Podcast appearances and mentions of paul i'm

Jay was talking to our boss Paul but was having trouble hearing him over his GPS system.

The concept of giving is more of an attitude of generosity. Always be generous with people that you come in contact with and add so much value that the people who receive your kindness feel compelled to be your cheerleaders and ambassadors.   In this episode, Dean chats with friend and business partner, Paul Tran, about giving people the potential to be your raving fans and make them want to help you. ----- Automated Transcript Below Dean Soto 0:00:00 Hey, this is Dean Soto founder of FreedomInFiveMinutes.com and ProSuum.com and we're here again with another Freedom In Five Minutes podcast episode. Today's topic is this: Giving So Much Without Expecting Anything in Return. That and more, coming up.   Dean Soto 0:00:29 Well, guys check this out. I have a special guest here today. I am NOT on my acreage running around with the Luna Mister. In fact, I am in some kind of industrial-type area with a lot of cars. We're at Toyota-thon guys.   Dean Soto 0:00:46 That's the way it looks over here it's Toyota-thon no we are actually at a Toyota dealership because Mr. Paul Tran got a flat tire right before we were going to speak. Of course, that didn't stop us but I have with us as a result of that beautiful gift of a flat tire.   Dean Soto 0:01:09 Mr. Paul Tran, how's it going my man?   Paul Tran 0:01:12 Good. It's good. Whenever I got that flat tire I thought of you know how we both are fans of Chaco Willing is his strategy have you heard of his concept of good? No matter what happens in your life always end it with good.   Paul Tran 0:01:26 If I today I was late for work good I got to spend more time with my family or I got a flat tire good I got to like appreciate people's help you know whatever happens just end up with good because it reframes your positive attitude.   Dean Soto 0:01:42 That's actually pretty cool. I love that. I love that. I'm at Toyota-thon good I am NOT gonna get another Toyota. I like Toyotas but I'm not in the market but yeah I still feel it makes me feel really good but um so interesting thing happened today so we were speaking out we work in boardwalk which was in Newport California right   Paul Tran 0:02:05 Irvine Irvine   Dean Soto 0:02:07 Irvine California and it was cool because there's a guy who got us into the whole WeWork space a guy by the name of Daniel. Can I share his name?   Paul Tran 0:02:18 Yeah okay.   Dean Soto 0:02:20 A guy by the name of Daniel Apple and he works for a company called TriNet who they are awesome by the way if you have a company that is doing anything HR-wise, TriNet is friggin amazing they run they do all the HR stuff for Paul's halal you know 20 million dollar halal guys restaurants that he owns and stuff like that and they just been pretty amazing   Paul Tran 0:02:40 right yep they also did payroll and did HR strategy for Netflix and its heyday so they just pretty much help you know maneuver all the HR pitfalls for a starting company because you know as you know you're in the business not to — unless you're in the HR business you're not in the business to process payroll you're in the business to serve people and do what you do uniquely so trying it kind of takes all that off of your plate so that you can focus    Dean Soto 0:03:07 I love that so yeah go check out so Daniel Apple which all once I post this on LinkedIn I’ll actually tag him on there so if you're if you want to check him out he's awesome great guy him and William Chiem C H I E M guys   Dean Soto 0:03:26.019,0:03:30.549 Yeah, both are awesome and the reason why we're bringing them up both of them is that so they got us into we work and the interesting thing is that Paul and I so hearing Paul actually reached out to me and said hey do you want to start speaking out we work I have this contact and he's you know he has a lot of people in there that he worked with and could get us into doing some speaking engagements to share all the whole VSA concept — the Virtual Systems Architects if you go to FreedomInFiveMinutes.com you get to check those out so he so we're talking about he's talking about this guy and I'm like oh that's awesome so like what's the catch what's the catch and it's been how many months like six months?   Paul Tran 0:04:14 yeah it's been about four months   Dean Soto 0:04:16 four months of doing these talks and I'm still waiting for the catch that's the interesting thing literally William and Daniel both got us into this spot and then have literally asked for nothing in return but it was interesting because every single time we've done any type of talk   Dean Soto 0:04:42 I know I always bug Paul I'm like we should have Daniel talk in the beginning we should have Bill talk in the beginning we should look how can I give back to Bill how can I give back to Daniel huh and to the point where I referred people to him and he literally has never asked for a referral whatsoever he's just been giving giving giving giving giving and it would today be the first time where he actually shared his dirty little secret with me after he after I had talked to him about somebody who I had actually referred and who looks like might actually be signing up with TriNet and I love for Paul to gotta give that little dirty little secret that he's shared today.   Paul Tran 0:05:24 well I mean pretty much the the concept was it's more of a an attitude of generosity like give so much be so generous with people that you come in contact with always add so much value that the people who receive your generosity they have no choice and not no choice but they feel so compelled to just be cheerleaders and ambassadors for you and create raving fans and just want to help you you know all this time you know Dean and I were always just figuring how did it benefit them how to take good care of them and you know the concept was pretty much I guess based on the book that they go giver and the concept was this like give more value than you capture provide more value than you capture like the the byproduct the referrals the business the growth all that stuff is a byproduct that takes care of itself similar to the concept of if you're doing the right thing for clients like the monies of natural Byproduct so his generosity his continued generosity to us has been so enormous and so over abundantly overflowing we abundant that we just want to help him out all the time like we're not even working for TriNet we just want to help him out and give him as much business as possible because of that philosophy    Dean Soto 0:06:45 yeah it's funny because he's even like he's was even like he's like yeah yeah dude you know if anyone now signs up will even give you a little you know I can give you like some kind of kickback or something like that I'm like dude no honestly you've given so much to us there's like it's already like we feel already in debt and that's literally what I told him today because it was cool because it just kind of came up out of the blue the the whole concept that he shared but it's super powerful it's something and quite honestly for me it's something and I don't know if it's because I grew up pretty poor I mean we went from you know hotel to hotel and how's it going guys we went from hotel to hotel and motel in the motel and never you know it was I grew up reporter so a lot of the times for me I tend to hold on to things I tend to like be more about me than about other people and just seeing just seeing like this I mean you've taught you Paul have taught me to give and to give and stuff like that but like even even with this I was like I mean literally every time we came down it was it was I had in my mind like what are they getting out of this I even asked Bill a couple times like what are you getting out of this what are you getting out of this and you know we want to help you and he's and he's just like oh I don't just long game don't worry about it and I'm like this is crazy but now it's funny because now you're starting to see the reaping of what he what those two have actually already sowed you know   Paul Tran 0:08:11 Yeah and but I mean it does start with just being someone who's generous and being a kind person with a positive attitude like if you're just in it truly just for that ulterior motive, yeah people smell it out and it'll debilitate any efforts that you make so you actually got to be a really kind good person and be super sincere about wanting to just truly help someone with no expectation in return that's the prerequisite.   Dean Soto 0:08:42 that's interesting like I could totally see that as well like if people know you're doing that just to get something that that that could be more detrimental at times but yeah like the I mean why like why is this important I mean it's important because a lot of times we're in business obviously we're in business to make money to feed our families to grow the business and so on and so forth but you know that doesn't need to come at the cost of a that doesn't need to come at the cost of giving before receiving you know even jesus said that's better to give than to receive the the whole idea is that that your mode is like because no matter what with a business you have to give that value anyway there the money your value should just in general with your business be more valuable than the money that they're paying they need to get a return on their investment and so that's a huge huge thing and it's so important to just have that in mind of I'm giving no matter what I have to find a way to give more value than receive right    Paul Tran 0:09:52 yeah and the trick is to I think because we as business people we need to manage our numbers and we need to measure things and whatever measure is measured and proves right all right but the trick here is you know culture things like generosity are really hard to measure but I find it funny that those are the most important so I'd say focus on things are a little it's it's okay to focus on things they're a little bit harder to measure yeah cuz those are the ones that usually probably every other business person is not measuring either so that's you're a competitive edge as well   Dean Soto 0:10:24 Yeah for sure and you know on the on the flip side of things the cool thing is you can actually systemize a lot of this type of giving there there are many ways like the reactive campaign attaching these active campaign to different things like Thankster or Zen Direct or other places you can actually systemize the giving to your customers based off of how much they buy based off of you know who hold a number of data points and stuff so if it's hard for you because it really is hard for me to give like I have to systemize giving to where it's actually out of my head and it just constantly get on a regular basis so like my challenge to you right now is if you have a business or just in general even with your family how much are you giving before receiving you know are you giving love notes to your wife are you giving love notes to your children every day are you giving you know free things to your your your clients or reaching out to them and just saying hey appreciate you or things like that like how much are you actually doing that and that's the challenge this week is to to put that as a priority and see over time just how much that gives back and that allows you to to grow as a business and to grow as a as a person in general but but yeah that's the challenge this week. Paul, do you have any other things?   Paul Tran 0:11:45 Actually, as you mentioned that you taught me the concept of the bank account the virtual the emotional-spiritual business financial bank account like you if the more you deposit the easier it is to withdraw like if you put more money into your bank account and it earns interest you can always withdraw without any issues without feeling like that scarcity mindset right it's the same thing it's not just money but if you're adding so much value you're depositing so much help you're sending them thank-yous you're giving them referrals you're figuring out a way to help your clients win like without any expected returns. Guess what those are deposits that interest-earning deposits that the with Charles and the distributions back to you are just automatic and you don't feel like you're losing out no some think of it as just living off the interest of it you know   Dean Soto 0:12:38 I love it right so my relationship — but I relate that to everything, yeah no I totally and I only use it for my relationship and some of my business I need to do it for other things so all that being said so this is Dean Soto and Paul Tran and if you haven't subscribed to the podcast yet go to FreedomInFiveMinutes.com do they actually do the right thing actually you go to Apple Podcast type in Freedom In Five Minutes and subscribe that way or go to Spotify type in Freedom In Five Minutes or stitcher to type in Freedom In Five Minutes or I Heart Radio and type in Freedom In Five Minutes and you will be able to find the Freedom In Five Minutes podcast go and subscribe now so I can give you lots and lots of episodes all the time okay so...   Paul Tran 0:13:28 without any expectation return   Dean Soto 0:13:31 Exactly. Exactly but until then Paul and I will see you on the next freedom in five minutes podcast episode

The pain, grief, discomfort, and vulnerability that can arise throughout the wedding process can actually be doorways into joy if we are willing to let them in. Sheryl Paul speaks about her book "The Conscious Bride" which addresses the MANY feelings that can arise around a wedding for everyone involved. Music by Terry Hughes Inspired to create something for yourself? Visit https://ever-changing.net/ Links: Sheryl Paul's work: https://conscious-transitions.com The Conscious Bride: https://conscious-transitions.com/books ---- Full Transcript Paul: I'm always interested in what's not being talked about what people are experiencing, but are trying to stuff away, trying to sequester, trying to sweep into the corner under the rug... when all that does is create shame and all that does is create anxiety. Sheryl Paul has a unique ability to see the invisible, to see what has been silenced. Her book "The Conscious Bride" has been helping couples prepare for marriage for 20 years - and prepare in a very specific way. Her work helps couples create room for all of the emotions that come with transition, not just the picture perfect ones. Funny thing is, that allows for even more joy. Join me for a conversation with Sheryl Paul. This is Shame Piñata. I’m Colleen Thomas. Welcome to Shame Piñata, where we talk about creating rites of passage for real-life transitions. When I got engaged six years ago, a good friend of mine gave me a book called "The Conscious Bride". Now, I'm not a reader, as my husband will tell you, but I devoured this book. I loved it because it touched on the shadow, the stuff we don't talk about, the stuff that gets in our way when we want to feel one way but actually feel a myriad of other ways all at the same time. It named the shadow that hovers over the wedding: the attachment, the fear, the uncertainty, the hidden power-struggles and the grief that lies beneath them, and that a big part of stepping into a new life is letting go of the old one - and not just for the couple. The Conscious Bride gave me permission to feel all the ways, and it helped me create room for everyone else to feel all the ways too so, ultimately, we could all process the transition without getting into weird fights about random things. I was so happy to have a chance to speak with Sheryl Paul. Thomas: So what led you to write this book? Paul: So, I was in a master's program around that time. I was at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, which I don't know if you're familiar with, but it has a very strong Jungian focus. And I had always been interested in rites of passages and I had a deep sense that there was a lot that was not being talked about around the wedding. And I started to interview women and I did a lot of interviews, especially when it came time to write the book, which came from my master's thesis. So it started out as as a thesis and then evolve into a book. And I started to see that there was a big gap in the cultural conversation around around transitions in general. All transitions are bypassed and overlooked, but particularly the wedding and then in particular, how much focus there is on the joy and the perfection and everything has to be blissful and ecstatic from the moment of the proposal into the first year of the wedding, and there was just no conversation happening about the shadow, about the death experience, about what women (and men) are actually experiencing quite a bit of a time. And, you know, the more I researched and the more I looked and the more I spoke, the more it became quite clear to me that just that again, that there was a real gap in the conversation around this pivotal rite of passage, one of our few ceremonies that we still invoke in the culture. And yet it's done in such a way where we really gloss over the element of a transition, of the reality that when you are in transition, you are in a death experience, you are in a liminal zone, you are between identities, you are letting go, you are grieving. And we only expect people to feel joyful. It creates a lot of anxiety and it creates even more chaos than there naturally would be around an event like this. Because I'm feeling sad, because I have a sense of loss, because I feel like a part of me is dying, because I'm not over-the-moon ecstatic... something must be wrong with me, or with my partner, or with the decision to get married - something's wrong. And it's an incredibly deep sigh of relief to the soul to know that nothing is wrong. In fact, the more you let those difficult feelings in, the more you will open to the joy; that the pain and the grief and the discomfort and vulnerability are the doorways into the joy, into what we are expected to see all and into what we hope to feel. And what I started to say earlier was that that the wedding more than any other transition, I think, has (probably being pregnant becoming a mother comes close) carries a very strong cultural expectation of unilateral joy and it is supported in a big way by the wedding industry that sells perfection and sells joy. So it's a it's very big money behind selling us the bill of goods by selling us this message that you are supposed to be joyful and the way to do that is to create a perfect event. Thomas: How do you work with someone if they're just starting to realize that they don't have to only feel joyful? Paul: So, I tell them to read my book. And, you know, it's really the first part it's about re educating people to understand all of the normal and necessary feelings that accompany this transition. And once they understand that everything they're feeling is normal and necessary, they can start to let it in and and feel it, feel the grief, feel the loss, feel the vulnerability, feel the loneliness. These are all normal feelings that accompany transitions. So once we give ourselves permission to feel without that overlay of "because I'm feeling this it means there's something wrong" everything changes from there. We don't then have to misassign meaning to the feelings and to think, "Because I'm feeling sad, it means I'm making mistake." No, it has nothing to do with that. You're feeling sad because you are in a rite of passage. You're feeling sad because you are in the death experience, letting go of this identity, this primary identity as single person, as daughter, and shifting into an entirely new stage of life, a new identity. And there is no way to go through that without feeling grief. Thomas: You spend a good portion of the book talking about how the bride is separating from the father/father figure and the mother/mother figure and the friends. Can you say more about that process? Paul: Yes, so it can go a few different ways. If the bride is very close to her father, that's one set of emotions and experiences where there is tends to be a lot of grief, a lot of crying, really good, medicinal, necessary crying to make that separation process... and to make it more effective to make it more complete to make it more conscious. Again, in the naming, to say, I am separating from my dad, I am no longer going to be... Yes, I'm his daughter, but not in the same way, not as my primary identity. That my new partner is going to be number one and I'm transferring allegiance. So, that's one example of one way that it can go if if someone's very close to their father. If somebody doesn't have a close relationship with their father or there is no father figure in their life, that's a different kind of grief of the loss of not having had that or never having had that. The same as somebody has passed away. If somebody who's getting married and their mother's no longer alive. You know, that's, that's one way that grief can come through, as opposed to a mother who is very much alive and very much involved. And then there's a separation. There's, there's a loosening of cords that is required. Thomas: I'm curious as you're speaking how this applies, I'm sure it's very different, but how it applies to folks who were older when they get married, or maybe a second marriage. Paul: It can be different, it can be similar. It depends. It depends on a lot of factors. But regardless of the age, especially if it's a first marriage and you're getting married at 40, you're still letting go of a massive identity. And in some ways, it's even more of a letting go because of all of those years that you spent as a non-married person. And so there's a lot of grieving, a lot of shedding of the independence, the separateness, all of the control that you have when you are a non-married person, that every inch of your life is your own: your home, your space, how you spend your time, how you organize your weekend, it's all yours. And so that is its own massive death experience for somebody who marries later, you know, and who has had that many more years than someone who's 22 if you're 42, that's a lot of years of being the sole architect of your life. Thomas: So you work with people around transitions, all kinds of transitions now, and I'm curious if ceremony plays a part in that with them. Paul: I'm a big fan of ceremony. Because my work is largely over the internet. I'm not the one doing the ceremony with them. I would love to be that person, but I'm not. But I always encourage people to create ceremony and create rituals. And so, you know, if it's somebody getting married... and I've had a lot more men come my way, by the way, since I wrote The Conscious Bride. And I'm thinking of some right now who are in one of my small coaching groups. And he's getting married on Saturday, and I won't, I won't share the specifics, but it's... because it's his story. But it's really beautiful to witness men in their transitional process and the rituals that they come up with because I encourage people to find their own rituals that are meaningful to them. Ways to acknowledge the end of you know, in his sake, his bachelorhood that that time in his life is over. And so he has been sharing these incredibly potent rituals that have come to him for ways of recognizing that that time in his life is over. And what ritual does is, as you know, is it, it concretizes, it makes it and embodies what's happening, so that it brings it out of just that realm of talking about it and it sends it into a realm that we can't see with our five senses, but very much exists and yet calls on the five senses to help transmute the experience into another form. And so rituals help us cross over that sometimes very scary divide that just looks like a big, cavernous, empty space, crossing from one identity to a new identity, from one stage of life to the next. And without the rituals we are... we're pretty lost and so, you know, again, as I, as I said earlier, the wedding is one of the few ceremonies that we have, which comes with ritual. A lot of people tend to minimize or diminish the ceremonial aspect because they're so focused on the party and the reception, you know, that's where all of the energy goes. When really, it's the ceremony that has so much power to carry us over the divide between one stage and the next. Thomas: And that's something I'm trying to encourage and put seeds out in the world for as well, that people take that the ritual, the ceremony of the marriage, the wedding and they, they feel free to do it their way so that it's powerful and is as powerful and meaningful for the couple as possible. Paul: Yes, yes! And I think we are at this extraordinary time in our world where we have freedom to do that, where we are breaking out of the traditions that have gone stale and revitalizing them with personal meaning of what is meaningful for you. And there may be long-standing time-honored traditions that are still meaningful. And I'm by no means one to throw everything out that we've come from, because many of those rituals are gorgeous and meaningful - but only if they're meaningful for the individual, right? Only if they land in a place where something inside of you says yes, right? That helps me, that bolsters me, that comforts me. Right? So, you know, whether it's at a Jewish wedding standing under the Chuppah, you know, it's just this beautiful symbol of, of our new home and and this, you know, long standing tradition... if that's meaningful to somebody great. If it's not, then it really.. it's not going to do anything for you on a spiritual level. I shared with Sheryl that before my wedding, I created self-commitment ceremony for myself. And in that ceremony I presenced all of my Ancestral grandmothers with the acknowledgement of how important marriage might have been for them, how much of a survival tool. I did this because women’s standing in society has evolved so much even since my mother's generation, but yet we are still connected to our Ancestral legacy and felt like a really important thing to me. Paul: That's incredibly beautiful that you did that and so powerful and it's probably the number one fear that comes up for women that I'm working with in their pre-wedding time in their engagement, is the fear of what does marriage mean? And does it mean that that I am beholden to this person now and I lose all sense of self and I become boring and frumpy and... This is this is the legacy. This is what we've been handed, right? This is what it has meant for thousands and thousands of years is that for women, marriage has meant really the death of self: I exist, to take care of the man and to take care of the children and that's it. And so there's this very deep ancestral legacy that we have to consciously break with and recognize that we are so lucky and we are so blessed to be on this new threshold, that we get to redefine what marriage means for us. And we only can really know that after we've taken the leap, because on the other side, on the first side, on the engagement side, it just all looks and sounds so scary to most women. And you know, that's why I have so many exercises in The Conscious Bride, more-so I think in The Conscious Bride's Wedding Planner, on what does it mean to be a wife? What does that mean to you? What does the word wife connote? When you think of wife, what is the connotation for you? And it's very rare that someone's going to say, "Oh, I see this rad, sexy woman, you know, like, doing like, the dance on the rooftops." Like, no, that's not usually what we think of when we hear the word wife. But it could be. More and more we are redefining that. And we are seeing that. And so I tell people, but look out into the world today and find those those models of marriage where you see a woman who is doing her life fully, you know, and yes, maybe she's also a mother and she's, you know, loves being married and she's fully committed to her path and and making her offerings, and doing her work in the world. Right? Separate from wife and mother. So, yeah, I love, I love that I love what you share. I love what you did. I think that is not only powerful, but essential on that ceremonial ritual level to recognize what we've come from. Thomas: I'm just so happy and honored to have the chance to talk to you after, after all this time of really, really, really appreciating your book and your wisdom. Paul: Yeah, thank you, Colleen. It means a great deal to me to have the opportunity to share Sheryl's wisdom with you. I hope that you are able to use it or pass it along to a friend. Here's one final bit of wisdom, a quote from The Conscious Bride. "A marriage is a rite of passage no matter when it occurs, and the woman must still pass through the phases of her transformation. She must die, she must sit in the unknown, and then she will be reborn." Sheryl Paul is the author of The Conscious Bride and The Conscious Bride's Wedding Planner. Her website contains a plethora of resources for addressing life transitions. Learn more about Sheryl and her work at https://conscious-transitions.com/ Our music is by Terry Hughes. If you like the show, please take a minute to review it on Apple Podcasts. Learn more at shamepinata.com. I’m Colleen Thomas. Thanks for listening.

We’re living through an unprecedented time in American history. Businesses are closed, schools are shuttered, and gatherings are canceled, all because of an invisible, infectious agent that our modern world hasn’t been able to match — not yet, anyway.Marking the unique circumstances, we spent the most recent episode of the P100 Podcast discussing the effects of COVID-19 on daily life (including our own), how people and businesses can help their communities, and how they can communicate during a crisis.If you’re hitting the download button or streaming from your “office away from the office,” thank you for listening and stay safe. Full Transcript:Paul:Welcome back to a special edition of the P100 podcast, the audio companion to the Pittsburgh 100 e-zine. This episode, solely focused on COVID-19, the coronavirus. I'm Paul Furiga, your cohost along with my colleagues, Dan Stefano…Dan:Hey Paul.Paul:And Logan Armstrong.Logan:Hi Paul.Paul:And I want you all to know at home we are practicing safe social distancing. In fact, we are so far away from you while you're listening to us right now ... well, that's another story. Seriously though, given the times that we're in, we thought that we would devote this entire episode of the podcast to understanding how we, as a community can deal with this. I've never seen a situation like this in my lifetime and as Dan and Logan frequently remind me, I'm old.Dan:I think you got a point there. I mean, I've tried to think of this in context of my own life. I'm 33 and I would say the most impactful thing that has ever occurred in my lifetime was 9/11.Paul:Right.Dan:And I was in high school whenever that happened. That was a time whenever the stock market cratered. The next day all air traffic was suspended. It was severely drastic. It took a long time for American life to get back to normal then. Whatever the new normal was, I should say. But this seems like it could be something different. There's a lot of uncertainty in the air, which there was at that time in 2001 for sure, but when we're talking about a virus here, we're talking about something that we don't have a vaccine for, it's a little bit scary right now. And I feel like the streets are even ... it's weird to be walking downtown. At the WordWrite offices here, we're getting ready to practice social distancing and work from home.Paul:Work from home, yeah.Dan:I could say in some ways it feels similar to those days after 9/11 but it's very different too.Paul:Absolutely. Logan.Logan:Yeah. And I'm a little younger. So I'm only 22.Dan:Little.Logan:I was a young kid when 9/11 happened. But also especially with what we're seeing in the market right now, very reminiscent of the 2008 era, which of course this has a few different causes than in 2008. But we've seen people are going crazy at supermarkets…Paul:That's right.Logan:... and really trying to stockpile, which is good because they're themselves trying to self-quarantine but it's going to be interesting to see how the markets react and how local businesses and business owners will wade through the waters during this time. Dan:AbsolutelyPaul:So a couple of things we wanted to do, number one, we wanted to share some helpful resources, which certainly there are probably, if you're listening to this podcast, you're probably a consumer of a lot of things online and you may already have some favorites, but we are at WordWrite in the business of working with reliable news organizations. So we'll share a few of our favorite go-to sources for local information here in western Pennsylvania.Paul:And then we're going to shift gears a bit and we're going to talk about our own experience because it's a crazy situation, but a lot of our clients rely on us for our crisis expertise. In any given year, we handle about 12 major crises, 10 of which you never read about because they're effectively handled. And then two of them, sadly, for whatever reason, they're all over the news. So we actually have a lot of experience in this arena and we are currently working with several of our clients on crises related to the COVID-19 outbreak.Paul:So first let's talk about some go-to sources here in western Pennsylvania. Dan and I, we share this other disease called being former journalists. Dan, some of your favorite go-tos for reliable and accurate information on what's happening.Dan:Still trying to get over that. The journalism disease. No, it's no disease. I mean, some of my good friends are journalists. So, I appreciate them.Paul:Yes, likewise.Dan:As you said, I do respect just journalism and what they put in. So I mean, your two major newspaper news sources in the area would be Post-Gazette and then triblive.com, the former Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. And now just the regular Tribune-Review set in Greensburg. That's a great place to go for it. But I'd recommend, if you're talking locally, the Allegheny County Health Department. That's got pretty consistent and good updates.Paul:They have an entire page, Allegheny County-Dan:Yes, they do.Paul:... .PA.US devoted to COVID-19.Dan:Right. Everybody's got their own page on it now. I mean it's incredible. I think everybody has been a victim of getting all these emails now. And I mean fortunately I have an email from the CEO of Banana Republic to tell me that all their stores are safe, but that's also just ... that's best practice right now. And businesses are doing their due diligence to just show everyone that they're trying to do their best.Dan:But for right now, I mean, that gets a little bit away from our question and I'm kind of drifting here, but I would follow the PG and TribLIVE. But a lot of them, they're getting their information from the government sources here. But I would really trust the County Health Department and that's some of your most current information.Paul:Absolutely.Dan:Make sure you're following their Twitter accounts and everything you can.Paul:Logan anything you'd add?Logan:I'd also say that The Incline, they're usually a little more lighthearted, but they've been doing a really good job of grouping up various articles from multiple local publications.Paul:Yes, aggregating content.Dan:Yeah.Logan:Exactly. Yeah. Aggregating that and that's getting delivered to inboxes at 6:00 a.m. every day. If you need to be up to date on the latest news in the area, I would also say check out The Incline for that.Paul:I'm going to add a few more. So in the last few years, pretty much every television station in Pittsburgh has debuted some flavor of an online presence, sometimes up to and including live streaming of events. So one of the things we've been doing at WordWrite is we've been watching live streams of Governor Wolf, the Pennsylvania governor, and his press conferences, Rich Fitzgerald, the Allegheny County executive, the County Health Department. I believe the new director's name is Dr. Bogen, so that's available.Paul:I would also add, and this has not really gotten much attention because the debut occurred during this whole crisis, but Channel 2 KDKA, which is owned by a CBS Network, has debuted essentially I believe a local version of on-air all the time local news. So CBSN is the national network and there's some local connection. I'll be honest with our listeners, I haven't had time to fully understand all of that because we've been so busy with other things. Personally, I look at all of those. I also look at WESA-FM. One of the reasons for that is with everything that's happened in newspapers in recent years, the major foundations in Pittsburgh have poured a fairly substantial amount of money into building the newsroom at WESA and they have all of the same kinds of resources in terms of online delivery of news that we've just talked about.Paul:So those for me are all good services. Most of us, I'm of a certain age, I'm 61. I hate to say that in a room with somebody in their twenties and thirties but it's the truth, I can't lie, it's on my driver's license, anyway, even somebody like me can make use of the phone and I am getting a lot of alerts. So I rely on the alerts as well to remind me. Before we shift gears here and talk about some advice for our listeners, even in our own planning for WordWrite, as Dan mentioned, on Friday we were ready, Friday the 13th of March, we were ready to implement a phased work from home process where some people would be in the office. And by the time we got to Sunday of the weekend where mandatory, non-essential businesses are asked to close or it is voluntary but strongly encouraged.Paul:So things are just moving so fast now it's worthwhile not to scare yourself, and I think that's, Logan, why it's good that you mentioned The Incline. Really good journalists can have the right touch to put an uplifting spirit into their round up of things. Right? But you don't want to be consumed by the news, but you also want to be informed and up to date. You don't want to be headed out to go to an event or something like that when it's not going to happen. And it was just cancelled. I don't know. Anything you guys would add to that?Dan:Well I think if you're talking about cancelled events, just try to look up to see what one is actually on now. Pretty much the assumption should be that it's closed. But-Logan:Yeah. And one thing I'd add is that it is a little hectic with all of these things happening so fast. But one of the hopeful benefits of that is this quick action now is really going to be the precursor to slowing it down in the long run.Paul:Absolutely. And this is something that, for our listeners, that we've been talking about here at the company in terms of working with our clients and that is that we are at this inflection point where the number of people who might be contagious in our community is at its highest point at the same time that we have the least ability to test.Paul:So if we self-isolate for the next two weeks, what we'll be able to do is keep those who might be infected from spreading the disease. National news media is saying that the United States might be 11 days behind Italy, meaning that what's happened there could happen roughly two weeks later here in the United States. God forbid, we don't want that. Other folks I've seen on the national news talk about we want to be like South Korea where there was a lot of testing, the self-isolation and they seem to have, as the medical experts call it, flattened the curve, which is to say slow the growth of the virus so that the number of people who are sick doesn't exceed the capacity of the region's healthcare providers to treat those who are sick.Dan:One thing, Paul, I'd like to bring up, open the conversation to you and Logan is what's fascinating about this is similar, like we said, I mean I hate to keep making the comparisons to 9/11 because that was a very much different type of crisis, but that was a tragedy that affected almost everyone in the U.S. at some level. Corona possibly even more. Just in terms of even if you aren't getting the disease, I mean it's probably going to disrupt your life, whether how you're working or somebody that you know. Maybe your children are off of school right now. There's quite a bit going on. And Paul, yourself, I know you've had some, personal events that are affecting you, right?Paul:Oh absolutely. So I'll give you a few. Number one, one of our two daughters is getting married, we hope, on May 31st. There's been a lot of conversations with the venue and the providers. The baker and the flowers and everything else. And we'll see how things play out. May 31st might be okay, but let's just say that we're a little concerned.Paul:Our other daughter is getting her MBA at the University of Chicago and they have extended spring break, which has pushed their, they're on a quarter system, their third quarter deeper into the year. She's supposed to have an internship this summer. It was going to start June 1st. She won't be done with school on June 1st and we don't even know if she'll have the internship.Dan:Yeah, certainly, it's amazing how this is just disrupting lives. I mean it's putting almost everything on pause. It's amazing. Myself, my wife and I, we were planning on taking a vacation to Japan, it was going to be the first week of April and we were looking forward to this trip for an entire year. It was just something we'd planned. It's kind of a bucket list type thing and just a week ago we had to cancel it. Right now as we record here, there are no travel restrictions over there, but there's just no guarantee whenever you see the massive lines that are coming for people that are coming back into the country, at least from Europe. But just something we had to be take care of.Dan:And we were even planning on maybe having a backup trip to California. And now we're really seriously kind of rethinking that one. It feels selfish to say, well hey, this thing that was just a wonderful little pleasure trip for us here we're disrupting it. How horrible is that? But we don't know when we're going to be able to take that trip again. We planned for specific dates in our lives. We mapped around that. So it's just another area that it does affect things. But Logan, I know you've even had some ...Logan:Yes. Yeah. It's a similar situation. I had a trip planned to Italy. I guess I would've left last week. Yeah. But it is unfortunate that this is such a disruptive virus. But thinking on the bigger picture of things, I mean, it's much better to have these disruptions now and really put these policies in place, especially because not only on an individual level, but on a business level, as we touched on earlier, there's really a lot of things that business owners are going to have to prepare for. And there may be some crisis communications that business owners have to take into account and that's something that we've experienced here. Yeah, Paul?Paul:Oh absolutely. Absolutely. And we want to dig into that for the remainder of our time here on the podcast, this episode. And before I do that, I just want to give a quick shout out to your point, Logan, the retail and restaurant sectors are going to be particularly hard hit and in the local economy as well as the American economy, the percentage of workers who are hourly who have, let's just say less robust benefits packages, whatever we can do as a community to keep them in mind and help to keep them employed I think is really important.Paul:One of the other sources of information that I didn't mention earlier were members of the Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership, the Partnership has articles in the Pittsburgh 100 frequently. Their weekly… they do a weekly sort of what's going on downtown email. And the one that I received just before we came in to record the podcast is all about this subject. So you can't dine in during the time that businesses are closed but you can still do take out. So there's things that we can do as a community to help our friends and our neighbors through. And I think it's something we should do.Dan:Yeah, I think before we take a deeper dive into talking about crises and crises management, what you said there kind of touches on an important point and one thing, one of the huge crises or huge problems that are coming out of this is whenever schools are closed there are a lot of students out there who might be on free or reduced lunch and these are kids who might rely on these school lunches to help themselves eat. It might be their biggest meal of the day.Dan:But one thing that you've seen is restaurants are coming out and offering free lunches to some of these kids. I believe some districts have, including I believe Pittsburgh Public, they have programs in place to help these kids to make sure that they have food, that they have resources.Dan:And that touches on your point there, Paul, about the Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership in that…do something. If you're a business owner and you feel like maybe it's a helpless time right now, maybe you have to put pause on a lot of things, you can think of something to do and that's one way I think if you make yourself a goal and you have a mission, you can help yourself get through this, right?Paul:Oh, absolutely. We're going to shift gears now folks and talk about crisis. To Dan's point, this is one of the things when we sat down and we looked at this episode of the podcast, there were other segments and other things that we had planned to do perhaps, but we agreed that one of the ways that we could be helpful was to share with people what we know about this.Paul:So I'm going to kick off this portion of the episode here and Dan and Logan will jump in. So historically, one of the things that we've done a lot of at WordWrite is crisis communication. And one of the things we've learned is that there are only really four basic kinds of crises.Paul:So there are acts of God, there are acts of man, there are acts of God made worse by man, and there are acts of man made worse by God. That's it. You can think about pretty much anything bad that's ever happened in the history of the world. And there's going to be some element of one of those four categories. So certainly-Dan:If you asked my wife I think she would say that there are also acts of God made worse by Dan. But we'll leave it to four right now.Paul:Well Dan, the last time I looked, you are a human being, so we'll put you in one of the four categories.Dan:Got you.Paul:Anyway, certainly the viruses, if you want to call it that, an act of God, it's an act of nature. What we don't know yet is whether what's happened, our acts of man, let's call it, that it made it worse. When you go back to China we're not here to judge. We don't really know exactly where the virus spread began. But certainly there's humankind and there's nature mixed together in this crisis.Paul:So one of the things that's interesting in doing so much crisis communications at our firm that is both a positive and a cause for pause, is that most crises are predictable. This is not the first time that the world's been through an epidemic, a pandemic, a virus, and perhaps it's the 21st century technology-driven, I don't know if we've become a little bit lazy or we're just lulled into a sense of complacency, but what this epidemic is demonstrating to us that this can still happen in the 21st century.Logan:Yes. Even with all the technological advances, and medical advancements, and medical capabilities, something that moves this fast is very hard to control no matter-Paul:Absolutely.Logan:... how many technological capabilities we have. And it's something that we're probably not going to have a vaccine for, for a little bit. This vaccine isn't going to be coming in the next week or the next month.Dan:Testing's an issue too right now.Logan:Exactly.Paul:18 to 24 months is what people are saying.Logan:Right. So we're really going to have to figure out what the best course of action is. And I think that's going to be something that is going to be on the fly. Because, as you've said, we've seen these kinds of crises before, but there's no real way to account for all the variants in it and it's going to be on people and on the media to portray information in as close to real time as possible and as accurately as possible to try to help mitigate that.Paul:So one of the things that I think is true about this, 1918 the Spanish flu epidemic was just a terrible worldwide crisis. So that fits into what I just said about most crises are predictable. So we can learn from that. And to your point, Logan, this is fast moving, but we can learn from what's happened in Italy. We can learn from what's happened in China, within the more restrictive immediate window. So that's critically important.Paul:One of the other things that's important, and there are going to be people who are going to be picking over this for years, I'm sure, what we tell our clients is if crises are predictable, then you need to plan for them. So theoretically the world, especially the largest economies and countries in the world should have been planning for this sort of a thing. And there had been some, let's just say missteps, fits and starts.Dan:Yeah.Paul:Now for our listeners, even though this thing is underway, you can look at history and you can look at recent events to do your own planning for the crisis. So we're already in it. So to your point Logan, there's an element of every day is different and you can't predict for sure, but one of the things we do when we work with clients is scenario planning. What's the worst case scenario? What's the best case scenario, what's the likely scenario? And then you start to develop your communications around each one of those outcomes. And that guides you on a day to day basis in terms of what you need to be doing.Dan:Right in this situation, and I would just kind of play interviewer here with you Paul, with so many different businesses it's hard to gauge, exactly what are likely outcomes. Businesses right now we might think of they might have to do some layoffs, they might have to temporarily furlough some employees and whether certain bills pass out of our Congress here they may have wages, they may not. It depends on how large a company is. One thing here though, whenever we've had this discussion is we talk about, you start from a place of truth when you're communicating these outcomes. Can you elaborate a little more on that?Paul:Sure. So in a crisis like this, obviously if you're standing in front of the forest and the forest is burning behind you, you can't tell people that that smell in the air is a candle. You have to acknowledge even the hard truths.Paul:One of the things that we see time and again is that if you're straightforward with people up front and there's tons of university research on this that validates this point, they're going to give you the benefit of the doubt. If I own a restaurant in Pittsburgh that opened two months ago – I'm in a place that's not the same as a restaurant that's been around for 25 years. Right? And I need to say to people, look guys, we just opened. I can't guarantee you that we're going to ride through this unscathed.Paul:And then what you need to do is you need to communicate process. And that's where that scenario planning comes in handy. It's like, look, we don't know where this is going to end, but here's what we're going to do today. Here's what we're going to do next week. Here's our thought process and our plan, and there's a lot of university research on this too, that when you can't communicate content, if you can communicate process it calms people's fears and gets people organized around the common goal of moving forward.Dan:I guess that speaks to control. It might be the wrong word to say controlling, but trying to manage people's emotions here. I think we have to understand how everyone is feeling because we're feeling the same way on a lot of these things. I mean we can tell a business, a B2B business, okay, hey, this is how you want to talk when you're talking to your clients or something like that. But we have the same feelings whenever we're trying to listen to the government here. Are they going to tell us the process? Are they going to describe that?Dan:So can you talk a little bit about how to be a good effective communicator to work with the community and make sure that you're delivering this information not maybe necessarily in a doom and gloom way and just being an effective storyteller essentially?Paul:Right. So one of the things that we're big on obviously at our company is the process of storytelling. We have our own process that we help companies uncover what we call their Capital S story. And I do a lot of speaking around this. In a crisis there's no more important time for you to be thinking about your Capital S story and that story is this, it answers these questions. Why would somebody work for you, buy from you, invest in you, partner with you? If you're a nonprofit, why would they donate or volunteer with your organization? And that is the story above all stories for your company, your organization. That's why we call it the Capital S story.Paul:And you think about that in times of stress, a crisis like this, which is an enormous stressor. It doesn't matter so much what you say on a daily basis. It matters what people believe you to be as an organization. And I think Dan, that's kind of what you're getting at there.Paul:And in a crisis, what we find is whatever audience you're trying to reach, employees, partners, vendors, customers, that's where they go in their minds in terms of assessing whether or not to believe you when you say don't worry about this, or I need your help to do X, Y and Z so that we can pull through this crisis.Paul:Right now, all of us are being flooded with information and this story is like cast in concrete. It's bedrock. It's the granite of who your organization is and they're going back to that hard place that they can knock on, that they can sit on, that they can lean on, and that's the truth that they're looking for. To assess whether or not your organization in this time of crisis is an organization that can be believed.Dan:Now, not every business, well whenever we think of Corona individually, I mean I'm just thinking of the restaurant that's across the street from us right now but people aren't looking necessarily for Bruegger's Bagels to answer the crisis or come up with a vaccine or explain people how to feel. But how, if you're a business that isn't necessarily adjacent to the current crisis or if you're just you have nothing to do with it, but your business maybe is closed or something like that, how do you kind of manage these crises that you're not necessarily related to but it does affect you?Paul:So I think one of the things that we're seeing, and we started the episode today by talking about the news media and some other resources who are trying to be helpful. So you want to be helpful. And there's also an element of business as usual. A lot of the companies that aren't directly affected by the crisis, and of course I'm sure many of our listeners are saying, well everybody's affected by it, and certainly when we all need to be self-isolating, we all are affected by it, but if you're not directly affected by it in the sense that you don't run a restaurant or you're not a retail store or you're not an event space where hundreds of people would be expected to gather, this is a time to be helpful.Paul:One of the reasons why we're doing this specific episode of the podcast, we see many, many institutions in the community, there is an element of what they're doing, to your point, Dan, where it is on some level still business as usual. However they have the opportunity because of things being pulled in to reduce the spread of the virus, to have some time, to have some resources to be helpful in whatever way that they can be.Dan:Paul, all that stuff is really helpful here. And so I appreciate you especially sharing your expertise here in crisis communications and we encourage anybody who's listening at home to feel free to check out wordwritepr.com. We've got some really good information. There's some good stuff on crisis communications and certainly even one of our VPs here, Jeremy Church, just wrote a really interesting blog about effective crisis communication during outbreaks.Paul:Yeah. And Dan, we'll be putting up in the show notes, I wrote one in July of last year, Storytelling in a Crisis: Why You Need Your Capital S Story. And again, we're going to be sharing a lot more of the resources that we can. This is a time when we all need to pull together as a community. And certainly we have clients whom we work for and we have a lot of experience that we've developed over the years, and we want to be able to share that with the community in the spirit of helping everybody recover from this as quickly as possible. And to your point, Dan, if there's anything that we can do as people who believe in good, strong, authentic communications, we want to do that for the community.Dan:Absolutely, 100%. And as we wrap up here just the message from us here is hopefully everybody at home can weather this as well as they can. Every business can as well. It sounds cheery and optimistic to say, but we will get through this and we'll survive.Paul:Absolutely.Dan:Yeah. 

 As Pittsburgh prepares to mark one year since the attack on the Tree of Life synagogue, we invited Maggie Feinstein of the 10.27 Healing Partnership to discuss the new center’s mission and how Squirrel Hill has healed over time.Also in this episode, we talk about fear-based marketing, future modes of journalism with a guest who has a special connection to the podcast, and hear a track from a promising singer from Sewickley.----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.The full transcript to this episode is 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 isn't enough for a great story.Dan: Hey, everyone. We're back. I'm Dan Stefano, host of The P100 Podcast. I'm here with Paul Furiga.Paul: Dan, how are you, my friend?Dan: And our other co-host, Logan Armstrong.Logan: How's it going, Dan?Dan: All right. Yeah, great to have you guys here, and we're happy for everybody to be listening today because it's a special episode. We're coming up to the one-year commemoration of the attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue in our Squirrel Hill neighborhood here. And there's a lot of interesting things going on this time of year. It's been a year of healing, and that's a highlight of the interview we're going to have this week. We're pretty happy to have that. Paul, what are your thoughts?Paul: I'm really looking forward to hearing from Maggie Feinstein, who's now leading the healing center. As you said, this one-year mark is really important for the community. Not just here in Pittsburgh, but beyond as well.Dan: That's right. That's Maggie Feinstein, the director of the 10.27 Healing Partnership and we're really happy to have her today. Also, we'll be talking with Erin Hogan. She's a fellow WordWriter and we'll be talking about fear-based PSA. It's kind of based on a blog she recently wrote. After that, we'll hear from Chris Schroder, the founder of The 100 Companies.Paul: The 100 Companies, right.Dan: Paul, you've met him. You have a pretty deep professional relationship.Paul: We do. And I think folks will enjoy the interview, three ex-journalists sitting around the table commiserating about journalism's past and talking about the future.Dan: Right? Yeah. That's always a lot of fun. And then we'll follow up with a Pittsburgh polyphony and Logan, you have somebody pretty exciting we're going to be talking to, correct?Logan: Yes, I do. We're going to be talking about a young neo soul artist coming out of the city. So I'm excited to talk about that.Dan: Right, yeah we're going to be really happy to hear from, well, we're not going to hear from her I guess, but we'll hear from her in her recording from one of her singles and we're really happy to hear that, and let's get to it.Dan: Okay, everybody. As we mentioned in the introduction, we are nearing the one year mark of the attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue. With us is Maggie Feinstein. She's the director of the newly named 10.27 Healing Partnership. 10.27 that being a reference to the date of the attack in which 11 worshipers were killed on a Saturday morning going to synagogue. It was an act of hate, but our city has responded with a lot of acts of love, including programs like this. So thank you for taking the time to be with us here Maggie.Maggie: Thanks for having me here.Dan: Absolutely. Can you tell us a little bit about your background and what you do with the healing center?Maggie: Absolutely. Thank you very much. My background is as a mental health clinician. I'm an LPC, a master's level clinician, and for the last 10 years or so, my work has really been around what we call brief interventions, working with medical doctors and working in medical environments and providing support to the doctors as well as to the patients when they come in for visits.Dan: Are you from Pittsburgh?Maggie: I'm from Pittsburgh. I grew up in Squirrel Hill. Yes.Dan: Oh wow.Maggie: I still live there and I'm currently raising my kids there.Dan: Being from there, can you tell us what that morning was like that Saturday?Maggie: Absolutely. I think that being from there – it is a very familiar place and it is actually somewhere where I've walked all those streets for many, many years. But that morning I was out for a run with a friend and usually we run through the park, but that morning because it was raining, we had run up and we weren't really paying attention. We ended up on Wilkins and we were running up Wilkins and remarked, Oh my gosh, we keep seeing people we know because that's sort of Squirrel Hill for you, people travel the same routes. And so people kept waving out the windows. So it was a morning unfortunately that I found myself outside of there, but was just about 20 minutes earlier and I was reminded of community really, which is what growing up in Squirrel Hill feels like, that it was hard to run down the street without having to stop and talk to lots of people. Which is a wonderful thing, though on that morning it did feel a little bit scary.Dan: That was an incredible day for all the wrong reasons. Can you tell us a little bit about the healing center then? When we talked previously, you'd mentioned being part of that community and now it's going to be a pretty integral piece I think.Maggie: So being from the neighborhood, it was this opportunity to try and serve the community that's been so great to me. And so after the shooting happened on October 27 there was a lot of amazing community activity going on, which I wasn't part of, but I'm really inspired by the community partners that stepped up to the plate. In Pittsburgh we have had such wonderful cooperation between the congregations, the nonprofits like the Jewish Community Center, Jewish Family and Community Services and the Jewish Federation. And so between the synagogues, those three major institutions as well as the Center for Victims, which is always ready and able to respond to community mental health needs, there was just this really amazing partnership that happened and then being able to eventually incorporate the voices of the victims and the survivors.Maggie: They all together created the 10.27 Healing Partnership. So I'm the director of it, but the truth was that it was the efforts that happened week in, week out afterwards of people really caring and people wanting to have their voices heard when it comes to what community recovery looks like since it was a community trauma.Dan: Right. And there is a level of a federal involvement with this?Maggie: Yes. And so immediately in the aftermath the federal government came, FBI, as well as the Office of Victims of Crime have offered a ton of support. They have people who were able to come in, help our community, help that group of people who were gathering to decide what to do next, help guide them through the process of creating what is generically known as a resiliency center. And those federal groups really were able to give perspective on how do we move forward, how do we gather, how do we anticipate what the community needs might look like, and then respond to those needs.Dan: Right.Logan: And so the, the healing centers recently opened, it opened on October 1st, correct?Maggie: It opened on October 2nd, yes.Logan: October 2nd, okay. And so it's been opened recently. Have you had a chance to gauge how they're responding to it now that it's open?Maggie: I think that opening our doors was a really awesome opportunity because what we say when people are feeling this sense of loss is that there's no wrong door and that the more doors that are open to people, the better. But I also think that before we opened our doors on October 2nd, a lot of people were accessing services through the Center for Victims or through JFCS. And so what we have seen in the last two weeks is that a lot of people are saying this is a relief to know this is here. It's good to know there's a door.Maggie: It doesn't mean that people were sitting and waiting to go just there because there are other places. But what a lot of people say is that I do have a therapist or I've been part of a support group and then there's just some days that feel really hard. And so knowing that I could come in here on those days that just feel hard to be with people, to gather, to maybe get some emotional support or maybe to practice some self-guided relaxation. People are saying, Oh that's really nice to know that's there.Logan: And going off that, I read that you guys actually have someone that will come to greet you when you get there and as you said, some days you're just feeling vulnerable or sad. How do you feel the importance of that is, just kind of having someone there to greet you and bring you in when you're going to the healing center?Maggie: I think it's so important. I think, I mean one functionally for the JCC, for people who are not members of the JCC, because that's where we are housed, we're using space within the JCC. For people who aren't members, it's helpful because they don't know their way around. But more importantly as humans it's nice to connect to people. And one of the things we know is that with trauma we kind of disconnect, we pull away. And so I think the earlier that people can connect and feel like somebody cares and feel like they're not alone, the better it is. And so the greeter role is a really important one where someone can come to the door and walk you up, make sure you have what you need and make sure you're comfortable.Dan: What do you see as a therapist, say the difference between an individual trauma and then traumas that might affect an entire community? I mean, there might be a guy who just works down the street who really, maybe he's not a Jewish person, but this tragedy, I mean, could greatly affect them.Maggie: Absolutely. And I think that's a really important point. And I think it's a good question because I've thought a lot about what is different than when something terrible happens to me and something terrible happens to the bigger community. And I think that there is a challenge because there are so many levels of grieving that can happen when there's a tragedy within the community and all of those different levels of grieving mean that people are hitting it at different moments and people are feeling different things. And so there's sort of these waves, but people aren't necessarily on the same wave as other people. And so that's one of the reasons that the federal government has thought through this, thought of having these resiliency centers and in Pittsburgh our resiliency center is the 10.27 Healing Partnership.Maggie: But to have these resiliency centers was thought out by Congress a long time ago after 9/11 when they realized that as communities continue to experience the losses that happened during a communal trauma, that it's very, the needs change and the needs need to be attended to. We have to keep ourselves aware of them. And one of the things that I would say is that the needs will evolve over time, that just like grief and like other experiences, that because it's a communal trauma, we want to evolve with the community's needs. We don't stay stuck. So the space that we created is meant to be as flexible as possible, but equally the services will be driven primarily by the people who come in and desire them. And the hope with that is that we can respond to what people are looking for rather than what I, with my mental health degree, believe people might be looking for because that's a lot less important than what it is that people are seeking.Dan: Maybe stepping outside of your professional role and just thinking of yourself as a Squirrel Hill resident. After this last year here, what do you see from the community and how do you see that either it has changed, good, bad, where people, where their heads might be and just where people are, how it feels there right now.Maggie: I think that this a high holiday season, Yom Kippur that just passed felt very different for most people. And I think that like most other grieving emotions, there's good and bad, they're complicated, they don't feel just one way. And the good part, I heard a lot of people say how relieving it was to go to synagogue this year and be around old friends, people that we haven't seen for a while and to feel that sense of connectedness. Like I was saying, that's one of the more important things. But for a number of the congregations there was also a sense of being displaced or the absence of the people who had been such wonderful community leaders in their congregations. And so I think that there is a lot of complicated emotions.Maggie: There's a lot of new relationships. There's also deepening of old relationships that are beautiful and wonderful to see and that people have connected not just within the Squirrel Hill community but within Greater Pittsburgh, like you were saying, there's a lot of people who've been affected from outside of Squirrel Hill of course, and a lot of them have come in to reconnect with old friends, to reconnect with community.Maggie: And so those are the moments that feel, we call that the mental health side, we call that the post traumatic growth. Those are opportunities where when something has been broken, there can be a new growth that comes out of it. But that at the same time there's just a big sense of loss. Like I was saying earlier with my morning that day when I came through Wilkins and it's just a small street, anybody from another city wouldn't consider it a major thoroughfare. But it is really hard to have the feeling of the change of the neighborhood with that building currently not being able to be occupied.Dan: What can you tell us with October 27th coming up here, what types of activities or events are going to be going on either at the center or just within the community?Maggie: There has been an effort by that same group of people that I'd mentioned earlier who helped to create the 10.27 Healing Partnership to create community events that happened on 10.27 this year, 10 27 2019. And that was something we learned from other communities was that it had to be owned by the community. And that there has to be something for people to do because there's often a lot of times where we have energy we want to give. So together that group's come up with the motto for the day is remember, repair, together. And those are lessons we've learned from other places. So there'll be community service, there's community service throughout the city. There's ways that people can sign up for slots, but there's also an encouragement that communities can gather on their own and create their own community service. It doesn't just have to be through organized community service.Maggie: And then also there'll be Torah study, which is really important in the Jewish tradition in terms of honoring people after death. And so the Torah study will be happening and there is a communal gathering at Soldiers and Sailors in the evening and throughout the day there'll be activities going on at the 10.27 Healing Partnership at the JCC, we'll be having for people who just don't really know what else they want to do that day. They're welcome to come and gather in community, sit together. The Highmark Caring Place will be there doing activities that are really geared towards being present with ourselves, being able to honor lives that were lost and also being able to support each other in this hard time.Dan: Right. And I'm not sure if we mentioned it earlier, but the Healing Partnership that's located, is that on Murray Avenue at the JCC?Maggie: Yeah, so the JCC sits at Forbes and Murray and Darlington.Dan: Okay, right.Maggie: It takes over that whole block. But yeah, so in Squirrel Hill, Forbes and Murray, and there will not be regularly scheduled activities that Sunday at the JCC. And the only real purpose for coming there will be people who want to gather in community. There won't be exercising or basketball or any of those other things that day.Dan: Right. Where can we find you online?Maggie: So the address is www.1027healingpartnership.org. And on the website we really tried to promote a lot of ways that people can do their own learning, exploration. Even some things that we can do on our own with apps and podcasts and things that people can do at home.Dan: Well Maggie, thank you so much for coming here and thank you so much for what you do in the community. We really appreciate you being here today.Maggie: Thank you so much for having me and thank you for highlighting the important things going on in Pittsburgh.Dan: Absolutely.Dan: All right, we're here with Erin Hogan, she's an account supervisor here at Word Write. And we wanted to talk with Erin here about one of her blogs that she just wrote for our storytellers blog. The title is fear based marketing campaigns are not always the right approach. A really interesting topic. It kind of sparked out of a conversation that we were having in the office and Erin, thanks for being with us and can you tell us a little bit about the blog?Erin: Yeah, thanks for having me. So really, this stemmed from a conversation I actually had with my husband. He sent me this video and asked for my opinion on it. I was, just had to be honest that I really didn't like it.Dan: Okay...Erin: I think it's from a-Dan: You didn't like the video. What's the video?Erin: So the Sandy Hook Promise PSA. It's basically this really dark play on a back to school supplies commercial. So it starts out with kids showing their folders and their backpacks and their skateboard and just general things that people and parents purchase their kids to go to school for the new year. And then it just starts to take a turn. You kind of see some shuffling happening in the background, and you start to notice that there's something happening at this school.Dan: There's an active shooter.Erin: There's an active shooter. And that's really what the video is supposed to get across, supposed to. The goal of this campaign is to show people, it's to encourage knowing the signs of gun violence before they happen. But the thing that really got me going with this video is that you're encouraging to know the signs about gun violence before they happen, when depicting an act of gun violence. That just seems to me counterintuitive to what they're trying to convey. Just in general, the whole concept of my blog, getting back to the point of this segment is fear based approach versus a positive tone of an ad. How do you, what's the best way to tell a story? I mean we're at WordWrite all about storytelling, finding the best way to tell a business story. But even in a general cause related marketing effort, what's the best way to tell a story?Dan: In advocacy, right.Erin: Right. And based on the evidence that I've found in the research, it really doesn't work. So sure everybody remembers the anti-drug PSAs in the ‘80s and ‘90s and 2000 that were funded by the Partnership for a Drug Free America. There was the your brain on drugs. That one was a big, everybody remembers that one. It was the guy in the kitchen saying this is your brain and he shows an egg. And then he hits it into a cast iron pan and says, this is your brain on drugs. And it's supposed to say your brain's fried on drugs. And basically over the years they had a bunch of variations, that it was basically saying if you do drugs, your parents won't approve. Well when was the last time a 14, 15 year old kid listened to what their parents do.Erin: They didn't work and in fact it caused the adverse effect. It encouraged kids to think that drugs were cool. There was something, it was the anti, going against my parents. Whereas they took a shift, a more encouraging shift in the mid 2000s, many of the younger generations will remember this, the above the influence campaigns. Which basically, instead of showing imagery of kids defying their parents and the consequences of their actions, it took a more positive tone, basically showing the positive ramifications of making an informed decision on their own and having the independence and the courage to say no without any oversight from their parents. Those actually performed far better.Erin: So it begs the question to me for a PSA like the Sandy Hook Promise PSA. Would it have had a more resounding impact or a better impact on the viewers if it showed the positives of stopping gun violence versus the negatives of what happens after gun violence occurs?Dan: One thing I think that's important that we'd be remiss if we didn't add here is that the ad itself within, I think a couple of days of it, I think had actually earned millions of dollars or a great sum for Sandy Hook Promise. So for that group, so-Erin: Donated ad spend.Dan: Donated ad, yeah there we go.Erin: Or ad, media placements.Dan: This is why we have Erin on because she can say the right words.Erin: I'm here all night.Dan: Exactly, this is going to be one of two hours now with Erin. No, but it did have an impact. It did, it did, it was successful. And I think something important right now that we have to think of is, do we have to be provocative today? Is that how you get people's attention or is there a way to balance that? Logan, you want to jump in?Logan: Yeah, sure. I think also this is just a microcosm of society at large where we've become less of, even in the media where 20 years ago it counted on who was reporting the right news at the right time and now it's become who's reporting it first, whether or not they have to issue corrections later or not. And so I think in that same kind of click-baity kind of way that that society on, especially on the internet has become, I think that this PSA may have fallen victim to that. And as you said, whether or not that was the right move is kind of debatable, but I think this is a small part of a society's directional move at large.Erin: Yeah, I mean certainly you have to cut through the clutter. No one would dismiss that. Especially any talented marketer. I'm also not insinuating or advocating for doing nothing. Doing nothing is never an answer either-Dan: Right.Erin: They certainly have an admirable cause that they're going after here. And obviously the genesis of the Sandy Hook Promise Organization, it comes out of, it was birthed from a really horrible, horrible tragedy in United States history. But in terms of the approach and just looking at it from a technical messaging standpoint that we as marketers do, I'm just not sure it fully executed what it’s intention initially was.Dan: All right. Well Erin, you definitely gave us a lot to think about here. We thank you for coming on and I think for sure we'll be seeing, as long as we have television, as long as we have advertising, we're going to see similar ads like this, so we'll be sure to keep our eyes on it and follow those trends. So thanks a lot.Erin: Yeah, thanks for having me. Bye guys.Logan: Centuries before cell phones and social media, human connections were 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 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.Paul: We mark an anniversary with this episode of the P100 podcast, the audio companion to the Pittsburgh 100, and that is the second anniversary of the Pittsburgh 100 e-zine. Our podcast is a little bit younger here but we're pleased to have with us in the studio for this segment, Chris Schroder, who is the founder of The 100 Companies. Say hello there Chris.Chris: Good morning Pittsburgh.Paul: The Pittsburgh 100 and this podcast are one of more than 20 affiliated publications in The 100 Companies network. Chris is in town for a few days, visiting, working with us on a few things. So we thought it'd be a great opportunity to give the listeners a little bit of background on why we do the 100, why we do this podcast. And since Dan and I are both former journalists and so is Chris, to have one of those, “didn't journalism used to be great and now where the hell is it going”, sort of a conversation.Dan: Was it ever great?Paul: Dan, your experience might be different than mine.Dan: I wasn't in the Woodward Bernstein era, so I don't know.Paul: I had a tee shirt when I got into journalism, which was during that era. The tee-shirt said "If your mother loves you, if your mother says she loves you, check it out".Chris: Trust, but verify.Paul: That's right. That's right. So Chris, tell us a little bit about your background.Chris: My blood is full of ink. I was a high school newspaper editor, college newspaper editor, came up in the Watergate era, graduated from high school when Nixon was resigning and then worked for six daily newspapers, and then started my own neighborhood newspapers in Atlanta. And we built that up to about a hundred thousand circulation, had about three different titles. About 10 years ago I started working with some journalists in the Atlanta area who worked for the daily newspaper and they were unfortunately being downsized out of the daily paper.Paul: A common refrain.Chris: Yes, and so they, I helped them start a publication there that had a newsletter, website and social media platform. So I helped them start that. I'd developed a revenue model for them. It's doing great 10 years later. But I noticed three or four years in that people were not clicking on the read more link in the stories as much as they used to in the newsletter. They were seeming to be fine with a shorter excerpt. So I tried to come up with a newsletter where you did not have to click through, where everything was contained in the newsletter itself and so we started designing that, realized that might be about a hundred words. So we said, why don't we call it the Atlanta 100, every article be exactly 100 words, every video be exactly a hundred seconds. And we went to market, people really enjoyed it.Chris: And later I talked to a conference of PR owners, about 150 owners in the room, and was telling them the history of content marketing all the way through the rise of newspapers and the fall of newspapers and ended with a journalism project on the Atlanta 100. And at the end of it, 12 owners came up and gave me their business cards and said I'd like to start a 100 in my city. So that thus began the expansion into a network of The 100 Companies.Paul: So Chris, something that Dan and I get a question about quite often, and really Dan is the editorial director here, having come to us directly from journalism. Where do the 100 publications and podcasts like this sit on the journalistic scale? I mean we joked about Woodward and Bernstein, obviously we're not an investigative journalism enterprise. How would you describe what we do?Chris: Well, we are part of what I see as the new emerging marketplace in media where we've had a sort of disassembling over the last few years of the traditional media marketplace. So 1,800 newspapers have closed in the last 18 years. Tens of thousands of journalists have been let go to be put into other jobs or find other careers. We've had a lot of changes, a lot of new emerging media coming up digitally. There's a lot of interest of course in the last 20 years in social media, but now we're finding the problems in that with Facebook and other issues of privacy.Chris: So I think what we are is a part of the solution and part of the experimentation that we will in another five years start to see a lot of clarity as people start to organize and merge. And there will be some platforms that emerge and some that fall away as we're seeing now with the larger level of some of the streaming, a lot of organization going on with HBO and AT&T and Comcast and different people trying to organize who's going to win. There'll probably be three or four winners in the streaming of video. Disney's getting into it, so many other people are. But there's going to be a consolidation there. Eventually, there'll be a consolidation of, as there was in the beginning of traditional newspapers in America in the 1700s, there will be eventually a settling of the industry and we certainly expect the 100 platform to be one of the winners.Paul: So gentlemen, last question, biggest question. What is the future of journalism?Dan: Well, if I could jump into it first here. Obviously the 100 gives us again, just a small little piece of the media landscape here in Pittsburgh. We're not going to be, we're never going to be the PG. We're not that. And it's not what we're trying to be. But I see a lot of former journalists in Pittsburgh that have found websites that maybe five, 10 years ago people would've considered blogs and blogs maybe had a stigma compared to them. But now we're seeing really sharp good people with news sense.Paul: Yes.Dan: They understand what is newsworthy.Paul: Storytellers.Dan: They're good writers, they're storytellers and they're finding these outlets that people are starting to gravitate to. Not long ago we had Rossliynne Culgan of The Incline on. They're doing a lot of great work there. Between say Next Pittsburgh, we see good stuff from out of them. There are a lot of good small outlets that journalists are flocking to after they either lose their job or they just realize that, I hate it, there's not much of a route forward in the newspapers. So there's always going to be room for people that know how to write, I feel like.Paul: Yes. And tell stories and write information. Chris.Chris: I think storytelling is very primal. That's how we all learned to hear, store and retrieve information as children. And it goes back millennia, the storytelling tradition. So I think it's very important to do it in as few as a hundred words or as many as 10,000 words. I'd like to look at journalism on a continuum and I think what's going to happen, I like to think that it's all sort of a pendulum. And that while in the last five to 10 years, our attention spans have gotten much shorter, I think we're poised and ready for what I think might be one day a pendulum swing by a future generation who, attention spans will start to push to be much longer and they'll appreciate the longer read and the longer write. And I think that could happen. Right now we're still in the throws of people just getting very short morsels of information. Twitter did expand from 140 to 280 characters, but I think we're going to see two or three years from now, people start to settle in and realize that morsels are good, but it still leaves them hungry.Paul: Well, Chris, really appreciate the perspective. Thanks for being here in Pittsburgh and joining us for this segment on the podcast today. We will have to have you back at some time in the future and see how some of your predictions and Dan's have meted out.Chris: Well, you all are doing great work. You're one of the leaders of our national network, and so thank you for the work you're doing and the innovations you're doing with this podcast and other things. Keep up the great work.Paul: Thank you, Chris.Dan: Thanks, Chris.Dan: Okay, we're back for another edition of our Pittsburgh polyphony series here and really enjoy this one because we get a chance to learn about some new artists that are doing some great things in the region here and Logan, this is a pretty new, interesting artist that we want to talk about here and can take us to introduction.Logan: So we're going to be talking about Sierra Sellers today. Neo soul, RMB, jazz artist in the Pittsburgh region and she's been putting out some tracks, but she's really seen some recognition in the recent past and I had the opportunity to see her at Club Cafe about a month ago and she just really brings a lot of great energy to the room. She has a great voice and her and her band really interact well and she just brings a lot of positive vibes to the audience.Dan: Yeah, that's one thing I think, you talk about the energy here and that's an important part of a performer here. As a guy, as an artist yourself, what do you think that offers whenever somebody can kind of control a crowd?Logan: Oh, it's invaluable. I mean it's the same as any other kind of entertainer, whether you're a comedian or anything else up on stage. And being a performer versus doing a performance is the difference between getting up on stage and singing or rapping or whatever you're doing, all your songs or giving an actual performance and putting on a show to the audience. So, one is vastly more memorable and more connective than the other. And being able to do that on stage is something that, if you want to be a successful artist, you're going to have to learn how to do.Dan: When you talk about Sierra, what exactly is it that she uniquely brings to the stage?Logan: Yes. So initially it's just herself. She just has kind of a bubbly personality, but she also gets the crowd to interact and she tells some stories from inspiration behind the songs or inspiration behind the instrumental or the production and talks with the band and just really kind of gets a feel for the audience and kind of feels them out and is able to work the crowd.Dan: That's awesome. Can you tell us a little bit about the track we're about to hear?Logan: Yes. So we're about to hear a track of Sierra's called Shine. It's a recent track, the leader on Spotify's playlist. They have a set of astrological sign playlists, with a pretty prominent following, and this landed her on Spotify as Libra playlist. It's collaboration with fellow Pittsburgh rapper who goes by My Favorite Color, which is a great name. But yeah, we're going to lead you out with Shine by Sierra Sellers. A nice vibey track. Great for just a chill day. Just a little mood booster. So hope you enjoy. 

In this episode, we discuss: The importance of a Wealth Coordination Account Understanding long-term planning for your long-term future Resources and tips related to understanding your knowledge gap   Rhonda: All right. Well, thank you so much for joining us for another episode. And I am so excited to be able to introduce to you my friend, Paul Adams. And he and I met via LinkedIn. All good things start there. And there was something about your profile that just captured my attention and I actually didn't even really know what you did when I said, "Hey, let's connect." And so, you are the Founder and CEO of an organization called Sound Financial Group. And you're also a fellow podcaster and entrepreneur. Paul: Indeed. Rhonda: And so, I just want to thank you for taking time to join us today. Paul: I got to tell you, I'm so happy to be here. Just our phone conversations we've had leading up to this, and you mentioned about creating a friendship. And I even was talking to my wife this morning and saying, "Yeah, I'm going to be on a friend's podcast this morning." And it was just like, "Oh, yeah, that's kind of nice." Versus somebody has a show somewhere that asked me to be on it. It just felt wonderful and warm and just getting a chance to reconnect this morning. Rhonda: Yeah, absolutely. Well, and I have certainly been in the financial industry and you are with an organization that happens to be in their headquarters in Milwaukee. Paul: Yeah, at the very beginning of my career. Rhonda: Right. Right, at the very beginning of your career. So, I just want to take some time and share, what are some of the trends that you're seeing? Obviously, our focus is women. Paul: And I think that if, for any of us, it's where is my knowledge gap? And when I say knowledge, I mean the capacity to act, not just understand it. If we were thinking of it like parachuting, understanding would be like, "I know the plane goes up to 13,000 feet, somebody jumps, they count to 10, they pull this thing here, and then they steer themselves with two cables they hold in their right and left hand, and it pulled them both down near the ground and they land." That's understanding. Paul: Knowledge is hurling yourself into the abyss and landing and not dying. That is the difference. And I think people tend to collapse the understanding and knowledge. And especially when we're divorced, prior to that, it may have been, at least we see this often, I don't know about you, but we'll see oftentimes that the wife will handle a ton of the bills, and then the husband tends to handle a lot of the long-term strategy and investments. And they both have an understanding of the other one. Paul: Now, it's a lot easier for the divorced husband to get a handle on the bills because it's a fast iteration cycle. They got to deal with the bills every 30 days. So, I don't know, after doing it for four or five months, you're back on plane and you know what you're doing. But when there is this... And it really is one of the longest feedback loops we deal with in our entire life. It's a 40-year feedback loop from 22 to 65. You have one time that you get feedback, and filling a glass of water, we're all used to it. We've all gotten our hands wet as kids when we overfill the glass, that we're listening and feeling the weight of the glass, and we turn off the spigot at the right time. Paul: If you perform really badly at work, somebody's going to let you know in a few weeks. You eat too much, over 7 to 10 days, you'll actually start gaining weight, and the feedback is in the scale. Bad behavior in all those areas equals bad short-term outcome. Paul: Here's the problem. With money, the feedback loop is like a negative feedback loop in that you can make bad decisions with money. And know how they feel in the short run? Awesome. It feels so good. You can get the brightness on your kids' eyes because you got them a cool new toy. Or all the Instagram likes because of the killer vacation you went on. All those things feel wonderful. The new car smell. Nice, so wonderful. And those are all things that, in the long run, the one-time feedback loop is you spend the rest of your life in some version of poverty below what you would have chosen. Paul: And so, one of the things we have to do is get those shorter iterations occurring through these coaching conversations around money so that everyone, and I think divorced women are particularly susceptible to having somebody that looks trustworthy, somebody who's super friendly, who's a friend of a friend, who may just be selling product. And one of the things we encourage people to think about is, is the advisor's revenue model only you acquiring product from them? Paul: And if that is their primary revenue model and they're not charging you a fee upfront so that they can support their business and themselves without needing to sell you a product, then that should give you at least a moment of pause, to stop and reflect and say, "Is there a chance that products could be recommended to me because of the advisor's revenue model, not because of what's right for me?" And not that the advisors are unethical or making bad decisions, any of that. It's just that, clearly, they can't work with 100 clients and not have any of them acquire product. Paul: But we and some other advisors out there, will do something similar to that, where we charge a fee upfront. It retains us for that first year, which is that timeline of a divorce. It never occurred to me how those line up that way. And then we coach them throughout the year, and we may meet them as many as 15 times over the first year, but that primary coaching to get spooled up and get all the things corrected in their financial life, et cetera, not counting ushering them through the divorce is about 6 to 10 meetings over about 10 to 14 weeks. Rhonda: Yeah. And I think that's spot on. Prudential did a longitudinal study. And what they found was that it was the knowledge plus experience that really helps the women build the confidence. Because if you have the knowledge without the experience, that's theory. If you have the experience without the knowledge, then you're just going through things hoping that you're not making too many mistakes. Paul: I was going that was a terrible idea, I shouldn't do that again. Rhonda: But it's those two things when they can work in tandem that really helps women build the confidence. And when I think that is one thing that, as we look at some of these studies, women have a great opportunity to step into power as it relates to their financial lives. It's just that they may not have had the experience because, statistically speaking, and you alluded to this, women are doing the day to day stuff, but they aren't necessarily as involved in the big picture things. And so, when they're thrust into that environment, it's uncomfortable and overwhelming and intimidating and all of those kinds of things all at once. Right? Paul: And I think there's probably a lot of domains that are that way. The trouble about the long-term planning for your long-term future is that's the one thing out of all the things that are coming at women going through divorce, it's the one thing that they really can, in the short run, put their head in the sand and avoid all the negative consequences. They are coming, but they're not here yet. And so, they can deal with all the things that are urgent and forget the things that are necessary. Rhonda: Yeah. Well, and I think too, it's history. Like you said, the feedback loop is so long, and even from the time that they got married until potentially the time that they're getting divorced, there's all of those habits and behaviors that they're now dealing with. Plus, let's face it, everything's always goes back to our childhood. There's always some connection between, "Hey, this is my attitude and belief about money as a kid. Here was how it was modeled. I brought that into the marriage. Now somebody always has to take the lead, and now I'm thrust into having to take the lead myself." You know? Paul: Yes. Yeah. And, you're right, it's so tough for them to make that gear shift. And we recommend people do something that's super subtle, easy, anybody can start it. Anyone of your listeners can do this right after the call. And we talk about the importance of somebody really understanding their own freedom and agency and choice. And we need to take that back immediately in people's lives around their money. Rhonda: Yep. Paul: Financial institutions ideally would like you to take your regular household checking and start choosing a financial product that you can automatically deposit via bank draft to. And we teach our clients to set up a separate checking account whose only purpose is to purchase assets. That's it. It shouldn't be buying anything else. It only buys assets. And we define an asset. An asset is anything that puts money in your pocket now or has the ability to put money in your pocket later. Paul: And it doesn't matter if it's just $25 a month. To shorten that feedback loop, we're simply saying we're going to put in $25 here and that is for my long-term wealth building. And then I'm going to put in $25 next month here. Now, for some people in some amounts of wealth, it might be 1000, it might be 2000, we have clients it's $30,000 a month they're doing. The key, and for the women that we've helped journey through getting their financial knowledge up to where they are financially during the divorce, is simply having a wealth coordination account means that when those payments start coming in, they realize, "Well, my bills are only 10,000 but I just got a $20,000 support payment during the trial period." Great. Let's just put that 10,000 aside. Paul: If the divorce attorneys are not saying that you need to keep your monthly spending up for a period of time while we finish the divorce. And then when they're complete and the divorce element goes in, where do most people put that first check? It's like there is a million dollars of liquidation. I guess I just go put it in my checking account if they haven't been working with a coach. Rhonda: Right. Paul: And whenever money goes in the household checking account, whether it's for a couple or a single individual, some of it is bound to get lost in the sauce of life. And by just putting it in the wealth coordination account, now you're sitting there and you're like, "Well heck, I don't know what assets I'm going to buy." But if you're resolved it's going to buy assets. At least it's not buying liabilities. Little steps here. We're not talking about big complicated things. Let's just make sure we don't buy stuff that costs us more in the future. Rhonda: And I love that. And you have a podcast episode that you focus specifically on that concept. As I was listening to some of your podcasts, that was one that really resonated with me because it's simple and it's not requiring women to make a big decision right now. Paul: Yes, that's right. Yes. The cognitive load of somebody saying, "Let's budget for this financial tool, and this is the financial tool you should use," being collapsed. The cognitive load is so high in making that decision versus simply being able to say, "Oh, all I need to do is set the money aside. I'll figure out what it purchases later." You make a good point. I was going to see if I could quickly find the name of that episode. So give me just a second, because I'm sure your audience right now is thinking to themselves, "Don't say that's a great episode of Paul's, not tell us." Rhonda: That's right. Yes. Paul: So, my podcast is Your Business Your Wealth. That's episode 131, Wealth Coordination Account. Rhonda: Perfect. And that reminded me too, this was a woman that I had met with a couple of years ago, and I was actually still in the financial industry at that point. And I remember, she had lost her husband. It was actually she was a widow, not a divorcee. But the concept is still similar. And I was so frustrated because there were two companies, two advisors from two separate companies, that were literally swarming her like vultures. And there was the one guy who called her probably every single day, literally called her every day. And I was like, "Okay, timeout. I'm going to encourage you to do nothing." And anybody who knows our personalities, would we ever tell somebody to do nothing? Paul: Nope. Rhonda: But in this case it made sense, just hang tight. Okay? You do not have to make a decision today, and you don't even have to make a decision tomorrow. Give yourself some space and permission, space and permission to just be. Paul: We are raised as kids with that, don't just stand there, do something. But sometimes we need to be, don't just do something, stand there. And that one's a lot harder. It's always easy to make a move. It's real tough to just sit with it and go, "Okay, I'm going to think about it for a while. I'm going to plan." And I think that example of those two advisors, I'm going to go out on a crazy limb here and say probably neither of those advisers had gotten an upfront annual engagement, some kind of retainer, to then be able to coach her throughout the year. They were calling, they had pitched a product, and they were calling to say, "Are you ready to execute on the product yet? Are you ready to execute on the product yet? How are things going? Do you want to meet for lunch? Because at some point during lunch I'll just bring up the product again." Paul: That is how that normally goes. And I know because that's how I was trained originally. That's exactly the process I went through as an advisor. And it took a lot to escape the gravitational pull of all those practices to have a different way to be able to serve and engage clients. Rhonda: Yeah, absolutely. And so that's why I think, yeah, that wealth coordination account, it's simple, it's easy. Again, they can go to whatever bank or credit union they're currently using and say, "Hey, I just need to set up." And finding, to that point, finding a bank that gives you the opportunity to go into one dashboard, see what you have going on, and set up those really simple automatic contributions to their wealth accumulation account. Paul: And the one thing that we do say a little different, if people want to put some amount that's regular and automatic going into the wealth coordination account, we're a fan of that. We also say, by the way, this is going to sound a little bit heretical to people who are more steeped in finance. We say it ought to be a checking account, we don't care what the interest is, because when you buy an asset you've got to write a check, so you better have a checking account you're writing it from, otherwise it has a chance to flow through another account that could be a consumption account. Once it's in there, you want it to be sacrosanct, it's an asset purchasing tool. And then, ultimately, we'll have enough assets to have enough passive income to not reach retirement. Paul: We don't talk with our clients about retirement, in fact our first conversation with clients that we currently call our philosophy conversation. We're thinking about changing it to the unretirement talk, and why we should not be pursuing a retirement, because most people who have done something with their lives and added value to the marketplace don't plan on doing that for 40 years so they can just stop doing any of it. In fact, you wanted just maybe change the mode of doing it. You might want to do it for a charitable cause, you might want to just do it differently. But people want to continue to add value to their world and their overall community. So why would we say retire? Because that word means something's put up on the shelf and is no longer of use. I don't want to feel that way one day. And nor do most of our clients. And when they relate to it that way, no wonder they don't want to plan for it. Paul: So, we just talk about planning for what we call DFI or definite financial independence. When we can get passive income to exceed existing bills, then if you choose to work, you just keep working. We're just going to save 100% of your income. You don't have to be dependent on it anymore because you're living off your passive income. Total paradigm shift. And the financial institutions would rather you just build up a huge pool of money and be really insecure that it's not enough so that they can get all the asset management fees on it, all that. And they're not like black helicopter conspiracy about it, they're just being normal players in the free market. And we just need to equip our clients with knowledge and hopefully some of your listeners with this knowledge to say just set up a wealth coordination account, add money every month, and the last thing I was going to mention, do some of it every month that is you moving it intentionally. Because if you move it intentionally, then every month you have to pause and at least consider your long-term financial wellbeing. And if you do that once a month, you are now doing that, I forget what the stats are, but it's something like for many people, they're only really looking at their planning sometimes once every two years to once every five years. Paul: There's the old saying, "People spend more time planning a family vacation than their long-term financial wellbeing." Well now you're having to at least consider, or have it hit your radar once a month, which right there we find changes people's financial lives if they do nothing else, just saying, "This is going to go into my assets." And then when somebody comes up and says, "Hey, we got some financial products you should buy," you just look to your wealth coordination account, it's like, "Well this is how much I have to put in that thing." You don't have that second part of cognitive load of how do I afford it, and should I do it or not? Now you can actually think much more clearly because your money's already set aside to do assets or not. And now you're just turning to say, "Is this right for me?" Rhonda: Right. And I remember back, this was in the early 2000s, that was when the book Cashflow Quadrant came out, by Robert Kiyosaki. Super classic book that I recommend to everybody because I think it's an easy read. And I think it's something that really helps people get their mind around, okay, well there are two different types of income. There's going to be the active income, job, self-employed, and there's going to be passive income as a business that's generating passive income, and investments. Rhonda: And so, if the listeners have not checked that out, we'll include that in the show notes as well. But it's just a great book to reprogram our mind about passive income. Paul: Yes. I remember reading it, it's kind of funny, I was actually temporarily disabled when I first got exposed to Robert Kiyosaki's stuff. I'd fallen off a horse and shattered an internal organ, and a lot of internal bleeding. So, you're in a massive amount of pain while organs heal, and bleeding is absorbed. So, I guess graphic warning for this podcast, I don't know. But I was on a pretty significant amount of painkillers for about a month after this accident. And I remember reading Robert Kiyosaki's Rich Dad, Poor Dad and Cashflow Quadrant during that window. And I would read, and I'd go, "I don't remember anything I just read the last five pages." And I have to read them again. And I think I read the books first time through, three times each. Paul: But instilled me this idea that there are things we buy that are assets and there are things that we buy that are liabilities. And by simply understanding the difference between the two, we end up, here's one, we teach our clients that their primary residence is not an asset, never is. Now, it can be if it goes up a lot in value and you decide to move. But we said something that puts money in your pocket now or in the future without changing your lifestyle. Paul: So, you can move from Seattle, say, to Gilbert, Arizona. If you have any listeners in Gilbert, Arizona, I mean no offense. But in Gilbert, Arizona you can buy the same size house for a lot less money than Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, but it's definitely a different lifestyle. So, your primary residence, if you think it's an asset, even if it's paid off, just stop paying your property taxes and the real owner of that asset will eventually knock on your door and politely demand you pay your taxes. That is an example of why we don't consider it an asset. Paul: Now, it probably is a good idea to have a paid off house at some point in the future, lowest possible cost of just providing shelter for yourself and your family. But I've watched women during a divorce hurt themselves financially significantly because they had this, they got a spouse, they've got this concern, that concern, and then what will sometimes happen is they really have a demand of, "I need to stay in this house." And it's like, between the two of you, you were making $800,000 a year, you're going to have some kind of settlement, but you're making 200 of the 800. You should not stay in a home that you afforded at $800,000 a year. You stay in the same neighborhood, we could do all kinds of stuff, but let's not trick ourselves into thinking it's an asset. That's something that, no offense to the realtors that are listeners, but the real estate overall complex has made us want to think it's our biggest investment, when in fact, for most people, their home is actually their biggest liability. Maybe one you should have. I'm not saying you shouldn't own a home ever, that would be crazy. But people just automatically slip into these habits that have been part of society. Paul: Have you heard the story of the little girl who asked her mom about the Christmas ham? Have I told you that before? Rhonda: No. Paul: I hope this is fun and interesting for your audience. Sometimes we have financial practices, things you grew up with. You talked earlier, Rhonda, about children and the way we picked up habits and how our parents talked about money, et cetera. Well, there's this little girl and her mom is baking the Christmas ham. And she's prepping it and putting all the rubs on it and all that, and then right before she puts it in the pan, she cuts off the ends, both ends of the ham. And then plops it in the pan and puts it in the oven. She says, "Mom, I understand why you did all the rest of the stuff. Why did you cut off the ends of the ham?" She says, "You know, I don't know. You should ask Grandma." Paul: So, Grandma comes over for dinner that night, and she says, "Grandma, why is it mom cuts off the ends of the ham right before she puts it? I understood everything else. Why does she cut off the ends of the ham?" She says, "You know, I don't remember why. I just know my mom always did it." So, a little bit later, Great-Grandma comes from the nursing home, comes over for dinner that night. And she goes, "Great-Grandma, I watched mom and she cut off the ends of the ham. Then I talked to Grandma and why she cuts off the end of the ham, and neither one of them remembered why they do it. Why did you do it?" She says, "Oh, honey, we were poor. I didn't have a pan big enough to hold a ham, so I had to cut off the ends to make it fit." Paul: And yet, how many people are still making financial relationship decisions or decisions about their own personal confidence about navigating the world by themselves because of an inherited mindset that is just as unimportant as cutting off the ends of that ham? And these mindsets go unexamined for people all the time. And that's what I love about what you do, frankly, is helping women engage and think through that mindset. That is something and the thing that attracted me to you is that idea of nobody else is teaching this that I could find. And I looked. Rhonda: Yeah, it's awesome. And just to wrap up the ham thing, I love the ends, don't cut off the ends. Paul: I'm the same way. I love the burnt ends of a brownie in a pan, the ends of a ham for sure. Rhonda: I mean, don't cut those off. Right? And yet, though, I think there's... Gosh, that story even goes deeper. Right? It's like, yeah, you know what? We do things because of perhaps the way that we have been taught to do them and we don't know why we do them. And, yeah, what are those things in our life where we are shortchanging ourselves or we're cutting off the best parts? Because we're not taking the time to really evaluate what it is that we bring to the table and why we do it. So, I love that analogy because I think it makes a really great point related to the financial aspect. Paul: Yeah. I think your point is good. That it almost wears on you a little more. What could have been in the ends, mindset-wise, for that entire family. Rhonda: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Paul: That does remind me of something that we put together for your audience, is we have a white paper that we give folks sometimes called The Three Money Mistakes No One Talks About and Six Things You Can Do About Them. And we actually have that set up on our website. Rhonda: Awesome. Paul: It'd be super easy for your audience to get to. You can get it at SFGWA, that's Sound Financial Group, WA, like Whiskey Alpha, dot com/rhonda. And right there, there's just going to be a page where you can drop in your email address and it will just shoot you this white paper. And, for anybody that just thinks they would also get benefit from it, you get a copy of my last book via PDF if they just check that box also, then we'll email them a copy of my last book, Sound Financial Advice. Rhonda: Awesome. Thank you so much. I'm part of an organization called eWomenNetwork and one of their principles, so their focus is helping one million women achieve one million dollars in annual reoccurring revenue. But one of their main principles is give first. And I have to be honest, when we first met, you embraced that principle. And I'm used to being the one who gives first. It was actually like, okay, I love that. Right? I don't think there are enough people who say, "I'm going to give first," not asking for anything in return. Paul: Yes. Rhonda: And I really appreciate that. Paul: Yeah, you're welcome. And maybe for folks in the audience, if any of you are thinking about making that shift in life about the give first piece, I'd never really thought about this before, Rhonda, but something you said there just hit me like a ton of bricks, is that for us to be able to give first we had to have created probably a lot of value for others beforehand because then we're just... For instance, great example is if I hadn't been writing books for years, I wouldn't have a book I could give away now. We sell it, people can find it on Amazon, it's called Sound Financial Advice. But we have another one releasing later this year. So, if I wasn't writing books or if I only wrote one book ever, we would never have the ability to do the giveaway. Paul: And so, we have to create value in the marketplace and in the world first before we can help people first. Because we've all had those people say, "I think I'd really like to help you here," but they have no skill set in that domain. And then you find yourself being offered help and then you're like, "Gosh, I got to look at this knucklehead and figure out what they're good at and what I could do with them. And now you've just created more costs for me in trying to help you." As opposed to somebody being able to listen well enough and say, "I think you might need help in one or two of these areas and I can specifically make a difference for you there." It's a totally different way to help people. And thank you for the acknowledgement around that. Rhonda: Yeah, absolutely. Well, this has been super fun. I always like to wrap up our time together with two things. One is favorite client success story, and then finally your favorite quote. Paul: Ooh, okay. Rhonda: I know, you only can pick one. Paul: I know. Is it okay if I use one for myself? Rhonda: Sure. Absolutely. Paul: I got to do one fun one and then I'll answer your question seriously. So, my fun one is actually a quote that our social media team put out, which is, "I really don't like complimenting myself, but I don't not like it so much that I won't do it in this space." And they put that out on Twitter and Instagram. I was like, "I believe I said it, but gosh, it looked weird in print." Paul: So favorite client success story is actually a woman that was introduced to me who was getting divorced, married to someone who is a very domineering relationship, from what I could take away. And I don't envy anybody on either side of a divorce at all. It's just hard. No way about it. This is somebody you thought you were going to spend the rest of your life with and now you're not going to. And all the hurt and shame or doubting yourself, "Did I make a terrible decision?" All this stuff that comes in. It's just terrible. Paul: And I watched her over the course of a year, as we engaged, go through one conversation after the next and coaching her, letting her know she's doing great. She's handling herself well. She let the husband say all the crazy things he wanted to say, which included things to the children that were not. And what people may not know who are listeners, is we work with clients all over the country. So, this woman is on the other side of the country from me. We're connecting via Zoom meeting, and we're just walking her through step by step this entire process. Paul: Okay, when's the next trigger date where something's going to happen? Great. Do you want to talk to me right before that or right after that? Emails coming through, et cetera. And I had a chance to see her the other day. She has now chosen to set up her own business. She was an employee before. Stepping into the world of entrepreneurship. Next introduction is actually to get engaged with the Women's Center for Financial Wellness, just to get some of that additional coaching and confidence around her business. And she has done such an amazing job to actually fully understand what she's doing, where the money is, from being so timid and scared, to now being confident and growing more confident every time I speak to her. And now the things she complains about are the busyness of life with family visiting in town. And no longer the, "Am I going to be okay or what's going to happen?" And that's my favorite story right now. Paul: And then my favorite quote actually is a quote from John Maxwell, if you're familiar with him, kind of general leadership guru. And my favorite quote from him is, "If you're curious what your future is going to look like, look at your habits and practices today. If you're going to change your future, change your habits." Rhonda: I love that. I love that, because that's exactly it. Right? Their future's going to look different and so, yeah, how can we be positioning our thoughts and attitudes and beliefs right now that are going to impact the future? And of course, anything by John Maxwell is always awesome. Paul: Yeah, that guy. And I know it to be right. I've had a chance to see him speak several times in person, and, gosh, he just such a great way about him. One of my favorite things about the way he speaks is he just looks like he's sort of making it up at the time. But when you've seen him multiple times, you realize he has laid everything out from dropping the note cards, to all of it. He has taken it on as a real performance he's doing. Not for his own sake to look good, but rather everything is crafted around impacting the people he gets a chance to interface with. I also think it's a lot of what you do, Rhonda, in that in our time together you've always taken super seriously, and you know it's kind of like life or death with the women that you work with that you have a chance to help them set themselves in a new direction and make a difference for them forever based upon just being coached by you and your organization for a year, and their whole lives could be different. Rhonda: Yeah, for sure. Paul: That doesn't exist out there the same way for these women that you deliver. And I love it. So, I'm so glad I could be here with you today. Rhonda: Yeah, thank you so much. Hey, this has been awesome. Certainly, if folks want to connect with you, they can reach out, grab that white paper. We'll include all your contact info in the show notes. But I just want to thank you for taking time out of your also busy, crazy schedule to chat with us today. Paul: You're so welcome, and it's a pleasure to be here.   QUOTE: "I really don't like complimenting myself, but I don't not like it so much that I won't do it in this space." – Paul Adams "If you're curious what your future is going to look like, look at your habits and practices today. If you're going to change your future, change your habits." – John Maxwell   RESOURCES: The Three Money Mistakes No One Talks About and Six Things You Can Do About Them Cashflow Quadrant by Robert T. Kiyosaki Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert T. Kiyosaki Sound Financial Advice by Paul Adams Podcast: Your Business Your Wealth Episode 131: Wealth Coordination Account: Big Wealth, Small Business with Paul Adams and Cory Sheperd   CONTACT INFORMATION: Paul Adams CEO & Founder Sound Financial Group info@sfgwa.com  (855) 578-8724 LinkedIn | Facebook | Instagram   Visit the Women’s Financial Wellness Center for a full directory listing of experts. Be sure to reach out if you would like to connect personally with the Women’s Financial Wellness Center. You can visit our website or grab a complimentary 30-minute consult. Leaving a positive podcast review is hugely important: they help the podcast get discovered by new people. Please spend 5 minutes of your time to leave a review on your preferred listening platform, we’d love to hear from you!

We've got a new segment this week: "I'm in Sports Jeopardy!" A bi-racial rapper pulls out of a racist themed festival, A Florida Mom is arrested for posting a video containing her daughter licking a tongue depressor and putting it back! WOW! A Georgia Man throws his 13 year old girlfriend out of this car during a high car speed chase. Jermaine Dupree breaks down why he is not a fan of Cardi B and Nikki Minaj and I explain why Miley Cyrus should also be included in that group. AOC and Nancy Pelosi are in the midst of a verbal food fight, and California passes a law requiring Presidential candidates will need to release their tax returns to be on the state's ballot. And in The Staff Report, North Korea is mad at South Korea, again, and I explain why Paul Ryan is a traitorous lightweight establishment politician.Are You.....?Ready. Set. Podcast!

The owner of Identified Talent Solutions, it's a talent recruitment company and this company has grown to the point where it's in the ink 500 Paul David   Stefan: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the show. Respect the Grind with Stefan Aarnio. This is the show where we interview people who have achieved mastery and freedom through discipline. We interview entrepreneurs, athletes, authors, artists, real estate investors, anyone who's achieved mastery and examined what it took to get there. Today on the show we have Paul David. He is the owner of Identified Talent Solutions, it's a talent recruitment company and this company has grown to the point where it's in the ink 500 of feet. Indeed Paul, welcome to the show. Respect the grind. Good to see you, my friend. Paul: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me Stefan. Stefan: Awesome. Yeah, I love having guys like you on the show because we got so many real estate people. I'm a real estate investor you know, I teach flipping houses and rental properties and stuff like that. And I love having someone from a different field and so for the people at home who don't know you that well Paul, tell us how'd you get started in the talent recruitment business? That's something that I'm sure is an awesome business. I've just never thought about it. So how did you get started? Paul: Sure. It was about 15 years ago, right out of college. I got into a firm that does third party recruiting. So basically they provide candidates, they provide employees to other companies. I did that for about six months. Very salesy position. Didn't think I was very good at it. I was really, really shy back then. But then I went into a mortgage company, they shot as a recruiter, mortgage was booming back then. I learned my whole entire trade from that particular point. After 10 years I decided, well it's about time to go on my own, utilized a lot of the relationships that I had over my 10 year career and I built the business basically in my garage. Stefan: Wow. I love stories where it starts in the garage. I think Apple started like that. All of these, I think Harley Davidson started in the garage. They all start in garages. I think Google started in a garage too. Paul: Yeah. Amazon started in the garage. Stefan: Yeah Bro. It's great. So really pertinent topic I think is recruiting. And a lot of people listening to the show, maybe they're solo preneurs or maybe they got like two employees or one employee or they want to recruit more. How does somebody effectively recruit? 'Cause I'll let the cat out of the bag here Paul. Every recruit I've done for my business has always been a referral. I've never done well with a head hunter. I've never done well with somebody recruiting for me it's always been through someone I know and I've tried agencies before. I've spent money before for whatever reason they don't stick. The talent is good if they don't know my brand or they don't know me in advance for whatever reason doesn't go. So how do you effectively recruit talent for so many companies and how does that match really work? Paul: Yeah, that's a good question. I mean I think what they need and recruitment's really tough because it's not only a matter of just the skill set that they have, but it's also how do you fit that person into a culture? Even if they have the incredible skillset. I mean that person might be really successful in one company, but then they go into a different culture and then they're completely off. So it is a little bit of a difficult process, but you said that most of your hires have been referrals. That by far is the best way to hire people in your company. Is if somebody in your company or yourself or someone that you know and trust vouches for them then that's fantastic. It's almost kind of like dating. If you meet someone and they're like, yeah, they are a great person, then generally you're going to trust that. Paul: But, if you don't have that capability, it is really important to stream that person properly. Now there's no silver bullet. So I mean you've kind of seen it. There's no silver bullet in picking the right person off the bat. I mean employment's like a dating process. So what we do is one, we're very narrow in the things that we do. So we know the skill set. So if you're a generalist and you're trying to do everything for everyone, like the larger staffing firms, it's really hard to understand what kind of skills are looking for cause you have to master one particular vertical. So what we do is we're mastering one specific vertical and understanding the skillset so the candidate is an optimal candidate from a skillset perspective. Then what we need to do is really, really build that relationship with the client. What is their team like? I mean not only the culture of the company, but what's the team like? How do they operate? What are they composed of? I mean what do they like to do? So you can look at the intangibles and the tangibles and place that candidate properly. Paul: So that's kind of how we do it. We really have to, I mean it's like a dating process. We got to make sure that we know our client really well so we know exactly what kind of candidate put in there. Stefan: I like what you say about the dating and I teach people real estate investing and they'll say, "How do I get a good deal?" And I'm like, "Bro, you got a good deal in real estate just like dating." You pick the most beautiful girl at the school, the Prom Queen. And if you go ask on stage wearing her sash that says homecoming and her tiara, you're never going to get a date. But if you wait for her to break up with her boyfriend and she's under the bleachers crying, wearing some dirty sweatpants with makeup running down her face, that's the time where you go in there and go, "Hey baby, look, let's grab a cheeseburger." And she's like, "I've been hungry for years. Let's go." And so it's really interesting 'cause I think people always try to over complicate business. Stefan: We always go, "Oh man, it's different. My industry is different. This business is different. This time it's different." It never is. It really is just dating. It's relationships. And I like what you said about, it's almost like a marriage. These two people have to come together, the culture has to come in with the skill set and it has to fold together. What do you think when you're out there recruiting people Paul, what's the most important thing that you look for in any candidate? Maybe like is it grit? Is it drive? Is it just general intelligence? What's something that when you're just meeting talent that you want to see in just about everybody? Paul: For me what I'm looking for is an intangible skillset. You can have someone that has the most impressive resume, the most impressive of education, but if they don't have a personality where they can build relationships, well I mean, at the end of the day, the fundamentals of business is relationships. If you do not know how to build a relationship, then you're just going to fail, period. I mean like, you know, I don't care how much you automate things, all the click funnels I hear, if you do know how to shake hands, talk to somebody and really build that relationship, you're not going to be successful, period. So I want to make sure that one of the things that we make sure it is how do we converse with this person? Will this person be able to influence other ... I don't care if it's an individual contributor or a manager. They need to be able to interact with people regardless if they do software development or if they're a nurse. Paul: So relationship skills are very, very important. Communication skills are very, very important and that's what we look for first and foremost. It's not a complicated thing, but I think people would really want to work with other people and that they can kind of get along. And if that happens then what happens is you build trust, right? So once you build trust, because you [inaudible 00:06:37] then you can kind of work through anything else. Stefan: I love that. So is it more, would you say, are you looking for more he EQ or IQ? I guess you're more of an EQ guy. Emotional quotient. Paul: I'm an EQ guy. I mean most of the people that I have, you know what I first did this, I was looking for skills, but when I started my company, I was looking for grit. I was looking for someone that had tenacity. Someone that wanted to improve, I can teach them the skills, I can't teach them to drive. Stefan: You just got to respect the grinding bro. Yeah there go. You've got a gong already. A gong's been hit man. I like that. You know, grit is something that in the military academies, they noticed that that's the number one thing that keeps people going. And one thing I say all the time is, I fail at 80% of the stuff I do. I'm failing all the fricking time, man. I'm an entrepreneur, so it's constant failure. And then the 20% I win on is so big. It handles all the losses and then some. Now, how would you describe grit? What is grit? What is the ability to keep going? What is that? Paul: You kind of hit it on the head. It's like for me happens after my why. Why do I want to achieve something? Why do I want to, what is it that's important to me? Once I fundamentally understand why something's important to me, then it's the dedication. What I've learned about grit is grit really is the ability to embrace failure, right? And really learn from that failure. 'Cause here's the deal. I don't care what you do in life you're going to fail. I don't care if it's walking down the street. One of these days you're going to fail. 'Cause I look at things this way, you're going to fail or you're going to succeed. And those two instances for failure, I'm going to learn something. I'm going to learn something really quick so it doesn't happen again. And if I do that, then I'm going to succeed. So I try to rush into failure as much as I can. Paul: I try to embrace it as much as I can and I look at it, I think being able to have grit is you can look at that failure not as a failure itself, but an opportunity to learn. Because all of us entrepreneurs, if we don't know how to learn from our failures, we're never going to be succeeding. So I've kind of looked at it in a different perspective. I actually enjoy failure because it's like, "Oh crap, I didn't do this right. Well let's try to figure out something else." So that's how I see it. So I think grit is the ability to understand that failure is more of a learning opportunity and something that sets us back forever. Stefan: I like what John Maxwell says. He says, "You either win or you learn." Paul: Yeah. That's in his book Failing Forward. Stefan: Yeah, you win and you learn. And that's just something I started to do in my life. I had some pretty hardcore things happen to me this year is what's the meaning of this? What's the story? What am I learning here? And I don't know if you ever read the book Man's Search for Meaning. You ever read that Viktor Frankl? It's one of Tony Robbin's favorites, and it's about a man who was thrown in the Nazi death camps in World War II. And he had a book manuscript, I guess he was like a scientist or something. A book manuscript he was going to publish and the Nazis took his book and they I don't burn it or ripped it up. They took it away from him. And what he noticed when he was inside the death camps was the optimist died first. So the people who were "Oh, we'll be out by Christmas, we'll be out by Christmas, we'll be out by Christmas." Stefan: Christmas comes, they die of a broken heart. But the people who lived through the death camps were the people who had meaning and they had a child to see. They had a book to write, they had a spouse to go find after the camp. And that to me when something bad happens to you in life, it's so interesting because there's two meanings. There's the victim meaning you can have, and then there's the, what am I learning meaning. Is that something you see in some of these very successful people where they have major setbacks and kind of the bigger the setback, the higher they climb? Paul: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think a lot of people that have overcome tragedy, have been very, very successful because they know how to adapt to it and they know how to get over it. I think when we first started talking, I told you I never really wanted to be an entrepreneur. I was kind of forced at it where my wife died of cancer at 36 we went through a four and a half year battle with cancer. I was left with a four year old. I had $150,000 in debt. And it's like I had to make a decision at that particular point. I had to look up my why, which was my daughter. What am I going to do? Am I going to crumble? Am I going to fall apart? I mean, that's not an alternative that I want. So I did, and I had no idea how to start this company. Paul: All I know was I needed to do it. So with that intensity and that drive, I said, I have to make this happen. And after that what's all your focus is I think from tragedy, once all your focus is pointed to one direction, then you'll start to see the opportunities that you've never seen before. So, I mean, I think people that have gone through tragedies and really decided to not let that tragedy define who they are, but let their choices make them who they are, that you see magic when that happens. Because intensity to succeeding and making sure that they're never defined by what happened to them in life so. Stefan: Bro I'm giving you a gong. I love you, man. Dude, I love you man. You know that story you have. I'm so sorry to hear your wife died. I mean that's just the most brutal thing. But I love that you picked up the pieces and I love that you saw the why in your daughter. And I love that you were able to get that emotional charge 'cause so many people would have folded like a lawn chair. It's so easy. Whenever you go downtown, you see a homeless guy on the side of the street. That's someone who folded a lawn chair, but you said, "No, I'm going to use this. I'm going to use it as fuel." And it's tremendous to see what you built. Now shifting gears a little bit, Paul- Paul: I actually wanted to kind of comment on that I don't know it's going to be ... I have colleagues and friends that have children right? And every time I hear them they say like, "Well, I can't do this. I can't do that. I can't do that because I have to take little Johnny or little Cathy or little whatever to the baseball game. I can't do that." I decided and I think people should decide that you know what? You don't make your children your reason why you can't do things. You make them your reason why you do, do things. Stefan: Oh, another gong. Bro. We're hitting today. Church of the grind is in session. Damn. Instant replay on that. I want you to say that again for the kids at home. Paul, one more time. Paul: Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, I have colleagues and I have friends that continuously tell me "I can't do this because I have to take little Johnny, or they have to take their children or their little Kimmy to their basketball game. Their ballet practice." But you know what? You have to be able, I mean, either you're going to choose to have your children be the reasons why you can't do something or you make them your reason why you can. So that's the different mindset. I mean, you have to make your kids a reason why you can achieve your dreams. Because that's the truth of the matter is if you don't, they're going to learn from that. Don't ever make your children your reason why you can't do something for yourself because that's not their fault. Stefan: You know, it's like the old seminar story. I don't know if you've heard this story, but there's two brothers and they're identical and they're twins. And one brother says he's living in cardboard box downtown and it's raining on this cardboard box and he's with the woman that's ugly. And they fight and they hate each other and he doesn't know where his kids and he can't hold down a job. He's got no money in his bank account. His creditors are coming after him all the time and life is horrible for this guy. And he says, "My life's a failure 'cause my dad was a drunk who beat me and my mom was a prostitute, smoked weed." And then I cross the tracks. And the nicest part of town is his identical twin brother who's in a mansion, the gorgeous wife and they have great sex and they've got lots of kids and the kids love the dad and they love the mom and they'd go on four vacations a year and they got the dream car and money in the bank and they sleep well at night. Stefan: And he says, "Man, I'm a success today 'cause my dad was a drunk who beat me. My mum was a prostitute who smoked weed every day." You know that same thing happened to those two guys. But on one side, one guy says, "This is my fuel." And the other guy says, "Oh man, this thing totally devastated me." And I love your story, man. Massive, massive props to your story because I come from a family, my dad was the son of an alcoholic and he had the dad who beat him. He says "Oh, I can't do this. I can't do that. It totally froze him." And with me, I use it as total motivation you know, my why. I think these interests are the whys, you're talking about your why's your little daughter. With whys I notice it's either people's parents that they want to save or it's their kids. Paul: Sure. Yeah. Stefan: And it's just either they want to help their parents who are screwed up or fix the parents or whatever, or they want to help their kids. And you know, how important do you think Paul to have a reason and a meaning outside of yourself to succeed? It can't be all about you. Paul: Oh, 1000%. I think if you don't have a reason outside, I think as human beings we're called to do something bigger than ourselves. And the reasons have to be more than ourselves. So I think innately, if you do not have a reason outside of your own personal gain, then it's going to be futile at the end because the drive stops. The why stops. So it's like when people are only motivated about money or cars or whatever, and they get that, then what happens after that? Right? If you have a purpose that's intangible and that can create a change for everybody else and the reason outside of yourself needs to be there. I mean it just has to. Stefan: I love that. We're going back to the Viktor Frankl Search for Meaning. You know, Man's Search for Meaning. What is the meaning of all this? And I think that one thing that's common across all of our shows, you're a very successful guy, especially in the space you're in. Is that the darker people get, the more they go into the darkness, the more they're in the light. And the worse it is and the deeper that pit of despair is, I call it the pit of despair. The deeper people go into that darkness, the higher they're able to climb after. And I think there's so many people at home that want to, they want to have it easy. They want to get a job, they don't want to go through any of the risk or the pain, they don't want to have their whys die, anything like that. But in some ways, Paul this is an interesting thing, like that event of losing your partner in some ways is that the best thing that ever happened to you? Paul: Yeah. I mean it's the worst and the best thing that happened to me. When I look back at it now, it's been about five years since she's passed away. But I look back at it now and even when we were struggling, right. And it was even before that, I mean we were homeless when my daughter was born and she was three months and we were sleeping out of our pathfinder and then a year later she got cancer. I mean we were going through a lot of crap, but I look back at it now and I think about it. If I didn't go through any of those struggles, it wouldn't have made me who I am today. Because I had to choose- Stefan: I'm going that. I'm gonging that bro. Paul: I had had to choose to be better. I had to choose. And I think seeing my wife pass away at an early age, that kind of pushed me too. 'Cause I think what happens is people don't realize how delicate their life is. Right. They can always wait until tomorrow. They can always wait till tomorrow. They can always wait till tomorrow. And you never know. You never know. Like my wife never knew she wasn't supposed to die when she was 36 so. Stefan: Right, right. Well that's super young men and like most women live till like 86 or something. So it's like 50 years too early. Paul: Yeah really early. Stefan: One word that you use and that I love those, the word choose. And the one thing that no one can ever take away from any of us, even if we're thrown in a Nazi death camp, is the choice to choose. Paul: Yes. Stefan: We can always choose the meaning of things. We can choose, what does this mean? This horrible thing. Is this going to be a wake up call? Is this going to be your fuel for the future? I had a big event in my life when I was younger and it was my parents' divorce. And it's interesting, my brother loved them to pieces. He uses it as a reason why he can't do stuff. You know, he says, I remember once he was yelling at my mom, he said, "Mom, if you guys didn't get divorced, I'd be in the NHL Right now." I'm like "Really?" I'm like "Dude, I don't know about that. You're a December baby. December babies don't make it in the NHL. You've got January, February, March, April go in." Paul: You've got a lot of Malcolm Gladwell. Stefan: Yeah man. I'm a Malcolm Gladwell reader. But it's so interesting 'cause I was with one of my girlfriends at the time and she said to me. I remember she came to one of my seminars and she said "All this stuff that you do and all this that you built, you do it for him." And I said, "Who?" She didn't know me that well and I didn't know her that well but she in two seconds as a woman with her intuition knew that the education company I've built is for my father 'cause my father never had that. And that was, yeah, there's such a deep meaning there and there's such a big why and it's so much fuel. 'Cause in life you got so much shit thrown at you all the time. They just, it's buckets and buckets of shit over and over again. And the people with a strong enough why can bear any how. What do you think about that famous quote? I think it's a Nietzsche quote. Paul: Yeah. No, I absolutely believe that. I absolutely believe that things that get you through the day. And the thing that gets you through life is why are you doing it? If you don't know why you're doing it, you're like a sailboat without a rudder. I mean, you're just kind of going endlessly through and through life, you know? And I think nowadays, I look at it nowadays with how instant everything is. Postmates, instant coffee instant, instant this, instant that. We're forgetting that the true gift of success is actually the journey that you go on. It's who you have to become, to become successful. That's what the gift is, not the actual achievement. It's who you have to become to achieve that. So like, yeah and to achieve that, you need to know your why and why you do it. I mean, so yeah, I absolutely believe in that quote. Stefan: Wow. Yeah. Now, I love what you're saying about the process and you know, this show's called Respect the Grind, right? You've got to respect that 10 years, respect the 10,000 hours. You can't cut the line. And we live in Instagram life, it's Instagram, Insta popcorn, Insta sex, Insta phone, Insta everything. Right? And I wrote about my book here Hard Times Create Strong Men. It's my fifth book I wrote. And it's interesting, right now there's like a porn and video game epidemic with young men. And I did the math. It's 10,000 hours to master let's say business or something, right? 10,000 hours. Well, you can master a video game in 500 hours. So where we give up our 10,000 hour endeavor, like maybe becoming an artist or a musician or an athlete or maybe starting a business. Stefan: Those are all like really worthy things. We go play World of Warcraft for 500 hours and we're at level 100 torrent shifting or something. What do you think about, does that translate into the workforce now with you recruiting young people? I mean, are there people out there who just don't get it and they're playing their world of Warcraft but they're not willing to put in the 10,000 hours? Paul: That's funny that you're saying that because I've visited Blizzard many times for one of our clients. Stefan: Dude, I want to work for Blizzard when I was younger, they didn't return my phone call though. Paul: Oh man. They give away like swords and shields when you hit your five and 10 year anniversary. Quite an organization but to your question about the younger generation, you know we do a lot of work with this particular segment because they're the incoming generation, they have to take over in the workforce. Right. You know what we are figuring out, it's not that they're not intelligent and it's not that they're not motivated or driven. They just want to get from A to B as fast as possible. And you and I both know it's like that's not going to work. You can't master anything. I don't know taking an online course or skipping out of school or whatever it is. You've got to learn the fundamentals and the basics. It's like building a house, right? If you're building a house and you decide that you don't really want to do and you think that the foundation, you just build it on the rock side it came on, it's got to fall down eventually. Paul: So we forget that I need to build that. But yeah, I mean I think because of how society is propagating this instantness that we're having, we're not putting in the fundamental work to make sure that not only our minds are strong, but our characters are strong, our will is strong, our drive is strong, everything is strong. So it is getting a little bit harder to recruit the younger folks just because they want things more instantaneous than before. And what they do is if they don't get it, they start moving to a different place of work or something else. I mean, I think the statistics were that the new grads, the last two years of college graduates, their average tenure at a company's eight months. So after eight months they're out. If they're truly a millennial, the average tenure at a company is 18 months. So we're seeing them just take off. So even if you get into a company, there's no level of mastery yet in that. Paul: And even if you're an entrepreneur, because it seems like everyone wants to be an entrepreneur now, but it takes a lot more than 18 months or eight months to really master a craft. You can't do that automatically. And if you do, you're probably going to lose it in the end. If you get lucky, you'll make a lot of money, but you lose it in the end because you don't have the fundamental to see it through different types of market. Stefan: Yeah. You know, those numbers are scary to me, man. I mean, I'm an employer and what happened to me last year, I came out of the jungle. I was fasting in the jungle for last year's 18 days, I'm going on a 40 day water fast actually. Yeah bro. So I came out of the jungle last year and I wrote this book, Hard Times Create Strong Men because I came out of the jungle and my young 21 year old, 22 year old millennial employees were saying like, "You're mean, I don't like you. You make me feel like a piece of shit." You know, they started complaining. And I was like "What's wrong with these guys? What's going on?" And you know it's interesting 'cause their tenure, those young millennial boy's wasn't very long. Probably right in that timeframe that you mentioned. And what happened was I went home and ... Well first I had to give these guys a talk. I gave two three hour talks one week in my office of how to be a man, which is like the most, that would never happen in the 50s. That would never happen in the 60s right? Stefan: The sixties you'd like smoking a cigar and a scotch and everyone just knew how to be a man. That was a normal thing. But I give this like six hour how to be a man talk and do your work. Being a man is about your work and that's what you do. We don't have a uterus, we don't have ovaries, we can't bear children. You're a dad by proxy, but you didn't have that thing come out of you, man. I mean you planted some seeds and walked away right? Paul: I didn't do it. I did the fun work. Stefan: You did the fun work yeah. It was like two minutes. So like- Paul: One and a half. You're being too generous to me. Stefan: One and a half minutes yeah. And I'm going to give that a gong. Bang. So these young boys, they're like, "Oh man, I want to be the leader of the company. I want this big salary. I want to make all this money." And what I found that was really interesting was these boys who were complaining like teenage girls never had fathers. And it was so interesting because you know, look at the stats 50% of the couples are divorced now, the marriages fall apart. And then I don't know what the status for dads sticking around, but dad's typically don't stick around 'cause either they don't want to stick around or the laws are so bad, the guy isn't around. And then you've got this entire generation of young men raised by young women and they don't know how to be a man and show up to work. Stefan: So I wrote this book Hard Times Create Strong Men and the cycles of history go hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. Weak men create hard times. Paul: That's absolutely right. Right. Stefan: And we're in this like weak man time and it's so interesting, my sales manager Ian, he had a very strong relationship with his dad. And his dad has a farm, a goat farm out East and the we're in Canada up here. And he had a great relationship with his dad and because he had a great wish up with his dad, he has a great relationship with work. And it's so interesting cause the guy with the good dad, he's a great worker, he does great work. And then the guys with problems still at my office guess what? Have daddy issues. You ever notice this where there's like daddy issues on some of these men and then they creep in your workforce and now they're bouncing after eight months. You ever notice that? Paul: Yeah. I think there's a strong linkage between how someone grew up and what their family structure was to whether it work [inaudible 00:26:14]. When people say that there's a work life and then there's a home life there's no difference. You're going to blend your personality with both. So yeah. I see there's a strong linkage. And also there's a strong link to you what you just said about your book where like, you know, when we're looking at World War II where all these young kids were born in a battle, right? They're after depression. There was a lot of adversity. But then you look at our times now we've been going through a lot of prosperity, especially in the last 10 years. I think we're both old enough to understand. In 2007 2008 there was a crash. Nearly all of us were getting our house foreclosed on and everything. Paul: So you've got these kids that have been going through this prosperity. I mean, you can throw anything at the wall and make money nowadays. And they haven't seen that [inaudible 00:26:54] yet. And then I think it's problematic in our domestic workforce too, because like especially in the technology field, because if you think about it, we've had all this prosperity and it's been a little bit easy, but then you have these emerging countries, these emerging markets like India and China that were oppressed for a long time and they're like, "Screw this shit." You know, like I want to work. Right. They were what we were going through back in World War II and the depression and things like that. So now they're becoming the very, very strong capitalistic societies that were a little bit more weak. So, I don't know it just, you made a really good point about your book because I completely agree with you on that. Stefan: Yeah. Well, they're hungry. Right. And like immigrants in America are four times more likely to become millionaires than native born Americans. Paul: Mm-hmm (affirmative). I know that 'cause I'm an immigrant, so I get it. Stefan: Where were you from, man? Paul: I'm from the Philippines. Yeah, my dad- from Manila. Stefan: Okay. Awesome. Yeah, I'm up here in Winnipeg and we got, I think 16% of the population is from the Philippines. I would flip houses and I'd sell them to the new immigrants. So I'd give him the Canadian dream for like a 100 grand or 129 grand. These houses look like little mansions. Right? And I always have these customers from Manila and they'd see it and they go, "Oh man, I got to have that house." And we actually just got a Jollibee bro. Paul: Oh my God. That's awesome. Stefan: We got some spaghetti and like a chicken leg or like a mango pie. They're pineapple pie or mango pie at Jollibee? Paul: It's a mango pie. Stefan: Oh, a mango pie. I haven't been there, dude, I haven't been to Jollibee yet, but I heard they play the song, the Jollibee song and- Paul: Yeah, you got to go, man. Stefan: Man. I'm trying to look after my health here, man. Paul: You can do it once. Stefan: Yeah go try it once man. Do they have a hot dog spaghetti at Jollibee too? Paul: Yeah they do. So the Spaghetti they put a little bit of sugar in there to sweeten it up. Stefan: Oh, of course. Of course. My dad's from Sweden, so I have an immigrant dad, and I remember going to Sweden when I was 12 and we're sitting down at the table and like Sweden is like, it's one of those countries, I looked it up, I was like, what's a racial slur for a suite? They call the Spanish people spics and they call Italian people waps and I looked up the Swedish one there isn't one because they're tall and they're beautiful and they're smart. So nobody's the Swedish people. But I'm over in Sweden and it's such a developed place. And they had these like Woodfire pizzas back in the day and they had like nice little pastries, they're so civilized. Stefan: And then we sit down at the kitchen table at my aunts or great aunts, I don't even know who these family members are. We're sitting down at the kitchen table at their house and they're making spaghetti. And I'm like, "Oh damn, I love Spaghetti." You know, my mom makes a great spaghetti back in Canada. We sit down at the table and they give us these like white boiled noodles. So it's like plain ass noodles and then you know what they do. And Paul you're going to be horrified at this man. They put the ground beef like straight up on noodles. So you got just playing ground beef, not taco meat. It's just like plain like gray brown ground beef on these plain white noodles. 'Cause like in Sweden they're not into spices. It's like salt is the white band spice over there. Salt and bill pepper. Stefan: So they put the ground beef down on the noodles and then I was horrified. They pull on a ketchup bottle and you cover it and ketchup. I know Bro. Ketchup spaghettis, you haven't ground ketchup and it wasn't just white noodles. I went to house to house to house. I was like "How are you guys eating this ketchup spaghetti 'cause you know we got like Oregano, we got basil, we've got garlic, we got all these great things written in the Ketchup Spaghetti." But I digress. I digress Paul. Now, let me ask you this. A lot of young people listening to this show, 12 years old, 15 years old, 18 years old, different ages, younger people. Do you think in 2019, it's going to be 2019 in like a week. Do you think that it's still good to get a degree today? Or do you think that no degree is the way to go and just get some skills and figure it out? Paul: That's kind of a controversial topic, but I promote education. I think you should at least get your college degree. And the reason why you should do that is, and this is just what I truly believe is that college is an opportunity for you to, it's kind of like a playground, right? You're accomplishing something. A four year degree isn't easy. So it's the first step I'm trying to accomplish something before you do anything else from the studies. I got my degree in Kinesiology, which is exercise physiology. I obviously don't use that, but what I learned from college is I communicated with a lot of people. I had to collaborate with my other students. I had to do projects with the other students. I had to get them to buy into a lot of things. I was part of a fraternity, so I understood that organization. Paul: So it's much more of an experience than anything else. And that's what I grew out of. But I look back, I mean I even got my MBA, but a lot of the reasons why I did that was because of the networking progress and the ability to build relationships during that. So I was really active in college and that's why I think it meant something to me. The stats don't lie, I don't know the stats exactly off the bat, but college graduates tend to earn twice as much as high school graduates. People with masters have by 40% more earning potential then that someone with just a high school degree. Now we have to understand that, okay, well don't go to college and then start your own business. But the failure rate of business is 99%- Stefan: I was going to say 99 bro. 90 in the first five, 90 in the second five but 99 yeah, you're going to die man. Paul: Right. So it's like go ahead and not have any education and then you have nothing to really kind of I don't know fall back on I guess. And not to say that a degree is going to help you out because I'm in recruitment, so you have a degree and you don't have skills, it doesn't really matter. But what I've noticed that every time I do interview someone, someone that has been active in college and has gotten through college, they will most all the time be better communicators and be better at being able to grip through their job. So I mean, that's my opinion for whatever it's worth, I still believe in it. I come from a very highly educated family. My Dad's a physician, so I don't know, look at the statistics. Most of the billionaires have a college degree, so I wouldn't dash it I guess. Stefan: Yeah. There's a lot of BAs actually in the billionaire club, bachelor of arts, which is interesting. I got a degree in English. So I went to school, I went to music school 'cause I want to be a rock star. So my mom says, "Oh if you want to be a rock star, get a music degree." Right? So I go and I'm studying jazz of all things, which jazz, it's funny it's all over here up in Canada, 2005 so like I don't know what is this. Like 50 years after jazz is relevant. They opened this new music called Jazz [crosstalk 00:33:23] behind. So I went and got a ... I was working in the jazz faculty there and I was a professional musician and then I realized I don't want to be a jazz musician 'cause it's a very hard and horrible life. Stefan: And then I dropped out of that and I went to the business school and I dropped out of that. Then I went into computer science, I dropped out. I was very good at computer science. I wanted to work for Blizzard bro. That was actually ... And then I ended up dropping out of computer science and I went to the registrar and I said, "Hey, can you recommend a way for me to get out of here without dropping out that won't piss my parents off." And she said, "Yeah, take two poetry class, you're going to have an English degree." So now I have an English degree with a minor in music. And I remember 2008 that was when I graduated, it was May 2008 and I went to go get a job. And the only thing I could get with an English, was a call center job in the middle of the night selling luxury hotel rooms to rich people, and you actually needed a degree. Stefan: And it was, we were making minimum wage, it was just like hardcore minimum wage. And I remember having like a post grad depression about that cause I was like, "Man, I spent my whole life, I spent 12 years plus kindergarten or whatever, plus four years of university and that degree got me here to a call center job. I could have just painted houses." But here's the bittersweet flip side of it is I'm a resourceful person. So I've written five books now, I'm 32 I've written five books. I'm sure the English degree helped with that a bit. Paul: Probably. Stefan: And then Mark Cuban, the billionaire in Texas, he says that today in today's world, an English degree is suddenly one of the most powerful degrees to have because we live in the world of content. People need more and more content. All content comes from writing. And so it's interesting, I used to totally bash on my degree. I used to totally beat on it. I still beat on it, but I kind of have to shut up about it now because I've published five books. By the end of this year I'll be up to eight books. I'm an avid blogger. On the flip side though, I wrote my first book when I was 12 before I went to school. So it's an interesting thing. I think it's a catch 22. I throw out resumes with degrees in my office. When they come in, I got a stack a degrees and it's actually kind of sad. Stefan: I get guys with PhDs, they go in the garbage. I get guys with MBAs or master's. It's pretty sad man. 'Cause a lot them are applying for entry level sales jobs. Now let me ask you this, Paul. I mean degree in school versus learning to sell. What do you think is more valuable? Someone who knows how to sell and make money on commission or somebody who has some sort of degree. We don't even know what it is. Mystery box. It could just be a mystery degree. What would you say is more valuable? Paul: Selling. Hands down. If you know how to sell, you'll beat out a degree. Stefan: So, okay. I love that answer man. I mean that's powerful stuff and I think being good at sales, it's funny like the Mormons in Utah, they all go on missions and they sell bibles door to door. So they have all these fantastic call centers up in Utah for these educated smart, street smart salespeople who speak two languages or more. With learning to sell, what are some of the best places that people can go to learn to sell? 'Cause there really isn't a degree in that there isn't a school. Nobody teaches it. Where do you think people should go and learn to sell? Paul: You know what? I'm kind of lost for like where people would want to sell. I mean, like when I'm talking to my sales guys I think the most important thing before any sales techniques is again, going back to the ability to build relationships. I don't think anyone likes to be sold to, but I think in order to be an effective salesperson, you have to be in a relationship with somebody and understand what their problems are, what their needs are, right? You can't just push it on them not knowing that there is a need. Right. I think the ability to be able to problem solve is one of the highest, well, one of the most critical abilities that there is. And the only way to do that is to be able to get into relationships. Paul: So, I mean, as far as sales techniques, I mean I don't know I guess I'm kind of lost as far as I think the best thing that you could possibly do in any kind of sales is really understand what the problem is. Or who you're dealing with and get into a relationship with them and make sure that once you do it, you can understand what their problems are and then you can fix it. Stefan: Right. Right, yeah. I love what you're saying man. I got a book I wrote here about sales called The Close: 7 Level Selling. On the back I put stop selling, start serving. That's just the main thing you said nobody wants to be sold these days. But it's funny 'cause everybody wants to buy. Paul: Yeah everybody wants to buy. Stefan: And they want to buy but they don't want to buy in some salesy way where they feel like you're manipulating them. They want to buy on their own terms. So how do you make it so that they choose you? So they decide and they want you. Coming back to dating. It's interesting like the man might choose the woman he wants to date, but he has to make the woman choose him. Paul: Yeah, I mean it's the same thing I think we're talking about. If we understand what the wires. So like let's take for instance our clients. If we get into a relationship and understand okay where their inefficiencies are, what's happening, what their troubles are with their current staff, what we can do. Once we understand what's keeping them up at night and what's keeping them desperate and what's keeping them in pain, people want to alleviate pain. So the minute you understand what their pain is and then you bring up a solution, you're not selling, they're going to be buying all day long. Stefan: Bum. You know, I heard a great quote weeks ago, I was down in San Diego at a conference and one of the speakers said "All human beings, all purchases are either avoiding or alleviating pain or elevating status." Paul: Yeah, true. I would bet it's more about pain. I think people are motivated by the carrot or the stick, but I think most people are motivated by pain. They don't want it. Why do we follow rules? Well, I don't want to get in trouble, right? Sometimes people don't understand the pain. So you have to be like, "Hey, you know what? As an expert, here's what's going to happen if you don't do that." So you've got to sometimes the pain understanding that you got to do good for them. You can't just create pain and just sell them crap. You've got to make sure that whatever you are doing is going to improve their situation. And I think that's how you have long lifelines. I'm sure you see that all day long in the real estate industry. Stefan: Yeah. Well one thing I say to my, and my sales guys, I say, "Look, do what's right for the customer.: And that gets in the ethics. I think ethics is the base, then it goes the product, then it goes sales, marketing, brand. And if you do what's right for the customer, whatever that is. If you go to chick fil a and you forget your credit card, the guy comes running out to get your credit card and hands you your food. If you do what's right for the customer, if you take care of the customer, you're always going to have food to eat. Right? Paul: Absolutely. I think in dealing with business integrity is the most. I mean that's the one thing that you cannot succeed without. You cannot succeed without integrity. Stefan: Yeah, absolutely. Well, Paul, I've got some questions I'd like to ask everybody. Here's one that I love just floating by you. Now, you see all sorts of people, man, you're in the hardcore people business. You got employees, you're recruiting, you're matching with customers. You're just like, your business is nothing but people. What do you think is the biggest cause of failure in people? Paul: They lose reasons on why they're doing it. It's always going back to the why, the problems, the challenges, the obstacles, whatever they have become bigger than the reasons why they're doing it. And once you start doing that, and a lot of it is perspective, if you start looking at, okay, I didn't get this promotion, I didn't to get this client, I didn't get this. And they start looking at all those challenges and obstacles and setbacks, that starts to vary your why. And I think that's one of the biggest reasons of failure. If you don't hold onto the reasons why you're doing things, you're going to fail nine times out of 10. So you've got to want to embrace that. But if you can't hold onto the reason why the heck you're doing something like a fitness goal, right? Paul: Like, okay, I want to lose 20 pounds. I lost 92 pounds. I was really heavy at one time and I wanted to do that because I wanted to be there for my daughter, right? And it got hard. I didn't want to wake up in the middle of the morning. I mean, it's not, the first thing that I want to do is wake up and be like, "Whoa, holy crap, I'm going to run like five miles." It's like I want to go to bed, but why am I doing that? Why am I doing this? And the reason why we fail is because we forget why we're doing things. Why was it important to begin with? So that's what I feel the biggest reason of failure is. Stefan: So it's really coming back to meaning, you know, when working out to be alive for your daughter or being healthy for your daughter's there, that's way bigger than you want to look sexy at the club and that mesh shirt you bought, right? Paul: Yeah. I mean that can be motivating to people too- Stefan: Oh yeah. Right. There's, there's some sex there, right? Paul: Yeah. There's always a why. If you don't know your why, then you're never going to be able to hold on to anything. You'll feel at everything if you don't know why you're doing it. Stefan: Right. I love that, man. I think we've had a really deep conversation here about the meaning and the why and it just translates everything. Now, Paul, if you go back in time, to let's say 15 year old Paul. And you would give yourself a piece of advice time machine here, what would you say to a 15 year old Paul? Paul: Do you. Don't think about anybody else and their opinions. Whatever's you feel is going to make you succeed, you do it. That would be my advice. Stefan: Yeah. Well everybody else is taken. You might as well do you, right. Paul: Exactly. Stefan: Awesome. Top three books that changed your life. Paul: Principles by Ray Dalio. Stefan: Damn. I'm giving that a gong. Great book. Paul: Awesome book. The Bible is one I mean just from a learning aspect and then Failing Forward by John C. Maxwell. Stefan: Those are three tasty books. Let me ask you this, the Bible and organized religions have lost a lot of ground in the last 70, 80 years in the United States, why do you think the Bible is so important? Personally, I think it's like I was born into a church and then I went to university, became an atheist communist as they manufacturer over there. And then now I'm back hardcore with the book of 5,000 years of human civilization and all the things that worked and didn't. But why do you think the Bible is so important? Paul: I think because there's a lot of great fundamentals in there. I think success books have, I mean they've originated somewhere, right? Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich is to think is great right? But then if you look back at Proverbs, it says "As a man thinketh so he is. So if it's like if you kind of go back to it, I'm not saying that I'm religious or anything, but I just actually like the content of the book. The story of Job where he was really depressed and he went through this whole entire depression and then what he did to come out of that. I mean those are all very applicable things for me in my life now. I'm not a big organized religion guy, but I mean if the Bible is the most read book in the entire world, there must be something coming out of it. So I wanted to try and get my bits and pieces out of it and I've just noticed after reading it, it's very similar to a lot of the new things that we talk about. So that's why I'm like it. Stefan: Yeah, well it's so interesting. It's incredible. I did a bit of a study on it and my book Hard Times and what it is is it's the base values of our civilization. Our laws come from those value. Our entire framework comes from there. So whether you're religious or not, it's super important. And you know what else I think is really cool about the Bible. I was lecturing my secretary the other day about how to live her life as old men like me do. And I said, "Look, the Bible, you got to study it because they've already tried everything. They tried it all for 5,000 years. 'Cause there's the Old Testament, there's the New Testament. They tried it. They tried all the bullshit we're doing now. If you look at Sodom and Gomorrah, the Tower of Babel, they already did this shit. They already did it, and they move on exactly how it happened or how things went down and they wrote down all the problems. So you know in advance, if you just read that thing, you can see the future because it's 5,000 years. Stefan: And I think it's so interesting how every 70 or 80 years, we always think we're smarter than the past. You know, oh, let's try out communism this time, or let's try out something that clearly does. Try socialism out I know. Yeah. Let's try out socialism. And when you read back on that text, whether it's history or not history, it's amazing because all the answers are in there. Paul: It is. Stefan: And the Bible means the book. It's the original book so. Paul: It is, I mean, I think if we don't learn from history, we're destined to repeat it right? That's the quote, right? Stefan: Right. Yeah it's money. All right, awesome. Well next question here, Paul. Talking about the young people again. This is one of my favorite questions I ask this absolutely everybody. 100% of the people on this show get this question. Come back to the young people, the millennials. What do think is the number one thing that the young people today need to succeed in this world? Paul: We just talked about him. Grit. I mean you just need to, I mean there's always going to be challenges. You need to be able to have heart and critic and desire and quite frankly you need balls man. This world is tough. So regardless if you want them to be successful, you've got to have balls. Stefan: Big massive bowling ball balls. Paul: I mean, yeah, absolutely. If you want to be anything you got to have balls 'cause the opposition to be successful is so, so stiff. I mean you just have to have the biggest pair of balls ever so. Stefan: I'm giving you a gong for that one, boom. Yeah, some big balls, big ovaries, whatever you're running with there. Awesome. Paul, how can people get in touch with you man, if they want to know more about you? Paul: Sure. I have a personal website, paulmichaeldavid.com and my Instagram handle is Paul Michael David. Those are the two best ways you can reach out to me. Our company website is identifiedtalent.com. Stefan: Awesome. Really appreciate having you in the show Paul. Respect the Grind, man. Yeah, we'll have to have you on again. I thought we had a really great chat today and I really appreciate you and your story, man. Bless you. Paul: Yeah, bless you too, man. Happy holidays brother. Stefan: You too. Bye, bye.  

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.

Over-sized piranhas are attacking Venezuela! Join me as I watch the film for the first time and attempt to figure out what is going on; why fish bark, roar, and oink; and why everything seems to have been shot at 6 o'clock in the evening. Listen as I identify the multiple artificial ticking clocks, write off the entire state of Florida, and calculate the growth rate of genetically modified fish on a scratch pad several times—oh wait, the characters do that last one. I research the extensive film biographies of Tiffany [last name unknown], Barry Williams, Paul "I'm not Paul Hogan" Logan, and director Eric Forsberg and come up pretty dry. However, they all do a pretty great job, so I have no complaints. Oh wait, I do complain that the titles aren't left on screen long enough. (I'm a slow reader!) And I complain that there aren't any subtitles or extras on the Blu-ray. That's right—I'm watchin' this puppy on Blu-ray! (from the $5 bargain bin) No more commercials! Bonus: brown lady boobs!