Podcasts about shawn yeah

Shawn Young is the CEO and Co-Founder of Classcraft, an innovative platform that motivates students using the culture and mechanics of games. Victoria talks to Shawn about edtech, behavior intervention, and the challenges he's faced with going from a homegrown tool to something big and out there in the world. Classcraft (https://www.classcraft.com/) Follow Classcraft on Twitter (https://twitter.com/classcraftgame), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/classcraftgame/), Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/classcraftgame), YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/c/classcraftgame), or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/classcraft-studios/). Follow Shawn on Twitter (https://twitter.com/_shawnyoung_) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/shawnyoung1/). Follow thoughtbot on Twitter (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido. And with us today is Shawn Young, the CEO, and Co-Founder at Classcraft, an innovative platform that motivates students using the culture and mechanics of games. Shawn, thank you for joining us. SHAWN: Thank you. Thanks for having me, Victoria. I'm happy to be here. VICTORIA: Wonderful, yes. So just tell me a little bit about yourself and maybe what brought you to start out as a teacher initially. SHAWN: [laughs] I have an interesting journey. I was originally a physicist, a physics major. Although I loved physics because it really gives you a deep understanding of the world, I realized that physics research in a basement with machines just on your own [laughs] wasn't for me, so that's when I started substitute teaching. I really wasn't going to go into education at all. It was just there was availability, lack of teachers. And it's kind of ironic. I really did not enjoy school. High school, in particular, was just a really challenging time for me, mostly because I just didn't see the point of it. I didn't have any problems in school. I had great grades, but I just was bored out of my mind. And so, as a teacher, I became really, really obsessed with making school meaningful for the students that were there, and because so many kids, so many learners just don't see the point. And so I did a lot of really cool project-based learning type of stuff. So that's where instead of lecturing the kids, you get them doing things and learning by doing. And so I was teaching physics, obviously. And so we were building hot air balloons and cannons and all kinds of stuff to study Newtonian physics. And kids were super happy to come to the class because we were doing some cool stuff. But I realized as that was happening that another part of meaning generation for kids and learners is the community and the social aspects. And so, I started thinking about how I can build community in the classroom, make the social experience of school relevant for them? And that's how Classcraft was born, really. I kind of put together my interest in motivating and building community with kids. I was a developer at the time as well, so I was able to develop a platform. And, of course, I'm a gamer, so I kind of put all those things together and built this platform in my classroom. VICTORIA: That's great. I was going to ask what skills or experiences from your teaching background translated to being a founder. SHAWN: That's interesting because clearly in the product...Classcraft was never meant to be a company. I already had a company. [laughs] I was freelancing as a developer for pretty large clients in New York. I was working with my brother, who's a creative director there. And we worked for Chanel for three years building apps and websites, and that was probably our biggest client. I wasn't looking to make a company. I just built it for me. It was my quest to make school meaningful and relevant. And after three years of just tinkering around with it with my students, I realized it was having a massive impact on their outlook, on the way they collaborated together, on their motivation. And because Classcraft is a platform that basically gamifies education, so kids level up and they earn points. They're on teams. They have a character class. All the things you would see in an RPG are translating to how teachers are running a school. And so I made a website just to talk about it after three years of this garage project I had going on. And the day that website went online, 130,000 people came to the website. It just started trending on Reddit gaming. And overnight, a lot of people were asking, "How do I download this?" I'm like, "You can't. There's no company." [laughter] So that's how the company started. Teaching is an interesting profession. I think that teaching is a job that requires you to, A, motivate and manage a whole bunch of people, so there's a lot similarility there to management. It's a group of humans that you want to work together to get to their full potential, just like your team should be. But then there's also independent planning. As a teacher, you have a set amount of time to get through X amount of curriculum. So you're always, you know, project management basically, 101 is the same thing as running a curriculum through the year. So there are a lot of those types of soft skills that translate really easily to entrepreneurship. And ultimately, as a teacher, you're responsible on your own for your own successes and failures, which is the type of attitude you need to have if you're going to be a successful entrepreneur is to be responsible, you know, [laughs] take control of your destiny a little bit. VICTORIA: Right. I hadn't thought about it from that angle. It makes a lot of sense. You're really an independent owner of that classroom, right? [laughs] SHAWN: Yeah, exactly, exactly. And trying to get humans to collaborate and do stuff sounds a lot like running a company. [laughs] VICTORIA: Right. I saw the tagline on Classcraft: relationships are everything. And I was like, that's a perfect DevOps kind of statement. [laughs] SHAWN: Yeah, that's funny. [laughs] We're thinking more like human relationships, but that's so funny [laughs] from the DevOps side for sure. VICTORIA: In and outside of the classroom, you need...it doesn't matter how great your technology is or your strategy. If the people aren't talking to each other and you don't have the right relationships, you're not going to be successful. SHAWN: Correct. And ultimately, that's the value proposition of Classcraft. Schools that don't build good relationships between students that don't do it between teachers and students, that don't do it between teachers and administration are dysfunctional. And what we're seeing in education today is one of the fundamental breakdowns that's happening and, you know, that's proxy for what's happening at large, and society is relationships are quite strange right now in schools, and that's making it really hard for them to be effective. VICTORIA: Right. It sounds like this app was built out of your direct experience and your direct experience working with these students. What do you find is unique in working with students, and how do you appeal to them as a user base? SHAWN: What's really special about edtech is that your buyer or the user that makes the decision to use the product is not the end user, and that's true in all B2B, SaaS. The decision maker who purchases the software isn't necessarily the employee who's going to use it. But in education, there are multiple levels. Like, if we sell to a district, they're the ones buying, but ultimately, they need to get the teachers to use it. And then, at the end of the day, the actual real users are the students. And so, there are a lot of design considerations when you think of UX. And even when you think of user permissions, there's a lot of complexity there in education because our goal is to build as much motivation and engagement mechanics as we can for kids. And so that means leveling up, and random loot drops, and all these things you see in video games but applying that to school. But then you need to build all this plumbing [laughs] basically to make it usable by a user who's the teacher who doesn't really know much about games, and that's changing as the teacher...average age of teachers is going down, a lot of retirements, et cetera, so that's changing. But at the base of it, the kids are really well versed in games, game mechanics, game culture, but the teacher who's running it is not. So we have to speak two languages, one of pedagogy, and classroom tools, and data, and saving time. These are the things that educators care about. And incidentally, they care about motivation and motivating the kids, and all of those things. But for kids, we're talking about avatars, and pets, and gear, and leveling up, and all this whole other set of language. And so when you think of design considerations, we always have to be thinking about how do I make this as motivating and engaging as possible for the kids, but how do I make it as easy to use and not complicated for teachers? Because if the teachers don't use it, then these kids aren't going to see the value anyways. So it's pretty complex because we don't have one single end user. VICTORIA: And so you have the challenge of making it fun for kids and then also providing useful and understandable data for teachers and probably parents and other people, right? SHAWN: Yeah, yeah, exactly. There are lots of stakeholders. [laughter] VICTORIA: So I want to ask more about how you make it fun, and then I also want to know more about the teacher's perspective, so whichever one you want to start with first. SHAWN: Perfect. I mean, those two questions are literally the placement of what Classcraft is. Classcraft is the Venn diagram between what in education is behavior intervention, so managing kids' behavior and motivation. And so, from a motivation angle, how do we make it engaging for kids? In essence, kids are earning points in Classcraft for things that they're doing in school that we want them to do. And by we, schools can configure whatever it is, but it'll be things like handing in homework, being respectful, being inclusive, participating, being on time, these behaviors that they want to see in kids to make them better learners. When those behaviors occur, teachers can give them points. And the points allow them to level up. As they level up, they each have a character. They have an avatar, and they can be warriors, healers, or mages. And based on that character class, they have a different role in the team. So they're playing in teams just like in an MMORPG or on a football team. And everybody has a different role within the team. And you win as a team. And so school is quite competitive. Kids are always compared to the class average and their grades. And there's a lot of competition happening in schools. What we've built is a way for kids to be motivated by collaboration. And so they're playing on teams. If they do good things, they get these points, and they level up. And there are millions of combinations of gear that they could buy for their avatar, but they're also unlocking real-life powers. And so these powers are things like, you know, in a video game, power could be like you could shoot a fireball. In Classcraft, shoot a fireball is the equivalent of you can skip a question on an exam, or you can go to the bathroom, or you can hand in homework a day late, or you can listen to music while you're doing your classwork, so giving them real-life privileges as they level up. And these aren't one-offs; they're skills that they have that they can trigger whenever they want, just like in a game. And some of those skills are things like being able to heal up your teammate because kids can also lose lives if they do negative things. So if you're late or you're rude, or whatever it is, just like in Mario, what's failing in Mario is falling in a hole, and what's failing as a student, it's not doing what you're supposed to do, or being a bully to other kids. And so, as that happens, they can lose lives. But then they can come in to help each other out. There are boss battles where they can fight monsters by answering quiz questions, et cetera. So all these motions that are ultimately the things that are happening anyways in school, what we're saying is instead of punishing kids or forcing them to do this stuff, make it feel like a game. Speak their language, use the same mechanics that we know are super effective at motivating players. Nobody is forcing people to play video games. Everybody's doing that of their own volition. It's the most popular cultural medium that exists today, well surpassing film, movies, music. And so, why are games so good at doing that? It's because they fulfill fundamental needs: being in control, feeling like we're progressing, social relatedness. That's what we're bringing to school. So that's the student side of it. The other side of it, behavior intervention, is...well, one of the biggest challenges for teachers is managing kids. It's not like showing you how to do a math problem; it's getting you to care about it, listen to it, stop disturbing other people. And so, a lot of time and energy is spent on classroom management for teachers. And so what we do is we use best practices there. For example, there's a lot of research out there in education that says that praising kids for good behavior is a lot more effective than punishing them. And so games are really good at praising you. You level up, and you gain points. It tells you your score. What we're doing here is giving them that framework but applying that to classroom management. And so instead of saying, "Hey, Victoria, stop goofing off," or "You're not dressed well, go to the principal," or whatever it is that's happening in schools, what we're telling teachers to do instead is say, "Hey if Victoria does something good, recognize her. Give her a high five." And in Classcraft, a high five is gaining points. And so we're shifting and applying this pedagogy, shifting towards a positive reinforcement mindset. And at the same time, because these high fives are digital, then you get all the data so you can know which behaviors did Victoria do at which time with which teacher? Hey, she didn't get a lot of points this week. What's going on with her? Maybe we should talk to her and see what's going on before her behavior escalates. And so there's a lot of value from a behavior intervention standpoint. But ultimately, it's super effective because the kids really care about it in a way that they don't normally care about classroom management. VICTORIA: Well, that makes a lot of sense. And I'm hearing something I've studied before when looking at technology organizations which is that growth mindset I think you're describing, the positive reinforcement, praising the effort for something versus their intrinsic skills. And that's something I love about teaching. I think that really, really translates to running a technology organization. SHAWN: Yeah, totally. Ultimately, what we're doing is giving schools and teachers a platform for really effective culture building. And what you're talking about is culture within a company, in essence, and it's really the same thing. It goes back to what I was saying earlier about managing a group of kids [laughs], and managing employees is super similar. It's all about what type of positive culture you are building. VICTORIA: I think there's something really universal about that. It's actually even true with dog training. I have a dog, and it's the same kind of motivational theory that works for them too. [laughs] SHAWN: Yep, yep. VICTORIA: I love it. And you mentioned that you built this tool yourself, and then suddenly, it became very popular, and now it's really, I'm sure, scaling. So what challenges have you faced with going from this homegrown tool to something big and out there in the world? SHAWN: Lots of challenges. [laughs] I would say working in education itself is a challenge. It's a pretty challenging vertical to work in. It's ripe for disruption at the same time, pretty conservative. There are a lot of forces working in education systemically not have it move forward. Working with schools and districts is challenging. They have a lot of requirements. And, of course, they're custodians of kids, so that's legitimate, but it does make it more challenging. One of the things that we had to evolve was we were very much a teacher-only tool when we started. I had built it as a teacher. Our user in mind was a teacher. Even our business model initially was selling to teachers basically. There was a free version, and they could upgrade to a paid version. And as we got more and more scale, you know, we have ten million-plus kids in the platform now. As we got more and more scale, what ended up happening was we were working more and more with schools and districts. And so we went from a B2C go-to-market and product vision to a B2B/enterprise where we have to roster 10,000 or 100,000 kids in one shot, so all the user provisioning, connecting to information systems that these districts have, et cetera, all of this ginormous plumbing that needs to happen in order for it to continue to be easy to use for every single teacher. And alongside with that, the other challenge is we were super appealing to teachers that were interested in games. [laughs] And so when you think of some teacher who's in their 60s and has never really played any games and just thinks that they're a silly waste of time, there's a different sales pitch that needs to happen there to get them on board and a different onboarding. One of the things we had to completely overhaul was the onboarding to make it really progressive. Classcraft, now when you start it, there's no avatar. It starts super lean on the feature side so that these teachers that are, you know, we're basically educating them as they're using the platform, educating them on all this game stuff. There are a lot of learnings in terms of what's our actual target audience. And if our target audience starts to be enterprise customers, how do we evolve our platform to appeal to a much more diverse type of persona from a teacher standpoint? VICTORIA: I was thinking, actually, a good friend of mine who is a teacher and has been running Dungeons & Dragons campaigns for us for several years. [laughter] SHAWN: There you go. VICTORIA: And, like, you'll love it. [laughs] SHAWN: Exactly. [laughter] VICTORIA: But I could see that being a challenge now that you're shifting your target business model, really, and how do you adapt to that? Mid-Roll Ad: As life moves online, bricks-and-mortar businesses are having to adapt to survive. With over 18 years of experience building reliable web products and services, thoughtbot is the technology partner you can trust. We provide the technical expertise to enable your business to adapt and thrive in a changing environment. We start by understanding what's important to your customers to help you transition to intuitive digital services your customers will trust. We take the time to understand what makes your business great and work fast yet thoroughly to build, test, and validate ideas, helping you discover new customers. Take your business online with design‑driven digital acceleration. Find out more at: url tbot.io/acceleration or click the link in the show notes for this episode. VICTORIA: What else are you looking ahead with Classcraft? What's on the horizon? SHAWN: There's a lot. Like I said, we have 10 million kids in the platform plus. But we have teachers in every single country you could imagine, and there's a universality to what we're proposing. We're not saying here's the best tool for fifth-grade math in the U.S. We're saying, solve this universal human problem that's prevalent in education. And so we have teachers in, you name it, Taiwan, and Australia, and Singapore, and all over Europe using Classcraft. And so there's definitely opportunity for us to look at the international landscape and identify opportunities. Another frontier beyond going out of North America is going beyond the brick-and-mortar experience of the classroom. A lot of what's happening in and around your software is actually not happening 18 inches from the screen. It's happening in this context where there are 30 other kids, and there are all these interactions going on. For example, if you made a reading app, you can imagine the kids sitting in a quiet space on their sofa at home reading this thing, but the reality that's happening is they're in a really loud classroom [laughs] with lots of other kids around them, et cetera. And so the design context for designing for edtech is really interesting. We have some views that are meant to be only on a projector in front of the class. And when that happens, the font size needs to be 80 point because a kid in the back needs to be able to see it. So the screen real estate you're playing with is pretty unique scenarios. Like, what does this look like at 120 feet, let's say, because people are using it in the gym? So interesting design challenges, but they have been really ensconced in the idea that a lot of how people are using Classcraft is with real-life physical situations. But Classcraft, in essence, we have an API. So you can also imagine behaviors that are not brick and mortar behaviors, like, if I'm being participative, that's something that a teacher would see and observe and give you points for. But there are 3,000 edtech platforms, and all of them have digital behaviors that teachers want to see. They want to see kids handing in homework in these platforms. They want to go see them complete assignments. They want to go see them participating in digital communities. These are all basically the new frontier for digital behaviors that are a part now post-pandemic of the ecosystem of education. And so we're really interested in connecting to other platforms. I don't need kids to be in Classcraft; I just need them every day. I need them to be earning points. And I'm happy if they're doing that in other platforms and that those interactions are rewarding them experience points and points in Classcraft. And ideally, automatically, that way, the teachers don't have to do anything. VICTORIA: And so you're integrating with all these different platforms, and you're working with all these different school districts. So you've had to make some difficult technology choices in your stack. Do you have any examples of those? SHAWN: Yeah, absolutely. When I started the company, I'd come out of programming in...I started building cool websites in ActionScript, [laughs] so that dates me a little bit. But I'd just come out of a decade of ActionScript and PHP. And I'm like, PHP does not scale, and it doesn't afford the same type of real-time interactions that you'd expect from a game. When I decided what the tech stack would be, right at the outset, it was, okay, we're going to do this all JavaScript. It's going to be Node. And at that time...now that's a pretty, like, anybody would make that decision. But this was nine years ago, and it wasn't as mature as it is now. And so that was a pretty ballsy move and one that we never looked back on. But we had a lot of things that we had to build ourselves because the libraries didn't exist yet. And we were really pushing the edge of what was possible in a browser, especially in a browser in school with a crappy internet connection. And often, they are on older browsers. Although it was the right decision to lean into the leading edge on the tech stack, it did afford us with a lot of specific challenges that we might not have had if we'd said, oh, let's just keep this super old school. Some other things that we've been challenged with over the years is just scaling the number of concurrent users is always a thing. When we started, we had a single database, one server, and I was doing all the DevOps. And a lot of what we've done since that is just move everything to services. So we've got, you know, MongoDB database-as-a-service. [laughs] We're all on Google Cloud now. From an IT standpoint, we think a lot about what stack we're going to be using. And to me, what really matters is build the product as fast as you can and as well as you can. So outsourcing all of the DevOps pieces to cloud providers is, in my opinion, [laughs] a really good use of funds versus maintaining it yourself and spending tons of money on sys engineers and architects. The reality is that for most products today, what exists as a service in the cloud already bundled is, you know, and we've got auto-scaling. When there are too many concurrent users, it automatically spins up new Docker servers, et cetera. So we've really evolved from this monolithic single-server approach to this imminently highly scalable solution that is all virtualized, but in doing that, moved all of it to services. And I think that's the right move because we're not, you know, if I was really, really core, if was, I don't know, [chuckles] an online video game, then the speed of connections and all these things become super important. But in our case, reliability, scalability is more important than the fine-tuning to a precise degree of specific tech infrastructure. And I'm seeing more and more founders now, Victoria, as well go-to codeless solutions as well. I think we're kind of abstracting a lot of what was core to product development from a tech side. You know, first, it was the DevOps, then it was the cloud, and even now, code, I think, is moving in the direction where we're systematizing, bundling, and having other services generate code more and more. I think we're moving towards that just in software in general. VICTORIA: Yeah, I think that is becoming prevalent. I do think low-code automation has also been coming around every 5 or 10 years or so. [laughs] I have the belief that technology never disappears; it just keeps building, and new tech gets created, and the user base shifts around a little bit. And, of course, for you as a technical founder, putting it all in Docker and setting up the auto scaling on Google is probably within your reach, whereas a lot of founders, that might be something more challenging, and you might need to have some support for. But that's essentially what we work on for Mission Control as well is helping teams set up their platform so that it will scale automatically that if there's an issue, you know about it in advance. [laughs] You can take care of it before it falls over, and that way, your users just see a reliable, happy system. SHAWN: I'm so grateful that I am a technical founder. [laughs] I know a lot of founders, and the ones that don't know how to code really are at the mercy of so many unknown variables. I'm not coding anymore, but I'm very aware of what's going on in the platform. And I think that helps me make better business decisions every day. So I have a lot of gratitude when I compare myself in that regard. VICTORIA: And I think it's really about communication then too. Like, having a good understanding of your system is helpful but being able to understand it well enough to then communicate it to other people, and what the value is, and how you want to invest money in different parts of the system. I think those are two things that having maybe a little bit more of experience in technology and then also having a teacher experience, I think, sets you up to be successful. But we also, of course, at thoughtbot, we offer a lot of that technical expertise to help founders navigate some of that. So there's a little pitch just for us. [laughs] But let's see, let me go through...I think I've gone through a good amount of questions. Here's one that I like to ask everybody. But if you could travel back in time to when you first started Classcraft, what would be the main piece of advice you would give yourself? SHAWN: If I could go back, there are some big lessons that have been learned. I've been for almost a decade now as a founder and CEO. One of the things we didn't do early enough was user testing. If I split the life of Classcraft into three eras, there's the first third we didn't need to because we had all of my own experience. But once we started moving past what was the initial product that I had built in my own classroom, we continued to make assumptions. And we, of course, always listen to our users, but now we're super systematic about it, and any new feature has research behind it and a really solid UX practice that we should have implemented much earlier. I think we're making much better roadmap decisions today than we were three years ago. A lot of companies hire UX people super late, and I would do that early or at least develop the chops to do it myself as early as possible. So I think that's one thing. I think as well...and maybe this is tied to that. I think we should have and could have iterated faster as well. A lot of startups in the tech scene talk about iteration, but there's a difference between incrementally iterating and just adding on, adding on, adding on, and actually making the kind of iterative decisions that, for example, pulling part of the product and discontinuing it for example. And we've done some of those moves, but I think we could have done them faster. And we should have done them faster if we'd had that UX research data to help us make decisions faster. So it's more than, like, common truism is like, oh, listen to your users and listen to their feedback. Like, yes, that's true, and we were doing that. But I'd say go further and create robust structures to get that data faster, not just wait for it to come in but actually go out and get it and digest it in a way that's actually usable. Because you have a whole bunch of testimonials and feedback, but if it's not organized, it's not somebody's job to make sense of it. It's just kind of sitting there. So there's a lot of value from that perspective that you can quickly generate for your users and, therefore, for your business. VICTORIA: Right. Save you some time and some money, probably in validating your ideas, right? SHAWN: Yeah. And the problem with education is that it's a yearly cycle, right? VICTORIA: Mmm-hmm. SHAWN: We're not looking at monthly scales; we're looking at the whole school year. So back to school happens once a year, and that's when you get a ton of data because that's when there's the most activity. Like, right now, August, September, October, these are the moments where we're getting the most data. And then when you make changes, you got to wait all the way back to the next back to school. So, in particular, in education, I think the cycles are long versus, let's say, more B2C-type consumer verticals where the test length is like a week. [laughs] So if it's coming once a year, you better make sure you're organized, I guess, is what I'm saying. [laughs] VICTORIA: Because we only have one shot. [laughs] SHAWN: Yeah, exactly. VICTORIA: That makes sense. Well, thank you so much for sharing all those insights. And I want to give you a chance to promote anything else you'd like to share with our listeners. SHAWN: Thank you so much for the conversation, Victoria. I appreciate it. I think if anybody wants to find out about Classcraft, classcraft.com, tons of content and resources that we're generating about these topics of building meaningful relationships in school but in general with human beings. Classcraft is a B Corp, and so for people who don't know what that is, it's a certification around impact. And so we have built-in commitment to generate good in the world. And it's a pretty hard certification to get, so we're pretty proud about it. But I think that this commitment that we have of generating meaningful relationships both with kids but also with our employees, with our community, with our different stakeholders, has been really core to a lot of the decisions we make and how we make them, and how we approach different problems. And so I think that as a tech founder, sometimes we can lose sight of what are we actually generating in the world. And so I would encourage people to think about, you know, if you're thinking about starting a company or thinking about your own company and the impact its having to look up that certification. But also, just look up triple bottom line, these types of concepts that are becoming more and more prevalent that really give meaning to the endeavor. Starting a company and running it is a lot of work. You need to believe in what you're doing. [laughs] And I think having a mission that generates impact in that way is a good way to motivate yourself and your team to go the extra mile and deliver. VICTORIA: I love that. And did we really cover the full impact this app has had on kids that are using it in schools? SHAWN: There's a ton of research about Classcraft; actually, that's been done by pedagogy professors in colleges. Literally, thousands of papers have been written on Classcraft because there just aren't a lot of...everybody's interested in student motivation. There aren't a lot of scalable systems for doing that other than Classcraft. And so a lot of research that's been done about that topic incidentally happens to be using Classcraft. And a recent meta-study about Classcraft was conducted, and they saw a significant statistical impact on student motivation and learner outcomes. And so it's hard in education to really understand impact easily because it's social sciences. So you need a lot of big data samples, and you need the control groups. It's complicated. So we're pretty proud about that because a lot of companies that work in education don't have that kind of hard data. It's like, okay, it seems to be having an impact. We've got pretty hard proof; literally hundreds of millions of positive behaviors that kids have done that are being reinforced every single year. And when you think about that, most kids don't get any positive feedback. The kids that get the most attention are the ones that are acting out and being the worst. So 90% of teacher energy is being directed at 10% of the kids, and so most kids go through school without ever feeling a sense of belonging, or accomplishment, or praise. And we've had kids write us saying, "I was suicidal. Classcraft changed my life," like these types of user testimonies where the impact, the human impact of the approach, is really, really real. And for teachers as well, like, "I was so demotivated with teaching. I found the spark again thanks to Classcraft because school is fun again." [laughs] So there's a lot to be proud of there, for sure. VICTORIA: That's wonderful and really powerful that you've had that impact and have been able to see it both from a scientific perspective and from those user testimonies. So I think that's wonderful. And I think it's an inspiring story. And that's probably why you're also so involved; it seems, in leadership groups in edtech and in other communities in Quebec. Is that right? SHAWN: Yeah, totally. I mean the reality...so I'm the president of the Edtech Association here in Quebec, which I helped co-found. We've got 100-plus organizations working in edtech that are part of the association. I'm also Co-chair for The Global Collective for Social Emotional Learning, Digital Learning for UNESCO. And I have been involved in numerous different systemic endeavors in education throughout the years. The truth is changing education is hard, and the way we're going to succeed is...it's fundamentally something I believe that we should really be focusing on as a society is improving education, education outcomes. All the positive changes we need to see to tackle the incredible challenges that are upcoming for us as a species are going to happen through education. But for that to happen, we need to make education evolve, and for education to evolve, we need to all work together. So the association is interesting because it's like a coopetition [laughs] in a sense. All these entrepreneurs we're all competing for the same budget dollars, but we're looking at education problems in different ways. And if we're more successful as an industry, individually, everybody's going to be more successful, and more kids are going to be impacted. So I just believe that and this is true specifically for education, but I do believe this for any vertical. If businesses are collaborating to elevate, if the water rises, everybody's boat goes up. I really believe that that's true in business in general and in education in particular. VICTORIA: It reminds me when I was at Pluribus Digital in my last position. We were a part of the Digital Services Coalition, which is another coopetition group of federal contractors who are going after the same money. But we are all trying to see the government be better, part of that collaboration which sounds like what Classcraft is all about too. We're all in it together. [laughs] SHAWN: Yeah. And if that's not the case, especially for incumbents, then what happens is status quo. And for startups, for tech companies, usually the status quo [laughs] is bad. That's where you're trying to generate opportunity from. But sometimes the systems that are there, government systems in particular...we've seen a lot in health as well over the last few years in clean tech. All of these impact tech sectors part of what they're fighting against are market forces of status quo. And so it's only by all working together that we can really move that. VICTORIA: Yeah, absolutely. I'm sure we could keep talking about that for a long time. [laughs] But unless you have anything else you'd like to share, I'll go ahead and wrap up. You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. You can find me on Twitter @victori_ousg. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening. See you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success. Special Guest: Shawn Young.

A few fun facts about our guest today, Shawn Malloy: 48yr old Father of 2, a little trouble being ‘present' sometimes.Married 17yrs to a very tolerant and patient wife Meghan.Undergraduate degree in Biochemistry (after starting as a music major) from California State University, Long Beach (study abroad semester in Nottingham, England). 21 years at current employer, Biogen, 12 roles in 8 groups over 21 years. Hobbies: parkour (6 stitches), rock climbing (sprained knee), mountain biking (sprained ankle, lots of scars), and trail running, Yoga, meditation, swimming, racing midlife crisis Camaro, guitar building from scratch. “Poor student” all the way from kindergarten through high school – a few flashes of brilliance caught by the odd teacher throughout. Dangerous teenager and mid-20s kid. 25 jobs by the age of 27 and only fired once. Still struggles with honing in on 1 passion. In his own words:  “I've always preferred breadth to depth but I know that if I gave my full attention to one of my passions, I'd conquer the world. As with most ADD folks, I tend to be my own worst enemy in that regard. But anytime I've given something full attention I've had wild success – the guitar is one of my favorite examples. I had a desire to build a guitar for a while, a passion for artistic endeavors, creating things, and woodworking, and a goal of finishing it before Christmas as a gift for my dad. The end result was a beautiful piece of functional art, and it was the first time I ever saw my father cry”. Today we're talking mostly about Neurodiversity in the workplace.  ——  In this episode Peter and Shawn discuss:   00:40 - Thank you so much for listening and for subscribing! 01:01 - Intro and welcome Shawn Malloy 03:36 - You had 25 jobs by the age of 27. Let's talk about how you're not bored now, finally. 04:25 - "An ADD brain is like having a Ferrari engine with bicycle brakes" 04:55 - ADD can really be a blessing if you're in the right environment or you've put yourself in the right environment 05:55 - Growing at work under good, or ideal managing 06:55 - What happens when you get a dud for a manager at work? 08:05 - About Human Resources 09:40 - About recognizing talent and knowing how to utilize it in it's best possible ways 10:22 - Trust = Commitment 10:54 - On Managers and management 13:19 - On how purposeful planning is so important 15:00 - What do you tell the up and coming manager about how to manage folks with neurodiverse brains? 15:47 - “You don't manage to the role. You manage to the person”. 17:47 - On the power of diversity 18:42 - What is the one thing you've learned about your brain, that you wish you would've learned earlier in life? 19:12 - This bit right HERE on Imposter Syndrome and permitting your neurodiversity to work 20:00 - How can people find more about you? LinkedIN profile page is here: linkedin.com/in/shawn-malloy-3636696 20:22 - Guys, as always thanks so much for subscribing! Do you have a cool friend with a great story? We'd love to hear. I'm www.petershankman.com and you can reach out anytime via email at peter@shankman.com or @petershankman on all of the socials. You can also find us at @FasterNormal on all of the socials. It really helps when you drop us a review on iTunes and of course, subscribe to the podcast if you haven't already! As you know, the more reviews we get, the more people we can reach. Help us to show the world that ADHD is a gift, not a curse!  Faster Than Normal Podcast info & credits  — TRANSCRIPT via Descript and then corrected.. somewhat:  [00:00:37] Peter: Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Faster Than Normal my name is Peter Shankman. I am thrilled to have you here today. It's great to be here. Its a gorgeous day outside its approaching the end of August as we're recording this. Couple more weeks to labor day, I am about to get outta here and take my daughter out for a week to Tenerife. If you don't know where that is, all need to know it's off the coast of Spain and it is the largest has the largest water park in the world. So you could make the argument I'm going to the largest water park in the world and taking my daughter with me. So it doesn't seem weird. Anyway, thrilled to have you for another episode!   We have a guy named Shawn Malloy on the podcast. Shawn is different than some of our guests, but also very much the same as all of our guests. 48 year old father to 12 year old boy Killion, 10 year old girl, Anna. He loves his kids to death has trouble being present sometimes .Sounds familiar, born and raised settled north of Boston, Massachusetts married 17 years to a lovely tolerant and patient wife named Megan. Here's the cool part undergraduate degree biochem okay, so abroad in England, 21 years, the past 21 years, he has worked at a company called Biogen, which is how I met him when I gave a keynote to Biogen about a month or so ago, 12 roles in eight groups over 21 years, loves adrenaline sports .Sounds, familiar, parkour, rock climbing, mountain biking. I love that he puts all this stuff in his bio and includes the number of stitches and injuries he got with each one, which I think is just so ADHD for all of us. He races a car. He has a midlife crisis Camaro on track. He built a guitar from scratch. Don't we all with that? Anyway, his story is like all of ours. He was a poor student. He was a dangerous teen, he, hit his stride stride in college. Let's talk to Shawn and figure out what turned him into what he's doing today. Shawn, welcome to Faster Than Normal man.  [00:02:37] Shawn: Thank you very much, Peter. Um, your talk at Biogen was definitely it hit home. Um, I was an adult diagnosed #ADHD or #ADD um, survivor, I guess you could say. Uh, and my teen years is definitely a survival story to some extent, um, But, yeah. Thanks for, thanks for having me on this is, uh, I'm looking forward to a fun conversation. [00:03:00] Peter: At the end of the day, we make it through, we survive it. Somehow we move on, you know, we become adults. I joke that, um, you know, I turned 50 a couple of weeks ago, but didn't really hit me until yesterday. When I had a wall unit delivered. I now own a wall unit in my living room, which is. What kind of bullshit is that right? That's how, you know, you're getting all that, a goddamn wall unit. You know, I used to just hang my TV on the wall, right? No, not I have a wall unit cause you know, I need storage. What is that? Right. Welcome to middle age.  [00:03:30] Shawn: Adulting. Um, it's horrible. [00:03:32] Peter: Yeah. So let's talk about ADHD. You had 25 jobs by the age of 27. You were only fired once you got bored, super fast, right? Biogen, you found a place that never let you get bored. Yes. Um, okay, so let's talk about that. Cause not everyone has the fortune to not always, you know, not everyone has a job where they don't always get bored. [00:03:56] Shawn: It it's been, honestly, it's been pretty amazing. Um, I think Biogen's been a place that. If you're performing reasonably well, you don't even have to be a top performer, but you're performing reasonably well. They'll let you try different stuff out. And I've moved from jobs that were somewhat adjacencies to jobs where I, I didn't know what I was doing. Um, And much to my surprise, each time I would be at 80% of my peers within a couple of months. And I attribute that to that ADD brain. Right. You've got this #Ferrari engine with bicycle brakes. Um, I. I was always able to assimilate information really quickly, put the pieces together, learn really fast, and it started to be intrinsically rewarded, rewarding. You talk about that dopamine hit, but the success profile that Biogen let me build over the years, just continued to add confidence to me as a person. Um, but also to the power of ADD. Like once I found out that I had ADD it started to click that this really can be a blessing if you're in the right environment or you've put yourself in the right environment. [00:05:02] Peter: Well, and that's sort of one of the, sort of the unexpected gifts of, or ADHD that we, we figure out, right? No one can tell you that, right? No one can say, oh, trust me. It's gonna be, you know, you don't believe it. It has to happen. And it has to show up naturally, but once it does. It's sort of that way of call, like, wow, I'm in a position. I, I, I have this job where I have ability to not only do my job great, but then I can create things within my job that give me that dopamine hit that, let me work harder and let work more and let do better. So it's almost like selfing, prophecy.  [00:05:33] Shawn: Yeah. Yeah. And in my time here, right, I've had 21 years. You can imagine I've had a lot of managers in that time. I've really only had two duds. And those were the times where there was such rigidity placed on me. And what I was allowed to do that I really did actually flounder. I, I was not good at the job, or I just couldn't get engaged with the job. And those were really hard and it got me to a point. You know, rather than looking for the ideal job, I look for the ideal manager and just make sure that the work's gonna be interesting. [00:06:04] Peter: That's an interesting point. Instead of finding the, the, looking for the ideal job, you look for the ideal manager. And I think a lot of that actually resonates because I remember, you know, the few jobs I've had, right? I, I, I, I worked for America online, back in the nineties. That was the last job I ever had. The only job I ever had. And I had a great manager who let me, who understood, like do your job, you know, do it whichever way works for you, but get it done. And, and that. I think for me, you know, for my first job, having that as a first job was a bit of a, a problem because, uh, I just assumed every job was like that right. I went to my second job and, and, and it totally was not. And, you know, there were 8:00 AM meetings. There were check-ins and like, you know, I quit in two weeks. So having that ability to find that, or to have a boss or to have a, a manager. Who understands how you work and let you, lets you go the way you want I think it's key. You sort of honed in on that and you said it, you only had two sort of duds. What happens when you get a dud though? How do you, how do you sort of handle yourself? Because it's not, you know, if you can't be yourself, if you're not allowed to do the things you want, be the way you want. It's difficult. [00:07:06] Shawn: It's very difficult and it, the problem that was just, it continued to get worse is I didn't stop being myself. I don't think that that's in the, a add profile is the ability to not be impulsive and not be yourself. Right. Um, that's so one of the things that defines us, so the relationship just deteriorated from not good to really bad. But what I did have was this long history of performance with a lot of people, I had a big network, so I was able to work through my network to find the next opportunity. Um, and really that was the only way out. I was not working my way out of this, this problem with the manager that was the dud or the managers that were duds, it just wasn't gonna work. Uh, one of the managers was removed, so they were a dud for everybody, not just me. The other one was the manager who was highly regarded and really was a brilliant man, but it was not a good personality match between how I needed to be functioning and how he wanted me to be functioning. And that one, the one where I network.  [00:08:04] Peter: That's interesting point. That's interesting point because you know, it's not all the time that, you know, remember there are a lot of times where you you're sitting there and you're going okay. It's not that the, the boss, isn't a good boss. He's not a good boss for me. Yes. Right. And how do you, how do you sort of explain that, you know, to, to the powers that be when they don't understand what he, not a good boss for you, he's a boss, you know, you deal with it. Well, it doesn't work that way all the time. [00:08:31] Shawn: No, it really doesn't. And you're very right. HR is almost always gonna side with the boss and they did, um, they didn't fully get it, but I wasn't in a unique position. This was, you know, maybe 15 years deep into my career here. I had built this legacy of everywhere I went, I did excellent. So it wasn't like, they just thought all of a sudden I'm not doing my job, but it was not a pleasant experience trying to, to escape if you will. I, there were a lot of things up against me, but I don't, I think there are gonna be a lot of people that don't have that benefit.  [00:09:00] Peter: Well, that's the thing that brings up a really interesting point is that, is that every, you know, for as long as you're in a job, whether it's 15 years or 15 days, you know, your goal is to create a, a sort of, uh, security blanket around yourself where people look at you and go, yeah, he's a really good worker, or he's a really, you know, smart employee or whatever and so if something's not working. Right. Let's not be that quick to blame him. Let's see what the issue and, and that doesn't necessarily happen all the time because companies aren't trained to think that way.  [00:09:35] Shawn: Not very often. No, I've what I got to know when I became a supervisor, is that there are very few people who don't want to do a good job. I would say it's bordering on none. Nobody wants to come in and be known as the crappy employee. Um, there's usually a barrier in their way, and it's whether it's a barrier in how the job is functioning or the training, or in my case, if you having a person with a ADD or some other, um, I don't wanna call it a disability, a different ability, a different brain, right. Um, you've gotta find ways to get them to be their best, cuz if you can find that for them; man, will they run through brick walls? Like if you're the person who discovers what that person's talent is after they've been, um, pushed down their whole life, what a connection seriously. Um, and had many of those over my career. [00:10:22] Peter: That's really a key point also, because if you are a manager and you're able to bring that out, Your in your employee. Right. And, and, you know, not only bring that out, but, but appreciate it as opposed to try and push it back down, you know, these employees will go to the end of the Earth for you. And I don't think enough managers- don'ts that, that. They don't realize the level of commitment that someone with a different brain will give you. If you give them that level of trust.  [00:10:54] Shawn: Oh, you I've seen it too many times to not believe it's true. Peter. You're, you're dead right. And. The not only that, right? The work side of things, but that personal connection that you get that personal, just watching somebody light up because they've been discovered for what they bring to the table. The, the trouble with managers is very few of them receive good formal training. It's kinda like when you're parenting, right. You become a parent. And then all of a sudden you've gotta figure out how to raise a human being. Um, when you're a manager, most of them are thrown to the, the, the job because they were good at a job, but not necessarily good at managing right. The good ones over time, come to realize that you manage the individual, you don't manage to manage your role. You manage to the people that you have in front of you. And, and that does get to you're managing to every individual difference. You're bringing out the bright spots and trying to minimize the deficits and it's not easy. It really isn't. So I don't, I don't fault always the managers who aren't good at it because it, it does take a, a really dedicated person to be able to do that. And you also have to have the bandwidth to do it. A lot of managers are given a day job as well as a manager role. So there's gotta be some patience for the manager as well.  [00:12:04] Peter: Isn't that, um, what you said earlier that, that, you know, most managers aren't born into, into the concept of managing they're they're they're become, they become managers cause they were given a job which isn't necessarily a manager job. Isn't that the Peter principle, the Peter principle is, is the object that basically states that every worker will rise to his or her highest level of incompetence. Yes right in that, in that you, you, you, you hire someone and they're good at their job, so you promote them and they're good at the next job, so you promote them again and they're good at the following job. So you promote them again. Then they're not good. If finally reach a point where they're not good. Well, you don't demote. But you don't promote them again. Right. So they sit there. Right. And they, it that's how bureaucracy happens.  [00:12:43] Shawn: yes. Yeah. It, it plays itself out over and over again in corporate America. For sure. I, I don't really have a good solution for it. Right. But I, I think, I don't know if there is one there really,  [00:12:55] Peter: I think we can make a lot, you and I can make a lot of money, but you figure one out.  [00:12:58] Shawn: No question. Yeah. I would agree. Um, I took a few notes as I was thinking about this podcast and, and the things I wanted to be able to convey. And we've talked about a, a great one, right? I think understanding how to navigate your career with ADD is important. But one of the things that I've I've learned throughout the years is, um, purposeful planning. As a person with ADD and activation energy. And I think they do relate to how I've navigated my career over time at Biogen. It wasn't just that I bounced around from job to job because I'm a ADD; I did all along have plans. Um, and for me, it's similar to the guitar that I built. Right. I had a, I finally had something that I could leverage my artistic capability, my engineering capability. I had a goal around it. Timing. And step by step of how to approach it. And I've, I've approached my career much the same way. And when I first started supervising people, I was in the manufacturing element of Biogen, very small little world. Okay. Very small little world. Right. But you feel like it's all there is because you're in the science, you're actually making the drug. But as I was developing people, all, I really knew how to develop them for were manufacturing roles. So I wanted to get out and see the broader thing that is biotech. I wanted to hop into some individual contributor roles, learn what different roles did so that as I came back to a management role, I'd understand how to develop people. Like when I saw somebody's passion to speak to what we were getting to before, when I noticed somebody's niche, I didn't necessarily know what to do with it other than maybe a small part in manufacturing, but now that I've come full circle with all this knowledge of all these roles, when I see somebody who's got a particular passion, I know where that fits in the organization. I know how to put them in a role that's gonna get them into that flow state. And that's good for people with a ADD that's good for people in life in general, but it all came because I had a plan that as a manager, I wanted to be able to develop people better, to be able to do that. I had to understand  [00:14:53] Peter: that brings up a great point. What do you tell, you know, if you had to. Sort of hammer that down in 10 words. What do you tell the up and coming manager about, I mean, managing in general, but obviously managing people with neuro diverse brains, right. Because you know, , you certainly do not learn this in school.  [00:15:11] Shawn: No, I think it's the first question I ask my people, um, when I meet them is- what is your passion? Where does time disappear for you? And then I'm gonna do my best to find the aspects of the current role that you're in and whatever future roles you wanna point yourself towards where that passion can come to bear as often as possible. Every job is gonna have crap you don't wanna do, sorry. It's work. Yeah. But the more that you can leverage those points of passion. The more you're gonna enjoy your work. The more you're gonna succeed. And the more you're just gonna really shine. And that's, that's what I would tell managers is you don't manage to the role you manage to the person. [00:15:51] Peter: Ooh, I like that.  [00:15:52] Shawn: If you wanna get the most out of the people that are around you, find out what drives them. Where does time disappear for them? You'll be surprised, right? You may hate analytics. You may hate looking at data, but I've had people under me who that is their passion. Mm-hmm they love working in a spreadsheet. They love seeing the story that comes out. When you start looking at the data and the numbers. If you have somebody who hates that, don't put them in a role that that's their main function. Find the person that that is their passion and oh, you're. Get such better work outta them, and you're gonna get better dedication, better loyalty. And you'll have people coming to you for jobs because they wanna work for you because you get it. You get how to place them in success. [00:16:35] Peter: You bring an interesting point because I think a lot of people, whether you're manager or not, you know, we tend to gravitate towards the stuff that we're good at the stuff we like. Right. I mean, you know, let's. As we're as we're growing up and we're in school when we're undiagnosed with a neurodiverse brain, um, it's no surprise that we gravitate towards the stuff we're really good at, right. For me it was, it was English or it was, you know, it was social studies or whatever it wasn't math. Right. And so math would be horrible. So I would avoid math as much as possible. I think as adults, when we're in job roles, we sort of keep that uh, in the back of our heads and we don't really let that go away. So that, so that, that, you know, we tend to gravitate sorts of stuff we like to do and try to avoid the stuff we don't. And so, because of that, I think, you know, we look at our, our, our sort of employees when we're in a managerial role and we put them in the same boat, but what we have to sort of understand is that, that we might have employees who love the very stuff that we hate, like love. Yes. The very stuff that we hate. And we have to sort of, I guess, embrace that. For them. Right. And let them under, you know, Hey, you, you have that math kick. Great. Go do math. you know, I, I, I look at along lines of, I, my assistant is awesome at the stuff I'm terrible at. She doesn't let me schedule stuff in my calendar because I screw it up, but she's great at it. She loves that stuff. And so it's that, it's that giving over that ability for her to do that. [00:18:08] Shawn: It's the power of diversity, right? We're talking about neurodiverse brain, but the power of diversity is everywhere in life. It's everywhere in work. And if you can work with people who are different than you, you're gonna be so much better off because everybody can bring a different strength to bear. Yeah. The hard part is a hundred percent. Different personalities that are there. Cause that can be a little weird. We are humans at the end of the day and sometimes we get a little quirky on the personality side.  [00:18:32] Peter: I think. We could do nine and a half hours on managing personalities. So I'm not even gonna start with that. but I will, I will end it with this. I'll ask you this. What is the one thing you've learned about your brain, whether it's, you know, in a professional setting or personal setting with your wife or your kids that you wish learned earlier?  [00:18:54] Shawn: That is a great question. I think you had mentioned it it's that the imposter syndrome, um, that it's very real, that it exists, but it really isn't true 90% of the time. The ADD brain, you are so good at so many things, and you can see the big picture better than so many other people. You're gonna be your own harshest critic. Yeah, that does not mean that you are not still better than 80 or 90% of the people who are doing the same thing. It means you're not 80 to 90% as good as you wanna be, or, you know, you could be, but stretching that extra mile may not be worth the effort. Your, your good enough is gonna be better than most people's best. So don't let imposter syndrome beat you down.  [00:19:46] Peter: I love that. [00:19:46] Shawn: Don't fall prey to it. Have faith that what you're doing is probably better than the majority of the people around you. [00:19:53] Peter: That's that's a phenomenal, uh, a phenomenal line. That's that's awesome. I love that. I love that. Awesome. Well, listen, I cannot thank you enough for taking the time, Shawn really appreciate it. I'm so glad we connected, uh, at the Biogen talk. Guys, Shawn Malloy , uh, how can people find you? How can they, how can they, uh, learn more about you?  LinkedIN profile page is here: linkedin.com/in/shawn-malloy-3636696 [00:20:11] Shawn: Uh, LinkedIN I am on LinkedIn. It's Shawn S H a w N M a L L O Y. Uh, and you'll find me as employed by Biogen. That's probably the cleanest and simplest way to find me.  [00:20:22] Peter: Awesome guys. We've been visiting with Shawn Malloy and you've been listening to Faster Than Normal. My name is Peter Shankman as always. We love that you're here. And if you had a second right now, go and leave us a review. I cannot tell you how those reviews help our uh, podcast growth, the more reviews the more it helps the website and the podcast is seen. It is really incredible, and we're able to help more and more people understand that ADHD is a gift, ADD is a gift, Any form of neurodiversity is a gift, not a curse! We will see you again next week with a brand new interview and a brand new episode. We appreciate you listening, and we appreciate all our guests, including Shawn, thank you so much Shawn for taking the time. Guys, thank you for listening. We will see you next week. My name is Peter Shankman. And remember the ADHD and all forms of neurodiversity is probably the best thing that ever happened to you. We will see you next week. Stay safe. Talk to you soon. Credits: You've been listening to the Faster Than Normal podcast. We're available on iTunes, Stitcher and Google play and of course at www.FasterThanNormal.com I'm your host, Peter Shankman and you can find me at shankman.com and @petershankman on all of the socials. If you like what you've heard, why not head over to your favorite podcast platform of choice and leave us a review, come more people who leave positive reviews, the more the podcast has shown, and the more people we can help understand that ADHD is a gift, not a curse. Opening and closing themes were composed and produced by Steven Byrom who also produces this podcast, and the opening introduction was recorded by Bernie Wagenblast. Thank you so much for listening. We'll see you next week!

INTRODUCTION: Shawn Murphy is the host of the Above The Bar podcast and a fellow military veteran. Join us as we discuss military issues, what it's like being a latchkey kid, growing up with a drug dealing dad and my new psychedelic journey!!! INCLUDED IN THIS EPISODE (But not limited to): ·      Military Matters – Burn Pits & Legislation·      Cannabis In Massachusetts ·      My New Drug Journey - #Psychedelics ·      Why Trauma Is The Real Gateway Drug·      Having A Drug Dealing Dad·      Relationships/Divorce In The Military·      Can We Be Addicted To Marriage?·      Latchkey Kid Issues·      Military Recruiter Tea·      Gay Marine Stories!!! CONNECT WITH SHAWN: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/theabovethebarpodcast/YouTube: https://bit.ly/3QCmg05Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theabovethebarpodcast/Instagram: https://bit.ly/3LglTr1TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theabovethebarpodcastTwitter: https://bit.ly/3qzq5ssTwitch: https://www.twitch.tv/theabovethebarpodcastPodBean: https://theabovethebarpodcast.podbean.com  CONNECT WITH DE'VANNON: Website: https://www.SexDrugsAndJesus.comWebsite: https://www.DownUnderApparel.comYouTube: https://bit.ly/3daTqCMFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/SexDrugsAndJesus/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sexdrugsandjesuspodcast/Twitter: https://twitter.com/TabooTopixLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/devannonPinterest: https://www.pinterest.es/SexDrugsAndJesus/_saved/Email: DeVannon@SexDrugsAndJesus.com  DE'VANNON'S RECOMMENDATIONS: ·      Pray Away Documentary (NETFLIX)o  https://www.netflix.com/title/81040370o  TRAILER: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tk_CqGVfxEs ·      OverviewBible (Jeffrey Kranz)o  https://overviewbible.como  https://www.youtube.com/c/OverviewBible ·      Hillsong: A Megachurch Exposed (Documentary)o  https://press.discoveryplus.com/lifestyle/discovery-announces-key-participants-featured-in-upcoming-expose-of-the-hillsong-church-controversy-hillsong-a-megachurch-exposed/ ·      Leaving Hillsong Podcast With Tanya Levino  https://leavinghillsong.podbean.com  ·      Upwork: https://www.upwork.com·      FreeUp: https://freeup.net VETERAN'S SERVICE ORGANIZATIONS ·      Disabled American Veterans (DAV): https://www.dav.org·      American Legion: https://www.legion.org·      What The World Needs Now (Dionne Warwick): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfHAs9cdTqg  INTERESTED IN PODCASTING OR BEING A GUEST?: ·      PodMatch is awesome! This application streamlines the process of finding guests for your show and also helps you find shows to be a guest on. The PodMatch Community is a part of this and that is where you can ask questions and get help from an entire network of people so that you save both money and time on your podcasting journey.https://podmatch.com/signup/devannon  TRANSCRIPT: [00:00:00]You're listening to the sex drugs and Jesus podcast, where we discuss whatever the fuck we want to! And yes, we can put sex and drugs and Jesus all in the same bed and still be all right at the end of the day. My name is De'Vannon and I'll be interviewing guests from every corner of this world as we dig into topics that are too risqué for the morning show, as we strive to help you understand what's really going on in your life.There is nothing off the table and we've got a lot to talk about. So let's dive right into this episode.De'Vannon: Shawn Murphy is the host of the above the bar podcast, and a fellow military veteran of mine. Join us today. As we discuss military issues, what it's like being a latchkey kid, what it's like growing up with a drug dealing data in my personal news psychedelic journey. Y'all they tuned listen close, and I hope you enjoy the fuck out of this episode.God bless [00:01:00] you.Hello everyone. And welcome to the sex drugs in Jesus podcast. Yes, he is up there. He is looking over me. He's looking over Sean. He is looking over all of you. Beautiful fuckers. And yes, Jesus told me to call you all fuckers today because he is super open minded and super and super loving and words like that.Simply don't offend him. Sean, how are you? Shawn: Wonderful there. Good, sir. How are you? De'Vannon: Fan fucking y'all Sean Murphy is the AU shit. The author is the host. Oh, bring us that book. I'm ready to say author, man, bring that book. It's Shawn: it's in the works. It's in the works. We gotta make it happen. He De'Vannon: is the host of the above the bar podcast where every week they belly up to the bar and talk about all kinds of shit.And I was on his show. And now we're doing the flip fuck thing that we often do [00:02:00] in the podcast industry. He did mean I'm gonna do him. You all this make me a bottom. Shawn: Does this make me a bottom, a De'Vannon: podcast bottom in this moment? Yes. And I prefer a nice dry fuck. I might spit on your whole little bit. Other than that I'll LA natural brow baby.Shawn: I'll try, I guess, you know, as having my own show, I'll try not to be too much of a power bottom. I guess. That's what that would make me right. If I have my own show and I'm on the other side, does that, what that makes me. De'Vannon: Let's abandon all these titles. Just do what the fuck says.Shawn: oh brother. It is good to see you, man. You're looking De'Vannon: good. You're looking gorgeous. I got my beard growing out. Cause my stylist is gonna turn in a weird ass color. As I approach 40 years old in December. I want to be sure that I get weirder and weirder as I get older and older. And and so yeah, y'all Sean, you know, and I love your beer too.We're compliment complimenting each other's you were before we got on the [00:03:00] broadcast, Sean is a military veteran. I'm a military veteran. And so show we're gonna be talking about his podcast, his military experience, and is gonna get dark is gonna get dim, but I will end it with a Ray of hope and light for our veterans out there.And so we need veterans, all of your motherfuckers out there. Couldn't run around. Doing the bullshit. You like to do fucking your brains out, doing all your drugs, you know, making all the money, raising all the children and everything. And I love all of those things, but without a military in place, crazy as dictators would come over here and snatch your shit from you in a minute, you know?And then the people who those crazy as dictators have sent into the country to spy and shed. And yeah, I mean, that's just the way the world works. We have spies in other countries, no reason for us to think that they don't have spies here. Right. But the military helps to keep all of that shit at ban from spiraling out of hand.So as two veterans, [00:04:00] we above all people have the right to comment on veterans' issues, more so than crazy as Republicans do. And anybody who dares to think that they're speaking on behalf of us, because usually I don't agree with what politicians say about veterans. And so, so we're gonna talk a lot about veterans in this episode.So I see the way you're nodding and then light in your eyes. So tell me what Tim was on your mind. Just let those thoughts out. Shawn: No, it, well, you know, it's funny when you bring that up, it, they suck on both sides of the fence. Yeah. They, they really do because you know, it's funny growing up in the timeframe that I grew up in the military, not I joined in 94.We were, it it's so funny. We were always told you vote Republican, that they they're gonna fund you. They're gonna give you money. They're gonna take care of you. Do you know who gave me my most pay raises in all my 20 years, who gave me the most pay raises De'Vannon: bill Shawn: Clinton, [00:05:00] bill Clinton in the Clinton administration.They're 50 50 in my book, cuz. Were the ones that realized a lot of guys were getting outta the service and taking better paying jobs than staying in because there was no money there in 94, I made less than a thousand dollars a month in the Marine Corps. Ooh. That was the DOD across the board. E one was less than a thousand dollars a month.And you still had taxes taken out of that. Yeah. Look at that. That's a sour face, like, and that's the facts, but I will also say on the flip side, he also created the bra base relocation closure act that closed down all those bases and shut down small towns that lived and thrived off those bases that existed.So I'm 50 50 on that guy, but it's funny. They both suck, you know, look at what just happened with the burn pit bill, like, and for, for those that don't know what the burn pit bill was, that's burning medical waste plastics, and anything else you could imagine and [00:06:00] service members having to do it without proper ventilation without respirators and getting sick.And these guys, the Republicans voted it down because they wanted to show the Democrats that they didn't like some other bill. And they were like, ha, ha look what we'll do. Like really like you did that. You bunch of SC holes. So that's my feelings on all of them. De'Vannon: Right. And so, so Senate Manor, majority leader, Chuck Schumer pulled like a Ropa dope on the Republicans and was able to get like a lot of the reconciliation infrastructure, climate change stuff passed through.And the Republicans felt tricked, you know, Biden and everything like that. I, I kind of felt tricked by it in a positive way because Democrats usually don't act like they have nuts and so I was like, wait, you actually. Back at the Republicans [00:07:00] one. And so, but they were real, but hurt over that shit and yeah, they did oh yeah.Cause it never happened. They're like the, the Republicans are like the bully who was used to getting their way. They're not used to anybody actually hitting them back. Or, and so the burn pit bill is something that Republicans kept pushing against why we don't know, but you know, and they were all pissy about it, but you know, it finally passed and everything like that.And so I, I just, since you mentioned bill, bill Clinton, BC, my homeboy, I Kansas bill. I love the fat art, Kansas bill. And there's a whole, like, what is it? A bill Clinton museum and shit. When I was in little rock or something. Well, Shawn: that's right. I forgot you did live in little rock. I, no, I didn't live De'Vannon: there.I just visited it, just friends. But there's like a whole museum in his honor. They love them. Some bill Clinton, they don't care how he got his Dick sucked and the Al office. And I, I commend him for playing the saxophone, smoking his weed. If he [00:08:00] did smoke weed, I just picture it with, he just didn't hell he didn't inhale getting his Dick sucked.I don't know what kind of marriage arrangement him and Hillary had. I commend her on keeping her shit classing and together, no matter what, I love me. Some bill Clinton, anybody who gonna get they knob swabbed in the oval office, which I would imagine every president has. Otherwise I fuck with you. Shawn: I mean, that's one of those weird ones where everybody was up in arms about it, but were you up in arms about Kennedy?Like, like let's, let's understand that the JFK. Was an old, was an old school pimp and he made that happen. Like let's not get that twisted like that. Don't he was there. I mean, so why do but he changed, you know, what, he changed an outlook of an entire generation towards those things. When he said I didn't have relations with that, with that woman.And everybody was like, see, do get in little head that [00:09:00] ain't relations. That ain't, that ain't nothing that ain't nothing. And it was like, yeah, go ahead and tell your old lady that see how that works out for you. De'Vannon: It wasn't me. mm-hmm what the camera say. And like the song, it wasn't me. Right? Shaggy. I think that was, he Shawn: was a Marine.Did you know he was a Marine? Nah. Yep. Shaggy was a, an artillery was in second battalion. Oh God can't think of what company, but he was, he was second battalion two 10. Two. Yeah. Second Italian 10th Marine regiment out of Jacksonville, North Carolina. He was an artillery Marine and I knew a guy.One of those knew a guy who knew a guy's situations, but knew somebody who knew him. And they said he used to go home every weekend to go do shows. Cuz that was, he wanted to have a music career, but he was an artillery Marine De'Vannon: that's dedication there. Now he's even that much more sex now that I know [00:10:00]he's a Marine I love it brother.So, so your show, the above the bar podcast. Why did you name the that? Shawn: Well, cuz all my equipment truly sits above my bar right now is you and I are talking all my equipment and is sitting above my bar. I have a bar in my home, but the other side to it is, is, is there's. I like double and undress the O the other side to it is the term keeping things above the bar, keeping things, real, keeping things legit.So I always enjoyed when I talked to people, hearing the real stories of their lives or their background, like you and I, when we talked, when you were on my show, you kept it real. There was, you know, there was real energy in that real advice, real things that had happened in your life. And you didn't sugarcoat 'em, you didn't weigh 'em down with, you know, blaming other people or blaming other.You were real about all of it. And that's what I love. So that's why it's the above the bar podcast. [00:11:00] All right. De'Vannon: Now, thank you for all those compliments and everything. I'm glad you appreciate the my direct tone. I'll say it like that. And so How long have you been doing Shawn: it? So we, we started this in June of last year.It was one of those situations where my, I had said many times I wanted to do it. I had been on some friends podcast that were very successful. We're on a network called the earplug podcast network. That's owned by a friend of mine, herb and been on his shows a bunch of times. And I kept saying I was gonna do it.I was gonna do it. My wife finally said on father's day, weekend of last year, she just turned around and she handed me all the equipment. And it was like, there you go. And it was actually might actually now think about it. It might have been father's day 20, 20 God time has flown. Cause we just finished [00:12:00] episode 1 36 or 1 37.Got another one tomorrow cuz today is Tuesday, right? Yeah. Today's Tuesday. So we got another one coming up, so just. Once it got going, it just kind of, it's had a life of its own. Hmm. De'Vannon: Well, I'm happy you found something that, that you love and oh my God, excuse me. I took my ass out in the backyard, my weed eater, call myself cutting fucking grass and shit like that because I just thought it was hideous. This is something I pay other people to do, particularly my parents this cause my, this is my parents doesn't mean that I'm gonna like have them work for free, you know, I still pay them, but I shouldn't do that.Cuz I had really sensitive allergies and I went out there and did it. I didn't put a mask on. So I've got the scratchy ass throat. It's like a whole thing. It's not the COVID I've never had COVID but I've been taking the test every day [00:13:00] just to be sure. And it's still negative. So it was just allergy. So hopefully I don't cough too fucking much.So who do you think your target audience is? So Shawn: I actually, do you know, what do you know about creating your audience avatar? Have you ever heard that term? De'Vannon: I think I've heard the term, but just tell us, Shawn: so, so I have a real good, good friend of mine, Jessica Gruber, she builds podcast or builds websites.And she has her own podcast also. And Jessica and I were talking and she said that to me, one day, she goes, who's your avatar? And I'm like, I, what? Like I'm thinking video game avatar or something like that. So she explained it to me and said, sent me some stuff, basically. It's. Kind of creating the image of what your target audience looks like and giving them a name that way when you're marketing yourself, you can actually say, well, would Steve, or would Jane listen to this [00:14:00] or that?So I've kind of figured it out that my target audience is probably late thirties at the youngest. I would say maybe mid up through unknown finished age, probably closer to mid forties. Not necessarily would they have a bachelor's degree, but they're educated in what they do. They're professionals, they like food, they like drink and they, like, they probably will be caught watching the history channel or some, or like documentaries or things of that nature they like to learn.Yeah, I would De'Vannon: imagine. And that's a beautiful avatar. I would imagine most people who bother to click on a podcast. Are trying to be enlightened on some level, I suppose, even an entertainment podcast and stuff like that. Even if it's finding out that, you know, ASRA Miller this Cod a felony for [00:15:00]being a little club to, you know, you know, you're still being enlightened.You're learning something you didn't know before. And I am not throwing shade at your Miller. They are very beautiful specimen of a human and baby. They can come and steal for me any day. I need, I need them to come steal my virginity all over again. That's what all over . That's what I need that beautiful, that beautiful thing to come and steal, baby.You didn't have to do all that. You could have come taken all that stress out right over here. so, and what do you, what are you drinking? Is that like a bourbon, a scar? Uh, So, Shawn: so I was drinking a little bit of so one of our former guests they have a. Distillery up here in the upstate New York area called new Scotland spirit.So I'm having a little bit there straight rye whiskey which is actually, I learned this from the, these guys, rye is a New York grain. So I didn't know that. So [00:16:00] all the times of hearing about rye whiskey, I learned from them. So they make what they call an empire rye. So it's mostly New York rye grain, and it's phenomenal.I love it. De'Vannon: Hmm. Well drink up. So as you were going over some of your target, I mean, you know, your kind of the breakdown of your show, I had to say, I agree. I feel like the information that you cover is very practical. Like some of the titles I wrote a few down like what is networking, how to build a website, how to start a music label.You know, it's like, you're trying to help people and to give them like steps and practical things that they can use. So I would not classify your podcast as an entertainment podcast. This is a very like lifestyle podcast. And it's like, you're trying to help people be better, like come up out of whatever their circumstance or situation is.It's like, you're trying to help them get knowledge and information that they, that might be out of their grasp. Other one it's. Thank you. And so now one is called cannabis. Oh, you're welcome sugar. Now one is called [00:17:00] cannabis and Massachusetts that I wanted to stop and kind of like meditate on this one here for a moment.These are some of my favorite titles after we get done with this Massachusetts meditation, I'm gonna ask you what your, what you feel like for you your most impactful episode was so you can just chew on that in the background. So this stood out to me because I'm on a new drug journey. And so when you did this episode on the cannabis of Massachusetts, tell me, what did you take from it?Shawn: You, you know, cannabis in Massachusetts is interesting because when, when they created their, their laws, so we have in New York, we have two states next to us that both have legalized marijuana. New York state is decriminalized marijuana, but we don't have any dispensaries other than for medical use.But it's interesting. And I'll tell you why the two states were interesting why the Massachusetts one. So we have Vermont, which is the only state ever [00:18:00] to legalize it through. Their actual, like it wasn't like the governor said, Hey, we're gonna legalize it. They actually voted it. The people voted it and said, we're gonna legalize it.But you and I couldn't go to Vermont and buy cannabis because in Vermont you have to be a Vermont resident with a Vermont driver's license or photo ID to buy there. So they're, they're, they're very cut off from it. But Massachusetts is interesting because what Massachusetts is completely legal, they are, were the first state on the east coast to go completely legal.And you think about that. That's the east coast, the whole east coast. They're the first ones. And they tied their marijuana laws to mirror their open container laws for alcohol, which I thought was genius. From the standpoint of, you know, it's not right to walk down the street with an open beer, you know, that I know that we were brought up that way.You know, you could be that person, but you know that the cops will stop you for an open [00:19:00]container. You've heard that. Okay. So they said, we're gonna do the same thing. If you're smoking a joint, walking down the street, don't walk down the street and smoke a joint. If you wanna sit on your front steps and smoke, go right ahead.But what I really gained from that episode in particular was I didn't realize how deep that, and it's a culture. I didn't realize how deep that culture was and really kind of focusing on that and, and listening to, to my guest and saying like, wow, you know, this really is, and we also came up with a dating show.Did you, did you listen to that one, hear about our dating show that we came up with, De'Vannon: do tell, just acted like I've never heard anything before. Okay. Shawn: Cuz this one, this one was pretty funny. So we're talking about it and everything. And we had come up with, you know, how you, you his name was Jarvis Jarvis and I were talking, he goes.You know, you have like [00:20:00] what's the, the rose ceremonies for the bachelorette and all that. And we decided that we could come up with one for cannabis. And instead of giving out roses, you give out buds and the competitions were gonna be like, rolling. How, you know, how good can your partner be? Like rolling?Are they really a road dog for you? Can they hide your stash? If you needed them? Like we had the entire thing fleshed out and I thought, this is great. And hilarious to talk about. He messaged me the other day. He's like, bro, we need to do this. I'm like what? He goes, no, no, I wanna do. I wanna come up with a show and he was dead serious.Cuz from that culture standpoint for a cannabis culture, they're not represented in those worlds. So it was a representation. I thought how great of an idea. And we. BS and on a podcast to come up with this. So that was, that was really kind of the, the nuts and bolts of that one. And it was just so much fun to talk to him about it.De'Vannon: And when you're [00:21:00] saying it's the culture, are you saying the culture of the cannabis or the culture in Massachusetts and of Shawn: culture? Cannabis culture itself. So, so I never thought of it as a culture, you know, growing up, you know, it was, oh, this dude smokes weed, that dude smokes weed. But you never thought about it from a culture standpoint, but when you talk to somebody that's really into it, or, or maybe from a medical standpoint, it's changed their lives, got them off of opioids or, or heavy medications.And you find out that truly it is a cultural thing.De'Vannon: Okay. That reminds me of how before. Franklin D Roosevelt, I believe it was issued this whole war on drugs, nonsense, how, you know, people were doing a lot of psychedelics and everything, and it was really, you know, you might call 'em hippies of what the fuck ever, but, you know, it was people, [00:22:00] you know, bonding over, you know, a, an experience that everyone was having, but it was very much more like a cultural movement than everything like that.Before everything got shut down. And so it sounds like that culture is coming back. Yeah. I mean, ever really went away, but it, you know, it's coming really more back into the mainstream. And so, which I appreciate. And so this leads me to my. Hm, you know, divulge of more of this new journey that I'm on.And so everyone knows my chaotic history being on and off drugs and stuff like that. Well, I watched two documentaries that sold me on psychedelics and I had never used psychedelics before I used to sell them, but I didn't do 'em. Maybe I did ask it, but I never hallucinated or whatever. But so I watched, what do they called the history of mental illnesses on PBS.Then the other one is called how to change your mind, which is [00:23:00] on Netflix. And so, and they both go over how psychedelics were used for health reasons and in clinics before, before the government made it all evil and the devil. And then in my opinion, the church echoed what the government was saying as they tend to do.And how now it's coming back, I'm particularly excited about these MDMA trials and how they've been used to treat veterans and stuff like that, you know, in the VA hospitals, in places and such. And so I'm actually going to go to Oregon. Next month to do an MDA trial thing. And also I'm going to do a psilocybin trial thing while I'm there really like a whole week, cuz everything's legal there and the therapists, you have a lot of these psilocybin centers and, and shit like that.And, and so, and I'm gonna video it of course. And and I hope that I have a total reaction. I did the IV ketamine thing, which is now legal in [00:24:00] all the states. I did not have a good experience with that because I don't think she gave me enough ketamine. And so fuck her. I'm never going back to that clinic.I'm gonna find me a clinic in a more progressive city where they won't mine upping the dose. But but the ketamine thing I did was only like an hour. The MDMA thing is an eight hour day. The SIL side thing is a separate eight hour day . So it's like a completely different. Shawn: Now, now when you're saying you're doing trials, does this mean that it's under the supervision, medical supervision?Is this pharmaceutical supervision? What do you mean by it's a trial? De'Vannon: No, there would be a licensed clinical social worker with me. It's not like a you know, like a, like an NIH, like a health Institute, sanction trial. Okay. My personal trial under the supervision of a medical person. So I'm not gonna go find homey with some MDMA and then be like, let me just and see what happens.No, like I'm, [00:25:00] I'm gonna be coached through the experience and everything like that. And so I'm super looking forward to it because, you know, I've, I've read and heard where these veterans have had things that I struggle with, like PTSD and OCD, you know, addiction to like drugs and shit like that. And they've been able to find whatever level of relief.And so. Shawn: Now is this gonna be like a microdosing thing? Like, I, I, I have a good buddy who, another vet who did the micro, whose brother is a psychologist, which one's an MD psychologist or psychiatrist, which one's the MD. No, I always get it backwards, whichever one's the MD. And he did the microdosing and was in a real bad funk with depression and all that.And he did microdosing and that was life changing for him. And, and he doesn't do it anymore, but he really, it, it helped to break that depression, but it was all microdosing. It wasn't anything [00:26:00]over the top, you know, he, wasn't watching pink bears fighting purple alligators or nothing crazy like that.But yeah, I mean, this is, I wanna hear about this. De'Vannon: I wanna see some goddamn pink bear fighting purple alligators. I guess, I guess what I wanna know is that I really, really had a true outof body experience. But if, for me, it doesn't require me to see strange things for me to get the healing. Then I'll take the healing, but you know, everyone I saw in these documentaries or going through these convulsions and crying and hollering, and it really worked for them.It, it, you have the fit and then you calm 'em the fuck down. And then it's like, you're healed. So for me, it looks like the, the trauma that would in, went into the person is forced out through the MDM a or the LSD or the Mein or the psilocybin or whatever, because that's the way it is. Trauma goes in. It comes out.And when it does, you might holler and holler or whatever. And so I want to know I've been changed. I wanna know I've been touched. Shawn: Well, I was thinking [00:27:00] about you the other day. I have to tell you this. I was watching a video and, and it wasn't one of those kind of videos. It was a different video. Mm-hmm and The gentleman said, you know, we all wanna say that marijuana is the gateway drug.It's not trauma is the gateway drug. If you really look at why people, you just said it yourself, you've had all these issues that fed, you know, your issues in the church and all these other situations for you that fed for your trauma and the drugs. Trauma is the gateway drug. And it, it was such a powerful statement to hear.And I thought about you brother De'Vannon: Ja. So we'll see how it goes. Thank you so much for thinking of me and I will be as transparent as I can legally be. With, with what I intend to do. And so we will go from there and I wanna do all the things now, you know, all the AKA and everything like that. And so, and let's just [00:28:00] see.So for you, out of all the episodes you've recorded, what, what do you think's been the most impactful one to you? You know, one that when you turn the mic off, you just couldn't stop thinking about it, whether you were disturbed, like in a good way or in a not so great way. Shawn: So it's definitely difficult to say that, you know, pick your favorites, you know, it's like they say, pick your favorite child.So I, I, I don't know that, but I will tell you a lot of my guests have become good acquaintances, people I talk to on a regular basis. People I communicate with on a regular basis, I will say though, that probably the one that as a parent. Shocked me the most and really was like, I, I don't know how I would go with this is gentleman named Jeff OWK Jeff is from, and it's funny enough, cuz he's from about two hours, [00:29:00] three hours, south of me in New York.He's from the peak school area of New York. And if you've ever been to peak skill, it's a fairly quiet area. Nothing really goes on there. Jeff, at age 16 was sent to adult prison for a rape and murder. He did not commit. And every, every story you've ever heard where you go, the police can't do that. The police wouldn't do that.16 years old inter you know, interviewing him without a lawyer, without his parents being aware that he's being taken away playing good cop, bad cop not feeding him. And just giving him at 16 coffee and cigarettes and zipping him up and telling him if he doesn't talk, they're gonna whoop his ass.He's gonna go to jail. His parents will be, you know, be charged because they're, they're hiding him, all [00:30:00] these things, his court appoint lawyer, because his family couldn't afford. It never took the time to follow up on BS, evidence on things that just didn't make sense all the way through. I mean, and there's a documentary it's called conviction.It's done by JIA works. And that's how I met Jeff was I interviewed JIA on her. It's J I a and then w E R T Z. She did this documentary on his life and it's on prime, Amazon prime. And, and it's worth watching. It's called conviction, but just watching that and then talking to him and him and I have become good friends.That made such an impact on me as a parent to think that, you know, he, and the reason they picked him out of it all was cuz he was a quiet kid. He was quiet. So today we would say, oh, that kid might have some me mental health issues, but he [00:31:00] did 16 years in jail finally was released when the person who actually committed the crime DNA evidence tied him to the crime and he goes, oh yeah, I did that.Even though Jeff spent all those years in jail and the best part about it though is Jeff got out, Jeff is now got an Esquire after his name, cuz he is a lawyer. And he actually has his own foundation where he defends people that have been wrongly accused and fights for their freedom. So that was probably of, of everybody that I still talk.You know, I talk about all of them. We could talk about the guy, what is aliens, Jesus and the afterlife have in common. That was the week prior to that. And that was one, one of that was some wild shit, but the one with Jeff DYS is probably one of the most impactful in my, in my life life. Like just thinking about things De'Vannon: well is you're right.And I'm taking [00:32:00] my notes and everything like that. Cuz I have to look up these documentaries and everything like that. That, that is very, very useful. Good Lord. Okay. So speaking of fuck, speaking of fucked up childhoods, we're gonna shift gears from your show and talk more about you personally because the people would just fall in love with you, man.And so, so you came from a single parent home cause your dad was arrested when you were young. Mm-hmm where were you born? Where did this happen? Tell us so, Shawn: so I'm. Was an only child. My mother raised me, really. My mother raised me from age 11 to 18 and my dad, my dad did a one year. I always tell people I've never had any problems admitting this.My dad did a one year clip for possession of illegal firearm, cuz he didn't have enough Coke on him at the time for them to put him in jail for that. And my dad dealt, but we, we came from a good life. You know, we had, we owned a liquor [00:33:00] store with a, with a dance club in it. We owned a bar. We were doing good.And we went from that level to my mom, had to sell it all. We moved into a house that didn't have a refer, didn't have a stove in it. We had to wait till she could save up to buy a stove and we used to joke around and call my mom the microwave mama, cuz she could cook anything in a M. And we did. All right.She had a microwave in electric skillet. My mother made it happen. It's actually her birthday today. She turned 70 today. She's a phenomenal woman and, and she made it happen. But you know, I, I was the original, I was like one of those true latchkey kids. You remember latchkey kids that term mm-hmm . So I was a latchkey kid, you know, I, my mom dropped me off at school and then she didn't get home till sometime around five 30.You know, I Def had to fend for myself, which I should have gotten [00:34:00] so much more trouble. I just didn't get caught I just didn't get caught. But yeah, you know, and on my 17th, 17th birthday, my mother knew that I needed more male influences, you know, positive male influences. So 17th birthday, she actually took me to the recruiter's office July 20th, 1993.I had already taken the Ava, went to the recruiter's office, signed up July 21st. I swore in July 6th of 94, I was standing on yellow footprints and headed all, headed down to Paris Allen, standing on the yellow footprints, and then did that for 20 years. But, but you know, I was I was a wayward soul as a kid.I, but I had uncles that, that stepped in and tried to fill that father role. But my uncle who did most of it, he was only eight years older than me. So think about that. He was eight years older than me trying to tell me stuff. So the, the conversations were, [00:35:00] I would almost say they, they had more value cuz they were more relevant, but sometimes I had a, he was closer to a brother than anything.De'Vannon: Okay. And that's your biological dad? So Shawn: my biological dad he popped back. He was back in my life. I guess he was back in my life when I was about 16 and try, you know, he tried, but it wasn't until after I graduated from boot camp that he really, you know, we were back on seeing eye to eye, cuz we didn't see eye to eye before then, you know, eye was that kid, you know, you, you treated my mom bad.You, this, you that. And it, it was tough on me. So it, but it was wasn't till I graduated from boot camp that we kind of were like, I'm a man, you'll talk to me like one. And we treated each other in a different way. [00:36:00]De'Vannon: Well, that's good. I'm here for some reconciliation. So y'all when he says like, as valve that stands for arm services, vocational aptitude battery test, you gotta take.Before you can scoot off to the military latchkey kid is just like a kid is at home without adult supervision. Just kinda like a key you know? So, so you said you knew your dad was, was dealing this cocaine. Oh yeah. So how old were you when you first became aware that he was dealing the Shawn: drugs? I guess I was probably, well, I guess it was probably right around when my parents divorced at age 11.And even that, like, I still remember that I was asleep in bed, woke up to my mother, waking me up, going, I'm putting your father's stuff in trash bags and putting it outside. And I went okay. And went right back to sleep. It had 0.0 impact on me at that point. That's what you're doing. Okay. Fine. I don't give a shit.He ain't around anyway. [00:37:00] He ain't, he ain't here. And but I was probably about that age, but even before then, like, My dad smoked weed, always did. And, and I knew, like I knew how to put it. I knew what it was, but I didn't know what it was, if that makes sense to say it in that way with different inflection.Like I knew dad's got a stash underneath this couch, it's in this bag. I don't touch it because it's dads didn't know what it did. Didn't know what it meant, but I just knew I didn't touch it. De'Vannon: Okay. I can understand that. I remember watching like an older sibling of mine like I think vomit up cocaine, you know, when I was like, you know, super young and I didn't really know what it was.Maybe I kind of knew it. It's kinda like, it's kind of like a, a foreboding sense of knowing I get that. Mm-hmm so let me be clear. So you had like a biological dad and a stepdad, or are we talking about this person? No, no. So Shawn: I had, I had my [00:38:00] biological father and then I had an uncle who was eight years older than me who really.Was the major male role model and help helped get me through high school and everything. De'Vannon: Okay. Okay. So now you also told me before that you personally were divorced twice and you were married three times. So do you feel like watching what happened with your parents attributed to your situation? Or was it cuz you were in the military or what do you think?Shawn: You know, I, I would say the, the first one was very military. You know, it was that it, and they don't, this is probably one of those things. I think we don't do enough. Good jobs with in the services is dealing with separation anxiety. You know, I was a 17 year old kid when I went to boot camp, turned to 18 in boot camp.Here I am. I'm gonna show up in Jacksonville, North Carolina, I got bills to [00:39:00] pay. I've gotta get myself going. I'm I'm on my own. And the only people that tell me, they love me or care for me are back home. So, but I can't be there every day. So why, if I can get one of those people to come with me and tell me that they love me again, why wouldn't I do it?So that was my first marriage. Good woman have no, no ill things. We've talked years later, we talked afterwards, cuz we were probably married for months. Like we're legally married for a year, but we were only together for a few months after we, we got married and we were high school sweethearts, but I have, we've talked years later and you know, looking back, she was like, oh, I'm sorry, this, that, and the other I'm like, it's fine.I understand. We were kids. I was like, she was 18 and I was 20, you know, we were kids. Like I turned 20 just after we got married and we were kids. [00:40:00] Which shouldn't have ever happened, but it was separation anxiety that caused that. The second one, it was military related stress. I promise you it was a, it takes a special person to be a military spouse.It truly does. You have to be a kind of person who can operate on their own with minimal interaction from the other person and be willing when that other person shows up to allow them to assert whatever force they have in it. But at the same time that service member has to be understand that you're not around all the time.So the rules have already been set. You have to find out what those rules are and let whoever's been leading that charge, tell you what the rules are and it's tough. So I went, I was on recruiting duty at the time. I was probably working 70 plus hours a week, not home getting up at crack of Dawn driving at this time.It was I was. Driving from [00:41:00] Redding, Pennsylvania to ha or horse from Pennsylvania about an hour, hour and a half each way. Every day, because the housing crash happened. We were at one, one, I was in charge of one location. They switched locations. And it was really just that stress finally broke our marriage.So De'Vannon: it's hard to be in a relationship period where you've got two different people who exist in two different worlds. And you're trying to figure out a way to make those collide without destroying each other one another. And so a military relationship, like what saying the chaotic nature of it is something I witnessed when I was an air force recruiter because some of the wives are the, you know, would be military wives.You know, they really couldn't handle it. Like they didn't. You know, he's gonna go to the military, but why should I [00:42:00] leave my mom and my sister, you know, is something the girl might think. And so I really feel like they should do like the military do like coaching and transition training and things like that for the spouses and stuff like that.I'm not overly fond of necessarily the way the military gets people ready to either enlist or to come out of the service. And so I feel like there's more that can be done both going in and coming out, but a lot, lot of, a lot, a lot of, a lot of, a lot of the women really had to come home. And I, and I see women because I really wasn't around a lot of females, you know, was only around guys and they had wives because unfortunately I was entering don't don't tell.And so, oh my gosh. I can only imagine the gay parties they're having in the fucking military now without me. shit. so, so, so wait, so you, you, you mentioned Before that you were always trying to [00:43:00] get married mm-hmm . And that, that sort of statement reminds me of Ernest Hemingway you know, very popular author and everything like that.And I watched documentaries on Ernest Hemingway and you know, he was an alcoholic and some might say a narcissist and a few other things, but there was a thing with him, with Mr. Hemingway, where he was always, always married, you know, he would like meet a woman and be like, I want you to be my wife, you know, while he still had another wife, you know, and then he, you know, she would be getting along, you know, he would, he'd be scooting her along sooner or later.But, you know, when I read that from my notes about you, that you were always trying to get married, it reminded me of Ernest Hemingway. Now you have an Ernest Hemingway is type beard going on right now. And so talk to me about this needed to be married. Shawn: You know, I, I think it, it was that It goes back to that [00:44:00] separation, anxiety being alone.Like I said, I mean, if I look at my, my life, like I said, latchkey kid, I was always by myself unless I went to a friend's house, get into the service. I separate myself from anything that I can consider as a connection and I have to build my own. So why not bring that connection with me? It, it took a lot of years before I could be on my own.And I think I, I attributed for a long time being married with being with someone, if that makes sense, like having someone else in my life, that's how you fill that space, whether it was good or bad. That's how you did it. Are you still De'Vannon: married? IShawn: am. I'm now I've been married to my wife now for five years.Very happy, much more mature relationship too, though. You know, I was much older. When I [00:45:00] got married, we both had careers. We both had lives. We both know how to, we, we can, at this point in my life, I can function differently. I don't need, I love spending time with my wife and doing things with my wife.I enjoy that, but we don't have to be up each other's as to, to feel that. And, and to, to have that trust factor, De'Vannon: right. I say, wait till you're at least 30, you know, all in my twenties, I used to think I knew who I was and I was an adult. It wasn't until I was like in my lower thirties that I really think I solidified who I was so slow down when y'all, there's no need to get married, do all the traveling, do all your experimentations, whatever, and then save all this getting kids and all that for later to darling, there's no need to rush.Shawn: And if you can avoid kids, just avoid it completely. I have so much more money. I love my children, but God, I always think about, that's see, this is something that once you have children, you [00:46:00] think about all the time. Like, God, I love my kids, but man, if I didn't have y'all, do you know how much money I would have?De'Vannon: I'd be paid. Shawn: I think a little S De'Vannon: I'd say I say that about my cats, but you know, they're probably only $30 a Shawn: month. Yeah, no, your cats are good. Like between a bag of food. And if you have like healthcare for them, you know, the cats are good here. There there's no problem with them. I've got two and I love my cats.So you De'Vannon: mentioned like yellow footprints. A couple times when you, what, what is that like when you talk about chipping off to the Marine, what is that? Shawn: So that's the, a very iconic Marine Corps thing. So if you look up yellow footprints, when you step off the bus at Paris island, or if you're from the left coast in San Diego, there are painted on the ground yellow footprints because that's where you have to stand.And they're painted at a 45 degree angle because that's where your feet need to go. So that to start teaching you the position of attention right away. So that's, [00:47:00] so you'll hear Marines, talk about, you know, landing on the yellow footprints or standing on the yellow footprints. De'Vannon: Paris island is the Marine Corps bootcamp.Right? We Shawn: have two. We have. So if you're east of the Mississippi, you go to Paris island. If you're west of the Mississippi, you go to San De'Vannon: Diego. Mm. I would've gone to Sango. Sango does Mississippi river runs right through Baton Rouge where I'm at on the west. Atton Rouge, Shawn: Baton and love Louisiana. I have to tell you that I love Louisiana.I've only been once and I would, I've been once and I would pack my shit up and move. Okay, De'Vannon: well, you can come here and then I'll go to Los Angeles. Shawn: Well, I'm in, well, I'm in all small Albany, New York. So you, you have to come to small Albany if we're gonna swap. De'Vannon: Oh, didn't you mention New York. There is a, a people of color psychedelics collective.That's a lady heads out of New York who I hope to have on my show. What it's like a whole nonprofit. And it's all about like the benefits of psychedelics and shit. [00:48:00] It's like the people of color psychedelic collective. It's like a thing. People Shawn: of color psychedelic, collective , De'Vannon: Yas . And so Shawn: P O S C C De'Vannon: Paska, something like that.But if I can get ahold of her and set it up, I will be flying my black queer ass to New York so I can get high on whatever the shit, whatever. Fuck I can give my hands on. If, Shawn: if you can get her on your show, I expect that you introduce me to her so I can have her on my show cuz I would love, see, that's see that's my show in a nutshell, somebody being like, I got this person, this is what they do.And, and I always tell people, my show should feel like you walked into a bar and you're overhearing somebody else's conversation. And, and if you're the guest that should feel like you walked in the bar and the bartender goes, Hey, you do that drugs in Jesus thing, right? yes, I have a podcast. And that's what it should feel like ad hearing that, oh God, I [00:49:00] would love to talk to her.What's her name there is she now De'Vannon: I've made a note. We'll talk about it. call. What is she call her now? Shawn: oh, De'Vannon: so great. So, so you were in the Marines and I have to say Marines are very sexy. Love the outfits and the uniforms. Was there any sort of scandalous, was there any kind of gay sex that you saw in bootcamp in training?I wanna know some tea, some dirt, some Marine, so Shawn: drama. So nothing that I ever ran into personally, like nobody that ever directly came on me. I'm not, I guess I wasn't that cute. I was, I was five, seven, a hundred twenty seven pounds when I got in. So it had to been into it to, into twinks or something like that to have looked at me that way.But but there was always stories. So for example, I remember in my first command, there was a Marine. I actually remember his name, but I won't say his name who. Ran down to the duty office, which was in the duty office is a Marine who's [00:50:00] in charge of the barracks for that day, making sure that nothing bad happens, reports on it.He ran down to the duty office, but booty naked because his roommate who was a big dude, and this guy was like 5, 1 52. And his roommate was a big dude, was standing at his door when he came out of the shower and basically tried to have his way with him, snatched his towel off of him and everything. And the only reason I remember this is because as I was checking in to our command that day, he was in handcuffs, leaving De'Vannon: who, the skinny guy or Shawn: the big guy, the big guy, the, he was in handcuffs leaving.So, so there was that, but probably the next big, I, next time I heard anything was Let's see what year would've been like 99, 2000 timeframe. It was right around in North Carolina. We had two hurricanes, hurricane Bertha and hurricane Fran. They were back [00:51:00] to back and they did a lot of damage. And so some of us got, you know, this was the only time I ever heard where they were like, go home, stay away from the area.Come back when it's clear. So I had come back and joking around. We had put a sign on one of my buddies trucks that just said he, he didn't know it. They had ziptied this big cardboard sign that said I'm gay. Everybody thought it was funny. He hadn't seen the sign. Ha ha ha. No big deal. All sudden our mass Sergeant comes out and flips on all of us.Get that shit off his truck. You don't know what's going on around here, blah, blah, blah. And we're all like, whoa, mess starting. Why, why are you flipping out on us? So we take it off. We'll come to find out one of the Marines who hadn't come back yet. Had just shown up. To our CO's office walked into the CO's office with a local lawyer and went, we would like him discharged outta the Marine court right now.He's gay and he's concerned [00:52:00] that if it other people within this command find out that he's gonna be physically assaulted and they had him out of the service in a day, at a day, he was gone. So those were two incidences, but I will tell you knowing Marines the way I do, I come from a pretty open household, grew up with an aunt who was gay, never thought nothing of it knew new people who were gay, growing up.Never thought anything of it. It was always just kind of like O okay, do you boo? I don't care. But when I found. Somebody didn't tell me they were gay. And it was somebody I was very close to was another Marine. And I found out after they had gotten out and they told me that I was kind of like, damn bro, why didn't you, why didn't you confront talk to me about this before you'd have been good.And it was because [00:53:00] I acted like a Marine and, and I, and I say that in quotes, that he was concerned that I would, I would see him in a different light. And that really hurt because I was just being a Marine and that rah yet, you know, loud, you know, over, over the top male kind of persona. And that was one of those things that really hurt me.Cause I was like, damn bro. I thought we were good like that. And, and they were like, yeah, man, I couldn't tell you. And I was concerned that you would feel a certain way about me and I didn't want you to know. And I was. I actually yelled at him and was like, Hey motherfucker, why didn't you tell me? And then he told me that and I was like, and that actually hurt my feelings.Cause I was like, man, did I, did I make somebody feel that way than I shouldn't have De'Vannon: it? Wasn't you? It was the environment of the military. You know, he didn't wanna lose his livelihood and he didn't tell you or anyone else, unless it was someone else who was not, who was [00:54:00] clearly queer, but you know, which you don't present that way.And so ain't nobody gonna risk their, you know, their income and everything because they wanna have a, an open conversation with somebody because you never know how those things are gonna go. So I wouldn't take it personally. He was just trying to survive. Well, Shawn: years later, I, I we've talked about it more.He's my closest friend, my best friend, but, but it really was, it was kind of one of those things where I was like, damn bro. Initially it really caught me off guard. Mm-hmm De'Vannon: so as a Marine recruiter, did they tell you to lie? Shawn: No. Nope. And that was always one of those things. Like, I, I always will tell people this, I never lied about it.That was actually the big difference between the Marine Corps from a recruiting standpoint and maybe other services. I don't know, only because we wanted to tell you how bad it sucked. We wanted to tell you how hard it was. We wanted you to know that this was gonna be the like boot camp was gonna be hard.It was gonna be [00:55:00] miserable. It was gonna suck. You're gonna sweat. You're gonna question the fact that you even met me and ever did this. We wanted you to feel like that because that was part of the sell because people wanted people wanna be like, fuck that I could do that shit. You ain't gonna scare me off.I'll make that shit happen. It was part of the sell. De'Vannon: That's some good reverse psychology right there and playing on the male ego. See when I was an air force recruiter. They would try to get me to lie to the recruits about like their career. So like if I had a recruit who wanted to be a weatherman or work in avionics, I would work to get him that job, what the higher ups in the air force would do.And in, in, as soon as I asked you that this, this question, I realized that this, the response would probably vary on who your supervisor was at exactly where you were recruiting at. So so they would do some shit in the air force, [00:56:00] like book the guy in like a security forces, this job to be a police or whatever.And then they'll be like, we're just gonna go ahead and assign him this job. We've disregarded what he wants to do. And we want you to bring him into the office and act like, you know, this is the best job ever sell him on this job, you know? That's the sort of shit that they would try to get me to do in the air force.So that what you're talking about is just a little bit of free decor. Shawn: Yeah. Like we were, so that was our move. Like I kid you not there's, this is a real thing. You would walk in front of a crowd of kids and you would look around and be like, I don't think most of you could do be in the Marine Corps. Here's a little bit about it.If you, the one or, and, and this would be a move, you'd go. The one or two of you that I see in the room and you would look, you would never actually make eye contact with anyone. You would do this be like the one or two of you that are in here that probably could do it. You can come meet me in the back of the room when this is all [00:57:00] over with.And you would get like five or six of 'em, cuz these idiots would be like, I'm, he's talking to me. I know I'm I could do it and you'd stand there. And it, you never looked at anybody, but it was just let me see if I can hype you up enough. And it was a thing. You know, I used to tell kids all the time, you're gonna hate the day you met me within the, the first couple hours that you're at Paris island.You're gonna hate the day you met me. And they'd be like, what? I'm like. Yeah, that shit sucks. De'Vannon: Okay. Bootcamp is a motherfucker. Oh hot, Shawn: hot, like you. I went to bootcamp in July, South Carolina in July. I here's how hot it was. You wanna know how hot it was? De'Vannon: I was in San Antonio in July and August for mine.And so we were clearly in the 100, 1520 degrees. It was Shawn: so hot in South Carolina in July of 94, they used to have a pool outside that [00:58:00] we did our swim calls in. It was an outside swim call. It was so hot. The pool water felt like bath water, and it wasn't heated. That's how hot it was. Think about that.Getting in a pool and being like, I'm gonna get in this pool and cool down. This shit feels like bathwater.De'Vannon: Well, I'm glad you didn't melt. Shawn: Nope. Nope. No, all this sweetness made it through. So do you feel like movies, De'Vannon: like I think like Jarhead a full metal jacket do the Marine, I think that those were like Marine specific mm-hmm if I'm not mistaken, do you feel like they do the Marines? You know, is that really how it is or there's really soap party there.Y'all beating people up at night, you know, you know, Shawn: I know what you're asking, so, so I'll put it like, yes, I think full metal jacket. There's a lot of [00:59:00] legit because of the fact that AR EY who plays the drill instructor was a Marine drill instructor. And I think a lot of it from that era is legit fast forward today.No, nobody's pulling out bars of soap and beating some eye's ass or something like that. Jarhead I think is one of the worst movies ever made bar none. By far the biggest load of bullshit I've ever watched it should be burned and never played again anywhere. It's so bad. The fact that Jamie Fox plays a staff, Sergeant that an E two private first class runs his mouth to him.Like he's a punk at one point in that movie, that's not happening. That's that's not happening. And they talk about if you watch that movie, when the main character, the, of the movie ends and he goes to his buddy's funeral, he's [01:00:00] still in E two. After four years, you will get promoted three months outta bootcamp to E two, six months after that to E three, if you haven't, if you're not again, At least picked up E three and got out.You're a turd, you're a turd of a Marine and you're getting in trouble on a regular basis. And really, I got nothing for you. So I can't stand the, can you tell, I don't like that movie. De'Vannon: a scathing review. Y'all yeah. Shawn: I, I just, I think it's a garbage and a friend of mine read the book another Marine and said the book was really good and he's like, man, don't don't judge the movie.Don't judge the book by the movie. He's like, the book is really good. He really gets into some details of things. I I'll tell you one that I really talk about eye opening things, not to, to switch sides here. There's a book called shadow of the sword that I really wish they would make into a movie. [01:01:00]It's about a Marine who is a, I can't remember if he's a bronze star with a, with a V, which is a pretty high commendation for valor, or he was a Flying across, which is one step below the medal of honor winner.But ver awarded for valor honor went to, went to become a drill instructor and suffered such PTSD that it broke him. But to I have his book, but to read his story, shadow the sword and to hear like I wasn't trying to be a hero. My body took over and just did things because my friends were there and I needed to survive that they needed to survive that.And just the way he explains it in his, the aftermath of, of dealing with things afterwards and, and going through the PTSD like this dude talks about in the book, his [01:02:00] NAB, he was at his in-law's house and the neighbor's dog wouldn't stop barking at him. So he jumped over the fence and started choking the dog to death, like bare hand, choking the dog to death.That's a P you know, people be like, oh, you're an asshole. Or you're psycho. No, that's a PTSD reaction. And if they want, if Hollywood, Hollywood, if you're listening, go get the book shadow of a shadow of the sword and go make that into a movie. Go treat that the way it should be and treat the service members the way we should be treated.We lose 22 vets a day to suicide a day. So about my shows, I interviewed a gentleman who had his own organization called 22, 22 a day. Vet lives matter. He committed suicide and he had an organization. He had people around him. He. De'Vannon: Well, since you mentioned suicide, I had put a note here and I'm so glad to see they were on the same page with, I wanted to talk about veteran suicide.[01:03:00]And I pulled up some statistics from back in 2020, and it said that the army had the highest rate of suicide in 2020, at 36.4 death per 100,000 soldiers. So basically this is 580 total service members who died in 20, 20, 30% were active duty, the Marine Corps at the second highest suicide rate, 33.9 death per 100,000 Marines Shawn: that I'm not surprised by those numbers.I mean, ho ho every day, you know, it's most of us go to work just to get the job done. You would agree with that. You know, the average civilian goes to work just to get the job done. Well. Yeah, they do, but. How about you go to work and every day get told you need to do it better than you did the day prior.You need to, you need to hold yourself at that next step level. There is no doing it easier. And if you try to take the easy way, [01:04:00] you're a skater, you're a slouch, you're a turd, you're everything under the sun. So you must perform at that next step. Do that every day and then come out and be around people who don't understand that mindset, do that every day and for four years, and then come out to a place where you're like, you're right.This fucking has how work. This is how I do things and then turn around and see everybody else not performing at that level. Tell me what that does to your mindset. De'Vannon: For me, it made me narcissistic and arrogant because, because the military told me that, you know, I'm Superman, I'm better than everyone else.This alludes to what I was saying earlier about better training people to exit the military, you know, in bootcamp and throughout military, they prime us to be on this pedestal and they, we can't, you can't function that way in society and PTSD is real. I struggle with it. It's one thing for me to [01:05:00]have a one hour conversation with you, but for me to try to immerse myself in a day to day work environment with people is impossible because I'm constantly judging them.It's the military's voice in my head judging them. It's not really the say for instance, the end of the world in the military. They're always saying if you're 15 minutes, late, 15 minutes, if you're 15 minutes early for an appointment, then you're on time. 14 minutes. You're late, early, you're late in the civilian world.It's actually not a catastrophe if you're running a few minutes late, but goddamn in the military. So, so with people, I have to stop myself. If they're like a minute or five behind from looking at them, like they're the goddamn devil , you know, to this day. And I've been out of the military for almost fucked, you know, going on 20 years, you know, to this day, I'm all like, it's okay if they're two or three minutes late the van.And I have to like talk myself down from wanting to burn them with kerosene and brimstone when they show [01:06:00] up, you know? But we, we judge people irrationally. We judge ourselves, whatever we do, isn't good enough. We beat ourselves up because the military told us whatever we did is never enough. 99.9% on a test is, is terrible.It should have been 100. You know, I have Shawn: to get that one wrong. you De'Vannon: know, how dare you get that one wrong? Well, I mean, Shawn: you, you bring that up. You, you talk about the test that was, you know, you go through your entire life in school. Hey, I got a 60, I passed it still. That's a D get into the military, 80 to 85 is passing.If you get anything below an 80 or an 85, depending upon what, what courses you're taking, you failed. So, I mean, right there, you you're, you're on a different level right away. De'Vannon: And so, you know, learning how to deal with society even all these years later is just like, it's still a thing. And so that's why I'm all for all of these psychedelics, whatever [01:07:00] can help me deal with the O C D and the PT, PT, S D I think every veteran should have a license to do whatever fucking drugs we want and just be done with it.And so. You were I just, so we're just gonna talk about one more thing and then I just have positive advice for the veterans. And so you were in during nine 11 as much as I hate how divided an

INTRODUCTION: Shawn Jacobson is the host of Tough Titties podcast!!! This show is an entertaining comedic lifestyle podcast and is as raw as it gets. She gives it to us straight when it comes to sex, dating, relationships, friendships, mental health and all the good shit in between. Shawn graduated in May 2020 from Syracuse University with a degree in TV, Radio, Film. Unfortunately, because of COVID-19, she was unable to get a job, so she started a passion project, which is her podcast. Shawn's goal is to break negative stigma around talking about sex and other topics seen as taboo. Tough Titties is available to listen to wherever you get your podcasts! INCLUDED IN THIS EPISODE (But not limited to):·      Shawn's Message To The World About Vaginas ·      Warning Signs Of Abuse·      Mental Health Struggles From A Young Age·      The Emotional Toll Of Break Ups·      Fuckboy Defined·      Trade Defined·      Pig/Spit Roasting Defined·      Dick Size Preferences·      Let's Talk Orgies!!! CONNECT WITH SHAWN: Website & Podcast: https://www.podpage.com/tough-titties/Facebook: https://bit.ly/30yylPWInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/thetoughtittiespodcast/Twitter: https://twitter.com/toughtittiespodTIK TOK: @shawn_jacobsonYouTube: https://bit.ly/3Fe7ebM SHAWN'S RECOMMENDATIONS:Safe Horizons: https://bit.ly/3cp3Wpw DE'VANNON'S RECOMMENDATIONS:·      Pray Away Documentary (NETFLIX)o  https://www.netflix.com/title/81040370o  TRAILER: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tk_CqGVfxEsTRANSCRIPT:[00:00:00]You're listening to the sex drugs and Jesus podcast, where we discuss whatever the fuck we want to. And yes, we can put sex and drugs and Jesus all in the same bed and still be all right. At the end of the day, my name is De'Vannon and I'll be interviewing guests from every corner of this world. As we dig into topics that are too risqué for the morning show, as we strive to help you understand what's really going on in your.There is nothing off the table and we've got a lot to talk about. So let's dive right into this episode.De'Vannon: Hello. Hello everyone. And welcome to the sex drugs and Jesus podcast. This week. I'm talking with Shawn Jacobson and she's the host of the tough titties podcast. Yes. I said tough titties podcast. Now her show takes a comedic approach to podcasting and she also gets very raw.With her subject matter and everything that she likes to talk about. She covers sex, dating relationships, friendships, mental health, and all the good shit in [00:01:00] between. Now in this episode, we're going to be covering some of the warning signs of abuse. We're going to be talking about breakups and in case you don't know what a fuck boy is, we're going to break that down for you as well. And, Shawn's got a special, message to the world about vaginas and Hey, have you never had an orgy before thenyou can live vicariously through this episode.Sean in the house. Y'all look for the sex, drugs and Jesus podcast. And we, we going to be preaching to y'all today about sex. How are Shawn: you allowed to be here? I'm Jewish. De'Vannon: I won't tell no one. Shawn: Okay. Well, Jesus was a Jew anyway, so it's okay. De'Vannon: Hey, you know what God created sex. We didn't, we didn't create dicks.We didn't great pussies we didn't assholes or mouths or ears or eyes or navels or any of the holes that we use. That was all his idea. Shawn: And the clit, he [00:02:00] made the clit, which is literally purely made for pleasure. So I just need to let that out there. De'Vannon: There's all kinds of interesting things in the vagina.What would you like the world to know about the vagina? I was going to ask you that later, but since you, Shawn: I would like, I would like the world to know, well, okay. This is more like the men world, the male world that likes women look at a diagram and figure out where the clip is because you guys are out here rubbing like the left lip and we're just like crickets.And we're just like, yeah, that's great. Like figure out where it is pleased for the love of God or ask, I guess it's better than just, you know, guessing because you guys are horrible guessers and you're just not good [00:03:00] at it. You're just not good at it. Also. Another thing I want to say is to the, also the men, I just am going to be mean to the men. We don't really like the vaginas in the world. Majority of us don't really like the like Jack rabbit. So like get a better stroke game. Okay. That's it, De'Vannon: when she says Jack rabbit, she is talking about Jack hammer, fast porn star, fucking, you know? Yeah, yeah. Shawn: Do you like that De'Vannon: giving it or receiving it?Either both. It depends on the situation. My dear is if it's like this one drag queen performance song that they do, and they, and I can't think of a song that they remade, but the drag queen will be lipstick and on the song will go like it's true. [00:04:00] Sometimes, you know, a woman needs to be made love to that's true.And sometimes she just needs to get fucked and it's up over there for me, like me and my significant other. Usually it's pretty fast, you know? I'm a wild bitch and I really, really like it rough, but sometimes I like to slow it down for a variety. And to also to make him to , like, to reverse control him in a way, even though he's usually has his Dick in me.So then what I'll do. While he's doing it all fast, tell him to stop while he's still in me. And then I won't let him move at all for a while. And then I'll tell him the cadence and the pace, and then I'll eventually allow him to speed it back up again.Shawn: Well, I think, I think for women, when they're, when the guy is going really fast, [00:05:00]like Jack hammering it, doesn't get into the G spot. If that makes sense. Like when you're like slow stroking, but going deep, then I think that's when you really get the pleasure, if that makes sense. De'Vannon: Right. Because the G-spot is kind of like.From what I've understood is like, if you were to stick a finger in there and do like the come here thing, it's kind of like in the middle of the vagina canal. So a Dick is going to reach away past that. So, so yeah. So a different technique, Shawn: if you're lucky,have you ever hooked up with a girl? De'Vannon: Yeah. I'm not a gold star gay. Oh no, no. A gold star gay is a gay was only ever had sex with men probably only ever will have sex with men. And no I've had sex with both. Shawn: Who do you like better? De'Vannon: Men [00:06:00] because I like the, the domination and then I like come a lot. I'm a come whore.And so women don't have to be long stick, which can be inserted into my asshole mouth ear, or whatever the case may be that day. And so, yeah. Shawn: I'm scared of ass sex. I haven't made it De'Vannon: there yet. I believe in you. This is your year Shawn: 2022. Give me a few months to prepare. Maybe I have to find somebody though that I actually liked.Like, I'm not going to let some random hookup put anything up my butt hole. I don't trust them. And guys straight guys are really fucking stupid. Like they just shove it in and I'm like, I feel like there's a lot we're missing here. We need to like prep the area we need to use lube maybe as maybe means definitely we need to use loo [00:07:00] both slow.Like, I don't know. I've just heard so many horror stories from people or girls that have tried anal and their guy just really didn't know what the fuck they were doing. Maybe I need to have sex, anal sex with a BI man that could work. You De'Vannon: think about that? We have bisexual. Men are great. They're wonderful.I recommend them. Or you could just send them to my house for some remedial lessons before they come over to you. Or Shawn: I actually read that they are like the best lovers De'Vannon: probably for us, but you know, it always depends on what you're looking for. Okay, so, so I'm curious, so your, your podcast is called tough kitties, the tough titties podcasts, which is what we're highlighting today in the logo is very interesting.You got different cup sizes of titties with very, got lots of boobies, [00:08:00] right? It's nice nipples and everything like that. I already showed you mine because I'm a lady.It's true, though. What I want to know is why the name tough titties, and I guess the logo speaks for itself, unless there may be something I'm Shawn: missing. No, there's no hidden message there. I just wanted a bunch of tickets on my art. So the name I was trying to come up with a good name for a while and.It kind of just came to me because my mom used to say tough titties to me when I was a kid, like, I'd be a brat or something and she'd be like, well, you don't get everything. You want tough titties type of thing. And then obviously, you know, when you're little, you hear that, but you don't really know what titties are, you know?So I was in kindergarten and I said it to another [00:09:00] classmate in class. I don't know. I don't remember exactly what that person was doing, but I said like, well, tough titties. And my kindergarten teacher had an aneurysm and, and I got in trouble for that. And then I've kind of just really loved the phrase ever since then.And I just think it's just a good, it's just good. I don't know. That's no deep meaning. I just like it. De'Vannon: You rebel rouser, you. So, what is the, the goal of your podcast, who is your target audience? Shawn: The goal of my pod cast is just, you have, you know, an open and honest conversation about sex, dating relationships, you know, sprinkle in some mental health and psychology because those things contribute to a lot of our behavior and [00:10:00] interpersonal relationships and insects.So I think it's important to touch on those things too. And so my target audience you know, I don't care. Anybody can listen. I would like everyone to listen because I think I talk about a lot of stuff that could be helpful for anybody. But the majority of my audience is 23 to 27. Like 50% is in that age range.And 60%, 65 to 70% is female, 30% male, which I would like more men, more men to listen because they're the ones that really need to learn. De'Vannon: I would just like more men in general, honey, Shawn: me too, because I got slim pickings here. I don't like anybody De'Vannon: in Florida. Oh God, you even boys come up there and I mean, everyone's so beautiful and delicious looking [00:11:00] you think.Well, what part of Florida are you in? Exactly. Shawn: I'm in south De'Vannon: Florida. Well, it depends on what you have a flavor for. So. Shawn: My thing is just like, there's such trash. I mean, some of them are cute, but like parents, they just don't know how to treat a lady. Me.So yeah. It's the dating scene down here has not been my friend. De'Vannon: Well, I invite you to Los Angeles, which is my favorite city. I'll move back there one day and you can just say I Shawn: want to go there very badly.De'Vannon: We'll be there for Halloween almost like Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday for folks. Shit damn near a week. Yeah. So I'm Gengar this year. Pokemon Pokemoning it Gengar. The pokey. [00:12:00] I believe he is he's as victims. Okay, mom, he just kind of like, Shawn: I thought you were going to be something sexy.De'Vannon: Well, that was last year. I was Fred Flintstone with the no underwear underneath his robehoochie dress. Anyway, what about you? Shawn: I don't think I did anything for Halloween last year. And then this year I have not thought about it at all. I'm not a big fan of Halloween. I like the camp sale candy on November 1st. That's it? I don't like being scared. I don't trust people. I feel like on Halloween, people go fucking crazy and like shit goes down on Halloween because they think it's like the purge low key.And I don't fuck with that. I don't fuck with people that were mass. The [00:13:00] medical mass. That's fine. I don't care about that. I'm talking about like the purge mass or scary, any mass you get at like spirit Halloween. I can't, I just let me stay in my house and I'll eat the candy that I'm supposed to give to children.De'Vannon: Fair enough. But, and so speaking of mental health issues like he did, I didn't want to touch on that on one of the shows you were talking about. I want to get your thoughts again on you. You were talking about the warning signs of abuse, which you hadn't gotten from safe horizon that, or, yeah. And I know that you have your own history of mental health issues too.So I was curious if any of your history has to do with some sort of abuse. Shawn: No thankfully, no. Yeah, I did that little disclaimer, just because, you know, the Gabby Pitino case has gotten really big. And it kind of gave me the [00:14:00] opportunity to touch on it. I like to have serious conversations on my show, but a lot of the time it is like funny, you know, and I thought, you know, if anybody who listens to my show needed to hear that, that I should put that out there. So yeah, for me, no, I have never dealt with any abuse like that, but my sister was with this guy for like 10 years, who was. Physically emotionally, mentally violent. And she finally left him last year during COVID cause he was home way too much and she's like, okay. Yeah. Like I can't even put up with this anymore.And that was kind of the straw that broke the camel's back. So she's been out of there for like a year or so. So for me, no, but I have a sister who went through that, [00:15:00] so yeah, I think it is important because I think it's a lot more prevalent than we think, you know, De'Vannon: the warning signs from safe horizon that, or I'll put that in the show notes for sure. No, the ones that stood out for me was when they try to isolate. The person being abused from friends and family. Shawn: Yeah. So they have no support system besides the abuser. And that was how my, my husband, my sister's husband was, he did not like when she visited me and you know, my mom and my other sister, he did not like her doing anything without him. But he was not allowed at my house. So, you know, that caused a lot of, a lot of stuff. He was just very controlling and it's just, I think, you know, all these abusers start out small because [00:16:00] if they started out the way that they end up, nobody would be with them. So they start out small. So I think that it's kind of important just to recognize the small signs before they get too big.And you know, when to leave. De'Vannon: Right. And and safe horizon.org has those warning signs. And it was important that you, that you've experienced it because from listening to your podcast is like you were saying, it can be hard to tell if a loved one is in an abusive relationship, unless, you know, the signs to look for.I feel like it took you awhile to realize what was going on with your sister. Shawn: I knew I didn't like him from the beginning. Keep in mind, my sister's 10 years older than I am. So she was with him when I was younger and I didn't really know what this kind of stuff was. So she did talk to my mom a lot about it and [00:17:00] you know, my mom would always tell her, you know, like you should leave him, but it's never that easy. And so. Yeah. When I first met him, I was like, I don't know. I don't like him, but I don't know. Maybe I was just feeling like he was like taking my sister away type of thing. But as I got older, I started hearing more of the things that he was doing. And so I think I didn't, I didn't really see it.I just heard about it because I didn't get to see her that often because of him. But now that I know the signs and I'm like, he literally checks off every single one, you De'Vannon: know, she made it out. Yeah. So then what are some of your personal mental health struggles that you have dealt with or, or dealing with?Shawn: Yeah, so I [00:18:00] think that I've had depression probably since I was nine years old. But I wasn't really sure what it was, you know, because I was like so young and most nine-year-old kids, at least when I was nine years old, did not struggle with that. Or at least I didn't think so. I just thought I was different. And so when I was nine, that was like the triggering point was that my dad passed away, like unexpectedly. So that kind of triggered that. And I went to therapy, but I was nine. So I didn't really know. I didn't really know what I was supposed to be doing there. You know what I mean? Like I couldn't process what therapy was.I didn't want to be there. I was like, just random man is trying to talk to me about shit. I don't want to talk about so after a little bit of that, I stopped doing it. I should have [00:19:00] went back when I was in high school. When I started liking boys, because that's my downfall. And then in college I think I was probably severely depressed, like 75% of my time there.And my, I got a boyfriend and that brought me out of it, but. I was like, so dependent on him for like all of my happiness. He was like my whole life. I did not have a life outside of him. Which I think is kind of, it kind of happens to a lot of people in their first relationships. I think I've seen it in, in some of my friends first relationships, like when we were younger, it's just like that puppy love , you know, you don't want to, you don't want to be away from that person.And so I was so happy with him whenever I was with him. So we spent literally [00:20:00] every second together pretty much. And so when we broke up, I literally had a mental breakdown, like severely unwell. And so that kind of is what triggered me to be like, okay, I need help. This is not a normal response to a breakup, obviously regularly.Break up your you're sad, but you can like still live your life. Like I could not live, like it was horrible. And so that's when I got back into therapy and that's kind of what made me start thinking about and start talking about my relationship to men and to sex, because I think it all kind of stems down to losing my dad at a young age, which is kind of fucked up.De'Vannon: I am sorry that that happened to you. But I am glad that you seem to [00:21:00] be aware that there is a problem that you're down from it. And I think that that's where it begins now, healing it and going to come until it's meant to, you know, I think, I think our task is to recognize our weaknesses and the issues establish a plan and to work with them, to be incredibly patient with ourselves as we stumble and fall along the way.But God, you know, I could see that, you know, not having that masculine foundation. Shawn: Yeah. And so this is kind of where the psychology and mental health stuff comes in on my podcast is, you know, a lot of the shit that we struggle with has to. Like it comes from our childhood, whatever we experienced. I talk about attachment theory. I don't know if you're familiar with what your attachment [00:22:00] is, but mine is anxious. So that comes in the form of being clingy as fuck being needy as fuck. And like scared of abandonment. And so if you're not securely attached and some people think they are, but they're not if you're not securely attached it, you have your own struggles that you face in all of your relationships, not just romantic.So I think it's very important that we kind of, we got to sadly get, go back into our childhood and figure out where we were fucked up.De'Vannon: Hey, it is what it is. Yeah. Yeah. I've been so, so much of that, you know, my own, this, this, this show here that I have has been very healing. Shawn: Ronnie, my brother, I feel the same way too. Very healing. It's like [00:23:00] cathartic. Right. De'Vannon: And I didn't expect that, you know, I started this podcast to compliment my memoir.That's coming out, but didn't the process I'm like, just talking to people has just helped me to get past some shit, which is why I love having people like you on, because we're willing to be transparent because it helps people. I probably say this on every fucking show, but yeah, like it's just something healing. About being transparent. Whenever somebody hears about a similar struggle with gives them the strength to go on a little bit further, not advice, not even needing advice, just knowing that somebody else is out there suffering the same ways, so helpful to people.Shawn: Yeah. And I think a lot of people have struggled in the way that both of us have, but not a lot of people are vocal about it. So someone's gotta be, and though someone's or us, De'Vannon: oh, someone's arm us with a [00:24:00] capital R so, okay, cool. So let's switch gears and get into a more fuckery.So, and I was trying to see the name of that particular show. That's what I've been giving out, trying to put a little bit Dov. It was something like something in origin. Shawn: Yeah. What is the first word? Oh, my tape sex tapes. De'Vannon: Six saves the word threesomes. Oh my. And I listened to several of them, but that one stood out to me.The most, that guy has said, Shawn: just because you have a crush on him. That's why I De'Vannon: have a Bonnie him, but I have to play hard to get, because I already heard his secrets. Yeah. I don't want him totally not interested.Shawn: I'm gonna see if he wants to come on the show [00:25:00] for you. You want me to text him right De'Vannon: now? I do it. I love the fucking with like straight guys and stuff like that. Not necessarily trying to turn them straight, but I like to see how much of my feminine energy they can handle without getting offended. I feel Shawn: like he would probably like flirt back with you.I think it's just American guys. They're like almost, I don't know. They're just like so hyper masculine. Like they, they can't even. Like play around with it. You know what I mean? I De'Vannon: just toxically just, just fucking bored with it. I'm Shawn: saying I have a POS podcast opportunity for you,De'Vannon: the good way to say it. So in there, you and sexy man there, we're talking about Shawn: sexy De'Vannon: man. Couple of things here, [00:26:00] like you, you described him as a fuck. Boy. He didn't want to be called a fuck. Boy. He felt like that it was a negative term. So I want to get into some terminology here. So there's a fuck boy. I want to get your take on what a fuck a boy he is.And then we're going to talk about trade, which is a, more of a term in the gay world, but they're kind of the same Shawn: trade trade. I've never heard that. Okay. So I feel like a fuck boy is a guy who will literally do anything to get in your pants. If that includes making you feel like he likes you, he will do that.He will lie up and down just to get in your pants. He'll make you feel like you're special just to get in your pants. And I think there's no problem with casual sex. Okay. But I think the problem is when [00:27:00] people aren't honest about what they want. And then that's when people's feelings get hurt. And I don't like that, you know, is that what a trade is for you?De'Vannon: Trade. That is a good definition of a fuck boy. And I would just ask you that a foot voice, somebody who has basically fucked everyone in town that's like a guy version of what some would consider to be a whore or promiscuous woman, Shawn: nothing wrong with being a whore. There's something wrong with being a fuck.Boy. I think it's De'Vannon: yes. The line, not the amount of sex, right. Okay. We'll be on that for sure. And a trade is the same way. So trade in the gay world would be a very masculine guy. Usually in very fucking good shape. We'll have a girlfriend on the side, but then he's gonna come around and fuck the dudes on the other side of town.But she don't know. Shawn: Oh, that was spot.De'Vannon: Trade. So [00:28:00] some people may call him an undercover brother or whatever the case may be. Trade will be fucking trainees and real girls, real fish and men all at the same time. And then, but that's not necessarily, everyone knows what's happening. He's at the center, these, the nucleus of this fuck world that he's created.Wow. Wow. So that's what you call a piece of trade this urban dictionary. If you don't trust me, I'm gonna put urban dictionary in the Shawn: show. I have a feeling that you wouldn't lie to me about that. I'm De'Vannon: not talking to you, honey. I'm talking to the audience audience. So I'm going to put urban dictionary in the show notes that somebody out there probably hasn't heard of urban dictionary can really help you understand a lot of shit in this world, urban Shawn: dictionary, at least once a day.I never know what the fuck people are talking about, De'Vannon: right? Like what is a. I [00:29:00] need to know, oh my God.Shawn: Oh my God. No, I think the most recent thing I looked up was a sneaky link. I'm like what the actual fuck is that I've never heard that, but I think that's like the generation under me uses that it's De'Vannon: just like a hookup. Shawn: It's just like someone you hook up with, I think De'Vannon: very covert way of texting and your parents, their parents don't know what the fuck they're talking about.So so speaking of terms and urban dictionary, I looked up pig roasting earlier, which is something that sexy man did when he was like 19 or something like that. And so doing what you care. So on the tail, the audience was pig roasting, as we were talking about orgies now. Okay. Shawn: I think it's spit roasting spit RO.De'Vannon: Changeable terms, but tell me what your understanding is of it. [00:30:00]Shawn: Okay. I think it's kind of like an Eiffel tower situation. Where, why are you smiling so big? I think it's like two guys and then a girl in the middle. She is on all fours, maybe that's Eiffel tower and maybe spit roast. And she's on her back. I don't know the technicalities.I haven't done it, but one penis is in her vagina. The other penis is in her mouth and then they just rotate her around like a rotisserie chicken. De'Vannon: Right. And that's why it's called pig roast. In Hawaii or you see that they stick the steak or the rotisserie chicken all the way through the ass in the mouth.So it's like, if you have a death in your mouth and a Dick in your ass and you're in the middle, that it could be a rotisserie chicken or a pig roasting on the motherhood, the [00:31:00] whole thing she's been skewered. And basically Shawn: it is an Eiffel tower then. De'Vannon: Yeah. It can be called that. Shawn: I think the Eiffel tower is like the guys hold hands.So it's like a triangle. Oh De'Vannon: yeah. In order to balance the balance, the forest, Shawn: that's a dream though. I'd love to do that. And my dream threesome. I want to guys, because I will not be sharing any attention with another bitch. I will tell you De'Vannon: that. Yeah. You pointed that out because, cause in your show you were talking about how they had like a whole five way going on.It was two guys and the one girl they thought was ugly and the other two, they thought work and she left the gracefully and you were like, okay, that would not be me. I would not bow out gracefully. Shawn: Oh, are you kidding? Like that is just so mean. They kind of just started leaving her out and I'm like, if that were to ever happen to me, I would lose my mind.That's why I [00:32:00] can't be put in those situations. Oh, wait dog just texted me. He said, what about I might be interested?De'Vannon: Oh, Honeywell will, we will, we will deal with him after the show picture of my tits, which I flashed you before we came on the air and that'll seal the So you've never had an orgy report. Shawn: No, I know shocking. I know I sound like such a whore.De'Vannon: I Shawn: know I have not having orgies. I don't know. Where am I supposed to find these said orgies?De'Vannon: Well, you can go on app and look for them. Or if you have ever have a significant other, you can look for them together, either out or on an app or. I mean, you're a girl. You can just go to any fucking club and just look hot and find two guys or show it up together.And there you go. Shawn: Yeah. I don't know. I just feel like [00:33:00] it's a hard to F I feel like you have to really coordinate a two guy threesome. De'Vannon: Well, any kind of threesome or two, there were three plus it's going to take some coordination cause you have different agendas, different energies, different everything.Well, you know, like y'all were discussing on your show. You know, the guys are concerned about the other Dick sizes of everyone else. And like, like, like, like my new boyfriend said he would prefer that if he's in a group situation at all the, all the other guys, they are having similar Dick size to him, not, not too much smaller than too much bigger that way.There's no like intimidation, because he was like, you know, women, you know, there's subjectiveness to what classifies a sexy woman, but either you have a 12 inch Dick or you every six inch Dick or a nine inch, one or 14 inch one, there was a clear winner. And so they, so they would [00:34:00] rather similar Dick sizes personally.I don't give a fuck about Dick size. I'm happy with Shawn: average, to be honest with you, De'Vannon: there's a point where it's too much for you. Shawn: Yeah, I have had sex. This is like my sophomore year in college. But I had sex with this guy who went to my school, but he was from Spain and. He kept saying owl. And I'm like, why are you saying Al?I'm fine. And he was like, it feels like something is crushing the tip of my Dick. And then I was like, okay, like, let's just stop. Like, I'm not trying to hurt you. And then I started researching it and I think it was getting like caught in my cervix or something. I don't know. So average is good for me and yeah, I have a tight [00:35:00] punani so I think that, that I prefer De'Vannon: like all up in your guts, literally.Shawn: I don't know. I felt fine, but he was saying, oh, and I was like, I've never had a guy say owl from sex from like putting his penis in me that you use. You're like, wow, that's great. Was he like super long? Yeah. De'Vannon: How many answers are now get honey. Shawn: I think he said that he was like nine, but I feel like you're like, Hmm, but you want a whole foot long.And your ass, De'Vannon: the longest I have had was about maybe 15 or 16, Shawn: who is walking around sling in that De'Vannon: dog. You got them out there, honey. I have had, I even do with that, whatever you can, I'm Shawn: like, give me a [00:36:00] nice seven inches and I don't live my life happily. De'Vannon: I mean the first time I had a date for that long and he was on like a 19 year old and I went over to his mom's house and picked him up and she greeted me in the driveway.Sorry, am I I'm a Cougar? Anyway, I'm like 38. My boyfriend is 24. I love him young bitch. And so it is what it is. And so like I'm older and so Hey to shade. And so, and so, yeah, he was, I think like in the 14, 15 inch range and he was one of these profiles on an app that almost looks fake because you're like, can this Dick really be this long bitch?It really, really was. And I feel Shawn: what race was this man? He was black. Have you ever seen a white man with that? De'Vannon: Yes, when I was a method dealer in Houston, one of the trucks used to hang out at my trap house. He wanted something, but I didn't know [00:37:00] because he had a wife and kids. And as far as I knew he was straight, it just one day he popped the Dick out on me.Out of nowhere, I was backing up some drugs at the table and it was same. And of course he was one of those white boys kind of like who acts black, like, you know, like G-Eazy and shit like that. You know, he has that, he got that about him, which I think is very fucking like boys. And and so there was that there was a Latino, when I lived with in Tucson and his shit, he had like imported, double XL, condoms with magnums were too small for him.And that his shit was way past 12 honey. And Shawn: so what do you do with a Dick that big, when you're like not having sex, do you have to like tape it to your leg? Well, they also don't understand. De'Vannon: Now they all start off as a little bitty wormy, looking, squiggly things, all of them. Shawn: And then they grow flat De'Vannon: long row.That fucking big, like [00:38:00] the picture made out of like a spongy sort of cellular material. And so it can expand greatly. So you're not always walking around with it, down to your knees and you know, and so that's why we get surprised by it. Sometimes it's nerves have really big dicks too. They just do. Yes.You used to find it and find you on any given day. You find me hanging around the apple store, honey. There's nothing wrong with my iPhone, but you know, those little skinny jeans and shit like that, they've got some huge monster. Shawn: It's like the spinny nerdy boys. They're the songs.De'Vannon: I'm telling you secrets out. Everyone had to the apple store and get you some Dick it, cause that's Shawn: like regular. De'Vannon: You've got to do. I know of people who have run from monster dicks before you have to listen to your body and your body's telling you, it doesn't want to get destroyed by that. But I feel sorry for a lot of guys like that, [00:39:00] because it's difficult for them to come.Cause they can't really go balls deep and most people they don't get, they don't get enough sufficient friction because you barely have a third of the Dick in there and this is why you can't go. And so there's a lot of masturbating. It's a lot of blow jobbing, you know, and stuff like that. No, but there's a lot to work with, you know, three or four people can all get both of their hands on this, that long, like fucking go for Shawn: it.It's like a magic bean stock De'Vannon: that just, yeah, you can climb then motherfucker and find, find Jack NGO. Sowhen it comes to sex and things like that you know, from listening to yours, like the guys were talking about how they like to do a good job while they're having sex and everything like that. And I feel like the focus should be more on [00:40:00] a conjugal. Experience, you know, like the, the whoever's there are all experienced to get, to get together.You know, I say this to try to release guys from the pressure of feeling like they have to perform a certain way or, you know, and everything like that, you know, like I don't, I don't think we should look at it like, okay, this is my project here. I need to get this person off. You know, how about, why don't we find a way to get off together, you know?And you both help each other. You understand what I'm saying? But what do you think about that? Shawn: Here's the thing. Okay. Maybe it's an age thing, but I don't think it is because I've hooked up with the older guys, like 39, 40, 43, and they don't give a fuck about my orgasm. They just only care about theirs.And they're like, okay. Night-night and then they turn over and I'm like I [00:41:00] am nowhere even finished here. So, so I think it's hard because like, I get the performance anxiety that guys get. But at the same time, if you took a moment and focused on the woman, because let's be real I'm I think only like less than 20% of women will orgasm from penetration.Like we need other stuff. So take a break, relax. And just like play with her puss. I don't know, like do something like women really love foreplay. And I think sometimes men get so excited to fuck like actually do the penetration that like, they, they skip over that really fast. And I think in my opinion, foreplay is better than the actual penetration.Like it's, I think it's more [00:42:00] fun. I think it feels better. And I'm more likely to come from that. So I think if men focus more on the feeling and the feelings that they're giving to the woman, rather than performance, I think maybe that would help, but I don't really feel bad for them.De'Vannon: Well, well, I mean, if that's the experiences that you had, and I can, I can, I can imagine, I could imagine, but you know, one day, Sean, you're going to find a guy who, who treats you exactly the way you want to be treated. I just, so what kind of foreplay do you like? What do you like have done to you? Let's tell the world right now.Shawn: Oh God. Okay. I love a good make-out [00:43:00] sesh. Like I just really love making out, but also if you're not good at kissing, the sex is probably going to be bad. Do you agree? De'Vannon: I don't let things be bad. Like if I'm going to get, get, get down to visit with somebody, it will be good. And it's just decided, so they suck at kissing.Now I'm going to teach them how.Shawn: Like, how do you do that? How do you teach somebody to De'Vannon: make them stop and be like, you're doing it wrong? Let me show you. And even though, cause I'm usually the submissive in sexual encounters and, and I've had married men who haven't been married to women by men, gay men, all kinds of men. Like they, you know, they, once they get turned on and everything like that, it doesn't matter how they're getting touched that you just go out there just black, that they are.It's really just that simple. [00:44:00] So right. It's the men are not super complicated. Actually. I Shawn: know there are. So you guys are so simple, but the women just can't believe that they're so simple. So we're like, okay, we have let's figure out what's really going on here, but they're really just. Simple De'Vannon: this thing, if you're going to agree to kiss them and you don't like it, then you stop and you show them how to do it.Right. There's no sense in going through an experience that you don't like or something you can do about it. Pause it. Let's have some conversation won't take long, but I don't necessarily equate bag kissing the bad Dick because. People have all kinds of emotional connotations with kissing. Some people feel like that's a super close thing to do was sticking a Dick.And somebody is not in any emotional attachment at all. Doesn't make any fucking, but you know, whatever you believe in your head is the way that you're going to go out there and approach society. [00:45:00] So maybe they're not kissing well because they haven't decided to give you their heart yet. And maybe they just want a kiss because you want it to kiss, but they really aren't fully committed to it because they're not in love with you.And I think they need to be in love with you to do the kiss. It's all kinds of shit that goes through people's head over kissing. And so that's Shawn: just too much.De'Vannon: It is too much going on. I'm like we in this bed, we fucking, we might as well kiss and do every damn thing else and be done.Shawn: Yeah, I, so yeah, I love a good make-out session. Like starting out like slow. Cute. And then it gets like nasty, you know, then I love like boob and nipple stuff, so maybe I should get my nipples pierced, but I'm scared. I'm not trying to like, have my Teton is out in front of like the whole tattoo shop and then they have to flick your nipples.I'm like, [00:46:00] I don't want this random man in a store flicking my nipples De'Vannon: that turned into the sex session. Shawn: Yeah. But I feel like that's more like porn. I don't know if that would happen in real life for you. Maybe you're like I would make it happen. Yeah, so some boob stuff, whatever I've really. I have started to love a good fingering because I had someone this is really hot and I think people should do this more and he was older.So I think that's why he did it. He was, he started fingering me and then he was like, hold on one second. And he turned to his nightstand and just brought out some lube squirted on his hand, squirted it on me and just like went to town. It felt so good. And guys, my age would literally never do that.They're scared of lube. And I was like, do you not [00:47:00] understand how hot that is hot? So like the straight boys in their twenties get some lube and put it in your nightstand. Yeah, love that love when they go down on, but also like if you're not good at that, then I'd rather you just finger. You know, cause sometimes for me, like if it's not, if I don't feel enough, like pressure or something, it literally feels like rain.I'm like, okay, let's just get back up here. De'Vannon: Well, you know, you got to talk to people. Sex is all about communication. Even if it is a random hookup or a one time thing, you know, you got to tell us how to do you the right way, because you're going to be different than the previous girl he was with versus the next girl.So I don't hold that against them. I understand this, this boy needs some instruction and some direction channel the inner Cougar and you bitch [00:48:00] and teach the men that shit. That is how it ended up itself. When a woman tells a man what to do. Shawn: Yeah, I think, I think it's coming with age. It's coming with age when I was younger, I would never say anything because I was like scared to hurt the boys feelings.And I still kind of feel that way, especially because I do date and hook up with guys older than me, like 10 plus years. So it's a weird little like power dynamic that I feel like I shouldn't say anything or like build up the courage to say something, but I'm getting there. I'm getting there. I just need a little more time De'Vannon: at a time.At least, you know, that are wrecks. You need to be headed in. This is how people out there, you know, we get to a point where we're happy with everything that we do, especially when it comes to an interaction with somebody else. If there's something that we don't like, change it and tell them[00:49:00] now ended if they're unwilling to adjust.But you'd be surprised how open and receptive people would be to to, to talking through it. And guys has got to get past the being intimidated if she wants to toy in the room. Shawn: Oh yeah. I don't understand that at De'Vannon: all. But the men are being taught by men who were also fractured and broken and head all the time, or they're just meeting taught by porn and not by anything else.And then, so they're approaching you with a whole head full of bullshit, but they don't know. It's both, they're just thinking, okay, I'm supposed to do this as the guy in the porn did it that way. You know, the education is so he needs to be reeducated and that's where you come in one day once you're ready to do that and take him to that house.Shawn: Yeah, I think I'll, I'll think I'll get there. I think I will get there. [00:50:00]De'Vannon: But what, what was that trick that you had for forgiving him? Had a cotton mouth cure. Apparently if you smoked some weed or whatever the fuck and you have dry mouth you, how, how, how, how can we fix that? Shawn: Okay. My newest favorite thing to do is honey head.You can do this on any genitalia that you want. It works for Dick. I don't eat pussy, but I learned this from someone who is bisexual. So she's done it to both. So for men, you get some honey, well, Yeah. I mean, I don't travel with honey. I just assume people have it in their kitchen, but yeah, so you just literally put a little like dollop on their deck or just like a little, little [00:51:00] bit on a clit, depending on who you're working with and you just, you know, suck it, how you normally would or like how you normally would, but the honey stimulate your salivary glands.So you make a lot of spit. So if you were smoking, if you have cotton mouth, if you're nervous and you don't have that much spit, this is like a really great tip. And it's like, Whoever you're hooking up with probably has honey in their kitchen anyway. And you know, when I do this to guys, I've only done it to two so far, but when I bring it up, they're like so excited.They're like, what, what do you need honey for? Okay, I'll go get it. And then they like run to the kitchen ass naked. And I've gotten like really, really great reviews from this. I think [00:52:00] the guy thinks it's like really hot because it's new. Like, I don't think a lot of people have like dropped some honey on their deck before they got head. And so, yeah, I kind of spice it up plus like 99.9% of guys like sloppy head. And the honey will help you achieve that because you get a lot more spit. De'Vannon: Wonderful like the honey too. We haven't done that in a while. The breakout, the honey, honey, Shawn: you should, it's so fun. And it tastes good. De'Vannon: We, I liked the Hershey strawberry syrup, which is used in much the same way, but we basically basically juggle it all over him.Shawn: I think the, so if you're gonna go down on a girl and you want to use the honey, I think you as [00:53:00] honey, like don't use like Hershey's chocolate syrup. Because, you know, vaginas are very sensitive and at least honey's like natural, right? A little, it might still, it might still fuck up your pH. I don't know, but I can guarantee you that chocolate drizzle will definitely do that.So you might as well go with the honey. If you are a vagina owner. De'Vannon: So, so you said pH the pH balance. So, so you have you find that the pH balance of a vagina that you stick like a litmus strip?Shawn: I don't know. I don't know what the pH balance is of vagina, but I will tell you when your pH in there gets the runoff and mine is very sensitive for some reason. Like if there's a new toy, a new finger, a new Dick, the condom, like anything, anything foreign she's like what the [00:54:00] actual fuck is this. And like, I get bacterial vaginosis or yeast infection and that fucking socks.So yeah, no, you don't stick a strip up your Cooter. But you know, women, if your. The smell down there changes. If it smells fishy, it's probably a bacterial vaginosis or some form of an STI. And then, you know, if you pull down your pants and you have some cottage cheese up in there, probably a yeasty.So girls know, girls know, we don't know our actual pH balance, unless like everyone's sticking strips up their vagina to find that out. But I do not do that. I just know when something's off De'Vannon: the girl who taught you about the honey, you said that you have never eaten a vagina. Did she [00:55:00] eat yours? No. So you never done any girl on Shawn: girl?No, I'm so scared of vagina. I really love man.Right now. Yes, right now I'm strictly dickly. I feel like, I feel like, I don't know, as people age, they're kind of like, oh, sure. I'll try. But right now I haven't gotten to that point. She, the lady that I'm talking about, she was a guest on my show and she's a kink educator and I asked her what her favorite sex tip was, and that was it.And I was like, okay, gotta try that shit. And it has rave reviews. De'Vannon: Hallelujah. On Tuesday afternoon. Favorite positions. Shawn: Okay. I'm going to have to be basic and say that I love doggy. I just think it's hot. And that's like kind [00:56:00] of where they get in the deepest. But I also love I don't know if this has a name, so I'm just going to describe it.Okay. I'm, I'm laying on the bed. The guy is standing up and my ass is kind of hanging off the bed and then my legs are on their shoulders. Just I have a name. De'Vannon: Yeah. I think that might be like the hang man or something like that. Cause the cosmopolitan. They used to have know they still have it on their app.They used to do the six position of the day and they cover every possible fucking thing. And they all have a name, but I know the ass off the side of the bed. Shawn: And I liked that one too, because it feels good. Those were my feet. Honestly, I have a bitch. I'm a good bitch for missionary. I'm a pillow princess.And it's, it also [00:57:00] feels good. And like, you can make out while you're doing it, like dog, you can't do that. De'Vannon: Sure. You can. Like if he reaches up and you turn your head, you can still kiss while you're doing doggy. Shawn: Like I guess it just like that's so much De'Vannon: work. Oh yeah. It's that? It's definitely that you got to put in that work.Honey. What about public sex? Have you done that before? Shawn: Okay. I've had sex in a car once and I was literally so scared, so scared. And I, I don't know why, dude, I've never even gone to speeding ticket. So I was like, if I have sex with you and we got in trouble, I'm going to be fucking pissed. So I start like hanging up every single item of clothing that I could find and just like sticking it in every inch of the windows, because I was so scared.And honestly, I fucking hated it. I do [00:58:00] not like car sex. De'Vannon: Whoops. At least you tried, you were Shawn: open-minded I tried, but what public sex have you done? I don't, I'm too scared of getting caught. Like I don't find that hot I'm like scared. De'Vannon: Well, the first time I was in like a truck, this guy I hooked up with a couple of times and I was.And living in Arizona picked me up. I don't know. I was like 19 Joe, just starting on my sexual journey and being a total whore. I'm trying to feel the void that my dad left by not being present enough in my life. And so I went about the business of finding that in the arms of other men. And I knew it when I was doing it.I was like, I want you to be embraced by someone more masculine than me Shawn: and I still do that. It's like sad De'Vannon: that you'll heal. One day. He'll heal one day, baby. Shawn: I've been on a sex cleanse. I haven't had sex for three months. So. That's [00:59:00] pretty good. The last time I did a sex ban, I lasted five weeks. So there's progress.Anyway, continue, De'Vannon: go, and go and get going. And so now he picked me up in his pickup truck and he intentionally wanted to park in the front of some people's houses to make it more erotic. And so we were in this neighborhood and then he laid me on my back. And so we did it missionary and stuff like that.And that was totally fine. Another time. I think I was walking around Montrose and Houston and the gay part of Houston high on probably at least ecstasy and maybe he'll cane or G in DHB. And GBL is like a liquid substance. It's a very European drug and you take it like a cap full, and that makes you feel very euphoric.You don't have like the groggy come down and hang over. You don't feel like a zombie when you're done. The high is only gonna last for a little bit. Anyway, it's not like a, an all night, several day high, but it's a very. [01:00:00] Party drugs, you take it and you go to raves and bands. You can take it and fuck you just kind of feel really, really fucking good, you know, kinda like ecstasy kicking in, but didn't take as long.And don't though when some guy was like walking around as they do, you'll find a lot of trade and a lot of just hot men walking around the gay parts of different cities. And so I was like, I want you to fuck me in this bitch right here. And so he didget you bitch. Shawn: Have you done that more than once? De'Vannon: Not that I can recallpretty much like every day, especially back when I was a drug dealer and you know, and all of that, all of the high, like all the time. And so.And then other than that, I was always trying to seduce guys to fuck me in different jacuzzis and pools and stuff [01:01:00] like that. But you as well, you probably wouldn't be surprised, but some men are, men are very adventurous, but some of them are not, some of them don't want to have public sex, but most guys would want to try some shit like that.So it wasn't just, you know, what was meant for me, my experiences were not as voyeuristic as I would've liked them to be. And so, but you know, now I now have enough sense to know about like a nudist colony is new, you know, there's places where you can go do public sex legally, and that there is getting in trouble.And then what you want to do back then? I didn't know all that.Shawn: I am not down for getting in trouble. Not not about that. Life De'Vannon: is not for everyone. Orange is not the new black, you know, I've been dressed in the orange jumpsuits and shit before it's hideous, fascia. That's when you're in jail.And so I take [01:02:00] it, no drugs, sex for you.Shawn: No De'Vannon: drug Shawn: druggies. No. Oh no. I, I haven't even really had like really drunk sex either. Most of my sex is sober. De'Vannon: That's a good way to connect and stuff like that. So that wayShawn: I heard, I heard having sex while high is good. De'Vannon: It, it can be, but you have to be careful that you don't let yourself have, like, I wouldn't do the first time experienced that way because then your bar is going to be set way too high. And then I wouldn't do that. Often, because then you're going to read, right?Like your synapses in your brain and the way your sex drive is. And then you'll, you can become, you will become codependent on it if you Shawn: will need it to have sex. De'Vannon: Right. So like when I go into like these different, like say [01:03:00] crystal meth, anonymous groups and meetings and stuff like that, you know, invariably you would hear somebody talking about how they cannot have sober sex anymore because they've had so much sex on meth or in the same thing, applies to any kind of drug that intensifies your sexual nature.You know, some things are not meant to be that intense and that shit is so fucking intense. Like, but you can't like, you know, do it every fucking day. You know, if it's a couple of times a year in, God bless you. If you have enough self-control to only do addictive drugs a couple of times a week, To answer your question.Yeah, it can be, but it's also a double edged sword. Some people said somebody, some people is going to experiment with the shit. It is. So what I'm saying is don't go down that road, tell yourself, put it in your subconscious that you are going to control it and not let it control. You started to get out of hand stopped because these people are like desperately trying to find ways to connect with people because they've had so much drug [01:04:00] sex that they cannot, they can't figure out how to have sex without being high.Shawn: They won't get hard De'Vannon: that, yeah. Wow. So it can fuck up your shit dudes, if you take it to the, to the extreme. You know, with S with anything you don't want to overeat, you don't want to be, you don't want to go to church too much if at all you want to just, and I say that because churches just generally suck these days, you know, I don't have anything to get to Jesus.Clearly you have him in the title of my show, but churches don't have to, you know, there's a whole, another thing. They ain't got nothing to do with Jesus half the time. And so, yeah. Okay. So then our last thing we're going to talk about, and of course it's still going to be Dick's cause it's both of our favorite subjects.You know, we love the stuff on a Dick together with you one day. Technically it would still be two guys strictly, Shawn: oh my God. Should we ask my friend? I was De'Vannon: thinking about him. [01:05:00] So I really love,you know, just, you know,you see in that stage of he in Italy Shawn: now he's in Florida. Oh, De'Vannon: Oh, that's fine, honey. Fly American airlines. I have, I'm always flying somewhere. And so yeah, I'm gonna have to bring the boyfriend. Are he made my work in, are kind of starting to open things up. We've actually made the decision to start doing that.We haven't made the jump yet because we're waiting for the right time, the right person, the right, whatever the case. So, so yeah. Let's make it happen and oh, so the last to see being circumcised or uncircumcised, IShawn: don't care. Do you care? De'Vannon: I don't [01:06:00] give two shits one fuck or good. God damn. Does it work?Okay. And work Shawn: with.I have experienced both. And I feel like when someone is uncircumcised and they're hard, you don't even notice really. So it's like, why does everybody makes such a big deal? Now, if you are uncircumcised and you don't know how to clean your deck, that is honestly, even if you are circumcised, if you don't know how to clean your Dick, like, I am not about that.But if you take care of yourself and you have good hygiene, like who gives a fuck? And I actually was thinking about if I were to have a son who would I circumcise him or not? I think it's so I think it's mean, I don't know. Are you circumcised? [01:07:00] Yeah, I'm cut. I'm like, it's kind of like, it's kind of fucked up.And, and okay. And I was going to say that the people that are uncircumcised have more pleasure, like they're more sensitive. So like, what is the reasoning of circumcising? That's what De'Vannon: I was going to say. So this comes from the Hebrew tradition from the middle Shawn: Jewish. De'Vannon: So, you know, this is something that God gave to Moses to separate them from the people around them, just like the other hundreds of hundreds of traditions that they had Shawn: pierced his ear or something.They had to chop his little Wiener skin off. De'Vannon: Hey, you know, everything goes down to the D at the end of the day. So and so, but so the reason it happened to me is because I was raised [01:08:00] in a Pentecostal. You know, family church and everything and who, and they pull so many things that they do from the Bible, but they don't separate the fact that it's no longer relevant our culture.It is not our culture. And they try to fit middle Eastern cultures into ours, which should not be being done. And so strictly speaking, if you're not Jewish and you don't clean or not clean to the old traditions, you know, in the old Testament that there is no, there's no health reason to get circumcised.It's strictly a spiritual thing from years and years and years ago from another land from another time. And if I had a sign I would leave for the day, just the way God made it apart from, you know, snipping, the, you know, whatever the hell you have to when they're born. But Other than that, that he could decide if you want to get your shit chopped up later on and that's you, but you know, I'm not doing that, you know, to him because there isn't, there's no [01:09:00] spiritual reason to do it because the Lord says he wants our hearts to be circumcised, not our bodies.You know, these already disavowed the need for physical circumcision. So why, you know, I don't do shit just because my family did it and the people before them. No bitch. Why does this make sense to me? So right. There is no logical reason. Shawn: There's a lot of, a lot of European men. Like they don't, they don't circumcise much over.De'Vannon: I mean, what the fuck for, you know, it doesn't, there's still the same amount of calm that's going to come out of it. It's going to poke you the same way. I feel sorry. For some of them, some of them sometimes can get like this really sensitive, mid sex because of the, it is so sensitive, but it never stops them from finishing their fine.They go fuck right through the pain. But but no, but then see in the gay world, there is Shawn: like [01:10:00] a stigma in the gay world for people that are uncircumcised. De'Vannon: No, the stigma is for people who are yeah. Yeah. People who are uncircumcised. Cause even when you're on like the gate hookup apps, they ask you if you're cut or uncut, some people will not talk to you if you are uncut.Some people are just so turned off by. You know, porn has taught us that every Dick has to look this way. And so if somebody has an uncut fetish, okay, well then now there you go. There's uncut dildos. You can get now and everything like that. If you want your, you know, your hooded, you know, you're there to help you where you're going, but it's, it's a shame, you know, all dicks matter,all bigs matter. Damn it. And but unfortunately, you know, and that's a huge thing that I've had to work out, [01:11:00] but, you know you know, in, in my relationship, because you know, my boyfriend is from Trinidad and Tobago. That's where his people, you know, they don't cut up nothing down there either. You know, it's all on natural route.It is what. You know, he questioned a lot. He really, how I felt about his Dick being uncut. And I had to really, really convince him that I literally do not care because he's come up against so many people being turned off and put off by him because he has an uncut Dick in, in the gay community, but gave each day gay boys, bitches, you know, about a lot of things.Oh, your hair is fucking your nails, not right. We not fucking cared about you down the street. We know, you know, all kinds of bullshit,which is a reflection of the insecurity that prevails in our community. You know, we, if somebody has a problem with [01:12:00] you, the problem is really within them is not, they ain't nothing wrong with you. Shawn: Yeah. I mean, I know like women who are like grossed out by. Uncircumcised Dick. And I'm like, girl went to tarred.You don't even know the difference. Like it really doesn't like, you really can't see a difference. De'Vannon: I didn't know. That was a thing in the straight world. Yeah. Shawn: Yeah. It definitely is. And I think it's just because like, we're so used to seeing circumcised, Dick that it's like, when you see uncircumcised, you're like, is something wrong with it?But once you're, once you realize that it's the literally the exact same thing, just one has a flap of skin and one doesn't, it really doesn't matter. And like, don't you want your partner to have the most pleasure that they can possibly have? You know, I don't know. I don't, I don't know. [01:13:00] So, if any of you uncircumcised guys want to hit me up, let me know.De'Vannon: I know that's right. Her contact information will be in the show notes and shit. And then you're right. 90% of the time, once they get hard, they look just like an uncut Dick. That's hard because that skin pools back to the base of it. And if you put a heart uncut bit right next to a hard cut big, you couldn't tell now some of them out of four skin, and even once they're hard, it is a hood there, but at the end of the day, it still works the same.It's just ones like like it's like, they're both red wines. One's a Cabernet. One's a, malbac,one's a little, had a little bit more character than the other, but they both don't get you fucked up. You drink enough of it in, so. [01:14:00] Okay. So with that, my dear we've had our delicious titillating conversation today. Oh, Shawn: that was good titillating. Cause Teddy's you do that on purpose? We De'Vannon: taught that right. We gave it to the air guns on that one lady.So I'll let you have the last word until the world. Oh God, my audience. Any fucking thing you would like to say about anything? Shawn: Oh my God. Guys, just keep fucking, but be safe about it. Be honest, communicate your needs. Talk about your STI history and now the best sex of your life. That's all. And here are your heal, your childhoods Rama De'Vannon: having great sex and heal your childhood trauma.That's all we need to know. Hey, that's good enough for me. Thank you so [01:15:00] much.Thank you all so much for taking time to listen to the sex drugs and Jesus podcast. It really means everything to me. Look, if you love the show, you can find more information and resources at sex, drugs, and jesus.com or wherever you listen to your podcast. Feel free to reach out to me directly at DeVannon@SexDrugsAndJesus.com and on Twitter and Facebook as well.My name is De'Vannon and it's been wonderful being your host today and just remember that everything is going to be all right. 

 Discover how to convert your email list to loyal and engaged customers by constructing a killer email sequence Learn how to make an email sequence that would bring in sales and customers to your business Find out the do's and don'ts of proper emailing in order to attract more customers into your business Resources/Links: Check out Shawn's Website: https://autoklose.com/ Summary Are you sure you're writing the right email for your customers? Are they really reading your emails or are they just stuck in their spam folders not wanting to be opened? Shawn Finder, at the age of 24, entered the entrepreneurial world after competing as one of Canada's top-ranked tennis players. He founded ExchangeLeads in 2013 which helps B2B companies build quality lists for outreaching new prospects. This was followed by his new venture Autoklose in 2017 that combines both sales engagement and list building all-in-one platform. In this episode, Shawn shares his insights on how to make sure your email is getting the attention it needs by making sure it is concise, precise, and with a little bit of spice! He also shares how to construct the right email in order to avoid your customer's spam folder (where your email will never be seen by your customer). Check out these episode highlights: 01:43 - Shawn's ideal client: “So our ideal client would be small business owners or sales management who have a sales team. So, they would be our ideal clients, and obviously, sometimes we have national sales managers who would also sign up for the platform.” 02:00 - Problem Shawn helps solve: “Well, I mean, I would say we save salespeople hours a week in prospecting, by automating a lot of the tedious tasks they do on a daily basis. And we all know that one thing that people in salespeople hate doing is follow up so we automate that process for them.” 02:42 - Typical symptoms that clients do before reaching out to Shawn: “Yeah, so I would say when a sales manager looks at their sales team and realizes there's a lack of follow up, so they're not following up their leads, they're sending one email, and they're thinking, "Okay, that person's not a concern." instead of sending 4,5,6 emails.” 04:00 - Common mistakes that people make before they find Shawn's solution: “I mean, I think when some of the common mistakes I think is, you know, the emails people write are way too 'salesy'. You got to really focus on trying to drive that pain point or that challenge of that prospect in that email. And one of the biggest common mistakes is, is it doing- being way too ‘salesy'?” 04:57 - Shawn's Valuable Free Action (VFA): “So the one thing I would say is in your email, your subject line, try and keep it to two to three words. And the reason why you want to do that is most people are reading up subject line on their mobile device, and they're only seeing three words. So, if you're writing eight words subject lines, they're not going to be able to see it.” 06:13 - Shawn's Valuable Free Resource (VFR): Check out Shawn's Website: https://autoklose.com/ 07:24 - Q: You have a sales engagement tool but what happens if people don't have data to put into the tool? How would that work? A: So, we actually allow you to upload your own data from what you have, and if you don't have your own data, but you still love the software, and you want to automate your outreach, we can actually provide you data all over the world. Tweetable Takeaways from this Episode:

 Discover how to convert your email list to loyal and engaged customers by constructing a killer email sequence Learn how to make an email sequence that would bring in sales and customers to your business Find out the do’s and don’ts of proper emailing in order to attract more customers into your business Resources/Links: Check out Shawn’s Website: https://autoklose.com/ Summary Are you sure you’re writing the right email for your customers? Are they really reading your emails or are they just stuck in their spam folders not wanting to be opened? Shawn Finder, at the age of 24, entered the entrepreneurial world after competing as one of Canada’s top-ranked tennis players. He founded ExchangeLeads in 2013 which helps B2B companies build quality lists for outreaching new prospects. This was followed by his new venture Autoklose in 2017 that combines both sales engagement and list building all-in-one platform. In this episode, Shawn shares his insights on how to make sure your email is getting the attention it needs by making sure it is concise, precise, and with a little bit of spice! He also shares how to construct the right email in order to avoid your customer’s spam folder (where your email will never be seen by your customer). Check out these episode highlights: 01:43 - Shawn’s ideal client: “So our ideal client would be small business owners or sales management who have a sales team. So, they would be our ideal clients, and obviously, sometimes we have national sales managers who would also sign up for the platform.” 02:00 - Problem Shawn helps solve: “Well, I mean, I would say we save salespeople hours a week in prospecting, by automating a lot of the tedious tasks they do on a daily basis. And we all know that one thing that people in salespeople hate doing is follow up so we automate that process for them.” 02:42 - Typical symptoms that clients do before reaching out to Shawn: “Yeah, so I would say when a sales manager looks at their sales team and realizes there's a lack of follow up, so they're not following up their leads, they're sending one email, and they're thinking, "Okay, that person's not a concern." instead of sending 4,5,6 emails.” 04:00 - Common mistakes that people make before they find Shawn’s solution: “I mean, I think when some of the common mistakes I think is, you know, the emails people write are way too 'salesy'. You got to really focus on trying to drive that pain point or that challenge of that prospect in that email. And one of the biggest common mistakes is, is it doing- being way too ‘salesy’?” 04:57 - Shawn’s Valuable Free Action (VFA): “So the one thing I would say is in your email, your subject line, try and keep it to two to three words. And the reason why you want to do that is most people are reading up subject line on their mobile device, and they're only seeing three words. So, if you're writing eight words subject lines, they're not going to be able to see it.” 06:13 - Shawn’s Valuable Free Resource (VFR): Check out Shawn’s Website: https://autoklose.com/ 07:24 - Q: You have a sales engagement tool but what happens if people don't have data to put into the tool? How would that work? A: So, we actually allow you to upload your own data from what you have, and if you don't have your own data, but you still love the software, and you want to automate your outreach, we can actually provide you data all over the world. Tweetable Takeaways from this Episode: “The emails people write are way too ‘salesy’. You got to really focus on trying to drive that pain point or that challenge of that prospect in that email.” -Shawn FinderClick To Tweet Transcript (Note, this was transcribed using a transcription software and may not reflect the exact words used in the podcast) Tom Poland 00:10 Hello, everyone,

  In this episode, we have an interview with Susan Guthrie - Family Law Attorney, Mediator, and Host of Divorce & Beyond Podcast. Learn more about Susan here: https://divorceinabetterway.com/. Visit us at divorceandyourmoney.com for the #1 divorce resources in the USA and get personalized help. Shawn: In the beginning of the process, as you're doing your research, one of the most important things you can do is figure out what are your options and what are the best ways to proceed during the divorce process. And know that the traditional method of divorce litigation is not the only method that exists when it comes to the divorce process, and you may have options. There's mediation, there's collaborative divorce. But in this particular episode, I want to discuss mediation, and to do that, I'm bringing in a great guest. Shawn: Her name is Susan Guthrie. She is a family law attorney with over 30 years of experience. And she's going to give us an overview of some of the key things about mediation to think about. She'll describe the process really well in this episode. And the other thing that's interesting about mediation is that there's the possibility for online mediation. And so, there may be some advantages to that as well. So, I hope you enjoy the interview with Susan Guthrie and also be sure to check out her podcast. She has a really good podcast that's called Divorce and Beyond. So, without further ado, here's my interview with Susan. Shawn: Today on the show I have with me Susan Guthrie. Susan is a family law attorney, mediator, and a podcast host of her own. Susan, welcome to the show. Susan: Thank you, Shawn. I'm so pleased to be here. Thank you for having me. Shawn: Susan, let's start with ... actually, I just want to start with the podcast so other people can listen to it. It's great. I recently did an interview on it. Why don't you tell us about your podcast? Susan: Thank you. Yes, and by the way, your episode is doing very, very well. People are always interested in Divorce and Their Money, it's called, my podcast is, Divorce and Beyond. It's really focused on, I've been a divorce attorney and a mediator for 30 years, so I bring that insider knowledge to the divorce process, and bring experts on to help with that, such as yourself. But I also am very much focused on the beyond, because divorce is really a finite time in your life or I certainly hope that it is, and you have a future ahead. So, many of our episodes are focused on preparing for the beyond, preparing for your future. Shawn: Great, and I encourage everyone to listen to it. There's lots of great episodes on there and you bring a great collection of interview guests on there as well. That's really interesting. Susan: Oh, thank you. Shawn: So, why don't you tell us a little bit about your background. I know you said you practiced for 30 years, but why don't you give us your credentials so to speak? So, we all understand who we're listening to. Susan: I have practiced as a family law attorney and still do to some degree for 30 years. My original State of practice was Connecticut, and I was located there in Fairfield County for 25 years or so, with a pretty traditional law practice. Then, branched out on my own and started moving around the country. I moved to California first, so I'm also licensed to practice law there. But I also segued my practice over to mediation, and in fact, that's all from a divorce perspective that I do in the process of helping couples negotiate and settle their divorce issues. I now live in Chicago. Susan: My practice is now entirely online, and I help people both through online divorce mediation services as well as legal coaching services around the world because I can do it online. I feel very lucky that I have been a divorce attorney and operating at a fairly high level. I dealt with a lot of high conflict and high net worth cases during my litigation practice. So, as you mentioned, I have access to a large number of really excellent experts because I've worked with them over the years in my practice, and I love bringing that wealth of knowledge and really that insider side of things to my listeners. Shawn: Yeah, I think that's great. You worked with a lot of high conflict people and now you do a lot of mediation work. Why did you make that shift? Susan: Yeah. So, it was sort of two fold. But really what it boiled down to, and for anyone who's seen the movie that's out right now, Marriage Story, you will understand I think what I'm talking about. But I got involved in divorce litigation when I first got out of law school, because frankly 30 years ago, that's really all that was out there. The litigation process is very adversarial. It is set up on a party A versus party B platform like any other lawsuit. Unfortunately, when you're talking about restructuring families, that is not a very good model for success. Susan: Unfortunately, that process actually drives people further apart, and then, when they find themselves post-divorce needing to co-parent or communicate, the animosity and the adversity that was brought up during the divorce and exacerbated during the litigation process really only makes it worse. It sets up an ongoing conflict cycle. So, mediation is an opportunity for parties to sit down, couples to sit down, and work together in a more cooperative fashion to communicate and restructure their family in a way that works best for all of them. Susan: It's not based on that win lose model, and so now having worked in both formats, the reason I only do mediation at this point is because the results for clients are so much better. Shawn: Let's start by defining what is mediation versus litigation. Can you just give us an overview of what that means, what that process looks like, how it differs? Susan: Sure, and actually that's a great place to start because there is a great deal of misunderstanding at times for people when it comes to mediation. I always hear it called the kinder, gentler way to divorce, or the kumbaya method of divorce. I will tell you, divorce mediation, like any process that you would go through to negotiate or resolve the issues of a divorce, it takes effort. It has its moments where it's not an easy process, but divorce mediation is based upon a principle of the two parties sitting down with a neutral professional, that could be an attorney like myself. It could be a financial professional. Susan: I know a lot of professionals who are financial advisors, who also are mediators, or therapists, or other professionals, but they sit down with a trained professional who's there to help them identify the issues that they need to resolve in the divorce, to give them an understanding of the law, and context, and nuance around those issues. Then, really importantly, to support both of them in having the difficult conversations that need to be had on how those issues are going to be resolved, with an eye to identifying what works best for all of them. Again, we're always in mediation looking for the third solution. Susan: We're not looking for the win for one side and a loss for the other. We're looking for that third solution that allows everyone to get as much of what they want on a needs base or interest based perspective, so that everyone walks away with a decision and with agreements that incorporate as much as possible what they've chosen that they can and cannot live with. Shawn: Let's give a concrete example of that, and I'm just thinking of, I want to just use a very simple case. Let's just say we have a house, a couple of retirement accounts, a couple of cars. How would I know when to use mediation and what would that look like for me versus going the traditional route and what would that mediation process look like start to finish? Susan: The two processes, they look similar because any method that you're going to use to resolve your divorce is going to sort of go through the same stages. You're going to have the quantifying or the pulling together of information stage. In litigation, we call that discovery. In mediation, we call it information gathering phase, but then you're going to discuss the issues. Then, you're going to come to agreement on the issues in 95% of the cases. So, the difference with mediation is, in litigation everything is done on a compulsory manner and fashion. Motions are filed, requests for orders are made, requests for production are made. Susan: Everything has time limits, and rules, and things are done because you are under court orders to do them. The difference is, in mediation, everything is done by agreement, including the fact that the parties are in mediation at all. Mediation is 100% voluntary as opposed to litigation, which people can be dragged kicking and screaming into, or if they ignore it, it's going to happen without them. So, the mediation process itself, just as a litigation case would start, does start with the information gathering. But it's not done in that fashion where you exchange compulsory requests for information. Susan: We sit down with your mediator, with the two clients, and compile all of the necessary information by agreement that we're going to do that as a part of the transparency of the process. That has a lot of different effects. The biggest one being it takes much less time to pull together all the information because we are talking about what everyone needs to see, wants to see, and agreeing to pull it together. It's also much less expensive because the parties are not utilizing legal counsel, filing of motions, all of which that they pay their attorneys for. Susan: It's usually much more successful, because nobody will drag their feet usually in the same fashion because, again, they've agreed that they're coming to the table to work through the process. So, in many ways, I've seen litigation cases where we have literally spent years, you mentioned a simple case where there's a house and some accounts, et cetera, that could take a relatively short period of time with that type of state to value things, because you have either written statements or you can get an appraisal. But when you get into some more complicated cases, or where there's a family owned business, or a cash business, or something of that nature, I've had cases drag out forever in the discovery process because it's so hard to get the information exchange, and that really just doesn't happen in the mediation setting. Shawn: You covered a lot of things that I have some kind of followup questions on. One of them that comes up, I hear every week or so is, oftentimes one party may not be as forthcoming as they should be during mediation. How does one handle that? Susan: So, that happens. Definitely it happens in litigation as well. So, the first thing to remember is, because mediation is by agreement, both of the parties have a reason or reasons why they have agreed to come to the negotiation table in mediation. Mediation tends to move much more quickly than litigation, so maybe time is an issue for them. It's usually infinitely less expensive. Maybe money is an issue for them. Maybe they feel it's a better forum for working through the issues. Whatever their motivations are, that brought them to the table, are the motivations that will also compel people to be forthcoming with the information that is required. Susan: Because what happens is if people do not come forth with requested information, the mediation process comes to a halt. Because if you are sitting at a table and one party does not feel they have the information that they need in order to make the decisions or the agreements that need to be made, the process can't move forward. You are putting people in the position, by making that choice not to be forthcoming, you're putting the other side in the position of having to take you into litigation. Susan: Having to compel your discovery as we were talking about earlier with the motions, and the depositions, and all of that. So, usually, it takes the mediator reminding the parties why they're there, that this is a voluntary process. They agreed to be involved in it, and failure to comply with reasonable requests for information are just by necessity going to bring the process to a conclusion. Shawn: I think that makes sense. I want to ask some technical questions about mediation, or just some basic questions is, you're a mediator and you're also an attorney, do the parties also have their own attorneys? How does that work? Who's actually in these mediation sessions? Susan: The majority of my mediation sessions are just the two people who are going through the process. That is not to say that they don't have outside consulting professionals, and I am very much a believer in the team approach to divorce. I think that everyone usually will need some sort of support as they go through the mediation or divorce process, whatever they're going through. That can include a consulting attorney, because as you point out, I am an attorney, but when I am operating as a mediator, I am not representing either of the parties. Susan: That would be an ethical breach. You can't, as an attorney, represent both sides of an equation. There's a conflict of interest there. So, your mediator, even if they're an attorney, is there as a neutral professional to support both parties. But often, people will need some outside legal advice, and it can be very, very helpful to the mediation process for them to have a good professional that they can go to. Other professionals are people like you CDFAs. I highly recommend using a certified divorce financial analyst, or a financial support team, especially in those cases. Susan: You mentioned that there are often one side of an equation in a divorce where they're not forthcoming with information. There's another paradigm that comes up all the time where we have one party who's pretty financially savvy and the other one who is not, and so, they feel very disempowered in making decisions. So, getting them some support by getting them a financial advisor or getting them a financial planner analyst, can be very helpful to the mediation process because it helps to support them and educate them as they go through. Another person that's often brought in is a therapist. Susan: If we have parenting issues, and maybe we have an issue with special needs for a child or developmental issues around the child's upbringing. So, I very much believe in the team approach to divorce, the divorce process as a whole, and certainly in mediation. Shawn: If I'm thinking about the mediation process, sometimes people think, is it just one meeting in an afternoon, is it multiple meetings? How does that work? Susan: Generally, it's a series of meetings. My mediations tend to be scheduled for two hours at a time, and that is because in two hours we usually can make some headway, start talking about real issues, and making proposals, and making agreements. But beyond two hours, it's an emotional context, right? You're talking about your kids, you're talking about your money, you're talking about separating all those things. So, the emotional content is very fatiguing. You are either in the same room, or if you are with me mediating, you're in the same Zoom meeting, and two hours tends to be where people sort of burn out. Susan: And what I don't want is my clients making decisions out of fatigue, or just saying because they're just so tired and they want to move on saying, "Fine, I'll do that." Because what ends up happening is they then leave the mediation, that session, come back to the next one having thought about it and they will backtrack. And that's harmful to the process only because now we have trust issues, "Well, you said you would do it. I relied upon that and now you're backtracking." So, it's better to do it in bite sized chunks that you can process, take your time, and move through it. Susan: Usually, it depends on the couple. It's usually a few three, two-hour sessions. It can be certainly more than that. I've had cases move faster. There are other types of mediations, so another type of mediation for family cases that people will be acquainted with is a case that's been in the litigation process all along. They're usually close to the courtroom door for trial, and they will, as what I call last ditch effort, resort, to sitting with a mediator for sometimes a full day session to try and resolve those last outstanding issues. Susan: In those cases, usually the attorneys who have been representing the clients all along are involved, and those usually tend to be one marathon type, long day type session. But for people who start in mediation, their divorce process from the start is in mediation, usually two, maybe three-hour sessions and a few of those, but infinitely faster. I will tell you, most of my divorce mediations are completed before the sixth month. California has a six-month waiting period. Connecticut has a 90-day waiting period. Susan: Those are my States of licensure, and we're definitely usually done by the sixth month mark in California, three months ... It just depends on the complications of the issues. Shawn: That's good to know, and if I'm sitting at home listening to this or wherever I may be listening to this, how do I know whether I can go down the mediation route? What kind of things should I be thinking about to say and maybe even conversations I might need to have with my spouse in terms of, "This is an approach that may work for us." Susan: That's another great question, because that's one of my key things I want people to know, that your best approach to divorce is to try mediation in most cases from the beginning. Because if it doesn't work, you always have litigation to fall back on. That will always be there for you. But knowing that it's a possibility at the beginning and giving it a try for all of the reasons of all of the benefits that it has, is something that I love for people to know from the very beginning. So, some of the things to be thinking about are, do you have the ability to self advocate? Susan: And if you don't feel that you do, can you find support to help you with that? There are a lot of amazing divorce coaches, legal coaches like myself. I work with a number of people going through mediation, helping them to strategize what they're looking for. I was just listening to one of your podcast episodes and you mentioned the question, what do you want? That's a huge question when you go into a mediation. You don't go into any process of divorce without knowing where you want to go, or the process is going to happen to you rather than you being an active participant in it. Susan: But that's really the question, is do you have the wherewithal to sit down and do the work that needs to be done with the help of your mediator? And to bring your spouse to the table, people ask me all the time, "Well, I'd love to do mediation. It's less expensive, it's less stressful, it's less time consuming, it's less adversarial. All of those things, it's better. It helps us create communication pathways for our kids so that we can co-parent in the future." All of those are benefits and those are actually the things that help you to talk to your spouse about trying mediation. Susan: Because the thing I always tell people is, the one thing that we do know after having been married to someone is usually what their interests are. And usually, there's one or more benefit of mediation that will appeal to them. Often, it's the cost savings. You and I both know the average divorce in the United States is in the 20s of thousands of dollars per person these days to litigate. Many people, even if they have that kind of money laying around, don't want to spend that kind of money on getting divorce. By the way, it can go much, much higher than that. Mediation is much less expensive. Susan: It tends to be much less time consuming, less stressful. You have much more control over the process. So, knowing whatever you know about your spouse and what would appeal to them, that is usually the best way to approach them and ask them to consider the process. Shawn: That make sense, and can someone come to you for select issues in a divorce? So, let's just say there's 10 things to figure out and they agree upon seven of them, but there's three issues that they still haven't quite resolved yet. Would mediation work for that? Susan: Oh, absolutely. In fact, I often work with couples who maybe have worked out the financial side, but they need help with the parenting plan or vice versa. They know what they want to do parenting wise, but there are certain issues on the side of the finances that they just can't quite resolve. So, you can bring limited issues to mediation. Any sort of any issue can be mediated. Many people who have gone through divorce but then after the divorce there's been a change of circumstances. Someone loses their job, someone gets a big raise, something with the kids comes up and you need to change your parenting plan because children aren't static. Susan: I often mediate that post-dissolution type matter as well. The only thing I would caution, and I just don't want people, because attorneys and mediators are accused often of ramping up, making problems in a divorce that didn't need to be there. What happens sometimes, when a couple comes to a mediator or an attorney to work out issues and they think they've resolved a bunch of them, but they have a couple that still need to be resolved. The thing with a divorce settlement is it's a puzzle. It's not separate blocks of issues. Susan: Everything works together, right? It's a family. So, the money, and the kids, and the house, and all of those things work together. So, sometimes the outstanding issues will have an impact on those issues that they feel they have resolved. So, some of those issues may need to be reworked or looked at again if they don't fit into the overall puzzle context. But, again, that's where mediation is great because you can sit down and talk about, in the broad picture, why maybe perhaps something that they thought they wanted to do isn't going to work in light of another aspect of their settlement that they also would like to accomplish. Shawn: Yeah, that's a good point, is that sometimes it's very hard to isolate particular issues in a divorce, because if you pull on one thing or adjust one thing, it can affect every other item. Susan: Exactly. Shawn: It may work in certain cases, but you have to be open to shifting or changing other parts of the big picture when you do that. Susan: Absolutely. I always tell my clients in mediation, I work off a written agenda. I find people like the visual of an agenda that outlines all of their issues, and then I take notes on it for them as we're going along. I always tell them, although an agenda is a linear thing and item one, item two, item three, and even if we're going to move through it in that order, it doesn't mean that we have to resolve issue one in order to move on to issue two. Often, it's, let's discuss issue one, come up with some possibilities, and then table issue one and work on the next issues because in the end, all of them need to work together. Susan: As an example, someone often wants to keep the marital residence, and both sides may be open to that and may have reasons why they want that to happen. But until you get into the financial side, with support and asset distribution and debt distribution, you may not know if that person can actually afford to maintain the property. So, that's a very common question that will come up, where we have to sort of resolve the support issues and the financial issues in order to know if what they want to do with the house is actually going to work. Shawn: That's great. One last question, which is, at least as it pertains to the mediation, is you do online mediation work. I know you've done in person, of course, work as well. How do you find the difference between just the setting, be it a video call versus everyone's huddled in a conference room kind of atmosphere? Can you just kind of give us your pros, cons, thoughts about that? Susan: Yeah. It's interesting because I do now have an entirely online practice, and I have to say, especially for divorce mediation, I've actually found that the parties having the ability to have a little bit of space, because they do not need to be in the same physical location in order to mediate online, that's actually been a benefit for most of my clients. That they feel more able to emotionally deal with the conversations that need to be had as opposed to sitting just a few feet away from each other in the same room. Susan: I've had many people, when I had a brick and mortar practice, who would come and I would meet with a couple for a consult to just decide if they wanted to mediate. And in the end, it would come down to one of them saying, "I loved all the benefits, but I just emotionally don't feel like I can sit in the same room with my spouse and do this at this moment in time." Because as we know, divorce, yes it is a financial transaction, we're talking about money, et cetera. But in reality, it is an emotional transaction as well. Susan: And so, the video context gives people a little more space, but still you have the ability to see the other person because 85% of our communication is visual, and most of that is our facial expressions and voice. What we say and how we say it, our voice inflections. So, much of that is still readily available in the online context. So, for me, in my experiences, it's actually been a benefit to the mediation process, and most clients are thrilled to be online. They don't have to sit in traffic. They don't have to get a babysitter. They don't have to leave work early. Susan: I know you work online quite a bit and so you know some of those benefits. It has translated very well to the mediation practice. In fact, I train other mediators in how to conduct their mediations online, because this is such a quickly growing aspect of the mediation practice. My colleagues are fascinated by it. Shawn: Yeah, and I think that's one of the hardest things is when you are getting divorced, having to be three feet away from the person you're getting divorced from, staring right at them the whole time. It can make the emotional side of things amplify them quite a bit, just being in the same room. They're funny in retrospect even from the client's perspective, but a lot of times where someone yells, stomps out, runs out of the room, just can't stand being in person with that person they're getting divorced from. Shawn: It's divorce and it's not a pleasant process to begin with. This isn't a civil suit business dispute. So, I think there are a lot of advantages to the online perspective for people who might not have considered it as well, just from that. Susan: Yeah, the ability to, in any way that we can, keep the emotional content a little at a lower level is beneficial to the process. Because the minute people start making decisions from that emotional place, from anger, from fear, from hurt, whatever, divorce unfortunately doesn't embody usually a lot of positive emotions. It's usually a lot of negative emotional content, and the higher that level, the harder it is for people to make rational reason decisions. As you know, these are decisions that are going to live with you, and your family, and your children for years to come. Susan: So, you want to make them from the best emotional place possible, and I'm not saying that it's always easy. But another thing that I do is I incorporate mindfulness techniques into my mediation practice and encourage my clients to have a mindfulness practice if they're open to that, only because it does help. When the emotions start to rise up, to be able to take that step back and find some space. It's really important to be able to think clearly, and that's another reason, going back to where I said the sessions are usually only about two hours long. Susan: I want people making decisions in a space where they feel that those decisions were good ones, or at least made from a reasonable place and that they can live with them. Shawn: That's excellent and thank you for coming on and explaining the basics and the essential parts of mediation. It's not a subject that I talk about too often on my podcast. Why don't you give us the best way to contact you and to learn more? Hopefully, have people potentially work with you in the future if mediation or other services are right for them. Susan: Absolutely. Pretty much everything about me can be found on my website, which is divorceinabetterway.com. My email is susan@divorceinabetterway.com. I encourage anyone who's going through divorce to take a look at the website. I have a lot of curated resources, most of them free, or special discounts that guests on my podcast have offered. I have your book going up on my website shortly, so that people can find it who have listened to the podcast, or go there. But I like to bring as much information to people because that is so empowering in the divorce process. Susan: Get your education, get your information. So, divorceinabetterway.com, and then also the podcast has its own website which can be found through Divorce in a Better Way, or at divorceandbeyondpod.com. Shawn: And outside of mediation you were telling me you do a few other services. Just so people can know, can you describe those? Susan: Yeah, so one of my biggest areas of practice at the moment is legal coaching, which is a little bit different than divorce coaching, because what I'm doing is getting involved in cases. Usually, they're either high conflict cases, where someone is dealing with a high conflict ex that can be a narcissist, a borderline personality disordered person, or just someone who is very difficult to deal with, or high net worth cases. I'm helping the client to learn to manage those relationships, manage the communication so that they can have as much control over their lives as possible. Susan: I help with strategizing, with negotiation strategies. I've been a divorce attorney for 30 years. I negotiate every day of my life. I have to stop myself from doing it in the grocery line because it's so second nature for me. But your average person, unless they have negotiation in their business life, that's not a normal, that's not something that many people are comfortable with. So, I work with just a lot of clients on how to identify what they want and then how to strategize and negotiate to get that in the divorce process. I work with people all around the world in that context. I have clients across this country, Australia, Europe, Canada, all over. Shawn: Well, Susan, thank you very much for coming on the show. I really enjoyed the conversation and I hope the listeners will, too. Susan: Well, and thank you so much for having me, and thank you for coming on my show. Again, I loved that episode and so do my listeners. So, thank you. Shawn: Now, before you go, I want to make sure you get some really important information. I'm going to tell you about a few things that maybe of interest to you. First as a favor, is if you could leave a review, if you're on the iTunes store, leave a review on iTunes, or if you search Divorce and Your Money on a website called Trustpilot or on Google, you can leave a review there. It's quick, it's anonymous. It only takes a few seconds and I really, really appreciate your feedback. I have lots of reviews on iTunes and on Trustpilot, and I appreciate hearing your stories. Shawn: Also, on divorceandyourmoney.com, you can get lots of great information. Of course, you can book a 30-minute strategy session directly with me. There's two types of strategy calls you can book, just a normal strategy session, where we discuss the questions that are most pressing to you regardless of where you are in the divorce process, be at the beginning, towards the end, or in the middle. It doesn't really matter. There's lots of great information we can cover during that strategy call. Also, we have a document review call. Shawn: It's been one of the biggest things that we've done over the past year, which is you can send me your documents, be it your financial affidavit, a settlement agreement, or other documents that you would like for me to review. Then, I review those in advance of the call and then we get to discuss them in-depth as part of a strategy session and get specific answers to some of the specific documents and things that you are considering. Also, for those who need ongoing support, we do have a few options for ongoing support, but regardless, it all starts with a coaching call that you can book at divorceandyourmoney.com. Shawn: Don't forget to also get a copy of my new book. It's called Divorce and Your Money: How to Avoid Costly Divorce Mistakes. It's available on my website, or also on Amazon. You just look me up and make sure you get the new edition. It is filled with excellent information regarding the divorce process, and I know that you will find it helpful. Once you've read the book, be sure to leave a review. That really helps me. I appreciate your feedback and it also helps other people as they try and find this information. And finally, last but not least by any means is on the store at divorceandyourmoney.com, if you click on the store button, you can get access to the full archive of podcast episodes. Shawn: There's over 200 episodes, and what's great about the store link is that the episodes are organized in neat buckets, and they're organized by topic. So, it's very easy to follow along with the information, and it is easy to pick out the key topics that matter most to you. You can get all of those podcast episodes in the store. Thank you so much for listening. I'm your host, Shawn Leamon, MBA and Certified Divorce Financial Analyst. Take care.    

Join our growing entrepreneur community on Facebook: www.facebook.com/groups/139597470073188/ Got any questions? Ask me on Facebook: www.facebook.com/AleksanderVitkinPage/ Check out my free business training: www.businessmentor.com Aleks: Hey, it’s Aleks here, and I’m with Shawn. Shawn is a member of the Business Mentor Insiders. Welcome, Shawn. You’re Irish and in Boston, but I’ll cut to the chase. You were born in the United States, you’re also American, so you’re a fake Irishman, but let’s talk about business. So you had some good news from last month. What’s the good news that you’d like to share with all of us? Shawn: Yeah, just short of a five-figure month, the first five-figure month, so I guess $400 short, so I’m super excited, I’m learning a lot, implementing a lot, and things are moving. Aleks: Wait, five-figure month, let’s talk specifics here. People like specifics. Everyone’s saying all this figure-this, figure-that. What are the specifics? Shawn: So I got some new clients on board, and I’ve been helping them with understand more about their actual research, and helping them progress their understanding in marketing, and then from that then I’ve been able to close more clients for copywriting services because I’ve got that trust, I’ve got that authority from helping them, and that’s pretty much what’s been going on. So these clients have been coming back to me, and they’re willing to invest money and they’re working with me because of that reason, so this month has been pretty much based on that. Clients that I’ve raised my prices, they’re happy to pay that, and as a result, I’ve had more revenue. Aleks: Right, and what exactly was your revenue? What was the number, if you want to share, of course. Shawn: $9,555 in total. Aleks: Alright, ’cause some people don’t know what five-figures is. All right, so that’s very close to 10K. Congratulations, and what’s the profit margin on that in your business? Shawn: About 90% or so, around that. Aleks: Okay, so you’re delivering. A lot of the service you’re still delivering yourself basically. Okay, that’s fair. What type of service are you currently selling? It’s marketing, but more specifically? Shawn: So I’m offering them help with wherever there’s a message, whether it’s their emails, whether it’s a website, thelanding page, the sales page, I’m coming in and I’m helping them revamp that and to connect with their audience that they’re after. Aleks: It’s a copywriting service essentially. Shawn: Right, pretty much, yeah. Aleks: Just to use the more common name. You don’t like saying that it’s copywriting? Shawn: I prefer to say help you enhance your marketing message, but then that’s just copy. The connotation of copywriting these days is people just getting some kind of cheap job. A lot of prospects I talked to think it’s just this 200, $300 job. Aleks: Oh boy, are they mistaken. If you want results to copywriting, you’re gonna pay, you’re gonna pay. Shawn: And that’s why there’s a lot of education on the call where I’m like, hold on a wee second here. Take your time and listen to what I got to tell you. Aleks: Just ask them how much money they’ve made with their copywriting efforts, and they don’t know, and they don’t know because they didn’t work with a proper copywriter. They didn’t work with a proper copywriter because they think you can hire a copywriter for $100. No, a good copywriter knows what’s up, just like with anything else, almost. Shawn: So it’s been a really good learning experience since then. The engine of copywriting, I’ve learned a lot, but there’s still so much more. I feel like I’ve only hit the tip of the iceberg kind of thing. There’s so much more to dive into.

Why switch from a fun, high-flying job to a stressful one? Property management is the “Golden Ticket” to finding new properties and creating value to help others. Today, I am talking to Shawn Johnson of Independence Capital Property Management about putting profitability before adding more doors. If your company isn’t profitable, than you can’t create value for the community it serves. You’ll Learn... [02:00] Property Manager with Spare Time: Shawn serves as an instructor pilot for San Juan County Sheriff’s Office.  [02:40] NARPM professional member, chapter president, and residential management professional (RMP). [04:30] Passion for Property Management: Happiness comes not from avoiding problems, but finding fun challenges. [06:02] Innovative Incentive: Competing for staff resources increases salaries, compensation, and revenue to successfully facilitate growth and manage the company. [07:35] DiSC Personality Type: Motivated by money or recognition? [10:15] What makes a business profitable? Finding perfect customer/market fit via value-ads and associated fees.  [13:42] Charge fees to compensate for extra time, energy, and effort without extra pay. [14:57] Cost Savings: Implement less labor-intensive work (paper checklists) and more technology (videos). [15:55] Tools and Software: Transition from a brick-n-mortar business to remote/virtual office using G Suite, Process Street, AppFolio, and RingCentral. [18:35] Current Client Base: Push out and justify new fee structure; talk them through it. [22:15] Sense of Scarcity: Feel safer and more comfortable raising fees and rates. [24:05] People are willing to pay for good service and experiences.  Tweetables Golden Ticket: Finding new properties, and creating value for others. Property management is never dull. Some people aren’t motivated by money, but freedom. Charge fees to compensate for extra time, energy, and effort. Resources Independence Capital Property Management National Association of Residential Property Managers (NARPM) Darren Hunter G Suite Process Street AppFolio RingCentral TalkRoute DGS 7: Increasing Fees in Property Management with Darren Hunter - Part 1 DGS 8: Increasing Fees in Property Management with Darren Hunter - Part 2 DGS 9: Increasing Fees in Property Management with Darren Hunter - Part 3 DGS 80: Automating Your Business with Process Street with Vinay Patankar DGS 82: Real Estate Revolution with Nat Kunes of AppFolio DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrow Website Score Quiz Transcript Jason: Welcome, DoorGrow hackers, 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 are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker. DoorGrow hackers 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 businesses and their owners. We want to change 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. Now, let’s get into the show. And today, my guest is Shawn Johnson of Independence Capital Property Management. Shawn, welcome to the show. Shawn: Thanks, Jason. Thanks for having me. Jason: Glad to have you. Shawn, we’re going to be getting into the topic today of profitability before more doors. When I mentioned that before the show, you’re like, “Yes, the cart before the horse.” Let’s get into that, but first, I want to give people a little bit of background on you. I’ve got your bio here and I’m going to read this and then maybe you can come and introduce yourself. Shawn grew up in Aztec, Nex Mexico. After completion of his Associate’s Degree from Glendale Community College, Shawn began flight school in Scottsdale, Arizona. Shawn’s career as a helicopter pilot provided opportunities to fly internationally into Mexico, off-shore into the gulf of Mexico, and as an EMS helicopter pilot. Shawn currently flies for the San Juan County Sheriff’s Office as an instructor pilot in his spare time. Shawn began his career in real estate in 2013 and has been investing in real estate since 2003. Shawn is currently a professional member of the National Association of Residential Property Managers and has earned his Residential Management Professional (RMP) designation. In 2017, he served as the NARPM Albuquerque Metro Chapter President and has been elected to serve at the 2020 Chapter President. Shawn enjoys golf, baseball, hunting, and fishing. He apparently is also connected with lots of really lengthy phrases and titles including his business name. Shawn, give us a little bit of a background. Who’s Shawn and how did you get into property management, so people can understand why should they listen to this guy say anything. Shawn: How did I get into property management? It’s kind of by default. My wife pulled me into it. She was a corporate paralegal for a large investment firm in California and in that process we moved, had kids, we moved to New Mexico, and she decided, “You know what? I think there is a need here.” There is definitely a need and we’ve started a management company. I was still flying helicopters at the time but she’s like, “You know what? I can’t do it alone. You’ve got to get out of the fun job and get into the stressful job.” So, I quit flying and here I am. Jason: And you regretted it ever since, right? Shawn: No, I actually really enjoy it. Jason: Good. Shawn: Your introduction to property management is spot on. I think there’s so much gold in it and it’s just really creating value for people. I really enjoy it. Really, it’s a nice “in” to investing in properties. I love investing in properties and this is like a golden ticket to find new properties. Jason: Property managers and everyone in the industry love to joke about how hard the industry is, but there is this passion for it that everyone seems to develop. I think happiness comes not through avoiding problems and challenges. It comes through finding challenges that are exciting to work on and property management is never dull. Shawn: Yeah, that’s a fact. Jason: Never dull, right? Shawn: No. Jason: Let’s get into this topic. Why is it important to have profitability before focusing on getting more doors? Shawn: For us, it was always a mission to be profitable right at the start. Back in the day, we’re just a management fee company. Because of that, we relented in the growth. We had to find ways to make money and compensate our employees appropriately. We live in a very blue collar town that is oil- and gas-driven and the salaries are very hard to compete with. We had to find ways to compensate them nice so that they weren’t pulled away from property management into oil and gas industry. Those are the things that were important to us. If you’re not a profitable company, you can’t create value for the community that you serve. You just can’t. You have to have money to be able to grow and expand and introduce new programs into your business. That was our mission right at the beginning. Jason: Because you’re competing with oil and gas for staff resources in your market, you’ve had to probably have a higher salary base than what would be typical for most management companies in most markets. Shawn: Yeah, they sell. Jason: In order to do that, you probably had to get a little bit innovative. Anytime we have a constraint as an entrepreneur, we have a challenge like that to overcome, we have to innovate. What were some of the steps you took to create a space that you could afford to have really good team members?  Shawn: One step was to create an incentivized comp plan. Our property managers are licensed real estate brokers, but we pay them off a percentage as the whole of the portfolio, not just a management fee. Anytime they bring in a late fee or an annual inspection that’s performed on the property, then they get a portion of that fee as well. That help us increase their annual revenue as well because it hurts when they lose a property and when we get a new property on, it actually helps them gain their salary as well. Jason: Okay. You’ve basically created the natural incentive for them to help facilitate growth and help successfully manage the company. And if the company does better, they do better.  Shawn: Exactly. Jason: I find that a lot of people, especially those that on a DISC profile that are not DI, they don’t have a high economic score. They’re not super motivated by additional money. As entrepreneurs, we tend to naturally think everyone’s like us; they love money. Those individuals that are not motivated by more money are more motivated by recognition. When you pick these team members and you have this comp plan, are you looking for people that also operate somewhat in a BDM role? Are they more of a sales-driven type of person? Are they a DI DISC personality type or more on the extroverted side? Shawn: No, we actually don’t want to mix those two―BDM and a portfolio management. You’re right. A lot of people are not motivated financially like entrepreneurs are, but what we found is giving unlimited vacation time, some perks to the business, having the ability to work from home or wherever they are. Everything that we do is electronic and digital anyway, so those perks. A lot of them are young parents and if they need to pick up their kid at school at three o’clock, who am I to say? As long as your job is done and you’re doing it effectively, then we don’t put constraints on that. I think that pools in that attraction to the job. Jason: I find those to be huge incentives, similar to running our virtual teams. Being able to work virtually and work from home, having flex time, being able to set your own schedule and as long as you’re getting work done, and being able to take vacations when you need to or want to, that’s huge. People want freedom. They want autonomy and that tends to attract the more entrepreneurial people we would like in our business. To what you’re saying, yeah it makes sense. The BDM portfolio thing would be segregated. But also that allows you, in your market, to have compensation that is on par with maybe what they might be getting in the oil and gas industry or at least competitive, right? Shawn: Absolutely. I would say that our salaries, once they have a full portfolio, they’re making as much, if not more, than what they would get comped in oil and gas industry which is good. That’s what we want. Jason: Right, and in oil and gas industry, they probably don’t have some of those other perks, I would imagine? Shawn: Oh, not at all. Jason: You’ve made your business intentionally competitive to maintain good people. Let’s get deeper into the profitability aspect. Since you’re paying more money for people, how do you make sure this is profitable? Shawn: We really evaluated the things that we did as a business beyond just the normal management stuff. What are the value-adds that we do every day? If they are a true value-add, can we add an associated value-add fee to it? We kind of looked at it that way. We went through Darren Hunter’s program and it was phenomenal. It definitely revolutionized the way we thought about our fee structure, but it also helped us think about and be cautious of those clients that are cost-conscious. If they are and all they care about is the cost of the service, then they may not be the right fit. It naturally brings in that right type of clientele when you have a fee structure beyond just a flat fee and everybody else is doing the same flat fee or whatever percentage fee. So, that was huge for us. As far as profitability goes, it varies in leasing season, but in our leasing season we’re about 44% profitability. Leasing fees and lease renewal fees, those things have to happen in the property management business. But to actually gain revenue from it is extremely important. I could look at our business structure and see that we have a leasing fee and we have a lease renewal fee, but my competitors lease homes in twice the amount of time that we do and they don’t push for lease renewals. So me as an investor, I’d be upset if they didn’t try to keep my tenants in a lease especially through the winter time. Such a cyclical business, we have seasons, and you don’t want it to go vacant in December. That little fee is nothing compared to having a vacant home in those times. Jason: What other fees did you guys start to identify and add going through this process? Shawn: We did a lease administration fee for our tenants. That was pretty big. The annual inspection fees—that’s a third party vendor that’s an actual inspector and he’ll come inspect the houses on an annual basis—there’s a little upcharge for that. A year-end statement fee. We found that our controller list just spinning a ton of time preparing for the year-end stuff and making sure everything was clear to send off to our clients’ accountants, so we incorporated a fee in that. Then a maintenance coordination fee. Our maintenance coordinators, we have one and we just hired a new one so we have two now, and they’re just super busy. Coordinating maintenance is a huge task and it’s such an important one here. We do have a small fee for that. There’s probably a bunch more. I’m not in the day-to-day as much anymore, so I’m kind of not thinking of the big ones. Obviously the bulk ones were leasing fee and lease renewal. Those are big and they’re often overlooked. Jason: One of the things you did then was you identified all the different situations in which it was taking extra time, extra energy, extra effort, you weren’t getting paid anything extra, and then just systematically saying, “Hey, can we add a fee to ensure that we’re getting compensated for this additional work?” to make sure that you business is profitable. Shawn: Sure. Jason: Okay. We’ve got somebody watching says, “Can you list the fees again?” I had down a leasing fee, a lease renewal fee, lease administration fee, annual inspection fee, year-end statement fee, and a maintenance coordination fee. Shawn: Those are the big ones. Kelly, reach out to me. I will give you the list. Jason: Slow down. Kelly you can rewatch this as many times. This is being recorded and it’s also on Facebook. Also for those watching this later, we have full transcription when this comes out on iTunes and you can check that out on our blog at doorgrow.com. Let’s get into other ways in which you’ve made this profitable. So, obviously increasing fees. You weren’t able to decrease cost with staff. This allowed you to increase cost with staff. Were there any cost savings things that you were able to implement? Shawn: Probably just technology and trying to not be super labor-intensive. I would say that doing things like move-in, move-out videos instead of running through an entire list on paper and whatnot. It takes a little bit less time than doing it on paper. Those types of things. It’s just efficiencies in the office. Then we set up our team literally to work from anywhere. If you’re on vacation, you want to check on a lease or whatever, it’s possible and super helpful. Those things help with driving cost down because you’re not focusing on the, “Hey, John. Are you back at the office? Can you reach me that file?” That’s just a waste of time. Jason: What are some of the things you’ve done to enable and facilitate this transition from being a brick-and-mortar business that operates on sneakernet, where everybody is walking into each other’s offices saying, “Hey, do you have this?” to being a virtual team that they can work from basically anywhere? Shawn: The big things are softwares that enable cloud access. Our general office is on G Suite. Everything operates through there and then our processes are through Process Street which is super helpful and can be accessed anywhere again. AppFolio for our software. They are super tech savvy as far as online stuff. I wish they’d open their API, that’s my shout out to them. Jason: Yeah, I’ve heard that a lot. Shawn: I imagine you have. And then RingCentral. We have a team in Mexico and I’ve got a team member in the Philippines, and they literally can call our office in Farmington, New Mexico. Then we have another Flagstaff office as well. It’s so easy because they can pick up their phone and it acts like they’re dialing from their desk. That was a key point we had to set up six years ago which was, back then, it wasn’t really heard of. Jason: Cool. I use all of those software or have in the past except AppFolio. Shawn: You don’t need that. Jason: We’ve had Process Steet on the show. Great interview. For those listening, I recommend you check it out. G Suite were a Google Apps reseller, so if people need help with that we can certainly help you get set up. We used RingCentral for several years. We eventually switched to Talkroute because we found that most of our team weren’t doing a lot of calling on our team and if they did, they had unlimited cell phone minutes. Talkroute just allows you to auto attendant and the call routing and the extensions but they can dial through the Talkroute app out of their phone and then it just uses their cell phone minutes. It’s free basically for outbound calls. It can also receive text messages. We switched to Talkroute and probably saved ourselves about $400 or $500 a month. Shawn: That’s big. I love it. Jason: What are some other things you focused on then to facilitate profitability? You’ve got the fees. You’re paying your team well so you can compete. You’ve got your leveraging technology. You’ve set up your team to be more virtual which is scary for a lot of property managers who’ve been doing things a certain way. Anything else? Shawn: What I would say is tap into your current client base. You probably have a ton of really loyal clients. Don’t forget to just really push out your new fee structure and justify those fees. Believe in what you’re charging to those current clients. When we switched over to a new fee structure, hardly anybody left. We had 12 clients leave on our first push. We found that those 12 clients were probably 12 good clients to leave. Jason: Out of how many clients? Shawn: We were at 614 at the time, 12 left. We had a second push and we did this in phases because you have to be really sensitive to homes that are vacant. You don’t want to increase fees on somebody that has a vacant home. That’s a stressful time already. We certainly don’t want to increase feels on a client that has not been in your portfolio for less than a year. They don’t really know and trust you yet. Then I haven’t built that loyalty for you. So don’t touch those yet. Once you segment those out and you found the client base that you really want to go after, then do it. Don’t just send out an email and hope that they sign into an agreement. You have got to follow-up. If you don’t follow-up, they’re just not going to believe in what you’re trying to do. So, make sure that you follow through with all of that. I’ve heard of people, “Hey, I increased my fees and I sent out this email. I got no response,” and I’m like, “Well, did you do anything else besides that? Because you got to call them. You got to pick up the phone and just talk them through.” It’s a scary thing. I just had a fee increase from one of the vendors that we use in our business and I was like, “What the heck?” My initial reaction was, “What the heck is going on?” Then, they talked me through and I was like, “You know what? It’s all good. We’re happy with you guys. We’re going to move forward. It’s all good.” I think that’s most people. Jason:Yeah, have a conversation. If you’re looking for the process that you went through or that Darren Hunter could have outlined—we’ve had him on the show before a few times—check out the episodes with Darren Hunter. Great content. He gave a lot away here in the show. You can check that out. I just saw him actually in Phoenix. So, 12 of out 614 that’s maybe 2%. Shawn: That was the first push. We did lose more the second round. There was probably a total number of 65. I can’t remember exactly that left, but our profitability went up. Jason: You lose 10% but you’re making more money, then not such a big deal, and usually those are the worst properties in your portfolio. What tends to happen then is you increase your revenue. You lose your profit. You lose a little bit of clientele, but you’re also losing the ones that take up the most amount of time, typically. Those particular doors probably have 10 times higher operational costs than a good door. By losing that pile in your portfolio, you’re gaining room to manage a lot more and you’re gaining a lot more leverage. Your profitability probably goes up even more because your operational costs go down significantly by cutting out the most challenging, most micromanagy, and most price sensitive owners that are the most challenging properties. Hopefully, people are a little bit sold to this idea, “Hey, maybe I can increase my fees,” because I do believe that property management businesses in general are not charging enough. They really deserve to be paid well for what they do. They provide a really valuable service and I feel there’s been this false scarcity that’s been created by marketers. Focus on SEO, pay-per-click and these sort of things where it feels like it’s difficult to grow. It feels scarce but they’re 70% self-managing in single family residential. There’s tons of blue ocean, there’s tons of opportunity, the scarcity is false. It really doesn’t exist. For those listening, if you feel like things are scarce, we should have a conversation because we can get you out of that mode of scarcity so that you feel safer and more comfortable raising your fees and rates. I believe that’s a false perception that doesn’t need to exist in the industry and it creates a problem for the entire industry—this sense of scarcity. It creates this competition that I don’t think really needs to be there. Really, the industry as a whole needs to be building each other up and helping each other out. You seen that being involved in NARPM. Shawn: Yeah, that’s right. NARPM’s big on that. Jason: Shawn, this has been really helpful. Any other other takeaways or things that you’ve explored your journey to make your business more profitable to grow your company? Shawn: I think most people get a little scared because of the competition and they’re worried about raising their fees. Let me just tell you that our competitors don’t charge anything besides a tenant, whatever, management fee. I almost said the fees. I don’t know if that was against the rules or something like that. Jason: I’m not a property manager so I guess you and I can talk about it. But someone else might hear it. We’re not colluding. Shawn: We are not colluding. Just don’t be fearful of that. I think that if you’re truly creating a value for your customer and clients that that is irrelevant, that people are willing to pay for good service and good experiences. When you raise your fees, it has a natural thing that happens that you get rid of the lower-end properties. The lower end properties cost you more money, they cost you more time, they cost you more stress, and they cost you more employees. They will burn out on the low-end properties. Once you bring on nicer properties and you keep to a standard, they are willing to pay the higher fees and get better service, and it naturally increases your profits. That’s a big win for us. Jason: Awesome. Well, Shawn it sounds like you’re doing great things in Farmington, New Mexico. Did you ever think that you would just end up in Farmington, New Mexico? Shawn: That’s the thing about New Mexico. It’s the land of entrapment, but it just brings you back. I’ve lived all over the country and it’s a good place to raise a family. Jason: Awesome. Shawn, I appreciate you coming onto the show. Thanks for being here. I appreciate your insight and I wish you continued success. Shawn: Thank you, Jason. I appreciate your time. Jason: If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors and make a difference then maybe we should have a conversation. So, reach out. There is a lot of opportunity in the industry to grow a property management business right now. I think we’re on the cusp of a wave. I think the industry is going to blossom and grow. There’s a lot of big and good things happening when it comes to technology, when it comes to software, when it comes to awareness. We would love to be a part of facilitating that journey with you and I would love the opportunity to be your coach in your business. Reach out to DoorGrow, let’s start with a conversation, and I will give you a free training on some of the secrets and tips. I call it DoorGrow secrets on how you can avoid some of the most common pitfalls of preventing growth. Just reach out and say, “Hey, I want DoorGrow Secrets.” You might find it so interesting and get so excited, you’ll want to work with us. That’s my hope. So, we will talk with you all soon, to everyone’s mutual growth. Bye everyone. You just listened to the DoorGrow Show. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet, in the DoorGrow Club. 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. 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 at doorgrow.com. 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.

Visit us at divorceandyourmoney.com for the #1 divorce resources in the USA and get personalized help. Learn about coaching services here.   Thank you for listening! Find a transcript of this episode below.   Chris: Hey everybody, it’s Chris Denmon with Denmon and Pearlman out of St. Petersburg, Florida and today I’m with Shawn Leamon. Did I pronounce that right Sean?Shawn: You got it right.Chris: All right. Shawn Leamon, who is a certified divorce financial analyst and the host of a podcast which is Divorce and Your Money. Which is how I found Shawn and we’re continuing our series today. We’re interviewing tangential professionals in other professions that can help our clients get through the divorce process in the best possible way and help them move onto their lives in the best possible way. And so Shawn, you’ll be talking to some of my future clients and my current clients. And take it away, what did I miss? What else about you should we let people know?Shawn: No, I think that’s great. I’m a certified divorce financial analyst. I get to work with people all over the country. My podcast, Divorce and Your Money is probably the largest divorce podcast that’s out there. I like to help people as much as possible because you know, divorce in many aspects, financially, legally and emotionally as well, is a very complex process for someone. So I like to help at least in my small segment where I can. Chris: Absolutely. And yeah, the same idea, right? So when I’m a lawyer and I do lawyer things, and my clients are going through the process, they’ll come to whether it’s for a figuring out a budgeting issue, or whether it’s a tax issue and I’m not an expert at that. That’s not what I know best, and I turn to people like you to help me answer those questions, and a lot of times, it’s easier for me to just introduce my clients to somebody like you, or you to you because then you can help them get the answers they need better than I can do it. And you and I were talking before we started, and I know you from your podcast. I also know you because I was looking up an answer to something that here I am, the divorce attorney, I didn’t know the answer, and you had answer it on a very detailed, excellent blog post that I was able to get the answer for me and then share it with my client. And you’re able to help that way. Chris: So, thank you for taking some time to chat with me today. I appreciate it.Shawn: Thanks for having me. I’m glad to be here.Chris: With my clients, I have two different phases where I think they need help and I’m going to kind of just mention that and let you kind of help educate in any way that you can. But I know that I have clients that right at the very beginning of the process, in anticipation of a divorce, or in anticipation really of a separation where they have one household and they’re getting ready to potentially move into two households, and they have to figure out how to budge for it. Plan for it and make the right decisions with their finances. That’s kind of one bucket where my clients need help.Chris: And then the other bucket is when it’s all said and done, you know as a divorce lawyer I think we’re good at getting things done and then we shake hands and then we release our clients into the wild, right? And sometimes we have clients like maybe a needy spouse who for the last 20 years, she hasn’t really done any of the budgeting and I don’t want to leave them … I don’t want to shake hands and let them go off and have them ill-prepared. And that’s another, that’s an area where I think that they need help. Is that kind of your experience?Shawn: Yeah. You know I think the main focus for anyone who’s thinking about divorce is already in the process, really boils down almost to two things. The first is knowing what you have. The number of conversations where people don’t know they have a retirement account, or you need to know … I mean, if you have a house, you need to know what it’s worth and have a good sense of that. If you have a mortgage, or if you have other debts somewhere. If you have credit cards. Regardless of whether you were the spouse who took care of the finances, or has never seen them at all, your first step is just to figure out, “Well, what are we splitting up?” And from that comes the second question which is, or a second answer that one should know the answer to is, what do you want?Shawn: The other problem or other area I see everyday is that, well you know you have a house that’s worth a certain amount, you know you have these retirement accounts, you know you have maybe a little credit card debt or whatever the case may be, but you don’t really have a clear sense of, “Well, what do I want when this process is over? What will I need to live?” Most of the people, at least that I deal with getting divorced, I like to say, “Look, you’re going to probably die these days at 100 years old. So if you’re 50, you’ve got 50 years of thinking and planning to do. What are you going to be thinking about over the next two or three or five decades? And are the decisions that you’re making right now, splitting up your family and your assets and everything else, are these really kind of what you want for the long-term and are they working for you?”Chris: Sure. And I mean, how do you help people engage in that conversation when … Because divorce is so life-changing, right? People tend to identify with what they’ve been for an extended period of time, especially in a long-term marriage. And then now, sometimes, am I right, would you say that sometimes they don’t even know what it is they want yet? Shawn: Yeah, it’s a great point. And one of the things that I try and tell everyone, which is very hard to do in practice, but actually makes a lot of sense is to depersonalize what you’re going through when it comes to making your decisions. Or the way I like to phrase it is, pretend like you’re the CEO of this process and you’re the businessman, businesswoman and what would just a rational person looking from 30,000 feet think about and would recommend for you and your situation? Meaning, if you’re going through a divorce, there’s any number of overwhelming emotions that make it hard to have any sort of clarity of thought. You know you have got a million questions, you’ve got to figure out this process, let’s forget all of that for a moment. Let’s just pretend that we take … Or the way I do it, or the way I speak about it with people, is let’s just take at least the asset part, the financial part. Let’s just put it all on a piece of paper. Your name doesn’t even have to be on it. It can John Doe or Jane Doe. What would you recommend Jane Doe for their future given what they have right now? And what do you think makes sense?Shawn: and once you kind of remove the you from it, I know it sounds weird, is to take yourself out of this process, but when it comes to making decisions, if you make emotions kind of cloud your judgment, that’s where people can go very far astray or end up making pretty poor decisions. Once you kind of depersonalize it a bit, you can really sit there and just treat them as X’s and O’s or numbers on a sheet of paper and say, “Hey! This person that I’m looking at on this piece of paper should probably do X instead of Y. Or take more of one asset or ask for more support, or ask for less support. And would be better off if we did whatever.”Shawn: And it becomes actually, for most people, a lot clearer pretty quickly once they take the me out of it.Chris: Sure. You got me thinking of the scenario where a party, they’re emotional to a home, and maybe the home is too big for the party by themselves,. The kids may be out of the house, the home might be too big already. But then you may have a, one of the party’s who are really attached to the home and they want to stay in the home but maybe the numbers don’t make sense and maybe if they were to keep the home, not only would they be keeping assets that are not going to generate any money for them in the future, I mean not really, unless you sell the house, it’s not a liquid asset.Chris: But they’re also, their standard of living is necessarily going down because they’re not going to have enough cash flow to do what they want to do. You know, so that’s a … Is that something, is that a problem that you … Is that a scenario –Shawn: That’s one of the most common things that I have to deal with on a daily basis. And the way that I teach people to think about it is before you decide what you want, start with your expenses. And so, the divorce process for most people, as painful as it is for most, is really only going to be a year or two of their life. And as I said earlier, you have decades to think about. Well, let’s start with, what is your life going to cost after this divorce? What is your mortgage payment or rent going to be? How much are you spending on cars and telephone bills and everything else. Once you kind of know – or your kids as well. Once you know what your expenses are, then you can start to say, “Well, all right, now I know at least how much income I need to stay even.”Shawn: And also you can say, “Well how much am I …”, and then you can start thinking about bigger questions like how much am I going to need for retirement or whatever else. But if you start with your expenses, things like that house that you have an emotional attachment to, you can see very quickly and very clearly that in many cases it’s not affordable. And you’ll see, like wow, you know if you’re spending … I’m just going to make up a number but if you’re spending 3,500 dollars a month on a house, and your income for a given year after a divorce is only going to be 5,000 dollars a month, it becomes very apparent that you don’t have much money for anything else.Shawn: And, once you just kind of map out – and when I say map out, I do things very simply. I take a blank sheet of paper and a pen and I say, “Let’s just do some simple math. How much is the house? How much is the car? How much are you spending on kids, clothes, going out, travel, vacations, whatever?” I just take a pen and a paper, nothing fancy, and just start writing down these kinds of things. And then once you have that kind of rough number, doesn’t have to be precise, you can start to think about is, well what is that really look like for me and start making the right decisions based upon that.Chris: Right, that’s a great way to do it, because … I think a lot about the stay at home mom because we represent a lot of stay at home moms and they just … Their responsibilities for the family have traditionally been kid-related stuff, maybe. Maybe the stay at home mom hasn’t traditionally had dollars and cents responsibilities. I mean, they’ll go out there and they’ll do the work and they’ll go do the shopping and all that stuff. But they may not be doing the budget and then it comes time, they have to now figure all of this out and they also have the great unknown of what their income is going to be when this is all said and done, and you know alimony will often play a big part in that.Chris: But if you don’t know what your expenses are, how are you going to know what is the money that you need outside of just saying, “We’ll get you the most amount of money possible.” Which is great, but it’s not really a great way to solve the problem. You just gotta know what you need and then try to get that and maybe some more. And I like your idea of just putting pen to paper with it because sometimes there are lawyers will do things that become a little cumbersome. Spreadsheets and it doesn’t really work. Sometimes simpler is better to help people, especially with so much else that’s going on in a divorce. So many other things to worry about, you know?Shawn: Yeah. There’s a lot to say about that point, particularly with the stay at home moms. I also work with many and there’s a variety of issues oftentimes with the stay at home moms. Sometimes a lack of confidence. I said you have to be the CEO of your divorce process. I’ll always say, because I talk to stay at home moms every day, everywhere, and I’ll say, “Hey, so, while your husband was working, who took care of the kids? Who took care of the house? Who took care of every other daily detail that happened?” And it was always them. And they have all of these skills in terms of managing a very complex life. They might not feel like they do, but they’ve been doing it for 10, or 20, or 30 years. And this is just one other challenge in that process. But they already have everything they need. They just need a little bit of guidance in terms of focusing that same energy they’ve had for a very, very long time.Shawn: And, as part of that, sometimes it’s, you know when I think about things that you need to do when it comes for planning for the process. Well, one big question is, we talked about the house. Sometimes I’ll say, “Well, let’s take some action towards it and find out. If you want to stay in the same neighborhood, why don’t you contact a real estate agent. See what houses are available in your neighborhood. You know particularly if your kids need to stay in the same school district.” I’ll say, “Go check out some apartments in the area. Are any of them feasible? Find out what the rent is for something that you could live with.”Shawn: It might not be the same, but sometimes just gathering some basic information that’s free, no cost to anyone, to call up a realtor and say, “Hey, I’m about to get divorced, or I’m in the divorce process, can you show me what some options are in the neighborhood?” Or, walking to the apartment building or driving over to the apartment building and say, “Hey, what’s a three bedroom in this area cost?” And those types of little steps, not very hard, and you can also start to crystallize, and you can say, “Hey, you know what? This three bedroom apartment actually could really work for me for the next few years while I get back on my feet.” Or you might say, “You know what? I’m priced out of my neighborhood. I need to think about what the right option for me in the long term.”Shawn: And it gives you the ability to confront reality head-on. Good or bad or anywhere in between. But at least you come through, or you start the process with some solid information so that you can make the right decision when it comes to going to mediation or talking with you or whatever else. It’s just you have a real, clear picture of what the future might look like, instead of just guessing and hoping for the best.Chris: a little bit of information goes a long way on the path. So that’s a great idea. And do you find yourself encouraging people to do that early in the process? In the middle of the process? When?Shawn: Yeah, it’s a good question. The answer is as soon as you can. You know, divorce is challenging of course, to understate it. And, you know, it’s not an instantaneous process even to get to the point where the D word gets dropped, much less serving papers and everything else. So, you know, it really depends. What I say is, the sooner you can figure these things out, the better. But, I have people who, and I actually am talking to someone in just a few minutes, who has to, has their proposals, their settlement proposals on the table. Right? And so the question is, well, does this make sense or should I be trying to make some adjustments? And some of the things that we’ve already discussed are going to be exactly that.Shawn: It’s like, “Hey, did you check to make sure that you’re going to be able to afford the house? Or be able to move to another place? Or be able to refinance? Or whatever the case may – or your spouse be able to refinance? If you go with this proposal, and if not, we gotta get these kind of details done now, so we make sure that we’re not walking you in to something that is not ideal for you.”Shawn: You know, the sooner you can plan the better. For the people that I get to work with before even papers are filed, I’ll say, “This is awesome. You’re going to go into your consultation with an attorney, with almost everything prepared, and your attorney is going to be able to take this job and do everything for you and I won’t need to talk to you again.” Other people, if you’re kind of still in the middle of the process, figuring things out, it’s okay, if you’re in the middle, so long as you’re starting to formulate that picture of what it is that you’re really aiming for.Shawn: I mean what I’m trying to say is that, if you don’t have a goal, you’re not shooting towards anything and you really need to have a clear sense of what your goal is for this process, otherwise your attorney, you aren’t as empowered as you could be to help them get to be where they need to be when this process is over.Chris: An awesome way of framing it. And we, again as an attorney, we’re always, we’re goal oriented. We have a process from the very beginning of getting them to conceptualize our clients and focus on their goals. But it can be easy to focus on goals that are more related to the divorce process and maybe kids, and sometimes, for however, it works out, because maybe our clients when they’re coming in, some of the issues we’re addressing at the beginning are more emotional. Sometimes the financial goals outside of minimizing my alimony payment, or maximize my alimony award, which isn’t very concrete, it isn’t very helpful. But outside of some of that stuff, we tend to maybe miss some of those financial goals from the very beginning. Whereas, if we have them from the very beginning, makes it easier to get people to where we need to get them to.Shawn: That’s exactly right. And you know the only thing that I would add to that is also if you have the goals, I say this all the time, is, once you have your goals written down, now’s a great time to talk to your attorney and make sure that your goals are reasonable. Because, you know, I see people who might say, “I don’t want to pay a dime of alimony and no child support and I want 100% custody.” And you’re like, “Your spouse is a decent human, even though the two of you don’t get along. That doesn’t seem like a reasonable case. You might want to think about those a little more.” But, you know, it’s having kind of a sense of what that is, so you know, my job, the way that I do view my job is to make them prepared for you.Shawn: And to, so that whatever time you spend with the client is maximized and you can do your job more effectively. You as the attorney and as the people listening are the people in charge of this process. And you know I’m sort of a support person, but you know, I want to make sure that what you’re doing and what I’m doing can kind of help them get to the best position possible.Chris: Absolutely. Before we go Shawn, do you have any like any tips to help somebody, whether it’s the husband or the wife, when they’re in the beginning of the process, maybe they’ve contacted me, maybe they haven’t, and they’re considering separation. And so, from a financial perspective, do you have any tips to help somebody who is thinking, “Hey, I think I need to get … I think for my own emotional wellbeing, I think I need to be in a separate household from my spouse. Obviously I’ll talk to a lawyer about things like custody and stuff like that. But what do I need to pull off from a financial perspective? And how do I get there?”Shawn: Yeah. I think the two things when it comes to separation. Some of the things that we’ve already discussed, but one is your credit report. Knowing what’s on your credit report. I have clients who make 100,000 dollars a year. I have clients who make 100 million dollars a year. You’d be surprised what’s on a credit report, and there are always surprises. And so just kind of knowing what that is. And then also, knowing what your expenses are. I mean look, when you’re separating, we’ve talked about expenses before, but, your income is going to be the same more or less, whether you’re married or in the separation process. The income part is semi-fixed. The expenses part is now all of a sudden doubling. And so you need to really understand is can you afford that? And what that looks like. Do you have enough savings? Do you have enough income? Do you have enough whatever the case may be that you need to separate.Shawn: And actually might add a third thing to that, is, separation can have other effects on the divorce process and so I always encourage my clients before taking that separation step, to talk to someone like you. You know, consultations are confidential. It’s not like, you know I have some clients who are afraid to step into an attorney’s office. I say, “Look, attorneys are confidential. No one’s going to know that you’re there. No one’s going to sign, put a billboard up in town that says, ‘They met with Christian’. It’s just so that you can understand your situation, the implications of what you’re doing and making sure that you ultimately protect yourself and don’t unintentionally run afoul of something that might come back to hurt you later.Chris: Absolutely. That’s right. I can help them with the legal pros and cons of separating, but you can help them with the practical if you separate, can you do it, and how will you make it work? And what’s it going to cost? Shawn, thanks so much man. I had a great time. I really appreciate you taking a few minutes to chat with me and ultimately chat with my clients and some people that are watching this just for advice. If somebody needs to reach out to you, what do they do? How do they do that?Shawn: Yeah you can visit me at divorceandyourmoney.com, and there’s a podcast by the same thing if you search any podcast player called Divorce and Your Money.Chris: Sounds pretty simple. Shawn, thanks.Shawn: Yeah.Chris: I appreciate it.Shawn: Thank you, Christian. Take care.

Let’s face it, even if you use an LLC, you still need insurance. However, when we need insurance for LLCs, corporations, and land trusts, our local insurance people and providers don’t know how to write the right type of policy to protect our assets. Clint Coons of Anderson Business Advisors talks to Shawn Woedl from the National Real Estate Insurance Group (NREIG) about the importance of insurance and different types of policies that are available. Highlights/Topics: Creating a Limited Liability Company (LLC) doesn’t relieve you of your responsibility to insure the property REIGuard: Accommodates portfolio of one to four family rental dwellings or any line of commercial real estate through any phase of occupancy, anywhere in the country Flippers should purchase Builder’s Risk Forms that include liability coverage for the premises Fix and flips are highest risk type of property for an insurance company; investors are forced to buy a longer-term policy, but won’t get a refund if they sell the property sooner Liability claims take down a company faster than any property loss, regardless of size General Contractor’s Policy covers faulty workmanship; a general contractor needs to provide Certificate of Liability Coverage and Workers’ Compensation Coverage Call monthly to verify their coverage, or add yourself to their General Contractor’s Liability Policy Flipping through a corporation can make it difficult to obtain policies; some carriers only offer coverage in the property owner’s personal name Local insurances don’t insure LLCs, only individuals, because of pre-negotiation through their reinsurance treaties and contracts, so they can’t accommodate for it Insurance agents encourage separate policies for each LLC, not an umbrella policy, to run up the cost; NREIG can aggregate them under one policy to lower rates Name anyone who has an ownership interest in the property that can potentially be included in a lawsuit as additional insured on your policy New investors who come to NREIG discover that they have many choices for property and liability insurance; NREIG structures unique coverage based on client’s needs Resources National Real Estate Insurance Group REIGuard Clint Coons Anderson Advisors Tax and Asset Protection Event Full Episode Transcript: Clint: Hi everyone, it’s Clint Coons here with Anderson Business Advisors and today I have Shawn Woedl on from National Real Estate Insurance Group, and he’s going to talk to us about the importance of insurance and the different types of policies that are out there. We all know as real estate investors that when you go out and you try to find insurance, you talk to your local guide. Many times they look at you as if you’re from another planet, because you’re using strategies that they’re unfamiliar with. We’re talking about LLCs, corporations, and land trust and we’re putting our properties into these entities or as a protection. Many times, when we need the insurance, our local insurance individual does not know how to write the right type of policy that we need to protect our assets. Because let’s face it, even though you use an LLC, you still need insurance. Just this week, I was speaking to an attorney who’s an investor. They called me up, and he said, hey, I have this property in an LLC, and my tenant has been hurt. The ceiling fan fell down and hit him on his foot, and he can’t walk anymore, he’s going to be permanently disabled, and he’s suing my LLC and I don’t have insurance. You think I have a problem? Now, of course, you do have a problem, because even though you create a Limited Liability Company, it doesn’t relieve you of your responsibility to insure the property. So, when we’re setting up these structures, it’s imperative that you get the right information. That’s why I brought Shawn on, I think he can explain, why that’s important. We’re going to ask him a number of questions, and hope that by the end of this, you’re going to understand this is the group you want to go to. So, Shawn, thanks for coming on. How are you doing? Shawn: Doing well, thanks. Thank you, Clint, for having me. Clint: Great. With National Real Estate Insurance Group, can you just give me a brief background as how this came together –  this group, because you offer a number of products out there that I think are really advantageous for investors. Shawn: Absolutely. National Real Estate Insurance Group itself is a national independent insurance agency who are licensed and active in all 50 states, with a focus on real estate investors. About twenty years ago, we developed what’s now known as the REI guard insurance program, and it kind of started with two separate programs that came together as one. We have Mike Wrenn here, one of our owners in Kansas City that was working with the home investors franchises and developed renovators insurance, which was a short term program for guys and girls who were doing fix and flips that needed a month or two of coverage and the insurance industry wasn’t responding to their need. Tim Norris and myself were in Cincinnati, Ohio, and we were developing National Real Estate Insurance Group and National Condo and Apartment Insurance Group, with the focus on residential real estate investors that were buying hold opportunities, as well as larger apartments, condo, association, really any line of commercial real estate. In 2010, after really passing some business opportunities back and forth that multiple events across the country, Tim and Mike actually merged their agencies, and developed this crazy program called through National Real Estate Insurance Group called REIGuard, that now can accommodate for a portfolio, one to four family rental dwellings through any phase of occupancy, anywhere in the country, on monthly recording. And then in 2014, I went ahead and merged my agency as well, and we now can accommodate really for any line of commercial real estate an investor decides to dive into. Clint: Wow. I mean that just, I mean, seems like it’s perfect for our clients especially, because at Anderson, we pride ourselves as being a one-stop shop for real estate investors, giving them the tax information, business planning, and asset protection, even a state planning. And it seems like what you’ve done with National Real Estate Insurance Group is hit the same type of demographic target, and that you saw there was a need out there, and people could then go to one place to make sure all their insurance needs are covered. And that’s refreshing, because I know how frustrating it can be, even with my own investing. As I tell people, I own over a hundred properties and it’s just difficult to go out there and find an agent that gets it, and it sounds to me in my experience with working with you, that you guys understand it. And I can tell you this, it took us a long time to finally find someone such as National Real Estate Insurance Group that understands real estate investors. I’ve been real happy with our relationship, to make you a trusted resource for our clientele because of the value you bring to them. So with that, you’re talking about policies. Can you tell me why is a flipper, because we have a lot of flippers, they go out, they buy and sell properties. I don’t think they understand the importance of the insurance, and what type of insurance should they get? Shawn: So, a couple of quick points that I’d like to make on those builders risk type of policies, or forms that these investors can purchase for these fix and flip opportunities: one, it’s typically a builders risk forms for property only. So, unless you specifically ask for liability coverage, that can be an exposure on a lot of builders risk forms to think of, maybe slips and falls, personal injuries like you just mentioned with one of your friends there, that’s happening, those are exposures on a lot of builders risks forms unless you specifically ask for liability to be included for the premises. Understanding the market the way we do, because we’re all investors ourselves, we of course include that into our forms, but to just kind of piggyback on that –  renovation properties, short term fix and flips, are considered probably the highest risk type of property for an insurance company to agree to insure. There’s lots of parties going in and out, there’s a lot of ongoing operations, typically, those are susceptible of theft or people breaking and entering. So, insurance companies are going to force investors most of the time to come in and buy a longer-term policy, a six-month to an annual policy, which doesn’t make a lot of sense if the flip in your possession, you think you’re going to have it done in three to four months. Because these policies are fully entered in conception. Meaning, from the get-go, as soon as you agreed to purchase coverage from your carrier, you have to pay the full premium up front, and by the way, if you cancel early because that flip’s completed, you can’t get any money back from the unused premium, that’s the cost of doing business with a lot of these carriers that will agree to actually take on risks, and it’s just on renovation property. And it’s really just because they don’t have an appetite for the risk they’re taking on and they don’t understand the market. Clint: Wow, yeah, I did not know that. I haven’t flipped properties in years, but yeah, I bet a lot of people think that when they buy a policy like that, once they cancel it, they’re going to get a refund of the premium, but they’re not. So that’s good to know. So you’re saying that with all your fix and flip policies, and you’re going to automatically include that liability coverage for them? It’s not something they have to ask for? Shawn: Yeah, this premises liability that’s going to be included on every opportunity that we propose and go over with an investor, whether it’s regardless of its occupancy, we think it’s more important to cover the liability exposure than any property exposure. Think about it, a liability claim, a wrongful death, a personal injury that is severe, can take a company faster down than any property loss regardless of the size. It’s the unknown, once you fail on it, liability goes a couple of years down the line where you think your business is growing well, and then all of a sudden get hit with a lawsuit for a slip and fall that occurred on the site a couple of years ago when you had ownership and percent of property. So absolutely, we always include liability. The only time we’ll ever remove it is if it’s specifically asked for by an investor during a proposal process. Clint: So, you just said something interesting in there. So if I bought this property and renovating it, and then I sell it, and then a year and a half later, somebody brings a claim, that they were injured on the property while they were working on it. You said that would be covered under your policy. Shawn: It would be covered – liability is a slippery slope, there’s a lot of gray areas, right? So, if the injury happened, and they were just maybe, maybe they were breaking and entering, or the house was left unsecured, and they fell down the steps and were injured, then yeah, then that type of exposure would be picked up under the premises liability coverage that was enforced at the time of the loss. If it’s a loss that was occurred under from general contractors negligent, or if you, as the investor, were actually doing the renovations yourself, and then a lawsuit was filed for faulty workmanship post-sale by the new owner, those are all types of stand-alone coverages that you have to purchase in addition to your premises liability. But yeah, a lot of those would be covered under the premises form. Clint: Got it. So there’s other policies you can or additions you can acquire when you’re purchasing a builders risk policy to cover that. So I’m going to give you an example. Just the other day, someone came into my office. They had rehabbed the property, they sold it, and it turns out there’s an issue with a catch basin in the basement. They have both greywater and rainwater that run into it, that pump it into the sewer lines. Supposedly, that’s not correct, and that needs to be changed. Would you have, would an insurance policy cover that type of change, that the contractor screwed up on or not? Shawn: The general contractors policy would pick that up, for faulty workmanship, right? So, your carrier, the premises liability, if needed, would provide you with defense clause, would go in and help you, you know, go against the general contractors policy, but that’s a GC exposure. So, you know, typically what we always recommend that our investors do, is when a general contractor comes on to your site just to bid on the property, to work on a property, they should be able to give you two pieces of information: their certificate of liability coverage that tells you their business is covered adequately, as well as their workers compensation coverage, if they have employees that are going to be on site as well. And you know, the certificates of liability give you a couple of cool pieces of information that you can use. It gives you the carrier that wrote the piece of business, as well as the agency. So if you want to go in and reach out to the agency each month and make sure their premium is paid, this will get a nice shiny certificate for a year showing coverage by paying a month or two of premium up front. You can do one of two things, and I always recommend the second, but the first one is you can call monthly to make sure their coverage is in good standing, or you can learn as an investor that those general contractors policies can work for us as investors, and we do that by adding ourselves as additional insured to their general contractors liability policy for the duration of time they’re working on your property. Those are always, those are usually free to do, or at most it costs $50 to endorse their policy, it’s well worth it to pay that money if they’re bellyaching about it. But that extends their liability coverage to you, if they do something negligent and you’re named in the lawsuit. And equally as important, it’s going to notify you as an additional insured prior to their policy cancelling or non-payment, or any other underwriting issues, and you can get out ahead of it and make sure that it’s right. Clint: Wow. Sounds like, kind of like buying a tail, then, on their policy. Nice. So how about if they, when someone comes to you and they have a corporation, because a lot of our flippers will teach them is it, either flip through a corporation, or better yet, flip through unlimited liability company that is owned by a corporation. Does that pose any difficulty for obtaining these policies? Does it matter? Shawn: It does for a lot of carriers, and a lot of carriers are limited to only being able to offer coverage in the personal name of the owner of the property. Again, knowing the market as we do, we’re all residential real estate investors ourselves, it made little to no sense for us to put that limitation on our investors, so we can actually accommodate for any type of name insured ownership entity, we can still have them all on one single schedule so we can leverage portfolio size and activity to keep an investors property rates and costs down at a time, because you’ve got common ownership or interest in the property, so LLCs, corporations, IRAs, trusts, you name it, it can all be bundled together through our program. Clint: Okay, so hold on, I’m going to back to that topic, because that’s really important for the listeners here. But just on the side of talking about insuring the LLC, for instance, if it owns the property. Why don’t local insurances agree to insure the LLC? Why do they only want to insure the individual? What’s their hang up there? Shawn: The best I can tell you is that it’s already been pre-negotiated through their re-insurance treaties and contracts, if they have, that’s just, they can’t accommodate for it. And those are the companies that you run into, like the State Farm, the Farmers, the Allstates of the world, they’re all, by the way, tremendous companies for what they do, and what they specialize in are home and auto and some life policies, some lower-risk type of deals homeowner policies. When you start getting into the investor world, where these are higher risk locations, your tenant’s more likely to burn your house down than you are, they always offer the coverage out of a sense of obligation to their existing clientele. They don’t have an appetite for it, and you can tell by the fact that they require you to insure a property through a very high evaluation per square foot, more than you’ll ever recover from in a loss. And they do that in an effort to garner, to recover enough money in the premium to offset the risk they’re taking on on a higher risk location. So I think it’s just not having the appetite for the risk, more than anything, along with the contracts that they’ve negotiated to be able to extend coverage to them. Clint: Interesting. Yeah, I can never figure that out, because it seems to me like you’re insuring me, I’m the owner of my LLC, it’s still the same insurance policy, who do you care or what does it matter who owns it, if there’s a claim made, you’ve still got to pay, so yeah. That makes sense. So, when you’re talking about this bundling, that’s something that’s really important, because the few that I’ve talked to, clients that have actually found that maybe their State Farm agent would offer them a policy, and I’ll give an example here. An investor comes into their State Farm agent and they have six limited liability companies, with one property in each LLC. The agent tells them, you need to have six separate individual policies, we can’t give you an umbrella policy over all of these, we have to do six separate agreements. And it just seems to run up the cost. Did I hear you to say that you can aggregate them together, it doesn’t matter how the properties are held in different LLCs, we can do it under one? Shawn: Absolutely. That’s exactly what we do when it comes to property, and the primary premises liability, your underlying liability, we’ll touch on umbrellas here just a second, but it’s a master schedule for a particular investor or investment group, and it allows you to add and delete locations from your schedule as need me, but think about it, me, myself as your agent, right, if you came to me and said hey, I’ve got one location, and I’ve blanketed it out to the 250 different, you know, carriers that I’m contracted with. One location, as opposed to ten locations, as opposed to a hundred, the more leverage I can get with that underwriter to drive your property rate down. So when we do a one-off policy for each location, you’re really at the mercy of the underwriter on what they want to assign as a property rate, and that can be based on the different areas of the country maybe that you’re investing in. could just be the mood they’re in that day. So, leveraging that, just it gives me more, you know, kind of fire power to go to, ammunition, we call it, and you go to the underwriter and drive those rates down for you. Clint: So, tell me this. So, who should you name then as the additional insured on your policy? Shawn: You know, it’s a good question, and we run across that all the time, and you can look at a couple of things if you have a lender on the deal. So, somebody, you know, whether it’s private or a larger institution, they’re usually going to require that you listed as additional insured, or the very least, certificate holder on your liability insurance. That way, again, they’re notified prior to your policy lapsing for non-payment or any other underwriting issue, on the off-chance that they’re named in a lawsuit, which would never happen and your liability cover, it would also extend to them. But you can, you know, many property management companies, if you’re dealing with a large property organization, would also require that you list their company on your liability as additional insured, so, again, you do something negligent, their liability coverage, or excuse me, your liability coverage extends to them. And you can do the same thing, vice versa, and be listed on their liability coverage, but really, anyone that has an ownership interest in the property, they can be potentially dragged into a lawsuit. Clint: Okay. So as far as if you had a corporation that’s the manager of an LLC, should it be named then as additional insured, as well? Shawn: No, the corporation would be listed as first name insured, though if the corporation’s managing other locations, if they don’t have ownership ventures then at that point, yes. That doesn’t stop, that doesn’t prevent them from having to seek out the correct liability coverage to cover the property management operations, as well. But, at least with the premises, they’d be covered without being listed as additional as well. Clint: Perfect. Okay, so you can do business in all fifty states, right? Shawn: Absolutely. Clint: And then, for our clients, all they have to do, we have that link that we’ve set up that drives them right to your page and then they can put in some information and then someone will contact them, is that how it works? Shawn: Yeah, and we do things a little bit different, as you well know, I’m sure. The last thing we do, especially if a new investor comes to us, and says hey, I need coverage but I don’t know what kind of coverage I need. You know, we’re not just going to send them a proposal and say, hey, take it or leave it. The most important thing that all these investors, all of our investor friends can know is that they have so many choices when it comes to property and liability insurance. So, what we do is we get one of my license advisors or myself to actually jump on a phone call with our prospect. In the first ten, fifteen minutes of the call, we want to listen to you. We want to know exactly what your business model is, we want to know what your appetite for risk is, what you’re okay self-insuring, what you’re not, what you do, God forbid, a total loss occurs. Would you rebuild the property, or would you clean the land up, sell it, and go buy something else like it? Are there lending insurance requirements that we need to comply with? And then, we’ll help structure your coverage, unique, whatever your package need on it. Clint: Perfect. All right. Well, I want to thank you for taking the time to be on this podcast today, and I know that for sure we will end up giving hopefully more people brought over to you so they can have their insurance needs taken care of. So with that, Shawn, thanks a lot, looking forward talking to you in the future. Shawn: Thank you, Clint, have a good weekend. Clint: You too, bye.  

Guest Bio: Shawn Rakowski is a seasoned software developer with Gullview Technologies out of Brainerd Minnesota, where he specializes in delivering full stack .NET solutions. Shawn is also a husband, father, conference speaker, blogger, former podcaster, aspiring entrepreneur, and game dev hobbyist.   Episode Description: In this episode, Shawn explains the value of taking time for personal creative projects to challenge yourself and create a more diverse portfolio and skills set. Shawn also talks about the dangers of second-guessing yourself, as well as the importance of always pushing yourself to learn more and gain new experiences.   Key Takeaways: (1.31) Phil opens the interview by asking Shawn to tell the listeners a bit more about himself. Shawn says that he’s been working in software development for about a decade, generally working in e-commerce and distribution, but has been recently focusing more on speaking about game development at conferences, including Codemash this past January.   (2.37) Phil then asks Shawn for a “unique career tip,” to which Shawn responds with the advice that anyone doing software development should make a point to spend time developing games or other side projects. He explains that games, in particular, are very useful for teaching developers new ways to learn and adapt and that they can be combined with different disciplines like music, art, physics or math.   (4.08) Shawn goes on to illustrate how games also provide a tangible product for developers to add to their portfolios. Shawn also tells Phil about “game jam” events where the participants have to build a game in just a couple days. Game jam events are useful because the time constraints force you to be creative, and there’s usually a prompt to follow, which solves the problem of not being able to come up with an idea.    (5.41) Phil notes that game development seems like it would make you think differently about problems and solutions, and Shawn agrees that game dev offers complexities that you would not typically encounter in your regular  IT or developer day job. Because of this, devoting time to game dev can also help you challenge yourself and make you a better developer overall.   (7.28) Phil asks Shawn about what he considers the worst IT moment of his career and what he learned from it. Shawn talks about working at a job where he didn’t like the culture of the office and felt like he didn’t fit. While he did leave that job for a remote one, he was convinced to come back on the grounds that management had changed and things were better, only to find that this was not the case. Shawn says the main thing he learned was to trust his feelings and to move on and don’t look back rather than stay unhappy at a bad job that might change.   (11.00) Phil changes gears and asks Shawn to share any highlights of his IT career. Shawn relates a story about how he developed his first indie game for Xbox Live and that, while it did not make him much money and was “kind of a terrible game, creating it pushed him to learn command patterns, object-oriented programming, C# (Sharp), and .NET. Now he works with .NET for a living and owes it to developing that terrible Xbox Live game.   (14.47) Phil and Shawn discuss the future of IT, with Shawn mentioning the book Developer Hegemony by Erik Dietrich, positing that we are moving more towards independent IT and development firms with small, specialized teams that can be brought into major organizations to solve problems.   (16.7) Phil starts the “Real Round,” asking Shawn what got him into IT. According to Shawn, LAN parties were his first introduction to computer technology but that he was actually going to school for a philosophy degree before falling in love with computer science.   (17.49) Next Phil asks Shawn for the best career advice he’s ever received. Shawn says it wasn’t just career advice but life advice from a guest on his podcast who recommended he look into meditation and mindfulness as a way to handle the feelings stress and frustration at being stuck at his old job. Learning to be more conscious of his feelings and rationalize them has improved his mindset when it comes to both work and life.   (19.41) Shawn tells Phil that if he were starting his IT career now, he would skip college and jump straight into programming and learning on the job. Shawn also mentions that he would make it a point to look into functional programming, stating that it’s a better way to compose software and that, as it is on the far end of the adoption curve, now is the best time to become familiar with it.   (22.22) On the subject of the most helpful nontechnical skill to have, Shawn says that it’s being fearless about stepping outside your comfort zone in regards to things like public speaking, podcasting, and not stopping yourself because you’re worried you’ll make a mistake or that someone is better than you. Shawn and Phil both emphasize the value of new experiences.   (23.24) Finally, Phil asks Shawn for some parting advice for a career in IT, and Shawn recommends joining a “mastermind group,” which is a group of like-minded people trying to reach the same goals that regularly meet up to help hold each other accountable as well as provide support, advice, and fresh ideas. Phil agrees and says that he’s in a podcast mastermind group as well.    Best Moments: (3.29) Shawn: “I’ve come to find that developing games opens you up to a lot of other disciplines and artistic endeavors that you can kind of combine with software development, which is something that I think is good for the soul and can be very, very good for your career.” (5.41) Phil: “It [game development] seems quite different in terms of the mindset of the people who do it and the way they think about solutions.” (7.10) Shawn: “I think games are a great domain for developing because they challenge you in ways that you don’t normally get challenged at your day job.” (10.29) Shawn: “When you find that you and a place no longer fit together, it’s best to just cut it and go forward and move on.” (19.27) Shawn: “I’m able to capture those feelings that I’m having and those thoughts I’m having and pinpoint them and realize that they’re not exactly true and realize that I can rationalize and get over things like fear, anger, and emotions like that.” (23.06) Phil: “It’s taking yourself out of your comfort zone, it’s new experiences, isn’t it really?” Shawn: “Yeah, being willing to embrace those new experiences and realize that those are important and paramount to your growth and just overall to your happiness.”  Contact Shawn Rakowski Twitter: @shwany Website: www.mylifeforthecode.com Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/srakowski/

Shawn Blanc is a writer, small-business owner, productivity coach, and creative entrepreneur living in Kansas City with his wife and their three sons. Shawn has been teaching and learning about creativity, diligence, and focus for over a decade, and his online courses have helped thousands of people do their best creative work while learning to thrive in the midst of life's tensions. A while back, Shawn sent an email that caught my attention. He wrote about the importance of creating a customer avatar and developing a content strategy to connect with them and help them achieve their goals. I liked the email so much that I emailed him back and asked him to come on my show to talk about his journey to making a living through writing online and what he's learned about growing an audience. Shawn also shares my passion for productivity and deep focus; so much so that he's gathered 12 incredibly smart people for a free 5 day online summit about the power of focused life. In this episode, Shawn shares how he was able to make a full-time living by writing online, and we discuss how you can grow your audience by creating a customer avatar (your ideal listener) and creating content that addresses their needs and desires. Highlights, Takeaways & Quick Wins: Interview your customers to get a real life picture of your audience. Start selling products as early as possible. Your customer avatar is a real person that exists out there. Use the language of your customer avatar in your content to create a deep connection with them. Be in people's weekly cycle at a minimum. Your niche is going to draw your audience but your ancillary interests will keep people interested. Show up consistently to earn people's trust and create an anticipation of future value. Do guest-based podcasts to grow your audience. Reach people that are far outside of your social circle by connecting with the people you can connect with right now. Show Notes Aaron: Shawn Blanc is a writer/small business owner/productivity coach/creative entrepreneur living in Kansas City with his wife and their three sons, and Shawn is a member of our Community. He's been teaching and learning about creativity, diligence, and focus for over a decade now. His online courses have helped thousands of people do their best creative work while learning to thrive in the midst of life's tensions. A while back, Shawn sent an email that caught my attention. He was writing about the importance of creating a customer avatar, that's knowing who you're creating for and what you want to help them achieve, what kind of person you want to help them become. I thought it was really interesting, so I sent him an email right back. I said, “Shawn, do you want to come on the show to talk about this? I think podcasters need to hear about this idea of customer avatars and also content strategy.” Shawn agreed, and he also shares my passion for productivity and focus, so much so that he has gathered 12 incredibly smart people for a five day online summit about the power of a focused life, and that's going to be starting, I believe, as this episode comes out. If you're listening to this in your podcast player, it's starting today, I think. I'll give you that link later. In this episode, I want to talk with Shawn about why you as a podcaster need to create a customer avatar, know who you're creating for, develop a content strategy, and then also the benefits of deep focus, what we call deep work. A few small changes in your daily habits can lead to big improvements in your productivity and creative output. Shawn, that's one of the longer intros I've ever done. Thanks for joining me today. I really appreciate you being here. Shawn: Thanks, Aaron. I love it. Super excited to be here. Shawn Blanc Aaron: I think of you, Shawn, as a writer and as the creator of an online course called The Focus Course, which is great. You're so much more than that. Do you want to give everyone a quick introduction, how you got here and where you came from? I would also like to hear what your biggest struggles have been over the years of getting to the point where you're at right now. Shawn: Absolutely. I'm in Kansas City. Originally, I'm from Denver. I'm a Colorado guy at heart. I've been married for going on 12 years, and my wife and I have three boys. It's insane at our house. We used to call the first two the Twin Tornadoes, but we just had our third eight or nine weeks ago. Aaron: Congrats! Shawn: It's awesome. Love it. I love being a dad. I used to be a drummer. I know that we have a lot of musicians around here. Sean McCabe plays a little bit of music, I think. Aaron: Yeah, he used to write music, just like he used to do lettering. I still play drums. Shawn: I used to play drums for a large ministry here in Kansas City, and I ended up transitioning out of that. It's a long story, but I ended up becoming a marketing and creative director. I ran a team, an in-house design team, with about 17 people—web developers, print designers, web designers, writers, editors, project managers, whatever. We did a bunch of stuff. One of our huge things was that we would host a conference at the end of the year that I was running. 25,000 people would come out for that. I did that for several years, and then my wife and I got pregnant with our first kid. I was like, “I don't want to do this work as a dad.” Part of it was just super demanding. Anyone who has experienced working in the corporate design scene knows that it's a very demanding spot. Everything is urgent all the time. I was doing like 80 hours a week, and I really enjoyed it. I had a lot of fun, but I was like, “There's no way. I don't want to do 80 hours a week as a dad.” I had that, plus I had this little blog on the side, where I had been writing about marketing stuff. I felt like, “This would be a good opportunity to quit what I'm doing and take a leap, see if I can take my website full time. Could I blog for a living?” That was the thought. I was doing about $1,000 a month in advertising and some affiliate stuff. I figured that if I could give it 40 hours a week, I could get the revenue up to a spot where it could pay the bills. I figured that it could grow from there. Aaron: How old were you at this point? Shawn: I was just about 30, not quite 30, like 29, when I made that jump. I asked everyone that was reading on the site. I said, “I'm quitting. I'm going to do this thing full time.” I asked people if they would be interested in supporting me to write the site for a living. I was like, “If you like what I'm doing, I'll write more if you want to give me some money to do it.” I did this little membership drive. I was going to charge $3 a month for membership. I was doing a daily podcast as a perk of membership. Aaron: You aren't still doing that, are you? Shawn: It's on hiatus at the moment. We'll see. I'm going to be diving back into the podcast scene starting early 2017. I miss podcasting. It's fun. Aaron: You decided to ask people to support you, give you $3 a month, to go full time with your writing? Shawn: Basically. I figured if I could get 500 people, at $3 a month that's $1,500, plus the other $1,000 I was doing, and that would be $2,500 a month. That's not a ton, but I figured that would be enough to cover the bare necessities. I figured that things could grow from there. People signed up, and I hit the 500 person mark by the end of the month before I had even quit. I started my new job, April 4th 2011, basically fully funded as an independent blogger. Aaron: I bet that was exciting. Shawn: It was really exciting. I felt like I got this permission slip from my audience to go for it. As a creative person, sometimes you need that. Sometimes you want to be like, “Do you guys care? I'm here. I'm making this stuff.” A lot of the work we do as creative entrepreneurs is for your audience. I know that we're going to talk about this in a little bit, the customer avatar profile. It's for these people that you really want to serve. When you hear back from them and they go, “Hey, we like what you're doing. Let's keep the relationship going,” it's like having a DTR with your audience. There's something cool about that kind of permission slip moment. It's like when you sell your first product, or whatever it is. People are interested. You get your first positive review on iTunes or whatever. Obviously, there's going to be the junk that comes later, but whatever. Aaron: Some of the haters that come later? Shawn: You forget about that stuff and you keep moving on. Aaron: That's awesome. Asking for Money Aaron: When you think back, do you remember any big struggles or hurdles that you really had to overcome about that period in your life? Shawn: There were so many. It's hard to say, “If I could do it differently, I would do it this other way,” because who knows? If I had done things differently, maybe it wouldn't have turned out the way I thought it would. One of the biggest struggles for me was asking for money. It was a huge challenge related to the membership drive. I was asking folks to support me on a regular basis to write for a living. I was like, “Who am I? What kind of a dork says, ‘Give me money so I can blog for a living.'” Aaron: Nobody pays for things online anymore. Nobody wants to pay for writing. Shawn: Exactly. That was a huge challenge. It has continued to be a challenge for years. I have been doing this for almost six years now, full time. When I came out with my first book, it's called Delight is in the Details, and it was an eBook package thing. I did some interviews. I charged $29 for my book, and I felt like this huge hypocrite. It was this feeling of, “This is information. Information should be free on the internet. Why would anyone ever buy this?” I felt like there was no value in this thing that people would pay for. I was like, “I have to do it. I'm going to charge for it.” Aaron: Sorry to jump in, but at the time, did you really feel like $30 was a lot of money? Shawn: Oh my gosh. I woke up feeling sick to my stomach the day I was going to launch it. I was like, “I can't believe how much I'm asking for this.” Aaron: What did you think was going to happen? Shawn: I thought that people would buy it because they trusted me, and then they would read it and come and burn my house down because I had ripped them off so bad. I charged so much money for something. Aaron: It was your first time launching a product, right? Shawn: It was. It was my first product launch ever. It ended up bringing in like $5,000 in that first 48 hour launch window. It made $5,000 that first couple of days. In hindsight, it was this huge inflection point for me. I think I spent about 100 hours building the thing, made $5,000 from it in the first week, and I thought, “Woah, that was a great return on my time investment! Now I have this product that I can continue to sell.” Since then, in the last four or five years that I've sold it, I want to say that it's sold $50,000 over the years. That's awesome. There's something great about creating a product, and it changed a lot. Producing and selling a book changed my relationship with my audience. Now I'm creating products for them to buy. That initial hurdle was huge. $29 was so much money. I think that was probably the biggest struggle, of being able to properly identify how much value I'm providing people and to price it correctly. That's just hard. I think that's why you should start selling stuff as early as possible, because you have to learn. There isn't a formula for how much value you're providing and how much you should charge for it. You can't just plug your stuff into a worksheet and get a number back. You have to feel out the market, your market, your audience, your skill level. How much polish are you doing? How much depth of information are you providing? Whatever skill, service, or product it is you're providing, you have to learn how to make money and price your stuff! It's hard to do it when you're starting. The biggest challenging for me at first was becoming comfortable asking for money and learning to accurately price my products. Aaron: The other thing is that once you launched that book and got familiar with all that stuff, that was a stepping stone to your future products, your future books and courses, and everything else that you're doing. I'm sure, at that point, you felt like, “Okay. I've done this once before already. Now it's like riding a bike. I just need to get back on and keep peddling, keep going.” Shawn: Yeah, absolutely. It really was a huge stepping stone. One thing I loved about creating and launching a product was that there was a start and an end date to it. This thing has to ship. I worked on it, and I was done. I put it out there. Boom, now it's there. I'm done. It's out in the world. Obviously, you iterate on it. A year later, I added some new interviews. I added some new chapters. I created some videos. I remastered all of the audio for the audio book. Product Launch Hiccups Shawn: Super random story related to this. It was the relaunch of Delight is in the Details, a year after it had come out, and I put it out there. People are buying it during that relaunch period. I get an email from someone going, “I was just listening to the audio book, and the last chapter sounds like it's not edited correctly. Something is weird about the last chapter. You should check it out.” I recorded the audio book and edited it by myself. I go and I open up the audio book for the last chapter and I'm listening to it, and it is the original take that I did of the book. The way I did the audio book, I'm reading it into my microphone in GarageBand. If I goofed up in the middle of a paragraph, I would just take a pause, say, “Okay, again,” and then I would start talking again. That was my marker. The last chapter of the book was that track, the whole thing. The audio track should have been 10 or 12 minutes for that chapter, and it was 30 minutes because of all my edits, retakes, and pauses. The whole thing. What's worse is, it was there from the very beginning. For a year, I had been selling that thing. I was mortified. For a year, I had been selling my book with the last chapter all messed up, and I was mortified. Aaron: Nobody said anything?? Shawn: They didn't. Either no one listened to it, or when they listened to it, they just assumed… I don't even know. I was so mortified. There you go. What worse thing can happen? Earlier, I had been so concerned about selling something that people weren't going to consider valuable. Here's this huge, huge mistake. What a goof! Aaron: I need to remind everyone that this audiobook is called Delight is in the Details. Shawn: The irony, right? That was one of the selling points of the book, too. I was like, “If you buy this book, it's a case study in sweating the details itself. You'll see all the areas where I've sweated the details in this product.” Whatever. Oh man. I was mortified. Aaron: Thankfully, no one came and burned down your house, and it was over a year before anyone even said anything. A lot of us are so curious about people who do such good work, so when a mistake does happen, it's almost humanizing. It's like, “Now I can relate to this person, because they're not 100% on top of everything all the time, either, like I struggle with. I make a lot of mistakes, so it's kind of nice when you see a really awesome musician on stage mess up a part and then jump back into it. You're like, “Oh, they are humans, too.” That's really cool. Nobody burned your house down, thankfully. Shawn: That's why it's so helpful to ship early. You get stuff out the door and you start learning. I love it. Aaron: I tell people this a lot, too, when it comes to podcasts. If you're thinking about making a podcast, there are so many things you can tweak, improve, or work on forever, but it's so much better to say, “What's the minimum I have to do? I want to try and do a good job, but let's do this, ship it, and iterate and improve on it every single week.” If you don't ship something, you'll just pick at it and tweak it endlessly. Before you know it, it's been a year and a half, and you've got three or five episodes you recorded 18 months ago that you're still working on. In the meantime, nothing has happened. Start Moving Shawn: As well, we have this picture of what we want something to look like and what we want it to be, but we have zero experience. I like the analogy of those lifesize mazes. Especially around Halloween and Thanksgiving, there are those corn mazes. They're these giant things. Imagine someone standing at the entrance of this life size maze, staring at the entrance to it, and in their mind, trying to figure out how to get to the end so they can get straight to the end the fastest way possible without making any mistakes along the way. Impossible! Not going to happen. You have to go in the maze and go left to realize that you should have gone right. Then turn around. You have to go through the thing to make it through. I like the phrase, “Action brings clarity.” Action brings clarity. You're waiting for clarity before taking action, and it's not going to happen—you have to start moving. You just have to get going and you adjust course as you go. You start to realize what you should major on and what you shouldn't. Aaron: That's an incredible analogy. I'm totally going to use that in the future now. It's perfect. You sit there and you imagine yourself being at the end of the maze. That's where you see a bunch of other people. Your friends have gone through the maze and they're at the end, so you're like, “I have to get to the end fast. I can't make any mistakes. I can't take a wrong turn, because that's where all my friends are, and that's where I want to be.” You do have to go through it. That's really incredible. Creating a Customer Avatar Aaron: Shawn, you sent out an email and you were talking about this. I want you to explain how you think about customer avatars, and then if you did something like that for yourself when you were just starting, or if this is something that evolved over time. Customer avatar and content strategy, go! Shawn: This is great. When I first started as a writer, I was doing ShawnBlanc.net. My entire job was publishing articles and links on my website. I didn't have a customer avatar or a customer profile, what I had was an ideal reader. I think, in terms of podcasting, it's very similar. Who's your ideal listener? For me, I actually had a person who was my ideal reader, who's name was Shawn Spurdee. He was a really good friend of mine. He and I had become friends through the blogging Twitter-sphere back in the day. When I wrote articles or links, I had him in mind. I thought, “Is this something he would find interesting? Is there a story in here that he's going to want to read? Is this a link to something he would like?” You had that ideal reader. John Gruber wrote about this for his site, Daring Fireball. He talked about his ideal reader, and he called it “a second version of himself.” He goes, “This person is interested in all the same things I'm interested in, and he cares about what I care about. All the design decisions I make on the site, all the articles I choose to link to, the stories I choose to tell, all of that stuff is with this ideal reader/listener in mind.” It was instrumental for me to have an “ideal reader” for all of the work I was doing. You know who you're trying to target. I'm still the writer for sure, but we've switched a lot more of our focus onto direct sales, building a customer base, and selling products to our audience. I still don't have that ideal reader. Who am I writing this for? Who is this product being created for? It has gone beyond just an individual person that I know. We did a customer profiling thing. I have a guy who works for me full time, and his name is Isaac. We took a couple of big, giant sticky pad things, two feet by three feet, they're huge, these giant sticky notes. Aaron: Where do you get those? Can you get those on Amazon? Shawn: You can get a lawnmower on Amazon, so I'm sure you can get sticky notes. We got ours at Office Max, an Office Depot kind of thing. It's weird. You drive to this store, and you can walk in, and they sell products on their shelves. You have to pick it up with your hand and drive it home yourself. Aaron: It seems like a waste of time. Shawn: For this customer profiling session or whatever, basically, we had these four quadrants. What do they think? What do they feel? What do they want? What do they say? Something like that. You're trying to get this picture of this person. Who is this person? What are the things that they say? Like, “I love my family. I like to watch Netflix.” Whatever. Aaron: “I want to learn how to make a podcast.” Shawn: Exactly. It's not just business, it's just life. What are the kind of phrases they might say? If you ask them what they care about, what things would they list? What are their pain points that they're feeling in life? For us, creating this customer avatar, we named him Brian. We found a random picture of somebody and stuck it up there to begin to humanize the person. Your customer avatar is a real person that exists out there. We talked about, “Here's Brian,” and we came up with this stuff. Brian has a job that he kind of likes, but he's got these other creative ideas that he really wants to pursue. Maybe he wants to take it full time. Maybe not. That's not really the most important thing for him. The most important thing for him is getting his best creative work out there and being able to do it and feel like he's making progress on the areas of life that matter to him. He's also a dad and a husband, and he cares about his family quite a bit. He cares about his kids. He still wants to be available for them. When he comes home from work, he's really tired, so the evenings don't feel like a good time to do his creative work, but he's not a morning person either, so he doesn't know when he's going to get the time. These are some of the scenarios, the stories, that begin to emerge as you begin to write stuff about this person. What are the pain points that they feel? When they look around, what do they see? What kind of car does Brian drive? Does he like minivans? Does he have a minivan? How many kids does he actually have? You really kind of start to come up with this stuff, and there's a lot you can do to get to a higher level of doing these customer profiles. You can actually do interviews with your customer base. Aaron: I do this! I try to meet people and talk to them, especially when it comes to podcasting. When you interview your customers, you can actually begin to get a real life picture of your real life audience. Creating an Empathy Map Shawn: There's this thing that we did, an empathy map, and you take the empathy map to create your customer profile. We ran this survey to our email list, and we ran a separate one to our customer list. It was, “When it comes to focus, what's your single greatest challenge?” It was just this open-ended question where people could write stuff down. Some people say, “Time.” Or, “I can't focus. I'm distracted.” Then you get some people who go, “I'm trying to build my photography portfolio website on the side because I love photography and I'm trying to grow it. I'm working this other job, and when I come home in the evenings, family is first. I spend time with family, so by the time the kids are in bed, I've only got about an hour left in the day. I'm so tired, and I don't want to spend time trying to work on my photography website, so I don't know where to get started.” The person who gives an in depth answer to the challenge like that, vs. someone who just says “time”, they're really in touch with their pain point. There's a book called Ask by Ryan Leveque, and you can find it on Amazon. He teases out, “You ask these questions, and you separate the people with the longest answers. You put their answers up at the top.” You cut the list at 20%. The bottom 80%, forget about those people, and look at the top 20%, these “hyper-responders.” What are their challenges? What are their pain points? Aaron, you could do this. You could say, “When it comes to building a podcast, what is your single greatest challenge?” You'll probably have someone who says, “Building my list.” Or, “Building my audience.” Or, “Technical stuff.” But then you might have someone who really gives this heartfelt, in-depth answer. If someone gives you a heartfelt, in-depth answer, they're hungry for a solution. That person is going to pay for a solution. That person is going to digest this, and when you give them something, they're going to check it out. Look for these hyper-responders and cater your response to them. That's what we did. That's how we figured out that our biggest pain points for people who go through the Focus Course are one of four primary buckets, so to speak. It's time management, getting traction on their business or side projects, finding clarity on what's important to them and what they should be doing about it, and a lot of people also feel overwhelmed by all that's already happening in life. Or, they look at the thing that they're trying to make progress on, and they feel overwhelmed. They don't even know where to start. Really, all of these things feed off of each other. When one is in a rough spot, the others start to be in a rough spot as well. We go, “Okay, these are the main challenges we're going to address as part of the Focus Course, in all of our writing. This is it.” The people that fit within these four buckets are the ones who are willing to pay for a solution. Use Your Audience's Language Shawn: Read the actual responses, the answers, and take the language that people are saying and use it in your articles. Answer their actual questions in podcast episodes. You use it in your marketing language. The landing page for your product, or your podcast, or your sign up, or whatever—use the actual language of your hyper-responder customers. Now, not only are you listening to them and you know who that ideal customer is, but you're also even speaking their language. A) it's going to be cool because hopefully you'll do more sales, but B) you'll actually get to connect with the people you want to connect with. That's the whole point. That's why we're here. That's one of the huge benefits of having these customer profiles. It can help you stay focused on who you're trying to talk to and what it is you're trying to talk about, to help them. Aaron: That's mindblowing. That's fantastic. At the core, I kind of know this stuff, but hearing you explain it made it even more clear to me. I love that. I want to take it in this direction. How to Grow Your Audience & Create Deeper Connections Aaron: One of the most common questions I get about podcasting is about growing an audience. It's always, “How do I get more attention? How do I get more listeners? How do I grow an audience?” I love what you said right here. Use the language of your customer avatar in your content to create a deep connection with them. That's where listeners come from. So many people think that they'll magically get 100,000 people to listen to their podcast, and they won't have any idea of who these people are. They're nameless, faceless avatars on the internet. No! Especially in the beginning, you start small. You develop relationships with people who care passionately about the thing that you're talking about. By investing in them, getting to know them, and asking them questions—regardless of whether you're doing some kind of business thing or not—by just talking to them and getting to know their language, that's how you're going to resonate with them and even more people. What methods have you found effective for growing an audience and developing deeper relationships? Shawn: I think that's a great question. Everyone wants to know the answer to this. For me, there are three primary keys to growing an audience: Consistency Honesty and transparency Relationships. 1. Consistency Shawn: Consistency is core. This is a phrase in the seanwes Community, and it's a phrase I like to use, and that's this: show up every day. That's consistency. We're just people of habit. The internet is a thing of habit, so you have to have that consistency where you're in people's regular cycles. Sean McCabe talks about this a lot. You want to be in people's weekly cycle at a minimum. Show up on a regular basis. Also, that's how people know you're going to be there. There's something about that consistency. One of the ways you develop an audience where people are tracking with you and paying attention when you're showing up consistently. When you show up consistently, not only do you earn people's trust, but you create an anticipation of future value. You want to have that. That's huge. People are like, “I want to know what's next. I want to follow this story and be here.” Consistency is huge. 2. Honesty & Transparency Shawn: This comes out in a lot of ways. In some ways, you want to have the transparency like Nathan Barry talks about, to “teach what you know.” Share what you know. Also, there's a human element, passion and persona, who you are as an individual. Humanizing yourself is so helpful. We don't want to connect with brands, we want to connect with people. As indie entrepreneurs or indie creative folks, when you are running your own thing, you are a brand but you're also a person. You've got to keep the person aspect of it, the human aspect of it, you have to keep it there. Allow your mistakes to show through. Allow your passions to show through. For me, at ShawnBlanc.net, I cut my teeth and grew my audience originally by writing about Apple stuff. I wrote tons of product reviews. It was super nerdy, gadgety stuff. I would also write about coffee, camera gear, books I was reading, music, and things like that. Aaron: Stuff you cared about. Shawn: Exactly. Other interests that were related to Apple gear because it was my site, and I can write about whatever I want. That humanized the work that I was doing. So many people came to my site because of the Apple stuff but they stayed because of the coffee stuff. Your focus, your niche, is going to draw your audience, but your ancillary interests will keep people interested. You're a real person with real interests who is not just this robot spinning off the same thing all the time. 3. Relationships Shawn: This is huge. I stink at it, but I'm trying to reply to emails. When people email me, replying back to them. Also, here's a prime example, having me on your show, Aaron. The practicality of it is that when this show goes live, I'm going to tweet about it. I'm going to link to it. I'm going to point the people that track with me over to your stuff. That's a way for you to grow your audience, but it's also a way for me to grow my audience. Your listeners, a lot of people, don't know who I am. Now, hopefully, some of them will come check me out and sign up for our stuff. There's a really cool dynamic here of introducing your group to someone else. Hopefully, that person will also introduce their audience to who you are. Doing guest-based podcasts is an awesome way to grow your audience. I did some back in the day, when I was first starting my site. I did interviews, blog interviews. The whole thing was conducted over email, and it was just this back and forth email. I did one with Daniel Jalkut, who used to work at Apple and then started Red Sweater. He has the best blogging app on the planet for Mac, MarsEdit. It's a super great app. I emailed him and did an interview with him. I did an interview with John Grubar. I did an interview with Brett Simmons, all these people who are super famous Apple people. I'm going back and forth with these guys and posting their interviews. They link to me on my site, and I get this influx of new readers. Or you find software that's awesome. I would do super in-depth reviews about this stuff, and then people would link to those reviews. Honoring other people, connecting with other people, and doing stuff that's worth talking about. Then the word will spread. That consistency, being transparent and honest about who you are, having that passion and that human dynamic to the work that you do, and then just trying to connect with other people. Do things that people are going to want to talk about. Another example is the summit that we're doing, the Focus Summit. I'm punching way above my weight class here with some of these folks, and it's a chance to hopefully get some of their audience to discover the work that we're doing and visa versa. I hope that people who sign up for this summit will get introduced to some new people and that they'll find some incredible resources. It's just fun. We're all just folks trying to do our best work, right? Aaron: Absolutely. I love that. That's one of the best answers for building an audience that I've ever heard. The Importance of Investing One-on-One Time in Your Listeners Aaron: The thing that I'm working on, and I just want to share this, is investing more time in my listeners. It's hard sometimes, because you can spend all the time in the world talking to people on the internet, as I'm sure you know, Shawn. I'm sure people are constantly emailing you, asking for your thoughts, your advice, and your feedback on stuff, and you try to stay really focused. Something I've wanted to do is spend a little bit of time every day, like on Twitter, reaching out and telling people that I appreciate what they do. Or, if somebody emails me, having a conversation. In depth, giving them 15 or 20 minutes of focus time to reply, and even asking them questions. Someone says, “Hey, thanks for doing your show. I really appreciate this thing.” I'll reply and say, “Thank you so much. How is your podcasting journey going? What are you working on right now? What do you want to get better at?” Some great conversations have come out of that. I'm trying to invest a little bit more in my listeners. I'm at the point now where I've started inviting some of them on the show. “Hey, you sound like you'd be a cool person to talk about podcasting with. Would you like to come on the show?” It just spreads. It's the building of community that will eventually attract people to you. When I started, I had 30 or 40 friends, maybe a couple hundred followers. Every new person that finds my show and gets to know me as a person, who respects the work I do, they might have 200 people that follow them, and they share my show with those people. It just spreads out from there. It becomes this big net. You can eventually reach people that are far outside of your social circle just by connecting with the people you can connect with right now. Let them do the work of sharing your stuff with their people, too. Shawn: Yeah, exactly. Focus Summit & Products Aaron: That's fantastic. We're getting close to the end of the episode. We need to wrap it up. I told everyone in the beginning that I would get you to talk about this Focus Summit that you've got coming up. What's the deal with this? Tell us a little bit about that. Shawn: The summit! I'm so excited about this. We have Jocelyn Glei, who just wrote this book called Unsubscribe, which is a fantastic book. It's about email distractions and stuff like that. We've got Josh Kaufman, who wrote The Personal MBA. Anyone who is trying to do anything related to business, you need to read The Personal MBA. It is a bargain. Aaron: So much good advice. Shawn: It's like a $35 book, and that book is so packed. Excellent, excellent stuff. Sean McCabe is on it, and Sean and I talk about how quantity leads to quality, which ties right into this stuff on showing up every day. The summit is going to be really, really cool. When this podcast drops, the summit is going to be kicking off. Here's the link: The Creative Focus Summit. After the summit wraps up, we're opening up registration for our Focus Course. That has become my flagship product. It changed everything for me, in terms of what I was focusing on. I came up with this course as the next product in a series. I had done Delight is in the Details, and I wanted to write a book about diligence and productivity. I wrote the book, and then, long story short, I realized that it needed to be a course. I felt like the way that I wanted to get these ideas across wasn't a book that someone would read, highlight, think was cool, and then puts back on their shelf and returns to life as usual. I want something that's really going to effect change. I knew that a book would probably go farther, broader, and reach a total number of more people. I would rather fewer people go through the course but have a higher number of them really get real impact. For me, the book ended up turning into the Focus Course, and we've had close to 1,300 people go through it. It's basically productivity training for creative people and entrepreneurs and leaders. It's way, way more than that. It's not tips and tricks. It's what I call “meaningful productivity.” It actually gets to the core, the heart, and the foundation. What do you really care about? How are you really spending your time? This is not a “Five Life Hacks That Will Help Me Go Through My Email Inbox Better.” It's hard questions that will make me challenge my assumptions about my family, my work, my down time, and my rest time. Anyone that thinks that taking a nap will improve productivity, the Focus Course is for you. Aaron: That's me! You have to have a healthy life to do your best work. Shawn: You can't sprint this. This is a marathon, so you have to have that breathing room. The Focus Course opens up after the summit is over, and I'm super excited about it. We're going to have a whole group of people cruising through in January. We're doing a winter class for it. We've got some forums, so everyone can share their progress. It's going to be a blast. I'm really excited about it. The summit is free, and the Focus Course itself is going to be something we charge for, obviously. Aaron: You have to charge for things, or else people won't take it seriously. Shawn: It's so true. Aaron: You have to invest. Shawn: That's something else. We didn't get into that earlier when we were talking about the pricing stuff, but that's another reason to charge for your work. Someone is actually going to have skin in the game. They're going to find value for it. Aaron: They have to ask themselves, “Okay. Do I think this is going to help me enough in my life journey to actually put money towards it?” If they answer that question for themselves and then make the choice to give you that money, they are going to say, “I told myself, I believe, that this is worth my time, so I need to invest my time in it.” Shawn: Exactly. Very true. Aaron: Where should people go if they want to follow you, connect with you, or ask you questions? Shawn: Twitter is a great spot. I'm @shawnblanc on Twitter.

Shawn Blanc is a writer, small-business owner, productivity coach, and creative entrepreneur living in Kansas City with his wife and their three sons. Shawn has been teaching and learning about creativity, diligence, and focus for over a decade, and his online courses have helped thousands of people do their best creative work while learning to thrive in the midst of life’s tensions. A while back, Shawn sent an email that caught my attention. He wrote about the importance of creating a customer avatar and developing a content strategy to connect with them and help them achieve their goals. I liked the email so much that I emailed him back and asked him to come on my show to talk about his journey to making a living through writing online and what he’s learned about growing an audience. Shawn also shares my passion for productivity and deep focus; so much so that he’s gathered 12 incredibly smart people for a free 5 day online summit about the power of focused life. In this episode, Shawn shares how he was able to make a full-time living by writing online, and we discuss how you can grow your audience by creating a customer avatar (your ideal listener) and creating content that addresses their needs and desires.Highlights, Takeaways & Quick Wins:Interview your customers to get a real life picture of your audience.Start selling products as early as possible.Your customer avatar is a real person that exists out there.Use the language of your customer avatar in your content to create a deep connection with them.Be in people’s weekly cycle at a minimum.Your niche is going to draw your audience but your ancillary interests will keep people interested.Show up consistently to earn people’s trust and create an anticipation of future value.Do guest-based podcasts to grow your audience.Reach people that are far outside of your social circle by connecting with the people you can connect with right now.Show NotesAaron: Shawn Blanc is a writer/small business owner/productivity coach/creative entrepreneur living in Kansas City with his wife and their three sons, and Shawn is a member of our Community. He’s been teaching and learning about creativity, diligence, and focus for over a decade now.His online courses have helped thousands of people do their best creative work while learning to thrive in the midst of life’s tensions. A while back, Shawn sent an email that caught my attention. He was writing about the importance of creating a customer avatar, that’s knowing who you’re creating for and what you want to help them achieve, what kind of person you want to help them become.I thought it was really interesting, so I sent him an email right back. I said, “Shawn, do you want to come on the show to talk about this? I think podcasters need to hear about this idea of customer avatars and also content strategy.” Shawn agreed, and he also shares my passion for productivity and focus, so much so that he has gathered 12 incredibly smart people for a five day online summit about the power of a focused life, and that’s going to be starting, I believe, as this episode comes out.If you’re listening to this in your podcast player, it’s starting today, I think. I’ll give you that link later. In this episode, I want to talk with Shawn about why you as a podcaster need to create a customer avatar, know who you’re creating for, develop a content strategy, and then also the benefits of deep focus, what we call deep work.A few small changes in your daily habits can lead to big improvements in your productivity and creative output.Shawn, that’s one of the longer intros I’ve ever done. Thanks for joining me today. I really appreciate you being here.Shawn: Thanks, Aaron. I love it. Super excited to be here.Shawn BlancAaron: I think of you, Shawn, as a writer and as the creator of an online course called The Focus Course, which is great. You’re so much more than that. Do you want to give everyone a quick introduction, how you got here and where you came from? I would also like to hear what your biggest struggles have been over the years of getting to the point where you’re at right now.Shawn: Absolutely. I’m in Kansas City. Originally, I’m from Denver. I’m a Colorado guy at heart. I’ve been married for going on 12 years, and my wife and I have three boys. It’s insane at our house. We used to call the first two the Twin Tornadoes, but we just had our third eight or nine weeks ago.Aaron: Congrats!Shawn: It’s awesome. Love it. I love being a dad. I used to be a drummer. I know that we have a lot of musicians around here. Sean McCabe plays a little bit of music, I think.Aaron: Yeah, he used to write music, just like he used to do lettering. I still play drums.Shawn: I used to play drums for a large ministry here in Kansas City, and I ended up transitioning out of that. It’s a long story, but I ended up becoming a marketing and creative director. I ran a team, an in-house design team, with about 17 people—web developers, print designers, web designers, writers, editors, project managers, whatever. We did a bunch of stuff. One of our huge things was that we would host a conference at the end of the year that I was running.25,000 people would come out for that. I did that for several years, and then my wife and I got pregnant with our first kid. I was like, “I don’t want to do this work as a dad.” Part of it was just super demanding. Anyone who has experienced working in the corporate design scene knows that it’s a very demanding spot.Everything is urgent all the time. I was doing like 80 hours a week, and I really enjoyed it. I had a lot of fun, but I was like, “There’s no way. I don’t want to do 80 hours a week as a dad.” I had that, plus I had this little blog on the side, where I had been writing about marketing stuff. I felt like, “This would be a good opportunity to quit what I’m doing and take a leap, see if I can take my website full time. Could I blog for a living?” That was the thought.I was doing about $1,000 a month in advertising and some affiliate stuff. I figured that if I could give it 40 hours a week, I could get the revenue up to a spot where it could pay the bills. I figured that it could grow from there.Aaron: How old were you at this point?Shawn: I was just about 30, not quite 30, like 29, when I made that jump. I asked everyone that was reading on the site. I said, “I’m quitting. I’m going to do this thing full time.” I asked people if they would be interested in supporting me to write the site for a living. I was like, “If you like what I’m doing, I’ll write more if you want to give me some money to do it.” I did this little membership drive. I was going to charge $3 a month for membership. I was doing a daily podcast as a perk of membership.Aaron: You aren’t still doing that, are you?Shawn: It’s on hiatus at the moment. We’ll see. I’m going to be diving back into the podcast scene starting early 2017. I miss podcasting. It’s fun.Aaron: You decided to ask people to support you, give you $3 a month, to go full time with your writing?Shawn: Basically. I figured if I could get 500 people, at $3 a month that’s $1,500, plus the other $1,000 I was doing, and that would be $2,500 a month. That’s not a ton, but I figured that would be enough to cover the bare necessities. I figured that things could grow from there. People signed up, and I hit the 500 person mark by the end of the month before I had even quit.I started my new job, April 4th 2011, basically fully funded as an independent blogger.Aaron: I bet that was exciting.Shawn: It was really exciting. I felt like I got this permission slip from my audience to go for it. As a creative person, sometimes you need that. Sometimes you want to be like, “Do you guys care? I’m here. I’m making this stuff.” A lot of the work we do as creative entrepreneurs is for your audience. I know that we’re going to talk about this in a little bit, the customer avatar profile. It’s for these people that you really want to serve. When you hear back from them and they go, “Hey, we like what you’re doing. Let’s keep the relationship going,” it’s like having a DTR with your audience.There’s something cool about that kind of permission slip moment. It’s like when you sell your first product, or whatever it is. People are interested. You get your first positive review on iTunes or whatever. Obviously, there’s going to be the junk that comes later, but whatever.Aaron: Some of the haters that come later?Shawn: You forget about that stuff and you keep moving on.Aaron: That’s awesome.Asking for MoneyAaron: When you think back, do you remember any big struggles or hurdles that you really had to overcome about that period in your life?Shawn: There were so many. It’s hard to say, “If I could do it differently, I would do it this other way,” because who knows? If I had done things differently, maybe it wouldn’t have turned out the way I thought it would. One of the biggest struggles for me was asking for money. It was a huge challenge related to the membership drive. I was asking folks to support me on a regular basis to write for a living. I was like, “Who am I? What kind of a dork says, ‘Give me money so I can blog for a living.'”Aaron: Nobody pays for things online anymore. Nobody wants to pay for writing.Shawn: Exactly. That was a huge challenge. It has continued to be a challenge for years. I have been doing this for almost six years now, full time. When I came out with my first book, it’s called Delight is in the Details, and it was an eBook package thing. I did some interviews.I charged $29 for my book, and I felt like this huge hypocrite.It was this feeling of, “This is information. Information should be free on the internet. Why would anyone ever buy this?” I felt like there was no value in this thing that people would pay for. I was like, “I have to do it. I’m going to charge for it.”Aaron: Sorry to jump in, but at the time, did you really feel like $30 was a lot of money?Shawn: Oh my gosh. I woke up feeling sick to my stomach the day I was going to launch it. I was like, “I can’t believe how much I’m asking for this.”Aaron: What did you think was going to happen?Shawn: I thought that people would buy it because they trusted me, and then they would read it and come and burn my house down because I had ripped them off so bad. I charged so much money for something.Aaron: It was your first time launching a product, right?Shawn: It was. It was my first product launch ever. It ended up bringing in like $5,000 in that first 48 hour launch window. It made $5,000 that first couple of days. In hindsight, it was this huge inflection point for me. I think I spent about 100 hours building the thing, made $5,000 from it in the first week, and I thought, “Woah, that was a great return on my time investment! Now I have this product that I can continue to sell.”Since then, in the last four or five years that I’ve sold it, I want to say that it’s sold $50,000 over the years. That’s awesome. There’s something great about creating a product, and it changed a lot.Producing and selling a book changed my relationship with my audience.Now I’m creating products for them to buy.That initial hurdle was huge. $29 was so much money. I think that was probably the biggest struggle, of being able to properly identify how much value I’m providing people and to price it correctly. That’s just hard. I think that’s why you should start selling stuff as early as possible, because you have to learn. There isn’t a formula for how much value you’re providing and how much you should charge for it.You can’t just plug your stuff into a worksheet and get a number back. You have to feel out the market, your market, your audience, your skill level. How much polish are you doing? How much depth of information are you providing? Whatever skill, service, or product it is you’re providing, you have to learn how to make money and price your stuff! It’s hard to do it when you’re starting.The biggest challenging for me at first was becoming comfortable asking for money and learning to accurately price my products.Aaron: The other thing is that once you launched that book and got familiar with all that stuff, that was a stepping stone to your future products, your future books and courses, and everything else that you’re doing. I’m sure, at that point, you felt like, “Okay. I’ve done this once before already. Now it’s like riding a bike. I just need to get back on and keep peddling, keep going.”Shawn: Yeah, absolutely. It really was a huge stepping stone. One thing I loved about creating and launching a product was that there was a start and an end date to it. This thing has to ship. I worked on it, and I was done. I put it out there. Boom, now it’s there. I’m done. It’s out in the world. Obviously, you iterate on it. A year later, I added some new interviews. I added some new chapters. I created some videos. I remastered all of the audio for the audio book.Product Launch HiccupsShawn: Super random story related to this. It was the relaunch of Delight is in the Details, a year after it had come out, and I put it out there. People are buying it during that relaunch period. I get an email from someone going, “I was just listening to the audio book, and the last chapter sounds like it’s not edited correctly. Something is weird about the last chapter. You should check it out.”I recorded the audio book and edited it by myself. I go and I open up the audio book for the last chapter and I’m listening to it, and it is the original take that I did of the book. The way I did the audio book, I’m reading it into my microphone in GarageBand. If I goofed up in the middle of a paragraph, I would just take a pause, say, “Okay, again,” and then I would start talking again. That was my marker. The last chapter of the book was that track, the whole thing.The audio track should have been 10 or 12 minutes for that chapter, and it was 30 minutes because of all my edits, retakes, and pauses. The whole thing. What’s worse is, it was there from the very beginning. For a year, I had been selling that thing. I was mortified. For a year, I had been selling my book with the last chapter all messed up, and I was mortified.Aaron: Nobody said anything??Shawn: They didn’t. Either no one listened to it, or when they listened to it, they just assumed… I don’t even know. I was so mortified. There you go. What worse thing can happen? Earlier, I had been so concerned about selling something that people weren’t going to consider valuable. Here’s this huge, huge mistake. What a goof!Aaron: I need to remind everyone that this audiobook is called Delight is in the Details.Shawn: The irony, right? That was one of the selling points of the book, too. I was like, “If you buy this book, it’s a case study in sweating the details itself. You’ll see all the areas where I’ve sweated the details in this product.” Whatever. Oh man. I was mortified.Aaron: Thankfully, no one came and burned down your house, and it was over a year before anyone even said anything. A lot of us are so curious about people who do such good work, so when a mistake does happen, it’s almost humanizing. It’s like, “Now I can relate to this person, because they’re not 100% on top of everything all the time, either, like I struggle with. I make a lot of mistakes, so it’s kind of nice when you see a really awesome musician on stage mess up a part and then jump back into it. You’re like, “Oh, they are humans, too.” That’s really cool. Nobody burned your house down, thankfully.Shawn: That’s why it’s so helpful to ship early. You get stuff out the door and you start learning. I love it.Aaron: I tell people this a lot, too, when it comes to podcasts. If you’re thinking about making a podcast, there are so many things you can tweak, improve, or work on forever, but it’s so much better to say, “What’s the minimum I have to do? I want to try and do a good job, but let’s do this, ship it, and iterate and improve on it every single week.”If you don’t ship something, you'll just pick at it and tweak it endlessly.Before you know it, it’s been a year and a half, and you’ve got three or five episodes you recorded 18 months ago that you’re still working on. In the meantime, nothing has happened.Start MovingShawn: As well, we have this picture of what we want something to look like and what we want it to be, but we have zero experience. I like the analogy of those lifesize mazes. Especially around Halloween and Thanksgiving, there are those corn mazes. They’re these giant things. Imagine someone standing at the entrance of this life size maze, staring at the entrance to it, and in their mind, trying to figure out how to get to the end so they can get straight to the end the fastest way possible without making any mistakes along the way.Impossible! Not going to happen. You have to go in the maze and go left to realize that you should have gone right. Then turn around. You have to go through the thing to make it through. I like the phrase, “Action brings clarity.”Action brings clarity.You’re waiting for clarity before taking action, and it’s not going to happen—you have to start moving.You just have to get going and you adjust course as you go. You start to realize what you should major on and what you shouldn’t.Aaron: That’s an incredible analogy. I’m totally going to use that in the future now. It’s perfect. You sit there and you imagine yourself being at the end of the maze. That’s where you see a bunch of other people. Your friends have gone through the maze and they’re at the end, so you’re like, “I have to get to the end fast. I can’t make any mistakes. I can’t take a wrong turn, because that’s where all my friends are, and that’s where I want to be.” You do have to go through it. That’s really incredible.Creating a Customer AvatarAaron: Shawn, you sent out an email and you were talking about this. I want you to explain how you think about customer avatars, and then if you did something like that for yourself when you were just starting, or if this is something that evolved over time. Customer avatar and content strategy, go!Shawn: This is great. When I first started as a writer, I was doing ShawnBlanc.net. My entire job was publishing articles and links on my website. I didn’t have a customer avatar or a customer profile, what I had was an ideal reader. I think, in terms of podcasting, it’s very similar. Who’s your ideal listener? For me, I actually had a person who was my ideal reader, who’s name was Shawn Spurdee.He was a really good friend of mine. He and I had become friends through the blogging Twitter-sphere back in the day. When I wrote articles or links, I had him in mind. I thought, “Is this something he would find interesting? Is there a story in here that he’s going to want to read? Is this a link to something he would like?” You had that ideal reader. John Gruber wrote about this for his site, Daring Fireball.He talked about his ideal reader, and he called it “a second version of himself.” He goes, “This person is interested in all the same things I’m interested in, and he cares about what I care about. All the design decisions I make on the site, all the articles I choose to link to, the stories I choose to tell, all of that stuff is with this ideal reader/listener in mind.”It was instrumental for me to have an “ideal reader” for all of the work I was doing.You know who you’re trying to target. I’m still the writer for sure, but we’ve switched a lot more of our focus onto direct sales, building a customer base, and selling products to our audience. I still don’t have that ideal reader. Who am I writing this for? Who is this product being created for? It has gone beyond just an individual person that I know. We did a customer profiling thing. I have a guy who works for me full time, and his name is Isaac. We took a couple of big, giant sticky pad things, two feet by three feet, they’re huge, these giant sticky notes.Aaron: Where do you get those? Can you get those on Amazon?Shawn: You can get a lawnmower on Amazon, so I’m sure you can get sticky notes. We got ours at Office Max, an Office Depot kind of thing. It’s weird. You drive to this store, and you can walk in, and they sell products on their shelves. You have to pick it up with your hand and drive it home yourself.Aaron: It seems like a waste of time.Shawn: For this customer profiling session or whatever, basically, we had these four quadrants. What do they think? What do they feel? What do they want? What do they say? Something like that. You’re trying to get this picture of this person. Who is this person? What are the things that they say? Like, “I love my family. I like to watch Netflix.” Whatever.Aaron: “I want to learn how to make a podcast.”Shawn: Exactly. It’s not just business, it’s just life. What are the kind of phrases they might say? If you ask them what they care about, what things would they list? What are their pain points that they’re feeling in life? For us, creating this customer avatar, we named him Brian. We found a random picture of somebody and stuck it up there to begin to humanize the person.Your customer avatar is a real person that exists out there.We talked about, “Here’s Brian,” and we came up with this stuff. Brian has a job that he kind of likes, but he’s got these other creative ideas that he really wants to pursue. Maybe he wants to take it full time. Maybe not. That’s not really the most important thing for him. The most important thing for him is getting his best creative work out there and being able to do it and feel like he’s making progress on the areas of life that matter to him. He’s also a dad and a husband, and he cares about his family quite a bit.He cares about his kids. He still wants to be available for them. When he comes home from work, he’s really tired, so the evenings don’t feel like a good time to do his creative work, but he’s not a morning person either, so he doesn’t know when he’s going to get the time. These are some of the scenarios, the stories, that begin to emerge as you begin to write stuff about this person. What are the pain points that they feel?When they look around, what do they see? What kind of car does Brian drive? Does he like minivans? Does he have a minivan? How many kids does he actually have? You really kind of start to come up with this stuff, and there’s a lot you can do to get to a higher level of doing these customer profiles. You can actually do interviews with your customer base.Aaron: I do this! I try to meet people and talk to them, especially when it comes to podcasting.When you interview your customers, you can actually begin to get a real life picture of your real life audience.Creating an Empathy MapShawn: There’s this thing that we did, an empathy map, and you take the empathy map to create your customer profile. We ran this survey to our email list, and we ran a separate one to our customer list. It was, “When it comes to focus, what’s your single greatest challenge?” It was just this open-ended question where people could write stuff down.Some people say, “Time.” Or, “I can’t focus. I’m distracted.” Then you get some people who go, “I’m trying to build my photography portfolio website on the side because I love photography and I’m trying to grow it. I’m working this other job, and when I come home in the evenings, family is first. I spend time with family, so by the time the kids are in bed, I’ve only got about an hour left in the day. I’m so tired, and I don’t want to spend time trying to work on my photography website, so I don’t know where to get started.”The person who gives an in depth answer to the challenge like that, vs. someone who just says “time”, they’re really in touch with their pain point. There’s a book called Ask by Ryan Leveque, and you can find it on Amazon. He teases out, “You ask these questions, and you separate the people with the longest answers. You put their answers up at the top.”You cut the list at 20%. The bottom 80%, forget about those people, and look at the top 20%, these “hyper-responders.” What are their challenges? What are their pain points? Aaron, you could do this. You could say, “When it comes to building a podcast, what is your single greatest challenge?” You’ll probably have someone who says, “Building my list.” Or, “Building my audience.” Or, “Technical stuff.” But then you might have someone who really gives this heartfelt, in-depth answer.If someone gives you a heartfelt, in-depth answer, they’re hungry for a solution.That person is going to pay for a solution. That person is going to digest this, and when you give them something, they’re going to check it out. Look for these hyper-responders and cater your response to them. That’s what we did. That’s how we figured out that our biggest pain points for people who go through the Focus Course are one of four primary buckets, so to speak. It’s time management, getting traction on their business or side projects, finding clarity on what’s important to them and what they should be doing about it, and a lot of people also feel overwhelmed by all that’s already happening in life.Or, they look at the thing that they’re trying to make progress on, and they feel overwhelmed. They don’t even know where to start. Really, all of these things feed off of each other. When one is in a rough spot, the others start to be in a rough spot as well. We go, “Okay, these are the main challenges we’re going to address as part of the Focus Course, in all of our writing. This is it.” The people that fit within these four buckets are the ones who are willing to pay for a solution.Use Your Audience’s LanguageShawn: Read the actual responses, the answers, and take the language that people are saying and use it in your articles. Answer their actual questions in podcast episodes. You use it in your marketing language. The landing page for your product, or your podcast, or your sign up, or whatever—use the actual language of your hyper-responder customers. Now, not only are you listening to them and you know who that ideal customer is, but you’re also even speaking their language.A) it’s going to be cool because hopefully you’ll do more sales, but B) you’ll actually get to connect with the people you want to connect with. That’s the whole point. That’s why we’re here.That’s one of the huge benefits of having these customer profiles. It can help you stay focused on who you’re trying to talk to and what it is you’re trying to talk about, to help them.Aaron: That’s mindblowing. That’s fantastic. At the core, I kind of know this stuff, but hearing you explain it made it even more clear to me. I love that. I want to take it in this direction.How to Grow Your Audience & Create Deeper ConnectionsAaron: One of the most common questions I get about podcasting is about growing an audience. It’s always, “How do I get more attention? How do I get more listeners? How do I grow an audience?” I love what you said right here.Use the language of your customer avatar in your content to create a deep connection with them.That’s where listeners come from. So many people think that they’ll magically get 100,000 people to listen to their podcast, and they won’t have any idea of who these people are. They’re nameless, faceless avatars on the internet. No! Especially in the beginning, you start small. You develop relationships with people who care passionately about the thing that you’re talking about.By investing in them, getting to know them, and asking them questions—regardless of whether you’re doing some kind of business thing or not—by just talking to them and getting to know their language, that’s how you’re going to resonate with them and even more people. What methods have you found effective for growing an audience and developing deeper relationships?Shawn: I think that’s a great question. Everyone wants to know the answer to this. For me, there are three primary keys to growing an audience:ConsistencyHonesty and transparencyRelationships.1. ConsistencyShawn: Consistency is core. This is a phrase in the seanwes Community, and it’s a phrase I like to use, and that’s this: show up every day. That’s consistency. We’re just people of habit. The internet is a thing of habit, so you have to have that consistency where you’re in people’s regular cycles. Sean McCabe talks about this a lot. You want to be in people’s weekly cycle at a minimum.Show up on a regular basis. Also, that’s how people know you’re going to be there. There’s something about that consistency. One of the ways you develop an audience where people are tracking with you and paying attention when you’re showing up consistently.When you show up consistently, not only do you earn people’s trust, but you create an anticipation of future value.You want to have that. That’s huge. People are like, “I want to know what’s next. I want to follow this story and be here.” Consistency is huge.2. Honesty & TransparencyShawn: This comes out in a lot of ways. In some ways, you want to have the transparency like Nathan Barry talks about, to “teach what you know.” Share what you know. Also, there’s a human element, passion and persona, who you are as an individual. Humanizing yourself is so helpful. We don’t want to connect with brands, we want to connect with people. As indie entrepreneurs or indie creative folks, when you are running your own thing, you are a brand but you’re also a person.You’ve got to keep the person aspect of it, the human aspect of it, you have to keep it there. Allow your mistakes to show through. Allow your passions to show through. For me, at ShawnBlanc.net, I cut my teeth and grew my audience originally by writing about Apple stuff. I wrote tons of product reviews. It was super nerdy, gadgety stuff. I would also write about coffee, camera gear, books I was reading, music, and things like that.Aaron: Stuff you cared about.Shawn: Exactly. Other interests that were related to Apple gear because it was my site, and I can write about whatever I want. That humanized the work that I was doing. So many people came to my site because of the Apple stuff but they stayed because of the coffee stuff.Your focus, your niche, is going to draw your audience, but your ancillary interests will keep people interested.You’re a real person with real interests who is not just this robot spinning off the same thing all the time.3. RelationshipsShawn: This is huge. I stink at it, but I’m trying to reply to emails. When people email me, replying back to them. Also, here’s a prime example, having me on your show, Aaron. The practicality of it is that when this show goes live, I’m going to tweet about it. I’m going to link to it. I’m going to point the people that track with me over to your stuff. That’s a way for you to grow your audience, but it’s also a way for me to grow my audience.Your listeners, a lot of people, don’t know who I am. Now, hopefully, some of them will come check me out and sign up for our stuff. There’s a really cool dynamic here of introducing your group to someone else. Hopefully, that person will also introduce their audience to who you are.Doing guest-based podcasts is an awesome way to grow your audience.I did some back in the day, when I was first starting my site. I did interviews, blog interviews. The whole thing was conducted over email, and it was just this back and forth email. I did one with Daniel Jalkut, who used to work at Apple and then started Red Sweater. He has the best blogging app on the planet for Mac, MarsEdit. It’s a super great app. I emailed him and did an interview with him.I did an interview with John Grubar. I did an interview with Brett Simmons, all these people who are super famous Apple people. I’m going back and forth with these guys and posting their interviews. They link to me on my site, and I get this influx of new readers. Or you find software that’s awesome. I would do super in-depth reviews about this stuff, and then people would link to those reviews. Honoring other people, connecting with other people, and doing stuff that’s worth talking about.Then the word will spread. That consistency, being transparent and honest about who you are, having that passion and that human dynamic to the work that you do, and then just trying to connect with other people. Do things that people are going to want to talk about. Another example is the summit that we’re doing, the Focus Summit. I’m punching way above my weight class here with some of these folks, and it’s a chance to hopefully get some of their audience to discover the work that we’re doing and visa versa.I hope that people who sign up for this summit will get introduced to some new people and that they’ll find some incredible resources. It’s just fun. We’re all just folks trying to do our best work, right?Aaron: Absolutely. I love that. That’s one of the best answers for building an audience that I’ve ever heard.The Importance of Investing One-on-One Time in Your ListenersAaron: The thing that I’m working on, and I just want to share this, is investing more time in my listeners. It’s hard sometimes, because you can spend all the time in the world talking to people on the internet, as I’m sure you know, Shawn. I’m sure people are constantly emailing you, asking for your thoughts, your advice, and your feedback on stuff, and you try to stay really focused. Something I’ve wanted to do is spend a little bit of time every day, like on Twitter, reaching out and telling people that I appreciate what they do.Or, if somebody emails me, having a conversation. In depth, giving them 15 or 20 minutes of focus time to reply, and even asking them questions. Someone says, “Hey, thanks for doing your show. I really appreciate this thing.” I’ll reply and say, “Thank you so much. How is your podcasting journey going? What are you working on right now? What do you want to get better at?” Some great conversations have come out of that.I’m trying to invest a little bit more in my listeners. I’m at the point now where I’ve started inviting some of them on the show. “Hey, you sound like you’d be a cool person to talk about podcasting with. Would you like to come on the show?” It just spreads.It’s the building of community that will eventually attract people to you.When I started, I had 30 or 40 friends, maybe a couple hundred followers. Every new person that finds my show and gets to know me as a person, who respects the work I do, they might have 200 people that follow them, and they share my show with those people. It just spreads out from there. It becomes this big net.You can eventually reach people that are far outside of your social circle just by connecting with the people you can connect with right now.Let them do the work of sharing your stuff with their people, too.Shawn: Yeah, exactly.Focus Summit & ProductsAaron: That’s fantastic. We’re getting close to the end of the episode. We need to wrap it up. I told everyone in the beginning that I would get you to talk about this Focus Summit that you’ve got coming up. What’s the deal with this? Tell us a little bit about that.Shawn: The summit! I’m so excited about this. We have Jocelyn Glei, who just wrote this book called Unsubscribe, which is a fantastic book. It’s about email distractions and stuff like that. We’ve got Josh Kaufman, who wrote The Personal MBA. Anyone who is trying to do anything related to business, you need to read The Personal MBA. It is a bargain.Aaron: So much good advice.Shawn: It’s like a $35 book, and that book is so packed. Excellent, excellent stuff. Sean McCabe is on it, and Sean and I talk about how quantity leads to quality, which ties right into this stuff on showing up every day. The summit is going to be really, really cool. When this podcast drops, the summit is going to be kicking off. Here’s the link: The Creative Focus Summit.After the summit wraps up, we’re opening up registration for our Focus Course. That has become my flagship product. It changed everything for me, in terms of what I was focusing on. I came up with this course as the next product in a series. I had done Delight is in the Details, and I wanted to write a book about diligence and productivity. I wrote the book, and then, long story short, I realized that it needed to be a course.I felt like the way that I wanted to get these ideas across wasn’t a book that someone would read, highlight, think was cool, and then puts back on their shelf and returns to life as usual. I want something that’s really going to effect change. I knew that a book would probably go farther, broader, and reach a total number of more people. I would rather fewer people go through the course but have a higher number of them really get real impact.For me, the book ended up turning into the Focus Course, and we’ve had close to 1,300 people go through it. It’s basically productivity training for creative people and entrepreneurs and leaders. It’s way, way more than that. It’s not tips and tricks. It’s what I call “meaningful productivity.” It actually gets to the core, the heart, and the foundation. What do you really care about? How are you really spending your time?This is not a “Five Life Hacks That Will Help Me Go Through My Email Inbox Better.” It’s hard questions that will make me challenge my assumptions about my family, my work, my down time, and my rest time. Anyone that thinks that taking a nap will improve productivity, the Focus Course is for you.Aaron: That’s me!You have to have a healthy life to do your best work.Shawn: You can’t sprint this. This is a marathon, so you have to have that breathing room. The Focus Course opens up after the summit is over, and I’m super excited about it. We’re going to have a whole group of people cruising through in January. We’re doing a winter class for it. We’ve got some forums, so everyone can share their progress. It’s going to be a blast. I’m really excited about it. The summit is free, and the Focus Course itself is going to be something we charge for, obviously.Aaron: You have to charge for things, or else people won’t take it seriously.Shawn: It’s so true.Aaron: You have to invest.Shawn: That’s something else. We didn’t get into that earlier when we were talking about the pricing stuff, but that’s another reason to charge for your work. Someone is actually going to have skin in the game. They’re going to find value for it.Aaron: They have to ask themselves, “Okay. Do I think this is going to help me enough in my life journey to actually put money towards it?” If they answer that question for themselves and then make the choice to give you that money, they are going to say, “I told myself, I believe, that this is worth my time, so I need to invest my time in it.”Shawn: Exactly. Very true.Aaron: Where should people go if they want to follow you, connect with you, or ask you questions?Shawn: Twitter is a great spot. I’m @shawnblanc on Twitter.