Podcast appearances and mentions of paul one

Episode 465 – Drink Responsibly?     Today we have Kevin. He is 44 years old and lives in Cleveland, OH. He took his last drink on April 28th, 2018.   I want to give a shout out to our DRY January REstore cohort. We're 1/2 way there, you all are doing a fantastic job, I'll see you all tonight.   On January 27th we start our six-week alcohol-free ukelele course. This course is brought to you by Kala Brand.   Better Help:  www.betterhelp.com/elevator - 10% off your first month. #sponsored   [03:09] Thoughts from Paul:   One of the main goals at Recovery Elevator is to soften the stigma surrounding alcohol addiction and recovery. Another goal is to give listeners permission to shred the shame and recover our authentic selves along the way.   The phrase “Drink Responsibly” is such a cop out and doesn't do anything but place blame on the drinker. Alcohol is the most addictive drug on the planet, and you won't see other drugs proclaiming that you use the substance responsibly. We can do the “Drink Responsibly” thing way better and at the same time bring more people together in community from both sides of the aisle to heal.   A favorite NA beverage company of Paul's, GO Brewing and Recovery Elevator have partnered up to release 180 six packs of their award-winning Sunbeam Pilsner. GO Brewing was started by a fellow member in the recovery space, Joe Chura. This is two companies who have a similar goal, uniting, in attempts to shred the shame around alcohol addiction.   Pick up your limited edition RE Sunbeam Pils, use the code elevator at checkout for 15% off and free shipping on orders over $40.   Andrew Huberman – What Alcohol Does to Your Body, Brain & Health   Exact Nature: https://exactnature.com/RE20   [10:20] Paul introduces Kevin:   Kevin is 44 years old and lives in Cleveland area, he is the head of coaching for the Reframe app and a former accountant. Kevin is married and for fun he enjoys attending his daughter's sporting events, reading and just relaxing when he isn't working.   Kevin says his drinking began in college where he was in a fraternity and played sports. His drinking transferred into his career where there was a lot of stress, happy hours, and deadline parties where binge drinking was a way to socialize.   Kevin and his wife got married when he was 23 and had their daughter when he was 27. His drinking increased as a way to cope with the high stress of his career. After some blood work found him diagnosed with fatty liver, he tried moderation and different attempts at taking breaks from alcohol.   Without much success at controlling his drinking on his own, Kevin eventually decided to look into therapy with his wife's support. He developed a journaling practice and would talk with his therapist while working on quitting and made it 60 days.    Several work and life events found Kevin trying to moderate the drinking again. He made the decision to commit to 61 days and then continued to extend the timeline. Kevin was reading a lot and listening to podcasts. His therapist helped him a lot as well. He started an Instagram page for himself, but after some time decided to go public and share more. He got a lot of positive feedback which fueled him to try and start recovery coaching. He became involved with Reframe app soon after.   Kevin's best sober moment: his first sober concert with his daughter.   Kevin's parting piece of guidance: practice. Find a platform that resonates with you and keep practicing.   Instagram  Recovery Elevator YouTube Sobriety Tracker iTunes    Recovery Elevator Go big, because eventually we all go home. I love you guys.

Hope Ankeny - Sermon by Pastor Scott Rains from Sep 24, 2023

What's SHE Up To Now Day 1967? Rob Peter To Pay Paul...One Way To Deal With Debt? Drop in to get the real scoop--the good, the bad, the ugly, the truth (well my truth anyway). https://facebook.com/beme2thrive #documentthejourney #shareyourexperience #robpetertopaypaul

Episode 431 – Transformation   Today we have Katy, she is 40, from Olympia, WA and took her last drink on February 12th, 2023.   Join Recovery Elevator this Sunday for a fun conference style meet up at the Marriott in Alpharetta.  This event is all about getting your connect on and it will be a fun time.  Spouses or loved ones are encouraged to attend and you can even stick around afterwards for some silent disco.   Exact Nature: https://exactnature.com/RE20   [02:26] Thoughts from Paul:   One of the best parts of doing the Recovery Elevator podcast is seeing the transformations people make.  Many of the travelers on this year's Costa Rica trip also traveled last year. With every single repeat traveler, Paul could see the growth almost immediately. There are many different reasons for the transformations, but it is always visible in the smile.   Paul wants to make a correction from a previous episode where he said that Goat Yoga was a horrible idea. Incorporating animals in our healing can be a great thing. One reason for this is the nervous systems of animals are much more intact, and with entrainment theory in biology, our nervous systems can heal while being around animals. Also, goats are hilarious. They are all about having fun and if you come near enough to them, they will make you part of the fun.   In the interview with Katy, Paul references a previous episode covering Natlrexone. That is episode 164 if you wish to go back and listen.   Better Help:  www.betterhelp.com/elevator - 10% off your first month. #sponsored   [08:06] Paul introduces Katy:   Katy is 40 years old and took her last drink on February 12, 2023. She is from Olympia WA, married and they have two kids and a dog.  Katy works in elementary education and for fun she likes to hike, read and listen to podcasts.   Katy first started drinking at a young age, but it wasn't until she was in her late teens that she started having consequences like hangovers and blackouts. She went on to a college that had a reputation for being a party school and she fell right into the scene.   Katy feels her twenties were stolen by an abusive relationship where the focus was on a party lifestyle. She had started drinking and driving, getting herself into debt, and struggled to hold down a job. The consequences of her drinking really started to escalate including a DUI that she got during a blackout.   In her thirties, she continued to work in bars and blackout frequently.  When she tried quitting on her own, she had some physical withdrawals and she decided to go to rehab. After around four months she decided to leave and started drinking immediately believing that she would be able to control it.  Before long she was back where she was with her drinking and had a mental health scare that found her seeking help once again.   Her family was very supportive, and Katy was able to make positive changes in her life including having children and getting her master's in education. She was able to stay sober through her pregnancies but would start drinking shortly after.   Katy was prescribed naltrexone which helped her stop drinking and start working on herself. On her doctor's advice she started attending sobriety groups in addition to the medication. She prefers SMART recovery over AA but believes connection is important.   Exercise is important to Katy's sobriety in addition to podcasts and reading. She looks for the good things in day-to-day life as well as in nature which help her feel gratitude. She uses some exercises to help with her anxiety that help her to surround herself in “now”. She enjoys music where she can connect to the lyrics.   Bucket list for Katy is to love her life and feel emotions.   [47:27] In closing, Paul shares another installment of “You Can Be Right, Or You Can Have Peace”.     Cafe RE  Use the promo code OPPORTUNITY to waive the set-up fee. Recovery Elevator YouTube Sobriety Tracker iTunes    Recovery Elevator It all starts from the inside out. I love you guys.

Being a Witness in the Midst of the Storm

Upcoming Event!How Can Mindfulness Give You a More Abundant Retirement?Are you ready to let go of anxiety and find the peace of mind you seek as you prepare for your golden years? Your Answer Lies in These 5 Critical Retirement Questions: Am I on track for financial independence?What do I need to do to get on track?How do I design a mindful investing portfolio?How do I manage that portfolio and my income over time through changing markets?How do I prepare non-financially for retirement? What are the dominant variables in a happy retirement?Learn more: https://courses.mindful.money/mindful-retirement-review-workshop/Paul Montoy-Wilson is an entrepreneur with a vision of helping people with their relationship to money and their personal money mindsets. Paul developed and launched Allo, a financial wellness app that focuses on mindful money practices. Today, Paul joins the show to discuss his personal and financial values, the relationship between spending and happiness and the importance of becoming aware of how we spend and save our money. Paul and Jonathan talk about the psychology of money as well as how the Allo app is helping others improve their financial well-being.

Jesus Ministries, Joan Boney  ...    Acts 26   (Paul speaking to king Agrippa)   9 I verily thought with myself, that I ought to do many things contrary to the name of Jesus of Nazareth.   10 Which thing I also did in Jerusalem: and many of the saints did I shut up in prison, having received authority from the chief priests; and when they were put to death, I gave my voice against them.   11 And I punished them oft in every synagogue, and compelled them to blaspheme; and being exceedingly mad against them, I persecuted them even unto strange cities.   12 Whereupon as I went to Damascus with authority and commission from the chief priests,   13 At midday, O king, I saw in the way a light from heaven, above the brightness of the sun, shining round about me and them which journeyed with me.   14 And when we were all fallen to the earth, I heard a voice speaking unto me, and saying in the Hebrew tongue, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.   15 And I said, Who art thou, Lord?    And HE said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest.   16 But rise, and stand upon thy feet: for I have appeared unto thee for this purpose, to make thee a minister and a witness both of these things which thou hast seen, and of those things in the which I will appear unto thee;   17 Delivering thee from the people, and from the Gentiles, unto whom now I send thee,   18 To open their eyes, and to turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins, and inheritance among them which are sanctified by faith that is in ME.   19 Whereupon, O king Agrippa, I was not disobedient unto the heavenly vision:  

Allen: All right, passive traders, we have a treat in store for you today. Many of you know about the option continuum, which is basically, you know, our levels of breakdown of where you are as an options trader, you start with level one, you don't know anything. And then you get to level 10, maybe if you want to, which is option professional. And basically a professional means that you are so good at trading options, that you are now trading and managing other people's money and you're getting paid for it. Many of you have reached out to us in the past and said, Hey, I want more information on that. And we haven't really put it out there because I am not doing it myself. Right now, as a professional, I don't I'm not measuring anybody else's money. And so, you know, I'm not the best person to talk to about that. But we keep getting people and be like, hey, you know, I want to learn, I want to learn. So one of our members, Paul Ashcraft, has volunteered to join us today. And I want to thank you, Paul, for coming and helping out. A few a couple of months ago, I think in one of our groups, I think it was a passive group, where I had put in there like, Hey, I'm thinking about starting a hedge fund. So I'm thinking about going professional, right? And he reached out and said, hey, you know, I'm already doing it if you want to, if you want to talk and I can answer your question. So we had an amazing conversation, I learned a lot. And I was like, You know what, this would be really helpful for everybody else. So I asked Paul, hey, could you do it again? And we can record it this time? It was like, Yeah, sure, no foul. And so he's here, Paul, thank you. Thank you for being on thank you for taking the time to do this. Paul: Thank you very much. Pleasure. Allen: And you're Paul is a member of our of a lot of our programs. So passive trading formula, the blank check, and now the credit spread mastery as well. So you know, it's good to see that, hey, if you're a money manager, then you're continuously getting learning and learning new things to help out your students, or your clients, I guess. So. Well, tell me, why did you get into management? What was it that drawed you through that? Paul: Well, I sort of got tricked into it. I had a, I'm a CPA by trade, and I had a client who was becoming an NFL player agent. And he trusted me and wanted me to help him manage his people's NFL players money. So I started the licensing process at that time. And so that sort of tricked me into it. So that sort of fell apart. And then he wasn't getting more leads for what he was doing. So I basically continued since then, so Allen: Okay, so were you already trading on your own? Or before that? Or did you learn as you want to? Paul: Yeah, I've been trading, you know, for quite a while. Off and on. So yeah, I've had some experience of trading. Allen: Okay. So you are comfortable, you could do it? Paul: I knew I needed to learn, I do need to learn some more. But yeah, I feel like I could I knew enough about the world to do that. Allen: Okay. And so you are known as what is a RIA, a registered independent advisor? Paul: Right. That's correct. Allen: So that's one of the ways of managing money. What exactly is an RIA? Paul: It's basically a firm that is licensed by the FINRA basically, and you are licensed to where you can manage other people's money. Allen: And all RIAs, are fiduciaries, right? Paul: That's correct. Yeah.  Allen: Right. Because a lot of people don't know the difference between a fiduciary and a non fiduciary. And so a fiduciary, if you don't know you are legally bound to do what's in the best interest of the client. A lot of these other companies that people think about when they're talking about money management, or Wealth Advisors, retirement advisors, all these words that they use, they have no license, or maybe they do have a license, but they're not a fiduciary. So they're not required to do what's best for the client. And so they can sell you a product that they get the highest commission on, even if it's not really a good thing, a good fit for you. So that's why..  Paul: Yeah one of the ways I deal with that fiduciary criteria is basically whatever I do for other people, I do for myself. Allen: Okay. Okay, interesting. So, what does it take to open an RIA? Paul: Well, if you want to legal structure and need, like, I have an LLC got a creative for that. And I have had to pass a serious 65 test, which you'd like an SEC test, and get to come up some kind of agreement you have with your clients that's approved by FINRA to sign them on as clients. Those are the basics you have to do. Allen: Okay, and like how long did it take you to go through all that? Remember? Paul: I'm gonna say, basically of six to nine months. Allen: Okay, and how long have you been? How long have you been an RIA? Paul: Since 2014, so roughly eight years. Allen: Awesome. Yep. Cool. And for those of you, you know, I'm going to repeat it later on, but Paul's business website is Businessadvisors.Pro. So if you ever or if you need a good adviser, you know, please reach out to Paul. And I'll repeat at the end, and we'll put it in the show notes. I just wanted to get that out there. Paul: And that's mainly my CPA website, just so you know. Allen: Very cool. BusinessAdvisors.Pro, there you go.  Paul: And then sort has been done about creating my Wealth Advisors website, because you're so under scrutiny when you were you advertise things, so I just sort of steered away from that a little bit. Allen: Interesting. Okay. So I guess there's certain things you can say and certain things you cannot say. Paul: Basically, anything you put out there to the public, you have to like, monitor it for five years, and they can question you about it anytime. So I just figured one way to get around that is just not to do it. Allen: Okay. So then that leads me to my next question, like, how do you find clients if you're not advertising? Paul: Well, you know, I have CPA clients, probably like half the clients, I have my Wealth Advisors from CPA side. Other thing is like, from friends, and referrals from other people who use me. Allen: Okay. So it takes time to build all that up?  Paul: Yes, yes. And I'm currently working on more. More advertising. Allen: Okay. All right. So the advertising is possible. It's not it's not like it's restricted. But you have to be careful of what you do and how you do it. Paul: Yes, yes, yeah. Allen: Now, what are your clients looking for? Because, you know, if somebody comes to you and says, Hey, you know, I'm looking to make more money, obviously, but they have so many, so many choices. They can do it themselves, it could go to like, like Fidelity and have them do it. They could go to they're really rich, they can have their own private like, you know, Bank of America, has their own private wealth, people. So when they come to you, what do they tell you? Like? What are they looking for in terms of an advisor? Paul: Well, I mean, I had someone recently come to me, and, you know, we're signing them up, or things that I'd say we, if we look, if we're here a year later, what do you want to what your criteria are saying, I did a good job. And he wanted a 10% return, which has been difficult in this market. But that's, that's one thing. Another thing? I you know, most advisors out there, these basically are, they're buying hold people, I mean, and they bid six things in a bucket, and don't look at it too often. So I, I basically say that I'm actively working in their account, and I'm not sure I'm going to just put it there and not be looking at it. Allen: So obviously, you probably tell them about your options experience and the different types of strategies you use. Paul: Yeah, a lot of times just the casual person warnings on the manager money that, that if I tried to tell them all that it would go way over their head. Because, you know, it took me like two years talking about options to actually start doing it myself, you know, so I'm trying to be a little bit of conscientious about what they can and cannot handle information wise. I'll be glad to talk about it, they want to, but I'm not gonna write too much about it. Allen: And I bet that would that would set you apart, right? You know, it's like, hey, you know, we can do plain vanilla stuff. Or we can do if you're a little bit more aggressive than we can do this, and this and this. And then if it goes over there, that's fine. But as long as they're like, whoa, this guy knows. Paul: Yeah, definitely. That's certainly part because like, my CPA, well, I deal with investment advisors. And like, no one, no one that I know of is actually managing costs. I mean, like, you know, every week or things like that, Allen: yeah, yeah, they just don't I mean, part of it is they have, depending on where they are some of these guys that I know, they have broker dealers, and the broker basically tells them what they can do and what they can't do. And trading is like, No, you're not doing it. They just they can't, they're not allowed. And so, you know, we get we get clients that are financial advisors, they come in, they're like, oh, yeah, I'm a financial advisor, like, oh, they shouldn't, you know, all this stuff. And they're like, oh, I don't do any of this for my son. I don't know, they don't even teach us this stuff. In financial advisors. Cool. So it's like, once I call again, I'm like, Oh, my God. Paul: Yeah, most of them are just like, call themselves people. And it is this, they don't necessarily know that much about investing. It's more about they have relationships with people, and they train their people to be accustomed to five to 7% returns. So so don't want you to do that as that's, you know, not a hallmark. Allen: Yeah, yeah. Like, you know, when I go to if I go to a dinner party, or whatever, and, you know, always comes up. So what do you do? It's like, well, I teach people how to do this. And the first they're like, really, is that, you know, what do you what do you mean? And then we tell them a little bit about it, and they go, Yeah, you know, we try to aim, you know, for 5% a month, and they're like, what a month. Really? Oh, wow, I gotta learn about that. And then, you know, you explain a little bit and then they're, like, bored and then they go talk to somebody else. Because, you know, it's cool. They want, they want it. They just want to do the work. So that's cool. Now as an advisor, how do you How do you charge? Like, what do you charge? How do you do it? Paul: So I have what's called a serious 65 license. So I'm able to charge a percentage of what assets are under management. Okay, so the basic generic, charged with as generally 1% of assets under management. Okay, that if I'm doing more as a some different strategies, things like that, I'm probably going to up the field more because it's, it is active trading. Allen: It takes more time. Yeah, yeah. Because I remember way back when I had a guy at America ice, and he was my advisor. And yeah, he would charge a minimum of 1% on assets every year. Every time you put money, you gave him money, they would take 5% off the top. And then every every mutual fund and every index fund or whatever that they put you in. And most of them were, you know, Ameriprise products. Each of those things would have a separate fee every year. So I mean, I got dealing left and right. I didn't know what I was doing. At the time, I was thinking I am going to you know, I'm smart. I got an advisor. But yeah, he was the one getting rich. And so.. Paul: They made that money, whether they go down or go up it. Allen: Yeah, I mean, they take the money right up front, 5% off the top. As soon as you make a deposit, it's like, man, you haven't done anything. Even if I turn around and ask for the money back, I just love fibers. Do you have like a lot of Is There a lot of overhead for being a advisor? You need a large staff? Paul: Right now, it's just me. And so I'm already have all my setup for my CPA business. So there's not really that much more to do.  Allen: And you can run it from the same location. Yes, yes. Okay. So then who does the like the backend stuff, you know, statements, and compliance audits, all that stuff. Paul: So we use Interactive Brokers as the broker dealer. So they basically, so all my clients have their own account set up with them, and it sort of goes underneath my master account. So so they take care about the then get a statement from there anytime they want to find out what their balances. And if they need to take up money, they can contact them and get the money taken out. So they saw him. So we're doing a lot of the back office stuff. Allen: Awesome. So you really don't have to do anything. And they they opened the account themselves, the client opens the account themselves, they deposit the money themselves, they can take it out whenever they want, they can go and log in, see all the trades, see whatever is there. So you really don't have a lot of customer service issues. And so you don't have to send send out statements, because Interactive Brokers will do that. Right. Paul: And one of my strategies is if someone is, I call it high maintenance, then I probably can't handle that, you know, they probably need to find someone else because, you know, I got enough things to do is it is. Allen: Awesome, cool. And then. So you don't handle any of the money either. Because they just go straight to interactive. So you're like a hands off, okay, I'll do the trades, but I'm not touching your money. So you don't have to worry about me taking your money and running away and flying to Bermuda or something.  Paul: Yeah, just like the Bernie Madoff deal where he was. He they call it having custody of the funds, and he had custody. And so they, they talked about that when you're going through your testing and things like that, about having custody and not having custody and things like that. So yeah, it's a big red flag. Allen: Yeah. Because I mean, like, I've been looking into starting my own hedge fund, you know, using the the passive trading strategies and such. And I looked at RIA first and then I looked at, you know, hedge fund as another way, and I think from what I've been able to find so far is that if you start a hedge fund, and you don't charge any management fees, you don't need the license, you can set it up in a way where you know, you get you only take a percentage of the profit. So if there's a gain, you can get a percent, but you don't get that yearly management fee. If you want the yearly management fee, then you do have to separate a separate Ria, to do the management of the fund. Okay, I didn't know that. Yeah, so I thought that was pretty cool. So we've been looking at that as well, different things. So now, what percentage of your management is active? versus, you know, index funds, mutual funds, etc? Paul: I'd say about half. Allen: Okay, and all of the clients are okay with that, or do you do client by client? Paul: I pretty much put everybody under the same model. Yeah. So Allen: And so with interactive, how does that work, you have to go into each account to put a trade on or you just put one trade on and it just trickles.. Paul: There's a master account and I can set up different  classification. So I could I could buy 1000 shares of IBM and have it spread it putting all the accounts did that.  So they have to watch out for is some of the accounts can trade certain things, some can't, like RIAs cannot do you know, futures and naked options and things like that as far as, at least on the credit side. Allen: Okay. All right. So can does that get confusing? If you want if you want like, Okay, I want like a say IBM, I want my IBM stock to be 5% of all of my everybody's portfolio. Paul: Yeah, that would be a different the different equation. So basically, like I did a trade today where I figured, you know, want to take a $10,000 risk. So divided by what that option was going for. And I bought that many contracts to take on that kind of risk. So not necessarily rebalancing everyone is usually trade by trade. So putting on a certain set of circumstances, set a step stop loss and things like that. Allen: Okay, cool. So you can do it as easy or as simple as you want. Or you can make it as complicated as you want. Yeah, up to you. Yeah. Nice. So what types of what types of trades do you do? Paul: Well, some of what you teach. So I do some swing trading. And of course, you know, credit spreads and things like that. And some, you know, some some of the dividend paying stocks and covered calls and things like that. Allen: And do you do any any oil futures options? Paul: Well, I'm not. I'm just at the point to get licensed for that. Allen: It's a separate license? Paul: That's as a separate license. Yes. So you have to you have to get licensed through the, Chicago Board of Trade, the NFA and National Futures Association. Allen: Okay. Okay. And then will you be able to do it the same as everything else through Interactive Brokers? Paul: Yes, I think so. Sometimes you don't know to actually do it. So I think it's pretty similar. Allen: Sweet. Okay. Now, as a as an RIA, do you also advise your clients on other alternative investments, you know, real estate, crypto anything else? Or is it just stocks, bonds, options? Paul: I'm always getting to ask questions, you know, because I'm in, you know, really, I'm gonna CPA world or the IRA world, I'm getting asked questions. So I will advise on that if I think I have a good opinion. You know, I'm not roll up on that rolled up on crypto Allen: Right, right. Are you still bound by the same fiduciary type rules on that or?  Paul: You could come under some scrutiny. You know, you'd like an offsetting handed comment, and then someone does something crazy. And so you got to be a little careful. Allen: Yeah. All right. And okay, so him now with the interactive account, or the broker dealer, is the software any different? Like, versus if you open a regular account by yourself? Is there anything you have to learn a new platform? Or is it basically the same thing?  Paul: It's pretty much the same platform, you just have to understand how to do the trading, like I was telling you about, like, allocating between all the accounts, but the platform itself is basically the same. Okay. Cool. Yeah. Allen: What do you see as the future of money management, because like, you know, they got these robo advisors now, and they got like Robin Hood, trying to get everybody to trade on their own. And so what do you see down the pike? You know, do you see like, your clients are like, yeah, rather just have you do it? Or are robots or whatever? Paul: Yeah, I can see, you know, some of the robot picking up. But on average, most people out there don't know, hardly anything about the investing world. My average client, so I think it's going to be still a good field you know, way up currently doing it. Allen: Okay, and who is like your average client? Paul: They're probably like 50 years old, that did 60. And probably, you know, got assets anywhere from, you know, 50 to 50,000 to over a million dollars, you know? Allen: And do you have any limits on who can invest with you? And how much? Paul: No, I mean, like, I'm not, I'm just gonna take on any account right now. It would need to be over a certain dollar amount for me to I just always have to keep that in mind about, you know, do I want to take on a five or $10,000 account? Because it's gonna be extra work. Taking that versus the capital issue at-- You don't have to be you don't have to comply with the day trading rules. You know, because because if you if you accidentally in and out three, three trades in a week, then your account gets shut down. You know, so you have to deal with that. So yeah, so I'm trying to gradually move up from like a minimum of 25,000 to 50,000, 200,000. Allen: Okay. And then you also have a certain criteria like a certain person that you want right? Certain somebody they can handle the options and that Intertek can handle that because I mean, it does swing a little bit. So if they have a 5,000 to $10,000 account, they freak out if they lose $1,000, obviously, that's not the right person for you anyway. Paul: Right. But on that same note, I had a client the other day that, you know, they have, you know, an excess a half million dollars with me. And they want to know how they could put in more money since this market was down so they could capture, capture that now mark? I love that kind of client. expecting them to call you and tell you, why is my account down? Actually, that question is dead. They're saying, How can we put more money in?  Allen: Yeah, that's a smart, that's a Smart Client. So that's, that's got to be your email, you know, going out, like, Hey, he's trying to give me more now. double down on your investments. Okay. Now, How has being a money manager improved your own trading? Or hasn't? Paul: Well, I mean, it's made me to seek out new avenues of investing. You know, because I'm looking out for my clients. By the same token, when I do that, I find things that I can use to, you know, like, I don't know, if I would have found the old future options without that, you know, seeking out new new investment strategies, you know, so I could do a better job for my clients. Allen: Okay. Now, we've had a lot of volatility lately. And you've, you've alluded to it already. When stocks down about 20% or so right now, how do you deal with the investor concerns or expectations? Paul: I'm continually learning that. The more, the more proactive you can be with that, I find that it's better. Like, if you have a bad day or a bad trade that, you know, that affects it so much, and then maybe call and talk to them about it versus waiting for them to call you later, and they get their quarterly statements. And they call you know? Allen: Right. So do you find that a large portion of your job is just talking to people and just calming them down? Or explaining certain things to them? Or educating them? Paul: In the beginning? Yes. If someone's with you for a while, and they haven't gotten, understood your ways, and why you do what you do. And it would be generally in the first year of a client relationship, you indeed do that more, but there is sort of they get to know you, you you get to know them and sort of like a training curve there. Allen: And now, most of your clients, are they either they know you or they were referred to you. Right. So there's always there's already that trust built in from the beginning. Most of them yes, yeah. So if you, you know, advertising, somebody comes in cold, they're like, oh, yeah, I like what you're doing here. You know, here's $100,000, there's gonna be a lot more back. Paul: Yeah. Allen: Okay. So how are you handling? How are you handling the volatility? Like when somebody calls up and says, Oh, my count is down. How do you? What do you do there? Paul: Well, number one, what I did when I saw when I saw the market starting to tank, I basically, was going more into cash. So like, I the client won't know why we aren't investing. I said, Well, I'm waiting for the market to give me indication has, it's found the bottom or, you know, it is headed back up. So I don't want to, I'm not a bottom picker. But I don't want to like, write it further down. You know. So that's one way of dealing with it. And they seem to appreciate that quite a bit and understand that. So I don't think that's something you get out of a typical advisor. Allen: So yeah, but what if somebody calls you and says, Oh, my God, you know, I'm down 10%? What am I going to do? I can't handle this. How do you handle that? Have you ever had that happen? Paul: Yeah. I tried to change up their strategies a little bit to get them a little more solid, or maybe not trade as much in their account. Just being a little more cautious. Allen: Okay, so Okay, so you can actually choose, like, let's say, we talked about that IBM thing. So if you're like, Hey, I'm buying IBM, you could choose and say, okay, don't put it in this account in this account, just because in all these other ones,. Yeah. All right. So you can actually tailor it because like, if somebody goes, Yeah, I just want to be long stocks, or I just want tech stocks. And I just want you know, credit spreads. So they you can, you can do that. Yeah, okay. Yep. So, do you have any shortcuts that you can share? You know, for somebody that's thinking, hey, you know, this sounds like cool, I'm gonna I'm gonna get into this. RIA business, anything that you probably didn't know, ahead of time that you would have liked to have known? Paul: This is sort of like a unknown territory. Because, I mean, when I was doing it, I couldn't get anybody to actually figure it out what like a serious 65 license would do. And I was sort of going into blindly a little bit. So I mean, I think the number one thing is maybe you know, then contact me. Shortcuts is, you know, I don't know like I had to find a place to take the take the course for that. And then I hired a guy to tutor me some. And, you know, there's, there's these firms out there wanting you to sign up with them for them to do oh, you know, like your paperwork and so forth. And I just sort of like fumbled my way through it and plagiarized another agreement online affected us. And so another thing is to know if you're in this world, you will get audited. Personally. Well, the your investment firm, right, yeah. Yeah. Like I'm in the CPA world, and I probably will never get out a different CPA world. But the investment side, I will get audited probably time and time again. So far, it's only been once one step Florida, but yeah, Allen: okay. Yeah. I mean, that's a good thing. I guess, you know, that, that the advisors and like you said, you know, the Bernie Madoff, he keeps him at bay as much as he can a little bit. So some of that, I guess, from a consumer standpoint, and that's a good thing to hear. Paul: Yeah, but a lot of a lot of us, they don't necessarily understand the world as much as you do. And it's more like them checking a box somewhere in a city. They ask this question, or I did that, but they don't really find that don't really necessarily know exactly what they're doing, you know, Allen: Yeah. So but do you mean tax audited or audited by like the audit by Paul: the state by the financial regulatory people for the state you're in Allen: The state regulatory? Okay, so every state has their own regulatory stuff that you have so far. Paul: Yeah. So just just sort of background here. Usually, as you're managing under $100 million, you're managed by the state. But then once you hit $100 million in the SEC is basically is going to your watchdog, it's gonna look over your shoulder. Allen: Okay. All right. Cool. And you're in Florida, right? Correct. But you can take clients from anywhere? Paul: I can. But different states have different rules, most of them allow you to take five to 15 clients, and not really be registered with them. But then once you hit over that threshold, they want you to fully registered with them. But there are a few states that require you if you get one client, they want you to be registered. And Louisiana was one of those states. Allen: So I guess, depending on how much capital the guy is gonna give you whether it's worth it to register there.. Paul: Exactly, exactly, yeah. Okay. All right. Allen: So would you knowing what you know, now, are you happy that you went this route? Paul: Ask me again, in a few years. Allen: Well, you've been doing already for like, eight years. So kind of got some kind of track record here. Paul: Yeah, it's been, you know, it's been definitely a learning curve, you know, from the regulatory side. And then from the investment side, too, so? Yes, I'm glad I did it. But it' had its rough moments. Allen: Well, give me an example. Paul: Well if you if you lose on a trade, you know, it can affect your account and other people's account. So that's probably the biggest things that has happened to me, you know? And then you got to figure out how am I gonna tell this person this?  Allen: Yeah. So how did you how did you deal with that? Paul: I prayed a lot. Basically, if I knew the fact that someone so much, I would, I call them and talk to him about it. But in a certain situation, like, because it was spread over so many accounts, it didn't really affect anyone that much. It wasn't that big of a deal. Like, you know, if I'm managing $5 million of money, and I lose 20,000, you know, the most Someone's probably gonna lose is maybe 2 or 3000. So the overall number is a big number. But you know, we spread between all the counts, it's not that big of a number. Allen: Interesting. Okay. Yeah, I mean, that's that thing, right? There is like, the biggest thing that's kept me out of it for all these years, you know, people have been asking me from the beginning, okay, can you take my money? I'm like, nope, nope, because I don't know how I'm gonna handle the stress. I don't know if, um, we will sleep, I can lose my own money, you know, market down 20% Okay, whatever, it'll go back up, I got time, you know, but somebody else if I lose your money, and I don't know, I don't know how I'm gonna handle it. And so that's the one thing that that's really caused me to be hesitant up till now. And I agree what you said about not having that much information out there. You know, I mean, there are companies out there that will like if you want to be in RIA you type in how to be an RIA and there's a company that hey, you if you give us like 30 grand, you know, we'll do all the paperwork and we'll file everything for you. So you Okay, but what do I actually get? You know, they're like well you do the paperwork. Well what about after that? How do I get clients how do I do this how to do that they will help you at all and these two guys they had approached, they had talked that a because I'm you know Option Genius is in what's called the financial publishing space that world, so we have our own little conventions and all the Guru's come and hang out and talk marketing and stuff. And so there was there was these two guys who were speakers, and they were telling all of the financial publishers that hey, you guys need to get into the into the management business, because you guys already have all these clients? They already trust you? You know, and they probably have a lot of money because people coming to me, you know, they say, Hey, I want to learn how to trade options. Okay, cool, you know, and how large is your account? They're like, Oh, 50,000. Okay, cool. And they trading options with 50,000. But they also have like, maybe a million dollar IRA, that they're not touching, or their wife has $500,000 that is with some other financial advisor that she doesn't want her husband to touch with options. So it's like, yeah, everybody that comes in has a lot more money. So if you started an IRA or an advisor, then you know, they'll give you that money as well. And you can make all this money. And I was like, Okay, that's interesting. But, you know, what are the legalities and all that and they wanted, I don't know, obtain $1,000 plus a percentage of the company to actually teach me all this stuff. And I'm finding a there's a lot of secrecy, as you can say, you know, and Wall Street, I think puts it like that on purpose. Because they don't want everybody to know what they're doing and what they that they don't know what they're doing. Pretty much. So cool. Paul: I don't know, that's intentional, but it just got I think there's so few people who are looking to do it. And like, it's not a widespread throughout the population thing. So you don't find as much about it, you know. Allen: Maybe okay, yeah, I'll take that. Yeah. Because like, you know, even like, what is the difference between an RIA and a hedge fund? You know, I've been beating my head, like, which one? Which way? Do we go? Which way? Do we go? If we go this way? Or this? Or what are the pros? What are the cons, and there's like, no one person that can that can tell me, if you want to go to a hedge fund, they got a little hedge fund world, and, you know, you got to you got to pay the dues to get in. If you want the RA world, then it's more common, but it's, it's for the guys, you know, for people who are like, Yeah, you know, I just want to put everybody's money in an index fund, you know, so it's like, what you're doing is totally different, like, I have not met any advisors that are actually, you know, trading that actively for people. So I mean, compared to the other guy, Joe Schmo that charges 1% a year, or 2% a year, just to put their money in an index fund compared to what you're doing, you know, your value is just so much more. But it does seem like it's very similar to a hedge fund where, you know, a hedge fund is a little bit different, where all the money is pooled into one spot. And then, you know, the, the trader controls it, you're doing kind of similar, where you can look at it and be like, Okay, I got, you know, $10 million under management, how am I going to split that up into different trades? And it just happens to be in different people's accounts? So have you ever thought about increasing your rates because like a hedge fund, they can charge a percentage of the gains? An RIA can't? Can they do that? Paul: They can do that on their certains particulars criteria? I think like you have to have an investor who's has at least $2 million in investable assets. They have at least $1 million invested with you. And then you can have certain arrangements where you say, Well, if I make whatever percentage I'll make about what the s&p does, you'll split it with me, or something like that, you know? Okay, so again, it's very, it's has a lot of criteria to it can't be done, though. Okay. Yeah. Because I wouldn't say the hedge fund world is based on what you're telling me is, cuz you're basically commingling all the funds. Right? So you got to do like a statement for each person or something. Yeah. And so I think the advantage is, you can just commingle it all and then do whatever you need to do. And then at the end of the day, you somehow allocated? Allen: Right, so the thing with the hedge fund is that all the investors have to be accredited. Okay, so accredited, as you know, probably, you know, you basically you have a million dollar net worth not putting your house, or you're making upwards of 300,000 a year. So, you know, basically, so at least Paul: They have to tell you, they're accredited. Right? Allen: I think we would actually want them to be proof, you know, give me proof otherwise, we're not letting you in. Paul: That was actually in so my testing I just did is like, yeah, you want this criteria? But are you actually gonna go go check it? No. So Allen: Interesting. Okay. Because I mean, you know, the government says that the hedge funds, you know, if you're an accredited investor, you should be smarter than the average bear. And so, if you lose money, it's not that big a deal. Like you are smart enough to get into it. You know, somebody with $5,000 or $10,000. That's my life savings. No, sorry, you can't invest in this. Even though the hedge fund might be like doing 1,000,000% a year, you can't invest because you're not accredited. Ras can take basically everybody, so that was one of the things okay, somebody comes in with 50,000 as an RIA, you might just take it because it's not that much paperwork. It's not extra for you. But for a hedge fund. Yeah, no, I can't do it. Because I gotta, I gotta pay the auditing company. I gotta pay the statement company. I got to pay the customer. You know, whoever's doing customer service and answering the phone and doing all that, and salespeople and all that. So 50,000 is not going to cut it, you know, the limit is a lot higher. For sure. Okay. Yeah. So yeah, that, in that sense, totally different world. But very similar from what I'm seeing is that, you know, you're doing probably what we're gonna be doing, you know, similar. Paul: So you probably can't take qualified money like IRAs and things like that. Allen: I think they can. Yeah, yeah, I think they can, as long as a person is accredited. And so there's different regulations, 5063 C, or six, C, five, or six D, they'll those tell you, you know, if you can take accredited and non accredited, and then can you advertise or not, I'm still learning all this, it's all different, because like, if you start a Real Estate Fund, different from if you're doing a hedge fund, versus a private equity fund, so some of the rules apply to everything. Some of the rules are just separate. So I'm still learning all that. But I know that the Interactive Brokers, people, they've done webinars in the past with attorneys. So if anybody wants to start a hedge fund, you can still use the Interactive Brokers platform. And they have they actually have a separate portal, I think, for hedge funds. Yeah, I've seen that. You've seen that too? Where you can actually see what other people are doing. And what are the trades that they're making? Paul: I didn't know about that. I just knew that they had some kind of hedge fund portion of what they're doing. I didn't know exactly what it meant. Allen: Yeah. So So what they said was that, you know, the attorney was like, you know, it'll take several, you know, maybe $30,000, to set up your hedge fund, you can probably do it with a smaller amount, if you want to start an incubator fund, which is like, you know, if you have your own money, and you put in and say $300,000, and you trade it as if it's a fund, and you don't maybe that that paperwork might be like 7000, and you set that up, you treat it as a fun, you build up your track record, and be like, Oh, hey, look, you know, I was trading for six months, I got this, that or not, and then you can start advertising it, and you convert it to a full fund. And then you can say, well, look at my track record, this is what I did. And then people can come in for the full fund. So that was one of the things that they were they were talking about. But so yeah, we were we were looking at an interactive, but the one thing that interacted with their software is a little bit more clunky or less user friendly than some of the most user friendly software. Yeah, it was my personal accounts. Now. So when, do you still trade on on your own on the side? Or is all of your money in the big? Paul: I have some money still in the in the huge fund? And then, you know, I have some I have an account on the side, right? Allen: So that separate account, did that change it all after you got licensed? Because they always, you know, when you open an account, they always ask you, are you licensed? And then they're I don't know why they do that. Is there to change anything on? You're not gonna recall? Paul: Yeah. So, there's, there's occasions where you can link up an account with the master fund, and you can D link the account. So I think at one time I had, it's actually my 401k account for my accounting firm attached to the IRA account, but then I detached it. One of the main reasons was for futures. Okay, because I knew I wasn't qualified to do futures for the whole fun. But I could on a mountain account. Allen: Ah, okay. So you have to keep it separate to do the futures options. Yeah. Until you get licensed by them. And is that like a lengthy process as well? The futures options? License? Yeah. Paul: I took a series three exam back a month or so ago. So I'd studied for two or three months, and again, got a tutor. Yeah. Okay. Allen: All right. How many clients do you have right now? Paul: I'd say about 20-25. Allen: Okay. All right. Cool. And so, from a financial standpoint, has it been worth it? Paul: Yeah, it's been really good. I might, my intention when I know that, you know, once I got into it, my intention was over the years, you know, retirement age, is at my incomes shift for my CPA business or to my investment business. So I could do that, say two hours a day and retirement versus, you know, doing tax seasons and all that. CPA visits. Allen: Okay. Is that still the plan? Yes. Still plan. Awesome. Cool. So yeah, I mean, handling managing millions of dollars of assets in two hours a day. That sounds pretty good to me. Paul: That might be a pipe dream. But that's what I had in mind.  Allen: I think you could do it your own way. You're on your way. Cool. Awesome. So is there anything that I haven't asked you that you think like, oh, yeah, people need to know this. Paul: I could probably sit here and think about a few things. Not on every call. No, no, no, no. I mean, one thing you have to like for instance, a you have to have a like an email account that you Gotta add to retain all your emails for at least like five years. That's one thing to keep in mind. And like I have to send a like a balance sheet and income statement to the state of Florida every year and get someone to notarize it. You have to upload information to the FINRA site at least once a year. And that's where you pay your like on license Louisiana along Florida and things like that. So I pay my fees for those licensing booth vendors website. Allen: And that you had told me that the fee that you charge for management that comes out Interactive Brokers basically pays you every quarter, your fixed asset if I had to build it, right, yeah. Paul: Okay. So, so they do it automatically. But when I got audited, the state wanted me to actually create invoices. So the answer your question is, I'm not sure what the real requirement is. So far, I guess I met that criteria then. So I'm not actually grading him. What's the reporter right now? Okay. Allen: Yeah, I mean, because like, I mentioned, those two consultants that I had talked to, they had told me that I would have to bill everybody invoice, everybody, every quarter. And those people would have to pay me directly. So it wouldn't be taken out of their account, it would be sent directly to me that they would have to write a check every quarter. And I'm like, that's a pain in the butt. You know, that's pretty cumbersome. Yeah, if a customer has to pay, you know, a big check every quarter for management fees. And then especially if you have a down year, he's like, What am I paying for it? I don't pay for this anymore. And you don't get paid. So I was like, Okay, that's a big red flag. But I'm glad that that's not true. Cool. Okay. Paul: One thing I have figured out there is, like, there's an account I was going to take from someone from one advisors to me, and they had all their fees, like totally hidden with all these mutual funds and things like that. And so like, you know, that account, I was gonna charge 3.3%. But we weren't able to ever get to the bottom of what the other advisor was charging. So, even though they have a lot of disclosures and things like that, I think we could have pressed the issue if we really wanted to. But, um, but you know, I ended up losing that account. Allen: So did that customer realize that, that he's being charged all these things? Paul: No, no, no clue. No, I mean, whenever I sort of parted ways, and I said, you guys at least need to figure out what they're charging you. You'd be surprised at the amount of inept that's out there and people who are actually hiring advisors, like, yeah, most people do not keep like their annual statements. They couldn't tell me how much they made last year. You know, because really, when I'm taking on an account, I want to know, what their track record has been sort of what I would need to beat to make them happy. You know, a lot of them are not that attuned to that. Allen: That's crazy. Yeah. I mean, people, they work their entire lives to save up money and invest it so they can retire. But then they don't pay any attention to the money. Oh, boy.. Paul: I think it's because they don't know that much about it. So they wouldn't know what to do if it was not what they wanted, you know? Allen: Yeah. I mean, you gotta you gotta take a little bit of time to at least read the statements and figure out where's the money going? And it could be better disclosed, you know, the statements could be easier to read that that's definitely sure. That's, yeah. But it is what it is for now. Paul: Like, I have this account right now, I'm probably going pick up another six to nine or 1000. And I asked them to get their annual statements ready. Because I wanted to see what they have been. have been doing, you know, so, you know, so they didn't know if there'll be they'll find those. So let me guess. It's like, it's weird. Allen: Okay, they just like asked her her advisor. Paul: Oh, that might be red flag fight flight to them. And they are looking so yeah. Wow. Okay. All right. seem bizarre. Allen: So if somebody was thinking about starting their own advisory firm, what would you say? They would need in terms of like, what are the minimums, okay, you should have been in the market for, you know, five years, you know, or you got to know XYZ, is there anything that you would say that, you know, if you don't, if you can't even do this, and this is not for you? Paul: Well, they're planning on doing what I'm doing, they probably need at least three to five years, you know, their own market experience. But, you know, that being said, like, I just met with someone the other day, and I could put all my funds through their strategies, and just sit and coast. You know, really, they charge an extra 1% or whatever, so I'll back off of my fee a little bit. You know, so you can you can play the game different ways. Wow. So you could do like I can see a new person and starting that and just have these other you know, because they have what's called sub managers or something like that. I don't know the exact term. Basically, you're hiring other money managers to manage the money you have for your clients. Right, like sub advisors, maybe is what it's called. Okay. So I'm not saying it will totally preclude them that they didn't have three to five years. But, you know, hopefully they're drawing on someone's experience to help hold their handle that Allen: Right. And do you know how much it costs to get it up and running? Paul: I would say three to five grand. Wow, that's not much. I mean, the hardware, these firms are brought in to charge you five times that? Allen: Yeah. Okay. So well, the sub accounts. Yeah, actually, I do remember those consultants talking to me about that. Paul: They they call it sub advisors? Allen: Yeah, I think that's what it is. And it's like, yeah, you know, if you don't want to do it yourself, you can put your money, you can put your your clients money into different buckets, and then they just do it for you, and they charge and then you split the fees or whatever, or something like that. So, and then each broker, each broker dealer has different ones. So like Fidelity or Schwab will have different sub accounts versus what you could put your stuff in. But interesting, I just Just curious the ones that you had talked to what what strategies were they were using, Paul: They're using free cash flow to is their criteria for who they're investing in. So they have like international, they call a cash cow c-o-w. So they've international domestic, and things like that. So they have a different definition of free cash flow. So they're they're fearing that's the best value, their way of determining value out there, like sort of like a value fund, but their own definition of what value is. Allen: Okay, so they're investing in stocks. Paul: Yes, international and domestic.   Allen: And they handle the ins and outs. And so you could put a portion of your client's money in there, you put it all in there. So it's like, it's like an ETF. So basically, you can say I want 20% of my money to go on this domestic one 20% International. And I might, I'm in talks with them. So I might end up doing some more money that way. But so they're coming up with different sample portfolios that I can use their funds for. Allen: Okay, interesting. And so that must be a much larger company. Paul: Yeah, I'm not sure how big they are. But they're, you know, big enough to where they had like a representative here in central Florida and some of their back office helping them out. Awesome. I'm not sure their size yet. Allen: Yeah. So I mean, this rabbit hole is pretty big. You can dive in there and spend a lot of time figuring all this stuff out. Paul: Yeah, yeah. So I can see a way I could sit and close more. But you're only doing it two hours a day anyway. Allen: Cool. All right. Paul: Well, maybe we're gonna get into my retirement years, a certain amount of years. I'll just put it there and just coast. The zero hours a day. Yep. Allen: Yeah, my, my neighbor in the office next door, he's a financial adviser. He's been doing it for, I think, 25 years now. So he's built up, you know, a sizable clientele. And so now he's at the point where he wants to retire. But he doesn't know what to do with the firm. He's like, you know, he makes probably a good 500,000 a year income from it. And he's like, I want one of my kids to take over. But the kids are not really willing, and not interested. He's like, I don't know what to do. So he's still there.  So there's been periods of times or, you know, like, I sit on the CPA world deal with other investment advisors, where it's been a quite a lucrative market to get bought your practice bought out by bigger, let's say Merrill Lynch or something like that, you know, they pay some pretty big bucks to buy those books of business. Yeah, yeah. Because I mean, one of the things that the consultants told me is that once you get you get a client, that turnover, meaning the fact that they're going to leave you is not very high, they're gonna stay with you for years and years. So you can count on that money coming in, you know, that fee money coming in for a long period of time, unless you unless you totally screw it up, and then they're gonna leave. Paul: If you play the play smart. You know, if you're dealing with someone 50 years old, right now, you know, another 10 or 20 years, you're gonna pick up their kids and things like that when they need investment advice and stuff. It's, it'd be a self perpetuating thing. Allen: Yeah, yeah. And I do like the fact that there's always going to be somebody there willing to buy you, your company. You know, because a lot of times in smaller companies if you're the only person or if you got one or two employees, nobody really wants to buy the company even if it's successful. Nobody wants to buy it because they would without you there they're basically buying a job for themselves, right? It's not running on its own you're the one doing all the work in this case. Yeah, you're the one doing all the work but they don't need you. They can just, you know, have their own advisors take over. So you still get a pretty decent multiple when you sell so that's really cool too. Right? Paul: Also, I met a.. in my travels on this world. I've met the company and actually finance you if you want to buy on someone else's practice in the financial visor word world. Allen: Hmm.. So have you looked into that? Paul: I had a conversation or two with them, but I haven't really pursued it further. Yeah. Because I didn't know if I wanted to buy a larger practice. Right? Yeah. Because generally, that is a seven year payout to do that. So, you know, seven years, you'd be free and clear. Allen: That'll be interesting. Yeah. So a lot of ways to skin this cat. So you would I mean, I'm assuming that if anybody asked you, Hey, should I do this? Probably the answer is yes. Paul: Yeah, I mean, just mean, talk to people who have done it, and sort of figure out if it's a good fit for you, you know? Yeah. It's definitely can be pretty lucrative. Allen: Right? And I like the fact that it's like, for you at least it's more localized, you know, so you're not competing with somebody in California or Canada, or whatever. It's like, yeah, you guys get your clients over there. I'll have my clients over here. You know, they love me, they trust me. We hang out maybe. And sometimes. So it's not like a competitive situation. So, right. Awesome. Are you in any? Are there any, like, associations or memberships for advisors?  Paul: No, I'm not. Allen: No, but obviously, they probably have them? Paul: Yeah, I'm just not familiar. Very familiar with that. I have another advisor to hang out with suddenly sort of share some ideas. That's, that's all I have right now. Allen: And they're also private. Like on their own? Paul: Now, one of the reasons I didn't cover this in the beginning, like when I started looking into this whole thing, I didn't want to get clients and then share my fees with other people. That's why I didn't latch on to a bigger firm and start building my clients from there. So that's why I started my own Ra. So they will be my clients. And I get all the fees for them. And no one else had had rights to him. So that's, that's one of the reasons I did the way I did it. Allen: Okay. Okay. So what would be the benefits of going with a larger firm just to name recognition? Paul: Well, they have, one of the biggest things is called compliance. So like, right now, I'm my own compliance officer for my firm, okay, and larger firm like that they have whole departments that take care of compliance, for you to make sure you don't get in trouble, the regulators and so forth. So, like this other advisor, I had, he joined another firm, just so you could have that compliance piece to it. But in his firm, he can't trade options. Right? Allen: Because they're very limited. Yeah, exactly.  Paul: It's taught me to join his is up, like can't trade options. Allen: Because compliance says no. Paul: It was on the client's officer. Allen: Right. So that's why when you said you were thinking about advertising, it's the risk is on you because you're the compliance officer. So you got to know exactly what can be done and what can't be done. Right. Right. Interesting, cool. Is there anything else because  I'm out of questions. Paul: One of the things, one of the things I tell you, I looked into going with other companies, other inactive brokers when I started, okay, and like Charles Schwab wanted you to have $7 million you're managing before you could go with them. Allen: Whoa, okay. And they're the biggest right right now, I think. Paul: I think so. Yeah. Yeah. So that's one reasons with Interactive Brokers, because they didn't have the minimums like that. I didn't really check too much rather than other people. Allen: So and how's your customer service at Interactive Brokers, because they for personal accounts, they don't have a good reputation. Paul: Yeah, they have a separate line, you can call as a professional advisor. So it's, I get pretty quick attention. Usually, you know, it's not it's not perfect, but you know, it's decent. Yeah, but you're happy. Yeah, I'm not saying that. I'm sure other companies have better customer service but you know, for right now, they, you know, I might need to call him a few times, but I get what I needed if I need need to.. Allen: And how are their margins and Commissions? Paul: Commission's are pretty low. I don't have the exact numbers I just know less than like $1 per 100 shares. Allen: And who comes out of the customers account? Obviously. Paul: Each person like when you do a trade display something all the counselee they pick up their own fees. Allen: Cool. All right. Well, thank you Paul. You know, Paul's website is again BusinessAdvisors.Pro. Paul said that he could reach out you know, you guys can reach out to him if you have any questions. And Paul is also in our other memberships are other programs as well past trading formula blank check and credit spread. So if you guys are members of those, you can reach out to him there. You'll find him in the group. And he's been very gracious with his time. So I do want to thank you and And he's very active in the group and you know you've been helping a lot of newer people as well they're so appreciate you there. Interesting place, interesting world and as I dive in I'm probably going to reach out to you more. Paul: Sounds great, I appreciate it.  Allen: Thank you thank you so much and we'll talk to you soon JOIN OUR FREE PRIVATE FACEBOOK GROUP: https://optiongenius.com/alliance  Like our show? Please leave us a review here - even one sentence helps. Thank you!

The NBA is experiencing a tanking crisis on both an individual and organizational level. Does the league actually care that teams and players are unwilling or unable to produce the best product night-in, night-out?

St. Paul Public Schools Superintendent Joe Gothard talked live with Vineeta Sawkar on the WCCO Morning News

Paul Nation is one of the world's leading researchers on and writers on vocabulary, reading and fluency, has written dozens of books and been publishing research on these topics since 1970. Paul is Emeritus Professor in Applied Linguistics at the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies (LALS) at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand and has taught in Indonesia, Thailand, the United States, Finland and Japan.For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channelTracy: Hey everybody. Welcome to our podcast.Ross Thorburn: Hey everyone. On our podcasts, I think we spent a lot of time talking about speaking, but we haven't ever really directly tackled the idea of fluency.Tracy: That's true.Ross: Today we've got, once again, Paul Nation, emeritus professor at the School of Applied Linguistics and Applied Language at Victoria University, New Zealand, to talk to us about fluency and vocabulary and how those two things link together.Tracy: Paul is one of the world's leading researchers and writers on vocabulary and fluency. We are incredibly lucky to be able to have him on our podcast.Ross: As usual, we've got three areas that we'll cover in the podcast. Firstly, we will ask Paul why fluency is important. Then secondly...Tracy: ...how can teachers help students develop fluency, and the third one...Ross: ...what are some common mistakes that teachers make in teaching vocabulary and helping students become fluent?Why is fluency important?Tracy: Hello Paul.Paul Nation: Hello.Tracy: How are you doing?Paul: Good.Tracy: Before we go onto fluency, let's start off by talking about vocabulary.Paul: No problem.Tracy: Why have you dedicated so much of your career to vocabulary and vocabulary research?Paul: There's a couple of reasons why I focus on it. I guess being important is one of the reasons. The vocabulary knowledge underlies every language use skill, and without vocabulary, you can't do much in the way of listening, speaking, reading or writing.The other reason I'd probably focus on is that it's been a very poorly researched area in the past. In fact, some of the worst researched areas that I know of in applied linguistics are actually in vocabularies.Ross: Can you tell us a bit about fluency then? To start off, why is fluency so important?Paul: One of my favorite stories about that is when I was in Japan. We went on a train. We weren't quite sure whether we were going to the right place or not. I looked around the carriage, and there was a very studious looking young woman there wearing glasses, looking like a student.I asked her, "Is this the train to Osaka?" She looked at me, and a look of dismay came over her face. She buried her hands in the face. "Oh my goodness, what have I done?" If I caused her to lose face, what's going to happen as a result?Anyway, someone further down the carriage, a man said, "Yes, Osaka." As the train went along, this woman pulled out a book and started reading it. Being nosy, I dropped my pen on the floor and had a quick look at what the book was.She was reading a book called "The Macro Economics of Agriculture" in English. I couldn't read a book called The Macro Economics of Agriculture in English, even being a native speaker. When we got off the train, she came up to us and said, "Where are you going?" I bet that she'd been practicing that sentence for the last 20 or 30 minutes before we got to the station.I said the name. She said, "Follow me." We had a conversation. Here was someone with enormous knowledge of the language and yet not fluent in some of the basic things that she could have quite easily become fluent. It meant that these avenues of use of it were closed off to her.I think it's important that about a quarter of the time on a course to spend getting fluent in reading, getting fluent in writing, using just the little bit that you know even, but making sure that you can use it.Ross: Paul, with fluency, I think there's this concept that, for students, they only really become fluent or develop fluency at maybe intermediate or advanced levels. You wouldn't think of a beginner as being fluent. When do you think it's useful for students to start to develop fluency?Paul: I can't talk about anything nowadays it seems without having to get onto what I call the four strands. The four strands are simply learning through input, learning through output, deliberate learning, and developing fluency.Each one of those that I call a strand, which in the basic principle is that in a well‑balanced language course there should be roughly equal amount of time spent on each of these four strands at every single level of proficiency.If you're learning a language for survival, David Crab and I did some research to set up a survival vocabulary for foreign travel, which is about 120 words and phrases, that if you know those, you can do quite a lot in the language.You can travel around. You can get food. You can find accommodation. You can be polite to people and so on like that. The thing is, you could learn those, but the other thing is you've got to learn them fluently.That means that you can say them in a way that people will understand. When people reply, you need to be able to interpret what they say at a speed which will make it useful for you. Even then learning, a survival vocabulary, you've got to get fluent and that kind of fluency is quite easy to develop.You keep getting people to repeat it over and over again to you and get faster and faster and faster. You keep practicing and practicing and doing that. It's very important because a lot of students have quite a lot of knowledge of English, but they don't have the fluency to put it into practice.How can teachers help students develop fluency?Tracy: Paul, can you please share some practical activities which teachers can use in the classroom to help their students and develop those skills to be more fluent?Paul: I've written lots of books, but the one that I liked the most, one that gave me the greatest satisfaction having written it is called, "What Should Every EFL Teacher Know," because of near I sort of wanted after training teachers and teaching English and that for well over 50 years.I thought if I can sit down, reading all the research, and say in a simple, clear and direct way what do I think EFL teachers should be doing, then there's something wrong with...I haven't spent my life well.I wrote that book and then as, part of doing it, I sat, and I thought, "Well, what if I had to choose 20 teaching techniques and activities, what would they be? The top ones that people should know."I came up with a list of those which are in the book. The ones for speaking fluency, one is a very interesting technique called Four, Three, Two, where the students choose an easy topic, and then they sit down with a partner and teacher says, "Go."For four minutes, they have to talk about that familiar, easy topic. After exactly four minutes, the teacher says, "Stop. Change partners." Then everybody moves onto a new partner.Then for three minutes, the same people, half of the class have to talk again to their partner saying exactly what they said before to the new partner, but doing it in three minutes. After three minutes, they move onto another partner. Then they have to do it in two minutes. That's a very simple, easy but very effective technique for developing spoken fluency.Another one would be repeated delivery of a talk, which is a bit like Four, Three, Two because repetition is one of the ways of developing fluency. It's what I call the will beat a path to fluency, that is you keep doing the same thing over and over again until you get good at it.Another way of developing fluency is a rich and varied map where you do similar things but not exactly the same thing. You change it in some way so that you keep coming at the same stuff, but you're doing it in different ways.A very useful technique for that is called Linked Schools where people might read about something. Then they might write about the same topic, and they would have to get up and speak about that topic.Having now read about it, written about it, when they come to speak about it, they can do this speaking with a lot of knowledge and use that speaking as an opportunity to develop fluency in speaking, drawing on that knowledge.Common mistakes teachers make in teaching vocabulary and helping students become fluentRoss: I remember, Paul, a few years ago, in fact, I think we did a podcast about this, I remember reading a paper that you wrote that was warning teachers of the danger of teaching vocabulary in lexical or semantic sets.Can you tell us about some other examples maybe of where you think there's a gap between what research says works with teaching vocabulary and what teachers tend to do for teaching vocabulary?Paul: The lexical sets was interesting because once again, the research is starting to show that there are sort of niceties to that lexical set idea comparing immediate learning compared with a long‑term retention from it.There's interesting research which shows that the interference is greater with say, if you learn fruit together. It becomes harder with fruit, which in some ways resemble each other like apples or more like oranges. Then they are like bananas.You're more likely to get interference between apples and oranges than you are between apples and bananas in terms of the word form and its meaning. That's funny.I would say that the greatest mistake is one I've mentioned already, which was the idea of vocabulary needs to be taught. I would say another belief that's encouraged by people who haven't read the research is that vocabulary needs to be learned in context.They often express this negatively in the sense that it's not good to learn vocabulary out of context and the research is quite the opposite. Learning vocabulary out of context is highly effective and highly efficient.The idea, for example, of using bilingual word cards or bilingual flashcard programs is a very good idea. You'd have this often criticized because it says all the vocab isn't learned in context.If it's part of a well‑balanced program where there's opportunities for learning from input‑output in fluency development, which are all in context. Then some deliberate learning, using the first language translation, learning the word without any illustrative context around it is very effective and efficient.Tracy: That one is interesting. I think that's very different to what most teachers believe and what gets taught on most of the teacher training courses.Paul: Steve Crashing criticized this saying that this learning will not be learning which will be of use when you come to use the language normally. I tackled him on this at a conference one time, and I said, "Does this apply to vocabulary? The idea that deliberate learning doesn't result in the kind of knowledge you need for a normal language used."He said, "Yes, it applies to vocabulary." I said, "Good." We went away, and we got one of our PhD students working on it. She showed the deliberate decontextualized learning of vocabulary resulted in both implicit knowledge and explicit knowledge.Implicit knowledge is a kind of knowledge that you need for normal language use, this kind of flash card learning. You can learn enormous amounts in a very short time, but they out very important principles to follow when you do this learning.These are principles, which have been well‑established by psychological research or research in psychology over the last almost 100 years, or so, involving repetition, spacing of the repetitions, retrieval that means not looking at the word and the meaning together all the time, but having to try and retrieve or recall the meaning that went with the word.If you can't recall it, you have a look. The idea of spaced retrieval is very important. The idea of varying the order of the words being learned, so you're not learning them in the same serial order or anything like it.There are simple guidelines for that learning, but they're very important guidelines. If learners are trained in how to do that, training is not a big deal for that, they could learn large amounts in a very short time.This allows them to make good progress through extensive reading and extensive listening and things like that, because they bring all this background knowledge of decontextualized learning, which now becomes contextualized through their reading and listening.More from Paul NationRoss: Paul, I'll put a link to your University of Victoria web page. Is that a place for people to go if they want to find out more about your work?Paul: Yeah. The latest thing on the website is the updated vocabulary levels test, which is the most useful test for teachers of English as a foreign language to do, to measure the learners' vocabulary size. Then I wrote a book for learners called "What Do You Need to Know to Learn a Foreign Language?" That's free for download.Ross: Thanks so much again for taking the time to come and talk to us.Paul: No problem. Good luck with your work.Ross: Thanks, Paul.Paul: Bye everyone.Tracy: Bye.

Neil Mandt is an actor, director, producer, and tech entrepreneur. He has directed and produced a lot of movies such as, The Million Dollar Kid and Disney's Million Dollar Arm. He is the leading actor, director, and one of the producers of one of my favorite travel movies, and one of the movies that inspired me to embark on an around-the-world trip, Last Stop for Paul. He's been to 120 countries and is also a member of The Circumnavigators Club. In this episode, we talk about how the movie Last Stop for Paul came about and some of the lessons and take-aways from his travels. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/reginstravels/message

Message preached by Pastor Scott Hanks at Heritage Baptist Church, Lawrence Kansas on Sunday School, November 7th, 2021.

Paul, One Man, One Final GospelBy Tammy Lacock In this week's podcast, Warren Litzman emphasizes the urgent need for Christians to know what Paul has plainly written throughout all his 14 epistles. And yet, most Christians are ignorant of his message, his final gospel for the born-again believer. In fact, about 90 percent of born-again preachers today don't know what it means to be born again. As Christians, we can live a lifetime and never know what's going on, unless we dive into Paul's epistles and the Holy Spirit reveals to us the answer to the ultimate question “What is Life?” Paul knew he was the only man God raised up to deliver the answer to this question and how to live once knowing the answer. God's entire plan, His entire hope, His entire scheme was placed in Paul. How did Paul handle it? He knew nothing else. His old life was dead, and Christ was his new life. “Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ” (Philippians 3:8 KJV). Throughout Paul's epistles, he tells us over and over that Christ is life. He doesn't just give us life; He is our life. Our old lives died at the Cross, and we are an entirely brand-new creation in Christ (Galatians 2:20). The problem is, we don't know it and, therefore, haven't given our minds over to this new knowledge. Our minds are still fixed on the old person, the only life we've known. Paul said, “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 2:5). We must allow the Holy Spirit to do His job and now fix our minds on the Christ that lives in us. Once we can do that, we will be shown and guided on how to live in our new status as God's bona fide children. We are now complete in Christ, free to be who God uniquely created us to be “before the foundation of the world” (Ephesians 1:4). We have been born again into a new life in Christ, bred by God by the placing of His Son, the “Incorruptible Seed,” in each of us (1 Peter 1:23). Our salvation is Christ, not by any self-effort. God no longer accepts our self-effort as He previously did for 4,000 years before Christ's death. He only accepts Christ, the Christ that now lives in each and every one who believes. Paul was the only man who brought this final gospel to the world. Nothing, not even jail, kept him from getting his gospel out. Will you follow Paul as he follows Christ? (1 Corinthians 11:1). Drop the structures we've built up around us and truly live from Christ within as Christians, Christ-persons? Christ is our strength, our joy, our peace, our righteousness. He IS Life!

Week 3 of series "The Gospel According to Paul" Scripture Lesson: 1 Corinthians 3:1-9; 12:1-11 Paul wanted to speak sense into a fractured and dysfunctional church, and help them understand the importance of a shared faith and life with one another. Paul was urging Christians to understand that we are not alone in this life, and we are not alone in our faith. We have the strength of God to carry us forward, we have the community of believers to accompany us in our journey, and we have the power of the Holy Spirit to help us stay rooted in Christ and live as an example of God's grace.

Ecommerce has come a long way from its early days as a separate part of the company that you set up and just hope to see returns on. Now, ecommerce is pivotal for just about every organization — but there is one faction of businesses that still lags behind. There are $17 trillion dollars worth of B2B payments made every year. Yes, trillion with a T. And half of those payments are still being made manually. Clearly, there is a massive shift that still needs to happen in the B2B space, and Deloitte Digital is helping make those digital transformations a reality.Paul do Forno is the Managing Director at Deloitte Digital, and on this episode of Up Next in Commerce, he helped us understand the struggles B2B brands are facing and how moving them into the digital space could spell a massive change in the ecommerce industry. Paul also dives into some of the major trends he’s keeping an eye on in the ecommerce world, including how ecommerce continues to scale around the globe, most notably in Latin America. Plus, he shares some tips for businesses who are overwhelmed by the amount of channels and platforms they suddenly have to play in. Spoiler: he says do less. Tune in to hear more!Main Takeaways:Massive Call And Response: Bigger brands are struggling to stay connected to their consumers in a way that scales. Today, customers are looking to have a more authentic relationship and connection with the brands they engage with and support. For enterprises, connecting one-to-one is nearly impossible, so they are investing in tools like A.I. and conversational platforms to keep up with this newer generation of customers who crave connection.Dinosaurs Still Exist: So much B2B activity is still done manually, which means that there are trillions of dollars of transactions that could be moving online if/when B2B companies finally shift their activities to the digital space. The problem is that many B2B companies are miles behind their B2C peers in terms of optimizing the digital space for their many personas. It will take a lot of tools and transformation to bring those traditional B2B companies into 2021, but it will be necessary because the next generation is not interested in manually doing business and would much rather work with companies that have effective digital tools.Do Less: Brands can get caught up in the hype and the attempts to keep up with the Joneses. Instead, they should focus on being great at one platform or marketing activity. Plus, it’s critical to never forget the basics — like making sure your email list is generating the leads and engagement it should be to power your business.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---Transcript:Stephanie:Hey everyone and welcome back to Up Next in Commerce. I'm your host, Stephanie Postles, CEO at Mission.org. Today on the show we have Paul de Forno, the managing direction at Deloitte Digital. Paul, welcome.Paul:Thanks. Excited to be here.Stephanie:I'm excited to have you. I was looking through your background and I saw you were on a list of the hundred most influential people in ecommerce and I was like, we need him. We need Paul. Why do you think you got on that list?Paul:I think first of all, in some ways I'm the old guy who's been around carrying the ecommerce flag for a long time, so I've been doing ecommerce for 20 years. When you've been around that long, 20 years ago it was, trust me, ecommerce is going to be big, honest. Most of the big companies just looked at me and said, "Yeah, it's just a tiny percentage. We don't have the time to focus on it." I've gone through the whole lifecycle from, "Yeah, I don't think ecommerce is going to be big," to, "Oh my god. What are we going to do? Everything is ecommerce."Stephanie:Yep, what did your journey look like? What have you worked on over the years, and then what does your role at Deloitte Digital look like now?Paul:Yeah, I've had some pretty interesting projects all along. We help customers at Deloitte, we're one of the largest implementers and SIs all the way from strategy, studio design, implementation, and run ecommerce and digital platforms. Kind of soup to nuts, end to end for some of the largest Internet retailers both B2C and B2B. My background, I've worked with some of the largest retailers and brands in the world, getting them online, selling, and also supply chain and connecting up all of those things.Paul:I've had the great experience of 20 years ago working with some of the earliest big retail brands of them ... It's kind of funny, when they first started, they treated ecommerce like a store because at the size that they were, on some of them, they were like ... And literally, they would call it store number 1099 and that's the way they treated it almost like a completely separate channel over the to the side. Yeah, let's put some money over there and grow and then see what happens. That from over time, then it became more of a challenge of omnichannel.Paul:How do we make sure that the channels aren't fighting against each other because we dealt with some retailers that literally would ... They wouldn't want returns to come in to the store because those sales and we're not getting them credit, right? That came back and if they exchanged for something else, and so they would be internal fighting because the bonuses of the executives weren't aligned. We've gone kind of like it's off to the side, it's big enough to challenge, to now it's almost the reverse. Retail wants to get more love from the ecommerce side.Stephanie:Yeah, it's a funny and an interesting flip that we see. We've had some guests on the show who said the same thing, like when I started out in ecommerce, they had us in a different building, like on the campus that they were at, they're like, that's the ecommerce team, they're doing their own thing. We've had a couple people say how siloed they were and now, like you said, interesting how retail is like, come on, come give us a little love now.Paul:Yeah, exactly.Stephanie:When you're looking through all these trends that are happening right now, I know that back in the day you were going to a lot of conferences, you were flying all over the world probably, and now I see and follow you on Clubhouse. Tell me a bit about how you're staying on top of the trends and what kind of things are you discussing now on Clubhouse or wherever else you're doing these virtual events?Paul:Yeah, I'll maybe separate ... Definitely right now as we're speaking it's almost a year to the day that I haven't been on a plane. In the last 20 years, over a 100,000 to 150,000 miles a year that I've been flying around.Stephanie:Oh my gosh.Paul:One, my wife has gotten to know me.Stephanie:Hi, Paul, nice to meet you.Paul:But, it's given me a lot of opportunity to connect digitally and do more research and some of the new tools, like you talked about, Clubhouse, and I'll come back to that. I think what this has just done is accelerated ecommerce and how important that is and commerce everywhere and brought it forward, and there's a lot of interesting trends that have popped out. Some of the things that may not be as evident, so in the past year, one of the biggest growth areas just for convenience has been around the growth of commerce around groceries, because we had to, right? You got a lot of the biggest stores growing and anywhere from 70% to over a 100%, and so a lot of the innovation has happened in groceries because it needed to, right? The companies that invested more have done well.Paul:For example, if you look at how Target has done, right? They were able to stay open because they had groceries and so they actually grew and were more profitable and a lot of that why they grew was their investments in shipped, a number of different way they pick from their stores, and so it's amazing that not only did they grow that much but their profitability on the ecommerce channel went up which is almost unheard of in a time like this. They executed unbelievably well.Paul:Then on the other side, another interesting related to the grocery which kind of because it forced people to try something new, the largest growing segment on online grocery was actually baby boomers, and it's because they never were forced to do it. They were always used to going to the store, and so we really see that as a watershed moment of hey, to get over the hump, hey, this isn't as bad. Then as soon as you try something and you do it a couple times, it's going to change how people behave.Paul:we expect the adoption rate going forward for boomers, for example, and older will continue. It won't necessarily be at the same rate, but is an important threshold that they'll continue to embrace it.Stephanie:Yeah, I agree. All right, so when thinking about these new consumers who are online who weren't thinking this way before, how are you advising brands to communicate and talk and do things differently? Because it is such a different generation coming online. We've had quite a few people mention you have to think very differently when it comes to customer service or even the whole unboxing experience. People want different things. What are you seeing among your biggest brands right now around what's working to connect with this brand new group of users who are not online before?Paul:Yeah, there's a whole bunch of battling trends that are in here. In fact, on Clubhouse we had a discussion around the eco considerations of delivery, and that got into we brought in a packaging expert and one of the interesting thing that we talked about is that, hey, everybody has all these cardboard boxes, right? People would love to find out opportunities to minimize what kind of packaging and we all probably had the experience of getting a huge package and having one little item in it. I think the whole consideration around eco and environmental is something that I just saw some research, that's at the top of the list of considerations.Paul:Things such as that and packaging and reducing it is a factor of when you're designing for stuff. Looking for opportunities that you can batch up or minimizing the packaging or making it recyclable and also balancing having a great opening unboxing experience, and so you have to balance those things, right? The environmental side and also the brand side, which is hey, the expectations of brands such as Apple put on, on this hey, you want this great experience in opening. There's a lot of non ... Things that you didn't have to worry about even 10 years ago because if you look at some of the studies of what gen Z and beyond are looking for, those considerations are much higher up than they were for other generations.Stephanie:It definitely seems like it can set up some of the newer based for failure though because it seems like you always have to stay ahead and be trying something new where it could kind of take you off your path of building a great product and a great company when you get too focused on some of that stuff. How do you think about the trade-off to stay focused but then also stay on top of consumer expectations that seem to have very rapidly changed in the last year where I wasn't really hearing a lot of consumers talking about eco-friendly packaging and really caring about that, and now it seems like that's a huge thing that we're hearing time and time again about this is a new expectation that you have to keep up with now.Paul:I think a little bit about it is around just the how do you be authentic brand? In many ways, some of the trends that we've been seeing is around less production, right? Some of the advertisement or even things that are helping to actually convert much higher are actually user-generated content that people in authentic ... You want to see how real people act, real people and real products, as opposed to a runway model or a runway person showing off this great ... Because of that, first thing we would say is try and be authentic to your brand and especially right now the over-production is actually a hindrance on many brands.Stephanie:For some of the larger brands you work with, I mean, I could see that being hard for them to want to keep up with the times but then also staying authentic to your brand. Like you said, I know it has gotten some companies in trouble for trying to do the cool thing, keep up with whatever that trend is, try and jump on something. When these big brands are coming to you, what are they struggling with right now and how are you working with them around this new UGC kind of content that a lot of these smaller D2C companies are like, yeah, of course, that's what we're going to do, but when it's a large company, they're like, I don't even know how to do that and how do you flag it and how do you think about the content coming in. Can I even trust it? How are you guys guiding them down that path?Paul:I think that for many larger companies in many ways it's kind of a how do you manage dealing with this on scale? Because in some of the smaller brands, dealing with a few interactions, it's somewhat easier, but when you have thousands and thousands of followers, how do you manage that on scale? What they mostly get concerned of, they want to be closer to the consumer and listen to them and interact, but being able to scale that in both a combination of AI related tools and responses, but also people responses that can do it in scale that are tailored to the brand voice, that's the challenge. We kind of work through different strategies to help them get through that.Stephanie:What are some other things that these brands are struggling with? What are you hearing right now that they're trying to work with you on?Paul:Yeah, and we work with brands both from B2C to B2B, and so I'll actually give two examples just to get a broad spectrum. On the B2C side, I think the ... And depending on the different segment. The B2C side on CPG we're seeing massive spikes because of all the purchases that we've seen especially going through stores, and that's a lot of the food, CPGs are just spiking. They're trying to figure out, okay, great. This is a great opportunity to scale. How do we now embrace and engage and maybe put out some direct to consumer feelers to learn?Paul:In many ways, a lot of the CPGs are going way more direct. Some of the largest scale CPG companies are doing record numbers of doing ecommerce, but they also partner with massive retail chains. They're trying to balance of not stepping on their channel conflicts, and so many are using ecommerce as a mechanism to explore, do special arrangements, special formulations, and learn and get data. As we see, for example, in that area is just there's been so much innovation going on, they're trying to keep up to the pace. They struggle with, well, what do I do first? How do I prioritize on some of these? Most of it is around helping to prioritize and segment some of the ideas to get them into marketplace faster.Stephanie:Trying to keep up with what's happening really quickly, I've seen a lot of them acquiring these smaller D2C companies and kind of putting them in a mini innovation hub where it's like we don't want to disrupt your process but we want to learn from you. Do you see that as a successful strategy for some of these more legacy brands to be able to learn while also keeping their brand identity or is that not really working?Paul:Yeah, I've seen some awesome acquisitions and unbelievable great talent that some of the large ... Just to stick to the CPG space, that's been probably the most aggressive of picking up new brands and learning, right? I think it's actually a brilliant ... That's why some of the premiums are getting paid. It's not just necessarily for the product and what margins, it's also from the know-how, because what ends up happening if you look, and this is something that that's probably the area that Club CPG on Clubhouse is probably one of the largest clubs and they have an amazing talent there, and there's been a number of acquisitions and they're on there talking about their story.Paul:What's really good about doing some of those acquisitions is these people have been very close to the customer, right? They've really interacted, as opposed to you're getting perhaps a new executive who's rotated around, right? These people understand the customer and had that relationship, had to build up the D2C. They really know all the different channels. They're able to provide that voice to the customer and how to go direct so much more. I've seen it be really successful and understand especially some of the early purchases that they've made. It's actually worked out really well, more from the people experience than even the product.Stephanie:It does seem like you can lose sight of that the larger you get, especially the more data you're getting. It's hard to get as informed and be able to actually find trends or themes. When you're working with a lot of these companies, what is your measurement of success when you're like, okay, we are going to transform this company. We're going to bring you guys to 2021 and what's relevant now. How do you look back and see if a digital transformation was successful?Paul:First of all, it's important that we judge success by the way companies measure their success. When we work with different companies, we try and understand what are their outcomes of success and their success can be ... The first thing you think, how much revenue did you grow? But some might not be. If it's a new brand and they want to get out there and they're trying to change their positioning, their goal might be a number of stories that got out, building brand awareness, changing the perspective, and so we always start with making sure that we understand what are their key outcomes and then provide some guidance on how do you get to those key goals.Paul:Looking at from a digital perspective, kind of like as I was saying before, it's also important to have an understanding of the voice of the customer and the sentiment. It's one thing to say what people might ... When you interview them. It's almost more important to see what they actually do, right? And using different tracking NPS scores, using different ... Looking at the data of actual purchase stories and mapping it onto example profiles. That then provides much more of a richer ... Even from compared to people say what they do is different than what they actually do and looking for actual intent in what they've done, and so making sure we're getting the right data is really important as well.Stephanie:Even if they have a lot of different outcomes, it seems like the solutions that you could bring to them could be kind of similar though. From what I've heard, there's a lot of decentralized processes going on, so you need to figure out a way to pull them all in and reduce your crazy marketing tech stack. Have you seen that on your side too that people might have very different outcomes but right now a lot of people have similar solutions or the solutions that you're presenting to them are kind of the same things?Paul:Yeah, in many ways some of our ... What we do to help customers in some ways is to help ... There's probably so many voices in the room and so many stakeholders is how do we help them bring them together and help to prioritize and to facilitate that conversation? Because that's the real hard part when you're dealing ... If you just have your own one product and your own single [sheet] you can make a decision and go.Paul:When you have hundreds of product lines and executives around the world and how do you facilitate the discussion, that's really what we help to do. Be it similar strategy to other companies or not, you need to help bring the internal alignment, and that's sometimes the hardest part because once you get to execute, many companies can do that. The harder part is how do you get agreement and prioritization with the different stakeholders.Stephanie:What kind of advice do you give for anyone who's struggling with that right now? What do you guys do to gain that alignment and have a go forward plan?Paul:Number one thing is start small and try something. You could spend forever talking about it and don't be afraid to fail. Get something in the market. We try and do agile sprints, and so from a development perspective we've been doing agile for a long time but we're also pushing into doing agile marketing so that we get into the same kind of feeding into that, so that okay, let's get something out there, let's try it, learn, and then from there go through the experiment, prove it, or make the changes and then scale, and keep that on an ongoing basis and trying to institutionalize that that it's an ongoing, you need to keep ...Paul:That's the business and how do you keep rolling that, because before when ecommerce was quote unquote more of a side business, it was more of a set it and forget it. Well, let's set it up. We'll set up the implementation, then we'll look at it, we'll make some changes every once in a while where now your core commerce business is your lifeline and some businesses it's over getting to 50, 60% of your overall business. You need to continue to change the priorities and especially as all of the changes that have come down the line from Facebook, from Google, is changing your whole marketing strategies.Stephanie:What about from a B2B perspective? I know earlier you said, okay, we got these two different viewpoints. What do you see in the B2B world? Which sometimes gets forgotten. We don't have many B2B people on the podcast very often and it'd be interesting to hear what does that side of the world look like.Paul:I've been focused more on that in the last year or two because it's such a big growing area. Just to lay the land, to understand how big B2B is, from a B2B perspective, just in the U.S. there's $17 trillion dollars of B2B payments done.Stephanie:Wow.Paul:That's just in the U.S. Right now-Stephanie:That's massive.Paul:It's completely massive and half of that is done manually. Meaning, if somebody writes a check, they send the check off, it's wired. It's not done digitally, and so when we talk about B2B commerce, again, people right away think B2C, it's just about the order, but actually when we talk about ... Or, the other myth or misconception that frustrates B2B people is, well, if just make it a cooler screen and easier to use on the web, then you'll be better, right? Then those are the myths and putting lipstick on problems.Paul:if you actually look into what the B2B challenges are, number one, many B2B purchases are very complex and there's many personas. It's not like, hey, I like this shirt, got it, they converted well, I've optimized, I buy it. Some of these deals are million dollars, half a million, and you need to go to procurement, you've got the business, you've got the people using it. It has to go through an RFP process, you have to buy versus ... Right? It's so much more complex on the number of personas, that's an important thing. There's no quick, easy, CX solution. Not to say that CX isn't important, but it's not like B2B. The first thing, if you start from that premise, that helps.Paul:Then the bigger pieces is traditionally how B2B sold was handshake over lunch, right? Traditionally, middle age guys shaking hands and "Hey, let's do this deal. There we go," and the last thing I want to do is look at the damn website, right? Well, obviously we know that's all changing and last year was the big thing in the workforce, millennials are now the largest part of the workforce. Guess what? Many of those, it's not all men. They're retiring at a very fast rate. Your expectation of your sales people are hey, where are my digital tools? When you talk about B2B commerce, it's about what are all the digital ways to interact, to be easier to do business with as you sell?Paul:In fact, what ends up happening is the top three things that people like for B2B commerce is order status, product information, and just doing a quick re-order. When you look at that, it's more about, hey, how do I make my life easier interacting with my customers? That's just important to understand the difference between B2C and traditionally on B2B side.Stephanie:What kind of opportunities do you see in the B2B world then? Do you see any new innovations coming about? Obviously having a platform that can meet the needs of the customers and to me it seems like it has to be personalized depending on what the business is and how your customers order, but what do you see right now that could be coming in the next couple years to help B2B?Paul:Well, kind of seeing where B2B is in their lifecycle, and so in many retailers, they're now onto their third iteration of a platform from B2C, and for most B2B, they're on maybe their first or they haven't really, right? Many of the B2B clients we're dealing with, oh, we put something up in 2004 and we've just been living with it and we still have to use IE to access it, and so we're dealing with web 1.0. They can't get it on their phone, and so a lot of it is just we need to make it easier for them and looking for ways to make the sales person's life easier.Paul:In the analogy of how B2C commerce is trying to be omnichannel, on the B2B side, it's helping your sales person and CRM. The lines between CRM and B2B commerce have blended together and it's really a tool to help the next generation business person to, hey, all my follow-ups, my data, you might get leads. Did you know your customers are looking at your products? You'll get that lead information, and so that you can follow-up with them or hey, have you deferred ... How many times has the business guy gotten a call? Hey, where's my order? I haven't got it.Paul:They end up spending half their time, and so the other big learning that we've got because it involves sales people so much is that you have to include them early and often during the process. For example, we had this happen one time. We had a customer come to us and say, "Man, we just spent all this money on this great new ecommerce platform for B2B, and we're just not getting the adoption." A couple lessons learned and they asked us to come in and do an assessment. We went in, we started talking to the customers and the customer said ... We ended up hearing this three different ways.Paul:The customer is like, "Oh, man. I love Joe. He's my best salesman, but he told me that if I put my sale through the B2B commerce, he's not going to get a bonus so I just called him to make sure he got his bonus." It's like, oh my god, of course you need to get the sales persons incentives align such that they don't get penalized for using the website, and that was like, oh yeah, that makes sense.Paul:Also, you want the sales people to be ... You want them to evangelize and get them to embrace leveraging it. That's such a key ... That change management in B2B and getting your sales people involved is super key for success.Stephanie:Yeah, which seems like it's a big training aspect to it too, make sure that they fully understand it to where then they can essentially sell the customers on using it and can act as customer service as well, because I'm sure their customers can be like, "I don't know how to order it on here," and if the sales person is like, "I don't know either," that's a big red flag. Are there any other hiccups like that that you've seen either in B2B or B2C where companies are like, oh, this isn't working. This new platform that we're using isn't working and you're like, well, let's talk a little bit about how you guys even thought about implementing it and you left out a big piece like this. Any other stories around that?Paul:Yeah, and number one it's always about ... It's so important getting the voice of the customer and getting representative people early on to provide input and feedback, because what ends up happening is if you don't listen to ... And we've had examples of rolling out systems trying to solve for what we thought was the problem but it wasn't really the problem. The way you bundled orders or the way products were bundled and you prioritized that and you didn't get the adoption, when actually they're focused on another set of problems or departments. That whole piece about getting user input early and often is so critical. The number one thing as you roll that out, you need the voice of the customer.Stephanie:In times like this that are changing so quickly, how do you think about separating the signal from the noise? I can see just so many companies try to keep up with other smaller brands and there's so many new things to try right now. It seems like it's hard to know what's actually going to be a lasting trend where you actually should put that as part of your processes or your platform. There's just so many tools and plugins and things. How do you all think about separating the two and being like, this one's a longer term trend and this is just something short that we see dying off in a year or two?Paul:Yeah, a couple of things that we do and obviously there's things that you want to lay out and over long-term and shorter term, but number one, look for ways ... First of all, understand what your brand promise is. Depending on your brand promise, you might prioritize things different, right? If you're a luxury item versus if you're an item at the dollar store. You have different brand promises and you want to be consistent to your brand promise, and so that's the first thing.Paul:The second thing as far as in general on commerce is continuously look for friction points. Do your tests with your customers and see what are things that are causing them to stop. As you go through all the different steps of the purchasing journey, if you're seeing friction points, how can you reduce that friction? Meaning, hey, this page seems really slow. I don't know why. Let's reduce that. Hey, this content is not connecting well. How can we use other ... For example, and I mentioned it before, hey, getting authentic content of the real users' pictures. That will help people convert higher.Paul:It's an ongoing iterative, so I think what you have is this ... And you're always plotting this, like how can you reduce friction and bang for the buck in a short-term that you can do versus a longer term investment that might then pay back, because it's easy to be like, okay great, we need a 3D VR AR strategy. We're like, well, how is that going to help your $10 item? Obviously that's an extreme example, but if you have a brand promise and you look for ways to reduce the friction to make your life easier, and similarly on the B2B side, that's why I always stress when I define B2B commerce, I like to say it's not about the purchase. It's about making your business easier to do business with, reduce the friction.Stephanie:I love that. What kind of longer term investments are you seeing being made right now that they might not see a payoff for a couple years? Because I know that Deloitte and I think Salesforce partnered on coming up with scenarios for the next three to five years, and so it'd be interesting to hear what you're seeing being implemented based on maybe the scenarios that these companies so all you get is put out there, which ranged to me from happy to very sad scenarios. I'm like, I guess it just depends how you're feeling that day which one you go with. I went with the happy ones.Paul:Especially for companies such as CPG that aren't used to having direct relationship with their customer, for example, big investments that take a while to really understand is the data, right? Getting real data direct from your customers that you then can build on. Those are things that it's not like, okay, a couple weeks, a couple months and you got it. It's something that over time you build up and you start to learn from, and so that's probably one of the biggest areas of especially getting your first party data, and especially since as you might have heard here recently, Facebook is reducing some of the data that they're sharing and how you're able to market and so is Google. Building up your first party data as a brand or building up your email list is so critical, and the benefits that you'll build definitely increase over time.Stephanie:It seems like it's an easy thing to say, yeah, obviously build up on that one-on-one connection with your customers, build up your email list, but it also seems like it's going to be very competitive because every brand is trying to do that now. It seems like every commerce company is turning to a media company that are all trying to have their blogs and newsletters and be on Tik Tok and Clubhouse and everywhere. How do you think brands can compete and build up content that actually pulls people into their community so they can have access to that first party data?Paul:Yeah, so I think the tactics on some of those platforms on core data and getting some of that primary, that's onto ... I think once you get into content and being outward brand, outward bound, I think the focus is and kind of the things that we've talked to our clients about is try and be good on one platform first. It's easy to be like, oh my god, we're so behind. We got to have a Tik Tok. We got to have Facebook, we have to have all the platforms all at once. We kind of guide them on, okay, start with one that's as close to your authentic brand as you can find, and then try and build it and iterate on it and master one before you really try and go after another because, again, there's limited resources and limited people. Trying to spread across all is a lot worse than trying to be good at least on one.Stephanie:Where do you normally find yourself suggesting brands start out at? It seems like Instagram is always a good bet for any company that has product pictures and things like that, but is that usually where you send them to or is it always very varied?Paul:Yeah, it just depends on where they're at. Some brands have ... Again, some of this stuff isn't cool, but SEO and email marketing have some of the best returns and they're super still unbelievably effective. Focusing on those and making sure those are solid, you get some of the best brand for the buck ... You get your bang for the buck. Sorry. Because it's easy to go the shiny happy route, but the core of understanding kind of the SEO and how it's connecting on all your different content and how you're coming up in search results all across and mobile related, that's still ... And again, email marketing on ecommerce, we did a study here recently and saw that some of the most successful brands are their leads are coming from up to 40 to 50% of their net new sales are coming from email related.Paul:We make sure that you have your core fundamentals ready before ... And you might do this like a portfolio, right? Like hey, maybe you're dipping your toe into ... Get a few Tik Tok videos out there and explore with a couple people, and know that you're not going hard on that but making sure that you get your fundamentals down first.Stephanie:Yeah, that's such a good reminder I think just for business in general but to stay focused and make sure that you're not getting caught up in the craziness and everything new. Make sure you have your email list good and that you actually own that and you're sending out good stuff. I don't know if this question could get you in trouble, but I'm going to ask it anyways. What is something you believe around ecommerce that many don't agree with you on?Paul:Huh. I'll have to think about that one. It's kind of funny in some ways because I've come through the whole ... I'm the old guy in ecommerce, and so I've been the one being like, ecommerce is going to be bigger than it is. I feel like in the last six months that now I'm the hey guys, retail is not going away. Retail has been here for hundreds of thousands of years. It's not going away. There's a lot of proponents out there, I won't name any names, but ecommerce is everything, and I'm the ecommerce guy and I'm like, no it's not. Understand it's too easy to say things are black or white for clicks, as opposed to understanding the nuance.Paul:If you look at in China, they just met a massive milestone. They're now over 50% of retail is via ecommerce. If you look at the states, relatively speaking, depending on which calculation you're looking at is anywhere from 17% or 22%, let's say it's somewhere in between that. Less than half of the penetration in China, and so I don't think over the long-term retail won't be 100% ecommerce, right?Paul:Over time, it might get in the U.S., because of the way we're distributed and the ease of buying at retail, you might get up to 50, 60% in the next 10 years but you're never going to get to a hundred and ecommerce is not everything and more the conversation should be retail has just many forms. I'm now pivoted to make sure that we don't forget the importance of these great real life experiences and then how you can balance and leverage commerce online.Stephanie:That's great that you've had to flip now to defend the other side. I'm assuming you think that retail is going to be changing though in some way or shape or form.Paul:Of course.Stephanie:How do you see that playing out?Paul:I talked about the grocery and that's a great example. They are now changing the way they see their line ... Because one of the biggest growth areas in this past year has been about BOPIS, buy online, pick-up in store. You probably saw, like you might have gone to a store and there's all these pickers. If you go, like half of the people in the store were employees picking for pick-ups. Just recently Walmart announced how they're going to re-jigger and automate so that parts of their stores are add-ons will be automated specifically targeted towards BOPIS.Stephanie:Wow, interesting.Paul:They're looking at maybe rolling that out over the next year or two over 200 stores. It's pretty significant. Then if you look at Kroger, they bought Ocado which is one of the largest robot ... Being able to bring together delivery in stage and they're looking for closer to the store to provide support for BOPIS as well. What you're going to see is this the way real estate is leveraged very differently than the big huge aisles with the big cart. It may be optimized slightly differently.Stephanie:Yeah, that's something I've been thinking about optimizing retail locations, and when I think about having someone go and buy my groceries, all the dry goods just get what I need, but when it comes to my fruits and veggies and things like that, I still think people sometimes they have a certain kind of avocado they want, they have a certain color banana they want. It seems like there's a way to segment the store and the stuff can just be picked out for you because you know what you want, and then there's another part of the store that you can still go in and interact with and grab the things that you want because there's actually preferences around them. I don't know what that looks like but it seems like an interesting thing to think about.Paul:Exactly. It's just going to change.Stephanie:Yep. Just a minute before we hop into the lightening round, I did have a question around Internet or ecommerce penetration. You were mentioning that and it does seem like there's a lot of opportunities all around the globe because certain areas have very lower ecommerce penetration because of a lot of reasons. Are there any regions that you're betting on right now or that Deloitte's looking into of there's some opportunities coming up here once X, Y, and Z is solved?Paul:Yeah, the area that has the biggest potential for growth right now that is behind ... If you look at just relatively speaking, to give everybody a perspective, from an ecommerce adoption, China is number one, Europe and the UK are generally a little bit ahead, and a lot of that has to do with they're smaller and it's easier from some of the delivery. The biggest growth area that we see right now in the next short-term is around Latin America.Stephanie:I was just going to say Latin America. I've heard a lot of VCs that you probably follow mentioned how they're going to be up and coming with them.Paul:Mercado Libre based out of Brazil is one of the fastest growing and there's also another shop app that's just skyrocketed out of Brazil, and so they see Latin America, because again they've been behind on the retail penetration and they've been behind, but this whole COVID just pushed that all along. I think that's the next big massive growth compared to everywhere else.Stephanie:I was just looking at them yesterday so it's funny you mentioned that. All right, well let's move over to the lightening round. The lightening round is brought you by our friends at Salesforce Commerce Cloud is our awesome sponsor. This is where I ask a question and you have a minute or less to answer. Are you ready, Paul? All right. First one. What one thing will have the biggest impact on ecommerce in the next year?Paul:It might actually be how this shipper container problem right now, all the ports are behind and not clear when some of the massive packaging and shipping issues around the world get sorted out. That might be the determinant, because if you can't get the products around the world, you might not be able to deliver what you want.Stephanie:That's a good one. Do you see any resolution with that? I don't understand what the problems are there. I've not looked into the shipping container world, so what's happening there and what could solve that?Paul:It's kind of a combo of stuff, and this has happened in a number of industries. It's kind of fascinating because it also kind of effected the way we planned. When you went back to a year ago into the spring and when you went back to all the historical of what happened when you had a large change and potential recession and what the impact was, you went back to, well, the shipping container industry went back and said, well, all our historical ... We got to pull back. They pulled back. What ends up happening, because of the ecommerce shift and spike, their demand very quickly ... They pulled back and it's hard to then build it back up when you're dealing with massive ships and containers around the world.Paul:By late summer, they realized oh crap, we're way behind and we need to catch up. That was part of it. Then you have a bunch of issues of hey, people on the essential front lines are just getting COVID and they can't deliver it, right? You have a combination of conservative planning, COVID actually effecting people, to geopolitical problems of hey, we don't want to receive packages and you're looking at different areas in the world that actually impact that. That's just another part of it that contributed to it. There was an article in Detail just this past weekend in New York Times that went into a little bit more detail.Stephanie:That's an interesting one and that's a lot at play. That'd be a good field or area to watch. Next question. If you had a podcast, what would it be about and who would your first guest be?Paul:Oh, man. I've actually been kicking around potentially doing ... This might be a little bit of what are the slow ways to be successful at ecommerce, right? Because it's funny because I've been on Clubhouse now for six months and you've got all of these entrepeneurs that hey, make seven figures, eight figures in a month or two, but the thing ... ecommerce seems overly easy to get into, but to scale and be successful is very hard because there's so many factors that play a part of it that you don't have full control of it. If I had a podcast that I would do, I would say the slow way to success to ecommerce.Stephanie:I like that. I've seen a lot of those people on Clubhouse, their bios of I'll scale you to a million. I'm like, nah.Paul:Yeah, right away it's like, next.Stephanie:Yeah, I just don't trust it, not for a second. What's up next on your reading list specifically around ecommerce trends? What are you reading every day to stay on top of the latest?Paul:It's something that I probably spend a couple hours a day reading lots of stuff. I actually use Feedly, I have all these keywords that kind of feed in, and I follow a lot of ... There's a lot of great podcasts out here. Of course, I got to plug my friend, even though he works at a competing company, he used to work for me, Jason Goldberg. The Jason and Scott Show is probably the best ecommerce podcast out there.Stephanie:Yep, I like theirs too.Paul:He's also a personal friend. I've known him for a long time. There's a whole crew of people out there that are passionate about it, and so I'm kind of geeky about it. It's funny, Jason as the retail geek but in some ways I'm more the ecommerce geek.Stephanie:Yep, I like it. That is a good one to stay on top of. I like that. Then the last one, what one thing do you not understand that you wish you did?Paul:Oh, man. I've come more from ... I'm more on the strategy and the technical side and the implementation. While I understand the marketing side okay, I really don't have the in-depth digital marketing side of it and I'd love to be able to spend more time and really focus around that area of how to really effectively connect. That's almost like another side of the brain that I have not spent the time on there.Stephanie:Yep. That's a good one. All right. Well, Paul, thanks so much for coming on the show and giving us a glimpse into what you're working on at Deloitte Digital. Where can people find out more about you or where can they follow you at?Paul:The easiest ... I'm quite active on Twitter, on deFornoP, you can follow me, and I try and share a couple articles a day of ... I curate good stories on both B2C and B2B commerce and people can also reach out to me at Deloittedigital.com or on LinkedIn.Stephanie:Amazing. Thanks so much, Paul.Paul:Awesome. Thank you.

In dieser Folge hören wir uns verschiedene Arten von tamilischer Musik an und sprechen über deren Hintergründe. Außerdem stellen wir euch ein paar tamilische Musiker_innen aus der Diaspora vor. Musik: 5.31 Minute Bombay Jayshree Valli Devasenapstie; 7.27 Minute Karthikai 27; 41.20 Minute Shan Vincent de Paul - One thousand Flowers; 41.44 Shan Vincent de Paul - Light; 42.15: Yanchan ft. SVDP - Dear Eelam; 42.25: Navz - 47 Naveeni; 42.52: Navz-47 - Pattasu; 43.09: Navz-47 -Mayura; 43.55: Dilukshan - 8; 44.14: Dilukshan - Irudhi; 44.31: Nirujan - Theeya; 44.45: Uyiril Uthiram; 45.10: Nirujay Kangal Redum Pesuthe; 45.21: Pritt - Identity; 45.49 Pritt - Tunnel Vision; 46.08: Pritt - Infactuatetd; 46.45 Agash - Arranmanai. Zum Nachlesen: Baskran, Theodore (2014): Music for the Masses. Film Songs of Tamil Nadu. In: Economic and political Weekly 26 (11/12), S. 755-758). Ramaswamy, Vijaya (1993): Women and Farm Work in tamil folk songs. In: Social Scientist, Vol21 No9/11, S. 113-129. Lakshmi Subramanian und Lakshmi Subramaniam (2004): Contesting the classical: The Tamil Isai Iyakkam and the Politcs of Custodianship. In: Asian Journal of Social Science Vol 32, No 1, S. 66-90. Pavel Hons: Tamil dalit art and Identity: What to Do with the drum? In: South Asian Research Vol 38(2), S. 140-155. Jindasa, Manoj 2016: Psychological and Philosophical readings of the Spectatorship of Bollywood and Indian Tamil Film in Sri Lanka. In: Journalism and Mass Communication 6 (4), S. 201-212 Dickey, Sara (1993): Cinema and the urban poor in South India. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Eriyanto, Eriyanto und Tambunan, Anton Sujarwo (2018): Indie Music Counterculture towards Pop Music Domination (A Literature Review). In: Tambunan 2, S. 267-279. Current Obsession Mac: Film- Soorarai Potru Abby: Schwarzer Tee mit Hafermilch, Kardamom, Ingwer und einem Schuss Zitrone

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When you’re entering a new company or a new market, there are lessons to be learned from the past and opportunities to grab hold of to propel yourself and your company forward. Paul Lanham entered a new company and industry all at once when he became the Chief Information and E-Commerce Officer at Charlotte's Web, a CBD company.   On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Paul details how he used his experience at companies such as Crocs, HCL and Brookstone to help guide him as he helped grow the Ecommerce business at Charlotte’s Web to the point where it now represents 65% of the business. Paul explains the methods he has used to generate qualified traffic, conversions and a high retention rate, and he discusses the technology he thinks is going to make a huge impact on Ecommerce in the future. Main Takeaways: Respect The Work That Came Before You: As a leader coming into a new company, there can be a tendency to try to change too much too fast. Instead, acknowledge and respect the work that was happening prior to your arrival, and then try to evolve that work into something more.  Let the Tools Handle the Work: Humans are excellent at many things, but we all have inherent biases and miss certain correlations or connections. Rather than trying to analyze all the data you have on your own, employ technology like A.I. that will ignore most (unprogrammed) bias and can do the deep work a human brain is incapable of. Tech is Catching Up To Personalization: For so long, there has been a promise of technology that could interact in a human way with customers in real-time. That technology is finally starting to become a reality and those that can implement it properly can take personalization of their Ecommerce experiences to the next level. For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length. --- Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce --- Transcript: Stephanie: Welcome back to Up Next In Commerce. This is Stephanie Postles, co-founder of Mission.org and your host. Today we have Paul Lanham on the show, the Chief Information and Ecommerce Officer at Charlotte's Web. Paul, welcome. Paul: Hi, nice to be here. Stephanie: I'm glad to have you. Yeah, I'm really excited. I've used Charlotte's Web products before. So, when I saw that you were in our queue for interviews, I was like, "Oh, this is going to be a good interview." Paul: That's good to hear you have some perspective then. Stephanie: To start, I was looking through your background and was really impressed by some of the companies that you've worked at. I'd love for you to first before talking about Charlotte's Web, kind of go through a little bit about your history and then what brought you to Charlotte's Web. Paul: Sure. As you just noted, I have a pretty diverse background mostly in the retial and CBG and technology industries. What's really colored my career is that I've been given a lot of opportunities, some of which I hadn't had a lot of experience in including Ecommerce when I started in its infancy in the mid '90s when you had to build everything. You couldn't really go to the corner shop and buy an Ecommerce server. Paul: But I basically have touched on virtually every aspect of Ecommerce over the past 20 somewhat years. I've been a C level executive for about 25 years and worked for a diverse group of companies, a variety of sizes. Some startups. Paul: I started my own tech company and now it's Charlotte's Web, which I have to say is very much different in terms of its make up versus the companies I've worked for in the past. Stephanie: Yes. And just for people to know the difference, it would be great if you could name drop a bit. I know people hate name dropping, but I'd love to hear what were some of the companies, the largest ones you've worked at? I think you can compare it to Charlotte's Web. Paul: Sure. I worked for what was a startup, Crocs. I think people will recognize the infamous shoe company that is just located down the street from where I work. Paul: I've worked for Jones Apparel Group, which is a mega apparel conglomerate that own companies like Barneys New York, Jones New York, Apollo Jeans, et cetera, in the apparel industry. Paul: I started a tech company that eventually became a subsidiary of HCL Technologies, which is a global tech firm based in India. Paul: And Brookstone, which is the gadget shop, competing with Sharper Image. Again, near its infancy as well. So, a diverse group of experiences. Stephanie: Yeah, that's amazing. With some of these companies you've worked at previously, are there a lot of lessons that you were able to bring to Charlotte's Web or is it just such a different beast that you kind of had to just start over and had a completely new hat on? Paul: Well, basically if you've been a C level executive for a number of years you have some successes and you have some failures and hopefully you learn from the failures, and I've had them too. Paul: Implemented virtually every kind of system you can imagine. Been on the business side from an Ecommerce perspective and learned a lot of different things that I've been able to bring to Charlotte's Web. Paul: Back to the diversity of my career, one thing I can note, I probably have been in just about every function that you can imagine from finance, to marketing, to sales, to Ecommerce, et cetera, et cetera. Paul: So, I think that brings somewhat of a unique perspective to a company like Charlotte's Web, where I frankly I have a lot of empathy for my peers in other departments because I've done a lot of their jobs. Stephanie: Yeah, that is so important. I've worked at previous companies where someone doesn't understand I worked in finance back in the day and people do not understand the complexity or why there are certain procedures set up and you can definitely see tension between certain groups if they've never worked in that team before. So, that's key I think. Paul: Absolutely, and financial people can be fun. Most people don't know that. Stephanie: They can be. Just like me, I'm fun. You're fun Paul. I'd love to hear or I'd love for you to explain what is Charlotte's Web and maybe even starting with the story behind it, behind the name. Paul: Sure. Charlotte's Web is CBD company that was founded by the seven Stanley Brothers and that's a wonderful story in it of itself in that they grew up in the Cannabis industry. Paul: But the company's namesake, Charlotte Figi, who many people may remember from the Sanjay Gupta CNN Specials from years back and most recently illustrating how there was this trajectory of various peoples and things to help a little child basically survive. Paul: So, our namesake Charlotte really is like our guiding star or north star in the context of our mission, which is to help people through natural products that Charlotte's Web produces. Paul: So, it's a young industry, it's a young company where we are a market leader. Obviously we are commercial, but we're always grounded by our original mission and we still do help quite a few people to where our product is very essential like the Charlottes olive oil. Stephanie: Yeah. I was looking at the I am Charlotte video on your website and it definitely gave me goosebumps. When did you guys create that campaign? Paul: Well, it's basically been the past year. The point is with her passing it really shook us all to our core because frankly it was probably one of the core reasons that most of us joined the company. I was fortunate to be able to meet Charlotte and her mother Paige a couple of times. Paul: But many people in my company, and obviously the Stanley Brothers basically grew up in this company attached to Charlotte's story. The I am Charlotte campaign is currently just obviously a testimony and our take on how beloved she is and still is. Stephanie: Yeah, I love that. The CBD industry as you mentioned, it is kind of a new-ish industry. When you're in California it seems like it's been around forever, but when you go to other states or back to my hometown, people still kind of have they either don't know what it is or yeah, are just very unclear about what it is. You have different preconceived notions, you can say. Stephanie: So, how do you all think about kind of educating the public or new buyers who come to your site for the first time? Paul: Certainly. Two points, actually about 15% of households have had some experience with CBD in the United States. And still because it's such an emerging industry, word of mouth is still very important. Typically, people first get exposed to CBD by a relative or a friend or somebody mentioning it that it helped them. Paul: When they go to search for it, we basically are actually a leader at Charlotte's Web because we rank very high on the first page, in the first third with what is CBD. To that point, we spend a good deal of time on our site through blog entries and various educational videos that we put out to educate our customer on the difference, for example, between hemp and cannabis or what is the efficacy of CBD and various in-depth, I guess, videos to illustrate the depth of what they could know about CBD. Paul: So, it very much is still an educational process as you've mentioned to evangelize the use of CBD. Stephanie: Yeah. Yeah, I completely agree. How did you all become a market leader? I know you were not first, but you definitely were some of the early leaders or even starting up in this industry. But how did you go about making sure people had your name as the household name when it came to CBD? Paul: Sure. They were among the first and the brand story between the Stanley Brothers and Charlotte really resonated. It was made for this industry and the mission that the Stanley Brothers inoculated into the company and we still have in terms of evangelizing the product and natural products to the world to help people, I think resonate with people. Paul: When you talk about, for example, our end-to-end integration from seed to shelf, our quality, et cetera, all those things kind of are confluence in terms of being perceived as a quality brand and a premium brand to a consumer. Paul: There are a lot of smart business decisions along the way, frankly, in terms of becoming that market leader. Stephanie: What kind of smart business decisions? Now you've piqued my interest. Paul: Okay. For example, going really strong in Ecommerce initially in that the nature of the industry is that there's been a slower adoption in the major retailers because hemp frankly, from a federal perspective, wasn't quite legal until a couple of years ago based on the format. Paul: There are some reticence in terms of conservative retailers to carry the product. So, they were very smart in not necessarily going the mom-and-pop route even though we have a big natural store population on the retail side. Paul: But going very strong with Ecommerce and hiring the right people right off the bat a couple few years ago to basically push the commercial side of this. Ecommerce right now represents about 65% of our business as was in the first quarter. That's somewhat of a higher percentage than many of our competitors. Stephanie: What do you think is attributed to that higher percentage? Paul: Being first out of the gate. Being very professional about it. But the primary drivers, they're a couple, back to the brand story that really resonated, was beautifully presented on the site and for media. Paul: Secondarily, the quality that we bring to the table that we try to communicate to other consumers. From that seed to shelf continuum, we test the product 20 times, we track each individual bottle or tincture or the like back to a specific lot and seeds. We could document virtually anything anyone needs to know about that particular product. Paul: So, particularly in this industry where you have an influx of competitors, some of which frankly are not quite as sophisticated in the context of testing and the branding. You can really stand out by basically taking care of those issues. Stephanie: Yeah. Yeah, I completely agree. That is how I found you guys in the early days was because quality to me is the biggest factor when it comes to CBD. Paul: Absolutely. Stephanie: And it's also something that a lot of people worried about early on because you do hear horror stories and it felt good going to a company knowing yeah, they've already got everything figured out. They've got the dosing down to its seed. They've got it's non-GMO and yeah, I think that's so important with an industry like this. Paul: Absolutely. Stephanie: The one thing I was thinking about was consumer journeys. Everyone is coming to your website maybe at a different place like we were mentioning before. Some people are brand new or they've maybe never even heard of it, where education is key. Stephanie: Some people have heard about it. You've got the people who maybe are hiding their browsers when they're looking for it or the people like me it's like, "Yeah, this is an obvious thing that can help you." Paul: Sure, sure. Stephanie: How do you personalize either your Ecommerce experience or your marketing efforts to kind of go after all those people and meet them where they are? Paul: Well that's a good question because when I mentioned sophisticated we invested in tools that enable us to personalize that journey. So, for example, back to my comment on what is CBD. Paul: If somebody enters that as a search term and they have to click on our link, we will take them initially to the education materials and will kind of guide them through the process from the Ecommerce perspective of walking them through that journey and hopefully they purchase. Paul: We do that in the context of segmenting our email channel. We have a variety of channels and we handle each one differently. Our affiliate channel, for example, is very strong in terms of the partners we deal with like a Healthline.com, which yet again is another educational component in that we're very strong with them. Paul: So, depending on the channel, depending on the entry point of our consumer, we will treat them differently in the context of where we land them on the website, what we offer to them in the context of their journey through the website, and what promotional activity we engage with them. Stephanie: Got it. Yeah that make sense. When it comes to affiliate programs, how did you all think about setting that up and is that still a big part of your strategy or did you kind of pull back on that once you started becoming more of a household name? Paul: It's still and will be a very big part of our strategy in that penetration of CBD from a search to perspective is still relatively low compared to what I've experienced in the past so that we're still in an emerging phase where we need to use and leverage every channel we can. Paul: So, as strong as our Ecommerce business is, which happens to be frankly Ecommerce alone at Charlotte's Web is a market leader in revenue compared to every other CBD company, just alone. It kind of tells you the scale of our business. Paul: But what I'm getting at, the Healthline.com affiliate is very important to us in that it is the number one rated medical advice site, I believe, if I look at the statistics recently. Paul: Every entry point is different for every consumer and we need to leverage all those different entry points. We can't, for example, rely solely on organic search as an example, not that we would. But we basically go through every venue. Stephanie: Got it. What does it look like setting up a partnership like that? Because, I think that is really important kind of finding someone who has a good reputation that a lot of people trust. But what did that look like setting that partnership up and making it so both sides feel like it's a win-win? Paul: Well to your point, it's important to vet the partner because obviously you don't want to be presented on a site that doesn't quite meet your value set or your brand image. So, we're fairly choosy in terms of the affiliate partners that we work with. Paul: Obviously, in some cases it's a longer negotiation in that obviously we want to do it on advantageous terms in terms of the share basically. So, we don't cast a wide swath in the context of the affiliate partners we deal with. We're very selective. Stephanie: Got it. So, the one thing that I was wondering earlier when you were mentioning failures and you of course have a huge backlog of experience at other companies, what did your first 90 days look like coming in to Charlotte's Web and what big things did you change from the start based on maybe past failures or successes that you've had at prior companies? Paul: Well, like entries in the most companies it's a rush. My story, this is pre-COVID times obviously, I talked on the phone with a board member and my boss, the CEO, on a Friday. I flew over the weekend, got there on Monday. I took the job sight unseen after a phone call. Stephanie: Wow. Paul: I was so enamored of it. I've never done that before. And Danny has never hired anybody like that before, it just went so well. I showed up on Monday and I didn't leave for 90 days, much to the consonation of my significant other in Boston. So, we worked it out. Paul: But it was just a rush of understanding the industry in-depth, doing triage in the context it was still a start mentality, triage in the context of building a business intelligence stack, revamping the Ecommerce organization, planning the next iterations and improvements, setting up for the holiday season for example. Paul: When I joined, literally the week after I joined we kicked off a new platform upgrade that we only had a couple of months to do prior to holidays. So, it was a lot of long days. Stephanie: Was that something that you feel like you could step into because I'm sure you've done many re-platforming experiences before? Paul: Yeah. There is some muscle memory and back to my point, you always want to learn from your failures and not do them again or at least understand the context and admit them. Basically one of those issues is that one has to listen very carefully. Paul: I parachuted into a company that was going 1,000 miles an hour and one of the lessons I've learned in the past is honor the past because there was a great deal of work and a lot of great work done that I took the attitude of evolving and adding to as opposed to turning the part which many C level executives take that as their mandate. Paul: I've never really done that. It's one of the failures I've learned from in my past that basically sometimes evolution is better than tearing things apart. Stephanie: Yeah. Yeah, I love that and I think the quote too. Paul: Yes. Stephanie: So, I'm sure another thing that you kind of the change of thinking on would be how you track the success of a business or the Ecommerce site. What kind of metrics, did you maybe look at prior companies where you were like this is our set of metrics that always made sense versus what do you look at now at Charlotte's Web? Paul: Well, there are quite a few. You know the Ecommerce business, there are probably 20 things that you look on a daily basis. That's my routine in the morning, I get up and I look at basically all the metrics. Paul: But what's important here, more so than perhaps, it's always in the top three conversion for example, on unbalanced traffic. It's significant here because you're engagement with a new customer and maybe fleeting because of the nature of the industry, the curiosity about CBD, people not knowing about it. Paul: I actually had to look at that statistic or those statistics several times because they didn't believe them, they were so high. That's a testament to the people and the staff that were here in that whether it's educating the consumer, or the customer experience on the site, or customer care on the backend, we have a high percentage of sales that convert. Paul: So, that probably is a much more important stat that I've paid attention to in the past. It's always been in the top three or four. Paul: Retention of consumers. Again, in this sort of industry because of the fleeting interaction with your customers, we have a very strong subscription program that is very important to us, which are typically customers who deem the product to be essential to their wellbeing. Paul: So, we've put a good deal of emphasis on that as well as retaining customers, and again, without divulging the statistics, it's much higher than I've experienced in my past 20 plus years of experience in Ecommerce. Stephanie: What do you think is making it so high? How are you all retaining customers so well or encouraging people to subscribe? Paul: Well, it's high because I guess in a way our traffic is more qualified, then again I've experience in the past. When they come through the site and they've been educated, there's a slightly high degree of propensity to buy. So, that's a factor. Paul: Plus some of our tools really facilitate the conversion in that. Not that we're pushy but we don't let go in the context of okay, this isn't right for you, maybe this or how about this promotion or have you rethought this through the customer journey in the site? Stephanie: Yeah. Paul: Basically, there's a pre-decisive to buy basically once they get to our site. Stephanie: Is there any initiatives that you've implemented when it comes to, like you said, it's nice you don't let go and you make sure to make to keep reminding them or showing them new products or new ideas. Stephanie: Is there anything that you've implemented recently around those kind of initiatives that have increased conversions or increased subscription rates or anything, or anything that you've done where you're like that was a big flop, don't try that? Paul: Well yeah. Again, getting much more sophisticated, I don't think anybody else has implemented the suite of what I call campaign tools and analytical tools. Typically, people use the standard GA or Google tools and we've gone past that and utilizing tools that I've used in much bigger companies without naming the company. Paul: So, we can have a high degree of personalization in terms of how we treat our customers as they kind of navigate through our site. A much higher capability in terms of test and react and basically inoculating those scenarios and situations into our campaigns eventually down to the individual level. Paul: So, we're still learning some of those. We've implemented those over the past three or four months. The company is still, my staff is still learning some of the aspects of those tools. Paul: On top of that from an analytic standpoint, which is a little unusual in the industry, we dived in with both feet from an artificial intelligence perspective because I joke with my staff and they read too rapidly that my experience doesn't always mean anything. I think I know everything about my customer and I'm confounded constantly in terms of why I was wrong on that. Paul: It comes down to the data and what artificial intelligence does for example, is that it makes those deep correlations that none of us would have thought of, I would have never thought of with my 20 plus years of experience of how our customers actually interact with our site or what are they thinking in the context of their purchase strength. Paul: So, when you put all those things together from a capability perspective, I love it in terms of being data driven, in terms of understanding our consumer at a deeper and deeper level and being able to provide the best experience and the best service that we can on an ongoing basis. Stephanie: Got it. That makes sense. When you're implementing AI, first can I ask what platform are you using for that and what kind of surprises have you found when you implemented AI? What were the consumers doing that you would never have guessed before? Paul: Well it's a third party app. It's a bunch of data scientists who basically provide the service for us. They're conduit for the massive amount of data that we have. To your question of surprises or those correlations or what people have affinities for in terms of say, an add-on purchase that we would never think of, what prompts them to basically make that leap to make the purchase in the context of their journey through the site. Some of which are counterintuitive to some of our experience particularly for certain segment of our consumer base. Paul: It's just some of those interesting nuggets of information. The hard part of it is, there's so many correlations that we have to rank them and we basically test each correlation over a period of time to vet out the action. Paul: Our challenge at this point is basically getting into a much more test and react cycle on these correlations. Stephanie: That's really interesting. Paul: Yes. Stephanie: So, if you were to implement AI all over again or you had someone who does not have that on their site right now, what would you do maybe differently or if you were like we could go back and maybe I would change the way we did this or think about it differently when implementing it, what are some advice around that? Paul: Well what slowed us down was the notion of producing what I call hypothesis based on our prior knowledge. That tends to put you into silos of information and doesn't quite give you the breadth of correlations that AI can do for you. Paul: So again, it was all of my advice that hey, I think I really know this aspect of consumer behavior. I'm really interested in terms of their conversion activity when they do X, when they do Y. Paul: I wouldn't be so structured in those hypothesis going into it and probably a little more open minded in the context of looking at the correlations in a much different broader way. Stephanie: I love that. That's such a good reminder about the kind of biases you bring when looking at data or your consumers and why all that should be scraped from the beginning and just let the technology work for you? Paul: Absolutely, absolutely. Stephanie: In your industry I'm sure you probably get a lot of questions around this. But I'm thinking about all the regulations you have to deal with especially on a state level and when it comes to having Ecommerce be such a large part of your business, what does that look like behind the scenes when it comes to shipping or selling in certain states? Paul: Well, it's mostly an impediment from a retailer, particularly a major retailer perspective because to your point, there's a hodgepodge of regulation in the state. Even though hemp was 0.3%, THC less than 3% as federally allowed, depending on the nuisances of what is in California or Florida, et cetera, retailers may be averse to getting into ingestibles as opposed to topicals. Paul: So, back to our point, one of the reasons why we're industry leaders we've invested heavily in internal, external lobbyists that can guide different parties and factions, whether it be congress at the federal level or legislations at the state level or associations to evangelize the notion of CBD. Paul: One thing that people miss the point on, we welcome more defined regulation from the FDA because we feel that we're heads and shoulders above most of our competitors in the context of how we test, how safe our product is, how we document it and the like. Paul: So, it's an ongoing journey that hopefully more clarity will emerge at both the state and federal level whether it's with the FDA or with various state legislatures to make the retail sales of CBD more palatable. We do ship to all states in the Ecommerce perspective. Stephanie: Okay. Yeah, I like that idea around encouraging the FDA to look into it and implement regulations because you're like my product is so good, we should have the other products regulated and be held to a high standard as well because that is what can maybe hurt the industry as a whole, is having people making subpar products that aren't as high quality as Charlotte's Web. Paul: Yes. It's kind of adding to that, major business publications have basically stated and make the articles that CBD is here to stay. It's a multi-billion dollar business growing at a rapid rate and it's frankly grown so fast and it's a new industry that regulations haven't quite caught up with it. Stephanie: Yeah. I was reading a bit about demand surges especially during the pandemic right now. I think maybe it was your CEO who was mentioning like, oh we had a surge in demand for two weeks and then people kind of pulled back for a little bit. Stephanie: I was wondering how you guys are keeping up your inventory levels, how you manage that and then if you're changing anything going forward after seeing these surges of hopefully consumers that are going to stick around going forward? Paul: We've been really gratified and continuing to serve our customer because the majority of the customers consider our product to be essential for their wellbeing whether it's the type of tincture they use or the ointment or the like. So, it's been relatively stable for us. Stephanie: Okay. Paul: Now from an notary perspective, as a growing company our processes have become more sophisticated and over the past year we've implemented an NSLOP process or production planning process that I'm more familiar with in my CBG background to really dial into marrying strategic plans to budgets, to demand forecast and skew level and doing a relatively sophisticated job of planning product demand. Paul: Now the flip side of that, this industry is volatile in the context of demand in general because retailers, some are still adverse to taking the product, so it's hard to predict demand in that context. Paul: So, we place a little more emphasis on safety stock and agility in the context of the co-manufacturers we deal with and the like. Stephanie: Got it. What are some of the best practices you set up when it comes to setting up that forecasting process because I know you've had a lot, like you mentioned, a lot experience with that. What did you bring to Charlotte's Web that maybe they weren't doing before? Paul: Well, they had started it but I amplified from an Ecommerce perspective, a rigorous skew demand process that is three dimensional and that it adds up from top to bottom and extremely rigorous analytical process of continually revising those forecasts taking into account promotional cadence, taking into account day-to-day iterations of different campaigns. Paul: So, it's a fairly in-depth forecasting process in Ecommerce so that our accuracy is much higher. It's in the 90 percentile by skew in terms of our monthly demand, for example. Paul: One of the things I've learned in my past is that sometimes you have to take a leap of faith on a particular product because you don't know how high you can go. On the other hand, that's what safety stock is for. Stephanie: Got it. What does that look like when it comes to thinking of new products? How do you influence your decision behind that, like you were mentioning, behind the sales channels and the marketing channels that help you influence your ideas or thoughts behind it. What does that look like when it comes to new products? Paul: We do have outside data and with a caveat that it's such a rapidly growing industry that tends to change overtime. But I feel is obviously one of the standard firms we use in the context of a longer term view, in terms of product categories and growth and certain segments and the like and we use that as a baseline. Paul: Obviously we use our trend and my counterpart on the retail side and myself where basically experience marketers and sales people and that we have our own opinions in terms of how we correlate our thoughts on category growth versus what we're seeing in external data, for example, like Brightview. Paul: So, we listen very closely to our consumer in terms of what categories we're pushing. Stephanie: I was just going to say I'm sure you guys get a lot of customer feedback of what people want or what they're looking for. Paul: Yes we do. Stephanie: How do you grab all that and put it in a meaningful way because you probably know best. So, a lot of times consumers might ask for something and then not actually buy it or not really want it. Paul: This is true. They certainly vote with their dollars. But on the other hand, we have a pretty good customer care department that is in my peer bid where I've managed those sorts of departments in the past but this is in an interesting one, the group of individuals that the empathy, because of the nature of the product and the stories they hear and the people they try to help, the empathy they exhibit in terms of comments from customer is just outstanding. Paul: So, it's not only commercial, but to the extent that it's practical based on the information they have, they are advisors to the customers that call in and we have a high volume of calls that come in not necessarily about order standard things, but really what should I do? What about this product? Paul: The other aspect is we have a fairly rich library of customer reviews and the technology we use enables us to slice and dice some of the categories of the customer reviews and try to get to a gist of what's working versus not, whether it's from a product efficacy perspective or perhaps a defect of some sort. Paul: The dropper may not work exactly the way we wanted to and the like. So, we have multiple sources of information of customer contact. Stephanie: I think that's so key to be able to call in and actually talk to someone. That's the perfect way to develop trust is by having someone that you can actually get on a phone with and be like, "Okay, I don't know what to do now. Tell me exactly what I should be doing." Or same with reviews, being able to see someone who sounds like me reviewing the product just seems like a great way to develop trust all around. Paul: Absolutely. From a hiring perspective, I have lunch, a virtual lunch nowadays with every associate in my group at some point. Today I just, prior to this meeting, I had lunch with three of our associates just to kind of get a feeling of that. Paul: When it comes to our customer care associates, I've never met such a group of people that are truly empathetic to where they hear a story and they're crying on the phone with the consumer. They're doing everything. They have a wide latitude of actions they can take to help our customers more so than I'd had in the past in much larger companies. Paul: But they really have the right mindset, I think, as opposed to working in a call center. Stephanie: Yeah. That's so key and so important. Paul: Absolutely. Absolutely. Stephanie: So to shift a little bit into more of a marketing mindset, I wanted to hear a bit about how you guys are investing in different digital channels. What's working and what's not? Paul: Sure. Just the overview is that you may have seen our Trust The Earth campaign, which I loved, we started last fall that kind of instills what our brand messaging is. Basically, a lot of our marketing efforts go to that because again we're an emerging industry, we're maintaining our market lead, we want to convey a certain image, just a random stat based on our efforts here today. Paul: We have over 400 billion impressions from the various things we've done versus, I think our closest competitor from the stats that I've seen were about two billion and it dropped rapidly. So, marketing our digital efforts from a broad perspective are very effective and that shows in the context of where we are in organic search or educating the consumer, long ways to go. Paul: From a digital perspective obviously we're active in every social media component and we're very assertive in terms of educating our consumer through that channel, conveying our brand message. Paul: The industry is in a place right now, there are some restrictions in terms of how aggressive that you can market CBD on social media like on Facebook, for example, or Twitter. But that's not a real problem for me right now because for me we want to activate understanding and education and our brand story at this stage of our growth in the social media channels. Paul: So, a lot of our digital, aside from our paid media, which we're very good at I believe, a lot of our digital is focused on building our brand. Stephanie: How are you thinking about expanding into other markets? I think I saw that you were looking at going into a few other countries. How are you guys exploring that right now? Paul: Well, we're basically putting our markers out there. We have a staff of people who are very experienced internationally. I have a good deal of international experience as well from an Ecommerce perspective in retial. Paul: But one of the constraints still is the regulatory environment in that we won't sell in any country that obviously it's not allowed. There aren't too many countries that actually allow it. So, we're basically putting the building blocks in place if in case that would be our strategy to understand what the international market would mean to us. Paul: But it's still evolving because it's basically not allowed from a regulatory standpoint in quite a few countries. Stephanie: Got it. So now that we're kind of predicting our future a little bit, I'm wondering what kind of Ecommerce trends are you excited about or preparing for right now? Paul: Well, in general, like I have for a number of years it's the technology keeping up with my visions of personalization. In the perfect world I'm interacting real time with the individual consumer in the context of whether we're educating them or guiding their journey and the like and the technology is starting to catch up with that capability even at a company of our scale. Paul: So, that's the trend that has been there for a little while but the promise has been there, but the reality is starting to catch up. The other one I mentioned is using deep technology to a point within certain boundaries to understand our customers behavior and needs and wants and applying, point number one, the personalization with that. Stephanie: Yeah. That makes sense. Is there any new tech that you're experimenting with right now that you guys are loving? Paul: Well, I've experimented with in the past in terms of client side speed of devices. Every Ecommerce and you know all the tropes about how conversion is impacted by site speed and page loading and all those different things. Paul: But what I've been enamored of in the past couple of years is utilizing technology to tailor the experience on whatever the device our consumer has. You know there's somebody out there who's still on dial-up, if that still exists. Stephanie: You caught me Paul. Paul: With a new browser, right. It doesn't matter how efficient your site is or your servers are like, you have to tailor the experience, strip down the page load, the content, rejigger the Java script on the fly depending on that individual's device because as far as they're concerned, they may have a iPhone 5 that hasn't been updated in five years but they still like that experience. Stephanie: Yeah. I completely agree. That's really important because I think a lot of people assume that users are always on a newest and the latest and greatest. The one thing, yeah, I had, let's see, we're doing a study on I think Google maps users in India and the majority of them were on such outdated versions that they were never seeing updated streets or an update at all in maybe a year or two. Stephanie: I think it's just a good reminder that a lot of people are on older versions of things, not just in other countries but here too. Like you said, some people still use dial-up. Sowe have a quick lightning round coming up. But before that, I wanted to ask you one last question because I love your excitement towards the company and your energy behind it and I wanted to hear what is the best day in the office look like for you? Paul: The best day in the office, let me think about that for a moment. Stephanie: Yeah. Paul: As I mentioned before I'm usually willing to go every day. It's when I'm in the thick of it, I'm a great delegator I believe, and I think the people who work with and for me would say so. Paul: But I'm most happy when I'm in the thick of it, not being Mr. Executive and my people interacting with, like a peer to some degree, in terms of coming up with ideas, debating certain concepts, making things happens. Paul: It's still small enough company where many people I'll be a jack of all trades and that's where I've shined in my past of, okay, rolling the sleeves up and figuring it out and having to learn things. Paul: Many of my jobs have reflected that. So, that's when I'm happiest, when I'm learning something new. I think I've been told I'm really, really curious to a fault. I ask too many questions sometimes. Stephanie: I think that's a good thing. Paul: Yeah, I guess so. But that's what jazzes me, being in the thick of things, making things happen. Now having said that, as a C level executive you have certain programs and responsibilities to create a conducive environment for your people to work in to make them feel trusted, to stretch them to the extent of their capabilities giving them a vision. Paul: On the other hand, I've always been a believer of an executive being able to walk the talk having done something. Being able to do it, without actually doing it. That lends a certain amount of credibility in your interaction with your staff. So, I think that's very important. Back to your point, that's what makes me happy is just being in the thick of it. Stephanie: Yeah. Yeah, I completely agree. I like that idea and I heard a ratio or it was a metric that an executive used called the say do ratio, and it was how much do you do what you're going to say you do, and that's how he gained the trust with a new company he was joining, was he actually tracked it. Paul: Well in a small company I think my first interaction with an associate at CW is riding up the elevator that Monday, they had heard of me, and they asked my name and they heard that I was a tech guy. I was really the Ecommerce business guy and tech guy and they asked me about an email problem they were having. Stephanie: A personal or a company one? Paul: A company one, yeah. Stephanie: Okay. Paul: "I can't quite get this to do this." It was a sales executive or a sales manager that we had. She asked me a question not knowing exactly what I did so I spent a half hour tracking it down and getting back to her. Paul: Later when she learned, you're in charge of Ecommerce and tech and all that stuff. To me, in a small company like ours, you have to be personal, you have to be willing to help anybody with anything and follow up on it and get it done as opposed to always delegating and there's a balance obviously in terms of the work balance. Paul: But you have to show that direct interest in everybody's issue in what they're doing. Stephanie: Yeah, I love that. That is such a good mindset to be in, like you said. Especially coming from a larger company where employees might be like, "Oh this guy is going to just delegate everything," like showing them you're willing to get your hands dirty and help them with their needs and stuff. It's also crucial. Paul: Yes. Stephanie: All right. Next we have the lightning round brought to you by our friends at Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This is where I'm going to ask you a question and you have a minute or less to answer. Paul: Okay, lightning round it is. Stephanie: Are you ready? Paul: I'm ready. Stephanie: Roll up your sleeves, get ready. All right. Paul: They're already rolled up. Stephanie: First, I'll start with an easy one. Paul: Yes. Stephanie: What's up next on your Netflix or Hulu queue? What are you watching these days? Paul: On my Netflix queue let's see, geez I don't watch a lot of TV so you're going to stop me. I have 30 seconds left. Mostly about historical dramas. I've always wanted to watch The Crown, which everybody has watched. So, that's probably next on my queue. Stephanie: Cool. I haven't watched that yet. You'll have to let me know how it is. Paul: There you go. Stephanie: All right. What's up next on your travel destinations when you can travel again? Paul: Wow. When I can travel again? I'd like to go back to Tokyo. I've traveled so much in my career personally. One point I spent about 50% of my time overseas. Stephanie: Oh my gosh. Paul: But Tokyo because I was born in Tokyo. Stephanie: Cool. Paul: And an American descent. But when I traveled I was always able to get there and see my cousins three or four times a year. But it's been a while. That would be my first place to basically get back to my roots. Stephanie: That is a good one. I love Japan. Paul: Yeah. Stephanie: What app or piece of tech are you most enjoying right now? Paul: I'm most enjoying, this is an odd app, is a password saver. I won't say the name of it, but I've been searching for the perfect one because I'm all about convenience and security and all those things at the same time. So, it's an odd choice but I found the perfect passwords saver. Stephanie: Yeah. That is actually a very good piece of tech. We recently implemented that at the company not too long ago and I was like, "Wow, this saves a lot of time. Who knew?" Paul: Absolutely. Get rid of the sticky notes. Stephanie: Yeah. All right. If you were to create a podcast, what would it be about and who would your first guest be? Paul: My first guest I'm thinking big. Stephanie: Go for it. Paul: Because I'm thinking really, really big because I'm enamored of her career. I was actually at her first rally, Elizabeth Warren. It tells you a little bit about politics and no offense. Stephanie: That's okay. Paul: But I was still in Boston, I went to her first rally and I was just enamored, I've always been enamored of her and not withstanding what happens in the near future. I would just be fascinated to talk to her about her career and how she made that mid career shift and the [inaudible] plan. Stephanie: That's cool. So, it would be politics focused or more human centric on what's important when it comes to you? Paul: More human centric with a tinge of politics because I am interested in politics. Elizabeth Warren would be it. Stephanie: We could get her on the show. I would make that happen for you. Paul: You could make that happen? Stephanie: Yeah. Paul: That would be so cool. Stephanie: I could do it. Elizabeth call us. We're ready for you. Paul: Absolutely. I remember I've actually seen her a few times, in the crowd obviously. The last time was at a protest at the Boston Common and she was quite compelling in her speech. Stephanie: Well that's great. I will have to see if I can find that online. Paul: Yeah. Stephanie: The last hard one which you've kind of already answered this, but I'll throw it anyways at your way. What one thing will have the biggest impact on Ecommerce in the next year? Paul: I think the biggest impact is the turmoil going around the big guys whether it's Facebook, Google, to some degree Amazon. What is the regulatory landscape, what is the antitrust landscape, how will they evolve, how monolithic will it be? Paul: I think I actually think about that quite often in terms of how do we enact with them, do businesses, make the leap into Amazon as a third party do, how do the algorithms evolve from a group perspective. How does privacy work? Paul: That really weighs on me in the context of thinking through how do those outside forces that are so monolithic in the tech industry impact Ecommerce. Stephanie: Well that's a big juicy one. We'll have to have a whole nother episode just to talk about your thoughts on that. Paul: Right, right. Stephanie: Well Paul it's been such a pleasure having you on this show. Like I said, I use Charlotte's Web. I've been around it for a while and I really appreciate you coming on and taking the time. Where can people find out more about you and Charlotte's Web? Paul: Well obviously our website, Charlotte'sWeb.com and I have a pretty fulsome linked in profile that shows you how haphazard my career has been but it's been a fun ride. Stephanie: Yeah. That's where I found out all about you. Well thanks so much for coming on. We'll have to have you back for round two in the future. It's been great. Paul: Absolutely enjoyed it. Thank you very much.

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. 

There is no denying the New Testament - and actually the entire Bible - is all about Jesus. His sacrifice for humanity is proclaimed from Genesis to Revelation. He IS the key to the gospel. Having said this, the life and writings of the Apostle Paul dominate much of the New Testament. His experiences and teachings are pronounced, and in the eyes of many, go too far. Critics see the Apostle Paul as a combatant against the gospel of the kingdom Jesus taught. The basis for their criticism is the way Jesus reflected the role of the Jewish Law and the way that Paul essentially wrote it off. How do we manage this? Was Paul at odds with the core values and teaching of Jesus? Jesus vs. Paul? One of the big debates in the early church raging on even today is whether or not Paul threw out the Jewish Law that Jesus not only followed but confirmed in Luke 16:17: "But it is easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for one stroke of a letter of the Law to fail." Critics argue that Jesus never said Christians DON'T have to fall in line under the Law's many requirements. On the other hand, Paul was clear that the new Gentile converts would NOT be subject to all the Law's requirements like circumcision and food restrictions. Who was right? Aren't we all taught that at least the 10 Commandments are valid in their admonitions to love God, love our neighbor and so forth? Moral - Ceremonial - Judicial The key to cracking this case is understanding that the Jewish Law was divided into three parts:  moral, ceremonial and judicial. The moral law of love, as expressed in the 10 Commandments, will never be replaced. It remained in play for both Jew and Gentile. In God’s future kingdom, it will stand as a beautiful requirement for all of mankind. Shadow vs. Reality Not only did the ceremonial parts had to do with cleanliness of people and food, but also how the Israelites atoned for their sins with sacrifices. Special sacrifices were required year after year in order to temporarily “cleanse” them of sins. This allowed a relationship with the heavenly Father to continue as long as the people remained in that clean state. These are recorded in great detail in the Old Testament. In hindsight, we see these foreshadowed the monumental sacrifice of Jesus that allowed the early Christians to have a relationship with God. This applies to Christians throughout the age - right down to you and me. The comparison between the “shadow” of the literal ceremonial events with how Jesus fulfilled them as the reality of the shadow is striking and faith-inspiring. Paul explains in many texts how Jesus replaced this part of the Law. After Jesus’ sacrifice and resurrection, the ceremonial parts of the Law were no longer necessary to have a relationship with God. (And they were completely obsolete after the Temple burned down in 70 A.D.!) What about the judicial parts of the Law? These had to do with pronouncing and administering the consequences to breaking the Law. But with the ceremonial parts obsolete, the judicial part would necessarily shift to personal responsibility of how we are judged and how we judge others. On this point, it is easy to show how Jesus and Paul agreed. Christianity was not to be a sect of Judaism. Jesus’ death and resurrection changed everything – except the fundamental law of LOVE. Listen to our podcast from February 24, 2020 called, “Did the Apostle Paul Contradict Jesus?” It is the last of our four-part series on the Apostle Paul and really brings the details of the controversy front and center. Paul lived, breathed and taught Jesus and the gospel 24/7. He devoted his life to being a faithful steward. What an example for all of us!

Learn more about being a better person through the positive impact of giving, difference of being the receiver from being a giver & the real definition of success from a person who experienced an extreme financial struggle while things were falling apart. And be inspired on how he and his family managed to still give, even on their toughest time. Show Highlights 00:02:04 - (Ari) You called your podcast How to Lose Money. And while we were setting up this interview, you mentioned that I should ask why. Yeah. So you definitely have a story about this. And I am incredibly curious. What is it? 00:02:04 - (Paul) One of my great goals in life is to be a great husband and father.. 00:05:25 - (Paul) I decided years later when we started a podcast, I said, hey, everybody's got all these successes and I love hearing about them, but I would love to hear about people's struggles, failures, problems, setbacks 00:06:01 - (Ari) The focal point of this podcast is, of course, success and greatness 00:06:54 - (Ari) What you felt like while you were watching your empire crumble from having one and a half million in the bank to being two and a half million in debt, a $4 million swing? 00:07:24 - (Paul) I actually started a nonprofit, but I didn't get the people involved 00:07:55 - (Paul) Investing is when your principal is generally secure and you have a chance to make a profit. Speculating is when your principal is not at all secure and you have a chance to make a profit. 00:08:47 - (Paul) One of my heroes in life is a guy named George Mueller. George Mueller was a hellion in Germany in the early eighteen hundreds. And he turned into a pastor. And he actually started orphanages 00:09:20 - (Ari) Wow. You're saying just by being him. People just get donations? 00:13:19 - (Ari) So I did a little math over here on the side and I'm seeing that giving around 10 percent based on making what you said a half a million dollars. 00:13:52 - (Paul) There's some formula that would that it always would work out. I think it just worked then 00:14:36 - (Ari) Can you remember when you were in the crux of it? Two and a half billion dollars in debt. Remember how you felt? 00:14:47 - (Paul) I think since all of it was backed by real estate and since I didn't have any idea how bad real estate was going to be out again, a thousand eight, nine, I actually wasn't that worried about it 00:15:49 - (Ari) Do you have a notable story about your time in financial struggle? 00:17:08 - (Paul) We were pretty tight. I mean, we were making enormous interest payments. 00:17:53 - (Ari) How did it feel to end up being the recipient when you needed it? 00:18:00 - (Paul) I wasn't ashamed, but it was weird getting a hundred dollar gift card 00:18:28 - (Ari) Are you still debt free? 00:20:47 - (Ari) How do you define success? 00:20:56 - (Paul) Inner quality, that inner satisfaction and joy from knowing you did something really, really excellent 00:22:15 - (Ari) You told me that you work very hard to fight human trafficking. You're generating funding and you rescued victims. So how does this work? And what's the backstory? 00:24:14 - (Paul) My goal is to give a significant portion of our company's profits toward fighting human trafficking and rescuing its victims 00:24:35 - (Ari) How did this end up on your radar? How'd you get involved? 00:26:44 - (Ari) Do you have any crazy stories about human trafficking that you like to share? 00:28:08 - (Ari) Felony is a much, much, much griever crime that has a much further impact on somebody's life overall as opposed to a misdemeanor Originally recorded 12/14/2018 Special Guest: Paul Moore.

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

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

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.  

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