Podcast appearances and mentions of ryan what

Crisco, Dez and Ryan - What did you steal?

It’s great to get an update from Gracie about Grace Rose Farm and how they’ve faced the many challenges of 2020. They have big plans for the next few months and I’m excited to share this latest conversation on The Flower Podcast. Some background about Gracie and Ryan: What began with a few beautiful rose images shared on Instagram blossomed into a beautiful story!  Gracie Poulson of Grace Rose Farm shares her floral journey on an earlier episode. See link below. From early childhood to dragging her rose pots into her New York apartment for the winter, Gracie has always had a soft spot for roses. Along with her husband Ryan, the two have grown her love of roses into a remarkable business specializing in organically grown old fashioned garden roses. Gracie shares her rose journey, business and rose advice, and pivoting during the effects of COVID-19. We're excited to have Gracie as our guest again this week on this special episode of The Flower Podcast and here's a link to their first episode. You can learn more about Grace Rose Farm, and all of our past guests at www.theflowerpodcast.com ! Be sure to subscribe to our podcast on the platform or app of you choice and we would love to have you join our email family. Did you know that you can also visit our Youtube channel if you would like to watch my chats with guests via Zoom. Follow the link to our YouTube channel for more information. Our latest Blog Post features our sponsor Grace Rose Farm and their new product line. Thanks to all our sponsors! Grace Rose Farm Accent Decor FlowerSchool NY / LA Details Flowers Software

Ryan explores whether you should or shouldn’t use PPC automation tools to assist you in your paid search efforts. The answer isn’t so simple. For all your PPC needs check out: https://www.logicalposition.com/ What's covered today: What is PPC Automation? Should we use it? What are the benefits to Automation tools? What are the drawbacks to Automation tools? TRANSCRIPT Jon: All right, Ryan. Today we're going to talk about PPC automation, or pay-per-click automation. Now Ryan, I've been hearing a lot about pay-per-click automation tools. Now, this is mainly with brands who are doing one of two things. I see it when they're either trying to save a dollar by not working with an agency, and they think, "Hey, automation can help me do all of these things that my pay-per-click agency is doing for me." Or, they're just trying to scale their traffic up extremely quickly, and they see automation as the holy grail of them being able to do that. So, I'm really excited to learn about this, because I keep hearing about it, but I don't know much about it, and so I'm happy to have an expert to discuss this with. So let's just start by defining what PPC automation is exactly. Ryan: It's a big topic, and PPC automation can mean so many different things to different people. But high level, it generally means not touching certain pieces of an account, and having some type of computer system make decisions for you, within the Google or Microsoft Ads space, and it's even going into the social world as well. But basically, something gets done without a human touching it. Whatever that looks like, it's from high level computers. Jon: So, it's not an all or nothing. Because I was just looking at this as an all or nothing, like you're either using automation to run your PPC, or you're not. But you're telling me that just having some automation built in can actually be beneficial, as opposed to just going full automation. Ryan: Yeah. And there's different thoughts on that, just like everything online, even in CRO, I'm sure that it has to do with... Everybody's got an opinion, and it's different than everybody else's, on what works or what doesn't. It's based on their experiences or what they've seen, or what they've been told. And so, you've got extremes, where Google Smart Campaigns are an automation in Google Shopping, that will literally do everything. All you do is give it a budget, and what your return on ad spend wants to be, and it goes and does that. If it can be accomplished in the system, it will do it. If your return on ad spend goal was too high, for example, it's just going to sit there, and not really spend any money. If it's really low, it's going to spend a lot more money, and get you a lot more clients because the potential's there. Jon: So you're telling me automation can't solve all of my hopes and dreams. Ryan: I wish it could. There's some people that will promise you that, for sure, but if anybody is telling you that, they are lying, or they have an ulterior motive in place for you and your business. And on the other side, there are ways to use automation that help but don't necessarily do even the work in place of a human doing the work. And, as with most things, and my most common answer, which is also my least favorite answer in questions about digital marketing, is, it depends. Where should your business lie in that space around automation, specifically in the PPC realm? It's going to depend on where your business is at in the life cycle, what you're able to afford as far as agency or humans doing work, and what are the long-term goals of the business, or what are you trying to accomplish? Ryan: And so, let me take it in a few phases I guess, in kind of explaining what I believe in automation. You've got the full automation, where you're just going to either use a tool, or, for most businesses, use Google's Smart Campaigns in the e-commerce world to spend money for you in Google. I think in some spaces it does make sense, but it also comes with a very large asterisk, where you're having Google do all of this work for you to grow your business, but Google's goals, generally speaking, are different than yours. As a big, publicly traded company, they have responsibilities to their shareholders to grow their revenues and profits, just like you as a business owner have a responsibility to yourself or to your employees to grow revenues and profits. So for most businesses, Smart Campaigns and full automation in Google is not my recommendation, and it is mainly around understanding what's going on in your account and the ability to really scale. Ryan: But small advertisers, just starting up, you've never spent before, you really want to see if your business online has some legs to it if you start spending money, I do think Smart Campaigns within the Google space do have a place to play in that. And if I had to put a line in the sand, probably somewhere around $500 or less a month in ad spend to kind of prove a model. My wife, for example, would make me prove something to her before we actually jumped with both feet into a business and say, "Yeah, let's throw a bunch of money at it, and really see if it works." She'd say, "All right, let's kind of see what happens if you just kind of let Google do something on the side here to see what happens with 500 bucks over a couple months, 500 a month for a couple months." I think there's something there. Ryan: On the other spectrum, no automation, where you are 100% customized, doing everything either with an employee or an agency internally running an account on Google and Microsoft. That has a place to play, and I think that pool of companies where that makes sense is probably in more of a mid-tier type business model where you're spending a few thousand a month, maybe as high as 10,000 a month, where you're really just one person doing all the work for you, and you can do a lot of customization, because generally when you're at that spend level, you're not the biggest, you're not the smallest, but you're having to compete with some of those biggest, and you need some of that kind of surgical precision to find those specific keywords, or specific searches for specific products that really makes sense for your company, and you've seen the conversion rates that work. Ryan: And then, the vast majority of businesses fall kind of in the middle, where you do need some automation, and you do need some human strategy and somebody else, and some humans touching the account as well. And so, focusing on the middle is where it gets most complicated. So, for the majority of businesses out there, it's how much, or what parts of the account really make sense there. Is it an internal employee with some automation? Is it an agency using humans, and some automation? And what goes first? Is it the automation first, with a human checking on it, and making sure it's working? That's going to be a broad spectrum within the space. Jon: So, I'm hearing that it makes sense to prove out a business. So, prove out a new product perhaps, somewhere where you're just going to spend a little bit of money, and you want to start and see if there's a good product market fit there. And if so, then it would make sense to expand beyond just automation. But it does have its use cases, which is great to hear. So, okay. So, you've talked a lot about, there's three tiers to be thinking about, right? And that that kind of messy middle is where "it depends" is usually the answer, which makes sense. So, let's talk about some tools around this. What are the benefits to using pay-per-click automation tools? You mentioned one of them being to prove out a marketplace, but in terms of the tools themselves, can you talk a little bit about what the automation does in that sense? Ryan: Yeah, so there's a lot of different areas of PPC that you can actually automate. And a lot of PPC automation came about, let's say maybe 10 years ago it really started to get some traction, around bid management, and having some computer system actually automate the bid changes in the account, because it does get mundane. It does become difficult, in the middle of the night, for example, or around the clock, to be making changes in an account when you actually have humans working your account need some sleep. And so, bid management was really the beginning of the space. And so, that's constantly there. It's still there. Google even has automations built into their platform now around bids. They have enhanced CPC, which I believe, Jon, you had some fun with that setting when Google changed some settings around that. I believe you spent upwards of $200 per click on Google when we looked at your account together. Jon: Yes. That's where automation became dangerous. And again, I know nothing about this, right? And so, I thought, "Hey, I'll let Google handle it," and I clicked the box, and then ended up spending a lot of money. Ryan: Yep. Oops. And that, it happens. It's not, obviously, what happens all the time. But when automated systems get... be doing what they're told, I mean, they have to still have input from a human, they can do things that maybe aren't intended, and that is really the big thing you have to be aware of in using automation. They're really as good as the inputs you're giving them, or the person designing the algorithm. And so, heavy trading algorithms are really impacting stock markets all over. And so, big drops, big swings up and down can happen because of automation. So, you just need to be coming in with some concern or just awareness that that can happen, so you're watching it, no matter what level of automation you're using. Ryan: But there's bid management, there is automated campaign management. In fact, one of my competitors that's been around for even longer than us, and they actually have a really good name in the marketplace, they built some automated systems to take search queries that converted and build them into ad groups automatically, because that became some of the more mundane time-draining things that were happening, when you'd see a search for this specific product that you hadn't seen before, you're like, "Oh, that converted, that's great, let's make sure there's not more of that out there. Let's build a specific ad group for that search and capture all of it." Great strategies. And so, the main argument that a lot of agencies that are using automation and automated systems that are helping internal employees and agencies scale is you can spend more time strategizing on growth and let these automated systems do a lot of the stuff that are just sucking time away from maybe the things that are more mundane and you don't need to be spending high-powered talent on doing those things. Very logical. I mean, there's no scenario in which that sounds like a terrible idea. Ryan: What's happened with that, that I've seen over the last 10 years, is a lot of agencies have adopted this automation, and it's allowed for tremendous amounts of scale, without having to develop a bunch of humans to understand what's going on, or to know how to communicate with clients, which is in no way bad. But what's happening is as this scale is happening at a lot of agencies that I'm seeing their accounts is they're losing their touch with what's going on, and then how to strategize for actual growth because this tool is doing so much of the work, that they can't go in and say, this client may say, "I really want to start doing this," or, "I want to move my return on ad spend goal to this," or, "Should I be breaking into this market?" And because these tools are doing so much of the work, that question isn't as easily answered as if by somebody that was actually in the account all the time that saw the search queries, that was doing negative keyword reports, that was doing all these wonderful things, and bid management, that could actually respond very quickly and say, "Oh, here's what you need to be considering as a business owner or your marketing team when looking at this question." Ryan: And so, that's been one of my big concerns. I think about stupid, stupid movie, but Idiocracy, where you've got a guy that's been dead for so long, comes back and everybody's really dumb, and he was not smart back when he lived, but everybody got so much dumber because of automation and the world doing everything for them. I worry about that. I don't think it's happening across the board at agencies or internal teams, but I really have a lot of respect for groups of people, or agencies that have to be in the account regularly, and I see a lot better results, generally speaking, when somebody's in a Google Ads or Microsoft account making the changes, because they're seeing in real time what's happening in the market, and they have to have a lens where they're looking at things through and say, "Why is this happening? I have to go solve this problem or understand it a little bit more." Whereas, if a tool's doing all the work, they don't have to try to get in there and understand what's happening, or what is the competitor doing that's causing this to happen in this account. Jon: I heard you talk a lot about search and search ads and Google and, okay, so Google has some automation. Does Bing have automation? Microsoft Ads. Ryan: They do have some, and it's not as old as Google. So, I can't say that it works as good or has as many advancements because I also don't look under the hood and I don't understand all the engineers and what they're doing. Microsoft obviously has some very smart people and they're doing some great things in there. So, a lot of the same things you see in Google, Microsoft Ads also has a lot of that capability for automation, and I would use a lot of the same automation the same way depending on where you are in the business cycle and what is needed in your business. Jon: Okay. Now, what about social channels, because that falls under pay-per-click for me, right? Ryan: Yep. Jon: So, what about things like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter? Is there automation built into those platforms? Ryan: There is some level of automation built into almost every platform, and I look at it almost the same no matter who or what platform it's on. It's an old example, but it still rings true. I wouldn't give all my taxes to the IRS to have them do them for me and tell me how much I owe them. We're diametrically opposed to what should be happening in that scenario. Jon: Right, success is different for each of you, right? Ryan: Exactly. Jon: Okay. Ryan: Exactly. So, if Facebook is doing everything for me and I'm just giving them a credit card and hoping that it does well, there is a piece of Facebook that wants me to succeed, but Facebook's success is more important to Facebook than my business succeeding. They know that if my business fails, another one's going to come up. Same with Google, same with Microsoft, same with LinkedIn. It's all the same. So, I, having been in this for a decade, I step a little bit away from automation whenever possible and I say, "Okay, how can I understand this better? How can I try to beat what the automation is doing?" Because what I've seen a lot of times with the engineers that build automated tools, way smarter than I am, as far as coding, math. I mean, it's not even close. But we're coming up with a strategy of maybe why this should be bid up or bid down, or maybe why this keyword should or should not be in the account. Ryan: I've still seen the humans making better decisions on that, and I think the machines and the AI is a very popular term. Artificial intelligence, everybody wants to be able to say that they do have a lot of that in their agency or in their organization, because it sounds really good. Like, "I've got this artificial intelligence that's really pushing growth and doing a lot of my thinking for me." Again, not bad at all, and I actually recommend businesses step into that space to understand it more and to use it where it's appropriate. But I still think when you have human searching and the change is constantly happening, we know that something like 15% of all searches done on Google every 90 days have never been done before. So, what is an artificial intelligence going to do with a search term that's never been done before? It can gain some insights possibly, but as we're blending in search query reports now voice search with text search, like, I type it into my computer or I search for it on Alexa or Google Home. There's a lot of different intent behind that. I've seen better results from humans looking through that and being able to filter it. Jon: Right, right. Especially working with natural language and understanding the intent behind what people are searching versus just what they say, right? Ryan: Yeah. Yep. Jon: Okay. Ryan: And so, yes, companies need to be looking at automation and considering the opportunities available, and then how is that going to compliment what they currently are doing? I don't ever look at, long-term, replacing humans... I mean, again, in the next five years that will be my long-term view. You can't predict anything in the digital space beyond five years, and really, anything longer than a year is, you're throwing darts at a dartboard way far away. But I don't foresee any time soon where I would be comfortable with my money on full automation, no human looking into that or doing it, or having a serious play within that space. I spend a decent amount of my own money on all these platforms, and I see the automation. I know the biggest players in the space. I mean, if you're in the PPC world, Marin, Kenshoo, Adobe, Acquisio. Probably hundreds of others that are doing the same thing in bid automation, in addition to Google and Microsoft, including Facebook will do some bid automation based on goals. There's no shortage of those. There's no shortage of very, very smart people working to create the next best automation. Jon: I think you made a good point earlier, and that's something I think you just touched on right now even, but it's in the favor when you do bid automation of Facebook or whoever to have that bid go up and up and up, right? So, automating means that escalation seems to happen more quickly. Is that not true? Ryan: Yeah, I mean, we saw it in your account, right? Where you were averaging in your business $20 a click, which is reasonable, based on how you spend money and the returns you get. But then all of a sudden, if everybody is on automation and everybody's using Google's automation on Google, how does Google know who's going to win? Does Google play, you know, make it socialist where everybody gets 5% because there's 20 people advertising, so we're going to even it out and make everybody little? How do you grow beyond that? And that's where logic comes into my side and says, okay, we can't all be on automation or there's just, there's no win. There's only so many ways you can look at moving bids up or down, for example. They can only move up and down, they can't move sideways, they can't move diagonal. And so, it's understanding more about the user as we add layers in from a remarking perspective, from an RLSA perspective. The more information we have about this user allows us to get more aggressive or less aggressive than maybe a competitor that doesn't have that information. Ryan: And so, all of these layers we add on add complexity and give opportunity to people that have that data. So data is actually probably, in my opinion, more valuable than some automations. The more data layers you can get, and you can get lost in data, so don't get me wrong, the idea that "Oh, big data, all you need to do is look in all these thousands of Excel sheets to figure out where that one specific customer is that you want and go find them and bid on them." It's more about using that as you're making adjustments and using the understanding and strategy behind why you may or may not be making this move. Ryan: It's fascinating, when I look at all the people I've hired in the digital marketing space and the people that have really succeeded on the backend of making the moves in an account. It's really, from a human perspective, becoming an art form in how you look at a Google Ads account, and you're kind of, I joke with the guys and girls on the team, or ladies on the team, that it's kind of like the Matrix, where you're looking at just all of these digits flying around. And the really good paid search account managers in the account really see it in a much different light than somebody like myself that would go in and say, "Yeah, okay, I see it says $200 and it says conversion." They're seeing all these different layers because of their experience. I mean, some of our people have been doing this for over a decade, 15 years actually, in the accounts, doing it, and they're so efficient and so crazy of what they can do. Ryan: And we've matched that up with people that are very good at gaming, like, the strategy piece of gaming. And so, really, we're looking at almost the gamification of digital marketing, where we're looking at these and saying, "All right, you're trying to beat these other advertisers." I'm a hyper competitive individual, as you know, and you're pretty darn competitive as well, in your basketball and marketing world. I want to win. And we find people that really want to win, and then they add their ability to see all of these moving pieces and saying, "Hey, if that competitor of our client goes out of business, that's unfortunate for that company, but it's really good for us and our client." Ryan: It becomes fun but also interesting in how you're taking that human that is really good at paid search management, and what we're trying to do is kind of make, right now my best analogy is kind of the Terminators. How are we using technology and bolting it on to them to make them more effective at what they do? Rather than replacing it, how do we give them things they can look through with weird glasses or things they can add onto their mice? What are we doing to make them more efficient as a human, and that's how we look at technology and automation. Jon: So next time I visit Logical Position, I'm going to be interacting with a bunch of cyborgs basically. Ryan: I mean, hey, if my vision comes in place. I mean, maybe two years out on that one. Jon: Dart board, right? That's one of the darts. Ryan: Yeah, one of the darts. But it's... I think the best use of PPC automation, personally, and this is my lens I look through and how we're looking at automation internally at Logical Position is, for the majority of companies in the middle, it's, how are you supplementing the humans? Instead of replacing them, how are you making them able to do more? So, we use, scripts are a great automation that a lot of people don't think about. We're using scripts to say, "All right, this ad group had a hundred impressions by 6:00 AM yesterday and it has zero today. What just happened? Something is broken there. Let's go in and see that." Replacing some of that minutia or things that just get really bored or tedious, or we just don't have the scale of a human in a large account to get to all of those pieces efficiently. How can we say, "All right, I need this to go do that"? Maybe it's not going to go through the search query reports for us and find all the negative, but it can bubble up some opportunities. Ryan: I've talked to a phenomenal technology company, Metricstory. If you haven't checked out Metricstory I think they're really cool, and they're really, man, they have some smart engineers. They're doing some automation where they're able to bubble up new opportunities based on scraping a Shopping search query report and saying, "Hey, these converted and they're actually not showing in your text ad or search portion of your account, from a search query perspective. You should put this keyword in there because it's converting on Shopping." And it can, based on their algorithm, their really smart algorithm, it can even give you an estimated return on ad spend, saying, "Hey, this keyword we think is going to get this based on ad groups around it." Ryan: So we're really looking at leveraging some of that in our efficiencies. Say, "Okay, if we have that, can we make this person able to focus more on bids on text ads because we have this filtering a search query report on Shopping?" Or we're able to find losers in the search query report on the text ad side much quicker than we could if we had to comb through it by hand. Jon: Yeah, this is a really interesting point, adding on to what people, the strategy that a human person can bring to this, with a little bit of AI, helps them to push this even further. But you still have to have the insight that somebody is bringing to the table with that experience to really pull out the meaningful changes. And I thought it was really interesting, you said earlier that aligns with this, bids and these automated bid machines, they only can go up and down. They can't go sideways or diagonal or any other dimension, right? And that's what a human is able to do. Ryan: It's a frustrating answer, but every company should be looking at kind of a backstop. And then also, if you're a company that has one person managing your account internally, I always had the worry as an agency of the bus theory, like what if they get hit by a bus? I told my team, nobody could take the public transportation because you can not be hit by a bus. We don't have enough backups. But in that scenario it's like, okay, well, who else is going to be aware of that? And it can't just be an automated system that's going to be continued going if they evaporated tomorrow, because it's unencumbered, you know, what's going on. Ryan: So, having some automation helping them, but also documenting things too so that an automation doesn't need to take all of it, but that another human could come in and replace or augment as well if somebody needs time off or pregnancy or birth or sickness, all these other things that we, at scale, with 750 employees here, we can do that automatically but a lot of companies don't have that ability. And so, they need probably a little more automation just to protect themselves but also ensure that there are some humans looking at things. Jon: Well Ryan, this has been extremely educational for me. Thank you for sharing all the knowledge around this. I am really looking forward to the day that I walk into Logical Position and I'm interacting with some cyborgs and then having you bring that skillset over to The Good so that we can continue to do the same on the conversion side. Ryan: Oh yeah. That looks fun, huh? Jon: Yes. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for educating me today. Really looking forward to not spending $200 unnecessarily on my own ads by checking a box for automation in the future. So, thank you for saving me on that earlier on. Any last words on this? Ryan: Of course, you can just send me a $200 bottle of wine and it'll be just the same. Jon: Perfect, I know what you like. It's in the mail. Ryan: No, I think it's good just to always be careful with automation. Don't assume it's going to work for you always. Just have smart humans working with you. Jon: Awesome. All right, thanks Ryan. Have a wonderful afternoon. Ryan: Thanks Jon.

You guys asked, the girls did it. The taboo topic of suicide and unpacking everything that goes with it. Speaking to personal experiences of loved ones, and how we can possibly get better as a society if we all weren't so scared to open the conversation.  Your Hosts: Taylor Nicks, Ryan Nicolaidis, & Christy Ray Connect With Us!  IG: @jaggedlittlefeels Email: jaggedlittlefeels@gmail.com Web: www.jaggedlittlefeels.com Want to donate to the Podcast? Find us on CashApp! We appreciate your support! $jaggedlittlefeels  Episode Notes: Thank you to our Sponsors this week! Jason Burt aka Electrophunck, Hayden Doerr, & Emily Falk "Don't Sleep On Mental Health" with Christy New York Governor Cuomo has called on any/all licensed therapists to band together in offering therapy to New York citizens struggling with mental wellness during the epidemic. We love seeing officials take initiative for mental health on a state level! New York citizens can call 1-844-863-9314 to speak to a licensed mental health professional during crisis and/or time of need. Maintaining Routines/ Self-Care During Quarantine: Stay Connected- Maintain sense of community even while social-distancing via FaceTime, Zoom, etc. Try to keep a schedule that works for you Get outside! Get your Vitamin D! (& wear sunscreen!) Practicing Gratitude every day; Wake up and find at least one thing you're grateful for. Don't beat yourself up! Give yourself some grace. Pro-Tip: When you observe a negative thought or critical self-talk: Try responding by saying the word "Change" out-loud. This will help interrupt the destructive pattern we all subconsciously get stuck in. Tea Time With Tay: Transparency about Self-Realization Taking responsibility & owning-up to mistakes This is a safe space for these things! Pro-Tip: We all need therapy!!  National Suicide Prevention Line 1-800-273-8255 or Text TALK to 741741 for free counseling  The line provides free confidential support 24/7 including non english speakers. A skilled trained professional will answer. Someone that is trained in active listening, and has been assessed as having a calming and non-judgemental qualities. They answer and will not start off by asking a series of questions. You can start the call however you would like. The entire goal is to help you feel supported and safe. Not to get you in trouble or necessarily rescue you. Even in high risk situations crisis workers will do everything they can to work with the caller and come up with a safety plan first without intervention. If you think someone you know is having a suicidal crisis, you might not know how to reach out to them. You may fear saying the wrong thing. You may also call this hotline for advice for this. They find simple ways to help you be a system of support for your friend or family member. University of Indiana Bloomington Case Study Toxic Masculinity as it relates to Males Suicide: Men are 4 times more likely than women to commit suicide. The Indiana University Bloomington did 78 studies with over 20,000 participants. The team concluded that it “It supports and confirms research done in the last 60 years that people who conform to masculinity have poor mental health.” The truth behind this research is teaching our children to “man up” is tearing people down and we have incorporated this as healthy practice. The traits that were most prevalent for an unhealthy mental state were “Winning, emotional control, risk-taking, violence, dominance, playboy, self-reliance, power over women, and disdain for homosexuals.” The top three that stood out more than the rest were in regards to frail mental health were “Sexual promiscuity, self-reliance and power of women.” This study also showed that in men, mental illness is more easily masked. It’s been shown for decades that women are more apt to recognize illness of any sort and get help. The studies concluded that women aren’t any healthier but that some men just repress it. Suicide in Teens/ Role of Social Media Comparison is the thief of joy. Reducing social media time is helpful in mitigating chronic depression Free Help In Dallas/Greater DFW Area: Foundation 45: A Non-Profit foundation offering FREE THERAPY & support groups several times a week that focus on depression, suicide, anxiety, mental health, & chemical dependency. Supervised by licensed counselors who are acquainted with the creative arts community. All meetings are currently being held online until further notice, and are being held at their normal times: Sunday 2PM, Monday 7PM, Thursday 7PM Download the App for your phone or Desktop to join a meeting! Adults 18+ are invited to share their struggles & successes with mental health issues & suicide.   Backline.care Backline Mission: To connect music industry professionals and their family members with a trusted network of mental health and wellness providers In 2019 Backline was created to provide easy access to preventative car3e and crisis management services for the music community In response to COVID-19: Come Together Crisis Initiative- Virtual Mental Health & Wellness support for the music industry: Support Groups, Breathwork, Live Yoga (All Levels), & Meditation If in Crisis: Please Text "TWLOHA" to 741741 to speak w/ a compassionate, trained crisis counselor on their crisis text line: FREE & Available 24/7 If in UK or Canada, Text "TWLOHA" to 686868 Eckhart Tolle on Suicide- how it relates to his book "A New Earth": his self-realization on surrendering to the present moment. "Who you are cannot be defined through thinking or mental labels or definitions. It is the very sense of being, or presence, that is there when you become conscious of the present moment. In essence, you and what we call the present moment are, at the deepest level, one." Inhale/Exhale with Ryan What are you inhaling/exhaling this week? Guided Meditation: Take 2 minutes to rest & be fully present with us! 

As the coronavirus pandemic is changing the game for businesses around the world, Jon and Ryan offer some timely advice on what you can do to propel your ecommerce business forward instead of just sitting on the sidelines. TRANSCRIPT RYAN GARROW: Jon, we are all working from home, because there's a virus running around the country, scaring us but also driving us to be safe and do different things. I'm not at all making light of that, but it is changing the game for every business. If you're a business that hasn't been impacted by this in a positive or negative way, you might be on vacation somewhere not knowing what's going on. As you're talking to companies over the last week or two, what are you hearing? Have you seen anything work, anything that's been terrible? What's the general gauge of customers that you've been speaking to or prospects you've been speaking to when it comes to business right now? JON MACDONALD: Good question. I'm hearing two camps, pretty exclusively, and it seems to be clear cut one or the other for e-commerce. The one camp is, "My sales are going better than ever. People are home, they're not shopping on retail at all and we're picking up the slack." A lot of brands that also sell through retail are seeing this because they still have a demand for their goods and they're still shipping. A lot of them are even offering special deals right now to get people to purchase even more. I see a lot of e-commerce brands I'm talking with that fall into the camp of, "Things are better than ever," and that's great. I'm so glad to hear that. Then there's the other camp that are saying, either, "I'm already out of stock of items, and I don't know when I'm going to get more," because they're having challenges-- In the United States, we're probably, what? Eight weeks behind where China was with this health epidemic. You look at that and you say, "Okay, eight weeks before the factories got going again." If they're full scale in eight weeks, we don't really know and then, the ports are really backed up and people aren't able to get the goods, even into the country. If they are, they'll be in China right now. We have a lot of issues with supply chain and I'm hearing a handful of folks that are saying, "This is a problem, I need to stop all spending. I'm not going to drive traffic anymore, because, why would I drive traffic? Why would I spend to convert my site if I can't get any product in the hands anyways?" I'm not suggesting that's right or wrong. I would love to hear your opinion on that aspect, but that's what I'm hearing. It's one of those two camps. What about your side? What are you hearing on these daily conversations? RYAN: Because we touch companies that are all e-commerce as well, we've got probably the full gamut of it. We have some small local businesses that only have storefronts and they've-- Obviously, nothing is happening. I can think of escape rooms like for entertainment, those companies stay with small little companies, didn't spend a lot but we helped them do well but nobody's going to go to an escape room for the near future. They have just nothing, no chance to market. They've got to do some interesting things. We're advising them in different ways. E-commerce, there's a lot of gut reaction we hear, mainly from smaller clients that it's like, "Pull everything back in, don't do anything. We just got to ride this out and huddle and protect what we do have." Then we have other companies of all sizes, saying, "Hey, this is great. Let's step on the gas. Let's go." Again, there's supply chain issues all over the place. Some of them are pivoting, some of them had backstop because of the previous issues with China production last year with tariffs, so that has some of our clients. They have a bunch of back stock from that even because they were worried about 25% tariff, so they had loaded up before that. We have, like you said, the full gamut. I don't think we go back to where we were three weeks ago. We're going to have a new normal for almost every business in the United States, no matter what your business is. Just lots of change. JON: Yes. Talk about that new normal a little bit, then, I'm interested. What do you think won't change? What do you think will stay the same, and what do you think will change? RYAN: What's not going to change is people are going to buy stuff online. People have already been buying online, they're going to continue buying online and so that doesn't necessarily change. What you're buying right now, I mean, if somebody had an online toilet paper retailer, they are probably in great shape right now. That's probably the ones that are like, "This is great, this is the best thing that's ever happened." I think we're going to have a reaction to that and people that sell petits are probably going to be doing wonderfully well because people are going to be sick of buying toilet paper. I think there's going to be a shift in retail, obviously. I don't know if-- I knew retail was going down and you've probably known this as well, like, it's not been a secret. Somebody told me today, I haven't actually found the article, but JCPenney may have like Forever closed all stores and gone online totally. Probably it was a good decision anyway. JON: They were headed that direction before, right? RYAN: Yes, so it accelerated that. What I see with a lot of these things that happen-- I mean, this is a very rare occurrence. I did a lot of research and I was preparing for talks around what do you do in a down economy, and you look back at the depression, and you can see how you can spend through that and you can do depressions-- Companies that advertise through recessions, depressions do better. There's a bunch of studies around that, it's no secret but when you have a cliff that we fall off of, it's not necessarily economic related. You do have to look at it from different lens and the easiest, closest thing I saw was 1918, when it was the Spanish flu, the first H1N1 and it was after World War 1 and the US was already in a recession to a degree and so this exacerbated it, but it was also, we had people that couldn't find work already and then people couldn't move. It was a very similar scenario, kind of a lockdown. They also didn't have e-commerce, they had local stores. That was basically all you could do. Retail obviously came back from there, but very unique times, but I think what it does is that when things like this happen, it shines a magnifying glass on things that were going really well and things that were going really bad. If you had a store that was already not doing well, it's really not doing well now, unless you randomly got some of the products that people need right now. JON: Right. I'm hearing that same thing that the best way to think about this is that your company needs to be able to survive this initial shock. I keep hearing the biggest similarities economically are 9/11. You get through that initial big shock and then we'll get into the recession, and then we can deal with the financial impacts. If you had a business that was having challenges already, you're not going to survive that shock because all it takes is one shock to a weakened system if you will, and your business is going to suffer the ultimate consequence because of that. If you were able to get through that shock, then you can probably pick up the pieces and we should see-- I'm not an economist, I'm just telling you what I keep hearing is optimism about this coming back up quickly. That, "Yes, we're going to hit a recession for a minute, but then we'll work our way back up pretty quickly." I think the long term effects are going to be more of an issue because of all the bailouts and money we're pumping in, we got to pay that back somehow as a United States economy, but we'll get there. The reality I think is if you are already running a business that couldn't survive the initial shock, then you had other issues as well, and if you run a decent business that had some cash that could weather the storm a little bit, then you're likely going to be better off coming out of this because maybe you'll run a little leaner, maybe you'll make sure that you're spending more effectively. I think that for you and I in terms of E-competence is what we're going to see on a regular basis is more emphasis on return on ad spend, coming out of this. I think there's going to be more emphasis on conversions for sure. I'm hearing that already from our customers and our clients. We did some research reports and interviewed everybody and the data was very eye-opening, and where people are going to cut and how they're going to cut. Are you seeing the same things? RYAN: Yes. Every company is a time to step back and analyze what's going on. I think what companies have to protect themselves against is making a really quick decision, just like, "Oh my gosh, we got to pull back and stop everything and then figure it out." It's like, "Let's stay calm, even if everything goes down." Let's hypothetically say the economy drops 20%, that's a big drop, but that still means that we have 80% still going. That's not a terrible thing. It's painful, bad things are going to happen. There's going to be people out of work. If 3 million people lose their job. I, it's 3 million people that can't buy your stuff but it also means there's still 97 million people probably working. It's not the end of the world. For some businesses, it will be, but I think it's-- Step one, remain calm and understand where we're at and that it's not a death sentence for every business out there. JON: I pulled up the data from our survey we did of e-commerce store owners. We ran the survey for about a week, last week, and I feel like it's already been a month since then, just in terms of how quickly things are moving. At that point as of the end of last week, we asked the question, "Have your e-commerce sales been negatively impacted by the recent health and economic events?" 52.2% said no. Again, it's been pretty split down the middle there, right? 52% are saying that they have not been negatively impacted. I know you sent out a bunch of great data as well, from what you're seeing from January to February, February, mid February and then end of March. Any thoughts on that data? You said January 1 through February 17th, that shopping impressions were up by 17% year over year, and revenue was up almost 14% year over year. RYAN: We saw really normal data. E-commerce has been steadily growing at that rate for years. For us, it's like, all systems go, everything's normal. I think we've got somewhere around 3,200 to 3,300 e-com clients. Then for some reason, I don't know why, I pulled some big snapshots of large segments of our e-comm data. Something happened on February 18th, couldn't find a news article or a reason. The first death in the Us-- this is US data by the way, first death in the US wasn't until February 23rd so in my head, there was something building up, some reason that people are starting to shop more. Impressions jumped to 37.4%, I think, year over year from the February 18th to 28th. I eliminated the 29th because of the leap year but that significant bump for no reason. External, there's no holiday involved and this is your year data too. Then we went into March and we looked at March 1st to the 9th, year over year and it got a little less crazy but it was still up 27% year over year. We didn't have a big move of Easter this year. I mean, there was no data other than people are online to buy things or search for things at a much higher rate. I didn't bring conversion data into those yet because latent conversions are important in a few of our clients that we just couldn't calculate that yet, but people are online. Even take my family, for example, we've been buying our groceries online for store pickup and delivery for, I don't know, a couple of years. Now, we have four small kids, nobody wants to take four kids under six to the store to buy groceries and out of everything. You can't get meat at Fred Meyer, for example, here in Portland. We had to check Walmart, can't get meat there. Costco, you could probably get meat but you're going to wait in line for an hour to get in. You're going to wait in line an hour to get stuff. They don't do pick up or delivery. Found Whole Foods, so we did a lot of searches actually just to find certain things we needed. That could be a part of it. Just continuing to search at a local level for certain things. Again, if you're being appropriate with your budgets and search, then you can capture a lot of these people that are trying to find various things. If you have it, people want to buy and they're not going to stores. JON: I think you made a good point there. I think there's goods that you need to purchase locally. You're not going to get online like meat, but even then, it's interesting. I mean, there's a lot of frozen meat companies out there that will ship you-- Omaha Steaks, things of that sort. RYAN: Exactly. If I could order Omaha Steaks for every meal, I totally would. Unfortunately, I haven't made enough money for that to be the case yet, but someday Omaha, you're shipping my steaks on a daily basis. How about that? JON: Love it. It's interesting because I'm also hearing, despite all of that, one of the questions we asked was, "Do you anticipate seeing your e-commerce sales grow as people take health precautions by not shopping in retail?" Again, 52% said yes. It aligns with those who feel their sales have not been impacted. They're also hopeful that they're going to do more of the capturing that retail group that is not buying at retail. I think that's really interesting that we'll see some hit from the e-commerce world, but it probably won't be as bad as retail. RYAN: I sure hope not. We do a lot in e-commerce together, so it'd be bad for us. I look at this, I'm an optimist. I'm an eternal optimist. I always think I'm going to win. I always think things are going to be great. I fail, of course. That's the way I look at it. I get excited because I see economic downturns as opportunities. The last time we had a big downturn, 2006, 2007, 2008 I wasn't prepared. I didn't have businesses in the places that I do now, so I couldn't capitalize when things got bad, they were house deals all over the place. If you had cash in 2008, 2009 you have a fleet of rentals at this point that probably tripled in value because you had that and you were prepared. I see this, I'm like, "Oh my gosh, this is exciting. I am prepared. I have the ability to move in and get aggressive where it's appropriate." Businesses, you might be able to buy competitors for pennies on the dollars very soon if they weren't prepared. If you're an e-com store for example, and you don't have the overhead of a retail and some of your competitors have expensive retail spaces, they have to support and still pay rent, or they have employees that maybe aren't being utilized in an e-commerce scenario, they're going to be struggling and it creates significant opportunities. For me, I'm excited because I think there's so much to do and this is where companies that really want to win will be able to distance themselves if they take appropriate actions. JON: I think that's a great point of taking the optimistic view of this of, "Well, how can you help someone out by perhaps bailing them out a little bit, buying their company and helping them turn that around and everybody win from that?" I think we're going to see a lot of that coming down the line just from an economic standpoint. You mentioned there's going to be deals to be had and if you're an e-commerce company in a position to be able to invest and take advantage of those, you're going to be doing I think very well coming out of this. JON: Well, we asked a question as well around what is the response these brands are going to take. "I predict my brand will respond to these health and economic concerns by," and reducing marketing spend was 61% of the response and I thought that was interesting because that's not taking advantage of this opportunity. I mean ad-words and stuff, are going to get a lot cheaper because people aren't bidding. RYAN: I feel bad for companies that their default reaction to the tough times is to pull back marketing, especially when we're in e-commerce. For example, my brand. I separate my accounts so I have brand terms and non-brand terms. You've heard me say this constantly. I probably preach it every event you're at with me. Non-brand, that's a free agent. If somebody is searching for your product but not you, they have intent to buy based on the search, they're choosing you or a competitor. There is no scenario for a business that I am involved with in an ownership and I have some say where we are not spending down to break even to buy that customer, no scenario. I want that customer and I want them more than my competitors do. It's going to become mine so I am turning up marketing. In fact, I hired people last week in the middle of this to increase production like we are going in and we're going in aggressively. Hey, it might not well be able to win as much as I want or could, but there's no scenario. I'm actually taking it. I'm going all in and if I fall a little bit short, oh well, at least I've made some gains and I got some clients that maybe I wouldn't have been able to get even as recently as two weeks ago because my competitors hadn't pulled back their marketing yet. JON: I think that's interesting because in that same response, 8.7% said they're going to spend more on marketing. I think that's 8.7% that's going to win. I look at that and I'm like, "If you're in that minority of 9% let's just say, you have a big opportunity where you're just going to be able to take over your competition and if you keep marketing through this, there's a very high likelihood that you'll have more revenue. You're going to have more resources when you come out of this, frankly, be able to overtake your competition and just in overall spend, because they're going to be limping along through this. They're hurting themselves or their sales not being able to be propelled by this marketing. When they come out of this, it's just not going to be as pretty for them as it would be for somebody who tries to maintain their marketing as much as they can." That's been a big message to my team here too. It's like, "Let's continue to keep marketing." Now, it needs to be done tactfully. Let's not get mixed up in the COVID-19, "Here's how we're continuing to serve our customers," emails. That's not helpful. RYAN: Oh my God. That's like popups to me for you. It's like, really? Thank you 500 people that I've ever bought something from in the last 10 years emailing me. Kudos. JON: That's exactly the problem. Most people aren't going to be upset about those emails, but they're certainly not going to read them. It's not a good opportunity. RYAN: My password keeper sent me an e-mail, the one on my iPhone that stores all my passwords that I pay for once a year, sent me an e-mail. I was like, "Do I care if your developers are working from home or working from the office?" JON: As long as I can get to my passwords. RYAN: I don't care. Why would you waste the, I even cost you something to send it like human capital, fractions of pennies for emails. Like, Oh my gosh. JON: There's that for sure. The way to get through this in terms of the marketing is to acknowledge it's a problem and just say, "Hey, you know what? We know that this is going on. Don't ignore it, and certainly don't take advantage of it and try to say 'Oh, we're running a shop from home sale because everybody's stuck at home right now."' That's not going to go over very well. RYAN: No. I was talking to one of our clients that sells, it's a beauty skincare cream. They focus on organic and teens or preteens. It's something like that. They're like, "Okay, what do we do with COVID-19?" I'm like, "What do you mean? You sell skin-- You're not going to talk about that. That's terrible." They're like, "Well, people can't go out for Easter." I was like, "Well, yes, they can't." "What about getting Easter baskets? You're going to buy your daughter some makeup for," I was like, "That's great. Maybe you can do an Easter sale and push your heart on social and get some--" Influencers may be involved, but you don't want to necessarily say, "Hey, you can't go out on Easter. You still want to dress up." I mean, that's just rubbing into somebody's face because there's going to be a lot of disappointment. Every Easter we do a big event at my barn with my whole family, because I have a large one and we do a beer tasting. We work our way through the Easter letters. The beer had to start with E one year, then A, we're around S which was a great one because there's a lot of great beers that start with S or they have to have like Jesus in them. There's some bad beers with Jesus. I'm just telling you that right now. [crosstalk] JON: I can't imagine it's good beer. RYAN: But we're doing it virtually, we're doing a virtual tasting. JON: Talk about taking advantage of a situation, naming your beer off of religious figures. RYAN: Oh man, there's-- I won't mention a brewery but there's a pecan Jesus beer that it is not very good. JON: Pecan beer sounds horrible to me. RYAN: Everything about it was like, "That is not a good sounding beer." JON: I'm much more of a wine person, unfortunately. RYAN: Well, we could do wine tasting too, but it's changing. Don't push it on people.There's two things I'm telling a lot of companies [unintelligible 00:21:30] is number one, assume everybody knows I'm going to tell them to keep marketing. Outside of that, you have to be creative but move. If you don't do anything, you're never going to start moving. Understand that you're going to make some mistakes and you're going to go out there. Maybe you accidentally mentioned the COVID or coronavirus when you maybe shouldn't have, but at least you're out there testing something and you realize, "Oh, that wasn't great." Get out there and do something to expand your brand. You have to think outside the box. This is unprecedented. None of us have been through a giant downturn related to a virus. If you find somebody that's been through this, I'd love to know what country they were in when this exactly happened. They had e-commerce versus Amazon not being able to send anything but toilet paper. Getting out of, it's going to take some testing. I say also talk to an expert, whether that's Jon, whether that's me, somebody else. Talk to somebody that understands something about what you're trying to accomplish and run some ideas by him and then say, "Hey, I'm thinking of doing this. Is there a reason that you would say bad idea or yes, it's worth a try. Let's measure it." Pull back quickly if it's not working. JON: I mean one of the benefits of a slowdown right now for e-com brands is that there are experts like you and I who were a little bit slower perhaps than what you would typically see and we're giving our time back and saying, "Hey, I'm happy to chat with you. I'm happy to help as much as I can, answer questions, let's do these things." We're stuck at home. We have an extra hour a day because we're not commuting. We have extra time on our hands as a whole, as a community that I think is really interesting. It's really, really fun to see how you can use that goodwill in a way that-- I'm answering questions. I sent an e-mail out last week instead of an article which we've sent out for seven years in a row over seven years now. We send one every Tuesday and last week I was just like, "Team, it doesn't seem right to send an e-mail out this week with an article that's quite frankly a topic we had booked three months out. On our content calendar. It's not really relevant to what's going on. I don't feel we should send that out this week." They were like, "Well, we don't want to just send no e-mail. Let's send, 'hope everybody's doing well."' I was like, "No, no, no, that's not going to go well. Nobody wants to hear that." Instead what we decided was let's send an e-mail that's basically being helpful. We really wanted to just be as helpful as we could for these e-com brands and be in it with them. The whole goal was,"Okay, we have all this content, seven, eight, nine years of content that we've have up on our site that we've written. It's super helpful." I just said, "Hey, if you're having a challenge, you want some expert advice on it, reply to this e-mail and we'll look at our back catalog of content and send you the article that's specific to your need along with some context and a little bit of help on that." The amount of responses I got is overwhelming. We sent it on Tuesday, we're recording this on a Thursday afternoon. I still have dozens of emails in my inbox that I need to get through. The benefit of that is not just that we get to help the community, but also that now I'm basically writing content because I'm answering these people and saying, "Here's the old content, but here's all the stuff I would update on this right now and here's how I would be thinking about it." Then I sent that e-mail to our marketing team and they're taking that and they're updating the content on the site, or they're writing new content based off of what I'm suggesting. We're able to produce a lot of great content with this extra time that we have on our hands because everybody's working from home, not commuting. We do have some clients who are like, "Hey, talk to me in two weeks when things calm down." They're not dropping but they're saying, "Hey, I just need some time right now," which is understandable. I think that it's really interesting to see how we can all band together and help each other out and really use this to generate some great content that will be everlasting out there. I think the knowledge base, the communal knowledge base is just going to grow so much. RYAN: I think it's going out with the idea people want to give help, they want to be helpful, but they also are going to be looking for help. I think it opens up a lot of doors to maybe a partnership that you wouldn't have even been able to approach or do anything with before. One of my companies is a brand that sells to retail as well as online and my retailers are closed. They're struggling. They still have expensive rent to pay in certain areas, and so I'm like, "Okay, well, you don't sell online. I do. I know how to do it. Let's get some of your stuff online, how can I help you move product?" They're going to sell more of my product probably with some of these things as well but it's like, "Hey, you're being forced as a local business to start selling online now, let me help you compete with some of those big retailers," because a lot of times it surprises me. We have some rather large advertisers and some of them came in and said, "Yes, right now we're going to cut budgets 50%," and there's no data around that. We didn't have anything to say around it. They just dictated that. We're going to go back and talk to them through some of the logic, but that was an e-mail we got yesterday and I was like, "That makes no sense." If you have one of the largest advertisers in a category that's going to pull back 50% of their digital spend, small guys have a huge opportunity to fill that void because people are still buying these things. The volume is still there. JON: That's so true. That goes back to just that small 9% in that survey that said they're going to invest more or continue the same. I think those are the folks who are going to come out winning. If nothing else, their brand is going to get in front of new people that they wouldn't have been able to afford to get in front of before. There is some bright spot here for sure. RYAN: I'm excited but it's also, I guess I get nervous, but it's almost like an excited nervous. We don't know what's going to happen. I'm pretty confident with our team's skill set and what we're going to be able to do and your team skill set, we're going to come out of this fine. Hopefully, most of our clients do and we're able to help that but if some of their competitors of our clients don't make it. JON: Maybe they should have talked to us first. [laughter] JON: I think there's a bit of a Machiavellian message here. I don't want to say take advantage of the situation but definitely think twice about how you can utilize this in a way that is going to help your company instead of hurt it. If you start thinking with that mindset, I'm not suggesting even a growth mindset, I'm just saying every company is going to have down revenue this year. If you are just thinking about how do I maintain, then when things pick back up, you're going to really pick back up much quicker. If you say, "Hey, you know what? I know we're going to have a 20% drop, I'm just going to cut everything." Like you mentioned with that one customer, that's just the wrong mindset. I understand. Of course, that sounds, coming from you and I, of course, we should be saying keep spending on marketing because that's our business. I cannot stress the data that's behind this and the reality of this. I know I've seen you do presentations on just how car companies back in the depression came out of this and how Ford really blew up coming out of that because of the actions they took versus what is it, GM at the time? RYAN: Chrysler. JON: Chrysler. RYAN: That was crazy. JON: I think the same situation can apply here. People who keep moving forward, keep marketing are going to grow like Ford versus Chrysler did back then. Different time maybe different industries, but I think the same tenants apply. RYAN: Yes, I probably would agree. If you Google recession studies, and I think I've referenced one from the '70s and then one from the early '80s they were recessions. They did some studies around companies that advertised in, during and after a recession and compared their growth to companies that cut marketing and every time companies that advertise and marketed through the recession, despite what maybe they felt like doing grew and their marketing wasn't even as traceable as our last-click attribution type tracking that we have online. We have unprecedented tracking online that if you have profitable or even break-even marketing, I don't care what the economy is doing, there's no reason not to spend that money. I mean it's just, it's layups. JON: Well, Ryan, this has been a lot of fun to connect about this today. Hopefully, there's been some value here for listeners, some things they should be thinking about. If nothing else, hopefully, they decide that they can be the Ford of the world versus the Chrysler coming out of this in a way that is really going to help propel their business forward versus sitting on the sidelines. RYAN: Yes. Hopefully. If anybody wants to reach out to either one of us, please do. This is fun for us to talk through and help companies and advise them. It's what we live for. JON: Yes. RYAN: And we've got extra time with no commute. JON: There you go. I'm happy to help. I've been putting this on LinkedIn. Anytime I see any of our partners or any offers out there, I repost them on LinkedIn. It's like, ''Hey, guys, look, e-commerce community is banding together.'' I don't know if you saw, Privy just came out with today ShopSmallEcomm.com. RYAN: I did see that, yes. JON: Ecomm with two m's at the end. It's just amazing. They're really trying to just help all of these e-com businesses to get listed in this directory and they're doing this effort for free. Yes, it's a marketing thing for Privy, nobody's hiding that. The reality is that it's helpful and it can't hurt to list your site on there. Right, so why not? RYAN: No, not at all. I already sent it out to my wife's businesses. I've sent it to all our directors and VPs like, ''Hey, there is no reason not to support a partner, number one, because we want to do that.'' JON: I'm hearing things like Brex does credit cards for e-com. They usually offer net 60 terms with no fees and they're extending those terms out to 90-120 days with no fees, no interest. Things like that are like, ''Hey, can you see three months in the future right now. If you are sure your business is going to be around in three months, why not do this and give yourself that runway, and perhaps be able to pay some employees in this time. Otherwise, you wouldn't be able to and keep advertising and take advantage of this opportunity." There are ways out there. I know there's Clearbanc that does funding, as well B-A-N-C, Clearbanc with a C. There's a ton of these type of things out there that are offering a lot right now. They understand that your balance sheet looks low, there understand what we've all been going through and they're willing to work with that. If you can show that going into this, you were doing okay, they're confident you're going to do okay when you come out of it, and they want to help you see that through. There's a lot of stuff out there right now, Ryan and everybody's got a little extra time to contribute. Everybody's kind of banding together, it's been amazing to see the e-com community. I just recommend that as many as e-com brands can take advantage of these opportunities that are in front of them and the help that has been extended, will really see it through. As you mentioned, we're both happy to help on paid search and how to keep marking on that front. Also on conversion to make sure that once you get those people there, that those dollars go as far as possible so definitely reach out. Any last thoughts on your side, Ryan? RYAN: I think the last webinar was probably just when in doubt, go. Just do it. See what happens. Again, that's kind of just get in motion. I think you can't fail if you're moving somewhere. You'll figure it out. JON: I'd rather go down swinging, right? RYAN: Heck, yes. JON: That's it. All right, Ryan. Thank you. This has been fun chat today, considering the sad circumstances and topic, but I think we're going to pull through this. RYAN: I agree. JON: I'm very excited to be able to help everybody. Thanks, Ryan. RYAN: Thank you.

Welcome back to our weekend Cabral HouseCall shows! This is where we answer our community's wellness, weight loss, and anti-aging questions to help people get back on track! Check out today's questions:  Megan: Hi Dr Cabral, I have a friend who says she has a lot of gallstones and I tried to find a past podcast on this but couldn’t find any ways to treat them naturally, would you be able to offer some light on this topic, and if it is possible to get rid of them naturally? Thank you for everything you do. Ryan: What are your thoughts on Joe Dispenza's work and meditations? Do you practice anything similar in terms of connecting to the quantum field? Have you seen some of these spontaneous healings that seemingly take place during some of his retreats in your own experience with clients? From what I can understand, if you can truly feel the feeling of your healthy future self, the autonomic nervous system can't tell tell the difference and begins to respond as if you were healthy. Super interesting stuff. Ryan: When it comes to extended fasts, I see 2 schools of thought. One which I have learnt through your teachings is that you should be fasting on a day you don't have a lot to do, a relaxed, chilled out day. I have often seen the opposite recommendation too, where it is recommended to stay busy with your day such that you're not thinking about it too much and the time flies. I know one can be busy and still relaxed, but probably not for most people. Would it be best perhaps for beginners to stay busy, and once you find fasting easier you try to focus on a more relaxed day? Emily: Dr. Cabral did a post cast with the Faster Way and a friend and I are debating about something he said as it was a bit contradictory. We bought the glucose meter to see if our morning coffee broke our fast (as he suggested), and he gave two responses to testing and results while fasting. 1. If your blood sugar stays under 100, 30 mins after drinking coffee then you're still in a fasted state. 2. If your glucose readings before and after coffee are different (spiked) then you are no longer in your fast. The question is if your blood sugar spikes with coffee 10-20 points but youre still under 100 are you still in your fast?? I am a coach with the faster way to fat loss and this has confused quite a few of us that listened to the podcast. Just hoping for some clarification. Many thanks!! Ashley: Hi, I am currently on day 3 of your detox and I am on the road to healing hashimotos. I also literally just finished reading your book. Thank you for your work and giving back to the world in a meaningful way. I hope to do the same. I am wondering why rice is the protein of choice in the detox nutritional shake when the understanding is that rice is high in arsenic? I have been avoiding rice like the plague other then some black rice on occasion. It came down to trusting you, faith, and I have also exhausted every avenue with no long term improvement so here I am on the detox protocol. I am really hoping this approach helps me with the hashimotos and gut health. If you have additional suggestions that would be wonderful. :) I appreciate you and how you share your knowledge. Thank you and have a wonderful day! Ashley Tiffany: I’m sure you get these emails all the time, but I need your help for my 15 year old nephew. I listen to your podcast and thought you could help. He is all of a sudden experiencing pain in chest and stomach and weakness in legs (he can’t walk down the hall sometimes at school without support from the wall), and fatigue. They have gone to hospital and all tests come back clear. They love in TN. We just do not know where to go next. Could you possibly give us some direction? My nephew is usually fun and outgoing, but doctors just keep telling us nothing is wrong. Thank you. Thank you for tuning into today's Cabral HouseCall and be sure to check back tomorrow where we answer more of our community’s questions!  - - - Show Notes & Resources: http://StephenCabral.com/1506 - - - Get Your Question Answered: http://StephenCabral.com/askcabral   - - - Dr. Cabral's New Book, The Rain Barrel Effect https://amzn.to/2H0W7Ge - - - Join the Community & Get Your Questions Answered: http://CabralSupportGroup.com - - -   Dr. Cabral’s Most Popular Supplements: > “The Dr. Cabral Daily Protocol” (This is what Dr. Cabral does every day!) - - - > Dr. Cabral Detox  (The fastest way to get well, lose weight, and feel great!) - - - > Daily Nutritional Support Shake  (#1 “All-in-One recommendation in my practice) - - - > Daily Fruit & Vegetables Blend  (22 organic fruit & vegetables “greens powder”) - - - > CBD Oil  (Full-spectrum, 3rd part-tested & organically grown) - - - > Candida/Bacterial Overgrowth, Leaky Gut, Parasite & Speciality Supplement Packages - - - > See All Supplements: https://equilibriumnutrition.com/collections/supplements  - - -   Dr. Cabral’s Most Popular At-Home Lab Tests: > Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis (Test for mineral imbalances & heavy metal toxicity) - - - > Organic Acids Test (Test for 75 biomarkers including yeast & bacterial gut overgrowth, as well as vitamin levels) - - - > Thyroid + Adrenal + Hormone Test  (Discover your complete thyroid, adrenal, hormone, vitamin D & insulin levels) - - - > Adrenal + Hormone Test (Run your adrenal & hormone levels) - - - > Food Sensitivity Test (Find out your hidden food sensitivities) - - - > Omega-3 Test (Discover your levels of inflammation related to your omega-6 to omega-3 levels) - - - > Stool Test (Use this test to uncover any bacterial, h. Pylori, or parasite overgrowth) - - - > Genetic Test (Use the #1 lab test to unlocking your DNA and what it means in terms of wellness, weight loss & anti-aging) - - - > Dr. Cabral’s “Big 5” Lab Tests (This package includes the 5 labs Dr. Cabral recommends all people run in his private practice) - - - > View all Functional Medicine lab tests (View all Functional Medicine lab tests you can do right at home for you and your family!)

Joining me on the show for this episode is science communicator and content creator Ryan O’Donnell, a.k.a RyanO. Ryan wakes up daily trying to fill the gap between the amazing science of behavior and the billions of people that it could impact for the better. He does this by creating content for behavioral science enthusiasts via The Daily BA on YouTube, The Controversial Exchange and CHATTcon while preparing for his next big venture. (He gives us a sneak peak into that during our podcast chat.)Ryan started his career as a Behaviour Analyst but his interests have grown to include everything from entrepreneurship, artificial intelligence, reinforcement learning, social media, podcasting, and vlogging. These interests and skills have allowed him to work with a lot of great people, travel and share the science of behaviour with the world at large and that’s what we are talking about today - how to bring the science of behaviour to a bigger world.In this episode I ask Ryan:What is Behaviour Analysis and why does it matter?What attracted you to the field?How did you move from straight BA work to film making and digital content creation? And why?What it the bigger purpose for you of bringing the science of behaviour to YouTube and the digital world?How did you develop your video and content creation skills?How do you think our communities can benefit from bringing behaviour to a bigger world?If you have a passion for science communication, helping others to learn, grow and flourish or the innovative use of digital content and story telling, don’t miss this fantastic conversation.For a full transcript, guest profile, expert tips and the resources mentioned in this episode, visit potential.com.au/podcast or join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter

Thank you for joining us for our 2nd Cabral HouseCall of the weekend! I’m looking forward to sharing with you some of our community’s questions that have come in over the past few weeks… Let’s get started!    Haven: Hi Dr. Cabral, I’ve been a long time listener and have successfully shared much of what you have taught me to many of my friends and family. Last year, my 50 year old mom, who has struggled with her weight for most of her adult life, became a listener as well. She successfully completed the CBO protocol and did a handful of 14-day Doctor Cabral Detoxes. She could feel that it was helping, but didn’t manage to lose more than 5lbs. This year, she is now on a weight loss program, called Optivia, where you eat 5 “fuelings” a day and one “lean and green” meal a day. I am very proud of her accomplishments, but worry about the long term health effects. The diet’s “fuelings” are all highly processed foods and the nutritional label lists many unidentifiable chemicals. Plus many of the “lean and green” recipes include processed meats, dairy and gluten and classify canola oil and margarine as “healthy fats”. I’m having a hard time finding the words to explain to her the damage she could potentially be causing her body, and wondered if you had any words of wisdom I could borrow? Many thanks! Joanna: Hi Dr Cabral My question is i tend to get a cracking noise likea bubbly noise in between my joints mainly knees when i exercise? Do you know what may cause this?Is it a matter of building my strength and training up. I have only started training up again in the last month, prior to that i had a few months off and was just walking mainly. I take your dns and collagen everyday Kind regards Joanna :) Les: Hi Dr. Stephan Cabral,I had a question about the type of gelatin you use in your products. Due to my religion, I do not consume pork and I noticed that your omega 3 contains gelatin. Thank you! Ryan: What are your thoughts on the benefits of turmeric vs. curcumin supplementation? I've read curcumin has troubles with bio-availability and that combining with black pepper, and/or certain water soluble or fat soluble forms, plus antioxidants can help... but the jury still seems to be out. How much have you experimented with different forms clinically and what's your experience? Do different forms work better for different things? Particularly interested in blood sugar benefits. Any new research you're aware of regarding turmeric/curcumin? Cheers. Grace: Hi Dr.Cabral, I have a question for you about a product I am considering buying. I asked this question in the support group page, and others also were interested in hearing your opinion. You have spoken about the benefits of infrared saunas before, but I am curious if you have seen or heard about the infrared sauna ‘blankets’? I am interested because they are much more cost effective and more portable than traditional saunas. The brand I am personally looking into is called Higher Dose. Do you know if these sauna blankets produce the same level of benefits to regular infrared saunas?On a similar note, I am a yoga teacher where I both practice and teach in a heated room, and I sweat A LOT. I am curious if this also produces the same benefit as an infared sauna session? Is it worth using an infared sauna if I regularly sweat in a heated room? Thanks in advance for your insight, and thank you for everything you do. Your work has significantly impacted my life and health! DB: What are the natural remedies for turberculosis. Can you cure it without the use of powerful medications. Dar: Lately I have been loving this black bean, yam, and spinach wrap for dinner with a little garlic caesar dressing from costco, however my wife mentioned that is probably too heavy on the starch, what do you think and what would you use instead of the beans if that's the case? How does too much starch affect digestion I have heard it is not good.   Thank you for tuning into this weekend’s Cabral HouseCalls and be sure to check back tomorrow for our Mindset & Motivation Monday show to get your week started off right! - - - Show Notes & Resources:  http://StephenCabral.com/1479 - - - Dr. Cabral's New Book, The Rain Barrel Effect https://amzn.to/2H0W7Ge - - - Join the Community & Get Your Questions Answered: http://CabralSupportGroup.com - - -   Dr. Cabral’s Most Popular Supplements: > “The Dr. Cabral Daily Protocol” (This is what Dr. Cabral does every day!) - - - > Dr. Cabral Detox  (The fastest way to get well, lose weight, and feel great!) - - - > Daily Nutritional Support Shake  (#1 “All-in-One recommendation in my practice) - - - > Daily Fruit & Vegetables Blend  (22 organic fruit & vegetables “greens powder”) - - - > CBD Oil  (Full-spectrum, 3rd part-tested & organically grown) - - - > Candida/Bacterial Overgrowth, Leaky Gut, Parasite & Speciality Supplement Packages - - - > See All Supplements: https://equilibriumnutrition.com/collections/supplements  - - -   Dr. Cabral’s Most Popular At-Home Lab Tests: > Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis (Test for mineral imbalances & heavy metal toxicity) - - - > Organic Acids Test (Test for 75 biomarkers including yeast & bacterial gut overgrowth, as well as vitamin levels) - - - > Thyroid + Adrenal + Hormone Test  (Discover your complete thyroid, adrenal, hormone, vitamin D & insulin levels) - - - > Adrenal + Hormone Test (Run your adrenal & hormone levels) - - - > Food Sensitivity Test (Find out your hidden food sensitivities) - - - > Omega-3 Test (Discover your levels of inflammation related to your omega-6 to omega-3 levels) - - - > Stool Test (Use this test to uncover any bacterial, h. Pylori, or parasite overgrowth) - - - > Genetic Test (Use the #1 lab test to unlocking your DNA and what it means in terms of wellness, weight loss & anti-aging) - - - > Dr. Cabral’s “Big 5” Lab Tests (This package includes the 5 labs Dr. Cabral recommends all people run in his private practice) - - -

Ryan Saxman joins Jay Conner. He's the author of "Don't Be Normal - Be Unstoppable"A former Coast Guard, since 2009. Became a reservist in 2019. He is flipping 5 homes presently. He started in REI in 2016.He wants to do more RE wholesaling.Ryan has raised $1,000,000 in Private Money. He now sees it as a small amount, whereas before it was a huge amount.He is flipping five houses right now. $175,000 in profits.He started a coaching program called Motivation to Millions, which teaches people to wholesale properties. A 90 day program. Accountability is a key to success.https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Be-Normal-Unstoppable/dp/1722487178Ryan's favourite books:Ryan: "What you do on a daily basis will determine your success.""On the other side of Failure is Success"Daily practicesBefore: Reading Facebook, emails, Hollywood gossip, then procrastinatingAfter: Writing daily affirmations, self visualization, building up his beliefs, then following through.Problems are "Nothing more than unanswered questions."Favourite Marketing methods: Word of Mouth/Affiliate Marketing - utilizes other people's knowledge and connections.How do you work in REI when you are in different states?Prop Stream that gives you a list of 60,000 people with 20-30 filters to get in touch with people who are going thru divorse, out-of-state owners, pre-foreclosures, and much more.Uses a skiptrace service to find cell phone numbers to call them personally. Skip Genie is his pick.Ryan calls them.You need to have pipelines to bring in prospectsRyan sends 10,000 postcards a month. Calls 20 potential sellers a day. Massive action brings massive results.Ryan is available at https://www.facebook.com/public/Ryan-Saxmanwww.Motivate2Mill.comRyan's best advice: Be persistent when going for success.Register for the Real Estate Cashflow Conference:http://bit.ly/jaymoneypodcastJay Conner is a proven real estate investment leader. Without using his own money or credit, Jay maximizes creative methods to buy and sell properties with profits averaging $64,000 per deal.What is Real Estate Investing? Live Cashflow Conferencehttps://youtu.be/QyeBbDOF4woThe Conner Marketing Group Inc.P.O. Box 1276, Morehead City, NC USA 28557P 252-808-2927F 252-240-2504Channelhttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZfl6O7pRhyX5R-rRuSnK6whttps://www.youtube.com/c/RealEstateInvestingWithJayConnerRSS Feedhttp://realestateinvestingdeals.mypodcastworld.com/rss2.xmlGoogle Playhttps://play.google.com/music/listen#/ps/Ihrzsai7jo7awj2e7nhhwfsv47yiTunes:https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/real-estate-investing-minus-bank-flipping-houses-foreclosure/id1377723034Watch on ROKU:Rokuhttps://my.roku.com/add/realestateinvestingRokuhttps://my.roku.com/add/realestateinvestingWatch on Amazon Prime:https://www.amazon.com/How-Locate-Real-Estate-Deals/dp/B07M9WNZR6/ref=sr_1_3

EJM 49: The Good, The Bad, & The Partnership ☠️ With Daxy Perez On this 3-Part Interview, we are joined by our guest, Daxy Perez. Daxy works as a podcast manager. He and his team helped Internet Entrepreneurs to create a voice on their price and services and build deeper and meaningful relationships with their clients, customers, etc. through the use of podcasting. On this episode, Daxy will talk about his partnership including with Ryan Helms and what are the differences between him and Ryan and how they deal with problems with Partnerships. He will also discuss the uncertainty of ideas for business partners and why podcasting is really important for him. You can find this interview, and many more, by subscribing to the Entrepreneur Junkie Movement Podcast on iTunes. If you don’t use iTunes, you can listen to every episode by clicking here. Make sure to head to www.facebook.com/groups/podcasting101group to jump into our brand new FREE podcasting community where we help you guys uncover how to launch your own podcast & monetize it at the same time.   "I think Podcast is a great way to build connections with people." - Daxy Perez   Daxy Perez     Bullet point Summary In this episode, we will know: How Daxy and Ryan started their Partnership Who is Daxy’s First Partnership What are the differences between him and Ryan What are the challenges that can teach people how to do stuff Why Podcasting is Important Timestamps   1:00 - Daxy’s Podcast and Partnership with Ryan Helms 2:00 - Daxy’s First Partnership 3:00 - Problems with Partnerships    5:15 - Differences with Ryan 6:30 - Start doing Personal Brand stuff 8:00 - Uncertainty of Ideas for Business Partners 9:00 - Challenge can teach people how to do stuff 10:30 - Importance of Podcasting   Contact Information Daxy Perez Legacy Podcasting - https://legacypodcasting.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/iamdaxy Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/iamdaxy Rocket Fuel Book - https://books.google.com.ph/books/about/Rocket_Fuel.html?id=213_BgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false DISC Personality Type - https://www.123test.com/disc-personality-test/   Jamie Atkinson Email: jamie@entrepreneurjunkie.co Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jamieatkinson/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Jamieatkinsonmedia Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/jamieatkinsonlive/   Free Podcasting Community The Entrepreneur Junkie Movement Facebook Page The Entrepreneur Junkie Movement Community Facebook Group Podcasting 101 Community - 4 Ways to Monetize Your Podcast  

Ryan Saxman joins Jay Conner. He's the author of "Don't Be Normal - Be Unstoppable"A former Coast Guard, since 2009. Became a reservist in 2019. He is flipping 5 homes presently. He started in REI in 2016.He wants to do more RE wholesaling.Ryan has raised $1,000,000 in Private Money. He now sees it as a small amount, whereas before it was a huge amount.He is flipping five houses right now. $175,000 in profits.He started a coaching program called Motivation to Millions, which teaches people to wholesale properties. A 90 day program. Accountability is a key to success.https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Be-Normal-Unstoppable/dp/1722487178Ryan's favourite books:Ryan: "What you do on a daily basis will determine your success.""On the other side of Failure is Success"Daily practices Before: Reading Facebook, emails, Hollywood gossip, then procrastinatingAfter: Writing daily affirmations, self visualization, building up his beliefs, then following through.Problems are "Nothing more than unanswered questions."Favourite Marketing methods: Word of Mouth/Affiliate Marketing - utilizes other people's knowledge and connections.How do you work in REI when you are in different states?Prop Stream that gives you a list of 60,000 people with 20-30 filters to get in touch with people who are going thru divorse, out-of-state owners, pre-foreclosures, and much more.Uses a skiptrace service to find cell phone numbers to call them personally. Skip Genie is his pick.Ryan calls them.You need to have pipelines to bring in prospectsRyan sends 10,000 postcards a month. Calls 20 potential sellers a day. Massive action brings massive results.Ryan is available at https://www.facebook.com/public/Ryan-Saxmanwww.Motivate2Mill.comRyan's best advice: Be persistent when going for success.Register for the Real Estate Cashflow Conference:http://bit.ly/jaymoneypodcastJay Conner is a proven real estate investment leader. Without using his own money or credit, Jay maximizes creative methods to buy and sell properties with profits averaging $64,000 per deal.What is Real Estate Investing? Live Cashflow Conference https://youtu.be/QyeBbDOF4woThe Conner Marketing Group Inc.P.O. Box 1276, Morehead City, NC USA 28557P 252-808-2927F 252-240-2504Channelhttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZfl6O7pRhyX5R-rRuSnK6whttps://www.youtube.com/c/RealEstateInvestingWithJayConnerRSS Feedhttp://realestateinvestingdeals.mypodcastworld.com/rss2.xmlGoogle Playhttps://play.google.com/music/listen#/ps/Ihrzsai7jo7awj2e7nhhwfsv47yiTunes:https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/real-estate-investing-minus-bank-flipping-houses-foreclosure/id1377723034Watch on ROKU:Rokuhttps://my.roku.com/add/realestateinvestingRokuhttps://my.roku.com/add/realestateinvestingWatch on Amazon Prime:https://www.amazon.com/How-Locate-Real-Estate-Deals/dp/B07M9WNZR6/ref=sr_1_3

Earlier this year, we helped migrate one of our first clients onto Shopify Plus. As part of that re-platforming, we tried a new app called Retention Rocket that had dramatic results. That shouldn't be a surprise if you're familiar with the co-founder. Dylan Whitman started BVAccel, the largest Shopify agency. His experience as an agency owner directly led to the creation of Retention Rocket You'll hear: How insights as an agency owner led to the creation of Retention Rocket Why rising acquisition costs are the biggest threat to your business The intentional reason they're NOT in the app store Ryan Somrak Started in the eCommerce industry 10 years ago running sales for Bronto software where they grew the company from 0-50M having never raised a single penny of VC funding. Successfully sold to Netsuite for 200M in 2015, and eventually purchased by Oracle in 2016 where he helped open their 1st Santa Monica location. Now Ryan heads up sales at Retention Rocket. Tune in for more details! Special Offer from Retention Rocket Retention Rocket: Free Install & Free Trial 50% Off 1st 2 months Platform Fee Dedicated resources to install for non-Shopify Plus stores. Show Links Example store: Yvonne Estelle's Transcript Kurt: Hello and welcome back to the unofficial Shopify podcast. I'm your host Kurt Elster in a beautiful kind of gray, rainy, but I don't mind Skokie, Illinois, high top, Westfield Old Orchards professional building in. This is my version of Wayne Tower in Gotham city. Anyway, I want to hop in the time machine and tell you a story. Kurt: A good eight years ago, early in my career before I was the Shopify guide and fully committed to it, I had an office and below that office where some retail shops and there was one wonderful shop called [inaudible 00:00:37] that sold fine linens and tableware and basically expensive French home goods for your house. And it really is very pleasant store to go into and it turned out the owner had an interesting background and was a fun person to talk to and she said, you know, right now my website, I think she used to like Front Page. She's like, I wish I had something better. I said oh I cold help you out with that. Kurt: And we got them on Presta Shop. And it was way better. But you know, over time it was a big pain. And she stayed on that custom Presta Shop theme we developed for seven years until at the very beginning this year we moved her to Shopify plus and it was just phenomenal. I mean you can imagine going from like old and busted to the absolute super car of a E-commerce platform that is Shopify plus, really had a phenomenal impact on her business. First just in time savings, then second in a better user experience that resulted in a higher KPIs across the board. And then third, the sheer number of opportunities that were opened up by apps. Like in the past, her Google shopping was, she was literally like writing her own Google shopping feed, manually uploading it. Kurt: I mean, just crazy stuff. So now we get to automate that stuff, which freed up bandwidth for this single owner seven figure business to then turn around and start trying new things. And of the new things we tried was one that utterly prints money and has been a phenomenal experience that I want to tell you about, and that's retention rocket. So it was new to me, I was skeptical, but it looked cool. The more I learned about it it sounded good. So I said, okay, well let's give it a shot. We tried it, and just utter phenomenal success. So I've got with me Ryan Somrack from retention rocket and I'm going to, we're going to pick his brain and hear about retention rocket and why he believes it is absolutely crucial to your marketing, along with a brief history of the platform because it's kind of interesting. Kurt: So Ryan started in the E-com industry ten years ago running sales for Bronto. It's my understanding that Bronto is like the enterprise equivalent of Klaviyo and he while with them went from zero to 50 million and ACV having never raised a single penny of AVC funding. Yes, a man after my own heart, successfully sold to NetSuite for 200 million in 2015 eventually purchased by Oracle where he helped them open their first west coast office in Santa Monica. And now Mr. Ryan, where are you? Ryan: Hey Kurt, now we are in San Diego. Kurt: And whatcha doing in San Diego? Ryan: Yeah. So I'm running the sales team here at retention rocket. Kurt: Cool. And what the hell is retention rocket? Describe it for me? Ryan: What retention rocket does right, is essentially we are a retention platform that is going to gear conversations with folks, sending the right message at the right time to folks, but most importantly through the right channel, right? So if you look at how E-commerce continues to become more competitive as merchants are duly pressured by the increased ad cost and new online competitors, as a consequence of that, right? Teams are getting leaner, larger merchants are cutting staff and smaller upstarts or are comfortable running lean, teams leveraging technology. Essentially what we want to do, right, is build a retention platform that can drive on its own for clients. So that way, again, when they are paying these customer acquisition costs to get people on their site, we're then capturing their information, whether it's email or SMS or Facebook or push, right? And so that way what we're able to do with deliver messages to retain those customers through whatever channel it is that they prefer. Kurt: All right, so recapping, we run, presumably a lot of folks run Facebook ads. Facebook ads, as we've discussed on the show, are getting more expensive than ever. So you've got this high acquisition cost to drive someone to your website and then once they're there, obviously we want to compete, keep them there. But even if we had some extraordinary conversion rate, like 5% , which would be super high. That still means that 95 out of a hundred people don't buy, but they still, we still spent the money on the ad, right? Kurt: So we want to convert, retain, as many people as possible into customers. So in the past that's all right, we're going to follow up with some dynamic remarketing and we've got like, if we're really sophisticated, we're going to send it a multi part, so like three or four abandoned cart emails. And that would be part of like a larger piece of software. What I'm hearing is in retention rocket, the sole focus of your automation suite is cart abandonment recovery, really. And in that like just have it, that's just the pure focus and it's doing it in more than just email, to multiple channels. Ryan: Yeah. So think about it in this way. Right? So we started off, it was only natural for us to start off in the SMS space. Right? So to kind of give you a brief history of retention rocket, right? So our co founder Dylan Whitman was running one of the largest Shopify agencies in North America, BB Excel. Kurt: Well truthfully, I like, BB Excels' reputation is great. I like Dylan with a lot. I met him a few times and that was part of my interest and willingness to try retention rocket. I'm like if Dylan is behind it, I need to pay attention to it. Ryan: Yeah. And so that's kind of the initial reaction that most people get when we talk about our, when we introduced SMS right up front, a lot of people are hesitant about it because their initial response is, hey, we don't want to pester the customer through text messaging. And usually our response behind that is, is, well, whether you're sending them a text message, right, versus an email, if you're sending out a four part abandoned series email, how much non pestering are you doing versus you know, sending them out a one time text message to try to recoup that through a different channel? Ryan: But essentially going back, right, so Dylan working with BB excel, what he was able to do is work with a variety of merchants in the world, right? Surrounding E-commerce. And he kept coming across a consistent problem with these E-commerce shops specifically on Shopify, which was retention marketing was just taking too many systems, too many technologies, and it was way too complicated to execute. And for the people who were executing it, it was costing them so much money to where they were constantly having to worry about the overhead cost of it. So at the end of the day, again, marketing tools should empower marketers and technology should not essentially bog you down. And so that's kind of where we wanted to focus the core solution, is how do we make a tool that's easy to use for everyone. And also a tool that when we turn it on right, you can start seeing demonstrable revenue day one. Kurt: That's, yeah. Well, that's always a great win for customers. I love that. The common story that we hear from entrepreneurs, from merchants on the show is they have a pain or problem in their own life. They identify a problem and they go, "Hey, I could do this better. Why not me?" And it sounds like that exact same path got followed in software by Dylan, and having you, you said, you know, hey, this thing's going to be easy. It's going to be a quick, fast to use. Having used the thing, that is how it feels like it is no nonsense. It's not bloated. It's not over complicated. Coming from a software development background. I appreciate dashboards like that. All right, so we've established where it came from. Walk me through a certain, you've got to have a roster of cool clients on this thing. Give me a few. Just drop those names. Ryan: Yeah. We work with a variety of clients. So think of like Ivory Ella, Pura Vida, Kopari Beauty, Head Kandi Pro, Brooklyn. And so those are just a variety of clients that we work with. And then from a total demographic standpoint, right? We work with over a hundred clients today, I, and we're constantly growing again, being only a 13 month old company, having a hundred plus clients. You can kind of see the adoption rate that this is starting to take place. Kurt: Yeah, I was going to ask, hey, when did this start? All right, so just over a year ago? Ryan: Yeah, February. That like the first week of February of last year is when we officially kicked things off. Kurt: Oh, so I'm imagine, you're just starting, you've probably got like these are the core things we fixed and I mentioned you've got a long roadmap, run me through, or we've established what it does, it's retention, but really, you know, we're gonna stop browse abandonment, cart abandonment. Walk me through currently the tools in your toolbox that let me do that. And then some of the stuff that's on the roadmap that's going to be coming down the pipe soon? Ryan: Yeah, so currently what we do today, right from think of it, from when we launched our MBP, was an SMS abandonment feature, right? So somebody reaches your cart, right? Or they reached the checkout page. Most people are already collecting a phone field in that checkout or cart page, right? And so what we're doing is we're collecting that opt in, right, and then we're triggering out an abandoned text message that goes out to those customers. Ryan: Additionally from that, right, we're also providing different opt in widgets. So think of tools like texts to opt in. So you'll walk into a lot of stores, especially on Shopify, what you see today, these clients are starting to run pop up shops. So what we're doing right, is we're allowing those customers to do like a text in campaign. So, you know, text Kurt, right to 12345 to receive a SMS, like specific promotions. Right? Kurt: Those are like, those work well as radio ads. I always hear those on like Sirius. Ryan: Yeah. Kurt: You know, like Howard Stern and they're like text blah blah blah 2345 to get here, you know, free info. Ryan: Yup. Yup. Kurt: Okay cool. Ryan: Yeah. We also do things like form builders, right? So we created, after speaking with some of our customers when we launched them, right? One of the biggest things, or the concerns that they had were, hey, we've been in business right, for ten plus years we've collected a substantial amount of emails, but we've never done text message marketing before. How can we start to convert those people in a rapid growth type way. So what we've done right, is allow them to create a separate landing page, whether it's on their site or whether it's one that we actually can create in the platform itself to where you can now start leveraging the email subscribers that you have and push them through like your normal monthly newsletters that encourage those customers to then sign up for like, mobile VIP offers through the site. Right? Ryan: So now you've got an email that's triggering out to your normal customers, giving them the ability to now sign up for another channel where they might receive let's say one to two messages per month and that could be just exclusive only to like those mobile users. So that's one of the other tools. Ryan: We're just also about to release a push notification tool, right? So our whole goal right, is to start now rolling out a lot of these separate performance marketing channels. And then for us, right, it's going to start to determine when these customers are so because we're integrated into Shopify, we're able to track when that order is completed. And so for us, right, it's again, it's not focusing on, hey, we want SMS to be the main driver of it. It's really to understand, hey, this customer is receiving three to four messages a month across email, push, Facebook and text, right? We're now able to track when this customer is purchasing so we can determine like when they should receive which message at what time and when they should start falling off the different engagements from those channels. Kurt: Oh, so you're adding machine learning to it? Ryan: Yeah. That's going to be towards like the second half. Now that we're starting to collect all this data, right? Our longterm goal is to start collecting those algorithms on when the customer is purchasing, when they're making that purchase, what channel they're making that purchase on. Right? So let's say if I set up, you know, a five part abandoned series, that five part abandoned series might be a five part multichannel engagement, right? Between SMS, push, email and Facebook. But if I know that the customer purchased after receiving a text message, they automatically fall off the funnel of the remaining channels that are supposed to go out. And then now I know, hey, this customer purchased through a text message at a, you know, a 5% off coupon as opposed to purchasing through an abandoned email where I might have leveraged at 15% off coupon. So again, it's starting, we want to start to leverage again, how you want to start sending out those messages to the customer. Kurt: All right let's walk through a practical example here, cause my fear is that people aren't grasping how cool this is 'cause it may be hard to picture between, you know, buzzwords like sales channel. Yeah. All right. That wasn't a great example of a buzzword, but the ... Ryan: AI, AI is a great buzzword. Kurt: Yeah I did say machine learning. Okay. So let's walk through an example. I'm, we'll go with you Yvonne Stills, since you started with that one, I'm on Yvonne Stills dot com ,I find like, oh, these are the place mats for me. I add these to my cart. I start to check out, the doorbell rings, I moved on. What happens? How are you going to fix this for me? Ryan: Yeah. Yeah. So from there, right on the backend, we've set up based on, again, working with Yvonne and understanding what she doing from an abandoned email standpoint because it's safe to say, right, most people are sending some type of abandoned email today. Right? Kurt: Lord I hope so. Ryan: Right. Yeah. And if you're not ... Kurt: Get to work. Ryan: Yeah, right. Yeah. You're behind the game already. So essentially what we did right, is we sat down with Yvonne to understand when those emails are going out from a time perspective, we know from our end, right, that went an abandoned text message is sent out. 97% of the time that message is opened within the first three minutes of receiving that text. So again, you got to think about when a customer is abandoning, they're really essentially abandoning for a couple of reasons. One, there's customers out there that are really just looking for a discount. The other ones, there is something that could come up where they might actually have a question of they abandoned, does the short coming a different color does the shirt, do the shoes coming in different size. Right. My kid threw up in the kitchen sink, right? So now I've got to attack that. Ryan: So essentially what we're able to do then, right, is trigger out that automated text message to go out after a unique set of timing that the customer chooses. Right. Some of them send a text message out within the first 30 minutes of someone abandoning. Some people send it out after two hours of when someone abandons. So for us it's understanding when they're sending an email. So that way we can determine when we should send out a text. So now let's say I've got an abandoned text that goes out after 30 minutes, right? I follow that up after let's say four hours of sending an abandoned email and then let's say 24 hours from then, right? I want the last notification to be through, let's say their Facebook messenger account if we've collected that opt in. Ryan: So now I've got three different channels that I'm now following up with the customer to say, to remind them the purchase. So let's say they then received that text message, they open that text, right? They click on the link that's provided there and then they make that purchase. As soon as that purchase is made, right? It's an notifying Shopify on the back end that that order has been completed. So what happens is, is they fall off any abandoned email program that was set up and they would fall off any Facebook notification that's scheduled to be pushed out. Kurt: Oh dude, sweet. It's painless and seamless. All right. So for my experience with Yvonne was like literally she was like, yeah, let's set it up. And then you guys set a meeting, and then like by that afternoon it was up and running and going. Is that, did she get special treatment because this is, this is one of Kurt's clients? Or is this just because it's this easy? Ryan: Yeah, no. So it really is that easy, right? So if you, if you look at it, right, the new breed of advanced and fast growing merchants, they just want, they just want software that works, right? They don't want to have to think about it too much. They want it to produce revenue in a way where you aren't bombarding individuals X number of times. And they also want to be able to turn it on. Right? And then kind of let it go from there. Ryan: So essentially during all of our on boards, that's when we, we sit down with the customer, right, to understand like, hey, what are the different channels that they're already working in today? And then the strategies behind that and then we introduce, right, what are the strategies that we see from a multichannel perspective work for our clients. We set up their campaigns, we configure the best practices behind that and then from there moving forward, right as soon as we turn it on. Right. They've got dedicated teams behind them to help assist in any way because at the end of the day, right, it is software. It's a certain channel that most people have not gotten into. So they need that hand holding experience, which is where we typically win most of the time. Kurt: All right, so devil's advocate question here is this thing lets you some retention messages through text, number one, and it's actually we should, it wasn't noted, you know when I tested it, it's MMS. So like I got a text message with the product photo in it. It was really cool. You're in push notifications, there's Facebook messenger, there are existing solutions that do all of those things individually. Devil's advocate question, like what's the difference or the advantage here? Ryan: Yeah, no, that's a great question. Right? So I think the biggest thing that we're going to be focusing on is that these tools that we're going to collectively put into the platform, right, are not going to be things where it takes an entire team to run those technologies, right? So I think that's primarily like the first and biggest thing is that, so ease of use is really our biggest focus. I think the next thing that is going to be the biggest game changer is that we're going to be able to start collecting all of the data and from a predictive intelligence standpoint, right? Predict from an automation way of like, Hey, we noticed that customer A converts 10X higher, throw an email at a 10% off coupon, push them down this flow. But we know customer B converged 20X higher through an SMS and no coupon at all. Right? Ryan: So maybe we want to save that coupon, right? For someone that we know purchases more through, let's say email, we're going to now push customer B through like the text message funnel. So again, it's starting to understand like, where the customers are purchasing and how often they're purchasing. So then that way you can start leveraging. Another thing that we're looking at right now is, is think of like post mail, right? So companies that we know have purchased, like maybe they purchased one time and they haven't purchased within the last six months, right? Send them actual postcard, a with an offer tied to that, right? Kurt: Does it do that? Can I do that now? No? Ryan: No. It doesn't do that now, but that's exactly what we're working on. Right? So ... Kurt: That's be cool. Ryan: It's not leveraging just one channel to try to steal an attribution from another channel. We could care less about what, you know, what channel makes the sale. Right? We literally just want to understand from a customer viewpoint, right, which channel is communicating to that person and which channel they're responding the most with. So instead of say, hey, I want to have an email platform, right? And then I want to have a Facebook message platform that's going to try to take the acquisition away from my email, right, now you've got two conflicting platforms trying to steal the attribution. For us it's more about understanding what these customers, or where in the funnel they're making these purchases from first and foremost. Kurt: Yeah, it's an important distinction that I had not picked up on, that is a big advantage is you've got better attribution as opposed to like last, touch attribution that a lot of these platforms use, so you have like multiple apps all taking credit for the same thing. It's silly. Ryan: And the hard part of balancing that is right is when we start chatting, like when we go that deep with customers, a lot of the times we're having those conversations with customers that have never done SMS before, So now like you really have to kind of dial it all the way back and and look at first and foremost and say, okay, what are the retention strategies that you're doing today? Most people that we talk to are like, our retention strategy isn't that strong. We're really focused on the customer acquisition side, which we can completely understand and relate with, especially as technologies are changing and the rapid pace that E-commerce is going through. That's a valid point. But people, I think in the next, you know, in the next twelve to 24 months, you're going to see a dramatic change and people trying to focus on how do they grow the LTV of a customer and then how do they grow the AOV of a customer. And that's where I think retention is going to like take over by storm, right? Ryan: It's because now you've spent all this money to get somebody to your page, so now it's a matter of like how do you get that person to then not only convert one time on that page, but to keep that customer for let's say 12 months, 18 months, 24 months, and to take them from $60 in revenue, right to $120 in revenue over the course of that 12 months. Kurt: It's absolutely a safe bet, as acquisition costs keep getting higher, eventually currently profitable E-commerce businesses won't be sustainable anymore unless they have that shifted focus to, okay, let's focus on retention and we're going to, you're going to see that represented in a few key performance indicators where, all right, what's our lifetime value? What's our average order value? What's our repeat customer rate? And I think you're absolutely right. Not like, if you're thinking, oh, that's a hot take, it's really not. It's inevitable. Ryan: It really is. And again, it's not to focus on one channel over the other, like email, like you hear these things, that email is dying, right? Or email is going away, right? That's just 100% false. What's happening, right, is that there's just been so many email providers, right, that the space in general is just a bit saturated and email is so cheap, right? That people can send, you know, five, six messages a week to the same customer. Right. And it's relatively inexpensive, which is why I think email is going to continue to be around. Ryan: Our position, right, is you need to find, you need to find a real like, almost like painting a picture, right? You need to find a way to where you're not just focused on one specific outlet to start responding to that customer and that's all part of like what we're even learning as a company. Right? Do we know if a back in stock reminder is better notified through push notifications than email or text? Do we, you know, do we notice that hey, a new product launch or, or let's say you know, basically hey an update to some new products that we're rolling out. Like should that be going through an email as opposed to anything else? Do we think a buy one get one free sale is more geared towards SMS then email or push? These are all things that like we're starting to at, and which is I think going to be the biggest proponent of like how customers start to trigger out their marketing messages. Kurt: No, absolutely. Okay. Going backwards a little bit. What is the, if we've got all of these channels unified in one app and we don't have to deal with a bunch of separate apps and now we're collecting this data. Okay. Then it stands to reason. You may have a cool dashboard, but it's also, it's a 13 month old app so, I don't know if it isn't there yet. Talk to me about the reporting and what that dashboard it looks like a little bit? Ryan: Yeah. So right now we're able to look at total messages sent right from a channel perspective. So if you sign up and you use like our Facebook tool, if you sign up for obviously SMS and push, right? We'll the able to tell you how many messages are going out through those various channels. We'll be able to report on how many people have opted in through those various channels. Then we can take a look at a sales attribution's as well as revenue generated. Right? So what we're going to be doing moving forward is we're actually going to dive in a little bit deeper from a reporting standpoint. So from like a customer level, right? You can actually look at the customers who have opted in. You can see things like their their last purchase. You can see things like the last item that they abandoned. Ryan: You can see things like total orders that they have on your site. You can see the average order value that they have on your site and we're actually putting them into predefined segments. So then that way when people start to send like outbound promotionals through text or through push or through Facebook, right? You're now able to maybe not send the same message to everyone. You can now start to dissect, hey, I want this message with free shipping to go to customers that we know have purchased more than twice. We want the customers who have purchased less than twice, right to receive, maybe like 5% off or something like that. Ryan: So from there, right, we're also going to be tracking things like opens, clicks, conversions, and then we're also going to be, from a diagraph standpoint, being able to show you exactly where customers are opting in. So, for example, right, if we know that we've got 30 customers that sign up for the text to join campaign versus maybe 15 people who have signed up by abandoning a product versus 10 people who have signed up after completing a purchase, right? You obviously want to know where some of these folks are are signing up. So then that way you can also determine like, which message should be going out to those folks as well. Kurt: So dope, dude, so sick. Ryan: Yeah, it's exciting. So we're super stoked, you know, like at the same time we've got, you know, we've got a two year roadmap, that like we're looking ahead on which is, you look at that and you're like, shit, like that's a long roadmap. But you think of like where E-commerce is going to be, you know, two years from now. I mean just over the last 12 months, like it's changed so radically, just with the changes that are happening within Facebook itself, right? Like, and the customer acquisition costs between now and 12 months ago. There's just always a constant radical shift. So for us, right, it's the challenge for us is, is staying on focus to the roadmap that we have in hand and making sure that we develop a product that again, is easy to use for the customer. And then first and foremost drives them revenue the moment that they turn it on. Kurt: So cool. Yeah. Well that was what amazed, me was how rapidly we were able to get the thing going and making sales. But one objection possible, objection here some of the brands you rattle off, I know her on Shopify plus Yvonne Styles is on Shopify plus. Do you have to be on Shopify plus for this thing to work? Ryan: Yeah, great question. No, you don't have to be on Shopify plus a to use the APP. So right now in its current state, right, we work with Shopify plus and people who are on Shopify, you know, either regular, or if they're on Shopify advanced and Shopify itself is just such an easy platform to work with. It's also a reason that we wanted to start there before venturing out. Kurt: That makes sense, on the topic I noticed like all right, another devil's advocate question. This thing's not in the Shopify APP store and I noticed like there's some big popular apps that aren't in the APP store. What's the deal with that? Ryan: Yeah. So in our current state, right, we're really focused on building, with how young we are still in our current state, we're focused on building one to one relationships with our customers and solving their problems. I think over time, right, as our product eve continues to evolve, you'll see retention rocket in the app store. So we're definitely looking at something like that. We just want to make sure that from a timing perspective, that we're able to deliver right, what the customers are looking for. Kurt: That ambulance you order just arrived. Okay. Nope, that makes sense. The way I'm hearing that as if it was in the APP store, anyone could just click install retention rocket. It's much harder to scale that experience, versus right now it's easier for you to work one on one and have that very high touch onboarding by having it just, okay, you sign up for it on the retention rocket website. Ryan: Yeah, because here's a perfect example of it, right? We get someone who's never done text messaging before, right? They download the retention rocket app in the APP store having never done anything with text messaging before. Like, their question is going to be, you know, what's the best way to op customers, via SMS, what's the best practices on sending SMS, right? Do I send once a week? Do I send twice a day, right? Do I send once a month? So these are all questions that for each customer, they're all going to be different, right? It depends on are, you know, are you a Pura Vida, right? Versus you know, a TAF clothing. Like are you selling $30 items right, where you don't care what the discount is a or are you selling, you know, $400 pairs of shoes that you're not discounting at all? Ryan: So for us, right? It's really a matter, the tool we know will be effective, right, when done the right way. And that's why we want to sit down with those customers and really understand like what they're doing today and how we can incorporate retention rocket to take them to the next level. Kurt: Cool. So what's, what's the typical ROI or results of using retention rocket? Ryan: Yeah, that's a good question. Right? Kurt: 'Cause it says you've got so far, you've got a 20 million that you've revenue increase for retention rocket customers. I see that on your website. Ryan: Yeah. I mean our average, I would say for people who do, from an abandoned cart standpoint, right? I'm just from a recovery standpoint and we've got customers that average anywhere from 300 to a thousand bucks a day, even more, right? Like I don't want to single out the people that we see doing like 4K a day. And I know that's a big average, but it also determines, right, again, like the amount of traffic that they're driving on their site, right? And the actual, the cart value of when someone abandons, right? Ryan: So I'd say typically, on average you can see about 300 to a thousand bucks per day in revenue. The conversion rates that we're seeing a range anywhere from 19 all the way up to 38% right? We've got a reach a fashion retailer down in Auburn that when we turn it on and we ran a 30 day performance forum, they drove over 40K and sales. They had a 46% open rate and a 38% conversion rate. Kurt: That's crazy. That's nuts. Ryan: Yeah. You think about it, right? If you, if you're doing an abandoned cart emails exceptionally well, you're seeing anywhere from let's say like a 12 to 15% conversion rate. Right? That could be fair. So imagine, right? If you increase that even another 9% or 10% what's that doing to the bottom line of the business, and for some of these folks, right? Who are just starting, you know, on a Shopify, an extra 300 bucks a day in revenue is a really big impact for them. So that's kind of some of the things we've seen from an outbound standpoint, people who were doing, I think you'll start to see more and more of this as people start to engage with SMS more, right? Ryan: The average ROI that we see is anywhere from a nine to 10X on those out bounds. Kurt: Alright, you've already sold me on it, stop selling, I want it. How much is it going to cost me? Ryan: Yeah. Right. So we do it based on different tiers, right? So it's based on the amount of orders that they do per day. So it could be anywhere from 99 bucks a month all the way up to 1000 bucks a month. And then from an outbound standpoint, right, they just pay a per message costs on those out bounds. So if they send a regular text message, or like a regular hundred 60 character SMS, you're looking at a penny per message. If they send an MMS like you were referring to earlier where they send something like a picture in there or a Gif, right, you can even include a two minute video inside those tax. You're looking at two cents per message. Kurt: That's cheap. Is there a set up fee for it? Ryan: Yeah, so typically there's a setup fee. So what we're going to do for anyone who wants to try it out, right from, from viewing on the podcast is we're going to do a free install for them as well as ... Kurt: Alright they're gonna shake you down. All right. We'll do a free install. What else do they get, any more? Keep it coming. Ryan: A free install. We're going to do a free trial for them. Kurt: How long is the free trial? Ryan: Yeah, the free trial will last up to 30 days. Kurt: Okay. Free install ,free trial. Gimme more. I need more? Ryan: Yup. Yup. You're going ... Kurt: Let's turn those pockets inside out. Ryan: So if they want to sign on right after after the trial, right. We're going to do 50% off their first two months of the platform fee. Kurt: Oh yeah. Okay. All right. That's you've been properly shaken down so we get free install free trial, 50% off for the first 60 days. Did I miss anything? Is that everything? I mean this is pretty good. All right, where do I go to get started? Ryan: So you're going to, there should be a link that's provided to the podcast, right? Kurt: In the show notes, all right. Exactly. Yeah, so in the show notes that they sign up through that link, it will then generate back to us to give them that special promotion. All right, listener note. If you're on you're on your phone, tap or swipe up on the episode art and it will open up the show notes and you'll find I will stick that in there. Like big heading, special offer from retention rocket. We turned Ryan's pockets inside out and then that will have the link, like a special shortened link that will take you to the page to get the offer. Or if it doesn't, I'm sure you could just, when you're doing the onboarding doc, I heard about you for Kurt, give me those free 60 days nerd and they should help you out there. Don't call him a nerd though, I guess Ryan: Say whatever they want when they sign up. Kurt: Cool. All right, well here I got one. An odd ball question for you. What apps have really good synergy with retention rocket? Like if I really want to make sure that I'm getting the most out of retention rocket, is there anything I should already be doing that would make me a good candidate for it? Ryan: Yeah, right. So I'd say the, the platforms right? That we're working right now on to build some pretty cool use cases. So [inaudible 00:34:56] won, right? Clavio from like an email perspective, smile.io from a rewards. Kurt: Love smile. Ryan: Yeah. Right. So we're working on some really good use cases with them on how they can incorporate SMS to their client base. Right. And then we're also working, we're going to be working pretty closely with recharge from a subscription standpoint, which I think will be, will throw out some really good use cases on people who obviously are abandoning subscriptions or things like auto refill reminders. So stuff like that is going to be down, actually not, pretty far away. So we'll be rolling those out pretty soon. So I think like people that are using those technologies seem to play really well with retention rocket. Kurt: Super Cool. Wow. All right. I got to go sign up. I gotta go sign my wife up for retention rocket. Thank you Ryan. This has been fantastic. I'm inspired. I got to go set this thing up. Ryan: Yeah, we appreciate it, man. So thanks for the help.

Rebekah just launched an online course focused on helping new moms with “everyday hospitality” **COURSE DETAILS AND DISCOUNT CODE BELOW** ….but first: We got started very late. 11:00pm…because we had a hard time getting both boys to sleep!  Ryan took Liam out to Trader Joe’s for groceries and the cashier gave him some candy (She asked first, which was awesome!) and the sugar rush added a couple hours to the bedtime routine. Bummer. Finally after Liam did fall asleep, Ryan came into the living room and Ari our 10-month-old decided he did not want to go to sleep. So we decided to go with it, watched some TV shows, and made some pop-corn.  But the big topic of this episode is the LAUNCH of Rebekah’s brand new online course, YOUR GENEROUS HOME. This project is several months in the making. Bekah has been putting this together for the past 6 months.  YOUR GENEROUS HOME can be found at www.yourgeneroushome.com Your Generous Home is a course that teaches "Everyday Hospitality" for busy moms with limited time, space and resources. Rebekah started this course for moms like her who want their homes to be a generous and welcoming place for family and friends without going crazy in the process The course is a video course about what Hospitality is. How we think about it and approach it (Perfection, expectations, and performance).  Rebekah has taught and spoken around the world to many different groups of people, but this is the first time she has done a video course.  The course dives into issues like, the things that are stopping you, and practical lessons like having dinner guests with children in the house. Rebekah breaks down the tasks in the course to make it easier for moms to get things done without having a melt down. Checklists are provided to help you think through what needs to be done before, during and after guests come over. Self assessment test: Questions about your specific stage in life to evaluate where you are at as an individual to give you a better picture of what your capacity is and what you are capable of in the moment.  Ryan asks some interview questions…it gets awkward for just a minute… Ryan asks why this subject matter. Why everyday hospitality? Rebekah: At the core…we all want to connect. As a young mom it’s harder to get out of the house and build connections and the easiest solution is to make your home the place that people come to.  We live in a 1-bedroom apartment, so we are very limited on space. We have also lived in a variety of situations and spaces where we have had to be creative with how we bring people into our home. Rebekah is no stranger to this and developed a sense of “Creative Hospitality” and learned to use what she had to make connections with people over food, coffee, or tea. Each place gives new ideas. Mainly, it’s all about your heart of generosity. This resonates with people who come to visit.  Ryan asks how this works while having kids: Rebekah: It’s more complex. Things do take longer. More planning.  Even though we live in a 1-bedroom, we have not let that stop us from having people stay with us. Family and friends…including a guest who stayed with us for 6 weeks.  Rebekah begin to realize that people would be surprised and what she would take on. Which is part of what drove her to create a course to show how limitations are not disqualifies, but opportunities to get creative.  Focus on what you DO HAVE not on what you DON’T HAVE. Hospitality is one the ways you can foster community and connection and battle against lonliness. As a mother, you can make a difference in the world through fostering connection through hospitality. It’s so accessible to everybody! Ryan asks what the most surprising thing for Rebekah in the process of putting this course together. Rebekah talks about how self-disqualification was a major struggle, because of the amazing people she has around her who are also doing such a great job. But on the other hand, when looking at the material and the potential, it makes her very excited. Ryan: What are the next steps for the course? Rebekah: This is the first part. Next we are going to build out additional audio lessons that are focused on specific areas of interest (issues, problems, topics).   Check out the course at www.yourgenerousehome.com10% Discount Code: GOODJOB10 Normal Price is $30 This is a course is not just for moms, but for anyone who is limited with time and resources! Find us on Facebook and instagram @goodjobmomdad Listen at: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2Wh6WuW Stitcher: https://bit.ly/2B0YZRJ Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2sSQqUq

The boys get mystical in this episode...sort of. They were supposed to, but Ryan and Mike zagged on y'all, with the behind-the-scenes help of Frank Edler. What was supposed to be a debate on the best kind of magic went a bit sideways. Instead of picking black magic or occult magic or chaos magic, well, Mike picked friendship and Ryan picked Magic the Gathering. Nick, excited at first, realizes this isn't going to be what he's expecting! Discussion points include: Gandalf, Seinfeld, the Dark Tower, imagination, Kevin Smith, Ticketmaster, Winston Churchill, competetive eSports, the X-Files, witch hunts, and self-referential friendships. Where did the boys used to record? What is Mike saving for Ryan? What does Nick's O-face look like? Whip out your wand for The Best Kind of Magic!

We have a VERY special episode for you today. My friend Janice Hisle, who was a reporter for over 27 years joins us to share details about the famous Ryan Widmer bathtub drowning case. Join us in this episode were we learn about Ryan and his wife Sarah and the murder case that has stumped everyone. Are you ready to hear the facts for yourself? Listen to the podcast HERE   Her wildly popular book SUBMERGED: Ryan Widmer, His Drowned Bride, and the Justice System has already had to be reprinted after just a few weeks in print. And readers have reported that they lost sleep over the book. It will be no surprise for you once you hear all the details of this baffling investigation. Did Ryan murder his wife or was this a very unfortunate hidden medical condition? In this episode we are going to present the facts and you will come up with your own conclusion. Questions I Asked Janice: ❏ What are the most surprising reactions that you have gotten from your book? ❏ Why did Sarah’s parents withdraw support from Ryan? ❏ What did you learn through this process? Topics Discussed: ❏ Why the coroner concluded that it was murder. ❏ Janice’s experience after visiting prisons for interviews. ❏ Surprising new facts that have emerged since the trial. Quotes from the show: ❏ “It touches your heart and confounds your brain.”@JaniceHisle ❏ “Things might seem simple but they rarely are.” @JaniceHisle ❏ “My keyboard is almost as active as my feet.” @JaniceHisle How you can stay in touch with Janice: ❏ Website and Book ❏ Facebook How you can stay in touch with Linda: ❏ Website ❏ Facebook ❏ Twitter ❏ Instagram ❏ Pinterest ❏ YouTube "Proud Sponsors of the Sisterhood of S.W.E.A.T" ❏ Essential Formulas ❏ Giovannicosmetics.com My daily energy stems from mushrooms... mushroom coffee that is! ❏ Have you checked out F our Sigmatic y et? If you want a coffee that contains superfoods and adaptogens like rhodiola, eleuthero, and schisandra to help you live a healthier, more enhanced life, then you need Four Sigmatic mushroom coffee in your daily routine! C heck out their products here and be sure to let me know what you think of it!

(#256) Dr. Ryan DeBell, founder of The Movement Fix, joins the podcast this week for a fantastic discussion about human movement. Dr. DeBell is a chiropractor, seminar leader, writer, and creator of The Movement Fix. The Movement Fix is an educational website that teaches us how to master our body through better movement. Here's what you'll learn about this week: Why he doesn't identify with being a Chiropractor How his passion in health and fitness all began with the Total Gym How he merged his background in Technology & Health and Fitness Why transitioning to a more digital learning environment A "hint" about the big project he's been developing Learn about the "Online" Movement Fix seminar What's the big thing that people walk away with after the MF seminar Can you assess your own movement? What are the principles to satisfy a good squat pattern? Why movement checklists aren't a good thing (according to Ryan) What are the 3 most common movement issues? Thoughts on spinal flexion (during movement and/or during lifts) What he says is worse than spinal flexion? What exercises he likes for back health Most valuable exercises to improve movement What exercise is often missed in training? An exclusive "sneak preview" about his upcoming soft-tissue tool Books he's recently read and recommends 2 actionable takeaways from our interview (great stuff!) [click_to_tweet tweet="'I'm here to teach people to think, not to memorize something.' -Dr. Ryan DeBell" quote="'I'm here to teach people to think, not to memorize something.' -Dr. Ryan DeBell" theme="style5"] [jbox color="green" radius ="2"]This week's podcast is brought to you by one of my favorite online learning resources to build a "world-class" education. Go To RdellaTraining.com/getsmart to learn more and test out a FREE 3-day trial.[/jbox] Get value from this podcast? Please take a minute to review the show. It’s fast and easy to do. To see how to post a review in Apple Podcasts, go to RdellaTraining.com/review SUBSCRIBE AND REVIEW THE SHOW IN APPLE PODCASTS SUBSCRIBE AND REVIEW THE SHOW IN STITCHER LISTEN AND SUBSCRIBE IN GOOGLE PLAY LISTEN AND SUBSCRIBE IN OVERCAST The Rdella Training® Podcast is published each week with valuable training information and amazing interviews with many “world-class” coaches, experts, and authors in the fitness industry. The Rdella Training Podcast is committed to "bridging the gaps" in strength, performance, and injury prevention. Created for the serious fitness enthusiasts and dedicated lifters around the world. SHOW NOTES: TheMovementFix.com TheMovementFix.com/Resources The Movement Fix Online Workshop Choose Yourself Think And Grow Rich Letting Go Of The Words [jbox color="red" radius ="2"]Follow @RdellaTraining on Instagram for high-value training tips, tutorials and education.[/jbox] [jbox color="yellow" radius ="2"]Community page: RdellaTraining.com/ask.[/jbox] Spread the word! Please share this on Facebook, Twitter or anywhere you’d like. [jbox color="blue" radius ="2"]Scott Iardella, MPT, CSCS is a strength coach, athlete, and former "physio" who's mission is to help men and women, regardless of age or background, forge their best, strongest self. Scott is the author of the book, The Edge of Strength.[/jbox]

So you are working a day job and you are wondering what can you do to get to your financial freedom sooner, rather than later!??!! I met Ryan who is living that life. He has a great day job, but he also wants to do something on the side to help build his financial foundation. Ryan not only figured that out, but he created a system that makes it possible to use his discretionary time wisely. Tune in on this interview as Ryan shares his secret!! Grant: Welcome to another episode of financial investing radio, so I'm very excited because I have in the house with me today, a visitor that I just recently met through someone that I know online and they pointed me to this person. They said, Grant, you need to talk to this person because he's doing a kind of investing that I know a lot of people in the corporate world think about, which is this uncertainty of what's gonna really happen to what's going on in my life, but without going any further. Well let me back up and stop and say, welcome. Ryan. Would you take a moment and introduce yourself? Ryan: What's up everyone? Ryan Helms here coming to you from right now, dark outside Atlanta, Georgia. But uh, yeah, I've been in Atlanta for about five years now. And uh, you know, I create content to help people with nine to five jobs, create freedom in their life. Grant: That's really cool. So how did you arrive at this? I mean, you just one day say, hey, this might be a good idea. Are there must've been some sort of impetus that got your attention and said, hey, I better do something about this? Ryan: Yeah, so for me, I, moved up to Atlanta for my job, which I have no disdain for at all and I came up here and I spent about the first two years I really kind of nose down kind of work, like you know, I'm going to make a name for myself in this company, which has worked out quite well. It was a good strategy, but it got me to a point where I wasn't burnt out, but when I looked up it was on the horizon and I knew I had to like step back, pull myself back for a bit. And unfortunately when you're early in your career in corporate America, you get about two weeks vacation and yeah, it's kind of unfortunate, but I'd used all two weeks of that because I sat on the couch which is about eight feet behind me right now. And I bought a plane ticket to Nairobi, Kenya and had no. Yeah, I had no plans at all. I was literally scrolling the Internet, had no intentions to buy a plane ticket on that Friday night, but I purchased that plane ticket because it was $750 and I thought, man, that's a pretty good deal to go all the way to Africa. I did that and that was in July of 2016 and I made the trip November of 2017 or no, November of 2016 and you know, while I was there it was just. First of all, it was an amazing experience. It's like going on a safari and spending a week on Zanzibar and all this, all these cool things. But you know, as cliche as it sounds, I really had like this epiphany moment when I was there. I was meeting all these people that were doing all these great things in their life that we're allowing them to have this freedom to travel. Like I was meeting people from all over the world and oftentimes they had different paths on how they got there and how they were traveling. Some of them were on vacation like me, but a lot of them were traveling for like two years and I'm in a year and all these things and when I left there I didn't necessarily know what I wanted to do because I'd never had that mindset before. It was always like it was. Yeah. That was like working in the corporate, Grant: So you are thinking "Hey, I'm being a good employee." So you're in the grind, right? And then you saw a flight where price was away from value. I think they call it a sale, right? There's a sale and you're like Nairobi, let's go! So you run into these people out there that are like, they're traveling around. So this pop that idea in your head. All right. And keep going. What happened? Ryan: Yeah, absolutely. So, uh, I'm on the plane ride back from, from Nairobi, Kenya, coming back to Atlanta and I said I, I need to, I need to create this freedom my life. Unfortunately I look at my bank account and I was about $55,000 in debt, not counting like my mortgage. So like consumer debt. And I said, alright, so how can I expedite the process of paying this debt off? Because that was the, that was the first thing hanging over my head that I knew if I wanted to be free quote unquote free, however you define that for me, it was financially free. Like I didn't want the burden of, uh, have that hanging over my head and have to make decisions based on money. So, uh, I said, how can I speed this process up? So the next thing was how can I create alternate streams of income? Right? So when you're working in a corporate environment, you can't just walk up to your boss and say, Hey, give me a 20 percent rate. Is that Grant: Well, you can try that, but how far does that go? Not far! Ryan: So, uh, so I just started to, for one pull the reins in on my finances, on my budget, things like that really started to understand it because I made good money for my age being at this time, probably like 28 or so, uh, and made good money enough to where I never had to look at my bank account. And I never did. I just knew I had enough money to spend and never was like, it was like I didn't know the password to my Wells Fargo account, that kind of thing. I just knew that I could do what I want it to do and not have to look at my bank. Grant: Maybe you were rich in the world's terms in the sense that you didn't have to look at your bank account, you were free a little bit, right? And you said you didn't have to look too much. But when you saw these other people on your trip you realized your current salary wasn't giving you the freedom at the next level. And that was the epiphany, right? Ryan: Yeah, absolutely. So I spent a, I spent some time figuring out how could I, how could I help speed up the process of, of paying this debt down. Uh, and then I came up on, okay, I'm going to start a side hustle, so I'm going to do something outside of my day job to help, uh, put me down this path. And the first thing I did was always been into fitness and things like that. So I started this a fitness business on the side focused on corporate individuals and it was called corporate fit in. That was going well in through that process though, I had a lot of people asking me how I was doing everything because at this time I was traveling around the world for my job, so I was constantly on the go and still putting out content, still building this business on the side and I didn't know how to answer people and they said, how are you doing it? I was like, I don't know. I'm just, I guess I'm doing what everybody else will be doing if they were doing this. Now stepping back though, I realized it was the systems, right? That's what was allowing me to, to manage all these moving parts in my life was how much I had systematize things. So that was a turning point for me. I said, okay, I don't really see myself doing this fitness thing. It doesn't thrill me. Like I enjoyed fitness because I liked working out. I didn't enjoy it as much when I was helping other people. I created the why. First off I had said, all right, I have a process, I systematized my life in this way to enable me to do this, and I sat down and put pen to paper. The output of that was a physical product called the side Hustle and journal, which I ended up launching on kickstarter a November, so almost about I guess 10 months ago now. November of 2017. Grant: Cool. Alright, so 10 months on Kickstarter. So you said something interesting you came up with this system, the system that the intent of the system has to help someone take themselves through the fitness experience. Is that right? Ryan: So the system that I was referring to was the system on how I was actually a managing my nine to five job, quote unquote, doing all this stuff on the side, hanging out with friends, still still having some form of a social life. That's the system I remember referring to it Grant: That's your system lead people to help them create their side hustle; while they have another job. So there's a lot of people that are in that situation right there. They've got the day job, they want to figure out the side hustle. You've got the system where you figured this out. So it's been 10 months, it's been out there. What's been the impact of that? What have you seen? What have been the results? Ryan: Yeah, it's been cool. So on, on it was really challenging because like I said, I had no audience at all going into this space and I went in it kind of backwards to most people. Most people start like on the content creation side, build some awareness for their, their personal brand, things like that. I like to make things difficult for myself. And went with the physical product right off the bat. Surprisingly I convinced 600, a little over 650 people on Kickstarter to back the project. Uh, so that was a good start to kind building my list. It was kind of a jumpstart to building my list. And since then it's been awesome. I've been really focusing on interacting with that community, really giving them an authentic view at me. So making it, like really showing them, I'm not a guy just selling them a product, I'm a guy like them. I'm a guy on this journey with them, uh, trying not so much to put myself on this pedestal above them. Show them that, hey look, I'm just following what I'm doing. I'm just like you, like if you come on this journey with me, what we're going to cross the finish line about the same time. So that's what I've been doing the past 10 months is, is bringing people on that journey, uh, leveraging the physical product itself as a way to get people to come on that journey with me. Right? So that's, that's the entry point into my ecosystem right now. Uh, so yeah, that's kind of where I've been at the past 10 months. Grant: That's amazing. So, so the style of investing, given financial investing, radio style of the investment here is that you have a way to leverage your discretionary time to produce additional income in your life and make a change without rocking the boat in terms of, you know, you're stable work and stable for now all with the intent that you're shooting towards. So do you have an idea how long it would take for someone applying your system? Regardless of how they apply? Right. I mean they could apply it anywhere from a creating embroidery products to selling books or whatever. Right. You use it for anything, is that right? Ryan: Yeah, for sure. Grant: So if they applied the system, what sort of timeframe would they expect as a two year or three year process where you think they could break free financially or get to that next level? Or does that depend hard to say? Ryan: It's probably too hard to say based on individual factors, but I think what you'll gain right off the bat is the systems that will enable you to leverage this time and actually like it's like finding, you know, you find money in the seat cushions and things like that so that you find time in all of these places that you don't realize you actually have time and it all goes back to just being very intentional about what you're doing and you know, the journal itself and the system within the journal is about discovering like what do you want to be intentional about and then how can you maximize your time around it that could give you time to do a lot of things. Not only could it give you time to invest in yourself by, you know, creating a side hustle or a business on the side, but I mean you could even, it could free up time to do actual investing. Maybe the stock market is what you're really into, right? This system. So could be the foundation for developing your new investing strategy. Doing the research, who you want to getting more methodical about those processes that are required to do really anything, whether you're investing in yourself or in the market, so, uh, it could really be applied to anyone in the amount of effort that you put in will determine the speed in which you reach it. Grant: I heard a seminar recently from a guy by the name of Alex Charfen. You ever heard of him? Ryan: Yeah. Grant: And Alex was, he said something that sounded kind of similar where he said that he has this thing called a a time study, I think was the term he used, which was take a moment to think about how you're spending your time. And he said, I guarantee if you take two weeks to really evaluate and log and write down how you're spending your time, he said you will find places where you are wasting a ton of time and that will free up to then be able to do the kind of system you're talking about. Is that right? Ryan: Yeah, absolutely. And I agree 100 percent. If you don't put it down in front of you, you'll think you're efficient with your time, but there's going to be inevitable gaps in the product says, you know, the reason I put out a physical product for this and I've had so many people saying you need to make an APP, you need to do this. It's because there's so much activity going on in your phone, right? There's so many things and beings and bongs like every two seconds for something like this as important as like getting time back and, and, and creating something great, but out into the world, you need to carve out a section of non-distracted time and really figure out, you know, what, what do I need to do, how can I get there? So that's, that's what I'm all about. Exactly. As you know, putting it down on paper and putting it in front of you and visualizing it. Grant: How much, how much non-distracted time does a person need in order for, to, to make some effective progress? Is Fifteen minutes enough or does it need to be more? Ryan: Uh, for me, I think it needs at one given time. I think it needs to be more, I think the, the uh, you know, the length of period of time should be definitely longer than 15 minutes. I would say at least 45 minutes so that you can, it'll take you 15 minutes, get focused on what you want to do and if all you have is 15 minutes and you have 15 minutes every two hours, yeah, you may be getting, you know, three hours worth of work in that day, but you'll probably only get about 15 good minutes worth of work as you will be starting over every 15 minutes. And as soon as you start to get in your groove, you're going to be, it's going to be over again. So I like to try to carve out a larger block of time of at least an hour so I can make sure I can get focused on what I'm trying to do and actually execute on something. Grant: I think that makes a lot of sense. I've seen multiple studies where people have identified the cost of a distraction in terms of productivity in every time we get distracted with the amount of time it takes in order to get the context back into your head so that you can begin to be productive again. That sounds like that's what you're describing. Absolutely. I used to. I used to ride a lot of code earlier on in my life and my career and every time I'd get distracted, right, it pull me away. It would take me a long time, like 15 minutes, get get into mine, mine everything where I was right in solving a particular problem. It was so expensive to do that. It sounds like you've optimized on that principal to help people invest in themselves, to invest in their future by taking advantage of the discretionary time they have to really reach the real goals. That's cool. You're good. Anything about goal setting as part of this? Is that. Is that a key part of your system provides? Ryan: Yeah, so the product itself, I always say like the backbone of this tool is what I call it, a molehill system. Grant: So why, why do you call it the mole hill system? Ryan: Uh, I was sitting at a Starbucks one Saturday morning working on this and I knew I had this system in it and just from a marketing standpoint, I knew I had to name it something, right? It couldn't just be, it couldn't just live in here. And I was thinking and I was like, man, I was like, don't make a mountain out of a molehill because that's what a lot of people do. You have this, this little obstacle in your way and you just stay in there for months looking at it because you're just so terrified of it. So like the, my thought there is, is you're breaking down, you know, this big mountain into these really manageable mole hills that you can just easily surpass on a daily basis. So the mole hills or things that you're doing every single day and the mountain is what you get at the end and you don't actually ever have to climb the mountain. It's just basically the finish line at that point. Grant: Oh, I see. So the mole hills or series of steps that take you up to the mountain. So what's been the impact of people that have applied the system so far? What have you seen? Ryan: Yeah, so that's one of the coolest thing for me is the satisfaction from just seeing people use the tool and the community that it's creating. So one of the things I did with the Kickstarter was create where it's like an accountability system. So I said, you know, if you want to back this tier, one of the things that you'll, one of the offers in this tier will be all partner you up with somebody. And actually just, this has probably been about three weeks ago now, but I got a uh, I got a email with a picture in it from two guys. And at first all I saw was a pitcher and I was like, why are these two guys sending me a picture? And they were in Milan and I can tell they were in Milan because of the cathedral and the, and one of the guys was from Switzerland and one of the guys was from New York and they were sending me the email to say, thanks for connecting us. This is my accountability partner. We decided to meet in Italy. We'd been working together for the past eight months using the journal. So yeah, things like that are just awesome. And just to realize that you're impacting people and knowing that there's probably other people out there that aren't sending you those emails that are impacting as well. So it's been very, very cool. Just to, uh, just to see how an idea in my head most nights mostly created in a Starbucks down the street is changing people's lives. Grant: That is really awesome. I appreciate you sharing that. That's all happened. Just within the 10 months since you put it out there, if someone wanted to go find your materials, wherever they go, did they go find it? Yeah, Ryan: Sure. GritAndHustle.co; it literally right there on the front page. If you want to check out the side hustle journal, you can get it for free. Just download the free PDF there and if you want to get a hard copy you can get that as well, but feel free to just download the paper version printed out, see if it's for you and if it's for you, awesome. Let me know if you have any questions. I'd be happy to help. Grant: That's awesome. Very good. Okay. Any last comments, thoughts before we wrap? Ryan: Just, you know, a lot of people say this, I think it could actually further closing comments, but just take action. Get out there, create freedom, whatever that means for you. Like for me, uh, I think about freedom as being financially free to do what I want to make decisions, not based on money. Freedom for you may mean something totally different. So figure out what that means for you. And then start taking action so that you can get there. Grant: Okay. So it's GritAndHustle.co. Got it. Excellent. Ryan, thank you for joining. This is Grant. Thanks for joining another episode of Financial Investing Radio. Until next time, take some action.

Ryan Daniel Moran was a preacher-in-training turned entrepreneur. He moved to Austin with little to nothing to his him name, and launched Amazon businesses that he eventually sold for over 8 figures. Ryan did us all a solid – really – by documenting and sharing his journey. The Freedom Fast Lane Podcast helps entrepreneurs at every stage of their business, from startup to exit. In this interview, Ryan shares his top three “mistakes”, or as discussed, things he wishes he did differently as he looks back. He openly shares his story and journey, in the hopes that other entrepreneurs do things to maximize the value of their business (and life). Through Ryan's conference, Capitalism.com, he helps bring like minded entrepreneurs and experts in the ecommerce space together to build brands and businesses that last. While he may be a preacher-school-dropout, Ryan still has a way of delivering the goods when it comes to advocating doing the right thing…so good things follow. Episode Highlights: [1:25] Who is Ryan Daniel Moran? [4:38] Is it better to buy or build? [6:43] Ryan thinks we're in a “seller's market” [8:05] What are Ryan's “mistakes” and what would he do differently. [11:30] Does it matter if you like your buyer? Does likability matter? [13:52] The likable buyer story…who won out over an all cash buyer. [15:12] Mistake # 1 – playing the short term. [17:25] Mistake #2 – telling people what to do and diminishing their talent. [18:51] Ryan shares his staffing team numbers. Inhouse and remote. [20:06] Mistake #3 – Ryan wishes he spent more money on advertising, customer acquisition, and brand building. [22:51] Why is a 100% Amazon business worth less than a Shopify store? [24:00] What channels would Ryan expand to – beyond Amazon.com [25:30] The first “nut you have to crack” [27:02] Ryan disagrees with Joe! [30:40] Brands last, product businesses don't. [31:06] Should you be thinking about a possible exit at all times? [33:05] What gives Ryan the “goosies”. Ok…he didn't say goosies, that was JLo. [33:58] Know what you will do with your money before you sell! [36:10] Should you plan your next brand before you sell, or stay focused? [39:29] How do you get more Ryan Daniel Moran Transcription: Mark: So if I could go back in time I would do a number of things different than I did in my entrepreneurial past especially before I sold my first company. And I have told you the story before that when I sold my first company I sold it for $165,000 only to find out that a year later the same person who bought the company got an offer for 350,000 without changing anything about the business at all. So … and there's a lot of regrets I have by not going back in time obviously I think anybody would like to have that ability. Joe: I'm glad it's that instead of saying you're bringing me on as a business partner. Mark: Well, you're here so I can't … I might not say that to your face. Only when you're on vacation and I have somebody else filling in as guest host. Joe: Well, Jason doesn't listen to the podcast, let's talk about him. Mark: Right. Exactly. Joe: Conversation … no regrets there. Yes and Daniel Ryan Moran was our guest and he talked about some of the regrets or as we called the mistakes because that's how he learns in life as many of us do by making mistakes and in trying not to make them over again. Fascinating … fascinating yes they're our podcast today Mark. I don't know if you recall … if you were there for his presentation at Smart Record over the last summer in Austin but he got up on stage and he spoke for 60 minutes with no script, no PowerPoint presentation and everybody was captivated. And the information that he has in it … volume of entrepreneurs that he works with and the velocities, and the approach, and everything about the way he does business and the way he literally … I mean not literally, preaches business. Okay, he's a … he was going to be a preacher so I want to say preacher school dropout. He chose to be an entrepreneur instead but the way that he talks about things is spot on with the way that we see the most successful entrepreneurs run their businesses. They focus on a number of different things and they implement those and maybe someday if they choose to exit they're in a great position to do so. Ryan talks about all of that including his own two exits that combined totaled over eight figures. Mark: Daniel Ryan Moran, same Moran that comes from Freedom Fast Lane right? Joe: Freedom Fast Lane Podcast where he talks about his story. You know five years ago he had a car and he drove to Austin, Texas and he decided he was going to launch an Amazon business and record his journey. And his journey is not over yet. It's on a new adventure, a different larger adventure but his journey kind of came to a new chapter after selling the last Amazon business that he had. But he talks about it all the way through on the Freedom Fast Lane Podcast. He got tired of seeing people do things the wrong way and learned ways to cheat at conferences and started to do his own conferences through capitalism.com and bringing good like-minded people together that build strong foundation long term value businesses and he talked about all of that today. Mark: Fantastic I can't wait to hear it. Let's go to it. Joe: Hey, folks, it's Joe Valley from Quiet Light Brokerage and today I've got somebody that a lot of you might know already. His name is Ryan Daniel Moran. Ryan, welcome to the show. Ryan: Joe thanks about having me in, let's make some magic. Joe: Listen I was having a barbecue last night we had some friends over and this is an absolute true story and one of them is an entrepreneur wannabe. She's in the corporate world and she bought some Amazon products and she tried something and it didn't work but she's going to go at it again someday and she's grilling me … she always asked me how things are with Quiet Light Brokerage and she starts asking about the podcast. I said yeah we're doing all right and hey have you ever talked to Ryan Daniel Moran just like that and here you are today we're talking to you. You're kind of a little celebrity I should say … little, you're kind of a celebrity; a rock star maybe for this … look it was a 50 year old woman. She's rather attractive and she knows who you are. Ryan: Well you know it's like my ideal market is attractive 50 year old women. We all know that that's the market I'm after right now. So tell her to give me a … maybe call me maybe. Joe: She loves listening and the fact that you're first and foremost helping people that's what she loves about it. She says someday she's going to get back to it but she loves listening and she's going to take that leap at some point in the future so good for you. And listen as I said prior to the intro we don't do fancy intros. So if you would … I know it's hard to talk about yourself but give folks a little bit of background about yourself; who you are, where you came from, and what you're all about. Ryan: Yeah. I invest in and I start physical products brands. And the way that I got to that point was actually as a pastoral student back in 2006. I built my first website and started my first business in between high school and college on my shared dial-up computer in my living room and hand coded websites using raw HTML in a software program called Dreamweaver. If you are old enough to remember Dreamweaver and you know it well. So what's funny is we hear a lot of people who are talking about building and … or selling businesses thinking about the good old or either like all the opportunity is gone now or the good old days have these … man, I was hand coding websites in Dreamweaver on a dial up computer. Do you realize how much more opportunity we have now being able to build websites on platforms and sell products on Amazon? So the opportunities are way way bigger now but I was just trying to find a way to supplement my … what I expected to be $30,000 a year salary as a pastor. Now fast forward a few years I did not finish the pastoral route for reasons that would be probably best left on a second podcast that you have Joe that's going to be called quiet skepticism. Joe: Yeah, some kind of … something where we're helping people, we're guiding them off that path right. Ryan: Exactly; quiet go to the light we'll call it. And I did not finish that route and I became a full time entrepreneur. So I was in really involved in the internet marketing space for many years until I really decided or realized I hated that crowd. I didn't like hanging out with those people. So I was like what a conference where those people hung out and I took the skill set that I had from Search Engine Optimization from Pay-Per-Click Marketing from Email Copyrighting and I applied it to physical products brands. And I've had a couple of different exits in the physical products world and now I'm an investor in physical products businesses because it's what I know. It's who I can help the most. And I think it's one of the biggest upside is in the market right now whether you are selling or building a business or buying a business, I think there's a tremendous amount of white space with the transition from big brands into more what I call micro brands mostly Internet based that's where I see the biggest opportunities right now. So that's a … I've had a couple of exits and the total over billed were eight figures in cash exchange. I still own a minority stake in a few of those businesses and have a portfolio business but my primary focus is investing in physical products brands and I have a media company for entrepreneurs at capitalism.com. Joe: Okay, so when it comes to investing people look at buy versus build. In fact, we had a podcast recently with our newest broker Walker Diebel who wrote about a book called Buy Versus Build and there's a really long subtitle and it was a … it quickly rocketed to the top 10 podcasts that we have. And you're talking about investing, do you think it's better to buy versus build at this point in your career or would you recommend somebody that's just starting out to scrape some dollars together and bootstrap something and start? Ryan: Yeah, it's better for me to invest but it wasn't better for me five years ago. In 2013 when I took my first sale on Amazon.com for a physical product I know business investing in physical product brands. I know businesses buying physical products brands now … back then I was buying a lot of websites. And you know what I was buying Joe? I was buying search engine friendly websites with email lists … social media followings weren't this big back then, but with audiences, followings targeting each market that sold affiliate products; because that was what I knew. Joe: That's what you knew. Ryan: I would have been a lot of people who are like looking for the system and that you are the system. You are the machine. And your machine is unique to you. So applying your machine to different opportunities is where value is created. So for me, I'm … at this point, I have more upside as an investor because I already have all the retail connections. I have the connections to sell businesses. I'm connected to other investors. That's my own skill set but the entrepreneur who I invest in is way better suited to start that company than I am and that's what capitalism is. Where I get the value that I bring in combination of the value that you bring and when we bring them together it's greater than the sum of our arts. And so for me yeah I'm … I have more value as an investor but to say like it's better I think would be a mistake. Joe: You know I think you're absolutely right. It depends upon the individual's situation without a doubt. I bought and I've sold and I've invested as well and I can say each were successful in their own way and each were very very difficult in their own ways as well. You'll learn along the way from the mistakes mostly. Ryan: If I could Joe I will add though, I mean globally I think we're in a seller's market. I think we're looking at buying versus selling if I give it a binary choice I do think we're in a seller's market right now. Joe: I have to agree with you 100%. When we have a good quality listing come … I had a conversation with someone this morning who wants to buy. And he's a referral from somebody who already bought and this guy is doing great so I want to do what he's doing. And the response is look when a great listing comes along you need to be prepared. So the more listings you look at the more you're going to know the right shit when it comes along. And you need to be able to act fast because you and a dozen other people are doing the same thing and they're going to make an offer on that business. So I agree it's a seller's market but at the same time, the multiple still don't get pushed too high. It's still the buyer to decide that. You and I as sellers, as brokers can pick whatever number we think the value of the business is but we don't make the final decision at the end it's usually the buyer. The seller's got a lot to say about it because they can say yes or no. But it's still the buyer makes the decision in terms of the value for the most part. But you just recently said you've exited a couple of different times in the last few years. What did you learn in that process if you look at the exit? Or maybe do you want to talk about the fact … the mistakes you made maybe building and what you can do to help the entrepreneurs that are listening or perhaps the exit and maybe a little bit of both. Ryan: Yeah well, there's one thing in particular that I think was on the stake if you will and it was thinking that the buyer had all of the control. By the way, this is C money right here or by a … my … he is the one who wants to make great on the Internet. Joe: For those listening and not watching somebody just walked into the background. Ryan: Yeah, so the mistake that I made was thinking that the buyer had all of the control. And if I could redo this Joe, the truth is if you built something, if you built a business you're the one with the asset. You're the one with the goods that money is chasing you, people want to buy you and so often the seller comes into market and is like the thing that I'm after is the check and I'm hoping that I get the check and that immediately puts you in the frame in which you're the after. You're the one who is not in the power position. So we share them with an offer and the seller is like thank you please oh please Mr. Money Pants I would like your money. And now they're in a position to beat you up over earnings, over … in the negotiations. So what I wish I had done was recognize the fact that I'm the one with the goods. I'm the one with the asset that people want. I'm the one courting the offers. People are making offers to me. There they want one I got not the other way around. So if you're in that position and you're willing to say no and you combine that with the turn ship that says here's what I'm looking for, that to me puts the seller in the frame of mind repair and the negotiating position. I didn't do that. I discovered that after the fact and I really could only have learned that by going through the process. I learned … I personally learned by making mistakes and paying for them later. Joe: We all do. Ryan: Yeah but that's a mistake that I wish somebody had told me before I went to market. Joe: Or is it … the buyer that you're referring to is it a strategic buyer or did you have your business officially listed and people came to you? Ryan: Yeah, we had it listed and we were acquired by an equity group. I still own a minority stake in that company and I'm in great terms with the equity group. I'm really happy with the buyer. I have become friends and obviously business partners at this point. But had I gone to the market with terms that I wanted I probably would have ended up in a more favorable financial position when it came to closing. Joe: Well, the next time you have a transaction you'll know that and you'll be able to make adjustments. Ryan: Right. Joe: Really I think like you said the check isn't the end all, it's more about … I think almost in many ways what your next adventure is going to be. I know that a lot of folks that I work with and myself included when I exited I was just … I sold too late. I was emotionally tired and I think that's the absolute wrong time to sell. You should sell … you should plan to sell, just don't wake up and decide to sell. But when you're emotionally tired you're not doing everything that you can to maximize the profits of the business and that's going to drive down the value. And you're going to get beat up at the end if you're so committed to that check that you can't negotiate a little bit more for something else and be willing to walk away from that buyer if they're if they're not a good buyer. And correct me if I'm wrong but just tell me how you think here, I always find that it makes an enormous difference if you like the person that's buying your business or the one … if you're buying a business from. It's not just about the check. It's not just about the money. It's the people you're doing business with. And I think that as a seller you can get more value if you're respected and professional and likable and the same as a buyer, if you're a buyer and you're professional and likable and complement the owner on the business that they built that you're going to get a better transaction out of it versus all the hard core raw street negotiations. What are your thoughts on that? Ryan: I don't know if you are right or wrong because I intentionally don't do business with people that I don't like. [crosstalk 00:15:45.7] Joe: So, therefore, anybody that wants to buy a business from you if you don't like them then you've got to do that to work with somebody you like. A classic- Ryan: I don't think everybody has that mentality though. I think I would even go as far as to say the majority of people are buying and selling based on numbers or like the deal and very few entrepreneurs get to find every purchase as a person. And so I think most people are approaching it by numbers and logically rather than is there a connection here. I personally … just like for the protection of my own lifestyle am willing to say no to anything that I personally don't like. And what that does is it always puts me in a strong negotiating position because if I don't like somebody I have no problem walking away. And the person who has … the person who is most willing to walk usually has the upper hand in the negotiation. Joe: I agree 100%. I find that from a buyer's perspective one of the questions I get a lot from buyers if I'm up on a panel or speaking or something like this is how do I negotiate up against an all cash buyer, somebody that's got more money than me? And the tried and true answer is really is be likeable. It's … you don't necessarily have to have more cash to get the deal done and I … the classic example is I sold a business last fall. It was about two and a $2.5M and the guy had two full price offers within the first 10 days. One was from an all cash buyer who was a little rough around the edges and was hard to work with. The other was from a really likable guy who was buying with an SBA loan and actually required 10% seller financing in that. The entrepreneur, the seller of this business had the choice; you could go for the all cash or you can go for the guy that he liked. He actually chose the full price SBA buyer and chose to carry a 10% seller note versus working with somebody that he didn't like. So in that situation, I think it makes a difference in terms of … buyers that are listening be likable. If you're working with a broker you absolutely have to be likeable because they're … as you said it's more of a seller's market. And there's a lot of buyers out there. There are buyers that are competing for that same business and when they're likeable they're going to build rapport and when you build rapport you sometimes learn about things before they hit the market as well. Ryan, talk to me about some of the mistakes you've made in your own business. Maybe two or three of the biggest mistakes that comes up at the top of your head. Looking back and learning damn I screwed that up if I ever do that again I'm going to it a different way. Ryan: Well, every time I've made a mistake it was because I was playing the short term. So when I have made short term decisions I usually make bad decisions. I like to say that the longer term that I can make decisions the wiser I am and the better decisions that I make. I said before that people forget that behind every purchase is a person … that goes for customers too and all relationships are long term relationships. Or the best relationships are long term relationships. So if you are aware that behind every transaction is a person and you play it like it's a long term relationship you end up building the better company. Sometimes in spite of a short term decision, meaning … for example as we're recording this there's a … in the Amazon there's a thing we're calling review gate where Amazon is coming in and hit them onto your businesses and removing their reviews. And it's been a bloodbath. It's been absolute bloodbath. And the people who are soaring through it are people who have been doing of the right things the right way for the longest. And the people who are being hurt the most are the people who are the most profitable over the last couple years because they played the tactic game. And like there's absolutely room for tactics inside of every business but those who have been building really solid brands and building audiences and building followings they're going to soar right through this and capture a whole heck of a lot of market share. So the mistakes that I made were always in saying what's the Band-Aid solution here rather than building for the long term. So we take a rule now in the business that we're building, we say okay here's the situation that we're in rather than talk about how we're going to fix it let's say what do we wish we had started doing 90 days ago and that would have made today a lot easier to get through? That's the decision that we need to make today which is a really hard conversation to have when you're in reaction mode. But we force ourselves to ask that question because it usually addresses whatever the root cause is that we need to fix rather than going for a Band-Aid solution. So that being mistake number one, mistake number two would be as a leader telling people what to do. There's a great book called Multipliers that really morphed my brain in terms of how I can affect [inaudible 00:20:52.9] people. And what I realize after reading that book was that I have been diminishing the talents on my teams by telling people what I wanted them to do rather than casting a vision and inviting people to build their piece of that. Now that seems kind of a nuance and maybe overly simplistic but I couldn't emphasize enough the accountability that this book brought me on how much I was diminishing the people that I was working with, And the difference in energy and growth that happened once I started correcting those issues. So as an entrepreneur, we often have like our baby that we're bringing in to our team and we're telling people how to build the baby when reality if we're working with smart people they'll probably own that area of expertise better than we can even if we can't see it. And the big distinction of that book highlights is someone who diminishes their team is usually the smartest person in the room but a real leader makes the rest of the team like they're the smartest person in the room. And that was a huge shift in my overall happiness and with the growth of my companies and it's something that I wished that I had done before I was building companies to sell them. Joe: What kind of staffing do you have just out of curiosity? Ryan: Well, the company that I just exited was a team of four. The portfolio of companies … of brands that I have is a team of five. And my media company capitalism.com is a team of six. Joe: And are all of those people in-house or do you do some … or the VA's are they working remotely or they come to the office every day? Ryan: I'm only counting in-house people so that does not count freelancers. But no not everybody … we have … there's, we are a distributed team. So like I'm recording this in my office right now, one of my team members is just right here my side. But people will come in and out. Some people … like we have a team member in Canada, we have a team member in Germany, but they're all full time dedicated to [inaudible 00:22:47.0]. Joe: Good. I asked that because you know most people that are listening would probably be considered lifestyle entrepreneurs and they have to outsource staff and VA's and people working remotely. So it's good to know that even though they're not coming into your office every day this is really important [inaudible 00:23:02.3] get their short term vision don't have that long term vision so that you don't have major major stomach aches with algorithm updates we'll review gates in that situation and then over managing of the staff you know let them be their experts; anything else that comes to mind? Ryan: As far as big mistakes that I've made … I mean we talked about the mistake in selling and as far as building the business I'll say I wished that I had spent more money on cold advertising. Like always like there's never been a business that was like ah you know I think I spent too much on advertising. I've only ever said I wish I'd spent more on advertising. Joe: Yeah, where would you have spent it because these are primarily Amazon based businesses correct? Ryan: The businesses that I personally built, yes. Joe: Right. So where would you spend that money? Ryan: So we just identified the problem because you said they were mostly Amazon based businesses so had I done things even better I would have doubled down on non-Amazon advertising. Because what … if you're an Amazon business which is like nails on a chalkboard to me because it means you're dependent on somebody else. Joe: Right. Ryan: It means that you're dependent on this channel and you've got to go double down on building a business has a different leg to the stool and that when you combine those things together magic can happen. If you've got an email list of 100,000 people that you've built from cold advertising or from buying tripwires and now you're combining that with the power of something like Amazon.com that's really really powerful. Most physical products sellers never make that [inaudible 00:24:32.6] or they get so myopic into one channel that they never spend the money and the time to go develop the advertising for another channel. I wish I had been comfortable losing my rear end on other advertising channels until I figured out those systems. It's interesting Joe, it's true that every channel you will lose for a while and then you figure out the systems and then you start to grow through it and you get profitable. The strange thing is that most people once they've figured it out and get profitable they're unwilling to go do that hard work in another area. So the way that Amazon worked in 2013, '14, and '15 was if you spend until you grab long enough you could outrank everybody else and go win but I never … I lost that hustle when it came down to Facebook Ads or influencers and people start looking for the immediate ROI. In what business is there immediate ROI? When you're building a long term brand that has sales potential … like buyers are buying the systems; they're buying profitable systems because you've already gone through that hard work of developing the systems that are profitable. But it requires you to go build them so I wish I had spent more on advertising, been more willing to lay it on the line, rolled more back into reinvestment. So I'll call that mistake number three. Joe: So for buyers and sellers that are listening, entrepreneurs that are listening it's that one legged stool, two legged stool, three legged stool. If you're 100% Amazon business it's riskier than if you also have a revenue channel from Google Ad Words and driving traffic to your Shopify store and you might be doing wholesale or B2B things of that nature but right away as I've said before if you've got a business that's just at within $100,000 in discretionary earnings that's 100% Amazon same business $100,000 in discretionary earnings but you've got 60% Amazon, 25% Shopify, I guess that would be 15% percent [inaudible 00:26:36.4] my math here, another percent of B2B that business on the other side is going to be worth 15 to 20% more. So you might be breaking even or losing a little bit of money on that land grab trying to grab more customers but if you can turn that into even the same discretionary earnings that business automatically is going to be worth 15 to 20% more because the buyers will pay more for a risk averse business that'll be around for the longer term so very very good advice. What channel would you go to first? Because there are so many options these days and building a channel off of Amazon is hard as you know. You've got to learn a whole new expertise. Where would you go first and what do most of your successful folks do? Ryan: Yeah and I'm actually going to cue on very creatively sidestepped this question because the obvious is Amazon. But where I would suggest is actually people double down on where the audience is. To me, this is the nut has to be cracked if their building a sellable company. And what that means to me it is for some people their audience hangs out following influencers. For other people that is they follow blogs or they have a blog where the audiences are already hanging out. Or some people they've got a Facebook where there's an audience. Now what most businesses, especially like a million dollar businesses, are doing is they're going channel first and trying to extract as much of it as possible. Like I'm going to go to Amazon try to rank and pull as much out of this pie as possible. Only a few people can win that game but if you switch it and you say where are my people who is the ideal buyer and where are they then the channel where you collect the order can always change. And that makes Shopify, Amazon, B2B a whole lot easier. The first nut that you have to crack isn't where the buyers hang out apart from the sales transaction and then you bring those buyers to the transaction. So the transaction to me … Amazon, easy no question. Put your product on Amazon the credit card is already there, people are already looking for it. No question, easy, done. The nut that needs to be cracked is what happens one step before that. And if there is … like if you don't have the influence, the list, the following, the traffic, the pay-per-click strategy that some way to go get those people and bring them into your ecosystem I think you are struggling from the get go and that's the primary question that I ask the entrepreneur. Joe: Yeah and I think depending upon as you say the product and what they're offering some of those different channels will make more sense. You know I had a conversation with someone this morning that has several brands and one brand has incredible numbers with email marketing and that same expertise applied to that different brand doesn't do as well. Ryan: Right. Joe: They're driving people to their Shopify store though Amazon keeps growing and out phasing everything else. So I understand identify where your customers hang out and then you've got to go find those customers. To own that list though you need to send them to your own store, not to Amazon. So are you sort of balancing between sending them to Amazon because it's all there or? Ryan: No, I just disagree. So I think that the loyalty to the brand is the customer experience. And you give the customer the ability to give you money wherever they are most comfortable making the purchase. I heard Brian Lee say where it's … Brian Lee is the founder of the Honest Company, the billion dollar brand with Jessica Alba, and I heard him say once that he considers it a win when the product is in the customer's home. That's when you've wo, not collecting it online e-commerce site, not getting into retail. It's when the product is in the customer's home. However, they get it and you want to release as little friction as possible getting the product into the customer's home. You will own the customer experience when you have their data. You have the ability to communicate a message in front of them. So if you've got the email list and you send them over to Amazon, Amazon rewards that and your conversion rate is probably going to be higher sending them to Amazon that sending them to your Shopify store. So there's a balance [inaudible 00:31:12.7] I know that I can get a higher immediate customer value sending them to my own web site because I can put them through upsells and cross sells to get their immediate data versus sending them to Amazon where I am going to have to work to get their data. I don't have any upsell experience. They might see a negative review. And so the entrepreneur is going to have to play the game of where the numbers make the most sense over the long term. But I think that the actual customer experience happens in when you communicate with them. And that's in the email message, that's in the outside of just a transaction, not just where their credit card is being added but words being communicated. Joe: Okay, I get and I'm just going to repeat it for those that are … well not smarter than me; let's put it that way. So it's capturing the customer information up front, building that relationship with them, and then simply send them to the place that they can buy the product and experience the brand with the least amount of friction and get it in their home. Ryan: Nailed it. Joe: Okay. Ryan: That's my opinion. Joe: And it all goes back I would say and it's kind of almost unspoken that the brand has to be pretty amazing so focus on that first. Build a great product, a great brand so they have a great experience and then do all that other stuff as well. Ryan: Yeah and let me address that because that often brings up the question how do I identify a brand? Like what exactly is the brand. And the brand is the way that trust is communicated to a very specific customer. Most Amazon sellers have no idea over their customers they know what their product is. If you know what you sell and not who you sell to you do not have a brand. Or you might have a brand but it's really lousy whereas if you know who the person is, it makes the product really really easy. I was just meeting with one of my team members today; we were expressing the frustration over one of our brands in our portfolio. Because when we acquired it, it sold a lot of product but it had no target market. And so we've had to do a lot of work to convert that brand into an actual brand where people are not just buying a product but they're buying something and it says about them sells. Those businesses last, product businesses don't because they're commodities. You forget about commodities and the minute that there's a better price or better customer experience their loyalty changes. But when you've got the brand people are very stingy with their trust. I want to give it to you, you have them for as long as you keep their trust. Joe: Very important message right there. Ryan, any thoughts in terms of whether someone should be building this business and always think about the future and possible exits; do you try to instill in them that they should know the value of their business in the event they wake up some day and want to move on or do you just focus on building that brand and when you're ready the time will come? Ryan: You know the real … the temptation for me is to say that no, you shouldn't be necessarily thinking about selling but I know that I'm in a different spot than everyone who's listening. So I would say if you are building this to make money, be building it to sell from day one. Because the very act of being in it for the money means that you will burn out, you will wake up and want to do something else. It's going to happen. So if that … and like let's just be real about it, if you're in it because of the payday, build it to sell because that's what you're in it for and the payday is the cherry at the end of the rainbow here. If you were in it because you've got a product you want to bring to the world then still develop the systems and processes that will keep you in the position to be in your zone of genius. And that will make you more sellable one day but I don't think it's necessary for you to know what it's worth or be making decisions based on that. So these are different goals. Now I build companies that I'm excited about and I am building them in the same way that we make something valuable because I want to be in a position where I'm just in my zone of genius. But it's a different mindset than if I'm building something because it's going to be profitable. Does that make sense Joe? Joe: Absolutely; excellent …excellent. Hey listen I know we're running out of time here I just want to say that last summer I was at the stock market conference and you got up and you spoke as did another dozen or so very very successful entrepreneurs. Each and every one of them had a PowerPoint presentation. You got up there with nothing. And you talked for an hour and the audience was captivated as was I. You have a gift thank you for sharing it. I appreciate it. Ryan: I just got goose bumps. Thank you so much, mate. I really appreciate it. Joe: How do more people get to experience that and listen to you and hear what you do share? Ryan: You know I'd love to answer that question, can I offer one more piece of advice before we go? Joe: You can offer a dozen more pieces of advice. Ryan: Wow, awesome. I'll leave it to one but if you are in this to please have a plan of what you're going to do with the money when you get it. Entrepreneurs are magicians. We remake things up here on thin air. We create value out of thin air. We create a bigger pie. We make money show up. And we also make things disappear. Joe: Isn't that true? Ryan: And if you do not have a plan of what you're going to do with the money it will slip through your fingers. I know you think you're the exception. I know you think all I have to do is invest this at 8% and I'm [inaudible 00:37:11.5]. I know you think that's how it's going to be. You will ball the money. I … right now I just heard you think “no I won't”, yes you will. So if you don't have a net for catching the money and allocating the money for your lifestyle you will be back in the grind very very quickly. I promise you, I know you don't believe me. I'm here to tell you that's the case. Have a plan for what to do with the money once you get the money. It's actually my favorite conversation to have. At some point, I'll probably have more chops [inaudible 00:37:45.3] about investing once you have a big windfall. But for now, it's like have a plan like a plan is better than no plan. And that plan would probably be best done after you sat on the money for about six months and you've gotten used to that money being in the bank account. Your second question or actually your only question was- Joe: Can I interrupt that? Ryan: Please. Joe: I definitely want to get to that but in terms of having the plan to exit, I'm always telling people look have your next adventure planned. Because entrepreneurs like you say they blow through the money, it goes through their hands like saying. I'm often saying maybe get that other opportunity started and launched long as it's not competing to get the ball rolling. So that you got some working capital maybe you're going to put it in … some of it you're not as bootstrapped although you'll be more successful probably if you are. Do you think maybe they should 100% focus on what they're doing on that brand before they sell it up until the day they sell or maybe when it gets big enough and good enough and they've done enough right they can take some of their attention and start Brand B while they're selling off Brand A? Ryan: Wow, Joe. The reason I'm saying wow is because my experience is pretty unique and that was I took about a week off and then I immediately went back to workaholism and it was the worst. It was a horrible experience. Now full disclose like at the same time I was going through separation and I'm going through a lot life changes. I threw myself into work right after the sale. I celebrated by reading books on my patio for like eight days and I was immediately back to workaholism. And I like … I roasted my body, I mean I so needed a break and I did not give myself that break. I don't know if every entrepreneur was as burnt out as I was. I was more burnt out than I [inaudible 00:39:40.5]. Joe: Most ideal [inaudible 00:39:42.8] they come to me tired, exhausted, ready to move on. Ryan: Joe, it's been over a year. I wouldn't even say I'm back now. You know I'm probably operating at 75% of capacity because I never really recovered. So should you go right back into it? I don't know. I think it depends on the level you're at and your own wiring. I make really good decisions when I'm relaxed and creative. I make terrible short term decisions when I'm stressed. And when I'm in that workaholic mode I'm a terrible entrepreneur. I wish I had just blissed out for like three months; I didn't. Joe: I don't know what the folks that listen to you every week would do if you would disappear for three months though. Ryan: Well here's the thing though Joe. I kind of did. Like my podcast sucked for like three months, three to six months and I was trying … like I'm sitting in front of mic trying to come up with things to say and I was uncreative as heck. So I sort of did disappear it was just a different way. And now I'm getting back to it and it's a completely different experience. But I actually think I did my listeners a disservice by not taking a break. And if have been just really upfront and be like guys I just got an eight figure check I am going to the beach and I will call you when I'm ready. My audience would've popped but instead, I was like operating from this place of like I'm so … oh my goodness I'm so tired and I turned off a lot of people. I know it's not the answer that you expected it's not the answer I expected to give you. Joe: No, I like it. Ryan: But I think it's true. Joe: I think sleep and rest and meditation or whatever it is to focus on is absolutely necessary. So back to that original question and you know finding out what they do with the money after they sell. How do they get more of Ryan Daniel Moran? How do they experience what that audience down at Smart Market and myself experienced where you just talked and everybody listened and took notes and all that? Ryan: Well, thanks so much, man, my media company is capitalism.com. My podcast is called Freedom Fast Lane. And I say things into a microphone and we hold events at capitalism.com that are specifically for entrepreneurs. And we're actually … we just rebooted the Freedom Fast Lane podcast. I feel as though- Joe: With fresh energy. Ryan: What's that? Joe: With fresh energy right? Ryan: Well yeah, I think you'd probably feel it from me. Five years ago I started this journey as a boy and I was … I just put everything I owned into my car, drove to Austin, Texas, started some new companies, I documented the whole experience from startup to sale. And then I kind of grew up while documenting the journey. And now there's a new journey and it's a much bigger one and so we just rebooted kind of the entire audience, the whole experience in the podcast. And my podcast is called Freedom Fast Lane. My company is capitalism.com. Joe: Okay. Well, I'll make sure those are in the show notes. I'd love to see you be more successful on this new adventure, this bigger journey. Ryan: Thank you. Joe: Let's stay in touch. I think I may see you at the capitalism conference at the end of August; let's see. At the very least we'll be to as many as we can be over the next few years. Ryan: Good to see you man, thank you so much for having me. Joe: Thanks for your time, I appreciate it. Links: Capitalism.com FreedomFastlane.com

Host Ryan Moreland (@TheRyanMoreland) is joined by Titans writer and host of Titans Town Cody Milholen (@MrMilholen) to continue the challenge that Cody gave to Ryan: What if the team hired us instead of Jon Robinson in 2016. Go to Titan Town on YouTube to hear the last installment next week! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZJzS-F-q_hZ_5rpYunWjhw See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

On today’s episode we sit down with Alex Roberts to create characters for her new game, Star Crossed! Timestamps: 00:00:00 - Cold Open 00:03:27 - Recap 00:03:43 - Amelia and Ryan - What two things about me do I not know is attractive? 00:04:24 - Player agency and X card use 00:09:18 - Back to picking two traits for Amelia and Ryan 00:13:11 - Amelia and Ryan - Why can’t I act on my feelings? Why is that so important to me? 00:17:16 - Play what you know 00:19:46 - Can you play with more than two people? 00:25:46 - Ryan and Alex - What brought our characters together? 00:27:32 - Ryan and Alex - What’s keeping us apart? 00:29:56 - Ryan and Alex - Who am I? 00:30:18 - Ryan and Alex - What is most attractive about ourselves? 00:31:08 - Ryan and Alex - What two things about me do I not know is attractive? 00:32:31 - Ryan and Alex - Why can’t I act on my feelings? Why is that so important to me? 00:35:01 - Alex and Amelia - What brought our characters together? Who am I? 00:38:45 - Alex and Amelia - What is most attractive about ourselves? 00:39:07 - Alex and Amelia - What two things about me do I not know is attractive? 00:41:17 - Alex and Amelia - Why can’t I act on my feelings? Why is that so important to me? 00:46:49 - Episode Closer Guests and Projects: Alex Roberts: @muscularpikachu Backstory Podcast @backstorycast Bully Pulpit Games www.bullypulpitgames.com Dialect by Thorny Games www.thornygames.com/dialect-rpg/ Threadbear by Stephanie Bryant www.drivethrurpg.com/product/215255/Threadbare-RPG Sig: The City Between by Genesis of Legend www.genesisoflegend.com/products/sig/ Game systems discussed in this episode: Star Crossed! by Bully Pulpit Games Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bullypulpitgames/star-crossed-the-two-player-game-of-forbidden-love Other Games Mentioned as inspiration for Star Crossed!: Dread by Impossible Dream (amazon) (website) Kagematsu by Cream Alien Games (website) Hot Guys Making Out by Tao Games (drivethru) (website) Breaking the Ice by Black and Green Games (drivethru) (website - romance trilogy) Fiasco by Bully Pulpit Games (amazon) (drivethru) (website) Character Inspired Mix Tapes: Amelia and Ryan’s Couple Spotify Playlist: https://open.spotify.com/user/verovladamir/playlist/7nguieqg9s4h9CqQMNifHp?si=aFX7r4HdTpaLO80McU5kbQ YouTube Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIQvSCMCGGkKn12lcNm8I3thhTK2MFvPt Ryan and Alex’s Couple Spotify Playlist: https://open.spotify.com/user/verovladamir/playlist/1fiectTQbuKO4d1gXOhiFd?si=WarEhAgHRUymPn4Cad94AQ YouTube Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIQvSCMCGGkLN3LhyGuLoBP9bMyNgJCNi Alex and Amelia’s Couple Spotify Playlist: https://open.spotify.com/user/verovladamir/playlist/5GLObBcZZxfRMjAoH8Tg3n?si=tWr0fDgPRpytAK3yVTfP-A YouTube Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIQvSCMCGGkIb1bw9OiDjDpX9ty-l8b7t Character sheets for this episode: https://blockpartypodcastnetwork.squarespace.com/completed-characters/2018/4/23/series-32-characters-star-crossed-with-alex-roberts Music: Opening: Meditation Impromptu 03 by Kevin MacLeod Clip 1: Autumn Day by Kevin MacLeod Clip 2: Backstory podcast opening theme Clip 3: Sovereign Quarter by Kevin MacLeod Clip 4: Delicate Frost by Winter Solstice used in the Star Crossed Kickstarter video created by @banana_chan_vid Main Theme: Hero (Remix) by Steve Combs Our Podcast: Character Creation Cast: @CreationCast Amelia Antrim: @gingerreckoning Ryan Boelter: @lordneptune Our Website: http://www.charactercreationcast.com

On today’s episode we sit down with Alex Roberts to learn about and create characters for her new game, Star Crossed!   Timestamps: 00:00:00 - Announcements 00:04:42 - Introductions 00:07:01 - What’s in a Game? 00:07:13 - The Common Thread for Infinite Settings 00:08:45 - What Do Characters Do in Star Crossed? 00:10:42 - What Do You Need to Play Star Crossed? 00:12:55 - What is Unique? 00:16:04 - History of the Game 00:25:44 - Term Definitions 00:29:42 - The X Card and Its Importance 00:34:09 - Let’s Make Some People 00:34:17 - First Steps: Creating a World 00:35:42 - Amelia and Ryan Brainstorm with Alex 00:37:42 - Amelia and Ryan Pick a Setting for Their Couple 00:42:17 - The Character Sheets - Lead/Follow Explained 00:50:52 - Amelia and Ryan - Who am I? 00:51:37 - Amelia and Ryan - What is most attractive about ourselves? 00:53:22 - Amelia and Ryan - What two things about me do I not know is attractive? 00:54:42 - Episode Closer   Guests and Projects: Alex Roberts: @muscularpikachu Backstory Podcast @backstorycast Bully Pulpit Games www.bullypulpitgames.com Dialect by Thorny Games www.thornygames.com/dialect-rpg/ Threadbear by Stephanie Bryant www.drivethrurpg.com/product/215255/Threadbare-RPG Sig: The City Between by Genesis of Legend www.genesisoflegend.com/products/sig/   Game systems discussed in this episode: Star Crossed! by Bully Pulpit Games Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bullypulpitgames/star-crossed-the-two-player-game-of-forbidden-love Other Games Mentioned as inspiration for Star Crossed!: Dread by Impossible Dream (amazon) (website) Kagematsu by Cream Alien Games (website) Hot Guys Making Out by Tao Games (drivethru) (website) Breaking the Ice by Black and Green Games (drivethru) (website - romance trilogy) Fiasco by Bully Pulpit Games (amazon) (drivethru) (website)   Character Inspired Mix Tapes: Amelia and Ryan’s Couple Spotify Playlist: https://open.spotify.com/user/verovladamir/playlist/7nguieqg9s4h9CqQMNifHp?si=aFX7r4HdTpaLO80McU5kbQ YouTube Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIQvSCMCGGkKn12lcNm8I3thhTK2MFvPt   Music: Opening: Meditation Impromptu 03 by Kevin MacLeod Clip 1: Autumn Day by Kevin MacLeod Clip 2: Backstory podcast opening theme Clip 3: Sovereign Quarter by Kevin MacLeod Clip 4: Delicate Frost by Winter Solstice used in the Star Crossed Kickstarter video created by @banana_chan_vid Main Theme: Hero (Remix) by Steve Combs   Our Podcast: Character Creation Cast: @CreationCast Amelia Antrim: @gingerreckoning Ryan Boelter: @lordneptune Our Website: http://www.charactercreationcast.com

Once you’ve done the research, selected your area and your suburb and know what you want, how long do you wait for the right property to come up on the market. Ryan: What do you do while you’re waiting for the right property to come on the market once you select a suburb, done your […] The post How Long Should You Wait For The Right Property To Come On The Market? appeared first on On Property.

What are your recommendations for an older and more advanced investor who has already been through the consolidation phase? Ryan: What would your recommendations be for an older investor/more advanced investor who’s already been through consolidation and has less time on their side compared to someone starting out? I’m guessing less time in terms of […] The post Recommendations For Older and More Advanced Investor appeared first on On Property.

Patrick Reilly, Ryan Gorman, Kevin Schaefer OVERVIEW & PURPOSE To help family members of/and individuals who are struggling with substance use order to understand. Why are we doing this podcast! Ryan What is good treatment -Patrick /Kevin Shaming hurts and is destructive Ethical Boundaries and the importance of them.

When doing your first property investment should you consider doing a development or should you stick to an easier investment option? Ryan:What are we up to? Okay, Rob is asking, what do you think about going into the development strategy on my first investment to help fast track the process? It can be done with […] The post Should You Do a Development As Your First Investment? appeared first on On Property.

It turns out it’s actually quite easy to upset Ryan… What did Tanya do when she had a tradie at her house?! Nine News London Correspondent Seb Costello  joins Ryan & Tanya with all the details of the tragic London Fire… Is this what happens when girls meet each other in the bathroom?! Online shopping can just be the worst… Tanya attempts to deliver Disney News despite Ryan’s best efforts to stop her…

Deb - The hardest thing for me with health goals is sticking to the program...what do you do when you go back to old habits and wind up sabotaging yourself?   Ryan - What effect does caffeine have on exercise, if any? Is it bad to drink coffee before exercising?   Nancy - My dad is undergoing chemo for throat cancer. He lost 40 pounds, and wants to work with a trainer to build muscle back. Is there anything I or he should tell the trainer to watch out for or consider when training him? ---- Fitness For Freedom Online Personal Training Subscribe to Our YouTube Channel Follow us On Instagram - fitness_for_freeedom_1

Ryan Holmes is the founder and CEO of Hootsuite. He started the company in 2008 and has helped grow it into the world’s most widely used social relationship platform, with 15-million-plus users, including more than 800 of the Fortune 1000 companies. As of 2014, HootSuite has raised over $250m in venture funding from some of the best in the world including Accel, Insight Venture Partners and Fidelity. Prior to Hootsuite, Ryan started a string of ventures from a pizza restaurant to a digital media agency. Ryan is also a prolific angel investor with investments in the likes of Gusto, Bench and previous guest Immediately, just to name a few.    In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How did Ryan transition from being a restauranteur to founding Hootsuite? 2.) What were the big lessons Ryan took from his hard journey as a restauranteur? How has he applied those lessons to his role with Hootsuite today? 3.) How does Ryan look to create an environment of employee ownership and internal entrepreneurs? What has been successful? What has not? 4.) Meetings suck. What does Ryan do to optimise the meeting for simple enjoyment and productivity? 5.) How was the fundraising process for Ryan? What does he think he did well and what would he like to improve on for the next rounds? How was fundraising in 200*? Is now a good time to be raising? Items Mentioned In Today’s Episode:  Ryan’s Fave Blog: Media Redefined Ryan’s Fave Book: The Long Walk As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Ryan on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. Angelloop is the leading post funding management platform for private market investors and their portfolio companies. They help investors manage and track their portfolio companies on the cloud while providing them with access to their investments performance data. Angelloop helps founders of startups track their performance, manage their cap table and keep their investors in the loop. Investors get free access while their portfolio companies pay only $49/Month. Use or share the promo-code 20MinVC to get your portfolio companies online with a two month trial. This episode was supported by Wunder Capital, the leading online investment platform that allows individuals to invest in large scale solar projects across the U.S. Wunder’s solar investment funds allow you to earn up to 11% annually, while diversifying your portfolio, curbing pollution and combating global climate change. Do well by doing good and sign up for a free account here and join the thousands of people that are already achieving their investment targets.

Heyang: We were all born as chubby babies one day, but how come after college graduationor apparently during that period of time in your life, we see more skinny Chinese people as opposed to Western peers? I don't think that has much to do with genetics actually. Ok, guys, yeah so what explains this phenomenon?Ryan: Well, first of all, I’m pretty sure that you just called me and Bob chubby babies, we were very healthy looking babies, am I right Bob?Bob: Yes, I was possibly chubby but I totally applaud your right, to say that we were chubby, whether we were chubby or not, is neither here or there. Let’s sort it that one there.Ryan: Let’s talk about what happens after you know that point when we were a baby, we grow up, and how it’s different from maybe the east and west. Um and I say I think first thing we’ll talk about, and we often just talked about on the show is that, how intense the school is here, and academic is that something is so important for many Chinese students. Young Chinese people preparing for this test, that seems to be the make break for them known as the Gaokao. Well we have something similar towards high school, the SAT, but at the same time in the US, you find the emphasis and the make break of the SAT isn’t really there. It’s something that helps you to get to the better school, but I think you can still manage to get to a good school, doing OK on your SAT. The thing is, in the US, we have in high schools, in middle schools, sometimes in elementary schools, but competitive sports, and we really put an influence on our kids, to go out and try out for sports. Because we believe like maybe makes you a good all-round kid, someone that knows how to compete, be a good sports man, practice good sportsmanship, know how to act in a team, you know inside and outside of a class, and because of this, we see I think in the US at least, a more emphasis on gym culture, in high school and what not.Heyang: And also I think there’s a huge influence or emphasis in the US, correct me if I’m wrong Ryan, that if you are really good at one sport, then it’s quite easy-er you are to get into a top knot university as there's a lot of sports sponsorships or scholarships? And I think that’s so closely tied to (you know) higher education, and in China, there’s no emphasis as such, and usually the PE classes are considered as a wasted time. There’s better use of that precious time of these young people -- that is to study Math or English or some of the other subjects. Ryan: Yeah you make a really great point. It’s true that actually I was reading not so long ago about the Olympics and where a lot of the Olympic athletes came from (I think it was) Berkeley, was one of them, I don't remember what the top one was. So these top universities are getting people not necessarily based offtheir academics, but how they perform as athletes. Why? You will find in the US, that many of these athletes bring just as much recognition to the school, and more money to the school than someone who's really good at math or what not. You know a good example is at UNM (University of New Mexico, our basketball team'sgreat, we built a huge new stadium. It was amazing, and the basketball team is very lucrative for my university. It’s a focus. Bob: But then is that saying that if you are good at sport, then you can't do Math? Ryan: No, that's absolutely not. But I would say someone who focuses all their time on math, like maybe what you would see here in China, someone focusing on their academics, and then someone splitting that time up between really becoming an Olympic athlete and going to Berkeley, and then competing the Olympics, and also keeping up that academics. It's gonna be harder. One person that is very focused on one thing, that's the academics, the other----it has its balance. Bob: But I think um I suppose if I could bring in the British dimension here (yes please), because I think when we talking about Americans, I think that's probably all about um you know body building and looking fabulous, and going to the gym, and things like that. If British people I think, you know um are little larger, it's nothing to do with muscles, I think it's just we eat too much. To be honest, ah....Heyang: And actually yeah I think my initial introduction to this topic was slightly biased, and I did it on purpose, waiting for you guys to catch me actually.Bob: Suddenly going through colleg, and you know there has to be exams you know, it's comfort to eat as well, because I think we have a big culture that when you get stressed or upset, we go straight to the larder and just eat (we do too, the freshman 13), and eat and eat and eat. Heyang: Yeah also I think there is this culture aspect to us as well. In China I think the parents don't really think that body building or you know having a good physics or you know playing sport is that important, and often mum says oh that is just playing, you are wasting your time, you are playing, you should be studying. And then also in traditional culture, if not ancient culture, we have this concept of Wen and WU, so it's Civil and Military, and that goes back to thousands of years. And military is usually a connected with maybe masculinity and Wen is more about being a magistrate, and you have a big brain, and the muscles don't really come in to play. People don't really care and that has been associated with also ascetics, what women think is attractive in men as well. So there's a whole concept going on. Ryan: Yeah I think what we are seeing here in China, in how the typical male and female act in their younger years and academically and sports wise. I think it works for here, passing the Gaokao and becoming successful. Although I think it's a different story in the US, we are kind of um very a culture that does focus on the look, as well as the academics. And um I think you know it's just different, it's just different and you know what there's no right or wrong here, we just see two different cultures and how they play out in the youth. Heyang: Yeah I think there’s no right or wrong, but there's always one that's attractive in a way. I guess although that's a....Ryan: What you are trying to say here uh?Bob:　I think she's trending on a very dangerous ground here. Heyang: Yes, I have some girl friends that like really skinny guys and think that muscles "eww", basically that sums it up. But also there's other girls, like myself, that we think working out is cool, and muscles I think it's sort of like a badge honor in a way, and when I myself is lean, and I've got muscles. I like to be paired up with a guy that got some too. So depends on your own, preference and ascetics, we are not judging at all. And yes it is east meeting west, and I think we are seeing each other and encountering each other so much more. So yeah that's a topic for discussion.

late night conversation via text: Ryan: What is this week’s album again? Shane: Sylvan Esso Ryan: I have no idea what that means Shane: It’s a band/album…you sound like somebody’s old uncle Ryan: What does that even mean? This week we listen to the album Sylvan Esso by the band “Sylvan Esso”…well, not exactly a band, but it is two people making music, so not exactly a solo act. I guess I could have said “duo”, but somehow that just doesn’t feel right. We all agree that singer Amelia Meath has a honeyed voice that makes one weak in the knees…but that’s pretty much all we agreed on. Next time around? We yell about Zen Arcade by Hüsker Dü and I might throw in All I Wanna Do Is Make Love To You by Heart during the intermission…tune in to see if I actually do that (Spoiler Alert! I do that). Till then,

We are stuck, stymied, frustrated. But it needn’t be this way. There is a formula for success that’s been followed by the icons of history—from John D. Rockefeller to Amelia Earhart to Ulysses S. Grant to Steve Jobs—a formula that let them turn obstacles into opportunities. Faced with impossible situations, they found the astounding triumphs we all seek. These men and women were not exceptionally brilliant, lucky, or gifted. Their success came from timeless philosophical principles laid down by a Roman emperor who struggled to articulate a method for excellence in any and all situations. In this episode we speak with Ryan Holiday, author of the bestselling book, The Obstacle Is the Way, as he reveals what these principles are, and how to turn our own adversity into advantage. Ryan Holiday is a media strategist and prominent writer on strategy and business. After dropping out of college at nineteen to apprentice under Robert Greene, author of The 48 Laws of Power, he went on to advise many bestselling authors and multiplatinum musicians. He served as director of marketing at American Apparel for many years, where his campaigns have been used as case studies by Twitter, YouTube, and Google and written about in AdAge, the New York Times, and Fast Company. His first book, Trust Me I’m Lying —which the Financial Times called an “astonishing, disturbing book”—was a debut bestseller and is taught in colleges around the world. He is the author of two other books and is now published in 16 languages. He currently lives in Austin, Texas with his rebellious puppy, Hanno and pet goats ____ "Wealth is created by scarcity. It's the fact that there are not many people who have been successful at the thing you are trying to do that makes it worth doing." - Ryan Holliday Quotes from Ryan: What we learn in this episode: How to find what you want to be when you grow up? Why are obstacles a good thing? What is stoicism? Resources: The Obstacle Is the Way http://ryanholiday.net/ Twitter: @ryanholiday -- This episode is brought to you by: Sidekick: Go to getsidekick.com/smartpeople to get your first month of Sidekick for free. WealthFront: The automated investment service that makes it easy to invest your money the right way. Visit wealthfront.com/smartpeople to to get your first $10,000 managed for free. Lynda.com: Do something good for yourself in 2015 and sign up for a FREE 10-day trial to Lynda.com by visiting Lynda.com/smartpeople.