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Sometimes it's just a pleasure to sit back and listen.  This is one of those moments - for me, certainly, but hopefully for you too.  I had the pleasure of sitting and chatting with two icons of the industry - Sean Conboy and the inimatable nonagenarian, Stuart Clark who is not only still shooting at the age of 97 but is a considerable racontour (you can hear me and Sean laughing in the background throughout!) Stuart started his career in 1941, so his stories are not only entertaining but are fascinating as they cover every photography development from glass plate through to the state of the art digital wizardry we're facing today. This interview is worth listening to every one of its 90 or so minutes! Enjoy!   Cheers P. If you enjoy this podcast, please head over to Mastering Portrait Photography, for more articles and videos about this beautiful industry. You can also read a full transcript of this episode. PLEASE also subscribe and leave us a review - we'd love to hear what you think! If there are any topics, you would like to hear, have questions we could answer or would like to come and be interviewed on the podcast, please contact me at paul@paulwilkinsonphotography.co.uk.    Transcript [00:00:00] Paul: So there are so, so many things I love about being in this industry, the things we get to do, and in particular, this podcast, and one of the many things is having these moments that you're about to hear, where I get to sit and chat with someone I've known for a very long time, Sean Conboy, fantastic photographer, and just a wonderful human being. [00:00:20] And someone he introduced me to, a guy called Stuart Clark.  [00:00:23] Now Stuart is 98 years old in July this year. Self proclaimed as one of the oldest working photographers in the country, and I'm not sure that anyone's going to argue with that. He started training as a photographer in 1940. That makes this, he's been working as a photographer for 84 years. [00:00:46] And the whole of this interview is taking place in what was, his photography studio in a little town just outside Leeds. It's his front living room, but it's huge. It's got a high ceiling and you can imagine how the lighting would have been hot, continuous lights and families just having the best time with someone who I learned very quickly, is a storyteller and a raconteur, uh, just a wonderful, a wonderful human being. There are lots of things to listen out for in the following interview, and let me draw your attention to just a few. Uh, listen out for the flash powder story. It's very funny. Uh, the story of, uh, People retouching, lots of retouching stories from the 1940s and billiard ball complexions. [00:01:31] . Doing multiple jobs in a day. He used to do three or four jobs in a day, and have the timing so accurate that could include photographing a wedding. He learned his craft. He's great. [00:01:42] He's spent time creating images for press, looking for alternative, alternative images and looking for PR images that no matter how much a sub editor crops them, the brand or at least the story is still very much intact. He talks about the utter love of the job and appreciating what a privileged position photographers like ourselves are in every day of the week. [00:02:07] He talks a little about the role of agencies and how they now manage messages from companies in a way that probably they never did. He talks about relationships and he talks about being positive and persistence. He also talks about the role of the Institute. [00:02:24] Finally, he talks a little bit about photographers always being the fag end of everything, but in the end, what he talks about really, It's the love of his job and the love of his clients.  [00:02:35] Why am I telling you all of this upfront? Well, this is a long interview, but the sound of Stuart's voice and the history that it represents, as well as the fact that he's more current than an awful lot of photographers who I know right now who are much younger, uh, but just, there's something in his, his entire manner that is captivating and enthralling, informative and useful. And so, although it's a long interview, I thought I'd just explain a little bit about why I found it so appealing and why I've left the edit almost entirely intact. I've removed a few lumps and bumps where we all managed to hit a microphone as we're gesticulating. [00:03:16] So picture the scene, there's myself, Sean and Stuart sitting, in armchairs and on couches. [00:03:27] And if you're wondering why it took me quite so long, this interview is actually, it goes back to February of this year, and why it took me quite so long to get it out, it was partly because there was a lot of of lumps to remove and partly because it was this trip, this interview, this podcast that I was returning home from when the Land Rover blew up. [00:03:46] And frankly, I think there's a little bit of trauma there with a six and a half thousand pound bill to re, to replace and repair piston number two. I think my heart just, I needed a minute just to not recall it every single time I try to edit this particular podcast down. It's a wonderful interview. Please enjoy. [00:04:06] I know it's quite long, um, but what an absolute legend. I'm Paul and this is the Mastering Portrait Photography Podcast.  [00:04:32] So, firstly, Stuart, thank you for welcoming us into your home. We've driven quite a long way, uh, to come and see you. Sean, uh, recommended we speak to you, because the number of stories you have make even his collection of stories look Insignificant. [00:04:48] And as we all know, Sean, The Footnote Conboy has more stories than any man I've ever met up until probably this, this moment in time. So to kick the conversation off, how did you become a photographer? [00:05:05] Stuart: It was an unfortunate or fortunate chain of events because, um, I was at the Leeds College of Art in 1940, 41, and I had the desire and intention of being a commercial artist, which is now referred as graphic designer and at that time, being wartime, there was little advertising being done, and so, uh, perhaps I was not sufficiently talented, but I finished up working for a firm who were essentially photoengravers, but they had a commercial photography studio as well, and they were short of somebody to join them, and I went in there and became virtually an apprentice photographer. This was very interesting because at that time, again, there was very little commercial photography advertising being done, and so all our efforts, or most of our efforts, were centred on war work, which involved going round the factories and, uh, Photographing for record purposes, the input of the particular company. And in those days, I can tell you that that was not a very comfortable proposition because we were on total blackout, and therefore, all the fumes in the factory, whatever they were, had very little chance of escaping, so you've got the fumes and the heat, and then of course we were only Illuminating scenes with flash powder, which was an added hazard, and, and so Photography outside in the factories was not very pleasant, but inside the factory, or in the studio, we were also doing war work, and that was to photograph silhouettes, scale models of all aircraft of both the enemy and, uh, and, uh, Home, uh, Aircraft for identification purposes, so that the air gunners were not shooting our own planes down in action. And another very interesting thing which I have always remembered was that the four, or the eight cannons In the Spitfire, that was four in each wing, were harmonized to converge at a point away from the Spitfire so that the Fire, the maximum fire point was when those two lots of cannons converged. [00:08:34] The only reference that the pilots had was a silhouette which we had photographed, so that he could visualize that silhouette in the, aiming sight of his  [00:08:50] guns.  [00:08:51] Paul: a very early heads up display.  [00:08:53] Stuart: Indeed.  [00:08:54] Paul: Yeah. [00:08:55] Stuart: And, so, that was quite an important element, I think, of our war work for the Air Ministry. [00:09:03] The main factory was engraving the, conical, rangefinder cones for 25 pound howitzers. [00:09:14] Paul: Right. [00:09:15] Stuart: And at the time of leaving school, everybody had to be doing war work.  [00:09:21] And so I went to the company on the pretext of doing war work of that nature, rather than going round snapping. [00:09:31] Paul: Right. [00:09:32] Sean: Stuart, could you also, um, I mean you've told me many great tales about your time actually in the, uh, armed services film unit, i think that might be quite interesting,  [00:09:42] Stuart: Well, I was called up and because of my interest in mechanical things and gadgetry and so forth, I finished up in the Royal Army Service Corps. But a friend of my mother's husband suggested that I applied for a trade test in photography. And one day I was called up to the orderly room and they said, We've got the movement order here for you. Um, to go to Pinewood Studios, of all places. I don't know what this is about, but anyway, here's your movement order. So, I went down to Pinewood, and we had a trade test, and I think I finished up, uh, top of the, the, uh, examination. But then I was returned to unit at Catterick, and I was up there for another few months, and then I was posted. And eventually, after about six weeks of the posting, I got another movement order to go back to Pinewood Studios, where I started my course in cinephotography, [00:11:06] and still photography. Now, this was the last course. before Pinewood closed down and the unit closed down. I'm talking about Pinewood closing down, Pinewood was the headquarters of the Army Film and Photographic Unit from when it was formed in October 41. [00:11:35] The course included preparation for action photography, essentially. when the course started, the war was still on in Central Europe. but before the course finished, it, uh, the war finished. [00:11:58] And The Japanese War was still going on until September of the same year, which was 45. But we were still being trained, and when the course finished, we had very little to do but just wait to see what happened. And so from September to, um, December of that year, we were just hanging about in the studios. [00:12:30] We were then posted to the Far East, in fact to Malaya, where the No. 9 unit was formed. Having been moved by Batten's headquarters, Mountbatten's headquarters, from Ceylon to Singapore, thought that it would be probably much more congenial there than in Ceylon, India. [00:12:57] So number nine was there and it's interesting to note that right at this moment an exhibition is being produced for the photographer's gallery on Bert Hardy's life and Bert Hardy at the time that I there was, in fact, the stills captain in charge of all the still photography in Malay Command. Or the, not Malay Command, the Far East Command, because we had outstations in Java and Hong Kong, and even, uh, one guy, uh, was in, um, in Hiroshima. So that was the formation of the, the, uh, Far East, Southeast Asia Command photographic, uh, outfit. until it closed down, uh, in September, August September of 46, and we are then dispersed Some went to the Imperial War Museum, the Imperial, uh, war, graves Commission, et cetera, and six of us went back to Vienna, where we joined number 9, Public Relations, because unit had been disbanded completely. So, there in, uh, in Austria, we were doing what they call Local Boy Stories, and we made a couple of films on the Irish regiments and also the East Yorkshire, not the East Yorkshire, the Yorkshire regiments who were guarding and on guard duties at the palace, Shurnbran Palace, which everybody has heard of, and um, and so that carried on until, uh, the Until I was demobbed in 1947, December. came home and went back to the company I originally started with because they were compelled to take people for 12 months. And at the end of that time, I decided to leave I had a bit of a a difference of opinion with the studio manager, who was RAF, and I was Army, and I was a sergeant as well, and I don't think he was quite that when he was in the RAF photographic section, but there was a resentment anyway. [00:16:02] of my presence.  [00:16:03] So, I went to the firm called C. R. H. Pickards, who were one of the finest industrial, uh, and leading industrial photographic units, companies, in the north of England. [00:16:24] It was there, then, that I began to learn industrial photography. And we photographed all sorts of various things, from factory engineering, factories, products and so forth, lathes, milling machines, railway engines, all manner of things. And that's where I cut my teeth on industrial photography. [00:16:56] Sean: And, and Stuart, what sort of, um, equipment would you be using in those days? not  [00:17:01] Stuart: so ha!  [00:17:02] Sean: but how  [00:17:03] would you be lighting these spaces in those days  [00:17:05] Stuart: um The equipment that we were using was always, almost always, whole plate, six a half, eight by, eight and a half, six a half, uh, folding field cameras. when I started, we [00:17:29] were on glass plates. But then the advent of film came in. And this was obviously much lighter stuff to carry around. And every, exposure had to count. Now in today's terms, where you press the button and pick the best out of however many, all we used to do was a duplicate at the most. So we used to There was a variation in the exposure or the aperture setting, and that was the only difference the two exposures. [00:18:19] So what we used to do was develop one side of the, uh, the double dark slides, see what they were like, if they wanted a little bit more or a bit less development, that was applied to second side. And, don't know whether you've ever heard of the expression of, um, developing by, uh, vision. But we used to have a very dim green light, and the sensitive film. [00:18:59] was not, uh, sensitive to the green light.  [00:19:03] Paul: All right.  [00:19:04] Stuart: But you had to be in the darkroom for ten minutes for your eyes to become adjusted, and you could then see absolutely every detail of the, the development process. And when the highlights started to you, to, To show a dark mark through the back of the antihalation backing, then the development was just about right, if but if you wanted a little bit more contrast, then you just pushed it on. If it had been a dull day, a dull, miserable day, then you pushed the development on a little bit further. [00:19:49] Sean: And  [00:19:49] Stuart: you've asked  [00:19:50] Sean: be, how would you be lighting some of these scenes? I'm very intrigued at that  [00:19:53] Stuart: I  [00:19:53] Sean: that  [00:19:53] Stuart: about to say that. [00:19:54] Um, for big areas, we used to use flash powder. And a little bit of flash powder goes a long way, believe me. But it was pretty dangerous stuff. And um, I remember we photographed a wedding on one occasion at the Majestic Hotel Harrogate. And there were 450 people. at the reception and they wanted a photograph to show as many of the people as possible. So we put the whole plate camera on a table stood up there with tray into which I poured flash powder. [00:20:38] Now then, this was actuated. with a percussion cap, like we used to have in little [00:20:46] hand pistols for toys. and when you pulled the release catch, that ignited the cap, [00:20:56] that ignited the flash powder. [00:21:00] So, the exposure was only going to be once. One exposure. [00:21:07] And so, the photographer I was with, he said, right everybody. Look this way, and I want to be making sure that everybody keeps still. [00:21:21] I'm going to count five for you, but don't move until I've finished counting. [00:21:29] So the idea was to take the sheath out of the slide. With having put a cap over the lens, shutter, just an open lens with a cap or a lid on the front. [00:21:46] And the technique was to take the cap off hold it in front of the lens, so that that allowed the vibration or any vibration in the camera to settle down and then take the exposure. the idea was count 1, 2, 3, 4, then take the cup off. And on four I ignited the flash gun and then the cup went on and the guy that I was worth put the sheath back and said, right, let's get out of here quick. The reason for that was that you got the brightness, got the, the buildup of the available lights. then it's just topped off, illuminated with the flash, not a very big one, I hasten to add. But the significance of flash powder was that there was a flame which simply went upwards.  [00:23:00] And that was it, that was all there was to be seen. But, it produced smoke, which used to go into, onto the ceiling, and it would roll across the ceiling, carrying with it the grains of the flash powder, which had obviously changed colour from [00:23:24] silver [00:23:25] To yellow, that was okay. But when the waiters came to move the, uh, soup plates, what they found was a white circle on a yellow  [00:23:47] cloth. [00:23:51] And you can also visualize the fact that a lot of people had a lot of. Little flash powder grains in their hair  [00:24:01] as well. well. By the time that [00:24:04] By the time that this happened, we were halfway back to Leeds.  [00:24:08] Sean: Very good.  [00:24:09] Stuart: But this this was the scourge of flash powder because you could only take one shot. Because the place used to, the whole of the place, the factory, if you using a large amount of powder, made a lot of smoke, and it just collected on the ceiling and it obscured it, the vision. So, we used to use photo floods, these were overrun pearl lamps, we used to have six on a button. And if the subject was still, we could go around on a long lead and paint scene with light. And that was, and that became established, So flash balder started to go, [00:25:08] Paul: Right. [00:25:10] Stuart: but you see, at this time, flash bulbs hadn't really got going. [00:25:17] The GEC flash bulbs, which were foil filled, were about the only thing that was available. Um, in this, in this country. And they were sympathetic. [00:25:31] And the GEC Warehouse in Leeds on one occasion, uh, a consignment of, um, bulbs came, [00:25:43] Uh, [00:25:44] in a, in a case, and, uh, one of the attendants decided that he would test them to see whether they were all alright. [00:25:54] So [00:25:54] he fired one. [00:25:57] and 50 flashbulbs, because [00:26:01] they had to be in contact with each other. If they were separate, it didn't work, but when you put them side by side, they were sympathetic. [00:26:11] Paul: What [00:26:11] happens?  [00:26:13] Stuart: Well, the whole lot  [00:26:14] went  [00:26:14] off. A whole box full of, um, flashbulbs, and they weren't cheap at that time.  [00:26:22] So  [00:26:23] really,  [00:26:23] that was, that was the basic equipment which we used to [00:26:29] use. [00:26:31] And [00:26:32] it was all, [00:26:33] it [00:26:34] was all, uh, 8x6. [00:26:37] Sometimes it was 10x8. [00:26:41] The, uh, the railway engines, which we used to photograph for the Hunsley's Engine Company [00:26:47] and hudderswell Clark's in Leeds, we always used to use 10x8 for those. Now it was interesting there because we used to have a particular date for going to photograph them. And [00:27:04] they were all finished up in black, white and grey paint. Because that served the cost of retouching the finished print. [00:27:15] There was very little photography done at that time. Apart from views and so forth. But anything that meant a machine, a lathe the, or whatever, it always had to go to the process retoucher who airbrushed the reflections or put one or two, put a shadow in or whatever it is. It was a highly skilled, uh, process. Uh, process, retoucher with white lines and so forth. But the interesting thing about these two railway engine companies was. that they only painted them on one side, the side that was being photographed. [00:27:59] Paul: And [00:28:01] Stuart: we used to go back to the studio, develop them straight away, yes, the negatives are alright, as soon as that happened, then they would strip all the black, white, and grey paint off and finish up in the customer's required, required colours. [00:28:23] Paul: Wow. [00:28:25] So, so the bit that strikes me is retouching has been part of this art  [00:28:30] Sean: a long time. Well,  [00:28:33] Paul: I mean, think about [00:28:33] it, right? Because we, there's a lot of debate about retouching and post production. That rages. Even now, but when you think about a manufacturer only painting one side of a train, they're painting it colours that repro well, and then it's being handed on to a retoucher, retouching's been going on for a very long time.  [00:28:51] Stuart: Well of course, everything at that time was, was, um, retouched, and most portraits finish up with complexions like billiard balls. There were no shadows, etc.  [00:29:03] Paul: haha, It's like nothing's changed!  [00:29:07] Stuart: Indeed. Indeed, and, and when people speak now in condemnation of, oh well you can see the retouching and so forth, well the only thing that you have to do now is to make sure that it doesn't show. But, it was, really when Photoshop and the like came in on the scene, this was manna from heaven. [00:29:32] Paul: Yeah. [00:29:33] Stuart: Because it cut out the need to do the work on the actual print. To retouch transparencies was a rather different process altogether. [00:29:48] And it was  [00:29:49] Sean: difficult process to be [00:29:50] Stuart: Oh yes, and very highly skilled. And the firm that I worked for, Giltrous Brothers, who were the photo engravers, they used to retouch twenty, twenty [00:30:02] four, twenty glass plates. Whereby, when you talk about printing today, and I think the, uh, top of the range, uh, Epson, Uh, printer works in, uh, we're printing 11 colors, but the, limited edition photolitho, uh, illustrations were, uh, certainly on, on 13 colors [00:30:36] And from 13 separate plates. All of which were retouched. [00:30:42] Paul: So [00:30:42] the plates were retouched separately?  [00:30:45] Stuart: correct?  [00:30:45] Oh yes.  [00:30:46] Paul: Wow. [00:30:48] Stuart: So [00:30:48] Paul: each of these plates is a black and [00:30:49] white plate that's going to take one color ink? [00:30:52] Sean: Correct. I understood the [00:30:52] Paul: the process right? [00:30:53] Sean: Yeah.  [00:30:54] Stuart: process, right? Retouches were earning more than photographers at any time.  [00:31:01] Sean: It's most interesting to hear this, Stuart, because you come into my era when I was learning photography and the discipline of the transparency, the 4x5 and 8 inch transparency, and of course there, retouching was an anathema because if we retouched the transparency, we started to lose some quality. [00:31:17] Stuart: Yes. we to, it was a period of photography, I think, more than ever, when we had to get everything right in the camera because the client demanded the transparency. Whereas the processes you were using enabled this retouching method, which is very, very interesting. [00:31:29] There are certain elements, as you well know, with your, even with your skills, whereby there are elements which cannot be lit out or exposed out or  [00:31:43] whatever. And there has to be some artwork, or whatever you call it, retouching done. And at the end of the day, most of the photography which, which I was taking and involved with, was going to be reproduced. And so if it was retouched at source, before it got to the retouchers on the reproduction, uh, side. [00:32:11] of the plate making, then that was, it was as we wanted it rather than what they thought it should be.  [00:32:20] Paul: As ever photographers being control freaks.  [00:32:24] Stuart: Well, after something like two to three years at Picards, by which time I got a fair amount of idea of what's going on.  [00:32:37] Um, I decided that, um, I ought to seek pastures new and became a staff photographer for the 600 Group Of Companies just on the west side of Leeds. And there I photographed secondhand machinery, which they used to recondition and I photographed the, lathes and milling machines, drilling machines and that sort of thing, and they were then printed on and they, all these were taken on the half plate camera, which is half the size of a whole plate camera, obviously, um, and, um. they were made on 6x4 glossy prints, and these were distributed by the appropriate department to potential buyers. And I was there for three and a half years. But I'd got to the stage where I'd photographed everything that didn't move, and I was becoming rather dissatisfied with life. So I  [00:33:49] Paul: Do you mind if I ask how old are you at this point? [00:33:53] Stuart: this point? Well, let me see, I would be about, twenty, twenty four, twenty, what, twenty five. Right. Twenty five, six.  [00:34:03] Paul: Right. [00:34:04] Stuart: I was dissatisfied because I didn't think I was getting anywhere. [00:34:09] Sean: So you were, you were ambitious, really, to take your photography on to another level and, and have more control, would you say, over what you were doing [00:34:16] Stuart: you could say that, yes. just say to work for yourself, Stuart?  [00:34:20] Sean: The Thing is that the, the company that I worked for. was part of the A. H. Leach corporate, uh, company at Brighouse, which was, uh, a very big organization with studios in Cambridge, Manchester, Glasgow. Um, and the prospects of moving to any one of those places was stalemate because they were well staffed was no flexibility for moving, and so I thought, well the only way to see whether I am a capable photographer was to make it on my own, see if I could make it on my own. And in fact started the business in some premises now occupied by the local library. down at the bottom end of the village. [00:35:19] Stuart: But this was going on for some time, two or three years, and then the question of getting married. [00:35:27] came into the reckoning, and this house in which we're sitting now became available, and very suitable because the front room lounge in which we now sit became my portrait studio. [00:35:46] And across the top of the window, which is facing opposite you, was a bank of Kodak, um, lighting with five, four 500 watt lamps in each for general illumination. [00:36:04] And So then I had a spotlight which is, was behind you for lighting the hair and then a fill in light on this side. And by this time, we'd moved on to two and a quarter square, real film cameras, 12 on 120. [00:36:22] I hadn't really at that stage got into, back into the industrial scene because I was doing social photography, weddings and portraits, to build up a reserve of capital to move on to buying more advanced equipment. [00:36:44] And the changes at that time were considerable. 5x4 were on the, on the fringe. At the time that I'm speaking of, German 9x12 plate cameras were still being used for press photography. And there they were, on the touchline at Heddingley, these, the local press photographers, with box of 9x12 single shot plates freezing to death, and um, and that's it, one off shots. [00:37:26] But I missed the point earlier on, I think, of saying that uh, every shot had to count. And, over the years, that has influenced me considerably, because I've always made sure that everything was right before I took the exposure. [00:37:48] And whatever the, whatever the occasion was, whether it was an industrial scene or a social scene, you look at the subject before you, to begin with, and then start looking round and see what's happening in the background. Because, if you do that, it saves retouching, and that's an absolute classical instance of today, where people, when Photoshop came, what about so and so? [00:38:22] Oh, don't bother about that, I'll take it out. I can take it out in Photoshop, and I've heard speakers come to the Institute and talk about, Oh, I do this and do that, and I've said, well, how long does it take you to do that? Oh, well, a couple of hours or so, like that. It could have all been addressed in the taking, and that would have been eliminated. [00:38:51] And when you talk about 2 or 3 hours retouching, well how much do you charge for, oh well I'll throw it all in. [00:39:00] And the number of people who I've heard say that, oh well I'll just include it. I think they've got a bit wise to it now because Uh, any extramural activities are chargeable by the hour, and, uh, and it's certainly in need of that, but what I would say to any in, up and coming photographer, they need to sure of what it is that they're taking to avoid having to retouch it afterwards, albeit that in today's terms, [00:39:40] With the relaxation of dress and disciplines and so forth, Um, I don't think it quite matters. And so, I think as far as today is concerned, I would find it difficult to go back to being a photographer in today's terms. Because, I can sit in a restaurant or in a room, somebody's room or whatever, and I'm looking at the, the vertical lines of the structure to, to see whether that line lines up with that, and it's surprising how often I can see lines that are out, even buildings. [00:40:27] I could see buildings that, that were not, um, vertical. completely vertical and line up with the I sit there looking at the streets and doors and windows and it's very, it's very difficult to get out of that discipline into the much more free and relaxed attitude towards photography today. [00:40:56] I don't know whether I, whether you would agree with that or not. [00:41:00] Sean: Stuart, I would agree with what you're saying and it's like the photographer's eye, your whole life has been trained by your eye viewing scenes and viewing situations and it's quite impossible to turn that off really. [00:41:10] That's part of you and how you see things, so no, I couldn't agree with you more. So Stuart, tell me, you obviously, the room we're in now was your studio, and you're in here, you're now married, you're doing more social photography, as you said, and obviously starting to make money. Where did the business go from there? [00:41:29] What was your sort of next stage really? Because I believe you had another studio then in the village, is that correct?  [00:41:35] Stuart: The children grew up and we were running out of room space, [00:41:40] So an opportunity came in the main street down the road to take over a building, um, which I was able to use the ground floor and turn it into a studio, a reception studio and darkroom. And, uh, during that time, I was doing, um, mainly social photography, but also, I had got associated with the local newspaper which circulated in this area, and I virtually, without being on the strength, I virtually became the staff photographer for the whole of the circulation area. [00:42:32] So on a Saturday in the summer, it was not unknown for me to do perhaps 11 cover 11 eventualities such as garden parties, a flower show, etc. and also fit in a complete wedding. So, [00:43:00] Paul: So,  [00:43:00] Stuart: so [00:43:01] my time, my, my mind used to work like a, like [00:43:07] a clock, uh, a precision clock, because it was, it was timed to the nth degree. Um, what time is the, uh, what time is the wedding? How long will the service be? Where's the reception? And I had a mental, uh, mental, uh, memo of the distance from here to there, and the length of time it takes to get from, from there to there. [00:43:36] And, as far as the, as the newspaper is concerned, I tried to take a different picture. at each occasion, so that we don't want the same picture of women serving tea, uh, for the WI, the church of this and that and the other. Um, I tried to make a different picture. So that training and experience fitted me in good stead for when the industrial scene tailed off. [00:44:15] Sean: I've just, uh, I've just, um, picked a photograph up here. [00:44:18] Stuart's got quite a number of his photographs in the room with us here. It's a very nice PR, press type shot here of Harry Ramsden's Fish and Chips shop, and it's got a very 1980s mobile phone and the world famous in this part of the world, Nora Batty which some of you may know from a famous last of the summer wine tv show and i think this is to do with the flotation of Harry Ramsden because it became quite a successful company didn't it so talk a little bit about this photograph Stuart it's very captivating and i think very very well executed [00:44:50] Stuart: Well, the story as you've already identified, I'm surprised that you have, because that was when they went public. And, uh, the, story was the Harry Ramsden fish restaurant, which, it was the center of all activities, just on the outskirts of Leeds, and they, as you said, they got Nora Batty there, who was a very leading personality at the time, and, of course, telephones, you can see the size of that, that mobile telephone, which is about the size of a half of a brick. Um, this was the, um, the story. And the essential thing was to locate the seed of the picture with the name of the, the company. across the top of the, the print or the format. [00:45:46] Sean: And if I could just butt in there Stuart just to say sorry to do this but I think it's important to get this across that I've just picked this image up and the story has come straight across to me. We've got the mobile phone. You've got the Financial Times, which is holding the fish and chips. You've got the sort of banker type chap behind her. [00:46:02] It just shows the skill that's gone into that picture, that an image is telling that story to me all these years later. Because I presume this photograph is 30 or 40 years old, Stuart. Am I correct there?  [00:46:12] Stuart: It's quite a long time. And the essential thing about that picture, uh, Sean, is that however much a sub editor chops it down. There was always be something of the story there, because the nearest or the furthest down that they could chop it would be across the top of the bloke's head, but it would still say Harry on the left hand side. [00:46:42] And, and, that was the, the art of, at that time, of getting the story across for public relations. Include the company's name or the brand in the background somewhere so that it had to be seen and it couldn't be taken out.  [00:47:03] Paul: I ask you a question? Have you always loved being a [00:47:06] Stuart: being a photographer? Oh, absolutely.  [00:47:09] I wouldn't do anything else. Um, had a very enjoyable life in every aspect of it. And I'll tell you one thing about it, and Sean will agree with me on this. Photography, photographers are in a very privileged position, and they don't realize how much so. Because so often, they are in, at the ground floor of activity. A conference, a confidential conference projecting the aims of the company. [00:47:46] I was in a company when I was in the conference actually, when the whole of the regional bank managers were in a conference at Harrogate, and they were told then, that we were going to dispose of the buildings, our assets, and I photographed several banks which were up for sale and they were simply being sold off. The managers didn't know. What's the photograph for? Oh, it's just for the estate. I knew what they were, why they were selling it. It was going on the market. [00:48:25] You know all these little convenience grocery shops and so on, on filling stations, I was in the conference there for all the ESSO managers in the region, when the the project was put to them that we're going to put these little kiosks, or whatever it is, and, and, and there I was. Um, and we were privy to information that was light years ahead of the actual official announcement. [00:48:59] Paul: Yeah. [00:48:59] Stuart: Metahall, for instance, um, I was in the conference when they were talking about what their footprint was needed to be to make that viable. And there are several instances such as that. And you do get it to a more personal level, where we've got, uh, injuries, personal injuries to photograph. [00:49:26] Oh well, what about Snow? [00:49:29] Well, [00:49:29] And you just can't get involved with passing that or repeating that information. [00:49:35] Paul: Yeah. [00:49:36] Stuart: It's confidential. And as I said, photographers are so often right in the heart of things. And I'm sure, Sean, that in today's terms, you'll be more exposed to it than I was with them. [00:49:51] Sean: Well, very much so Stuart. [00:49:52] Very much so. Yeah. I mean, it's, I can't tell you how many NDAs I've signed in my career, so, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.  [00:50:00] So Stuart, so you've now got the studio, the, the biggest studio now on in the, in the, in the village here. And you're obviously doing your social, your weddings, you're obviously doing a lot of PR. [00:50:11] Did you start to do, did the industrial photography come back a little bit more as well? [00:50:15] Stuart: Yes But I was, I was extremely fortunate and the odd thing about it was that the connection came through the, uh, the work of the local paper because three miles from here was the control room for the Central Electricity Generating Board and they were having an open night and the local paper was invited to to cover the, the event. So I went along and took a few photographs of whatever was going on and had a bit of a look around the place and subsequently then I was approached by their, their public relations department for the northeast region. Would I take a photograph of something else?  [00:51:13] From that stemmed the work, which really became the mainstay of my activities with the Central Electricity Generating Board. [00:51:26] Again, I wasn't on the staff, but I was vir, virtually became the staff photographer for the Northeast Region. And the amazing thing is that here I was, photographing power stations, the grand openings of power stations, starting with Thorpe Marsh, which was the, down in Doncaster, which had two 400 megawatt sets, which were the f The Forerunner, they Thorpe Marsh was really the testbed for the, um, the 400 megawatt stations which followed. [00:52:13] And there again, this was being in on the ground floor whenever there was a fault down there or whatever. or a problem, um, I was called in to, to, to take the photographs.  [00:52:27] Sean: So [00:52:28] Stuart, would you say that, um, he's very interesting listening to this about how your business built. Would you say that networking was a great part of building your business? [00:52:37] Stuart: Networking, well they call it networking now, and it's, it's contacts really. And I think, I'm sure that you'll agree that being in the right place at the right time, and that really applies to anything, the theatrical world, et cetera, and, not necessarily knowing the people, the right people, but getting on with them, and being able to mix with people, and behave in a way that people expect you to. So  [00:53:10] Sean: Would you have any sort of advice or tips for a young photographer or somebodnew breaking into photography and how to. build a business? Have you anything to add there at all?  [00:53:22] Stuart: I think that in today's terms, it is extremely difficult for photographers. And I'll tell you why, because I think that the opportunities which I just mentioned are remote, probably remote in the extreme. Social photography is something else, and the, the website, and all the various media opportunities, with which I am unfamiliar and have no knowledge of because I've not had the need to do it. But I am aware because I look at what people are doing. And that's another instance of success. Of keeping an eye on what other people are doing. If you admire anybody's particular work, then that sets the example and the criteria to work to. But as far as going back to contact is concerned, I have the distinct impression now that not only photography, but everything now stems from public Relations and I don't know whether you've noticed it or not, but if there's, if there are any problems, on the one hand, of people's behavior or their activities, or whatever it may be, adversely or favorably, and the promotion of brands and industries and business, it all seems to stem now very much from the agencies.  [00:55:12] If you read question of the so and so company are going to introduce this product or [00:55:22] service or whatever it is, or they've taken over a business. the [00:55:27] statements attributed to the managing director or chief executive or accountant or whatever it is, right across the board, a great many of the people that are being quoted, I would suggest, are not capable of speaking and thinking the way that the statement appears in print. And it raises sometimes, a lot of suspicion as to just what is behind this thing. This business with the post office. It's full of it. And so the point that I'm making is that advertising agencies, that's another one, the advertising agencies are in direct contact with the, um, with the brand or the company. [00:56:24] And so the opportunities of the photographers, in my judgment, are minimized because of the hold. that the advertising agencies have on the job.  [00:56:43] And  [00:56:43] they,  [00:56:45] they will say who they want and who should be employed. They may think them best or otherwise. And it also then comes down to, rights, and I bet you are right in the thick of this, that, uh, you are the, the favorite bloke on the, on the block, and whilst ever that person is engaged in that company, your situation is secure. But suddenly, if he goes to pastures new, and they've already got their established photographers, as far as you're concerned, you've lost that company. [00:57:28] Sean: Very  [00:57:28] Stuart: company.  [00:57:29] Sean: very true. Yeah, yeah.  [00:57:30] Stuart: Is it true? [00:57:31] Paul: But there's always opportunities with these things, I mean, in the end, there are more photographs being created today than ever historically, I think you're right about the structures of advertising agencies, though this isn't my world, when someone moves on, there's an opportunity, and there's always the opportunity to stay as well, there is risk, of course there's risk, but equally, you could be the guy he takes with you. [00:57:54] So how do you make that happen? [00:57:56] Sean: Well, I think it's very apt because I've had two or three key clients in my career that have moved numerous times, you know, seriously big companies and they've taken me with them, yeah. And not only that, in some cases, they've taken me to their new company. And it's gone well. They've then moved on to another company and taken me with them, but the company they've left still retains me. [00:58:19] So there's a benefit that way. But I think it's really, I greatly believe in the, in the networking, keeping in touch with people, making an effort at all times. And I think, I know we've got today's digital world and there's lots of advantages to that, but also personal contact I think is still really, really important. [00:58:38] Relationships and personal contact. [00:58:40] Stuart: What you are saying is, is correct. And I remember an uncle of mine who was a milkman and, had a, a big dairy, and he once said to my mum, oh, well, it's so and so, he's come again, a rep has come. It's been three times, so really it deserves an order. [00:59:03] There's a  [00:59:04] lot  [00:59:05] Paul: in [00:59:05] Stuart: a lot in [00:59:06] truth in that, backs and it backs up what you were just saying, of keeping in contact, and, of course as far as advertising is concerned, or mail shots. the first one they take no notice of and throw away. The second one, oh well, there's another one from this so and so. The third one, it is usually reckoned that the person will be activated by that And so, as you said, keeping in contact is very important. [00:59:42] But I'm bound to say that breaking in a lot of it is by accident, but certainly the persistence of contact is very important. [00:59:56] And when you consider, you see, over the years we have thought of Only the Institute, or I have, and I've done, I've put a lot of time and work into it, as other people have, without which we might have been a lot more better off or a lot wealthier than we in fact are. [01:00:20] Sean: Stuart, did, did, when we say the institute, it's the British Institute Professional Photography we're talking about here. And I, I'm a member too, and that's how I met Stuart through the institute. Through your long career as a photographer, how important did you find the, The Institute and the ability to mix and talk and, and, and work, you know, get information from other photographers, I suppose. [01:00:41] How important did you find that  [01:00:44] Stuart: Photographers, um, are, as you know, very, very much individualists. they work a lot on their own, and when you consider that there are probably 7 or 10, 000 practicing photographers in this country, and so few of them belong to anything.  [01:01:10] It makes you wonder how all those people survive. but, it really comes back to, to, uh, what we were saying earlier, of contact, those people must be in contact with other people. [01:01:29] Their reputation goes before them, obviously, and when you consider the situation with the Royals, for instance, who, from time to time, have official photographs taken, um, by names that I've never heard of, where you would perhaps expect that they are members of the, this organization, the Royal Photographic Society, as a case in point. Um, these people are not members of them and so how they I'm not talking about the Litchfields, I'm talking about the other people who officially, officially photograph, uh, in recent times, the, um, William and Kate's family, the, their birthday or whatever anniversary it was. So, those people, um, are plowing their own furrow. [01:02:33] But going back to the the meaning of the institute, whereby people are individual, the opportunity over the past years was for all these individuals to rub shoulders with each other and the networking that went on then. For instance, you go to a meeting and you're chatting away, and a couple of blokes have a common, common interest, uh, uh, or they're equal practitioners, but suddenly, one of them comes up with a problem that he can't answer, and so he's able to phone this guy in Nottingham, or wherever, because he is not in competition down the street. He can't ask the guy down the street how to tackle the question, but the man in Nottingham will willingly bare his soul for you, and keeping in contact with, um, with other people to solve problems where they have them is incredibly useful, in my judgment.    NOTE: to see the rest of the transcript, head over to https://masteringportraitphotography.com (it exceed the normal limit for podcast texts!)

Join host Adam Larson and special guest Paul McManus, as they discuss the importance of personal branding in today's accounting and finance industry, and how it can help you stand out from the crowd. Paul is a podcast host, the author of the book “The Short Book Formula” and the co-founder and CEO of More Clients More Fun.  Discover the power of writing and publishing a book as a means to enhance your personal brand and become a thought leader in your field. Explore practical tips and insights on how to effectively communicate your expertise, simplify complex concepts, and engage with both experts and non-experts alike. Don't miss this episode that will empower you to create expert status and level up your career as a financial professional.Full Episode Transcript:Adam:            Welcome back to Count Me In. In today's episode, we have a special guest joining us, Paul McManus. To discuss the power of personal branding for accounting and finance professionals. Paul is a podcast host, the author of the book The Short Formula, and the co-founder and CEO of More Clients More Fun.  We'll explore why personal branding is crucial in today's competitive landscape, and how it can elevate your status as an expert in your field. Paul, an accomplished author, with multiple bestsellers on Amazon, will share his insights on how creating a book can enhance your personal brand and establish you as a thought leader. We'll also touch upon the challenges professionals face when approaching the idea of writing a book and how to overcome them. Let's get started. Paul, I want to thank you so much for coming on the podcast, today. We're really excited to talk about personal branding and becoming better versions of ourselves through that type of work. And, maybe, we can start off by talking about why things like personal branding are, especially, important for today's accounting and finance professionals. Paul:               Definitely. Thank you for having me, I appreciate being here. I think personal branding is one of the things, whether you're a small business owner, or whether you work at a firm, as a professional.  At the end of the day, when you're growing your business, or whether you're looking for promotions and to make a bigger impact in your world. Nothing, well, not nothing, but personal branding can be one of those things that help you differentiate yourself from everybody else.  One of the ways that I, primarily, focus on to help professionals with their personal branding is to help them write and publish a book. Which I know is something, again, I talk to a lot of financial professionals and I ask them if they've considered it, and many have. But it just seems like one of those daunting tasks that it's on someone's bucket list, but they never quite get to.  So, as part of the personal branding question that you asked, I'd love to deep dive, as appropriate, into how a book can really help accountants, and other finance professionals really take their personal brand to the next level. Adam:            Yes, definitely, when you think about writing a book, some people think, "Oh, no, I have to write this thousand-page book, and it's going to take six years, ten years of my life. But if anybody has looked at the show notes for this event, if they've looked at what you do. They've seen you written multiple books and they've been on Amazon bestseller. So how does creating that book really enhance your personal brand and elevate your status? Paul:               Yes, writing a book is one of those things that has a long history that people respect. I think there's really two things that help professionals stand out. One is writing a book, another is public speaking. There is the old quip from Jerry Seinfeld on the public speaking side that if you're at a funeral; would you rather be giving the eulogy or be in the casket? And the joke was, well, most people would rather be in the casket because they're terrified of public speaking.  But I think just the act of getting up and speaking in front of people, is just one of those things that most people are afraid of, and so they respect. It's the same thing for writing a book. It's something that just in our culture, there's a tremendous respect for someone who's put in the work, done the work, and who has written and published a book.  Because it's one of those things that really differentiate yourself from everybody else in the field. It's one of those things that people think about, talk about, and more often than not, never do. And there's a variety of benefits to doing it, personal branding be one of them, which we can go deeper on. And, then, there's also a variety of reasons why people never take that action. So, on the plus side, we want to be clear about why do it.  There's a great Simon Sinek talk about begin with why, and when your why is clear, then, you get that much more clear on the motivation and the how. And, so, let's talk about the why, from multiple ways to think about it.  So, again, if you are one of those professionals that does any work in the capacity, as a business owner. So let's say maybe you're a fractional CFO and you're looking to attract clients. Let's say that you work with clients themselves and, maybe, what you do is more difficult to understand. The ability to articulate your core knowledge through a book, way that is interesting and simplifies it to an outside audience. Especially an outside audience of non-experts, is a very powerful way simply to communicate.  I find that writing a book, it's a personal growth endeavor. Oftentimes you start with a blank page and you think, "Okay, what do I know about this topic?" And after a few minutes, you're like, "Oh, that's it." And, so, you have to say, "Wait a minute, I know more than this." And it really challenges you to think about what you know, and why is that important, and who's interested in that. How can you communicate that in a way that's effective? How can you use stories?  Oftentimes, especially, with accountants and other finance professionals, what I find is that there's a lot of jargon. There's a lot of technical terms. There's a lot of things that they understand implicitly through experience and study, but for a non-expert, they get lost. And, so, it's how do you communicate ideas in such a way that is relatable to whomever you're speaking to?  And, so, throughout that process, and we talked about personal branding a little bit, but it really helps you create leadership skills, communication skills, and those things all come together. And, so, whether you're looking to sell more, get a promotion, or simply be more effective at your job. The act of writing and publishing a book is an amazing vehicle to help supercharge those efforts. Adam:            Mm, yes, it's interesting because when you think about it, if you don't know how to explain what you're doing. If you don't know how to articulate it in a very good way. How can you be that storyteller, be that business partner? Whether you're in a firm and you're trying to go alongside the C-suite and make sure you're telling the story right, of what's happening financially.  But, also, if you're trying to build your own business, you got to be that. And there's that word that comes up, thought leader, and I think that word is thrown around a little too much. But, maybe, you can explain what does it mean to be a thought leader and how does that boost your brand, as you're building up this idea of writing a book? Paul:               Yes, I like that question. So before I get into thought leader, I want to talk about one of the opposites, almost. And it's an idea that you, probably, heard of and is known as Impostor Syndrome. And there are so many people that I talk to, come to me in one of two ways when we start talking about writing a book. On the one side, it's either "I have so much knowledge that I want to share with the world." And then, of course, they run into the challenge of "Where do I start?" On the other side, it's, "Who am I to talk about these ideas? What I do is very average and ordinary. Would people be interested in what I know?" And that's a form of Impostor Syndrome. And, so, as a starting point, in either case, what I love to be able to help people do.  On the one side, if they have a lot of knowledge and ideas that they want to share, is how do you simplify and focus that to a core message. That you have a core audience for and it resonates with them, and they're motivated to learn more about, ultimately, how you can help solve a problem, in most cases. Help them create that transformation from where they are to where they want to be, and do so in a compelling way that engages them and interests them. Then on the other side, if someone is stuck and thinking, "What do I have to share?" What I love doing with them, is really showing them it's like almost falling in love again, with all the amazing knowledge that you've learned. I mean, all of us, we've put years into our craft, into our profession. We've learned really cool things and, over time, because it becomes so routine and we don't actively think about it, let's say we get bored of it. Or it's just so routine that we forget how amazing it was the first time that we, actually, learned how to do something.  The first time I learned how to do something, I'm like, "This is the best thing ever." And, then, a week later, or a month later, it's like "I do that all the time." So I wanted to establish that first. Because, now, when you think about a thought leader- what is a thought leader? And there's a progression of what's considered a thought leader.  But, I think, first and foremost, it's someone who's perceived to be an expert on a subject. I think a lot of people go to university, get degrees, have some initials after their name, but I don't think they're perceived as thought leaders. I think that's considered pretty standard, pretty average.  But someone that's willing to go publicly and put their ideas out in public in the form of a book, or speaking and talking about a book. And when people listen to them or read their work, they see that they have a point of view, a cohesive set of ideas, and they can explain that in such a way that's informative or persuasive. That becomes the basis, in my mind, at least, of becoming a thought leader.  Now, the more exposure you get, the more media you do, the more you write, the more people are aware of you. I think that, then, grows your influence and, by definition, your thought leadership, and that's just really a factor of awareness of what you do. And, so, the more people you talk to, the more people know your work, the bigger your, quote-unquote, "Thought leadership" becomes.  I think at the end of the day, though, and what I do, I attract a lot of my clients through LinkedIn, and these are people that I don't know who they are. I've reached out to them in some form, or I've created awareness in some form because I work with financial professionals.  And, so, they are attracted by marketing in one way or the other. They read my book, they listen to a podcast, and then, at some point, they show up on my calendar, and it's that awareness through ideas, thought leadership, it could be described as, that can take someone who's a complete stranger, but attract them to you in a way that you want them to. And there's a lot of different applications there to do that.  I don't want to overemphasize what thought leadership is and make it this grandiose thing, that only a certain few select people do. I think any of us can be a thought leader, and it just takes the willingness and desire to package some of our knowledge, and be willing to put it out there in the public sphere. Adam:            Yes, I mean, the way you explained it, really makes a lot of sense because, I think, it's been a term that's been thrown around a little too much. But it's helpful to make it more applicable, saying, "Hey, anybody can be a thought leader because you have knowledge, you have experience, and it's just about sharing that knowledge."  So how does one get over that Imposter Syndrome that you talked about? Because I feel like the first step would be to, "Hey, how do I overcome my Impostor Syndrome?" Because you may realize, listening to this podcast, "Hey, I do have a lot of things I can share, but I don't know if I'm able. I don't know if people want to listen to me." Right there, the definition of that Imposter Syndrome. So how does one start overcoming that to move to the next step? Paul:               Yes, there's a quote that I learned from one of my mentors, maybe, 10 years or so, ago, his name is Michael Port, and he talked about learning in action. And what that means, to me, because I've really built up my current business from the ground up, over the past nine years. And when I started I didn't know a lot, and it was just I have to go out there and put up my shingle. And, then, as an entrepreneur, you have to figure stuff out. And it's just willing to take action, being willing to be uncomfortable.  I think the two components that are important there is that, one, you have a desire. You have an end result that you want to achieve. I mean, if you don't have motivation, then, chances are you're not going to follow through on it. So you want to have that why clearly established. Why is this important to you?  Why are you doing this?  And once you're clear on that why, then, you have, ultimately, the fuel that's going to propel you forward. I think the second part of that is to not go it alone. I think in any endeavor, in life, having a coach in some capacity. Someone that you have as a sounding board, someone you can bounce ideas off. Someone who's gone before you and can make the path that much easier to trot. I think those things are all extremely helpful in overcoming the Impostor Syndrome. So much of the time, it's just this small voice in our head that says, "You can't do this." Or "What are you doing?" And what you need, what's beneficial is to have someone supportive around you. Whether it's a coach or a group that can challenge you and say, "No, you absolutely have every right to do this." I want to share a story of one of my earlier clients. She's not an accountant or a finance professional, but she was a world-class expert in helping to rescue penguins. And her name, I believe it was, Diane, Dylan or Diane, I think, it's been a few years. But I was interviewing her on a podcast because I knew about her reputation, and she's written books, and she's one of like five people in the world, that can rescue penguins. When there's some global tragedy, the UN or whomever agency calls her. So that, I think, by definition, would be an expert. That would be a thought leader in the space.  But when I interviewed her, on the podcast, it was just amazing, she's like, "Ah, who am I to do this?" I mean, it was just remarkable, considering that she's like one of five people. She's written books, she does this for a living. But it just goes to show you that this is very common. And, so, I think, another aspect of that is just being aware that it's okay.  If you're having small thoughts, that's okay, we all go through it. And it's, ultimately, having that vision, that goal, that why that can help you say, "Okay, I'm willing to grow. I'm willing to stretch my comfort zone because there's a reason for me to do this." And, so, when you have those things in place, you can overcome Imposter Syndrome. Adam:            Definitely. Well, I like the idea of getting a mentor, getting somebody that has walked the road before you because they've... And I want to preface this, too, is you're not going to get everything right the first time. You're going to fail, and you can't be afraid to fail, right? Paul:               100%, myself, as an entrepreneur, one of the chief lessons I've learned is fail fast, fail forward, and we're going to get most things wrong. And the more you're comfortable failing, the faster you can become successful. It's not to say that you want to provide quality work and you want to do all these different things, but just being willing to fail is the fastest way to succeed. As an aside, I've taken Improv classes, and one of the key lessons that I learned there, and it's really a mindset, is that fail and fail big, don't get scared by it but embrace it. And, of course, in the Improv setting it's funny, the more you fail, the funnier it can be. But it really just becomes a mindset. And, so, just in your day to day, there are so many things that we act small on and we're afraid to do. But if you just have this mindset, "Hey, I'm just going to try it. What's the worst that can happen?" And you just say, "It doesn't really matter." Then that is the fastest way forward. Adam:            And it's interesting, when you were saying that. It made me think of a term that I've used a lot in my professional career, sometimes, like, "I'm just faking it till I make it." But, sometimes, I wonder if faking it till you make it is part of that Impostor Syndrome. Where "I'm just faking it till I make it." But you, actually, are doing a really good job and you're not faking it because you do know what you're doing. So I wonder if trying to getting over that mindset of "Faking it till you make it" and saying, "No, I'm just going to fail, fail hard, and keep going forward instead." Paul:               Yes, I hear you because, I think, "Fake it till you make it" almost has like a negative connotation, that you're not really qualified to do something. But, yes, it's how you frame it in your mind, and, I think, it could be similar. But it's, definitely, the way that I mean it's in a positive way, it's that that's the way to success.  But, again, that's where you can fake it till you make it on your own. And, maybe, that's where you don't tell anyone that you're uncomfortable, or you don't quite know what you're doing, or this or that and, maybe, there are some negative connotations there.  But that's where when you just understand that being uncomfortable is part of it, and you can surround yourself by like-minded people, or a mentor, or a coach, and they can help guide you, and set those boundaries, so to speak. Where it's okay to not get it perfect. It's okay to, fail, is a strong word, but imperfection is okay.  I think another analogy might be perfectionism. It's like, "Well, if I can't write a masterpiece, if it's not going on the New York Times bestselling list, then, why even bother? And another analogy or another metaphor is being willing to write something or step out and not be perfect. Because the act of doing something is inherently more valuable than staying small. Adam:            Yes, I like that. I like that it's a kind of reframing that mindset of, "I'm not really faking it, but I'm learning as I grow, and things may not be perfect. But I'm putting myself out there and that helps me grow, as a professional." Paul:               It is, and I think it's authenticity. Again, that's where you just reframe it from the "Fake it till you make it" which can be a little bit of a negative connotation, it's just being authentic. It's like, "Hey, I'm learning something new, I'm trying something new. It's not going to be perfect, bear with me, but this is my goal." And if you tell people that they'll appreciate your authenticity, when it comes to it. At the end of the day, part of Imposter Syndrome is the fear of being judged.  So it's like, "I'm really good at staying in this lane. I'm really good at it, and people respect me, and I get praise, and I get rewarded. And if I come into this other lane that I'm not comfortable with, then, I haven't developed my competency, yet. And, so, suddenly people see that I'm not perfect." And, so, again, it's all this mindset stuff that you need to grapple with. And, again, should you put yourself through the process and it goes back to your why. And we'll talk about personal branding or writing a book; what could it do for your career?  What could it do for your personal brand?  What could it do for your thought leadership?  What could it do for your ability to communicate?  What could it do for your confidence?  I mean, I find that before I do anything now I want to start by writing a book. Because if I launch a service, or a company, or anything, I want to start by writing a book because I know that in doing so, I'm going to get my own thinking very clear. I'm going to be able to communicate my message that much better and, then, my path to success is that much shorter. Adam:            Mh-hmm, I'm sure somebody's been listening to us chat about writing a book, and personal branding, and I'm sure somebody has thought of the term white paper. And when you think of professional writing, people think of white papers. Maybe we can help distinguish the difference between this book that we're talking about writing, and a white paper. Let's help differentiate that in people's minds, as we're talking through this. Paul:               Yes, in my mind, from a strictly writing standpoint, they could have some similarities. I think from a status and impact level, though, there's a huge difference. One's author, what I love about the word, is that it's part of the word authority. And, so, people see someone who's an author and they have a completely different view of them, immediately, in terms of their competency, their expertise, all these different things. Rightly or wrongly, that's the immediate perception that people have.  I think with a white paper you might have the same level of knowledge or skill set, but there isn't any status or additional credibility that is associated with it. There's no personal branding. Largely speaking, you don't go and tell people, "Hey, I wrote a white paper, no."  And it's like, "What?" Whereas when you say you're an author everyone, suddenly, steps back and says, "Wow, that's really cool."  So my recent book, it's called The Short Book Formula. And I think that one of the reasons everyone is afraid to write a book is that if you think about a 40,000-page business book, that could be a daunting task. And, then, conversely, if you actually want people to read your book, people have limited attention spans.  And, so, the idea of reading six, 10, 12, 15-hour book is a bigger task for the reader. And, so, what I've devised is what I call the Short Book Formula, which is based on writing a roughly 12,000-word book. Now, why is that important? 12,000 words and the way we format it, is roughly 100 pages, and 12,000 words can be read or, in audio form, listened to in about 60 to 90 minutes. With 12,000 words you have the ability to, in our case, we help people write and publish a book within six to 12 weeks. And, so, it's not this year-long thing that they have to do, it's a lot more manageable. And, on the flip side, when you give your book or when people read your book, they're that much more likely to, actually, not just get the book and put on their bookshelf. They're that much more likely to actually read, listen to, and consume the message. Which, especially, if you're in the role of selling, is extremely important. Short books have a strong pedigree. I have a list right here that. I talk about, so I'm going to name out a couple of titles that you may have heard of before. ●       The Art of War by Sun Tzu, 96 pages. ●       The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli, 94 pages.●       This next one, have you heard of The Communist Manifesto? For better or worse? Adam:            I have, yes. Paul:               40 pages. And, so, I share those examples because you can see the impact that short books have had throughout history. What I really love about short books is when someone reads it, if the message resonates, not only do they get through it and actually read the whole message, they're more likely to read it again.  I mean, there's books that I've read multiple times because I really enjoyed it and I can get through it, relatively, quick. And, this also helps to answer the question of the person who has too many ideas, so to speak, knows a lot of things, and is trying to focus in on what should my book be about? My answer would be, well, let's start with one book and get it really focused, in terms of your audience, what the message is, why they should read it, and write a book around that topic. But, then, from that point, you could start another book, 12,000 words. Maybe it's a new audience or it's a different topic. And, so, you have the ability to create, over time, a series of books. I mean, I've found that I've gone from publishing a book once a year. To, now, where I'm starting to hit two books a year just because I see the value of it and just the process of doing it, is that much more quick and effective. Adam:            Mh-hmm, wow, and from somebody who's read your Short Formula Book. It, probably, took me about two hours, just because I'm a slower reader, and I was thinking more about it. But it is a very quick read and it's an easy read. And it's not like you have to write at a collegiate level, but you want to write at a level that people can understand, and get through it quickly, and understand what you're talking about.  And, so, I think that's a huge difference, too, is that don't think that you have to write in this crazy way. Obviously, I mean, something like The Art of War, may not be easy for everybody to understand because of the way he wrote it. But other ones that went far like the communist one you mentioned, that one went far and wide to many different people because of the plain language, as an example of plain language, and how well that can affect people. Paul:               Yes, I mean, that's one of the things that a book well-written or well-read is, probably, the better way to say that, uses accessible language. It uses language that an average person, a non-specialist, can read, absorb, and learn from. And that might be another difference between a white paper and a book. I think, a white paper is more technical, in nature and it's geared more towards a technician.  Whereas a book, fundamentally, you have a specific audience in mind. But you want to expand who that audience is and, actually, get them to read it because it's interesting and engaging, uses stories to make points, but the language should be accessible. I mean, when you're trying to impress people through fancy language, oftentimes, it's actually the opposite. You want to make them understand it better. Adam:            Yes, you want to make them understand it better. I've always heard that "If you could explain what you do to an eight-year-old, you can explain it to anybody." And I think it's having that mindset when you're writing. Paul:               Well, and, then, from there it goes back to the benefits of writing a book is that it helps you to clarify your thoughts, it helps you to communicate your ideas better. And, then, aside from the actual book, it translates into your ability to communicate with people. Whether it's internal, in the company, whether it's external, you're able to express your ideas that much more clearly to a wider audience and be understood. So for someone who is looking for, say, more speaking opportunities. I mean, at a corporation or a company, oftentimes, the higher you go up the ladder, the more it requires your leadership and your communication abilities. And, so, it's just a great way to hone in on those skills, develop those skills, and then be recognized for it. Someone who has a book is much more easily given an opportunity to speak, whether it's at a conference, whether it's at a podcast, for example, whatever it is because it's trust in advance. People trust that you have a message that can help inform and teach people. Adam:            Yes, and it allows you, and it grows your name, as you get out there and get those opportunities. Paul:               It does.  Adam:            Yes, so as we wrap up the conversation, this has been a really great conversation. Thinking about the accounting and finance professional, and the people that you've worked with. Are there any examples you can give or any stories you can tell? That are success stories, that our audience can hear as they imagine how they could take this route? Paul:               Yes, definitely. One person that comes to mind, his name is Michael Poisson, and I met him, I want to say, a year or two ago. And Michael is, I think, he's really the epitome of everything that we've been talking about.  He's a ESG data specialist, and he works for a smaller company who, essentially, sells ESG data to, primarily, service-based companies, as well as to asset managers. And in his journey of it, part of what he was doing from a marketing and sales perspective, was that he was going to conferences, really as an attendee, and listening in, networking, doing all those things. And part of the value that he saw of writing and publishing the book, even though he was an employee for a company, not a business owner or an entrepreneur, was that it would elevate his personal brand. And it would give him more status to generate more speaking opportunities, to create more visibility, and credibility for what he does. So he published his book, I want to say, six months to a year ago. And I've spoken to him since then, and since then he's reported that, at these conferences, he's invited much more often to, actually, be a panelist or a speaker, which massively increases his awareness inside of his community. He's also gone on a number of podcasts, both as a guest. He hosts, now, his own podcast, and he invites thought leaders on.  But, essentially, having the book has allowed him to elevate his game, meaning that he can create a lot more visibility for himself. He can much more effectively network with more influential people in the process. And it allows him to go from this person at a small company, and because of that elevated personal branded awareness, he can more effectively compete with the larger companies out there in the marketplace. What's interesting about his story, and it ties back to what we've been talking about, is that he's a really smart guy. And I knew this from day one, working with him, ton of knowledge, all these things.  But to go back to the Impostor Syndrome, throughout our work together, continuously, he would not refer to himself as the expert. He would refer to, "Oh, these people they're the experts, I'm just gathering data. I'm just presenting the information." And I had to tell him over and over again, "You are the expert. In doing this process and demonstrating what you know and all these things, you are an expert." So it just goes back to that whole personal journey. I think it was also rewarding because, again, we've been talking about, and I could see this during the time that we worked together and afterwards. But it really helped him deep dive in terms of ESG, and its value, and the stories, and why it's important, and he, obviously, knew this stuff beforehand. But just in going through the process, it really deepened his knowledge and his ability to communicate with others. He even had a college professor, who is pretty prominent in his field, come to him and say, "Hey, I want to use your book as part of my course." Which was pretty cool. Adam:            Yes, that's pretty awesome. And I like that you told the story about how even during the process, as he was going through it and learning more, he was still struggling with that Imposter Syndrome, and that's a big thing for a lot of us to overcome. Because you don't realize, "I am an expert." Paul:               Yes, a 100%, and that goes back to why you don't want to go it alone, you want a sounding board. But you also want someone who can give you positive encouragement and challenge some of, perhaps, the limiting thoughts that you might have on your own. Adam:            Definitely, well, Paul, we could probably talk about this for another half hour. But I really appreciate the insight you've given us, you've given our audience, and I really think that they're going to really benefit from this. I encourage everybody to look at the show notes. You'll see links to Paul's website, if you want to check out his books and the stuff he's written, and if you want to get in touch with him, there'll be ways to get in touch with him, as well. And just thank you, again, for coming on. Paul:               All right, thank you, I appreciate it. I enjoyed the conversation. Announcer:    This has been Count Me In, IMA's podcast, providing you with the latest perspectives, of thought leaders from the accounting and finance profession. If you like what you heard, and you'd like to be counted in for more relevant accounting and finance education, visit IMA's website at www.imanet.org.

Today we have Emily.   She is 34, from Cincinnati,  OH and took her last drink on Aug 27th, 2022. Happy Halloween. A drink won't make your overall Halloween experience better. Exact Nature:  https://exactnature.com/RE 20   Recovery Reinvented Link: https://recoveryreinvented.com/events/2022/#overview   Highlights from Paul All emotions are created equal and you need them all equally. Here is why. In the world of duality we need opposites for defining purposes. I want to tie this into recovery one more time. Do not gauge your recovery success on your emotions. You will feel them all. Yes, do more of what you enjoy, but thank the other side of that for telling you what you don't enjoy. Better Help:  www.betterhelp.com/elevator – 10% off your first month. #sponsored [11:35]  Emily is married and has 2 little boys, ages 5 and 8.  She runs a bar in downtown Cincinnati.  Emily enjoys being crafty and making stuff.    Emily doesn't remember seeing any unhealthy alcohol behavior in her home while growing up.  Emily was 13 the first time she got drunk.  20 years old and in college Emily got her first bartending job.  She met her husband working in the bar in Cincinnati and they have now been together for 13 years.    After having her first baby Emily got out of bartending and into alcohol sales.  This escalated her drinking.  She then got pregnant with her 2nd and went back to bartending after that.  As her kids got older there was more drinking and drugs…while still getting up and taking care of her kids and responsibilities.      January 2021 Emily quit drinking for 5 months.  This year Emily changed jobs, started working at a new bar with good friends.  Emily was approaching 1 month sober at the time of her interview.    Ben's Friends https://www.bensfriendshope.com/   Kris's Summary   Recovery Reinvented - The event will be held in person on November 3 in Grand Forks North Dakota. But if you can't make it to Grand Forks, don't worry, the event is available online as well! It's 100% FREE to attend. www.recoveryreinvented.com.    

Host Helen Lee continues her discussion of a new style of business for a transformed world with an interview with Paul Dunn, Chairman of B1G1 (BUY1GIVE1) Business for Good, a global giving initiative that has grown into a global movement. B1G1 helps businesses embed giving right into the heart of everyday activities and makes business giving easy, effective and meaningful. It focuses on connecting small to medium sized businesses with more than 500 carefully selected high-impact giving projects. Paul is a four time TEDx speaker, winner of the Global Lifetime Achievement Award for Service to the Accounting Profession, entrepreneur, master presenter and keynote speaker. Known for building great businesses, he was also featured in Forbes, alongside Richard Branson in a 2014 feature on Disruptive Business Ideas That Worked. Helen and Paul discuss the origin of B1G1, the philosophy of world change through business and what he; Founder, CEO & his wife Masami Sato; his team and a growing number of members have achieved for the world.      KEY TAKEAWAYS Paul gets out of bed every morning to help business owners and their teams create more impact on our world and in their businesses than they ever could have imagined possible. “What if we were able to create a world where every time business was done, something great happened in the world?”, Masami asked Paul in 2007 to consider. "Imagine if every time someone bought a cup of coffee, a child in need got access to life-saving water?  Or when an author sells a book, a tree gets planted?", Masami explained. This momentous conversation 15 years ago gave birth to their setting up B1G1 with a vision of life-changing impact being created every time a business sells a product or service.   Today, we can go beyond being only profit and even purpose driven to being impact driven.  We can also move from solving for problems to solving for potential, just as Nature does and Paul refers to, in this episode. What B1G1 does is let you look at micro impacts that have incredible outcomes. All of us at some point know that there is something more, but what we often don't know is how to achieve it. Rather than doing something big in the future, we can do something small right now, every day. This is the philosophy of B1G1. This is the power of small. Paul, Masami and their team run B1G1 from Singapore. Together with their members, they have amazingly created more than 301 million giving impacts to date.  Both the number of members and impacts are growing exponentially as well. B1G1 members can choose from more than 500 high impact giving projects under the categories of education, environment, food, health, shelter, income generation, human rights, and life enhancement.  Check out https://b1g1.com/ for more information and if you feel called to do so, become a member making your own impacts on the world today.  You can select from 4 levels of membership. B1G1 has grown from being a business to being a movement. It is about creating a world that is full of giving by shifting the spirit of businesses to that of a giving one, thereby helping the entire organisation or team transform in the process.  "We are all at our best when we are giving," as Paul points out. It allows for a specific transaction-based giving model to small and medium enterprises worldwide.  Helen has created a global group online program called ‘Invincible You : The Hero's Journey' to support everyone in the world rise and thrive during these phenomenal and challenging times. It is based on the methodology she created more than two decades ago (honed and upgraded over the years), that has since impacted thousands of people worldwide from Chairmen and Presidents of conglomerates to children and the whole range in between.     BEST MOMENTS ‘We were talking about the distinction between talking about things and actually doing things. So, chairmen are often thought about as thinking about things. And, by the way, it's very important for chairmen to do that.' – Paul ‘“The storyteller sets the vision, the values and the agenda for an entire generation yet to come.” (Steve Jobs, 1994). When I read that I realised that all of the things that we do are not about us, it's about something greater than us.' - Paul  ‘All of a sudden, once you get that new understanding, what happens is you just see things that were there all the time but you never saw them before.' – Paul ‘I'd like to know what's the difference for you before B1G1 and after. Because it was life changing, right?' – Helen ‘If you ask me that now, I would add “to recognise that you can just create an enormous difference in the world by doing awesome things once you look at the world in a new way.” I would refer to that as you can become impact driven as opposed to purpose driven. When that happens you get what happened to me and that is you just become curiouser and curiouser and curiouser, and in that curiosity you continue to find just incredible realisations that you didn't have before.' – Paul  'The pandemic has taught us that we are all connected. It's no longer about me, it's about we. When you start to get that we need to move from self to something bigger than self, from value to values, from transactions to belonging, from income to impact, from profit to purpose, everything there (on the right hand side of what I said) is about humanity.' - Paul  ‘“If working apart we are a force powerful enough to destabilise our planet, surely working together we are powerful enough to save it.” said Sir David Attenborough at Cop26 in 2021. Once you get that, you automatically have this thing that kind of powers you, which is that thing that is bigger than yourself.' - Paul  'We move from the wisdom of one to the wisdom of many. When we find a way of combining that, then we can do great things together.' - Paul  ‘Masami is both the founder and CEO of B1G1, and the couple and their team are based in Singapore together with their B1G1 members worldwide have created more than 301 million giving impacts to date. Isn't that incredible?' – Helen ‘Our personal and corporate or business worlds are already shifting. People are becoming more conscious of not only our interconnection but our need to make a difference and to care enough to do so.' – Helen ‘I see us rising together, transforming and thriving together. This is indeed a very special time for us. As I wrote two years ago, we have our work cut out for us and need to have many more people join us, in making good across our world, across all fields of reality from our environment and climate justice to justice for all humans and all sentient beings everywhere, indeed.' - Helen   GUEST RESOURCES B1G1 website https://b1g1.com/   ABOUT THE HOST HELEN LEE Founder & Principal Coach of Lee Heiss Coaching, Helen Lee coached thousands of clients worldwide and multinationals in Asia-Pacific in the last three decades. She created a powerful ontological coaching methodology that ignites the true greatness or invincibility in people. Thoroughly tested and honed over 20 years, this methodology consistently and rapidly produces desired results. Helen was also a journalist who later ran her own communications consultancies in Australia and Asia.The Business Times listed her in its “Who's Who of Women Shaping Singapore” while The Straits Times named her “The Leader Prodder” in a feature on Singapore's top coaches. VALUABLE RESOURCES To become a member of the Transform and Thrive Club and benefit from monthly powerful live sessions on Zoom video calls and multimedia coaching, check out and sign up here: www.transformandthrive.club   CONTACT METHOD  www.leeheiss.com  www.facebook.com/leeheiss  www.facebook.com/transformingpeopleworldwide  www.instagram.com/helenleeheiss  enquiries@leeheiss.com

Almost everyone can remember being moved by music. Feeling joy, inspiration, or even healing brought my listening and engaging in music. Different stories and perceptions are in place that could prove the ability of music to move or inspire a listener and that it doesn't just come from a technical skill or a particular setting, it's what's inside the artist and the music itself. Join Aviv Shahar as he welcomes the musicians, Ed Dowrick and Paul Stone, to unravel the mysteries of Essence Music through their own experience and inspiration. KEY TAKEAWAYS 07:20 – Aviv introduces today's topic, Essence Music: The Emergence of a Collective Agency08:07 – Paul talks about the interesting challenges on music languages12:14 – Paul shares about the weakness of his left hand17:10 – Aviv recaps what Paul has just said and shares his thoughts as well24:01 – Ed speaks about his thoughts on Essence Music33:39 – Ed opens up on something he heard from Hans Zimmer39:05 – Paul shares his realizations on being in the audience in the previous years48:54 – Ed shares his thoughts on the language and grammar of emergence55:10 – Paul talks about museums and why he thinks it's gives exhaustion1:00:51 – Ed shares about great things music can give more than just physical healing1:09:08 – Aviv thanks Ed and Paul for joining him TWEETABLE QUOTES “But I discovered that my left hand is very weak or was very weak. So, it's been on a long program of strengthening and reconditioning. Not ‘cause I want to play good, it's more in terms of so that it can be more versatile in what it can offer into any session or live piece of music”. (12:16) (Paul)“Many times, I would think that you can play the same piece of music, like for example, when you hear one rendition of Mozart from one orchestra on one day, and you hear it a month later, and it's the same music but it doesn't move you. Or di doesn't move the audience.” (24:01) (Ed)“In a way, people assume, I think in not just in music, that because a person has chosen to play an instrument, that all of a sudden there's a bond between another person who has chosen to play an instrument. And it's not the place to start. And I think again the world makes this mistake in many areas outside of music.”  (33:14) (Ed)“I stopped letting myself off the hook of being in the audience and thinking as the member of the audience, I had no effect on the musicians, the conductor and the song.” (39:05) (Paul)“All of a sudden, out of the blue, this lady broke through. And something beautiful came through her voice and through her music. She was playing a harp. And it was brilliant!”  (50:42) (Ed)“But to be able to find the music that would say, not just to healing at a physical level, but music that would transmit say, for example, huge stream mental healing, or you could share the feeling somehow in a collective sense” (1:00:51) (Ed) RESOURCES MENTIONED Portals of Perception WebsiteAviv's LinkedIn Aviv's TwitterAviv's Website

Big Vito and Virtue are back with Getting Color! - NFL Sunday Games -Tyson -Mayweather challenges Paul - All today's wrestling news! Videos of our podcasts are available on Twitch.tv/thebigvitobrand Listen HERE Anchor : Anchor.FM/thebigvitobrand IHeart : https://www.iheart.com/podcast/256-the-big-vito-brand-31159185/ iTunes : https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-big-vito-brand Stitcher : https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-big-vito-brand Podbean : https://www.podbean.com/podcast-detail/j26b3-76d3a/The-Big-Vito-Brand-Podcast On your Alexa Devices under Flash Briefings https://www.amazon.com/The-Big-Vito-Brand/dp/B07N62Z7J4 Get Social HERE Instagram and Twitter: @thebigvitobrand Instagram and Twitter @MagicTSpiller Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thebigvitobrand TikTok @thebigvitobrand Official websites :BigVito.com TheBigVitoBrand.com --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/thebigvitobrand/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/thebigvitobrand/support

Stuck moving forward and always looking for the next deal? A chat with Flips Nerd Mike Hambright reveals how an experienced investor can start scaling toward financial freedom. Mike started REI with no job to support his family so he had to make it happen. So in a short period of time, he's flipped over 400 properties and held over 800 in his rental portfolio. Because of his background in corporate America, he's mastered building systems and placing the right people into place. In the interview, you'll hear: The most common characteristics of successful investors How to build a highly responsive list' his story of how he got started and how he was forced to make REI work for him with no job to back him and his family up How to transition from a one-man-show to a small team. The first person you should start hiring and how How to shift when markets change How to lower the costs of marketing - using the right data and lists How much volume you need to start hiring Predictions for REI in the next upcoming months And much more You learn more about Mike at www.investorfuel.com Transcript Mike: We just give every house and every seller a score, and the more things you have wrong with it, the higher the score, the more likely they're going to need to sell. Paul: All right. Welcome to another interview at the Deals Today Podcast, and I'm your hose Paul at realestateaudios.com. And we're going to be interviewing a giant in the REI word. His name is Mike Hambright, the blogger, creator at FlipNerd.com. Now Mike's a serial entrepreneur. He's built many businesses within real estate. He has that background of business building, of being a manager in the corporate world, and building and scaling up businesses. So we're going to talk about that in this interview. He's flipped over 400 properties. He now holds a portfolio of over 800 rentals. So he definitely knows how to scale up to a financial freedom number, and he helps hundreds of other investors through his mastermind find their financial freedom. Paul: So that is him. That is his expertise is business building, and I want to bring that into this interview. And we're going to talk about a few other things. We're talking about the most common characteristics of successful investors. He lays that out for you. We're going to talk about how to build a highly responsive list, his story of how he got started, and how he was actually forced to make real estate work for him with no job to back him and his family up, how to transition from a one-man show to a small team, and the first person you should start hiring and how you should do it. Paul: All right. So of course you can check him out at investorfuel.com. I highly recommend going over there. That's his mastermind. He's helped hundreds of investors. I have no affiliate to that. That's his straight website, investorfuel.com. And let's get to the interview. Mike: My wife and I started in the summer of 2008. So about 12 years I guess. For the first couple of years, all we did was real estate investing. I had a job that I loved. I played the traditional game of... I really was the first person in my family to go to college. So I just found my way there, and I was one that did it. So anyway, ended up finding a really cool job. It ended up being like I can't imagine a better job. I was the apprentice for at the time a president, he became a CEO of a $5 billion company. Paul: Wow. Mike: So it was just amazing, flying around in private jets, and having real

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听Paul: Did you go to any other places, besides the tiger farm?Todd: Yeah. Actually, they have a whole array of special animal farms. They had a crocodile farm, they had a snake farm, and they also had an elephant farm, and I went to the elephant farm, or rancher, whatever it was called.Paul: All right. Could you tell me about that? How did the elephants treat that? How was the experience?Todd: Actually, to be honest, I was surprised. I felt sorry for the elephants. I didn't really feel that sorry for the tigers, oddly enough, probably because they just lay around and sleep. But the elephants, you know, they kind of have to work.Paul: Right.Todd: I mean, it's definite work; they're put to work. And even though they've been doing this for years, for some reason, it just seems strange. Like they had a lot of the elephants chained to poles, you know, so they couldn't getaway.Paul: Right.Todd: You have to figure if you're chained inside, you know. It's kind of nature's way of saying that you want to go someplace else.Paul: Yeah.Todd: So, yeah, I did feel sorry for them. But, you know, they're really cute. Like you ride on the elephant, and then they give you, you know, this sugar cane. It's really cheesy; it's really commercialized. And they take you along this trail, and then every now and then, you can buy the sugar cane and feed it to the elephant. And then, the elephant does some little trick to show you that he's thankful, but it does seem pretty unnatural.Paul: Yeah, I guess so. I mean, it seems unnatural, like forced. And you know, I guess it's kind of easy to be cynical about it, but essentially, we're talking about, you know, these animals. They're making money.Todd: Right.Paul: So, again, we're back to the kind of ethical or moral kind of point, you know. And I guess elephants are cute, and elephants have this, you know - we have this curiosity about elephants. So, you know!Todd: Well, one thing that I thought was interesting is that when you do this trip, like the first part of the trip, you're on an elephant, and then eventually, you get off the elephant and they put you on an oxcart, an ox-pulled cart. Then later on, you're on like a bamboo raft. But, you know, when you're sitting on the oxcart and you're going along, it dawned on me that you don't feel sorry for the ox.Paul: Right. That's interesting, yeah.Todd: You know, like I had a connection with the elephant. I kind of felt a little bit guilty. But the ox, like nobody, has any connection to it at all. It's just like, - Yeah, that's your job. You've been doing it for hundreds, thousands of years. So, you know, maybe that's it. Like the elephant, maybe in a thousand years, people won't even feel sorry for the elephant. They would just be taken for granted.Paul: Well, maybe, yeah. I mean, I guess, like you say, we've used the ox over time for farming and such, so they've kind of been bred and that's been their role. Whereas I guess, elephants do have that power. But I don't know, it seems a little skewed like that you feel sorry for the elephant but you don't feel sorry for the ox, right?Todd: I know.Paul: I mean, like why do we have this kind of categorization, where like some animals, we feel kind of some more of an emotional connection with them than others? It seems odd to me.Todd: Yeah, it does make you wonder.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听Paul: Did you go to any other places, besides the tiger farm?Todd: Yeah. Actually, they have a whole array of special animal farms. They had a crocodile farm, they had a snake farm, and they also had an elephant farm, and I went to the elephant farm, or rancher, whatever it was called.Paul: All right. Could you tell me about that? How did the elephants treat that? How was the experience?Todd: Actually, to be honest, I was surprised. I felt sorry for the elephants. I didn't really feel that sorry for the tigers, oddly enough, probably because they just lay around and sleep. But the elephants, you know, they kind of have to work.Paul: Right.Todd: I mean, it's definite work; they're put to work. And even though they've been doing this for years, for some reason, it just seems strange. Like they had a lot of the elephants chained to poles, you know, so they couldn't getaway.Paul: Right.Todd: You have to figure if you're chained inside, you know. It's kind of nature's way of saying that you want to go someplace else.Paul: Yeah.Todd: So, yeah, I did feel sorry for them. But, you know, they're really cute. Like you ride on the elephant, and then they give you, you know, this sugar cane. It's really cheesy; it's really commercialized. And they take you along this trail, and then every now and then, you can buy the sugar cane and feed it to the elephant. And then, the elephant does some little trick to show you that he's thankful, but it does seem pretty unnatural.Paul: Yeah, I guess so. I mean, it seems unnatural, like forced. And you know, I guess it's kind of easy to be cynical about it, but essentially, we're talking about, you know, these animals. They're making money.Todd: Right.Paul: So, again, we're back to the kind of ethical or moral kind of point, you know. And I guess elephants are cute, and elephants have this, you know - we have this curiosity about elephants. So, you know!Todd: Well, one thing that I thought was interesting is that when you do this trip, like the first part of the trip, you're on an elephant, and then eventually, you get off the elephant and they put you on an oxcart, an ox-pulled cart. Then later on, you're on like a bamboo raft. But, you know, when you're sitting on the oxcart and you're going along, it dawned on me that you don't feel sorry for the ox.Paul: Right. That's interesting, yeah.Todd: You know, like I had a connection with the elephant. I kind of felt a little bit guilty. But the ox, like nobody, has any connection to it at all. It's just like, - Yeah, that's your job. You've been doing it for hundreds, thousands of years. So, you know, maybe that's it. Like the elephant, maybe in a thousand years, people won't even feel sorry for the elephant. They would just be taken for granted.Paul: Well, maybe, yeah. I mean, I guess, like you say, we've used the ox over time for farming and such, so they've kind of been bred and that's been their role. Whereas I guess, elephants do have that power. But I don't know, it seems a little skewed like that you feel sorry for the elephant but you don't feel sorry for the ox, right?Todd: I know.Paul: I mean, like why do we have this kind of categorization, where like some animals, we feel kind of some more of an emotional connection with them than others? It seems odd to me.Todd: Yeah, it does make you wonder.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听 Paul: Hey, Todd. I saw your pictures with you and some tigers. Where's that from?Todd: That was at a place in Southeast Asia. It was in Thailand, actually.Paul: All right.Todd: Yeah, it was pretty cool. I was a bit dubious of it. I mean, I saw the little advertisement of Tiger World and Tiger Zoo, or whatever it was. I went and took a tuk-tuk out there and checked it out, and it was pretty cool.Paul: How are the tigers treated within the zoo, the Tiger Land?Todd: Well, it's actually quite weird, in that it was like a zoo but you can go in and like touch the tigers -Paul: Oh, wow!Todd: --and be around the tigers. And so, they seem to have a pretty big area to roam around, and I guess they have a pretty good life. I guess the deal is that they were all raised in captivity, so they kind of give you a little spiel when you go in, and they explain that the tigers are raised in captivity, just like you would raise cows or pigs or horses or anything like that. So they're bred for the farm, and even though they're still really deadly, basically, you know, that's why they're there, because they were bred to be there.Paul: Bred to entertain.Todd: Yeah, kind of. It's a bit odd. You do feel a little strange, because you figure that they're tigers, and they should be out in the wild. But then again, you know, it's an opportunity for people to actually see these beautiful things.Paul: Yeah, it's an opportunity. I guess it's an opportunity also to learn about these creatures, which would are found in the wild.Todd: Right.Paul: Okay, wow, I mean, you're really close to those tigers, Todd. I mean, how did you feel? Were you scared?Todd: Actually, yeah. I mean, it's a little unsetting. Even with the little babies, you figure, - Wow! you know, or the young ones, that they are still quite big, you know. When they lie down on the ground, the full length of their body, even for a young tiger, is about the size of a human.Paul: Wow.Todd: And you realize that, you know, they could eat anything, so it's a bit scary.Paul: Yeah, you could have been eaten at any point.Todd: Well, it definitely crosses your mind. And you ask them about that, because naturally, everybody's worried about security, safety. And they say that, you know, their deal is that they know the tigers' behavior down cold, and that they know that as long as you feed the tigers early in the morning, and then they feed them again at night, then during the day, they just want to lay and sleep. They have no desire to go hunting or anything like that. So that's why they're actually safe to be around in the afternoon hours.Paul: Ah, they're very like placid by that point.Todd: Right. And they also say that because the tigers are born in captivity that they're used to being around humans from birth. So ever since they're little cubs, you know, they've had human handlers. They've had humans around them, so they're highly familiar and comfortable with humans touching them, being around them. So that's how they can, you know, allow people to be around them and keep it safe. But it still does cross your mind.Paul: Yeah, I'm sure it does, especially if you're a parent with a child, because obviously, you know, children will be a quite nice meal for a tiger.Todd: Actually, you know what? I think, looking back, you couldn't take children in the cage.Paul: Ah.Todd: I think it was almost like an amusement park; you had to be a certain height. So they didn't want you to be---they didn't want anything small that would just be too tempting for the tiger.Paul: Yeah.Todd: Although that seems kind of strange, because there were really small, petite women that were going in the cage.Paul: I see.Todd: So there's not that much of a difference there.Paul: No, I don't suppose so. I guess, if it's based on height.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听 Paul: Hey, Todd. I saw your pictures with you and some tigers. Where's that from?Todd: That was at a place in Southeast Asia. It was in Thailand, actually.Paul: All right.Todd: Yeah, it was pretty cool. I was a bit dubious of it. I mean, I saw the little advertisement of Tiger World and Tiger Zoo, or whatever it was. I went and took a tuk-tuk out there and checked it out, and it was pretty cool.Paul: How are the tigers treated within the zoo, the Tiger Land?Todd: Well, it's actually quite weird, in that it was like a zoo but you can go in and like touch the tigers -Paul: Oh, wow!Todd: --and be around the tigers. And so, they seem to have a pretty big area to roam around, and I guess they have a pretty good life. I guess the deal is that they were all raised in captivity, so they kind of give you a little spiel when you go in, and they explain that the tigers are raised in captivity, just like you would raise cows or pigs or horses or anything like that. So they're bred for the farm, and even though they're still really deadly, basically, you know, that's why they're there, because they were bred to be there.Paul: Bred to entertain.Todd: Yeah, kind of. It's a bit odd. You do feel a little strange, because you figure that they're tigers, and they should be out in the wild. But then again, you know, it's an opportunity for people to actually see these beautiful things.Paul: Yeah, it's an opportunity. I guess it's an opportunity also to learn about these creatures, which would are found in the wild.Todd: Right.Paul: Okay, wow, I mean, you're really close to those tigers, Todd. I mean, how did you feel? Were you scared?Todd: Actually, yeah. I mean, it's a little unsetting. Even with the little babies, you figure, - Wow! you know, or the young ones, that they are still quite big, you know. When they lie down on the ground, the full length of their body, even for a young tiger, is about the size of a human.Paul: Wow.Todd: And you realize that, you know, they could eat anything, so it's a bit scary.Paul: Yeah, you could have been eaten at any point.Todd: Well, it definitely crosses your mind. And you ask them about that, because naturally, everybody's worried about security, safety. And they say that, you know, their deal is that they know the tigers' behavior down cold, and that they know that as long as you feed the tigers early in the morning, and then they feed them again at night, then during the day, they just want to lay and sleep. They have no desire to go hunting or anything like that. So that's why they're actually safe to be around in the afternoon hours.Paul: Ah, they're very like placid by that point.Todd: Right. And they also say that because the tigers are born in captivity that they're used to being around humans from birth. So ever since they're little cubs, you know, they've had human handlers. They've had humans around them, so they're highly familiar and comfortable with humans touching them, being around them. So that's how they can, you know, allow people to be around them and keep it safe. But it still does cross your mind.Paul: Yeah, I'm sure it does, especially if you're a parent with a child, because obviously, you know, children will be a quite nice meal for a tiger.Todd: Actually, you know what? I think, looking back, you couldn't take children in the cage.Paul: Ah.Todd: I think it was almost like an amusement park; you had to be a certain height. So they didn't want you to be---they didn't want anything small that would just be too tempting for the tiger.Paul: Yeah.Todd: Although that seems kind of strange, because there were really small, petite women that were going in the cage.Paul: I see.Todd: So there's not that much of a difference there.Paul: No, I don't suppose so. I guess, if it's based on height.

Tara Kenning:  "Teamwork makes the dream work," John C. Maxwell. I'm Tara Jaraysi Kenning and I'm a Tri-Cities Influencer. Paul:  Most people fail because of broken focus. Broken focus is one of those things that actually hurt us, so complete your tasks before you move on to another one. The ancient proverb is if you chase two rabbits, you'll catch neither Speaker 3: Raising the water level of leadership and the Tri-Cities at Eastern Washington. It's a Tri-Cities Influencer podcast. Welcome to the Tri-Cities Influencer podcast where Paul Casey interviews the local leaders like CEOs, entrepreneurs, and nonprofit executives to hear how they lead themselves and their teams so that we can all benefit from their experiences. Here's your host, Paul Casey of Growing Forward Services coaching and equipping individuals and teams to spark breakthrough success. Paul: Thanks for joining me for today's episode with Renee Adams. She is the executive director of the arts center task force, and she's the director of programs and outreach for the Mid-Columbia Ballet. And a fun fact about Renee is she said she has this coffee cup with a picture of a cactus on it that says, "Can't touch this." Tell me about that. Renee: Hey Paul. It's really great to be here. Okay, so the story of the coffee mug. On good mornings when I wake up and open the cupboard and pull out the coffee cup, it sometimes says, "Can't touch this," and I get out my little MC Hammer moves and I do my little dance in the kitchen before getting my coffee and you know that's going to be a good day. Paul: Before we begin, let's check in with our Tri-City Influencers sponsors. Neal Taylor:  Hello, my name is Neil Taylor. I am the managing attorney for Gravis Law's commercial transactions team. The CTT team helps business owners, investors, and entrepreneurs accelerate and protect their business value. Today we're talking about employment law and alcohol and cannabis licensing. Josh Bam and Derek Johnson are both here with me now to describe those practice areas. Take it Derrick. Derrick:   Thanks Neal. I'm Derek Johnson, partner at Gravis Law. We find that many employers in Washington state simply don't have handbooks, employee policies or any other written materials to protect themselves and their employees. Without having these types of policies in place, an employer can run into trouble by firing employees even if the employee isn't properly performing or causing issues at work. Even if an employer fires someone for performance issues, for example, but fails to take the proper steps, they may run into trouble by inadvertently exposing themselves to a wrongful termination suit. We build strong, predictable and protective employee policies to protect our client's business. Josh:   That's true. Thanks Derek. And having employment policies in place when you're dealing with cannabis or alcohol licensing is especially important. We know that clean employment policy, clean corporate structure, and having an attorney that can work with the Washington State Liquor and Cannabis Board is critically important to protecting your business through licensing. The attorneys at Gravis Law have this experience. Visit us today, www.gravislaw.com. Paul:  Thank you for your supportive leadership development in the Tri-Cities. Well, welcome Renee. I was privileged to meet you last year. Leadership Tri-Cities Class of '24 at the retreat. Renee:  I think I'm supposed to say the best class ever here, yeah best class ever. Paul: All right, you can get away with that here. And you came strutting in with a smile on your face. And I'm like, I like this gal already. And you ended up getting elected president of your class. Renee:  I did. Paul:  So way to go for that. Renee: Thank you, it was a great experience. Paul:  So our Tri-City Influencers can get to know you. Take us through your past positions that led up to what you're doing now. Renee:  Yeah, well I've had a lot of different experiences in my career. I grew up as a ballet dancer and so I spent the majority of my teen years training in pre-professional ballet and I got my first job as a dancer right out of high school in Seattle with a company called Spectrum Dance Theater. And I was one of their apprentice dancers. And so I spent 12 years as a professional dancer. Primarily, I performed with contemporary dance companies in Seattle, Portland, and Chicago. And some time while I was in Portland, I realized I had an interest not just in teaching, but also in the administrative component of building outreach programs that go out into schools, community centers, and bring dance to people, one-on-one. And so those were the types of programs that I did when I wasn't on stage or in the studio. Renee:   And by the time I left Chicago, which was in about 2013, I had amassed a good experience as education specialist, education director, outreach coordinator type positions for dance companies. I made the connection with the ballet company here in Tri-Cities, Mid-Columbia Ballet actually through a friend in Chicago. And they said, "We have this company in Washington that is looking for help, and so give them a call." So I did, I called up Deborah and Joel Rogo and they hired me as their assistant artistic director. Renee:  And there was some moving around, but I eventually landed here in that position of director of programs and outreach. And then through that position, I realized I really had an interest and skill in the administrative component of arts organizations. And not just dance, but looking at how the arts as a whole benefits our community and thinking about how as an administrator of the arts, I can have a really great impact on individuals in the community through the arts, Paul:  Which not everyone in the arts or in ballet has that same wiring like you do. Renee:  Right. No, actually it's true that it's a special ... I think it's a special thing to have that. Paul:  Who are some influencers along the way in that journey that maybe were mentors to you or you picked up leadership tidbits from? Renee:  Yeah, so I think that in the beginning of my artistic journey was my ballet teacher, as most dancers would tell you, and her name was Phyllis Sear. By the time I met Phyllis, she was in her mid-80s. She was still a young-hearted woman even as she aged. And she really taught me a lot about life skills and the value of humility, the value of having grit and tenacity and following through and being patient and compassionate. And those were things that we talked about a lot in the context of performing and teaching, but they turned out to be very relevant as an administrator and as a leader. Renee:  So I've really valued those lessons. And then, as I danced through my career, I was always enamored by the company managers that I worked with. And watching them run all of the behind the scenes thing and calling the production manager and getting the tech crew there and making sure that we had funding for all of the employees to get their paycheck in time and just really watching them and listening to the tidbits of gold that they dropped. Paul: Fantastic. So when you got into these two positions, what was your original vision and then how has that morphed along your leadership journey? Renee:  That's a great question. And it's a little bit complicated because they are two different organizations that each have their own type of vision. But I think if I could summarize in both positions, my vision was sort of small. It was, what can I do with the resources I have right now to make a difference today? And maybe that was by taking an outreach program out to a senior living facility or by attending a board meeting, but over time, and I've been with Art Center Task Force as their executive director for a year, and over the course of that year, I've realized the vision is much broader and it's actually in the arts, it's about how do we bring people into our shared vision? How do we get them on the boat and show them that their vision aligns with ours? And I think the vision is more of, how do we show our community the value of the arts in their everyday lives? Paul:   Love that. So inspire a shared vision, one of the five principles- Renee: That's right. Paul:  That we learned in leadership Tri-Cities. Renee:  I learned something, Paul. Paul: You did, you did. Why is it so important to share that vision? Because you could just keep that vision, it could bubble you up every day and it's fantastic to keep you motivated, but why does it have to be a shared vision? Renee:  Well, I think that especially in the arts, nothing happens without collaboration. I think that's probably true in many industries. But as artists, we are very, very passionate and we tend to believe that our way is usually the right way. And without that element of collaboration and being able to see how our way can align with those next to us, that we all have the same kind of goals, then we really just fall into fighting and chaos. And that's something that I noticed about the Tri-Cities arts community as soon as I got here. That is not the case. This is the Tri-Cities arts community is one that its core value is collaboration, and so it was really easy to slide into that. Paul:  Are you the only staff in those roles? Is it all volunteer-based? Tell us a little bit about how you evangelize arts? Renee: Yeah. At Mid-Columbia Ballet, there are a variety of staff members. There are three key staff members, the artistic director, the company manager and myself, director of programs and outreach. And so we coordinate a lot of the day-to-day activities, each in our own sort of departments I guess. And then there are some other staff members that come on and do project-type activities. So one staff member runs our include program, which serves people with special needs and so on and so forth. So there's a lot of staff support at Mid-Columbia Ballet. There's also a lot of volunteer support there for things like the Nutcracker, which most people in the community have probably been to. What they might not realize is the Nutcracker takes about 100 volunteers every night to run the backstage components. And so certainly we can't have a staff of 100 volunteers, that would break the budget and we would not be able to share the art at art. Renee: At Art Center Task Force, it's a much different situation with a lot different mission. And so I am the only staff member. I am the first staff member of the organization. And this is an organization that was incorporated in the mid-90s, and since then it has been run on the passion and tenacity of volunteers in the community. So it is so inspiring to go to work and see that there's all these volunteers who've put in all these hours before me and be able to follow in those footsteps. Paul:  Well, what are you most passionate about? You've used the word inspire a few times already, so what are you most passionate about in these organizations right now and why? Rene: I'm really excited and passionate about the idea of finding connections between people. And a friend of mine actually at the ballet the company administrator said when I first started working on coordinating events and thinking about these bigger visions that my job was kind of like putting together the pieces of a puzzle. You me throw the puzzle out and all the pieces are there. And to be able to find the connection between two or three or four puzzle pieces that makes the whole picture, that's really exciting. That's the thing that makes me do my MC Hammer dance a little more actively in the morning. I love to see those connections. And not just with people in the arts community, I love to see how people in the sports community, in our city government, in business leadership positions throughout the community have those connections to the arts, those personal emotional connections. Paul: So you must have some type of networking strategy to make those connections. How do you prioritize your time or these people and influencers in town? Renee:  I wish I could tell you I had a perfect template for my networking strategy, but I don't. But one of the things that I realized early on is how important it is to keep on my calendar time to do my work, whether that is administrative work or phone calls or networking opportunities. And so, I just try to look at my calendar each week as a balanced meal and then each month as a balanced meal to make sure that I'm talking to the right people, to go through my database or my email list and see who is it that I haven't touched base within a while? And try to spread it out that way. Paul: Awesome. So talk to me about building a team and creating a culture. So you've got some staff in the ballet, you also have lots of volunteers and whether our listeners are a nonprofit or for-profit organizations, what do you look for when you're trying to bring someone on board, make sure they're on the right seat on the bus, the values you're trying to instill, all that? Renee:  The single biggest quality that we look for in volunteers or staff members is are you a team player? Because we really appreciate people who offer opposite views or who offer different views. And so we're not necessarily looking for somebody who just agrees with all of our pragmatic choices, but we're looking for people who can sit around the table and also be that team. The other thing we're generally looking for is people who have follow-through. And so whether that's a staff or a volunteer member, especially for volunteers, it's hard to not over commit yourself. And so- Paul:  What? Renee:  What I've realized as a leader in this position that I am starting to get a sense of volunteers who really have so much passion, but maybe they're a little over-committed and how can I get them involved and how can I keep them in the family, so to speak, of the arts community and help them feel successful as well as get what we need from the project? Paul: I really liked that. I read a book last year called The New Breed of Volunteers, and it's talking about both the eldest generation and also the youngest generation that want to volunteer and how it's really a new breed nowadays that they want to do it on their time, they want to do it in nuggets, they don't want long-term commitments. And we have to, as leaders, maybe meld our volunteer opportunities to fit. So like you said, they can all be included. And I think that's a great way to do so. I love that team player is number one. And you mentioned about diversity of thought, so sometimes diversity of thought can be divisive, other times it can be a real asset. How do you see the difference when it becomes an asset? Renee:  Yeah, I think that the diversity of thought that's an asset is the one that can listen and not just hear what you're saying and respond, but really slow down and listen and absorb the other point of view. Because they still may have a dissenting view or a disagreeing view, but a lot of times we find that those individuals who maybe aren't ready to be a team player in our setting, they're just not quite ready to listen to whatever the opportunity is. Paul:  Yeah. They might have a little personal agenda that they are ... Or they're entrenched there and they're not doing the old Stephen Covey-ism, "Seek first to understand then be understood," which I still love that one. Let's stay on that topic of personnel, how do you keep them inspired and affirmed? Because volunteers could walk away tomorrow, so how do you keep them pumped up? Renee:  Paul, I have to say that I learned a lot from you in our leadership sessions during Leadership Tri-Cities. And one of the things that I really took from me in those sessions was this idea of small wins. And I've been trying it out in small doses throughout the year. And this is something that in our industry, in the arts, things rarely move quickly. Nonprofits rarely move quickly. And so there's a lot of waiting around, even when you're in the middle of the production and the show has to happen, there's still a lot of waiting around. Things just don't move quickly sometimes. And so, it's easy for people to get frustrated and to feel that pull of impatience. And I've been doing my best to find these moments of small wins and celebrate, whether it's send an email to the board and say, "We have this great connection. Please give me any feedback or let me know if you have a connection to this connection." Renee: And the other way we try to celebrate small wins is through a lot of gratitude. Thank you so much to this person for this activity, et cetera. And yeah, that small wins thing is really valuable for us. Paul: I was listening to another podcast the other day that says, "Make sure that it's clear what a win actually is in your organization because what you might as the leader think a win is and what your people think is win might be totally different things. So give them this view of what a win actually is or what done looks like when you delegate something to people so that they really get it." So let's turn to you a little bit. No one wants to get stale in leadership, so how do you stay relevant and on the cutting edge yourself? And then how does that build innovation for your organization? Renee: I thought a lot about this question and I realized the reason it was hard for me to process and answer was that it's changed a lot for me personally. As my career has changed from specific arts programming in the field of dance to a broader perspective of arts administration, that thing of not being stale has changed. And what I realize it is now is looking more globally and maybe that is for example here the state of Washington, at leaders who are doing similar things as us in this community and literally calling them up and saying, "Hi, my name is Renee and I'm from the Tri-Cities and we're working on this idea here," whether it's a joint fundraiser or an art center or a unique program, "I'd like to pick your brain a little bit." And that is very inspiring for me, because there are not a lot of other arts staff leaders in this community. The ones that there are, are amazing and we have a great network with each other, but it's so wonderful to be able to reach out to other people in other communities and find parallels. Paul:  Yeah, I just got back from the National Speakers Association conference and it's sort the same thing. If you don't have a lot of people doing exactly what you do around you, you've got to go find them and strike up those conversations and it just pumps you up because they really get what you do and they've got also some ideas, because they're a little further down the road than you in some ways and who knows? Maybe you've got some wisdom to share with them. Renee:  Right. Paul:  Well, before we get to our next question to ask Renee what makes a good day for her, let's give a shout out to our sponsors. Paul:  Jason Hoke, American Family Insurance. Jason, what is the biggest pushback you get about life insurance? Jason Hoke:  Hey Paul. One of the biggest push backs I get from life insurance is from folks that are single. They usually ask me, "Why do I even need this? I don't have kids, I don't have any dependents or a spouse, why do I need this?" Ultimately, whenever you pass on, there's going to be somebody there to pick up the pieces, there's going to be somebody to deal with your affairs and I would say it's your responsibility to make sure that there are funds, that there's money there so that person can take the time needed to go through it properly and not make it their responsibility. Paul:  Awesome, Jason, so tell us how can our listeners get in touch with you? Jason Hoke: You can swing by our office on Road 68 in Pasco, or give us a call at (509) 547-0540. Paul:  So Renee, what makes it a good day for you personally? You look back at the end of the day and you go, "Man, that was a really good day," both personally and as you just look at your workday? Renee:  I wish there was a simple way to answer this question because every day in my world looks absolutely different. I'm not sure if one day has ever looked the same. So I think I have to be a little more abstract here. For me, when I leave the 'office' which is rarely an actual office and it's rarely five o'clock, it's that feeling of yes, I communicated with all the people I needed to communicate with today. Yes, everyone feels like they got to speak their mind and share their perspective and they felt heard and I felt heard. And so it's those kind of more abstract communication-focused things that make it a good day because our journey is a long one and we have a lot of work to do to enrich our community with the arts. And so we look for that type of feeling. Paul:  So you probably use different communication methods. What are the most effective for you that you use? Renee:  Oddly enough, the most effective communication method for us is written. And we spend a lot of time writing down our ideas and writing down our thoughts, whether in emails or, for example, reports, the board that we can save in our Dropbox files. And the reason for that is because people change, board members change, volunteers change. And so to have that written communication in place of the work we've already done helps us create an archive of all of our progress. And that's really valuable. And the other thing is it's so valuable for us to be able to get in front of the community and actually talk about what we're doing, whether that's on a news clip or in podcasts or at the farmer's market or whatever it is, just getting out there and talking to people is so very important for us. And then of course the obvious one is the arts are very visual. Whether you're looking at them on a sculpture, a painting or on a stage, they are a visual thing. Paul:  So it sounds like if there are people looking for speakers for their organizations in town, you guys are game. Renee:  Absolutely. Paul: Listen for that contact information in just a few minutes. So take us behind the scenes of your life. What's your best habit, what's your worst habit? Renee:  Oh dear. Well, I have to say that my best habit is something that's a carryover from my dance career, which is just to really start every day with some physical activity. Whether that's going to the yoga studio around the corner from my house or walking my dog or maybe getting a quick jaunt weeding my garden in the morning. But what I find when I don't do those things, I get to the point where I can't focus on my day. One of my worst habits is that I tend to be a workhorse, and so sometimes that means I get stuck in the weeds. Sometimes that means even though I can see the big picture, I drill down on something too specific and I go down that windy path that's not helpful. And without a lot of other staff support around on a daily basis, sometimes it's easy to do that. And so that can be one of my worst habits, is not slowing down enough to look at the big picture consistently. Paul:  So if our listeners had that same malady and they got stuck down in the weeds and realize, we're in the bottom of a hole, what advice would you give them to pull out of that once they're self-aware enough to realize, wow, I'm way down deep? Renee:  Yeah, I'm at the bottom of the hole. My recommendation is to surround yourself with people who are not necessarily better than you, but have different skills and characteristics than you. And I really rely on the supportive committees in our organizations to bounce ideas off and, "Hey, don't let me get too far on this idea if it's a bad one." Paul:  A favorite quote that you have. Renee: Paul, I wrote this quote for you because it is my very favorite quote. It's actually a mission statement of a theater company in Chicago. It's called The Looking Glass Theater. And the quote says, "Fire the imagination with love. Celebrate the human capacity to taste and smell, weep and laugh, create and destroy. And wake up where we first fell, changed, charged and empowered". Paul:  Well it's pretty obvious why you would choose that, but what does that mean to you? Renee:  To me that means that each day is an opportunity to be creative and to welcome the day with this fiery energy that I find is really important in my work. It helps people connect to me, it helps me connect to them. And this quote reminds me that it's okay to cry and it's okay to destroy and it's okay to have these moments that aren't always beautiful, that it's about the journey. Paul: Let me follow up on that. So if someone says, "I'm not really creative," I mean you are naturally, and what would you say? How can they stoke their creativity? Is there a habit that people can do to do that better? Renee:  I love the idea of thinking about our daily lives as creativity, and how is it that we ... What are the things we find joy in that are sort of mundane, like cleaning the counter and putting away the dishes. And it's not necessarily that we do those things artistically, so to speak, but creativity is often something that's born out of routine. And so finding the joy in those routines I think often allows us to be creative. Paul: I love that. Finding the joy in the routine. How about your favorite book that you think all of our listeners should read? Renee: So I recently read a book by Brené Brown called Daring Greatly, and I'm sure many people have read that book. And I love the idea of thinking about vulnerability and thinking about ourselves as whole people, not just as people that go to work and then people who go home to our families and then people who go to the grocery store, but that all of our experiences summarize us at each moment in each day. Paul:  Daring Greatly, Brené Brown. And she wrote one recently, Dare to Lead as well that I read. How about an influencer in town that every Tri-Citian should meet? Renee:  Now, I may be biased from my arts perspective, but if you have not met Deborah and Joel Rogo who own the Tri-Cities Academy of Ballet, and Debra is the artistic director of Mid-Columbia Ballet, then you are missing out. These are really influential people, their history and their past is rich and they bring so much experience and professionalism to the community here in Tri-Cities. And we're just so grateful to have them here. Paul:  Sound like cool people. Renee:  They are very cool people. Paul: Now let's talk your legacy. If you left a letter on your desk for the leader who came after you, what would it say? Renee: So I think today that I've spent a lot of time talking about the connections and who are the people, as you said, on the bus or in the room. And for me, that letter or that legacy for future leaders is really think about who you have surrounding you. And for me, that's always about finding people to surround me that I want to look up to, that I want to emulate. They have qualities that are ... Have more experience than me, they have different experience than me. And so, to me, that's really important in any position in our life, but also as a leader, that we're looking for people who are better than us so that we can continue to grow. Paul:  Fantastic. I got to hear John Maxwell live at this conference I went to recently and he got the Influencer of the Year award from the National Speakers Association, and he has the law of the inner circle, which says, "Your success is determined by those you surround yourself with." So that really backs up what you just said. Renee:   Yes. Paul:  Finally, what advice would you give to new leaders or anyone who wants to keep growing and gaining more influence? Renee:  Yeah, I wrote down the word gems in my notes, as in sparkly stones. And I don't think that the path is always obvious as we go on in our career and our lives and search for leadership opportunities. I think that we walk a path and we have a choice, the right path or the left path, and neither is wrong and we just take one and then we look for the gems along the way. And when we look at it that way, we don't get stunted by fear. We don't stop because we can't be perfect, and it's more about the journey and the exploration and the experience than it is about the perfection. Paul:  Tri-City listeners, look for the gyms along the way. So Renee, how can our listeners best connect with you? Renee:  Probably the best way to connect with me is over email at artscentertaskforce@gmail.com or through a phone call at (509) 6019-98546. Paul:  Well, thanks again for all you do to make the Tri-Cities a great place and keep leading well. Renee:  Thanks for having me, Paul. Paul:  Let me wrap up our podcast today with a leadership resource to recommend. It is the emotional index quiz. You go over to lifecoach.com and you go into the free quizzes section and this emotional index quiz is 100 questions, takes about 20 to 30 minutes to do and it's to figure out the underlying needs that drive your behavior. This is essential for each of us to identify because there might be some changes that need to be made to get a little bit more emotionally healthy. Again, lifecoach.com, free quizzes. Paul:  And don't forget to consider patronizing our sponsors of Tri-City Influencer Gravis Law And Jason Hogue, American Family Insurance. Finally, one more leadership tidbit for the road to help you make a difference in your circle of influence, it's a quote by former Dallas Cowboys coach, Tom Landry, "A winner never stops trying." Keep growing forward. Speaker 3:  If you enjoy this podcast or it piqued your interest in learning more about leadership and self-leadership, you can continue to glean from Paul and his growing forward services. Check out Paul's blog and the products, tips and tools on his website at www.paulcasey.org and opt into his target practice inspirational E-newsletter. You'll get his 33 top tips for becoming a time management rock star when you subscribe and consider buying one of his three books. The most recent one being Leading the Team You've Always Wanted. Paul:  This podcast has been produced by Bonsai Audio at Fuse Coworking Space.  

This week on the P100 Podcast, of course, we had to address the sinkhole that shook Pittsburgh (and fueled a day’s worth of memes). We dig deep to learn how sinkholes form and consider ourselves grateful to be above ground (it was only a few blocks away from us). Elsewhere in the episode:Alexandra Loutsion, a soprano singing the lead role in Pittsburgh Opera’s “Florencia en el Amazonas,” stops by.Priya Amin of Flexable discusses her childcare solution for working parents and gives a preview of an upcoming webinar.A Veterans Day tribute to those who served.----more----This Episode is sponsored by WordWriteCenturies before cell phones and social media, human connections were made around fires as we shared the stories that shaped our world. Today, stories are still the most powerful way to move hearts and minds and inspire action. At WordWrite, Pittsburgh's largest independent public relations agency, we understand that before you had a brand, before you sold any product or service, you had a story.WordWrite helps clients to uncover their own Capital S Story. The reason someone would want to buy, work, invest or partner with you through our patented story-crafting process. Visit wordwritepr.com to uncover your Capital S Story.Here's the full transcript from this episode.Logan: You are listening to the P100 Podcast, the biweekly companion piece to the Pittsburgh 100 bringing you Pittsburgh news, culture and more, because sometimes 100 words just isn't enough for a great story.Paul: Hi, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the P100 Podcast, the audio companion to the Pittsburgh 100. I'm Paul Furiga, here along with my colleagues, Dan Stefano and Logan Armstrong.Dan: Hey Paul.Logan: How you doing?Paul: Guys, we have a great episode today. We're talking about big black holes.Dan: Everybody's seen the hole now, but yes.Paul: Yes, we are. Singing a little bit, accurate gentlemen, Pittsburgh Opera.Dan: That's true. Yeah. We're not singing, fortunately, but there is singing in this episode.Paul: We have a great guest on, who's going to talk about a really cool initiative called Flexable.Dan: Yeah, it's a company that is involved in instant onsite childcare and it's an issue that affects a lot of working parents and I think you want to hang on for that interview. It's definitely interesting.Paul: And we're going to be talking about Veterans Day.Dan: Absolutely.Logan: Finish it off strong.Paul: That's right.Dan: Yeah. That's the way we love Veterans Day, actually, it's a great holiday.Logan: It's also (beep) birthday.Dan: Hey, that's supposed to be ... That's spoiler alert there, we don't want to talk about that.Paul: Is that how that wound up in this episode?Dan: I know. I can't do another little ... Maybe the last five minutes is just a celebration of (beep), or maybe it isn't. I don't know. We all have to hang on.Paul: I don't think so, folks.Dan: No.Paul: Stay tuned.Paul: All right, now we want to talk about holes, sometimes black holes, sometimes big holes, sometimes big holes, small holes.Dan: Sometimes famous holes.Paul: Sometimes famous holes. All of them, sinkholes.Dan: I feel like I've seen that in the news lately. I don't know.Paul: Yeah, something about a bus downtown, Dan, going into a hole somewhere.Dan: Bus, Dan, in the sinkhole.Paul: Dan, means the up streets [crosstalk 00:02:12].Dan: Well, you got to work on your [inaudible 00:02:15] accent, but you're getting-Paul: I don't think so.Dan: Yeah.Logan: The Cleveland is showing.Dan: Yes, exactly.Paul: All right, so, holes. I have a word for you gentlemen. You ready?Dan: Got you.Paul: This is not a Pittsburgh ethnic food, although it sounds like one. Karst. K-A-R-S-T.Dan: Yeah. I need a definition.Paul: All right. Karst, occurs in bedrock, that’s primarily limestone and it's like an underground cave system that water rushes through. The most common form of sinkholes is caused by karst. We don't really know yet which caused the sinkhole that happened downtown, what we do know is that the Allegheny River has a limestone bed. That is why the water in the Allegheny River is clear, whereas the water in Monongahela is brown because that's more of a mud bottom.Dan: You and I have varying definitions of clear, but yes, it is definitely cleaner than the stuff in the Mon.Paul: If you go upstream…Dan: Yeah. Oh, now like elegant Armstrong County.Paul: Yes.Dan: Beautiful.Paul: It is beautiful.Logan: Here's the thing, are we sure the Mon is only dirty because of the mud?Paul: I didn't say, only dirty because of the mud, I do know it has a mud bottom.Dan: Like, 40, 50 years ago, it was definitely ... I can only imagine how dirty it was.Paul: Guys, that's how that airplane disappeared into the Mon however many years ago.Dan: Correct.Logan: Oh yeah.Paul: Right into the Mon.Dan: Maybe it went down a sinkhole.Paul: Yeah. Okay. Paul: Back to karst, which is not like pierogi or kraut or any of the great ethnic foods we have in town here. That's the main reason in Pennsylvania that we have a lot of sinkholes and there are a lot of sinkholes in Pennsylvania. There's another reason. Mining. There's a lot of unchartered mines. We really have had an epidemic lately of things collapsing. The sinkhole that occurred in the South Hills. Big water main break.Dan: That's affected my house.Paul: Yes. That's another reason that sinkholes happen. Underground infrastructure. That might be the case here, we really don't know.Logan: Yeah. Either way, Pittsburgh, as you said, has had quite a history of some interesting sinkholes and there've been multiple cases in the past few years that have been documented. Around the world too, there have been houses that have been swallowed by sinkholes, but specifically here in Pittsburgh, an interesting story that I found just the other day, was a man who was actually just walking, and this has happened a few years ago, was walking underneath an underpass and just all of a sudden a sinkhole opened and he fell 10 feet into the ground.Dan: Where was this? What neighborhood?Logan: That happened in Glassport, he had to call 911 using his own phone and they came and rescued him an hour later when he was sitting 10 feet underground.Dan: You probably got a bad signal when you're in a sinkhole … no bars.Logan: I would think that was a prank call.Paul: One bar, which when they arrived they probably thought he'd been in a bar before he fell in the hole.Dan: Paul, I think you have some more insight though, right?Paul: This is such a big problem. There are two Pennsylvania state government departments, the department of natural resources and also the department of environmental protection, that have massive micro-sites including interactive maps all about sinkholes. So it's not your imagination, sinkholes are a real problem here. In fact, there is an Instagram account devoted to sinkholes in Pittsburgh. It's unofficial @pwsasinkholes, all one word. @pwsasinkholes on Instagram. Check it out, the bus picture's there, but so are a lot of other very interesting ones. I don't think the one from Glassport made it though.Logan: That's a shame. It might just be within city limits but-Paul: Might be.Logan: It would take quite a sinkhole to top what we saw last week.Dan: Oh it was incredible. Fortunately no one was hurt so we were able to make memes and social media was able to go crazy over this.Paul: Made the national news, international news.Dan: Right. It also reminds you though that it could have been a lot worse and that this is something that needs to be figured out. Infrastructure in Pittsburgh and all over Pennsylvania and the Northeast, it's just old.Paul: Your average water distribution system in an urban area like Pittsburgh is easily a hundred years old, so that may well be the cause. We don't know. One thing we do know, according to our government, our Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the average sinkhole in Pennsylvania is four to 20 feet in diameter. This is 75 to a hundred feet, so it's not your imagination, that is one big hole.Dan: For this next segment, we're going to be talking about childcare in the workplace. We have a really interesting guest here with us. It's Priya Amin. She's one of the co-founders of Flexable.Priya: Thanks for having me.Dan: Absolutely. We also have Keira Koscumb. She's one of our fellow WordWriters, and childcare is very important for her because…Keira: I'm pregnant.Dan: Okay. It's super exciting. Yes. Keira, you’re due in January, and this is definitely something we've talked about in the office, just important stuff about childcare here, the cost of it, the availability of it. Priya, can you tell us a little bit about Flexable and just what you guys do there?Priya: Yeah, so Flexable was launched in 2016. It was born out of necessity, quite honestly. My co-founder, Jessica Strong and I, we both have five kids between us, ages four all the way up to 12, almost five up to 12 and we both had professional careers prior to being entrepreneurs, but the common thread that we shared was that childcare was always getting in the way of our professional development. First off, I was a brand manager at Nestle for years. I ended up leaving my career because I just couldn't find the balance between traveling all the time and seeing my children. I felt like my husband and I were ships passing in the night and we barely got to see each other, let alone our kids. So I ended up leaving my career and moving to Pittsburgh and I started a consulting company here and it was great.Priya: It was going really well and I had my second child and unfortunately I kept running into the same issue, which was, I couldn't do this. I could not go to a podcast recording in the morning. I couldn't meet with a client. I couldn't go to networking events because I had a three year old and a baby in a pumpkin seat. It was distracting and it was unprofessional and it was just really stressful for me. So that kind of planted a seed in my head to say, how can I create something that marries work and life together? How can I fit life and work together better? That was the start of Flexable.Priya: Flexable provides on demand onsite childcare at offices, conferences and events to help parents, to help women be able to have a seat at the table, to not miss professional development events, to miss work or to even miss doctor's appointments. We have some really great strategic partnerships with some large organizations around town, but the pinnacle partnership that we have is with Allegheny Health Network. We provide childcare at their women's behavioral health clinic to help patients get the therapy that they need specifically for postpartum depression care. We're affiliated with the Alexis Joy D'Achille Postpartum Depression Care Unit, and our caregivers go and provide childcare so that women can get the care that they need and not put childcare ahead of their own needs.Priya: We employ 32 highly vetted caregivers. These are people that have background checks, clearances, first aid, CPR, and they pick up shifts pretty much like any other gig economy job. So it's similar to Uber or Lyft from that perspective. A caregiver goes onto our system, finds a job that's on a Wednesday afternoon, picks up that shift. They have all the supplies that they need. They have all the play supplies, games, toys, crafts, all of that stuff, but they also have all the safety supplies. So corner guards, outlet covers, first aid kits, rubber gloves, Clorox wipes, all of that. So they arrive on site, they set up, they take care of kids, they clean up and they leave.Dan: That's fantastic. Keira, I know that's got to be something that sounds pretty interesting for you. Once maternity leave ends for you, I know your husband, he's got a full time job that's pretty important. Yourself, you need to go on a lot of client calls and meetings outside of the office. How does something like this sound to you?Keira: It sounds great. Daycare is expensive, you're on a waiting list. I think this evolution has happened with companies where in the past, maybe 10 years ago, I always viewed being somebody that wasn't planning on getting pregnant anytime soon, single and working. I viewed the companies as the enemy, they won't let me do these things, they won't let me be flexible with my kids when it's really not that way anymore. Companies are willing to pony up and be flexible, but it is just a time thing for parents. You know what I mean? You have stuff to get done at your job and you're responsible for things. So how you balance that guilt of, not letting your co-workers and your company down, with spending time with your family and kids and your husband and making sure that, what's the point of having this kid if you're just going to shell out a bunch of money for them to be sitting in a daycare or sitting with a nanny?Keira: So, this is definitely something that's attractive. I guess my question for you would be is, it doesn't sound like this is ever permanent. It's more like a temporary thing. It's not like WordWrite could ever hire Flexable to have a daycare that, Dan or me or whoever could bring our kid in every day.Priya: You could. Right now though, the best scenarios that we've seen with organizations is having childcare when it's needed, so at events or at a conference or on that one specific day, if it's election day, for example. We're also a relatively new company and I think that's one of the reasons why we haven't had these long-term commitments with organizations, but we're starting to see that. Amazingly, we have a 100% contract renewal rate with all of our customers because they see that once they have our caregivers at one event, parents keep asking for it and they're like, why can't we have this during these days or whatnot? So that's what we're working towards. We're working towards creating more of a more, not permanent footprint, but definitely a more regular footprint in some organizations so that it becomes synonymous with the company's culture, with their benefits, for example, just something that is a part of their inclusivity package. So it just helps people be more productive and just be there.Dan: Priya, for our listeners at home here, they can hear more from you. You have a webinar coming up later in the month on November 21st, can you give us a little preview of what that's going to be about?Priya: Yeah, so with the GPMP, we have a webinar coming up later this month on childcare as an inclusivity driver in the workplace. We see that when parents take time off to take care of their children, actually roughly $6 billion hit to the workforce, the American workforce, and unfortunately the majority of that is women. It's about 75% of the women who have left the workplace because of childcare reasons, only about a quarter of them even come back and even those that do take time off of work, there is such a hit to their personal finances but also to the greater economy as well. So we'll be talking about some of that. We'll be also talking about how things like childcare could potentially help drive productivity and inclusivity at work and give some best in class examples of those, not only in Pittsburgh but across the country as well.Dan: That's great. We're looking forward to hearing more about that then. For everybody who is interested in that webinar, we'll be sure to include a link in the show summary and in the Pittsburgh 100 that's going to drop on November 7th, and again that webinar is on November 21st so plenty of time to sign up. If you want to hear more about Flexable, you can find them at flexablecare, all one word, .com and even if you need to hire somebody for some childcare, it's a great place, but Keira and Priya, I really appreciate you guys coming in and just this is a great conversation.Priya: Thanks so much.Dan: Thanks a lot.Logan: Centuries before cell phones and social media, human connections were made around fires as we shared the stories that shaped our world. Today, stories are still the most powerful way to move hearts and minds and inspire action. At WordWrite, Pittsburgh's largest independent public relations agency, we understand that before you had a brand, before you sold any product or service, you had a story. WordWrite helps clients to uncover their own Capital S story, the reason someone would want to buy, work, invest or partner with you through our patented storycrafting process. Visit wordwritepr.com to uncover your Capital S story.Dan: All right. Hey everybody. As promised in the introduction here, we've got a pretty special treat for you here and we're bringing a little bit of culture to the 100 today too. We're here with Alexandra Lucian of the Pittsburgh Opera. She's in town for a new show that's just starting this week.Alexandra: Thank you so much for having me.Dan: Yeah, absolutely. It's going to be exciting for you coming back because you're a local, right?Alexandra: I am a local. I'm born and raised in Canonsburg, PA. Went to Chartiers Houston high school and so it's always a joy to come back to my hometown.Dan: Great. Can you tell us a little bit about the show that you're going to be on?Alexandra: Yes. The show that we're doing at Pittsburgh Opera right now is called Florencia en el Amazonas, which translates to Florence on the Amazon. Basically, it is a Spanish language opera, which is the first that Pittsburgh Opera is producing. The piece itself, it's a very unique opera because first of all, it's very short. It's two hours with intermission. So it's kind of the perfect step into opera if you've never checked it out before. The music itself is almost like a Disney movie. It's very cinematic and lush and the setting is in South America, so it sounds very tropical and very accessible and very easy to listen to. It's very beautiful.Alexandra: The story is basically about Florencia, who is a famous opera singer actually and left her hometown of Manaus in Brazil a long time ago to pursue an opera career and 20, I think it's about 20 years or so, and 20 years later she's now coming back because she feels like her life hasn't fully been fulfilled. Part of the reason is because she left her lover behind and his name is Cristóbal, and she wants to come back and find him again and reunite with him.Dan: Right. You're playing the lead role of Florencia, right?Alexandra: Yes.Dan: Okay, that's awesome. One thing that's interesting, and again, I'm pretty inexperienced when it comes to opera, but one thing that I find interesting about it, is it seems like there's always is a mix of fantastical and some grounded maybe romance that's involved. Do you see those big themes in a lot of operas?Alexandra: Absolutely, yes. There's a lot of fairytales in opera, I'd say, and kind of larger than life stories and sometimes stories that don't make a lot of sense. But the cool thing about this piece is that it really ... It was written by a Mexican composer and a Latin American librettist. They really wanted to celebrate their own culture, and a big part of that culture is magical realism, which is basically magic that kind of takes the form of something real. So, we're sitting in the studio, it would be like, if one of us started to levitate in that world, that wouldn't be anything weird because that's what magical realism is.Logan: That's very cool. As a musician myself, I know from a pretty young age, I really wanted to do something in music and I was always very entranced by it. Was that kind of your same experience? Did you always know that you wanted to do something in opera or at least musical or did that come a little later?Alexandra: Yeah, I always sang. I drove my parents nuts actually, because I would sing around the house and I would also sing in church with my dad, and basically they got to the point where they were like, we need to do something with this kid or else she's going to drive us crazy. So I auditioned for what used to be called the Children's Festival Chorus in Pittsburgh and is now the Pittsburgh Youth Chorus. I sang with them for six years, and that was the first spark of really being into classical music and singing. So I did that. I did high school musicals. I did the Junior Mendelssohn choir also. So all of these things, led me in this direction because I started singing in foreign languages from the time I was eight years old.Dan: Oh, wow.Alexandra: I also grew up Greek Orthodox, so we sing in Greek too in church. So I was kind of surrounded with that. So for me, I started to take voice lessons and I realized that I didn't sound like any of the people on the musical theater recordings, I sounded like the opera recordings, so I went to Pittsburgh Opera to check out an opera when I was 15, which was Turandot and I completely fell in love with it, and then almost 20 years later, I sang Turandot here two years ago. So yeah, it's been a cool journey.Dan: Well, something about that journey then, in my thinking, I would just assume that, a singer stays with the same company for a while or you're contracted or something. But looking at your history here, you've been all over. That's Minnesota, Chicago, Canada, New Orleans, pretty much anywhere and everywhere. This has got to be like ... It's quite the career I imagine, it takes you a lots of cool places.Alexandra: Yeah, opera is very unique in that way, in this country in particular. In Europe it's a little different, but here we are freelancers and basically we have managers mostly, but we're kind of our own entity. So this year I'm in Minnesota, here, Palm Beach, Chicago twice and then Austin, so yeah, you just kind of bop around and you get used to traveling and meeting new people every time, new cast, new company, and then sometimes you get to come back to old favorites, like here.Dan: Right. Is it exciting to come back to Pittsburgh then? Do you get a lot of friends and family in the crowd?Alexandra: Oh yeah. It's really great. I have a really supportive community. I'm very lucky and Pittsburgh Opera also has been very generous in working with me, in bringing in my community, which is the Greek community here. Last time for Turandot and this time they are doing a Greek night for all of the Greeks in the area, they're-Dan: Quite few.Alexandra: Yes, exactly. There's some ticket discounts for opening night and some backstage tours and things like that.Dan: Someone who isn't familiar with opera like myself, probably other people in this office and it's something that sometimes it might feel like it's inaccessible, like in my head I say, well I don't know these languages, but ... Why would you recommend someone who hasn't experienced it to just try it out, get to a show?Alexandra: Yeah. I think that first of all, you'll never be lost in the story, because there's always English super titles that are projected above the stage. That's first and foremost. So you were not just going to go in and hear the story and be like, what the heck are they saying? Because you'll know. We try to also provide synopsises and stuff, but the super titles are a huge help. I also think that in our digital age, we hear a lot of music through our computers and through our phones, but the cool thing about opera I think is that, it's like music in its purest form. We don't use any microphones, and that is something that's really cool. We're singing, like the opera I just did was a 90-piece orchestra and I did not use a microphone in a 2,500 seat hall.Alexandra: That's what we're trained to do and it's pretty cool to hear the raw human voice singing like that in a big space. The Benedum's almost 3,000 seats and it's kind of a way to bring all of the pieces together of lots of different art forms. So you've got singing, you've got instruments, you've got set design. This one has projections, so there's kind of like a movie going on behind the sets. There's costuming. So there's something for everybody, which I think is really neat. If you're into seeing interesting costumes, you can check that out. If you're into singing, you can check that out. If you're into the symphony, you can check that out. So it's kind of something for everyone.Dan: One thing that we'd be remiss to not point out here is that these shows are coming up here, going to be on November 9th, 12th, 15th and 17th you can still grab tickets at pittsburghopera.org. They're all going to be at the Benedum Center, which is an awesome venue, I imagine a lot of people have been there, but if you haven't, it's really great to see, and do you enjoy playing there as well?Alexandra: Oh yeah. It's so beautiful. It's one of the most beautiful venues in the city I think, and there's so much of our history as Pittsburghers in that venue, thinking of it as like a movie house back in years and years and years ago and then a performing venue. It's really amazing, and when you think about all of the different shows that have been on that stage, it's really cool to be able to share the stage with that kind of history.Dan: Alexandra, last thing we're going to ask you, can you hit a note for us?Alexandra: Sure. Okay. Let's see. (singing)Dan: I don't think we can end this segment any better than that. Alexandra, thanks for being here, and everybody try to get to the opera. At some point here for Florencia en el Amazonas or they've got a lot of great shows coming up in 2020 too, so thank you again Alexandra.Alexandra: Thank you guys so much.Dan: OK guys, we have another important holiday coming up here. Within the next week we'll be at Veterans Day, which is the day that obviously, we celebrate all our servicemen and women about, just the people who are serving and making big sacrifices for us here. Unlike Memorial Day, which is another important one, I think Veterans Day is an important one because it's about the living too.Paul: That’s right Dan, absolutely.Dan: Yes, and Paul, you just had an interesting experience though. You were over in the UK and you had a chance to really learn about how people over in Europe feel about our veterans.Paul: That’s right. I think this is really an important way to look at Veterans Day, Dan, because, given the geography of the United States, with the exception of the terrible 9/11 attack, we've never really been invaded or bombarded in the way that Europe was during the Second World War. Those events are fading further and further into history. We're coming up next year on the 75th anniversary of the end of that war, so it was surprising to me, as you mentioned, a group of about 40 of us from the States went over to my dad's old airbase and my dad was in the Eighth Air Force. He was a bombardier navigator, and of this group of 40 there were three veterans, each one of them, 96 years old. Two of them brought their significant others who were also not spring chickens, and then the rest of us were mostly kids of World War II veterans or in some cases grandkids.Paul: We had a few who were nephews and nieces as well. It was a very interesting group. So 75 years ago, 1944, was a time period when my dad's airbase was really up and running and my dad was actually there. I think that different perspective, and I did one article about this, I'll probably do another one in the 100, we went to the cemetery at Mattingly, which is the only cemetery in the UK that has American war dead from World War II, and there's 3,800 graves there and there's another 5,000 memorialized who are still missing 75 years after the end of the war. As you said, really Veterans Day is more about the living. Memorial Day is about those who lost their lives defending the country.Paul: The thing that was really interesting to me, Dan, about this whole trip was the way people overseas view what we as Americans did through our military service. There was a group of people, and I don't mean people who are like our veterans in their '90s, I mean people in their '50s, '60s, '40s, '30s, teenagers, that we met, who care about what happened 75 years ago. And the reason is, as one of the people said to me when he kept profusely thanking me for my dad's service, he said, "No, you don't understand. If your dad and his fellows didn't do what they did, we'd all be speaking German."Dan: To those three men you were there with, right?Paul: That's right. So I came away with this experience of understanding that, it's not just another day to put the flag up out front, it's not just another day when the post office is closed or governments or whatever are not at work. It's a day to celebrate what Americans can do in service of our country and also in service of democracy around the world.Paul: One of the other things I learned, there's a cemetery as well in Holland, there's a four year waiting list for volunteer families, guys, to take care of American servicemen's graves. Again, these ain't people who are 90 years old, we're talking about, families with teenagers, et cetera, et cetera. As we approach this Veterans Day, I think it's a very important perspective to understand that the service of our veterans, it's not just an American thing, it's something that extends far beyond our borders.Dan: That's awesome. That's great to hear. Again, talking about, you can help memorialize our war dead, which is fantastic, but again, Veterans Day and pretty much any day of the year is a day to support and recognize our current veterans. I've got two of my best friends, two friends who were in my wedding are veterans who served over in the Middle East, and I respect the hell out of them for being able to do that. I know for a fact that each of them saw things that I can't even imagine. That's going to have effects on them for the rest of their lives, and so it's important, whether you can find some support online, whether you can maybe donate to causes for veterans or just, hey, pat someone on the back and every now and then give them a call and make sure that they're feeling all right. That's important stuff. I can't say that I served, but what I can do is I can support my friends who did and try to do what you can to make these people recognized, let them know that we care about their sacrifice.Paul: And really, that's kind of, Logan, what I would say to people this time around and certainly, Logan, people in your generation are the people who are overseas right now, doing multiple tours. Again, more than the flag, more than the day off, is doing something to say thank you to veterans.Logan: Yeah, I totally agree. As you said, there's a couple of people I know that are deployed right now overseas. My dad's also a 10-year veteran of the air force. So I completely agree and I think it's very important to recognize both the Memorial and Veterans Day and as you guys both said, just do what you can to support and let them know that we do appreciate all the things that they've done for our country and that things might be very different if they weren't all there, similar to the story that, that gentlemen over in the UK told you. They do a lot of things for us that sometimes go, it can be out of sight, out of mind, because we don't always see them, obviously they're not fighting here on the homeland, but yeah, I think it's very important to recognize and to appreciate them for Veterans Day and every day.Dan: Right. Yeah. So we are very thankful to them, and to be a little tiny bit selfish, I would also say that Veterans Day is my birthday.Paul: Dan, I knew that that was why we really were talking about this day.Dan: It's awkward to bring up because if I'm at a restaurant or something, and they get free entrees, I can't ask for the free dessert or else then I'm just a jerk.Paul: Well, Dan, happy birthday. We'll buy you some ice cream and let's remember our veterans on Veterans Day.Logan: And we are well beyond 100 words today. Thank you for listening to the P100 podcast. This has been Dan Stefano, Logan Armstrong and Paul Furiga. If you haven't yet, please subscribe to p100podcast.com or wherever you listen to podcasts and follow us on Twitter @pittsburgh100_, for all the latest news, updates and more from the Pittsburgh 100. 

 In this episode of the P100 Podcast, our hosts Paul, Dan and Logan welcome Nicole Chynoweth from the Carnegie Science Center to discuss the center’s new exhibit on mummies. From there we move on to the science of fear, and then on to hockey with their guest, Jeremy Church. This episode wraps up with a review of some unique Pennsylvania town names. We bet you have your favorites.----more----Full transcript here:Logan: You are listening to the P100 podcast, the biweekly companion piece to the Pittsburgh 100, bringing you Pittsburgh news culture and more because sometimes 100 words just aren't enough for a great story.Dan: Hi everyone. Welcome back to the P100 Podcast, we're happy to have you back for another episode. I am Dan Stefano, I'm here with Logan Armstrong. Logan.Logan: How's it going?Dan: A pleasure to have you with us and Paul Furiga will be joining us in a little bit. Today's episode we're going to be talking about mummies. Not your mothers, not like that Logan. I see you, that's what you're thinking. No, just having a pleasant thought, thinking about dear old mom. No, Okay.Dan: Now, we're actually going to be talking about the mummies that you might think of whenever you think of ancient Egypt and other parts of the world here. There's a new exhibit at the Carnegie Science Center - Mummies of the World, and we're really excited to talk with someone from the Science Center about that.Dan: Afterward, we're going to be discussing the science of fear. Keeping with us, somewhat of a Halloween type of theme here. Then, we're going to be talking about, what everybody knows, it's the beginning of hockey season. Logan, you excited about that?Logan: No. Dan: No. You're not excited about hockey. Okay. Well, I am and some other people in the office, and we're going to be talking with one of them about the growth of youth hockey in the region, which is really something that's taken off in the past few couple of decades here in Pittsburgh. And we're going to finish up with Logan and I being just as serious we are now. We're going to talk about strange Pennsylvania town names. So if you make it to the end, you're going to be in for treat on that one.Logan: Oh yeah. Stay tuned.Dan: Okay, so let's get going. All right guys, for this segment we're going to talk about mummies. In particular, mummies of the world, the exhibition. It's a new exhibit at the Carnegie Science Center and from the Science Center, we have Nicole Chynoweth. Nicole, thanks for being here.Nicole: Thank you for having me.Dan: Absolutely. Thanks for being with us here. And can we talk a little bit about your own role within the Science Center here. Can you tell us your position and a little bit what you do?Nicole: Sure. So, I'm the manager of marketing, public relations, and social media with a focus on exhibits and the Rangos Giants Cinema.Dan: Great. What does that entail then? I mean, that I imagine you you are working with a lot of different positions there. Right?Nicole: Yeah, it's a really fun job. I get my hands in everything from new movies that we have coming out at the Rangos, educational films to the exciting new exhibits that we're bringing to the science center, from space topics, planetarium related things, and mummies-Dan: Really cool, it seems like a fun place to work. Right?Paul: Nicole, you've had your hands in the mummies?Nicole: No.Paul: Okay. The promotion of the mummies.Dan: The promotion of the mummies. Paul: I'm sure we'll talk about some of the technical aspects, but that would seem a little gross, but...Nicole: I don't think so. I find the exhibition more fascinating than I do creepy. And I'm not a fan of scary movies or I did not watch the Brendan Fraser mummy movie.Paul: You didn't?Nicole: No interest in that.Paul: I did watch those.Dan: You're missing out on a classic from the 1990s.Paul: Yeah. Well, classic is a little strong-Dan: I think it should have won an Oscar, but that's just me.Paul: Okay, Dan. We'll talk about that another time. So Nicole, when I think of the science center, I think about some of the other things you mentioned. Space, technology, mummies?Nicole: Yes, mummies are, especially this show, the mummies featured in Mummies of the World, the exhibition is, have so much to offer in terms of scientific, anatomical, biological information that we can still learn from today. So what I find really exciting about the mummies of the world is that it focuses on both natural mummification and intentional mummification. So, you might be more familiar with intentional mummification. That's the type that was [crosstalk 00:04:15] practicing in ancient Egypt. Correct.Nicole: And we do have some examples of Egyptian mummification in the show, but this also takes a look at the natural mummification process that can happen when conditions are at such a level moisture wise, temperature-wise that is able to naturally mummify a body, be it animal or human.Dan: Right. Well, it sounds like some pretty amazing things to see...Paul: Yeah, it's fascinating.Dan: What are some examples maybe of the intended mummification that we'd see there? I mean, is there anything from, I guess everybody knows about Egyptian mummies but then, they're also South American. What else might you see?Nicole: So an interesting example of the intentional mummification process that aside from like the Egyptian mummies that are featured in the show, there is Mumab, also known as the Maryland Mummy. In the nineties, two scientists at the University of Maryland decided that they wanted to try their hand at an Egyptian mummification process. A man had donated his body to science, and so they started the process of mummifying him. So, you can see Mumab in the show.Nicole: That's just an interesting way of seeing how we are still learning thousands and thousands of years later about how this process works and the tools that they had to use to complete the process and what the body has to go through for mummification to occur.Dan: That's really cool.Paul: Did it work?Nicole: I've been told that it's still in process, it's not completely... He's not completely mummified yet.Paul: Take some time?Nicole: Yes.Paul: Wow. Something I never knew.Dan: That's pretty awesome. Can you tell us what else is in the exhibit then? I mean, are there any, you say interactive portions to it. What should people and families expect whenever they're inside here. It's not just, as you'd be at a museum taking a look. I mean one of the great things about the science center is it kind of hands-on.Paul: Hands-on. Yeah.Nicole: Yes. So in addition, to the 40 animal and human mummies and 85 rare related artifacts, visitors will also be able to look through several interactives related to different topics within mummification. I think a favorite among children will definitely be the, what does mummy feel like a station where you can touch different types of mummified materials, so there's like frog skin, fur. Mummified fur, different things like that they'll be able to touch these like textile panels that are examples of what those things feel like.Nicole: Another great interactive is there's a large map that shows where different types of mummies have been found all over the world, which I think is really important to look at from the perspective of which, like you said, we are so used to just thinking about Egyptian mummies.Paul: Yes.Nicole: And really there are mummies all over the world, [crosstalk 00:07:15].Paul: So not to be surprised?Nicole: Yeah.Paul: You never know where you might find a mummy!Nicole: Right, right.Dan: Okay. Well, people will hear, we can see Mummies of the World through April 19th that's correct, right?Nicole: Correct. Open through April 19th. It takes about 60 to 90 minutes to get through the exhibition, for parents that are maybe wondering if the exhibition is appropriate for their children. We do have a family guide available at carnegiesciencecenter.org/mummies, that might answer some of the questions parents have before they take their kids to the exhibition.Nicole: But I really believe that it is appropriate for all ages and I think people will take something away from the show, be it a new interest in archeology or anthropology or just being able to connect with the backstories of the mommies that are featured in the show. You get to know them. They're more than just a mummy in front of you. You learn their story, how they lived, the way they lived, where they were from. So, super excited to have it at the science center and to be able to offer this experience to Pittsburghers.Dan: That's great. Anything else happen at the science center lately?Nicole: Yes. So, it's Halloween season.Dan: Yes.Nicole: What better time than to experience a scary movie on Pittsburgh's largest screen?Paul: Very good.Nicole: The Rangos Strengths Cinema teamed up with Scare House, this year actually for Rangos x Scare House. We co-curated some Halloween movies together to offer Pittsburgh a really exciting lineup for the Halloween seasons. So we have coming up the Universal Studios Classic Monsters. We're showing the Creature from the Black Lagoon, Frankenstein and Dracula, on October 11th through the 13th.Nicole: We also have Dawn of the Dead 3D showing October 25th and the 26th. And that's a really exciting screening because they don't often show the 3D version. So if you've seen Dawn the Dead before, I can guarantee you have not seen it like this.Dan: This is the original one?Nicole: Yes. This is the original Dawn of the dead. Yes.Paul: In 3D.Nicole: In 3D.Paul: Have you seen it, Nicole?Nicole: I have not seen it. I'm not a huge fan of the scary movies, but I've been told that if there's one I should experience at the Rangos this year. It's probably this one.Dan: All right? Just how big again is the Rangos?Nicole: So we are a certified giant screen. The screen itself measures 72 by 38 feet.Paul: Wow.Nicole: We also have 45 surround sound speakers. Your average theater has 14.Paul: Dan, if you and I can get that past our spouses and into our basements. I think that'll be good.Dan: I might have to tear down a wall or two in my basement, but I think I can handle it.Paul: You know, it's all about the purpose, Dan.Dan: You know what, we're trying to fix more damage to begin with. So I think I could get this Rangos a screen down here. That'd be perfect.Paul: It'd be very nice.Dan: Nicole, how can people find out more about the Carnegie Science Center, both online and in social media?Nicole: Sure. Visit us at carnegiesciencecenter.org or find us on Facebook. Carnegie Science Center or Twitter and Instagram @Carnegie S-C-I-C-T-R.Dan: Okay. Thanks so much for coming on Nicole. We appreciate it.Nicole: Thank you.Paul: Yes.Dan: All right guys. We were just talking about mummies and now we're going to... mummies, if you'll look back at it, they're famous movie monsters, some of the old ones from the 30s, some of the more recent mummy movies and whatnot.Paul: Brendan Fraser.Dan: Exactly, yeah. I love those horror movies and I love being scared. I love this time of year whenever we get a chance to go out to a haunted house. Me and my wife try to do one at least once a year. She's not wild about them, but I have a great time. Even right now in a couple of days. I believe the scare house is going to be reopening the scare houses. One of the more popular attractions around the area of this third winter.Paul: Award-winning.Dan: Award-winning, correct. Yeah. They had to move from Etna and they're in the Strip District. I think they maybe even changed the name to reflect that, but I think, it's interesting that people love to go to these things and they're so well attended.Dan: You see the lines around the block just to be scared and so I've had a chance to go look at the psychology of fear here, and there's an interesting phenomenon that researchers have found called VANE. It's V-A-N-E, and it stands for Voluntary Arousing Negative Experiences. Logan or Paul, you guys ever felt anything like that? Do you have any voluntary experiences?Paul: Yes. Dan, some people call that work?Dan: No. Yes.Paul: I've absolutely. So, I mean, I'm the old guy in the room. You think back to when I was a teenager, the voluntary arousing negative experience was to take the date you really like to a scary movie.Dan: Okay.Paul: I think we're going to get into this Dan, some of the why this is in... Things that people will voluntarily do you, you might not have expected a certain level of affection from your date, but if you took her to a scary movie, there would be the involuntary reaction when something happened on the screen of-Dan: Them getting closer? There you go. That's clever.Paul: Yeah. Well, and it's all this time at least all the scary movies.Dan: I think, when you look at some of the research here, what they point at, one of the most important parts of that is that it `is voluntary and that people were making a conscious decision to go out and be scared. And a lot of that is about overcoming stress. And you might go in with another person, you're working together to try to get through this shared experience here, fighting the monsters, try not to punch the actors who are just trying to have a good time and scare you.Dan: But they get a chance to get outside of themselves, and as we said, face a fear and there's really a great quote here from a woman named Justine Musk. Her quote says, "Fear is a powerful beast, but we can learn to ride it". I think that's just a very good succinct way to put it. But our good friend Logan here, you were actually a psychology major for a couple of years at Pitt and you know a lot about fear.Logan: Yes. So, as you said, I was a psychology major for a few years. I really enjoy just kind of how humans work. But so basically what it is that you have a part of your brain and it's a little almond-shaped lobe called a medulla. But, so basically what happens is that you're, when you see emotions on people's faces or when you see something that would cause you to emote in a certain way.Logan: So, say you see you're out in the wild and you see a lion and you're like, well that's not good. So that message sends to your medulla, which then sends to your limbic system. And if you guys are aware of the limbic system, it's your fight or flight response.Dan: Yes, okay.Logan: When you experience these negative arousals, that kicks into high gear and that pumps adrenaline through your entire body, your pupils dilate, your bronchitis dilates, just you're in this hyper-aware zone, and that's where adrenaline junkies get it from.Logan: It's a similar thing to where you're experiencing fear where you might be scared, but your adrenaline is pumping so much and it's releasing so many endorphins and dopamine that you end up enjoying it.Dan: Well. Okay, now we know whenever we either go to a haunted house or if we go see the mummies exhibit at the Carnegie Science Center, none of us are going to be scared because we know all the science, and we just know what's going on in our brain.Paul: Well, I mean this is also why people like roller coasters shout out to the steel curtain at Kennywood. Because they know it's safe. Right?Dan: Right.Paul: The experience is scary, but it's safe. When you go and see a movie. Yes. You sure hope so. You see the movie, you know it's going to be an hour and 20 minutes or two hours or whatever and when it's over, you may have been scared during the movie, but you're okay. The same with the rollercoaster, three minutes and then you're back in line, right it again. Right? Because you've enjoyed that safe experience of being scared.Logan: And it's the same concept where it's going back to my earlier example. If you see a lion in the wild or you're going to be scared. But if you go to the zoo, you're going to think it's cute or whether somebody else tickles you, you get a reaction, but you can't tickle yourself because your brain knows it's not a threat.Dan: Well, we do see a lot of alligators on the streets of Pittsburgh these days, so I don't know. You know what I mean. Maybe we'll see a lion the next, but I don't know that's all there is to know about fear or at least a good introduction for it. So, yeah. Logan, thanks for the knowledge there.Logan: Sure thing.Dan: Yeah. Maybe you should have stayed as a psychology major.Paul: He won't be here helping us today.Dan: That's a fair point.Logan: Now he's like "you really should've stayed a psych major"Logan: Centuries before cell phones and social media, human connections are made around fires. As we shared, the stories have shaped our world. Today, stories are still the most powerful way to move hearts and minds and inspire action. At Word Wright, Pittsburgh's largest independent public relations agency. We understand that before you had a brand before you sold any product or service, you had a story.Logan: Word Wright helps clients to uncover their own Capital S story. The reason someone would want to buy work, invest or partner with you through our patented story-crafting process, visit wordpr.com to uncover your capitalist story.Paul: All right guys. It's a fun time of year because the penguins are back in action. We're all hoping that they can get back to the Stanley cup this year. Who better to have on our vice president Jeremy Church here at one of our vice presidents here at WordWrite. Jeremy, you're involved with hockey and can you tell us a little bit about that?Jeremy: Sure. I've been fortunate to be involved with the game for nearly 40 years now as a player and a coach. Grew up starting about eight I guess in Michigan. Then we moved here in 10 continued to play, went away to prep school and played all through prep school Junior A, was fortunate enough again to play in college and then the last 17 years at various levels. I've been able to coach.Paul: That's awesome. Yeah, Who do you coach with?Jeremy: Right now, I'm coaching my younger son. With 11 Hornets, youth hockey organization. Prior to that, I helped with the high school in Mount Lebanon for five years. Coached at Shady Side Academy for a year and again using the word fortunate was able to go back to the Prep school. I played at Culver Military Academy and coached there for six years and it's a pretty storied program.Paul: That's fair and awesome. Well, Pittsburgh's got a long history in hockey going back to the turn of the century here, pretty much and but from a lot of people, the history and hockey didn't start until Mario Lemieux got here in the early eighties and Jeremy have a fun story about Mario Lemieux actually.Jeremy: I do. There've been two big booms locally when it comes to the growth of the sport. And certainly the first one had to have been when Merrill was drafted back in 1984 so we had just moved here from outside of Detroit and moved to the South Hills and we went to South Hills village one day and the mall was still there. At the time it was Kaufman's Department Store, which is no longer there.Paul: Oh yeah, the mall's there now just no Kaufmann's.Jeremy: So we're walking through and there's a little table set up and there are two or three people sitting there, one of them towers over all the others. And as we get closer and closer, there's no line at all. Mind you, it's Mario Lemieux sitting there signing autographs before he'd ever played a game.Jeremy: So, we walked up to the table, got his autograph. He still really couldn't speak English that well. But if you could imagine today the kind of stir it would create if Mario were around talking at to anyone in any environment. It was the exact opposite back then. I still have the autograph today.Paul: What did you get autographed?Jeremy: They had little teeny pamphlets of him in his Junior A Laval and from the Quebec Major Junior League Jersey, and that's all they had to sign. I think it was him. And it might've been Paul Steigerwald because at the time he was head of showing Mario around town and Mario, for those who don't remember when he was 18 actually lived with a host family in Mount Lebanon for the first year that he was here when he was 18.Paul: Yeah. Well, like I said it, whenever he first got here, he lived with Lemieux.Jeremy: Yeah, he returned the favor.Paul: Well, since that day, whenever there was no line at Kauffman's, today there was no more Kauffman's and you would have a gigantic line. But so what can you say about just seeing the growth of hockey? Especially from a youth hockey angle here, you've been front and center with it your entire life?Jeremy: It's pretty remarkable. Doing a little research earlier and in 1975 there were basically two rinks that you could play out of indoor rinks for Youth Hockey: Rostraver Gardens, which is still around and Mount Lebanon Recreation Center, which is still around.Jeremy: By 1990, when I was in high school, there were 10 and now that figure is roughly doubled to around 20 in the region. There are 62 high school teams and there are 28 organizations in the Pittsburgh Amateur Hockey League. And within the Pittsburgh Amateur Hockey League, there are now 5,600 players. And that's for those who are around playing in the eighties or growing up in the eighties and early nineties here, that's almost hard to believe there's, you know that there are 28 organizations, but if you go down through the ranks of 18 and under 16 and under 14, 12, ten eight and under age groups, there's dozens and dozens of teams at various levels all throughout that.Jeremy: So, for last year at the ten-year level, ten-year-old level, there were 80 plus 10 new teams in PAHL, Pittsburgh Amateur Hockey League League. So pretty remarkable.Paul: Right, Yeah. The majority of those kids, they're probably not going to be heading to the NHL, but a lot of kids want to at least, pretend that they're one of their heroes and get involved in the game. And I think one of the problems, maybe not a problem with hockey, but one of the issues surrounding it is there is a perception that there is a bit of a barrier to entry. You've got to have skates, you've got to have pads, you've got to have a good helmet, you've got to have a good stick. There's a lot of, there's a lot to that kit there. Jeremy, there are easier ways for kids to get involved in the game today though, right?Jeremy: Yes. Part of the Testament to the Penguins organization and certainly as Sidney Crosby has been, his emphasis and involvement with youth programs and youth hockey initiatives. And not just in Pittsburgh, but I know as well back when he returns to Canada in the summer and throughout the year, he likes to give back to the community.Jeremy: But a big initiative that started, it's now celebrating it's 10 year anniversary or 11 year anniversary is the little Penguins learn to play hockey, where Sid partnered with Dick's sporting goods to give, what is now I believe more than a thousand sets of free equipment out to kids who want to start playing the sport. So that goes hand in hand with a program that I think runs six weeks, eight weeks, in January, February to get kids introduced to hockey.Jeremy: But to your point in that, the big barrier to entry is the cost of equipment, which can be several hundred dollars even for kids that are five, six, seven years old. So that's certainly got a lot of kids involved in the game and has led to those massive increases in participation that I cited before.Paul: All right, that's awesome, Jeremy. Well, thanks so much for coming in and talking to us about hockey. We're hoping for another good season from the Penguins. Maybe a longer playoff run than last year. We got a bit of a break last year. I think they earned it after winning a couple of cups. But yeah, thanks again and yeah, we'll talk to you soon.Jeremy: No problem. Thanks to you.Dan: Right. This next segment. We're going to learn a little more about our co-host Logan Armstrong. Logan is from Eighty Four, PA.Logan: That I am.Dan: Now, we got talking about this and it got us, we started, you know, going down a rabbit hole and we got discussing why 84 was actually named 84? At first, I thought it was named after the construction company the-Logan: 84 Lumber.Dan: Yeah, 84 Lumber, and it turns out I was wrong. That 84 is named after 84 PA, and there's a lot of history and a lot of different theories about how the town was named. Logan, do you want to go through some of them maybe?Logan: Yeah, sure. So there are a couple theories. 84 is quite the town. There's not much in it other than 84 Lumber, but you know, it's nice. There are a lot of theories on how it was named, the most popular of which is that it commemorated Grover Cleveland's 1884 election victory. Some other theories were that it's on mile 84 of the railway mail service. My favorite though is that it's located at 80 degrees and four minutes West longitude. This seems like the most probable to me.Dan: My favorite actually is apparently in 1869 general David "Crazy Legs" Hamilton had an outfit of 84 soldiers with them and held off an attack of Outlaws. Now that just sounds fantastic. Yeah.Logan: That sounds quite heroic. If that is the case. I am proud to be from 84 PA.Dan: Maybe you're a descendant of general David "Crazy Legs" Hamilton here. Is that possible?Logan: Yeah. I believe I'm Logan "Crazy Toes" Armstrong.Dan: Okay, keep your shoes on man! We don't want to see anything. Well, after this, after we talked about 84 we also started taking a look at some other weird names for towns in Pennsylvania here and if you go online, you can find quite a few of them. Logan, what were some of the interesting ones you like you?Logan: There are quite a few to choose from. A couple of my favorites were, while the all known intercourse, PA, which is actually the most stolen sign in Pennsylvania, where it says "Welcome to Intercourse" for good reason.Dan: Obvious reasons.Logan: Right. Going along that same route, a rough and ready PA was, they named it after a California Gold Rush town, so I guess they're rough and ready to get some gold out there. Can't blame them for that.Dan: I imagine that sign is also been stolen many times.Logan: Right. Okay. Then, well, let's play a game here. I'm going to give you some Pennsylvania town names and you're going to tell me how you think that those names came to be. How's that sound?Dan: Bring them on. I'm a repository of knowledge.Logan: Okay, great. Peach Bottom.Dan: Peach Bottom. This is simple. This is extremely simple. Everybody in the town of Peach Bottom is very short, and they're, but they're also Peach farmers, so they can only see the bottom of the peaches that come from the trees. It's kind of a shame because they've never seen the peach tops.Logan: That is a shame. Those peach tops are so beautiful.Dan: We have an actual reason why it's called Peach Bottom?Logan: In fact, Dan, you weren't too far off, Peach Bottom. Got its name in 1815 from a peach orchard owned by a settler named John Kirk.Dan: John Kirk was very short, as we all know.Logan: Right? Yes. Okay. Shickshinny, Pennsylvania. What do you think of that?Dan: Schickshinny. Ah, got it. Okay. Shickshinny is named after a famous dance created by the person who created Schick shaving blades. Fun fact, a few people realize that he had a dance. Whenever he would cut his face on his old rusty blades, he would do a little jig-Logan: A little jig!Dan: In a big thing because it can... to get the pain away, and so he decided I've got to create a better, more comfortable blade and so he created the Schick shaving blade.Logan: Well, I foresee-Dan: Everybody knows this.Logan: I've foreseen the future...We had the Whip, we had the Nae Nae. Next, we're going to have the Shickshinny going on in all the clubs in Pittsburgh.Dan: I think this one is actually one of those Indian words that have made a lot of Pennsylvania names here.Logan: Yeah. Yeah. It looks like an Indian word that either means the land of mountains or land of the fine stream.Dan: Or land of the cutting your face on your favorite razor.Logan: Yeah, I think that's the most common translation. Yeah.Dan: Sure.Logan: We are well beyond 100 words today. Thank you for listening to the P100 podcast. This has been Dan Stefano, Logan Armstrong, and Paul Furiga. If you haven't yet, please subscribe at P100podcast.com or wherever you listen to podcasts, and follow us on Twitter @Pittsburgh100_, for all the latest news updates and more, from the Pittsburgh 100.

Paul Mattal is the Director of Network Systems at Akamai, one of the largest content delivery networks in the U.S. Akamai is a major part of the backbone of the internet and on today’s episode, Paul is going to talk about the massive amount of telemetry that comes into Akamai and the various decision support tools his group is in charge of providing to internal customers. On top of the analytics aspect of our chat, we also discussed how Paul is approaching his team’s work being relatively new at Akamai. Additionally, we covered: How does Paul access and use internal customer knowledge to improve the quality of applications they make? When to build a custom decision support tool vs. using a BI tool like Tableau? How does Akamai measure if their analytics are creating customer value? The process Paul uses with the customer to design a new data product MVP How Paul decides which of the many analytics applications and services “get love” when resources are constrained Paul’s closing advice about taking the time to design and plan before you code Resources and Links: Akamai Twitter @pjmattal Paul Mattal on LinkedIn Paul Mattal on Facebook Quotes from Today’s Episode “I would say we have a lot of engagement with [customers] here. People jump to answering questions with data and they’re quick. They know how to do that and they have very good ideas about how to make sure that the approaches they take are backed by data and backed by evidence.” — Paul Mattal “There’s actually a very mature culture here at Akamai of helping each other. Not necessarily taking on an enormous project if you don’t have the time for it, but opening your door and helping somebody solve a problem, if you have expertise that can help them.” — Paul Mattal “I’m always curious about feedback cycles because there’s a lot of places that they start with telemetry and data, then they put technology on top of it, they build a bunch of software, and look at releases and outputs as the final part. It’s actually not. It’s the outcomes that come from the stuff we built that matter. If you don’t know what outcomes those look like, then you don’t know if you actually created anything meaningful.” — Brian O’Neill “We’ve talked a little bit about the MVP approach, which is about doing that minimal amount of work, which may or may not be working code, but you did a minimum amount of stuff to figure out whether or not it’s meeting a need that your customer has. You’re going through some type of observation process to fuel the first thing, asset or output that you create. It’s fueled by some kind of observation or research upfront so that when you go up to bat and take a swing with something real, there’s a better chance of at least a base hit.” — Brian O’Neill “Pretend to be the new guy for as long as you can. Go ask [about their needs/challenges] again and get to really understand what that person [customer] is experiencing, because I know you’re going to able to meet the need much better.” — Paul Mattal Episode Transcript Brian: Hi. We’re back with Experiencing Data here and I have Paul Mattal on the line who is currently the Director of Network Systems at Akamai. How’s going, Paul? Paul: It’s going great. Thanks, Brian. Brian: I’m glad to have you on the show and you’re working at one of these companies that I think of as kind of like oxygen in the internet. It’s everywhere but you don’t really see it because it’s all invisible and that’s actually this big thing behind the scenes. You’re swimming around the internet as all these data and Akamai’s in the middle of all of a lot of that, largely responsible for making sure it’s moving quickly and is available at the right time and in the right places. As I understand it, you’re in a new position, you’ve changed domains, previously you were working in the space of legal patent work, digital forensics, and you built some tools that your previous company makes. You can tell us a little bit about those. Now, you’re moving more into the bits and bytes of the internet and you’re responsible for creating data products like decision support tools for people that keep the Akamai network going and running smoothly and anticipating demand? Did I get all that right? Paul: That’s exactly right. At Akamai, we like to think of it as we’re the ones that make the internet work. There’s a notion that the way things work on the internet is you just simply put your content up on a server and the rest is history. But these days, there’s a lot of complexity. There are many, many users who want access to the same content at the same time. Akamai makes that content all available to everyone when they need it and how they need it. In my past job, as you mentioned, was quite a bit different, although it had some similar qualities. I was helping to develop systems and tools for lawyers and for consultants for lawyers, in some cases to analyze patents, to help them better understand their subject matter of patents, so we’ve created some applications there. Here at Akamai, I’m also creating applications and tools to be used by the members of the network’s team who are responsible for deploying and maintaining the whole Akamai network. That breaks down roughly into tools that help us manage our work, tools that helps us with analytics and planning, and also tools that help us visualize data. It is somewhat of a shift. A lot of the domain knowledge is different, but it’s interesting that so many of the problems end up being similar. Brian: Tell us a bit about who the end-customer is. How many internal customers do you have? Do they break up into personas or segments? Like you have network administrators and you have whatever people. Tell us a bit about who those people are that you’re designing these tools for or you’re helping deploy these tools for. Paul: There are a couple of groups. The infrastructure group which is responsible for really deploying all of the servers and maintaining all of the servers. That’s a set of one class of user who is mostly using our tools in a logistical fashion to coordinate and organize their work. There’s a planning team who is thinking about the capacity of our network: Do we have enough for what’s coming down the pike? Do we have the right capacity in the right places? We also have users who are thinking about the architecture of the network and thinking about how we build and optimize our hardware and our network, to continue to be cutting edge and to continue to meet the needs of our customers. So, different people looking at different tools and different data for different purposes. Brian: Cool. Just a little fun question here. This is probably because I don’t know the domain very well. When there’s a big event coming on the internet, let’s take something like the Super Bowl, or the World Cup, or the new Game of Thrones, or whatever, are there literally changes that you guys go and make to facilitate a major event? Or are those actually more like a blip in terms of internet traffic and all of that? Paul: It depends. Certainly, some of those events have been some of the largest data traffic we’ve seen move across our network. Often, there are considerations especially depending on where exactly we expect the viewers to be for those events. We may deploy additional capacity in one geographic area or another. Brian: Going back to the people that are the end of these tools—again, these are decision support tools—how do you know if your team is doing a good job? How do you measure that the end-customers are getting the right information and they believe it, that they’re willing to take action on it? Do you a regular feedback cycle or interaction with these different personas that you talked about? Paul: Yes, That’s one of the most important aspects of what we do is trying to figure out how to measure, how exactly to measure how we’re doing, especially in the analytics space, right in the productivity tool space is a little simpler. We can tell pretty much where the pain points are. People come to us and say, “This interface isn’t working for me or these five things are in five different places,” and they’re going to use them as one. Those are a little bit more straightforward kinds of feedback. With analytics, we find it goes a lot to how successful were we predicting, how much excess capacity did we end up within a place we didn’t need it, for example, and all those kinds of questions. We meet with our customers pretty regularly and we also have some metrics that we compute to give us an idea of how we’re doing. Brian: Are those quantitative then? Those are all quantitative metrics or do you have any type of qualitative conversations that go deeper than like, “I wish there was a filter for the date on this chart,” or stuff like that. Those things do matter and it’s the sum of all those little, tiny details that add up into good experiences typically, but I’m curious if you have any deeper qualitative type of interaction with these end-users. Paul: A lot of what we’re discussing these days, for example, is there’s a tremendous amount of telemetry available that comes off the platform. Numbers about what’s going on in the network that could measure and we could capture. In many cases, a lot of the conversations are about, “Hey, can we capture more of this data? Is there’s somewhere we can get sample more frequently?” or, “Can we get access to this kind of data that we don’t have right now, so that we could be able to optimize more effectively on the things that actually matter, where the actual bottlenecks are in the network,” versus more simplified models based on less data. We’re finding that’s one of the very common kinds of feedback we’re getting is for more data and differently sampled data. Brian: We talked about this a little bit when we did our pre-call on whatever about topics and you mentioned that you have different classes of users in terms of who’s capable of designing an effective tool for themselves. I think you said you’ve got a mix of tools that are custom-built which might have two-way interaction, where data’s being put back in through forms or whatever in the tool. Then you have Tableau and some kind of rear-view mirror type historical reporting interfaces which, as I understand it, those start with the user a blank slate? Is that correct? Then they put together the views that they want and the reporting that they want? Kind of curious just for you to talk about how many people are using custom tools that you built versus the ones that they designed for themselves. Are people doing a good job creating the tools they need for themselves? Do you have a sense of that feedback that they’re looking at the right data, that they know how to interpret it, they know how to visualize it? Can you talk a little bit about that? Paul: Sure. Our organization has hundreds of people in it and I would say at least probably 50%–75% of those users are highly technical, which is very helpful, actually. They often come to us with a better idea of what they need. In some cases, we can give them good interfaces to go build their own tools. The historic approach to that here has been to give them pretty decent access to the data in our databases and even the engines themselves. Many of them are comfortable writing their own queries. But we also have a very mature ecosystem of query exchange. We have this tool that allows people to write their own queries and share them with others, and then others can manipulate those queries further and customize them to their own needs. They’re very familiar with that. The piece we’re bringing in next is this idea of really making visualization also of a self-serve kind of area where, with a tool like Tableau, you can point Tableau at the same data that might be the out part of these queries but then have powerful visualizations on top of that. The other piece of this is how much of it do we do and how much of it do customers create from old cloth. It’s kind of a balance. Some people come to us and say, “Here’s what I need but I don’t know how to do it,” and then they ask us to do it. Sometimes a customer actually originate it and will say, “Here’s the report or this query that I think is interesting,” and we’ll say, “Oh yeah, that’s interesting. Why don’t we bake that into something more sophisticated?” It’s kind of a mixed bag but I would say most people come in to us, there’s usually something that we already have that they can use as a basis and then they can usually modify that further. That’s been a pretty successful model for us because it really lets people get what they want, get the very detailed, precise view that meets their needs, but benefit from all of the other work that we’ve put into to making those views and those approaches effective and mature over many years. Brian: It sounds like you don’t struggle as much with engagement with the analytics. You actually have plenty of that? Or would you say that’s not necessarily entirely true? Paul: Yes. I would say we have a lot of engagement with that here. People jump to answering questions with data and they’re quick. They know how to do that and they have very good ideas about how to make sure that the approaches they take are backed by data and backed by evidence. Very mature in that sense people. Brian: Since you have this mix of these custom tools that you guys are building and how slick, how do you decide which wheel is going to get the most oil? You’ve got these custom tools, you’ve got some Tableau stuff, you’ve got people coming in, maybe they are using Tableau, but they don’t know how to build the reporting they need. Is it based on a business driver? If we get problem X wrong, this cost a lot of money, so we’re going to put our team on this problem and sorry, Jane, you’re going to have to take that Tableau tutorial and figure it out yourself. How do you resource like that? Paul: As with any place, there’s certainly scarcity. Everybody wishes they had choice in people they had and twice them. Maybe even the computing resources and everything else that they wished they had. At a high level, a lot of it is driven by a strategic plan, by an idea for what we as an organization are trying to accomplish. That determines which things get the most people and the most priority. There’s actually a very mature culture here at Akamai of helping each other. Not necessarily taking on an enormous project if you don’t have the time for it, but opening your door and helping somebody solve a problem if you have expertise that can help them. We find that it’s a balance of those things. We work on major roadmaps, large projects or tools for strategic and efficiency. Particularly efficiency reasons that we’re wishing to achieve as an organization. We spend a lot of us of the time helping the folks who need it, to get where they need to get. Brian: That makes sense to me. Is the feedback loop in place such that there’s some point in the future which you look backwards on these projects, or products, or tools that you’ve built and say, “Did we make a dent? What were the success criteria for those? What’s that three month or six month rear-view look like?” Do you guys talk about what that is, so you know whether or not you hit your objectives? “And since project X got four times the resourcing, did we get four times the value or whatever the value was that was determined?” I’m always curious about these feedback cycles because there’s a lot of places that they start with this telemetry and data, then they put technology on top of it, they build a bunch of software, and a lot of times the releases and the platforms are looked at as the outputs and the final part of this and it’s actually not. It’s the outcomes that come from the stuff we built that matter. If you don’t know what outcomes those look like, then you don’t know if you actually created anything meaningful. So, I’m curious, that feedback cycle, does your business know? Like, “We have to see. We can’t get predictions wrong or we don’t want to have a little more than 12% server waste from the wrong prediction, whatever.” I don’t know what those metrics are. Can you talk about that feedback loop from a business and a value perspective? Paul: Sure. Some of the things we’re doing are very tied to specific business goals for certain kinds of […]. These are targets for dollars saved in terms of operating the network at a lower cost. In those areas, we are very acutely being measured pretty much on a yearly basis along those lines. We’re working towards getting better at what happens in between and the rest of the year. You can often go off-track a little bit somewhere in one month and that can cost you down the road. We’ve been focused on trying to get to more of a monthly evaluation where we can break things down, try to deliver a value on a monthly basis, then get feedback from customers, and also to see how they’re affecting the numbers in real world application of this data to actually optimize. They never to learn. Are we consistently on track? Or are we moving in the right direction? I say that it’s definitely an element of what we do. Right now, we’re doing it more like every six months or a year. At a granular level, we’d like to move that to be a much shorter term and focus on constantly delivering smaller chunks of value. Brian: That’s good to hear. My understanding from when we talked to that you be almost what I would call a product manager, even though you’re not developing commercial products but you’re overseeing the creation of these different tools. I’m curious. Do you have the equivalent of a product manager role where one person’s job is to make sure that whatever analytics and/or custom tools you guys build for the network operations team or the team that deploys the servers, they live and breathe that world and they’re totally responsible to service those staff that work on those technical problems? Is that how it’s shaped or is everyone’s touching all of the different parts of Akamai? I’m just wondering how you get into that world. What’s it like to be the server administrator and predicting where to deploy servers? How is that structured? Maybe you don’t have enough staff to break it down that way and I’m asking a leading question, but I’m curious if you could talk about that a little bit. Paul: We actually do have four teams within our group and they are divided up with focus on the different stakeholder groups within the network’s organization. There is definitely some division. There’s also some who sort of cross responsibility but there are definitely folks who know specific subject matter areas very well and who are critical in those areas to anything more than the simple bug fix in an area is going to involve somebody managing that area. Now, for our largest projects of all, we do have product managers as well as project managers involved in the creation of the larger ones. I’d say about two or three are major systems and the other several hundred tools or various pieces that we manage, care and feeding over the years. That stuff is either being taken cared of by one of these SME areas or it’s sort of rolling out to me especially if it’s something new. A large part of my role is helping to at the outset to say, “Let’s define what this tool looks like. What it’s doing? Who is going to use it? What those people need? What are the processes at play here at Akamai that this is a part of? Do we understand those processes? Have we optimized those processes?” That’s a lot of what I end up doing with the rest of my team, to define those new products so that they’ll be the most successful as we build them and get off in the right direction. Brian: That sounds awfully like design to me. Paul: It is. Brian: Is that traditionally how things have been done in this group or is this something that’s new? How’s that being received? Are you getting like, “Just give us the data and we’ll put it together,” and you’re like, “No. Help me understand what are you going to do with it at the end.” It’s just like, “Well, I’ll know when I see it.” Is it that kind of thing or are they like, “Great, let’s get it right.” What’s that process like? Paul: The history of our group is that we have probably not put enough focus on planning and design, but I think it’s an area where people realize that we need to spend more. They really are now focused on that as a goal and understanding that it’s important in many context. That’s not to say that there aren’t sometimes when people will say, “Here’s what I need and I need it tomorrow,” and you know that comes up. It’s a balancing act that is always a challenge, but I think there is an increasing sense and increasing support across the network’s organization and maybe beyond that using some sort of platform organization, other parts of engineering at Akamai. It’s really a much better result if you make a plan upfront, you understand the context into which you’re creating this new thing, and you understand how it’s going to impact processes and flow that occur once you’ve built it. Brian: Maybe you haven’t been there because I know you’re somewhat new in this position but if you’ve been there long enough to go through a full cycle with that where you’ve taken someone through like, “Let’s hold on. Let’s figure out what’s actually needed. What the real problem’s face is like,” and then you’ve gone all the way through maybe building a product or a prototype or something. Have you gone through a full cycle yet? Or are you still in the design phase on some of these? Paul: For a couple of smaller projects, we’ve definitely done that. It’s been posted where people have come and said, “Hey, could you do X?” and we’ve said, “Well, we could do X but that actually requires more code and more effort. We have this other thing over here that actually can accomplish that and then it puts you more in the driver’s seat because you can help maintain it later. How’s that?” Often, the results are very positive. If we can actually get things implemented faster, people are happier in the end, it’s less maintenance for us overall in the long-haul. So, yes on the small things. On the bigger things, those are in progress and we’re excited about those design phases that’s going on now. They’re larger and more productive than they’ve been in the past. We’re excited to see probably by the middle of this year or later in the year that there is also an output of that. Brian: Can you tell us about what some of those activities are? I think some of the people listening to this are not coming from digital-native companies. The whole product design process is maybe foreign to them. Can you tell us about like, “What are you doing during this time? Why aren’t you writing code? You have the data. Put Tableau there and build some reports.” What are you doing that’s not that during this phase? Paul: Usually, the first thing we’re doing is trying to find out who are all the people that interact with this data, or these kinds of systems, or these particular business objects, or aspects of Akamai’s network. Often at the start, we find there’s common problems. There’s people and other parts of the organizations who may already have a tool that allows them to do this. Now we also want to go and observe those users. We want to go find out are they satisfied with the tool and is the tool meeting their needs, which are actually two different questions. Really seeing whether what they’re doing is a process that’s optimal and seeing whether we can create a solution to this new problem or borrow a solution to this new problem and change it in some way that helps everybody. That’s one of the interesting aspects of design here is that there are many groups that interact with the same data in so many different ways. I think a lot of that design phase is about, “Hey, one of the tools out there, how do we integrate them so that they’re the least work for us? How do we make sure that we’re choosing a good solution and we’re actually meeting the user’s needs?” Probably the last part of that, especially in our group is, and not getting stuck on not meeting 100% of any single tool, because in some cases, you’ll get 80% of the use cases for five groups and you have to say, “Okay, that’s fine. For this other case, they’ll do it this way.” That’s a lot what goes into the design process. Really just understanding what the users are looking for, how does that match up with stuff we already have, and then how do we integrate that use case into what we maintain, in a way that is streamlined and effective for them and also streamlined and effective for us. Brian: When you talk about getting to know what they’re going to do with this information and how they want to use it, is that through them self-reporting through, like talking to you in a meeting? Is it through you observing them doing what they’re doing now without the tool? Is this largely like, “Right now I can’t do any of this. I need this tool so I can enable this new thing that I currently don’t do,” or is it more like, “I have this long, convoluted process I have to do in order to achieve X. Can you help me build the tools so I can do it in less time?” One of those there is like a recipe for something already and you’re trying to optimize it and the other one is more like, “This is a new thing I’ve never been able to do but maybe I could with your help.” Do you put it into those buckets and then if it’s the former, how do you figure it out? Is it observation or just them talking to you about how they’re going to use it? How do you figure that out? Paul: There definitely are both of those scenarios come up. We often get requests about processes that already exist. At some point, there’s some tool in there already, sometimes it’s a highly manual process. In that scenario, one of the great assets of this particular group is that we have whole standards, documentation, and work co-optimization group here within network, which is a true treader to have. Usually, when that kind of problem comes up, the first thing we do is say, “Okay, let’s work with the [worker?]group and let’s get a really good map of what this process looks like end-to-end and let’s look at what the steps are, what tools are now, where the pain points are, and then once we have drawn this out so that we understand the context, let’s actually first look and see whether there’s any way we can optimize the process, because the last thing we want to do is to spend a lot of time implementing automation steps for a process that shouldn’t be that way in the first place.” We look at that process and we say, “Okay, how do we simplify it? How can we bring automation to bear, to make the process more straightforward, take less time, take less human effort.” Then, we usually at that point, sit down and actually design the automation solution around that. That’s one kind of problem and that process of workflow [analysis…] does involve what we call business process performers in each step. These are not the people who manage those areas. These are the people who are actually doing the work. We want to know what are they actually doing, we talk to them whenever we can, and we actually go [observe.] them because we can learn at least this much and probably more by watching what they’re doing and what they’re struggling with. That’s one side of it. The less well-described problems, those are the ones where nobody knows yet. This is something brand new. There, I think we tend to sit down and try to understand what these users are trying to accomplish, what problems they had in the past that this addresses, because so often, something that’s new is really some way connected to something old. We did this before. It didn’t really work or we have a gap here, there’s something that we’re not doing as well as we should or we’re not doing at all, and how do we get that better? A lot of it is about understanding what they’re looking for and I think the big element of that that’s key is breaking it down into manageable phases so we can deliver quickly and iterate quickly. The last thing you want to do is sit down and say, “Okay, we think we understand exactly what you need. Now, we’re going to go off for a year-and-a-half and build it.” That’s always a recipe for disaster. So, what we want to do is sit down and say, “Let’s take the most important crux of what you’re trying to get at here. Let’s implement something in a few weeks or a month. Then, let’s sit down and get it in your hands, get your feet back on it, and then figure out the next piece.” This doesn’t mean we can’t have a plan for like, “Here’s really roughly what we think the phases are going to be and how they’re going to be laid out. But let’s have these checkpoints along the way and let’s iterate based on what we actually are able to learn, what we actually to benefit from.” That’s what we found is the key to those kinds of new projects is the fast iteration cycle. Brian: We’ve talked a little bit about the MVP approach, which is about doing that minimal amount of work, which may or may not be working code, but you did a minimum amount of stuff to figure out whether or not it’s meeting a need that your customer has. You’re going through some type of observation process to fuel the first thing, the first asset or output that you create. It’s fueled by some kind of observation or research upfront so that when you go up to bat and take the swing, there’s a better chance of at least to base hit and not a strikeout or something. I fully support that type of effort instead of me going off, “We all have the data. We’ll send you back a kit and then you can put it together yourself. It will take a year, you’re going to dump everything into the data warehouse, and then you fall into the Gartner 85% of ‘Big Data Projects That Failed’ category, which nobody wants to be in that whole thing. I think that that’s really great you’re doing some of that. Earlier, you said you have a lot of different products and you said two to three of them are large. I’m just curious. Large by number of users? What justifies putting a dedicated product manager on it and what’s the extra love that is received because you’re one of those two or three? Is it they have a dedicated designer and dedicated engineers? It is more research time? Tell us about your big ones. Paul: I would say that the largest projects usually have someone who’s effectively an architect for the project, who may also be part of the development team. They usually have a development team. It’s usually several people. At least in an ideal world, three or four is probably typical for larger projects. Then there’s a project manager who is managing the project and also how that reports up into our overall program of initiatives for that organization. Usually, those projects, to get substantial research, are going to be priorities for the organization at some higher level. The last [piece] probably the most important piece is that there’s a product owner, who may or may not be the architect, in some cases the architect plus feedback from the stakeholders is enough to make it work, but most of the time, it’s usually somebody who is also the project owner or the product manager who’s really responsible for shaping the design of that product. For example, one of the big tools we’re working on has to do with increased virtualization that we’re rolling out within the Akamai network. This is a big project because it’s a company-wide initiative. We have somebody working on designing the interface and working to figure out how the interface to provisioning works within the context of all the processes we have here at Akamai. Another example, one of our key analysis or databases for analytics and for planning. There, the ownership is essentially a data team who is responsible for this database, the universe of this data, and roughly how it’s visualized. That team has responsibility for that database for its schema, how we got that data, where it comes from, its cleanliness, but also for the visualization aspect of it, and then it’s now also inheriting this ‘how do we use Tableau as part of that ecosystem?’ Just to give you some idea how these projects are organized and then what the roles are. Brian: Got it. Your large projects fall both into maybe a database that’s sitting behind Tableau as the interface and then you have another one, the server provisioning one, which sounds like a custom web-based application or something? Paul: That’s right. Brian: So then, for that one, to me that’s the decision support. The provisioning action would be the decision the human takes theoretically, upon some analytics or insight, that made them decide, “I need to push the button to deploy X servers in Y region or whatever it may be.” Is that decision support part of that custom product as well? Or is this a balance between two or three different Tableau instances that are behind different databases, and then you co-authored the provisioning tool and just do the action, you make the decision in that tool, but the insight about when and how and where to make the decision is not part of the tool? Or is that actually in that tool as well, where it’s like, “Hey we predict that you should do this,” or “Here are the stats. You come and make the decision on provisioning based on what’s in this tool.” How much is that wrapped together versus a series of different URLs you’re going to bounce through and piece together yourself with eyeball analysis? Paul: There’s some separation of systems and we’re actually moving into a more integrated direction. For example, a lot of us begin with a customer demand. Either we determine or the customer gives this information that helps us determine that they need capacity in a certain area. That drives the process but that also factors in to a lot of decision-making that goes on, right about exactly what gets deployed, where, and when. There’s elements of this that are integrated in a sense that the deployments that we’re planning to make to expand a network or to choose a network in some way, are inputs into this great big optimization model where you say, “Here’s what we know we think is coming, here’s what we know we think is going to happen, here’s the moves we’re planning to make when and where we will run out of capacity. I think we’re moving towards a more integrated feedback model for that where less of the work has to be sort of connect the dots by a human being and more to saying, “Okay, all the systems have this data and if they can exchange it with each other, then we have all the data in the places we need it.” Brian: You’re talking about this feedback cycle annually, then you might look back and say, “How well did we arrange for these optimizations? We planned for these predictive resource allocation or whatever it may be,” you look back and see how accurate that was by looking at the utilization rates or something? Paul: Exactly. Is there a customer demand we failed to meet? On the flip side, were there servers sitting around underutilized? Brian: Got it. When we talk about Akamai going out and deploying servers, are you talking about deploying physical hardware in a datacenter or are you just talking about provisioning up virtual servers on the cloud somewhere? I’m just curious because you guys are a network that sits on top of the internet. Does this involve lots of humans and you’re rolling out hardware and all that or are we really talking about virtual deployments? Paul: Some of each, but one of Akamai’s hallmarks, actually, is the breadth of the network. We have some servers in pretty remote locations. These are physical servers. These are places in some cases where there isn’t a lot of good cloud providers or anything like that. Brian: Johnny’s going to the Arctic to install some Dell servers. Paul: That’s right. I’ll tell you there’s a datacenter in Antarctica and it’s possible we have a server there. Brian: Someone’s got to go rewire it once in a while. Oh, we’re out of a storage. There’s still disk drives in that cloud up there. They might be flash, but they’re still a piece of hardware. Paul: One of the things that really differentiates Akamai is that we have this extensive edge network which really is pretty unparalleled to the industry. Brian: When there’s a report back then, do they look at the travel cost for Johnny going to the Arctic on an ice clipper or whatever it’s called, and then was it worth going there to deploy these servers? Paul: Sure. Increasingly, that is the kind of analysis that we’re doing. [and] we manage the network according to some of that. When there’s servers that are sitting somewhere and just not getting used or they’re there but they were extremely expensive to put there, then maybe that’s not a place to cover in the future. But in some cases, it makes sense to keep our coverage really good even if in one area where we’re sacrificing a little bit of cost to keep the coverage up over all and that might be worth it. Brian: Right. I’m curious. Now that you’ve been here awhile and through all these, do you have any stories or anecdotes about a particular user experience, a customer/internal user that found an approach that’s useful, or you’ve got some feedback or maybe it was negative, but you learned something not to do it again, or any type of anecdotes that you can think about that were insightful for you? Paul: Yes. We had a number of tools that we use for manipulating all the business data around what’s deployed in our network. I would say that I guess the best [anchor??] I had about them is that we’ve found there are tools that are very commonly used because of their flexibility. But if you actually look at the tool itself and you look at the complexity of the tool, it’s not that complex. It’s the default way of using things and people have used it continually because it has always been the way of using it, when in fact, there’s nothing particularly special about it. We’ve seen in certain circumstances where you give somebody a new tool that just works faster, it provides very similar interface, or you found some tweak to that workflow that really can save them tons and tons of time, and you just watch their eye pop out. They realized that you just probably saved them two hours a day. It’s interesting that that can happen in pockets and corners. There are many tools that have been built already to help with that but there are still plenty of opportunity for it. Brian: That’s great. That’s one of the things I think I love about being a designer. A lot of times, the big picture rewards like, “Was this product valuable or profitable?” There’s these lagging indicators which take a while and they don’t have the same hit as those small wins which were like, “I just saved this guy two hours a day doing a task that has nothing to do with his skill set. It’s just labor. He’s not using his brain. He just has to download these logs, put them in Excel, run a lookup, and then blah-blah-blah. And now it’s just bam.” I love that and that’s part of it for me, at least the joy of doing design work and stuff. I totally relate to the way you’re saying about helping someone. It is so much about helping people and you also feel like, “Man, I’m also helping the company because I’m helping this person use his brain to do much more important things than maybe he was doing with tool time, like downloading crap and uploading into a tool, sorting it, changing this, and blah-blah-blah.” Most of that is tool time. That’s not the, “Should we put more servers in Antarctica?” It’s not the thinking time and the valuable business time. Paul: It’s one of the very fulfilling aspects of the job like this where you’re building tools for internal stakeholders. In many software industries, you build product but your users might not be accessible for you or hardly at all. “I see that they’re right down the hall.” It’s a great fulfillment I think in building something that meets a person’s need and having that feedback and knowing that [did.] and having the satisfaction of that. Brian: Yeah, that’s awesome. This has been great. I’m curious. Do you have any closing advice for other product owners or data product leaders, analytics practitioners in your space, maybe about changing domain, you’re in a new domain? Any kind of insights looking back in this six months or however long that’s been that you’ve been there? Paul: I would say above all, my advice would be take the time to plan. Nobody ever thinks they have the time to design or to plan. To some extent, you just have to say, “If we don’t do this, [you know] the thing we build is not going to be worth nearly a much as the thing we could build.” You’re much better off figuring out the right design for something before you build it. Even when you think you don’t have the time, ask your managers and then your management chain for that space you need to get that pipeline started the right way because once you actually design things, you’re going to find that the number of people you’re helping and the degree at which you’re helping them is much greater. Brian: I can totally get behind that. That closing statement, I agree. First of all, you’re putting that anchor in place to do good things down the road. You’re probably reducing you’re technical debt and you’re maximizing your ability to change, especially when you’re doing small deployments. You’re probably going to need to change stuff, so a little bit of designing and planning upfront can do a lot for both the engineering part of it but also most importantly the customer experience getting that right. So, amen to that. Paul: Maybe the last part of that, just to add, is sometimes we take for granted the job we’ve been at for a long time. We actually take for granted that we think we know what everybody needs already. Sometimes, actually, it’s a blessing when you come to something brand new, because you’re not to assume you already know what that person across the hall really needs. You say, “I’m going to ask that person because I have no idea.” I would say these problems are the same everywhere. Whether you’re in a place, in a domain you’ve been for a while, there’s still going to be some aspect to that problem and you don’t understand what that person is living with. Pretend being the new guy for as long as you can. Go ask again and get to really understand what that person is experiencing because I know you’re going to able to meet the need much better. Brian: Yeah, I think that’s great advice. You don’t have that bias from your own knowledge about the domain or your assumptions there and that’s just a good design technique in general is being able to compartmentalize. We all come to the table with bias but if you can try to put that aside. For me, a lot of times it’s like leaving with new stuff with clients. It’s explain it to me like a five year old and I tell my clients sometimes this like, “What does it mean to deploy a server? What is he literally going to do and how does he know when to push the button to go do that,” and sometimes they look at you like, “What do you mean? You don’t know what a server is?” It’s like, “Well, I know what a server is, but literally I want to see every step it takes to know to go put one there. Is the guy going to walk out there with a box and rack it up? Or is this a virtual thing? Literally tell me what that’s like, that whole process.” Even though I know something about how that works, you’re going with that clean slate because you want to be open to those things you don’t know to ask about, and that the more you can come in with removing as much of that bias is possible, you might find those nuggets and stuff that just pop out to you that the customer doesn’t know to tell you about, but that they’re just going through their process. They’ll often ping you. You have these moments where you’ll learned something you didn’t go in there to ask about and sometimes it can be a really big thing like, “Wow. That’s really what the gap here is. It’s not this. It’s this another thing.” Having that really childlike innocence about the way you inquire can help enable that. Paul: Absolutely. Brian: Where can people find out about you? LinkedIn? Twitter? Are you out there in the internet? Paul: I’m on LinkedIn, for sure. I’m on Twitter. I’m on Facebook. Brian: Where are you on LinkedIn? What’s your Twitter handle? I’ll put the links in the notes, too. Paul: I think I’m @pjmattal everywhere. Brian: @pjmattal on Twitter. Okay, great. I’ll put your information up there. Thanks for coming on the show. It’s been great to hear about what you’re doing in Akamai and good luck as you guys charge forward. Paul: All right. Thanks.

Vanessa Cabrera was let go of her corporate job, only to find out she was pregnant with her first child and within the same week became a single parent - what a way to start your own business. Her passion, hustle and good fortune of finding a great strategic partner gave her the base to rapidly grow. In this podcast Vanessa shares rich insights into social media which every corporate escapee should pay attention to.   There were lots of great takeaways in the episode, so grab that pen and notepad, and enjoy! Why is it important to focus on one or two key platforms for social media Why you should be growing your email list at the same time as growing social Why Instagram stories are so powerful How you get more speaking gigs by applying two simple but rarely used actions Why is it important to have multiple streams of income How to build your list from LinkedIn connections What are the best performing lead magnets/opt-ins? The value of day blocking   Important Links & Mentions From This Episode: Vanessa's LinkedIn profile Vanessa on Twitter Vanessa’s Website Top 10 Ways to Grow Your List & Audience Acuity St. Jude Children's Research Hospital Constant Contact Leadpages WebinarNinja Amy Porterfield Podcast   EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION: Announcer: Are you a corporate escapee and wasting valuable time attempting to figure challenges out on your own? Well, this podcast is for you. We bring you firsthand experiences of guests going through many of the struggles you face each and every day. We get real with no corporate BS, and now over to your host, Paul Higgins. Paul: Hello and welcome to corporate escapees, the podcast that takes you behind the scene of people who are successfully running their own businesses, hearing their war stories and motivations for making the jump from a corporate gig. I'm your host, Paul Higgins, and our guest today is someone who after years of working in corporate, met the perfect storm when she first started her new business, she found out she was pregnant and also her partner left her within a week, leaving her as a single mom with a new business. She talks about how she hustled her way through this. It was really inspiring. Also, she gives some really rich insights into email marketing and also social media marketing. So what I'll do now is hand you over to Vanessa Cabrera, welcome Vanessa Cabrera to the corporate escapees podcast. Brought to you by Build Live Give. So Vanessa, we're going to get to know lots about you today, but why don't we start with something your family and friends would know about you that we wouldn't. Vanessa: Oh my gosh. Okay. You hit me with a good one. All right. So let me see. I'll give you the scoop. Something funny that my friends, my close friends and family know about me that maybe others don't. Is that um, I'm. My last name is Cabrera. So I am Latina, but I oftentimes when I'm in a group of Latinos I oftentimes kind of like pretend not to understand Spanish, just to see if they're talking smack about me. True Story. Yeah. Paul: Very funny, very funny. And uh, have you ever had that situation where they were talking about you? Vanessa: I have, I have busted some. Let's just be real. Like girls can be catty. Okay. And women, we're no different. So yes, I have busted some, some people have called them out, some people I didn't. Um, but yeah, that's just something like funny I do. Paul: Yeah look I definitely, when we travel, especially at Italy, my wife's family's background is Italian, so she can't really speak it, but she can certainly understand it. And one day we've heard very, very entertaining conversations, especially when it comes to the local prices versus tourist price. It's like, hang on, I've just charged us three times the average. Vanessa: Yes Exactly, exactly. So you know what I'm talking about. Exactly. Paul: Brilliant. So what don't you tell us a little bit about your corporate escapee story? Vanessa: Yeah. Okay. So I, um, my background has been in marketing. I've been in marketing my whole career and as soon as I got out of college I was very blessed to be a marketing and communications manager for a trade association that represented the out of home entertainment industry. So think like Pacman, dartboards, jukeboxes, that kind of thing. Um, and so I loved it, loved every minute of it, and I'll be honest with you and your audience, it was, I'm second generation to that industry. So my dad totally hooked me up with that job straight out of college. And when I say Pacman paid for my college, it's true. My father's owed Pacman for like 30 years, so I loved it, loved every minute of it. Um, I was there for 10 years and was responsible for all their marketing, their website, events. I launched their email marketing program, which is when I graduated from college social media wasn't a part of what wasn't even in existence and totally dating myself, but email was launching. So that's where I really started was with email marketing. And from there I went to, um, after 10 years I loved it, but I needed something different. I needed a challenge and to be honest with you, Paul, I needed to make more money. So the gambling industry came into Chicago, which is where I'm from and let's just say we call gambling like amusements rich cousin, let's say slot machines are making much more money than Pacman is, right. So, so I got everything I wish for. I got a challenge. I got a ton more money and be careful what you wish for because I hated every minute of it. I went from loving my job to, you know, having the Sunday night blues to dreading Monday morning, and it was basically because it was a good old boys club. It was a very male-dominated industry. Right. And to be just honest with you, they just treated me not very well. They treated me like a secretary who, you know, a little girl that liked to play on Facebook, never really took me seriously, even though I was hired to be their marketing person, they treated me like a secretary. So I was like getting coffee and it just, there was other bad, bad stories that I won't even get into, but you could just imagine, you know, in a very male-dominated industry like gambling, like where really all the deals go down. It's not necessarily always in a boardroom. Right. So I was planning my escape and every night I would go home and I would work on my website and all that because I knew what I knew was valuable. I was, since the association days, people were always asking me, Vanessa, how are you doing this? How are you sending out these emails? How did you grow the Facebook page so quickly? You know, things like that. So I knew in the back of my mind that that's what I knew was valuable and so I was planning my escape, but unfortunately or fortunately the slot machine that they have for the marketplace was not the right product and I knew that. So I lost my job and about a week later I found out that I was pregnant and about a week after that, I found out that I was going to be a single mom, so my world got turned upside down within three weeks time. And I was like, how did this happen to me? Right. I did everything right, right. I went to school, I studied hard. You know, I, I'm, I'm a good worker. I pay my taxes, like, you know, all this stuff that we're supposed to do. And here I was, you know, jobless, pregnant and alone. So I don't know what to tell you, Paul. I just knew in my gut literally and figuratively, that this was gonna work. And so I didn't even touch my resume, I don't know what came over me. I'm like, you know, what, if I don't start my own business now, it's never gonna happen. So I did. I just put one foot in front of the other and just really worked my ass off for nine months straight. Obviously, I can't go out party. So I say I stayed home and continue to work on my website and you know, would speak in front of anybody who would listen. And it was just like really hustle and go time. So that's how I escaped. Paul: That's an amazing, amazing story. And, and what was it harder or easier than you expected when you, when you did finally start your own business? Vanessa: In the beginning, I think it was just, if it was somewhat easy just because I knew what I was doing when it came to marketing per se, right? Like you have to build an audience and you'd have to get your social media channels up and you know, all those things. So I think I was just in such a grind for nine months and I was like, okay, this is how I get clients. So, you know, when it's fear-based or the fact where I cannot fail, it's not just about me, it's now about my son. Um, it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be probably that first year. But to be honest with you, Paul, I was such in hustle mode because I couldn't fail. Um, that it came relatively easy to me. But that was only year one. Okay. And entrepreneurship. And now I'm, I'm proud to say I'm now in year six. I'm coming in and my sixth year, um, and it's, uh, you know, and I have a thriving consulting business. I have a waiting list of clients wanting to work with me. But if you would've told me this six years ago, I've been like, you're crazy. So it was a little easier for that first year. But again, for me specifically it was just because I knew what I had to do and I just kept pushing and grinding. But it wasn't always easy. Like, I had never worked this hard in my life. Now in your six, it's really a grind now. I love it because I love what I do, so I'm extremely blessed, but it's a lot of work. It's a lot of work to, to sustain the business. Paul: Yeah and with you know giving birth, etcetera. How did that transition occur? Did your clients stay with you or did that sort of interrupt the business? Vanessa: So I was planning ahead. I knew I would take two months off. Um, and to be honest with your audience, your listeners, when I was let go, I was a little saver. So I did have money in the bank. I thought I was always a little saver. Um, so for those who are wanting to escape, this is one piece of advice I would say save every dime you possibly can because you're going to need it because even though I saved, you know, that money goes quick. So I knew that I was going to take two months off after my son was born. Um, and like I said, I just kept grinding. I mean, there's pictures of me where I'm like very pregnant and you know, doing a seminar about email marketing back in the day. So it was just about getting, you know, building that list and getting in front of as many people as I could before I became, you know, a mom. Paul: Great. And what sort of help did you get along the way? Vanessa: So, uh, my, my email service provider tool, the tool I use to send out my emails is constant contact and so I have been a constant contact customer since 2001. I'm totally dating myself. So I've been in email marketing a very long time. Um, and so there was always local seminars about email marketing and social media and I would always go to them on behalf of the association. WelI got very chummy with the speaker and he was the first person I turned to when I lost my job. I'm like, okay, this is what I'm planning to do. And he said, Hey, do you know that there's a partners program that constant contact has? And I'm like, what? He's like, you'd be perfect for it. So it just so happens, right, everything happens for a reason. Um, the week I found out I was going to be let go the, within two weeks there was the first constant contact partners conference that was gonna be held in Boston. So I booked my ticket. It was the first plane business plane ticket I ever bought with my own money since that. Before then it was always, you know, my, my company paid for it. So I was like, Whoa, that's a big wake up call. I'm like, oh my gosh, I can't expense this. Right. So I went there and I'd say that was a huge help because they then helped me get some speaking gigs. Um, obviously I was telling constant contact that would, that's like the call to action at the end of the seminars. But to be honest with you, Paul, it's happened so organically because I was doing that anyways. Like I said, back from the association days when I first got our first email campaign where no one saw that had seen something like that before, like our board of directors and our members called me and was like, what is this? So, so I was already doing that. There are like, what, what is this? Oh, it's constant contact and I would just tell them what I was doing and how I did it. That's pretty much the monster help and I really got that really helped me in the beginning with partnering. Yeah, partnering with constant contact. Paul: Excellent. And we'll move now into the build section. So when someone says to you today, Vanessa, what do you do? How do you answer that? Vanessa: So, um, my go-to answer is I'm an online marketing consultant and I help small business owners, particularly women entrepreneurs. That kind of happened organically too, and it's probably because of my story and the style that I teach, but I helped them put together an online marketing plan. I see so many small businesses, solopreneurs and things like that on social media, but they're just posting, just to post. There's no real strategy on how to use these tools that are literally at our fingertips on how to sell, basically sell their products, sell their services. So that's, um, that's what I do. Paul: Great. And what do you know about coming up with social media plans that a few others don't? Vanessa: No, I think when I run into with all the clients I've had the pleasure of working with is that they, there's, there's so many options out there with social media that it gets overwhelming, right? It gets overwhelming for them and there's no plan. So I just like to really simplify marketing because it can be so overly complicated and if you just pick one or two social media platforms to focus on and master those because one of the things I've seen is that everyone's on every single social media platform on the planet, right? Like I have a strategy session with clients and I'm like, okay, tell me, you know where you live online. And so they're like, okay. So we have a Facebook page, we have a Facebook group, we have a LinkedIn profile, we have a LinkedIn business page where on twitter we have a YouTube channel and we are now on Instagram. Okay. How many of those can you sufficiently run effectively and putting out killer content? You can't. There's no. Unless you have a team. And I'm talking about like you know, small business owners that they're doing their own marketing. There's just no way. Right? So my first advice would be just to focus on one or two social media platforms that A, your target market is hanging out and B, that you actually enjoy. I think that's like a big myth that people think they have to be on twitter. Well if you hate twitter, right? And you know, then you have to be on there. Your audience is going to know they can smell the BS when someone doesn't like what they're doing. So I would say just to one or two social media channels, master those. And what I mean by master is that you actually bring in money with that you have a system that is actually bringing you clients and customers and then move onto another one. Paul: Look it's a great point. And I think, um, know let's use me as an example. So, you know, corporate escapees just like you is my key target audience and know that they're probably in all channels like you said, but um, if you were advising me which channels I should focus on, which, which are the key social media channels you would recommend? Vanessa: So my first question would be would be, what is your target audience? Paul: My target audience is probably slightly more male than female, but between 40 and 50 and you know, uh, either have left like you because of, you know, we'll let go. Um, because of something though, there was maybe a redundancy involved or they've just had enough and they want to spend more time with their family. So similar to you spend more time with your family and really being in control. Uh, so that's. Yeah. So they've all had a corporate background and now they're effectively running their own business. Vanessa: Yeah. So I would say just based off of that, that I, if I were you, I would stick to Linkedin, um, because when people are looking for an escape or looking for new jobs or things like that, they generally tend to go to LinkedIn if they're corporate backgrounds. And I've met several people who have seen my story and connected with me on LinkedIn. So I would focus on LinkedIn. For you, Paul, and then as well as your podcast. Paul: Great. Well, I'm glad you said that because I, uh, definitely because, you know, I had a facebook group, I had Instagram, I was the classic where I had everything. There's so many people listening right now are probably thinking, Oh gee, I'm like that as well to spread too thin. And they doubled down on LinkedIn. And I think with LinkedIn where you can also retweet, I think, you know, you don't have to that, that's quite easy. So look, that's great advice. And I really, you know, I know so many times in our community when people do double down, they get such a better improvement of being spread too thin. And, you know, other than being spread too thin, what are some of the other classic, um, mistakes that you see people make on social media? Vanessa: Well, I'd say using social media, you know, again, just to keep it simple is that, you know, it's phenomenal that we have all our social media channels. However, really what we want to use social media for is lead generating. That's it when you, when it comes down to it. Okay. And so, um, when you're first getting started or even if it's your third or fourth year in business is my advice is that you have to have an audience to sell to, right? I mean, I know it sounds, but like people get so focused on, you know, the numbers and the followers and you know, all of that where there needs to be some sort of system in place where they're continuing to grow their audience and their email list at the same time. So they actually have someone to sell stuff to you. I can't tell you how many times I have these phenomenal entrepreneurs and you know, they get a little bit disappointed because, you know, they only had about 10 people registered for the Webinar or whatnot. And then I asked them, okay, how big is your email list? And they say maybe 40 or 50, and then I'm like, okay, well how are we generating more people into that list? And they're like, well, I'm not. And so I'm like, okay, well let's just do the math. Right. So I would say like just a commonality is to use social media as a way to generate leads and by leads I mean to grow your email list at the same time. Paul: Yeah great. And we've got so many people and probably the people listening right now and say, look, you know, I've got really good connections based in LinkedIn, but I don't particularly own that and I have, I haven't converted that into my list. So what are some of the key tips you've got for getting people from LinkedIn into your list? Vanessa: Yeah. So nowadays it's all about content and providing real value to people to connect them with your expertise. Right? So you need to have some sort of opt-in, opt-in, Freebie or you know, a giveaway in exchange for their email address. Right. So you no longer can say join our newsletter, right? Just click here to join our newsletter. This is 2018. Okay. So you have to give them some sort of value in exchange for their email address. So that's it. Like a guide or a video tutorial or you know, whatever the case may be that you're an expert in. And then once you create that often right, that guide and set up your email automation, right, set up that welcome funnel. Then you'd have to put it out in the universe. Right. I've had so many clients where they have all this, but I'm like, well how many times do you post about it? And I'm like, oh well I posted about a couple months ago. Okay, well you've had new followers since then. So I'd say like post about your options and your freebies on a regular basis on LinkedIn, you know. Paul: Yeah. And just on the opt-in, is there any particular format that's working better on LinkedIn at the moment than others? Like, you know, is it video, is it a pdf, is for infographic? What's, what are you sort of seeing trending in your clients? Vanessa: Yeah. So the, I think the format, you know, you kind of have to test to know your audience on what format they like to get content from you, you know, different strokes for different folks. So, um, but one of the things that's really easy to do and, and people love to get because it's really quick like the opt-in to me should be in what I teach often actually do a whole webinar about this, but often she'd be like a snackable treat, right? That you're helping them with one problem. Okay. One problem that you can help them with. So, um, so for example, I did a guide last year for Facebook lives and I did a checklist like what to do before, during and after your live streams to prepare them. So checklists really simple to do. They're really easy to create and they're snackable, meaning like your audience can literally, you know, just kind of review it. And it won't take very long because our attention span is tiny, right? And move on. So I would say, I don't know if there's a particular format that does better than the other, just as long as you're opt-in, your Freebie, your guide is banging. I mean like don't have usher opt-in because I've had other clients that say, Oh yeah, I can just use a guide that I did last year or a couple of years ago. Your content is what's going to separate you from everybody else. So my advice is that when you create an opt-in and say someone comes back and say, wow, Vanessa, I would've paid for that information. You got yourself killer opt in. And it doesn't matter if it's a Webinar or a checklist or a guide. So long as that, that content is phenomenal and really helped them. That's what's gonna separate you. Paul: And your ideal clients. Who Do you love working with? Vanessa: Um, I mean, like I've, I worked with a lot of Solopreneurs. I work with a lot of women entrepreneurs, a lot of consultants, a lot of coaches. Um, I do have some male clients too. I don't discriminate guys. It's just, like I said, it just happened kind of organically as I, as I started to speak more and more, I'm in front of people. The women entrepreneur just naturally gravitated towards me. Maybe because I'm a single mom, maybe because you know, I had enough balls to jump and they're just saying how I did it. I don't, you know, I, I think that's the connection, the human connection with other women entrepreneurs have to me that, you know, if I can do it, you know, having lost my job newly pregnant completely alone and I did it anyways, then anybody can do it. Paul: And you know, you've had, like you said, an amazing journey over the six years. What is the future? You know, what's, what's your prediction for the next three years? Vanessa: Oh Gosh, I'd be a rockstar. Right? And I can retire and in Bali I'll come visit you in Australia. That's so. No, so I'm, I'm a professional speaker. I'm proud to say now that I actually get paid to speak where back in the day I drove two hours to speak to like two people when I was about six months pregnant. So I did the grind, um, so I would like to do like just more speaking gigs, I'm land more national conferences because, you know, this is the virtual world and obviously you and I love it, right. Um, but you know, every once in a while I like to hang out with the three dimensional people and that human interaction which will never be replaced. Um, so I say maybe from three years from now that you know, I land some bigger stages, maybe social media marketing world. I have my eye on that and I'm just traveling the world, you know, I'll go to Australia, Paul. Paul: We got great conferences here. Vanessa: I'm sure. Paul: I'm writing down a couple of names right now then will talk to them. Let's get you down here. Vanessa: Awesome. Love it. Paul: And as far as you know, improving the profitability of your business, what are some key things you've done to improve the profitability over the six years? Vanessa: Oh my gosh. Okay. So one of the things I learned early on was as an entrepreneur is that you have to have multiple streams of income coming in. I know that's kind of seems like one on one, but this is the stuff you learned, right, and during your entrepreneurial journey. So I started off with email marketing because that's what I knew best and then I started, you know, doing people's email campaigns and becoming their email marketing manager for those who didn't have the time to do it, but it was like a step above a virtual assistant. No offense, virtual assistants. I loved them. I would not be where I am without virtual assistants, but they have had an email, um, expert to their emails, but that wasn't enough. So you have to have multiple streams of income. So, you know, I created different ways for people to work with me right now, you know, paid to be a speaker in paid for one on one clients where, you know, I have VIP sessions with individual clients one on one. I have a group consulting program for those who can't afford, right. The one on one attention and I get it. I just launched an instagram membership. It's called the instagram incubator. Um, so where all we do is talk strategies on how to work instagram and like just instagram one on one for businesses who have no clue how to use it and things like that. So that, where I'd say I've learned is just creating different ways on how to help different entrepreneurs and marketers, like different strokes for different folks and in ways that they can afford it. Paul: And as far as you know, the key trends obviously I think there's been a bit of a trend from Facebook to LinkedIn and certainly for B2B. Now seeing that the organic reach that you get on LinkedIn risks as facebook is, is exceptional. But what are you seeing as some of the key trends in the social platforms you they stable at the moment or is you know, there's about to be another major change? Vanessa: Yeah, I think all eyes from just from my own experience as well is that, you know, I think we've all seen and felt that, you know, engagement is down when it comes to facebook business pages, right? I mean, this earlier this year, actually, January of this year, at the beginning, I can't break 2018 is over, but in January remember Zuckerberg himself said, right, he dropped a bomb saying that they weren't going to push out a lot of content from business pages and publishers because he was listening to his customers and his customers which is you and I saying we didn't want to see ads. We didn't want, you know, all the stuff in front of us. We go on facebook to stalk our exes, we go on facebook to socialize, right? So I've definitely seen engagement down from my facebook business page and I think as we all know, facebook has become a pay to play platform. So meaning you have to boost your own content, your own posts for your own followers to see it on your facebook business page. So I think a lot of people, that's why people are turning to instagram because instagram engagement is so much higher than facebook right now. And I think all eyes are on instagram stories. I mean, that feature is a tremendously powerful feature. Um, that businesses are really, really taking advantage of. So I would say for anyone who's interested in instagram to obviously get familiar with the basics, but um, I think my prediction for 2019 is that all eyes are going to be more on instagram stories rather than just posting to instagram. Paul: Brilliant, And what's the key that you get new clients? Vanessa: Speaking. Yeah, I'd say the seminars I do and the webinars that I've been doing. So, you know, they're both online and offline stages. Um, so that's the key way I've been able to land a clients is through my seminars that I do in person and also the webinars that I do online. Paul: Great. And it seems like you did do the hard yards, so you said you started with audiences or two and they'll probably one of them was your family members, right through to where you are now. Um, any, any tips based on your journey that you can give someone that's just at the start of trying to get a speaking gig? Vanessa: Yeah. So, um, take any gig that you can. Okay. This is where I started from, so we, I can only give advice based on where I started from. So in the beginning I took any gig that I could. Reach out to your nearest chambers, you know, find out where your target audience cares, but like, you know, reach. I reached out to chambers, I reached out to women organizations and I would said, hey, I would, I would speak for free. I have an hour seminar, you know, email marketing or I have an hour seminar on how to grow your list or something like that. So I would say buckle down and just hustle and speak for free and speak to as many people as you possibly can. And then my other advice on becoming a speaker is to be nice. Okay. And so this is something that I'm teaching my toddler, but it's 100 percent true. You will not believe the amount of other speaking gigs I got just because I was nice. Meaning like I gave them my presentation way early. I promoted the hell out of their event. I, um, you know, then when I hit the stage as it was my child to go to work, so I presented the best way I could. Um, I stayed and answered questions. I stayed and helped event producer clean up, you know, so she was all by herself. It was 8:00 at night. Everyone had gone and then she was alone cleaning up her event and I stayed and helped her and she was amazed while she had another event the following year we'll guess who she called, you know what I'm saying? So there's just so many speakers out there in my opinion, Paul, and I'm just going to be honest that like their ego is insane. They just go speak, don't answer any questions and leave. And that to me is just an ass move. So I would just say to really stand out is to just help the event producer as much as you possibly can because it's a really big job that they, it is a, it's a lot of work to put an event together and they're doing it and they're literally giving you a stage for you to speak on. The very least that you can do is just help them in any way possible that you can. And I guarantee you, if you do that, word of mouth will spread. Paul: And you mentioned before, about Virtual assistants. Just tell me a little bit about your team. Who helps and supports you? Vanessa: Oh my gosh. Okay. So I have to give a shout out to Jessica. Jessica. I have four different VAs. They're not full time too, so I don't think I'm fancy because I have four. I use them for different times for different things. Um, but right now Jessica is my VA and she is my right hand woman in my instagram membership. So you know, anyone that has a question and it's like a techie question. She goes in and answers it right away because she knows instagram, like the back of her hand and she posts all of my instagram posts for me and things like that. That's one VA use. I'll use another VA here locally. Um, because sometimes when I do these speaking events and I don't have the attendees, right, you need the attendee list to grow your emails to grow your email lists. Sometimes they like give me a stack of business cards. Well, I have another, a VA that, you know, I give her the stack of business cards. She got enters them into my list, sends out, you know, all my followup emails, books, all my strategy sessions with them. She calls them on the phone and says, Hey, what did you think about Vanessa's seminar? You know, did you want to book a strategy session with her? And things like that. So, um, I also have a phenomenal bookkeeper. She's not a VA, but you know, she does my books. And so yeah, you need help. As you get bigger, you get, you're definitely going to need help to free free up time for you to just focus on your content and selling. Paul: Great. And you know, as I said. What are some of the biggest challenges you face today for your business? Vanessa: The biggest challenges I face today. Um, I mean it's always, you know, a financial goals. I always have financial goals and reaching them. I would say that's a challenge, but, you know, sometimes you just don't always reach those. And let's see, financial challenges. I'm not quite sure. I'm like, I'm pretty good where I'm at. I'll be honest with you. It's been a good year, you know, I mean like besides like maybe not getting, um, you know, the 10k stages that I want because I've submitted myself and they said no, not this year, maybe next year. So stuff like that, that's, that's a challenge. Um, I guess maybe just like in general, and I think everybody can kind of attest to this, is just to stand out from all the noise that's out there. You know, that gets into my head too, but I, I, as I tell a lot of my clients where they're like, well, you know, I did a whole facebook live about this in my group and I, it was called facebook envy, right? Where you look at somebody else and they're like, well how did she grow her group? So asked her how did she land that speaking Gig or why didn't you know all that and I call it facebook envy and I struggled with that too. So, um, but you just have to like put your, you know, your blinders on and just focus on your work and don't worry about what other people are doing. Paul: Excellent. Well look, before we go onto the next section, I'd like to mention our YouTube channel called Build Live Give. You get tips to help corporate escapees just like Vanessa to rapidly grow your business. So if you would like to subscribe, just go to build live, give and please, if you love the content and you get value, share it with other corporate escapees as well. So we can all have a great lifestyle and also financial freedom. So the next section is the live section. So tell us about a couple of daily habits that help you be successful. Vanessa. Vanessa: Okay. Um, one of the things I start my day as because I used to like just rush and hurry and start my day and you know, I have to drop off my son and you know, I have a consult and all that. Now I've learned to breathe as soon as I get up and like just lay with my son where we just cuddle in like we talked. That's a big, big start to my day. Um, and that's a regular that I've been doing for the past four months and it's helped me tremendously because I'm like, why the hell am I busting my ass so much if I'm just rushing through these little moments? So that's why I love to kickbox I'm an avid kickboxer so I'm actually working out is super important to me. It's just a way to like, you know, get rid of the beer, I'm a beer chick, work off the beer, work off the stress and like the clutter. Um, so that's definitely important in my life. If it's not on my calendar, Paul, it's not gonna happen, so it's just always on there, you know, Tuesday night kickbox class. Um, so that's a regular. Um, I do. And then one thing that really works for me is just really managing my time. Well, it took a while for me to, to figure that out, but there's so many people say, Vanessa, how are you able to put out so much content or you know, you're everywhere. Well, it's just because I've learned to manage my time, so my calendar I live and die by. If it's not on my calendar, it's not gonna happen. So I'd say those, those three things are really funny. Paul: Great. And do you use the scheduling tool for your calendar? Vanessa: Yes. You talked about on Linkedin, of course. Yeah, I use acuity. Paul: Yeah. Greatl Vanessa: Love it! Paul: Brilliant. And the next section is the give section. So what's a cause or a charity that you're passionate about? Why? Vanessa: Yeah. So, um, I had been giving, um, I've always donated to St. Jude for many. Oh my God, for many, many years now. Um, and it'd be honest, it's just because my mother has, she supported it for so long and you know, it's completely devastating when you talk about, you know, kids who have cancer, um, and so it's just very near and dear. And so the fact that St Jude is an incredible organization that takes care of families and more importantly takes care of these kids who beyond me, medical attention beyond the love and support in the family, don't have to worry about this financially. All they have to do is love and support their children and help them get through these unimaginable treatments. I can't even imagine my son going through something like this. Um, so, uh, so yeah, so my mom has always been to St. Jude and she's all in love with the charity, so I have to. Paul: Well, look, the last section is the action section and I'll just ask you some questions and get some rapid fire responses. So the first one is, what are your top three productivity tips? Vanessa: Top three productivity tips. Okay. Um, I would day block. Okay. So, uh, that's how I get so much done is that instead of like time blocking, where from like nine to 11, I'm going to work on this and the 11 to 12, I actually day block. So like say on Mondays I scheduled no consults. It's specifically just my creative days. Okay. So that's one way I am able to be so creative and so productive is through day blocking. Um, the other thing is scheduling tools like we talked about on your linkedin post that has saved me a monster time. You know, you no longer have to email someone and say, when are you available? Right. I can meet Monday and then that is gone, right. Um, and then the third, uh, productivity is to outsource. Oh yeah. Outsource anything that you don't want to do, you don't want me doing your books. So that was the first thing. Okay. I am not whatever they want. I'm not right brain. I'm left brain, I'm more creative and you don't want me to do numbers. And so that was the first thing I did was hire a bookkeeper and a tax guy because yeah, no, that is not my forte. So outsource. Paul: Great. And what are some favorite apps or software that you use to run your business? Vanessa: Um, obviously constant contact for my emails and my autoresponders. I love lead pages. I've been using lead pages for ever. Um, so I don't have to be, you know, a web designer. They, the templates they have making it look very, very professional. So I love lead pages. And then what's an Oh um, my webinar tool for sure. Um, Webinarninja have used for webinars this year, which is actually probably the number one way I grew my email list this year. So webinar tool. Paul: Brilliant. Then what, what are some podcasts or books that you love and why? Vanessa: Well, one of my favorite podcasts is Amy Porterfield, so I've been listening to her since day one. She actually is the one that pushed me, to be honest with you, to start my own business when I was planning my escape at the end of my nine to five Gig, I would, um, I, I think she's was, hers was the first Webinar I actually took and was like, I could do this. I could teach this. I think so, yeah. So I'm, I'm a big fan of, but Amy Porterfield's podcast. Paul: Brilliant. So what's some parting advice you'd love to leave people listening now? Vanessa: You know, I would just say, you know, if you're planning on escaping again, save every dime that you can for sure now. And I mean like, you know, live like you would live like a broke entrepreneur. Okay. Like it's worth it. So I would say save every dime that you can. And I know it's scary. The Lord knows, I know it's scary. Um, but life is just too damn short not to love what you do and you know, regret is going to be a son of a b****. Just, you know, picture yourself at like 80 or 90 where, you know, it's kind of just too late to think about starting that Gig or I wish I would have quit my job back then because I was just so miserable. And if and when you are miserable in your life, I think about it. We spend the majority of our life at our job doing, you know, are working and so to be in a miserable job that has got to affect your health, that has got to affect your, your family and I just, and I know it's, you know, maybe it's the pay or the insurance, you know, that you need or things like that. But I really believe that we all have something very, very unique to offer every single person and you just don't know where it'll take you after you jump. So like I said, if I can certainly do it, uh, I think anybody can do. Paul: Oh, that's great advice. And it was such a lovely interview, Vanessa, like you've given so much value. I've once again, filled my page of notes. So we'll have all the comments, all the links, etcetera in the show notes, and also Vanessa has been very kind to give us a brilliant gift as well. So if you go to Vanessa-Cabrera and I'll put that in the show notes, dot com forward slash top 10 ways. There's a brilliant, um, gift that Vanessa's given on why is it you can grow your audience and you know, what I love about you, Vanessa, is that you've got lots of practical experience and obviously started in email marketing, then you've made the shift into social. But I also love what was on your website where you've got, you know, um, first you help people understand it. Second, you help people make it easy to implement. The third thing is you get results and I just liked the fact that you are making it simple in a world where social media can be so complex, but brilliant having you on the show today and thanks for coming. Vanessa: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me, Paul. This is awesome. Paul: All right, brilliant. Thanks Vanessa. Bye. Vanessa: Bye. Paul: That was a really wonderful interview with Vanessa. My top three take outs are, first one is the power of instagram stories, so in 2019, it's where it's at and what I love that she said off off camera that you can actually do both personal and business with instagram stories. The second is to always be nice and professional, which helps you get additional gigs, so if you're a speaker or that for anything for that matter, people will always bring back the people that are professional and nice. Leave your ego at the door and the last one is around checklists to get people from your linkedin connections onto your email list. So they're my top three take outs. I'd love to hear yours. So why don't you email me at Paul@buildlivegive.com where I'd love to get your insights from this podcast. Also, if you love this podcast and you know other corporate escapees, please share it with them. Thank you. Announcer: Thank you for listening to the corporate escapees podcast brought to you by Build Live Give. If you would like to join a community of like minded peers, please visit www.buildlivegive.com. Until next time. Thanks for listening and be brave.

Today on the Podcast we attempt to catch up on what we have all been watching this summer.  NEWS ON THE MARCH R.I.P. - Burt Reynolds          - Neil Simon Possible Casting Exits? - Chris Pine (Star Trek) / Henry Cavill (Superman) Joaquin Phoenix reveals his Joker make-up Marvel debuts Captain Marvel Trailer   FEATURE: ROUND-UP SESSION  (26:00) - Ron - Westworld Season 2 / Barry  (HBO) (29:00) - Ivan - It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (31:45) - Paul - All or Nothing (HBO) (35:05) - Darren - Steve Martin & Martin Short: See Them Before They're Dead Tour! (37:00) - Ron - Documentary Now! (IFC) / The Looming Tower (Amazon) (40:18) - Ivan - Too Many Remakes: Tomb Raider / Ghostbusters / Power Rangers / Oceans 8 / The Magnificent Seven (45:20) - Paul - Final Space / Frontier  (Netflix) (49:40) - Darren - The Square / Paterno (HBO) (57:45) - Ron - The Tree of Life Expanded Cut  (1:01:50) - Ivan - Don't Breathe / American Assassin (1:04:20) - Darren - Stronger / Patriots Day (1:08:17) - Paul - Like Father (Netflix) (1:10:10) - Ron - Professor Marston & the Wonder Women (1:11:34) - Darren - German Concentration Camp Factual Survey (1:19:00) - Ron - The Emigrants & The New Land (1:21:50) - Ivan - The Book of Mormon  (1:23:50) - Paul - Ali Wong Baby Cobra & Hard Knock Wife (Netflix) (1:25:30) - Darren - 3 CD's from Nina Rota; La Dolce Vita, Amarcord, and The Leopard (1:30:00) - Ron - Deadpool 2       

Looking at Lumina Desktop 2.0, 2 months of KPTI development in SmartOS, OpenBSD email service, an interview with Ryan Zezeski, NomadBSD released, and John Carmack's programming retreat with OpenBSD. This episode was brought to you by Headlines Looking at Lumina Desktop 2.0 (https://www.trueos.org/blog/looking-lumina-desktop-2-0/) A few weeks ago I sat down with Lead Developer Ken Moore of the TrueOS Project to get answers to some of the most frequently asked questions about Lumina Desktop from the open source community. Here is what he said on Lumina Desktop 2.0. Do you have a question for Ken and the rest of the team over at the TrueOS Project? Make sure to read the interview and comment below. We are glad to answer your questions! Ken: Lumina Desktop 2.0 is a significant overhaul compared to Lumina 1.x. Almost every single subsystem of the desktop has been streamlined, resulting in a nearly-total conversion in many important areas. With Lumina Desktop 2.0 we will finally achieve our long-term goal of turning Lumina into a complete, end-to-end management system for the graphical session and removing all the current runtime dependencies from Lumina 1.x (Fluxbox, xscreensaver, compton/xcompmgr). The functionality from those utilities is now provided by Lumina Desktop itself. Going along with the session management changes, we have compressed the entire desktop into a single, multi-threaded binary. This means that if any rogue script or tool starts trying to muck about with the memory used by the desktop (probably even more relevant now than when we started working on this), the entire desktop session will close/crash rather than allowing targeted application crashes to bypass the session security mechanisms. By the same token, this also prevents “man-in-the-middle” type of attacks because the desktop does not use any sort of external messaging system to communicate (looking at you dbus). This also gives a large performance boost to Lumina Desktop The entire system for how a user's settings get saved and loaded has been completely redone, making it a “layered” settings system which allows the default settings (Lumina) to get transparently replaced by system settings (OS/Distributor/SysAdmin) which can get replaced by individual user settings. This results in the actual changes in the user setting files to be kept to a minimum and allows for a smooth transition between updates to the OS or Desktop. This also provides the ability to “restrict” a user's desktop session (based on a system config file) to the default system settings and read-only user sessions for certain business applications. The entire graphical interface has been written in QML in order to fully-utilize hardware-based GPU acceleration with OpenGL while the backend logic and management systems are still written entirely in C++. This results in blazing fast performance on the backend systems (myriad multi-threaded C++ objects) as well as a smooth and responsive graphical interface with all the bells and whistles (drag and drop, compositing, shading, etc). Q: Are there future plans to implement something like Lumina in a MAC Jail? While I have never tried out Lumina in a MAC jail, I do not see anything on that page which should stop it from running in one right now. Lumina is already designed to be run as an unpriviledged user and is very smart about probing the system to find out what is/not available before showing anything to the user. The only thing that comes to mind is that you might need to open up some other system devices so that X11 itself can draw to the display (graphical environment setup is a bit different than CLI environment). Q: I look forward to these changes. I know the last time I used it when I would scroll I would get flashes like the refresh rate was not high enough. It will be nice to have a fast system as well as I know with the more changes Linux is becoming slower. Not once it has loaded but in the loading process. I will do another download when these changes come out and install again and maybe stay this time. If I recall correctly, one of the very first versions of Lumina (pre-1.0) would occasionally flicker. If that is still happening, you might want to verify that you are using the proper video driver for your hardware and/or enable the compositor within the Lumina settings. Q: Why was enlightenment project not considered for TrueOS? It is BSD licensed and is written in C. This was a common question about 4(?) years ago with the first release of the Lumina desktop and it basically boiled down to long-term support and reliability of the underlying toolkit. Some of the things we had to consider were: cross-platform/cross-architecture support, dependency reliability and support framework (Qt5 > EFL), and runtime requirements and dependency tracking (Qt5 is lighter than the EFL). That plus the fact that the EFL specifically states that it is linux-focused and the BSD's are just an afterthought (especially at the time we were doing the evaluation). Q: I have two questions. 1) The default layout of Unity(menu bar with actual menu entries on top and icon dock on the side) is one of the few things I liked about my first voyage into non-Windows systems, and have been missing since moving on to other distros(and now also other non-Linux systems). However in 1.4.0 screenshots on Lumina's site, the OSX-like layout has the menu attached to the window. Will 2.0 be able to have the menus on the bar? 2) Is there any timeline for a public release, or are you taking a “when it's ready” approach? In Lumina you can already put panels on the left/right side of the screen and give you something like the layout of the Unity desktop. The embedded menu system is not available in Lumina because that is not a specification supported by X11 and the window manager standards at the present time. The way that functionality is currently run on Linux is a hacky-bypass of the display system which only really works with the GTK3 and Qt5 toolkits, resulting in very odd overall desktop behavior in mixed environments where some apps use other graphical toolkits. We are targetting the 18.06 STABLE release of TrueOS for Lumina 2, but that is just a guideline and if necessary we will push back the release date to allow for additional testing/fixing as needed. A long two months (https://blog.cooperi.net/a-long-two-months) IllumOS/SmartOS developer Alex Wilson describes the journey of developing KPTI for IllumOS > On Monday (January 1st) I had the day off work for New Year's day, as is usual in most of the western world, so I slept in late. Lou and her friend decided to go to the wax museum and see several tourist attractions around SF, and I decided to pass the day at home reading. That afternoon, work chat started talking about a Tumblr post by pythonsweetness about an Intel hardware security bug. At the time I definitely did not suspect that this was going to occupy most of my working life for the next (almost) two months. Like many people who work on system security, I had read Anders Fogh's post about a "Negative Result" in speculative execution research in July of 2017. At the time I thought it was an interesting writeup and I remember being glad that researchers were looking into this area. I sent the post to Bryan and asked him about his thoughts on it at the time, to which he replied saying that "it would be shocking if they left a way to directly leak out memory in the speculative execution". None of us seriously thought that there would be low-hanging fruit down that research path, but we also felt it was important that there was someone doing work in the area who was committed to public disclosure. At first, after reading the blog post on Monday, we thought (or hoped) that the bug might "just" be a KASLR bypass and wouldn't require a lot of urgency. We tried to reach out to Intel at work to get more information but were met with silence. (We wouldn't hear back from them until after the disclosure was already made public.) The speculation on Tuesday intensified, until finally on Wednesday morning I arrived at the office to find links to late Tuesday night tweets revealing exploits that allowed arbitrary kernel memory reads. Wednesday was not a happy day. Intel finally responded to our emails -- after they had already initiated public disclosure. We all spent a lot of time reading. An arbitrary kernel memory read (an info leak) is not that uncommon as far as bugs go, but for the most part they tend to be fairly easy to fix. The thing that makes the Meltdown and Spectre bugs particularly notable is that in order to mitigate them, a large amount of change is required in very deep low-level parts of the kernel. The kind of deep parts of the kernel where there are 20-year old errata workarounds that were single-line changes that you have to be very careful to not accidentally undo; the kind of parts where, as they say, mortals fear to tread. On Friday we saw the patches Matthew Dillon put together for DragonFlyBSD for the first time. These were the first patches for KPTI that were very straightforward to read and understand, and applied to a BSD-derived kernel that was similar to those I'm accustomed to working on. To mitigate Meltdown (and partially one of the Spectre variants), you have to make sure that speculative execution cannot reach any sensitive data from a user context. This basically means that the pages the kernel uses for anything potentially sensitive have to be unmapped when we are running user code. Traditionally, CPUs that were built to run a multi-user, UNIX-like OS did this by default (SPARC is an example of such a CPU which has completely separate address spaces for the kernel and userland). However, x86 descends from a single-address-space microcontroller that has grown up avoiding backwards-incompatible changes, and has never really introduced a clean notion of multiple address spaces (segmentation is the closest feature really, and it was thrown out for 64-bit AMD64). Instead, operating systems for x86 have generally wound up (at least in the post-AMD64 era) with flat address space models where the kernel text and data is always present in the page table no matter whether you're in user or kernel mode. The kernel mappings simply have the "supervisor" bit set on them so that user code can't directly access them. The mitigation is basically to stop doing this: to stop mapping the kernel text, data and other memory into the page table while we're running in userland. Unfortunately, the x86 design does not make this easy. In order to be able to take interrupts or traps, the CPU has to have a number of structures mapped in the current page table at all times. There is also no ability to tell an x86 CPU that you want it to switch page tables when an interrupt occurs. So, the code that we jump to when we take an interrupt, as well as space for a stack to push context onto have to be available in both page tables. And finally, of course, we need to be able to figure out somehow what the other page table we should switch to is when we enter the kernel. When we looked at the patches for Linux (and also the DragonFlyBSD patches at the time) on Friday and started asking questions, it became pretty evident that the initial work done by both was done under time constraints. Both had left the full kernel text mapped in both page tables, and the Linux trampoline design seemed over-complex. I started talking over some ideas with Robert Mustacchi about ways to fix these and who we should talk to, and reached out to some of my old workmates from the University of Queensland who were involved with OpenBSD. It seemed to me that the OpenBSD developers would care about these issues even more than we did, and would want to work out how to do the mitigation right. I ended up sending an email to Philip Guenther on Friday afternoon, and on Saturday morning I drove an hour or so to meet up with him for coffee to talk page tables and interrupt trampolines. We wound up spending a good 6 hours at the coffee shop, and I came back with several pages of notes and a half-decent idea of the shape of the work to come. One detail we missed that day was the interaction of per-CPU structures with per-process page tables. Much of the interrupt trampoline work is most easily done by using per-CPU structures in memory (and you definitely want a per-CPU stack!). If you combine that with per-process page tables, however, you have a problem: if you leave all the per-CPU areas mapped in all the processes, you will leak information (via Meltdown) about the state of one process to a different one when taking interrupts. In particular, you will leak things like %rip, which ruins all the work being done with PIE and ASLR pretty quickly. So, there are two options: you can either allocate the per-CPU structures per-process (so you end up with $NCPUS * $NPROCS of them); or you can make the page tables per-CPU. OpenBSD, like Linux and the other implementations so far, decided to go down the road of per-CPU per-process pages to solve this issue. For illumos, we took the other route. In illumos, it turned out that we already had per-CPU page tables. Robert and I re-discovered this on the Sunday of that week. We use them for 32-bit processes due to having full P>V PAE support in our kernel (which is, as it turns out, relatively uncommon amongst open-source OS). The logic to deal with creating and managing them and updating them was all already written, and after reading the code we concluded we could basically make a few small changes and re-use all of it. So we did. By the end of that second week, we had a prototype that could get to userland. But, when working on this kind of kernel change we have a rule of thumb we use: after the first 70% of the patch is done and we can boot again, now it's time for the second 70%. In fact it turned out to be more like the second 200% for us -- a tedious long tail of bugs to solve that ended up necessitating some changes in the design as well. At first we borrowed the method that Matt Dillon used for DragonFlyBSD, by putting the temporary "stack" space and state data for the interrupt trampolines into an extra page tacked onto the end of *%gs (in illumos the structure that lives there is the cpu_t). If you read the existing logic in interrupt handlers for dealing with %gs though, you will quickly notice that the corner cases start to build up. There are a bunch of situations where the kernel temporarily alters %gs, and some of the ways to mess it up have security consequences that end up being worse than the bug we're trying to fix. As it turns out, there are no less than 3 different ways that ISRs use to try to get to having the right cpu_t in %gs on illumos, as it turns out, and they are all subtly different. Trying to tell which you should use when requires a bunch of test logic that in turn requires branches and changes to the CPU state, which is difficult to do in a trampoline where you're trying to avoid altering that state as much as possible until you've got the real stack online to push things into. I kept in touch with Philip Guenther and Mike Larkin from the OpenBSD project throughout the weeks that followed. In one of the discussions we had, we talked about the NMI/MCE handlers and the fact that their handling currently on OpenBSD neglected some nasty corner-cases around interrupting an existing trap handler. A big part of the solution to those issues was to use a feature called IST, which allows you to unconditionally change stacks when you take an interrupt. Traditionally, x86 only changes the stack pointer (%rsp on AMD64) while taking an interrupt when there is a privilege level change. If you take an interrupt while already in the kernel, the CPU does not change the stack pointer, and simply pushes the interrupt stack frame onto the stack you're already using. IST makes the change of stack pointer unconditional. If used unwisely, this is a bad idea: if you stay on that stack and turn interrupts back on, you could take another interrupt and clobber the frame you're already in. However, in it I saw a possible way to simplify the KPTI trampoline logic and avoid having to deal with %gs. A few weeks into the project, John Levon joined us at work. He had previously worked on a bunch of Xen-related stuff as well as other parts of the kernel very close to where we were, so he quickly got up to speed with the KPTI work as well. He and I drafted out a "crazy idea" on the whiteboard one afternoon where we would use IST for all interrupts on the system, and put the "stack" they used in the KPTI page on the end of the cpu_t. Then, they could easily use stack-relative addresses to get the page table to change to, then pivot their stack to the real kernel stack memory, and throw away (almost) all the conditional logic. A few days later, we had convinced each other that this was the way to go. Two of the most annoying x86 issues we had to work around were related to the SYSENTER instruction. This instruction is used to make "fast" system calls in 32-bit userland. It has a couple of unfortunate properties: firstly, it doesn't save or restore RFLAGS, so the kernel code has to take care of this (and be very careful not to clobber any of it before saving or after restoring it). Secondly, if you execute SYSENTER with the TF ("trap"/single-step flag) set by a debugger, the resulting debug trap's frame points at kernel code instead of the user code where it actually happened. The first one requires some careful gymnastics on the entry and return trampolines specifically for SYSENTER, while the second is a nasty case that is incidentally made easier by using IST. With IST, we can simply make the debug trap trampoline check for whether we took the trap in another trampoline's code, and reset %cr3 and the destination stack. This works for single-stepping into any of the handlers, not just the one for SYSENTER. To make debugging easier, we decided that traps like the debug/single-step trap (as well as faults like page faults, #GP, etc.) would push their interrupt frame in a different part of the KPTI state page to normal interrupts. We applied this change to all the traps that can interrupt another trampoline (based on the instructions we used). These "paranoid" traps also set a flag in the KPTI struct to mark it busy (and jump to the double-fault handler if it is), to work around some bugs where double-faults are not correctly generated. It's been a long and busy two months, with lots of time spent building, testing, and validating the code. We've run it on as many kinds of machines as we could get our hands on, to try to make sure we catch issues. The time we've spent on this has been validated several times in the process by finding bugs that could have been nasty in production. One great example: our patches on Westmere-EP Xeons were causing busy machines to throw a lot of L0 I-cache parity errors. This seemed very mysterious at first, and it took us a few times seeing it to believe that it was actually our fault. This was actually caused by the accidental activation of a CPU errata for Westmere (B52, "Memory Aliasing of Code Pages May Cause Unpredictable System Behaviour") -- it turned out we had made a typo and put the "cacheable" flag into a variable named flags instead of attrs where it belonged when setting up the page tables. This was causing performance degradation on other machines, but on Westmere it causes cache parity errors as well. This is a great example of the surprising consequences that small mistakes in this kind of code can end up having. In the end, I'm glad that that erratum existed, otherwise it may have been a long time before we caught that bug. As of this week, Mike and Philip have committed the OpenBSD patches for KPTI to their repository, and the patches for illumos are out for review. It's a nice kind of symmetry that the two projects who started on the work together after the public disclosure at the same time are both almost ready to ship at the same time at the other end. I'm feeling hopeful, and looking forward to further future collaborations like this with our cousins, the BSDs. The IllumOS work has since landed, on March 12th (https://github.com/joyent/illumos-joyent/commit/d85fbfe15cf9925f83722b6d62da49d549af615c) *** OpenBSD Email Service (https://github.com/vedetta-com/caesonia) Features Efficient: configured to run on min. 512MB RAM and 20GB SSD, a KVM (cloud) VPS for around $2.50/mo 15GB+ uncompressed Maildir, rivals top free-email providers (grow by upgrading SSD) Email messages are gzip compressed, at least 1/3 more space with level 6 default Server side full text search (headers and body) can be enabled (to use the extra space) Mobile data friendly: IMAPS connections are compressed Subaddress (+tag) support, to filter and monitor email addresses Virtual domains, aliases, and credentials in files, Berkeley DB, or SQLite3 Naive Bayes rspamd filtering with supervised learning: the lowest false positive spam detection rates Carefree automated Spam/ and Trash/ cleaning service (default: older than 30 days) Automated quota management, gently assists when over quota Easy backup MX setup: using the same configuration, install in minutes on a different host Worry-free automated master/master replication with backup MX, prevents accidental loss of email messages Resilient: the backup MX can be used as primary, even when the primary is not down, both perfect replicas Flexible: switching roles is easy, making the process of changing VPS hosts a breeze (no downtime) DMARC (with DKIM and SPF) email-validation system, to detect and prevent email spoofing Daily (spartan) stats, to keep track of things Your sieve scripts and managesieve configuration, let's get started Considerations By design, email message headers need to be public, for exchanges to happen. The body of the message can be encrypted by the user, if desired. Moreover, there is no way to prevent the host from having access to the virtual machine. Therefore, full disk encryption (at rest) may not be necessary. Given our low memory requirements, and the single-purpose concept of email service, Roundcube or other web-based IMAP email clients should be on a different VPS. Antivirus software users (usually) have the service running on their devices. ClamAV can easily be incorporated into this configuration, if affected by the types of malware it protects against, but will require around 1GB additional RAM (or another VPS). Every email message is important, if properly delivered, for Bayes classification. At least 200 ham and 200 spam messages are required to learn what one considers junk. By default (change to use case), a rspamd score above 50% will send the message to Spam/. Moving messages in and out of Spam/ changes this score. After 95%, the message is flagged as "seen" and can be safely ignored. Spamd is effective at greylisting and stopping high volume spam, if it becomes a problem. It will be an option when IPv6 is supported, along with bgp-spamd. System mail is delivered to an alias mapped to a virtual user served by the service. This way, messages are guaranteed to be delivered via encrypted connection. It is not possible for real users to alias, nor mail an external mail address with the default configuration. e.g. puffy@mercury.example.com is wheel, with an alias mapped to (virtual) puffy@example.com, and user (puffy) can be different for each. Interview - Ryan Zezeski - rpz@joyent.com (mailto:rpz@joyent.com) / @rzezeski (https://twitter.com/rzezeski) News Roundup John Carmack's programming retreat to hermit coding with OpenBSD (https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=2110408722526967&id=100006735798590) After a several year gap, I finally took another week-long programming retreat, where I could work in hermit mode, away from the normal press of work. My wife has been generously offering it to me the last few years, but I'm generally bad at taking vacations from work. As a change of pace from my current Oculus work, I wanted to write some from-scratch-in-C++ neural network implementations, and I wanted to do it with a strictly base OpenBSD system. Someone remarked that is a pretty random pairing, but it worked out ok. Despite not having actually used it, I have always been fond of the idea of OpenBSD — a relatively minimal and opinionated system with a cohesive vision and an emphasis on quality and craftsmanship. Linux is a lot of things, but cohesive isn't one of them. I'm not a Unix geek. I get around ok, but I am most comfortable developing in Visual Studio on Windows. I thought a week of full immersion work in the old school Unix style would be interesting, even if it meant working at a slower pace. It was sort of an adventure in retro computing — this was fvwm and vi. Not vim, actual BSD vi. In the end, I didn't really explore the system all that much, with 95% of my time in just the basic vi / make / gdb operations. I appreciated the good man pages, as I tried to do everything within the self contained system, without resorting to internet searches. Seeing references to 30+ year old things like Tektronix terminals was amusing. I was a little surprised that the C++ support wasn't very good. G++ didn't support C++11, and LLVM C++ didn't play nicely with gdb. Gdb crashed on me a lot as well, I suspect due to C++ issues. I know you can get more recent versions through ports, but I stuck with using the base system. In hindsight, I should have just gone full retro and done everything in ANSI C. I do have plenty of days where, like many older programmers, I think “Maybe C++ isn't as much of a net positive as we assume...”. There is still much that I like, but it isn't a hardship for me to build small projects in plain C. Maybe next time I do this I will try to go full emacs, another major culture that I don't have much exposure to. I have a decent overview understanding of most machine learning algorithms, and I have done some linear classifier and decision tree work, but for some reason I have avoided neural networks. On some level, I suspect that Deep Learning being so trendy tweaked a little bit of contrarian in me, and I still have a little bit of a reflexive bias against “throw everything at the NN and let it sort it out!” In the spirit of my retro theme, I had printed out several of Yann LeCun's old papers and was considering doing everything completely off line, as if I was actually in a mountain cabin somewhere, but I wound up watching a lot of the Stanford CS231N lectures on YouTube, and found them really valuable. Watching lecture videos is something that I very rarely do — it is normally hard for me to feel the time is justified, but on retreat it was great! I don't think I have anything particularly insightful to add about neural networks, but it was a very productive week for me, solidifying “book knowledge” into real experience. I used a common pattern for me: get first results with hacky code, then write a brand new and clean implementation with the lessons learned, so they both exist and can be cross checked. I initially got backprop wrong both times, comparison with numerical differentiation was critical! It is interesting that things still train even when various parts are pretty wrong — as long as the sign is right most of the time, progress is often made. I was pretty happy with my multi-layer neural net code; it wound up in a form that I can just drop it into future efforts. Yes, for anything serious I should use an established library, but there are a lot of times when just having a single .cpp and .h file that you wrote ever line of is convenient. My conv net code just got to the hacky but working phase, I could have used another day or two to make a clean and flexible implementation. One thing I found interesting was that when testing on MNIST with my initial NN before adding any convolutions, I was getting significantly better results than the non-convolutional NN reported for comparison in LeCun ‘98 — right around 2% error on the test set with a single 100 node hidden layer, versus 3% for both wider and deeper nets back then. I attribute this to the modern best practices —ReLU, Softmax, and better initialization. This is one of the most fascinating things about NN work — it is all so simple, and the breakthrough advances are often things that can be expressed with just a few lines of code. It feels like there are some similarities with ray tracing in the graphics world, where you can implement a physically based light transport ray tracer quite quickly, and produce state of the art images if you have the data and enough runtime patience. I got a much better gut-level understanding of overtraining / generalization / regularization by exploring a bunch of training parameters. On the last night before I had to head home, I froze the architecture and just played with hyperparameters. “Training!” Is definitely worse than “Compiling!” for staying focused. Now I get to keep my eyes open for a work opportunity to use the new skills! I am dreading what my email and workspace are going to look like when I get into the office tomorrow. Stack-register Checking (https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20180310000858) Recently, Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) described a new type of mitigation he has been working on together with Stefan Kempf (stefan@): How about we add another new permission! This is not a hardware permission, but a software permission. It is opportunistically enforced by the kernel. The permission is MAP_STACK. If you want to use memory as a stack, you must mmap it with that flag bit. The kernel does so automatically for the stack region of a process's stack. Two other types of stack occur: thread stacks, and alternate signal stacks. Those are handled in clever ways. When a system call happens, we check if the stack-pointer register points to such a page. If it doesn't, the program is killed. We have tightened the ABI. You may no longer point your stack register at non-stack memory. You'll be killed. This checking code is MI, so it works for all platforms. For more detail, see Theo's original message (https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=152035796722258&w=2). This is now available in snapshots, and people are finding the first problems in the ports tree already. So far, few issues have been uncovered, but as Theo points out, more testing is necessary: Fairly good results. A total of 4 problems have been found so far. go, SBCL, and two cases in src/regress which failed the new page-alignment requirement. The SBCL and go ones were found at buildtime, since they use themselves to complete build. But more page-alignment violations may be found in ports at runtime. This is something I worry about a bit. So please everyone out there can help: Use snapshots which contain the stack-check diff, update to new packages, and test all possible packages. Really need a lot of testing for this, so please help out. So, everybody, install the latest snapshot and try all your favorite ports. This is the time to report issues you find, so there is a good chance this additional security feature is present in 6.3 (and works with third party software from packages). NomadBSD 1.0 has been released (https://freeshell.de/~mk/projects/nomadbsd.html) NomadBSD is a live system for flash drives, based on FreeBSD® 11.1 (amd64) Change Log The setup process has been improved. Support for optional geli encryption of the home partition has been added Auto-detection of NVIDIA graphics cards and their corresponding driver has been added. (Thanks to holgerw and lme from BSDForen.de) An rc script to start the GEOM disk scheduler on the root device has been added. More software has been added: accessibility/redshift (starts automatically) audio/cantata audio/musicpd audio/ncmpc ftp/filezilla games/bsdtris mail/neomutt math/galculator net-p2p/transmission-qt5 security/fpm2 sysutils/bsdstats x11/metalock x11/xbindkeys Several smaller improvements and bugfixes. Screenshots https://freeshell.de/~mk/projects/nomadbsd-ss1.png https://freeshell.de/~mk/projects/nomadbsd-ss2.png https://freeshell.de/~mk/projects/nomadbsd-ss3.png https://freeshell.de/~mk/projects/nomadbsd-ss4.png https://freeshell.de/~mk/projects/nomadbsd-ss5.png https://freeshell.de/~mk/projects/nomadbsd-ss6.png Beastie Bits KnoxBug - Nagios (http://knoxbug.org/2018-03-27) vBSDcon videos landing (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfJr0tWo35bc9FG_reSki2S5S0G8imqB4) AsiaBSDCon 2017 videos (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnTFqpZk5ebBTyXedudGm6CwedJGsE2Py) DragonFlyBSD Adds New "Ptr_Restrict" Security Option (https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=DragonFlyBSD-Ptr-Restrict) A Dexter needs your help (https://twitter.com/michaeldexter/status/975603855407788032) Mike Larkin at bhyvecon 2018: OpenBSD vmm(4) update (https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20180309064801) [HEADS UP] - OFED/RDMA stack update (https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-arch/2018-March/018900.html) *** Feedback/Questions Ron - Interview someone using DragonflyBSD (http://dpaste.com/3BM6GSW#wrap) Brad - Gaming and all (http://dpaste.com/3X4ZZK2#wrap) Mohammad - Sockets vs TCP (http://dpaste.com/0PJMKRD#wrap) Paul - All or at least most of Bryan Cantrill's Talks (http://dpaste.com/2WXVR1X#wrap) ***

Kai Davis is a dynamite internet marketing professional. He's really reinventing how his clients view SEO and creating an amazing suite offerings with which anyone can build an amazing organic stream for their website. We discuss: How Kai boosts a website's findability Why you should focus on results, not SEO What best practices to follow What does on-site SEO involve? How do you get quality backlinks? The education problem that SEO faces What a bad SEO engagement looks like Link-building strategies for real SEO results The easiest SEO win you can use for your site How important are search rankings? An easy way to improve click-through rates Are you communicating trust? Kai's number one SEO tip. If you want to learn more from Kai, he's got a newsletter where he dispenses more of the hot truth you heard here. Sign up at http://kaidavis.com/newsletter/ PS: Be sure to subscribe to the podcast via iTunes and write a review. iTunes is all about reviews! Transcript.... Recorded: This is the Unofficial Shopify Podcast with Kurt Elster and Paul Reda, your resource for growing your Shopify business sponsored by Ethercycle. Kurt: Welcome to the second episode of the Unofficial Shopify Podcast. I am your host, Kurt Elster. With me is my cohost and partner-in-crime, Paul Reda. Paul: Hello. Kurt: Joining us today is our guest and friend, Kai Davis. Kai, you're out in Portland. How's it going there? Kai: Hey, folks. It's a nice and rainy overcast Portland day so it feels like home. Kurt: Fantastic. Kai, you're my go-to SEO guy. Why don't you tell people a little bit about yourself? Kai: Sure. I am a marketing consultant specializing in search engine optimization and helping my clients get found online through digital outreach promotion and link building. I figure my clients have wonderful content, wonderful websites. My role is to help people find out about those sites. Go out there on my clients' behalf, tell influencers, authorities, bloggers, and journalists about my client, their resources, their linkable assets, and promote that connection. Kurt: It sounds like you've differentiated yourself. You're like, "I should wait more than just an SEO guy." Kai: Totally. Totally. So many people practicing SEO out there but saying I need an SEO is like going to an architect and saying, I really need a hammer. You want a new house. You want a beautiful entry way. I am focused on the results for my clients which usually are traffic, sales, better image, not necessarily just, "Hey, we're going to do some SEO on your site." We're going to do best practices that help you get found online. Kurt: Okay. Actually, tell us a little bit about those best practices. Kai: Sure. It really splits into two different camps. You have on-site SEO and off-site SEO. With the on-site side of things, it's like saying, "We want to get everything tuned out that we can, make it easy for people to find us." The analogy I like using is saying, "If you're going to have people over to your house, you're going to tie some balloons to your mailbox so they know exactly where you are." I think that's what on-site SEO really is. What can we do to make it so when people come by, they're able to find your site. It covers the normal stuff, title pegs, headers, headlines, on-page content, what keywords are we targeting? Just making sure everything is as perfect as it can be. When it comes to off-site stuff, again, that end goal is we want to get traffic to your site. We want to get interesting people finding your site and saying, "Hey, this is what I want." To do that, the best signal to send to Google is and always has been links. What I do is that outreach on behalf of my clients saying, "Hey, we want to get some links to your site from relevant sites, from influencer sites, from sites that have high quality content, and everybody benefits from that. Paul: That mention of high quality content is really what is important and sticks out to me because at least, my impression is dealing with the SEO consultants of the world. Is that SEO has almost become like a catch-out term for snake oil salesmen who are just trying to get people to be … I can get you to be number one in Google. I can do black magic that will secretly increase your Google rankings so you give me a ton of money. I feel like those people are taking advantage of a customer who actually needs legitimate help. Is that something that you think is a problem in dealing with your industry that the clients don't understand that there's much more to this than just paying some guy to buy a bunch of backlinks off of Fiverr? Kai: Absolutely. It comes down to an education problem and a reputation management problem on behalf of the SEO folks. I've had so many clients and potential clients say to me, "You know what I hate? Two things in the world. Only two things. Lawyers and SEO specialists. I don't understand what they do. It's confusing. They try to explain it to me and do a terrible job, and I just throw money to a black box, and I don't know what's going to come out of it." That's what I want to move away. There's so many people out there who are eager to sell a $300 or a $500 solution. We'll get you traffic. We'll get you a number one position on Google, but again, for that hammer analogy, it's like they're selling you a really fancy hammer when you want a better house. Kurt: Let's talk about the bad SEO people. What are those guys doing? Let's dispel it right now. Kai: Usually when somebody goes out and says, "Hey, I want to get to number one on Google. I am going to pay somebody $300, $400, $500 a month," they're going out there and they're doing, the SEO company is doing on that client's behalf directory submissions, building a spam backlinks through blog commenting or buying up existing sites that have links pointing to them, building out the content, and then putting links in that content to the client's site. As with anything, there's some ways you could use these black hat tactics effectively and some ways you could do it very ineffectively, and most of the time, if your client he says, "Hey, I just want to spend $300 or $400 a month on Google and get to number one," you're going to be working with an SEO company who is really good at cashing your tanks, building some spam backlinks, get you a little bump in your traffic or rankings of the first couple of months. Then, you'll see your traffic just plummet when Google catches on and says, "All that's pointing to your site is 5000 low quality irrelevant links, why should we be ranking you high? What's relevant about your content that you deserve these links and what's relevant about these links that you deserve this rankings?" Paul: Yes. Really, if you cheap out on it, in the long run, you're only hurting yourself because Google is going to catch on to your shady game and they're going to punish you for it. Kai: What's that comment? I never knew how expensive it would be to work with a professional until I work with an amateur. If you cut corners, if you work with somebody who says, "It's going to be cheap, we'll get you what you want," if it seems too good to be true, we're going to get you 1000 hits a day in 24 hours, it's probably too good to be true. Kurt: The way to avoid those snake oils, the bad SEO marketers is number one, look at price and look at unrealistic promises or results? Kai: Absolutely. I'd add to that. Talk to them about what clients they've worked with before and what results they see, and talk to them about the system they use. A few months ago, I had a call from an entrepreneur who is starting up an SEO company, and I said, "Hey, just walk me through. How do you get these links toy our clients? What system are you using?" It's a really innovative patentable process that our VP of technology has developed that assures people's first place rankings." "Yeah, but what do you do?" "Unfortunately, I can't tell you that." Whatever any client ask me, "Hey, Kai. How are you going to get us links?" I will break out for them in detail what I do. Let's identify the influences in your industry. Let's identify those bloggers. Let's figure out who is linking to your competitors and what their most valuable links are. Let's copy your competitors' most valuable links through link building and direct outreach, and let's find those people who are having conversations about your brand or your industry online, and insert ourselves into that conversation through outreach, picking up the phone or hopping into email and saying, "Hey, we'd love to have you link to us. You have this great resource about X, Y, Z. We have X, Y, Z. Would you be willing to include a link to help your audience?" That's what I do. That's what good SEOs do. Paul: What you're saying is you do actual hard legwork to deliver real actual results. That is craziness. How could you charge people to do actual work instead of just cunning them out of their money like most of these guys? Kai: I know, right? I built my practice from the beginning to say, "I want to work with a very small number of clients but deliver the best results possible for them. That's a different attack than a lot of SEO companies or a lot of consultants. They say, "Hey, we want to work with 50 or 100 different clients." To do that, you might end up having to staff up or cut corners. I say, "I want to run an independent practice. I want to work with six exceptional clients at a time, and deliver to them the best results possible." Paul: Yeah, these other guys are selling mass-produced nerve tonic. You're a natural doctor. Kai: Exactly. Exactly. Kurt: Let me back up. We do a lot of web developments. Naturally, for us, we just follow Google's best practices, or usability best practices, accessibility best practices when developing. Does that mean we're following good on-site SEO? Kai: For 95% of the cases, it means that you are. Time and time again, Google has reinforced a viewpoint that the way to do good SEO is to do what's in the user's or the visitor's best interest. If you're following Google's guidelines, if you're making sure your website is designed to be accessible, designed to be usable, designed to load quickly and efficiently, you're crossing 95% of the Ts and dotting the Is. Kurt: What's probably the biggest mistake you see for on-site SEO? Kai: For on-site SEO, for people who are using an off-the-shelf theme like let's say they have a Shopify site and just picks something off the shelf, they aren't looking at the theme to make sure that everything is dialed in. I had a client recently and I did a website x-ray for them, just digging through their sites, seeing what they needed to change to make their site better able to generate traffic. Whoever had built their theme had included three instances of the title tag on every page. That's a weird thing to have. If you think about it, the title tag is like the story name in the newspaper and if you pick up a copy of the New York Times and the front page story has three separate titles for it, you're going to say, "This is confusing. What I am reading?" Same thing for Google. They're going to look at that page and say, "There's three separate titles here. What is this page really about?" If you are using something off the shelf, making sure that it's dialed in, talking to an SEO consultant or talking to the web developer and saying, "Hey, walk me through how you optimize this thing for SEO." It's really easy to slap optimize for search engines label on anything but, what did they actually do to achieve that? Kurt: Okay, yeah. Just asking people. Seem straightforward. It sounds like a lot of the stuff you do, SEOs like the direct byproduct of it, especially with off-site optimization. Give me a couple of tips, methods, tactics to do off-site SEO. Kai: In the end, you're really just looking to get a number of domains linking to you and domains websites that are relevant to your industry that have related content that are talking about the same thing. The biggest, easiest when I see for a lot of clients who are starting a new online store and say, "Hey, I want to do off-site SEO. What do I do?" It's just to make a list of everyone you know who has a website or blog. Maybe it's ten or 15 friends. Maybe it's more than that. Just writing them individual outreach emails saying, "Hey, I am launching a new thing. I would love it if you could include a link in a post just talking about it." If he had a post about the handbags I am selling, please link to me. Those links will add up. It will start getting traffic to you. It will help move you towards getting your first sale but just finding those people who have relevant sites to you and saying, "Could you include a link to me?" Not anything super keyword-heavy. You don't want, for this handbag side, have it be like, "Buy handbags online." Just be like, "Hey, my friend, Dave, has a handbag site. You should go check it out. He sells wonderful quality products. Getting that link is the most value possible." Kurt: When you put it like that suddenly, now it seems so easy and obvious. The thing that stuns me is most people won't take that advice and won't do it because they'd have to go ask someone for something. People are so resistant to doing that. Kai: I had that exact same scenario come up. I had a mentoring call for a friend that he said, "Kai, what can I do in the next 30 minutes to get a link to my site?" I said, "You got to email people." He's like, "I don't want to talk to people. I just want to get a link to my site." Kurt: I got to talk to somebody. Paul: I just want to have it for free. Couldn't it just happen? Kai: Yeah. That's hope marketing where you sit around and hope that happens. Kurt: I think it's perpetuated by this slimier side of SEO that says, "Hey, there's a magic wand that I have that you don't, and if you pay me, I'll waive that magic wand." "Where can I buy a magic wand?" There's no magic wand. Paul: My SEO will cure all of your illness with your business. Kurt: I think you're saying the benefit, the results of good SEO, good marketing is dollars. It's money in the client's pocket. I see a lot of people where they'll guarantee rankings and that to sounds like the worst thing you could possibly do. Kai: It's terrible on both sides. It's terrible for the person guaranteeing the rankings because as you find out when you play online, Google search results change dramatically depending on if you're locked in to Google or not, depending on what city. I had a call from a friend not even two hours ago where I Googled a key phrase that she was trying to rank for an online dating coach, and she Googled it, and we compared the top five results. Three of the five were different. She's in Seattle. I am in Portland, Oregon. We have a couple of 100 miles between us. It's impossible to guarantee a search ranking because it could change from instance-to-instance. Plus, for the client, you're saying, "Hey, they're going to guarantee me that I'll be number one for this term." Is that a term that even generates traffic? I can get you ranking number one for web development studio with podcast in Chicago, run by a friend of Kai Davis. If nobody is searching for it, does it even matter that you rank number one? Kurt: Yeah. How important is it to have those rankings? Kai: I look at rankings as a nice-to-have thing but month-to-month where I am putting together a report for a client, I am focused on how much organic traffic are we receiving overall? It's hard because 20% of Google search every day are unique. Nobody searched for it before which could mean that 20% of people who are coming to your website every day are searching for a new phrase. If it's hard to rank for every phrase under the sun, is there a lot of value in being number one for a specific key phrase? There is because you know it is generating traffic for you but I'd encourage anybody listening to this who says, "What metrics should I be looking at for best SEO to know it is working?" Look at your organic traffic on your site. Just the traffic from search engines and Google Analytics and see month-to-month, is it staying consistent? Is it rising? If it's going up, you know your SEO is working. If it's going down, you know, "'Hey, maybe there's some holes we need to plug." Kurt: Yeah, that's really great that you're focused on ROI like that but we've also made that the core of our business here is searching for the actual thing that the client needs, not the way to get there. We want to increase the end result as much as possible and it's just how you're saying where you want to look if the traffic is increasing and not if the ranking is increasing. Paul: In the end, it's really the traffic that's more important. Who really gives a shit where the ranking is as long as the traffic is good? Kai: Bingo. Bingo. If you're getting enough traffic by ranking fourth, and fifth, and sixth for a big basket of terms that your business is profitable and sustainable, you win. Now, it's just about incrementally improving it over time. Kurt: People really shouldn't obsess over phrases and rankings. Kai: I really don't think they should. I think, again, it's good to look at and good to say, "Hey, strategically, we want to rank highly for web development in Chicago or SEO Portland, Oregon," but if you're focused entirely on that one term, you've one-it is, you're missing all the other opportunity out there because you're too focused on just one thing. It said … Paul: I'm sorry. Yeah, it's like a business that's focused entirely on revenue and cares nothing for profit. All the revenue in the world is great but if you're not actually making any money, who cares? Kai: Right. Right. Absolutely. It's the same thing with traffic. Traffic is only an indicator in and of itself. I can get you a ton of traffic but if that traffic doesn't convert, if you have a conversion rate of, say, 0.1%, it's just not going to work out for you. It really needs to be a holistic effort. We're getting you traffic but shouldn't you be focusing on increasing your conversion rate? Shouldn't you be trying to raise your price from a $10 average value per customer to a $20, $30, or $300 price? A lot of the time I work with a client and when I come in to their business, I'll say, "Let's just take these three baseline indicators." How much traffic are you getting from search engines? What's your conversion rate? What's your average lifetime value for a customer? If one of those looks really out of whack, I'll say, "Hey, you know what? Maybe SEO isn't the right thing for you to invest in right now. You'll get a bigger return on investment by tuning up your checkout process and taking your conversion rate from 0.1% to 1% or 2% or 3%. That will pay off so much more than doubling your traffic." Paul: All right. Let me get technical with you. In developing Shopify feedings, we always include, and correct me if I am using the right term, not metatags. Those tags you define inside a product page where you can tell Google like, "This is the title. This specific span is the title. This span is the price. This is the image." Are you familiar? Kai: Yeah. Paul: I've been doing that but I don't think, does Google do anything with that? Is there really any advantage to doing that? Kai: There is and if I am thinking of the same thing, within a product, you'd say, "Hey, Google. This is the product title. This is, say, the product rating or review, or number of stars." Those are valuable since they'll show up for sites that Google indexes and trusts in the search results next to that product name. Remember back, we had Google Author Photos through Authorship a year ago and they discontinued it a couple of months ago. Things like that, I call them value adds in the search results do increase the click through rate. It's an easy way for a customer who searches, say, handbags. They see two different handbag sites in the search results. One is just the product title, a normal Google search result. The other shows the price, shows the number of reviews, show the quantity available. Those make it easier for the customer to say, "This site is better put together, more trustworthy, has the product in stock. I'll click this." Elements like that can increase your click through rate in the search results. Paul: Trust is very important in having all of that metadata in there quickly at the customer's fingertips. It psychologically increases the likelihood that they will trust that that site that that site is not some sort of fly-by-night. Kai: It looks professional. Paul: Yeah, it's professional and people want to more likely to give their money to someone who is professional. Kai: Yeah, absolutely. It's all about trust signals in the end. During the checkout process, are you communicating trust to your customer, on the project page in the search results? Good SEO is about outreach and about they can share your site is both accessible and is trustworthy that somebody look at this and say, "This is the type of site I want to get my credit card to." Kurt: Tell us about, what are some trust signals? Tell us about that. Kai: The main trust signals I advocate my clients to include really fall outside of SEO as a whole but a best practice for a website, get your phone number on there. Get your phone number in the header. Have an 800 number. Include testimonials on product pages and in the checkout process. Remove extra fields in the checkout process. It dovetails a little outside of strict SEO as a whole but if there's elements I could advise the client to include to make their website look like actual other real humans that use it and love the experience, let's get those o0n there just so more humans that come along will say, "Hey, a guy named Bob once brought a product and really liked it. I am willing to give my money to you now." Kurt: That's a good tip. For a Shopify store, what's your number one SEO tip? Kai: For a Shopify store, my number one SDEO tip really is contact. When you think about it, when we're getting these links to your site, what are people linking to? You have the product pages on your site. You have a marketing page like the homepage or an about page, and then you have what I call linkable assets which is really content creation. What can you develop that people say, "Hey, that's really exciting and I want to link to it." We could do on-site SEO until the cows come home but unless we're getting other relevant sites in your industry to link to you, we won't really see any benefit from it. The biggest tip is saying, "What's our content creation process? Who are we marketing to? Who is your audience? What are the problems your audience experiences relating your industry and how can we help solve them for that audience member with educational informational content, and then the link building. The SEO becomes, "Hey, let's go tell people about this really great content we have," and get links to it. Kurt: People, an e-commerce story should be writing articles creating blog entries? Kai: I really think so. I think it's sort of mixed because I work with a number of SEO consultants whose number one tip is like "You need to be blogging more," but what are you talking about? Who are you saying it to and what problems are you solving? I am sure we've all read across stories and websites that half at the bottom works like, "Hey, great. We released a new product," and nobody really cares, but I think e-commerce stories should be talking to their audience or researching their audience, seeing what questions their audience has about their industry and that product line and then, writing content that explains what to do. Kurt: I think that's interesting because you can turn that like you could start with increasing customer engagement. We want to know what to blog about so you could set it up. In your email, your order confirmation email to your customers who bought. Those are really your ideal audience, people who are already buying. Include a link to a survey and reward them with a coupon on their next order, and survey them and ask them, what's interesting about this? Why did you buy this? What problems are you facing? Then, the replies to those survey results are going to be people essentially writing you your blog articles. Kai: Bingo. Bingo, or even just every customer feedback email you get which is like, "Oh man, I couldn't use this thing because X, Y, Z." Hey, great. Here's a blog post that explains how to solve X, Y, Z problem and everybody in the industry, everybody who is buying a handbag, or website, what have you can now link to that and say, "Great. This is the definitive guide to solving problem X, Y, Z." That's going to get links. That's going to traffic. That's going to build trust. Paul: Kai. It sounds like there's a blood pressure machine going on in the background or something. I don't know what it is over there by you. Kai: They're tearing up the carpet in my hallway. Kurt: Yeah. This has been incredibly helpful, Kai. Where could people find you? Kai: My website right now is KaiDavis.com, K-A-I-D-A-V-I-S dot come, and I've got a newsletter on there where I send out SEO and marketing tips. If you want to sign up, please do and I promise it will be worth it. Kurt: Wonderful. I know I've signed up for your newsletter. I've gotten value out of it, but yeah, people should go to your website and sign up for that newsletter. Kai: Excellent. It's been a pleasure being on and I hope that your audience enjoys us. If they run in to any questions or have any SEO ideas that they want to throw at me, my email address is on my website. Please open invitation. Send me an email, folks. Send me a question and I promise I'll get back to you. Kurt: Wonderful. Very generous. Thank you, Kai. Paul: Thank you very much, Kai.