Podcast appearances and mentions of paul they

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!

In this episode of What Catholics Believe, Thomas Naegele and Father Jenkins first address viewer questions and then discuss current events from a traditional Catholic perspective.

 A viewer asks whether practicing Natural Family Planning for couples with a propensity to produce children who are mentally impaired is a kind of eugenics; Pope Pius XII - NFP can be licit in certain circumstances; if life is there, but impaired, the child has right to life; abstaining from fear; Can “divorcees” reconcile after one has contracted a civil “marriage” and a new “family”?; the moral depravity of the Novus Ordo; the question whether the first two are genuinely married; Church does not accept “second marriages”; the obligation is to reunite; living in a “second marriage” is a mortal sin; what about the children — should the marriage remain for their sake?; best example for the children — to honor the marriage that truly exists, not remain in adultery; to remain in a false marriage is a road to hell; USSCB opposing penalties for those who commit abortions; Catholic Church - anyone who participates in an abortion is automatically excommunicated; mothers naturally risk their lives to protect their babies; to succumb to pressures is unnatural; the default stance is that the woman bears the first responsibility; to treat the woman as if she has no responsibility cheapens the life of everyone; abortion is an attack on the value and meaning of human life and thus leads to all other evils; everyone knows the baby in the womb is a human life; they abort it precisely because they know it is a human life; democratic party is the party of abortion; St. Paul — “They glory in their shame”: democrats applaud pro-abortion laws (e.g., NY); abortionists howl like the possessed; reduced human life to a commodity; there are graces at work right now as a result of prayer; we must pray like we've never prayed before; we should expect graces from prayer; we should pick up our rosaries and run to battle; Pius XII and the changes in the holy week in 1955; Pius XII condemned “archeologism”; modernists — “if we can change the Triduum, we can change anything; Pope Pius V's Quo Primum; Last Gospel not practiced universally before St. Pius V; Church emphasized devotion to the Sacred Heart and Christ the King — added organically to the missals; problem with the 1955 “restoration”— protestant in spirit; said that the Mass had become corrupted; look to primitive (rather than traditional) practices; what counted as legitimately primitive was subject to their fancies; Martin Luther — Catholic Church is a false church and I, myself, have discovered the truth; Modernists — the Church's liturgy has gotten off track and we need to establish “primitive christianity” (according to their fancies); archeologism a denial of the work of the Holy Ghost in the Church; thousand year practice of the Church not to administer Holy Communion on Good Friday; St. Pius X in Pascendi — modernism the synthesis of all heresies; compromise in the liturgy leads to compromise in other areas; insertion of St. Joseph's name into the Canon; now optional to mention saints name in the Novus Ordo Mass; St. Pius X - modernists characterized by audacity and pride; marxists had to get the Church out of the way; only the Catholic Church has the power given by Christ to withstand the powers of hell. In current events: Food shortages part of the plan of the Great Reset; “You will own nothing and be happy”; Karl Marx - private property the source of unhappiness; Our Lady of Fatima — famine would result if sin continued and Russia was not consecrated. This video was livestreamed on 5/17/2022. Please visit our website at www.wcbohio.com for our daily livestream of Holy Mass and other traditional Catholic content. May God bless you all!

What you'll learn in this episode: What charnel houses and ossuaries are, and why they were an important part of people's spiritual lives Why the Catholic Church decorated hundreds of Roman skeletons with jewels in the 17th century Why 17th century nuns were some of the most skilled yet unrecognized jewelers of their day How art and jewelry can help us explore death and other touchy subjects About Paul Koudounaris Paul Koudounaris is an author and photographer based in Los Angeles. He holds a PhD in Art History from the University of California, and he has traveled around the world to document charnel houses, ossuaries, pet cemeteries, and other macabre subjects for both academic and popular journals. His books include The Empire of Death, Memento Mori, and Heavenly Bodies, which features the little-known skeletons taken from the Roman Catacombs in the seventeenth century and decorated with jewels by teams of nuns. His most recent book is A Cat's Tale: A Journey Through Feline History. Additional Resources: Instagram Photos: Rorschach upper half, chest with skull  Hergiswil stomach full shot Weyarn head with problem here due to discoloration behind skull due to back lighting through stained glass window Sonntagsberg felic chest detail Bad Schussenried head and chest Peterskirche munditia in shrine three problems, top over curtain over rope and weird candle Transcript: Today, covering a skeleton with jewels seems odd or downright morbid. In the 17th century, it was par for the course for the Catholic Church, which covered the skeletons of martyrs with jewels and lavish accessories to highlight the Church's power. Author and photographer Paul Koudounaris has spent years researching and documenting these little-known historic treasures, which he detailed in his book Heavenly Bodies: Cult Treasures & Spectacular Saints from the Catacombs. He joined the Jewelry Journey Podcast to talk about how the skeletons (and human remains generally) were an important part of people's spiritual lives; why nuns were responsible for decorating the jeweled skeletons; and why the Catholic Church's efforts to honor martyrs didn't exactly go as it intended. Read the episode transcript here.  Sharon: Paul, I'm thinking: you have a PhD in art history, so you're a historian skilled in doing research. A lot of what you're talking about isn't just looking at something; it sounds like you had to do a lot of digging. Were the things you were talking about, the traditions and things, was this just passed down and the clergymen knew about it when you came to town, or did you have to go find original documents? Paul: I had to go back to a lot of original source material. Obviously, a lot of this stuff is forgotten about now. I did a lot of digging. It was a good couple of years of very solid research, mostly in Germany. This is very obscure information, but it was rewarding information. When you do research like this, it's like a jigsaw puzzle in getting all the pieces back into place. In the end, you never get all the pieces; you never wholly fill out the puzzle, but I feel like I did a good job of filling in about 98 percent of the puzzle of those skeletons. Sharon: I'm sure you know more than anybody else on earth about this. For all of your books, you've done the photography. Were you into photography before this? Paul: I had played around with photography a little bit before, but not professionally. When I did my first book, The Empire of Death, I actually didn't want to do the photos for the book. I wanted someone else to do them because I wanted to be able to concentrate on the research, and I didn't want to get too distracted by the photos. I wanted to walk into an old charnel house and be able to concentrate on understanding it as a space rather than immediately running in and looking it as a photographer. In the end, there was no one who could do the photos for me. There was no one who wanted to take that trip and get involved, so, I was forced into the position of doing it. In the end, by both doing the photos and researching them, I understood them all the better. It didn't distract me; I think it actually helped me focus on them.  After I had done that book, there was no question that I was going to do the photos for the rest of my books. I liked working that way. I did all the photos for Heavenly Bodies. Photographically it was a very hard task because a lot of them are in cases, so they can't be removed from these glass cases without destroying a lot. It was very difficult, but again very rewarding. I'd like to think by doing it myself and really understanding it, it allowed me to get pictures that, to me, looked more sympathetic than clinical. It might be hard to explain that without looking at other people's photos, but a lot of times, I felt that by taking the photos, I'd strive for a sense of personality because each of them had something to convey. I felt very close to them by the end of this work; maybe not close to them, but close to the people who once venerated them and those nuns who created them. Sharon: I could understand how that would be. In the beginning, you were talking about how you got your PhD in art history and you were looking for the niche. How did you stumble on this death niche?  Paul: I studied at UCLA. I was probably the Fox Mulder of the art history department. I was always the guy who, while everybody else was working on Rembrandt, I'd go off and do a seminar paper about wood cuts of werewolves or something like that. It was the things that were not considered high art and were not considered masterpieces. I was always into these things that were visual culture for common people and visual culture that had been pushed to the margins just because we consider it hokey or unseemly. I was always into that kind of stuff. I was not working on the death stuff while I was in grad school. That came later to me, when I was traveling around Europe and I understood this massive part of people's lives that we had pushed out of the history books just because we were uncomfortable with it, and when I understood the incredibly important role it played in people's spiritual lives to have these bones around. I do want to talk a little bit about the materials that went into the skeleton, if that's O.K. Sharon: Yes, please. Paul: I think that's important because people always ask me, “Are these real jewels or are these replicas?” They want to talk about the materials, and I think this can relate to your audience. In most cases, they are glass replicas rather than real rubies or things like that, but there's a reason for that. When I say they are replicas, a lot of them think, “O.K., it must be cheap,” and it's not. Nature provides what it provides, and it might not provide the materials we need in perfect shapes and sizes and patterns. So, if you were to decorate a skeleton just with real jewels found in nature, it would be very, very hard to match things up to get a perfect pattern and a perfect flow of material. That is a big part of the reason they were using glass replicas, but when I say glass replicas, I don't mean cheap. I don't mean going down to Hobby Lobby or Michael's and buying junk like people would today. There were very few glass-blowers in Europe who could make presentation-quality replicas of real jewels. They were located in the Czech Republic, in Bohemia and in Venice, and they were very, very expensive. When I say replicas, I don't mean cheap. If you look at the skeletons and you see these perfect patterns of similarly shaped jewels with a similar sheen to them, that's because they're replicas, but they would use replicas so they could complete a decorative pattern perfectly rather than relying on what nature could provide.  A lot of them you'll see are wearing what looked like wigs. Those wigs are super important. Those wigs are made of gold and silver wire. Talk about incredible expense. There was only one place in Europe that could make wire in the finest of hair, and it was in Lyon, France. They would have to get this wire made out of silver. The reason they would use this gold and silver wire, this metallic wire and precious metal, to make these wigs for them was because they wanted them to stand the test of time. Let's say I got a nice wig made out of horsehair or something. That would be pretty durable. It's still not going to last 300 years and hold its shape, is it? No way. But a wig made of coiled precious metal wire will stand the test of time, and it will maintain its shape for hundreds of years. That's why a lot of them still have these perfect curls, because they're made out of this incredibly expensive metal wire. These were really, really expensive productions to make. Even when they were made of replicas, they were incredibly expensive.  One question I constantly got asked when the book came out—whenever I did a talk, someone would ask, “How much would this cost to make in modern terms?” I never came up with a satisfactory answer for that because it's hard enough to say, “Well, today's dollar versus dollars in 1950,” and that can be kind of deceiving. Now, let's talk about today's dollars versus guilder in 1612. You're talking not just about converting currencies through a vast amount of time, you're also talking about a different economic system. You're talking about a system back then where you had incredibly rich people and everybody else was incredibly poor. Even if I said, “O.K., if you base it on such and such, maybe it costs $2 million to make,” that's still incredibly deceptive because nowadays, over the course of your lifetime, an average person might make $2 million. Back then, an average person who's out there picking carrots is going to make $2 million in a hundred lifetimes. So, these were extremely expensive even when they were replicas.   Sharon: I'm backtracking a little bit. Were they mixing real jewels with these glass jewels? Would the nuns send an order to the glassblower and say, “I need one this size”? Paul: It could be. Some of them are real jewels. A lot of times, they might use a real jewel for an accent. A lot of them have pearls. Even the pearls are fake, but the pearls are faked to be the exact same size, because nature doesn't provide pearls in equally identical sizes. But again, even the pearls that were fake were incredibly expensive to make because you had to start with a perfect, handmade glass jewel, then they had to make a covering for it to get the sheen of a pearl. They had to make the covering out of ground fish paste and paint over this ground fish paste to seal it so it would soak in. It was incredibly expensive.  One advantage was when these skeletons came to town, they were a big deal and they were going to be venerated, so a lot of wealthy people wanted to be a part of them. You might have a local duchess or duke or local count or baron donate things for the skeleton. They might donate authentic jewelry; they might donate authentic jewels, and they might donate clothing, too. You'll notice a lot of them aren't just jeweled. A lot of them are jeweled, but they also have what looks like outfits on them. Those outfits were donated by local nobility, and then the nuns would tailor them to perfectly fit the skeletons and make cutouts to show the bone. It's funny, because if you were into high fashion at the time, you would walk in and esteem these skeletons as wearing yesterday's clothes. It would be like, “That guy's a couple of years out of season,” because the nobility will donate fancy, expensive clothes for the skeleton's use, but they're not going to donate the clothes they just bought. They're not going to donate their own clothes. If you were a real nitpicker and you were into high fashion at the time, if you had an eye for it, “Yeah, that look on that skeleton is really last year.” That also would help to flesh out—pardon the pun—the decoration of the skeleton, giving them some extra materials. One other thing I think is very touching about these skeletons: a lot of them are wearing rings on their skeletal fingers. The rings often would be donated by the nuns when they were done. You mentioned the nuns, obviously, were very trustworthy and loved the skeletons. When they finished, before they put them on display, the nun had a special ring or a ring that was a family heirloom. She would donate it to the skeleton and put it on his finger. What the nuns donated, these rings, that became kind of their artist's signature, even though the meaning of it is kind of opaque to us. That became their signature, by donating something to the skeleton that would be there when it went on display.    Sharon: Could you tell there was a pattern? There are so many questions I can go through. When you talk about these rings as a signature, did you keep seeing the same ring over and over, or the did the ring have an initial? Paul: While the nuns were donating their rings, each ring was unique. Those rings were often things that had been passed down their families, like family heirlooms, so each ring would be unique. I became good enough in looking at these skeletons that I was able to tell you the same people worked on this skeleton too. I could tell you that; it's not that hard to tell. Your listeners who are really into jewelry, I'm sure they'll know. It's like, “O.K., when I see a wire bent that way and this done to fix it, I know who did that, because there are certain technical aspects that become signature moves.” There were certain convents in Europe that were particularly famous, that were well-known for doing handwork. They might work on several of them, so I was able to tell, “O.K., these people did this skeleton too,” or “Somebody from that convent worked on part of this one, but not all of it.” You could tell just by those signature, little things about the way they would wind the wire or the way they would set in the jewels. Sharon: Did the nuns make the silver and gold wigs? Paul: They would have to bend it. Not all of these were made by nuns. There were some. I should point that out in fairness to my gender. There were some that were done by men, but the vast majority was done by nuns. The most famous group that still exists is in Waldsassen Basilica in Germany. Waldsassen Basilica has 10 of these skeletons, and they are all on display in the church. It's like the Sistine Chapel of jeweled skeletons. The vast majority of those 10—I think it's eight of those 10—were all done by one guy who was a lay brother at the basilica who was also a professional jeweler and a smith. I mentioned some of them would also be in suits of armor instead of being jeweled. The ones that are armored, that armor was pretty much universally made for them by men. Smith work was men's work. Sharon: Wow! How many books have you written? Paul: Four. Sharon: Four books. I'm thinking about all the effort and research and photography that go into one book, let alone writing four of them. So, The Empire of Death, you finished it, and you had the photos you showed the commissioning editor. What more did you learn as you went along, besides the fact that there were skeletons, about the empire of death or the way we view death? Did you think, “I want to say more about this after The Empire of Death”? Paul: The Empire of Death is really a history book, and it's a history of charnel houses. It's not one of these guides to the history of death. It is an art historical tome, and the genre of art is just art in bone. I started on The Empire of Death and then I wrote Heavenly Bodies, and then I wrote a book called Memento Mori, which was a more global exploration because I had been traveling around the world photographing skeletons and bones in ritual contexts. I've got to say it took me about 10 years of work to even truly understand what I mean when I use the word death. When you ask this question about what I learned, I learned a lot, but it was a very slow process. Death is the hardest thing for any of us to contemplate, and oftentimes the most troubling thing for any of us to contemplate. It took me a really long time to understand what lay underneath all that material I was working on. I was working on all this death material, but in the end, I think I came out with a better appreciation of it and understanding. Sharon: Wow! Contemplating death, yes, that is a very difficult topic. We can imagine, but we can't really know. You're a member of the Order of the Good Death. What is that? Paul: The Order of the Good Death is not some kind of heretical, worrisome order. It's not some secret society. It's just a group of scholars and researchers and artists who work on death material. It was founded by a famous mortician, as famous as a mortician could be, I guess I should say, by the name of Caitlin Doughty, who has three New York Times-bestselling books about the way we deal with death in our society. She put this together as a think tank or a group to bring together people who were working within society to broaden our perspectives on death. None of us are out there wanting to die, and we are all hot and bothered by the idea of passing away, but at the same time, we need an acceptance of it, a more positive attitude towards nature as a natural process.  Sharon: Do you have to be invited? Can I get a membership card? How does that work? Paul: No, there's no membership card. There are no meetings. It's funny because of the name. It intrigues people. The term “good death” is an old term. It just means to pass well, to pass with grace and to pass in a meaningful and positive way. That's why she used that term. No, you can't. You don't fill out an application online, and there are no membership cards. There are no meetings. It's a very informal group. It's Caitlin's thing. If she feels that someone is doing work that she thinks fits in with her basic objective of broadening our western perspectives of death, she would like that person to join. Sharon: O.K., so she's the one I have to talk to. Now, let me ask you this. Maybe I have the order wrong, but it looks like your most recent book was A Cat's Tale. Is that correct? Do I have that right?  Paul: Yeah, that book came out this past November. That was my last book. I switched from death to writing about cats. Sharon: Why was that? That's what I wanted to ask. It's like, oh my gosh, is that the same person? Paul: It's the same person. Underlying all of it, there are some similarities. Cats also have been pushed to the margins of history. That's a much longer discussion, but when you ask people about feline history or famous cats who are not internet stars, like famous cats from history, they'll pretty much draw a blank. They'll tell you, “They were big in ancient Egypt, right?” That's about all they know. Of course, cats also have a great background in occult lore, so there are some similarities underlying the cat research and the death stuff. It's just something I wanted to do. I felt that cats, if you read the book—and the book is not technically written by me. The book is technically written by my cat. It says “By Baba the Cat as told to me,” so I'm the transcriber as she reinterprets human history from the cat point of view and puts the cat back into its place. It was just something I wanted to do.  If you or your audience find pictures from that book, they'll realize something: that it's also an illustrated book. My cat happens to be a supermodel. I had been messing around with those photo projects for a long time, making costumes for my cat because she'll wear them; she'll model and she's good. I was making a Marie Antoinette costume for her and things like that, and these were amazing pictures. So, it's like, “Well, I've got to do something with these pictures. Is there some way to put them into book form?” I thought at one point about doing a fashion guide for cats by my cat to show these looks, and then I was like, “No, wait a minute. Let's do a real book, something that will mean something to people.” So, I came up with this idea of a feline history from the perspective of a cat. It's really an emotional book, because cats have had a rough time. Yes, they were big in ancient Egypt. They were also a persecuted and hated animal at one time, and she pulls no punches. She tells you all the highs and all the lows and brings you up to the modern day and the place that cats hold in our lives. So, yes, that is by me. That was the last book. To be honest, from my perspective, being in collaboration with my cat, it's actually my favorite. Sharon: Say that again.  Paul: It's actually my favorite since it's a collaboration with my cat. It's basically a 200-page love letter to my cat. Sharon: Did she like jewelry? That's the most important question. Paul: Well, there's a lot of jewelry as you'll see. Sharon: O.K. What's your next book then? Paul: I would really like to write a history of pet cemeteries.  Sharon: Oh, interesting. Paul: That combines all of it, doesn't it? Death stuff and the cat's back into play. A history of pet cemeteries and famous animal memorials and the way we memorialize our animals. Pet cemeteries have a very interesting history. At this point, I probably know more about them than anyone in the world. I've photographed more of them than anyone in the world, too. I've gone all the way to New Zealand and Australia photographing animal graves. It's a book I had actually started. I had all the research done, and I was going make that my fourth book. Then the idea for the cat book came along, and it's like, “I'm going to sell a lot more copies of the cat book than I am a pet cemetery book in the end.” Think about this: if I mixed the order and did the cat book after, it would have a sticker on it that says, “New cat book by the guy who wrote the cemetery book that hardly anybody ever read,” or it can have a sticker on it that says, “A book about the history of pet cemeteries by this guy who wrote this famous cat book.” You know what I mean? I thought it might help to do the cat book first, so that was part of the thinking. Also I just really wanted to do this cat book at the time, because I love working with my cat.  Sharon: It sounds like you have a good partnership. Paul, thank you so much for being with us today. Do you have a favorite place to buy your books? Do you want them to go on Amazon? Does it matter to you, or is it just what people want? Paul: It doesn't matter to me. On a human level, I always tell people, “Hey, if you can support a local independent store, that's great. If you don't want to, it doesn't make any difference to me where people buy the books.” If they want to buy any of the books, I'm flattered. Thank you, but it doesn't make any difference. Sharon: Thank you so much for being with us today. Paul: Thank you. We will have images posted on the website. You can find us wherever you download your podcasts, and please rate us. Please join us next time, when our guest will be another jewelry industry professional who will share their experience and expertise. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you again for listening. Please leave us a rating and review so we can help others start their own jewelry journey.  

What you'll learn in this episode: What charnel houses and ossuaries are, and why they were an important part of people's spiritual lives Why the Catholic Church decorated hundreds of Roman skeletons with jewels in the 17th century Why 17th century nuns were some of the most skilled yet unrecognized jewelers of their day How art and jewelry can help us explore death and other touchy subjects About Paul Koudounaris Paul Koudounaris is an author and photographer based in Los Angeles. He holds a PhD in Art History from the University of California, and he has traveled around the world to document charnel houses, ossuaries, pet cemeteries, and other macabre subjects for both academic and popular journals. His books include The Empire of Death, Memento Mori, and Heavenly Bodies, which features the little-known skeletons taken from the Roman Catacombs in the seventeenth century and decorated with jewels by teams of nuns. His most recent book is A Cat's Tale: A Journey Through Feline History. Additional Resources: Instagram Photos: Rorschach upper half, chest with skull  Hergiswil stomach full shot Weyarn head with problem here due to discoloration behind skull due to back lighting through stained glass window Sonntagsberg felic chest detail Bad Schussenried head and chest Peterskirche munditia in shrine three problems, top over curtain over rope and weird candle Transcript: Today, covering a skeleton with jewels seems odd or downright morbid. In the 17th century, it was par for the course for the Catholic Church, which covered the skeletons of martyrs with jewels and lavish accessories to highlight the Church's power. Author and photographer Paul Koudounaris has spent years researching and documenting these little-known historic treasures, which he detailed in his book Heavenly Bodies: Cult Treasures & Spectacular Saints from the Catacombs. He joined the Jewelry Journey Podcast to talk about how the skeletons (and human remains generally) were an important part of people's spiritual lives; why nuns were responsible for decorating the jeweled skeletons; and why the Catholic Church's efforts to honor martyrs didn't exactly go as it intended. Read the episode transcript here.  Sharon: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Jewelry Journey Podcast. Today, my guest is Paul Koudounaris, who's an art historian, photographer and author whose publications in the field of charnel houses and ossuary research have made him a well-known figure in these areas. Today, he'll tell us about his fascinating work and what it has to do with jewelry. We'll hear about his unusual jewelry journey today. Paul, welcome to the podcast. Paul: Hi. I'm delighted to be here, and I'm delighted to talk about this topic from the perspective of jewelry. Sharon: I was so interested to hear it. Tell us about your journey. Did you get into this field because of your doctoral studies in art? How did you get into it? I don't know what charnel house means, and I didn't want to look it up until I heard your definition. Paul: Well, a charnel house is just a room full of bones. It's from an old Latin word, “caro,” that meant flesh. It's a flesh room, or it was literally a bone room. When they'd run out of room in cemeteries, they would put the bones and skulls in a separate room. They didn't want to discard the bones of their relatives, but they needed room to bury more people. I started out studying that. Of course, that has nothing to do with jewelry, at least not at first, but it does have something to do with a PhD in history.  When I finished the PhD, everyone likes to carve their own niche in life, and I was always interested in the macabre stuff. I was very familiar with the famous charnel houses, giant bone rooms, such as the Paris catacombs, which most people know about as big tourist attractions. As I traveled around Europe and looked in depth, I started to realize how many of these places there were that nobody knew about; that weren't famous but were spectacular. I started to realize how these places, these great bone rooms that were constructed in the 16th, 17th, 18th centuries, had once been a very important part of people's spiritual lives. We had pushed them into the cracks because we are so uncomfortable with the topic of death, and because the churches that administered them were oftentimes embarrassed to own these rooms full of bones because it just doesn't play well in the modern world. So, I got started looking at those bone rooms. I wrote called a book called The Empire of Death that was designed to bring their meaning back into play for a modern audience. Sharon: People must flock around you at cocktail parties. I'm thinking about them being so interested in what you have to say about this. Tell us about how the jewels come into play here. Paul: I was finishing my book called Pyre of Death. It was literally about the bone rooms and the skeletons, the meaning of their décor and their place in people's spiritual lives. When I was finishing that book, I found a topic that was even more spectacular, and it had me hooked. Sometimes in Italy, they would take me into these old bone rooms. A lot of times, they were closed off from the public, so I needed permission from the church. Before I would get into the bone rooms, sometimes I would find these old skeletons that had been put into storage that were completely covered in jewels, and this is where the jewelry angle comes in. They were never part of the bone rooms per se; they were the relics of saints, these whole-body skeletons completely covered over in jewels. I started getting into that, understanding what that was. We can talk about it because it has a very profound meaning in terms of religion.  By the time I finished the first book, as it was coming out, I was in London at my publisher's office. I had taken a picture of some of these skeletons, and I had put them on the commissioning editor's desk. I pushed him the photos and said, “Here's the next book,” and he looked at the photos and was like, “Yeah, O.K., that's the next book. We'll draw up a contract. What the hell is this?” It's hard for your listeners to understand what I'm talking about. They might Google it. If they Google my name, Koudounaris— Sharon: And we will have links to everything and photos on the website when we post this. Paul: The book is called Heavenly Bodies. If they Google my name and the book, they would see pictures of what I'm talking about. They truly are spectacular. We're talking about entire human skeletons, head to toe, completely covered in jewels. It was something utterly spectacular that has apparently been blotted out, pushed aside because of our own anxiety dealing with this kind of material in the modern age. That's how the jewelry angle comes in. Sharon: How did they decide which skeletons were going to be covered in jewelry? Paul: The skeletons that were jeweled had nothing to do with the charnel houses themselves. The bone rooms were filled with people from the cemetery. The skeletons were something different. To understand why these were important, I need to talk a little bit about the historical background. I know since this is a jewelry show, people have different levels of awareness of religious history, so pardon me if some of this is a little rudimentary, but it's very important in understanding this topic.  I think we all know about the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther, in the 16th century, takes the first breakaway group from the Catholic Church and other groups start to leave. The Catholics, who thought they were inviolable and didn't think they could really be hurt by these Protestant break-away groups, by the time they take this seriously, they've lost about half of Europe and they have to respond. They have to produce something to bring people back in their church. The Protestant groups all had different viewpoints, but one thing the Protestants universally disliked was the Catholic practice of relics, relics being those little bits of bone or a lock of hair or some piece of a holy person that would be on display in a church. “Look, we have St. Peter's fingernail.” The Protestants didn't like that kind of stuff. First of all, they thought it was cultish or death-y. More importantly, they thought it was leading people into idolatry, because maybe someone's praying to a fingerbone rather than praying to God. So, the Protestants go around and destroy the relics. When the Catholics decided to rebuild their church and try to bring people back in, they said, “Well, we need new relics, and they need to be spectacular. We need to show them.” The Catholics understood propaganda, and they understood that people respond to visual symbols more than they respond to abstract ideas. So, they said, “O.K., we're going to rebuild the churches. We are going to bring in new relics, but relics that are so powerful, like nobody has ever seen before, that are really going to attract people.” And so they needed new relics. Around this time, they rediscovered the catacombs of Rome, which were early Christian burial sites. They would send people down there to look for early Christian martyrs. Because they gave their lives for God, to the church, early Christian martyrs have a status about equivalent to a saint. They would take these skeletons of these early Christian martyrs from Rome and send them to northern Europe to the battleground areas where they thought they could win people back from the Protestants. Mostly that was in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Then they would cover them over completely in jewels, and they would put them on display in these newly re-founded churches as a citadel for people to say, “Look, this is the glory. This glory you see in earthly terms, a skeleton covered over in jewels, this is a reflection of the heavenly glory, the heavenly Jerusalem, that God promises to people who are true to the faith, who will fight for the faith, who fight to reestablish the truth faith, the Catholic Church, in the face of its adversaries, much like these martyred people once fought to found the faith against heathens and pagans of the world.” Sharon: When they went back to find these early martyrs, did they have an X on them? How did they know? They just said, “This was a martyr”? Paul: That's the big problem. The Roman catacombs are famous for Christian burials, but other Romans were buried there too. You could do either of them; you could cremate or you could bury, your choice, and the Jews put their people in the catacombs, too. So, how do you go down into these 1,400, 1,500-year-old tunnels and figure out who in there is a Christian versus a Roman or a Jew, and who has actually been martyred? Of course, it's very difficult.  Again, as I said, the Catholics really understood propaganda. These people they were sending north, were they really Christian martyrs? They didn't intend it as a total fraud. They looked for certain symbols. If there was a letter M on a gravestone, they thought, “O.K., well, if there's a letter M, it might mean martyr.” Then again, the gravestones were often broken, so they might see an M, but it might have been part of a larger word. Maybe it was the word Mars; maybe it was someone who had dedicated their lives in the service of the god Mars. You really didn't know, so a lot of it was guesswork.  One of the things the Christians looked for were little vials that had been filled with blood. If there was a vial near the grave that had been filled with blood—or then, it had turned to a brown or a reddish dust—they decided, “That must be a martyr because there's a little vial that had been filled with blood. It must be that person's blood that was spilled at his martyrdom. This is definitely a martyr; take him out and send him north.” What they didn't know is the Romans also had a funerary practice that is basically the backstory for us putting flowers on a grave. The Romans would sometimes put vials of perfume near a grave, and perfume over time can also turn into this brownish power.  So, you're asking how they knew. They really didn't. A lot these people who were reborn as Christian saints may have been Roman fisherman, for all we know, and people would have been primed to venerate a fisherman. It's a wild story historically. They would pull these skeletons out and rebaptize them. They'd call it batizati because they didn't necessarily know who they were. The catacombs had been ransacked and they were not in good condition, so they'd pull these skeletons out and have a baptism. They'd rebaptize them and give them a name because they didn't know who they were. A lot of these skeletons would have names like Felix. Tons of skeletons who were named Felix who were sent forth from these catacombs. Why Felix? Names like Felix or Clemente, names like that. Why? Because they sound like proper names, but they're also the names of virtues. Felix is the base word for felicity meaning happiness. When they call a guy Felix and send him out, they're saying, “We're not really saying he's a saint by the name of Felix or a martyr by the name of Felix; we're saying he is the epitome of Christian happiness because he died for God.” Now, as I said, this was a propaganda war that these jeweled skeletons were involved in, so when they get to Germany, people didn't question, “Yeah, we have St. Felix here.” One of the most common skeletons to be sent out of the catacombs was St. Valentine. Why St. Valentine? The real St. Valentine has always been interred in Italy, but to make sure they were well received—because, again, this was propaganda to re-found the church. There is no Google to stop people from saying, “Oh, St. Valentine has just arrived in our town. Blessed be, we are graced by the God of love.” There's no Google to say, “Wait a minute, this is horrible. Valentine's interred in Italy.” They're just going to accept it for what it is. You asked a good question: how did they know? They really didn't, but these were tools to re-found a church. They were really jewels of war. These jeweled skeletons were tools of war in the battle against Protestantism.  Sharon: You said you stumbled on this, but how come people didn't know these were here? Paul: They did a little bit. It would be unfair to say no one knew. They were still around. I think most of them—it's another question you can asked: what happened to the bulk of them? A lot of them were destroyed, and a lot of them were destroyed for certain reasons. When they fell out of favor, people would rob the jewels from them and throw the skeletons away. I would say most of them, maybe two-thirds of them, have been destroyed, but a lot of them were still around; they were just only known by theologians or people who were really plugged into Catholic history in those places. When I was working in Germany photographing these, I was staying at a friend's house in Stuttgart. Every day I would come back to her house, and she would sit me down at the table and say, “O.K., show me what other crazy things you found in my country that we don't know about.” The bulk of Germans didn't even know these skeletons were there, even though they had been a big part of spiritual life.  There were several problems with those skeletons. First of all, I've already told you that a lot of them couldn't be brought. When the Enlightenment came, they decided, “We need to get a lot of the superstition out of religion.” There were actual doctrines passed in Sumer that said, “O.K., we can't have relics on display without a proven provenance, because we don't want people praying in front of a Roman fisherman's bone.” A lot of them were put into storage for that reason. A lot of them were simply removed by the churches and taken away because they didn't want the modern church to be associated with a skeleton covered in jewels. It's not a good look for the modern world. We have an incredible anxiety over death, plus the church gets accused of being a death cult, and what better proof would you have of a death cult than walking into a church and seeing a jeweled skeleton?  A lot of them got pushed away in one very strange incident. There were some skeletons they felt bad about removing because it was such an important part of local history. They said, “Well, we want him out of our church. We don't want this look anymore. We don't want a jeweled skeleton in our church, but we don't want to throw him away because he's a part of local history and local lore.” So, they cut a hole in the wall. They shoved it in the wall and plastered the wall over, so he's still technically in the church; he's just literally inside the wall trapped in plaster. So, they got rid of them.  It's funny; times change, tastes change. For me, in writing this book, of course I had to get into the theological history, but it was more of an appreciation or reinterpreting them and saying, “O.K., these may have been failed religious items, and they may not have been the skeletons of the people they thought. They may not have been the Christian martyrs, but we can still appreciate them in the modern world as incredible works of art, the finest works of art in human bone that have ever been seen, and incredible works of jeweler's art to cover them like that and make them so splendid. Let's appreciate them in those respects.” A lot of people do love the photos, not for the death aspect or the theological aspect, but for the artistic aspect.  Times do change. There's one in a church in Switzerland. There was a variance to bejeweling them. Sometimes they would put them in suits of armor. If they thought it had been a military martyr, they'd put them in a suit of armor. This one has always been on display and they've never removed it. It's still there in the modern church. I talked to the priest about it at the church in Switzerland; its name is St. Croesus. I was like, “Do you ever get any guff at the church for having this skeleton in armor there?” He was like, “It actually does us some good because the heavy metal kids think it's really cool to come to church because there's a skeleton in armor.” Times have changed. Sharon: That's really interesting. When you look at the photos in your book, Heavenly Bodies, it's just amazing the jewels and how they decorated them. Talk about works of jewelers' art, or any kind of art.   Paul: I think one very important aspect of this is the people who did the work. That is another forgotten chapter in history along with the skeletons. People are often surprised when I tell them these skeletons were mostly decorated by nuns. They weren't decorated by professional jewelers, and they weren't decorated by big-name artists. They were decorated by teams of nuns. People are sometimes surprised when I say that, but we have to understand life in a convent at that time. Remember, a convent had to have an economy. It had to support itself, and all the money didn't necessarily from donations. Nuns were very skilled in certain trades, what were then sometimes called women's arts. They didn't get the same respect as sculpture and painting, the kind of arts that have been traditionally patriarchal, but these nuns were skilled in what were called women's arts, things like textile making, jewelry work, beadwork, wirework.  Some of these nuns were probably the Michelangelo or Leonardo of working with jewelry at time; it's just that we don't know them because our history has always been a patriarchal view. Their names are signed to these skeletons, and they do incredible work. They would send skeletons undecorated up to Europe. The church would get them, and they would turn them over to teams of local nuns. The nuns might take years decorating them, a very costly process, a very time-consuming process, but nuns have the right religious temperament to deal with such an object, They can do it, they have a love for it, and very importantly, nuns had the technical and artistic skill to do this kind of jewelry work, to do this kind of textural work and to do it beautifully. That's another really important of the story. It shows the incredible, high level of skill of these female artists that had been living in these convents to do this kind of work.  Sharon: Also too, I assume that one would think they're trustworthy and not be afraid that the jewels were going to disappear. Paul: Oh, sure! Like I said, the nuns had the perfect temperament to deal with the sacred object, and the nuns obviously were not going to steal anything. Sharon: Why were these jeweled skeletons in on display? Did people parade past them in the church? How did that work? Well, I guess they were underneath in the charnel house. Paul: They were on display in the church. They were never stored in the charnel houses. That only came later when they removed them. They would set them into altars in big glass cases. It's the reason that so many of them are posed. A lot of them are posed in a resting pose, full body laid out, almost like they're waking from a sleep. The reason for that is the best place to put them was in the predella of an altar, right underneath the altar table. Of course, that's a long, thin area. They would usually put them in there, so that explains why so many of them are in that resting pose.  People would see them every time they walked into the church, but you asked about parades. When they were drilling them into the panel, the technical term for moving a relic is a translation. When they would translate the relics into town and bring them in the church, it was a religious holiday for the town. They would parade them in front of the entire town. Everybody would come out to meet their new patron saint. It was a very big event. Canons would shoot off, and there would be a military parade and an escort for them, and they'd set them into the church with much hoopla. These were very revered objects at the time, and many of the local churches would have special feast days in appreciation of the new saint that had come to them, this new, jeweled skeleton. For instance, in one instance in Germany, a town did have a skeleton they called St. Valentine, so of course they all took him to be the god of love. So, every year on Valentine's Feast Day, myriad couples and boyfriends and girlfriends would come and march and stand in front of this skeleton who, like I said, for all we know, might have been a Roman fisherman. But they'd stand in front of the skeleton they were calling St. Valentine, and they would renew their vows and renew their love for one another in front of the skeleton. The town had even commissioned an orchestral piece that would be played every year when people would stand in front of the skeleton and speak their vows. So yes, they were very much on public display and they were very much a big deal.  

Paul McDowall and Catherine Clark were neighbors when they founded ClarkMcDowall, a 21-year-old agency that with “intelligence and imagination” architects growth for “visionary companies.” Originally starting with big clients Catherine “inherited” from her previous employer, the agency had to put in effort to bring on the startups and mid-size companies that keep an agency nimble, fresh, and entrepreneurial – where there is a higher chance of “getting stuff done.”  Paul says the agency's most productive relationships come with clients that want to think ahead and think differently, make changes and do something different, and push boundaries – that these companies have a “sophistication in the way they think, but also a progressive way of thinking about their own industry or their own business.” Catherine notes that the human side is important to the mix and that today's clients are far more savvy about marketing and innovation than they were even six years ago. Brand-architecting involves broad-scope innovation in such activities as creating new brands, amplifying “rising star brands,” and transforming legacy brands for visionary clients by changing brand strategy, purpose, or positioning. The agency's brand expression work covers verbal expression (naming/ messaging) and visual expression (visual ID, packaging, design across the whole ecosystem, and web, video, and social components). Catherine says, “Architecting a brand is really about getting into what it stands for and then really thinking about how that impacts in all the ways it expresses itself.” As an example of client work, Catherine talks about the agency's multi-year effort with the Oklahoma City Thunder NBA team; addressing such issues as – What is their purpose? Why do they exist? How do they uniquely do things? What is it they actually do? – and then thinking how that manifests in the organization's operations – a campaign, a tagline, player experience, how a new player is greeted . . . or about the arena itself and the experience of the arena. Paul extends the scope by mentioning that these things include the internal culture as well, “how they talk to each other” and “how they hire.” Although ClarkMcDowall is based in New York City, the 2020 Covid lockdown forced the agency to rethink its organization. Catherine talks about the tension that comes with change . . . and the agency's decision to “Just go hybrid and start building it.” Today, the agency uses different systems, different ways of hiring, and different ways of working than in the past . . . and has a strong focus on creating a work environment that is less transactional and more about people's lives. About 25% of the agency's 25 employees work remotely – across the country.  Catherine says all this change has come with some nice surprises (and these are quotes): The more we allow people to try to find their own rhythm and their own environment, the more we're able to retain them and get the best out of them. I feel like we're even truer to ourselves in our values. We've really doubled down on the way that we treat people, the way that we integrate into our community, some of the pro bono stuff that we're doing.  There's this weird thing that the more you innovate, in a way, the easier it is to be true to yourself. You have to change a lot in order to really notice that anchor that you have. Catherine and Paul can be reached on their agency's website at:  clarkmcdowall.com or on LinkedIn. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by a duo, Paul McDowall and Catherine Clark. They're both Founding Partners at ClarkMcDowall, based in New York City. Welcome to the podcast. PAUL: Thank you. CATHERINE: Thanks for having us. We're very excited to be here. ROB: It's very excellent to have you here. Maybe you could start off by telling us about ClarkMcDowall and about what it is that makes the firm unique. CATHERINE: We call ourselves brand architects. I guess we'll start there with the unique piece. Just to be tangible for everybody who might be listening in, that means we do a bunch of things. We create new brands, we amplify what we would call “rising star brands,” and then we transform legacy brands for clients that we would consider to be visionary clients who are really looking for some change. What does that mean? It means we offer services like brand strategy, brand purpose, positioning, architecture. We also do a lot of innovation work, as that is also part of architecting those brands. Finally, we do brand expression work, whether that's verbal expression like naming/messaging or visual expression like vis ID packaging, designing across the whole ecosystem, web, video, social. There's about 25 people in our agency. Our roots and our base are in New York City, but we are hybrid. We also have talent across the country. I think what makes us unique is – we phrase it as “intelligence and imagination,” and I'm sure Paul will jump in and add to that, but it's really born from the partnership that Paul and I have. I'm a strategist originally and Paul is a creative originally, and we both own 50% of this business. It's very much about the fusion of two sides of our business that are usually not seen in equal partnership very much in the agency landscape. PAUL: Yeah. We got to the intelligence and imagination – for a while we were talking about “we have strategy brains and creative brains working together,” and it sounded a little clunky. It also felt quite limiting as well. It feels as though creatives can't think and then strategists don't have a creative thought. It's just not true. The idea of intelligence and imagination is something that we do collectively as a team. It's not one team, one person owns that. It's everybody, whether it's the strategists, whether it's the creatives, but also whether it's our client experience team, whether it's our marketing team, ops team, whoever it is. That's how we think and how we approach life. It's a broader philosophy which has stood us in good stead for the last, gosh, 21 years, Catherine. CATHERINE: It's been a journey. PAUL: Yeah. Awesome journey. ROB: Congratulations on that alone. That's quite a journey. You mentioned building brand architecture. When someone goes to your website and looks at the range of brands that are on there, we see quite an array of impressive top-level name brands. How does that play out? I imagine you can talk about some of those brands that are on the site. What does brand architecture look like for one of those examples that we might see looking at the firm? CATHERINE: I could pick a couple of examples. Architecting a brand is really about getting into what it stands for and then really thinking about how that impacts in all the ways it expresses itself. One client we like to talk about a lot is the Oklahoma City Thunder NBA team. We worked with them for a number of years, really helping define their purpose, why they exist, how they uniquely do things, what it is they actually do, and then thinking about how that manifests in all kinds of ways. It could be a campaign, a tagline, some visuals. It could also be the player experience. How do you greet a new player when they show up at your team? Or it could be about the arena itself and what the experience is like. PAUL: Even their internal culture as well, how they talk to each other, how they hire. It's from the inside out. Sorry, Catherine. CATHERINE: No, no problem, Paul. This is our two heads thinking together, like we do. [laughter] So that's how we would talk about being brand architects. It's actually a little bit like an architect thinks about creating a building that is influencing the way people live their lives, the way they interact with each other, the way that building leaves a mark on the landscape. It's really bringing a lot of things together. Another manifestation of our work might be some work we did with Starbucks, restaging Evolution Fresh, which is their juice brand that was doing really well. They had this incredible, beautiful design, actually, that won some awards. But then the whole landscape changed around them. That's what happens when we get brought in to do brand transformation. It's like, “Hey, we've got this thing. It was doing great and now it's hit a wall.” We would help them from the get-go in terms of understanding, what is the problem? Who is your audience? How do we change the way you position yourself and tell your story? Then we're able to bring it to life. In that particular instance, it was mainly packaging. The packaging was their main source of communication; they didn't have any advertising. So that's where we applied all our efforts, into the visual expression, and it turned their business around. They went from major decline to double-digit growth. PAUL: They were getting delisted. Even from their own Starbucks stores, they were getting delisted. That's how dire the situation was. Through the work we launched, they were doing double-digit growth. They had the biggest growth I think they'd seen in the brand itself, and actually outpacing the category itself. So a pretty dramatic transformation. ROB: What was the timing of your engagement with Oklahoma City? Were you there right when they were moving and that transition? Was part of the brand design around the new team name? Or was it downstream from there? CATHERINE: Downstream. We came in at the Kevin Durant free agency time. I can't say too much about all of that, but you can imagine that that team was going through a lot of soul-searching in terms of what they stood for, and if that player was going to leave – which he ended up leaving – how do you make sure you define that team so that it has a real sense of purpose, regardless of the outcome they can't control? So we came in at that point and really helped them articulate what makes them different. And as Paul was saying, impacting their culture internally. They made this incredible bounce-back as soon as he left. And they're always changing and there's always players coming in, coming out. How, with a brand like that, do you help them to find what they stand for, agnostic of the players that might be there, knowing that the players are actually a huge part of the experience? So trying to create some stability and a sense of agency, if you like, for themselves outside of wins and losses and players. PAUL: I think it's interesting. They have a very progressive team way of thinking. I'm impressed with the GM, who we worked closely with and Catherine has a very good relationship with. He's super thoughtful about everything, not wanting to be just another sports team or thinking like another sports team. I think they're the folks that we do really well with, those clients that really want to push the boundary, thinking ahead – not just reflecting the status quo – and wanting to do something different, wanting to make a change, wanting to think differently, wanting to think fresh. There's a sophistication in the way they think, but also a progressive way of thinking about their own industry or their own business. We create wonderful, productive relationships with folks that are wired that way just because we're wired that way as well. CATHERINE: Just to build on that, a lot of agencies in our business are used to helping their clients narrow down their bull's-eye, target audience and all those good things. We've had to do the same thing over the years and say, “Hey, what kind of clients do we work best with?” Because you can't be everything to everyone. That's really been the thread: people who we consider to be visionary, who really want to do something different, transcend their category, push the boundaries, but at the same time have this very human side to them. We're a very casual agency in terms of how we present ourselves and how we work with people. So there's a real human side. We know we do better with clients that want that very personal, intimate relationship versus clients who are maybe looking for a big agency with lots of fancy style of working. We're in a category where there's lots of different people doing different things, and if you can really define your niche, you're more likely to be successful and be able to focus on that. ROB: Right. There's a big piece of the story there that I would like to come back to, because I think you look at a lot of the brands you've worked with, and I think a lot of agencies would look at the overall top-level brand and say that that brand is untouchable, that you really have to be a big holding company shop to engage with them. But I'm going to put a pin in that for a moment. I want to get back to the origin story a little bit. Clearly, you two teamed up and you're combining worlds of your own strengths. But how did ClarkMcDowall come to be in the first place? What's the origin story? PAUL: [laughs] This is a story that we actually didn't tell from the get-go because I think it would've scared our clients, but we were literally next-door neighbors, literally over the garden fence. Catherine was running the UK side of a London branding company and I was doing my own thing with somebody else. I was very dissatisfied; I was on the creative side/design side, very limited. Wasn't really allowed to ask a lot of questions. I'd inherit a brief and then respond to that brief. Catherine was on the flipside, doing all this incredible thinking with innovation thinking, strategic thinking, and then it would be mistranslated or turned into – just lost, just melt into the ether and never see what happened to it. We had a conversation one day – I think our spouse and partners were like, “The person next door, you should talk! They do what you do!”, whatever. And eventually we did. I remember Catherine sharing her insights. Catherine is extremely eloquent, as you can tell already. Very intelligent, bang-on. I just exploded and was like, “This is incredible.” It opened my mind to things. Likewise, Catherine, different side, “Here's a creative that thinks differently about the industry and is dissatisfied and doesn't just want to be a designer,” all those sorts of things. It was literally a meeting of the minds. It was happenstance. It was one of those magic moments in your life that is transformational. And I mean that in the biggest sense of the word “transformational.” Then we built the business from there and basically shared thoughts and insights. We started in the East Village because that's where we lived. As your audience will know, running an agency is a 24/7/365 job. We had babies at the time, or babies to come, so we wanted to stay close to our families. The human side, as Catherine touched upon, is super important to us, and recognizing that and trying to make it work for people. By the way, Catherine, jump in at any time. You've heard this story a thousand times. You don't need to hear me warbling on. CATHERINE: But you tell it so romantically. It's amazing. [laughter] I think what Paul's saying is incredible because we ended up having two girls, two boys, they were the same ages, they all went to school together. It became kind of like a family thing. The company never felt like a family business, but there was definitely a sense of community. We were very proud to have an office open on E 11th Street between A and 1st back in 1999. It was a complete scary neighborhood, and we were like, “This is where we live. We love it. We're doing it.” Our clients were a little freaked out at first, and then as soon as they got into our office, or past the front door, they were like, “This is awesome. I feel energized. I feel like I'm part of something.” I think we really stuck to who we were, and that's carried us all the way through. Then we ended up in various spaces on the same block. We couldn't really expand the space. At one point we had an apartment, we had a storefront, we had a studio, all literally on the same block. We called it our little village. That's how we grew. We started with some big clients that I'd inherited from my previous employer, Unilever – that then turned into Mars that then turned into other companies – just literally following people around. So we started really having what I would call big clients right from the get-go, and then over time actually had to work to try to get smaller clients – which is the opposite of maybe the journey a lot of other agencies take. They start with the smallest startups and then make their way up. We started literally with the big corporations and had to make an effort to go and acquire startups or mid-size companies that are actually really important to work with also, because they keep you nimble, they keep you fresh, they keep you entrepreneurial, and you have a higher chance of getting stuff out the door and published and all of those things. But it's been definitely a very organic journey for us. PAUL: Yeah. And it's not being afraid to evolve, I think. It's interesting because even after 21 years, we'll stop and do a brand refresh or want to choose our narrative or whatever it is, and we go back to those original core tenets, those values. Maybe the language around them changes, but the essence of those things, what we believe in, is still really true to who we are – this idea of being original, this idea of evolving and problem-solving and going with the times, this idea of having an optimistic outlook, because you have to in order to keep in business and keep going. The idea of community, the idea of taking care of people, nurturing people. Those things were baked in from the start. They weren't things that we made up. They're just true to who we are as people. I think that's something, if any of your audience are new business owners as well, really doubling down on what you believe in and your values and being brave and sticking to them. When you start off, you're a bit insecure. You think you need to be something else than you actually are. We had that, right, Catherine? We said, “Oh, we need to be like this agency,” and in the end it took a couple of years to be like, “No, people are buying ClarkMcDowall. They're not buying the other agency.” Then it was like, “Oh, we are who we are.” You embrace it more and you really go with it. That quirky little storefront we used to have or whatever it might be, it becomes part of you, and then that's what you build upon. ROB: It's really a key point. Maybe since you've made it through 21 years and probably continue to actually refine your authenticity – sometimes you think about building up layers; it seems like it's almost the opposite sometimes. It's peeling away the layers of what people made you think you were supposed to be and finding who you can authentically be. How have you figured some of those moments out? Because it's really, really hard when you think about the expectations that people have upon you when you say, “This is us, this is what we do. We're in the market.” CATHERINE: There's something about knowing your values. I think it was helpful that Paul and I met as people and shared values, so it's easy for us to return to, if you like, as opposed to maybe people meeting through a business lens. We just genuinely wanted to do work together and respected each other's ways of thinking. So there's a human side. I will say the tension comes when you want to change. For example, when 2020 hit, we were really quick to say – I think it was like April or something, a month or two after lockdown – “You know what? Just go hybrid and start building it. Whatever that means, we'll define as we go, but let's commit to that.” So we've changed in the last year and a half probably more ways of working than we've ever changed. Basically moving everything to Google, using different systems, different ways of working, having maybe 25% of the company remote. But somehow, I feel like we're even truer to ourselves in our values. We've really doubled down on the way that we treat people, the way that we integrate into our community, some of the pro bono stuff that we're doing. So there's this weird thing that the more you innovate, in a way, the easier it is to be true to yourself. You have to change a lot in order to really notice that anchor that you have. ROB: Have you hired in a particular secondary location, or has it really been anywhere, everywhere, or maybe just North American time zones? What's the range? CATHERINE: We're in North American time zones. We have had some team members go abroad for a month or so, and that's fine, as long as it doesn't exceed let's say the 5- or 6-hour time range. But in general, it's across the U.S. We have some people on the West Coast, which is great because we have some business over there as well. But there are some other people in places where we don't have clients. What we're noticing, though, is there's a fair amount of movement. Everybody's like, “Do I want to move?”, or they move and then they miss New York and they come back. I think what's been nice for people is that they've felt that they had the freedom to go and explore and not feel like, “I have to not move because we're going to have to go in the office next month” or something. We've allowed people to also discover what works best for them, and I think it's going to take a while to settle, because we're still in this very unexpected, volatile time. The more we allow people to try to find their own rhythm and their own environment, the more we're able to retain them and get the best out of them. That's our attitude. ROB: It's been an exciting opportunity. To your overall point, I think it can almost help when you're not trying to choose “Who's the best person we can find that wants to commute into the East Village?”, and instead you say, “Who's the best person that aligns to our values and needs who wants to work remotely?” It's a different question, and I think the numbers are bigger. The candidate pool is bigger. In our experience, at least, you can hire faster in a lot of cases. CATHERINE: Absolutely. We've also experimented with different hiring models, getting people on short-term contracts so that they're more willing to say, “I'm usually freelance, but I'm going to try to have this full-time experience for a period of time, but I'm not fully committed,” or people working part-time. I don't know that we've cracked the code yet, but we're very much in an open mindset around different ways to engage people, and that's been super successful for us. We've been able to attract people and retain people that maybe in the past it would've been like, they're not local, they don't want to work on these hours, and we might've passed them by. And actually, they've contributed tremendously to the business. PAUL: It's like constantly learning. Same with the space as well, like Catherine said. We gave up our lease. The timing worked out. We've got other pals who are big agencies who are locked into leases and they're like, “Gosh, what do I do with this now?” I guess we were in a fortunate position of being able to give that up, which means that we can experiment and we can learn and beta test. We keep saying we could never imagine – if you were to create an office from the get-go, there's no way you would put people in desks side by side, 9:00 to 6:00. You just wouldn't build it that way. So we're thinking about if and when we have the space – don't even want to call it an office, but what would that space be? What's its role, what's its function? How do we design around people? How do we design around the team? How do we design around people's lives? Because it's not just about work. It's not a transaction. I think work can often become, or has been in the past, a transactional relationship. We want to make it much more integrated and thoughtful in that sense. So that's the sort of experimentation. Do we have the answers? No, not at all. The same way Catherine said we don't have the answers on the hiring. But we're super open. We're not afraid of testing things, and we're not trying to be rigid because “That's the way it was.” It's, “What could it be?” And then we'll try to figure that out. ROB: It's fascinating that you were able after 20 years to hold the office lease even somewhat loosely. But I'm sure maybe because you've moved around so much, it's been possible to recognize that there will always be someone who will let you sign a lease when you show up with a signature in hand. But this moment is unique in what you can learn from it. We talked a little bit about some other lessons along the way around peeling those layers back, but Catherine and Paul, what are some other key lessons you'd say you've learned along the way that if you were rewinding 21 years, you'd tell yourself to consider doing differently on this journey? CATHERINE: Maybe I won't answer fully the doing things differently, but one thing that has been a big thing is how much brands have changed and how much our clients' needs have changed. For a long time – I would say for at least 10-15 years – I remember we used to do some work for a client, a big corporation, and you'd be educating them on this innovation process. They'd never done it before. Then six months later, you work with somebody else in the same company and they also don't know anything. The years would go by. I'm like, when are they going to figure out that they keep learning the same stuff? And suddenly, all of a sudden, I would say maybe five to six years ago, we started to see a shift where a lot of our clients became very sophisticated. They in-housed a lot more things, and all this stuff that we tended to have to educate them on, they know. What it means is you really have to make sure that you're adding value on top of what is basic 101 for everybody now. So the level of sophistication has really increased in the industry – which is great, actually. Different agencies are going to bring different things. For us, it's really about joining the dots. I think having a company that's owned both by somebody that comes from a creative background as well as someone who's coming from a business and strategy background has meant that we've created this culture where one doesn't trump the other. We don't have a design-led culture where strategists are post-rationalizing, or the opposite. That confluence of thinking, of different minds, is really, really rich. We find that harder to replicate in-house for clients just because they're not built that way. They're coming from a business perspective. So we're able to maybe crack things, join dots between things in ways that really add value, and we understand that process really well. But every agency is going to need to be finding how they add value over and above clients being much more educated. So if you ask me what we would do differently, I don't know if I have an answer to that other than just keep staying ahead and making sure that we're always attuned to what our clients really need and where the gaps are for them. PAUL: Yeah. I think about doing differently, maybe things to avoid is avoid limitations. Don't feel as though one has to behave and operate within a box. You can define that box yourself. I think there's more – well, not just you're able to do it; there's more need to do it, to really redefine what those parameters are. I think that is super important, whether you want to call it evolution or whatever it might be. And not just talking about services. That's a part of it, but how you do business is really important as well. And then going back to the transactional nature of business – and we see it with other agencies. I know great agencies. I'm not going to name anybody. They do fantastic work. But what we hear is they're still in a transaction with those folks. They have slots, they have people, they do the job, they go, they quit, they stay, whatever it is. They do great work. We believe that's really shifting and it's really putting the human being first. You need to craft a different kind of relationship with the folks that work for you and work with you, and putting those at the center, and then how do we build around those needs and how do we support those needs? Because if they're doing well and they're feeling fulfilled and they're feeling really good and energized, then your work product, what you do, your clients and your experience, is better as well. I think that's how we think about our business tool. ROB: It's healthy. Definitely, as you get the team in there and aligned, it really lightens the load as well as they become more capable. You don't have to always fill every hat that you've been wearing since the year 2000 or 1999. CATHERINE: Yes, that's definitely – and that's probably been our biggest challenge, getting to a team that is really empowered and that works well together. I look back over the years; we've had incredible talent, but it takes a lot of time and effort to get to a place where you can look at your leadership team and the rest of your talent pool and go, “Whoa, what an amazing bunch of people, and they work really well together.” Actually, we have an all-female leadership team at the moment, which is amazing, and they're really empowered. We have a Head of Client Services, a Head of Creative, a Head of Strategy, a Head of Operations, and a Head of Growth, and they have incredible relationships with each other. A number of those people have been with us a long time and some of them are newer. I think what's been really amazing is exactly what you just said, finding ourselves not having to wear absolutely every hat every day. I think when you do that for too long, it's hard to have big ideas when you're running around basically taking care of millions of different things. As an agency owner, allowing a team to grow under you that can really take some of the responsibility and ownership is huge. I think Paul and I spent a good 10 years running around like headless chickens. [laughter] Suddenly we hit a wall and it's like, “We have to have a reorg,” all these kinds of things that we had to do 10 years ago. But we've really managed to build this incredible team under us, which enables us to do things like this and reflect and think about where we want to take the business. PAUL: It's an old adage, but hiring people that are really good at what they do and in certain things are better at you. There are certain disciplines where I'm happy to hand that over because you're really good at that thing, and you're going to make us better and up our game. Advice to anyone starting a new business is don't be afraid of that. As business owners, your ego – you say, “Oh my God, I've got to be the best at absolutely every single little thing.” You can't. Nobody's that good. Nobody can do that. A lot of it is just trust and support and letting those people do what they do, and letting them shine as best they can. Like Catherine said, we have an awesome leadership team as well, a bunch of very intelligent, motivated, lovely human beings that I think have really helped us think about our business and move our business forward about the way we do things. Right, Catherine? And brought ideas to the table that we said, “Wow, we never thought of that” or “That really helps,” or building on ideas that we have and going with it. We call it “yes, and-ing.” That really energizes you, and it pushes us all forward. It's exciting when that happens. You get off one of those calls, those sessions, like “We just did something really good. I feel as though we've made steps forward here. I feel really good about this.” Those are great moments. ROB: Gosh, all sorts of lessons in there. I'm grateful to have you both on the podcast here. Paul, Catherine, when folks want to get in touch with you and when they want to connect with the firm, ClarkMcDowall, where should they go to find you? PAUL: If you go to our website, clarkmcdowall.com – that's “McDowall” with an “A,” not an “E” – you'll have contact details there if you want to get in touch, for talent. And then there's also LinkedIn as well. We're happy to connect with people. ROB: That's excellent. Paul McDowall, Catherine Clark, congratulations on what you've accomplished together, at the meeting of the minds known as ClarkMcDowall. Thank you for sharing your journey, and I wish you all the best moving forward with this new hybrid adventure as well. CATHERINE: Thank you for having us. It was a great conversation. We also appreciate the forum that you have for other agency owners and talents to hear about agencies and get a little bit of an insight into the underbelly of these different companies. Really appreciate that focus on the industry. PAUL: Totally agree. Thank you so much. ROB: That's wonderful. We all need each other. Thank you, and be well. CATHERINE: Take care. PAUL: Awesome. Thank you so much. Take care. Bye. CATHERINE: Bye. ROB: Bye. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

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.

jQuery(document).ready(function(){ cab.clickify(); }); Original Podcast with clickable words https://tinyurl.com/yx93yn7d Death Wish 2 is a 1982 American vigilante action film directed and co-edited by Michael Winner. sǐ wáng yuàn wàng 2（Death Wish 2） shì 1982 nián yóu mài kè ěr · wēn nà （Michael Winner） dǎo yǎn hé gòng tóng biān jí de měi guó jǐng tì dòng zuò piān。 死亡愿望2（Death Wish 2）是1982年由迈克尔·温纳（Michael Winner）导演和共同编辑的美国警惕动作片。 It is the first of four sequels to the 1974 film Death Wish. zhè shì 1974 nián diàn yǐng 《 sǐ wáng yuàn wàng 》 de sì bù xù jí zhōng de dì yī bù。 这是1974年电影《死亡愿望》的四部续集中的第一部。 Paul Kersey has managed to recover from his shattered life and moved on, and is now dating Los Angeles radio reporter Geri Nichols. bǎo luó · kè xī （Paul Kersey） shè fǎ cóng pò suì de shēng huó zhōng huī fù guò lái ， jì xù qián jìn ， xiàn zài zhèng zài yǔ luò shān jī guǎng bō diàn tái jì zhě jié lǐ · ní kē ěr sī （Geri Nichols） yuē huì 。 保罗·克西（Paul Kersey）设法从破碎的生活中恢复过来，继续前进，现在正在与洛杉矶广播电台记者杰里·尼科尔斯（Geri Nichols）约会。 They go to pick up Pauls daughter, Carol, from the mental hospital. tā men qù jīng shén bìng yī yuàn jiē le gāo shǒu de nǚ ér kǎ luó ěr。 他们去精神病医院接了保罗的女儿卡罗尔。 They spend the afternoon at a fairground, where Pauls wallet is stolen by a gang, consisting of Nirvana, Punkcut, Stomper, Cutter, and Jiver. tā men zài jí shì shàng dù guò le yí gè xià wǔ ， nà lǐ de bèi qián bāo bèi yì huǒ rén tōu zǒu le ， zhè xiē rén bāo kuò niè ， yuè duì ， péng kè tè kù ， sī tuō mǔ pò ， kù tè hé jí fú 。 他们在集市上度过了一个下午，那里的保罗的钱包被一伙人偷走了，这些人包括涅，乐队，朋克库特，斯托姆珀，库特和吉弗。 The gang splits up when Paul chases them; he goes to pursue Jiver, whom he corners in an alley but lets the hood go after Jiver tells Paul that he does not have the wallet. dāng bǎo luó zhuī gǎn tā men shí ， bāng pài fēn liè le 。 tā qù zhuī bǔ Jiver， tā zài yì tiáo xiǎo xiàng lǐ wān yāo ， dàn shì zài Jiver gào sù Paul tā méi yǒu qián bāo zhī hòu ， jiù fàng kāi le dōu mào 。 当保罗追赶他们时，帮派分裂了。他去追捕Jiver，他在一条小巷里弯腰，但是在Jiver告诉Paul他没有钱包之后，就放开了兜帽。 The gang finds Pauls home address in his wallet and later breaks into his house. gāi tuán huǒ zài qián bāo zhōng zhǎo dào Paul de jiā tíng zhù zhǐ ， suí hòu dǎ kāi tā de fáng zi。 该团伙在钱包中找到Paul的家庭住址，随后闯入他的房子。 They gag and restrain Rosario, Pauls housekeeper. tā men dǔ zhù zuǐ bìng shù fù le zuò de guǎn jiā luó ào。 他们堵住嘴并束缚了保罗的管家罗萨里奥。 Then, they begin taking turns raping her. rán hòu ， tā men kāi shǐ lún liú qiáng jiān tā。 然后，他们开始轮流强奸她。 When Paul arrives home with his daughter, he is beaten unconscious. bèi dāng lǐ wù hé nǚ ér yì qǐ huí jiā shí ， tā bèi dǎ hūn le 。 保罗和女儿一起回家时，他被打昏了。 Rosario tries to call the police, but Nirvana kills her with his crowbar. luó sà lǐ ào （Rosario） shì tú bào jǐng ， dàn niè rv yuè duì （Nirvana） yòng qiào gùn jiāng qí bèi wài wéi。 罗萨里奥（Rosario）试图报警，但涅rv乐队（Nirvana）用撬棍将其杀死。 They kidnap Carol and take her to their hideout, where one of the gang members rapes her. tā men bǎng jià Carol， jiāng tā dài dào cáng shēn zhī chù ， qí zhōng yì míng bāng pài qiáng jiān chéng yuán le tā。 他们绑架了Carol，将她带到藏身之处，其中一名帮派成员强奸了她。 Carol attempts to flee by running through a plate-glass window and falls onto an iron fence and is impaled. kǎ luó ěr shì tú táo guò yí shàn bō li chuāng táo pǎo ， diē luò dào tiě zhà lan shàng ， zāo dào cì chuān 。 卡罗尔试图逃过一扇玻璃窗逃跑，跌落到铁栅栏上，遭到刺穿。 When the police arrive, Lieutenant Mankewicz asks for help identifying the muggers, but Paul refuses. jǐng chá dào dá shí ， màn kè dàn tā men zhōng qǐng qiú bāng zhù shí bié shí bié zhě ， dàn qiǎng jié le 。 警察到达时，曼克维奇中尉请求帮助识别抢劫者，但保罗拒绝了。 After Carols funeral, he takes his Beretta Model 84 handgun to a low-rent inner-city hotel as a base of operations. kǎ luó ěr jǔ xíng zàng lǐ hòu ， tā jiāng zì jǐ de Beretta 84 xíng shǒu qiāng dài dào yì jiān lián zū de shì zhōng xīn jiǔ diàn ， zuò wéi xíng dòng jī de 。 卡罗尔举行葬礼后，他将自己的Beretta 84型手枪带到一间廉租的市中心酒店，作为行动基地。 The next evening, he observes and follows Stomper into an abandoned building as a drug deal is ab...

Aimee: So Paul, what's the most memorable job experience that you have?Paul: Hmm, well, I think the most memorable one is the volunteering time that I spent in Australia. And I was up in the northeastern corner where there's a relatively small rainforest. And I was helping with a research station that's located in the rainforest. So we do a range of different things, going from trying to control coconuts—coconut trees.Aimee: Control?Paul: Yeah, because, like, believe it or not, you imagine this kind of tropical paradise to have coconut trees but they're actually very invasive and they're not native to that area. And basically, if you let a population of coconut trees to go out of control, nothing else can grow.Aimee: Oh.They drop their fronds, and they drop, obviously the coconuts, and nothing else can grow. So you basically lose a lot of the native species there. So we're trying to keep them under control. There was also caring for bats that had been orphaned. Sometimes they're born with physical disabilities that mean they can't survive in the wild.Aimee: Like a sanctuary then?Paul: Yes. Just like a sanctuary, yeah. So they take care of—Aimee: What size of bats, like any other—Paul: Fruit bats.Aimee: What size are they?Paul: They're pretty, like, once they spread—they're like little monkeys with big wings.Aimee: Yeah. So what's their wingspan then? About?Paul: Let's say, maybe, I guess up to probably 4 feet. Does that sound too much?Aimee: So about a meter?Paul: Yeah. Some of the big dudes, they got huge wingspan.Aimee: Oh, the only bats I've seen in real life are really tiny. They're just like mice.Paul: Oh, the micro-bats.Aimee: They're like little birds, you know. You see them flying around and you think, “Oh that's birds.” No, they're bats. So these guys sound pretty big.Paul: Hmm, but they're completely like omnivorous. They only eat fruit, so like, they really—Aimee: Do they eat the coconuts?Paul: Well, the coconuts are kind of tough for them to get into. You need to be able to make a hole, I suppose, to get that.Aimee: Of course, yeah.Paul: But they eat all, mostly like fleshy fruits; apples or whatever they can get really—berries. They're really important for spreading—because obviously, they eat the flesh of the fruit but they don't eat the seeds. So they just kind of pass through them and they're really useful for dispersing seeds. So rainforest regeneration, they're very important animals.Aimee: So they're like the big bumblebees of the rainforest, then.Paul: Yeah. I guess you could look at it like that, yeah. So yeah, that was an interesting volunteering kind of odd job that I had, I suppose.Aimee: Yeah. Essentially yet really cool.Paul: I really like to go back there someday.

Aimee: So Paul, what's the most memorable job experience that you have?Paul: Hmm, well, I think the most memorable one is the volunteering time that I spent in Australia. And I was up in the northeastern corner where there's a relatively small rainforest. And I was helping with a research station that's located in the rainforest. So we do a range of different things, going from trying to control coconuts—coconut trees.Aimee: Control?Paul: Yeah, because, like, believe it or not, you imagine this kind of tropical paradise to have coconut trees but they're actually very invasive and they're not native to that area. And basically, if you let a population of coconut trees to go out of control, nothing else can grow.Aimee: Oh.They drop their fronds, and they drop, obviously the coconuts, and nothing else can grow. So you basically lose a lot of the native species there. So we're trying to keep them under control. There was also caring for bats that had been orphaned. Sometimes they're born with physical disabilities that mean they can't survive in the wild.Aimee: Like a sanctuary then?Paul: Yes. Just like a sanctuary, yeah. So they take care of—Aimee: What size of bats, like any other—Paul: Fruit bats.Aimee: What size are they?Paul: They're pretty, like, once they spread—they're like little monkeys with big wings.Aimee: Yeah. So what's their wingspan then? About?Paul: Let's say, maybe, I guess up to probably 4 feet. Does that sound too much?Aimee: So about a meter?Paul: Yeah. Some of the big dudes, they got huge wingspan.Aimee: Oh, the only bats I've seen in real life are really tiny. They're just like mice.Paul: Oh, the micro-bats.Aimee: They're like little birds, you know. You see them flying around and you think, “Oh that's birds.” No, they're bats. So these guys sound pretty big.Paul: Hmm, but they're completely like omnivorous. They only eat fruit, so like, they really—Aimee: Do they eat the coconuts?Paul: Well, the coconuts are kind of tough for them to get into. You need to be able to make a hole, I suppose, to get that.Aimee: Of course, yeah.Paul: But they eat all, mostly like fleshy fruits; apples or whatever they can get really—berries. They're really important for spreading—because obviously, they eat the flesh of the fruit but they don't eat the seeds. So they just kind of pass through them and they're really useful for dispersing seeds. So rainforest regeneration, they're very important animals.Aimee: So they're like the big bumblebees of the rainforest, then.Paul: Yeah. I guess you could look at it like that, yeah. So yeah, that was an interesting volunteering kind of odd job that I had, I suppose.Aimee: Yeah. Essentially yet really cool.Paul: I really like to go back there someday.

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.

Finance Alternatives with Paul Boyd-Skinner Josh: Everyone out there in podcast land, we've got a great guest for you today. We've got Paul here from NoBNK, and he is a bit of a wizard when it comes to looking at a different way that you can do finance. This is especially critical in today's financial climate. So Paul, tell me a bit about what it is that you do with NoBNK. Learn more about finance alternatives at dorksdelivered.com.au Paul: So NoBNK is predominantly a non-bank business and commercial finance solutionist. I've been involved in nonbank lending for around about 16 years. So I've done all sorts of finance. I've done everything from home loans to commercial development, construction equipment, finance, factoring, all that sort of thing. And I'm proud to say that I've never ever put anybody in a loan with the bank.  Josh: High five! Paul: Look, you know, my adversity towards banks. Back in the 80s, back in the day when I got my first home, which was in late 1988, 89. You know we will be excited about getting our first home and interest rates at that time were around about 12% when we went and got our loan. The way it sort of worked back then was you go to the bank. And you're begged for a loan and they'd say, ‘Yes, yes, we'll give you a loan.’ And it was usually, you know, like about 70% or something that they give you, but they will do on a bit of a special, at the time for first home buyers where they give you 100% at interest only. We were living in a caravan when we first got married, so that was a pretty good option to get our own homes.  Josh: Absolutely! And upgrading it’s pretty low friction option, I guess. Paul: The only thing was the in-laws had to go as guarantors. So I now know that today is like a parental guarantor. Really wasn't heard of back then. So it was a little bit of a product for first home buyers. So we did that. We jumped in and we got the house and everything was going along nicely. And then we had to have the recession that we had to have. And our interest rates went from 12% to a 7%, 8.5% in the space of about six months. And just to give you an idea, the loan was $105,000. My repayment was $1,560 a month. Yep. And I was on $33,000 a year. So when you take tax out, 80% of my income was going towards paying my mortgage.  Josh: Yeah. Far out.  Paul: And it wasn't knocking 1 cent off it. Josh: Yeah. Just sitting there as interest only. And that is a scary spot to be in, because you're not sure if it's going to go up or down or left or right, or what it's going to do. Somersaults.  Paul: That happened with a lot of first home buyers over the years. Eventually, you know, it just got too heavy. I had to do up to 30 hours a week overtime to make ends meet, I was a fitter-machiner at the time,and you know, we ended up losing it. It's just the way it was. There were a lot of people losing their properties.  Josh: You weren't the anomaly. I don't think so. Paul: I sort of didn't understand what happened to me. I didn't like the banks at all when I worked it out. I've done a lot of study on the banks since then, or the banking system, and, you know, my thoughts on the global financial system is, I believe it's a world's biggest Ponzi scam. I've been open and honest about this for quite a long time, about how I feel about the banking system and I'm a bit like the disruptor.. I'm all about wanting to make the change so that it's a benefit for us, not so much just for them.  Josh: Yeah, well, I guess like I've done a bit of research into things such as the fractional reserve system and how that works. Paul: Does it work?  Josh: Well, how it works doesn't mean it works. No, you're exactly right. It's not a very good system, which is based on, now, nothing really. It's just based on numbers in a computer. It's not weighted against any real thing of intrinsic value. Paul: Well, have a think about that. So what a lot of people don't understand is that when you deposit money into a bank, you're actually lending them that money. It's a loan. You become an unsecured creditor, yet there is no security for that loan to that bank.  Josh: Yep.  Paul: It's a promise that they give you. We'll promise that we'll give you your money back.  Josh: After changing you bank fees or having it in there. Paul: Well, what a great deal for them, isn't it? They say, ‘Joshua, can you lend me your $100,000?’ Josh: Yeah, no problem at all.  Paul: Now would you want to say, ‘Oh, I need a contract with that?’  Josh: Well, normally you would. Yeah. You hope so. Paul: No. So what's going to happen, Joshua, on the bank is you're going to lend me $100,000. You're the bank, though. Not as a contract, but I do promise that I'll give you your money back and I'll dictate the terms. Right? So you might want 10% interest, but I'm happy to give you 1 ½. And you'll say, ‘Yep, I'm happy to do that.’  That's really what you've done when you put money in the bank, and just remember that one critical part. You're an unsecured creditor. Meaning that secure creditors, in the event of the bank collapse or whatever, secured credit is paid first and then unsecured credits. Josh: Yup. So in the situation where shit hits the fan hypothetically, we can all feel the recession, we can all hear it being spoken about, we can also feel some pressures around the place. If shit hits the fan and everyone starts frantically pulling money out of the bank, they've already planned for that, and that's what's been going through at the moment. Am I right?  Paul: Yeah, correct.  Josh: Tell me a bit about that for our listeners. Paul: Well, long story short is that there's three generations of savers, so you've got you've got your builders, you've got your boomers, and then you've got generation X, which is me. We've all been bought up as a generation of ‘get yourself a good job, save for retirement.’ It was all about saving money. Okay. The other thing too is that we had our children quite young, so you know, I've been married 31 years and I've got married to my wife she was 19, and I was 23. And, we had our children when she was 21. So we had our kids young, and if you think about my father, he was one of 17 children, so they had big families. So they were called boomers, you know. Josh: Huge families, but small houses.  Paul: Can you imagine having 17 children? And the house, there were three bedrooms, one bathroom, right?  Josh: One bathroom, 17 people. 17 children! 19 people. Paul: It's 28 years from youngest to oldest. You know what I mean? Like it's just a constant flow of, you know, at least seven, eight, nine people in a 3-bedroom house.  Josh: Should have bought a TV, so that there's something else to do.  Paul: Didn’t have TV back in the day, so what they did was they went out into the world and started the businesses and all that sort of thing and created quite a lot of wealth. And they stored that wealth in the bank because that's what they were told to do, you know? And they'll get great returns. So when I had those interest rates of 18% of my home, you would get 16% return on money that you had sitting in the bank and you know that's a fantastic return. But look what's happened over the years. You know, that was 30 years ago. Now we're down to zero negative rates in other countries. Japan has been at negative rates for 20 years.  Josh: How much money have they reprinted over there? Paul: Does anyone know why? Does anyone really know why? Or is it just like it's a bad economy and all this sort of stuff? So what makes the bad economy? When people stopped spending! If you're not buying things at the shop, then retail starts to drop off. I want to spend the money. So they're trying to force you to get your money out to spend. Banks don't make money out of people saving and make money out of people borrowing. So they don't want you having money sitting in the bank anymore. Their fractional reserve system, that doesn't matter anymore because they're reprinting money off loans. They make more money out of loans than they do early use saving. So the idea is to try to get that money out of the system and into risky investments or to just get you out there spending.  But when you have the majority of the world's population over 45 years old, that's when our spending curve drops right off. We're not out there buying. We're not down to supermarkets every week, three times a week, or whatever at the big shops. I'd be lucky to go to near Robina. I'd be lucky to go there once a month.  Josh: Yup. For those listeners that didn't hear you. You were saying the GFC is a light rain comparative to what could be happening. And I always say if it's been 30 years since a major recession and it doesn't hit right now, all that means is we're going to be getting a slightly bigger downfall before we're getting absolutely torrential rain in 7 or 11 years time from now. Would that be fair to say?  Paul: It could be any time. When you think about in Australia, we've had 28, 29 years without a recession. What has stopped that recession from happening? So back in the 90s when it happened, like 1990, 91, we had the recession we had to have, but they didn't do anything to try to stop it. You know, and as I said, the interest rates are at 18% so what they've done to stave it off every year, you know, because the next government that comes in needs to be leaving it in a good place. They don't want to be the government that caused the recession. Right.  Josh: The inevitable recession. Paul: The inevitable recession. And when you look at what the US in particular, they've had about seven or eight in that amount of time. Australia have had none. So every time that you look at the interest rate table and you look at different things that's happened, like the 9/11, the GFC, they've dropped rates 3% to 6% in order to stave off that recession. Probably the other recession that we had to have. And now we're getting down to zero. We will be at zero. We're 100% going to zero. Where do they go? Where do they go if we had some major problem, like a GFC or whatever again or a reset? How do they fix that? Josh: I don't know. How do they reset that? They can’t.  Paul: They can't! There was a paper written 18 months ago by the IMF, and in that paper, they said that they are working on models to make -4% to -5% feasible. Josh: All right. Paul: So try to get your head around that.  Josh: I get paid to have a house. Is that right?  Paul: That's already happening overseas.  Josh: I have read up about that. So that would mean that the more debt you've got. Go and buy a house now, ladies and gentlemen.  Paul: Why would they want to do that? Why would they want to get down to -4% to -5%? Josh: Well, I always say if they're getting down to those numbers, it's going to mean that people are going to be more wanting to get loans and get things like that.  Paul: I think it's about getting rid of cash because if they could get rid of cash and move it into a digital world, get rid of the physical cash, then they've got complete control. Josh: Well, see, the problem that I, and this is something that's come about over the last 10, 12 years. When cryptocurrency started coming around, if you're comparing apples with apples, and I'm not going to say that they're both exactly the same, obviously. But when you have a digital currency being compared to a digital currency, which is, if they're getting rid of all paper and all money becomes more frictionless to be able to move from the AUD to a Bitcoin or any of the other cryptocurrencies that are out there without it being is in the power of the banks or anyone else. How do you think they are going to overcome?  Paul: Well, I believe cryptocurrency is a red herring. I believe that it's just been set up for you to play with while they build their real money system. And there's a little bit of a showing of that last week. So in this IMF paper, what they actually said is that they would introduce e-money. They call it e-money. And basically what that means is that that item there is $100. They say, ‘Joshua, you know, that's $100 if you pay cash or $95 if you use e-money.’ And you go, ‘Well, I'll use e-money.’ So that's how they destroy cash. So they make it worth less than what it is. That's how they get rid of it.  There's a bank in Sweden, and the currency in Sweden is krona. The central bank in Sweden has announced the e-krona and they're in the second phase of testing e-krona. Josh: The timing of it's great.  Paul: And of course, it runs on blockchain because blockchain is a great technology. But yeah, it's a decentralized system? I don't believe so. I think it'll be a very centralised system, but it'll definitely be electronic or digital.  Josh: Yeah. Okay. So I guess the recession at this stage, you're saying, is inevitable. It's going to happen. Got a beautiful way to at least have people that are struggling a little bit in their business, whether that be because they need to have more finances bought into it. Or maybe you've got people on the other side of the coin that have liquid assets or liquid cash where they want to be able to use that and invest into something that's going to be giving them a bit of a better return without having to put it into the big nasty banks. How do you go about? How does NoBNK work?  Paul: So the way that NoBNK came around is that many years ago, I looked at many of the managed funds and different places like that where they would collapse. There were quite a few here on the Gold Coast where a lot of those managed funds collapsed and the person who lost that was the investor every single time.  And it's only because the managed funds, number one, they think like a bank. And number two, they take their fees and everything out first. I'm not saying that all managed funds are like this. I'm just saying that when you get that real control freak at the helm, that's when there's a problem. So I designed a system where there is no control freak. So it's all about putting the control, the choices, the security back in the hands of the investor. And the number one thing is the trust. You know, because I think that we put a lot of trust in these organisations, in the corporate side, the banks and a lot of these managed funds. That's what we were told. You know, this is what you do. And I think they’ve broken our trust. I think they've broken our trust big time. You know?  The way that NoBNK is set up is that we make our number one product service. You know, everybody wants service. Well, the banking model can't give you service. It's impossible because of the way that their pecking order is designed. So their pecking order is profits first, shareholders second, then clients, then employees, that's the pecking order. They can't give you service. They don't make money out of service.  We're not about that. We're about, if we create that service for you, where you're having a great experience and you feel that you've got the trust and you will have to trust because what I say to people is, who's the one person that you trust more than anybody else in the world? To make the right finance decision for you. It's yourself, right? You trust yourself more than anybody else. So why are we giving that away? Why are we giving that trust away to the banks? So what we've done with this platform is that we're going to make you the bank.  Josh: Okay.  Paul: If I want to borrow money from you, why do I have to go to a bank to do that? You put your money in the bank and then I go and borrow the money from the bank. That's your money that's in the bank. That's not theirs. So why not just borrow directly from you? So the platform is set up where we facilitate accurate information between somebody who wants to borrow money and someone who wants to lend it. So the terms are all worked out, and if the borrower is happy to go, and the lender is happy to go, we just put those two together. That's all we do. And they've paid monthly returns in events on their investment. I don't know how many other investments you get paid monthly in advance, and it's direct in the security goes into the investor's name. Josh: Okay. So let's say I'm new to the idea and I'm going, ‘Okay. Yeah. Stuff the banks. They've stuffed me over too many times.’ Without saying the bank that I'm with, I can see the interest rates that I could be getting just changing to another bank, I could be saving $11,000 a year in mortgage repayments, and I had to look and I thought, ‘Ah, it's too hard.’ How hard is it? Or how would I go about moving a lot like a house?  Paul: The area that we're not going after at the moment is the consumer market. It's very regulated. There are a lot of rules around that market. We'll get to that. We'll get to that market. But the area that we want to look after, first of all, is the business and commercial arena. I think that if you look after the business side of things first and the business owner, they're gonna have to worry about their day-to-day things rather than worrying about when the next dollars, you know, how they're gonna pay their bills, if the bank's going to foreclose on them and the house is tied to that loan and all that sort of stuff.  So we look at things a lot more commercially and it won't always need to be property initially. There’s a lot of lending that happens out there that a lot of people don't know about, where you might have some text it or you need to, you want to jump on an opportunity pretty quickly and all this sort of stuff. So they use private, short-term lending and that short-term lending could be a loan that's anything from 3 months to 3 years. It’s not a 30-year loan and all that sort of stuff, and it's just about jumping onto an opportunity or it could be getting out of trouble. You know, ‘We're in a bit of trouble over here. We need to pay back the bank and get some cash flow into our business as well so that we can stay afloat.’ So really, we're more targeting that area there at first, which is perfect. Yeah. Well, I think it's an area that's very under-serviced.  And the other area that we're targeting, and this, as I said before, is those people all around the world, those high net worth investors all around the world that's got money sitting in the bank and it's getting them no return or very low returns. We want you to be able to negotiate the term between what sort of return you want. So really you get to choose the return you want. And the client gets to choose whether to accept it or not.  The way this platform is designed is that as an investor, we don't touch your money. So we never touch your money. We're not a managed fund. It's not a pooled investment. It's not a, you know, sort of property trust. It's not a contributory fund, none of that sort of stuff.  It's just one loan, one investor, one loan, one investor, one loan, one investor. So someone wants to borrow $1 million, the investor's gonna put up the whole $1 million, and we're just going to put those two directly. Josh: So it sounds like obviously it's a lot of advantages for both parties in regards to the returns that they're going to be getting, as well as the rates that they're going to be paying because you're cutting out the bank in the middle. What would be some of the, I guess, risks? Or does it take the same amount of time to process through if you wanted to get an equipment finance loan for $50,000 for a new digital printer or something like that. Paul: The process is quick, it all happens within 24 to 48 hours. You'll know how many people So as a borrower, you'll know how many people are interested in doing your loan and you'll get offered the lowest interest rate that they offer.  Josh: Is this a global thing or is this just Australia?  Paul: This will be a global thing. Initially, it's Australia, but we do want to take it globally because the problems that started in the world, the reason why I've talked a lot about Japan is because the reason why they've already experienced all this, what we're going through, is they’re the oldest population in the world, you know? So it all adds up to me. Their ages crossed over and over that 45-year mark, they're average age crossed over 15 or 20 years ago. So it comes in a lot sooner than what it has to us.  Josh: And their workforce is diminishing because of that. Paul: That's exactly right. And the wages aren't going up. All the problems that we're starting to have here in Australia, you know, property prices are going through the roof, but wages aren't going up. So the next step is how does somebody that's on 60 grand a year buy a million dollar property in Sydney? Well, I'll have to have a 70-year mortgage just like they have in Japan. You can see it. You're watching the pattern globally. It's happening all through Europe. You know, there are 30 countries in the Eurozone now that are on zero and negative rates and the lowest is -0.75.  Josh: All right. That's nuts. It's nuts when you think about it, and as you were saying, like it was only 30 years ago, we had the last recession, and so for Japan to be at the position...  Paul: 20% 30 years ago. Now the -0.5.  Josh: And that all comes down to the workforce and the economy, and that's where we're, as you said, we're heading towards the potential issue here.  If someone wants to jump in and jump onto NoBNK or hear any more information, how do they go about sort of doing that? Paul: The good thing about us is we can look after you no matter where you are in Australia and then as I said, that eventually, New Zealand will be pretty quick, but then we'll be going into places like the UK and America and things like that as well. This is something that can go global and that's the whole idea is that we're about like, you know, if you're going to disrupt your models and make it worthwhile.  Josh: Absolutely. If you’re going to kick the big in the head you may as well do it globally.  Paul: They had their place and as I said, we're not going to manage, we're not going to take your money and just go and do a hope and pray thing like many do. Your money stays in the bank under your control, so nothing changes, right? The only thing that changes is you get the opportunity to be able to have a crack at one of these deals and become the bank.  And your worst case scenario is you're sitting there with a security in your name and you're getting a return. Whereas what's your security in the bank? There isn't any, but if you don't win the deal, because it's going to be like an auction type system where you make a bid on what sort of return you want, then nothing's changed in your life. You still get your money sitting in the bank, you know? No one's touching it. No one's taking any fees off you or any of that sort of thing.  We're all about mitigating risks. We've got to mitigate the risk for the borrower, the lender, and for ourselves. So it's about everybody having this happy equilibrium, you know? That's how we're going to structure this thing.  We've got a whole website there. It’s NoBNK.com.au. And the reason why we got B N K is because ASIC won't let us use the word ‘bank’. It's a swear word. So we call ourselves NoBNK and we advertise as NoBNK does that, which has a double meaning. NoBNK does that. Josh: Perfect. As an investor and a borrower, what's the starting and ending amounts you can go for.  Paul: Because we're starting with the property component of it first of all, the minimum line would probably be around the $50,000 mark. This is why we're up to sophisticated investors. So this is some for your institutional versus, or you know, like your mum and dad's and things like that. You must be a high net worth. You know, I know people out there, they have tens of millions just sitting in the bank.  Josh: Yep.  Paul: Globally. So you might have somebody, you might have a deal here in Australia. There might be somebody in Japan that makes a bid on the deal and all of a sudden they're getting a return of 4%, 5%, 6%, 7%, whatever it is, whatever that agreed return is, where they're getting nothing over there, but they've actually got to pay to put their money in the bank over there. So it's a really good outcome because, you know, we just let the market set itself dynamically. There is no ‘ring Paul up and say, “Mate, what interest rate can I get?”’ There's none of that anymore. It's just like, well, it's whatever anyone's prepared to bid and whatever you're prepared to pay. Josh: Yep. So it's win-win. Paul: And look, there's rules for the investors. I've got a pretty good record. We're doing this sort of thing.  Josh: You've been doing it for more than 10 years?  Paul: Yeah, about 10, about 12 years now. I've been doing these sorts of loans for some high net worth. And in that amount of time, we've had no foreclosures and the investors haven’t lost money in the capital. And it's just about managing it.  Josh: That's a good run.  Paul: Yeah. It's just about managing. You don't smash people when they're down. You help them. You don't have to be all hard about it. You know, you're a day late or two days late with your payment. It's about managing it. Nobody gets hurt. You know what I mean?  Josh: So how do you guys come into it? Do they just clip the ticket on the way through?  Paul: You have a gross line amount. You have a net loan amount. You got to add that first month's interest. There's lawyers involved, there's all sorts of things, which for the investors, it's great for them. It's their lawyer. So it's a lawyer of their choice. And you know, usually there's brokers involved in all the research, so there's nothing under the table. So there's no hidden fees and charges and all that sort of stuff. In our letter of offer, it's like, say for example, you want half a million dollars and it might cost $520,000 you know, like when you add everything up. So you say, okay, so your gross loan amount is 520, that's what it is. You'll see all the costs that are involved, all the rest of it, and you get the choice to say, ‘Yeah. I'm happy with that.’ ‘Well, no, thank you.’  Josh: Fair enough. Cool. Cool, cool, cool. I think there's going to be a big help for a lot of people that are feeling a bit of pressure, whether that'd be as an investor or they're looking potentially down the barrel of a gun for a business. They might not be going as well as it was. Is there anything else you'd like to add? Paul: There's lots of businesses out there that need lots of help in different ways. It's not just about, you know, finance and properties and all that sort of stuff. It's just about knowing that there are people out there that, you know, we'll have a chat about it first. I mean, whether you've been rejected by a bank, don't want to go to their bank or can't go to a bank, that's why we're here. So pretty well covers everybody. When you do those things, we tell them, you don't go to the bank, come to NoBNK.  Josh: I guess back in the day, there was like no-doc loans and things like this. This is from a business owner's perspective. Paul: It's a very, very simple process. So you know, the information that we asked from you is not onerous. It's really quite simple. It's a very quick application process. This platform that we've built that we'll be releasing in the next couple of weeks, it'll be automated. It's just a quick, you know, fill in the application process type of thing and you'll get SMS and emails and all that sort of stuff, and then so will the investors and they'll be able to start bidding on your deals straight away.  Josh: Sweet.  Paul: It's a little bit of a game changer, come to the market.  Josh: Absolutely. Yeah.  Paul: That's what it's about, isn't it? It's about changing things up and seeing if we can do it better and make a change, you know, a different change for the better for once rather than just doing the same as everybody else.  Josh: Really enjoyed talking to you and is there anything else you'd like to add before we jump off? Paul: No, mate, I really appreciate it. Thank you very much. I'd like to wish everybody out there that, you know, there is hope. It costs you nothing to apply with us or to have a chat with us or anything like that. So, you know, your people wanting to, you know, they're welcome to have a chat anytime they like. Josh: Cool. Only advantages and as I said, a very welcome time for me to be talking to you about this sort of stuff for a lot of people out there.  Paul: Appreciate it, mate. Thank you very much.  Josh: If you have any questions and bits and pieces, we'll put a link down to NoBNK as well as Paul's details. If you've enjoyed this episode, jump across to iTunes, leave us a review, give us some love and stay good. 

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. 

https://youtu.be/UUAbKclR_LI The Terminator!                                                                                                                               Acts 25:1-22 Time line: New governor FestusJews appeal to Festus against Paul They wanted Paul to be taken to Jerusalem – but not really, they just want to kill him on the way thereFestus refuses to send Paul to Jerusalem He requests the Jews (accusers) to come with him and state their casePaul makes his defense and is not afraid to diePaul appeals to Caesar King Agrippa and his sister Bernice request to hear him This evening, I want to speak to you about Sin and the nature of Sin. Acts 23 – we saw the Jews plotting to kill Paul …but their plan was frustrated by a small boy – Paul nephewIt's been 2 years and the Jews still want to Kill Paul. With the new King, they are not using a new line, Acts 25:1-3 Now when Festus had come to the province, after three days he went up from Caesarea to Jerusalem. 2 Then the [a]high priest and the chief men of the Jews informed him against Paul; and they petitioned him, 3 asking a favor against him, that he would summon him to Jerusalem—while they lay in ambush along the road to kill him.” The enemy does not create – but uses the same trick over and over. he just gets better at it as we fall prey to his schemes. I know that in my life, the struggles I have are the same, they are just dressed in a different way.I think I have overcome them and as soon as I let my guard down, boom! There it is again.We ought to be aware how our enemy -sin - works in order to guard ourselves Who here has ever seen the movies sequels – The Terminator? Dark future – an AI has destroyed the earth but in 2029 the humans lead by John Connor destroys Skynet (brain) and wins but the machines have a secret plan – the machine send a lone robot agent to kill John Connors mother before he is even born.Disguised as a human, to fit in (Sin)Look normal (Sin)To the outside it looks really good but on the inside it's a soulless metal The enemy knows what you are capable of, and just like the terminator, he will try and destroy your dreams before you can even get started. (Steal, Kill and destroy)John 10:10 - The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly.The terminator does not give up, no matter how much you think you have killed or destroyed it, it will find a way to regroup and come after you. Folks, that is how sin is. Sin is relentlessoppressively constant; incessant ((of something regarded as unpleasant) continuing without pause or interruption) We see it clearly here, that no matter what Paul does, how long he stays away from the Jews, they still want to destroy him. They want to kill him. Acts 25:4 -5 - But Festus answered that Paul should be kept at Caesarea, and that he himself was going there shortly. 5 “Therefore,” he said, “let those who have authority among you go down with me and accuse this man, to see if there is any fault in him.” Gills commentary: Let them therefore, said he, which among you are able, Who are at leisure, can spare time, and to whom it will be convenient, without interrupting other business, to take such a journey; ( 24hr by foot – 110Km) and who are able to bear the expenses of it, without hurting their families, and whose health and age will admit of it; and above all, who are masters of this affair, and are capable of forming charges, and of supporting them with proper proofs and evidences: let such go down with me; from Jerusalem to Caesarea: and accuse this man: in proper form, according to the rules of law, of what he is guilty, and can be proved upon him: if there is any wickedness in him; or committed by him, anything that is absurd and unreasonable, notoriously flagitious and criminal; that is, contrary to the rules of reason, the common sense of mankind,

https://youtu.be/UUAbKclR_LI The Terminator!                                                                                                                               Acts 25:1-22 Time line: New governor FestusJews appeal to Festus against Paul They wanted Paul to be taken to Jerusalem – but not really, they just want to kill him on the way thereFestus refuses to send Paul to Jerusalem He requests the Jews (accusers) to come with him and state their casePaul makes his defense and is not afraid to diePaul appeals to Caesar King Agrippa and his sister Bernice request to hear him This evening, I want to speak to you about Sin and the nature of Sin. Acts 23 – we saw the Jews plotting to kill Paul …but their plan was frustrated by a small boy – Paul nephewIt’s been 2 years and the Jews still want to Kill Paul. With the new King, they are not using a new line, Acts 25:1-3 Now when Festus had come to the province, after three days he went up from Caesarea to Jerusalem. 2 Then the [a]high priest and the chief men of the Jews informed him against Paul; and they petitioned him, 3 asking a favor against him, that he would summon him to Jerusalem—while they lay in ambush along the road to kill him.” The enemy does not create – but uses the same trick over and over. he just gets better at it as we fall prey to his schemes. I know that in my life, the struggles I have are the same, they are just dressed in a different way.I think I have overcome them and as soon as I let my guard down, boom! There it is again.We ought to be aware how our enemy -sin - works in order to guard ourselves Who here has ever seen the movies sequels – The Terminator? Dark future – an AI has destroyed the earth but in 2029 the humans lead by John Connor destroys Skynet (brain) and wins but the machines have a secret plan – the machine send a lone robot agent to kill John Connors mother before he is even born.Disguised as a human, to fit in (Sin)Look normal (Sin)To the outside it looks really good but on the inside it’s a soulless metal The enemy knows what you are capable of, and just like the terminator, he will try and destroy your dreams before you can even get started. (Steal, Kill and destroy)John 10:10 - The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly.The terminator does not give up, no matter how much you think you have killed or destroyed it, it will find a way to regroup and come after you. Folks, that is how sin is. Sin is relentlessoppressively constant; incessant ((of something regarded as unpleasant) continuing without pause or interruption) We see it clearly here, that no matter what Paul does, how long he stays away from the Jews, they still want to destroy him. They want to kill him. Acts 25:4 -5 - But Festus answered that Paul should be kept at Caesarea, and that he himself was going there shortly. 5 “Therefore,” he said, “let those who have authority among you go down with me and accuse this man, to see if there is any fault in him.” Gills commentary: Let them therefore, said he, which among you are able, Who are at leisure, can spare time, and to whom it will be convenient, without interrupting other business, to take such a journey; ( 24hr by foot – 110Km) and who are able to bear the expenses of it, without hurting their families, and whose health and age will admit of it; and above all, who are masters of this affair, and are capable of forming charges, and of supporting them with proper proofs and evidences: let such go down with me; from Jerusalem to Caesarea: and accuse this man: in proper form, according to the rules of law, of what he is guilty, and can be proved upon him: if there is any wickedness in him; or committed by him, anything that is absurd and unreasonable, notoriously flagitious and criminal; that is, contrary to the rules of reason, the common sense of mankind,

This episode, we’re talking about people who are coming to Pittsburgh, whether it’s for work or just visiting.We’ll break down a report that suggests the city might be a better fit for tech workers than the mecca of the digital economy, Silicon Valley (gotta love our standard of living). We’re also talking about a recent article that probes the need for a new hotel at the convention center. (Hint: The answer isn’t very simple.)In between, we welcome the Breaking Brews Podcast’s host Jason Cercone for a chat about the business of beer and Pittsburgh’s place in the industry.This episode is sponsored by WordWrite:Centuries before cellphones 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, 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.Logan:You are listening to the P100 podcast, the bi-weekly 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. Logan:Hello, and welcome to a brand new episode of the P100 podcast. You're here with myself, Logan Armstrong, and co-hosts Dan Stefano and Paul Furiga. Guys, how are you doing?Paul:Great, Logan.Dan:Emphasis on the co-host there. You're the host with the mostest there.Logan:I try to be. I do what I can, but-Paul:Yes he does and he does it well.Logan:I get my mostest from the people I'm surrounded with. On today's episode, we're going to be examining tech jobs in Pittsburgh, and there have been a few recent articles for some vying to leave and some vying to stay that you may have seen. So we're going to be talking about that and seeing how Pittsburgh ranks compared with cities and metros around the country in tech jobs.Logan:Then we're going to bring in our good friend Jason Cercone from the Breaking Brews podcast. He takes a drink from breaking, excuse me. He takes a break from drinking beer and talks about the business side of it.Paul:Wait a minute, that wasn't in this segment. There was no beer drinking?Logan:Unfortunately no.Logan:We asked him about it and he said that he'd be happy to rejoin us.Dan:Logan, let's remember we're talking to the CEO of our company within the office, so no. There's no-Paul:Well that's fine. Let's chat.Dan:We don't have a video of this, but if you could see the winking eye. No, there is no-Logan:No beer during this segment.Dan:Drinking during this segment.Paul:Of course not.Logan:Okay, and then finally we're going to wrap up with what's missing from downtown.Paul:Oh.Logan:Indeed, mysterious.Paul:Question.Logan:That's right. You'll have to stick around to see what we're talking about, but we're in for a great episode so we hope you stick around.Dan:I hope it's not my car or anything.Paul:Okay guys, time to do one of our favorite things on the podcast. Talk about Pittsburgh getting another great national ranking.Dan:Another list, right?Paul:We're on another list.Dan:Yeah.Paul:This one's a good one. Although, if you're in the Silicon Valley area, maybe not so good.Dan:Right.Paul:A couple of weeks ago, Wallet Hub, which is an online service provider that looks at financial things, very popular with millennials.Dan:They make many lists.Paul:They make many lists of many different things. Top places to live in the country for tech workers. Pittsburgh, number five. Silicon Valley, not so high, which caused the San Jose Mercury News, which San Jose's a community that's smack in the middle of Silicon Valley, to write sort of a cheeky little article. Pittsburgh is better for tech workers than Silicon Valley? Question mark. Well, yes, if you want to live affordably, apparently it actually is.Dan:That's completely accurate. Yeah. The Bay Area, it's got to be one of the highest costs of living-Paul:It is actually.Dan:In the country.Paul:It has the highest cost of living in the country. And Logan, you were looking inside some of the rankings, and Pittsburgh ranked in the top 15 in a number of categories, right?Logan:Yes. So the three categories were professional opportunities, STEM friendliness, and quality of life. And Pittsburgh ranked 13th, 14th, and 11th in those, respectively. And some of the reasons that places like San Francisco and the Bay Area didn't rank so highly is that they would rank very high in one or two of these categories. So for example, San Francisco ranked third in both professional opportunities and STEM friendliness but then ranked 63rd in quality of life for reasons we were alluding to earlier. So it's good to see that Pittsburgh ranked in these lists as being as an all around. Maybe it's not top five or the best in STEM friendliness or professional opportunities, but it's well-rounded and our quality of life here is, according to this list, far better than some of our counterparts.Paul:And certainly as the community here has continued to transform, and I'm thinking now of Uber, and Apptive, and Apple's got a good presence in the city. Facebook's virtual reality company, Oculus, is wholly sited here in the Pittsburgh region. We're trying to attract more tech workers and we've got these great university programs, CMU and Pitt at the head of the pack, but others as well, where we're building this tech community. And I guess it does still surprise people in the more traditional communities, but it's legit. There's something going on here.Dan:Right. For better or worse, Pittsburgh will always kind of bring that blue collar atmosphere, that blue collar mentality, a bit rough around the edges. I talk about it all the time, but my wife's family, who, they grew up in California, they all lived in California for a while. They came to Pittsburgh here and they said, "Wow, I had no idea it was this green." So there's always going to be a bit of a stigma that the city carries around, but I think these lists show that to that the news is catching on here. And Pittsburgh is basically known now for the meds and eds and now tech. The reputation is definitely growing here and starting to overcome that stigma.Paul:That perception.Dan:Yeah. But there's ... Well, not to be Debbie Downer or play devil's advocate here, there are still the legacies of that history here that carries on, especially in our environment.Paul:Yeah. We still have work to do, that's for sure. I can remember when I first moved back to this region from the Washington DC area. I had a job in the south side and what is now South Side Works was still a working steel mill, and as I would drive across the Birmingham Bridge every morning, the smell of burning coke was my appetizer before breakfast.Logan:Morning coffee.Dan:That'll wake you.Paul:And there's been plenty of coverage, and legitimately so, that we still have environmental problems in the region. And certainly one of the reasons why the Bay Area, Silicon Valley, is disadvantaged on a list like this, is because there's such a huge economic disparity there. It's the most expensive metropolitan area in the country. Ours is not. Part of the reason Pittsburgh's so affordable, the collapse of the steel industry and heavy industry. So there's all this housing stock and we didn't have the kind of inflation maybe that a place on the coast like San Francisco has had, but we have economic disparity too, and that's something that we have to work on too.Dan:Right. I think that's being recognized now. We talked about a couple episodes ago here, that the city is starting to take a hard look at itself, especially in terms of the racial inequalities that exist here.Paul:Yes.Dan:Again, the three of us aren't the best people to speak to this. We don't live the same experiences that a lot of people do in this city, but we can play a role by listening and being active and playing a part in recognizing that. And trying to create opportunities, being part of the solutions here. It's going to take a long time for Pittsburgh to completely shrug off some of the legacies that came from the 20th century here, some of the stuff that might be dragging down the city, but we can do it.Paul:We absolutely can. And if we can, we'll put in the show notes, there have been a couple of interesting public source articles that have dug into some of these issues, and I was reading-Dan:Quite a battle in tech, here.Paul:It was a battle in tech, and there's one written by a fellow named Noah Theriault, I believe that's how his name is pronounced, and he's at CMU. And the conclusion of this article, which you found, Dan, I thought was really interesting. He said "Here many of us who come here for opportunities in the city's universities, hospitals, and tech firms, do so in a state of willful ignorance. We take advantage of the low cost of living, we relish the walkability of the neighborhoods. We gentrify. Many of us smugly believe that we are the city's rebirth, the salvation from rust and blight. Too few of us learn about the historical and ongoing realities that make it most livable." And I think that's something that's really at the heart of what we need to remember. It's great to be on lists like this, but really there is no Nirvana -Dan:Right?Paul:That exists among places to live in this country. We have work to do too.Dan:It's hard to put a number on somebody's personal experiences here. I think that's the crux of what you were talking about there.Paul:Exactly. Exactly.Dan:All right. We're here with Jason Cercone. He's the chief brand officer at Breaking Brews, also the founder there and they're a content network and digital resource platform for people in the beer industry. Not only that, he hosts the Breaking Brews podcast, which takes a pretty unique look at the beer industry. They focus a lot on the business side of things. So Jason, thanks for being here.Jason:Thanks for having me guys.Dan:Awesome. Okay. As we mentioned, what you like to do with Breaking Brews your podcast and kind of spins off of your business. You look at a pretty different side of things in the spirits industry, in the alcohol industry there, that people don't think of all the time and that's actually selling the stuff and getting it out there, right? Yeah.Jason:Yeah. What I discovered was there are a lot of podcasts dedicated to drinking beer and reviewing and having fun and those podcasts are all great, but I wanted to bring something different to the podcast world. And I started looking at the fact that we don't have a ton of podcasts that are dedicated to the business side. Which talks about sales and marketing and distribution, all those different facets that are very important and very critical to the beer world. That was where it really started to ... or where I really started to make it take off. And I talked to a lot of industry professionals that felt the same way. They said when they're cleaning kegs and doing some of the horrible work that goes on in the brew houses that they want to put on a good podcast and listen to something that they can learn from, and that was the resource I wanted to put out there for them.Dan:Right, well the industry's really exploded as far as the craft production or the craft beer segment goes. I think ... I'm just looking at some facts here from the Brewer's Association, retail sale dollars of craft beer in 2018, I think the most recent year of stats was $27.6 billion. You said you've seen that since you started the Breaking Brews podcast yourself, you started about four years ago, or is that just your business?Jason:Breaking Brews itself started back in 2014. This is actually my third iteration of a podcast. I actually did one, like I was saying before, where we just sat around and drank beer, and that got old after a while.Dan:Why aren't we doing that right now?Jason:That's a very good question. I know. I was quizzed on that when I walked in the door, why I didn't bring beer and I'm starting to regret that.Dan:We'll just have our first kegger podcast, here.Logan:Yeah, well that'd make for some good conversation, that's for sure.Dan:That's a great idea.Jason:I'm always happy to come back for a second round if you guys want me to bring some-Dan:Right.Jason:Good drinks.Dan:Great idea. But yeah, as we were talking about the industry is just enormous right now. We're seeing that too in Pittsburgh, right?Jason:Absolutely. Yeah. I mean when I started things in 2014, there was probably maybe a dozen local craft breweries and now you look at the landscape, there's over 50 throughout the region. It's incredible. So many of them are doing great products and getting it out to bars around the area and also creating an awesome taproom experience too.Dan:Why do you think that is?Jason:Pittsburgh loves its beer, man.Dan:Yeah.Jason:But overall I think that ... I mean we haven't ... we hear the talk about the bubble a lot and has craft beer reached its saturation point. And I've always been a firm believer that we haven't even come close because we're not even close to the number that we had, or number of breweries we had before prohibition.Dan:Yeah.Jason:I mean we're creeping up, we're getting close, but the population of all these different cities and states across the country is so much higher. And when I go out to events and I do samplings and I talk to beer drinkers, a lot of folks still really aren't aware of what's going on in the craft beer industry. So there's still a lot of education that we can provide and that was one of the main drivers of Breaking Brews was putting some education out there so people can better understand what's going on in the industry and what's going on with these products.Logan:That's an interesting benchmark that you mentioned there that the number of brewers before the prohibition. Is that a common milestone in the craft beer business? And are there things that were happening back then that are happening now? The same way?Jason:I think it's, it's obviously changed a lot in regards to how beer is made. Brewers have pushed the envelope to the furthest degree possible and then a little bit more. You see a lot of crazy ingredients going into beers that probably pre-prohibition they weren't putting donuts into stouts and Twinkies-Logan:What were they doing?Jason:Breakfast cereal. I know it's like they weren't living their best life at all. However, a lot has changed. It's just the question of people's tastes have changed too and it's what do they want? And that's what these brewers are constantly trying to stay on top of, is what does the beer consumer want to drink today? And that's why I think you see such a variety out there in the market.Dan:Is it fair to say that it's easier to start a brewery round now or at least, somebody can be in their basement and actually trying to kickstart their own beer?Jason:That's probably the biggest misconception is that it's so easy to start a brewery because it's like any other business.Dan:Look, I've seen the Drew Carey show and he had a brewery in his basement. I know how this works .Jason:That's one of the big problems when you see some of these breweries that come out and their beer really isn't that great. They're standing around with their friends in a circle and all their friends are drinking their beer saying, "This is the best beer I've ever had. You need to start a brewery." And that's all well and good, but if they don't have a business sense that goes along with making a good product or even a subpar product, if they don't manage it properly, it's just not going to succeed. So it's just like anything else. I think that the barriers to entry are a little bit less because a lot of people have done it, but the smart thing to do would be go into it knowing that it's a business and you have to do all the things that you would normally do to run a business, or partner with somebody that can handle that end of your business for you.Logan:Partner with someone like Jason, Jason Cercone.Jason:I am for hire. I am here if anybody needs assistance. I'd be happy to help.Dan:Have you ever, you yourself, have you ever actually started ... Well maybe not started your own brewery, but have you ever brewed your own drafts?Jason:I've partnered and done some collaboration beers with a few different breweries across town. I did an event last year where I partnered with Yellow Bridge Brewing out in Delmont. I just went out and brewed with them for the day and I was able to say that I helped and I call that a collaboration. And I've done that with a couple of other breweries too. And that's fun. I mean that's the brewing side of it for me. I've always been more of a beer drinker and I like to obviously talk about it and promote it and market it. Brewing it just wasn't really something I wanted to do full time. It's a hard job. I think that's where a lot of people look at that like a glamorous thing and brewers will tell you, those are long days. It's very industrial and they work their asses off to put together a good product. End of the day, they are dog tired.Dan:Sure.Jason:So yeah, important. If you're going to be a brewer, know you'll be working hard.Dan:Right. We talk about hard work there. We're talking about having a good business sense. What do you see are some of the secrets to say these successful craft brewers and the people that maybe ... even some of these breweries that say are smaller, let's think about Southern Tier years ago, nobody knew who they were. Now they've got their own brewery on the North shore and what are some of the secrets to some of these businesses that have made it?Jason:I think it's understanding how to grow and being very deliberate about it and not trying to just shoot the moon right out of the gate. Obviously you have to establish a loyal fan base and make good product at the same time. But if you try to go too heavy, if you're a small local brewery and you try to make a statewide distribution, your number one priority, chances are you're not going to succeed because you don't have the liquid to supply the markets. So there's a lot of different aspects that you have to look at, but probably the most important is to use a popular phrase of our time, stay in your lane, and understand what it takes to build that brand from the ground up.Jason:Don't try to get too far ahead of yourself before you're ready. And then once the time comes where you've established that brand, then you can start looking at ... popular thing now other than distribution is looking at secondary spaces. We're starting to see some breweries in the Pittsburgh area open up secondary spots so they've proven that their brand is good enough to support it and we wish them the best in carrying that out.Dan:Who would you point to as some really good success stories in the Pittsburgh area then and what they've done successfully?Jason:Oh man, that list is long.Dan:Yep.Jason:Yeah. One of the breweries that I work with, the Spoonwood brewing in Bethel Park.Dan:I was there just this weekend.Jason:Awesome. What'd you think?Dan:I loved it. It was my second time there. I had a great time.Jason:Yeah, they're doing great beer. Great food. It's a great tap room atmosphere. You really can't ask for much more than that. They've been ... they're coming up on five years.Dan:Wow.Jason:And I've been working with them since pretty much the beginning and we've been building that brand and we don't do a ton of distribution, but a lot of the beer that we put out there ultimately was just to build that brand and give people an opportunity to taste it. To where they might say, "Wow, this is in Bethel Park. I'm going to go down there and see what else they have to offer." Another brewery I work with is Four Points Brewing out of Charleroi. They've ... just under two years old at this point, actually just about a year and a half now and they're killing it. They're doing some great beer and then you've got a lot of the names that people hear of all the time, like your Grist Houses and your Dancing Gnomes and Voodoos and Hitchhikers of the world. Again, we could sit here and do a whole podcast where I just rattle off the list because there's a lot of good beer happening.Dan:Well, you're in luck, our next segment, we're going to list breweries for the next 25 minutes. All right.Jason:Yeah. Close off with reading the phone book.Dan:Exactly.Jason:Riveting radio.Logan:Now you've learned a lot of these techniques and methods. You have over 20 years’ experience in marketing and sales. Did that start off in beer, or and if not, how did you navigate into the beer industry from that?Jason:That was ... I mean that was broken compasses for days, man, that was ... No, it did not start in beer. I've been working in the beer industry – counting what I did with starting Breaking Brews – for going on six years now. I sold cell phones right out of college, landed at Enterprise-Rent-a-Car for several years after that. Ran Hair Club for Men here in Pittsburgh for about four years. And with Breaking Brews, when I started it, it was ultimately just to build something that I felt was a good resource that could teach people how to gravitate to these beers in a very approachable way. Because as I learned, a lot of people just weren't aware of what was happening around them. So I was able to parlay my skillset from all my years in the professional world into a business that now I can help the breweries and help the different businesses that I work with do sales and marketing and create a good customer experience. All those good things, all things that are very important to building a good brand.Dan:Bring it back a little bit locally here to ... Pittsburgh I feel like is ... we've got a pretty special relationship to beer here. And it's some pretty big names in terms of, you think of Iron City, Duquesne, there's obviously Rolling Rock used to be around. How do you feel like the city's adopted and adapted to this craft brewing? I don't know if you could call it a Renaissance because it hasn't been around until right now, but this upsurge right now that people are ... they are doing with craft brewing.Jason:Yeah I think with the breweries now, I mean obviously as we spoke about earlier, we've got over 50 across the region now. It says a lot for the fact that people are going to go to a good brewery regardless of where they're at. It's become very neighborhood centric where you look like an old neighborhood pub, that's in some respects, being replaced by the local neighborhood brewery. You're seeing them essentially on every corner, quote unquote. And I think that helps with the fact that these guys are able to grow their brands so well because then it expands beyond their neighborhood as well. But yeah, we have a very rich history here in Pittsburgh with beer going back years and years back to ... I mean, Iron City was the beer.Jason:And I think now you're starting to see more of a shift towards the craft brands and many of them have been here for ... You look at East End, they've been here for 15 plus years now and they really were setting some good trends for what could happen and how people could gravitate towards a craft brand. Same with Penn Brewery. I believe 1986, was when they hit the scene. So a lot of good things have come along that have really helped push it forward. And now Pittsburgh is becoming one of those hot beds and I shouldn't say becoming it already is. And probably our closest rival in the state, just like everything else, is Philadelphia. And I think both of us have a tremendous beer scene that we can be proud of.Dan:Yeah. I think if you ever see a Penguins, Flyers game, it looks like more than a few people have beers.Jason:Well now, you see breweries have gotten in with the rivalries, like Grist House, and I'm forgetting the brewery that they partnered with out of Cleveland, they did a Browns, Steelers rivalry beer.Dan:Oh did they really?Jason:Rivertowne and Sly Fox had partnered up a couple of years ago for the stadium series. And they did a ... Glove Dropper was the name of the beer. And they worked together on that and sold it in both markets and worked out really well.Dan:All right Jason, well thanks so much for being here with us, for everybody at home. If you're listening, make sure to visit. If you're interested at all about starting a brewery and perhaps finding ways to market it and get it out to the world, you can go to breakingbrews.com. Look for Jason Cercone and also look for Breaking Brews podcast. You can find that on all the major platforms including Apple podcast, Stitcher, Google play, Spotify, iHeart, all the big ones where you can find us. And Jason, thanks so much for being here.Jason:Thanks again guys. Appreciate it.Logan:Sure thing.Dan:Great.Logan:Centuries before cell phones and social media, human connections are 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.Paul:It's now time to talk about the biggest building that is not in the downtown skyline. We are talking about what is known in the travel trade as a headquarters hotel. In other words, if Pittsburgh were to host a very large convention, a large hotel would be designated as the headquarters hotel. In many cities, this is a large hotel that's attached to the convention center.Dan:Right.Paul:And that typically has somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand rooms.Dan:Right.Paul:Pittsburgh – yinz don't have one of those n’at.Dan:Oh, they do have a hotel connected to the convention center, right?Paul:Yes, yes. We do the Weston and actually Dan, I'm glad you mentioned that.Dan:Yeah.Paul:Because in the original plans for the convention center development, that hotel was supposed to be about twice as big as it is and if it were, it would be the size of a headquarters hotel.Dan:Sure. Well, I think that is, it's interesting that you're bringing this up and I think we rewind a little bit. The reason we're bringing this up is, on February 3rd, in the Post-Gazette, Craig Davis, who used to be the CEO of Visit Pittsburgh.Paul:Yes.Dan:Yeah. Visit Pittsburgh is the local-Paul:It's the Convention and Visitor's Bureau in part supported byPaul:Our tax funds and they promote the city to businesses like conventions.Dan:Right, yeah.Paul:But also to leisure travelers.Dan:Draw people into the city. Yeah, it's important. Yeah. This article, what it did with, again with Craig Davis here, he had a piece of parting advice for Pittsburgh is how Mark Belko, the writer introduced this and he did a really nice job with this piece. Craig wanted to build a convention center hotel.Paul:Right.Dan:And that's what we're talking about here. And there's a lot of back and forth about whether it should be done, whether ... what kind of impact it would bring on the city here. And he had some really good information about it, yourself, but a lot of people, they want to see more here. And that's what we're talking about today.Paul:Right. So in the tourism and convention industry in Pittsburgh, this is the third rail of politics. Nobody really wants to talk about it. And I look at this article in the Post-Gazette, Visit Pittsburgh, great organization. Craig Davis, very effective leader and he's been hired to run a similar organization in Dallas. Smart person. He's in Dallas now, so he can kind of say, what maybe he couldn't say before when he was in Pittsburgh. And for people in his business, his line of work, you need to have a convention center hotel. The thing is, to build that would cost about, Oh, kind of like the same amount of money to build PNC Park or Heinz Field.Dan:Right? Yeah. In this article here, they have an estimate of $350,000 to $400,000 a room to build.Paul:Or in other words-Dan:That's all.Paul:Yeah. $240 million.Dan:Right. That's for a 600-room hotel.Paul:Exactly.Dan:Yeah.Paul:It's a lot of money. And it was not easy to get PNC Park and Heinz Field built. There was actually a referendum on the ballot one year that failed. It was called the Regional Renaissance Initiative. I mean we put renaissance in the name of everything, don't we? And it was after that, that a deal was brokered. A lot of critics said behind closed doors and smoke-filled back rooms that wound up producing Heinz Field and PNC Park. There doesn't seem to be a lot of political appetite for spending that kind of money, again.Dan:Right.Paul:On something like a convention center hotel.Dan:Again here, Mark did a great job with this article here and he put it pretty succinctly here. He said, "In recent years, Davis' pitch has landed with all of the enthusiasm of a root canal."Paul:Yes.Dan:I don't know about you guys, I get too enthusiastic over root canals, but I suppose not many other people do, but the article does bring up a good point. That there's been a recent hotel building boom in the region, in the downtown area, particularly across the river. Some other smaller hotels that have cropped up here and there, the Marriotts and whatnot.Paul:Many. You could throw a rock from where we sit right now, we can hit the Monaco.Dan:Absolutely, yeah.Paul:Throw it across the way, hit the Embassy Suites. We've got the William Penn, which has been here for a long time. The Drury is in the old federal reserve building.Dan:Right and that's just a block away from the convention center. But the kind of full service hotel that, again, this is from the article here that Mr. Davis would see here, that would require huge public subsidies. And that's-Paul:Yes.Dan:I think the sticking point that it comes down to.Paul:That is the third rail part.Dan:Whether we want this here and I think it's one of those things where you balance. You say, "How much are these conventions going to be worth compared to the costs, the investments that you have to make in a city here." And it could take a while until the scales tip one way.Paul:Well, and what's very interesting about this is, there are statistics, there don't seem to be any statistics readily available to say, "Yes, Pittsburgh, you should do this." What we tend to fall back on, are a couple of really great seminal events. First was the Bassmaster Classic several years ago. And still of course people who don't know Pittsburgh want to depict it as a smoky mill town. And we had this freshwater national competition for bass fishing. And it went off really great. And that's led, as Mark Belko's article points out to Visit Pittsburgh getting into seeking sports events. And we've had, I can't believe this, I didn't even realize this number, 22 NCAA championship events have been held in Pittsburgh and we've got more coming.Dan:Yeah. Just recently they had the National Women's Volleyball championship out here.Paul:Yeah.Dan:And I think a big part of that comes down to, they now have a world-class arena to do it in.Paul:Yes.Dan:Where Civic Arena definitely showed its age after a while.Paul:Right.Dan:That plays a different part here. But certainly the downtown hotel building boom assists with that.Paul:Absolutely. Absolutely.Dan:Convention centers is ... that's a little different. And again, I think what, Craig Davis is trying to say here is, having it connected to the convention center, people love that. It's very convenient just to grab an elevator, have a little sky walk over to the convention center. It's not always a feasible immediately though, it's nice to think of these things, but it's hard to find room for it. And whether you're going to supplement what is already there or again, it takes money.Paul:Well, my point about Bassmaster, the other thing that happened of course was the G20 in 2009. Those two events put Pittsburgh, reputation-wise, on a world stage. In the article, Mark Belko talks about Milwaukee, which is a nice enough town and they have a baseball team that has a better record over the last decade of a postseason-Dan:They spend more than the Buccos, but that's a-Paul:They do.Dan:That's a whole other podcast.Paul:However, in terms of the hotel market, not quite the same size as Pittsburgh and they're getting the Democratic convention this year.Dan:Absolutely.Paul:Why does Pittsburgh not have that sort of convention? And if we did, aside from the monetary benefits of the convention itself, what would it do for the city in terms of raising the reputation even more and bringing more convention business to Pittsburgh? It's hard to say. It's also hard to argue that it was really cool to have Bassmaster or certainly the President and world leaders for the G20. That was awesome exposure for Pittsburgh. This is kind of a question of how much is the region willing to spend? And apparently it's going to have to spend something, in order to create that kind of environment.Dan:I think what's important when you look at these national conventions, particularly in the political arena, that is strategic by the parties too.Paul:Oh yes.Dan:Wisconsin's very important in this upcoming election to the Democrats. As is Pennsylvania.Paul:Right.Dan:But they were also in Philadelphia not that long ago, so do they want to spend so much more time in Pennsylvania and look, Wisconsin, the people ... whenever they do the Monday morning quarterbacking of that election, they did not spend all the time there. So it's ... they're showing ... it's a quite a statement that they are spending the time in Milwaukee for this upcoming convention. But it also shows that if Milwaukee can host something like this, then, so can Pittsburgh.Paul:Why not Pittsburgh, yeah.Dan:I think Pittsburgh actually held the very first Republican convention that was back in the 1860s or so. And we had the hotel rooms for that one, I guess. You know.Paul:We did.Dan:Yeah.Paul:Well, country was a little smaller then.Dan:Indeed. Yeah.Paul:Might be a difference, but I think this is a topic we're going to come back to again, so we wanted to put it out there for everybody. Again, props to Mark Belko and his article and the truth speaking, shall we say, of Craig Davis. We'll have to watch the skyline and see where this one goes.Dan:Well, most importantly, just as a final coda to this, and Mark's article did describe this a bit at the end, for the leaders that want to see this kind of change, that want to see a hotel down here, they have to show their work. It has to be ... You have to come to ... with studies from respected institutions, respected people, who are proving that, "Okay, hey, when Milwaukee hosted this type of thing, if they had a hotel here, this is the impact that they would have got."Dan:There are other areas here in Louisville and Columbus that are building hotels. What will those hotels do for their ability to draw conventions? Are they stealing them from Pittsburgh? You have to come up with that information. You have to present it to the leaders, not only in our government, but the community to approve ... like, "Hey, okay, some of tax dollars should go to this."Paul:Absolutely.Dan:And if you can do that, if you can convince enough people, then maybe it happens. But that stuff takes some time too.Paul:Well, and just a final thought on this since Craig Davis left Visit Pittsburgh, they are engaged in a search for a CEO. So I would expect that once a new CEO is named, one of the first things that we should be looking for, is some thinking around this topic.Dan:Absolutely.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 at p100podcast.com, or wherever you listen to podcasts and follow us on Twitter at Pittsburgh100_ for all the latest news updates and more from the Pittsburgh 100. 

This week, Car Con Carne crosses over with the "Make Us a Mixtape" podcast, hosted by comedians Paul Faravhar and Marty DeRosa. The premise is simple: Their weekly guest makes them a 5-song mixtape and they collectively talk about the tape, song by song. I chose "Chicago music" as my theme. Here's what we talked about this week, over food from Big & Littles: Paul says Portillo's makes the best Chicago burger. Marty: "(Picking Portillo's as the best) is a coward's move." The art of crafting a mixtape. The tyranny of "Make Us a Mixtape"s rules. Guilty pleasures: Are they bullshit? How do you eat your food? One item at a time? My love of Kuma's. My first playlist created for this episode, which was rejected. The quintessential Chicago band when I was young: Naked Raygun. The appeal of "album play" concerts. Paul doesn't know his Adam Ant history. I assigned him homework. The 90s in Chicago music. Paul blames record companies for shitty music. Indie rock is alive and well in Chicago. Guitars are alive and well in Chicago. James: "I hate Lollapalooza." Paul (shocked): "WHY?" Paul likes going to Lollapalooza to hang out in the VIP section. Paul: "Do you remember the band Live?" James: (inaudible eye roll) "I know a lot of recovering Limp Bizkit fans" The charm of AM Taxi, and their emergence from the suburban scene. The best concert I ever saw... it was a whiiiiiiile ago. Paul thought mosh pits started in the 90s. Metro is clearly the best rock club. I wasn't young enough or punk enough for Fireside shows. The legacy of Wesley Willis. Rock over London, Rock on Chicago! Paul made a post-break-up mix tape for an ex. Marty and I understand that as being a fucked up move. Counting Crows completely fucking suck. Paul: "You have to admit that at the time, (Counting Crows)... " Me: "No." Paul: "They were the biggest thing.... " James: "No."

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.  

We celebrate our second anniversary episode by interviewing Emeritus Professor Paul Nation about reading. Paul tells us about research into the effectiveness of reading, why as teachers we tend to avoid including reading in our classes and how we can start doing more reading in class.Ross Thorburn: Hello everyone. Welcome to this second anniversary podcast. Today, we're going to talk about something that we've not talked about much before on the podcast which is reading. I know we always say we have a special guest but today, we really have a very, very, very special guest.Tracy: He's a true world expert on reading, Paul Nation. I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with Paul Nation. Paul is emeritus professor at the School of Applied Linguistics and Applied Language at Victoria University, New Zealand.Written dozens of books and been publishing research on these topics since 1970s. There are three areas that we're going to talk about. The first one is, how does reading help students learn vocabulary?Ross: Second, we'll ask, how can teachers include more reading in their lessons? Finally...Tracy: Why isn't there more reading in most language courses?How does reading help students learn vocabulary?Ross: Hi, Paul.Paul Nation: Hello.Ross: Thanks so much for coming on the podcast.Paul: No problem.Ross: Do you want to start off by telling us a bit about vocabulary teaching and how reading relates to vocabulary teaching?Paul: The problem with vocabulary is when it's framed as teaching vocabulary because most of vocabulary learning will occur not through the teacher teaching, but through the teacher planning well, organizing well and providing opportunities for the learners to develop strategies to take control of their own learning.There are just too many words for teachers to be able to teach them. Really, we have to see learning of vocabulary is really occurring through input which is very, very important. Learning through output and learning through fluency development, but also learning through some teaching and then through deliberate learning and so on like that.I think that's really important because otherwise, teachers feel that they're the only source of vocabulary for the learners in the classroom. That's a very wrong view indeed.Tracy: That's really interesting. Does that mean teachers aren't really that important then in language learning?Paul: I didn't say the teachers weren't important. I said teaching was not important. There's an important difference. That comes back to what you see as the role of the teacher or the roles of the teacher. I put planning as the number one role of the teacher.From a vocabulary perspective, planning involves working out what vocabulary your learners already know and making sure that they have plenty of opportunities to learn that vocabulary.It's deciding what vocabulary your learners need to learn and then making sure that they have plenty of opportunities to learn it. If we just take meaning‑focused input, teachers need to know and the learners need to know how many words they know. Then what level of graded readers they should be working on in order to help expand their vocabulary through input.The teachers' roles are very important because it's, first of all, making sure that learners were spending time reading at the right level for the students so that they have the opportunity to learn vocabulary through guessing from context and through some dictionary lookup and so on as they do reading in order for that to happen.If you had a really good extensive reading program that learners were spending anything from half an hour to an hour or two a week on and maybe more, they could be learning at a rate of around about a thousand words a year, which would be a native speaker rate of learning.The teacher has a good job to play there, a very important job to play but the teacher is not teaching. The teacher is making sure that the materials are available to the students.The students know why they're doing it. The students are, therefore, motivated and they're getting some feedback on their progress. The teacher needs to do all those things but it's not fronting up saying, "This word means X and that word means Y." It's getting the learning going.Ross: I'd heard before that the big problem with reading is that it's actually much harder to guess from context than most of us assume. Something like students need to know. Is it 95 percent of words in a text?Paul: Yeah.Ross: If you're getting that correctly.Paul: That's 98.Ross: Right, 98 percent. How do you reconcile those two areas, that guessing from context is really difficult, but reading is also extremely helpful and helping learners build up their vocabulary?Paul: It depends on the standard used for guessing. You have to view knowledge of words developing over time. If you meet a word in a reading and you have a guess at its meaning, and your guess is good enough for you to carry on reading, you might have added only a little bit of knowledge about that word to your knowledge of words.When you meet it again, the next time you'll add a little bit more knowledge. You can show...if you set your standard of knowledge for one meeting with a word is high, you can say, "Oh, people don't learn anything from context."It's just to have the guess the full meaning of a word from one meeting. That's absolutely true. All of research on learning from context used to have this problem of saying, "Well, actually, we know that people learn from context, especially native speakers, but it's very difficult to show it experimentally."You've got to see that when you guess from context, it's something which you're going to have to keep doing for the same word a dozen times at least. Each time you're building up knowledge, strengthening knowledge and enriching your knowledge of that word.How can teachers include more reading in their lessons?Tracy: I read about some other studies before. Students, they make some really, really good progress in using graded readers. The progress was even bigger than attending teacher lec classes.Have you ever seen any other examples of people applying these ideas? For example, they have a school and using these ideas, and then they provide the students an opportunity environment to read more.Paul: I always like giving the example of a language school in Tokyo that I heard about and couldn't believe. I went along to see it. This language school is...But I think they call it a Juku. Juku is where kids after the normal school day go and spend three hours, say from 6:00 to 9:00 in the evening doing study.It's a private language school. The parents have to pay money for them to go. They have to take time away from their lives to go to it. They might go to one three‑hour class a week or maybe two.This language school for at least half of that three hours simply gets the students to sit down and read. They can choose the book. They'll get a guidance and advice on what books to choose. Each classroom has lots and lots of books graded readers and text written for native speakers.Some of the students, if they wish, can actually spend the whole three hours doing extensive reading. Most choose not to do that. Most do one and a half hours and then they have one and a half hours session of conversation with a native speaker.The guy who owns these schools is making a fortune. He's really doing well. His results in the entry exams to universities are so good. That word of mouth just keeps them coming and the students love it.I couldn't believe that parents were paying a lot of money for their kids to go to a language school where for at least half of the time they sat down and read while the teacher sat in front of the classroom and just did other irrelevant work.I went along and sort, and oh boy, it was working well. The teacher said, "Here, you watch." This was the owner of the school, actually. He said to the students in this particular class I was observing, "Do you like coming to these classes and doing them?" Of course, being obedient students all the hands went up but I think they made it.He said, "Now, watch this." The next question was, "Would you do this at home?" Only about two or three hands came up. They said, "Well, at home, we're just too busy. There are too many other things to do at home. Even though we could sit at home for an hour and a half, or also each week and quietly read."There's so many other...We got homework to do, there is computer games to play and all of these things. We just never get around to it." Having to come to this class and sit down and do it. I was talking to some of them after the class and they were really proficient.Ross: It sounds a bit like going to the gym, doesn't it? That example of, if you pay for the gym, but a lot of the things that you're doing at the gym, you could just do a home. Actually, if you don't pay for the gym, probably none of those things you end up doing at home for whatever reason. Right?Paul: You don't. No, I know. You don't. That's right. Once you have a dedicated time where your money is being paid out and that sort...people ask about extensive reading, "Why don't we just get the students to do it at home?"There is a research which shows, in fact, you're much better starting off in the classroom at least. For the start at least of getting to do it because then you make sure that they do it. Then you make sure that they suddenly come to the realization that in fact, there are books that they can read, understand, enjoy, which are at the right level for them.That's quite a revelation. A lot of students have never read a book in English from the beginning to the end. Through well‑planned extensive reading program, they should be reaching the end of a book at least once or twice a week.Tracy: Paul, those students that you just mentioned, they're younger learners rather than adults?Paul: They were teenagers. I think that were getting off to university in a year or two.Tracy: Is it possible to use graded readers with younger learners?Paul: You can have meaning‑focused input right from the very beginning stages of learning English. The lowest level of graded readers assume knowledge of 100 different words. You could start from that and the second or third week of a course if you really was switched on.Why isn't there more reading in most language courses?Ross: Why is it then that all English schools don't actually have more reading in their curriculum? Pretty much everywhere I've ever worked there's been some reading in courses but it's been a very small one.Paul: That's right. The research on extensive reading is clear. We know how much extensive reading learners need to do. We know that very, very significant progress can be made through doing extensive reading. Every teacher should read the book "Flood Study" by Warwick Elley and Francis Mangubhai.It's only about a 20‑page or so report, but it's such a significant piece of research showing that by getting meaningful input and comprehensible input as a significant part of the program, learners can make almost double their learning compared to a teacher in front of a class.The researchers are clear on that but teachers are very reluctant to take up the option of extensive reading. One of the reasons is that if you have a really good extensive reading program, once it's running, once it's planned, organized and set up, the teacher has little to do. Teachers feel guilty about that.They feel, "How can learners learn without me teaching them?" That's one of the false beliefs. Then, "Here are the learners working away and I'm doing nothing. Am I earning my money?" You could say, "Well, the teachers are very conscientious and things like that." It worries them that they do that.Ross: I presume that you need pretty interesting and engaging books for the students for all this stuff to work then...Paul: I would think so. In the Elley and Mangubhai study, they found that actually there was quite a lot of agreement among students on the books that they liked. The books that they liked, the books that native speaking kids also liked. The material also has to be at the right level for the students.You need to get the good books. The good books part is really easy because every year the Extensive Reading Foundation runs a competition for the best graded readers. That's been going on for...I don't know, maybe 10, 15 years now. You can simply go to their website and find the best ones.More from Paul NationTracy: Thanks very much for coming to our podcast.Paul: No problem.Tracy: I'm sure our listeners would really appreciate all the valuable information you shared with us.Ross: Everyone, highly recommend that you go into Paul's University of Victoria web page. I'll put a link for that on our website. You can find lots of great resources from in there, vocabulary tests, free books, etc.Tracy: Thanks everybody for listening to our podcast for the last two years and then really appreciate your support.Ross: Bye.Tracy: Bye.

What information is Facebook gathering? Do we really understand how our data is being used? Is it time for Silicon Valley to step up and address our concerns around privary? This week, Paul and Rich sit down to discuss the problems with Facebook (beyond its ugly interface) and the lack of governing body around our data security. Mark Zuckerberg holding a cat (that is very much alive) They Have One Product: This week Paul Ford and Rich Ziade sit down to chat about the hellscape that is Facebook. We chat about the lack of communication around what is happening with your data, discuss what Silicon Valley’s role is in protecting our privacy, and complain about how ugly the Facebook interface is. Rich also paints us a picture of Zuckerberg holding a dead cat!   2:01 —Paul: “They have one product, the product is the social network and your access to that social network. So privacy should actually be something they have worked out in my opinion.” 2:01 — Rich: “They’re doing stuff to me I don’t know about. That’s very different to me than privacy.” 9:37 — Rich: “And so what I just described to you is the human cookie, right?” 13:34 —Paul: “what we’re seeing here is that there’s no . . . centralized controlling authority for all this stuff, right? Like people think that there’s might be order or like a governing body . . . but it doesn’t work that way.” 17:34 —Paul: “What the hell is goin’ on in that interface though? As we make fun of it as a giant, monolithic privacy destroying pseudo-government… as a product it’s just an insane circus — it’s just this blue and white hellscape.” 21:57 — Paul: “I think people assume that consuming is a kind of making, right?” 26:03 — Rich: “Zuckerberg? He creeps me out. The way he holds his hands out… It’s like there’s an imaginary dead cat in his hands. I can’t — I can’t peg it, man. He freaks me out.” A full transcript of this episode is available. LINKS Facebook eHow wikiHow Content farms mltshp (Formerly Milkshake) Paul’s Archivepix on Twitter “Silicon Valley Has Failed to Protect Our Data. Here’s How to Fix It” by Paul Track Changes is the weekly technology and culture podcast from Postlight, hosted by Paul Ford and Rich Ziade. Production, show notes and transcripts by EDITAUDIO. Podcast logo and design by Will Denton of Postlight.  

Blac Chyna’s dating an 18 yr old and find out why he refuses to wear a condom when they’re having sex. Sarah wants to know if she should post a racy picture of herself bending over in an irish leprechaun outfit...her boyfriend says NO WAY. Plus, who can jug a beer faster...Sarah or Paul? They take on the Tom Brady/Stephen Colbert beer challenge.