Podcast appearances and mentions of rob well

In this episode of Building Texas Business, I sit down with Rob Holmes of Texas Capital Bank. Rob shares the bank's dramatic turnaround story since he became President and CEO in 2021 amid challenges, including a failed merger. Rob explains how Texas Capital improved its standing through strategic moves like fortifying capital levels and attracting talent from global institutions. We explore Texas Capital's community focus through initiatives increasing volunteerism and launching a charitable foundation. Rob highlights how their junior program brings diverse talent while nurturing a vibrant culture. Wrapping up, Rob discusses maintaining liquidity amid regional banking stress, their strong capital position, and diversification that sets them apart. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS Rob and I discuss the transformation of Texas Capital under Rob's leadership since 2021, highlighting the strategic moves that improved the bank's financial standing and attracted top-tier talent. Rob explains how Texas Capital's strong capital position and strategic diversification helped it navigate the regional banking stress of 2023. We explore Texas Capital's commitment to community engagement, including extensive volunteer hours, the founding of a new charitable foundation, and various philanthropic activities across Texas. Rob elaborates on the bank's innovative junior program, which has attracted diverse and talented professionals to Texas Capital. We discuss the importance of maintaining a respectful, collaborative workplace culture and the value of in-office collaboration for fostering a strong, healthy culture and achieving better customer outcomes. Rob shares insights on the challenges facing the banking industry, such as regulatory inconsistencies, the inverted yield curve, technology integration, and commercial real estate risks. We discuss Texas Capital's strategic initiatives to expand services, including public finance and equity research in oil and gas. Rob reflects on the lessons he has learned from his career, emphasizing the importance of candor, transparency, and servant leadership. Rob recounts personal anecdotes about his first jobs and leisure pursuits, offering a glimpse into his personal life and leadership style. We touch on the role of media in shaping perceptions of regional banks and the distinct advantages of regional banks in serving local communities and businesses. LINKSShow Notes Previous Episodes About BoyarMiller About Texas Capital GUESTS Rob HolmesAbout Rob TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Chris: In this episode, you will meet Rob Holmes, President and CEO of Texas Capital. Rob shares an inspiring story on how Texas Capital has rebuilt itself and become the first full-service financial services institution headquartered in Texas. Rob, I want to thank you for joining me here on Building Texas Business. Welcome to the show. Thank you very much. Let's start. I know you're the CEO Building Texas Business. Welcome to the show. Thank you very much. Let's start. I know you're the CEO of Texas Capital. Tell the listeners a little bit about what Texas Capital is and the type of services it provides here in Texas. Rob: Great. Well, thank you very much for having me. So Texas Capital had a very proud founding in the late 90s by Texas business people to found a bank to serve Texas businesses with local decision making. After all, the banks failed in the late 80s and they had a very proud run and 05 went public and did very well. Then about the mid teens we kind of started going a little sideways and by the time I got there the bank needed to be kind of rebuilt and so we had a failed merger with a bank about a third our size and that tells you anything, and really because of COVID. But after that they needed new leadership and so what we did was we started over and we went fast. So we raised a perpetual deferred deal with sub-debt securitization, got out of a line of business correspondent banking that attracted a lot of capital and improved the capital by about 270 basis points in about eight weeks, and that's my bet as we run the bank very conservatively. We also brought in a lot of new talent. So the entire operating committee is new. We have a new junior program we can get into that later. But then we started on the journey to build and this is kind of interesting. I think you'll find it interesting. We're the first full service financial services firm ever to be headquartered in Texas and if you think about it it makes perfect sense. So in the 80s you had Glass-Steagall and stuff. You had a lot of big banks. They failed. They were replaced by larger institutions from out of state that saw this as a very attractive market. But the in-market banks never went into the full service direction. So regional banks are made from community banks and they get bigger and they didn't have the products and services. They just had NIM banks, if you will Sure. Chris: Well, that's an impressive thing to have a claim to being the only one headquartered in Texas. I would not have thought that, you know, given some of the other Texas yeah. So I mean you're not kidding when you said a full restart just a few years ago. Rob: Full restart. So we have think about who we're able to attract, and this says more about Texas than Texas Capital. But the woman that runs treasury services for us ran treasury services for JPMorgan Chase globally. Our chief risk officer was the head of risk for JPMorgan's investment bank and then chief risk officer was the head of risk for JP Morgan's investment bank and then chief risk officer for the commercial bank and then head of risk for real estate globally. Our head of ops was a head of ops and tech for Stan O'Neill at Merrill Lynch. The CEO Started in the mailroom, ended up reporting as CEO head of ops and tech for Merrill Lynch. I think he can do it here and that so and that just kind of it keeps going. Our CHRO came from Cilindes and our CIO has an impressive background. Our head of commercial banking all of them had bigger jobs at much larger institutions. Chris: Yeah, what that tells me, Rob, is that those people saw a bright future in the business climate in Texas to make those kind of moves to join you and the Dallas headquarters. Rob: There's no doubt about it and, by the way, I wouldn't have tried this anywhere else, I mean for sure. So, as you know, texas is eighth largest economy in the world, second largest workforce, youngest workforce, fastest growing. We've created 46,. We've created more jobs in 46 last 48 months, so it's a very attractive place to be overall? Chris: What was it about just speaking to you? I know you joined in 2021, that based on the career you had built to that moment where you saw this as the right opportunity for you. Rob: I was very happy where I was. So I was primarily in the investment bank at JPMorgan Chase, but my last 10 years I ran the large corporate bank and the commercial bank ended up taking that to 22 countries. So I ran that business. Globally it was over $180 billion in assets. It was a third treasury, a third lending and a third investment banking. Great business, great people. But when this bank kind of went sideways, I had two or three people call me and say, hey, I'm thinking about this, would you come run it? And it surprised me. I'm like, why are you calling me? But then I started looking at it and, like you, I'm from Texas. I commuted to New York for 25 of the 31 years that I worked for JP Morgan. But people kind of said, why don't you come home and build something special with where you're from? And that, through more and more dialogue, became very appealing to me and I did not know and shame on me that as bad a shape as a bank was when we got there. But it ended up being a blessing because you know like today it'd be very difficult to do what we did. I mean to have a board, investor base, regulators, constituents. Let you reinvest. We reinvested over a third of our non-interest expense and then more, and we said to the investor community and the board and others that we're going to have negative operating leverage for about a year and a half. That'd be very hard to do in this climate, right? And so the other thing we had to do became a blessing because you had to do it all at once, and so I'm glad that's behind us. Today the bank is. It used to have just mono banking, like a community or regional bank. Today we have segmentation, so you have business banking for small businesses, middle market banking for a little larger businesses, a little more sophistication, and then we have a corporate banking group like a money center bank. And when you have a corporate banking group you have to have industry expertise. So we have energy, diversified FIG, government, not-for-profit healthcare, tmt and mortgage, so we have the industry expertise of any money center bank right here in Texas. And then we have private wealth and then we rebuilt all of treasury. So it's a brand new bank. We have a new payments platform, new lockbox, new card, new merchant, new digital onboarding that we came up with. And so we people say the banks can't compete on technology like with the big bank, but we can because we have one platform. Those big banks have many platforms because they're a combination of many banks. We can go in that if you want. And then we have one platform. Those big banks have many platforms because they're a combination of many banks. We can go in that if you want. And then we have, as I said, private wealth, investment banking, and we can go into as many of those areas as you want. Chris: So you basically built it like you said. As businesses are coming to Texas, you're ready to serve whatever need they have. Rob: For sure. So we want to be very relevant to our clients and we are a one-stop shop, so you won't outgrow us. We were a top 10 arranger of bank debt for middle market companies in the years. We've done about $110 billion of notional trades in about 18 months. Wow, it's profitable. Chris: So what's your vision for the future, then for Texas Capital, and kind of, how are you working to achieve? Rob: that it's actually pretty simple. It's maturing the platform that we built. So we are the number one lender to Texas-based businesses of any Texas-based bank. Now that's new. We've had tremendous success. Business owners and decision makers love the local decision making. They love the fact that when they hire us, they're getting a very talented, experienced MD working for them instead of maybe the money center bank, whatever, a VP or something assigned to it. They just like the local decision making, local access. But the go forward strategy is People ask me this all the time what's next? And they think that we have a big bang answer. The big bang answer is delighting clients and banking the best clients in our markets, and we've always said, or I've always said we'll be defined by our clients, and so we have been blessed to have clients be attracted to the strategy and platform. So we're going to just do more of what we've done. Chris: So what I like about that strategy is the simplicity. I think there's a lesson there for entrepreneurs and other business owners in what you've done in the last few years, and that to me is get the foundation right and your core right Correct, and then do the fundamentals really well. Right, it's blocking and tackling is what you're doing. Rob: It's executing now for sure. And I had one CEO of a very renowned New York financial firm ask him to come see me. They had heard about what we were doing and he wanted to understand it because we actually we took what he would say was the very best person from his sales and trading floor who had been there 18 years. He didn't understand how we could attract that person because that person drove a U-Haul to Dallas with his wife and kids before we were even open. And he said tell me your strategy. And I went through it and, to be honest with you, I was hoping he would like it because I was pretty long the strategy. And so he did. And I said what do you think? He said I think y'all are going to be very successful. And this was early on. And I said why is that? He said do you have a differentiated strategy with differentiated talent in a differentiated market? And I think that's true. But then he said what do you think? And I said well, our talent's really. This is back in 21. Now we've done all these things, but I said that the talent is really good, but we've got to do everything with this jersey on now and delight our clients with TCB jersey, not another jersey. And he said look, rob, do it once, it'll be hard, do it three times, you'll be good. The fifth time you're an expert and I kind of he kind of and he's pretty renowned. It was a pretty simple lesson but it's kind of true. And now we have done it and we are good at what we're doing. But we still can mature the platform, that treasury platform we talked about. It's literally second to none. We're doing open banking for clients. We're doing a digital onboarding. You can open a commercial account tomorrow at a money center bank. That take eight weeks or six weeks. But that platform to scale to get the most out of it, I mean we could run it without any more investment for five years. So we got to scale the business and, by the way, it's happening. So that treasury platform is it's called P times V, price times volume that's how many transactions are going through the factory or warehouse financial transactions. That's usually for a bank it's a 2% business at best. It grows the economy, it grows the GDP. We're going 17%, quarter over quarter, year, quarter after quarter. That's remarkable Because of new clients moving to the platform. So it is scaling but we just need to continue to do that Right. Chris: So you talked about the platform a couple of times. What type of I guess technology or emerging technologies do you see having the biggest impact in the banking industry over the next, say, three to five years? Rob: I think real-time payments, I think open banking, and people don't really understand what open banking is. What open banking is? It's actually very simple, so think well, here's, here's one simple way. Part of it is you don't have to leave your internal financial platform to go to our platform. We'll put an API on yours and so you can just push a button and be into our system and send ACH or wire or what. So I think AI, I think open banking and I think real-time payments. Okay. Chris: Well, I can speak from experience, as we transitioned to Texas Capital a year ago and, to your point of the ease of that transition and being able to deal with decision makers made it seamless. Good Well thank you. It's been a great relationship for us, for sure. Rob: Good Well thank you. Chris: What you're saying is true, Well, thank you. It's been a great relationship for us for sure. Good, Well, thank you. I can attest to that. What you're saying is true, Well, thank you. Let's talk a little bit about where you see corporate leadership whether that's your C-suite or just the company as it exists and community impact. What type of initiatives is Texas Capital working on to be a meaningful member of the community? Rob: Yeah, well, that's a. Thank you very much for the for the easy pitch. So I think we do. We bat way above our weight in community impact. So we do tens of thousands of hours of employee volunteer in the community. We, as part of this transformation, when we were investing in the platform, we took time to also found our first foundation. We never had a foundation before. So we have a foundation and we do volunteer hours and we just were part of the group that bought Opal Lear Newhouse. We were the first one to open a branch in West Dallas. We gave the founding seed money for Southern Gateway in Dallas. We're big supporters of Rodeo here in Houston. Last year I think we sponsored the opening night, so I think you're going to see us pretty much all over the state of Texas in terms of giving and more than just money but time, resources, expertise to philanthropies. We hosted a great event about three weeks ago. People came from all over the country and it was for veterans and we had veteran not-for-profits and we had veteran-owned businesses and we just brought them together and talked about issues and how they could work together and synergies between the two and advancing veterans on a go-forward basis, and the people that came would just blow you away and the feedback of it. I happened to be out of town on a three-day weekend afterwards out of the country and somebody approached me and I didn't know them and they didn't know me, but I guess they'd seen my picture or something and they thanked me for having that veteran event. Wow, and so it had a far, far impact. It will do things like that. We have a nonprofit event in every city, getting nonprofits together, helping them learn how to raise money and trade best practices, and we do that and we'll do that in every city during the summer. So you know, our giving is good, Our volunteer hours are fantastic, Our sharing of expertise is good. Our investment in the community is great, Good. Chris: Let's circle back to because that kind of made me think of team building, right, so you talked about basically a wholesale change with the team around you. What are some of the things that you look for to make sure you're you know, through that recruiting and hiring process, that you're getting the right person for the position? Rob: Yep, so this is a great question and this was the key to what we've done so far and how we're going to reach our 25 goals. So in September of 21, when we announced a strategic plan, which was pretty dramatic, we said we're not going to achieve our financial goals until 25. With that came a lot of change and a lot of talent. So 80% of the people at the firm are new since I got there. That's 80% of over 2,000 people. So that's a lot of change, managing through a lot of change through a transformation, through a regional quote, unquote regional banking practice that I'd love to talk about, regional banking practice, regional banking stress that I'd love to talk about transformation. So there's a lot going on there, both internally and externally, that we had to manage through. And what we did is we started at the top and the bottom, so we put new leadership with new skill sets and new expectations and new goals of banking the best clients in our markets instead of just being a bank, etc. And we also started a junior program. It was the first junior program in the history of the bank. Chris: You mentioned that earlier, so tell us a little more about the junior program. Rob: It's awesome If you have a kid and they want to get into finance and they don't want to go to New York but they want to work at a great financial services firm to have them join us. So we post in. So I got there in January of 21. It so I got there in January 21. It's COVID Nobody's in the office. We'd just been through this internal stress with the failed merger, new CEO, the whole bit. I said we need a junior program. We posted 60 positions. We got 800 applications. We hired 60-something. A third of those had their masters. That wasn't required. The average GPA was over 374. So people love what we're doing right. The next year there's over 2,000 applicants and our junior program is great. And, by the way, I helped build one in the investment bank in my last firm and one in the commercial bank in my last firm. I thought they were both very good. This one's awesome. So you come in, you go through four or five months of training and then you go into your line of business. But we probably hired you after your internship the summer before, if that makes sense. Sure, the program has some of the diverse classes I've ever seen in banking and we didn't do that. This may be controversial. We do that on purpose. We did that because we hired the best people Exactly and they're the most diverse classes, and so we're really excited about that. And then the attrition rate there isn't nearly what we thought it would be. We built it for a higher attrition rate because those kids usually leave a large percentage after third year. Sure. They're not leaving. Rob: They like it, so that's been kind of fun. It's a good problem, right, it's a great problem and we'll use all of them. And, by the way, after that change you should just know the attrition stuff has dramatically slowed as the transformation slowed. We got all the talented people in place that we needed so we are ahead of corporate America, finance and Texas companies for attrition and excited about that in the new culture here. ADVERT Hello friends, this is Chris Hanslick, your Building Texas business host. Did you know that Boyer Miller, the producer of this podcast, is a business law firm that works with entrepreneurs, corporations and business leaders? Business law firm that works with entrepreneurs, corporations and business leaders. Our team of attorneys serve as strategic partners to businesses by providing legal guidance to organizations of all sizes. Get to know the firm at boyermillercom and thanks for listening to the show. Chris: Well that you know that low attrition rate leads to what you talked about earlier better customer experience, more stability. Rob: We need stability. Chris: Everybody needs stability. Yeah, for sure. Okay, so you mentioned regional banking stress. Tell me what you're referring to about that. Rob: Yeah, last spring of 23,. Eb failed, first Republic and the like. We were fortunate. So, november of 22, we sold a business to Truist for $3.5 billion with a very big premium on it. With the sale of that we became if you compare us to any $100 billion bank or above in the country or any Texas public bank we have the third most capital and I think in the next quarters we'll have the second most but third and we're number one in equity tangible common equity assets. So we're the least levered. We have third most capital. Our highly liquid assets are like 29% our cash and securities. Our AOCI problem, which is the mark on the bond portfolio. Banks are struggling with that. We're very good there. So our capital, our liquidity, et cetera, was very strong. So we didn't experience outflows of deposits or anything. What we did experience was a rotation, like every bank in the country, from non-interest-bearing deposits to interest-bearing deposits. So all banks if you want to call this cost of goods sold went up. But the regional banks for us the reason I wanted to come back and talk about that people call it a regional banking crisis. It was not. It had to do with certain banks were of the size that they define regional banks that had the wrong strategy, the wrong concentrations, and they failed, right. That's not because they're regional banks, right, they just happen to be that size. By the way, credit Suisse failed too. It is a global bank, right. So you know, I think this is sometimes where the media gets the message wrong and puts fear into the market, and they love it, and they love it and so I'm really proud of what the regional banks do and how they serve their clients in market and their local communities, giving back to their communities, being Main Street lenders, and I'm really proud of. You know how we do that. I think I told you before we went on the air. We're the number one lender of Texas-based businesses, of any Texas-based bank. That's a big deal because these money center banks they may be in the state or super regionals in the state or even regionals in the state but, if they decide, oh you know what, it's not okay to bank an energy company, they don't Well, guess what? We have those decisions here. We don't have somebody else deciding our social norms. Chris: Right, right, that's a great selling point. Going back to the kind of the junior program and this new team, let's talk about culture, I mean. So how would you define the culture at Texas Capitol and kind of, what do you think you've done to kind of foster that and what do you see as necessary to keep it growing? I think? Rob: the culture is transparent, curious, candid and relentless dissatisfaction, as my general counsel calls it. So, look, we've made a lot of change. We'll continue to make a lot of change. We just hired somebody to run public finance for us. We didn't have that before. Lot of change we just hired somebody to run public finance for us. We didn't have that before. We started into the foray of public equity, research and oil and gas. We're going to keep growing and building, doing things that serve our clients and our clients' needs. But the one thing that we kind of talk about a lot is and I'll say it little softer is you know just no jerks allowed. You could talk about, you can talk about Ivy League. You know culture and they have you know big words, but the simple thing is like we're gonna treat people with respect, period. Right now. You can be tough and you can be hard, but you gotta be fair, right, and you gotta be polite. And you know you can be hard but you've got to be fair and you've got to be polite and you can have high expectations while being compassionate. So we have high expectations, we are moving fast, but we do treat people with respect and we like working with one another and that's been part of the fun is, we've been in office because we think that's how you build a career and not a job, and that's how you collaborate to serve your client and that's what's best for our clients and best for employees. And we like being with one another. We don't want to work remote from a beach and not share life's experiences with our colleagues. Chris: Yeah, couldn't agree more. I mean, we got back to the office in May of 2020. I believe, and my partners here, you're a part of an organization for a reason. Organizations are a group of people together, right, correct, and we learn from each other. We can collaborate in a customer service-related industry. Like you and I are in the customer does better when we're collaborating to serve them, you and I are in the customer does better when we're collaborating to serve them, and we do that when we're together. Yep Hands down, no question. And we've been like you. We've been in office in person for a while now and you read as much as I do for the last six, seven months. You just see the pendulum swinging back because the other organizations are realizing they're losing customer satisfaction, they're losing engagement with their people. You can't have a culture if you're not together. In my view, or you can. Actually, you can have a culture. It's just not a healthy one in my view. Yeah, it's really bad, that's right. Rob: So, look, looking back, it seems like a really easy decision and, by the way, I was back in the office in 2022. But at this room, I didn't get there until January 21. Nobody's back in the office. You meant 22 as well. Yes, I did. I did. Excuse me, I did, but you know I got here in 21. We went back to office Memorial Day the Tuesday after Memorial Day of 21. And it was a harder decision then. It seems easy now Because, like even the day before, there was rumors of everybody in our ops organization that they were going to protest and walk out. You know at 901 and we decided, we made a conscious decision that this is what they're going to do and we wanted the people that wanted to be in the office right, and we may lose some people, and that's fine, and it would be harder in the short term, but the people that would be attracted to the platform and the business and us would be people that wanted careers, not jobs, and, by definition, those are the better employees, right, and I think those people attract those people and that's how we were able to transform so much while other people were sitting at home. Chris: Yeah. Now to your point. I mean, if you have a long-term strategy right, then you're willing to go through some short-term pain to get the right people that are going to help you achieve that For sure. A little bit about just your thoughts on what are some of the biggest challenges you think facing the banking industry as we sit here today and maybe for the foreseeable future. Obviously, for the last couple of years, every month everybody's watching the Fed, so that may be part of the answer. But just what do you see as the challenges? Rob: Yeah, so there's plenty for most industries though, too. So one is, and this is an excuse, but it is a challenge. The regulatory body needs to come together and be consistent and apply things consistently. That'd be helpful. We have an inverted yield curve now for the longest time, one of the longest periods in history, you know the two years four, seven something. The 10 years four two something. That makes banking very hard for a lot of technical reasons we can go into. For most banks, technology is a problem. Most banks are an aggregation of multiple banks. They're not like us that has one technology platform. That's, by the way, brand new and totally modern. Banks have not been willing to. It's been a cost cutting game because a lot of banks this is why our strategy is so good NIM banks. So net interest margin, which is loan only, the model of taking a deposit and making a loan and achieving a return above your cost of capital through cycle, I think is very difficult and that's why we supplemented our platform. You know loans, investment banking, private wealth. You know all the different things we do for a client so that we can achieve that return, because a lot of the banks to have that return would have to maybe make a riskier loan to get a higher spread or what have you? So I think the NIM banking model to get a higher spread or what have you? So I think the NIM banking model especially after spring of 23, is hard. I think the technology spend is hard. I think there's a lot of banks that have too much commercial real estate. So our commercial real estate is a very small percentage of our total capital. Regulators want you to be maybe 250 or 300%. There's a lot of banks that are 400. That's too much, yeah. And when you have that much commercial real estate, remember a lot of its construction loans, and so the construction loans. You made that decision today and you're funding it in two years. So you're going to you're that that concentration, because those paydowns are, you know, like a five-year low and commercial real estate is going to keep growing. So banks marginal loan the dollar to make the next loan. The cost just went up, so they're going to slow down their lending while the commercial real estate gets absorbed. They can't be relevant to their clients with anything other than the loan product and if they're not doing that, they're going to slow down their growth and slow down lending. They can't be relevant to their clients with anything other than the loan product, and if they're not doing that, they're going to slow down their growth and slow down lending. They don't have the margin to spend on technology. Chris: And those are some of the problems. Yeah, there's cascades, right, totally. Let's turn a little bit to just kind of you and leadership. How would you describe your leadership style today and maybe how you feel like it's evolved over your career? Rob: I think you've got to do what you want other people to do. So I'm in Houston today. We're seeing six clients we talk all the time about it's about the client, not us. Ops exists to serve a client, technology exists to serve a client. It's not for the bank. And so we have become pretty client obsessed at Texas Capital, delivering the best outcomes for our clients. I mean, like the one deal I think I told you about, we sole managed the largest debt deal in the country last year. The largest sole managed debt deal in the country last year. That's after a money center bank failed doing it. We gave the client the best advice, knowing they'd probably go with the other bank. They did. The other bank failed them. They came back to us and we did it. Now we have a client for life. So give the client the right advice, do the right thing for the client, but your people have to see you do what you want them to do. So I'm with clients. We are aggressively serving clients, but we've managed the place very conservatively. And then I think candor and transparency is really important. Chris: I think those are great qualities, anything that you could point to. I always think people I'll speak for myself, but I think I hear it in others as well a setback or failure that you encountered, that you learned from, that made you better as a leader, as a business person, anything that comes to mind, that where you look back and go, wow, that was transformational. Because of that, how long do you have? Rob: No, I think we talked about junior program, one that always comes to mind because there's early on the program of what early on my career was. When I was a junior, you know, I talked to that junior class a lot and one of the things I tell them is be careful, because you know, building your brand sometimes is too easy, like you know, if you do something great, like I had some successes early on as being a good client guy, then I was the client guy, but also my brand that I got early on was, as a junior was I wasn't very good at details and as a junior an analyst associate your only job was details Right, and so I learned the hard way that maybe I needed to focus on the details. Now I would suggest that the people that work with me think I'm too focused on the details. But that's because I learned the hard way as a junior and people corrected me Right and I'm not sure if they corrected me the wrong way or right way. That was the old days, but they certainly made an impression. So I think that was one of the things I learned is details matter and details are important, and I learned it as a junior and that stayed with me throughout my career. The other one was one I think is interesting is later on, when we were talking about a promotion, one of my bosses told me that I think this is really important for people to know, because I think it's true. He said rob, I don't it, my vote doesn't matter. The vote that matters is everybody else on the floor that works with you, because I'm not promoting you unless they want you promoted, right and so I do think that you know that's a pretty good lesson too. Chris: Yeah, kind of well servant the well, servant leadership, for sure, and that kind of team mentality For sure, team mentality. And I've said forever, I think the lessons you remember the most are the ones you learned the hard way. For sure, so the details right. Chris: So he's like I'm not going to let that happen again. For sure, that's great. Well, I appreciate you sharing those up, but I think it's a great quality leadership to have that vulnerability and humility about you for sure. So I'm going to kind of move away from the business stuff. Okay, to wrap things up, I want to know what was your first job, my? Rob: first job was uh bagging groceries and stocking grocery shelves in high school I did the same thing, did you? Chris: yeah, uh, it was hot and yeah, I tell people we had to wear like black pants. Oh, yeah, these kids get to wear shorts. Now I'm like this is going easy on them. Rob: Yeah, I think one day one of the guys got mad at me because they made me restack all the remember when people used to return the glass bottles. Yeah, and it was in a cage in the back of the alley of the grocery store. It was about 110. And nobody had organized them for about three months and I got fine job. Chris: Very good. All right, you're born and raised in Texas, so do you prefer Tex-Mex or barbecue? Rob: Both Like a brisket taco. Yeah, that's pretty good. Yeah, yeah, I like that All right. And last thing if you could take a 30-day sabbatical, where would you go and what would you do? I'd probably spend half of it fly fishing in Montana and half of it quail hunting in South Texas. There you go, Just not this time of year. Not this time of year. That's right. Chris: Rob, I want to thank you for taking the time. I mean, I had no idea the details behind the transformation at Texas Capital and obviously what you and your team are doing and have done is nothing short of remarkable. So thanks for sharing that. Rob: Well, thank you, I think you know. We think Texas does deserve its own full-service financial services firm. Chris: Well, I'm glad you're delivering it. Thank you, take care. And there we have it another great episode. Don't forget to check out the show notes at boyermiller.com forward slash podcast and you can find out more about all the ways our firm can help you at Boyermiller.com. That's it for this episode. Have a great week and we'll talk to you next time. Special Guest: Rob Holmes.

Rob Finn? …Hello Finn?芬恩?...你好芬恩？Finn Oh sorry Rob, you caught me napping. It's that time of day when I need to nod off – or in other words, fall asleep.芬恩: 哦，对不起，罗布，你发现我在打瞌睡。 一天中的这个时候我需要打瞌睡，或者换句话说，需要入睡。Rob Well, sleeping on the job – or sleeping at work - is no bad thing – and I hope today's programme will wake you up to the idea that sleeping in the workplace might be a good thing.罗布: 好吧，在工作中睡觉——或者说在工作中睡觉——并不是坏事——我希望今天的节目能让你意识到，在工作场所睡觉可能是一件好事。Finn Oh really! That's good to hear. I would have thought that sleeping at work was against the rules.芬恩: 哦真的吗！ 听起来还不错。 我本以为在工作时睡觉是违反规定的。Rob: Not in every office, Finn, and I'll tell you why soon as well as explaining some sleep-related vocabulary. But now you're wide awake, how about a question?罗布: 芬恩，并非每个办公室都如此，我会尽快告诉你原因，并解释一些与睡眠相关的词汇。 但现在你已经完全清醒了，有个问题怎么样？Finn OK, let's hear it.芬恩：好，让我们来听一下。Rob When the former British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, was in power, she did her job with very little sleep. Do you know how many hours of sleep she is said to have had each night?罗布: 当英国前首相玛格丽特·撒切尔掌权时，她几乎不睡觉就完成工作。 你知道她每晚睡几个小时吗？a) Three hours 三小时b) Four hours 四小时c) Five hours 五小时Finn I always thought she got by, she managed her job, with just four hours of sleep a night.芬恩: 我一直以为她能过得很好，她能完成自己的工作，每晚只睡四个小时。Rob Not much, is it? We'll find out if you are right or wrong later. I'm not sure if she chose not to sleep for long or she just wasn't able to sleep for long. Someone who can't sleep is called an insomniac. 罗布: 不多，是吗？ 我们稍后会知道你是对还是错。 我不确定她是否选择不睡太久，或者她只是无法睡太久。 无法入睡的人被称为失眠症患者。Finn And I'm certainly not an insomniac. I enjoy sleeping all night and some of the day too. And Rob, you said napping during the day is a good thing?芬恩: 我当然不是一个失眠症患者。 我喜欢整夜睡觉，白天也喜欢睡觉。 罗布，你说白天小睡是件好事吗？Rob It's always nice to have a short sleep – or what I call 40 winks – during the day, but when you're at work this can be a problem. In some companies, like Google and the Huffington Post, workplace naps are positively encouraged. They're seen as a way to make staff more productive.罗布: 白天短暂的睡眠（或者我所说的 40 次眨眼）总是好的，但当你在工作时，这可能会成为一个问题。 在谷歌和《赫芬顿邮报》等一些公司，积极鼓励在工作场所小睡。 它们被视为提高员工工作效率的一种方式。Finn So you mean they work harder and are more creative because a power-nap – a quick sleep – makes workers feel refreshed and more alert. I like the sound of this!芬恩: 所以你的意思是说，他们工作更努力，更有创造力，因为小睡——快速睡眠——让员工感到精神焕发、更加警觉。 我喜欢这个声音！Rob An Australian health writer called Thea O'Connor, is a founder of a campaign called Nap Now which is trying to make sleeping at work more acceptable. She calls herself a 'naptivist'! Let's hear from her now. What does she say is stopping us from doing this?罗布: 澳大利亚健康作家西娅·奥康纳 (Thea O'Connor) 是一项名为“Nap Now”的运动的创始人，该运动旨在让人们更容易接受在工作时睡觉。 她称自己为“Naptist”！ 现在让我们听听她的消息。 她说了什么阻止我们这样做？I think that our culture is a bit crazy not to embrace it, and one of the reasons we don't is our attitude, you know it's quite counter-cultural to do nothing in order to get ahead. I just really see that it's time to disrupt the prevailing work ethic which is all about work longer and harder.我认为我们的文化不接受它有点疯狂，我们不接受它的原因之一是我们的态度，你知道为了取得成功而不采取任何行动是相当反文化的。 我真的认为是时候打破普遍的工作观念了，这种工作观念就是工作时间更长、更努力。Finn: Right, so she wants us to embrace – to accept – the idea of a workplace power-nap. But it is our attitude – the way we think about work – that stops society from accepting this.芬恩: 是的，所以她希望我们接受——接受——工作场所小睡的想法。 但正是我们的态度——我们思考工作的方式——阻止了社会接受这一点。Rob Yes, she explains that it is counter-cultural – so going against the normal way of thinking – to actually do nothing and have a snooze.罗布: 是的，她解释说，实际上什么都不做，打个盹是反文化的——因此违背了正常的思维方式。Finn That's why she is trying to change – or disrupt – our current work ethic of working longer and harder. She believes this doesn't necessarily bring better results. But Rob, is this idea just a fad – something that's popular for a short while?芬恩: 这就是为什么她试图改变——或者说颠覆——我们目前工作时间更长、更努力的工作理念。 她认为这并不一定会带来更好的结果。 但是罗布，这个想法只是一种时尚——只是流行了一时的东西吗？Rob Maybe, but research has certainly shown that good quantity and quality of sleep is important for our wellbeing. A few years ago research by the East of England Development Agency found 30% of people have their best ideas in bed compared to just 11% who have them at their desk. It called for companies to install beds in the workplace.罗布: 也许吧，但研究确实表明，良好的睡眠时间和质量对我们的健康很重要。 几年前，英格兰东部发展署的一项研究发现，30% 的人将自己最好的想法放在床上，而只有 11% 的人把这些想法放在办公桌上。 它呼吁公司在工作场所安装床。Finn Well, there aren't any in our office yet Rob. I think putting beds or areas for naps in the office would help us workers feel more able to rest and recharge our minds.芬恩: 好吧，我们办公室还没有人，罗布。 我认为在办公室里放置床或小憩区可以帮助我们的员工感觉更容易休息和恢复精力。Rob An alternative idea would be to change our working hours. The UK's Sleep Council claims the nine-to-five work culture does not fit into the natural sleeping pattern of the human race and bosses need to introduce a more sleep-friendly working day.罗布: 另一种想法是改变我们的工作时间。 英国睡眠委员会声称，朝九晚五的工作文化不符合人类的自然睡眠模式，老板们需要引入更有利于睡眠的工作日。Finn That sounds like a siesta to me - a short period of sleep in the middle of the day that people in warm places like Spain often have.芬恩: 对我来说，这听起来像是午睡——在西班牙等温暖地区的人们经常在中午休息一段时间。Rob: My problem with a siesta is that if I have a sleep in the afternoon I'd never wake up!罗布: 我午睡的问题是，如果我下午睡一觉，我就永远不会醒来！Finn Well before you nod off now Rob, could you please tell me the answer to today's question.芬恩: 罗布，在你打瞌睡之前，请你告诉我今天问题的答案。Rob Yes. I asked you if you knew how many hours of sleep the former British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, is said to have had each night? Three, four or five hours?罗布：是的。 我问你是否知道英国前首相撒切尔夫人据说每晚睡几个小时？ 三、四、五个小时？Finn I said four hours Rob.芬恩：我说四个小时，罗布。Rob You are right. It has often been said she needed just four hours of sleep – only on weekdays, not weekends. Well before you have another power-nap, could you remind us of some of the vocabulary we've heard today:罗布: 你是对的。 人们常说她只需要四个小时的睡眠——只在工作日，而不是周末。 在您再次小睡之前，您能否提醒我们今天听到的一些词汇：Finn Yes, we heard:芬恩：是我的，我们听到了:napping小睡nod off打盹sleeping on the job工作期间睡觉insomniac抢眼40 winks40次眨眼power-nap打盹naptivist潜入主义者attitude态度counter-cultural反文化work ethic工作风格wellbeing福祉nine-to-five朝九晚五siesta午睡Rob Thanks. We hope you've enjoyed today's programme.罗布: 谢谢。我们希望你喜欢今天的节目。

Discover the fascinating ancient art of coppicing as we visit Priory Grove in Wales' Wye Valley, where the technique is still practised on a small scale to benefit both people and wildlife. We meet site manager Rob and contractor Joe to learn more about the coppicing carried out here, and how this interaction between people and nature has enabled the two to develop and evolve in tandem. Also in this episode, find out how an unfortunate end for ash trees resulted in a fantastic sea of wild garlic, the team's efforts to encourage dormice, bats, pine martens and other wildlife and which tree to identify by likening the trunk to elephants' feet!  Don't forget to rate us and subscribe! Learn more about the Woodland Trust at woodlandtrust.org.uk Transcript You are listening to Woodland Walks, a podcast for the Woodland Trust presented by Adam Shaw. We protect and plant trees for people, for wildlife.  Adam: Well, today I am off to Priory Grove, which is next door really to the River Wye near Monmouth in Wales to meet the site manager Rob there who's gonna give me a bit of a tour. It's predominantly made up of ancient woodland and provides a wide range of habitats for wildlife. Things like roe, fallow deer, they're known to forage throughout the area, and a wide variety of bird species, including the tawny owl, sparrowhawk, and the great spotted woodpecker, which can all be seen on the wing here. All very exciting and I've just got to find it and find Rob.  Rob: Hello, I'm Rob Davies, site manager, South East Wales.  Adam: So tell me a little bit about where we are and why this is significant.  Rob: This is Priory Grove woodland. It's quite a large site on the outskirts of Monmouth, but nobody really knows what its history is. It's it's called Priory Grove, presumably because it was attached to one of the monastic estates round here. And that probably accounts for its survival as one of the one of the largest ancient woodlands next to Monmouth. And it did retain a lot of its coppice woodland, which is quite important for biodiversity.  Adam: Right. And what we're, I mean, we're standing by some felled, are these oak?  Rob: These are oak. Yes, oak, oak in length.  Adam: So why why have these been felled?  Rob: This is part of the coppice restoration programme, so coppicing on this site has been a management tool that's been used for hundreds if not thousands of years in this area and it's used to produce products like this, this oak that will go into timber framing and furniture and all those good things. And also, firewood is part of the underwood and the the the hazel and the the the understory coppice. So products for people and in the past it was used for all kinds of things before we had plastic. But it's still very useful, and so because it didn't cease until recently on this site, the animals and plants and the fauna that relies upon this method that have evolved with it essentially in the last 10,000 years or so since we've been managing woods in this way, still are present here on this site or in the local area. So if you continue the cycle you continue this interaction with the wildlife and you can help to reverse the biodiversity declines. So it's very holistic, really this management technique. But it does mean that to make space for the coppice regrowth, because trees don't grow under trees, you know it needs the light. The light needs to be there for the coppice to come up again. You have to take out some of these mature oaks that were planted 150, 200 years ago, with the intention of being used in the future. So we're planting things and we're carrying out the plans, we're bringing them to fruition, what people enacted a couple of hundred years ago.  Adam: It it's interesting, isn't it, because it it it is an ancient woodland, but that doesn't mean it's an untouched woodland, because for hundreds of years it's it's been managed. Man has had a hand in this and not only that, commerce has had a hand in that, so often I think we think of these things as a dichotomy. You have ancient woodland, nice, pristine sort of nature, and then you have sort of horrible invasive commerce. Actually, I think what's interesting about this site is that there isn't that dichotomy. They both work in tandem, is that fair?   Rob: That's right, it's a false dichotomy. So the reason these woods have survived is because they were used for people, and because of the way they're managed, coppicing and thinning is quite a sensitive technique, it allows space for nature to be present and to develop and evolve in tandem, so they're not mutually exclusive.  Adam: Yes. So tell me about coppicing is an important part of this site, tell me a little bit about what you're doing at the moment with that.  Rob: Yeah, so we've had a grant actually from the Wye Valley AONB from, supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, to to do some coppicing work on stands that were coppiced about 20 years ago. So we're continuing that cycle. And we've been working with a company called Wye Coppice Community Interest Company, Wye Coppice CIC, and they're quite developed in, in the Wye Valley area. And we formed a good relationship with them and through them we've been able to do half a hectare of coppicing up on the other slope higher up in the site there. If you like we can go up and meet Joe?  Adam: That would be wonderful. Yeah. You you lead on I will follow. Well, you can hear from this I'm a bit out of breath, we've claimed, OK, I'll be embarrassed to say it's a hill, a small incline, but we've come across this stand of of felled trees. So just tell me a bit about what's going on here.  Rob: Exactly. So all these stumps you can see scattered throughout the stand. This is the coppice, so it's cut down to just above base ground level there now and it will just regrow. So it's kind of a natural defence strategy that we're just exploiting. So it's it's been used to, it's, you know, since it evolved things like hazel especially, it‘s used to being browsed off by animals, the animals move on and then the tree just comes back. So it's like a phoenix strategy it comes back, back up again. We're just exploiting that. So we'll cut the tree to base and then we'll protect the regrowth from the browsing animals and then the tree will come again.  Adam: Right, and this is the work done by Joe?  Rob: Yeah, this yeah so this is the work done by Joe Weaver. Joe's just down the end there actually if you want to come and meet him.  Adam: OK, let's go have it let's go meet him. Ohh I've got stuck. OK, so Joe, this is all your handiwork.  Joe: It is, yes.  Adam: Tell me a bit about what what it is you do then.  Joe: So I run Wye Coppice CIC, we're a coppice contracting company and working with Woodland Trust, Natural Resource Wales and Wildlife Trusts throughout the Wye Valley and we're embarking on a project to restore areas of the Wye Valley to restore, do a coppice restoration project for for various organisations throughout the Wye Valley. The what you see, what you see here is about 1 1/2 acres of cut down trees with 7 or 8 standards.  Adam: What are standards?  Joe: The standards are the trees that we've left behind, so, so they're the large, they're the larger trees.  Adam: Oh, I see right. So you wouldn't be coppicing, these are very well established big trees, you don't coppice trees like that, you coppice quite small trees, don't you?  Joe: Yes, so all the small diameter understory trees we've cut down to ground level and and they will, they will resprout and grow back again. We can then come back in 10 years and recut them and have a healthy supply of continue, a continual healthy supply of pole wood.  Adam: And yeah, so what you're trying to get with coppicing is sort of quite it's quite small diameter wood, is that correct?  Joe: Yes, generally speaking, so this is a restoration project you can see this first cut is fairly large diameter. And so most of this will go to make charcoal but generally speaking after 10, maybe 15 years of growth, we'll have poles about sort of thumb size and maybe up to about 50 pence diameter.  Adam: Right. And that's ideal size, is it?  Joe: And that's a really good size for products like bean poles, hedging stakes and binders that go on the top of naturally laid hedging and then various other pole wood applications.  Adam: And and when you see a coppiced tree, evidence that it's been coppiced, there's, I'm trying to look over there, is is this where you see lots of different branches actually coming out from the stump in the ground? That's evidence that's been coppiced, cause it not just one thing grows, lots of them?  Joe: That's right. So you can, if you have one birch tree standing up, for example, you can cut that down to the ground, and when you come back in a few months' time, you'll notice about 5 or 6 shoots coming from that one stump at the bottom of the ground. So if we can protect that from deer browsing and rabbit browsing, then those stems, those five or six shoots will grow up into individual stems that we can then use use in pole wood products.  Adam: It's odd, isn't it that that happens, though, that you chop down one sort of main stem and you get four or five coming back, that's sort of an  odd natural thing to happen, isn't it?  Joe: It is. I think it's the tree's response to the stress of being cut down. So it sort of puts out a lot of it puts a lot of energy into regrowing new growth to try to survive because essentially these broadleaf species, trees, they're they're forever growing, you can cut them down they'll regrow, cut them down again, they'll regrow again. So it's a constant cycle of of regrowth.  Adam: Yeah it's it's like sort of, you know, thumbing their nose at you isn't it, going well, you cut me down well I'm gonna come back fivefold. You know, that's it's a sort of really funny response.  Joe: Indeed. But we can reap the benefits of that.  Adam: Yeah no, no, it's, I get, I get why that's good. And coppicing itself, that, and that's an ancient art, isn't it?  Joe: It has, certainly here in the Wye Valley it was practised at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to produce charcoal to power the Industrial Revolution until coal was iintroduced and so it happened for hundreds and hundreds of years here.  Adam: Right. So you think, do you think I mean there's no need for you to be an historical expert on the history of coppicing, but do you think that's the first big sign of it happening, sort of Industrial Revolution time?  Joe: Certainly around here it is yeah, and there's some of the coupes that we've cut, some of the coppice areas that we've cut here, we've found evidence of charcoal hearths. So you can see flat areas with bits of charcoal sort of sliding down the bank.  Adam: So that would be ancient sites in here, well, ancient, I mean, a few 100 years old of them actually making charcoal in this woodland?  Joe: Yes, in this woodland, throughout the Wye Valley all the way throughout the Wye Valley here, yes.  Adam: Amazing. Now so your company, it's not just a traditional sort of private business, it is a a different sort of form. Just explain how that works.  Joe: So we run a community interest company and that allows us to access grant funding if we need to. Essentially, we're run as a private business, but we are able to do community outreach work as well and that's part of what we do is to try to educate people about sustainable woodland management.  Adam: And how did you get involved in all of this then? Did you grow up as a boy going I want to chop down trees to make fences.  Joe: No, I didn't. I was walking in the Dolomites, I saw two stoats fighting and thought woodland life is for me *laughs*.  Adam: Ok, well, fantastic, never heard that, so inspired by the the battle between two stoats and the and and the Dolomites. That's fantastic, but a hard life, I would have thought to run a business to, I mean it's physical work anyway, but that's my perception from the outside, is it hard work?  Joe: It it can be very difficult, it does have its benefits. Obviously it keeps you fit and it gets you outside but yes, it is a hard life and and you know it's it's quite a technical job as well and the training is expensive so we're trying to introduce a training programme as well through through our through our business Wye Coppice to try to get young people interested in woodland management.  Adam: And do you find that people sometimes don't understand or or perhaps disagree with the fact that commerce and nature can be actually mutually beneficial? Do you find that an issue at all?  Joe: Yes I do. Yes, and we're we're we're always willing to stop and talk to dog walkers especially. Shortly after COP26, we had two dog walkers come past and shout at us for chopping the trees down, after sitting down with them and having a cup of tea, they bought a bag of charcoal off us.  Adam: Right ok very good there we are. You're bringing them round one by one, one by one, those customers are coming over. Well brilliant and we've had not a bad day. I thought I might have to put my wet weather gear on, but it's been it's been OK. Anyway well, that's brilliant thank you very much. That's been really interesting.  Joe: Thank you.  Adam: So we've got this stand of trees we're looking at Rob. A couple couple of oak. Did you say that was a lime?   Rob: That's a lime yeah.   Adam: That's the lime, that that one with lots of ridges in it is that the lime?  Rob: That's it, yeah.  Adam: That's the lime. So why have you left these trees? Is there particular reasons you didn't take these ones out?  Rob: Yeah. So these as you can see, these are all mature trees and so you don't take these decisions lightly. So when we coppice this sort of half a football field area here, there were thirteen of these big mature trees, trees you can barely get your hands around as they're so large, taken a couple of hundred years to grow, so you've got to be quite careful and quite selective, although you need the light. There's an old adage about oak trees, it goes something like this that to fell an oak tree you need three things. You need a good eye, a sharp axe and a cold heart because these trees, you know they've been grown and nurtured and developed, and they're impressive life forms. And so it's not something you do without considering it very carefully so so you can see a couple of trees in here which are a couple of oaks, good size, but they're full of ivy, very dense ivy and that's very good for wintering bats. For hibernation, or for potentially summer roosting.  Adam: So the bats would live just amongst the Ivy, they'd sleep amongst the ivy?  Rob: Yeah when it gets as dense as this, when it's really all knotted, entwined, there's lots of gaps behind it. You could stick your hand in and find little cavities and several species of bat, especially pipistrelle, they they will hibernate over winter in this kind of growth. So you really don't want to be disturbing this.  Adam:  Right. And and what what's, is there something specific about lime that wildlife like is there any particular wildlife?  Rob: Well, it's good for bees. It's good good good pollen.  Adam: You get beehives in there? Oh I see, the pollen itself is good.  Rob: They like the flowers. Yeah yeah it produces lots of the small leaved lime it produces lots of good flowers and and it will attract aphids which is actually a food source for for dormice in the summer. So they they feed on the feed on the lime sap, you know if you park your car under a lime tree, you'll get this very sticky kind of substance coming off it.  Adam: Yes, yeah, yeah. Of course it does. Yes. Yeah, yeah.  Rob: So that attracts aphids, attracts the dormice, it's good for insects who like nectar as well. So it's a it's a very valuable tree and and you know  Adam: So interesting it's it's not valuable commercially, it's valuable for nature.  Rob: Yeah, absolutely. And it's quite it's quite a special tree in the in the Wye Valley, it doesn't occur much outside this area naturally, and it's kind of an ancient woodland indicator in this part of the world, perhaps not officially, but it's a.  Adam: OK. Any other trees we've got here?  Rob: Yeah. The rest of the trees, then are beech.  Adam: Right and you've kept those why?  Rob: Yeah, because you can see if you look at this one here, it's got quite a few cavities in it at the base at the top, beech tends to do that. It tends to take, form little cavities, rot holes and ways in, and that's ways in for fungus and then they eat out and hollow the tree. So the potential for harbouring bats again is very high in these trees. Without sort of going into them, doing some invasive exploration, you can't tell, but it's it's very high potential for bats. So again, bats, all species of bats in this country are protected under law because they've had massive declines like a lot of woodland species. And so we'll do everything we can to retain that habitat.  Adam: It's it's the Field of Dreams, philosophy. You you build it and they will come.  Rob: Yeah, yeah. This as long as it stays there, it'll always be valuable as habitat and so at least then, there are future sort of veteran trees within this stand.  Adam: It is interesting you you've already, I mean, we've only done a short part of this walk so far, but you talked about whoever was managing this woodland 100 years ago knew what they were talking about. And I think that's fascinating that we don't know who that person is or who who they, who those people were. And in 100 years time, people won't know who you were p.sumably, but the the evidence of your work will be here. They'll go yeah, that was a good bloke who did all this and left us with something.  Rob: That's it, you you don't plant trees for yourself, you plant trees for the future generation so you know, I won't see the oaks I plant develop. I'll be dead long before they mature and it's the same for the person who did this. But you can see the ones we took out, the ones I took out and selected were tall and straight. And that means that the coppice is well managed, because there was enough light for the hazel in the understory to come up straight away. If you cut hazel to the ground and you protect it, in a couple of years, it'll be way above six, eight foot and it'll just continue to get higher and higher over the next few years. And what that does is it shades the stem of the oak and it prevents side branching. So you get this very tall initial first stem. And that's what you're looking for. And that's what these trees had. So this would have clearly been cared for and these trees have been selected, they were on a journey from the moment they were planted.  Adam: OK. And just on my journey of education about trees, how do, what, they're beech, I wouldn't be able to spot that myself, what tells you they're beech?  Rob: It's a smooth trunk. If you look at this one here now you can see I always think of them as sort of elephant legs. They're grey and they're tall and they're smooth and they quite often have sort of knobbly bits on the base like an elephant's foot. And if you go through a stand of pure beech, it looks like it looks like a stand of elephants' feet, really tall, grey stems and these big huge buttress roots.  Adam: Fantastic. I am never going to forget that and I will always think of elephants when I look at a beech, a brilliant brilliant clue. Thank you. Right. So where we off to now?  Rob: We'll walk around so you can see the top of the coupe and just see the extent of it and and then we'll walk back down perhaps and have a look at this oak.   Adam: Brilliant. Well we've come to the, over the brow of the hill and along this path, there's a tiny little path for me to walk, and on either side there's a carpet of green. And I think I know what this carpet of green is. Rob, what is it tell me?  Rob: This is wild garlic.   Adam: Yeah. This is the time of year, is it?  Rob: Yep, you can see the flower heads. Ramsons it's also called, it's just about coming into flower now.  Adam: Sorry they're called what?  Rob: Ramson.  Adam: Ramson. Is that the flower itself is called ramson, or is that?  Rob: Well, just the plant.  Adam: We call it wild garlic but it's it's real name is ramson?  Rob: Well some people call it ramson too.  Adam: Right OK. And I never, I mean I have never picked and eaten anything from a forest because I am sure I will kill myself, but all of this, I mean, I've seen loads of people do that, pick wild garlic and it's, I mean there's there's acres of the stuff here.  Rob: It can it can yeah any kind of wild plant comes with the caveats that you need to know what you're doing.  Adam: Yes, which which I don't.  Rob: Yeah, absolutely. It's funny yeah, this site is quite well known for its ramsons, for its wild garlic carpets. This this is in response to something here, quite a sad thing actually. We're right next, you can probably hear the road noise there, we're right next to the main road from Monmouth into the Forest of Dean, Staunton Road there, and unfortunately, a lot of the trees along the road edge were big, big, mature ash trees. And they all had dieback and they were all dropping limbs and about to crush a car. And so, you know, we take that very seriously in terms of health and safety so the trees just along the road edge, we left the ones in the wood, just the road edge trees we had to do something about them, so they've either been reduced or felled and what that's done in this woodland where in the last 60 years, you have had very little management, like most woods, post war, very little has happened. So it becomes very high, very closed canopy, very dense. And what's happened, because of the ash felling is, you've got this pocket of light here and the ramsons have immediately responded to that. So this wasn't here last year. This carpet like this.  Adam: What so this is this is brand new?  Rob: This is brand new. It was the odd plant coming up every year, patches of it.  Adam: I'm shocked because this looks like something from the Wizard, if this was yellow, this would be we'd be in the middle of the Wizard of Oz set here, the yellow brick road. It just I mean it it's just a beautiful, winding, lush, dense path of wild garlic. It looks like it's been here forever.  Rob: And in a sense it it was. It was just waiting for the opportunity, waiting for that temporary disturbance caused by the ash felling. And so like with the coppicing, that's what we're trying to recreate essentially, is these temporary pockets of disturbance where you you break up the canopy, you get this flush of greenery and then until the trees recover it and regrow again. So you don't want this homogeneous block of woodland really. You want, you want variation, because that's the key to success for, for wildlife and biodiversity, different niches, different ages. If you look closely, you can see it's not just the garlic either. You can see wood anemone, you can see greater wood vetch, you can see little violets. So, you know, quite quite a lot of species are now taking advantage of this temporary light that the ash felling's produced.  Adam: It is a nice positive message, isn't it? Because ash dieback has been a real tragedy. But even in the midst of problems there are opportunities which nature comes back with, it's an optimistic sign.  Rob: There is and so this as I say, you know these these trees would have coppiced without us because you know when animals browse them, they they they they come back after that so all we're doing is sort of recreating these natural processes through the management of the woodland. A once in a lifetime storm might have knocked these ash out or a hurricane, something like that, could have felled the whole area and then temporary open space, the plants capitalise and then the wood comes back again, so we're just just mimicking what nature does anyway.  Adam: I'm going to take a photo of this, put it on my Twitter feed. It's fantastic. So we've just taken a little stop on this path of wild garlic. So over to the right is well, I thought it was a bird box, it's a large bird box. You tell me it's actually something very specific.   Rob: Yeah, this is a pine marten nest box cause there was there has been a big release of pine marten. Pine martens are native to this country. It's kind of like a large weasel that lives in the trees. That's a really bad way of describing it, but it's a it's a mustelid. It's a large, impressive, intelligent animal and they were sort of pressed to persecute, to extinction, with persecution in the past. But they're very important in these woods for regulating, you know, the biodiversity, they, they prey on the grey squirrel especially, and they'll regulate bird numbers like any predator does. So it's it's great to see them coming back and it's a success story actually, because a couple of years ago now there was a release programme where captive animals were put into the Forest of Dean which is just over that direction. And so we put up some boxes and monitored them and pine martens are moving back into this area now. Whether they're using the boxes or not, we're not entirely sure, but they are moving in, so it's a, it's a really good story. So we'll do whatever we can to sort of encourage them because we've we've lost a lot of this old growth woodland that we're trying to protect and so they haven't got the nest cavities, so temporarily we'll provide this habitat.  Adam: And over the other side of the little dip, there's another pathway and it looks like the bank has been cut away and it's very black so that it doesn't look quite natural. What's going on there?  Rob: Well the the track that's been put in there is exposed, an earlier industry, so that's that's a charcoal platform. See what is it about five, five metres in diameter. Sort of sort of circular and very, very thick layer of charcoal. A huge fire has been there, but that's that's lots and lots of fires, one on top of the other.  Adam: So this is this is not current, this is probably a couple of hundred years old?  Rob: I think the last burn in this woodland would have been before the Second World War.  Adam: Oh right, so not that old.  Rob: Well, I mean, if they were still burning, they would have had the odd one, but this probably dates to sort of the the height of the the periods of the the late 19th century. So this here, it's been buried and forgotten about. But it shows you as Joe was saying earlier, at one point this was a managed wood and quite a few woods in Wales if you look on the maps you'll see things like coed poeth, which probably roughly translates as sort of hot wood or or burning woods, very roughly, probably, which gives you, may may give you an indication that these woods were worked and if you came here, you would have probably seen people living in the woods with the charcoal, tinner and charcoal workers, especially in the the 19th century, would have moved in in the summer to do the charcoal production with their families.  Adam: Just living in a tent or something?  Rob: Living in on site yeah, because then you know you don't want to move products, move things twice. You know, it's it's an economic, so you bring your family in, you produce your product, and then you come out with it at the end of the season so it's very peaceful here today. You can hear the birds. It's great for wildlife, but it would have been a managed landscape and we're trying to introduce a little bit of that. Obviously not people living in the woodlands anymore, but there's space for both here within this woodland, a bit a bit of coppicing a bit of management and reserve areas.  Adam: And I mean, I I hadn't quite noticed it while we were walking, but now we're we're standing here on this green carpet, there is an overpowering smell of garlic, it's quite extraordinary. It's very fresh, you know, sometimes when you're in the kitchen and the garlic it's it's, it's not fresh, it's pungent, but this is, you know, it's mixed with the sort of cool air, it's a really lovely smell.  Rob: It's making me hungry, actually.  Adam: Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah. Well I was thinking whether I should pick some for dinner.  Rob: Chop some up. Pasta sauce. It's lovely with that.  Adam: Yeah, yeah, yeah, lovely. And and there's another one amongst this wild garlic, it's clock, what was it?  Rob: Yeah, this one here, it's the town hall clock or moschatel as it's known.  Adam: Town hall clock that's it. So just, what's the what's its proper name?  Rob: Moschatel. Well, that, that's it's another acronym, ah pseudonym really it's moschatel.  Adam: Moschatel.  Rob: Or town hall clock. I forget the Latin actually, to my shame.  Adam: Is moschatel the Welsh word for it, or it's not  Rob: No, it's not. It's a general general word, just a colloquial local term.  Adam: And why is it called the town hall clock?  Rob: Look you can see these four, the flowers have four sides to them, like an old town hall clock would.  Adam: Right, lovely. It's really quite, quite a rich path we're wandering down.  Rob: You see the the bluebells are out look just now, if you look up into the wood there you can see them. In Welsh they're called clychau'r gog, which is the cuckoo bell.  Adam: Wow. Cuckoo bell.  Rob: Because it comes out when the cuckoo comes. Apparently, the grant paid for like a fence, contractors to fence off that, this boundary here, stop the deer coming in from the Dean. To stop the wild pigs actually, pigs are a  Adam: You get wild pigs here?  Rob: They're a nuisance round here, yeah.  Adam: Wild pigs?  Rob: They call them, they're not really boar, because a boar will produce like, I don't know, maybe a litter of six, and these pigs will do 22.   Adam: Right. Blimey. And how big are they?  Rob: They look like boar.  Adam: So and boar can be quite violent, can't they, quite aggressive.  Rob: Yeah, they're sort of half breed, half pig, half boar. They're big animals, got a cute little stripey piglets, just like a boar does. But they, you know, they're exponential in their reproduction, so they're  Adam: And and they're around this wood?  Rob: They're here.  Adam: So do they cause a problem with eating or do they nibble on the new trees and stuff?  Rob: Yeah, yeah, well, they sort of rootle, I mean you want boar, because they were here originally. You want boar, like the deer, you want them in sustainable numbers, they're all sleeping now.  Adam: Do they come out at night?  Rob: They only come out at night yeah.  Adam: I'll have to return.  Rob: Yeah. I mean you'd see them if you went up to the top path up there.  Adam: We haven't done a night podcast. I think we should do some bats and.  Rob: You can do bats, if you wait, while you're waiting for the badgers to come out, you can do the bats. There's a few sites around here where you can watch them.  Adam: OK, well maybe  Rob: I'm sure there's other Trust sites where people know.  Adam: Maybe I'll come back.  Rob: One summer when I was doing my bachelor's degree, I was working in Llanelli in like a, just a café just to get some money. I was working with the local girls there, I'd been out surfing in Llangennith on the Gower the day before and I was like just telling her how the seals came in because they chased the mackerel in just beyond the surf line and I was sitting there and the water just boiled with the stench of of fish and mackerel and I looked around and two seals popped up and they were driving the mackerel into the back of the waves to hunt them. I was telling her this and she was like, what, you're telling me there's seals in the water here, in Llanelli, where? I said just in the Gower. Seals? Like seals seals, like live in water? I said there's seals there, yeah, they've always been there, we just don't value what's around us.  Adam: We don't notice it.  Rob: We don't notice because you can't see it, you don't see it, yeah.  Adam: It's interesting, isn't it, Attenborough has done a series recently on the UK and you go, you don't have to go to Africa or Latin America to see these things.  Rob: There you go. I was in West Wales last week in Aberaeron, and you can see bottlenose dolphins. Increasingly under threat there's that number of point but yeah, but they're there. You can see the seals, you can see them all around us, yeah. This is doing well.  Adam: Well, I'm going to have to leave our little trip down the Wye Valley with some rather unexpected chat about seals and bottlenose dolphins and a promise to return one dark night to meet some bats. Until next time, happy wandering.  Thank you for listening to the Woodland Trust Woodland Walks with Adam Shaw. Join us next month, when Adam will be taking another walk in the company of Woodland Trust staff, partners and volunteers. Don't forget to subscribe to the series on iTunes or wherever you're listening to us and do give us a review and a rating. And why not send us a recording of your favourite woodland walk to be included in a future podcast? Keep it to a maximum of five minutes and please tell us what makes your woodland walk special or send us an e-mail with details of your favourite walk and what makes it special to you. Send any audio files to podcast@woodlandtrust.org.uk. We look forward to hearing from you. 

About RobRob Zuber is a 20-year veteran of software startups; a four-time founder, three-time CTO. Since joining CircleCI, Rob has seen the company through its Series B, Series C, and Series D funding and delivered on product innovation at scale. Rob leads a team of 150+ engineers who are distributed around the globe.Prior to CircleCI, Rob was the CTO and Co-founder of Distiller, a continuous integration and deployment platform for mobile applications acquired by CircleCI in 2014. Before that, he cofounded Copious an online social marketplace. Rob was the CTO and Co-founder of Yoohoot, a technology company that enabled local businesses to connect with nearby consumers, which was acquired by Appconomy in 2011.Links: Twitter: @z00b LinkedIn URL: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robzuber/ Personal site: https://www.crunchbase.com/person/rob-zuber#section-overview Company site: www.circleci.com TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host cloud economist, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: If you asked me to rank which cloud provider has the best developer experience, I'd be hard-pressed to choose a platform that isn't Google Cloud. Their developer experience is unparalleled and, in the early stages of building something great, that translates directly into velocity. Try it yourself with the Google for Startups Cloud Program over at cloud.google.com/startup. It'll give you up to $100k a year for each of the first two years in Google Cloud credits for companies that range from bootstrapped all the way on up to Series A. Go build something, and then tell me about it. My thanks to Google Cloud for sponsoring this ridiculous podcast.Corey: This episode is brought to us by our friends at Pinecone. They believe that all anyone really wants is to be understood, and that includes your users. AI models combined with the Pinecone vector database let your applications understand and act on what your users want… without making them spell it out. Make your search application find results by meaning instead of just keywords, your personalization system make picks based on relevance instead of just tags, and your security applications match threats by resemblance instead of just regular expressions. Pinecone provides the cloud infrastructure that makes this easy, fast, and scalable. Thanks to my friends at Pinecone for sponsoring this episode. Visit Pinecone.io to understand more.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I'm joined this week by Rob Zuber, CTO of CircleCI. Rob, welcome to the show.Rob: Thanks. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.Corey: It really is, isn't it? So you've been doing the CTO dance, for lack of a better term, at CircleCI for about five, six years now at this point?Rob: Yeah, that's right. I joined five and a half years ago. I actually came in through an acquisition. We were building a CI/CD platform for mobile, iOS specifically, and there were just a few of us. I came in an engineering role, but within, I think a year, had taken over the CTO role and have been doing that since.Corey: For those of us who've been living under a rock and recording podcasts, CI/CD or Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery has gone through a bit of, shall we say, evolution since the term first showed up. My first exposure to it many moons ago was back when Jenkins was still called Hudson, and it was the box that you ran that it would wait for some event to happen, whether it was the passing of time, a commit to a particular branch, someone clicked a button, and then it would run a series of scripts, which sort of lent itself to the idea of the hacker news anthem, "That doesn't look hard. I can build that in a weekend." Now, we've seen a bit of growth in that space of not just, I guess the systems you can run yourselves, but also a lot of the SaaS offerings around this. That's the, I guess, the morons journey from my perspective to path through CI/CD. That's almost certainly lacking nuance. What is it, I guess in the real world with adults talking about it?Rob: Yeah, so I think it's a good perspective, or it's a good description of the perspective that many people have. Many people enter into this feeling that way. I think, specifically when you talk about cloud providers in CircleCI, we do have an on-prem offering behind the firewall. No one really runs anything on-prem anymore. But we have an offering for that market, but the real leverage is for folks that can use our stuff, multi-tenant SaaS cloud offering. Because, ultimately it's true. Many people have start with something simple from a code based perspective, right? I'm starting out, I've got a small team. We have a pretty simple project, maybe a little monolith Ruby on rails, something like that. Actually, I think in the time of the start of CircleCI. Probably not too many people kick off the rails monolith these days because if you're not using Kubernetes and Docker, then you're probably not doing it right.Corey: So, the Kubernetes and Docker people tell us?Rob: Yeah, exactly. They will proudly tell you that. We'll come back around to that point if we want to, but so you have simple project and you have simple CI, right? You may just have a simple script that you're putting in a Jenkins box or something like that, but what ultimately ends up happening is it gets complicated, and as it gets complicated, it becomes a bigger and bigger distraction from the thing that you're really trying to do, right? You're trying to build a business to ... I don't know, to do ride hailing, to do scooter sharing, what's big these days. You might be trying to do any of the ...Corey: Oh, my project is Twitter for pets. We're revolutionizing the world of pet communication.Rob: Right. And do you want to spend your time working on pet communication or on CI/CD, right? CI/CD is a thing that we understand very well, we spend our time on it every day, we think about some of the depths of it, which we can go into in a second. One of the things that gets complicated, amongst others, is just scale. So you build a big team, you have multiple projects and you have that one box under your desk where you said, "Oh, it's not that hard to build CI/CD. Now, everybody's waiting for their stuff to run because someone else got in there before them and you're thinking, okay, well how do I buy ... maybe you're not buying more boxes, you're building out something in a cloud provider and then you're worrying about auto scaling because it starts to cost you too much to run those boxes, and how do you respond to the amount of load that you have on any given day?Because you're crunching for a deadline versus everybody's taken a week off. Then, you want to get your build done as quickly as possible. So you start figuring out how to paralyze the work and spread it across those machines. The list goes on and on. This is the reality that everyone runs into as they scale their work. We do that for you. While it seems simple and ... I said I came in through an acquisition, we were building CI/CD for iOS, and I was that person. I said, "This seems really simple. We should build it and put it in the market." It didn't take us very long to get that first version to build, and it had to be generic to support many different types of customers and their particular builds.It was a small start but we started to run into the same problems, and then of course as a business, we ran into the problem of getting access to customers and all those things and that's why we joined CircleCI and that became what is now our iOS offering. But there is a lot of value that you can get quickly, to your point, but then you start focusing time and energy on that. I often refer to it, others in the industry refer to these sorts of things as undifferentiated heavy lifting. Something that becomes big and complex over time and is not the core of your business. Then as you start to invest in it, as we invest in it, then we build capabilities that most people wouldn't bother to build when they write that first bash script off a trigger or whenever, around helping you get your project set up, handling the connection into hooks, handling authentication so that different users only have access to the code they should have access to, maybe isolating access to production secrets, for example, if you're doing deploy.The kinds of things that keep coming up over and over in CI/CD that people don't think about on that first pass but ended up hunting them down the road.Corey: What do you think that people tend to misunderstand the most about CI/CD as you take a look at that throughout the ecosystem? From my perspective, when it was a box that you ran, behind the firewall as you say, the problem was is that everyone talked about, "Oh yes, we use cattle, not pets, except the box that does the builds. Of course, that box has a bunch of hand-built stuff on it that's impossible to replicate. It has extraordinary permissions into production environments and can do horrifying things, and it was always the star of various security finding reports. There are a number of us who came up from an operation side viewing CI/CD as, in some ways, a liability, which I understand is a very biased and one sided perspective. But going beyond that, what are people missing? What are they not seeing about the CI/CD landscape?Rob: One thing that I think is really interesting there, well, one thing you call that was just resiliency, right? We think about that in the way that we operate that system. We have a world of cattle because we've managed to think about that as a true offering. So, as you scale and you start to think, "Oh, how do I make this resilient inside my operation?" That's going to become a challenge that you face. The other thing that I think about that I've noticed over the years is, I want to call it division of labor or division of responsibilities. Many of those single instance or even multi-instance self-managed CI/CD tools end up in a place where, past any size of team, honestly somebody needs to own it and manage it to make sure it's stable.The changes that you want to make as a developer are often tied to basically being managed by that administrator. To be a little clear, if I have a group responsible for running CI/CD and I want to start building a different type of code or a different project, and it requires a plugin or an extension to the CI/CD platform or CI/CD tool, then I need to probably file a ticket and wait for another department who is generally not super motivated to get my code out into production, to go make a change that they are going to evaluate and review and decide ... or maybe creates conflict with something somebody else is doing on that system. And then you say, "Oh well actually we can't have these co-installed so now we need two systems." It's that division of responsibilities. Whereas, having built a multi-tenant cloud offering, we could never have that. There is no world in which our customers say to us, "Hey, we want this plugin installed. Can you go do that for us?"Everything that is about how the development team thinks about their software and how they want their build to run, how they want their deploys to run, etc, needs to be in the hands of the developers, and everything that is about maintenance and operation and scale needs to be in our hands. It has created a very clear separation out of necessity, but one that even ... I mentioned that you can deploy CircleCI yourself and run it within a team, and in large organizations, that separation really helps them get leverage. Does that make sense?Corey: It really does. I think we're also seeing a change in perspective around resiliency and how this works. I once worked at a company I will not name where they were. It was either CircleCI or TeamCity. This was years and years ago where I don't recall exactly what they were using, but it doesn't matter because at one point the service took an outage, and in typical knee jerk reaction, well, that can never happen again. So they wound up doing all of the CI/CD work for some godforsaken reason on a Raspberry PI that some developer brought in and left in the corner of the office. Surprise, it took an awfully long time for tests to run on basically an underpowered toy project. The answer there was to just use less tests because you generally don't need to run nearly as many.I just stared at people for the longest time when it came to that. I think that one of the problems that we still see, I know when I write code myself, I'm as guilty of this as anyone, I am a terrible developer and don't believe in tests. So, the CI/CD pipeline that I tend to look at is more or less a glorified script runner. Whenever I make a commit to this branch, go ahead and run the following three lines script that does a serverless deployment and puts it where it needs to go, and then I'll test it manually, or it's a pre-production environment so it's not that big of a deal. That can work for some use cases, but it's also a great thing that no one actually depends on the stuff that I write for day-to-day business operations or anything critical. At what point does it stop being a script runner?Rob: Well, to the point of the scale, I think there's a couple of things that you brought up in there that are interesting to me. One is the culture of testing. It feels like one of these areas of software development, because I was around in a time when no one really understood what it was to do automated testing. I won't even go into TDD, but just, in general, why would I do that? We have this QA team, it's cost effective to give it to a bunch of people. I'm thinking backwards or thinking back on that, it all seems a little bit well, wrong. But getting to the point where you've worked effectively with tests takes a little bit of effort. But once you have that, once you've sat and worked on something and had the feedback loop of, oh, this thing's not working. Oh, I'll just change this, now it's working.Really having that locally, as a developer, is super rewarding, in my mind and enabling I guess I would say as well. Then you get to this place where you're excited about building tests, especially as you're working in a team, and then culturally you end up in a place where, I put up a PR and someone else looks at it and says, "I see you're making an assumption or I believe you're making an assumption here, but I don't see any way that that's being validated. So please add testing to ensure that is actually true." Both because I want to make sure it's true now, but when we both forget that you ever wrote this and someone else makes a change, your assumptions hold or someone can understand that you were making those assumptions and they can make appropriate changes to deal with it.I think as you work in a team that's growing and scaling and beyond your pet project, once you've witnessed the value of that, you don't want to go back. So, people do end up writing more and more tests and that's what drives the scale at least on the testing and CI side in a way that you need to then manage that. Going the opposite direction of what you're describing, which is, hey, let's just write fewer tests and use cheaper machines, people are recognizing the value and saying, "Okay, we want that value, but we don't want to bottleneck everyone with an hour long build to run all these. So how do we get a system that's going to scale and support that?"Corey: That's what's fascinating, is watching that start to percolate beyond the traditional web applications with particular blessed languages and into other things. For example, in my copious spare time, I'm the community lead for the open guide to AWS, which is a GitHub project that has 25,000 stars or so, so you know it's good, where it's just a giant markdown document that lists the 10,000 tips and tricks that we all wish we'd known when we'd gotten started with AWS, and in a format that's easily consumable. The CI/CD approach we have right now, which I believe is done through Travis, is it just winds up running a giant link checker in parallel across the thousands of links that are ... sorry, I wanted to say 1,200 links, that are included within that document.There's really not a lot else we can do in that type of environment. I mean, a spellchecker with all of the terms of art involved would more or less a seg fault itself to death as soon as it took a look, but other than making sure we don't have dead links, and it feels like there's not a lot of automation or testing opportunity in something like that. Is that accurate? Am I completely wrong and missing something?Rob: I've never built that particular site so it ... I mean, it sounds reasonable. I think that going the other way, we often think about, before we kick off a large complex set of testing for a more complex application, maybe then a markdown document, a lot of people now will use things similar to what you're using, like maybe part of my application is a bunch of links to outside docs or outside sites that I'm referencing or if I run into a problem, I link you to our help site or something and making sure all that stuff is validated. Doing linting on the structure and format of code itself. One of the things that comes up as you scale out of the individual script runner is doing that work in parallel. I can say, you know what? Do the linting over here, do the link checking over here. Only use very small boxes for those.We don't happen to have Raspberry Pi's in our infrastructure, but we can give you a much smaller resource, which costs you less if you're not going to be pushing the limits of that. But then, if you have big integration tests or something which need more space than we can provide that as well, both in a single channel or pathway to give you the room to move faster and then to break that out and break up your work. At an extreme example, and of course, anyone who's done parallelization knows there's costs to splitting up work in like the management overhead. But if you have 1200 links, like you could check them all at the same time. I doubt that would be a good use of our platform, but you could check 600 in one and 600 in another, or 300s at a time or whatever, in find the optimal path if you really cared about getting that done more quickly.Corey: Right. Usually, it's not that big of a concern and usually it winds up throwing errors on existing bad links, not something that has been included in the pull request in question. Again, there's nothing that is so awesome that I can't horribly misuse it for something ridiculous. It's my entire stock and trade. It's why I believe route 53 remains the best database option for everyone, but it's fun going through this space and just seeing how things have evolved. One question I do have since you come from a background, by way of acquisition, that was aimed squarely at this, historically, it seems that running a lot of testing on mobile devices, specifically iOS devices, was the stuff of nightmares because you couldn't really run that in any meaningful way in a virtualized environment. So, it generally required an awful lot of devices. Is that still the case? Has that environment changed radically since I last worked at a mobile shop?Rob: I don't think so, but I think we've all started to think a little bit differently. We got started in that business because we were building iOS apps and thought, wow, the tooling here, it's really frustrating. To be clear, at CircleCI and at that business, we were solving the problem of managing the machines themselves, so the portion of the testing that you would run effectively in a simulator, not the problem of the device farm, if you will. But one of the things that I remember, and so this is late 2013, early 2014 as I was working on mobile apps was people shifting the MVC layers a little bit such that the thing that you needed to test on a device was getting smaller and smaller, meaning putting more logic in, I forget what the name was specifically, but it was like the ... I don't want to try to even guess.But basically pulling logic out of the actual rendering and down into what we'll call state transitions I guess. If you think about that in modern day and look at maybe web frameworks like React, you're trying to just respond with rendering on top of a lot of state change that happens underneath that. In that model, if you thin out the user interface portion, you make a lot more of your code testable, if that makes sense. The reason we're all trying to test on all these different devices is often that we've baked a lot of business logic into the view layer. Does that make sense?Corey: Yeah, it absolutely does. Please continue.Rob: Instead of saying, well, all our logic's in the view layer, so let's get really good at testing the view layer, which means massive device farms and a bunch of people testing all these things, let's make that layer as thin as possible, and there's analogies for this in even how we do service design these days and structure the architecture of systems, basically make the boundaries as thin as possible and the interaction with the outside world as thin as possible. That gives you much more capability to effectively test the majority or much larger portions of your business logic. The device farm problem is still a problem. People still want to see how something specifically renders on a particular screen or whatever. But by minimizing that, the amount that you have to invest in that gets smaller.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Uptycs, because they believe that many of you are looking to bolster your security posture with CNAPP and XDR solutions. They offer both cloud and endpoint security in a single UI and data model. Listeners can get Uptycs for up to 1,000 assets through the end of 2023 (that is next year) for $1. But this offer is only available for a limited time on UptycsSecretMenu.com. That's U-P-T-Y-C-S Secret Menu dot com.Corey: You mentioned device farm, which is an app choice, given that that is the name of an AWS service that has a crap ton of mobile devices that you can log into and it's one of my top candidates for the, did I make this service up to mess with you competitions? It does lead us to an interesting question. CI/CD has gotten an increased amount of attention lately from pretty much everyone. AWS, as is typical for Amazon, tends to lie awake at night worrying that someone somehow is making money that isn't them. So their product strategy distills down to, yes. So, they wound up releasing a whole bunch of CI/CD oriented products that at launch were, to be polite, terrible. Over time, they've gotten slightly better, but it's still a very confusing ecosystem there.Then we see things like Azure dev ops who it seems is aimed at a very similar type of problem and they're also trying to challenge Amazon on the grounds of terrible names of services. But we're now seeing an increased focus from the first party providers themselves around the CI/CD space. What does that mean for existing entrenched players who have been making a specialty out of this for a lot longer than these folks have been playing with it?Rob: It's a great question. I think about the approaches very differently, which is probably unsurprising. Speaking of lying awake at night or spending all day thinking about these things, this is what we do. You've the term script runner a few times in the conversation, the thing that I see when I see someone like AWS looking at this problem is basically, people are using, the way that I think about it, is maybe less the money, although it translates pretty quickly. People are using compute to do something, can we get them to do that with us? Oddly enough, a massive chunk of CircleCI runs on AWS so it doesn't really matter to them one way or another, but they're effectively looking to drive compute hours and looking to drive a pathway onto their platform.One thing about that is it doesn't really matter to them in my perspective, whether people use that particular product or not. As a result, it gets the product investment that you put in when that's the case. So, it's a sort of a check the box approach like, hey we CI and we have CD like other people do. Whereas, when we look at CI and CD, we've been talking about some of the factors like scaling it effectively and making it really easy for you to understand what's going on. We think about very much the core use case, what is one of our customers or users doing when they show up? How do we do that in a way that maximizes their flow? Minimizes the overhead to them of using our system, whether it's getting set up and running really quickly, like talk about being in the center of how much of the world is developing software.So we see patterns, we see mistakes that people are making and can use that to inform both how our product works and inform you directly as a user. "Hey, I see that you're trying to do this. It would go better if you did this." I think both from the, honestly, the years that we've been doing this and the amount that we've witnessed in terms of what works well for customers, what doesn't, what we see going through just from a data perspective, as we see hundreds of thousands of builds running, that rich perspective is unique to us. Because as you said, we're a player that's been doing this for a really long time and very focused on it. We treat the experience with, I guess I'm trying to figure out a way to say this that doesn't sound as bad as it might, but a lot of people have suffered a lot with CI/CD.There's a lot that goes into getting CI/CD to work effectively and getting it to work reliably over time as your system is constantly changing. Honestly, there's a lot of frustration, and we come in to work every day thinking about minimizing that frustration so that our customers can go spend their time doing what matters to them. Again, when I think you sort of ... a lot of these big players present you with a runtime in which you can execute a script of your choosing. It's not thinking about the problem in that way and I don't see them changing their perspective. Honestly, I just don't worry about them.Corey: Which is a very fair tack to take. It's interesting watching companies and as far as how much time and energy they spend worrying about competition versus how much they focus instead on customers. To turn it around slightly, what makes what you do challenging in some respects, I would imagine is that a lot of your target market is themselves, developers. Developers, in my experience, are challenging customers in that, first, they tend to devalue their own time to the point where, oh, that doesn't sound hard. I'll build that overnight. Secondly, once you finally win them over to the idea of paying for something, it's challenging to get them to have the necessary signing authority. At best, they become champions. But what you do has to start with developers in order to win widespread adoption and technical buy-in. How does that wind up manifesting as approach to, well, some people call it developer relations, developer advocacy. I refer to those folks as developers because I have problems, but how do you folks view that?Rob: Yeah, it's a really insightful view actually because we do end up in most of our customers, or in the environments of our customers, however you want to describe it, as a result of the enthusiasm of individual developers, development teams, much more so than ... there are many products certainly in enterprise software and I don't really think purely in enterprise, but there are many products that can only be purchased by the CIO or the CTO or whatever. Right? To your question of developer relations, we spend a lot of time out in the market talking to individuals, talking at conferences, writing content about how we think about this space and things that people can do. But we're a very product driven company, meaning both, that's what we think about first, and then support it with these other things.But second, we win on product, right? We don't win in the market because you thought the blog posts that we wrote was really cool. That might make you aware of us, but if you don't love the product, I mean, developers, to your point, they want to use things that they really enjoy using. When developers use the product and love the product and they champion it and they get access because they might work on a side project or an open source project or maybe they worked in another company that used CircleCI and then they go somewhere else and they say, "What are we doing? Life is so much better for you Circle CI, those sorts of things. But it very much comes from the bottom up. It's pretty difficult to go into an organization and say, "Hey, you should push this down to all of your developers."There's a lot of rejection that comes from developers on mandated tooling. We have to provide knowledge, we have to provide capabilities in our product that appealed to those other folks. For example, administrators of our tooling, or when it gets to the point where someone owns how you use CircleCI versus just being a regular user of the product. We have capabilities to support them around understanding what's happening, around creating shared capabilities that multiple teams can use, those sorts of things. But ultimately, we have to lead with product, we have to get in into the sort of hearts and minds of the developers themselves and then grow from there and everything we do from a marketing, developer relations myself, I spend a lot of time talking to customers who are out in the market, is all about propping up or helping raise awareness effectively. But there's nothing that we can do if the product doesn't meet the needs of our customers.Corey: That's what it seems like it comes down to a fair bit. It's always weird to consider that, at its heart, developer relations is marketing. The folks I talk to who argue against that, it seems that it comes from a misunderstanding of what marketing actually is. It's not buying ads in airports, it's not doing podcast advertisements. That's a subject near and dear to my heart. It's not about annoying people by showing up at their office with the sales team. It's about understanding what their challenges and problems are and then positioning a solution that ideally solves them in a place that and in a way that they can be receptive to. Instead, people tend to equate marketing to this whole ridiculous statistics driven nonsense that doesn't really resonate with anyone and I think that that's unfair to everyone involved.That said, I will say that having spent a fair bit of time in this space, I've yet to see anything from CircleCI that has annoyed me to the point where I would have remembered it, which is awesome. I don't see it in flight magazines, generally. I don't see it on obnoxious people try to tackle me as I walk through an expo hall and want to scan my badge. It just seems very well executed and you have some very talented people working for you. To that end, you are largely a distributed company, which is fascinating. Did it start that way? Did it happen that way by a quirk of fate?Rob: Yeah, I those two things probably come together. The company, from very early days, now I wasn't there but I think some of our earliest engineers were distributed and the company started out basically entirely as engineers. It's a team solving problems of other engineers, which is ... it's a fun challenge. There were early participants who were distributed. Mostly, when you start a company and no one has ever heard of you and no one knows if you're going to be successful, going and recruiting is generally a different game than when you're, certainly, when you're where we are now. There were some personal relations that just happened to connect with people around the globe who wanted to participate.We started out pretty early with some distribution, and that led to structuring the org in a way, both from a tooling and process perspective. A lot of that sort of happens organically, but building a culture that really supported that. I personally am based in the Bay Area, so we have headquarters in San Francisco, but it doesn't really make a difference if I go in versus just stay and work from home on any given day because the company operates in such a way that that distribution is completely normal.Corey: We accidentally did the same thing. My business partner and I used to live across the street from each other and we decided to merge a week before he moved out of state to Portland. So awesome. Great. We have wonderful timing on all of these things. It's fun to build it from that way, build that way from the ground up. The challenge I've always seen is when you start off with having a centralized office and everyone's there, except this one person who, no matter how you try to work around it, is never as involved. So it feels like the sort of thing you've absolutely got to be building from day one, or otherwise, you're going to have a massive cultural growing pain as you try to get there.Rob: Yeah, I think that's true. So I've actually been that one person. I, at some point in my career prior to CircleCI, was helping out a company founded by some friends of mine based in Toronto. I grew up in Toronto. I kicked off a project and then the project grew and grew until I was the one person out of maybe 50 or 60 who wasn't in an office in Toronto. It got to the point where no one remembered who I was and I was like, "Cool, I think I'm done. I'm out." I was fine with that. It was always meant to be a temporary thing, but I really felt that transition for the organization. I would say in terms of growing, I mean, yes, if you start out, it goes both ways, if you start out distributed, you're going to remain distributed.There are certain things that get more challenging at scale, right? If everybody is sort of just in their home all over the globe, then the communication overhead continues to increase and increase in just understanding who people are, who you should be talking to. You need to focus-Corey: There's always the time zone hierarchy.Rob: Ooh, the time zones are a delight, yes. I would say like we talk a lot about, in this industry, Dunbar's number and sizes of teams and the points at which things get more complex. I think there's probably a different scale for distributed teams. It takes fewer people to reach a point where communication gets challenging, and trust and all the other things that go with Dunbar's views. You kind of have that challenge and then you start to think, oh well, then you have some offices, because we actually have maybe six physical offices, partly because in our go to market org, we've started to expand globally and put people in regional offices.There's this interesting disconnect. I don't know about disconnect, but there's a split in how we operate in different parts of the org. I think what I've seen people ... well, I don't know about succeed, but I've seen people try when you start out with one org, or sorry, one location is, let's not jump to that one person somewhere else and then one person somewhere else kind of thing, but build out a second office, build out another office, like pick another location where you think you ... it's often, certainly where we are, in the Bay Area, it's often driven by just this market. Finding talent, finding people who want to join you, hanging onto those people when there are so many other opportunities around tends to be much more challenging. When you offer people alternatives, like you can stay where you are but have access to a cool and interesting company or you can work from home, which a lot of people value, then there's different things that you bring to the table.I see a lot of people trying to expand in that way, but when you are so office-centric, a second office I think is a smoother transition point than just suddenly distributing people because, especially the first and second one, unless you're hiring in a massive wave, are really going to struggle in that environment.Corey: I think that's probably one of the more astute things that's been noticed on this show in the last couple of years. If people want to hear more about what you have to say and how you think about the world, where can they find you?Rob: I would say, on our blog, I tend to write stuff there as do other people. You talked about having great people in the organization. We have a lot of great people talking about how we think about engineering, how we think about both engineering teams and culture and then some of the problems we're trying to solve. So, off our site, circleci.com, and go to our blog. Then, I attend to is to speak and hangout on podcasts and do guest writing. I think I'm pretty easy to find. You can find me on Twitter. My handle is z00b, Z-0-0-B. I know I'm not super prolific, but if someone wants to track me down and ask me something, I'd probably be more than happy to answer.Corey: You can expect some engagement as soon as this goes out. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I appreciate it.Rob: Yeah, thanks for having me. This was a ton of fun.Corey: Rob Zuber, CTO at CircleCI. I'm Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on Apple podcasts. If you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on Apple podcasts along with something amusing for me to read later while I'm crying.Announcer: This has been this week's episode of Screaming in the Cloud. You can also find more corey@screaminginthecloud.com or wherever fine snark is sold.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Joe Soltis, CEO, ChoiceLocal (Cleveland, OH)   Joe Soltis is CEO at ChoiceLocal, which Joe describes as “the top performing franchise growth engine” with a “money back guarantee.” The agency offers a wide scope of services for franchisors and franchisees of over 50 brands, enabling them to provide “Fortune 500 level customer service, results, strategy, and ROI on the franchisee level” for a “small and medium size business price.”  Large clients might be parent companies of franchise systems, franchisors owning 20 or more franchise systems where each system may have from 20 to 200 franchisees – and up to as many as 6,000 internal franchise units. Small franchise systems may have 10 units. For these smaller clients, the agency facilitates franchise development, consumer, new customer, location, company, and digital talent recruitment marketing. Joe says hiring is a challenge, especially in the franchise space. The agency needs to understand its client's hiring needs, the kind of candidates it desires, and the historical hire rates to know the number of applicants to target . . . then reverse engineer the hire rate/cost per quality candidate by channel and implement the most effective marketing strategy to ensure future growth. Joe says they use the same channels as they do for consumer marketing (in a different order), plus some that are recruitment specific. Joe notes that franchise operations need to beware . . . a lot of agencies will lock clients into proprietary technology solutions . . . that don't fit. ChoiceLocal strives to find the right tools for each client to build a “win-win” ecosystem where franchisor, franchisee, and the agency all win. He says it's important that the tool providers are companies sensitive to client needs, adaptable to a changing market, and willing to invest in “making sure that you can use their tool to provide the best in the world customer service to your end customers.” Joe started his career working his way up for 10 years in a company that grew to serve Fortune 500 companies. At a time of great personal loss, he changed the direction of his life. In his words, I always said I wanted to be successful so that I could help people, and that day it changed to “I don't want to just build something; I want to help people and I want to do it now. I don't want to be successful so that I can help people later. I want to do it now.” Joe started ChoiceLocal with the mission “to help others” – the agency's franchisor and franchisee partners, agency teammates (to make their dreams and aspirations reality), and people in the community.  Joe structured the agency with the goal of having employees work their 40-hours, then “unplug and leave work at work.” With a teammate Net Promoter Score in the 70s (far exceeding the “good” score, which is in the 30s), the agency has been a Top Workplace in Northeast Ohio for the past five years. When Covid struck, the agency created a ChoiceLocal Economic Stimulus Package to help its customers “grow through the downturn,” an initiative that Joe estimates saved 30 franchisees from going out of business.  Giving back to the community is “baked into” the agency's DNA, with 10% of profits dedicated to helping “kids in need.” Joe says the agency's “big hairy audacious goal is to help 10,000 kids a year.” As of this interview, the agency had already helped 6,000 kids in 2022 through such things as meal programs, partnering with Habitat for Humanity to provide a home for an in-need family, and through team members' personal volunteer work in the community. Joe says the next thing after achieving this goal would be to “raise the goal.” Recently, the agency spun off a dental franchise, Broadview Dental Group, which Joe targets to be “the largest provider of dental care in the United States within 10 years.” Expectations are that dentists following this franchise system “can have 4.5 times the profit of a typical dental practice and only have to work three days a week to do it.” In this franchise system, a dentist maintains 100% of the business's equity and, on retirement, can sell the franchise. Joe can be reached on his agency's website at choicelocal.com, by following ChoiceLocal on social media channels @ChoiceLocal, by following Joe on Twitter @helpothersjoe, or by connecting with him on LinkedIn.  ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Joe Soltis, CEO at ChoiceLocal based in Cleveland, Ohio. Welcome to the podcast, Joe. JOE: Rob, great to be with you today. ROB: Excellent to have you here. Why don't you start off by telling us about ChoiceLocal? What is the firm's specialty? What is your superpower? What are you known for? Hit us with it. JOE: We're the top performing franchise growth engine. We work exclusively with franchisors and franchisees, and the reason we do that is we want to give Fortune 500 level customer service, results, strategy, and ROI, but we want to be able to do it when you look on the franchisee level at a small and medium size business price while delivering that. When we do that, we offer a money back guarantee. We're the first and only franchise marketing agency to offer that money back guarantee. We work with 50+ brands. We're one of the fastest growing companies in the U.S., members of the IFA, the whole nine yards.  ROB: Wow, congratulations. There's a certain clarity to that that is certainly appreciated. Let's peel it back just a layer. When we think about franchise, I think some of us think about restaurants, but there are franchises of all stripes. There is plumbing. There are franchise marketing agencies, for that matter. So what does a typical customer look like? Is there a particular range of franchises, of locations? Because you could have two or two thousand. What's a typical engagement look like? JOE: We work with some franchise systems that are owned by what we would call a platform, like a parent company that owns franchise systems. There are some franchisors that we work with that actually own 20+ franchise systems, and within each of those franchise systems there can range anywhere between 20 franchisees on the small side and 200 on the large side. So, we're talking within these companies 2,000-unit franchise operations, and some franchise systems that we work with even have 6,000+ franchise units within them. Also, on the other end of the spectrum, there are franchise systems that we work with that are 10-unit franchise systems. We power them on franchise development, we power them on consumer marketing and new customer marketing for their franchisees as well as their company and locations, and we also power their talent recruitment through digital marketing to drive highly qualified applicants. Staffing is obviously a huge challenge in today's world, and particularly within the franchising space. ROB: That's a little bit of a wider scope of services than I think we often hear in local marketing, especially once you get into the recruitment side. So that's interesting. Is it the same channels for getting customers in and getting employees in? Is it different? What's the mix of touchpoints there? JOE: It is the same channels, used in a different order, plus there are additional channels that are recruiting specific. Obviously, there's different job boards that are highly important in the recruiting space, and then there's also a whole host of digital channels that can be activated, from geotargeted Google Ads to Facebook advertising. Each of them has their strengths and their weaknesses. Our job within these franchise systems is to understand what their hiring needs are, who they're looking to hire, what their historical hire rates are so we know how many applicants we need to drive, and then we can also reverse engineer the hire rate by channel, and then we can from there figure out their cost per quality applicant by channel and then develop a marketing mix that's going to allow them to continue to grow. ROB: There's a lot going on there. Over time we've seen different platforms that have tried to jump to the forefront to help, I think, organizations like ChoiceLocal, handle marketing for multilocation, for franchises. What's the state of the tool ecosystem for this? Has any tool that tries to help with this problem and actually create a library of content to push out to different locations worked? Or has it not worked and you end up building some of those solutions yourselves? How do you look at dozens of locations, different local needs, some shared content, that sort of thing? JOE: There are a lot of agencies that will come in and sell franchise systems, their own proprietary tech in order to bring that about. What we've generally found is when these marketing agencies bring in their proprietary tech, it's more in the agency's interest and less in the interest of the franchisor and the franchisee. Essentially, it's “Here, take this marketing solution. Take our proprietary tech, and then it's impossible for you to leave us.” That's how they set that up, and it can create some difficulty and a lot of angst within these different franchise systems. When working in the franchising space, what you need to do is build a win-win ecosystem where the franchisor wins, the franchisee wins, and as a byproduct of that, as the agency you win as well. There's a whole host of various tools in this, from Rallio to WebPunch to SOCi. There's a lot of others. Yext. These are all various powerful tools that can be used and deployed. There's other powerful tools in the call tracking space, too. You have companies like CallRail who do a really strong job with this, with call analytics and those types of things. The job of the agency is to find the right tools that are right for that franchise system while also using their agency buying power to leverage economies of scale and do what's in the best interest of their client partners. ROB: If I hear you correctly, there's not a one-size-fits-all best franchise management tool. It is a little bit of a best of breed, it's a what are the needs of your particular brand/set of stores, that kind of thing. Sometimes it is Yext, maybe sometimes you bring CallRail to the table. You're the experts, and you're prescribing the menu that you recommend. JOE: Yeah, that is right. One thing, too, as you follow these companies – depending on how much they're investing in R&D, how much they're willing to listen to their customer, how much they're willing to allow their agency partners to fuel their product roadmap and guide their product roadmap – that's really how you're going to pick your partners, in large part. There's a lot of these SaaS companies that are not very customer service minded. They're more like “Get in, sign up for a product, and then leave us alone” kind of deal, and as an agency, that's not the kind of partner you're looking for. You're looking for ones that will invest in making sure that you can use their tool to provide the best in the world customer service to your end customers. Why I say that is that's something to look out for in the beginning. And the other reason I say that is the companies that are willing to invest in their customer service also tend to invest in their product development, and you'll notice there's ebbs and flows of who's good and who's bad when they do this. And things change, so you've got to find a partner that's always looking to change and adapt with the market as it changes and evolves. ROB: It's interesting how the cast of characters has changed. When I google for this problem space, Hootsuite is out there, Content and Sprout are out there contending for just a small slice of that franchise deal. But you know they're chasing every other vertical in social as well. I can certainly appreciate – we're in Atlanta; CallRail is a neighbor company here. Do you know their roots a little bit? It's an interesting background on them. JOE: It's a really neat company. ROB: The founder started off with a site to help people with BMWs that were out of warranty to find a local repair shop. My understanding is if you have a BMW that's out of warranty, you need a local repair shop. That's what I've heard. So, he started off doing lead gen for these local shops and then built call tracking to help prove the value of his BMWershops.com website, and ended up building CallRail from it. JOE: What's neat about CallRail, too, is they really have come in – there's a lot of companies that historically have played in that place, and they really trounced them. Some of their advanced features and some of their call analytics, listening to calls, transcribing calls, turning them into qualified leads, or basically saying what's a qualified lead, what's a hot lead, what's not a lead, and how they built some of that technology – it's pretty cool stuff. ROB: Yeah, there's a tremendous customer focus there. I do want to shift gears for a moment; I want to get to the origin story of ChoiceLocal. What led you to create this firm? What led you to this point of focus, of all the areas you could have focused on helping and niches you could have served? JOE: I served at a company that served multibillion dollar companies. I was a Vice President of Operations of Product Development there. We served Fortune 500 companies – FedEx, CBS, other multibillion dollar publicly traded companies. That's where I spent my day and that's who I served. We built a team of 180 full-time digital marketers. Kind of a neat story. Started as employee #8, within a few years worked my way up to VP of Ops and Product Development and did that. It was cool. I learned a lot and I had some really great mentors while I was there. The owners there have done some really amazing things outside of agency, just building multimillion dollar companies and multibillion dollar companies and taking some of them public, like NCS Healthcare and others. So, I learned a ton while I was there over that 10-year period. Then in 2012, we had a pregnancy. Went into an ultrasound room with my wife and there was no heartbeat. So we lost our son, Ben, pretty late in the pregnancy. I always said I wanted to be successful so that I could help people, and that day it changed to “I don't want to just build something; I want to help people and I want to do it now. I don't want to be successful so that I can help people later. I want to do it now.” That's actually how ChoiceLocal got started. In its simple form, our mission always has been – our mission and our core values were written prior to even having a business plan – our mission is help others. We help our partners succeed, our franchisor and franchisee partners, help their dreams and aspirations become a reality. We help our teammates' dreams and aspirations become a reality. We've been a Top Workplace in Northeast Ohio five years running. We have a teammate Net Promoter Score in the 70s, which is unheard of high. You ask people, “What is a good employee Net Promoter Score?”, the answer is 30. We're hanging out in the 70s. So, we really work to live that mission and really care about others. Working in the agency space, a lot of agencies will bring in talent, they will work them like crazy for like five years until they burn out, and then they leave and they go in-house. Having experienced that and have friends who've experienced that in other companies, I wanted to do something fundamentally different. That's why we founded ChoiceLocal and built it the way that we have. But our mission of help others is also giving back. We take 10% of the profits out of the company and we use it to help kids in need. Our big hairy audacious goal is to help 10,000 kids a year. We created the Benjamin Isaac Foundation, named after our son, Ben. We just gave a home to a single mother with three kids. Her name is Brie; she's got three beautiful boys. We just had their house dedication two weekends ago, and that was through Habitat for Humanity. We were the sole sponsor for the home. Got to meet her beautiful boys. We helped them move in, had the housewarming and a dedication. It was so cool. It's just so cool. We do tons of other stuff like that. So far this year – it's now June, and we are at a little over 6,000 kids that we've helped through various charities that we partner with. ROB: Well, 4,000 more to go and then another goal. JOE: Yes, raise the goal. ROB: There's a depth in that origin story. I think something that is interesting to think through – when you have a team, when you're giving to causes, how do you connect the day-to-day of what the team is doing to the causes that the company is giving to and really ensure that there's an authentic connection there? I think it can be very disconnected sometimes. Here's the owner, here's the team, we're building this stuff, some money got shot out over here – to a good cause, but maybe it doesn't feel relevant to the day-to-day. So how do you think about connecting the team to the cause? JOE: That's a great question. It's a really great question. The first thing is we hire for people that have the core values that we have. Family, giving, integrity in all things. There's certain ways that you can interview people to make sure that they have those. And if you actually study some of the psychology behind it, if you study various hiring techniques that are used in books like Topgrading and WHO and those types of things, there's ways you can interview for those core values and competencies to screen people out that don't have that. So, you're hiring people that believe what you believe and then you're coming into a culture that celebrates those core values and celebrates those things. For example, we have a team meeting every single month where we update on everything that's happening in the agency, what's going on with business strategy. We're transparent on financials and performance and all of those things so everybody can see what's going on. We have a part where we talk about help others and core values. In core values, people nominate teammates and they celebrate how they live those core values out, and we tell those stories. A lot of those core values are how we help our partners and internally, but it's also how we give back. And then we tie in our financial performance. We then say, “Because we were able to do this, we were able to give Brie and her three boys this gift.” We make it very personal. Along those lines, we also have quarterly volunteering. We try to get every teammate to volunteer once a quarter so they can see, feel, and touch the work they're doing. My personal favorite is when we go to the Boys and Girls Club of America. Those kids need love, they need support, they need good mentors, and when you go there, you feel fantastic afterwards because you've been able to deliver some of that for them. So that's really powerful. And then we also do this BHAG walkthrough. BHAG stands for big hairy audacious goal. We have this roadmap, and then we say, “Here's three kids that were helped because of this. Here's 1,600 kids that were fed for a year in a place of education.” We did this charity giveaway through our annual thing at the International Franchise Association called the ChoiceLocal 10k Charity Giveaway. People enter a drawing giveaway. There's a really cool story – there's a woman who served as a board member of the International Franchise Association; today she owns about 20 Taco Johns franchises. Very successful businesswomen. She picked the Great Harvest Heartland as her charity, and she ended up winning. What I found out after she won is that as a kid, she was so poor that she needed to go to the foodbank to eat. So, it was a very personal gift for her. That's the type of stuff that really hits home, when you always tie it to that personal story. And then when you say, “Because you were able to do this specifically,” and you name the person, “it allowed us to be able to do this.” Sorry, I'm passionate about this – the last thing I'll add to it is helping the business owner. This particular franchisee is having a really hard time and they're on the verge of going out of business. We had a good amount of this through COVID. We announced the ChoiceLocal Economic Stimulus Package for our customers. We have this whole “grow through the downturn” quarterly priority and theme. We saved probably 30 franchisees from going out of business during COVID, and that was really cool. We celebrated each one of those as a company during the team meetings and made a really big deal out of it, because it's a huge deal. They put their life savings into the business. Together, we helped save their business. That's flipping awesome. It's really cool. ROB: What an opportunity. I hear a certain proximity that you're referring to within the team. Is all of your team right there, one office, one team? Is that your world, or are people in different places? JOE: It used to be that way, pre-COVID. We were in the office three days a week, and Monday/Friday work from home. COVID hit and we went 100% remote. Then we had highest teammate Net Promoter Score ever, highest client Net Promoter Score ever, highest revenue ever by far, highest profit dollars. We're like, this is working really well. So we surveyed our team and said, “What do you guys want to do?” and everybody said basically, work from home, come into the office once. So, we instituted that. What we then found is about 10-15% of our staff in a given week would come into the office, and they'd come in on different days, and when they came in there was like 3% of our staff there. It felt a little lonely, and some people like that connectedness. So I just met with our leadership team on this this past week; we're probably going to be instituting now – we do a lot of stuff on Slack. I know a lot of companies do. Basically, we're going to have ChoiceLocal In-Office Day. It's going to be completely optional, but everybody that's going to go is going to go into Slack, fill out this poll, and RSVP and say “Hey, I'm going to be in the office this day” and try to get other teammates to come in. And then they're going to have a group of probably 30-40% of the company in on that individual day, and they can hang out together. Plus we do all the fun stuff. We have team meets once a month. Those are in person. About half the company comes to those; the rest are virtual. We bring in catered food. We're in Cleveland, so we're going to watch a Cleveland Guardians, which used to be the Cleveland Indians, game. ROB: Yeah, that's an adjustment there as well. JOE: Stuff like that. We do Topgolf. We do a big Christmas party every year. Stuff like that. It's fun. It's so fun. ROB: It sounds like an adjustment, but it sounds like listening to the team, it sounds like adjusting well. When I think about folks I've known in the agency world in Cleveland, there's no shortage of opportunity to lose your team to the revolving door of brands. That seems like it's probably the way of life there – not to mention the regional opportunities with vendors. It really does take some work to keep them on the agency side, I think. JOE: Historically, at my prior agency that was definitely a continual challenge. We launched ChoiceLocal with the mission of help others, with the goal – we're not perfect at this; I don't want to sugarcoat it – but with the goal of being a fast-paced, high energy environment, but you work 40 hours, then you unplug and you leave work at work. We were able to build our systems so that's possible. We historically have had almost no turnover. Now, with that said, this year during COVID, our turnover rate has spiked a bit, but it's nothing like I was ever used to. In a year we would have maybe, out of 100 people, like 1 to 2 people leave that we didn't want to leave. Historically. This year that number is probably up to like 4 out of 100. ROB: Yeah, that's turnover, but it's not a high turnover rate. It is managing what it is. It sounds like you have learned a lot along the way. As you think about lessons you've learned building ChoiceLocal, are there particular things you think of that you would wish to go back and tell yourself to do differently if you were able to? JOE: There's a whole host of things. One of the things I have as an advantage is I was a political science major, and I learned absolutely nothing in college that is useful to me today. [laughs] ROB: A beginner's mindset is what you're saying. [laughs] JOE: Yeah, exactly. There's this book called All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, and there's so much truth to that. I was raised treat others the way you want to be treated, and that's how I've always operated. I've always brought that to what I do because I thought it's the right thing to do. But I've actually found it's an amazingly sound business strategy. What I'm going to say now may be a little bit controversial, but there's so much stuff that you learn in business school, like when you're getting your MBA and those types of things, and so much of that you need to throw out and ignore because it's trash. For example, you're a service-based business, so a person is not a commodity. A person is not a tool to be used. A person is not a KPI. They are a person with dignity, a person who has a family, a person who deserves to be cared about, loved, and appreciated. If you just do that and focus on that first, the business results tend to take care of themselves. But at the same point, KPIs are important. Accountability is important. Ensuring that you have that is critical. Knowing that you hire right for core values first and for performance second, but also critically important – all of that integrates really well, and those are really important things. The last thing, from a mistake that I made, that I'll say is there's a book called Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Else Smarter, and basically the premise of the book – and this happens for a lot of folks in agencies, particularly in leadership positions – how did you get successful? You got successful by busting your butt and being pretty smart about the way you do things. That's how you were successful. The weakness that comes with that is as you get a bigger team, you need to shut up, you need to ask questions, and you need to be humble. That's the next level. And that book, for me, as I was evolving and growing as a leader, taught me those skills. It played a really important role, and now it's something I believe in so strongly. I met with a future VP of our organization who's probably going to get promoted to a VP very, very shortly, and I said, “Read this book. Take it to heart and do it.” Then I said, “Here's all the stupid things that I did, and here's how this book helped me.” ROB: You start to pull apart some pieces, many questions come to mind. I start to think about – clearly, when you talk about future VP, there's some planning there. There's still some awareness of individuals in your organization, even though at 100 people, it starts to get hard to know everyone. Especially when some people aren't even coming in one day a week, possibly. It's an interesting mix. I think this probably had to be intentional for you as well – building up the leadership team. What are the pieces you've put in place at different stages in the business to build around you to be your best, but also to help the company be its best, maybe where you aren't? JOE: Hire generous people, people that love helping other people be successful. If you have people on your leadership team that don't believe that, don't have them on your leadership team. And if you don't believe that, work on it. [laughs] It's so critical. You need to hire generous people, surround yourself with generous people. It's funny; I was like, we're the world's best at marketing for franchise systems, world's best at franchise development, consumer marketing for franchising; we're the world's best at recruiting for franchise systems. Why don't we just own a franchise system? So, we launched a separate franchise system, hired a guy who led another franchise system to $750 million in network revenue to be the CEO of it. And he believes what we believe. What attracted him to us first and foremost – and he's got an amazing track record in franchising – was our values. He's a generous person. He believes in integrity. He believes in accountability and performance at the same time. So, you've got to find people that believe that and have those competencies. The other thing I'll say is it's important, if you're hiring somebody to lead a business, that they understand that business. You can do it and you can be successful if you don't understand it inside and out, but it's way harder. If you can find people with the right values but also who have worked at different levels in that industry over the course of their career, they can understand the strengths and weaknesses of various decisions, and when you make a decision, how it affects people in different parts of the organization or what you're actually asking and what it entails to make it happen. Which tends to result in better decisions being made, better business performance, less mistakes. Those are the types of things that you really look for. ROB: What franchise business have you got yourself into, then, now? JOE: The name of it is Broadview Dental Group. Our vision is to be the largest provider of dental care in the United States within 10 years. We have some aggressive plans, but I am very confident that we're going to be able to pull it off. ROB: And I've heard that some different models of roll-up franchise operating groups – I've heard they're taking the dental world kind of by storm. The independent dentist is starting to dry up a little bit. Are you seeing that? Is that part of the move? JOE: Yes, it is, and it's sad. What's ended up happening – there actually is one other franchise system in the dental space. I wouldn't call it a real franchise system. That sounds arrogant. I don't mean it that way. But if you look at how franchise systems typically operate, where they basically have some sort of buy-in and then some sort of royalty, it's set up very different with the buy-in being extremely, extremely, extremely high. It's different. But if you look at most of them, they're called DSOs or DPOs, and what they basically do is a dentist is like “Hey, I want to get my practice to the next level.” Then these DSOs or DPOs, which are typically funded by venture capital – this isn't always the case, but typically with venture capital, they care about one thing, which is maximizing shareholder wealth. They'll say, “Okay, you want to take your business to the next level? Sign here. We get 70% equity in your business up to 90% over time, and we can fire you if we want to, and we'll help get your business to the next level.” When you're a dentist and you're passionate about helping others and you're passionate about your practice and your trade, you basically just need a really good business mentor, and most dentists really haven't had it. So what we're doing is giving them 100% equity in their own business, a way to get to the point where they can have 4.5 times the profit of a typical dental practice and only have to work three days a week to do it, and all they need to do is follow our system. And they own 100% of their business. They can sell it when they want to, and when they sell it, they'll sell it for a higher multiple because guess what? In franchising, when you sell your business when you're ready to retire, it's worth more because it's a franchise system and it's proven. There's less risk involved. ROB: Right, it's not (Your Name) Dentistry. It is part of an umbrella. There's brand equity there, there's a system. They don't have to figure it all out. One of my college roommates, his dad was in the dental world, and when you mentioned the high fee to buy in – he always told me dentists like to buy expensive things, so I guess the franchise must be one of those things, just priced for the market, I suppose. When we look ahead to what's next for ChoiceLocal, what's next for marketing in the franchising world, Joe, what are you seeing? What are you excited about for the firm, for what is going to be necessary for your clients to continue as the marketing world evolves? What are you seeing? JOE: There's so much exciting growth ahead. One of the things that I love about being an agency that focuses on ROI and provable results is every time there's an economic downturn, it's good for the agency growth and it's good for your customers. What happens is when there's an economic recession, which I believe we're headed into – we have horrible inflation and there's certain policies that have to be implemented to bring it under control, and the result of that is going to be a recession. What happens in those cases is companies tend to pull back in marketing. But if you're driving marketing where for every dollar they spend, you're giving them $18 in new customer revenue, it's stupid not to spend that. You can grow through the downturn. You can take market share. Imagine putting a dollar in the stock market and getting $18 back within a year. It's a brilliant investment. It's a simple investment. So, what's going to end up happening is that's going to accelerate growth within agencies that are ROI-focused as this economic recession hits, and for however long it hits for. That's exciting. But what I'm also excited about in the newer leading-edge things within agencies is the ability for big data backed with artificial intelligence to transform marketing, to transform business, and frankly to transform medicine. I was talking with the COO of ChoiceLocal, who serves a role with Broadview as well, and we're like, who ever thought that two internet marketers would fundamentally change healthcare and dental care in the U.S.? You'd be like, “Explain that.” It's the same thing you do in marketing with big data. If you have a massive amount of data in a HIPAA compliant way, you can anonymize it, data mine it, and find correlations and causations and literally, with that type of patient data pool, you can change medicine. Similarly, you can do the same thing with marketing, where you can data mine, you can find ways to micro-target ideal customers based on who current ideal customers are – and you may not even know what some of those things are – and then you can target them and measure the performance and lift. That's crazy cool stuff. And that's the newer leading-edge stuff that's really exciting, particularly when you're dealing with franchise systems and the volume that's behind that. ROB: Right. You've got volume there, you've got a growing scale in the business. To think about leveraging it for more than just “Hey, we're bigger” – lots of interesting things there. Joe, when people want to find and connect with you and with ChoiceLocal, where should they go to find you? JOE: They can go to choicelocal.com. Everything is there. They can follow ChoiceLocal on pretty much every social media channel that exists @ChoiceLocal. So they can do that. They can follow me personally on Twitter @helpothersjoe or connect with me on LinkedIn. I try to post a lot of content there that's specific to purpose-driven business, which is a huge passion of mine, as well as franchising and marketing as well. So yeah, @helpothersjoe on Twitter is for me personally. ROB: That's excellent. Joe, thank you for coming on the podcast. Thank you for sharing your experiences. Congratulations on what you've built so far and why you're building it. I think everyone listening has enjoyed the depth in the origin of the business and the intentionality as you build it. JOE: Thanks, Rob. Thanks for all you've done and thanks for having me on today. It really is a great pleasure. Really appreciate you. ROB: All right, appreciate you. Take care. Bye. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Sean: Now I'm wondering when some of your people that you hired and you're paying for told you that - "Hey, Rob, you got to step up. You've got to have more presence in the team. They've got a feeling more as a leader." How did you respond to that and how have you evolved yourself? You said that you had to be more open to that. What happened then? Rob: Well, I believe just in general, in being open and being able to say how you're feeling to other people in the team, they can be giving you direct feedback. So that is part of leadership too, is being able to get feedback from people and even being heard, it's just you listening to them is very powerful and not reacting and saying, "no, I'm not like that" or dismissing what they say, but just listening, that's very powerful. Because now they feel like they're heard and you're going to try and do something and that's a really positive thing. So I just tried to take it on and it is difficult, honestly, because I'm not always sure what I should be doing. And so it's not always just because I've built this company and the owner of the company, it doesn't make it that I automatically know how to lead a team. Right. And there are different leadership skills that are required the bigger the company gets. So I can imagine leading a 100,000-person company like Apple or something like that would be really challenging. And it's on another skill level that I haven't personally experienced yet. And so it's just a lot to learn and trying to feel like I can learn, I can grow, not trying to feel like I'm just - I know what I know or to feel arrogant that I know everything as well. Just to feel like there is things that I should learn and grow and improve on. Sean: That's very interesting because even if you're not leading 100,000 people like Apple, you're leading 130 people spread across the world. And one of the things that I personally find difficult to see during the two years 2020, and 2021, is the pandemic. SEO hacker worked fully remote to try and prevent anyone from our team from getting or contracting COVID. And what I realized was the culture that we had when we were meeting here in the office, it's very, very different. And the bond between team members was not as strong as when we were face to face. And as a leader, I find it more difficult because here in the office I'd walk around and see people and I tapped in the back and say, "How are you? How is your family?" But when you're working remotely, and especially for introverts like us who like to work on our own projects, and keep our heads low, I am unable to largely put any attention to that. I'm just working on my own stuff and I wasn't really leading in a way where people felt my presence and I find that the culture severely changed in a way. - - - Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/leadershipstack Join our community and ask questions here: from.sean.si/discord Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/leadershipstack

Jennifer Brown of Jennifer Brown Consulting based out of New York, NY Jennifer Brown founded her namesake Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion consulting agency 20 years ago. The agency develops top-down DEI strategies and training programs for medium-size to large companies; sets up effective, well-aligned affinity groups within those companies; and promotes inclusive leadership through educational initiatives. Jennifer is a frequent keynote speaker, both virtually and live. She presented Beyond Diversity: Building A More Inclusive World at the 2022 South by Southwest Conference and followed that with a book signing of her third book, Beyond Diversity: 12 Non-Obvious Ways to Build a More Inclusive World, which she co-authored with Rohit Bhargava. Jennifer is the bestselling author of Inclusion: Diversity, The New Workplace & The Will to Change (2017) and How to Be an Inclusive Leader: Your Role in Creating Cultures of Belonging Where Everyone Can Thrive (2019). The second edition of the 2019 book will be released in October 2022. Jennifer says there was “a huge wake-up call in spring/summer of 2020” after the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent and still-ongoing social movement for cultural change. Jennifer feels that today's workplace is “not built by and for so many of us if we . . . don't fit a certain demographic.” Jennifer explains the importance of this “sea change”: “If people feel welcomed, valued, respected, and heard, and a deep sense of belonging and being treated equitably . . . they do better work . . . and they stay longer.” Jennifer says she is a “member of the LGBTQ+ community” who has “been out for nearly 25 years.” She believes half of her cohorts “are still closeted in the workplace,” but that, finally, people are no longer talking about “why” inclusion is important, but “how” to make it happen. She believes companies will be challenged in setting up equitable workplaces as they rebuild “post-Covid,” particularly with managing blended teams of hybrid (virtual and in-person) employees.  Jennifer warns that managers need to be vigilant in supportinging inclusivity. “Harassment has gone up in the virtual workplace,” she says. Why? “There are no witnesses,” she explains. People are “cut off from information” and don't know their options on how to escalate a complaint and whether they can trust their employer to handle the issue. Jennifer Brown Consulting facilitates the establishment of corporate affinity groups, which are often comprised of people who tend to be “overlooked in the talent pipeline because of bias” in hiring practice, promotion, advancement, and talent reviews.” Even smaller and medium-sized companies are adopting affinity groups to serve as workplace “sources of intelligence about cultural experience,” tap into what is working and what is not, and provide support and “community” to employees who may have, in the past, felt “marginalized.” Jennifer can be reached on Instagram, @JenniferBrownSpeaks; on Twitter, @JenniferBrown, on LinkedIn, and on her agency website at: jenniferbrownconsulting.com, where those interested in DEI information can find the agency's DEI foundations program. ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk. I am joined live at South by Southwest by Jennifer Brown of Jennifer Brown Consulting based out of New York, New York. Welcome to the podcast, Jennifer. JENNIFER: Thank you, Rob. ROB: So good to have you on here. Why don't you start out by telling us about the firm, about Jennifer Brown Consulting? What is your calling card? JENNIFER: The firm I founded 20 years ago. It's a DEI strategy and training company. We work with companies, medium-size and large typically, to help them build their diversity, equity, & inclusion strategy from the top down and help also set up what's called affinity groups and make sure they're effective and well-aligned. We also do a lot of education around inclusive leadership. I have an amazing group of consultants who are, at any given time, working on client projects. And then I do a lot of keynoting – virtual, but now increasingly in person, I'm glad to say . . . as we come out of this into a new variant, I just read yesterday. [laughs] ROB: Last night, yes. JENNIFER: But anyway, I also love writing books. I just co-authored my third book with Rohit Bhargava, Beyond Diversity, and then I have a second edition of How to Be an Inclusive Leader, which was my book from 2019. I have a second edition of that coming out in October of 2022, which I'm really excited about. ROB: Congratulations on the book. Rohit was a guest three years ago, the last time we were recording live at SXSW, and then we all skipped a couple of years because of that COVID thing we were just talking about. As you're engaging with these firms – you mentioned medium and larger firms – at what point are they coming to you these days? What do they know? What are they doing right? What are the blind spots? JENNIFER: There was a huge wake-up call in spring/summer of 2020 on multiple levels. I think the big one for us, obviously, was George Floyd murder and the social movement that occurred and is still occurring. A massive shift in attention and prioritization of the fact that the workplace as it is currently is not built by and for so many of us, if we basically don't fit a certain demographic. Finally – we've been talking about this for many, many years – finally there was attention and resources available. For the last couple of years, our firm has doubled in size and number of companies, and we've been incredibly busy. We were ready for this. This is the conversation we've been having for many years. I'm a member of the LGBTQ+ community, and I've been out for nearly 25 years – I'm dating myself. ROB: Early. JENNIFER: Early, early, when we were still arguing for domestic partner benefits with big companies. Those were the early days of my own activism. Then we grew Jennifer Brown Consulting to be a full-service DEI firm. So, they come to us now and say, “Okay, Jennifer, we get it. We know that it's important. But we don't know how to tackle this, and we don't know how to equip our leaders with the skills and also to awaken their motivation to care about this.” But really, Rob, I'm so excited that it's not a “why” conversation; it's a “how” conversation now. We all are a little bit worried that the urgency is flagging as the world continues to be so chaotic and business priorities shift around, so we're trying to really make sure the burning platform of this remains on fire in people's minds. We know it's on fire, but it's easy to move on and say, “We got this. We're doing enough.” But I can tell you no company is doing enough. ROB: Right. You have two lanes. A lot of companies are going to install somebody with a title in DEI at some level, and then there's actually integrating it into the cadence of the firm. How do you make sure it sticks? How do you keep it from regressing to “business as usual” plus somebody with a title? JENNIFER: I think the way we speak about why this is urgent really matters, and how it can drive business. It drives innovation. Literally, if people feel welcomed, valued, respected, and heard, and a deep sense of belonging and being treated equitably – which means those day-to-day support mechanisms, resources, pay equity, all that good stuff – they do better work. And they stay longer. We're in the midst of a talent crisis. Literally, it is the Great Resignation, and I can tell you from my point of view, it has a lot of reasons, but one of the big reasons is toxic workplaces – workplaces that feel like “I go through my day and I don't see anyone that looks like me. I don't feel trusted or trusting of others. I have one foot out the door for something better.” So, culture can be a differentiator, and belonging can and should be a differentiator to keep great talent. But I can tell you, the workplace needs to be overhauled to be a welcoming place for so many of us. I mean, just LGBT people, half of us are still closeted in the workplace. That is a statistic from 2019. And even in the virtual world, I wonder how it's changed; I don't know. But we are not bringing our full selves to work. And that's just the tip of the iceberg in terms of all the identities that aren't bringing their full selves. ROB: For sure. There's part of me that says, what company wouldn't be welcoming in some way? But that's the tip of the spear of the question, I am sure. You mentioned even the structure of the workplace. As we're resetting and coming back and a lot of companies have been virtual, what opportunities to set up an equitable workplace can companies do as they're rebuilding what it means to be in an office from scratch, what their work expectations are from scratch? What are the opportunity points? What can they do today that would've been hard for them to do two, three years ago, and now it's like “No, don't do this again when you come back”? JENNIFER: Well, let's see. So many things. We went to an open office plan for a while. That was the thing. But now data has shown that actually, that's really hard for people to be productive in. Also, the physical office was not a comfortable place. So, virtualizing ourselves actually opened up a sense of safety for a lot of people who found the physical workplace unsafe. I think we have to carry that with us and remember that that is a critical thing to leverage. But then new diversity dimensions are opening up, like who's on site? Who's able to get face time? Who's able to get on somebody's calendar or bump into somebody? There's the haves and have-nots that's opened up. In some companies, the virtual employees are the haves, actually, that are getting the flexible arrangement, and then the people who have to come into the office – but you can actually see it in the reverse, who has access to leadership. If leadership's in the office, that could benefit you. It really depends on the company. I tell managers, we have to up our inclusivity vigilance. When we are managing blended teams, hybrid and in-person, we've got to ensure inclusion constantly and be checking in with people who are virtual because we may not know they are on the bubble in terms of their own engagement and loyalty. And what we don't know can really hurt us, and often when it comes to diversity dimensions, what you don't know can make the difference between keeping that person and having them leave and being surprised. So virtually, we just have to be checking in, asking how people are. The most powerful question is something like “Do you feel included and valued in the way that we're working right now? Is this working for you? Do you feel you can thrive? Do you feel there are barriers? What can I do as your colleague, as your leader, as your manager, to address any barriers that you're experiencing so that you can do your best work? I think asking that often will build the trust and tell us what we need to know so we can architect a better situation for people. ROB: This is the second conversation I've had this week where what you're describing sounds like being a good manager. JENNIFER: Doesn't it? Strange, that. [laughs] ROB: It doesn't sound like anything to do in some ways with particular topics of diversity, equity, inclusion, while at the same time I think what's underpinning there is there's an assumption of commonality that allows people to get by without managing well. Is that fair to say? JENNIFER: Yes, fair to say. Intersectionality speaks to all the different diversity dimensions that live in a human being. And there's multiple things going on. I'm a parent. I identify as queer. I'm caregiving. I'm wrestling with mental health challenges. I'm Latinx. All of those things have an impact on our belonging. In most organizations, there's some angst and some difficulty there because, like I said earlier, workplaces are biased. Period. Any one of those things or a combination of those things may be going on for someone. They may be hearing microaggressions. They may be being harassed virtually. Unfortunately, I hate to say this – harassment has gone up in the virtual workplace. ROB: Wow. JENNIFER: There are no witnesses. Think about this. There's a lack of understanding of how to escalate a complaint and whether you trust your company enough to handle the complaint. When we virtualize employees, they're cut off from information, often, that may have been available and they would've known what sort of avenues exist. I found this harassment data really disturbing, honestly. Anyway, there's a lot of risks. Like I said, as a manager and a leader, to have somebody's identities in mind and be able to anticipate, “What's going on for this person? How can I get them to trust me enough to share with me so that I can help?” – and even if that means suggesting that somebody go to HR, suggesting that somebody seek out the EAP for mental health support. I mean, just connecting the dots is so much of our job these days, and it's been made more difficult when we're out of the loop with each other. That's a dangerous place to be. ROB: Absolutely. You mentioned affinity groups as a key component. What does that look like, building from scratch? How do you get from zero to something there? JENNIFER: It's funny; back in the day, only large companies had affinity groups, and they're like the LGBT Network, the Women's Network, the Black Network, the Asian-American Network, Disabilities, Veterans. In big companies, there's a lot. But since two years ago and everything crescendoing, even the smaller and medium-size companies now have affinity groups, and they understand that these groups are literally sources of intelligence about cultural experience in our workplace – what's going well, what's going wrong, what needs to be supported, resourced, which talent exists. Sometimes people in affinity groups are the ones that are overlooked in the talent pipeline because of bias in our hiring, promotion, advancement, talent reviews. So, affinity groups are really important mechanisms to enable people to find community, especially virtually, to share what's going on and not feel so alone, to strategize about how to be heard in a workplace that is maybe not conscious of its own bias, and then also provide that identity intelligence to the employer to say, “Hey, this community is feeling this now.” For example, Stop Asian Hate wasn't just in 2020. It's actually been increasing and getting worse over this last year and the year before. And yet employers aren't prioritizing it. If it weren't for the affinity groups that are keeping it top of mind and saying, “Hey, this is a problem” – our employees are bringing this into the workplace every day and walking around with this, if they're commuting or in their communities or in their families. People are afraid, and they expect their employer to address it and to know that it's happening and to say, “What can we, the employer, do to support you, to raise awareness, and to make a statement?” Honestly, employers also, by the way, need to be making statements about a variety of social issues right now. Otherwise, silence – look what happened to Disney not saying anything about the Don't Say Gay activities in Florida. Their employees have been so upset and writing letters to the CEO and agitating, and finally the CEO wrote a memo and it just broke yesterday on Twitter. But it took a long time, and it shouldn't take a long time. Companies should have their employees' backs. Period. ROB: And then it's even harder when you do actually say something – the rubric against which it is measured at that point is so much harder. JENNIFER: Oh yeah. There's a lot of issues, granted. But this is the world we live in. Certainly, I hear from leaders, “Jennifer, where does it stop?” I'm like, “This is your new normal. It doesn't stop. But by the way, this is an opportunity to connect with your employees on a deep” – when I feel seen and heard and valued, this is what it means. If my CEO is silent on a harmful bill to me and my community, I am out the door. I can't describe – it's like a visceral thing. Like “I can't work here anymore. This company doesn't see me, doesn't care about what's happening to people that identify like I do.” Employees are finding their voice in a way that I have been waiting for for a really long time. So really, the problem is leadership is really behind. They don't have the competency. They're not able to pivot quickly. They're like, “I can't walk and chew gum at the same time.” I'm like, no, this needs to be your new leadership skill. You have to be able to know, to be scanning your environment all the time and saying “What do I need to make sure our employees know that we're not okay with?” That needs to be the first thing you wake up thinking about every day. ROB: This sounds like it ties into some of the dimensions of the book, so let's go over that direction for a moment. Talk about the book, how it came to be – the book is Beyond Diversity with you and Rohid. How did this happen, and what should we know about it? You had a session here talking about the book. What should people know? JENNIFER: Yeah, we did. It was so great. It came out of a five-day Beyond Diversity Summit, literally, with 200 speakers. Rohid approached me. I was one of those folks part of organizing it, and he's like, “This needs to be a book.” I was like, “Oh no, 200 speakers, hours and hours of footage. How do we boil this down into a book? It's terrifying. My team will never forgive me.” However, we said yes, let's do it. We organized all of this footage into 12 themes, and those are the chapters. They're not identity themes. We could've gone that way. We could've done “This is the chapter on LGBTQ+. This is the chapter on Asian-Americans and AAPI folks.” Instead, we did education, media, workplace, storytelling, government, family. It was so cool to take all of that wisdom from a wide array of diverse storytellers in every way and figure out, where do we tell this story, that story, that story? I loved the challenge of that. I think also, “beyond diversity” to me perhaps means, yes, identity diversity, but let's look at how this plays out in these domains of life that really touch our lives every single day. We can all relate to education. We can all relate to what's happening in media. I hope the book reaches people who have dismissed this topic maybe in the past, but they pick it up and they're like, “Oh, this book makes sense to me. This is relevant to my life holistically.” And it's such a positive book. It's not a “shame and blame” book. It is full of celebrations of where innovation is occurring and how exciting it is and how it's going to better our world. I think it's a really different kind of book, and I hope it finds all kinds of audiences. I think it should be in curriculum in schools. Professors should be assigning it. My parents, in their eighties, tell me it's the best book I've ever written. They love it. They're reading it and they're able to understand it. ROB: It is very, very approachable in the structure. It's just made so that you can come in, engage with it at whatever depth you want to – not that you want to treat it like a dictionary and shop by topic, or an encyclopedia, but there is that ability. There's skimmability. There's summary. But that facilitates approaching it easily, but also the education context. You open it up, and it's credible – this book was made by people who were making a business book, not just like “my opinion and here you go.” It wasn't a memoir. JENNIFER: Yes, exactly. We actually really intentionally decentered ourselves. Even though we were writing the book, we gathered this big writing team also. So all of their hands are on the writing. And then we hired also inclusivity readers, otherwise known as sensitivity readers, because Rohit and I and the other writers knew we would still not perceive the correct language, for example. They went through the book and gave us tons of feedback. It was just a wonderful learning experience. But the book literally is all about different storytellers – unusual, unexpected, nonobvious storytellers. I hear myself talk all day, but I want their voice to be out there, and I think we were both in service of that. ROB: It is excellent. You get in deep, and then there's the contributor list – obviously voluminous, for sure. JENNIFER: Yes. ROB: Jennifer, let's rewind a little bit. Let's talk about where Jennifer Brown Consulting came from. What made you decide that you should not have a job with somebody else and you should build something, and who knows where it goes? Especially with the past couple of years with that growth now. But where did it start? JENNIFER: It started because being in the LGBTQ+ community in my early days, really way back, I was an opera singer. ROB: Wow. JENNIFER: I came to New York to make it, and then my voice kept getting injured and I had to get vocal surgery several times to repair it, but it would never – I realized my instrument just wouldn't ever do what it needed to do, and I would have to reinvent. I found my way to – I like to think of it now as a different stage, literally. I'm a keynoter now. I'm able to use my love of the stage – which I've been on stage since I was five; I grew up in a really musical family, and we are like the Von Trapp Family Singers. [laughs] ROB: Yeah, it came to my mind as soon as you said it. [laughs] JENNIFER: I was that kid. So I seek the stage. I love it. I crave it. I enjoy it. I'm comfortable on it. I think it's the best medium for me. Anyway, though, as a closeted person who was trying to find my voice, I found in those early days all of these amazing companies in New York – IBM, Deloitte, Proctor and Gamble – I didn't even know this world existed, but it was the world of corporations that were leading-edge in terms of LGBTQ equality. They were all starting to vie for us as talent and then also trying to vie for us as customers. I had a front seat years ago on those early battles for domestic partner benefits, for adding sexual orientation and gender identity to the non-discrimination policies and the language of the company. Their statements used to not include that. I hope people are hearing this and being like, “Wow, I've always taken that for granted, and I didn't know there was a time that wasn't there.” But I can tell you, there was a time. And those were really exciting days. I feel like I cut my teeth on – the way that LGBTQ employees shifted companies was super powerful for me to see and be a part of because I think it clicked that I could be a voice for change, and that change would actually happen in this massive entity with just my voice, or just the voice of a community. We were very strategic in the way we approached it. We argued the case around talent retention and recruitment. We argued the business case for customers. It trained me to think about how large institutions change and why they change, and because of what, and how to be an irritant in the system but to be strategic and grounded in their “care abouts” where it's a win-win. That is something I've carried with me as we built Jennifer Brown Consulting, and I would subsequently leave corporate America. I was an employee, like you say, and I was like, “This is not creative enough for me. I don't have enough agency. I can't have a boss. I have to start my own firm.” Very quickly, when I put my shingle out – I'm kind of a natural marketer – it became much bigger than I could manage. I started to hire people. I started to send people in instead of me and started to scale my company. In fact, one of my first hires was a COO, and I really dug deep to pay somebody six figures to build my entire backend because I knew – I was like, I don't know how to do this. And I don't want to. I need to be out there, doing what I do best in my zone of genius, which was evangelizing for the idea of the firm and also putting forth not just me, but all these talented consultants that I was able to attract and send in on our behalf to the clients that I had procured. It worked really well. I always felt it was important to work on the business, not in the business. So from the very beginning days, I was like, how does this scale? And then how do I find my way into my best role? And I'm there now. ROB: How many people did you have when you hired your COO, and were they somebody that had done that job before? JENNIFER: Like three people. And yes, they had scaled my friend's firm, a marketing agency. They had allowed her and enabled her to focus on the creative. Founders are often not the backend people. We're the salespeople. We get the attention. We know how to do that. So, he had done that, and I took the plunge and said, “Please, get everybody paid on time. Do job descriptions. Help me figure out who's my first, second, and third hire. Who should that be? Help me run my finances responsibility. Get us a bookkeeper and do QuickBooks and set up…” – whatever, there's just so much you have to think about. I never regretted it. Subsequently, I've gone through four or five COOs over 20 years. ROB: But the role is necessary. JENNIFER: Yep, and I really recommend it. If you think you've got a tiger by the tail, like I thought I did – and I had no idea what that really would feel like until 2020 – but up until that time, I was evangelizing this idea that belonging is important for all of these dimensions. Better products, better services, better customer relationships, better design. More retention. Losing people is so expensive for companies, and they don't see it as that. It's sort of this invisible cost of attrition. I mean, now they know. But I think it's been happening for years because many of us have been bailing out and becoming entrepreneurs because we literally were like, “I can't stand another day here.” Anyway, it's a big wakeup call and I'm here for it. ROB: Absolutely. I hear you on the COO side. Our sixth employee was an operations role, and she's moved up to COO. It was terrifying. I started off thinking I wanted just a junior project manager / order-taker / “do stuff for me,” and then I was persuaded by some advisors to spend the money. But it was terrifying. JENNIFER: How's she doing and feeling? ROB: She's moved up. It's great. It's a relief because I'm out here talking to people, and things still happen back home on the home front. JENNIFER: I want to share – maybe this will be interesting for your audience – my name is on the name of the consulting business, right? It's Jennifer Brown Consulting. We refer to ourselves as JBC. But we have transcended that question I always get, which is “Don't people expect you?” They don't, actually. They know about me, but they don't expect me to be on the calls. We've scaled ourselves to such a level that the team is completely empowered and completely the star of the show, and I'm not involved unless there's a keynote that's needed and wanted or an executive session. I'm off writing the books that hopefully draw attention to us. It's just an interesting thing I know founders wrestle with and thought leader-driven brands. It's this interesting question that always comes up. But I think we've done it really well. I think the secret is it's always been my plan and it's always been my expectation. I have said very clearly, it's not about me. I'm not even the most practiced expert in my company, and I never have been. My consultants are incredible, and they will solve problems differently than I will in any client engagement. They are bringing their own 30 years of looking at these things, and they have different identities than I do, and they have that lived experience that they can bring. So, it's worked really well, and it's enabled me to pull out of the day to day and speak and write, which I do think is what I have been, all these years, preparing to do. ROB: Was it easier or harder, those first couple of engagements when you were tagging someone else in? JENNIFER: I remember. If I'm on the phone, if I'm involved, how can somebody feel that they're in charge of the gig? The client is always going to be looking to me as the authority, and I don't want to be looked at as the authority. I had to be really careful in the early days of this transition of what I was a part of – that they even met me. I minimized that. [laughs] I was like, “Nope, you don't need to talk to me. Thanks for the inquiry. I'm introducing you right away to my team. They will take care of you.” We still actually do this because stuff still finds its way to me. But we're very strict, and we have protocols that we follow. I never break those because it's super important for me that my team can take care of whatever you need. I'm almost like a consultant now. The team is in charge and knows what to bring me and when that's needed. Also, for me and my wants and needs, I don't want to be in the day-to-day client work anymore, and I haven't wanted to be for many years. That's not what brings me fulfillment. So, I think for founders, commit to and dig deep to seek – know what you don't want to do, but what you want your firm to still do. That's so important. Just pay attention to that and then dig deep financially and wherever else you have to dig to staff around the work you want the group to do as a delivery but is not work you directly want to be involved in. And then make sure you're not sending mixed messages and that you're truly empowering the people you've hired to go and be brilliant. ROB: I hear you talking about handing over two separate sets of responsibilities at least, which are doubly nerve-wracking. You're talking about handing over the delivery of the work, but you're also talking about handing over the selling of the work. JENNIFER: Yeah. We're interesting because our folks don't do business development. I have been in the space for so long that our amazing marketing team who helps me get the word out – we provide so much value. We have so many opportunities to read our thought leadership, join our calls, be a part of our JBC community, that we get a lot of inbound. One of the things I've learned is you cannot force people to be salespeople if that is not what they do. I understood my role very early on. I'm here to build the house that people can live in and make sure the bills are paid and whatever, taking care of the container and making sure there's enough opportunity coming in for people to focus on being the subject matter expert and delivering the work and taking care of the relationship. We have a sales team, but they field a lot. They really more operate as “Now we have an opportunity; what is the scope? What is the statement of work? How do we price it? Who do we put on it? What's the team going to be that delivers it?” That is what happens after we receive an interest or a lead. It was the way I got around sales, honestly, because the only kind of sales I'm really comfortable with is this back-door way of putting myself in conversations, adding value, moderating panels endlessly – which is what I did for years, just going to conferences and being in the room, speaking up and offering to be helpful. And over time, now it's like, “We've wanted to work with you and your team for years. We finally have the budget!” But years and years and years of people watching us grow, and now it's amazing to get these calls from people that saw me speak 10 years ago or were in the room.  ROB: You can't be transactional about that. That's playing the long game. JENNIFER: It's reputation, it's trust, and it's generosity. We've been so, so generous. That's my MO. I see myself as part of the field. I think of it as we are a field of practitioners, and even if we're competitors, we're not. We all stay in touch with each other. When we hang out, other heads of firms, it's like this amazing, really rich conversation because it's a moment. This is purpose work. And people will find the firms that they feel the most comfort with for what they need. But honestly, it's co-opetition. I've heard that word, and I think that really speaks to that, at the end of the day, we're part of a movement and advocacy and whoever does the work, we deeply care that the work is done. ROB: Absolutely. I can see clearly that you deeply care and you have a team that does. Jennifer, when people want to find you and JBC, where should they go to find you? JENNIFER: Thanks for asking. Amazon has all my books, and then on Instagram, I'm @JenniferBrownSpeaks. I'm on LinkedIn. Twitter, I'm @JenniferBrown. Yes, I was on Twitter many, many, many years ago. ROB: Well played. JENNIFER: Well played. [laughs] And then jenniferbrownconsulting.com is our website. I just want to say if you're a new practitioner or an aspiring DEI professional, you should really check out our online courses. We're building our foundations program and rolling that out. It's just a wonderful six-week “get yourself grounded and work on your personal diversity story.” ROB: That even scales down to some people who maybe aren't midmarket enough to pay for you. Excellent. JENNIFER: Exactly. You understand. ROB: I do understand. JENNIFER: Thank you. ROB: Jennifer, thank you so much for meeting up and coming on the podcast and helping us learn well in your expertise. JENNIFER: It's a pleasure. ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Chad talks to Rob Hirschfeld, the Founder and CEO of RackN, which develops software to help automate data centers, which they call Digital Rebar. RackN is focused on helping customers automate infrastructure. They focus on customer autonomy and self-management, and that's why they're a software company, not a services or as-a-service platform company. Digital Rebar is a platform that helps connect all of the different pieces and tools that people use to manage infrastructure into infrastructure pipelines through the seamless multi-component automation across all of the different pieces and parts that have to be run to bring up infrastructure. RackN's Website (https://rackn.com/); Digial Rebar (https://rackn.com/rebar/) Follow Rob on Twitter (https://twitter.com/zehicle) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/rhirschfeld/). Visit his website at robhirschfeld.com (https://robhirschfeld.com/). Follow RackN on Twitter (https://twitter.com/rackngo), LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/rackn/), or YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCr3bBtP-pMsDQ5c0IDjt_LQ). Follow thoughtbot on Twitter (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot), or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Rob Hirschfeld, Founder, and CEO of RackN, which develops software to help automate data centers, which they call Digital Rebar. Rob, welcome to the show ROB: Chad, it is a pleasure to be here. Looking forward to the conversation. CHAD: Why don't we start with a little bit more information about what RackN and the Digital Rebar platform actually is. ROB: I would be happy to. RackN is focused on helping customers automate infrastructure. And for us, it's really important that the customers are doing the automation. We're very focused on customer autonomy and self-management. It's why we're a software company, not a services or as a service platform company. But fundamentally, what Digital Rebar does is it is the platform that helps connect all of the different pieces and tools that people use to manage infrastructure into infrastructure pipelines through the seamless multi-component automation across all of the different pieces and parts that have to be run to bring up infrastructure. And we were talking data centers do a lot of on-premises all the way from the bare metal up. But multi-cloud, you name it, we're doing infrastructure at that level. CHAD: So, how agnostic to the actual bare metal are you? ROB: We're very agnostic to the bare metal. The way we look at it is data centers are heterogeneous, diverse places. And that the thing that sometimes blocks companies from being innovative is when they decide, oh, we're going to use this one vendor for this one platform. And that keeps them actually from moving forward. So when we look at data centers, the heterogeneity and sometimes the complexity of that environment is a feature. It's not a bug from that perspective. And so it's always been important to us to be multi-vendor, to do things in a vendor-neutral way to accommodate the quirks and the differences between...and it's not just vendors; it's actually user choice. A lot of companies have a multi-vendor problem (I'm air quoting) that is actually a multi-team problem where teams have chosen to make different choices. TerraForm has no conformance standard built into it. [laughs] And so you might have everybody in your company using TerraForm and Ansible happily but all differently. And that's the problem that we walk into when we walk into a data center challenge. And you can't sweep that under the rug. So we embraced it. CHAD: What kind of companies are your primary customers? ROB: We're very wide-ranging, from the top banks use us and deploy us, telcos, service providers, very large scale service providers use us under the covers, media companies. It really runs the gamut because it's fundamentally for us just about infrastructure. And our largest customers are racing to be the first to deploy. And it's multi-site, but 20,000 machines that they're managing under our Digital Rebar management system. CHAD: It's easy, I think, depending on where you sit and your experiences. The cloud providers today can overshadow the idea that there are even people who still have their own data centers or rent a portion of a data center. In today's ecosystem, what are some of the factors that cause someone to do that who isn't an infrastructure provider themselves? ROB: You know the funny thing about these cloud stories (And we're talking just the day after Amazon had a day-long outage.) is that even the cloud providers don't have you give up operation. You're still responsible for the ops. And for our customers, it's not like they can all just use Lambdas and API gateways. At the end of the day, they're actually doing multi-site distributed operations. And they have these estates that are actually it's more about how do I control distributed infrastructure as much as it is about repatriating. Now, we do a lot to help people repatriate. And they do that because they want more control. Cost savings is a significant component with this. You get into the 1000s of machines, and that's a big deal. Even at hundreds of machines, you can save a lot of money compared to what you get in cloud. And I think people get confused with it being an or choice. It really is an and choice. Our best customers are incredibly savvy cloud users. They want that dynamic, resilient very API-driven environment. And they're looking to bring that throughout the organization. And so those are the ones that get excited when they see what we've done because we spend a lot of time doing infrastructure as code and API-driven infrastructure. That's really what they want. CHAD: Cool. So, how long have you been working on RackN? When did you found it? ROB: [laughs] Oh my goodness. So RackN is seven years old. Digital Rebar, we consider it to be at its fourth generation, but those numbers actually count back before that. They go back to 2009. The founding team was actually at Dell together in the OpenStack heyday and even before the OpenStack heyday. And we were trying to ship clouds from the Dell Factory. And what we found was that every customer had this bespoke data center we've already talked about. And we couldn't write automation that would work customer to customer to customer. And it was driving us nuts. We're a software team, not a hardware team inside of Dell. And the idea that if I fixed something in the delivery or in their data center, and couldn't go back to their data center because it was different than what the next customer needed and the next customer needed, we knew that we would never have a community. It's very much about this community and reuse pattern. There's an interesting story that I picked up from SREcon actually where they were talking about the early days of boilers. This is going back a few centuries ago. But when they first started putting boilers into homes and buildings, there was no pattern, there was no standard. And everybody would basically hire a plumber or a heating architect. Heating architect was a thing. But you'd build a boiler and every one was custom, and every one was different. And no surprise, they blew up a lot, and they caused fires. And buildings were incredibly unsafe because they were working on high-pressure systems with no pattern. And it took regulation and laws and standards. And now nobody even thinks about it. You just take standard parts, and you connect them together in standard ways. And that creates actually a much more innovative system. You wouldn't want every house to be wired uniquely either. And so when we look at the state of automation today, we see it as this pre-industrial pre-standardization process and that companies are actually harmed and harming themselves because they don't have standards, and patterns, and practices that they can just roll and know they work. And so that philosophy started way back in 2009 with the first generation which was called Crowbar. Some of your audience might even remember this from the OpenStack days. It was the first OpenStack installer built around Chef. And it had all sorts of challenges in it, but it showed us the way. And then we iterated up to where Digital Rebar is today. Really fully infrastructure as code, building infrastructure pipelines, and a lot of philosophical pieces we've learned along the way. CHAD: So you were at Dell working on this thing. How did you decide to leave Dell and start something new? ROB: Dell helped me with that decision. [laughs] So the challenge of being a software person inside of Dell especially at the time, Crowbar was open-source which did make it easier for us to say, "Hey, we want to part ways but keep the IP." And the funny thing is there's not a scrap of Crowbar in Digital Rebar except one or two naming conventions that we pulled forward and the nod of the name, that Rebar is a nod to Crowbar. But what happened was Dell when it went private, really did actually double down on the hardware and the more enterprise packaged things. They didn't want to invest in DevOps and that conversation that you need to have with your customers on how they operate, the infrastructure you sold them. And that made Dell not a very good place for me and the team. And so we left Dell, looked at the opportunity to take what we'd been building with Crowbar and then make it into a product. That's been a long journey. CHAD: Now, did you bootstrap, or did you take investment? ROB: We took [laughs] a little bit of investment. We raised some seed funding. Certainly not what was in hindsight was going to be sufficient for us to do it. But we thought at the time that we had something that was much more product-ready for customers than it was. CHAD: And what was the challenge that you found? What was the surprise there that it wasn't as ready as you thought? ROB: So what we've learned in our space specifically...and there are some things that I think apply to everybody, and there are some things that you might be able to throw on the floor and ignore. I was a big fan of Minimum Viable Product. And it turned out that the MVP strategy was not at all workable with customers in data centers. Our product is for people running production data centers. And nobody's going to put in software to run a data center that is MVP. It has to be resilient. It has to be robust. It has to be simple enough that they can understand it and solve some core problems, which is still sort of an MVP idea. But it can't be oops. [laughs] You can't have a lot of oops moments when you're dealing with enterprise infrastructure automation software. It has to work. And importantly, and as a design note, this has been a lesson for us. If it does break, it has to break in very transparent, obvious ways. And I can't emphasize that enough. There's so much that when we build it, we come back and like, was it obvious that it broke? Is it obvious that it broke in a way that you can fix? CHAD: And it's part of the culture too to do detailed post mortems with explanations and be as transparent as possible or at least find the root cause so that you can address it. That's part of the culture of the space too, right? ROB: You'd like to hope so. [laughs] CHAD: Okay. [laughs] In my experience, that's the culture of the space. ROB: You're looking more at a developer experience. But even with a developer, you've got to be in a post mortem or something. And it's like everybody's pointing to the person to the left and the right sort of by human nature. You don't walk into that room assuming that it was your fault, and you should, but that's not how it usually is approached. And what we find in the ops space, and I would tell people to work around this pattern if they can, is that if you're the thing doing the automation, you're always the first cause of the problem. So we run into situations where we're doing a configuration, and we find a vendor bug or a glitch or there's something, and we found it. It's our problem whether we were the cause or not. And that's super hard. I think that people on every side of any type of issue need to look through and figure out what the...the blameless post mortem is a really important piece in all this. At the end of the day, it's always a human system that made a mistake or has something like that. But it's not as simple as the thing that told you the bad news that the messenger was at fault. And there's a system design element to that. That's what we're talking about here is that when you're exposing errors or when something's not behaving the way you expect, our philosophy is to stop. And we've had some very contentious arguments with customers who were like, "Just retry until it fixes itself," or vendors who were like, "Yeah, if you retry that thing three times, [laughs] then it'll magically go away." And we're like, that's not good behavior. Fix the problem. It actually took us years to put a retry element into the tasks so that you can say, yeah, this does need three retries. Just go do it. We've resisted for a long time for this reason. CHAD: So you head out into the market. And did you get initial customers, or was there so much resistance to the product that you had that you struggled to get even first customers? ROB: We had first customers. We had a nice body of code. The problem is actually pretty well understood even by our customers. And so it wasn't hard for them to get a trial going. So we actually had a very profitable customer doing...it was in object storage, public object storage space. And they were installing us. They wanted to move us into all their data centers. But for it to work, we ended up having an engineer who basically did consulting and worked with them for the better part of six months and built a whole bunch of stuff, got it working. They could plug in servers, and everything would set itself up. And they could hit a button and reset all the servers, and they would talk to the switches. It was an amazing amount of automation. But, and this happens a lot, the person we'd been working with was an SRE. And when they went to turn it over to the admins in the ops team, they said, [laughs] "We can't operate. There's too much going on, too complex." And we'd actually recognized...and this is a really serious challenge. It's a challenge now that we're almost five years into the generation that came after that experience. And we recognized there was a problem. And that this wasn't going to create that repeatable experience that we were looking for if it took that much. At the same time, we had been building what is now Digital Rebar in this generation that was a single Golang binary. All the services were bundled into the system. So it listened on different ports but provide all the services, very easy to install, really, really simple. We literally stripped everything back to the basics and restarted. And we had this experience where we sat down with a customer who had...I'm going to take a second and tell the story because this is such a compelling story from a product experience. So we took our first product. We were in a bake-off with another bare metal focus provisioning at the time. And they were in a lab, and they set our stuff up. And they turned it on, and they provisioned. And they set up the competitor, and they turned it on and provisioned. And both products worked. Our product took 20 minutes to go through the cycle and the competitor took 3. And the customer came back and said, "I can't use this. I like your product better. It has more controls with all this stuff." But it took 20 minutes instead of 3. We actually logged into the system, looked at it and we were like, "Well, that's because it recognized that your BIOS was out of date, patched your BIOS, updated the system, checked that it was right, and then rebooted the systems and then continued on its way because it recognized your systems were outdated automatically. And he said, "I didn't want it to do that. I needed it to boot as quickly as possible." And literally, [laughs] we were in the middle of a team retreat. So it's like, the CTO is literally excusing himself on the table to talk to the guy to make this stuff, try and make it right. And he's like, "Well, we've got this new thing. Why don't you install this, what's now Digital Rebar, on the system and repeat the experiment?" And he did and Digital Rebar was even faster than the competitor. And it did exactly just install, booted, and was done. And he came back to the table, and it took 15 minutes to have the whole conversation to make everything work. It was that much of a simpler design. And he sat down and told the story. And I was in the middle of it. I'm just like, "We're going to have to pivot and put everything into the new version," which is what we did. And we just ripped out the complexity. And then over the last couple of years now, we've built the complexity back into the system to do all those additional but much more customer-driven from that perspective. CHAD: How did you make sure that as you were changing your focus, putting all of your energy into the new version that you [laughs] didn't introduce too much risk in that process or didn't take too long? ROB: [laughs] We did take too long and introduced too much risk, and we did run out of money. [laughs] All those things happened. This was a very difficult decision. We thought we could get it done much faster. The challenge of the simpler product was that it was too simple to be enough in customers' data centers. And so yeah, we almost went out of business in the middle of all this cycle. We had a time where RackN went back down to just the two founders. And at this point, we'd gotten far enough with the product that we knew it was the right thing. And we'd also embedded a degree...with the way we do the UX, we have this split. The UX runs on a hosted system. It doesn't have to but by default, it does. And then we have the back end. So we were very careful about how we collected metrics because you really need to know who's downloading and using your products. And we had enough data from that to realize that we had some very committed early users and early customers, just huge brand names that were playing around. So we knew that we'd gotten this mix right, that we were solving a problem in a unique way. But it was going to take time because big companies don't make decisions quickly. We have a joke. We call it the reorg half-life problem. So the half-life of a reorg in any of our customers is about nine months. And either you're successful inside of that reorg half-life, or you have to be resilient across this reorg half. And so initially, it was taking more than nine months. We had to be able to get the product in play. And once we did, we had some customers who came in with very big checks and let us come back and basically build back up. And we've been adding some really nice names into our customer roster. Unfortunately, it's all private. I can tell you their industries and their scale, but I can't name them. But that engagement helped drive us towards the feature set and the capabilities and building things up along that process. But it was frustrating. And some of them, especially at the time we were open-source, were very happy to say, "No, we are a super big brand name. We don't pay for software." I'm like, "Most profitable, highest valued companies in the world you don't want to pay for this operational software?" And they're like, "No, we don't have to." And that didn't sit very well with us. Very hard, as a starting startup, it was hard. CHAD: At the time, everything you were doing was open source. ROB: So in the Digital Rebar era, we were trying to do Open Core. Digital Rebar itself was open. And then we were trying to hold back the BIOS patches, integrate enterprise single sign-on. So there was a degree of integration pieces that we held back as RackN and then left the core open. So you could use Digital Rebar and run it, which we had actually had a lot of success with people downloading, installing, and running Digital Rebar, not as much success in getting them to pay us for that privilege. CHAD: So, how did you adjust to that reality? ROB: We inverted the license. After we landed a couple of big banks and we had several others and some hyperscalers too who were like, "This is really good software. We love it. We're embedding it in our service, but we're not going to pay you." And then they would show up with bugs and complaints and issues and all sorts of stuff still. And what happened is we started seeing them replicating the closed pieces. The APIs were open. We actually looked at it and listening to our communities, they wanted to see what was in the closed pieces. That was actually operationally important for them to understand how that stuff worked. They never contributed or asked to see anything in the core. And, there's an important and here, and they needed performance improvements in the core that were radically different. So the original open-source stuff went to maybe 500 machines, and then it started to cap out. And we were like, all right, we're going to have to really rewrite the data store mechanisms that go with this. And the team looked at each other and were like, "We're not going to open source that. That's really complex and challenging IP." And so we said the right model for us is going to be to make the core closed and then allow our community and users to see all the things that they are actually using to interact with their environment. And it ends up being a little bit of a filter. There are people who only use open-source software. But those companies also don't necessarily want to pay. When I was an open-source evangelist, this was always a problem. You're pounding on the table saying, "If you're using open-source software, you need to understand who to pay for that service, that software that you're getting. If you're not paying for it, that software is going to go away." In a lot of cases, we're a walking example of that. And it's funny, more of the codebase is open today than it was then. [chuckles] But the challenge is that it's really an open ecosystem now because none of that software is particularly useful without the core to run it and glue everything together. CHAD: Was that a difficult decision to make? Was it controversial? ROB: Incredibly difficult. It was something I spent a lot of time agonizing about. My CTO is much clear-eyed on this. From his perspective, he and the other engineers are blood, sweat, and tears putting this in. And it was very frustrating for them to see it running people's production data centers who told us, and this is I think the key, who just said to us, "You know, we're not going to pay money for that." And so for them, it was very clear-eyed it's their work, their sweat equity, very gut feeling for that. For me, I watched communities with open-source routes, you know, the Kubernetes community. I was in OpenStack. I was on the board for that. And there is definitely a lift that you get from having free software and not having the strings. And I also like the idea that from a support perspective, if you're using open-source software, you could conceivably not care for the vendor that went away. You could find another life for it. But years have gone by and that's not actually a truism that when you are using open-source software if you're getting it from a vendor, you're not necessarily protected from that vendor making decisions for you. CentOS is a great...the whole we're about to hit the CentOS deadlines, which is the Streams, and you can't get other versions. And we now have three versions of CentOS, at least three versions of CentOS with Rocky, and Alma, and CentOs Streams. Those are very challenging decisions for people running enterprise data centers, not that simple. And nobody in our communities is running charity data centers. There's no goodwill charity. I'm running a data center out of the goodness of my heart. [laughs] They are all production systems, enterprise. They're doing real production work. And that's a commercial engagement. It's not a feel-good thing. CHAD: So what did you do in your decision-making process? What pushed you, or what did you come to terms with in order to make that change? ROB: I had to admit I was wrong. [laughter] I had to think back on statements I'd made and the enthusiasm that I'd had and give up some really hard beliefs. Being a CEO or a founder is the same process. So I wish I could say this was the only time [laughs] I had to question, you know, hard-made assumptions, or some core beliefs in what I thought. I've had to get really good at questioning when am I projecting this is the way I want the world to be therefore it will be? That's a CEO skill set and a founder skill set...and when that projection is having you on thin ice. And so you constantly have to make that balance. And this was one of those ones where I'm like, all right, let's do it. And I still wake up some mornings and look at people who are open source only and see how much press they get or how easy it is for them to get mentions and things like that. And I'm like, ah, God, that'd be great. It feels like it's much harder for us because we're commercial to get the amplification. There are conferences that will amplify open-source TerraForm, great example. It gets tons of amplification for being a single vendor project that's really tightly controlled by HashiCorp. But nobody is afraid to go talk about TerraForm and mention TerraForm and do all this stuff, the amazing use of open source by that company. But they could turn it and twist it, and they could change it. It's not a guarantee by any stretch of the imagination. CHAD: Well, one of the things that I've come to terms with, and maybe this is a very positive way of looking at it, instead of that you were wrong, [laughter] is to realize that well, you weren't necessarily wrong. It got you to where you were at that point. But maybe in order to go to the next level, you need to do something different. And that's how I come to terms with some things where I need to change my thinking. ROB: [laughs] I like that. It's good. Sometimes you can look back and be like, yeah, that wasn't the right thing and just own it. But yeah, it does help you to know the path. Part of the reason why I love talking about it with you like this is it's not just Rob was wrong; we're actually walking the path through that decision. And it's easy to imagine us sitting in...we're in a tiny, little shared office listening to calls where...I'll tell you this as a story to make it incredibly concrete because it's exactly how this happened. We were on a call. Everybody was in the room. And we were talking to a major bank saying, "We love your software." We're like, "Great, we're looking forward to working with you," all this stuff. And they're like, "Yeah, we need you to show us how you built this plugin because we want to write our own version of it." CHAD: [chuckles] ROB: We're like, "If you did that, you wouldn't need to buy our software." And they're like, "That's right. We're not going to buy your software." CHAD: Exactly. [laughs] ROB: And we're like, "Well, we won't show you how to use it. Then we won't show you how to do that." And they're like, "Well, okay. We'll figure it out ourselves." And so I'm the cheerful, sunny, positive, sort of managing the call, and I'm not just yelling at them. My CTO is sitting next to me literally tearing his hair. This was literally a tearing his hair out moment. And we hung up the call, and we went on a walk around the neighborhood. And he was just like, "What more do you need to hear for you to understand?" And so it's moments like that. But instead of being like, no, you're wrong, we got to do it this way, I was ready to say, "Okay, what do you think we can do? How do we think we can do it?" And then he left me with a big pile of PR messaging to explain what we're doing, conversations like this. Two years ago when we made this change, almost three, I felt like I was being handed a really hard challenge. As it turns out, it hasn't been as big a deal. The market has changed about how they perceive open source. And for enterprise customers, they're like, "All right, how do we deal with the licensing for this stuff?" And we're like, "You just buy it from us." And they're like, "That's it?" And I'm like, "Yes." And you guarantee every..." "Yes." They're like, "Oh. Well, that's pretty straightforward. I don't have to worry about..." We could go way down an open-source rabbit hole and the consulting pieces and who owns the IP, and I used to deal with all that stuff. Now it's very straightforward. [laughs] Like, "You want to buy and use the software to run your data center?" "Yes, I do." "Great." CHAD: Well, I think this is generally applicable even beyond your specific product but to products in general. It's like, when you're not talking to people who are good customers or who are even going to be your customers who are going to pay for what you want, you can spend a lot of time and energy trying to please them. But you're not going to be successful because they're not going to be your customers no matter what you do. ROB: And that ends up being a bit of a filter with the open-source pieces is that there are customers who were dyed in the wool open source. And this used to be more true actually as the markets moved a lot. We ended up just not talking to many. But they do, they want a lot. They definitely would ask for features or things and additions and help, things like that. And it's hard to say no. Especially as a startup founder, you want to say yes a lot. We try to not say yes to things that we don't...and this puts us at a disadvantage I feel like from a marketing perspective. If we don't do something, we tend to say we don't do it, or we could do it, but it would take whatever. I wish more people in the tech space were as disciplined about this does work, this doesn't work, this is a feature. This is something we're working on. It's not how tech marketing typically works sadly. That's why we focus on self-trials so people can use the product. Mid-roll Ad I wanted to tell you all about something I've been working on quietly for the past year or so, and that's AgencyU. AgencyU is a membership-based program where I work one-on-one with a small group of agency founders and leaders toward their business goals. We do one-on-one coaching sessions and also monthly group meetings. We start with goal setting, advice, and problem-solving based on my experiences over the last 18 years of running thoughtbot. As we progress as a group, we all get to know each other more. And many of the AgencyU members are now working on client projects together and even referring work to each other. Whether you're struggling to grow an agency, taking it to the next level and having growing pains, or a solo founder who just needs someone to talk to, in my 18 years of leading and growing thoughtbot, I've seen and learned from a lot of different situations, and I'd be happy to work with you. Learn more and sign up today at thoughtbot.com/agencyu. That's A-G-E-N-C-Y, the letter U. CHAD: So you have the core and then you have the ecosystem. And you also mentioned earlier that it is an actual software package that people are buying and installing in their data center. But then you have the UI which is in the cloud and what's in the data center is reporting up to that. ROB: Well, this is where I'm going to get very technical [laughs] so hang on for a second. We actually use a cross-domain approach. So the way this works...and our UX is written in React. And everything's...boy, there's like three or four things I have to say all at once. So forgive me as I circle. Everything we do at Digital Rebar is API-first, really API only, so the Golang service with an API, which is amazing. It's the right way to do software. So for our UX, it is a React application that can talk to that what we call an endpoint, that Digital Rebar endpoint. And so the UX is designed to talk directly to the Digital Rebar endpoint, and all of the information that it gets comes from that Digital Rebar endpoint. We do not have to relay it. Like, you have to be inside that network to get access to that endpoint. And the UX just talks to it. CHAD: Okay. And so the UX is just being served from your centralized servers, but you're just delivering the React for the JavaScript app. And that is talking to the local APIs. ROB: Right. And so we do use that browser as a bridge. And so when you want to download new content packs...so Digital Rebar is a platform. So you have to download content and automation and pieces into it. The browser is actually your bridge to do that. So the browser can connect to our catalog, pull down our catalog, and then send things into that browser. So it's super handy for that. But yeah, it's fundamentally...it's all behind your firewall software except...and this is where people get confused because you're downloading it from rackn.io. That download or the URL on the browser looks like it's a RackN URL even though all the traffic is network local. CHAD: Do your customers tend to stay up to date? Are they updating to the latest version right away all the time? ROB: [laughs] No, of course not. CHAD: I figured that was the answer. ROB: And we maintain patches on old versions and things like that. I wish they were a little faster. I'm not always sad that they're...I'm actually very glad when we do a release like we did yesterday...And in that release, I don't expect any of our production customers to go patch everything. So in a SaaS, you might actually have to deal with the fact that you've got...and we're back to our heterogeneity story. And this is why it's important that we don't do this. If we were to push that, if we didn't handle every situation for every customer exactly right, there would be chaos. And it would all come back to our team. The way we do it means that we don't have to deal with that. Customers are in control of when they upgrade and when they migrate, except in the UX case. CHAD: So how do you manage that if someone goes to the UI and their local thing is an old version? Are you detecting that and doing things differently? ROB: Yes, one of the decisions we made that I'm really happy with is we embedded feature flags into the API. When you log in, it will pull back. We know what the versions are. But versions are really problematic as a way to determine what's in software, not what's not in software. So instead, we get an array back that has feature flags as we add features into the core. And we've been doing this for years. And it's an amazingly productive process. And so what the UX does is as we add new things into the UX, it will look for those feature flags. And if the feature flag isn't there, it will show you a message that says, "This feature is not available for your endpoint," or show you the thing appropriate without that. And so the UX has gone through years of this process. And so there are literally just places where the UX changes behavior based on what you've installed on your system. And remember, our customers it's multi-site. So our customers do have multiple versions of Digital Rebar installed across there. So this behavior is really important also for them to be able to do it. And it goes back to LaunchDarkly. I was talking to Edith back in the early days of LaunchDarkly and feature flags, and I got really excited about that. And that's why we embedded it into the product. Everybody should do it. It's amazing. CHAD: One of the previous episodes a few ago was with actually the thoughtbot CTO, Joe Ferris. And we're on a project together where it's a different way of working but especially when you need it... so much of what I had done previously was versioned APIs. Maybe that works at a certain scale. But you get to a certain scale of software and way of working and wanting to do continuous deployment and continually update features and all that stuff. And it's a really good way of working when instead you are communicating on the level of feature availability. ROB: And from an ops person's perspective, and this was true with OpenStack, they were adding feature flags down at the metadata for the...it was incredible. They went deep into the versioned API hellscape. It's the only way I can describe it [laughs] because we don't do that. But the thing that that does not help you with is a lot of times the changes that you're looking at from an API perspective are behavior changes, not API changes. Our API over years now has been additive. And as long as you're okay with new objects showing up, new fields showing up in an object, you could go back to four-year-old software, talk to our API, and it would still work just fine. So all your integrations are going to be good, but the behavior might change. And that's what people don't...they're like, oh, I can make my API version, and everything's good. But the behavior that you're putting behind the scenes might be different. You need a way to express that even more than the APIs in my opinion. CHAD: I do think you really see that when you...if you're just building a monolithic web app, it's harder to see. But once you separate your UI from your back end...and where I first hit this was with mobile applications. The problem becomes more obvious to you as a developer I think. ROB: Yes. CHAD: Because you have some people out there who are actually running different versions of your UI too. So your back end is the same for everybody but your UI is different. ROB: [laughs] CHAD: And so you need a back end that can respond to different clients. And a better way to do that rather than versioning your API is to have the clients tell you what they're capable of while they're making the requests and to respond differently. It's much more of a flexible way. ROB: We do track what UX. We have customers who don't want to use that. They don't even want us changing the UX...or actually normal enterprise. And so they will run...the nice thing about a React app is you can just run it. The Digital Rebar can host its UX, and that's perfectly reasonable. We have customers who do that. But every core adds more operational complexity. And then if they don't patch the UX, they can fall behind or not get features. So we see that it's...you're describing a real, you know, the more information you're exchanging between the clients and the servers, the better for you to track what's really going on. CHAD: And I think overall once you can get a little...in my experience, especially people who haven't worked that way, joining the team, it can take a little bit for them to get comfortable with that approach and the flexibility you need to be building into your system. But once people are comfortable with it and the team is comfortable, it really starts to hum. In my experience, a lot of what we've advocated for in terms of the way software should be built and deployed and that kind of thing is it actually makes it so that you can leave that even easier. And you can really be agile because you can roll things out in a very agile way. ROB: So are you thinking like an actual rolling deployment where the deployed software has multiple versions coming through? CHAD: Yep. And you can also have different users seeing different things at different times as well. You can say, "We're going to be doing continual deployment and have code continually deployed." But that doesn't mean that it's part of the release yet, that it's available to users to use. ROB: Yeah, that ability to split and feature flag is a huge deal. CHAD: Yeah. What I'm trying to figure out is does this apply to every project even the small like, this just changes the way you should build software? Or is there a time in a product to start introducing that thing? ROB: I am a big fan of doing it first and fast. There are decisions that we made early that have proven out really well. Feature flags is one of them. We started right away knowing that this would be an important thing for us to do. And same thing with tracking dependencies and being able to say, "I need..." actually, it's helpful because you can write automation that says, "I need this feature in the product." This flag and the product it's not just a version thing. That makes the automation a little bit more portable, easier to maintain. The other thing we did that I really like is all of our objects have documentation embedded in them. So as I write a parameter or an ask or really anything in the system, everything has a documentation field. And so I can write the documentation for that component right there. And then we modified our build scripts so that they will pull in all of that documentation and create an aggregated view. And so the ability to do just-in-time documentation is very, very high. And so I'm a huge fan of that. Because then you have the burden of like, oh, I need to go back and write up a whole bunch of documentation really lessened when you can be like, okay, for this parameter, I can explain its behavior, or I can tell you what it does and know that it's going to show up as part of a documentation set that explains it. That's been something I've been a big fan of in what we build. And not everybody [laughs] is as much a fan. And you can see people writing stuff without particularly crisp documentation behind it. But at least we can go back and add that documentation or lessons learned or things like that. And it's been hugely helpful to have a place to do that. From a design perspective, one other thing I would say that we did that...and you can imagine the conversation. I have a UX usability focus. I'm out selling the product. So for me, it's how does it demo? How does it show? What's that first experience like? And so for me having icons and colors in the UX, in the experience is really important. Because there's a lot of semantic meaning that people get just looking down a list of icons and seeing that they are different colors and different shapes. But from the CTO's perspective, that's window dressing. Who cares? It doesn't have functional purpose. And we're both right. There's a lot of times when to me, both people can be right. So we added that as a metafield into all of our objects. And so we have the functional part of the definition of the API. And then we have these metaobjects that you can add in or meta definitions that you can add in behind the scenes to drive icons and colors. But sometimes UX rendering hints and things like that that from an API perspective, you're like, I don't care, not really an API thing. But from a do I show...this is sensitive information. Do I turn it into a password field? Or should this have a clipboard so I can clipboard icon it, or should I render it in this type of viewer or a plain text viewer? And all that stuff we have a place for. CHAD: And so it's actually being delivered by the API that's saying that. ROB: Correct. CHAD: That's cool. ROB: It's been very helpful. You can imagine the type of stuff we have, and it's easy to influence UX behaviors without asking for UI change. CHAD: Now, are these GraphQL APIs? ROB: No. We looked at doing that. That's probably a whole nother...I might get our CTO on the line for that. CHAD: [laughs] It's a whole nother episode for that. ROB: But we could do that. But we made some decisions that it wasn't going to provide a lot of lift for us in navigation at the moment. It's funny, there's stuff that we think is a really cool idea, but we've learned not to jump on them without having really specific customer use cases or validations. CHAD: Well, like you said, you've got to say no. You've got to make decisions about what is important, and what isn't important now, and what you'll get to later, and that requires discipline. ROB: This may be a way to bring it full circle. If you go back to the stories of every customer having a unique data center, there's this heterogeneity and multi-vendor pieces that are really important. The unicycle we have to ride for this is we want our customers to have standard operating processes, standard infrastructure pipelines for this and use those and follow that process. Because we know if they do, then they'll keep improving as we improve the pipelines. And they're all unique. So there has to be a way in those infrastructure pipelines to do extensions that allow somebody to say, "I need to make this call here in the middle of this pipeline." And we have ways to do that address those needs. The challenge becomes providing enough opinionated like, this is how you should do things. And it's okay if you have to extend it or change it a little bit or tweak it without it just becoming an open-ended tool where people show up and they're like, "Oh, yeah, I get how to build something." And we have people do this, but they run out of gas in the long journey. They end up writing bespoke workflows. They write their own pipelines; they do their own integrations. And for them, it's very hard to support them. It's very hard to upgrade them. It's very hard for them to survive the reorg, your nine-month reorg windows. And so yeah, there's a balance between go do whatever you want, which you have to enable and do it our way because these processes are going to let your teams collaborate, let you reuse software. And we've actually over time been erring more and more on the side of you really need to do it the way we want you to do; reinforce the infrastructure as code processes. And this is the key, right? I mean, you're coming from a development mindset. You want your tooling to reinforce good behavior, CICD, infrastructure as code, all these things. You need those to be easier to do [laughs] than writing it yourself. And over time, we've been progressing more and more towards the let's make it easier to do it within the opinionated way that we have and less easy to do it within the Wild West pattern. CHAD: Cool. Well, I think with that, we'll start to wrap up. So if people want to find out more, where are some places that they could do that or get in touch with you? ROB: The simplest thing is of course rackn.com is the website. We encourage people to just, if this is interesting, download and try the software. If they have a cloud account, it's super easy to play with it, all things RackN through that. I am very active on Twitter under the handle @zehicle Z-E-H-I-C-L-E. And I'm happy to have conversations around these topics and data center and operations and even the future of cloud and edge computing. So please look me up. I'm excited to have conversations like that. CHAD: Awesome. And you can subscribe to the show and find notes and transcripts for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you can find me on Twitter @cpytel. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening and see you next time. Announcer: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success.

Reseller Hangout Podcast - Jason ThriftsRob: [00:00:00] All right guys, today, we are super excited to have Jason T. Smith with Jason Thrifts, to talk to, give us some great pointers about his reselling business.Melissa: Thanks for being on here with us.Jason T: Thanks for having me. What's going on, guys?Rob: Not too much. We're super excited to talk to you. Love to get a little bit of your background, kind of how you got into reselling, and start with that first.Melissa: This is fun too, because we actually were on your show, it's probably been two or three years now. It's been awhile. And now we're doing a podcast, we get to have you come on here, so it's a lot of fun. Thanks for doing this with us.Jason T: It's always fun to be on the other side of the desk. You know, I love hosting and interviewing, but yeah, I love being a guest every once in a while too. I got started when I was six. My mom, well, my mom and my grandmother drugged me to flea markets and garage sales. And my mom lost me at the big flea market in our town. I just wandered away and she found me talking to the vendors, asking them what they were selling and why were they selling it?I was a very [00:01:00] inquisitive little kid, and I didn't really fully grasp it till I was about 10. And so this is back in the late seventies, early eighties. And I realized we, when we went to a community garage sale where the entire front yard of the school was, everyone had their table, there was a lot of toys, and I realized at that moment I can buy twice as many used toys as I could new toys, and I'd rather have more stuff than new stuff. So at that point I understood the value of used items, but I turned it into a career.I lost my job in March of 2000 and I was kind of despondent. My wife and I were newly married, and how are we going to pay our mortgage with one of us out of work? And you know, like a lot of people do when you're feeling depressed, you do a little retail therapy. So I went down to the local record store and I saw they had a table of dollar CDs. And this is April of 2000, so online selling was brand new and I'm like, these CDs have to be worth more than a dollar.So I picked 20 of what I [00:02:00] thought were the best CDs, and I went home and I sat down, and I taught myself how to sell and I just kept on selling from that point on. It wasn't a full-time gig cause I didn't think it could be. So I, I finally went and got a job and I would sell in the evenings. And then about 10 years ago, I got an infection in my arm, spent five days in the hospital. We fought my life and the unhappiness at the real job I had and I haven't looked back since. I've been a reseller since that full-time and also full-time teaching others how to do it.Rob: I love it. I love it. And the cool thing is, I think that's a misconception for a lot of resellers. It's like, you can't do this full time. I had to tackle the same thing for me. It's like, you can't do this full time and you can. You can absolutely do it full time. So that's very, very exciting that, that was your realization. I thought I was the only one who had that realization, but now talking to you, I'm like, yeah, that's how it is. That's how it comes to be. So that's really cool.Jason T: But sometimes tragedy makes you have that rethink your life realization. I had this infection in my arm, stuck in the hospital for five days, had two life-saving surgeries to clean this infection out of my arm, [00:03:00] and in those five days I just sat there and thought, man, I hate my job. I hate going to work, and what am I going to do? Let me hustle hard at reselling and make it a full-time career. And here we are hanging out today.Rob: That's awesome, I love it.Melissa: So what platforms are you mostly active on and did you start there?Jason T: Yeah, so I've been on eBay for 22 years, and back then I was also on Half.com. That's where I sold a lot of my CDs. Unfortunately, eBay bought Half.com, so that's for you old timers out there. And then they ruined the brand and then just dissolved it. And then I got onto Amazon. I've been selling on Amazon for about 17 years. And as of the last, you know, five or six, I'm pretty big on Mercari and I use Etsy and Poshmark and Depop and Bonanza, and TrueGether, and Facebook Marketplace. So, I have about 10 that I'm currently on, at all times.Melissa: Wow.Rob: That's awesome. That's huge. I mean, 90% of our sales are on eBay.Melissa: But we don't really try to crosspost that much.Rob: That's awesome. That's totally awesome.Melissa: You mentioned CDs, so is that your favorite thing to still [00:04:00] resell?Jason T: Oh, yeah. My two big things are music, so CDs, cassettes records, eight tracks, reel to reels. And then I collect a Tiki mugs. And if you don't know what a Tiki mug is, when you go into a Tiki bar, you often get a cocktail in a ceramic vessel, and then you take it home. And then, so those are collectible, the old ones, the new ones, and then you can resell them. So I've also perfected essentially drinking cocktails for free. So you go to the bar, you get the cocktail with the take-home mug, and then you sell the mug on eBay. And the money you make on the mug is what the drink costs with the mug. So in an essence, the cocktail was free.Rob: I love it. I love it. That is awesome for sure. A great thought process.Jason T: Did that make me sound like an alcoholic? I hope not.Rob: Another question that I'm thinking of while you're talking so, I'm assuming you are a music buff. This is something that you enjoyed before you got into this? Talk a little bit about that cause that's one of the things that we try to tell people too, is the best place to start reselling is definitely in something you enjoy or a hobby. So how did you get started in the music industry?Jason T: My uncle threw me on the back of his [00:05:00] motorcycle when I was 10 years old. It was 1981 and we went and saw the Charlie Daniels Band at the height of The Devil Went Down To Georgia and I had seen the Donny & Marie Show when I was younger, but this was my first big, full concert, 20,000 people. It blew my mind. I was hooked from that moment on. And when I started selling those CDs, 22 years ago, I had always been collecting music. I still do. It's 2021 at the recording of this, and I still have 4,000 CDs alphabetized into my house. Those are my personal collection, so I still love collecting music, but I realized right away that not everyone is everywhere where music is plentiful. You know, people who live in other countries, remote, remote parts of this country, don't have the access I live in Vegas. I can go to LA, I go to Phoenix and so I've always collected it. Plus I worked for a chain of CD stores. The one I got laid off from was a stores in Detroit, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh.So I worked throughout those three states and then I went to work for one of the biggest independent CD [00:06:00] stores in LA called Fingerprints. And then I moved to Tower Records back in the early 2000s. So I was a night manager at Tower Records in Hollywood. And so back then, if you wanted music or movies, you couldn't, I mean, you could order online, but it was very, very in its infancy.So if you were a celebrity, you just had to come to Tower. So all day long, I'm helping like Don Henley and Paul Stanley of KISS, and B.B. King and Meg Ryan. And so I got, you know, I, I got used to the used stuff from the used stores, but I also got, I understood merchandising and selling better from working for a big corporation, like Tower.Melissa: So are the CDs still selling now with all the new downloads out that you can stream?Jason T: That's my wall of CDs for sale on Amazon. This week, I've shipped a $200 CD, $115 CD, $100 CD that was just a one-song Christmas CD.Rob: Wow.Melissa: That is a niche.Rob: That is a niche.Jason T: And that one I bought online on one website for $15, and then sold it on Amazon for a $100.Rob: That is awesome. [00:07:00] So if you don't know anything right now, this is an amazing business to be into, definitely the music industry.Melissa: I had a question back when you were talking about how many platforms you're listing on. So are you using a cross-posting tool to do that?Jason T: Yeah. So I'm using a Chrome extension called cross-listed and that cross lists between eBay, Etsy,Posh, Depop, and Mercari, and then some things like some of the high-end CDs, you know, there isn't a hell of a lot of customers that are willing to pay $500 for a CD. There's a few just not a ton. So I can put that on multiple platforms at the same time, with not any fear that there's going to be a run and it's going to sell in three places at once. Ten dollar CD, sure. $500? It takes a while for the customer to figure out where you are, but that's why I use all these platforms. And that's what people need to learn, especially when they're new. Not every customer is on eBay. My last assistant who just moved, she had never been on eBay and she's 44 years old, until she worked for me. Never.And so, [00:08:00] but she'd been on Etsy and she's sold on Etsy. She'd never shop on eBay, never sold on eBay, so you have to realize your customers aren't in one place. So you've got to go find them because if you've got it listed on Amazon for two years and it hasn't had a bite and you put it on eBay for one day and it sells, okay, that's where that customer is. So you gotta figure that out and, and keep doing where they are.Melissa: And start listing some more.Rob: Yeah, that's a great point, guys, he just pinpointed your customer might not be on the platform you're at, especially if that's your hobby. Whatever your hobby is, mess with those different platforms. You got to go and find where your customer's at and like Jason is doing, he's cross posting it. So you're constantly doing research in your business to find out the best place for that. That's a huge key point in this business, for sure. So, we're not even doing that for sure, but now you're encouraging me get out there and do that. That is a great takeaway for sure.Jason T: The other thing that's good about selling music as opposed to many other items, with some rare exceptions, when you list the CD or sell a CD, they're all the same shape, size, and weight. [00:09:00] And so once you know how to ship one, you know, a pair of jeans, a pair of jeans can be for a little toddler, or it could be for a giant man like myself. Those are greatly different sizes. CDs are all four ounces and they're all square.Melissa: So how many hours right now are you putting into your reselling business and what, what is your average monthly income from that?Jason T: So I put it a lot of hours. I don't really keep track. I definitely, and this is what you need to know when you're going to do this for yourself, you will work longer and harder than you ever have, and it'll be way more satisfying and enjoyable.And you can move about the country, especially if you have help. I do have two people helping me right now. And in the next seven days, I'm going to be in Cleveland, Vegas, Phoenix, and LA. And so I couldn't do that at a regular job without saying I need the whole week off, boss. I'm the boss. So I put in long hours and I work at night when, my wife and I are watching TV, but we get to spend time together, I keep working. But I probably put in 60, 70 hours a week, but it's stuff I love. I love finding these rare CDs. I love selling them. [00:10:00] And I do, you know, on average this year, I'm doing about $9,000 to $10,000 in sales a month, of my used product.Rob: That's no joke. That's awesome. And it's like you said, you highlighted, this is what you love. You're not going to an office every day. You're not punching on a keyboard. You're actually out. You're about, you're visiting music stores. You're sourcing, you're selling, so it's something that you absolutely love, and that's how we feel too. It's like, you're not really working. You are working and there is work to add there's aspects of work, but it's still stuff that you love so you can continue to do it and grow, which is, it's an amazing part of this business for sure.Jason T: And you do get addicted to it, to the point where every once in awhile, if you have a spouse that doesn't do what you do, and they're like, can we have a little break, because we're flying out tonight to see our folks. We have not seen our folks in two years and we're flying tonight and I have all these pictures of CDs, preloaded. I'm getting wifi on the plane and I'm listing the whole way home. So, because I know the next couple of days we're gonna be with my family and my wife's family, so those days will not be any work will be done. I'm stuck in a plane seat for four hours, might as well list some CDs.Melissa: We [00:11:00] try to do that before trips too, like, get as many pictures as we can so that while we'reRob: on the road, get them listed.Melissa: Get them listed. Do you have a flip that, I don't know if it's a CD or something else that is like one of your more memorable things that sticks out in your head? A cool flip that you did?Jason T: Well funny, I'm trying to ship it right now, but the shipping store next door, did me dirty yesterday. So after we're done talking, I got to go pick up a box from another store. I picked up 14 chairs from a casino that was going out of business here in Vegas. They were 1970s, Herman Miller office chairs, and here's a little tip. They hadn't seen them yet. The people who are running the liquidation sale and of the 14 chairs, 13 looked about the same condition and one was just beat to death. So I took a picture of the beat to death one, and I walked back to the front of the liquidation sale, and I said, how much were these chairs? And he goes, how many are there? I said 14. He goes, ah, $50 each. I said, sure, so the one I'm shipping [00:12:00] today, I sold for $1,200.Rob: Herman Miller is huge.Jason T: I average about $1,100 a chair and I spent a $50 a chair because I was smart enough to show them the crappiest one.Rob: Wow. That's crazy. I know we, one of the auctions that we have down here sells those chairs. It's actually, yeah. I don't know where they come from, but I know. Yeah. That is one of the brand names that you want if you're in, definitely office chairs, that is the name brand to go with so.Melissa: The funny thing is we've bought them before and sold them. And, but we don't keep that stuff because I'm like, why can't we just keep the nice stuff because we gotta make money on it. We did the same thing with the strollers forever. We wouldn't keep one of the Bob jogger strollers cause I'm like, oh, I can make $300 or I could keep it. I don't know. I think we've got to sell it.Jason T: Yeah. As much as I like music, when something comes in that Iwanted, and then I'm like, oh man, it's a $300 record. Okay. I'll just get the music in my computer and I'll sell the record.Melissa: Can you think of a, like maybe a flipping fail or one of an item, a flop?Jason T: Well, you know, I, I made money, [00:13:00] but this is when I learned the lesson of time is worth money too. I bought 6,000 records out of a dude's garage when I lived in Long Beach with my wife. We had a two bedroom condo and it took over our dining room for a year. You know, two bedroom condo, it wasn't that big. It was like 1,200 square feet, but we lost a whole room for a year.And when I looked back at the money that I made, it was money. Compared to what I spent to, what I made. I made thousands of dollars. But then as I grew in this business, I realized, oh my God, the amount of time I spent digging through those 6,000, because there wasn't a ton of home runs and amount of time I and gas, I spent driving all over LA trying to trade in the stuff that wasn't worth the time to sell online.I think I lost money because I didn't value my time back then, so it was a good learning experience. Everyone has to go through that, but yeah, that was a fail. Like I could have made the same amount of money, much smarter.Rob: That is a great, great point in learning that, and then growing from that.Melissa: Time is valuable, very valuable and to know your, what your time is worth.Jason T: When you see people on Facebook going, you know what this customer is trying to screw me.[00:14:00]I've been on the phone with eBay for three hours. I've posted my complaint in 12 Facebook groups. And I go, how much was this item that you're spending three hours, $20. Look, no one wants to get being taken advantage of, but you've got to evaluate. Okay, am I going to piss and moan and try and figure out how to get this $20 back? Or am I going to list for three hours and sell a lot more? Yeah, that's what you should be doing. It's a $10,000 purchase. Okay. Fight for that one. $20, let it go, let it go.Rob: That is, that is great advice. Do not tie yourself into this and screw yourself time-wise on something that is not worth it. And you're right, if it is an expensive item, then, you know, go after it, do it. But if it's not, don't mess with it. And the other thing is mentally your brain gets sucked into negativity when you're going after that. And it just screws you mentally, and you can't straighten it out. If you just walk away from it or no, okay, let me go with two items and replace that $20, it's one of those things that you have to know in the beginning. So I was going to ask you a story, I know you just told us recently that you actually did a trip and you, you visited [00:15:00] record stores or music stores while you're on the trip and you were able to pay for the trip, which is pretty exciting. That's cool. Can you tell us a little bit about when you do go away if this, if this is something that you live out, while you're traveling?Jason T: Unbeknownst to people who don't collect music in 2021, there's still 1,400 record stores in the United States, so they're everywhere. So when I travel on my Google maps, I pinpoint all the record stores, especially if I've not been there, the ones I want to go to. And I lucked out, my wife is not in this industry and she used to get that glazed look when we'd be in a record store for longer than 20 minutes where I could spend hours. But I got smart at one point many years ago and I gave her a printed out list. Okay. Go to the soul section, go to Prince and look for this CD. It's worth a $100. And so it was like a treasure map. And if she found one or two within that map, within that list, she goes like, cool, we keep on going and then I could work the rest of the store. So when we travel, she's really enjoys it.She knows how to scan and read it and everything. So we hit all the record stores cause she knows that what I bring home from those record [00:16:00] stores will pay for, if not all of it, at least part of our trip, because I can find those $100 CDs in any store. And people might say, don't the stores know what they're doing.They do to a point, but also they only price for the customer who's going to walk through the door in Phoenix. I price for the entire world because I ship worldwide, and so I can, I can command a higher dollar amount because I don't have that small of a potential customer pool. So yeah, every trip has paid for, and it's not just music.I do some clothing stores too. Like we're, we're going to Phoenix for two days, next week. And I've got all the CD stores and like Buffalo Exchanges, the used secondhand clothing stores, all mapped out. I got my trades of my crap cause I take my junk in, they give me some money and then I buy better stuff.Rob: That's awesome. Yeah, that's really, really cool. So being able to go on vacation and do this, and not only that, it's not like a drag to you, it's not like you're really working. You're actually out there having fun, doing this stuff you love, so that is so exciting.Jason T: But the key, especially for [00:17:00] a spouse you find the things where you can source next to a fun place to eat or an amusement park or whatever you guys like, because as soon as you're done, you just waltz right into that thing that the whole family's going to enjoy. And then they're like, oh, yay, cause they can see the prize. They can see the prize coming. Oh, dinner at our favorite restaurant is right next door to dad's favorite thrift store.Melissa: At the flea market, our kids get slushies or whatever they have icees in the middle it's right in the middle. So they know if they make it halfway through, then they can get one.Jason T: Exactly.Rob: If you can tell, Jason has been in the business for a while. He's got this thing planned out, how to intertwine it in his family, how to make money on vacation. I love it, man. That is awesome. That is so exciting for sure.Melissa: What would be two or three tips that you would give to somebody who has you know, dabbled in reselling or they want to take their business and grow it?Jason T: I would definitely start with what we already talked about. Start with what you know, but then the, the, the other half of that is you must expand.Once I go into a thrift store and found out there's no Tiki mugs and I've already [00:18:00] combed through the media, there's still a whole big thrift store left, and so I can leave with bras, and purses, and dresses. I don't wear any of those, but I've taught myself the good stuff, and while I'm in this store, I might as well grab all the good stuff and not just the good stuff that I love.So that's number one. Be prepared to fail and not sit in the corner and suck your thumb. Once you do, definitely learn from it. I host a weekly YouTube show inanda segment I had from the beginning, is my duds of the week. I show things that haven't sold that should have, and I'm, or I shouldn't have bought them and things that sold, like last night I share showed a CD.I paid $6 and I sold it for $5.95on Amazon. So with Amazon fees, I lost a lot of money, but I want to show it to people who are new. I'm doing this for 22 years, I still make mistakes. And the mistakes come typically with, all suddenly people don't care about that piece of music anymore. I bought it when they did, by the time I listed it, they don't. So embrace your mistakes and really [00:19:00] learn from them.And like, we kind of talked about prepare your family. If they're not together and doing this, you know, I feel bad for those people go, my husband or my wife or my significant other hates my eBay business. And so you, you know, you got to have a supportive family, and so figure out a way if your, if your profit or slash death piles are taken over everything, maybe find a way to move them.You know, but you've got to have a supportive family. If they're not, you've got to have that sit down, say, this is, this is mommy, daddy's, whatever's busy. Here's how it's going to work. You can all help me and it'll be better. And guess what? We'll go to Disney World if you help me. See, got eye on the prize, always eye on the prize.Melissa: Yes.Rob: Or get a slushee if you go to the flea market, for sure. For sure. No, I get it. Those are great, great points for sure. And that's something that everybody can learn.Melissa: Personally, I was not into flipping whenever we got married. So it was something that I learned and it wasn't, it's not a real passion of mine. I enjoy it now. But I think the biggest thing for me is [00:20:00] once I saw what he could make. So like, like, oh, okay, well, we're spending this much, but we're making this much now. I'm like, okay, I could get into this making money thing.Rob: And we adapt on your vacation as well. That's the same thing we try to do. We try and find those items on vacation when we're traveling that will pay for the vacation. So, that's one of those things that she's happy about making money on vacation, even if it takes a little bit of our time to pick something up.Melissa: Yeah. An extra 30 minutes detour to go pick something up, off of OfferUp or whatever.Rob: But happy happy wife, happy life.Jason T: I've been with my wife since 1990.And so, yeah, I understand that. We were in Maui once and it rained more than it'd ever rained in Maui, in the history of Maui. And it rained so much, she looked at me while we were just stuck in our room and she goes, let's go thrifting. Now for my wife to say that in Maui tells you how bad the weather was, because she doesn't mind going a little bit, but for her to suggest it is totally, totally next level.I would like to add one more little tip is about the goal thing [00:21:00] where I'm talking right now is a house that I do not live in, but I do own, and it houses my entire business. And I realized at a point that our business, my business taken over our house and I understood the family, my wife, we don't have any kids just was tired of it.And I went to look for a commercial space and by pure luck, the house four doors down from us was for sale cheap and the owners wanted gone quick. And so I invested in this property to house my office and I've since gained a lot of equity in this property in just two and a half years. So it was the smartest business move I've ever made because at the end of a rental space, all you have is cashed checks. At the end of this, when I leave this, I'll have made a lot of money on just the, the office, basically.Rob: That's very smart. That's awesome. And a great tip too, for sure. So when your business is taking over your house, exactly. Go buy the house next door.Jason T: And I mean, just the timing. It was amazing, but my wife just told me what the house is worth yesterday, compared to what we pay. And I'm like, yay. [00:22:00]Rob: That is super exciting.Melissa: You can't sell yet though. Cause you got a lot of stuff.Jason T: Oh no, no, no. I'm not going anywhere yet, but down the road, I'm like, yeah, this will be a nice, you know, because what, what the mortgage is, is what I was going to pay for in rent.Rob: Exactly.It's the exact same. So boy, if you can pull it off and I didn't tell people for a while, cause I thought people would be like, oh, he's bragging, he has two houses. I'm like, no, it was a smart business investment, that's going to pay huge dividends at the end. So if you can pull it off, do it.Melissa: That's what we're renting. We just a year or so ago started renting a warehouse.And I, I told him like, we really need to just get property and get a warehouse of our own. Then we own it and it makes so much more sense down the road. So that's on the goal eventually.Rob: Well, that's good. I like your mindset too, though. Instead of going into commercial property, you got a house that can do the same thing,or you that you could move into whatever. If you move into it or use it as an office, I like that. I like that thought process a lot, and that's a retirement for you. One day, you're going to get a nice chunk of change when you go sell it and you're ready to just, you know, [00:23:00] travel or do whatever with your wife, whatever your passions are, at that point.Melissa: Back to Maui in better weather. So, where can everybody find you today?Jason T: So my name is Jason T. Smith. I do have a business page for my Jason Thrifts on Facebook, but my big group is The Thrifting Board, it's ,about, we're about to hit 60,000 members. It's a free group. Come on on, come on over. We have, resellers of all shapes, ,sizes, ages, brand new today, been selling for 30 years, whatever. And I do two YouTube shows every week. And my channel is just my name. Jason T. Smith. Thursday nights is thrifty business, have a guest expert on something every week. And then Sunday, I host one with my mom who is 78 years old.Her and my dad are both 78. They sell on eBay and they kill it. They make a couple thousand a month, part-time at 78 years old. So when you say I can't do this, I can't do this, my folks can do it. They're 78. You can do it too. So my mom and I, co-host a show, she co-hosts a [00:24:00] YouTube show with me on Sunday nights called Selling Past Your Expiration Date, Being Thrifty Over 50.Melissa: I'll check that out.Rob: Yeah, that is awesome for sure. And you're a busy man. You got a lot of stuff going on, but I'm glad you got all those different avenues that people can connect with you, so it's very, very exciting. So, Jason, thanks for doing this, man. We appreciate it, that you jumped on here and gave some of your time and awesome, awesome tips on how people can be more successful in the reselling business. So thank you so much.Jason T: Oh, thanks for having me. I love what you guys are doing and I love the energy you guys put out. So I am around anytime you want to do something. I think I have unlimited energy, then I watch you two, and I was like, I'm a slacker. I am, I am a slacker.Melissa: That's all him.Jason T: It definitely bounces off of you too.Melissa: I try. Sometimes he'll just start talking and I'm like, I can't, I just can't.Rob: Well cool. Well, thank you so much. Like I said, we'd greatly appreciate you, appreciate your friendship and all the great information that you're bringing out to the workplace and the flipping industry for sure.Jason T: Thanks, guys.Rob: Thank you.

In 2006, Angie and Will Scott, COO and CEO and co-founders, started Search Influence as a technically oriented search, social, and digital marketing agency, supported with tracking and attribution, and demonstrating value across very complex systems. Challenged at the beginning to find people with the needed skills, the agency outsourced its production work and developed an intensive training cycle and “robust” documentation for new hires. Will claims that, to this day, the agency's internal-facing superpower is training and education.  For the agency's first six years, SEO required seeding web content with relevant keywords. Will says that today's content has to be more nuanced . . . that SEO is now “more about meeting the customer where they are in the buyer's journey.” The agency concentrates on three verticals: midmarket healthcare (driving patient visits to individual practitioners on up to regional medical centers and, on the practice side, generating more leads), higher education, and tourism – market segments where the strategically complex buyer's journey is characterized by “multiple systems between a customer's first interaction with the brand and actually closing the sale.” When the real estate market crashed in 2008, two years after Hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans and decimated the region's small businesses, the national economy took a downturn. New Orleans was still rebuilding. Tourism was booming. Medical and – in particular, elective medical – remained strong. At a time when many companies were failing, Search Influence . . . grew. Unlike many agencies, Search Influence does not try to “do it all.” Outsourcing work that is not in its areas of concentration (SEO and paid advertising) and bringing on partners to provide services complementary to its quantitative efforts keeps the agency focused and nimble. Client websites are built by a cadre of website development partners. Early on, the agency built a process, an internal editorial team, and platforms to manage external freelancers who produced as much as 10,000 pieces of content monthly for a large direct-to-SMB digital marketing company. That creative management arm is still in place today. Angie questions whether it makes sense to try to develop “side skills” when the agency can so easily partner with “top talent.” With its practice built around content, the Search Influence developed an internal tool, UpScribed, that morphed into an external-facing platform. Through UpScribed, other marketers (including those who are not Influence clients) get direct access to the Search Influence content team. When Covid “shuttered” a lot of New Orleans's small businesses, the purposely overstaffed agency went to work for its clients . . . for free. That's taking a rare, long-range view on things. The same clients they keep afloat today will be tomorrow's even-more-dedicated customers. In this interview, Angie, who has an accounting background, talks about maintaining organizational balance. Will identifies a valuable list of free business development networks and ecosystems available to help small enterprises. They can be found on their agency's website at: searchinfluence.com or on their blog, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined today by Angie and Will Scott. They are the COO and CEO and co-founders at Search Influence based in New Orleans, Louisiana. Welcome to the podcast, Angie and Will. ANGIE: Thank you. We're excited to be here. WILL: Thanks, Rob. ROB: It's a treat to have you here. We don't always get a little tag team like this, so that is an exciting change of pace. Why don't you start us off by telling us about Search Influence and what the agency's superpower is? WILL: Search Influence, Angie and I started it together more than 15 years ago. We started rather technical. I had come out of a position where I was very focused on SEO, so that's what we started with. Over the span of time, though, what we have decided our internal-facing superpower is, is training and education. Because we started in 2006, it wasn't really easy to go out and find folks who had the skills we needed, so we did do a lot of training. And to this day, we remain robust documentation and a training cycle for all new hires. Externally, we feel like the things that we do really well are still more in the technical realm. Our name is Search Influence, so search is a big part of where we spend our time. But we've also spent a lot of time thinking about tracking and attribution and how we actually demonstrate value across very complex systems. Our top verticals in which we work are healthcare, higher ed, and tourism. And in almost every one of those cases, there are multiple systems between a customer's first interaction with the brand and actually closing the sale, in whatever way that happens. ROB: I can certainly think that through. We're talking about healthcare – what part of healthcare? Obviously, it's a journey. We're not going to the ER here. What segment of the healthcare market is representative, would you say? WILL: Our focus has historically been on the midmarket, so think a handful of practitioners up to say a regional medical center. Very much about driving patient visits, and on the practice side, more leads. ROB: This is I'm coming to an area, I'm trying to figure out where I should go, or it might have an existing doctor and it's an evolution over time of where my loyalty is going to go. There's a journey there. There's a journey in travel. All of that makes sense. I can certainly see – you talked about 2006; there was I would say a lot of science around SEO, and it has evolved into art and science, to an extent. How have you thought about evolving your team and the documentation as there has become more of – I would almost say Google and the search engines have moved more towards searcher satisfaction with what they found, which is kind of an art. WILL: Yeah, in the early days, say 2006 through probably 2012-2013, it was easier to be a little more heavy-handed, to think about content primarily as a vehicle for keywords to correlate to what people were searching for. I think in the time since then, we and any company that tries to practice SEO in a serious way have learned that the content actually has to be more about meeting the customer where they are in the buyer's journey. And that's a much more nuanced piece of content than one where you're trying to have an appropriate keyword density and blah, blah, blah, and highly targeted internal links and that kind of thing. ROB: Right on. You started in 2006; a few years in, we hit a weird economic spot and the market of search was rotating at that time as well. How did you think through and evolve through that transition to emerge healthy on the other side? Maybe it was always healthy to an extent, but I don't know. The tourism thing was probably down a little bit if you were in that market at the time. WILL: New Orleans is interesting on a lot of levels. In 2008, when everybody else was suffering from the real estate market crash, we were booming because it was two years after Katrina. Where everybody else was seeing people drop the keys off at their mortgagor and walk away, we were still in a heavy rebuilding phase. Also, with the focus on medical, particularly elective medical – that was really a heavy piece for us at that time – there wasn't much of a downturn. We actually grew through that recession. ANGIE: Right. Our largest focus, though, at that point was medical. We were – I don't know, lucky or saw something coming, I don't know. WILL: I prefer brilliant. [laughs] ANGIE: [laughs] We almost felt bad at that time, I remember. It's like when your baby is sleeping through the night and no one else's is and you don't want to say that they are. I think we would talk about if somebody asked, but we just didn't talk about it because we felt bad. It was like, “We're growing.”  ROB: And that's been an echo for this year for a lot of people. This past year, this COVID, 15-16 months now, some people – restaurant industry, they're just scrapping to get by. A few restaurants figured out how to nail takeout and delivery, and they're doing better than ever. And then some folks in the digital realm are just doing great, growing. But it's hard to talk about. WILL: Totally. Sadly, we are not among them, because we did have a bunch of revenue in tourism and attractions leading into COVID. ANGIE: But they're starting to come back as the recovery comes. WILL: Yeah. And we did this thing where because we were intentionally overstaffed – we didn't cut nearly as much as we should have if we were trying to meet revenue. So we had staff and we reached out to our customers who were paused because of budget, and we created this thing – our core values spell CHARGE. We marketed it as the “Recharged Fund.” We put our team to work for free for those clients who were effectively shuttered because of the pandemic. ROB: That's a pretty bold move, and I wonder, when you first started doing that, how long did you think it was going to be before things echoed back, and when did you start wondering again? WILL: A handful of weeks. [laughs] ANGIE: Like everyone else. WILL: I was actually out of town and Angie was responsible for shutting the office down on March 13th. I don't think at any time until many, many weeks later we thought that it was going to be more than a handful of weeks that we were out of the office. ROB: That was a rude awakening for a lot of us. “Oh wait, this basement setup I'm in? This is a lifestyle.” That's when I went back to the office and I grabbed some tables and chairs and I said, “Okay, this is going to be for real. I'm bringing home a screen, I'm bringing home anything I want to see for the next few months.” ANGIE: Right. I think everybody had that happen. We did the same thing. We plotted out a very careful schedule for everybody to be able to come one by one and meet me at the office to get any equipment or furniture or anything that they needed so that they could set up some sort of workspace once you realized this may be life. [laughs] ROB: If we rewind a little bit, we mentioned earlier that you are co-founders. Talk about the journey that let you both into a place at the same time where you're like, “Hey, let's start Search Influence and drop whatever we were doing before.” What did that jump look like? WILL: At that time, we had come from working together – we actually met at work, which is I think part of what makes it so effective for us. But what happened was we found ourselves at the beginning of 2006 still in that Katrina hangover, if you will. I had actually just exited another company, and we were looking for what we were going to do next. We had the good fortune that Angie and I don't have the same skillsets. Angie is a businessperson. She has a degree in accounting and has spent her whole career in that side of the businesses, whereas I, oddly enough, have a degree in architecture, but I've spent my whole adult career on the more creative and development side. We saw this opportunity, especially post-Katrina, that there were a lot of small businesses that were decimated. It actually wasn't too much unlike right now, except that the infrastructure didn't exist for these companies to go online as they had to after Katrina. Angie's family runs a chiropractic clinic, and we saw them as sort of a prototype. They had been located in a place called Chalmette. They were the Chalmette Chiropractic Clinic. Chalmette is a New Orleans suburb that you really don't hear enough about in the context of Katrina, but it flooded from two directions, and one of those directions came through an oil field. So it wasn't just wet; it was wet and oily. We really had to restart their business online. For a little while, the Chalmette Chiropractic Clinic was practicing out of our garage. And then, because it was 2006, we were able to build their brand rather quickly online, rebuilding them as New Orleans Chiropractic and ultimately the Maple Street Chiropractic Clinic. ANGIE: And making sure that their patients could find them. At that point in time, it wasn't just about cellphone service and so forth. People were searching online for where did they go, where did they set back up. Thankfully, Will had exited; I still had my current role, an accounting and HR role at a business, so we were able to not only have the time, because I had moved into consulting, but also have the funds and also the time to really get it going and truly focus on the business between both of us. I think we were lucky and we also had an agreement that we would only start a business that didn't require going out and finding investors or getting loans. So we were able to get it going just between the two of us and devote everything we had to it. ROB: What sort of business were you working in together when you met? WILL: That business morphed over the time that we were there. It was originally a website business, and then we moved into online Yellow Pages. You remember Yellow Pages, right? ROB: I do. I sure do. WILL: We actually put them online so that they looked like the book, which was –  ANGIE: Weird. [laughs] ROB: It reminds me a little bit – I had a friend in the agency business who exited his agency, and what they used to do was take the corporate earnings reports and he would put them on CD-ROMs and make it look just like the real thing, but on a CD-ROM and maybe a little bit interactive. He built a good business of it. So you can never underestimate what that looks like. You can see how that would lead adjacently, then, to the search side where you would have some of those technical chops of how to do that right. I can see the transition there, for sure. ANGIE: Right. WILL: It really was. I remember having a conversation with a guy who was at Yellow Pages. It was shortly after I'd exited that business and I was thinking about maybe going to work for them, and I said to him, “What's your biggest priority for these phonebooks?” He said, “Anti-scraping technology.” He turned it around and asked me the same question: “What would be your biggest priority?” I said, “Making our data as accessible to Google as humanly possible.” So clearly, I didn't get that job. ROB: Yeah, there's a little bit of a strategy delta there. But somehow those businesses managed to wander around. I knew some folks here a few years ago who were working for YP.com, which is YellowPages.com. I don't know if they're in there selling to car dealerships and TV stations or what they're doing, but those businesses remain around. There was obviously at some point a step where it made sense, Angie, for you to join full-time as well. What did it look like when you started growing the team? Who did you need to join? At some point I'm sure it came from “We're doing this, we're not taking investors, we're not taking on debt” to “Hey, this is kind of a good business. We can grow it.” ANGIE: Right. If I had to guess, looking back, I maybe spent six more months consulting within the other company. Having two of us full-time devoted to it was not necessary when you only had – we weren't even employees; we weren't even getting paid. So once we started having employees, you start to have to build all the processes, the handbook, the payroll. I was bookkeeping sitting at night for an hour, no big deal, super easy. But once we started having employees and growing that side of the business, that's really when I think it took over for me. Our first employee was actually somebody who stepped in and worked with Will really closely on what we now would look back and probably call account management, because it was strategy, and then we had – at the time we were outsourcing all of our production work. They would basically strategize with our production teams outside of the company. ROB: Got it. That's an interesting little strategy there. Different people still recommend, even at scale, having different percentages of the work go outside the firm and then have some burstable capacity outside of there. I think probably one part of your journey where you've had to make a lot of decisions is what to add and what not to add. You mentioned you're in three verticals now, but you could be in 12 or 20, and there's probably some services you've added over time and some you haven't. How have you navigated that decision of “We're going to add this line of service; we're not going to add this line of service. We're going to add this vertical; we're not going to add this vertical”? How have you navigated the temptation to do everything? WILL: I think it was about 10 years ago that I coined the phrase, “If we really want to lose money, we'll take a website client.” The thing is, there's a very different skillset there. What we do instead is we have partners that we work with to build websites at different scales for different clients if they need them. But the things that we do really, really well are much more quantitative. We also developed a practice around content, so much so that we built an internal tool that we ultimately turned into an external-facing tool that we call UpScribed. It's a platform that other marketers can use to have direct access to our content team. We had a period in time where we were the backend for a company that has been acquired – and they may still have the same name – Yodel, who was one of the big direct to SMB digital marketing companies probably between 2007 and 2013-2014. We were doing as much as 10,000 pieces of content a month for them. ROB: Wow. WILL: As you can imagine, we didn't employ the writers and editorial staff to do all of that, so we built a process where we had an internal editorial team and platforms to manage external freelancers for the actual creative of that. ANGIE: That we will use today. WILL: Yeah, that we still use today. And UpScribed has clients using it external to Search Influence as well. ANGIE: Because it turns out that is an agency problem. [laughs] Which is probably not a surprise to anyone. I think right now – it's funny; I was actually chuckling inside my head that you maybe were a fly on the wall in the last few weeks, because we've been discussing literally writing out the services that we are going to spend all of our focus and time on. We do quarterly planning, we do annual planning. These are the services that we should be planning around, and that's SEO and paid search. Sorry, SEO and paid advertising. I have to get my words right. Then those other services that we do still offer, like website builds and PR and so forth, we would find really good partners if we don't already have them. A lot of it we already have a great partner for. And to your point of what things we outsource, we outsource and partner with different people who are really good at that stuff. There's people out there who are very good at video production. Why would we build that? That would be silly, because there's some really great video production companies out there that we can use, and use their strengths. WILL: And it turns out that somewhere in the last decade, people have forgotten how to do SEO. I think as everybody's gotten on the whole inbound content marketing bandwagon, we've forgotten the basic blocking and tackling of SEO. Oftentimes, we'll come across a site that has great content that's completely inaccessible to search. I think of myself as having grown up in SEO because back in 1999, we were using GoTo.com to try to figure out what keywords we were going to stuff into the metatags. So really, for us, when we think of the things that we've trained our team on historically and where we feel like we're adding a lot of value, it's in those places that are technical and quantitative and ultimately that we're able to demonstrate very good return on those investments because of that tactical focus. ROB: Has there ever been a service area that helped teach you some of these lessons? Like you dabbled in it and you realized – maybe it was websites, maybe there was something else. Sometimes our eyes get a little bit big for our appetites and we say, “Oh sure, let's do that too,” and then we get our hand smacked one way or another. ANGIE: I think maybe it wasn't services and it was more so certain clients, probably, that led us down “Yeah, we can figure out cross-domain tracking for this and that,” and then you get into it and you're like, whoa, this was a much bigger thing than we thought it was. But then you're there and you've got to figure it out. So I think it was probably more the client side that drove us down some of these more technical areas. ROB: That makes sense. If we broaden that a little bit, what are some bigger picture lessons you've learned along the way that if you were picking up the phone to yourself 15 years ago, you'd be like, “Hey, you're going to want to do this. Don't do that. Do this differently”? WILL: This is one of those things – and I think time and maturity allow you to really look at these things in the right way. Almost all of those lessons helped us to better understand the kind of company that we want to be. A great example is we spent about five years with a single reseller representing way too much of our business. The kind of work that they needed was much more fulfillment, much more high throughput work, and it was not as satisfying for our team to execute on. It didn't make for the greatest work environment for some of our team for a while. And then after all that, they decided to take that business in-house, which meant that they were taking a really big chunk of our revenue with them. I think that was a really good lesson learned. When you find yourself with too much concentration in one customer, you've really got to get busy making sure that you're doing the business development work that makes them not so monolithic. I think anybody who's ever worked with customers knows, when a customer comes to you and says, “Hey, I want to give you five times as much money,” you don't say, “Hey, sorry, we can't take that because that would screw up our customer concentration.” ANGIE: Right, because a lot of people do talk about that. They say, “Don't let a single customer get to X percentage of your revenue.” It's like, don't let them? So, say no? Who's going to do that? No one's going to do that. So really, the answer is not that. It's when they offer that, you go and you find more of that in other clients. ROB: Notoriously – I'm here in Atlanta, and one of the bigger agencies here for a good while has been Moxie, and they're owned in a holding company now. But when they were acquired, at least if the street reports are to be believed, they had 200 or 300 people and 70% of their business was Verizon. Every time a new iPhone launched, they had to do all the in-store collateral, just fire drill. Are you going to say no to that? You've got 150 people you can put on the payroll to serve this client. You figure out how to grow out of it. I think what is often the case with some of these reseller, these channel relationships, these subcontract relationships, is sometimes they're selling a deal that you haven't quite figured out how to sell yet. Was that your experience? Or did their business look a lot like business you were bringing in yourself? WILL: It actually didn't look like the business we were bringing in ourselves. In fact, we found ourselves with two account management teams, one that was serving our direct clients and one that was serving this reseller. And there were a couple of other smaller resellers as well, and their lived experience day to day was very different, and their understanding of the work that we did also was very different. So it was hard to move somebody from that partner account management team to the direct account management team or vice versa and have them be Day 1 ready. ANGIE: The reseller was selling packages because you could sell them – you didn't have to understand everything. If you have a large sales team, it is much easier to hand them a package that says, “This is what you're getting on this month in Month 2, 3, 4, 5, 6,” whatever it is. It was the same work over and over, whereas our direct clients were much more about the marketing funnel and creativity and so forth. ROB: So even some of those clients may have been – would it be fair to say they were a little bit smaller where the direct engagement might not make sense? Was there a delta in deal size, or was it just a matter of the relationship? WILL: I think generally speaking, those that were coming in through our reseller partners were smaller than we would've approached directly. ANGIE: Yes. WILL: They were much more true SMB. The other thing that we talk about as an opportunity and that we try to tell new business owners about when we encounter them is that we didn't know how many services were available for small businesses when we started this up. Things like SBA's Small Business Development Center and all of the different networks and ecosystems. We literally had a meeting with one of those organizations, the local big entrepreneur ecosystem entity, and we sat down with them and we were like, “Hey, you guys are doing great things here. We'd love to get engaged. How can you help us out?” As we were talking to them, they started asking us questions like, “How many people do you have? How much revenue do you have?” At the end of the conversation, they were like, “You seem like the kind of people who could really help us out.” ROB: [laughs] Wow. WILL: Yeah. Not the plan. But I think there are so many of those services available that smaller entrepreneurs who are coming up in that classic startup ecosystem don't really have a sense of. ROB: What are a couple more of those that you would say someone should at least take a look at and not miss out on? Maybe New Orleans driven, maybe more national in scope. What should people pay attention to? ANGIE: Later on – probably much later on, I went through the 10,000 Small Businesses program, I guess you would call it. It's put on by Goldman Sachs, and I would say that's a really good one. And it is everywhere. They're all over the place. They do a really great job of walking through – you don't have to go there with questions. They assume you don't know anything and you're going to learn it in the classes. So that's a really good one. WILL: I was going to say we have a number of purpose-driven organizations that I think are opportunities as well. There's one called the Good Work Network that tends to work mostly with smaller businesses primarily in marginalized areas, and I'm sure that there are sort of sisters around the country. There's one called Vet Launch, which is focused specifically on veteran entrepreneurs. I would say that there are going to be dozens of these, and if you can find one that you can plug in consistent with their affinity, the resources are going to be invaluable. ROB: That's a great thought, to think about plugging into the affinity. It creates that extra link. Sometimes it's hard to ask for help, it's hard to ask for mentors, it's hard to ask for advice. Sometimes that linkage can be a relationship you incubate over time, but it sounds like a great shortcut you're talking about there, about navigating through a shared interest. That's a really great thought there. Angie, Will, I'm sure when people want to find Search Influence, I'm sure they can search for you and find you pretty quickly. But if people want to connect to you, how else should they go about finding you, connecting with you, and keeping track of what's next for Search Influence? WILL: Our website, searchinfluence.com, and our blog are really great places to start. We are pretty active as a company on Facebook and LinkedIn, and Instagram as well. Those are all great places to connect with us. ROB: It's not to be missed. LinkedIn in some ways seems to continue in effectiveness, even though – you probably have this worse than I do – the random connections. I don't know how you handle them. I get a lot more than I'd like to get, I'll put it that way. WILL: What's funny is that I've been getting a lot of them – a lot of my random connections lately have actually been somewhat relevant. So if I do choose to connect with folks, I'll say, “Hey, I connected with you because I'm interested in this thing that's in your bio. I'm not a buyer today, but I wanted to have you in my list of connections.” ROB: Nice. WILL: Especially when you're working B2B. When we're approaching folks who work in higher ed or who work in hospitals and health systems, they're on LinkedIn and they're paying attention. So from a cold outreach to start a conversation perspective, I find LinkedIn to be the most effective. ROB: Makes so much sense. Angie, Will, congratulations on building, growing, sustaining a meaningful business through making it through some challenging times and some good ones. Thank you for sharing your journey with us. It's really helpful. I think it's motivating, and there's great little tips all along the way to learn from. Thank you so much for sharing. ANGIE: Yes, thank you for having us. WILL: Yeah, Rob, thanks for having us on. I was glad to be introduced to your podcast because in prepping for this, I came across a number of episodes that I thought were really useful. ROB: Well, thank you. We all need to get outside our head sometimes, and that's part of it as well. Thanks for coming on. Be well. ANGIE: Thank you. ROB: Bye. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Rahul Raj is founder and CMO of 5&Vine, a fractional CMO and marketing agency that identifies industry incumbents' vulnerabilities, market changes, and technological opportunities to enable startup brands to challenge and overtake established brands.  The agency focuses on challenger brands that have both economic and social goals, e.g., increasing financial literacy, addressing discrimination, or making organic food more accessible to the masses.  Before starting 5&Vine, Raj worked at a Canadian thermostat startup, Ecobee. The big-name competitors, Honeywell and Nest, owned the market. Their vulnerability: single location thermostats did not address the comfort of people in “different” parts of their homes. Ecobee developed a system of individual room sensors that identified temperature and occupancy so that people could be comfortable where they were, instead of only being comfortable in the “single thermostat” hallway. The technological opportunity, Bluetooth, enabled sensors located in different rooms to communicate to the main thermostat without the need for “dropping wires.” The company had no money, no “presence,” and no awareness. It invested heavily in customer support, won converts, and curated reviews. Ecobee had 10% of the five-star reviews of big-name competitor Nest . . . with only 0.1% of the market share – which made Ecobee larger than they actually were.  Faced with a profound family tragedy, Rahul left Ecobee, interviewed over 200 companies, received 10 offers, and decided he wanted to “date.” With each company, he agreed to work for anywhere from a week to a month which de-risked the hiring process for both sides. He so loved working as a “fractional CMO” that he professionalized his “dating” and launched a fractional CMO agency. Rahul's “sweet spot” is working with referred clients are those who are “pre Series A to just post Series B” – those who have the financial resources to invest in marketing and are highly motivated to grow. In keeping with his “dating” philosophy, Rahul typically works for a company for up to three days to ensure there is a personal and intellectual fit. If both Rahul and the customer are satisfied, they write a formal contract. Of the thirty or so companies 5&Vine has worked with, the agency has taken a significantly reduced financial compensation from five or six – in exchange for equity or options in the client organization. Rahul has developed a formalized process to discern vulnerabilities that open opportunities for his startup clients to beat more-established companies. Use the web to research the big company's product Compare customer reviews to the company's product claims Buy and use the product and compare your experience to the company claims and to customer's reviews. Answer the questions: What are people yearning for? What is being under-delivered, and  What opportunity exists for your startup to come up with a powerful product that will prove a market winner? In this interview, he also notes that it is helpful to determine what has changed over time. . . and what technologies could be applied to solve problems. Rahul spoke at HubSpot's 2020 Inbound Conference on Go-To-Market Strategies for Startups: A Framework + Insights from One Challenger Brand to Another. He can be found on his agency's website at 5andVine.   Transcript Follows: Rob: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host Rob Kischuk and I am excited to be joined today by Rahul Raj, founder and CMO of 5&Vine based in Toronto, Canada. Welcome to the podcast, Rahul. Rahul: Thanks so much I'm delighted to be here. Rob: It's excellent to have you here. Would've loved to meet up with you in person at the Inbound conference, which you spoke on and we'll talk about that, but glad to be on the line too, in virtual land. Why don't you start off by telling us about 5&Vine and what your agency superpower is? Rahul: Fantastic. We are a fractional CMO and marketing agency that helps startups and scale-ups take on industry incumbents and win. We focus on challenger brands that have some type of social pursuit alongside an economic aim. Whether that be financial literacy or addressing discrimination head on or making organic food more accessible to the masses. What we're particularly great at is identifying the vulnerabilities of the industry incumbents and using that to help propel the challenger brands that we work with to positions where they either take on or take down those industry incumbents. Rob: And you have some experience with that yourself having worked in a startup and a challenger brand before starting the firm, right? Rahul: I do indeed. Yeah. Prior to starting 5&Vine, I was the CMO at a technology company called Ecobee. Now, when I joined that firm, they were single digit million in sales, they were focused on the B2B market with a smart thermostat. That organization had a tremendous opportunity to go head-to-head with both Nest and Honeywell in the consumer space, but they were very reluctant to do so. Obviously, both of those organizations like Honeywell, as an example, created the thermostat and are a massive multi-billion-dollar organization with a variety of product lines that essentially translates to deep pockets. On the side of Nest, they were the darlings of Silicon Valley, started by Tony Fidel, who was the principal designer behind the Apple iPhone. And so they had tremendous street credit on the design side. And so here was this little engine that could call Ecobee in the Canadian marketplace that kind of wanted to rattle the cages of those big dogs. And, in essence, what we did was we identified the single biggest vulnerability of both of those organizations. And that vulnerability being that consumers are uncomfortable in their homes despite hiring a thermostat to make them comfortable. And the reason is that both of them measured the temperature in one spot only and it was typically in something like a hallway. Now, if you spend the entirety of your life in the hallway, outside of your thermostat, you are going to have one cushy life when it comes to temperature. But if you're like the vast majority of humans that sleep in their bedroom that eat in their dining room or hang out in their rec room, you're probably going to experience hot and cold spots. With that insight in mind, we created what was deemed to be a room sensor. Now a room sensor measured temperature and occupancy. So, we knew which room you were in, and we could help curate the comfort for the room that you were in instead of by the hallway. The way that we framed it from a language point of view is that Ecobee delivered comfort in the rooms that matter. So, there was a sub text, which was Ecobee: for homes with more than one room. And that, that strategy of going and addressing a fundamental design flaw that existed with thermostats was the cornerstone that enabled us to take on those industry incumbents. Rob: That's interesting. I didn't know that Ecobee story so much and, I'm just curious, how did those room sensors connect through to the main thermostat? Rahul: Yes, it was done through Bluetooth. Rob: That makes sense. And that really highlights it. You know, one of the things that can make a startup a success is by taking advantage of something that has changed in the market. And something that has changed in the market is Bluetooth, right? Very few people would string wires around their house to connect different rooms, to connect the sensor back to the thermostat, but with Bluetooth or even if it had been Wi-Fi or something like that, that's something that changed in the market that it seems like hadn't fully been exploited by the incumbents or even the splashy new entrants. Rahul: A 100%. Yeah. I think that they kind of fail to acknowledge the customer pain point, failed to sort of conceive of a solution. And then it was the like solving for “how do you make that solution technically feasible.” Now that the sort of first chapter of that story. The second chapter, just in brief, was that we had no money and we had no presence and no awareness. And so what we ended up doing to get this product out into the market was that we invested disproportionately in customer support, over marketing. And so the intent was to go out and find people that had this pain point, sell them on the resolution of the pain point, which is be comfortable in the rooms that matter, but then go out of our way to deliver on support. So if they needed help with the installation, we would stay on the phone with them the entire time. We would go out of our way to do whatever it took to make sure they had an extraordinary experience.  Now, at the end of that experience, we say, if you're happy with our product and our service, could you do us a solid and write us a review. There wasn't any sort of bias towards it, where it was like writing a review that consisted of X nor was that like write a review and we'll give you X dollars. It was just based on reciprocity – doing the right thing. If we go out of our way to do right by you, could you please help us with a review? And in the end, we had about 10% of the five-star reviews that Nest had with like 0.1% of the market share. So, we presented an image to the world that we were bigger than we actually were. And then we worked like heck to close the gap between the perception and our reality and grew our sales. Rob: That's a great point. And in your talk at the Inbound conference was go to market strategies for startups, a framework and insights from one challenger brand to the other. And I think that kind of tees into the question of how you build a business and agency around finding these insights. Because a lot of times what you have is this sort of survivorship bias where a company survives, and then you go back and you write the story of why they succeeded. But you're really putting yourself in the position where you need to have a process to uncover these insights about what the vulnerability is in the market. How do you get to that? Rahul: Yeah, it's a great question. I think the starting point is just like web research about the product. So obviously there's a bunch of commentary that's put out by the organization about what they're great at and perhaps what they're not as great at. So that becomes your starting point and it's the hypothesis that you're trying to validate working validate. So, the next step is to go to customer reviews and seeing whether the customers substantiate the strength of that product or service or whether the company is misleading people by stating that they are better than they actually are and so that becomes the second phase. The third phase is to buy the products yourself and experience them in some way and determine whether your experience is in fact reflective of the reviews and what the company has stated or not. I think in total, that that gives you a sense of what are people yearning for that is being under-delivered and what opportunity exists for your startup to really come out with a powerful product or service and clean up. Rob: Wow. And so you've talked a little bit about the origin story of the business, and I think we can kind of see the overall through-line, but it's still nonetheless a significant jump to go from CMO of a sort of scaled physical product startup into starting 5&Vine as a services organization. What led you into taking that jump? Rahul: Yeah, I mean, truthfully, I did not architect this. I accidentally stumbled upon it. So, when I left Ecobee, it was on the back of a profound amount of family tragedy, five deaths in three months, murder, a suicide. My father was given three months to live, it was overwhelming. Through the negotiation of that grief, I read an adage that said you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. And it resonated so deeply with me that my quest was actually to find my five. So, I went through the process of evaluating a number of jobs, and I had 287 job-related conversations, which translated into 10 offers. And with each of those 10 offers, I wanted the experience of working with them before I drew a conclusion about whether I wanted to engage full time. So, in other words, I wanted to date. I didn't want to get married because I was aware that dating behavior in marriage behavior are materially different. So for each of them, I said, let me work with you for anywhere between a week to a month, pay me and we will essentially de-risk the hiring for both sides. So, I did this 10 times, and with each of them, I was able to make a significant impact to their business, to help them see opportunities that perhaps they were otherwise they were otherwise unaware of. And, and that was all done in a very short period of time. Now, the reframe of that experience is that I was engaged as a fractional CMO instead of a full-time CMO. And I loved the civility with which I was able to engage because I was treated almost more like a guest than a family member. Can I decided that this was such a delightful experience and the variety was so appealing that instead of taking any one of those jobs, I would just professionalize my dating and launch a fractional CMO agency. Rob: And at what point did it become clear that you were going to have to get some more people on board? You know, obviously it's one thing you can kind of picture making your own way kind of as a consultant, but there's another inflection point from there where you say, gosh, I need some help and even get to the point where you may have other people who are running that primary fractional CMO seat. What was that transition like? Rahul: Again, it was relatively like a logical transition and it kind of comes back to de-risking the move. So, when I needed extra help whether it would be in PR and growth in social, in content, in design. I would initially go to trusted people in my network that I could engage on a contract. And so, I would start paying them to do the work. We would evaluate or solidify our chemistry, both personality wise, intellect wise. And it was only when the expense for that discipline became significant enough that I could make the calculus to say, I think it would be more economical to hire someone full-time than it would be to continue on contract. And that's when I started building up my team. Rob: You make it sound so logical, but I, you can also see it, it really is kind of a steady sort of building block path to progress. Now, one thing that strikes me, particularly when you're talking about startups, a challenge that some agencies have when they work with startups is client selection. Because you have to essentially find clients that you can help, but also are financially solvent enough to not leave you hanging with open invoices. How do you think about process of choosing the right risks when it comes to clients? Rahul: Yeah, it's a fascinating question. There's a few dimensions to the answer. So, I'd say as a general rule, what I've learned is my sweet spot is just pre-Series A to just post-Series B. And the reason for that is that the organizations have the financial resources to invest in marketing and to pay me, but it beautifully aligns with their motivation to grow. They've they need to show aggressive growth as they, in order to land financing, or if they've just landed financing, they need to show their investors that it was worth it, that they can grow at the pace that they originally promised. So that's my sweet spot when it comes to . . . Rob: Okay. Have they typically raised seed money or have bootstrapped their way to some measure of viability at that point? Rahul: Yes. Yes. So, it's either that, or the founders themselves have means either due to a previous success, the discipline of saving, or family means. Rob: I see. And so, it definitely makes sense that somebody who's pre-Series A, you know, they're looking for that edge. They're looking to come into that fundraise with all of their advantages and with articulation of their differentiation and that's always an investor conversation, is what makes you different. And so, I can certainly see, you probably are plumbing some words into some investor decks along your way, Rahul: 100%. Yeah. I've pitched X so far for the startups that I engage with, and it's been amazing to even join them alongside those pitches to help close financing. Rob: And how do you think about customer acquisition in this way? Because it seems to me that startups are, they kind of show up, they get some degree of success. Sometimes they disappear there. It's not like targeting a Fortune 500 firm, everybody knows where Coca-Cola is and how to find them. You may have to navigate the organization to get there, but it seems to me that startups right around as they're getting to your sweet spot can be a little bit hard to find even. How are you finding these businesses? Rahul: So, fortunately it's all referral based. There's no active prospecting, it is just word-of-mouth, because I think when you start to see a startup do well, many people ask, well, how the heck did that happen? Right. Where did these guys come from and what drove their growth? And when I'm associated with that story and whether it's helping in a minor way or in a major way – that helps generate more client work. Rob: Got it. Rahul, you've been at this for a little bit now, what are some lessons you've learned in building 5&Vine that you might do a little bit differently if you were starting over from scratch today? Rahul: Yeah. Great question. So I think the first is, it's something that I'm now practicing I just didn't realize that at the beginning But I employ the same first date premise that I did with the job prospects that I referenced earlier to the startup clients. So, because fit matters and it's really, it's hard to assess fit during an interview process. I'd like to start by engaging in one to three days' worth of paid work with the client, but I don't need a contract. I just work on the honor system and I want to see whether our personality-based chemistry in our intellectual-based chemistry works. And if they're happy with the value that I've delivered and they like me, and I feel the same way about them, then we'll formalize a contract. And to me, it's not how I necessarily started, but it's what I've embraced now, it's very different than trying to hunt for as many clients as you can and treating them all as just dollar signs to build your business. I'm not trying to optimize for money alone, I'm trying to optimize for joy, social impact and fair economic compensation so that's one of the big lessons. Rob: Got it. It's funny how sometimes there are things we instinctively do early in our business that we don't realize we value. It sounds like you were doing this dating and then you kind of got away from it and you've realized that it wasn't just something that you did. It's actually something you did that was valuable along the way, it's an interesting journey there. Does anything else come to mind that you might adjust? Rahul: Definitely. The second one is, thinking about the composition of your compensation. I have out of the, certainly, 30 companies that we've worked with, there were about five or six where I have taken a meaningfully reduced financial compensation in exchange for equity or options in that organization. And that is just a powerful decision to make, but it obviously comes along with a proportionate level of risk. But it's powerful because when that organization does well, its game changing, it's just game changing. So, give you one example and knowing that you're in Atlanta, this will land pretty well, but one of my early clients was a company called Greenlight Financial, based in Atlanta. Greenlight is a smart debit card for kids that helps parents teach kids about financial literacy in an era where we're no longer as dependent on paper bills. Right? So, because our transactions occur virtually Greenlight helps facilitate that conversation and that education between parents and kids using a debit card and a mobile app, and they do an extraordinary job. When I was engaged, we grew the business significantly enough to close a Series A, led by Amazon. Recently within the past month, Greenlight has closed a $215 million round of financing that values the company at $1.2 billion. Trust me that I am delighted that I took a reduced financial compensation and have a piece of that business. Rob: Yeah, that's a great one to be in, they are certainly on their way, but early on, I think there were probably along the lines of what you were saying with the thermostat. Some unspoken kind of concerns and skepticism from the market. I know those folks, Johnson Cook, I think I know over there, I've known for a while. I think, Tim that's in charge of it.  Rahul: That's correct, yeah. Rob: Anyhow. They used to be right down the hall from us So, I know Greenlight well. Rahul: Do you know TBC as well? Rob: Yes. Absolutely. But talking about the insights, what was the insight in that payment market that really, it seems to me that the challenge would be trust. I think I had a little bit of skepticism and trust around the product when they first rolled it out the way I knew the people involved were excellent. Most people don't have that privilege. So how did you think about the differentiation and opportunity in the market with Greenlight? Rahul: Yes, there was, I guess to your exact point, because it's trust-based, you de-risk a situation when you know someone that has used it and derives value from it. So, you need to take something that is a private experience – and most financial things are private – and you need to help make the private public, and you can do that through storytelling. And so what we did fairly early on was we had great relationships with the parents and kids that were using our product and with their permission either encourage them to share their story on social and or enable us to share their stories on social. But we did so in such a way that the storytelling was, you were exposed to the storytelling, likely from someone in your community, in your city or someone that was relatable because their kids play in a particular sports league that your kids played in. So we made the private engagement with the product or public but did so in a way that you could relate to, and that was familiar to you. Rob: Wow. That's really intriguing and for the sake of Rahul, but as well as for the sake of your children, go check out Greenlight is a really, really cool product. I would encourage anybody listening to go have a look. I think the market is certainly validated that there is something there, there is value there, and I will vouch that there are good people working on it, so that's really exciting. Rahul, when you look ahead, when you look at what's coming up for 5&Vine, or maybe more broadly in the market of either marketing or innovation, what's exciting to you that's coming up? Rahul: So, we're evolving our business into a venture studio model where we are taking a bigger position in companies but taking on a higher level of risk in developing their brand, their websites, and their acquisition strategies. So, in essence, whereas a venture capital firm might put in dollars and then the use of proceeds is to do those things, we are doing the same thing, except we're giving all of our intellectual capital to these organizations to help them develop and accelerate them in exchange for more material equity positions. And that to me is unbelievably exciting because there's so much skin in the game. Where our future essentially depends on the success of those organizations and I'm just so excited to unleash more of the team's talents in bringing more socially responsible brands to market. Rob: That's interesting. And it's really interesting from a team compensation perspective, because oftentimes a lot of agencies will get into a model of some sort of profit sharing or distribution or something like that. How do you think about, is there any way you've been able to align the equity upside to the incentives of your team to kind of be staked into the long-term success of the clients? Rahul: Yeah, truthfully, not yet. But the model that I'm exploring – but I have not yet solved for – is the venture capital model. And my understanding of the venture capital model takes into consideration is: who's working on the business, how long are they working on that business, and then what is the outcome? And then how do you proportionately share proceeds based on agency and risk and by agency, I think involvement. And that's the trickiest part of this model is that we all know there's turnover. People leave agencies for a variety of reasons and so you want to ensure if they contributed to the success of an organization, that they can benefit from it for the time that they were involved. But the related thing is to what extent does it impact their base compensation? Because it's a risk model and the risks or the return isn't necessarily generated in the first two years, five years, or even 10 years. Right? And so, I'm trying to figure out how to structure it in such a way that it's equitable, doesn't disadvantage people, also they're still able to live fairly, get compensated fairly, but benefit from that level of upside, knowing that it's the agency that's taking on the most risk. Rob: Right. I've been having some conversations lately with attorneys. I've been facing down a similar thing because coming from an investor-funded product business, as I have, but also a services business, which we are spinning up. What you run into, if you just follow a typical startup pattern of granting equity, not that you run out of equity, but you keep diluting people with people who are not there anymore. And on the one hand you want them to benefit from the upside maybe . . . probably . . . not at the expense of everyone, they're not at the expense of maybe even an investor. So I've been tweaking with an idea, and I'm not sure if we're going to get anywhere with it, but if I can find an attorney who will make this format public the same way that some attorneys have made like safe notes and certain sorts of, investment instruments, they've made them public and sort of open source. What I've been thinking is to have people vest into a profit sharing and equity pool that they vest out of, they relinquish when they leave and that doesn't fully solve things. We had an episode where we talked to Soze, which is an agency out of Brooklyn. And they, it wasn't like Monte Python where they were an autonomous collective, but they said something kind of like that. It was a very like Brooklyn kind of hippy sounding, but really compelling and empathetic way where they, nobody owns that agency, they're a co-op I think they said. So, everybody owns the share that they own for the time they've been there while they're there and then it goes back in the pool when they leave. And so, I think somewhat inspired by that I've been tweaking with ideas and I, I don't know where I will get with it. I hope if anyone else has some thoughts on it, I'd love to hear drop me an email. Rahul: Oh, that's fascinating. We should make sure to stay in touch on that one then. Rob: Yeah. I think it's something that needs to be solved for, I mean, a service business with an interest in the product, which is what we are, which is what you are. I don't know how many of those there are, but I'm a big believer in letting the team share in the upside. And it's a lot easier to reckon that I think on the services side, it's here's profit sharing. but it's, it's harder when it's longer term it's harder when it's, it's something that's not, it's not divisible in the same way.  Rahul: Yeah, fascinating. Rob: Well, Rahul, when people want to find you and when they want to find 5&Vine, where should they look for you? Rahul: Yeah, the best way is online. Our website is 5andvine.com. It's the number 5, A-, N-, D-, V-, like Victor, I-, N-, E.com. And as you referenced earlier, it's based on the David and Goliath story where David took five stones from a river and use that in a slingshot to take down Goliath. So, he made a Slingshot out of vine. So it's 5 and Vine Rob: That's a good, concise backstory as well. Well, Rahul, thank you for your time. Thank you for sharing your story and I'm sure the audience will benefit well from it Rahul: Much appreciated. Thanks so much for having me on. Rob: Be well. Bye-bye.  Thank you for listening. The marketing agency podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive to learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

John Lawson, Chief Executive Officer at Colder Ice Media, started in e-commerce in 2000 on eBay. He claims that people talked about business in Ebay chat rooms, making it  “the first social commerce platform” before there was such a term. At the time, John sold bandanas, and was pestered by constant customer questions for information on “how to fold a bandana.” So, he made a video and tracked ten thousand sales – not ten thousand dollars in sales – from that single video listing. Today's digital/social media was not the beginning of social commerce. John says, “No matter where you go, whether first world country or third world country, there is a central location that is a marketplace where people do commerce” and that no matter the channel, there is always a person on the other end. If you appeal to human instinct, people will respond. Commerce, by its very nature, requires human interaction and “social” should be much more broadly defined. John explains that there are social channels that many people do not recognize as social, e.g., Amazon Comments. John wrote a book, Kickass Social Commerce, which offers universal stories of social commerce (as opposed to social media). In one story the book, he tells how Madam C.J. Walker, an African-American entrepreneur, developed a line of hair care products, marketed them to her friends, then sold them door to door, and finally had her friends set up “product presentation” parties for a cut of the sales, a sales strategy later used by such companies as Tupperware and Avon. Walker became the first self-made female millionaire in the US. John describes this as “early social marketing.” John presented “Twenty-one Kickass Social Commerce Tactics to Sell More Today” at HubSpot's 2020 Inbound Conference, where he talked about the phases of social that make people buy and “the flywheel of contacting, engaging, getting people to take action, and then measuring that action to create better contact.” Two key concepts he covered were: Identify and define your avatar, your King Consumer . . . and profile in detail a minimum of three people who would purchase your product. Establish a need for reciprocity. DO SOMETHING for your King Consumer that creates an imbalance that makes them feel that the need to do something for you in return. In a candid and enlightening history lesson, John also discusses how race has impacted the growth and development of black entrepreneurship. Thank you, John. John can be reached through “Colder Ice” on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest – almost everywhere except on Tick-Tock. ROB: Welcome to the marketing agency leadership podcast, I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined today by John Lawson, Chief Executive Officer of Colder Ice Media, based in Atlanta, Georgia. Welcome to the podcast, John. JOHN: Hey, thanks for having me, bro. ROB: Yeah. Good to have you here. If we were you know, if it weren't COVID, we might meet up in person. JOHN: Right? ROB: We have an Atlanta episode today. JOHN: Absolutely. ROB: Well, why don't you start off, John, by giving us a rundown of Colder Ice Media and what you all do exceptionally? JOHN: What I do exceptionally. I do e-commerce. Right. And I started my e-commerce business back in 2000 on eBay as a necessity. People were asking me the same question over and over, how to fold a bandana because I sold bandanas. It was annoying. So, I made a video on YouTube on how to fold a bandana. I would give everybody who asked that question that link. That bandana video went completely viral. Three hundred thousand people watched the video. Out of that, we were able to track ten thousand sales – not ten thousand dollars – but actual sales from that single video listing. That was like a cavalcade of understanding for me as people started asking me, “Hey, how do you do videos for selling stuff online?” I'm like, “Answer questions that people want.” That got me on stages. Finally I was like, “OK, if you need help with how to use social – the whole world of social – then that's what we did with Colder Ice Media. ROB: That's a very fun story. I can see why someone would put you on stage to talk about it. I think within that, at a tactical level, there's some cleverness, I think probably in your attribution –  because when you're talking about was not the easiest time to tie through who bought this thing. So how did you sort out that people were buying OR buying more of your product from that particular video? What was your tracking? JOHN: We would just look at the Google tag. Google tells you where traffic was coming from and we would see YouTube, YouTube, YouTube, and I'm like, “Dude, this is crazy.: And then, like you say, back in the day, the tools were not that deep, but they would show you the views. I would see these peaks and valleys in the number of views.  The week of Halloween, the peak would be 10X normal viewership. I had no idea that Halloween would be a great time to run specials selling bandanas. And I got that kind of information just by the volume of watchers during that Halloween week. So, it's if you take all of the parts, then you start seeing trends. You can't see a trend in a month. I know people think you can, but a real trend comes over years. When you see something happen three years, you can jump on and really take advantage of those little blips that other people are not able to see because they're just getting started. So, there's value in being there for a long haul, especially on social media. ROB: Wow. How many YouTube channels do you have in your orbit now? JOHN: Five. Yeah, I'm short. I will tell you one thing that I do – every time I get a new client, I create their own Google space – go out and create a Google account – because you need a Google account to create the YouTube. You're going to need that for writing or using their Google advertising. I will create that entire environment and isolate it for myself. What we do – we can show them the value of one-to-one versus, “Oh, by the way, here's some other tracking inside of your tracking.” I'm like, “No, we're tracking this. Put this in your cart so you can see exactly what our efforts are bringing to your business.” ROB: That makes perfect sense. You got this start in understanding on the video side, but you have this, I think, a broader intentionality around social commerce in general. How has that unfolded – your understanding from that first moment of “a video driving sales” to the broader portfolio of social platforms and tactics? JOHN: That's great . . . I like that question. What happened with me is I got really fascinated with Twitter in the beginning. I'm talking about . . . there were like one hundred thousand people on Twitter when I joined. What was fascinating for me is that I had created this business and I left the office space and I didn't have a whole lot of conversations anymore. So, I started using Twitter to just conversate with people while I was sitting at home in my home office. All of a sudden, it just started naturally moving into, “Hey, what do you do?” “Here's what I do.” “Oh, Ok.” Then I start talking about what I did. The e-commerce thing just started bringing other people in that were in the same field. That made me say, “Why or what is it about being or putting your expertise out that makes people suddenly feel like you are their expert?” You hear about this – everybody today will say, if you want to be an influencer, the first thing you do is start going to places and giving your expertise, There was no playbook when I was doing this. But I would watch this happen and it would happen organically. So, you start wondering. Social is very organic. I know people think it is some technology, but it's really not. I've traveled all over the world and no matter where you go, whether first world country or third world country, there is a central location that is a marketplace where people do commerce. In that commerce marketplace, there's always at least one coffee shop where you have social. Social and commerce go together. I tell people. Facebook was not the first social platform neither was MySpace. Actually, eBay was the first platform. Why? Back in the day, we would sit in these chat rooms while we were waiting for eBay auctions to end. A lot of people were talking about business in those chat rooms. They were a social commerce platform way before there was a term. They were doing social because social has been here since chat boards and chat rooms. AOL was Facebook, 1990. Social has been here forever. And if you grasp what I'd like to call the flywheel of contacting, engaging, getting people to take action, and then measuring that action to create better contact  . . . it goes around and around in that flywheel. And that's kind of what I talked about when we were doing the Inbound thing. It was about the phases of social that make people buy. ROB: Let's get right into that. We were talking beforehand. We were probably hoping to meet up at the Inbound conference and record this live and in person or in Atlanta. But we're not meeting up for things like that right now. But Inbound still happened. HubSpot's big Inbound conference, tens of thousands of people, maybe more – online. And your session there was “Twenty-one Kickass Social Commerce Tactics to Sell More Today.” And so I'd love you to dig in and get us into some of the meat and potatoes, maybe some particular things that you saw resonate back out into your audience on Social because you probably were paying attention to that. JOHN: Yeah, I mean, the first thing I'm all about and I tell people and Ok, I get it these do feel very, "Oh I've heard that before." And that's probably the problem is that if you've heard identify your avatar, I call him the King consumer. If you can identify and get in the mind of your King Consumer, then everything that you do after that speaks to that King Consumer. Create at least one. But I say really, at minimum three people that actually purchase your product. They can be real people or they can be fake people. Let's say you don't have your product in market yet, or you think you know who's going to buy that product when you create this King consumer, what you have to do is start thinking about everything that that consumer is into. I want you to go deep into your thought patterns about, not just what they're what they want, but what do they need, what situation are they in? How do they know how many kids do they have? What job do they have?  What are they what do they listen to? What do they say? What are some of the terminology they use? And the more you find that out, the better your business is going to be. I know when I created our business and I was selling those bandanas, I bought those because I was into hip hop and everybody in my neighborhood was wearing the bandanas. I could sell that to people in my sphere. But once I started putting it out there and getting the feedback from others, I was like, whoa, wait a minute; these aren't hip hoppers that are just buying these. These are the bikers. Oh, wow, that's cool. Like I said, people do in the Halloween. Oh, Ok. Cool. And once I started asking my people, hey, how are you using that? How did you like that? You got to definitely go out there and ask. You have to ask. What you're going to learn from your ask are things you're never going to be able to come up with in your own mind. Things that you think when you think that your product and you are your customer – you're not. You're absolutely not. So back to the original question. Identifying that King consumer is one of the things you have to do. The next thing I talk about was reciprocity. If you do something for others, there becomes an imbalance in them that makes them feel like they have to do something for you. That was the whole thing about me teaching people – and I didn't tell you that is the main question actually was – how to fold a bandana like Tupac. Right. And it's so ridiculous. But remember, this is early 2000s, so or late 2000. So, the deal was in my mind, I'm like; everybody knows how to do that. But here's the deal. The people between the East Coast in the West Coast – those flyovers would watch videos and they wanted the same look and they didn't know. Once I taught them how to fold that bandana, then when they were making their choice on who to buy one from, they automatically thought about, “Hey, those guys taught me how to do it.” And just by the nature of who we are, we wanted to make the balance inside of ourselves with reciprocity. So, I'll buy it from them. They might be a dollar more, but I'll go ahead and do it. So, you really want to think about that. That's human nature. We want to get in balance. We always do. If I ask all my friends to help me move, I know, when one of them asks me to help them move, I can't say no. That's reciprocity. Right? ROB: And it's even more helpful in it's not just that they want to know this information. It's that the Internet to an extent and social have made it possible to ask questions that you're too embarrassed to ask your friends. So, you're bailing people out of feeling silly that they don't know how to fold that bandana. JOHN: Yeah, that's true. That's true. Or, they don't even know who to ask. ROB: Yeah. And that continues on out to – I think you look at the some of the beauty influencers and all these makeup tips. There are people who want to know how to do something with their makeup and they are embarrassed that they cannot. Yeah. YouTube bails us out of that. YouTube bailed me out of not knowing how to fix my toilet . . . anything. JOHN: And think of who are the biggest beauty influencers out there – a lot of them are males. That's crazy, right? But you think these guys wanted to put on makeup and a lot of their audience maybe never did. So, who are you going to ask? Your sister? There's a whole lot I got to do before I ask my sister how to put on makeup, There's a whole lot of steps I got to go through. ROB: Yeah, you're probably not going to get a straight up answer right away on that. JOHN: There's going to be some other conversation where exactly we need to have a deeper conversation. ROB: Amazing. I like how the story it started out. When did you realize that you were going to be into this world of social and commerce and Colder Ice Media for the longer run? Was that evident right away? Or was there something after the instigating moment that really cemented the business for you? JOHN: It was probably around 2012 2013. These guys were writing a column about eBay sellers and they asked me if I could do an interview as one of people who are eBay success stories. I agreed.  We get on the phone and were doing this interview and she's like, ”You're one of ten people we're going to feature blah, blah, blah.” But we stayed on the phone for 80 to 90 minutes. And I was like, “Just for a feature piece, this is kind of weird.” We were just having good conversation. At the end of that call . . . she and her husband are a team and write together . . . . . . at the end of the call, they said, “John, man, that was really good stuff. I think we're going to make a multipart feature just on your business.”  I was like, “Really? That's pretty cool.”  And then he's like, “Hey, and if you ever think about writing a book, I'd help you because we've written twenty-two books and we'd love to help you.”  I was like, “Really?” I had never thought about writing a book before because I never thought I had much to say . . . or how much you need to say. But once we put the treatment together, it became my social commerce book. First. It was about social commerce, not just social media. But the key thing was, I don't care how many people like me – I want you to buy from me. There are a lot of people out here who have social influence but couldn't get people to piss on them if they were on fire – they don't really have the ability to move people. There's a difference between having likes and having people that will buy from you. And that's the big difference to me in social media. For me, it was all about the commerce portion. ROB: And what's the name of the book folks want to go . . . JOHN: Kickass Social Commerce. ROB: Excellent. Excellent. Any additional publishings of it or is it still pretty fresh? JOHN: You know what? Here's the thing. When I wrote the book, I wrote it forever. Yeah, right. I did. I literally did because the concepts, again, of social and purchasing go together. So, I grabbed all of these universal stories. And one of my major stories, he first story I talk about is a woman called Madam C.J. Walker. Have you heard of her? ROB: I am not familiar with her. JOHN: Great. Fantastic. So, I could tell this story if you don't mind. ROB: Go. JOHN: All right. So, here's the deal. Madam C.J. Walker was an African-American, a black woman. OK, I like that better. Right? She was a black woman and she created a scalp ointment because her hair was falling out from straightening it. She created an ointment that would keep her hair healthy. And other women saw her hair from going to where she had maybe patches, bald spots, and not healthy hair to these long, luxurious locks. People asked, “What are you using?” She had created this thing in her kitchen and she ended up going from her sink and to the bathtub to create larger volumes of it to sell to her friends. Well, the business starts growing and she starts going door to door to do sales. So that's the first part, right? You go from friends telling friends to going door to door. Her door to door sales grew so much that she realized that she was limited by the number of doors she could go to in a day, and that was hampering the growth of her base simply because there's only so many doors you can knock on. So, she came up with this great idea. She said, look, I'll get one of my clients that already buys for me to have a party and I'll go to the party and display my products at the party. Sound familiar? ROB: Mmm-hmm. JOHN: She was the one that created the model that today Mary Kay and Avon use. She created that and that was, again, social. You're expanding your network by using small influencers to bring their friends in and allowing you to do that demonstration. Of course, you would give them a cut for the party. Ultimately, she built a house bigger than the White House . . . and this was in 1918. This is she is the first self-made female millionaire in America. She was ranked number six of the top 10 entrepreneurs in Entrepreneur magazine for all time, one of the greatest success stories. But I tell this story because, as I was listening and reading and researching, I realized how social media can grow for commerce because. literally, she had her own, quote “Facebook” by doing what she did with these people. So, it's universal. I wrote from that understanding . . . from that standpoint. ROB: Yeah. You can imagine a version of a book on social commerce that would get nitty-gritty – focus very much on the popular channels, marketing channels of the day, would talk about specific ad-spending tactics – and it would have a very short shelf life. But I get the sense from talking to you that you define social channels – and you did this a little bit with eBay – you define that remarkably differently from many people. So, when we think about social channels today, what are some other channels you think may not be intuitively understood as social, but yet are extremely so? JOHN: Hmm, that's a good question. ROB: Because we could talk about Tick-Tock, but we don't and we can, but we don't have to. I don't think you could write a book with a long shelf life if that was your frame of mind. JOHN: Right. Because the channels always change their rules. Yeah. But if your understanding is, no matter what their handle is, there is a person on the other end and there are certain things that we . . . we as humans are just a higher level of animals and there's certain habits that we have that we're always going to use. No matter what channel you use to get there, if you nail that human instinct, they're going to respond to it. Here's what I give you that you wouldn't think of: Amazon comments. Amazon comment, that is a social channel. There are some people that do nothing but read and post or try things and post and then they read other stuff from people. And then they respond in those posts. They do this all day long. Why are they doing that? Because that's their social world. ROB: Hmm. Have you seen some people using Slack communities in a business context, maybe? JOHN: Yes, absolutely. Because what they're doing now is they're getting people away – moreso Reddit. I mean, Reddit, its killer. Reddit is really killer. But a Slack community is a great way to get people that are interested in a specific topic away from the distraction that is social media, especially in an election year. ROB: Hmm, right. Plenty of that. JOHN: There's so much of that. And people's moods are being changed sometimes by the constant back and forth in these major social channels like Facebook or Twitter. It gets distracting. So, you get your people out from there into a nice global world that doesn't have all the noise in it. ROB: Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's almost in some cases, there's too much – If you were in a room, there are some rooms where there's too much shouting to be helpful. You can't help people who are in the middle of a fight. JOHN: Right. Exactly. It's like it's really hard to get my attention when there's a train wreck right in front of us. ROB: What does that pivot point look like? What's it look like? What's an example – help us kind of think through it and catalyze our thinking – of someone who's commenting on reviews on Amazon and they're selling something and it's driving – I understand it conceptually, but it's a bit abstract. Is there a concrete example you've seen where they comment on this thing because they were selling this other thing? JOHN: Well, what ends up happening is, if you comment a lot, Amazon flags you as a commenter. Once you get that known as a trusted source, once you get that flagging, then other people that are trying to get reviews by people that have that tag or that flag will start reaching out to send you products. ROB: Got it. JOHN: Right. So, here's the deal. Once you recognize that people are gravitating to you, starting to ask you for your opinion, you've probably got something going on there. I've got a client right now that built a business – and this is so weird – around selling old music media. So, it's flipping CDs. Who buys a CD today? Why don't I get that? I didn't get that. I get it now. He's done six figures just teaching people how to look for CDs at garage sales and thrift stores. That's just amazing to me. You wouldn't think there was a community around that before this. I just never knew. So, there are a lot of niches – there are people that do nothing but needlepoint – there's a niche for darn near everything and it doesn't take a lot of people for you to reach out and find an audience that will either purchase from you or take your recommendations and purchase other things so you can become that influencer for that thing. ROB: Right. It's like the kind of the Kevin Kelly conversation, around a thousand true fans and there are lots of thousands of fans that are looking to be with him.  JOHN: Who did you say? ROB: Kevin Kelly, I think. JOHN: Who's Kevin Kelly? Wait a minute, is not the original? ROB: It might be. Where have you heard it most? JOHN: I'm just going to check this out because. Ok, says Kevin Kelly. Interesting. I'm thinking. Anyway, go ahead. Go ahead. I want to talk about it, Ok? KK.org got it. Technically. ROB: Yep. JOHN: Yep. Yeah, absolutely. Because it's funny you say that. When it first came out, I was so into that. The reason why I was into it, just to go a little bit backwards. is because I'm a huge Prince fan. When Prince left the label, he left a multi-million-dollar deal with Warner Brothers. He was like, “You know what? You can have my entire song category. I just want to be free.” And I was like, “What the hell?” Right after that, he put out his own album. This was the early 90s, He used like a chat room, basically a chat board, to sell a hundred thousand records. Now, this is a man that sold 10 million records for just his Purple Rain album and now he's selling a hundred thousand. And he said, “You know what? I made more off that hundred thousand records than I ever made off of Purple Rain. And when that thousand true fans came out, I was like, ‘Wow'.” That is the basis from where I teach. If you can get a thousand true fans, you're in. ROB: That's amazing, I didn't know that story about Prince, but even in the music world, it brings me forward even to someone like Run the Jewels. Their first album, they put it on their website for free. And they kept on doing their albums for free. And now their albums are basically for free, even if on Spotify. But they were able to cut through a lot of noise and find their fans a lot faster, but still make a living and in a way that is far beyond just selling music. JOHN: Right. Most musicians don't make their money off selling music anyway. That's why they have to tour. Yeah. They have to tour to pay for everything because, I mean, the music business is an amazing thing. I don't want to go into how they really do their business, but let's put it like this: If you sell a million records, you're probably not a millionaire. ROB: Yeah, man. Well, John, this is this is quite a knowledge drop here. I hope that when we're back to meeting in person, people will get a chance to get out and see you and meet you and hear you. When people want to find you and when they want to find Colder Ice Media, where should they go to track you down? JOHN: Just put in Colder Ice. That's all you got to do. Put it in your browser and I will show up I'm Colder Ice on every platform. I am one of those branding crazy people that did that a long time ago. And I'm Colder Ice on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest. I don't care where you go. Pretty much I own Colder Ice except for Tick-Tock. Somebody stopped me on Tick-Tock. ROB: Oh man, that's tough. Well maybe you can make a phone call at some point and get it unlocked for Colder Ice. The handle you reserve when you were early on Twitter, did you get another good Twitter handle early. JOHN: Man, you are just pulling out all the good stories. But my name is so common. John Lawson. When I first looked it up, there were like eight million John Lawsons. I had the story in my head. I remember this story that back in segregation – a lot of people don't understand this, but African-Americans are some very original entrepreneurs, not because we had the entrepreneurial spirit – but you had to be an entrepreneur if you wanted to feed your family. You couldn't I couldn't walk into the regular grocery store and buy groceries back then. You had to have a black-only grocery store. There was a black-only cab company. There was a black-only bus company, black-only hotels. All of that. Run by black people because “white people wasn't sharing.” But literally, those storefronts that were serving the black community, the day that integration became the norm, they would see their customers walk right past their storefronts to go shop downtown. They came up with the saying, “Well, I guess the white man's ice is colder.” And I always remember that: colder ice. That's the story. ROB: Wow, I didn't know that either and you're gracious in your history lessons. There's a lot of strong feelings tied up in that. I know. We're all trying to figure out different ways to actually be sorry and be better. JOHN: No, we're all getting better, man. That it's all good effects on your ear. That's the great story of America. ROB: Well, John, thank you for coming on again. I can't wait to get out and hear you share something in real life, but I appreciate you joining virtually as well. And I think our audience is better for it as well. JOHN: This was a great interview. I really had fun. ROB: Thank you. Thank you for listening. The marketing agency leadership podcast is presented by Converged. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting email info@convergehq.com or visit us on the web at Convergehq.com.

What You'll Learn From This Episode: Converting "leads problem" to "sales problem" Getting the right first impression on your LinkedIn profile Having the right platform for strategy and campaign   Related Links and Resources: To get a free profile review, visit the site https://linkedconversionsfreelinkedinprofilereview.getresponsepages.com/ Summary: Rob Lowe has a background in Web, SEO, adwords and Social Media Marketing. He can bring a common sense approach to the marketing puzzle for business owners seeking growth and wanting to scale their businesses. He leads a team of Social Media Experts, who help their clients position themselves as leading experts in their space and increase sales; They work with consultants, advisors, and business owners to grow their businesses exponentially via the LinkedIn channel. Here are the highlights of this episode: 1:35 Rob's ideal Client: My ideal client is somebody that really seeks to grow their business, and business to business is the focus, and wants to grow their business via LinkedIn channel. We're the medium in helping them grow through the LinkedIn channel. 1:58 Problem Rob helps solve: People who start the conversion "Rob, I need more leads!", so we make it a sales problem. Does that make sense? (I got a leads problem, I will make it to sales problem). 2:39 Typical symptoms that clients experience before reaching out to Rob: Well in the old days we say the phone isn't ringing with new prospects or customers, and people like that. They come to us with needs; the business needs to grow and they have a cycle. They do a little bit of business development they get from leads. They go facilitate the work, they come back, they got an empty leads funnel. Feast-famine. What you need is somebody filling the funnel so you can facilitate the leads outside the funnel and actually close deals as a business owner. 3:52 What are some of the common mistakes that folks make before finding Rob and his solution: I'm firm believer in outsourcing special services where you outsource an expert that actually does what they do so that you can focus on running the business. So, the biggest mistake that actually people are doing is spending hours on a platform that they don't understand. LinkedIn's an animal; a lot of people have tried, most have failed. Then they say well 'LinkedIn doesn't work', but that's because you're a mortgage broker, you're a financial planner, you're a business owner, you're not a social media expert. And worse than that, you're not a LinkedIn expert. I'm not a LinkedIn expert but I employ a LinkedIn expert. 4:57 Rob's Valuable Free Action (VFA): Well, start having a look at your profile and fix your profile, get the first impression, a pleasurable one and a business like one for people seeking your services. That's the most actionable thing I can say along with your website, your LinkedIn profile is the landing page is a website. Make it a good one. Depends on your perspective. If you're an SEO expert, it's all on Google. But people have stopped playing on Google a long time ago. They're active on social. It's choosing the right platform. LinkedIn isn't specifically the correct platform for every business. Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, you name it. Google even. All right. But choose the right platform where your clients are engaged and active. Market to them there, engage with them there. 6:18 Rob's Valuable Free Resource (VFR): It's a free profile review, that's linkedconversionsfreelinkedinprofilereview.getresponsepages.com 7:24 Have I chosen the right platform to market to my audience? I would think that's the most important starting point. I see a lot of people focusing attention on SEO, Adwords, Facebook, Instagram. They're not choosing the platform of choice where they are going to get the most benefit. So if I leave everybody out there with any wisdom, target the right platform. I'm not saying don't have a representation on the other ...

What You’ll Learn From This Episode: Converting "leads problem" to "sales problem" Getting the right first impression on your LinkedIn profile Having the right platform for strategy and campaign   Related Links and Resources: To get a free profile review, visit the site https://linkedconversionsfreelinkedinprofilereview.getresponsepages.com/ Summary: Rob Lowe has a background in Web, SEO, adwords and Social Media Marketing. He can bring a common sense approach to the marketing puzzle for business owners seeking growth and wanting to scale their businesses. He leads a team of Social Media Experts, who help their clients position themselves as leading experts in their space and increase sales; They work with consultants, advisors, and business owners to grow their businesses exponentially via the LinkedIn channel. Here are the highlights of this episode: 1:35 Rob’s ideal Client: My ideal client is somebody that really seeks to grow their business, and business to business is the focus, and wants to grow their business via LinkedIn channel. We're the medium in helping them grow through the LinkedIn channel. 1:58 Problem Rob helps solve: People who start the conversion "Rob, I need more leads!", so we make it a sales problem. Does that make sense? (I got a leads problem, I will make it to sales problem). 2:39 Typical symptoms that clients experience before reaching out to Rob: Well in the old days we say the phone isn't ringing with new prospects or customers, and people like that. They come to us with needs; the business needs to grow and they have a cycle. They do a little bit of business development they get from leads. They go facilitate the work, they come back, they got an empty leads funnel. Feast-famine. What you need is somebody filling the funnel so you can facilitate the leads outside the funnel and actually close deals as a business owner. 3:52 What are some of the common mistakes that folks make before finding Rob and his solution: I'm firm believer in outsourcing special services where you outsource an expert that actually does what they do so that you can focus on running the business. So, the biggest mistake that actually people are doing is spending hours on a platform that they don't understand. LinkedIn's an animal; a lot of people have tried, most have failed. Then they say well 'LinkedIn doesn't work', but that's because you're a mortgage broker, you're a financial planner, you're a business owner, you're not a social media expert. And worse than that, you're not a LinkedIn expert. I'm not a LinkedIn expert but I employ a LinkedIn expert. 4:57 Rob’s Valuable Free Action (VFA): Well, start having a look at your profile and fix your profile, get the first impression, a pleasurable one and a business like one for people seeking your services. That's the most actionable thing I can say along with your website, your LinkedIn profile is the landing page is a website. Make it a good one. Depends on your perspective. If you're an SEO expert, it's all on Google. But people have stopped playing on Google a long time ago. They're active on social. It's choosing the right platform. LinkedIn isn't specifically the correct platform for every business. Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, you name it. Google even. All right. But choose the right platform where your clients are engaged and active. Market to them there, engage with them there. 6:18 Rob’s Valuable Free Resource (VFR): It's a free profile review, that's linkedconversionsfreelinkedinprofilereview.getresponsepages.com 7:24 Have I chosen the right platform to market to my audience? I would think that's the most important starting point. I see a lot of people focusing attention on SEO, Adwords, Facebook, Instagram. They're not choosing the platform of choice where they are going to get the most benefit. So if I leave everybody out there with any wisdom, target the right platform. I'm not saying don't have a representation on the other ...

What You'll Learn From This Episode: Converting "leads problem" to "sales problem" Getting the right first impression on your LinkedIn profile Having the right platform for strategy and campaign ​ Related Links and Resources: To get a free profile review, visit the site https://linkedconversionsfreelinkedinprofilereview.getresponsepages.com/ Summary: Rob Lowe has a background in Web, SEO, adwords and Social Media Marketing. He can bring a common sense approach to the marketing puzzle for business owners seeking growth and wanting to scale their businesses. He leads a team of Social Media Experts, who help their clients position themselves as leading experts in their space and increase sales; They work with consultants, advisors, and business owners to grow their businesses exponentially via the LinkedIn channel. Here are the highlights of this episode: 1:35 Rob's ideal Client: My ideal client is somebody that really seeks to grow their business, and business to business is the focus, and wants to grow their business via LinkedIn channel. We're the medium in helping them grow through the LinkedIn channel. 1:58 Problem Rob helps solve: People who start the conversion "Rob, I need more leads!", so we make it a sales problem. Does that make sense? (I got a leads problem, I will make it to sales problem). 2:39 Typical symptoms that clients experience before reaching out to Rob: Well in the old days we say the phone isn't ringing with new prospects or customers, and people like that. They come to us with needs; the business needs to grow and they have a cycle. They do a little bit of business development they get from leads. They go facilitate the work, they come back, they got an empty leads funnel. Feast-famine. What you need is somebody filling the funnel so you can facilitate the leads outside the funnel and actually close deals as a business owner. 3:52 What are some of the common mistakes that folks make before finding Rob and his solution: I'm firm believer in outsourcing special services where you outsource an expert that actually does what they do so that you can focus on running the business. So, the biggest mistake that actually people are doing is spending hours on a platform that they don't understand. LinkedIn's an animal; a lot of people have tried, most have failed. Then they say well 'LinkedIn doesn't work', but that's because you're a mortgage broker, you're a financial planner, you're a business owner, you're not a social media expert. And worse than that, you're not a LinkedIn expert. I'm not a LinkedIn expert but I employ a LinkedIn expert. 4:57 Rob's Valuable Free Action (VFA): Well, start having a look at your profile and fix your profile, get the first impression, a pleasurable one and a business like one for people seeking your services. That's the most actionable thing I can say along with your website, your LinkedIn profile is the landing page is a website. Make it a good one. Depends on your perspective. If you're an SEO expert, it's all on Google. But people have stopped playing on Google a long time ago. They're active on social. It's choosing the right platform. LinkedIn isn't specifically the correct platform for every business. Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, you name it. Google even. All right. But choose the right platform where your clients are engaged and active. Market to them there, engage with them there. 6:18 Rob's Valuable Free Resource (VFR): It's a free profile review, that's linkedconversionsfreelinkedinprofilereview.getresponsepages.com 7:24 Have I chosen the right platform to market to my audience? I would think that's the most important starting point. I see a lot of people focusing attention on SEO, Adwords, Facebook, Instagram. They're not choosing the platform of choice where they are going to get the most benefit. So if I leave everybody out there with any wisdom, target the right platform. I'm not saying don't have a representation on the other ...

What You’ll Learn From This Episode: Converting "leads problem" to "sales problem" Getting the right first impression on your LinkedIn profile Having the right platform for strategy and campaign ​ Related Links and Resources: To get a free profile review, visit the site https://linkedconversionsfreelinkedinprofilereview.getresponsepages.com/ Summary: Rob Lowe has a background in Web, SEO, adwords and Social Media Marketing. He can bring a common sense approach to the marketing puzzle for business owners seeking growth and wanting to scale their businesses. He leads a team of Social Media Experts, who help their clients position themselves as leading experts in their space and increase sales; They work with consultants, advisors, and business owners to grow their businesses exponentially via the LinkedIn channel. Here are the highlights of this episode: 1:35 Rob’s ideal Client: My ideal client is somebody that really seeks to grow their business, and business to business is the focus, and wants to grow their business via LinkedIn channel. We're the medium in helping them grow through the LinkedIn channel. 1:58 Problem Rob helps solve: People who start the conversion "Rob, I need more leads!", so we make it a sales problem. Does that make sense? (I got a leads problem, I will make it to sales problem). 2:39 Typical symptoms that clients experience before reaching out to Rob: Well in the old days we say the phone isn't ringing with new prospects or customers, and people like that. They come to us with needs; the business needs to grow and they have a cycle. They do a little bit of business development they get from leads. They go facilitate the work, they come back, they got an empty leads funnel. Feast-famine. What you need is somebody filling the funnel so you can facilitate the leads outside the funnel and actually close deals as a business owner. 3:52 What are some of the common mistakes that folks make before finding Rob and his solution: I'm firm believer in outsourcing special services where you outsource an expert that actually does what they do so that you can focus on running the business. So, the biggest mistake that actually people are doing is spending hours on a platform that they don't understand. LinkedIn's an animal; a lot of people have tried, most have failed. Then they say well 'LinkedIn doesn't work', but that's because you're a mortgage broker, you're a financial planner, you're a business owner, you're not a social media expert. And worse than that, you're not a LinkedIn expert. I'm not a LinkedIn expert but I employ a LinkedIn expert. 4:57 Rob’s Valuable Free Action (VFA): Well, start having a look at your profile and fix your profile, get the first impression, a pleasurable one and a business like one for people seeking your services. That's the most actionable thing I can say along with your website, your LinkedIn profile is the landing page is a website. Make it a good one. Depends on your perspective. If you're an SEO expert, it's all on Google. But people have stopped playing on Google a long time ago. They're active on social. It's choosing the right platform. LinkedIn isn't specifically the correct platform for every business. Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, you name it. Google even. All right. But choose the right platform where your clients are engaged and active. Market to them there, engage with them there. 6:18 Rob’s Valuable Free Resource (VFR): It's a free profile review, that's linkedconversionsfreelinkedinprofilereview.getresponsepages.com 7:24 Have I chosen the right platform to market to my audience? I would think that's the most important starting point. I see a lot of people focusing attention on SEO, Adwords, Facebook, Instagram. They're not choosing the platform of choice where they are going to get the most benefit. So if I leave everybody out there with any wisdom, target the right platform. I'm not saying don't have a representation on the other ...

Local Canadian drummer, Rob 'Beatdown' Brown, known widely for his YouTube channel where he has grown to nearly 70K subs makes him one of the bigger drum related channels hands down. He also works a lot, staying busy as a full-time musician, Rob shares a lot of fundamentally useful knowledge that has been said before but Rob and I somehow put it all together in one place with a nice punch to the delivery. It is all stuff that will shift your mindset, or chances if you are busy, you can just nod your head and say "fuck yeah, he's right about that" about 400 times from start to finish. It's that episode.   POI in the episode   - Rob and I kind of just shoot the shit for the first little while until I ask him to wind back the clock a bit and explain how he got started with all this. It luckily doesn't fall into the pots and pans thing, it is actually a lot cooler than that.   - A big topic that we explore is teaching and one of the best things Rob says here is how we don't need to be college profs to teach a person something on drums. Rob specifically mentions that if you have played for six months and another has played for two months, you can likely teach at least one thing to the younger player. He also goes through some benefits of teaching, and we both contemplate whether people dig into teaching for a better chance to get endorsements and make music their livelihood, even if they hate teaching for example.   - So how much has YouTube helped Rob? Well, a lot actually. More than I was expecting to be honest. He does a very good job of promoting products and his content has a down to earth, trustworthy, and overall not douchey vibe. So I am not too surprised that he does well with it. We chat a bit about the advantages of the internet in today's music industry.....And then we talk about how fucking weird social media is.   - Next up...endorsements. This is such a funny thing to me. I for one am relationship rich, and endorsement poor. But maybe what I have is even better than an "endorsement". Peers, friends, family, and the ignorant all congratulate the endorsement deal. I am not sure if any achievement endures my social media groveling than an endorsement. Well, I suppose winning stuff gets a lot of praise too. Anyways, what Rob says here is just winning.   - Rob takes it up a notch when I ask him to share any wisdom that he feels needed some airtime to clear up and/or inform fellow drummers/musicians. He goes into encouraging people that if they want to get into music....JUST DO IT! Think Nike and that's it. Don't wait around, and don't be an entitled shit about not getting paid what you think you are worth in the beginning. If you wanna play so bad, you should want to and look forward to the experience. Especially when you are young. This part is chalked full of good stuff.   - Lastly, we talk about the Law of Attraction. Now, for the record, I completely believe that what you put out into the universe is heard if it is sent with intent. This is in conjunction with JUST DO IT. It boils down to exactly what the phrase suggests and also to have intent while doing it. The right people will enter your world and will align with your cause if you seem like someone worth investing in.    Make sure to check out Rob's (YouTube channel) to watch and subscribe to his content.   Audio in beginning is from Rob 'Beatdown' Brown and Sarah Thawer drum duo video.   Rob's Website

Job Insights Extra: Adjustment to Blindness - Meet Rob Hobson: College Prep and Success All in One. Transcript Provided Job Insights Extra brings you Rob Hobson, Cordinator for Professional Development and College prep at Blindness Learning In New Dimensions, Inc. Best known as Blind, Inc. located in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Rob tells his story how he overcame the challenges that nearly defeated him when entering his Masters program. He made a decision to improve his Blindness skills and this led him on the journey he continues today. From nearly bailing out to exceeding his own expectations by finishing his Masters degree ahead of time and landing a job in the career he wanted. Rob talks about his job details when he started as an Orientation and Mobility instructor to his duties today as Cordinator of Professional Development and the College Prep program. Join Rob Hobson and Jeff Thompson on this brief look into Rob’s Adjustment to Blindness and how he is helping others adjust to their Blindness today. You can find out more about Blind,Inc and Adjustment to Blindness on the web at www.BlindInc.org You can also contact Rob and Blind, Inc. via email You can find out more about State Services for the Blind on the web at www.MN.Gov/Deed/SSB And to find Services in your state check out the American Foundation for the Blind web site and enter your State’s name in the, “Find Local Services” section. Thank you for listening! You can follow Job Insights on Twitter @JobInsightsVIP Send the Job Insights Team and email and give us some feedback and suggest some topics you would like to see us cover. Job Insights is part of the Blind Abilities Network. You can follow us on Twitter @BlindAbilities On the web at www.BlindAbilities.com Send us an email Get the Free Blind Abilities App on the App Store. Get the Free blind Abilities App on the Google Play Store.   Job Insights Extra: Adjustment to Blindness - Meet Rob Hobson: College Prep and Success All in One. Transcript Provided [Music] Rob: When I started that semester, I soon realized that the skills I used in college from my undergrad weren't gonna work in grad school. Jeff: That's the voice of Rob Hobson, Coordinator of Professional Development and College Prep at Blindness Learning in New Dimensions. Rob: Set up an interview and came up here in early December of 2008 and I was offered a position and I accepted. Jeff: Rob talks about the challenges that he faced when transitioning from college to his master's degree program, and how adjustment to blindness training gave him the skills and confidence to succeed. Rob: We use structure discovery which utilizes the environment as a teaching tool and if you only just know one specific route, that can be really debilitating because that's all you know. Jeff: And you can find the Job Insights podcast on blindabilities.com, part of the Blind Abilities Network with host Serina Gilbert and myself Jeff Thompson, and you can contact us by email at JobInsights@blindabilities.com, and join us on the job insight support group on Facebook, on Twitter at Job Insights VIP. Rob: Get that adjustment to blindness training because it is vital for you to be able to compete out there with your sighted peers. Keep an open mind because there is a lot of life after blindness. [Music] Jeff: I went down to South Minneapolis to the historic Pillsbury mansion, the home of Blind Incorporated and that's where we met up with Rob Hobson, we hope you enjoy! [Music] Welcome to Blind Abilities I'm Jeff Thompson and today we're down at Blind Incorporated in Minneapolis we're talking to Rob Hobson and he's the Coordinator for Professional Development and College Prep. How are you doing Rob? Rob: I'm doing well on yourself Jeff? Jeff: Doing good thanks, Rob thanks for taking the time to coming on the Blind Abilities and sharing a little bit about your journey through blindness and your job that you have. Rob: Oh thank you I'm happy to be here. Jeff: Well Rob, can you tell a little bit about what your job is like here? Rob: Well working here at Blind Incorporated, it's a lot of fun, we have a great team and we work together as a team to provide adjustment to blindness training to college-age students, to adults, to seniors, and we have transition programming, and we even have a buddy program which covers 9 to 13 year olds. Jeff: You cover the whole gauntlet? Rob: Yeah we do, it's, it's great, it's, it's a lot of fun. [Bass guitar sound effect] Jeff: Now you did not start out as a Program Coordinator? Rob: Well when I started at Blind Incorporated, I started in 2009, but I should go further back, actually, it's actually a little journey. In 2006 I started grad school at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale to get a master's degree in public administration, on paper that sounds great, when I started that semester I soon realized that the skills I used in college from my undergrad weren't gonna work in grad school. The bar was a lot higher, note takers were hard to get, because I utilized their services through disability services through the campus and I realized that my skills weren't up to par because I just couldn't keep up. Every time I thought I did great, I was still further behind. What really hit it for me was when I took this budgeting class and I thought I got all the points possible, and in that class it was zero to five, five was like the max of points you can get, so I thought hey, I might have gotten a four or five, and I got my grade and it was a 1.5, and the words that really changed my view was, well I felt bad, so I just gave you a 1.5. And that really hurt, it really set, threw me back a loop, you know, it's like wow, I've never had that happen to me before. I called some friends who are in the NFB and I talked to them about, you know, maybe it's time for me to get some adjustment to blindness training. I knew it would be a process because getting Illinois, because that's where I lived at the time, to pay for it was a process. I've heard horror stories that sometimes it could take two years but I was pretty confident that it wouldn't take that long. So in August of 2006 I met with a counselor, I convinced her to start the process and I had an O&M evaluation. I wrote a letter stating why I needed this training and what it was going to do for me, so I had an O&M evaluation, through the letter I was able to convince them to provide me the opportunity to go to the Louisiana Center for the blind in Ruston Louisiana. I started my program at the end of March of 2007, and that's when I started my journey in blindness training. Now to be fair, my goal was to get through the program, go back to Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, and complete my Master's in Public Administration Degree. Well while I was in the program, it was suggested to me that I should consider the Louisiana Tech O&M program and I considered it for about 1/2 a second and I thought no that's not me. As they say it, it put the seed there and throughout the summer of 2007 I realized that hey, you know I might actually like this. I started the process in the fall to go into Louisiana Tech, in the end of November I started my first classes as a Louisiana Tech student in grad school. Jeff: Now Rob, could it be that winter was coming and.... Rob: I'm not gonna lie, that was true, I thought that was a good benefit but really I was excited to start this program because I knew that, you know at the end of this program I would be able to get a job, and believe it or not, throughout that year it took me a year, end of November of 2007, and by November 19th of 2008 I walked away with a college degree, a graduate degree, from Louisiana Tech. It was a rough year, they say that a master's degree generally is a year and a half to two years, I did it in a year, it was probably the hardest year of my whole life at that time. Jeff: Congratulations! Rob: Thank you. I soon talked to Sean Mayo who was the Executive Director of Blind Incorporated, set up an interview and came up here in early December of 2008 and I was offered the position and I accepted. In January of 2009 I started as a Blind Incorporated employee, and to be fair, I only planned to be here year after about a month of working here because it was so cold, but I soon liked it, teaching cane travel was a lot of fun, it took me a while to get into my zone, you know because when you come to a new city you have to learn how to navigate the streets and learn the grid, the outline, you know all of the names of the roads, and I knew I had the skills to teach, it was a matter of learning the environment so I could teach and understand how to relate that information to my students. Jeff: So did you do a lot of exploring in your off time and just try and navigate the city and learn it? Rob: I did, I spent a lot of time learning south Minneapolis, I spent some time with Zach Ellingson who was the full-time cane travel instructor at the time, and we talked a lot, he really helped me gain the information necessary to teach. I spent some time observing him just to see how he taught because you know, when you're still a new teacher, you still like to get other teaching styles and I knew Zach was really successful at what he was doing and it was a good resource to work with. I spent a lot of time on weekends going out to other places in the city but at the time I really focused on south Minneapolis because I knew majority of my instruction was gonna be during that time. I later throughout the years, I gained knowledge in Northeast Minneapolis, Southeast Minneapolis, St. Paul, I know some of St. Paul, I don't know a lot of it but I know enough to to be able to teach it. Jeff: Now learning the areas that you did, it's pretty much transferable skills the way you teach here right? Rob: It is, the skills are transferable but you know it's like anything else, when you want to teach someone you have to still know what you're teaching, does that make sense? Because we also teach how to navigate the area via some of the names, so I needed to know those names so I can you know pass that information along, learn bus routes, I learned a lot of the bus routes, but yes, the skills I learned in Ruston Louisiana were transferable once I figured out the grid system and for an example, Hennepin Avenue is your divider between north and south Minneapolis, and the river, the Mississippi River divides southeast Minneapolis and northeast Minneapolis from north and south Minneapolis, and anything more than that you get a little complicated because it depends on where you are further south in the city, you actually have the river divider between St. Paul and Minneapolis. [Bass Guitar Sound Effect] Jeff: There's always been a debate about people sometimes teaching route travel compared to teaching skills that will allow you to explore other areas and use the same set of skills. Rob: That is true, in our format we use structure discovery which utilizes the environment as a teaching tool. We do start off with students in the beginning giving them simple route assignments so that they learn to gain that confidence and gain those problem-solving skills so that they're able to change those routes, make a diversion if need be, I mean because, well if you've walked in Minneapolis in the summer, you know that, maybe every, about every few blocks there's construction, or they tear up a sidewalk to put in a new one, or whatnot, you have to be able to problem solve in that and if you only just know one specific route, that can be really debilitating because that's all you know, and how are you gonna be able to get through that situation. Jeff: Yep I graduated from Blind Incorporated and I remember the whole thing, the only thing Zack always got upset was, I grew up here so, when he was trying to fool me or something, I'd hear a church bell. Rob: Oh, and that gave it away didn't it? Jeff: I could identify the church, so he would be more creative next time you know, just knowing that I had a few cues that other people didn't have so it was always interesting. Now in your new position, what do you do for Blind Incorporated? Rob: Currently I set up all of our activities, I coordinate from beginning to end. For an example last year we went camping for the first time in I don't know how many years, at least since I've been here we've never gone camping up to that point, and we actually went camping, we stayed in tents and that was a long process to put that together because there's a lot of details involved. It's not like we all just got in a van and drove up to Duluth area and pick the camping site and just went camping. There's a lot of details involved when you take 30 people, 30 of your closest friends and students up to, up to go camping. So there's logistics because you have to work on you know the amount of food, how many tents, how many people per tents, just a lot of logistics. I coordinate all of the logistics to make sure everything falls in line, all of our activities from camping to just going rock climbing at vertical endeavors. Starting last year we started putting together professional development for the staff and students, some of the highlights, we had Kevin O'Connor come in, who is a renowned professional speaker who came in and talked to our staff and students on basically just professional development, working with each other, and what does it mean to be professional, and covered all of those components. We also had somebody come in and do a multicultural training, we had somebody come in and talk about cognitive disabilities, we've done some first aid CPR, so we've done a lot of different programming, but we've done it before but not to this caliber, so we really have a professional development piece about every three months or so for the staff and we started incorporating the students in that as well because it's important I think for our students to be able to have that information, they can put it on their resume, and I think it makes them even more employable. [Music] Jeff: You also had a program called Blind and Socially Savvy, can you tell us a little bit about what that is? Rob: So Blind and Socially Savvy really covers the soft skills, starting in conversation with somebody, proper way to introduce somebody, etiquette, so they have an etiquette meal where they actually sit down, a full meal and they learn how to conduct themselves in a professional environment because I'm sure you know Jeff that there are always interviews, sometimes those interviews are sitting down with a meal with your future employer, so it's a great opportunity to be able to conduct yourself professionally, it makes it even more likely for you to get that job. Also it's good to be professional and to have that proper etiquette because you're going to be amongst peers, whether they're your fellow co-workers, or friends, family, maybe you volunteer in an organization, it's great to have that etiquette because it puts you even higher up on the bar of success. Jeff: I attended something very similar to that and I remember they said, your bread is not a mop and turn your phone off, and pay all your attention to the person, it's not about the food mostly, it's about the interview so to say, or the person that you're attending with. Rob: That is correct. Jeff: And then they went through, start from the, just like on the Titanic, start with the outside silver and wake work your way in, so there's a lot of information there that people are kind of expected to know, but if you haven't had the opportunity to learn it, Blind and Socially Savvy that you guys provide here, is awesome! Rob: Yeah and we didn't do it ourselves, we did it along with State Services for the Blind, we worked well with them and Sheila Koenig who's the coordinator for transition for SSB, she worked really well with Dan Wenzel the executive director here, and Michelle Get, who coordinates our transition programs. Jeff: And you do have a lot of programs here and opportunities that you mentioned early and it's really neat to see all the stuff that's happening from the summer to prep to like I said you cover the whole gauntlet here. Rob: Yep we also are starting a new program, it's our College Programming or I like to call it College Prep and what it is is students come in maybe they don't want to do a full six to nine month program but they want to come in and get some of those non-visual adjustment to blindness skills. So they'll come in for a summer, get that training, and if they're new to going to college we actually have a college class component that would start in the fall where they could take a class and still continue to get some adjustment to blindness skills, we would work with them on navigating a campus, and specifically that campus, and we would also work with them on study skills, note-taking skills, all of the the skills necessary to be successful in college. I know when I first started college I was absolutely terrified and I think even now with, with the technology being the way it is, back then you know if you had a computer you were lucky, but nowadays there's phones, there's Braille displays, there's lots of different technology out there that we would be able to work with students on so that they are fully competent and capable to be successful in college so that they can be employable in the future. Jeff: And being able to use that equipment on day one! Rob: Exactly, I mean that's, I think that's a really good point Jeff, you don't want to start, get your technology September first when you start at the class in late August and then have to learn how to use it while taking classes at the same time. We like to work with students early so that they have those skills when they start the college class, that they are able to know how to use their technology, take the best notes possible so that they can be self-sufficient. [Music] Jeff: Rob Hobson thank you very much for what Blind Incorporated does here in Minneapolis and across the nation because other students come from other states and you guys give them an opportunity to succeed, give them skills and the confidence to do so. What advice would you give to someone who has recently become blind visually impaired or has trouble reading the printed word, and what advice would you give them as they start that journey? Rob: I would say keep an open mind, blindness is probably the one of the most terrifying disabilities out there, and really it's because of the unknown, it's a sighted world out there, people perceive through what they see, but keep an open mind because there is a lot of life after blindness. I lost my vision I, I wasn't fully sighted but when I did have some vision I lost it pretty quickly due to a retinal detachment and, and that's a long journey itself, but I know what it's like, it's tough, but what I can tell you is working with State Services for the Blind, figure out your options, whether it's Blind Incorporated, VLR, or Duluth Lighthouse, get that adjustment to blindness training because it is vital for you to be able to compete out there with your sighted peers and really that adjustment to blindness training is what's going to put you on that same platform for success. Learn those skills, know how to cook, clean, learn to read Braille, technology, cane travel, because you got to be able to get there on your own. You can always use Uber and Lyft but I can tell you that stuff's expensive, I know I look at my bank account every month, not that I use it every day but I use it just for quick things, it's expensive, so you're not going to be able to do that all the time, so you've got to pick up those, you know learn those non-visual skills that you can travel independently. Remember that blindness is not a tragedy. I like to say blindness is what you make of it, you can look at it as a tragedy, or you can look at it as, you know what, this is a new challenge, and I'm here to overcome it. Jeff: So Rob, if someone want to get a hold of you or Blind Incorporated, do you have any contact information? Rob: Sure do, you can call our main number 612-872-0100, and ask for Jennifer Wenzels, she handles our intake. You can also ask for me, I'm happy to talk to you if you have any questions, my extension is 220, and Jennifer's extension is 251. We also if you like email, you can send an email to info@blindinc.org. Jeff: info@blindinc.org, well Rob thank you once again for taking the time, sharing your story, sharing your experience with the listeners and, really appreciate it. Rob: Oh you're welcome Jeff, it was a pleasure. [Music] Jeff: Yes it was a real pleasure talking to Rob Hobson, and if you want a contact Blind Incorporated, send them an email at info@blindinc.org, on the web at blindinc.org, and to find out more about State Services for the Blind check us out on the web at www.mn.gov/deed/ssb, and to find services in your state check out American Foundation for the Blind's website at AFB.org. And Thank You Chee Chau for the beautiful music and you can follow Chee Chau on Twitter at lcheechau. Once again, thank you for listening, we hope you enjoyed, and until next time bye-bye [Music] [Multiple voices] When we share what we see through each other's eyes, We can then begin to bridge the Gap between the limited expectations and the realities of Blind Abilities. Jeff: For more podcast with the blindness perspective, check us out on the web at www.blindabilities.com, on twitter at BlindAbilities, download our app from the app store, Blind Abilities, that's two words, or send us an email at info@blindabilities.com, thanks for listening.  

Listen now: Clive Chafer has been a namer for almost as long as naming has been a profession. In 1987, he started at the firm now known as Lexicon, where he helped develop a few names you definitely know, like PowerBook for Apple and Outback for Subaru. He went on to eventually become creative director at Master-McNeil in Berkeley, California, and he now runs his own firm: Namebrand. Clive also does freelance naming work. Clive and I dove right into a conversation about his process for name generation, which led us to a discussion of "sound symbolism." I brought up the bouba/kiki effect (but couldn't remember what it was called) and Clive pointed out that, "whether it's consonants or vowels, you can build something just on sound symbolism that will have certain tonalities and associations, even if the brief is very abstract. We linguists are not left entirely adrift." Clive talked about his "wonderful thesaurus" from the late 60's (so good luck getting a copy). Clive Chafer's well-used Roget's Thesaurus He listed a handful of other online ad offline tools* he uses while naming, e.g.: Wikipedia Foreign-language dictionaries (online) Forvo.com (to hear native speakers pronounce foreign words) OneAcross.com (a crossword dictionary, especially useful when length is a consideration) Clive talked about keeping the creative juices flowing by stepping away from a project for a bit and exercising, going out with friends, or doing a DIY project. He listed a few pitfalls young namers (and more experienced ones) can fall victim to, and proposed some solutions. Lastly, Clive shared his favorite thing about being a namer: "It keeps the brain young." If you want to learn more about Clive or get in touch with him, check out wemakenames.com. You should also check out the interview Clive did with Robert Siegel on NPR's All Things Considered. Below, you'll find the full transcript of the episode (may contain typos and/or transcription errors). Click above to listen to the episode, and subscribe on iTunes to hear every episode of How Brands Are Built. * To see a complete list of online resources listed by namers in episodes of How Brands Are Built, see our Useful List: Online/software resources used by professional namers. Rob: Clive, thank you so much for making time to speak with me. I'd love to just talk about process, and given how long you've been doing this, I figure if anyone has a process—I'm talking specifically about when you sit down to start generating ideas—where do you start? Clive: I knew in advance you were going to ask me this, and I had to sit and think for a moment about whether or not there is a start point, or indeed a process. Yes, there is a starting point. And, having been a project manager as well as a creative, I know a little bit more now about how those two things work together, and the brief is incredibly important in how well the creative process develops and how well it goes. And it may well be proved to be—as you probably know—way off track after the first or second round of creative. Back to the drawing board. But in terms of the actual creative process, I start narrow and broaden out. So if I get a brief, whether it's couched in single-word naming directions or explained content, I will draw up a list of words and word parts that I think might be useful. Now how do I get to those? Well, partly from the words that are already given to me in the in the brief. And then from there, broaden out to closely associated ideas, concepts, and directions. And I think, yes, I definitely use the thesaurus, but it really depends on the nature of the project whether the thesaurus is going to be a useful tool or not. Rob: Right. Clive: If you get a name, this rarely happens, but if you get a brief that says, "This name needs to have no content whatsoever," because perhaps it's a name for a company and they don't want to be tied to any one activity. Rob: Sure, a name like Avaya, or something ,  a coined... Clive: Yeah, or Hulu or something like that. You know if you're going to do that then there's not a lot of point in going to the thesaurus. I mean, the truth is that most names have something about them that does relate back to what they do. You just mentioned Avaya. If you kind of pick that apart for sound, the idea of 'a way,' "via," is buried in there somewhere. And so the idea that a buyer is a communications company and that it's providing the means the "via" for communications. Okay. Yeah. You know, it's not too many steps away from the thesaurus. Rob: Right. Clive: So sometimes, even when it seems like they want to take a step away from real-world vocabulary, you still can start with that kind of mindset, if you like—that kind of relatively pedestrian research that says, "Let's put together as many words that word parts that are relevant to this as possible, and let's use those as the springboard," rather than trying to find something entirely meaningless out of nothing, out of whole cloth, if you like. Rob: Yeah, I find that that's really hard to do. You end up sort of wandering aimlessly. Clive: Well yes. Now this is where, going back to Lexicon, I met the chap who was their kind of linguistics expert. His name's Will Leben—lovely chap—who I've come to know as a friend as well, and the exquisite irony of Will Leben is that he is almost entirely deaf. He is a linguist who doesn't really hear language the same way that we do. Plus which, his specialism was what they call "sound symbolism" or what he called "sound symbolism." And he really developed the idea of sound symbolism and it's not a particularly deep science, but short, high sounds tend to suggest things that are smaller, and larger, longer, deeper sounds tend to suggest things that are bigger. So, "Pixi," has to be something small. You don't know what it is, necessarily, although obviously a pixie is a little creature. But sound symbolism is a somewhat disputed area of linguistics and it's very culturally confined, but it does work as a way to look at the tone—the tonality, if you like—of what you're trying to put across. These are things that work without meaning, without semantic meaning. Rob: Right, and to some degree across cultures. I hear what you're saying, it certainly is culturally specific to a degree, but I think I've seen—and I'm not sure whether this would have come from Lexicon or if it's actually just from social psychology—but this diagram with two drawings, one of which is pointed and sharp looking, and the other is just a bunch of curves and swirls, and then there are two made-up name options underneath them, and one of them has hard stops in it like "t" and "k" and the other has, like you said, liquids, more vowels, more soft fricatives "s" and "f" and "v." And it's, I believe the finding is that across pretty much every culture, people choose the same way that the harder sounds, so to speak, go with the pointier made-up object and vice-versa. Clive: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Now what cultural associations they make with that can vary. But yeah, I mean by and large, that works and it works particularly well across all the romance languages. It's a little harder in the Germanic languages, but anyway, yes you're right. I mean whether it's consonants or vowels you can build something just on sound symbolism that will have certain tonalities and associations even if the brief is very abstract. We linguists are not left entirely adrift. Rob: Well, if you'll bear with me getting into the weeds a little bit on process: Let's start with timing. Do you generally sit down for a certain number of hours with any given brief? Do you have any kind of consistent approach along those lines, just with regard to timing? Clive: It's not entirely consistent but there is a pattern. When I first sit down with a brief, there very often quite quickly comes a point within an hour or so where I'm banging my head against a brick wall—where I've got through the obvious stuff, I've made the obvious connections and made the semantic and language word parts and phonemes, and so on, and listed them, and come up with some names based on them, and so on. And then I kind of go, "Ok, what's next?" I have found personally, that if I break off then, that isn't going to help. That's actually a barrier that I have to work through, so I generally don't want to start a project unless I've got about at least four hours clear in front of me. Rob: Wow. Clive: Because I find that a lot of really good stuff comes after that point where you're going, "Wow, this is a tough one. I don't know that I'm going to be able to come up with a lot of stuff for this." And then you just have to keep pushing back the borders of your own immediate responses to a brief. And that's the problem. I've been doing this for so long now—you know for 25 plus years—that there are tracks in my brain. And to get out of those ruts, you need to make associations that you haven't made before, or least if you have, it was a while ago and you can't read them. And I find that I need to work through that barrier rather than walking away at that point. Now, having said that, there then comes a point about—you know, whether it's 4 hours, or whatever in—where you've then had a little breakthrough and suddenly there's been this strangely rich period of productivity. And then I think, frankly, the brain just gets tired, and that's the point at which I take a break. Rob: Ok. Clive: And yeah, it helps if you can go away for 24 hours. There are other things you can do as well. Exercise is terrific at reframing the brain, at you know throwing the pieces up and letting them fall down in different places. Rob: Do you find that when you are exercising—or just, you've gone away from being immediately focused on the project itself—do you find yourself still thinking about it, and that sometimes ideas will pop up and maybe you'll need to quickly find a way to jot them down before you forget? Or do you really feel like you push it out of your brain for a while? Clive: Both. I find that I can definitely push it out of my brain for a while. I find that if I do go off and do something else, I'm not thinking about it. But ideas will come to me and it's clearly there in the subconscious, because something out of apparently nowhere will come and will relate back to what I'm working on—the project that I'm working on. And I'm not making any conscious effort and in fact, some of the best associative ideas—associated ideas—come from doing something completely different, but there's suddenly this connection with what you're doing or with an idea that you have to what you're working on. And your brain reminds you, or at least it does me, that this is an idea you might want to capture for what you're working on. But I never go to bed when I'm working on a project without a pad next to the bed. My partner, Christian, will tell you, I quite often turn out the light, five minutes later, I turn the light back on, because that moment between sleep and waking is absolutely the best time for my best ideas. Rob: Do you use a pad otherwise, or is it just for that space specific context. I was gonna ask anyway, do you work in Microsoft Word or something like that as you're coming up with ideas, or do you tend to stick to pen and paper? Clive: It used to be pen and paper. Partly that was because one of the great things about naming is you can do it anywhere, and I used to do it in the back of the tour bus when I was touring a theatrical production, and then it was definitely a pad, because laptops were way too big and expensive back in the nineties to do it any other way. But occasionally I'll do it with a pad if I'm travelling and getting a laptop out is a hassle, or whatever. I still make notes on pieces of paper. But generally, I work in Excel now. I used to work, for years I worked in Word, till I realized that actually, it's easier to manipulate data in Excel even if it's just text data. Rob: And what about, you mentioned the thesaurus earlier. Do you do you favor any particular thesaurus, whether it's print or online? Clive: I have a wonderful thesaurus... Rob: That sounds like a book, then. Not a website? Clive: Absolutely. I was awarded this. I was actually able to choose the modern languages reading prize at my secondary school—my high school—I won for reading a Russian poem, and was awarded Roget's Thesaurus in nineteen sixty...I can't remember, eight, or something like that, and it still has the sticker inside that says, "Modern Languages Reading Prize, Awarded to Clive Chafer." Rob: Congratulations. Clive: It's not because of that, although it's wonderfully battered now, because he used to go to Lexicon, it used to go to Master-McNeil, and so on. But it has words in it that I've never found in any other thesaurus. It's a treasury of the English language. I was given more recently I think a Bartlett's Thesaurus, which was given by a namer who said, "This is absolutely the best thesaurus I've ever found." And it's very good, and it has a lot more modern usages in it than my sixties tome, but it's nowhere near as comprehensive. Rob: Right, it sounds like if you cross reference both, maybe you get the best of both worlds. Clive: Absolutely, and I use both. I use them all the time, and I even use thesaurus.com although I pretty much hate it. But it's very convenient. So I do use it rather than lugging a book around with me. I find thesaurus.com is very poor at alternative meanings and concepts that are close to the words that you're looking up. There are some just outstanding omissions from thesaurus.com. Rob: Are there any other books that you keep close at hand as you're doing naming aside from those two thesauruses? Clive: Not for every project, no. I mean, clearly there are lots of books that I use, whether it's books on mythology or astronomy. You can get a lot of this online, as well, but I still like having...the way that you use a book is less linear than the way you use online resources. Rob: Right. Clive: And so, I like the fact that it takes me in different directions. If it's Bulfinch's Mythology, I end up looking at different things than I would if I had looked up Wikipedia for "Roman gods associated with agriculture" or something. Having those books around is very useful, but I would say that I probably use the thesaurus on 95% of projects that I work on, and then the Oxford dictionary and the other Bartlett's Roget's that I have, those I use pretty frequently as well. Beyond that, it's really specific to the individual project and brief. Rob: What about websites other than dictionary.com, are there any that you just find yourself going back to or...you know, even if it's not on 95% of the projects, even if it's only 25%. Clive: The things that I keep bookmarked are foreign language dictionaries and Forvo, which is a place you can go to to find the pronunciation of—by native speakers—of foreign words, which is kind of interesting. Rob: Interesting, how's that spelled? Clive: F-O-R-V-O dot com. There is one that I have been using in the last year or so. I think it's more of a crossword type dictionary. One of the parameters for a name is often length, and the thing about a crossword dictionary is that it will offer you solutions that are, you know, all the solutions that are five letters long. And that I find useful for projects where length is particularly important—if it's going to be on a name badge that has very little space, for instance. I think it may be OneAcross.com. Rob: Oh. That makes sense, speaking of names. Clive: What it lets you do, and this is what I was trying to think about earlier, is find every six-letter word of which the last three letters are "con," for instance. But at OneAcross you can put in three question marks, "C-O-N," and it will come back with everything in the dictionary. Rob: Exactly. Yeah, this can be very helpful. Clive: Yeah. And you can switch that around as well. You can make it "two blanks, "con," two blanks, or something like that. And it's surprising what it will come up with. Rob: Is there anything that you've done to get past that inevitable writer's block at some point when you're on a naming project? Any tips or tricks for other namers to help? You mentioned working out; I think that's a great one. Clive: Pretty much anything that takes you completely away from what you're doing is really what you need. I mean, going for a walk in the country, going for dinner with a friend. You'll get into conversation and your subconscious still has the brief in it, and you'll find that you'll find yourself bringing your pad out at the dinner table. "Excuse me a minute, can I just make a note, I just had an idea." And they all think it's very fun. "Oh, he's being creative again." So yeah. I mean it generally is not a social faux pas to do it. It opens up a whole new direction of conversation. As long as you walk away—physically walk away—and go off and do something else, whether it's a DIY project or whatever, it will help you to take a new perspective on what you're naming. The thing about exercise is that it's been scientifically proven to really help freshen up your brain. Rob: I don't know how often you have the opportunity to work with newcomers to the field of naming, but I'd love to hear any tips that you have for them or any mistakes you see them consistently making that you think you could help them steer clear of. Clive: I used to come into contact with them much more. It's funny, because back in the days of Lexicon, almost everybody did brainstorming sessions, which brought together—physically brought together—as many as a dozen people in a room. It did become obvious that a lot of people had...the way their brain worked meant that their creative output bore a very distinct resemblance across projects, even though those projects weren't necessarily related. So look at what you've put down as names over maybe five unrelated projects and look for patterns. And if you see them, be aware of them, so that you can break them. Rob: That's interesting. So, I almost imagine printing out those lists and circling anything, or highlighting anything that you see across lists and recognizing your own biases. Clive: Yes, exactly. Yeah, it is, it's biases. We all have ideas that we like and we are desperate to have them expressed in some form or another. And it's astonishing the lengths that we will go to to get them represented. And it's really good to be aware of them so that you can say, "Ok, I've got to be careful not to just fall into this pattern again," and find a way of breaking it, and find a way of expanding beyond it. And you can do that consciously. And if you don't do it, you'll probably find that unconsciously, you will continue to regurgitate the same stuff again and again. Rob: It feels a little bit like when you're new to naming, it's more about just sort of what interesting words do you know? And you're very tempted to throw those words into the list, whether or not they make sense. And maybe the more mature you get, the more you really stick to what is the brief asking for, and start there, as opposed to just having hopefully too much of your own bias to put into it. Clive: The other thing I would say—sort of advice to the young namer—is that you will be terribly disappointed, time and time again, by one, the names that get chosen, which will always be...they will always ignore the names that you think are the best. Rob: That's so true. Clive: And that's partly because a brief is a terribly inadequate way of communicating what a client actually wants. And it can be a very frustrating experience being a namer, because either you never find out what the client chose anyway, and you feel like you're just throwing this stuff into a black hole, or you find out afterwards that the whole directions—all the directions that you were working on—were not the direction they ended up going in. Or they abandoned the project, and it sounded wonderful, and you came up with all these great names. It's very easy to get dissuaded at that point and feel like a very small cog in a much larger wheel. And it's only by being a project manager as well as a creative that I have been able to understand how what I do fits into a bigger picture and not get frustrated about it. Rob: Absolutely, and I remember as a junior namer, it's not only the client. It's also if you're junior and you're on a larger team, it's the rest of your team. I remember feeling like my boss didn't get it. You know, they didn't get the names that I'd come up with and they weren't choosing my best names to even present to the client. Clive: The single biggest problem with naming, the single biggest thing that goes wrong from anybody's point of view, is that somebody in the company—somebody at the client—is not brought into the process early, even though they have veto power over the name. And very often, it's somebody down the line who is protecting their boss from getting involved because they don't want them to have to put time into this, and then they're saying, "No no no no, he's got much more important things to think about. We'll handle this." And then they come up with a name and they put it in front of this person who has not been involved, and he looks at it and goes, "No." And you know they, well, yeah. You know, the answer is no because you didn't ask him what the question was in the first place. Rob: It's a classic problem and we've all seen it too many times. Clive: It is the single-most frequent way that the wheels come off the project. You've got to involve them from the start. Ignore the fact that they have very busy schedules and that their calendar is all booked up. If you don't get them involved at the start, you are risking wasting everybody's time. Rob: Well just the last question, just for fun: You've been doing this for so long, I'm curious what do you like about it? Do you have sort of a favorite thing about naming and name generation that makes it something that you want to keep doing? Clive: Well I'm in my sixth decade now, and I am grateful for anything and everything that keeps my brain ticking over. It is really good to have something like this that makes me not just think conceptually around a problem but, as I said before, that gets me out of the ruts that my brain is in. When I come to a project, I try as hard as possible to make my brain do what is unfamiliar, because I really do think that that is part of what keeps my brain ticking over at a reasonably good level. Rob: There you go, naming keeps you young. Clive: Yeah. Keeps the brain young, certainly. Yeah. Rob: Thanks again Clive. Clive: You're welcome. Rob: I'll talk to you soon. Clive: Yep. Have a good day. Rob: You too. Bye bye. Clive: Thanks, bye.  

Listen now: Anthony Shore is one of the most experienced namers out there. He has over 25 years of experience in naming and has introduced more than 200 product and company names to the world. Some of the names he’s created include Lytro, Yum! Brands, Fitbit Ionic, Qualcomm Snapdragon, and Photoshop Lightroom. In 2015, he was featured in a New York Times Magazine article titled “The Weird Science of Naming New Products,” which tells the story of Jaunt, a VR company he named. And a BBC News article called him "one of the world’s most sought after people when it comes to naming new businesses and products." Anthony has led naming at Landor Associates. He worked at the naming firm, Lexicon, and now he runs his own agency, Operative Words, which you can find at operativewords.com. I had a great time talking to Anthony. He shares a bunch of knowledge, some great tips and examples, and we even got to nerd out a bit talking about recurrent neural networks. Anthony's using artificial intelligence to supplement his own name generation; it's fascinating to think about how tools like these might be used in the future. Anthony also gave a great overview of his naming process and provided a list of tools and resources he uses when generating names. Some namers I've talked to seem to prefer analog resources (i.e., books). In contrast, Anthony almost exclusively uses software and online tools*, including the following: Wordnik ("a great resource for lists of words") OneLook Rhymezone Sketch Engine (a corpus linguistics database) TextWrangler (a plain ASCII text editor) BBEdit Microsoft Excel Anthony and I rounded out the conversation talking some of his least favorite naming trends, as well as what he likes most about being a namer. I highly recommend you check out Anthony’s website and blog at operativewords.com, where he has a bunch of amazing content that goes into way more detail on some of the topics we discussed. Below, you'll find the full transcript of the episode (may contain typos and/or transcription errors). Click above to listen to the episode, and subscribe on iTunes to hear every episode of How Brands Are Built. * To see a complete list of online resources listed by namers in episodes of How Brands Are Built, see our Useful List: Online/software resources used by professional namers. Rob: Anthony, thank you for joining me. Anthony: Thanks so much for having me, Rob. Rob: One of the first things I wanted to ask you about is something I don’t talk to namers about that much. It’s artificial intelligence. So, I saw that you’ve written and talked about the potential for using neural networks and brand naming. Can you tell me a little bit about what made you start down that path and then maybe how it works today? Anthony: Sure. I love talking about this. Artificial intelligence, and really using computers in general as an adjunct to what I do, has always been near and dear to my heart. Way back in college, I created a self-defined AI major. And so, when recurrent neural networks started becoming available and accessible over the last few years, I took an interest. And a woman named Janelle Shane, who is a nanoscientist and a neural network hobbyist, started publishing name generation by neural network. And this really caught my interest. And she was doing it just as a hobby and for fun, but I could see that neural networks offered a great deal of promise. And so, I engaged with her and asked her to teach me what she knew, so that I could also use neural networks to help me create brand names, in addition to using the other tools that I use, like my brain and other bits of software and resources. Rob: And is there...how technical is it now in your use of it? Is it something that anyone could do or does it really require a lot of programming knowledge? Anthony: Well, right now I’d say it’s not for the faint of heart. The only interface that really helpful is through command line, really using a terminal. So it’s all ASCII. It’s done in Linux and there’s various and sundry languages that have to be brought into play like Python and Lua and Torche. Rob: So you’ve got to know what you’re doing a little bit. Anthony: Yeah yeah. It’s not something that’s just a web interface that you plug ideas in and it’s going to work like a charm. Now, that is right now and it’s changing constantly. I mean, even in just the few months, six months that I’ve been doing this, I’ve been seeing more and more neural networks front ends on the web pop up. But their results aren’t very good at all. But it’s clear that that’s going to change. Rob: And I saw that Janelle has named a beer I think using her neural network it’s called The Fine Stranger which is a cool name for an indie beer. Have you had any success using it yet for some of your naming projects? Anthony: I’ll say this: that neural networks have, in my use of them, have illustrated to me some really interesting words and ideas, and clients are interested in AI and neural networks as part of the creative process. But there haven’t been any names yet that a neural network I’ve trained has generated and the client said, "Yes, that’s going to be our name." But it’s only a matter of time before that happens. But I’m bullish on AI and neural networks. Rob: Well, it’s funny because, I know this isn’t the same thing, but every now and then, I’m sure you see this too, there are these doomsday proclamations of naming...the human aspect of naming dying out because computers will be able to do it themselves. What are your thoughts in terms of how people and computers will interact in the future to do this job? Anthony: Oh, without a doubt, accessible AI tools for name generation will increase everyone’s access to interesting names. But just because you are shown a word or a list of words doesn’t mean that you’re going to know, as someone in the company for instance, is this really going to be the right word? Does this have the potential to become a brand? And there’s other aspects of naming such as understanding and ascertaining what the right naming strategy should be. What should the right inputs that an AI should be trained on? You know, what kinds of words should the AI be trained on? Helping a client see how each word in a list of words could become their future could become their brand, and helping them to see the the assets and potential of each of these names. That’s not something AI is going to do. So there’s still a place for professional name developers. Rob: I want to back up a little bit and just talk more generally about about name generation. Can you just give me a 30,000-foot view of the entire naming process before we dive into some of the specific steps within it? Anthony: Yeah, sure, I’ll be happy to Rob. So, I’ll be briefed by the clients, and maybe they’ll provide me with an actual creative brief, or not, but from that, I’ll develop name objectives that succinctly capture what the name needs to accomplish; what it needs to support or connote. And once we agree on those marching orders, I’ll get into creative. Now the first wave of creative is a mile wide and an inch deep, where I explore many different perspectives of the brand, different tonalities, different styles of names, different executions. And that process takes about two weeks of creative development. At the end, there’s probably a thousand or several thousand words that have been developed. I’ll cull the best 150 names and run those through preliminary global trademark screening with my trademark partner, Steve Price. And from that, there’ll be 50 to 70 names, and I’ll present those names to the client. And I present them in a real-world context so they look less like hypothetical candidates and more like de facto, existing brands. And I present each name in the exact same visual context to really keep the focus on the name and not confound variables by changing up the color or the font. I present each name individually, talk about their implications and what they bring. And at the end the client gets feedback—what they like, what they don’t like, what they’re neutral about—and that informs the second round of creative work, which is an inch wide and a mile deep, where I delve into what was really working for them. And, it’s important to have a couple of rounds of creative because it’s one thing to agree in an abstract brief, but what clients really react to are real words, and that’s where you can really find out what’s going on, because it’s difficult for people to really understand what they like and don’t like in a name until they see them. And so that second round of work focuses on what’s working for them. And that process again is about two weeks, thousands of names developed, 100, 150 go into screening for trademark and domains, and then 50 names plus are presented to the client. And the client chooses from all of the names that’ve been presented across both rounds—typically over 100 names. They bring a handful of names into their full legal screening. Maybe there is cultural and linguistic checks that have to happen, and their full legal checks and then they choose one final name to run with. Rob: What steps do you take when you just start generating names? Anthony: All right, so once we all agree on what the marching orders are. The process looks like this: I’ll first bring up my go-to set of software and applications and resources that I use pretty much in parallel, and I bounce between them as I go through development. So, I’ll bring up I’ll bring up Wordnik, which is an important piece of software online, a great resource for lists of words. I use OneLook, Rhymezone, an engine called Sketch Engine, and various other applications. And I will use those to identify words, word parts, that are interesting to me. And so over the course of that development I will use different techniques in order to unearth every possible idea I can find. I will also go through prior projects that I’ve done through Operative Words, and if I find a good word for this project, I’ll search on my computer for all files that I’ve worked on that also contain that word, and so I’ll be able to mine from my prior work. And so, that creative process happens for about two weeks. At the end of two weeks I will have amassed thousands of ideas, and if I bring neural networks and software-based combinations and permutations there are literally tens-of-thousands of ideas in the picture. Rob: You mentioned Sketch Engine awhile ago as one of the online resources that you use. I’ve seen that you’ve written quite a bit about it and how you use it. But can you just briefly explain what it is and why you recommend it so highly? Anthony: Yes, Sketch Engine is a corpus linguistics database. So, let me explain that. Corpus linguistics is using a very large body of real-world language. That’s a corpus, and it’s plural is corpora. And using computers to sort of analyze and tag and organize what’s in there. So a corpus might be, for instance, the one I use is all of the news articles that have been published between 2014 and 2017. All of that real-world text—that’s 28 billion words—all of which have been tagged by part of speech, and it’s recorded all of the words that live next to all of the other words. In other words, it records what are called "colocations." Now, colocations are useful because you can learn a lot about a word by the company it keeps. So if there’s an attribute that a client is interested in, let’s say ‘fast’ or ‘smart,’ I can look up a word like "fast" or "smart" or any other related word, and discover all of the words that have been modified by it. So, therefore I can find an exhaustive list of things that are fast, things that are smart, or verbs related to things that are fast and things that are smart. And so, the benefit is, one, is exhaustiveness, two, is also linguistic naturalness. That is, you’re finding how words are used in a real-world context, and I believe that linguistic naturalness in names is very important for names being credible, for names being relatable, and for names feeling very adaptable. You’re not foisting ideas on people that make no sense. Rob: It rolls off the tongue, to use kind of the layman’s term. Anthony: Yes, that’s right. Rob: You’ve mentioned so many online tools, I’m just curious, is there anything offline that you frequent? Anthony: I’m typically watching some kind of movie or TV show or some other sort of visual stimulus while I’m doing my creative development. Rob: Interesting. Anthony: And those things provide visual stimulation and there is dialogue and other ideas that come up that provide an extra input to my creative process. Rob: Do you choose what you’re watching based on the project, or is it just whatever you happen to be watching anyway? Anthony: No, no, I do. Absolutely. So, with projects that are very technologically driven or scientifically driven, I’ll watch something that’s sort of technological or scientific. Rob: That’s fun. Do you ever just, you know, there’s been a movie that you’ve been wanting to see anyway, and you feel like, "Oh, that fits this project," and you put that on? Anthony: Yeah, absolutely. Rob: Another technique that I saw that you wrote about, it’s called an "excursion." Can you can explain what that is? Is that related to the idea of watching a movie while you’re doing naming? Anthony: In an excursion, you identify a completely unrelated product category. Sometimes the less related the better. And you look for examples of a desired attribute or quality from that category. For instance, if you’re naming a new intelligent form of AI, let’s go ahead and consider examples of intelligence from the world of kitchens. Let’s look for ideas of intelligence in the world of sports. By thinking through an attribute as it appears somewhere else, you are able to find ideas that are differentiated but relevant, because when you take a word from a different category and drop it into a relevant category, it immediately becomes relevant to that new category. People are very comfortable with this technique. Rob: I have a couple of tactical, logistics questions that I’m curious how you would respond to. What about the actual medium that you use when you’re writing down or documenting your name ideas? Do you do this in Excel or do you have a pad of paper with you while you’re doing all these other exercises, and you’re just furiously jotting down ideas? Anthony: I’m using Microsoft Word, by and large, for this. I also use another text application called TextWrangler. I use Excel when I’m charged with developing a generic descriptor for a new product. Rob: And what is TextWrangler? Is there an important difference between that and Word, or just, you happen to use both? Anthony: TextWrangler is a text editor. So, there’s no formatting whatsoever. It’s plain ASCII text. It has another sister application called BBEdit, and these applications are very useful when you’re working with pure text, and it has some terrific tools like the ability to eliminate duplicates, the ability to use pattern recognition, something called Grep, in order to find words that include certain patterns. So, very useful tool and an adjunct to the toolset that I use. Rob: And then the other logistical question is just about timing. You mentioned usually a two-week period of time for your first run at name generation, but I’ve heard other namers say they like to have a four-hour window to really immerse themselves in a project anytime they sit down to do name generation. Do you have any rules of thumb that you adhere to in terms of timing? Anthony: Over the course of two weeks, the process is, I will immerse myself completely in a project maybe for four hours, maybe for a day, maybe for two days, or three days even. And then I put it away. And then I forget about it, and I work on something else for a day or two, and then I come back to it. And so, I have this repeated process of immersion and then incubation and I repeat that in order to do creative work. That’s a process that’s been demonstrated and proven to help maximize creative output. Those "aha" moments—those Eureka moments you have in the shower—happen because you’ve been thinking about something and then stop thinking about it, consciously anyway. But meanwhile there’s something bubbling up under the surface that comes out when you least expect it. Rob: You’ve mentioned a lot of things that you could use if you get stuck on a project. Do you ever get writer’s block so to speak, and if so, is there anything that you haven’t already mentioned that you would use to kick yourself back into naming gear? Anthony: Sure. You know, the writer’s block happens when a client is looking for something that isn’t different. If their if their product or their brand doesn’t really have something new to offer, that’s a more difficult nut to crack. And so, in those cases, I will look at projects that are utterly unrelated in any way, or other kinds of lists. And in this way, I expose myself to words that have nothing to do with the project whatsoever. But, because of how I see words and how I think, I can look at a list and look at a word and go, "Oh, wait a minute. There’s a story there." I can see what would be related or that would be interesting. So, really, it’s a process of compelling me to look at words just in order to see what happens. It’s a little bit stochastic. It’s a little bit random, but it’s actually very useful and interesting and new ideas can come out of it, even for projects where there isn’t something wildly different under the surface. Rob: I like to ask whether there are any names or naming tropes that you see that you’re getting sick of. You know, like any other creative process, there are trends in the industry—startups ending with with "-ly," for example. Are there any specific name ideas or trends like that that you want to call out or that you wish would discontinue? Anthony: Well, Rob, there’re always trends that I wish would go away. In fact, any trends, by and large, I wish would go away, because they’re unoriginal and they don’t serve the brands that they represent. They look derivative. They look unoriginal. And what does that say about their company or their products? So, yes, I’m not crazy about the "-ly" trend that’s been going on, just as I wasn’t crazy about the "oo" trend that was happening after Google and Yahoo found success, just like I wasn’t crazy about the "i-" or "e-" prefix trend back when that was happening. You know, I’m just fundamentally opposed to these ideas because they don’t they don’t serve their clients and they, I think, reflect a company that isn’t truly original. I’m also not crazy about the trend to randomly drop consonants or vowels, or double them, because it’s clear that it was done just in order to secure a dotcom domain, and it feels like domain desperation. Rob: Right, it feels forced. Anthony: Exactly. And linguistic unnaturalness, where you do these things in order to shoehorn words in order to get a free dotcom, I don’t think serves a brand well either, because they’re immediately off-putting, they look unnatural, and they’re difficult to relate to. Rob: The last question I like to ask namers is just what your favorite thing is about being a namer or coming up with name ideas. Anthony: Well, I really love the process of identifying, exhaustively, every possible perspective of a new brand. If I’m looking at a list of a thousand potential names, those are a thousand different perspectives, a thousand different ways of framing you looking at this company. And those are a thousand potential futures. And then seeing when a company finally adopts a name that I’ve helped them with—to see how they adopted the name, breathe life into it, and then run with it, and do their own, get their own inspiration from the name. So, as an example, a while ago I worked with an architectural and design firm called Pollack Architecture, who needed a new name. And eventually, I worked with them and developed the name "Rapt Studio" for them, R-A-P-T, "Rapt Studio" for them. And they do brilliant interior and architecture work and branding work as well. Really brilliant and wonderful people. And so once I gave them "Rapt Studio," they ran with it and they called their employees "Raptors." I didn’t give them that idea. They have meetings once a week, which are called "Monday Rapture" meetings. All right. So, I love when a name can inspire a client with great ideas. That makes me very happy. Rob: That’s great. Well let’s leave it there. And I just want to say thank you again for your willingness to share some of your thinking and how you do what you do. Anthony: Well, thank you so much, Rob. You know, I really do this for selfish reasons because I hate ugly words, and names are an unavoidable part of our environment and our habitat, and wouldn’t you much rather be surrounded by beauty and gardens than blight? I feel that way about names and so I give away what I know, because I want other namers, even my direct competitors, to come up with with great names so that they can also populate the world with words that are interesting and creative imaginative, and words we like to have around. Rob: Well, you call it selfish but it seems selfless to me. I really appreciate it and thanks again. Let’s go make some more beautiful words out there. Anthony: Yeah, let’s do that. Thanks, Rob. Rob: Thank you.  

Listen now: Shannon DeJong is the CEO of House of Who, an art house and agency based in Oakland, California, whose clients include Google, among others. Outside of her naming expertise, Shannon is an artist, speaker, and podcast host: she hosts ArtistCEO, where she uses her story to talk about how business and art can work together. Shannon's also worked at Salt, an independent branding agency in San Francisco. She's worked at Logitech, and also HP, where she was global naming manager.  Toward the end of my conversation with Shannon, she describes what she was like as a kid: "a very mercurial, precocious little thing...[that] would bounce around and just talk and talk and talk" [27:16] You can still hear that kid come through in the enthusiasm and energy she brings to this episode. We kicked things off talking about her approach to name generation, in which Shannon starts out as a hummingbird, flitting from idea to idea. Later on, she turns into a drill, when she's more thorough and exhaustive. In the hummingbird phase, Shannon's quick to get out of her chair and go outside, sometimes driving for miles to find the right setting for creative inspiration. Shannon lists some tools* she uses, such as: A dictionary (ideally the Oxford English Dictionary) OEDonline Dictionary.com ("not the best dictionary...[but] often it gives me that base of synonyms that I start from") Synonym.com Online Etymology Dictionary Google Google Images OneLook We also talked about how to get past writer's block, for which Shannon shared the "Stupid Rule" and the "10-minute Rule" [15:24]. Lastly, Shannon gave her perspective on "brand truth" [21:20], and says the reason she loves being a namer is that "for just these few hours, I get to create an entire world" [26:26]. Below, you'll find the full transcript of the episode (may contain typos and/or transcription errors). Click above to listen to the episode, and subscribe on iTunes to hear every episode of How Brands Are Built. * To see a complete list of online resources listed by namers in episodes of How Brands Are Built, see our Useful List: Online/software resources used by professional namers. Rob: Shannon, thanks for taking the time to chat. Shannon: My pleasure. Good to be here. Rob: Let's zero in on name generation. So, you get a naming brief, you sit down to start generating names. Walk me through what you do next. Shannon: Well, I am a bit of a hummingbird when it comes to creative. The very first thing I do is just read and absorb and listen, letting it kind of sink in, because sometimes it's the stuff that I wouldn't hear on first blush or the nuance of what the client is saying or not saying that ends up proving to be a really fruitful area. You know if someone's like, "Here's the brief; we want it to be about connectivity and speed," you're like, "All right, network, hive, bee, prism, nexus, fast, cheetah pounce, run, paw." Y'know, it's like, that's great. And, once that has run out, the place that's gonna be sweet, where it's going to be truly helpful to the client and where the client could not maybe have gone on their own, is to think about the subtlety of what they're asking for and the subtlety of what the right answer could be. Especially now with the world—everything, brands, naming, trademarks—being so cluttered, it's really about these little teeny slivers of space, whether it's creative space, strategic space, where there's going to be something truthful and effective and clear. So, I like to just do a lot of receptive work first, especially because naming is such a generative, productive act. Rob: So, talk to me a little bit more about interrogating the brief. Is there anything you can point to that that works? Shannon: Yeah, I mean, I guess broadly I just want to ask every question until I have no questions left and I'm sitting there on the call or looking at the brief going, "Ok, Ok, I guess there's nothing left to do but start naming." Like, if I have any question at all in my head, even if it's a playful one or a curious one, like, "Hey this maybe doesn't have anything to do with naming, but how did this company start?" And then I think, practically, I will interrogate a brief or dissect it by just making sure the strategy is watertight. You know, the number one factor for success in any naming project is the strategy. It's always about making sure that you're clear what the ask is and what this name is going to do for you. So, I will always look a brief through and through and just know that there are those different pieces that I know need to be covered. I have to be very clear on what the brand—the master brand or the product brand—is about, the positioning must be ultra-clear. One thing that I find really helpful is coming back to the simplicity of this particular exercise, which is just a small part of branding writ large. It's a very important part. It's an essential part. But just reminding everyone, hey this is a name. There's a lot of other things that the brand is going to be. What do you need the name to do? Rob: Well let's talk about a hypothetical. I don't know how often this really happens, but let's pretend that you've been given a perfect brief. Where do you start, any process or steps that you follow consistently? Shannon: Oh yeah. Now the fun begins. I think my number one thing that I always do—so I mentioned I'm a bit of a hummingbird and then other times I act like a drill... Rob: And explain what you mean by those two metaphors just so that I'm clear. Shannon: Yeah, sure. As a hummingbird I like to give myself permission to...so creatively, I think I need to be able to flit from idea to idea. So, when I first sit down, I really like to give myself a ton of freedom, even though later on I will be more thorough and more exacting and I will make sure that I've covered my bases, and what am I missing, and where can I mine? And that's when the drilling comes in. The initial phase for me is always one of freedom and following the thread wherever it goes. It's organic, it's potentially disorganized. It's kind of like a little kid with a bunch of sugar who just wants to like, run around like, "Oh ooh, what's this over here? Oh, look at that! Oh, look it's a kitten. Oh, Mommy, can I have another..." You know, it's like I let myself do that because I know that that's where a lot of the creative wisdom is. And at the very least, even if that initial flush of naming doesn't produce names that are going to be viable, because like I said, the way the brain works you're going to have to be recycling and going over lots of synonyms and things that maybe aren't the quote unquote "diamond in the rough," that's where you get the volume. That's where you get the quantity, at least for me. I should say, I get the quantity and the volume and the breadth and inspiration and the curiosity, so I can cover a lot of ground if I just let my mind flit from beautiful little idea to beautiful little idea. Rob: And just to be clear, how are you, in practical terms, how are you working at this point? Are you often on a whiteboard or working with Post-It Notes or are you in software of some sort? Shannon: Great question. I would say that, well, first of all, I would say even my method is a little hummingbird-like in I also follow wherever the impulse is in terms of how to work. So, in the first several hours I really do just follow however I want to work. I start totally on impulse. It's like, have I been sitting at my computer all day and I'm just now getting to it? Well, opening up an Excel spreadsheet, while it can be very helpful later on with organizing, right now is going to just kill my creative mojo. So, why don't I grab a pen and paper and my running shoes and walk outside and go for a walk? I mean, I have even driven before an hour away to a beautiful setting. Especially when it's a particular kind of project and I need you know more tranquil, kind of open, expansive ideas and given myself physical space and physical beauty in order to start unleashing. Other times, I work a lot in just good old Word or good old Google Docs or a text doc. Increasingly now, I have, when I have a limited amount of time, I actually will start in Excel because anytime you take your pen and paper and you go out into nature, it takes longer. But I would say that I love starting with pen and paper. That's always a great way to start because you know that no matter what you're going to be ending up back at a machine. Rob: And I'm just curious, when you when you do wander off into nature with a pad, you don't you don't have Wi-Fi access when you're doing this? Shannon: Correct. Yeah, absolutely. That's part of the genius, I think, is that, to totally disconnect. I'd like to give myself a chance to see what I can do without any influence. I guess I should say without any digital influence. Because I think once I start getting into using—and there are a lot of great tools out there and they're absolutely essential, you know dictionaries and thesauruses and I think there's something called OneLook, and Wordnik, and Wikipedia, not even for words but just for ideas and how are certain concepts related to other concepts. These are all great. And for me that's more like middle process or it or toward end of the generation process when I'm starting to slow down a little bit from my raw creative fire. I think the best stuff has come from when I'm actually just sitting back a bit. And sometimes I physically do this. I sit back from the computer, I sit back from my desk, maybe I don't even have a pen and paper and I just... It's kind of that like shower moment, that lightbulb moment of, "Hold on, hold on, let me take a break from trying to generate 20 words a second and just go back to that initial listening and thinking. It's a very important step because sometimes I have had that moment and it's like, "Oh, that's the name." Like you just had this moment you're like, "That's it. Yes!" And you know that it's probably not it. Rob: Or it's not available. Shannon: Or it's not available. Yeah, usually that's the next thought. I think I need to have a feeling of, oh, I've had several moments like that, where I just go, "Yes, oh yes!". Rob: You've brought up timing. How do naming projects go for you from a timing standpoint and what's the ideal? Is it to have a huge block of time in front of you or do you like to work in little sprints? Shannon: Well, the ideal timeline is one that is two weeks for creative work where I have the opportunity to try out a lot of different modes. No matter what, at some point, I need to have a long block of time and that long block of time is always relative to the timeline and size of the project. So, if it's a quick little name list that I'm helping another agency with a long block of time might be two-to-four hours. I mean, that might feel like a good amount of time to sink in. I do feel like the minimum amount of time total is four hours. Like, I feel like it's after the four hours is when you can really get to some good stuff. And then you do hit a wall and you're like, "Ok, I need to refresh." Rob: Let's talk about tools. You mentioned a few but I'd love to just get a list from you, if you have it off the top of your head, of online or offline tools that you like to have handy for every project or maybe there are some that you find you only use once in a blue moon. Shannon: Sure, yeah. I have to admit, while I'm always on the search for new tools, I kind of I kind of feel a little boring or old school because as of yet I haven't found a tool that's better than my brain. But, with that said, I definitely use various dictionaries. So, I might have a dictionary here, whether that's a Webster's, ideally you have a full, original OED and you can open up and look through etymologies, but I do not have one of those. I do use, I think it's called OEDonline or Etymology.com [Online Etymology Dictionary, I believe. OneLook. Just, really Dictionary.com. It's not the best dictionary and often weeding through all of the ads and crossword puzzles and whatever I find very distracting, but it works as a tool because often it gives me that base of synonyms that I start from. Like ok, here is "fast," and dictionary.com or synonym.com, they're going to give me a definition and like top-10 synonyms. And then those synonyms, I, using my brain, or my other favorite naming tool, which is just Google, then get inspired to take that synonym and try and find what I call related or extended conceptual synonyms to go from. I also just use Google and the way I use it is I will start, embarrassingly, by just taking words in the brief or in the pathways and just typing them in. Like hey, let's just start. What does the Google brain and what does the world and what does the internet...how do they relate to this word or this pathway that I need to explore? Then I go into, I use a lot just Images, Google Images, and I'll type in various words, whether it's from the brief or even words that I have found that capture some kind of essence, even if it's not the right word. I'll write that into Google Images and then I'll get a visual palette or visual collage of more things that stimulate more thought. Rob: That's a great idea. I love the Google Images idea just to break yourself out of...I mean frankly, you're looking at words a lot when you're doing gaming so it's even just a nice break for the eyes. Is there anything particular that you've found works well for writer's block, so to speak? Shannon: I want to think carefully before I say this because I might jinx myself. I was going to say I don't experience writer's block very often. Maybe more than writer's block, I just get constricted and rigid and I get too narrow in my thinking and it just gets dry. So, I think that's probably my version of it. It's not a full block. But it just sort of is there's no juice anymore. And what I always do then is the Stupid Rule and the 10-minute Rule. The Stupid Rule—I just made these up right now, can you tell I'm a namer? The Stupid Rule is that I have to write down things that are stupid. Like alright, alright, now I want the next ten names, fifty names, to be totally stupid. Like you would never name this that. You would never even show it to the client. You'd be embarrassed to do it, you know? Rob: And the Stupid Rule—I love the name—when you do that...so, I guess it's sometimes it tells you, "Ok, I'm done, because I did this and I feel like I've gotten everything out of my system," essentially? And then other times does it, it spurs another wave? Shannon: Well, I don't think that just feeling like I'm out of ideas is the right feeling for telling me that it's time to stop. Usually that tells me that it's coming up on that first wave or a dry spot and I have to push through it. The 10-minute Rule—to finish up that thought—is just do anything for 10 minutes. If you want to stop after that, ok, then maybe it's not the right time to do it, but most likely you'll get into flow and you'll be on the treadmill and it will just, fwip! And off you go. I think it's absolutely that way with creativity. I mean anything, right, it's "I don't want to do it, I don't want to do it, I don't do it. Ok, 10 minutes, 10 minutes, 10 minutes—oh, this is fun." Rob: So, in that example what are you doing? What are you doing for 10 minutes? I just want to understand, are you doing something naming related for 10 minutes? Shannon: That's it. And maybe you only get 10 minutes of naming right now and then do something else and come back to it. If I'm really feeling blocked or I don't like it I'll just say, "Ok, 10 more minutes. Just do 10 more minutes." You know, I've even done that to myself three times in a row, like "Uggh, I don't want to." "Ok. Hey, hey, how about another 10 minutes? Rob: Making deals with yourself. Shannon: Exactly. Rob: Are there any specific name ideas or naming tropes you know like the "-ly" on the end of all these startup names—is there anything in particular that you're sick of seeing or that you've identified as a trend that you try to steer clear of? Shannon: Well, it's a trend that isn't my favorite but I'm not yet able to steer clear of it because it's so pervasive, but I must say the verbable name is lovely in theory and there's nothing overtly obnoxious about it. But here's what I don't like: I don't like it because people ask for it just because they think that that's going to be a successful name, and I hate to be a broken record but I want to go back to this idea of, "Yeah, but does it make sense strategically?" And I have gotten a lot of that like, "We want it to be one syllable, real word, ideally verbable," which is nice but there's going to be tradeoffs. Rob: To what extent do you think verbability is a real thing, though? Because "Google" is a noun, right? I mean, if anything. Shannon: You know what, Rob, thank you! So is Apple. So is...Uber is an adjective. This is what's so funny, is that I look around I'm like, "How many names are actually..." and people are like, "You know, like Twitter." I'm like, Twitter is not...you don't "Twitter" something. You Tweet it. And I don't know, honestly, if that came from Twitter, the company, the brand itself. But I don't think so. I don't even think that they created their own language. That was done by people. That's the thing, people will do that. This is the nature of language. This is my background: linguistics. I started as a linguist and I love language and the beauty of language. This is why I'm not a prescriptive but a descriptive linguist, which just means languages is alive. Language is organic. And it will extend and bend and twist itself as memes, as trends, as tropes from person to person in this way that is beyond any one individual or brand. Rob: I absolutely agree with you. I think what I hear you saying is that it's not necessarily our decision as the people behind the brand as to whether or not people end up using it as a verb. That's their decision, and one that they'll likely make subconsciously. But then, on top of that, I also think that brands need to be really careful about trying to impose that type of prescriptive language on to consumers or onto their customers because it—aside from it potentially not working—it could also just really backfire in terms of making them look silly. You talk about "brand truth" a lot. I think I saw it on the House of Who website and I believe you give talks about it as well. Can you just explain what brand truth is and how it relates to naming? Shannon: Brand truth is the very simple idea that one, you don't have to be fake in order to succeed. And two, your truth is going to be your most valuable asset. I think that the branding industry and the marketing industry is often known for putting layers on and making things shiny and beautiful and glossy, and there is a time and a place for that. I'm most interested in peeling the layers back and getting to the heart of what is essential. And if you are a business and a brand, there's something truthful about your product, your offering, your culture, and the essence of who you are, and that is going to be your sweet spot. I think that that actually ends up being—especially now with the way the world is going—people want realness. People want to be able to connect with a brand and its truth, in all of its glory, wants it to be whole. And I think in terms of naming it drills down the value of essential information. You get one word, one name, to communicate who you are and hopefully you have a bunch of other brand assets that go along with it. But sometimes you don't, and it's one word that may appear in print, it may be verbal, it may be someone just passing on the street. And I think, in that one name, there should be something really essential about who you are and it should be real. Also, just in terms of the process of naming, we're talking very tactical, you don't have to go to all these fancy bells and whistles and naming trends and what's going to be cool in five years and what's most searchable. All of those things are important to consider because they're realities. But I think in the process of naming, what's most important is to think of something really clear and clean and concise. And I would call that "truthful." We recently worked on Google Home Mini, and that's not a sexy name, necessarily. It's not like, "Oh god, that's so fun, and you just say it and it's like an inside joke, and it's cool, and it's hip." But it's pretty simple and it just makes sense. And it's at the heart of what the thing is. It's a small, cute version of Google Home, and there you have it. So, I kind of feel like people often try too hard when they don't have to. There doesn't have to be anxiety, you don't have to worry like, "Oh god, we have to be super creative, or edgy, or unique, or differentiated." Yeah, those things, sure. That's where your strategy comes in. But when it gets down to naming, I say start with the truth. Rob: Yeah, I often find myself reminding clients that no one will ever think as hard about this name as we're about to do. And try to relieve a little of that pressure and temptation to overthink it. Shannon: I often say to people my secret as a namer is that naming is the most important thing you will ever do for your business, and...it doesn't matter. At some point, get as close as you can and do the best you can, but as long as you—again—as long as you're on strategy and you're communicating what you need to communicate, you're fine. Rob: Well I love that Google Home Mini name. I think it's a good example of a name that's great but you don't realize it is. And the reason for that is, or the way to realize how great it is, is to think of what they could have called it. To think of all the things they might have done and some of the atrocities that other companies have waged upon us with more fanciful attempts to convey what is ultimately a pretty simple message. Shannon: I think when I was younger and new at naming, for a long while I was like, "Oh, I want to get that that perfect name. I want to have on my resume...like I want to have named Twitter!" I want to get something that people hear and they're like, "Oh my god, that's such an amazing name!" and I'd be like, "Yeah, thanks." And at this point I really let that go and I realize that it's far more satisfying to just get a name that's right and just makes sense. And if I never get associated with it, great. And if it does its job, great. Rob: Last question: What is your favorite thing about naming or generating names? Shannon: Oh gosh, I think that it's a little moment to play God. It's like, for just these few hours I get to create an entire world. I mean maybe it's like—I don't have children, and so maybe it's getting to name all of these potential little babies that will grow up and go out into the world, and there's sort of like a maternal pride about giving my creative oomph to something that will live on past me. I think that's part of it. And I think the other part is it satisfies this, like I said, the hummingbird in me. When I was a kid I was a very mercurial, precocious little thing. I was super teeny with shock-white hair and I would bounce around and just talk and talk and talk, and I think at some point, people were just like, "Ok, thank you for the 15 cartwheels and the story about rainbows. But it's time to be quiet now." And I think that energy, that childlike enthusiasm for language and ideas, gets to play when I'm naming and then it gets to saddle up next to, and ride along with, the other part of my brain which then wants to make it all make sense and put it all into a structure and find a place for it in the world. Rob: Shannon, thanks so much for making the time to chat. Shannon: Thank you. This was a lot of fun.  

Rob’s purpose can be summed up pretty succinctly - “Rob believes everyone should love business and entrepreneurship”. Why does this simple statement summarize Rob? Well, he believes in creating value for others, and he sees business and entrepreneurship as a direct path to achieving it. Rob’s journey may very well be a perfect example of how many of our journeys look. His current passion, helping employers create and promote their career opportunities with job ads that don’t suck, Rob and the team at Ongig are turning talent acquisition into the marketing focused activity it’s meant to be. This episode is, what I would call, organized chaos. There’s a potpourri of wisdom, stories, and opinions on everything from going to college, to starting a business, to swimming with dolphins, and even a little music trivia sprinkled in. Listen to this podcast interview and more episodes from the Built On Purpose Podcast at http://yscouts.com/podcast

Tom picks a couple of verses from 2Deep's album, Honey That's Show Biz featuring Jae Supreme and Rob Well.

Tom picks a couple of verses from 2Deep's album, Honey That's Show Biz featuring Jae Supreme and Rob Well.

Holy Bajeebus! Aaron and Olivia are both here at the same time for once!News of the Weird w/Eugene:-Guy's ex and current jump into river to make him save them-Single ladies in Japan get married to nobody just for pics and honeymoons-High-speed rail to Beijing to be completed soon?Ask Aaron and Olivia - Why can't they just choose one spelling for Korean words and stick with it?On the pulse w/Rob - Well actually, we were going to talk about the stresses of student life, but instead we ended talking about our guest's bad blind dating experiences. GASP!ALSO! There's a chance to score a blind date with her yourself! If you are younger than 26, have good hygene, and are in the market for a hot babe, then listen to find out how YOU could win a blind date!

Holy Bajeebus! Aaron and Olivia are both here at the same time for once!News of the Weird w/Eugene:-Guy's ex and current jump into river to make him save them-Single ladies in Japan get married to nobody just for pics and honeymoons-High-speed rail to Beijing to be completed soon?Ask Aaron and Olivia - Why can't they just choose one spelling for Korean words and stick with it?On the pulse w/Rob - Well actually, we were going to talk about the stresses of student life, but instead we ended talking about our guest's bad blind dating experiences. GASP!ALSO! There's a chance to score a blind date with her yourself! If you are younger than 26, have good hygene, and are in the market for a hot babe, then listen to find out how YOU could win a blind date!