Podcasts about nick no

Savvy property management entrepreneurs are always on the lookout for new ways to expand their services and better serve their clients and residents. In this episode, property management growth experts Jason and Sarah Hull chat with Nick Friedman, founder of College Hunks Hauling Junk and Trash Butler. You'll Learn [02:08] Becoming an entrepreneur [09:14] Daily trash removal for multifamily communities [16:45] A butler service for trash? How does it work? [19:47] Vetting team members [27:50] Junk removal services for property managers Tweetables “Property managers are that front-line resource for all things community.” “We've got to have urgency of effort, patience for the results.” “Culture drives behavior. Behavior drives results.” “Execution is a differentiator if you can out-execute everybody else.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] Nick: I have come to realize, because we're in a blue collar industry ourselves, moving furniture and picking up trash at residents' doorsteps. Execution is a differentiator if you can out execute everybody else.  [00:00:14] Jason: All right. Welcome DoorGrowers 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 a business and life, and you're open to doing things a bit differently then you are a DoorGrower. DoorGrower property managers, love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges and freedom that property management brings. [00:00:39] 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 business owners and their businesses. [00:00:56] We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. We're your hosts, property management growth experts, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow and Sarah Hull, the co owner and COO of DoorGrow. [00:01:12] Now let's get into the show. All right. And our guest today is Nick Friedman. Did I say your name right?  [00:01:20] You got it right.  [00:01:21] Cool. And Nick has two different businesses. And why don't you introduce the two businesses and then I'd love to get into your background of how you got into entrepreneurship. [00:01:30] Nick: Absolutely. So two businesses that are relevant to property management, one is a doorstep amenity for apartment complexes called Trash Butler. It helps increase revenue and net operating income for the communities while also providing an amenity for the residents and that kind of incubated out of our first company that we launched, which is a company called College Hunks Hauling Junk and Moving. I'm a little more widely known for that business that I started back in college. It's a moving and bulk removal service that now has over 300 franchises across the U.S. So it's been a fun journey and a very entrepreneurial journey to say the least. [00:02:08] Jason: Awesome. So Nick, when did you first realize you were an entrepreneur that you were a little bit weird?  [00:02:13] Nick: I would have to say in retrospect, it was all the way into my early days of childhood. My sister had a lemonade stand in front of our house. She wanted to charge 25 cents for lemonade. I went out and started a competing lemonade next to hers and I wanted to charge a dollar for my lemonade because I thought my lemonade was better and I think we probably sold the same amount of cups, but I made four times the amount of money than she did because I was charging a dollar then she was charging 25 cents. So in hindsight, I think I would always do some out of the box things. My teachers would call me a little bit restless. But really our business innovation took place when we were in college. Because we had always been brought up and told to follow the more traditional career path, work hard in school, get good grades, get a job after you graduate, climb up that ladder. [00:02:56] And the summer before my senior year of college. My buddy's mom had a beat up cargo van from her furniture store and she said, "why don't you guys go do something with the van? You guys could move furniture, haul trash, you guys could be like college hunks who haul junk," and we just started laughing about it decided to put that on flyers and the phone started ringing so we were in business and realized that the name was catchy. [00:03:18] People appreciated quality service and and that was the light bulb moment for us to pursue a career of entrepreneurship and not the traditional path.  [00:03:26] Jason: There you go. So thank goodness for that truck, right? That's right. Changed your life.  [00:03:31] Nick: Totally changed our life. We credit her with the name. Yeah. [00:03:34] Jason: Competing with the sister. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think for me, it was my entrepreneurial mom who was a real estate agent. She just, she was always hustling, trying to figure out how to make money. And she would have us fold flyers for her and canvas neighborhoods.  [00:03:50] Nick: And that's really when we realized the niche for us is very much so within property management, right? [00:03:56] Because. A homeowner or business might move every couple of years, might have junk to be removed every so often, but property managers are that front line resource for all things community, whether that's residents who are moving in and out, whether that's bulk trash is being left behind and needs to get turned around for the next move in. And then that ultimately, as I mentioned, incubated our Trash Butler business, which is more of a recurring revenue model, but it produces income for the apartment complexes that we partner with. It was an evolution for us. I always tell the story when we 1st started, we were doing all the work ourselves. [00:04:29] So we went out and we bought an 800 number. And we slapped it on the back of our truck, trying to make ourselves look bigger, but it was still routed to our cell phone. And so people would call to complain about erratic driving and we'd be in the driver's seat answering the phone, pretending like we weren't, saying, "Oh yeah, we'll fire those guys when they get back on the road, yeah, they're the worst." Yeah. Yeah. "We don't condone that driving in our company." So we probably fired ourselves at least three or four times. And I'm sure, your property manager listeners can relate to that. When they first started their business, you're doing all the work yourself. [00:04:59] You're fixing the doorknobs, you're changing out the light bulbs and everything in between. And one of our mentors recommended to us that we read a book called the E Myth Revisited, it's by a guy named Michael Gerber. And in it really emphasizes the notion of working on your business, not just in your business, creating systems and processes for the business to scale, which is obviously what you're doing for folks. [00:05:20] And so I think that was the next light bulb moment for us is if we're ever going to have another truck. Let alone another location, let alone eventually a second business. We've got to start documenting how we do everything.  [00:05:31] Jason: Yeah. And is that what kind of helped it take off? [00:05:34] Nick: I describe ourselves as a 20 year overnight success because it feels like it took that long for us to get to where we are. [00:05:40] It really did. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of business owners and leaders have a level of impatience, which is good. But I always preach to our team, we've got to have urgency of effort, patience for the results, because if we get up every day, grind it out, and then we look a year from now, two years from now, three years from now, based on that consistent grind, we're going to see long term results start to manifest. [00:06:03] And so none of it happened overnight but it was a process and it was putting systems in place, aligning ourselves with great people and just being committed to our purpose and our vision.  [00:06:14] Jason: Yeah, I love it. I think I love that. Urgency of effort, patience for the result. [00:06:18] I think as entrepreneurs, nothing's ever fast enough for us.  [00:06:22] Nick: No, and that's a good and a bad thing as a business leader and an entrepreneur is, if we weren't optimistic, we would never start the business in the first place because we believe that the business is going to be successful. [00:06:34] We may minimize how hard it's going to be. We may minimize some of the challenges that we're going to encounter along the way. And that sort of maybe, cognitive dissonance or whatever you want to call it, getting into business, I think is a good thing, but you then have to then have the grit and the resilience and the sophistication to muscle through the challenging times. [00:06:56] But I don't think I've ever met an entrepreneur that says, "I made more money faster than I expected to." It's usually longer. "I didn't make as much as I had hoped for when I first started out." And when reality sinks in, some people give up and go back to their corporate grind and other people just stick it out and keep pushing forward. [00:07:13] Jason: Yeah, I call that the fantasy stage of entrepreneurship. That's the beginning. We only see upside. It's all upside. It's going to be a success. I get property managers coming to me, potential property managers are like, I'm going to start a property management business. I'm like, "Oh yeah, how are you going to do this?" [00:07:28] And they're like, "it's going to be amazing because all the other companies in my market suck. And I'm like, "okay, what are you going to do different?" "We're going to charge less. And we're going to provide better service." I'm like, "okay, good luck with that."  [00:07:38] Nick: So yeah, that's a tough recipe. Look, I have come to realize, because we're in a blue collar industry ourselves, moving furniture and picking up trash at residents' doorsteps. And execution is a differentiator if you can out execute everybody else. It's not easy. It's not the flashy, shiny objects that entrepreneurs like to chase, but we, coming through this past year, obviously, the market has shifted its leads aren't falling from the sky like they used to, we've had to assess are we doing everything that we're supposed to with every client touch point? [00:08:09] Are we consistently delivering the service that we preach in all of our markets across all the apartment communities that we service? And that I think is something that that takes reinforcement and repetition. And sometimes it can be a little bit boring, but it matters because that does make a difference. [00:08:25] I wouldn't charge less than everybody. That's not a sustainable business strategy. But if you can consistently out execute everybody else, that is an advantage.  [00:08:34] Jason: Yeah, if you can out execute everybody else, then you can probably out price everybody else, too, the leader gets to dictate the price, I think. [00:08:41] Nick: That's right, and usually it's going to cost us more to be able to out execute everybody else, unless you've got just, these magic employees that are willing to take less money to provide a better experience for the customer so that you can charge less it becomes a difficult equation. [00:08:56] Jason: Yeah. It's not too difficult to close the deal when somebody comes to you and says, "I want the other company's price, but I want your level of service." [00:09:03] Nick: That's right. That's right. And that is hard to explain in the sales process. If they, having, don't have the relationship or don't have the trust built that, that takes time. [00:09:14] Jason: Cool. Explain how Trash Butler works for people that have multifamily communities.  [00:09:19] Nick: Yeah, so as I mentioned, it incubated out of our college hunks business. We recognize this opportunity in the apartment space, particularly in a multifamily communities where there's a long walk for the residents to take the trash out. [00:09:31] If you think about the garden style apartments, even mid rise or raps, where there's a long walk to the trash room or trash shoot. And so this industry has emerged doorstep trash service, where we've signed a contract with the apartment complex and then 5 nights a week, the resident can simply put the trash in front of their door and recyclables in some markets, and then our Butler will come by and take the trash and the recyclables to the onsite compactor, which is provided by the 3rd party hauler. So it saves the resident a trip to the dumpster or the compactor each night or every other night. There's a safety component for the residents, an amenity component for the communities and looking to try to enhance the their quality of life for the residents. [00:10:10] And then it actually becomes an income producer for the apartment complex. I know that there's some, skepticism about upcharging services in the industry right now. We're staying very close to that legislation, but let's say we charge $10 a month per door to the apartment community. [00:10:24] They have the ability to, charge anywhere from $20 to in some cases, $30, $40 a month per door to the residents. So it becomes an NOI. Producer, net operating income producer for the community, and it's an amenity for the resident, many times an expected amenity for the resident. So currently, we're the second largest provider in that industry. [00:10:41] We service about 300, 000 doors nightly. We're the national partner with Graystar, of course, the big 800 pound gorilla of property management. And we started out as a side venture has all of a sudden, blossomed into a meaningful business that we've actually brought in some private equity money to help sustain that growth. [00:10:58] Jason: Yeah, brilliant. So yeah, I've lived at a complex for a while, and I had to walk forever to go drop my trash off. I hated it. It was super annoying. So I had to have some sort of stupid cart or something just to carry all my trash and like...  [00:11:12] Nick: I used to live in an apartment complex that did not have this service, and I would put the trash either on the hood of my car or in my trunk at times to drive it to the compactor, and one day, I actually forgot that I put it in my trunk, and so I passed by the compactor and this was a hot day in Florida in the summertime. [00:11:30] So of course, when I came back to my car at the end of a long work day and realized that I had failed to take the trash bag out of the trunk, it was a direct trip to the trash compactor and then the the car dealership. Oh yeah.  [00:11:42] Sarah: And then this is a service that the tenants pay for. Yes?  [00:11:46] Nick: It is. [00:11:47] So we contract directly with the community, but the tenants pay for it through their lease. So what we do when we sign up a community is we have a what we call phase in pricing where it steps up over the 1st year of the service. And so the community is never out of pocket. It's never a cost to the community. [00:12:03] The residents are either just paying a pass through, or even an upcharge to the community so that it becomes a profit center for the community. Yes, it does become an ancillary income stream for the apartment complexes. The resident is paying for it. It's part of their lease. It's not something that's opt in, opt out, but if they haven't had it before, it'll wait till the lease renews for it to be added in. [00:12:24] And so we're not charging full rate during the first year. We're stepping it up during month one, month two, month three in order to ensure that the residents are all paying for it by the time we're fully phased.  [00:12:34] Sarah: Oh, very nice. And then is this nationwide? If someone were like, "Hey, I think that's a great idea. Can I?" [00:12:40] Nick: It is. Yeah. So we're in about 30 states right now. Usually when you have a national partnership with a company like Graystar, they point to that direction and we run in that direction. So we opened up in the Northeast, we opened up in California. Our biggest presence is in the Southeast, Florida, Texas, Georgia, Carolinas. We've got a pretty big presence in Arizona. I know that's where you guys are. We're all over. We got boots on the ground. That business is not franchised. Our college hunks business is a franchise model that we have independent operators, but our Trash Butler business is all corporately operated. [00:13:12] So we have managers and and sort of area supervisors in each market that we service.  [00:13:17] Sarah: Oh, very cool.  [00:13:18] Jason: Got it. Yeah. All right. And is there a lot of competition for Trash Butler?  [00:13:22] Nick: Trash Butler and College Hunts has a lot of competition. What I always like to say, there's low barriers to entry, but high barriers to scale. [00:13:29] So there's probably a lot of similarities with the property management business as well, right? Any mom and pop can go out, hang a sign out or get a truck and say, "I'm in business." and you can do that with one or two communities or maybe one market. But when it comes to scaling out that infrastructure and providing a consistent level of service nationwide there's only a small handful that have done it and that's because it costs a lot of money to get to that scale. You've got to have software. You've got to have great people in every market. You've got to have accountabilities in every market. And that's been good and bad. There's always the people that will come in and try to undercut what we're charging or what their competitors are charging, but they can do that on a one off community or two communities. [00:14:09] But at some point their systems are going to break because they're doing all the work themselves. Like we did when we first started.  [00:14:15] Jason: Yeah. And I'm sure occasionally you see the cheap, dumb property manager that wants to like, "Oh I'll just do this myself. And I'll just make my team members, I'll make my gal at the front office desk go haul garbage." [00:14:26] Nick: And, we all know that employee retention is one of the hardest things right now to keeping good people. And you want your good people doing high value activities. At the property management level, you don't want your good people picking up trash from, 100, 200, 300 units every single night. [00:14:42] That's a surefire way to lose your good people. We think of us as an outsourced arm of property management. We pride ourselves on being an extra set of eyes and ears because we're walking the communities in the night. Night walks and when we're doing our patrol, so we're able to report back if we see a safety hazard or we see anything, suspicious activity, we can report that back in our reporting tools. [00:15:03] And so it becomes an extension for property management, not a cost center. And that's, I think, the most important piece. And there's redundancy. We've got backup butlers if a butler misses because he's sick or, has a wedding or something, I don't know. And so we send people in their place and that redundancy is important because, the residents will let you hear it if the trash gets missed. [00:15:22] That's for sure. Yeah. And they're paying for it. So they expect it to get picked up every night that they put it out there.  [00:15:28] Jason: Yeah. If trash day gets missed, there's going to be some pretty unhappy people. It's just sitting on their porch for a week. "Do I bring this back inside? Where do I have to walk it over myself?" [00:15:37] So how small of a complex do you guys take on? Like what are your sort of limits here?  [00:15:42] Nick: To be honest with you, the sweet spot for a trash butler is really a hundred units and greater. So I know there's a lot of property managers that manage smaller facilities or single family properties. [00:15:52] Usually communities like that it's smaller communities, it's more difficult to create a scalable model for the nightly doorstep trash pickup service. But we do see a lot of partnerships with our College Hunks business and the single family rentals the smaller apartment complexes where there's tenant leave behinds, or they want to have a move in special, so they'll contract with our College Hunks location in their market to move the resident in or move the resident out because the move in and the move out are two very critical touch points of the overall living experience as it relates to a community. And so I think the property manager may, in some cases, undervalue the importance of that high touch experience, especially on the move in when they're moving out, unless they're moving to another 1 of your properties. "Have a great day. Sorry to see you go." But when they're moving in, you really want to make that a special, memorable, positive experience so that then it reinforces the positive experience they have while living there.  [00:16:45] Jason: Now, normally trash pickup by the garbage companies is weekly, but you get, you mentioned nightly that you're doing this. [00:16:52] Nick: So we're doing the butler service nightly. We're not taking the trash off property. We're taking it from the doorstep of each resident to the onsite compactor. So if you think about it, the compactor pickups are still going to be weekly but the trash can be picked up from the residents doorstep on a nightly basis, typically 5 nights a week. [00:17:09] This kind of industry standard is Sunday to Thursday night. And so that's where this is becomes a very attractive amenity because if your trash fills up, you got to take it out and you want to wait until the trash day or whatever. You can put it out five nights a week and the butler's gonna take it to the onsite compactor. [00:17:24] Jason: Nice. . Yeah, that makes it really convenient. Okay. Got it. Cool. What do property managers typically. Ask about this service that I haven't asked yet? [00:17:35] Nick: Ah, so what we like to do is we boil it down to three very simple things. What's most important in this service, the doorstep amenity is the trash going to be picked up on time? [00:17:45] Is it going to be consistent? And is it going to be clean? In other words, is the trash butler not going to leave a mess or loose trash and all those sorts of things. And so we actually have what we call A 3x guarantee of Trash Butler, where we guarantee that those 3 things are going to be 100 percent consistent. [00:18:02] If not, we're going to make it right financially by reimbursing for the night, or in some cases, the week. And so I think that's really important. Another question that we actually make sure we emphasize is that there are some companies that do this that will use independent contractors and we recommend steering away from that because there's a level of liability and also accountability that's missing if you've got independent contractors picking up the trash five nights a week on your community. And so having a W 2, uniform, background check butler that's walking the hallways, walking the breezeways, picking up the items is really critical as well. So those are usually the most consistent questions. [00:18:41] I think not a lot of not all property managers really know how to charge the residents back for the service. So we try to pride ourselves on being revenue consultants and sustainability consultants as well. Not just the doorstep vendor for picking up the trash. And so I think, creating that partnership with any of the vendors is really critical, for your listeners not just our category but anybody who they're working with is having that trust and go to relationship. [00:19:04] That they can, rely on. It's not just an invoice, it's not just a contract, but there's actually a relationship there to ensure that, stuff is getting done when it needs to get done. And again, that goes with maintenance, that goes with roofing, that goes with insurance which I know is a huge issue, with properties these days. [00:19:21] And I think that we want to be a piece of that overall equation.  [00:19:24] Jason: Yeah. One bad independent contractor story could probably destroy a property management company. It certainly could destroy a relationship with one particular multi family complex or with that particular owner, but it could destroy a business if it were serious enough. [00:19:41] So that's right. That's right. Yeah. So related to that, how do you vet your butlers?  [00:19:47] Nick: So we prided ourselves both in our college hunts hauling junk business and our trash butler business on really being a culture first team member driven organization. And what I mean by that is we want to get great people. [00:20:01] It's a blue collar industry, but we want to get people to have pride of ownership of the work that they're doing. So it starts with the recruiting, our job posting, our recruiting machine, our interview process, our background checks, our reference checks, and then our onboarding. Our onboarding and retention is all about, we say, enrolling our team members in either the Trash Butler way or the College Hunks way of doing business. [00:20:24] And so I think it's important anytime you're hiring employees that you've got a system and a process. For identifying who are the type of people you want to bring into the organization because that's going to help define the culture and we always say culture drives behavior. Behavior drives results. [00:20:38] And so if you're just picking up any body off the street to fill a hole, you might get somebody good, but chances are, they're not going to be. Aligned with the core values of the company, the purpose of the company. And so we've viewed ourselves as our secret sauce as being able to recruit a widespread labor team decentralized across the country, train them, onboard them and retain them to go out and provide a good service on a consistent basis. And so I think again, relevant to your listeners and their businesses as they think about who they're hiring or teams that they're developing having a set of core values that you would abide by having a long term vision of what you're trying to become as an organization, what you want to be recognized for as an organization. [00:21:21] And then and then work to the present, the action items that you're going to take to, to ensure that those values are upheld and that the vision is becoming a reality.  [00:21:30] Jason: Yeah, that's that's so in alignment with the stuff that we teach, you mentioned culture, behavior results. [00:21:35] And when we focus on helping clients figure out their hiring systems, we focus on what I call the three fits, which is culture first personality fit, which relates to behavior and then skill. And skill's the only one that you really can move the needle hugely on. Usually it's about finding people that match your culture, that share your values, and then finding somebody that is the right personality fit to succeed in the role, and then you can train them. [00:22:01] But most business owners do the opposite. They're like, let's just find somebody with the skill.  [00:22:05] Nick: Somebody who knows how to do it. Yeah you're 100 percent right. There's a mantra. I'm sure you've said it probably is, you hire for attitude, you train for skill. And if you can hold true to that now, look, obviously they have to be capable and competent of learning the skill. If you're providing them the tools to do the work and they still can't do it, then there's a competency gap there that's missing. And you, you have to have, we like to say results based, performance based objectives, but you also have to have good people who align with your values because, if you've got somebody who's not good at the job, but a really good person, ideally, you could train them or find a seat for them to fill. If they're a bad person, but good at their job, then you feel handcuffed and it becomes this poison seed and an apple pie that ends up making the whole thing rotten. [00:22:56] Yeah, I want a team that can perform on the field, but you've got to have a good dynamic locker room. You can't have somebody in there that's upsetting the team dynamics, and that's where leadership comes in. That's where the leader of the organization has to champion the values, has to champion the vision, has to champion the culture, has to hold people accountable, especially their fellow leaders about, what are the behaviors that we value in our organization that matter to us? [00:23:24] Jason: Yeah, love it. It's got to be pretty daunting task to run a large empire, especially in a blue collar industry of people to make sure you've got good leadership. Managing good people and a good hiring process.  [00:23:38] Nick: Yeah. It's like I said it was a 20 year overnight success for us and it never gets easier. [00:23:43] Maybe, new level kind of different devil, but it's it's a lot of fun growing a business and embracing those challenges along the way. But, you hit it on the head, having the right leadership team to help support the founder of the entrepreneur in the journey. [00:23:58] And another thing that I think your listeners probably can relate to is along the way as their business grows is sometimes you're going to outgrow your leadership team, which we've gone through, multiple layers of that. And it's not easy because somebody who helps you get from, 0 to 20 properties may not be able to take you from 20 to 100 properties or somebody who took, in our business that took us from, 0 to 50 franchises or or what have you. [00:24:22] And there's a lot of parallels between our trash Butler business and property management. And so I'm sure we're facing the same sort of things and, making sure that you've got folks that... that's probably the hardest part is when they fit the culture, but the business starts to outgrow them. [00:24:33] And so that's why leadership development is very critical and also identifying the skill sets to make sure they're built for the longterm.  [00:24:41] Jason: Yeah. It said that the number one indicator of success is actually intelligence. And if somebody has enough intelligence, they can rise to different levels of competency and improve. [00:24:53] For example, like somebody might have a good executive assistant and maybe someday they're CEO, but I've had some assistants in the past that were not capable of that. They just weren't right. And then I've had some that were able to rise to different levels of, management. [00:25:06] And I think being able to, I think it's a knack or a talent to be able to identify that light because you can't just give people intelligent tests.  [00:25:14] Nick: Although they, they do have some different tests out there. Now there's the wonder liquid, which I think is what the NFL uses. [00:25:18] We use predictive index, which has a cognitive test and then also a personality profile matching, it's not an exact science, but it definitely provides another data point. Because hiring is probably the toughest thing. Even the sports teams get it wrong half the time, they can actually see the person playing on the field and they know from the other coaches, what type of person that individual is. [00:25:40] And yet they still draft the wrong player or sign the wrong position. And we got to give us, give ourselves a little bit of a break too, because our managers and our franchise owners who view the leadership role as a blessing rather than a burden, I think are the ones that are going to see the most success because they embrace the challenges of turnover. [00:26:01] They embrace the challenge, teaching their team members or empowering their team members to tackle new obstacles. They embrace the fact that maybe certain individuals on their team might have to be layered underneath the next layer of leadership. And so I think that's I think that's something that we got to keep reminding ourselves also as entrepreneurs. [00:26:17] Jason: We've, we partnered here at DoorGrow for DoorGrow Hiring with an AI assessment company before AI was big. And it's pretty spot on and amazing at identifying people that are the right culture, personality, and intelligence level. I used to use Myers Briggs, human design, Wonderlic DISC, and I would get a pretty decent picture of a person incorporating all of these things, but I had to know all these different systems and and I can hire with pretty good accuracy. [00:26:46] And so we started testing against this AI tool and it got the right candidate every time. And it was pretty obvious in the tool. We now use it with clients and it does a really good job. So it's pretty awesome. Very cool. That's how I got my current assistant, Mar, who's awesome. And I think all of our last several team members. [00:27:03] Nick: So yeah, it's pretty cool. Are you able to share the AI tool or is that proprietary to you guys now?  [00:27:08] Jason: So we've partnered with a company called BRYQ, B R Y Q. And yeah, it's super cool. So it's usually not affordable for the small business owner.  [00:27:17] Nick: Got it. So you guys have like an enterprise platform for, because you do recruiting as well? [00:27:22] Jason: Yeah, we help property managers with the hiring and recruit recruiting piece. 'cause if you get that wrong, that's a $10,000 minimum mistake. Minimum. And plus the opportunity cost of the money that you're just not going to get because they didn't do as good of a job. And I've seen it at the multimillion dollar level, most business owners just doing Russian roulette in hiring until they finally get a good team after a decade,  [00:27:41] Nick: I've been guilty of that myself.  [00:27:42] Jason: So me too. Yeah we're the summation of our mistakes when it comes to success. Super cool to have you here on the show. What should property managers know about the College Hunks Hauling Junk? How could that benefit  [00:27:54] Nick: them? [00:27:54] Yeah. A lot of people don't realize that our college hunks business is nationwide. We have almost 300 franchise owners in that business. We're in about 40 States. And so that business is local moving as well as we call bulk trash removal. So it's not just homeowners that we're moving. [00:28:10] It's not college campuses that we're moving, but we're moving anybody that's moving from point A to point B, whether that's a business, an apartment, a resident, a homeowner. And everything in between and we also do junk removal or bulk trash removal. So we're really the only one stop solution that can do both the move and the bulk removal as one brand, one company. [00:28:30] And I think it's important for apartments and multifamily in general, because you want to know that the individuals and the companies that are coming onto your property are insured, have a reputable, accountable brand behind them. And so we've started to see a lot of traction with apartment partnerships where we've become this preferred mover for them to recommend to the residents in the moving leasing packets. So they know that, the trucks are going to be branded. The property is going to be protected. The elevators or stairways are going to be, wraps that are not damaged. The individuals are going to be properly insured, so there's no injury, no injuries, properly trained. [00:29:09] We're not going to be blocking resident cars with the moving van, which, makes everybody upset. We've got a whole national platform and local platform for partnering with property managers. To be their go to solution for moving the residents in and out as well as the tenant leave behind the bulk trash removal, clearing out, for the turns. [00:29:28] And whether that's, corporate removal or just furniture removal, we have a partnership with goodwill where we can donate anything it's reusable. So I think that's something that maybe a lot of property managers don't realize is our College Hunks Hauling Junk and moving business is a great resource for property management in general. [00:29:44] Sarah: That's awesome. That was one of the things that was so frustrating is just waiting on the junk removal. Like it's finally vacant. Go! And sometimes they're like, "yeah, I'm a week out."  [00:29:55] Nick: Yeah. And we can do same day, next day. And look, there's going to be a wide range of prices on junk removal. I know that, there's a budget consciousness and property management. [00:30:03] I get that. Anyone with the truck can come and claim to do junk removal, but he might not answer the phone the next time you call him, or he might be a week out or he might say he's coming and not come. We've got a national call center, a national booking platform, a national accounts program. [00:30:18] So we've got responsiveness and that's something else again for your listeners. Nine out of 10 service companies don't even answer the phone. And so it's something as simple as just making sure the phone gets answered when people call if you've got a property management company, making sure your phone, you have somebody, even if it's an outsourced third party, answers the phone when your residents call or answers the ticket when, the client calls. That goes a long way. It's simple and often overlooked, but it gets back to what we talked about earlier about just being able to out execute what other people aren't doing.  [00:30:48] Jason: Yeah. That's the foundation of decent customer service is accuracy and availability, according to the Gallup polls customer satisfaction pyramid that they had in one of their books. [00:30:59] And if you're perfectly accurate and perfectly available. They don't notice you like that's just default. They just assume that should be done. So it's a math that it's partnership and then advice. And so when you get to that level where you're giving advice, like you had mentioned, like helping them with their fees and helping them figure out how to make money off of this and get the NOI, that's where you're at an exceptional level is when you get to that peak of partnership and then advice. [00:31:25] Nick, this has been a really cool, appreciate you coming here on the show. How can people get connected to College Hunks Hauling Junk and a Trash Butler?  [00:31:36] Nick: So the best way for Trash Butler, really simple, TrashButler. com and for our College Hunks hauling junk and moving business, really simple, CollegeHunks. com. So TrashButler. com, CollegeHunks. com, that's for the doorstep trash and recycling amenity as well as the moving and junk removal partnership opportunity and and look, I appreciate you having me on. I think it's awesome what you're doing to help, empower and motivate and inspire and elevate the property management industry because it's a great industry. And it's one that is right for people to continue to elevate and improve upon.  [00:32:07] Jason: Awesome. Thanks, Nick. Appreciate you being here on the DoorGrow show.  [00:32:10] Nick: Thank you.  [00:32:12] Jason: Thanks for being here. All right. So if you're a property management business owner, you're wanting to grow and scale your business. [00:32:18] Reach out to us. You can check us out at DoorGrow. com or go to join our community and hang out with a bunch of property management entrepreneurs and find out if we're legit and see what everybody else is doing. Go to DoorGrow club. com, and hopefully we're talking and working together soon. Bye everyone. [00:32:36] you just listened to the #DoorGrowShow. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet in the DoorGrowClub. Join your fellow DoorGrow Hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead content, social direct mail, and they still struggle to grow!  [00:33:03] At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge: getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today's episode on our blog doorgrow.com, and to get notified of future events and news subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow Hacking your business and your life.

With Nick on Vacation in Maine with his family, Marcus and Atrax take over the show! I think the two of them MAY have talked about video games, but you'll have to listed to confirm... Enjoy! Join the Nerds Community Discord!https://discord.gg/78e5BUmXx8We're on YouTube!https://www.youtube.com/@workingclassnerdsCheck Out Our Streams!https://www.twitch.tv/Atrax_Ahttps://www.twitch.tv/marcusb814https://www.twitch.tv/NickVern51

On this blast of an episode I sit down and chat w/ Jason Baygood and Nathan McDougall of the Chicago pop punk/power pop band Space Age Zeros. We chat about how they formed, how they hooked up with Nick No from Ramonescore Radio/Wellsville Records, how they blend all their influences, and how the scene thrives in the digital age of streaming and social media. There's also plenty of Screeching Weasel, Dan Vapid, J Prozac/ The Prozacs, Descendents/ ALL, and Anti-Flag talk, and much, much more! So sit back and take off w/ this episode of TIJAP! *** (enjoy all four songs from SAZ's debut EP “Blasting Off” in this episode: “On a Date w/ Suzi Moon,” “Ali w/ an Eye,” “Dead Inside,” and “Wishing Well.” - used w/ permission.) ***

In this episode of New Music with Nick, Sligh reviews British rapper Little Simz's latest album, "NO THANK YOU." For more podcasts by The Stanford Daily, visit stanforddaily.com/category/podcasts. Graphic: Michelle Fu Producer: Philip Baillargeon Managing Editor: Helena Getahun-Hawkins

Tony heads to British Columbia on his next stop on the world tour and is joined by Season Regular, YouTuber and Fellow Podcaster Nick Green aka No Score on YouTube. The two talk everything about the game awards and Destiny Insider Jackson gives his last Destiny 2 report before the new year.Follow Tony: https://twitter.com/RadioT0nyTwitch: https://www.twitch.tv/tonysgameloungeFollow Nick: https://twitter.com/NoDamnGood1104No Score YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@noscoreOut of Focus: https://open.spotify.com/show/6XrtUV7rZCoQ2g8rcaxu4s?si=0478c5a59b524092Join the Official Tony's Game Lounge Discord: https://discord.gg/xXyvjaCsXp

Wouldn't it be nice if you could sleep at night knowing that you don't have to worry about pests in the properties you manage? In this episode, property management growth expert, Jason Hull interviews Nick Drzayich from Cover Pests to learn about dealing with pests in property management. You'll Learn… [02:00] Cover Pest… It's like Insurance for Pest Control [03:59] Dealing with Pests as a Property Manager [07:48] Dealing with the Different Kinds of Pests [13:13] How Partnering with Something Like Cover Pest Works [16:02] Eliminating Having to Figure Out Who is Gonna Pay the Bill [17:15] Using Pest Coverage as a Selling Point for Property Management Tweetables “We want the tenants to feel good about where they live and have it clean. We also want the owners to understand that their property's being taken care of when it's needed.” “It's nice for the property manager to have someone else get some eyes on the property every once in a while.” “It's increasing the visibility. It's decreasing some of the potential costs for the owners. It's protecting the owners.” “We go out, and we take care of it.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] Nick: We want the tenants to feel good about where they live and have it clean. We also want the owners to understand that their property's being taken care of when it's needed and then obviously the property management companies, they don't have to hassle with the back and forth and who's paying the bill.    [00:00:14] Jason: Welcome DoorGrow Hackers to the #DoorGrowShow. 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 in 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.   [00:00:53] At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management business owners and their businesses. 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.    [00:01:13] Now, let's get into the show and my guest today, I am hanging out here with Nick, and Nick, you got to tell me your last name. I should have asked you before the show.    [00:01:25] Nick: No, that's okay. I tell everybody to just say "does your eye itch?" And that'll about cover it. Okay. It's pronounced (dur zye ich) Drzayich. It's a Serbian name, and it's way too many consonants in a row.    [00:01:37] Jason: Nick Drzayich. All right. From Cover Pest. Cool. And is it Cover Pest or just "Cover?" Website says "cover."    [00:01:45] Nick: Yeah. Cover Pest. Yeah.   [00:01:47] Jason: Cover Pest. Okay, cool. Well Nick, glad to have you on the show. So tell me-- give us a little bit of background. How did you-- and I'll just say for those listening, it says, "pest control solution for property managers," like on your website. So tell me a little bit about Cover Pest, and how did you get into this?    [00:02:04] Nick: Come from an insurance background actually. 13 years or so ago, I started and grew a independent life insurance agency, and so that's kind of been my background. Right. And so within insurance, you're obviously taking a big cost in life insurance. There's a death benefit with other insurances. There's big expenses that come at some point throughout the life of a policy and you're taking the cost of that and you're spreading it out among all the policy owners.    [00:02:34] Jason: Mm-hmm.   [00:02:34] Nick: So kind of with that mindset. I was chatting with my business partner who lives north of me, and he actually runs a pest control company and has for several years. We kind of got to chatting about this combination of life insurance and kind of sharing this cost, spreading the cost out and how you could potentially do that with pest control. And that's how we kind of landed on this idea of using that model to help property management companies take care of their pest control issues, which we know are just a hassle whenever they happen. Yeah. And solve that issue for them and allow them to take that off their plate and add a little bit of revenue in the meantime. Got it. And what areas do you guys cover? Is this a national business? Or is this local? How does this work? Yep. So this is a national business.   [00:03:21] We obviously have the ability to go anywhere in the country. We have, we started it here in our home state of Idaho, which is where we have the bulk of our clients. But ultimately, yeah, we we work with vendors across the country to be able to help take care of the issues that, that property managers are seeing.   [00:03:37] Jason: Cool. So help me understand how this works. Like why would a property manager decide, Hey, I should work with Cover Pest instead of just use some pest control vendors locally and connect with and have these people in as a feather in my cap. What advantages do they have with working with Cover Pest and why would a property manager choose? Or why do they choose to work with you?    [00:03:59] Nick: Yeah. Great question. So. As soon as you mention pest control to a property manager, you're probably going to get just a lot of heartache right there. Whenever an issue comes up, it's technically it's a tenant responsibility. Yeah, but ultimately it's going to come back to the maintenance manager. It's going to come back to the property management company or owner every once in a while. And so they're having to deal with finding a vendor. Vendors got to contact the tenant, get the service done, and then you got to figure out where you're sending the bill, and there's always going to be a fight there. The tenant's not going to want to pay it, the owner doesn't want to pay it, and you, as the property manager, you don't want to pay it either. And the benefit here is that, we work best with companies that have some kind of resident benefit package. So what our service does is it kind of slides right into that resident benefit package, and for a very nominal fee compared to what you would normally pay for pest control, your tenants are able to have all their pest issues covered, and when they need service, they put the request in online-- goes to call. We send a technician out and take care of it. There's no additional cost on top of what that monthly fee is.   [00:05:03] So like I mentioned, we kind of slide in the benefit packages. We also work as a standalone amenity for those that either don't want to put us in a benefit package or don't offer a benefit package.    [00:05:13] Jason: Got it. So what are what are property managers typically bundling in along with Cover Pest in, you know, in addition to Cover Pest in their resident benefits packages that you're seeing?   [00:05:26] Nick: Yeah, so oftentimes we'll see-- a big one is filter service, so furnace filters that are shipped--   [00:05:31] Jason: mm-hmm    [00:05:32] Nick: --every few months. There's a lot of times some kind of a credit building aspect to the benefit package. There's usually some kind of a maintenance, a 24 or seven maintenance benefit that's inside of that package. And then a lot of times there'll be some kind of perks. You get a free maintenance request once a year on something that would normally be charged to you, or you have late fee, late payment protection. Once per year, you can make a late payment and not have to worry about any kind of fees. So those are just some of the things that we're seeing inside of benefit packages along with our service.    [00:06:03] Jason: Got it. And what are you typically seeing property managers charge for this resident benefit package? And I would assume this is something that they're convincing the tenants to buy as a product.   [00:06:15] Nick: Yeah, so ultimately, what we've seen is that the benefit package just rolls right along with the lease agreement. There's not an option there for the tenant to either pay for or not. It just is what it is and you get it. Yep. And they range across the board, right? From, you know, 20 bucks all the way up to 75 plus dollars per month, depending on what's in the package.   [00:06:41] So when we were designing our service to be able to slide into a benefit package, we wanted to be super conscious of increasing that at all right because any increase in a benefit package cost is going to come with some kickback initially. And so there's got to be some good value there. So we had that in mind for sure, but they definitely range. They kind of run the gamut of, you know, pretty cheap all the way up to some pretty expensive packages, depending on what's offered.    [00:07:08] Jason: Got it. Now you said kickback, but I think you mean push back, right?    [00:07:13] Nick: Yeah.   [00:07:13] Jason: Okay. All right. Just making sure. People are like, "is there an affiliate thing going on here?" right. Okay. Yeah. Right. The tenants are going to be a little frustrated if it's too expensive and they're going to say, "Well, why am I being forced to do this? I don't know that I need all that stuff." Okay. So then, can you give us an idea of what this would cost? How do you price this with companies? Is this like on a per unit basis that you work out a deal with the property managers? Are there certain rates? Is this something that they just can do on certain properties that they can convince the owners to buy into? How does that typically work?    [00:07:48] Nick: Yeah. So when we onboard a company. It's pretty much an all or nothing deal. Right. We want to make sure we cover all of their properties regardless of where they're at and if they have current pest issues. We do work individually on a customized basis with each property management company to decide: "all right, what are you seeing typically pest issue wise? What package makes the most sense, and do we need to customize a package to best fit?" So, at a broad level, we have a couple of different packages. One of 'them is more of a basic package that covers the things that don't typically happen a lot, but when they do happen, it's a real hassle.   [00:08:25] So a good example of that would be bed bugs, for example. They don't happen a ton, but when they do, it's a pretty severe cost.   [00:08:32] Jason: Right.   [00:08:33] Nick: Yep. And and then going up from there, our upper package is a little bit more of the common stuff that people call on a regular basis. Your spiders, your ants, wasps, bees, that sort of thing. And so we do have a couple of packages that we work off of, but we do customize with each company and make sure that we're covering what they want and making it specific to them.    [00:08:56] Jason: Got it. I'm sure it differs. Like here in Texas, we have some big bugs and a lot of mosquitoes here in Austin, but yeah, in some markets, I would imagine you've got certain issues that are just typical to that market and then other markets you don't, and it might also have to do with sometimes-- unfortunately might have to do with the class of the property or the area of the property that it's in, how well it's maintained, stuff like that.   [00:09:21] Nick: Yeah, for sure. And I mean, ultimately we don't want the tenants to hesitate to call because that's what normally happens, right? They know that they're responsible for it.    [00:09:30] Jason: Yeah.    [00:09:30] Nick: And so, they don't call and they just kind of sweep it under the rug either literally or figuratively and the pest issue goes untreated and it can get out of hand, and so we want to eliminate that from happening. We want the tenants to feel good about where they live and have it clean. We also want the owners to understand that their property's being taken care of when it's needed and then obviously the property management companies, they don't have to hassle with the back and forth and who's paying the bill.   [00:09:57] Jason: So let's make this a little bit real. So let's say you've got a tenant. They've got some pests. I don't know what kind of pests would be a serious issue, but they decide not to call. Give me an example you've heard of, and then it's incurring additional damages that then the owner's going to have to pay for. Can you think of something like that?    [00:10:17] Nick: Well, I can tell you that, for example, like an average bed bug cost to remediate is going to be anywhere between 800 and a thousand bucks.    [00:10:25] Jason: Okay.    [00:10:25] Nick: So right there, you know, our average package is probably around 10 to 12 bucks a month. So if a tenant is paying 10 to 12 bucks a month, they have a bed bug issue, they're paying substantially less than what they would have to pay to have that remediated through just a general pest control company. Those obviously become much bigger issues when you're looking at multi-family situations where units are connected and those bugs can travel. So I've seen that stuff get pretty out of hand, but ultimately we want to get it controlled as, as quickly as we can so that doesn't happen.    [00:11:00] Jason: Yeah. I hate roaches. Really don't like those things like yeah. I remember being in some houses, like some just not really nice areas, like visiting some houses and stuff in upstate New York and high humidity, and there were some units that I went in that had some really nasty infestations with cockroaches and some of them are really freaking tiny. They're just running around all over, so. Yeah, I hate those things.    [00:11:27] Nick: It's rough. It is nice. Yeah. It's nice for the property manager to have someone else get some eyes on the property every once in a while because typically if you're seeing a lot of bugs, there's a reason. The bugs want to eat. And so there's some cleanliness issues there. So it's nice to be able for us to be able to report on what we're seeing and if we're seeing multiple calls on the same property that's a little bit of a red flag to maybe send someone out there to take a look at the property and have a chat with the tenant.   [00:11:52] Jason: Got it. Yeah. So one of the key benefits then is it's giving you greater visibility into some of the problem properties as to what's going on.    [00:12:02] Nick: Yeah, absolutely because we're going to track every time we get a service call, and you're going to see that report as well. So we can both kind of keep eyes on it.   [00:12:09] Jason: Got it. Okay, cool. So this is something they can build into, you know, along with their leases as part of their resident benefit package. It's not going to increase their costs. Does this become a profit center in any way for property managers or is this just mitigating costs?    [00:12:26] Nick: Yeah, we've had property managers use it just to kind of mitigate those costs. No additional revenue.    [00:12:32] Jason: Mm-hmm.    [00:12:32] Nick: Most of the companies we work with as with everything in their benefit package, they're going to add some kind of a mark up there or an admin fee just for them for kind of doing the work and yeah and setting up the relationship. So it makes perfect sense, so that's what most of them will do. And it's kind of up to them, how much they mark it up, but yeah, there's definitely an additional kind of profit stream there that can be created through using Cover.    [00:12:54] Jason: Got it. And certainly some advantages to taking greater care of the property. Cool. So what are the big questions besides the ones you've already touched on that when people come to you, they're really curious to know because I'm sure some of our listeners are probably thinking, "Hey, maybe this is a good idea."    [00:13:13] Nick: Yeah. Yeah. So one of the main questions I get is how do we roll it out? Yeah. And a couple different ways. Typically what we'll do is it's a kind of a slow rollout and it's upon lease renewal or a new lease creation. So as you're working with a property management company, they have new leases come up. They'll send us that batch for the month. That's renewing and we'll get them added into the service catalog. We have had companies that have gone in and asked their tenants, "Hey, do you want to opt into this right now in the middle of your lease?" and that option is there as well.    [00:13:44] Jason: Have you seen much success with that, with them doing that? What percentage do you see typically? I don't know if you have that data, but...   [00:13:52] Nick: that are opting in?   [00:13:54] Jason: Yeah. If they put it out to all of their residents for opt in, I'm just curious what the typical response rate is that people are like, "yeah. I'll go ahead and do that." Maybe 10%?   [00:14:05] Nick: Yeah. It's not high. Not high--   [00:14:07] Jason: yeah   [00:14:07] Nick: because--    [00:14:08] Jason: I would imagine it's like, "Hey spend more money. Do you want to?" And they're like, " yeah."    [00:14:11] Nick: exactly. Yep.    [00:14:13] Jason: Okay.    [00:14:13] Nick: So most frequently, most commonly, it'll be rolled out as leases are renewed and as new properties or leases are assigned, that's the most common way that it's done.    [00:14:23] Jason: Okay. Got it. So they sign up with you. You've worked out the pricing based on what sort of package they need, you implement, consult them and help them figure out how they're going to roll this out, and they're probably building this into their lease with some verbiage. You typically provide some verbiage for them to add to their lease as part of this.    [00:14:41] Nick: Yep, absolutely. We have some stuff that you can throw in.    [00:14:44] Jason: And then they get this rolled out. So then they've got this new maybe profit center, but at least it's being paid for by somebody. It's increasing the visibility. It's decreasing some of the potential costs for the owners. It's protecting the owners. If something gets really bad it could cause a lot of damage. And I'm curious, like, you've mentioned bed bugs, and I mentioned roaches, but what else are you typically seeing causes a lot of damage? I mean, termites, we hear a lot about. Is this something that is checked for or like relevant?   [00:15:13] Nick: Yeah. wood destroying bugs like termites are a completely different animal.    [00:15:18] Jason: Yeah.   [00:15:18] Nick: That's not honestly a part of what we do. It's another specialty altogether. As far as damage is concerned, mice and rats are another one that are--   [00:15:28] Jason: oh yeah.   [00:15:28] Nick: --they're out there, and we hear about them and we treat for those. Those ones will come in and cause some real issues. If nothing else, just scaring the crap out of people.   [00:15:37] Jason: Yeah, that's true. Yeah. And then, you know, safely doing the cleanup because--   [00:15:42] Nick: right.    [00:15:43] Jason: --You know, some issues with some of that stuff, so yeah.    [00:15:46] Nick: Yeah.    [00:15:47] Jason: And so no on termites, but yes, on bed bugs, roaches and mice and and rats. Okay. Got it. Any other questions that property managers might ask that would be curious about your service or that you'd like them to understand or know?   [00:16:02] Nick: Yeah, maybe just to, again point out that sometimes when we go out to do a service the property management company will expect another bill from us or think that there'll be another bill coming, but it's all taken care of. Just in that monthly subscription that's paid for by the tenant. There's no additional fee, no additional cost. We go out and we take care of it. And so that's a common question, common concern. One other one that comes to mind is sometimes they'll be rehabbing a property or making some significant changes to one of their properties and they'll want to stop the service or pause the service. We're definitely open to doing that and have done that. So pausing service during a rehab or big remodel is definitely something we can do. That's one question that has come up in the past as well.    [00:16:44] Jason: Unless they potentially could uncover something in the walls during that room.   [00:16:49] Nick: Right. Right. Yeah. And that's another thing to mention. Yeah. Another thing to mention is the service kind of runs with the address, not necessarily the tenant, so--    [00:16:59] Jason: okay.   [00:16:59] Nick: --if you have a property that maybe sat vacant for a couple months, and you had a maintenance manager out there to check on something and he notice a pest issue. He can just give us a call and we'll go take care of it. Even though there's not a tenant in there, because it kind of runs with the address.    [00:17:15] Jason: Got it. And that justifies including it as part of the rent as well. So if you're saying, "Hey, this. This property, in some instances like in California, like you have to usually pay for lawn care if you want the lawn to be maintained because some people just won't do it sometimes, right? So there's certain things you would include. So this would be included. You could then-- that could be a selling point to the tenants. Like this comes with a resident benefit package where it includes this and this, you won't have to worry about pest control. You won't, and these other things.   [00:17:46] Nick: Yep, exactly.   [00:17:47] Jason: Okay. So potentially as the benefit of helping, sweeten the deal a little bit on a potential rental property for a potential resident, so.   [00:17:55] Nick: For sure. Yeah.    [00:17:57] Jason: Cool. Well, I think we've covered most of the highlights. This sounds like-- it sounds like a no brainer. It sounds like a good service. Let's tell everybody how to get in touch with you and how to find you.   [00:18:10] Nick: Yeah, super easy. Our website is CoverPest.com and you can call me anytime. My number's (208) 477-1330. That's my cell. And you can go on to CoverPest.com, submit a form, and we're happy to chat about creating kind of a custom pricing model for your property management company.    [00:18:29] Jason: Cool. So I want to ask one more question. So when they hear you say, "you'll call my cell" and "here's my number," they might be thinking, is this a scalable business? What if somebody has 10,000 doors or they're a big conglomerate, you know, or they're a small property manager. Is this a scalable model for you? Can you handle different size property management companies?   [00:18:50] Nick: Yeah, what's nice is that our portal, our backend portal that's a part of our website makes it really easy for property management companies to go in and add their properties to their list. So every time they have a backed upload of lease renewals. They go to the service portal, they put it in there and they're added and they can see exactly which properties are covered in that month. And then, yeah, we work with a network of pest control companies that we use as vendors to service accounts that we get with property management companies in different states, if that makes.    [00:19:23] Jason: Got it. So you've got this all figured out really well. I appreciate you coming the show, Nick, and it's been great hearing about Cover Pest. So thanks. Thanks for coming on.    [00:19:33] Nick: Yeah, thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it.    [00:19:36] Jason: All right. Cool. So check them out at coverpest.com sounds like a good service. And as always give me your feedback. I want to hear... those of you that work with Cover Pest, let me know how it goes. And those of you that are tuning in for the first time, and you got some value from this episode, or if you're not tuning in for the first time, give us some feedback. If you find us on YouTube, The Google play store, or you find us on Spotify or iTunes, give us some feedback. We'd love to hear what you think of the show. And we may even give you a shout out on a future episode. So we appreciate that. And if you're interested in growing your business, check us out at doorgrow.com, and if you want to join our free community of property management entrepreneurs, you can go to doorgrowclub.com and that will get you to our Facebook group.    [00:20:23] Join that community. We've got some great people in there and you know, a rising tide raises all ships, as they say this will allow you to connect with some other property managers and have a resource you can go to to ask questions. And we'd love to hear from any of you inside there, so make sure you join. And until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye everyone.   [00:20:49] You just listened to the #DoorGrowShow. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet in the DoorGrowClub. Join your fellow DoorGrow Hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead content, social direct mail, and they still struggle to grow!    [00:21:16] At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge: getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today's episode on our blog doorgrow.com, and to get notified of future events and news subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow Hacking your business and your life.

The phrase “tone deaf” is so misleading. I can HEAR tone just fine. Look at how many things I edit!…

There are certain age milestones where you should really pay attention to your retirement planning progress. On this episode, we'll look at the most important birthdays as you approach retirement and cover the exact things you should be checking off your to-do list at each age. Helpful Information: PFG Website: https://www.pfgprivatewealth.com/ Contact: 813-286-7776 Email: info@pfgprivatewealth.com Disclaimer: PFG Private Wealth Management, LLC is a registered investment adviser. All statements and opinions expressed are based upon information considered reliable although it should not be relied upon as such. Any statements or opinions are subject to change without notice. Information presented is for educational purposes only and does not intend to make an offer or solicitation for the sale or purchase of any specific securities, investments, or investment strategies. Investment involve risk and, unless otherwise stated, are not guaranteed. Information expressed does not take into account your specific situation or objectives and is not intended as recommendations appropriate for any individual. Listeners are encouraged to seek advice from a qualified tax, legal, or investment adviser to determine whether any information presented may be suitable for their specific situation. Past performance is not indicative of future performance. Transcript of Today's Show: For a full transcript of today's show, visit the blog related to this episode at https://www.pfgprivatewealth.com/podcast/ ----more---- Mark: Hey, everybody. Welcome into another addition of the podcast. This is Retirement Planning Redefined, with John and Nick and myself, talking investing, finance, retirement, and birthdays.   Mark: We're going to get into important birthdays in the retirement planning process. As we get older, I don't think any of us really want birthdays, but these are some things we need to know. They're pretty useful. Some of this is pretty basic. Some of this stuff's got some interesting caveats in it as well. So you might learn something along the way. It can go a long way towards that retirement planning process.   Mark: We're going to get into that and take an email question as well. If you've got some questions of your own, stop by the website, pfgprivatewealth.com. That's pfgprivatewealth.com.   Mark: John, what's going on, buddy? How you doing?   John: A little tired. Got woken up at 2:00 in the morning with two cranky kids.   Mark: Oh yeah.   John: So if I'm a little off today, I apologize.   Mark: There you go. No, no worries. You get the whole, they climb the bed, and then you're on the tiniest sliver?   John: I got one climb into bed, I think kicked me in the face at one point.   Mark: Oh, nice.   John: Another one climbed into bed missing out on the other one, because they share a room. Then I had the sliver. I woke up almost falling off the bed.   Mark: There you go. And usually freezing because you have no blankets.   John: Yeah, yeah.   Mark: That's usually the way it goes. Nick's sitting there going, "I don't know what you guys are talking about."   Mark: What's going on, buddy. How you doing?   Nick: Yep. No. Pretty low maintenance over here.   Mark: Well, that's good. Hey, don't you have a birthday coming up?   Nick: I got a couple months still.   Mark: Okay, a couple months.   Nick: Yeah, I just got back from a trip a few weeks ago. Some buddies that I grew up with, a group of us have been friends for a really long time, I guess, going back to middle school. We're all turning 40 this year, so we rented a house in Charleston, and all survived.   Mark: Nice. There you go.   Nick: Yeah. It was good.   John: This is how you know Nick's turning 40. He came back with neck pain.   Mark: Exactly.   Nick: Yeah.   Mark: Hey, when you start to get a certain age, you start going, "When did I hurt that?" It's like, "I didn't even do anything." Yeah. You don't have to do anything.   Mark: Well, you know what? That's a good segue. Let's jump into this.   Mark: We're going to start with age 50. I turned 50 last year. First of all, the thing that sucks is you get the AARP card. I don't know about all that. That's annoying as a reminder that you're 50.   Mark: But the government does say, "Hey, let me help you out a little bit here if you need to catch up on some of the retirement accounts, help building those up." Talk to me about catch up contributions, guys.   Nick: Yeah. Essentially what happens is when you hit 50, there's two types of accounts that allow you to start contributing a little bit more money. The most basic one is an IRA or a Roth IRA, where the typical maximum contribution for somebody under 50 is 6,000 a year. You can add an additional thousand to do a total of 7,000 a year. The bigger one is in a 401(k) or 403(b) account, where you're able to contribute, I believe it's an extra 6,500 per year.   Nick: This is also a good flag for people to think about where, hey, once that catch up contribution is available, it's probably a good time, if you haven't done any sort of planning before, to really start to dial in and understand your financial picture a little bit more. Because if you talk to anybody that's 60, they'll tell you that 50 didn't seem too far back. So that's a good reminder to dig into that a little bit.   Mark: Yeah. It adds up. It's not necessarily chicken feed. You might hear it and think, "Well, a thousand dollars on this type of account over a year, or 6,500 on the other type of account, whoopedidoo." But if you're 50 and you're going to 67, let say, for full retirement age, and we'll get to that in a little bit, that's 17 years of an extra seven grand. It's not exactly chicken feed, right?   Nick: No. It's going to be big money down the road.   Mark: Yeah, exactly. So that's 50.   Mark: John, talk to me about 55. This one's really similar to 59 and a half, which most of us are familiar with, but most people don't understand the rule at 55. So can you break that down a little bit?   John: Yeah. We don't see people utilize this too often, but an example would be let's say you're 50, 55, 56, and for whatever reason, you leave your current job. You have an opportunity, at that point...   John: Let's give a bad scenario. You get laid off. If you didn't have a nest egg saved up in savings, there's an opportunity to actually access some money from your 401(k) plan without penalty. What you'll do is, basically, you take the money directly from the plan, and you just have it go to your bank account, and the 10% penalty's waived.   John: Now, some people need to be careful with this. Once you roll it out to an IRA, this 55 rule here, where the 10%'s waived, ceases to exist. It has to go from the employer plan to you directly in that situation. It's a nice feature if someone finds themselves in a bad situation, or they need access to money, and the 10% penalty's gone, but you still have to pay your income tax on that money [crosstalk 00:05:03]   Mark: Of course. Yeah. That caveat being, it's only from the job that you've just left, right? It can't be from two jobs ago kind of thing. It's got to be that one that you've just walked away from, or been asked to leave, or whatever the case is. That's that caveat.   John: Correct.   Mark: It's basically the same rules, Nick, as the 59 and a half. It's just is attached to that prior job. But 59 and a half is the more normal one. What's the breakdown there?   Nick: Yeah. Essentially what happens is, at 59 and a half, you are able to take out money from your qualified accounts while avoiding that penalty without any sort of caveats. One thing to keep in mind is that usually you're taking it out from accounts that...   Nick: For example, if you're currently employed, the process of taking it out of the plan where you're employed can be a little bit different, but it's pretty smooth and easy if you have an IRA or something like that outside of the employer plan.   Nick: One other thing that happens in most plans, for people at 59 and a half, is, and we've seen it a bunch lately, where a lot of 401(k) plans have very restricted options in fixed income and those sorts of things, where most or many plans allow people to take inservice rollovers, where they're able to still work at their employer, but roll their money out of the plan to open up some options for investments outside of the plan.   Nick: That's not always the best thing for people. Sometimes the plans are great. Fees are really low. Options are great. So it may not make sense, but oftentimes people do like having the option to be able to shift the money out without any sort of issue.   Mark: Okay. All right. So that's the norm there. You got to love that half thing. You always wonder what the senators or whoever was thinking when [crosstalk 00:06:56]   John: Finally, they got rid of the 70 and a half [crosstalk 00:06:58]   Mark: Yeah. They get rid of that one. Yeah. We'll get to that in just a minute as well.   Mark: John, 62, nothing too groundbreaking here, but we are eligible finally for Social Security. So that becomes... I guess the biggest thing here is people just go, "Let me turn it on ASAP versus is it the right move?"   John: Yeah. So 62, you're now eligible. Like you said, a lot of people are excited to finally get access to that extra income. You can start taking on Social Security.   John: Couple of things to just be aware of is, any time you take Social Security before your full retirement age, you will get a reduction of benefit. At 62, it's anywhere, depending on your full retirement age, roughly 25 to 30% reduction of what you would've gotten had you waited till 66 or 67.   Mark: They penalize you, basically.   John: Yeah.   Nick: Yeah. Actually, if you do the math, it ends up breaking down to almost a half a percent per month reduced.   Mark: Oh wow.   Nick: Yeah. It really starts to add up when you think about it that way.   John: Yeah. We always harp on planning, so important if you are thinking about taking it early, once you make that decision, and after a year of doing that, you're locked into that decision. So it's important to really understand is that best for your situation.   John: Other things to consider at this age, if you do take early, Social Security does have what they call a earnings penalty slash recapture. If you're still working and taking at 62, a portion of your Social Security could be subject to go back to them in lieu of, for a better term, [crosstalk 00:08:27]   Mark: It's 19,000 and some change, I think, this year, if you make more than that.   John: Yeah.   Mark: Yeah.   John: Yeah. Anything above 19,000 that you're earning, 50% goes back to Social Security. [crosstalk 00:08:36]   Mark: Yeah. For every two bucks you make-   John: 5,000 goes back to Social Security. So that's really important.   John: Something that I just want to make, last point on this, is that earnings threshold is based on someone's earned income, and it's based on their own earned income, not household. That comes up quite a bit, while people say, "Well, I want to retire and take at 62, but my husband's still working. Am I going to have a penalty if I take it?" The answer is no. It's based on your own earnings record.   Mark: That's where the strategy comes into play too. Because if you are married, then looking at who's making more, do we leave one person's to grow, as we're going to get into those in just a second, to grow towards that more full number.   Mark: Again, that's all the strategy. It may make sense for one person to turn it on early, and the other person to delay it. That's, again, part of the strategy of sitting down and talking with a professional, and looking at all the other assets that you have, and figuring out a good move there.   Mark: Nick, let's go to Medicare. 65 magic age.   Nick: Yeah. Actually, my dad turns 65 this year. So we've been planning this out for him. He is a retired fireman, so he has some benefits that tie in with his pension.   Nick: One of the things that came up, and just something that people should think about or remember, even if they are continuing to work past 65, is it oftentimes makes sense to at least enroll in Medicare Part A. You can usually enroll as early as three months before your birthday. The Medicare website has gotten a lot easier to work with over the last year or two.   Nick: Part A, the tricky thing is that you want to check with your employer, because usually what happens for the areas that Part A covers, which is usually hospital care, if you were to have to be admitted or certain procedures, it's figuring out who's the primary payer, who pays first, who pays second. So making sure that you coordinate your benefits. Check in with HR, if you're going to continue to work.   Nick: If you are retired and are coming up on that Medicare age, make sure that you get your ducks in a row so that you do enroll. Most likely you're going to start saving some money on some healthcare premiums.   Mark: Technically, this starts about, what, three months early? It's a little actually before 65. I think it's three months when you got to start this process, and three months before and after.   Nick: Yep. Yeah. You can typically enroll three months before your birthday, and then through three months afterwards. There can be some issues if you don't enroll and you don't have other healthcare, at least for Part A. There can be penalties and that sort of thing.   Nick: Frankly, with Medicare and healthcare in retirement, this is a space that we typically delegate out. We've got some good resources for clients that we refer them to, because there are a lot of moving parts, and it can be overwhelming, especially when you start to move into the supplements and Advantage plans, and all these different things.   Mark: Oh yeah. And it's crucial. You want to make sure you get it right. A lot of advisors will definitely work with some specialists, if you will, in that kind of arena. So definitely checking that out when we turn 65.   Mark: Again, some of these, pretty high level stuff, some of this stuff we definitely know. But we wanted to go over some of those more interesting caveats.   Mark: Let's keep moving along here, guys. Full retirement age, 66 or 67. John, just what? It's your birthday, right?   John: It is your birthday. That's the time that you can actually take your full Social Security benefit without any reduction, which is a great thing to do. Then also that earnings penalty we discussed earlier at age 62, that no longer exists. Once you hit your full retirement age, 66 or 67, you can earn as much as you want and collect your Social Security. There's no penalty slash recapture.   John: When that happens, people have some decisions to make. If they're still working, they can decide to take their Social Security. I've had some clients that take it, and they use that as vacation money. I've had some other ones take it, and they take advantage of maxing out their 401(k) with the extra income. Or you can delay it. You don't have to take it. You get 8% simple interest on your benefit up until age 70.   John: So full retirement age, you got a lot of big decisions to make, depending on your situation. But you want to make sure you're making the best for what you want.   Mark: Definitely.   Nick: Just as a reminder to people that that 8%, and you had mentioned it, but it does cap out at age 70. So there's no point in waiting past 70, because it doesn't increase any more.   Mark: Right. Thanks for doing that. It wasn't on my list, but I was going to bring it up real fast. So yeah. People will sometimes email and they'll say, "Hey, I want to keep working past 70. How's that affect Social Security." It's like, "Well, you're maxed out, so you got to just go ahead and get it done." You can still work if you're feeling like it. Your earnings potential is unlimited, but it's just a matter of you're not going to add any more to it. So I'm glad you brought that up.   Mark: John, you mentioned earlier, they got rid of the other half. Thank God. The 70 and a half thing, just because it was confusing as all get out. They moved it to 72.   Nick: Yeah. Required minimum distributions, as a reminder for people, are for accounts that are pre-tax, where you were able to defer taxation. 401(k), traditional IRA, that sort of thing. At 72, you have to start taking out minimum distributions. It starts at around 3.6, 3.7% of the balance. It's based on the prior year's ending balance. It has to be taken out by the end of the year.   Nick: An important thing for people to understand is that, many times, people are taking those withdrawals out to live on anyways. So for a lot of people, it's not an issue at all. However, there are a good amount of people that it's going to be excess income.   Nick: Earlier mentioned, hey, at age 50, really time to check in and start making sure that you're planning. One of the benefits of planning and looking forward is to project out and see, hey, are these withdrawal going to cause you to have excess income at 72, where maybe we're entering into a time that tax rates could be higher, tax rates could be going up, which is fairly likely in the next five to 10 years. So if we know and we can project that, then we can make some adjustments to how we save, should you be putting more money into a Roth versus a traditional, and how we make adjustments on the overall planning.   Nick: So making sure that you understand how those work, and then the impact that it has on other decisions to take into account for that situation, is a huge part of planning.   Mark: Definitely. Those are some important birthdays along the way. You got to make sure you get this stuff done. 72, there's the hefty penalties involved if you don't do that. Plus you still got to pay the taxes. All this stuff has some crucial moments in that retirement planning process, so definitely make sure that you are not only celebrating your birthday, but you're also doing the right things from that financial and that retirement planning standpoint along the way.   Mark: Again, if you got questions, stop by the website, pfgprivatewealth.com. That's pfgprivatewealth.com. You can drop us an email question as well, if you'd like. That's what we're going to do to wrap up the show right now.   Mark: We got a question that's sent in from Jack. He says, "Hey, guys. I've thought about meeting with a financial advisor to plan my retirement, but I've never used a budget or anything like that before. So I'm wondering, should I budget myself for a couple of months before I meet with a professional?"   Nick: Based upon experience, putting expense numbers down on paper is one of the biggest hurdles for people to get into planning. But with how this question is phrased, I would be concerned, because it's kind of like the situation of starting a diet. You start a diet. You're going to eat really good for two to three weeks. You're trying to hold yourself accountable. You're functioning in a way that isn't necessarily your normal life.   Nick: One of the things, as advisors, that we want to make sure that we understand are what are you really spending. It's great to use a budget, but if you're budgeting to try to look good in the meeting, which we've seen happen, you're painting a false picture, and you're not letting us know what the finances actually look like.   Nick: So I would actually say to put down the real expense numbers in place, let's see what it really looks like, and then if we need to create a budget after we've created a plan, then that's something that we can dig into.   Mark: Yeah. John, let me ask you, as we wrap this up, sometimes people associate seeing a professional financial advisor with a budget. Also, people have a cringe to the B word. They think, "Well, I don't want to live on a fixed budget," or something like that.   Mark: That's not necessarily what we're talking about, right? That's not probably what Jack is referring to. He's just trying to figure out, I guess, more income versus expenses, right?   John: Yeah, yeah. The first step is to analyze your expenses. That could be what he's referring to as far as, "Hey, should I take a look? Should I get my expenses down before I meet with someone?"   John: I'd agree with Nick, even if that's what you're looking at, versus the budgeting, I would say no. I think the first step is sit down with an advisor, because they can assist in categorizing the expenses correctly based on today's expenses, versus what expenses are going to be at retirement.   John: I think it's important just to get going rather than trying to prep. Because we've seen a lot of people that have taken ... They've been prepping for years to meet. That's years where they haven't done anything, and they've, unfortunately, lost out on some good opportunities, otherwise, if they just said, "Hey, I'm going to sit down first, see what's going on."   Mark: Yeah. It gives you that built-in excuse.   John: [crosstalk 00:18:26]   Mark: It gives you that built in, "Well, I'm not quite ready." Well, you might never be ready if you play that game. Especially a lot of times when it's complimentary to sit down with professionals, have a conversation. Most advisors will talk to you, no cost or obligations. So why not right? Find out. Just get the ball rolling. That's the first step. It's usually the hardest part too.   Nick: Yeah. One thing that we typically tell people is that we are not the money police. We are not here to tell you that you can't use your money the way that you want to use it.   Nick: The way that we view ourselves, and what our role is as an advisor, is to help you understand the impact of decisions. Whether those decisions have to do with spending money, saving money, whatever, it's to make sure that you understand the impact of your decisions so that you make better decisions. That's it.   Mark: There you go. Yeah. It's your money, at the end of the day, your call, but certainly having some good, well, coaches in your corner, if you will, advisors to help advise, that's the whole point. But I like that. Not the money police.   Mark: All right. That's going to do it this week, guys. Thanks for hanging out. As always, we appreciate your time here on Retirement Planning Redefined. Don't forget. Stop by the website.   Mark: If you need help before you take any action, we always talk in generalities, and try to share some good nuggets of information, but you always want to see how those things are going to affect your specific situation.   Mark: If you're already working with John and Nick and the team at PFG Private Wealth, fantastic. Then you already have a lot of this stuff in place. But if you have questions, or you're not working with them, or you've come across this podcast in whatever way, or maybe a friend shared it with you, definitely reach out and have a chat. pfgprivatewealth.com. That's pfgprivatewealth.com. Don't forget to subscribe on whatever podcasting platform app you like to use.   Mark: We'll see you next time here on the show. For John and Nick, I'm your host, Mark. We'll catch you later here on Retirement Planning Redefined.

E185 Skiing Santas, True St. Nick, No Anxiety...AT ALL! by Paul George

On this episode I sit down with Scott Parente, a good friend, punk rock fan, and co-host of the Ambivalence podcast along w/ Nick No of Ramonescore Radio Records and Tyler Adams of The Followups. We chat about his podcast, topics that they tackle, including favorite musicals, movies, toys, some of the guests that have been featured, and just being straight up nerds. We also talk about our love of punk rock as fans and how his podcast, even though they don't talk about punk music, is still punk rock in it own right. Scott is a cool ass guy and I was happy to have him on the show again… let's be thankful with this episode of This is Just a Phase. *** (feat. music by Lesser Creatures, The Follow Ups, Kobanes, J Prozac, and Jagger Holly.) *** --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

About NickNick Heudecker leads market strategy and competitive intelligence at Cribl, the observability pipeline company. Prior to Cribl, Nick spent eight years as an industry analyst at Gartner, covering data and analytics. Before that, he led engineering and product teams at multiple startups, with a bias towards open source software and adoption, and served as a cryptologist in the US Navy. Join Corey and Nick as they discuss the differences between observability and monitoring, why organizations struggle to get value from observability data, why observability requires new data management approaches, how observability pipelines are creating opportunities for SRE and SecOps teams, the balance between budgets and insight, why goats are the world's best mammal, and more.Links: Cribl: https://cribl.io/ Cribl Community: https://cribl.io/community Twitter: https://twitter.com/nheudecker Try Cribl hosted solution: https://cribl.cloud TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Thinkst. This is going to take a minute to explain, so bear with me. I linked against an early version of their tool, canarytokens.org in the very early days of my newsletter, and what it does is relatively simple and straightforward. It winds up embedding credentials, files, that sort of thing in various parts of your environment, wherever you want to; it gives you fake AWS API credentials, for example. And the only thing that these things do is alert you whenever someone attempts to use those things. It's an awesome approach. I've used something similar for years. Check them out. But wait, there's more. They also have an enterprise option that you should be very much aware of canary.tools. You can take a look at this, but what it does is it provides an enterprise approach to drive these things throughout your entire environment. You can get a physical device that hangs out on your network and impersonates whatever you want to. When it gets Nmap scanned, or someone attempts to log into it, or access files on it, you get instant alerts. It's awesome. If you don't do something like this, you're likely to find out that you've gotten breached, the hard way. Take a look at this. It's one of those few things that I look at and say, “Wow, that is an amazing idea. I love it.” That's canarytokens.org and canary.tools. The first one is free. The second one is enterprise-y. Take a look. I'm a big fan of this. More from them in the coming weeks.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Jellyfish. So, you're sitting in front of your office chair, bleary eyed, parked in front of a powerpoint and—oh my sweet feathery Jesus its the night before the board meeting, because of course it is! As you slot that crappy screenshot of traffic light colored excel tables into your deck, or sift through endless spreadsheets looking for just the right data set, have you ever wondered, why is it that sales and marketing get all this shiny, awesome analytics and inside tools? Whereas, engineering basically gets left with the dregs. Well, the founders of Jellyfish certainly did. That's why they created the Jellyfish Engineering Management Platform, but don't you dare call it JEMP! Designed to make it simple to analyze your engineering organization, Jellyfish ingests signals from your tech stack. Including JIRA, Git, and collaborative tools. Yes, depressing to think of those things as your tech stack but this is 2021. They use that to create a model that accurately reflects just how the breakdown of engineering work aligns with your wider business objectives. In other words, it translates from code into spreadsheet. When you have to explain what you're doing from an engineering perspective to people whose primary IDE is Microsoft Powerpoint, consider Jellyfish. Thats Jellyfish.co and tell them Corey sent you! Watch for the wince, thats my favorite part.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. This promoted episode is a bit fun because I'm joined by someone that I have a fair bit in common with. Sure, I moonlight sometimes as an analyst because I don't really seem to know what that means, and he spent significant amounts of time as a VP analyst at Gartner. But more importantly than that, a lot of the reason that I am the way that I am is that I spent almost a decade growing up in Maine, and in Maine, there's not a lot to do other than sit inside for the nine months of winter every year and develop personality problems.You've already seen what that looks like with me. Please welcome Nick Heudecker, who presumably will disprove that, but maybe not. He is currently a senior director of market strategy and competitive intelligence at Cribl. Nick, thanks for joining me.Nick: Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.Corey: So, let's start at the very beginning. I like playing with people's titles, and you certainly have a lofty one. ‘competitive intelligence' feels an awful lot like jeopardy. What am I missing?Nick: Well, I'm basically an internal analyst at the company. So, I spend a lot of time looking at the broader market, seeing what trends are happening out there; looking at what kind of thought leadership content that I can create to help people discover Cribl, get interested in the products and services that we offer. So, I'm mostly—you mentioned my time in Maine. I was a cryptologist in the Navy and I spent almost all of my time focused on what the bad guys do. And in this job, I focus on what our potential competitors do in the market. So, I'm very externally focused. Does that help? Does that explain it?Corey: No, it absolutely does. I mean, you folks have been sponsoring our nonsense for which we thank you, but the biggest problem that I have with telling the story of Cribl was that originally—initially it was, from my perspective, “What is this hokey nonsense?” And then I learned and got an answer and then finish the sentence with, “And where can I buy it?” Because it seems that the big competitive threat that you have is something crappy that some rando sysadmin has cobbled together. And I say that as the rando sysadmin, who has cobbled a lot of things like that together. And it's awful. I wasn't aware you folks had direct competitors.Nick: Today we don't. There's a couple that it might be emerging a little bit, but in general, no, it's mostly us, and that's what I analyze every day. Are there other emerging companies in the space? Are there open-source projects? But you're right, most of the things that we compete against are DIY today. Absolutely.Corey: In your previous role, which you were at for a very long time in tech terms—which in a lot of other cases is, “Okay, that doesn't seem that long,” but seven and a half years is a respectable stint at a company. And you were at Gartner doing a number of analyst-like activities. Let's start at the beginning because I assure you, I'm asking this purely for the audience and not because I don't know the answer myself, but what exactly is the purpose of an analyst firm, of which Gartner is the most broadly known and, follow up, why do companies care what Gartner thinks?Nick: Yeah. It's a good question, one that I answer a lot. So, what is the purpose of an analyst firm? The purpose of an analyst firm is to get impartial information about something, whether that is supply chain technology, big data tech, human resource management technologies. And it's often difficult if you're an end-user and you're interested in say, acquiring a new piece of technology, what really works well, what doesn't.And so the analyst firm because in the course of a given year, I would talk to nearly a thousand companies and both end-users and vendors as well as investors about what they're doing, what challenges they're having, and I would distill that down into 30-minute conversations with everyone else. And so we provided impartial information in aggregate to people who just wanted to help. And that's the purpose of an analyst firm. Your second question, why do people care? Well, I didn't get paid by vendors.I got paid by the company that I worked for, and so I got to be Tron; I fought for the users. And because I talk to so many different companies in different geographies, in different industries, and I share that information with my colleagues, they shared with me, we had a very robust understanding of what's actually happening in any technology market. And that's uncommon kind of insight to really have in any kind of industry. So, that's the purpose and that's why people care.Corey: It's easy from the engineering perspective that I used to inhabit to make fun of it. It's oh, it's purely justification when you're making a big decision, so if it goes sideways—because find me a technology project that doesn't eventually go sideways—I want to be able to make sure that I'm not the one that catches heat for it because Gartner said it was good. They have an amazing credibility story going on there, and I used to have that very dismissive perspective. But the more I started talking to folks who are Gartner customers themselves and some of the analyst-style things that I do with a variety of different companies, it's turned into, “No, no. They're after insight.”Because it turns out, from my perspective at least, the more that you are focused on building a product that solves a problem, you sort of lose touch with the broader market because the only people you're really talking to are either in your space or have already acknowledged and been right there and become your customer and have been jaded to see things from your point of view. Getting a more objective viewpoint from an impartial third party does have value.Nick: Absolutely. And I want you to succeed, I want you to be successful, I want to carry on a relationship with all the clients that I would speak with, and so one of the fun things I would always ask is, “Why are you asking me this question now?” Sometimes it would come in, they'd be very innocuous;, “Compare these databases,” or, “Compare these cloud services.” “Well, why are you asking?” And that's when you get to, kind of like, the psychology of it.“Oh, we just hired a new CIO and he or she hates vendor X, so we have to get rid of it.” “Well, all right. Let's figure out how we solve this problem for you.” And so it wasn't always just technology comparisons. Technology is easy, you write a check and you hope for the best.But when you're dealing with large teams and maybe a globally distributed company, it really comes down to culture, and personality, and all the harder factors. And so it was always—those were always the most fun and certainly the most challenging conversations to have.Corey: One challenge that I find in this space is—in my narrow niche of the world where I focus on AWS bills, where things are extraordinarily yes or no, black or white, binary choices—that I talked to companies, like during the pandemic, and they were super happy that, “Oh, yeah. Our infrastructure has auto-scaling and it works super well.” And I look at the bill and the spend graph over time is so flat you could basically play a game of pool on top of it. And I don't believe that I'm talking to people who are lying to me. I truly don't believe that people make that decision, but what they believe versus what is evidenced in reality are not necessarily congruent. How do you disambiguate from the stories that people want to tell about themselves? And what they're actually doing?Nick: You have to unpack it. I think you have to ask a series of questions to figure out what their motivation is. Who else is on the call, as well? I would sometimes drop into a phone call and there would be a dozen people on the line. Those inquiry calls would go the worst because everyone wants to stake a claim, everyone wants to be heard, no one's going to be honest with you or with anyone else on the call.So, you typically need to have a pretty personal conversation about what does this person want to accomplish, what does the company want to accomplish, and what are the factors that are pushing against what those things are? It's like a novel, right? You have a character, the character wants to achieve something, and there are multiple obstacles in that person's way. And so by act five, ideally everything wraps up and it's perfect. And so my job is to get the character out of the tree that is on fire and onto the beach where the person can relax.So, you have to unpack a lot of different questions and answers to figure out, well, are they telling me what their boss wants to hear or are they really looking for help? Sometimes you're successful, sometimes you're not. Not everyone does want to be open and honest. In other cases, you would have a team show up to a call with maybe a junior engineer and they really just want you to tell them that the junior engineer's architecture is not a good idea. And so you do a lot of couples therapy as well. I don't know if this is really answering the question for you, but there are no easy answers. And people are defensive, they have biases, companies overall are risk-averse. I think you know this.Corey: Oh, yeah.Nick: And so it can be difficult to get to the bottom of what their real motivation is.Corey: My approach has always been that if you want serious data, you go talk to Gartner. If you want [anec-data 00:09:48] and some understanding, well, maybe we can have that conversation, but they're empowering different decisions at different levels, and that's fine. To be clear, I do not consider Gartner to be a competitor to what I do in any respect. It turns out that I am not very good at drawing charts in varying shades of blue and positioning things just so with repeatable methodology, and they're not particularly good at having cartoon animals as their mascot that they put into ridiculous situations. We each have our portion of the universe, and that's working out reasonably well.Nick: Well, and there's also something to unpack there as well because I would say that people look at Gartner and they think they have a lot of data. To a certain degree they do, but a lot of it is not quantifiable data. If you look at a firm like IDC, they specialize in—like, they are a data house; that is what they do. And so their view of the world and how they advise their clients is different. So, even within analyst firms, there is differentiation in what approach they take, how consultative they might be with their clients, one versus another. So, there certainly are differences that you could find the more exposure you get into the industry.Corey: For a while, I've been making a recurring joke that Route 53—Amazon's managed DNS service—is in fact a database. And then at some point, I saw a post on Reddit where someone said, “Yeah, I see the joke and it's great, but why should I actually not do this?” At which point I had to jump in and say, “Okay, look. Jokes are all well and good, but as soon as people start taking me seriously, it's very much time to come clean.” Because I think that's the only ethical and responsible thing to do in this ecosystem.Similarly, there was another great joke once upon a time. It was an April Fool's Day prank, and Google put out a paper about this thing they called MapReduce. Hilarious prank that Yahoo fell for hook, line, and sinker, and wound up building Hadoop out of it and we're still paying the price for that, years later. You have a bit of a reputation from your time at Gartner as being—and I quote—“The man who killed Hadoop.” What happened there? What's the story? And I appreciate your finally making clear to the rest of us that it was, in fact, a joke. What happened there?Nick: Well, one of the pieces of research that Gartner puts out every year is this thing called a Hype Cycle. And we've all seen it, it looks like a roller coaster in profile; big mountain goes up really high and then comes down steeply, drops into a valley, and then—Corey: ‘the trough of disillusionment,' as I recall.Nick: Yes, my favorite. And then plateaus out. And one of the profiles on that curve was Hadoop distributions. And after years of taking inquiry calls, and writing documents, and speaking with everybody about what they were doing, we realized that this really isn't taking off like everyone thinks it is. Cluster sizes weren't getting bigger, people were having a lot of challenges with the complexity, people couldn't find skills to run it themselves if they wanted to.And then the cloud providers came in and said, “Well, we'll make a lot of this really simple for you, and we'll get rid of HDFS,” which is—was a good idea, but it didn't really scale well. I think that the challenge of having to acquire computers with compute storage and memory again, and again, and again, and again, just was not sustainable for the majority of enterprises. And so we flagged it as this will be obsolete before plateau. And at that point, we got a lot of hate mail, but it just seemed like the right decision to make, right? Once again, we're Tron; we fight for the users.And that seemed like the right advice and direction to provide to the end-users. And so didn't make a lot of friends, but I think I was long-term right about what happened in the Hadoop space. Certainly, some fragments of it are left over and we're still seeing—you know, Spark is going strong, there's a lot of Hive still around, but Hadoop as this amalgamation of open-source projects, I think is effectively dead.Corey: I sure hope you're right. I think it has a long tail like most things that are there. Legacy is the condescending engineering term for ‘it makes money.' You were at Gartner for almost eight years and then you left to go work at Cribl. What triggered that? What was it that made you decide, “This is great. I've been here a long time. I've obviously made it work for me. I'm going to go work at a startup that apparently, even though it recently raised a $200 million funding round”—congratulations on that, by the way—“It still apparently can't afford to buy a vowel in its name.” That's C-R-I-B-L because, of course, it is. Maybe another consonant, while you're shopping. But okay, great. It's oddly spelled, it is hard to explain in some cases, to folks who are not already feeling pain in that space. What was it that made you decide to sit up and, “All right, this is where I want to be?”Nick: Well, I met the co-founders when I was an analyst. They were working at Splunk and oddly enough—this is going to be an interesting transition compared to the previous thing we talked about—they were working on Hunk, which was, let's use HDFS to store Splunk data. Made a lot of sense, right? It could be much more cost-effective than high-cost infrastructure for Splunk. And so they told me about this; I was interested.And so I met the co-founders and then I reconnected with them after they left and formed Cribl. And I thought the story was really cool because where they're sitting is between sources and destinations of observability data. And they were solving a problem that all of my customers had, but they couldn't resolve. They would try and build it themselves. They would look at—Kafka was a popular choice, but that had some challenges for observability data—works fantastically well for application data.And they were just—had a very pragmatic view of the world that they were inhabiting and the problem that they were looking to solve. And it looked kind of like a no-brainer of a problem to solve. But when you double-click on it, when you really look down and say, “All right, what are the challenges with doing this?” They're really insurmountable for a lot of organizations. So, even though they may try and take a DIY approach, they often run into trouble after just a few weeks because of all the protocols you have to support, all the different data formats, and all the destinations, and role-based access control, and everything else that goes along with it.And so I really liked the team. I thought the product inhabited a unique space in the market—we've already talked about the lack of competitors in the space—and I just felt like the company was on a rocket ship—or is a rocket ship—that basically had unbounded success potential. And so when the opportunity arose to join the team and do a lot of the things I like doing as an analyst—examining the market, talking to people looking at competitive aspects—I jumped at it.Corey: It's nice when you see those opportunities that show up in front of you, and the stars sort of align. It's like, this is not just something that I'm excited about and enthused about, but hey, they can use me. I can add something to where they're going and help them get there better, faster, sooner, et cetera, et cetera.Nick: When you're an analyst, you look at dozens of companies a month and I'd never seen an opportunity that looked like that. Everything kind of looked the same. There's a bunch of data integration companies, there's a bunch of companies with Spark and things like that, but this company was unique; the product was unique, and no one was really recognizing the opportunity. So, it was just a great set of things that all happen at the same time.Corey: It's always fun to see stars align like that. So—Nick: Yeah.Corey: —help me understand in a way that can be articulated to folks who don't have 15 years of grumpy sysadmin experience under their belts, what does Cribl do?Nick: So, Cribl does a couple of things. Our flagship product is called LogStream, and the easiest way to describe that is as an abstraction between sources and destinations of data. And that doesn't sound very interesting, but if you, from your sysadmin background, you're always dealing with events, logs, now there's traces, metrics are also hanging around—Corey: Oh, and of course, the time is never synchronized with anything either, so it's sort of a giant whodunit, mystery, where half the eyewitnesses lie.Nick: Well, there's that. There's a lot of data silos. If you got an agent deployed on a system, it's only going to talk to one destination platform. And you repeat this, maybe a dozen times per server, and you might have 100,000 or 200,000 servers, with all of these different agents running on it, each one locked into one destination. So, you might want to be able to mix and match that data; you can't. You're locked in.One of the things LogStream does is it lets you do that exact mixing and matching. Another thing that this product does, that LogStream does, is it gives you ability to manage that data. And then what I mean by that is, you may want to reduce how much stuff you're sending into a given platform because maybe that platform charges you by your daily ingest rates or some other kind of event-based charges. And so not all that data is valuable, so why pay to store it if it's not going to be valuable? Just dump it or reduce the amount of volume that you've got in that payload, like a Windows XML log.And so that's another aspect that it allows you to do, better management of that stuff. You can redact sensitive fields, you can enrich the data with maybe, say, GeoIPs so you know what kind of data privacy laws you fall under and so on. And so, the story has always been, land the data in your destination platform first, then do all those things. Well, of course, because that's how they charge you; they charge you based on daily ingest. And so now the story is, make those decisions upfront in one place without having to spread this logic all over, and then send the data where you want it to go.So, that's really, that's the core product today, LogStream. We call ourselves an observability pipeline for observability data. The other thing we've got going on is this project called AppScope, and I think this is pretty cool. AppScope is a black box instrumentation tool that basically resides between the application runtime and the kernel and any shared libraries. And so it provides—without you having to go back and instrument code—it instruments the application for you based on every call that it makes and then can send that data through something like LogStream or to another destination.So, you don't have to go back and say, “Well, I'm going to try and find the source code for this 30-year old c++ application.” I can simply run AppScope against the process, and find out exactly what that application is doing for me, and then relay that information to some other destination.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Liquibase. If you're anything like me, you've screwed up the database part of a deployment so severely that you've been banned from touching every anything that remotely sounds like SQL, at at least three different companies. We've mostly got code deployments solved for, but when it comes to databases we basically rely on desperate hope, with a roll back plan of keeping our resumes up to date. It doesn't have to be that way. Meet Liquibase. It is both an open source project and a commercial offering. Liquibase lets you track, modify, and automate database schema changes across almost any database, with guardrails to ensure you'll still have a company left after you deploy the change. No matter where your database lives, Liquibase can help you solve your database deployment issues. Check them out today at liquibase.com. Offer does not apply to Route 53.Corey: I have to ask because I love what you're doing, don't get me wrong. The counterargument that always comes up in this type of conversation is, “Who in their right mind looks at the state of the industry today and says, ‘You know what we need? That's right; another observability tool.'” what differentiates what you folks are building from a lot of the existing names in the space? And to be clear, a lot of the existing names in the space are treating observability simply as hipster monitoring. I'm not entirely sure they're wrong, but that's a different fight for a different time.Nick: Yeah. I'm happy to come back and talk about that aspect of it, too. What's different about what we're doing is we don't care where the data goes. We don't have a dog in that fight. We want you to have better control over where it goes and what kind of shape it's in when it gets there.And so I'll give an example. One of our customers wanted to deploy a new SIEM—Security Information Event Management—tool. But they didn't want to have to deploy a couple hundred-thousand new agents to go along with it. They already had the data coming in from another agent, they just couldn't get the data to it. So, they use LogStream to send that data to their new desired platform.Worked great. They were able to go from zero to a brand new platform in just a couple days, versus fighting with rolling out agents and having to update them. Did they conflict with existing agents? How much performance did it impact on the servers, and so on? So, we don't care about the destination. We like everybody. We're agnostic when it comes to where that data goes. And—Corey: Oh, it's not about the destination. It's about the journey. Everyone's been saying it, but you've turned it into a product.Nick: It's very spiritual. So, we [laugh] send, we send your observability data on a spiritual [laugh] journey to its destination, and we can do quite a bit with it on the way.Corey: So, you said you offered to go back as well and visit the, “Oh, it's monitoring, but we're going to call it observability because otherwise we get yelled out on Twitter by Charity Majors.” How do you view that?Nick: Monitoring is the things you already know. Right? You know what questions you want to ask, you get an alert if something goes out of bounds or something goes from green to red. Think about monitoring as a data warehouse. You shape your data, you get it all in just the right condition so you can ask the same question over and over again, over different time domains.That's how I think about monitoring. It's prepackaged, you know exactly what you want to do with it. Observability is more like a data lake. I have no idea what I'm going to do with this stuff. I think there's going to be some signals in here that I can use, and I'm going to go explore that data.So, if monitoring is your known knowns, observability is your unknown unknowns. So, an ideal observability solution gives you an opportunity to discover what those are. Once you discover them. Great. Now, you can talk about how to get them into your monitoring system. So, for me, it's kind of a process of discovery.Corey: Which makes an awful lot of sense. The problem I've always had with the monitoring approach is it falls into this terrible pattern of enumerate the badness. In other words, “Imagine all the ways that this system can fail,” and then build an alerting that lets you know when any of those things happen. And what happens next is inevitable to anyone who's ever dealt with the tricksy devils known as computers, and what happens, of course, is that they find new ways to fail and you generally get to add to the list of things to check for, usually at two o'clock in the morning.Nick: On a Sunday.Corey: Oh, absolutely. It almost doesn't matter when. The real problem is when these things happen, it's, “What day, actually, is it?” And you have to check the calendar to figure out because your third time that week being woken up in the dead of night. It's like an infant but less than endearing.So, that has been the old school approach, and there's unfortunately still an awful lot of, we'll just call it nonsense, in the industry that still does exactly the same thing, except now they call it observability because—hearkening back to earlier in our conversation—there's a certain point in the Gartner Hype Cycle that we are all existing within. What's the deal with that?Nick: Well, I think that there are a lot of entrenched interests in the monitoring space. And so I think you always see this when a new term comes around. Vendors will say, “All right, well, there's a lot of confusion about this. Let me back-fit my product into this term so that I can continue to look like I'm on the leading edge and I'm not going to put any of my revenues in jeopardy.” I know, that's a cynical view, but I've seen it over and over again.And I think that's unfortunate because there's a real opportunity to have a better understanding of your systems, to better understand what's happening in all the containers you're deploying and not tearing down the way that you should, to better understand what's happening in distributed systems. And it's going to be a real missed opportunity if that is what happens. If we just call this ‘Monitoring 2.0' it's going to leave a lot of unrealized potential in the market.Corey: The big problem that I've seen in a lot of different areas is—I'll be direct—consolidation where you have a company that starts to do a thing—and that's great—and then they start doing other things that are tied to it. And in turn, they start, I guess, gathering everything in the ecosystem. If you break down observability into various constituent parts, I—know, I know, the pillars thing is going to upset people; ignore that for now—and if you have an offering that's weak in a particular area, okay, instead of building it organically into the product, or saying, “Yeah, that's not what we do,” there's an instinct to acquire a company or build that functionality out. And it turns out that we're building what feels the lot to me like the SaaS equivalent of multifunction printers: they can print, they can scan, they can fax, and none of those three very well, so it winds up with something that dissatisfies everyone, rather than a best-of-breed solution that has a very clear and narrow starting and stopping point. How do you view that?Nick: Well, what you've described is a compromise, right? A compromise is everyone can work and no one's happy. And I think that's the advantage of where LogStream comes in. The reality is best-of-breed. Most enterprises today have 30 or more different monitoring tools—call them observability tools if you want to—and you will never pry those tools from the dead hands of those sysadmins, DevOps engineers, SREs, et cetera.They all integrate those tools into how they work and their processes. So, we're living in a best-of-breed world. It's like that in data and analytics—my former beat—and it's like that in monitoring and observability. People really gravitate towards the tools they like, they gravitate towards the tools their friends are using. And so you need a way to be able to mix and match that stuff.And just because I want to stay [laugh] on message, that's really where the LogStream story kind of blends in because we do that; we allow you to mix and match all those different pieces.Corey: Joke's on you. I use Nagios and I have no friends. I'm not convinced those two things are entirely unrelated, but here we are. So here's, I guess, the big burning question that a lot of folks—certainly not me, but other undefined folks, ‘lots of people are saying'—so you built something interesting that actually works. I want to be clear on this.I have spoken to customers of yours. They swear by it instead of swearing at it, which happens with other companies. Awesome. You have traction, you're moving forward, things are going great. Here's $200 million is the next part of that story, and on some level, my immediate reaction—which does need updating, let's be clear here—is like, all right.I'm trying to build a product. I can see how I could spend a few million bucks. “Well, what can you do with I don't know, 100 times that?” My easy answer is, “Something monstrous.” I don't believe that is the case here. What is the growth plan? What are you doing that makes having that kind of a war chest a useful and valuable thing to have?Nick: Well, if you speak with the co-founders—and they've been open about this—we view ourselves as a generational company. We're not just building one product. We've been thinking about, how do we deliver on observability as this idea of discovery? What does that take? And it doesn't mean that we're going to be less agnostic to other destinations, we still think there's an incredible amount of value there and that's not going away, but we think there's maybe an interim step that we build out, potentially this idea of an observability data lake where you can explore these environments.Certainly, there's other types of options in the space today. Most of them are SQL-based, which is interesting because the audience that uses monitoring and observability tools couldn't care less about SQL right? They want search, they want regex, and so you've got to have the right tool for that audience. And so we're thinking about what that looks like going forward. We're doubling down on people.Surprisingly, this is a very—like anything else in software, it is people-intensive. And so certainly those are other aspects that we're exploring with the recent investment, but definitely, multiproduct company is our future and continued expansion.Corey: Expansion is always a fun one. It's the idea of, great, are you looking at going deeper into the areas you're already active within, or is it more of a, “Ah, so we've solved the, effectively, log routing problem. That's great. Let's solve other problems, too.” Or is it more of a, I guess, a doubling down and focusing on what's working? And again, that probably sounds judgmental in a way I don't intend it to at all. I just have a hard time contextualizing that level of scale coming from a small company perspective the way that I do.Nick: Yeah. Our plan is to focus more intently on the areas that we're in. We have a huge basis of experience there. We don't want to be all things to all people; that dilutes the message down to nothing, so we want to be very specific in the audiences we talk to, the problems we're trying to solve, and how we try to solve them.Corey: The problem I've always found with a lot of the acquisition, growth thrashing of—let me call it what I think it is: companies in decline trying to strain relevancy, it feels almost like a, “We don't see a growth strategy. So, we're going to try and acquire everything that hold still long enough, at some level, trying to add more revenue to the pile, but also thrashing in the sense of, okay. They're going to teach us how to do things in creative, awesome ways,” but it never works out that way. When you have a 50,000 person company acquiring a 200 person company, invariably the bigger culture is going to dominate. And I don't understand why that mistake seems to continually happen again, and again, and again.And people think I'm effectively alluding to—or whenever the spoken word version of subtweeting is—a particular company or a particular acquisition. I'm absolutely not, there are probably 50 different companies listening right now who thinks, “Oh, God. He's talking about us.” It's the common repeating trend. What is that?Nick: It's hard to say. In some cases, these acquisitions might just be talent. “We need to know how to do X. They know how to do X. Let's do it.” They may have very unique niche technology or software that another company thinks they can more broadly apply.Also, some of these big companies, these may not be board-level or CEO-level decisions. A business unit might decide, “Oh, I like what that company is doing. I'm going to go acquire it.” And so it looks like MegaCorp bought TinyCorp, but it's really, this tiny business unit within MegaCorp bought tiny company. The reality is often different from what it looks like on the outside.So, that's one way. Another is, you know, if they're going to teach us to be more effective with tech or something like that, you're never going to beat culture. You're never going to be the existing culture. If it's 50,000, against 200, obviously we know who wins there. And so I don't know if that's realistic.I don't know if the big companies are genuine when they say that, but it could just be the messaging that they use to make people happy and hopefully retain as many of those new employees for as long as they can. Does that make sense?Corey: No, it makes perfect sense. It's the right answer. It does articulate what is happening there, and I think I keep falling prey to the same failure. And it's hard. It's pernicious, but companies are not monolithic entities.There's no one person at all of these companies each who is making these giant unilateral decisions. It's always some product manager or some particular person who has a vision and a strategy in the department. It is not something that the company board is agreeing on every little decision that gets made. They're distributed entities in many respects.Nick: Absolutely. And that's only getting more pervasive as companies get larger [laugh] through acquisition. So, you're going to see more and more of that, and so it's going to look like we're going to put one label on it, one brand. Often, I think internally, that's the exact opposite of what actually happened, how that decision got made.Corey: Nick, I want to thank you for taking so much time to speak with me about what you're up to over there, how your path has shaped, how you view the world, and also what Cribl does these days. If people want to learn more about what you're up to, how you think about the world, or even possibly going to work at Cribl which, having spoken to a number of people over there, I would endorse it. How do they find you?Nick: Best place to find us is by joining our community: cribl.io/community, and Cribl is spelled C-R-I-B-L. You can certainly reach out there, we've got about 2300 people in our community Slack, so it's a great group. You can also reach out to me on Twitter, I'm @nheudecker, N-H-E-U-D-E-C-K-E-R. Tell me what you thought of the episode; love to hear it. And then beyond that, you can also sign up for our free cloud tier at cribl.cloud. It's a pretty generous one terabyte a day processing, so you can start to send data in and send it wherever you'd like to be.Corey: To be clear, this free as in beer, not free as an AWS free tier?Nick: This is free as in beer.Corey: Excellent. Excellent.Nick: I think I'm getting that right. I think it's free as in beer. And the other thing you can try is our hosted solution on AWS, fully managed cloud at cribl.cloud, we offer a free one terabyte per day processing, so you can start to send data into that environment and send it wherever you'd like to go, in whatever shape that data needs to be in when it gets there.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to that in the [show notes 00:35:21]. Thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it.Nick: No, thank you for having me. This was a lot of fun.Corey: Nick Heudecker, senior director, market strategy and competitive intelligence at Cribl. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with a comment explaining that the only real reason a startup should raise a $200 million funding round is to pay that month's AWS bill.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

On this episode I sit down and chat with Nick No and Nick Spoon of Ramonescore Radio Records. Some of the topics we touch on are how the label started out as a podcast playing pop punk greats and small, unknown bands, how their various comps raise awareness and money for charities that are close to their hearts, and No's interest in Ghost Hunting. We also chat about why there is a TikTok ban on future episodes, discuss both of their bands, and so much more. So sit back and listen to us yammer on in this episode of This is Just a Phase!

Spen discusses the emergence of Cam Thomas during summer league, the ridiculous depth of this Nets team and some unwarranted trash talk involving a few Brooklyn superstars.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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About NickNick Frichette is a Penetration Tester and Team Lead for State Farm. Outside of work he does vulnerability research. His current primary focus is developing techniques for AWS exploitation. Additionally he is the founder of hackingthe.cloud which is an open source encyclopedia of the attacks and techniques you can perform in cloud environments.Links: Hacking the Cloud: https://hackingthe.cloud/ Determine the account ID that owned an S3 bucket vulnerability: https://hackingthe.cloud/aws/enumeration/account_id_from_s3_bucket/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/frichette_n Personal website:https://frichetten.com TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Thinkst. This is going to take a minute to explain, so bear with me. I linked against an early version of their tool, canarytokens.org in the very early days of my newsletter, and what it does is relatively simple and straightforward. It winds up embedding credentials, files, that sort of thing in various parts of your environment, wherever you want to; it gives you fake AWS API credentials, for example. And the only thing that these things do is alert you whenever someone attempts to use those things. It's an awesome approach. I've used something similar for years. Check them out. But wait, there's more. They also have an enterprise option that you should be very much aware of canary.tools. You can take a look at this, but what it does is it provides an enterprise approach to drive these things throughout your entire environment. You can get a physical device that hangs out on your network and impersonates whatever you want to. When it gets Nmap scanned, or someone attempts to log into it, or access files on it, you get instant alerts. It's awesome. If you don't do something like this, you're likely to find out that you've gotten breached, the hard way. Take a look at this. It's one of those few things that I look at and say, “Wow, that is an amazing idea. I love it.” That's canarytokens.org and canary.tools. The first one is free. The second one is enterprise-y. Take a look. I'm a big fan of this. More from them in the coming weeks.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Lumigo. If you've built anything from serverless, you know that if there's one thing that can be said universally about these applications, it's that it turns every outage into a murder mystery. Lumigo helps make sense of all of the various functions that wind up tying together to build applications. It offers one-click distributed tracing so you can effortlessly find and fix issues in your serverless and microservices environment. You've created more problems for yourself; make one of them go away. To learn more, visit lumigo.io.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I spend a lot of time throwing things at AWS in varying capacities. One area I don't spend a lot of time giving them grief is in the InfoSec world because as it turns out, they—and almost everyone else—doesn't have much of a sense of humor around things like security. My guest today is Nick Frechette, who's a penetration tester and team lead for State Farm. Nick, thanks for joining me.Nick: Hey, thank you for inviting me on.Corey: So, like most folks in InfoSec, you tend to have a bunch of different, I guess, titles or roles that hang on signs around someone's neck. And it all sort of distills down, on some level—in your case, at least, and please correct me if I'm wrong—to ‘cloud security researcher.' Is that roughly correct? Or am I missing something fundamental?Nick: Yeah. So, for my day job, I do penetration testing, and that kind of puts me up against a variety of things, from web applications, to client-side applications, to sometimes the cloud. In my free time, though, I like to spend a lot of time on security research, and most recently been focusing pretty heavily on AWS.Corey: So, let's start at the very beginning. What is a cloud security researcher? “What is it you'd say it is you do here?” For lack of a better phrasing?Nick: Well, to be honest, the phrase ‘security researcher' or ‘cloud security researcher' has been, kind of… I guess watered down in recent years; everybody likes to call themselves a researcher in some way or another. You have some folks who participate in the bug bounty programs. So, for example, GCP, and Azure have their own bug bounties. AWS does not, and too sure why. And so they want to find vulnerabilities with the intention of getting cash compensation for it.You have other folks who are interested in doing security research to try and better improve defenses and alerting and monitoring so that when the next major breach happens, they're prepared or they'll be able to stop it ahead of time. From what I do, I'm very interested in offensive security research. So, how can I as, a penetration tester, or red teamer or, I guess, an actual criminal, [laugh] how can I take advantage of AWS, or try to avoid detection from services like GuardDuty and CloudTrail?Corey: So, let's break that down a little bit further. I've heard the term of ‘red team versus blue team' used before. Red team—presumably—is the offensive security folks—and yes, some of those people are, in fact, quite offensive—and blue team is the defense side. In other words, keeping folks out. Is that a reasonable summation of the state of the world?Nick: It can be, yeah, especially when it comes to security. One of the nice parts about the whole InfoSec field—I know a lot of folks tend to kind of just say, “Oh, they're there to prevent the next breach,” but in reality, InfoSec has a ton of different niches and different job specialties. “Blue teamers,” quote-unquote, tend to be the defense side working on ensuring that we can alert and monitor potential attacks, whereas red teamers—or penetration testers—tend to be the folks who are trying to do the actual exploitation or develop techniques to do that in the future.Corey: So, you talk a bit about what you do for work, obviously, but what really drew my notice was stuff you do that isn't part of your core job, as best I understand it. You're focused on vulnerability research, specifically with a strong emphasis on cloud exploitation, as you said—AWS in particular—and you're the founder of Hacking the Cloud, which is an open-source encyclopedia of various attacks and techniques you can perform in cloud environments. Tell me about that.Nick: Yeah, so Hacking the Cloud came out of a frustration I had when I was first getting into AWS, that there didn't seem to be a ton of good resources for offensive security professionals to get engaged in the cloud. By comparison, if you wanted to learn about web application hacking, or attacking Active Directory, or reverse engineering, if you have a credit card, I can point you in the right direction. But there just didn't seem to be a good course or introduction to how you, as a penetration tester, should attack AWS. There's things like, you know, open S3 buckets are a nightmare, or that server-side request forgery on an EC2 instance can result in your organization being fined very, very heavily. I kind of wanted to go deeper with that.And with Hacking the Cloud, I've tried to gather a bunch of offensive security research from various blog posts and conference talks into a single location, so that both the offense side and the defense side can kind of learn from it and leverage that to either improve defenses or look for things that they can attack.Corey: It seems to me that doing things like that is not likely to wind up making a whole heck of a lot of friends over on the cloud provider side. Can you talk a little bit about how what you do is perceived by the companies you're focusing on?Nick: Yeah. So, in terms of relationship, I don't really have too much of an idea of what they think. I have done some research and written on my blog, as well as published to Hacking the Cloud, some techniques for doing things like abusing the SSM agent, as well as abusing the AWS API to enumerate permissions without logging into CloudTrail. And ironically, through the power of IP addresses, I can see when folks from the Amazon corporate IP address space look at my blog, and that's always fun, especially when there's, like, four in the course of a couple of minutes, or five or six. But I don't really know too much about what they—or how they view it, or if they think it's valuable at all. I hope they do, but really not too sure.Corey: I would imagine that they do, on some level, but I guess the big question is, you know that someone doesn't like what you're doing when they send, you know, cease and desist notices, or have the police knock on your door. I feel like at most levels, we're past that in an InfoSec level, at least I'd like to believe we are. We don't hear about that happening all too often anymore. But what's your take on it?Nick: Yeah, I definitely agree. I definitely think we are beyond that. Most companies these days know that vulnerabilities are going to happen, no matter how hard you try and how much money you spend, and so it's better to be accepting of that and open to it. And especially because the InfoSec community can be so, say, noisy at times, it's definitely worth it to pay attention, definitely be appreciative of the information that may come out. AWS is pretty awesome to work with, having disclosed to them a couple times, now.They have a safe harbor provision, which essentially says that so long as you're operating in good faith, you are allowed to do security testing. They do have some rules around that, but they are pretty clear in terms of if you were operating in good faith, you wouldn't be doing anything like that. It tends to be pretty obviously malicious things that they'll ask you to stop.Corey: So, talk to me a little bit about what you've found lately, and been public about. There have been a number of examples that have come up whenever people start googling your name or looking at things you've done. But what's happening lately? What have you found that's interesting?Nick: Yeah. So, I think most recently, the thing that's kind of gotten the most attention has been a really interesting bug I found in the AWS API. Essentially, kind of the core of it is that when you are interacting with the API, obviously that gets logged to CloudTrail, so long as it's compatible. So, if you are successful, say you want to do, like, Secrets Manager, ListSecrets, that shows up in CloudTrail. And similarly, if you do not have that permission on a role or user and you try to do it, that access denied also gets logged to CloudTrail.Something kind of interesting that I found is that by manually modifying a request, or mal-forming them, what we can do is we can modify the content-type header, and as a result when you do that—and you can provide literally gibberish. I think I have VS Code window here somewhere with a content-type of ‘meow'—when you do that, the AWS API knows the action that you're trying to call because of that messed up content type, it doesn't know exactly what you're trying to do and as a result, it doesn't get logged to CloudTrail. Now, while that may seem kind of weirdly specific and not really, like, a concern, the nice part of it though is that for some API actions—somewhere in the neighborhood of 600. I say ‘in the neighborhood of' just because it fluctuates over time—as a result of that, you can tell if you have that permission, or if you don't without that being logged to CloudTrail. And so we can do this enumeration of permissions without somebody in the defense side seeing us do it. Which is pretty awesome from a offensive security perspective.Corey: On some level, it would be easy to say, “Well, just not showing up in the logs isn't really a security problem at all.” I guess that you disagree?Nick: I do, yeah. So, let's sort of look at it from a real-world perspective. Let's say, Corey, you're tired of saving people money on their AWS bill, you'd instead maybe want to make a little money on the side and you're okay with perhaps, you know, committing some crimes to do it. Through some means you get access to a company's AWS credentials for some particular role, whether that's through remote code execution on an EC2 instance, or maybe find them in an open location like an S3 bucket or a Git repository, or maybe you phish a developer, through some means, you have an access key and a secret access key. The new problem that you have is that you don't know what those credentials are associated with, or what permissions they have.They could be the root account keys, or they could be literally locked down to a single S3 bucket to read from. It all just kind of depends. Now, historically, your options for figuring that out are kind of limited. Your best bet would be to brute-force the AWS API using a tool like Pacu, or my personal favorite, which is enumerate-iam by Andres Riancho. And what that does is it just tries a bunch of API calls and sees which one works and which one doesn't.And if it works, you clearly know that you have that permission. Now, the problem with that, though, is that if you were to do that, that's going to light up CloudTrail like a Christmas tree. It's going to start showing all these access denieds for these various API calls that you've tried. And obviously, any defender who's paying attention is going to look at that and go, “Okay. That's, uh, that's suspicious,” and you're going to get shut down pretty quickly.What's nice about this bug that I found is that instead of having to litter CloudTrail with all these logs, we can just do this enumeration for roughly 600-ish API actions across roughly 40 AWS services, and nobody is the wiser. You can enumerate those permissions, and if they work fantastic, and you can then use them, and if you come to find you don't have any of those 600 permissions, okay, then you can decide on where to go from there, or maybe try to risk things showing up in CloudTrail.Corey: CloudTrail is one of those services that I find incredibly useful, or at least I do in theory. In practice, it seems that things don't show up there, and you don't realize that those types of activities are not being recorded until one day there's an announcement of, “Hey, that type of activity is now recorded.” As of the time of this recording, the most recent example that in memory is data plane requests to DynamoDB. It's, “Wait a minute. You mean that wasn't being recorded previously? Huh. I guess it makes sense, but oh, dear.”And that causes a reevaluation of what's happening in the—from a security policy and posture perspective for some clients. There's also, of course, the challenge of CloudTrail logs take a significant amount of time to show up. It used to be over 20 minutes, I believe now it's closer to 15—but don't quote me on that, obviously. Run your own tests—which seems awfully slow for anything that's going to be looking at those in an automated fashion and taking a reactive or remediation approach to things that show up there. Am I missing something key?Nick: No, I think that is pretty spot on. And believe me, [laugh] I am fully aware at how long CloudTrail takes to populate, especially with doing a bunch of research on what is and what is not logged to CloudTrail. I know that there are some operations that can be logged more quickly than the 15-minute average. Off the top of my head, though, I actually don't quite remember what those are. But you're right, in general, the majority at least do take quite a while.And that's definitely time in which an adversary or someone like me, could maybe take advantage of that 15-minute window to try and brute force those permissions, see what we have access to, and then try to operate and get out with whatever goodies we've managed to steal.Corey: Let's say that you're doing the thing that you do, however that comes to be—and I am curious—actually, we'll start there. I am curious; how do you discover these things? Is it looking at what is presented and then figuring out, “Huh, how can I wind up subverting the system it's based on?” And, similar to the way that I take a look at any random AWS services and try and figure out how to use it as a database? How do you find these things?Nick: Yeah, so to be honest, it all kind of depends. Sometimes it's completely by accident. So, for example, the API bug I described about not logging to CloudTrail, I actually found that due to [laugh] copy and pasting code from AWS's website, and I didn't change the content-type header. And as a result, I happened to notice this weird behavior, and kind of took advantage of it. Other times, it's thinking a little bit about how something is implemented and the security ramifications of it.So, for example, the SSM agent—which is a phenomenal tool in order to do remote access on your EC2 instances—I was sitting there one day and just kind of thought, “Hey, how does that authenticate exactly? And what can I do with it?” Sure enough, it authenticates the exact same way that the AWS API does, that being the metadata service on the EC2 instance. And so what I figured out pretty quickly is if you can get access to an EC2 instance, even as a low-privilege user or you can do server-side request forgery to get the keys, or if you just have sufficient permissions within the account, you can potentially intercept SSM messages from, like, a session and provide your own results. And so in effect, if you've compromised an EC2 instance, and the only way, say, incident response has into that box is SSM, you can effectively lock them out of it and, kind of, do whatever you want in the meantime.Corey: That seems like it's something of a problem.Nick: It definitely can be. But it is a lot of fun to play keep-away with incident response. [laugh].Corey: I'd like to reiterate that this is all in environments you control and have permissions to be operating within. It is not recommended that people pursue things like this in other people's cloud environments without permissions. I don't want to find us sued for giving crap advice, and I don't want to find listeners getting arrested because they didn't understand the nuances of what we're talking about.Nick: Yes, absolutely. Getting legal approval is really important for any kind of penetration testing or red teaming. I know some folks sometimes might get carried away, but definitely be sure to get approval before you do any kind of testing.Corey: So, how does someone report a vulnerability to a company like AWS?Nick: So AWS, at least publicly, doesn't have any kind of bug bounty program. But what they do have is a vulnerability disclosure program. And that is essentially an email address that you can contact and send information to, and that'll act as your point of contact with AWS while they investigate the issue. And at the end of their investigation, they can report back with their findings, whether they agree with you and they are working to get that patched or fixed immediately, or if they disagree with you and think that everything is hunky-dory, or if you may be mistaken.Corey: I saw a tweet the other day that I would love to get your thoughts on, which said effectively, that if you don't have a public bug bounty program, then any way that a researcher chooses to disclose the vulnerability is definitionally responsible on their part because they don't owe you any particular duty of care. Responsible disclosure, of course, is also referred to as, “Coordinated vulnerability disclosure” because we're always trying to reinvent terminology in this space. What do you think about that? Is there a duty of care from security researchers to responsibly disclose the vulnerabilities they find, or coordinate those vulnerabilities with vendors in the absence of a public bounty program on turning those things in?Nick: Yeah, you know, I think that's a really difficult question to answer. From my own personal perspective, I always think it's best to contact the developers, or the company, or whoever maintains whatever you found a vulnerability in, give them the best shot to have it fixed or repaired. Obviously, sometimes that works great, and the company is super receptive, and they're willing to patch it immediately. And other times, they just don't respond, or sometimes they respond harshly, and so depending on the situation, it may be better for you to release it publicly with the intention that you're informing folks that this particular company or this particular project may have an issue. On the flip side, I can kind of understand—although I don't necessarily condone it—why folks pursue things like exploit brokers, for example.So, if a company doesn't have a bug bounty program, and the researcher isn't expecting any kind of, like, cash compensation, I can understand why they may spend tens of hours, maybe hundreds of hours chasing down a particularly impactful vulnerability, only to maybe write a blog post about it or get a little head pat and say, “Thanks, nice work.” And so I can see why they may pursue things like selling to an exploit broker who may pay them hefty sum, if it is a—Corey: Orders of magnitude more. It's, “Oh, good. You found a way to remotely execute code across all of EC2 in every region”—that is a hypothetical; don't email me—have a t-shirt. It seems like you could basically buy all the t-shirts for [laugh] what that is worth on the export market.Nick: Yes, absolutely. And I do know from some experience that folks will reach out to you and are interested in, particularly, some cloud exploits. Nothing, like, minor, like some of the things that I've found, but more thinking more of, like, accessing resources without anybody knowing or accessing resources cross-account; that could go for quite a hefty sum.Corey: This episode is sponsored by ExtraHop. ExtraHop provides threat detection and response for the Enterprise (not the starship). On-prem security doesn't translate well to cloud or multi-cloud environments, and that's not even counting IoT. ExtraHop automatically discovers everything inside the perimeter, including your cloud workloads and IoT devices, detects these threats up to 35 percent faster, and helps you act immediately. Ask for a free trial of detection and response for AWS today at extrahop.com/trial.Corey: It always feels squicky, on some level, to discover something like this that's kind of neat, and wind up selling it to basically some arguably terrible people. Maybe. We don't know who's buying these things from the exploit broker. Counterpoint, having reported a few security problems myself to various providers, you get an autoresponder, then you get a thank you email that goes into a bit more detail—for the well-run programs, at least—and invariably, the company's position is, is whatever you found is not as big of a deal as you think it is, and therefore they see no reason to publish it or go loud with it. Wouldn't you agree?Because, on some level, their entire position is, please don't talk about any security shortcomings that you may have discovered in our system. And I get why they don't want that going loud, but by the same token, security researchers need a reputation to continue operating on some level in the market as security researchers, especially independents, especially people who are trying to make names for themselves in the first place.Nick: Yeah.Corey: How do you resolve that dichotomy yourself?Nick: Yeah, so, from my perspective, I totally understand why a company or project wouldn't want you to publicly disclose an issue. Everybody wants to look good, and nobody wants to be called out for any kind of issue that may have been unintentionally introduced. I think the thing at the end of the day, though, from my perspective, if I, as some random guy in the middle of nowhere Illinois finds a bug, or to be frank, if anybody out there finds a vulnerability in something, then a much more sophisticated adversary is equally capable of finding such a thing. And so it's better to have these things out in the open and discussed, rather than hidden away, so that we have the best chance of anybody being able to defend against it or develop detections for it, rather than just kind of being like, “Okay, the vendor didn't like what I had to say, I guess I'll go back to doing whatever [laugh] things I normally do.”Corey: You've obviously been doing this for a while. And I'm going to guess that your entire security researcher career has not been focused on cloud environments in general and AWS in particular.Nick: Yes, I've done some other stuff in relation to abusing GitLab Runners. I also happen to find a pretty neat RCE and privilege escalation in the very popular open-source project. Pi-hole. Not sure if you have any experience with that.Corey: Oh, I run it myself all the time for various DNS blocking purposes and other sundry bits of nonsense. Oh, yes, good. But what I'm trying to establish here is that this is not just one or two companies that you've worked with. You've done this across the board, which means I can ask a question without naming and shaming anyone, even implicitly. What differentiates good vulnerability disclosure programs from terrible ones?Nick: Yeah, I think the major differentiator is the reactivity of the project, as in how quickly they respond to you. There are some programs I've worked with where you disclose something, maybe even that might be of a high severity, and you might not hear back four weeks at a time, whereas there are other programs, particularly the MSRC—which is a part of Microsoft—or with AWS's disclosure program, where within the hour, I had a receipt of, “Hey, we received this, we're looking into it.” And then within a couple hours after that, “Yep, we verified it. We see what you're seeing, and we're going to look at it right away.” I think that's definitely one of the major differentiators for programs.Corey: Are there any companies you'd like to call out in either direction—and, “No,” is a perfectly valid [laugh] answer to this one—for having excellent disclosure programs versus terrible ones?Nick: I don't know if I'd like to call anybody out negatively. But in support, I have definitely appreciated working with both AWS's and the MSRC—Microsoft's—I think both of them have done a pretty fantastic job. And they definitely know what they're doing at this point.Corey: Yeah, I must say that I primarily focus on AWS and have for a while, which should be blindingly obvious to anyone who's listened to me talk about computers for more than three and a half minutes. But my experiences with the security folks at AWS have been uniformly positive, even when I find things that they don't want me talking about, that I will be talking about regardless, they've always been extremely respectful, and I have never walked away from the conversation thinking that I was somehow cheated by the experience. In fact, a couple of years ago at the last in-person re:Invent, I got to give a talk around something I reported specifically about how AWS runs its vulnerability disclosure program with one of their security engineers, Zach Glick, and he was phenomenally transparent around how a lot of these things work, and what they care about, and how they view these things, and what their incentives are. And obviously being empathetic to people reporting things in with the understanding that there is no duty of care that when security researchers discover something, they then must immediately go and report it in return for a pat on the head and a thank you. It was really neat being able to see both sides simultaneously around a particular issue. I'd recommend it to other folks, except I don't know how you make that lightning strike twice.Nick: It's very, very wise. Yes.Corey: Thank you. I do my best. So, what's next for you? You've obviously found a number of interesting vulnerabilities around information disclosure. One of the more recent things that I found that was sort of neat as I trolled the internet—I don't believe it was yours, but there was a ability to determine the account ID that owned an S3 bucket by enumerating by a binary search. Did you catch that at all?Nick: I did. That was by Ben Bridts, which is—it's pretty awesome technique, and that's been something I've been kind of interested in for a while. There is an ability to enumerate users' roles and service-linked roles inside an account, so long as the account ID. The problem, of course, is getting the account ID. So, when Ben put that out there I was super stoked about being able to leverage that now for enumeration and maybe some fun phishing tricks with that.Corey: I love the idea. I love seeing that sort of thing being conducted. And AWS's official policy as best I remember when I looked at this once, account IDs are not considered confidential. Do you agree with that?Nick: Yep. That is my understanding of how AWS views it. From my perspective, having an account ID can be beneficial. I mentioned that you can enumerate users' roles and service-linked roles with it, and that can be super useful from a phishing perspective. The average phishing email looks like, “Oh, you won an iPad,” or, “Oh, you're the 100th visitor of some website,” or something like that.But imagine getting an email that looks like it's from something like AWS developer support, or from some research program that they're doing, and they can say to you, like, “Hey, we see that you have these roles in your account with account ID such-and-such, and we know that you're using EKS, and you're using ECS,” that phishing email becomes a lot more believable when suddenly this outside party seemingly knows so much about your account. And that might be something that you would think, “Oh, well only a real AWS employee or AWS would know that.” So, from my perspective, I think it's best to try and keep your account ID secret. I actually redact it from every screenshot that I publish, or at the very least, I try to. At the same time, though, it's not the kind of thing that's going to get somebody in your account in a single step, so I can totally see why some folks aren't too concerned about it.Corey: I feel like we also got a bit of a red herring coming from AWS blog posts themselves, where they always will give screenshots explaining what they do, and redact the account ID in every case. And the reason that I was told at one point was, “Oh, we have an internal provisioning system that's different. It looks different, and I don't want to confuse people whenever I wind up doing a screenshot.” And that's great, and I appreciate that. And part of me wonders on one level how accurate is that?Because sure, I understand that you don't necessarily want to distract people with something that looks different, but then I found out that the system is called Isengard and, yeah, it's great. They've mentioned it periodically in blog posts, and talks, and the rest. And part of me now wonders, oh, wait a minute. Is it actually because they don't want to disclose the differences between those systems, or is it because they don't have license rights publicly to use the word Isengard and don't want to get sued by whoever owns the rights to the Lord of the Rings trilogy. So, one wonders what the real incentives are in different cases. But I've always viewed account IDs as being the sort of thing that eh, you probably want to share them around all the time, but it also doesn't necessarily hurt.Nick: Exactly, yeah. It's not the kind of thing you want to share with the world immediately, but it doesn't really hurt in the end.Corey: There was an early time when the partner network was effectively determining tiers of partner by how much spend they influenced, and the way that you've demonstrated that was by giving account IDs for your client accounts. The only verification at the time, to my understanding was that, “Yep, that mapped to the client you said it did.” And that was it. So, I can understand back in those days not wanting to muddy those waters. But those days are also long passed.So, I get it. I'm not going to be the first person to advertise mine, but if you can discover my account ID by looking at a bucket, it doesn't really keep me up at night.So, all of those things considered, we've had a pretty wide-ranging conversation here about a variety of things. What's next? What interests you as far as where you're going to start looking and exploring—and exploiting as the case may be—various cloud services? hackthe.cloud—which there is the dot in there, which also turns it into a domain; excellent choice—is absolutely going to be a great collection for a lot of what you find and for other people to contribute and learn from one another. But where are you aimed at? What's next?Nick: Yeah, so one thing I've been really interested in has been fuzzing the AWS API. As anyone who's ever used AWS before knows, there are hundreds of services with thousands of potential API endpoints. And so from a fuzzing perspective, there is a wide variety of things for us to potentially affect or potentially find vulnerabilities in. I'm currently working on a library that will allow me to make that fuzzing a lot easier. You could use things like botocore, Boto3, like, some of the AWS SDKs.The problem though, is that those are designed for, sort of like, the happy path where you can format your request the way Amazon wants. As a security researcher or as someone doing fuzzing, I kind of want to send random gibberish sometimes, or I want to malform my requests. And so that library is still in production, but it has already resulted in a bug. While I was fuzzing part of the AWS API, I happened to notice that I broke Elastic Beanstalk—quite literally—when [laugh] when I was going through the AWS console, I got the big red error message of, “[unintelligible 00:29:35] that request parameter is null.” And I was like, “Huh. Well, why is it null?”And come to find out as a result of that, there is a HTML injection vulnerability in the Elastic—well, there was a HTML injection vulnerability in the Elastic Beanstalk, for the AWS console. Pivoting from there, the Elastic Beanstalk uses Angular 1.8.1, or at least it did when I found it. As a result of that, we can modify that HTML injection to do template injection. And for the AngularJS crowd, template injection is basically cross-site scripting [laugh] because there is no sandbox anymore, at least in that version. And so as a result of that, I was able to get cross-site scripting in the AWS console, which is pretty exciting. That doesn't tend to happen too frequently.Corey: No that is not a typical issue that winds up getting disclosed very often.Nick: Definitely, yeah. And so I was excited about it, and considering the fact that my library for fuzzing is literally, like, not even halfway done, or is barely halfway done, I'm looking forward to what other things I can find with it.Corey: I look forward to reading more. And at the time of this recording, I should point out that this has not been finalized or made public, so I'll be keeping my eyes open to see what happens with this. And hopefully, this will be old news by the time this episode drops. If not, well, [laugh] this might be an interesting episode once it goes out.Nick: Yeah. I hope they'd have it fixed by then. They haven't responded to it yet other than the, “Hi, we've received your email. Thanks for checking in.” But we'll see how that goes.Corey: Watching news as it breaks is always exciting. If people want to learn more about what you're up to, and how you go about things, where can they find you?Nick: Yeah, so you can find me at a couple different places. On Twitter I'm @frichette_n. I also write a blog where I contribute a lot of my research at frechetten.com as well as Hacking the Cloud. I contribute a lot of the AWS stuff that gets thrown on there. And it's also open-source, so if anyone else would like to contribute or share their knowledge, you're absolutely welcome to do so. Pull requests are open and excited for anyone to contribute.Corey: Excellent. And we will of course include links to that in the [show notes 00:31:42]. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. I really appreciate it.Nick: Yeah, thank you so much for inviting me on. I had a great time.Corey: Nick Frechette, penetration tester and team lead for State Farm. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with a comment telling me why none of these things are actually vulnerabilities, but simultaneously should not be discussed in public, ever.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

If you're of the age that your mom and dad retired 20 or 30 years ago, the world was a much different place when they walked away from their paychecks. Let's talk about how things are different now. Helpful Information: PFG Website: https://www.pfgprivatewealth.com/ Contact: 813-286-7776 Email: info@pfgprivatewealth.com Disclaimer: PFG Private Wealth Management, LLC is a registered investment adviser. All statements and opinions expressed are based upon information considered reliable although it should not be relied upon as such. Any statements or opinions are subject to change without notice. Information presented is for educational purposes only and does not intend to make an offer or solicitation for the sale or purchase of any specific securities, investments, or investment strategies. Investment involve risk and, unless otherwise stated, are not guaranteed. Information expressed does not take into account your specific situation or objectives and is not intended as recommendations appropriate for any individual. Listeners are encouraged to seek advice from a qualified tax, legal, or investment adviser to determine whether any information presented may be suitable for their specific situation. Past performance is not indicative of future performance. Transcript of Today's Show: For a full transcript of today's show, visit the blog related to this episode at https://www.pfgprivatewealth.com/podcast/ ----more---- Speaker 1: Hey everybody. Welcome into the podcast. It's Retirement Planning Redefined with John and Nick from PFG Private Wealth. Hanging out with me to talk about this being not our father's retirement now. That's our podcast topic this week, not your father's not our fathers, whatever you want to say, we're going to go into this conversation about how things are so much different even just 20 years ago when it comes to retirement. And some things to think about before we walk away from that paycheck. And there's a lot that's obviously changed and obviously we're seeing a lot of turmoil coming off of COVID and things of that nature. So there's a lot of good topical stuff in here for us to discuss, but let's jump in and say hi to the guys first, Nick, what's going on, buddy? How are you doing?   Nick: Pretty well, staying busy.   Speaker 1: Staying busy. Well, that's always good. John, how are you, my friend? Last time we talked you were having some troubles with the kids. Everybody not sleeping and things like that. Doing better?   John: Yeah, for the most part, actually, I don't know if I've mentioned it. We got them to share a room which has helped their sleeping habits a bit. So we've been sleeping through the night. So it's been a few years, my friend, of consistent nights of sleeping.   Speaker 1: There you go.   John: Starting to feel pretty good again.   Speaker 1: Yeah, I like that. Well, very good. So you never know what's going to make the trigger there. So I'm glad to hear that. Do you guys remember these commercials? I'm a little bit older than you, but I know a lot of our listeners might remember these as well, if you guys don't. But back, maybe late '70s, early '80s, Oldsmobile was trying to rebrand and make the Oldsmobile a little bit cooler. And so they had these commercials and it would always say things like, "It's not your father's Oldsmobile." You guys remember those at all?   Nick: I do actually.   Speaker 1: Yeah. And so they would try to rebrand it that way. So that's kind of the idea I had for today's conversation. It's not our father's retirement. My dad retired in '93. He passed away in '96. So he didn't have a very long retirement, but even just the principles and some of the things are completely different here 30 years later.   Speaker 1: So let's talk about a couple of these things and how the world's changed and how really planning has also changed and what you guys do and what folks need to consider when they get closer to retirement. First of all, the concept of retirement is not actually that old, a hundred years ago you didn't retire. You worked until you dropped. Right? So really retirement's only been around since, the idea of it really since the late '30s, '40s, '50s, '60s, so on and so forth. And it was this thing where you got to 65, you retired, you were done. Maybe you sat on the front porch and did little, but nowadays more and more people work beyond 65. They want to, not just have to, they want to, and that's okay. Right? There's nothing wrong with that.   John: Yeah. I would definitely, we see that in our office here, Bob Perry's 76, 77, he's still working. We joke that his wife won't let him retire, but he really enjoys coming in and the environment here and just being with everyone, it gives him stuff to do and he provides a lot of insight for us as well. So it's great to have him around so I could see where in his situation or other people's, if they're somewhere they enjoy, what's the point of retiring if you enjoy it?   Speaker 1: Right. Exactly. And not only that, Nick, but a lot of times people, again, they just want to do some other things and maybe you don't need the full job income, like you used to have, the big career, but maybe you do need a little extra money to help with the plan or something, but it's just a way to kind of have some fun and maybe make a little extra scratch on the side.   Nick: Yeah. I think ultimately what happens is that almost one analogy to think about, you see things like football players, baseball players, et cetera. Here you have people that retire early, they maybe have a career 5 to 10, maybe 15 years. And obviously their situation is a little bit different from a perspective of the money that they're retiring with and the bandwidth they have to route the time between retirement and their life expectancy. However, there's probably a little bit more similarities than people realize where ultimately when you see interviews with people like that, the things that you hear them talk about are missing the structure, missing the comradery, coworkers slash teammates, those sorts of things.   Nick: So, there's actually a lot of similarities and it's almost keeping that sort of structure and help keep my mind sharp, keep people engaged. We definitely see patterns from the perspective of, there are some people that they do a great job of having hobbies and they know that when they retire, they've got a list of things that they want to do, whether it's travel, whether it's hobbies, whether it's a small sort of business. And then you have people that really struggle. And I was having this conversation actually with my parents this weekend. My dad is a retired fireman, but he's been working, he had his own small business for the last maybe 15 years. So he retired as a fireman really early.   Nick: My mom's a nurse. She works a couple days a week now, but she's looking to slow down. And my dad was talking about a friend of his, maybe like 10 years older, that still does some work because he can't just sit around, he's got to stay busy. And my dad was like, "Well, he needs hobbies." And I said, "No, you need some hobbies. You don't have any hobbies." And he looked at me like, "I had never really thought about that before." And we've had different conversations, but the point that I'm trying to make is a lot of times, we look at other people, we look at other situations and we perceive ourselves in a different way. And sometimes just taking that self inventory and asking ourselves these sorts of questions, it really is important because there's many more similarities that we realize. So...   Speaker 1: Yeah.   Nick: So we've tasked my nieces who are younger to help, start coming up with some hobbies for my father, their grandfather, to keep him sharp and engaged. So...   Speaker 1: Well, I think we went through this cycle. Like I mentioned earlier, a hundred years ago you just worked until you dropped. And then we said, "Oh, we can do this thing called retirement." And then people started retiring and sitting around and doing nothing. And then you wither away that way too. So I think we've now started to learn over this past a hundred years that, okay, it's got to be a bit of both. You, you work really hard, you get to retirement, you hit retirement, but you still need to be active. You still need to do things and have things that interest you, if you want to just sit on the front porch and make wicker baskets, then that's great, do that, if that's what you want, but more and more people are-   John: Real quick, Nick loves making wicker baskets.   Speaker 1: Does he really? I got to get one now, I need a custom wicker basket.   Nick: No wicker baskets.   Speaker 1: Oh man, just crushed my dreams right there. But anyway, I think that's a really great point is having something to retire to. Now, the next point on this guys, is being retired, it can be more expensive nowadays than working. So, we used to see that 20% less is what you need in retirement. Well, that might not be the case now. And we've just been having conversations as well about inflation and stuff. So it can be quite expensive to retire if you're not careful.   Nick: It absolutely can. Especially depending on where you live from the perspective of the things that you may be looking to get into or do. I live in a downtown area in St. Pete and I absolutely see how, anybody that lives in this space, all you have to do is walk down the street to grab a coffee, to grab a lunch and depending upon your lifestyle, you've just got more time on your hands to do the things that you want to do. So, so why wouldn't it be more expensive if we're just doing these things more often, more frequently, so it can definitely be the case. And that's even from a discretionary standpoint, let alone the health care costs and all the things that people do to stay healthier, stay more engaged, live longer, all those sorts of things.   Nick: And ultimately, one of the things that we'll have conversations with people, sometimes people come in with an open mind thinking like, "Hey, this might be happening. I may spend more money." Other times we have people that they're absolutely convinced, " No I'm going to spend 50%, 60% of what I spent before." And that's sometimes the question to them is, "Why would you? Is that what you want to do? Or is this just something that you read?" Because I would guess ultimately you want to enjoy what you've saved up for and worked hard for. So, at what point in life or maybe even in the last 30 years, one of the questions, at one point in the last 30 years, have you lived only for needs and realistically here in the U.S That's for most people that's not too common, ultimately we live in the things that we bought. We enjoy the times that we want to spend with others, all those sorts of things. So, that's an important conversation to have.   Speaker 1: No, I definitely agree with you there. John, retirees are facing more problems than ever too. Well society, we're all facing more problems than ever before, social media, so on and so forth. Just the inundation of information, but longevity, I think maybe longevity guys might be a key to this whole conversation today because it magnifies all of these things. And that's certainly going to be the case when juggling more problems because we're living longer, so much longer, the body's able, we're figuring out lots of great ways to keep the body going, but sometimes we're having some difficulties when it comes to the mental side, dementia is on the rise, things of that nature. And that gets pretty costly.   John: Yeah. Yeah. Previously we talked about retirement changing, people had pensions which lasted for their life. And the shift has been away from pensions to putting the responsibility on the individual where now they have just basically savings, whether it's cash or investments or whatever, but now you need to be very cautious, we have to be very careful that that's going to last you 30 plus years. And that's why it's important to have the plan to make sure that your money is going to last throughout retirement, which is really the biggest concern for retirees. Some other things we've seen popping up more recently and we've just dealt with this with a client where their they're aging parents, they were providing financial assistance for their parents in assisted living facilities and things like that, or having helpers.   John: So I have one client where they're were assisting their parents with that. So they weren't really going on vacation and enjoying their time. And then the parent passed away and then with everything that's happened recently, their son lost a job and then they were not helping out their son with expenses. So it was a double whammy for them is that they can't truly enjoy retirement because they're helping family members out, which again, no one plans for this, you just happen in this situation, but it's something that you always want to keep track of.   Nick: Yeah. That's kind of that sandwich generation that they talk about a little bit and it really started coming to the forefront back during the recession, '08, '09, '10, where there was a lot of kids coming out of college, couldn't get jobs, parents aging, all these sorts of things. So I would say baby boomers definitely have their hands full with all the different things that they have to juggle. And so having peace of mind of having that plan in place and understanding how their money is going to work in retirement is more important than ever.   Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, and like I said, longevity is probably the key to this whole conversation. So we have to sell fun. Right? We don't have pensions now. Well, not many do. Right? So I think something like 15% or less of the population has pensions. It's an interesting statistic, but we're talking 30, 40 years. I was just chatting with somebody yesterday, guys who they're 72 and their mom and dad both are still alive. They're in their 90s and they're also dealing with helping their 40 year old children. So there's a lot in this to unpack.   Nick: Yeah. Yeah. We see it all the time. We see it all the time and it can be pretty stressful. And a lot of times what we'll try to do and go through with people and this even ties into some other previous podcasts, that we'll have from the perspective of, "Hey, my kids are looking to buy a house. I want to give them money for a down payment." And we'll talk about things like, "All right, well, where does that money have to come from? How does it impact your overall plan?"   Nick: So we try to walk it through and we try, we joke where we try not to be the money police and tell people what they can and can't do, but we just help them understand the impact of their decisions and trying to make sure that they do it from a perspective of viewing their retirement first and making sure that they're okay because they also don't want to be a burden down the line for their kids. So it can be a really slippery slope and making sure that the decisions that are made along the way position them to be able to help, but it can be difficult, especially like you said, planning for that 30, 40 year retirement.   Speaker 1: Yeah, definitely. And it's a situation where we're just going to continue to see more of it. So having a good strategy, having a good plan is going to be paramount to getting through all these hurdles and things that we've got going on. Because I imagine at the end of the day, nobody comes in and says, "Hey, I'd like to have less of a lifestyle than I have now in retirement." No one wants to go backwards. So you want to make sure that you are having those conversations to move yourself forward or at least maintain into retirement. So that's our topic this week. So we all know things are different than they were 20 or 30 years ago. But when you really start dissecting it, especially from a financial standpoint, there's just a lot to unpack.   Speaker 1: So sit down and have a conversation. If you're not already with a team that can help you like the team at PFG Private Wealth, John and Nick, and the whole team there to get on the counter, reach out to them. (813) 286-7776. If you've got some questions or concerns, reach out on the website if you'd like to as well pfgprivatewealth.com, that's pfgprivatewealth.com. Don't forget to subscribe to the show. Retirement Planning Redefined on your smartphone there. If you've got an Apple phone, for example, Apple Podcasts is already on your phone. You can just open up that app and type in Retirement, Planning Redefined, and subscribe that way or Google or whatever platform you use. Most of that stuff's already pre-installed on your phones anyway, but you can find it all at pfgprivatewealth.com. Guys, thanks for hanging out with me this week. I appreciate it. John. I'm bummed that he's not going to make me a wicker basket.   John: I've been trying to get one, he won't do it.   Nick: I'm not the creative type.   Speaker 1: Not the creative type. All right, guys. Well, thanks for hanging out again. I appreciate it. I'll see you next time. John, take care, buddy.   John: Have a good one.   Speaker 1: We'll see you later. Nick, take care. Have yourself a good week.   Nick: All right. You too. Take care.   Speaker 1: We'll talk to you next time here on Retirement Planning Redefined with John and Nick from PFG Private Wealth.

In this episode we discuss what to do when you finally have some space. 00:02:35 - Empty Space Well, this is something I definitely noticed with myself is, you get that empty space and there's usually like a sigh of relief. Yeah, man. You know, maybe something got canceled or, you know, a meeting got canceled or something shifted and it's like, oh, now I don't have to do that thing. And whew, man, it's like sigh of relief for a second. But immediately the mind is like, well, what am I going to fill it with?  NICK I don't even know that the mind go. I feel like it's sort of this subconscious, you start just filling or maybe yeah, because there's a nervousness, like there's space. When am I going to do? And then at least if I'm not grounded or anchored, I'll just start all of a sudden floating around the house and walking outside and picking a plum and coming back in and just like things that don't need to happen right then and there. And before, you know, an hour's gone. KISMA 00:004:00 - What is taking space? So describe what is taking space.  KISMA Well, I mean, to, to me in the truest sense of it taking spaces, like I'm not going to, I'm just not going to do anything.  NICK I'm just going to be with myself.  KISMA I'm just going to like sit and be a maniac, you know, and be with myself. NICK Just like be with my feelings, my thoughts, my body, my energy, that can be incredibly uncomfortable for people.  KISMA  It's really, it's really a weird experience, I think, you know, and how I put it in the message, you know, is like pure perception. NICK 00:05:35 - Not that easy It's it's, it's, it's actually not that easy.  NICK No, we're so used to being distracted. Yes. And then, then there's a feeling like, well, I should be doing something, so I'm taking space, but I'll read this book or I'll devour this book or something that man just being with ourselves. And it's interesting because we're the ones, you know, between our ears, we are with ourselves 24/7, we are with ourselves more than any other human yet to just be and have that space can feel so uncomfortable. KISMA 00:07:25 - Practices, Tips & Tools So what about some practices, some tips, some tools for people to just be, where do they start?  KISMA It's a little hard to instruct because it's, you know, it's the opposite of doing anything. NICK Right.  KISMA That you have to actually like make a decision to just do nothing.  NICK What would one possibly feel, or what can they expect when they enter this decision of I'm just going to sit and be for five minutes a day.  KISMA Well, that's a really interesting question because, um, I think it could be like, really, really, I know in myself, like I have really different experiences of that. You know, sometimes it's like really relaxing and just like, you know, kind of  NICK getting cosmic. KISMA Yeah. And then other times it's, there's, you have some really deep insights from that space. You know, other times you just kinda just feels like a sigh of relief, you know? So I, I can't really say, you know, but all I can say is like, you gotta try it, just try it for yourself. NICK 00:09:27 - When one takes space Well, I think when one takes space and you're able to just be, that's when the intuition starts to come in, like there's just there's quietude and it might take, it might take some practice or it might just happen automatically for people's like, yeah, I'm just going to make that decision. I'm just going to be bit without the noise, without leaning in and having to do something, you're going to feel the connection that is there anyways, with your intuitive channel, with your spiritual channel, it's just, there is that space and depth for you to start to hear a start to know or start to receive. KISMA 00:12:35 - Anytime So before we sign off choice decision to take the space, is there a certain time of day that you recommend?  KISMA No. Anytime, anytime. Cause it doesn't have to be a lot, like five minutes will, it can seem like an eternity.  NICK  So perhaps it would be like the taking space challenge five minutes a day.  KISMA Yeah. Anytime, anywhere like you can just sit on a park bench and just be, you can be that weirdo. Who's just sitting there looking at the tree. NICK I think back in the day. That's what people did, like we're on our phones and we're eating and we're doing all sorts of crazy things.  KISMA Yeah. You see people it's like I say, I always crack up at that meme when I, whenever it floats through my feet, you know, it's like I was in a coffee shop and I saw this guy sitting there just drinking a cup of coffee, like a maniac, like, like people don't do that, you know, just go somewhere and just drink a cup of coffee, you know? NICK 00:15:43 - Do Nothing So five minutes a day. Doesn't matter what time everyone just sit and be with yourself.  KISMA Yeah. Yeah. One, try it in the middle of the day.  NICK Yeah. I bet there'll be a renewed energy for the rest of the day.  KISMA Try, you know, you can try it in the morning. Like that might be a little easier to start and don't meditate. NICK Don't meditate, you know, just, you're not meditating. Don't go to God, let God come to you.  KISMA Oh, dang Kimsa. My mic drop right there. Yeah. I like that. Um, you're not meditating. You're not reading or studying. You're not contemplating. Is it like none of it's really. I mean, what I like just do nothing. NICK

Preparen los pañuelitos descartables porque este episodio es BA JO NE RO! Leímos el capítulo 8: “La fiesta de aniversario de muerte” y hablamos de los Fantasmas y de lo mucho que les cuesta SOLTAR. Hicimos DOS IDENTIKITS! A Argus Filch, que no se entiende bien qué hace en el colegio, y a Nick Casi Decapitado, que es tan Campanita que duele. Nos quejamos del curso Embrujorapid (currito mágico o alternativa educativa?) y de les traductores de esta saga que otra vez hacen mal su trabajo. Y por último, un aplauso para Poppy que se puso al hombro el Covid en Hogwarts y para Myrtle que se banca el bullying incluso muerta! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/lasquisquillosas/message

Sometimes the easiest way to learn about something is make it really simple. Like some of the first true/false tests you might have taken in school, let’s play a round of fact or fiction to test your financial planning acuity. Helpful Information: PFG Website: https://www.pfgprivatewealth.com/ Contact: 813-286-7776 Email: info@pfgprivatewealth.com Disclaimer: PFG Private Wealth Management, LLC is a registered investment adviser. All statements and opinions expressed are based upon information considered reliable although it should not be relied upon as such. Any statements or opinions are subject to change without notice. Information presented is for educational purposes only and does not intend to make an offer or solicitation for the sale or purchase of any specific securities, investments, or investment strategies. Investment involve risk and, unless otherwise stated, are not guaranteed. Information expressed does not take into account your specific situation or objectives and is not intended as recommendations appropriate for any individual. Listeners are encouraged to seek advice from a qualified tax, legal, or investment adviser to determine whether any information presented may be suitable for their specific situation. Past performance is not indicative of future performance. Transcript of Today's Show: For a full transcript of today's show, visit the blog related to this episode at https://www.pfgprivatewealth.com/podcast/ ----more---- Marc: Hey everybody. Welcome into this edition of the podcast. Thanks for hanging out with us here on retirement planning, redefined with John and Nick, financial advisors at PFG Private Wealth. Find them online at pfgprivatewealth.com, that's pfgprivatewealth.com. Fun podcast this week, we're going to have a little fun with some financial fact or fiction and test our financial planning acuity with the guys in just a minute, but let's say, hey and see what's going on. John, how are you my friend? John: I'm doing good. How are you? Marc: Doing pretty good hanging out and doing well hope you guys are doing the same down there. Nick, what's going on with you? Any new action on that attorney you guys were telling us about? Nick: No, we're still plugging away on the golf tournament. We're looking forward to doing that. This the first time that John and I have been involved in putting together a golf tournament. We're not big golfers, it's definitely an interesting process, but we're looking forward to... I think our two charities are going to be locally Pepin Academies and Southeastern Guide Dogs. We're looking forward to raising some money for charity. And then, we also actually recently sponsored a run through the Herald Center, which is a part of the USF Tampa campus and through the college of public health, that's done to support in studies, family violence, which is a huge issue really in any community. They have a run coming up and we're sponsoring that. Anybody that's involved locally with that, we'll see the name of the podcast and those sorts of things. We always stay involved in the community, enjoy doing those things. Marc: That's great. John: But we are definitely not running. Marc: You're not running. Are you going to golf? John: We're probably not golfing either. Nick: [crosstalk 00:01:47]. Marc: I imagine planning a tourney, a golf tournament, is a bit more challenging than you might expect. You first dive into it. You think, oh, this is... And then you're like, wow, this is a lot more work than I thought. John: There are a lot of moving parts, but we have a really strong team. We have some members that have planned golf tournaments before and they're heading up the logistics. Nick and I are very organized and detail oriented, we're making sure all the tasks are checked off and everyone's doing their work, but we're really excited about that one. Marc: Dotting the I's and crossing the T's. Nick: The local steakhouse that we're teaming up with is really well known. Having them involved, this is the first time that we had paired up with them. It's a pretty cool experience as well. Marc: Very cool. Well, I'll keep asking about it and we'll keep updating things as we get closer, but for now let's play a little financial fact or fiction. I know it's a little tougher sometimes in your guys' industry, because often I've heard that saying that the answer to most financial questions are, it depends, but we'll try to do as best we can here. Like when we were in school, we do true or false of simple ways to learn things. I've got some basic statements here guys, just have a little fun with it. Fact or fiction, give us the best answer you can, based on the way the question is worded and we'll go from there. Fact or fiction, whoever wants to take this first one, your social security can be taxable. John: I'm going to say fact, although sometimes it's not, but it's based off of your income in retirement. They called it, your modified adjusted gross income in this situation, where basically it's half of your social security, your adjusted gross income, plus any non taxable interest like municipal bonds. They add all that up and depending on where that falls will determine how much of your social security is taxable. Example if you're making married filing jointly over 44 000 of that [inaudible 00:03:46] income, up to 85% of your social security is going to be taxable. That's the maximum amount of your social security that's going to be taxable is up to 85%. Marc: Okay. It can be taxable. It doesn't mean it always will be, but it can be. John: Correct. I'll say more often than not, it is going to be taxable because the limits where it's not taxable, it's married filing jointly between zero and 32 000, 0% is taxable at that point. But you'll find the majority of people, they're above that when you're talking two incomes. Marc: Got you. Okay. All right. We'll go with fact on that one, it can be taxable. Quick and easy fact or fiction. Nick, how about you, you want to take this one? Your taxes will likely be lower in retirement. Nick: There is a decent chance that may be the case, the tricky part about that, and we usually have a better idea of that within the last couple of years of retirement, when we can measure your expenses and measure what is being deployed into savings and those sorts of things. I would say that a solid percentage of people do have lower taxes, at least initially in retirement. But one of the things that we've started to see is, especially those that have done a good job of maybe managing expenses, because the market has taken such a big jump over the last, five to 10 years, there's a lot of people that have found themselves with a lot more money in retirement accounts than they expected. And they're creeping into their RMD age, which is now 72, they're going to have income that's going to be coming in via their required minimum distribution that may be much higher than their spending that could really flatten out that difference. going back to what we've said in previous podcasts, there is a decent chance that your taxes will be lower in retirement. However, it's important for us to plan for scenarios that they aren't and give you options in retirement. Marc: Yeah. And to be fair with continuing taxes possibly going to be on the rise with all the spending we're doing, it's one of those statements where again, it's in the wording, likely to be lower. Okay. But there's a good chance of anything happening in that arena. You always want to make sure you're checking them as relates to your specific scenario and plan efficiently. Try to plan to be as efficient as possible so that you can be tax efficient, hopefully in the future, just in case they do go up, because they do raise up the tax brackets. All right. How about fact or fiction guys? Term life insurance is better than whole life insurance. John: I'm going to have to say it's a, it depends on this one. I can't go fact or fiction on this one because it depends on your situation. Term-life is great for covering an immediate need. Example, having two kids, I've enough life insurance, death benefit to cover my income for the next 20 years, if something were to happen to me. Whole life is nice to have basically a permanent policy. Going into retirement, I have something that's going to last, in essence, depending on the policy and disclosures, whatever and disclaimers it's going to last forever. This one is, it can't be fact or fiction, it really depends on the person's situation. Nick: One of the things I would just throw in there on this is that, life insurance can be a topic that people feel strongly about. Typically though, it breaks down to a cashflow issue where if you have the cashflow to be able to have the right type of permanent whole life insurance, oftentimes it can be a better plan and strategy than otherwise, but it's definitely an in-depth and a topic that's important to go through in detail. Marc: Well, we're having a little fun with these, but like any financial vehicle or product there's pros and cons to everything and what's going to be right for your scenario may be different for someone else. It's all about that complete holistic strategy, if you will. And that's why working with an advisor is a good idea to do so when it comes to your scenario. And of course, if you've got questions or you need some help or whatever the case might be as always check out John and Nick, and have a conversation with them if you need some help, or if you have something that sparks your interest a little bit, go to pfgprivatewealth.com, that's pfgprivatewealth.com, and you can drop them a line there while you're on the website. Lot of good tools, tips, and resources. Here's another one guys. Medicare will cover most of your medical needs in retirement, fact or fiction? John: I'll say fact that the right type of Medicare policy will cover most of your medical needs in retirement. Again, disclosure, everyone's situation is different and Medicare only covers certain things. But I'll say from your basic health needs, going to the doctor, prescriptions, if you have the right type of Medicare policy, it will cover quite a bit of that. As far as any disabilities, that's where Medicare does not really kick in for that. A lot of people get confused. Marc: Hospital stays, basic doctor visits, things like that. But it doesn't do dental. I can be interesting. My mom had, with her Medicare, she had some cataract stuff done and it covered portions of it. There's definitely some outliers there, which is why they've got the 47 million supplement programs that go in there. A lot of stuff to talk about for sure and it doesn't do anything with long-term care. John: Correct. It's important just to understand what it covers. Both Nick and I, we know a good amount about it, but we've both gone to some seminars and presentations and make sure we're up to date on the latest. But we typically, when it comes to that point in the planning, we refer this out to a couple of people that specialize in it because there's so many different policies of so many different nuances. And again, it's all about finding the right professional and what fits your needs. Fact, some of the time, fiction some of the time as well. Marc: Yeah, exactly. Well, I guess with these, it's really just a fun way to do it, but ideally when it comes to financial stuff, there's always a depends caveat, if you will. One more here, we'll have this last one, then we'll take an email question to wrap up this week. As you get older, you should gradually shift from stocks to bonds. That's been a thinking for a very long time fact or fiction, or maybe has that changed? Nick: I would say that it obviously depends upon where you're starting from. If you've been a typical investor that has been comfortable with market risk throughout your life and you are starting from a place of maybe having a 70/30 stock to bond or a 60/40 stock bond portfolio that shifting to decrease your risk does make some sense. We've seen plenty of people that haven't really taken enough risk from the perspective of market risk. Not taking enough market risk, can create things like longevity risk and your money lasting for you, those sorts of things. If you're going to make shifts, it's important to be shifting in the right way. Making sure that you're looking at stocks that are on the lower risk side of things is important. But I would say in general, the key is to tie your investments to your overall financial plan. But in general, it will make some sense for many people to reduce some of their stock holding risk as things go forward. With the caveat that when you're getting your access to the fixed side of things, the bond world, you need to do it much more carefully than maybe you had to 10 or 15 years ago. It's a much more convoluted space than it was. And so that's something where there are many people that under-appreciate the risk that you can have in the bond space. Marc: All right. Well, that's going to do it for fact or fiction, and we're going to wrap up this podcast with an email question again, if you'd like to submit your own, stop by the website at pfgprivatewealth.com, that's pfgprivatewealth.com. Greg's got a question for you. Greg says, "Guys, I'm being offered an early retirement package from the company I worked at. It also includes a severance package and pension buyout. It seems wise to consider this anything to think?" Anything that he should be thinking about, questions to maybe ask? Nick: Yeah. Good question, Greg. Nick and I are seeing quite a bit of this coming up where clients are near retirement, few years away, and all of a sudden it's, hey, I got the severance package and this pension buyout, what should I do? And the first thing we do is really to say, "Hey, let's run the numbers and the plan and see if you can retire with that severance package and what the pension buyout is." And we'll evaluate it and give our recommendations based on, again, the plan. I'll say it's definitely worth comparing your options in that situation. One thing you want to consider is the financial health of the pension itself. Is it fully funded or is it underfunded? Because we have seen some pensions that aren't fully funded and there's some financial risks of that pension. In that scenario, I would say you might want to go ahead and take the money. Nick: And then, reverting back to the plan, what are their current income needs versus liquidity? Just to give you an example of a plan we're doing, client had a couple of pensions and didn't really have much liquidity. When a situation like this came up, we evaluated it based on the income that it was spinning off and what a lump sum could do. But, we looked at it and said, "Hey, this, this could be a nice option to give you some of the liquidity, which you currently don't have", because he had two pensions and social security, but didn't have a lot of liquid assets he could draw on if needed. Another thing to consider is beneficiaries. We've seen a lot of clients where they say, "Something happens to me with this pension, basically the money goes away. I don't feel comfortable with that. I'd prefer the lump sum buyout. At least if something happens to me within the next 10 years or 15 years, someone's going to get something versus in the pension option that I'm given, they're not going to get anything." And again, there's different pension options and we review it all. And then, we've seen some scenarios where the pension guaranteed income was so excellent, we didn't even consider a lump sum withdrawal or any other type of contracts that provide guaranteed income because it was so strong. Marc: Some good questions to ponder there, Greg. Thanks for submitting that in. There's obviously a lot of information that you didn't share with us. If you'd like to have a more in-depth conversation about exactly what they're offering, you definitely reach out to John and Nick. You can call them at 813-286-7776, but that gives you four or five things there to think about. Again, 813-286-7776. You can give them a call and have a conversation with them. Of course, with the podcast, subscribe to the show folks, if you have done so already. That way you can catch up new episodes when they come out, you can also check out past episodes and all that good jazz. You can find it all at pfgprivatewealth.com. It's really the easiest way to get in touch with the guys, If you'd like. Marc: You can drop an email question, you can book some time with them. You can subscribe to the podcast, just a lot of good tools, tips, and resources there at pfgprivatewealth.com. That's pfgprivatewealth.com and that's going to do it for us this week on the podcast. John, Nick, guys thanks for hanging out with me and good luck with the upcoming events. Nick: All right, thanks Marc. John: Thanks, have a good one. Marc: We appreciate it. We'll see you next time here on retirement planning, redefined with the guys from PFG Private Wealth, serving you here in the Tampa Bay area. We'll talk to you next time on the podcast folks.

On this episode of Ask Nick we start with someone who is confused after the break-up of her first big love when her ex calls and asks if she would be willing to have a threesome with his new fiancé. Our next caller is stuck in a new guy vs. ex guy scenario and is trying to figure out which one is her guy and if verbal cheating will be a deal breaker in her relationship. A traumatic event has affected intimacy for our next caller and was a reason for her ex to break up with her, but a year later he is asking to reconcile and she does not know if it is something she should do.  Finally, we speak with a woman who is stuck in a cycle with a guy leaving and coming back and she wants to try and make boundaries to stop the cycle.  “There is a difference between fighting and communicating and it sounds like you guys don’t know the difference in the moment.” Please make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss an episode and as always send in your relationship questions to asknick@kastmedia.com to be a part of our Monday episodes.  THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS: Nuts.com : New customers text FILES to 64-000 to get free shipping on your first order from Nuts.com. Dipsea: http://www.dispeastories.com/VIALL for a 30 day free trial.  Caviar: Download the Caviar app and use offer code VIALL for 20% off your first order. Blenders Eyewear: http://www.blenderseyewear.com enter promo code VIALL for 15% off  Episode Socials:  Viall Files @viallfiles Nick Viall @nickviall See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey all! We've officially done it! We've had so many guests that we've had to start repeating NAMES. That's right, all. It's time for Nick No.2 to take a seat and spew some hot nonsense into the mic. We first met our friend Nick as patrons at his bar; a favorite after-work drinking spot of both Ryan and Anna. After realizing, "Huh... he's actually pretty funny..." they decided to offer him a spot on the pod, and are so happy he accepted! So get your beer ready and listen to this trashy trio talk DJing in strip clubs, BJ's in the middle of a bar, serving Bill Murray a whiskey that was NOT SUNTORY, and all things Maryland. (Anna and Nick are both from there, okay? Let them have their fun). ALSO! Stay tuned for the biggest surprise of the year... Ryan taking a shot! This is a man who has NEVER taken a shot in the 5 years that he and Anna have lived in New York. What does he take a shot of? Well you'll have to listen to find out!

Big Nick is a comedian from New jersey. Freethinker.TV Support this podcast

Episode Notes [“Don’t Tell Me Your Major Theme” By Malena Ramnath] Malena: Hey, guys, my name is Malena Ramnath. Hannah: And I'm Hannah Fredly. Malena: And we are your hosts and freshmen here at Northwestern. This is Don't Tell Me Your Major an interview podcast where we avoid getting to know people on the surface level with questions like what their major is, where they're from, and how old they are, but try to get to know them on a more profound level. That's how you really know the kind of person someone is rather than judging them based on pre–established stereotypes. So we're here today in the thick of the Coronavirus quarantine, currently hosting this podcast over zoom, which is definitely weird but we're all very excited to be able to continue this despite the distance. And unfortunately, Alison couldn't join us today because she's in Seoul, Korea, and those time zones are insane. So today we're here with Hannah. Also on today's podcast is the one and only Nick, please say your last name for me, Nick. Nick: Schoenbrodt. Malena: Okay. And he is another Northwestern student with an impossible last name. And he just said hi. So we're super– Nick: Yeah, you're doing great. Malena: We're super excited to have you as today's guest. So where is everyone currently? I'm in DC. Hannah, where are you? Hannah: I'm currently in France. Nick: Oh, I am in New Jersey, the opposite of France. Malena: Um great. And so I figured since we're all stuck inside our questions today will be themed around being stuck. So without further ado, I figured we’d get started. Um, so Nick, what is your favorite stuck inside hobby now that we're in quarantine? Nick: Um, God, that's a good question. I have been doing almost nothing. But I got a new laptop. So I'm trying to get into music production a little bit which is fun, but also difficult when it's like the only thing there is to do and I don't have anything to like take a break from it with I guess, but that's what I've been doing. Mostly it's happening slowly. Malena: Damn, music production. Hannah, what are you doing now that you're stuck in bed? What are your hobbies that you've picked up to stay productive? Hannah: Um, well technically we're out of quarantine. So, ha. Malena: I hate you. Hannah: But, um, otherwise, something really fun to do is those like, workout videos that are like dance and workout at the same time. That's really fun. Nick: And that's on jazzercise. Malena: Well yeah, I mean, those two are like, generally more productive than me. I mean, I've been, I guess one of my hobbies– Oh, I'm learning Italian on Duolingo! You guys ready? Io no sono un ragazzo. Which means “I'm not a boy”. You know, and that's pretty much all I know how to say. Nick: That’s good. That’s gonna really come in handy I feel like. Malena: You know if anyone mistakes, you know, me for a little boy. You never know. Italians these days. Nick: That’s true. Hannah: Have you been keeping up with Duolingo? Malena: Yeah, the owl is really aggressive dude. It's always like: “You have one hour to save your streak! You're so lazy, it takes five minutes!” Nick: He, he yelled at me for not knowing my Greek alphabet and I think I, all I had done is like put Greek in a language I was like kind of interested in, in the app and he was like, like learn your alphabet, learn your alphabet! Hannah: He, as in the owl. Nick: Yeah, yes, he as in the owl, my, my good friend, the Duolingo owl. Malena: Evil demon that haunts my dreams, alright. Um, but okay, so moving on to our next question. What is the one movie you would watch if you were stuck with one for the rest of your life? Nick, your thoughts? Nick: Oh, no. These, I can't answer these questions without pulling up my like, letterbox like and looking at the movies I've seen. The Princess Bride is great. Just because it's fun, but like, I don't know, maybe like Whiplash if I want to like be stressed for the rest of my life. I don’t know. Malena: I mean, that would also push you to be ridiculously productive. Just like watching Whiplash and like, you know, striving– Nick: Cause watching, cause watching a two hour movie is the most productive thing you can do. Malena: This is, this is fact. Hannah, what about you? What are you thinking for your stuck-on-an-island with the rest of your like that for the rest of your life movie? Hannah: Um, how about Shutter Island? On the island? Nick: That's not good. That's not gonna stress you out. Malena: Shutter Island– brooooo. I watched that, we watched that on a really big like movie screen that we found and that it really freaked me out just like on the big screen. Leo DiCaprio killing you know, oh, spoilers. Sorry. You know, terrifying. Nick: Bleep it out in post you know. Malena: Yeah. For me, I think my desert island– I mean Princess Bride is a big classic. I love Call Me By Your Name. It's so calming. Just watching like handsome people run around northern Italy. We love to see it. We love to see it. Um, okay. And then my third question is, if you could be stuck anywhere in the world for quarantine, where would it be, like besides where you are right now? I'm sure you're very happy in New Jersey, Nick. So not to hate on New Jersey. Nick: Yeah, of course – it's it's great here. Malena: If you could be stuck anywhere else for quarantine where would you be stuck? Nick: So I am if my if we are remote fall quarter which, don’t talk to me about it cause it's not gonna happen and I won't let it happen. I think I'm planning to go – which is where I would go – to my cousin's beach house in California. And just like, it's like on a mountainside overlooking the ocean and just like sit in the backyard and take zoom classes outside for the entire quarter. That's the plan. Malena: That sounds like heaven. I'm jealous. Do you go there often? Nick: No, like, once every two years – Malena: And how old is your cousin that he has his own beach house? Nick: It's like my family like my, I guess it's my aunt’s and uncle’s. But I mean, he's like 22, 21, I don’t know. He's graduating this year, which is awful. But yeah. Malena: Hannah, what about you? I mean, France is a pretty great place to be stuck. So if you could be stuck elsewhere… Hannah: I'd be in Asia, dude in Asia. They are out of quarantine, people are just out, out and about. They’re partying, they've confined it more or less pretty well. They're just having the time of their lives. Anywhere in Asia. Malena: That's fair. That's fair. I do miss Singapore. Is still under circuit breaker. But our friends definitely out in Korea – shout out to Allison – are having the time of their lives as compared to the good old US of A. I'm quite jealous. Hannah: Florida’s having a good time. They don't give a fuck! Malena: No, it's okay. Hannah: You’re gonna have to bleep that. You’re gonna have to bleep it. Malena: No, you can swear– Hannah: I’m sorry, I'm giving you much more work than it had to be. Woops Malena: No, we can swear on this podcast– Nick: Malena is a dutiful editor. Malena: All right, and then I think that for me, I don't know, I'm definitely going through a very Greek phase. I'm reading Zorba the Greek, I was making Greek food, I have way too many Greek friends. And they're all sending me like videos from Athens of like the sunsets around their house. And I'm very jealous. So I think, probably Greece– just literally anywhere in Europe – because I feel like it's just stunning views. You know, like for me, I mean, I do get to see the Washington Monument from my apartment, but otherwise, Nick: Okay, flex. Malena: Not many, like you know, seaside views, in comparison, so I think anywhere in Europe with a seaside view would be my answer. All right, guys. And so for our final question for the day, this is you know, a little bit more personal, a little bit more difficult to answer. But if you could be stuck with anyone who you are not currently with right now in quarantine, who would you be stuck with and why? Nick: Like a someone that that listens to the podcast would not know who they are? Malena: I mean, it doesn't matter, you could give a shoutout to anyone. Nick: I mean, I mean, this is, you guys know who this is but other people wouldn't. It would be probably be Asteris or Artie. Malena: And for what reason would these two mystery men, who our listeners have no idea who they are? Nick: Well, because they they brighten up my day with their with their beautiful faces but also because, I don’t know, it'll just be fun to chill with them. I guess. Like it's a boring answer, but it's true. Like they're, they're people I just hang out with and I'm not getting that right now, not getting my fix right now. So, you know, getting, getting that fix. Malena: Yeah, I think the two of them have a very good sarcastic sense of humor that I think is generally lacking in most other people. Nick: Yeah. Malena: So. Nick: Yeah, and especially lacking in no social interaction at all, so. Hannah: Very true. Malena: Hannah, what about you? Hannah: I'd be stuck with you. Malena. I just blew you a kiss. I love you. Nick: That's a mistake. Malena: I know you miss me. Hannah: That was my declaration of love. Malena: I know you, Nick, we could be reading together. Fun fact. Nick is a major book nerd. Nick: Yeah but I haven’t read all quarantine. I’m – it’s a shame. Malena: I know. But– Nick: I have some things in the mail. It's coming. I'm going to force you to read it. Malena: I like that's, I mean, I'm always down to read more. That's definitely one hobby that I've picked up more is I've been reading a lot since I've been back. But, um, for me, who would I be stuck with? I mean, besides you, Hannah. Obviously, love of my whole life. Um, my heart is warmed by that answer. I don’t know, that's a tough one. I think– Hannah: It's fine. Go ahead, choose someone else but me. That's fine. Malena: No no it’s because I'm trying to think– Hannah: It’s fine. Malena: –of someone else but Hannah: I see how it is. Malena: –you but unfortunately, you're the only person I spend my time with. Nick: Ah, thanks, thanks, Malena I thought we were friends. I thought we were friends. Hannah: You’re digging yourself a hole right now. Malena: Oh, you know what, I really can't think of anyone else cuz then I would say like Asteris, but Nick already said it. Nick: We could all spend our time with Asteris. Malena: I know, but we're like just trying to – fun fact: Asteris lives in Athens, not to expose him, but you know, if I could be stuck with him right now – big life goals. Nick: Also I think he's still in quarantine though. Malena: Soon, soon they'll be out though. Europe's on its way as Hannah mentioned. You know if I could go out on a limb here, I’d probably say Timothee Chalamet. I've been having a major– Hannah: Okay here's another thing, I feel like Timothee Chalamet became so much more famous over quarantine. Malena: Yeah, it’s because everybody’s stuck inside and they have nothing to do but stare at celebrities. So yeah. Well, alright guys, thank you so much. Actually, that's perfect. We've just hit 13 minutes. And so we're going to end our podcast here. Thank you so much, Nick for being our guest, keeping us entertained during quarantine. Nick: Yeah, of course. Malena: Giving your opinions on things. It was so nice to get to know you. And this has been another successful podcast from NBN audio. Hannah say bye! Hannah: Bye-bye! Malena: Bye, gang. Nick: Peace. Malena: See you later, on our next podcast, which will hopefully be out soon. Bye! [“Don’t Tell Me Your Major Theme” By Malena Ramnath]

Last week we covered the basics of the traditional IRA and today we will shift our focus to the Roth IRA. John and Nick will once again explain the basics to this investment vehicle. We will also compare and contrast the Roth IRA to the traditional IRA.Helpful Information:PFG Website: https://www.pfgprivatewealth.com/Contact: 813-286-7776Email: info@pfgprivatewealth.comFor a transcript of today's show, visit the blog related to this episode at https://www.pfgprivatewealth.com/podcast/Transcript of Today's Show:----more----Speaker 1: Hey everybody. Welcome back in to Retirement Planning Redefined. Thanks for tuning into the podcast. We appreciate it. Maybe you've received this podcast through the team's newsletters or email blast. Or maybe you found us online on various different podcast outlets like Apple or Google or Spotify. Either way we appreciate your time. And we're going to spend a few minutes with John and Nick talking some more about IRAs. And this go round we're going to spend some time on the Roths. But first guys, what's going on? How are you?John: I'm good. So my one year old is sleeping through the night very well, so I feel like a new man.Speaker 1: That goes a long way that's for sure. Well kudos on that. And Nick, how you doing, buddy?Nick: I'm pretty good. My 15 year old dog is not sleeping through the night.I'm okay.Speaker 1: Yeah, getting up there. I've got a 13 year old dog and she's a pistol. I got a 22 year old daughter and I can't tell which one's a bigger pain in the butt, the dog or the daughter. But they're both doing pretty well. The kid's actually graduating from nuclear engineering school. Actually I get to go see her Friday, and she's now a petty officer. She ranked up in the Navy. So we're all proud of her.Nick: Congrats.Speaker 1: Yeah, I appreciate that. I'll tell you what, let's not talk about babies, dogs or the Navy for just a minute. Let's talk about the Roth IRAs as I mentioned. So if you happened to catch the last podcast, we wanted to go through and talk about IRAs, about the vehicle. And we spent some time on the traditional side. So guys, do me a favor first, let's just do a recap, a little bit, of the traditional IRA before we switch over to the Roth so people have some context on that.Nick: So one of the biggest benefits for any sort of IRA account are some of the tax benefits. But one of the things that we wanted to remind everybody of, and this helps with IRA accounts, but also just really any investment account. Sometimes the feedback we've gotten is it's helpful for people to think about the different types of accounts in three phases of taxation. There's as the money goes in, is it taxed, is it not taxed. As the money grows, is it taxed, is it not taxed. And then when it comes out so that you can use it, is it taxed or not taxed. So for traditional IRA, you know the first one, as it goes in, in the last session we talked a little bit about it. Most of the time for most people it's not going to be taxed. But there will be some rules on when that's after tax money, it's going to grow tax deferred. So you're not going to get 1099 on it each year as it grows. And then when it comes out, it's going to be ordinary income tax.Nick: And then for the Roth IRA, which is what we're going to get into today, it is money that's already been taxed is going to go in. It's going to grow tax deferred. So [inaudible 00:02:43] 1099s, and then on the backside it's tax free. That's the comparison as you go through.Speaker 1: Okay. Since you brought it up, let's go ahead and just jump right into it. So John, give us a few things to think about on the Roth side. He already mentioned the tax deferred part. What are some other limitations and things of that nature we talked about like with the traditional, some numbers or some things we need to know?John: Yeah, so like the traditional IRA, the contributions are based off of earned income. So again, that does not count real estate state income, any interest, income like that, but earned income. And as far as the limits go, if you're below 50, [inaudible 00:03:20] 6,000. Anyone above 50 can do 1,000 catch-up, which gives you a 7,000 total. And just to again reiterate some mistakes we've seen where you can only contribute 7,000 between the two of you. You can't contribute 7,000 each. Okay, so 7,000 total.John: And something that some people aren't aware of is that even if, let's say one spouse is not working and is staying home for whatever reason. They are eligible to make a spousal contribution to an IRA, whether that's Roth or traditional, which is a nice feature because that does come up quite a bit. So to talk about the contributions of a Roth, we gave the example of traditional IRA as far as making a pre tax contribution. As Nick mentioned, the Roth is after tax dollars. So example of that, 100,000 of income for somebody, they make a $5,000 contribution to a Roth, their taxable income stays at 100,000 in that given year. So there's no tax benefit up front with the Roth IRA versus a traditional IRA, you could have a tax savings up front when you make the contribution if it's deductible.Nick: So from an eligibility standpoint, for a single person, somebody that makes under 122,000 can make a full contribution. If their income is between 122,000 and 137,000, there is a partial that can be made. If their income is over 137,000, they are not able to make a contribution to a Roth IRA. For married filing jointly, if their income is below 193,000, they can make contributions for both of them and their spouse. If the income is between 193 and 203,000, it's a partial. And if the household or the married filing jointly income is above or greater than 203,000, then they are not eligible to make the contribution.Speaker 1: Gotcha. Okay. All right, so we've covered some of the contributions, some of the eligibility you mentioned already in the tax deferred growth part. What about access? Did we cover some things there?John: So one thing the eligibility and it's becoming more popular now with Roth 401k. So if you're not eligible to make a Roth IRA contribution, one thing to do is check with your employer and see if they offer a Roth 401k, which actually has no income limits for you to be able to participate in it, which is a nice [inaudible 00:05:37]Speaker 1: Okay, that's good to know. Yeah, absolutely. All right, that's a Roth 401k. Maybe we'll do another show about that another time. What about the access side, anything there? Is it the same 59 and a half, all that kind of stuff?John: So rules are fairly similar, where you as far as access getting to the account, there is the 59 and a half rule. And if you do draw early there's a 10% penalty on your earnings. And I stress earnings on that, because with a Roth IRA and I say this, consult with your tax preparer, tax advisor, we don't give tax advice. But with a Roth IRA, you can actually access what we call cost basis prior to 59 and a half without any penalty. I've seen a couple of people do it where basically let's say if you've put in 30,000 into your Roth in your account at 50. So 20,000 earnings, 30,000 is what you've put in, which is considered your cost basis. You can pull that 30,000 out without paying a penalty. It's just you have to keep very good records of your contribution amounts. And if you do pull it out, you have to work with your tax preparer to go ahead and let the IRS know that you pulled out a portion of your tax basis. And that's would avoid any type of a penalty on that.Speaker 1: All right, so we've covered several things on the Roth side, so the access, the eligibility, contributions, all that good kind of stuff. So let's just get into the fact that it's been hugely popular. It's been a very hot button issue for the last really couple of years. Obviously one of the reasons, we mentioned earlier that it's tax deferred. Really, the taxes are low, right? We're in a historically low tax rate. So one of the reasons that a Roth might be a good place to go, or a Roth conversion I guess I should say, is because of the tax thing. So what are some other reasons why the Roth is just really popular?Nick: You pointed to one of the biggest reasons from the standpoint of we are in historical low tax brackets. And one of the things that we talk about with clients and it really became evident towards the end of 2019 is, the thing that might be the quote unquote best strategy today, it may not be the best strategy five years down the road, 10 years down the road. So for most of the clients that we meet with, they're substantially overweight on pre-tax money and maybe only recently have started to build up Roth money. And we think it's really important to have balance and to have options in retirement. Your ability to be able to pivot and adjust to law changes, rule changes, market conditions, etc. are really important. And then part of that is not having to be forced to take out a required minimum distribution on a Roth helps you maintain that balance and maintain the nest egg, those tax free [inaudible 00:08:18] roles help give you flexibility and balance, the ability to be able to pass on funds to beneficiaries, Roth dollars.Nick: Especially if you have... Maybe your kids are high-income, you've done a good job planning. We go through the numbers, we built the plan and there's a pretty high probability that you're going to be passing on money to the kids. The rub, money is usually much better to plan or to pass down, because of the fact that it will be tax-free to them as well. So the ability to really create flexibility in your planning and strategies is one of the reasons that we think the Roths are a really important piece of the pie.John: Just to jump in. One thing, just backtracking to accessing it tax-free. Just a couple of rules with it is you have to be above 59 and a half. And you actually have to have had a Roth IRA account for at least five years. So an example would be, let's say I open one up at age 60. I'm above 59 and a half. The person cannot actually withdraw tax free until basically 65. So I have to wait five years and that's from the first Roth I ever started up. So one thing that we typically will work with clients is if they're eligible, we might just go ahead and start a Roth IRA just to start that five year window.Speaker 1: Okay. All right. That's good. Yeah. Good information to know on that. Now with the beneficiary thing and passing things along, is the change in the SECURE act, does that make a difference in the Roth as well? Is there anything there that would pertain to people if they're thinking about it that they should definitely be checking with you guys on before doing a conversion or something like that?John: Yeah, so I believe we're doing a four part session to this. We're going to talk about conversions, but yeah, that makes conversions a little more appealing where you have to pull the money out over a 10 year period now. Where basically at least if you have to pull it over 10 years, there's actually no tax hit. So as your IRA gets bigger, if you're pulling out of a $1 million IRA over a 10 year period, that's going to really affect your tax rate. If it was all Roth money, it would have no bearing on your taxes.Speaker 1: Gotcha. Okay. All right. Yeah, and we are going to continue on with this conversation on a future podcast about which one might be right for you and all those good kinds of things. Nick, anything else that we may have overlooked in there we need to throw in?Nick: No, I just can't really say it enough from the standpoint of building in flexibility is key. Most of the people that listen to the podcasts are going to have pretax money, but if they don't have any Roth money then just getting started can be really important to build that up. Because even if they're within a few years of retirement, just remember that we're still planning for 30, 40 years down the road. Having money that compounds over a long period of time and then has tax free withdrawals on the backside is a pretty significant leverage point and benefit.Speaker 1: Okay, one final question I'm going to ask you guys is you sometimes hear people say, if I'm still working, can I contribute or should I contribute to both kinds, the traditional or the Roth? What do you say when someone asks that type of question? Should someone do both the traditional for the tax reasons and then the Roth for the non-tax? What's your answer?John: We'll answer that in the next session.Speaker 1: Nicely done. Look at him teeing that up. There you go, folks. All right, I'll tell you what. We will take care of that on the next session and that way you have a reason to come back. A cliffhanger if you will. So if you've got questions about the Roth IRA, make sure you talk with your advisor about that. If you're not working with an advisor, you certainly should be. Reach out to John and Nick and give them a call at PFG Private Wealth. And you can reach them at 813-286-7776. That's the number to dial. 813-286-7776 here in the Tampa Bay area or go to their website, check them out online at pfgprivatewealth.com. That is pfgprivatewealth.com. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast so you can get those next episodes as they come out. Nick, John, thanks for your time this week.Speaker 1: I hope everybody has a great week and you guys enjoy yourself and continue to get some good sleep while that baby's resting, all right?John: Hopefully it continues. I think it will.Speaker 1: Yeah, there you go. Nick, appreciate your time, buddy. Take care.Nick: Thanks. Have a good one.Speaker 1: We'll see you next time here on Retirement Planning Redefined with the guys from PFG Private Wealth, John and Nick.

Hey gang, sorry this one took an extra day to get to you! But you know, the world has a bigger thing going on. Nick and Lou hope that this silly podcast helps give you a laugh in these trying times. That said this episode is funny as hell! Lou made me say that. You know me, the guy typing. Nick? No. Lou, well yes, but it's the royal Lou! but for real, they got "Judgement Call," "Legally Speaking," "Bernie's Big Book of Weird Laws," and as always the gents get to those emails from a few people looking for a little, free consultation:) --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/free-consultation/support

SEASON 2: EPISODE 5 Poet Nick Flynn talks about the ways in which he won't die. ABOUT THE GUEST Nick Flynn has worked as a ship’s captain, an electrician, and a caseworker for homeless adults. Some of the venues his poems, essays, and nonfiction have appeared in include the New Yorker, the Nation, the Paris Review, the New York Times Book Review, and NPR’s This American Life. His writing has won awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, PEN, and the Fine Arts Work Center, among other organizations. His film credits include artistic collaborator and “field poet” on Darwin’s Nightmare (nominated for an Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary in 2006), as well as executive producer and artistic collaborator on Being Flynn, the film version of his memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. His most recent collection of poetry, I Will Destroy You, appeared from Graywolf Press in 2019. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Lili Taylor, and his daughter, Maeve. http://www.nickflynn.org/ ABOUT THE HOST Neil Goldberg is an artist in NYC who makes work that The New York Times has described as “tender, moving and sad but also deeply funny.” His work is in the permanent collection of MoMA, he’s a Guggenheim Fellow, and teaches at the Yale School of Art. More information at neilgoldberg.com. ABOUT THE TITLE SHE'S A TALKER was the name of Neil’s first video project. “One night in the early 90s I was combing my roommate’s cat and found myself saying the words ‘She’s a talker.’ I wondered how many other other gay men in NYC might be doing the exact same thing at that very moment. With that, I set out on a project in which I videotaped over 80 gay men in their living room all over NYC, combing their cats and saying ‘She’s a talker.’” A similar spirit of NYC-centric curiosity and absurdity animates the podcast. CREDITS This series is made possible with generous support from Stillpoint Fund.  Producer: Devon Guinn  Creative Consultants: Aaron Dalton, Molly Donahue  Mixer: Andrew Litton  Visuals and Sounds: Joshua Graver  Theme Song: Jeff Hiller  Website: Itai Almor Media: Justine Lee Interns: Alara Degirmenci, Jonathan Jalbert, Jesse Kimotho Thanks: Jennifer Callahan, Nick Rymer, Sue Simon, Maddy Sinnock TRANSCRIPTION NICK FLYNN: I was driving my daughter to soccer. And she had a bike and I had a bike and we'd ride, even though it was a little cold.  NEIL GOLDBERG: Yeah.  NICK: But a guy went by on a bike and he had like a boombox, one of those boombox that plays, he's playing like a podcast, like really loud, and it was so odd. We both just laughed. It was like, what is that? You're just blasting a podcast going down the street, blasting.  NEIL: This is fresh air.  Hello, I'm Neil Goldberg and this is SHE'S A TALKER. I'm a visual artist and this podcast is my thinly veiled excuse to get some of my favorite New York writers, artists, performers, and beyond into the studio to chat. For prompts, I use a collection of thousands of index cards on which I've been writing thoughts and observations for the past two decades, kind of like one of those party games, but hopefully not as cheesy.  These days, the cards often start as recordings I make into my phone. Here are some recent ones: I really love how Beverly pronounces 'Meow'. It's never appropriate to share scrap paper from home with students. I'm never sure what a simmer is. I'm so happy to have as my guest, poet Nick Flynn. I have been a hardcore fan of Nick's writing since his first book, Some Ether, came out in 2000 and was blown away by his memoirs, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, and The Ticking is the Bomb. In the fall, he released a new book of poetry, I Will Destroy You, and in the next few months he has two more books coming out: Stay, and This is the Night Our House Will Catch on Fire. I met Nick briefly in, I think, the late eighties in Provincetown, and we reconnected recently via our mutual friend, Jacques Servin, who is on an earlier episode. Nick and I spoke in January at a recording studio at The New School near Union Square in New York City. NEIL: Are you comfortable?  NICK: Like on a scale of one to ten?  NEIL: Like, you know those smiley faces, like if you're in the hospital. NICK: How much pain I have? Uh, I hadn't even thought about it till you just said that. Now I'm wondering if I am, so.  NEIL: I feel like I'm, I'm totally not, I'm not feeling any pain at the moment.  NICK: No, I'm not feeling any pain. No, I'm feeling no pain.  NEIL: That's different from, feeling no pain is different from not feeling any pain. NICK: That means if you're kind of fucked up, I think.  NEIL: Exactly.  NICK: You're feeling no pain.  NEIL: Um, I'm so happy to have you, Nick Flynn, on the show, SHE'S A TALKER.  NICK: I'm happy to be here, Neil Goldberg -  NEIL: I, you know -   NICK: on the show SHE'S A TALKER. Is the 'She' the cat? NEIL: Yeah.  NICK: That's, that's who the 'she' is.  NEIL: It is, yeah. I, you know -  NICK: I guess I got that. Yeah.  NEIL: Well, you know, in 1993 when everyone was dying... Everyone is still dying, but just differently.  NICK: I remember that. Yeah.  NEIL: Yeah. Uh, you know, I did a video project where I interviewed, it turned out to be, like about 80 gay men all over New York City in all five boroughs who had female cats, combing their cats and saying "She's a Talker." NICK: They were combing the cats?  NEIL: Combing the cat. It was just almost like, it was like a stealthy way to like, not stealthy, but it was a way to document a lot of gay men who felt like really imperiled, and it was my first video project. And, I don't know, when I decided to name this, that came up for me. But subsequently I get a lot of like, what does the word 'she' mean at this point? NICK: Right, right, right. Yeah.  NEIL: Maybe I should rebrand it. What should I call it?  NICK: Uh, you should stick with it, I think. Hmm.  NEIL: Uh, when, when you're looking for like a short hand, like you encounter someone on the proverbial elevator and are looking for like a pithy way to describe who it is you are and what it is you do, what do you, what do you reach for? NICK: I say I'm a poet.  NEIL: Period.  NICK: Period. Yeah. Yeah. Cause that usually gets a pretty dead-eyed stare like the one you just gave me. Like that's it? That's it.  NEIL: When someone is confronted with poet, silence, do you ever feel like helping someone out?  NICK: Well, it depends on like, often, that'll pretty much be the conversation-ender.  NEIL: Yeah.  NICK: So it does nothing to help cause they're gone right at that point.  NEIL: If your folks were around, how might they describe who it is you've become? NICK: Wow, that's a, that's an interesting one. Would they, would they still be, are they like idealized, my, like my parents on their best day or on their worst day?  NEIL: Oh, I wouldn't mind hearing both if you don't mind. Like the...  NICK: Ah, like, you know, there's the idealized version of your parents. Then there's the, not the reality, but the, you know, but recognizing at a certain point that they had some rough days, you know. In my mind, it's hard to deny they had some rough days. So, um, it's a little, it's a little harder to pretend. Yeah. Uh, my father, he knew that I'd published books and he was sort of, you know, strangely proud of that. Uh, but proud just in the way he knew I'd be a good writer because he was such a great writer, so I got it all from him. So he took all credit for any of it. So I imagined he would still take credit for any accomplishments I've had or that he perceives I've had. I've, I'm trying to think if he had like on a good day, that's sort of like a not so good day. Yeah. On a good day, he did have a couple moments where he was able to just recognize the struggle it had been, uh, between the two of us, uh, to actually acknowledge that. And I think that would be like, he'd say like, yeah, this was, this must have been hard, you know? So I think that would be. That'd be a good day for him.  My mother's a little more enigmatic, like it's actually, when I think about it, like, cause I mean, she died before he did. I was younger. I didn't know her as well, probably. So, although I grew up with her, but, um, I sort of studied my father more, and my mother's more of a, uh, a construct of the imagination in some ways. Although, I mean, we spent so much time together too. It's strange to say that actually, I don't know if that's true.  You know, I, there's always the question like, what would my mother be like now? So I'm, I look at women that are my mother's age, that would be my mother's age now. Like I don't know how, how she would be. So either way, I think she's, since she, from her backhouse sort of WASP-y Irish background, she probably wouldn't say directly anything. I'd have to decipher what she said.   NEIL: So it would be cryptic in terms of her estimation of you, or?  NICK: I mean, she, I think she'd say, "Oh, I'm, I'm proud of you." But the deeper levels of that I think would be harder to get to.  NEIL: Yeah. I see you came in, you were, you had a bike helmet, which I connect to. Um, on your bike ride over, did you have any thoughts?  NICK: Wow. Thoughts as I was coming here - the sort of meta thing is I was listening on my headphones to SHE'S A TALKER. And you're talking to someone about riding a bike over the bridge.  NEIL: Right, yeah.  NICK: So like, yeah. I mean, at the moment I was riding over the bridge. I was listening to you talk to someone else about riding over the bridge and then thinking that I would soon be here talking to you, and I brought my helmet it, I didn't - usually I lock it on my bike  but maybe I brought it in so you would ask me about it. It's possible, but I think I just brought it in cause it was cold, it was so cold outside. I wanted a warm helmet when I went back out. So.  NEIL: Aha, you didn't want to put on a cold helmet. I never thought about that. NICK: What I thought about on the bridge was that it was way colder than I thought it was. It was the wind, it was like howling and I had a hat in my bag and I kept thinking, I'll just stop and put my hat on under my helmet and I didn't stop. I kept thinking, I'll warm up at some point, but I just kept getting colder and colder the further I went. I just never stopped, I just kept going.  NEIL: Well, let's, um, go to some cards that I curated for you.  NICK: You curate these for this conversation?  NEIL: Yes. Yeah.   (Card flip)  So the first card is: the specific, tentative, hyper-attentive way one tastes something to see if it's gone bad. NICK: Um, what I usually do is I'll, I'll, I'll cook it and then give it to my brother. NEIL: Mikey likes it?  NICK: Yeah. And then if he can get through it then it probably hasn't gone so far bad. Cause he's pretty sensitive actually. I mean, while I'm presenting, it sounds like he'd just eat anything. No. He's quite sensitive. So he's like sort of the. He's, he, he, he's a Canary. Ah ha. Yeah. So I'll just fix it up and give it to him and then, cause he'll, usually, he's quite happy if I make him something, give him some food, then if it's no good, then, then I throw it away. Yeah. If he eats it, I'll eat it.  NEIL: He's your taster. Um, where, where does your brother live?  NICK: He lives upstate, New York.  NEIL: Oh, okay. Yeah, but he's your older brother, right, if I'm remembering? NICK: But why did you say, "but." Because he lives upstate?  NEIL: No, because of the scenario of like, your brother, the implication. He's an implied younger brother in the story.  NICK: Gotcha. Yeah. Yeah. He's an implied younger brother in life too.  (Card Flip)  NEIL: Next card. When a toddler falls, that space before they start to cry. NICK: Well. My daughter was, uh, three. And for us, like three was really like, spectacular meltdowns and just like, you know, tantrums and just like wildness, just like absolutely wild, like wild animal, just screaming and frustrated and like, you know, furious. And one day she, uh, she was in a tantrum, she fell and she hit her cheek on the corner of a staircase and it split open and like bled. It sort of woke her up. Like it was right at the end of her being three, she was going to turn four. It was a Sunday night. And my wife and I were like, Oh, what do we do? Like, I'm like, I guess, do we take her to her doctor or do we like, you know, just like, like leave her with a scar for the rest of her life? And so I butterfly-stitched it, you know, like made a little butterfly thing, to hold it together to squish the skin together, you know? And, uh. That's what we did. We sort of looked up t see like how big and deep it had to be to go to a doctor and stuff and to need a stitch, and it was sort of right on the edge. So I butterfly-stitched it, and then. Yeah so now she just has this pretty little scar on her face and she's perfect.  NEIL: Wow. And does she know the story of the scar?  NICK: Oh yeah. I would say it's a part of her myth, part of her origin myth. The wildest, the wildness poured out of her cheek. Yeah. Yeah.  NEIL: Uh, can, can you share -  NICK: Did that answer your question? NEIL: Yes and no. That's always the, um, I think it's beautiful. I have the idea, I'm not a parent, but when I see a kid having a tantrum - NICK: I wasn't either before that.  NEIL: Yeah.  NICK: It comes on kind of suddenly.  NEIL: But how did you deal with tantrums?  NICK: I, I've been sort of attentive and amused by the whole process. Like I feel like we're really lucky. She's a really good kid and just a really interesting kid and like, so I just sort of like see it, like, I admire the tantrums in a certain way. Like, I think everyone should be like, just screaming, running down the streets, you know, most of the time. Like this sucks. Um, so there was something very, uh, wild about it. Like just to see like, wow, like you can just do this. You can just go and like, you can go to a store and just pull a whole rack down. If you don't get your Popsicle, you don't fucking. She, she used to fire me like every day as a father. She said, if you do not give me that Popsicle, you will not be able to kiss me. You will not be able to hug me. You will not be my father.  NEIL: What did you say to that?  NICK: I'm like, Oh, that's really hard. I'd be sad not to be your father. She was like, you will not be able to, you will have to go to Texas and never come back.  NEIL: Crafty.  NICK: Yeah, she was good. Yeah, but I, you know, I was onto her though. Yeah. I'd be her father like in half an hour later. NEIL: Did you ever say -   NICK: She'd rehire me like half hour later. Yeah.  NEIL: Was there a re-intake process?  NICK: No. No. We just pretended it didn't happen. Yeah, it was all moving forward. It was all the continuous present.  NEIL: Yeah.  NICK: You just kept this present moment. This present moment had no connection to the other moments whatsoever. NEIL: Did you ever join your daughter in a tantrum?  NICK: Did I ever join her in a tantrum? Oh, wow. Yeah, I did. Yeah. I remember one night, like early on when she was like six months old and that. The beautiful hallucination of early parenthood where you just, you just don't sleep. You just like, you're just awake for like months. Like just not sleeping. And you just fall asleep in the middle of things. Just like, you know, you can just barely do anything. Everything's filthy and like, you know, you just wash all the clothes and immediately they're filthy again, the food is just taken and thrown to the floor. I think the dogs eat it. You just give up in a certain way. There's one night I was up with her at like three in the morning and she was just screaming. And I was just like, I think I filmed her screaming with my phone. I'm just like, okay, just scream. Just scream. I'm going to make a movie of you screaming. I was like, I don't know what to do. So I just made a little movie of her. NEIL: Wow. But you didn't, but, but it didn't call on you the feeling of like, now I am going to lose it myself and cry?  NICK: Um, well, I think I viewed, it's like, you know, I'm from like a sort of WASP-y Irish background, and so we don't really show that stuff. And I'm sort of always like that, but it don't, I don't, I try. I think no one can see it, but I think everyone actually sees it.  NEIL: So always you're, you're crying always. NICK: Melting down, yeah.  (Card Flips)  NEIL: Okay. Kids with artist parents. Because both you and your wife are artists. Like to me, the idea of like, two artists come together and they have a kid, well that's going to be a super kid. And then that kid maybe, will - NICK: Be with another artist, yeah. NEIL: It's almost like an artistic eugenics kind of vision or something.  NICK: Um, yeah. I always think it for our daughter, like Lord help her. Really. I don't think like, Oh, you've been, you've won the lottery. Like, like, this is the card, this is the hand you've been dealt. Good luck with it. You know, we're both like, yeah, we're both a little. I, I don't know, I don't know if neurotic is the right word, but like, you know. You know, we're, we're sensitive. We're like, you know, in some ways not made for this world, we're, we're awkward where other people are comfortable, we're, uh, you know, we found our place to, to survive, which is really lucky, you know? And also, you know, in a culture, like I'm a poet too, I'm not, like, it's not that like, this is like some hugely respected artistic position in our culture at the moment. You know, like, that's why I say that I, I say it perversely if someone asks me, with the elevator pitches, like if they ask me what I do, I say I'm a poet. And just because it's perverse, it's like it's so perverse, you know? You know when, if you go to a doctor's office, I write it on a form. I write 'poet', just, you might as well ride hobo or something. Right? That's not right. I'm a wizard. So it's not like, it doesn't feel like that she's suddenly being dealt like this, like, like a superhuman. Like, what are you talking about?  NEIL: Right. NICK:  It's just unfortunate. Like, you know. Artists get attracted to artists because we can vaguely understand each other, maybe. You know, we're not like, you know, I've tried to be with civilians before and it's like, not easy, you know? I really, I feel less understood, you know? I barely feel like I fit in now. To this world. So you know, you find someone who you feel like, yeah, you also don't feel like you fit in. So that's a kind of connection.  NEIL: How does your, how does your daughter describe what, what you both do? Does she unabashedly say -  NICK: Well, it's a little easier for Lily, for my wife. I mean, cause she's like, you know, people actually will sometimes recognize her on the streets and stuff, so she's a little prouder.  NEIL: But him, the hobo.  NICK: And my dad's a poet.  (Card Flip)  NEIL: Okay. Next card: the fetishization of storytelling.  NICK: Yeah. Right now there's a, there's a whole storytelling thing going on, right? Yeah. There's a whole sense of revival and stuff, and I don't exactly get it. I mean, I, I admire it, like I've gone to The Moth, I've participated in a couple of storytelling things. It's a, it's a strange form for me. It's a strange art form for me, and I admire it when it's done really well. I admire it. The ones I've gone to, that I've been part of, they were, kind of felt a little closer to stand-up, which is another art form too. But I'm like, the line is a little blurry and a little like strange and, and it makes sense that stand-up would be part of it. Cause they are sort of like, like jokes in a way. They're sort of packaged. I mean it's a packaged form. It's like improv is more interesting to me. Like where you don't know where it's going to go. But where, if you know where, I mean, like I say, people that do it well, it's really beautiful.  NEIL: Yeah.  NICK: It's just not what I do. It's like memoir is not storytelling. Uh, it's another form. And storytelling is like one part of it. You sort of tell the story, but then you sort of have to turn over the story and say like, why am I telling this story? Like what am I trying to present in telling this story, ignores all these other realities that are happening or all these other things I don't want you to know. People will come up and say like, you know, how's it feel to like, have that people know so much about you now? Like, well, you only know what I want you to know. You're gonna get some glimpse from a book.  NEIL: Right. Yeah.  NICK: From storytelling, I don't know even what glimpse you get, you get a glimpse of how they tell a story I guess. I want to know about other people. I want to know like what their, the interior life is of other people, what the landscape is. Which is why I like read... Or, why I, why I do anything. Like go see art. Or just to sort of like have that, so you're not so, so you recognize it's not all, all ego, you know? It's not all, like everything isn't sort of springing forth from within me. You know?  NEIL: Right. I'm not interested in other people's stories generally.  NICK: Yeah.  NEIL: Specifically too. I'm not interested in other people's stories, but I'm interested in hearing people think, which is what this podcast is about. So like the way their thought processes reveal themselves. That interests me. I don't know, but I'm, I'm, I'm not interested in the content. NICK: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I understand. Yeah. I teach creative writing and often it's like, I'm much more interested in like, the stuff around the content. It's not about the content, like it's more about the stuff around like how you're like, like, you know, how this one thing transformed something else or how you chose to make this weird sentence, or how like these things that have sort of moments of excitement. The story itself can be rather deadening.  NEIL: Right.  NICK: Yeah. Because, I think because it's somewhat packaged too, it is a lot of times, yeah.  NEIL: But I also, the thing I really resist is this, like: "We're about stories." You know, like the, this fetishization of storytelling has creeped into like how, how stories are talked about. It's like, we bring you stories da da da, stories. It's like, it feels infantilizing too.  NICK: Well, you know, I was just talking about this with one of my, some of my students, uh. You know, the, what's the most famous Joan Didion line? "We tell ourselves stories in order to live."  NEIL: Right, right.  NICK: And, yet, The White Album goes on. That's the first line of The White Album. That'll probably be on her tombstone. Uh, you know, they make bookmarks of it in bookstores, and yet if you actually read The White Album, that essay, she totally just doesn't believe it and contradicts it and says like, why? Like this makes no sense at all. And like that this is, I thought I could do this. Like I was, I was desperately trying to create a story that would protect me from something and it, none of it worked. And it just dissolves, the whole thing just all is like, so to take that one line out of context and say, this is actually a truism is so strange. It doesn't make any sense at all. And there's a  thing, my therapist came up with this thing of the, I don't know if he came up with it, but we talk about my, one of my disorders, uh, one of my many disorders is a narrative affect disorder where I'll create like stories like, but you know, it's not stories like you're talking about, it's creating books and creating like versions of what happened, um, in order to contain it and to be able to hold onto it in a way that seems safe, so I don't have to feel the actual emotional intensity of it.  NEIL: Right.  NICK: Um, and I think it's, it is a type of illness. I think storytelling is a type of illness, uh, that keeps you from actually feeling.  (Card Flips)   NEIL: Next card: often when I leave the apartment, I think, is this how I'd like it to be found if I die today? NICK: I think that one's more about you than me. I think. Um.  NEIL: You don't think that when you leave?  NICK: Well, I don't think I'm ever going to die. I'm pretty sure. NEIL: Do you really believe that?  NICK: Yeah. Like I, yeah, no. I have a thing where like, I'm, I'm, there's, well, I just know the ways I'm not going to die.  NEIL: Okay. Let's hear it.  NICK: I'm not going to die in an airplane crash. I'm not going to die by getting eaten by a shark. Might die by getting hit by a car on a bicycle. I mean I might, so I have to be careful.  NEIL: Yeah.  NICK: But I can swim for miles in the ocean filled with sharks. I'm fine. Yesterday I was on a plane coming from Houston and, uh, it was just like, like being on a ship in the middle of a, of a nor'easter. Like it was just wild, you know, like it really, like it was almost spinning. Yeah. I was fine. I'm like, Oh, this is cool cause I'm not gonna die in a plane. Like, you know, so I just have these sorts of things. They might be, you know, just delusional. You know, I mean, how could I possibly know? But I'm almost positive I'm not going to get eaten by a shark. NEIL: Uh huh.  NICK: Which really, which really helps in Provincetown. Cause there's a lot of sharks there now and a lot of people don't swim in the water. And I'm like, ask yourself, are you going to get eaten by a shark? Do you really think that's the way you're gonna die? And most people would say no. I mean, wouldn't you say no? Like no. If you know, on a rational day, like that'd be really, and if you did, that'd be so cool. Like how many people, how many poets get eaten by a shark? That'd be so excellent, right? Like it's a win-win. I have a poet, there's a poet, Craig Arnold, a really great poet that died a couple of years ago. He was writing a whole series of poems on volcanoes. Traveling the world, like got a grant to travel the world and look at volcanoes. He's just gone. He just vanished one day. He vanished. We think he fell into a volcano and died. Like, that's like an amazing story. Like it's terrible, terrible, awful. But I mean, there are a lot worse ways to die than falling into a volcano.  NEIL: Oh my God. How would you feel about being bitten by a shark and surviving it?  NICK: That's cool. That woman, that, that surfer that only has one arm, she's cool.  NEIL: You'd be okay with that?  NICK: If I could surf like her.  (Card Flips)  NEIL: Um.  NICK: I really killed this bottle of Perrier.  NEIL: Oh, awesome. I love it. Um, good job. Uh: the ambiguity of "It's downhill from here."  NICK: Oh. The whole idea of like, you know. There's a few things. Yeah. The opposite is all uphill from here, right. It's all, so downhill sounds pretty good, right? But it suggests like we're sliding into the grave, I think. NEIL: Yes.  NICK: Like it's all like we've reached the peak.  NEIL: Yeah.  NICK: That was the peak. It was really hard to get to the peak. And as soon as you get to the peak, you start going downhill. Yeah. You know? Uh, and, uh. Yeah, I often joke, yeah, I'm on the other side of the, on the other side, now, you know, that you somehow that the, the, the greatest work and the greatest, uh, notoriety so that was a while ago. Um, and.  NEIL: But also maybe the greatest struggle, no?  NICK: Was a while ago.  NEIL: Yeah.  NICK: Yeah. Oh, I dunno. But I, I joke about it. I just, I don't really believe that. The most recent project I'm doing just feels completely, uh, uh, fulfills me. You know, I'd have this other book coming out, this book, Stay, coming out, which I'm, I worked on a lot last year and I'm happy with that. And another book coming out after that. So there's like, you know, I don't really worry about it, but it's, it's almost a thing. It might be sort of Irish too, like just so you don't want to sort of, uh, be too full of yourself. You know, you want to like sort of be somewhat, you don't want to show how many fish you caught that day cause then you have to give half away. So you sort of downplay it. You downplay it. So the downhill side is where we sort of live. We live on the downhill side. I don't know, it's a strange metaphor.  NEIL: It's, it's ambiguous. NICK: Yeah, it's a strange metaphor.  NEIL: But I'm also thinking it's a paradox, too, and, as you talked, because take the downhill part. Um, it does get easier.  NICK: Yeah.  NEIL: I think, I mean, my life, I will say, and anything could change at any moment, has gotten so much easier, you know, now that I'm clearly on the other side. NICK: Psychic.  NEIL: Yeah.  NICK: Psychically. Yeah.  NEIL: For sure.  NICK: Yeah. Yeah.  NEIL: Um, yeah. It's also, I am sliding into the grave. Yeah. I mean, hopefully it's a long slide, but...  NICK: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Mortality. The cold wind of mortality does start to, you start to feel it. At a certain point.  NEIL: In your back.  NICK: Yeah. You started, you know, it's blown in your face. Yeah. It's like, it's like you feel it, which I, you sort of thought you felt it in your 20's but you really, you could have, I mean, we know a lot of people that died in their 20's, sure. It was not like this. This is like the real thing. Yeah. This is like, yeah. There's no, like, there's no choice in the matter. So like, yeah, maybe I'll just overdose or something, you know, or, or, you know, or I'll just be reckless and didn't die. Now it's like, yeah, no matter what I do, doesn't matter what I do, I can, I can eat kale, I can eat kale the rest of my life.  NEIL: Yeah. I don't have to coax the process and it's still going to happen. NICK: Yeah.   (Card Flips)  NEIL: The existential space of the clipboard. NICK: Well, I mean, clipboard, I think when you say clipboard, I was thinking of just like first of a blank clipboard, but then I was also thinking of the thing you put clippings on, that you put other things on, combine things together.  NEIL: I'm thinking of the clipboard, the computer clipboard. Like when you cut something. That space.  NICK: Well, what do, what is it? What is that on the computer?  NEIL: The clipboard. NICK: Yeah. What is that? I'm not sure what it, what do you mean? You cut and paste stuff? Or... NEIL: Anytime you, surely you do Command X and Command C, right?  NICK: You mean like copy things and then cut things? Yeah. Yeah. Cut. Yeah.  NEIL: So when you copy something -  NICK: And Command V.  NEIL: Oh yeah.  NICK: Yeah, yeah. Can't forget Command V.  NEIL: Absolutely. When you do Command C - NICK: Yeah. That copies it.  NEIL: Into the clipboard. And then that command, do Command V - NICK: It takes it off the clipboard.  NEIL: Yeah. Well, it stays in the clipboard, but it also pastes the inside.  NICK: See I don't think, I never knew that. Yeah. I never would've thought of that.  NEIL: I'm acutely aware of the clipboard. NICK: I never thought where it went. Oh. Oh. Well, this is a tough question cause I've never really thought of this before. So, uh, existential, I mean, that's kind of heavy to suggest it has to do with life or death. Um, uh.  NEIL: You don't think about your text in that kind of liminal state between when you cut it and when you've pasted it? NICK: I figured it just, it goes away. Like it doesn't, like if I, if I cut something else, then that replaces the thing I cut before, or if I copy something else, replaces the thing. So I just assume there's not a clipboard holding all of them.  NEIL: No, it isn't. That's part of the existential condition.  NICK: Cause it just vanishes once you put something else on top, once you copy something else.  NEIL: Yeah. It's fragile.  NICK: Yeah. I make a lot of copies. I try to, I try to like, save things as much as possible and like, yeah, like I'm, and print things up. I, I prefer to write by hand first. Uh, really. Um, and then to print it and then to write by hand on the thing I've printed and then to keep going back and forth like that. I like writing by hand. There's a, there's a young poet, um, who created an app called 'Midst.' It's hard to say midst, like in, you're in the midst of something. Yeah. I don't know how to - midst. M. I. D. S. T. It's very hard to say for me.  NEIL: Yeah. Me too.  NICK: Can you say it?  NEIL: Uh, yeah. I feel like it's going to intersect with my sibilant A-S. Let's try it. Midst.  NICK: Yeah. Oh, you do feel very well.  NEIL: But a little gay, right?  NICK: I didn't, I didn't say that. I raised one eyebrow, but I did not say it.  NEIL: When straight men raise one eyebrow, it somehow doesn't look gay. Midst. Midst. What's Midst?  NICK: Well, it's a, it's a program that she did where you can, where you write a poem, I guess you write anything, but it sort of keeps track of all the cutting and pasting you do and the, the process of making it. So you ended up, you send her like a final poem, but then she can press a button and can see all the stuff you did to make it. Um, so I have to try it though, but I usually, I really usually write by hand first and she's like, no, you have to write it on the, you have to compose the whole thing on the thing. I'm like, okay, so I just haven't quite done it yet, but I'm, yeah, I'm planning on it though.  NEIL: But this is basically, this isn't a useful tool. This is a tool to create a kind of -  NICK: To create a thing. She'll publish like a magazine that shows, like you look at a poem and then you press a button and it all sort of like, maybe it goes in reverse and dissolves back to the first word or something.  NEIL: Yeah. I just am not into those kinds of things. I feel like there's a lot of that peripheral to the art world. These things that kind of like perform a process or reveal a process. I'm just not into that. You know what I'm saying? NICK: No, but that's okay. I mean, I try, I believe that you are not into it. I'm just like, process is nice. Like I love, I love, I love seeing the process. I love seeing, don't you love like, like thinking like Michelangelo's slaves, you know, on the way to the David, right?  NEIL: Oh yeah.  NICK: We get to see the slaves like coming out of the block of marble and everyone says that they were like incomplete.  NEIL: Yes.  NICK: Yeah. We just said, which is such bullshit. Like if you think about it, like what, he did twelve incomplete at the same stage, like they're half out of the block just, Oh, I'm just gonna stop them all here.  NEIL: Right?  NICK: Like, it makes no sense at all. Like you couldn't finish one of them? NEIL: Right. NICK: Like he clearly saw that it looked cool for slaves who were pulling themselves out of what they're stuck in. And that, I find it so much more interesting than David, which is complete and perfect. I think, I think that's the meta thing where it's like all about process. That's like the process right there.  NEIL: Huh.  NICK: Yeah. So I try to think about that. That was just sort of a highfalutin way to counter your anti-process.  NEIL: Doesn't feel highfalutin. I think my thing was like faux highfalutin.  (Card Flips)  What keeps you going?  NICK: Um. Uh, just wondering what's gonna happen next. Yeah. Yeah. NEIL: Poet. On that note, thank you, Nick Flynn, for being on SHE'S A TALKER. NICK: Thank you, Neil. NEIL: That was my conversation with Nick Flynn. Thank you for listening.  Before we get to the credits, there were some listener responses to cards that I'd love to share. In my conversation with artist Tony Bluestone, we talked about the card: That moment when you forget what you should be worrying about and try to reclaim it. In response to that card, Jamie Wolf wrote, "A single brussel sprout rolled under the stove, and I wasn't gonna let Shavasana get in the way of my at least remembering to retrieve it." John Kensal responded with what I think is a haiku: Please sit or flee, my wee and quiet executive function disorder. Another card Tony and I talked about was: Fog is queer weather, to which Jonathan Taylor wrote, "To me, fog is transgressive because it's like a cloud. So it's either you or it is not where it's supposed to be."  Thanks to everyone who wrote in. If you have something you'd like to share about a card on the podcast, email us or send us a voice memo at shesatalker@gmail.com or message us on Instagram at shesatalker. And also, as always, we'd love it if you'd rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or share this episode with a friend. This series is made possible with generous support from Stillpoint Fund. Devin Guinn produced this episode. Molly Donahue and Aaron Dalton are our consulting producers. Justine Lee handles social media. Our interns are Alara Degirmenci, Jonathan Jalbert, Jesse Kimotho, and Rachel Wang. Our card flip beats come from Josh Graver. And my husband, Jeff Hiller, sings the theme song you're about to hear. Thanks to all of them, and to my guest, Nick Flynn, and to you for listening. JEFF HILLER: She's a talker with Neil Goldberg. She's a talker with fabulous guests. She's a talker, it's better than it sounds, yeah!

This week, listen in as I chat with Nick No about her experiences living with parosmia. Parosmia can be a debilitating condition for people to live with, it is a condition where a person does not perceive smells correctly. Generally, all smells are perceived in a negative way, aka everything smells awful. To visit the Parosmia/Phantosmia Facebook support group, click here. To visit the Acquired Anosmia and Parosmia Facebook support group, click here. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/thesmellpodcast/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/thesmellpodcast/support

A special conversation I had on stage at the Traffic Secrets event with a friend and a student Nic Fitzgerald. On this episode Russell talks to his childhood friend, Nick Fitzgerald about helping him go from being in a technician position to being in an entrepreneurial position. Here are some of the inspiring thing in this episode: Find out how Russell found out his childhood friend was in desperate need of help and what he offered to do for him. How Nick was able to make to Funnel Hacking Live via credit card, and then spent $1800 on a program without telling his wife. And why being on the program helped Nick be able to ask a client for $25,000 on a project, when that was his previous yearly income. So listen here to find out how Russell was able to help Nick achieve his entrepreneurial dreams. ---Transcript--- Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson and I want to welcome you to the Marketing Secrets podcast. The next two episodes are a really special one. For our Two Comma club X members and our inner circle members I did an event recently, some of you guys heard me talk about it. It was a traffic secrets event, where I’m getting all the material ready for the book, and start teaching this stuff. Anyway, it was really, really fun and as I was doing the presentations, the night before when I was doing all the prep work I had this thought. I was like, I want to bring up somebody on stage and it’s somebody who was a friend I grew up with in elementary school, and junior high, and high school, someone who was down on their luck, who was really, really struggling. About a year ago I saw him post something on Facebook and I reached out, and this interview is happening about a year later. During the process he tells his story about what happened and the transformation and the change that’s happened by being involved inside our Clickfunnels, Funnel Hacker community. So I wanted to share that with you as part of the event, so this first half is going to be Nick kind of telling his story and it’s going to be the story from the bottom of the barrel where they were, they literally made $25,000 a year for 3 years in a row and then the transformation to this year, they’ll do well over six figures. And that’s going to be this first podcast. And the second podcast episode is, I’m actually going to be doing, I did a live coaching session with him on stage, and I want to share that with you as well because I think there’s a lot of things for you specifically that you can get from this episode too. So the next few episodes are going to be sharing this really fun conversation that happened late night at the Traffic Secrets event with my friend Nick Fitzgerald, and if you think that name sounds familiar, I have talked about him before on this podcast. In fact, a little over a year ago I did a podcast episode called being a rainmaker that was a personalized podcast that I sent to Nick specifically to help him with what he was struggling with at the time. So anyway, I wanted to share this with you because it will take you full circle to show you kind of the progress and the momentum and things that are happening in his life, and I think it will be encouraging for you to hear the story because no matter where you are in your journey right now, if you are struggling, doing well, or if you’re somewhere in between, there are parts of this story that will resonate with you. And in the second episode where I coach Nick I think will help everybody as well. So with that said, let’s jump right in and have some fun. I want to introduce you to my friend Nick Fitzgerald. Alright so I want to set the tone for the next hour or so of what the game plan is. So I have a first initial question that I’m curious about with everyone here. I’m curious, who since they joined the Two Comma Club X program has had some kind of experience with Mr. Nick Fitzgerald? That’s powerful, I’m going to talk about why in a little bit, but very, very cool. So some of the back story behind this, and then we’re going to introduce him up, and when he comes up I want you guys to go crazy and scream and cheer and clap, because it will be good, and then I want him to sit down so we’ll be the same height, which will be good, it’ll be fun. So some of the back story, I actually met Nick the very first time in elementary school, and even in elementary school he was a foot and a half taller than me, which is amazing. He was like 6 ft 2 in like third grade, it was amazing. But we knew each other when we were dorky little kids and going up through elementary school we were both doing our things, and we didn’t have a care in the world and everything’s happening. And as we got older he kept getting taller, I stopped growing. And then we got into high school and he kept growing and he joined the basketball team. I didn’t keep growing so I went downstairs in the basement, literally, at our high school in the basement they call it the rubber room, and it’s this room that smells like, I don’t even know, but it’s under the gym. So he would go upstairs and fans would show up and people would cheer for them, and scream at their games. And all the girls would come to the games. And we’d go down in the rubber room by ourselves and cut weight and put on our sweats and lose weight and we’d jump rope and sweat like crazy. And we’d sit there, and I remember one day after working out for two hours pouring in sweat, I had my plastic gear on and my sweats on top of that, my hoodie and my hoods and we got the wrestling mats, and literally rolled ourselves up in the wrestling mats to keep the heat in, and we laid there and we were so hot. And I could hear the basketball players in the gym up above having so much fun and people cheering for them. And all the girls were there. And I was like, “Why are we not playing basketball?” It doesn’t make any sense. But during that time, obviously we were in two different kind of worlds, and we didn’t really connect that much, and then we left our separate ways. And I didn’t hear from him for years and years and years. And then do you guys remember Facebook when it first came out? The first time you got it and you log in and you’re like, “Oh my gosh, I can connect with people.” And you start searching the friends you know and then you find their friends and you spend a day and a half connecting with every person you’ve ever remembered seeing in your entire life? Do you guys remember that? So I did that one night, I connected with everybody. Everyone in high school, everyone in junior high, or elementary, everyone in every stage of my life, as many as I could think of. And then I was like, I think that’s everybody. Okay, I’ve connected with everybody. And one of those people that night was Nick. And then, but I didn’t say hi, I just friend requested and he requested back and I’m like, cool we’re connected. And then after that I got kind of bored with Facebook for like a year or so. Then a little while later I found out you can buy ads on it and I was like, what, this is amazing. So we started buying ads and everything is happening. And it’s crazy. And then what happened next, I actually want Nick onstage to tell you this story because I want you to hear it from both his perspective and my perspective, I think it’d be kind of interesting. Yeah, I want him to come up first. So let’s do this real quick. As you guys know Nick has been a super valuable part of this community since he came in. I’m going to tell the story about how he got here and some of the craziness of how he signed up when he probably shouldn’t have and what’s been happening since then, because I know that you guys have all been part of that journey and been supporting him. How many of you guys are going to his event that’s happening later this week? He just keeps giving and serving, he’s doing all the right things, he’s telling his story, he’s doing some amazing stuff. So my plan now is I want to talk about the rest of the story. I want to tell you guys what I told him a year ago and then I want to tell you guys my advice for him moving forward, because I feel like it’s almost in proxy. I wish I could do that with every one of you guys. Just sit down here and coach you. But I feel like he’s at a stage where some of you guys aren’t to where he’s at yet and some of you are past that, and some of you guys are right where he’s at, and I feel like the advice that I really want to give him, will help you guys at all different levels. So that’s kind of the game plan. So with that said, let’s stand up and point our hands together for Mr. Nick Fitzgerald. Alright, this has some good music. That was like music from high school. Look how tall I am. I feel like….okay, so I had him find this post because I wanted to actually share a little piece of it. So this, I’m going to share a piece of it, I want to step back to where you were at that time in your life. So this was July 7, 2017, so what was that a year and a half ago, ish? So July 7, 2017 there was a post that said, “Long post disclaimer. I hate posting this, blah, blah, blah.” So at the time my family was about to go on a family vacation. We’re packing up the bags and everything, and you know how it is, you do a bunch of work and then you stop for a second and your wife and kids are gone and you’re like, pull out the phone, swap through the dream 100 and see what’s happening.  And somehow this post pops up in my feed and I see it, I see Nick my buddy from 20+ years ago and I’m reading this thing and my heart sinks for him. Some of the things he says, “I hate posting things like this, but I felt like need to for a while. Being poor stinks. For those friends of mine who are ultra conservative and look down consciously or not, on people like me, I can honestly tell you that I’m not a lazy free loader who wants something for nothing. I’m not a deadbeat who wants Obama or whoever to blame now, to buy me a phone. I’m not a lowlife trying to get the government to pay for my liposuction. I’m not a druggie who eats steak and lobster for dinner with my food stamps. I’m a father of four, a husband, someone who lost everything financially, including our home when the time came to have your healthcare in place or to get fined, I went through the process. “Based on my family size and income, we were referred to the state to apply for those programs. We couldn’t get coverage for ourselves to the exchange in other places, we qualified for Medicaid. After the process was complete, the state worker suggested we try to get some other help, some food stamps.” It kind of goes on and on and on and he says, “In 2016 I made $25000. $25,000 plus our tax returns for the previous year. So a family of 6 living on $25,000 a year is being audited for receiving too much help, too much assistance.” And it kind of goes on and on and on with that. He says, “I’ve never abused drugs or alcohol, I’ve never even tried them. I’m just a guy trying to live the American dream and provide for his family. It’s unfortunate that we look down on those who are trying to better our lives, even if it leaves them from receiving help from assistance in place to help them. Look down on me if you want, I don’t care. I know the truth. My family is healthy and sheltered and that’s all that matters. I don’t wish these trials on anyone else…” and it kind of goes on from there. So I want to take you back to that moment, what was, talk about what you were experiencing and what you were going through during that time. Nick: I didn’t expect this. I’m a friendly giant, but I’m a big boob too. Back at that time, I had started what I thought was, I started my entrepreneurial journey. I was working in film full time, working 12, 14, 16 hour days making $200 a day, just killing myself for my family. Going through the process of, I’d lost my job because I wasn’t going to hit my sales, I was a financial advisor, and I wasn’t going to hit my sales numbers. So you know, my ticket was stamped. So I said okay, I’m going to do my own thing. And in the course of all that, it was time to get your health insurance and those things, and I went through the proper channels, like I felt like I should. And I was referred to the government for the programs, based on the numbers. And as a provider, a father, an athlete competitor, I felt like a failure. We’ve all, when you have to rely on somebody else , or somebody else tells you, “Hey, we don’t think you can do this on your own, come over here and we’ll take care of you.” That’s basically what I was told. So it was hard to accept that and to live with that reality. So we did, and I worked hard and it was a blessing really, to not have to worry about how much health care costs or have some of the things to supplement to feed our family and stuff. So it was great and it was wonderful. But then I got the email from the state saying, “Hey, you’re being audited. We’re just looking at things and we’re not sure. You’ve been getting too much help.” So at that point I’m just sitting there frustrated because I’m working my butt off, just trying to make things happen, become someone involved in the film community in Utah. And I was, and everyone knew me, and I had a reputation, but I still was a nobody in the eyes of the government. So I went to Facebook to whine, looking for what I wanted, which was a pat on the back, “There, there Nick, you’re doing…we know you’re a good dude and you’re working hard.” That kind of thing, and I did… Russell: I was reading the comments last night. “Oh you’re doing a good job man. Good luck.” Everyone like babying him about how tough life can be. Nick: So I got what I wanted, but it still didn’t change anything. I still had to submit my last two years of tax returns and all of the pay that I’d got and everything like that, so they could look at our case number, not Nick, Leisle, Cloe,Ewen, Alek, William. So it was just one of those things. I got what I wanted, then comes Russell to give me what I needed, which was…. Russell: I saw that and I’m like packing the kids bags and everything and I was like, “ah, do I say something?” I don’t want to be that guy like, “Hey, 20 years ago…” and I was like, ah, I kept feeling this. Finally I was like, “hey man, I know we haven’t talked in over 20 years…” This was on Facebook messenger, “we hadn’t talked in like 20 years. I saw your post today and it sucks. And I know what’s wrong, and I can help. But at the same time, I don’t want to be that guy and I don’t want to step on any toes. I know we haven’t talked in 20 years, I have no idea if this is even appropriate. But I know what’s wrong, I can help you. And no, this is not some cheesy MLM I’m trying to pitch you on. But if you’re interested in some coaching, I know what’s wrong.” And I kind of waited and then I started packing the bags again and stuff like that. I’m curious of your thoughts initially as you saw that. Nick: It’s funny because my phone was kind of blowing up with the comments. So I would hear the little ding and I would check. And then I saw that it was a message from Russell, and we had said like, “Hey, what’s up.” And had a few tiny little small talk conversations, but nothing in depth personal. So I saw that he sent a message, so I’m like, “Sweet.” So I look at it, and I was half expecting, because I knew he was successful, I didn’t know about Clickfunnels per se. I knew he had something going on that was awesome, but I didn’t know what it was. So I was wondering, “I wonder what he’s going to say, what he has to say about things?” But I read it and it was funny because when you said, “I don’t want to overstep my bounds. It’s been a long time, I don’t want to step on toes.” Kind of thing, Russell, we all know his athletic accolades and stuff. I was a great basketball player too, I was in the top 200 players in the country my senior year and stuff like that. So I’ve been coachable and played at high levels and been coached by high level guys. So when I read it and he said, “I know what’s wrong and I can help you.” I was just like, “Yes.” That was my reaction. I just did the little, um, fist pump, let’s do this. So I replied back and I thanked him for reaching out and stuff, and I just said, I think I even said, “I’m coachable. I will accept any guidance.” And things like that. Because up until that point in my life, especially in sports, if a coach showed me something, I would do it the way he did, and I would kick the other dude’s butt. I didn’t care. I played against guys who made millions of dollars in the NBA. I dunked, I posterized on Shawn Marion when he was at UNLV my freshman year of college. I started as a freshman in a division one school in college. So I would take, I’ve always been that kind of, I would get that guidance, that direction, I can put it to work. So I was just like, “Dude, Mr. Miyagi me.” I’m 8 days older than him, so I’m like, “young grasshopper, yes you can teach me.” That kind of thing. So I welcomed it and I was excited. I had no idea, because again I didn’t know what he did. I just knew he had a level of success that I didn’t have. And if he was willing to give me some ideas, I was going to hear him out for sure. Russell: It was fun, because then I messaged him back. I’m packing the car and Collette’s like, “We gotta go, we gotta go.” I was like, ah, so I get the thing out and I was like, “This is the deal. I’m driving to Bear Lake, it’s like a six hour drive. I’m going to give you an assignment and if you do it, then I’ll give you the next piece. But most people never do it, so if you don’t that’s cool and I’ll just know it’s not worth your time. But if it’s really worth your time, do this thing. I need you to go back and listen to my podcast from episode one and listen to as many episodes as possible, and if you do that I’ll make you a customized episode just for you telling you exactly what’s wrong and how to fix it. But you have to do that first. “And I’m not telling you this because I’m on some ego trip, but just trust me. The problem is not your skill set, you  have mad skills, you’re good at everything. It’s all a problem between your ears. If we can shift that, we can shift everything else.” Then I jumped in my car and took off and started driving for six hours. And then the next day, or a day later you’re like, “I’m 14 episodes in.” he was still listening to the crappy one’s, according to Steven Larsen. The Marketing In Your Car, he was probably thinking, “This is the worst thing I’ve ever heard, ever.” But he did it. I said do it, he did it. And he kept doing it and doing it, and so two days into my family vacation I had Norah, you guys all know Norah right. She’s the coolest. But she won’t go to bed at night, she’s a nightmare. Don’t let that cute face trick you, she’s evil. So I’m like, I can’t go to sleep, so finally I was like, I’m going to plug her in the car and drive around the lake until she falls asleep. So I plug her in the car, strap her in and I start driving. And I’m like, this could be a long, long thing. She’s just smiling back here. I was like ugh. I’m like you know what, I’m going to do my episode for Nick. So I got my phone out, I clicked record and for probably almost an hour, it was an hour. I’m driving around the lake and I explain to him what I see. Did anyone here listen to that episode? I’m curious. I’m going to map out really quick, the core concept. Because some of you guys may be stuck in this, and the goal of this, what I want to do is I want to map this out, and then what’s funny is last year at Bear Lake, so a year later we had this thing where I was like, we should do a second round where I do a year later, this is the advice now. And I wrote a whole outline for it and I totally never did it. So I’m going to go through that outline now, and kind of show him the next phase. So you cool if I show kind of what I talked about? Nick: For sure. Russell: Alright, so those who missed the podcast episode, who haven’t been binge listening, you’ve all failed the test, now you must go back to episode number one, listen to the cheesy jingle and get to episode, I don’t know what it was. Okay, I’ve said this before, if you look at any business, any organization, there’s three core people. The first one is the person at the top who is the entrepreneur. The cool thing about the entrepreneur is the entrepreneur is the person who makes the most amount of money. They’re the head and they get the most amount of money. The problem with the entrepreneur is they also have the most risk, so they’re most likely to lose everything. I’ve lost everything multiple times because I’m the guy risking everything. But the nice thing is entrepreneurs that write their own paychecks, there’s no ceilings. So they can make as much as they want. They can make a million, ten million, a hundred million, they can do whatever they want because there’s no ceiling. So that’s the first personality type. The second personality type over here is what we call the technicians. The technicians are the people who actually do the work. And what’s funny, if you look at this, people who go to college are the technicians. What do they do, they look down on entrepreneurs, they look down on sales people. “Oh you’re in sales. What are you a doctor?” For crying out loud in the night. But they look down on people like us. Because “I’m a doctor. I went to 45 years of school.” What’s interesting, there’s technicians in all sorts of different spots right. I actually feel bad, I shouldn’t say this out loud, but at the airport here I saw one of my friends who is an amazing doctor and him and his wife were leaving on a trip and we were talking and he said, “This is the first trip my wife and I have been on in 25 years, together by ourselves.” I’m like, “What?” and he’s like, ‘Well, we had medical school and then we had kids and then we had to pay off medical school and all these things. Now the kids are gone and now we finally have a chance to leave.” I was like, wow. Our whole lives we’ve heard that medical school, becoming a doctor is the…..anyway that’s a rant for another day. But I was like, there’s technicians. And what’s interesting about technicians, they don’t have any risk. So there’s no risk whatsoever, but they do have, there’s a price ceiling on every single person that’s a technician, right. And depending on what job you have your price ceiling is different. So doctors, the price ceiling is, I have no idea what doctor’s make, $500 grand a year is like the price ceiling, that’s amazing but they can’t go above that. And different tasks, different roles, different position all have different price ceilings. But there’s like, this role as a technician makes this much, and this one makes this much and you’re all kind of these things. I said the problem with you right now, you have these amazing skill sets, but you are stuck as a technician in a role where they’re capping you out, where the only thing you can make is $25k a year. Remember I asked you, “What have you been doing?” and you’re like, “Oh, I’ve been networking, I’ve been learning, I’ve been getting my skills up, getting amazing.” I’m like, “That’s amazing, you’re skills are awesome, but your ceiling is $25k a year. No matter how good you get you are stuck because you’re in a technician role right now.” I said, “you’ve got a couple of options. One is go become an entrepreneur, which is scary because you’ve got four kids at home and you don’t have money anyway.” I am so eternally grateful that when I started this game, my wife, first off, we didn’t have kids yet, my wife was working, we didn’t have any money but I didn’t have to have any money at that time, and I’m so grateful I was able to sometimes, I was able to risk things that nowadays is hard. For you to come jump out on your own initially and just be like, “Boom, I’m an entrepreneur and I’m selling this stuff.” That’s scary right, because you’ve got all this risk. So I was like, that’s the thing, but it’s going to be really, really hard. I said, “there’s good news, there’s one more spot in this ecosystem. And the cool thing about that spot it’s that it’s just like the entrepreneur, there’s no ceiling, now the third spot over here is what we call the rainmakers. The rainmakers are the people who come into a business and they know how to make it rain. This is the people who know how to bring people into a company. Leads, they bring leads in. They know all this traffic stuff they’re talking about. These are the people who know how to sell to leads and actually get money out of peoples wallets and put it into the hands of the entrepreneurs. These people right here, the rainmakers don’t  have ceilings. In fact, companies who give the rainmaker the ceiling are the stupidest people in the world, because the rainmaker will hit the ceiling and then they’ll stop. If you’re smart and you have a company, and you have rainmakers, people driving traffic, people doing sales, if you have a ceiling they will hit and they will stop. If you get rid of the ceiling and then all the sudden they have as much as they want, they have less risk than the entrepreneur, but they have the ability to make unlimited amount of money. I said, “Your skill set over here as a technician is worth 25k a year, but if you take your skill set and shift it over here and say, “I come into a company and I’m a rainmaker. I create videos, I create stories, they’ll sell more products, more things.” Suddenly you’re not worth 25,000, now you’re worth $100,000, you’re worth $500,000. You’re worth whatever you’re able to do, because there’s no ceiling anymore. And that was the point of the podcast. I got done sending it, then I sent it to him and I sent it to my brother to edit it. And I have no idea what you thought about it at that point, because we didn’t talk for a while after that. But I’m curious where you went from there. Nick: So the first thing, you know, being told I was really only worth $25,000 in the eyes of the people who were hiring me, that was a punch in the gut. That sucked to hear. Thanks man. It was just like, I literally was working 12, 14, 16 hour days, lifting heavy stuff, I did a lot with lighting and camera work, not necessarily the story writing stuff, but you know, for him to put it so perfectly, that I was a technician. I thought going in, when I failed as an advisor and I started my own company, or started doing videos for people, and being so scared to charge somebody $250 for a video, being like, “they’re going to say no.” That kind of thing, and now I wouldn’t blink my eyes for that. But you know, it’s one of those things for him to tell it to me that way, just straight forward being like, “You are, you’re learning great skills and you’re meeting amazing people.” I worked with Oscar winners and Emmy winners and stuff in the movies and shows that I worked on, but again, I was only worth that much, they had a finite amount of money, and I was a small part of it, so I got a small piece. So listening to all of that, and then hearing the entrepreneur, the risk and stuff. I’m really tall, I’m 6’9” if you didn’t know. I’m a sink or swim guy, but because I’m tall I can reach the bottom of the pool a lot easier. When I jumped in, we had lost, as a financial advisor we had lost our home and we lost all these things. So I was like, I have nothing left to lose. Worst case scenario, and I had never heard that mindset before. We were renting a basement from a family members, our cars were paid off. Worst case scenario is we stayed there and get food stamps and that kind of thing. There was nowhere to go but up from there. So for me, I was just so excited. I’m like, I want to be a rainmaker, I want to be an entrepreneur, but I didn’t know where to find the people that I could do that for. So I was in this thing where I was still getting lots of calls to work as a technician, but I didn’t want to do that anymore. I didn’t want to put myself, my body, my family through me being gone and then when I’m home I’m just a bump on a log because I’m so wiped out, all that kind of stuff. So that was my biggest first thing, the action point for me. I started thinking, okay how do I transition out of this? How do I get myself out and start meeting the right people, the right kinds of clients who do have budgets and things like that, and how do I make it rain for them. That’s when I made that shift from working as a technician. I told myself I’m not going to do it anymore. The last time I technically worked as a technician was about 9 months ago. It was for a friend. So I made that shift and it was just amazing. Like Russell was talking about earlier, when you start to track it or when it’s part of your mindset, things start to show up and happen. You meet the right people and stuff. So those things just started, just by listening to that one hour long thing, I started changing and then the black box I got, Expert Secrets and Dotcom Secrets and started going through that as well. And it was just like, you see in the Funnel Hacker TV, that moment where the guy goes, “RAAAAA” that’s what happened with me. It was like a whole new world, Aladdin was singing. He was Aladdin and I was Jasmine, with a beard. Russell: I can show you the world. Nick: Exactly. But that’s what really, literally happened with me. Russell: That’s cool. Alright this is like summertime, he’s going through this process now, figuring things, changing things, shifting things, he’s changing his mindset. We go through the summer, we go through Christmas and then last year’s Funnel Hacking Live, were we in February or March last year? March, and so before Funnel Hacking Live we kind of just touched base every once in a while, seeing how things are going. He’s like, “Things are going good. I’m figuring things out.”  And then Funnel Hacking Live was coming, and I remember because we’re sitting there, and I think he messaged me or something, “Funnel Hacking looks awesome I wish I could make it.” I was like, “Why don’t you come?” And you’re like, “I just can’t make it yet.” I was like, “How about this man, I guarantee you if you show up it’ll change your life forever. I’m not going to pay for your flights or your hotel, but if you can figure out how to get there, I’ll give you a free ticket.” And that’s I said, “if you can come let Melanie know, and that’s it.” And I didn’t really know much, because you guys know in the middle of Funnel Hacking Live my life is chaos trying to figure out and how to juggle and all that stuff. So the next thing I know at Funnel Hacking Live, we’re sitting there and during the session I’m looking out and I see Nick standing there in the audience. And I was like, ‘I have no idea how he got there, but he’s there. Freaking good for him.” And I have no idea, how did you get there? That wasn’t probably an easy process for you was it? Nick: No. Credit cards. It was one of those things, I looked at flights. As soon as we had that conversation, it was funny because I was, I can’t remember what was going on, but it was a day or two before I responded back to his invitation. And I was like, I’d be stupid to say no. I have no idea how I’m going to get there. I think I even said, “I’ll hitch hike if I have to, to get there.” Can you imagine this giant sasquatch on route 66 trying to get to Florida. But I told my wife about it, and this is where Russell might have this in common. My wife is incredible and super supportive and she let me go. And we didn’t have the money in the bank so I said, “I’m going to put this on the credit card, and as soon as I get back I’m going to go to work and I’ll pay it off. I’ll get a couple clients and it will be fine.” So I booked the hotel, luckily I was able to get somebody who wasn’t able to go at the last minute and I got their hotel room, and I got the lfight and I came in and I was in the tornado warnings, like circling the airport for 5 hours, like the rest of you were. So I got there and I just remember I was just so excited. Walking in the room the very first day, the doors open and you all know what it’s like. I don’t have to relive this story. I remember I walked in and the hair on my arms, it was just like {whistling}. It was incredible, just the energy and the feeling. And I was like, t his is so cool. And then the very first speech, I was like that was worth every penny to get here. If I left right now it would have all been worth it. And you all know because you’re sitting here, you’ve felt that too. So that was my, getting there was like, “Honey, I know we don’t have the money, we have space on the credit card, and when I get home I swear I will work hard and it will be okay.” And she’s like, “Okay, go.” So I did. Russell: So now I want to talk about, not day one, or day two, but on day three at Funnel Hacking Live. How many of you guys remember what happened on day three? Russell sneak attacked all you guys. I was like, if I start going “Secret one, Secret two, Secret three” you guys will be like, “Here it is.” Sitting back. I was like, how do I do the Perfect webinar without people knowing it’s the perfect webinar? And I’m figuring this whole thing out, trying to figure that out. And we built a nice presentation, create an amazing offer for this program you guys are all in. And as you know, all you guys got excited and ran to the back to sign up and now you’re here. But you told me this personally, I hope you’re willing to share. But I thought it was amazing because you didn’t sign up that night. And I would love to hear what happened from then to the next day, and kind of go through that process. Nick: So this is my first Clickfunnels, I was all new to this whole thing. I was so excited when the 12 month millionaire presentation came up and I was like, “This is awesome.” Then I see it in the stack and I’m like, “I’m seeing the wizard,  I can see the wizard doing his thing.” And I was just so excited, and then the price. And it was a punch in a gut to me, because I was so, listening to it I was like, ‘This is what I need. This is what I want, this is what I need. It’s going to be amazing.” And then the price came and seriously, the rest of the night I was just like…. The rest of the presentation and everything after that I was just kind of zoned out. I just didn’t know what to do. Because I knew I needed it so badly and I’m like, that’s almost twice what we’re paying in rent right now. You know, it was just like, how am I going to justify this when I’m on food stamps and Medicaid and all this kind of stuff. You know, “yes, I’m on that but I dropped this money on a coaching program.” Russell: “From this internet coach.” Nick: Right. And so I’m having this mental battle and get back home to my room that night and I didn’t go hang out with people. I just was not feeling it. And I remember texting my wife on the walk back to the room. And I took the long way around the pond, just slowly depressedly meandering back to my room. And I’m texting her and I’m telling her how amazing it was and what the program would do and all that kind of stuff, and she’s like, “That sounds great.” And I’m purposely not saying how much it’s going to cost, just to get her excited about it, so I can maybe do a stack with her right. “For this and this….” See if I could try it. I didn’t, I failed when it came to doing that. I told her the price and she’s like, “That’s a lot of money. How are you going to pay for it.” And I’m like, “I don’t know.” And I’m like, “The only thing I can do, because I have to sign up while I’m here, and pay for it while I’m here. I can put it on the credit card and then we will figure it out.” So we talked a lot and I talked to my dad and it was the same thing. He was like, “Man, that’s a lot.” Just the scarcity mindset that a lot of us have with our family members and support system who aren’t, don’t think, who aren’t the crazy ones. So I went to bed and I got emotional, and I slept so so bad. Just didn’t sleep well that whole night. And again, I talked to my wife again the next morning, and I just, we just said, “It would be awesome. But I can’t do it, so I’m just going to work hard and figure something out and then if it ever opens up again, then I’ll be in a position to do it.” So I left my room that morning with that in my mind. I made the mistake of keeping my wallet in my pocket though, because I’m here. I again made the long walk back and kind of gave myself a pep talk like, “Don’t worry about that kind of stuff. Just more value out of it, meet more people.” So that’s when I left my room that morning, that’s where my mind was. Russell: What happened next? Nick: I walked into the room and Kevin Hansen, who I had, it’s funny, he does a lot of editing for Clickfunnels, and he and I had actually met independent of Clickfunnels before. It was one of those things like, “Oh you do, oh my gosh.” and it was like 2 months after we’d met. So I was talking to him, just chitchatting, and I just had right then in my mind, it was like, “Walk over to the table and sign up. If you don’t do it now, you’re never going to do it.” And it was just one of those things, because I’d given myself that speech, that whole five minute walk across the property. So I finished up talking with him and I just said, “I’ll be right back.” And I walked straight over to the table, got out the credit card, wrote it all down, and I’m like, I don’t even know what my limit is, so I hope whenever they run this that it goes through. I don’t know what’s going to happen. So I did and I got that little silver ribbon that we all got. And again, {whistling} chills. Like I was like, holy crap, this is amazing. I put it on my little lanyard thing and I was just like, I couldn’t believe it. The adrenaline and all that stuff of, “I’m doing it. And my wife is going to kill me when I get back home.” So that’s, then I went and got my seat and I was just floating, you know. I was so amped, I could have “Steven Larsened” it and screamed over the noise of everybody else and it would have been very, you would have heard it. So that’s what I did that morning. I was like, ‘Not going to do it, not going to do it, not going to do it.” I walked in, 60 seconds done. You have my money. Russell: So I’m curious, when did you tell your wife? This is like a marriage counseling session, huh? Nick: yeah, do you have a couch I can lay down on? Russell: A big couch. Nick: yeah, really. So I got home and I didn’t tell her, at all. I didn’t. I said, the clock is ticking. I have 30 days until that hits, or 20 days until the credit card statement comes and she’s like, “Wait, why is there an extra $2000 bucks on here?” So I just, I said, I’ve got some time because my wife, she’s 5’3”, she’s dainty, little petite lady, but she’s not scary I guess. But this is the first time I was really scared to tell her something in our marriage. So I just said, I’m just going to hit the road hard and see what I can come up with to cover at least the $1800 and the hotel, for what I racked up at Funnel Hacking Live, and then that will get me another 30 days to figure something out. So I went and I never told her until the credit card statement came and she saw it. She’s like, “What’s this?” But what happened before that, I don’t know, do you have something after that or do you want me to go to the next part? Okay, so me going to work and being like, “I gotta find it.” and it’s funny that night at Funnel Hacking Live, I went on Facebook and I created some half thought through offer where it was like, “Hey if I can get like 5 people locally where I’m at to do a monthly low number where I create a couple of videos for a monthly retainer, that will cover it and I can figure it. But nobody nibbled on it. So I got home and I started just trying to figure stuff out. And I had met another lady who had a company and she uses Clickfunnels for her course. And it was funny, I talked to her before I went to Funnel Hacking Live, and we were talking and she was like, “Do you know Clickfunnels?” And I was like, “That’s so crazy. I do.” Because I’d never met anybody else that had. So I got home and I shot a little video with her, it was a test to do some modules for her course and she loved it and it was great. So we were talking about, she had like 20 videos she wanted to do and we were talking about budget, and I just said, “you know what, for that much, for that many videos and all this kind of stuff, it’s going to be $25,000.” And she didn’t even blink. She’s like, “Perfect, that’s great.” Thank you, you guys. You’re going to make me cry. Thank you.  And that was like maybe two weeks after I got home that that happened. And I left her house and I tried my hardest not to do a jump heel click going down her driveway, out to my car, and I got around the corner and I messaged Russell like, “dude, you’ll never guess. I just closed my first 5 figure deal and this is what it was…” and he was like, “That’s so cool.” You know. But it was the whole plata o plomo thing, I would never have the guts to ask for something like that, I know that I should and that my skills and what I can do are worth that and more, and it’s been proven to me again and again since then, but to ask the first time, that first time you have a big ask and you’re just throwing yourself out there, and if she would have said no…Now what am I going to do? Because I had actually done another pitch where I did like a webinar pitch where I  had a stack and slides and stuff because it was for a Chamber of Commerce, and I wanted to charge them 2500 a month to do like 4 videos a year. And I did the whole thing like, “If you do it, it’s $2500 a month, or if you do it all right now it’s this…” that whole you know, and they passed on it. I was like, ugh. So it was just one of those things where being around y’all, that was my first experience being around entrepreneurs, really. I have friends who have had businesses, but I felt weird for wanting to create my own thing or being selfish because I have four kids. Like why don’t you go get a real job? All those conversations that you hear and have with yourself, especially when things aren’t going great. But it was like okay, I have to get it done or I have to drop out. And I just, even in that short amount of time I received so much value from the people I was beginning to meet, and then as the content started coming out I was like, “There’s no way I could live without this after having a taste of it.” So that was my, I had to get it done and it worked out. Russell: Amazing, I love that story. So coo. Alright, so since then, how many of you guys have watched his….are you daily or almost daily Facebook Lives? Nick: Pretty much, almost daily. I’ll miss some… Russell: How many of you guys have watched his daily Facebook lives, he’s doing what we’re saying right. He’s doing it. He’s doing it. I see it, I see it coming in my feed. It pops in my feed over and over. He’s doing what we’re talking about. He’s attracting people, he’s telling stories. All the stuff we’re talking about, he’s been doing it. But part of it, he had to have that emotion, that plata o plomo moment and then he hit it and it’s just like, he’s been running and running and running and running. And it’s been so insanely fun to watch the progress and the growth. Some of you guys know he put out an event that’s coming up this weekend and sold out in 5 seconds. He’s like, “I sold out, should I make it bigger?” and I’m like, “No people should have responded to you faster, it’s their fault. Sell it out because next time it will be easier to sell it out again and easier to sell out again.” But he did it by giving tons of value. Telling stories, telling stories, telling stories, providing more value to you guys, to other entrepreneurs, other people in the community and people are noticing. All the stuff we talked about today, he’s doing it. Consistently, consistently, consistently doing it. That was so cool. I don’t even know where to go from here. Alright I know where to go from here. Before I move into this, was it scary? Nick: All of it scary? Well, this is what, back to my competitive days, I don’t care who, I’d played against the best players in the country at high levels. And I didn’t care if you were going to the NBA, being recruited by Duke, once we got into the lines I didn’t care who you were, I was going to make you look silly. I would hold, you wouldn’t score a point on me, or I would just like out work you and if you wanted to get anywhere I was in your face the whole time. And so this was a whole different game for me. I remember Myron talking about in his speech at Funnel Hacking Live, you have to stay in the game long enough to learn the game, and I was new to this game. Like brand new, less than 12 months when I went to Funnel Hacking Live. And it was terrifying because, not necessarily because I didn’t think I could do it, I was just worried when, how long it would take. Like am I going to go and just spin my wheels and it’s going to be 15 years, 2099 and I’m wheeling up across to get my reward from him in his wheelchair, just like, “Hey buddy.” You know, that kind of thing. I just didn’t know how to make it happen quick. That kind of stuff. So I was definitely scared, not necessarily of failing, because I had failed before, I was just scared how long it was going to take. Russell: one of the best moments for me was this summer, him and his family were driving home from, I can’t remember where, they were driving through Boise, and he’s like, “Can we swing by and say hi? My kids want to meet you, my wife wants to meet you.” That’s always scary when you haven’t met someone’s wife or kids and you’re like, what if they hate me. And I remember I started thinking, oh my gosh. He spent all his money coming out here, and then he bought the thing, she might legitimately want to kill me. I have no idea. I was a little bit nervous. And I came and met them and the kids, it was super cool. I remember the coolest thing, your wife just looked at me and she said, “Thank you.” And I was like, how cool is that? Just the coolest thing. Thank you for convincing, persuading, whatever the things are to do this thing. I think sometimes as entrepreneurs we feel the guilt or the nervousness of, “Should I sell somebody something? Is it right, is it wrong?” You have to understand when you’re doing it, it’s not a selfish thing for you. It’s like, how do I get this person to take the action they need to do. Because most people won’t do it until they make an investment. It’s just human nature. They’ll keep dinking around and dinking around, whatever it is until they have a commitment, until they make that covenant, like Myron talked about earlier, people don’t change. So in any aspect of life, you want someone to make a change, there’s got to be something that causes enough pain to cause the change, which is why we have the program. We could have priced the program really, really cheap but I was like, “No we won’t.” We legitimately wanted to make a plata o plomo moment for everybody. You’ll notice, when the program signup, not everybody who signed up is here today. Some people fell away, some of them left, things happen and I totally understand, but I wanted to make it painful enough that we get people to move. And there are people in this room, I’ve joked about, Nick probably shouldn’t have bought that. If he would have asked I would’ve been like, “No dude, don’t. What are you thinking? Why would you do that?” as a friend this is weird, but I’m so grateful. Are you grateful you did? Nick: Absolutely. Russell: Where’s Marie Larsen, is she still in here? I talked about this in the podcast. She was in the same situation, she should not have signed up for it, it’s insane. I saw this text she sent Steven, she’s like, how much did you have in your bank account when you signed up for it? $70 in the bank account, $1800 a month bill she signed up for. And then it started happening and she was freaking out how it’s going, if you guys haven’t listened to the podcast, Lean In, yet I told the whole story. But it got nervous month one, then month two happened and she’s like, “Oh my gosh, I need to leave. I can’t afford this.” And she’s talking with Steven and Steven’s like, “Well, you could leave and walk away, or you could lean in.” so she decided, “Okay, I’m going to lean in.” So she leaned in, and I’ve watched as her business over the last 3, 4, 5, 6 months is growing and it’s growing and it’s growing because she leaned in. Tough times will come, every single time it comes, but those who lean in are the ones who make it through that, and who grow and who build huge businesses.

We sit down and talk about Black Texas Magazine with Founder, Editor & Chief Nickholas Bailey.Learn about Black Texas Magazine here:https://www.blacktexasmag.com/TRANSCRIPTZach: What's up, y'all? It's Zach with Living Corporate, and yes, you're listening to a B-Side. Now, yes, we've introduced the purpose of a B-Side before, but remember, every episode is what? That's right, somebody's first episode. So for our new folks, B-Sides are essentially random shows that we have in-between our larger shows. These are much less structured and somehow--that's right, you even guessed it--it's more lit. That's right. So there's lit. This is more lit than our regularly scheduled shows. Sometimes they're discussions that the hosts have. Sometimes they're extended monologues from just one particular host like myself or Ola or Latricia or Ade, or sometimes, yes, maybe even sometimes, maybe even most times, they're a special chat with a special guest. Today, we have a special guest - Nickholas Bailey. Nick Bailey is the editor-in-chief of Black Texas Magazine, a media outlet that is dedicated to enriching the lives of people of color across the state and beyond by connecting on a personal level through a passion for leading fulfilling lives. Welcome to the show, man. How you doin'?Nick: I'm doing well, how are you?Zach: I'm doing good, man. Look, let's talk about Black Texas Magazine. Where did it start, why the name, and what are y'all trying to achieve?Nick: Well, Black Texas started kind of as a jumping point for me because prior to this, or about--oh, I guess about a year prior to this I was the online editor for a publication called Texas Lifestyle Magazine. Great publication. They've done a lot of great stuff, but as I--as I got further into it, I started to recognize that there was a disconnect between my perspective and the perspective that they were--that they were creating. You know, like, I live a very different lifestyle than the people that they target, you know? I'm not accustomed to paying $300 for a charcuterie board or paying, you know, $1,000 for, you know, a grill set. It just wasn't really my--it wasn't really my thing, and I was pushing for some more relatable content for the average Texan, and it just wasn't--there was a disconnect there, and so after a lot of thinking and a lot of planning I decided to make the jump and create a publication for black people that was essentially the same thing in some ways. Like, I don't want to say that we just copied and pasted the formula because, you know, unfortunately I created a lot of the formula for Texas Lifestyle once I came on, but I would say that our goal is to enrich the life of black Texans and really Texans of all colors by exposing them to new brands, new opportunities, and new experiences that they may not have previously known about or they may not have previously felt like were open to them, you know? So I know for a lot of--for a lot of black people in the community, we--we almost self-segregate with a lot of things, you know? We look at things as, "Oh, that's white people stuff. We don't really--we don't really mess with that," whether it be, you know, simple stuff or the wild stuff like bungee jumping or skydiving, which I'm still kind of on the fence on. Like, they might be able to keep those. [laughs] But even things like, you know, eating at different restaurants or trying different festivals and experiences. Just really making it more palatable for--you know, for the black community, because there are plenty of people in the black community that say, "Hey, I want to live life. I've only got one life. I want to enjoy it while I'm here," and finding the opportunities for them that will enhance their lives is really the big overarching goal for us, but also highlighting the black businesses that are trying that as well along the way.Zach: So it's interesting, right? So I looked at the platform, and, you know, I think what I was taken most aback by was the amount of content, right? Like, you guys--it seems like you guys are publishing something every single day, and so talk to me a little bit about y'all’s challenges in getting this started up and, you know, what goes into managing a digital magazine. How do you juggle--it seems that there's a lot of hats to juggle. It seems that there's a lot of things to do, and I understand that you're also working full-time still.Nick: Yes.Zach: So how do you manage all of that?Nick: I manage that with a lot of stress--a lot of stress, not a lot of sleep, and an overdose of patience, because we do have a small team. We're always looking--like, we're always looking for new writers to bring on-board, but right now we do have a small team, and it's really just a matter of balancing everyone's talents and abilities. Like, for the time being I take on the burden--I take on the bulk of the burden by handling a lot of the administrative tasks. So, like, making sure that content is up on the website, proofreading the content, gathering all of the materials. So that might be, like, getting the photos in order, sorting it--like, sorting our files and documents online. So I do a lot of that stuff, and so I have the writers, and I say, "Hey, I want you to focus on writing," and the plan that I have right now is really to kind of spread that load across--across the team so no one person is having to do all of the writing. 'Cause everybody--like, to my knowledge, everybody else is working full-time somewhere as well. So what I would rather them do is each person write, you know, one or two things a month, and we could be able to keep a steady flow than expecting one person to churn out, you know, a new article every week, you know? And with balancing it with working--like, I work full-time, and for me it's kind of difficult 'cause I work 12-hour shifts. So a lot of my work is done--I guess done at night, so I'm usually up until about 1:00 in the morning making sure that content is looking good, there's no errors and we're gonna be good to go.Zach: So I have another question as a follow-up, right, really to the title of Black Texas Magazine. Has anyone run up on you with, "If we had a White Texas Magazine, that would be racist?"Nick: Not that directly, but it's been one of those side--like, side-swiped questions. Like, "Hm, why is it just for black people?" And kind of insinuating that, and to that I would say, to be honest, most of the public--like, most of the Texas-based publications we have are catered to a white audience. And, you know, I'm not opposed to--I'm not opposed to acknowledging that it may seem--it may come off as a bit contentious to say, "This is a publication for black people," you know, but at the same time it's never been a situation of, you know, "No whites allowed," you know? We've had--we've had white contributors to our publication. We have a lot of white readers. We have readers all over the world, and most of those aren't, you know, nations of color. And so I would say if they want--if they asked the question or they posed the question or the statement "If we had a White Texas Magazine, that'd be racist," I would tell them, "Well, let's go read Texas Highways. Let's go read Texas Monthly. Let's go read Texas Lifestyle." The list could go on. Most publications are catering to a white audience. Like, they may not be as blatant as to say it, but it's one of those--I would say it's one of those underlying things of once you see the subject matter you--there are ways of siphoning out certain groups by the content.Zach: Right. And, you know, it's funny because I think it's easy to forget that white is the default, right? Like, it's--like, you don't have to call something for it to be--the majority of the country is white, so most of the content out there in any type of media is largely going to be white, right? So you don't have to call--I don't have to call something white, something anything, but you do call things--you know, if there is other underrepresented groups, black, XYZ, or Asian-this or Latin-X or Hispanic-this because we're trying to highlight the fact that this is not the default, right? It's not what you immediately consider when you think about whatever audience or population that you're gonna be engaging. Okay, so let me ask you this. You know, you guys landed J Prince recently, [inaudible] J Prince, but how did that happen for you guys? Like, how did it work, and what was that experience like?Nick: For me, honestly, it was an amazing experience. I lucked into it because I got--I got an email from the city of Austin about an event that they were co-hosting. It was just an evening with J Prince where he was just hearing Austin talking about his life, and I went, and I was like--I didn't know what to expect, and I was just like, "Man, I just want to see this guy in person, see, you know, really what he's about and just kind of, you know, measure him up instead of just looking through a screen," and it was a cool event. The event went off really well, and at the end there was a line to, like, you know, take a picture with him and stuff, and I was like, "Okay, cool." You know, "I don't mind getting a picture with J Prince. That'd be kinda cool," and so I get in line, and as always they're trying to sell the book or sell merchandise and stuff like that, and just out of, you know, the spur of the moment I'm like, "I'll buy the book," and so I get the book, and when it's my turn he autographs the book and everything, and I ask him a question, and the question I asked him is, you know, "Hey--" Like, he talks about--he talked a lot about, you know, replacing IGs with OGs in terms of, you know, getting off of social media and really linking up with people that have done what we do before us and really gaining some knowledge from them, especially, like, in different entertainment avenues. A lot of the OGs that we came up with came up through nefarious ways, you know? They sold drugs, they robbed people. They committed crimes to get the assets that they needed, and so I asked him, you know, "How can we look up to these OGs and get advice from them when we're at a age where we don't want to take those penitentiary chances to make it into the industry?" And I think it kind of--it kind of put him on the spot, and he stopped and he said, "You know what? Talk to me after the show."Zach: You asked him--you asked him that in front of a bunch of people?Nick: No, it was--like, it was a one-on-one thing. I asked him, like, face-to-face, maybe two feet away from him.Zach: Oh, my gosh. Well, shout out to you for asking J Prince such a very pointed question to his face.Nick: You can't get the answers you don't ask for.Zach: [laughs] That's a good point.Nick: You know? 'Cause I would love to be in different indust--like, involved in different industries, but I don't wanna have to go sell coke to get the money for it.Zach: Straight up, yeah.Nick: But at the same time, trying to save money from a regular 9-to-5 is a very slow process.Zach: And this is the thing I think people forget, like, man, the blessing of an--you cannot, you cannot undervalue initial capital, man. Like--so you know, like, even when you talk about Jay-Z's album, the last album he dropped right, and he was talking about how I flipped this, and it's like, "Well, Jay-Z, man, you started off with, like, 400 racks. You had $400,000 from the coke game, so you say." So it's like, "Okay, yeah." If you--if you gave a very ambitious, you know, entrepreneurial person of color $400,000, man, that's gonna--yeah, they could flip that into something too. I'm not saying--they might not flip it into a billion, but they can flip it into something because they have the initial capital. So to your point, like, how--that just was such a good question because, like, okay, I'ma talk--if I talked to Jay-Z for an hour, people would say, "I'd love to talk to Jay-Z for an hour 'cause then I would learn how to be a billionaire." It's like, "Well, Jay-Z's gonna be like, "Well, I had initial capital of $400,000 because I sold drugs, and it was tax free. So I basically started with a 400--" Like, most black people don't have seed money, hundred thousand dollar seed money. They have a little bit of change here and there that they scrounge up, like you said. Like, that they hold over from their full-time job after paying off this and paying off that and whatever debt they have, and they have, you know, a little bit of change, not enough money to build an empire. You know what I'm saying?Nick: Absolutely, and that was--and after listening to Jay-Z's album, that was one of the things that I kind of left with. I was like, you know, "He talks a lot about, you know, these amazing ways to do better," and it's one of those things of "If you knew better, you'd do better." And that's cool. Like, I would love to buy a piece of art that's worth, you know, 1 million, hold it until it's worth 2 million, sell it when it's worth 10 million. That's cool. I would love to be able to give that to my children, but I gotta get that first million.Zach: Right. [laughs]Nick: It's easy--it's easy to compound wealth once you have it, and a lot of rappers talk about that part, but they don't really tell us how we can get the money, how we can get started without selling drugs, without robbing people. That's--like, that's the link they never give us, and I think that unfortunately that's because a lot of them don't have the answer for that, aside from "Sell drugs. Rob people." And that's an unfortunate truth. Like, I get it, that's the environment they came up in, but if we're trying to do better now we need new lessons.Zach: Right, right. So let me ask--let me ask you this. What advice would you have for black and brown folks trying to get, you know, multi-effort ventures off of the ground? So you have a full-time job. You've launched a magazine. It takes multiple hands, driving it and grinding it. It clearly--like you said earlier, it's stress. It's late nights. What are you--what advice would you have for folks who look like us trying to do similar things?Nick: The strongest advice I would give is work together. In college I ran a midterm program, and one of the things I taught was the idea of collective development. You know, especially if you're starting off with little to no capital. You're--like, you're working at a point where you're not getting paid. You need to find a team of people who are willing to work with you to build something up that benefits everybody, you know? Like, Black Texas isn't just me. It's not the Nick Bailey show, you know? My byline comes up very little. For me, I look at it as a plat--as I'm creating a platform to advance the careers of other people, you know? Because as we gain our audience and as we, you know, get that brand retention, that brand recognition, people start coming to the website looking for other people. They're not looking for me, you know? They're looking to see, "Oh, let's see what's up with these movie reviews. Let's see what's up with these fashion tips. Let's see what's up with these house-keeping tips." You know, "What events are coming up?" I want--I want people looking for the thoughts and ideas of other people, and for me in my particular situation I can say, "Hey, I can't pay you to write right now, but what I can give you is an opportunity to grow your name," because not everybody has the money to start up a website, you know? Even the cheapest websites that aren't free aren't cheap. Once you get past the, you know, this is BrandXYZ.WordPress.com and you get to just Brand.com, it becomes a different--a different financial burden, and not everybody--not everybody is willing to take that risk, and I've gotten to a point where I took that risk to--ideally to make it easier for other people. So I would say, you know, one, be willing to work together. Understand the vision. Don't just work for anybody, but understand the vision. Understand what it means for you personally and how it's going to benefit you personally, and then you give it your all, you know? Like, that's the truest thing that I can tell anyone, and also set ego aside, you know? Not everybody's going to be #1, and not everybody needs to be #1. You can easily do amazing as a strong #2, and what I mean by that is not everybody has to be a CEO. Not everybody has to be the founder, the president. You know? Like, I don't introduce myself as the founder or CEO of Black Texas because that's not important to me, you know? I want this to be something much bigger than myself. I'm the editor-in-chief, which is just to say I'm the guy steering the ship right now, you know? Like, I don't look at the--I don't look at the Dallas Cowboys and think of who the owner is, I look at the Cowboys and think of who are their star players, you know? Who are the people who made the team breathe? And that's how I look at--that's how I look at Black Texas and really any business, you know? We know--we know who Mark Zuckerberg is. That's cool. He made it that way. He's not the one looking at all this Russia info. He's not the one making sure that you wind up in Facebook jail for some post, [laughs] and those people may not have the fame, but they're getting us all a paycheck.Zach: Right. Right, right. Man, this has been dope, man. Do you have any shout outs for us?Nick: I did not think of shout outs. Let's see. If there are people I'd shout out, honestly I would just give shout outs to my team. It's been--like, we launched this year mid-January, and it's been a wild ride along the way. I've taken risks. I've asked them to follow me, and they have, and we really--we really made a lot of strides this year, and I'm proud to see the work they're putting in and what we're able to accomplish when we work together, you know? This is the first time that I've really steered a team like this, and to see them, you know, putting up the hard work is honestly amazing. I would want to give a shout out to my family, you know? Like, I love my daughters, but most importantly, like, my parents. They have been a well of support for me. They've encouraged me to, you know, chase my dreams. They've helped me when I--like, when I wasn't sure about myself, and, you know, my grandma's been my day one, and she's helped me in life as well, but I don't know. I would say--if I had to give a specific shout out it would be to my father, and that's because he gave me the capital to get this magazine started, you know? 'Cause, like, every year he'll give--like, he'll give a gift for Christmas, which really isn't a gift to me, it's more of a "Hey, here's some money from me. Get gifts for the girls," because he doesn't really--he doesn't really celebrate Christmas. Different religion. That's not really his thing, and so I get it, but this last year he gave me a little more than usual, and he said, you know, "Take this and do what, you know, you feel you need to do with it," and I was just at a loss, and I thought and I thought about it. I strategized, and I prayed over it, and I said, "You know, I have to be willing to take that jump," you know? It called me back to a quote from Steve Harvey talking about getting to success, and he said, you know, "You have to be willing to jump. You can't be successful on the ledge," and so I went for it. And so, you know, I've got to give it my all because I can't--I can't let folks down. That's not my thing.Zach: Awesome, man. Well, look, that does it for us, guys. Thank you for joining us on the Living Corporate podcast. Make sure you follow us on Instagram at LivingCorporate, Twitter at LivingCorp_Pod, and subscribe to our newsletter through living-corporate.com. If you have a question you'd like for us to answer on the show, make sure you email us at livingcorporatepodcast@gmail.com. You have been listening to Nick Bailey, editor-in-chief of Black Texas Magazine. Peace.Kiara: Living Corporate is a podcast by Living Corporate, LLC. Our logo was designed by David Dawkins. Our theme music was produced by Ken Brown. Additional music production by Antoine Franklin from Musical Elevation. Post-production is handled by Jeremy Jackson. Got a topic suggestion? Email us at livingcorporatepodcast@gmail.com. You can find us online on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and living-corporate.com. Thanks for listening. Stay tuned.

This episode is about No Child Left Behind: how it impacted learning, as well as how it succeeded and how it fell short. In it, we interview with two professionals in the field of education. Both Professor Song and Mrs. Spiess discussed the huge role that standardized testing played in the outcomes of NCLB, and how the act ultimately made learning a lot more generalized and more focused on passing the standardized tests, rather than being individualized. There were obviously areas where NCLB succeeded, and Mrs. Spiess explained that there was actually very real financial success associated with NCLB based on the funding received. However, NCLB ultimately fell short in that it failed to provide students with the strong, customizable learning experience that they might have received otherwise because there was so much focus on standardized testing.

With Carol’s "Response" we present,"Call & Response," covering "Another Day in the Diamond" & "Good Out Here" * Catching up is hard to do, for many reasons * Our regulars celebrate the 1st anniversary at The Diamond, but so time is unaccounted for * #LucianaGalvez is back? #NickClark ribs her for leaving * #AliciaClark's baseball grenades: weapon against #TheVultures? * The world has other plans for our self-sufficient Alexandria/The Prison * Enter Charlie & her least favorite food: swimming upstream sucks * 47 people saved: #MadisonClark cares about more than her own: How & What happened? * Awesome opening sequences, especially the music * Charlie's #RobertJohnson dilemma & #VictorStrand's concrete reminder * Nick's Agoraphobia/PTSD & our desire fully understand * The Vultures' suspicious timing: weevils destroy the crops * Enter Naomi, near-Exit Naomi! ...thanks salmon Madison! * Madison's strange #Walker foreshadowing * #TheLittlePrince Charlie * Why Madison swims upstream, "No one's gone till they're gone" * Nick's PTSD, manifests. Turnips in the apocalypse * Enter The Vultures: Responsible for the numbers on structures; Cataloged Walkers * Charlie's betrayal: Mel knows everything about our group (and how settlements tend to fall). Is chill but loses his cool, once: who is underestimating whom? * Madison & The Clarks still prep Charlie's room. Unlike previous seasons, The Clarks are in sync. Luciana shows Charlie she still has a place * Luciana questions our misfits over the 51 flag. Our regulars take #Althea's van & head towards area 51 * Althea extorts our regulars, reminding them (like #CarlGrimes did #RickGrimes & #Negan) that it’s people vs Walkers * Althea flips the script, but almost flips the SWAT van * Nick's purpose up in literal smoke, decides to venture out with Madison * Althea is a truth-seeker who places herself at risk to get at it * Babysitter #MorganJones with ADHD Nick. Peanut-butter protein bar callback * Morgan scouts, Nick finds his video. Morgan tries to protect Nick from The El Camino, but Nick savagely escapes * #JohnDorie's desire to find (#TWD #TheSaviors?) Laura while Strand questions Althea's motives - Savage Alicia wonders how she's lasted * Nick stumbles upon Bluebonnets: Mel stakes Charlie as his claim * Nick's #Tyrese hammer & Morgan's desire to save more than Nick's life. "Nick" rhymes with "Rick": coincidence? * Ennis & Charlie beat Madison & Nick in scavenging with the El Camino by scanning the radio * ...a tale of two Nicks: Inside Nick wouldn’t kill Ennis in front of Charlie. Afraid of Outside Nick * Morgan: vengeance not only makes you lose yourself, but also what you ultimately want * Althea deal, confirmed: they'll probably be sticking together from here on * Morgan: caught between a Vulture & Nick place: takes their advice & walks away * Morgan sees the Good out Here bluebonnets (all life is precious). Rushes back to Nick * Morgan “reaches” Nick: No one's gone, till they're gone * John hopes his Luciana still loves him * Althea's The Bog tapes. Callback to #Deanna's Alexandria interviews * Cinematic use of color during time shifts, particularly Nick’s death scene * As Nick falls, one wonders if Morgan wasn't wrong ("It won't turn out like you think") * Our feelings over Nick's passing * [Sneak Peeks] Althea's lens: Walker Ennis, covering Nick's body, Strand’s Interview, Group footage; Naomi, the group should move on; The water park in the next episode * [Sneak Peek] Mel's attempts at convincing Madison to join: food & safety. Madison backs her group. * [Sneak Peeks] Morgan would rather be on his own; Strand & Cole confronting (Vulture weaponized?) acupuncture #Walkers * More of Nick. Tons of questions only the past can answer. More of John Dorie, please. * The Vultures: definition of non-violent/non-confrontational. What happens with Madison & Naomi? Why was Nick desperate to end Ennis? --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/squawkingdead/message

Som and Nick (No mac) talk about their feelings concerning the spring 2017 season! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/anime-summit/message

Click above to listen in iTunes... I LOVE video…. And traffic. I have over 200 videos on Youtube now and here's what I wish I'd known… Steve: Hey, everyone. This is Steve Larsen. Welcome to Sales Funnel Radio. Announcer: Welcome to Sales Funnel Radio where you'll learn marketing strategies to grow your online business using today's best internet sales funnels. Now, here's your host, Steve Larsen. Steve: All right, you guys. Hey, I'm super excited. I'm super pumped for today because we get to talk about something that has always intrigued me. It's actually kind of the way it got started in internet when I first started working for Paul Mitchel and driving internet traffic with one of my buddies. Since then I really haven't done much so I'm excited to welcome on to the podcast an expert in this area, thank you so much, Nick Arapkiles. How are you doing? Nick: I'm great, man. Thanks for having me on. Steve: Hey, thanks. I appreciate it. Thank you so much for coming on. I was just looking through Facebook messages before you and I got on here and I didn't realize I think you had asked if we could push the time back and I'm such a morning person, thanks for getting up this early to do this. Nick: Hey, no problem at all, man. I'm happy to do it. Like you said I'm not much of a morning person, but when someone like you gives me an opportunity like this I'm happy to get on. Steve: It's nice that you did, I appreciate it. For everyone listening, this really is probably the first time, I mean, this is the first time that we'd really spoken like this. The guy that connected us is Ben Wilson obviously. Ben is the guy. He and I we're doing that things, Paul Mitchel and several other companies just think the world of him. He sent me a message and he goes, "Dude, I got this awesome guy. He's the man." I think I still have the message just to put it on the podcast or something. It's pretty funny. He's like, "This sweet guy, man, he's this genius and he said he wants to come." "Hey, sweet." I'm always looking for talent, for people because I get boring for everyone I'm sure. I'm excited to have some mix out. Nick: It's kind of a funny story. I met him at an event here in Colorado and then I actually ran into him at the Rockies, in the baseball game. Then he messaged me about you and here we are. Steve: Dude, that's great. What event was it? Nick: It was actually for a book publishing event ironically ... Steve: He told me he's going to that. Okay, cool. That's fantastic. It's funny this whole internet marketing world, it's actually a lot smaller than people think it is because people get in it, they'll get out of it, they'll get in it but the people that stick around I don't think there's ... Anyways, get around quick. What is exactly that you're doing then? You told me that you're awesome with YouTube which is awesome. Most people forget you can even advertise there I feel like but what is it that you're doing? Nick: Basically, I've been doing this stuff for a lot. Do you want me to just go on to my story a little bit? Steve: Okay, man. Let's hear it. Nick: Okay, cool. I've actually been online for about six years now and two and a half of those first six years were complete and utter struggle. It's usually the case with a lot of people's stories. I don't think I'm too much different... Steve: Anyone who says otherwise I feel like they are just lying or throwing a sales video. Nick: Yeah, I mean, it sucked at the time. Obviously it sucked at the time not having, you always expect when you get started you're thinking you're going to make money in your first day, first week, first month at least but it was tough man, it really was. I forfeited a lot of things going on. I was actually in college at the time... It was the summer before my last year of college so all my friends were going out partying and going to pool parties, different stuff like that. I was just dedicated to this thing. I essentially locked myself in my room that whole summer and I was dedicated to making it work and I didn't even make it work that entire summer and even years after that. It just led me on this path I think once you get into this like you're essentially infected with the entrepreneurial bug as I like to call it. You can't really go back from that. I mean, I kept on trying different things. I even went into the trading Forex and stuff like that but eventually came back into the marketing realm and that's where I am now like you're asking I've done a lot of YouTube stuff. That's the big thing is I really always focus on driving traffic because if you can drive traffic then you have a business. You really can do anything, it depends on what traffic you're using. Most the time I promote different funnels like business opportunities or just affiliate programs... I haven't really dove into much of my own stuff. I just leverage other systems that people put out and that's pretty much what I'm doing but it all stems from driving traffic and then calling people from YouTube into my world. I like to really call it my world more so than my list. I think a lot of people say my list or build a list. That's great, obviously you need to build a list but I think it helps me come from a better mentality than it's I'm building a list of people or a list. It's more so I'm building an audience of people, they are in my world now. Because I think a lot of people secure a list and they just think of numbers and what it really comes down to is that these are people that are interested and they want to connect with you and they want to learn more. You have to treat them as such and I think when you do that you get a lot better results. Steve: Interesting. That's interesting. A lot of people I know will talk about, they'll have you fill out something. Who are you trying to attract? What's their likes? What's their dislikes? What do they hate? Sometimes I feel like that gets pretty artificial after a while. You're just targeting people like yourself. I feel like it's the easiest way to go... Nick: Yeah, to be honest I didn't express this fully but basically what I do right now is I don't actually do too much advertising where I'm paying for the clicks and stuff like that. It's mostly just all organic. I've done a little bit of advertising here and there but the big thing is just putting content up. I know you're asking if I could drop some nuggets for YouTube and stuff like that but the biggest thing is just to continually put out content just like any other type of platform whether that's Facebook, Instagram, even Snapchat now. It's just continually putting out content because the more content you have out there, the more likely people are going to find you... I mean, there are some videos that I have that have seven views but there's also other videos that have 100,000 views. You never really know exactly which videos are going to hit. You might have an idea depending on the keywords and how optimized your videos are but the biggest thing that I stress and every day I learn more and more, I'm always learning is the fact that you never really know exactly until you start putting up content which videos are really going to stick and gain some traction until you upload them. Steve: That's interesting you say that. Back in college also I started really, really diving into this also, same thing. I sucked at it. There's a guy I listen to and he was saying, "You should always be publishing. Try and get a way to be in front of your people. Produce content." Just exactly what you're saying. I started doing that and making all these Periscope videos and I would put the recordings on YouTube. I can't tell you how cool that was. Stuff started happening when I did that. The exact reason you're saying. I had some videos that were terrible but then others were completely surprising to me. People started watching them and pushing them around. What the heck is this? My products started getting sold organically. I was like, "This is kind of cool," I totally agree with that but I have to ask though, you're putting YouTube videos out. Try to put as many up as you can. How do you rank a YouTube video? It's hard to... these words for spiders to go crawl and stuff like that like a blog post. What are some strategies you use to actually try and get them out there? Nick: It almost feels like it's changed throughout the years, I think the algorithms and everything. I'm not that geeky like that but I just noticed some trends here and there. As of late, I've noticed that a bigger channel with more subscribers and just a little bit more authority, maybe it's been on for a little bit of while or a little while, those are the videos that's pushing up towards the top of the search engines. You can pull back links. I know that probably gets a little bit more complex. I don't know if you're familiar with back linking. Steve: 100%, yeah definitely. Nick: Okay, I just didn't know if your audience would or not but that's basically you can go out there and get some other people to put your video in a bunch of different places. The idea behind that is that the search engines see your video all over the place and they are like, "This must be a video that is good. Let's start pushing it up towards the top of the search engine." Especially a couple of years ago that was huge and it definitely got me a lot of results but the thing again that I've noticed lately is that just having a big channel and having some decent subscribers and having people actually watch majority of your video is what's really pushing your videos up. I've had some videos where I just started making videos and they don't get much traction at all but then I have one of my bigger channels and I just put it up and I don't really optimize it at all, I don't really do anything to it and right away it's like one of the first videos on the search engine. Steve: I hear of Traffic Geyser. Nick: Yeah the name sounds familiar. Steve: These sites where you just submit your video and they'll just blast it across the internet so that you could get more views. I mean, totally spam-my stuff, you know what I mean? It's the dream for every entrepreneur or internet guys to just put your stuff everywhere. What strategies do you use for finding people to put your videos up? You know what I mean? Did you have to find related channels to yourself? Nick: Not necessarily. I use a website called Fiverr a lot of the times or at least I used to. I haven't been using it as much lately but it's a really cool website. You're obviously familiar with it but I'll explain it for your audience. Basically, it's just a website. It's called fiverr.com, F-I-V-E-R-R dot ‎com and basically it's a site that has a bunch of people doing a bunch of different gigs. They'll literally do anything for you for $5. I think there's a processing fee now for like 50 cents. Essentially people will do anything for you on the internet. I should be more specific with that. Steve: It's funny though because I've had people like, "Rap my name." I've had people, "Beat box stuff," they'll do anything for five bucks. Nick: Exactly, there's a lot of different stuff that you can do. Basically I just go on there and look for back links or maybe social signals and it's not to complicated. I mean, you just have to find someone with good rating, good track record and just test them out and that's the whole thing that I always tell people too is that you just have to test things out. You'll never really know what's working, what's not working until you go out there and actually apply it yourself... I think a lot of people are always asking me for the secret, asking me for different things that are just going to make it click and they're going to make hundreds of thousands of dollars. That's really never the case. You know this just as well as anybody is that you actually have to go out there and do the work, see what's working, see what's not working and then throw out the stuff that's not working and then just ramp up the stuff that is working... Steve: This is one of the reasons why I laugh so much when you brought up Fiverr because it started out as a great class. I'm sorry if anyone's listening that was in that class. It was like an SEO class in college and it started out great. We're learning all these cool strategies for SEO and things like that. Then it just got like the strategies were really old. I've been doing it long enough by that point that I just knew that what I was earning wasn't significant or anything. He's like, "Hey, what you're all going to go do is you got to go create a YouTube video and think about a topic a lot and the competition in the class to see whose video can get the most views." I was like, "I could totally game that." We went and we made this, you know that, "Do you even lift, bro?" Those videos that are out there right now, have you seen it though? Nick: I'm not sure. Steve: "Bro, do you even lift?" Nick: Okay, yeah. Steve: The next Star Wars is coming out and we said, "Do you even Jedi, bro?" We made all these funny videos of people. It was pretty cool but I totally went to Fiverr and I paid this dude $5 to send like 10,000 bot clicks. For no views at all to just this massive spike and we went and we gave the ending presentation stuff like that like we have over 10,000 clicks on this thing and everyone's like, "Oh my gosh, that's amazing." It's in the last few weeks and what's funny is that we ended up getting contacted right before the class ended by this ad agency. They were like, "Hey, we want to use your video to promote Star Wars stuff on." I was like, "Okay." None of them knew that this were like ... I'm sure that 50 of them were real clicks out of the ... Maybe. What's funny though is that obviously YouTube after a while can start to see if that's crap. The views on the bottom went from 0 to 10,000 to 12 and it stayed there. We're looking at the analytics for a while and then just totally drop. They took away all of them all the way back down to 3 views or something like that after the class was ended. Anyways, the only reason I bring that up is because A, it was a total failure and I knew what happened. I knew enough about that world that time but it was I mean, how do you go through Fiverr and figure out who's going to be sending you real clicks and not. You know what I mean or who's going to be pushing your video around the right way or not? Because most of it ... I like Fiverr for testing a lot of the lower level stuff but it sounds like you've got a cool way to do it that isn't that way. Nick: Yeah, that's actually a good point... I'm glad you brought that up because that's very important that you find good gigs because if you are sending a bunch of fake traffic to your YouTube videos it can get your video shut down and even your account shut down because YouTube will recognize that and they see that you're just throwing all these views on there and they are all fake. They don't like that. I've had the experience of getting a lot of my stuff shut down because of that in the early stages. Anyone listening, make sure that you're not sending crap gigs over to your videos because YouTube will shut that down real quick. In terms of finding good stuff, basically I just make sure that the vendor has a good track record. There's one specific guy that he's probably one of the bigger gigs. He's got so many different gigs on there. I'll just let you know his name is Crorkservice. Steve: Crorkservice, you know, I might actually seen him before. Nick: I'm sure you have. Honestly he's probably one of the best out there and he's got the best ratings. He's like the top of the top sellers... I mean, it's no hidden secret. You just have to go through his gigs and figure out what exactly it is that you want. If you are going to purchase views I really haven't done that in a long time. I know there are some people that do it and they do actually have success because again like I was saying before, if you can get high retention views where people are watching the majority of your video, that actually can really, really help you with ranking your video on YouTube in specifics. Just make sure that is a high retention view and again it has a good track record because that can definitely help with rankings on YouTube. Steve: Interesting, okay. What are you doing? I heard some people talk about we’ll give some formula or outline for what to make, what to put in the video to make sure that they’ll push pass minute seven or whatever it is. Do you have anything that you would recommend there? Nick: Yeah, for sure. There’s a couple of things. The first thing that you definitely need to know, basically how I get all my traffic for the most part is it’s all based on keywords. People come into the search engines and this is just like general in terms of search traffic. Basically people will come in, they’ll be searching for something, I mean you and I have done this just as much as anybody else is that they have a concern, they have an issue, they need help with something. They come into the search engines and they start typing it out whether that is how to lose weight, how to grow tomatoes. It doesn’t really matter, it just pertains to whatever your business is but they’ll start searching things in and then they’ll find your videos if you start uploading videos, you do it on a good channel, you start optimizing it. Your videos are going to start rising towards the top of the search engines. What you need to do when you’re making your videos is that you need to let your viewers know that they are at the right place. Let’s say for example that you did make a video about how to grow heirloom tomatoes for example. What you need to say in the beginning of the video, you need to let your viewer know that they’re in the right place at the right time. You say, “Hey, you probably landed on this video because you are looking, you started searching out how to grow heirloom tomatoes,” right then and there they know that they are at the right place. That's what starts it out and then if you can get technical and say, you need to say this, you need to say this, but I think it ultimately comes down to is that you need to let them know that they’re in the right place and then give them value. I know it sounds stupidly simple but I think there’s many people out there that just like they’re trying to heighten all this traffic, all this stuff through your website. People are smart, you can’t bullshit people... When you’re genuine, when you give value and you’re just a real down to earth person then that’s when people recognize that. People will connect with you just on that fact based alone, they might be coming searching for information they want to learn how to grow tomatoes or lose weight or whatever it is. A lot of times people just want to connect with somebody and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had that happen where people just, they’ll hit me up on Facebook and they’re like, “Yeah, I mean, your video is great and all that but you just seem like you’re a down to earth person, you seem like a good dude and that’s why I came out and connected with you.” Steve: Interesting... I have had it happen before also and I never realized that that was probably it. I’m trying to be authentic on camera, you know what I mean? I’m just being myself and I have people come back and say, “Hey, you’re the man. I have this feeling when I was talking to you I should reach out to you,” and I was like, “What kind of feeling? All right, thanks.” Interesting. Yeah, that’s cool you bring that up... There really is as simple as that just answer the question, let them know that they’re there and then connect with them. There’s a guy I was listening to and he was saying something like, “The first 20 seconds you have to do something crazy to keep their attention. The next 60 seconds then you got to teach a little nugget then the final two minutes do something that’s also a little crazy to make sure they come back next time.” I was like, “Man, that’s a lot. All right,” but that’s so much more simpler route to do that. What kind of timeline do you usually look at when you’re trying to rank a video? You know what I mean, like how long it usually take? Nick: Again, it’s kind of goes along the same thing I was talking about just before and there’ll be a lot of people that say, “You got to make two to four minutes.” I certainly agree to that to an extent because like I was saying before it’ll help you start ranking your videos a little bit more if people are watching more of your video. If you have a shorter video it’s more likely that people are just going to watch more of it. If you have an 11 minute video then obviously less people are just going to watch it just because everyone has shorter attention spans. It does depend on the video that you’re doing because specific keywords especially like I do a lot of reviews. I’ll be honest that’s where a lot of my traffic comes from, a lot of my buyer traffic. That's just kind of a nugget right there. If you can start doing some reviews like that’s going to be some of your best traffic out there. I’ve got review videos that are like 10, 11, 12 minutes long and people watch the majority of it because buyers, think about this, buyers will watch, they will watch everything and they’ll read everything because they're thinking about it from your perspective. If you’re going out there and let's just say for example you want to buy a new MacBook or yeah, let’s just go with that example. Are you going to go to the website and just like look at a couple of pictures and then buy? No, you’re probably going to be going, you’re going to watch the hour long keynote presentation, you’re going to watch the ten minute video that shows all the details and all the benefits and features on the MacBook. You’re going to be talking to people, you might even reach out to a support. Buyers they will do their research. To just tell you, “You have to have it four minutes long,” or, “You have to have it ten minutes long,” I can’t really tell you that exactly because if you just target keywords that are buyer keywords, people are going to be searching that stuff until they make that buyer decision. Does that all makes sense? Steve: Yeah, it does. That’s a great insight. It’s not like a two to four minutes, there's not a hard fast rule, it's just hey whatever is … Make sure first that you’re actually delivering value and answering the question and coming back to them. Nick: Yeah, and if you’re asking for a short answer, I would say keep it shorter if you can but if you need more time to explain everything that you need I think there’s nothing wrong with that. Steve: What kind of buyer keywords? I mean is there’s a trend in good buying keywords, you know what I mean that you’re saying? Like across mostly internet or things that will pull your videos apart because those keywords are more valuable or you know what I mean? Nick: I’ll just be honest, review videos are probably the best videos that you can possibly make. Steve: Really? Nick: Yeah, because the reason people are coming and looking for reviews is because they saw a video or they saw a product and they’re a buyer. They’re looking for more information on that, they want to get everything they can possibly know about that. Once they figured out, once they see your video, once something clicks and they make sure it’s the right product for them then they’re ready to buy right there. Does that makes sense? Steve: Interesting. Yeah, 100%. I was just thinking too I’ve got like, I don’t know, 150 videos on YouTube but 90 of them are unlisted or whatever so that I can put them inside of websites and things like that. Do you have a preference at all? Have you found that there’s any kind of, I don’t know. I don’t even know, favoritism given to people who stay on the YouTube website versus watching YouTube video embedded on a page? Nick: I haven’t really done too much embedding on different pages so I can’t really speak for that. One other thing I was going to touch is the fact that you can actually look at your analytics too and you can see which videos people are watching longer. You can see the average duration on how long your viewers are staying on your video... Steve: Yeah, I love the stat section in the back of YouTube, it’s nuts. Most people don't look at that by a part but it’s pretty fascinating. Nick: Yeah, it’s great stuff and I actually just like within the last few months I’ve really started looking at that stuff a lot more and it’s really helped me. We just go back to the whole thing about testing seeing what works and then start doing more of what works. That what I was doing is I was really taking a look at the analytics, see what the videos that people are staying on for a long time and then just making more of those videos. Because there’s some videos where people are staying on for less than a minute through an average of 10,000 views. I’m like, “Okay, that obviously didn’t work so let’s throw that away. It was a good test, that was some good feedback, I won’t do that anymore so let’s move on and let’s find something better.” Steve: I just wanted to touch on something because this really matters a lot in kind of my world. I build funnels all day long, just tons of sales funnels and that’s kind of what I was looking through on your site mentorwithnick.com which is super cool, everyone should go there, mentorwithnick.com. You’ve got a quiz there and we’re a huge a fan of quizzes, it kind of pre-frame people. You got a welcome video from you and automated email that I got and then a link over to $1 offer. Kind of a cool biz opportunity there or business product I should say. Usually what we do when I build these types of funnels. You just kind of took me through in that mentorwithnick.com is we’ll always take those videos and enlist them and put them inside a funnel. I mean, I never let people just sit inside of YouTube format. I think it’s interesting that you just said … I mean it sounds like almost all of your review videos they’re all on YouTube anyway which makes sense. That’s what people are searching. That’s fascinating though. I guess I’m just recapping that. That’s cool though. Do you ever embed it all I guess, I mean you obviously did on that welcome video with Mentor With Nick. Nick: Yeah, that is one place that I do embed, I kind of almost forgot about that but those are like the only places. Mostly just like welcome videos or I like to call as bridge pages, like you said I do promote different things, different opportunities and stuff like that. What a lot of people will do is they’ll just send traffic directly to an offer and while that can work for sure like I’m not saying it can. Steve: It’s rough though. Nick: Yeah, pre-frame that a little bit and kind of just introduce them, kind of welcome them into your world. That’s a big thing it’s just like saying, “Hey, I’m here for you,” like, “I got your back,” like, “Don’t worry,” like, “We got this taken care of and you know I’m going to introduce you to this thing and you can certainly take us up on that but if not, you know, just connect with us.” So many people just want to connect with somebody, that’s what my whole video is about and after they opt in it’s just kind of saying, “Hey, I’m here,” like, “If you need anything from me you’ll be receiving some emails from me and you know I’m here to help you out.” I think that’s just a lot better way to do things instead of just like hard driving traffic to offers... My honest opinion that’s going to drop convergence but it’s also going to drop your audience where they just think that you’re just trying to sell them all the time. Steve: Yeah, 100% I agree with that and I was impressed with that video that you put out there, I thought that was really good. I always draw out funnels like crazy and in my world we call it funnel hacking. I was going through your funnel and drawing all that out, the emails that came, things like that and it’s not like you need that welcome video, the one from you. Technically you don’t but I thought it was interesting and cool that you put it in there because I watched the whole thing and it made sense to me is like, “Hey, there’s a lot of trust and there was a lot of ...” What’s the word? I can’t think the word. After watching the video I was like, “Hey, this guy is real. That was cool. What a good video,” and it set me up because I have to tell you when the next video started I was like, “Eh.” I don’t know but because I watched you, I was like there was a lot more trust, like a lot more stock in that video. Anyways, great example right there, I thought that was fantastic... Nick: Thank you. I appreciate that. Steve: Yeah, everyone go checkout mentorwithnick.com, that’s an interesting process for a bridge page right there. That’s really good. Nick: Thank you. Steve: Do you send people to quizzes a lot also? Nick: I use that capture page right now because it seems to be converting the best. I’ve noticed that in the past like I even got opt in pages like that up to like 50% opt in rate for all my traffic which is really good. Right now I’m sitting at around like 39%. I mean that’s for the best that I’ve done. I’ve tested with a lot of different stuff and everything else have been kind of sitting around like 32 to 33 maybe like a little bit higher than that. I just use that because it just kind of like gets them invested... They have the two step opt in and you are obviously very familiar with all this stuff and that works really well where you have to click on something that makes it a little bit more congruent. They’ve already invested a little something to make sure they put their email address in but the survey just kind of adds a little bit more like they’re taking a quiz and then they’re like, “Okay.” Now, they need to put their email address in and they’re already a little bit more invested so they’re more likely to continue with that action, that whole congruency. Steve: 100% plus then you can follow up with them, you got their email address and you can re-market to them and ask them if they got the trial. Yeah, great for you, great for them. Yeah, I completely agree with that too. I had this quiz who’s probably about 50% also, same thing. It’s just quizzes are great things for people. It was only like four questions but it set them into my … It was the same thing that you did which is what I was laughing at, “Where did you hear about us from?” and it was like, “Facebook, Oprah, Obama mentioned me,” and then other. I’ve never been on those things before but because they heard those names first and then your name last or even other, it’s a lot more stock also. Just increases your authority like crazy, not that you want to be deceptive but it does give you more authority. The next question was like, “What age range are you in?” and these are questions that sometimes don’t even matter or you can ask questions that just kind of poke them in the eye a little bit. “How much do you make on your side business every week?” “Zero. A hundred bucks,” and then just, “I got to choose the lowest one.” For a weight loss product, “How many products have you tried?” but at the time your solution comes up they’re like, “Man, he’s right. I fail every time at this. I do need to buy this product.” That’s interesting though. Cool. Hey man, I don’t want to just keep taking your time. I appreciate you getting up early to do this with me. Where can people learn more about you and join your world like you were saying? Nick: You can add me on Facebook, that’s a good place. I am kind of maxing that out now. Lately I’ve been going pretty hard with getting people add me and everything like that. My friend list is kind of maxing out right now so I did also start up a new Instagram account, a new Snapchat account which my usernames are Mentor With Nick, just kind of goes along with my website. You can also go to my website like you mentioned before which is mentorwithnick.com. Steve: Mentor With Nick Instagram and Snapchat, mentorwithnick.com also and then also on Facebook. Hey Nick, I appreciate it man. Thank you so much for taking the time again and for dropping all the nuggets you did. Nick: Yeah, for sure man. It was fun. I always love getting on with like-minded people and just chat marketing something I’m very passionate about. Steve: Yeah, I appreciate it. Everyone else usually who talks about it, sometimes they feel alone in this world. Anyways, it’s cool to meet you man and I do appreciate it. Nick: No problem, man. Happy to be on. Steve: All right, talk to you later. Announcer: Thanks for listening to Sales Funnel Radio. Please remember to subscribe and leave feedback. Have a question you want answered on the show? Get your free t-shirt when your question gets answered on the live Hey Steve Show. Visit salesfunnelbroker.com now to submit your question.

Green Meadows Beef is an unique family business providing grass feed beef direct to the consumer. This is the story how the Carey family have built their business of providing raw materials to the end user and the way they have used social media to take it to market     Today’s guest is Nick Carey, Director and General Manager of Green Meadows Beef based in Taranaki.  Green Meadows Beef is a unique family business who have built their business primarily using online and social media platforms.  The business has experienced tremendous growth over the last five years.  Craig and Nick talk about what started as an offbeat idea that has become big business for his family.   In 2012, his family decided they wanted to add value to their products.  This propelled them to launch a paddock to plate system.  This involved shipping products from their farm through their own processing and distribution channels.  Their direct-to-market through online sales has formed a big growth part of their business.   Nick’s father, suggested for them to try and market their beef product directly to the consumer.  They sat together as a family and formed a new way to get their products to the market, and soon, they recognized the opportunity of selling online. This propelled them to launch a paddock to plate system.  This involved shipping products from their farm through their own processing and distribution channels.  Their direct-to-market through online sales has formed a big growth part of their business.   Nick started his career as a commercial lawyer in Wellington and New Plymouth His role in this new family business was in the development, branding, and logistics.  Soon enough this was taking most of his time and he eventually decided he needed to quit his job as a lawyer.    That was a leap of faith for Nick, who has had to adjust to being an entrepreneur.  There were four key problems Green Meadows Beef was solving for the consumer.  These were (1) Time saving (2) Ease of purchase (3) Quality assurance, (4) Provenance.   Nick and Craig also talk about how wildly successful My Food Bag has become.  It is a website that allows it’s customers to order a food bag for a varied number of people.  It is also customized for them in terms of the number of people and their diet.  My Food Bag has revolutionized the industry.  Countdown eventually came up with a similar concept of online selling.  There was a big shift in the market of people being more open to purchasing food products online.  That assured Green Meadows Beef of its market.    In terms of marketing research, they were lucky that Green Meadows Beef was nimble enough to adapt their offering as well.  This included having to tweak their operations on the way.  They started out selling bulk-frozen packs and delivering them through chilled or frozen trucks.  However, it has now evolved to a point where they can customize their own products and deliver them the next day, chilled, through a courier.   Nick’s journey has not been without challenges.  One day, his company’s freight company informed him that they were no longer going to deliver Nick’s frozen meat packs.  As a result, he was forced to change his business model, which led to better results because they are now selling fresh produce instead of frozen produce.   Another challenge Nick has had to face was the price of raw materials.  Over the last three to four years, the price of raw materials has almost doubled.  At the same time. One of the things that has raised the price of the raw product is the price that it can otherwise be sold elsewhere.  Export of demand has been high.   They now run their farm as a separate business from their meat processing.  Each company has different governance, advisers, and processes.  Ensuring that the two businesses were independent of each other will help with succession planning and will force each one to be profitable on its own.  .  However, with the easing off of demand in the United States, the farm gate prices have been affected.    Nick learned to focus on the role of governance and the value of the right independent advice.  Another crucial area that Nick has focused on is being able to get accurate and timely business information, dealing with changes in technology and how scalable that is, and finally, achieving a profitable core business before evolving into other paths.   Another thing that Nick has focused on is learning how to work with his people.  Getting the right staff onboard has been a good learning experience for him.  He makes sure his employees have clearly defined roles, responsibilities, and reporting lines so that he could focus on working on the business and growing it.  Nick has been able to retain his staff for 4 years now.  He hardly needed to do cold hires because he utilized the benefits of his networks.   As for online selling, Nick uses mostly social media such as Facebook and Twitter to connect with people and to build an audience.  They do mostly paid advertising now.  He initially did everything in-house but has started outsourcing it already using a marketing consultant who works remotely for them.   In terms of content, Nick suggests that you keep it personal, relevant, and fun to keep his customers engaged.  With competition sprouting up more, there is a need to ensure that you get heard.  Nick’s friend once said that content is king but engagement is queen and she rules the house.  You need to be able to engage your followers.    Currently, they are on Pinterest and Instagram but it has been a challenge to maintain everything.  They use third party tools to help with the marketing side.  They also use cloud based systems that help cut costs and get things done.   What Nick enjoys about being in business is building something from the ground up, seeing the evolution of that business, and having a chance to enjoy its success.    As a lawyer, Nick had a structured and disciplined career.  At the moment, he says he has very little structure in his life now.  Working with creative types, for example, causes him to work longer hours and deadlines extended.  He deals with it by communicating well with his people.  He says that if you spend a good portion of your day through communicating, it makes the day go so much better. This goes back to having structures in place so the rest of the team can function harmoniously while you’re communication with them.    Nick’s challenge working with his family is ensuring that there is regular communication in terms of what’s happening in the business as well as asking for feedback.  He suggests that there has to be a clear distinction of business and family time.  It is important that everyone gets their chance to have a say but at the end of it, they are able to sit down and have dinner together.   In terms of having external professionals and mentors for his business, Nick says that one of the critical things is finding the right independent advice.  His solution has been to persevere until you find exactly what you need at a particular time.  As your business continues to change, so does the levels of advise.  Nick has found that having an independent director has helped him fill the skills gap.  Engaging the services of experts can be beneficial to his business as well.    Nick does not dwell on the past.  His company has a year end review where they identify what worked and what didn’t so that in the future, they can learn from these experiences. Nick says that in hindsight, he would have focused on margin analysis in his business and having a better handle on his cash flow and budget.  This has become one of their strengths and has allowed them to diversify the business for a more consistent cash inflow.   Being content in terms of business and the industry that you’re in is a mistake that business owners make.  As an example, the evolution of online selling has had an effect on traditional purchasing.  Nick suggests that you need to stay on top of things and not rest on your laurels because you don’t know what’s around the corner.   Strengthen your core business and ensure that it is profitable and sustainable before you venture out into other business opportunities.  At the moment, there is a need to develop relationships with consumers because people want to know where there food comes from, how it’s produced, and what’s going on.    Visit www.GreenMeadowsBeef.co.nz for more information.   TRANSCRIPT NICK CAREY    Craig: Hi guys!  Craig here from The Project Guys. Today in our podcast, really happy to introduce Nick Carey.  Nick is a Director and General Manager of Green Meadows Beef based here in Taranaki.  Green Meadows Beef is a unique family business who built the business primarily using online and social media platforms.  They specialise in suppling New Zealand consumers’ grass fed premium beef, where you online, and delivered to your door in twenty four hours.  And their business has experienced tremendous growth over the last five years.  What started as an offbeat idea and working from home office is now having their own dedicated butchery and retail premises and offices.  So, welcome Nick.   Nick: Thanks Craig.  Thanks for giving me the opportunity to tell a little bit about our story.    Craig: No drama at all! . Tell us a little bit about your background and why you decided to go into business.   Nick: Well, my background was as a commercial lawyer for a few years both in Wellington and New Plymouth.  We as a family, I guess, back in 2012, decided that we wanted to add value to the products we were producing which was mainly meat or beef and as a way to, I guess, cement the family farm and those plans through a formal succession plan, we decided to launch an integrated pallet to plate business which is shipping products from our farm through our own channels and processing channels, as Craig mentioned, direct consumers New Zealand wide through the different channels we utilise it at supermarkets, restaurants, and caterers and of course, direct-to-market through online sales, which is our biggest growth part of the business.   Craig: So, you’ve mentioned that you were a lawyer and then from a lawyer to an entrepreneur, it’s not a traditional path, was it your idea to do businesses with family?  How did it all sort of evolve?   Nick: Yeah.  Evolve is probably the right thing to say.  It was my father’s idea to try and market the products.  Obviously, we soon recognised online was a much easier path than let’s say the traditional paths of standing at farmer’s markets or carport sales or whatever it may be where other people are maybe trying to sell similar products.  So it’s at that time, all of us, I’ve got two siblings.   We all became involved to help form a plan to get the products to market and I helped here on the side with development and branding and things and arranging all of that and then once we launched the business, it became pretty evident that I wouldn’t be able to continue in my day job and helping out with the business.  So it was about, I guess, 3 months in that I gave up…   Craig: Oh, that quick! Yeah.  Yeah.   Nick: Yeah.  Yeah.…full-time paid employment to jump into the business.   Craig: To be poor for a couple of years.    Nick: Yes!  Yes!    Craig: [laughs]   Nick: Forever.    Craig: Forever.  [laughs] Yes!  Yes!  So, when you started, obviously, it was just quite a bit different and there’s a new concept.  Get away from the farmer’s markets or selling to a wholesaler, direct….did you guys do any market research and that actually work out where you had a legitimate market and business…   Nick: Uhm…   Craig: And what are the problems you’re solving which are and I suppose were time saving and ease for the purchaser, wasn’t it?   Nick: That and also quality and provenance.  So those are I guess the 4 key messages or key problems we’re solving for the consumer.   Craig: Yeah.  Yeah.   Nick: In New Zealand, at that time, there was a limited range of producers doing what we were doing.  Certainly that landscape has changed now and more and more are coming on board to be…whether it’s in meat or other ___ farm products or whatever.  The launch of things like MyFoodBag and you know and the whole…   Craig: Which is wildly successful.   Nick: Exactly.   Craig: Yeah.   Nick: And a great example of success in this market.   Craig: Yeah.   Nick: So I guess in…when the business was in its infancy, there was only a couple of competitors in New Zealand.  I don’t even think Countdown had really launched their…   Craig: Right.   Nick: Online sales at that time so obviously, we’ve noticed a big shift in the market and people being far more open to purchasing food products online.  So, with our research, it was really based on looking at producers in Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, seeing what they were doing, what offerings they had.   Craig: Yeah.   Nick: And obviously, because we…we were selling online, just online only at the start, it did allow us some chance to scale as time went on so there was no pressure of having products ready to go with no markets.   Craig: Yeah.   Nick: So I guess, we…we are currently on to building website number three.   Craig: Right.   Nick: So there has been multiple chances to refine the offering based on our own learnings…   Craig: Yeah.   Nick: Rather than…than doing too much…   Craig: Yeah.   Nick: market research at the beginning, I guess, which  potentially a pitfall…   Craig: Yeah.  But…   Nick: that were fallen into but we’ve been lucky that we’ve been nimble enough to be able to adapt that offering to…   Craig: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah…   Nick: to see that…what does that mean?   Craig: Yeah.  Oh, it’s a case sometimes of getting that ___ to market and then work out having to… and having to tweak everything on the way, isn’t it…   Nick: Exactly.  We’ve started out in our industry selling bulk frozen packs and delivering it via the chilled or frozen trucks…   Craig: Yes.   Nick: all over the country where it could take anything from a week to two weeks.   Craig: Right.   Nick: To be delivered to the model that we have now and it’s evolving as you can customise and pick and choose your own products…   Craig: Yeah…   Nick: …and it’s delivered the next day, chilled via courier, so…   Craig: Yeah.   Nick: You know, there’s different challenges that come at you and one of that for example was the freight company telling us, “No, we’re no longer gonna deliver your frozen meat packs.”  So…   Craig: Oh, is that right?   Nick: So your business if often forced to change…   Craig: Yes.   Nick: …which can obviously lead to better results…   Craig: Yeah.   Nick: …because the consumer appreciates…   Craig: Yeah…   Nick: fresh produce versus…   Craig: Yeah…   Nick: frozen produce.    Craig: So there.  So tell us a bit more about the challenges and the learnings you had in those early years and maybe also the challenges you’re facing now and how that evolved?   Nick: Definitely.  I guess the critical challenge for us been the price of our raw materials.   Craig: Alright.   Nick: Just to put them in a little bit of context and background, we run the farm as a totally separate business from the meat processing…   Craig: Yeah.   Nick: Different governance, different advisers, everything and we thought that was a critical distinction from a…   Craig: Uhm…   Nick: …a governance point of view particularly in the family situation so that we had two separate business which were hopefully, hopefully independent of each other, both supporting…   Craig: Uhm…   Nick: …themselves.  So…   Craig: Also that.  I guess it also helps with succession planning too.  Exit strategy is one [incomprehensible]…   Nick: Exactly.  And obviously that’s what we’re focusing…   Craig: Uhm…   Nick: The meat processing business now is taking on a life of its own with contract manufacturing…   Craig: Yeah…   Nick: …and things like that so…obviously anytime, I mentioned it at the start that the farm is very much part of the succession plan but if there were something that caused the farm to go, well, we’ve got another business…   Craig: Yeah…   Nick: And vice versa, we could always onsell the meat processing side of things.   Craig: Uhm…uhm…uhm…   Nick: …and keep the farm…   Craig: That’s right.   Nick: But so…part of it is that the farm must obviously make a profit…   Craig: Yes…   Nick: So we have to purchase the animals that we’re using through the Green Meadows Business from the farm at the prevailing market rate…   Craig: Yes…   Nick: Over the last three to four years, that price of raw materials has almost doubled…   Craig: Oh sh….   Nick: Without a corresponding rise in meat prices at the consumer end…   Craig: Yeah…   Nick: There’s still a certain barrier at the consumer end as to what a sausage or whatever may cost so I guess that’s been the critical challenge that we’ve face and we’ve had to really adapt and change our product offering.  So…   Craig: So what’s driven the price of the raw product up?  Is it the price on the farm to produce that product?   Nick: No, it’s the price that it can otherwise be sold elsewhere...   Craig: Oh, okay.   Nick: So, export demand, primarily out of the U_S where ground beef, easier ground beef is exported…   Craig: Okay…   Nick: …to the U_S and it’s been in quite high demand in particularly out of China as well…   Craig: Right.   Nick: So, depending on what’s happening in those markets, I’m assuming we’re seeing an easing off in the United States at the moment on demand which, of course, is then having a…   Craig: Yeah…   Nick: …a correlation back to farm gate prices here.   Craig: Cool…   Nick: So I guess with that challenge, we learned quite a lot and kind of like it’s focused a lot on what’s happened in the business so there are a couple of points off the top of my head…   Craig: Yes…Yeah…   Nick: I guess the role of governance and the value of the right independent advice has been a critical things that we’ve taken from it, I guess the information we’re pulling out of the business in terms or accurate and timely…   Craig: Yup…   Nick: …business information, technology and how scalable that is, what machines can really make our day better…   Craig: Right.   Nick: Versus culling out some of those manual processes, cause obviously, bearing in mind making food can sometimes be a relatively manual process…   Craig: Yup!  Yeah…   Nick: And then it all comes back to achieving a profitable core business before evolving into other paths.  So, we’ve really focused over the last year or two on what is our core business, how to make it profitable before launching into some other opportunities as well.    Craig: So how do you take yourself out of the business to work on the business around those things you just…   Nick: Yeah, well, as the businesses continue to grow, we’ve been able to put staff into roles that I was otherwise doing, so for example, we’ve just taken on an operations manager who is handling most of the day-to-day production and supply side of the business whereas I’m just handling the demand side and obviously everything else.  So the finances and working on the business so, I guess that’s been a good learning is getting the right staff on board, making sure that they have clearly defined roles and responsibilities and reporting lines so that that then frees you up to do as you say, “working on the business,” and growing it.  So we have that clearly…clear definition of okay, operations manager was gonna focus on the supply side and production, I was gonna handle the demand, so that’s where my focus is now…is on the demand side and when you’ve got the right people and the right positions, everything is fine and it works well.    Craig: So, you’ve gotta run on a fierce podcast business and about staffing.  How’d you go and find the right staffing?  How’d you know?  Do you know?  [laughs]   Nick: I guess, that’s a good question, “Do you know?”   Craig: Cause that’s critical, isn’t it?   Nick: It is and we are fortunate that in nearly 4 years, we’ve retained all our staff which I guess, obviously speaks of our environment also.  The direction that we’re pushing the company.  It…it’s…I guess it comes down to clear jobs…just clear job descriptions when you’re going so you know exactly who you’re looking for so when you find them, you know, they tick all the boxes and utilising the benefit of networks because all of our staff have been knowing to….   Craig: Someone…someone…   Nick: Yeah.    Craig: Someone who knows somebody…Yeah…   Nick: Exactly, so now I’m doing that thing with cold hires but I can see that the next thing we’re already looking for our next staff member, which is scary…   Craig: Yeah…   Nick: But I can see that that will be a cold…a cold hire so I guess that will come down to getting clear…clear pre-employment checks and questions and also making sure they’re the right fit for the…   Craig: thing…   Nick: Exactly.   Craig: Cool.  Awesome.  So, you have used a lot of online tools and platforms that you’ve touched on before to build the business to where it is.  Tell us about the strategy and has that changed over the years and if so, how or….yeah…   Nick: Yeah…It’s a different __part obviously with online selling.  You wanna connect with customers in real time and I guess social media in particular is great for that.  We’ve primarily used Facebook and Twitter for the connecting with people and building an audience at the beginning.  I guess how that’s changed is we’ve now moved from just connecting with customers and building that brand and that relationship through the more paid advertising now.  So we do a lot of online marketing in terms of ECO and pre marketing and also direct marketing through the likes of Facebook.  So, I guess it’s building a network and a platform, which would then turn into an opportunity to market, so…   Craig: Did you do all that in-house, or do you outsource it?   Nick: We did start all that in-house but now I’ve outsourced it.  We have a marketing consultant who works remotely for us, who handles all that ECO and ECM marketing.   Craig: And what about all your Facebook engagement?  Cause I know when you first start your business, you’re massive on engaging with your audience, you do a lot of that at the start.  Is that still done in-house?  Or…   Nick: It’s still done in-house and obviously that’s been one of the challenges I found is that I handle that role as the businesses grow, keep it…personal, and keep it relevant and keep it fun which is how we engage with our customers and perhaps that’s something I could be doing better.    Craig: [incomprehensible]   Nick: I think as we came and set the so high with using that as a focus, it’s kind of…you can easily fall by the way, so…   Craig: That’s so much of a big challenge, isn’t it because that’s how you built the brand and showing you some of the loyalty stats.   Nick: And I’m definitely seeing that with other influences that I follow that they came out with a good solid two years of social media engagement and then now it’s sort of dropped back…   Craig: Yes…   Nick: And I don’t know whether that’s just the maturing of the market and there are a lot of these platforms now and monetising, they’re successors, so it now makes it difficult to instigate…seen whereas in the beginning it was relatively easy but I think you raise a good point about engagement because a lot of the focus on social media a few years ago was all about content and posting the right sort of content but now, I know a person who writes and used to podcast a lot of Facebook.  She said that content is king but engagement is queen and she rules the house.   Craig: Yes…   Nick: And it’s sort of something that’s always always stuck with me because you can have great content but if you’re not getting anything back from the people you’re publishing it to, what’s the point?   Craig: Yeah, you could have 100,000 followers but if you’re not engaging them, what’s the point?   Nick: Yes.  So I think, you know, that’s a key thing to keep it at the back of your mind because it’s not a question of numbers because it’s like you said, it’s how they’re engaging.    Craig: You said when you sell your products you use Facebook and Twitter, yet have you tried the other platforms at all?   Nick: We do have a little bit on Pinterest, obviously we’re in a food business and Instagram, but it’s again, it’s the challenge of maintaining everything.  We do use a lot of third party tools to push the marketing side of things which we find works well and we obviously into the day to day side of things prefer to use online tools for managing the business, whether it be accounting software, our website is all run on a third party CMS which is obviously cloud based and what else do we use in the cloud?  Design tools and everything like that that’s all accessible now which really help (a) cut costs and (b) get things done.   Craig: So what do you enjoy most about being in business?  What strokes your ties?   Nick: Tough question, but I guess it’s with building something from the ground up and seeing the evolution it’s having the chancing to leap at success.  There are days obviously that I don’t enjoy leading.    Craig: You wish you were a follower there mate? [laughs]   Nick: Yeah.  Exactly.  When you bring in HR and customer issues and things like that.  Obviously, you want to do a good job, whether it be your staff or your customers but I guess that’s the critical thing is having that chance and opportunity which I do feel fortunate for that you know, we’re in a position that I was able to leave my fulltime employment to follow something which I could see working and it…with just a few challenges and refinements.  We’re now well on a path to making a success.    Craig: Yeah.   Nick: So that’s pretty special and something that I hold dear and try not to abuse really but it is a bit of a privilege to do this so if I can keep looking at it like that, then it’ll keep me focused and also keep me grounded.   Craig: Grounded, which is what New Zealand ___ is all about.  Cool, you hear that?   Nick: Yeah, I guess we at the start to kinda pushed the business and I do believe in it is we did a lot of PR work which is obviously the opposite to the grounded because you’re having to put yourself out there and tell your story and that can be difficult at times especially when you get…things like TV involved, so yeah, I think that’s a good balance to have.    Craig: So, ____ what have you learned from you know, five or six years ago, when you left the safe little confines of a lawyer’s office…   Nick: To me, just by one and a half years…whatever it was…   Craig: You were very structured and disciplined to doing this.  What have you learned as a leader?  Here, professionally and personally?   Nick: Yeah, I guess a couple of things, you do mean structure, I have very little structure in my life now.    Craig: [laughs]   Nick: Just by trying to plan things, you know, obviously things never really go to plan.  So that’s been difficult in terms of deadlines and things like that as I’m understanding how things work in the real world versus a lawyer’s world where 5 o’clock Friday was your excellent deadline and you wouldn’t dare go past 5 o’clock Friday whereas when you start involving perhaps creative types into the mix and deadlines can often extend.    Craig: Yes.   Nick: So that’s been one challenge for me personally and also from a managing or leadership type of thing.  Communication and understanding the importance of communication internally and externally and you can never really over communicate particularly with staff and things of concerns.    Craig: Yeah.   Nick: I guess that’s another that I’ve really learned is you spend a good portion of your day through communicating and it makes the day go so much better.   Craig: Yes.   Nick: But then it comes back to what I mentioned earlier about having the structures in place so that the rest of the team can function harmoniously while you’re communicating with them…the team…   Craig: Yeah.  And what about the family dynamic, isn’t that communications is key?  Sometimes, the family businesses, they can either go really well which is good or goes real bad because one of the first rules of business is don’t ever do business with family members, isn’t it?   Nick: It is.    Craig: Yes, back to the question.  Sorry about the rain everybody!  So I asked Nick about the dynamic of working with some family members.  One of the first rules of business is don’t go into business with family.  So I guess it has worked here.  From a leadership point of view, the communications point of view, have you managed that?   Nick: Yeah, it has been both a benefit and a challenge to go into business with family.  On a daily basis, I work with both of my peer, so on a day to day to basis, I mean, both of my brothers work externally from the business so two problems obviously, or challenges working with family day in day out but also having family interested in the business but not having the experience or benefit of seeing what’s happening day to day so we have pretty regular communications between in terms of what’s happening in the business, asking for feedback that they’re both very helpful and useful, these are my brothers who don’t work in the business.   Craig: Yeah.   Nick: But balancing that you also have a clear distinction of what’s business time and what’s family time because there’s always that tendency to make family time always business time and I think that’s critical particularly in terms of my own domestic situation as well, I’ve got a partner who doesn’t work and the person that’s end to end in terms of say my parents with their grandchildren and things like that.  It’s still got to operate in a normal situation and we are very open with each other so there’s never any issues in terms of overstepping lines or boundaries.   Craig: Yeah.   Nick: And I think it’s really important that everyone gets their chance to have a say but at the end of it, we still sit down for dinner.   Craig: Yeah, yeah, yeah.  Cool.  Cool.  So you’ve always had external professionals and mentors for your business and I believe now you’ve got a Board of Directors and an independent director tell us about what made you decide that you needed this and the benefits of using these strategies and advise that is out there around using mentors or Board of Directors, etc.    Nick: I guess one of the critical thing is finding the right advice, independent advice and it can be a struggle at times, so I guess what I sort of found is keep persevering until you find exactly what you need at that particular time and your levels of advice and who can advise you changes as the business continues to change…and…   Craig: Evolves.  As the business evolves…   Nick: Exactly, so I think the best thing you can do is get out there and take advice as step one but then if you’re not getting the right sort of advice is going out and looking for some different advice.   Craig: Yeah.  Yeah.   Nick: So, we’ve had, as you mentioned, a range from formal strategic planning with our accountants through the business mentors through to now an independent director who I work with closely on a daily basis and they’ve all had their uses and purpose but having an independent voice daily looks like some of the skill gaps that we have or that I have as well is really important and I guess that’s what I see the benefit…the main benefit of the independent board is to plug the skill gaps and I mean we are looking now at maybe bringing another independent onto the board who has some different skill set that none of us have secure around dealing with marketing to the end consumer…   Craig: Right.   Nick: And events cg and things like that so it’s…   Craig: So it’s skill gaps or experience gaps?   Nick: I guess both are incredibly relevant because you get the skills from experience so I think yeah.  I think both are intertwined.   Craig: And you said before that when you first started out your sort of a range of advisers, I mean, it’s the right advice.  When you start out were you ever nervous and scared about what’s going on.  So how do you know if you get some right advice?  If you’re speaking to for example an accountant and they say you should be doing this strategy, how do you know, is that the gut instinct or it is…how do you know if it’s the right one or the wrong one?   Nick: Yeah, it’s a good question because I guess when you go into business you’re always confident and pigheaded and you don’t really wanna take advice.   Craig: No.   Nick: And then to sit over the table with someone and, no offence when you’re listening to maybe to sit over the table with someone, no offence to any listeners who may be in the accounting profession or something.   Craig: Someone’s profession…   Nick: Who’s telling you you’re doing this wrong, you’re doing that wrong.  You know, it can be difficult so I think it’s not a case of knowing or choosing what that right advice is at the start but getting a lot of advice and really going out there and getting as much in as you can and taking bits and pieces from different sources to kind of form that plan because you and only you, I guess will know exactly how the business is going internally or what your dreams and goals and things are but it does help to get as much advice from them.   Craig: So that could be what we’ve talked about accountant, but there could be other business owners that could be lawyers, other professionals, and that’s where networking comes in, isn’t it?  You realize that when you network, you understand that same…your peers to having the same issues you have even if they might be in a different industry.   Nick: Exactly and as many people you can speak to as possible.  You know, whether it’s just a friendly ear or someone that you admire, in your industry or a different industry.  It can be really beneficial to have that engagement.    Craig: Awesome, so the benefit of hindsight, we all do this.  What would you do differently?   Nick: Hindsight, oh yeah, it’s a great thing.   Craig: No, it’s not.  It’s a terrible thing!   Nick: I guess that’s one thing our plan is not to dwell too much on the past.  We do a year review the end of each year and pick out the points of what went good and bad and then put it together and then don’t really dwell on it too much because again, it’s what you’re looking into the future that really controls things.  So I guess with hindsight, what I would do it has been more of a focus on margin analysis in our business, so which products work well, where we can extract the most value and also a better handle on cash flow and budget so that financial side of the business from the get-go.  I spend a lot of focus now on cash flow and planning cash flow a couple of months in advance and…   Craig: So you turned into an accountant?   Nick: Yeah, well, I…   Craig: [laughs]   Nick: I think maybe I’m turning into an accountant but that was a chance to really tighten the skill gaps that I had.   Craig: Right.   Nick: In the financial management side of things and now that’s one of our strengths where a lot of similar sized businesses I see don’t have a handle on cash flow, which in my business, can actually be quite difficult with online selling because we don’t know when people are gonna bulk buy meat packs and what’s gonna happen which is why we’ve diversified the business from just straight online sales to other traditional sales so that we’ve got consistent cash flow coming in.   Craig: A little bit of advice to people.  Look after your cash flow and mind your  budget, sounds like you’re good at. A couple of hours a week takes to analyse what else has happened that week which is critical.    Nick: I guess that’s one thing that having an independent director allows me to do because we have a phone call every Friday afternoon, which…   Craig: Hi guys, so from your experiences, what are some of the mistakes that you see business owners are making.  So, we talked a little bit about cash flow.  Anything else that…   Nick: Yeah.  I guess, something a little different and that I can see out there I see is that they are content both in terms of their businesses and their industries and not pushing their boundaries and or doing the… trying alternative ways to do things and obviously in the retail side of things.  I guess something else I am saying is people being content in terms of their…inside their businesses and in terms of marketing their businesses as well so obviously, the example is that the evolution of online selling and the effect it has on traditional purchasing, and brick and mortar stores and it kinda seems like…to some of them that it’s come out of nowhere whereas the evolution of online selling has been happening in time over the last ten years or so.  So I think, I see that both as established businesses and the traditional business being content can often come back to hurt them later on.  So, i mean, that’s something else we noticed and why we’re doing things differently as well.   Craig: So, the moral of the story is don’t be scared of pushing the boundaries and thinking outside the square box, just give it a go.   Nick: And also staying on top of things and not just resting on your laurels because you don’t really know what’s around the corner.   Craig: Don’t be scared of what’s around the corner.    Nick: Yeah.  That’s just saying a little bit no matter how established you are.   Craig: So is that the sort of advice you’d give to…if you were to mentor for a better general word, either both established or a startup…what other things would you…   Nick: Yeah, it’s different keeping on top of thinss, looking overseas, seeing what’s happening whether you’re selling shoes or cats, or whatever.  It’s…there’s a lot to…we’re fortunate in this part of the world that we’re a little behind as well.   Craig: Yes, yes…I was gonna ask that.   Nick: So, it’s kind of a good thing I think for us because we can have a look and see what’s happening overseas.   Craig: You think sometimes, people fall into the trap of going overseas either to Europe or America, seeing something, trying to do it New Zealand but they’re too soon   Nick: And obviously given our market size as well as the other key issue here, and also how spread out the market is.  It’s a long way from the top of the North Island to Steward Island.  Yes, I know, I definitely think that’s true and that’s where the difficulty, I guess comes in with what I just see is…do you become an adopter or do you follow…   Craig: Become second tier.   Nick: Yeah and there’s lot of risk, in obviously going out and being an early adopter and it falling in your face which…   Craig: But then fortune favours the brave and…   Nick: But again coming back to what I mentioned earlier on in the podcast is that’s where you’ve got a profitable and sustainable core being you’ve got those opportunities to go out and expand and you’ve still got that core business to I say loosely, to fall back on but you know…   Craig: Yeah.  To pay the bills…   Nick: Yeah.  Yeah.   Craig: Yeah.  Cool.  Awesome.  And so where do you see your industry going in the next five to ten years?   Nick: Yeah, well in the markets, the direct food market, there’s differently more choice for quality and more relationships with…between consumers and producers so I definitely see that as an important step in what we’re trying to stay ahead of because people increasingly do want to know where their food comes from and how it’s produced and what’s going on so I think it’s only gonna get more and we’re gonna see return as one kind of crystal ball return to a lot traditional ways of doing things because the end user or consumer’s putting a price on all those so in our case, it’s manufactured products and more real products and people are prepared to pay more even though it costs more to produce but that’s where I see it headed.   Craig: Alright.  Cool.  Awesome!   Nick: And you’ll be more disrupters, I’ve already talked about MyFoodBank and seeing markets online so we find those disrupters coming into the market so I guess, listening to my own advice that’s where I need to stay ahead of and say exactly what’s happening in the market and what trends are coming up.   Craig: Awesome.  Awesome.  Hey Nick, we’ll wrap it up.  Thanks very much for your time.  .  How do we find you?   Nick: Yeah so we are an online business.  Our website, so you can check out our products at greenmeadowsbeef.co.nz and find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram with our page will get you there.   Craig: Awesome!  Right.  Thank Nick!  Good stuff!   Nick: Sure!    

非常感谢热心听众【Trevino Zhang】对本文稿的贡献！ 赠人玫瑰，手有余香。想为文稿做贡献的童鞋请微博私信联系@CRI罗煜。我们撒花欢迎你的加入！ 听写完的文稿都会由主持人们负责Check，然后发布给小伙伴们。同时，通过对比，也可以学习到很多有用的单词和短语呢！希望大家能够加入我们，让圆桌能够陪伴更多小伙伴们的成长！Heyang：An online post has pointed out ten silly things that city dwellers do, but rural folks just think these people are out of their minds. What are these things and why is it so hard for rural folks to comprehend? Guys, what’s on this list that applies to you, and maybe explain a little bit to us why there is this discrepancy?Nick：One of the things that you already mentioned was the going to the gym in the city (Yeah, I can relate to that.), you said that people who you know drive their car, take the elevator to the gym in a high-rise building and then go running on a treadmill. It doesn’t quite apply to me, I don’t drive, but I do go to an indoor gym. And I think, in a big city, that’s, I know, that’s one of the nicest ways to exercise because you go running outside, there’s traffic, there’s people everywhere, it’s polluted. It’s very difficult you know, you are constantly dodging people left, right and center, everybody conspires to be in your way at exactly the wrong time, and you’re just thinking I’m gotta give up, and sometimes running inside is better. I think, if you live in a rural area, probably running outside is very nice. (Right.) And, you know, I feel more inclined to do it.Liuyan：I agree with that completely, so I think whoever made that list, especially this point, probably didn’t think, you know, the air in urban places usually tends to be worse, so that people do not feel like they want to actually stay outdoors and do exercises, so maybe hitting the gym is the best possible solution there. That’s said, I’m very glad it doesn’t apply to me at all, because I don’t go to gyms, I always power walk, so I walk in nature. When it gets really smoggy sometimes, I just put on my facial mask and still walk.Heyang：Wow, you are a very brave and athletic guy, Liuyan. (Yes, you can say that, that’s how I lost so many pounds and then to keep, keep this way.) Yes, and Liuyan looks great you know, not only has he got a very slender frame figure and also you know you are not one of those sickenly thin people, and that’s really important. And you know what Liuyan does when he is power walking, you know, when he is maintaining such a great figure? What do you do, Liuyan? Liuyan：I listen to Round Table. That’s totally true and that’s not tooting our own horn. Because I power walk usually for you know, close to 50 minutes every day. That’s exactly the length of an episode of Round Table.Heyang：Yes, so our listeners are out there, I know a lot of you have very healthy habits, lifestyle, like you work out, to listen to music. What do you learn from that, listen to Round Table when you are doing that? Yeah, Nick, what did you want to say?Nick：No, I was just laughing, to be honest.Liuyan：Seamless product placement.Heyang：Well, there you go, there you go. And when you guys are talking about like some of the rural folks, maybe why they don’t think that you know, driving to a gym and work out is a good idea or that’s just absurd. It’s also, I think a couple of days ago, one of our WeChat listeners left us this message, but I’m sorry can’t find your name right now, but he said that in rural areas, people probably, they need to plow the fields, they need to do so much farm work, they don’t need to go to the gym. Probably going to the gym and working out itself is just absurd, and they think you know, these people must be mad, having to designate a special length of time, and driving to that place, just to get some exercise. And I think that’s a really valid point too, so what else do you think is a bit weird that has been in the eyes of some of the rural folks?Liuyan：I think one of the things that you mentioned before was some people really treat their puppies maybe too seriously. The minute they get sick, they immediately take them to hospitals and treat them as if they were the most important people in the world. When their parents get sick, they probably don’t even know, so I think that’s actually kind of ironic, and also true on a lot of people.Heyang：Yes, does that mean that we are a bit too lonely that you know, having a little creature that is there for you to cuddle every day, and that replaces the position of a real human being. What do you think? (Uh, funny you had a robot, uh?) Thinking about that too, Nick.Nick：No, I think some people are very very attached to their pets, let me run this past you, a couple of weeks ago, I was out in the street, and a woman walked past me with her dog, and the dog, I noticed, was making kind of strange sound as it walked, and then when it went past me, I noticed that it was wearing four tiny baby shoes on its feet (Oh...), is that normal? Heyang：Oh, I’ve seen that and I found it slightly difficult to understand, but it’s like Chinese people you know, we always take off shoes at home, so you know, maybe... (and the dog does too.)Liuyan：Yeah, that’s one other thing that I really don’t understand, a lot of Chinese people and also foreigners apparently treat their pets as if they are real human beings that need clothing, so I don’t really get the logic in there. I thought you know, animals should just wear their natural fur, and that should be enough. No human clothes necessary, but that’s just me.Heyang：Yes, and what about on this list when there is this other entry that is, having 200, 300 phone contacts in your cellphone, but none of them is your neighbors’ number, that you don’t know you neighbor, what do you think of that one? Is that weird?Nick：It’s maybe weird, but it’s very common I think, sadly... (In the UK, too?) I would say so, yeah, I mean, especially if you live in like a high-rise building, I think you just, you don’t see the people around you, you know you are all in your own little space, you come and go, at different times, and you just sadly, you never interact with each other. And it’s not a good thing because obviously your neighbors are right there, if you have some kind of emergency, it would be great if they were someone you can call on for help, but it’s sadly just not something that we seem to do anymore.Liuyan：Yeah, I agree with that completely, but I think it’s understandable because in China, when you live in complexes, usually we have the thing called Wuye, so sometimes if you cannot find your neighbors, you just go to Wuye, so that already solves all your problems and it’s kind of not necessary for you to have the neighbors’ numbers.Heyang：All right, well, before we go, one last question for you guys, do you think that this differentiation between so-called urban and rural is all that relevant anymore? Nick：Relevant... It’s probably not that helpful I think it’s you know creating a divide where there doesn&`&t need to be one, and it’s probably on its way out.Heyang：Yeah, and I think with this kind of division, it’s not very helpful in the sense that so many of the rural population have migrated to the cities. Some of them stay in the city and become city dwellers and some go back home, so it’s a complicated situation.

Today we're talking with Nick Disabato of Draft, a small interaction design consultancy in Chicago. His previous clients include Gravitytank, New Music USA, Chicago Magazine, The Wirecutter, and too many other attractive, intelligent people to count. We spent quite a bit of time talking about his work designing a delightful user experience for Cards Against Humanity. We discuss... Cards Against Humanity marketing strategy Split-testing Conversion rate optimization And more Links: Cards Against Humanity - http://cardsagainsthumanity.com/ Cadence & Slang - http://cadence.cc/ Draft: Revise - https://draft.nu/revise/ Nick's newsletter - http://eepurl.com/vqJgv Visual Website Optimizer - https://vwo.com/ PS: Be sure to subscribe to the podcast via iTunes and write a review. iTunes is all about reviews! Transcript Recording: This is the Unofficial Shopify Podcast with Kurt Elster and Paul Reda, your resources for growing your Shopify business, sponsored by Ethercycle. Kurt: Welcome to the Unofficial Shoplift Podcast. I'm your host, Kurt Elster and with me today is Nick Disabato from Draft. Nick, how are you doing? Nick: Doing fantastic. How are you, man? Kurt: I'm well. Where are you at? Nick: I live and work in Logan Square, a neighborhood in Chicago and have been here for the past seven years. I've been independent for the past 3-1/2. Kurt: That's good. I'm about right miles from you in Park Ridge. It's funny we're doing this over Skype but we're like a bus ride apart. Nick: We are. We're probably a short L ride apart. Kurt: Tell me, who's Nick D? Nick: Nick D is me as I exist on the Internet and I run a small design consultancy called Draft as you mentioned and we do a lot of things. I publish books. I do monthly A/B testing for people. I run the world's stupidest newsletter but what I think we're here to be talking about is my one-off interaction design product, just more typical client work, more consulting work. I've done it for a variety of e-commerce clients and solved a lot of really interesting problems for both mobile and desktop and I think about these sorts of things a lot. That's kind of ... Kurt: For the lay person, what's interaction design? Nick: Interaction design, it's the process of making something easier to use and it involves hacking out the layout and behavior of a product. That can range from prototyping something and running it by users to see how they enjoy using it or whether they're successful at completing goals within it. It can range from promoting certain design decisions and hacking out functionality. It can involve figuring out edge cases like if you type in a really long response that doesn't belong in a certain form field, what happens? If you click here, what happens? It's figuring out to choose your own adventure capacity of going through a technology product of any type. I've worked... Kurt: It sounds like you're a problem solver for your clients. Give me a good example of a problem you solved with interaction design. Nick: We'll talk about e-commerce stuff. One of my biggest clients over the past few years was a board game company called Cards Against Humanity. Kurt: I dearly love Cards Against Humanity. Tell us about it. Nick: For your audience, if you do not know Cards Against Humanity, it's similar to a card game called Apples to Apples where I'm a person judging a card and everybody else plays another card only it's usually quite inappropriate. You have weird poop jokes or [scathalogical 00:03:03] things. Kurt: The favorite combo I ever got, the winning combo I ever got out of Cards Against Humanity, I will never forget. It was "Santa gives the bad children genital piercings." That was genius. Nick: My personal favorite is 'What's the last thing Michael Jackson thought about before he died?' and somebody played Michael Jackson. Kurt: That one is layers on layers. Nick: Oh my God, I still think about it. It's amazing. I've worked with them to define all of the layout and behavior for their e-commerce system. They now have, in addition to Amazon, you can buy stuff directly through them. You go through and they run through Stripe. It's not through Shopify but it's entirely independent and entirely custom. What they wanted was something that worked pretty well on mobile and they wanted something that was a little more unconventional to fit their business's needs. Cards Against Humanity, for those of you who don't know, they're a relatively unconventional business just in terms of their tone and in the way that they carry themselves and the way that they deal with their customers. Kurt: That has totally differentiated and set them apart. Nick: Yes. I think a large part of Cards Against Humanity's success is their marketing and their outreach. They do a terrific job of both of those but they do a very ... Kurt: I've seen their marketing and it's amazing. They do one-off promo cards. I've got their House of Cards promo set that they did co-branding with Netflix. What kind of outreach do they do? Nick: They do a lot of ... They'll reply to people on Twitter. They'll follow along with people's activity. They'll pay attention to what people are talking about and they'll try and be a little bit proactive about it. As far as their site is concerned, their tone is very distinctive. It's ... Kurt: Absolutely, it irreverent. Nick: Yes, it's irreverent. It's a little bit standoffish, a little bit jerk but fun jerk. It's like [inaudible 00:05:09]. Kurt: Yeah. You love them for being mean to you. It's like Ed Debevic's.. Nick: [Crosstalk 00:05:10]. Yeah, it is like Ed Debevic's a little bit which is a diner in Chicago that ... Kurt: Right, [inaudible 00:05:15]. Nick: It's definitely one of those things where they own their voice and they know how to do it. If you go through the prompts on their Website, if you go to ... I believe it's store.cardsagainsthumanity.com. You can go there and buy stuff and they ask you what country you're from right away. We can go to a UX teardown of why that is but I'll give you the high level. They go to country [crosstalk 00:05:40] right away. Kurt: I'm already there. Nick: If you choose I live in the rest of the world like not US or Canada or UK or something like that, they'll be like, "Begone foul foreigner" or something like that." They'll just make fun of you. "Send us an e-mail for when Cards Against Humanity is available in your inferior country" or something like that. They're just totally blanked up. UI Copy was definitely an enormous component of it. It's part of why I'm getting to this because I wrote a fair amount of the UI copy that is still on there right now. Another thing that you'll see on the page if you go through it while you're listening to this podcast is you'll see a row of information at the top of it. You'll go and buy something, you'll hit Pay Now and you'll see country recipient, e-mail and shipping and what it says is ... It says USA. It'll try and geolocate you and then it'll say, "Not right." You can tap back to that and two things are happening there. You can edit your order as you're going and it reads the order back to you. One thing that you see in Shopify in particular or in e-commerce in general like Amazon or anything like that, it reads your order back to you before you hit Place Order. That's an extra click that you don't necessarily need because you could get this kind of inline feedback. There's no reason why you couldn't get inline feedback. I built the interaction model to fit that and people liked it. There were two things that people called out – the way that the feedback was being read back to you and the way that it was auto-correcting as it goes. If you type in your zip code, it autocorrects to your city and state and is usually accurate. That's pretty cool and it does have for both USPS and Canada Post. It requests little information from you, moves you through the process as fast as possible at the minimum of clicks. I wrote a book that called about interaction cycle, Cadence & Slang. One of the things I say is reduce the number of steps to complete a task. I tried to make this kind of exemplar of that principle by making it as efficient as humanly possible. The other thing that people talk about is when you actually go buy something, which I see you're tapping through that right now, Kurt, that I would ... Once you finish the transaction it says, "Now, go outside" and makes fun of you about the fact that you're on the Internet and it links ... Kurt: It shames you for your order. Nick: It already has your address and if you click "Now, go outside," it searches on Google Maps for parks near you. Kurt: [Crosstalk 00:08:07]. This is incredibly clever stuff. Nick: It's thinking like, okay, I'm on a computer and I'm refreshing it whenever an expansion comes out or I'm doing all these other things and it just wants ... It's like, "Oh, by the way, you're on the Internet. Now, you don't have to be on the Internet anymore. You gave us money. Just go away." That's most of the design decisions behind this. I feel like a lot of people just reinvent the wheel with e-commerce. They want to do something safe. One of the great things with Cards Against Humanity is they don't want safe. They don't care. They want to get the orders okay but if you're messing it up, it's not their fault. It's your fault for this particular organization. [Crosstalk 00:08:56]. Kurt: Yeah, like the whole ... the entire experience ... Like it's easy to use and it's great but at the same time the game ... It starts with a product. You've got this incredibly irreverent game and then that gets extended to the messaging and the copy and the positioning. Then amazingly where everyone else would have stopped, they moved it into the actual user interface. The interaction itself is irreverent. Nick: There are a couple of people at Cards that handle a goodly amount of the logistics in getting the cards printed and shipped and everything. To use a developer term, they are a full-stack operation. They deal with the printer. They deal with Amazon. They deal with the warehouse. They want to build a vertically-integrated system for [crosstalk 00:09:40]. Kurt: I was going to say that sounds like a vertical integration. Nick: They're a good enough business and are popular enough that they can get away with it. They could ... If I did that ... Kurt: It's a great product. People love it. It's a catch-22. People love it because of these irreverent decisions but at the same time, are they able to make those irreverent decisions because people love it? It's like where do you start with that? Nick: I would be putting words in their mouth but I suspect it's kind of a feedback loop. They make these decisions and they realize they're getting rewarded for it by having more business and so, they end up making more irreverent decisions in more irreverent ways. Kurt: Why, yes. You're right. It does. It rewards itself. Anyone could start trying this and if it doesn't work out, you shouldn't do it. Nick: Yeah. I run a large part of my design practice as A/B testing. You could build this and run half of your users through it and if your conversion rate drops, either try and tweak it or throw it away. That way you're not losing an insane amount of sales on your testing idea. You're vetting whether it works for you. I suspect at least certain conceits of these like auto-complete and providing this feedback. I don't see any personal reason why that couldn't exist in other e-commerce context. I really don't. Kurt: Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned split testing. Tell us briefly, what is split testing? Nick: It's essentially you have an idea and rather than fighting about it internally about whether it's a good idea, you let people decide and you're letting real customers decide. This can be anything. This can be a call to action button. This can be a headline. This can be a person on your homepage selling the thing. It can be whether a video autoplays or not. It can be any design decision you want and you have a control page which is your original page. You send that by 50% of your users and then the other goes to the other 50%, whatever you're varying and you're measuring success in sales, signups for your mailing lists, whatever have you. It can be anything that you want. Kurt: As long as it's a measurable goal. Nick: You have a goal, right. You can do this with multiple variations. Most of my A/B tests are in fact A-B-C-D-E tests where I'm vetting many different variations of something and many different permutations of something and testing it with real-life people. It reduces risk because you're running many variants. You're optimizing the page slowly and you're throwing away what doesn't work and learning what does work and where you want to be putting more of your efforts. Even a failure, which is a plurality of your tests are failures or inconclusive, you're still learning where you don't want to be putting your efforts, like you don't need to be fighting over that link, that sort of thing. I always try and frame it in a very positive way. Kurt: It's interesting. The way you brought it up is you don't have to fight about it internally. It's a great way to talk about it because in our design practice that's generally how I bring up the idea of split testing is when the client pushes back on something or they attribute some loss in sales to a change and I say, "Actually, we don't have to guess about it. We could split test it and know for certain." It's usually how I introduce that concept. Nick: Yes. Kurt: As soon as you say, "We can know for sure and we can know scientifically," then people become very interested in it. What's your favorite tool for split testing? Nick: I give all of my clients ... I have a monthly A/B testing tool or a service called Draft Revise where you pay me a certain amount every month and I run tests for you and write up reports and that's it. You never have to worry about the practice of doing this. I use something called Visual Website Optimizer. It shortens to VWO. You can go to vwo.com. For a few of my clients, I use something called Optimizely, if you go to optimizely.com. Both of those are terrific. They have very small differences at this point. It's like Canon and Nikon. They're just snipping at each other and it's making both of them much better. Kurt: I've used them. I've personally used VWO. I really liked it. I used the Google split testing tool. That thing's a nightmare. Nick: Yeah, it's changey. I would pay the money for V. If you have enough scale to get statistical validity out of the A/B tests which typically you need at least 3,000 or 4,000 [uniques 00:13:53 ] a month to be doing that for whatever goal you're measuring, usually it's more, you're probably making enough money that you can afford Visual Website Optimizer, no question or Optimizely. Don't do the free Google stuff. It just sucks. Kurt: The amount of time I wasted messing with that wasn't worth it. VWO is so much easier. Nick: Yeah, don't bother. Kurt: The support is really good. I'm not condemning Optimizely. I've literally just never used Optimizely. That's a good way to get into it for our listeners. If it's confusing or they don't want to deal with it, your service is great. I've seen the reports you run and I'm not even plugging it. It's just genuinely good stuff that you do. Nick: Thank you. It's one of those things where a lot of people don't know how to start and they don't know how to do it and I have two different offerings. One of them is a one-off like I give you a guide and I give you a lot of suggestions for what you can test and what you can change things to, things that I would change. You're getting a UX teardown and a write-up of how to put into practice but I find that a handful of those come back to me and they're like, "Can you just do this for us?" Kurt: Essentially, what you've said to them is like, "Here's a plan for immediate success based on my vast experience and you could do whatever you want with it." I imagine a lot of people are going to be, "All right, fine. You know what you're doing. You just take care of those for me." Nick: Yeah, and they're already used to paying me and I give them a discount on their first month. If they pay me $900 for Revise Express Report and then they sign up for a 2000-dollar plan for Draft Revise, you're paying only $1,100 for the first month which at that point you're not getting charged twice. You're able to hit the ground running. I signed up a Revise Express client recently for Draft Revise and it's been going well. We went from not having anything together to contract signed and A/B tests running on their site in three days because I already knew it. Kurt: That's good. Nick: I wrapped my head around it. It was great. Kurt: When you're wrapping your head around it, how do you approach optimizing a site? Nick: It depends on the site. Let's say it's like a typical SaaS business. I look at the things that I know changing them will yield a lot of fruit and that can be common elements to optimize like your headline or your call to action or testimonial quotes, stuff like that which is very optimizing 101 type stuff. Or I'd look at things that I see are clearly bad like if you have an e-mail list signup form and the button says Submit. Unless you are [crosstalk 00:16:39]. Kurt: I look for the stuff that just like, "This is painful. This goes against every best practice. Let's fix this first and get our baseline back to zero." Nick: Yeah. I break things into two categories. One of them is one-off design changes which are beyond the need for testing. Things like if you make your button Submit. Unless you're an S&M site, you have no business making your buttons Submit, all these other things. Then I also look at things and suggest "Let's test this because I'm not sure." The difference between those two is confidence. I'm still changing things. I'm changing elements on the page but I'm not fully confident that changing your headline to this one thing is going to speak to your customers effectively especially because I've been working with you for only three days if I'm doing these teardowns. It's very like intuition at that point. I will check everything within ... If you're a SaaS business, call your conversion funnel like your homepage to your pricing page to your signup page to your onboarding to all that and then you get converted from a trial into a paying customer eventually. There are a bunch of pages that you have to go through in that flow to actually figure that out. I try and vet all of those and figure out if I were building your site and figuring out your marketing page and trying to figure out a really good way to speak to people, would I do this? I bring in my experience working with dozens of SaaS businesses and e-commerce sites to bear on that and eight years of interaction design experience. That's often something that they can't get internally because I don't know any actual fulltime UX employees who've worked for as many individual clients as I have. Kurt: They couldn't possibly. Earlier you had mentioned to me the other day that you're working on something with Harper Reed. Nick: Yeah. I did it for six weeks. It was a one-off project with Harper Reed. For those who don't know, he elected the president at the beginning of ... starting at the beginning of last ... No, two years ago. It was 2012. Kurt: The way I view it is Harper Reed personally defeated Mitt Romney. Nick: His tech team certainly did. He built the team that ... It almost feels like that. If you read the teardowns of it, they're amazing but he has a startup now which is essentially a mobile e-commerce startup called Modest. It's at modest.com and first project that he did was a storefront for a toy and game manufacturer called [Choonimals 00:19:04], if you go to Choonimals Website. He's a friend of mine. He works and lives in Chicago. He works in Fulton Market. They had me come on and just be another pair of eyes on their UX. They already had a lot of interesting UX ideas there. I'm not going to take remote amount of credit for some of the most novel and fascinating parts of it but I agree with the conceit. A lot of the things were already coming together like scanning your credit card with the iPhone's camera is one of them and Uber does that. There's a JavaScript library called card.io that lets you do that where it just turns on your flashlight and lets you take a photo of your credit card and it scans your number in so you don't have to manually type it and reduce the error [inaudible 00:19:52]. He has a thing where you can buy stuff and it's basically buy with one touch and then if you ... You get a grace period where you could undo that. You can un-buy something and then ... Kurt: The easier you make something to buy, if people aren't used to that standard yet, I think there is a lot of that ... I wouldn't call it cognitive dissonance. Nick: I think you're just thrown off expectations-wise. There's a mismatch. Kurt: Yeah. Or it becomes too easy and suddenly, it's frightening. You have to have that grace period, that undo. Nick: I did not come up with these ideas to be clear. I helped refine them and offer my own ideas about them which is just like fit and finish. The idea of un-buying, you might tap something and it says Buy. It's very clear you're buying something but you don't even get an undo button in the app store if you buy something. You tap it on your iPhone. Kurt: Yeah. I bought a lot of silly things. I wish there was an undo button in the app store. Nick: I don't let myself check the app store while I'm drunk anymore because I just threw up and buy some 30-dollar application that's just ill-advised but this is like they're not going to ... It's a physical good usually. They're not going to ship it for another day at least or five hours if it's [overnighted 00:21:08] or something like that. At which point, you have a chance to take back that notion and edit your order. You barely get the chance to edit your order or merge orders on Amazon as it stands. Kurt: With Amazon, it's a scam. You could cancel an order while it's in progress but once you put cancel, it says, "We're going to try to cancel it" and it's like less than 50% of the time that it actually manages to cancel it. Nick: Right and if you're Prime, they probably already have it sent on a drone to you so you don't even know. It's one of those things where it just seems obvious that you should have an undo button when you're buying something. Kurt: Absolutely. You've got a lot of experience with this. Give me one tip for – obviously this is tough because it's general – one tip for an e-commerce store owner who's looking to grow the revenue. Nick: I'm going to drill down into this tip. You need to make it as easy for the person to buy the thing as possible and easy for them to back out of it and so, cutting down the number of steps. If you're asking for any extraneous information, if you are deliberately asking for both billing and shipping address, if you're splitting the person's name into three different fields, if you're not supporting auto-complete, those are all different forms of the same problem which is you're making the person enter more data than is necessary. Make the person input les data. Nobody likes to fill out a form. You don't want to feel like you're in a doctor's office buying a product. That's the one tip that I've got. Kurt: I guess it's pretty common with Shopify store owners. They want to do less work personally. They want like or go, "Can you make it ask them X, Y and Z thing?" and we'd say, "Sure, we could build out these product options for your products." Then when we do it, their conversion rate plummets and they're like, "Why did that happen?" Well, because you just made it really hard to buy from you. Nick: Yeah. Doing this auto-complete ... Going back to Cards Against Humanity, doing the auto-complete for your address and address validation and making it as fast as it is on that site is tremendously difficult. It is not easy programming to be putting in. Doing this focus is really hard but their sales bear out how they're doing. It justifies that decision. It almost says the amount of work that you put into the site and making it smarter, making the defaults easier and making it easier for the person, that's hard work but it directly connects to your conversion rate and if you're delighted about it ... I can't tell you how many positive twits happened when the first storefront came out that talked explicitly about the user experience and shared that out. It said, "Oh, you have to buy something." Who says "Oh, you have to buy something" about an e-commerce store? Kurt: You have to experience this. Nick: You have to experience getting sent to a park nearby you. That's very unexpected. Kurt: People are just ignoring the product itself. They'll just buy it for the sake of the purchasing experience. Nick: Right. Kurt: People don't think ... They would never think twice about someone making the interior of a retail store nice, making it easy to buy something there but as soon as it comes to e-commerce, then suddenly it's like the strange thing that no one wants to spend money on. Nick: It's funny because Apple's retail stores are beautiful and amazing and their UX is incredible. If you go in person, they swipe your card there in front of the computer and somebody walks the computer out to you and ... Kurt: Have you ever paid with cash in the Apple store? Nick: I have not. Kurt: It's same deal but the cash register is hidden inside one of the display tables. Just like the face of the table pops open. The cash box was in there the whole time. It's clearly on remote. They still use their iPhone and then the thing pops open. Nick: Right. Their UX is amazing but I bought an iPhone. I bought the new iPhone from the Apple store online the other day. Kurt: Did you go with the 6 or the 6-plus? Nick: I have 6. Kurt: You don't have monster gorilla paws is what you're telling me. Nick: No, I have normal human being hands and I don't need a Phablet. I have an iPad Mini. Anyway, I was going on it and I was on the Website, not the app just to be clear. I think the app is better but it was not fun. It sucked. It was really flunky and weird and it could be better. You're selling ... You're the biggest company in the world. You can fix that. Kurt: I noticed that they do one clever thing. You can choose multiple payment methods. I don't think I've seen that anywhere else. Nick: Amazon ... Kurt: If you were to max out your credit card and then finish up with a second credit card, they will let you do that. Nick: Or if you have one of those crappy gift cards that you get from the grocery store, like somebody gives you 100-dollar gift card and you have 18 cents left on it and you feel bad wasting that 18 cents, you could put that on the card. Kurt: You could do it. Nick: Right. That's edge [casey 00:25:58], feasible. Kurt: That's an argument I have with people is about edge cases where it's like, okay, we could fix this problem that one of 100 people have but what's that impact on the other 99 out of 100 people? I think Apple has walked themselves into that. Nick: Yeah. They can accommodate edge cases. I know that Amazon used to accommodate that sort of edge case and then they got rid of it for whatever reason. They probably saw that it wasn't diminishing returns or something but anyway. Kurt: That's a thing you could split test. Nick: Right, yeah. I'm sure Amazon does. Amazon A/B tests everything. I get bucketed into A/B tester of their pages all the time. I find it redesigns itself and I refresh it and it goes away [crosstalk 00:26:42]. Kurt: Or open an incognito window and it's a different site. Yeah, I've had that happen. Nick: Yeah. Kurt: If I wanted to learn more from you, the best way would be to do what? Nick: You should subscribe to my mailing list because it's funny. Kurt: I subscribe to it. I enjoy it, lots of good Chicago references in there. Nick: There are a lot of good Chicago ... Kurt: Like the hotdog story. Nick: There was a story ... It's a dog stand that's very popular here. It's closing this week. That is a very good way to get to know me as a person. If you want to know more about interaction design, I would go to cadence.cc which is my book, Cadence & Slang, and grab a copy. It is generally considered one of the more important texts on interaction design by people far more famous and important than me which is terrifying. Kurt: I have read it. It is genuinely good. Nick: Awesome, thank you. That's the best way to get to understand the kind of stuff that I'm talking about with e-commerce. It's applicable to any technological project but the ultimate goal is just to make things more efficient and pleasurable to use. Kurt: Fantastic. That's great. Thank you, Nick. Thank you for joining us and have a great day. Nick: Thank you so much. Take care.