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Those who listen to this show likely either manage or invest in rental properties. There are several different types of real estate to choose from, but have you ever considered self-storage units? In today's episode of the #DoorGrowShow, property management growth expert Jason Hull sits down with the “OG” of self-storage real estate investing, Scott Meyers to talk about an opportunity to invest in real estate without the common challenges of residential properties. You'll Learn [01:22] Switching from residential investment properties to storage units [08:35] Investing in self-storage without the management [12:15] Pros and cons of self-storage [14:51] Self-storage education Tweetables “When you have just a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” “Be honest with yourself, and sometimes the best cook in the world can't fix a broken recipe.” “Once you get behind in habitational real estate and rental real estate in general, you know, it takes double the effort to get caught back up again.” “The more valuable you are to your property management business the less valuable your property management business is to everybody else.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] Scott: Self-storage really found me instead of me finding self-storage. Which I just felt it's a simple, predictable business model that you can replicate over and over again without as many moving parts and that human factor.  [00:00:11] Jason: Welcome DoorGrow property managers to the DoorGrow show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you're interested in growing in business and life, and you're open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow property manager. [00:00:28] DoorGrow property managers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it. You think they're crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate, high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management business owners and their businesses. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. [00:01:09] Now let's get into the show. All right. So. I'm hanging out here with Scott Meyers. Welcome Scott.  [00:01:18] Scott: Thanks. And so good to see you again. How are you?  [00:01:20] Jason: Good. Good. It's good to have you. So, why don't we get into your background, how you kind of into this, but Scott, you're a self storage investment expert. Is that fair to say? [00:01:33] Scott: That's fair to say. They call me the OG in self storage now. And I guess I can step into that role.  [00:01:38] Jason: All right. The OG, the original gangsta. All right. So tell us a little bit how you got into this.  [00:01:44] Scott: So like many people got into real estate by buying one single family rental house. Of course, this is a back a little ways now back in 1993, I bought a single family house. with an assumable VA mortgage on it. So I took out a home equity loan from my own home and bought this one, no money down, just like Carleton Sheets, the other OG in the real estate space taught me how to do. And so I bought that house, we rehabbed it to refinance it, rented it out. [00:02:11] So the BRRRR method before everybody called it the BRRRR method. And then we went out and bought two more. And then that turned into four, six, eight, and my wife and I got married along the way and brought my wife into this hobby. I was working for a fortune 500 company at the time, and this was really just to supplement retirement until it kind of took on a life of its own. [00:02:29] And that was because in 1999 with the dot com crash, when all of our tenants were then able to buy a house shortly after that, because the presidential administration at the time reinstituted the Community Reinvestment Act and allowed anybody who could basically fog a mirror to buy a house while all our tenants left and they were doing so. [00:02:49] And so at that time, we were now rehabbing a second time so that we could sell our houses just to be able to keep up with what the market trend was at the time. Well that just about broke us. And so we decided then to get into multifamily and all we needed to do was get some economies of scale, work a little harder, work a little smarter, and we'll make this all happen. [00:03:08] But really what I found is that we just had more doors, we had more tenants, we had more toilets. And to be honest with you, Jason you know, we made a lot of money in residential real estate and growing that side of the business. I mean, we were very big, we got up to just shy of 450 doors. But I realized that I don't think I was cut out for this. [00:03:24] I understood the math, you know, the real estate math and everything that went into it. But I found even though we had property managers and property management companies, I was finding that I was becoming less loving of my fellow man and women, because they were destroying our properties and stealing from us, as well as our contractors and some of our staff. [00:03:40] And so at that point, I began to look around the landscape and, you know, we love real estate because of all the reasons to love real estate. It appreciates, we can depreciate it. We can borrow money to buy it. And then our clients pay down our basis. I mean, there's no other investment like that. So as I looked at the landscape and real estate, that really only left parking lots and self storage if I really didn't like the tenant and toilet business. [00:04:01] So. I looked into storage and loved what we saw in terms of the fundamentals of the historical, the track record of performance of the asset class. And it was right under my nose all the time. It's just this ugly, you know, stepchild of commercial real estate that nobody was really talking about. So I researched it and spent a lot of time understanding the nuances bought my first self storage facility in a partnership. [00:04:22] And then yeah, the light bulb went off and recognize after owning it from the operation standpoint, that It was truly what everybody had said that it was. And what we found is it was all the benefits of real estate without the hassles of tenants and toilets and trash. And so we began simultaneously selling off our houses and our apartments and then going forward into self storage. [00:04:41] And here we are today at about just shy of 5 million square feet of self storage, 28, 000 doors nationwide and growing. And then along the way, also built a sizable education and consulting and mentoring and coaching and event business that only not only teaches people how to get into the business, but also became a funnel, a conduit for a lot of partnerships and a lot of deal flow into our organization. [00:05:01] So that's either the long winded version on a podcast or the short winded version however you want to look at how we got started in the business.  [00:05:07] Jason: Yeah, love it and qualify yourself help everybody understand like where are you at right now with storage and rentals. I mean you got some impressive numbers. [00:05:17] Scott: Yeah, so we're sitting at about we've done over 5 million square feet We're sitting at about three and a half just maybe three and three quarters million square feet right now assets under management So we're right now jason, we're basically a syndication company where we're a financial services company that raises capital and layers that on top of debt and then deploys it in nothing but self storage. [00:05:37] And so many of these projects, these partnerships, these joint ventures in our funds, they have a shelf life and they expire in four to five years because that's when we can capitalize and pull our chips off the table, if you will. And we have a capital event by way of sometimes a refinance, but usually a sale of the property or properties within that fund. [00:05:55] And then we just go out and buy more. So it ebbs and flows when some are going out the door, we have more projects coming in the door as well. I only own two residential properties. One of them is an Airbnb and the other one is the one that I live in. And that's it. Everything else is 100 percent self storage at this point. [00:06:10] Jason: Got it. How many units of storage do you represent then?  [00:06:14] Scott: Yeah, so 28 to 29, 000 overall is what we've invested in and we're sitting at about 20, between 20, 000, 21, 000 right now in asset center management. Awesome.  [00:06:25] Jason: Wow. Okay. So for those listening that are in residential property management, and they're listening to you what would you say to them? [00:06:34] Like, maybe there's some of them that they're like, "man, I don't want to deal with toilets, tenants and trash anymore." And, you know, "I'm starting to love humans less. And I love real estate," but what's kind of your message?  [00:06:49] Scott: You know, in the education side of our business, Jason, of course, when there's a room full of folks interested in self storage, it's really easy to say that you know, I think everybody should have a self storage facility, one in their portfolio, if you're in real estate and, you know, all roads lead to self storage eventually, because I think everybody gets to that place where they do get frustrated and it could be just a day. [00:07:06] It could be, you know, in terms of, "wow, that was a whole lot coming at us." But it doesn't mean that, you know, my recipe is the catch all, you know, when you have just a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And I'm not saying that anybody should go out and do what I have done because we made a lot of money you know, on the residential side and commercial multifamily. [00:07:21] I just found for me, that this self storage really found me instead of me finding self storage. Which I just felt it's a simple, predictable business model that you can replicate over and over again without as many moving parts and that human factor. And so for a knucklehead like me, I think it was the perfect fit to be able to go out and just master this practice and that business model and the standard operating procedures. And then just at scale and at speed go out and just make a go of it. And we grew really fast and never really get over our skis. It was just it's a manageable model as well. And so it just fit for myself. But I would say Jason, when business gets so difficult that it's just absolutely no fun anymore, and it's drudgery... I see many people doing it right now, they're just throwing good money after bad. Well, you know, be honest with yourself, and sometimes the best cook in the world can't fix a broken recipe. And if they find that is the recipe is your business model or just your business in general, then get help. [00:08:13] Or, you know, maybe it's time to take a look at some of their asset classes like self storage.  [00:08:17] Jason: So if somebody's an investor and they're wanting to get into this, there's probably a learning curve. There's probably potential pitfalls. So like, yeah, I've tried my Airbnb. That was kind of difficult. I didn't like having to mess with pricing constantly. Like maybe I should try self storage. I'm curious about what you would say to them and then, you know, if somebody's just an investor and they're just looking to just invest, but they're not wanting to really actually manage storage units, then what path would you recommend? [00:08:45] Scott: So sure. Two paths, but also some folks just take a one and end up achieving the same result. So if this is something that you're looking to do actively you know, of course, Jason, I own, you know, I run an education company. And so we're always going to tell you to get education because the cost of not, you know, you pay the dump tax. [00:09:03] And sometimes we've seen people pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for the dump tax. And that just means that they've gone out and they've watched a couple of videos read a book and all of a sudden they're experts in masters and this is commercial real estate. There's a lot of nuances to it, no matter what the asset class you pick within commercial real estate, but also because it's commercial real estate, there's lots of commas and zeros to profit from it, which is fantastic. [00:09:23] But also if you make a mistake. Those mistakes in underwriting and in other areas also come with commas and zeros behind them as well. And we've seen many a good investor that maybe it was a little prideful or maybe thought that, "Hey, this is an easy asset class compared to what I've been doing. You know, I can do this with one hand tied behind my back." And then they find out that this is an operating business on top of real estate. And there's more nuances to this and they need to dig in and understand what that looks like, because as you know, once you get behind in habitational real estate and rental real estate in general, you know, it takes double the effort to get caught back up again, and if that goes on for a quarter, sometimes people just can't recover. So, you know, we can go into all the reasons why and the mistakes that people have made, but I think just understanding you need to educate yourself. Now, if you're looking to do this passively, in other words, you don't want to take on the credit risk, you don't want to take on, say, the construction risk or a lease up risk of a turnaround or a development project then you can invest passively. [00:10:20] There's a number of REITs out there and we have funds and individual syndications and joint ventures that we do with folks where they come in as a limited partner. They still get equity. They still have ownership. They have a piece of ownership of this property. So they get the depreciation, they get a share of the cash flow, and then the profits upon the sale. [00:10:38] But they don't take on the lease up risk, the development risk, the risk of a project going south no matter what, and or have to go out and create a business, you know, and a team to be able to do so. And along the way, many folks, Jason, they start as passive investors either with one of our projects or others, and by, by just following along, you know, you get that education. [00:10:59] You know, we hold webinars once a quarter and we send out monthly reports and we send out updates as to what's happening with our projects. And so by def facto, our passive investors are getting an education and they earn while they learn the business.  [00:11:11] Jason: Got it. Earn while they learn. Like it. [00:11:15] And that's probably a better path to start out as is to first explore doing it passively to figure out should they jump in and do it more actively.  [00:11:24] Scott: I don't know better. That's not my decision to make. I think some folks, if they have a team in place, you know, they can make that pivot just by learning the business, but it just really depends on where they're at. [00:11:34] I would say that it's It's certainly the safest. And if you have a small amount of capital to set aside to invest in a project, that's the best way about doing it. Because once it comes time to do your own, it's going to take a larger chunk of capital to be able to do so unless you're raising private equity. [00:11:49] So you know I can say that is the best and probably is for most people, but not everybody.  [00:11:54] Jason: Got it. Yeah. Well, a lot of people listening already have some sort of business, a lot of them, they won't just throw it in, jump right into storage units, maybe. But I think a lot of them, it would resonate with them. [00:12:06] "Hey, then maybe this is another way to diversify my portfolio, another way to invest. I would love to do, try it out passively, and then maybe even get some education." for those that maybe heard the beginning of this and they're like, "Man, I don't have to deal with toilets, tenants, trash, and it's real estate. And it sounds so easy." What are some of the things that maybe they have a blind spot to? That somebody, you know, they would learn once they start doing this, it's not all, you know, stars and rainbows and roses with this as well.  [00:12:38] Scott: Right. So, you know, outside of the front end and the due diligence that needs to be done just to make sure that you've bought a solid property from an operational standpoint, which is what you're referring to, you know, what we found is that, you know, a million bucks, 5 million bucks goes a lot further, meaning you buy more doors you buy more square footage and it allows us more doors because these are metal boxes on concrete slabs and they're not, you know, multifamily that has drywall and plumbing and, you know, a lot of HVC, it just goes further. [00:13:03] So that means that there are more units to be able to keep track of. You know, the good news is there's software and we do have property management companies and property managers to handle that and a lot of it is automated, but at the end of the day, you know, it's a large amount of units and a large amount of rental tracking that needs to be done to make sure that the dollars come in the door. On the flip side of that, just because I am a bright side up, kind of guy, you know, we have the ability with our leasing structure within self storage that, you know, it's a 30 day lease automatically renewable. And so anytime that we want to raise the rates, we don't have to wait. It's not an anniversary. It's not an annual lease. It is a month. And so that means on month seven, if we see that the market is changing and the demand is higher and there's a whole lot of development going on, then we can raise the rates in seven months. [00:13:46] We can do it in four months. We can do some nuisance increases in between, you know, either way, and we're very flexible when it comes to that. But then also, the good news is even if people do fall behind in the rent, you know, we have the ability to, or we have the power behind us of the lien laws instead of habitational or versus habitational real estate in which you have tenant and toilet courts. And so when I used to walk out of there, I had a pink piece of paper and very little ability to be able to get my money back and to be able to you know, execute on getting that the money back in the door. [00:14:18] But with self storage and the lien laws. We can put a lock on their unit, lock them out and we don't have to go to court within 60 or 90 days depending upon the state, my manager or an auction company will cut the lock off and open it up for bids on the date that we have an auction and I can recoup my back rent to my late fees and, you know, we are the judge and jury so we don't have to wait. [00:14:36] I know you asked for the pitfalls but, you know, the good side is that you know, even though there's a lot of units to manage the, just because of the nature of the industry and the safeguards that we have in place, it's much, much easier and simpler to handle.  [00:14:48] Jason: Awesome. Cool. Well, yeah, this is very informative. [00:14:51] Tell us a little bit about your education company, what you do there and and maybe how people can get in touch if they're curious.  [00:14:58] Scott: So on the education side, you know, when I got into business, you know, there wasn't an education company out there. There wasn't anybody that I could go to to learn the, you know, the A to Z to the nuts and bolts of the business. [00:15:10] I could certainly go to the trade shows and some of the industry events and I can learn about doors and how to build these facilities and some of the, you know, the bolt on property management software. But there wasn't anybody teaching about the investment side of the business. And so, you know, we scraped as much as we could, you know, leaning on and building on the foundation that we had in commercial real estate already by owning multifamily and office buildings and warehouses. [00:15:30] But just digging into this business and talking to as many people as possible. And I hired a consultant to fill in the gaps and spend a day with him touring his facilities and others that he managed for other investors. And, you know, that's how we grew our you know, bank of knowledge and created our standard operating procedures, at least the foundation of it. [00:15:48] But then after we got into the business a little further down the path and buying facilities I used to run the Real Estate Investor Association here in Indianapolis. And we had 600 folks in the association. And about 300 of them wanted to know about self storage after they saw what we were doing. [00:16:04] And so we started holding workshops and then some of the agents that represent the national speakers in the industry, again, there wasn't a person speaking and experts on the industry. And so they contacted me and one of them assisted me in setting up presentations, the ability to sell tools and resources for folks, and then helped us to create a live events, and thus, our education industry was born. It was really just out of a, I guess, like any good entrepreneur, you see an opportunity in the marketplace and a hole to be filled, and we stepped in and filled that. And so it's evolved from just a home study system, which is, you know, that's such a guru, you know, term to use that what we developed, what we put together was a very extensive business plan with all the tools, the resources and links and software, you know, and everything you need to find, manage, purchase a self storage facility. And that is the name of our home study system. And then that evolved into live events, three day events, which is an immersive workshop and then also for folks that are looking for either one on one or a group coaching and mentoring, you know, begin offering that. And to this day, still offer that. And so we have you know, we're the nation's leading education company in the space. [00:17:14] We've taught more people how to get into the business and grow and scale the business and than anybody else out there in any other organization out there and still going strong at this is what we'd love to do is, you know, we love to take people from zero to 55 miles an hour in storage. [00:17:26] And then in our mastermind and in our other areas, we like to take them from 55 to a hundred and build partnerships and do syndications with them as well. Awesome.  [00:17:35] Jason: Yeah. Sounds very much like our goal here at DoorGrow for the residential space. So what's the name of your education company?  [00:17:44] Scott: Self Storage Profits is the name of the education company. [00:17:46] SelfStorageInvesting.com is the website for all the tools and the resources, a ton of free information, pull downs, white papers, a whole lot to not only just dip your toe in the water, but really to help you get started, and then anything else that you would want or need with regards to coaching, mentoring, attending our live events, it's all located on that page as well, including access to our passive investments as well. [00:18:11] Jason: Very cool. Awesome. Cool. Well, I appreciate you coming on the show, hanging out with us here on the DoorGrow show. It sounds really interesting. I think there's a lot of our clients that are involved in different types of management. And so this may be another one that everybody should maybe take a look at that could be interesting. I think it's fantastic. Or as to do management, you know directly so very cool. Scott, thanks for coming on the show. Appreciate you.  [00:18:39] Scott: My pleasure, Jason. Good to see you again  [00:18:41] Jason: Good to see you. All right So if you are a property management entrepreneur and you're dealing with frustrations, you can go start a storage unit business as well. So appreciate Scott for being on the show. If you would like our help in cleaning up your business so that you don't hate it and getting you out of that first level of exit of doing the frontline work and getting out of the next exit and the next exit until maybe eventually you decide to sell that business, we can help you with that because the more valuable you are to your property management business the less valuable your property management business is to everybody else. And what I find with clients is as we ascend them through these levels of exit, It becomes more and more business that they would enjoy keeping perhaps And so let's see if we can ascend you and get you past that first exit at least, maybe the next exit where you're out of managing the people in the team and you've got an operator and things are really smooth and so if you would like our help here DoorGrow reach out to us at DoorGrow.com And until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye everyone. [00:19:45] you just listened to the #DoorGrowShow. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet in the DoorGrowClub. Join your fellow DoorGrow Hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead content, social direct mail, and they still struggle to grow!  [00:20:11] At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge: getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today's episode on our blog doorgrow.com, and to get notified of future events and news subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow Hacking your business and your life.

What is MySQL HeatWave? How do I get certified in it? Where do I start? Listen to Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham, along with MySQL Developer Scott Stroz, answer all these questions and more on this week's episode of the Oracle University Podcast. MySQL Document Store: https://oracleuniversitypodcast.libsyn.com/mysql-document-store Oracle MyLearn: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ X (formerly Twitter): https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode. -------------------------------------------------------- Episode Transcript: 00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this  series of informative podcasts, we'll bring you foundational training on the most popular  Oracle technologies. Let's get started! 00:26 Nikita: Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast! I'm Nikita Abraham, Principal Technical Editor with Oracle University, and with me is Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs. Lois: Hi there! For the last two weeks, we've been having really exciting discussions on everything AI. We covered the basics of artificial intelligence and machine learning, and we're taking a short break from that today to talk about the new MySQL HeatWave Implementation Associate Certification with MySQL Developer Advocate Scott Stroz. 00:59 Nikita: You may remember Scott from an episode last year where he came on to discuss MySQL Document Store. We'll post the link to that episode in the show notes so you can listen to it if you haven't already. Lois: Hi Scott! Thanks for joining us again. Before diving into the certification, tell us, what is MySQL HeatWave?  01:19 Scott: Hi Lois, Hi Niki. I'm so glad to be back. So, MySQL HeatWave Database Service is a fully managed database that is capable of running transactional and analytic queries in a single database instance. This can be done across data warehouses and data lakes. We get all the benefits of analytic queries without the latency and potential security issues of performing standard extract, transform, and load, or ETL, operations. Some other MySQL HeatWave database service features are automated system updates and database backups, high availability, in-database machine learning with AutoML, MySQL Autopilot for managing instance provisioning, and enhanced data security.  HeatWave is the only cloud database service running MySQL that is built, managed, and supported by the MySQL Engineering team. 02:14 Lois: And where can I find MySQL HeatWave? Scott: MySQL HeatWave is only available in the cloud. MySQL HeatWave instances can be provisioned in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure or OCI, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Microsoft Azure. Now, some features though are only available in Oracle Cloud, such as access to MySQL Document Store. 02:36 Nikita: Scott, you said MySQL HeatWave runs transactional and analytic queries in a single instance. Can you elaborate on that? Scott: Sure, Niki. So, MySQL HeatWave allows developers, database administrators, and data analysts to run transactional queries (OLTP) and analytic queries (OLAP).  OLTP, or online transaction processing, allows for real-time execution of database transactions. A transaction is any kind of insertion, deletion, update, or query of data. Most DBAs and developers work with this kind of processing in their day-to-day activities.   OLAP, or online analytical processing, is one way to handle multi-dimensional analytical queries typically used for reporting or data analytics. OLTP system data must typically be exported, aggregated, and imported into an OLAP system. This procedure is called ETL as I mentioned – extract, transform, and load. With large datasets, ETL processes can take a long time to complete, so analytic data could be “old” by the time it is available in an OLAP system. There is also an increased security risk in moving the data to an external source. 03:56 Scott: MySQL HeatWave eliminates the need for time-consuming ETL processes. We can actually get real-time analytics from our data since HeatWave allows for OLTP and OLAP in a single instance. I should note, this also includes analytic from JSON data that may be stored in the database. Another advantage is that applications can use MySQL HeatWave without changing any of the application code. Developers only need to point their applications at the MySQL HeatWave databases. MySQL HeatWave is fully compatible with on-premise MySQL instances, which can allow for a seamless transition to the cloud. And one other thing. When MySQL HeatWave has OLAP features enabled, MySQL can determine what type of query is being executed and route it to either the normal database system or the in-memory database. 04:52 Lois: That's so cool! And what about the other features you mentioned, Scott? Automated updates and backups, high availability… Scott: Right, Lois. But before that, I want to tell you about the in-memory query accelerator. MySQL HeatWave offers a massively parallel, in-memory hybrid columnar query processing engine. It provides high performance by utilizing algorithms for distributed query processing. And this query processing in MySQL HeatWave is optimized for cloud environments.  MySQL HeatWave can be configured to automatically apply system updates, so you will always have the latest and greatest version of MySQL. Then, we have automated backups. By this, I mean MySQL HeatWave can be configured to provide automated backups with point-in-time recovery to ensure data can be restored to a particular date and time. MySQL HeatWave also allows us to define a retention plan for our database backups, that means how long we keep the backups before they are deleted. High availability with MySQL HeatWave allows for more consistent uptime. When using high availability, MySQL HeatWave instances can be provisioned across multiple availability domains, providing automatic failover for when the primary node becomes unavailable. All availability domains within a region are physically separated from each other to mitigate the possibility of a single point of failure. 06:14 Scott: We also have MySQL Lakehouse. Lakehouse allows for the querying of data stored in object storage in various formats. This can be CSV, Parquet, Avro, or an export format from other database systems. And basically, we point Lakehouse at data stored in Oracle Cloud, and once it's ingested, the data can be queried just like any other data in a database. Lakehouse supports querying data up to half a petabyte in size using the HeatWave engine. And this allows users to take advantage of HeatWave for non-MySQL workloads. MySQL AutoPilot is a part of MySQL HeatWave and can be used to predict the number of HeatWave nodes a system will need and automatically provision them as part of a cluster. AutoPilot has features that can handle automatic thread pooling and database shape predicting. A “shape” is one of the many different CPU, memory, and ethernet traffic configurations available for MySQL HeatWave. MySQL HeatWave includes some advanced security features such as asymmetric encryption and automated data masking at query execution. As you can see, there are a lot of features covered under the HeatWave umbrella! 07:31 Did you know that Oracle University offers free courses on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure? You'll find training on everything from cloud computing, database, and security to artificial intelligence and machine learning, all free to subscribers. So, what are you waiting for? Pick a topic, leverage the Oracle University Learning Community to ask questions, and then sit for your certification. Visit mylearn.oracle.com to get started.  08:02 Nikita: Welcome back! Now coming to the certification, who can actually take this exam, Scott? Scott: The MySQL HeatWave Implementation Associate Certification Exam is designed specifically for administrators and data scientists who want to provision, configure, and manage MySQL HeatWave for transactions, analytics, machine learning, and Lakehouse. 08:22 Nikita: Can someone who's just graduated, say an engineering graduate interested in data analytics, take this certification? Are there any prerequisites? What are the career prospects for them? Scott: There are no mandatory prerequisites, but anyone who wants to take the exam should have experience with MySQL HeatWave and other aspects of OCI, such as virtual cloud networks and identity and security processes. Also, the learning path on MyLearn will be extremely helpful when preparing for the exam, but you are not required to complete the learning path before registering for the exam. The exam focuses more on getting MySQL HeatWave running (and keeping it running) than accessing the data. That doesn't mean it is not helpful for someone interested in data analytics. I think it can be helpful for data analysts to understand how the system providing the data functions, even if it is at just a high level. It is also possible that data analysts might be responsible for setting up their own systems and importing and managing their own data. 09:23 Lois: And how do I get started if I want to get certified on MySQL HeatWave? Scott: So, you'll first need to go to mylearn.oracle.com and look for the “Become a MySQL HeatWave Implementation Associate” learning path. The learning path consists of over 10 hours of training across 8 different courses.  These courses include “Getting Started with MySQL HeatWave Database Service,” which offers an introduction to some Oracle Cloud functionality such as security and networking, as well as showing one way to connect to a MySQL HeatWave instance. Another course demonstrates how to configure MySQL instances and copy that configuration to other instances. Other courses cover how to migrate data into MySQL HeatWave, set up and manage high availability, and configure HeatWave for OLAP. You'll find labs where you can perform hands-on activities, student and activity guides, and skill checks to test yourself along the way. And there's also the option to Ask the Instructor if you have any questions you need answers to. You can also access the Oracle University Learning Community and discuss topics with others on the same journey. The learning path includes a practice exam to check your readiness to pass the certification exam. 10:33 Lois: Yeah, and remember, access to the entire learning path is free so there's nothing stopping you from getting started right away. Now Scott, what does the certification test you on? Scott: The MySQL HeatWave Implementation exam, which is an associate-level exam, covers various topics. It will validate your ability to identify key features and benefits of MySQL HeatWave and describe the MySQL HeatWave architecture; identify Virtual Cloud Network (VCN) requirements and the different methods of connecting to a MySQL HeatWave instance; manage the automatic backup process and restore database systems from these backups; configure and manage read replicas and inbound replication channels; import data into MySQL HeatWave; configure and manage high availability and clustering of MySQL HeatWave instances. I know this seems like a lot of different topics. That is why we recommend anyone interested in the exam follow the learning path. It will help make sure you have the exposure to all the topics that are covered by the exam. 11:35 Lois: Tell us more about the certification process itself. Scott: While the courses we already talked about are valuable when preparing for the exam, nothing is better than hands-on experience. We recommend that candidates have hands-on experience with MySQL HeatWave with real-world implementations. The format of the exam is Multiple Choice. It is 90 minutes long and consists of 65 questions. When you've taken the recommended training and feel ready to take the certification exam, you need to purchase the exam and register for it. You go through the section on things to do before the exam and the exam policies, and then all that's left to do is schedule the date and time of the exam according to when is convenient for you. 12:16 Nikita: And once you've finished the exam? Scott: When you're done your score will be displayed on the screen when you finish the exam. You will also receive an email indicating whether you passed or failed. You can view your exam results and full score report in Oracle CertView, Oracle's certification portal. From CertView, you can download and print your eCertificate and even share your newly earned badge on places like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. 12:38 Lois: And for how long does the certification remain valid, Scott? Scott: There is no expiration date for the exam, so the certification will remain valid for as long as the material that is covered remains relevant.  12:49 Nikita: What's the next step for me after I get this certification? What other training can I take? Scott: So, because this exam is an associate level exam, it is kind of a stepping stone along a person's MySQL training. I do not know if there are plans for a professional level exam for HeatWave, but Oracle University has several other training programs that are MySQL-specific. There are learning paths to help prepare for the MySQL Database Administrator and MySQL Database Developer exams. As with the HeatWave learning paths, the learning paths for these exams include video tutorials, hands-on activities, skill checks, and practice exams. 13:27 Lois: I think you've told us everything we need to know about this certification, Scott. Are there any parting words you might have? Scott: We know that the whole process of training and getting certified may seem daunting, but we've really tried to simplify things for you with the “Become a MySQL HeatWave Implementation Associate” learning path. It not only prepares you for the exam but also gives you experience with features of MySQL HeatWave that will surely be valuable in your career. 13:51 Lois: Thanks so much, Scott, for joining us today. Nikita: Yeah, we've had a great time with you. Scott: Thanks for having me. Lois: Next week, we'll get back to our focus on AI with a discussion on deep learning. Until then, this is Lois Houston… Nikita: And Nikita Abraham, signing off. 14:07 That's all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We'd also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University  Podcast.

Dan VeitchGratts - Pretty Lights (Ft. Brandon Markell Holmes & Leito)Will Sessions & Amp Fiddler ft. Dames Brown - Lost Without YouRetromigration - All I Do ft. MauricesaxKnevrm!nd - Matters Of T!meRossy De Palma feat Max Skiba - Dominatrix Faze Action - FantasyAdi Oasis - Maintain (Jafunk Remix)Bobby Donny Soundsystem - Love MeC. Scott - Thanks for Calling Make A Dance - Lady J (Rakim Under Edit)Ezel - Little Things (Ezel Remix)Retromigration - ITWT ft. MauricesaxHoratio Luna - Lit TonightSteve Mill and Tee Amara - Whatever It TakesFelix Dickinson feat Blane Lyon - People's People (Felix Dickinson Dub)Isolée - Con O SinMr. Flip - Drippn' (Mike Steva Remix)Bill Campbell - Body BeatLevel 42 - StarChild (Shallibrukit Flip)Kolter - Get SexyNAP - A2. On & OnHarold Matthews Jr & Black Sonix - Deep Into My Sleep (Haze City Remix)

Catch up on our regular segment with Sam and Lloyd looking into hypotheticals in todays episode of If I was...

About ScottWith more than 28 years of successful leadership in building high technology companies and delivering advanced products to market, Scott provides the overall strategic leadership and visionary direction for Azul Systems.Scott has a consistent proven track record of vision, leadership, and success in enterprise, consumer and scientific markets. Prior to co-founding Azul Systems, Scott founded 3dfx Interactive, a graphics processor company that pioneered the 3D graphics market for personal computers and game consoles. Scott served at 3dfx as Vice President of Engineering, CTO and as a member of the board of directors and delivered 7 award-winning products and developed 14 different graphics processors. After a successful initial public offering, 3dfx was later acquired by NVIDIA Corporation.Prior to 3dfx, Scott was a CPU systems architect at Pellucid, later acquired by MediaVision. Before Pellucid, Scott was a member of the technical staff at Silicon Graphics where he designed high-performance workstations.Scott graduated from Princeton University with a bachelor of science, earning magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa honors. Scott has been granted 8 patents in high performance graphics and computing and is a regularly invited keynote speaker at industry conferences.Links Referenced:Azul: https://www.azul.com/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: I come bearing ill tidings. Developers are responsible for more than ever these days. Not just the code that they write, but also the containers and the cloud infrastructure that their apps run on. Because serverless means it's still somebody's problem. And a big part of that responsibility is app security from code to cloud. And that's where our friend Snyk comes in. Snyk is a frictionless security platform that meets developers where they are - Finding and fixing vulnerabilities right from the CLI, IDEs, Repos, and Pipelines. Snyk integrates seamlessly with AWS offerings like code pipeline, EKS, ECR, and more! As well as things you're actually likely to be using. Deploy on AWS, secure with Snyk. Learn more at Snyk.co/scream That's S-N-Y-K.co/screamCorey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at AWS AppConfig. Engineers love to solve, and occasionally create, problems. But not when it's an on-call fire-drill at 4 in the morning. Software problems should drive innovation and collaboration, NOT stress, and sleeplessness, and threats of violence. That's why so many developers are realizing the value of AWS AppConfig Feature Flags. Feature Flags let developers push code to production, but hide that that feature from customers so that the developers can release their feature when it's ready. This practice allows for safe, fast, and convenient software development. You can seamlessly incorporate AppConfig Feature Flags into your AWS or cloud environment and ship your Features with excitement, not trepidation and fear. To get started, go to snark.cloud/appconfig. That's snark.cloud/appconfig.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. My guest on this promoted episode today is Scott Sellers, CEO and co-founder of Azul. Scott, thank you for joining me.Scott: Thank you, Corey. I appreciate the opportunity in talking to you today.Corey: So, let's start with what you're doing these days. What is Azul? What do you folks do over there?Scott: Azul is an enterprise software and SaaS company that is focused on delivering more efficient Java solutions for our customers around the globe. We've been around for 20-plus years, and as an entrepreneur, we've really gone through various stages of different growth and different dynamics in the market. But at the end of the day, Azul is all about adding value for Java-based enterprises, Java-based applications, and really endearing ourselves to the Java community.Corey: This feels like the sort of space where there are an awful lot of great business cases to explore. When you look at what's needed in that market, there are a lot of things that pop up. The surprising part to me is that this is the direction that you personally went in. You started your career as a CPU architect, to my understanding. You were then one of the co-founders of 3dfx before it got acquired by Nvidia.You feel like you've spent your career more as a hardware guy than working on the SaaS side of the world. Is that a misunderstanding of your path, or have things changed, or is this just a new direction? Help me understand how you got here from where you were.Scott: I'm not exactly sure what the math would say because I continue to—can't figure out a way to stop time. But you're correct that my academic background, I was an electrical engineer at Princeton and started my career at Silicon Graphics. And that was when I did a lot of fantastic and fascinating work building workstations and high-end graphics systems, you know, back in the day when Silicon Graphics really was the who's who here in Silicon Valley. And so, a lot of my career began in the context of hardware. As you mentioned, I was one of the founders of graphics company called 3dfx that was one of, I think, arguably the pioneer in terms of bringing 3d graphics to the masses, if you will.And we had a great run of that. That was a really fun business to be a part of just because of what was going on in the 3d world. And we took that public and eventually sold that to Nvidia. And at that point, my itch, if you will, was really learning more about the enterprise segment. I'd been involved with professional graphics with SGI, I had been involved with consumer graphics with 3dfx.And I was fascinated just to learn about the enterprise segment. And met a couple people through a mutual friend around the 2001 timeframe, and they started talking about this thing called Java. And you know, I had of course heard about Java, but as a consumer graphics guy, didn't have a lot of knowledge about it or experience with it. And the more I learned about it, recognized that what was going on in the Java world—and credit to Sun for really creating, obviously, not only language, but building a community around Java—and recognized that new evolutions of developer paradigms really only come around once a decade if then, and was convinced and really got excited about the opportunity to ride the wave of Java and build a company around that.Corey: One of the blind spots that I have throughout the entire world of technology—and to be fair, I have many of them, but the one most relevant to this conversation, I suppose, is the Java ecosystem as a whole. I come from a background of being a grumpy Unix sysadmin—because I've never met a happy one of those in my entire career—and as a result, scripting languages is where everything that I worked with started off. And on the rare occasions, I worked in Java shops, it was, “Great. We're going to go—here's a WAR file. Go ahead and deploy this with Tomcat,” or whatever else people are going to use. But basically, “Don't worry your pretty little head about that.”At most, I have to worry about how to configure a heap or whatnot. But it's from the outside looking in, not having to deal with that entire ecosystem as a whole. And what I've seen from that particular perspective is that every time I start as a technologist, or even as a consumer trying to install some random software package in the depths of the internet, and I have to start thinking about Java, it always feels like I'm about to wind up in a confusing world. There are a number of software packages that I installed back in, I want to say the early-2010s or whatnot. “Oh, you need to have a Java runtime installed on your Mac,” for example.And okay, going through Oracle site, do I need the JRE? Do I need the JDK? Oh, there's OpenJDK, which kind of works, kind of doesn't. Amazon got into the space with Corretto, which because that sounds nothing whatsoever, like Java, but strange names coming from Amazon is basically par for the course for those folks. What is the current state of the Java ecosystem, for those of us who have—basically the closest we've ever gotten is JavaScript, which is nothing alike except for the name.Scott: And you know, frankly, given the protection around the name Java—and you know, that is a trademark that's owned by Oracle—it's amazing to me that JavaScript has been allowed to continue to be called JavaScript because as you point out, JavaScript has nothing to do with Java per se.Corey: Well, one thing they do have in common I found out somewhat recently is that Oracle also owns the trademark for JavaScript.Scott: Ah, there you go. Maybe that's why it continues.Corey: They're basically a law firm—three law firms in a trench coat, masquerading as a tech company some days.Scott: Right. But anyway, it is a confusing thing because you know, I think, arguably, JavaScript, by the numbers, probably has more programmers than any other language in the world, just given its popularity as a web language. But to your question about Java specifically, it's had an evolving life, and I think the state where it is today, I think it's in the most exciting place it's ever been. And I'll walk you through kind of why I believe that to be the case.But Java has evolved over time from its inception back in the days when it was called, I think it was Oak when it was originally conceived, and Sun had eventually branded it as Java. And at the time, it truly was owned by Sun, meaning it was proprietary code; it had to be licensed. And even though Sun gave it away, in most cases, it still at the end of the day, it was a commercially licensed product, if you will, and platform. And if you think about today's world, it would not be conceivable to create something that became so popular with programmers that was a commercially licensed product today. It almost would be mandated that it would be open-source to be able to really gain the type of traction that Java has gained.And so, even though Java was really garnering interest, you know, not only within the developer community, but also amongst commercial entities, right, everyone—and the era now I'm talking about is around the 2000 era—all of the major software vendors, whether it was obviously Sun, but then you had Oracle, you had IBM, companies like BEA, were really starting to blossom at that point. It was a—you know, you could almost not find a commercial software entity that was not backing Java. But it was still all controlled by Sun. And all that success ultimately led to a strong outcry from the community saying this has to be open-source; this is too important to be beholden to a single vendor. And that decision was made by Sun prior to the Oracle acquisition, they actually open-sourced the Java runtime code and they created an open-source project called OpenJDK.And to Oracle's credit, when they bought Sun—which I think at the time when you really look back, Oracle really did not have a lot of track record, if you will, of being involved with an open-source community—and I think when Oracle acquired Sun, there was a lot of skepticism as to what's going to happen to Java. Is Oracle going to make this thing, you know, back to the old days, proprietary Oracle, et cetera? And really—Corey: I was too busy being heartbroken over Solaris at that point to pay much attention to the Java stuff, but it felt like it was this—sort of the same pattern, repeated across multiple ecosystems.Scott: Absolutely. And even though Sun had also open-sourced Solaris, with the OpenSolaris project, that was one of the kinds of things that it was still developed very much in a closed environment, and then they would kind of throw some code out into the open world. And no one really ran OpenSolaris because it wasn't fully compatible with Solaris. And so, that was a faint attempt, if you will.But Java was quite different. It was truly all open-sourced, and the big difference that—and again, I give Oracle a lot of credit for this because this was a very important time in the evolution of Java—that Oracle, maintained Sun's commitment to not only continue to open-source Java but most importantly, develop it in the open community. And so, you know, again, back and this is the 2008, ‘09, ‘10 timeframe, the evolution of Java, the decisions, the standards, you know, what goes in the platform, what doesn't, decisions about updates and those types of things, that truly became a community-led world and all done in the open-source. And credit to Oracle for continuing to do that. And that really began the transition away from proprietary implementations of Java to one that, very similar to Linux, has really thrived because of the true open-source nature of what Java is today.And that's enabled more and more companies to get involved with the evolution of Java. If you go to the OpenJDK page, you'll see all of the not only, you know, incredibly talented individuals that are involved with the evolution of Java, but again, a who's who in pretty much every major commercial entities in the enterprise software world is also somehow involved in the OpenJDK community. And so, it really is a very vibrant, evolving standard. And some of the tactical things that have happened along the way in terms of changing how versions of Java are released still also very much in the context of maintaining compatibility and finding that careful balance of evolving the platform, but at the same time, recognizing that there is a lot of Java applications out there, so you can't just take a right-hand turn and forget about the compatibility side of things. But we as a community overall, I think, have addressed that very effectively, and the result has been now I think Java is more popular than ever and continues to—we liken it kind of to the mortar and the brick walls of the enterprise. It's a given that it's going to be used, certainly by most of the enterprises worldwide today.Corey: There's a certain subset of folk who are convinced the Java, “Oh, it's this a legacy programming language, and nothing modern or forward-looking is going to be built in it.” Yeah, those people generally don't know what the internal language stack looks like at places like oh, I don't know, AWS, Google, and a few others, it is very much everywhere. But it also feels, on some level, like, it's a bit below the surface-level of awareness for the modern full-stack developer in some respects, right up until suddenly it's very much not. How is Java evolving in a cloud these days?Scott: Well, what we see happening—you know, this is true for—you know, I'm a techie, so I can talk about other techies. I mean as techies, we all like the new thing, right? I mean, it's not that exciting to talk about a language that's been around for 20-plus years. But that doesn't take away from the fact that we still all use keyboards. I mean, no one really talks about what keyboard they use anymore—unless you're really into keyboards—but at the end of the day, it's still a fundamental tool that you use every single day.And Java is kind of in the same situation. The reason that Java continues to be so fundamental is that it really comes back to kind of reinventing the wheel problem. Are there are other languages that are more efficient to code in? Absolutely. Are there other languages that, you know, have some capabilities that the Java doesn't have? Absolutely.But if you have the ability to reinvent everything from scratch, sure, go for it. And you also don't have to worry about well, can I find enough programmers in this, you know, new hot language, okay, good luck with that. You might be able to find dozens, but when you need to really scale a company into thousands or tens of thousands of developers, good luck finding, you know, everyone that knows, whatever your favorite hot language of the day is.Corey: It requires six years experience in a four-year-old language. Yeah, it's hard to find that, sometimes.Scott: Right. And you know, the reality is, is that really no application ever is developed from scratch, right? Even when an application is, quote, new, immediately, what you're using is frameworks and other things that have written long ago and proven to be very successful.Corey: And disturbing amounts of code copied and pasted from Stack Overflow.Scott: Absolutely.Corey: But that's one of those impolite things we don't say out loud very often.Scott: That's exactly right. So, nothing really is created from scratch anymore. And so, it's all about building blocks. And this is really where this snowball of Java is difficult to stop because there is so much third-party code out there—and by that, I mean, you know, open-source, commercial code, et cetera—that is just so leveraged and so useful to very quickly be able to take advantage of and, you know, allow developers to focus on truly new things, not reinventing the wheel for the hundredth time. And that's what's kind of hard about all these other languages is catching up to Java with all of the things that are immediately available for developers to use freely, right, because most of its open-source. That's a pretty fundamental Catch-22 about when you start talking about the evolution of new languages.Corey: I'm with you so far. The counterpoint though is that so much of what we're talking about in the world of Java is open-source; it is freely available. The OpenJDK, for example, says that right on the tin. You have built a company and you've been in business for 20 years. I have to imagine that this is not one of those stories where, “Oh, all the things we do, we give away for free. But that's okay. We make it up in volume.” Even the venture capitalist mindset tends to run out of patience on those kinds of timescales. What is it you actually do as a business that clearly, obviously delivers value for customers but also results in, you know, being able to meet payroll every week?Scott: Right? Absolutely. And I think what time has shown is that, with one very notable exception and very successful example being Red Hat, there are very, very few pure open-source companies whose business is only selling support services for free software. Most successful businesses that are based on open-source are in one-way shape or form adding value-added elements. And that's our strategy as well.The heart of everything we do is based on free code from OpenJDK, and we have a tremendous amount of business that we are following the Red Hat business model where we are selling support and long-term access and a huge variety of different operating system configurations, older Java versions. Still all free software, though, right, but we're selling support services for that. And that is, in essence, the classic Red Hat business model. And that business for us is incredibly high growth, very fast-moving, a lot of that business is because enterprises are tired of paying the very high price to Oracle for Java support and they're looking for an open-source alternative that is exactly the same thing, but comes in pure open-source form and with a vendor that is as reputable as Oracle. So, a lot of our businesses based on that.However, on top of that, we also have value-added elements. And so, our product that is called Azul Platform Prime is rooted in OpenJDK—it is OpenJDK—but then we've added value-added elements to that. And what those value-added elements create is, in essence, a better Java platform. And better in this context means faster, quicker to warm up, elimination of some of the inconsistencies of the Java runtime in terms of this nasty problem called garbage collection which causes applications to kind of bounce around in terms of performance limitations. And so, creating a better Java is another way that we have monetized our company is value-added elements that are built on top of OpenJDK. And I'd say that part of the business is very typical for the majority of enterprise software companies that are rooted in open-source. They're typically adding value-added components on top of the open-source technology, and that's our similar strategy as well.And then the third evolution for us, which again is very tried-and-true, is evolving the business also to add SaaS offerings. So today, the majority of our customers, even though they deploy in the cloud, they're stuck customer-managed and so they're responsible for where do I want to put my Java runtime on building out my stack and cetera, et cetera. And of course, that could be on-prem, but like I mentioned, the majority are in the cloud. We're evolving our product offerings also to have truly SaaS-based solutions so that customers don't even need to manage those types of stacks on their own anymore.Corey: On some level, it feels like we're talking about two different things when we talk about cloud and when we talk about programming languages, but increasingly, I'm starting to see across almost the entire ecosystem that different languages and different cloud providers are in many ways converging. How do you see Java changing as cloud-native becomes the default rather than the new thing?Scott: Great question. And I think the thing to recognize about, really, most popular programming languages today—I can think of very few exceptions—these languages were created, envisioned, implemented if you will, in a day when cloud was not top-of-mind, and in many cases, certainly in the case of Java, cloud didn't even exist when Java was originally conceived, nor was that the case when you know, other languages, such as Python, or JavaScript, or on and on. So, rethinking how these languages should evolve in very much the context of a cloud-native mentality is a really important initiative that we certainly are doing and I think the Java community is doing overall. And how you architect not only the application, but even the Java runtime itself can be fundamentally different if you know that the application is going to be deployed in the cloud.And I'll give you an example. Specifically, in the world of any type of runtime-based language—and JavaScript is an example of that; Python is an example of that; Java is an example of that—in all of those runtime-based environments, what that basically means is that when the application is run, there's a piece of software that's called the runtime that actually is running that application code. And so, you can think about it as a middleware piece of software that sits between the operating system and the application itself. And so, that runtime layer is common across those languages and those platforms that I mentioned. That runtime layer is evolving, and it's evolving in a way that is becoming more and more cloud-native in it's thinking.The process itself of actually taking the application, compiling it into whatever underlying architecture it may be running on—it could be an x86 instance running on Amazon; it could be, you know, for example, an ARM64, which Amazon has compute instances now that are based on an ARM64 processor that they call Graviton, which is really also kind of altering the price-performance of the compute instances on the AWS platform—that runtime layer magically takes an application that doesn't have to be aware of the underlying hardware and transforms that into a way that can be run. And that's a very expensive process; it's called just-in-time compiling, and that just-in-time compilation, in today's world—which wasn't really based on cloud thinking—every instance, every compute instance that you deploy, that same JIT compilation process is happening over and over again. And even if you deploy 100 instances for scalability, every one of those 100 instances is doing that same work. And so, it's very inefficient and very redundant. Contrast that to a cloud-native thinking: that compilation process should be a service; that service should be done once.The application—you know, one instance of the application is actually run and there are the other ninety-nine should just reuse that compilation process. And that shared compiler service should be scalable and should be able to scale up when applications are launched and you need more compilation resources, and then scaled right back down when you're through the compilation process and the application is more moving into the—you know, to the runtime phase of the application lifecycle. And so, these types of things are areas that we and others are working on in terms of evolving the Java runtime specifically to be more cloud-native.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Sysdig. Sysdig secures your cloud from source to run. They believe, as do I, that DevOps and security are inextricably linked. If you wanna learn more about how they view this, check out their blog, it's definitely worth the read. To learn more about how they are absolutely getting it right from where I sit, visit Sysdig.com and tell them that I sent you. That's S Y S D I G.com. And my thanks to them for their continued support of this ridiculous nonsense.Corey: This feels like it gets even more critical when we're talking about things like serverless functions across basically all the cloud providers these days, where there's the whole setup, everything in the stack, get it running, get it listening, ready to go, to receive a single request and then shut itself down. It feels like there are a lot of operational efficiencies possible once you start optimizing from a starting point of yeah, this is what that environment looks like, rather than us big metal servers sitting in a rack 15 years ago.Scott: Yeah. I think the evolution of serverless appears to be headed more towards serverless containers as opposed to serverless functions. Serverless functions have a bunch of limitations in terms of when you think about it in the context of a complex, you know, microservices-based deployment framework. It's just not very efficient, to spin up and spin down instances of a function if that actually is being—it is any sort of performance or latency-sensitive type of applications. If you're doing something very rarely, sure, it's fine; it's efficient, it's elegant, et cetera.But any sort of thing that has real girth to it—and girth probably means that's what's driving your application infrastructure costs, that's what's driving your Amazon bill every month—those types of things typically are not going to be great for starting and stopping functional instances. And so, serverless is evolving more towards thinking about the container itself not having to worry about the underlying operating system or the instance on Amazon that it's running on. And that's where, you know, we see more and more of the evolution of serverless is thinking about it at a container-level as opposed to a functional level. And that appears to be a really healthy steady state, so it gets the benefits of not having to worry about all the underlying stuff, but at the same time, doesn't have the downside of trying to start and stop functional influences at a given point in time.Corey: It seems to me that there are really two ways of thinking about cloud. The first is what I think a lot of companies do their first outing when they're going into something like AWS. “Okay, we're going to get a bunch of virtual machines that they call instances in AWS, we're going to run things just like it's our data center except now data transfer to the internet is terrifyingly expensive.” The more quote-unquote, “Cloud-native” way of thinking about this is what you're alluding to where there's, “Here's some code that I wrote. I want to throw it to my cloud provider and just don't tell me about any of the infrastructure parts. Execute this code when these conditions are met and leave me alone.”Containers these days seem to be one of our best ways of getting there with a minimum of fuss and friction. What are you seeing in the enterprise space as far as adoption of those patterns go? Or are we seeing cloud repatriation showing up as a real thing and I'm just not in the right place to see it?Scott: Well, I think as a cloud journey evolves, there's no question that—and in fact it's even silly to say that cloud is here to stay because I think that became a reality many, many years ago. So really, the question is, what are the challenges now with cloud deployments? Cloud is absolutely a given. And I think you stated earlier, it's rare that, whether it's a new company or a new application, at least in most businesses that don't have specific regulatory requirements, that application is highly, highly likely to be envisioned to be initially and only deployed in the cloud. That's a great thing because you have so many advantages of not having to purchase infrastructure in advance, being able to tap into all of the various services that are available through the cloud providers. No one builds databases anymore; you're just tapping into the service that's provided by Azure or AWS, or what have you.And, you know, just that specific example is a huge amount of savings in terms of just overhead, and license costs, and those types of stuff, and there's countless examples of that. And so, the services that are available in the cloud are unquestioned. So, there's countless advantages of why you want to be in the cloud. The downside, however, the cloud that is, if at the end of the day, AWS, Microsoft with Azure, Google with GCP, they are making 30% margin on that cloud infrastructure. And in the days of hardware, when companies would actually buy their servers from Dell, or HP, et cetera, those businesses are 5% margin.And so, where's that 25% going? Well, the 25% is being paid for by the users of cloud, and as a result of that, when you look at it purely from an operational cost perspective, it is more expensive to run in the cloud than it is back in the legacy days, right? And that's not to say that the industry has made the wrong choice because there's so many advantages of being in cloud, there's no doubt about it. And there should be—you know, and the cloud providers deserve to take some amount of margin to provide the services that they provide; there's no doubt about that. The question is, how do you do the best of all worlds?And you know, there is a great blog by a couple of the partners in Andreessen Horowitz, they called this the Cloud Paradox. And the Cloud Paradox really talks about the challenges. It's really a Catch-22; how do you get all the benefits of cloud but do that in a way that is not overly taxing from a cost perspective? And a lot of it comes down to good practices and making sure that you have the right monitoring and culture within an enterprise to make sure that cloud cost is a primary thing that is discussed and metric, but then there's also technologies that can help so that you don't have to even think about what you really don't ever want to do: repatriating, which is about the concept of actually moving off the cloud back to the old way of doing things. So certainly, I don't believe repatriation is a practical solution for ongoing and increasing cloud costs. I believe technology is a solution to that.And there are technologies such as our product, Azul Platform Prime, that in essence, allows you to do more with less, right, get all the benefits of cloud, deploy in your Amazon environment, deploy in your Azure environment, et cetera, but imagine if instead of needing a hundred instances to handle your given workload, you could do that with 50 or 60. Tomorrow, that means that you can start savings and being able to do that simply by changing your JVM from a standard OpenJDK or Oracle JVM to something like Platform Prime, you can immediately start to start seeing the benefits from that. And so, a lot of our business now and our growth is coming from companies that are screaming under the ongoing cloud costs and trying to keep them in line, and using technology like Azul Platform Prime to help mitigate those costs.Corey: I think that there is a somewhat foolish approach that I'm seeing taken by a lot of folks where there are some companies that are existentially anti-cloud, if for no other reason than because if the cloud wins, then they don't really have a business anymore. The problem I see with that is that it seems that their solution across the board is to turn back the clock where if I'm going to build a startup, it's time for me to go buy some servers and a rack somewhere and start negotiating with bandwidth providers. I don't see that that is necessarily viable for almost anyone. We aren't living in 1995 anymore, despite how much some people like to pretend we are. It seems like if there are workloads—for which I agree, cloud is not necessarily an economic fit, first, I feel like the market will fix that in the fullness of time, but secondly, on an individual workload belonging in a certain place is radically different than, “Oh, none of our stuff should live on cloud. Everything belongs in a data center.” And I just think that companies lose all credibility when they start pretending that it's any other way.Scott: Right. I'd love to see the reaction of the venture capitalists' face when an entrepreneur walks in and talks about how their strategy for deploying their SaaS service is going to be buying hardware and renting some space in the local data center.Corey: Well, there is a good cost control method, if you think about it. I mean very few engineers are going to accidentally spin up an $8 million cluster in a data center a second time, just because there's no space left for it.Scott: And you're right; it does happen in the cloud as well. It's just, I agree with you completely that as part of the evolution of cloud, in general, is an ever-improving aspect of cost and awareness of cost and building in technologies that help mitigate that cost. So, I think that will continue to evolve. I think, you know, if you really think about the cloud journey, cost, I would say, is still in early phases of really technologies and practices and processes of allowing enterprises to really get their head around cost. I'd still say it's a fairly immature industry that is evolving quickly, just given the importance of it.And so, I think in the coming years, you're going to see a radical improvement in terms of cost awareness and technologies to help with costs, that again allows you to the best of all worlds. Because, you know, if you go back to the Dark Ages and you start thinking about buying servers and infrastructure, then you are really getting back to a mentality of, “I've got to deploy everything. I've got to buy software for my database. I've got to deploy it. What am I going to do about my authentication service? So, I got to buy this vendor's, you know, solution, et cetera.” And so, all that stuff just goes away in the world of cloud, so it's just not practical, in this day and age I think, to think about really building a business that's not cloud-native from the beginning.Corey: I really want to thank you for spending so much time talking to me about how you view the industry, the evolution we've seen in the Java ecosystem, and what you've been up to. If people want to learn more, where's the best place for them to find you?Scott: Well, there's a thing called a website that you may not have heard of, it's really cool.Corey: Can I build it in Java?Scott: W-W-dot—[laugh]. Yeah. Azul website obviously has an awful lot of information about that, Azul is spelled A-Z-U-L, and we sometimes get the question, “How in the world did you name a company—why did you name it Azul?”And it's kind of a funny story because back in the days of Azul when we thought about, hey, we want to be big and successful, and at the time, IBM was the gold standard in terms of success in the enterprise world. And you know, they were Big Blue, so we said, “Hey, we're going to be a little blue. Let's be Azul.” So, that's where we began. So obviously, go check out our site.We're very present, also, in the Java community. We're, you know, many developer conferences and talks. We sponsor and run many of what's called the Java User Groups, which are very popular 10-, 20-person meetups that happen around the globe on a regular basis. And so, you know, come check us out. And I appreciate everyone's time in listening to the podcast today.Corey: No, thank you very much for spending as much time with me as you have. It's appreciated.Scott: Thanks, Corey.Corey: Scott Sellers, CEO and co-founder of Azul. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an entire copy of the terms and conditions from Oracle's version of the JDK.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

About ScottCloud security historian.Developed flaws.cloud, CloudMapper, and Parliament.Founding team for fwd:cloudsecLinks: Block: https://block.xyz/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/0xdabbad00 TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Vultr. Optimized cloud compute plans have landed at Vultr to deliver lightning fast processing power, courtesy of third gen AMD EPYC processors without the IO, or hardware limitations, of a traditional multi-tenant cloud server. Starting at just 28 bucks a month, users can deploy general purpose, CPU, memory, or storage optimized cloud instances in more than 20 locations across five continents. Without looking, I know that once again, Antarctica has gotten the short end of the stick. Launch your Vultr optimized compute instance in 60 seconds or less on your choice of included operating systems, or bring your own. It's time to ditch convoluted and unpredictable giant tech company billing practices, and say goodbye to noisy neighbors and egregious egress forever. Vultr delivers the power of the cloud with none of the bloat. "Screaming in the Cloud" listeners can try Vultr for free today with a $150 in credit when they visit getvultr.com/screaming. That's G E T V U L T R.com/screaming. My thanks to them for sponsoring this ridiculous podcast.Corey: Couchbase Capella Database-as-a-Service is flexible, full-featured and fully managed with built in access via key-value, SQL, and full-text search. Flexible JSON documents aligned to your applications and workloads. Build faster with blazing fast in-memory performance and automated replication and scaling while reducing cost. Capella has the best price performance of any fully managed document database. Visit couchbase.com/screaminginthecloud to try Capella today for free and be up and running in three minutes with no credit card required. Couchbase Capella: make your data sing.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud, I'm Corey Quinn. I am joined by a returning guest with a bit of a different job. Scott Piper was formerly an independent security researcher—basically the independent security researcher in the AWS space—but now he's a Principal Engineer over at Block. Scott, welcome back.Scott: Thanks for having me, again, Corey.Corey: So, you've taken a corporate job, and when that happened, I have to confess, I was slightly discouraged because oh, now it's going to be like one of those stories of when someone you know goes to work at Apple because no one knows anyone at Apple; we just used to know people who went there and then we kind of lost touch because it's a very insular thing. Not the Block slash Square slash whatever they're calling themselves this week has that reputation. But InfoSec is always a very nuanced space and companies that have large footprints and, you know, handle financial transaction processing generally don't encourage loud voices that attract attention around anything that isn't directly aligned with the core mission of the company. But you're still as public and prolific as ever. Was that a difficult balance for you to strike?Scott: So, when I was considering employment options, that was something that I made clear to any companies that I was talking to, that this is something that probably will and should continue because a lot of my value to these companies is because I'm able to have discussions, able to impact change because of that public persona. So yeah, so I think that it was something that they were aware of, and a risk that they took. [laugh]. But yeah, it's been useful.Corey: This is the sort of conversation I would have expected to have with, “Yeah, things seem to be continuing the same, and I haven't rocked any boats, yet and they haven't fired me, knock on wood.” Except that recently you've launched yet something else that I am personally a fan of. Now, before we get into the specifics of what it is you're up to these days, I should call out that since your last appearance on this show, I have really leaned into the Thursday newsletter podcast duo of Last Week in AWS: Security Edition. Rounding up what happened the previous week—yes, it was the previous week, and it comes out on Thursdays—because, you know, timing and publication, things are hard, computers, you know how it is—aimed at a target audience that is very much not you: People who have to care about security, but are not immersed in the space. It's a, “All right, what now? What do I have to pay attention to?”Because there's a lot of noise in this space, there's a lot of vendor-captured stuff out there. There's very little that is for people who work in security but don't have the word security anywhere near their job title. And I have to confess that one of my easy shortcuts is, “Oh, it's a pretty thin issue this week,” which is not inherently a bad thing, let's be clear, it's not yay, the three things you need to care about in security then eight more of filler; that's not what we're about. But I always want to make sure I didn't miss something meaningful, and one of my default publication steps is, “What's Scott been tweeting about this week?” Just to make sure that I didn't miss something that I really should be talking about.And every single time I pull up your Twitter feed, I find myself learning something, whether it's a new concept, or whether it is a nuance on an existing thing I was already aware of. So first, thank you for all the work that you do as a member of the community, despite having a, “Regular corporate job,” quote-unquote, you're still very present. It's appreciated.Scott: Thank you. Yeah. And I mean, that newsletter is great for people that don't want to be spending multiple hours per day trolling through Twitter and reading that. So, it provides, also, something great for the community to not have to spend all that time on Twitter like I do [laugh], unfortunately.Corey: It also strives—sort of—to be something approaching an upbeat position of not quite as cynical and sarcastic as the Monday issue. I try to be not just this is the thing that happened, but go a little bit into and this is why it matters. This is how to think about it. This thing that Amazon put out is nonsense, however, here's the kernel hidden within it that might lead to something, such as thinking about how you do sign-on, or how to think about protecting MFA devices, or stuff like that you normally care about a lot right after you really should have cared about it but didn't at all. So, it's just the idea of aiming in a slightly different audience.Scott: Yeah definitely. And it provides value that it does, it takes some delay so that you can read what everybody has written, how they've responded to the different news outtakes, you're not just including the hot takes. For example, as of this morning, there's a certain incident with an authentication provider, and it's not really clear if there was actually a breach or not. And so it's valuable to take a moment to understand what happened, get all the voices to have expressed their points, so you can summarize those issues.Corey: An internal term that we've used to describe the position here is that I am prolific but I also have things to do as a part of my job that do not involve sitting there hitting refresh on Twitter like mad all the time. The idea is to have the best take not the first take—Scott: Exactly.Corey: And if that means that I lose a bunch of eyeballs and early ad impressions in the middle of the night and whatnot, well, great. I don't sell ad impressions anyway, so what does it matter? It winds up lending itself to a more thoughtful analysis of figuring out, in the sober light of day, is this a nothing-burger or is this enormous? With that SSO issue that you're alluding to—[cough] Okta—sorry, something caught in my throat there—very clearly, something is going on, but if I had written next week's newsletter last night while it was still very unclear, it would have been a very different tone than the one that I would have written this morning after their public statement, and even still a certainly different tone that it would take a couple of days once more information is almost certain to come to light. And that is something that is, I think, underappreciated in certainly on Twitter, where an old tweet—there's nothing worse than an old tweet unless you're using it to drag someone for something—that, “Well, we have different perspectives on that nowadays. It's not 2018 anymore.” Right. Okay, cool.Scott: Yep. [laugh].Corey: But something that you've done has been a bit of a pivot lately. Historically, you have been right there in my sweet spot of needling cloud providers for their transgressions in various ways. Cool, right there with you. We could co-author a book on the subject. But lately, you've started a community list of [IMSDv2 00:07:04] abuses.Now, first, we should talk about what IMSDv2 is. It's the name that it clearly came from Amazon because that's a name only a cloud provider bad at naming things could possibly love. What is it?Scott: So, it's the Instance Metadata Service, Version Two. If there's a version two, you can imagine there was a version one at some point. And the version two—Corey: And there's a version two because Amazon prod—the first one was terrible, but they don't turn anything off, ever, so this is the way and the light and the future; we're going to leave that old thing around until your great-grandchild dies of old age.Scott: Exactly, yeah. So, when EC2s first came out, and IAM roles first came out, you wanted to give your EC2s the ability to use AWS privileges, so this is how those EC2s are getting access to their credentials that they can use. And the way in which this was originally done was there's this magic IP address, this 169.254.169.254 IP address, which is very important for security on AWS because if anything can access that magic IP address from an EC2 instance, you can steal their credentials of that EC2, and therefore basically become that EC2 instance, in terms of what it can do in the AWS environment.And so in 2019, there was a large breach of Capital One that was related to this. And so as a result of that—I think that AWS probably had this new version, probably, in the works for a while, but I think that motivated their faster release of this new version, and so IMDSv2 changed how you would obtain these credentials. So, you basically—instead of making a single GET request to this IP address, now you had to make multiple requests, they were now PUT request instead of a GET request, there was a challenge and response, there's the hop limit. So, there's all these various things that are going to make it harder and basically mitigate a lot of the different types of vulnerabilities that previously would be used in order to obtain these credentials. The problem, though, is that IMDSv1 still exists on EC2s, unless you as a customer are enforcing IMDSv2.And so, in order to do this in a large environment, it's difficult—theoretically, it's a simple thing; all you should have to do is update your SDK and now you're able to make use of the latest version. And if you're using any version of the SDK that was released in the past over two years, you already should be using IMDSv2 there, but you have to enforce it. And so that's where the problem is. And what was most problematic to me is now that I work for a company, we have run into the problem that there are some vendor solutions that we use that weren't allowing us to enforce IMDSv2 across all of our different accounts. And this is something I've heard from a number of other customers as well.And so I decided to create this list with vendors that I've had to deal with, vendors that other customers have had to deal with, in order to basically try and solve this problem once and for all. It's been multiple years now and a lot of these vendors, unfortunately, were also security vendors. And so that makes the conversation a little bit easier, to basically put them on this wall-of-shame and say, “You're a security vendor and you're not allowing your customers to enforce best practices of security.”Corey: I want to call on a couple of things around that. Originally the metadata service was used for a number of other things—still is—beyond credentials. It is not the credential service as envisioned by a lot of folks. The way that—also we'll find those credentials empty until there's an EC2 instance role, and those credentials will both be scoped what that instance does and automatically rotated in the fullness of time so they're not long-lived credentials that once you have them, they will last forever. This is, of course, a best practice and something you should be leveraging, but scope those credentials down, or you wind up with one of the ways that was chained together in the Capital One breach a few years ago.It's also worth noting that service would have been more useful earlier in time with a few functions. For example, you can use the metadata service to retrieve the instance tags about the EC2 instance. When I requested it in 2015, it was not possible. But they had released it in January of this year, 2022, long after we have all come up with workarounds for this, where we could have used that to set the hostname internally on the system, if you're looking for something basic and easy. It would have been something then you could have used to automatically self-register with DNS without having to jump through a whole bunch of hoops to do it manually.And you look at this, and it's wow, that's a whole lot of crappy tooling I can just throw into the trash heap of history you don't need anymore. But the IMSDv2, you're right, makes it a lot harder, there has to be a conversation, not just something you can sort of bankshot something off of to get access to it. And it's a terrific mitigation. What I've liked about your list of more or less shaming companies for doing this is, on the one hand, you have companies who take themselves off of the list as soon as it's up there. It's, “Oh, we love when people talk about us. Wait, what's that? They're saying something unkind? On the internet?” And they'll fix it, which honestly is better than I expected.And then every once in a while you'll see something that's horrifying of, “Oh, yeah, we're not vulnerable to that at all because we tell you to create permanent long-lived credentials, store them on disk and we'll use those instead.” And it's… that is, like, guaranteeing that no one is going to break down your door by making your walls out of tissue paper. Don't do that. Like, that has gone so far around the band that has come back around again. So, hopefully that got fixed.Scott: And I think you pointed out a couple of things I want to talk about with this is that, one, it has actually been very successful in terms of getting large vendors to make changes. Currently, of the seven vendors that have ever been listed there, are three of them have already made fixes and have been removed from the list. And the list has only been up for about a month. And so, in terms of getting enterprise solution vendors to make changes within, like, just a few weeks is very surprising to me. And these are things that people have been asking for for years now, and so it had motivated them a lot there.And the other thing that I want to point out is people have looked at the success that it's had and considered maybe we should make wall-of-shame lists, for all the things that we want. And I want to point out that there are some things about this problem, the IMDSv2 specifically, that make it work for having this wall-of-shame list like this. One of them is that not supporting or not allowing customers to enforce IMDSv2 is basically always bad. There is not a use case where you can make a claim—Corey: There is no nuance where that, in this case, is the thing to do, like having an open S3 bucket: There are use cases where that is very much something you want to do, but it's the uncommon case.Scott: Exactly. That I think is an important thing. Another thing is it's not just putting up a list, you know, like that is what people are seeing publicly, but behind the scenes, there's a lot of other things that are happening. One, I am communicating with various customers, customers that are reporting this issue to me, in order to try to better understand what's happening there, so that I can then relay that information to the company. So, I'm not just putting up the list; I'm also, behind the scenes, having conversations with these different companies to try to get timelines from them, to try to make sure that they are aware of the problem, they are aware that they're on this list, how to get off the list. So, there's that conversation happening.There's also the conversation that I'm happening with AWS in order to make various requests that AWS improve this for customers, to make this easier. And this is something that is public on that repo. I have my list of requests to AWS so that people can relay that to their own TAMs at AWS to basically say these are things we want as well. And so this includes things like, “I want an AWS account to have the ability to default to always be enforcing IMDSv2.” You know, so as an example, when you create an EC2 through the web console—which people can say, oh, you should always be using Infrastructure as Code; the reality is many folks are using the web console to create EC2s to do other changes.And when you create an EC2 in the web console, by default, it's going to allow IMDSv1 still. And so my request to AWS is, you should allow me to just default enforce IMDSv2. Also, the web console does not give you visibility into which EC2s are enforcing it and which ones are not. And also, you do not have the ability in the web console to enforce it. You cannot click on an EC2 and say, “Please enforce it now.”So, it's all these various, like, minor changes that I'm requesting AWS to do.Corey: It has to be done at instance creation time.Scott: Exactly. And so there is an API that you can make in order to change it afterwards, but that's only an API so you have to use the CLI or some other mechanism; you can't do it in the web console. But the other thing that I'm requesting AWS do is if security is a priority for AWS and they have all these other partners that are security companies, that they should be requiring their partners to also be enforcing this in their various products. So, if a partner is basically not allowing your AWS customers to enforce security best practices, then perhaps that partnership should be revoked in some way. And so that's a more aggressive thing that I'm asking AWS to do, but I think is reasonable.Corey: I'd also like them to get all of their own first-party services to support this, too.Scott: That's true as well. So, AWS is currently on the list. And so, they have one service, Data Pipelines, which if you are an AWS customer and you are using that service, you are not going to be able to enforce IMDSv2 in your environment. So, AWS themselves, unfortunately, is not allowing customers to enforce this. And then AWS themselves in their own production servers, we have seen indications that they do not enforce IMDSv2 on their own production servers.So, the best practice that they are telling customers to follow, they unfortunately are not following it themselves. And so the way in which we saw this was Orca is a security company that ended up finding this issue with AWS—and there's a lot of questions in terms of what all exactly they found—but they had this post that they called “Breaking Formation” in which they were somehow able to find—basically exploit to some degree—and again, it's unclear exactly what they were able to exploit here—but they were able to exploit AWS production servers that are responsible for the CloudFormation service. And in their blog post, they had a screenshot which showed that those production servers are not enforcing IMDSv2. And so AWS themselves is struggling with this as well, as are many customers. So, it's something that, you know, I put together this list of requests in hopes that AWS can make it easier for not only customers but also themselves to be able to enforce it.Corey: There are a lot of different things that we wish companies did differently, particularly if that company is AWS. Why is this the particular windmill that you've decided to tilt at given—let's say—it's not exactly slim pickins out there as far as changes that we wish companies would make? Obviously, you mentioned at one point, there is no drawback to enabling this, but a lot could be said for other aspects as well. Why is this one so important?Scott: So, in part, I personally have some, I guess, history with this [laugh], basically, IMDSv2, and so we can discuss this. This is back when Capital One had their breach in 2019, there was this Senator, Senator Ron Wyden, who sent this email over to AWS, to Steve Schmidt, who was the CISO at the time there and still is the CISO, and he basically—Corey: Now, he's head of security for all of Amazon.Scott: Yeah, yeah.Corey: CJ is now the AWS CISO. And he has the good sense to hide.Scott: Yeah. [laugh]. So, at the time, this Senator Ron Wyden had send over this email—and obviously it's not Senator Ron Wyden himself, you know, it's one of his, like, technical people on staff that is able to give him this information—and he sends this email to AWS saying, “Hey, this metadata service played a role in this very significant breach. Why hasn't this been fixed?” And Steve Schmidt responded, and because it's communications between a senator, I guess it has to become public.So, Steve Schmidt responds, saying that, “Hey, we never knew that this was an issue before,” is essentially what he responds with. And that irked me because I had reported this to AWS previously, as had many other people. So, there was a conference presentation by this guy Andrés Riancho at BlackHat, I believe in 2014, and he had presented previously in 2013, so it was a known issue; it had been around for a while. But I took the time to actually report it to AWS Security. So, I went through the correct channel of making sure that AWS was aware of a security concern, as a security researcher—so reporting it through that correct channel there—and provided Senator Ron Wyden with all this information.And so, then he then requested that the FTC begin a federal investigation into AWS, related to basically not following the best practices that security researchers have recommended. So, that was, kind of like, my early, I guess, involvement with this issue. So, it's something that I've been interested in for a while to make sure that this is resolved completely at some point.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle Cloud. Counting the pennies, but still dreaming of deploying apps instead of “Hello, World” demos? Allow me to introduce you to Oracle's Always Free tier. It provides over 20 free services and infrastructure, networking, databases, observability, management, and security. And—let me be clear here—it's actually free. There's no surprise billing until you intentionally and proactively upgrade your account. This means you can provision a virtual machine instance or spin up an autonomous database that manages itself, all while gaining the networking, load balancing, and storage resources that somehow never quite make it into most free tiers needed to support the application that you want to build. With Always Free, you can do things like run small-scale applications or do proof-of-concept testing without spending a dime. You know that I always like to put asterisks next to the word free? This is actually free, no asterisk. Start now. Visit snark.cloud/oci-free that's snark.cloud/oci-free.Corey: It's always fun watching where people come from, as far as the security problems that they call out. There was, I believe in the cloud security forum Slack, a thread of recently about what security issues are top-of-mind and that should be fixed as a baseline expectation. In fact, let me dig it out because that is one of those things that I think is well worth having the conversation properly on this.Good examples of risky, insecure defaults in AWS. And people are talking about IMDSv1, and they're talking about all kinds of other in-depth things, and my contribution to it was, “If I go and I spin up an AWS account, until I go out of my way, I'm operating as root in that account. That seems bad.” And a few responses to that were oh, the basically facepalming, “Oh, of course.” I wish that there were an easy way to get AWS SSO as the default because it is the right answer for so many different things. It solves so many painful problems that otherwise you're going to wind up stuck with.And this stuff is hard and confusing; when people are starting out with this for the first time, they're not approaching this from, “All right, how do I be extremely secure?” They want to get some work done. For fun a year ago, I spun up a test account—unattached to any organization—and because account aliases are globally unique, I somehow came up with the account ‘shitposting' because that's pretty much what I use it for. The actual reason I wanted that was I wanted something completely unattached from any other account that I could easily take screenshots from at any point, and the worst case scenario is okay, I've exposed some credential of my own in an account that has no privileged access to anything; I just have to apologize for all the Bitcoin mining now. And honestly, I think AWS would love that marketing campaign; they'd see my face on a billboard looking horrified. It'll be great.But I turned on every security service as I went because, of course, security is the most important thing. And there were so many to turn on, and the bill was approaching 50 bucks a month for an empty account. And it's. It starts to feel a little weird and more than a little wrong.Scott: [laugh]. Yeah, my personal concern in terms of default security features is really that problem of the cost controls, I think that that still is a big issue that AWS does not have cost controls such that when a student wants to try and use AWS for the very first time and somehow they spin up large EC2 instance, or they just you know, end up creating an access key and that access key gets leaked and somehow their account gets compromised and used for Bitcoin mining, now they're stuck with that large AWS bill. For a student who has no budget, is in debt, and now is suddenly being, you know, hit with multiple thousands of dollars on their bill, that I think is very problematic, and that is something that I wish AWS would change as a default is basically, if you are creating AWS account for the very first time, have some type of—I don't know how this would look, but maybe just be able to say, like, I don't ever want this AWS account to spend more than $100 per month, and I'm okay if you end up destroying all my data in the account because I have no money and money is more important to me than whatever data I may store in here.Corey: Make an answer to that question mandatory, just as putting a credit card in is mandatory. Because there are two extremes here. It's more or less the same problem of AWS not knowing who its customers are beyond an AWS account, but there's a spectrum somewhere between I'm a student who wants to learn how the cloud works, and my approach to security is very much the same. Don't let randos spin up resources in my account, and I don't ever want to be charged. If that means you turn off my “Hello World” blog post, okay, great.On the other end, it's this is Netflix. And this is our, you know, eight-millionth account that we're spending up to do a thing and what do you mean you're applying service quotas to it? I thought we had an understanding?—everything is a service quota, let's be clear—Scott: Yep.Corey: —or a company that's about to run a Superbowl ad. Yeah, there's going to be a lot of traffic there. Don't touch it. Just make it work. We don't care what it costs.Understanding where you fall on the cost perspective—as well as a security point of view of, “We're a bank, which means forget security best practices, we have compliance obligations that cannot be altered in this account and here's what they are.” There has to be a way that is easy and approachable for people to wind up moving that slider to whatever position best represents them. Because there are accounts where I never want to be charged a thing. And that's an important thing because—and I've been talking about this for a while because I'm convinced it's a matter of time—that poor kid who wound up trading on margin at Robinhood, woke up saw that he was seven-hundred-and-some-odd grand in debt and killed himself. When it all settled out, I think he turned something like a $30,000 profit when all was said and done, which just serves to make it worse.I can see a scenario in which that happens, and part of the contributors to it are that we used to see that the surprise bill for compromised accounts was 10, 15, 20 grand. Now, they're 70 to 90 because there are more regions, more services to run containers—because of course there are—and the payoff is such that the people exploiting this have gotten very practiced and very operationalized at spinning up those resources quickly, and they cost a lot very quickly. I mean, the third use case that they're not aiming at yet is people like me, where it's, oh, you have a free account that sandboxed; I want to get the high score on the free tier because all their fraud is attuned to you making money. With me, it's nope, just going to run up the store to embarrass Amazon. That's not a common exploit vector, but I'm very much here.Scott: [laugh]. Yep. And that also is the thing though: The Denial of Wallet attack is also a concern on AWS, as well, where you've written a blog post about this, how if you are able to make use of data transfer in different ways, you can run up very high multi-million dollar bills in people's AWS accounts and even AWS's own protections and defenses against trying to look for cost spikes and things like that is delayed by multiple hours. And so you can still end up spending a lot of money in people's accounts, or one thing that's wild is an S3 object locking; that feature, the whole purpose behind it is to ensure data can never be deleted. It exists for various compliance reasons, so even AWS themselves cannot delete certain data.So, if an attacker is able to abuse that functionality in somebody's account, they can end up locking data such that for the next 100 years, it can never be deleted and you're going to have to pay for that for the next 100 years inside your account. The only way of not paying for that anymore is to move everything that you have in an AWS account to a new account, and then ask AWS to delete that account, which is not going to be reasonable under most circumstances.Corey: Yeah, alternatively, it's one of those scenarios where well, the only other option is to start physically ripping hard drives out of racks in a bunch of different data centers. It's wild to me. It's such an attack surface that honestly I believe for the longest time that AWS Security is otherworldly good. And as we start seeing from these breaches, no, what really is otherworldly good is their ability to apply pressure to people not to go public with things they discover that they then wind up keeping quiet because once this whole Orca stuff came out, we started digging, and Aidan Steele found some stuff where you could just get unfiltered, raw outputs of CloudTrail events by setting up a couple of rules in weird ways.And that was a giant problem, and it was never disclosed publicly. I don't know if any of my events were impacted; I can't trust that they would have told me if they were. And for the first time, I'm looking at things like confidential computing, which are designed around well, what if you don't trust your cloud provider? Historically, I guess I was naive because my approach was, “Well, then you shouldn't be using the cloud.” Now it's, “Well, that's actually kind of a good point.”Because it's not that I don't trust my cloud provider to necessarily do what they're telling me. I just don't trust them to tell me what they're doing. And that's part of it. The, “Well, we found an issue, but you can't prove we had an issue, so we're going to say nothing.” And when it comes to light—because it always does—it erodes trust in a big way. And trust is everything in cloud.Scott: Yeah. And so with some of the breaches that have come out, I created another GitHub repo to start tracking all the different security incidents that I could find for the three cloud providers, Azure, GCP, and AWS. And so on there, I started listing not only some of the blog posts from security companies that had been able to exploit vulnerabilities in the cloud providers, but also just anything else that I felt was a security mistake in some way. And so there's a number of things I tried to avoid on there. Like, I tried to avoid listing something that's kind of like a business decision, for example, services that get released that don't have CloudTrail support. That's a security concern to me, but that's kind of a business decision that they decided to release a service before it supported all that functionality.So, I tried to start listing off all those different things in order to also keep track of you know, is there a security provider that's worse than the others? Are there any type of common patterns that I can see? And so I tried to look through some of those different things. And that's been interesting because also I really only focus on AWS, and so I haven't really known what all has been happening with GCP and Azure. And that was interesting because there's been two issues that have happened on AWS where the exact same issue happened on the other cloud providers. And so that tells me, that's concerning to me because that tells me tht—Corey: Because those are not discovered at the same time let's be clear.Scott: Yeah. These were, like, over a year apart. And so basically, somebody had found something on GCP, and then a year-plus later, somebody else found the exact same issue on AWS. And then similarly, there was an issue with Azure and then a year-plus later, same issue on AWS. And that's concerning because that tells me that AWS may not be monitoring what are the security issues that are impacting other cloud providers, and therefore checking whether or not they happen to themselves?That's something that you would expect a mature security team to be doing is to be monitoring what are public incidents that are happening to my competitors, and am I impacted similarly? Or what can I do to try and identify those issues, fix them, make sure they never happen? All those types of steps in terms of security maturity. And that's something that then I'm a little concerned of that we've seen those issues happen before. There's also, on AWS specifically, they have had a number of issues related to their IAM-managed policies that keep cropping up.And so they have had a number of incidents where they were releasing policies that shouldn't have been released in some way. And that's concerning that showed that they don't really have a change management process that you would expect. Usually, you would expect a company to be having GitHub PRs and approval processes and things like that, in order to make sure that there's a second set of eyes on something before it gets released.Corey: Particularly things of this level of sensitivity. This is not—like, I was making fun of them a day or two ago for having broken the copyright footer and not updating them since 2020 because instead of the ‘copyright' symbol, they used an ‘at' symbol. Minor stuff, but like that's fun to needle people about, but it doesn't actually matter for anything.Scott: Yeah.Corey: Security matters and mistakes show.Scott: Yeah. And so there had been some examples where they released a policy that was called, like, ‘cheese puffs something' and it's like, okay, that's clearly, like, an internal service of some sort. But I'd called them out and, like, I'd sent an email to AWS Security being like, “Hey, you need to make sure that you have change management processes on your IAM policies because one day you're going to do something that is bad.” And one day they did. They made a change to the read-only access policy, and that basically—they removed every single privilege, somebody had ended up, you know, internally, removed every single privileges to the read-only access policy and replaced it with a whole bunch of write privileges for, I think, the Cassandra service.And so, that was like, clearly they've made a mistake that they should have made sure they were correcting because you know, they had these previous incidents. Another kind of similar one was in December, there was a support policy where they had added S3 GetObject to that policy, and that was concerning in terms of have they just given all of their support employees access to everybody's content in their S3 buckets? And so AWS made some statements saying that there were other controls in place there so it wouldn't have been possible. But it's those types of things that [crosstalk 00:33:17]—Corey: Originally, those statements were made on Twitter, let's be clear here.Scott: Yes. Yeah. [laugh].Corey: And I feel like there's a—while I deeply appreciate how accessible a lot of their senior people are, I cannot point the executive leadership team at a client to some tweets that someone made. That is not a public statement of record that works on this.Scott: Exactly.Corey: They're learning. We'll get there sooner or later, I presume. I want to thank you for taking the time to speak with me, as always, I'll throw links to these repos into the [show notes 00:33:46], but if they want to know more what you have to say, where's the best place to find you?Scott: So, my Twitter, which, unfortunately, is a handle written in hex, but it's—‘dabbadoo' is how you would pronounce it, but it's probably easiest to see a link for it. So, that's probably the main place to look for me.Corey: That's why my old Twitter handle was my amateur radio callsign. I don't use that one anymore. It's just easier. And I think that's the right answer. Besides, given what you do, it's easy enough if people want your attention. They screw up badly enough, you'll come to them.Scott: Yep. [laugh].Corey: Scott, I really appreciate your time. Thanks again.Scott: Thank you.Corey: Scott Piper, Principal Engineer at Block and, more or less, roving security troubadour for lack of a better term. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice or a comment on the YouTubes saying that this episode is completely invalid because you wind up using the old version of the metadata service and you've never had a problem. That you know of.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

On Part One of this two-part series, you were introduced to Matt and Brian from the ACCEL Gaming Division. We discussed their background as it pertains to blockchain and gaming, involvement with ACCEL as well as P2E Gaming and their use of and integration of NFTs.On today's episode of the Podcast, Scott, Eric and Ryan welcome back Matt from the ACCEL Gaming Division to discuss how P2E Gaming, NFTs, and two exclusive projects that the ACCEL Gaming Division are working on!-----------------------------------------Episode Transcript:[Scott] On today's episode of the ACCEL Podcast, we dive deeper into the world of blockchain games and their use in the NFT World. As always, my name is Scott and I am Eric and I'm Ryan. You're listening to the ACCEL Podcast defining a decentralized view future, One listen at a time.[Scott] Thanks for tuning into part two of our series on blockchain gaming. We wanted to do something a little different this time with regards to putting the podcast together, and what we came up with was to survey the community or rather solicit questions on topics of P2E Gaming, Play-to-Earn Gaming and their use and integration with NFTs. [Ryan] So Matt, I wanted to welcome you back onto the ACCEL Podcast. How are we doing? [Matt]Good, pretty good. Thanks for having me. [Ryan] Always our pleasure. But right out the gate I feel like we've got to set the record straight as one of the leads of the ACCEL gaming division. What kind of games do you like to play? [Matt] Honestly, I like hard games. I've always been a big fan of platformers. My favorite game when I was young was Sonic. Still to this day I also love RPGs. I played most of the Final Fantasy series and a lot of the current very modern RPGs. I'm currently playing Eldon Ring. I think it's an absolute masterpiece and I'm honestly up for anything that seems some sort of a challenge or a good build up on an RPG element. [Eric] So Matt, I wanted to go back to the basics from our earlier episode in relation to what P2E or Play-to-Earn games are on. Maybe you could give us some examples of the P2E Games, what blockchains they exist on, and maybe some games that currently aren't in the space that you think could come to the blockchain. [Matt] I think the Play-to-Earn model, even though not formally it has existed for the longest time. And just calling out to our previous example. In the previous episode, RuneScape was a game that people actually started trading items for your money very long ago. And then that model was also formally implemented in Diablo Three and casually seen in World Warcraft, where it was a bit more informal. So the P2E aspect of trading time for some reward. Usually money has existed for the longest time. You can call on online casinos, online card and poker platforms, et cetera. At least those would be most of the games that would be outside of the space. And if we were to go inside the space, you have a lot of gains that have existed for a while. You have mostly yield farming gains, kind of like Axie Infinity, Crypto Cars, Bomb Crypto. A lot of these have very good options as well, and I think it's gotten pretty popular these days, so those are great examples. [Eric] So my question, can you be more type specific. In your opinion, what are the best blockchains or the best platforms that relate to the P2E Games, which makes it the easiest to navigate. [Matt] I would say anything that's currently built upon the most mainstream platforms, like you have Ripple, you have Ethereum, you have Bitcoin, which not a lot of games are tied to. Most of them are tied to Ethereum and Ripple. So I would look into something with that. You also have BNB and other big options, and it generally is going to be tied to whatever the devs think is the most stable platform to build upon. [Eric] All right, so now that you touched upon with the devs, in a devs opinion, let's say, or in your own opinion, if you're acting as a Dev, what would be the most profitable? [Matt] I would say just not to give out names because I would get burned for that. But whichever has the most potential for growth, because as the game grows, as the community grows, as the base grows, so does everything else tied to it, the tokens, the rewards, and everything gets better. So whatever is going to have the biggest room to grow is going to be the thing that's going to give the most returns. [Scott] So I guess it kind of follow up question of that is, I completely understand that. I think we see this craze with there being talk about Solana and Matic being big for gaming, but the big thing is for it to be scalable. Can you kind of give us a little bit of an explanation how these P2E Games are kind of profitable for the developers, even going back to the online poker and stuff like that, how do you actually make money off of it? And how is it that you're not throwing money at making these games that just don't have any returns on them? [Matt] Yeah, it usually comes down to how you model the economy of the game itself. For example, the real money trading market and Diablo Three actually had a transaction Commission for every buy and every sale. So that is also true with a lot of the current crypto games. There is a transaction fee that is being used in every single transaction by yourself. Kind of like being repetitive here, but that's usually how devs can still hold a pool of the big amount of those resources to make sure that they don't run out, to make sure that they can scale over time to make sure that tokens don't get overcapped and to its own. It's similar to how every company operates when you're first starting out in a company, you're always going to have some sort of shareholding because you're invested in the project and they can't really pay you a full salary. So they pay you in equity that gets you involved. And that makes you be sure that if the company does well and it scales, then so is going to be your share. [Scott] That makes sense. So it's all about kind of making sure at the early stages you're bringing in the right people and then making sure you have the right backing. I guess that kind of ties into what my next question would kind of be. And it's a commonly asked question that we see a lot over in the ACCEL community is how does P2E Games work in attracting people that aren't currently interested in the crypto space? Are you seeing kind of trends that are starting, that are really kind of pushing for that game, by experience, by outside investors that maybe might be involved in investing, but not in crypto or even individuals that might not invest at all? [Matt] I would like to break that into different viewpoints for different kinds of profiles. First, as an investor, why would this be like an important thing to you? Because as an investor, like crypto projects actually have a very good standpoint in the fact that they can actually have a bigger growth than most of traditional investments. So it's a very attractive market to get into. Also, as the game skills, as the community scales, you can also bring a lot of other things to the table where we touched a bit on the last episode about things like fractal ownership. So you don't even have to bring money all the time. You don't have to bring funding on the time. Maybe you own your musician, you want to stay a part of your music. Ownerships are all right. So you can get people that get that NFT can get royalties, and there are so many other valuable things that you can actually just convert into this game or market. And then from the player's side, obviously most of the people you have people that have been in crypto for a while, and you have people that have games for a while. For those who have games for a while, like me, it's really cool because now I can actually sit for hours in front of a screen, play, be good at a game and actually get something out of it, rather than my mom telling me to go to bed. So that's from one side and then you have the other side, which is the people that are in crypto who usually are more into the investment side, they actually have a fun way of interacting with their tokens, a fun way of watching those stakes and rewards and investments grow in a way that you're more of an active participant into everything. And it's a bit fun rather than just sitting there and watching candles on a chart. Not that's a bad thing, but there's more to life than that. [Ryan] So Matt, I wanted to backtrack for a moment and specifically discuss the earn in Play-to-Earn games. Could you discuss how and what exactly players earn in these games and how NFTs come into play? [Matt] Absolutely. Well, the earned part of any interaction that involves real money is done through tokens. 99% of the time is done through tokens. When you go to the horse tracking bed. Like you get this little slips of paper that you can later and cash in if you win. When you go to the casino, you get chips that you can cash in if you win. And sort of every single game has that mechanic built in where you win tokens inside the game and then you convert your tokens to get outside of the game. And this draws a very strong parallel with how everything in the physical world currently works. So the model is not really that different. And where do NFTs come into play here? A lot of these can usually be done or used as collection based items of a Rarity based items. And you can hold these NFTs that would be implemented into the game. And as the NFT or the usage of the character or the item or anything that it is gets more popular and more popular and it increases in value because the community perceives it to be rare or to be more valuable than others. That's a really good way for people to get involved is like, if you have the sense that an NFT is going to become popular, you can get it minted early and then when people use it, when it becomes popular, and what increases value and someone wants to rent it off of you or someone wants to permanently buy it off of you, it'll most likely have increased in value from when you brought it in. [Eric] So Matt, touching on NFTs and regarding NFTs because we know how huge they are now in the crypto space, how they function within the P2E Garning model. Could you talk a little bit about that? And ACCEL's recent acquisition of the Soldiers of the Metaverse NFT collection and how the SOTM NFTs will be tied into ACCEL and What I'm starting to hear their Mortal Kombat style P2E Game that is currently in their development, which I know you have a tremendous impact on. [Matt] Oh yeah, it's been such a fun time to work on the model for the Satin acquisition. And I think you have the basics, which not all of the NFT's are currently implemented in the game. We have a decent line up of characters, but not all of them as of yet. So the NFT in itself will increase in value as the game increases in popularity. Because who doesn't want to own a very rare Batman comic? If you're into comics, it's sort of the same community perception that makes you geo cards, rare, magic cards rare, like comic books are very rare or old collectibles, et cetera. Those things are very important because they tie back to someone's ability to own the NFT, believe in the project, but not necessarily play the game. There's people that don't like fighting style games. There's people that maybe they didn't like how complicated certain inputs might be, or they might not be their favorite time type of game. So that allows and gives people the flexibility to have something sticked into the game, not necessarily have to play it because you don't like the mechanics of the game itself, and then you can still participate somewhat into how everything's going to go up into the game. [Eric] So, Matt, if it's possible to could you just elaborate a little bit on the beta access in relation to the NFTs? [Matt] Oh, yeah, absolutely. That's something that has come up recently. The game is currently in beta access. We're working with a limited pool of people that are currently testing the game and helping out with ironing the bugs and making sure that we find anything that might be exploitable, et cetera. Because when you're going to stake tokens into a game, you want to make sure that everything is stable and fair as possible. The beta access, I think, has been going on, not for too long. It's still going to be out there for a bit. So if someone wants to get involved, I think it would be a good idea to look up the project. And obviously as the game goes on and it moves to like a pretty lease sort of endpoint, all the other questions are going to be answered over time. Right now, I can tell you I've actually played it and it's really fun. And the mechanics, at least the fighting game mechanics are really solid, not great with inputs, but that didn't stop me from actually just getting a combo or two in. [Ryan] Matt, that's good stuff. That's good stuff. But what if I'm not interested in playing this game? So is there an incentive to purchase and hold one of the Soldiers NFTs if I'm not interested in playing this game? Yeah, there would be, because for the same reason that I own a big ass Batman hand painting, because it's more related to how people perceive the value of the community around the game itself, rather than you just playing the game. There's a whole bunch of people that have a million posters or a lot of things, and I'm not good at drawing, but it's not going to stop me from going out and investing in something that I believe is very well drawn and stuff like that, because as I said before, it allows me to participate in something and being a part in something without actually having to play it. If I own a soldier and the game becomes popular, that's also going to benefit me because my soldiers both the Mint price if it were to be reissued or new soldiers were to be issued, and the acquisition price for my own NFT as well is going to go up. So even if I don't play, there are still ways for me to benefit off of the project. [Scott] So I guess, Matt, my next question would kind of be for you. We brought in a developer recently that was added to the team that kind of specializes in staking pool build out. And one of the things he does is NFT building out for staking pools. And it's kind of a new concept that's really starting to catch on. And with passive income being a huge part of ACCEL, can you kind of elaborate a little bit on how these NFT Staking pools work and what you kind of see them doing in the future? [Matt] Yes, I think I am not an expert in the topic, but honestly, it's one of the trends that I've seen come up a lot recently. And the idea of an Ft staking, if I'm not mistaken, would be among the lines of something similar to rent, kind of like you can put your entity out there and people can use it. And obviously, for every win that the character has, you get a bit of a share. And that is also true for other games where you actually are the owner of something, but you still get royalties if someone else rents it out for usage. And a common topic that comes to mind for that is, again, just the RMT market and Diablo Three, where not only you could purchase weapons, you could actually just borrow them for a day, but you have a lot of these very good options to own something and not having to sell it for someone else to be able to use it. And at the same time, given that you didn't have to sell it, you also were able to accrue, one might say rent or profit off of it, kind of like in the horse track how the jockey isn't really the one that owns the horse. So the guy that owns the horse still gets profits if the horse wins and the jockey get profits if the horse wins. So it's sort of like this mixed ownership model that allows people, as we said before, people that might not have zero interest in playing the game. They can stake an NFT that is actually currently tied into the game for people that do want to play the game but may not have an NFT ready at the moment for them to be able to play, to stick to win, and then they both profit a lot from that interaction. [Scott] Okay, Matt, so I guess they got a little bit of a follow up question for you, because I think the big thing that we kind of see with what we were just talking about, people want to be able to profit off of NFTs, and I think something we really want to see is the ability to bring our own art or ideas to life. Is this something that you kind of see how some of the games have to is the ability for people to bring their own ideas, their art into fruition? [Matt] That's kind of a hard question, and I want to divide it into two parts. I would say both yes and no. And the reason for that is that it can be done. But that doesn't mean every project is going to implement it. Why? Because you can build the Game around the NFTs, or you can build the NFTs around the game, which is kind of like the example with Axie and like the current games that you have out there, because the NFTs are specifically designed to work in a pattern in a way that the game itself implements, rather than the Game having to adapt to any new NFTs because there are not a lot of interoperability projects. And interoperability. What it means is basically a way for the same item to work in different ways in different games. There is, I think, the Loot project, and it's really, really cool because every single game can infer the stats of the items themselves. Like they just give you the NFT, so you can basically implement it in any way that you'd like. But that also requires a lot of manpower. It also requires you to be able to implement something that bridges that interaction with a random NFT. And that is not only rendering or models or physics or whatever it is, it's something that is really hard to plan when basically the NFT world is endless. So, yes, I believe there might be a project in the future. I can see projects coming up that sort of implement that, but I also see it's going to be very hard to do. So I think we might still be as a community as a whole. Like the NFT community still might be a bit far off from getting that done. It's definitely a huge stream to have, and it's definitely something that I would look forward to. But at the current time, with the current capabilities, I think we're still a bit far away from that. [Eric] So, Matt, it seems like a lot of these P2E Games require some sort of initial investment at first to play. But do you know of any games that don't have any buy in but still use the P2E Model? [Matt] Yeah, I can think of a few, honestly. There are, if I'm not mistaken, at least one or two games that have that implemented. But to be more specific, I want to talk about an upcoming game. It's called PHLIP. You're going to see it soon in the announcements, if not already. And this sort of ties back to the previous question, which is something that I like a lot. And PHLIP is one of the first games that sort of implemented this kind of freestyle mode into the NFTs because it's just a card game, but it's really fun, and I suggest you check it out. [Eric] So, Matt, you've intrigued me a little bit here about PHLIP, but you kind of gave us some info, but you really didn't let us know what it's about. Could you just give us a little more so our listeners can really get a greater grasp of what PHLIP is about? [Matt] So basically, yeah, this game has a similar model to Cards Against Humanity, but implements a lot of more of the freestyle way where you can come up with your own phrases. There's going to be cards that you could mint as NFTs, and they're also going to follow that model that we've mentioned about before. The general idea of the game, if you haven't played Cards Against Humanity, is to just come up with the funniest possible phrase to an image. An image is going to be thrown out, and then you just throw your cards. Whoever gets the funniest answer is going to win. And then cards are going to have different rewards. And basically, like, if you get voted by the judge, you're also going to get some rewards. And that's a really fun way of getting involved playing a game. If you're currently not involved in the crypto space that you like to have fun and all these fun games, that is a really good gate into whatever it is because you can be funny. And if you're funny, you have currently found a way to make that funny profit for you without having to go to stand up comedy and Saturdays. [Ryan] So, Matt, how do you feel about the Soldiers of the Metaverse project or even the PHLIP project? Are you guys, ACCEL or does ACCEL have any special plans to keep it fresh and relevant for new players coming in? [Matt] Yeah, that's a great question, and I think it would be important or interesting for people to know about that, because you might think that people that come in and made first come, first served, and they're the only ones that are going to get good rewards with time. And that's not true. The idea is that we want to bring in as many people as possible. We want to bring in people not only right now, we want to bring in more and more people as the project evolves and grows and implement new mechanics, implement ladder, implement tournaments, implement different sorts of things that will make the game evolve over time, like the soldiers of the metaphors that you're seeing right now that you're going to see at launch will not be the solution of the matters that you see two to three years from now. We want to make sure that this project goes on for a long while, and that requires a very delicate balance of a lot of things, but also a lot of work from our part to keep it fresh and making sure there's always, like, different things. So the community is always excited about the next thing that's going to come, and that's the same for Flip. I think while being a simpler game, there's still a lot of different things that can be done for that. So that's something that we're also looking into. [Eric] So, Matt, is there anything else you can tell our listeners about how we kind of plan to tie the ACCEL gaming ecosystem together as a whole. [Matt] Yeah, actually I have a very good nugget for everyone out there listening and that is that we are working every game in such a way that it is either directly or indirectly tied to one another. So if you're a part of one, you're always going to have preferred access to the next one. You can get probably early access to some of the newer games. You can get preferred staking when converting to one game to another. There's a million surprises coming off and I would strongly suggest that if you are not an existing holder you can come in now. There's a lot of cool things coming in, especially with NFT minting. So that's going to allow you to be part of a very select group of people that get to test a lot of these things early. [Eric] Once again, I want to thank all our listeners for tuning in again today to the ACCEL podcast. Please feel free to join us on Telegram or check the show notes for our link tree. [Ryan] And Matt, thank you for your time and for being a part of the ACCEL podcast, especially this two part mega episode. As Eric said previously, check out the show notes for all of our links and our link tree and even a full transcript of this episode. You want to go back and read some of the things that were said as always sit back, and ACCEL!-----------------------------------------The Information presented in this podcast is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, and without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose. The Information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice. The Information provided from or through this podcast is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional broker or financial advisor.You understand that you are using any and all information from this podcast at your own risk.

Scott Couvillon is CEO and Executive Strategy Director at Trumpet Advertising, an agency that strives to create purpose-aligned, believable ads. Scott says that companies succeed with their advertising, not only because their creative product promotion is compelling, but more so when the ads “compel an honest connection between a person and a brand.” Scott says there is a lot of talk in the advertising industry about purpose. What is more important is “What do you do with it once you've got it.”  Scott holds that advertising needs to be aligned with a company's core beliefs. Organizations need to think holistically and ask, “If you put purpose in the center, how do you: Get the company culture aligned with that purpose?” Get the advertising and communications pieces aligned with that purpose?” and  Get the customer experience aligned with that purpose?” Advertising agencies typically work on communications – but may neglect a company's culture and customer experience components. Focus on product characteristics does not build relationships with customers, instill customer loyalty, or keep a company's product from becoming a commodity. Trumpet clients have a common understanding – “They will sell more product by selling that product within the context of what they stand for.” Scott explains, “Brand connection is an invitation to participate in a culture that is very intentional.”  Holistic alignment is what sells premium brands like Apple phones and BMW SUVs. If you don't have holistic alignment, Scott says, the best you can hope for is that people will not dread the absence of holistic alignment. The product is okay . . . and the customer only hopes the experience won't be bad. Because transformational organizational alignment involves a deeper client-agency relationship beyond mere “communications management,” Trumpet typically engages with organizations in one of two ways:  High-level management will bring Trumpet in to force “purpose alignment” on its marcom operations.  Trumpet will start out working with marcom. Once Trumpet has proven itself, it uses its analytical performance to talk with the leadership team about a more holistic brand and organizational alignment. Scott presents the example of one client, a “very profitable credit union” that Trumpet turned into “a very meaningful credit union.” “Meaning” made the credit union “even more profitable.” Although increased profit wasn't the first goal, it was the result of the client's focus on purpose. He refers to Raj's Conscious Capitalism, and these “firms of endearment,” as “the companies that we don't dread.”  Communications should be locked in with company culture and customer experience, all three driven by clairvoyance and purpose. Scott asks key questions. “What is the core belief?” “What would the world lose if this company went out of business?” and then delivers an indicting punchline to the last query: “If the answer is a product, then you're a commodity and somebody else can do what you do. He warns that commoditization often happens when companies internalize the advertising function, communicate on self-serve platforms, and focus more on selling product than on “what they stand for.” Scott can be found on his agency's website at: https://trumpetadvertising.com/. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined today by Scott Couvillon, CEO and Executive Strategy Director at Trumpet Advertising based in New Orleans, Louisiana. Welcome to the podcast, Scott. SCOTT: Nice to meet you, finally. ROB: Yeah, awesome to have you on here. Sometimes these things can take a little bit to schedule, but this is the moment. Why don't you start off by giving us the rundown on Trumpet Advertising and what your superpower is? SCOTT: I guess the thing about a superpower is normally the world can either see you running really fast or a human flying, and ours is maybe a little more backstage than that. But it's nonetheless clear to us and to the clients we're working with. It's pretty simple. It's the focus on believability and being purposeful as an organization as an underpinning for the things that we actually do every day, which for us is being an advertising agency. For them, it's running operations and trying to grow their organization. We just try to do that a little bit more meaningfully than I would say agencies that we've all worked for, and even in some cases the agency that we were 10 or 12 years ago. The idea that agencies are responsible for compelling creative is a prerequisite, and let's just assume that all good agencies can buy media and do the analysis and reporting and optimize and come up with great ideas for that engaged attention. But there's a difference between compelling creative and trying to compel an honest connection between a person and a brand. The most successful companies right now are doing a better job of that. Advertising works. We know that. Analytics tell us. America being overweight and in debt, advertising is alive and well. But not every business is able to truly create the connection that allows month over month growth to be sustained in the long term. That requires a more fundamental relationship than just window to window promotion success. ROB: That sort of strategy, to really execute it, it seems like that would require necessarily partnership from the client as well. How do you think about that and that initial client-agency dance of figuring out if they're really interested in that level of connection and genuineness in what they're doing? SCOTT: There's a lot in that. How do we proactively go after business? What is our posture or the conversation when we're, for example, answering an RFP or an open call for agencies? The reality is that if we are dealing exclusively with marketing communications, it would be very difficult to think so holistically about the spirituality of an organization in order to bring some level of alignment between what we're saying externally through communications and what the experience with the company is ultimately going to be if our only connection to the organization is marcom. So yeah, frankly, it requires involvement and buy-in from the leadership team. The relationship's got to go a couple of ways. Either we have a very legacy-oriented, thoughtful, and extremely intentional CEO that brings us in and forces us upon marcom, or we'll work within the marketing communications sphere for a while, really prove our practical worth, that we have good ideas and good tactical execution that shows that we know what we're doing, and then we almost use analytical performance with the leadership team to start having conversations about more of a holistic brand alignment at the organizational level, not just within communications on its own. And again, it clicks for some organizations and definitely not others. ROB: If we can, let's get a little bit more concrete with an example. Is there a particular client you can talk about that typifies what the engagement looks like, what the structure is, as well as the go-to-market message? What's that look like? SCOTT: We are not category specialists. This is a methodology and a perspective that is applicable to a very specific mindset of an organization. What our clients have in common is that they believe they will sell more product by selling that product within the context of what they stand for. They're not constantly just putting something to buy out there; they're being clairvoyant on what people are buying into via that purchase. Structurally, from a relationship standpoint, we have a big financial institution in Texas and expanding out into more and more markets every year, it seems like; we work in healthcare, we work in tourism and destination management, hospitality, but what they all have in common and the structure that's the same is by identifying the purpose of the organization – what is truly the core belief? Our industry has beaten the tar out of “figure out your why and your core motivation” and all that stuff, but what our industry has done a very poor job with is getting beyond the cosmetic application of that “why.” It's easy to turn why we exist into beautiful brand creative, but if the brand, if the company, isn't living that in any real way, it's disingenuous at best and a lie at worst. Our scopes are focused on articulating what that belief is, getting that right and bought into by every level of the organization. When we were working with that financial institution, it was very much led by really, truly an unbelievable CEO who pulled his executive team along with him and really got them all bought in. There were years of internal transformation about “Look, this is the organization that we were, and this is the organization that we are going to be. We're going to move from a very profitable credit union into a very meaningful credit union, and that meaning is going to make us even more profitable.” The profit didn't come first. It got relegated to a result. That became really, really clear, because there became a spirituality at that organization that employees, stakeholders, customers, everybody was truly able to validate and then buy into. They were more than just checking account for a free toaster. The way that process went was getting very clear on that narrative, figuring out what the utilitarian expressions of that narrative were going to be – what products were they going to stop offering? What were the kinds of products they were going to develop? Because their product offering was going to be truly a manifestation of what they stood for, not just different ways for them to make money for shareholders and stakeholders. That kind of internal, truly product holistic thinking first prior to a total renaming and a new identity, new uniforms for employees – how are we going to retrain those employees in the new spirituality of the company while we're handing them a new shirt, as opposed to just handing them a new shirt? That's really how these things, in a perfect sense, go when people are buying into it wholly. There's been plenty of clients that we've talked about this upfront, we've gone through the purpose identification in each standpoint, and it inflects in some of the product expressions and some of the customer experience in a retail sense – certainly we're talking to it from a content standpoint in advertising, marketing, and social media stuff – but never really get invited into the inner sanctum of operations and HR practices, orientation and internal transmission to every employee at the organization. As an egomaniac, those aren't my favorite scopes because we're not able to do the true holistic alignment with every element of the business with a core belief. But it's better than just offering free shipping and extra cheese and hoping for month over month improvements. ROB: Right. It's necessary for you to have the conversation at a higher level in the organization, which is usually where you want to engage. Maybe not sometimes; sometimes the CMO has tons of power and big org. But when you're talking about essentially a credit union, a bank, it's a commodity to people, just like an airline can mostly be a commodity to people unless you are let's say Southwest and you do the work over time to sustain a differentiator. Even when everyone else is charging you for a checked bag. SCOTT: I think you look at the companies that get put into a very specific cohort that we pay a lot of attention to. It's really these believable, more purposeful companies. Raj Sisodia, great TED Talk, talks about conscious capitalism, talks about these firms of endearment. It's the ones that always get talked about at ANA and every conference in our industry. It's the Caterpillars and the Starbucks and the Disneys and of course the Apples and Intuit. It's that category. It doesn't have to be consumer. But these are organizations that are truly aligned, inside and outside, with an idea, not aligned more practically with an IP or a product or a manufacturing process. You bring up Southwest; identical equipment, flying from the exact same building as other companies. It's as commoditized as rice. But there is an affinity and a preference for airlines that we all have and that we use for specific purposes. Yes, there are times that we pinch the nose and it's the cheapest or it's the only one going where I need to be, but we're dreading that experience. And when we go in as a consumer with dread, the best you can have is the absence of dread. I defy you to find a leadership team whose mission statement is “Let's provide an absence of dread to the world.” That's not going to make our stock price soar. But that's where they're landing, whereas Southwest, as you bring up – JetBlue I'd say is another one. They've got a commodity product, and they've really focused on the only thing that there is to focus on, which is the morality and the spirituality of the organization and allowing people to really buy into it. Their turnover is lower. Vendor relationships are better. It is an easier company to run because there is alignment beyond the practical. Don't be late and don't lose bags. ROB: How disruptive – you talk about that feeling of dread. Names pop to my mind. Airline names pop into my mind when you say “dread.” What a heck of a brand. You're the airline of last resort and of dread, but hey, it's cheap. But let me digress a little bit from there. Walk me through the origin story of Trumpet. How did Trumpet start and get to be where it is now? What's that journey look like? SCOTT: Trumpet was founded in '97. It fell out of another agency. Just three guys took the phones and ran and opened up a new agency. That's kind of the late '90s agency founding story. It was a designer and a writer and an account guy, and they started with some real clients, and despite being in a Tier 3 city like New Orleans, over the years they've done some great work for clients like Gatorade. Not nobodies. Launched FreshDirect in New York. It wasn't just car dealerships and plaintiffs attorneys. In fact, those are the two categories we won't work in. They really grew into a creative powerhouse when I was exposed to them in the late '90s and met the founders. At the time, I was in San Francisco. I'm from New Orleans, but I was working out there for years and was loving that, and every day being the dumbest guy in the room and just trying to stay on my toes and not get discovered. But then when I came back to New Orleans, I got reintroduced to Trumpet. The idea at the time was they had amazing creative, but really not a strong, or as strong as it could've been, strategic underpinning. So I joined, maybe narcissistically, thinking that there was an opportunity to bring some strategic scaffolding together with the creative superiority they were wielding. It took a while to be heard and understand it and figure out how our personalities were going to coalesce, but getting into about the last four or five years here, we were on a clip, winning advertising agency accounts like an advertising agency does, talking about case studies and making result promises and case studies that are completely non-verifiable. But we didn't really have a perspective that made us different. We were frankly commoditizing ourselves with all of the other agencies that are able to execute, come up with ideas and get them into the market. But the development of this perspective – and not only adding the brand consulting mindset, if not the brand consulting scope to our scopes of work with clients, but that shift of perspective to, how do we stop lying? How do we stop running ads that test well and analytically prove in the near term that they work better than the old stuff? How do we let advertising be not a short-term tool, but really have a long-term impact? And how do we stop talking about things like brand ads as unmeasurable? How do we start talking about brand ads as being really the only promise we're making? Advertising, when it's seen as a trigger or stimulus for sales, if that's how you see it, that's what it's going to be. That has become the most ignorable stuff in a consumer's day to day, when they're seeing on average 3,600 ads a day in different format. And we're calling three from the day prior. There's a ton of waste. Advertising agencies say, “Yeah, but the waste is so cheap, you can afford it.” But when you look at advertising as truly an invitation to participate in a culture of a company – even when you're promoting, even when you're doing something of a more retail nature, but definitely when you're doing it in a brand sense – you have to be making plain and clear what experience you're going to have if you were to engage with this company via a product or social media visit or whatever those things may be, so that that experience can actually validate the promise we made in advertising, because that's when you get the connection that Raj is talking about in Conscious Capitalism. Those are the companies that we don't dread. In fact, those are the companies that we re-purchase from. The Apple phone that costs twice as much as a Samsung is not twice as good. It just costs twice as much, but we don't think twice about it because we have an affinity. We have a preference for that company, and if they tell us we need a watch – I didn't, but many people did go and get one. People don't want an SUV from BMW. They want the ultimate driving machine. They want the connection with BMW, and they just had too many kids. That brand connection being meaningful isn't throwaway, unmeasurable stuff. It's frankly the most important stuff, especially when the organization sees it as an invitation to participate in a culture that is very intentional, because the leadership that's approving the ads is also using the same idea that's easy to capture in ad creative and doing the harder work of trying to figure out how to keep that alive or to program that into the organization itself and into the customer experience itself. ROB: That's definitely a very compelling challenge. I think one part of the journey that's worth underscoring for you is – we're always talking to the challenger, the independent agencies, not the holding companies. But you've got even a different perspective. Those are quite often typically operated by somebody who was there on Day 1. Talk about your own transformation from joining the agency to being the CEO now. SCOTT: There's been a lot of leadership and structural capitulations over the years. Let me start by saying, too, that while we were a small agency in New Orleans – at our biggest, we were under 50. We really enjoy remaining at about that 20-to-25-person range, because we focus primarily on creative and strategy and project management. We do not have PR and social media and media planning and buying under roof. Now, we have media planners, but they're working with external groups in our network to plan and buy media and reconcile and optimize and all that stuff. The reason for that is because every place that we've ever worked, when you have a media department, that media department's mentality is kind of what every client that we win gets. And while it might be appropriate for consumer packaged goods, it might not be right for pharma or a healthcare system. But tough; that's our media director and that's your plan. Not all flowcharts look the same, but they could. That's the risk. We don't think downstream execution is unimportant; we just don't want to subject a client we haven't met yet to a downstream execution philosophy. That's how you wind up becoming a categorical agency, and we're trying to avoid that in order to fully administer the perspective regardless of category. That said, when you see the agency that way, it's not like you have a CEO sitting atop all these profit silos, because the only silos that are at Trumpet are really creative and strategy, and then the execution that comes from our client services division, which is split between project management and relationship management. But regardless, it's not a very complicated business to run. That said, the leaders of these disciplines are really empowered. The distance between CEO and the leaders of the silos is not very distant. But in order for the vision to not be lost in day to day execution, that's really where my focus remains. Right now we're in the process of trying to extract ourselves to the degree that we can from the day to day so that we can focus on the collective vision of the day to day. I say, how do we think a little less about the busyness of the agency and think more about the business of the agency? Not to be cavalier, but clients come and go, but the agency is either going to be defined by our relationships and whether we're right about to get fired or our clients love us, or we're going to have an idea as an agency that clients are going to find valuable or they won't. That's really what we're shifting to: trying to make it very, very clear, inside and out – just like we profess to our clients – let's make Trumpet a place very clearly inside and out that our employees and our clients are all clairvoyant on our value. Because if they want it, we'll be around for a while, and our retention increases and our connection with our employees increases the more transparent and clear we are about what's different about working here and working someplace else. There's no greater commodity than an advertising agency. ROB: It doesn't take a lot of capital to stand up something. SCOTT: Yeah. It takes three people and a client, and sometimes not a client. And sometimes not three people. [laughs] But there's a lot of talk in our industry right now about purpose. This should not be the 75000th purpose podcast because there's plenty of that. What this should be is one of the few that says, what do you do with it once you've got it? If you take it and run it into brand ads that are beautiful but aren't what the company is really rallying around, I think you're frankly doing a disservice. You're probably better off sticking in promotion land. That's been around since the '50s. ROB: Oh yeah, that's a well-trod lane as well. I think what's interesting maybe also is stepping into that CEO role, what are some things you might wish you had done sooner stepping into that seat? SCOTT: Actually, I've thought a lot about this. I mentioned this to you, but there's a difference between showing up to work every day as an account person or a team member or director of a discipline and trying to do the whole. But I think what has happened successfully here, in my personal path and matriculation, is we didn't miss the opportunity to shift from being in the mailroom to being an account guy to being a strategist to now being CEO. It's not like strategy is king now, like the ops guy takes over the CEO role and now ops is king, or the marketing guy takes over the CEO role and marketing is king. We are being disciplined enough to have Trumpet become associated operationally with an idea. There is very intentional alignment between Trumpet as an organization and the products and services that we provide. So those products and services being rendered on behalf of this portfolio of clients does not wholly define Trumpet. There's an idea of Trumpet: how do we make companies more believable? Advertising has a role in that, but advertising is a very narrow solution to that. Brand consulting or internal operational consulting has a role in that, but operational consulting is a narrow solution to the complex problem of how you get the customer experience, separate and apart from the company culture, separate and apart from the communications from that company, aligned with not a product, but a belief. Product innovation: awesome, you need it. But it's a very narrow solution to the satisfaction of that complex problem. There's three legs to that stool. If you put purpose in the center, how do you get the company culture aligned with that purpose? How do you get the advertising and communications pieces aligned with that purpose, and how do you get the customer experience aligned with that purpose? That requires very intentional, top-down commitment from the organization, and in our case it requires us challenging those organizations to think that holistically. Advertising agencies typically just exist in that communications third. I think we have a responsibility not to take over the whole, but to understand or to be able to provide a perspective that not only should communications be tied, locked in with the company culture and the customer experience, but all three should really be driven by clairvoyance and purpose. What is the core belief? What would the world lose if this company went out of business? If the answer is a product, then you're a commodity and somebody else can do what you do. But how you bring that product to market and what you stand for more spiritually than practically – you get that right and you will be more successful. Ironically, you will sell more product by talking about what that product is a means to what end. Becoming the CEO of the organization of Trumpet has been a challenge to not just let this be, “Oh my gosh, what clients are we about to lose or which ones do we really want to get?” and more, how do we keep this idea clear and alive internally and externally so that everybody, from our employees to our partners, in whatever executional hallway we partner with networks, and our clients – that idea of Trumpet is alive in all of those conversations? So that you don't get lost in the execution and confuse successful execution and analytical awesomeness with the idea of the company. Because that's not the idea of a company. That's the commodity part of advertising agencies. None of us should be bad at creative, buying and measuring and optimizing media and reporting on results. We should all be good at that. But that's all short term. What's the long term? Long term comes from brand, and not the unmeasurable ads. ROB: Right, and it's at a fractal level. Most individuals don't want to just buy and sell ads and measure them, and most organizations would be better not to. There's an alignment from client to organization to person that is going to put off some people who want to go in a different vision, but at least you're not adrift without direction and just commodity all the way down. SCOTT: And look at what the industry has done relative to that mentality. It's why agencies have been complaining for years that they're being marginalized. I don't lament marginalization. I think frankly, our industry deserved it. We allowed ourselves to be commoditized. The media commission structure lived on way too long and was disproportionately beneficial to agencies a long time ago, and has just been eroding and eroding and eroding over time. Now bring in the democratization of media buying and content development and clients can internalize a lot of this stuff. That democratization of the ability to execute elements of communications through self-serve platforms, and you don't need IPG anymore to run national broadcasts. Ironically, the democratization of the ability to participate in advertising, from a local one-off car dealership to a global superpower, is moving businesses farther away from a focus on purpose. They're like, “Man, this advertising thing is something we can just do. Let's internalize it. Let's run this with greater control.” What winds up happening is that the distance, the separation, the space between consumers and companies is widening because there's just less and less focus on companies being clear about what they stand for. They're providing consumers fewer and fewer opportunities to have a referendum on whether or not they like them, so products get commoditized. You'd better lower your expenses if you hope for net profit. ROB: Thank you for all that, Scott. When people want to find you and connect with you and with Trumpet, where should they go to find you? SCOTT: The internet is an awesome place, so you can google Trumpet. If you just scroll past the instruments for sale, you'll find us. But we're not hard to find. We're in downtown New Orleans now. We love our hometown, but we just as much love airports. We do not restrict our client base to here or really even the region. Have perspective, will travel. We're really just looking for those types of companies that are interested in holistic alignment, if not holistic transformation from where they were to a much more intentional place of where they want to be headed, and then right size our relationship to what makes sense for the individual company. ROB: That is excellent. Scott Couvillon from Trumpet Advertising, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and sharing the transformation of your firm and thoughts on how we can all be transformational individually, organizationally, and brand-wise. Thank you so much. SCOTT: Thanks for the time. Love what you're doing. ROB: Be well. Thank you. Bye. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

The online buying experience is always evolving, so it’s table stakes for companies to be on their toes and ready to adjust when the market tells them to. Especially when the company we are chatting about today was founded in 1948! But being prepared to adjust and actually making it happen are two different things. At DICK’S Sporting Goods, its customers, who are referred to as “athletes” are truly running the show, and Scott Casciato, who serves as the VP of Omni Channel Fulfillment & Athlete Service at DICK'S, is the man who takes their needs and delivers a seamless experience to them via DICK’S ecommerce platform and throughout their 700 retail locations. And with their ecommerce sales increasing by 100% in 2020, Scott and his team have had to rethink many things like: how to scale up operations during peak seasons, why testing every iteration on the website is key, how to perfect the buy online pick up in-store experience, and determine how to take their athlete's feedback and transform it into a funnel for change. This episode brought back a lot of nostalgia for me, thinking about the days of wandering the aisles of Dick’s in my high school days looking for a new lacrosse stick or soccer shoes. So it was fun to hear about how much has changed, and  what investments the company has been making lately in creating the best customer experience possible for its athletes. Also, tune in to the end to hear Scott discuss the importance of great vendor relationships, how to future proof logistics, and the new in-store experiences that Dick’s is betting big on. Enjoy! Main Takeaways:The House Don’t Fall When the Bones are Good: Having a strong foundation is the most impactful thing a company can do to prepare for surges in traffic that might come during peak seasons or after highly-successful campaigns. You have to do the work, go through the load tests and constantly be improving the technology stack because there are no shortcuts when you are creating a scalable platform that can withstand anything you throw at it. With last year being a perfect case study to reflect on, dive into the data and pivot if needed so you’re ready for the surge!Bet On It … Then Test It: Building out an online experience that works requires constant testing. You can plan for outcomes and bet on how you think people will react, but until you test it, you can’t ever be certain. As Scott mentioned, following the path the data reveals can be surprising and sometimes opposite of what your intuition is telling you.Experiences For The Future: The shopping experience is going to continue to change, and the strongest companies are planning for the future by paying attention to trends and then creating experiences — both in-person and online — that will drive engagement with consumers and build trust and confidence in the company’s authority in the space. By investing early into an experience or a specific market, you set yourself up as the expert in that specialized vertical and become the retailer of choice for consumers.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---Transcript:Stephanie:Hey everyone and welcome back to Up Next in Commerce, this is your host, Stephanie Postles, ceo@mission.org. Today on the show we have Scott Casciato, vice president of Omni Channel Fulfillment & Athlete Service at DICK'S Sporting Goods. Scott, welcome.Scott:Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.Stephanie:I'm really excited to have you. So I have this deep love of DICK'S Sporting Goods because there was a location in my hometown, eastern shore of Maryland, which I feel no one even knows where that is on a map. But back in high school, I would go almost every week and just kind of peruse through the aisles and look for new lacrosse sticks and shoes. And I didn't really have much money, but I remember just loving the experience and being there probably for three hours with friends, just kind of hanging out. So I was so excited when I saw you guys on the lineup where I was, "Yes, something I know well."Scott:Was that your sport growing up, lacrosse?Stephanie:Lacrosse and soccer.Scott:Nice, nice. That's great.Stephanie:Deep love there. So I'd love to hear a bit about how you got into this industry, because you had a funny quote where you said, "I don't know how I really ended up here," and I'd love to start there, how did you become the vice-president of Omni Channel Fulfillment & Athlete Service at DICK'S Sporting Goods?Scott:It goes back... I spent the early part of my career in software, supply chain software, and kind of even on the sales side, then moved into the operational side and then got into management consulting and did a tour duty in the management consulting ranks. And I got introduced to the founder and co-founder of a company called ModCloth that I was with previously. And they were looking for somebody to run fulfillment and customer service. And I just said, I don't know anything about, I mean, I know supply chain, but I don't really know anything about direct consumer fulfillment at the time. And the founder of that business was, "Yeah, I know, but you're smart enough to figure it out." Right?Scott:So and I have a bent for really high growth, high speed businesses, and it just kind of the way I grew up in my career and that was a really great opportunity. So I did that and I spent five years there scaling that business really significantly, hyper growth phase and it was awesome. I learned a ton about fulfillment and service. And then about five years in, I had this great opportunity to come to DICK'S. And the thing that was really interesting to me is, the question was how can we build a great service organization for DICK'S Sporting Goods? I'm like, "Wow, if I could do it at a much smaller company, what would it be like to come to such a great brand and try to do it here?" And and we did, right?Scott:And so we spent a lot of time building that for the first four years of my time at DICK'S and then had an opportunity to take fulfillment on. So it's interesting that I have some of the aspects of that, that previous role that I had only, a scale that is much larger and just been very, very fortunate to be with such a great business. And it's been awesome to work with the team at DICK'S.Stephanie:Okay. So you are leaving ModCloth, I mean, that's like strictly ecommerce and then you're coming to this, I would say very omni-channel company. I mean, you have over 700 locations across the US, quickly moving to digital, at least over the past couple of years. Tell me a bit about what that transition was like?Scott:I mean, and at the same time we were really building... We were just starting our transformation to building our own technology. So it was a massive... It was basically rebuilding what we had already had from an ecommerce business perspective. And I think fundamentally a lot of the things that I came in and the tools that I had were relevant, right? How you scale a business. I mean, that stuff is somewhat the same. I think one of the biggest changes was or a few of them were one, just having more teammates that knew a lot of stuff that could really help and drive the initiatives and the progress forward, whereas in a much smaller company, right? It's you're wearing so many different hats and you're doing so many different things here.Scott:It was a shock to me to say, oh, there's somebody that can help with reporting or data analytics and help us with these answers. So that was awesome. And then I just think we were all learning, right? So we were learning what we needed. We were learning what we wanted to be in customer service, we were learning what we wanted to have in terms of digital capabilities. We were learning how to run that business as we were deploying new technology, right? So how do you do pricing online appropriately? I remember a lot of conversation. How do you display things? What's the right... How do you check? What's the right checkout flow? And then we had, as all businesses do, you have to make a lot of trade-offs because it may not be the most elegant thing right at the beginning, but we just got to get it up and running, right?Scott:And so having those conversations can be tough, right? Everybody, and especially our business, we just have this DNA where we just relentlessly improve, right? And so it's tough to launch something and know that it's not the perfect solution, right, and then making sure that you go back and you iterate and you keep going, right? We just did that for a long time. But it was a lot of fun and it's really tiring, but it was a lot of fun.Stephanie:So that's amazing. What was one of the maybe projects or things that you felt most strongly about that you got maybe the most pushback on that people are like, nope, that's not a good idea?Scott:I would say, well, we had a lot of conversation about how we were going to set up, for example, in my world, we were going to set up customer service. And we continue to evolve that. I think it wasn't that people were saying it's not how we want to do it, I think it was really more what I was saying about, we want to own more of that customer service experience, right? So we had always been outsourced. And as we moved, as we did the transition, and our previous outsourcer did a great job. And as we move to the next wave of that evolution, we decided we really need to keep an outsourced view in some form or fashion of customer service, but we really wanted to try to start to build our own, right, because we were, "Wonder what we could do on our own?"Scott:So this conversation about, [inaudible] how do you scale for the hockey stick effect that we have at holiday, right, while maintaining the great experience that we have? And we want to in source, but then we want to scale a holiday. We just had a lot of spirited debate about that. So that was part of that conversation.Stephanie:Very cool. And so are you guys kind of now balanced approach when it comes to customer service, depending on what's incoming and how to route it?Scott:Exactly. Right. So we have a team of internal service people that take various types of contacts, and then we have a few outsourced partners that we work extremely closely with. And we balanced the volume across there. And then at holiday time, we scale up across all. And so it's turned out to be... And we're measuring that experience relentlessly. So it's been a great symbiotic relationship, I think, across all three of those.Stephanie:Well, now that you've touched on holiday, I do kind of want to go into peak season and maybe talking about, I mean, you mentioned that you went through this big technology evolution and implementing new things to try and get to where you are now, what did that look like, especially when it comes to preparing for big surges? I mean, I saw your ecommerce I think went up 100% in 2020 or something, so you guys have had massive growth. What did it look like behind the scenes to prepare for that plus peak demand?Scott:I think it's been this... We're very happy that we started when we did, right? when you think about what happened over the past 12 months and what has happened in the ecommerce world and the growth that everybody has seen, we're fortunate that we started four years ago down this path. Because the foundation that we built really allowed us to scale this year really quickly. We've been through all the load tests dynamics that you go through at holiday, we've built the technology stack that can support the traffic that we knew that we were going to get. We've been through the trials and tribulations of how to test, what to test, where to find the failure modes, and we've got really talented people that work on that stuff every day. We've built controls internally to manage where things might not be working appropriately and to be able to balance that.Scott:And as you think about what happened last year, specifically with curbside, it is the example of, it took us four years to become an overnight success type of situation where [inaudible].Stephanie:[inaudible].Scott:Right.Stephanie:[inaudible]. Who knew?Scott:Totally. So I think it was scaling for holiday. We scale every year for holiday. I think last year was one that we didn't quite know, nobody knew what was really going to happen. But I think we over-prepared, and we executed an extremely successful holiday because we just had every... It was so great to see everybody so engaged in solving that challenge and really thinking through every aspect of what might happen in holiday from fulfillment through the web traffic through customer service. And we really came together as a team and figured out all the ways that things could go right and wrong and covered it all. And we had a great holiday season because of it.Stephanie:That's great. So what areas do you think businesses are maybe under-prepared? Is it in the fulfillment piece? Is it in customer service? What are some of the top pillars that you guys covered down on that maybe some people might not be fully prepared for?Scott:I think that we do a great job in measuring and really paying attention to the athlete experience across all measures, right? I think we've pivoted from, I think historically in most businesses have been in a place where you manage internally, right? You're managing things like conversion or traffic or speed to athlete and things like that, and to be the customer, traditional service levels and customer service. I think those are all important, but I think if you take the outside in view, right, and you're looking at things like how are we measuring the experience, what's happening to that customer when they're out there and they're buying from us? But are they buying from us again, right, as an articulation of their commitment to the brand?Scott:And then how do we influence that purchase behavior? And how do you think expansively about that in terms of not only the shopping experience online that they have, but the post-purchase, the delivery experience, the customer service experience, how are you really measuring that data and getting good information and causal information to figure out how you can drive really great lifetime value? And I think we do that and we're really starting to do that really well across our business. And we've gotten so much support for that outside in view, across our leadership team as well that it's become a real engine of thinking across our teams.Stephanie:I mean, it seems like that holistic view is really hard for a lot of companies to get to though. I mean, I hear about a lot of companies trying to consolidate their tech stack, marketing stack, put it all in one area that things actually are connected and you can have attribution and you can see the LTV. How do you guys think about having that view that allows you to make decisions?Scott:I mean, I think that it's philosophical at some level and don't get me wrong, it's hard because I think when you look at the business on a day-to-day basis, all retailers, right, especially those that are public are driving towards hard goals. We take a much longer term view of things generally across the business, which is really refreshing and great. And so it allows us to really make good decisions. When you think about what we're measuring, how we're investing, we're not investing, I mean, obviously we care about the quarter and we care about the year, right? Don't get me wrong, but I think we're making investments that are in the long-term interest of this brand and our customers. I think, we're a really large small business in that regard. And I think we've been able to energize our teammates to deliver that experience on the front line, but also make the investments on the back end of the house that allow us to do that.Stephanie:And I see you guys have been making some big tech investments. I saw, I think Commerce Hub, you did a multi-year deal with them. And I saw something about the vendor partner program that you have. We can kind of plug and play into a bunch of vendors and have an endless aisle. And I was, wow, that could be game changing to be able to pivot quickly and offer, get to the consumer, right, wherever they are, whatever they need, especially in times right now where it's very uncertain. So it seems tech is a big piece of that, towards that investment philosophy right now.Scott:It is.Stephanie:How are you figuring out what you need and how to put the proper pieces in place?Scott:I think we have over 500 vendors in our drop-ship program. And connecting to it has them, and understanding what the inventory is, and getting them to send us the right inventory, and then order information back and forth in real time is incredibly important, which is why we made the investment in Commerce Hub, it has been a great partner for us for a few years now. And it's easy to use. So I think that's that was great for that aspect of our business. I think our vendor relationships are super strong and we're fortunate that we have them because it allows us to be really creative in the way that we go to market. Scott:And I think we're also continuing to build great brands internally, right? And so if you think about, we just recently launched our first brand and it's been a great success so far. It's great stuff. We had got our [inaudible], if you haven't tried it, you should.Stephanie:I haven't. [inaudible].Scott:That's awesome. It's a partnership that we did with Carrie Underwood about six years ago, and it's quickly become our number two selling women's line.Stephanie:Wow. That's awesome.Scott:And then we launched our DSG brand a few years ago, or a year and a half ago, which is really a value-driven brand and with very high quality, right? So when you think about the continuum of our brands, we have very specific and different strategies and they're complex depending on what we're trying to achieve within a given brand or category within that brand. But I think we're fortunate that we've built such great lasting relationships, because again, I think it gets back to, we take a longer term view of things and we really, I think we treat our vendors as partners.Stephanie:Yep. So key, especially in this industry where so much is happening, so much is changing quick and people can get burned really quickly too.Scott:Right, right, right.Stephanie:It also seems being able to plug into a vendor system like that is important, especially around... It seems a lot of companies are doing private label type of things and launching their own brands. I mean, it's not fully reliant now on the big brands and being able to have that flexibility to pull people into your ecosystem that maybe could have never sold at a DICK'S Sporting Goods before, that seems amazing and really allows access in a way that wasn't here maybe five years ago.Scott:It really does. We're always looking for those bets to make with new and upcoming brands. And our vendor director job channel is a great way to sort of test some of these things. So that's definitely, you hit the nail on the head for us. It's a strategy that we actively have and it's nice because my team who manages that part of our business we'll work with our merchants to say, "What could our strategy be with the supplier or partner X?" Right? Some of these folks are small businesses that can't handle our volumes. So if we buy a little bit more, we can test some of them or we can test it in the vendor direct channel. So it's been a real tool for us.Stephanie:Testing's interesting too. I could see kind of doing AB test quickly and see if people like this product and if they like this one more, okay, here's what we're going to go. Maybe we'll circle back with you next year in a much less risky way to bring people in.Scott:We've gotten really good at testing and specifically on the site with how we're thinking about the experience online. And we test almost everything these days, right? I mean, there's some stuff that I think is just go do things, some go do things that we do. But I think generally speaking, we've really developed a muscle around building an experience and testing it and iterating on it to figure out what's really resonating with the athlete most. So everything from shopping experiences on our site all the way down through the conversion funnel to fulfillment, right? And speed and how we're communicating with our athletes.Scott:So I think we've learned so much, and I'm like constantly reminded when we get these, we all kind of make bets, right, when we launched these tests like what do think's going to happen? And I think I'm wrong so often, it's so important to test.Stephanie:Yep.Scott:Good. Because what you think the consumer is going to do they just don't. And even when you think about surveys, I think there's this everybody lies concept, right? And it's true...Stephanie:And depends on what state they're in or where they're at in the day.Scott:Right, right. So I think it's just so invaluable to us.Stephanie:And we do surveys on the show sometimes just to see who do you want on, and how am I doing? And it's, well, it's depends on probably where that person is, if they're happy, if they're sad, it could be different depending on the place that they're in.Scott:For sure.Stephanie:So what's an example of a test that you ran where you were so sure, you're like this one's going to win, everyone was kind of on board with one scenario winning and then the results come back and everyone's wrong?Scott:That's a good question. We just ran one recently that I did win on, which is the one that was top of mind for me coming into this. Let me talk about that one for a second. So the one we launched on same-day, we're trying to figure out what are our athletes appetite is for same-day services. And we did definitely get a lot of engagement on the test. I kind of thought it was going to be more than it was, but it was still interesting, right? So I think that's something that we're going to continue to have conversation on.Stephanie:They wanted it, the majority of the [inaudible]?Scott:I think they did. It wasn't as much as I would've thought, really.Stephanie:Because that's an interesting one that some people on the show said, people just want to know when it's getting there, they're okay if it's not same day, versus if it's more of a commodity product, you better get it to them the same day. And to kind of seems it depends what it is and how much delayed gratification someone can have on it, it depends, it seems.Scott:Yeah. Some of the tests that I think that we've run that have been less intuitive, I just think how products are set up on the site and how people search, right, and find products like you would think that sometimes when you put the best or most visible sort of notable product of the top search results, that's going to create a better conversion and sometimes it just doesn't, right? So it's really people come in I think with a lot of intent around how they're shopping and sometimes what you think is going to happen just doesn't because I think there's so many different ways that people shop.Stephanie:Yep. How do you think about shifting the website either, from what you learned from last year or when you're approaching peak season, are there certain key elements that you adjust knowing that maybe the consumer's are in a very different mindset than they were at any other time in history probably?Scott:Yeah. I think I can speak more to the way that we think about fulfillment in this regard. I always, I historically had thought, that's another example of what I thought was going to happen. I historically thought that during, for example, Black Friday weekend speed was really important, right? I need it, I want to get it fast. And it turns out that weekend in particular speed is not the most important, getting what you want is the most important, right? So getting the deal is the most important. I think it makes sense because most people are thinking, I've got three or four weeks that this thing can get to me. I'm not super concerned to get it next week, just to make sure that I get it, right?Scott:So that's one that we adjust in terms of making sure that we're really being honest with how we're going to fulfill. Thankfully we've got an extraordinarily resilient fulfillment network and we do really well in speed and but historically had been surprised as we've really measured that one over Black Friday weekend. It's really about getting the deal, not the speed.Stephanie:Versus Christmas when everyone's probably last minute shopping, it's probably opposite.Scott:Very different.Stephanie:Okay.Scott:Very different. And as you get into December and you get through towards the ground cutoffs and you get, depending on what's happening, the speed becomes a real issue. Last year was was nuts. I mean, FedEx was running commercials, right? They talked about the speed or buy early. And we definitely saw a little bit of a shift in terms of how people were thinking about buying.Stephanie:So how are you building up that resilience fulfillment network that you mentioned to be able to basically say I can offer anyone the endless aisle, we have unlimited of these, in one moment and then be, okay, now next month got to go, got to be there in three days or less type of scenario?Scott:I think you mentioned it when we kicked off the show, it was we've got over 700 fulfillment locations when you think about our store network, which is a blessing for us because it allows us to really, not only be closer to our athlete and get things there faster, but also allows for a lot of flexibility when... It's just load balancing, right? When you think about a business that has a couple of three, in my past one fulfillment center, when that thing gets backed up, or you have a labor problem or you have whatever the case, would be trucks that don't show up on the receiving dock or the outgoing dock, you're kind of backed up, right?.Scott:And so while that definitely happens across everybody's network, including ours, having all of these different nodes that are moving product out each and every really helps mitigate the risk. And so it also helps us, at peak time, it helps us staff up and get stuff out. And we have we've built a really sophisticated way to manage the way that orders are routing. So we're able to identify where we might have congestion points, for example, and try to proactively avoid those as we see those things happening, right? So we can move orders to one node or another, or block a node if we've got a weather issue or something, or we've got, in the fall when you have hurricanes in Florida, right, or in the Southeast, we're able to really change the way that our orders route to get product out of different places that aren't having those issues.Stephanie:And is that kind of done in the background where it's looking at all these different inputs and then kind of making decisions that you can come in and adjust if you need to, but it's already routing it for you in the background?Scott:Yeah. So part of it's automated part of it's people, right? And it's still a lot of people, right, washing the switches each day. But we've got a great team of people that are communicating, we're communicating out of our stores to my team and fulfillment. We're communicating from my team into stores and we're using the technology that we've built to really manage the capacity and the inventory across the entire network.Stephanie:It seems that is so important too you when you essentially have two business units when it comes to fulfillment, you've got your store locations with one set of data, inventory is probably very hard to track because it's always getting grabbed, it's always getting shipped out, and then you have just maybe a fulfilment center that's a whole different beast probably. How do you get to that consolidate view? Is that part of the backend tech that's kind of looking at it at a higher level, treating it all as one?Scott:It is and it's definitely complex for the reasons that you noted. And it creates, sometimes it can compromise how close we can get to the athlete if we think we've got a unit in Austin, Texas and we actually don't. The fortunate part is instead of canceling that order on you or that unit on you, it's going to go to maybe it'll go to a Dallas store, right? And we can still stay pretty close to you and get it to you. And we're also trying to look at things like, how do we keep packages together? Of course, anybody that's listening to this that manages freight will say, yep, really important from a cost perspective. And frankly, even from, as I mentioned earlier, that athlete experience, people want to get one box, right? I don't want to order three or four different things and get three or four different boxes. And sometimes that's unavoidable, but we're trying everything we can to not let that happen.Stephanie:Oh, blessing.Scott:Totally, right?Stephanie:I get, one company I'm not going to mention their name, they will send a can of soup, anything a bone broth. I mean, it's in these little bags and they just come one at a time. I'm like, "Oh my gosh, I just would have rather just gone to the store and picked it up myself than getting random of one item at a time."Scott:It's so wonderful when the customer experience need and the business need align, right? So when you think about, nobody wants to ship more packages to you, right? We want to get it to you, we want to get to you fast and we want to get it to you in one package. And that's also a great experience for you. It's the same thing we talk about with customer service, which is a traditional metric that people manage as average handle time, right? How long are [inaudible]? And I'm so careful, we collectively are so careful with this metric because it can be so disastrous to the teammate that's on the other end of the phone if they think they're being managed to a handle time, right? I don't want to just get you off the phone, however, and you need to use it for all kinds of different scheduling and making sure you have enough people on the team.Scott:But what's really aligned is generally people want to get to an answer pretty quickly also, right? I want to have an efficient, valuable use of my time. I want to get to an answer and then I want to move on with my day. So that's another example of where if we can do it right and align those desires, we're going to create an awesome experience.Stephanie:The unintended consequences, pizzas is such a tricky thing with thinking about designing roles and KPIs. I mean, I'm doing it right now. I'm thinking about sales and building a sales team and being like, oh wait, this might incentivize bad behavior.Scott:You got to really think about it, right?Stephanie:You just think really strategically about it.Scott:The outcome or the impact is very different than the intent in some cases.Stephanie:Yep. Are there any external inputs right now that you think companies aren't preparing for? I'm thinking about the algorithms that are kind of running everything behind the scenes when it comes to your fulfillment and things like that. Is there anything that you guys are watching now that maybe you weren't watching a couple of years ago and letting it help influence how things are routed or how things are kind of being redirected, anything like that?Scott:I mean, I think we're constantly trying to get to be more precise, and we're very fortunate that if everything goes right, we can get you an order really, really quickly. So we're really trying to pay attention to, where are things not going perfectly and we've called this thing the perfect order, what's our perfect order, right? And how do we get more of those? So we're spending a lot of time thinking about how we can perfect our fulfillment network. And I mean, it is, as you can imagine, just an infinite number of variables that dictate how this thing goes. But we're working a lot on that. I do not think that...Stephanie:[inaudible] like local stuff, because that's something that kind of came to mind. You're paying attention to weather and higher level things are you down in the weeds of, okay, well there's a festival this week here so that means... Is it that [inaudible].Scott:It can be. I mean, for example, when we're doing a hot market event, so Super Bowl, NCAA Tournament, they're national events, but their inventories largely local, right? So we're really paying attention to what the traffic is doing and the inventory is doing it at those local levels for sure.Stephanie:I'd love to talk about events a bit because I know that's a focus is the athlete experience online and in person as well. And I saw that you guys are opening more retail locations. You're opening, I think I saw a golf center, I soccer center, I mean, these full on experiences. And I'd love to hear how you guys are thinking about that.Scott:I'm glad you mentioned that we're really proud. We just opened recently the House of Sport up in Victor, New York, which is an expression of what we think the future can be for DICK'S Sporting Goods. And it's really an experiential retail location. So you can go in there, obviously we've got golf simulators and we've got fitting in there. We've got rock walls to climb. We've got an outdoor fitness field where we're doing things and we're engaging the community in different ways. So we're running clinics and figuring out how we can get local teams into their... Engaging in the community in this way has been a part of our brand since 1948, right? So I think, if you read the story of DICK'S and how we were involved in the Binghamton New York community, when the business was founded, it'll give you a sense for why this is important to us.Scott:And we just believe that, we say it all the time, we believe that sports makes people better. So how do we think about engaging in the community where we're at? We've done this forever in community marketing, and you see how we donate equipment to local teams and so forth. This is kind of another evolution of that, where we think we can make a big impact, we can change the way that people think about retail. And I think it'll quickly get to how do we merge the online and the brick and mortar or traditional retail experience? So I think that's a place that is really exciting to us right now.Stephanie:I was just thinking about, how do you create, you have a view where you know this person came in to this event and they were using the golf simulator, and they really liked this club. And then they either bought in store or maybe four weeks later they ended up online and bought the one that they were using? Do you feel you're moving in a direction where you're going to have that viewpoint? And it's not a hard time to get there.Scott:Yeah, I think we're getting there. I think we're really focused on data and analytics, right? And so I think our ability to stitch together these experiences, we're building that muscle. I don't think that we're totally there yet, but we've got really smart people that are thinking about this. And I think we're moving in that direction because that's the key. We're not really worried about what channel you buy in, right? I think it's more about, are we the retailer of choice for you, right? And however that experience, the experience that we can build for that, it's important to measure it because then I think it unlocks the investment in the targeted areas that are going to drive more of that for our athletes. So I think that's where we're really focused.Stephanie:Have you thought about creating essentially kind of a guide shop, but you have the soccer experience or something, and then just a small shop where maybe you can look at a few other things, but then essentially you're going back online to order whatever you played with and got to experiment with, or are you doing full on retail location as always, and then often this area we're doing our experience center?Scott:We haven't done really pop up experiences, guide shop experiences like that. We're moving more towards, how do we create a more scaled experiential experience in store and then how do we measure that in terms of who might go online to buy.Stephanie:Mm-hmm (affirmative). I love that. I'm excited to see... I need to visit one of those stores, especially the soccer one. I mean, I don't know what it's going to be happening there, but I want to be there.Stephanie:I want to hear, which I feel you'll have a great answer for is what are you all most excited about right now over the next one to two years? What are you most passionate about?Scott:We're excited about a lot of things. And as usual, we have a very full plate. So I think things that we've already deployed that we'll continue to refine, things like our curbside program or a buy and pickup in store program for online, we're really excited about that. That's got a long runway of improvement, enhancement, and creativity that's going to be placed into that program. We are really excited about this merger of... I'm really excited about the merger of stores and online specifically around becoming a trusted advisor to our athletes. So if you think about the breadth of the teammates that we have, and when you walk into our stores or you talk to our people online, everybody's got a passion, right? Your passion is lacrosse and soccer.Stephanie:Mm-hmm (affirmative).Scott:How do we think about unlocking that potential, right, in terms of then being able to help our customer, whether that customer is buying first player pair of soccer cleats for their son, to getting ready to play club soccer, to getting ready to go off and play soccer at a D1 level or beyond, right? So how do we look at that continuum of expertise and really become that trusted advisor, both online and in our stores? And I think that is incredibly exciting venture. And we do it well today. I think there's an opportunity to do it even better. So we're really excited about that. We're really excited about the assortment, right, that we're going to continue to launch online. I think it's going to be differentiated. I think it's going to keep our position in the market really strong.Scott:So I think the product that we put in there, the expertise that we put in there is going to be differentiated in the market, right? And that I think is probably more incremental and more incremental expression to the core business. And then we're going to continue to press. Game Changer has been a great business for us for years. And that team is great. And they continue to build a technology that service the baseball market. But we're always looking for different ways that we can expand or innovate across the industry.Stephanie:I love that, you know what? We need like, what do you do after college? I always think about that and I'm like, I loved playing sports. But then you start working, and then you have kids, and then you're, I still want to play, but how do I get back into it? And something is missing there, Scott. [inaudible].Scott:No, but I love... So that's who we want. That's another sort of persona that we really want to love to serve in our stores. Because I'm one of them.Stephanie:I'm your person.Scott:Right.Stephanie:We're the people.Scott:We're the people. And I think what we want to be able to do, I love talking about this. I think in our stores and online, our ability to listen and inspire, right, how do we help you meet that goal, right? "Hey, I'm doing a couch to 5k first time. I'm starting to get active." Or, for me, the 5'8 guy that always had a dream of the NBA that never came to fruition because my vertical is about that high. I still play. I want to make sure that I can get all the gear that I need to be competitive, right, or to achieve my personal best.Scott:So I love the fact that we can really positively impact people's lives in that way. And I think we want to make... I would love to make sure personally that anybody that walks into our store and knows that we're not just a sporting goods retailer, right? I think we want to make sure that we're helping, we want to facilitate you achieving your dreams. And then we talk a lot about that internally. So if we can translate or transmit that feeling to our athletes, I think that's really powerful.Stephanie:And also makes me think about creating custom leagues too, where it's, this is a different kind of league. It's not the traditional school. It's not even people creating their own volleyball leagues. It's we are a part of this. We're making sure that this can happen for people who struggle to even find those networks. I mean, I know back when I was in DC, I looked for where's some other women who play lacrosse? I don't really want to play with guys who are going to be checking me and I count find it, super hard to find. I mean, it's easy to find some sports in a community setting, but it's very hard to find people in certain other sports settings.Scott:You're right. There's a social, I don't want to, careful to say social network, but there is this idea of how do I plug into people that are me within a certain geographical area, right? That would be interesting. That's really interesting. Thanks for that one. Let me...Stephanie:Take it back to leadership. We just need a parenting kit. It's, here's everything you need so that we can go play our sports and then your kids are entertained. They get many lacrosse sticks. You go there and then I'll go off on my own so I can actually play, give me the kid.Scott:I love that idea.Stephanie:I want to think like such parents. Anyone who's not a parent is probably, "What are y'all talking about right now?"Scott:What are you talking about? Yep.Stephanie:Yep. All right. So let's shift over to the lightning round. Lightning round is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This is where I ask a question and you have a minute or less to answer. Are you ready?Scott:I think so.Stephanie:Okay. So I'm sad, I haven't asked this yet and don't know this, but what is your favorite sport?Scott:Basketball.Stephanie:Oh, nice.Stephanie:And who's your favorite sports team?Scott:It's always been the Chicago Bulls since back in the day, which is probably blasted me because I live in Pittsburgh. So to not say football and the Pittsburgh Steelers is a problem.Stephanie:You'd probably get egged.Scott:Probably. But they're close second.Stephanie:That's good. What is the nicest thing anyone's done for you?Scott:Oh, wow. I'm going to struggle. I'm going to go to my kids. I think my kids being, this is going to sound so cheesy, but it's so serious. The way that my kids treat other people with respect and kindness, I think is the thing that comes to mind for me first. And I know that's probably not the answer that you would normally get.Stephanie:Nope, I like it.Scott:To me that's pretty important. So I'm really proud of them. And I think that's probably the best thing that somebody could do for me.Stephanie:I love that. There's so much you can learn from kids. I think about that all the time. So I'm the person who is here for those cheesy kind of kid answers. You're in the right space. What's one thing you don't know that you wish you understood better?Scott:American history comes to mind?Stephanie:That's a good one.Scott:I don't think that's on topic, but that's the first one that comes to mind.Stephanie:When you want to feel more joy, what do you do?Scott:It's going to sound crazy. I tell people, thank you.Stephanie:Mm-hmm (affirmative).Scott:Right. So I just believe that there's a lot... I get a lot of energy from being grateful, right? And so that's what I do. If I'm really feeling a little down or if I'm really stressed or some of the times the way that I work out and I get the endorphins mode going, that's one way to do it, and the other way is to be grateful for things. So I feel that's the way I get a lot of energy.Stephanie:I love that. All right. And then the last one, I mean, it seems you guys are very much ahead on a lot of things within the ecosystem. What do you do to stay on top of the trends? Are you watching other companies? Are you reading things, what are you doing to stay on top?Scott:I think it's a combination of experiencing and reading. I don't read nearly enough, it's hard, right? There's so much the content that comes out and not enough time. So I'm trying to just experience things out in the wild right? I'm talking to a lot of people, whether it's parents at a game or if it's just my own experiences online, and I'm trying to translate that to what's happening and why companies would do things a certain way. And then my team is doing the same thing. So I think we're trying to stay close. We're trying to stay close that way and certainly reading and engaging in conversations like this also kind of help.Stephanie:Good. That's awesome. Well, cool. Well, Scott, thank you so much for joining us. It was really fun to hear all about what you guys are up to. Where can people find more about DICK'S Sporting Goods and find you?Scott:I think www.dickssportinggoods.com. For the story of Public Lands and Golf Galaxy, and you can find me at LinkedIn, on LinkedIn.Stephanie:Amazing. Thank you so much.Scott:Thank you so much for having me. It's been a great time.

Subscribe & Download Listen on Apple Podcasts Listen on Google Play Follow us onSoundCloud Listen on Spotify Guest: ​​​​Scott Swedberg https://vimeo.com/450499054 Episode Transcript 00:05  Ramesh: Hello everyone. Welcome to the agile entrepreneur podcast and video cast. And this is your host, Ramesh Dontha and today we are going to talk about jobs. The next person I'm going to talk to, will get you a job. His name is Scott Swedberg. Scott is the founder and CEO of job sauce, a career services company focused on the individual. He founded the company while working at LinkedIn and the job sauce has helped 10,000 professionals since 2014. Scott, welcome.  00:39  Scott: Thanks for having me Ramesh.  00:41  Ramesh: so right off the bat, I know I introduced you as the founder of the company that focuses on the individual and I think that particular word is very important for you. So can you talk about, you know, what job's sauce is about and why the word individual means so much to you?  00:57  Scott: Yeah, so something that we recognize at job sauce and I founded it because I experienced personally is so much of your life is tied to the work that you do. It's how a lot of people express their fulfillment in life. That's how most people make money. So it's really important for an individual to feel fulfilled in their career. And I noticed that most career services type companies, it was either, you know, an individual resume writers say helping people, which is great, but you kind of have to trade your time for money. You can only help so many people or you've got these bigger outplacement companies that focus more on a B2B level. Certain company has to lay off employees and they contract this company to ease the landing, provide them with resume services or what have you. What the job sauce does is we focus on the individual, like individual resume writers career coaches do, except we can do it at scale. And we bring in a lot more resume writers and career coaches to help the individuals who are coming to us, so we can actually impact 10,000 people in the last five or six years as opposed to if I were doing this just myself and didn't have any support, you know, maybe I could have eclipsed a thousand by now if that's all I did. But we're able to reach a lot more people because we're focused on this niche, helping individuals grow in their career as opposed to, and I'm just helping a company ease the landing of their weight off employees. 02:26  Ramesh: Great. Okay. So just for my own clarification is job sauce a market place where you're connecting people like resume writers and career coaches with the people who are looking for a job or you as a business owner, you will manage all that who to bring in as a resume writer and career coach, but you are the front of the company. How does it work? 02:49  Scott: And so it's not a marketplace. When someone comes to us, if they're going to work with us, all of our resume writers and career coaches have ...

The old-school way to train someone for a task involves memorization, repetition, and practice, in order to make it like second nature. Not only is that time-consuming, but also, people aren’t very good at it. So why train, when AR makes it obsolete? Scope AR aims to help companies get out of old habits, and CEO Scott Montgomerie drops by to explain how. Alan: Today’s guest is Scott Montgomerie from Scope AR. Scott is the CEO and co-founder of Scope AR, a global leader in developing augmented reality solutions and products for industrial clients focused around field maintenance, manufacturing, and training. As the pioneer of utilizing AR for industry support and training, Scope AR are partnered with technology leaders such as Google and Microsoft. Since founding the company in 2011, Scott as one of the first executives to get augmented reality tools in use by multi-billion dollar corporations. Having launched many AR firsts, Scott has become one of the industry’s thought leaders and visionaries. He’s shared his knowledge and spoken about some of the most innovative uses of AR at several leading conferences, including South by Southwest, Augmented World Expo, Unity Vision Summit, and XRDC. Some of the clients include Unilever, Prince Castle and Lockheed Martin. To learn more about Scope AR, visit scopear.com. Scott, welcome to the show. Scott: Thanks a lot, Alan. Alan: Yeah man, I’m really super excited. We’ve been kind of chatting offline and it’s amazing, the work you guys are doing and you’re starting to really see this uptake of augmented reality being used in enterprise. Can you maybe give people a 10,000 foot view of Scope AR, what you’re doing, and who your clients are, and what they’re using it for? Scott: Yeah, sure. So we really view that augmented reality is a way of interacting with the world in a way that’s much more intuitive, the way that we evolved with our hands and our eyes. And so we really view that there’s a huge market central there. I think it was a stat out there that said that, 90 percent of Silicon Valley is focused on the worker that’s at their desk, using computers and screens. And there’s a vast market out there that is untapped, in these field workers that are using their hands and their eyes. And so if we can use augmented reality to get them the information they need, at the time of need, and really help them become an expert when they need to know that information. And like I said, we think that’s a huge market. So we really approach the problem in two different ways with our products. The first is a remote assistance capability. So we were the first to market with a product called Remote AR, we launched in 2015. So it was far before any of the other 30 companies that are out there today. The idea is that it allows you to communicate over video between a technician and an expert. So it’s almost like FaceTime. If you’re looking at a piece of equipment — maybe a car engine — you take your phone or a pair of smart glasses like a Hololens, and you can look at this piece of equipment and transfer this video back to somebody with expertise. And this expert can now draw on their side of the screen, and get a really good remote guide instructions. So the problem with something like FaceTime is that the communication channel is not wide enough to provide really good instructions. When was the last time you actually communicated with a mechanic over the phone or over FaceTime? There’s no chance. Alan: Never. Scott: Yeah, exactly. It would probably be very painful for him to guide you how to replace something simple like a spark plug. “It’s that one right there. No, to the left. No, no, the other le

The old-school way to train someone for a task involves memorization, repetition, and practice, in order to make it like second nature. Not only is that time-consuming, but also, people aren’t very good at it. So why train, when AR makes it obsolete? Scope AR aims to help companies get out of old habits, and CEO Scott Montgomerie drops by to explain how. Alan: Today’s guest is Scott Montgomerie from Scope AR. Scott is the CEO and co-founder of Scope AR, a global leader in developing augmented reality solutions and products for industrial clients focused around field maintenance, manufacturing, and training. As the pioneer of utilizing AR for industry support and training, Scope AR are partnered with technology leaders such as Google and Microsoft. Since founding the company in 2011, Scott as one of the first executives to get augmented reality tools in use by multi-billion dollar corporations. Having launched many AR firsts, Scott has become one of the industry’s thought leaders and visionaries. He’s shared his knowledge and spoken about some of the most innovative uses of AR at several leading conferences, including South by Southwest, Augmented World Expo, Unity Vision Summit, and XRDC. Some of the clients include Unilever, Prince Castle and Lockheed Martin. To learn more about Scope AR, visit scopear.com. Scott, welcome to the show. Scott: Thanks a lot, Alan. Alan: Yeah man, I’m really super excited. We’ve been kind of chatting offline and it’s amazing, the work you guys are doing and you’re starting to really see this uptake of augmented reality being used in enterprise. Can you maybe give people a 10,000 foot view of Scope AR, what you’re doing, and who your clients are, and what they’re using it for? Scott: Yeah, sure. So we really view that augmented reality is a way of interacting with the world in a way that’s much more intuitive, the way that we evolved with our hands and our eyes. And so we really view that there’s a huge market central there. I think it was a stat out there that said that, 90 percent of Silicon Valley is focused on the worker that’s at their desk, using computers and screens. And there’s a vast market out there that is untapped, in these field workers that are using their hands and their eyes. And so if we can use augmented reality to get them the information they need, at the time of need, and really help them become an expert when they need to know that information. And like I said, we think that’s a huge market. So we really approach the problem in two different ways with our products. The first is a remote assistance capability. So we were the first to market with a product called Remote AR, we launched in 2015. So it was far before any of the other 30 companies that are out there today. The idea is that it allows you to communicate over video between a technician and an expert. So it’s almost like FaceTime. If you’re looking at a piece of equipment — maybe a car engine — you take your phone or a pair of smart glasses like a Hololens, and you can look at this piece of equipment and transfer this video back to somebody with expertise. And this expert can now draw on their side of the screen, and get a really good remote guide instructions. So the problem with something like FaceTime is that the communication channel is not wide enough to provide really good instructions. When was the last time you actually communicated with a mechanic over the phone or over FaceTime? There’s no chance. Alan: Never. Scott: Yeah, exactly. It would probably be very painful for him to guide you how to replace something simple like a spark plug. “It’s that one right there. No, to the left. No, no, the other le

This is a special episode courtesy of the Dorks Delivered Youtube channel where Josh interviews Scott Aurisch about his life in business and what motivates him. Josh Lewis and Scott from NRG Boost Fitness talk about taking the plunge in business in the fitness industry. Watch this interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wX1YaTk2bl0&t=22s Josh: I've got Scott here from NRG Boost Fitness and today we're going to be talking about taking the plunge in business. My understanding is you've been in business for a while and about 12 months ago, you decided to go for some brick and mortar. Scott: Yeah, exactly right. I've been in the fitness industry now for over 20 years but in business for myself for coming up to 8 years, and very close to 12 months in my own premises. Josh: Right. Are you loving it? Scott: Absolutely loving it. It's probably been one of the most tiring years of my life but certainly the most fulfilling, from a professional standpoint. Josh: I think it's a big discipline thing. You get your own business and you take a plunge and you do something that you're thinking, should I or shouldn't I, and if you take the risk, sometimes against all odds, and it's not that you fail, you don't fail, you make sure you don't fail. Scott: Exactly right. You sort of get rid of that safety net and you're just forced to step up and it's an enormous growth experience and I'm really pleased that I did. Josh: That's cool. And has there been any milestone moments over the last 12 months that really stood out as a, ‘I've made it’? Scott: Yeah! Probably no one moment, just lots of little moments along the way, where, when you do take a moment to reflect back on where things were... Pretty much 12 months ago was when I was in the planning phase for opening here, which all came together super quickly. Once I've made the decision to make this happen, things just seemed to fall into place, which is something we might talk about a little bit later on, but as the year has unfolded, just sometimes when I'm training somebody that I've built a good relationship with, in some cases over the years, but in some cases, people I've just met this year, it's in those moments that I realise what I've achieved, when you make those connections with people. So that's what I mean by what some people would regard as little things, rather than big milestones, but they're the most rewarding moments for me. Josh: That's cool. Prior to running out of brick and mortar, how was your business beforehand? Scott: I was working out of a local gym and I'd been there for several years, and it wasn't that I got to a point where I was unhappy, but I did feel like I wasn't growing professionally anymore, and I just needed a new challenge that would present that opportunity for growth and freedom as well. Josh: Cool, cool. I guess you haven't looked back. You're 12 months in. What sort of aspirations do you have for the next 12 months? Scott: Yeah, I guess I haven't looked too far ahead, which is probably something I need to get a little bit better at, but certainly, consolidating what I've achieved in the first 12 months, and I think one of the keys to that is building good relationships with my client base but also other industry associates that I have contact with. So I'll definitely be looking to build on that over the next 12 months in a way that is sustainable in terms of my energy and my own health and wellbeing because, as you would know, when you work for yourself, you can get a little bit focused on the business and some of your personal life can tend to suffer. Josh: Absolutely, it can go by the wayside. Scott: Yeah. Josh: It becomes a very addictive, very addictive thing, having your own business. Scott: It certainly can, and in my situation, where I'm preaching to people about achieving balance in your life. It's really important that I practise what I preach and set the example of having a balanced lifestyle where I'm looking after myself and looking after my personal relationships outside of work as well because your business might be firing on all cylinders but if some of those other areas of your life begin to suffer, that's going to impact on you as an individual at some point, and then ultimately affect your business. Josh: Yeah, completely agree. It's all about having balance. Otherwise, the whole system breaks. Scott: Yeah, that's right. Josh: If you were to go back to the moment while you were working for someone else and you didn't have your own business, can you remember what made you take the step and take the leap towards doing everything, wearing all the hats, and doing the payroll, doing your taxes, doing everything underneath your own banner? What was the catalyst towards the move? Scott: Yeah, probably just a couple of little moments. Again, it was nothing major. There was no massive falling out with anyone at my previous workplace, but just piecing a few things together and just some little frustrations and I thought it was time to take control of things myself and when you run your own business, you get to do things your way and you are absolutely responsible for everything that occurs. So, yeah, it was nothing major and just a couple of little things and I do distinctly remember in those moments thinking, yeah, I've got to do this because there was a lot of thought that went into it beforehand but when I eventually made that decision, like I said earlier, it all just fell into place. Josh: That's cool, that's cool. You do a lot of stuff for communities, and I understand you've gone back to the school that you went to and you've helped them out. Tell me more about what happened there. Scott: Well, I was fortunate enough to be contacted by the Logan PCYC who run a lot of great programmes and one of them is called the Deep Blue Line programme, which is in association with Queensland Police, where they visit local high schools and present an 8 to 10 week programme to a group of students of various ages. I was invited to come along and speak for one particular week about the importance of exercise and nutrition and, yeah, it was pretty cool. But one of the schools I got to visit was my own old high school that I had not stepped foot inside for 25 years and it was my Back to the Future! Josh: That would have been weird. Scott: It really was. It was a really cool experience, though. The place had not changed. It had been really well maintained over that time but it was just like going back to how I remember it. And then to go back as an adult, as a professional, and feel like you're adding some sort of value to a place that played a role in your own development. It was very fulfilling for me, and I've been back a couple of times since as well. Josh: Was there any old teachers that you saw and you were like, ‘Oh, no… Sir, what are you doing?’ Scott: No, no. Very much a turnover of staff but while I was at the school office, I did look at the boards with all the photos and the honour boards with the kids' names and that sort of thing. And just to tie that into NRG Boost Fitness here, I've actually got three old schoolmates as current clients. Josh: That's cool. Scott: Yeah. So that's also something that I find very rewarding as well and makes me feel really good. Obviously, we all run businesses to earn money. Josh: Ideally, yeah. Scott: Yeah. You've got to earn a living. You've got to support yourself and your family, but for me, I think one of the keys to my success is that I don't focus on just the dollars. It's about a lot more than that. It's about personal fulfilment and things that make me happy and the fact that I've got three guys that I'd probably fallen out of contact with a little bit over the years but have reconnected with in recent years. They're now current clients, and I'm helping them improve their lifestyles. Josh: That's cool. So you've been in business for a long time, you've got your bricks and mortar now, have a rough idea of where you're wanting to go. If you were to do it all again, would you change the order of events or what would you do differently? Scott: I honestly don't think I would change a great deal. One of the things I think I got right from the outset was as professionals, as entrepreneurs, you would have to read a lot about the importance of beginning with the end in mind, having a clear picture of what you want your business to look like, and it was the clearest example in my life where I was able to come up with a very clear picture of how I wanted this place to look, how I wanted this place to operate, and doing that, and putting effort into getting those details right from the start, allowed me to almost follow that to the letter and it was amazing watching that unfold. To have ideas go from just words on paper through to, a little over two months later, from when I first decided to undertake this venture and then to actually open my doors, it was literally two months, but the reason it was able to happen so quickly is because I was clear on what I wanted and things literally just fell into place. There was no forcing or pushing. Things just sort of fell my way. Josh: That's very, very serendipitous, or lucky, I guess, or fortunate that that worked out that way. Scott: Yeah. So just to answer your question in fewer words, basically, beginning with the end in mind was the most important thing that I did and I would recommend that for anybody else looking to do anything similar. Josh: Cool. A lot of people get into business and they think, ‘Oh, in two years' time I'm going to retire. I'm going to make a million dollars,’ and have these huge thoughts of grandeur and they don't necessarily make the appropriate planning before jumping in and understanding the depth of the water and realising how deep it goes and how much is actually involved in running your own business, especially when you're starting up and you need to be the person wearing all of the different hats. You need to be the technical person, you need to be the administration, you need to be the marketer, the salesperson, you do all of the different things all at once, and as you said, you want to have a balance in your business, you want to have a balance in your life. Was there any steps that you went, ‘Oh, shit, I need to learn more about this,’ or, ‘I need to learn more about that,’ or things that you went, ‘Oh, wasn't expecting that to be a hurdle?’ Scott: Yeah. Not really. That's probably another thing I think I got right—the scale of the venture that I took on, I think, was appropriate for that first leap. But the point you make about a lot of business people taking the plunge but not realising the depth of the water they're diving into, in my industry it might be somebody that says, ‘Oh, I can run a gym,’ and they take on this big operation and then it's not until they're in it and they realise what an undertaking it is. So I was pretty happy to start with a personal training studio that's literally a couple of hundred metres around the corner from home, so it suited my lifestyle and I've been really comfortable with the size of the jump, so to speak. There have certainly been things that I've had to learn as I went along but that was the whole point to begin with—to learn new things and challenge myself. Josh: I think it's very sensible the way that you've gone about the business because, as you said, a lot of people might just go in and they jump straight into a lease but they don't have any clientele and they have no idea about marketing. They just think they get some business cards and then they will come, build it and they will come, and that's not how it really works. I think it's great that you're in the IT world, they call it agile development, where you try and make the smallest profitable item first and then you build upon that. A good example would be Uber. So you don't start with an autonomous vehicle that's driving everyone, tens of thousands of autonomous vehicles driving everyone around countries. Instead, you start with an app that allows for people to take in that step until they've saved up enough money to then be able to move onto the next ventures, and Elon Musk does the same things. Josh: And you've done the same thing in where you've built up your clientele, you've created a rapport and the message is strong and your social content in strong, and the community that you've created around your business is very strong. Different events that I've been to with Scott have been 60, 70 people upwards. Your opening day here, I don't know how many people you would have had here, it was stacks, so it shows the belief and the message that you've instilled in all the people that you have come here is very strong and the allegiance of people. Scott: Well, I think, getting back to one of your earlier questions about community, I've done things outside of here for the broader community, but I placed great emphasis on the importance of building a community within your business, in much the same way that a café might do the same thing. There are hundreds of cafes, Brisbane wide, and what makes you choose one over another? It’s generally the one where you feel most welcome and almost like it's a second home, and so that's what I try to do here, again, not in a forced kind of way but just in an organic way, and it's been another very satisfying thing for me to observe, friendships being formed and I know that some of my group members socialise outside of here, that didn't know each other previously but they met through NRG Boost Fitness and that's sometimes more rewarding than dollars. Josh: I think just, straight on the friendship situation, it's something, it's a place... I come here myself and it's a place that I feel very comfortable in, and I've brought multiple friends here because I find it's a good time to be able to catch up and see people while having a workout, as opposed to catching up and having a beer and a pizza, which is lovely as well, but it's not as great for your waistline and your health, and I can definitely say you...we, two and a half years ago, met for the first time and I told you my goals and you said, ‘That's not achievable’, in nicer words, in the timeline that I wanted to achieve it in. You said, ‘Look, see how you go’, I think, and I tried really hard, twisted my ankle, stopped trying as hard for a while, but I continued to persevere and 12 months later I achieved the goal that I wanted to, the weight that I wanted to, the percentage of body weight that I wanted to, and I'm very impressed with the results I was able to get from you. But it was not just the journey of the weight. It was also the friendship that was made along the way, and a great example would be Scott coming over and surprising me of a lunchtime and taking me over to see the jolly old Saint Nick. Scott: That's right, yeah. Coming up to a year ago. Josh: Yeah, that's right. We were able to sit on Santa's lap together which was… Scott: For the first time in probably 30 years! Well, for me, anyway! Josh: For you, yeah! And I thought it was great that you definitely went above and beyond and I don't think there would be many business owners, or especially PTs, that would do that level of commitment towards the friendships and the bonds that were created within the community, so it's a testament to the way you create your business. Scott: Thanks, Josh. Josh: I'd like to cut across to a quick video that discusses more about taking the plunge and we'll talk more about that afterwards. It's big, it's wet, it's wild. That's right. It's Niagara Falls, and if you've ever been here or any other large waterfall, you might have wondered, what would it be like to just jump in? So, there was this time when Sam Patch, who was the first daredevil to take the plunge over Niagara, all the way back in 1829. He shot to fame and his slogan became part of a popular slang. The slang was, ‘Some things can be done as well as others.’ It's a great line. You could take it to mean that our achievements are equal, or you could also take it like we are trying to do our own thing as best we can, or maybe he was telling us that we can do those things that others think are impossible. So what about you? What's your Niagara Falls? What's that big challenge that you are scared to take on? Well, let me tell you, it's often much easier than you think once you just commit to it. For Sam Patch, he was actually pretty disappointed with the crowd that turned up for his first successful attempt. There was bad weather and he'd been delayed, so he announced that he would do it again a few days later. This time, 10,000 people turned up and he cemented his place in history. So, if old Sam can jump off Niagara Falls twice, there's nothing to stop you taking the plunge. Whoa! Josh: Good to be back. I thought that was pretty good. So we went through that you can sort of see sometimes it's not the first time, the first step, but just taking the plunge and just being the person that commits to that can really make a big difference in your business. So it's cool that you've gone through and you've done that and you've experienced that firsthand and you didn't, in a sink or swim situation, you were able to swim and, if anything, swim very, very well. Scott: Yeah. Well, just one point I'd like to add to that, Josh. As any person should do when making a decision to go into business or not, you're going to come up with your list of pros and cons, and you'll have your moments of bravery and you'll have your moments of fear and ultimately, for me, it came down to a fear of financial risk and when I really thought about it, I then fast-forwarded to when I'm 80 years of age and I look back, and if I hadn't done this, what would have been the reason that I didn't and would I be comfortable with that decision? And if it was just a money thing that held me back, I think I would look back and regret it and be disappointed that I wasn't bolder at the time. So, yeah, I think it's a useful exercise sometimes, to fast-forward to when you're in your final years, will you wish that you had have taken more risks? Josh: Definitely, I agree completely. I've always looked at it like, who would you like to see standing there at your funeral and... as dark as that is, who would you like to see standing there, at your funeral, and what was the reason you were remembered? And hopefully, there's a legacy that you've left behind, whether that be children or even just a nice smile in helping someone out and that's there some memory that you've left there. So it's work your way back from there. Scott: Yeah. And it might seem a little bit dark to some people but it's an extremely powerful exercise to take yourself through as well. Josh: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Definitely. So what would you say would be the life tip or quote that you live by? Scott: Well, there are probably a few but one that I have been thinking about recently is not being a victim in life and basically taking absolute personal responsibility for your life circumstances. I just believe that as soon as you blame somebody else or other people for your situation, is when you give away your power. Sure, bad things are going to happen in your life and some will be other people's fault, but it's how you respond to that really makes the difference. So I really try to remember that all the time and take the appropriate action. So there might be people out there who are unhappy with their job and it's as simple as changing jobs. I understand that it's scary in that moment but if you're truly unhappy, you have the power to find a better job. Josh: Absolutely. Scott: And if you're overweight, you can continue blaming this, blaming genetics, whatever the case might be, but ultimately, if you eat better and exercise, you're going to improve that situation. Josh: Absolutely. And it's all about baby steps and getting the understanding, sometimes understanding your weak points and turning them into your strengths or at least having recognition towards them so you know how to work and come out of your comfort circle, to grow into a better person, whether that be through weight loss or a change of job, or a change of marriage, or whatever the situation is, it can all make you a happier you. Scott: Yeah, exactly right, Josh. Josh: Cool. And we're going to do something here. So we're going to do a shout out. You've done really, really well. Public speaking and especially in a global audience, like YouTube, can be scary. It's all imprinted in stone forever. It's going to live on longer than us. This could be our legacy. If nothing else, this is it. Scott: Don't stuff it up. Don't stuff it up! Josh: So you've done really, really well and I really appreciate your time that you've given me today, and I'd like to see if there's maybe another business coach, leader or business that you think would benefit from having a review and that the public would benefit from hearing from. Scott: Yeah, well, certainly one of the best things I've done in recent years in terms of developing my own business expertise, for want of a better term, is I undertook an internship with a business called Create PT Wealth. I attended a free workshop. It was probably over three years ago now, and that, in itself, was a half day, full day workshop that was highly valuable and I took a lot out of that and I realised the position my business, and I'll use the term business fairly loosely because at that time it was a fairly poorly structured business, and it made me realise what work I needed to do to make a real business. Scott: So I then undertook an 18-month personal training business internship and it covered all sorts of things: business systems, marketing, the whole gamut of things. At the time, I could not afford it, well, I told myself that, ‘You can't afford this,’ but something in me knew that I needed to do it and it wasn't an expense, it was an investment in the future of my business. So that was another time where I took the plunge and found a way to afford it and what I learnt in 18 months has been a massive reason behind where I'm at today, in terms of having my own premises and being very happy with my professional life. Scott: So Create PT Wealth is the name of the business and I would strongly recommend that anybody else in the fitness industry or a personal trainer seek them out and see what they can offer your business. Josh: Cool. Is there anybody particular at PT Wealth that stuck out for you? Scott: Yeah, well, certainly both Brad and Jason were both extremely helpful, right from that initial workshop and I also had a business coach, Leanne, through that time as well, that I would check in with, every fortnight, and just have a phone conversation, and it was a good way to be kept accountable. She would set me certain business-related tasks that I would need to report back to her on in the next fortnight and that's a really important thing, is accountability, because sometimes it's easy to make excuses to yourself but when there's somebody else that you've got to report back to, I found that that really kept me on track. Josh: Definitely. Scott: Thank you to Create PT Wealth. Josh: Cool. Well, I think we should all take a deep breath and give yourselves a clap. That's awesome. Thank you very much. Scott: No worries, Josh. Thank you. Josh: Awesome. Read about the interview: https://dorksdelivered.com.au/business-tips/interview-with-scott-aurisch-of-nrg-boost-fitness?highlight=WyJzY290dCJd I hope you enjoyed the episode. Every little bit helps and a small thing that you could do, as a token of appreciation, would be to jump onto iTunes and rate and review to make sure that other people can listen and get the same helpful help that you guys had. Thank you, and keep good.

There's something to learn by listening to any individual's success story, but when the story starts with being kicked out of high school at 15, one can get pulled especially quickly into hearing how it panned out. I found myself at the edge of my seat while sitting across from Pivotal Coaching Co-Founder Scott Hopson for the latest #WeGotGoals podcast episode interview because that was exactly how his story started. If you're in the training industry, maybe you've attended continuing education sessions through NASM, EXOS, The Gray Institute, or Power Plate International; if so, you've probably studied Hopson's material or done a workshop with him. He also helped launch Midtown Athletic Club, Chicago's first urban sports resort with 575,000 square feet of health and wellness amenities. And, as the co-founder of PTA Global, he's coached countless personal trainers in a unique approach focused on behavioral science. Essentially, Hopson has worked his entire professional life on becoming the best version of himself as a personal trainer, but he's also dedicated his life to the fitness industry from a practical coaching, educational, and business perspective. And with the prestigious laundry list of titles he possesses, you can imagine why I found it unbelievable that it all started with being kicked out of school. But, as Hopson told me during the interview, when he decided he wanted to turn his life around, he started at the source where he felt like he was always home, the one place where he felt "in flow" amidst it all - with his coaches when he was playing sports. He held onto the memory of being coached and let that passion drive him forward. Now, helping others achieve their movement goals makes him feel alive, and he's equally passionate about training other coaches to bring out their fullest potential and thus, inspire clients to become the best version of themselves too. The most interesting thing about our interview, though, had nothing to do with fitness and everything to do with the human behind the science of coaching. In order to go after the "what" (whether that's a specific fitness goal or any other transformational goal in your life), "you have to articulate the 'why,'" Hopson said. Ultimately, understanding that it's not about him as a coach at all when he's in a coaching session has helped him understand how to navigate every other kind of partnership and communication in his life. "If I'm going to coach you, I've got to create an environment for you to train yourself, because I can't do it," Hopson said. "That'd be quite arrogant and ignorant of me to believe I can. If I create an environment for you to change yourself, that affects how I communicate to you, how I listen, do I have empathy? And I apply that to my business relationships. Am I listening? Am I willing to consider the possibility that they don't only have a point of view, but they might actually change mine?" Hopson also mentioned that he leans into his intuition to help guide his unique, nonlinear career path and what big goals he goes after. "I'm at my happiest, and in flow, where nothing else matters than that present moment, when I'm being of service to someone as a coach," he said. I commented on how lucky he was to know that feeling - a feeling of just being in total flow. He replied that we all have it, in some way, shape or form. We just have to notice and be open to tapping into it. "It doesn’t happen every day, [but] there are things you can do to connect you back to it if you lose it – whether it’s prayer or meditation, or whatever it is that connects you to that thing," Hopson said. Listen to Scott Hopson's episode of the #WeGotGoals podcast to hear one success story you likely won't ever forget. You can listen anywhere you get your podcasts (did we mention, we're on Spotify now?) If you like what you hear, please leave us a rating or a review! We'd really appreciate it. And stick around until the end of the episode, where you’ll hear a goal from one of you, our listeners. (Want to be featured on a future episode? Send a voice memo with a goal you’ve crushed, a goal you’re eyeing, or your best goal-getting tip to cindy@asweatlife.com.)   --- Transcript: Jeana: Welcome to #WeGotGoals a podcast by aSweatLife.com on which we talk to high-achievers about their goals. I’m Jeana Anderson Cohen. With me I have Maggie Umberger and Cindy Kuzma. Maggie: Morning Jeana! Cindy: Good morning Jeana! Jeana: Morning! Maggie, you talked to Scott Hobson this week, right? Maggie: I did! I spoke with Scott Hobson and he has a lot of roles which I will try to give you in the upfront here but he will do a better job of talking about the many companies that he has started. And from his career trajectory, he’s been a personal trainer, he has coached coaches. He still loves to coach people on how to help other people achieve their goals. He is the founder, co-founder of PTA Global as well as Pivotal Coaching. But essentially what he does, is he helps people move better.  Whether that is individuals or people within big gyms or at really large conferences and for fitness professionals across the world. He’s been to 40 countries to teach. He’s also an author, a writer, and a speaker. And I was so lucky to get to speak to him about his goals of which he has many. Jeana: But he also failed big once, right Maggie? Maggie: I didn’t realize this. I didn’t know this until we were talking for this interview, but he was kicked out of high school. And he kind of tossed it out there and I was honestly shocked because he has done so many things. He is the co-founder of Pivotal coaching which is a world-wide coaching business now. And I was honestly surprised because he is so accomplished. He’s so well spoken, he’s so driven. But I learned that he did get kicked out of high school and it took something for him to realize that in order for him to turn his life around he needed to find the thing that made him feel like he was in flow, is what he calls it. And when he feels like he’s in flow, he knows he’s doing the right thing and the only thing that he felt that kind of sensibility around was when with his rugby team and when he was being coached by his coaches. He felt like he was at home and he wanted to do that more. He wanted to do that in any capacity he could, so he became a personal trainer. He kept going back to school, he kept learning more and his fervor for learning more about human movement and just how people behave around fitness. It’s a much broader topic for him then just like what happens in a coaching session. And he’s really turned that enthusiasm, is what he calls it. This spirit for understanding how people move into his life-long career. Which is huge leaps and bounds away from getting kicked out of high school years ago. Jeana: And he feels like it’s important to coach the humans who are doing the movement and not actually coach the movement. Which is an interesting semantic issue, it’s an interesting word choice. What does he mean by that and how does that fit into his overall philosophy? Maggie: So Scott has the wherewithal to know that what happens in the gym is only a tiny part of your day. And he knows that as long as you just throw anatomical cues at people it’s going to go over their head. They have to find their why. And so he’s become really, really passionate about helping other coaches learn how to speak to people to meet them where they are and to really influence and inspire change for people on a greater level than just going through the motions of a program, of going through the workout. We say this all the time at aSweatLife that fitness can be the catalyst to you living your best life and that what happens in the gym can absolutely affect you life outside of the gym if you let it. If you want it to and he has started to focus a lot of the training and the protocols within Pivotal Coaching around human behavior and how can what coaches do in your training sessions influence how that training session goes. It's so much more of an emotional thing than just a physical thing which is interestingly a large part of the conversation that we had was just about how connected to his own emotional well-being he is. Like when he’s not in flow as I was saying, he knows it and he needs to make a change. And that's what happened when he was director of a really large facility that he's still incredibly involved with and he loves it very much. But when he was doing a role that he could do but he felt a little bit more stressed by being in it. It was apparent to him that he needed to make a change and he could be a better asset in a different capacity. So that when he could actually get back to working with people, for people and helping. Really his passion is working with coaches then he could really feel, do better work, help people on a greater scale. And so that's been his guiding force, like getting within the process, finding the joy, finding the payoff in the process is what he says. Not just that the end goal or whatever the thing he's trying to accomplish gets checked off the list. It's about feeling the way he needs to feel all along the way. Jeana: What an incredible story of overcoming obstacles and finding your true path I can't wait to hear Maggie talk to Scott. And stick around at the end of the episode we’re hearing from you listeners. Maggie: Thanks so much for joining me Scott, on the We’ve Got Goals Podcast. Scott: I'm excited. Maggie: We're excited to have you! So Scott for the listeners at home I know that you do a lot of jobs and that they probably sometimes they overlap, sometimes they’re different. You're a one-on-one coach, your a group coach, you have managed big facilities, you also coached on a global scale and your a founder of a couple companies. For the listeners can you give a little brief description of, I know you said what you do on a daily basis is different, but how you spend your days and what your general title is? Scott: Yeah, it’s wonderful. Well I mean the single biggest thing right now is I’m a co-founder of Pivotal. We’re a development company. And our mission is really simple it's to empower people to fulfill their potential. And our clientele if you will is anyone that has a passion for movement. So what I do on a daily basis could be considered coaching - one-on-one, groups, and teams from everyday people at health clubs to Olympic-level teams I work with all of them. But my real passion is teaching and you could say I coach the coaches. So what I travel the world doing, I think I've been to about 40 different countries by now, I coach coaches on how to be a better coach. We can talk later about what that includes maybe. But I also consult.  Having been an operator for 20 years building health clubs, big beautiful sports resorts around the world. I know what it takes to actually build facilities, operate facilities, manage people, sales marketing, membership and on it goes. But ultimately I think it all comes down to coaching. I’m in the people industry and my job is to build meaningful relationships and I think that’s what coaches do. I don’t know if that makes sense, but that’s kind of what on any given day one of those is what I’m doing or all of those is what I’m doing. Maggie: That’s fascinating.  Not only the breadth of what you do but the depth to which you do it. So like you're talking about working on the business side of the athletic club and building out a club. And then also building out an amazing coaching staff and helping people become better coaches. And then helping individuals also reach their fitness goals. It just runs the gamut. Scott: Yeah, it does. Maggie: Did you start as a personal trainer yeah in terms of profession? Scott: Yeah, in terms of profession that's the first real professional job I had. But I've been in the movement industry my whole life the only thing that's really kept me sane through life's adventures that don't all start out the way you want them to. But that one kind of bedrock of always connecting to why I'm here has been either playing sport, coaching sport, moving, coaching people, something to do with this idea of I'm here to move and I'm here to help people move. Not just physically but towards their dreams in life, you know? So 1998 is when I became a personal trainer and fitness instructor in the UK, in London. But immediately, the minute I was in the industry I knew this was only part of what I was going to do here. And that's when I went back to school to become a physical education teacher. Which is the problem when you get kicked out of high school at 15. Maggie: Wait a minute, should we go back and ask about that? Scott: There would need to be some whiskey in the room.  Yeah you're talking to a guy that didn't even graduate high school at 15. I left and then when I realized “oh, I probably should have stuck around” I was 24, 25 and I decided I wanted to go back and become a coach and a physical education teacher. So the problem is that you've got to graduate high school first. So believe it or not I was a 25 year old in school with a bunch of teenagers. Maggie: Wow! Scott: Yeah, that’s where it started for me. Actually, I answer it that way because that’s where it started, was the realization that I needed to do something different with my life. And I found out pretty quickly it was in this area of movement and coaching. That was my only real love in life, was playing sport and being coached.  So how do I do that, Okay I'll go to university. Okay, how do you do that, you’ve got to graduate high school. Problem, big problem. So I had to go back in order to go forwards and then it's been an unbelievable journey since then just exploring all the possibilities in this industry, you know? And there's multiple Industries- it's not just fitness, it's not just performance, it’s wellness, it's all of it really. You know? Maggie: Oh, yeah. And it’s a huge world. And it can feel, it seems like you have this outlook that is just wide-eyed and excited versus daunted. You know, because you talk about there being so many facets to movement, and to health and wellness. That I can get intimidated by where do I spend my time? Scott: Where do I begin? Maggie: What to learn. Oh my god, there is so much to learn. Scott: There is. Maggie: But, based on what I’ve seen and how you have grown your career. You’ve just gone after the things you wanted to go after. And created your career based on what excites you. Scott: That’s probably quite accurate actually. For me we’ve also got passion. But I’ve kind of shifted. I think passion is a good thing. If you aint got it, it’s too darn hard to do anything. You know? Maggie: Yeah. Scott: But for me it’s become more enthusiasm. And it sounds like semantics but that word. When you’re enthusiastic about something. Like it literally means to be in spirit, right? It means to be, the payoff is in the process. I think you've got to passionately follow where the payoff is in the process. Whatever that is in your life. Like that burning desire to do something just because the act of doing it is the payoff. And that really sums up my career. Every few years there seems to be another door opens or something says no, you should take a left here. When my best laid plans said to take a right but something says in me says no, you’re supposed to follow that. It leads to failure, a ton actually but if your enthusiastic. The saying about enthusiasm, it's the ability to keep falling on your face and not care anyway. That’s a big part of enthusiasm. Maggie: Well, I think that kind of transitions to the question that we ask on #WeGotGoals, which is what's one big goal that you're proud to say you've accomplished and how did you get there? Scott: Wow, that's I knew you were going to ask it and it's surprisingly difficult to answer, right because you don't want to sound trite or have too much levity. But the reality is there's two things that all stand out. One is, one of the company’s that I'm a founder of is PTA Global, Personal Training Academy Global, we launched that out of nothing. We literally traveled the world.  Me and my five brothers who created it. Not biological brothers and we asked every health club we had worked with in 40 different countries. What are your problems? What are your pains? And we built personal training certification to answer their problems. Not just based on whatever we thought was the best way to train. We actually tried to build something on what people needed rather than what we thought. Then we went out and recruited 26 of the best educators in our industry. Many of whom we were told they won’t even be in the same room as each other. They had conflicting opinions, philosophies, they argue. We got them all in the same room to write PTA Global. All of them in the same room and we launched it in 2009 which was the worst economic time. Little did we know what was coming.  And now we're 35, 40 countries, you know? And it all just came from sharing a common purpose, you know what I mean? That drive, that desire to do something. So that stands out professionally as the best thing I've done in my career so far. Is to truly just go all in, we all quit our jobs with salaries and put all our chips in. And said it's this or nothing. Just once we have to try and do the right thing, rather than to do things right and it cost us everything we had. If we didn't sell, we didn't eat. If it wasn't successful, it was on us there was no one to blame, no corporate structure or nothing. It was incredible! I'll tell you that's the biggest achievement in my career other than being in it in the first place. Because it wasn't easy for me to be in it in the first place you know I talked about getting kicked out of school and I had to go back to college. I was the first person in my entire family history that has ever done anything outside of high school. And I think just having to pay for your own way you know what I mean despite life willingness to say you can't do it. Maggie: Where did you learn that? Where do you think that drive comes from? That just openness to enthusiasm and willingness to lean into it. Scott: Truthfully, I think for me it was just not failing a lot, but really discovering who I was in the first. I think some people it's wonderful they seem to have the playbook, they come with it. They can be like oh this is what it's like to be a good person. Or this is what it's like to follow your dreams. But that wasn't my experience. My experience was a lot of failure and a lot of pain and alot of looking at who I was at first. And then finally when you hit it enough bumps you say holy crap I’ve got to change something. The second part is you can’t do it alone. I've been very blessed to have people that showed up right on time. When I needed help so I think surrounding yourself with the people that you hope to become you know what I mean. I mean truly looking at people, I don't know what it is that you have but I want that. Whether it's their spiritual fitness, their ability to be kind, their ability to be successful in business. Like you clearly have something I don't, where I lack or and I'm unable to see. I should probably surround myself with people like you and try to learn it, you know? And it's really those two ingredients and that burning desire. For me to pick up a book and study coaching and movement or isn't a drudge, it's a joy. You know what I mean? When I'm bored it's the first thing I want to do. Wow I’d love to learn more about [...] or how did that Olympic coach win it for the fourth year in a row. Whatever. I'm fascinated with not just human movement but with the human being inside it. So I think when you're fascinated, I think that curiosity, that’s the word. Maggie: Yeah. Scott: You’ve got to have a relentless curiosity for whatever you’re passionate about. You know? Maggie: Yeah, absolutely! Did PTA Global come about, you said you visited countries you visited the big clubs that you worked with and answered some of their problems or their needs. Was it also an equal part you finding those extra elements that you were excited about. Like what's inside a human being and how can we help them feel their best while they're working out. Those little nuances, did that kind of come together as the marriage. Is that what PTA Global is? Scott: 100%, yes. if you're going to solve a problem, you’ve got to first know what that problem is. And the key to getting clarity is to ask better questions. If you keep asking the same questions, it doesn’t matter about how many ways you phrase it. So part of the fascination was what are the real problems of our industry. We’ve got 300 times more education than we’ve ever had, we’ve got more gyms and health clubs than we’ve ever had and we’ve got more billions of dollars invested in health and wellness than we’ve ever had. Yet we’ve got less human beings moving than anytime in human history. We’ve got more disease, disability and dysfunction than anytime in human history. And believe it or not we have the first generation of youth with a lower life expectancy than their parents.  If that don't make you wake up like our kids are scheduled to die younger than we are. It’s supposed to be the opposite. We're keeping old people live longer and sicker and younger people are dying sooner with more sickness. So part of it was that we've got to solve this problem. But the other part wow I've got to go find something that maybe isn't there or I've got to find the missing link. There’s that journey of discovery, right? The merging of that and the guys and girls we did it with are geniuses in their respective fields. Nutrition, behavioral change, movement, anatomy, whatever it is. So to actually go to each of these leaders and get their take on how it answer that. It was, you don't get many opportunities in life to do that to. Say here are the problems let's go speak to the world's best and find out how they might solve it. And then bring it back to the people who asked for it. That really was the journey. Maggie: So for the listeners at home what does PTA Global do or what does that certification earn you? Scott: A couple of things. One, if you woke up today as a fitness enthusiast and said man I would love to become a  professional coach, a personal trainer or a fitness professional, you have to get legally certified. Now you can do it the right way or the wrong way. The wrong way is you could go online trough some swipe your finger, take an exam, call yourself professional. Or you can go study, whether it’s 6, 9, 12 month program. Some of them are two years, actually study the human body anatomy, kinesiology, program design, behavior.  Then you have to sit for an actual exam and there's a practical in a room. One of those companies is PTA Global, we created a brand new approach to becoming a globally certified fitness professional. So if you take our course whether you're in Dubai, London, Amsterdam. You are legally certified anywhere in the world to practice in this profession. So that's kind of a big deal. It very much a behavioral change approach, we say when you find the why, you find the what. Everyone’s got a what, weight loss, weight gain, whatever it is. Until I find the why, the chances are we aren’t going to get you there. So that's how our philosophy is meeting people where they need to be met. And then we have advanced curriculums. One of them is called Exercise and Stress Management. We are nothing but a bunch of cells that get stressed on a daily basis. And how I move today is as much to do with my nutrition, my sleep, my emotions as much as it is my posture and flexibility, you know? So we can go on a very deep journey with you. And that then that leaves into Pivotal, my company now, which is that my passion is to travel the world and connect those dots. With the operators, with the product manufacturers, with the educators, with the certification bodies. We work with all them to bring people together to connect dots. So we travel the world, me and Haley, creating partnerships between global leaders. Delivering education for these people, creating education for them. One of our biggest passions is to teach the teachers. When you're in a room of a hundred coaches you’re really touching hundreds of thousands of people, right? Maggie: Sure. Scott: But when you’re in a room of 50 teachers your reaching exponentially more. So that’s what Pivotal does. We’ve kind of gone even bigger, how do we touch the most people to empower and fulfill their potential. Whether it is the club operator, whether it is the coach, whether it is the educator. And that was really the birth of Pivotal. Was to take everything I learned at PTA Global and kind of go one layer deeper. Which is really connecting people. I can’t think of one single movement in human history that hasn’t come from those first followers finding their fanatical fans and on and on it goes. So that’s kind of our gig now. Maggie: Yeah. So this conversation that is generally focused on goals. Is interesting to me I think to ask this question about how you’ve worked with people in the fitness world, in the fitness realm about how to tap into their why by them articulating their what. And then going through the behavior change process to get them to meet their goals. And how has that potentially shaped the way you view goals? Scott: Utterly, completely. You know one of my most important values to me is authenticity. Sometimes I feel like saying no experience, no opinion, you know? How can you coach someone one-on-one personal training or in small group or large group and hope to not only inspire but guide them to transformation. Because really everyone is looking for a transformation. No one wants to be what they are. You want to be more than they are. You want to be the best version of yourself you can. So if I want to coach you my job really is to create an environment for you to change yourself because I can’t do it. It’d be quite arrogant and ignorant for me to think I can.  So behavioral change, this whole view point is if I create an environment for you to change yourself that affects how I communicate to you, how I listen, do I have empathy can I be a GPS because you're coming today and you're stressed because you’ve had 15 coffees, you didn't eat, didn't sleep, you busted up with your partner. Okay that changed our program like instantly. How do I create on demand based on your behavior. So what that does authentically as coach for me. Man am I applying that to myself? Am I applying that to my business relationships? Am I listening when I’m speaking to my partners? Am I willing to consider maybe the possibility that they don’t really have a point of view but it might actually change mine. That’s empathetic listening. I'm going to listen at a level where I actually might realize that I'm wrong. Do you know how hard that is as a personal trainer because we always think we're right. Don’t eat this, do eat that. Stop doing that, go to bed on time.,   Okay, you just told them to change their whole life and you're there for maybe 3 hours a week out of the 168. So you're like 2% of their life but you've asked them to change a hundred percent of their life. That seems a bit drastic and you're not there to pick up the pieces because there's going to be a lot of falling pieces. When you ask someone to change everything. What if their partner doesn't like that? What if it means now, when everyone else is eating fried chicken. They’re saying “ugh, couldn’t we have grilled it?”. But no one else in the family likes grilled. And on it goes. So it's affected everything I do because it makes me stop and go am I applying that same principle to my life? And is what I'm asking them to maybe consider doing, have I consider the choices in my life today or this week? Am I making the right choices for myself? That's authentic. So when someone says I come in today Scott. No I didn't fix my nutrition plan, I didn't work out three times this week, empathy would say man I know how that feels. There’s no judgment. It’s just like I know how that feels. Now ask more questions. What would your block? What was your break? What do you want to do about it? That's shifted how I am in my relationships and life for the most part this aint about me, right? I wish it was. Then my script would work. Maggie: Well it's interesting because the world of fitness has like you said kind of blown up. And everyone has a place in it in a really cool way. Brands are part of it. Different kinds of fitness have become hybrids and people aren’t just one thing were multiple things. And I think that's an awesome thing that health and wellness has become a little bit more top of mind. But I also think that creates a lot more ego about who is right and who is wrong so the idea of taking it back, maybe I’m wrong is probably very slim to none in the health and wellness world. Scott: One of my favorite quotes I heard was in 2004, it was at a conference I was speaking at called Meeting of the Minds. And it was like TED talks back in the day every presenter got 20 minutes and they were leaders and what they did. It was incredible I got to ask to present, I was the new kid on the block. I heard this guy say, “I’m pretty sure standing here today, after 30 years as a world-class Olympic coach”, which he was and educator. “He said 50% of what I’m about to tell you is complete BS.” So everyone laughs. And he goes, “The real problem is I’m not sure anymore which 50%.” And it really struck me. That’s probably the wisest thing anyone in this room is going to say all day. There is what I think is right and there is what I know, I don’t know. Then there is what I don’t know, I don’t know. And in every area of research in every industry, every few years there’s like wow that changes what we think about technology or medicine. And yet our industry for the most part still wants to practice fitness the way we did 30 years ago. Even though what we’ve learned about the body and the mind is dramatically more evolved. So you go into these operators and you see them building clubs the same way they did 30 years ago. If medicine followed that it would be a problem, right? And so to your point, I think fitness itself needs to be dramatically redefined. Because fitness just means your fit to perform the task that you were here to perform. So what is that? Your a mum wants to pick up her kids is different from someone who wants to look better naked that’s different from someone. It’s just you know? So the industry itself could really do with redefining a little bit of its purpose I think. Because we are more wellness, we are more healthful. We should be. I think fitness itself is what could with a little bit of a tweak. Maggie: Yeah, yeah. So moving forward, as you look down the line. Whether it's tomorrow kind of goal or 10 years down the line. What is a big goal you hope to accomplish? Scott:  I've got too many, I think. Maggie: That's okay. Scott: I think for me, I would love, love for us to get rid of names like personal trainer and instructor. And I’d love for us to get rid of the definitions of I’m a yogi, I’m a pilates, or I’m a [...]. We’re coaches, I know I keep saying it. We’re coaches and what’s fascinating about the word is it comes from the 14th century. Like the stagecoach, it was a vehicle of transportation that carries people from where they are to where they’re going. So I always like to say you can be a personal trainer, you can be an instructor but what people are looking for is to go from where they are to where they want to be. From who they are to who they want to become. When you’re a coach you’re this vehicle of transportation, you know? And you remember your coaches, the good and the bad. I think we’re bigger than just trainers and instructors. But what I would love to see, is if we could all come together to say this is what we agree on this is how we coach the human being inside the human body. These are our ingredients for human movement. The thing about ingredients are you can create infinite different recipes. But we’ve got to agree on the ingredients, surely.  A world class chef can cook all different kinds of cuisines. But they know the food, they know the ingredients, they know their basics. And I don’t think we have that. So if I go to physical therapy [...], there’s not a lot of respect for the fitness professional world or the professional training world. There’s not a lot of respect for the group exercise instructor. You go into mind body and there is a complete dissonance between what you’re do in a yoga studio versus what you do in a swimming pool. Movement is movement. Coaching is coaching. And human beings are human beings, man. I would love for us to just have a commonality around those basic ingredients. I really would and that’s kind of what my journey now of Pivotal is about. Is because I can be in a room with physical therapists looking at movement assessments, joint mechanics, knee pain, back pain. The next day I’m at a conference with 300 people going through small group training. And [..] understand is I’ve actually given them the same ingredients, just a different recipe. It absolutely blows my mind sometimes. People go, “Oh yeah, you do the rehab stuff and you do the small group.” I’m like I do movement and coaching. Maggie: Yeah, and from the consumer side of it. Like, it can be taxing to go to so many professionals. Not only for your own dollar that you’re just doling out to hear the latest and greatest from this party and then you hear a contradictory thing from another person. Then you’re like where do I spend my money? But it’s also like how do I get better from this injury? Or how do I actually perform better in this goal that I’m trying to reach fitness-wise? That can be really hard on the just fitness enthusiast. Scott: Go back even more right. The person who’s not enthusiastic about it Maggie: Right. Scott: So your mom and dad passed away when they were say 55. You’re 53, 54. You’re one year away from the exact age where you might have lost your parents. Your sedentary, you're overweight, you're in pain, you don't move. It's not lack of information or lack of education. You need to move, everyone knows. Exercise is probably gonna do. Going to  bed on time is probably a good idea. You pick up a cigarette packet it's got a picture of death on it with a cross. It's kind of very ignorant of us to think people need more education they don't they don't. They don’t need education. But they haven't found a meaningful and relevant reason to do it that outweighs the reasons not to do it. And so I would suggest that what we need to do as a movement and industry is get back to coaching human beings. Because when you find the what you find the why.  But, we just got back from China, here’s my example. And it blows my mind. It's one of the hottest places to go and travel. I don't speak Mandarin. Very very to no English. Not that there has to be but it makes it hard to even get a cup of coffee let alone eat or move around. And loads of smoking. Loads of pollution. Crazy packed busy. But everywhere you go is movement. I’m not lying, there’s eighty, ninety year old people riding bikes in the middle of a busy cross-section. Music’s playing, you turn around someone’s just doing [...]. You walk to the nearest park, hundreds of old people dancing, doing pull-ups and then they drop, no lie. Light up a cigarette and get back on their bike. No obesity, I don’t see the diabetes. I see people moving in ways that make them feel good. It’s nearly always in a community. They’re not doing it alone. Maggie: Right. Scott: Do you know what I mean? I think we really need to look at that part of it. Is how do people want to move? What's their style of moment? What's emotionally attaching to them? Not just physically but emotionally attaching. And so we put people in boxes and there’s good to that. Chances are they've already had a bad experience most people have exercised their life. Most people have failed at it.  It goes all the way back to that crappy gym teacher who told you we're good enough. There’s a lot of emotional triggers going on as soon as they walk through the door. And they're met by trainers that often are wearing shirts that are 3 sizes too small. It’s not the most enticing model of movement. And I think we can shift it. It wouldn’t take too much. The shift come from the neck up. Not the neck down. So I hope, my biggest goal coming is that Pivotal really, we just would like to leave the world a little bit better than we found it. And so if we could get more people moving more often that’s a win. But more importantly, in ways where the payoff is in the process. They move because it feels good. They move because emotionally connects them. Not, “Oh, I have to do it.”  I've got to do it. Or I’m doing it just for an outcome - weight loss or whatever it is. We know that doesn't work, it never has worked. If it does is short-term. I move because I love to move. Some days I swing a tennis racket, some days it’s playing rugby, some days it’s lifting weights. I move because I just love to move. I think everyone is wired to move, we just haven’t worked out how they want to move. Maggie: So, if we were to imagine that I were coming in for a first time coaching session with you, And it probably begins a little bit more about the conversation and what's happening neck up versus alright let’s do this functional screening and figure out where your compensations are. What would be some of the questions that you’d ask me as the client to tap into something. Scott: Wow, wow, wow. Maggie: A reason for moving. Scott: I love what you said because let’s call that the client intake consultation, whatever it is. There is a movement screening involved. There is a nutritional screening involved. But it starts with a motivational interview. And so one of the first questions we’ll ask. Repeat the questions you feel comfortable with. Because if I create emotional insecurity right out the gate, I’m already a threat to you. So the first questions can’t be too deep or you’re immediately thinking I don’t know if I like you or trust you, why on earth would I tell you that. So we even teach, not just the kind of questions but the sequencing, the language, all of it. But one of the first things would be what is the single most important goal you would like to achieve in your time with me. Okay, there’s a couple of big words in there. Not all your goals, the single most important in your time with me. Another big question right out of the gate is what are your expectations of me in the next 60 minutes. Because I need you to know right out the gate that I am here for you, it’s all about you. But I’m accountable, right? If I go to the doctor and they misdiagnosis me or prescribe me to wrong medicine, I’m holding them accountable.  What are your expectations of me. If I got type A directed, I like just tell them what to do and just make sure I know why we’re doing it and kick my butt. Okay. You’re not a high-five kind of guy. You just told me a lot of information on how to coach you. But someone else might say, I have no idea where to start. So giving you an entire game plan in 60 minutes is overwhelming, confusing and the opposite of what you asked for. The only thing I need to give you is the one next thing, then you do it and you’re going to feel like a success. Another question we might ask would be we get further into the questionnaire and we say 1 through 10, 10 is most important, 1 is least important. How important is it that you are successful moving toward your goal? We don’t judge it. If I say a 5 out of 10, that’s wonderful. Why is it not a 2? We don’t go to how can I make it a 10? Why is it not a 2? Because you’re already thinking that. Oh, it wasn’t a 2 so I’m not bad as I think. I’m not as behind as I think. Yeah, it was a 5 that is important to me. We’re reinforcing in your brain with your words. And you’ll get things, oh it’s not a 2 because if I don’t change now it could be too late. Or it’s not a 2 because I waited to long and my pain has gotten worse. They start to unravel the magic. But then another question and this will be the last example I give you. Will be 1 through 10, 10 is the most confident, 1 is the least confident. How confident are you, you can successfully achieve your goal? If someone says oh, I’m an 8 out of 10. Interesting, because it was only a 5 out of 10 for importance. But it’s nearly a 10 out of 10 on confidence. So you’re really confident about a goal that’s not that important. Or it could be opposite, it’s really important but I’m not confident. Two completely different people to coach. We literally have an entire script of motivational questions that are based in neuroscience and behavioral change. Not just the language but the sequence. So by the time you get to the end and you do a summary, they say how did you get all of that out of me.  Number two, you clearly listened. But most important, they say I just admitted that to myself outloud and another human being. That is the start of a valuable change. Is getting clear on what you’re willing to do and ready to do versus not. So there’s not sets and reps, there’s no calories, or anything. What’s your why? And are you ready and willing to change at this time because if you’re not it’s a trainwreck. And I’d be irresponsible to offer you to do it, quite honestly. Maggie: What I think is really fascinating about everything that you just outlined and all the questions that you brought up the word goal with. Those questions could be transitioned from a pre-coaching session to a goal setting session for your career, for your family, for how you want to set up your life at home or whatever it is. It’s how you do anything is how you do everything. Scott: Yes. Maggie: And so I think, at aSweatLife we do really believe that like what happens at the gym is not just that little box of time in the gym and then you leave and your gone. It’s those things that come up in there can carry out to the rest of your life if you let them. And it’s just about. Scott: It’s supposed to, right? Maggie: Right. And it can in a really positive way if you’re open to it. And if you say. Oh yeah, this small victory I did do this thing that was awesome. I’m going to go carry it into my meeting at work. Then I’m going to do the next thing that’s awesome.  So it’s really fascinating and really cool to hear because it is just a conversation around like how do we feel about goals, in general. Scott: Yeah. And what do I mean by goal? Is that just the outcome, is that the process. How will I know when I’ve got there. Measurably and subjectively. How do I know when I’ve actually got there. Most goals are subjective. I want to be in less pain, I want to feel better. That’s a subjective goal. How do we know when we’re there when you’ve arrived? And finally, how do you want to get there. Are you a kind of person who says I’ve got to get on the freeway and get there as quick as possible?  Okay, but then it’s the freeway and it’s concrete jungle and there’s lots of in and out. No, I’d rather take the scenic route. I’d rather go slow and take in the sights. So there’s where you’re going and then there’s how you want to get there. But invariably there is going to be traffic and roadwork. So as a coach, you’ve got to be a GPS and recalculate the route. Which for me, in my experience is every session. You can just see it emotionally in people when you get used to coaching wise. Something just happened where you stopped enjoying this session, that didn’t feel good. Maybe I said something that wasn’t. You know? Or maybe I didn’t listen to something you needed me to listen. I saw something in my client, the entire posture changed. You better recalculate right now.  And so for us, we’d say most people what they emotionally care about is outside the gym. There is very little emotional connection to the dumbell. So yes, in groups that’s different. Don’t get me wrong. That sense of tribe, community, relationships, being part of something bigger than yourself, agreed. But in one-on-one, I would honestly say that most people what they care about is outside the gym. They’re hoping what they transform inside the gym makes that better out. That’s what they’re trying to improve is their life outside the gym. And the people who care about their life inside the gym are the people who work inside the gym. Quite honestly most clients don’t. Maggie: So, I want to pull it back to you for a minute. Because you’ve talked about going from not finishing high school at first. To where you are now which is cofounder of multiple companies. And a huge contributor to what we know about  modern fitness today. You’ve written 50 or more accredited courses that people now go through to get their own certifications. And how you’ve gone from one step to the next. When you look back on it now, what do you think was your guiding force throughout? Or has that changed? Scott: That’s a really great questions. Today, looking back I’ve got a different lens than if you had asked me a year ago or ten years ago, right? But the common thread is to truly be of service. I know it sounds really cheesy but from PGA Global to Pivotal to coaching people or teams or kids. And a lot of what I do is volunteer work in the community. A lot of the teams that I coach, the high schools and the local soccer leagues. It’s all volunteer work, right.  I find that I’m at my most happiest, in flow. When you’re not thing about the bills or the money. When nothing else matters in that present moment is when I’m being of service to someone as a coach. Whether it’s the teacher coach, the sports coach, as a coach. And it could be 4:00 on a Friday night, pouring rain on Foster Lake shore where I coach soccer. And we’ve got out ten year old kids, our eleven year old kids, our sixteen year old high school girls and it’s pouring with rain and it’s 25 degrees. The time just flies. And you get home soaked and cold and you think I want to do it again. It’s those moments where you feel that in flow there is something going on in you. You know what I mean? There’s an internal something directing you. So the single biggest directive force is that, I find that when I’m of service to people, selfishly it seems to make me feel really great. So maybe that’s one good use for being selfish [...]. And I really do want to know that it mattered, to be honest mate. I want to know that the work I do matters. I guess I can only speak for myself but man some many times you go through life and you think did anything I do today make a blind bit of difference. Do you know what I mean? Or, in some cases made it worse. But at the end of the day you want to know that your life made a difference. To someone or something bigger than yourself. I think that’s the biggest directing force I’ve had is the sense of I think this makes a difference. I just have a feeling this makes a difference. I don’t know if that answered your question or if it was too esoteric. I can make it more pragmatic if you want. Maggie: No, I think that it gives me goosebumps because I think that’s what everyone wants to some degree. And that’s a really special thing to find your flow. I don’t know that we can all say that we have it enough. We have probably been in flow at some point in our lives. But maybe we’re not attuned enough to saying this is it, how do I recreate this. It seems like you do have that awareness sort of around what is the secret sauce to when you’re feeling in flow and how you can keep doing it. Or keep bringing it back as much as possible. Would you agree? Scott: Yeah. I think the struggle for all of us, myself included is I think we do know what that is. There’s just an innate knowing, you know? It like saying I don't know if I love my kids. You know you love your kids. You can’t find the words. You know, right? But life, we allow ourselves to be distracted by what’s urgent rather than important. By what’s demanding. So I’ve often taken jobs that didn’t feel good. Because the money was a safety net. Or the benefits were a safety net. Or whatever it was, even though I knew there was a big [...] I would love and yeah it’s in my industry. And then a year in you’re like, this is not me. But you go along because now you’ve got bills and kids. We do and that’s real man. But at some stage you know you can’t die with your music in you. That’s for sure. Maggie: Yeah. Scott: You know what I mean? Maggie: Right. Scott: It’s like being in flow is when you sit down and you’re writing. I write alot for work and also non-work stuff. And you’ll just be in flow and you have it going you don’t realize 3 or 4 hours are gone and it’s 20 pages on the floor. And you realize crap, I didn’t number them. Because you’re just in flow. It doesn’t happen every day. It doesn’t and there’s things you have to do to reconnect to it when you lose it. You know, there’s prayer or meditation, whatever it is that connects you to that thing. For some people, it’s playing sport. It’s dance. Maggie: Yeah. Scott: When you feel disconnected, you better reconnect. You know. You have to because that is really painful being constantly disconnected from your source, your flow. That’s a really painful existence, for me it was. Often, what sparks me into reconnecting is how much more miserable do I have to get before I reclaim happiness, you know? How much more self-pity, wallowing. Sometimes you have to say hold on, there’s what happens to you and then it’s how you react to it. And sometimes you have to say stop that’s enough. I’m going to reconnect to what makes me feel good. I’m going to go back to where I’m in flow. And it requires a leap very often. And Pivotal started when, two years ago. I had been at Midtown Athletic Club as their national director for five years rebuilding the facilities, re-recruiting the coaches, developing Midtown University, it was huge projects. And I realized I was getting more into operations again. More into PNLs and that’s what the job deserves and that’s what they deserve. But in my mind I thought maybe I could manipulate it to be more education so that wasn’t fair. So I had a wonderful chat with an incredible COO, John Brady. And [...] changed. It was like I need to reclaim and he said Scott just do what you love and you’re great at. That’s why I recruited you in the first place. And I went home and I realized I need to make a change. Loved the club, loved the people but I wasn’t in flow anymore. I made two phone calls on the way home that day to two leaders in the industry that I hadn’t spoken to in years. I said what would you say if I said I was available to write education, deliver education, and teach teachers again. Within 24 hours, I had a plane trip to China and I was in boardrooms speaking to these leaders. And I came home to Haley and I said I think we need to start a company. But you honestly need to stop doing one thing that wasn’t making you happy but do it the right way. Don’t just cut and run. Consider other people. And then took this leap of faith, like these two names came to me and it was like wow, they’re leaders man. Should I really call them. They picked up immediately and said I want you on a plane. And it was that reminder light that when you say yes to life it conspires to help you, you know what I mean? That’s my experience but you’ve got to do the work. It doesn’t just come. It’s not Mary Poppins sitting around and hope that if I meditate good things come. No, you’ve got to meditate but then you’ve got to take action, right? It takes a lot of work. Relentless effort, actually. Relentless effort and I think that’s the final piece. For successful people I see is, if it sounds like a lot of work, it’s because it is. Maggie: It’s probably ten times more than it even sounds like. Scott: Success is always hard work whether in love relationships, raising your kids, business life. To be good at anything is probably going to take a bloody lot of work. But if you’re enthusiastic and you’re in flow more often than not, even on the bad days it’s like you know what, I can do that. Maggie: Well this has been an awesome conversation. Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast, Scott. Scott: Thanks for having me! I hope the listeners get something out of the crazy stuff that comes out but it was an honor. It was really nice. Cindy: He goal getters, co-host and producer Cindy Kuzma here. Just letting you know that we have coming up for you now a goal from one of you, our listeners. This is another one recorded live at the Michelob Ultra Sweatworking Week Fitness Festival last month. If you want to share one of your goals with us, whether it’s a goal you achieved, a goal your setting up to achieve, even a piece of goal-getting advice that you’d like to share you could do that and you could be featured on this very podcast. All you have to do is record it and email it in mp3, wav, whatever kind of file you want to  Cindy@aSweatLife.com. Thanks and here is you and one of your goals. Speaker: So I set a couple of goals earlier this year and I noticed that one thing I didn’t do was have accountability in a plan. So I find myself now it’s June and I haven’t accomplished the goals that I set for myself.  Because I haven’t set those checkpoints to say, hey, you know how are you going to get there? Have you been doing everything on a daily basis, on a weekly basis? And then just that accountability. So whether that’s telling someone and having them check in with you, or just saying by first quarter I’m going to accomplish this and then next quarter I’m going to accomplish that. And then I just found myself not having achieved anything. So, for the second part of the year I’m going to reset and visit some different goals and create strategies that are more focused around holding myself accountable for those specific plans. Cindy: This podcast is produced by me, Cindy Kuzma and it’s another thing that’s better with friends. So please, share it with yours. You can subscribe pretty much anywhere you get your podcasts including now on Spotify. And while you’re there if you could leave us a rating or review we would be so grateful. Special thanks to Jay Mono, for our theme music, to our guest this week, Scott Hobson, and to TechNexus for the recording studio. And of course, to you our listeners.  

“Wow. You’re really great with kids.”- Scott “Thanks. I’m also a youth pastor.”- Jimmy Woo (Randall Park) Please subscribe in your favorite podcast app! www.justdoesntmatter.me

Scott Polansky, Appian’s Industry Practice Lead for the Healthcare Payer Industry discusses digital transformation topics and trends impacting healthcare payers. Topics include customer behaviors, adapting an agile approach, the importance of a unified member view and accurate provider directories, as well as the current state of uncertainty amidst healthcare reform. Abby Jacobs serves as contributing host.TRANSCRIPT: Abby: Hello and welcome to the Appian Industry Outlook Podcast, where we take time to speak with Subject Matter Experts on digital transformation topics impacting their industries. I’m your host Abby Jacobs, a member of Appian’s digital marketing team and a self-proclaimed digital disruption evangelist.Today, I’m joined by Scott Polansky, Appian’s Industry Practice Lead for the Healthcare Payer industry. Thanks for joining us today, Scott!Scott: Thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.Abby: Before we get started could you tell us a bit about your background and your role at Appian.Scott: I’m Appian’s Healthcare Payer Industry Practice Lead, where I help support the sales efforts around the country. Prior to Appian, I have 30 years of experience working for primarily Healthcare Insurers as well as doing some consulting business in a broad range of operational and strategic roles.Abby: That’s quite an extensive background. I’m sure you’ve witnessed many changes in the healthcare industry over the years and how payers are changing the way they do business. What would you say are the biggest topics currently influencing customers behaviors for healthcare payers?Scott: I think top of mind for customers is looking at greater flexibility and simplicity in product, benefit and network design. Consumers out there struggle with affordability. We called it the Affordable Care Act but it was really anything but in many instances.There’s also a tremendous lack of transparency around cost and quality, so those are the primary drivers. From the payer standpoint, they’re trying to figure out how they can better engage with their members to be able to drive better outcomes and quality of care.Abby: From your experience, how are healthcare payers adapting to today’s digital economy? Scott: It’s a spectrum out there. What we see is that those who are innovative and successful are adapting an agile approach to developing software and technology. They recognize that legacy systems do not provide the flexibility or speed to market so they are adopting new platforms to develop customized apps and integrate data from multiple disparate systems. Innovative payers are moving away from point solutions and towards enterprise platforms that enable the rapid development of customized solutions. Abby: It goes without saying that adopting a customer-centric approach is essential for any organization in order to compete and deliver in today’s landscape. We’re witnessing a huge shift in what exactly that means and who exactly is a consumer across all industries. For healthcare payers, who are the consumers or stakeholders they need to keep happy and how are they able to do so in an agile way to meet growing expectations? Scott: Payers have multiple stakeholders and they are trying to figure out how to simplify processes to create a better customer experience. It starts with the members who either come directly as individuals (retail) or through an employer. Often times a broker or consultant is involved and the plans need to meet their needs. Providers (facilities, physicians, medical professionals) are another critical stakeholder and the growth of value-based care will only intensify the need for cooperation and collaboration between providers and payers. Finally, the payer’s employees are critical stakeholders whose needs cannot be overlooked. Abby: Now you spoke a lot about providers and recently we’ve been hearing more about how having a unified view of members and providers is critical, and the importance of maintaining accurate provider directories. What are the biggest risks and opportunities for healthcare payers around this topic?Scott: I’m glad you asked that. As I travel around the country talking to our prospects and clients and speaking with industry professionals at conferences, that’s one of the number one topics out there and the risks are many. For provider directories, the risks are both financial and operational. The financial risks include potential fines from CMS and State regulators for not maintaining accurate directories; as well as more indirect costs due to membership losses (or lack of growth) because members are dissatisfied with their experiences. Additionally, providers might be less willing to contract with a payer if they’re not being represented accurately to members. Operationally, there are huge inefficiencies and wasted resources because payers have not developed efficient processes to manage provider data. The challenges are not only in collecting accurate data from the providers, but also in managing processes to insure that the data is maintained among various systems such as claims, contracting, credentialing, and appeals and grievances. The unified view of member is critical to be able to integrate clinical data from providers with financial data from the payers. The payers are in a unique position to do this as they are the hub for all the claims from multiple providers. If we’re going to achieve better outcomes the payers have to have that integrated or 360-degree view of members. Additionally, the continuing growth of population health initiatives and value-based contracting makes it imperative for payers to have a more integrated view of both members and providers. Abby: Those are a lot of moving pieces and a lot of factors for healthcare payers to keep in mind as they look to digital transformation to improve operations and keep stakeholders happy. Now with everything going on in Washington right now around healthcare reform, I have to ask, how does this impact the way healthcare payers do business and the technologies and approaches they’re considering with their digital transformation approach? Could you speak a bit about this and what you’re witnessing in your experience?Scott: The continuing uncertainty is causing many payers to pull out of government programs as they are concerned about regulations causing unsustainable rating and underwriting (e.g., high risk pools, lack of mandated coverage). Due to the uncertainty, many payers are pulling out of marketplaces and making decisions for today that will impact 2018 and 2019. The challenge for payers is that with their legacy systems they have very inflexible platforms that are prohibiting them from responding to these rapid changes. Payers will need an agile technology platform that will allow them to respond quickly to changes. If they continue to pursue complex off the shelf solutions, they will be just like everybody else and will not be able to create unique competitive advantages. Successful payers are working with these agile platforms to be able develop customized solutions to meet their unique needs.Abby: There certainly are a lot of layers and organizations seem to be at different stages of their digital transformation strategy. What would you say is one critical first step required for all healthcare payers to start their digital transformation journeys?Scott: I think the first thing is to define what digital transformation means to the organization. Some think it primarily means going mobile while others might think it means going paperless. The way I define digital transformation is using technology and software to allow you to develop competitive advantages in the marketplace. The other critical step there is healthcare payers need to recognize that their legacy systems are not allowing them to be competitive in the marketplace. By the time they develop their requirements and start building the software and end up with a solution the requirements are out of date and the regulations have already changed so again, it’s the importance of having that agile platform. The other thing I would say is critical for success is moving to the cloud. I think a lot of organizations have been somewhat reluctant but we are seeing a growing trend towards moving to the cloud and that’s going to allow payers to be much more efficient in the future by allowing them to alleviate the burden of managing their technology platforms and instead allow them to focus on innovation and solutions.Abby: There certainly are a lot of moving pieces for Healthcare Payers to consider. I know we covered a lot of territory today so thank you for taking the time to share with us and we look forward to catching up with you again in the future. To learn more about Appian as a digital transformation platform for healthcare, you can visit appian.com/healthcare.

Scott Polansky, Appian’s Industry Practice Lead for the Healthcare Payer Industry discusses digital transformation topics and trends impacting healthcare payers. Topics include customer behaviors, adapting an agile approach, the importance of a unified member view and accurate provider directories, as well as the current state of uncertainty amidst healthcare reform. Abby Jacobs serves as contributing host.TRANSCRIPT: Abby: Hello and welcome to the Appian Industry Outlook Podcast, where we take time to speak with Subject Matter Experts on digital transformation topics impacting their industries. I’m your host Abby Jacobs, a member of Appian’s digital marketing team and a self-proclaimed digital disruption evangelist.Today, I’m joined by Scott Polansky, Appian’s Industry Practice Lead for the Healthcare Payer industry. Thanks for joining us today, Scott!Scott: Thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.Abby: Before we get started could you tell us a bit about your background and your role at Appian.Scott: I’m Appian’s Healthcare Payer Industry Practice Lead, where I help support the sales efforts around the country. Prior to Appian, I have 30 years of experience working for primarily Healthcare Insurers as well as doing some consulting business in a broad range of operational and strategic roles.Abby: That’s quite an extensive background. I’m sure you’ve witnessed many changes in the healthcare industry over the years and how payers are changing the way they do business. What would you say are the biggest topics currently influencing customers behaviors for healthcare payers?Scott: I think top of mind for customers is looking at greater flexibility and simplicity in product, benefit and network design. Consumers out there struggle with affordability. We called it the Affordable Care Act but it was really anything but in many instances.There’s also a tremendous lack of transparency around cost and quality, so those are the primary drivers. From the payer standpoint, they’re trying to figure out how they can better engage with their members to be able to drive better outcomes and quality of care.Abby: From your experience, how are healthcare payers adapting to today’s digital economy? Scott: It’s a spectrum out there. What we see is that those who are innovative and successful are adapting an agile approach to developing software and technology. They recognize that legacy systems do not provide the flexibility or speed to market so they are adopting new platforms to develop customized apps and integrate data from multiple disparate systems. Innovative payers are moving away from point solutions and towards enterprise platforms that enable the rapid development of customized solutions. Abby: It goes without saying that adopting a customer-centric approach is essential for any organization in order to compete and deliver in today’s landscape. We’re witnessing a huge shift in what exactly that means and who exactly is a consumer across all industries. For healthcare payers, who are the consumers or stakeholders they need to keep happy and how are they able to do so in an agile way to meet growing expectations? Scott: Payers have multiple stakeholders and they are trying to figure out how to simplify processes to create a better customer experience. It starts with the members who either come directly as individuals (retail) or through an employer. Often times a broker or consultant is involved and the plans need to meet their needs. Providers (facilities, physicians, medical professionals) are another critical stakeholder and the growth of value-based care will only intensify the need for cooperation and collaboration between providers and payers. Finally, the payer’s employees are critical stakeholders whose needs cannot be overlooked. Abby: Now you spoke a lot about providers and recently we’ve been hearing more about how having a unified view of members and providers is critical, and the importance of maintaining accurate provider directories. What are the biggest risks and opportunities for healthcare payers around this topic?Scott: I’m glad you asked that. As I travel around the country talking to our prospects and clients and speaking with industry professionals at conferences, that’s one of the number one topics out there and the risks are many. For provider directories, the risks are both financial and operational. The financial risks include potential fines from CMS and State regulators for not maintaining accurate directories; as well as more indirect costs due to membership losses (or lack of growth) because members are dissatisfied with their experiences. Additionally, providers might be less willing to contract with a payer if they’re not being represented accurately to members. Operationally, there are huge inefficiencies and wasted resources because payers have not developed efficient processes to manage provider data. The challenges are not only in collecting accurate data from the providers, but also in managing processes to insure that the data is maintained among various systems such as claims, contracting, credentialing, and appeals and grievances. The unified view of member is critical to be able to integrate clinical data from providers with financial data from the payers. The payers are in a unique position to do this as they are the hub for all the claims from multiple providers. If we’re going to achieve better outcomes the payers have to have that integrated or 360-degree view of members. Additionally, the continuing growth of population health initiatives and value-based contracting makes it imperative for payers to have a more integrated view of both members and providers. Abby: Those are a lot of moving pieces and a lot of factors for healthcare payers to keep in mind as they look to digital transformation to improve operations and keep stakeholders happy. Now with everything going on in Washington right now around healthcare reform, I have to ask, how does this impact the way healthcare payers do business and the technologies and approaches they’re considering with their digital transformation approach? Could you speak a bit about this and what you’re witnessing in your experience?Scott: The continuing uncertainty is causing many payers to pull out of government programs as they are concerned about regulations causing unsustainable rating and underwriting (e.g., high risk pools, lack of mandated coverage). Due to the uncertainty, many payers are pulling out of marketplaces and making decisions for today that will impact 2018 and 2019. The challenge for payers is that with their legacy systems they have very inflexible platforms that are prohibiting them from responding to these rapid changes. Payers will need an agile technology platform that will allow them to respond quickly to changes. If they continue to pursue complex off the shelf solutions, they will be just like everybody else and will not be able to create unique competitive advantages. Successful payers are working with these agile platforms to be able develop customized solutions to meet their unique needs.Abby: There certainly are a lot of layers and organizations seem to be at different stages of their digital transformation strategy. What would you say is one critical first step required for all healthcare payers to start their digital transformation journeys?Scott: I think the first thing is to define what digital transformation means to the organization. Some think it primarily means going mobile while others might think it means going paperless. The way I define digital transformation is using technology and software to allow you to develop competitive advantages in the marketplace. The other critical step there is healthcare payers need to recognize that their legacy systems are not allowing them to be competitive in the marketplace. By the time they develop their requirements and start building the software and end up with a solution the requirements are out of date and the regulations have already changed so again, it’s the importance of having that agile platform. The other thing I would say is critical for success is moving to the cloud. I think a lot of organizations have been somewhat reluctant but we are seeing a growing trend towards moving to the cloud and that’s going to allow payers to be much more efficient in the future by allowing them to alleviate the burden of managing their technology platforms and instead allow them to focus on innovation and solutions.Abby: There certainly are a lot of moving pieces for Healthcare Payers to consider. I know we covered a lot of territory today so thank you for taking the time to share with us and we look forward to catching up with you again in the future. To learn more about Appian as a digital transformation platform for healthcare, you can visit appian.com/healthcare.

Andrew: This is Safety on Tap. I’m your host, Andrew Barrett, and since you’re listening in, you must be a leader wanting to grow yourself and drastically improve health and safety along the way. Welcome to you. You’re in the right place. If this is your first time listening in, thanks for joining us, and well done for trying something different to improve. And welcome back, of course, all of you excellent regular listeners. We’re super pumped to be collaborating on this podcast series with Safeopedia. Safeopedia’s mission is to organize the world’s environmental health and safety information to make access free and easy for everyone. Now, the team over at Safeopedia wanted to get to know you better, and for you to get to know Safeopedia better. So, this podcast series brings you some intimate conversations with the founders of Safeopedia and members of the Content Advisory Board. Safeopedia set up their Content Advisory Board to share observations and ideas on which topics and trends in the environmental health and safety industry will have the greatest impact for their audience. Their commitment to quality and to giving you relevant content is just top-notch. Listen in to each episode in this series, as we get to know the individuals involved, what makes them tick, and get some great advice, insightful stories, and motivation to help you grow. Here we go. Scott Cuthbert, co-founder of Safeopedia.com, welcome to the Safety on Tap podcast. Scott: Thank you very much, Andrew. A pleasure to be here. Andrew: This is the beginning of a bit of an experiment for both of us, where Safety on tap, with its support for leaders who want to grow themselves and drastically improve health and safety, and Safeopedia, aiming to be the place to go globally for health and safety and environmental information, come together. I’m pretty excited, I should say, on here, for our listeners, to be collaborating with you guys. Thank you very much, to begin with. Scott: Oh, our pleasure. We’re equally excited to be working with you and just understand the importance of leadership in environmental health and safety. Andrew: You have the genesis story. You have the very beginning, because this hatched, I’m sure, in your head, sitting in the bathtub or trudging through the snow or—one day, I’m sure, it popped into your head. So tell us a little bit about you and your story and how Safeopedia came to life. Scott: Sure. My background really started in the construction industry. Not swinging a hammer, so much, out on the job site—I started in the finance departments with the international general contractor. Because I was the guy that knew how to reboot a printer or run the backups for the AS400 at the time, I ended up getting pulled more and more into the IT side of things, and ended up leaving the grind of working for a general contractor and providing some consulting services back to the industry through project controls consulting and also system selection and implementation, and then decided to branch out on my own with a software company that was specifically designed to deal with the field data capture on these large-scale industrial projects. I guess it was really through that experience that I got pulled more and more into the safety side of the business. They needed to pull data from our system to do safety statistics, hours of exposure by plant area, by trade, by demographics of the workforce. I just sat in more and more safety meetings and really took a personal interest in it and volunteered to sit on several committees and just sit around the table more as an observer and as a safety expert and to hear what the guys out on the field were talking about, what their biggest hurdles were, and understand where their strengths were, versus where they were falling down, implementing the best practices out in the field. Andrew: How do you bridge the gap, then, between that active interest that you had in those still project-based roles on the consulting and how Safeopedia came to be? Scott: Well, it is one of those “light bulb goes on” stories, because I had— Andrew: It wasn’t in the bathtub? Scott: It wasn’t in the bathtub, but I was going to say it was one of those bathtub moments, but it was actually in my car. I was driving back from a safety committee meeting, and I had sat around the table with half a dozen—a dozen folks that had just a tremendous amount of experience. They were trying to do the best job that they could possibly do. They were trying to share best practices and understand what was working on this job site, versus that job site, and they were really struggling to collaborate with each other effectively. They were sending huge Word documents back and forth, and really, it wasn’t my idea, as much as it was the group’s idea, saying, “If there was just one place we could go where we had these best practices, where we had these tips and tricks, where we could share ideas, it would save us so much time and energy.” And so, I was driving back from the meeting, and it’s quite a ways away from where our office was, and I had this just pop into my head: “Safeopedia.” And as soon as that idea popped into my head, I just couldn’t wait to get back to the office. I drove safely, minded the speed limits, of course, but I drove straight back to the office and looked up the domain name, and it was available, and I purchased it right there and then and began the incorporation process to set it up as a legitimate company. I guess the rest is history from there. Andrew: You really just started with what was a relatively tiny bit of market research, passion for the area, and a spur-of-the-moment domain purchase. And after that, you really just worked it out from there. Scott: Yes, that’s absolutely correct. After securing the domain and starting the trademark and incorporation process, I did spend another year or two vetting the idea with industry folks to the best of my ability, throwing out ideas of “What should it be? Should we try to replicate LinkedIn? Should we make it more social, like Facebook? Or should we just be producing educational content to start with?” It was over the next 12 to 24 months where, again, the industry that had helped give me the idea helped me vet my ideas and strategies on how we should get it off the ground and where we should start. It wasn’t an overnight idea that popped into existence. It did certainly take some time to cultivate it and find the right folks to work with and align ourselves so that we could be successful out of the gate. Andrew: I think that really speaks to me, in the paradox of—on the one hand, you had an idea, and you just jumped on it. You kick-started it by that drive in the car and then purchasing that domain name. That, in itself, was very insightful, in that sometimes we spend too much time stewing on things, and we just don’t get them started. But then, on the other hand, the paradox is that you did spend a fair bit of time and effort in order to validate the idea, to make sure it worked. I think sometimes, often, there’s a learning out of that for us, where we spend too much time analyzing and thinking and planning, and maybe not enough time just getting stuff started. We might find that it is a big job—and that’s OK—but we might find sometimes that the job’s not as big as we think, and we’ll actually solve problems and help people a whole lot quicker if we just get on with it. I think that’s a great story to tell and a lesson for us to learn from. Safeopedia has been growing and growing, in terms of the numbers of people that it serves, visiting the website, attending webinars, consuming the content, contributing new content. We have our collaboration, obviously, which is moving into a new space with podcasts and potentially pushing the boundaries a little bit more. You’ve come up with this concept, which we described in the introduction, of this Content Advisory Board. From your point of view, with you leading the charge, why have a Content Advisory Board? Scott: Great question And both Jamie and I are the faces of Safeopedia. We have a tremendous amount of background and experience within these industries. But we’re not going to sit here and pretend that we know everything, that we’re experts in all the different areas. It was really important for us to pull a group together that could certainly augment our strategy and our ideas and provide some really strong expertise to the direction that we wanted to go in. As listeners will learn, we have a very diverse group of professionals across primarily North America, one in UK, and certainly, with your involvement, Andrew, some Australian representation, as well. Andrew: From Down Under. Scott: From Down Under. And they’re helping us to understand what the hot topics or the key topics are within their industries and their geographies, and help us look ahead a little bit to what will be the most valuable information we can produce for our users in those areas. Andrew: Makes plenty of sense to me. In the time that you have been grinding and driving and working to slowly grow Safeopedia, what’s the biggest lesson that you’ve learned in that process? What’s been your light bulb moment or a big height? What’s been the biggest lesson? Scott: The light bulb moment? I think it’s understanding the new economy—the Google economy, if you will—and how people are looking for information. It’s great. I think there’s a lot of really passionate people out there that are publishing great content. But unless you know how to get found, unless you know how to connect with others and have a voice in this ocean of data that we now live in, it’s all in vain. I think the most important lesson we’ve learned is, again, how to get your data out there, how to get your information out there, but make sure that you get heard, as well. I think that’s key. Andrew: Great lesson. Do you have a superpower? Scott: I don’t know if I have a superpower. Certainly, I was an early adopter on LinkedIn, and was connecting with people and keeping in touch with people. I think that, if anything, that’s been my superpower over the years. I can’t remember who wrote the book— Andrew: The Six Degrees of Separation? Scott: No, the connectors and the influencers and the mavens and Malcolm Gladwell, I think, The Tipping Point. Definitely, I’m a connector, and I’ve always been a connector. I think that’s key in this new digital economy: having an online presence and having some knowledge of how that all works. Andrew: You know what? You reached all the way across the globe in order to tap me on the shoulder. That brings us here today, so that’s a real testament to that. When we first started talking about getting together and working out how we can make a bigger dent in the world together than we might do separately—we’ll be honest with the listeners—I said to you, “I’m not sure that we’re a match. The content on Safeopedia is really good to support people in a technical sense, but it does have a focus on compliance and some of the detailed stuff, and there’s a different leaning towards stuff like hazards and IT systems and checklists and things like that.” Now, all of those things are important. They’re the foundational things that help us drive our programs in health and safety in our work. But I think, sometimes, we tend to ignore the gray and the messy and the people part, effectively. That’s very gray and messy. Here at Safety on Tap, we fuel leaders to grow themselves and drastically improve health and safety along the way, which often means challenging the status quo and pushing boundaries out of what I call “the conventional.” What direction do you personally want to see Safeopedia take in 2017? Scott: I definitely want to echo your comments. You can’t dismiss the fact that a lot of the compliance components are what has helped us build our audience of over 100,000 members. But in the long run—and this was echoed, as well, by the Content Advisory Board—there is a bit of a leadership vacuum within environmental health and safety. It’s been, to date, a very technically-focused discipline, and we really need to broaden that, to teach people and attract visionaries and leaders to the industry, so that we can not just make sure that companies are compliant, but that companies are embracing culture, health and safety, and they’re being leaders, not just followers, in the industry. Long-winded way of answering your question, but I’d really like to see us provide more content and more connections for people who want to take a leadership role, perhaps who don’t know how to get started or want to connect with leaders who have done it before and can share their experiences and best practices. That’s definitely an area that we want to focus on for 2017. Andrew: That’s the very reason why we’re talking today, because we’re all about supporting leaders to grow. I’m sure the listeners will tell I’m pretty excited about collaborating with you guys. Is there anything that you want to ask the listeners for, in terms of how they can contribute to improving Safeopedia, putting in what you get out, so to speak? Scott: Yes, absolutely. One of our biggest compliments—if you want to call it that—from last year, was when one of our team members was on a conference in Puerto Rico, thousands of miles from here, and was talking about different businesses that he was involved in, and mentioned Safeopedia, and the fellow that he was speaking to—his eyes just lit up, and he said, “Hey, I use Safeopedia all the time. I can’t believe you’re one of the guys involved in Safeopedia! We go there regularly to look at articles and share content with our management team and our guys on the field.” That’s one of the greatest compliments we can get. We see, through Google Analytics, that over 50,000 people are coming to our site every month, but we really only get an opportunity to interact with a few of them, who maybe have some suggestions for us, who have some criticisms for us, who think that we need to focus on different areas or expand an article or a term that we have posted on the site. I really encourage people to—and we listen. I’m sure there are sites out there where people send emails and you never hear back, but we want to hear from everybody. We only know what we know. If you know something we don’t, by all means, share with us. Our terms and articles—our content is there as a starting point to help improve industry and help people out in the field, so any ideas or suggestions or criticisms that you guys have for us, please, by all means, share it. We’d love to hear it. Andrew: I’ll just add to that, it’s not just about you, then, getting more of what you want out of Safeopedia, or providing feedback to our podcast, as well. It’s equally the same, where the feedback you provide will help hundreds, if not thousands, of people. Scott: That’s right. Andrew: That, I think, is the fantastic thing about this global connected economy that we live in. Scott: Absolutely, if you have a question, or you have a problem with an article, then chances are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of others do as well. It was a little while ago now, but we had posted an article, and somebody replied, and the tone of it was a little bit angry. He had written a big dissertation about what was wrong with the article and the approach that we were taking. We reached out. We contacted him and said, “Hey, this is fantastic. This criticism is absolutely invaluable. Can we take this and turn it into an opposing article that talks about the same subject from a different perspective? Because if you’re having that problem—no matter how many people like or share or retweet that original article, if you’re having problems with it, then somebody else is, too.” He agreed, and we posted his follow-up article as a Part 2, and it was hugely successful and really, really well-received. We’re here to make the site better. We don’t take anything personally, so by all means, get involved and let’s make it the best site we can make it. Andrew: That’s a fantastic example. We might link to those two articles, I think, in the Safeopedia article for this podcast interview, and also on the Safety on Tap website show notes, as well, so the listeners can have a look at those and compare and contrast for themselves. Before you go, Scott, what’s your best piece of advice for people who want to have a more effective impact in their environment, health, and safety practice? Scott: I would say, "be tenacious." It’s a very, very important industry. It’s an important part of every organization. But it still continues to be minimized. Some companies are looking at it as a cost item, and some people think that it negatively impacts productivity, but we have to keep providing them with—keep educating them and keep moving them forward, slowly if necessary. But be tenacious. Don’t give up. It’s so important. It’s about our planet. It’s about our coworkers. It’s about ourselves and making sure everybody gets to go home safe to their families at the end of the day. Don’t lose hope. Be tenacious. If you need to, reach out, and we’ll provide whatever support we can. Andrew: Fantastic advice, and I’m looking forward to continuing to make a difference in the world with you and Jamie and the rest of the guys at Safeopedia. Scott Cuthbert, thanks for joining us on the Safety on Tap podcast for Safeopedia. Scott: Thanks, Andrew. My pleasure. Andrew: Thanks to Scott for today’s conversation. Next episode, we have Scott’s partner in crime—hang on, that didn’t come out right—anyway, Jamie Young from Safeopedia. Given the commitment to improvement that we have here at Safety on Tap and at Safeopedia, let us know what you think about this episode. Give us a comment. The best way is to head over to iTunes or Stitcher to leave us a review and to comment, and we’ll be eternally grateful. If you haven’t already, check out even more episodes and great content over at Safeopedia.com and SafetyonTap.com. Until next time, I think you take positive, effective, and rewarding action to grow yourself and drastically improve health and safety along the way. See you!

Scott Francisco & Jessica Robinson discuss Pilot Project’s Green Garage Hub – Bonfires on the Move  In this episode, Jessica and Scott Francisco, Director of Pilot Projects, discover a mutual fascination with the unloved city parking garage and explore what a current design for today's urban neighborhood might look like. Pilot Projects' Green Hub concept is an adaptive reuse that reimagines parking structures as vibrant community spaces with parking for bicycles, coworking space, a cafe, and even a rooftop garden with solar panels. Scott and the team partnered closely with a number of community organizations in New York to put this design together, and we hope that a network of parking garages like the Green Hub will eventually be built.   http://bonfiresofsocialenterprise.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/SFrancisco_Headshot_BBF-2.jpg ()  http://bonfiresofsocialenterprise.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/greenhubbanner-1.jpg ()        http://bonfiresofsocialenterprise.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Pilot-Projects_GreenHub_2015.jpg () http://bonfiresofsocialenterprise.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Early_Green_Hub_Sketch.png ()   Full Transcription: Jessica: Scott, it is so good to talk to you this morning. I have to confess that we are about to dig into one of my favorite topics but it's an obscure one for sure, and that's parking garages. Welcome, and thank you for joining. Scott: Thanks for having me. Jessica: Yeah. Scott, you’re the Director of Pilot Projects out there in New York. I was looking at the website, and I see you guys describe the work that you do focus on people, spaces, culture and infrastructure and certainly parking garages are one of those pieces of cities that we don't often think a lot about and don't appreciate. Thank you again for joining me on this journey today. I'll give a little context here; the reason I love parking garages so much is I spent a ton of time in them when I was managing parking for Zipcar out in San Francisco and had a chance to see lots of different designs and think about the neighborhoods that they were located in. When I heard about the Green Hub project that you guys are working on I just had to hear more. Tell me first a little bit more about Pilot Projects and how Green Hub came to be and what exactly are you thinking about for parking garages today and in the future. Scott: Jessica, we have something in common that’s our love of parking grudges because I also have a bit of history with them. When I was a very young architecture student, I spent a summer doing assessments of parking garages for an engineering firm where we dragged chains around on the surfaces to test whether the concrete was still intact. I spent a whole summer in parking garages in Canada. Pilot Projects is a design company that focused on how infrastructure in all its different variations can support culture and look at the dialect and connections between what we build and how we use the buildings and spaces in a way that has a deep cultural impact. In our neighborhood on the lower side of New York City, there's an old parking garage that was built in 1970. It's one of the most unloved, unlike the looking structure it doesn't seem to contribute anything to this streetscape and yet there it is, and it has space for about 300 cars. It's the kind of thing that we walk by very regularity and would look at it and say, “What could be done with the structure to bring life and vitality to the neighborhood.” We’re also avid bikers and are involved in some bike related projects. One of the first things we thought about is how we could bring bicycling and bike culture into this parking structure. Why has it just for cars? It seems completely out of sync with the way the city is going and the way neighborhoods are embracing bike transportation. Jessica: That's so interesting to me how you're bringing it back from just being a place for...

Amplifying Influencers - Episode 25Who is the mayor of your topic? Description Part 4 of our Social Network Analysis Series. In this episiode, Marc details how seeking out specific influential people, or mayors, in your topic areas can lead to better engagement with new networks of people. We discuss how to find, connect, and engage with these mayors to have conversations that they amplify to their connections.   Show Notes Previous shows in the Social Network Analysis Series Ep 1 - Social Networks 101 - Introduction to the imporance of thinking about social media in terms of networks. Ep 4 - Influence is a Graph - Marc defines influence and how our influence is different depending on the context we are in. Three kinds of centrality are described and what they mean in our networks. Ep 17 - What does your hashtag look like? Lee Rainie from Pew Internet Research - We discusse a report from Pew Internet Research describing 6 types of social network shapes and how each behaves. Learning these 6 will help you better understand how people are interacting and passing information when you see a social network map Additional Introduction to Social Network Analysis Next in Nonprofits 23 – NodeXL with Marc Smith - The first 15 minutes of this interview will also be helpful if you are new to social network analysis thinking and terminology. Tools for finding influencers based on centrality Gephi - The Open Graph Viz Platform NodeXL with Smart Tweets Request a graph for your hashtag or topic Start finding the mayors you should connect with by requesting a custom network map. You can search Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Instagram, various Wikis and more using a keyword, hashtag, URL, username, fan page, or group name. Be sure to let us know you are part of the Social Media Clarity audience! Request a sample network map Episode icon photo CC BY-SA 2.0 taylar @ Flickr   Transcript Randy: Welcome to the Social Media Clarity podcast, 15 minutes of concentrated analysis and advice about social media, in platform and product design. Scott: Thanks for listening everyone. This episode is about finding new influencers, connecting with these influencers and getting your message amplified by them. It will be the fourth episode in our new Social Network Analysis Series. What are the other episodes, Marc? Marc: Right, we have three episodes already out. Episode 1, the Social Networks 101 podcast. Episode 4, Influence is a Graph, and episode 17, What does your hashtag look like? with our guest Lee Rainie from Pew Internet Research. You might want to listen to any of those if this theme of using network analysis of social media is of interest to you. Scott:Additionally, Marc was interviewed in episode 23 of the Next in Nonprofits podcast. The first 15 minutes of that interview may also be helpful if you're new to social network analysis thinking and terminology. Today we're talking about influencers and what kind of influencers are we looking for, Marc? Marc: Well, many people are interested in finding the people in a conversation stream who seem to have a lot more power to get their messages heard than others. Indeed, it's often the case that there are only a few of the mayors, if you will, of a topic or a hashtag. In many cases, we are interested in finding not the most prominent of these people, what you might think of as the A listers. In many cases we're finding that it's more useful to engage with the B-list. The B-list are the not quite as prominent but still quite influential people who might be a little less jaded, might be a little less busy, might be a little bit more interested in the fact that you notice them. They still play an out-sized role in most of the conversations in which they participate. If you calculate a few network metrics about how all of the connections among a group of people in a discussion come together, some of these people really jump out. They're very visible as being very in the center of the conversation, so we rank those people and then we try to focus our users on engaging these very, very central people. Scott: How do we find these B-list influencers? Marc: Right, it is a multi-step process. We'd start with a few topics, we will build a snowball sample if you will. We start with a few words that we know are of interest to the people we want to communicate with and we might discover words or hashtags related to those key words. Then we're going to collect messages from each of those topic streams in order to build an analysis of the connections within them. We're going to go from each topic to it's near neighbors. You might start with a brand and then move towards a sporting event and then it might be an athlete, then it might be a big game or another team. We're looking for the very few people who are very much at the center of these conversations. We sometimes talk about these people as the mayors of the hashtag. We know that there are people who are more influential than others. The question is what are the indicators, the numbers or the measurements that tell us that somebody is influential. Many systems focus on the follower count or the reply count. Those are interesting numbers but for any particular topic they may not be very predictive. We focus instead on a network metric, the measurement known as centrality. We argue that people who have this attribute known as betweenness centrality who are ranked highly on this metric are the people that other people react to the most. They sit in a position within the larger web of connections that put them in a strategic position. We consider those people to be the mayors. If we could only identify the mayors for every topic we would have a list of influential voices, influential people who we might want to try to engage. These are the people who already have an audience, they're already demonstrating a certain amount of communications power and they're demonstrating that power on a particular topic. They are the mayor of the topic you care about, the hashtag that you are interested in. Scott: What would be a good example of, say, I'm a brand and, say, I'm a clothing brand and I'm looking into a new network and I'm looking for a mayor of a particular network. Can you give me an example of, are they talking about my brand, are they talking about my topic or are they talking about related or a totally different topic? Marc: All of those are very good seed terms for these network map efforts. You certainly would like to know who is actually using the name of your company or your brand or your product or your clothing line. If somebody is actually saying that, if they are the mayor of talking about you by name, that would be interesting but there may not be that person. Even if there is there may be other people talking about other topics that are relevant to your brand. It may be the case that you sell something that protects you from sunburn but people don't really talk about sunburn but they might talk about camping or being marathon runners. Connecting with people who are having a conversation in which your product is relevant is a way of finding the mayor of a topic that might actually talk about you in a positive way because you have something meaningful and relevant to talk about with them. Scott: Okay. Great. Now that we've found, say, a mayor or maybe two mayors in particular topic areas, what's the next step that we should take? Marc: Right. Identifying a mayor is only the first step. We do want to identify them. We want to know who to follow. After all, it's unlikely that somebody will engage with you if you are not following them. Once you've followed them then the question is how would you start a conversation with them? We are interested in using some analysis of people's content to come up with words that are likely to be, or hashtags that are likely to be, salient, relevant, meaningful to that person. We do this by analyzing their content and finding out what words they use at a rate far higher than the rest of the community might use those words. Those words tend to be the salient or relevant terms for that person. Scott: Can we have an example of determining saliency for a particular person? Marc: Everybody in the data set is tweeting or writing some set of messages. You could argue that everybody is using a collection of words with a certain rate. In fact, if we took the words and messages from everybody we could put them all together in one pot and average them and we could come up with a number for every word which is the average rate that this word is used. Then we can compare each person to that average. Of course, no individual is likely to be average. Some people are above and below that average. Maybe you say the word carburetor a lot, maybe I don't say it much at all. In the context of automobiles maybe people talk more about performance rather than the price or in some cases people care about safety. Different words are going to be relevant to different people even though they're still talking about the same brand. Scott: In this example if I'm, say, Ford, I wouldn't necessarily look for people talking about Ford. I'm looking for people talking about carburetors or mileage or handling and I'll find those particular people who are talking about that particular aspect of cars more than the other people around them. Marc: Yes and we want to know that when they talk about it other people care. We want them not only to use a word but to use a word and be central. Scott: Being central, how does that look in terms of behavior? Marc: A person who's central not only gets retweeted but gets retweeted by a more diverse group of people than anyone else. It's not enough that a lot of people thought your stuff was great but people from groups that would otherwise never connect connected through you. You're essentially the bridge. If you can be the bridge then that's a sign, in network theory, of your power or your influence. We use that as a proxy for being the mayor or the leader of this discussion. Scott: Great. So we find our mayors and how do we interact with the mayors? Marc: Very carefully. After all, these are already very powerful people. They are the leaders of their communities. They dominate these discussions. There may be a few of them, there may be a dozen of them but here thousands of people who tweet or produce messages on a particular topic. This half dozen or a dozen people have far more power than anyone else. If you're going to try to engage them I recommend caution and respect. One thing you might start with is to try to talk to them about what they already want to talk about. Changing the subject with these people is something that you should do very carefully. The first step is to identify what is it that they care about. We do that through this salience analysis of their content. We suggest using some of those key words as the basis for your entre, your opening to these people, in conversation. You should be talking about the hashtags. You should include the hashtags that they care about most. Scott: If I'm Ford trying to reach out to the mayor of performance then I would want to include the hashtags that they're using or the key words that they're using when I reach out to them. Right? Marc: You would want to use their hashtags, their words rather than, let's say, the ones that you want to use. You do want to convey your message but you must first include some evidence that you know what they care about and that you're willing to talk to them about what they have already defined as their interests. I think in many cases there's a difference between marketing which is interrupting people and trying to talk to them about what you care about and social marketing which is talking to influential people and actually opening a conversation to try to connect what they care about with what you care about. It can be done in a more one-on-one way because there are relatively few of these people. With numbers that low you can actually have a conversation with everyone of those people. Scott: By extension of the network effect, if we manage to engage that mayor well they're going to re-broadcast our conversation or their followers will see our conversation. We're actually reaching out beyond just the 300. Right? Marc: Exactly. If you win any of those 300 you win a very big prize. They each might have thousands of followers who already have an established audience relationship with that person. Rather than trying to establish new audiences this strategy suggests that you engage people who already have these audiences. You do so by actually engaging them in conversation about topics that really do matter. It's really that shifting away from a marketing model where we make claims about a product and try to bombard people with those claims repeatedly in order to make them submit. The shift instead is to actually having a conversation with the 30 or 300 people who actually really do care about your product and do want to talk about it and are open to hearing about the nuances of it and what's new about it because they really do care. This is about forming real relationships albeit commercial in nature but with people who really care and talking to them about what they care about. Scott: In a nut shell that is amplifying your influencers. Right? Marc: Yes. Scott: Because we're working with them rather than trying to push them or guide them specifically. Marc: You can't make them do anything. They already have enough power to really make trouble for anybody who tries to just advertise at them. If you spam these people you're really asking for it. They care deeply about their topic but if you can honestly engage these people you can actually have a conversation. The power of a few dozen conversations is greater than, I would argue, a mass broadcast to hundreds of thousands of followers. Scott: What tools do we use to go about finding influencers and figuring out what their conversations are so that we can engage with them on their level? Marc: There are a number of tools. It could be done manually. It's conceivable that with a pencil and paper you could read a tweet stream and draw, or at least write down, a series of observations about who replies to who and who mentions who. Clearly, that doesn't make a lot of sense in the internet age. There's a lot data out there and there are computers involved so they should help. There are a large number of tools if you are a software developer. If you're a programmer there are database tools and network database tools and libraries for getting data and breaking it into pieces. If you are not a programmer, however, the number of choices drop. You really have relatively few choices at that point. There are tools out there like Gephi (gephi.org), which is a very beautiful and powerful tool which can be used to draw very large networks and do visualization and analysis of them. That's one possible tool. I, of course, have been working on a project of my own called NodeXL which attempts to address this issue with a real focus on automation. Really focusing on making this just a few clicks to produce this analytic output, this report. You can find it on the web or you can get it emailed to you. The report tries to answer the questions that we think that people who care about a hashtag and want to get an overview of it or want to act strategically towards it would want to know. One of those questions might be, "Who is important around here?" So we have a feature called the Top Influencers section and it simply lists the people with the highest betweenness centrality. Then it presents two features that help you implement this strategy. This vision of engage the people at the center and talk to them about what they want to talk about. That is one. That is a simple feature which is that there is now a follow button on each of these influencers. The second is this feature we call a Smart Tweet. A Smart Tweet essentially is a rough draft of a message to a person that contains first their name but then two of their most important hashtags and two important words, or salient words, and then room for your message, your hashtag and your URL. The goal is to encourage you to talk to an influential person about what they care about and find a way to link it to your URL and hashtag. After all, you're engaged in strategic communication. You have a goal. You want to convey your message. We're going to make it easier because we're going to help you actually craft it with relevance for the person who is most influential. Scott: Now that we understand how to find those influencers that are not in our immediate networks we have an action for you, the listeners, to take. Marc has a request form where you can request any topic for a variety of networks and get your own NodeXL network map that will include the betweenness centrality, the most influential people, and if you're on Twitter give you options to set up your own Smart Tweets. Marc: People who request a map will be notified when we complete the production of the map and we'll post it to the NodeXL gallery. Often when people see a map and report that's about a topic that's directly relevant to them it's easier to understand how they might use the tool. Randy: For links, transcripts and more episodes go to socialmediaclarity.net. Thanks for listening.

In today's podcast we're going to help Scott and Alyssa figure out how to balance work life while growing their online business - Happen to your Career. Every couple and parent has similar questions to Scott and Alyssa. How do you record a podcast with kids? When do you work on your business vs. play with your kids? (when you're also working a full-time job) How do you build lasting relationships with other people online? We're going to cover all of those and more to help them figure out where to focus on in their business to see the greatest returns. [Tweet "When working with your spouse delegate tasks and get out of each other's way. "] You will learn How to work together as a married couple. The importance of delegation and automation. How to schedule priorities so you know when it's time to work. (and not) What kind of live events to attend to build better relationships. Where you should be investing your business profits. The importance of batching your content. Why you shouldn't “Be Everywhere”. Links and resources mentioned in today's show Scott and Alyssa's website happentoyourcareer.com Jill and Josh Stanton - Screw the Nine to Five Live event we hosted in San Diego Chris Ducker - Tropical Think Tank Flip your Life Program Jocelyn's Elementary Librarian Website Apply to be on the show If you're interested in a consulting call with us Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what's possible for your family! Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air! You can connect with S&J on social media too!   Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y'all next week! Can't listen right now? Read the transcript below! JOCELYN: Hey y'all! On today's podcast, we're going to help Scott and Alyssa take their online business to the next level. Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? Alright, let's get started. JOCELYN: Hey guys, welcome back to another Flipped Lifestyle podcast. We are super excited today to bring you a Flipped podcast and today's guests are Scott and Alyssa Barlow. We are very excited to have you guys today, welcome to the show. SCOTT: Thanks. JOCELYN: And I want to just say that our Flipped podcast is where we bring people on for a consulting call, and they ask us questions, and we help them to either get started in the online business or in this case, with Scott and Alyssa, to really try to work to take that to the next level because they're already having some success online and we are going to get into that in just a little bit later. But first of all, tell us about yourselves, where you are from, and anything that you want to share with our listeners. ALYSSA: Okay, I'm Alyssa and we are from Moses Lake, Washington, located in Central Washington State; if you don't know where that is, it's a pretty small town. We both graduated from high school here, left for a few years and then eventually made our way back. SCOTT: We tried to get away, it didn't work. SHANE: It always sucks you back. It does. SCOTT: It always sucks you back. ALYSSA: We have three children, our oldest is seven, we have a six-year-old and a four-year-old. So, they are all in a pretty tight span there. SCOTT: Boom, boom, boom. Three in a row, 18 months apart, each one. ALYSSA: And I am a former teacher, I guess, you could say.