all of those kinds of qualities. And I mean, literally pacing it out with a rod in your hand or a dagger in your hand or your hand up, or, you know, whatever it is to Yucca: Sprinkling the sand or the salt or the water. Mark: Yes. So making a physical action in which you are embodying your intent to make that boundary, so that. Only that which supports the outcome, the desired outcome of the ritual is held within that circle. And then when you break the circle, when you smear the dust or salt, or you walk in a reverse direction to undo what you have done, then you welcome back your critic, voice, and the rest of the world. And you kind of put back on all the layers of complexity that we all are, and then you go forward. There's, it's not an accident that these kinds of activities have become associated with, with occult and and ritual practices because they work with our psychology Yucca: So another direction to jump in for a moment is outside of the moment. Outside of the moment that you're interacting with that voice when you're starting your ritual or at your, in the middle of it is taking some reflection time to just notice what that critic is, what that voice is saying, because sometimes there's patterns there and it might be the, this is silly or you're going to fail or your dog's going to run away and you're going to die under the bridge. Right. And just starting to note that and be aware of what those are, and actually think about, respond to the what ifs and go, okay, this is silly and this is silly. So. So what let's follow the logic of what actually thinking about it critically. If it is silly, then what's the consequence. If I am making it up, what's the consequence. What is actually the worst thing that can happen, but what's the best thing too, and putting some when you're stepped away from the situation, putting some thought into it so that you do have answers when that voice comes up, that you're just making this up. Yes, I am making it up. This is my theater right now. Mark: Yes, where's the harm Yucca: Where's the harm. Mark: Because often. Often the critic voice crosses over from this is dangerous. This is going to embarrass you. This is silly. This is stupid, whatever it is often that critic voice crosses over from those kinds of characterizations to this is bad, right? Just it's just bad. Well, why is it bad? No, it's just bad. You should never do this. And particularly in those cases, it's really important to unpack. Well, what do you mean by bad? What's going to happen to me. And is that really a realistic projection or is it just fear-mongering because the critic voice is very good at fear-mongering and what ends up happening over time in my experience is that you can get to a point where you're crossing over that boundary from the comfortable into the sort of edgy by trying something new or entering a difficult conversation or, you know, someplace where you feel emotionally exposed and the critic voice goes off. And I'm now able most of the time to simply say, thank you. I know you're trying to protect me, but I don't really need that help right now. And so I'm going to ask you to be quiet and most of the time it will, which is a great state to be in, honestly, because I mean, I've been beaten up pretty bad by my critic voice over time. So it's it's much more comfortable being in this situation now. Yucca: It sounds like you're describing switching the role at the beginning, you described the critic voice as being a parental voice, at least coming from that. And the way that you just spoke to, it sounds a lot like a parent acknowledging the child, who's having a tantrum and acknowledging what they're talking about and saying, okay, I've heard that. I hear that you want the ice cream. If we're going to, we're not talking about ice cream right now, we'll come back to that discussion later. Right. It seems like that is the same Mark: it is. type Yucca: of pattern there. Mark: The challenge is that when this voice first arises, you're a child. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: so it speaks as an authority figure and automatically becomes a parental kind of a voice, but it doesn't ever acknowledge that you've become an adult. And so you have to assert your own adulthood. You have to say yes. Okay. I realized for many years you tried to protect me from being humiliated and being hurt and being in danger. And that's all great. I'm an adult. Now I'm able to make these decisions for myself and I appreciate your input, but I'm going in a different direction this time. the critic voice honestly has no response to that. All it can do is turn up the volume more on what it's already been saying but . And that. Very quickly becomes background noise. You don't, you just don't listen to it. So what are some other ritual ways that we can work with this voice to to gain permission, to suspend our disbelief so that our ritual practices are fully in the moment and fully present and not distracted by these. Naysayers in the backs of our heads. Yucca: Well, we've mentioned a few so far, the placing or wearing some sort of piece of jewelry that represents protection from it, giving it an actual place like a chair, literally take a chair, put it on the other side of the room and your voice can wait there. And when you're done, you can come in. We talked about doing a circle. So there's been a couple of themes so far places where it can wait. Outside or be kept away. Are there other themes? I mean, maybe we could give it something to do in the meantime while we're doing our other work. I mean there's Mark: That's an interesting idea. I hadn't thought of that before. What would that look like? I mean, it's a guardian figure, right? So, I mean, you can just say, you know, I'm going to have you wait by the door while I'm doing my ritual here, just to make sure that, you know, everything is safe and you know, that I'm protected because you're good at that. Yucca: you could become one of those stone lions that wait the door and you're going to protect me and great. So you're doing your job, which is to protect me and I get to do my job. Yeah, Mark: I like that. Yucca: what's a good one. Yeah. Mark: like it. Yeah. And I think that you'll hear as we as we kind of brainstorm these ideas the inherent creativity and playfulness of the ritual space it's really a delightful place to be in even when you're working with very solemn kinds of themes. There's something that is just. That is so awakening to a childlike sense of wonder when you're in that warm, glowing present limbic system kind of experience rather than a thinky talkie kind of way of being, but more of an embodied integrated mammalian kind of way of being We did a, we did an episode about rituals about a year ago. I think it was our third episode or Yucca: It was pretty early on. Yeah. second Mark: episode, something like that. Maybe we'll come back to that at some point and kind of talk more about the specifics of all the different ways that we can do ritual behavior and ways that it can help and transform us. Yucca: And examples. I always love hearing examples of the other things that people have come up with. Mark: yeah. I mean, funny things, right. I have an office at work and I have put maybe five grains of salt in each corner. You know not enough so that they could ever be noticed by anyone, but just I've put the salt in the corner and it just makes it more of a place of power for me. Because I did that deliberately to make it, so, so, you know, I feel like when I'm going to have a really important meeting, of course this was before COVID, but when I'm going to have a really important meeting I tend to want to have it in my office rather than somewhere else, because I feel really solidly in my power in that room. So, you know these are things that we can do, not only in the context of our sort of private living at home, but that can extend out into the world and into our engagement with the world as a whole. So. I don't really have a lot more to say about this. I mean, I think we could come up with many examples of different ways to approach this, but the thing that I really hope our listeners will be left with is that this is really possible. If you have a mean critic voice, and one that has taken up a lot of space in your psychology, The things that we've been talking about today can help. They really can help and they can, and believe me, when you start to implement them, the critic voice will go berserk. So you, I mean, you will be hearing . Don't do that. Don't do that. This is stupid. This is silly. You're being an idiot. You're Yucca: How could you think that would even work in the first place? That's ridiculous. Mark: right, right. Yeah. So be aware that the critic it's very good at defending itself and it will do what it can to defend itself. But if you pursue the kinds of techniques and practices that we've talked about here, you can come into a better relationship with that part of your psychology and it's very powerful to get there because then it's so much easier to move into the new, it's just much easier to go into the ritual state or flow as psychologists call it. The, it really is a gatekeeper in many ways and being able to get past it, having a password. So another thing you could do, you know, you could see or pass card, something like that here, you know here's my ID. I'm going past now. Yucca: Yeah, a key. r Mark: Or a key I mean, keys are magical. People use keys in all kinds of ritual things, right? Because they, they allow us entry to what otherwise has been previously interdicted from us. So yes, I could easily see putting, hanging a key on a chain around your neck. As a way of going past the guardian and into this into this ritual sacred space. So many different ideas and I really encourage people to be creative around it. Yucca: And learning to do this, it opens the doors up so that you can do more with your ritual, but it in itself is wonderful practice and skill building so that you can then take the skills that you learned while working with your critic and to work with another part of yourself. Mark: Yes. And bear in mind, this is not, I mean, we've been talking a lot about how this has a bearing on people's ritual practices, because those tend to set off the the critic, voice in people who are generally skeptical and kind of rationally based to begin with, but I've had experiences, well, social anxiety. And also what about those hard conversations? You know when you've hurt someone's feelings when you've done something that someone really disapproves of and you need to have a conversation with them about it, if you allow the critic to rule the moment then all you're going to do is feel lots of shame and self self criticism and self-injury, and that doesn't really help you grow very much. It's a lot better to suspend that. And listen. Yucca: Sometimes it can be directed past just you and an attempt to defend you the critic can turn on whoever you're speaking with and direct that anger towards them as a PR as a way of protecting you. Mark: For sure. The I think we've all had the experience of being in a fight with someone. Yeah. And if you get defensive enough, you kind of go a little crazy, you know, you can start yelling, you can, you know, you can feel like being violent. And all of that is that guardian complex. That's trying to protect you. But it's gone off the rails. So being able to listen to the hard news, breve not succumb to a lot of internal shame dialogues, but instead to just simply say, you know, I'm really sorry I hurt your feelings. I didn't realize that I had done that. Or. You know, I just wasn't in my best self that day. And I'm sorry. And I resolved to do better is just a much healthier. And it's not only that it's a healthier way to interact with other people. It's that it's literally good for your self-esteem instead of bad for your self esteem, you can walk away from a conversation like that feeling. Hey. I'm an adult look at me adulting. I just did a whole bunch of emotional adulting. That was really great. Instead of listening to this critic voice and saying, you're a garbage look, you hurt this person. And so, Yucca: Yeah. You know, something that's come up for me as we've been talking, just listening is another possibility of exploring. We've been using two words for the critic. We've been calling it, the critic and the guardian. Mark: okay. Yucca: And maybe a ritual process in transforming the critic itself into a guardian in a more appropriate adult way going okay. You it's time for you critic to grow up too. You're not my parent anymore. You're my partner in protecting us and, you know, see it transform from the, from the angry school teacher, who's waving their finger at you to the magnificent sphinx or griffon or whatever your imagery around that might be. That is another direction ago. Right? Mark: Yes, absolutely. So I'd be really interested to hear what our listeners have to say about their experiences with doing some of this kind of work. So if you have those experiences and you can send us some feedback at thewonderpodcastqs@gmail.com. So the wonder podcast, all one word Q s@gmail.com. We'd love to hear from you and if you have other questions or suggestions or things we might've missed, we welcome all of that. It's really great to hear from our listeners. Always. Yucca: Yes. Thank you everyone. Mark: Thanks so much. We'll see you next week.

Independent Journalism is a critically important part of maintaining a democratic society. Unfortunately, it seems that media has become increasingly dominated by a handful of major corporations and technology companies. In many cases, local journalism is the only remaining bridge to create an independent voice. Doug and Mark talk about the dynamics of local journalism and its importance to the community's overall health. Doug's business specializes in partnering with companies and non-profits to capture overhead cost savings without layoffs to fund growth and strengthen financial results. Schedule time with Doug to talk about your business at www.MeetDoug.Biz [Music] [Introduction] Welcome to the terminal value Podcast where each episode provides in depth insight about the long term value of companies and ideas in our current world. Your host for this podcast is Doug Utberg, the founder and principal consultant for Business of Life, LLC. Doug: Welcome to the terminal value podcast. I have Mark Garber with us. Mark is the chief publisher for Pamplin Media Group, which is a local media chain, I think you'd say for the Portland metropolitan area. And Mark and I are here today to talk about the importance of local journalism, not just to the Portland area, but really to pretty much any area. Mark, welcome to the show. And thank you for coming on. Mark: Thanks, Doug. Glad to be here. Doug: So tell me a little bit how has the pimply Media Group been, you know, how is the vault? Everybody wants to talk about COVID. But just in general, the, you know, the technical turmoil, the technology turmoil that's been happening for the last 15 years. How is this impacted? pamphlet? Because, of course, it's a diversified set of newspaper news publications, but there has to have been an impact. Mark: Oh, yeah, the technology, as you know, dramatically changed what we do. And local journalism. And you know, it really goes back, Doug for 25, 30 years. If you think back to the very beginnings of, of online content, and newspapers, actually, were some of the first entities to jump into online news. You know, I started publishing news online.  Doug: Yeah. Mark: And so we were really competing with ourselves for a number of years in terms of giving our product away. Doug: Yeah. Mark: Online while we were still charging people to read it in print. So but you're right, that is really accelerated. I'd say, you know, since you know, the mid 2000s.  Doug: Yeah.  Mark: It's really changed the newspaper world. And we actually, with our 25, local newspapers, we have more people now, who read us digitally than who read us in print, we still have, you know, hundreds of 1000s of people read us and brand. Doug: Yeah.  Mark: But we have more than that, who read us online? Doug: Yeah. yeah, that's, and yeah, I mean, what are some of the adaptations even making I mean, because, you know, I think, you know, of course, we'll get to the importance of the local journalism, because I obviously think it's important because I subscribe to the local journalists, and, you know, and to the, I actually do the all digital all access package, to subscribe, not just to the Portland Tribune and the Newburgh graphic, which is where I live, but also the broader Metropolitan papers, just because I think it's really important to understand what's happening in the different local communities. Just, you know, that tell me a little bit about, you know, just kind of a about the adaptations that Pamplin has made to, you know, to stay in the game. Mark: Yeah, and I'll try to not get too too technical in what we do. But obviously, it's changed our entire workflow as far as how we, how we distribute the news. Doug: Yeah.  Mark: And so, you know, in the old days, where there was a daily newspaper, or weekly newspaper, or twice weekly, whatever the frequency was, I mean, everything was geared toward meeting a...

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.    

Do you work because you want to or have to? Have you ever considered investing in land to generate enough passive income that exceeds your fixed expenses? Today, I am talking to Mark Podolsky of Frontier Equity Properties. Mark’s passion is investing in land, creating wealth efficiently, and helping others develop their inner geeky entrepreneurial spirit. He’s known as, “The Land Geek,” for buying and selling thousands of raw and undeveloped land deals. Also, he’s the author of Dirt Rich, a guide to building a passive income model in land investing. You’ll Learn... [02:40] Beat Friday Blues: How and why Mark became a land investor.  [05:40] Breaking Down Passive Income Model: No emotional attachment to land and distressed financially.  [07:26] Property Checklist: Due diligence to confirm ownership, back taxes, no title breaks, and no liens.  [08:25] Buy the property free and clear, and sell it in 30 days or less.  [08:40] Neighbors: Built-in best buyers to protect privacy, views, and expand holdings. [09:09] Other Options: Sites with specialized buyers and sellers of raw and undeveloped land (i.e., Craigslist, Facebook, Land Flip, Land Moto).  [10:00] No renters, rehabs, renovations, and rodents; exempt from erroneous real estate legislation.  [10:48] Price Point of Fixed Expenses: Typically, $10,000 a month in passive income.  [12:05] Operating Entity: Spend a few hours a day on land investing business, and automated software/virtual assistants do the rest.  [14:35] How to get started? Everything is hard in the beginning. Embrace the suck. [16:00] What Mark loves about land investing? No physical inventory, no competition, inefficient market, one-time sale, and passive income.  Tweetables Core Business Philosophy: Happy customers guaranteed. Raw land is the best passive income. There’s nothing not to love about land investing for passive income.  True Wealth: Work where you want, when you want, and with whom you want. Resources The Land Geek Dirt Rich by Mark Podolsky Frontier Equity Properties The Land Geek Podcast Warren Buffett’s Margin of Safety Land Moto Land Flip Dodd-Frank Financial Regulatory Reform Bill Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act (RESPA) S.A.F.E. Act FortuneBuilders Robert Kiyosaki Zig Ziglar GeekPay DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrow Website Score Quiz Transcript Jason: Welcome, DoorGrow Hackers, to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business, and life, and you’re open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow Hacker. DoorGrow hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you’re crazy for doing it, you think they’re crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate, high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show. Today, I am hanging out with Mark Podolsky. Mark, welcome to the show. I’m going to read your bio here because we want to qualify you and then we’ll let you brag a little bit because you got to do a little bit of starting out here. Today’s topic (for those who are just tuning in) is land investing for passive income. We’re going to learn how to use land investing to create a passive income stream. Mark J. Podolsky (AKA The Land Geek), is widely considered the country’s most trusted and foremost authority on buying and selling raw, undeveloped land within the United States for almost two decades. Mark has been actively investing in real estate and raw land and has completed over 5000 unique transactions. Mark’s company, Frontier Equity Properties, LLC, is an A+ rated Better Business Bureau real estate company. Mark has achieved this level of success largely due to his core business philosophy, happy customers guaranteed. Mark is the host of one of the top-rated podcasts in the Investing Category on iTunes, aptly titled The Best Passive Income Model and The Art of Passive Income. He is also the host of The Land Geek podcast: Work Smart. Earn More. Learn How. Mark, there you go. Give us a little bit of background on you and how you got into this land investing. Mark: Let’s rewind to 2000 and imagine me fighting traffic, 45 minutes in the car there and back, micromanaged, stressed out at an investment banking job, working with private equity groups specializing in mergers and acquisitions. Jason, it got so bad for me that 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 heading back to work on Monday. My firm hired this guy and he’s telling me that as a side hustle, he’s going to tax deed auctions, he’s buying up raw land pennies on the dollar, he’s flipping them online, and he’s making a 300% return on his investment. Jason, I’m looking at companies all day long and a great company has 15% EBITDA margins or free cash flow. Great company. Average company is 10%. I’m looking at companies all day long, less than 10%. Of course, I’ll believe him. We go to New Mexico. I do exactly what he tells me to do. I’ve got $3000 saved up for car repairs so I can only buy $3000 worth of land. I buy 10 half-acre parcels, an average price of $300 each. I put them up all online and they all sell 30 days later from an average price of $1200 each. It worked. 300%. I took all that money, I went to another auction in Arizona (which is where I live) and again, it’s 2000. There’s no one in the room, there’s no competition, I’m buying up lots, I’m buying up acres for nothing. Over the next six months, I sold all that property and I made over $90,000 cash. I go to my wife, and she’s pregnant. I said, “Honey, I’m going to quit my job. I’m going to become a full-time land investor.” She says, “Absolutely not.” So I worked land investing part-time and 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. Jason: It’s so easy, anybody can do it? Mark: Yeah, I wish. I wish it was so easy. It’s a simple model but anything worth doing in life is not easy. What I could do is I could walk you through the model and then, odds are you’ll just stop the podcast and quit doing what you’re doing and start land investing with me, but that’s okay. That happens a lot. You want me to walk you through it? Jason: Yeah. Mark: Jason, where do you live? Jason: I’m in Santa Clarita, California. Mark: Okay. Let’s imagine that you own 10 acres of land in Texas. I go to the county treasurer and I get a list of people that owe back taxes. Sure enough, there’s Jason Hull in Santa Clarita, California, $200 in back taxes on this 10-acre parcel. Jason, you’re advertising two things to me. Number one, you have no emotional attachment to that raw land. You’re in California. The property is located in Texas. Number two, you’re distressed financially in some way. Because when we don’t pay for things, we don’t value them in the same way. And you haven’t paid your property taxes. As a result, the county treasure keeps sending you notices saying that, “Jason, if you don’t pay your taxes, you’re eventually going to lose your 10 acres to a tax deed or tax lien investor. What I will do is I would look at the comparable sales on that 10-acre parcel. I’m going to take the lowest CUP and I’m going to divide by four. That’s going to get me what Warren Buffett calls a 300% margin of safety. I’m going to actually send you an offer of $2500 on that 10-acre parcel assuming that the lowest CUP is $10,000. I send you an offer for $2500. Now, you accept it because for you, $2500 is better than nothing and you haven’t gone out to look at the property. You just don’t care about it anymore. In reality, 3%-5% of people accept my “top dollar offer.” Now that you’ve accepted the offer, I’ve got to go through due diligence or in-depth research. Number one, I got to confirm you still own the property. Number two, I have to confirm the back taxes are only $200. Number three, I have to make sure there have been no breaks in the chain of title. Number four, I have to make sure there are no liens or encumbrances. I have this whole property checklist and it goes on and on and on. If it’s a property deal that’s worth less than $5000, I’ll actually close it directly with my team in the Philippines. We’re hooked up to an American title company. I pay $11 for due diligence. They’ll give me a whole property report. I’ll get the GIS maps, the plat maps, aerial maps. If it’s an area I don’t know, I’ll have somebody go out there, stamp on the property for me, take a video and shoot photos throughout the property checklist. What are the neighbors doing out there, what’s the road like, all these things. Everything checks out and now, I buy the property from you for $2500. You get $2300 of it, $200 goes to the treasurer, and now I have that property free and clear. I’m going to sell this property 30 days or less. The reason I’m going to do this is I have a built-in best buyer. Do you know who it is? Jason: No. Mark: The neighbors. I’m going to sell that to the neighbour saying, “Hey, here’s your opportunity. Protect your privacy, protect your views, expand your holdings, know your neighbour.” Oftentimes, the neighbors will buy it. If they pass, I’ll go to my buyers list. If my buyers list passes, I’ll go to a little website you might not have heard of called Craigslist (10th most traffic website in the United States). I’ll go to an even smaller one. It’s called Facebook buy-and-sell group and marketplace. And then, I’ll go to these platforms that specialize in buying and selling raw land, landmodo.com, landandfarm.com, landsofamerica.com, landflip.com. It goes on and on. Now, the way I’m going to sell it is I’m going to make it irresistible. I’m going to ask for a $2500 down payment. I get my money out on the down, within (let’s say) six months of that. I’m going to get a car payment, let’s say $449 a month, 9% interest over the next 84 months. Essentially, I’ve got a one-time sale, I have passive income of $449 a month, 9% interest over the 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 (this onerous real estate legislation). The game that we play is can we create enough of this land notes where our passive income exceeds our fixed expenses and then we’re working because we want to, not because we have to. The beautiful part about all of this is 90% of it is automated with software virtual assistants. It’s great. Jason: What is the price point of fixed expenses typically? Mark: For most people, after you earn about $10,000 a month in passive income (that’s $120,000 a year), you’re in pretty good shape. Now, we have some clients who are doctors and lawyers. I have a client. He’s been working with us for 10 months. He’s at $15,000 a month passive and he just went from 5 days a week at his law firm to 2 days a week and he’s spending the rest of his time with his dad who needs help working with him and the other two days doing what he wants to do. We have so many clients that once they hit that point, they retire their spouse. They quit their job. They do what they really want to do in life because the whole idea of this is that we can always make more money but we can’t get more time. For me, true wealth means you wake up and you don’t have to be anywhere. You work where you want, when you want, and with whom you want. That’s really the goal of doing all this. Jason: Love that. What else do people typically ask you about this? When you say it, it sounds really easy. It sounds like something that maybe anybody can do, but it’s like starting a part-time job if you start getting into this. Mark: It is. It is an operating entity. We ask our clients to spend about an hour or two a day doing this. That will move the needle because with our virtual assistants and our software, it’s pretty automated. We actually have automation software for marketing. We can automate our craigslist and our Facebook postings with a posting automator. The only two things that (as CEO of your land investing business) you, Jason, actually have to do, is county research because if you get that screwed up, that whole thing falls off the rails, so you have to pick a good county. From there, you’re going to make sure that you get your pricing right, so you might want to work with a VA, train them, and show them, “Hey, look. Here’s our lowest comps dividing by four. We need a response rate of 3%-5%. If it’s under 3%, our offer is too low. If it’s over 5%, let’s get nervous. Why are they selling us their property? We might have to renegotiate.” We have our metrics in there.  As far as the rest of the process, you can get virtual assistants to do our due diligence. You can get an intake manager that can actually talk to your sellers (because that’s a big time-suck as well). From there, you can close. We like to use Simplifile accountings, so that we can record our deeds online, so I don’t have to go and do a lot of whole paperwork that way. Once we own it, again, we have an inexpensive virtual assistant getting us through GIS, all the neighbors information, uploading that to our software, sending out our neighbor letters. There’s an API with lob.com, which does our mailings. On the backend of it, we use a software called GeekPay.io that is a set-it-and-forget-it system on collecting our money. We get our down payment via credit card and then we get our monthly payments via ACH. It does all the amortization. It does all the calculations. It charges fees but it does it through notifications. If that ACH bounces, it will charge the credit card on file. We went from an 8% default rate to a 4% default rate. I personally worked two hours a week in Frontier Properties, doing the kind of volume that we do. Jason: Sounds great. That’s pretty incredible. How hard is it for somebody to get started with this that’s new? Mark: It’s like anything in life. Everything is hard in the beginning. You know what’s really hard, Jason? Learning to read. We don’t remember it. We forgot how hard that was in the very beginning but you had a good teacher, they broke it down for you step-by-step, and you are with other people. It was just a thing, like everyone can do this and you’re just expected to do it. It’s the same kind of thing. What happens is we’re so ingrained after all these years of schooling that you have to achieve what you achieve, to go back and embrace beginner’s mind and embrace the suck. It’s hard. If you can do that, if you can be comfortable being uncomfortable and you have some grit, you can be successful in anything in life, whether it’s my land investing niche or growing your doors. It doesn’t matter. Nothing worth doing is easy. Jason: It sure is nothing worth doing is easy. The challenge is if somebody is going to choose into doing this, choose into doing property management, or choose into doing any business, they have to fall in love with this. They have to get excited about this. Help the listeners understand what do you love about doing this? Your clients that get involved in this, what do they love about it that’s different from other entrepreneurial ventures that they get into? Mark: The main reason that people like this model is number one, there’s no physical inventory. Number two, there’s little to no competition. If you go on HGTV or the DIY Network, you’re not going to ever see me on Flip This Land. The before pictures is raw land, the after pictures is raw land. It’s not going to be much fun to watch me in front of a computer. If you go to [...] meeting and there are 100 people in that room, 99 of them are house flippers, landlords, or wholesalers. You and I are the only land guys. Number three, you have an inefficient market. I’ve got a hedge fund manager that loves this business because he’s like, “Mark, there are very few inefficient markets left out there. Nobody knows the value of raw land.” Now, that can be very frustrating in the beginning, but it’s also very exciting once you get your arms around it.  No physical inventory, no competition, inefficient, and then you have the fact that it’s a one-time sale and then the passive income versus let’s say I flip a house. I make $20,000 on a flip. I have a new problem. What do I do with my $20,000? I can’t put it in the bank. It’s not going to earn anything. I have to keep redeploying that capital. Once we get to let’s say $10,000 a month of passive income, what our net worth? How long would it take you to have an investment of $120,000 a year at say 2% interest in the bank? That’s over $3 million you and I would have to save. How long, Jason, would it take for you to save $3 million? How long would it take anybody to save $3 million? Jason: I probably would never do it. Mark: Yeah. 12-36 months, you can have that kind of cash flow and then your bankers are really happy with you because your net worth is over $3 million. The fact that—I’m not proud of it—I can’t even screw in a light bulb. I tried to flip a house once. I am not interested in physical things so the subs come out there. I meet the subs. They don’t show up. Just the capital outlay, I started with $3000. My buddy, [...], started at $800. You’re not going to ever get knocked out of the game in this niche. The dollars are just too small. If you go into multifamily housing, you do one bad deal and you’re done for 10 years. You’re BK or you’re just a pariah in the investment community because you lost all your investors money. This is not like that at all. You have an easy entry point, you have no physical inventory, you have no competition. You have a one-time sale on passive income. You have an inefficient market. There’s nothing not to like about it. I think what’s interesting is if you go to a party and you tell people you’re a land investor, they’ll yawn. It’s not sexy. Definitely not sexy. Maybe you lie and say you’re in multifamily housing. Jason: I don’t know if that’s super sexy sometimes either, but yeah. Mark: I mean it depends who you’re talking to. Jason: How do people get started in this? It sounds interesting. My interest is piqued. I’m sure some people listening are interested. How do they get started with this because I’m sure there’s a fairly steep learning curve? There’s got to be a reason why everybody isn’t doing it. How saturated is this? Mark: It’s not saturated at all because again, it’s just not sexy. It’s not conventional. The marketing budgets of the people that are in the house flipping world like Robert Kiyosaki or FortuneBuilders, that’s really where people thought to. Land investing, you have a mental hurdle for people where they think, “Well, I’ve never bought land.” We all know everyone needs a place to live. Nobody needs raw land. You don’t wake up today and say, “Boy, I really got to own 10 acres today.” Jason: That land that nobody is using and nobody seems to want. That land. Mark: Right. It’s a marketing business. You have to interrupt somebody’s day, pique their interest, and make it irresistible. I’ll tell you, after over 5200 deals, I’ve never been stuck with a piece of land. You buy any asset, 25–30 cents on the dollar, there’s someone else on the other end of that deal. Whether it be a piece of land, a car, a trinket, it doesn’t matter. The market is the market. So to get started, I would say you’ve got to learn from somebody who’s done in. For example, let’s say you and I are going to go to Mount Everest together. We’re going to climb this big mountain. Jason: We’re not just going to wing it. Mark: Yeah. You’re going to someone who’s done it a million times and they can tell you the best routes quickly, efficiently, and safely to do it. That’s what you want to do. You can start with that. In fact, for the listeners, I would say that I have a $97 course that I’d love to offer them for free. If they just go to thelandgeek.com/launchkit, they can go ahead and get that course for free. Start there and then see if they like it or not. Jason: Their time investment is 1-2 hours a day? Mark: If that, yeah. It depends if they’re using tools or not. It also depends if they have a scarcity mentality or abundance mentality. A lot of people, when they start doing this, they think they can penny-pinch their way to wealth. They don’t want to use the tools that are out there.  Jason: “No, I’ll do it myself. I’ll watch 120 Youtube videos and figure out how to do it myself.” Mark: Yeah, and you can do that. But again, my whole philosophy is that I can always make more money. I can’t get more time. So, anything that’ll save you time, I’ll invest in. Jason: I say something very similar to my clients. That makes sense. Anything else anybody should know before we wrap this up and how can they get in touch with you? Mark: If you have that mindset that Zig Ziglar says, “If you'll do for the next 3–5 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.” You’ve got to get your reps in and you have to embrace the suck. Again, nothing worth doing in life is easy. It might be a simple model, but it’s not easy. You have to take action at some point  Again, the best way to get a hold of me is thelandgeek.com. I’ve got an audio book. I’ve got a book on Amazon called Dirt Rich if you want to just read about it and hear my story as well. It got really good reviews. People seem to like it. It’s not because I’m such a good writer. It’s just that they like it. Jason: Nice. Perfect. Look for the book, Dirt Rich, or check out thelandgeek.com. Mark, this is interesting. I think it’s a new idea that people certainly haven’t heard of this before on the DoorGrow Show. I appreciate you coming on and hanging out here with me. Mark: Jason, thank you so much. Again, I apologize if you’re just going to quit your business and go [...] with me. Jason: I love what I do so. Mark: See? There you go. You can do both. Jason: Both. All right. Maybe I’ll get a few people from this show that are wanting to do both. There you go. Mark, thanks again for coming on the show. We’ll let you go. Mark: Thanks, Jason. I appreciate it. Jason: If you are a property management entrepreneur and you enjoy the show, be sure to like and subscribe. If you’re watching this on Youtube or on Facebook, be sure to share it if you would. We would appreciate that. If you’re in some property management groups, we’d love to see your comments. And if you’re on iTunes, give us a review. We would really love to get that feedback. We’re putting out this content for free. We would love a little reciprocity, people. That would be really sweet of you. I would appreciate it greatly. It helps us get the word out and make a difference in this industry.  If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to grow your business, add doors, you’re struggling, you’re feeling that there’s a scarcity in the industry, there’s no scarcity in property management right now. 70% are self-managing. There’s plenty of opportunity. Reach out, talk to us, and let us help you see how you can align your business towards more warm leads and stop spending so much time trying to go with cold leads, time keepers, and time wasters. The people that are at the very end of the sales cycle are the coldest, crappiest, most price-sensitive. Those are the people searching online. They’re the leftovers that fall off the word-of-mouth table. Come sit at the table with us. We’re DoorGrow. We’ll talk to you soon. Check us out at doorgrow.com. Bye everyone. Until next time, to our mutual growth.

James: Hey, audience and listeners, this is James Kandasamy from Achieve Wealth True Value-add Real Estate Investing. I'm here today with Mark Kenny, who's the founder and I'm not sure, the president or what's the title?   Mark: Yeah, well my wife and I together so we might have different opinions but...   James: Okay. Both of you run the King multifamily. But before that, before we go into the hot topics that we're going to discuss with Mark, make sure that you guys look at last week's episode where we had KK Singh being interviewed. KK has moved from a business owner. He used to own gas stations and laundry mat and now he's become a multifamily investor, which is a very, very interesting concept. Because I think any business owner, anybody who wants to know how that business is run and why he's using multifamily, why did he go into multifamily? And he didn't even pay tax last year just because of the multifamily investment. So you guys want to check out the last episode.  But let's come back to this episode. Hey Mark, welcome to the show.   Mark: Thanks for having James. Great to see you again.   James: Awesome. Also, I'm happy to have you on the show. So, Mark, he's a GP, almost like 5,200 units, out of that 2000 units where he's basically the primary active asset manager and he's also GP on another 3,200 on top of the 2000 units. And he goes across multiple markets, which is very interesting for me. I want to go a bit deep dive into that. You know, he's in Texas, he's in Alabama, he's in Tennessee, he's in Florida and I believe that's what I covered. Right. Mark?   Mark:  Georgia, as well.   James: Georgia. Okay, got it. Got it. Atlanta. Right. So yeah. So Mark, did I miss out on something about yourself? Do you want to tell the audience about yourself?   Mark: No, I mean, yeah, real quick. So I grew up in Michigan. I'm in Dallas now, so not too far away from you, James. But I was a CPA for a while, did IT consulting, which you and I traded some stories about that before about the IT side and I started buying small multi-family when I was 22, I was a senior in college. About two to four units and then my brother and I...I didn't know what syndication was. Syndication is the fancy word for raising money from other people for the most part and pooling it together to buy properties. I didn't know what that was. So I started buying two to four units. And then my IT business was doing pretty well. That was, I really had no time. I always, I'd say 80, 85 hours a week and start really doing the math.   I was probably 90 to a hundred hours a week and a lot of weeks. And you know, frankly didn't have any time for my wife, caused some issues and so she basically said, you need to do something different than what you're doing. And I said, well, yeah, I will. But you know you have to deal with me and we both love real estate. So we started buying larger properties through syndication. I invested passively first in a syndication with a friend of mine, said it makes a lot of sense and you know, why don't I look at doing it myself and that's what we started doing back in 2013.   James: Got it. Got it. It's very interesting about your story when you're working on a W2 job, especially in the IT tech industry. I mean, it's a lot of work, we put in long hours, right? It's a constantly changing sector, right? The industry is consistently changing. We are always driven by schedule and I was just talking to, Shanti, who's my wife and all and how our life has changed when we used to be in W2 every day, like Fridays when we can really open up our time, open up because from Monday to Friday we are like so busy working like [03:55unclear]  focused and where I used to work, we used to work remote as well. So after five, six o'clock we used to work like, you know, we have lunch, we have dinner, and we continued working with the offsite team. So life never ends. And now with real estate, it's so much of a difference. Now you own your own time and you're out on what to do and we can, you know, my traveling time in Austin is like 11 to 2. That's it because it's a bit of traffic.   Mark: Yeah. It's interesting, right? I mean, I actually started my own IT business 2008 so I didn't even have a W2 job since 2008. But I got in a situation where, you know, any project that came up and any unrealistic timeframe that was out there, I would do it. I would make the dates. So that's what allowed me to get more and more projects. I had a number of Fortune 100 companies as customers, but so even though I have my own business back then, I still didn't have the luxury of time. You know, I was always going somewhere, always doing projects and yeah, I'd be up, I sleep three hours a night, like consistently, that's all I would sleep.   James: I mean, you don't have to go by numbers, but did you make like almost a similar amount of money compared to what you made in real estate? I mean, it's a time versus money investment, right?   Mark: It's a great question because when I first started looking at syndication, I said I'm not going to be able to replace my IT income. And I truly, it was a mindset. It really was. I really did not think I'd replaced my IT income. It was pretty, pretty high at the time. And after three projects that I did in multifamily I stopped doing IT. I had not replaced my IT income at that point in time, but it was enough to live and live, you know, decent. And then we've done, you know, we've done 37 projects, whatever now. But I didn't think I was gonna replace IT. But yeah, we've far surpassed it. I mean a lot frankly, and the time we have, and I don't have to ask anyone to go anywhere or you know, things like that, you can turn it on and off if you want to. Where in IT, if you're not working, not making any money, you don't have that passive income.   James: So you have a very interesting life cycle because you were working in IT, a W2  job and then you went to do your own business but still in IT. And now you are completely a full-time real estate investor. So, so in terms of time wise, I mean from what we're discussing, I mean, real estate investment gives you the best return of time, right? I mean, you get really good pay and at the same time, your time is like, really low.   Mark: There is no comparison. You know, you mentioned about talking to your wife a higher life is different. I mean, my life has, you know, 180 degrees different for the better than when it was before. I was on the verge of, you know, I'm not sure, you know, Tammy, my wife wasn't only happy because of my work schedule and now we got to work full time together. Just like you get to work with your wife, which is great. And the time, you know, if I want to go somewhere and you can get to the point with multifamily or any real estate investment, you get enough of it. If you choose to go sit on the beach, which I don't want to do, frankly I don't but if you choose to go and do that, you get in a position to do that for sure. With IT, I wouldn't be able to, I had to keep working projects in order to make money.   James: Yeah. But can we go back to your mindset when you are working, not as a business owner, when you are working in IT? Because I sometimes analyze my own mindset when I was working, because when I was working in IT, I did look at Robert Kiyosaki's book and I could not read like a few pages because it just doesn't make sense to me, we are so busy working. What is this guy talking about business. And after a few pages I put it down and I forgot about it until recently I started reading it and I was just surprised that that book changed a lot of people, real estate investors' life. But I don't know, I think when you are working you're really, really working, you really don't care about the business side of it and I mean, I think it's up to your circle, right? Who are you mixing with?   Mark: That's a great point. I know when I worked originally at KPMG Consulting and I worked for SAP you know, did some Salesforce consulting and things like that. And you're looking at other people that are older than you at the time I started out, it was, you know, early twenties when I started out. And look at other people that are partners, for example, and you have this image, you're like, that's my lifestyle. I'm going to be traveling all the time and I'm going to be working seven days a week, which is what I did. And you know, and then, you know, some point in time, not everyone gets to the point where I was, where my point was. And my wife was pretty much ready to leave me if I didn't do anything. And that was a big eye-opener for me. But you're right, you get trapped in that circle of influence, right? And everyone's doing the same thing. And at that time, I aspire to be a partner and I would've made partner, I mean, made a manager in two years and things like that. But I would have been miserable, frankly. I would have been.   James:  So compared to the job security, I mean, I don't know whether there's job security in any job or not because there is no job security, right? I mean, when I was a manager, I used to hire and fire people very quickly just because of non-performance, right? So there is no job security, right? I mean, I use to work on a semiconductor industry for like almost 20 years and we thought we were going to retire there but we realize you know, during different economic cycles, the company doesn't really, you know, honor your loyalty.  I mean, there's no such thing. They have to make a business decision, they'll let you go if they need to let you go. There's no such thing as a company is going to be keeping you forever.    Mark: Right, right. That's true.    James: Right. So yeah, coming back to real estate venture. So 2008 was when you got into IT and when did you start your real estate venture?   Mark: Syndication; 2013 is when I first started investing passively and invested in a few deals. And about that time I started looking at syndication, but it took me almost a year to get my first deal. And it was partly, I was looking at other things too; self-storage and building custom development, you know, homes and things like that, franchises. I looked at everything. I was looking for something to get me out of the bad situation I was in. But it still took us about a year to get our first deal.   James: So did you stop work and start into real estate? Was it a step function or was it like a...   Mark: It is gradual; for me, it took me three deals. So I'm thinking, let me see, 2014 is when I think I got my first deal, I don't remember exactly. But by '16 I had stopped doing IT.   James: Got it. Was that a painful transition from a business owner to a real estate investor?   Mark: No, it really wasn't for me anyway. You know, I've always had a big fear of money and you know, I wish I did, but I always did cause growing up and things like that. But we had enough money set aside to where, you know, I looked at it, if I had to go back and do IT, I had so many connections at a time, I could get a job pretty much, you know, right away. I didn't want to, but I was like, okay, well, I have a transition I'm making here, but if I fail, that was my mind, if I failed at doing this and after taking a year to find my first deal, I was pretty skeptical. And then we started getting the traction. So I was like, Hey if I need to go back, I can do that. I don't want to do it. But if I do, I can support the family. The transition wasn't hard for me. We were buying at that time only in Dallas, so I really wasn't having to travel outside Dallas. Yeah. So it was a pretty easy transition.   James:  Got it, got it. So as I was talking about that, you had like three different lifecycles, right? You're a W2 employee, you're a business owner and then you become a real estate investor and you are a CPA. So I'm going to ask you, similar to CPA question, how was your tax advantages comparing these three life cycles?   Mark:  Okay. So you know, even though I'm a CPA, I haven't practiced for 20...   James: But at a high level, was there any tax benefit between...   Mark:  Oh yeah. Without a doubt. When I had the IT business, you know, I was actually paying taxes quarterly. I was getting hit hard. I mean, I was making decent money. Now, in the last two years, we haven't paid any federal income tax like zero. And in fact, it's negative. So people were like, Oh, you didn't make any money. No, we make money. But from the tax benefit we received through depreciation and cost segregation and bonus appreciation, we pay zero federal income tax. So, I mean, think about people listening to this, if you didn't have to pay taxes, how much more money you'd have in your pocket and what you could do with that?   James: Absolutely.  Yeah. Yeah. I have a chart that shows how a $2 double for the next 20 years. And you know, at a 25% rate, that $2 becomes 72,000 after 20 years because you're taxed 25% every time you double, right? But if you don't have tax, that $2 becomes almost like $11 million, you know.   Mark: Oh, boy, Oh my goodness.    James: So the tax does impact your compounding savings. And if you don't look at it, you may not know. I mean, when I was working, I never really looked at tax because as I say, we are busy working. We just look at net pay coming to the thing. I mean taxes, like it's not nice for me. But when I look at that kind of chart, you know, it does make a lot of difference in terms of, Hey, you know, it does impact your overall savings. You know, if you compounded for not [13:53unclear]  you see a big difference, millions of dollars of difference.   Mark: Oh yeah. And like you mentioned, when you have a W2 job, it just comes out, you notice it, you don't like it. But when you have your own business, my own IT business, you have to write check every quarter you really notice it. And then you're like, I made that much money this quarter and where did it all go? And now I have to write a check for, you know, X number of dollars. And you know, you're just scratching your head and you're frustrated and stressed out. But with real estate, it's literally zero.   James: So did you have employees under you when you have a business?    Mark: All 1099.  James: Okay. So if you have an employee, then you're to pay tax for them too, I guess. So that's double taxation   Mark: That's exactly right.   James: Okay. So W2, I mean, I don't know. I have a chart that shows W2 people are paying almost 70% of the tax in this country. So this country is supported by people who are in W2. They are the ones who's paying taxes. They're the ones building the roads, the bridges, and all the infrastructure. Right? The 30% is from the other people who are earning less than 30,000 or people who are earning more than 500,000 and above.   Mark: Yeah.    James: Right? I mean, people who are earning more than 20,000 to pay a lot of taxes. But in general, if you look at it, the big bulk of it is paid by our W2 employees.   Mark: Right. Makes sense.    James: Just because you can't run away.    Mark: You can't. There are no savings, no tax shelters.   James: Absolutely. I'd say real estate investors, all kinds of you know incentive in the tax code to not paying taxes. So coming back to your real estate venture in multifamily, and you skipped over buying single-family and you went direct to multifamily.   Mark: We did. I mean, multifamily, two to four units when I was 22. Yeah. So it was smaller for sure. It made more sense to me, frankly. I don't remember, I actually didn't look at any homes. I don't know why I'd go back and think about that. Why I didn't start looking at any single-family homes. To me, we looked at two to four units at a time.   James: Well, I mean if you look at cashflow, two to 14 definitely make a lot more sense in terms of cash flow. Right? Maybe that's what it is. And how many two to four units did you own before you come to multifamily?   Mark: We had like 17 units total.   James: Okay. 17 in two to four units, I guess. Smaller multifamily. And do you think that helped you when you scale up?   Mark: It did. Because I know you manage, right? You and your wife manage. When we did the smaller properties, we self-managed and we took care of things and evicted people. So it definitely helped from that perspective. I didn't like the process, it's not something I want to do now, but it also, even though it's drastically different how you evaluate four units and below and in five units and below is drastically different, people can argue all day long steps are almost identical, right? You identify your criteria, you go drive by a property, contract, blah, blah, everything's the same. So it helped for sure. Plus just kind of, you know, getting comfortable with buying your first deal is the hardest. So once you start, you know, I bought like whatever it was, you know, five deals, six deals, I don't remember the number, exactly.  It gets you more comfortable. So when you go buy a larger property, it's bigger numbers. So it is concerning whatever I had already done, you know, like six transactions before that time, even though they're small, it helped.   James: Got it. Got it. I mean, in a way, it helps because I mean, you know at least how to read the lease and you probably know how real estate section happens, right?   Mark: Your first time signing for your first deal, usually you're most likely going to be pretty freaked out, right? You've done six smaller deals. It's still, then when you start doing bigger deal, then it's the money. Right? The only thing that concerned me, you know, I have to say only it really was the, you know, brain capital to the deals. I had no concerns about how to underwrite the deals that I knew how to do that or how to find deals or talk to brokers or loan. It was always about, you know, the capital. That was my biggest concern.   James: Okay. Okay. But do you think that's still an issue in this market cycle?   Mark: Yeah. I'm always concerned about capital. You know, we have like eight deals under contract right now. You know, so we've never not closed a deal, but you know, that's the one thing that's still stressing me out sometimes, frankly.   James: Yeah. Because you need to figure out whether you have big enough investor base too in all those eight deals.    Mark: That's right.    Mark: Okay. Got it. So coming back to this, no multiple markets that you have, I mean, do you want to explain on how did you get into this so many markets? I mean, I think some of it is you've partnered with some of your students, right?   Mark: Well, originally I was just buying pretty much with one other person off in Dallas. Dallas, and at least, in my opinion, was definitely getting more expensive and it's even more expensive now. I have a twin brother that moved to Atlanta so I used to visit him and Atlanta has a lot of similarities to Dallas. Dallas is yet, and it may never be, but it definitely has a lot of similarities. So I started traveling there. I looked at properties for about a year and a half before we got our first deal. And I just really like the market. That kind of was if my brother wasn't there, I don't know if I would be in Atlanta, frankly. I don't know if I would have thought about going there. When I'm going there, I see a lot of activity, new buildings, new development cranes, things like that. So it was an attractive market.    And then, so that's Texas and you know, kind of the Atlanta area. And then we started looking in the Southeast. This is a general statement. Some of the brokers cross different estates sometimes too. They might, if they have a license, they can actually sell in multiple States and they might say, Hey, now, we're in Tennessee, we have a project here, we have a project up in Arkansas now, which we don't own anything there yet. So these brokers started giving us deals and I started checking out different markets. And really, the way I got into the other markets as far as initially was I would have brokers in Dallas typically reached out to other brokers in other markets and make an introduction for me. And that kind of gives you instant credibility and they're going to typically give you the best of the best of brokers to work with in another market. And that's how we got involved in other markets.   James: Got it. So how did you choose this market? I mean, except for Atlanta where you said your brother was there, you initially went there because of Atlanta, but now you are like in five different markets. Tennessee, Alabama, Florida. I mean, now, how did you choose these markets and why these markets?   Mark:  Yeah. A friend of mine who I've done a lot of deals with, he had bought a smaller deal in Memphis and I never would have considered Memphis. And some people don't like Memphis. We own a lot there. We've done really well there. But Memphis also has, you know, even though [21:05 unclear] job growth population growth, things like that, it's okay, but not like Dallas, of course. But the rent growth has been going up. They're putting, you know, several billion dollars in investments of downtown. But that particular city also has something called a pilot program, which we've done multiple times. Where you can go in, you buy a multifamily property, you have to put a certain amount of capital into it. It's a lot. And then you'll get your property taxes cut in half and then they're frozen for 20 years. So I mean, as you know, property taxes is typically one of the largest, right?  [21:44unclear]  I can freeze them for 20 years. Cash flow is going to typically be pretty nice on it.    James: Hmm. So you're basically taking advantage of that particular program. What about the other States that..."   Mark: Yeah, Florida, I always looked, I like Florida just because of probably the weather initially and when we were in Atlanta we started looking in Florida as well. And Florida has, I mean, some areas like Miami that as you probably know are extremely expensive, just not going to buy there. But I also have a cousin, multiple cousins actually live in Florida and so I heard different things from talking to them. And then some of the brokers we were talking to like in Georgia and stuff like that, had some properties in Florida and a property came up and the first time we're looking at properties there. I liked the properties in Jacksonville and we have a few properties there now. And it was one of those markets, again, similar to Atlanta, job growth, population growth, rent growth. It doesn't have to be off the charts, frankly.    Some of the markets where it's so off the charts, it's just too expensive to buy in, the yields. You can't get the returns. And then with Alabama, it was a guy that had a deal and was looking to partner and I partnered with him on a few deals. He had deals there in Alabama. And then we have another one right now, a guy in our coaching group that has a deal in Alabama as well. He's closer over by there as far as that's where he'd been looking. So usually it's through some sort of relationship. Somebody either already lives there or someone is looking there and then it kind of gives me an opportunity to check the markets out.   James: Got it, got it. So basically if you have boots on the ground as part of your program, that's an advantage definitely. Right?    Mark: It is for sure.   James: But don't you find, you know, establishing broker relationship in that kind of market it's harder because you, I mean they did not know you, right?   Mark: It is, there's no question. I mean, you know, I think that's why it took us so long to get into Atlanta. We had a really hard time breaking in there. And then once we got in there, you know, it was just one brokerage firm in Atlanta that we closed 11 deals in like 18 months with. We've definitely had their attention. With that first deal., I went to Florida. I mean, I was banging my head against the wall because we couldn't get any traction with brokers there. I would say, you know, you just keep sticking with it, but there's no question, you know, if you're an outsider, don't live there and you've never bought a deal there, you're at a disadvantage. You can use things like, Hey, your track record and you can have brokers that I know.    So when we got a deal in Florida, our first deal, it was with a brokerage firm that I had bought a deal in Dallas with and the broker in Dallas had called me about it. So he, you know, if you want to say put a good word in for us. So a lot of these brokers talk as, you know, it's very small world. Yeah. And I don't think we would've gotten that deal in Florida if I had not bought a deal without a broker, you know, brokerage firm if you want to stay in Dallas, I think we would have probably not been selected for that deal.   James: Got it. So let's go a bit more detail into that step by step. So let's say today somebody, you know, in your circle or one of your students come, Hey, you know, I found a deal in Florida, right? Somewhere in Florida, right? So what are the things that you would do to underwrite the deal?   Mark: Yeah. You know, the underwriting different aspects of it, forget the reports and stuff for a second. But you know, even financing terms can be drastically different across the country. Some of the pre-review cities and stuff like that start at 65%. So you want to first understand, don't assume we're getting 80% leverage in three or five years IO in every single location because it's different. So understanding first, the insurance can be drastically different. You know, if you're on a coastal area, it can be a lot higher than all the other areas and understand kind of the fundamentals there.    Taxes, you know, do they get reassessed? And that can be through, we have a tax consultant we use, but also you can typically just call the County and the County will tell you kinda how the taxes will be reassessed and when. You know, in Memphis, that's every four years so that's important to know. They only reassess every four years. And then we'll get like a report, whether it's Yardi or CoStar. Those are paid reports. We'll also use things like some free...we have a number of links on our analyzer that take you to things like crime and the school districts things like that. Those are all links we have on that. But overall, nothing beats having someone on the ground, you know. So if you can talk to other people there and talking to lenders, you know, lenders have the biggest investment in a deal than anybody as a general statement where they have more money involved. So try to understand from lenders to kind of how some of the properties are performing there, it is important. In the report, as I said, it's only as good as the report. It is good data. A lot of it's based on, you know, actual transactions that have happened, but I'm trying to get someone like a broker or property management company. So if we have a property management company you know, David Shore is multi South in Memphis and he's in seven other, he's actually in seven other States.   Once we built that relationship, then we start asking him questions. He'll tell us, don't even look at that deal, it's not a good deal. This deal maybe you can look at, you know, 95% of deals he tells us not to look at there. So having some boots on the ground can't be replaced. It might take you a while to do that. It's typically going to be like a management company or maybe, you know, a broker, but you know, brokers in to sell, you know, they wouldn't, don't get paid unless they sell a property. So kind of all the different aspects. Reports talking to people, visiting the area, trying to understand what happened before in the past. Those areas are all good ways to kind of get more Intel on the property.   James: So you basically look at location, crimes, making sure how are you underwriting your tax records.    Mark: The tax is huge.   James:  Every state is different.   Mark: Yeah. Every state, county; city even sometimes. So we have like I say a tax consultant, but we have found really if you call the County and tell them the property what you're doing, they'll tell you how they reassess and they'll give you a good number. And we've only had like a couple of occasions where it hasn't really given us the information we want. Generally speaking, we always get the information we need from the County.   James: Got it. Got it. So who have told you the most knows? I mean like who say don't touch that deal most of the time? Is it a property management company or is it the tax consultant or insurance company?   Mark: Property management company. Without a doubt. It may be they don't want to manage it.   James: Well how do you know they just don't like that property. Maybe it's just because...   Mark: I know you self-manage. We have found in almost every submarket we ran with a management company, even if they don't manage a property today, they're like, we manage that property five years ago and you know like in that, you might have some Intel. We got a property here where a number of properties in Dallas I've looked at and our management company managed it. So I called the guy and said, Hey, what's up with that? And he'll say, you know, it had like $200,000 of plumbing issues or whatever it might be. But usually someone that's large in a submarket, they know the property or they at least know you know the area well enough to give you some really good Intel and it seems to amazed me where people are like, well, THE manageMENT company says we can push rents like $75, I think we can do it like by 125. it's like there's no basis for that. Like why do you think you can do that?    You can push your management company and ask them questions and things like that. You know, if I go try and do a comp for a property myself, I don't fit the demographics, I'm probably not going to get a good comp. Have a management company do it for you. They'll actually send people out there that fit the demographics. They'll actually get you comps and pictures and things like that. Go into some of these reports...I get called all the time from, I won't name them, but these providers of data call me all the time. I don't talk to them. And half time the information you get, you don't even know if it's right. It's coming through there. So, yeah.   James: So how do you know the management company that is calling is not the current management company?   Mark: Yeah, it's happened before. You know, you can ask the broker who managed it today. They'll tell you because it could be for sale and the property management company doesn't even know it. And if you call them and tell them, Hey, I'm looking at this property for sale, then they're going to be pretty upset.   James: Yeah. I've looked at out-of-state as well at one point. And I realized management company gives me the best quick data. They can tell me a lot of things about a state compared to anybody else, right. Because they know the pain of managing it. So yeah, I would say they are one of the best resources to call if you're looking at out of state investment. So after that, what do you do? I mean, you already looked at taxes, you already looked at the property, so it's all good. So what do you do next?   Mark: So then we'll underwrite it. Usually using, you know, we have a quick analyzer. We have a much more detailed analyzer. In the detailed analyzer, we're going to go through every expense category, like line by line, compare them to the, you know, T12. We'll try to get two independent property management budgets so we get that. And then our analyzer also has industry standards based on property, class, and size. We'll tell you what the standards are for every single category. Which is very helpful to see if something's out of whack. You know, I just had an example. Somebody not in a group, if someone's sent me something, it was two properties. It was over 300 doors together and they had payroll at $750 a door. I'm like, no, it's not going to happen. Or we're going to share the property manager on-site across the two properties and might not for 300 plus units, we're not going to, not very easily.  So I said, okay, so does the management company say they're okay with that? No. And if they did, what happened was that if you have to get rid of them and now you're going to bring in another management company, they're going to be at $1,200 a door. It just happened, another one today actually on something where they're getting charged two and a half percent on 80 doors. I said that's pretty low, two and a half percent. I'm not saying it's impossible, but you need to probably bump that up because just because one management company said they'll do it for that, if they're not your management company anymore, then you're going to be paying more.   James: Yeah. Yeah. You can't underwrite just because one person said it. I mean two and a half is really low compared to any industries. Whenever I see sponsors or syndicators showing me a deal, I mean, not many people should me their deals, but I do get to see some people still.  I mean, when they say they want to share management, that is an indication that you know that deal doesn't have that much upside. They have to do really, really creative weird stuff. They will share this, share that, we have to do. [33:15 unclear] covered parking. We have to do washer dryer and that's all that really small amount of upside. And that is not a good deal.    Mark: That's just the gravy. You're exactly right. I mean, you know it, right? You manage your properties and people are like, I'm going to share. I was like, you're not going to. I mean, if you think it was that easy, don't you think all the management companies would do it?    James: You're going to compromise a lot of things when you share management. And as I said, when you're going to that extent to really justify your upside in the deal, that means the deal is really not a good deal.   Mark: Well, James, I have people who'd be like, we're going to put in like wifi and charge this and they're trying to put that in an underwriting and I'm like, yeah. First of all, you might not be able to because of the cable contract. Right. You might not be allowed to, and second of all, let's just assume you're able to do that, is that needed in your analysis to make the deal work? I sure hope it doesn't. You know, it doesn't mean that.    James: Those who are learning this business, the biggest bulk of the deals that work is when you can bump up rent and you can reduce expenses if you can do these things is a big thing. So if you see any deals that you can, majority of your upside comes from here. You know, I don't look at adding more one or two washer and dryer, adding parking, adding wifi. That's what you said or sharing management. That's all right. Really the deal doesn't work at all. I think the sponsor's just trying to squeeze all kinds of juice and tell you that it's going to work, but in reality, it is really, really hard to make all that work. I mean that all that is just a bonus. If it works, it's good.   Mark: Yeah, that's exactly right. And your total expenses, you could go up because the property taxes, but you know some of your points of your own, you reduce the expenses. I mean there are huge savings in water lots of times for operators. You can go in there and do repair and maintenance. We see lots of times you do as well, I'm sure were people are putting capital items in repair maintenance and they're like $1,400 a door per year. I mean that's a really high, right? So they're just putting stuff up there. If you go in and get a loan you're able to put capital in there and maybe do roofings and a/c and things like that, you can most likely bring your repair maintenance down more to industry standard. So for looking for those things, but if you don't know what those standards are, you know, you don't have any gauge.   James: Sure, sure, sure. So we don't have to talk about your detail and analysis that you do, but on the sniff test that you have a quick analysis. So one of the few things that you would look at to, you know, kick out a project   Mark: Return wise, I'll look at, you know, we still shoot for like a 10% cash on cash return, which is getting harder   James:  10% with the IO on year one, I guess.   Mark: Yeah. Overall or if the product is a five-year project, 10% cash in cash, 15% plus IRR and 100%; 100% is getting harder on five years, frankly for a lot of properties, closer to six.  In some markets, it's more than that, but usually we try to stay in six and below to double the money. And then I'm looking at other things like, you know, what cap rate are they using? You know, on their exit, how they get the current cap rate, the broker. I mean, I had someone, no joke, in Florida called me and said- it wasn't Miami, by the way- they said, Oh, the broker told me the cap rate is 3 and a half. You know what I mean? So those types of things, right. So you can make any deal work. It's on a piece of paper,   James: Just change the exit cap rate.    Mark: Exactly right. I have an example, I do in our workshop where I'm like, you know this, and then you do the cap rate down to two, what does it do? And then, you know, other things are going to be more round, you know, total income growth over the first couple of years. What does it look like? You know, I'll see sometimes people think we're going to grow income 30%. I'm not saying it's impossible to do that, but I see a property as, you know, 92% occupied and you go up 30%, your total income in a year is pretty high so you need to have justification for that. So basically we look at a lot of different gauges, break-even occupancy, break-even reds and then the financing. You know, people don't understand financing well enough. Lots of times as far as what the hell they're going to do that.   James: It can make or break a deal. Right? So let's look at like the rent growth and the exit cap rate, right? So how do you differentiate these rent growth and exit cap rate on this like five different markets there?   Mark: Well the market cap rates, so we always start with the submarket cap rate, doesn't matter which property it is. And we have different ways to get that through reports and things like that. And then we put an escalator on it, an annual escalator, and it'll be different between ABC assets. And we have some ranges there. Some markets actually, you know, Dallas has gotten compressed so much on class C, you know, it was like eight and a half percent in '13. Now, it's like five cap for a lot of properties and you don't know if it's ever gonna go back. So we'll usually use you know, minimum 0.1 up and then up to a 0.2 for a year. So it could be, you know, full a hundred basis points on a five-year exit and a lot of it's depending on the property and location.    I mean some of them, some of the markets that the cap rates the banks compressed there but they haven't compressed as much as like Dallas. I mean they might've been..I'll just make an example, say Dallas eight and a half. Now it's five and the market there might have been seven and a half and now it's six. So it went down, you know, one and a half percent total. But we'll actually, we'll look at the property, the type of property that, you know, the age of it as a class and then the demographics and we'll add an escalator on an annual basis for it. So each year it escalates up.   James: But how do you decide that? So for example, I think in Texas a lot of people uses 3% rent growth, right? Even though some cities are different.   Mark: Well, no, for rent growth we usually use 2%. This is across the board, across all markets after year two. Your first two years as you know, you might have come in and you're increasing rents, rephase revenue in and things like that. After year two, the general statement is going to be 2%.    James: What about expenses?    Mark: Two.     James: Okay, so 2% income growth. 2% on year two onwards I guess. Which makes a lot of sense. I mean, you're not really counting for the first year for value add.   Mark: Right and it might be higher. I mean some people were like in Dallas, you know, seven and a half percent rent increase growth for a while. And people were like, I'm like, but that's like today, one point in time it's proved where, you know, Dallas rent increases have gone down considerably. It's still a great market, I like the market. I don't really buy here right now, but you can't count on today. Or someone will say, Hey, the economic vacancy is 6% and I'm like, yeah, but I mean, good for them. But you can't count on that.    James: You can't count on that. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, yesterday there was a national multifamily trend report which shows I mean Dallas is below national average in terms of rent growth, right? So San Antonio and Austin, Austin has been always higher than national rent growth but San Antonio is higher than national rent growth. I never seen that San Antonio being higher than Dallas. I mean it's just cities change. You have to be really conservative in your underwriting.    Mark: I think people are like, enough is enough, right? When rents go up, you know, seven plus percent for a few years in a row, people are like, you know. And it doesn't mean it's a bad, bad market. I mean, there are 150,000 people a year here that moved to, [41:07unclear] you know, net. So there's great jobs and population growth. I've been arguing that for a while. It doesn't matter all those things happen. At some point in time, people will say enough is enough.    James: Yeah. People can't pay anymore.   Mark: In a 2% increase in their wage or whatever they get in 7% in rent, you know, four years in a row, it has a big impact on them.   James: Absolutely. Absolutely. But how do you like for example, in your experience, because you're working on multiple markets, right? I mean apart from Texas, which has seen a good rent growth, I mean, I think even Florida is seeing a good rent growth. I do not know what other markets house in Tennessee, Alabama and I think...   Mark: Georgia is good as a whole. I mean some markets and we bought in a place called Gainesville, Georgia, not Florida. The property has done phenomenal. But that's a secondary market for sure. It's about 45 minutes from Atlanta, but it's like, you know, a 7% rent growth right now. Same with Dalton, Northeast, you know, almost close to Chattanooga rent growths. Florida, like you said, is high; parts of Georgia is definitely high. Alabama and Tennessee, I would say are mediocre, frankly, they're just going to be average. Now, Memphis in general, the random amounts are lower, but the rent growth there is quite high right now from a percentage standpoint. But you know, the starting with rents, half of Dallas, wherever it is, right. So it's proportional, but the percent of rent growth in Memphis is actually quite high right now. The last I saw, it was in the top 10 in the country.   James: Oh really? Okay. Okay. And what about the exit cap rate? Right. So usually, I mean the usual underwriters, people use like one, to 0.2 more than what the market is. Do you use the same exit cap rates in the other markets?   Mark: We take the current and we'll add...so let's say the current was a six cap, we'll add 0.1 per year, 0.20 per year. And in some cases like to your point, and so like that's to the end of five years, you would've gone from a six to a seven. And in some markets, yeah, we'll be, you know, if we're going to be doing a 0.15 in a certain market and we're like, well, maybe this market isn't quite as attractive or in the past it hasn't performed quite as well, we might do the 0.20. At the end of the day, I mean, as you know, nobody knows what the cap rates going to do. We can all guess. And the important thing to consider is that you know, the cap rate has no impact on your cash flow per se. It's really more of a capital event like a refi or a sale, things like that. So if you can still cash flow and you know, get good returns, then you know, you wait to sell when it makes more sense to sell.   James: Correct. What about a loan wise? Have you guys been doing a longterm agency debt or you've been doing some short term loans as well?   Mark: We do about a third of the deals we do prior bridge, but not necessarily short term is still up to five years. So it's not short term really. And the rates are attractive and there's, you know, a lot of advantages too. Bridge and some disadvantages, but there are a lot of advantages. I like them, especially in the big value add deals from what you have to get them. And then we do Fannie, Freddie, and then a number of bridge frankly.   James: Got it. Got it, got it. So I mean, you work with a lot of you know, students who are trying to come up in this industry, right? So can you describe one characteristic of a student who made them really successful you know, sponsor on their own?   Mark: Okay.  Characteristic is, I mean, you know, if you want to say grit, not giving up, but as far as a whole, it's getting really good at something that really, you know, one skill set. You don't have to know everything about multifamily necessarily to get started. You have other people there to help you. But getting really good at something that's a value to somebody else. And it sounds like, okay, that's kind of obvious. Well, we've seen it work time and time again where someone, all they do is pretty much come in and just find deals. That's where the specialty is. They don't want to raise money or sign the loan or know things like that. But I think it's being patient, you know, when you have to wait a year, potentially. I waited a year to get my first deal. That's a long time, you know, to wait. And then you look back on it, it's like, that's not a long time to wait when you started buying more deals or you're like trying to do something new and you're spreading, you know, 12 months before you get a deal that can be frustrating. So just being patient.   James: Yeah. Especially when people are already committed, I'm going to do this.    Mark: Yeah, some people give something up to do it.   James: Yeah. I mean, I really just remember there's not much deals out there. So, you know, finding that one deal that makes sense takes time. Right. It's not easy, If it was easy, everybody would do it.   Mark: That's right. That's right. Okay.   James: So coming back to your personal side of it. I mean, is there any proud moment in your life that you think I would remember that moment? That one particular moment in your experience in your real estate venture?   Mark: Yeah.  That's a great question actually. I would say when I got that third deal and it closed because I had already decided if I close that deal, I was going to stop doing IT. So when I got that third deal and said, Hey...my son kept asking me cause I kept looking for deals when he's like, if you get that deal, can you stop doing IT? Cause he was seeing me work so much. And so when I got that that was huge for me, for my family.   James: Got it. That was a transition point of view, getting away from IT to real estate, I guess.    Mark: Right, right. And making the decision, like you said, to do it full time.     James: Yeah. It's a hard decision, especially if you're already used to a certain industry. And what has been, you know,  paying your bills, right.    Mark: Paying your bills, which is great. And you know, the other thing, unfortunately, when I was doing IT, that was kind of my self-worth. That's where I got my value. I wasn't really good at a lot of things, but for some reason, my mind just worked that way. And so I got my self-worth out of my job. So to give that up, you know, it is a big thing. And you don't know how successful you're going to be or not in your new adventure. So, but I mean, the best decision I ever made.   James: Yeah. I mean, you brought up a good point. Sometimes that whole industry, what you study for, define you 20, 30 years in your life and suddenly, you are changing your complete identity. I mean, it's a big thing, right? I mean, a lot of people do not want to do that. If they're known as engineer or a CPA or the IT guy, they don't want to know, what! Suddenly this guy's doing real estate.     Mark: Oh yeah. I mean, my CPA said, what are you doing? He did. Now he doesn't say it anymore. He did. He said, what are you doing? You're making a lot of money doing IT, why are you not doing it anymore? I mean, you know, he couldn't even comprehend it.   James: Yeah. And I have to mention this; when I was in IT, when I was an engineer, you know, I always think that people in IT, people who are engineers are really smart guys. So these are the smartest guys because that's what your circle is, right? Your circle of friends is there. You think this guy's smart solving problems. And I mean, I did my MBA, it was really eye-opening because I realized there are a lot smarter guys than me with a lot more money in the financial industry. So that was a big aha moment. And that's where I realized that you know, you have to go into business to make a lot more money. And there are a lot of other smarter guys in other smarter professions out there that make a lot more money. And so, I mean, before I forget what is the most valuable value add that you've seen in all your deals? What would you do in case your rehab budget got cut into half in a deal?   Mark: Oh, you mean from a CAPEX?    James: Capex wise, yes.   Mark: You know, one, people need to be...if the property looks like junk outside...I've been in properties that look good on the outside and they're not that great on the inside. But you need something outside to kind of attract you. And it could just be paint, you know, something so it's not dreary and dark, dark colors, you know, but using something a little bit more attractive color-wise for paint. Landscaping, simple stuff to do. It's basically thinking about what does a tenant see? When people say I'm going to do, you know, electrical work and you know, things like that. It's like the plumbing, stuff like that need to be done, but tenants don't see that. So first start with the outside and see what the tenants, you know, whether they go up to the office and it's kind of decked out.   Sometimes we'll spend a lot of money around the office to kind of put a lot of landscape in there and make it really nice, exterior wise. Interior, I mean, paint, it's pretty easy to do. Flooring is huge just from a maintenance standpoint. So if you can do it, but as you know, it's not that cheap to do floor and then we'll like resurface countertops. I wouldn't do cabinets and stuff like that if you don't have the budget for it. I wouldn't do appliances unless they need them. You're not going to get the bang for the buck for that. Again, people will see paint, they'll see flooring and they'll see like maybe surface countertops, paint the cabinets, things like that. But some people have really high aspirations. They want to do all these things, but at the end of the day, you're not living in the property so don't outdo the market. I won't be the first guy to prove something in a market, I let other people prove it first. But I would say for sure start with the outside. We start like with landscaping and paint, stuff like that. People can see that.   James: Got it, got it. Awesome. Mark. So we're at the end of the podcast. Do you want to tell our audience and listeners how to get hold of you?   Mark: Yes. An email address is Mark@thinkmultifamily.com and love the chat with anybody and I really, really appreciate you spending time with me today, James.   James: Sure, sure. Absolutely. Thanks for coming over. You had a lot of value. And I really like going across markets here because sometimes it's hard to find someone who has done deals in different markets, right. Because it's important. A lot of people want to do markets everywhere. I mean, there are deals everywhere so you just have to buy it right and you have to analyze it right. And, you know, just make sure the numbers work and the location works. Yeah. Awesome. Thank you, Mark.    Mark: All right, James. Appreciate your time.    James: Absolutely. Thank you. Bye.

Getting control of your business is the key to navigating towards a profitable future. The most common obstacles for successful eCommerce businesses are inventory and cash flow. Today's guest is an expert in providing forecasting tools to help skirt those obstacles to grow your business and prep for a successful exit. Scott Deetz was one of the advisers whose input was crucial to a successful overseas deal we discussed on a previous episode. In this episode, we explore the ways Scott's forecasting techniques have fact-based evidence to support predicted ROI for potential buyers. Scott is the founder and CEO of the Northbound group, a company that helps eCommerce businesses uncover the value in their businesses and prepare a successful exit. With a background in corporate transactions, Scott got into the amazon selling space in 2013. He soon realized his interest remained where it had started, in mergers and strategic advising. He now spends all his time assisting eCommerce businesses on how to maximize the value of their company for either keeping or selling. Episode Highlights: Whether forecasting is based on a wish and a prayer or if there is science and methodology involved. The importance of forecasting as a regular part of any growing business. How Scott's tools can help establish the supplier as a partner and diminish cash flow problems. How the forecasting can change the discussion on strategy. The value of the planning and structuring a deal around the forecasting. The buyer's effective multiple and what it means for their purchase process. The importance of speaking the buyer's language. Scott reveals the levels of building from forecasting. How hard data coupled with owner wisdom can the best formula for forecasting as well provide a roadmap for a successful exit. Transcription: Joe: Mark, one of the things or a dozen of the things that I always see happen with entrepreneurs that we speak with is that everyone runs out of inventory, everyone has cash flow problems, in fact I was just on a call prior to recording this podcast with someone that does an amazing job with their business to the point where it's growing 150% year over year which causes what? Cash flow problems, inventory problems. I did a webinar yesterday and one of the questions was have you ever run a stock? Yes, no, or I'm so amazing I never run out of stock. Oddly enough no one checks the third option which is really good. But a lot of people run out of stock. It seems to be the status quo. I understand that you had our friend Scott Deetz on the podcast talking about forecasting, talking about cash flow management; what it does for your peace of mind number one but inventory management and how you can use all of these forecasting tools to renegotiate with your suppliers to build a more valuable business and to grow it with more confidence. How did the call go? Mark: Yeah. So, Joe, I know the podcast episodes that you do are so well packaged that you have an amazing podcast, right? I just want to start out with that. You have an amazing podcast and you package these together so well with their incredible exits series that you've been doing and actually, in all honesty, it is a really good series that you've been doing where you're interviewing some sellers. With my less desirable or appealing package, I've been doing essentially the same thing with the UK deal. We really had Joseph Harwood on. That episode aired I believe in August and we talked about Joseph's exit as a UK company. And one of the things that we brought up on that call was how many advisors helped us through that process. Well, Scott was one of these advisors and I'm going to also have another podcast with one of the other advisors on that that helped us through that. One of the crucial aspects for shows of sale, one of the things that really made it run was the forecasting that Joseph and Scott did with the business now forecasts. A lot of us see them and think they're just kind of a wing and a prayer and they're kind of hoping and hey, if my rosy assumptions work out this business, is going to have a hockey stick amount of growth. And so they get discounted quite a bit. I remember I spoke to somebody else about this; Andy Jones from Private Equity Info and we asked him about forecasts and he said look you look at forecasts they are all hockey sticks. I guarantee the buyer is going to do their own forecasts. Well, Scott has a different approach to forecasts. They're very very conservative. He ends up doing scenario analysis to see Scenario A, Scenario B, Scenario C; one's very pessimistic, ones very optimistic, one is what they actually expect to happen and there's actually a methodology here. Now we spent the first half of this call going over why is this important. He explained how he uses this to negotiate supplier terms that don't pinch the supplier but actually help a partnership with that supplier. He talks about how it was crucial for Joseph having the ability to order a really sizable amount of inventory as we're going into a busy season so that he didn't run out. And then finally we talked about how it has an impact on the actual selling process. And he brought up a point; super simple, you and I talk about this all the time, when you're talking to a buyer for an online business you need to be able to speak to the return on investment they're going to get. And their buyer is constantly doing that sort of analysis. Well, Scott was able to go through an analysis that was based on reason and logic and numbers and it had been refined if we could take a look historically to see here's what we were forecasting, here's how close we were, right? We were off and so we've modified our assumptions. So about half of it is on why the second half is on how and kind of giving people a little bit of a jump start on how to actually do forecasting. And it's something that I would highly recommend. We had Ben Murray on from the SaaS CFO and he talked about the importance of forecasting in a SaaS business. So this is a really important thing for any online business and frankly any business to start doing. Joe: And these guys are all connected with running multi-million dollar businesses that will have a multi-million dollar exit. And that's they've; I want to say grown up into forecasting. A lot of people bootstrap things and sort of do the best they can. Those that hold on long enough or mature enough to get to the forecasting part. I think it makes a huge difference. The folks that I just had on the call prior to this they've got an incredible business and they've grown up into that as well. I think that this podcast will help them tremendously. I know Scott personally he's a great guy, very smart, very very good at numbers so let's jump into it. Mark: But before we get there, I just want to throw out there to the listeners in case you didn't catch it. Mark Doust is an expert at very subtle wise assery; here's why, I told him I was going to read this quote, quote-unquote this is from a listener, a guy named Chris Rock is his last name. Thank you, Chris. I just want you to know you are my favorite listener at this point. Quote, I've been impressed by several podcasts with Joe Valley; no space there for Mark Daoust, no mention of Mark Daoust at all, Joe Valley and we'd like to set up a call this week to discuss the process and valuation. Thank you, Chris. You are my favorite without a doubt. Let's go to the podcast. Joe: I was being sold. I just want to make it clear. Mark: Alright here we go. Scott Deetz, here we go folks. Mark: Alright I'm really excited this week to have Scott Deetz on. Scott you and I worked together for a long time and frankly it's been way way too long for this to even happen. I should've had you on the podcast probably a year ago or so but I don't know if you've listened to the podcast at all. We have a tradition of guests introducing themselves mainly because we don't do show prep so I'll hand it over to you. Why don't you introduce yourself to the audience? Scott: Sure, perfect. Yeah, I'm excited to do this Mark. So my name is Scott Deetz. I'm with Northbound Group which is a company that I founded. I was an Amazon seller starting in 2013. I was ASM3 for folks that may know what that is and I got into the Amazon selling side of things but my background has been in more corporate transactions, mergers, and acquisitions. And once I got into the industry for a little bit, I realized that I liked helping people and looked at the industry and thought I could help people in a series of ways with strategic finance and with corporate development work and with being, in essence, a strategic advisor to people that may want to consider exit strategies as well. So I started Northbound Group about three years ago and now that's what I do full time; it's just assist Amazon and other e-commerce businesses on how to maximize the value of their company for whether they want to hold it or whether they want to sell it. Mark: Yeah. And you worked on; actually, we worked together on Joseph Harwood's deal. We had him on the podcast a few weeks ago talking about how to sell a UK based business and that was a complex transaction. We talked a lot about that on that podcast about how complex it was at least compared to what we typically see in the spaces as to how these transactions go. The topic that you and I are going to discuss today is forecasting. And I really think with Joseph's business and the way that we presented that business to potential buyers there was so much that it hinged on the forecasting that your group did to be able to say what are we looking at for sales coming from the future. Now this is a bit of a touchy subject because within Quiet Light we don't rely on forecasts all that much, right? We would never sell or trade necessarily on a forecast on its own. However, your forecasts were a bit different than what we've typically seen in the past. If I could just kind of put it bluntly most forecasts that we see are kind of a wish and a prayer. If someone is saying hey here's what I like to do over the next twelve months or it's even more simplistic than that; well this is what I did the first three months of the year, a straight-line projection shows that it's going to be this so that's going to be my forecast. And it's just very unreliable and that's why we've never used it. Yours tended to have quite a bit more specificity and we really put a lot into that forecast including structuring the deal around the forecast as well which meant that our client, in this case, Joseph really believed the numbers that were coming out because he was riding a lot on that. So I wanted to talk about forecasting and I want to start out with just kind of a basic question, is it just a wish and a prayer to say this is what we're going to be doing in the future? And again this is a softball question. I'm leading you into the answer pretty easily here. Or is there actual science and actual methodology here where we can use these forecasts with some level of reliability? Scott: Yeah. So to me, that case study really showcased the power of how forecasting can ultimately affect the amount that you receive for your company. But I would say the short answer to your question is if an Amazon seller came to me and said would I rather have a simplistic forecast than no forecast at all I would say yes. But the answer to it really is that I think forecasting is not a one-time event but something you implement. So, in other words, people don't build a forecast and then it collects dust. You implement a forecasting methodology in your business that is continually being updated as new information is coming into the business. And when your self as an owner or when an outside party can see that not only is it a science and it's around a tool but it is also an ingrained methodology for the business, I think that's really when the power of forecasting takes hold. And particularly in Joseph's case, for example, the first forecast that we built and if he was on the call we would laugh together, it started out like you would expect. I have no idea. Let's put some numbers on a board. Let's start looking at it. Then we started implementing it on a regular basis and we would get it down to the point to where we could update a complete forecast for the business in under 60 minutes. And every time that we realized we were either short of our forecast or over our forecast we started tweaking it and we got more and more and more accurate so that by the time that we, for example, got in front of a potential buyer for the business the buyer could sense our confidence in the forecast and obviously then that in turn gave them their confidence in the forecast and ultimately helped facilitate the transaction. Mark: And I want to get into methodology here in a little bit but I want to start at a maybe a little bit of an earlier point because we talk a lot in Quiet Light about how having a good exit strategy and preparing a business for sale often gives you a really good business to own, right? And this exercise of forecasting is not just for an exit. It's actually really good from a business ownership standpoint. What are some reasons that people should be implementing forecasting as a regular part of their business? Scott: Yeah. The easiest way I can answer that is that I say there is no cash flow planning without forecasting. Mark: For anybody out there by the way it felt like a good rhyme. Scott: It does, doesn't it? Yeah, there is no cash planning without forecasting or something like. But everybody out there that is in this industry struggles with the fact that as you grow because you have to front a lot of your inventory oftentimes or at least a portion of that you have to invest in the business. Everybody is doing this dance between growth and having enough cash to grow. A forecast fundamentally is the link between the two that doesn't look at what your accounting numbers were in the past but looks at what the next six or twelve months forward of your businesses and we'll answer the question for you do I have enough cash to succeed? And the way I look at if you use Xero or Quickbooks or a good accounting program is very simply that gives you a gorgeous picture of what's in the rearview mirror but you don't drive your car based on what's in the rearview mirror, you drive your car based on what's out in front of you. And really what forecasting is that capability. So whether you ever want to sell your business or not if you want to have an accurate cash flow of your business you by definition have to be good at forecasting. The second reason that I think that it's really really critical is because forecasting helps you determine where you're making your money and where you're not making your money. So very often in our forecasting tools that we have built for Amazon sellers, we'll build a forecast for people and it doesn't only forecast the revenue but it forecasts the profitability. And it's not uncommon at all for example to see somebody who's selling a product in the US that's making a great amount of profit and they take that same product and when you add the VAT or other costs in the UK it's not profitable at all. So why put the gas pedal down so to speak and grow an area of your company that's not as profitable? So I think it's really helpful in two things; well three things actually, the first one is cash flow planning, the second one is analyzing your profitability, and then the third one is once you have an accurate forecast we have found it's the single most important thing to help you get better supplier terms. So when we go negotiate with suppliers on behalf of our clients or we give them the tools to do it themselves we are incorporating forecasting to show the suppliers a forecast that they then believe. And if your supplier believes an accurate forecast then what they'll do is they'll say to you, okay wow we're going to grow this much. That is the basis for the conversation of getting payment terms after shipping. And it's also the basis for being able to ask for a better price for your product. So those are really outside of even selling the business; as far as running the business those are the big three. Mark: Yeah. This idea of cash flow planning; I mean the number one problem with Amazon businesses is what it's cash flow, right? I mean people are growing, their business is growing and they're putting all the money back into inventory and I think a lot of Amazon sellers are really just sticking their thumb up in the air and saying okay I think I should order this much. Maybe there's some level of estimation going on there. But the number of people that we see the number of businesses we see where they have inventory shortages or they have a busy season and they end up ordering too much and so they're sitting on just a big pile of inventory that's there for another year waiting for the next busy season. I mean it's kind of a rule; it's not an exception that we see this. Your supplier terms that you mentioned in the third point that plays into this cash flow problem as well. I don't want to get into the details of exactly what Joseph's structure with his business and his supplier terms but suffice it to say he eliminated all of the cash flow issues that you would normally have with an Amazon business because you guys were able to negotiate really good terms with the suppliers. I assume that was based on the forecast that you're able to put together. Scott: Yes absolutely it was and the key part that we were able to do was bring in the supplier in essence in partnership and have them realize, and this is what I'd recommend anybody that's listening to this, this is not about beating up a supplier. This is about being upfront with them and saying if I had no cash flow problem this is what the growth potential would be for the products that I sourced through you. We were able to make that case with this particular supplier. And in essence, it rapidly accelerated the growth of the business prior to then ultimately exiting the business because we eliminated the cash flow problem which also became a competitive advantage against other people that had cash flow problems because when they run out of inventory we get our sales. So it's absolutely critical and the number one reason that a lot of suppliers don't want to give better terms is because like you said they don't trust that either the business will sell that many units. So then if they know the business doesn't sell the units they may be stuck with them. Forecasting helps eliminate that concern and we were able to go to the supplier and say look at all of these trends, look at all of this information if we sell this many units of these many products this is how fast we could grow. But the problem is we don't have the cash to order that many units, can you help us out? And ultimately we are able to come to a very favorable situation for frankly both the supplier and for Joseph. Mark: Yeah. This idea of profitability as well. I mean this is just a common area where we see a lot of waste being spent on ASINs that frankly aren't that profitable. And these are the areas where people are spending time, resources, maybe they're spending money on this and it's really just diluting what their efforts should be as well. So this idea of going back I liken it to something that again we preach over and over at Quiet Light which is it starts with having good books, good data that you can go back and look at. Personally in my personal life like when I review my finances and if you do this at home and you look at your credit card statement, how many times have you looked at your credit card statement and you look at something and say oh my gosh I have this subscription; I didn't even realize I still had this subscription on there, right? Going back over and over again and like you're doing revising assumptions of what the business is doing helps you think about your business more critically in a different way than maybe we would normally think of you know especially with a product-based business you're thinking about product variations, you're thinking about customer service, how can you make that customer experience better but maybe not thinking strategically about your business as you might want to. And I know with Joseph's business looking at his inventory purchasing history he made a couple of purchases in there which I looked at and I just thought oh my goodness this guy is brave. Because he was taking huge chunks of inventory on at the time but he was able to do that because you guys had worked on this and he felt very confident about what was coming up plus he got great supplier terms that came with kind of a safety point there. Scott: We simply would not; two notes on that, one without going to the suppliers for the supplier terms we wouldn't have been able to grow as fast because we wouldn't have wanted to take on the personal risk that comes when you sign a letter of credit at a bank or anything like that. You've got a personal guarantee. So good supplier terms allowed us to have a business partnership that while we had a good-faith guarantee that we were going to pay them for that it's not the same as putting up your house or putting up all of the other assets that you have in the business. And forecasting was sort of a key aspect to that. Here's the other thing and I've seen it go the opposite way as well and I always like to stress this is that if somebody is thinking about eventually selling their business you have to understand that every dollar of profit in the year that you sell costs you three to four times as much. Because when you apply the multiple to your valuation if I am a company that's making $200,000 a year and they go out of stock and that stock going out of stock costs them $10,000 of profit. You not only lose the $10,000 of profit because you went out of stock you lose three times that amount and if your multiple is three and we're not here to discuss multiples. But the point is that just going out of stock we had somebody that we work with that went out of stock during a busy season for only two weeks, it cost them about $30,000 of profit and instantly they lost $100,000 off their sales price by one outage that forecasting could have prevented by knowing that they needed to order more. So I think if you needed a fourth reason out there why this is so critical I always say the most expensive way to finance your business is by running out of stock and not ordering enough not because we've all seen that yo-yo. Forecast at least allows you to see the problem so that you can address it proactively as opposed to all of a sudden boom you're out of stock and you're in a scramble and you're shipping by air which also costs you on your valuation and those things. So for those reasons that's why I think it's just so absolutely critical to running a business successfully particularly on Amazon. Mark: Yeah and I want to comment on that real quick because I was about to say obviously we're going to be Amazon-specific; that's where you really know your stuff extremely well. The forecasting is an exercise that pretty much every business should be doing. I know I had Ben Murray on the SaaS CFO and he talks about the importance of forecasting in a SaaS business. And I know at Quiet Light we just recently implemented some forecasting models as well. And it's super helpful when I can look at; our major expense is conferences, right? So when I can even look out and see what our expense profile in the forecast for that over the next six months is it really helps us understand how to spend our money and gives us a different way of looking at this. Alright; forecasting, we could talk a lot about why we should do it for just running the business. When it comes to selling a business the impact of having a reliable forecast and the impact that it has on a buyer, I'm going to just comment on this real quick because with Joseph's business I was obviously working with buyers directly on that and I can tell you that oftentimes forecast get met with some skepticism. People look at it and they don't really trust them. When people look at your forecasts partly because of the way we structured the deal and there was an earn-out that we were upfront with saying look we expect some pretty big growth in this business so we're not asking for everything upfront. We're willing to do an earn-out type of structure here but also because of the way that the forecasts really seem to have some specificity to them. That became an integral part of that sales process where people wanted to delve in and understand the forecasts. And as we were going through an update in months people were checking the forecasts as well. And when they saw that you guys were right on them or in some cases maybe a little bit wrong but here's why. It changed the discussion dynamically. This was not just kind of an amateur business of somebody who found a product that sold well on Amazon. This was a business that was being run strategically and had a real plan moving forward. And so on the sales process, I think the very simple conclusion is you added a lot of value to Joseph's business by virtue of having the strategic planning and the strategic background that you were working on and then structuring a deal around this as well. Scott: Thank you. Yeah, so I think a couple of points on that; one of them as you transition over to the sales side of things, the first thing I always want to state is that most buyers like you said will say to you we can't buy on future projections. As a general rule, there's a lot of risk in Amazon and all of these reasons for it but I want to make this statement and I state it so boldly when I talk with sellers because I think it's so critical in forecasting such an important part of it. The only multiple that a buyer cares about is not the historical multiple, the only multiple they care about is what I call the buyer's effective multiple which is what is the price I pay divided by the earnings that I get which by definition is something in the future. So while they're not sharing their forecast with you if they don't believe they are building a forecast on their side which is helping them calculate what's called the return on investment in various ways. So the notion I want sellers to understand just as how when you build a listing you need to speak in the language of your customer in order to have your product listing make sense. It's the same thing when you go through a transaction you need to be able to speak in the language of a buyer to have the most credibility for that particular buyer. So the forecast that we built with Joseph is built very very much with that purpose in mind. We think of ourselves as an outsourced CFO to a business with the responsibility of communicating in the language of a buyer. So when I think about sort of forecasting and what I'll call more advanced forecasting what we were able to do was not just to say hey if you give us a bunch of cash we think the business will double what we were able to do is to look at every product on a per unit basis of how many units it's doing right now. We would then apply seasonality to it so that we had all the historical information to apply seasonality. We did that for every current product in every market based on the margin in that market whether it was in dot.com or in Europe or in the US. And then we were able to build in each of all of the product launches of new products that didn't exist today but we're coming out to market. And we were able to be conservative on those but in essence, show that even if we hit conservative numbers of that we're gonna be in a pretty positive situation. So I think the message is when a buyer sees all of that underlying logic in the forecast it's more than just an idea. It's really a strategic communication tool between the buyer and the seller. So they were able to go okay, and you bring up another great point which is that this is absolutely a process through the life of getting the transaction done. If it takes you a few months to sell your business every month you're updating that forecast; you're having that dialogue as to where things are at. So I think what I would encourage people is that when you want to be in front of a buyer the same way that you want to be in front of a customer and think about it from their lens. You want to do the same thing for a buyer and a buyer needs to understand what the potential is of the business in order to pay the highest price for it. And if they don't know the business as well as you do I look at it as we're sort of obligated in our minds to provide them that picture. They can agree or disagree and we can structure a deal accordingly but unless we have a common view of what we think reality is in the future that's really the only effective multiple that they can use to calculate their return on their investment. Mark: Yeah. And the phrase I've always used for that is buyers buy for ROI. And you see it's got that rhyme so it's more memorable. Scott: Yeah, I love it. I love it. Exactly. Mark: No one buys a business to lose money. People buy a business because they want to make money. And speaking in the language of the buyer it really does boil down to that and the more firm that we can make that ROI pitch of here's why you're going to see a return on your investment; the more fun you can make that the more certain a buyer is going to be, the more willing they're going to be to pay a higher price for the business. I feel that we spent a lot of time speaking on why and that's my fault here. I want to get into how to do this because it's one thing to say okay here's what my historical sales were and maybe we're going to assume certain growth; I mean what sort of assumptions would you start with when you're doing some forecasting on an Amazon business? And then I'm going to wrap in multiple questions here and just kind of let you go to town on this, how would you do like a new product launch as well? I'm interested in both of those questions; like existing products in the next year and also new product launches. Scott: I got it. So here's the way I think; I'm going to refer to this as the building blocks of a forecast. So the building blocks of a forecast first is an understanding that there are two types of forecasts that you need. One of them is I'm going to refer to it as a product forecast or a product sales forecast and the second one is one I'm going to refer to as a P&L forecast or an overall profit and loss or income statement forecast and here's how they relate together. The first thing that you need to build is you need to build your product forecast which is, in essence, each one of your products. And part of what we've built over the last two or three years is toolsets to do this. But even if you weren't going to use our toolsets and just think about it conceptually every one of your products you need to know what the margin of that product is. You need to understand what the historical sales of that product have been. And then very simply you need to be able to project out; we do it on a per-day basis because that's generally how people think about it and then multiply times 30 but you need to be able to project out how many units per day or per month of each one of my current products am I believing that I'm going to sell. The second thing is most of the time when we build a per product forecast for people and they say that they want to double the size of their business or that they could, the first thing that they realize when they look at all their existing products is that that's not going to get them where they want to go. And that's where new product forecasting comes in. And the way that we do new product forecasting is exactly the same way but we build in what we call a launch budget and then a launch ramp up for each one of those new products. So we'll build in an upfront cost of let's say $5,000 to do giveaways or ads or review gathering; those types of things. And then we'll build in that if I eventually get to 30 units a day of this particular product then it's going to take me four months to get there so we'll start at 10 units then 15 then 20 and then 30 over each particular month. So visually the way it looks is in the product forecasting all of your current products we have out on the top and then down below that over time you have a bunch of zeros but then you eventually have revenue coming in down below that if you list out all of your new products. And that gives you what I refer to as your product forecast. Mark: So how do you project out with some of these products on a per-day basis? I mean obviously; let's say I'm selling 10 units a day right now and I want to get to 17 units per day, where do you look at to say I think I can get here. You have to be looking at; we have to do X, Y, and Z to get here almost working backwards to be able to say we're going to do X, Y, and Z to get here or are you looking at here's what we're doing and here is just kind of the trajectory and where do you see the limit as well? Because that's more aspect of it where if you're doing 10 years a day you might want to sell a thousand per day but that market just isn't there for that. Scott: Yeah. So the way we think about that is first of all you have to look at what the overall market potential is. So pick whatever tool that you want to use. We use Helium10 for example when we say okay if I was in first spot for this keyword, this keyword, this keyword, and this keyword what is really a realistic assessment of how much I could gain? And then let's look at the product trajectory of where this product is at and if we're rank 15 then we believe that we can get; and we usually say start conservative. Start your product forecast on if I could eventually get to the top half of Page 1 but don't necessarily build a forecast based on I'm going to outtake the competitor. A more advanced forecast what we want people to do is literally situate themselves compared to the competition. So it's pretty obvious sometimes when you go into a market and one of the clients I was speaking with yesterday while we're doing our forecasting work he said yeah for me to get to spot one or two is I'm going to have to have literally 4,000 reviews, I'm gonna have to do massive giveaways, so we said really for this product and this keyword and this niche we're going to keep the forecast is based on being in positions 3 to 6. And then let's look at where you're at now and if you're in position 22 but you're working your way out then you can build your forecast up to that particular level. But you really have to do it that way. And then the other key that we really really focused on a lot is every month has a seasonality factor to it. So you have to understand what is your seasonality factors when you're building your forecast. So in our tools for example we have the ability to set up to 12 different seasonalities because we want to basically allow you to understand when it gets to August how much should I order for the holidays or for a lot of people they have summer seasonality when should I place my orders. So you really have to assess not only the units per day but assess the seasonality side of things. And then the only other thing that we look at in terms of building that sort of bottoms-up forecast is don't always plan that a product is always going to stay level. You have to plan sometimes over a two or three year period based on the product life cycle to start to even put in a slight decline. There might be competition there might be price wars and those types of things and I think that's absolutely critical to forecasting because it encourages you to always innovate. Where sometimes people get a few; and I'm sure you've seen this a ton of times, you get a few hero SKUs that are doing great but then they don't invest in new product and we've talked about this before, you have to keep doing that even if you're thinking about selling your business because you can't count on those products always being the big winners that they might be today. Mark: How many influencing variables do you typically look at in a mature forecasting model and are they working together in a formulaic way or are you really just taking more subjective assessments of these things? And what I mean is let's say that you're looking at I know this is what my keyword volume is for particular products, I know what my [inaudible 00:36:08.1] says so I can kind of back into some projected numbers here from just the paid model and here's the organic models so you can almost approach this formulaically or you could sit back and again have more of this the subjective look at all the different factors. Are you taking more of this variable approach? Scott: Yes. So here's what I would say. I look at formulaic as tools that provide insight but do not provide wisdom. You as the owner of your business need to become what I'd refer to as wise. And my way of thinking about it is you have a bunch of data that eventually leads to information that then information leads to decisions and then decisions over time leads to wisdom. And so the way that I think about that is sort of like a pyramid building up. The tools provide you the data and the information but it's your insight and your time and experience that provides the wisdom. So the way that we think about it is every one of your products with our best clients that we force them through the discipline of looking at all of the data out there but committing to units per day in the future going forward on this particular product and think of it as sort of a manual override. All of the forecasting tools out there are great but every one of them every time; and we built all these tools because I built that originally for my Amazon business and eventually what ended up happening in every conversation we have with owners of businesses they say oh yeah I know that I used to do this the last three months but I've really taken a hit. My review rating went down to 4.2 and I lost 20% of my sales. Oh good, then we better put this one down at 20 units a day down from 30 until we feel more comfortable with it. So once you get the process down, that's what I want to encourage people, as you get the process down to where it's a half-hour a week the one that we do that takes an hour a week they have 75 parent SKUs out there and we can go through that in an hour and just yup, yup, yup, yup, and just continually refining what that particular process is. So I always think of it as tools versus wisdom and you need to apply the owner's wisdom to it. That's the only way we've found; same thing with launches you have to build into a launch what do you realistically think that it's going to take. And then oftentimes that's why this cashflow thing is so important is that we have multiple clients that will list out 15 different products that fit the brand. Then we'll look at the cash flow and we'll say here's the first five, the second five, and the third five, and we're going to roll them out over the next year so that you can then implement them in a way that is cash flow acceptable to the business. Mark: How do you recommend people get started? I know we're getting up against the clock here but starting something like this can be terribly daunting because there are just so many factors to be able to consider. Any recommendations on how somebody can start out maybe with some simple forecasting? Scott: Yeah. So here's what I would say there's four levels to forecasting and if you take nothing else from today implement Level 1 which is look at every one of your products, what it's done historically, and implement what you believe that it can do over the next 12 months. And if you want to do it by using the historical sales via ASIN report or the business report that comes out of Amazon for the last month and then just project what that is in terms of units and then in terms of sales build yourself a very simple spreadsheet in order to do that. That will at least start to give you an idea. And if you commit 30 minutes every week to looking at that sheet that you've built and you build that and just continue to update that I guarantee you you'll learn more about your business. So step one is just do that every week. Pick a time that you're not frustrated and you want to just kind of look down and see what the potential of the business is because frankly, that's a pretty exciting goal for you to then say hey if I want to get here; that's what we always…another action we say is you can't manage what you can't measure. So you have to build it to that. Level 2 then is to apply seasonality and new products. So layer on new products you're thinking about and if you don't know what they are right now still layer in I want to release 4 new products in the next year, I'd like to think that they could be as good as my current one's etcetera, etcetera, and then look at your seasonality trends. The next level beyond that and I want to describe this because you do have a lot of advanced sellers that are thinking about selling on this podcast is transition from a product forecast to then look at the rest of your income statement on what I call a percentage of revenue basis and project out that if the revenue doubles or grows up by 20% does my cost of goods sold go up by what percent. And so each one of your line items I always look at it as product costs are 19% of revenue, Amazon selling fee is 15%, FBA is 21% and get to where you can easily know every one of your; overhead and tools is 4%, paid media is 12%, know every one of your numbers on a percentage basis and you'll now have the product forecast and then the budget forecast and you'll be at what I'll call it an advanced level. And then the expert level what we build for people when we want to take them to market is we apply what we call a scenario analysis which is where we're looking at worst case, middle case, best case so that we can show it to a buyer that hey even if this thing doesn't do everything it's still going to have a positive ROI for you. But if it hits either the middle or the advanced case or the more aggressive cases your ROI is going to go up to 70 or 80% IRR. So the most advanced one then is to take a base forecast and then create scenarios and that probably building a toolset to do that all by yourself unless you really like doing that might not make the most sense. There's folks like ourselves or your accountants or other people out there that you probably want to work with but that is sort of the ultimate level because now and my closing comment of this will be relating it all back to the topic of selling your business. For most people, more than 50% of the money ever put in your own pocket will come when you sell your company not when you run it because you're always having to finance your inventory. And forecasting is the simple thing that tells you when is the right time to sell because it answers the question when does my value reach a level at which I go oh wow if I could get that much for my business now is the right time to sell. So we haven't talked about that at all but the number one question you get is the number one question I get; what is my business worth and when should I sell, and is now the right time to sell? Forecasting is the answer to that particular question and not some answer that Scott gives you or Mark gives you. But my goal for everybody on this podcast would be implement forecasting and give yourself some time to get good at it and you'll be able to answer that question for yourself which is a very powerful enabler for your business. So that's why I'm so passionate about the topic because it ultimately answers the question what should I do with this business and when; should I keep it or should I sell it and if so for how much. Mark: And even on top of that I mean Joe says all the time he says don't decide to sell your business plan to sell your business, right? Don't just wake up one day and be like I'm done because you're leaving money on the table; guaranteed you're leaving money on the table if that's the way that you go about it. If you say my goal is to get here to this number then like you're saying you can work towards that goal, you know how to get there, you have a roadmap to get there as well and you know that you're going to maximize the value of your business at the time of the exit which is frankly what most of us want to do. That's usually the goal. Scott, we could talk a lot on this and really get more in-depth. Thank you so much for coming on. I hopefully can have you on in the future we can spend less time on why and more on the how because it seems like we just started to scratch the surface on this but I really appreciate it. Where can people find out more if they want to ask you questions about forecasting or frankly anything else that Northbound does and I'll just make this quick plug; you guys do great work. I love working with you guys. Where can they find out more about you and your group? Scott: Yeah so I'm always happy to answer questions so people that want to get a hold of me individually ScottDeetz@NorthboundGroup.com or if you want to get in contact with us just in general do Info@NorthboundGroup.com and I'm happy to answer any questions. You're right there's just so much to this but it's to me the most powerful thing that can put you in control of your business. So if there are people that are out there that feel like they're kind of bouncing along and they don't really know where their business is going or what its true potential is, forecasting is the thing that gets you back on the horse where you've got the reins firmly in control and you can see your business as opposed to just feeling like you're reacting to what's in the rearview mirror. So thanks for having me on. I look forward to obviously working with you on [inaudible 00:45:28.5]. Mark: Thanks, Scott.   Links and Resources: Northbound Group Email Scott Email Northbound Group

Happy Halloween and Samhain from the Irish & Celtic Music Podcast. FinTan, Poisoned Dwarf, Dylan Walshe, A Campo Traviesa, Alexander James Adams, Ciunas, Hot Griselda, Brendan Monaghan, Moch Pryderi, Flook, The Rogues, Dervish, Cady Finlayson, Heather Dale, Haggis Rampant, Runa I hope you enjoyed this week's show. If you did, please share the show with ONE friend. The Irish & Celtic Music Podcast is dedicated to growing our community and helping the incredible artists who so generously share their music. If you find music you love, buy their albums, shirts, and songbooks, follow them on Spotify, see their shows, and drop them an email to let them know you heard them on the Irish and Celtic Music Podcast. Remember also to Subscribe to the Celtic Music Magazine. Every week, I'll send you a few cool bits of Celtic music news. It's a quick and easy way to plug yourself into more great Celtic culture. Plus, you'll get 34 Celtic MP3s for Free, just for signing up today. Thank you again for being a Celt of Kindness. VOTE IN THE CELTIC TOP 20 With the new year comes a new votes in the Celtic Top 20. This is our way of finding the best songs and artists each year. Just list the show number, and the name of as many bands in the episode as you like. Your vote helps me create next year's Best Celtic music of 2019 episode.  Vote Now! THIS WEEK IN CELTIC MUSIC 0:04 - "A'Soulin'" by FinTan from Excursion 3:50 - WELCOME 4:43 - "The Dark Side of the Mooncoin" by Poisoned Dwarf from Bolt the Door 9:20 - "Death Dance" by Dylan Walshe from All Manner of Ways 12:20 - "A Bruxa (Galicia)" by A Campo Traviesa from The Kid on the Mountain 16:47 - "Samhain" by Alexander James Adams from UnSeelie Self 20:14 - CELTIC FEEDBACK 24:09 - "Uncle Rat" by Ciunas from High Time 26:24 - "The Broken Doll / Sandpipers" by Hot Griselda from Sunbox 30:44 - "The Devil Must Have Sent You" by Brendan Monaghan from Unbroken 32:55 - "Llwyn Onn (Ashgrove)" by Moch Pryderi from Moch IV 36:31 - "Sharig / The Pipers of Roguery / The Huntsman" by Flook from Ancora 41:03 - CELTIC PODCAST NEWS 44:21 - "Hellbound Sleigh" by The Rogues from 25...and Live! 48:54 - "Molly Malone" by Dervish from The Great Irish Songbook 52:29 - "Five Horned Jig" by Cady Finlayson from Celtic Purple 53:47 - "The Morrigan" by Heather Dale from Fairytale 57:04 - "The Pumpkin's Fancy / Andy Renwick's Favourite Ferret" by Haggis Rampant from Burly! Haggis Rampant Plugged In 59:42 - CLOSING 1:01:01 - "Dance in the Graveyard" by Runa from Ten: The Errant Night The Irish & Celtic Music Podcast was produced by Marc Gunn, The Celtfather. To subscribe, go to Apple Podcasts or to our website where you can become a Patron of the Podcast for as little as $1 per episode. Promote Celtic culture through music at http://celticmusicpodcast.com/. CELTIC PODCAST NEWS * Helping you celebrate Celtic culture through music. My name is Marc Gunn. I am a Celtic musician and podcaster. This show is dedicated to the indie Celtic musicians. I want to ask you to support these artists. Share the show with your friends. And find more episodes at celticmusicpodcast.com. You can also support this podcast on Patreon. Subscribe to the Celtic Christmas Podcast. TRAVEL WITH CELTIC INVASION VACATIONS Every year, I take a small group of Celtic music fans on the relaxing adventure of a lifetime. We don't see everything. Instead, we stay in one area. We get to know the region through its culture, history, and legends. You can join us with an auditory and visual adventure through podcasts and videos. Join the invasion at http://celticinvasion.com/ Listen to more about the itinerary on the Pub Songs Podcast. The Celts Invade Venice… Again! THANK YOU PATRONS OF THE PODCAST! Because of Your kind and generous support, this show comes out every week and has done so since 2014. You can pledge a dollar or more per episode and cap how much you want to spend each month over on Patreon. Your generosity funds the creation, promotion and production of the show. It allows us to attract new listeners and to help our community grow. Plus, you get to hear episodes before regular listeners. When we hit a milestone, you get an extra-long episode. We are super close to getting a two-hour instrumental special. I want to thank our Patrons of the Podcast: You can become a generous Patron of the Podcast at http://patreon.com/celticpodcast. I WANT YOUR FEEDBACK What are you doing today while listening to the podcast? You can send a written comment along with a picture of what you're doing while listening. Email a voicemail message to celticpodcast@gmail.com Morgan Presley emailed a photo: "Hi Mark! I first discovered your podcast a few months ago, and I immediately fell in love! I’ve discovered so many new songs and artists, and I look forward to each new episode. Your podcast has now become the soundtrack to my sewing. It’s a lovely addition to my hobby, and makes my weekend afternoons drafting patterns, pinning fabrics, and sewing seams even more enjoyable. I also listen to your instrumental episodes while doing my physics homework. Thanks so much for creating this podcast!"   Debra VanTuyll emailed: "Hi Mark --I was just listening to your podcast while I work on a research grant. Pictures would be way too dull to share. However, I heard you mention not knowing of any Irish bands in Atlanta. I'm sure you know John Maschinot. He has a group that plays some. Then, there's the Atlanta Junior Irish Ceili Band that Katherine Irwin Thomas runs. Over in Augusta, you've got de Ceádaoin, which is also more of a ceili band. We do sessions twice a month, once at each of the two breweries here (come join us if you're in this area. We're at Riverwatch Brewery the last Friday of the month and Savannah River the middle Wednesday of the month) and occasional gigs. We're presently working on a Christmas CD that will feature some little-known Christmas jigs and reels as well as some better known carols. We'll send you a copy when it's out. Also, Lillie Morris has a number of children violin students, and they play occasionally in Harlem. At any rate, my main reason for writing was to let you know that the Irish music scene may be nano-sized in Georgia, but there are a few of us fighting the good fight out here in the hinterlands! Best wishes from east Georgia!" Ed Stoffer responded to a Celtic Music Magazine email: "Hey Marc, Yes I did get all the music downloads. Thanks so much, I've listened to most of them and they are great. I've been listening for a while now, but sure which episode I started on but for at least a couple of years. Thank you for taking the time to produce the podcast. I'm still relatively new to Irish and celtic music, but for the past 6/7 years my wife and I have been regulars at the Iowa Irish fest here in Waterloo Iowa. Some of our favorite artist are Scythian, The Screaming Orphans, Seo Linn, The Gothard Sisters, Gaelic Storm, The Langers Ball, Realta, and JigJam. Thanks again for all the work you do to put the program together." Ravus Caelum emailed a photo: "Mark - Thanks for doing the podcast.  You asked for pictures of us while we're listening, so here's me working on chainmaille and unwinding with some excellent music after work." Sarai Lorenzo emailed: "Hi!  I'm listening to your podcast while working designing books on an editorial. I am from Galicia, Spain, a place that is linked closely to Celtic culture. Thank you for your work, the music and sorry for my english! Keep doing this amazing work!"

AR dragons, psychedelic displays at Coachella, and other digital gizmos made possible with XR technologies are fun and all, but Mark Sage, founder of AREA, is on the more pragmatic side of the table; he loves it when XR technologies can solve real-world problems for businesses. Mark and Alan sit down to discuss how to do that, and how that creates a better ecosystem for enterprise XR to thrive. Alan: Today’s guest is Mark Sage. Mark is a product owner, creator, marketer, innovator, business development professional, evangelist, spokesperson, strategist, program and project manager, and mentor across a range of AR, mobile, B2B and B2C technologies and products in an international context. Mark is currently the executive director of AREA: Augmented Reality in Enterprise Alliance; the only global, membership-funded, non-profit alliance dedicated to helping accelerate the adoption of enterprise augmented reality, by supporting the growth of a comprehensive ecosystem. AREA members include Exxon Mobile, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, NVIDIA, PTC, and so many more. You can learn about The AREA at theAREA.org. It is with great honor that I welcome AREA executive director Mr. Mark Sage; welcome to the show, Mark. Mark: Thanks so much, Alan. It’s great to be here to speak to you, and to those who listen out there, as well. I’m really excited. Thank you. Alan: Thank you so much for joining me. We’re really excited; let’s get right into this. I’m going to start — just, dive right in here — what is one of the best XR experiences that you’ve ever had? Mark: Oh, wow. Gosh. Alan: I know, I’m going right in there. Mark: You are, aren’t you? And in the kind of role I’ve got, I have a huge opportunity to go around the world, experiencing all sorts of different experiences. I guess, when I first started, one of the first things I was amazed about was the DAQRI Helmet, back in the day. I remember first wearing that, probably about three years ago, thinking this would be amazing. It didn’t quite end up as it would be. So, they’re still working on some of the areas there. What I’m really thrilled about is the experiences that really solve problems. Being focused on the enterprise space, I love to see things that are solving real-life problems, here and now. So anything from the simple-yet-effective remote assistance services and applications, I love seeing those; the way that you can engage with an expert, and get real detailed information of how to fix things. I always love trying those things out. I love some of the simple things; I remember being at a shipyard in Finland, and just using a tablet, they were showing me how they look into a new container that had been built, and how they could check what was going on, and using in an eight hour experience to make sure it was all correct. They were cutting down — literally, by hours — the amount of time it took to review things, and make sure it was all set up and stuff like that. Right into the step-by-step innstruction, I always remembered RealWear, when they did their first step-by-step instruction. Doing it in a brewery, and showing how they were moving taps and pipes, and doing work there. So to be honest, anything– Alan: Do you think they did it in exchange for beer? Mark: Well, I hope so! I absolutely hope so. So you know, Alan, anything that shows some real benefit… I love some of the kind of cool stuff, but certainly, my experience in the enterprise AR stuff that actually solves a problem, and creates real benefit for enterprises, is really cool for me. Alan: It’s interesting you mentioned that DAQRI s

AR dragons, psychedelic displays at Coachella, and other digital gizmos made possible with XR technologies are fun and all, but Mark Sage, founder of AREA, is on the more pragmatic side of the table; he loves it when XR technologies can solve real-world problems for businesses. Mark and Alan sit down to discuss how to do that, and how that creates a better ecosystem for enterprise XR to thrive. Alan: Today’s guest is Mark Sage. Mark is a product owner, creator, marketer, innovator, business development professional, evangelist, spokesperson, strategist, program and project manager, and mentor across a range of AR, mobile, B2B and B2C technologies and products in an international context. Mark is currently the executive director of AREA: Augmented Reality in Enterprise Alliance; the only global, membership-funded, non-profit alliance dedicated to helping accelerate the adoption of enterprise augmented reality, by supporting the growth of a comprehensive ecosystem. AREA members include Exxon Mobile, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, NVIDIA, PTC, and so many more. You can learn about The AREA at theAREA.org. It is with great honor that I welcome AREA executive director Mr. Mark Sage; welcome to the show, Mark. Mark: Thanks so much, Alan. It’s great to be here to speak to you, and to those who listen out there, as well. I’m really excited. Thank you. Alan: Thank you so much for joining me. We’re really excited; let’s get right into this. I’m going to start — just, dive right in here — what is one of the best XR experiences that you’ve ever had? Mark: Oh, wow. Gosh. Alan: I know, I’m going right in there. Mark: You are, aren’t you? And in the kind of role I’ve got, I have a huge opportunity to go around the world, experiencing all sorts of different experiences. I guess, when I first started, one of the first things I was amazed about was the DAQRI Helmet, back in the day. I remember first wearing that, probably about three years ago, thinking this would be amazing. It didn’t quite end up as it would be. So, they’re still working on some of the areas there. What I’m really thrilled about is the experiences that really solve problems. Being focused on the enterprise space, I love to see things that are solving real-life problems, here and now. So anything from the simple-yet-effective remote assistance services and applications, I love seeing those; the way that you can engage with an expert, and get real detailed information of how to fix things. I always love trying those things out. I love some of the simple things; I remember being at a shipyard in Finland, and just using a tablet, they were showing me how they look into a new container that had been built, and how they could check what was going on, and using in an eight hour experience to make sure it was all correct. They were cutting down — literally, by hours — the amount of time it took to review things, and make sure it was all set up and stuff like that. Right into the step-by-step innstruction, I always remembered RealWear, when they did their first step-by-step instruction. Doing it in a brewery, and showing how they were moving taps and pipes, and doing work there. So to be honest, anything– Alan: Do you think they did it in exchange for beer? Mark: Well, I hope so! I absolutely hope so. So you know, Alan, anything that shows some real benefit… I love some of the kind of cool stuff, but certainly, my experience in the enterprise AR stuff that actually solves a problem, and creates real benefit for enterprises, is really cool for me. Alan: It’s interesting you mentioned that DAQRI s

A great deal of the businesses we sell at Quiet Light are founded by entrepreneurs looking for the rush of finding the next thing. Sometimes they look to sell because of burnout and sometimes it's just boredom. Today's guest's business is designed to help entrepreneurs really question the goal of the businesses they run. Jason Zook earned social media fame and experienced that burnout while on his first entrepreneurial ride after walking away from his day job. For five years Jason ran IWearYourShirt, creating thousands of videos, photos, posts on social media, and had countless media outlets talking about IWYS during the early days of social media marketing. At some point, Jason realized he had almost created a self-made work prison for himself. He and his creative wife started their company to guide owners towards financial freedom and a business they actually want to work on. Jason's focus is now on working to live rather than living to work. He strives for entrepreneurship with a healthy balance. Episode Highlights: The backstory on Jason's current company, Wandering Aimfully. Why the t-shirt business had to end. The things Jason learned from that business and his subsequent years of starting and growing companies. How Jason and his wife formulated the idea for the business. The importance of setting a mark and working towards it. What the “enough” number means to Jason and his wife. How to create the balance between getting ahead and falling behind. How that balance applies to the business creep that can often take over work-life balance. Ways Wandering Aimfully helps people build their business impactfully based on what they need, How Jason uses challenges to create habits. Transcription: Joe: Most of the businesses that we sell Mark … well maybe not most but a great deal of them are businesses where someone bootstrapped it, put all their energies into it, got it up to a certain level, and then looked around and thought “man, this is kind of work now I'm not loving this day to day anymore; I'm not happy with this challenge and I'm getting burnt out”. It happened to me. I had a cushy gig, I was working 20 hours a week, easy business, recurring revenue, and I looked around and said this isn't fulfilling me, I'm burnt out I need to move on. A lot of buyers that are from the corporate world don't understand that. Those people that are in the entrepreneurial world know that they need that new challenge, that exciting challenge. And as I understand it you had Jason Zook on the podcast; a husband and wife team actually and they talked about working to live not living to work and trying to overcome that burnout challenge. Mark: Yeah, Jason got completely burnt out with one of his 1st businesses and one of his 1st businesses; really simple concept, he would wear a t- shirt that was a sponsor. It would be their company on the t-shirt and he would wear a t- shirt every single day and put up a YouTube video of that and the prices increased every single day for that sponsorship. And so as he put it he said I was doing daily videos before Casey Neistat made that cool to publish daily videos on YouTube. He said it was great initially and he was making money by just wearing t-shirts and having people follow him around with cameras. But then this organization grew and it grew more and more and his whole life every single day was being documented and he built this prison. And I think as entrepreneurs a lot of us can relate with this idea that you build prisons sometimes for yourselves with the businesses that we've built. And so he naturally got completely burned out on that and now his whole focus and life as entrepreneurship but with a healthy balance in that life and understanding what are the real goals of your life. What do you really need and why are you doing what you're doing? And I think these are really important lessons for all of us just to keep in mind and have as a focus when we're pushing that entrepreneurialism envelope like why are we pushing growth, why are we adding this new feature to our business, and really understand what is our goal as an entrepreneur? Maybe you want to be a billionaire and if that's your goal all right then go for it but I think most of us get into this entrepreneurship game for the lifestyle. We get into it for the freedom. We get into it to be able to do what we want to do by our own rules. So are we actually doing that? Are you doing that? And is what you're doing fulfilling you today? So this whole podcast … Jason is somebody that I did not know before this podcast. He and I had never talked before and … just a fascinating guy, an absolutely magnetic personality so I'm excited to share this interview with everyone today. Joe: I don't think we can have enough people on the podcast talking about work life balance. We had Ezra Firestone; Ezra's got a staff of 25 or 30 VA's working all over the world and his work life balance is his primary focus. He and his wife they've got a certain lifestyle that they want to live and he is growing the business but at the same time making sure everybody within the business understands that work life balance. So I'm excited to hear what Jason has to say, it's always interesting to hear somebodies approach in what they do on a day to day basis. Let's go right to it. Mark: Jason, I'm super excited to have you on the podcast. Thank you for agreeing to come on here based off a completely cold and random e-mail that I sent to you. Jason: It was a good cold and random e-mail. As someone who has sent thousands of cold and random e-mails in my time as an entrepreneur, it was a good one. You didn't just kind of like lay out exactly what you wanted, you were kind, you were nice, you really presented yourself well and I was like yeah I'll say yes to this interview. I have no idea who you are, we're meeting for the 1st time in this conversation which I think is fun. Mark: Yeah absolutely and I'll tell you why I wanted to have you on the podcast. I think I said it in an intro e-mail that I sent to you. But on your website, you and your wife have a phrase on there and it's actually one of the core values that I consider my company Quiet Light Brokerage to have and that is that we work so that we can live we don't live so that we can work. This idea that hey we're entrepreneurs, we get obsessed, we love the grind, we like that sort of thing but at a certain point it's got to have something else beyond just the work itself; right? Jason: Yeah. Mark: I would love to get your story, have you share your story real quick with the listeners as to how you kind of came about this with Wandering Aimfully and this new mission that you and your wife have. Jason: Yeah sure. My entrepreneurial journey actually started kind of way late in life for a lot of people who are entrepreneurs like had lemonade stands and they like went door to door and did all those things and started businesses super early; I didn't. I started my 1st business when I was 27 on a whim after leaving a full time job that I in all essence liked it just was a very boring job and I didn't see a lot of potential for myself there. And I really felt this drive and this pull to do something better and something else. I started my own design company. It was just two people and from there I had this kind of crazy idea to get paid to wear t-shirts for a living for no reason whatsoever other than I just thought social media is kind of growing. This was 2008, 2009 I just … I don't know there was just something about it that seemed interesting to me and it struck me one day when I was literally standing in my closet looking at all these clothes that I had paid brands to own and then walk around and kind of schlep and promote. I was like wait why am I doing this? This is so weird. Could someone just pay me to wear their shirt? So that idea did not take off. I launched a website called iwearyourshirt.com five people showed up on the 1st day. I think three of them were my grandmother like refreshing the page, no joke. And then I really had to start doing the entrepreneurial kind of hustle and sprint that we all do to get things started. I was e-mailing friends and family and I was getting on Twitter and jumping in conversations back when Twitter wasn't just a barrage of political nightmare that it is now and that's not to say there's not some still good stuff on Twitter but this was 2008 so it's very different; a very small community. And yeah that idea just kind of took off on its own after a lot of hard work putting in a daily YouTube video. So I recorded 889 videos straight every single day before vlogging was a thing before Casey Neistat was recording videos and we were all watching them and loving them all I was making really terrible videos every day. But yeah that led into a couple of different ventures along the way. I created a software company to help people build and sell online courses because I wanted to build and sell online courses I just wasn't a good one at the time, a couple of other little random things and then yeah just a couple of weird different changes and ebbs and flows. My wife actually worked for my I Wear Your Shirt business and when that had to shut down in 2013 after 5 years she was kind of left with like I don't wanna go back to the nine to five world, I'm going to start my own business as well and so she started a business. So we kind of worked like 12 feet from each other but we always chatted and then we kind of came back together this past year on this Wandering Aimfully project. Mark: So why did the t-shirt business has to end? Jason: So many factors that we can dive into, I'll lay down on the couch and we can talk about them all. Truthfully it was my 1st business and I think so many people can resonate when you start your 1st business you don't know what you don't know. And I didn't know about managing people, I didn't know about managing money, the pricing scheme of I Wear Your Shirt was very poorly designed for paying people at a consistent salary. So the 1st year it was just myself and it was a dollar on the 1st day, $2 in the 2nd day, $3 in the 3rd day and so that pricing scheme is cool because it's so low barrier entry in the beginning and towards the end of the year once you build momentum it makes sense and it adds up. It made $66,795 in the 1st year which is really cool. But when you have five employees as I grew the company too because I thought I had to scale up, I thought I had to grow, I'm reading and watching all of the things that we're all reading and watching and I'm thinking that's what I have to do. I ended up having $30,000 in salary in January when my business only made $800. That doesn't work out well and so it was just a lot of those things where I just was so new to things; we had billables, we were printing all of the t-shirts through an outsourced printing service. I didn't know about just like paying invoices and all those things and so I got very back on bills and I actually built up a $100,000 in debt not overnight but in about a year and a half and it just it was so crazy to me because Mark it went from I was making almost $100,000 with literally no expenses, literally getting e-mails from PayPal like “hey there's a $100,000 in your PayPal account what's going on” to people e-mailing me and going “hey what's going on you can't pay your bills or you're 30 days late in your bills”. And so eventually I just saw the writing on the wall and I was just like this isn't sustainable. I tried this thing, it kind of grabbed its moment in time in social media and the landscape of it and I just wanted to move on to other things plus I really overworked myself every single day running the business, wearing a shirt, managing people, doing all of the marketing and sales and interviews and things. It was just time at the end of five years to move on. Mark: Five years is a long time to be wearing other people's shirts. Jason: And I'm still wearing other people's shirts if you think about it I'm just not talking about them at all. And almost none of them have a brand name on them because I'm just so burnt out from that. But yeah I actually don't regret any of it. I think I learned so many unbelievably important valuable lessons that I continue to use to this day in everything that I do. So while it ended not on a wonderful note and I don't feel like I have like this crazy awesome success story I also have a really relatable story that so many business owners can kind of stand behind me or stand with me and go “yeah my 1st business didn't do well either or my 2nd, or 3rd, or 4th it fizzled out or I didn't manage it properly” and you just learn from those experiences and you kind of take those with you and you kind of take your lumps and move forward. Mark: Yeah you know I would disagree I actually think the idea that you were able to take something as simple as wearing a t-shirt and having somebody paying for that and turning that into something that actually generated revenue is pretty remarkable. Now obviously is it sustainable, eventually, you're going to run into the problem that you ran into which is I don't want to wear your shirt anymore and I don't want to be on TV … have a video done every day and everything else that you ran into. You said something in there in that story that you were reading and listening to what everybody else was reading and listening to, there's a sort of like momentum that's out there in the business community where there is this almost like a psych guy stuff here's what you should be doing and it's all towards drive, drive, drive, grind, grow, expand, and all this sort of stuff. What are some of the things you've learned over the years with all the different ventures that you've been in about listening to that or not listening to it? Jason: The 1st one is more money more problems and as silly and as dumb as that sounds it's true. I mean it's just I don't know any business owners that have taken their business from one level to another level whatever that means and not encountered so much more work, so much more stress, so much more all of the things. And I saw that with myself like in that 1st year of I Wear Your Shirt I was making almost $100,000 because I had some other sponsorship stuff in there. There was literally almost no stress. I mean the daily creativity and all the things I had to do was a lot of work but in the 3rd year of I Wear Your Shirt when I had five employees, we had five sponsors per day, we made almost $600,000 that year; I was so much stressed. It was a nightmare almost. And I'll tell you I made $30,000 that year. I got paid the least as the person who was doing the most. And I think so many people can relate to that and so I just saw all of these things that I was latching onto of like I wanted a million dollar business what does that mean? I wanted this big house, why? I don't need a big house, I actually like having a small place where I know where everything is and I don't have a lot of stuff. And so I really just started to look at a lot of these different values that I was buying into or believing into especially the ones that society puts pressure on you and when you read Entrepreneur.com, or Business Insider, or Forbes, or whatever you're reading we all read these stories of millions and billions and all this stuff. It's like where are the people who are just making $100,000 or a couple $100,000 or $50,000 that are super happy? And it's because those stories don't sell. Those headlines don't get clicked and I really just started to reevaluate all these decisions and it was through a lot of conversations with my wife and we just kept saying this phrase what is it all for? Like what is all of the work for, what is all of the time for, what is all the energy being put into this for if at the end of a day or the end of a week or a month or a year you're so tired and you don't enjoy the life you've created? Why are we doing that? I should just go get a nine to five job at Target and clock in and clock out and leave and that's it like I don't even think about it. And so I do think there's just a lot of misnomers that go on with this like buying into up into the right mentality and you should always be growing and social media landscape can change so you got to grab all the Facebook advertising stuff you can do. It's like no you don't have to do that. You build the business around the life that you want and you really figure out what that means to you and I think that's so personal and subjective to everybody that's starting a business. Mark: At what moment of your life did you really start to formulate that when you and your wife were thinking what are the values that we actually want to have? Because look I agree with you 100%, this idea of I want a million dollar business and once I get a million dollar business I want a 10 million dollar business. When I talk to some of our clients, some of the people that are preparing to sell and I ask them what are your goals, why are you thinking about selling? Because one of the things that I try and impress especially on sellers … I'll tell you a quick story here; the 1st client that I worked with, a good friend of mine he had a company and he came in and said “Hey would you help me sell my business?” Well this is how Quiet Light Brokerage started and I went through the process, we got it sold. I won't say exactly for how much but you know what he was in financial trouble just a couple of years later. He gave up a lifestyle business for a big pile of cash today thinking this is going to set me free only to find out that he was back in the grind that he was in before. And so I'm curious from your standpoint what was it where you started to question that up until right mentality and same maybe it's on up into the right maybe it's whatever is right in front of me today? Jason: Yeah it's funny I get chills because I think back to the exact moment. I was in Fargo, North Dakota speaking at a very small conference called Misfit Con; they don't even do it anymore. And this is like literally 120 people and I was a speaker. No one knew who the speakers were so it's just a group of us sitting in this really cool yoga studio actually kind of converted into this space. A guy stepped on stage and he had well-coiffed hair and he had skinny jeans and he had really nice boots and I'm like this guy's going to tell me all the secrets that I need to know to succeed. And he started telling the story and it was eerily similar to mine of trying to grow, being focused on the money, the big house, the things, the stuff and I come to find out that was Joshua Fields Millburn of The Minimalists and his story was so akin to mine. And then when he started talking about these specific values and these specific things and really questioning all of the stuff that we buy into both societal and personal and these things it really hit me. It hit me hard sitting there and I remember sitting with my wife at the time just looking at her and going like uh-oh we got to rethink everything. And I think I spoke like two or three spaces after him and I just remember spilling my guts about how everything wasn't perfect at the time for my I Wear Your Shirt business and yet I was there to talk about this is a business that was supposedly doing so well. And that flight home after that conference we basically sat down and were just like what do we actually need to live? What do we want our lives to look like? Then those questions are so big and they're so heavy and they're scary because you tend to find yourself thinking well if I'm going to make a decision that's the decision forever. That's just not true. It can be a decision for the next three months, six months, a year, two years, five years, whatever it is and we've changed so much in that time since that conversation; that was 2012, 2013 and it's just been really big for us too at every turn and every opportunity where we can do more or we can sell more or make more is to ask ourselves hold on what is this going to add to our plate. And just like your story with the client that you worked with I find that question to be so interesting to me, I was like if I sell a business or anything I'm a part of, like I have a software company, the online course business, like if I sold that business and I made X amount of money from it what would I do with that time? I like working on that business. I actually enjoy it and I want to invest in it and so if I just sold it for a small chunk of cash which is a sizable chunk of cash, in a long term it's not really that big of a chunk of cash I'm going to have to start over. And I think we see that with so many people and you suppose this way more than I do but so many people sell a business that they actually enjoyed working on only to then find themselves a couple of months or years later bored out of their minds wishing they had something that fulfilled them to work on every day. And that for me is kind of where this comes from too of like I want to make enough money that we don't have to think about money and truthfully we're not there yet. We don't make enough money every month. We were just like we don't care about money but we've set what mark looks like and we're working toward that mark. We call that our enough number and once we hit that number we're just going to stop trying to make money. And you are going to have to fill in gaps [inaudible 00:08:45.1] we have a lot of monthly recurring business stuff. And so it's always going to be a game to just kind of stay around that enough number but I love the work that I'm doing so I'm happy to do that. Mark: How would you balance out the difference between … I think there's two motivations for working hard, right? One is to get ahead the other one is to not fall behind. Jason: Yeah. Mark: Because oftentimes in business I've seen it some of our clients that come to us with distressed businesses where they got to that enough number or probably more than enough and then they're like I made it and then they relaxed and then a year later they're thinking oh my gosh my business just completely fell apart underneath me. How would you approach that in your own life when you get to that stage of having enough to make sure that you're also not necessarily falling behind? Jason: Yeah I think it really depends on your lifestyle and I think lifestyle creep is such an interesting idea that we all run into and just like you started saying earlier it's like well you create a million dollar business and then you want to make a 10 million dollar business or even just a two million dollar business and the reason that that tends to happen is not because you need that money, you don't need the money, it's that you go oh well now I can afford this and so now I'm going to … I need more money to kind of balance that out. And so I think for Caroline and myself, my wife, we really just started to try and define what are the things that we love and want in life and if we don't have those now what does it actually take to get those things? And to really put a price tag on those and then to question those things and to go … for one thing for us has been looking at buying or building a dream home and for most people, that's in like the millions of dollars. For us, I think we could actually do it for a couple hundred thousand dollars. Like we just want a 1200 square foot cool modern pretty fab place and we keep going through the effort of that and just going you know what though the cash that it would take up from for it, the time and stress to deal with everybody building all the things right now in our lives it just doesn't fit. And it may be something we do down the road but it just is not … I don't want to creep into that and have that completely change our life. So to answer your question I really think it's about checking in constantly with the things that matter to you and then really questioning every single one of those things and just going like do I need more money to do this or do I just need to change something in my life or change something in the way that I operate because I kind of … I tend to find for myself at least like flexibility and control of my time is the number one thing I want. Of course, I want more money in the bank but if I can make a little bit less money and have a little bit more time because I'm not working to make more money I'm happier because I can then choose my schedule every single day of my life. I don't have to give up and sacrifice things at the whim of making money and that to me becomes a really important discussion to constantly be having with yourself and thinking about. Because just like you said with that client you can reach your enough number and then just fall back and go okay I'm good like I don't have to do anything anymore and it's like yeah but that's not how business works. You just don't get to a finish line and then you're done and you won the race. You kind of have to stay in the race at a certain point and you find that pace that you can kind of go at that makes sense with you. Mark: Yeah I think something that's interesting with business as well because you talk about lifestyle creep and that's obviously a problem. I think anybody can relate with that but there's also business lifestyle creep that I've found where when you start up a new business some of it … a lot of it is bootstrapping, you're going out there and you're figuring out how am I going to make this business work with whatever little money I have and then you get that client they pay you less money and like awesome I can now pay for ads. It how you start paying for ads, you have an ad budget and then you hire a few employees and now have those employee … the next thing you know your monthly budget is ramping up and you have the added stress of I got to keep layering on more and more revenue to be able to cover this monthly budget as well. I think it's an interesting concept to say core value is both for the business core value is also for yourself and keep reminding yourself of those core values in order to stay true to that and have a balanced life. That's what you question, just kind of riffing on what you're saying there. Jason: No and I do think it's a really valid one because we've thought about that. My wife and I, we live and work at home so where we would have a dining room table we have our desks and it's been that way for the past six years, five years something like that. And for a lot of people that would probably be the worst thing ever. They'd be like oh I don't want to look at my work I want to be completely separate so I need an office or I need a studio or whatever. And so I do think there are some decisions you could make for your business being separate from your life if that really matters to you. For us we run very creative businesses, we love the community that we built so I don't hate my e-mail inbox. I don't loathe looking at these things so for us it is such a blend and lifestyle career business creep for us would potentially be like oh we want like a really cool office base like we've talked about this before. And it's like yeah but we have that in our home it's just not a full dedicated space and we don't actually need that. So it's continuing to come back to that and then honestly I think a big part of it too is not watching all of the videos and reading all the stories of the cool office spaces. Because then you just get stuck in that mode of like oh yeah but I really want a ping pong table and the full living wall and it's like I don't need that. That's just a cool thing and I can appreciate someone else having that. Mark: I do want to nap pad. I'm just going to say it like I want a nap pad in my office because that would be awesome. I've got a glass door you can actually see it. If you're listening in your car you can't see it of course but I have a glass door behind me so I can't really take naps in my office. Let's talk a little bit about your community. I love what you guys are doing with the community over at WanderingAimfully.com. Tell me a little bit about it and who it's targeted towards and what the whole purpose of this is. Jason: Yeah I think it's a really good question of who it's targeted toward because when we started to blend Caroline and mines two businesses together in March of 2018 … and actually the conversation started many months before that. We weren't sure who to target because her business was targeted to soulful creatives which is kind of general in a way and my business was targeted to business owners who just want to get better at taking action. Again very general audience it's not like stay home moms who love to cook vegan meals. It's like it's not as focused as it could be. And so when we started Wandering Aimfully it was very generic of like independent creative business owners and that's designers, musicians, artists, [inaudible 00:24:57.5] and we really found that it was tough to get people to identify of like hey I'm raising my hand I fit within Wandering Aimfully. They kind of felt like they did but it just wasn't kind of niche enough if you will. And so in the past couple of months we really decided to hone in further on okay who have we attracted over the years that we've made the most impact for? And what we found is that that's service based business owners or like client based business owners; so that is your designers, that's your developers, that's your coaches, that's people who have clients and that they want to move away from selling their time one on one to building digital product businesses. So it's having online courses, books, workshops, membership communities of their own whatever that is. And we went back to the root of what did we do when we were getting started and that's exactly what we did. We were service based business owners and we wanted to stop trading our time for money and we want to try and reach more people and make more of an impact based on what we had learned and experienced. And so now that's essentially who Wandering Aimfully is for and there are some fringe benefits to people who are not those people but if you run a service business and you want to transition into selling digital products we're the perfect community for you because we ourselves have had that exact experience. We know exactly how to help you. We built now a six months program that helps people really do that without burning out because we just decided the people need to slow the hell down and not try and transition their entire business in 24 to 48 hours or a couple of weeks. And it's been really interesting to shift the focus on this is exactly who we are for and it's a smaller audience and you have people who self-identify much faster than we did before where people are like I don't know if it's right for me it's like now they know that it's right for them and then for everybody else they can still kind of try and figure out if it's right for them but we can now more clearly identify. Mark: That's pretty cool. I've kind of poked around through your website and you guys have all sorts of prepackaged courses and checklists and everything else. One thing I love about this and I can relate with buyers who are acquiring a new business or anyone growing a business as well you get into something and there's a sense of I've got to be doing all the things all right now. I got to have my Facebook marketing strategy, do some CRO, get an Instagram account going because it doesn't have that and it's this long list of things and you're going to just kill yourself in trying to do that. What you guys have through this community, I saw you have a bunch of checklists and action plans for some pretty normal things that a lot of different companies are going to have to deal with as well. And it seems like the entire goal and correct me if I'm wrong but the entire goal is just that breaking up these projects into bite sized pieces. Jason: Yeah absolutely and we just want to help people navigate. Like you said when someone is running a business or starting a business or making that transition from clients to products there's a lot that can be done and really what we try and do because it's what we've done for ourselves is to identify what do you need to do. Like what is actually going to make an impact? Because for so many people a Facebook ad campaign or an Instagram account is not at all what they should be focusing on. What they should be focusing on is creating some type of really valuable content that can be searched for on the internet because Google is still the number one place that people go on the internet and that is not going to change for quite a while. And so we've just seen through a lot of experience that people want the shiny new and fancy and we've been there as well, we've been one of those things too but you find that they actually don't make that big of an impact on your business and it's a lot of time spent without a lot of return. And listen I'm all for branding, I'm all for hitting the word out about your business and going where people's attention is but I think that there's a lot to be said for having a good foundation for your business, making sure that your ducks are in a row and so much and you probably see this so often is as business owners a lot of times we don't even know the basics of expenses and cash flow and I know that stuff can sound really silly to people like oh how do you not know that? It's because it's different for every business. So what we're taught about how to run a business may not be applicable to the business we actually create and start. And so I think that so much of that we've seen is just trying to help people navigate their own journey based on our experiences, experiences of community members, identifying bigger tasks like you said that people want to do like if you want to start a podcast that's a pretty big task. There's a lot of things that go into that that you don't see and so we've broken it down. I think it's in like I don't know … I want to say less than 100 steps and that sounds like a ton but some of the steps are like name your podcast step cool, check it off the list. But it gives you this incredible bite sized thing and people find it so helpful to just have this list to be able to like yes I did that, yes I did that, and go through and knock it all out as opposed to having to think of everything themselves. Mark: Yeah it reminds me of a couple of other episodes that we did here at the Quiet Light Podcast. One was with Bjork Ostrom who owns Food Blogger Pro and a few other pretty big food blogs and he talked a lot about … he's grown that company from nothing into a significant enterprise and he talked a lot about this idea of I'm not going to try and double my business tomorrow. I'm going to try and have this single daily marginal improvement and the compound in effect of this on a day to day basis. The other person … you talked about going back to the basics and focusing on those things that really work well the person you're agreeing with right now Babak Azad who grew Beach Body into a billion dollar business that was on the podcast and he told me … he said people are focusing on way too many advertising channels. He said that you should really be focusing on just a few; probably one, maybe two because if you're focusing on six that means you're not doing any of them well. You've got to focus on those basics so I think that's fantastic advice. Okay, I'm going to round this out with a final question here for you and this is really the content on your site. I absolutely love … I've always liked this kind of I'm doing this productivity experiment or just whatever sort of experiment. Jason: Yeah. Mark: You recently rode a stationary bike at your standing desk for 30 days and I haven't read how it finishes out but how did that go? Jason: Cliff hanger, okay, so the reason why I did this experiment … why I love doing 30 day challenges specifically is because it's just like you said with like you do these little daily things that can add up and incrementally make a big change or make a big impact. And it's hard to change, it's hard to build habits, it's hard to do those things and I highly recommend a book Atomic Habits by James Clear; a friend of mine and just a super smart guy when it comes out. So if anybody is like I'm bad at habits James will help you, that book is really great. But for me, I just always like breaking these things down into 30 day challenges. So to round this out I rode a stationary bike at my standing desk every single day for 30 days. I just wanted to know could I get a little bit of exercise every day because I'm just at my desk. I didn't want to sit at my desk and do those things and I ended up burning 18,339 calories in 30 days. It's insane. And I wrote this at the end of the thing and I talked about this in the video that I kind of recapped and put it all together it did not feel like I was working out. It felt like I was sitting at my desk very slowly methodically riding this bike while doing e-mails and bunch of other admin tasks and the average amount of time that I rode the bike a day was one hour. It didn't feel like I was riding an hour because I would break it up into different chunks throughout the day. I rode an average of 25 miles a day and at the end of it my pants fit better, I had more energy every day, and it really became a good solid habit for me. So it was super … just a weird random thing I wanted to do but now like I still have the bike we're now a couple of weeks after that I've finished up I'm still riding it. It's great. My wife is starting to ride it and it's just one of those things that's like challenge yourself to do something for 30 days that you might think is weird or out there are different and see what kind of tangible result you get cumulatively over the time and you might realize like wow yeah in a couple of days of course I didn't get like six pack abs from riding this bike but I think if I do this for six months I'm probably going to be in a better shape than I would have been than just if I'd continue doing at the gym and eating better and all those things. Mark: That's fantastic. I absolutely love everything that you guys stand for. I think it's so easy for all of us entrepreneurs to build businesses but at the same time build little prisons for ourselves as well because we get so driven by productivity when we worship at that altar and then also by just having more and more and more instead of thinking about like you said at the beginning that focus on the goals and ask yourself a question and I'm encouraging everyone listening that's thinking about buying a business or maybe you want to sell the business or you're building something right now to ask those questions; why, for what, what are your goals, what are your values, what do you value in life, a really good advice. Jason: Yeah, absolutely. Great chatting with you. Mark: Thanks for having … thanks for coming on I should say. Way to end that professionally. Alright, thanks for having … for coming on Jason. Jason: Yeah no problem.   Links and Resources: https://wanderingaimfully.com/ Atomic Habit

The week...we decided to wing it. We didn't have a guest booked so just invited whoever was close on to the podcast and frankly, we had a blast! No agenda, nothing to plug apart from our sponsors and our own stuff. We talked about Tony Robbins, Santorini, Interesting Facts and how crap our theme tune is (according to Mark) Thanks this week go to Mark and Rob (and briefly Lacey) for joining us, and to Harpers events (@harpersevents), Crown the Colony (@crownthecolony) and PacVan (@thepacvan) for throwing us some coinage and love!

What are the different aspects needed to grow a sustainable business that is transferable and valuable? Today's episode is all about planning a successful strategic exit plan when selling your business.  Whether it be online, offline, or hybrid, how you lay the foundation for your business is the key to a smooth transaction even before you start the process of selling. We are talking with Ryan Tansom, a fellow podcaster, consultant, and successful business seller all about how he turned his sale into a springboard for helping others accomplish a great exit. Episode Highlights: How a strategic exit compare to a financial exit. Figure out how to align growth strategy with exit strategy in order to get what you want out of the deal while taking into account the financials, the company culture, and the potential legacy involved. When an offer comes to the table it is important to weigh all the variables. Think about any way that the buyer can do to add to his profitability. Show them all the things the things they can do and package it up for them. Network early and often with people who align their motives with yours. Make sure you know what the buyer's business continuity goals are. From knowing their goals you can come up with ways to fill their strategic plan. Understand the industry on both sides of the transaction so that you can design how the business can look for a strategic exit. Prepare early for the sale of a business so you don't get any nasty surprises during due diligence or negotiation. Ryan lays out the framework of a strategic sale. When strategic exits work and when they don't. Transcription Mark: Joe, how are you? Joe: I'm good, feeling old and tired but pretty good how about you? Mark: You are old and tired and I'm catching up quickly. Joe: But I'm not cold it's 63 in North Carolina today and you going to get snow this weekend right? Mark: Stop it, Stop it, by the time this episode airs it's going to be a beautiful year and I will no longer be recording episodes, I'll be outside enjoying it. Joe: Yes. I mean 36. Mark: Something like that, alright when we talks to people that want to sell their business, pretty common scenario, they're looking for a strategic exit or maybe they'll say, you know, we go to the whole valuation process and then they come back and then say “I've got a couple of companies of mine that might be really good fits to acquire the business right?” Nothing about strategic. I'm sure you get the pretty often on your side. Joe: Sure. Yes. Mark: Yeah, right. So strategic, how do you actually do them? Are they worth it? Do we actually get more money from them? That is the subject of today's interview. I sat down with Ryan Tansom. Ryan has his own podcast which we talk about a little bit, but he's got a really cool story, he and his dad were in business together in a traditional offline business. They are selling copiers and had all sorts of contracts there. And they went to the process of merging that company with another one. They first try to sell the company, and found out how difficult it was, then they spent some time retooling in and really planning their exit, and after they've retooled and planned their exit they were able to do a deal in just a few weeks. So his whole thing right now is to help people plan their exit and build value on the business at the same time, but I wanted to talk to him about how do you plan an exit if you want to do a strategic sale? Does that make sense? That you actually get more money from it and what are the chances that's going to happen? This is a fascinating conversation. Joe: Good. One thing that most people don't do, and that's plan their exit. They usually just wake up one day and decide, “I'm tired I want to sell the business I'm ready to move on, So you know I've talk to Ryan a number of times and I think He's life experience, what he went through  with his business with his father trying to sell finding, it was difficult and then actually putting a plan together and deciding, when he executed that plan and he'd sold the business very quickly and I think to a strategic buyer. He learned a lot and he's sharing that with people now. So It's nice that he's got the first hand experience in the sharing with people and I think he does a really good job at it. Mark: Yeah, and so in this we're going to talk about what do you need to do to get strategic exit setup and not surprisingly, it's a lot of the same stuff you have to do  if you're going to have a financial exit or a regular market type sale. Just take a little more upfront work and we talk about the chances of it actually happening. I also talk about how that it's not always the best thing. The very first business I sold went itself to a strategic exit. We ended going to a financial buyer because they actually got more money from it so we talk little about that as well. Well we get on into it because it's a lot good mini topics in this episode. Joe: Let's do it. Mark: Ryan, hey how are you? Ryan: Good Mark, how are you doing? Mark: Thanks for joining me. It's been a while since you and I met, well I think we're just talking about this a year and a half ago or something like at Caribou Coffee here in the Twin cities. Yeah you're local to me which I like. Ryan: I know we're local yet we're sitting here on video right? Mark: We should've done the very first podcast with [inaudible 0:03:58] and where he would have be like saddled up right next to me. Alright cool, well on our podcast we like to better a guest introduce him selves, probably because we're really lazy and don't like to do the upfront research but also because guest  do a better job at introducing themselves. So could you introduce yourself a little bit to our listeners? What is your story, what's your background and why are we talking. Ryan: Yeah, I appreciate it, I'm glad to be on the show I'm usually the one doing the interviewing so this is actually a lot of fun. So Ryan Tansom, my Dad and I had a family business kind of a little bit of backdrop back in 2014 we end up selling it. He grew it from the ground up, bought a semi [inaudible 0:04:32] of copiers in the mid 90's and ended up growing a very substantial business that I think we've topped for about 20 million and a hundred employees, and I joined the firm full time in financial crisis, and it was pretty much lot of all hands on deck for the seven years I was there. It was.. We realized that company was not sellable  because there's a private equity firm that was buying out platform companies in each marketplace, and we have the opportunity of potential to be one of those, and they passed on us so we spent pretty much in next 6 years, 7 years going. Okay what do we need to do to build a sellable business that either I buy it or we sell it to someone else we didn't really know what were options so we just roll up our sleeves and did a bunch of stuff. Build out the outsource, the IT. Remarketed ourselves, did a bunch of stuff, and then in 2014 ended up selling it to a local competitor here which the sale went very well financially, but we left a lot of money in the table from a lack of tax planning and some other deal structure that things we could done creatively, and then also we found out a strategic sale like that that there's a lot of redundancies, so I ended up having to fire a lot of my good friends, and family and the employees, so since then I've been in a mission to figure out how do you align your grow strategy with your exit strategies so that you will get what you want, regardless whether it's financial or you know, anything associated with your business that you know, whether it's legacy or culture, and stuff like that. Hopefully I sent too much but it's definitely the backdrop of why I'm doing what I'm doing. Mark: Alright so there's a lot that we can unpack here and we're going to have try to pick a branch and go with it, because I think there's a lot that we can unpack here. Business that you and your dad sold, this is more of a traditional offline business right? copier sales? Ryan: Yeah, where on we have15 sales representatives that were knocking on the doors and I wish we would have done something that would have been a hybrid, and we would have probably gone that direction, had we, continue grow on the business, but I think, you know, every offline businesses, which is what we were, has the opportunity to have the hybrid online stuff that a lot of that community that you're involved and I'm involved you know. Mark: Yeah, I think a lot of the online community is moving towards this more traditional business model, at least in the E-Com Space and you've seen it all. So in the and largest as company, because they do develop our staffs and in onboarding, customer service and all that. So similar to your stuff.. So I guess, let's talk first about the fact that you left money on the table, with your.. You spent six years trying to hammer the business industry, I think there's a discussion in there on it's own, like, how do you line your crawl strategies and your business strategies with an extra strategy, but I like to know a little more about the money on the table. A lot of times when we say people leave money on the table, that's because they have maximized the sale price of their business, but were there other areas where you've guys felt that you left money on the table? Ryan: You know, I think yeah, there's a lot of different variables in this, and you know, I've got a Podcast too. I've interviewed lots of entrepreneurs that have soul and I've tried to unpack this exact topic as well and there's the “Hey there's a price so I might want to give you 2 million dollars for your business” it doesn't mean that you're getting 2 million bucks because you're paying taxes, so there's the whole deal structure whether it's asset sales or stock sales, or how the deal structured from earn outs, from an SBA loan financing, whatever it is, you know, when someone starts courting you, whatever dollar amount is thrown out, there's a lot after the fact than what actually comes in your bank account. So whether that's a tax planning, the deal structure, you know, escrow all that kind of stuff, and then there's the maximize the value of the business, so there's kind of, two different key components to it. Mark: Yeah and I think, just by way of example, within online businesses, say that your [inaudible 0:08:10] corp, and somebody wants to buy your business for 5 million dollars. Great, and they're getting an SBA loan and everything looks good, but then you get to it and at the end of your purchase agreement there's this asset allocation agreement that's to how is this been allocated tax wise, and the buyer says “Well, we want to pay, out of 5 million, we want 1 million to be your salary for the next 2 years for consulting, that's part of the purchase price” well now that comes at ordinary income tax, cruise up your whole tax, percent tax situation.. Ryan: Because you know [inaudible 0:08:41]? Mark: Yeah, how much are you getting from that point, and you're from, for buyers trying to relegate towards income, makes sense because they can learn it off in a way, because they were going towards assets, it's a long period of times that they can make that of. So, there's a lot of, like you said there's a lot more complexities there, in terms of the deal structure. So let's talk about maximizing the value, the dollar amount. Did you feel like you guys left some money on the table with that? Ryan: No, actually we did as much as we could of, because our business naturally.. I got it appearing to what is the, honestly the best kind of business because we had contracts, that were locked in with reoccurring revenue, backed by bank financing, we've bundled them with maintenance, so like, if you want to buy, manage IT services with.. You know, bundle them with servers, firewalls, maintenance, copiers. I mean you'd be bundled in finances and then, it'll be 60 months typically and it'll be in.. It's as good as a mortgage, so when you're looking at what we did and what our industry.. It wasn't something that we were like geniuses or anything, either the whole industry, I've been gone that way and I think the whole industry was built of greedy sales people. In reality it was good as mortgages because you can't cancel. So, it didn't really matter when you think about a strategic sale like that, the relationships of the sales people, the admin, all the infrastructure was redundant. Because we can literally just take a bunch of paperwork and give it to someone else. And so what you're mitigating less on the sale on like the, EBITDA, multiples, because the cash flow is not the situation, it is your Han dinging over contracts. So I don't think there's anything we could have particularly done on that aspect to maximize the sale of the business, but the industry itself taught me, what, “we got lucky, is pretty much what it came to” versus “we could always use other business, where it might be, a 50 million dollar consulting company and there's nothing to sell besides a bunch of people”. So, I realized, after the facts that we got lucky and there's a lot of other ways to maximize the value of the business from the strategic operational side of it. And then it comes down to, we sold a couple of branches prior to selling the corporate headquarters, so the first time we sold our branch we got  about half the price because we didn't have preliminary due diligence done, they didn't trust us, we couldn't get the right documents and all these different things so there was technical stuff on that aspect that we, by that time we ended up selling, we knew what questions are coming at us and why. Mark: How did that impact the price the second time around? Ryan: Second time around when we ended up settled…  I mean we closed in 2 weeks. Mark: I know how. Ryan: Very substantial sale so average closing is, either we talk in months and months and months, either because, we came there with a package and said this is exactly what we have, here's our profitability, here's where every single dime goes in and out of the business, here's why, here's our, I mean employee contracts, customer contracts, lender contracts. I mean everything was just ready, versus the first time and we knew it was like, we're bumbling idiots. Didn't have any clue what they're asking and why. Mark: Yeah, we've created a very simple paradigm at Quiet Light Brokerage that we call the 4 pillars of value and that is, look at the risk of your business, the growth opportunities, how transferable it is and the last one would be in documentation. Now I think sometimes people take that documentation that light as to.. Well, it may not really make that much of a difference on the value of the business, it's just going to make it easier, actually makes a difference in the value of the business too. Ryan: 100% yup, I got people that I know, that I've interviewed and talked to, where their value actually went up by 30% because.. But with a click of a button, especially by drop box these days and software where you can, “Hey here's everything” A – you can get more buyers at the table quickly, if you can do that instead of having threads through all these documents, but, you end up as the seller end up guiding the process more than the buyers. Because in the marketplace 90.. No, plus % the time the buyers are coming in there and they're going to find every reason to discount that companies so they can  make in return.   Mark: Right! and on top of that it's risk right? So a buyer takes a little good in business with poor documentation, and they don't know what they don't know. And so they see that as being risky and they will discount an account for that risk as well on the purchase price, and you don't have your stuff together, you can't defend against it. Alright let's talk about strategic sales. Because you guys did a strategic sales and this is something that I find a lot of questions on. First let's talk about what was the difference between a strategic and a marketplace sale in your realm. Ryan: So it's my world it's every world right? So a strategic sale realm, let's start with the financial sale. The financial sale whether it's an ecommerce business or if it's a traditional business or whatever it is, someone's looking for a cash flow. What's transferable cash flow? So if I want to buy Quiet Light, if you guys are dropping a half a million bucks to the bottom line or whatever it is, I want to.. How transferable is that? So that's where the multiple EBITDA comes from. So, if I can buy that chas flow without having any risk that it's going to decline, and you apply a multiple which is how many years, what's my rate of return that I want,  3 years, 5 years, whatever it is, and the more transferable that is the higher the multiple goes up. So, I mean someone that's looking for cash flow as a lifestyle buyer, a private equity buyer, I would say that there's also strategic financial buyers which is someone that understands MNH extremely well and knows how to do this, that's kind of like a hybrid. So they're looking for cash flow and they're applying a rate of return based on the risk of the business and the asset. Then you and this strategic sale which I think is one of the funniest ones because every business owner, every entrepreneur that I sit down in front of, or I talk to, you know your business, you're intrigued better than anybody else out there, right? So you know who you'd partner with, where they collaborations with you, all these different things, and I don't want to say the multiples even they go out the window, but it's more of how fast, in terms of, if thinking of rate of return from 3 years to 5 years, or wherever the buying might be, and the rate of return is, how fast can we pay for that? So regardless of the EBITDA, now you're saying “okay well, are there complimentary products and services? Is there a cross pollination between customer list” Is there horizontal ways, there are vertical ways you guys can expand, and if you can think about everything in the terms of the buyer, the strategic buyer and what they would do with your business, you can literally model it out for them, how fast they can pay you for your company. Mark: Yeah, so this is great. I want to talk about this because we get this question, wow goodness, probably one out of every four or five people that contact us to sell. One of the very first things that they say is “Well I have a few companies of mine that might be a good fit for us” and they're thinking it in terms of that like strategic sale, they think it's going to be much more valuable to them and there is some truth to this the webhosting industry it's a classic example, webhosting, at the very first I sold working with Quiet Light Brokerage, first started Quiet Light Brokerage was a webhosting company, and webhosting company has a tons of roles because it has a bunch of user accounts that is on our servers and it's very easy to migrate that user accounts over to another server, keep the packages the same as really just paste and transfer it **** sometime **** and a monthly contract so it's really really easy without transfer overall stuffs, so like you said all of the expense profile of those companies you do really care about that because if I me acquiring a company I already have those expense profiles. I know what to cost me to host for 500 clients, so it will become a client count. Now when you're talking about strategic sale, like I said, there is not only to redundancies which you dea'lt with, first hand, it sound like,  in your sale redundancies where you have multiple sales people doing the same thing so you a lots of people go, but there is also the synergies of my crop up with one company that is a name in an industry right? Ryan: Right! And there's [inaudible 0:16:28]for us, it was, that we didn't sell telecom. It was the one thing in outsource, the IT in office technology that we didn't do, since okay, we got, you know, 2 or 3 thousand accounts, how many people can you sell telecom to? A lot, probably. So that is not guarantee in profit that they're going to make, but it makes a deal look better, you know, then you can make some basic assumptions or something like that, and then you know, cash or order discount on suppliers. We weren't taking advantage of that. So we start to think about any way. Going to that buyer and saying, here's all of the things that you can literally get packaging up for them, and you know, I think there's some people that you and I know in Rhodium, and why see that, the reason that they start on their family to start in the retail, wedding industry, they got online… well, weddings usually don't have repeat customers, you know there are couple every now and then.   Mark: Hopefully not.   Ryan: I usually do subscription services so, what are different ways that they can expand their products and services, because they have a crazy amount of volume that come through their doors every single year. Because they got a very good foothold in Minnesota here, but so it's their robes, it's their jewelry, it's there. Other things that they can sell them and they know the volume of their customers, so you know, yeah there's the sale or the purchase price and the profit but they're more looking at do I build it or I buy it? So they know how long it's going to take the opportunity cost of how long it's going to take to build it, screwing things up, all that kind of stuff. Mark: Right, alright so let's talk about how you would.. Let's say, we have a listener out there, they own a business and they're thinking, “I've really like a strategic sale just because my business is unique enough I think there will be enough benefit for maybe 3 or 4 companies that are sort of [inaudible 0:18:03]my industry. How would they want to go about preparing their business and thinking about that exit, a potential strategic sale. Ryan: That is a good question and I think you know this whole conundrum of exit planning and grow planning.. I believe that if entrepreneurs are running the business the way that they should and working on the business not in the business, and treating their business like an actual investment, then it is like, where are all the different options that I can sell to whenever and how fast can I [inaudible 0:18:29] so it's being ready no matter what. If you are in love and addicted to a girl then you're having a blast, great! But always be ready for industries that change, Google changes their algorithm, Facebook gets kind of a little bit a heat like they are right now, always preparing yourselves so that, the first and foremost is the due diligence, your docs, and knowing, and really cleaning up your financials because, if you can answer any kind of questions that even your friend would ask, the buyer is gone just, completely slam you down. So getting your house in order, the financials, and the due diligence is one thing, but then, thinking about, “Okay so these are going to be.. These five companies are companies that i can eventually sell to” Who are they and what, why and how will your decisions in the business affect where you're going. So for example if one of the companies is running and you know, he is an Amazon merchant or something or someone is running on Shopify, don't go build out a Magento, you know, spend 300 grand in Magento if someone that you're going to sell it to is doing Shopify. I mean, that's the same thing that we did. We spent 300 grand on an ERP's because 85% of the people on our industry had it. That's why we could close in 2 weeks. Knowing how you are spending the money and why in relationship to where you're going to sell, and again, so if you think about, if your service has complimentary service to just someone else. Don't go spent a bunch of money building out something that they have. Because you are not going to get a return so you're going to spend, your immediate cash flow, but then you're not going to get the attitude because they don't seem [inaudible 0:19:58] I think it's aligning where want to go and why and then also that strategic decisions that you are doing in between there. Mark: Yeah, alright I want actually bring a really basic level here, because the thing is important point to make special more talking about strategic sales. I think people get with the financial market sale where you take a look at the profitability of the company and you have Joe blow buyer come in who really isn't related to the industry. We all know that he wants to get return on that investment after 3 or 4 years, you'd see that investment come back in so it's pretty easy to apply a multiple. Sometimes when we're talking about strategic sales people come and go crazy and they start thinking, well, look at all the upside potential that is going to come about from this and so they start lowering their valuation expectations through the roof because sometimes strategic do get really high relative valuations of this realm to the financials, that said, I'm going to make a very basic statement here and I'm sure you'd agree. Strategic still need to see an ROI, right? They still need to see a return of investment. Yeah so, what you're saying is when you're building out your company, when you're really planning that exit and working on the company, think about the ROI that the potential buyer is going to have and don't build something that's going to super expensive for them to migrate it over, right? Ryan: Right and it's like, so how we went about it is, I want to know this business, I want to know why they should buy this business more than anybody else. So like, I want to know everything about their business, I want to know exactly what their marketing strategy is, what their profitability strategy is, I want to know their strategy just as well as they do, whether you can or not. Because then you can show exactly how you fill their strategic plan, based on what they're buying. Mark: Right, so let's talk about modeling a little bit. When you're talking about strategic sale in your case with your dad in your business, [inaudible 0:21:41] done in season staff and so, when you're looking at presenting the financial picture to potential acquiring company, how did you go about that? How did you pitch it as far as the ROI? Ryan: So, I had like literally our entire.. I mean we have cash list statement and we learned a lot first time, right? So I knew every single penny that went in our business and why, so we did some serious cash flow modeling so we had our whole P&L, and then we had the forecast of what was going on to the sales and the cost of goods, our profitability, and I hacked a bunch of stuff through it, and I said okay, and I buy GL code Mark.. Mark: Wow Ryan: We did a.. Yeah, I know. Because there's the, in the financial buy, there's the add backs, right? So, a hundred grand might be 300 grand on the value, whether it's being added to the value or not. So, usually in the financial buys, you want to take that off to increase your EBITDA, so that way it's applied to the multiple. But in this system the same thing were [inaudible 0:22:41] you don't need these people, you don't need these servers, you don't need these things because you already have them. So, that is all dropping to the bottom line which will then help them calculate the ROI's so, we just looked on them and say okay, here's how much of the expenses you can take out of this, with these assumptions and then move back and forth, you said, what we actually need these people, we need these things, and then you're just negotiating back and forth but it was not more in the add backs, it's more of understanding the redundancies and the strategic value behind this. So it's a similar exercise but, you know, and now comes actually kind of the same but it's more specifically to operations. Mark: Well on the key pieces I think, needs to be understood is you need to understand the industry and the business itself. We work for the financial, forex leads site, this was several years ago. And they were getting lots of leads that they were selling and they wanted to arrange a strategic sale to a forex broker. Because they knew that they were jittering these leads and so that the equation really became okay. We know how much we're getting paid out on their [inaudible 0:23:43] basis for these leads. But as a forex broker, here's where the dollar amount for the valid leads are, and now we can start modeling our what does this look like, how much revenue is this site really making, from a forex broker's standpoint and then the other value proposition there. Ryan: Yeah it's literally of about knowing both of the businesses and the industry as well as you possibly can. So you can just design exactly how it looks. And then you backing up numbers, you know, I'm just kind of making some other things up but like, you and I have talked and I think that was when you were on my show, we're talking about the hybrid of the online versus offline and so, if someone has literally the best data ever on their drip marketing, their automation in their online marketing and knows exactly the entire cost of acquisition of one wheel, and whether it's Facebook ads or Google ads, all of what the email mark and you say “here's how much all this stuff cost,” they can go in and if you're going to [inaudible 0:24:38] and sink that up with an offline business, like there's some huge power there because you know that they're not doing that potentially. So you can, there's just so many different ways to design that I guess. That's kind of the fun part. Mark: Yeah and the nice thing about strategic is that there's really, you have the ability to blow a traditional valuation out of the water, right? That's one of the big advantages. Transitions can also be a little bit easier because they already know the industry and so you don't run saying “here's how you do this little process that you should probably know anyways” it's a little easier to transition. When I talk to people about doing strategic, so I often tell them that I don't think it's a good idea for them. And the reason I say that is mainly because they're difficult to do if you haven't been preparing. How long do you think it takes to really prepare business for a strategic? Ryan: So I think maybe I'll go back with remarkable steps which is what's the order of operations I think you should do to do this correctly, right? So kind of the assumptions to repeat is beat your foundation setup, build your financials, build healthy business from recurring revenue, the clarity of all these different things, making sure you don't have a bunch of concentration in one client, all the typical ways of de-risking your business and if you're striving to make a healthy business like that then you'll have lots of options. So at the bare minimum, you should be able to sell to a financial buyer, so then called to 3 to 5 times multiple EBITDA. So you know that, financially going okay, if it's 200 grand, I know that I'm going to be getting 600 or a million. Whenever it might be, right? So I know that's how or that's my target. But with a strategic sale, you could completely blow it out of the water, but that's kind of like hunting. It's hunting for unicorns or really specific synergies so you mention 5 people, that's fantastic but, what if they don't want it? What if they're struggling? What if they don't have the money? Don't have the ability to get banked? All those different things. Those are things that you don't know and yes you should work towards them so I think, to answer your question, I don't know but really helps with that, it's like, we knew our buyer. Like  half of our employees has hog back and forth, you know, we're in the same industry trade associations so, I actually had taught the woman I interviewed yesterday at my show, she would have spent 2-3 years building and fostering those relationships, so those people could have been at the table. She didn't do that, so this is more of a relationship building, going in Rhodium Weekend, going to the YC Events, going to [inaudible 0:27:00] all these different things where people build relationships. And then what ends up happening is, I [inaudible 0:27:06] the bar over a napkin, and then you're back in the stuff. Mark: Yeah absolutely, that's actually normal when I [inaudible 0:27:13] people that want to do strategic is, if you want to know strategic, 2 or 3 years down the road, contact the companies now and don't say “Hey I want to sell to you” just contact and do that real networking stuff and get out there. Once they've become aware of your company, and you start to learn each other's companies, then you can sort of see that conversation for down the road. Ryan: And then you get out on their radar, right? Because you're not on their radar otherwise. So, there was actually a really interesting story that I heard Mark from one of the guys I interviewed in my Podcast, where he was at a trade association, he started talking one of the base competitors and he goes “Why don't you buy me?” and that's how he started and they started, you know, BS and then it went around and then the guy has said “You know what? Let's have a [inaudible 0:28:00] every 6 months call to see how you're doing” and these people literally told him exactly what to do, so they could buy him. Mark: That's great. Ryan: That was super unique, right? His name is Norm Brodsky, he wrote Street Smarts and he was a part of the small giants book, so he's on the cover of [inaudible 0:28:16] and a lot of exposure but like, I think the concept is very unique, because if you wanted to buy my business, why don't you just keep telling me what to do, and if everything works, I mean, like I said it's kind of a shooting for the starts, but I mean, you got really nothing to lose at that point especially if you don't need to sell. Mark: Yeah alright. So you said a couple of things a while ago, I think is a good foundation I have and this is a general advise, and feel free to disagree with it if you disagree with any of the advice that I typically give people and respect them on this. With strategic, yeah you can get the out of the water valuation sometimes. But it all starts with first making their business safe, financially viable business and in someone that you can sell in a financial market. You are dealing few buyers, this is probably the biggest obstacle to a strategic sale, you might have half  a dozen companies that can potentially acquire a business and the sake people make is they went in and say “I want to sell my business” then they called ABC company and ABC company's saying “Yeah we don't have a million dollars” or “You were not in our annual budget this year” or “Acquisitions were not in our plan for this year”. Ryan: Right, I'd pause you there for a second. They may have the money, but like, everybody's busy, right? So what if they're developing their own software or doing something else, they might just not have the physical time to integrate the two companies. Mark: Right. Yeah absolutely. So you need to have that relationship in place and it has to make sense as being a natural evolution. Kind of like a marriage, right? I mean.. Ryan: Yeah, totally. I mean, you're partnering up with someone. Mark: Yeah, and last thing I would say is, take a look to see if actually does make sense. That first company that is sold, in the webhosting space, I could've sold that very easily in a strategic sale, because there was so many strategic happening, we did a financial sale because we knew we're going to get more money. So, where you can often blow the top of the valuation with this strategic, it doesn't always happen that way. Sometimes financial actually does work a little bit better. Kind of a weird, odd case. Ryan: Sorry you're.. Mark: No, go ahead please. Ryan: I think the one thing to that people really need to think about, because you might blow the valuation off the charts, but I tell you what Mark, the reason why I do what I do now is because we got the financial target that we wanted to hit, I literally had to fire 60 of my friends and family. So if your culture in your employees and the clients.. You have to understand what's important here because in a strategic sale redundancies are huge. So, how will you stomached that afterwards? Like going and calling all of our employees in, they was way at 85 or something like that at that time and they only kept [inaudible 0:30:47] I mean like, that's literally the stomached ache. Are you going to be proud and happy about what you build? Is it just a financial target that's fine and you have people dispersed across the US and there's a lot of VA's and you're not orally loyal to them or if there's people that you care about, like they are role playing that strategic sale I think is extremely important so you can calibrate against all your options. Mark: That's a really, really good point. So what do you do now? What are you doing these days? after the sale, of course. Ryan: So other than being in the Podcast just like yourself, so, we have a company called GEXP Collaborative, so, it's Growth and Exit Planning collaborative, that's what it's stands for, and it took a lot of time, over the last for years.. Exit planning I think there's some negative [inaudible 0:31:33] to it because you might not want to sell right now, but it's literally both having a good business. So we combined the two which is growth and extra planning because it's like, we're talking about what are your plans and then how do you back in to all your strategic plans, they sell where you're trying to go with you options and I found some amazing people in the industry that have different disciplines because you got legal, finance, the front insurance, deal structures, you have the business brokers, you got all these people, and they all play a roll, and how do you back into that plan? So, if you kind of think, we're almost like a building, If you start a building you start with the budget and a blueprint, because you can't build a building without either of those, so the budget is your financial targets, where you want to go and why, so is there debt, net, the amount that you need or cash [inaudible 0:32:22] and what's the blueprint. So what are the five different strategic buyers and then you got the six financial purchase, timing, role, responsibility, and you're back and do it, so you can then hire the team [inaudible 0:32:34] so the growth next to planning that we do with the collaborative team is literally building the budget and a blueprint, and then actually coordinating the team like a general contractor because no one person can do all this stuff. I've been doing it non-stop day and day of four years, and I still couldn't single hand lay out to someone. Mark: Yeah, there's a lot involved with that.. now if somebody is listening to this, one of the misconception running to all the time, with clients that come to us and say I want to sell, I'm not really ready because I did not plan ahead maybe should've talked to somebody 2 or 3 years ago. We try to get people to talk to us, the brokers, a few years in advance. For you, you're focusing again on that growth as well so even if somebody isn't ever planning to sell, it still makes sense to talk about that growth. Ryan: Because the reality is you're going to do the best of your business at some point. I mean, there's people, like I work within this, the baby boomers, well they're going to die in your business but then what you're doing is you're working on the shares and the estate planning and dispersing the shares to employees, and to kids, and do trust, so he's going to sell his company, and you know what, he loves it, great! But then there's, build a business that has value and has cash flow and you de-risks then you can literally do whatever you want whenever you want. So yeah you're right it's coming ahead of time but then also knowing the people like you and building these relationships, you can't do this at the last second, you're going to leave money on the table, you're not going to be as happy with terms and conditions and so many times Mark, and I don't know if you see this, but a lot of people that are out there, and the people that are in aggressive growth path, they're all acquiring company so the out of the blue offers happen all the time. So whether it's PE firms or funds or other strategic buyers, and how do you know what to weigh that against if you don't have a plan? So you don't even know like how much I'm going to get? What terms? I mean, you're thinking on the fly and that usually doesn't go as well..   Mark: Right! The number of time I've heard from clients, get in to this process and say, “Man, I really wish I've contacted you a year ago” I mean it happens all the time, no one ever thinks about selling their business until they actually want to sell their business and I think what's really cool about what you're doing is you're focusing again not just the exit, you're focusing on growth. Because a good growth strategy is a good exit strategy they often go hand in hand. Ryan: You're back can do it. You know, I just have a little plug for you guys too, because we do not do what you do, and I think a lot of entrepreneurs, they really think, because they understand their business so well that they can sell their business by themselves, and “Oh my gosh” it's the first time you're going to do it and why.. Like every one of those professional should pay for themselves, it should be your return of investment, what to spend, because you know it's an emotional roller coaster first of all and it's like a 24/7 fire drill while you are in the process which is what your team does, right? so I think all the people, if you have the right advisors, and that's another reason left a lot of money on the table, is you need to have the right advisers. I mean it wasn't people that do it all they want, they do transactions, they understand the market, your industry, and so having the right team is crazy important. Mark: Yeah, alright could you plug as well if anyone listen to this and enjoys the Quiet Light podcasts, and hopefully you do if you've listened this long, Ryan's Podcast talks a lot about the same stuff, you talk a lot about selling, you talked to a lot of entrepreneur's who has sold their businesses before, and you go over a lot of the same material, but with a little bit of a difference spinned to it, really, really high quality content and another one, what was name of the Podcast where can they find it? Ryan: “Life after Business” Mark: Life after Business. Awesome! So we will link to it in the show notes on our Podcast page, we'll also link over the Ryan's website, and Ryan, anything else that you want us to link or to want to draw attention to, please feel free. Ryan: We got a resources tab just like you, you're my model right? So I guess I said year and a half ago, you put me in the right direction with the presence that I wanted online, so we got white papers, and resources and Podcasts and all that kind of stuff so. Mark: Awesome, so definitely check at his site and feel free to reach out to him, if you just want to talk, he's a good guy to talk to. You know I can talk all day about this stuff and someday we probably will. Thanks for coming I really appreciate it. Ryan: Yeah, had a blast Mark, Thanks! Mark: Alright. Links and Resources: www.gexpcollaborative.com Ryan's website Life after Business Podcast Ryan's podcast link

  Mark sits down with Julie Patterson, a longtime ALPS Business Development Representative, bringing with her two decades of experience helping law firms across the country understand the importance of selecting the right coverage to protect their law firms. In this episode Mark and Julie discuss legal malpractice insurance costs in terms of what a firm should actually be getting for their premium dollar. ALPS In Brief, The ALPS Risk Management Podcast, is hosted by ALPS Risk Manager, Mark Bassingthwaighte. Transcript: MARK: Welcome to another episode of ALPS In Brief, The ALPS Risk Management Podcast. I'm Mark Bassingthwaighte, ALPS risk manager, and I'm sitting down today at the ALPS offices in Missoula, Montana, with JULIE. Julie has been with ALPS on the business development team for 20 years. She brings with her a wealth of knowledge on legal malpractice insurance, and today we are going to talk about the cost of legal malpractice insurance, focusing on what really should you be getting for your premium dollar. Julie, welcome. JULIE: Thank you, Mark. I appreciate that nice intro. MARK: Well, you're very welcome. You're very welcome. I think it's a fair question. Malpractice insurance is … It's an investment. It's not an insignificant line item of business year to year. When I think about I'm cutting this check each year and buying my ALPS policy, really what am I getting, what should I be getting when I think about malpractice insurance? JULIE: Good question. It's very important for your firm to have your malpractice insurance carrier picked out and go through their features with a reputable person at the company to help you out with everything. You want to look for somebody who is going to partner with you, who's going to understand what you do in the course of your day-to-day business and be able to provide support where you need it, but also peace of mind for exactly what you're buying for your firm. MARK: I think that's a great point in the sense … Heaven forbid, if I have some significant claim come up at some time, I mean, I really am counting on the carrier to have my back. What I'm hearing is the relationship here I really should look into. JULIE: You should. MARK: That this is a partner. JULIE: It is, and that's very important because you want to have access to the people when you need to talk to them, or if you have a claim in your firm, you need to be able to talk to that person who can help you, ease your mind, and get the ball rolling for you. MARK: Are there other things that come to mind? JULIE: Absolutely. You want to look at the policy features. You want to see what they offer in limits and deductible. You want to access your clientele and your risk and what you can sleep with at night for your limits and deductible. That's an important factor as well. MARK: In policy features, there's one thing I think that's important and I'm not sure everyone fully appreciates at times. You can sit down and compare policies at times and everything seems to be exactly the same except one is significantly cheaper. What we're really getting at is there's some policies out there that are what we refer to as cannibalizing policies. I think that might be an important distinction. Can you share what I'm talking about, what this issue is? JULIE: Yes. That's very important. A lot of times when you see a quote come in to your firm for a cheaper price, that means that they're trying to buy the business in your area. They may not know what the jurisdiction brings in claims experience. They may be just trying feelers out there to see what kind of business they can bring in the door, but typically if it's a cheaper policy, it's going to be cannibalizing. You are not going to have limits on the outside of your per claim limit, and you will probably have a hammer clause, meaning if a claim were to arise and you don't agree to settle it with the carrier who you've been insured with, they are going to walk away, and you're going to be left holding the bag. MARK: Okay. I want to make sure that we're clear. When we talk about limits being inside or outside, if I have my defense costs inside limits so that every dollar that gets spent on defense is going to erode what's available for the loss payment. JULIE: You're exactly correct. It's going to erode that per claim limit, and you want to look for defense costs on the outside of your per claim limit with the carriers that you are shopping with. MARK: That seems to me to be a pretty important thing. JULIE: That's very important. MARK: Just to understand, so two policies that are on their face may provide a million dollars in coverage, but if the cheaper policy has defense cost inside limits, I'm really not getting a million dollar policy, so that's why it's cheaper. JULIE: That's correct. MARK: Okay. That makes sense. That makes sense. Continue on. We've talked about the relationship, we've talked a bit about some of the features and looking at some of the pricing issues. Are there other things that come to mind yet? JULIE: Well, the add-on to the pricing, responsible pricing. You want to look for a carrier that's had some experience in that jurisdiction, that's been there a while. They know the climate, they know the jurisdiction, and they are going to rate accordingly and responsibly. If you see a carrier come in real low, they're just trying to buy your business, and they might do a bait and switch the following year. Be careful when you're shopping and looking at pricing. MARK: Again, it seems to me, is it worth even asking how long you have been in a market if I'm shopping and- JULIE: Absolutely. The other important factor is if that carrier is endorsed by the state bar. Many state bars around the United States will endorse a carrier, meaning they're giving back to that community, that legal profession in that community, and that's an important factor as well. It comes with a- MARK: Okay. All right, so what I'm hearing on sort of the takeaway with this piece is just looking at commitment to the local market, that I want to work with an insurer that is committed long term. That makes a lot of sense. Okay. JULIE: Customer service plays into it as well. You want somebody who's going to return your calls, who's going to answer your questions, respond to your email in a timely fashion, and hopefully under 24 hours. You shouldn't have to chase them down. They should be willing to talk to you, whatever it is that comes about and you need help with. MARK: Okay. Excellent. Excellent. Boy, I wish I had known that years ago, let me tell you, before I got into working with an insurance company. Are there any final thoughts or other things you'd like to share, Julie? JULIE: Yeah. Probably just a quick input on claims handling. Double check on how they handle the claims, how you report a claim, are you going to be assigned a claims attorney to work with or a claims adjuster, very important. You really want somebody who is a claims attorney, who is an attorney who can talk on your level, and find out who their defense panel is in your jurisdiction, and if you have input there. That's important as well. You really want input instead of them picking an attorney that maybe is somebody you don't respect in your jurisdiction. MARK: Right, right. This has been great stuff. The big takeaway for me is this isn't just like going to a store and picking out some item for home or something. What you're really saying is we're entering into a partnership here and heaven forbid again, something come up in terms of a blown statute or some other type of significant claim. What you're really telling me is that the relationship that I've created with the carrier is really going to be key in terms of how we get through all this in the end. JULIE: It's very key. MARK: Yeah. Good stuff. Good stuff. Well, thank you very much for joining us today. JULIE: You're welcome. Yeah, thank you. MARK: Thanks to all of you for listening to the show. If any of you have any questions about the issues Julie and I have discussed, please don't hesitate to contact me here at ALPS at mbass@alpsnet.com. We'd love your feedback on the podcast including hearing about any other issues or topics you'd like to hear us cover. That's it. Thanks again, Julie. Thanks to all of you. JULIE: Thank you.

In 2013 Seb Broster was diagnosed with a rare form of blood cancer. As a result of a combination of chemotherapy and steroids, he suddenly ballooned to 135kgs and lost all his hair. That's when we first met in London. The thing that struck me most about Seb back then was how positive he was and just how funny he was. "A black sense of humour is what got me through this whole journey. You've got to laugh no matter what." Our penchant for growing moustaches for the Movember Foundation brought us together and fast forward to today, not only does Ben have a serious main on his head and is drug free, but he's also dropped down to 87kgs. Loosing 48kgs in the process since March 2014. The equivalent of a small child in weight! So when Seb walked into our studio this morning, I could barely recognise him. He had, after all, lost 1/3 of his body weight over the course of three years and was in the best shape of his life. In today's interview Seb shares his journey, what helped him stay positive throughout the whole process and what he believes is the formula for getting in shape. Spoiler alert, it's pretty simple: stay positive, be consistent and make sure to have a life. If you enjoyed todays episode, please share it with a friend as that is the biggest compliment you could give me. Thanks and see you next week! Mark (Thanks to the folks over at Flint Media Group, today's episode is available in video format, visit http://www.theunconventionalists.com/tv-show/how-seb-broster-beat-cancer to see the full interview for free!) If you don't want to miss another episode, make sure to subscribe now on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-unconventionalists-with-mark-leruste/id1029651449?mt=2 SHOW NOTES www.theunconventionalists.com/episode/72 GET IN TOUCH Website: www.theunconventionalists.com Facebook: www.facebook.com/markleruste Twitter: www.twitter.com/markleruste YouTube: www.youtube.com/markleruste

David: What does it take to be a top twenty political blogger? How do you persuade traditional thinkers to adopt digital marketing strategies and what’s the future for journalists? Those are just three of the questions that I intend to ask today’s special guest, Mark Pack. Mark, welcome to DMR. Mark: Thanks very much for having me on. David: You’re most welcome. Mark is an associate director at Blue Rubicon, an award-winning consultancy that transforms the reputations of some of the world’s biggest organizations. He’s also a visiting lecturer at City University in London in the Journalism Department. Mark, you’ve marketed using YouTube, Facebook and Twitter to name just a few activities, but is the written word still your favorite communications medium? Mark: That’s a good question. I think the written word, in many ways, is the toughest communications medium; so quite often, if you’re busy, if you’re stressed, if you got too many things to do, I wouldn’t necessarily say always feels like my favorite but there’s no doubt the written word is still immensely powerful. And in fact, very often, the most successful use of for example, social media channels, is to promote the written word, is to share, is to engage, is to respond but is all centered around having some good in-depth written words as the piece of content that you’re then generating buzz, engagement, discussion and sharing for. David: Right. Okay and so the written word not dying out any time soon then. Mark: I certainly hope not. David: Do you think that the style of communication online that you use, i.e. videos or pictures or written word in some format, should depend on your customer base or should it depend on the abilities of the people producing the content? Mark: I think it’s important to try to bear your audience in mind all the time; so, what is the format that will suit them, what is the style that will suit them and also communicate your issues, your messages, your branding most effectively. A good example of that is the use of footnotes, if you’re flicking through a set of books; the ones with footnotes immediately seem more credible; they immediately seem more authoritative.