Podcasts about peter thank

Picture this: Three successful Amazon sellers from each corner of the globe sat down in a quaint Italian café, their journeys colliding over a shared passion for selling on Amazon. In this episode, we're chatting with Peter and Franco, our guests who symbolize the true essence of a global Amazon seller. Born in the US, raised in Australia, and operating out of Asia, Peter's journey through the world of Amazon selling is a fascinating tale. Then we have Franco, an Italian native who transitioned from a traditional upbringing to become a leading e-commerce entrepreneur. We listen to their stories, not just the triumphs but also the trials, like the time Franco's competitor created fake test reports to tarnish his reputation. Venture with us as Franco shares his extraordinary journey as an Amazon seller. From hitting his peak year of gross sales to navigating the fiercely competitive medical device field category, his story truly is a rollercoaster ride. Then we turn to Peter, who climbed to the number one spot in the health and personal care category within a mere three weeks. His dedication to producing reliable products and setting the right price point made him a standout entrepreneur. His unwavering commitment to his product and the pursuit of excellence are lessons for every budding e-commerce entrepreneur. As we bid our Italian farewell, we delve into Franco and Peter's strategies for success, from image testing to understanding European selling regulations and leveraging social media. Get a peek into Franco's vision of reaching nine figures and perhaps even owning a football team in Italy. We draw the final curtain discussing the potential of the Italian Amazon community and the role Amazon plays in shaping the European market. Join us for this riveting conversation brimming with success stories, challenges, and unique experiences in the world of Amazon selling. We promise it's worth the listen! In episode 509 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Franco, and Peter discuss: 00:00 - From Italy to Amazon 01:55 - Discovering Cultural Diversity in a Podcast 04:01 - From Australia to Italy 11:21 - Launching Products in Global Markets 14:58 - Challenges and Successes on Amazon 16:29 - Medical Device Field Competition and Tactics 24:32 - Strategies for Amazon Success 27:54 - Challenges With Listing Product on Amazon  32:35 - European Market Testing and Selling Strategies 36:21 - Discussion on Translations for International Marketplaces  39:25 - Italian Farewell and Appreciation for Italy ► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup  (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos Transcript Bradley Sutton: Today we've got sellers in the show that I originally met in Italy and now they're selling millions of dollars on Amazon. We're going to hear their story, which includes a case where one of their competitors even sent fake reports to the media about their product safety in order to get them kicked off of Amazon. How crazy is that? Pretty crazy, I think. What was your gross sales yesterday, last week, last year? More importantly, what are your profits after all, your cost of selling on Amazon? Did you pay any storage charges to Amazon? How much did you spend on PPC? Find out these key metrics and more by using the Helium 10 tool Profits. For more information, go to h10.me forward slash profits. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That's a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed, organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And today we are doing what I think is a first we are having a three continent podcast at the same time. We're not recording this separately. I'm here in North America, we've got Peter, who, I believe, is in the Asian continent, and we've got Franco, who is in Europe. So welcome to the show. And the funny thing is, I met all of them in person, at least in Italy, which is why I'm wearing my Mona Lisa shirt, my Mona Lisa shirt, here. So anyways, welcome to the show, guys, and good afternoon and good morning to Franco, and it's good evening here. Peter: Thanks for having us. Bradley Sutton: Now I, as I said, I met these gentlemen at a conference in Milan, Italy, recently and you know, just talking to them a little bit and I was like man, all right, I don't want to know too much more because this sounds interesting and I just love to find out about the rest of you know your stories. You know, along with everybody else, the podcast. Now, that was like a couple months ago. So the cool thing is, you know, with my terrible memory, the little that they did tell me I've already forgotten. So, guys, I am going to be learning everything you know, right, right with you, with all the listeners today. So let's, first of all, you know the first thing that that that blew me away was, here's Peter, and you guys can't see him. You know he, he is, he's in Asia right now and he is of Asian descent. You know like he looks. I'm half Asian. I don't look Asian. Peter looks Asian and here he is sitting with me in this Italian restaurant and ordering in perfect Italian, like, what? Like? Do I really have jet lag? What is going on right here? Let's start with your backstory, were you? Uh, oh, yeah. And, by the way, the way he speaks English was also a little bit different, so were you. Were you born and raised in Australia, or were you born and raised? Peter: Yes, sir, I grew up in Australia, but actually I was, I was. I was born in the States. I don't know if I mentioned that in the state. Bradley Sutton: That makes it even more interesting I love it when we're about here in the States, in Minneapolis, minneapolis Okay, man, that's, that's. That's still the coldest I've ever been. Uh, not sure I want to go back there in winter, but all right. So you were in Minneapolis, and how? I mean? You know, the Minneapolis Australia connection is not very common, so how did that happen? Peter: Yeah, so if I take it back a step further, as you said, um, I'm, I'm Asian. My parents were born in China. Bradley Sutton: Okay. Peter: And they. They met in the US, so that's why I was born there, okay. And then, after um, they finished their studies, they decided they wanted to move to Australia. So when I was a baby, still be immigrated to Australia. Bradley Sutton: Okay, all right. And then now, growing up in Australia, what do you think you're going to be when you grow? Peter: Yeah, I didn't have any, you know, any special, different aspirations. I was like all the other kids. Bradley Sutton: Fine. Franco: Anything like that. Peter: Yeah. Bradley Sutton: Okay. Peter: I didn't think of being an entrepreneur or a commerce guy or anything like that. Bradley Sutton: Did you go to university in Australia? Peter: Yes, I did. I studied engineering Engineering. I had a very traditional upbringing? Bradley Sutton: Yeah, okay. And then, upon graduation, did you start working in that field? Peter: Yes, I did I um. So as I had no real exposure to my Asian roots, I wanted to do one year in Asia. So I ended up working in Hong Kong. So I worked in uh in Hong Kong for a little while with uh in the engineering field related to engineering. Bradley Sutton: Did you speak Chinese? Peter: I did not. That was one of the reasons why I wanted to go to Asia, because, growing up in Australia, yeah. At that time, I was the only Asian kid in school. Um, there was no real interaction with other families or anything, so, um, I just spoke English. Bradley Sutton: Okay, Now you know USA to Australia, to Hong Kong, how do you end up speaking Italian? Peter: So when I was in Hong Kong, um, I got headhunted for a job in Italy. So, yeah, I took the opportunity and went over there and um lived there for a few years and worked there for a few years. Bradley Sutton: Okay, that's cool that you learn the language. You know some people, uh, you know, go to other countries and you know years and they don't are not able to learn the language. That's a, that's a cool, uh cool skill there and and all right. So so that brings us to. I mean, obviously you're not in Italy anymore, so how long did you stay in Italy? Peter: Right, uh, I think it was about five years. About five years, about five years in a minute. Okay. Bradley Sutton: All right, and it was it during your your run in Italy there that you learned that you started on Amazon. Or how did you go from engineering to e-commerce? Peter: No. So, um, while I was in Italy, I also got headhunted for another job and I was moved to Shanghai. And while I was in Shanghai, I met a one of my friends who I did sport with, was very much into Amazon, and he always kept talking about it. And then, finally, uh, one day I said this sounds really interesting. Why don't you show me what you're doing? And I offered to invest in what he he was his business, because it sounded like it was really good. And he said no, why don't you just try yourself? So I did it as a um, as a hobby, for a while, and then eventually it became became a full time thing. Bradley Sutton: Okay, all right. All right. Now we're caught up to to kind of like the e-commerce list. Let's go ahead and take the journey with with Franco. Now for you it's a lot easier backstory Were you born and raised in Italy and lived there your whole life? Or or do you live in 17 million countries like, uh, peter? Franco: No, I was born and raised in Italy. I passed a couple of years in China, but it means that I was there like uh, every month of April and every month of October since 2003. So it's not was not like living permanently there. I was living in a hotel. So basically, I've been living my life in Italy. Bradley Sutton: Okay, all right. Now. What about you? Uh, what did you go to university for? Franco: I did pure maths and when I was starting at the university, I thought that I would be doing academia after that. Okay, and then it changed my mind. Bradley Sutton: Okay, what so? Upon graduation then, what did you enter into if you didn't want to go ahead and take that route that you thought you were going to take? Franco: Yeah, I did. When I graduated I didn't really know what to do because I changed my mind. I didn't want to be a university professor of math, so I was going into my other side of me, that was, being an entrepreneur. So I did an MBA and after that MBA I worked for a couple of years as a marketing assistant in a company and during that time I founded two companies, two different ones, with friends of mine. And then I resigned and from that point I always been an entrepreneur. Bradley Sutton: Okay, all right. So what year did you go full-on into e-commerce? Then what did you say? Franco: I went into e-commerce probably more than 10 years ago. Bradley Sutton: Dot com or other marketplaces, or what Now? Franco: in Europe, we're selling. Bradley Sutton: At that time, what I meant was yeah, the dot com is on Europe, but what I meant was like online sales or was it like a marketplace that you were on? Franco: No, it was our own e-commerce, our own website, and I was selling on with my company. I was selling rubber trucks that are the equivalent of tire for excavators and accessories for construction equipment, so something that probably even today you cannot sell on Amazon because like super huge and super heavy. Bradley Sutton: So you exited that company and then you said you became like a full-time entrepreneur. What was that endeavor like Full-time into? Like what was your? Was it just still online sales, or now you got into Amazon, or what happened there? Franco: Okay, so well, now most of my time is well, 100% of my time is on Amazon. But yeah, the other company, the one that's now, is doing Amazon as a long story, because it started in 1999. And we've been doing so many different stuff because we started from scratch with nothing. So we started doing multimedia content, then we went into doing CD and DVD duplication that means producing physical discs, then USB flash drives, accessories for smartphones, electronics in general, and then medical devices. When we went into medical devices, we went quite big on our e-commerce. That was not something that we were doing in this company. We're doing business to business mainly. And then from that, we went into Amazon. Not that we even had tried to do Amazon before, because we opened the Amazon account in 2014. But it was just a sort of let's see what's happening there, not really investing in that. So we were becoming big on Amazon since 2020. Bradley Sutton: All right, now we're kind of caught up in a similar timeline here. Let's go back to Peter then. Are you still selling your first product today, peter? Peter: Yes, I think I started with two or three, and all of those three products I'm still selling. How? Long has that been? Bradley Sutton: I started in 2017. Peter: Wow. Bradley Sutton: The same product. How many reviews do you have now approximately on that one? Peter: Maybe 3,000 or something like that. Reviews and ratings. Bradley Sutton: All right, so you're still selling the same stuff that you got into. How did you find that first product? Did you just take some course that a lot of people did and then just use the criteria to find the product and just struck gold in your first one? Or how in the world did you hit a home run with your very first product? Peter: So my friend had done the ASM course and so he suggested I did it as well. He told me the beginnings that I was doing the normal thing everyone was doing Just looking for a product that had an opportunity, that seemed like a good, not too competitive, good price, etc. Etc. And I was just lucky, I picked something that could last well. Bradley Sutton: Now, during this time you said you were back in China or were you in Italy? Peter: No, I was already in Shanghai at that point. Bradley Sutton: Ready in China? Okay, and then. So what marketplace did you launch this product on? Usa or Europe? Peter: Yeah, so I started in the USA. But I think within the first year I knew I wanted to be in Europe. So I immediately started in the European marketplace. I applied for VAT and everything. So yeah, pretty soon after the US Europe, I was into Europe. Bradley Sutton: Now? Was it any more easy than another person because you had lived in Italy before, or that meant nothing? Were you an American citizen, since you were born in America? Peter: Technically I have dual citizenship, but I always traveled on Australian passport. But, answering your question. So when I started Europe, I wanted to try the UK and Italy first before going into all the other countries. So, yes, there would have been a small advantage, starting with the Italian market, because I didn't have to worry too much about translations and more understanding what things were going. So small advantage, I would say, but not huge advantage. Bradley Sutton: Okay, All right Now. In the first couple of years of selling on Amazon, what was your peak of sales for like a year? Gross sales. Peter: I think it was about the second or the third year I reached seven figures. So I was going at seven figures for a while, but in the last two years I decided to focus more on profitability than revenue. So it's now in six figures, but making more profit overall. Now at what? Bradley Sutton: point did, like you said, it become your full-time job. At what level did you have to get to for it, to replace your engineering jobs that you've been doing for most of your adult? Peter: life. Yeah, I was able to replace it. I think it was maybe three or four years into the business, maybe four years. Bradley Sutton: You say you sell in multiple marketplaces. Do you aim for the same profit across the board, or is there a marketplace that's giving you better profit over another? Peter: For sure, Europe is way more profitable than the US, for products Is it? The shipping? Is it the? Bradley Sutton: PPC or what's you know, you're able to charge a higher price. What's the difference? Peter: It's the sellers in Europe. There's less of them, in my category at least, and the sellers are less sophisticated so they're not as good at branding PPC and just the basic stuff. Bradley Sutton: Okay, all right, let's go back to Franco then. So when you started on, amazon sounds like you started doing different things, but was there a point where you were only doing the medical devices, as you said, or did you start with only medical devices and that's all you've been doing this whole time? Franco: When I started in 2014,. We started with electronic, with accessories for smartphones, but I mean, we were making money with other stuff, so we were, we didn't really take it care of a lot about that and we were a little bit inexperienced. So we also did a couple of mistakes, like in the quality of the products. So we just like got a lot of bad reviews and we say, okay, we are making other stuff, we don't care about this, and we just kept the account open but we didn't use it. When, in 2020, we started doing medical devices, we went big almost immediately on Amazon. But before that, as I said, we were doing pretty well, like six or seven months before, on our e-commerce. That was the same e-commerce that was selling the electronics. That was like that website that we changed it and were you? Bradley Sutton: and were you only selling in Amazon Europe? Franco: Yes, because I'm proud to do not have the certification for selling in the US. They are very highly restricted and certified, so the regulatory stuff in US is completely different. Bradley Sutton: Now, what's been your peak year of gross sales? Approximately how much? 10 million, 10 million only in Europe in one year in medical devices. Yes, wow, is it safe to say that now Amazon is the main, as opposed to your? Franco: website. Are you still even? Bradley Sutton: doing anything on the websites or just all Amazon. Franco: We still have it. But I think it's very important because one of the reasons why we were successful on Amazon is because we know so well our customer. We know so well what they want from the product and when we launch a product we can tell to our customer. There is also this new product. You can also find this in Amazon, so it gives a lot of help. But because of the growth that we had on Amazon, we have a little bit of neglected our website. So as soon as we have more banned, we should keep making the website better and grow the website as well. Bradley Sutton: Now, as Peter was saying, europe is very profitable for him, partly in fact due to low competition. I would imagine being in the medical device field makes it even less competition. Would that be a fair assessment that it's very few competitors you have, or has it gotten a little bit more tough to? Franco: So I would say there are not so many, but the ones that are there are very aggressive, okay. Bradley Sutton: Aggressive as in they might do some black hat strategies and things like that, or what do you mean by aggressive? Franco: Yes, also Because on medical, it's very like you can get suspended for any kind of claim. So yeah, it's quite an aggressive field. Bradley Sutton: What's the craziest thing that has happened to you. I would assume that you've maybe had your account shut down or at least products suspended or what's been some crazy experiences you've had. Franco: The craziest things that happened to me was a competitor that wanted to get rid of all the big seller of the same product, so it creates some fake test report. It passed those tests to the media and from media they went on national TV and that was insane At the same time. Hold on, hold on. Bradley Sutton: So he made some fake report about like that your product is like unsafe, or something gave it to like a TV station and it got in TV. Franco: The first thing to give it to the media, to a newspaper To a newspaper and it made the biggest newspaper. From the newspaper, bump it to the national TV. Bradley Sutton: Yeah, and then and then. So what was the result? Like, did Amazon see that and then shut you down, or did you start getting bad reviews, or what? Franco: happened At the same. We were waiting experience on all the way to do stuff properly on Amazon. I mean, we didn't even have the brand registry at that time, so they were also able to hijack. At the same time, they hijacked our product and they left all our picture, the branding of our product, but we could not access our listing anymore. It's insane. I know it's insane. Bradley Sutton: Wow. Franco: Up to now I haven't heard of anyone that has an attack like that. Bradley Sutton: Yeah, it's intense. Franco: Yeah, and after like so the listing was destroyed because one month to get back the ownership of the listing and when it happened it was not possible to. I mean, it was like flu. That was probably more than a thousand of bad reviews, one thousand of, like one star reviews. Bradley Sutton: Now did the newspapers and media and stuff? Did they ever submit like retraction or correction? Franco: Oh well, yes, the newspaper, they we submitted like a press release, the newspaper, the newspaper added our press release to our today news. But customers don't really care. I mean, amazon business is a quick business, it's very quick. So we went, we look into that with, probably I think that the best lawyer we could find we usually have very good lawyers and there was no other way to have it fixed as soon as we wanted or to have like an economical compensation because of the way it was structured. Okay, the attack. Bradley Sutton: All right Now, peter, you know like it's safe to say that you've never had that level of attack, or you know? Peter: I don't think anybody has had that level of attack. So but I'm sure you have had my things on national television. Bradley Sutton: Yeah, I'm sure you've had some crazy things happen. Anything like anything that's happened to you. That would you say. You would call it. You know, your, your, your your kind of like worse experience on Amazon or craziest experience. Peter: I haven't had anything really horrible. I've had a lot of the standard like minor attacks from competitors, but probably the scariest one I had was Just I think it was three weeks before Christmas a big competitor in our space did an IP complaint against me and had my products suspended, but luckily I was able to get it back within a week. That could have easily dragged on for months, but I was very lucky. I got it back in a week. That was obviously very scary. How did you get it back? Just submitted appeals I used. I have a lawyer which I use all the time and even they said that's way faster than we normally see. You were really lucky. So I was just super lucky. Bradley Sutton: Okay, now you know let's not just scare everybody with all these bad stories. Peter, you know, sticking with you what's the best thing that's happened You're the craziest in a good way or biggest surprise, or biggest win you've had over the years on Amazon. Peter: I think the first one, which was really a happy experience for me. I've heard other guests on your podcast. I think they're similar. I had a product, one of my standard products, and in the UK suddenly I was having 10 times sales that I normally have. So and this was quite early on, so I still didn't know about being attacked, so I wasn't worried like I would be now, and in those days you could still write to the customers quite easily. So I was writing to a few of them and I got a response back that a celebrity. I've seen the products used by a celebrity on their you know, on their social media. So yeah, that was fantastic and yeah, I knew that celebrity. So it was pretty cool. Bradley Sutton: Awesome, awesome. Now you know you've sold in multiple marketplaces, but you know you're probably an expert, I would say on the Italian one. Is what you do on Amazon Italy, 100% the same strategy across the board? Like, I mean, obviously the language is different, but is your PPC strategy the same? Is your branding strategy the same? Is your keyword research strategy the same, or is there something different that you're doing in Italy? You know due to your experience there. Peter: No, I would say everything's particularly the same. As I mentioned before, it was a small advantage, and even now it's practically no advantage with the translation software that's available. So I'm just doing the same thing in all the marketplaces. Bradley Sutton: That's good to know, because you know some sellers out there. You know they start in a marketplace, whether it's Italy, whether it's Germany, whether it's USA, and they're like kind of scared sometimes to branch out because they're like oh man, I'm gonna have to learn a whole bunch of new strategies to go to this new marketplace. But no, it's across the board. I mean sure. You know every now, and you know there's VAT, you know, and then in Japan you might have to do a little something different. You know, but for the most part the strategy is the same. Now, what's going on these days with you know? You mentioned you sell in UK and Italy. What changed after the Brexit? Like, now do you have to send inventory to UK and then send inventory to Italy separately, and it's completely separated and segregated, or what was the difference after Brexit? Peter: Yeah, so you've probably heard of Pan-European and probably you'll. Listeners who have some experience know about Pan-European. Maybe I can explain that really quickly. Go ahead, please. It's like the US when you send a shipment to, it goes to one location and then Amazon will spread it out all over the US, right? Bradley Sutton: Yeah, we call that. North American remote fulfillment is what it's called over here. Peter: Right, so they have the same thing in Europe. If you're VAT, you registered in their core countries, which was UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain I think that's all of them. It was the same thing. You'd send it to one country and then they would spread it out amongst all the countries as if it was one country. So that was very convenient. When Brexit happened, the UK became its own separate country, so all the work that you do logistically, which you used to do for Europe, then you had to repeat it for the UK. So it's a bit of a hassle, time-wise. Bradley Sutton: Okay, all right. Now, switching back to Franco, you had the worst thing that somebody could possibly imagine happening. Now the same question that I gave Peter what was the best thing that's happening? I mean, other than the fact that you're not even selling the USA and you can still gross 10 million a year? I mean that by itself is pretty amazing, but what else other than that is a cool thing. That's happened to kind of like pump up people's spirits after feeling so sorry for you. Franco: Yeah, well, I think that if I put on my hand the bad thing and the other thing, the good things, the good thing outweigh the bad thing. And the best one was the velocity to which we could reach the number one in health and personal care category with our products like in three weeks. Bradley Sutton: So number one, as in BSR, one in the whole health category. Franco: Yes, yes, Wow, that's pretty impressive. Yeah, that was between 2020 and 2021,. We reached that position in like three weeks with our product. Bradley Sutton: that's why we got a time Three weeks from the time you launched yes, Wow, okay, well, okay, well, then tell me, I gotta pause you there. Then how in the world did that happen? Like, did you have some crazy campaign? Was it all organic? Franco: How would you go from zero to number one so fast? No, they were proud of the COVID. Bradley Sutton: Ah, okay, okay, that's the reason. Now, did you was this after COVID you started? Or did you just get lucky, like it was something you were starting and you had no idea COVID was happening and the timing was just right? Or how in the world did you manage that? Franco: Well, we have been manufacturing in China since, I told you, since 2003,. We have a very strong presence in China, and so when COVID hit in China in January 2020, I knew it was coming to Italy or to Europe. I was pretty sure. I also wrote article about that, and so when that happened, I was a sort of reference for many people to say, hey, can you help in something? Because you know, italy was the first country in the Western world to be hit very hard, and so we started doing those like masks, those kind of product for COVID, and at the beginning, we were just doing that for hospitals, like for what was really needed. Franco: And then after that, we went to doing this on our e-commerce and the reason was that we ran out of money because the request was so insane Because we look into that so deeply that we were 100% legit. Our problem was like, probably the safest you can buy at the right price. We didn't want to speculate. We really want to have the country, and so we had a good product at the right price and we have an insane amount of demand for all those state-owned stuff, like the police even the finance police was buying from us. And so when we ran out of money. We opened the e-commerce because we need some very short money cycles and you know, on e-commerce you get the money like right away. And so after that, six months later, and also we got a lot of. Our e-commerce was an instant success as well, because we were supplying all the hospitals and so our product with our brand was in every hand, everyone hands and so our e-commerce was an instant success. Franco: And then we asked it like in April 2020, to our product to be listed on Amazon, and Amazon didn't accept it. And you have to consider that at that time on Amazon, it was fluted with product that were not legit, like all the things you were finding on Amazon related to the kind of product was like not compliant. We submitted our product. We were rejected. We said, okay, I don't care, I have other stuff to do. And then in October, I tried to resubmit the product. It was rejected again, okay, but in November, for I don't know what I receive, like Without asking again to to be listed, the I so the listing the listing was there but was not like, not active. The list he became active. Franco: From that point, I think that because we have so much, I'd say, brand recognition, yeah. Trust from the customer. As soon as we told the customer we are on Amazon was like that. I mean, we could have been number one, probably in a week. The only problem was the, the velocity, and that we need to have the product on their warehouse. Yeah, and so it was like giving three days out of stock. One day, then three, because of the space that Amazon was giving us, because when you are number one, you have to send a truck every day, or even more and and so, yeah, that's the story, that's cool. Bradley Sutton: Now, you know, for the last part of this, you know let's just go back and forth with some, some strategies, you know, and I don't mean, oh, you know, keep your a cost down and and and have a nice logo, or you know it's just standard stuff. But you know each of you to be at the position you are, you know which is, you know Amazon is your full-time business and you've reached six, seven, even eight figures. You know you've got to have some, some unique strategies and some, some things that are that you feel are the difference of why you've been so successful. So we'll start, you know, franco, with you. What is something that you know? So you know, it could be a PPC strategy, it could be a launch strategy, could be branding strategy. Uh, what? What's your first strategy of the day? Franco: I think that's still uh, the obsession with the product is a key. So like, uh, having the best product you can have for your customers, and so listening to all the advice and Now you can use AI and do all your research. But, uh, do the extra, the extra mile. Don't only use AI, because AI is very good to finding, um, like patterns, like to put in together Something that is saying a different way, but it's not good to find out liars, and many times in the outliers there are some very good gold nuggets, so talk with as many as you can, even even call them and Understand what are they paying, what are they, what they really want. Franco: When you have the best possible product, then you need to apply all the techniques that amazon Required. Like I have the best possible page. Uh, add those pains and uh, emotion of the customer reflected in your stack image At the best possible main image ever. Like, do a lot of testing, an insane amount of testing, until you know you will be the number one choice and never Let the customer down. Whatever they have a problem, solve it, solve it. Solve it, because then you have To, you have to reach the position, then you have to stick to in the position. Yeah, it's an ever-ending story. Bradley Sutton: All right, switching back to peter. Uh, what's your um first strategy you'd like to share? Peter: Uh, I'd give a general one and then maybe an amazon specific one. Very general. Uh, I think there's a lot of listeners on your podcast that are maybe just starting out, so I would suggest just to keep things simple. I've seen some people they they try and go to advanced from the beginning and it's uh, they get in over their head. They don't understand what's happening. So I would just keep it simple, even though I've been doing it for a long time. I I also Follow the same principle. I don't have any, I don't have any full-time staff. I I just try and keep things as simple as possible. And then, specifically for amazon, as I mentioned before, I think if you're, especially if you're getting started, you really need to think about products or a product that you can brand. And if you, if you can't brand a product for example, if you're doing I don't know stationary or Cleaning accessories or something, it's very difficult to build a brand around that, to build User excitement. So that's something you probably need to consider as well. Bradley Sutton: Okay, Going back to Franco, you know like you can give us another strategy, but before you do that, I wanted to kind of like double down on what you were talking about. You know you were saying hey, you know, have the best listening, have the best images and and do a lot of testing. How are you doing this testing and how are you making sure that? You have you know the best. Franco: Well, I'm using all the Software as a service, as a this are available. So I like take my few four competitors and I test my main image against their, I mean against the main image of my competitors. Then I got all the advice from the pollers, like we choose this because of this, we don't like this because of that. We run AI on that. But we don't only run AI. Franco: I read all the response one by one and I try to see how can make it. I can make it better. And then I write like Something that, what, what need to be done. I pass this to my and I try to be very, very Pacific. Like many times, I take a piece of paper and make driving by myself, like this is how I want this to be, and then I pass to my designer and then the designer make a new Couple of variation and it test again and sometimes I go very deeply on that. Like I am not happy until, like I get that out of five possible choice of main image, my main image gets 60% of the clicks and the other four share the 40%. Bradley Sutton: So it's not just a matter of all right, hey, I won with 30%, another one has 28, another one has 26. That's even though you won. That's a failure to you until you can get to the 60%. Franco: Yeah, I won like 60% and 40% spread between the other four, then I know that I'll stand out, and this is the first step. Then I need to like the page has to be consistent. And then I need to maintain my promise to the customer. Bradley Sutton: Are you selling? You're still with Franco here. Are you selling in all European marketplaces, like including the newer ones like Poland, netherlands, or are you focused only on the bigger ones? Franco: So my sellers, I sell both on one P vendor center and three P seller central and I have all the accounts. I mean all the nine accounts in Europe, but the only one that really matters are the big five UK, Italy, Germany, Spain and France. And for the most of my product I cannot use the Pan European, as Pita does, because there are specific regulations for each. So there is on top there is the EU regulation, but then there are specific regulation on a country level. So, amazon, do not allow us to do the Pan AU. We need to stop the product on each country. Peter: Okay, that's a lot of work and increases your workload to manage your logistics in each country like that. Franco: Yeah. Bradley Sutton: All right, going back to Peter, you have any more strategies for us. But before you get to that, what about you? You mentioned UK and Italy. Are you also selling in all nine marketplaces, or are you only keeping your listings active in the big ones? Peter: Yeah, it was only UK and Italy when I first started in Europe to get an idea of how it worked. Bradley Sutton: And almost immediately. Peter: I think I only did UK and Italy for three months and then straight away I went into the Pan European. Bradley Sutton: So for the last few years. Peter: I've been, yeah, outside of the big five. Bradley Sutton: If you have to pick one of the newer ones, are they all doing equal or is there one that you feel? Hey, down the road, this could become the sixth one, that's a good question. Peter: Now I haven't really focused on any of the new ones. I think whether you're Belgium, sweden, I can't remember, but Poland's Check for public. But from what I've seen they're all very minimal. I haven't really put an effort into them. I wouldn't say there's one that particularly stands out. Bradley Sutton: And then for all of those, are you just using what Amazon does for the auto translation, or did you, did you commission official translation with a service or something? Obviously, you did the Italian one yourself, but what about for these other languages? Peter: Actually, I didn't do the Italian one myself. I used Yana's service, ylt shout out to Yana. But for the other marketplaces, no, I haven't specifically worked on those. I've just left it with Amazon doing their own translations, and then they have a similar system to NAF. So, for like for Canada and Mexico, then for the other countries that we just mentioned, they'll take the product from Germany or France or wherever, and then send it over. It's a similar system. Bradley Sutton: Okay, all right. Any more specific strategies for us that you'd like to? Peter: share. I do a lot on social media. I don't know if you've seen that's been a huge part of improving profitability in the last two years. So the PPC costs were going up incredibly Like for us. It was getting. Tacos was getting up to 30%, maybe even 40% for some products and now, with some strong, a lot of work on the social media side and managed to bring that down to less than 5%, which I think is quite rare in the industry for the TACOS Less than 5% TACOS. Wow, that's very impressive and most of the TACOS is brand defense on the product page. So, yeah, that's been huge for us to make that change. Bradley Sutton: All right. What does the future hold for you, Franco? Like you, just hey, let's just keep going. Or are you looking to exit your business and retire? You looking to start any more brands, or what's your you looking one year down the road, five years down the road? Buying a lower division Italians football team, or like what's gonna, what's gonna. Franco: Yeah, yeah, maybe, maybe Now. Well, my dream would be to. I have my figure. My company reached nine figures. That's a very, very difficult endeavor, and at that level. Bradley Sutton: I think you might be ready for Inter Milan or AC Milan. Franco: Forget the lower division, you'll be ready. Bradley Sutton: Let's buy one of those. Franco: What else. And that could be through acquisitions of other brands or through expanding our product range. We have been looking to many, many things, okay what about you, Peter? Bradley Sutton: What's the future hold for you? Peter: Yeah, I'm just happy doing what I'm doing. I don't have any new term plans to sell the business. Enjoy what I do and just gonna keep going. Bradley Sutton: All right, excellent. Now why don't we just go ahead and close this out with a one or two sentence words of farewell in Italiano here. Start with Franco. Say something for the Italian community out there. Franco: The Italian community of the Amazon vendors has to grow to a great potential. Amazon has become one of the most important markets in Europe. So, guys, we're gonna win Amazon. Bradley Sutton: All right, and, peter, where were your Italian words of wisdom? Peter: Italian. If someone in Italy hears this, I'll pass their Shanghai. So they're content with the Vedetti. Bradley Sutton: All right. Peter: I have no idea. Bradley Sutton: This host of the podcast is a crazy guy. Peter: Shoot a sexy host of this podcast is what I said. Bradley Sutton: All right, there we go. That's good, I'll believe that. All right. Well, guys, thank you so much. It was great to have you on. It was great to meet you and hang out in Italy. We found that little nice restaurant that I was not expecting much, but I was really, really delicious food. My whole time in Italy was good food, but I look forward to seeing you at a future conference, whether it be in Asia, north America or Europe. So thanks for coming on. Peter: Thank you. Franco: Thank you.

Having ADD or ADHD is a gift, not a curse. Hear from people all around the globe, from every walk of life, in every profession, from Rock Stars to CEOs, from Teachers to Politicians, who have learned how to unlock the gifts of their ADD and ADHD diagnosis, and use it to their personal and professional advantage, to build businesses, become millionaires, or simply better their lives. — Hey guys, Peter Shankman the host of Faster Than Normal. I wanna talk for a second about the Skylight Calendar, the wonderful sponsors of this episode and one of the things that keeps myself and my daughter on track. Skylight sits on your wall and tells you what you have to do today; what chores your child has to do today. It's basically a family calendar all-in-one. You can color code. It is amazing for people with ADHD. I am truly in love with this thing. We look at it every single day. It tells us the weather. It tells us what's on our calendar. It tells us what chores are left to do. Oh, time to feed the dog! - Mark it off on the calendar. My daughter can check the box when she's done and the chore disappears. It is one of the best things we've ever had. You can get yours with a discount using code: PeterShankman for 10% off, up to 30 bucks off. You're gonna love this Skylight calendar.  And you are gonna love.. I mean, truly it is amazing for people with ADHD or basically anyone who wants to keep track of their schedule. It sits on the wall, added bonus. You can throw your own photos onto it as a screen saver- on your wall! So now your wall has pictures. That's cool. Check it out. I'll put the link in the show notes. https://www.skylightframe.com code:  PeterShankman 00:40 - Thank you so much for listening and for subscribing! 01:38 - Say hello to my daughter Jessa Shankman! 02:17 - How old are you and what grade are you in? 02:22: So when you think of the letters ADHD what do you think of? 02:43 - Do you get distracted sometimes? What do you do when you do- if you do, to re-center and focus? 03:30 - About daily routines 03:50 - What do you think about your Dad and ADHD? 05:00 - On getting distracted and realizing that you have become so. How do teachers help? 05:22 - What do you think kids can do to be more focused?  05:52 - When is a fidget spinner really helpful? 06:42 - Can a little water help you focus? If so why do you think that is? 07:15 - What would you tell a kid who realizes that they are being distracted, doesn't like school and doesn't know how to fix any of it?  08:09 - Ref: Amanda Steinbegr's interview sponsored by Bouncy Bands https://www.fasterthannormal.com/ftn-052-failing-doesnt-mean-youre-a-failure-with-guest-amanda-steinberg/ 08:24 - On the importance of being comfortable and being able to employ a comfortable posture 08:52 - Do you think that when you exercise it helps or hurts your focus? 09:10 - What about recess? 09:30 - Do you feel more focused if you've had a good night of sleep? 10:01 - Anything else you wanna tell kids who might have ADHD or might be distracted once in a while? 10:48 - Jessa and Peter's big shout outs to Skylight calendar! 11:18 -  The Boy with the Faster Brain is now out! https://amzn.to/3FcAKkI 11:40 - Faster Than Normal Podcast info & credits. [After this interview Peter's dog, Waffle submitted a request to share more 'screen time' in future interviews. You can check-in on him here:  @petersdogwaffle on INSTA  Guys, as always thanks so much for subscribing! Faster Than Normal is for YOU! We want to know what you'd like to hear! Do you have a cool friend with a great story? We'd love to learn about, and from them. I'm www.petershankman.com and you can reach out anytime via email at peter@shankman.com or @petershankman on all of the socials. You can also find us at @FasterNormal on all of the socials. It really helps when you drop us a review on iTunes and of course, subscribe to the podcast if you haven't already! As you know, the more reviews we get, the more people we can reach. Help us to show the world that ADHD is a gift, not a curse!  — TRANSCRIPT via Descript and then corrected.. mostly somewhat:  [00:00:40] Peter:  Hey guys, Peter Shankman, host of Faster Than Normal. I wanna talk for a second about the Skylight Calendar, the wonderful sponsors of this episode, and one of the things that keeps myself and my daughter on track. Skylight sits on your wall and tells you what you have to do today, what chores your child has to do today. It's basically a family calendar with all in one, you can color code. It is amazing for people with ADHD. I am truly in love with this thing. We look at it every single day. It tells us the weather. It tells us what's on our calendar. It tells us what chores are left to do. Oh, time to feed the dog, mark it off on the calendar. My daughter can check the box when she's done and the chore disappears. It is one of the best things we've ever had. You can get yours with a discount using code: PeterShankman for 10% off, up to 30 bucks off. You're gonna love this Skylight calendar.  And you are gonna love. I mean, truly it. It is amazing for people with ADHD or basically anyone who wants to keep track of their schedule. It sits on the wall. Added bonus. You can throw your own photos onto it as a screen saver on your wall. So now your wall has pictures. That's cool. Check it out. I'll put the link in the show notes. https://www.skylightframe.com code:  PeterShankman [00:01:37] Peter: Hey guys, Peter Shankman, host of Faster Than Normal. I wanna talk for a second about the Skylight Calendar, the wonderful sponsors of this episode, and one of the things that keeps myself and my daughter on track. Skylight sits on your wall and tells you what you have to do today, what chores your child has to do today. It's basically a family calendar with all in one, you can color code. It is amazing for people with ADHD. I am truly in love with this thing. We look at it every single day. It tells us the weather. It tells us what's on our calendar. It tells us what chores are left to do. Oh, time to feed the dog, mark it off on the calendar. My daughter can check the box when she's done and the chore disappears. It is one of the best things we've ever had. You can get yours with a discount using code: PeterShankman .Check for the link in the show notes. And you are gonna love. I mean, truly it. It is amazing for people with ADHD or basically anyone who wants to keep track of their schedule. It sits on the wall. Added bonus. You can throw your own photos onto it as a screen saver on your wall. So now your wall has pictures. That's cool. Check it out. I'll put the link in the show notes.  Welcome to Faster Than Normal. My name is Peter Shankman. I am sitting here today on a one-on-one interview with one of the most incredible people I've ever met, and I guess I kind of have to say that cuz we're talking to my daughter. We're talking to Jessa Shankman. Say, hi, Jessa.  [00:01:54] Jessa: Hi, my name is Jess Shankman and I am the daughter of Peter Shankman.  [00:01:57] Peter: We are gonna talk today about, we're gonna talk to my daughter about what it's like to have a Dad with ADHD. And we're sitting here, we're joined by Waffle the dog. And we'll take a picture and, and put it up as well of all three of us on all family on one couch. But we are talking today about what it's like for a Dad and for a Daughter when a Dad has ADHD and how a daughter deals with it. So, Jessa how old are you? [00:02:18] Jessa: Nine.  [00:02:19] Peter: Nine. What grade are you in? [00:02:21] Jessa: I'm in fourth grade. [00:02:22] Peter: Fourth grade. So when you think of the words ADHD and letters, adhd, what do you think of?  [00:02:27] Jessa: Well, when I think of adhd. I just think of like the letters and the word or, yeah, the letters. I think of like, like a, what do you call? Like a just random numbers, like math. I just think of like when I think of adhd, I think of people who get distracted.  [00:02:43] Peter: People get distracted. Okay. And do you get distracted sometimes? [00:02:48] Jessa: Yes. A lot actually. [00:02:49] Peter: A lot. And what do you do when you get distracted?  [00:02:51] Jessa: Well, sometimes when I get distracted, I. lose focus or I, like, I keep doing it, but then if I realize I've gotten distracted, like today I was just, uh, like fidgeting or singing or something and I wasn't paying attention that I have to read my book. So then I was like, okay, yes, you have to read your book and be focused. So I just try to do that.  [00:03:15] Peter: And how do, what happens when you, when you do, do you do anything special to help you refocus? We talked about sometimes you do exercises or, um,  [00:03:24] Jessa: I don't usually do exercises, but sometimes I just need to get my mind. So I take, I don't usually take deep breaths, but I just try to get my mind in focus by using my mind. [00:03:35] Peter: So breathing helps though, right? Sometimes taking deep breaths. Yeah. And sometimes when you're a little too hyper or sometimes we'll do exercises together. We'll do like,  [00:03:42] Jessa: I was too hyper to read today,  [00:03:43] Peter: too hyper to read today, what didja do like a Peloton workout or something. Normally if you get a work workout in the morning, you're pretty much focused all day. [00:03:49] Jessa: Yeah.  [00:03:49] Peter: Yeah. But I mean it also happens cuz you know you're also nine, so sometimes that happens. What do you think about when you think about your Dad and ADHD?  [00:03:57] Jessa: Sometimes when I like ask him to like read me this or do something, he doesn't listen the first time and he sometimes gets distracted. But then if I say again, he's like, sorry, what'd you say? And then he listens.  [00:04:14] Peter: So I think anyone can really have that. Anyone can get distracted. Right? So sometimes, but, but you also know that I do certain things to help you, control my ADHD like what? What do I do to control it? Like exercise and stuff like that? Exercise, yeah. I get on my bike every morning,  [00:04:27] Jessa: right? Get on the bike If I [unintelligible] every morning. Yeah.  [00:04:30] Peter: So I get on the bike and I do things so I'm able to focus better. But it's not, do you, do you see, like, do you have friends who have a hard time concentrating too?  [00:04:39] Jessa: I don't think so. Most kids are prob, most kids are, oh yeah. One friend is, uh, but I think some, some of my friends are, but then they get, um, like focused. [00:04:54] Peter: I think a lot of times what happens, especially when you're younger, is that you get distracted and you don't realize you're distracted. Right? So you're like, oh, what? And then you were like, oh, wait a second. I wasn't paying attention.  [00:05:02] Jessa: that's what I do. [00:05:03] Peter: Right. And that can be, that can get you in trouble sometimes. Like if a teacher's saying something, you have to listen. Right?  [00:05:08] Jessa: Sometimes my teacher does point it out to me.  [00:05:10] Peter: So your teacher, when your teacher points out to you, what does he say?  [00:05:13] Jessa: He says, Jessica, Jessa.. Like, he just says that and he,  [00:05:18] Peter: so he just says your name and then you like it sort of snaps you back in. [00:05:21] Jessa: Yeah.  [00:05:22] Peter: What do you think kids can do to be more focused?  [00:05:27] Jessa: Have a fidget maybe near them, but also be, that being said, a fidget is a fidget. It could be more distracting.  [00:05:35] Peter: Well, you're sitting here right now, you're playing with a little bit of slime, right? .  [00:05:38] Jessa: Yeah, but I'm focused.  [00:05:40] Peter: You're focused because you're giving your fingers something to do. Yeah. Right. So you're playing with your slime and you're rubbing it and like, so turning it into a ball, a ball or something like that.  [00:05:49] Jessa: Sometimes a fidget can be really helpful and sometimes it can be distracting.  [00:05:52] Peter: When is it really helpful?  [00:05:54] Jessa: Uh, helpful. Like when you're, when you are kind of focused, but then like your hands are just like, Just like doing anything and you like, it's just, I don't really know how to say this, but sometimes when you're distracted, if like you're doing a math class or any class that you don't love and you like get bored, you should get something in your hands. Or it could be like a marble or it could be a piece of slime, but like not, not something to really get you distracted, like something that you can make a whole town out of. like clay. You can't have that. We You can't. It's a little something. Yeah. Just like a marble or like a, A magnet. Or a fidget spinner. [00:06:34] Peter: That's a really good suggestion. So the goal is like to keep yourself sort of a little bit occupied. Keep your hands busy.  [00:06:39] Jessa: Yeah. Keep your hands busy, but keep your focus on the teacher.  [00:06:42] Peter: Do you think that you get more or less distracted if you've drank some water? Less like you drink water and you get less distracted. [00:06:49] Jessa: Sometimes I do that, like sometimes I'm like, okay, I gotta go and get my water bottle. And then I drink, like, um, I drink a little bit of it, and then I'm like, okay, sit back down and focus on the Math.  [00:07:00] Peter: So sometimes your distractions, your brain can be helped by water. Why do you think that is?  [00:07:06] Jessa: Maybe the water just gets you refreshed. [00:07:08] Peter: Yeah.  [00:07:08] Jessa: And like, [00:07:09] Peter: because your body may have like a lot of water. Yeah. The majority of your body is water, right? Yeah. What would you tell a kid who realizes that he or she is being distracted and doesn't like in school and doesn't know how to fix it?  [00:07:22] Jessa: I would tell them to, if you realize you're getting distracted, then just notice it and try or drink a and drink water or just shake it up.[as Waffle laps at his water bowl in the background] Maybe like I would say raise your hand. Just go to the back of the room and maybe do like, maybe like I, you can't do jumping jacks in the middle of a class. Maybe some squats. But I would say, yeah, not even, maybe just like, maybe just moving your feet or something. Maybe standing up. Yeah, just standing up. Cuz sometimes if you're sitting down, you could easily be distracted. Just stand up and take a breath or take a break. [00:07:58] Peter: I think there's also, there's um, you know, there's a company we had on the podcast called Bouncy Bands, where they make little bands that go on the bottom of the chair and you can just move your feet to those. Oh, really? So yeah, those are like helpful too. But yeah, I think at the end of the day, movement just stand up movement. Really helpful. Right? Really? Yeah. Just it's hard to sit down all day. Yeah. Back when, back when we were cavemen, we never sat down all day. If we sat down, we were sleeping. If we stood up, if we, if we weren't sleeping, we were hunting stuff and getting food. Right?  [00:08:24] Jessa: Yeah. Like also there's like, I sit on something that does not support my back and that makes it even harder to really sit and my back sometimes during the day.  [00:08:35] Peter: What do you sit on that doesn't Like a chair or just a bench?  [00:08:38] Jessa: You know, there's a bench. Oh, they bench in school. Yeah. But then most of the time if I'm like, I wanna, I want like I need to stand up, I would do that and then I would grab a chair, which, you know, it's better for me, like, [00:08:51] Peter: yeah, definitely. Do you think that when you exercise it helps or hurts your focus? Helps.  [00:08:56] Jessa: Helps. I just say like move your feet. Like you can't like, just like maybe like do, I don't think you should do like jumping jacks or squats. No. That's kinda tough in the middle of the class, but I think you should just like move your feet or move your arms. [00:09:10] Peter: Like how do you feel after recess? Are you focused? [00:09:12] Jessa: After recess, I am focused, but sometimes a little bit distracted. Recess gives you a time to run around, but some people don't run around. But .Do you? I sometimes, yeah. I, I don't love to run around that much. I don't love the game tag or, but sometimes I just sit and like try to get myself ready for the next. Or for the class or just, you know. [00:09:35] Peter: Do you feel more focused if you having a good night sleep?  [00:09:36] Jessa: I think so, yeah. Because sometimes I'm really tired in class and I'm like, I probably didn't get a good night's sleep. That explains, I went to bed at nine last night. Um, but I think sleep, I think you should really get a good night's sleep for you to help. Cuz you could be really tired in class. Yeah. And that wouldn't be good. You would fall, you would like almost fall asleep or you could just be like really tired that you would just fidget and just do this and you wouldn't pay attention to anything.  [00:10:01] Peter: Anything else you wanna tell kids who might have ADHD or might be distracted once in a while. [00:10:05] Jessa: I think just standing up, taking a break and then sitting back down, sitting in a comfy seat. You don't wanna sit in like a bad seat where you can get really distracted easily. I think you should just sit in a chair and listen or try to listen. Just take a break if you feel distracted or something like that. And yeah, that's it.  [00:10:28] Peter: Awesome. Guys. That was my daughter, Jessa Shankman, who is enough to come on the podcast today, interrupting her day of, she's off this week, so interrupting her day of playing with slime and, and, and playing Roblox and, uh, talking to her friends. But really, really appreciate you taking the time, Jess. I love you very much. [00:10:43] Jessa: Love you too.  [00:10:43] Peter: Okay, guys. You've been listening to Faster Than Normal, my name is Peter Shankman. As always, we are thrilled that you're here. Big shout out again to Skylight Calendar. That frame, that calendar has saved my life countless times. [00:10:53] Jessa: Can I tell them about it?  [00:10:53] Peter: Yeah, go ahead.  [00:10:54] Jessa: Skylight is really good cuz it helps me with my chores and like if I see like feed the dog, or clean up after breakfast, I can just tap it when it's done. And it also has cool pictures. You can upload pictures on it.  [00:11:04] Peter: Yep. It is a very, very cool product. We both love it. Strongly recommended. Check the link out in the show notes, get a discount with the code. Peter Shankman. Guys, thank you so much for listening as always thanks to Steven Byrom, our wonderful executive editor and producer who creates amazing episodes for us every week. [Thank you too Peter! -sb]  We will see you next week. We are thrilled that you are here. ADHD and all forms of neurodiversity are gifts, not curses. And by the way, if you haven't picked up The Boy with the Faster Brain yet, it is on Amazon and it is a number one bestseller in all categories. So check it out, The Boy with the Faster Brain. It is a children's book about neurodiversity.  Jessa: I love it.  Peter: Thank you, Jessa. Guys, thanks for listening and we'll see you next week. Say bye, Jess.  [00:11:39] Jessa: Bye  [00:11:40] Peter: Bye guys!  — Credits: You've been listening to the Faster Than Normal podcast. We're available on iTunes, Stitcher and Google play and of course at www.FasterThanNormal.com I'm your host, Peter Shankman and you can find me at shankman.com and @petershankman on all of the socials. If you like what you've heard, why not head over to your favorite podcast platform of choice and leave us a review, come more people who leave positive reviews, the more the podcast has shown, and the more people we can help understand that ADHD is a gift, not a curse. Opening and closing themes were composed and produced by Steven Byrom who also produces this podcast, and the opening introduction was recorded by Bernie Wagenblast. Thank you so much for listening. We'll see you next week! 

André Brisson, P. Eng., is the host of The Impulsive Thinker Podcast, the podcast for the high-achieving ADHD entrepreneur. Andre owns an entrepreneurial consulting engineering company and recently started Tactical Breakthroughs where he is developing the ADHDTransformation Journey program. Diagnosed late in life with severe ADHD and mild Asperger's(ASD), the mechanisms and systems he created to overcome his undiagnosed ADHD havehelped him succeed. He credits his undiagnosed ADHD as key to his success and a factor in restricting success. Since discovering how to turn his ADHD into a strength, people havesought him out for help with using their ADHD as a strength to drive success. André Brisson has a special ability is devouring and learning complex information and simplifying for others to solve complex problems. Like most entrepreneurs, André has started multiple companies, the two of which failed for various reasons. Learning from those failures, André now operates three very successful companies, including a self-managing entrepreneurial engineering firm specializing in niche markets that require unique training, experience, and impulsive instinct to try new things. Enjoy! In this episode Peter and Andre discuss:   00:45 - Thank you so much for listening and for subscribing! 00:48 - Welcome Andre Brisson! 02:40 - What is your success key for imparting complex information to the neurotypical? Ref: Ringette 04:15 - Simplifying the complex 05:06 - On the differences between informing and teaching 05:30 - When did you get diagnosed and what brought all that about? 06:02 - On inventing a “character” for yourself to be perceived as “not abnormal”. 07:00 - On then importance of being unique  07:45 - You said you were beginning to scare your kids- can you go into details on that? Ref: emotional dysregulation 09:55 - Have you ever bought anything strictly on impulse? Tell us in the comments! ;-) 11:00 - Parenting with ADHD/mild Asperger's prior to a diagnosis 12:20 - So when you got diagnosed, what was the treatment plan? Ref: DBT, CBT Executive Function What is Time Blindness? 13:36 - On learning your strengths and maintaining, managing and delegating what's not best for you. Aka Peter's “life rules” 15:15 - A bit more on delegating and staying in the lane, on the road. 16:38 - How can people find more about you? Email:  andre@andreb.ca André Brisson Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/andre.brisson.1447/ LinkedIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrebrisson/ Twitter: @fatrol Website: www.andreb.ca Objective Engineering Inc. Website: www.objectiveeng.ca Tactical Breakthroughs Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TacticalBTs LinkedIN: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tactical-breakthroughs/ Twitter: @tacticalbts Website: www.tacticalbts.com The Impulsive Thinker Podcast Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/impulsivethinkerpodcast LinkedIN: https://www.linkedin.com/company/impulsive-thinker-podcast/ Twitter: @impulsivthinker Website: www.theimpulsivethinker.com 16:51 - Andre, thank you so much!  Ref: Faster Than Normal the book! 17:75 - Thank you. Guys, as always thanks so much for subscribing! Do you have a cool friend with a great story? We'd love to hear. I'm www.petershankman.com and you can reach out anytime via email at peter@shankman.com or @petershankman on all of the socials. You can also find us at @FasterNormal on all of the socials. It really helps when you drop us a review on iTunes and of course, subscribe to the podcast if you haven't already! As you know, the more reviews we get, the more people we can reach. Help us to show the world that ADHD is a gift, not a curse!  19:08 - Faster Than Normal Podcast info & credits  — TRANSCRIPT via Descript and then corrected.. somewhat: [00:00:38] Hey everyone, Peter. Shankman welcome to the episode of Faster Than Normal. I'm thrilled that you're here. It is great to have you again, we have a fun guest today. I'm gonna start with his tagline because his tagline pretty much says everything ;it's simplifying your complexities, which I think is just the best description I've ever heard of someone who works with people with A D D ADHD, people who are. ADHD. I love that. It's just so clear. Andre, Brisson and I, I screwed it up. I tried my was really hard to get. That was good. Was good's the host of the Impulsive Thinker podcast, very similar to FTN. Podcast for high achieving ADHD entrepreneurs. He owns an entrepreneur consulting engineering company, and recently started another company called Tactical Breakthroughs where he's developing an ADHD transformation journey program. He was diagnosed later in life with severe ADHD and mild Asperger's and the mechanisms and systems he created much like the stuff I did to overcome his undiagnosed ADHD have helped him succeed and he credits his undiagnosed as a key to his success and a factor in restricting success as well. So that's ING to discover, um, Since discovering how to turn his ADHD into a strength people have out for help using their ADHD as well. You talk in your bio about how you have special ability for taking complex information and simplifying for others and first thought, when I heard that was something that happened with me. And I think my mom, like five years ago when she got a new iPhone and she was having a problem doing like four things. And so I just went over there. The their, my parents' apartment. And I'm like, here, gimme the phone done. Dun dun dun. She's like, great, but I didn't learn how to do it. Right. Right. And I realized I'm terrible at taking complex information that I understand and teaching people how to understand it. I just want to do it and get it done. That's an ADHD thing. So let's, let's start there. What is, what is your sort of success key there where you actually have the ability and the, the patience or whatever it is to take that information and simplify it down so other people can learn it as opposed to just doing it for them.  [00:02:55] Andre: Well, the, to me, that's the key difference is I don't do it for them. I've always helped people understand, break down something complex into simple steps or layman terms so that they can act on it. And then they can think about it differently to act on it at a future time. Um, like for example, and on in Canada here, we have Ringette. It's a, it's a, it's a sport on ice for women. So basically they got a rubber ring with a spear, their stick. And I, I referee then I was in an evaluator and, uh, an officially evaluator. So what I actually did was I always asked them what's. The rule, like usually you guys say this occurred, this occurred that I call it right or not. So I go by and says, what's the rule. The rule says this. And then we break down the steps of what occurred and apply the actual rule to those steps. So I step it out for people so that they can understand it. And if you don't understand the first way, I tackle it at a different angle until they get it. And what I'm trying to teach them is stepping out the thought process to come with their own conclusions, with the facts that they know they already had. And didn't realize it. Okay.  [00:04:04] Peter: That makes sense. Yeah, it does. It does. It's interesting. Cause that, that takes patience and, and that's one of the few things that most people with ADHD simply don't have anywhere near half of. [00:04:15] Andre: Mm-hmm yeah. The thing is a lot of times I can simplify that complex information. So someone understands it and so that they can act on it and I can make it real. So usually I, I I'm able to connect something that's in their life or someone else's life or mine. And that's what I do a lot on the podcast is this is a snare that happened. It kind of happened to me. And then people, once you make it real people seem to click with it better.  [00:04:39] Peter: Yeah. Makes sense. And, and yeah, I mean, that's, that's a, a, you know, my keynote speaking trait, you tell stories that people have people who relate to and all of a sudden, it's not some guy on stage talking about something foreign, it's something. Oh yeah. I get that.  [00:04:51] Andre: Yeah. I. I had a chat today with two different people. We, I kind of, I blurted this out and I thought it was pretty smart now to think about it now, but I think there's a difference between informing to understand versus educating, to teach. So if, and for me, I was talking about advocacy as you know, I, I stopped educating people. I just tried to inform people so they can understand adult ADHD and the differences.  [00:05:17] Peter: That makes a lot of sense. I think that also the more informed they are, the more they feel like they can have a handle on it, as opposed to. I guess educating. Yeah. Yeah. They might not necessarily get, no. That makes sense. Tell us about, um, your background. You said you were late, you were late, uh, diagnosed how late?  [00:05:36] Andre: Uh, about four years ago when I was 44. Oh, wow. Um, and then that was a, that was all because of a life Tempest. As I've been calling had three perfect storms collide at once. Um, got into a bad business partnership. I got bored with my first company once it got successful. So I S sabatoged that. Things weren't going well at home. And my Sy symptoms overtook me and controlled me for a couple of years to the point where my kids are just looking at me scared. And I said, I gotta get help. Huh. And got the diagnosis. I went actually to get the diagnosis to prove it wasn't ADHD. Cause I thought there was something worse, wrong with me. Because that diagnosis, like it was too simple of a solution to explain my last 44 years and develop a character that I became so I can fit in and not be looked as abnormal. And then, so I got really good at playing this character. Now I'm learning how to be me and to differentiate the two, because it almost became, you know, I almost, I brainwashed myself to believe that that was the person I was or shouldn't be. [00:06:38] Peter: No, I get that. I mean, it's, it's, you know, fitting in and not being, uh, you know, and not sort of ever really fitting in with the crowd or with, with, uh, any group in, in school, you know, and that takes a toll. I don't think, I think we're just starting to realize what kind of toll that takes on people, um, and how much, uh, that that's re you know, those early forming, forming years are really responsible for sort of right. The kinda stuff you deal with.  [00:07:03] Andre: And then I was overlooked because I was doing well in school. Like I'm also gifted. Um, and so since you're successful and you're doing well in school, you can't have it. You're just not doing what you're supposed to. You're not trying to hard enough for, you know, stop being unique. That was my favorite word. You're too unique to be part of this and I've always fought the right to be unique. And I always thought we should all, we're all different. I understood why we were always trained to say we're everyone's alike, but we're not. We're all unique. [00:07:35] Peter: So what, when you get, I'm curious, you mentioned something, you said, um, you said you had symptoms that were starting to, uh, that were starting to scare your kids. Ex can you go into detail on that?  [00:07:47] Andre: Oh, emotional dysregulation times 2 million. Um, it didn't take much to spark me off. And then all I would do was I'd just be screaming at them for something silly. And when I started being cognizant of a screaming at them, for being silly, my brain was actually saying, Hey buddy, you're overreacting here. You should stop. And then I got the other part of my brain going, eh, forget it. Let's keep going. I'm already into it. Um, so when I saw those look in their eyes, it gave me a. It scared me cuz I saw myself. Um, there when I was a child and that's when I said no, no more, no more. So I went and got help. So the emotional dysregulation definitely took over, um, and enforced, uh, and then my impulsivity and the no filter uh, aspect of my brain having no filter, just my impulsivity, my ver my words would just come out and I just started not caring anymore. And that's when I said that, that, that the symptoms took over, um, impulsive bias, impulsive business partnerships, knowing that it was not going to be good. Um, and for me, I realized with time, since my diagnosis, I have a fear of being idle and when I get bored, that's when I could become dangerous. And that's when, so my physical hyperactivity, even at, as an adult kicks in, if I'm bored and then what happened was with my other company, once the startup phase was done and we're successful in maintaining success and having good gradual growth, I was bored. The, the entertainment, the interest was gone. So I created chaos. Impulsively trying this, trying that in muscle dysregulation, continuing. Um, and, and then just going on with the inattention, not caring, I had a really great point and it just escaped me. It'll come back to that's yeah. [00:09:46] Peter: I mean, that's that happens all the time. You, you go down the route, press rabbit, home, like, wait, my original point was like five feet away from that. Yeah. Um, I think that probably, I think every episode [00:09:55] Andre: and the impulsivity of buying stuff. You know, spending sling money, losing cash flow, all that type of stuff. That was it.  [00:10:03] Peter: It's interesting. I've never, I, I, I, I understand that. And I get that. I I'm fortunate. I don't think it ever, I never went down that rabbit hole too much, but I've certainly made impulse. I mean, you know, mm-hmm, virtually everything I've ever bought in my life has been impulse by, I, I do you wind up doing research on the product you bought after you bought it? [00:10:22] Andre: um, No. I usually do all the research ahead of time. So I know what I'm buying is good is just deciding to do it. Like the one was, Hey, we got a bunch of cash in the bank account. Um, I've been looking at building a server. This is quite a few years ago getting a server for the office. We got a big team, so I'm just gonna blow 40 grand right now, rather on a finance plan. Um, cuz at the same time I didn't care. Um, which was part of it, which was the interest part. Um, but the other thing too Peter. I think that I think a lot of people are getting diagnosed later in life. And for me, I never realized this about two years ago was. It really started to take control. My symptoms. When I had kids, when they disrupted my, my rhythm at home, my routine at home, that was my calm down time. When I got home, I could rejuvenate and now having being stuck, cuz you're scheduled being disrupted all the time. Cuz kids just want to be with you. They just wanna last minute try different things and no, no, I like, I just sat down, I'm ready to do a bunch of stuff and now you're disrupting me. So that's when I think it started to steamroll the effects of these symptoms.  [00:11:35] Peter: I totally totally get that. It's it's a, having a kid. I got diagnosed before I had my daughter, but it was Def it's definitely a, um, you know, you sort of, you get this vibe where it's like, okay, uh, dinner's over, you know, I have an hour till I have to put her to bed, I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna sit down and breathe and just whatever. And then it's like, dad play with me. And of course I, I will, but it took a while to sort of, uh, be able to focus entirely. Right, right. And  [00:12:01] Andre: not oh, huge. You know? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then you feel shitty as a, as a parent, cuz you can't give your full attention or you're always thinking, how can I get outta this? I , how can go back to what I was doing exactly. Cause I need to get that done. I gotta get it done. What's going on? Right?  [00:12:14] Peter: No question about it. So when, so when you got diagnosed, what, what was the, uh, what was the treatment plan? Was it medication? Was it, . [00:12:22] Andre: We, uh, tried medication, uh, I think I'm part of that 20% that doesn't work well. Um, but I think the, some of the medication I was on at that time, I needed it just to settle and almost had stopped my brain for a while so I can just catch my breath and take everything in. And then, um, Slowly got off of it. Um, but for me, the big thing is I just hyper-focused for a good year and a half on learning everything I could about ADHD interesting and simplifying it. And that's why I tell people like educating yourself the effects and then is huge. And then I was part of therapy group therapy. Now I'm just finishing up my dialectal behavioral therapy. I've done cognitive behavioral therapy, ah, even the group therapy on how to have fun. But it was a neurotypical direction, but anyways, um, a lot of talking with similar people helped. And then for me to simplify ADHD down to, I think it's its core, it's an executive functioning dysfunction and time blindness. Those two affects the, the, the, the DSM symptoms of inattention hyperactivity, impulsivity, and inattention. Um, that made a lot of sense to me. And then at the same time, shortly before my ADHD diagnosis, I got diagnosed with type two diabetes. And that's when I realized I can't get rid of it. Like I diabetes, I can't get rid of it. Nothing I can do can cure it, but I can manage it and extend my life. And that's what I saw with ADHD. .Manage the symptoms so I can work well. And I had a mantra my whole time for a long time saying your strengths can become your weaknesses. And when I put that together with my ADHD symptoms, as long as I can manage my symptoms, That's how, why I succeed as an entrepreneur and those are my strengths, but if I let them go be overutilized or underutilized and then become my strengths. And that's when I say ADHD can become a disorder, is when they're impeding your day to day. [00:14:23] Peter: I agree. I, I think it's another way of saying, you're saying the same thing that I say a different way, which is, you know, you have to have. These life rules that you can't deviate from because you know, you, your brain works a certain way. And so you put these right pro processes into place that allow you to utilize it to your best ability. Mm-hmm . And if you, if you deviate from that, you're gonna go off the road.  [00:14:42] Andre: Right. And, and then the other thing I discovered too, so for, I don't know, I can't do math. I'm an engineer. I need a calculator here. Um, so about a good 20 years, all I did was read all the self-help books. I've taken almost every assessment out there to identify strengths, but my therapist actually said you were doing all that to find out what was wrong with you to concentrate on what's not good enough to build on. So with my diagnosis, I took there's three good tools that I use that really identifies my talents and strengths. And. Take those. And I help people with these assessments too, to understand what's your unique strength and talent. So if we could just stay in those abilities, Then it's easy to hyperfocus and you're having a lot of fun and you're not, and don't waste your time on things you're not good at and you don't like doing that. So as an entrepreneur, it's handy, you, you got staff, you can have people, you delegate a lot of those, but I help people understand what their unique talents and strengths are, where they should be spending their time, where they can get a lot of energy and enjoyment every day, be creative and then have a team around you that just take care of the stuff you don't like. [00:15:50] Peter: That's a hundred percent given you, have you have someone or people to do the stuff that you're terrible at? I mean, that's, you know, for 14 years now, I've had, I've had my assistant, it's a game changer.  [00:16:00] Andre: Yep. Like we got a minimal limited brain mental brain, uh, energy, right. Every day. And I think ADHD, we just have a really good ability to effectively use it to run all day, or we have a really great efficient way to inefficiently use our mental energy and at the end of the day, it, so if we're starting to do things we don't like to do all day, then we're really, really burnt out at the end of the day. But if we can stay in that lane, man, you can do that seven days straight and not get, get tired. [00:16:29] Peter: It's a great way to put it. It's a great way to close too. I wanna keep us to our 20 minute mark. Uh, tell us how people could find you?  [00:16:36] Andre: Uh, you can find me at, uh, Andre, Andre, b.ca I'll take anyone's email. Um, but you can find me on LinkedIn. Our tactical bts.com is another source.  [00:16:47] Peter: We'll put all the, all the, all your links that you gave us. We'll put 'em in the, uh, in the podcast notes. Andre, thank you so much for taking the time. This was really, really informative. We're definitely gonna have you back, uh, at some point in the near future.  [00:16:57] Andre: Well, I appreciate you having me, Peter. And, um, like I said, like, I don't think I said this, but, uh, yet till now, um, you're Faster Than Normal book. I actually bought it five years ago, thinking it was one how I can work faster. then I bought it again, uh, and read it. And then I found the other book, but I think I really liked your aspect too, that, you know, it's not a disorder. It's our, it's a, it's a very unique ability of doing things and to not thinking as a negative. And, and make it work. And I really, a lot of stuff in there I re not reflected it hit me. I can, I understand exactly what was in there. And it was also comforting to know what I created in the past. Unknowingly. I was on the right track. So I thought it was a really good book and I do recommend it to a lot of people. [00:17:45] Peter: Thank you, man. That's a really, really kind of you. Guys as always, Faster Than Normal, We wanna hear what you're thinking. We wanna hear of any guests you might wanna hear from,  shoot us a, a email Peter@shankman.com. We're on all the socials. You know, our, our handles by now. Thank you for listening. We will see again next week with another guest, we appreciate you and know that ADHD and all forms of neurodiversity are gifts, not curses! We'll see you next week! [00:19:08]Credits: You've been listening to the Faster Than Normal podcast. We're available on iTunes, Stitcher and Google play and of course at www.FasterThanNormal.com I'm your host, Peter Shankman and you can find me at shankman.com and @petershankman on all of the socials. If you like what you've heard, why not head over to your favorite podcast platform of choice and leave us a review, come more people who leave positive reviews, the more the podcast has shown, and the more people we can help understand that ADHD is a gift, not a curse. Opening and closing themes were composed and produced by Steven Byrom who also produces this podcast, and the opening introduction was recorded by Bernie Wagenblast. Thank you so much for listening. We'll see you next week!

France shocked by death on busy Paris street: ‘Killed by indifference' David - Why hasn't the letter about the low impact of COVID in Africa been more publicized? Kate - Teacher in California. We are teaching students that it is their duty not to have children. Fred - Where does the word 'Guadalupe' come from? Peter - Thank you for your show. It basically has become my Catholic Community! Bob – Can you explain Mark 4:12? George - Are Moses, David and Abraham saints? Mary - I thought that the bishop named Guadalupe after a city in Spain.

What you'll learn in this episode: The process Atelier Zobel uses to fuse different metals together in innovative and beautiful ways How Peter has maintained Michael Zobel's legacy while modernizing and refining the Atelier's designs Why Peter is attracted to imperfect gems, and how he designs jewelry that highlights the beauty of imperfection Why passion and a willingness to push boundaries are necessary for aspiring jewelry designers About Peter Schmid Peter Schmid owns Atelier Zobel in Konstanz, Germany. Original owner Michael Zobel was a master craftsman who honed his skills and talent to create pieces that are arresting in their visual impact and remarkable in their goldsmithing and soldering technique. He combined metals in new, sensual, even erotic ways. The effect was electrifying. Working at his side was protégé Peter Schmid.  Like Zobel before him, Peter is both artist and craftsman, and he brings that special blend to every piece he creates. His chief inspiration is character: the character of place, the character of material, even the character of intent. Mountains and rivers inspire him. Precious stones inspire him. And the idea of what he is making inspires him, whether it's a ring or a brooch or a bracelet, or one that transforms into another. For Peter, every piece is about the interaction of visual elements with invisible inspiration. His work is revered worldwide for its attention to detail, its fusion of gold and silver, his gemstone settings, and the fluid movement all his pieces seem to share. Additional Resources: Website Instagram Photos: Jewelry from Peter Schmid:   Transcript: Peter Schmid might have become a corporate manager if he never walked past the window of Atelier Zobel in Konstanz, Germany. Peter was instantly mesmerized by the jewelry on display, and he made it his goal to leave business school and become an apprentice for Michael Zobel. After a few years of jewelry design school, that dream came true, and today Peter is the head of Atelier Zobel. He joined the Jewelry Journey Podcast to share what advice he would give young jewelry designers who want to follow his path, why he loves using stones with imperfections, and how he has refined Atelier Zobel's designs and process. Read the episode transcript below. Sharon: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Jewelry Journey Podcast. Today, my guest is Peter Schmid, head of the well-known firm Atelier Zobel in Konstanz, Germany. Although he didn't set out to become a metalsmith and jewelry designer, his work is shown all over the world. Today we'll hear all about his jewelry journey. Peter, welcome to the program. Peter: Thank you. I'm glad to be here. Sharon: Glad to have you. Tell us about your jewelry journey. They're all interesting, but this sounds like a very interesting one. Peter: Yeah, I don't know. When I started, I was basically thinking about what I was going to be in my professional career. I was thinking, “Well, I'll be an accountant or manager of something,” so I went to school. After that, I found out it's not actually exactly what I wanted to be, because I was always painting and interested in sculpting things and making things, but I never knew what to make; I just wanted to make something. So, a friend of my dad was like, “Well, why don't you become a goldsmith?” and I was like, “I don't know.” I looked at the jewelry of my mom and it didn't appeal so much. It's not what I wanted to do, the jewelry she had.  Then another friend was telling me about Konstanz, the town I'm now in, that there are so many goldsmiths here. It's a big tradition in Germany and in Konstanz especially. Then, I walked up to the window of Michael Zobel—this was in 1995—and I saw the window. It was amazing, with crazy decoration and big pieces in there. This is how jewelry should look like. It's an expression. It's an artful piece. It's a piece you wear for yourself and not for anybody else. It's a personal thing, and I think that got me more into this experience, what is jewelry and what to make out of it. Sharon: Were you always creative, or were you always painting and doing other things? Up to this point, were you doing things with your hands? Peter: Yes, I was always painting, but the paintings I did, I was playing with colors. It was a lot of just paint on the canvas and melting colors into each other. I was always fascinated by that. I didn't like my paintings that much, I have to say. I had an exhibition once here in Konstanz because people were pushing me into that, but I didn't feel like I was a painter. I didn't feel like this was my career or I was good enough for that, the play of color. Sharon: I'm jumping around now, but today do you feel like you're a jeweler? You didn't feel like you were a painter. Do you feel like you're a designer, a jeweler?  Peter: The designing for me is the pleasure of being free with my thoughts. I don't know if I'm a designer in the sense of designing. It's hard to say. Maybe I'm more an artist. But in the first place, that's the tradition here in Germany. How I learned metalsmithing and goldsmithing was basically traditional. It's more about the techniques and refining those techniques. It's also what our atelier still does. We're really working on the bench with the metal, melting them together and fusing them together. We basically use the metal as a paint as well as the stones and the color of the stones. I use this as a color palette, but with the skills of a goldsmith. It's nice to be able to do that and to use those traditions as well. Sharon: So, you combined everything, in a sense.  Peter: Yes. Sharon: So, you looked in the Michael Zobel window. Tell us why you saw this jewelry and said, “Oh my god, this is it.” What did you do from there? You became an apprentice, but how did that happen? Peter: I became an apprentice. I was very convinced that this was it. It never occurred to me that there is something else. What happened was I had a résumé made, and I walked into the shop and met Michael Zobel. I'm like, “I want to be your apprentice,” and he was like, “Well, you first have to go to school and learn the basic techniques of sewing and filing and soldering and all of this. This is what I need of somebody who comes to us. They need to know how to work with the tools.” I'm like, “O.K., sounds good to me.” So, I walked out again and applied to a school which offered a design course that was just a year longer than the regular school.  After that, I graduated as a jewelry designer as well as a theoretical goldsmith from that school. In Germany, you have to do both; you have to do school and learn with a master goldsmith. I did everything theoretically in school, learning how to file and do all the basics. I came back to him and said, “I'm done with my school and I want to apprentice with you.” He was like, “Well, I have an apprentice already.” For me, it was so clear that I was going to practice there. I never looked for anything else. I never thought of anything else, because that's the jewelry I wanted to make. Somehow I think he felt that I was really passionate about that, and he was like, “Well, I think this is the first and only year we're going to have two apprentices.” That was it, and he took me in as an apprentice. It was so interesting to learn, and yeah, it's different. You're on the lowest level when you start as an apprentice. You have to clean the workshop and supply basically all the other goldsmiths with whatever they need. If they need coffee, you have to go and run out for coffee. Sharon: Go get Starbucks, yes. Peter: Exactly, that's how it works. Sharon: So, you already had a career in a sense. You were on a different career path before you did this, right? Peter: Yes, I was in business school. I didn't really know what to do, but I felt like, “Well, business is always good. It sounds perfect.” My dad was also an entrepreneur and I felt like it was a good path, and I knew a lot about it already and how it is to work for yourself. Then in school, the whole time it was, “You're going to be manager of Zieman's and you're going to be manager of this and that company,” and I was like, “I don't want to be a manager of any company.” Sharon: When you decided to switch, did you meet resistance from family and friends? Like, “How are you going to make a living?” Peter: No, actually, everybody knew already. Sharon: They were happy you found something that made you happy. Peter: They were happy I finally realized that. Sharon: Wow, that's great! What is it about jewelry that attracted you when you saw it? They sound like statement pieces. Peter: There was a fusing of the work back then. Gold was not as expensive as it is today. There was a big cuff which was about, I don't know, like a Wonder Woman cuff, but all in gold with platinum on top of it. I looked at it and I was like, “This is so strong and mesmerizing,” because I didn't know how it was made, that the platinum on top was fused and it's all done by heat only. I could not believe how to make a piece like that. It was unbelievable. Sharon: I love that word, mesmerizing. That is really great word. I don't hear it too often, but it just drew you in. I'm not a maker—I've done some soldering and stuff, but when we look at your pieces with the gold on top of the—I don't even know what the other metal is. Peter: It's sterling silver. Sharon: Is it just heat that makes it stick together? Peter: Yeah, and magic I guess, but basically it's just heat. It's a heating process. We heat it up. It's like a granulation, which is also just heat to heat, and you granulate it. It's gold on top of sterling silver, and then we do gold with platinum on top or gold with gold on top. That works as well. Then there's sterling with palladium or sterling with platinum all together also. Sharon: That would be mesmerizing. Is this a technique that you learned outside of your schooling?  Peter: It is a tradition we have here in the studio and at Michael Zobel. When I came here as an apprentice, we already did a lot of the sterling with gold on top. I think Michael started that in the 80s, the first pieces, when I look back in our archive. Then, there were a lot of tryouts with different material on top, like copper and bronze. There was already a lot of trying of these things, and some worked out really well and some didn't so much. When I started working here, I learned all of these techniques to make jewelry in that way, with the fusing and basically painting on the piece.  At the beginning, I was just executing designs for Michael Zobel. Later I graduated as a goldsmith in the studio, and I worked here for a while as a goldsmith and in the shop, so I was in contact with the clients. I always liked to travel, and at one point we started traveling more in the U.S., building out more contacts there and doing shows in Baltimore. I think it was the late 90s when we were in Baltimore. It was fun, and I met Todd Reed. I met all these people. It was super fun. I had a great time, and for me, as a goldsmith, it was amazing to see all that. Michael liked to have somebody to travel with, so we built up that market together and it was nice.  At one point I took over the business, because I think he saw that I'm very passionate about it. I started to design my own pieces and work from there. It was very interesting to step forward into designing and making. I wasn't hired as a designer; I was hired as a goldsmith, but it was kind of a liquid transition to it. It's a flow. It went on. It's like a master and an apprentice, and then the apprentice becomes a master. It's quite an interesting way of moving on, with an atelier like that. Sharon: So, you were transitioning from being one of the hands-on people to translating your ideas, your vision into something that somebody else was making. Peter: Right. I became the head of the atelier later because Michael retired. I did my own work, and we moved on with a lot of the designs and the process. The fusing became more refined. I don't know how to describe it, but it became more textured on the surface. In the early days, we only had strong graphic designs. Now, they've become a bit more poetic because we do flowers and paisley, stuff like that. That wasn't possible before. It was interesting to work in the studio with the goldsmiths and push them into going forward in the making process and discovering new techniques in how we work. It was really cool.  That happened when I saw an exhibition of Japanese kimonos. Parts of them are stitched. There's stitching and printing on the kimonos, and they have these beautiful patterns. I thought, “It's amazing. I want to do something like that. I want to bring a pattern onto the surface of our jewelry.” We actually have been able to do that, to put a real pattern on it. The first pattern we figured out looked a bit like a koi pond. It's sterling silver as a base, and then we figured out how to print koi onto the figure in gold. We had golden koi printed on top. Sharon: It sounds beautiful. Peter: It was a beautiful piece with aquamarine, beautifully carved. There were aquamarine slices carved from the back on the surface, which was the water of the pond, and then the koi, which was a little reminiscent of the kimonos. Sharon: Wow, that sounds beautiful! You mentioned aquamarine. I know you have a real interest in gems. How did you develop that? Did you just start incorporating it, or was it already part of the atelier? Peter: It's interesting because now I love gems, but when I was in school—I don't blame the school, but when you learn about gems and have class about gemology, you look at these tiny little stones and they all look alike. I mean, one is blue and the other is red. O.K., this is tourmaline red and this is ruby red, but they all look alike. You have to use a microscope and all of that. I couldn't really grasp them as a piece of jewelry.  Now what I love about stones is the imperfection. I love a stone which is completely perfect; that's amazing, but I actually do like the imperfection in the stone. I feel like it's more personal. It's a unique stone and I'm always drawn to that one. I'm like, “This is off. The color is off,” and I want that. I want to have something that is not expected to be that color. Now I love stones and I use them as my color palette, but it was not so easy to get into gems. Sharon: Do your clients embrace the fact that you like the imperfections? Do they see it in the same way you do, that it gives the work personality, or are they like, “Oh, that's not a perfect stone”? Peter: No, I think they see what I do with it. For me, when I see this beautiful stone, it's not that it's sitting there as a flaw. It comes into a composition with the piece itself. I want to put it on a pedestal and show off that it's beautiful and that it has this imperfection. Sometimes, when there is an inclusion in the stone, for example, I repeat this inclusion onto the metal as an echo of the inclusion, so you really see the inclusion. I don't want to hide the inclusion; I want to show the inclusion. The cool part is the inclusion because that makes it real. A perfect stone could be synthetic, but nature is amazing, how that inclusion is in there. Hydroquartz or inner quartz is amazing, I think. They do great work with that. Sharon: You're probably surrounded by fabulous stones, both perfect and imperfect ones. Peter: Yes. Sharon: Tell us about your clientele. Is there a demographic of women of a certain age? Is it younger people? Is it men?  Peter: I don't know. Most clients, I think they like the jewelry because it is a personal piece. It's something you wear for yourself, and you don't have to show off with it. I mean, you show off; you get attraction with it. It's not something that hides. If you wear a piece of my work, you can definitely see it, and I think the clients appreciate it. They also like that people don't understand what it really is. It's an interesting piece.  I have one client, she never wore jewelry and then she came and was so in love. We had this exhibition on lucky charms. Lucky charms are usually these tiny things you wear around your wrist or your neck, but we made big ones. I made a really big brooch with a Buddha inside. There was an ancient Buddha about two or three hundred years ago inside, then rays of gold going away from that, and then rough diamonds as a frame, almost like a picture frame. It was a round brooch, and on top was a tourmaline cat's eye just to have this magical light, because the Buddha was in a triangle, sitting there in a niche. It's quite a big brooch, about 12 centimeters in diameter. The client came and she was like, “This is an amazing piece of art.” She didn't wear jewelry at all, but she bought the piece and she wears it all the time. When she doesn't wear it, she has it in a frame at home. I see her often in the city wearing it. Just like that, they go to a beer garden and she's wearing that piece around her neck, and it makes her feel good and lucky. It's amazing. Sharon: A different kind of lucky charm. If it makes her feel like she's lucky, that's half the battle. Do you do custom work? Do you do jewelry for men?  Peter: Yes, I do custom work. I love to do that. I love to explore special pieces with people when they tell me a story for what it is. We talk a little bit, and usually I get a sense of this person, if they like a big piece or a smaller piece. I'm not only making gigantic pieces. It has to fit to the person. The person has to be comfortable to wear it. It shouldn't be something which is wearing you; you should wear it. You should own it. That's what it should be, so I love to make custom pieces for people. Men are also super fun. I have a collection of Ashanti gold weights. They're from a tribe in Africa. Nowadays, I think it's in Ghana. The tribe of the Ashanti, they used to have these gold weights for trade back then. It was a different time, so they traded the gold with these little pronged weights. I think they're super interesting. Each one is different. I make a lot of men's jewelry with that, like a ring or a pendant, adding some rough diamonds to it and giving it an edge. Men tend to like the story around that. Also meteorite jewelry is often used for men. Sharon: I'm sorry, what kind of jewelry is used for men? Peter: Meteorite. Sharon: Oh, meteorite. Yes, that would be interesting. There's a masculine element to that.  Peter: Yeah, or opal. I love opals for men as well. Sharon: Who doesn't like opals? For those people just starting out, for the next person who knocks on your window and says, “This is really cool. I really want to do this,” what advice would you give them, besides make sure you know how to saw and all of that? That's important. Peter: It is important. Sharon: Oh, my gosh! It takes a lot of patience and you have to be very detail-oriented. You grew up with an entrepreneur as a father and you're an entrepreneur. What advice what you give somebody, besides that they have to have the foundational skills? What advice what you give somebody starting out? Peter: The first that comes to my mind is you have to be passionate about what you do. You must follow the passion in what you do and be true to that. I also think curiosity is important, to push it always a little bit. I think that's important to just push a little bit. I have a little story about pushing, because I have that in mind. When I was in school, we had pottery class and we had to make a flowerpot. You just have a flower in there. I started off making that flowerpot and I was like, “This is so boring. I can't even tell you how boring it is to make a tubular flowerpot out of clay.” Clay felt amazing for me, and so I started drifting off into clay. I ended up with—how do you call it, for watering flowers? Sharon: Like a watering can? Peter: Yeah, like a watering can out of clay. It was really amazing, and my teacher loved it because it was well-done and beautifully made. She had to take one point away from me because it was supposed to be a flowerpot, but it's always pushing a little bit, pushing the boundaries. I don't know; I love that. I think it's hard to stay within the parameters. I think passion is a good thing. Sharon: It's so important. It's clear that's what has driven you and continued the firm's success and made your jewelry so well-known. Peter, thank you so much for being with us today. Peter: My pleasure. That was fun. 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.  

My guest today is Peter Morville. Peter is a pioneer in the discipline of information architecture. Among many other distinctions, he co-authored with Lou Rosenfeld Information Architecture for the World-Wide Web, the classic O'Reilly “polar bear” book on the subject. This is Peter's second appearance on The Informed Life podcast. I asked him back because I wanted to learn more about his recent call for practitioners to emancipate information architecture. Listen to the full conversation Download episode 47   Show notes Peter Morville on Twitter Semantic Studios Intertwingled.org Information Architecture: for the Web and Beyond, by Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville, and Jorge Arango The Informed Life episode 10: Peter Morville on Seductive Information Emancipating Information Architecture by Peter Morville Don't Think of an Elephant! by George Lakoff Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences by Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star Pema Chödrön Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commissions for purchases made through these links. Read the full transcript Jorge: Peter, welcome to the show. Peter: Hello, there. I'm very happy to be back. Jorge: Yeah. I usually start shows by asking guests to tell us about themselves, but you have the distinction of being the second repeat guest to The Informed Life podcast. The first was our friend Lou Rosenfeld, and I think it's appropriate that as the two co-authors of the polar bear book, you are two of the folks I most want to hear from. And part of the reason that I wanted to talk with you again is, when you were last on the show, you talked about what was next for you. I actually have the transcript up here and I'm going to quote back to you what you said. You said that… well, I'm going to paraphrase first, but you said that you had this not completely formed plan to buy some property and start an animal sanctuary to create a place that can be helpful to people and animals. And now I'm quoting, “and that comes from that deep questioning of what do I want to do with my remaining time here on planet earth. And while I get a lot of intellectual satisfaction from consulting with big organizations, I'm not sure as I look forward to the next 25 years or so, that that's going to fulfill my need for a real sense of purpose and meaning.” Peter: That sounds like me. Jorge: Yeah, it does, doesn't it? And now you've written a blog post where you update us on how that is going. And I'm looking forward to talking with you about that here on the show. Peter's blog post Peter: Yeah, the blog post was called “Emancipating Information Architecture.” Freeing information architecture from the shackles I helped to forge, so that we can use information architecture to free minds. That's the general gist. And on the personal side, since we last talked, we have moved from Michigan to Virginia, which is the place that we're planning to buy property. But we're currently renting, so hopefully 2021 will be the year that we buy the property and get some goats and chickens to get started. Jorge: So, I want to find out more about both of those, but why don't we start with this idea of emancipating information architecture. That's some pretty powerful language. What is keeping information architecture bound? Peter: So, in the article I take some credit or blame for that state of information architecture. And I think back on those early years in the 1990s, when Lou and I were working together to build our company, Argus Associates, and to evangelize this new practice of information architecture, and I was driven by fear. I had spent a year unemployed — sort of — and not really knowing what I wanted to do and feeling lost in the world. And then, ambition, because I had now gotten a taste of entrepreneurship and felt strongly that there was something here with information architecture that I can grow into a career. But you know, it was very dicey. We were paying the bills month-to-month early on. And so, there was a values-based side to my passion for information architecture. I was incredibly excited about the potential of the internet and then the worldwide web to enable us humans to share information all around the world and to become smarter and better. And so there was a techno-utopian side to my passion. But ultimately, I was trying to figure out, how am I going to be able to live in this world? How am I going to be able to pay the bills? So, there was a very strong orientation towards situating information architecture in the business context. How do we make money doing information architecture? How do we turn it into a job, into a field or discipline? And really, the community that grew up around information architecture was predominantly people who were figuring out how do I do this as part of my work in a business context. There were people from nonprofits and education, and there were folks who were more academic and were interested in the intellectual ideas. But 80% plus were folks who were figuring out, how do we do this as part of our work? That really is, I think, where information architecture has been centered. If you look at most writing, most conferences, it's been centered in business. Jorge: What I'm hearing here is that what you're looking to emancipate information architecture from is being bound to these business contexts. Is that right? Peter: Yeah, and I make the point in the article. It's not that information architecture isn't doing good in the business world and can't do more good. So, it's not an abandonment of business at all. But I think that there's so much potential for the ways that we think, the ways that we practice information architecture, particularly In the areas of language and classification — how we use language, how we define or design labels, how we structure and organize conceptual spaces — those skills are so useful beyond business, whether we talk about social or political or environmental areas, I think that part of what is holding us back as people are archaic words and structures: language and classification systems that we have inherited from the past that we're having a hard time getting beyond. What is different about Information Architecture? Jorge: There are other fields that think about this stuff as well. I'm thinking of George Lakoff's book, Don't Think of an Elephant! — I think that's the name of it — where he dives into this subject of labeling and distinctions in the realm of politics, specifically. What is special about information architecture? What is different about information architecture that would make it a good agent for change in this realm? Peter: Yeah. So, as I was working on the article, George Lakoff came to mind. He's one of the few people out there that I know has engaged in these issues in really interesting ways. There are also other books that come from outside of our discipline; Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences comes to mind as a fascinating exploration of the impact of language and classification in all sorts of contexts, for instance, in the kind of the hospital and nursing context. So, as I was writing this article, I was not under the impression or trying to portray the notion that we have a monopoly on these ways of thinking. In fact, in the article, the examples that I provide, one is focused on topics in and around LGBTQ+, gender and sexuality and all of the labels and classification systems around them that. And that work is being done by people who would never identify as information architects or don't even know our field exists. There's so much that we can learn from the work that people are doing out in the world. But I think that the folks who have spent the last 10-20 years thinking about information architecture, learning about information architecture, have a skillset and a talent that could be used beyond business. And I'm really trying to get our community to just at least question, “am I practicing in the contexts where I can make the greatest impact, given where I want to see the world go in the future?” For some people, the answer might be, “yes! I am super passionate about helping to grow this business, and this is what I want to do.” For other folks, they may say, “I need to do this work in order to pay the bills in a business context, but maybe I could volunteer some time and evenings or weekends to help folks work through issues around, how do we present ourselves? How do we label and organize our information so that we might be better understood, or so that we can make a bigger impact?” Jorge: When I hear you talk about the particular skills and talents of practicing information architects, what came to my mind is that information architects put these ideas of classification and distinction-making through language into action, right? It's one thing to think about it in the abstract, in theory, but we are very much practitioners making things in the world, right? Peter: Yes. Jorge: And as such, we are in a position to make these distinctions more palpable, perhaps or more tangible? Peter: Yeah. There's an interesting dance between the abstract and the tangible that we do. Very often, whether it's as in-house practitioners or consultants, we're hired more for the tangible stuff that we do. Most people are able to understand the tangible side of what we do. So, it's very often almost their own secret that the most important work that we do is pretty abstract and hard to explain. It's like, as a consultant, I go into an organization and I immerse myself in their world, in their language and classification system, in their domain, their area of expertise, their content, as well as all their challenges and goals and so forth. And I always go through this journey of initial excitement then feeling completely overwhelmed. Like, “oh my goodness, there's so much here. It's such a mess. How can I ever make a difference?” And with experience, I've built up the confidence to know I will get to the other side and I will start to come up with some models, hopefully some elegant models of how we can move forward. And the highest level, those models are sufficiently abstract that very few people appreciate them. It's when you take them to the next level and they start to become tangible and you can sort of see them, you've got a diagram or a wire frame or sketch, and people get it, and you start to get people behind this shared vision. So, I think you're right in the sense that we have that experience of grappling with the abstract stuff that's really hard to even talk about and then moving it into some tangible artifacts which then eventually move it into the world and it becomes the digital place. It's a website, it's a software application. Or in the physical world, right? It's how the grocery store is organized; it's how the airport is organized and the signage. Whether you talk about digital or physical places, then those end results start to shape how people think. So, that's the part that's interesting. We create environments that then shape people's perceptions, right? I mean, you go back to the Winston Churchill quote, if it was really him, “We shape our buildings and thereafter they shape us.” That's very true, whether you're talking about buildings or digital places or classification systems, and once people get used to a certain structure, it's hard to shift; it's hard to get people to think differently. And that's the challenge I think is interesting. But it's different in every domain. Is a website going to help make this shift or a book or do people need to be teaching this in elementary school? Where are the levers for effecting change in people's minds? Top-down vs. bottom-up structure Jorge: There's a distinction between molding information structures, structuring them, giving them shape, and spotting patterns in the ways people use these systems, that result in emergent structure. And I realize that sounds a little abstract, so I'll give you an example. The hashtag emerged in the use of Twitter. It's not something that was designed into Twitter from the get-go. And I am noticing in the world such structures coming into being, and I'll give you an example — and this one is related to what you wrote about in the article, and I'm hoping that we will get into this — but I've started seeing more and more people appending to their name, on social networks, a description of the pronouns that they want to be described with. You will usually see the name and then parentheses, “he/him,” right? And there's no space in that information system for you to describe your preferred pronouns. So, the users have kind of hacked the system by appending it to their last name field, or what have you. And that came to mind as I was reading your article, because you did get into the — I think you called it the “architecture of identity” — that we do seem to be living in a time where that is becoming more and more of an issue for folks. And I'm wondering what our role is as information architects, with regards to this top-down versus bottom-up spotting of these patterns and enabling their use in our systems. Peter: Yeah, I love that example. And I think, yeah, there's a couple of different directions to go there. One, I think that that notion of identifying patterns and then deciding whether or not to try to spread them, to embed them in infrastructure or to squash them, that is something that I think we should be more aware of our potential to play a role there. When we talk about information architecture, it's easy to think that we are the creators of structure, that it has to come out of our heads. But, as the Twitter hashtag idea suggests, many of the best innovations come from a user, one person who has an idea and tries it out and then other people see it and copy it and it starts to spread. And then, there's an interesting point there where in that case, the team at Twitter had to decide, “do we embrace this and embed it in infrastructure? Does the hashtag become part of Twitter?” And they decided, yes, right? And, the issues around pronouns are so tricky. They're difficult. I guess I'll make a confession that there have been times where I've been irritated by this kind of injecting pronouns into various contexts. Like, I was at a meeting a couple of years ago. The purpose of the meeting was really to focus on helping undocumented immigrants in Michigan. It was hosted at the University of Michigan. And at a certain point, we were all asked to introduce ourselves and to introduce our pronouns. And at an introductory meeting where we didn't even know if we were ever going to see any of these people again, it seemed like that was kind of forced into the conversation. And when I experienced that irritation, number one, I tried to moderate it, like, “hey, there's a plus here. We're really trying to make sure that as we're talking to one another and referring to one another, we're using the right words, right? We're using the words that people are comfortable with, as their identification.” But I also try to grow a little compassion for the people who are on the other side, right? The folks who have very little tolerance for the LGBTQ+ folks, because, the thing that's really interesting in here is I think that there's this little part of our brains that — I'm sure there's a spectrum in terms of like how active this is across the population — but there's a little part of our brains that just gets annoyed at added complexity, right? Like, “oh, now I've got to worry about whether I say you know, ‘he or she,' or ‘they or theirs'? My life's hard enough already. I'm just keeping my head above water. That just annoys me.” Right? And I think that little irritation may be the source of so much conflict, and unnecessary suffering in our society. And the flip side is — which for the most part, is how I feel — is, I love difference. I am so bored by the sameness. Living in a world where there's people of all different sort of races and sexes and genders and people who have different customs and do things differently. I love that. But I have a brain that loves learning, and I also have the privilege of a certain level of stability in my life and a certain amount of confidence that I'm sort of ready for the next thing. “Hey, I want to learn something new! Tell me more about what it means to be trans, right?” That's a new wrinkle; tell me about that, I'm interested. But I think that little kind of irritation is something that probably would be good for us all to be mindful of. We all probably feel that at different points about different issues. The need for progress and leadership Jorge: I can relate to that, Peter. And I'm also thinking again, in the spirit of — you used the word “compassion” — to try to empathize, perhaps with folks who might be irritated by this. You used the word “archaic” to refer to the traditional words and structures. And again, that's a very strong word. It might be read as “obsolete,” you know? And I imagine, and that there might be people for whom there's a counter argument there, which is, these distinctions that you label “archaic” have served us for a long time. What would you say to those folks? Peter: Yeah, that's a great point and I agree. It's a provocative word. So, to explain my perception… why I use a word like that. I am somebody who kind of lives in the future. Like, too much maybe, for my own good. I'm always thinking about what's next, where are things going? Which is helpful for being an information architect and planning ahead. But [it] has its costs. It takes me effort to live in the present a little more, right? To be aware of what's going on today. How am I feeling? To take time, to enjoy just being alive. And I don't spend much time reflecting on the past. And I think to a certain degree, I've missed out a lot on, positive emotions, like nostalgia; looking back at how things were. I think I miss out a little there. But my current mental models — my sense of trajectories and where things are going — is that human civilization is really approaching a very dangerous moment. We are in a very dangerous moment, where we are not only causing incredible destruction to other species and to the environment, but we're doing it to the extent that we're on the verge of destroying ourselves. And so, at a time where I see this crisis, like we're in it and it's getting worse, I feel that we need to be more progressive. We need to move faster. The structures that have served us well, served us well in a different world — in a past world that's not coming back. And so, I think that we need to be more open to change, to embrace change. And I say that knowing, especially just based on how you phrased that question, that that's really scary to a lot of people and very difficult for a lot of people. And I'm not sure what the answer is to that other than, to me, in order to deal with change — especially rapid or dramatic change — what's needed is great leadership. It's times like these, where we need great leaders. And at the moment, at least in this country, we don't have that. And so, we're all feeling lost. We're struggling. We're seeing parts of this crisis unfolding. We probably all see it differently, but, what's needed from great leadership is the ability to say, “hey, we have to move from A to B.” Whether that's physically moving from an island to a mainland location, whether it's moving from the use of fossil fuels to renewable energy. A great leader can get people to think in a more positive way about the challenges ahead to recognize, oh, this is going to be hard, but we can actually do something valuable and meaningful with our lives. We can be the generation that made this change, that sacrificed for future generations. And to view it less with fear and more with a sense of adventure and curiosity. I'm hopeful that at some point in the fairly near future, we will get that kind of leadership because I think that we can make tremendous progress. You and I in our careers, we have been part of the internet revolution and we know that one thing humans are good at is technology, at like being incredibly innovative and moving really fast and doing things that were previously viewed as impossible. We just need great leadership to harness that in the right direction. Jorge: For context, we are recording this before the US election. I'm saying that because we don't know what's going to happen, and people might be tuning in after the fact. But I want to call out that this brings us back full circle to where we started the conversation. You mentioned the fear you had when you were starting out at Argus and we've come full circle back to fear. And I wanted to bring things to a close by asking you about what's making you hopeful today. You are now in a different modality from the last time that we spoke. You have started your sanctuary or in the process of starting your sanctuary. And, I'm wondering, how you are, vis-a-vis how you were at the time of the founding of Argus? Peter: Yeah. I think that one difference is that, I'm sort of on the other side of my career. With Argus, I had no real savings, so, I was living month to month. You know, paying my rent with my paycheck. And so, my fear was very focused on job and career and how I made money. I didn't really have time or emotional space to think about all the other things that could go wrong. I wasn't worried about getting sick. I just… that couldn't happen! I couldn't get sick. Now that I have a little more financial security, and I'm older, I'm more aware of a much wider array of things that can go wrong. I've had had an extra 25 years of having things go wrong. And that's where for me, learning about Buddhist philosophy, listening to tapes from Pema Chödrön, really trying to be more at peace in a world and in a body where so much can go wrong — and will go wrong. Things get better and then they get worse and then they get better and then they get worse and that's life. We can't control those ups and downs all that much. So, with Sentient Sanctuary, with this vision that I have to create an animal sanctuary, it's exciting for me and fun for me to imagine it and to begin to work towards it. But I'm not attached in a kind of negative way to its fruition. I'm not…. you know, if I die tomorrow, it's okay. I've had a great life. I've been really fortunate. And, I think that there's a danger with visions, with plans, with hope, that we cling to an outcome. You know, 25 years ago, that was much more me. “I've got to make this work. It has to work!” And now I'm more comfortable with saying, “you know, I can put in my best effort.” When I trained for the Detroit marathon, that was very humbling in the sense that, you spend six months working as hard as you've ever worked for something. And every day, you know one wrong step and you twist your ankle and your dream is done. And you've got to have a bit of sense of humor about that. Otherwise it'll destroy you. And so, that's where I am today. I wouldn't say I'm incredibly hopeful for the future of human civilization. I just don't know where we're headed. I feel really fortunate, given the life that I've lived so far and where I am right now. And I have some fun, exciting things to work on for the future. I'm starting a new consulting project next week that I'm excited about and I'm actively learning about how to raise chickens and goats. So that's great stuff. Closing Jorge: Words of wisdom, Peter, thank you for sharing them with us. Where can folks follow up with you? Peter: So, my websites are semanticstudios.com and intertwingled.org. And I am Morville on Twitter. Jorge: Well, thank you so much. We look forward to hearing more from you as Sentient Sanctuary evolves, and best wishes with all that you have going on. Peter: Thank you. And thanks for having me.

Tips on how to develop leaders with Peter Montoya As I help develop leaders my job is to help them become much more effective. And oftentimes I serve as a leader confidant. The feedback agreement is, you want to give feedback that is kind, honest and helpful. All leadership is leadership development, which means that my sole job is to be coaching, training, mentoring people in my organizations to be a leader themself, leaders of friends and family, and leaders in my organization. And leadership development starts before the interview, most likely in the employee manual. There is no avoiding all political decisions. There is minimizing political decisions. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ SHARE THIS POST: HOW TO DEVELOP LEADERS [just click to tweet] HOW TO DEVELOP LEADERS Most leadership authors portray leaders as being extroverts.  And that is categorically wrong.  _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Doug: Well, welcome back listeners to another episode of Real Marketing Real Fast. Today in the studio I've got joining me, Peter Montoya. Now, Peter is a very gifted speaker. He is a bestselling author. He's a successful entrepreneur. And rarely do you find all three qualities like that in one person. Peter's a thought leader, he's a skilled orator and a leadership strategist with real-life experience driving his insights and ideas. Doug: His business acumen, inspirational journey, and human behavior insight and decades of real-life experience have helped him become one of the most inspirational and sought after speakers, coaches, and leaders in development for creating high performing teams. Doug: When he isn't transforming organizations around the globe, Peter lives with his wife and his two teenagers in Orange County, California. He is the best selling author. His first book was called The Brand Called You, and his latest book is called Leadership Power. He is also just starting a podcast that should be out shortly. Doug: So I'd like to welcome Peter Montoya to the Real Marketing Real Fast podcast today. Well, Hey Peter, super excited to have you on the Real Marketing Real Fast podcast today. So welcome to the show. Peter: Thank you, Doug. I'm thrilled to be here. Doug: Do you want to give our audience just a high-level overview of your kind of expertise and how you help your clients? Peter: Sure. You bet. My previous career wasn't that of personal branding. I wrote a book called The Brand Called You, and I spent the better part of 30 years working with independent financial advisors, helping them with their marketing and branding. So all that knowledge is still stored in my head. But as I've evolved, I really have become an expert in that of leadership in high-performance teams. Peter: My job is to help leaders become much more effective. And oftentimes I serve as a leader confidant. Oftentimes what leaders need is someone to cry over the phone at nine o'clock at night when they're faced with really big decisions. And then also helping people inside companies work better together and get more done. And that really comes to the process of empowerment. Doug: Well, as I mentioned before we started recording, one of the things that really caught my eye when I was looking through your skillsets, and I would assume those are your kind of four power talks or presentations you get, was the feedback agreement. And as a creative agency, often we find it difficult working with clients because everybody's got an opinion. Doug: Can you walk us through a bit of the low hanging fruit, how you help your leaders to make sure that they're getting appropriate feedback and dealing with that, and being able to use that to empower their people and to still be able to execute? Peter: You bet. A quick story. I'm on my second marriage. I've been married to my wife Amy, been with my wife Amy now for nine years. And maybe about a year ago,

What's the secret sauce that top growth marketers use to predict performance and develop their marketing plans and budgets? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Onna Head of Growth Peter Schroeder shares his process for building growth models, and how he uses them to predict future marketing and sales headcount needs, allocate budget, and more. Peter's approach to growth modeling can work for any type of company, from an early stage startup without a lot of marketing performance data, to a well established high growth company looking to take its performance to the next level.  Highlights from my conversation with Peter include: As head of growth for Onna, Peter focuses on the demand gen side of marketing (as opposed to the brand building side). Peter says that a focus on growth is particularly important at early stage companies where very often investors have high expectations regarding growth milestones. Onna is just this type of company. It is early stage, having just closed a Series A round of investment with funding from companies like Slack and Dropbox, and the growth goals are ambitious. When Peter thinks about growth modeling, he begins with the revenue number that the company is trying to hit, and then reverse engineers the funnel so that he can determine things like required budget and headcount. Peter's growth models are built as spreadsheets that reflect patterns in historical marketing data with regarding to channel performance, conversion rates and more. He says that while many startups say that they don't have enough data to build a growth model, he believes this is just an excuse and the small amount of data you do have coupled with anecdotal feedback from your sales team are enough to get started. Peter encourages marketers not to get too wrapped up in making the model perfect. He says to follow the 80/20 rule and spend no more than 20 percent of your time building the model and at least 80 percent of your time working on growth-oriented activities. Using his spreadsheet, Peter identifies the cost to acquire a customer by channel, and then he models out what the cost is at each stage of his funnel, by channel. While most marketers think that CAC will get lower over time, Peter says it is just the opposite and CAC will increase as your efforts saturate a particular channel. Peter says that the ket metric marketing should be measured on is marketing contributed revenue. He uses his growth model to report on that, and says that the model is a helpful tool to incorporate into leadership meetings and regular marketing checkins. Another way that Peter communicates about marketing success is by sharing his team's work internally. Resources from this episode: Visit the Onna website Follow Peter on Twitter Email Peter at peter@onna.com Listen to the podcast to learn more about Peter's approach to growth modeling, and how to build a growth model of your own. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth, and today my guest is Peter Schroeder, who is the head of growth at Onna. Welcome, Peter. Peter Schroeder (Guest): Thank you so much for having me. Happy to be here. Kathleen: Yeah. I am excited to talk to you, because I speak with a lot of marketers, and your title is head of growth. So maybe you could start out by talking a little bit about yourself and kind of your background and what led you to where you are today, as well as what Onna is, and then we can talk a little bit about what it means to be a head of growth. About Peter and Onna Peter: Yeah, absolutely. So what head of growth really means is, it focuses on the demand gen side of marketing. It's not as involved in brand-building and any of those other activities that don't directly result in pipeline generation for a business. So what the head of growth really does is, like I said, just focuses on all areas that would drive the business forward from a revenue perspective. So that's like a little bit of the differentiator. And I think that we're starting to see it more and more at early stage companies where you really need to focus on that revenue growth as opposed to like brand-building. Kathleen: Yeah, definitely. Those results are kind of where the rubber meets the road. Peter: Yeah, exactly. Kathleen: What has your career path been? How did you become a head of growth? Peter: Yeah, absolutely. So I've been in the software world for about eight years. I was in marketing roles and digital marketing roles. And I think that ever since I started early on in my career, it's always been demand gen focus. Whether it's paid media events, webinars, it's always been about things that directly impact the revenue side of the business. I think that brand is very much so a luxury that early stage companies just can't afford to focus on exclusively. I think a lot of our demand gen activities residually affect that brand. Making sure that we're going to market with a unified message, consistent branding, that's something we want to do on the demand gen side. So I think that branding will come, but it's just not a luxury that most companies have. Most early stage SaaS companies have that runway. They have those numbers that they need to be held accountable for. So that's really focusing on the demand gen side. So being a marketer at early stage software companies, I feel like it's just kind of comes with the territory. Kathleen: Yeah. I would say amen to all of that, but especially if it's a company that's venture-backed or that's looking for investment, those numbers are critical, and usually investors are watching them really closely, so I can see where your kind of role would be important. What does it mean to be a growth marketer? Kathleen: Now, when you come into a role such as head of growth, how do you approach that? I know we were going to talk about growth modeling, and I love this concept, because especially at early stage companies, I've been at some, and the question is always like, what can we expect in terms of growth? And what's it going to take to get like if we want to grow by 2X? And a lot of times, I think, marketers come into these roles and they sort of feel like it's like putting their finger up in the air and measuring where the wind is blowing, and they pull a number out of the blue and sometimes feel nervous about it. But you've really dug into a little bit more of a scientific approach to figuring out growth. Peter: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So I can give you an example of where I'm at right now. So I'm at a company called Onna, which is a platform that centralizes data from your favorite apps, so think Slack, G Suite, anywhere where you get work done, to deliver a connected enterprise. So we're gathering all that data and we're supercharging it with machine learning and unified search to give you all that data in one place. This last year, to give you like a stage for the size of our company, we closed our series A with investments from Slack and Dropbox. And with that investment, we have really aggressive growth goals on the sales and marketing end. When you're getting funding from companies at that level, we have really big goals for 2020. So what that means for me is coming into the business and thinking, how can we hit those aggressive growth goals? And starting at the revenue number, what's the revenue number we have to hit? And then sort of reverse engineering that funnel to make sure that we have the funnel covered at all stages from a budget perspective, from a headcount perspective, just overall coverage on all ends. And what that means, for example, is we don't want to generate more pipeline than we have the headcount to be able to close from a sales perspective. So this is where a sales and marketing alignment gets really close, so working with sales to make sure we know when they're hiring people. For the marketing side, we know when we need to bring in what amount of pipeline to make sure we're able to close at an effective rate. Otherwise, from a marketing perspective, if we're under-generating pipeline, that's going to impact the sales department. On the flip side, if we're over-generating pipeline, things are going to slip through the cracks, because we don't have enough coverage from a headcount perspective to be able to sort of reign all that pipeline in. So when we think for like planning for a whole year. So for example, we want to grow 2 to 3X next year, which is really aggressive growth goals. That comes with a lot of hiring, a lot of pipeline generating. So we just want to make sure that we're scaling in unison to be able to support each other effectively. Kathleen: I am loving this topic, because I think this is something that so many marketers have had to grapple with. And I love that you talked about almost starting with the end in mind. The investors want you to reach X amount of revenue, and how do you back out what's needed to get there? Right? And especially that you talked about sales and marketing alignment, because obviously those are both really important parts of the puzzle. So knowing that that's what you have to do, where do you start? How do you break this up into manageable pieces? How to get started with growth modeling Peter: Yeah, definitely. So I don't know if you can start with somewhere manageable, but you kind of have to think about all stages of growth modeling to make sure you have all your bases covered. A lot of people just want to say, "Okay, we're going to do everything in everything." And that's just not possible, especially when you're smaller stage. You need to focus. You need to understand where you have the biggest opportunity to have an impact. You have to understand historical trends. Where did your early customers come from? Recognize those patterns. Try to map out, if you invest more money to try to amplify those channels, how does that impact it? So it's really like a full scope sort of understanding of how you want to grow your business. And I know that people will hate to hear this answer, but it starts in the spreadsheets. You have to get into the spreadsheets. You have to start mapping out your numbers. I know that early stage companies like to say, "We don't have enough data to back that." But I think that early data is really good early indicators. And like I said, I think just as a really good place to start is to start with that revenue number. Then based on historical trends, you can reverse it up from closed won. Then you can go up to opportunities. Then you can go up to SQLs, MQLs, leads, traffic, and you can understand the whole funnel. And then that at least gives you a sense of what you need to bring in from a lead perspective, and that gives you a place to start. Then once you have that lead number, you can break it up by channel based on what you've seen by channel. How much does it cost for you to acquire a lead at each channel? And then you just start laying out the whole framework, and it shows you how much you need to invest in each channel, what headcount you need to support that investment. And it helps you go back down that funnel and give you that coverage. Kathleen: Okay, so there's a lot there. Peter: Yeah, there's a lot there. I have a slide that I can give to you that you can put it in the show notes, but it kind of articulates from a funnel perspective what you have to look at and where you have to identify conversion rates to get those numbers to be able to map out your channels. Kathleen: Now, you said something that really caught my ear, which is that a lot of people in startups are going to say, "We don't have enough data." And that was running through my head as you said it. So you talked about even the early numbers are good and kind of interesting numbers, but there is a certain amount of data that's needed because when you talk about things like looking at performance by channel, et cetera, some early stage companies coming out of stealth are going to have really basically nothing, or they might have a pipeline but it's entirely from having an SDR on the team and dialing for dollars and not any inbound. And so how much data do you really need in order to do this? Like do you have to have a basic inbound pipeline up and running? Peter: I mean, it's a good question. I guess it depends on where your company has seen growth and if it has seen growth yet. Like you said, if it's coming right out of stealth mode, that's when you lean on your early employees, their experience, historical trends, market research, and you put together some baseline numbers to at least have something to measure against. If you're early-stage, you pull together the data that you have, and you start mapping out against it. But everyone should be able to at least pull something together. And I think that the use of this data, I also don't want to over-advocate for it, because I think that we can get stuck in analysis paralysis too. And our primary function as marketers are people who create, people who drive demand. So I think that when we think about the balance between this growth modeling and actually acting upon it, I like to use a simple 80-20 rule. We shouldn't spend more than like 20% of our time planning and building out these frameworks and building these models. It's like, at a certain stage, especially when you're early, do the best that you can. Have something to model against. Have something to show that you have actually thought about your growth goals and you're not just spending money to spend money. But at the end of the day, like you said, you could only have so much data. We all only have access to so much data. And at the end of the day, we need to execute on it. We need to be able to put our plan into action and put our plan into motion, so at the end of the year we're not pointing back to our growth model and being like, "Well, we didn't do any of that." We need to actually execute on these things that we put together. Kathleen: So I want to make sure I'm understanding you correctly. You come in and you're looking at historical information around conversion rates and volume at each level from traffic to lead all the way through to closing a deal. And I assume you're also looking at the growth of those numbers over time, in other words, how the conversion rate has changed over time? Peter: Yep. So conversion rates also paired with like unit economics. So by channel, how much are we acquiring customers for? What's the lifetime value of those customers? What's our payback period? So being also very conscious of the economics by channel. How to build a growth model Kathleen: Okay. And so let's say your revenue is at $5 million a year, and your investors come in and they say, "We want you at 50 million by the end of next year." Walk me through. How do you take that model and use it to answer that question? Peter: Yeah, that's a really good question. So that'd be 10X in growth, so --- Kathleen: We can make it 2X, if that's easier for the purpose of this. Peter: Sure. Let's go five to 10. That might be easier. So what you have to do is, you have to sort of dissect the pipeline from this last year. So how much revenue in the last year have you gained? Based on that revenue, what was your closed won percentage? Where was the pipeline coming from? And you'd have to identify where's the best opportunity to amplify that pipeline. Like, do we dissect our pipe and dissect our deal flow and find out that like 90% of our deals came through channel partnerships? Well, that means that we might have the biggest opportunity to go into those channel partnerships and amplify it with resources and money and going to events. So it's really identifying historic trends and pattern recognizing, and then coming up with hypotheses by channel that support our growth goals, and then kind of filling in the numbers to help support that so you have something to measure against. Kathleen: Okay. So let's use the example you came up with, like channel for example. Let's say we decide channel is the biggest opportunity because we see that a large volume of our customers are closing from there. If the hypothesis is that that's where we need to put our resources... You talked a little bit about using growth modeling to determine plans and budgets and that sort of thing. How do you translate that hypothesis into a concrete plan and a budget? Turning growth models into marketing plans and budgets Peter: Yeah, definitely. So I think at a high level, it starts with your revenue number and what you need to get there. So you need that. You need your cost to acquire customer by that channel. And then you can basically, based on what you need to do from that channel, based on your projections, you can divide it by your cost to acquire a customer, and you can basically fill out your funnel and recognize the cost at every stage of the funnel. You can associate a dollar amount to an MQL, an SQL, an opportunity, and a closed one. And it helps you understand at each stage of the funnel what you need to acquire a customer for. So let's say in that example, you do your math, you look at your cost to acquire a customer, you look at the number you need to get to, and you recognize that you need to acquire an MQL at a price of $1,500. Well, it helps you know when you go to that channel partnership event... Let's say you spend $100,000 to promote that event. You need to be able to acquire X amount of MQLs at $1,500 to have that event back out and to continue to support your growth goals. Kathleen: Okay. So it's more about the cost of acquisition than setting an arbitrary budget, for example. Peter: Yeah, exactly. It all comes back to, what is that cost to acquire a customer? And then you can compare it to your funnel metrics to identify dollar amounts at every stage of the funnel. Kathleen: And to what degree, when you build this model, are you baking in assumptions about becoming more efficient over time? In other words, especially with earlier startups, they might be spending a lot to acquire leads and customers. But presumably that number should come down over time with the volume, with efficiencies, with lots of lessons learned. How do you account for that? Peter: Well, it's interesting, because I think the classic assumption is that you do get more efficient by channels as you kind of do it longer. But it's kind of my mindset and philosophy to assume that channels get worse as we grow, because we saturate them more. Kathleen: Oh really? Peter: Yeah. Our goals get bigger. We have to assume that we will run out of runway in certain channels. At a certain point, we will sort of maximize them. So I think it's really important to think about as we scale and as we grow, as we throw more resources at different channels, as we have to ramp people, there's a lot of factors that come into... Like we talked about in our example, going from like five to 10 million, there's a lot of factors that go into building a growth team during that period and doing it in such an aggressive time period that we have to assume that we won't figure out things as quickly as we want to. And what that helps us do is it helps us sort of like protect ourselves. We'd rather over-plan and plan for the worst and then outperform and then go from five to 10 million in eight months instead of 12 months. We would rather do that if best case scenario comes to fruition than actually plan for best case scenario. Kathleen: So do you pair your... Call it your analysis of the conversion rates, of volume, et cetera. Do you pair that with a demand waterfall, then, where you kind of lay out where those new leads are going to come from by channel, by event, et cetera? How does that work together? Peter: Yep. So ideally you would pair up and have... I know I keep going back to spreadsheets, but at early-stage companies you just have these big, ugly spreadsheets- Kathleen: I mean, every good marketing nerd worth their salt loves the spreadsheets, so you're preaching to the choir here. Peter: True. These big, ugly spreadsheets that all just feed into your number. And it helps you lay out month by month, and add it up to quarter by quarter, and then total into a year where every single lead is coming from by channel and how that lead ultimately impacts revenue. So you have this big spreadsheet all the way month by month, from lead all the way to revenue, that is marketing-contributed and pairs up as well with sales headcount to make sure that there's enough salespeople to support that pipeline and that revenue that you're bringing in. So I don't have a really pretty way to scrape that together. Based on your business, if you're doing more outbound, if you're doing more inbound, it's something you kind of just hack together in the spreadsheets. But that's the way that I've always done it, and it seems to work to a certain extent. Eventually you have to automate that, but early on it's definitely a good way to build this out. What role does sales play in growth modeling? Kathleen: What part of this are you leaning on the head of sales for? Because obviously a lot of this data has to come from them, correct? Peter: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. So they're responsible for that revenue number, and I would say that revenue number alone. Marketing should own the funnel all the way to the pipeline. And then once it gets to the pipeline, there's that sales and marketing handoff. And then sales is responsible for winning that business that we put in the pipe for them. So what they're really doing is, they're letting us know what's that conversion rate from pipeline to closed won, and what do they need to like support their sales goals based on the reps that they're bringing on, the quotas that they're putting in place. And those are probably the big things. Kathleen: It sounds like this really would form a great basis for a service-level agreement between marketing and sales, because it gives you some pretty concrete numbers and expectations. Have you used it for that before? Peter: Yeah. Yeah, so for our SLA, we don't think like too concrete in place from these numbers perspective. It's more so like, we think of sales and marketing as like almost one department. So it's not like we're going to hold a gun to your head for this. Based on this, it's like we're one department working this together, like we are generating leads for you to close. So I've never found SLAs too crucial, unless there's like a war between sales and marketing, which thankfully I've never had to deal with. It's always been really close, viewed as one department. Using growth modeling to determine headcount Kathleen: Yeah. So you talked about how you can use this to model out sales headcount, but how do you use it, or can you use it, to model out marketing headcount? Peter: Yeah, that's a good question. It's a lot harder, because it's not one-to-one. What you need to do, though, is you need to recognize based on your strategy that you have in place... Let's use the channel partnership example for one. If 90% of our pipeline is coming from those channel partnerships and we don't have anyone on marketing dedicated to that channel, someone needs to own that. If there's that much of our business relying on it, we can't just leave it up in the air. So then we have to look at our org chart, and we have to understand who contributes to that channel, who owns that channel, where can marketing contribute. And it helps paint a more clear picture than kind of just arbitrarily structuring your marketing department. It helps you align your headcount to the numbers a lot better. Another example is like early on when people put a lot of money into paid. No one really owns paid. It's just a lot of sort of cooks in the kitchen. You can look at that paid number and you can say, "We're spending X amount of money. Definitely warrants someone." And that helps you go to your leadership team, helps you really advocate for that internally, to get someone to manage that budget. I think whenever you see a significant part of your budget going in this growth modeling, it helps you really paint a clear picture that you need people there to support that and you need to grow your headcount. Kathleen: Yeah, it's funny. I've never met anybody who has a really good formula for figuring out marketing headcount increases over time. It's definitely more of a black box than sales headcount is for sure. Peter: Yeah, absolutely. And I think based on this growth modeling, if any of your numbers are falling behind from the growth modeling perspective, it's also something you can point back to if no one's owning it and say like, "I have an assumption that we can be X more effective or X more efficient if we bring in someone to to manage this budget. Right now it feels like we're kind of just burning money to put it in this channel." So it helps you build those arguments a little bit more. But it's definitely not as like one-to-one to sales. Like if we spend X on this person, we should get X out. Growth modeling in action Kathleen: Yeah. Now let's talk about once you've built your growth model, because you... Like all these great spreadsheets, you build it, and then what? So what does your cadence look like in terms of how frequently you're going back to that model over time, adjusting it, checking assumptions, et cetera? Peter: Yeah, so this growth model should feed into your overall overall marketing strategy, and it should be something that your team is measured against as a marketing department as a whole. Like where do you kind of stick your pin in the map, and what do you point out and say, "This is what marketing is going to do. This is what we're going to be held accountable towards"? So for me it's always been marketing contributed revenue. Like what do we actually drive at the end of the day? And I know that some people don't like doing that, because there's multi-touch attribution and all these other things with actually tracking and stuff. But I think it's so important, and I think it gives marketing a seat at the table, per se, from a revenue perspective, where we're saying we're actually driving revenue at the end of the day through marketing activities that we do. So I think it's something that at least I've always measured against monthly, quarterly, even weekly sometimes once you're getting close to the end of the quarter and really needing to push your marketing team to be like, "Where are we at? What did we say that we're going to do? Are we falling short? Are we on target? Are we running ahead?" But at the end of the day, the whole marketing team should be aligned to to those numbers as well to make sure that we're all on the same page and to make sure that we're supporting revenue-driving activities. Kathleen: Yeah. It seems like it would be a really good management tool for a marketing leader to just pull out in team meetings and use as a pulse check. Peter: Yeah, yeah. It's brought out at marketing check-ins, and it's also brought out at leadership meetings too. Like what does leadership care about? What do they want to hear about when you sit down for your weekly or biweekly or monthly or whatever your leadership team does? Those are the numbers that they care about. They don't want to hear about like, "Oh, we held a webinar, and it was fun." They want to see like, okay, how many leads did we bring in? How many of them came to the pipeline? What did that mean from a revenue perspective? They care about those really hard numbers that marketing in 2020 needs to be ready to talk about, like the actual revenue driving impact that we have. Building a growth-oriented marketing tech stack Kathleen: You talked about multi-touch attribution and being able to say what marketing's contribution was towards top-line revenue. What kind of a tech stack do you think you need to have in place in order to enable that? Peter: Yeah, I think it really depends on the size of your organization, because at Onna, we're selling enterprise deals, so we're very much at the stage where we can just go in, dissect the deal, manage it in a spreadsheet, and it's really low-touch, minimal effort. As opposed to if you're selling SMB and you're selling annual contracts of $50, and it's very self-serve, you need to have a robust attribution system in place to be able to measure that. So it's not something that I've had a ton of experience with, but from the people that I've talked to that do have to build out that attribution system, people have recommended Bizible, that it's a really good multi-touch attribution tool for them to use. But again, I just haven't had to get into that too much thankfully, which I'm happy about. Kathleen: Now can I ask what kind of tech stack you guys have that you're using? Peter: Yeah, so we use Pardot and Salesforce, and we also have a sales ops person on our team already, so they're able to... Like I said, sales and marketing is kind of the same for us, so our sales ops person's able they both to run reports, slice data for us, pull any numbers or data that we really need. Kathleen: That's awesome. And now how long have you been at Onna? Peter: So I've been at Onna for a few months now. Setting expectations for your growth model Kathleen: Okay. And this isn't the first time you've held this kind of a role. So I'm curious to know, expectation-wise, someone tries this for the first time... I feel like it would be like setting KPIs overall or like setting your professional development goals. It seems like one of those things that you would get better at over time. So what has your experience been with the first one or two times you build a model like this? How accurate do you think someone should expect to be out of the gate? Peter: Yeah, I think there's a few things. I think that, like you first said, you definitely get better. You have to start somewhere though. It's going to be iterations on iterations, and hopefully it becomes like your own personal playbook that you can sort of bring wherever you go and adjust no matter where you're at. But it all starts with actually doing that, starting somewhere and actually improving on it. I think the second thing is, you need a team and a leadership team that's okay with challenging and pushing each other and being candid with each other. Because the first time I did this, no one asked me to do this. No one said this is something that we needed. It's something that I felt that I needed to be able to support the decisions that I was making. And so I went to the CEO of my former company. I said, "Hey, this is something I've been working on. It's an MVP. It's lightweight. Please tear it apart and give me feedback and go back to the drawing board with it." And one, he was so happy that I took the initiative to do it. It's not anything he asked for, but it painted such a clear picture of what marketing's doing and why marketing exists. And he did. He tore it apart. He told me from a CEO and founder perspective what he wanted to see, what our board cared about, and what I should be focusing on to help build out the bones of this growth modeling foundation. So I think you'd definitely want that from a leader and you want that from a team. And I also get that not everyone has that team in place. So then I think it's about having a network and being able to go to peers and be able to go to other people you know to help build that out, if you're not in as like a secure place, that you need to go to your team with something a little bit more buttoned up than that MVP version. Kathleen: Yeah, that's a really good point. And I appreciate that you brought that up, because I think there probably are some marketers out there who are thinking like, "We don't have enough information, or, "I don't have a tech stack that can give this to me." But it sounds like, to me, what you're saying is, don't let that be something that stops you. If you don't have the data internally, you either know someone who has comparable data or you can Google it and find out what industry averages are. But it sounds like it's just worth starting with something and then iterating, and as you build data you can refine. Peter: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's important, saying again, if you're at a company where no one asked you to do this and you go build this growth model and you present it to them, it will be a big deal in their eyes. These are the things they want to see. These are the numbers that they care about. This is how you paint marketing in a light that that leadership and investors and everyone really wants to see. So if no one's asking you for it, I'd encourage people to build out these models and show the nitty gritty of what marketing does. Kathleen: Yeah. Yeah, that's great advice. And I think... What is it? The average head of marketing lasts 18 months these days. And so that is something that I'm sure is top of mind with lots of people who are listening, which is, how do I set myself up for success so that I beat the odds and last longer than 18 months? It's a depressing number. Peter: It is. And I think people fall into this trap of marketers not getting the credit they deserve for a few reasons. It's like marketers need to show what they do internally. If you don't showcase what you do, if you don't share what you do, people in product who are writing code all day are just going to be like, "Oh, marketing doesn't do anything." You need to showcase the things that you're doing and boast them proudly. Sharing your work is a very important thing. Like at Onna, whenever my team creates something, does something, we have like a marketing shares channel where we show everything that we do, so it allows us to showcase what we do. And we want to hold ourselves accountable. We want someone to call us out if something isn't up to our brand standards. If something doesn't look good, we want people to call us out on that, because we want to be better and we want to be held accountable. And the second thing is marketers that just sort of never execute and just move too slowly. We want to be known as a department that can get things, spin something up, spin up an MVP and be able to iterate. So that's another aspect, that we want to be known as a team that's on the ball, that's snappy to a reasonable amount. We don't want people to come to us and throw off what we're working on. My team operates in marketing sprints so we can protect ourselves from those things that come in. We have our priorities locked in for two weeks, but we can tell people and we can set the expectation but next sprint we'll put this in and we'll get back to you in like two to three weeks with something ready. Kathleen: Yeah, I love that marketing shares channel idea. It was funny. Months ago I interviewed Dave Gerhardt, who has been the VP of marketing at Drift. He's just left to take a new role. But he talked a lot about sharing your work, but it was sort of more internal within the marketing team. And I've done that now for a while. Ever since I first talked to him about it, I started implementing it, and it's been great. But what I haven't done is that next step, which is what you're talking about, and that's having marketing shared outside of the team with the rest of the company. And I love that, because you're right. I think a lot of people do think marketers are just sitting back there, as somebody once said, doing arts and crafts, right? And it's a lot more than that. And unfortunately a lot of the work we do does take some time before there's very publicly visible things to show for it. And so taking those pieces and sharing them out as they're ready, I think, can be very powerful. So I'm going to do that too. I'm going to copy your idea. Peter: Yeah, I really like it. And I think that I've heard from some people like, "Oh, my team's afraid to share things internally." And it makes me question like, how can you be afraid to share things internally but okay to share them externally?  Kathleen: Yeah, that's a bad sign. Peter: Yeah, that's a really bad sign. So it just promotes good work, good behavior, good actions. So I'm a big fan of it. Kathleen: Now, do you wait until those things are done? In other words, are you sharing drafts of things, or are you sharing completed, shipped work? Peter: To the whole team, we're sharing shipped work. We do have the internal marketing team sharing where we share early versions, early drafts, to make sure that we are buttoned up. But we're sharing to the whole team final products. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: Great. That's awesome. I love it. Love this topic, and I will definitely put your slide in the show notes. Changing channels a little bit right now, I have two questions I always ask all of my guests. I'd love to know your thoughts on this. The first is, when you think about inbound marketing, is there a particular company or individual that you think is really killing it? Peter: Yeah, absolutely. I think Ryan Bonnici at G2, the CMO over there, he's doing amazing work. I think he built an incredible team over there from an inbound perspective. If you're not following him on Twitter, on Instagram, follow Ryan Bonnici of G2. He's like my favorite CMO in the world. If you're thinking about going to a marketing conference in 2020, check out the G2 Reach conference. I think that I went last year, which was the first year, and Brian's just doing incredible things out there for all marketers. I encourage everyone to watch him and see what he's doing. Kathleen: Yeah, he's incredibly creative. I interviewed him as well, so I will also put the link to my interview with Ryan in the show notes, because he talked about some really cool stuff that he did at HubSpot that he was rolling out at G2 Crowd as well, so that's a good one. He is super creative, and he moves fast also. Peter: And he's also just a really good person and really funny. He's just entertaining too. If you ever get the chance to talk to him or watch anything that he puts out there, he's genuine. He's thoughtful. He doesn't just talk about marketing, but he talks about like mindfulness, things like imposter syndrome for young marketers. Just overall great person, great marketer. I think he's doing it better than anyone. Kathleen: Yeah, agreed. All right, second question. Marketing changes really quickly. A lot of marketers I talk to feel like they're drinking out of a fire hose. How do you personally keep educated? Peter: Yeah, I think marketing is changing rapidly, but I think the fundamentals kind of stand the test of time. So I'm a big fan of reading marketing books depending on what I'm going through. Like one of the things I always fall back on is How to Win Friends and Influence people by Dale Carnegie. If you just understand empathy and you understand actually what makes people tick and what people want, that's where marketing starts. We're trying to influence people. We're trying to empathize with people and understand their problems and present them with value. I think things like Elad Gil's High Growth Handbook, it's a book that he wrote that just outlines anything that really anyone could go through at a SaaS company. And then depending on what your specialty is, like if you're in something like content or copywriting, reading, something like Ogilvy on Advertising, such a good copywriting book. So depending on what you're going through and what role you're in, there's so many books that have been written that tell you the foundations and the principles of what have been done, what you should be doing, and things that have already been tested. You don't have to go learn things on your own. These things have already been done, so learn about it and then put your own flavor on it based on what you're going through. Kathleen: I'm so excited that you mentioned a couple of specific books, because I love marketing books. I have a lot of them on the shelf here behind me, which you can't see if you're listening. But yeah, I have Ogilvy on Advertising, but I haven't read a couple of the other ones you mentioned. So my little trick for that is, I love to listen to them on Audible at like 1.5 speed. But then if it's a book that has a lot of meat to it, I'll get the hard copy and do that at the same time so that I can mark up the pages. It's a good way to get through things quickly without... Peter: Yeah. Yeah, I think audio books have been great, because you can just power through them on your commute. They've been great. But for the books that I really like, I do love having a physical book and highlighting it and writing in it. That's hard to beat. How to connect with Peter Kathleen: Yeah, 100%. Well, I love all of those suggestions, Peter. If somebody wants to learn more about Onna, or the topic of growth modeling, or they want to just reach out to you and connect, what's the best way for them to find you online? Peter: Yeah, people can follow me on Twitter @peterschroederr with two Rs. If you have any questions about this, any of this, just feel free to email me at peter@onna.com. Happy to talk to anyone anytime and help people out who are like going through this for the first time and and just walk them through this. Just as much as as growth modeling, I love that career modeling with people too, and building out their own careers and next steps and sort of where they want to go. So big fans of both topics. You know what to do next... Kathleen: That is incredibly generous of you to offer. Thank you so much. If you are listening, I will be putting the links in the show notes for those things, so head over there if you want to reach out to Peter. And if you did listen and you learned something new or you liked what you heard, please consider heading to Apple Podcasts and leaving the podcast a five star review. That helps us get found by new listeners, and I would really appreciate it. Thank you so much, Peter. I appreciate everything you shared with us today. Peter: Thank you so much for having me. I had a great time. Hope everyone enjoys it.  

My guest today is Peter Merholz. Peter is one of the co-founders of the pioneering UX design consultancy Adaptive Path, now part of Capital One. After leaving Adaptive Path, he has structured and led design teams in various organizations. Peter and his co-author, Kristin Skinner, wrote Org Design for Design Orgs, the book on how to organize design teams. In this episode, we discuss how the structure of organizations influences their customer's experiences. Listen to the full conversation https://theinformeddotlife.files.wordpress.com/2020/02/the-informed-life-episode-28-peter-merholz-2.mp3   Show notes PeterMerholz.com @peterme on Twitter Adaptive Path Org Design for Design Orgs: Building and Managing In-House Design Teams by Peter Merholz and Kristin Skinner Liftoff: Practical Design Leadership to Elevate Your Team, Your Organization, and You by Chris Avore and Russ Unger The Informed Life Episode 22: Andrea Mignolo on Designerly Ways of Being IDEO Tim Brown The Double Diamond Conway's Law Organization in the Way: How Decentralization Hobbles the User Experience by Peter Merholz MacGuffin Shopify Forrester Research Kristin Skinner Read the full transcript Jorge: Welcome to the show, Peter. Peter: Thank you Jorge. Jorge: So, for folks who don't know about you and your trajectory, would you please introduce yourself. Peter: Sure. I'm Peter Merholz, I work in — ostensibly — digital design, have for over 25 years. Started in CD-ROMs, so even pre-web. But cut my teeth on the web and through web design. Probably most notably, helped start a user experience consulting firm called Adaptive Path, which I helped lead from 2001 to 2011. For the last eight years, I've been some flavor of design executive, primarily working in-house. A few years ago, co-wrote a book called Org Design for Design Orgs, which is still the only book about what it… Kind of a playbook on building in-house design teams. Though I'm happy that Russ Unger and Chris Avore's book is coming out soon, so we will no longer be the only one on that subject. And a few months ago, decided to commit myself to independence and started a company. The URL is petermerholz.com, but the company name is Humanism At Scale, and it's my one-person consultancy dedicated to helping design organizations realize their potential and helping bolster and improve design leadership practices within organizations. Jorge: What is the link between the potential of organizations, humanism, and design? Peter: I see design as the Trojan horse for humanistic thinking within companies. Design is an obvious contributor of value, particularly in digital contexts and software contexts, and so companies are building design organizations in order to create these digital experiences. What they don't know they're getting with it is that design, when practiced fully, is situated within a humanistic frame that also includes social science and subjects like user research, it includes writing, rhetoric, composition, with things like content strategy… And so I see design as this lead… It's the tip of the spear, but what's behind it is a full kind of humanistic understanding that design can help bring into these companies. And the importance of that is companies have been so mechanistic, so analytical with their either kind of business orientations, MBA orientations, spreadsheet focuses, or engineering orientations. They've been so mechanistic that design has this opportunity to bring a humanistic balance into that conversation. Jorge: I had Andrea Mignolo as a guest in the podcast last year, and she talked about this subject as well, design as a way for organizations to map out possible futures, in distinction to using things like spreadsheets. Is that kind of what you're talking about here? Peter: That's definitely part of what I'm talking about. I mean, there's the obvious benefits or contributions of design in this business context, which is making a strategy concrete. We talked about that at Adaptive Path over 10 years ago, probably closer to 15 years ago, and, and IDEO has been talking about that. Tim Brown's been talking about that, right? It's very easy for executives to have different interpretations of bullet points on a PowerPoint slide and projections and spreadsheets, but it's really difficult to have different interpretations of sketches and prototypes of futures that those PowerPoint, bullet points and spreadsheets are actually inferring, right? Design can very quickly make concrete these abstract notions. And, so I think lead to better conversations about where an organization is headed. So, I think that's part of it. But I think, again, importantly, there's a whole body of thinking, of problem solving, of looking at the world that is rooted in the humanities, that is rooted in not just design and visual expression, but in language in social science, that can inform how businesses operate in and basically encourage them to operate better at least when I think would be better. Jorge: In your book and in your presentations on the subject, you often talk about this three-legged stool, where the three legs are, business, technology, and design. Is that the context in which you're talking about design here, as in supplementing the other two? Peter: I wouldn't say supplementing, but yes, balancing the other two. And that still makes it sound like design is one against two in that equation. But essentially, business and technical approaches tend to be analytical and reductive. And that's not bad in and of itself, but it's insufficient, particularly given the complexity of the things that we're building and how those things that we're building are situated within a society. And so the opportunity that design and humanism brings is providing a more generative, qualitative, creative, big picture frame and approach to problem-solving to balance that reductive, analytical, quantitative metrics-driven approach that has been so dominant for so long. Something I hadn't actually connected it with until just now as we're talking about, when you have that metrics-driven approach, that leads to businesses so focused on the numbers, they lose sight of the, frankly, societal impact of those numbers, right? So, you know, the big issue with social media is that everything's driving towards engagement. Because that's what they're measuring. And having lost sight of the societal impact of what happens when you have two and a half billion people that you're trying to engage, and not recognizing that the product of that engagement outside of the system is massive societal unrest. Jorge: Which has become evident after the fact, right? Peter: Right. Exactly. But if you had talked to or had any social scientists actively involved in that process, and you had a more humanistic approach involved in that process, you would have likely realized those potential outcomes in the process instead of simply after the fact. Jorge: I've worked mostly as a consultant in my career. I did spend some time internally in an organization, but most of my career I've spent as an external designer who is brought into an organization to help them through some of these challenges. And in that capacity, I've had the opportunity to interact with internal design teams. And one of the things I keep seeing in many of those organizations is that designers are working making either products or services better, but often at a very kind of granular level. And I'm bringing this up because I love what I'm hearing you say about design being kind of the organ of the organization that helps them think more systemically. But sometimes that can be at odds with the way that designers are actually working in organizations. And I'm wondering if you can speak a bit to that. Peter: I agree. By and large, most design in most organizations is seen as part of production, part of delivery. This is the challenge, but the opportunity, with the Trojan horse, right? Design is being brought into these organizations because you need designers to design the interfaces, essentially, of these digital experiences. And that is seen primarily in an output mode, right? The stuff that your users are interacting with, someone needs to design that, let's hire designers. And so it gets very much… I often use the double diamond when talking about this type of work and it's very much second diamond, very much on the execution side, the implementation side. Because that is the obvious value that design brings into business. And I think in many businesses, you're right, that's pretty much the limit of the value that design is bringing. What I would argue though, is there's this potential and more and more companies are expecting that potential of design to have some contribution “upstream.” I talk to companies all the time where they want design to have that seat at the table, to be a peer to product and engineering, to contribute strategically, to the conversation. And so the challenge there though, is often — this is part of the reason why design leadership is so important to me — is that I think we have a general kind of industry-wide shortcoming among our design leaders in terms of understanding the breadth of the influence they can wield and how to wield it. My concern is that many of those design leaders have come up in organizations where design was seen primarily as a production function. And so that's how they're approaching design leadership is just to make production better. And so, there's an opportunity, I believe where design leaders, one, can learn how their practices can have a broader influence. And then two, — and this is actually, I think, an even harder challenge — help those design leaders develop the confidence to assert their perspective at that more kind of executive or strategic level. Right? Because they're often a lone voice in a wilderness, right? That wilderness is heavily analytical, heavily mechanistic. And there are some designers saying, “We've got to listen to users,” or you know, “What about ethics?”, or whatever the thing is that the designer is talking about. And they're often that lone voice. And it can be hard to be that one to stand up and be the one that is — not necessarily getting along with whatever the dominant kind of cultural paradigm is — but I believe… Frankly, I believe it's kind of our duty. I think it's, in an unconscious way, these businesses have realized there's a power to this other way of thinking. That the current models aren't working, that the mechanistic model is running its course. And so, they're seeking other ways of working. So, then they bring in design, and when design starts doing its other way, the initial reaction is going to be one of pushing back because it's weird and uncertain and different. And it's up to the design leader then to manage that transition to help the business not react, not lash out, not reject out of hand, this new way of thinking and then also for that leader to help their team recognize its power and its potential in terms of influencing the organization. And it's really hard. Like, I think design leadership is probably, at least within a product development context, the hardest kind of leadership there is right now. It's easier to be an engineering leader or a product leader, or a data science leader, than it is to be a design leader because of this kind of contradiction or conflict of we want design, but design is different so we're pushing back on design, but then when we push back on it, we're unhappy because design isn't being interesting. Resolving that is this interesting challenge design leaders have. Jorge: You're validating how I see the arc of your career. We've known each other for a long time, and we met through the information architecture community, where — to summarize it really kind of unfairly and at a very high level — it's all about the design of the underlying structures of — at least when we met, at the stage that the discipline was in — was mostly focused on digital experiences. Peter: Web experiences. Jorge: Web experiences, yeah. Peter: Not even software or mobile. Jorge: It was pre-mobile. But that's what we were focused on, right? Like the structures that underlied these experiences. And my sense of your career is that there came a point in your own development where you had this insight that the structures… That you can work on the structure of the thing, or you can work on the structure of the thing that's going to produce the thing. Right? And that's where Org Design for Design Orgs I see basically as a book about the architecture of the organizations that define these architectures. Is that fair? Peter: Sure. Yeah. It's so… Conway's law. Conway's law is an interesting concept in this context, right? Conway's law is that any organization is going to deliver… Whatever it delivers will be a reflection of how it is organized. And oftentimes Conway's law is thought of not as a law, but as a thing to be aware of that you can work around. Right? So, if your company has organized in some way, you have business units, but when you present your org, when you present the company to the world, you don't want your customers to get caught up in the business units. Right? That's often… That has been a role for design to play in the past — web design in particular — is to create this kind of skin, this presentation layer, over the mess that is the company in its presentation to the customers. I actually first was writing about this like literally in 2002 or three there was an essay on the Adaptive Path website called Organization in the Way, where I was talking about how the reason websites don't make sense is because they basically reflect a company's organizational structure. And at that time, I thought the solution was, well, you can keep that organizational structure and the role of the design team is to understand the user and how they are approaching that company and again, create this presentation layer, this interface, this interpretation, so that the user can actually engage with the company meaningfully and not worry about how that company is structured. What I have since come to realize is that Conway's law is a law. That organizations will deliver their value, deliver their services, deliver their experiences, shaped directly by how they are organized. And yes, you might be able to paper over that for some brief period of time, launch a website design that, you know, in the past we would launch these kinds of task-based website designs because customers weren't looking at an enterprise software firm and thinking about the product modules, they had tasks they wanted to solve, so let's do a task-based architecture. And that would last maybe even a year or two, but eventually it would break down because that organizational structure has such power that it would reassert itself in how the company is presented to customers, regardless of whether or not it made sense to the customers. And so, what the true implication of Conway's law is, if you want to deliver a meaningful experience — a sensible experience — to your customers, you have to reorganize your company in a way that makes sense to your customers. That is the only way you're going to solve that problem. Jorge: Yeah. As you're talking about this, I'm thinking that I've experienced that very issue as well in projects where I've been brought in to help an organization, for example, rethink the way that their products are presented on their website. And it seems on the surface to be kind of an information architecture challenge; I've been hired to fix their navigation system or whatever. And then when you start digging into the problem, it turns out that the website and its nav structures are actually a MacGuffin for these conversations that are much more strategic and more challenging that people at a very high level in the organization — for whatever reason — have not been able to articulate except in the context of having something actionable like the website to serve as their meeting ground. Peter: Yeah. What was interesting about the web from an organizational perspective 20 years ago was it was the first time an entire company was being presented in a single unitary canvas, right? Before you would just deal with whatever channel that you were a part of and you know, whether there was a sales channel, a marketing channel, et cetera, and whichever part of the business that made sense to you, and you didn't have to worry about anything else. But with the web, all of that got placed on a single point of entry. And you know, we all dealt with trying to figure out how to design websites for these big companies that now their complexity was being exposed to the users, and the company had never had to deal with that before. I do think you're starting to see some companies grapple with this in a more meaningful sense. They're starting to change how they're organized. Shopify. I'm not a customer of theirs, I don't know if this has been good or bad, right? But Shopify for the longest time was basically organized functionally. You know, product team or an engineering team and a design team and marketing teams, and they would then deliver the products. And then at some point two or three years ago, they decided to — it's not radical — organize by products. But they also identified meaningful product distinctions. Products for merchants in one fashion, products for point of sale products, or whatever it is, right? The product line changed. And so that's now how they organize. They had to reorganize in order to make their company makes sense to their customers, possibly make their company makes sense internally as well. And so, I think you're seeing, you know… I'm doing some work with a bank and they have a set of… So, banks are funny, right? Because they're highly regulated, so that actually limits how they are able to organize. One of the things I've learned in working in financial services is that when a bank offers both checking and savings services as well as credit card services, those have to be treated by the bank as two independent organizations that really shouldn't be interacting with each other for legitimately good regulatory reasons. But as a customer, if you have a checking account with a bank and a credit card with the bank, it can be odd how it's not seamless in engagement. And you're like, “It's the same bank. Why can't I just do it?” And it turns out there's regulatory reasons for that. But what I'm starting to see with in this one bank I'm working with, they have this thing called “missions” and “value streams,” and they're organizing by, basically, tasks. You have a payments team and you have within that payments team; you have a value stream for moving money or a value stream for paying bills, and they're pulling people together in these teams. I'm doing work for a journalism company, news company, I guess you would call it. They talk about journalism; they don't just talk about news. I'm working with a news company, and they also have adopted missions. They have an engagement mission, a growth mission. And these missions are the means by which these companies are pulling together cross-functional teams, but providing an organization that now can make some sense to the customer, right? A customer isn't going to want to navigate the marketing team, the sales team, the product development team, et cetera, et cetera. But a customer, you know, if you are new to this company, you are working… You are basically… Your experience is managed by the growth team as they try to bring you into the fold. If you are an active user, you are now being handed off to the engagement team that keeps you engaged, it introduces you to new experiences, et cetera, et cetera. And so, these companies are looking at ways of creating, internally, at least, some new structures that are orthogonal to the kind of functional structures that better speak to customer experiences because they recognize kind of that Conway's law thing. If what matters is the customer's experience, you have to change your organization to meaningfully deliver on that customer experience. Jorge: I'm guessing that a considerable part of the people listening to us right now are not external consultants but are actually… I don't know if to use the word “affected,” or at least their work is influenced heavily by the type of structures that you're talking about. Peter: Hmm? Yes. Jorge: And I'm wondering if there's any advice or any insights that folks working in organizations can glean from this way of thinking about the work that could help them be more effective. Peter: “Yes” is the short answer. I think particularly designers have — which I'm assuming is the large part of your audience, designers and the design-adjacent — I think are particularly well-suited to have an impact on these internal structures because, as I was suggesting these internal structures should be influenced by an understanding of customers and the journeys they are on. And it's oftentimes and design team working with researchers that are tasked with understanding those customer journeys. And the opportunity, I think, for people internally, is to understand and map these customer journeys. So, do that work. And that, that's not hard to sell. Right? That's a pretty accepted practice now. Forrester's been talking about journey mapping for well over a decade. But I don't think every company has recognized the implications that I was referring to earlier, which is that that customer journey becomes a blueprint for how you reorganize your teams. Now, it might not be their reporting organization, right? That might maintain functional organization. So, you know, your designers will still report up to a Head of Design, and you might have 50 designers reporting into it as part of a single design team. But their day to day work, those designers are spending the bulk of their time and effort in these cross-functional teams that are organized by these journeys. And I think the opportunity is to help drive that organization, drive that conversation around, “Hey, we shouldn't be organized by either function…” Sometimes you get companies organized by platform, right? You have the mobile team versus the web team, you have an iOS team versus an Android tea m. Because that's not how people are experiencing it, right? You want to organize by the nature of how people are experiencing it so that you can deliver value across the customer journey. And you're seeing that more and more. I think we're still at very early days for it. But the opportunity for people listening who are in-house is, one, to know that this shift has occurred. It's not even occurring. The shift has occurred within many companies. And if in your organization, you're not operating in this kind of model that is… In this framework that is modeled after the customer journey, that is something to propose, that is something to continue to agitate for. And the customer journeys that you and your team are creating are that architecture for thinking through this and for organizing in this way. Jorge: Well, that's a great summary, I think. And, I think that those folks should reach out to you. Why don't you tell us where they can do that? Peter: Sure. I'm easy to find. My URL is petermerholz.com. That's my professional URL. I'm on Twitter at @peterme. Those are probably the two best places to find me. You can contact me through either means, through petermerholz.com or through @peterme, my DMs are open. So yeah, that's the easiest way to find me. Jorge: Great. And I believe the book has a website as well, right? Peter: Yes. The book has a website, orgdesignfordesignorgs.com, which also has with it a blog that we update in fits and starts. So, the book came out about three and a half years ago, and we've been blogging about ideas from the book, but as we've had new insights, new thinking, we've been blogging about those ideas. Improved, levels, frameworks, improved portfolio assessment tools, definitions of team leadership. As Kristen and I both do our work, and then teach a workshop based on this, we come up with things to write about. And so, the blog has all the most recent thinking when it comes to organizing your design organization. Jorge: Well, fantastic. I hope that folks visit the site and I'm sure they'll find valuable stuff there. Thank you, Peter, for being on the show. Peter: My pleasure. Thank you, Jorge, for having me.

Mark (here on LinkedIn) talked at the DMSS 2019 and he is a professional outreacher. His presentation was called Building a lean, mean, lead generating machine with outbound prospecting. And he knows how to help others do it. He is the CRO at TaskDrive. We have his whole presentation here: Building a lean, mean, lead generating machine with outbound prospecting from Mark Colgan   Here is the transcript of the talk we had: Mark Colgan: HubSpot is the biggest advocate of inbound marketing, yet they spent over 60% of their budget in the first few years on outbound. Really, the answer is that inbound alone doesn't work, and you need to support it with outbound prospecting or outbound marketing. Intro: This is Time For Marketing. The marketing podcast that will tell you everything you've missed when you didn't attend the marketing conference. Peter: Hello, and welcome to the Time For Marketing podcast. The podcast that brings you marketing conference speakers from all around the world, and takes their presentations, smoosh it up into five minutes, and you have a small package of knowledge. My name is Peter, and I'll be your podcast host. If you would like to check out the previous episodes, timeformarketing.com, or you can also subscribe to our newsletter, and of course find all the links to the iTunes Google podcast, Stitcher, and every else places where you can listen, and review, and rate, and do all of the great things that you do with podcasts. Today with me is Mark Colgan. Mark is the chief revenue officer at TaskDrive. Mark, hello, and welcome to the podcast. Mark: Hey, Peter. Thank you very much for having me. I'm really looking forward to sharing the presentation. Peter: Thank you for being here. Mark, you are a chief revenue officer. What does that mean? Mark: Yes, that's a great question to start with. A chief revenue officer has a few different definitions, but in my understanding and interpretation, it's somebody who aligns the different departments within a business in order to achieve revenue. Those departments I look after at TaskDrive are marketing, sales, customer success, and product. I make sure there's no silos, and I make sure that our customer is first in terms of our priority. We do everything we can to increase the quality that the customer has with us, which helps us reduce churn, and also helps us increase new customers through the sales and marketing activities too. Peter: What is TaskDrive? What are you doing? Mark: Good question. TaskDrive is a service-based business. Our mission is to help b2b sales and marketing teams focus on high-value activities. We do that by offering an outsourced lead generation and data enrichment service. We help companies build new lists of prospects. We also help them enrich existing datas, then we also help companies that sell into enterprise with their account-based insights to helping them expand their reach and increasing their sales velocity by giving them a detailed view of the stakeholders within the decision making process. Peter: This was a complicated way to say you help companies with their prospects, with their leads, is that right? Mark: Yes, but it's not just leads because we help them-- A lot of companies are faced with the fact that they have a lot of data that they've amassed over the last few years which has gone fairly out of date, so we also help them with data enrichment. Yes, one of the use cases is lead generation for prospecting. Peter: Your presentation comes from the Digital Marketing Skillshare Conference that is organized every year in Bali. You were there this year. How was the conference? Mark: Yes, it was fantastic. A really great conference. They originally started out with an SEO focus but over the last few years, have broadened that out to other tracks. There's people talking about marketing, pay-per-click advertising, as well as email marketing. I covered the outbound sales and prospecting through the presentation there. Peter: What was your favorite presentation at Bali? Is there one? Mark: I personally really enjoyed Mark Webster's presentation. He's from Authority Hacker, and he spoke about building and selling online courses, or online IP, basically, your knowledge as a personal interest of mine. I really enjoyed that talk and got a chance to speak with Mark after the event as well. Peter: Of course, Mark is a big podcaster in the marketing world. I think we should go directly to the presentation. Mark, you spoke on building a lean mean lead generating machine with outbound prospecting. Here are your five minutes. Tell us what your presentation was about? Mark: Thank you for having open mic, Peter. This presentation was actually around 50 minutes, so I'm going to do my best to bring everything into 5 minutes. I spoke about outbound prospecting, and throughout the presentation, I covered a number of different sections. I started out with what outbound prospecting is, what the four stages of building a lead generating machine is, how you can then scale that outbound prospecting. Then I gave some bonus tips and additional reading, which are all in the slides for those who are listening. I'll start with outbound prospecting. It really it's a direct channel where you can identify and target customers and directly reach out to them, and introduce them to your company its products and services. The goal of this is to start a conversation, and it's also to position yourself as a trusted adviser. You're not going to sell- especially in the b2b space, you're not going to sell directly to consumers in a cold email, so you need to remember that. Also, you need to remember that it's just one lead generation strategy, so you've got search engine optimization, social media events, webinars, side projects. Outbound prospecting just fits into your lead gen strategy. It's not the be-all and end-all. It's part of the sales process. It's the beginning part because once you generate leads, you then need to convert those leads by sales calls, or from demos, or free trials, and close them into paying customers, and then you need to fulfill those needs. Fulfill those customers and deliver the value that you promised, nurture those customers, and ensure they're successful, and hopefully, they become advocates of your business. Outbound prospecting works for most companies who have achieved product-market fit. They have an average order value of over a thousand dollars per year, and you can also scale the delivery of your service or product. It's really important to distinguish those. Also, as we approach 2020, there's a couple of things that I believe personally you need to do in order to succeed with the outbound prospecting. These are, you have to come from a attitude of offering value and giving without expecting anything in return. You need to understand the buyer's journey of awareness consideration of the decision, and people within your prospects are going to be at different levels of that journey. Also, only 3% of your market are actively buying at any one time, so that means 97% of people aren't looking to buy right now. If you're selling and pitching to a hundred people, only 3 are actively looking and 97 aren't. You need to make sure that what you're sending in your messaging is building value, and position yourself as a trusted advisor, and not just sending a sales pitch. For the sake of time, I broke down the lead generation machine into four different steps. I'll just go through those in a bit more detail. The four steps are planning, research, message, and launch. Planning really comes down to understanding who you're trying to target with your ideal customer profile, as well as the individuals within those companies. Those are your buyer personas. The best way to create these is to look at your existing customers and any sales or prospects in the funnel and just identify what they have in common. What pain points do they share, what characteristic characteristics they share as a company? You then need to move on to understanding what their pain points are, what problems are they trying to achieve or overcome from a account level as well as a personal level. In their role, what are they trying to overcome? Then you want to split out your ideal customer profiles and buyer personas into different campaigns. That might be via location, by industry, by job titles or seniority. Then you also need to prepare your email for outreach. One of the most important things to do is not use your main domain to send out these emails because you run the risk of hitting the spam traps, and then blocking your email deliverability in the future. You also need to research, spend a lot of time personalizing the outreach, so you can research on an individual persona. On an account level, make sure that your outreach is personalized, and you can use merge tags for the outreach. You put those things that you find in your research into the emails which builds relevance with the individual, and also it encourages them to reply. You then need to find those leads. There's a number of places you can look at. LinkedIn, you can go to directories, you got to the podcast, you could use paid databases like-- discover. There are hundreds of different sources for the data, but you'll only be able to know where they are when you've done your ideal customer profile and buyer persona research. Again, skipping through quite a lot here [chuckles] to try and get it into five minutes. Then we're onto your messaging. Here, you need to understand what your strategy for cadence is. That is, how many touchpoints, how many times are you going to try and attempt to contact people, over which media or channels, what the duration of the outreach is going to be, how much time in-between each of the messages, and what that content is. There's a number of ways to select media channels. The easiest way is the cheaper or smaller. The shorter the cell cycle is, the less effort you want to put in. The more longer the cell cycle is, and the more expensive your product is. You'll want to use channels such as Direct Mail, personalized video, and personalized experiences because the effort is worth the reward. Then the final element after you've got the messaging is to-- Sorry, then the messaging comes on to these four elements of the cold email. The subject line whose job it is to get the email opened. An opening sentence, which shows that you've done your research and it's a relevant email or message for the person who's received it to read. The main body, which connects your opening sentence to the value proposition that you offer. Then a call to action. The simplest call to action can be, "Would you be interested in finding out more?" The last thing you need to think about is the launch. This is where you select the right technology that you can use to send out these emails. The most simple technologies for email outreach where it's just email, you could use outreach.io, Lemlist, Amplemarket, or Reply.io. If you're combining your outreach with other channels, like direct mail, phone calls, and voicemails, you might want to use a tool like SalesLoft or outreach.io. Once you have that technology in place, you just need to set up your outbound sequence. All of the tools out there will help you do this. What you can typically expect is if you're doing this right, you can get an open rate of 60%. A reply rate of 45%, a conversion rate of 20%. If you're good at closing those deals, you want to be aiming for 50% close one. Obviously, you want to aim for 100%, but it won't always happen. That really is the key to building a lean mean lead generating machine and how you scale this is that you learn, you iterate, and you repeat. Once you've effectively done this for one fiscal or one campaign, you can launch multiple campaigns at a time and add more leads to the top of the funnel. Peter: All right. Thank you, Mark. A couple of questions. Outbound versus inbound prospecting. I feel that we're mostly, in the last couple of years talking about inbound. What is the difference and even more important, how should people decide which of those two channels should be more important for them? Mark: Great question and one that I like to usually back up with a fact which is escaping me right now. HubSpot is the biggest advocate of inbound marketing, yet they spent over 60% of their budget in the first few years on outbound. Really, the answer is that inbound alone doesn't work and you need to support it with outbound prospecting or outbound marketing. That's really key. I think when it comes to inbound, you're relying on the fact that your content is going to be picked up. You've got the right keywords and you've got the right audience segmentation that they're going to read your content and then convert or contact you. `Whereas what you can do with outbound prospecting is because you know who an ideal customer is, and you know the particular triggers and signals that you look for or you can see when somebody is right for you. Say for example, one of your buyer personas has started a new role and you offer a product or service that would help that person in their new role. You could actually reach out to them at the time where they're starting a new role with a bit of content or with some value that you can share with them to start the conversation. That you can't really do with inbound because you're not controlling the process, whereas with outbound, you can control the start and the initiation of a conversation. Peter: All right, you said that outbound is for companies whose customer value per year is around $1,000. How did you come to that number? Why? Mark: It's a rough rule of thumb. I'm not saying it wouldn't work for customers who have a smaller lifetime value, but the more the better. The reason being is that there's often costs associated from a tools and technology process. Some of these tools can cost 70 or even hundreds of dollars per month, and that's to send the emails out. You need to spend time doing the research. You also need to verify the research and you probably want somebody doing it for you because it may not be the best use of your time as a founder or even as a marketing or sales director. You've also got to be prepared to play the long game because not everybody converts on the first message. Often you see that sequences have over 30 touchpoints. In addition, because email alone may not work, you might need to include phone calls and voicemails, videos and direct mail. There's just a lot more labor costs in it. If your unit economics don't work out, it may cost you more to acquire a customer than it does if your average order value is low. Peter: Do you have any tricks to write email subjects? Mark: Yes. I would say the best subjects are short. They invoke curiosity, you could potentially use humor, definitely personalize with an account name, the company name or the person's first name. Those would be my main tips. Also, I shared in the presentation on the day that the best performing subject line for open rates is, I've got your wife. That will always get a lot of opens,- [laughter] Mark: -but you will have a lot of angry and annoyed people because you've tricked them. Never trick, be honest, be sincere. Use humor only if it's right with you and your audience. Some audiences you'll be able to get away with more humor than others. Peter: I like that idea of not using the main domain for the email outreach, could you briefly speak about that, why and how that works? Mark: Yes, sure. The best practice really is to pick a domain which isn't your main one. Let's say that your domain is companyname.com. Try and find a domain which is very similar, but it's .io or .co or whatever variation it may be or you might want to say getcompanyname.com. What you want to do is, even if you're doing everything right, you're taking time to research your ideal customer profiles and understand your buyer personas, you really understand their pain point and you have a fantastic product or service that can solve their problem and you're not spamming people and you're sending small volumes out at a time. You've warmed up your domain, you can still get triggered as spam. You can do everything right, but send the message to somebody on the wrong day and they mark you as spam. Also, if you're not personalizing your outreach and you're taking a very template shotgun approach, you will also be sending the same message out over and over again. That's what the spam filters are looking out for and it reduces your chances of delivering emails in the future. The main reason why we say to use a spare domain is because whilst you be able to do the right things, you still might be marked as spam on your cold email outreach domain which means that it can affect the deliverability of your main domain if you're not using a separate one. That means that your internal emails to each other, to your team members, may not even be delivered because you've been marked as spam so much. I've seen personally, companies who have really struggled with this in the past. Peter: All right. One last question, everyone who is from the European Union and you being from the UK, still count. They would ask, of course, how does that work with the privacy laws with GDPR and others? Mark: What I'd always, first of all, is to say get professional legal advice. This isn't legal advice, but if you can find the email address and it's publicly available and you have legitimate interest to message them, then you should be okay in using their email address to send. Also, you could do the research on LinkedIn and connect with individuals on LinkedIn and not even have to do email for the outbound prospecting. That's what I see some of our European clients doing with the data that they're using. However, the majority of our customers are in the US and not affected with the same privacy laws. Peter: All right. That was very very interesting and a lot of great info. We will be able to attach your presentation to the podcast notes so that everyone can go into to check out for the whole presentation. Is that right? Mark: Excellent, yes, that's perfectly fine. Peter: Excellent. All right, Mark. What are your future conference plans and where can people find you on conferences or where can people contact you online if they would like to talk about everything that you do? Mark: Great question. We're planning our 2020 conference plans at the moment. There's still a bit TBC. I'll certainly be speaking on more podcasts and online summits, but if you'd like to speak to me in the meantime, the best place to find me is on LinkedIn, where you can search for Mark Colgan, that's C-O-L-G-A-N or you can email me at mark@taskdrive.com. Peter: All right, and I will, of course, add all of those links to the show notes so if you're listening to just open your podcast app and find all of the links to Mark. Mark, thank you again for being on the podcast. Have a great day enjoying the sun and hope to see you around. Mark: Thank you very much, Peter. It's been great. Thank you. Peter: Bye-bye.

I've met Rebecca (Linkedin) at the smind conference in Ljubljana Slovenia and I really enjoyed her presentation. She and the company she works for, look at e-commerce websites and learn from what works and what does not work (if nothing else, go and check out the FREE blog). The presentation has a couple of great ideas on how to minimize checkout abandonment. Here is the link for the mobile cheat sheet. The transcript of the podcast: Rebecca: 23% of users in one of our studies cited that a too long or complicated checkout process was a reason for abandoning the site. [music] Peter Mesarec: This is Time4Marketing, the marketing podcast that will tell you everything you've missed when you didn't attend the marketing conference. Hello, and welcome to the Time4Marketing Podcast, the podcast that brings you the best speakers from marketing conferences all around the world. My name is Peter and I'll be your host today for the episode number 29 as we're slowly ending the 2019 year, the second year of this podcast. Before I introduce you to an excellent guest that we have tonight, please go and subscribe to the podcast if you like it, and of course, rate the podcast in your favorite podcast listening app. We now have a website, it's called time4marketing.com. The number four is a number. That sounds very logical. On the web page, you can also subscribe to the newsletter so we'd send you interesting information about the podcast and marketing conference. Now, we go to our today's guests. We have with us-, I'm very glad to have Rebecca Hugo. Hello. Rebecca Hugo: Hello. Thank you for having me, Peter. Peter: Very glad that you are here today. I saw you speaking at the Slovenian Conference e-Commerce Day sMind conference. You are the UX auditor at Baymard Institute. What is it, what do you do and what do you do there? Rebecca: Baymard Institute are an independent usability research company. We specialize in helping other sites improve their e-commerce givings to their users. We do all of independent research. From there, we distill a lot of our findings. We found, I think it's 11,000 I think is our current number of individual issues that all users have come across when they're testing various sites across all industries. From there, we distill those down into-- We're over 750 guidelines at the moment. The number's still growing because we have a couple of research studies on at the moment. Those guidelines look to the design patterns that either positively or negatively are reacted to by the user. That is anything from a product detail page layout, to how filtering options are presented to the user, to how the checkout is or is not optimized, depending on the site. From there, my role as a UX auditor, our clients will come to us and say, "Could you look at our site?" Basically orders us, "Let us know what we are or are not doing well." I suppose it's almost like taking your car in for a service. It's, "Your oil is a little bit low, your windscreen wipers need tightening up, but the leather in your seats are fantastic." We'll do a similar thing with the order. It can be anything from just looking at a single section, doing the entire site, or even doing prototypes. It gets really quite exciting in an odd way, looking at how different industries present essentially the exact same information to their users and also the nuances thereof in those instances to really create a great experience for that user. Peter: I do a lot of SEO audits. When I begin my SEO audit, there's always the one thing that I'm going to go and check if it's done right, that's the canonicals and the language alternates. When you start such an audit, you probably have a workflow that you have to go through, but what is the one thing that you think that companies are forgetting about and shouldn't be forgetting about? Rebecca: That is a ridiculously hard question, Peter. [chuckles] It's so specific. Because depending on the industry for a start, so if you're looking at a gifting website, one of the core aspects of that is going to be wildly different from a heavy text-back website or anything. For example, selling a laptop or even a fridge, mass merchants and so on. One thing we can fairly consistently find that is still an issue with all the sites that we look at is their search. Their search is predominantly quite poor. That's anything from the varying types of search, your exact search, your feature search, you have slang, you have abbreviation, you've got thematic. All of these aspects across the board, the search for majority of e-commerce sites is still surprisingly weak. There are a great deal of users who just prefer to use search. Knowing that if your search is particularly weak, then not having a particularly good category taxonomy to back that up, it can cause just so many issues for that user. It's still consistently interesting to find and look at what the search landscape looks across the majority of sites regardless of industry. Peter: One of the SEOs on my LinkedIn feed was showing a couple of examples of, I believe UK e-commerce retailers who had no results when he searched for Black Friday on Friday. It seems that search is something that people are forgetting about or just using the default settings over whatever their search is. This is something that we often see. Very right. I've mentioned that I've invited you for this podcast because you had a very interesting presentation at the Slovenian sMind Conference. That was called the 6 Findings from Testing the World’s Leading Checkout Flows. Before we go to your presentation, how is-- That's a weird question because I live in Ljubljana. How was Ljubljana and how was the conference for you? Rebecca: Ljubljana was-- It was beautiful. I sadly didn't get as much an opportunity as probably deserving of such a beautiful city to really look around it. One of the representatives from e-commerce sMind was so-- Sorry. e-commerce-- I can't even say it now. Shopper's Mind e-Commerce Day was kind enough to actually take myself and another speaker around a little bit one of the evenings, so we did get to see some parts of it. It's such a beautiful city. I would really like to visit again. The day itself was great. The atmosphere was fantastic. Everyone was so kind. It was wonderful having just people being comfortable enough to come to you for feedback for a start. You never know how these go unless someone actually tells you exactly what they have or have not been able to take away, any improvements and so on. It was a lovely crowd. It was really well put together. It's a real testament to what Ljubljana, Slovenia, and obviously the Croatia side of things as well and what the company has been putting together. I felt very touched to be able to have the opportunity to come and speak. Peter: Excellent. All right. Let's go to your presentation. 6 Findings from Testing the World’s Leading Checkout Flows. Rebecca, here are your five minutes. Rebecca: Okay. Obviously, the checkout is such an integral part of any e-commerce store. If you can't purchase online, it's not really e-commerce. Having a robust checkout that's really going to perform well for a user is so important. What we really found over a lot of our data studies was that 70% of users who put something in their cart would end up abandoning it. That's two-thirds of users we're going through all the trouble of finding a product that they liked, added it to their cart, but they'd still ultimately not purchase it. If you took away all of those users who were simply not ready to purchase, which is completely fair, there's only so much that a site can do about that, but when you look at the reasons that were left, so many of them could be improved with relatively simple checkout optimization. Some of the core things that we were particularly interested in, one of which is checkout length. 23% of users in one of our studies cited that a too long or complicated checkout process was a reason for abandoning the site during a checkout process during their checkout flow. Our most recent 2019 checkout UX benchmark, which is something that Baymard does, we look at 60 top-grossing US and European sites and use those to take a look at what the landscape looks like for e-commerce UX, we found that the average e-commerce site in 2019 has 12.8 form fields within their checkout flow. This may not seem like a lot, but considering you could actually essentially half that number, sites could get that number down to six to eight form fields for a guest checkout. 12.8 is actually quite a lot. There's such a disproportionate amount of time that users will spend with any open-text form field. Increasing time, causing issues, causing errors, that being able to minimize the amount of form fields, essentially the amount of tasks a user has to do can really create an improved performance and improve experience for the user. The other thing that we found really quite fascinating, at least I know that I did, was the perception of site security. Because the perception of site security can be just as, if not even more impactful than the actual site security that is present. 17% of users in the same survey, they abandon the checkout process because they just didn't trust the site with their card information. Users, we found we're believing that part of a page, so if you feel the box and area in [unintelligible 00:10:46] were more secure than other parts. Even though from a technical standpoint this doesn't make sense, the page is either encrypted or not, the fact that we were aware of this fact from our users, we can then leverage this misconception. Creating a visual robustness, leveraging the importance of site seals, and also what sites seals are more beneficial. A fascinating thing, we've found that some large companies were not given the same weight as just a simple padlock because that's something that users recognize. Knowing about these particular instances and how users react to that information can be so powerful in how we're able to create a comforting and a secure experience, as well as a good experience for our users. Finally, just a simple factor of mobile keyboard optimization. There are still issues across so many sites that are simply just not optimizing the mobile keyboard for their users during the checkout, and with the occasional even dire consequence. In fact, granted that dire is quite a drastic term, but that is exactly what it feels like for a user who doesn't receive their package. Anything from it needing to be for a big event or a wedding or a birthday, not receiving something that you're so looking forward to can be really quite detrimental. We're finding that even something as simple as not disabling the autocorrect feature for fields that don't benefit from it, name or address fields, that can result in the dire consequence of not receiving a package. It's something essentially simple. Our data is showing that 79% of mobile sites are not disabling autocorrect for those fields. On top of that, it's just needless friction from not finding or utilizing the optimized keyboards for email addresses, telephone numbers, credit cards and so on, the alphanumeric, numberic, the @ symbol and so on. Even on top of that, doing it consistently. 25% of mobile sites weren't consistently evoking optimized keyboard. For example, credit card came out with numeric, fine. As soon as you entered security code, it'd go back to alpha. Again, it just really comes down to this needless friction. When the companies really pay attention to that and how you can alleviate it, it can just make such a difference to the site. Peter: Thank you. I have a couple of questions coming here. I've listened to your presentation and the idea of thinking about the number of fields and the checkout compared to the idea of the number of steps for the checkout was something that was enlightening for me. I was like, "How did I ever not think about that?" Of course, I went home and started minimizing the number of fields on my website. I came down to, I think what was six fields. The question that I had then while watching the data coming in was, "Did I go too far?" I would like to hear your thoughts about that. I feel that customers are a bit used to having a bit bigger number of fields where the post number and the city are two different fields, and maybe name and surname are two different fields. I somehow felt that people are now misunderstanding my checkout fields. Is this something that you also see in your tests? Rebecca: Things like it will come up occasionally. It's part of the reason for a good placeholder text, good tooltips. Whenever a user does encounter something, not unusual, but something they're not necessarily used to, it can immediately be a little bit jarring. Microcopy is such an important aspect, especially within the checkout. I think a lot of sites don't necessarily pay attention to their microcopy the way that they should. There's a reason why UX copywriters are becoming such a big career choice within our industry. I think it's so important and something that's just not paid attention to the way that it should. There are multiple reasons for anything, [chuckles] sadly. If users are used to seeing 12, suddenly seeing 6, it can be jarring. That's not to say that it's a bad experience because it's jarring, it's just a new experience. There will always be a little bit of habituation time, but it's knowing that what you're able to actually offer the user is that improved experience. Bolstering the microcopy, bolstering the placeholder text, bolstering the tooltips if appropriate. It's also just determining what is actually useful for your particular site. If your site is niche in any way, six to eight is the average for "a typical e-commerce site". It's ensuring that you don't overly assume anything to be typical. If you're a gift predominant site, then changing your address fields or matching your billing to shipping address by default isn't immediately beneficial. If you've got something very important for an industrial site, then yes, you might need company details over just having a standard address. That is the nature of heuristics, heuristics are a rule of thumb. We are finding that, more often than not, these are the best situations to be and these are the best patterns to follow. However, never ignore the niche that you're in if you happen to be in a niche. Peter: The workflow is go and check out the expert findings that you have on your website, then change it on your website, but still measure the impact and see if it can be directly used on your website or not. Rebecca: Yes, in a great deal. Not only look at we're suggesting but why we're suggesting it. With all of our data, we try and back up with what the issue is, why it is an issue, so what we're seeing during all of our research to lead us to the conclusion that X is happening, therefore implement Y should alleviate. Because the other side of it, and it's something that we will do during auditing is mark something as issue resolved. The site may not necessarily be doing what we have specifically recommended, but they are circumventing the issue through another implementation. It's bearing that level in mind as well, whether what we're suggesting of the 774, 767? We'll eventually keep track of that number. There will be a great deal of these that just simply won't be applicable to your industry or to your site. There's always going to be a little bit of a pinch of salt because that's the nature of heuristics, but that's not to say don't pay attention to what we have found. Peter: Especially in e-commerce sites that feel that search engine optimization is important for them, we can usually see people starting to add category descriptions to their category landing pages. Whenever people start adding that to their e-commerce sites, the question comes up, should we have content above the products or should we have the content below the product? Should we have the content hidden and "read more" button or should we not? Do have any data on how that content can influence people coming to the category pages? Rebecca: Our data at the moment and our research findings, we don't have anything specific with category descriptions. What we do find is what that page looks like. For example, the filters on the actual main list are out of line, or if something looks too much like an advertisement or a promotion rather than actual benefit or actual product, it can mislead or distract users the same way that banner blindness will just mean that they pay absolutely no attention to it. With a lot of the information, and UX can often stand not in the way of SEO, but they're not always aligned with their needs quite often, that it's very important to essentially just understand what is the user needing to get from that page. Anything that a site therefore needs to do from a company perspective, is it stopping that user being able to do the fundamental task that they're looking for? If that is needing to filter and needing to understand the amount of products on a page, needing to create a visual comparison against products. Whatever the size or company needs to add from, again, a company perspective, as long as it doesn't stop the user being able to complete their task, then it really is a design preference. Anything too large that pushes down the content of the page-- Because many users, they're are not adverse to scrolling when they've determined a purpose, so going through, say 100 products on a visual push site like apparel, that's fine. Users are quite accustomed to that. If it's taking them a disproportionate amount of time to understand what the page is actually doing or selling them, then that could be off-putting. If that category description is particularly long and showing that above the fold, then that could possibly-- Again, we don't have any hardcore data to say it will, but that could pause the user or hinder the user from being able to understand exactly what it is and what is the page they've landed on. Peter: All right. You spoke briefly about the mobile keyword optimization. I'll just add the link to you. If I remember correctly, you have a page where you gave examples of how mobile fields should be optimized on your Baymard website, is that right? Rebecca: Yes, we do. It's on our little cheat sheet. You can just find all of the code snippets and the attributes to establish and actually implement the best way to optimize these keywords. Some of them like card filled for example, they don't have a direct code phrase as it were to trigger numeric, you have to do it slightly more manually. Peter: All right. Excellent. Rebecca, I think that's it. Where can people find you? Do you have conference plans? What are the social networks where people can find you and your company? Rebecca: You can find us on LinkedIn. You can search for Baymard Institute and you can search for myself, Rebecca Hugo on LinkedIn if that's your prerogative. At the moment, we don't have any specific conference plans for Europe, but if you are interested in getting any of us in the company to speak, please don't hesitate to be in contact. If not, we've also got Twitter. Baymard Institute, we're also on Twitter. We love a bit of a chat. You're more than welcome to contact us there and we look forward to speaking with anyone. Peter: All right. Excellent. Rebecca, thank you very much for being on the podcast and talking about the UX of e-shops. Next time you're in Ljubljana, we definitely can meet and [inaudible 00:22:31]. Rebecca: Fantastic. Thank you so much for having me today, Peter. Peter: Have a great day. Rebecca: You, too. Peter: Bye.

Aira Workshop on Employment, Education, and Aira as a Reasonable Accommodation. Seeing AI Developer Joins the AI Team at Aira! Full Transcript Below Blind Abilities continues its coverage of the NFB 2018 National Convention from Orlando Florida with this presentation of the Aira workshop on the subject of education, students and employment. Aira team members, Michael Hingson and Patrick Lane present a detailed discussion of how the Aira service can be used by students, both in school and transitioning into the workplace, by Explorers seeking employment, and while actually on the job as a reasonable accommodation. Get an in-depth peek at how Aira Agents are trained and how they find their passion for describing tasks and experiences for Aira Explorers. Hear a live demonstration of a real call to an Aira Agent using the new Horizon glasses and get updates on what has been going on with Aira since the convention ended in July. This NFB 2018 blind Abilities podcast is brought to you by Aira. You can check them out and subscribe to the Aira service on the web, at: www.Aira.IO special thanks to Patrick Lane for his awesome original guitar music. Thanks for Listening! You can follow Blind Abilities on Twitter @BlindAbilities On the web at www.BlindAbilities.com Send us an email Get the Free Blind Abilities App on the App Store. Full Transcript: Pete Lane: Hi folks, this is Pete Lane welcome back to Blind Abilities. As you know Blind Abilities was in Orlando at the NFB 2018 National Convention. Our own Jeff Thompson attended an Aira workshop on the topic of education, students, and employment. In this workshop, we hear about how Aira can fit the needs of students as they attend college and transition into the workforce. We hear about how Aira can be free for those explorers who are looking for jobs, and we hear about how the Aira service can be a reasonable accommodation and can perform so many tasks for workers on the job. Aira staff members Michael Hingson and Patrick Lane present this workshop courtesy of Aira. Before we join Michael and Patrick just a quick announcement. We have a new addition to the Aira team, Anirudh Koul, founder of Seeing AI and former senior data scientist with Microsoft has joined the Aira team as the head of artificial intelligence and research. We welcome him to the Aira staff. Without further adieu let's join Michael Hingson and Patrick Lane from the Aira workshop on education, students, and employment from the NFB 2018 National Convention in Orlando, Fl. Michael Hingson: I'd like to welcome you all to our seminar today. This is the first of three that Aira will be conducting. This particular one is gonna be on education, employment, students, people in the workplace, employers and employees and our intent is to set the stage for what Aira offers and can bring to you in terms of how it can benefit you in any of those categories. So our intent is to really give you a good idea of what Aira is, what it isn't and how you can use it. I am Mike Hingson, I am the director of Aira explorer special projects and we have a live agent on the stage, why don't you introduce yourself.   Patrick Lane: Hey everybody my names Patrick Lane, I am currently an agent analyst here with Aira. I've been an agent with Aira for coming up on two years now. So, I've gotten to see Aira used in all of the specific cases that Mike just mentioned many, many different times in different ways. Michael Hingson: One of my favorite Aira stories is that in Patrick's early days, I happened to call him about 7:00 in the morning California time because I needed to put a laundry cart together that we had gotten in the email. And as the Chinese are learning from Ikea, the instructions were all pictorial there were no text pieces to the instructions at all. So I called, got Patrick and we put it together in a half hour. And that's as good as it gets because that really is what Aira is about. Michael Hingson: Aira if you look at Aira in the general terms of what it is, Aira is an information source. Aira is a way that you can get any visual information that you otherwise would not have access to. When I talk to a lot of people about Aira, they think about the fact that oh well I really have good travel skills so I don't need it or I've always got sighted people with me so I don't have that problem. Let's deal with that in terms of a job. I'm on the job, I'm using JAWS and suddenly the computer quits working. Now, where do I go to get my sighted assistance? I'm in the office, I've got to go interrupt somebody else to get them to come and look at the screen, tell me what the error screen is or of course the infamous blue screen of death. In any case, I have to go find someone. Michael Hingson: Why should I have to do that today? Because there is a way to do that on my own, namely using Aira. I can use Aira to contact an agent, the agent can look at the screen, see an error code and if I can't easily move my cursor to where it needs to go, it's possible that I can even enter into a tandem or two-way session using TeamViewer or some other technology with the agent. That might be a little harder with JAWS not talking but for a lot of different things that I do where there is an inaccessible webpage or something that isn't talking the way it should, I can interact with an agent and get their assistance both in terms of actually having a session, a two-way communication session or at least getting information described. Michael Hingson: If I am an employee and I want to go to lunch, lets say I am in sales and I want to take people somewhere for lunch for sales, I can more quickly use an Aira agent to research possible restaurants if I don't really know all the options or when I get to the restaurant or going to the restaurant using an agents help to do all of that. Aira gives me the opportunity to get anything that I need that I don't otherwise have access to because it's visual. It is that simple, it is that general and I urge people to look at Aira in that way. Michael Hingson: Don't limit yourself to looking at it as a travel device, don't look at it as something that's gonna diminish your skills, don't look at it as something that is anything other than what it is, an information source. And all of us no matter how good our cane skills are, no matter how good our dog skills are, can benefit by having access to Aira because Aira is the way that I can get more information to better tell my dog where I want to go or interact with traveling with my cane. Michael Hingson: Let's talk about students and Aira. As a student, Aira offers an incredible amount of opportunities for you to be able to more independently do things than you otherwise would be able to. The most common thing that we as blind people have to do as students is to read material that otherwise is inaccessible to us. If the average reader is paid, lets say $15 an hour, we an unlimited plan for Aira that's $330 that exists today. Things are gonna change but let's just use what we have today. $330 is equivalent to 22 hours of reading time at $15 an hour. Michael Hingson: I'm submitting that Aira is cheaper than hiring readers. Any office for students with disabilities will save a heck of a lot of money if they independently allow students to use Aira and they pay for the Aira service. Aira will allow me to read when I want to read, where I want to read, and essentially how I want to read. There are incredible examples of different ways that students have used Aira in libraries, have used Aira in the classroom to access the material that a professor is writing on a board or is displaying on a power point presentation. An Aira agent can be describing that to a student who uses Aira plugged into earphones so that they can hear what's going on while the instructor is doing what they do. Never in any way interfering with the class and more important not demanding any change in the methodology that the professor uses to do what they have to do. So, I don't need the professor to do something different for me when I'm using Aira. It frees me up to perhaps better take notes. It opens up an incredible world. Michael Hingson: Of course, I can use Aira to travel around a campus, learn where things are and go off campus and do all the things that I might otherwise do that any other student would do. So, Aira gives you that flexibility that we have never had as students and Aira makes it available in a way that is affordable by any definition to any department of rehabilitation or any office for students with disabilities on a college campus. Both of whom ought to be providing Aira in one way or another because it will make me a better student in theory, if I study and it will also then make me a more employable person. Because as I graduate from school, I'm gonna be going out and I'm gonna be looking for a job. Michael Hingson: While I'm at school, I talked about the fact that we do have departments of rehabilitation starting to look at Aira and some who have signed Aira up and are paying for those services. Some offices for students with disabilities are doing it. But Aira also has another program and this is the second year in a row that it has existed, it's called back to school. Aira will be sponsoring some 500 students for a full year of Aira use. You can apply by going to aira.io/backtoschool, where you can sign up for Aira and once chosen then you'll get Aira with a 400 minute a month plan, I believe is the plan that we're using. Julenna is that right? Are you here?   Julenna: Yes, that's correct. Michael Hingson: By the way, Julenna in the back right is the person who's in charge of back to school so, if you're a student and you want Aira, I would be really nice to Julenna just say it. But Aira with back to school means that you will have without any expense from the college or the department of rehabilitation access to Aira. You can apply for that today. And I urge any students in the room to do that. Michael Hingson: Aira uses smart glasses, glasses that contain a camera that transmits images directly to an agent. Agents are hired by Aira, they are paid by Aira. They're hired because they have demonstrated an aptitude to be able to describe and then after they are hired, they go through a significant training period. And once they are trained they go out and start acting as agents in describing things for people who happen to be blind. Aira does not tell you what to do. Aira will not, for example, tell you cross the street. Aira agents may tell you they don't see cars coming if you ask. Aira agents may tell you that the light has turned green, Aira agents will describe an intersection so that you can cross it with full knowledge of what the intersection looks like but Aira's not gonna tell you to cross the street, that's your job because you have the cane or dog skills that you need in order to make the right decisions and cross the street. Aira will give you the information that you need. Likewise, on the job, Aira will do the same thing.   Patrick Lane: The agents are not here to teach, and we're not here to tell you a situation is safe. We're here to provide you instant, equal access to information. So, we'll provide you all the information that you need to be more comfortable and know more about your surroundings to paint that rich picture of your environment so you are aware of everything that's around you. The agents are able to have a conversation with you, they can tailor the amount of information and deliver it in a way that you prefer. So we make things as easy to understand as possible. We'll deliver information about as Mike was mentioning intersections, we'll tell you the name of the intersection, the size, and shape of the intersection, whether or not there's traffic signals, stop signs, pedestrian signals, crosswalks present. We give you all the information that you need but we're never here to replace your o & m stills, we're never here to replace your cane or your dog and we're never here to tell you that you are safe or unsafe.   Patrick Lane: We just provide you all the information that you need, even if it's simply completing a task that you've completed a million times in the past. We might be able to provide a different sense of independence while doing that task or a different type of enjoyment. Not only can it be used for navigation but we are here to provide all of the information that you need about pretty much any task that you might have in mind. We can help you with online tasks, we can help you planning trips, making online purchases, helping with different types of inaccessible websites. For instance, if you're a student and you do online courses and Blackboard's not cooperating, we read you about the information that you need for your schoolwork for any upcoming assignments, any kind of printouts that are passed out through classes.   Patrick Lane: So, just consider us as basically an OnStar for those are blind or low vision. We're not here just to point a camera at something and tell you what you're describing. We are a full service. Our agents are very highly trained and they're very dedicated and extremely patient. We are amazing problem solvers, we're great at troubleshooting. The agents will find the information that you need at all costs. It's situations like that. I've looked up YouTube videos and gone through the entire process. Basically what an agent can do is up to you. Our explorers are called explorers because they are creative in the way that they use our service. They go out there and they test our service to the limits and show us what we're capable of and let us know where we make changes and at this point from my first day till now, it's completely different. Our company is growing exponentially, our technology is amazingly consistent and our agents are there to work as a team with you to complete any task it is that you want to do. Be creative whatever you think of that's what Aira is here for. Michael Hingson: So you go off, and you graduate and then you go looking for a job. The first thing you should be aware of if you happen to be an Aira explorer is that we have an Aira access network for jobs. A job access network. Whatever you want to call it to stick it in your memory. If you are doing anything relating to getting a job at all, whether it's writing a resume, writing a cover letter, making sure everything is formatted, getting dressed to go to a job interview, ladies putting on makeup, anything at all related to getting a job, that time is automatically free to you. Michael Hingson: So for any Aira explorer doing anything relating to getting a job is free. We are saying at Aira, we want to take that unemployment rate from 70% unemployment rate among blind people down to 7%, which would be cool. And Aira is trying to help to make that happen by making it possible for you as an explorer to have access to the tools at no additional charge to get that job. What does it mean though as far as getting a job and where does Aira fit into that? Michael Hingson: The way Aira fits in is really pretty simple. Aira by any definition of the Americans with Disabilities Act is a reasonable accommodation. It is something that should be usable and used by you on the job. I can take almost any job that you can imagine and find a way Aira can help. Because again remember what Aira is, an information source. It provides you with what information you need. How many here in the room have a job?   Patrick Lane: A few hands back there. [crosstalk ] Michael Hingson: Raising your hands' guys isn't gonna work, I'm not using an Aira agent right now.   Patrick Lane: How many are looking for- Michael Hingson: How many are looking for a job?   Patrick Lane: Handful. Michael Hingson: So, for the fun of you for some of you who are looking for a job, tell me some tasks that you might need to perform on the job?   Speaker 9: Doing my resume. Michael Hingson: Let's say you have a job what are some of the tasks that you might need to perform? We'll come back to the resume and that as well. But you're on the job. What are some tasks that you might need to perform on the job?   Speaker 4: [inaudible] Michael Hingson: Typing and what was the other one?   Speaker 4: Filing. Michael Hingson: Filing. What else?   Speaker 5:[inaudible] Michael Hingson: Okay.   Speaker 6: A handwritten note. Michael Hingson: Handwritten notes.   Speaker 7: Finding information. Michael Hingson: I'm sorry. Speaker 7: Finding information. Michael Hingson: Someone up here said something.   Speaker 8: I was saying looking at presentations. Michael Hingson: Looking at presentations.   Patrick Lane: Powerpoint slides, I've described a handful of those in my day. Michael Hingson: Let me suggest a couple others. Making copies on a copier, anybody try to do that lately? Copiers are touchscreen.   Patrick Lane: Oh yeah. Michael Hingson: The one that I love to pick on at Aira, going and getting something from the coffee machine because it's also touchscreen. However, every single thing that you guys have said are all things that you could use Aira to do. You don't have to ask someone else. So let's talk about the coffee machine. I love hot chocolate so I go up to the machine, I call an Aira agent and I do this at Aira. And it's absolutely a great example, I wouldn't have it any other way. I call the agent and I say, need help getting hot chocolate. Now, I'm sure that we could probably mark the machine in some way but the problem is finding the markings you're gonna touch the touchscreen so it doesn't work very well. But, the Aira agent can look at the screen and tell me, move your finger a half an inch to the left, you're right over the button, push it or whatever and I'll find the start button or actually you have a choice of making it with milk or water and I like it with milk. Michael Hingson: So, we need to find the milk button. Move your finger down to the bottom of the screen, over to your right a half an inch, you're over it, push and it's a little longer than just doing it with buttons but it's accessible because Aira agents can help do it. And I don't need to wait until someone else might be available, I don't need to wait until I'm dying of thirst, I can just have an Aira agent do it and give me the information so I can get exactly what I want. And in fact, learn more about that coffee machine than I ever would've learned any other way. Something that sighted people take for granted, the tens of thousands of different ways you can, permutations that you can get out of that coffee machine. Michael Hingson: But, with an Aira agent, I can learn those same things and I wouldn't know that any other way. Copy machines the same way. Most of what you do on copiers these days are touch screen but I can become as good a copy expert as anyone else if I have access to it. And I do because I can use Aira. Filing, obviously, Aira agents being able to read information so that I can put things in the right folder and even creating the tabs to go in folders or whatever. All of those things are commonplace everyday tasks that you should be able to do as well as anyone else. But, you can't if the equipment isn't accessible unless you use Aira. It's all about access to information. Michael Hingson: Somebody mentioned resumes and I want to talk about that a little bit more. There are countless examples and Patrick help out, people want their resume to look good. The Aira agent can help, so let's take a typical example. You're writing a resume, you've got all the facts and you can put them down, now you want to make it look good. So you can call an Aira agent who can describe and help you or what I would do being lazy and being industrious and trying to get it done as efficiently as possible. I would use one of the programs that I mentioned earlier. Michael Hingson: TeamViewer for example which is a way that you can have an agent connect directly to your computer and you can work with the agent and let the agent do the formatting. Because they see what your screen shows. And so the agent can actually format the resume for you or with you because you're still gonna have to tell them what you want it to look like but the agent will be able to format that resume and by the time you're done, you'll have a resume that you would be proud to provide to any employer for them to look at.   Patrick Lane: With the TeamViewer, it's not only us being able to see your computer screen but we also have remote control of that computer screen. The agents can do a lot of stuff with TeamViewer. Let's just say you've never actually seen a resume, you don't know what the actual format looks like, how it's set up, its never been described. Agents can input all the information that you've given them into a pre-made template for a resume. Can work on all the different fonts and colors and apply that to a specific type of job that you might be searching for. So really make that resume look unique and noticeable so it stands out when it is viewed by the employer. They can make sure that all of the spelling and the grammar and the punctuation are correct because nobody wants to submit a resume with spelling errors or bad grammar, anything like that. So the agents can apply all that information. They can update old resumes and then reformat them to show the changes. Even your LinkedIn account we can go in there and update that with prior jobs statuses and all of that information. Patrick Lane: So, with the TeamViewer being able to have that remote access to your computer screen it means that you don't have to potentially hold a phone there or lean in really close with the glasses, it makes the whole type of experience more enjoyable for a possible tedious task. So, I have personally assisted in setting up all of what I just mentioned. I've helped somebody build their resume from the ground up and they have successfully used that. I've helped update LinkedIn profiles to reflect what's written on a resume. I've helped people apply for jobs and send that resume automatically though CareerBuilder or Monster, whatever it might be. So, we have assisted hopefully a large amount of people in finding that employment that I know that they're looking for. Not only will you hopefully, potentially find that employment but while using the service for that reason, you're not gonna use any of those really valuable Aira minutes. So, when seeking out a job the agents mark the call as such so you're not gonna use any of your Aira minutes while performing that specific task. Michael Hingson: So if it takes you five hours to build a resume or 10 hours to build a resume that's not a problem. If you need help creating other documentation for job search it's not a problem. It's all part of the job access that Aira has made available for any Aira explorer to use. So that's available to you today. Michael Hingson: Aira just announced a partnership with VFO where if you're doing anything using JAWS or any other equipment manufactured by VFO and you run into any access issues, or you run into any problems with using Aira and VFO products, those minutes that you spend where VFO can't do it without you bringing an agent or someone else in to assist are all free. So, I for example, when I had an issue trying to deal with some Slack messages last week, I contacted an Aira agent, we established a communication sessions through TeamViewer, and we accomplished what I needed to do with Slack. But because I couldn't easily do it with JAWS that meant it was in part a JAWS issue, so those minutes happen to be as they ended up, free because it's part of the VFO access program available from Aira. Now the operative part that we've talked about with all this is that you have to be an Aira explorer. Michael Hingson: On the job you've got a lot of ways to do it in theory, and I realize that this is only in theory because different places operate in different ways and so on. But, typically speaking if you want to get a job even if it costs you money upfront to be an Aira explorer to subscribe to the service, to start that process, Aira can better help you in dealing with getting that job not only from the job access process that we talked about earlier but when you go into an employer's office and are going through an interview, and they ask you, how are you gonna do one thing or another? You can say, I'll show you. Now, technically, I suppose, one could say, why are you asking me how to do things when you don't ask sighted people how to do things? Michael Hingson: And I suppose if you wanted to be a stickler under the law say, that's true. But for me, I want the job and if I have the opportunity to educate an employer and help them understand that I'm gonna be more employable because I'm gonna be using Aira then I will educate the employer any day of the week. And more important I would then say, Aira is a service that costs money and as you provide various different kinds of technologies and methodologies and devices for all of your employees to do their job, this is one that I need to do my job. And under the law that is appropriate to do. More important than that, it's encouraged and most people at least have some sort of a clue that's a valuable thing to do. Aira is a reasonable accommodation. Michael Hingson: And, it's not very expensive compared to lots of other things that an employer might provide an employee and it makes you much more efficient. And if I were really gonna make the case I would say, hey employer you know the unemployment rate among employable blind people is anywhere between 65 and 70%. I gotta tell you right now, it is really hard for me to get a job because people don't think I can do the job although I can. People don't look at what I can do, they think well you're blind cause you can't and so as a result, you can't. Although I've just shown you how Aira helps me do the job better. If you hire me I guarantee you I'm sticking it out here because it is so hard to get a job. If you're gonna have faith in me, I'm gonna have faith in you. The fact is we will be more loyal on the job if we're given the opportunity and Aira can help make that case and sell it for you. And I think that's an important aspect of dealing with looking for a job. Michael Hingson: Is it HIPAA certified? Today, it is not. HIPAA does have standards although we are compliant with the California certification and security standards which actually is even worse than HIPAA but it's a very expensive process to get HIPAA certified. There is a lady in Canada who works at a community college and she deals with a lot of the medical cases and other privacy issues that go around student paperwork on the campus. What they did is they included in the paperwork that you signed to go to that college a statement that basically says that, some of your material may be read by a person who happens to be blind and they will be using reader services including remote reading services, Aira, to read your material. By signing this paper you consent for that to be able to be done. Michael Hingson: Now as soon as you make that consent statement and as soon as they sign it then HIPPA is not even relevant anymore for that person. And they're doing that as a blanket thing for every student that goes to the college. So, the issue is that we know that there are a lot of different kinds of processes, HIPAA is a good one and we are working toward that process. But there are also a lot of situations where our agents are extremely well trusted. There is a lawyer that I know in the United States who works for an organization and there is constant need to read and prepare documents for trial. And there is a lot of stuff in going through and dealing with things for trial, that's pretty confidential stuff. Michael Hingson: It's confidential from the law firms standpoint because they don't want the other side to necessarily know things until they're ready to give it to them. But it's also true the documents that are being used in discovery and acquired in discovery can be very confidential. Agents are really trusted because we know what happens in an Aira connection stays in an Aira connection. It doesn't go further. Many of us use Aira to look at our personal financial documents because it makes it available. Michael Hingson: My wife is sighted but if I don't have to use her to look at stuff I won't because she has her own things to do. And as willing as she is to describe things, to give me data and to help me accomplish tasks like that. Two things, no offense to my wife, but Aira describes better because they do it all the time and they're use to it. By the way, she'll acknowledge that because she's heard some of the agents. But two, I don't have to take her away from other things which gets back to what we said about on the job work right. So, the fact is that it makes for a much better situation all the way around. And Aira can be only positive in a job environment, much less in what we've talked about with students and so on. So, there is a, I think that the job didn't actually happen but for other reasons. Michael Hingson: There's a person who almost two years ago went to a career fair in Los Angeles and one of the companies there was See's Candy and they were hiring people to process orders so she turned in her resume and they said we'd love to hire you but problem is not all of our orders are electronic some come in paper. And she well let me show you and pulled out Aira. And that eliminated the problem. They said, gee solved that for us, great. Sure working in a store think of all the various things that you need to do whether it be, finding material on a shelf, reading a cash register that doesn't talk or excuse me point of sale device that doesn't talk. Whether it be doing other kinds of things. Whether it's filing or whatever. Blind vendors can use Aira and can be more efficient because they can stock their own shelves. They can read all the information that's not accessible to them. Again, I get back to what I said, you're only limited by your own imagination with what you can do with Aira. Michael Hingson: Aira doesn't use volunteers and our general response time is extremely quick, the time to get an answer is usually 10 seconds. Are you a user of Be My Eyes? Speaker 10: Yes, I'm an uses of Be My Eyes. Michael Hingson: So, Be My Eyes is a way that you can call someone and get simple tasks done. The problem is you don't know who you're gonna get in terms of their abilities. You don't know how long it's gonna take you and you can't do something like walk through an airport like you can with Aira. All of those things you can do with Aira. Speaker 11: I read somewhere that Aira can be activated via Siri. Michael Hingson: You can. You can say, make an Aira call or call Aira. You can use Siri to do it. Actually, I think you've got to call Ara because Siri don't talk good. Patrick Lane: There's two different voice commands depending on what device you're gonna be using. You can say Ara video call or Ara audio call and depending on which one you use it will call from either your glasses or your phone and connect to an agent very quickly as Mike said, 10 seconds or less depending on whether or not we have the largest conference going on in the country. Michael Hingson: But you do need to say Ara cause that's what Siri knows. Siri's gotta learn some language skills. What you will get is someone who is highly trained. You will get someone who knows how to describe, we've actually hired a number of new agents over the past months so, you're gonna get some newbies. I worked with one agent yesterday, I was blown away when I learned that at the end of the call, I was one of the first calls and this was her first day on the job. She did great. Aira's available for Android or for iPhones. Anybody with a smartphone can use it. That's the answer that we've been using. That changes too. Michael Hingson: Aira has developed its own glasses, it's the next generation of what Aira will become and that system consists of glasses with a high-resolution camera with a very wide field of view compared to the way it use to be. They actually connect directly to what we call an Aira controller or Aira controller phone. It's an Android phone locked only to Aira stuff. It also because of that it powers the glasses and there's a lot more power available. But, by using that system you don't even need your smartphone so you'll use the Aira system without even using the smartphone. Without even using your smartphone so that Aira will make it possible for you to keep your phone free for making your own phone calls while you're working with an agent. Michael Hingson: Or for example, if you're paging or needing to page or call Lyft or Uber you can ask an Aira agent to do that if you're an Aira explorer. And you link your Lyft and Uber accounts to Aira but along the way, there's a very good likelihood that the Lyft driver or Uber driver will call you and say, how am I gonna know you or where exactly are you? In the past, that's been a problem because you're using your smartphone and you have to disconnect from the Aira agent and then get back on. Now you don't because you're using the Aira controller as the way that you're communicating with Aira so your smartphone is still available. That is the horizon system. Michael Hingson: I am now connecting my Aira-   Automated Voice: Unlocked. Michael Hingson: Horizon glasses.   Automated Voice: Glass connected. Initializing Aira. Michael Hingson: Can everyone hear that?   Automated Voice: Hello Mikel Hingson.   Patrick Lane: Mikel Hingson.   Automated Voice: Aira ready for service. Michael Hingson: Yeah, it says Mikel. Could everyone hear that?   Patrick Lane: Yep. Michael Hingson: So I'm using the horizon glasses.   Automated Voice: Battery 73% that's attached connected to Arave four G LT. Hello Mikel Hingson, Aira ready for service. Michael Hingson: I want feedback to support we want Mikel to be pronounced correctly. All right, here listen to this.   Automated Voice: Calling Aira agent. Connecting to agent, connecting to agent. Michael Hingson: See how long it takes.   Automated Voice: Connecting to agent, connecting to agent Peter. Michael Hingson: Bingo.   Peter: Thank you for calling Aira, this is Peter how may I help you? Michael Hingson: Hey Peter, how's every little thing?   Peter: Going well, how are you? Michael Hingson: Doing well. So we are in a room and might you be able to tell us anything about where we are in terms of where this room is or anything like that?   Peter: I do see you're at Rosen Shingle Creek so I'm assuming your at the NFB Conference. Michael Hingson: And you see that's part of what Peter and all agents get is not only what they can see but they get GPS information and other data that can add value to them in terms of your Aira experience. And you are right we are at the NFB Convention, we are at the Rosen Shingle Creek Hotel and we are in Pensacola, H3 if you wanted to pull that up so you can really see where we are. Can you maybe describe a little bit of the room for us?   Peter: Sure. So you're in a relatively large room with really high ceilings, I want to say they're about 30 feet high at least. The room you're in, so it looks like you're seated on the stage, there are several rows across from you, they're all facing forward and there is a walkway down the center aisle between those rows as well. Michael Hingson: Peter, really serious question. Does anybody look like they're asleep? Those people in the back row, you know what I'm saying, Peter?   Peter: I see people waving. Michael Hingson: I just want to make sure because those people in the back rows they usually hide back there because they think they can fall asleep but with Aira they can't do that. One of my favorite stories is about a father who wanted to make sure his daughter was doing her homework, he called an Aira agent and walked in, and just said, how are things, what are you doing? She said, I'm doing my homework and the agent said, no she's playing computer games on her phone. Anyway, does anyone want to ask, while we've got Peter and Patrick, so Patrick's over here Peter?   Patrick Lane: Hey Peter.   Peter: Hey Patrick.   Patrick Lane: Good to see you again. Michael Hingson: So, any questions for either of these gentlemen?   Patrick Lane: So, the dashboard that Peter's using, what information does he have access to for him too?- Michael Hingson: So Peter why don't you tell us about your dashboard.   Peter: So on my dashboard, I have information like emergency contact info first of all in their profile, and then I do have access to seeing what kind of assisted devices anyone might be using such as a white cane or guide dog. Different preferences they have, if they prefer left and right or clock face for orientation. Just things so we can tailor the experience to each specific explorer since everyone has their own preferences. We also have access to like Michael said earlier the GPS location on the map and I'll be able to utilize public transit, I am, if the explorer connects the Aira app to their Lyft of Uber accounts, we're also able to request those rides for our explorers and then we'll be able to take a look at the driver's info, the name, the car the driver has and spot where they are on the map. And let the explorer know when the driver has arrived and help them spot the car. Michael Hingson: And more important with the NFB ride share test program, for example, if the car comes and it sees that you are blind and have a guide dog, and just decides to drive away, they'll get nailed.   Peter: We'll watch them like a hawk. Michael Hingson: They'll get in trouble. Other questions for Peter? Peter, can you read medication bottles?   Peter: Yes. Before I became an Aira agent I actually don't think I've ever met or interacted with anyone blind or low vision. So, initial training they start with just explaining what it's like for people who are blind or low vision, getting the what orientation mobility is and what kind of information is important to an explorer versus what I think is important information to me as a sighted person because those things are very different. We learn how to give what's necessary and then also when an explorer wants more detail, we learn what kind of detail to give them and then we start exploring the dashboard that we have with all those things I explained to you and then we do some training.   Peter: And the explorers who also [inaudible] who helps us train and we just do exercises like navigating, intersections with different tools. So, Michael has a guide dog and we'll learn how someone navigates with a guide dog and then we'll have another explorer teach us how someone navigates with a white cane and that helps us just get use to all the different things because it's one describing all the visual information that we want to give to the explorer but there's also the technical side of using the dashboard and all the other ways we communicate with other agents and the rest of the Aira team. Michael Hingson: The question was what can Aira do to help people do mobile deposit, bank deposits and so on.   Peter: I actually, coincidentally done that a couple times in the past couple weeks. We can help you align your phones camera over the check and make sure that it's face up, whichever side the app wants you to do and for certain bank apps, some of them aren't as accessible as others so it will help get you aligned to where the button is to take a picture of the check and send it off. Michael Hingson: So you've had an agent that wasn't able to make that happen. When you encounter a situation where an agent isn't successful it would be extremely helpful for you to provide that feedback because well Patrick why don't you deal with that. Patrick Lane: We love when the explorers use the feedback form at the end for both good and bad calls. That's why we have both good and poor marked on there. When you leave us feedback about why a call was poor, we as analysts can go provide that extra training to make that all of our standards are being met by the agents and that your standards are being met by the agents as well. Michael Hingson: So, if your having a problem getting an agent to be able to help you with a mobile deposit then it's important that we hear about that so that we can go back and review it and talk to the agent and find out what the problem is. And see what their difficulty is. So, if you took 60 minutes that's a real problem, and you should get that time credited back. But you have to let Aira know to do that. There are any number of factors, the camera could be one, I mean, it could be that on a particular day the cell service wasn't as good as it ought to be. Michael Hingson: Aira is absolutely pushing the envelope in terms of the technology with video streaming and so on and any number of factors can make it less than stellar and its not Airas fault or anyone's fault it's just the way it is. We'll talk about in a moment the new horizon glasses which will make a lot of that better. But those aren't the kinds of things that we do end up dealing with and so Aira can help make it better by understanding when you encounter problems. Those are some of the best things is to do is to be able to really talk about the problems that you're having so please give the feedback okay. Michael Hingson: I want to thank you all for coming. I would appreciate it if you would tell friends and colleagues. We've got more sessions coming up later this week. We will be at the booth. If you sign up for Aira by the way, you can then participate in refer a friend. If you refer someone to Aira, and they sign up, then they will get a free month, and you will get a free amount of credit equal to whatever plan they sign up for. So, get your friends to sign up. Scott White here at our national center has been very good at that, and I think mostly paid for a year of Aira because he got his friends to sign up. Pete Lane: I thought I'd pop in here and bring you up to date on a couple of recent developments with the Aira service. Aira is now available twenty-four seven. This means that explorers can dial up an agent from their Aira app anytime night or day. This not only allows U.S. users to dial Aira during the wee hours of the morning but it also allows folks in the U.K., Australia, and New Zealand to get an agent at times during the day when the need was very great in the past. Such as in the afternoon, during rush hour or during the prime time evening hours. Pete Lane: Another brand new feature is the Aira messages feature. Messages allows Aira explorers and agents to communicate via text. There's a text box that pops up right on the Aira app and you can type or dictate your message directly to the agent. This is really useful if you're going into a meeting or library or a church for example where you want to be very quiet. You can text your communication to the agent telling them what you want, what tasks you want performed and things like that without having to talk and interrupt what's going on around you. Pete Lane: There are also about a half a dozen pre-set messages for more common situations that you can just tap on and send. Those pre-sets can be edited or completely changed depending on your needs. Another new feature is called Aira live. Aira live allows an explorer to broadcast the audio from their contact with an agent either to a small group of private listeners or to a larger group through a public live event. This allows others who download the app and either create a guest account or who are already Aira explorers to tap into the app, go to the live tab and see what live events are currently in session. Pete Lane: And finally we have a new edition to the Aira team, Anirudh Koul, founder of Seeing AI and former senior data scientist with Microsoft has joined the Aira team as the head of artificial intelligence and research. Big things are in store for Anirudh and we welcome him to the Aira staff. Thanks so much for listening to Blind Abilities. For more podcasts with the blindness perspective you can find us on the web at www.blindabilities.com we're on Facebook and on Twitter or download our free app from the app store or the Google Play store. That's two words, Blind Abilities. Once again this podcast is brought to you by Aira. Special thanks to Patrick Lane for his wonderful guitar music. Thanks so much for listening and have a great day.    

Leeza Gibbons, (Entertainment Tonight, The Celebrity Apprentice Winner-2015, NY Times best-selling author, Speaker ...and caregiver) called my show for family caregivers to share her insights learned as a caregiver —and to encourage fellow caregivers.  Peter:  Welcome back to the show for caregivers, about caregivers, hosted by a caregiver …I am Peter Rosenberger bringing you 30 years of experience to help you stay strong and healthy while you take care of someone who is not. John, we have a great guest here with us today.  She’s known all over the world from Entertainment Tonight, The Celebrity Apprentice—but for THIS show, she is a fellow caregiver, and we are thrilled to have Leeza Gibbons here with us, she’s calling in.  Leeza, thank you for being on the show …welcome! Leeza: Thank you so much, I am so happy to be here.   Peter: And, I wanted to mention …we’re both South Carolinians …and we don’t have to worry about translation, because if I happen to go off the rails here and get real “country,” Leeza will be able to understand me, John. John: I had no idea … Leeza: “Oh, I got Chu! I got Chu!” John: The last guest we had on was from Boston.  Peter: And it was “wicked bad!” [Laughing] Peter: We are thrilled to have you here. Leeza …thank you for sharing your heart with us, and you story …and your passion to help fellow caregivers. This show is all about strengthening family caregivers; the need is great.  You more than most know how difficult this journey is. Tell us a little about your journey as a caregiver. Leeza: I went into it kicking and screaming. I was a very reluctant recruit.  I think that many of us don’t willingly put the sweater on. I’m like, “Oh this doesn’t fit me; these are not my clothes.”  I guess I was waiting for someone to send me a greeting card. Which, you know, it never arrives in the mail, does it”? Peter: No [Laughing] Leeza: “Congratulations! Welcome into the club!”  It’s just never like that.  I kept thinking that our culture would catch up with the need that you guys speak about so wonderfully and are so lovingly supportive of …but it’s just …we’re getting better, and the conversations are getting stronger and more powerful, but it’s just not that way.  And it wasn’t that way for me.  I tended to um …I isolated, and our whole family did.  When my mother got Alzheimer’s disease after being a caregiver for her mother, you would think that we had a blueprint.  We didn’t.  We all went to our corners and licked our wounds.  I got “over-busy,” that’s where I went to hide. My brother went into denial, my sister got depressed, and my dad pretty much closed the door with a bottle of red wine.  We said, “Wait a minute!”  “Wait.  What can we do? What can we do?  If we’re acting this way, everyone must act this way.  What can we possibly add or contribute to this narrative?” And so, we created what we wished we had, and that became Leeza’s Care Connection …and that’s our community for caregivers. Peter:  Well, and like most caregivers, we tend to learn it the hard way …it’s on the job training.  There is very little blueprint.  I remember a counselor once told me, he said, “Look, you know, Peter …I’d recommend a book for you to read …but you’re the guy to write it.”  And you, I’m thirty years now (plus) into this, and it is a brutal journey …I often refer to myself as the “crash-test dummy” of caregivers, ‘cause if you can fail at it …I’ve failed at it.  But, in this thing, you and your family pulled together—I want to throw out a couple of things, Leeza, and get your read on it.  I talk about three “I’s” that every caregiver deals with: We lose our independence We isolate We lose our identity I can’t tell you over the years how many people have asked me about my wife, but I can count the ones who asked about me.  And …how does that resonate with you …Those three “I’s” …Independence, Identity, and Isolation? Leeza: Well, it’s interesting when you say, “How many have asked about me?”  That’s a big one with the groups that we talk with—and was with me, too.  You know, and after a while, I think if you held up the mirror, you wouldn’t even see yourself in it. You know?  It would almost be like there would be no reflection there, because you get so accustomed to even feeling like you don’t exist.  You know, when we talk about how imperative it is to take your oxygen first, you begin to realize in your caregiving mode …you don’t even take deep enough breaths to think that you can even fill up your heart and soul.  It’s almost like you’re not even giving yourself credit for being a whole person.  So, I think that’s real for almost everybody. For me, I was working at like one quarter of what I had to offer, because I think most people would say, “What does this have to with everybody if you’re not a caregiver?”  But we know the percentage of the people who are offering care …also in the workplace. And we know that they’re not able to work at full steam.  And we know that they’re coming in late and calling in sick, and not able to focus when they’re there.  All of the things that are happening and how’s it affecting the bottom line across America.  We know this is everybody’s problem, and we all need to care about it more.  And that if we would just help that person find the “I” back again …that everybody wins!  But, we sure aren’t getting there fast, are we? Peter:  No, we’re not.  There are 65 + million of us. Almost half of us are in the workforce …you referenced those statistics, and they’re amazing statistics.  I’ve been saying for years, “If you love someone, you’re going to be one.  If you live long enough, you’re going to need one.” In your case, when you interact with these caregivers, and all the things you do, do you find that they have a hard time speaking in first person …first person singular?  So, when you ask a caregiver “How are you doing?” “Well, she just got home from the hospital last night…” or “He had a bad night…,” and they can’t speak …when they finally get them to say something in their own voice, that’s when the tears come and the stammering come.  Is that pretty consistent with what you’ve seen? Leeza:  That’s very consistent.  Very consistent.  And when you try to tell them, “You’re doing a good job.” You know, it’s very hard for them to hear it …to get credit and validation.  That’s really been the most exciting thing for me …is to, be able to turn that back around for people who offer care.  I think they’re the real heroes of our culture.  We’ve got all this focus on the health care system. Well, “Hello!” The caregivers are the health care system. That’s the health care system. That’s it. John:  Write that one down! Peter: Yeah …write that one down! John:  We talk about this on the show a lot …we don’t give nearly enough credit for showing up. Peter: Well, that’s the thing, we caregivers beat ourselves without mercy.  And you talk about this a lot with Senior Helpers and the caregivers you interact with …about guilt. And we just flog ourselves. So, when you try to give some kind of affirmation, we’re so wrapped up in guilt …that we can’t.  And there’s no problem so bad, that we can’t make it worse with a little bit more guilt. And so, one of the things I’m on a mission to do is help caregivers accept the fact that you don’t have to judge yourself exclusively by your job performance …you can look at your attendance. And our attendance is spot-on perfect; we show up every day …however we drag in …we still are showing up and getting the job done to the best of our abilities. Talk about the guilt that caregivers struggle with …I know you’ve seen this, you’ve done this in your own life, and you’ve seen this with all the people that you’ve interacted with.  What are some common things …and what are some things that you’re saying to it? Leeza: Well, my mother always said to me, “Show up, do your best …let go of the rest.”  You do have to get scored on the showing up and on trying.  “Are you trying?”  Trying doesn’t mean you’re are going to get it in the basket.  Sometimes you just exasperated. But you did show again, right? You did show up the next day and say, “Ok, I’m here again!” Peter: Everyday [Laughing] Leeza: Every day. “Let’s go I’m what you’ve got!” Peter:  Bleary-eyed and dragging …but I’m here! Leeza: And I think you are absolutely so right about that.  And the other piece that I think is so hard is why I do this work with senior helpers:  Asking for help is difficult.  We don’t have a skill-set for it.  We think, somehow, it’s going to rob our souls. We think we don’t get to go to heaven.  We don’t get a gold star.  We’re going to be judged. My whole personal mantra is, “Breathe, Believe, and Receive.” It’s the receiving part that’s tough for us.  But once we can let go, you know we’re so tightly wound, once we can open up and let somebody else in, and see us, “warts and all,” and to say “Wow, I need some help here.”  Then, we can exhale …and things get better.  And I think it’s the highest form of humanity both to give help and receive it.  Sometimes I just say, “Stop achieving and start receiving.” And, as caregivers, we’re like those “sit on the front-row kind of students,” where it’s like “Call on me, call on me, I can do it, I can do it, I can do it.  It doesn’t matter that I have like so much going on!” The best thing you can do right now is to say, “I’ve got too much to do …help me!”  And delegate one little thing.  And look what will happen.  And we do teach others how to treat us …by the way we treat ourselves. With my dad, when he had a heart attack; he had open-heart surgery …and the next day he had colon surgery …we had to have a strategy.  Look, I literally wrote the book on Fierce Optimism, but that wasn’t a plan.  And my brother and sister lived very close to him, like within fifteen minutes; I’m the long-distance caregiver …we all needed help.  And so, we brought in someone from Senior Helpers, you know they provide in-home care.  We had the family caregivers, the in-home care provider that we coordinated with the doctors …we had them to come help us with the meds, the meal preparation, with driving errands.  We had a strategy.  We had to have help.  So, some people just need a peace of mind visit.  Maybe they need someone to drive errands, someone just to help with the laundry … it’s a customizable thing.  But I’ve seen it make a huge difference in the lives of family caregivers and their loved ones. Peter:  You know a reporter once asked me, he said well …it wasn’t a religious interview …it was just a reporter just talking to me … he said,” Well, what would Jesus do as a caregiver?” I said, “I don’t know what He would do …I’ll tell you what He did do.  He delegated.  He had John take care of His mother …while He was hanging on the cross. I thought, “If Jesus can do that, then I can ask for help, too!” And I’m all about trying to equip caregivers with the courage and the vocabulary of asking and identifying what help is …and I really try …and I’m going to run this by you and get your thoughts by this and then I’ll let you go because I know you’re very busy, but it’s a …when people say, “Well let me know if there’s something I can do.”  And I try so hard to get people to stop saying that phrase.  And I say, “Don’t ask a caregiver, “well …let me know if there’s something I can do for you,’ because now I have think of something for YOU to do.’” Instead, offer something very specific.  “Can I send someone over to clean the gutters.”  Because nobody thinks it’s a good idea to for a caregiver to be on the roof cleaning gutters. Or, you know, “I’m at the grocery store, can I pick this up for you?”  And …that kind of stuff …the more specific …there’s riches in the niches …the more specific that you get, the more you’re going to be able to be a source of help, and a real blessing to people to do that.  How does that resonate with you? Leeza:  I am so with you on that!  I’m so with you, and I’m glad you brought it up! Because, that’s the thing!  First of all, no caregiver has time to think of what you can do to help them …. they’re not going to come up with any darn thing.  Peter: …and they’re not going to trust you to do it right …or stay with it, a lot of times. Leeza:  …or stay with it!  So, I do the same thing. I always say, “Don’t even ask. Just say, ‘I’m making a casserole …I made two, I’m dropping one off for you!’”  John:  Thank you…Thank you! Leeza: [Say], “I’m on my way to the dry-cleaners, how about put your bag out by the front porch, and I’ll just pick up your bag on my way?”  Exactly those things! Peter: Beautiful.  Beautiful Leeza: Just do it …do it …do it.  If it’s wrong, they’ll probably tell you it’s wrong.  Just stick your foot in it anyway. Peter: [Laughing] By the way …we’re all about sticking our foot in something … John: Peter …don’t be a heel! Peter: [Laughing] I don’t know if you know this, but my wife is a double-amputee, and we have a prosthetic limb outreach in West Africa, so John and I are always making leg jokes here.  And Gracie does, too, in all fairness. I mean, I’ve seen her take her leg off and scratch her ear at a stop sign with people …and they just freak out! John: [Laughing] Leeza: You did not just say that! Peter: [Laughing] Oh, I did say that! John:  Peter one time attached a dog to her wheelchair, okay?  There’s video …I’ve seen it! Peter: Well, Jeff Foxworthy and I did a whole thing of, “You might be a caregiver if …” to let people know …because some people don’t identify that.  You know …like, “If you have a professional carpet cleaner on retainer …you’re probably a caregiver.”  Or, “…if you hooked up your dog to your wife’s wheelchair …just to see if it would work”—and it did, and I have footage! Leeza: [Laughing] Peter:  You know …I mean, we’re trying …what we want to do is let caregivers know  …first off, “it’s OK to laugh.  It’s OK to come together and be joyful.  It’s OK to, like you said, “breathe!”  I do martial arts, and breathing is a part of everything we do.  We [caregivers] are trying to “white-knuckle” this thing, and I know …in the closing thing …if you could say anything to your younger self, when you did come “kicking and screaming into this,” what would that be?  Because there are so many people right now listening, who are in that same place.  They’re in that place where they’re screaming going in to this.  And they’re just terrified.  They got the phone call …or whatever’s happened.  What would you say to them?  Leeza:  I think it’s like what my mother said …where we went earlier, you know “Show up …do your best …let go of the rest.” Peter: I love that phrase John: Aww …. Kudos to Mom! Leeza:  My mother lined us up when she got Alzheimer’s; she lined up the entire family and she said, “Look, when I’m kick and scream and can no longer call you by your name, just know that’s the disease talking and not me. And, I do not want to go live with you, Leeza.  I don’t want to live with your brother.  I don’t want to live with your sister. And you have got to tell Daddy when it’s time to let me go.” She gave us our marching orders.  It was unbelievable.  She made us strong as a family. She was amazing! Peter: What a tremendous gift of a parent to that! And, I’m sorry that you’ve had to go through these things, but I’m not sorry for what you’ve learned through it. And I’m not sorry for what you’ve become through this process …because you’ve become such an inspiration and blessing to so many.  And here you are taking the time to call our show and share some of those things.  Thank you for being such an encouragement to all us here! John: Yeah …well the lessons that you shared are not just for caregivers …they’re for people talking to caregivers, like we talked about earlier.  It is a wonderful thing.  Leeza:  Amen!  I love you guys.  I thank you so much for everything you do.  You’re such a gift …and always fun to unwrap. Thank you. Peter: Thank you, Leeza.  And if people want to get involved with Senior Helpers …where do they go? Leeza:  Go to www.seniorhelpers.com.  They’ve got franchises all over the country …and they would love to help you figure out what makes sense for you and your family. Peter: Seniorhelpers.com …and …also, I think it’s LeezaGibbons.com if you want to know more about Leeza.  As if you don’t know already more about Leeza …as if you don’t already know more about Leeza!  I mean, she …It’s Leeza Gibbons for Heaven’s Sake!  However, if you want to see more …go out to her website …and, thank you so much for being here with us. Hey listen, don’t go away …we’ll be right back! This is Peter Rosenberger, this is the nation’s #1 show for the family caregiver.  We are glad you are here.  Don’t go away. [Music]