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4 episodes with Richard Bell
6 episodes with Richard Bell
4 episodes with Richard Bell
2 episodes with Richard Bell
2 episodes with Richard Bell
2 episodes with Richard Bell
2 episodes with Richard Bell
2 episodes with Richard Bell
2 episodes with Richard Bell
Have you ever wondered what else was happening during the American Revolution? It turns out that the conflict was waged far beyond the shores of North America. Historian Richard Bell joins in today to talk about the unexpected participants in and ramifications of the American Revolution across the globe.About our guest:Richard Bell received his PhD from Harvard University and his BA from the University of Cambridge. His research interests focus on American history between 1750 and 1877 and he welcomes enquiries from graduate students working in this period. Visit his website. Download his CV.Bell's most recent book is The American Revolution and the Fate of the World. Published by Penguin/Riverhead in 2025, it received starred reviews from Publisher's Weekly, Library Journal, and Kirkus Reviews. It reveals the full breadth and depth of America's founding event. The American Revolution was not only the colonies' triumphant liberation from the rule of an overbearing England; it was also a cataclysm that pulled in participants from around the globe and threw the entire world order into chaos. Repositioning the Revolution at the center of an international web, this narrative ranges as far afield as India, Africa, Central America, and Australia. As Bell's lens widens, the “War of Independence” manifests itself as a sprawling struggle that upended the lives of millions of people on every continent and fundamentally transformed the way the world works, disrupting trade, restructuring penal systems, stirring famine, and creating the first global refugee crisis. Bell conveys the impact of these developments at home and abroad by grounding the narrative in the gripping stories of individuals—including women, minorities, and other disenfranchised people. The result is an unforgettable and unexpected work of American history that shifts everything we thought we knew about our creation story.Bell is the recipient of more than a dozen teaching awards, including the University System of Maryland Board of Regents Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching, the highest honor for teaching faculty in the Maryland state system. He is also one of the conveners of the Washington Area Early American Seminar, a member of the Board of Trustees of the Maryland Center for History and Culture, an elected member of the Massachusetts Historical Society and the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. On campus, Bell serves as Chair of the UMD United Kingdom Fellowships Committee and was a founding member of The 1856 Project. He lives in University Park, MD, with his wife and two daughters.
Today on AirTalk, we discuss the early results for Proposition 50; the implications of the NYC mayoral race; an interview with historian Richard Bell on his new book The American Revolution and the Fate of the World; an interview with LA County's probation chief; and how to restore your mental state after a chaotic day. Today on AirTalk: Prop 50 (0:15) NYC Mayoral Election Results (16:06) How much do you know about America’s founding event? (37:08) LA County's Probation Chief (51:20) Restoring your emotional and mental state after a chaotic or stressful day (1:24:19)
What if the American Revolution wasn't just a national uprising — but a global turning point? Prize-winning historian Richard Bell joins Matt Crawford to discuss his groundbreaking new book, The American Revolution and the Fate of the World. In this episode, Bell reframes the Revolution as an event that reverberated far beyond the thirteen colonies — reshaping empires, inspiring new movements for liberty, and transforming ideas about democracy itself. Richard and I explore the global consequences of America's founding struggle, the untold stories of those left out of its triumph, and how its ideals still echo — and clash — in the world today. Join the conversation about power, freedom, and the unfinished legacy of the Revolution.
Think you know the story of the American Revolution? Think again. In this episode, acclaimed author and history professor Dr. Richard Bell joins the podcast to discuss his book "The American Revolution and the Fate of the World,” where he dismantles the myths and explores the shocking global story behind America's founding. Forget the simple tale of colonists vs. the British crown. Dr. Bell reveals the Revolution as a world war, a chaotic and contingent struggle whose outcome was never certain. We dive into the fascinating, often overlooked connections to China, India, and the Caribbean, and uncover the critical roles played by Native Americans, enslaved Africans, and European powers. Dr. Richard Bell is a historian and professor specializing in early American history, currently serving as a Professor of History at the University of Maryland. Dr. Bell received his BA from the University of Cambridge and his PhD from Harvard University. He joined the University of Maryland in 2006, earned tenure in 2012, and was promoted to full professor in 2020. His teaching and research focus on American history between 1750 and 1877, with a particular emphasis on social history, slavery, and revolutionary transformation. Get the Book: https://kingsbookstore.com/book/9780593719510 Richard Bell's Website: https://www.richard-bell.com Greg's Blog: http://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/ Pat's Substack: https://patcummings.substack.com/about RichardBell#TheAmericanRevolutionandtheFateoftheWorld#AmericanRevolution#RevolutionaryWar#USHistory#WorldHistory#GlobalHistory#FoundingFathers#EarlyAmerica#MythvsHistory#Loyalists#250thAnniversary#Washington#KenBurns#ThomasJefferson#KingGeorgeIII#MollyBrant#HarryWashington#Hessians#MarquisdeLafayette#BenedictArnold#PeggyShippen#BaronvonSteuben#PatCummings#GregGodels#CFLF#ComingFromLeftField#Podcast#zzblog#mltoday
What makes a war a World War? If it's the involvement of multiple major world powers, will France, Spain and the Netherlands do?If it's battles fought globally, do Canada, West Africa, India and the Mediterranean count? On top of the 13 colonies?In this episode, Don is joined by Richard Bell from the University of Maryland. Richard is the author of ‘The American Revolution and the Fate of the World'.Edited by Tim Arstall and Aidan Lonergan. Produced by Sophie Gee. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Vancouver's largest intergenerational wealth transfer is underway and most families are completely unprepared. Founding Partner of Bell Alliance Richard Bell sits down with Adam & Matt this week to reveal how property owners can avoid costly estate planning mistakes that drain thousands from their families. From the shocking reality of dying without a will to joint tenancy strategies that bypass probate fees, this conversation tackles the complications when property owners die without proper planning. Richard breaks down wills, powers of attorney, and capital gains implications for BC homeowners while sharing practical solutions for vacation properties, investment assets, and second marriages. When should you add your kids to title? How do you structure inheritance to protect your children's future? And why is simplifying your estate the key to protecting your family? Don't miss this one!
"What the hell is water?" Art, music, literature, drama. When the frontiers of human potential slam against capitalist industry, a force that can't be stopped confronts an object that can't be moved. Capitalism twists and redirects culture and imagination into a revenue stream, limiting to its flow the ideas we're allowed have and drowning all the rest. At the nexus of pop culture and "Pop Culture" struggles Superman, swimming against the current. ---------- Special thanks to our Lovable Sidekicks: Better Possible Futures, Kourtney Smith, Walt Lewellyn, Kafka, The Black Casebook's Very Own Nightwing, JD Lunt, Ambird, Mr. Pig from the Intervention, Travis Armstrong, Chris Marks, Wirecats, Sheeee-itttt, VoidTek, Mars Hottentot, Richard Bell, TakoTuesday, Joseph, and Knife Money ---------- Email: collectiveactioncomics@gmail.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/collectiveactioncomics Twitter: https://twitter.com/CAComixPod Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/cacomixpod.bsky.social Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/collectiveactioncomics
Bigambul-Kamilaroi artist Archie Moore - who’s already won the world’s most prestigious art prize - is bringing his masterwork kith and kin to Australia. Today - how Moore creates powerfully emotional art from Aboriginal stories of family, love and loss. Find out more about The Front podcast here. You can read about this story and more on The Australian's website or on The Australian’s app. The weekend edition of The Front is co-produced by Claire Harvey and Jasper Leak. The host is Claire Harvey. Audio production and editing by Jasper Leak who also composed our theme.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Finally, the definitive Marxist take on Lex Luthor. Just what we've all been waiting for. The strange flavor of 90s foreign intervention, the eventual goal of capitalist policing, and why you should never trust a homeless shelter (it's not what you think) all tie together into the stories of two of the world's most famous mad scientists - one a product of capitalism, the other a perpetuator. It's our final Superman-less issue. In a way. Join us, won't you? ---------- Issues covered: Supergirl and Team Luthor #1 ---------- Special thanks to our Lovable Sidekicks: Better Possible Futures, Kourtney Smith, Walt Lewellyn, Kafka, The Black Casebook's Very Own Nightwing, JD Lunt, Ambird, Mr. Pig from the Intervention, Travis Armstrong, Chris Marks, Wirecats, Sheeee-itttt, VoidTek, Mars Hottentot, Richard Bell, TakoTuesday, Joseph, and Knife Money ---------- Email: collectiveactioncomics@gmail.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/collectiveactioncomics Twitter: https://twitter.com/CAComixPod Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/cacomixpod.bsky.social Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/collectiveactioncomics
What do heroes leave behind? The answer should be obvious. The contest for control of the world economy entered a new age at the end of 1991. Socialist forces were in retreat as the then-second largest superpower, the USSR, crumbled under pressure from more than 70 years of capitalist onslaught. Its splintered masses would be powerless to defend themselves against instantaneous pillage and plunder by the avaricious. Half a planet away, the ostensible beneficiaries of capitalist success, the US working class (including the writers and artists behind Superman), would find their rights and livelihoods under immediate and vicious attack as well, although you wouldn't know it by asking them. An ideology of righteous violence befits a class of owners who need the workers to fight their wars, and it limits the imagination of a class of workers who need each other if they ever hope to win their own freedom. What do heroes leave behind? More heroes. It's time to grasp what that means. ---------- Issues covered: The Legacy of Superman #1 ---------- Special thanks to our Lovable Sidekicks: Better Possible Futures, Kourtney Smith, Walt Lewellyn, Kafka, The Black Casebook's Very Own Nightwing, JD Lunt, Ambird, Mr. Pig from the Intervention, Travis Armstrong, Chris Marks, Wirecats, Sheeee-itttt, VoidTek, Mars Hottentot, Richard Bell, TakoTuesday, Joseph, and Knife Money ---------- Email: collectiveactioncomics@gmail.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/collectiveactioncomics Twitter: https://twitter.com/CAComixPod Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/cacomixpod.bsky.social Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/collectiveactioncomics
Episode 51: In this episode we conclude our coverage of Angela Garcia's case on Crime to Burn. Angela was faced with an impossible decision, risk another trial or accept what is known as a Dark Plea from prosecutors to secure her freedom. However, when he offered her the plea, prosecutor Richard Bell knew just how flawed his case against her was and many have suggested that his offer of this plea was really an effort to try to prevent his office from negative optics related to the mishandling of this case. And perhaps they're right, after all Richard Bell is now a sitting judge in Ohio. Were his actions an attempt to prevent Angela's conviction and the errors made in the case from tarnishing his reputation and negatively impacting his aspirations to win a seat at the bench? We'll tell you what he did and said, and you can decide. His actions may not have been illegal but they certainly don't seem very honorable. To get involved in assisting formerly incarcerated individuals like Angela, please consider these organizations: https://innocenceproject.org/donate-monthly/#:~:text=There%20are%20many%20ways%20to,Project%20in%20your%20estate%20plans. https://exoneratednation.org/ https://www.lifeafterjustice.org/ https://organizationofexonerees.com/ This podcast is a true crime podcast about arson and criminal fires. Listener discretion is recommended. Background music by Not Notoriously Coordinated Be sure to check out Season 2 of the You Should Be Here Podcast for the limited series, Or No by Fire Eyes Media. This this collaborative podcasters-give-back series is to bring awareness to and stand against domestic violence. All proceeds will go to a charity taking a stand against domestic violence and human trafficking. Your support of this project is so greatly appreciated. You deserve a safe love. Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/you-should-be-here/id1779150686 or on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2VqlmgQxwn55tdY7td9IM9?si=e19fffdc24064f7b&nd=1&dlsi=e6920c0f7e4c4d65 Get your Crime to Burn Merch! https://crimetoburn.myspreadshop.com Please follow us on Instagram, X, Facebook, TikTok and Youtube for the latest news on this case. You can email us at crimetoburn@gmail.com We welcome any constructive feedback and would greatly appreciate a 5 star rating and review. Source List: Please also refer to the source list for Episodes 49 and 50 (Parts 1 and 2 of this case) for a complete list of resources used along with the list below. One of the best articles on this case is by Liliana Segura (an absolute rockstar reporter) for The Intercept and you can find it here: https://theintercept.com/2017/03/05/did-angela-garcia-kill-her-own-daughters-arson-cover-up/ Liliana Segura's other article on the actions of Richard Bell can be found here: https://theintercept.com/2020/03/15/richard-bell-arson-junk-science-angela-garcia/ Other sources: https://www.endthebacklog.org/blog/interview-with-rick-bell-pt-2/ https://www.cleveland.com/opinion/2020/02/richard-a-bell-in-the-democratic-primary-for-cuyahoga-county-common-pleas-judge-unexpired-term.html
The American Revolution is often remembered as a war for liberty, but for African Americans, it was a fight with even higher stakes. Many saw the war as an opportunity to claim their own independence; some by serving in the ranks, others by seizing newfound chances to escape enslavement.On February 20th, historian and author Richard Bell visits the Delaware History Museum in Wilmington to speak about how the chaos of war created unexpected paths to freedom for many enslaved people.In this edition of History Matters, Delaware Public Media's Joe Irizarry is joined by Bell to explore this pivotal chapter in Black History.
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*Top 10 List: Fred Williams and co-host Doug McBurney review their list of the top 10 things people still believe, that science has proven wrong. #10: Vestigial Organs - The most popular one growing up was the appendix, remember? Until this (from PubMed in 2016). And don't forget tonsils! #9: GPS won't work without Einsteinian relativity. It will, and does. #8: Junk DNA - There's no such thing! We're only beginning to comprehend DNA. And to have ever assumed any of it was junk was foolishness! #7: Lucy is a Human Ancestor - Poppycock! #6: Plate Tectonics - The fourth-biggest-dumbest theory going, (after Darwinian Evolution, the Big Bang, and Einsteinian Relativity). #5: Dangerous Anthropogenic Climate Change - Fifth biggest-dumbest... #4: Darwin's Tree of Life - That dog don't hunt, and lies like a rug! #3: The Big Bang: See #'s 4 & 5, the James Webb Space Telescope, and our favorite! Genesis One. #2: Evolution: Ha! Yeah.... right! (Also, see Genesis One again). Neo-Darwinism is so laughably preposterous even foolish atheists like Jimmy Shapiro are beginning to re-evaluate the emperor's outfit. #1: Dinosaurs lived and went extinct millions of years ago. We've long had solid evidence that man and dinosaurs lived together, from cliff and cave drawings to the tomb of Richard Bell, to Chinese calendars... and of course all that dinosaur soft tissue in all those fossils!
*Top 10 List: Fred Williams and co-host Doug McBurney review their list of the top 10 things people still believe, that science has proven wrong. #10: Vestigial Organs - The most popular one growing up was the appendix, remember? Until this (from PubMed in 2016). And don't forget tonsils! #9: GPS won't work without Einsteinian relativity. It will, and does. #8: Junk DNA - There's no such thing! We're only beginning to comprehend DNA. And to have ever assumed any of it was junk was foolishness! #7: Lucy is a Human Ancestor - Poppycock! #6: Plate Tectonics - The fourth-biggest-dumbest theory going, (after Darwinian Evolution, the Big Bang, and Einsteinian Relativity). #5: Dangerous Anthropogenic Climate Change - Fifth biggest-dumbest... #4: Darwin's Tree of Life - That dog don't hunt, and lies like a rug! #3: The Big Bang: See #'s 4 & 5, the James Webb Space Telescope, and our favorite! Genesis One. #2: Evolution: Ha! Yeah.... right! (Also, see Genesis One again). Neo-Darwinism is so laughably preposterous even foolish atheists like Jimmy Shapiro are beginning to re-evaluate the emperor's outfit. #1: Dinosaurs lived and went extinct millions of years ago. We've long had solid evidence that man and dinosaurs lived together, from cliff and cave drawings to the tomb of Richard Bell, to Chinese calendars... and of course all that dinosaur soft tissue in all those fossils!
Superhero comics are cycles of endless strife, dialectical tides pushing and pulling between too often oversimplified representations of "evil" and "good." As if on a journey from vulgar physical form to enlightened spiritual ascendence, superheroes die and are reborn over and over, with little consideration that this time might be the last. What happens when an economy does the same? How do we allow it to rise and fall like the characters in our funny mags? Like the souls in our bodies? Will it ever be enough? ---------- Issues covered: The Adventures of Superman 499 Action Comics 686 Superman: The Man of Steel 21 Superman 77 ---------- Special thanks to our Lovable Sidekicks: Better Possible Futures, Kourtney Smith, Walt Lewellyn, Kafka, The Black Casebook's Very Own Nightwing, JD Lunt, Ambird, Mr. Pig from the Intervention, Travis Armstrong, Chris Marks, Wirecats, Sheeee-itttt, VoidTek, Mars Hottentot, Richard Bell, and Takotuesday ---------- Email: collectiveactioncomics@gmail.com I nstagram: https://www.instagram.com/collectiveactioncomics Twitter: https://twitter.com/CAComixPod Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/cacomixpod.bsky.social Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/collectiveactioncomics
Martin talks to Richard Bell, Partner at Bell Alliance LLP, about the difference between Estate Planning and Personal Planning, why wills are important, and Personal Planning documents.
All right, everybody, I've got an amazing special episode in store for you all today. So, I've partnered together with the Firing the Man podcast, and Dave and Ken, who run this podcast, have done an amazing job and interviewed Adam Feinberg. Adam had a nine figure exit just a couple of years ago, and he dropped some massive knowledge bombs as to the actionable steps that he took in order to grow his brand, big enough that he had a nine-figure exit where the majority of his revenue was coming from Amazon. So, there's a lot to dig into today. Okay, so make sure you take some notes. And then when you're done with this episode, make sure you go follow Firing the Man podcast by David and Ken.Adam (00:00:44) - You have to if you want to be an entrepreneur, you have to keep your expenses reasonable and you have to be willing to take risk. And if you don't take risks and take chances, you're just not going to succeed over the long haul. Kind of following strategies correctly pays off.Adam (00:01:02) - We also invested a lot of money in advertising and building up our brands, which I think is really, really important on Amazon. I kind of learned from it that it's kind of better in a lot of instances, to be the big fish in a little pond than like, the eighth best fish in a big pond. Amazon.com once you have momentum, if you're in the top couple listings in the category, you don't want to give it up no matter what. So I would start and people would laugh. There'd be like your air shipping, solar lights, and the solar lights cost $15 to air strip and you only make ten bucks on each one. Why are you doing that? And I said, it's worth it because we don't want to lose our rank on Amazon.Intro (00:01:43) - Welcome, everyone, to the Firing the Man podcast, a show for anyone who wants to be their own boss. If you sit in a cubicle every day and know you were capable of more, then join us. This show will help you build a business and grow your passive income streams in just a few short hours per day.Intro (00:02:01) - And now your host, serial entrepreneurs David Schwimmer and Ken Wilson.David (00:02:06) - Welcome everyone to The Firing Man podcast. On today's episode, we have the privilege to interview Adam Feinberg. Adam is the CEO of Web Deals Direct and Amazon FBA business that is home to more than 30 brands. Adam recently sold his business to perch, a technology driven commerce company that acquires and operates top Amazon third party sellers and other direct to consumer brands at scale, resulting in an impressive nine figure earnout. We are really excited to share Adam's story and knowledge with listeners today. Welcome to the show, Adam.Adam (00:02:40) - All right. Thanks for having me. I'm glad to be here.David (00:02:42) - Yeah, absolutely. So first things first, tell us a little bit about your background and how you got to where you are today.Adam (00:02:49) - All right. Well, I used to be in the IT consulting business, and I have a wife who's a physician, and I have two big kids now. My daughter is a freshman in college, but about 10 or 11 years ago, we figured our lifestyle didn't work.Adam (00:03:03) - And as well as I thought I was doing, she told me my job wasn't important. So you stay at home so I could have either been a stay at home dad, or I had to figure out something to do that worked with carpool drop offs and soccer, little league and karate class and all that. So I started running an SEO company at home. I put up a website. I learned a little bit about ranking in Google, helping my wife with her business, and some of her friends with their businesses. And I got lucky with it and put a website on the first page for a bunch of search terms like SEO company, SEO, agency, SEO services, and built up an SEO company up to about $3 million annually for about 4 or 5 years. I have a partner named Richard Bell, and he talked me into expanding the SEO business into the UK in 2012 or so, and we were going along merrily. Google made some changes. It started to become a little bit more difficult as a business to get small business customers competitive and Google rankings.Adam (00:04:10) - We were looking for something else to do. My friend Richard had a chiropractor friend who was selling swim goggles and swim caps and making more money than he was being a chiropractor in 2014 and was making fun of us, that he was doing better than we were with this little side gig, but kind of invited us along at the same time. So I told Ritch to quit doing SEO and to look into this. In 2014, I gave him a gigantic budget of maybe 25,000 bucks. I said, turn it into $100 million. And six years later, here we are. But, you know, there's a couple of things in between then that's pretty much the background of how we got into Amazon. E-commerce was just kind of a side thing, as we saw that digital marketing using search engine optimization was kind of a declining and more. Difficult and challenging business and adventure.Ken (00:05:02) - Yeah, that's pretty awesome. So, Adam, you mentioned you have been an entrepreneur for about 11 years. Is that correct?Adam (00:05:08) - That's correct.Ken (00:05:09) - Awesome. So did you have any fears about jumping over from corporate life to an entrepreneur, or was anything holding you back, or did you just dive right in?Adam (00:05:20) - I was absolutely petrified. I always wanted to become an entrepreneur. My dad was an entrepreneur, my grandparents were an entrepreneur. But we kind of grew into living at our means, living the Washington, D.C. area. Even with my wife being a physician and me having a pretty senior position at Accenture. We would spend every dime we have. So kind of the thought of jumping into corporate life kind of scared the hell out of me. To be honest, one of the things that really made it possible for me to become an entrepreneur was in 2012, we moved to Charlotte. My wife took a new job, the Charlotte Market for doctors, a lot better than D.C. so we kind of got a four for like double the salary and half the house price. So it was really life changing for my ability to kind of be able to take a chance as an entrepreneur.Adam (00:06:16) - When we moved down here, and it kind of gave me a second chance at it. I had some ups and downs in the SEO business when I had my first down in 2012, and that kind of was kind of the leading factor for me to move to Charlotte. I plan to get another job in the IT business, and the only thing that prevented me from doing that now is I had 15 years of telecom experience, and it's a banking town in Charlotte and no one really wanted me. So I was sitting at home with nothing to do. I figured I give SEO another punt, so that's kind of where it's at. But really what helped me is my wife was able to cover all the expenses. We went from having like a 4 or $5000 mortgage down to $1,000 a month down in Charlotte. And I really think that really having a manageable expenses is really super duper key in becoming an entrepreneur at first. And I really had to produce nothing other than my wife said it was deck and vacation money.Adam (00:07:15) - So I think that's really is something. I was super lucky about that a lot of other entrepreneurs don't have. a lot of my friends that sell on Amazon, even some that do it full time, they started doing both a full time job and like an Amazon side gig, and I was able to do the SEO business as a full time business. And then the Amazon business is a full time business.David (00:07:37) - Okay. So knowing what you know now, what advice would you give yourself at the beginning of that journey?Adam (00:07:44) - Really? Well, I think like the biggest, the biggest things are you have to if you want to be an entrepreneur, you have to keep your expenses reasonable and you have to be willing to take risk. And if you don't ...
Nights' resident film critic Dan Slevin is back this week with an Australian theme. Dan takes a look at the next edition of the Mad Max franchise Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, You Can Go Now! a documentary about Aboriginal artist and activist Richard Bell and the Aussie classic Death in Brunswick featuring our very own Sam Neill.
Gun WA racecaller Richard Bell joins us to preview The Nullabor at Gloucester Park worth $1.25 million. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Today Nikita answers questions from Richard Bell. Listen for another great episode of Q&A.
Aboriginal artist Richard Bell's documentary You Can Go Now is screening at the Maoriland Film Festival, underway in Otaki . In it, he poses provocative and humourous challenges to the status quo and to our preconceived ideas of Aboriginal art.
The largest-ever court award for slavery reparations came from an unlikely plaintiff. Henrietta Wood was an enslaved woman who gained her freedom in the 1840s - only to be kidnapped and sold back into slavery for 15 more horrific years. Her heroic fight for payback is inspiration for today's reparations battle. Join us with historian Caleb McDaniel, whose book telling Wood's story, Sweet Taste Of Liberty, won the Pulitzer Prize.SHOW NOTESGuest: W. Caleb McDanielDr. McDaniel is a professor at Rice University and U.S. historian, focusing on the Civil War Era and the struggle over slavery. He chairs the Department of History and serves as co-chair of Rice's Task Force on Slavery, Segregation, and Racial Injustice. His book, Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America, was awarded the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in History.Caleb McDaniel's home pageCaleb McDaniel's book about Henrietta Wood, Sweet Taste Of LibertyStolen by Richard Bell - story of five Black boys kidnapped from Philadelphia into slavery in 1825 More about Henrietta Wood's son Arthur Sims including his photo in Jet Magazine when he was America's oldest practicing Black lawyer!HIGHLIGHTS OF EPISODE:[5:57] The “reverse Underground Railroad” and kidnapping gangs in border states[12:51] The villain: Zebulon Ward[17:37] The case: Henrietta Wood v. Zebulon Ward[20:38] Generational impact of court award on Wood's family[28:42] Importance of political action in the fight for reparations[31:52] The hero: Henrietta WoodContact Tony & AdamSubscribe
Artist and curator Tony Albert collects Aboriginalia, colonial kitsch still found in Australia's second-hand and souvenir shops, to reconstruct historic racial stereotypes and reclaim contemporary Indigenous experiences. From ‘Picanniny Floor Polish' to ‘Bally Boomerang Pinball Machines', Sydney-based artist and collector Tony Albert has long been fascinated by Australiana, tourist objects which attempt to define, and commodify, Aboriginal and Torres Strati Islander peoples. Transforming them into grand sculptural installations, his works are political interventions with these vintage objects, and reappropriations of their use and meaning - which refuse to shy away from the shameful status they now hold. One such installation lends its name to Story, Place, a group exhibition in London, which brings together contemporary Indigenous artists from Australia and the diaspora. Tony talks about the plurality of Indigenous identities and lands across Australia, comparing the country's diversity to that of the European continent, and using ‘dreamtimes' to dispel the creation myth of Captain James Cook's Botany Bay landing in 1770. From his working-class upbringing in North Queensland, to working in cities like Brisbane with the likes of Richard Bell and Vernon Ah Kee, he unpacks the importance of collaboration and collective practice. As a member of the Kuku Yalanji peoples, Tony shares his perspectives working within museums and institutions ‘made by white people, for white people' - and why these particular works must travel to Europe and America, to highlight shared colonial histories, and what Aboriginality means today. Sullivan+Strumpf: Story, Place runs at Frieze No.9 Cork Street in London until 21 October, as part of Frieze London 2023. Join the Gallery this Saturday (12 October), for special exhibition tours and artist talks. For more about terra nullius, listen to EMPIRE LINES Australia Season, marking the 30 year anniversary of the Mabo vs. Queensland Case (1992) and Tate Modern's A Year in Art: Australia 1992, with Jeremy Eccles on Judy Watson (https://pod.link/1533637675/episode/e02b445e9c355b30b90c77df1f39264d) and Dr. Desmond Manderson on Gordon Bennett (https://pod.link/1533637675/episode/8ab2ce0a86704edc573cb86a69e845e1 For more on Cigar Store Indians, listen to Anna Ghadar on Mining the Museum at the Maryland Historical Society, Fred Wilson (1992-1993): https://pod.link/1533637675/episode/e02b445e9c355b30b90c77df1f39264d WITH: Tony Albert, multidisciplinary artist and curator. He is the first Indigenous artist on the board of trustees for the Art Gallery of New South Wales, a First Nations Curatorial Fellow, and a founder member of the Brisbane-based collective, proppaNOW, with artists Richard Bell and Vernon Ah Kee. He is the co-curator of Story, Place, with Jenn Ellis. ART: ‘Story, Place, Tony Albert (2023)'. IMAGE: Installation View. PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic. Follow EMPIRE LINES on Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936 And Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Feature length documentary, You Can Go Now, premieres Sunday 24 September at 8.30pm on NITV and SBS.
Englishman Thomas Paine arrived in America in 1774 as the conflict between the colonies and Great Britain peaked. Up to that point, the colonies were said to have considered negotiation rather than separating from Britain. This week, University of Maryland history professor Richard Bell joins BTSA to discuss Paine's arguments, his life, and what led him to publish Common Sense. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Richard Bell, a University of Maryland history professor discusses Thomas Paine's life, and what led him to publish Common Sense. Common Sense written by Thomas Paine is a 47-page pamphlet advocating for independence from Great Britain, it was published in 1776. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
New subsidies by the government from July 1 will see more childcare costs covered, but the industry argues this will drive up demand.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Daniel Browning travels to London's Tate Modern, to speak with artist Richard Bell about his ongoing installation Embassy, inspired by the original Aboriginal Tent Embassy pitched in 1972. Embassy offers a space for dialogue about the continuing struggle for Aboriginal land rights.Rosa visits the studio of designer and experimental woodturner Makiko Ryujin, who torches her creations until they're charred and transformed into new forms.When great artists pass, how do you ensure their legacy and work are protected and remembered? When artist and gay activist David McDiarmid died in 1995 he left his friend Sally Gray in charge of his creative legacy. She chats with Rosa about David's art, her guardianship of it, and what it was like to make art during the height of the AIDS crisis.
Daniel Browning travels to London's Tate Modern, to speak with artist Richard Bell about his ongoing installation Embassy, inspired by the original Aboriginal Tent Embassy pitched in 1972. Embassy offers a space for dialogue about the continuing struggle for Aboriginal land rights. Rosa visits the studio of designer and experimental woodturner Makiko Ryujin, who torches her creations until they're charred and transformed into new forms. When great artists pass, how do you ensure their legacy and work are protected and remembered? When artist and gay activist David McDiarmid died in 1995 he left his friend Sally Gray in charge of his creative legacy. She chats with Rosa about David's art, her guardianship of it, and what it was like to make art during the height of the AIDS crisis.
Behind the Scenes of Day 1 of the fifth edition of the Leaders Sport Business Summit in Abu Dhabi.Leaders on the Ground takes you behind-the-scenes at our in-person events, where our team review the action and key takeaways from the on-stage sessions. In partnership with the Abu Dhabi Sports Council, the Leaders team invited 750 senior executives to the world-renowned Yas Marina Circuit for the fifth edition of Leaders Sport Business Summit Abu Dhabi.In this episode, Leaders' Content Director David Cushnan and Editorial Director James Emmett review the proceedings from Day 1, with insight from the following guests:- Michele Ciccarese, Commercial & Marketing Director, Lega Serie A (08:51-17:13)- Juliet Slot, Chief Commercial Officer, Arsenal F.C (22:38-32:07)- Richard Bell, Managing Partner, UK Financial Advisor, Deloitte (34:58-40:59)- Tony Bellew, Boxing Analyst & Pundit, DAZN Group (49:03-57:27)*Note: This was recorded on site, so there may be some slight distortion in the audio, but this should not take away from your listening experience.*
You Can Go Now here II Larissa Behrendt film You Can Go Now focucsing on indigenous artist policital activist Richard Bell is in cinema's now. I speak with Richard Bell.Another Refugee Death in Custody here II Ian Rintoul from Refugee Action Coalition talks about the latest suicide of a refugee in Villawood. Enough is enough.Socialist Alternative Push for Parliament here II Jerome Small, a recent Socialist Alternative candidate for the most recent Victorian election talks about the experience and the push for a socialist presence in Parliament.This is the Week here II Kevin Healy gives the best analysis of the tennis to be found in any media.Wombat State Forest Logging Protest here II Amy Calton from Wombat Action Group tells us about the week long action against logging in the state forest leading up to the rally outside Victorian Parliament on Tuesday Feb 10 at 10am.Decolonizing Gender here II We hear from Toroga Denver Breda (Khoihoi), language revitalizer from a webinar run by Cultural Survival. Cultural Survival is a nonprofit group based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, which is dedicated to defending the human rights of indigenous peoples.
Enter the art installation of provocation, decolonisation and truth. Admission? Beyond the bare minimum. Abolish the date with YOU CAN GO NOW this week.Non Indigenous Australians need to do the work but also here are resources mentioned to get involved beyond tweeting and signing petitions:https://paytherent.net.au/https://www.reconciliation.org.au/https://supplynation.org.au/First Nation organisations to donate to:https://www.mentalhealthformob.org/https://www.magabala.com/https://www.commonground.org.au/https://indigenousx.com.au/https://ourislandsourhome.com.au/https://dhadjowa.com.au/https://awesomeblack.org/Website | Rotten Tomatoes | Apple | Patreon | Twitter | Instagram
Mark and Megan chat with newly elected Winchester City Council member, Richard Bell, as he describes past, present, and future opportunities for the City of Winchester to make a lasting impact for those who live in our community.
Richard Bell, the Executive Director of Operations for USD 385 Andover Public Schools joins the show today to share leadership strategies and disaster recovery lessons learned. Two short months before Richard joined his current district, one of the elementary schools was severely damaged by a glancing blow of a tornado. He was boots on the ground the next day and worked tirelessly with the team to get the restoration and reconstruction of the school completed and ready for occupancy before the next school year. Tune in to the School Facilities and Operations interview to hear: - How to prepare for a disaster so you have the needed information at hand - Lessons learned on how a quick response and trusted teams can lead to success - How to let your staff understand your expectations when it comes to quality --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/schoolfacilities/message
“It could have been a last waltz,” Bill Flanagan wrote, “instead, it turned out to be rock & roll's greatest half time show." Thirty years ago, Sony Music hosted Columbia Records Celebrates the Music of Bob Dylan at Madison Square Garden on October 16, 1992. A double-CD concert album and a concert film, both titled Bob Dylan: The 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration were released to memorialize the event. This episode will memorialize the memorialization, contextualize the concert within the lineage of other great multiact, multiheaded concerts and festivals, and it will also strip bare some of the event's mythologization. In "20 Pounds of Headlines," we round up news from the world of Bob Dylan as it was in 1992 and today, including a brief clip of Dylan reading from his forthcoming THE PHILOSOPHY OF MODERN SONG, an update on his current tour itinerary, and a special guest review of another much more recent Bob Dylan Tribute Concert that took place at Town Hall in New York City, this review written by our listener Jon Olson of Arlington. In "Who Did It Better?" we ask you who did "When I Paint My Masterpiece" better live, Jerry Garcia and John Kahn or The Band (minus Robbie Robertson) with Richard Bell and Jim Weider on the stage of Madison Square Garden for Columbia Records Celebrates the Music of Bob Dylan? For past episodes featuring the music of the Columbia Records Celebrates the Music of Bob Dylan concert, look up the following episodes of HARD RAIN & SLOW TRAINS: BOB DYLAN & FELLOW TRAVELERS: 10/29/2020: “All Those Who've Sailed with Me: Bob Dylan & His Bands part 3,” 6/10/2021: “The Great Pretender: The Music of Chrissie Hynde,” 11/11/2021: “Bloomington,” and 11/25/2021: “Playing to the Big Crowds, Playing to the Cheap Seats: Bob Dylan & The Beatles part 2.” You might also like to listen to 10/8/2020: “The Rock Era” for some more context concerning multiact and multiheaded concerts and festivals.
In this episode we sat down with West Covina's Chief of Police, Richard Bell. Now three years into his tenure leading the West Covina Police Department, Chief Bell covered a wide range of topics during his interview, topics that are of keen interest to all residents. For example, Chief Bell discussed recent trends in crime in our city – trends that both confirm and contradict widely held perceptions. Other topics we covered included the increasing use of license plate recognition cameras by the WCPD and changes to policies for permits to carry concealed weapons. Those policies are being changed now, the result of a ruling by the Supreme Court just months ago. Chief Bell also shares with us his personal history including his time as a running back in the NFL and, post professional football ascending the ranks of law enforcement. Chief Bell is a humble, thoughtful, and experienced leader that takes enormous pride in our police department and the residents they serve. Get to know, Police Chief Richard Bell, on this episode of Talk to Us West Covina. Richard Bell - Pittsburgh Steelers (1990) NFL Touchdown Video (Click Link):https://steelersdepot.com/2018/06/one-hit-wonders-richard-bell-turns-the-dial-up-to-11/Learn more about the West Covina Police Department at www.wcpd.org
Richard Bell is one of the few individual artists curated into Documenta 15, the highly-anticipated global survey of contemporary art. This year, for the first time, it's been dominated by artists and collectives from the Global South. But the historic takeover has been eclipsed by a media storm ignited by what appears to be a Jewish caricature in a mural painted by Indonesian artist group Taring Padi, since taken down. Queensland-born sculptor Sebastian di Mauro who now calls Delaware home, discusses his obsession with materiality and his new exhibition featuring appliquéd army blankets based on the arcane imagery on American dollar notes. And we discover the little-known painter Edward Brezinski who lived on the fringes of the hyperactive 1980s New York art scene that produced Jean Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. His desperate bid for fame is charted in the new documentary Make Me Famous which also offers a fascinating insight into the ecosystem of the art business.
Richard Bell is one of the few individual artists curated into Documenta 15, the highly-anticipated global survey of contemporary art. This year, for the first time, it's been dominated by artists and collectives from the Global South. But the historic takeover has been eclipsed by a media storm ignited by what appears to be a Jewish caricature in a mural painted by Indonesian artist group Taring Padi, since taken down. Queensland-born sculptor Sebastian di Mauro who now calls Delaware home, discusses his obsession with materiality and his new exhibition featuring appliquéd army blankets based on the arcane imagery on American dollar notes. And we discover the little-known painter Edward Brezinski who lived on the fringes of the hyperactive 1980s New York art scene that produced Jean Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. His desperate bid for fame is charted in the new documentary Make Me Famous which also offers a fascinating insight into the ecosystem of the art business.
A band of teenage boys arrive at Long Point Camp on sprawling Balsam Lake for the ultimate Canadian experience: two weeks of games, kite-making, lacrosse, sing-a-longs, marshmallow roasts, canoeing, swimming and adventure. The unofficial leader of this band of brothers, George Waller, has fled a tumultuous family life and lands at camp-angry and very raw. Waller meets Arthur, a new camp leader who's progressive and amenable, and is reunited with Robert, the camp's patriarch, stoic and orderly-someone who reminds Waller just a little too much of his father. Both Great War veterans, Arthur and Robert have their own approaches to educating and nurturing boys. Arthur and Robert set off across the lake in a thirty-foot Indian war canoe with Waller and ten of his companions. When they encounter a freak summer storm and are capsized in the middle of the churning lake, the brotherhood's holiday descends into a soul-shuddering fight for survival. Only four will survive. Based on a true story. Richard Bell, the Writer and Director of Brotherhood sat down with the Cross Border Interviews with Chris Brown to talk about the movie and his event in Calgary on June 24th. Purchase Tickets to the Calgary Event at the Plaza Theatre Now: https://www.theplaza.ca/films?id=ST00000166 *************************************************** Follow the Cross Border Interview Podcast: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/crossborderpodcast/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/CrossBorderPod Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/CrossBorderInterviews Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCI2i25ZVKTO84oUsLyO4jig Website: https://www.crossborderinterviews.ca/ Back the Show: https://www.patreon.com/CrossBoderInterviewPodcast The Cross Border Interview Podcast was Produced and Edited by Miranda, Brown & Associates Inc © 2022
Jim Carlen, head football coach at West Virginia, Texas Tech, and South Carolina, 1966-1981) is on this year's ballot for induction into the College Football Hall of Fame. Leadership set Jim Carlen apart, not just leadership in the football sense, but in terms of leadership writ large. Carlen was adept at doing the things that great leaders do, including visioning, personnel selection/deployment, establishing/reinforcing group norms and performance expectations, and day-to-day-management. Being a consummate leader translated into Jim Carlin being a great football coach (career record of 109-67-6). This audiocast is designed to offer testimony to that assertion, voiced by those who played under and coached with him at West Virginia University from 1966 to 1969. Those you'll hear include John Hale, Tom Kucer, Dick Roberts, Mickey Plumley, Phil Callicut, Richard Bell, Ken Juskowich, and Danny Wilfong. This 30-minute audiocast is a companion piece to the article, COMMENTARY: Great Leadership Set Jim Carlen Apart, published in The Sports Column. (Cover photo courtesy of WV Sports Now)
How often does a political artwork fall into the national spotlight during a federal election? Hear from Archibald portrait prize winner Blak Douglas. Plus, an Italian art exhibition that puts NFT juggernaut Beeple alongside European masters and Australia's Richard Bell. And enter the studio of weaver, printmaker and textile artist Ema Shin.
How often does a political artwork fall into the national spotlight during a federal election? Hear from Archibald portrait prize winner Blak Douglas. Plus, an Italian art exhibition that puts NFT juggernaut Beeple alongside European masters and Australia's Richard Bell. And enter the studio of weaver, printmaker and textile artist Ema Shin.
Heading south from Honolulu today to Australia---like most places, a land still reckoning with its history. In 1972, four aboriginal Australian men set up umbrellas outside the old Parliament House in Canberra. They called it the Aboriginal Tent Embassy because they felt treated like aliens in their own homeland and were demanding land rights. That protest mushroomed, footage was viewed in 86 countries, it is the longest running continuous protest for indigenous land rights in the world. 50 years this year. In 2013, artist Richard E. Bell created a traveling "Aboriginal Embassy." Every time it goes up around the world, discussions about land rights and sovereignty are held inside. Material from previous iterations is incorporated at each new location. Bell is also a painter. His muscle-y paintings jump off the walls. Arresting colors in a patchwork, often with text, kind of Barbara Kruger meets Rauschenberg. With words like: "Pardon me for being born into a land of racists." And "You can go now." Also, "We know how to wait." Richard was due in Honolulu soon, so I caught him on a Zoom recently. I think youʻll enjoy him, I know I learned enough to need to know more. Richard Bellʻs "Embassy" is coming to Honolulu May 6 and 7. It's part of the Hawaiʻi Triennial 2022, "Pacific Century: E Hoʻomau no Moananuiakea" through May 8, 2022 at seven venues in Honolulu. This "Embassy" has gathered steam already in Moscow, New York, Jakarta, Jerusalem and Sydney. We will gather to add our manaʻo from Hawaiʻi on Friday, May 6, 5-6pm and Saturday May 7, 2-3 pm at the Hawaiʻi State Art Museum. Issues of land and sovereignty could not be more pressing, as we bleed with the resistance in Mariupol. We send these Brolga Bird Clan Songs to the resistance. By Dabulu and Magern, hear Australian aboriginal sounds on Smithsonian Folkways. We offer this chant from the Pacific in solidarity with Ukrainian resistance. Next up on fresh pacific, the fabulous girls from toqa.
Aloha mai kakou! This podcast series is kicking off with four artists featured in the Hawaiʻi Triennial 2022, "Pacific Century: E Hoʻomau no Moananuiakea." HT22 continues through May 8, 2022 at seven venues in Honolulu, so weʻve got to get cooking! Today, we meet featured artist, Beatriz Santiago Munoz, who lives and works in San Juan, Puerto Rico. She exhibits her art internationally. The works are primarily video and installations, dealing with place, politics, history, memory. Munoz works inside and through issues that Honolulu and San Juan have in common, including gentrification, militarization, changing communities, and wealth disparity. Munoz made "Gosila," for example, in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in 2018. Munoz mixes news of devastation with uprooted trees and demolished homes which end up being visual metaphors for what happened.The power grid collapsed, leaving many without food, water, or electricity, as a history of corruption and lack of investment was laid bare. Munoz keeps her camera on what the people of Puerto Rico went through. Then, the slow human process of rebuilding. The video is projected through a fragment of lens found near Maunabo, Puerto Rico. In the HT22 installation, Munoz shows Post-Military Cinema, 2014, a rumination surrounding an abandoned cinema on a defunct U.S. Naval base. Otros usos, 2016, is shot from an old fuel dock for battleships, now used by fishermen. Their hands tell the story of their rugged days. Ojos para mis enemigos, 2014; and Black Beach/ Horse/ Camp/ The Dead/ Forces, 2016, are also there. Multiple giant screens juxtapose images in the mind at once: a horse grazes quietly, then turn a corner, waters churn in widescreen on the left, while on the right, a manʻs gnarled hands gather fuel for a blaze. Itʻs a tactile, breathing world that can be absorbed more than deciphered. Munoz has exhibited at the Tate Modern, the Whitney Biennial, the Guggenheim Museum, and other international venues. Right now, her work is featured in a refreshing outpost of the Hawaiʻi Triennial 2022, at Royal Hawaiian Center in Waikiki. Go Diamond Head on the third floor, on the mauka side. Youʻll see a cheery exterior and glimpse Momoyo Torimitsuʻs Pink Bunny. Inside, youʻll find Munozʻs videos, Lawrence Sewardʻs sly newspaper/lemonade stand, and in a viewing room, Hong Kong artist Zheng Bo shows tender, sexualized explorations of the forest. Thereʻs VR too, of course, Miao Ying hints at a brighter, less structured world. Others, including Herman Piʻikea Clark, also on view there. I ended up spending a couple of very satisfying hours. Please local people brave Waikiki. I went there last night -- after the show closed, itʻs only open 12-7. Today, someone dropped me off while they did errands in town. That strategy may work for you! Otherwise, from what I can figure, itʻs 1 hour free parking with a $10 purchase validation or $12 per hour with no RHC validation. Next up, Friday, I think! Richard Bell, his installation/intervention, Embassy, a wry comment on statelessness---is going up at the Hawaiiʻi State Art Museum May 7 and 8 for the Hawaiʻi Triennial 2022. Beatriz Santiago Munoz podcast song list: Super Groupers. Smoke Signals featuring Exile. https://zenburecords.bandcamp.com/track/smoke-signals-featuring-exile Ohtoro. Leafbrella with Kizuna https://ohtoro.bandcamp.com/track/leafbrella-with-kizuna Maryanne Ito. Double Talk https://open.spotify.com/track/5A8tr3QGKdZjVSXjhyV11Z Ohtoro. (Kiva) featuring YB by Cooki3 + Ohtoro. https://zenburecords.bandcamp.com/track/kiva-feat-yb Super Groupers. Shine Thru featuring Punahele. Learn to Fly. https://music.apple.com/us/album/shine-thru-feat-punahele/1132411809?i=1132411987 A hui hou!
This episode Michelle and Katherine angree about nature facts, television show finales, Steve Martin love, Kanye West curiosity, and the very notion of time itself! Tree Talks by Ben Kinsley: https://blackcube.art/event/tree-talks-populus-tremuloides-by-ben-kinsley The Yard Project by Ben Kinsley and Jessica Langley http://whatsintheyard.com Lake Nyos, Menchum, Cameroon, “Deadliest Lake in the World Suffocated Over 1,746 People in One Night” Atlas Obscura https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/lake-nyos-the-deadliest-lake-in-the-world Kanye West's Mask on Page Six https://pagesix.com/2021/10/19/kanye-west-dons-bizarre-mask-for-second-michael-cohen-meeting/ Richard Bell's website: https://richardbellart.com The Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory https://www.thetimeparadox.com/zimbardo-time-perspective-inventory/
With today's guest we branch out into the world of L&D and more specifically OD and Talent.I'm joined by Richard Bell who has been operating in this space for over 20 years. Richard helps define what these three concepts are and how that translates into day to day work. So, if you're someone who is interested in a career down this path, or you'd heard the terms but weren't quite sure what they were, then this will be a really useful episode for you.I'll be honest we do go off on quite a few tangents in this episode but it's definitely worth it.As always, I hope you enjoy listening.Support the show
Philadelphia, 1825: five young, free black boys fall into the clutches of the most fearsome gang of kidnappers and slavers in the United States. Lured onto a small ship with the promise of food and pay, they are instead met with blindfolds, ropes, and knives. Over four long months, their kidnappers drive them overland into the Cotton Kingdom to be sold as slaves. Determined to resist, the boys form a tight brotherhood as they struggle to free themselves and find their way home.Their ordeal—an odyssey that takes them from the Philadelphia waterfront to the marshes of Mississippi and then onward still—shines a glaring spotlight on the Reverse Underground Railroad, a black market network of human traffickers and slave traders who stole away thousands of legally free African Americans from their families in order to fuel slavery's rapid expansion in the decades before the Civil War.Impeccably researched and breathlessly paced, Stolen tells the incredible story of five boys whose courage forever changed the fight against slavery in America.-Richard Bell teaches Early American history at the University of Maryland. He has received several teaching prizes and major research fellowships including the National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Award. His first book, We Shall Be No More: Suicide and Self-Government in the Newly United States, was published in 2012. He is also the author of Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home.
Richard C. Bell, Esq. has been practicing law in New York City for more than 30 years. He graduated from Duke University Magna Cum Laude. Richard Bell served on the DNC National Lawyers Council, the Minority Voting Rights Committee, was an electoral poll monitor for the Obama campaign in Philadelphia in 2012, and an electoral poll monitor for the Clinton campaign in Broward County, Florida during the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. He has also argued and won an appeal of a court order protecting voters' rights in New Jersey on Election Day, 2006. Richard Bell has been on the ground at the polls and in the courtroom, pro bono, defending people's right to vote since 2004, and is author of VOTING: The Ultimate Act Of Resistance which can be found on amazon.com go to vote.org to find out about your own voter registration.
Sometimes a business can go through the acquisition cycle once, twice, or even more. A deal that was pivotal to our development back 2011 came back through Quiet Light this year and our very own Brad Wayland is here talking to the buyer, Richard Bell, about his recent purchase of a business we originally sold 8 years ago. Throughout his career, Richard Bell has mostly been in the high tech world. He's worked in sales, product development, marketing, business development, and mergers and acquisitions. He stayed mainly on the strategic side of running a business before deciding to make a purchase of his own last year. He started off small, looking to take his breadth of behind-the-scenes knowledge to bat with YUGSTER, the e-commerce business he bought. While Richard's thorough due diligence process may have initially overwhelmed the seller, the two worked well together in the end. Richard did a lot of the work up front, showed the seller he was serious, and greatly reduced the risk for problems once the deal was done. Episode Highlights: How Richard went about the search process and decided to buy this business. Factors that made the purchase good a fit. Who YUGSTER sells to. How the office and staff structure has changed since Richard took over. Richard's SBA purchase choice and how he navigated the process. Advice for anyone considering an SBA purchase. The rebrand and other changes that Richard made with Yugster, now called Until Gone. Successes and growth he's seen since the changes to the site. The software and the technology he's using and how he's are taking advantage of modern applications and platforms. Ways shopify has become the go to e-commerce cart choice for vendors. The biggest challenge Richard has encountered since the acquisition. Words of advice for others looking to delve into the purchase process. Transcription: Mark: One of the darkest periods in the history of Quiet Light Brokerage happened around 2011. I wasn't sure what I was going to do with Quiet Light at that time. And due to some personal situations going on with health issues with a family member of mine I took my eye off the ball of Quiet Light for a little bit of time and found ourselves in a position where frankly we didn't have a lot of money coming in. We had a lot more money going out and not a lot of deal flow at the same time. It was at that point in time when a great listing, a great business literally just fell on my lap and I was able to get that listing on the market, get it sold within a few days or at least found a buyer within a few days and it really represented kind of a life vest for me which really helped in bringing Quiet Light Brokerage profits back off the brink of extinction. One of the great things about this business that I love is seeing some of the companies that we touch early on grow and sometimes come back to us. When I originally started Quiet Light Brokerage my previous company that I'd sold came back through Quiet Light. I sold it again. I actually ended up selling that company a total of three times which was pretty fascinating to do. Today we don't have Joe on the introduction. We have Brad because Brad talked to one of his previous clients; a buyer that just closed an acquisition and they bought the business that served as a life vest for me back in 2011. Brad, how was the conversation with Richard? Brad: You know it's really great. I didn't actually know that background. I think he sent me an email and said hey I've got a lot on my plate. This is a good listing. Do you want to take a peek at it and see if you can put a value on it and help them get it sold? So I didn't know that backstory I just knew that you had sold it once previously. So it's one of those situations where we had a guy that was in Richard the buyer; we had a guy that was looking for an investment. He had inquired on a little tiny listing that I had out at the time it's like a hundred thousand dollars and came to the conclusion that it wasn't a good fit. But I had picked up on that this guy was like a serious M&A guy. I could already tell from the get-go like why is this guy looking at a hundred thousand dollar listing? This guy supposed must be looking at much larger listings than this. So I was a little surprised and ended up floating in the details of this listing that we had for a daily deal site that kind of needed someone with the ability to kind of handle a lot of moving parts. I felt like he seemed like the perfect personality for it. And so I floated it his way and the next day he sent me an LOI and it was just really smooth sailing from there on out from his side of things. He just was a really great buyer to work with and so I wanted to bring him on the podcast. I think he's done several things that have been really interesting with that company. Mark: How is this due diligence process different than say your average buyer out there? Brad: Yes. So when we do these deals they always look a little bit different. After we get an LOI why we are involved sometimes a lot in the due diligence process. Sometimes we're not involved very much at all. We have kind of standard folders and things that people want to look at; bank statements or proofs out of PayPal or your credit card provider. Things like that where people can kind of verify the numbers. In the case with Richard I found out after he got under LOI he had done like 200 million dollars in acquisitions in the corporate world. He was a very seasoned and experienced M&A guy. I can't remember how many transactions he had done but he had been responsible for some very large deals for I think a publicly-traded company. And so he put his diligence request together and he said hey I'm working on my diligence request and I sent them over to the seller. I think the seller about passed out. It was just; there was nothing wrong with it. It was very thorough but when you get these really experienced guys sometimes you think that means it's going to be a piece of cake for the seller but it doesn't always mean that. Sometimes if you've got a seller that's really done it's kind of like hey I'm just ready to move on and I don't want to look at it anymore. It can be a little bit of a challenge. And so we definitely dealt with that a little bit on this one where we've got a really seasoned buyer who had a very nice thorough package of diligence information that he wanted gathered. And then we had a seller that was really ready to be finished. And when he got the packet I think he felt like oh my goodness I just put all this work into getting the listing ready now we're going to go through this diligence process that is way more exhausting than what I did whenever I bought it on the front end. But honestly it was two great guys; the seller was a great seller, the buyer was a great buyer and they worked very well together and I think they've continued to be friends post-transaction. Mark: That the seller that you worked with was the buyer when I sold this business, and he still remains one of my favorite people that I've worked with out at Quiet Light. He is a fantastic guy. I think people sometimes get intimidated especially in the sell-side when they see these really long due diligence lists. But I've learned over the years, and I don't know how you feel about this Brad, but I've learned over the years that a thorough due diligence list is a good sign. It's usually a sign that the buyer is extraordinarily serious because look you have to generate all the information the buyer has to digest that information and that's really tough. And it also reduces the risk after the sale. Because if they're doing a thorough due diligence the chances of something coming back on you after are pretty small because they've done their homework. Brad: Yeah I totally agree with that. I actually tell my sellers all the time if they are complaining about the due diligence process I always tell them the work you're putting in now is saving you headache later. If you're going to go ahead and give them all the things that they need today they're not going to be the type of buyer that's coming back to you and saying hey man I really need you to help me with this or that I need to take advantage of these hours that we carved into the APA and train me on these different things. And I definitely have seen the transactions where they don't ask for much and then I find out later that the buyers had to come back to the seller several times asking for things and it seems like it is a better situation to just kind of lay all the cards on the table and do the work upfront and kind of have the ability to be done with the business and kind of transition to your next thing. Mark: That's a lot of chitchat on our part let's go ahead and listen to the interview. Brad: Welcome to the Quiet Light Podcast. I'm your host today Brad Wayland and we are joined today by Richard Bell. Hey Richard how are you today? Richard: I'm doing great, thanks. Nice to see you. Brad: Good. Yeah. So we've been doing this series of podcasts on folks that have bought something from Quiet Light and now we're kind of following up with them; seeing how things went, learning about why they bought, what they learned early on, what the challenges are and so today's kind of one of those profiles. And this one has a really unique kind of proposition that I want to kind of get into later but we usually start off by just getting some background. We don't do like these fancy intros. We let our guests kind of describe themselves. So Richard give the profile of what your career has looked like and tell me kind of where you've been. Richard: Sure, I'm happy to. I've done a variety of different roles which I think is one of the reasons that set me up well to do or set me up to do well with this job of running this business. I mostly worked in the high tech world with one particular company called Akamai Technologies. And within that company, I had spent time in sales roles, technical roles, product development, marketing, a lot of time in business development, and mergers and acquisitions with business development side and really partnership focused. And the roles I had after I left Akamai were very similar positions where I had a chance to really look at strategic issues, touch on a lot of different things across the whole breadth of running a business so it set me up well for the position I'm in now. Brad: Yeah that's great. I remember; I think you had inquired on another listing that I had. I think it was a pretty small listing and we got talking about it and you gave me some background I think in the time you told me like hey I ran M&A for a big corporation for a long time and gave me some pretty staggering numbers in terms of the dollars of deals you had helped close for your business. And when I heard it I was thinking about this potential listing it was coming up for this business called Yugster which I thought was the strangest name. I was not familiar with it even though we had sold it in the past but Yugster was Yours Until Gone and it was Yugster.com. And Mark Daoust the founder of Quiet Light called me and said hey we sold this business like years and years ago and now the guy that we sold it to is interested in selling it again and asked me if I would like to take a look at it. So when you started talking and I could hear your operational background I thought this might be a good fit for you and I think I just said hey I've got an idea I want to kind of float to you and I feel like that's kind of how we started it. Is that what you remember? Richard: Absolutely. I mean I started looking for a business probably six or nine months before you and I ever even touched base. Part of that was me doing homework on sort of what was out there and how to look at these businesses that were a lot smaller than the kinds of things that I'd looked at before where we're talking sale prices in the nine figures; so very large businesses, large multiples is in stack. And so I wasn't quite sure how to go about buying frankly a smaller business. And there's a lot of chat out there. I mean you know that and you know there's a lot of brokers out there who would just put a listing out for anything. So you end up learning quite a bit about what's really there and what's meaningful just by going through that process. And we did look at a business for another e-com site that you had posted up there and I think we had decided it was a little bit too seasonal for what we were doing. And then you threw the Yugster thing out there. I think it hadn't even gone public and I'm like Yugster? As a marketing guy that was like just you know what that is. But yeah that's exactly the story and so I think when I got my teeth around that one it actually made a lot of sense for me. I was kind of excited about it. Brad: Yeah. And correct me if I'm wrong but so the business model was it had been a drop shipping business I think since day one and it still had a very impressive; you're looking at it and I'm looking at the sign and I'm thinking this looks kind of antiquated. It looks a little bit like it's seen its better days. But when I looked at the results and we're talking about a low eight-figure business that was on some slightly declining trends and I could just tell that the light bulb kind of went off for you about like I think I might better inject some life into this and I clearly could see that you'd be able to handle the size of a business that was from what you had done before. But what specifically about Yugster was interesting to you? Like when you first looked at it what were you thinking like this is a good fit for me because of what? Richard: Like I said I went through this process where I started talking to some different brokers about a variety of different businesses to help me get educated about what's out there. There are a lot of businesses out there especially in the e-commerce space that are really it is an Amazon store. Somebody who is importing some private label from China and then they're essentially listing it on Amazon and having Amazon do fulfillment and so forth. It doesn't, and the issue I got to is that it doesn't really leverage my skills. There is not a lot of value that you can add to some of those kinds of businesses. Maybe you get a few more distribution channels or what have you. What I saw with Yugster was really interesting to me that it was a fully operating business. Yes, it was drop ship but they had relationships with a sizable number of vendors. They had a functioning platform. They were not dependent on other marketplaces like Amazon which could be all over the place or eBay or whatever. They had their own storefront. It had been established I think in 2005 or early 2006 when it went live. So it had a long life which is really important in terms of longevity and the brand and so forth. And the other thing that I; the two other things that I really looked at and I liked about it, one was it had a core staff. There were talented people that had a good resume and seem to know what they were doing. And it also had a really solid customer base. They had a loyalty program they've run for many years. These were customers that had been buying from Yugster repeatedly and they had it tiered up and they were kind of passionate about the business. And these sort of strong customer base, loyal customer base that's established, the staff is there and a technology platform that I thought I could really make a difference with because I do have a strong tech background; all of those things kind of came together for me and made me want to dive in with Yugster. Brad: Yeah that's interesting. So of course as just kind of a layperson when I go to the site I think of it as like a daily discount kind of idea. I see like maybe a generation ago iPad or MacBook or something like that. Is it retail-focused folks like me or is it more like small businesses that are like hey we need iPads for our production floor? We don't need the latest and greatest we need to get 10 of this. Is it a mix of those types of customers or who really is the customer that comes to this place? Richard: A really good question and it's changed a bit. So the business model just to kind of flesh that out a little bit more for the audience it is a daily deal site. And what that mostly involves is sort of inventory end so people might have a couple hundred or something left and they just want to get rid of it. It could be there's a lot of refurbished product out there that like you're saying is a year or two behind and for most people you need the latest and greatest Apple MacBook Pro or is one that's two or three years old is going to work just fine for you even the things like vacuums and what have you. And so there's a range of products but we get them; we typically really focus on running them for a period of a few days. We sell out the inventory and then we move on to the next product and cycle through it. Our customers have; we're historically very male. So 70, 80% male buyers; the profile would be sort of bargain hunters, people that are somewhat shopaholic shows up in the mix as well. Since we've moved the business over to; I took it over last year and we kind of modified the site and the product mix and we're actually closer to 50-50 male-female at this point because we have a lot more home goods than we used to. And one of the things so your point about selling to businesses I've actually noticed a significant increase in the number of orders from businesses. We really used to have only a small handful but now I've seen things like schools. I've seen a school order like 20 Chrome books from us. They're going to use them with smaller kids and they just don't need the latest and greatest. They just need a laptop. Ipads, as you suggested, is another great example, I've seen a bunch of those go out for businesses that are needing it but the latest and greatest current generation isn't required for what they're doing. They're doing order entry or checking people out kind of thing. Yeah but it's definitely shifted and I think some of that is the changes that we've made in the site and the business as well which I think we'll get into this. Brad: Yeah. You mentioned the staff I kind of want to jump to that. So from what I recall you're in Washington are you in the Seattle area? Richard: I am yeah. Brad: And then this business was in Salt Lake I believe and there was a physical office there. And how many employees were in that office? Richard: There was about nine. Brad: Okay, and so what have you done with that? Have you kept that office there, did you retain that staff, what have you done in terms of changing that since you bought the business? Richard: Great question; so because of my background being in tech most of my career the majority of the people that I manage were actually remote, some as far away as China or India in different roles that I have. And so I'm very personally very comfortable running a remote staff. And so one of the things that we did is actually close that office because it wasn't adding much in the way of value and home office everybody. So the whole organization now is based out of their own homes and we use a lot of EG Suite technologies or a lot of video meetings, audio calls, whatever, Slack to communicate and stay very, very highly interactive between us. But everybody just works from home in their jammies or sweats or whatever [inaudible 00:18:56.1] worked. So I think you asked about did we keep the staff and we kept 100% of the employees. We gave everybody a job offer as they came over because we wanted to really evaluate what they could do with different leadership and sort of reenergizing the business. And we made some with that some staffing turnover since people that pursued other opportunities or maybe weren't the right fit for us where we were going. But I'd say about 80% of the staff is the same as what it was when I acquired the business. Brad: Yeah that's really interesting you know at Quiet Light we run a distributed team as well and so we've got eight brokers in the States, we've got two overseas, but it is an interesting timeframe that we live in where I actually go to an office. If you see behind me my house is not behind me but I have five children at home so that can be challenging at the house. I choose to rent an office but I do think it is interesting in this day and age that remote works so well and I feel like as a general rule people are happier when they can choose where they go to work. Richard: And I will actually tell you that the last round of hiring we did was for some new buyers that we brought into the business and the ability for both of them to work from home was actually a big competitive advantage in getting them to come on board. Brad: Yeah, that's really interesting. So we don't really use this as like a sales pitch but as you're sitting there talking about what you guys do; I mean our listeners, we have a lot of listeners to this podcast and a lot of them are small entrepreneurial shops, some are like PE firms and you've got your like solo entrepreneurs so I'm just kind of curious where do our listeners kind of fit in to the kind of product mix that you guys offer at your business? Like what are the types of things that they might be most interested in that you sell on a daily basis now? Richard: Sure. I mean I would say for that kind of audience you're probably looking at mostly the technology and maybe some of the home goods for example. So on the tech side, we sell all kinds of computers; Windows and Macs, desktops, laptops, Chrome books, iPads, even phones. Obviously, that technology suite is something that just about every entrepreneur or business will need to some degree. If you're somebody who's looking for like I said the absolute latest and greatest it's not going to be on our side and I'll be upfront like we don't sell the latest Mac books at all. Almost all of our tech in that sense is refurbished and you pay for what you get. I mean if you're buying a refurbished laptop and you're buying 300 bucks for a Mac Book it's going to be older. But for an awful lot of people that are simply doing email that kind of thing that works just fine. And we also have a range where we go from let's say a Mac Book at 300 all the way up for a Mac Book at 1,200. So you get to choose sort of what level you want and what you really need. But there are generally some pretty good bargain prices in terms of the type of technology and look that people are after. On good side, I mean coffee bar if you've got a home office everybody needs coffee. You can't function without it. So one of our vendors; an awesome vendor is the exclusive factory refurbished provider for Ninja products. Ninja makes some incredible home appliances. There was this great little ninja coffee bar that's sort of a single serving fresh ground coffee maker and they sell like crazy. People love them. And so yeah I think there are some tech products and some home products that would be a good fit for any business person. Brad: Yeah that's great. I want to get into some of the changes that you've made but one thing I want to kind of back up to that kind of struck me and not something I've seen that often was your deal structure. I remember talking to you and kind of floating you the price and you said yeah I'm a cash buyer so we can leverage that; no problem. And then when we got to LOI and you called me and said hey I think I'm going to utilize some SBA on this and I'm going to put down way more than what they'll require but I've got an SBA lender that I want to tap into. I just kind of like for you to explain to our listeners kind of as much as you're willing to share about that process what you're thinking was and like basically how you kind of navigated that SBA process? Richard: Yeah actually that's a really good question because I guess it is a little bit unique. I did have the cash going in to pay 100% of it down, the issue for me really was just in one-word flexibility; being able to conserve my capital, put down enough to be meaningful so the SBA approval process was a no brainer. But not be running really tight on sort of the amount of down payment I did but keeping and a good chunk of reserve capital because there's always been sort of a possibility that I might acquire other businesses that I would add on to this as well and you want to have that flexibility in place. And I also wanted to make sure that once I had acquired the business I didn't want to have to use all the capital for the acquisition. Obviously, you need operating capital and you would build that into any plan. But I also wanted to be in a situation where I had enough investment capital inside the business that I could invest in the company and make the changes that I wanted. And so when I looked at the overall sort of combination of things it made a lot of sense to sort of mix us up a little bit and take; I would have to look at the paperwork again but I think we did something like 40% down cash and 60% finance. And what that essentially did for me is mean that within the business I had a good chunk of capital available to pay for all the technology changes and enhancements that I wanted to make to move the business forward because we knew we would need to do that going. Brad: Yeah I found it very interesting; so SBA we have just a massive number of people reaching out to us looking for SBA eligible businesses and wanting to talk to us about it. And I will say that one of the common pitfalls that I think that our buyers kind of find themselves in is trying to maximize the SBA situation for themselves. So a person thinks okay on the high-level point an SBA loan can be a 10% down kind of situation. That's in the absolute most ideal scenario would be a 10% down. So someone has $250,000 in capital that they can put down on a business and so their mind immediately goes to okay then I'll buy a 2 ½ million dollar business. And what I've kind of found over time doing these SBA deals is that those end up being a tough deal. If anything goes even remotely wrong then now all of a sudden the deal is falling apart; maybe the valuation doesn't come back high enough, maybe there's more inventory than was expected and SBA can't cover the inventory. So actually you were the first person that I've had to do that and I've had a couple of people do it since but you're the first person that came and said hey I can pay cash but I'm going to go ahead and use SBA. And honestly, I think SBA has a lot of advantages and a lot of disadvantages. The advantages are from a broker standpoint it really opens up our buying pool. We can offer something as an SBA. We really open up the number of buyers that can come in. But for the seller, SBA can be a grind to get through especially in these situations where people are putting down the minimum amount. I think with what you did was interesting because I never got a single phone call from the SBA lender in your deal. I never heard anything about it. You kept me updated on kind of where things are going and that is not typical for what we do with at Quiet Light. A lot of times we're introducing them to an SBA lender and then we're getting the play by play and we're delivering information back to the sellers about what's going on. In your case you said I'm going to use SBA. I thought you put down 50%; maybe you put down 40% I can't remember, but you put down a big chunk and just said I want the flexibility and I think that really proved to show just a really wise move on your part from a business decision and it didn't hold us up at all. We literally got that thing closed right on time where we were expecting in terms of timing at least the way that I'd kind of set the expectations for our seller. Richard: I would just add to that Brad. I think the advice I'd give anyone considering buying a business is get your house in order. One of the reasons the SBA process on our side went smoothly was because our finances and sort of our credit rating; everything was cleaned up so that there was nothing weird on our credit reports. It was all sort of looking pretty and accounts that needed to be closed or resolved were done. So when the bank looked at things; they look at your credit report, they look at your house, they look at your mortgage, your payment histories you want to be able to give them a very clean robust picture and be able to give it to them boom here it is. And then we also had a very clear picture of the financials and what we were going to do with the business. We gave them a 30-page business plan that essentially laid out here's the financials, here's what we're going to invest in, here's the changes we're going to make, here's the timeline, here's the results and they were conservative. They weren't sort of wild willy-nilly captain. And so between getting our own personal numbers kind of cleaned up; and this is everything just from credit numbers to even just having a nice clean resume. I mean you're applying to SBA and they want to see your business history and what you've done. So you can't take the resume that you use for your job five years ago and just slap it down. It's got to show the bank that you know how to run a business. And so there's a lot of little things that you can do to get ready and so we had those in place before you and I even got into this acquisition process. The other comment I would add about doing the sort of 10% down, I mean we could have gotten approved on a bigger deal at 10% down. I would never have done it in a million years. And part of this maybe comes from my M&A experience which is obviously a lot larger kind of mix. But one thing I learned is that no matter how good you are at diligence, no matter what you know about this particular industry, any business you have is going to have some surprises and it's going to have some ups and downs. And so one of the problems I see with people that would be doing sort of this 10% in sort of right on the bleeding edge you're not going to have enough capital to be really flexible. You're going to struggle with investments and here's, and this is maybe not something that people don't really think about that much but buying a business is stressful. You're running a new business. You're investing. This is potentially your whole income, your life, what you're doing, a good chunk of your personal assets are going to get tied up and it's stressful even if you have tons of money to play with. Putting yourself right on the edge where your finances are squeezed that tight where you're doing 10% down and that's everything that you've got it just adds to the stress level in a way that's not good for running the business. It's not good for you personally on a health basis. So I think if I can look back at it and say what's my advice to people to get through an acquisition process using SBA prepare; good credit cleaned up, get all your documentation in order, get your resume pretty and all that stuff but don't squeeze yourself so tight that you don't have flexibility, you don't have capital to invest, you're going to panic if you have any ups and downs. It's not worth it. That's too much stress when you really want to be thinking clearly, being able to make smart decisions with some perspective on it. You for sure know this Brad it's really hard to make perspective when you're tight on the finances and you're panicking. So all those things factored in sort of where I went to. But I would definitely encourage people to make sure they've got enough of a cushion and flexibility to run their business confidently. Brad: Now I totally share your thoughts on that. And in my operating days that is really exactly how we tried to run the business. If you don't have a good amount of cash on hand it just makes something that's already difficult to do running a business that much more difficult and puts additional strain on you whenever you get some of those unknown kinds of problems that come up. One of the things I remember about you; I actually don't refer to you by name I tell people one time I sold a business to this M&A guy that had done a lot of corporate deals and let me tell you something if you think that diligence folder that you saw today is involved I should show you his because I remember it was a thorough deck of information. You had that thing all laid out perfectly. It was like okay one of the things I think I learned there is the pros have seen everything. So when you laid out that diligence folder and I saw it I was like it was organized, it was great, there was nothing wrong with but it was lot. It was a lot of information. You're very thorough, very detailed, and it kind of makes sense to me that it's gone well for you doing this business. Okay, I want to get into; so I was thinking about doing some podcast episodes and I think I emailed you maybe a month ago and said hey I went to a Yugster and there's no more Yugster. So talk about the rebrand and then let's talk about some other changes that you made. Richard: Yugster had a cult following behind it. And cult followings are great. There's a lot of loyalty that goes into that. But it was not a brand that was going to work well to sort of reach out to a larger audience. And so we, the team; I got the leadership team that was in place one of the first things we did was restructure internally to kind of give them really clean roles and responsibilities in purchasing and marketing because it had all been sort of blurred before. And what we then took off and did is really sit down and think about the kinds of changes we wanted to make in the business. The brand was a big piece of it. And we did really dig in on the idea of keeping the extra brand but we also knew that we needed to give it a refresh, improve the look and feel of the website, and sort of get it to a healthier sort of message and make it more attractive to people. In the end, when we kind of dug through it Yugster as a brand itself wasn't going to scale for us. It wasn't going to bring in a larger audience that we were sort of now starting to pursue and chase. So we spent some time doing; figure out what brands you want to work with, see what domain names are out there. We knew we wanted a dot com. We also knew that we wanted to keep a little synergy with the Yugster. We didn't want to go too far away from it and so as you mentioned, in the beginning, Yugster had become Yours Until Gone and YUG would show up throughout the branding of the site. The loyalty program was called YUG points. There was a lot of YUG that showed up. And so we figured if we kept the Until Gone piece of it that would be a nice connection. And so it turned out that that brand or that domain was actually available for purchase. This is where we made some of our capital investment; it was actually buying that domain name. And it's worked out great. I would say that the marketing team did; it could be a case study frankly in the rebranding going from Yugster to Until Gone. I won't say everything was perfect but it was as good as I've ever seen it done. And what the team put together and it was fantastic. We had a few customers that didn't make it over but the vast majority did. And we went live with the new Until Gone site which we can talk about some of the software stuff we did here in a second on September 1st. And I can tell you, Brad, if I showed you the detailed financials you'll see them start to grow through December and then there's this inflection point September 1st where they just kicked up and you start seeing this nice steady growth curve. And I think a lot of it had to do with we made changes over the summer to the Yugster's site to clean it up, make it a little bit more polished, but there's only so much that we were able to do. Once we went to the new site which was a completely revamped look and feel and brand I think it; for all the customers that we were bringing in, it just gave them confidence. That look and feel was a lot more professional; a lot more polished than the old site had been. And while we lost some of the cult kinkiness that was tied in with Yugster I think the more professional side appealed to a much larger group who were more willing to buy and make purchases through the site. And that's why we see the growth and that's continued to accelerate as we came into 2019. Brad: Yeah when I saw it actually; so I was kind of going through my list of deals and I've closed 20 deals at Quiet Light since I've been here and so I was kind of just looking at it and trying to think about what would be good podcast episodes. So I'd gone through 14 of them or so when I hit Yugster and as soon as I hit it and I went to the site I was like I know there's a story here because I mean it looks fantastic. I remembered what the old site looked like. I see what the new one looks like. It's like I could totally get that you were very thoughtful about how you approached it and how you kind of kept that Until Gone. I think that was really smart. So I totally could see the thought process from a marketer's standpoint of what you were doing and it seems to me like it did go really well just from an optics standpoint on my part. So it doesn't surprise me that your trends are good. We're getting somewhat short on time let's get into the software a little bit. I want to know what kinds of changes you've made to the stack and just kind of go wherever you want with that but I kind of want to know what you've been doing there? Richard: You know we can make a podcast about that in and of itself. There were some really interesting lessons learned I guess but I'll try to keep it focused for the group because not everyone's a techie. But basically, we have replaced 100% of the stack at this point. The original plan had been to upgrade the existing stack and put a new front end on it the new Until Gone front end basically and then do a bunch of workarounds creating APIs. And what APIs are for anyone who's not familiar with it they are programmatic interfaces that allow third parties to engage with your site. And so, for example, we wanted our vendors, our partners who were doing shipping to be able to work with us via API rather than exchanging text file CSVs for example. And the reason for that is just sort of accuracy, the time to market, and so forth. And there were lots of opportunities to do that to help our vendor and ourselves frankly work better together. Once we got into the details and we started looking at the Until Gone site design and what we wanted to do it would have required too many changes to the existing platform that would have left behind, in all honesty, a lot of stuff that we still needed to change. And so I think we closed the deal the first week of May last year; May 7th, 2018, by the end of June we had made the decision to do a full stack replacement top to bottom. And so we sourced a company actually here in Seattle to do a new website front end design and to then actually do the implementation on Shopify. We're on Shopify plus because we're large enough that we need to be on the bigger platform with the capabilities that they give us. And then that meant that we had to build a new back end because with the number of vendors we work with, with the way we work, with the flexibility we wanted to do it would not have been possible for us to just rely on Shopify. Now that won't be the case for a lot of e-commerce vendors but we operate more like a marketplace and we need to process a lot of purchase orders out to our vendors and take products in and not every product goes on-site and so forth. So we had to have control over that back end and so essentially we built out a completely new platform stack that operates; there's an admin portal, there was a huge amount of infrastructure for integrating with Shopify and providing all the APIs that we essentially built out. And what we've done since then is build some custom APIs. We've integrated with ShipStation which is a shipping management tool that a lot of our vendors utilize. We've integrated with ChannelAdvisor. We've integrated with a great company called Quitch just similar to ChannelAdvisor but a little bit more technology-focused. We're finalizing an integration with Celera Cloud which is another one of these integrator platforms that a lot of vendors and suppliers utilize. And so that's given us just a huge amount of flexibility because it was sort of getting rid of a lot of the deadwood that had existed previously. We've been able to do things that we weren't able to do previously and really take advantage of technology to reach our customers better. And so some examples of that we actually built a little ad engine so that we could serve our own products as ads to our customers and notification emails. We've done things with targeting where we've essentially built kind of a; think of it as a mini CRM, customer relationship management platform where the marketing emails that we send to them are fully targeted to their interests, their likes, what they prefer. Each of these changes as we've gone into the stack had given us sort of an incremental growth and helped us improve that curve, show better metrics, and have better control. It's also allowed us to really tightly integrate with our vendors and we continue to invest in it. We have some new capabilities coming out this week frankly that we want to get in place before Q4 that will allow us to do some things that will really improve our shipping and our customer service related to that because that's always a big issue with customers. So I'm happy to get into more it detailed Brad but I don't want to take up the time just talking about coding and Google Cloud and what we did. That's not our focus here. Brad: No, I think you hit some great highlights there and actually it's been interesting to watch Shopify and it's kind of dominance really in the kind of hosted stores platform. I think WordPress as a CMS is now like 35% of the world's websites and I can tell you from my perspective of operating for many years and kind of coming from that custom website world where we built everything from scratch because it gave us more flexibility and then seeing the kind of out of the box solutions come on the scene and then seeing Shopify and Volusion and WiX and these other players come on the scene. But it really seems like Shopify has asserted some dominance in the space at this point or just I mean there's entire; I'll be speaking at an event in San Diego next month and at that event, it's Shopify sellers. I'm going on a podcast in two weeks. It's just Shopify folks that work with Shopify every day. And we find a lot of our sellers now when they have high margin products are really utilizing the Facebook Pixel for marketing and for some reason Shopify plus the Facebook Pixel is just the combo that everyone wants to use. It's just Shopify is just kind of become this I think of it became kind of like WordPress for the CMS. I feel like Shopify is kind of becoming the e-commerce shopping cart or store hosted platform for the e-com side. Did you have any struggle with choosing to go with Shopify? Was that a tough decision for you? Richard: No, not really I mean I think we really looked at Shopify and BigCommerce. They're really the sort of two that we were down to at that point. We did look at Magento which is both a platform that you can just open source and build your own but they also have a hosted option. That was much more complicated and had a tech stack that we weren't sure we really wanted to work with. So it really came down to Shopify versus BigCommerce. And honestly, it was a combination of the partner we ended up wanting to work with was more comfortable with Shopify. And we also looked at Shopify and felt like you were saying given their market share and their size it was a good fit and I think it made sense to do that. I will say I came from a platform world so I'm very comfortable with using these kinds of platforms and I will say there are tradeoffs. There are huge positives; as an example of a positive, when I wanted to implement Apple Pay on the site and our payment processor already supported it. So I did all the things I needed to do with Apple, I hooked it up with my payment processor, went into Shopify, one checkmark and it's live and ready to go. The Facebook Pixel is another one. You configure the Facebook stuff in Shopify, it's done like that. Google Analytics is the same thing and so there's a lot of functionality that's built into the platform that you don't have to customize; that you don't have to tweak but you can still change things like your notification emails to make them personalized for your look and feel. So I think there are some really great things there in working with a platform. The flip side there is some loss of control. You don't have necessarily quite the same flexibility. There was a feature we were talking about the other day in my management team's meeting. The reality was if it was on our platform we could do it in a minute. It's just on Shopify it's going to be difficult to get it live and implemented not because of anything I say it would be a real flaw with Shopify but just because when someone else is running a platform there's sort of some constraints that you get into it. But I'm comfortable with the Shopify decision. I think I'd make the same one again. I think given their size, given the number of big brands that are using them now it's a good solid fit. So yeah I would go there again. Brad: Okay. And one of the things I kind of wanted to at least ask was the biggest challenge; what's been the biggest unforeseen kind of thing that you have had to tackle at least that you're comfortable sharing? Richard: Sure. I mean there are always surprises in acquiring any business and challenges are going to come up. You end up having to do more of something than you expected and so forth and it kind of throws you. I would say in this case I was actually; probably the biggest challenge was the technology side. Not because it was inherently a bad decision or difficult to rebuild the platform and do what we did; it was absolutely the right decision. I guess the point I would make is we weren't expecting to make that decision for 12 months. It was kind of something we were looking at as a 2019 project and it ended up being a 2018 project. And so what I had actually hoped to do was use the existing platform and like I said give it a facelift; redo the front end, make it into Until Gone but rely on the same core operational platform and just maybe do a few extensions. And it didn't end up being possible to get where I knew that we needed to be. From a marketing; branding capability perspective we had to make the changes. And so basically from July through the end of September, it was heads down coding. I wrote more code in those two months than I think I had in the previous 10, 20 years. Brad: Wow. Richard: My career has not been as a coder I've been in sort of management but we had to build a completely new platform from scratch and so it was a lot of stuff that we were putting together to make it work. And that continued through Q4 and even into this year as we add new features. And like I said earlier now we're at a point where we're really adding some really unique distinctive capabilities. We've even thought about spinning out some businesses to take the stuff that we've built and Shopify has this huge app ecosystem; apps that you can plug into Shopify and extend its core capabilities. A lot of what we've now built are things that are unique and not available within that ecosystem and so we think there are some opportunities just to extend that and make that sort of additional part of the business. But I would say that was my number one sort of challenge or I guess surprise and sort of what we did. And at times it's taken me away from running the business in a way that I wanted to. But I think it's ended up like I said being in a good place at this point. Brad: And it's really interesting and I do think the Shopify kind of app marketplace is pretty vibrant. We had a lead come through a couple of weeks ago that we were discussing among the team, it was a collection of some apps and I think it was bringing in about $80,000 a month and recurring revenue from a group that had built several apps in the space. So I do think that there's a pretty large market there to tap into. Well, I really want to thank you for coming on the show today. It's really helpful to our audience. I hope it ends up being helpful to you. People reach out to me all the time when I'm on these podcasts so I hope that you get to make some good connections from coming on and giving us some of your time. Do you have any parting pieces of advice for those looking to buy or sell an online-based business? Richard: I guess since I haven't sold a business of this size I'll maybe not give advice on that just yet but as a buyer, I would say don't sit on the fence. It's one of the best things you can possibly do. Get out of your corporate life. Find a broker that you trust, that you like, that you can build a relationship with and tell them what you're looking for. Don't make stuff up or blow smoke or try to sound bigger than you are. Be honest with them. Tell the broker what you're looking for, what your strengths are, what kind of things would keep you engaged and challenged so that they have a good idea because their job is to connect you. So if you don't give them the honest picture they can't help you. But don't hesitate. Owning your own business, running your own destiny I think is something that's just fantastic. It's challenging. It can be scary at times but if you're thinking about it go for it. And I've definitely liked working with Brad. He was always a straight shooter and honest and I'm not saying this just because you're on. I'd say this to anybody but finding a broker that is a straight shooter that's honest and upfront that makes it easy; that's huge. And I loved working with Quiet Light and Brad and I would definitely do it again if I had another business to go after. Brad: I appreciate that and honestly, you were one of the easiest buyers that I've ever worked with. I mean you brought all this experience to the table and honestly that is what we do, we're matching people up a lot of times. That's the game that we're playing and we may or may not be helpful in the other aspects of it but really to do well as a business adviser in Quiet Light we really need to be able to listen to what people are telling us they want and then pair that up with things that we have that are for sale. And I don't know that I'd take a whole lot of credit for it but I do think that you were the perfect person to take over this business and I'm really glad to hear that it's going really well for you and I hope that you continue to have success in the future. Richard: Thank you, Brad. I think it was a good fit and I hope the improvement we're seeing continues. It's a great course we're on and I appreciate your help making this connection happen. Brad: Thanks a lot for coming on today Richard. We really appreciate it. For the listeners, we will see you the next time. Thank you. Links and Resources: Richard's Business
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