Podcasts about so i'd

Meet Agostino Pintus As a former INC 500 Technology Chief, he had great success...until he failed in spectacular fashion that kicked off his "10 Dark Years". He was rudderless, with no direction and financially broken. It wasn't until a friend introduced him to the power of buying large real estate deals that changed the entire course of his life. Agostino ended up building a real estate portfolio as the General Partner on over $42M of deals in 32 months! Today, he helps people get into real estate deals and build their wealth. Why don't you start by sharing your thoughts on how we think we've been conditioned to not take risks? I was talking to my friend about this the other day actually. And if you think about it, when we were kids in grade school, and you made a mistake on a test or something like that, at least when I went to grade school. We had nuns that ran the school and if you made a mistake, they whip out the ruler and wrap it right across your knuckles. Right? Because you made an error. And if you can imagine that type of behavior to a child, amplified, and done day in day out where you're worried about your score and you're worried about being wrong. It's the conditioning. We're conditioned to be very good employees, that is what we are trained to do, because we live in a very antiquated system, right? We live in a system where we were told you're going to be good employees, you shall not make a mistake. And I need you to work eight hours a day. And then you're going to get eight hours to yourself, get eight hours of sleep. This is the perfect balance. You're going to do this for five days a week. You're going to do this for 40 years until we don't longer need you. Then you're going to go on to a pasture and live out the rest of your life that we permit you to have. Why do people live in fear even though they have a secure job? That's the thing, that's the fake thing. It's not secure. It's this belief of security like you said in the introduction there. I was working at this this company. It was a fine company, a great company, we had a great deal of success. We helped grow this business from a few hundred employees to a couple thousand employees. I mean, we're doing remarkable things. But what I did was while I was working at this company, I got into real estate back then doing like single family homes and stuff like that, because I was I was living in fear, even though I was earning a six figure job, even though I had stock options and all that fun stuff with this company. And even though they supposedly loved me, I still thought one day these guys are going to turn on me. That was always in the back of my mind. I already knew it because as long as your future in the hands of someone else, they will define when you can take your time when you can take your time off and when and where you can go, that even comes into play, too, right? Because if you're given two weeks and I say given two weeks or three weeks of your time, your time must be taken into account as to where you want to go and you have any flexibility around that if you want to take a longer trip, there's no way it has to be included in your time off that is again allocated to you. But at any rate, all this stuff is a facade. It's not real. And I’m a perfect example. You have really achieved some major successes. What are some of the best habits that you've employed to help you achieve these goals and live without fear to some extent? I would say that before can answer that question, there has to be a realization. And I'll tell you that when you have this reawakening and you develop a whole new focus around what your life needs to be, you start living on purpose, and that's what I've been doing now. So, what I do as far as the ritual is concerned, I wake up early every morning, 5:15, I avoid touching the phone, I avoid all that I go to the gym and do CrossFit, come home, start the coffee, and I start writing. I write down my affirmations. I say, I visualize my future as I want it as it is as if it's present and happening today because your subconscious does not know the difference. Can you share with our listeners, one of your most successful or favorite networking experiences that you've had? I network like tremendously it's what we do and as part of our core to our business. So what we do that you alluded to before is we buy these large multifamily real estate deals. And I have a friend of mine that that introduced me to, but he brought me into the fold of his network. And I tell you, the people he introduced me to are just phenomenal. This one guy, this one friend that he introduced me to got us in front of a deal that would never have made its way in my hands in a million years. And now we're closing it in a few weeks here. I can't really share with you what it is just yet because it's a non-disclosure agreement. But you have me on in three weeks and I'll tell you all about it. But I'm telling you, that this is a historical property, it will be worth a great sum of money when it's completed. But again, networking is what brought it. So how do you stay in front of or best nurture these relationships that you're creating? I think everybody is somewhat in some degree guilty of this is that is the follow up. The follow up is probably the hardest part. Because we get in our own heads. If a relationship goes nowhere, it goes nowhere. What are you going to do right, but establishing those contacts in relationships. Everyone else has got what you need and myself included, right, I have what someone needs out there. And that's why we're here today. Like I'm sharing my knowledge and sharing what I have for someone else to hopefully leverage and do something good with it. But that's probably one of the biggest things that I'm still pushing myself to do is to really tighten up the follow up. And I think what I'm going to be doing the next 30 days here is really bring on more staff to help offload some of the items that I'm doing so I can focus on what matters and that's other people. What advice would you offer that business professional who is really looking to grow their network? Deliver value, deliver all the value that you possibly can. There's friends that I've met and we're very close business partners today. But at first we weren't. And we met through a mutual friend. And we just talked on the phone and he says that he's looking for help. Next thing you know, I hook them up with a top notch guy that I know can do the job. And you know, he happened to come into town. You know, a few months later, we're still talking. We have a very good dialogue. He mentioned that he liked a certain type of coffee. And I said, hey, you know what? You should try espresso. I have this crazy stovetop thing and he had never heard of it. I went off and bought one for him and handed it to him. So a $10 item, but you know what, though? It's sitting on his stove right now. And he's thinking about me. Right? If you could go back to your 20-year-old self, what would you tell yourself to do more of, less of, or different with regards to your professional career? My mother had a serious accident and not really talked about this on the air, but she had a serious accident. And I ended up having to raise my little sister and I had the responsibilities of running the house, so to speak. So I don't know I think I would have probably told myself to give myself a challenge to read books a lot more. I totally underestimated the power of books. So I'd probably go back to my 20 year old self and say, create a list of all these books, and not just garbage books, I'm saying the classics that will really cause a mental shift, to really build your character, and to really improve your overall skills because I was relying just on tech, and I thought that as long as I had a good “job”, that's all you needed, and that was totally incorrect. Totally incorrect. Do you have any final word or advice to offer our listeners with regards to growing and supporting your network? I would say that it's other people who have your money. And people don't talk about money a whole lot. It's kind of like it's taboo. I'm not sure why it is. It's others that have your money and it's not just saying it in a bad way. I mean that if you're able to help someone achieve their goals, and you make some money at the same time, that is how you win. You win, they win, everybody's happy. And it just comes down to really supporting that other person and making them the star of the show, not yourself. That's ultimately what it is. That's what we do in our teaching program. That's exactly what I talk about. How to connect with Agostino Website: https://bulletproofcashflow.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bulletproofcashflow Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bulletproofcashflow/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/bulletproofcashflow?reload=9 Twitter: https://twitter.com/bulletproofcf Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/bulletproofcashflow/

Well, we are in our summer series entitled "Love the Commandment" and we'll begin this morning by showing you four images. Each of these are related but slightly different but all will help illustrate where we are going this morning. The first is a picture that will trigger PTSD in some. I think almost every parent at some point in their child's development tries to get their kid to learn some musical instrument. Perhaps you have been on the receiving end of this cruel and unusual punishment. Every musician must go through it. There are some really lame moments of rote learning. There are zero rewards. You have to drill the flashcards into the memory banks and it's horribly painful and laborious. But once you do it, you are able to read music. And when you can read music, you can play songs. And that is really enjoyable. And when you can play songs, you can participate in bands or orchestras. And that is even more enjoyable. And now when you listen to songs, you can appreciate them more. And every level of musical proficiency that is achieved releases you to enjoy in new ways what you thought you previously enjoyed but only mildly enjoyed by comparison to your new perspective. You see, musical pleasure is always available. The piano is right there. The potential exists. But only a few have their minds trained in such a way that they can take advantage of it. Untrained minds/souls are not in the right shape to receive that kind of enjoyment. Here's another example: This is a hand-written copy of Romance of the Three Kingdoms and is considered the greatest Chinese novel of all time. Now, what if someone handed this to you and just started raving about it. I mean they were so electric and gushing with enthusiasm. All this thrilling adventure, intrigue, and beautiful character development is right here, ready to be enjoyed. Now read it for yourself. Problem: I don't read Chinese. You see your mind and soul are not in the right shape to receive it. Or how about this one. On several top ten lists of most famous paintings or most beautiful paintings, this bad boy shows up, Van Gogh's Starry Night. Some of you, because you have been trained to appreciate art, look at this and marvel in ecstasy. When I look at this, I think, "That's pretty good, for a kindergartener." If you were to lay it down next to 50 other paintings I'd vote this one last. I'm not skilled in art criticism. My eyes are not trained to notice and appreciate. I don't have the categories of thought to see ideas in art. In fact, Van Gogh himself rebukes me: Apparently, I cannot see and I have not been a very good student. He's totally mocking me here as an obtuse, thick-lidded brick. Again, my mind and soul are not in the right shape to receive it. A final example. This was voted the most beautiful equation in the world by a top group of mathematicians and physicists. There may be only a few in the room who could even identify it much less appreciate it. Physicist Jon Butterworth of University College London who spent his entire life trying to understand the laws by which the material world operates, said, "I love the Dirac equation because it combines elegant mathematics with huge physical consequences." I'm not a scientist but apparently, this equation combines quantum physics (how big stuff moves) with particle physics (how small stuff moves) and predicted things like antimatter which is the mirror image of all known particles. And apparently using things like particle accelerators, they've discovered the Higgs Boson and other such crazy things. Even with that explanation, you just can't appreciate it. For most, our mind and soul are not in the right shape to receive it. Now, that introduction was to make this point: - Is God more beautiful than the most amazing painting in the world? Yes. - Is he God more complicated than the craziest formula in the world? Yes. - Is he more elegant than the most marvelous musical masterpiece? Yes. - Is there a bit of a foreign language that you need to be learned to understand God? Yes. Then certainly, if it takes some shaping to appreciate these lesser things, these aspects of his creation, it will take significantly more shaping for us to be able to appreciate and see him in his beauty, complexity, singularity. If we can readily admit that we are not in the right shape to run a marathon or read a Sanskrit or Ugaritic text or not in the right shape to digest a chemistry formula, shouldn't we be even more ready to admit that there's no possible way we even have the categories of thought to appreciate the God who made all those things? It is pretty arrogant to assume that we are currently in spiritual shape to appreciate an infinite God. Now certainly, the Scriptures speak to the principal of our unfitness for spiritual realities. Let's not forget them! Paul says in 1 Corinthians 3:2, What happens if you try to feed a baby solid food? He chokes and throws it up. Why? Because his body isn't sufficiently developed. The problem isn't with the food. The food is really amazing. Strawberries, prime rib, artichokes, asparagus, mangos, grapes. A baby could die if he chokes on a grape or olive! He needs more practice swallowing. He needs to develop teeth. His bacteria in his gut needs to develop. His body needs to develop in its ability to metabolize. Great food awaits after he has matured. And in a similar way, there are all these spiritual delicacies that are way better than the milk we are drinking but because of spiritual immaturity, we can't handle it yet. The author of Hebrews uses the same word picture. You can see the idea. Let's just admit it this morning. We are out of shape. And because we are not in the right shape, we cannot receive the beauty of God. There are prerequisites and categories of thought necessary for appreciating and enjoying and digesting spiritual truth. So all this was to set us up so that we can understand where we are in our cycle If you've been here for the last three weeks, you'll recognize this chart. This chart serves us in describing a cycle that is always at work in our hearts to either create or deepen love our deconstruct or remove love. So thus far we've looked at the quadrant of belief and the quadrant of pursuit. Just as a reminder of how this works. We begin by believing a truth claim that affects our fulfillment. We believe that this thing out there that I do not yet possess is somehow objectively fulfilling and has the capability of fulfilling me. Let just use the Chinese novel as an example. You believe that this book will be a very enjoyable read based on the testimony of your friend who has read it. So that's the belief quadrant. But the problem is that I'm here and the object of fulfillment is over there. So that represents the pursuit quadrant. Pursuit is all about closing the gap. You can't read the Chinese novel if it's in a library in China. So you have to go get it. You have to get yourself into the right location. So you get on an airplane. You get an UBER. You drive to the ancient manuscript library. Now you have the book, but you still can't read it. The pleasure isn't yet unlocked. You aren't in the right shape to receive it. This is the point of the third quadrant, with the cultivate commands. These are pursuit commands of a different species. The cultivation commands are not about getting you into the right location. They are about getting you into the right shape. And the more in shape you are, the more enjoyment you can extract. You could imagine someone with a rudimentary Chinese education, a conversational Chinese education, and a scholarly Chinese education all experiencing varying levels of fulfillment while reading this novel. So the cultivation commands of the Bible are the largest and most diverse set of commands. They are commands that shape us: serve, sing, worship, pray, speak, tell, love, obey, enjoy, be. These commands tell us ways we are to be and usually describe other things we are not to be. They usually tell us ways we are to behave and other ways we are not to behave. Refrain, do not be, do not love, abhor, put off. Honestly, these are the commands that if you obeyed them all, you'd be a very moral person. They relate to behavior, how you treat other people, how you speak, what you do with your body, etc. Now again, these are commands that should be obeyed. And why? What's the point of obedience? The commands shape us. This is the misunderstanding of the moralist. These commands force us into unnatural positions, positions we have never experienced, positions that feel totally foreign and bizarre to our typical habits and instincts, but once we are in that position and practiced in that position we suddenly understand what it feels like to be happy. We are finally in the right shape to be fulfilled. I learned to play golf as an adult, and if you've shared in this experience, it's the most unnatural thing in the world. The one thing everyone shares in common as a beginner golfer is that you are guaranteed to do it wrong. You can see what a good golf swing looks like but you have no idea what it feels like. - So your friend is telling you to keep your left arm straight. - Swing path like this. - Finish like this. And all these commands are forcing my body into the most freakish, unnatural positions but then all of a sudden one day it happens where you flush a ball and the light clicks on! Ah, that's what it feels like. You'd never have that experience without first submitting yourself to the unnatural positions. But here's what's even cooler. Now future swings are not so much trying to obey commands, but they are mentally recalling what that good swing felt like. You've had an experience that now can be recalled in the mind. The obedience was required to create the experience. And now the experience drives future attempts. So all the cultivation commands of the Bible are commands that get us into the right shape to receive the goodness of God. They are commands that help us learn the foreign language of God, learn the physics behind the formulas of God, learn the artistic categories so we can appreciate the beauty of God. Obedience to the cultivation commands shapes us so that we can behold and be fulfilled by God. - The fact is, our eyes need to be re-calibrated. We are focused here and missing what's here. - Our ears need to be tuned to a different frequency. - Our interpretation algorithm is all jacked up. So that's what the cultivation commands are for but the problem is it doesn't feel this way. It doesn't feel like we need this kind of recalibration. Now, let's compare our analogies for a moment. We can look at one page of a Chinese novel and realize we are not in the right shape to receive whatever that thing is. Clearly, if I'm going to extract the enjoyment of that story, I've got some learning to do. Compare that to Van Gogh's Starry Night. Because I'm not skilled in appreciating art, it's very easy for me to be dismissive of what's here. I can say to myself, "I know exactly what I'm seeing and I recognize all these elements. A house, lights, hills, moon, clouds. Yep, I understand everything that I need to know and it's not amazing." So I'm moving on. This is much more what it's like when we approach God. - Yeah, I see what God is offering. - I get the basic idea of religion. - I get the concept of an all-powerful God. - I see what God is saying, but it doesn't do much for me. I'm not attracted to God. Moving on. Now the reason I say that is to make this point: you will have the most success in obeying the cultivation commands of the Bible if you believe with strong conviction, you are not in the right shape. In the case of the artwork, if you really believe that the problem is not the artwork- the problem is with you who can't appreciate the artwork- then you will begin to learn art in anticipation that one day your mind will be large enough to take it in. And in a similar way, if you really believe that Jesus Christ is the source of fulfillment but you are not in spiritual shape to benefit from all he has to offer, then you will get after it. If you believe the problem with my disinterest in Jesus is a problem with my spiritual unreadiness and spiritual unfitness then I'm going to become very eager and very obedient to these soul cultivation commands. Conversely, if you believe that Jesus is genuinely uninteresting, then the last thing you are going to do is submit yourself to a set of cultivation commands issued from an uninteresting guy. So what are these commands? There's no way we can visit all the cultivation commands in the Scriptures. So rather than try to list them all, we are going to observe two of the main things these cultivation commands teach us. We will answer the question: - What aspect of our being is transformed such that we are able to take in God more fully? - What liability is removed when we obey the cultivation commands? Now here's the idea: when we obey the cultivation commands, the Holy Spirit is able to help us see and appreciate spiritual realities. Obeying the cultivation commands invites the Spirit to help us see. Now it's so important to see this in the text itself. Get your nose in the Bible and see this. Now earlier we read 1 Corinthians 3 which is God explaining to us that there is much that God is holding back. There's this truckload of spiritual benefit that could be ours but we are unfitness for spiritual realities. Let's just refresh what we read: And so here Paul is calling us out as babies. Steak and wine over here. A loaf of french bread and cheese over here. Strawberries and rhubarb pie and apple pie are all here. And your mouth is watering. And you say, "Give it to me!" But you are all babies. You are all so immature, I'm going to give you a bottle of milk. When I hear that I say, "Well, I don't want milk. What's the problem?" In what way am I a baby? What's this spiritual liability that is so inhibiting? Well in the next verse he tells us! Man, this is gold. Don't let this pass you by. There is so much spiritual content that awaits you but the problem is that jealousy and strife and disunity among you. Does this not describe our country? Jealousy and strife. Let's make sure as we see this in our church we deal with it or we have no hope of ever maturing. Acting in the flesh and destroying unity are among the most significant inhibitors to being able to digest spiritual things. Why? Because in doing this, we take off our spiritual glasses. You see, if we need spiritual eyes to see spiritual things then we need the Spirit of God. The problem of not being able to appreciate God is that we lack the Spirit of God. Look at how it is said at the end of chapter 2 right before this section we just read. The Spirit of God is the lens we need. Do you see how clear this is? We can never hope to understand God without the Spirit of God. He's like the telescope or microscope that pulls in entire worlds previously invisible. He's like the infrared camera that helps us see an entire spectrum of reality that's always existed but we could never see. So if we want to have any chance of seeing God's beauty, appreciating his complexity, loving his intricacies and simplicities, we will need the Spirit of God. Do you see that? The Spirit of God is required. And how do we involve the Holy Spirit? Well here's a hint: not by disobeying. By loving the cultivation commands. By obeying. The Scriptures speak of quenching the Spirit (1 Thess 5:19), grieving the Spirit (Ephesians 4:30). So clearly sin is a Spirit killer. Now you might be tempted to try and flip that around and say if sin is a Spirit killer than obedience is a prerequisite to get the help of the Holy Spirit. Absolutely incorrect. So typical of the way we think. No, the Holy Spirit, whether you are believer or unbeliever, is always trying to help and disobedience pushes that help away. The only prerequisite, if you even want to call it that, is don't push him away. Listen to how Stephen says it in Acts 7 when speaking to the religious leaders. After laying out God's sovereign, redemptive plan of salvation, he turns to them, looks them in the face, and says, What is the Spirit doing in this verse? Trying to persuade, trying to empower, trying to change the heart, trying to help. The Spirit is always trying to help; disobedience is the spiritual stiff arm. It's the resistance mechanism. Galatians 5:17 says, "The flesh sets its desire against the Spirit." Picture the Spirit of God as throwing you a life preserver ring over and over again and sin is pushing it away. It's ignoring it. So when we obey the cultivation commands, we allow the Spirit of God to do the work he's wanting and trying to always do. He helps us to see spiritually discerned things. This is one of the ways in which we are most significantly scarred as fallen people. We are simply unable to tell what is good and what is bad. The fact that we cannot do it is bad enough. But there's something even worse. Most of us think we are really good at discerning what is good and bad when in reality we are really bad at it. We are all like that tone-deaf person who thinks they are really good at singing, but they lack the sense organ to self-evaluate accurately. We are spiritually tone-deaf and we think, "Oh yeah, I absolutely know what is good and what is bad." But we are deceived. Satan is known as the deceiver and plays of this spiritual liability. His entire job description could be boiled down to this: make what is not good look good. In the garden, Satan is described as the most crafty of all the created order. Second Corinthians 11:3 says that "Satan deceived Eve with his craftiness." How did he succeed? Think about it. Somehow he made disobeying God look like a good idea! Like, the worst idea in the world would be to disobey the sovereign Creator of all things. How in the world did Satan make that appear like a good idea? Somehow he did it. That's the point of deception. Satan is the great deceiver. In Revelation 12:9 he's called the dragon, the serpent of old who is called the devil, who deceives the whole world. The best deceivers present something to you in such a way that it looks really, really good, really, really innocent, really, really beautiful but in reality, it is actually hideous, monstrous, and pure evil. The ultimate example I think is Satan himself. After speaking about the deception of false teachers he says, So you're walking along and you think, oh my goodness, I just saw an angel. What could be purer than that? That's really good, an angel of light. What could be more innocent? What could be more disarming than an angel? What could be more beautiful and pure than an angel? He's here to help me. And so you open your heart to him. And yet, the reality is, it's Satan's goal to destroy. Now that feels hopeless. How can I ever avoid such trickery? There is hope because no deception is perfect. If it was perfect it would be a replica, not a deception. All deceptions have variations. There's always a slight difference. There's always the smallest little tip-off. Something just doesn't feel right. Picture a worm on a fish hook. It deceives most fish. But the giant 28-inch trout hanging out at the bottom of the largest hole says, "Hold on. That doesn't look quite right. It's not wiggling totally naturally. I think something's off." And even though he's really hungry he stands back. Then the young trout in his haste and inexperience gobbles it up and gets fried up for dinner. Now here's the point: obedience in the cultivation commands trains you to identify good and evil. It helps you identify the pure and push away things that look good but in reality, are poisonous and deadly. What looks like good is often not but how can you know? How do you get good at identifying those nuances and slight differences? How do we avoid being tricked? Look how this is specifically called out in Hebrews 5. Do you see the idea here? The idea is that by obeying the cultivation commands, but constantly doing good things, you will be able to discern between actual good things and things that appear good but are actually just illusions. By constantly doing, interacting, and obeying what is good, you begin to have an automatic sense of what is good. You are able to sort and distinguish automatically. And it does so by constantly helping you to handle the good. I have spent a lot of time handling screws and bolts and nuts in my life. And I can tell you just by picking up a screw what the pitch of the screw is. That's a 1/4-20. That one's a 10/24. I can look at a hex head and say, "That's a 7/16 socket. That's a 1/2 socket." Others of you who have spent a lot of time with music can listen to a E note played on a guitar and say, "That's a little flat or sharp." Others of you who have spent a lot of time painting can identify a color a million miles away, "That's burnt sienna." This is the idea. By doing truly good things, over and over again, you learn to identify the counterfeits. You see the slight differences, the things that appear to be good but are evil. By filling your mind with good thoughts over and over again, you learn to identify a bad thought, something that only appears good but will actually corrode your soul. Obedience in the cultivation commands, helps you acquire the taste for the divine. So what types of cultivation commands must we obey to invite the Spirit to alter our view of reality? What type of cultivation commands can we obey that will train us through constant handling to be able to discern between good and evil? Probably my favorite passage to illustrate this is Romans 12. Chapters 1-12 is Paul telling us all these true things about what Christ has done for us and who we are in Christ and then when you get to chapter 12, there's this incredibly long section of imperatives. There's a list of commands that just make your head spin. And it keeps going. I won't read it all, but doesn't that feel a little overwhelming. Is Paul a moralist here? He's just trying to get me to obey externally but doesn't care about the heart. Not it at all. Paul is saying, "You can't change the heart without the Spirit of God. But man, you're resisting the Holy Spirit who wants to help you." This is Paul saying, straighten the left arm, accelerate through the ball, hit down on the ball. Make a wider arc. Your swing path needs to go from inside to out. Keep your head still. Utilize your core. And all of a sudden, as we submit to these commands we find that we flush it. Instead of our flesh fighting and resisting the Spirit, the Spirit is now at work transforming our sight and giving us new values and new levels of appreciation. It's a magical moment where we just experience what it's like to be a Christian living under the influence of the Spirit of God. And by obeying these commands we find ourselves truly tasting goodness so that evil becomes obvious. We develop an instinct for good and now desire it and that good heals us. So I'd encourage you, if you want a place to start in the cultivation commands, write these down this week and just try to do them. Force yourself into these unnatural positions, not so that you can earn God's favor. You have God's favor in Christ. Force yourself into these unnatural positions so you can get into the right shape to understand a God who has made every good thing and has saved you. Now as we close, we should remind ourselves of the power of the choice. We should pause and think of the commands of the Bible as a choose your own adventure story. C.S. Lewis said: Choices shape us. Our choices change us. Do you believe that? But that shaping takes time. Either for good or for evil, either way, it takes time. To serve something means you submit to the process. Consider going to a gym. Sure you believe that it will help. You pursue it. You actually close the proximity gap. You get off the couch, you drive to the gym. And you actually work out. Now what? You look in the mirror and everything is the same. Something is happening that you can't see. It's slow. But it's happening. That choice that you made to cultivate is changing you. And what is really changing at the deepest level, is the object of your affection, your perception of what has worth and value. Here's the call from the message today. Submit to that process. Submit to it and your love will change! When I was in high school, I liked to play video games. But now I never play video games. I prefer other things. Here's the thing: of the things I prefer to do now, there is not a single one of them that I enjoyed the first time I tried it. Reading, exercise, hobbies. All of them had to be learned. But now I prefer these things way over video games not because video games have gotten less interesting (they've actually become way more interesting), but because of the fact that other things have eclipsed them. But I had to serve them, I had to be shaped to receive their gifts and benefit. Now, friends, how much more with Jesus Christ? We are not slaves to our own disposition. We can change what we love. How? By serving the Lord. By submitting ourselves to these soul shaping cultivation commands of the Bible. Listen, your choices change you. How will you choose to be shaped? Commandments represent something you control. - You can't control world politics. - You can't control your spouse. - You can't control your kids. But you can control your choices. And choices made in a direction over time are very powerful. God says that when we obey, the mystery of God's sovereignty meets us there. Work out your salvation for it is God who is at work. Let us obey with excitement and change what we love.

The one where I recorded with my good buddy and former boss, Nelson Leiser. The vast majority of his career (22 years) has been spent in recruiting and he now leads the Talent Acquisition team at Bluegreen Vacations. He's extremely wise and was the best person I could possibly think of on my home team to bring on to encourage you during such a tough time in the job market. We talked about: Searching for a job and working for a mentor LinkedIn basics (and why you need to create a profile!) Interview skills Building your "book" and telling your career story Networking (and why it doesn't have to be an icky word) He's one of my favorite people and I can't wait for you to hear from him! Go check it out wherever you download your podcasts! Connect with Rebecca Dotson George Instagram | @rebeccadotsongeorge Facebook | Rebecca Dotson George Website | Do The Thing Movement Connect about Speaking | www.rebeccadotsongeorge.com Email | Say hello! Pinterest | Do The Thing Movement Become An Insider | Sign up here! Unedited Transcript Sample (view full transcript on the Do The Thing Movement website) Okay, Nelson. I am so excited to have you on the show today. This is so fun for me. And just excited to talk about job search, about interviewing about a lot of things that. Are really, probably heavy on the hearts of a lot of our listeners. However, you're the expert in all these things, which is why I love you and what people won't know when they start listening is you used to be my boss, which is so fun. And now years later, we get to talk about all this kind of fun stuff and just kind of unpack your wisdom, which I'm super excited about. So I'd love for you to start by just telling everybody a little bit about you, about the work that you've done for. Gosh, how many years now? 21 years. And just your experience kind of in this space before we jump into all the things. Yeah, sure. Hey, listen, I am pumped that I made it on your show. I wasn't sure I'd make the cut. So I'm honored to be here, I guess I'll pass the interview. So that's good news. I have worked in recruiting for 22 years, a variety of different organizations. I started with staffing firms, which just meant I worked in companies that helped other companies find talent. Uh, and again, a large variety of roles. Uh, I guess when I looked back at that nine year period, before I got into corporate recruiting, uh, had a hundred different. Companies that are supported over that period. Not all at once, but a lot of different types of jobs, different industries, mom, and pops, billion dollar corporations, a lot of different sizes, right. Uh, have worked in sales recruiting a majority of the time that I've been on the corporate side. Um, I had a three and a half year run in healthcare help to build a team from the ground up here in the Knoxville region. And that was a lot of fun. Um, my sweet spot really is sales recruiting. That's what I enjoy the most for sure.

Daniel Egli is the Chief Financial Officer at Russell Stover Chocolates, based in Kansas City.  His journey began in Switzerland where be grew up and worked out of college.   Egli worked for Proctor and Gamble for 14 years mostly in his native Switzerland before moving to Boston to serve as head of financial planning and analysis for P&G.   He was hired by Russell Stover in December of 2017 as CFO, responsible for finance and accounting, procurement, supply chain planning and IT.   Joel spoke with Daniel about his responsibilities, leadership and the culture at Russell Stover.   TRANSCRIPT: Joel Goldberg: My guest on this episode is Daniel Egli. He is the Chief Financial Officer at Russell Stover chocolates and we have had this podcast scheduled in the works for a very long time. Joel Goldberg: We just didn't think when we scheduled it that will be we will be in these times, but that's the world that we're living in Daniel, thanks for joining the podcast. Daniel Egli: Thank you Joel, for having me.  Joel Goldberg: It’s good to it's good to catch up. And I know way back to normal times you and I went for coffee on the plaza. And we had bad at an event before that.  Joel Goldberg: So I do, as is the case on this podcast and I've told you this I like to think more, you know, big picture bigger concept. So I don't want to get too tied up with with how things are going. But we'll talk about it a little bit because, as this is released. Joel Goldberg: A little bit after we've recorded this you know people are still adjusting to these times, and new normals, but how have you through all this and with your, your position of Russell Stover handled all the changing times. Daniel Egli: It’s been it's been crazy, you know, we've been working from home now for two months, it's certainly been a big change. Daniel Egli: But, you know, on a positive note. The think, you know, we're still making chocolate and the business keeps on going. The organization has definitely adapted well working remotely. And on a personal note, they've enjoyed spending more time with my family. So, so there's positives as well. Joel Goldberg: There’s positives to everything. I really believe that. And I know for Joel Goldberg: For some situations, many situations, that's easier said than done, but the family time truly has been great. My wife was talking about that recently. I mean, I'm never home.  I was home for Mother's Day from, from the moment we woke up to the moment we went to bed versus if I was lucky to be in town. Joel Goldberg: You know there for a couple hours and then hopefully home for dinner. So there's been a lot of positives to, you know, you said something that's interesting to me, you said, while we're still making chocolate. And I think that when when there's a lot of stress eating going on. Joel Goldberg: You know, and so I find myself. Definitely having more of a sweet tooth and you know that maybe maybe a few extra Bourbons is my choice and definitely a lot of a lot of chocolate but I assume that you are seeing plenty of demand for your product still Daniel Egli: Yeah, I mean, people still eat chocolate in these times maybe even, even more so in these times, right, I mean you maybe want to treat yourself. Daniel Egli: More and more often, when you say that. Oh, man. Yeah, well, that's, that's what we're here for. Joel Goldberg: Exactly. That's what you're here for. So there's so much I want to talk to you about in terms of your background. Joel Goldberg: And also in terms of culture of Russell Stover that was really the the original reason for why I wanted to have you on I'll, I'll preface, all of this by saying that you and I met at an event. Joel Goldberg: And you may remember now better than me. I feel like it was February I don't, I don't remember, but it's right. Yeah, yeah. I've been, you know, a while back. Joel Goldberg: And it was funny because I was moderating a panel of a bunch of executives, I was Scott havens, who many people know how to organize this at mariner wealth and Scott's with hub international and it was that marriage or wealth and he talked about what what I was going to ask everybody, you know, kind of going Joel Goldberg: Down the line in terms of answers and perspectives and in front of an audience. Joel Goldberg: And I think one of the questions was a baseball themed question in the front. I could see and hear the panic in your voice about it. Do I need to talk about baseball and and I assured, you know. And that was true for even now podcast that has the title rounding the bases. So this isn't important. But I figured my listeners will get a kick out of it on a scale of one to 10. What is your baseball knowledge. Daniel Egli: Well, I'm still probably like two or three, I would say.  Joel Goldberg: Better. It was my way of leading to the fact that you are, for sure. The first guest that I had on the show that is from Switzerland, and I'm sure that that people heard the accent a little bit. So can you give a little bit of a background of how you ended up in the states and then eventually a Russell Stover as as a kid that grew up in Switzerland. Daniel Egli: Yeah, sure, sure. Well, I've been here in Kansas City with Russell Stover since December 17 but I actually worked out of Boston before joining Russell Stover So working with Gillette as part of the Procter and Gamble company I've been with Procter and Gamble for about 14 years working mostly in Europe, Geneva Zurich spent some time in the UK and then Daniel Egli: Joined the Gillette business unit in Boston. So that's how I love to the United States. And then I was approached the you know about the the opportunity of Russell Stover that's that's kind of how I got to Kansas City certainly never thought that would you know, live in Kansas City. But here I am enjoying it. Joel Goldberg: Yeah, I mean, it's always one of my favorite questions, not so much where you live, but just, could you have envisioned doing what you're doing when you grew up, or maybe better phrased. What were what were the dreams of the young Daniel Egli. Daniel Egli: Well you know I as a high school student I spent a year in Canada, an exchange some year and ever since I have this desire to, you know, experience other countries and not just travel, they were on vacation, but also live and work in other countries. So Daniel Egli: Since then, I was really aiming to have a an international career. And when I finished my studies join Procter and Gamble, which, you know, as you know, is an international company that offers. International career opportunities so was kind of from a pretty young age on my desire. Joel Goldberg: So I'll backtrack, just a little bit and I would I would assume that Canada, much more similar to the United States than Switzerland or maybe not, I'm not sure.  Daniel Egli: No, it is very similar to the United States. All that I think many Canadians like to make highlight the differences, but yes. It's pretty similar in terms of the lifestyle that we see the language. Same where i where i was i was in the western part of Canada so Joel Goldberg: It was speaking part of where we're in. We're in Western Canada where you and I wasn't in Vancouver Island. Okay. Joel Goldberg: Beautiful, beautiful. Yes. Yeah, sounds sound awful. And I remember you talking about that when we went for coffee truly one of the most beautiful areas in all of North America. Daniel Egli: For anyone and and for me, having I've got really two connections. I guess to Canada one Daniel Egli: I like to call myself quarter Canadian which basically translates into my grandmother emigrated to Canada, when she was a kid and she was the only one in a big family that ended up in the United States. Daniel Elgi: Once she got married and all the rest of them. To this day, if they're alive or their, their offspring are still in Canada. So, you know, we would go up to Canada from time to time. Not as much now. Joel Goldberg: As kids and then having a covered a lot of hockey for years. So I go up there and I've been a pretty much all the NHL cities and then we go in normal years. Not this year, I guess. Joel Goldberg: We go to Toronto once a year. So it is a, it's a different world up there. But that's still a lot of similarities to to hear what what did that experience for you in molding you being an exchange student very far from home. How did that multi think to where you're at today. Daniel Egli: Well, you know, I think it has a pretty big impact on the young person. I mean, you're definitely way out of your comfort zone when you you know I was 17 years old when I when I left there and Daniel Egli: You, you obviously learn to kind of find your own way and the become more independent more mature. So yeah, I mean it certainly had a big impact. The think for me personally, I made a big step forward in that year and that I noticed that when I came back and you know you Daniel Egli: Kind of, talk to your friends that were in the same place during that time and the, you know, this kind of, okay, how, how far you've come as a, as a person, how much you've developed mature. Joel Goldberg: Was the was the interest in finance and obviously the chief finance officer at at Russell Stover now. And, you know, have all the financial history from Procter and Gamble and even before that, what was it always a Joel Goldberg: Driver a passion to go towards, towards that. And the things the finance world. Daniel Egli: I studied international business. So I was not something that I had in mind. At the very beginning when I when I entered university but Daniel Egli: Yeah, it says just kind of through kind of trial and error different internships and you know different conversations kind of ended up in the in that in that area. Joel Goldberg: And it's so now here you are in the, in the world of chocolate. Chocolate needs finance, I guess, and and so You know, you said before you never envisioned that you would end up in Kansas City, but not only you in Kansas City, you're working for a very famous company what what do you love about working in Russell Stover and beyond the chocolate. Joel Goldberg: Which probably everybody that you know asks about chocolate or or that type of stuff. You got to be a very popular guy at Christmas time, I would imagine what what what do you like about working at Russell Stover Daniel Egli: You know, I, you know, it's certainly a very interesting brand has been around for 100 years It's we're currently going through a transformation, really, you know, there's a lot of changes that happened in terms of consumer preferences, the way Daniel Egli: You know shoppers shop nowadays. So it's really for me comes down to making an impact on a on a brand that consumers love that they know that has a long history and really having that impact and, you know, Daniel Egli: Hopefully, you know, to the positive sense that, you know, finding a profitable way to grow in the future and the to continue to Daniel Egli: The to make a good chocolates that PETA. People want so so that's what it comes down to, for me, and how, how have things changed. I mean, Joel Goldberg: Nothing obviously in the world. I'm not talking about pandemic, but nothing in the world today is the same for a company that was around 100 years ago would have been sort of the biggest changes. Joel Goldberg: In recent years for Russell Stover and the challenges of of keeping up with the time so i mean i chocolate good chocolates good chocolate. Joel Goldberg: That I hope and would think would never change. But, but I know it's not that simple either Daniel Egli: Yeah, no, definitely. I mean, you can look at this from different angles. I mean, there's, you know, the competitive landscape has changed so consumers have different choices. Daniel Egli: Nowadays, there's new new products, new brands on the market. So that's, that's one aspect. Daniel Egli: And then the other aspect is also how people shop. You know, if you know probably even now it's it's it's even accelerating, but people shop in a different way. Nowadays, many people shop online or they they go to different retailers. So that's also something that we need to adjust to and adapt. Joel Goldberg: Again, I think that it helps when you have a brand name, An institutional name like a Russell Stover that Joel Goldberg: Nothing's guaranteed right i mean good product and everything you're talking about matters but but what does it mean to have the Russell Stover name Daniel Egli: Well, I think it's a huge asset. I mean, it's, it's a, you know, it's something. It's a brand that consumers trust that consumers know and i think that's that's an asset that we're You know, we're capitalizing on. I mean we we have a big opportunity, I think in terms of, you know, the brand awareness and Daniel Egli: You know, obviously focused on bringing new innovation that that help us grow in the future. One of those examples is sugar free, sugar free businesses doing Daniel Egli: phenomenally well and has been doing well for the last few years. And I think that's just one of the aspects that is in our favor in terms of changing consumer tastes and demands that we can satisfy Joel Goldberg: You obviously have a big role at Russell Stover and to the topics that I love to talk about certainly on this podcast and then also to Joel Goldberg: You know, to audiences when I'm speaking our leadership and culture. Both are obviously elements that are extremely important to you in your world. My first question to you regarding that is about leadership and Joel Goldberg: One, how, how many people are you overseeing and then the maybe the deeper question and one that I always like to ask is, when you come into a new role when you're new to an organization. Joel Goldberg: I'm always fascinated by those initial discussions and you know how you build trust with your team and and you know adapt to that situation and Joel Goldberg: And being the new guy, so to speak. So how many people, and what were those early days like for you.  Daniel Egli: Yeah, well, you know, I’m besides finance also responsible for it procurement and supply chain planning. So it's a group of about a little over 100 people Daniel Egli: Mostly based here in Kansas City and and yeah you know the first few days, I have to say that was a you know it's it's it was a big change for me. You know, I Daniel Egli: I worked for the same company for you know 14 years and, you know, you kind of know the culture, you know, even even go to a different office. They're always kind of commonalities and Daniel Egli: You know when you change company, obviously you don't have that familiarity. So, so it was you know spent a lot of time talking to different people meeting people and It's so obviously a lot of new information you have to absorb and a lot of it has to do with getting to know the organization, besides getting to know the business, obviously. Joel Goldberg: And then what for you were the keys in building those relationships with your employees as, as I'm sure they're sitting there saying, you know, who Joel Goldberg: Who is this. Who is this new guy and you know, and this guy isn't from here and and of course you've been in the States, a long time, but I don't care. Joel Goldberg: I don't care if you're coming from another place and other shop in town. You're the new guy and everybody's looking Joel Goldberg: You know, what's my new boss, like what is, what is it going to be like to interact with. So what are, what were some of the strategies that you had coming in to build that rapport with your people. Daniel Egli: And you know, it's, it's, you know, I've tried to be very open and, you know, communicate the log to share Daniel Egli: Share with my organization more about my background where I'm at, where I am as a person what what my values are so that really making an extra effort to share more about me so they they know you know Daniel Egli: me as a person and and also being open, you know, really. Daniel Egli: Having an open to also encouraging people to to come up when they have questions or when they have an issue and and yeah, trying to do everything I could to to get the communication going and to maybe yeah, make make make people comfortable in speaking coming up with to me.  Joel Goldberg: I Want to go back to a little bit of the pandemic, as we're recording this. What have been some of your strategies in terms of communication in a world that we're living in which, which has been dominated by zoom or whatever your, you know, whatever your choice platform is Daniel Egli: Yeah. Well, we certainly spent more time communicating. So we, you know, it starts with the executive team where we have a daily connect instead of just the weekly Daniel Egli: Meeting and then with my team as well. It's just, you know, spending quite a lot of time connecting with people. One on one or in smaller groups and making sure that Daniel Egli: Yeah, we all kind of stay connected we know what we're working on and and not only from a business standpoint, but also checking in how people have people doing you know it's it's obviously it's been this this stressful time and people Daniel Egli: Process this in different ways. You have the full spectrum you have some people that are worried about the virus situation you have others that are less so. So it's just kind of figuring that out and Daniel Egli: That's kind of the approach I took.  Joel Goldberg: I think you're there been so many lessons to learn in this to our their elements of communication or the way that they you have gone about your business. During these these unique times I guess I could call it that, that you'll take and not just learn from but but implement or other elements of what's going on now. That'll be part of the future. Daniel Egli: And you know, I think. So we have more shorter meetings, but more frequent which I have to say, that's fine. Shorter meetings to be more productive. And that's, that's something that I think that I would want to continue Daniel Egli: I think also having giving people flexibility, you know, maybe having giving people more room to work from home. When they when they need to, or when they want to, because I think we've shown that we can get the work done. Productivity, I think, is still in a good place. And I think that that is something that is of value. Joel Goldberg: Yeah, I'm completely fascinated by what this looks like, you know, next year, five year whenever this is all done. Joel Goldberg: Just the way the world changes and you know the way office space changes and communication and all that we've certainly had our eyes open. Joel Goldberg: To a lot of different elements. Oh, one more thing pandemic related to a minute. I think what you know is so interesting about these times, is this is not just a Joel Goldberg: A certain cities problem or a certain countries problem. Everyone in some form or another is dealing with this around the world. What do you hear from back home in Switzerland. Daniel Egli: And yeah, it looked at said it's a similar situation is here. People you know restaurants were closed shops were closed are now starting to to reopen Daniel Egli: I think it's fairly similar. I have to say it was not as strict as the situation in Italy. So, you know,  Not, not quite as bad as that but the I think pretty comparable to how things were handled here in Kansas City area. Joel Goldberg: All right, I want to get to my baseball themed questions which once again I assured Daniel would not be baseball questions. I assure that to every guest but Joel Goldberg: If he is saying that the baseball knowledge is somewhere around a two or three out of 10 this will not be anything about baseball strategy. Joel Goldberg: baseball predictions or anything of that matter. I'm in the baseball prediction business, I guess, and I give up after what's going on during the pandemic. I'm not going to try either, but the baseball theme question is this. Professionally speaking Joel Goldberg: You know, in all your years and I'm, I'm looking through the LinkedIn profile and whether it be the 14 years of Procter and Gamble, I should I should do a quick sidebar here. Joel Goldberg: It says that you are a financial analyst know three to five for financial animal analysis and planning Western Europe denture care and whitening. I didn't so Joel Goldberg: That's that's unique background for a guy that found Russell Stover I would think. Daniel Egli: Yeah, well, let's say it was a interesting business to work on. Definitely. Yeah. Joel Goldberg: That was the maybe one of the stars of the career. Like, I guess. Yes. Many years ago, so I'm assuming that that's not the big home run. Joel Goldberg: But the question, what's the biggest home run. You've had professionally in your career or in Joel Goldberg: In layman's or non baseball terms would spend the biggest moment for you. What's been that you know that the huge impactful moment in your career. Daniel Egli: Yeah, sure. Well, you know, I, I would say that, you know, I've been very fortunate to grow throughout my career and, you know, assuming Daniel Egli: More responsibilities as I changed into different roles. So I would say that at any you know those different stages, there were always kind of those homerun moments, but you know when I reflected this today, I would certainly say that you know I love the role that I'm in right now. Daniel Egli: For me, you know, being able to shape the direction the strategy of real Stover and starting to see the results of that work that's that's been hugely satisfying. You know, we had a good year in 2019 in terms of the business results. And also, frankly, from an organization standpoint. So you know we measure that organization health via a survey quarterly survey. Daniel Egli: And, you know, we've made some really good progress. And that's, you know, I'm proud of that the progress that we're able to make here at Russel Stover. Joel Goldberg: Okay, so that's the the positives. Let's go to the negative, which I don't necessarily view as a negative i. The swing and miss question to me. Joel Goldberg: Is essentially a learning experience. You know what, what, what's something you missed on that you learn from. And I think we grow from those that that's my personal opinion. So what's a big swing and miss. You've taken in your career. And what did you learn from this Daniel Egli: Well, I would say that, you know, some of the most important decisions I make our people relate to them, you know, hiring decision. Daniel Egli: And moving people into different roles, maybe for all being the responsibilities. So, you know, as you do that, you obviously take risks and you know in many, many times. This worked out well. But, you know, obviously it's not the 100% success rate. Daniel Egli: So sometimes those decisions don't work out as planned, and You know that's that's what I would say to that to the learning for me, you know, in terms of hiring. For instance, you know, there's certainly and methods to, you know, how you conduct an interview, there's Daniel Egli: Certain best practices. You can follow in terms of having several people interview person references, etc. But I think there's also the maybe the the less tangible part which is maybe your, your gut feel. And your, your instincts that I feel are equally important as you as you make those decisions. And that's certainly something that, you know, over the years, and Daniel Egli: I have kind of improved on our learned on from from experience.  Joel Goldberg: Yeah, I just want to follow up on that, because that's that's always fascinating to me too. How much, how much do you weigh that gut feeling. Daniel Egli: Well, you know, I, I'm more an analytical person and focus more on kind of the facts and all that, but I think there is an element of judgment because obviously when you interview people you only see them for a very limited amount of time and Joel Goldberg: Some people are very articulate and others maybe struggle a little bit more right to convince you in a in a short period of time. So I think that's, that's something that over time. I, I kind of refined, more and I find that I could be more maybe use that for the more I rely more on my instinct now than I did earlier in my career. Definitely. Yeah. Joel Goldberg: So intrigued by that. Just on a side note, because in the baseball one. I think it's true in anything you have sort of your Joel Goldberg: Non numbers go by the gut. In in in athletics. It's usually the former players that they trust their eyes and then you might have sort of the younger or the new school that that have the numbers. And what happens over time is Joel Goldberg: Eventually, those that trust the numbers. Joel Goldberg: Will start to go a little bit of the gut instinct and those that that live on the instinct start to learn more about the numbers and he kind of start to marry some of that together, so it's Joel Goldberg: I think if there's always kind of a, a harmony to that when you can when you can when you can blend it all together and use it all as tools. So this is my take. But Joel Goldberg: The final baseball. Question is what I call the culture question and and and I'd like to put it in terms of Russell Stover because I’m I'm interested in in the culture there. We know about chocolate but it's small ball. Meaning, what are the little things. Joel Goldberg: That add up to the big things in baseball terms. It's not all about the homerun I call it you know the little bits of foundation. What make you who you are or culture, the backbone of the company. What is small ball. What are the little things that matter at Russell Stover Daniel Egli: Yeah, I think you're, you're right, the kind of the link to culture, you know, Daniel Egli: So reflected on that. I think it's really walking the talk and culture. You know, we have a Daniel Egli: We have documented our values, our culture. You know, it's a nice piece of paper, but in the end. What really matters is that the day today and how you show up with your team and how the rest of the leadership team shows up with their teams. Daniel Egli: So it's really the small things that you do, day in, day out, that are consistent with those values that we have all agreed on. So that could be, you know, sending a thank you note to somebody who's done a nice job or recognizing somebody in a town hall meeting. Daniel Egli: Things like that is small, small things that are, you know, it's just consistency point consistency with the values and that's what that's what I would highlight i think that's that's the important aspect of the culture, not so much what you say it is, but it's what you do, day in, day out. Joel Goldberg: Really interesting and couldn't agree more. So that's it. Joel Goldberg: It's my favorite question actually, because there's never one simple answer to that everybody has so many different perspectives, but Joel Goldberg: I haven't heard a lot of the you know the handwritten note or the personalization and all that and and how far it goes. Okay. Joel Goldberg: For final questions I have not discussed these with you and else I don't say that in any way to to scare you, or anything like that but Joel Goldberg: Oftentimes these are and it's what I call my rounding the basis for final questions there. They can be light hearted, they might not be. But they're, they're kind of things that popped into my head. Joel Goldberg: As I'm going over the course of an interview. And so the the first one that that I would ask you is, in terms of sports. We talked about Joel Goldberg: Not growing up with baseball. I actually, I think I asked you this in person. But what was the sport. What were the sports growing up that you enjoyed in Switzerland. Daniel Egli: Well, I used to play handball when it was young and then it was a little bit older in high school I started playing rugby and picked it up in Canada and played that when it came back. Daniel Egli: So those are the sports a it actively I was a ski. I like outdoor sports hiking, skiing,dabble a little bit and golf, although not very successfully. Joel Goldberg: It sounds like you and I could golf together. Because, because, because dabbling is being generous. For me, it never goes well, but it's still fun so it's it's nice to get outside always Joel Goldberg: Say that much. Okay, the obvious question. My second question is we round the bases favorite, favorite product or chocolate. Joel Goldberg: For you at Russell Stover assuming that you do enjoy chocolate.  Daniel Egli: I do enjoy chocolate. Yeah, well, you know, the, the, the product when when I Daniel Egli: Start with your product that most surprised me was our sugar free products and they test taste really surprisingly good. I mean, considering they don't contain any sugar. It's Stevia sweetened so I really love our sugar free line. Joel Goldberg: And like I would agree with that and an important one. By the way, too. Right. I mean, in, in a world with Joel Goldberg: With you know diabetes and other issues that that that becomes a great option for for so many third question, as we round the bases. It's more of a geography or culture question actually two biggest differences and similarities to Kansas City and Switzerland. Daniel Egli: In Terms of culture, and well, I would say, what's the first thing that comes to mind is, I think, a strong work ethic. I think that's, you know, Daniel Egli: Something that I hear often about people when people talk about the Midwest and that's something that I would say applies to to the Swiss as well. Daniel Egli: Yeah, I would say, kind of a work ethic kind of down to earth mentality that that that's the first thing that comes to mind.  Joel Goldberg: What’s the, what's the kind of traffic and population and everyday living how, how those different Daniel Egli: Oh, well that's very different. I mean you know you. I'm sure you know, for those who have traveled to Europe, they'll know i mean you have much less space in Europe, it's more densely populated then here in Kansas City. Daniel Egli: You have a lot of space. I mean, obviously also around Kansas City. But there's, you know, it's the layout of the city is very different. It's much more oriented towards you know, using the car is Daniel Egli:no shortage of parking spots and it's it's a different lifestyle definitely in Switzerland. It's much more, you know, you walk in a city or use your bicycle or public transport and and here it's it's all designed around using your car. Joel Goldberg: It's a different world for sure over there and and really you know my opinion of amazing when I've not been to Switzerland. So I'd love to add that to the list. I guess the closest I have then will be will be France and Paris. And of course, you know, and Joel Goldberg: In that world over there. You hop on a train and you can, you know, get through to a number of countries in any given day, which is Joel Goldberg: I don't know. I don't know what what we have like that here. I guess it's kind of like like being in Boston, where you live and being able to hop on a train and get to New York, or DC or whatever it is, but Joel Goldberg: We don't really have anything quite like that. Okay. Final question the walk off question and it's a Russel Stover question for you with, with all the history of this great company and the brand name, where, where do you see this going Joel Goldberg: 10 years 20 years down the road so often I have guests on this this podcast that are Joel Goldberg: That are startups and they've got these dreams of hitting a big Russell Stover obviously has been big for a long time. But as you suggested Joel Goldberg: In this episode, that there's constant evolution. You can't stay still, the market changes, where do you see the world going in terms of chocolate in terms of Russell silver and then the next 10-20 years Daniel Egli: Look, I'm very optimistic about the future of Russell silver. I think that brand is as well. No, I think there's many opportunities for us to grow still Daniel Egli: So obviously we have a successful sugar free align that continues to grow. We have strengths and other parts of the business. So the Valentine arts or, you know, Easter rabbits and our gift box that you may enjoy in the in the Christmas period. Daniel Egli: So I think that for me, it's, it's about, you know, coming up with innovation that you know make the brand rejuvenate the brand, make it Daniel Egli: More relevant to also to to a younger consumer group and getting getting more people to buy Russell silver chocolate. I think we we have, you know, some interesting you know innovation in the pipeline and I'm looking forward to seeing those in the market place soon. Joel Goldberg: Well, it's always changing. I know that. And then some things of course will in some form or another. Always stay the same. I mean, there, there are Joel Goldberg: People have certain elements of sweets and chocolate that they will always love there there we can call whatever we want guilty pleasure, whatever, whatever it is that, that'll always be around, so it's it's interesting to see. Joel Goldberg: How things are going to change how they evolve and certainly you talked about it before, too, in terms of in terms of selling and online and all that the world will will continue to change so well. Joel Goldberg: That these are my two hopes and promises one hope we can get out for coffee again when when the time is come down or when they become safer and and what I, you know, I've got this like, you know, thought or hope that I can at least get your baseball interest from like a 2 to a 4 Daniel Egli: I'll work on my baseball and all its yeah but looking looking forward to the season, starting at some point.Hopefully I can get out there and watch the game, some time.  Joel Goldberg: Well, I'll help you with that. Not that you need the help, but you know, I'll try to do my part, I don't need to convert you or anything like that. I just want to make sure that I've at least tried to do my part in this one is not all about baseball and but you know it's a bit of my world, so to speak, so Joel Goldberg: Yeah yeah hey we both have we both have jobs that people can understand or at least brands that they understand. So, you know, certainly people always want to talk baseball with me and I'm Joel Goldberg: Sure, there's not a day that goes by that that people don't ask you something. Chocolate related, but hopefully this was a conversation more than that. And it was Joel Goldberg: It was great to be able to dive into the the culture and in your background. It's been a long time coming. So Daniel. I really appreciate you spending the time I'm glad you're here in Kansas City, and I Joel Goldberg: Can officially say that my first ever Swiss guest on rounding the bases. It took like 90 episodes was Daniel Egli, so it's groundbreaking for me. But hey, I appreciate you spending the time best of health to you and your family and I look forward to seeing you soon.  Daniel Egli: My pleasure. Thank you. Joel Goldberg: That's going to do it for another episode of rounding the bases, I'm Joel over. You can reach me at joelgoldbergmedia.com you can email at info@joelgoldbergmedia.com or find me on social media. I'm all over the place there. Joel Goldberg: Thanks for listening. I'd love it if you jump on to and give a five star rating on iTunes hope to catch you next time on rounding the bases.        

In the poem, Housekeeping, by David Harris, a patient struggles with what it means to be saved. Read by Seema Yasmin.   The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. This is not a substitute for professional medical care, and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of individual conditions. Guests on this podcast express their own opinions, experience, and conclusions. The mention of any product, service, organization, activity, or therapy should not be construed as an ASCO endorsement.   Welcome to JCO's Cancer Stories, The Art of Oncology, brought to you by the ASCO Podcast Network, a collection of nine programs covering a range of educational and scientific content, and offering enriching insight into the world of cancer care. You can find all of the shows, including this one, at podcast.asco.org.   Housekeeping by David Harris. I've been clearing out my closets so that my husband won't have to afterward. She wiped her eyes on her hospital gown. I imagined her at home, pulling out hangers and holding up clothes to her wasted body, choosing what to save and what to throw away.   And by save, I mean leave behind for her husband afterward. Me imagining her imagining him, pulling out hangers, loosely dangling clothes, a Christmas sweater, the jeans he liked, a scarf, a blouse. Him wondering what he is supposed to do with a pink blouse.   Should he throw it away or bury it in some unsorted pile, half forgotten, or save it, leaving it hanging in the closet of their bedroom? I am talking to her about CPR now. About what we can save and what we can't. And by save, I mean prolong.   And she turns to me and asks what she is supposed to do with the word terminal. Afterward, after latex gloves are peeled off hands, after the bag is found and zipped around her quiet body, after all the things I said or didn't say, this is what we save. Her hospital gown, unbuttoned, washed clean, folded onto itself, with thousands of other gowns.   With me today is Dr. David Harris, a palliative care physician at Cleveland Clinic. Dave, welcome to our podcast.   Thank you, Lidia. I'm grateful to be here.   It's great to have you. You're the author of a poem that we recently published called Housekeeping. Before we start to talk about your poem, tell me a little bit about what you enjoy reading and perhaps what's on your nightstand right now.   Sure. I've been reading some nonfiction work on behavioral economics by Predictably Irrational or Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. But I should also probably talk about poetry that I like reading, since the poem in JCO was published.   Two of my favorite poets, and if you read my poem and you want to find more like it, would be Mary Oliver and Marie Howe. And if you're looking for a place to start with those poets, you could look for What The Living Do by Marie Howe or The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac by Mary Oliver.   So training does one need to have to read and appreciate poetry?   Oh, that's a great question. I think when I was in high school, I kind of got scared away from poetry because it felt like something that I really didn't understand and that you had to have a lot of training to read and appreciate. But I don't think it necessarily has to be that way.   I find poetry really nice because it's short, and if you find authors that keep their poetry accessible, you can just read it and spend a moment appreciating it, and go on with your day. So I'd say you don't really need a lot of training other than just being a human being and bringing to the poem the experiences that you've had in your life.   I love that. And with that, let's talk a little bit about the poem that you wrote and that I've had an opportunity to read and love it, and that is Housekeeping. There's a line here that drew me right in, and that is the line, a very simple line, me imagining her imagining him.   It seemed to me that that's almost the perfect definition of empathy. Is that what you had in mind? The ability to connect and just imagine what it's like to be somebody else, to see the world through the mindset of another person?   Yeah. Thank you, Lidia. That's exactly what I was going for. I mean, I think that this poem is mostly in the speaker's imagination. The inspiration for the poetry was the quote at the beginning of the poem, which was told to me by a patient. I'd been cleaning out my closets so that my husband won't have to afterward.   And I think we've all had patients tell us something, and after we leave the room, we just pause and say, like, wow, I can't believe that that conversation just happened. And, you know, what a strange, and meaningful, and powerful thing that patient said to me. So that was the inspiration for the poem. And then for the rest of the poem, I was just sort of imagining different scenes or different thoughts that were inspired by that line.   So in the poem, you talked about having the difficult conversation with a patient, and you state this in the present tense. I am talking to her about CPR now. And then you bring us also to the world of the very practical task of having this conversation and imagining a time when the patient is no longer present, her death.   And then you have this parallel process where you describe all the tasks, the very practical housekeeping tasks, of what happens after death. The sorting of possessions and the dispatching of the body. Tell us a little bit more about how you thought about putting these two things together, and so compactly and beautifully.   Oh, thank you, Lidia. Yeah. I think as I was writing the poem, I began to think more and more about those material pieces of our lives, that they're of special significance when we're thinking about end of life. And that came from the patient who was going through her closets and holding out clothes and thinking, you know, am I going to wear this before I die or can I throw this away, and thinking about how much clothing means to people.   And then I thought about the hospital gowns and how much of a contrast that is, how impersonal that is compared to what people wear in their day to day lives. That sort of focus on these material possessions and these tasks that can be kind of mundane at times came out as I was writing the poem.   And there is this parallel, also, about what we do as physicians when we are looking after patients who are so ill. There are some very practical things, but then there are conversations that have to do with the ultimate abstraction, which is imagining not being here.   I think the title grounds us in the same way that some of these tasks, perhaps, ground us in our day to day world. I also thought that it was very interesting that you used the word afterwards twice, including leading with it in the last stanza. And I imagine that, perhaps, as you were thinking of a title, another title could have been Afterward.   Yeah.   So does that capture some of your process?   Yeah. Afterwards was a rough draft title. You guessed it. Because I think that so much of the poem is about thinking of the future or we're thinking about what's going to happen next.   I think I chose Housekeeping instead because one of the things that I really am interested in in art and in talking with patients is the importance of daily lives, or the importance of these kind of mundane tasks that we all go through.   And how, for people who have cancer and are struggling to maintain quality of life, sometimes doing the laundry or cooking suddenly becomes really meaningful and important to them, or maybe even housekeeping becomes meaningful and important to them. So that title felt like there were more layers to it, which is why I chose it.   You know, as I was reading this, and I read that you were imagining your patient imagining her husband's grief and her husband's reaction to her passing, I was imagining what you, as the clinician in this situation, were imagining and feeling. It was very impactful to me.   And there's something about how simple the lines are and the language is that really drew me in. Tell me a little bit more about your feeling and what this kind of an encounter with a patient does to you as palliative care physician.   Thank you for asking me that, Lidia. You know, this meant a lot to me. And after I left the room after having this conversation with the patient, I was struck by how profound that moment was and how meaningful having those conversations with patients is for me.   And part of the purpose of writing this poem and publishing it is to share that experience. I think most of us in oncology and palliative care go into the field because we look for moments like this and we appreciate moments like this. But also, day to day life can kind of make us blind to these things with all the paperwork we have to do and all of the red tape.   And when I talk to physicians who are feeling burned out, I notice that they don't really bring up moments like this anymore, and I feel like they're not noticing them the way they used to. So noticing moments like this and appreciating them helps me from being burned out, and I'm hoping that people will read this poem and sort of be able to be resensitized to those moments in their practice.   That's a lovely thought. I also would add that one of the themes that we find in the submissions we receive to Art of Oncology is this very sincere desire to honor a patient. And I read that also in your line.   Yeah. I mean, this patient has passed away, but they've made such an impact on me, and it feels like I need to do something to remember them. That's part of what made me write this piece as well.   Well, thank you for sharing all of that with us. And I hope our readers go back and read your beautiful poem, Housekeeping, over and over. Let me finish by just asking you a little about the process of writing. You-- are you a repetitive writer? Do you have time set aside to write, or do you write when you're inspired or when it calls you?   That's a great question. And I feel like people who have previously been on your podcast have said something similar. But for me, I have these moments, and it feels like there's something in me that has to come out. It feels like I already know there's a poem there, and I just have to start writing it.   So usually, that's how things begin. If I'm not feeling burned out and I'm in a place where I can notice those feelings, and then I start writing. And then once I've begun writing, I notice different ideas that I want to develop in the piece.   These are things that you picked up on, sort of this interest in the mundane, daily tasks of life, or another thing that I wanted to develop in this piece was the idea of saving, and what does it mean to save something. And then, you know, I just kind of keep writing and trying to figure that stuff out until it feels like the poem is done.   Well, thank you so much, Dave. I loved Housekeeping, and I hope you keep writing. So this ends our podcast. Please join me again for more of about cancer stories.   Until next time, thank you for listening to this JCO's Cancer Stories, The Art of Oncology Podcast. If you enjoyed what you heard today, don't forget to give us a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. While you're there, be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. JCO's Cancer Stories, The Art of Oncology Podcast is just one of ASCO's many podcasts. You can find all of the shows at podcast.asco.org.

Show Resources: LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. Show Transcript: LinkedIn is the only way to reach your ideal target audience, and your event is less a week away. What do you do? This is high urgency strategies on LinkedIn Ads. 0:17 Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. 0:24 Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. So LinkedIn Ads is a great ad network. When you're targeting just evergreen audiences on a consistent pace. You put interesting offers in front of the ideal audience, and then you wait for them to come to you. Every once in a while though, we run into situations where we need to spend budget quickly. Maybe you have a webinar in three days and signups are low. Maybe you have an in person event coming up soon, or an offer that's expiring. Whatever the reason, it can be really difficult to spend both quickly and efficiently on LinkedIn. So today, we're specifically going through the strategies for accelerated delivery. So you can hit your goals without wasting your hard earned budget. So in the news this week, LinkedIn did a poll of its members, and found some pretty interesting statistics. And I'm just gonna read these off, it was in a private deck or something that I can't link to. So you'll just have to listen really closely to get these these benefits out of it. So 43% of respondents are now working remotely. That seems small compared to maybe the knowledge workers that I know. But maybe the vast majority of these are not knowledge workers. 36% of respondents say they're actually more productive when working from home than when they were working in their office. Now, to me that feels low because I am very productive working at home. And I get so much less done when I could hear conversation around me in an office environment. 54% of senior leaders reported that their companies are implementing virtual events as a result of the outbreak. That even feel low to me. But hey, this is interesting. It's a poll 52% are doing more calls on phone or video that feels extremely low, especially when you look at Zoom's stock price. 26% of respondents report feeling no impact to their productivity at all. When you add those who report feeling no impacts their productivity, the 26% to the 36% of people who feel more productive, that makes 62%. So what that means is the 38% that are left are the people who feel like they're less productive working from home, which totally based off of your style, your preference, but that's pretty wild to understand as well. 45% say that this is somewhat or very likely going to become a more permanent shift. I've been thinking recently about those in commercial real estate and I'm thinking, wow, all these companies are figuring out how to get more and more of their people working from home, so they don't need larger spaces. And what are they going do with all of that space. So it will be interesting to see what that industry does. I won't be surprised if every company has some kind of a work from home policy. Okay, let's jump in and highlight a few reviews that you guys as listeners have left on the podcast pages. RyanRhoten says "Pure value. AJ is such a wealth of information on LinkedIn ads. This podcast is like using the Hogwarts pensive to glimpse into his brain and extract the exact information you need to grow your business through LinkedIn Ads. Thanks for sharing AJ, you are as generous as you are wise." Thanks so much, Ryan. So Ryan runs The BRAND New You Podcast and anyone who is into branding should definitely check that one out, The BRAND New You Podcast by Ryan Rhoten. Thanks so much for leaving such an awesome review. Okay, Cinthia M. P. calls it "Not your average marketing podcast. I just started listening to this podcast based on the recommendation from a friend and I'm incredibly impressed. Sometimes marketing podcasts can be pretty general with information that is somewhat actionable, or information you've heard 1,000 times already, but I found this podcast to be full of useful, very detailed and specific information. I had to stop the podcast a few times to take notes. I highly recommend listening. I'm excited to keep learning from the best in the world of LinkedIn advertising." Cinthia, I don't know if we've met before, but thank you so much. That means the world to me that you would say that. That's exactly how I create this podcast. I actually created in mind for my employees to help train them. And so it's really nice to hear someone saying that they're listening along, ready to take notes. So thanks, you're doing it right. The username Steve467774, totally machine generated, it says, "Informative and actionable. One of my favorite podcasts. AJ gets into the details of how to be successful with LinkedIn Ads, while keeping things easy to understand. And the best part, you can take immediate action on what you learn in nearly every episode. Keep it coming." Steve, I absolutely think that that's the case and I at least hope it is that every episode, you can take something away and go and make changes to your account right then to become more successful or more efficient. Everyone else listening, I want to feature you so go and leave a review on whatever podcast player you listen, and I'd love to feature you there. Okay, with that being said, let's hit it. 5:29 If you listened to Episode 14, that was all about low budget strategies, how to be as incredibly efficient as you can possibly be on the network. And I want you to understand, this is nearly exactly the opposite. This is all about how to get accelerated delivery. And we know that we're going to pay more for this accelerated delivery. But here all of the triggers, all of the levers, all of the knobs that you can pull in turn in order to get accelerated delivery. These are in no particular order, I really mixed them around because I didn't want this podcast to be totally lopsided where you only needed to listen to the first half. Because the last half, it got increasingly less relevant or less valuable. So we'll jump into one that I think is maybe a little bit obvious, but it's more valuable in this situation to target large audiences. Because remember, only a small percentage of visitors on LinkedIn will end up clicking on an ad. It's about 1% if you have really good ad copy, or if you're extremely lucky. So that means the larger the audience you have, the more opportunities you will have for impressions. And the more impressions you have, the more clicks that you'll get totally dependent on your click through rate. So you'll want to target these large audiences. Now consider either expanding your existing audience into new audiences, or maybe even try to reach your existing audience with new targeting. For instance, here If you are only targeting your audience with job title targeting, be aware that LinkedIn only understands about 30% of job titles out there. And so if you can go and reach that same audience through either job function and seniority, or skills and seniority, or groups and seniority, you now have access to significantly more people in your audience who should already still be a great fit for your product or service. And of course, it makes sense to target new audiences. If you know that, wow, only directors and above are a good fit for what we do, maybe consider adding managers in there as well. Considering that LinkedIn considers those who are managers as being people managers. So not just you have the job title of manager, they want to see that you have people underneath you that report to you. My next recommendation is called LAN, L-A-N, and it applies to sponsored content campaigns. And you'll see as you're going Down in the build process, the very first checkbox that you come across will say LinkedIn audience expansion. Don't worry, we'll get to that one in a minute. But the second checkbox will be LinkedIn Audience Network, which is like LinkedIn Display Network. If you've used the Google Display Network or Facebook's audience network. The difference here is that LinkedIn's LAN, their audience network is extremely high quality. Every one of these sites were handpicked by someone who was way way overpaid for doing this kind of job. But it's super important because so many advertisers on LinkedIn, super, super care about the sites that they're being associated with and how that reflects on their brand. LinkedIn hasn't announced before, which sites that LAAN actually has access to, and it's been really difficult. I've had conversations with those who are overland and so I know a few of these sites, but I've been under a nondisclosure agreement. So I couldn't share. So I was super excited when last week when LinkedIn made their announcement about engagement retargeting. They also mentioned an update to LAN. And they mentioned three places where these ads can show up. So Microsoft New, MSN.com, and the app Flipboard. Obviously, this is just a very small amount, I'm sure there are at least 1,000 of these sites who have all been hand picked to be high quality. What's so cool about being able to just enable LAN is one checkbox later, and you now have the opportunity to get maybe 25% more traffic from your same audience. You're not diluting the targeting, you're going after the same people you've been going after anyway. So lead quality is going to stay extremely high. The reason why you can capture 25% or maybe even more than that traffic is because LinkedIn is not really the site that people go and spend a whole lot of time on. So if LinkedIn understood who these people are when they're on other sites around the web, that is so good for us to be able to reach the exact audience in more places than just LinkedIn. And as a bonus here, when you turn on LAN, you will notice your overall cost per click goes down. And that's because your clicks on the audience network actually cost significantly less than they do on LinkedIn.com. So you'll get more traffic, it will cost less per, and your targeting stays the same. It's the same high quality, which is more than I can say for audience expansion. Still, we'll get to it. 10:37 So next we have your bidding strategy. Now first off, you need to understand the difference between your bid and your budget. Your bid is how aggressively you're telling LinkedIn I want traffic when people show up. Your budget, on the other hand, is a safety net that says once you've hit this, we remove you entirely from the auction from bidding. So first, what you want to do is get your budgets out of the way, because what you don't want to do is bid super aggressively on LinkedIn to get traffic, and then hit your budget halfway through the day, and then realize that man, I blew all of my budget on super expensive clicks. If I would have just bid less, I could have gotten clicks for cheaper and had it go all day long, maybe even gotten twice the traffic. If you've listened to me for long enough, you know that I'm not a fan of paying too much for clicks. So I always recommend bidding low. Under a high urgency circumstance, though you can't cheap out on your bids, you want to bid aggressively, giving you the maximum amount of impression share, which then turns into clicks at the rate of whatever your click through rate is. Now if you have time, I recommend first starting by bidding by cost per click, just because the risk is lower to you as an advertiser doing this because you're only going to pay whenever someone actually clicks to go to your landing page or clicks on your offer. And you can still bid aggressively on cost per click, but it's just that you're going to pay only for what you get. And I say if you have time, because a lot of times in high urgency circumstances, you don't really have time to go through and test different ad formats or test different bidding strategies. Because LinkedIn doesn't have hourly reporting, you have to go and really take a stab at something and hope that it's going to work as well as possible for you. So if you start bidding by cost per click, and you don't do well in the auction, you're not getting enough traffic. That's really unfortunate and you've lost some time. So that's a natural segue into the next one, which is all about CPM bidding. So as opposed to CPC or cost per click bidding when you're only paying because someone took action on your ads. The opposite end of the spectrum is CPM or cost per thousand impression bidding. And the way this works is it takes the risk and puts it all on you as an advertiser. Because if you have a bad ad that no one wants to click on, LinkedIn is gonna get paid no matter what, just for showing it. And you could get zero traffic to your website and still be paying and paying handsomely. The reason why it's attractive here, though, is CPM bidding, basically bypasses the whole auction. You don't need to worry too much about your relevancy score, how good your ads are, and LinkedIn size. Because since LinkedIn makes money every time they show your ad, it's low risk for them. So they don't really care to take that into account. They're just going to look and see what you're bidding and say, yeah, okay, we think that that would be more worthwhile to bank that cash rather than take a chance on serving against other advertisers who may only pay when their ads get clicked on. So this is riskier for you. But when you are bidding by CPM, LinkedIn will want to show your ad at every possible juncture. Every time that they get a chance they're going to show it, which is great for you if you're trying to get as many of these impressions in as possible in time for your event or the end of your budget. 14:10 Now, I've talked about CPM bidding. But it's really helpful to understand there's another option called auto bidding, that really is very much the same thing. All auto bidding is, is CPM bidding that you don't have to babysit as much. You don't choose a bid. It's kind of like handing LinkedIn, your wallet and saying here, take as much out as you think you need. But whatever objective you've told LinkedIn that you're trying to optimize towards, when you're doing auto bidding, it's going to optimize towards that paying CPM at the same time, CPM auto bidding, they are great if your ads are performing extremely high to the click through rate. 14:49 So this gives us a nice natural segue then into another lever you have which is just simply increasing your click through rate. I'll use sponsored content ads as an example here because they're really the standard. The average sponsored content ad gets clicked on about .4% of the time. So a little bit less than half a percent. What that means is there are a lot of people seeing your ads without actually clicking. So if you can increase your click through rates, even a small amount, it means you can get significantly more traffic. You don't need to make your audience bigger, you don't need to change your bidding at all. You can really just change your ad to something that people want to click on more often, and you can start enjoying getting significantly more traffic. On the other hand, when you're in a rush, launching new ad creatives is a significant risk. You'll have to launch and potentially see a four to eight to even 12 hour review period for your ads to go through review. And if you don't have something else running at that same time, that's scary because you're trying to accelerate delivery and at the same time your ads are offline for several hours. To mitigate this risk, I would consider going back through old successful, creative and trying to find something that used to work. And maybe it's even from different channels, maybe you're running the same kind of thing on Facebook, or Google and you can go and try to borrow whatever has been successful over there. And here's a neat little hack. If you're running sponsored content ads, there is going to be a frequency cap that is actually pretty stringent to you as an advertiser. The natural frequency cap, at least used to be members can see your ad once per day, per account. And the only way that we could actually get more delivery, we could show more often than that once per day once per 24 hours, was to put additional creatives in the same campaign. And thanks to a wonderful rep named Natalie Gubman, I recently got informed about how the frequency cap is working currently. And she says a member can see one unique creative from an advertiser determined at the company page level, so not account every 12 hours, they cannot see this one unique creative again, within that 12 hour period. However, a member can see five unique creatives from that advertiser, again determined at the company page level within the same 48 hour period. So what that means is, if you can put five unique creatives, five different ads into your campaign, you can essentially accelerate delivery to your most active LinkedIn users who are part of your audience. Now, you may not actually want to test five separate creative, maybe you're running an AB test, and you only want two different creative running. Well, what I would do LinkedIn doesn't know the difference between ads even if they look exactly the same. So if you're trying to run two ads against each other, just duplicate those two ads. LinkedIn thinks that these are two separate ads even though they say exactly the same thing. And then if you're trying to do this AB test where you're trying to split the traffic evenly, it'll be really easy to roll all of those results up and combine the metrics for the ads that were exactly the same. So you still get great split test data. And you got to take advantage of LinkedIn's increased frequency cap and getting the word out quicker. Okay, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into the ad formats that we're going to use for accelerated delivery. 18:27 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. 18:35 If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We manage LinkedIn's largest accounts, and we're the only media buying agency to be official LinkedIn partners and performance to your goals is our only priority. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com to get in touch and we'd love to help you absolutely demolish your goals. 18:59 All right, let's see jump into the other ad types that will help you accelerate your spend. So the first ad type you'll want to concentrate on here is sponsored messaging. Now this is because most of the ad formats on LinkedIn are what I consider inbound. They're essentially putting a message out there and waiting for someone to come around from your audience to log in, see something and then click on it when they're interested. But with sponsored messaging that includes both message ads that used to be called sponsored in mail, and conversation ads, these are what I consider push marketing. They push directly into a member's messaging box while they're online. And they're a little bit exclusive, because each member can only receive one of these every 45 days. So while sponsored content, it's sitting in their newsfeed and if you're lucky, maybe 1% of people will end up clicking on it. These end up getting about a 50% open rate, which is definitely a minimal kind of reaction, but it is a reaction nonetheless. If you're trying to get the word out as fast as possible, having someone see an offer and then click to open it is definitely more than just watching it scroll by in their newsfeed. So again, if you're trying to get the word out fast, this is really the only ad format where you can kind of force someone to see something. I really love sponsored content as well, I don't think you should ignore that. But the next thing I want you to consider doing is stacking your ad formats. And that means using all of the different ad formats, all concurrently, because if your goal is to get in front of these people, no matter where they are, each ad format depending on where someone is on LinkedIn, and what device they're using, it means using a different ad format is much more likely to still engage one of these users, even if they were on their way to do something or we're going to be like a ship in the night passing by. The more ad formats someone sees you in, the more likely they are to click one of them. We've seen this when we do quarterly business reviews with our larger clients and LinkedIn comes to present. One of the things that they'll give us is a report, like a contribution report, of those members who saw more than one ad format, what the difference in their click through rate was versus someone who hadn't seen another ad. And we routinely see this number between about 13% and 30%. So someone is 13% to 30% more likely to click on your ads, if they've seen you in a different ad format before. So certainly, my recommendation is to use sponsored messaging first, then sponsored content, then text ads, and then dynamic ads. And I would do this all concurrently, all mimicking the same targeting. And this will envelop your ideal target audience in just a nice warm embrace a nice warm display ad hug. 22:00 The next tip I have for you is essentially a change in motivation. So there's this concept called FOMO, that many of you know, and it stands for the fear of missing out. This is such a strong motivation, a strong emotion that we as humans feel. We hate missing out. We hate knowing that there was a big party that happened last night that we could have gone to that all your friends were there, and you totally missed it. And you can use this motivation in your ad copy. Try ad copy, like don't miss it, put it on your calendar, only a few days left, limited seats remaining. Now, a note here on morals. So I'm not a fan of putting limited seats remaining. If there really are unlimited seats, you're just manufacturing fake urgency here. But if you do actually have a limited number of seats, then yes, say it. Let people know. You might miss this if you don't take action now. 22:56 Okay, this next recommendation I've been debating internally whether or not to share it with you. If you've been listening to me for long enough, you know how I feel about the audience expansion option. I hate it. I loathe it. I shudder every time I think about using audience expansion. I will say, though, as a very last resort, after you've done everything else, all my other advice here, and if you're still spending short of trajectory, it is one checkbox that you can check that will instantly give you access to a larger audience. So let's say LinkedIn, when you click that box inserts about 20% more people into your audience. LinkedIn is going to try to make sure that those are close to your ideal audience. And I think this is the only situation where I can see audience expansion making sense. Although I will say conclusively, I have never once seen a situation where I couldn't significantly speed up my spend using all of the other strategies here before I checked the audience expansion box. So I'd say maybe this is one in 100 chance that you'd even have to do this, but I have to say it. Okay, so now I'm gonna go take a shower after making that recommendation, because I feel real dirty. 24:11 The next one I've got for you is really just in case, you should ask yourself, Is this a brand new account? Is this an account that's been opened in the last few weeks that really hasn't had a significant amount of spend go through it? You should know that there is a glass ceiling on every new account to keep people from making giant mistakes. And what it does is it artificially limits your spend in that account to $100 per day. LinkedIn doesn't tell anyone about this. It's not written really anywhere, at least not that I've seen. And so what happens is, you'll be in this high urgency situation where you're trying to spend and the account will just stop at $100 for the day, and you'll be scratching your head going, I don't get it. My ads are active, my campaigns active I have plenty of budget. Why? Well, it's because of this invisible cap and your LinkedIn rep might not even know about it. So what you want to do is either file a ticket beforehand with LinkedIn help, or if you happen to have a LinkedIn rep, make sure you let them know to remove it significantly beforehand. So don't do this they have because sometimes it can take some time for them to respond. Ask several days in advance, hey, we want to spend a lot of money please remove this cap. Because nothing is more of a buzzkill than when you have $1,000 a day to spend and the account gets stuck at $100 and two cents. While everything's active. please learn from my mistakes. I've done this many a time and forgotten about this glass ceiling. There's also a setting that is actually kind of hidden and it's for good reason, we've talked about it before. And this is where you can rotate your creative evenly or optimize for click through rate. Now I want you to go and look and make sure if you have the option check to rotate evenly, change it. Get over to optimize for click through rate. The reason here is if you are rotating evenly, I call this the charge me more and show me less button. When you're in a high urgency situation, you do not want to be shown less. And my guess is you probably don't want to get charged more. So avoid that option, even if someone looked at it and thought, oh, this will help me do AB testing. It won't, it'll just charge you more and show you less. So in conclusion here, you're going to pay more for this accelerated delivery. So set that in your expectations, expect your efficiency metrics to take a hit, you are sacrificing your efficiency for speed of delivery here. Ayou won't have as much time to test things, so you'll really have to accept whatever performance your ads and offers get. So give yourself the best stab. Do as much testing as you think you can do without disrupting, but certainly put your best stuff on and keep it going. I'll also mention that it's much better to front load your ads. That means take all of these strategies into account and potentially spend more rapidly up front than you want. The reason is, if you have something like a webinar coming up, it's actually better the sooner people can get it on their calendar, just so they don't end up having something else like a conflict happen before they see your ads. So you'll want to front load there. But it's also just as important to understand that it's easier to slam on the brakes than it is to slam on the accelerator with ads. It takes much longer to find new ways, new audiences to spend more than it is to just simply bid something down, set a daily budget or pause the campaigns or ads entirely. When you are in high urgency, there is value in just being everywhere. Make sure you use all of the ad formats, make sure you expand your targeting where it makes sense. Okay, with that being said, I've got the episode resources coming up right after this so stick around. 28:06 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. 28:16 Okay, hope you enjoyed that episode. I had a lot of fun recording it. I get a little bit passionate about this stuff as I'm sure you can tell. I'd love to share with you the resources we talked about earlier. But because one was a link to a protected deck, I can't share the stats with you here. So maybe just write them down or keep them in in memory. But check in the show notes. If you are new to LinkedIn ads if this is something that you are doing for your job, and you need to get up to speed quickly. The course that I built with LinkedIn Learning. The link is right there and you will love this course. It takes you from absolutely nothing all the way to yes, you can build and run your own campaigns and get started. It contains the same information that I teach in about my first hour and a half In person training, and I charge $500 an hour for that consultation and training. And the course itself is only $25. And it's even free if you have like a premium subscription to LinkedIn. So definitely take me up on that course it is well worth the investment. Both time and money. 29:18 Whatever podcast player you're on, please look down right now and hit the subscribe button. Because if this is good content for you, if this is gonna help you in your job, then I want you hearing more of it. And then please do rate and review in whatever podcast player you're listening on. I would love to feature your review here publicly for everyone. If you have ideas for the show, topics that you want covered questions, shoot them over to Podcast@B2Linked.com. And we love to take those into account and help prepare future episodes. We're always looking for great content. Okay, with that being said, I'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

"I love wrecking things. I think when you get down to it... I love disruption. I love being the disruptor and I really don't like being disrupted. So I'd love to go help somebody go disrupt some stuff." ~Andrew Johnson In this episode, I catch up with Andrew Johnson, CEO of ShelfAware VMI, a system that monitors inventory consumption in real-time via RFID technology. His affinity for disrupting the family distributorship’s systems led to a spin-off career at the helm of a virtually no-touch inventory solution. Andrew shares his company’s fascinating origins story as well as its mission to provide an efficient, remote data reporting method with a low-cost point of entry. “We knew our data and our systems and our processes inside out and that hard, rough experience - really getting our hands dirty, it changed us.” But prior to tackling a massive data migration project at the family’s rubber and plastics distributorship in 2012, Andrew and his brothers-in-law weren’t exactly systems engineers.  Over the course of several months, however, the trio of self-taught technologists became intimately acquainted with the company’s infrastructure. So much so that they followed up their successful data project with a massive systems overhaul, taking a match to every process they could get their hands on. “We would walk in, tear something down, burn it to the ground sometimes before we even really knew what we were going to put in place.” No department was left unscathed - or improved.  *** Distribution Talk is produced by The Distribution Team, a consulting services firm dedicated to helping wholesale distribution clients remove barriers to profitability, generate wealth and achieve personal goals.    http://www.distributionteam.com This episode was edited & mixed by The Creative Impostor Studios. Connect with Jason on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonbader Connect with Andrew on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-johnson-supply-chain-innovator-5015b612/ *** “Inside distribution and small business in general, I think incremental innovation is the way to go,” says Andrew of the three years the boys spent disrupting his father’s rubber and plastics distributorship.  That philosophy, coupled with a drive to design bespoke systems inside the family business, culminated in 2015 with the creation of an external innovation: the vendor managed inventory solution now known as ShelfAware VMI. The hardware/software combination takes inventory reporting out of the hands of the consumer and the customer service field rep, replacing barcode scanners and clipboards with an elegant, old tech-based solution.  ShelfAware VMI uses RFID (radio frequency identification), the same system found in hotel key cards, to remotely track and collect all sorts of inventory data via intelligent packaging tags. That feedback has allowed distributors to greatly improve efficiencies with an added benefit of limiting field rep visits in the era of COVID. “It’s been a wild ride,” says Andrew and he’s enthusiastic about ShelfAware VMI’s growth across multiple distribution verticals as well as the future of socially-distanced managed inventory. CONNECT WITH SHELFAWARE VMI ShelfAwareVMI ShelfAware VMI YouTube

Hello, amazing entrepreneur, it's Tash Corbin here and welcome to another episode of the Heart-Centred Business podcast. This is episode number 208 which means you can find all the relevant links and show notes over at tashcorbin.com/208. In this episode, we are going to deal with the icky topic of what to do when someone says, "give me back my money!"  When you get refund requests from customers or people wanting to drop out of your coaching packages - How do you handle it? What do you do? Have you completely failed? No you haven't. We're going to deal with all of this in today's episode, so let's dive straight on in.   Ugh, I can already feel your discomfort right now. It is so “ick” - that feeling, even just the fear of having it happen.  Someone's asking for a refund or wanting to drop out of working with you, or they don't feel like they got value and are telling you it was horrible.  And they demand they get their money back. Oh my goodness, it is so icky. Now for all of you tappers out there, feel free to do some EFT as you're following along to this if any of those feelings are coming up for you! I totally understand as an entrepreneur and business owner, especially for those of us who have personal brands where we put our heart and soul into our business - having someone say something wasn't good enough or they don’t want that anymore – It can feel like they're saying you as a person are not good enough, or that you as a person have failed. There's a lot of emotion tied up in someone not wanting to work with you anymore, or them wanting their money back.  So I want us to take an objective step back for a moment. I've got three things you can do when it happens. But first let’s take that objective step back, and think about our own experiences.  Not only as the seller, but also as a buyer, because we can have both good and bad experiences with refunds and people dropping out as both the seller and as the buyer, and I have plenty of examples of these. I was working with a VIP mentor once and after a couple of sessions together, I started to feel like we weren't a great match.  One of the key reasons was that the business and marketing strategies that they were trying to get me to use didn't really feel like they were aligned with my values. And I also felt like I got very overloaded in the first couple of weeks and then kind of left high and dry for a little while. So I reached out to that person and expressed how I was feeling, with the intention of us having a conversation and working out how we could continue working together, but in a way that was better suited to my needs. I instantly received back an email that basically blamed me and told me that it was all my mindset that was the problem, and gave me a list of all the reasons why the provider was doing the right thing, and suggesting that it was me as the client who was doing all the wrong things. Wow, this left such a bad taste in my mouth! I truly didn't know how I was going to continue working with that person, after the way they had reacted to my initial inquiries about maybe adjusting the way that we work together. It became a really interesting experience for me as a buyer, to experience the backlash while not even asking for a refund, but just looking to pivot the way that we were working together. I've also had times where I tried to get a refund from a course or program because what was on the inside did not match what was advertised, and I had to jump through a bunch of hoops to access that refund - it felt really gross. In one course I did, the promotional webinars and sales page showed a “30-day, no questions asked, money back guarantee.” I had felt very safe in buying that because I knew that I could jump in, give it a go, see what it was like, and decide whether it was actually the right fit for me. But “silly me,” I didn't read the “terms and conditions” when I purchased that course.  I will never make that mistake again.  Nowadays, I always read the Terms and Conditions very specifically when I buy courses! So I jumped into that program, but sent an email just five days after joining and said, ‘Actually, I would like to access the 30-day, no questions, Money Back Guarantee.’  I did this because after watching the first two modules, I could see it wasn’t in alignment with the way I wanted to grow and market my business. Some of the strategies being taught felt pushy and aggressive to me. And I didn't want to engage in that way.  The strategies weren't what I was expecting. I didn't feel like what was promised in the promotion matched the quality of the program on the inside.  In particular, there had been the promise of lots of connection, but when I got inside the program, the calls weren't run as Q&A calls, they were run as teaching calls, so you couldn't even ask questions.  It was just not the way I like to learn.  But I didn't say all of that in my email - I just said it didn't feel like a good fit. So when I sent through my refund request, I got a canned response that said, “this is a digital product and there are no refunds.” I emailed back and said, “well, actually on the webinar, there was a promise of a 30-day, no questions asked, money back guarantee. So I'd like to access that refund, please.” I then got another email back saying that I needed to read the terms and conditions of the course, and there was a link to a PDF. And in the terms and conditions, it said you get access to a 30-day refund so long as you do the work.  And “doing the work” involved completing at least five modules, and investing at least $500 in Facebook ads using the strategies that were taught. So what they required for me to get the refund was to actually take a screenshot of my Facebook ads account to show that I had spent $500 on Facebook ads.  But I had never run Facebook ads up until that point, and didn't have the evidence to provide to get that refund! Now, through a lot of back and forth emails, I eventually was able to get a 50% refund on the program. But I would never recommend that program to anyone, nor will I ever follow that person again, and it has left a really bad taste in my mouth. So as a buyer, I know what it's like to ask for a refund and then be forced to jump through hoops or be told that it's my fault. Another example that's not with an online business was when I bought one of those NutriBullet things.  On the box it said it was dishwasher safe on the top shelf. At the time, I was getting into smoothies, so I totally fell in love with it. One day I popped the two cups into the top shelf of the dishwasher as instructed, but when the dishwasher was finished, both of my cups had melted and completely deformed. I got in contact with the company and checked the instruction manual, checked on the box, checked everywhere that said it's completely dishwasher safe as long as it's on the top shelf and that is exactly what I did. When I called the customer service line, I had to speak to three different people and all three of those people accused me of putting it in the wrong spot in the dishwasher. I had to tell them, “I can assure you, it was definitely on the top shelf, and it has melted.” Then they tried to get me to give them my dishwasher model and all sorts of things. They just kept saying it was my fault, and acting like I’d done something wrong. They made me wait for the regional manager to give me a call, and she said, “well actually it's not guaranteed dishwasher safe. If you read the instructions, it says it's better to hand-wash but you can put them on the top shelf of the dishwasher.”  And I told her that I had put it on the top shelf of the dishwasher. It can become this crazy space when I'm asking for refunds of being like a dog with a bone – feeling like it would have been easier for me to just purchase a completely new machine with all the new cups for $125, but it's the principle of the thing, right? I've done consumer law as part of my degree, and I’m into a lot of psychology and Consumer Affairs sorts of things, so I'm very clear on my rights. And I just imagine all of the other people who aren't clear on their rights, who just take it as they're told, and accept it as fine. They just take the blame and walk away.  So I feel like my little win is a win for everyone. Because I know what it feels like to be a buyer, when I am acting as a seller I want to make sure that I provide a really amazing experience for people, even when they are asking for a refund. I find that the energetic and emotional feelings I have about refunds are way more manageable than many other people who may be still feeling scared about them. As a seller, I've had good and bad experiences in giving refunds. When I have been deeply invested in that person staying or their person's business results, or I've crossed a boundary into the real trouble of needing them to be successful because I've attached it to my identity or my value, then that's when I have tricky experiences with refund requests. But when I have that clear boundary that this person's business, or them staying or not staying with me, actually doesn't reflect upon who I am as a person.  It doesn’t impact my value, or my worth as a human being, and that boundary really helps me to experience refunds in a positive way. So here are my three tips for when people ask for their money back or inquire about dropping work with you as a client. Keep it classy. We each have so many horror stories!  And people are more willing to share the horror stories than the positive stories. If I have a refund experience that is really positive, I am conscious of sharing the great experience and continuing to support that person because they've kept it classy. Unfortunately a lot of people don't consider this. But if you don't stay classy in that experience, it is going to be bad.  We want to make sure we always keep it classy, and treat that person the way you would like to be treated if you were requesting a refund. Remember, we've all been through those horrible situations, so don't be someone who perpetuates those horrible situations for others. Please take note that even the passive aggressive post on Facebook is not classy. It has happened to me where I requested a refund from someone, and they were totally classy about it to my face, no questions asked, and gave me my money back.  But then they went on their Facebook page the next day, and complained about what a terrible client I was. They would talk about how this is why we weren't meant to work together, and basically celebrated my refund request and us not working together anymore. They've had a passive aggressive message that it was my fault something went wrong, and that it was because I wasn't their ideal client, and that their life is so much better because I've disappeared from it. That is so not classy! I know that you're not actually calling someone out by name, but when I see other service providers sharing any of that passive aggressive, gross stuff on their Facebook page, it says way more about the person posting it than it does about the person who's left and asked for a refund. So just check in with yourself. Sometimes we want to go out there and celebrate in a safe space for ourselves, or convince ourselves that it's totally okay and it doesn't mean anything about us. But you need to be really mindful of the audience you choose for sharing that kind of post. Instead, I suggest getting yourself a lady posse wolf pack of just a few people that provide you with a safe space to go and have that debrief without necessarily downloading on your entire audience. There have been people I've gone to work with, and then seen these passive aggressive style posts, whether in courses we've done together, or in free Facebook groups, or on their Facebook page or Instagram. And that has turned me off working with them! Because I can’t help but think about who is that poor person that’s being referred to? What did they do, and what if I end up being that person if I opt to work with this service provider? So please be sure that that you keep it classy! There are some big positives from refund requests. If someone has signed up to work with you for a six month package, and after a month they decide it isn’t the right fit or they aren’t getting the outcomes, that's actually really good information for you. If they aren't the ideal client, and they don't see themselves getting great results from staying with you for six months, wouldn't you rather them articulate that early?  Rather than just staying with you, going through the motions, and then after six months becoming someone who hasn’t had great results or the best experience? You don't want to force someone to stay working with you if they don't feel like it’s a great fit or like they're getting great value. My goal for everyone who joins one of my programs, like TakeOff or the Heart-Centred Business Academy, or who works with me one on one, is that when they end that time together, if it's not a 100%, heck yes “loved it,” then I want to know as soon as possible.  I want to know what it is they don't love, and if there's a good reason why it's not a fit for them.  I would much rather give them a refund and clear that space for someone else that will be the right fit. You also want to make sure you’re not creating really weird standards for yourself. One of the positives about refund requests is that there are industry norms. There is a normal refund rate of between 3 and 5% of people who buy online courses. There's a normal dropout rate between 3 and 5% of people who sign up for your VIP work. If you are trying to keep a zero percent refund rate, then chances are you're going to fail at that. For a lot of people, the positive of getting a refund request is that it's actually still well below industry average. So it's totally brilliant to celebrate that someone has opted out. Someone who isn't the right fit and isn't going to get great value from it. Another positive that comes from getting a refund request is that it's a rite of passage.  When you get that first refund request, I want you to celebrate it because baby, you made it! Every business has refund requests - every business - and you cannot have a multi-million dollar online business without some refund requests. Instead of avoiding them, if we aim to stay around or below industry averages, and we celebrate those refund requests as the people for whom it's not the right fit dropping out, then suddenly refunds just feel like a normal part of business - a totally positive part of business. Look for the opportunity. When you get a refund request, there's often an opportunity in that refund request for review. Do you have good refund systems in place? When people request a refund for my programs, I don't actually know about it anymore. My customer service team takes care of that for me.  They refund the person, and the person can tell us why, or they don't have to tell us why. The only time I know about refunds is if we have a big spike in them and it’s something we need to actually deal with. As long as it stays under our normal average of under 2%, I don't even need to know about it. My system makes it easy for that person to get their refund, and the system makes it easy for me to not get bogged down in worrying about the refunds.  And the system also means those refund requests are recorded and reported appropriately so I can pay attention to the refund rate to see if there's a spike or anything I need to be worried about. But if there's nothing I need to be worried about, I'm not worried about it. Refund requests also present a chance for you to review your policies. For a lot of people, the reason why refunds feel really awkward is they don't actually have a clear and concise refund policy in place - it's a bit of a gray area. Then you're left with needing to make a decision about whether that person is entitled to a refund or not, without having clear guidelines and policies that will give you a straightforward answer. If you haven’t got refund policies in place, you don't have terms and conditions in place. You don't necessarily have clear guidelines on what to do if someone is looking for a refund or if something's not the right fit for them. That refund request is your opportunity to review those policies, get them in place, and think about various scenarios that might happen. When it comes to working with VIP clients, the completely risk averse approach would be to have people sign a contract. And in that contract, you would have very clear terms and conditions about refunds, about dropping out, about failed payments on payment plans, etc, and it’s completely written to the letter. The opposite end of the spectrum would be to not even talk about it. We don't want to be at that end of the spectrum.  Usually somewhere between the middle and the very risk adverse space is ideal when it comes to a refund policy for people working with you as a VIP. I really want to focus down on this one because I have heard some horror stories.  I've also heard of people using the contract as a way of basically separating themselves from needing to deliver good services to their customers. I had a client who had previously been working with someone else. She had been working on a six month VIP package with this person at a negotiated price, and paying on a monthly basis.  After three months of working together, she realised she was not getting the level of support she expected to get in that package. She was not getting enough detail in the execution of the strategy she was learning. Therefore she was finding she wasn't getting any results from the process, and was feeling more and more overwhelmed, being told she needed to hire more and more and more team members, which was never discussed when they first started working together. So she reached out to me for some advice on how to approach this. It wasn't through the lens of wanting a refund or wanting to drop out at first, but just wanting to really clarify the deliverables, and how much more money she would need to invest to get the results.  Truth be told, she had invested her last bit of money in working with this person, thinking that if she invested in this coaching, she should be able to put those strategies in place and get return on investment. She didn't realise - and there had been no initial conversation - that there would be another 10 to $15,000 worth of hiring needed in order to scale the business and get the intended results. And so I helped her draft up a little email indicating maybe she wasn't quite exceeding the expectations, and requesting a conversation about where to go from here.  The provider wrote back and said, “If at any time you don't think it's the right fit, you can just stop working with me. However, as per the contract, you need to complete your payment plan.” Instantly after sending that email, the client was essentially told, “well, I don't really want to work with you either. But you still have to keep paying me.”  This service provider was using that contract as a means of saying, the law is the law, you still have to pay me. Ultimately, that is not how I want to show up as a provider online.  It would be interesting for you to reflect on how you want to show up as a provider online? Yes, your rights as the seller need to be protected. But you also have an obligation as the provider to deliver on what you promise and to be upfront at the start of the process about what it's going to look like and what people can expect. I'm not saying you shouldn't have contracts, or you that should.  But I do think no matter what it is that you are selling, no matter how you deliver those products or services, no matter how risk averse or risk friendly you are, you want to make sure at the start of any engagement that you're really clear on what your rights and responsibilities are, what your buyers’ rights and responsibilities are, and what you're going to do. If either party feels like it's not a great fit anymore, then you don't need to necessarily have a detailed contract that covers those things off.  I personally cover that off in a very informal confirmation email. For some industries, you do need to have it in writing, such as handling someone's finances or if you're doing something in health, sometimes you do need to actually have a contract. But for me, I actually have an informal confirmation email that talks about those core things. It very clearly says that we are two grown adults, and if at any point in this arrangement either of us feels it's not a fit anymore, we're going to talk about it and see if we can adjust what is being delivered to make sure it fits both parties needs.  If the person decides they don't want to do it anymore, here's how the refund or payment would be renegotiated or adjusted to reflect the level of service that had already been provided. And also, here's what to do if you're not happy with that. It's a simple way of just being really clear. Developing this approach came through a specific experience with a refund request where I realised I hadn't made that 100% clear. The person had been a little bit unhappy with the level of stretch I was giving - they wanted to be stretched and pushed further – but I was still working on the basics with their business because their foundations needed some work. So the person wasn't happy they weren't doing the more advanced style strategies. But for two months - four sessions - they hadn't said anything because they didn't know how to raise it. And so it ended up escalating for them behind the scenes and kind of blowing up because they hadn’t been happy for three months, and it all came out at once. I took a day. I read the email several times and then I recognised that I hadn't been upfront about what to do if someone didn't feel like it was meeting their needs. So that person got a partial refund, and we stopped working together. I sent them to a friend of mine who I thought would be able to help them with more advanced stuff, and it actually ended up working out really well. As a result of that experience, I included an extra part in my confirmation email when we first start working together on what to do in that situation. It’s important that you look at this through the lens of “it's all a practice,” and sometimes you don't know what people are going to want or how they'll want you to deal with things, or what boundaries people are going to be pushing, until those boundaries are pushed. All you can do is set yourself up with some systems and basic policies, or get advice from a legal representative to set yourself up in a way that feels good for you. Know that you might have to make some adjustments on the way - you don't need to get it perfect from the very start. Now, the final opportunity that I want to talk about from a refund request is the learning opportunity. It might be that your sales processes aren't clearly articulating how your services are delivered, or your sales processes are promising things that aren't clearly delivered in your services. It might be that your marketing is attracting people who aren't the right fit because of the way you talk about something or the audience you're advertising to. There are many reasons why it might not be working. Refund requests are great opportunities to look at where there might be a disconnect. Don't be afraid of asking people, after reassuring them of their refund, to share why it's not a fit to what they expected. I only ever ask that question after I've given the refund. We just ask for any feedback that may have been able to prevent this issue. And that is a really beautiful learning opportunity as well. It helps me to get clearer with my offers, and ensures I am getting clear on who my ideal clients are.  Then when I'm putting my courses together, it speaks to the level of information and detail people need to make an empowered decision, without making assumptions about what's included. So just to recap - Stay classy, look for those positives, and look at all the amazing opportunities the refund request will give you. Now, I also just want to say in closing this podcast episode, that refund requests are all part of scaling your business. The larger your business becomes, the more clients you have, the more likely you are to get some of those refund requests. So please, please, please, if I can leave you with one thing, it's the understanding that a refund request is not a reflection of your value as a human being! A refund request does not mean that you are a failure at business. A refund request is simply a part of your business scaling. And it's a sign that you are on your way to bigger and better things. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of the Heart Centered Business Podcast. If you’ve got any questions or lightbulb moments as a result of this episode, come on into the Heart-Centred Soul Driven Entrepreneurs Facebook Community, use the #podcastaha and let me know that you've been listening to episode number 208. And let me know any “aha” moments, light bulbs or questions you might have in relation to refunds. Until next time, I cannot WAIT to see you SHINE.        

In response to the horrific murder of George Floyd and the worldwide protests against police brutality that followed, the House Democrats wrote the Justice in Policing Act. The provisions in this bill are our best chance for real change in the 116th Congress. In this episode, we see how the bill would limit military equipment being transferred to cops, create a nationwide public database for information about cops and police departments, and limit the qualified immunity that allows cops to use violence with impunity. We also look at The Dingleberry Method, which is the best play for Democrats to use if they want any of this to become law. Please Support Congressional Dish – Quick Links Click here to contribute monthly or a lump sum via PayPal Click here to support Congressional Dish for each episode via Patreon Send Zelle payments to: Donation@congressionaldish.com Send Venmo payments to: @Jennifer-Briney Send Cash App payments to: $CongressionalDish or Donation@congressionaldish.com Use your bank’s online bill pay function to mail contributions to: 5753 Hwy 85 North, Number 4576, Crestview, FL 32536 Please make checks payable to Congressional Dish Thank you for supporting truly independent media! Recommended Congressional Dish Episodes CD192: Democracy Upgrade Stalled CD200: How to End Legal Bribes Bill Outline Justice in Policing Act of 2020 TITLE I: POLICE ACCOUNTABILITY Subtitle A - Holding Police Accountable in the Courts Sec. 101: Deprivation of Rights Under Color of Law Makes it a crime for someone enforcing a law to “knowingly or with reckless disregard” deprive a person of a right or privilege protected by the Constitutions, instead of “willingly” deprive a person their rights. Sec. 102: Qualified Immunity Reform Local law enforcement officers and prison guards will not be given immunity if they say they were acting in “good faith” or that they believed their conduct was lawful. Sec. 103: Pattern and Practice Investigations Gives the Attorney General optional subpoena authority and authorizes (but does not appropriate) $300,000 for grants to help states conduct investigations for the next three years Sec. 104: Independent Investigations The attorney general to give grants to states to help them conduct independent investigations of law enforcement. Authorizes (but does not appropriate) $2.25 billion Subtitle B - Law Enforcement Trust and Integrity Act Sec. 113: Accreditation of Law Enforcement Agencies Orders the Attorney General to do a review and recommend additional standards that are supposed to result in greater accountability of law-enforcement agencies. Sec. 114: Law Enforcement Grants Gives the Attorney General the option to provide grants to Community organizations to study law-enforcement standards. Sec. 115: Attorney General to Conduct Study Orders the attorney general to do a study on the ability of law-enforcement officers to dodge investigative questions. Sec. 116: Authorization of Appropriations Authorizes (but does not appropriate) about $28 million. Sec. 117: National Task Force on Law Enforcement Oversight Creates a task force staffed by the Attorney General to process complaints of law enforcement misconduct. Authorizes (but does not appropriate) $5 million per year Sec. 118: Federal Data Collection on Law Enforcement Practices Each federal, state, and local law enforcement agency would have to report a breakdown of the numbers of traffic stops, pedestrian stops, , And uses of deadly force by race, ethnicity, age, and gender of the officers and the the members of the public to the Attorney General. States that do not submit the reports would not be given money from the Department of Justice. TITLE II: POLICING TRANSPARENCY THROUGH DATA Subtitle A - National Police Misconduct Registry Sec. 201: Establishment of National Police Misconduct Registry Six months after enactment, the Atty. Gen. would have to create a database containing each complaint filed against the law enforcement officer, termination records, certifications, in records of lawsuits and settlements made against the officer. The registry would be available to the public Sec. 202: Certification Requirements for Hiring of Law Enforcement Officers Withholds money from a state or jurisdiction if all officers have not completed certification requirements. Subtitle B - PRIDE Act Sec. 223: Use of Force Reporting Requires states to report to the Attorney General, on a quarterly basis, information about law enforcement officers who shoot civilians, civilians who shoot law-enforcement officers, any incident involving the death or arrest of a law-enforcement officer, deaths in custody, and arrests and bookings. The reports must contain information about the national origin, sex, race, ethnicity, age, disability, English language proficiency, and housing status of each civilian against whom a local law enforcement officer used force. Reports must also include the location of the incident, whether the civilian was armed and with what kind of weapon, the type of force used, the reason force was used, a description of any injuries sustained as a result of the incident, the number of officers involved, the number of civilians involved, a description of the circumstances, efforts by local law-enforcement to de-escalate the situation, or the reason why efforts to de-escalate were not attempted. The Attorney General would have to make this information public once per year in a report. TITLE III: IMPROVING POLICE TRAINING AND POLICIES Subtitle A - End Racial and Religious Profiling Act Sec. 311: Prohibition “No law-enforcement agent or law enforcement agency shall engage in racial profiling." Racial profiling is defined as relying, to any degree, on actual or perceived race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, gender, gender identity, or sexual orientation in selecting which individual to subject to routine or spontaneous investigatory activities. Sec. 312: Enforcement Allows victims of racial profiling to sue in civil courts, either in the state for in a district court of the United States. Subtitle B - Additional Reforms Sec. 361: Training on Racial Bias and Duty to Intervene The attorney general has to establish a training program to cover racial profiling, implicit bias, and procedural justice. The training program must exhibit a clear duty for federal law-enforcement officers to intervene in cases where another law-enforcement officer is using excessive force against a civilian. Sec. 362: Ban on No-Knock Warrants in Drug Cases Search warrants authorized for drug cases would have to require that the law-enforcement officer provide notice of his or her authority and purpose. Sec. 363: Incentivizing Banning of Chokeholds and Carotid Holds States will not receive funding from the Department of Justice unless the state has enacted a law prohibiting officers in the State or jurisdiction from using a chokehold or carotid hold. Chokeholds would be classified as civil rights violations Sec. 364: PEACE Act “Less lethal” force can be used if it’s “necessary and proportional” in order to arrest a person “who the officer has probably cause to believe has committed a criminal offense” and if “reasonable alternatives to the use of the form of less lethal force have been exhausted” Deadly force can only be used “as a last resort” to “prevent imminent and serious bodily injury or death to the officer or another person”, and if the use of deadly force creates no “substantial risk of injury to a third person”, and if “reasonable alternatives tot he use of the form of deadly fore have been exhausted” Officers have to give people a verbal warning that they are a law enforcement officer and that they “will use force against the person if the person resists arrest or flees” Sec. 365: Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act Prohibits the 1033 Program from transferring military equipment to domestic law enforcement for “counter drug” and “border security activities” but they can continue to get equipment for “counterterrorism” Would require the police departments to submit to the Defense Department a description of how they intend to use the military equipment, the department would have to publish a notice on their website and “at several prominent locations in the jurisdiction" that they are requesting the military equipment, and have the notices available for 30 days, and that the department has approval to receive the equipment by the city council. Reports on where the equipment goes must be submitted to Congress Prohibits the transfer of controlled firearms, ammunition, bayonets, grenade launchers, grenades (including flash bangs), explosives, controlled vehicles, MRAPs, trucks, drones, combat aircraft, silencers, and long range acoustic devices. The department would be required to return the equipment if they are investigated by the Justice Department or found to have engaged in widespread civil rights abuses Police departments “may never take ownership” of controlled property Applies only to equipment transferred in the future. Subtitle C - Law Enforcement Body Cameras Sec. 372: Requirements for Federal Uniformed Officers Regarding the Use of Body Cameras Requires uniformed officers with the authority to conduce searches and make arrests to wear a body camera. The body camera - vide and audio - must be activated whenever a uniformed officer is responding to a call for service or during any other law enforcement encounter with a member of the public, except if an immediate threat to the officer’s life or safety makes turning the camera on impossible. Officers must notify members of the public that they are wearing a body camera When entering someone’s home or speaking to a victim, the officer must ask if the resident or victim wants the camera turned off and turn it off if requested, if they are not executing a search warrant. Body cameras can not be equipped with real time facial recognition technology Facial recognition technology can be used with the footage with a warrant Body cameras can’t be used to gather intelligence on protected speech, associations, or relations. Body cameras are not required when the officer is speaking to a confidential informant or when recording poses a risk to national security. Body cameras are not allowed to be turned on when an officer is on a school campus unless he/she is responding to an imminent threat of life or health Footage must be retained for 6 months and then permanently deleted Citizens and their lawyers and the families of deceased citizens have the right to inspect body camera footage related to their cases Body camera footage related to a use of force or a civilian complaint must be kept for at least 3 years Redactions can be used Body camera footage retained longer than 6 months is inadmissible in court If an officer interferes or turns off a recording, “appropriate disciplinary action shall be taken” and the interference can be used as evidence in court. Sec. 373: Patrol Vehicles with In-Car Video Recording Cameras In car video camera recording equipment must record whenever an officer is on patrol duty, conducting an enforcement stop, patrol lights are activated, if the officer thinks the recording could help with a prosecution, and when an arrestee is being transported. Recordings must be retained for 90 days. Sec. 374: Facial Recognition Technology In car video cameras can not be equipped with facial recognition technology TITLE IV - JUSTICE FOR VICTIMS OF LYNCHING ACT Sec. 403: Lynching Co-conspirators to a lynching can be sentenced to 10 years in prison Articles/Documents Article: READ: Democrats Release Legislation To Overhaul Policing By Barbara Sprunt, npr, June 8, 2020 Article: Retraction—Hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine with or without a macrolide for treatment of COVID-19: a multinational registry analysis By Mandeep R Mehra, Frank Ruschitzka, and Amit N Patel, The Lancelet, June 5, 2020 Article: Verizon and AT&T Partner With Pro-Police Militarization Lobbying Group By Donald Shaw, Sludge, June 4, 2020 Article: The no-knock warrant for Breonna Taylor was illegal By Radley Balko, The Washington Post, June 3, 2020 Article: 10 Things Dems Could Do Right Now -- If They Actually Wanted To Stop Trump’s Power Grab By David Sirota, Substack, June 2, 2020 Article: De-escalation Keeps Protesters And Police Safer. Departments Respond With Force Anyway. By Maggie Koerth and Jamiles Lartey, FiveThirtyEight, June 1, 2020 Article: U.S. lawmaker prepares bill aiming to end court protection for police By David Morgan, Reuters, June 1, 2020 Statement: The Posse Comitatus Act, U.S. Northern Command, September 23, 2019 Article: Slavery and the Origins of the American Police State By Ben Fountain, Medium, September 17, 2018 Document: An Evaluation of the Department of Defense's Excess Property Program: Law Enforcement Agency Equipment Acquisition Policies, Findings, and Options by Aaron C. Davenport, Jonathan William Welburn, Andrew Lauland, Annelise Pietenpol, Marc Robbins, Erin Rebhan, Patricia Boren, K. Jack Riley, Rand Corporation, 2018 Article: Trump Reverses Obama Policy on Surplus Military Gear for Police By Pete Williams and Julia Ainsley, NBC News, August 28, 2017 Article: New Ferguson Video Adds Wrinkle to Michael Brown Case By Mitch Smith, The New York Times, March 11, 2017 Article: L.A. schools police will return grenade launchers but keep rifles, armored vehicle By Stephen Ceasar, Los Angeles Times, September 16, 2014 Article: Michael Brown Robbed Convenience Store, Stole Cigarillos Before Darren Wilson Shooting, Dorian Johnson Says By Thomas Barrabi, International Business Times, November 25, 2014 Article: The “1033 Program,” Department of Defense Support to Law Enforcement By Daniel H. Else, Congressional Research Service, Specialist in National Defense, August 28, 2014 Additional Resources About: Vanita Gupta, President and CEO, The Leadership Conference on Civil & Human Rights Sound Clip Sources Hearing: Oversight Hearing on Policing Practices and Law Enforcement Accountability, House Judiciary Committee, June 10, 2020 Watch on Youtube Witnesses: Art Acevedo: President of the Major Cities Chiefs Association Paul Butler: Professor of Law at Georgetown Law School Vanita Gupta: President and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights Sherrilyn Ifill: President and Director-Counsel, NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Inc. Marc Morial: President and Chief Executive Officer of the National Urban League Ben Crump: President and Founder of Ben Crump Trial Lawyer for Justice (lawyer for the family of George Floyd) Transcript: C-SPAN: Part 1 34:15 Vanita Gupta: My tenure as head of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division began two months after 18 year old Michael Brown was killed by a police officer in Ferguson. The Justice Department was hardly perfect, but we understood our mandate: to promote accountability and constitutional policing in order to build community trust. During the Obama administration, we opened 25 pattern-or-practice investigations to help realize greater structural and community centered change, often at the request of police chiefs and mayor's who needed federal leadership. After making findings, we negotiated consent decrees with extensive engagement and input from community advocates, who not only identified unjust and unlawful policing practices, but also helped develop sustainable mechanisms for accountability and systemic change. That is not the Justice Department that we have today. Under both Attorneys General Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr, the department has abdicated its responsibility and abandoned the use of tools like pattern-or-practice investigations and consent decrees. Instead it is focused on dismantling police accountability efforts and halting any new investigations. The disruption of crucial work in the Civil Rights Division and throughout the Department of Justice to bring forth accountability and transparency in policing is deeply concerning. In the absence of federal leadership, the Leadership Conference Education Fund launched the new era of public safety initiative, a comprehensive guide and toolkit outlining proposals to build trust between communities and police departments, restore confidence and imagine a new paradigm of public safety. While much of these changes must happen at the state and local level, success is going to require the leadership support and commitment of the federal government including Congress. Last week, the leadership conference and more than 400 civil rights organizations sent a letter to Congress to move us forward on a path of true accountability. The recommendations included the following: One, create a national necessary standard on the use of force. Two, prohibit racial profiling, including robust data collection. Three, ban the use of chokeholds and other restraint maneuvers. Four, end the militarization of policing. Five, prohibit the use of no knock warrants, especially in drug cases. Six, strengthen federal accountability systems and increase the Justice Department's authority to prosecute officers that engage in misconduct. Seven create a national police misconduct registry. And eight, end qualified immunity. The Leadership Conference was pleased to learn that the Justice in Policing Act introduced Monday by both members of the House of Representatives and the Senate reflects much of this accountability framework. This is Congress's most comprehensive effort in decades to substantially address police misconduct by taking on issues critical issues affecting black and brown communities. 1:02:00 Sherrilyn Ifill: One of the key parts of the system of impunity has been qualified immunity defense that shields officials from the unforeseeable consequences of their act but has been interpreted by courts so ***extensively that it now provides near immunity for police officers who engage and unconstitutional acts of violence. 1:02:45 Sherrilyn Ifill: The Justice and policing act seeks to address qualified immunity by amending the civil rights statute used most in police excessive use of force cases. 42 USC section 1983 and we welcome this amendment. We want it to apply to all civil suits that are pending or filed after enactment of the Act. And we'll continue to work towards the elimination of qualified immunity. 1:24:10 Ben Crump: The only reason we know what happened to George Floyd is because it was captured on video. The advent of video evidence is bringing into the light what long was hidden. It's revealing what black Americans have known for a long, long time - that it is dangerous for a black person to have an encounter with a police officer. Given the incidents that have led to this moment in time, it should be mandatory for police officers to wear body cams and should be considered obstruction of justice to turn them off. Like a black box data recorded in an airplane body cams replace competing narratives with a single narrative, the truth with what we see with our own eyes. C-SPAN: Part 2 3:00 Vanita Gupta: I will tell you there's actually significant law enforcement support for this kind of registry. And prosecutors around the country have asked for this kind of registry. But chiefs in particular have said that this is a real problem when they don't have this kind of information when they're making hiring decisions. 14:00 Sherrilyn Ifill: The principal problems that we have found in this long standing systemic issue of police violence against unarmed African Americans is the inability to hold officers who engage in misconduct accountable. Now, this is not just about the individual officer who some refer to as a bad apple. This is about a system of accountability that must exist if police officers are to understand that they cannot engage in certain kinds of conduct without impunity. And unfortunately, all of the legal tools that are available to us to hold officers accountable, have been weakened or lacked the sufficient strength and language to allow us to do so. So strengthening the language of the federal criminal statute that will not hold us to such a high standard and proving intent of the officers conduct is critical. And so adding a recklessness provision into that language that will allow us to get at some of this officer misconduct is vitally important. 45:00 Rep. Hank Johnson (GA): Mayor Morial, throughout recent times, we've seen repeated instances where black people often unarmed have been killed by a police officer. And if the death results in a use of force investigation, that investigation most often is conducted by the law enforcement agency that employs the officer who used the deadly force. Isn't that correct? Marc Morial: That's traditionally the way it works. Rep. Hank Johnson (GA): And Professor Butler we've also witnessed these use of force investigations being overseen by the local district attorney who works hand in hand, day after day, year after year, with the same officer and with the agency that employs the officer who used the deadly force in the case that's under investigation. Isn't that correct? And attorney Crump we've seen time and time again that the investigation becomes long and drawn out. And at some point, months or even years later, the local Prosecutor takes that case before a secret grand jury. And out of that grand jury usually comes what's called a no bill, which is a refusal to indict the officer who committed the homicide. Isn't that correct? Ben Crump: Yes, sir congressman Johnson. Rep. Hank Johnson (GA): And Professor Butler because grand jury proceeding's a secret, the public never learns exactly what the prosecutor presented to the grand jury. Isn't that correct? Paul Butler: Just like the grand jury proceeding in Staten Island with Eric Garner, who was placed in an illegal chokehold. We have no idea why that grand jury didn't indict that officer for murder. Rep. Hank Johnson (GA): It becomes just another justified killing of a black person by the police in America. Wouldn't it be fairer if the homicide investigation were undertaken by an Independent Police Agency, Attorney Gupta? Vanita Gupta: I think it would. It would also give the community members are much more faith in their legal system if there was an independent investigator in these kinds of cases. 1:41:30 Rep. Tom McClintock (CA): I think there are many proposals that have been raised in the house that merit support. And first is the doctrine of qualified immunity as it's currently applied. It has no place in a nation ruled by laws. For every right, there must be a remedy. And qualified immunity prevents a remedy for those whose rights have been violated by officials holding a public trust. And this reform should apply as much to a rogue cop who targets people because of their race, as it does to IRS or Justice Department officials and target people on the basis of their politics. 1:42:15 Rep.Tom McClintock (CA): Police records must be open to the public. It is a well established principle that public servants work for the public. And the public has a right to know what they're doing with the authority the public has loaned them. And police departments should be able to dismiss bad officers without interference from the unions. 1:42:45 Rep.Tom McClintock (CA): Turning police departments into paramilitary organizations is antithetical to the sixth principle laid down by Peel. Quote, "To use only the minimum degree of physical force which is necessary on any particular occasion for achieving a police objective." Weapons that are unique to a battlefield need to be limited to a battlefield. 1:43:15 Rep.Tom McClintock (CA): No knock warrants have been proven to be lethal to citizens and to police officials for obvious reasons. The invasion of a person's home is one of the most terrifying powers the government possesses. Every person in a free society has the right to take arms against an intruder in their homes. And that means that the authority as a police must be announced before that intrusion takes place. To do otherwise places every one of us in mortal peril. 2:00:45 Vanita Gupta: I think right now there is a hunger in the streets and in communities around the country to recognize that people want other options in their communities other than to call 911 and have a police officer come at the door when people are in mental health crisis, for homelessness issues and school discipline issues. And they want to - and I've heard this from police chiefs. The International Association of Chiefs of Police issued a very powerful statement two days ago, recognizing the systematic decades of underinvestment in the kinds of social systems in housing and homelessness and education, and how that's all been placed at the feet of police officers. This needs to be a holistic evaluation of what spending priorities have been in communities that have been saturated with a criminal justice response, but under invested with resources for education and jobs, and the like. 2:39:00 Rep. Greg Stube (FL): But there are proposals in this bill that are extremely dangerous for those who protect our communities. Removing qualified immunity is only... Qualified immunity is only a protection if officers follow their training and protocols. If they don't follow the training and protocols, they don't get to use the immunity because it's qualified. If officers don't have qualified immunity to follow the training and protocols. I don't know a single person who would want to become a law enforcement officer in today's world, knowing that they may or may not be able to use the training and protocols that they were used to be able to apprehend a suspect who is not complying with them. But maybe that's the goal of the majority to get less and less people to join our law enforcement offices. 2:59:00 Vanita Gupta: Justice Department currently only has one law that they can use to prosecute police misconduct. And as you said, it has the highest mens rea requirement there is in criminal law requiring not only that prosecutors prove that the officer used unreasonable force, but actually also that the officer knew that what he or she was doing was in violation of the law and did it anyway, that is actually a very high burden. And so for years, there have been case after case that the Justice Department has been unable to reach it because of how high this burden is. There are many criminal civil rights prosecutors that for years have also wanted the change that is being proposed in the Justice in Policing Act, because I think it would enhance the Justice Department's credibility in these matters to be able to hold officers who violate federal civil rights laws accountable. And so this Justice in Policing Act asks it change the mens rea standard to knowingly or with reckless disregard, to slightly lower standards so more cases will be charged. It also really importantly broadens the language of the federal civil rights statute by including in its definition of a death resulting from an officers action, any act that was a substantial factor contributing to death. And I know many, many former US Attorneys that are eager to see this change as well. 3:07:00 Vanita Gupta: It is a real shame that in 2020, we still do not have adequate data collection on use of force in this country. We've had to rely for several years on journalists to putting this stuff together at the Washington Post and at The Guardian. The FBI has started to try to more systematically collected it, but this bill, the justice in policing act actually includes a requirement for states to report use of force data to the Justice Department, including the reason that force was used. Technical Assistance Grants are established in this bill to assist agencies that have fewer than 100 employees with compliance. That was often the reason that that police agencies were not reporting on this, but it also requires the Attorney Generals to collect data on traffic stops, searches, uses of deadly force by federal, state and local law enforcement agencies, and to disaggregate that data by race, ethnicity and gender. 3:26:00 Vanita Gupta: This national registry would have misconduct complaints. It would have discipline termination records, it would have records of certification. It contains conditioning for money for funds from so that agencies actually have to put in inputs before they can access federal money, but it is high time for this to happen. 3:39:20 Vanita Gupta: The Trump DOJ has essentially abandoned and abdicated a mandate that was given by Congress in 1994 to investigate patterns and practices of unconscious, systemic, unconstitutional policing and police departments around the country. Since the administration began, there has been the opening only of one on a very tiny issue at the police department out of Springfield, Massachusetts, compared to 25 in the Obama administration, and many others in Republican and Democratic administrations prior to that. And so what that has meant is that the tool of these investigations, the tool of the consent decrees has just been lying dormant. Typically, when I oversaw the Civil Rights Division, we had mayors and police chiefs that really, in numerous instances, were actually asking the Justice Department to come in because they needed federal help in very bad situations. And so, jurisdictions have not been able to rely anymore on the Justice Department to support these kinds of efforts. And I think this bill, Justice in Policing does a lot to strengthen the Civil Rights Division's authority, giving it subpoena power, giving it resources. It also gives State Attorneys General the ability to do these patterns and practices where they have already state laws that allow them to do it as well. And that's, of course in this moment, with a justice department that is very disengaged from these issues. An important... Hearing: Oversight of Federal Programs for Equipping State and Local Law Enforcement, United States Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, September 9, 2014 Watch on C-SPAN Witnesses: Alan Estevez - Principal Deputy Defense Under Secretary for Acquisition, Technology & Logistics Brian Kamoie - FEMA Grant Programs Assistant Administrator Peter Kraska - Professor at the School of Justice at University of Eastern Kentucky Mark Lomax - National Tactical Officers Association Executive Directior Transcript: 26:00 Alan Estevez: More than 8,000 federal and state law enforcement agencies actively participate in the program across 49 states in three US territories. More than $5.1 billion of property has been provided since 1990. 26:15 Alan Estevez: A key element in both the structure and execution of the program is the state coordinator, who is appointed by the respective state governor. State coordinators approve law enforcement agencies within their state to participate in the program, review all requests for property submitted by those agencies along with the statement of intended use. Working through state coordinators. Law enforcement agencies determine their need for different types of equipment and they determine how it's used. The Department of Defense does not have the expertise and police force functions and cannot assess how equipment is used in the mission of individual law enforcement agencies. 27:14 Alan Estevez: Law enforcement agencies currently possess approximately 460,000 pieces of controlled property that they have received over time. 27:20 Alan Estevez: Examples of control property include over 92,000 small alarms 44,000 night vision devices 5200 High Mobility Multi Purpose wheeled vehicles or Humvees and 617 mine resistant ambush protected vehicles or MRAPs. The department does not provide tanks, grenade launchers, sniper rifles, crew served weapons or uniforms. 28:20 Alan Estevez: During the height of Superstorm Sandy in New Jersey, police drove cargo trucks and three Humvees through water too deep for commercial vehicles to save 64 people. In Wisconsin, Green Bay police used donated computers for forensic investigations. During a 2013 flood in Louisiana, Livingston parish police used six Humvees to rescue 137 people. In Texas armored vehicles received through program protected police officers during a standoff and shootout with gang members. 30:35 Brian Kamoie: The department's preparedness grant programs assist communities across the nation to build and sustain critical capabilities to prevent, protect, mitigate, respond to and recover from acts of terrorism and other catastrophic events. 33:00 Brian Kamoie: Grant recipients must purchase equipment listed on the department's authorized equipment list, which outlines 21 categories of allowable equipment. The department prohibits the use of grant funds for the purchase of lethal or non lethal weapons and ammunition. These equipment categories are not on the authorized equipment list. Homeland Security grant funds may be used to purchase equipment that can be classified as personal protective equipment, such as ballistics protection equipment, helmets, body armor, and ear and eye protection. Response vehicles such as BearCats are also allowed. The Homeland Security Act allows equipment purchased with grant funds, including personal protective equipment to be used for purposes unrelated to terrorism. So long as one purpose of the equipment is to build and sustain terrorism based capabilities. 33:46 Brian Kamoie: The authorized equipment list also notes that ballistic personal protective equipment purchased with grant funds is not for riot suppression. 40:10 Alan Estevez: When it's no longer needed, we make it available not just cross levels across the Department of Defense first, and law enforcement by congressional authorization as dibs early in that process before it goes out to state agencies. And not all the equipment that's provided to law enforcement is available to everyone else. 40:45 Alan Estevez: Again, it's not for the department to really judge how law enforcement's...that's not our expertise. We rely on the state coordinators, appointed by the governor of each of those states who vet incoming requests from their local law enforcement agencies. 48:00 Coburn: How do you all determine what Federal Supply classes are available to be transferred? Alan Estevez: That is done basically by our item managers who... Coburn: I know, but tell me how do they decide MRAPs appropriate for community of my hometown, 35,000 people. Alan Estevez: that is done by the state coordinate... Coburn: I understand that but how did you ever decide that an MRAP is an appropriate vehicle for for local police forces? Alan Estevez: We know an MRAP is a truck senator with Coburn: No it is not a truck. It's a 48,000...offensive weapon. Alan Estevez: It's a very, very, very heavy...it is not an offensive weapon, Senator. Coburn: It can be used as an offensive weapon. Alan Estevez: When we give an MRAP, it is stripped of all its electronic warfare capability. It does not have a 50 caliber weapon on it. It is not an offensive weapon, is a protective vehicle. 49:15 Coburn: How do we ever get to the point where we think states need MRAPs. How did that process come about? Alan Estevez: Now this is one of the areas that we're obviously going to look at senator. How we decided what equipment is available. I mean, obviously we've made some big decisions, fighter aircraft tanks, strikers, those type of things are not available. Sniper Rifles - not available. Grenade launchers - not available. Coburn: Drones are available. Alan Estevez: No. Coburn: Airplanes are available. Alan Estevez: Airplanes are available. Cargo helicopters. Helicopters, not Apaches. Okay. Coburn: But but really you you can't tell us today how we make those decisions of what goes on the list and off the list. Alan Estevez: It's basically a common sense decision inside the department and then we do as I keep saying go back to the states. 50:15 Coburn: When something is removed from the list, and I don't know if you have any recent experience with this, are agencies are required to return the restricted equipment. Alan Estevez: That's why we retain title for what we call controlled equipment so that we can pull that equipment. 57:00 Alan Estevez: So as force structural changes, as our budget changes, things that we thought we would need, were are no longer needed. Or things that we bought for the war. And I'm not not talking about tactical rifles and like I'm talking about basic medical kits, that type of stuff may no longer be needed as we draw down force structure based on changing environment on the ground. PCA changes our force structure, things that we required will no longer be needed as that force structure changes. That's the basic reason. 58:30 Senator McCaskill: The Lake Angeles Police Department in Michigan, you gave them 13 military assault weapons since 2011. They have one full time sworn officer. So one officer now has 13 military grade assault weapons in their police department. How in the world can anyone say that this program has a one lick of oversight if those two things are in existence? Alan Estevez: I'll have to look into the details on each of those. The rule of thumb is one MRAP validated by the state coordinator for a police department that requests an MRAP no more than one. So I'd have to look at the incident in Senator Coburn's state. And same thing with rifles...weapons. Senator McCaskill: I will make part of the record the list we have a long list of law enforcement agencies that received three times as many 5.56 and 7.62 military grade weapons per for full time officer and this is a long list. 1:05:00 Senator Johnson: This program, which has apparently provided about $5.1 billion of free equipment since 1997. It's all been free, correct? Alan Estevez: Yes. It's not free to the taxpayer. We bought it used it on... Senator Johnson: Free to local governments, correct? Alan Estevez: That's correct. Senator Johnson: Free local to police departments. Alan Estevez: Yes, sir, Senator. Senator Johnson: Do you know if too many police farms return free things down? Alan Estevez:Again, I'm not in the position of a local police department, but if something was available, and they thought they needed it, because they have to sustain this equipment, if they thought they needed it, and it was useful to them. Why not? 1:23:15 Rand Paul: In FEMAs authorized equipment lists, there's actually written descriptions for how the equipment should be used. And it says it's specifically not supposed to be used for riot suppression. Mr. Kamoie? Is that true that it's not supposed to be used for Riot suppression? And how do you plan in policing that since the images show us clearly, large pieces of equipment that were bought with your grants being used in that Riot suppression? Protest suppression, rather. Brian Kamoie: Senator Paul, that is accurate. The categories of personal protective equipment that include helmets, ear and eye protection, ballistics personal protective equipment, is a prohibition in the authorized equipment list that is not to be used for riot suppression. Rand Paul: And what will you do about it? Brian Kamoie: We're going to follow the lead of the Department of Justice's investigation about the facts. We're going to work for the state of Missouri to determine what pieces of equipment were grant funded, and then we have a range of remedies available to us. Should there be any finding of non compliance with those requirements. Those include everything from corrective action plans to ensure it doesn't happen again. recoupment of funds. So we'll look very closely at the facts. But we're going to allow the investigation to run its course and determine what the appropriate remedy is. 1:25:20 Rand Paul: Mr. Estavez in the NPR investigation of the 1033 program, they list that 12,000 bayonets have been given out. What purpose are bayonets being given out for? Alan Estevez: Senator, bayonets are available under the program. I can't answer what a local police force would need a bayonet for. Rand Paul: I can give you an answer. None. So what's the what's President Obama's administration's position on handing out bayonets to the police force? It's on your list. You guys create the list. You're going to take it off the list. We're going to keep doing it. Alan Estevez: We are going to look at what we are providing under the administration's review of all these programs. Rand Paul: So it's unclear at this point whether President Obama approves of 12,000 bayonets being given out. I would think you can make that decision last week. Alan Estevez: I think we need to review all the equipment that we're providing Senator. And as I said, we the Department of Defense do not push any of this equipment on any police force. The states decide what they need. 1:26:00 Rand Paul: My understanding is that you have the ability to decide what equipment is given out and what equipments not given out. If you decided tomorrow, if President Obama decided tomorrow that mine resistant ambush protection 20 ton vehicles are not appropriate for cities in the United States. He could decide tomorrow to take it off the list. You could decide this tomorrow. My question is, what is the administration's opinion on giving out mine resistant ambush protection 20 ton vehicles to towns across America? Are you for it or against it? Alan Estevez: Obviously we do it senator we're going to look at that. I will also say that I can give you anecdotes for mine resistant ambush protected vehicles that protected police forces in shootouts. Rand Paul: But we've already been told they're only supposed to be used for terrorism, right? Isn't that what the rule is? Alan Estevez: Our rule is for counter-drug, which could have been the shootout I'd have to look at the incident. Counter-narcotics counter-terrorism. 1:28:00 Rand Paul: The militarization of police is something that has gotten so far out of control and we've allowed it to descend along with a not a great protection of our civil liberties as well. So we say we're going to do this, it's okay if it's for drugs. Well look at the instances of what have happened in recent times. The instance in Georgia just a couple of months ago, of an infant in a crib getting a percussion grenade thrown in through a window in a no knock raid. Turns out the infant obviously wasn't involved in the drug trade, but neither was even the infant's family - happened to have been the wrong place the wrong time. No one's even been indicted on this. So really, this is crazy out of control and giving military equipment and with a breakdown of the whole idea of due process of no knock raids and not having judges issue warrants anymore. You can see how this gets out of control and people are very, very concerned with what is going on here. And I see the response so far to be lackluster, and I hope you will do a more complete job in trying to fix this. Thank you. 1:32:20 Ayotte: Is there any coordination between the grants that homeland is giving in light of what the departments are receiving on the 1033 front? Brian Kamoie: We don't coordinate in the decision making about local law enforcement requests. The process that Mr. Estevez has laid out, we don't coordinate that at all. 1:51:40 Peter Kraska: The clear distinction between our civilian police and military is blurring in significant and consequential ways. The research I've been conducting since 1989 has documented quantitatively and qualitatively the steady and certain marks of U.S. civilian policing down the militarization continuum. Culturally, materially, operationally, and organizationally, despite massive efforts at democratizing police, under the guise of community policing reforms, the growth in militarized policing has been steep and deep. In the mid 1980s, a mere 30% of police agencies had a SWAT team. Today well over 80% of departments, large and small, have one. In the early 1980s, these these agencies conducted approximately 3,000 deployments a year nationwide. Today, I estimate a very conservative figure of 60,000 per year. And it is critical to recognize that these 60,000 deployments are mostly for conducting drug searches on people's private residences. This is not to imply that all police, nearly 20,000 unique departments across our great land, are heading in this direction. But the research evidence along with militarized tragedies in Modesto, Georgia, Ferguson and tens of thousands of other locations, demonstrates a troubling and highly consequential overall trend. What we saw played out in the Ferguson protests was the application of a very common mindset, style of uniform and appearance and weaponry used every day in the homes of private residences during SWAT raids. Some departments conduct as many as 500 SWAT team raids a year. And just as in the two examples above, and in the Ferguson situation, it is the poor and communities of color that are most impacted. 1:54:00 Peter Kraska: I mentioned that police militarization predates 911 this is not just an interesting historical fact it is critical because it illuminates the most important reason or causal factor in this unfortunate turn in American policing and American democracy. It is the following: our long running an intensely punitive self proclaimed war on crime and drugs. It is no coincidence that the skyrocketing number of police paramilitary deployments on American citizens since the early 1980s, coincides perfectly with the skyrocketing imprisonment numbers. We now have 2.4 million people incarcerated in this country, and almost 4% of the American public is now under direct correctional supervision. These wars have been devastating to minority communities and the marginalized and have resulted in a self perpetuating growth complex. Cutting off the supply of military weaponry to to our civilian public is the least we could do to begin the process of reining in police militarization and attempting to make clear the increasingly blurred distinction between the military and police. Please do not underestimate the gravity of this development. This is highly disturbing to most Americans on the left and the right. 1:57:30 Mark Lomax: The threat that firearms pose to law enforcement officers and the public during violent critical incidents has proven that armored rescue vehicles have become an essential as individually worn body armor or helmets in saving lives. 2:11:30 Peter Kraska: The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 had been in place untouched for quite a long time until the 1980s drug war. And it wasn't until the 1980s drug war it was actually the Reagan administration that wanted to completely repealed Posse Comitatus. But what instead happened is they just amended it significantly, to allow for cross training and weapons transference. And just as an aside, I don't want to make too much of an aside, but we also have to remember that the Department of Defense has been very actively involved in training local police departments as well, not just providing them equipment, but providing them training. I've got a great quote that if you, I'm not going to read it now, but if you asked me to read it, I will. that talks about even having navy seals and Army Rangers come to a local police department and teach them things. So it's not just weapons transference. The federal government has increasingly since 911 played a significant role in accelerating these trends towards militarization. And, you know, the extent to which the 1033 program, Department of Homeland Security funds, etc, have contributed to it. I would certainly call it significant. But I think we have to remember that the that the militarized culture have a component of policing, and it's just a component of policing. This isn't a unified phenomenon at all of police in the United States of America. Hell, we have a police department right next to us, Lexington PD, very smart, very wise. They don't do this kind of thing at all, and they would never do it. So the police in communities a bit split over this. And I don't want anybody to get the impression because of the experts we've heard that policing is all for this stuff, because it's just not true. There are lots of folks that aren't. Anyway, back to federalisation. So, I think the federal government's played a significant role in probably the last 10 to 14 years. 2:14:10 Peter Kraska: This had everything to do with prosecuting the drug war. And that's when we saw the precipitous rise in not only the number of SWAT units but the amount of activity. That's when we saw departments doing 750 to 1000 drug raids per year on people's private residences. That's when we saw police departments all over the country in small little localities sending off two or three officers to a for profit training camp, like Smith and Wesson or Heckler and Koch getting training and coming back to the department and starting a 15 officer, police paramilitary unit with no clue what they were doing whatsoever. That all happened as a part of the drug war. 2:26:50 Peter Kraska: Oftentimes, these kind of conversations devolve into an either or type of argument. And it's really critical to recognize that there are absolutely lots of situations. Columbine, for example, where you have to have a competent professional response, a use of force specialist, military, Special Operations folks, police special, whatever you want to call them, you have to have that, no doubt. What I was talking about was 60,000 deployments, as I was not talking about 60,000 deployments. For those situations. Those situations are incredibly rare. Thank goodness, they're incredibly rare. Those situations absolutely require a competent response, active shooter, terrorist, whatever kind of situation. Our research demonstrated conclusively that 85% of SWAT team operations today are proactive, choice driven raids on people's private residences 85%. What that means is that the original function of SWAT in the 1970s was the idea that SWAT teams were to save lives, they were to respond in a laudable way to very dangerous circumstances and handle the circumstances well. What happened during the 1980s and early 1990s drug war is that function flipped on its head. We went from these teams predominantly doing reactive deployments, maybe one to two of these in an entire municipality, one to two a year. Smaller jurisdictions, probably something like that wouldn't happen in 100 years, but they were there to handle it. This has devolved now into what I'm talking about widespread misapplication of the paramilitary model. 2:29:00 Peter Kraska: 50% of these small police departments... 50% of them are receiving less than 50 hours of training per year for their SWAT team. The recommended amount from the MTOA used to be 250. I think they've reduced it to 200. 250 hours versus 50 hours. These are not well trained teams. These are a localized 18,000 police departments all doing their own thing with no oversight and no accountability. And that's why we're seeing and we have seen hundreds of these kinds of tragedies that I've mentioned, but also lots of terrorized families that have been caught up in these drug operations and drug raids. Thank you. 2:35:30 Peter Kraska: Military gear and garb changes and reinforces a war fighting mentality amongst civilian police, where marginalized populations become the enemy and the police perceive of themselves as a thin blue line between order and chaos that can only be controlled through military model power. 2:47:50 Peter Kraska: Most police departments that handle civil protests correctly know that the last thing you want to do is instigate. It was just a wonderful article written in the Washington Post, it interviewed a whole bunch of Chiefs of Police that understand this and how you sit back and you don't antagonize and you certainly don't display this level of weaponry. Hearing: Police Brutality, United States House Judiciary Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights, March 20, 1991 Witnesses: John Dunne: Assistant Attorney General of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division Transcript: 6:00 Rep. Howard Coble (NC): It would be my hope that this matter could be resolved internally in Los Angeles. The fear I have about what occurred on the coast is that many people are probably going to try to bash every law enforcement officer in the country. That's what bothers me. And I don't think this is an accurate portrayal of law enforcement in this country. 30:15 Rep. Henry Hyde (IL): I know civil rights prosecutions nationwide by year, compiled from annual Department of Justice Statistics, and in 1990, there was 7,960 complaints received and 3,050 investigations. I take it, a great number of the complaints were found to be without merit or beyond investigation, but cases presented to the grand jury or grand juries were only 46. So out of 3,050 investigations there were only 46 that you felt worth taking to a grand jury was that right. Mr. Dunn? John Dunne: Mr. Hyde in light of all of the circumstances, specifically, the key being whether or not the federal state interest had been vindicated. Yes, about one and a half percent, usually runs about 2% a year, of the complaints we receive actually go to prosecution. Cover Art Design by Only Child Imaginations Music Presented in This Episode Intro & Exit: Tired of Being Lied To by David Ippolito (found on Music Alley by mevio)

Dr. Jason Luke, associate professor and the director of the Cancer Immunotherapeutics Center at the UPMC Hillman Cancer Center, discusses new advances in immunotherapy that were discussed at the #ASCO20 Virtual Scientific Program.   TRANSCRIPT ASCO Daily News: Welcome to the ASCO Daily News podcast. I'm Geraldine Carroll, a reporter for the ASCO Daily News. Joining me today is Dr. Jason Luke, associate professor and director of the Cancer Immunotherapeutics Center, at the UPMC Hillman Cancer Center.   His clinical focus is on immunotherapy for advanced solid tumors, as well as cutaneous malignancies and melanoma. Dr. Luke will discuss key abstracts in the immunotherapy field that were featured at the ASCO20 Virtual Scientific Program, including Abstract 3004, the study of an agent called MGD013, which Dr. Luke presented during the meeting. Dr. Luke, it's great to have you on the podcast today.   Dr. Jason Luke: Thank you very much.   ASCO Daily News: Do you have any conflicts of interest to disclose that are relevant to the issues we'll discuss in this podcast?   Dr. Jason Luke: Thanks. I would like to disclose a few things. I'll note that as a phase I clinical trialist, I try to work with every company in the field. But relevant to the abstracts, I have been a consultant to most of the big pharmas that have advanced these. So specifically, EMD Serono, Genentech, EMS, Merck, and some others.   ASCO Daily News: Dr. Luke, are there any advancements in the immunotherapy field that will likely support new standards of care?   Dr. Jason Luke: So thank you. Yes. In fact, this was a big year for immunotherapy. I think ranging from abstracts with a high immediate impact on the standard of care all the way to -- or earlier truly -- research studies that I think we'll look back on and realize this was the year when that technology started to mature.   So when thinking about abstracts-- presentations that are going to have an immediate impact on the standard of care, there are really two that I would highlight. One of them was called the JAVELIN Bladder 100 trial (Abstract LBA1). And the second one was a clinical trial called KEYNOTE 177 (Abstract LBA4). So I'll talk about them individually at first. And I think they introduce ideas about using immunotherapy you should be cognizant of to inform your practice.   So for the first one, the JAVELIN Bladder 100 trial, is a clinical trial in advanced urothelial cancer, in which patients were treated in the frontline setting, albeit for that first treatment and the standard of care setting, with cisplatin-based chemotherapy. And as they completed their cisplatin-based chemotherapy, they were randomized to either get the anti-PD-L1 antibody, avelumab in a maintenance sort of approach, or waiting until they had progression and going on to standard therapy with second line chemotherapy, as would be commonly done.   So the clinical trial showed an overall survival advantage to the maintenance approach of giving avelumab or anti-PD-L1 in that setting. And this is a pretty big deal because this is really the first maintenance approach that really has been associated with an overall survival advantage in solid tumors in general, but specifically a bladder cancer.   Now obviously the context for such an approval is the activity of PD-1 or PD-L1 blocking agents in urothelial cancer. And probably everyone who is listening is aware that multiple checkpoint inhibitors are approved for second line usage in bladder cancer. And all of you listening are probably also aware that there's been a lot of discussion in the field of urothelial cancer about moving checkpoint inhibitors into the frontline setting.   And the FDA had to release a guidance that that should not be done without the obvious presence of PD-L1 positivity. So a very interesting thing from the JAVELIN Bladder Trial was that the benefit to maintenance avelumab appeared to be independent of PD-L1 status. So in other words, everyone, or the total population of patients, benefited from getting that chemotherapy and then going on to get avelumab, whether PD-L1 positive or negative.   So I think that's a big deal. So based on these data my read of it and the conversations that I've had with other experts in the field of GU malignancies aren't to suggest that this is a new standard of care, that patients should after completing initial chemotherapy go on to get a PD-1 or PD-L1 agent.   Now that being said, it isn't without some controversy. These maintenance approaches have been criticized over time about cherry picking patients and discontinuing chemotherapy that might otherwise be active. One can't really know here how many patients would have done well without the avelumab for a long time.   It's also obviously the case that patients could go on to get second line PD-1 or PD-L1 agents on label. So again pembro, nivo, atezo, durva, avelumab, these are all approved for second line therapy. And in this clinical trial, because it was done ex-US, only about 40% of the patients who were on the placebo-matched arm actually went on to second line PD-1.   So this trial definitely did not test the question of maintenance PD-1, PD-L1 versus giving it in the second line after an initial progression event in the front line. And that is obviously a criticism of these data. Now that being said, all of you who have treated patients with urothelial cancer realize what an aggressive malignancy this can be and how these patients can sometimes be rather frail.   And what we can run into is that at the time of progression after frontline chemotherapy performance statuses just dwindle very rapidly, such that you can't really, fully give them a shot to get the second line PD-1 immunotherapy. So here, though, by giving the therapy immediately after the initial chemotherapy without waiting for progression, we make sure that all patients get access to that therapy.   So despite the controversy around subsequent lines of therapy, et cetera, I think most people who view this data really do find it to be practice changing. And moving forward we really should be considering immediate initiation of anti PD-L1, or PD-1 I suppose, after chemotherapy. So that was the first abstract to highlight in that space, the JAVELIN Bladder 100 study.   The second study was the KEYNOTE 177 study (Abstract LBA4). This was a randomized phase III trial in the frontline setting for MSI-- or MicroSatellite Instable-- colorectal cancer for the use of immunotherapy with pembrolizumab, as opposed to chemotherapy. And so again oncologists listening will be very well aware that MSI status has become an important biomarker in our field, selecting out patients, especially with colorectal cancer but actually any cancer type, who if they have MSI status can be treated in this integrative care setting with the anti-PD-1 or pembrolizumab.   One of the questions that has been looming and seemed like had an obvious answer, and, in fact, this trial supports, was whether that biomarker would be strong enough to move that immunotherapy into a prechemotherapy setting. So to date the use of the MSI biomarker has been to select patients after they failed standard therapies to go on to get immunotherapy.   So in colorectal cancer, patients would get FOLFOX/FOLFIRI as per standard. And if they were MSI, they would be treated thereafter with pembrolizumab. So in this study, they moved that biomarker selection into the frontline, looking at MSI high patients and randomizing them to either get pembrolizumab or standard chemotherapy.   And the answer here, as was expected, was that patients who are MSI high in their tumor who got immunotherapy in the frontline, in fact, did better than those patients who got chemotherapy in the frontline. And so I think that's an important clinical practice changing algorithm. So we should be testing all our patients upfront for MSI with colorectal cancer, and one might even argue actually other tumor types, because we find that the patients who have that phenotype, their rates of response approach 50%.   And those responses tend to be very durable with the median not being reached in these kinds of trials. So that quality of immunotherapy response, I personally think that's the thing that we all really like about immunotherapy, is that for the small patients where they get that benefit from immunotherapy, it can sometimes be long lasting-- and even life lasting-- kind of benefit. I think these data are very important, again, to move this biomarker selection of patients for colorectal cancer by MSI high status into the front line and give them immunotherapy if we find that.   These data don't come as much of a surprise given that we know in the adjuvant setting, in fact, the MSI high patients do worse with chemotherapy in the stage two setting. So again, these data don't come as a big surprise. But they do support a change in practice to move immunotherapy into that frontline setting.   And I would say as a sort of forward-looking discussion point, given the broad approval across cancer types for MSI high tumors to get pembrolizumab, one wonders whether or not this phenomenon will begin to come forward and other tumor types where we know MSI could be present, such as gynecological cancers and some others. We'll watch the field. But I think that that's something to be excited about for immunotherapy coming forward and potentially displacing chemotherapy in the front line for different cancer types.   ASCO Daily News: Dr. Luke, what are the other studies that really stood out for you this year?   Dr. Jason Luke: There were three other big trials I think that generated a lot of buzz that I think I should be highlighted. They don't quite change standard of care at this time. But they do influence standard of care.   And so there are three of them. One of them was the CHECKMATE-9LA study of lung cancer (Abstract 9501). There was a second phase 2 study called the CITYSCAPE study (Abstract 9503), also in lung cancer. And a third study in bladder cancer called the IMvigor010 (Abstract 5000) or 10 study.   So just to discuss them-- so CHECKMATE-9LA in fact did lead to an FDA approval of the combination of nivolumab and ipilibumab or PD-1 CTLA-4 in combination with chemotherapy for the frontline management of non small cell lung cancer. So this regimen is somewhat different than the chemo I-O combo that people will be cognizant of right now. So the standard of care now, there's an approval for chemotherapy with platinum-based chemotherapy and a second agent, such as pemetrexed, with pembrolizumab in the front line.   This trial took a different tact. And they randomized patients to either get regular chemotherapy, platinum-based chemotherapy, or they would get the combination of ipi and nivo with two cycles only of platinum-based chemo. So you could refer to this as some sort of platinum sparing approach. And the rationale for this was that perhaps because patients with lung cancer can have a very aggressive course, having that immunotherapy onboard up front might allow a space for immunotherapy then to kick in and have a longer term benefit.   So this trial is a positive Phase III clinical trial. And actually just before the ASCO virtual meeting, the FDA approved this regimen for the use in patients with lung cancer. Now you might be listening and thinking, well, wait a minute. You just told me about their new standards of care. And you're telling me this is approved. So what's the deal?   And so what the deal is is that it's not completely clear at this time that this sort of an approach would be better than using the chemo pembro combination that's already approved. And the toxicity profile using doublet checkpoint blockade with PD-1 and CTLA-4 is not insignificant. Sorry for the double negative there. But in other words, you're generating a lot of immune-related side effects for patients by giving them ipi/nivo and chemotherapy.   So the question then becomes, so which patients then should you give chemo pembro to versus giving chemo ipi/nivo to? And unfortunately at this time, we don't really know the answer to that question. So that then sets us up with a tough spot to sit in, that we don't really know how to use these regimens either way. And we know one of them causes more side effects.   So what I would say right now is that it's not clear that this advances the field in terms of changing the standard of care. But I'll be very interested to see the long-term outlays in terms of overall survival in this clinical trial. So the trial we would want to see would be chemo pembro versus chemo plus ipi/nivo.   But these trials were done chronologically at similar times. And the standard of care had not switched to chemo pembro yet when they had started this trial. So certainly that's a future trial we would look forward to. I think it is possible that the chemo ipi/nivo trial might have the potential to have better overall survival over a long period of time, relative to chemo pembro.   And the reason I say that is we can see that in melanoma where giving ipi and nivo does appear to give better longer overall survival, but you don't see that effect until about two to three years after you start ipi/nivo relative to starting nivo monotherapy. So we're not really going to know whether or not the long term survival of this quadruplet regimen of platinum doublet plus ipi/nivo is actually better than the triplet of platinum doublet plus pembro.   We're not really going to know that in a head-to-head trial for a long time. And even just comparing two trials head-to-head, we're not really going to know that again for at least a couple of years. So I don't know whether or not that trial really changes practice yet. But it'll be very interesting to watch it over time.   The second trial I wanted to talk about that really stood out was the CITYSCAPE trial (Abstract 9503). And so this is a nice name for a clinical trial. Essentially what it is is looking at a combination immunotherapy in the PD-L1 high subset of non small cell lung cancer. So in patients with greater than 50% TPS In lung cancer, the molecule, the PD-L1 antibody atezolizumab, was combined with an anti-tigit antibody in that population and randomized against atezolizumab plus a placebo.   And the idea here would be to look for a second combination checkpoint that's not CTLA-4 and see if that could have more activity relative to a PD-1 PD-L1 monotherapy in that PD-L1 high population. So again, all of you are aware that PD-1 monotherapy is approved in that setting. PD-1 and PD-L1 are both approved for PD-L1 high patients in frontline lung cancer.   And what they observed in this CITYSCAPE study was an improvement in the response rate for the combination immunotherapy relative to the PD-L1 plus placebo. And that was statistically significant. And it was of substantial interest.   So I think that's very interesting. And based on those data, in fact, the company advancing this tigit antibody that makes atezolizumab has rushed forward into a series of randomized Phase III clinical trials, where they're combining atezolizumab with this tigit antibody across a number of diseases. The first two trials will be a non small cell lung cancer as well as small cell lung cancer with the idea that this new PD-L1 plus tigit regiment essentially is going to replace a PD-1 or PD-L1 monotherapy either as-- oh, sorry, either as monotherapy or in combination with chemotherapy and various different indications.   So this is really interesting because the toxicity profile of this combination regimen was quite modest and in fact look mostly like a PD-1 PD-L1 monotherapy. So this wouldn't be the addition of a second checkpoint that actually doesn't increase the toxicity, but might amplify the benefit. And so why would that be the case?   Well the checkpoint tigit we know from basic biology is also associated with the T cell activation state in the tumor microenvironment. And it may very well be that this is yet another checkpoint that's important in the tumor, that by blocking it we might not increase the overall toxicity because where the tumor is where the action is at. And it might increase the benefit.   And that would be different than CTLA-4 or ipi, where the effect is broadly throughout the whole body and not localized in the tumor microenvironment. So that's a very interesting molecule, this tigit molecule to keep your eyes on, because I think there will be a number of Phase III trials coming forward the next few years It'll be very interesting to see if we can find other combination immunotherapies.   The third abstract that I wanted to dwell on quickly that stood out-- again, doesn't change practice, but it's important to be cognizant-- was IMvigor 10 or 010 (Abstract 5000). And this was a bladder cancer randomized Phase III adjuvant clinical trial. And the idea was high risk patients with bladder cancer are randomized to either get atezolizumab or to get placebo in the adjuvant setting.   And really as, I have to say, a shock to most of the people in the field, there was no difference in rates of relapse or overall survival in high risk urothelial cancer for patients who got adjuvant PD-L1 relative to those who got placebo. And this is one of those things where don't count your checks before they're cashed, or don't count your eggs before they're cracked, or whatever the euphemism goes. Everyone assumed this would be a positive clinical trial.   In melanoma when we moved PD-1 antibodies from the metastatic setting into the stage three setting, it was a slam dunk. It was fabulous, unbelievable-- hazard ratio of 0.5. Yet here we see in another disease, which is responsive to immunotherapy in the refractory disease setting, we see no difference in the adjuvant setting. So I think that's really an eye opener and, again, just suggests why we have to do these trials.   My dad used to like to say, that's why they play the games. Let's talk about sporting events with atypical outcomes, things you didn't expect. So that's again what we saw here. So adjuvant PD-1 or PD-L1 is not a standard in bladder cancer. There are some other clinical trials that are ongoing to look at other PD-1 agents that have slightly different designs. And we'll be very interested to see what the results of those kinds of clinical trials look like over time.   ASCO Daily News: Are there any other clinical trials that our listeners should be aware of?   Dr. Jason Luke: Yes, so there are also a whole handful of trials that I think are worth quickly pointing out because I think they give us indications around better using agents that we already have. So in melanoma there were a couple of abstracts presented that looked at the use of CTLA-4 with a PD-1 in second-line melanoma. So in patients who got a frontline PD-1 an open question is, should you give them ipi as the second line, so PD-1 followed by CTLA-4? Or what about the idea of continuing the PD-1 and adding the CTLA-4 antibody on top of it?   And so there were two abstracts. There was a prospective open label Phase II study, in fact, that I designed. It was our study (Abstract 10004). And what that showed was that where we would expect a response rate of about 13% to ipilimumab in the second line as a monotherapy, in our Phase II study of 70 patients, we got a 27% response rate. And that trial was augmented by another abstract from the Melanoma Institute of Australia, who aggregated their experience of what they had done in their standard practice in the second line.   And in the patients who had gotten ipilimumab plus nivolumab after a PD-1 (Abstract 10003), they observed a 32% response rate. So if you put these two studies together, you're now up about 250 patients between both series. And you get a response rate between both of them around 30%. And that looks to be about a doubling of what we would expect in standard care setting of just getting ipi monotherapy after PD-1.   So I think that's a really interesting thing to be aware of. In my practice I tend to give that combination regimen after initial PD-1. And I think we'll look forward to a study from SWOG, which is actually randomized patients to get ipi/nivo versus just ipi after a frontline PD-1. So I think that's a really important abstract to be aware of.   The other study that I'll be-- but I'll just share, however, was that in contrast to that, there was a series of studies presented in renal cell carcinoma, where this paradigm did not appear to be true. So there was an abstract called the FRACTION study in renal cell carcinoma (Abstract 5007), as well as the Hoosier Oncology Group GU16-260 (Abstract 5006). In both of those studies, there did not appear to be a big benefit to adding ipi after a patient had progressed on PD-1.   And that was interesting because in the FRACTION study (Abstract 5007), they used ipi/nivo. And they got responses in the second line. But in the Hoosier study, it was less clear. And so I think the renal guys feel like if you're going to use ipi/nivo, you need to do it right away upfront. And you shouldn't do the sequential approach of giving a PD-1 and then adding on ipi later.   And it's interesting to contrast those two things because that's a difference between tumor types, where we think there might be more benefit to giving that combination or waiting for the combination of melanoma, whereas in renal, if you're going to use it, you should really come in guns blazing both checkpoints at the same time.   One other study I want to do just highlight quickly was also in melanoma, where the group from Sloan Kettering did a study looking at two doses of ipi/nivo versus four doses of ipi/nivo. And not to dwell on it too long, but what they observed was essentially all of the benefit and all of the toxicity appeared to be associated with just the first two doses of ipi/nivo.   In other words, when they looked at an early CT scan to look for responders, all the responding patients had already basically had their benefit after the first two doses. And none of the patients who hadn't already benefited by two doses actually went on to benefit at four. So this was a pretty small study. It was upwards about 25 or 30 patients. But I think this really deserves further follow up.   And I think it emphasizes, however, that in clinical practice, there is no need to really push the envelope in giving more ipi/nivo, especially if patients have toxicity. So if patients get a couple of doses and they get toxicity, you do not need to go back to pushing them to get more doses. We'll be very excited to look for future data to really look into this so we can really optimize the use of combination immunotherapy in the broader population.   ASCO Daily News: Dr. Luke, are there new treatment approaches or agents in development that you are particularly excited about this year?   Dr. Jason Luke: Yes, so there were, as I mentioned, a couple of abstracts around adoptive cell therapies in solid tumors that I think we're going to look back on this year's ASCO and say, wow, this is the year when these things really started coming to the forefront. And there were three of them that I'll highlight quickly.   One of them is a drug called lifileucel. In fact, that is a tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte product. And in melanoma, an updated data series was presented on a group of about 70 patients who had undergone tumor excision and then harvesting of TIL. And then a TIL product was made. Patients were given lymphodepleting chemotherapy and were reinfused their TIL . (Abstract 10006)   And what was exciting about it was the stability of these results over time. So in these patients, a response rate in 70 patients was observed at 36%. And realize that these are patients who already had PD-1. They had CTLA-4. They had BRAF. These were refractory patients. So a 36% response rate-- quite impressive.   The other thing that was very interesting to be observe was that the duration of those responses in the refractory disease setting was not reached. So in other words, the patients who responded did very well. And then the final thing on that one to be aware of was it looked like patients who would benefit from that therapy were disproportionately those who had not benefited from previous PD-1 therapy.   And certainly, that's a big unmet need in melanoma. And in the melanoma field, we're fairly confident that this therapy is going to be approved by the FDA either later this year or next year. So being cognizant of cell therapy for solid tumors, at least in terms of TIL for melanoma, is going to be important.   The other two abstracts I'm going to put together quickly. One of them was about SPEAR MAGE-A4 TCR transduced T cells (Abstract 102), as well as a second abstract about HPV E6/E7 TCR transduced T cells (Abstract 101). So what are TCR transduced T cells, you might ask?   What this is, is taking a patient's own lymphocytes and then ex vivo transducing them with a lentiviral vector most commonly to express a T cell receptor that's been identified from a different patient. So that T cell receptor can be specific for a certain antigen. So you'll have heard-- I mentioned MAGE-A4-- as well as HPV E6/E7.   So these are antigens that we know can be expressed to certain degrees in certain tumor types. For example, MAGE-A4 is highly expressed in sarcomas as well as some esophageal cancers. And HPV is obviously highly expressed in HPV-associated cancers, such as cervical cancer and others-- head and neck, et cetera. And so these studies were very interesting because obviously this is a somewhat complicated process, sort of like the TILs I told you about before, but it adds an extra layer of genetically modifying the product.   But, again, they saw high levels of response in tumor types that had these antigens. And those responses tended to be durable over time. So there are randomized trials coming forward now to look at these agents. And I'm very excited that over the next couple of years, we're really going to see a movement of cell therapies to the prime time and maybe even in the standard of care setting for patients with multiple solid tumors.   ASCO Daily News: Absolutely. Can you tell us about new agents that will likely move the field forward or have already done so?   Dr. Jason Luke: Yes, so there were a handful of abstracts here. But I think there are two conceptual things that I'm going to highlight. It isn't so much the individual agents, I would say, but rather the concepts around them. I'll give you the names of the agents so you can look them up.   But one of them was an agent called MGD013 (Abstract 3004). But the reason it's of interest is that it's a bispecific antibody. So disclosure, I was the presenter of this abstract. But I think it's very interesting because what it gets at is a future of using antibody engineering technology to bring forward novel agents. So MGD013 is a bispecific PD-1 and LAG-3 inhibitor.   So those are two immune checkpoints that are being investigated separately with monoclonal antibodies. But here we have one drug that can hit both of those. And so what was interesting was the drug was safe. And the response was seen across a host of different diseases.   But perhaps most interestingly in the trial, we combined MGD013 with the HER-2 antibody margetuximab. And margetuximab is an FC-modified and optimized HER-2 antibody. And in patients who had refractory HER-2-positive tumors that were PD-L1 and LAG-3 low, the combination of MGD013 with margetuximab generated more than 40% treatment responses.   So this really fits the paradigm of what we were hoping to do. And you may have heard of this-- "turning cold tumors hot" is how we sometimes talk about this. In other words, we can identify a biomarker, target that with the margetuximab in HER-2, and then come in with immunotherapy. And because the first therapy was successful, it makes the second therapy likely to be successful as well.   So I would be aware of these bispecific approaches. Some of them have come forward from leukemias already. And I think in solid tumors, it will be interesting as well.   And the final one I'll note were the combinations of VEGF or VEGFR inhibitors with PD-1s or PD-L1s. And in fact there were so many of these combinations presented that I don't really have time to go over all of them. The listenership will be cognizant that the standard of care has changed in kidney cancer and recently in hepatocellular carcinoma in the front line to include these kinds of combinations.   But there were data presented for endometrial cancer (Abstract 6083), mucosal melanoma (Abstract 10040), colorectal (Abstract 4019), bladder (Abstract 5013), prostate (Abstract 5564), lung (Abstract 9610), more, that these combinations look to be quite active in the PD-1 progressed setting. And in fact clinical trials are now starting to move these combinations into earlier lines of therapy as well. So I think this combination of VEGF blockade with PD-1 is really going to be something to be on the lookout for because I think this is going to expand the horizon of immunotherapy within and across multiple solid tumors.   ASCO Daily News: Excellent. Thank you, Dr. Luke. So I'd like to let our listeners know that the abstract numbers relating to all of the studies Dr. Luke discussed today are on the transcript, which is published with this episode. Dr. Luke, thanks again for your insights on these incredible developments in the immunotherapy field.   Dr. Jason Luke: Thank you very much for having me, Geraldine.   ASCO Daily News: Thanks to our listeners for joining us today. If you're enjoying the content on the podcast, please take a moment to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts.   The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. This is not a substitute for professional medical care and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of individual conditions. Guests on this podcast express their own opinions, experience, and conclusions. The mention of any product, service, organization, activity, or therapy should not be construed as an ASCO endorsement.      

Black lives matter. And not just in the abstract. When given the proper space and support, Black investors can materially improve portfolio returns. But that almost never happens. In aggregate, only about 1% of the $70 Trillion managed by professional investors is overseen by minority-owned firms. On this episode of Free Money, we were fortunate to speak with Daryn Dodson, a Managing Director at Illumen Capital who knows perhaps more than anyone else what needs to be changed in order to create a more equitable future. We spoke on Friday, June 5th. And because the perspective he shared was so valuable, we decided to dispense with our regular essay and include a transcript of the conversation instead. Enjoy!Ashby Monk (10:44): We were just kind of talking through the issues of the week, obviously a pretty heavy week out there and wanted to connect with somebody who could really explain a couple of things. You know, why the asset owner community isn't doing more to support the managers that are people of color, but even before we get there, how are you doing?Daryn Dodson (11:13):I am a hosting a group in a conversation of a hundred billion dollars in asset allocators to put a through line from slavery to lynching, to mass incarceration, to tuck that into the asset management overlay so that people can understand how assets got to be so imbalanced and the huge disparities that lead to suboptimal returns for our portfolios. They also violate fiduciary duty. We have about 30 hours of work over the weekend. So I just finished the opening session. We offer for a lot of our investors at Illumen Capital something called the Illumen impact experience to bring them together, to put these dots together. So I'm heartened by that work. A lot of this is doing the work to move capital in ways that's optimal as I've worked with Dr. Jennifer Eberhart, and as well as Dr. Ashby monk to hit to work on this paper, uh, with a few other authors, really to prove and show the bias managers of color face as they increase performance, particularly black managers. So after we proved that in a paper and published it, then the question becomes, what do we do about it? A lot of people are making statements all over the country around how they value communities of color and black communities. But when you look at their balance sheets, I've been kind of thinking about things like, not public statements, but balance statements and financial statements, and whether those mirror the statements that people are making publicly. So that's something we believe in as a firm at Illumen Capital. It's something that is evidenced in the paper that we published. It's something that we share with our investors, who currently manage over a trillion dollars in capital so that they can begin to apply these ideas to their broader portfolio.Sloane Ortel (13:15):Let me just hone in on a sub point of that. I think throughout history, whether through red lining or another process, you might want to name, the financial community has been a big player in perpetuating inequality, perpetuating in effect segregation. Is it still happening in your view?Daryn Dodson (13:31):In terms of my background, I spent three years, with the center for responsible lending and 60 attorneys passing laws to reduce predatory lending. And we also proved through a data-driven hypothesis and execution of $6 billion in loan pools and proof points, the low income women and people of color, particularly black and Latino communities were overcharged for mortgage loans. And we wrote several papers about that back then, that led to the shifting of 18 laws across the country, based on the evidence of the overcharging and taxing of the number one way in which low-income particularly black communities reached the middle class, which is home ownership. So systematic overcharging above risk on communities, where when you overlay GIS statistical mapping data with different mortgage databases to prove that indeed banks were overcharging families, mothers, fathers that were black and Latino relative to their white counterparts and their biggest opportunity to create wealth in their life.And is it still happening? Part of the reason I went to business school at Stanford business school, it was because I was sick from seeing the practices in the mortgage lending markets. And after working with a team of 60 attorneys to pass national frameworks, watch businesses transform and change those laws back and undercut a lot of the laws that were on the books to protect well income homeowners. So now in this strategy at Illumen capital we invest in 10 private equity funds, systematically require and partner with them to do 10 years of implicit bias reduction work as a part of our investment and unlock the impact and returns within our portfolio is a part of our systemic change. Since the passing of laws do not work to sustain those protections against women and people of color, particularly black people.Sloane Ortel (15:32):That's fascinating. And in the process of doing that, you must encounter tons of people who come into it thinking they're not racially biased, but yeah, nonetheless, make these racially skewed decisions, whether it's where to get a cup of coffee or who to back, how do you counteract that tangibly?Daryn Dodson (15:50):Well, I think the most interesting thing is that they don't realize that they're leaving returns on the table. So they may not realize that they're racially biased, but what is the incentive to reduce the bias? One is that you miss the people in the human condition, that maybe are wonderful additions to your life. The other is you missed your fiduciary duty to invest the billion or trillion dollar corpus on behalf of the communities, whether they're pension funds or retirement programs or foundation endowments or family offices or university endowments. And I think that there's a long way to go in university endowments and pension funds as Ashby knows, I think better than most in the world And that's part of the reason why we partnered together with Ash and, you know, his incredible work and research cross pension funds. So take a deep look and help them to understand that unless they do the work, we are going to leave money on the table. And not only that they'll sort of undercut the best fund managers that are in their pipeline, through their biases without doing the work.Ashby Monk (17:03):Yeah. That has been such a rewarding project for me in part, because we've been able to make the case quite clearly, that they're leaving returns on the table. They're not assessing all of the opportunities in the same manner, which means that any bias, we see them investing and we have many biases, right? There's status quo bias, there's geographic bias, home bias. This is a bias that distorts the decision making of investors, asset allocators. We showed that in the PNAS study. And so we can go back to them and say, look, you're leaving money on the table. It's your fiduciary duty now to build processes that reduce this implicit bias so that you can maximize the performance. But Darren, I really want to hear a little bit more about, Illumen loved hearing the kind of prior narrative about your, I didn't actually know that story.Sloane Ortel (17:54):That was just wild.Ashby Monk (17:57):That's what sent you to go study with us at Stanford, but what are you doing now with Illumen? I think it's such a compelling story that maybe you could just do, you know, 30, 45 seconds on, on Illumen.Daryn Dodson (18:09):Sure. Illumen capital is a private equity venture capital fund of funds. We'll select, uh, 10 managers that are working on different themes of transformation within key systemic leverage points within the world. They vary from themes around financial innovation, inclusive financial innovation. I'll just put that in there due to my background and experience in watching the extractive financial innovation, environmental transformation on transit, improve outcomes and health outcomes in communities around the world. We also are invested in some of the leading ed tech firms in the world who, of course, if they don't reduce bias, the AI and machine learning the acceleration of algorithms will repeat the same biases that are present in school systems. Many listeners may know that for X amount of black students are currently expelled relative to their white peers within that school system currently in K-8 reading levels, school levels. And if we repeat those biases within the minds of the teachers as we build these technologies, that's a huge challenge for business models because the federal government likes to see things grow in ways that are equitable, but it's also a huge challenge generally for those of us that love equity and justice and inclusion.So part of what Illumen Capital has done from inception is it also includes a partnership with Stanford SPARQ and Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt's research center. She's one of the leading thinkers on implicit bias in the world. And in fact, published the book bias, which were included in, and part of the reason why that's so important, it was because that we knew when we went out to, uh, work on the thesis that Ashby and I worked on with Dr. Eberhart found that and on our journey that without a credible backing from a fabulous institution like Stanford, it would be difficult for people to believe something that by definition that they could not see, which is actually what bias is. So we have to make that palpable, tangible, help him to see it, which is the mission of our partnership with Stanford, for finding the tools to reduce bias within the investments that we make.Sloane Ortel (20:35):I'm just fascinated. It occurs to me that some of our listeners may think that we're talking about essentially a philanthropic activity, even though it's a pure private equity fund of funds. I wonder if you could tell us a story of like, from intervention through to internal rate of return of how this sort of intervention made money?Daryn Dodson (20:54):Yeah. I think, um, you know, we're, we're, we're two years in right now, so it's quite early, but Hey, you know, some of the early evidences that we've seen managers invest in companies that they wouldn't otherwise have seen without our process, much of the work that we do is confidential. And the reason why that is, is because we believe there's $35 trillion in undervalued assets within the $70 trillion in the asset management business. And because we have a competitive strategy to help people see how those undervalued assets work, we don't reveal kind of the process of reducing bias within our firm to those other than the investors that we have. I think, you know, it'd be like Google putting its algorithm out there and saying, this is our algorithm. But let me see if I can help on a, you know, a previous career example, you know, there's a education tech company that's in front of, uh, 90% of all kids in the country. The potential of them to realize what I just said around the 4x expulsion rates of black kids before they begin a strategy to go in and put images in front of kids by translating the New York times wall street journal and other reading material to kids on K through eight level. Imagine if the New York times were translated in front of kids today, and it doesn't take much to imagine how you'd need to filter out the images that could destroy the future imagination and capacity of kids to overcome the images that they're seeing of people that look like them, particularly for black kids as they’re kind of taking in the images across the country and the world. So without kind of thinking together around strategies like that the business model breaks because the company is reinforcing biases and instead of unlocking the imagination innovations are the future within the minds children rather than reducing them and allowing that forcing function that we need as a society to take place.Ashby Monk (23:00):That's great. I might ask another question here on, I think we run this podcast largely because we're trying to talk about, you know, the biggest investors in the world, pension funds, sovereign funds and the system of capitalism that we're all a part of today is increasingly powered by these big longterm investors. They provide the capital to the professional money managers, which in turn provide money to companies and projects that need it. And this chain of intermediaries kind of flows through the entire system. And so unraveling all of this is kind of part of what we're trying to do with this podcast. Darren is we're trying to like explain what pension funds and sovereign funds are to the world that, you know, so that they can understand this system of capitalism, what I've noticed and the work that I've done around climate change is that the forest fires in California and the, the fires in Australia, terrible crises have, have forced the trustees of these fiduciary bound investors to start to take climate change seriously. Is there a moment now where this is a moment similar to the climate change story, where we can take this terrible tragedy and the protests around the country and bring this issue into the boardroom of the biggest investors on earth and sort of demand that they pay attention?Daryn Dodson (24:25):Well, I think not only could we, but I think we've gone too far now to turn back from that commitment. One of the things that, of the many good things that happened in the civil rights movement, one thing that didn't happen is that the push for optimal asset allocation that would include brilliant black fund managers and latino fund managers, and women, and people of color across the world never happened. And that's the backbone of the muni bonds, you know, across different strategies. It's the backbone of the ways that we fuel ed tech that is proliferating around the world, it's educating all of the students around the world, it's building the infrastructure in ways that systematically leaves out communities. So without a critical analysis of this time around, and this moment in time, that includes the $70 trillion in assets that are the backbone of the global financial markets, we'll never be able to really have black lives matter or other lives matter across the country. Or in the world. So I think that, you know, one of the laser focuses of a capitalism mission is to execute on our vision, to invest in the funds, reduce bias, and increase returns, and enable our investors to out compete others by applying similar technology. So if you're at a pension fund and this isn't part of your thinking, I think that you've run the risk of being lifted behind and worse risk of leaving the retirements of so many people. And, you know, some would wonder why pensions underperform relative to what many would expect. And I think this is one of those big reasons. And as I've learned from Ashby relative to the climate movement, although there are lots of really important things to hit right on climate we're actually rather than limiting the total set of investing assets by not including the optimal women and people of color run funds, which are the optimal funds that have traditionally been left out of the analysis. And when included in the analysis, these often don't get invested in when we leave them out, we shrink the universe of total potential opportunities. Modern portfolio theory would suggest that is a bad idea. Something is deeply broken in our system. It's something that hurts our returns. It's something that creates systematic bias across many of the asset pools in the world. And, uh, that's not a good thing, whether it's confirmation bias or anchoring bias, as Ashley shared earlier, it's a about looking at the opportunity on the other side of reducing bias, as I mentioned before where we'd be normally distributed, we're underweighted $35 trillion in women and people of color. Let’s put it like that.Ashby Monk (27:17):I love that you brought that up because it is something I'm constantly reminding folks that unlike the climate change space, where we're in effect, asking people to reduce the size of their portfolio in order to minimize the effects of climate change, racial biases already minimizing the portfolio. And what we're asking you to do is open your eyes to the entire portfolio of investable assets, which it's your duty to do. And so this should be a much easier ask actually of the fiduciary bound investors. We're asking you to consider all the investable universe, which is your duty to do. Thank you for reminding me of that. I need to continue to use that in my talks and classes.Sloane Ortel (27:58):Darren, thank you so much for doing the labor to educate us and our listeners. I mean, I'm sure there are many things you'd rather be doing. I can't in good conscience. Let you go though, without asking how the energy and emotion, really the thirst for change that has happened in the last week, can really be harnessed for the long term. In other words, how do we make sure that whatever changes are made really last?Daryn Dodson (28:23):Well, the answer might seem quite simple, but it's a move $35 trillion to women and people of color run funds. I mean to do it with a good intention and don't take 50 years to do it, do it in 10. So if the strategy, if we knew, I mean, imagine one day, if we woke up and we found out we were underweighted clean tech by 50% and like our returns and our job, and those we report to and steward wealth for mattered. How long would it take before we moved to meet a market gap around the things that would produce the highest returns in the world? Not long. And if that's not enough, it's illegal by fiduciary duty to systematically preference investors that would not choose optimal returns for the portfolio. So I think that on the stick side, there are some tools on the carrot side. I think there's a lot of incentives. I think this is a carrot opportunity. And one of the encouraging things in the, you know, depths of the sadness of what so many are taking a moment of pause for around George Floyd's death is that those that I have seen the violence and seeing the little tip of the spear of the financial services backbone that shows up and the financing of cities, it shows up in the financing of, you know, heavy weaponry in communities like the one that I grew up in in DC where the mayor asked the president last night to reduce some of shock and awe tactics used to destroy and create fear in society. So they won't ask for the things and they won't demand things that are better that create a better world. Like we're talking about right now and not just a better world, but also higher returns for the communities in which so many investors are in theory responsible to.Ashby Monk (30:25):Couldn't agree more, Darren. I think, I think my last question for you before we let you go, is our hope here is we can be talking to the pension funds themselves and, you know, through this format to people who are interested in freeing the money inside these organizations, from the constraints and biases that they often exhibit, how would you advise the people running these big pools of capital to be reacting this week, next week in the months to come, what can they do constructively in terms of really anything, what would you would be advising me to be advising my friends that are chief investment officers on how they can be a part of a constructive dialogue or a solution of some sort?Daryn Dodson (31:08):Yeah, I would say, sit down and talk with us. We didn't wake up and start this journey yesterday. This has been a lifelong commitment for the people from our team and our relationships. And we built this boat for tough waters because we, our thesis is that tough waters will always come and will continue to come until this, you know, happens either financially tough waters because volatility is much higher in times like these, and it will never stop until, you know, portfolios are ironically both optimized and include the very people that we see overlooked because they're outperforming on a systematic basis throughout markets. So I'd say don't leave money on the table, do the work to figure out. I mean, if we were talking about the new growth trends and AI moving through the world, what everybody would do is they would begin to learn how to do AI. They'd do the research. They'd talk to the leaders and thought leaders in the field. And I think that includes our incredible team. That also includes Ashby in his great thinking as well as Dr. Eberhardt. And I sort of reach out to the people who have had it for a while and not the people that showed up within the last two weeks and thought it was a great idea to launch a fund. It's just, they have a lot of catching up to do. And in this field, in particular there are a lot of false starts based on the fact that people haven't been studying, researching and understanding. And one of the things that we see in bias in high periods of anxiety, national anxiety is that it skyrockets. So the inability to select top performing managers because of race even spikes higher. So while everybody's launching funds, unless they've really done the work and honed in an analysis, approach, a thesis and understand that nuanced dynamics like any other field of investing, then they subject themselves to greater risk. So I'd say, you know, talk to us. Yeah, we have something to share. And we have a, uh, you know, a mission and a strategy that's been around.Sloane Ortel (33:14):I love that allegory. I mean, I remember every corporate CEO is talking about blockchain, like six months after Bitcoin came out. We all hope that we have an adoption curve which looks like that for racial awareness.Ashby Monk (33:25):Couldn't agree more. I mean, think about all the research projects that got launched on autonomous driving, even among, you know, the asset owner community, we need more research projects to understand how you can get this exposure. Darren, thank you for all the work you're doing at Illumen and in the work that you're doing to educate and engage, and the patience and passion you brought to me to get me involved in the research. It's been incredibly educational and eye opening, and I'm just grateful to be on the journey with you. So thanks again for coming on.Daryn Dodson (33:55):Yeah. Grateful to both you Ashby and Sloane, look forward to it, continuing the journey with both of you and, uh, excited that there's a focus on this now and I think the big challenge is to make sure that that doesn't go away.Sloane Ortel (34:09):Well, I'm sorry. It took us so damn long.Ashby Monk (34:10):Me too.Daryn Dodson (34:12):We'll keep pushing it.Sloane Ortel (34:13):Thanks Darren. Have a great weekend.Sloane Ortel (34:15):That was wild.Ashby Monk (34:16):Yeah. He's one of the most thoughtful people in the space. And so I was really grateful he could come on and spend, you know, 25 minutes with us and you know, he's been doing it! Illumen, they are the tip of the spear of putting diverse managers, people of color managers in business and helping them launch. And you know, he's not going to tell you the secret sauce. He joked about the Google algorithm. Yeah. His performance is really good. And so he's going to have a successful career because he's right. There is a bias which you, as an investor could take advantage of, you know, there's outperformance here, which you can go get. If you're just willing to see it for what it is. It's a racial bias.Sloane Ortel (34:54):Yeah. One subpoint that he made. When he's talking about ed tech and AI and bias, I think like put a pin in this conversation. Like when we think about minority VC, often people think about like black products, but black investors don't need to invest in black products, just like trans investors don't need to invest in trans products or male investors. You know, it's like black people use Slack too.Ashby Monk (35:16):right?Sloane Ortel (35:18):The voice of black investors, you know, women, investors, other folks can really help make those experiences better in meaningful ways and less reinforcing these crazy biases. That so infect our society,Ashby Monk (35:30):I agree. I agree. I wish I was more articulate and more educated. Like at the end when you said, I wish we started earlier., It's just so obvious now that this is like one of these monumental things that we all needed to be paying attention to for so much longer. My wife worked at Teach for America for six years. And I feel like I was being sensitized to all of this over that period. And I just still feel so far behind. And I, you know, I want to sound like I want to be the partner to Darren and Jennifer and the team and do our part. I'm guessing I'm not alone. Sloane. I'm guessing many middle class white academics and professionals like myself are out there trying to say, how do we help?Sloane Ortel (36:08):Yeah. And TBH, I hope. Yeah. If there's anyone in the audience who doesn't think that way, that they've deleted our podcast. Get on the email list at freemoney.substack.com

James:  Hey, audience, and listeners this is James Kandasamy with Achieve Wealth Through Value Add Real Estate Investing podcast. Today I have an awesome guest and we're going to be flying very high with this guest. His name is Lane Beene; Lane is an F16 pilot who has been doing multifamily syndication and recently has been doing development. He owns almost 700 units in DFW area and also there's another, like out of that, another 200 plus units in the Longview, Texas which is a tertiary market. So we're going to go a bit more detailed into that as well. He has been recently working on a hot development project near Austin almost 300 units with a $15 million equity raise and a total valuation of the project of almost $52 million. Hey Lane, welcome to the show. Lane: Thank you so much, James, for having me on the show this afternoon, I'm excited to share with your audience and share with other up and coming real estate investors on what I've learned so that they can become a better millionaire and they can get to their financial goals safer and more quickly than I was able to do. James: Yeah. Yeah. We always want to share. I mean, real estate investors are really interesting people. This is one profession where people like to share how they come up in their business. I'm not sure why or maybe we are just within the circle of people who like to share. Maybe there are a lot of people who don't share but in general, I've seen like a lot of my friends in my circle we like to share, and we have all these podcasts, which gives all that information. So it's very, very, very interesting just investment asset class. So tell me about; you are doing, I mean F16 is for me from I can see from the ground, it flies very fast. It's super sophisticated. Do you know the rough estimate of a cost of a F16? Lane: It's a lot; we'll see syndication for sure. James: Does it go to billions or still in the millions? Lane: Me and you and our whole network of investors would probably have to get a good debt, we would have to get a good financing to make it right. I think James, I think that the basic model is right around $40 million and then the the luxury apartment F16 is probably $45 million or more so that's for one and you've got to have about 24 units of that. So 24, times 30 is a pretty big tax liability. So that's kind of what it is. James: So to fly a plane, I presume to fly a plane, I wouldn't say simple. I mean, it's already complicated; to apply an F16 must be more complicated and so like in general, how many knobs do you have to turn to make it fly? How many controls do you have? Lane: Tough question there to answer James... James: Or is it all automatic? Lane: But I'd say it's like this, imagine you're doing brain surgery while you're juggling four bowling pins. That's sometimes what it's like and then other times it's like, imagine watching your kid play the violin at a recital, it's so boring and you're just trying to keep yourself awake. Then other times it's almost impossible brain surgery while juggling bowling pins. So between those two extremes, the number of buttons and the number of switches and the number of displays you have to watch varies greatly. James: You are still flying right now. I mean, you're not a retired person, you're still flying. I mean, is it because you enjoy it flying? Lane: James, I've got the best job ever. And flying is like riding, and some of your audience I know is going to love this and some will probably will hate it, but it's like riding a roller coaster with no rails. I grew up in Fort worth in North Texas, and there's a big amusement park here in the area where I live and it's called six flags and I know a lot of people have probably been to six flags before, but I remember as a kid, when I was in the seventh or eighth grade there was a roller coaster that we would ride and it took four or five minutes to ride and then they'd let you off. On certain times of the summer, when it was like a day week there was no line. So you could sprint from the exit back around through the line and then get back in line and it would take you about two minutes to race from the exit of the roller coaster back to the end and I think I rode it 42 times without not stopping. It's so much fun. James: That's very interesting analogy. Lane: So now flying an F16 is like an adult roller coaster, but there are no rails and there is no line.  James: And it can fly because no one is up there. I mean, you probably have some, you say it's a wide sky and open sky and you can fly, it's very interesting. Throughout your career, I mean, throughout your life, you became an F16 pilot, at what point did this aha moment of the real estate come in at what point from real estate to multifamily came in? Lane: James, that's a great question. Here is a short story or a short answer to a very long story. I was in the air force and I was in our squadron lounge drinking coffee on September 11th and somebody said, well, is an accident. And we went in to watch television and there was; that was when the first aircraft hit the world trade centers and then not too long after that, the second aircraft hit the world trade centers. I remember thinking what was going on here? No one really knew at the time and one of the senior pilots that was a pilot for American Airlines was right beside me and he said, that's it and I looked at him and I said, what do you mean that's it? And he said, the economy, the airlines, the travel industry is over. James: I mean, even after the first plane hit? Lane: Almost immediately and I think it was 10:30 here and about 11 o'clock he said, that's it. And I said, well, what do you mean that's it? That's not it because maybe you don't understand, but Lane Bean is going to become a commercial airline pilot and make a half million dollars in work one time a year. So you can't just stop that. That was my goal. And he's like, no, that's it and sure enough, that was, the economy changed forever. So I went into a period of what I was trying to do was totally gone. I was going to be, my career was going to transition from the air force pilot to commercial aviation, to be an American Airlines, Delta pilot, or United pilot that didn't work out because for the next 10 years, those companies stopped hiring pilots. So I went into a tailspin thinking, what am I going to do now? So what I did was I was always very interested in making repairs. I liked doing house, I liked doing carpentry work, working with wood, working with my projects on my own house and improving them. So in my neighborhood, and this is right around 2000, so 20 years ago; and so in my neighborhood, there was a vacant house that had been vacant for six or eight months and I thought, well, if I can improve my own house and make it better, why don't I try to buy this one and rent it out and make it better? And so I did.  After learning that process, I thought, well, this isn't that hard, bought another one, bought another one, bought another one, bought another one, bought another one and eventually I had 10 single family properties buy, rent, renovate, improve it and then hold it. But then 2008 came where you could no longer continually advantageously finance these houses because I had too many. and they said, well, now you have to either one, put a very large, you can't get favorable financing on single families at this rate, or you have to go to commercial and so that's when I went and transitioned to commercial, which is for your audience. I know they know, but that is multifamily, five plus units and that's what started my career in multifamily.  James: Very interesting because I did the same, I went up like 10 properties and I bought one more 11 and I was thinking, I have to go to commercial loan because they didn't want to do it and that's where I have to jump the multifamily. Because he just very hard to do a single families in terms of scaling up and all that. So cool. I mean, and how did you build up this 700 units in DFW and Longview? Can you quickly tell us what's your timeline in terms of moving from 10 single families, what was your first purchase in multifamily and going to 700? Lane: Some really great lessons here to share with your audience if they are in the process of maybe operating or syndicating their own deals. I had this mentality and I was pretty good at single family, I had 10 of them and they were all doing really well and I didn't need to sell them or anything, but I had the attitude of DIY because as a single family operator, you have to DIY, do it yourself. That's what you have to do because there's just not that much revenue to hire professionals; you can, but it's more difficult. I took this attitude of DIY, I'm going to find it, find a multifamily property. I'm going to finance it myself, or very little of partners. I'm going to acquire it. I'm going to manage it myself. And let me tell you for everybody listening, listen very carefully to what I'm about to say, DIY doesn't work in multifamily. You have to partner with a good team.  Now, the question you asked me was not DIY, the question you asked me was how did I get started on my timeline? I'm mentioning that I had a do it yourself mentality and I took that mentality into multifamily syndication or operations for two straight years. It was a complete discouragement because I had no results or progress whatsoever because I wasn't reaching out to other professionals and utilizing their skill sets. I was trying to develop my own skillset. And so for two years, I made no progress whatsoever. Then I finally learned that in the multifamily community, because the projects are bigger, you have to develop a team. Once I developed that team, I was able to accelerate and get properties and acquire assets and manage them correctly and safe and securely much more quickly and much more efficiently and productive. So that's the timeline. Two years of complete strikeout, and then starting at month 24, when I changed and stopped trying to do it myself and started trying to partner with other professionals and experts in the field, my results sky rocketed. James: What was the first person that you think was the team member that you wanted and who the other person that you think is the most crucial team member? Lane: Somebody just like James or somebody, that's has Achieved Investment coaching. Somebody that can hold your hand or can just be there to help you. I tell this to everybody, I say, when you hire someone smarter than you, you show that you're smarter than them. And so my advice is not to egotistically brag, is to surround yourself with very smart people and the very first person you need is a coach or a mentor or an advisor that's already successfully walked that path. They don't have to be a hundred years of experience, but they need to have some experience where they can say, hey, Lane, James, hey, don't do that. I would recommend you direct your efforts here. Let me connect you with my friend who is a broker, let me connect you with my friend who's a commercial insurance specialist. And then that's how you start building these networks. That's how you build your team. But the answer to your question clearly is find an advisor or coach or mentor or partner that has experience. That's who I would put on my team first.  James: It's very surprising, not say surprising, it's sometimes when you are coming from a different world, like you came from the airline industry and I'm sure it's a very complicated world. I came from being an engineer and it's complicated world, but we are all within our own world. Sometimes we think this is the world. This is how everybody should be reacting. This is the best that everyone can do. But suddenly when you go out of your network and meet another person, which come from completely different circle and you start talking to them and they tell you things that you have never heard before, then you realize, okay, your circle is too small. So, I think that's very important for you to go and listen to other people who are, as you say, that was smarter, who has done it is very important because people who have more than thousand units for them buying 50 units is not a big deal. They already done it, they can tell you all the shortcuts and commercial is no joke. It's not like single family. You can make mistake and get away with it, commercial is multi-million dollar deals. If you're syndicating it's worst because now you have a lot of passive investors money in it too. You don't want to make mistakes.  So you're absolutely right, just find people who are willing to share as we start in this podcast in the beginning, real estate is an area of investment where people are willing to share. If you go to biggerpockets.com, you open a free account and you ask one question, that's like a hundred people answering you. So can you do that in stocks? I mean, first of all, stocks is very hard to do because you don't have control itself. No one knows what's happening in the management. If Elon Musk smokes weed then the share goes down. You can't ask question, will the price go down if Elon Musk smokes weed. No one knows. . But in real estate you can be more predictable. Same thing with bonds. I mean, it's an investment asset class, but not many people knows about it. For me, it's very highly  secretive investment method. It sounds very simple, but it's a much bigger than that, bonds is huge. I mean, even same thing with Bitcoin and crypto, all that is you buy by chance. You do not know what's happening behind it. They say there's some server running behind it and all that, but real estate is like, you can make sense out of it. I say, there's a lot of people who are willing to share for free. Go to Facebook groups, go to meet ups.  The problem I see is people really do not want to take action to do it. So that's good. It's very interesting on how did you find out and how did you move towards that stage and you have 700 units right now and you're going to tell them, but before we go into development and the details of that. So you own three or 500 units, maybe four to 500 units in DFW area, which is a major core city, it a business hub, it's a city by itself and you have like 242 units in Longview, Texas. So that's more of a tertiary market. Can you describe, why did you invest in a tertiary market compared to currently focusing on DFW and what are the differences you see between this primary market and the tertiary market, or I mean the city market and the tertiary market? Lane: Well, for your audience, James, I know they're looking probably in different States and areas and regions and you have a national representation and so market selection, I have a four pillar funnel and I call these the four principles of real estate investing. This funnel real quickly is the very first one is strategy; so you have to have a clearly defined strategy. The second is a team; you have to have a professional team. The third of funnel and this is sequential, is market selection. Then the fourth is property identification or criteria. A lot of people revert or invert that funnel and they begin to immediately look at property and then they maybe jumped to strategy and then they jump around and I believe that's wrong way. I believe you have to start in the order and the sequence that I talked about. So before I ever looked at any property, whether it's a good or bad property, or how big or small it is, you want to make sure you evaluate the market. So what you asked me was, you said, why would you want to go to a secondary or tertiary market or non-primary market? Why is that better or worse or advantageous or disadvantageous?  The reason is because in the area where I invest and I'm familiar with the primary markets were getting overheated, and what do I mean by that? They were being priced to perfection. In other words, they were being priced so highly, there was no margin for error, or there was no attraction in the return because the markets and the amount of money that was going into these was driving the competition to the point where it had to literally be perfect. And the pricing was priced to perfection is what I turned to termed it. There was really very little return to be had in this market with any level of risk mitigation. In other words, if the rents didn't just accelerate like a rocket ship, you weren't going to be able to make the return that you expected; or if expenses didn't flat line like you want them to, or taxes or insurance went up, which it did substantially then your perfect pricing model was in jeopardy. That is exactly what you are seeing now in the primary markets, because expenses have continued to rise, but because of COVID the revenues and the revenue increase has flat lined. So a lot of these assets that are in primary markets that has suffered from perfect pricing, they're going to be in trouble because they will not make their rent growth projections. So the answer to your question, let me summarize in ten seconds is this, the secondary markets and the tertiary markets have not suffered as greatly from what I coin perfect pricing as the primary markets have in Texas. James: Oh, okay. That's interesting because I didn't talk to anyone recently about tertiary market and secondary market and how is it? What you're seeing is that market seems to be performing better compared to the primary market, because primary market is basically everybody overpaid, I guess, because it's just so much competition and the brokers are more advanced and there are so many betas and best and final, and you end up paying the highest price end of the day and you're right, you're basically depending on around growth and usually the County are more aggressive as well in terms of a tax appraisals. So, okay, very interesting. Very interesting. So let's go; I can't hear you Lane. Lane: I would add to that. So you do have to understand though, there are differences in the secondary market and there are differences in the tertiary market and that's why I said first strategy, because you may not be able to execute the same strategy in the Austin downtown area that you would execute in the outer lying areas of Austin, even though it's the same market, the sub-market may be different. So it's just important that you understand and remember I said that funnel, or the four pillars have a strategy,  have a team that can execute the strategy and then identify what market would be the best or sub-market and then at the very end of that notice, that's when I said project specific. This is a 1985, 200 units, garden style but I've already answered the top three questions and that's given me an 80% green light, yellow light or red light. If it's red, don't even worry about looking there for projects and if it's yellow, that's where you may have a little bit of consulting with your coach or consulting with your advisor, mentor. Should I pursue this, is the opportunity right? And in the East Texas market, the one that you're describing, we found a yellow light with a good project, and we were able to execute correctly. James: So is turning around a multifamily investment deal more complicated than F16? The more complicated part of the F16 or...? Lane: The real estate part is easy but the personal part is harder. James: Okay. Okay. Got it. Got it. Got it. So let's go to your development. So why did you start, I mean, after you have this 700 units you started working on this 300 units development in Austin, mainly Austin. So why did you take that decision and can you walk or the rational?  Lane: Sure. And so James, your audience is listening today for one primary reason, as we span back and ask, what value can I add to your audience? What value can you add? Why are they really listening? I believe that most of them would say we're listening because we want to use the vehicle of multifamily real estate to reach our financial goals. And so the underlying question is I want to become, I want to reach my financial goals, that's pretty much what people want to do. They want to do that and then they feel like multifamily investing or working with James and his group is going to be the best, safest way. So I believe that's what everybody is trying to do. I feel the same way. So the very first thing is, like I already mentioned strategy and as we were looking in 2018 and mispricing to execute our strategy became so thin that we realized, I don't think I can really do this strategy anymore because I can't find a good acquisition price that gives me enough margin for error and at the same time an attractive investment that I can execute a value add strategy, which was what I was trying to do. We looked at at about that same time, the tax incentive job tax bill of 2017 came out and it really advantaged redeployment or recapitalization of capital gains and that was the opportunity. It created opportunity zones.  So if you were to reinvest capital gains into an opportunity zone project, it was extremely tax advantaged. And so we looked and we thought, boy, this is a great idea. It's kind of like a super 1031 exchange for your investors or your audience that don't know about that and I can explain that more detail if you'd like, but I said, let's look at all the opportunities zones and how can we pair opportunities on investment projects with what we do multifamily investing real estate and put those two things together because the two principles of key worth of building net worth are this one efficiently place your capital in a cash producing asset. So I'll say that again, because this is important to hear, efficiently place capital in a cash producing asset. Number two principle is execute that transaction in a tax advantaged event, if possible. So how could we do those together, development project with an opportunity zone? It's a one, two punch for success. James: So opportunity zone is crazy. I mean, I did cover opportunity zone with Scott Hendricks maybe three to four months ago, which is fascinating on how much a tax advantage that they would get. Did you get people trying to do a 10, I mean, not 1031, trying to move the capital gain from real estate only, or was it from stocks as well? Lane: Most of the people were already associated with real estate investing. And so it was an easy transition for them. However, that is not necessarily a requirement of opportunity zone. When you 1031 exchange, which I know your audience is familiar with, that's a like kind exchange. So real estate for real estate, business equipment for business equipment, you cannot sell your tractor at the farm and invest in real estate. You can't sell your art collection with a capital gain and invest that money into real estate. However, opportunities zones not required, it's a capital gain. So you can still Google stock at a capital gain, reinvest that capital gain into an opportunity zone and have tremendous tax advantages. James: Yeah, it's very interesting. So let's talk about how did you select this 300 unit development place. I mean, can you walk us through what was the process? So you decided I wanted to development, I want to do opportunity zone development. So how did you choose this side or did you look at nationwide and how did you come to this particular 300 unit site development? Lane: Yeah. So, James, again, what you're asking me is how do you select market? What adds value to a real estate market? And that's number three. I mean, that's one of the very first things you want to be able to identify. So there are three things, in my opinion, that establish consistent value in a real estate market. Number one, is demographic changes; are more people moving into that area or are more people moving out? An example, California, as you've read and you may be familiar with more than I am, a lot of people are exiting California because of taxes and other things, job loss and other areas. There are other parts of the country where they're experiencing an out migration of population. So that's a long established trend that doesn't happen overnight. It doesn't happen by this afternoon. That's a trend that is established over a long period of time. Some markets are having an inflow of people moving to the area. So we can get into all detailed analysis and data. But let me tell you this one example that anybody can understand, and this example last year had 21 million data points, 21 million. So that's a pretty big number. It's the number one way U-haul rentals. What city in the United States has the number one, is the top choice of one way rentals to this city, Houston, Texas and that area around that. So more people are moving to Houston, Texas, or that area around Texas, wherever than any other place in the country, according to U-haul truck rentals.  So the number one thing is demographics. Where are people moving? That's going to create a demand for housing, number two, job growth. Where are the jobs being developed? A lot of jobs are being lost in areas and in cities and in governments that are not favorable for government or job growth. California's one of them, high taxes, a lot of government regulation in Texas, low taxes and very favorable job regulations. So number two, job growth. Then number three is the supply and demand of housing in any one market or sub market. So those three things are the way I chose the market. I looked at the entire map of opportunity zone areas and they are identified by census tracks and then I said of all of these areas, which one has the most favorable of those three conditions and it's the Texas triangle, it's North, Texas, South westbound San Antonio and then eastbound to Houston and then back to North. So that triangle, or what I refer to as a Texas triangle, that area contains 85% of the Texas population and it contains the majority of jobs and anything invested in that area as all those three things that I've mentioned. James: Yeah. I mean, for the audience, if you guys want to know about what Lane is talking about, just Google, Texaplex there is a documentary which shows the Texas triangle and how much growth is happening in this triangle. I mean, if you look at when Texas had 50% of the job growth from 2009 to 2000 at that time I was 15,19, 18 by now. So job growth after the last crash happened in Texas. I think Texas is going to continue to grow, even though now we're in Covid and it's just so favorable. If you look at everywhere that Covid has affected, nothing is wrong with where it is being affected, it's just there is are some vulnerability to that market and Texas is one of the first state to open up. So we open up, we open for business.  So yeah, I mean that Texaplex area is really, really powerful. But how many sites did you see before choosing this one particular site in Austin? Lane: We looked at a lot, James and a lot of the opportunities zones, the federal government gave the authority to governors to say, here's the criteria you identify, whatever it is you want and a lot of those governors across the whole 50 States delegated that responsibility to state mayors or regional governor officials and some of them did a really good job of identifying areas that needed to redevelop and then some of them, I think, turn their homework in the last hour and they didn't do a very good job. So a lot of the opportunities zones that have been developed they don't have any financial or investment fundamentals that would make anybody want to invest there. So they're very challenged. A lot of the other ones were more creative in what they were trying to do, realizing that as you stimulate this one part of the city, the other parts of the city may benefit from that even though they may not be the most in need at this time and so we looked at a lot and we concluded that almost 80% were areas that had zero financial incentive or investment incentives. You just have to recognize that and then just move on. So we found ones that we had those three qualifying characteristics. James: So let's talk about the loan that you get in this development deal because I believe it's a hard loan. So tell us what the loan that you get in this double meaning, what are the advantages that you're seeing, or even a disadvantages that you've seen in this hard loan compared to your normal buying already built apartment complexes. Lane: So a development project has a lot more risk than just buying an existing project because if you buy an existing project and a management, the property management messes up, well, maybe you can fire them six months later and you can just rehire them in within a matter of month or two, they may be able to correct what was a problem and get you back on track. But if you hire a development where it is just dirt and they mess the foundation up, or they mess up something, they blow the budget. Six months later, you may have spent a whole lot of money and you have nothing to show for it. There is no income because there's nothing to rent. So it's a lot riskier and there's a lot more risk involved. Therefore the funding and the development costs, you're incurring a greater risk. Well, obviously the government recognizes the fact that we have to develop new housing for our growing population and we have to replace existing stock. The government through the HOD program, Housing Over Development has created some very financial terms and financing conditions to encourage guys like you, James, your audience members, and myself, to develop this new property, to meet the future needs of our country. The program that that we're under is called HUD221-D4. It's the development of new multifamily housing and it's the gold standard. It's the Cadillac of financing. We just closed our loan and it's a 40 year fully amortized loan fixed permanent and we got a 3.35% interest rate fixed for 40 years and it's permanent. So I'd never have to worry about it. So that's the advantage, the terms are almost impossible to beat.  James: What about the prepayment penalty?  Lane: So it's a 10 year prepayment penalty and this escalated down. So at 10 years it can be paid off, it's fully assumable and the the difficult part is it's just very difficult to get. There are a lot of qualifications for the sponsorship team, for the market, for the strategy for the project itself. There's a tremendous amount of oversight. And so it's very rigorous in that regard, but it has very, very advantageous benefits if it meets your strategy team, market and property and business model. James: So having, I think you're still in the early stage of development right? I don't think they even break ground yet, but would you do this again? Development compared to buying a deal that is reasonably priced, that's already building? Lane: Yes. And the reason that I would say yes to that, even though we're going to have two years of development, that is not cash flowing. The reason is because when you pair the right development opportunity with the tax advantages of an opportunity zone is what I call boom shakalaka. It's the one, two punch. So let me kind of give you some general ideas of the cost. Our project 320 units, we're building it at about the same price we can buy an existing class A project. So we're building and the price to purchase existing is roughly the same. Now in some markets that doesn't work because the cost to build is a lot more than the cost to buy. So you have to understand your financial model. Then now when I put that in, combine that with the opportunity zone tax benefits, we're expecting a three, or we're actually expecting a four X equity multiple. That means that for every dollar you give me at the end of this project, I'm going to give you back $4. So if you were to do that with an existing project that was not opportunities zone, you would pay a 20% capital gain on those $4 or whatever your tax bracket was. But for simplicity sake, let's say you were to pay 20%, this opportunity zone, if I give you back $4, you're cash is taxed $0. So immediately, without any appreciation or any change, the benefits of that appreciation have a 20% tax benefit because it's an opportunity zone. The opportunity zone does have requirements. You have to hold it 10 years and so the hold period is a little bit longer, but couple that with the right financing, which was a HOD221-D4, which is a 10 year hold, is the perfect match for our business model and it's the perfect financing structure for development project, with opportunity zone tax advantages. James: Also the loan, as you're talking before the show is like, you had it from beginning, from now until the end, until you own it for 40 years, there's no refinancing in between, you don't have a change loans at all? So very interesting.  Lane: That's correct and so the same that developers get, let's say you're a fantastic developer, and you're the best there is. And you develop a project and you say, hey, this project is going to take me three years to build and so I need a construction loan and you get a three year construction loan and you nail it, at the end of 24 months, you've perfected, you've been under budget. It's the perfect model. COVID happens, now the value of your construction and your development, you nailed it. But the market took a 20 or 30% decrease. Well, guess what? Your loan doesn't care. You have to pay this loan off in nine or seven or eight months. You just finished construction. Nobody's renting because of COVID-19, it's stay at home or that. And so that's how it developers go bankrupt. It's not that they necessarily blew their project. It's just the financing lined up with a horrible market condition that they may, I mean, who could have predicted that? No one, but there's going to be developers that are fantastic developers that unfortunately got wrapped up in a very unfavorable market condition. Our loan, we have 40 years to pay it off. So right now it's 2020. This loan does not come due until 2060. So we're going to be able to ride a couple of cycles out even if it does turn back cold.  James: Yeah, that's very interesting, because usually construction, that's the biggest risk once you're doing the beginning and you just start construction and suddenly the construction guy said, okay, everything frozen up, we are not giving you money. Or your LTV goes down. Now you bring more money. But in this case, your loan is different and couple that with the opportunities zone tax advantage. So did you have any normal investors who didn't want to take advantage of the opportunity zone tax advantage? Was there anyone who just invested in this who brought in cash rather than a capital gain or 1031 money into this? Lane: Absolutely. So James, I think, and again, this is so important to emphasize, the keys to building your net worth are number one, invest your money efficiently in a cash producing asset. Number two, if you can, make that transaction tax advantage event, there were investors who recognize the value of Austin, Texas, recognized the value of what we were doing. And they said, this is a good deal with or without the tax advantages. Real estate in general is very tax advantage and so there were plenty. In fact, probably half of our investors did not use the right type of capital that would benefit from opportunity zones. The other half did, and both halves, both sides are equally pleased with the project. The ones that didn't use the right capital they're still going to get a great return. They're just going to have to utilize the taxes in a slightly less advantageous way. James: Yeah, very interesting. So let's talk about yourself. I know the loan is 40 years from now, but I'm not, I don't know what's your plan with that, but where do you see you going from now? From F16 pilot, you're still flying and you're doing all this multifamily syndication, and now you're doing development, where do see you moving forward from here? Lane: Well, James, that's another great question. So you're asking a lot about my goals and I love real estate. I love to help other people and the reason that I love to do that is because this is my purpose and that's to help you, James, help James' audience to become a better millionaire. That's what really gets me charged up and why do I say that? Because you have a passion in your life, maybe it's real estate, maybe it's a hobby. Maybe it's your community. Maybe it's your church, whatever it is, your family, travel, whatever. That's great. But sometimes we're so engaged with our nine to five vocation that we can't spend our talents and our passions where we really desire. So the vehicle of real estate allows passive investment and it allows you the financial wherewithal so that you can hopefully break away from that employment and you can get more free time. So now you can spend your talents your times and your treasures, where you really get the most satisfaction. I hope that you use those for the altruistic good of mankind. Maybe it's the boy Scouts of America. Maybe it's your community. Maybe it's your church organization. Maybe it's your travel or other things.  But if you're working 50 to 60 to 70 hours a week, which a lot of us are out there doing, it's very difficult for you to have extra time, money or resources to really leave the impact or the influence that your life passion could. So you asked me a question and I wanted to back it up with that color, the ask, what gives me a kick? It gives me a kick when I can help James become a better millionaire or I can help James' audience become a better millionaire. The vehicle I'm going to drive us there, is multifamily investing and I'm driving the bus, get on the bus, let's become better millionaires and then when we get there, you get off the bus and you say, I'm going to do this. And I'm going to make the world better through my community involvement or through my, whatever your passion in life is.  James: So that's awesome. One question I have for you is, was there any moment in your life where you think that I was really proud of what I did in your real estate business? That moment you can never forget it until the end. Can you describe that moment? Lane: Well, there are certainly moments like that all the time. I'm very, I get a big charge out of real estate. I love to talk about it and I would say the, to answer your question, most clearly was one of my properties. The very first property I bought. I didn't know very much, and I didn't have a lot of the experience that I have now. And I was swinging, like I said, I had been doing real estate, single family for 10 years and then I transitioned to multifamily and I did, I was just killing myself with effort and I made no progress, zero results. And then finally somebody gave me some good advice. I went underneath the council of good counsel and I was able to acquire property, it was in my hometown here in Fort worth and it was a value add reposition of an actual vintage asset and we basically did a really nice job. I teamed with smart people, we executed a plan and that property, the very first property, this was a 25 unit property in Fort worth and it competed for property of the year for the apartment associate Tarrant County and won. This is a 25 unit property competing against all assets, less than built prior to 2000. And so that was 1500 properties in Taron County and it was number one and so I'm really proud of that fact. As much of it as this is lager or whatever you want to say [48:08inaudible]. James: No, no, no. I would never say it's a luck. I mean, when I won the property of the year for San Antonio, it was very surprising itself because I'm sure you went to this gala, the dinner gala, that apartment association have, where they have two, three tables of 10 people each from each company. Capstone, Greystone, all kinds of stone there and every time their people won the award they get a big clap and the whole room becomes very loud. I'm not sure what they do that in Fort worth, but in San Antonio, they did that. And when I won, it was surprising because I was the only one standing and going because it was a snowy day and no one else came and I'm not a big management company. But when we won, I was going alone. Did you have that same experience where you're walking alone where everybody's wondering, who is this guy? Lane: Well, like I said, the properties that were in competition, they were run by professionals and a long established, I mean, it was pretty much like a high school team beating the Dallas Cowboys. They were not expecting a 22 year old, 1965 property to win. And it was like I was Rudy from Notre Dame and so everybody gave me the golf clap and I'm sure that under their voice, they were like, who's this guy? James: Yeah. I know I had that. I had like a very quiet, everybody was quiet because they didn't know who's this guy, which company he is, which stone is this guy. But they clapped at the end, but it was like just some of proud moments that we have in our life. Where we able to beat all these big guys out there. This is not the IRO of the year award. This is property of the year. IRO of the year you compete within the IROs. It's not many IROs anyway, but property of the year you compete with all the big guns out there. All the class A's, all the top notch property management company, it just complete different. So awesome, Lane. So tell audience how to get hold of you. Lane: Yeah, I'd love to. And like I said, my goal and I get a charge out of helping other people invest and get better. I want you to get there faster and safer than I did. And if there's anything I can do to help you, James, or your audience, I love to help out. I love talking about this. It helps me when I talk about it with you and understand what your goals needs and desires are to sharpen my own skill and sharpen my own skull. I try to educate people and try to train people and I have basically, I link all of my videos and education series onto my Facebook and LinkedIn page. So you can find me on LinkedIn at Lane Beene, you can find me on Facebook, two places. One is pilot legacy private equity group and that's where we post all of our training and video education or you can also find me on my website page, which is pilot-legacy.com, or you can email me directly and talk to me about anything, like I said, I'd love to talk to and help you, James, or your audience or any market studies or anything I can do, certainly do that or you can email me the lane.beene@pilot-legacy.com. James: Awesome. All right. Thank you very much for coming on, I'm sure all of us obtained lot of value out of your knowledge and the discussion itself. Thank you. Lane: Thank you, James. And your audience. Good luck to you.

How can brands stand out and drive incredible customer loyalty? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Katie Martell talks about what it means to find your "exceptional truth" as a brand, and why that should be the guide for everything you do as a marketer. As Katie says, "the only thing in the middle of the road, is roadkill," and brands that fail to speak their truth get lost in the crowd. In our conversation, we wade into the controversial waters of whether and when brands should speak out and take a stand, and how to do it in a way that keeps you tightly aligned with your customers. Highlights from my conversation with Katie include: Katie says it is the job of the marketer to understand what is happening in the world. Marketing controls brand perception, and brand perception influences whether someone will buy from you. If you're in marketing, you have to understand where your brand fits in the world of your buyer's identity. When you know what your buyers care about, you can align that with your brand values, and you have an opportunity to take a position that will strengthen your place in the market. Katie says that brands that don't take a position get lost in a crowded marketplace and are not a part of the conversation. By taking a stance about what you believe, you can change the conversation in your market and, in doing so, become a market leader. Katie says brands need to find "exceptional truths" - little kernels of truth that get buyers to stop, pause, and rethink the way they see the world. When you've created that seed of doubt, buyers are open. They're leaning in, they're listening to what else you have to say. And that is when marketing works at its best. That's when they're more receptive to your pitch. This takes knowing buyers so well that you know where they're misinformed or what they don't know or what they don't understand so that you can challenge that. This approach is based on the concepts outlined in the book The Challenger Sale, which is typically used in the sales world but has a lot of application to marketing. Marketers need to be confident to convince the organizations they work for that this type of challenge is the right approach. This can be hard because marketing is a "voyeuristic" profession - meaning that everyone can "see" marketing so they think they are an expert and know how it should be done. As a marketer coming into a new company, its important to determine what your exceptional truth is and then find ways of rolling that out across your marketing in a way that makes your brand unique and different. Resources from this episode: Visit Katie's website Follow Katie on Twitter Connect with Katie on LinkedIn Listen to the podcast to hear Katie's take on why it is so important for brands to find their exceptional truths, and how to use that in your marketing to gain a competitive edge. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is Katie Martell, who is an on demand communications strategist based out of Boston, Massachusetts. Welcome Katie. Katie Martell (Guest): Hi Kathleen. Thank you so much for having me. Katie and Kathleen recording this episode. Kathleen: I am excited to have you here. For everyone listening, I heard Katie speak at Marketing Profs B2B Marketing Forum in, what was that? September or October? October of 2019. Back in the days when we still went to conferences in person. And I was just so blown away. She gave such an amazing talk on Rabble Rousers and it really not only struck me for the content of the talk, but also, you were just an amazing speaker. We can have a separate conversation about that. But anyway, that's why I wanted to have you on and share some of your amazing wisdom with everyone who's listening. So I could go on and on about you. but before I go down too much of a tangent, I would love it if you would explain what an on-demand communication strategist is and what you do, and also a little bit of your background and how you wound up doing that. About Katie Martell Katie: I would love to, and I have to start by saying thank you for the kind words about that talk last year. So the title of that talk was something like "Market Like a Rabble Rouser" and it came from this fascination I have with the world of politics and persuasion mixed with what I do as a marketer. So I've been a marketer in the B2B realm for 11 years now. And what's been interesting is, I've been marketing to marketers for the majority of my career. And that was first at a B2B data services company. We were an early sponsor of the Marketing Profs event. That was a startup that I grew up to acquisition. And then it was a PR firm, an analyst from my own MarTech startups. So I've kind of lived multiple lives, worn many different hats, but always marketing in this world of B2B tech, and MarTech specifically. So I've been a student of marketing in a time when it's completely changing from what was the kind of capital M marketing that we've known it to be. And so this talk was just honestly, they had asked me what I wanted to talk about, which is a moment in time where you go, "Oh, that's a dangerous, that's a dangerous ask of me." And I was honest. I said, "Let's talk about what's happening in the world of misinformation, persuasion." I'm talking Russian trolls, I'm talking campaign interference. I'm talking all the stuff that, you know, you read on the headlines, on whatever news outlet you choose to follow. And let's talk about what marketers can learn from it. So I get up on stage. I give this talk. It went over a little bit of time because that's, hello, it's me. Well, people were absolutely polarized in the audience. We had half the room, a little more than half, I will say, who were like, "Yeah, we got the takeaway. This is great. Thanks so much." And the other half that I just think, I don't know what, didn't go across as well for many, because I presented a lot of information about Russian trolls and some of the exact campaign ads they used and it was pretty incendiary stuff, but that was the point. I was trying to get people riled up and hey, achievement unlocked. Kathleen: But I also think, isn't that polarized response just such a perfect reflection of why that talk was needed in the first place? Katie: I hope so. I was encouraging folks to really, you know, rouse the rabble, you know,? Create emotional responses, shake things up, and that's kind of what I did on stage. Kathleen: Well, and to be clear, just to interject, your talk was not an inherently political talk in the sense that you weren't taking sides, you were presenting facts, right? And people can take that and do with it what they want, but I just wanted to put that out there. Marketers need to pay attention to what is happening in the world Katie: Well, I appreciate it. And let the lesson and the takeaway here be that we need, as marketers, to pay attention to what's happening in the world. I mean, the world around us, look at this past week and today's date. I don't know if you're going to give the date here. It's June 1st. So we are coming off of a weekend of civil unrest, Black Lives Matter protests. It is a time where, if you check social media, you're bombarded with hashtag activism and names and everybody from brands to individuals getting involved in this current conversation. We as marketers should be watching this and learning. Kathleen: Yes. I mean, actually, it's interesting that we are having this conversation today because I literally, just this morning, was online on social media and I saw one person saying something about how you have to speak out and you have to make your positions known. And another person's literally saying "I'm not going to support businesses that don't say anything." It's interesting. There's so many different sides to what's happening right now, but it really doesn't matter what you believe about the current situation. The fact is that the world around us is going to make judgments and make personal buying decisions. And they could be different ones, person to person, but they're going to be made based upon what you do and or do not say right now, right. So if you're not paying attention as a marketer, you're not doing your job Katie: Because this is our job. It is our job. Marketing controls brand perception, right? Brand perception is the reality for consumers. They make a decision about us before they engage with us by the way we act through marketing. That's the kind of inherent "duh" that we know about our jobs, but what that means at a time like this and what it started to mean over the past, I would say, decade or so as the world of social movements, identity, and brands and corporate world they've started to intersect. And so what that now means is, if you're in marketing, you have to understand where your brand fits in the world of your buyer's identity, whether they believe in the Black Lives Matter movements, right? These kinds of areas that were kind of gray areas before of, we don't want to get political. It's not appropriate for every brand to have a comment on what's happening. For example, we're talking about the treatment of African American individuals in the US, if your brand happens to live values that embrace diversity and inclusion and have large representation from that community and you take steps to make sure that their employee experience is great and yada, yada, yada, you might as well leverage that in marketing. You might as well show the world that you're on the same side as the giant movement that's now building in States and cities around the world. My God, this is a great opportunity for marketers, which I know sounds dirty to say out loud, but it's absolutely a time to take advantage of the global zeitgeist right now, and be part of the conversation, be part of the narrative, earn trust. It might help you differentiate. It is a way of saying to the world, "This is where we play, this is what we believe, this is who we are as a brand" that may go well beyond what your product or your service does. That is an opportunity. Kathleen: I agree with you. This is such an interesting conversation. In the past year, I had a conversation about this with someone who I've always considered to be very much a professional mentor/idol/role model. I've come to realize as I've gotten to know this person better that they feel very strongly about keeping all politics, all commentary on social issues, completely out of business. And that is their personal belief. It has come into focus, I think, with this last election cycle, and we had a big debate where the person was saying companies should never post about politics. I personally don't believe that, nor do I think every company should post about politics. People will disagree with me and that's fine, but I think that it all comes back to really understanding your brand. And in this case, especially for privately held companies, brands are very inextricably interwoven with the person that owns the company. This is going to come right down to the owners of the company and what they personally believe in. There are some companies where the person that owns it is never going to talk about politics because that person, as an individual, doesn't talk about politics even in social settings. But then you have companies, and there's some examples I'd love to cite, like Penzeys Spices. They are a spice company out of the Midwest. I had discovered them years ago because I was looking for some really niche spices. I like to cook and I had followed them, and then I started seeing this stuff on Facebook and they come out really, really strongly. This is a long story, but I got into a really big debate with this person. And the person was saying, you are going to lose customers and that's not good for your business. And you're going to alienate people and that's not good for your business. And my feeling is, that might be fine. If you're somebody who believes that you want to live your beliefs and you want your business to live those beliefs, you may lose customers, but you will probably have the ones you keep drive tremendous loyalty and you may gain as much, if not more, than you lose. So, diatribe over. You're the guest, not me! Katie: Oh, please! I love your point of view. I'm honored to be here because I think you are just brilliant and I love your work. You hit on something really polarizing right now which works at multiple levels. It also kind of hearkens back to the fundamental truth that not all marketing advice is going to apply to every company. And I feel like that's an important disclaimer, because we tend in marketing to say, brands should do this, they shouldn't do that. It's really, to your point, what is right for your business, your customers, and most importantly, your goals. Now that spice company, I don't know them, but I guarantee their goal is not to be the spice for everyone. It sounds like they know exactly who their buyer is and they know exactly what that buyer wants from them. They want a spice company that stands for more than spice. Great. Not all car companies are going to be a car for everybody, right? Just like with Patagonia, right? If you're buying a jacket to go skiing and they have a set of brand values that they know aligns with the subset of the total market, but that subset will be inherently loyal to them because Patagonia is an example of a brand that's been consistent against their values. For years, they've always been kind of counterintuitively anti consumption. They sell retail products. They need to drive consumption. Remember that famous ad that was like, "Don't buy this jacket"? You don't know it. You have to Google it. And it's Patagonia saying "We cause too much waste in our industry. We build products that may cost you a little more, but they're sustainably made and we want you to wear them for longer. We're going to help you repair them. We're going to give you some tools to make sure that you can make sure you get the most out of them. They're longer lasting." These are brand values that the buyer can relate to because the buyer also shares those values. So this really isn't a new marketing problem. We like to think it is because of social media and hashtag activism and all the propaganda that's happening. But this really isn't old school marketing best practice. Know your buyer, know where you fit in their world. Bill Bernbach has a great quote that's like, "If you stand for nothing, you'll find some people for you and some people against you. And if you stand for nothing, you'll find nobody for you and nobody against you." Which is worse for a marketer? To be completely out of the conversation or to be clear about where you sit and stand and who you're intended for? I love old time radio. There's a great Sirius XM station about the radio shows from the era of when that was entertainment. Somebody had this quote in the old timey accent. They were like, "The only thing you find in the middle of the road is roadkill my dear." Right now, today, brands do not have to have a comment on who should be president. That is politics. That is up to the individual. We each have a right to vote. Stay out of it unless you're relating to the campaign or you're lobbying for a certain group. Honestly, we need to have a say about issues that matter for our buyers. That's it. If it doesn't matter to your buyers, it shouldn't matter to you and your marketing. If you're a founder, I'm going to kind of disagree with you on this, but if you're a founder trying to lever your organization for your own political, personal views, that's a mistake because not everyone in your company is going to agree with you. Just like not every one of your buyers is going to agree with you. You have to find middle ground. That's what this is about. When you canvas for a political campaign and you're going door to door for, I don't know, Bernie Sanders, you don't open the door and knock on the door and say, let me tell you why you're wrong about insert political candidate. You find common ground. You say, what do we share? What are we aligned on? And how do we then move forward together? It's not about polarizing. It's about recruiting people to see the world the way you do. And those people likely bring the same set of values that you do. Kathleen: To be clear, I should say because I probably didn't explain this, I'm not advocating that businesses come out and say "Vote for so and so." I'm more coming out and saying that the context that came up when I talked about it with somebody, was that there were things happening politically that impacted other issues, whether that's the environment or social issues, et cetera, there was like a trickle down. And there were businesses that at the time were coming out and standing for or against those environmental or social issues. That was what sparked the conversation. It's very interesting to me because the things that swim in my brain when I get into this conversation are, there is an increasing amount of data that started to come out, particularly with younger generations, that they are actually much more likely to buy from businesses that are willing to say what they stand for. Again, I'm not talking about politics, I'm talking broadly about things that you stand for. And I loved your statement about the only thing in the middle of the road is roadkill. Because you know, you look at social activism and business today and you see companies like Tom's shoes, which stand for something, and Patagonia, which stands for something. These businesses are doing very, very well, particularly amongst a younger demographic. And so I think part of it is knowing who you sell to, as you said. Part of it is also recognizing that over time, things are going to change as this younger demographic ages and people follow them, who knows? I don't know what will happen with the next generation, but today's 20 year olds are going to be the 30 and 40 year olds of tomorrow and the next decade, et cetera. And so as our customer populations age, their preferences come with them as they do. It reminds me of the conversation that I've had with people about niching down as a business. I used to own a marketing agency and agencies talk about this all the time. Should we be the agency for everyone? Or should we declare that we are serving this one niche? And the fear that everybody always has when you get into that conversation is the fear of having to say "no" and turn people away. What most data shows, and most people find when they do it, is that when you niche down, you actually thrive. You make more money because you really find the right fit customer and they have a higher perception of you. They stick with you longer, et cetera. And so, there's an echo of that going through my head as I listened to us talk about this. Understanding your brand promise Katie: Absolutely. And again, it comes back to branding basics. You have to know the promise that you're going to make to anyone. That's what brand is. Brand is a promise. When they engage with you, they want to know that they're going to get something that you've promised them. You don't have to take a stance around hot button issues. Stay away from hot button issues, unless you're ready for that, unless that's really core to your business and your values and live throughout the organization. There are many examples, from our history, of B2B companies that stand for something in their industry. This is where this needs to be applied to B2B. B2B listeners might be thinking, this doesn't apply to me because I sell, I don't know, refrigeration. And I'm here to tell you, there is, within the world of refrigeration, a company called Stirling Ultracold, that was kind of a smaller player within this world of refrigeration. They would sell to pharmaceutical companies, and we're talking commercial grade keeping stuff cold, right? That's the extent of my knowledge, but they are ultra low temperature freezers that companies need. This is a great example of a company in a world that we would think, what is controversial about this space? The way they were disrupting their own industry was just with this idea of sustainability and energy costs and carbon footprint -- these things that their product enabled companies to decrease. They saved something like 70% of energy costs. Energy and sustainability and carbon footprint was never a consideration point for this buyer before. They just didn't look at it along that list of criteria that they're making their decision against. It didn't matter. Suddenly, here's a company who comes forward with a great PR program, really strong thought leadership, a leader who says, "I believe we have a responsibility to have a smaller carbon footprint. And guess what? My products enable you to have it." It suddenly changed the entire perimeter of an industry. That is the exact same advice that you and I are preaching right now. Just take a stance in what you believe in your own market. That's how you're going to change the conversation in market. That's how you're going to find buyers that are aligned with you around this value that now matters, and in a broader sense, you know, to the world, but really in this industry. And that's how you're going to differentiate and earn that trust, is when you declare "Here's what we're about." And you do that with confidence, because that allows the buyer to look at you and say, "I know exactly what I'm signing up for." Change the conversation in your industry Kathleen: I love that. And it reminds me of a talk that I heard by April Dunford. Katie: Love April Dunford, high five. Kathleen: I heard it at HubSpot's Inbound conference. April Dunford is an expert on positioning and she gives this talk about the four different ways you can approach positioning for your business. And I don't remember the nickname she has for it, but the example that she gives for one of the ways is about changing the conversation. And she talks about Tesla and how before Tesla, the leader in the electric car market was the Prius. And the whole conversation in electric cars was about battery life. How long could you drive before you needed to recharge? You could substitute refrigeration, but the bottom line is that, as a new entrant, if you think about coming into an established market, you're not going to have the first mover advantage. You're not creating a category per se. So how do you catapult yourself to the head of that market? You do it by changing the conversation. And so she talks about how Tesla came in and totally changed the conversation by saying, "Yeah, whatever. Battery life. Of course, we all have battery life. It's really all about how sexy is the design and how fast does the car go?" And now, you see a completely different dialogue happening in electric cars. You see Tesla as a front runner. And you see a lot more electric car manufacturers focusing on design and speed because they made it sexy. And that's the new conversation. And it sounds like that's exactly the same thing this refrigeration company did. Finding your "exceptional truth" Katie: They had to. And this is really where I think, and I know I'm a little biased. I come from a communications background. I've seen the power of content marketing and PR and all of that working in tandem to lift up brands. I mean, I'm a startup girl at heart. When you can't be the loudest voice in the room and you can't be the dominant player of which, by the way, there's only one in every industry. So the majority are not dominant players. All of us need to figure out how to get more strategic with the way we leverage PR and content. I think we've fallen into a bit of a trap, and I'll use that word gingerly because of the rise of inbound marketing, because of the rise of the tools and tech that allow us to publish a lot of content. What we've sacrificed are the kernels of little ideas that we're using to seed the market. We've become really good at publishing education tips and best practices, which are great and necessary. This podcast is a great example of one. The issue is that we've lost sight of what creates movements, what creates change in people. It's that little kernel of truth. I call them exceptional truths that get people to stop, you know, pump the brakes and go, "Wait a minute. I've been thinking about things all wrong." And when you get a person, a human being to stop and kind of pause, you've got them, that's it. When you've created that seed of doubt, the way that they saw the world may not be that capital T, truth, they're open. They're leaning in, they're listening to what else you have to say. And that is when marketing works at its best. That's when they're more receptive to your pitch, to your ideas and your path forward, but it takes knowing the buyers so well that you know where they're misinformed or what they don't know or what they don't understand so that you can challenge that. This is drawing from, everyone knows, The Challenger Sale. Applying The Challenger Sale to marketing Kathleen: I was just going to say, I used to be in sales and in the sales world, this is The Challenger Sale. Katie: Yes. I don't know what happened. I mean, how can The Challenger Sale extend its way to marketing? Not to say that it hasn't, but you know, is that a puppy? Kathleen: Yes. I have two who are laying at my feet and every now and then they lift their heads up and say, "Wait, there's a world out there!" They're getting excited about The Challenger Sale. Katie: They probably are just as confused as I am as to why The Challenger Sale didn't work its way into the world of PR and content marketing. To me, we need to challenge the way the buyer sees the world. I think very few brands do that. Kathleen: It's very true. I have worked in sales before and when I was in that job, I read The Challenger Sale. I used that approach in sales and it made me very successful. And you're spot on. That has so much applicability in marketing. I owned an agency for 11 years and I worked with a lot of different companies and there is, in marketing, this lemmings syndrome where we see the lemmings running ahead of us and we want to follow them off the cliff. If they're doing it, it must be the right thing to do. And it extends from everything, from messaging and the way we talk about what we do, to things like brand colors. I used to do websites for attorneys and they all wanted forest green and maroon and these very stodgy, old attorney colors. And I remember I had one client and I was like, "Let's just do something crazy." And they were like, "But nobody else did that." And I was like, "Precisely." There's this inclination both amongst marketers and within the business world to play within the lines. And I think that does hurt us. There's a sea of sameness out there and it's the content we create, it's the colors on our websites, it's the way we message. It's, you know, "Hey, you should or should not talk about this in our industry. We don't talk about that so I'm not going to" and I really think that that has tied our hands behind our backs, Katie: I have a lot of empathy. I mean, I'm a Pisces. I'm gonna look at every situation from both sides. And it's empath to the Nth degree over here. But I do have a lot of empathy for the modern marketer. And this comes from being one, but also selling and marketing to them for 10 years. I've been on the megaphone side of MarTech vendors back in the day when there was a hundred of us, marketing solutions in a world of digital marketing that was now starting to shift. Don't forget, 10 years ago, we now had to be good at becoming top ranked on Google. We now had to start using social media to develop a two way dialogue. We then had to automate everything. Then we had to start measuring everything. Now we're trying to leverage AI. It has moved at such a pace. It all happened in nine years. It has moved at such a pace that the marketer, the poor beleaguered marketing ops person and lead gen new roles that are being created because of this ecosystem in MarTech have inherent uncertainty, an inherent doubt and inherent fear because thinking about it, you and I work, we do marketing for a living. This is our income. How are we going to support our families? This is more than a job and an industry, buyers and marketing. I always had this kind of point of view when I was marketing to marketers. The buyer is more than a director of marketing at an IT company. They are an individual who's just trying to figure it out. And a brand like a HubSpot who comes out right at the turning point of an industry in flux to say, we have 10 ways that you can do this better. And five tips for this and seven strategies for success in that, that brand is going to win. That fearful buyer who's like, I just need a job, and I need to keep ahead. The biggest fear for the marketing buyer is falling behind. If we fall behind, we're no longer relevant. If we're no longer relevant, guess what? There's some 23 year old who's going to come up and take our spot because they know Tik Tok. I'm being hyperbolic, but that's constantly on our minds. And so we have to have empathy for that marketer who's like, we are going to do the things that work and copy the things that work because they work and we need a win. It's really those organizations that can allow their marketing team to do what they do best. That means leave them alone. Let them understand the buyer and the market, the way that they're supposed to. The challenge of being a marketer Katie: Somebody else said to me that marketing is a very voyeuristic profession. Everyone can see it. Unlike finance, unlike R&D or engineering, or even sales, to an extent. Everyone can see marketing. Everyone in a business thinks that they're an expert in marketing because they see marketing all day. They see billboards. They see ads. They feel like they know the science and the practice of marketing. That creates a lot of pressure on the marketing team to kind of do whatever everyone else thinks they should be doing. So we have a department that's not only fearful of falling behind, but also facing pressure from the business to do things that may be counterintuitive to what marketing should do. To your point, the lawyers with the maroon versus doing something different. The telling of exceptional truths, the disruption, the rabble rousing, it works on teams that allow marketers to operate with confidence and hire marketers that are allowing them the space to push back and say, "No, this is what marketing does. Our job is to understand who the buyer is, what they need and why we're uniquely fit that market. And that may look different than what you expect, but that's why you hired me." If you're listening to this and you're young and you love marketing, but you're unsure of the path ahead, that's the strongest thing I think you can do is to hone this sense of what marketing does for business and the sense of confidence that you need to bring to every meeting. You almost have to defend your job at every go, but the more you do it, the more resilient you get, the better you get at it. Kathleen: Well, I think it also points to what you should look for in a place of work. I completely agree with everything you just said, and, and I don't often talk about where I work now, but I'm at this company Attila Security, which is in cybersecurity. I knew I had landed in the right place and I had this sense when I interviewed. When I got into the company and I met with the CEO and I presented him with my 90 day plan and strategy, this was about 30 days in, he said, "Yeah, just do it. I hired you because you know what you're doing", you know? "You don't need my permission." And I was like, "Wow, what a great feeling". When you're interviewing, that's a thing to really watch for and to dig into and to see if that's a trait that you're going to find amongst the leadership team of the company that you go and work for. Katie: I wonder how to ask that in an interview. I'm a startup girl who's just been at companies where inherently, there's no one to tell me what to do. What would you ask if you were interviewing? Kathleen: As somebody who hires a lot, I've always been a big believer in behavioral based interview questions. Those are basically, you don't ask people "What would you do?", you ask, "What did you do?" And you ask people to talk about actual experiences. So I would probably ask something along the lines of, you know and it depends on if it's a company that's had marketers before. I would say, "Tell me about a time when a prior head of marketing proposed something that you weren't sure about or didn't necessarily agree with, what did you do?" And if they haven't had marketers before, if it's a startup, I would probably ask them something about being at a prior company. Or I would say, "Tell me about a time the head of sales proposed something," or somebody else in the company presuming that there are other leaders. Because I think past behavior speaks better than hypotheticals. Everybody can come up with the right answer, hypothetically. For what it's worth, that's kind of the approach that I've taken, but some of it is also just a feeling that you get from talking with people. And I think that's something that you hone over time as you work in more places and you're exposed to more different types of people. Standing out in a world saturated with marketing content Kathleen: But one of the things I was thinking about as you were talking, you mentioned HubSpot and how they solve for something very specific at a time when it was a real need. And, it got me kind of circling back to a little bit of what we started with here, which is this need to tell exceptional truths and should companies go there? Should they not go there? One of the things that I started thinking about as you were talking is that the interesting unique moment that we live in right now is that content marketing has become so commonplace. And there are so many companies creating content that there is this saturation. There's just a lot out there. There's a lot of blogs. There's a lot of newsletters. There's a lot of video out there. We're all busy. Nobody has the time to read all of it. So how do you choose what you're going to consume? And this applies to anybody, any buyer out there has this dilemma whether they're actively searching for something or not. And it seems to me that one of the factors that's really affecting what works now in marketing is that one of the most effective ways to stand out amongst a very saturated world of content is to have a point of view. We've talked a lot about in the marketing world about authenticity, and a hot topic lately has been email newsletters and getting really real in your email newsletters and showing personality and individuality, even in company newsletters. And the reason that that's working so well, I believe, is because it is different. Just the fact that it's different and just the fact that it doesn't sound like everybody else, people gravitate to that. So I'd love to know kind of what you think about that. Katie: I a hundred percent agree. Mic drop because you said it yourself. This idea that everyone is a publisher, everyone can produce content - it makes it more important than ever to do what we were suggesting 20 minutes ago, which is to know exactly who you're talking to, what they value, the ways you share that value and just be confident that that is the niche that you have decided to own. You cannot be all things to all people. I'm hearkening back to my marketing undergraduate. This was a long time ago now. It's the one thing I learned. This is not new, right? We just have a proliferation of information now available to us. It makes it more important than ever to have not only a clear point of view, but first a very clear intended audience. You cannot be the solution, in your case, for all CIOs. You're the solution for all CIOs that are extremely risk averse or something. There's something about your buyers that you are really aligned to. Well, many companies fail to understand what that niche looks like and where that alignment happens. I have a newsletter. I call it the "World's best newsletter." I started it when I started consulting, frankly, honestly, truthfully as a way of reminding the world that I wasn't gone. I was leaving a startup at that time that I had co-founded and I was the public face of, and I needed a way to take that momentum and transfer it into my consulting, speaking, whatever it is that I do, practice. So I started a newsletter. I had no intentions with it. I had no best practices around it. I probably break every rule in the book. People love it. And what I do with it is what I've done from day one. I collect the things that hook my attention throughout the week, that I believe more people need to read, and I send it out weekly. And I say, "Here's what is important to me". I am a human being with other other interests outside of marketing. I'm a fierce advocate for feminism, and I'm a fierce advocate for human rights. And I have a documentary coming out about the intersection of marketing and social movements. And all of that is jam packed into this little newsletter, seven links and a quote of the week. It makes no sense. If you were to tell me, as a marketing consultant, it wouldn't make any sense. There's a lot of marketing stuff in there, but sometimes there's a really important New York Times cover story about racism in America. It works for me because people know what they want from me. It's neat. I have been really reticent to do that. It feels wrong. It goes against everything I'm taught as an email marketer, but you know what? It performs. It might be because it's real. I think it's because it's honestly what people want from me. I think that's really what matters. And they come back to it week after week because it serves that need and it's fresh. They don't get it from other people. Finding your unique brand voice Katie: If you're a business, trying to figure out what to send in your newsletter, think about that first. Just like a product and the way that you develop a product, look at the consideration set. What are you up against? What are the other emails looking like from your competitors or even others in the same general industry? Do something different. Maybe it's just doing it shorter. Maybe it's coming at it from a totally different angle, right? Content and thought leadership should be treated like product development. Not only is it something new and different, but it's like this muscle that you have to work on. You've gotta be really good at coming up with the processes to uncover those insights from inside the business to say, "This is what we believe, what we know." And then really, really good at delivering that in a fresh and new way. That's what makes the job of content fun and hard. But it's not what most people do. Most people opt for the easy ebook, the 10 tips, best practices. And then they wonder why isn't this performing? How to find your exceptional truth Kathleen: So true. So if somebody is listening and they're a marketer, who's come into a company and they're thinking about - and let's talk about startups because I think that's the best way to illustrate how this works. If you come into a startup as the first head of marketing, it is a green field, right? You get to shape the clay. If you're coming into an established company, that's a different story, but it's still, the challenge is still there. It's just how you navigate. It might be different. Putting on my hat as head of marketing at a startup, I'm coming in, it's the first time we're going to have a marketing strategy. If I wanted to come in and really mine the richness of what you talk about as exceptional truths, what is the playbook for doing that? Katie: Well, good luck finding a playbook. The place to start, in my mind, is to ask yourself the question, just like you would if you were starting a movement and activism, "What is the change that you want to see in market?" What is that end result that you're hoping to get people to switch? It could just be, you want them to choose you instead of a competitor. Great. So what does that mean? What belief do you need to shift? What misinformation do you have to correct? What new insight, to quote the Challenger model, do you have to bring to the table to get them to see the world a bit differently? I'll give you an example from HubSpot again, because I think HubSpot did this so well. And it's an example that we can all relate to. Your podcast. The name is a great example of the power of what they were able to do, how this came to market. I hate to say it, they were just a blogging, search engine optimization, social media, and eventually an email tool mixed into one. They were not the only player doing this at the time. However, they thought about this brilliantly. They needed people to see the way they wanted things to change. They were advocating for us to use these tools instead of cold calling, billboards, et cetera. The way that they got people to make that shift was to create a dichotomy or create an enemy. I actually presented on this at their conference two years ago, create an enemy. You can find it on their inbound library. And they saw the world in two ways. There's inbound and outbound. There's the new way forward, Mrs. Beleaguered marketer, who doesn't want to lose her job, the way that you're not going to fall to irrelevancy. And there's the old way that you're going to fall behind if you keep using it. They were extremely polarizing with this perspective. It was just one article that started all of this, right? They were like, "Here's the way forward. This inbound and outbound. One is good. One is bad. White, black, right? Devil, whatever it is." And 80% of the market was like, "Oh man, there's no way I'm going to go there." They were pissed because HubSpot is over here, challenging the existing status quo, the way they sell. 20% saw that and went, "Oh, you're right. Let's opt into this." And so HubSpot now of course built an entire movement around inbound marketing. It is a practice. It is a job title. It is a category in and of itself because they started with that kernel of what changes do we need to create. We need to figure out a way to get people to move from A to B, to go from what they think they know to what we want to advocate for. And then they brilliantly built a movement around it. And they did so with a ton of content ideas, a community of people that were proud to call themselves inbound marketers and this kind of repetitive, consistent muscle they use to push the movement forward, now extending years and a $125 million IPO and19,000 people at their conference. It just has ballooned because they were smart about this kernel of truth that they've never deviated from. Are you going to be the next HubSpot? No. This is right place, right time, right conditions and market. But, you do have to find and be willing to provoke, with purpose, the existing beliefs of buyers, and then be consistent about that. If you can do that, your startup is going to make a lot of noise. You're going to punch well above your weight. Even if you don't have the biggest budget, you're going to make waves and you have to be willing to do that or risk falling into irrelevance. Kathleen: It's a really incredible story, that story of HubSpot and it's certainly not the only one. You have Mark Benioff at Salesforce who famously picketed outside with a sign that had a big red X through the word software. And he similarly named the enemy and it was software and his solution was move to the cloud, software as a service. That is an approach that absolutely works. I would say to go out and read The Challenger Sale. So many sales people read it, but so few marketers do, and I love that you brought it up in this conversation. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: We are going to run out of time soon so I want to make sure I ask you my questions. I could talk to you forever. My first question that I always ask my guests is of course, this podcast is all about inbound marketing, and is there a particular company or individual that you think is just a great example of how to do inbound marketing in today's world? Katie: I think Rand Fishkin and his work with Moz and now with SparkToro which he actually details really well in a book called Lost and Founder. It's a great book. If you're thinking of starting a company read this first. It may scare you away, but he always was the example for me of somebody who was again, challenging white hat versus black hat, giving away all the industry secrets to become a trusted industry resource, to ranked the highest, but it really builds trust in his company and him as an individual. And I think it's just his consistency, Whiteboard Fridays, he was writing five days a week. That's still the best example of consistent inbound marketing. Kathleen: You know, it's so funny because I could not agree with you more. He is somebody that I have followed really closely. I read his book. I read everything he does at SparkToro. I follow him religiously. And I have been very surprised. I think you might be the first person that has mentioned his name. I ask this question of every single guest and that has baffled me because I think he's amazing. So I'm really happy that you said that. Katie: He's also the world's nicest guy. We both spoke at the SpiceWorld conference in, I want to say, 2018. Both of us were speaking in the marketing track and I'm sitting here backstage fan girling because I love him. Who hasn't read his stuff? He comes off stage with the mustache. He's the nicest guy. He's just, you know, very down to earth. And I think that's the secret. He wrote this content to truly help others. And I think that genuine purpose behind the content is really what sets him apart. More people should have mentioned him. Kathleen: Yes. I agree. And maybe they will now because we'll turn them on to his stuff. All right. Second question. You mentioned earlier that the biggest fear of marketers is falling behind. And the second question I always ask everybody is exactly that. It's like every marketer I talk to says, they feel like they're drinking from a fire hose. There's too much to keep up with. So how do you personally stay up to date and keep yourself educated? Katie: 100% LinkedIn. I'm a huge advocate for using LinkedIn appropriately. I have a big following there, so I love it as a platform, but I also use it to consume a lot of best practices. I ask a lot of questions. I'm constantly looking through comments. It's become a resource that just, I find invaluable. It's a mess. Sometimes now people take advantage of LinkedIn to post some really nonsense stuff, but at the core of it, it's there. Can I give two answers? There's a lot of Slack communities that are being built around specific topic areas. I'm not in marketing, but I'm part of a great marketing operations Slack group that keeps me knowing what's going on. I work with a lot of MarTech vendors still as an amplifier now and a community evangelist. I need to know what's going on. And so even on that, in the practice, these Slack groups are hidden sources of insight. So if there's not a Slack group for your world, your community, build it, invite people. They will come. This is not field of dreams. They're desperate to connect, one-On-one, sometimes outside of the loud world that is LinkedIn. Kathleen: That group would not happen to be the MoPro's would it? Katie: No, but now I want to join that one. Kathleen: I'll send you a link. A guy I interviewed once for this podcast has a marketing operations Slack group that I am in. But I agree with you. I have a ton of Slack groups and there's only like, let's say, two or three of them that I'm religious about checking every day. They're just insanely valuable. But, love all of those suggestions. Again, I could talk to you all day long, but we're not going to do that because we both have other things we need to do. Great conversation. I'm sure people will have opinions, both ways, about what we said here today, but that's okay. That's why these conversations are important to have. If you listened and you disagree, tweet me. I would love to hear your perspective. This is all about learning and listening and I'd love to hear what more folks think about this. How to connect with Katie Kathleen: But Katie, if somebody wants to learn more about you or connect with you online, what is the best way for them to do that? Katie: They can Google me. I'm very, very, very Google-able. You can LinkedIn me. You can find my website. I'm just, I'm everywhere. Kathleen, congratulations on over 150 episodes of this. This is a service to the community and we are grateful for it and it's a lot of work to put these together. So thank you for doing what you do and thank you for having me, really. Kathleen: Well, I very much appreciate it. And I will put links to your personal website as well as your LinkedIn in the show notes. So head there if you want to connect with Katie, and she does produce some amazing stuff, so I highly recommend it. You know what to do next... Kathleen: If you're listening and you liked what you heard today, or you just felt like you learned something new, I would love it if you would leave the podcast a five star review on Apple podcasts, because that is how other people learn about the podcast. And finally, if you know somebody else who's doing amazing inbound marketing work, please tweet me @workmommywork, because I would love to make them my next guest. That's it for this week. Thank you so much, Katie. Katie: Thank you, Kathleen. Everyone take care.

Connect with Samantha Ruberto:https://www.samantharuberto.com/https://www.instagram.com/hellobeyoutifulpodcast/Join Hello BeYOUtiful's Community:https://www.facebook.com/groups/518783975450354/ Connect with Deidre:https://www.instagram.com/deidresirianni/https://www.radicallyaligned.com/Transcript:I love your brand. I love everything you stand for the radically aligned life. What does that mean to be radically aligned? Ooh, that's a great question. I was feeling into this the other day. So first of all, everything happens in the exact moment it's supposed to. And before we jumped on here, we were talking about birthing something into the world.And so when you're pregnant with something like a baby, you can't push it out at six months or five months or rush it and everything. Great takes time. And so I remember being under this tree in San Diego, um, about a year and a half ago, and I was meditating. I don't remember what I was meditating at, but I was at a Brendon Burchard seminar and a bird pooped on my shoulder.And as the bird pooped on my shoulder, I got the name radically aligned. And so I love it when that happens to me. And it happened to me recently too. So I'm feeling really good about myself. I'm like, something good's about to happen. I love that. Well, they say it's good luck, but I mean, just to love it when you get a bird poops on your shoulders, just like, that's hilarious.Totally. So when I think of radical alignment, there's different stages of it, and I actually have this. This graph that I've been creating to really map it out on our journey and how to really awaken to our highest self and our full potential, but essentially radical alignment is you are radically aligned.It's like the center of. Across, you know, not being religious that the center across, like it's the dead center of the core of who you are. And there's no being off path. There's no compromising. There's no, I'm not sure. There's no maybes. There is no, um, Oh. Um, if this happens, then that will happen. It's a strong knowing that, well, you are.And being radically honest with your path and not compromising and going off path because of distractions, because of old programming, because of what people think you should do because of self-sabotaging behavior when you're radically aligned. You are unstoppable. And these are the people in the world that I think of that are the, I work a lot with up and coming thought leaders and those who have a message inside of them that they know, like they're not quite where they're supposed to be yet.And there's a gap because they're not radically aligned from the outside looking in though they look like they have their life together. They seem aligned, but they know they're playing small. They know that there's something bigger and this is where radical alignment comes into place because the more aligned we are.The quicker we can manifest what we want and the less distracted that we get and the more confident we are. But it's not even a doing. It's the being ness that attracts what it is that we want to have in there. Certain rituals, practices, tools, and um, processes that I take people through to make sure that they've cleaned up trauma, that they've worked through, pieces that are still like the dust that hasn't quite settled in their life to clean that up.So it's like having a. Like a diamond that has dust on it. You know? It's about the polishing. So it's the polishing. It's like you're already amazing. You're already great, you're already rocking, you're doing all the things that you love. But the polishing is in the radical alignment. So I would compare it to maybe a, um, I'm a Lamborghini.Okay. So there's a lot of people who are Lamborghinis, so they're super sensitive. They're super dialed in when they are radically aligned with who they are and who they're meant to be in the world as far as influence, impact, and all of that. But they're operating, they're giving themselves the fuel. Of a Honda.And the truth is if you bring a Lamborghini up to a regular pump, and I don't have a Lamborghini, but I'm pretty sure that you need different fuel, you need different services. And the truth is when you're a Lamborghini and you're in the car and you're out of alignment just a little bit, there's something that's not quite right in, in the system.It throws the whole thing off, it throws the whole path off, and it can actually take you off track with your full potential. So it's about getting people to know that they have six cylinders, 10 cylinders, whatever, instead of two that they're operating on and it opens up the doors for everything. I love that.I love the idea of radical alignment. I want to know the tools, the different things that you would use to get people aligned. The first. I'm going to assume that you haven't always been this passionate and this like aligned even yourself. Like there's obviously a story that sort of got you there. So I'd love for you to share your journey of getting into radical alignment.Wow. So that's a big question. Everything starts at a young age and it's called soul school, right? So we go through all these obstacles. We have these moments of this is who I am when it's not the truth of who we are. And for me, at a young age, when I was probably six or seven years old, I started to live a dual life.So I would go to school and I was a happy go lucky girl, like friends with everyone. I'm had a hard time learning and staying focused in school. Um, and then I would go home and I had a family member that had an addiction. And because of that addiction, it was this space of lack of certainty when I would come home.There was a space of lack of knowing how things would be and also deep concern for that person in my life. And it was a part of my life that I categorized. And we do this as humans. We categorize moments in time. We categorize parts of our life to disconnect from it because we don't know how to process it.So at around the age of six or so that was happening. So I'd go home and I'd have a totally different experience. I wasn't able to speak my truth. I wasn't able to be a little girl. I had to be my own, you know, my own best friend, my own parents in a lot of ways. And so there was this dual personality, do a life.And so this pattern continued into high school. I was the popular girl, I was friends with everyone at school. But I didn't really get too close to any groups. I was the one that was friends with all the groups because I didn't want to let anyone get too close to me because I didn't want them to see the truth that I had something to hide.And then I was taking on someone else's addiction, someone else's behaviors as my own. There's a lot of deep shame and a lot of deep separation from both of those lives. And so naturally, um, when you live with someone who has an addiction or anything like that, or you know, you're in a relationship with someone who has an addiction, um, you can become codependent, which is trying to fix everyone else's problems or trying to support everyone else too.Avoid dealing and feeling what's going on on a deeper level. And also with that, there's also the people pleaser that comes up. I see this all the time with people, and a lot of that comes back to codependency and also having a family member or somebody in your world that has an addiction and addiction, that behaviors as far as how they act is very different than maybe how addicted or how often they go to whatever that is for them.So again, I was the happy go lucky girl. I had one emotion. And it was, I'm happy all of the time. So that continued into my adult hood and essentially I had more trauma in when I was 19 I was raped and didn't know how to process that. So I categorize that again. And I got really good at checking things off of the list, that list of get married, um, buy a new car, buy a house, go traveling together.All of the things. And again, from the outside looking in, it looked like I was the happiest person. Everyone knew I had the perfect life, the perfect marriage. I had a business that was doing well in a lot of external validation for it, but. I was not connected to myself. I was not connected to my truth.And because of that, I was avoiding dealing with the voice that was trying to come up. That was saying, first of all, every time I've reached a goal, I was saying is this it? Like looking around like, is this really what success is? Is this really what love is? Is this really what life is? And that continued to push me to chase new goals.But I never quite felt like it was, it always felt empty. It's like you're chasing these things. You get there and it's like, now what. Yeah. Right. And so I was chasing these pieces of external validation and essentially I was running away from myself as I was running towards a goal. So I kept feeling that way.And of course it led to burnout and other symptoms. But then there was another voice that was coming up and the voice was saying, there's so much more. Yeah, you are so much more capable and powerful. And you know, and I knew deep down that there was something that I was supposed to step into that because of all of the programming, because of all of the disconnect, the dual life, the categorization.It felt like impossible to even bring it into my conscious reality. And so with that, I started to get a lot of symptoms, a lot of manifestations of disease. Because as you noticed, and I know we've Jan about this before, is anytime our soul is not being honored, it speaks to us through symptoms of disease.And. I manifested depression, massive social anxiety, even though I was in front of about a hundred people a day. I have panic attacks. I manifested auto immune disease and what else? And food sensitivities. Stomach pain. Yeah, totally. And so it's like all of these were the universe or my universe, my body saying pay attention.But the thing is. And, and if you're listening right now, and I'm sure you can relate to Sam, it's like when things come up in our body, it's so easy to be like, Oh, well my mom has this, or it runs in my family, or, Oh, I should take a pill for it. Or, Oh, it's just a part of me. There's like this acceptance of the bullshit in our life.You know what I'm saying? 10. And it's like NSC acceptance of the symptoms and the symptoms is a sign that you were so out of alignment with your soul's calling. And I knew this, I was like teaching wellness. Like I knew you back then too, like I was in that wellness space. I own a yoga business and it was, I was like living and teaching a lot of these things, but I wasn't really owning it and embodying it.So I finally had my wake up call. It wasn't any of the things I said before. But was it like an Elizabeth Gilbert moment? Like, did you have a moment where it's like you hit rock bottom with it and you were just like, the universe just wasn't going to let you keep going? Exactly. That's exactly what happened.And so I, so I had all those symptoms. I pushed him away cause I was like runs in my family, whatever, whatever stories as we do, accepting the bullshit of our symptoms and our life. And um, I remember one day, Sam, and like at that time in my life I had mermaid hair. It was down in my hips and it was kind of my thing.And I was going through my hair one day as us girls do, and I noticed, Oh my gosh, I am missing a huge chunk of hair. And it was like on the top of my head, I had a massive bald spot. It was like the size of the toony. Whoa. Yeah. Completely bald. Completely bald. Like right on the top of my head right there.And I just woke up one day and it was like that. And it wasn't like, you know, when you shave something and you can see like, there's like, there's still hair growth, but you know, maybe it was ripped out or something happens. Like your hair was stressed out. It wasn't breakage. It was totally bald. And, and I remember, I remember the moment getting out my smartphone and, you know, um, having the camera on and going in the mirror.I'm like, what the heck is going on here? And it was this massive bull spot. And this was the moment when the universe was like, okay, Dee, we gave you this, we gave you that. We tried to whisper. We try to take it easy on you. Yeah, there were a million yellow flags, but it's going to take this one bread one.And that's usually what happens. Like yellow flag, yellow flag, yellow flag. And we just keep on driving poorly. So I, um, I was super stubborn, so I had to learn things the hard way. And, um, and then so that happened. And naturally natural instinct go to the doctor, what the heck's going on? Fix me? And the doctor said, Oh, well, it looks like you've developed another autoimmune disease.And I was like, huh? And she's like, yeah, like we can give you some steroids or, you know, some shots in that area of your head. But, um, she's like, you're probably gonna lose all your hair. Yeah. Wow. Okay. That's pretty scary. Yes. And they say also like, just going back to, um, people who go through cancer. Um, one of the biggest fears for women apparently isn't necessarily losing their breasts.It's actually losing their hair. It was like a, it was a big fear of mine. I'm like, Oh my gosh. And then I went home. I got the prescription because I was like, just in case I get home. And I was like, this is not going to be my story. This is not it. And I am going to listen. And I thought of Louise Hay's, I thought of her affirmations.I thought of what our body is trying to tell us. And I don't remember exactly what it said in the book about, you know, a bald spot. But I remember being like, it was like self hatred or something. And I chose to be with that, which is the truth, because my entire life. Based on past trauma and you know, living a dual life and checking things off the list.It was self hatred because I was not connected. To my soul. And so I remember talking to my husband at the time and he was like, so not woo, like black and white, like thought crystals were weird. Right. And I like owned that moment. Wow. In that moment was the moment I changed my entire life and my hair grew back. I started studying Mashama's. I've actually been working with shamans for almost a decade now. I started doing the inner work meditation, and what I learned through that journey is that. First of all, I believe, and I can see it in people.Most people are not even living in their truth. So radical alignment feels like what the F is that? And I get it. I was very disconnected and it took, it took me having that moment. To change it. And I know because my soul told me around this time too, that if I did not change my life, I was going to die of cancer in a year and I didn't have cancer, but my body, my soul was like, you are here to do work and you are not listening to your one and we're going to go after your vanity because you like to pretend that everything is great and you can't hide this.So wake up. Wow. But at that said, you probably look back at that moment and you're so grateful, so much gratitude, because I know that this is like what, six or seven years later, I wouldn't be alive. I would not be on this having this conversation with you if I didn't actually have that wake up call and change because I was so deep in it.And when we're so in something, whether it's a relationship or an area of our life where we have created all of these. You know, um, this checklist and we're, we're so in the role, it's difficult to even know that we're in the role because we've been playing the role our entire life. So. I had to wake up. I had to do the deeper work.It was not always comfortable, but it led me down the path of really understanding universal laws.  what our soul's telling us, as well as a bunch of other things, which has led me down this path of radical alignment and and seeing those symptoms in people and helping them break through really quickly.And on that note, I'm heal trauma. As we were talking a little bit about that earlier. Before we jumped on was unhealed trauma, I believe is the root cause of all suffering. Because what happens when we have a trauma? And so I had trauma when I was younger, like coming home and having a, um, a family member, not sure if they were alive and then having to like, not know how to deal with that and, you know, continue just showing up at school and in life and shoving it down.We do that all the time and we don't necessarily need to say we as a whole with humans right. We don't know how to, first of all, identify trauma and essentially it's anything in our life, any imprint that we haven't been able to process. And when we have a trauma, it actually takes us out of our body.Because it's not safe to be in our body. So when we're not in our body, we actually can't be aligned because it's like we're outside of our body. We're not connected to the symptoms. We're not connected to our heart, and we're constantly being triggered by our subconscious from any images, thoughts, body sensations, emotions, and then the energetics of anything that even slightly reminds of us of any of those imprints in our past of the trauma that we haven't fully.Completed because it's like a moment that's frozen in time. So I was triggered all the time, didn't know it, didn't mean that I was upset. It just means I kept taking steps away from my soul. And then I had my big wake up call and had to change my entire life. And in my marriage of eight years, I starting a new business.I started saying yes to adventures all the time. I had a lot of deep work to do and in the realization was the first step. Of course, it's healing trauma. You know, but it's, it's also like what is not me. And when I started to go through that, most of the things, most of the rules that I was living in plane and weren't me.It's not about finding or creating who you are. I like the idea of it, but it's more about who are you not and how is that showing up in your life? That's a really good way to look at it. I feel like it's easy to say, Oh yeah, everything's good, I'm great. Right? But then if you look at the back way, that way, it's like you can get other information about yourself and your situation and your, the people who are in your life or whatever it is, and it's easier to be like, well, is this really me?Is it serving me? Yes or no? And it's easier to let it go. Totally. Yeah. And it's, it's scary too, and, and that's why it's really important. Like, I know for me, when I was going through the process, it took me a few years to actually really take some of those outward steps of creating change. Because first it starts internally and it can be a little messy.But it's like finding the right community, the right support, being around people who get you right. And um, and so that's what led me down this path. And, and I see it in other people and I know that like, we're all here to do something, to create something to experience, love to bring love. And it comes through the foundational piece of being radically aligned.And there's different stages of that. So long story short, I mean. Phones are long. That's good though. Cause you're here, you're living here, you know your radical line life now and you're really holding the torch for other people to do the same. What are a couple of grounded things someone could do and implement in their life that would be really effective in terms of like achieving some alignment, like something that they could do today.I'm just thinking of, first of all, uh, I have a program that's running right now and we're on module two and I want to talk about this because this is exactly what we're sorting out. So I'm, one of the things that I love to do in my life, I do this probably once a year, is I like to create my obligation list.And then also the things that bring me joy. So two lists, and this is a very simple way to see the things that maybe you said yes to that aren't quite aligned. And you go through the obligation list. These are all the things that you feel like you have to do. They have the, I shouldn't be doing this. I have to be doing it, and you do it.You show up for it. But the thing is, because we're so on autopilot all of the time, we don't even know how they feel. So we just do it. And then if we feel like should at the end of the day or we don't feel the way we want to feel or we're not doing the work that we want to do, it's because we haven't taken the time and the space to assess where we're putting our time, energy, and space.So going through the obligation list and saying, okay, who was I when I said yes to this? Who was, I wasn't the person I was a year ago. Is that still aligned with who I am today? Because you know, like we're all evolving all the time, and if we're saying yes and doing things out of obligation based on old version of ourselves, well, it could be actually leaking our energy.It can be pulling us down. So it'd be outdated. Exactly right. And like, I know you sound like you're changing so much every day. So am I. I think about who I was a couple months ago. I'm like, Whoa, I've changed a lot. So it's like it's good to reassess, right? Totally. I love that. Going into the list and looking through them and asking yourself some questions, so number one, when did I say yes to this thing?Who was I like? What were my core belief systems at this time? Because it's important to notice your core belief systems around why you said yes to that thing. And then the next piece is, is it still serving me today? Is it aligned with my values today? And if you don't know what your values are, I highly, highly recommend asking yourself what your top three values are.Because anything that you're saying yes to and you are, is on your obligation list. And I just want to say, having things on the obligation list is not a bad thing. We're all going to have responsibilities and things we show up for, but it's important to know. Is aligned with my values. Does it make me feel the way that I want to feel?And is it supporting my longterm vision goals of who I am and who I meant to be in the world? And if the answer is no, well my friend, it's time to cross that obligation on the list. Maybe have a conversation with someone and say, you know what? I know I said yes to this. Back when and moving forward, um, I have to release my obligation to this and let's sort it out.And that's going to free up so much energy and awareness right there. So what would you say to somebody who's at that point who sees something that they want to cross off, but then there's that fear of actually having that conversation? Because for a lot of people, that conversation. It's like they don't want to hurt feelings, so they don't want to like, you know, it's an uncomfortable thing.So what would you say suggest to do? That's a great question. I was actually thinking about it like, Mmm, people want to, you know what? What do I do with it? Okay. First of all, I think it's really important. Anytime we have anything that we've committed to or bought into of our own, whether it's a belief system, an obligation, or anything else in her life, what is the cost?Okay. What is the cost of not having that conversation? What is the cost of continuing to, um, maybe it's self sabotaging behavior of feeling resentment towards that person or that thing that you're doing. What is the longterm cost. Of continuing to show up in authentically within that relationship or that obligation and the longterm cost for yourself, number one.So what's the longterm cost on your health? On your relationship maybe with that person on, um, you know, the longterm relationship with what you're creating. Like what is the cost? Is it the time? Is it money? Is it your health? Is it your relationships? Because the truth is when we're saying yes to something that doesn't feel good, and we're doing that people pleasing thing, like walking on eggshells with, guess what?We have resentment. And that resentment is showing up in our physical body, our liver, right? Our di, our organs. There's a cost on our health. Our mental health or emotional health, and also we're bringing that negative energy into some of our closest relationships. That could be time that works, stepping away from the things that we love most in, we're probably not showing up as the best version of ourselves.So when you, when you get radically clear and honest and aligned with the costs. I'm saying yes, in that obligation, it's going to be like, Oh my gosh, like I need to have that conversation and there's frameworks to it. It's just like, Hey, so and so like Sam, Hey, Sam. You know, let's play that. Hey, Sam, I know that I'm pro.Let's pretend you're my sister. So, um, let's say that I had an obligation to you and I would, and I've heard this before, you know, I pick up, you know, Sam's kids every and every week, and I hang out with her kids, and that's the time that she gets to spend time with her husband, right? I've heard this before and it's just something I've been doing for years.But you know what? Now I don't have time for this, this, this, this, so perfect example. Hey Sam. I just want to talk to you about, I mean, is that okay? Sure. What's up? Um, well, I really love, uh, taking care of your kids every week. It's been such an honor to do that. They're so much fun. And, um, I said yes to that, you know, a few years ago when I had a lot more time.And I want you to know that I really appreciate the time that we've had together and moving forward. Um, I won't be able to continue to do that. So I'd love to find a way for us to. Shift this to support you, but also for me to have my time back cause I really need my Wednesday nights for this project.So how can we move forward and create that together? Like how much time do you think that you need? Like a few more weeks to sort of a babysitter or something else that's so easy. It just makes it so easy to say yes. Yeah, that's really good. Cause it's really appreciating and seen appreciating the person, but then like looking at coming at it from like a win-win perspective.Totally. And it's the framework of, you know. Brain. It was love. Like, can I speak to you about something? Yeah, of course. Like everyone's open and then the acknowledging of who you were and what you were able to do in the past. So honoring the past, right, and then talking about how moving forward it needs to be different.And that's a very easy framework. But acknowledging the past and who you were when you said yes is really important. Because if you're just like, I can't do it anymore. People were like, well, like I thought you liked doing it. And there's all of these like. Gaps in communication or their stories. Yeah, exactly.So that's what I like to do. And, and um, is that helpful? Does that answer it? Totally. Okay, cool. Totally. And what I love about that too is like even asking the question, cause like you were just saying like if I was just like, Hey Dee, I can't pick up your kids anymore. All of a sudden it's like the defense is up.It's like, well why? Like a million reasons go up there. Whereas if you're like, Hey, can I talk to you for a second? And you come and you're like. Yeah, sure. What's up? It's already like creating a safer container to have that combo. So I love that you just walked us through that entire scenario. Thank you.No problem. And like for you to, like you said, you completely like let go of so many things in order to live radically aligned. Do you struggle with that on a basis, like day to day basis now? Or is it easy for you to just like drop things that aren't serving you. Well at the beginning it was very difficult.It started with really my marriage. That was, that was a big one. And, and it's never easy to end a relationship, especially when there's love there and, and time and all of that. So that was not easy to do, but I knew that it was for my highest good. And. For myself and also for that person, because I know that in the relationship, and this is another thing, I'm going back to the obligation list and that conversation.So let's say that we're going back to me picking up your kids every weekend, hanging out with them every week. Well, if I'm continuing to honor or show up for you, even though I don't feel good about it, it's going to create. Tension in our relationship and it's not going to feel good. You're not going to know why, and I'm going to end up being passive aggressive.That's actually a natural thing with people pleasers. They don't know that they're doing it, but they have passive aggressive tendencies. So when you think about the cost and honoring other people that are involved in these obligations and things that you're letting go of, it's really important to think of what's the cost for them longterm view, playing a role that isn't yours.It's expired. And I really had to look at that with my husband and I was like, you know what? Like. I'm costing him the opportunity to, for him to be with someone who really, really, um, wants to be in it. And it has radically line with him. And I, I'm not that. We didn't have the same values. And so that's why it's so important to your values.So when I left, I knew, yes it was for me, but I also had to really feel into, I want the best for him. And what's the cost longterm for him? Cause he's not getting any younger either. He wants kids and all of those things. And when I could get into that space, it was a selfless releasing. Hmm. To answer your question as far as letting go of things, you know, at first it can be difficult, but every time I do the internal work on myself that I take my clients and people through, I always feel good about it.And the people and the places and the environments that I released, they normally do too. And yeah, there are some people, um, that I've released in the last year, even that I'm like, Oh, this is, this is awkward or difficult because there were people that were close to me. But I will not dishonor my soul.And sometimes that means walking away from things and, and sometimes not having the kind of conversations that, you know, in a perfect situation you would have, but it's about, I will not allow myself to dishonor my soul. And I love that. And that's like where the radical part really comes into it because so many people like will be like 99% in, but then just keep the 1% back.And it doesn't necessarily work that way. It's like you have to be a hundred percent an FPS or an F. No. And that's like essentially what you're saying, you're like. If it's not a hundred percent FES ain't doing it. And, and so with that, with friendships, with relationships, with environments, I have a really tight filtering system of who I let into my inner circle, outer circle, outer, outer circle, et cetera.And it's not saying any one's bad or less than, that's not what I'm saying. It's just about alignment based. People in my inner circle have the same values as me. Um, they can teach me something, I can learn something from them. It doesn't mean that they're like actually my teacher. It means that maybe they're a mirror for me and my bullshit's coming up and I have to clear it.So that's, that's a sole person that I would want in my circle. But there's certain qualities, values, and things that I hold really true to myself in the people that I keep closely and I'm very aware of. Um, what belongs where in my life. And it makes things really easy. Actually. And I love that you keep on bringing up values.I was actually on a call this morning with my friend, my good friend, glow, and we were talking about values in a relationship and I'm like, I had never actually done that with my partner, like asked, what are your three values? Or even like really told him what mine are. So we're actually going to do this exercise where he doesn't know it yet.I told glow and now I'm telling you. And all the ladies who were listening, you should do this with your partners, but like find out, write down what your three values are, find out what your three values are, but then also guests to see what your partner three values would be and then have him do the same or them do the same for you.And then kind of like compare and see even I see the same situation or the same, you know, the same core list of values. I love that. And it's interesting, I was in conversation with a colleague the other day and. And she's been married for a long time and she's like, you know, I was at someone's wedding and, and this man said, you know, the key to happiness longterm is compromise.And, and for me and my being, I was like, Ooh, I don't like that word. I don't like that word. Right? Like by being kind of like tightened. But she's like, no, but I get it. And this woman's been married for a long time and, and she said, you know, it's compromising on the small things but never compromising on your values.And she's like, that's why I've been married for so long. She's like, because we have the same values and we've made an, we've made an agreement, like there might be one or two that are off. She's like, but we never compromise on our values. And that's like why they are so happy in their marriage. Because they can compromise on the small things, but they never compromise on their values.And I feel like a lot of us in our dating relationships or um, our friendships, it's like there's a clash in values and that's where the chaos, that's where the maybe drama or whatever else comes in and it's because values are the foundation of a healthy relationship. Totally agree. Some guys are going to do that.I will see how it goes. Like I'm actually interested, I'm going to make them do it later today. So posted. I wanted to sort of turn the conversation a little bit. We met three years ago at a Tony Robbins fence. The first night we met, we walked on fire together, like legit across hot coals. So fun. And then while I was in New York city, we were in New York city.I went shopping and bought a bunch of really crazy wild outfits because I was going to my first burning man, you know, in a few weeks. And you were like looking and you're like, you know, at the outfits and you're like, I think I'm going to come, and we put it out in the universe. You ended up manifesting a ticket and lo and behold, we had our first burn together.I can't even say it without laughing because it was like honestly one of the most fun experiences of my life, because your first burn is always so memorable. I've been three times, I guess now. But like, it's just like nothing beats the, like the, like sizzle of the first. And so how would you describe Bernie man to anybody curious about it?So first they have to share the whole story. Okay. I mean, not the whole story cause we'd be here for days. So I always ask the universe for signs. And at this point I was getting all these signs to go to burning man, but I was, I was in my bubble a little bit, just got out of my longterm relationship of eight years.And you know, it wasn't super liberated in some ways, and self-express and so Sam, my wild new friend is like, girl, you've got to come to burning man, showing me all the things, and, and then I manifest all these tickets. So I got the ticket in the mail. I said yes. And then I drove down to burning man on my own, and that was an adventure and it's, I'm didn't even know what I was going to wear.I had a bag of like random costumes that my friends gave me, um, got lost in the, uh, on the desert on the way there had a Holy S moments when there was a, a T in the road. There's no. No signs in the middle of the desert, there's a broken gas station to my left. I don't have a map. I'm out of water. Um, prepared spontaneity.You, my friends post-weld on therapist, no cell phone service. And I was like, Oh my gosh, I'm going to die in the desert. Like this is not good. It's like a left and it's wrong way. I might be in trouble. I have half a gas, a tank left if I go right. You know, like all the things were coming up and as soon as I felt the feelings.This police car came up and showed me the way, and it was like this universal sign, like D and like, this is for all of us when we say yes to the not just to the poles, um, things figure themselves out and it's cool to be spontaneous and, and so I get to burning in, don't know where my camp is, and it's in the middle of the night that get you to roll in the Playa desk, which seriously took me two years to get out of my car, by the way.Like, like bro, my haunted Elementor right. I'm like, I had it professionally cleaned. Nope, there's still there. Still apply a desk in there. So you roll in the desk to like get over yourself cause you're going to have dust everywhere for the next two years. And I get there and it's like this massive city, but it's, um, it's just like pops out of nowhere and I can't find my camp.And I get there and I look around and there's people on floating bikes, it looks like, cause there's just, all you see is lights. And I just was like, Oh my gosh, everyone's on drugs. Like, what did I sign up for? And I remember the Lance my trunk grabbing a bottle of wine and my sleeping bag reclining my chair in my car, have you a sip of wine and putting my blanket over my head and be like, what did I, what am I doing?Like, why am I here? Right? Like, this is just, I don't know what I signed up for. My friends sounds crazy. And then the next morning I get up and I realize I'm actually parked outside of the camp that we were at. And I'm like, Hey, is Sam here? And one of the guys is like, Oh, she's in that pod. And I remember opening the pod maybe like 10 inches max.Okay. Sam's sleeping right sparkles all over her face, like in her own, like you know, world. And all of a sudden she goes from lying down like she's dead to full on, standing up doing circles around like this pot. Oh my gosh, Deidre, like the Playa dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. And I remember just being like, what. Is going on here like this is wild.Like what? What is she talking about? She's talking, you were talking so fast had sparkles all over the place. Probably lipstick on different parts of your face from like just sleeping funny. And I remember just being like, what is this? And then you're like, we have to go to the center. We have to go out on the Playa.I'm like, okay. So we got a bike, and the moment we just started rolling out on the Playa, it was like I got high, this wave of being high from the Playa desk, and I just entered into the magic of it all. And so many synchronicities, so many moments of just pure joy, magic, um, burning. All I can say is that burning man is everything that you could ever imagine.It's all of the lessons at once and all of the magic, and it's just, it's just a beautiful community of, of everything. And, and it was the most spiritual experience I've ever had in my life at that point in my life. And it really broke me open to. So many things from that one experience. I can't even get into the stories of it because it's like, it's not even going to do it justice.It's just pure magic and it's not what you think it is. It's what whatever you need, you're going to get from the Playa. And that's what they say. It's like you go to the place of wanting to have an experience, but you're really going to get what you need and the synchronicities that happen there. It's just like there's so many people that go to burning man that are so open and elevated and just like they just.Go into this vortex of like possibility, and there really is no place like it. There is no place like it, and it's so fun to dress up too, and you're just, it's just magic. And it was so fun to share that with you and for you to show me the way. Oh yeah. We had, we had a way, that's for sure. It was fun. But it kind of even goes back to the thing that you were talking about before, like all of the things that don't serve us.It's like letting go and shedding and like burning. Even like it's symbolic cause like the, they, they burned stuff there. They built these beautiful different like monuments and different places and then you celebrate it, you enjoy it. But at the end they burn it down. And it's like the, the, the idea of impermanence, how things are constantly changing.Like enjoy the moment. But there's a moment when everything is going to be dust. So it just like, it's really symbolic on such deep levels of life. I love that. It actually, um, yeah, I almost feel emotional about that because any time that we cling on to something, and this is human behavior, when we cling onto something and we're like, I identify as this, this is me, and, and you know, we could talk about my marriage or whatever's going on in my life or your life or anyone's life, but anytime we hold on to something.We're not actually in the moment anymore. And so I love that. If the burden, it's also the purification of, of the soul, it's the letting go, right? And it's just a beautiful way of honoring your past. So, um, I think there's a lot, probably why we burn, you know, letters that we never, I ended up giving to people.And it's about honoring, releasing, and, and being in that moment. And I remember peeing at the burn with you, Sam, and us just being dressed like, I don't know, you were like a mermaid or something with your purple hair. I love way cause like for me it's like that's my thing. I'd love wearing crazy color hair.It's just so fun. Yeah. I could see you having permanent purple hair, by the way. I think I'm like bad ass just putting it out there. I support it if you choose to do it or the wig. But I remember just watching the burn with you, like the big burn on the last night and just eyes wide open. Whoa, Whoa. Oh my gosh.It's such a immersive experience and it's something like that. I've always been experiential person, and so I say yes to things based on what feels right in the moment I'm like, okay, I have a pull. I'm going to go talk. That person do that thing. It's all of the magic in life can only be experienced. It can't be thought about.And so it's about saying yes rather than saying, well, trying to figure it out. So every time that I've said yes to something, based on a feeling, it's all turned into magic. And burning man was a huge piece of that. So everyone should go to burning man. Everyone should go to Bernie. Man. I remember when we were there, actually, I was like one of the night exhibits, and I guess I was like putting like my bike chain on, or I was doing something to my bike and I was looking down.I looked up and I saw your face. It was just like, like almost like a deer in headlights staring out, and then I'm like, what is that? You're like, Oh my gosh, Gerard Butler was just there and he smiled at you. And then I turned around to see him, but then he was gone. Was it George Butler? Yeah. You were like, you're like deep, go talk to him.Go talk to him. He was looking over it. I was like, I was too cool. I was like, no, I didn't even though, no, I didn't. Yeah. I'm like, when I looked, he was already gone and then I was like, so tell us, cause he like smiled at you. Yeah. I was like, I'm not going to go talk to him. I'm too cool anyways that everyone should go to burning man.It is like a once in a lifetime experience. It's like another world. And if you are curious, Google it right now and be like amazed by, it's like mad, mad max almost meets, I don't even know what else. A different planet. It's not earth. It's definitely not earth. Four texts into another dimension. We're just going to leave it at that.On that note, is there anything else that you want to share? I could share like a message? Is that what you'd like me to share? Sam? Yeah. So the message is, is that if you are going through anything right now that isn't feeling good, definitely I invite you to do that. You know, assessment, the joy and not the joy, but the obligation assessment, cause that's super bad ass can change your life.And the next piece is if you're looking to do more of that and find out what the gap is, what is in the way of you having and being and living the life that you deep down want to experience. I have a freebie on my website that I'm happy to and you over to. It's 24 categories of life. Oh, where you are now, where you want to be, and really identifying exactly what's in the way so that you can show up more powerfully for that.And I believe there's also a video series with it that can help you move through that. So you can go run over to my website, we can drop the link below it radically aligned.com and. It's one of the most powerful tools that I've used on myself and that a lot of the people that I work with do, and, and, and yeah.Just the question. This is, this is the quote that I love. The question is not whether or not you are here to do great things. We're all here to do great things. The question is, are you ready to wake up to the truth of who you are and who you're meant to be? Because your soul is infinite. It's joy, it's love, it's abundance, it's connection.It's all of the things that you could ever imagine. Anything or anyone that tells you you are not that. Is not like is not playing in your magic. It's not honoring you. And it's important for you to remember who you are by plugging in to people, to podcasts like this, hanging out with Sam, Sam's amazing and plugging into the magic of life, because that's where everything great happens and it cannot be process.It has to be experienced. So. Jumping into those experiences saying, yes, and I know that you have a Morocco trip coming up sometime soon, and I think that's pure magic. So, um, that would be an experience. If you feel the pull to say yes to, I want to be there, you'll be there. We'll be there in Morocco some point soon, once this pool.Pandemics over. Yes, totally. But on that note, thank you so much my dear. I thank you for doing this. Thanks for having me. This is so fun. And, and going back to memory Lane's fun with you, Sam.ar. I love, I love your brand. I love everything you stand for the radically aligned life. What does that mean to be radically aligned? Ooh, that's a great question. I was feeling into this the other day. So first of all, everything happens in the exact moment it's supposed to. And before we jumped on here, we were talking about birthing something into the world.And so when you're pregnant with something like a baby, you can't push it out at six months or five months or rush it and everything. Great takes time. And so I remember being under this tree in San Diego, um, about a year and a half ago, and I was meditating. I don't remember what I was meditating at, but I was at a friend and Rashard seminar and a bird pooped on my shoulder.And as the bird pooped on my shoulder, I got the name radically aligned. And so I love it when that happens to me. And it happened to me recently too. So I'm feeling really good about myself. I'm like, something good's about to happen. I love that. Well, they say it's good luck, but I mean, just to love it when you get a bird poops on your shoulders, just like, that's hilarious.Totally. So when I think of radical alignment, there's different stages of it, and I actually have this. This graph that I've been creating to really map it out on our journey and how to really awaken to our highest self and our full potential, but essentially radical alignment is you are radically aligned.It's like the center of. Across, you know, not being religious that the center across, like it's the dead center of the core of who you are. And there's no being off path. There's no compromising. There's no, I'm not sure. There's no maybes. There is no, um, Oh. Um, if this happens, then that will happen. It's a strong knowing that, well, you are.And being radically honest with your path and not compromising and going off path because of distractions, because of old programming, because of what people think you should do because of self-sabotaging behavior when you're radically aligned. You are unstoppable. And these are the people in the world that I think of that are the, I work a lot with up and coming thought leaders and those who have a message inside of them that they know, like they're not quite where they're supposed to be yet.And there's a gap because they're not radically aligned from the outside looking in though they look like they have their life together. They seem aligned, but they know they're playing small. They know that there's something bigger and this is where radical alignment comes into place because the more aligned we are.The quicker we can manifest what we want and the less distracted that we get and the more confident we are. But it's not even a doing. It's the being ness that attracts what it is that we want to have in there. Certain rituals, practices, tools, and um, processes that I take people through to make sure that they've cleaned up trauma, that they've worked through, pieces that are still like the dust that hasn't quite settled in their life to clean that up.So it's like having a. Like a diamond that has dust on it. You know? It's about the polishing. So it's the polishing. It's like you're already amazing. You're already great, you're already rocking, you're doing all the things that you love. But the polishing is in the radical alignment. So I would compare it to maybe a, um, I'm a Lamborghini.Okay. So there's a lot of people who are Lamborghinis, so they're super sensitive. They're super dialed in when they are radically aligned with who they are and who they're meant to be in the world as far as influence, impact, and all of that. But they're operating, they're giving themselves the fuel. Of a Honda.And the truth is if you bring a Lamborghini up to a regular pump, and I don't have a Lamborghini, but I'm pretty sure that you need different fuel, you need different services. And the truth is when you're a Lamborghini and you're in the car and you're out of alignment just a little bit, there's something that's not quite right in, in the system.It throws the whole thing off, it throws the whole path off, and it can actually take you off track with your full potential. So it's about getting people to know that they have six cylinders, 10 cylinders, whatever, instead of two that they're operating on and it opens up the doors for everything. I love that.I love the idea of radical alignment. I want to know the tools, the different things that you would use to get people aligned. The first. I'm going to assume that you haven't always been this passionate and this like aligned even yourself. Like there's obviously a story that sort of got you there. So I'd love for you to share your journey of getting into radical alignment.Wow. So that's a big question. Everything starts at a young age and it's called soul school, right? So we go through all these obstacles. We have these moments of this is who I am when it's not the truth of who we are. And for me, at a young age, when I was probably six or seven years old, I started to live a dual life.So I would go to school and I was a happy go lucky girl, like friends with everyone. I'm had a hard time learning and staying focused in school. Um, and then I would go home and I had a family member that had an addiction. And because of that addiction, it was this space of lack of certainty when I would come home.There was a space of lack of knowing how things would be and also deep concern for that person in my life. And it was a part of my life that I categorized. And we do this as humans. We categorize moments in time. We categorize parts of our life to disconnect from it because we don't know how to process it.So at around the age of six or so that was happening. So I'd go home and I'd have a totally different experience. I wasn't able to speak my truth. I wasn't able to be a little girl. I had to be my own, you know, my own best friend, my own parents in a lot of ways. And so there was this dual personality, do a life.And so this pattern continued into high school. I was the popular girl, I was friends with everyone at school. But I didn't really get too close to any groups. I was the one that was friends with all the groups because I didn't want to let anyone get too close to me because I didn't want them to see the truth that I had something to hide.And then I was taking on someone else's addiction, someone else's behaviors as my own. There's a lot of deep shame and a lot of deep separation from both of those lives. And so naturally, um, when you live with someone who has an addiction or anything like that, or you know, you're in a relationship with someone who has an addiction, um, you can become codependent, which is trying to fix everyone else's problems or trying to support everyone else too.Avoid dealing and feeling what's going on on a deeper level. And also with that, there's also the people pleaser that comes up. I see this all the time with people, and a lot of that comes back to codependency and also having a family member or somebody in your world that has an addiction and addiction, that behaviors as far as how they act is very different than maybe how addicted or how often they go to whatever that is for them.So again, I was the happy go lucky girl. I had one emotion. And it was, I'm happy all of the time. So that continued into my adult hood and essentially I had more trauma in when I was 19 I was raped and didn't know how to process that. So I categorize that again. And I got really good at checking things off of the list, that list of get married, um, buy a new car, buy a house, go traveling together.All of the things. And again, from the outside looking in, it looked like I was the happiest person. Everyone knew I had the perfect life, the perfect marriage. I had a business that was doing well in a lot of external validation for it, but. I was not connected to myself. I was not connected to my truth.And because of that, I was avoiding dealing with the voice that was trying to come up. That was saying, first of all, every time I've reached a goal, I was saying is this it? Like looking around like, is this really what success is? Is this really what love is? Is this really what life is? And that continued to push me to chase new goals.But I never quite felt like it was, it always felt empty. It's like you're chasing these things. You get there and it's like, now what. Yeah. Right. And so I was chasing these pieces of external validation and essentially I was running away from myself as I was running towards a goal. So I kept feeling that way.And of course it led to burnout and other symptoms. But then there was another voice that was coming up and the voice was saying, there's so much more. Yeah, you are so much more capable and powerful. And you know, and I knew deep down that there was something that I was supposed to step into that because of all of the programming, because of all of the disconnect, the dual life, the categorization.It felt like impossible to even bring it into my conscious reality. And so with that, I started to get a lot of symptoms, a lot of manifestations of disease. Because as you noticed, and I know we've Jan about this before, is anytime our soul is not being honored, it speaks to us through symptoms of disease.And. I manifested depression, massive social anxiety, even though I was in front of about a hundred people a day. I have panic attacks. I manifested auto immune disease and what else? And food sensitivities. Stomach pain. Yeah, totally. And so it's like all of these were the universe or my universe, my body saying pay attention.But the thing is. And, and if you're listening right now, and I'm sure you can relate to Sam, it's like when things come up in our body, it's so easy to be like, Oh, well my mom has this, or it runs in my family, or, Oh, I should take a pill for it. Or, Oh, it's just a part of me. There's like this acceptance of the bullshit in our life.You know what I'm saying? 10. And it's like NSC acceptance of the symptoms and the symptoms is a sign that you were so out of alignment with your soul's calling. And I knew this, I was like teaching wellness. Like I knew you back then too, like I was in that wellness space. I own a yoga business and it was, I was like living and teaching a lot of these things, but I wasn't really owning it and embodying it.So I finally had my wake up call. It wasn't any of the things I said before. But was it like an Elizabeth Gilbert moment? Like, did you have a moment where it's like you hit rock bottom with it and you were just like, the universe just wasn't going to let you keep going? Exactly. That's exactly what happened.And so I, so I had all those symptoms. I pushed him away cause I was like runs in my family, whatever, whatever stories as we do, accepting the bullshit of our symptoms and our life. And um, I remember one day, Sam, and like at that time in my life I had mermaid hair. It was down in my hips and it was kind of my thing.And I was going through my hair one day as us girls do, and I noticed, Oh my gosh, I am missing a huge chunk of hair. And it was like on the top of my head, I had a massive bald spot. It was like the size of the toony. Whoa. Yeah. Completely bald. Completely bald. Like right on the top of my head right there.And I just woke up one day and it was like that. And it wasn't like, you know, when you shave something and you can see like, there's like, there's still hair growth, but you know, maybe it was ripped out or something happens. Like your hair was stressed out. It wasn't breakage. It was totally bald. And, and I remember, I remember the moment getting out my smartphone and, you know, um, having the camera on and going in the mirror.I'm like, what the heck is going on here? And it was this massive bull spot. And this was the moment when the universe was like, okay, Dee, we gave you this, we gave you that. We tried to whisper. We try to take it easy on you. Yeah, there were a million yellow flags, but it's going to take this one bread one.And that's usually what happens. Like yellow flag, yellow flag, yellow flag. And we just keep on driving poorly. So I, um, I was super stubborn, so I had to learn things the hard way. And, um, and then so that happened. And naturally natural instinct go to the doctor, what the heck's going on? Fix me? And the doctor said, Oh, well, it looks like you've developed another autoimmune disease.And I was like, huh? And she's like, yeah, like we can give you some steroids or, you know, some shots in that area of your head. But, um, she's like, you're probably gonna lose all your hair. Yeah. Wow. Okay. That's pretty scary. Yes. And they say also like, just going back to, um, people who go through cancer. Um, one of the biggest fears for women apparently isn't necessarily losing their breasts.It's actually losing their hair. It was like a, it was a big fear of mine. I'm like, Oh my gosh. And then I went home. I got the prescription because I was like, just in case I get home. And I was like, this is not going to be my story. This is not it. And I am going to listen. And I thought of Louise Hay's, I thought of her affirmations.I thought of what our body is trying to tell us. And I don't remember exactly what it said in the book about, you know, a bald spot. But I remember being like, it was like self hatred or something. And I chose to be with that, which is the truth, because my entire life. Based on past trauma and you know, living a dual life and checking things off the list.It was self hatred because I was not connected. To my soul. And so I remember talking to my husband at the time and he was like, so not woo, like black and white, like thought crystals were weird. Right. And I like owned that moment. Wow. In that moment was the moment I changed my entire life and my hair grew back. I started studying Mashama's. I've actually been working with shamans for almost a decade now. I started doing the inner work meditation, and what I learned through that journey is that. First of all, I believe, and I can see it in people.Most people are not even living in their truth. So radical alignment feels like what the F is that? And I get it. I was very disconnected and it took, it took me having that moment. To change it. And I know because my soul told me around this time too, that if I did not change my life, I was going to die of cancer in a year and I didn't have cancer, but my body, my soul was like, you are here to do work and you are not listening to your one and we're going to go after your vanity because you like to pretend that everything is great and you can't hide this.So wake up. Wow. But at that said, you probably look back at that moment and you're so grateful, so much gratitude, because I know that this is like what, six or seven years later, I wouldn't be alive. I would not be on this having this conversation with you if I didn't actually have that wake up call and change because I was so deep in it.And when we're so in something, whether it's a relationship or an area of our life where we have created all of these. You know, um, this checklist and we're, we're so in the role, it's difficult to even know that we're in the role because we've been playing the role our entire life. So. I had to wake up. I had to do the deeper work.It was not always comfortable, but it led me down the path of really understanding universal laws.  what our soul's telling us, as well as a bunch of other things, which has led me down this path of radical alignment and and seeing those symptoms in people and helping them break through really quickly.And on that note, I'm heal trauma. As we were talking a little bit about that earlier. Before we jumped on was unhealed trauma, I believe is the root cause of all suffering. Because what happens when we have a trauma? And so I had trauma when I was younger, like coming home and having a, um, a family member, not sure if they were alive and then having to like, not know how to deal with that and, you know, continue just showing up at school and in life and shoving it down.We do that all the time and we don't necessarily need to say we as a whole with humans right. We don't know how to, first of all, identify trauma and essentially it's anything in our life, any imprint that we haven't been able to process. And when we have a trauma, it actually takes us out of our body.Because it's not safe to be in our body. So when we're not in our body, we actually can't be aligned because it's like we're outside of our body. We're not connected to the symptoms. We're not connected to our heart, and we're constantly being triggered by our subconscious from any images, thoughts, body sensations, emotions, and then the energetics of anything that even slightly reminds of us of any of those imprints in our past of the trauma that we haven't fully.Completed because it's like a moment that's frozen in time. So I was triggered all the time, didn't know it, didn't mean that I was upset. It just means I kept taking steps away from my soul. And then I had my big wake up call and had to change my entire life. And in my marriage of eight years, I starting a new business.I started saying yes to adventures all the time. I had a lot of deep work to do and in the realization was the first step. Of course, it's healing trauma. You know, but it's, it's also like what is not me. And when I started to go through that, most of the things, most of the rules that I was living in plane and weren't me.It's not about finding or creating who you are. I like the idea of it, but it's more about who are you not and how is that showing up in your life? That's a really good way to look at it. I feel like it's easy to say, Oh yeah, everything's good, I'm great. Right? But then if you look at the back way, that way, it's like you can get other information about yourself and your situation and your, the people who are in your life or whatever it is, and it's easier to be like, well, is this really me?Is it serving me? Yes or no? And it's easier to let it go. Totally. Yeah. And it's, it's scary too, and, and that's why it's really important. Like, I know for me, when I was going through the process, it took me a few years to actually really take some of those outward steps of creating change. Because first it starts internally and it can be a little messy.But it's like finding the right community, the right support, being around people who get you right. And um, and so that's what led me down this path. And, and I see it in other people and I know that like, we're all here to do something, to create something to experience, love to bring love. And it comes through the foundational piece of being radically aligned.And there's different stages of that. So long story short, I mean. Phones are long. That's good though. Cause you're here, you're living here, you know your radical line life now and you're really holding the torch for other people to do the same. What are a couple of grounded things someone could do and implement in their life that would be really effective in terms of like achieving some alignment, like something that they could do today.I'm just thinking of, first of all, uh, I have a program that's running right now and we're on module two and I want to talk about this because this is exactly what we're sorting out. So I'm, one of the things that I love to do in my life, I do th

How to get out of your comfort zone by Steven Webb, episode 28 of the podcast stillness in the Storm's. Become a patron: https://stevenwebb.com/patreon Transcribe   EP28 – Getting Out Of Your Comfort Zone Host and Presenter: Steven Webb ______________________________________________________   Intro: How do we get out of our comfort zone? That was one of the most difficult things we'd ever do. And the only way you hear all these wonderful quotes everywhere on the internet about freedom is on the other side of your comfort zone in this wonderful Utopian world if you could only get out of your comfort zone. What is your comfort zone and how do we get out of it? I'm Steven Webb and this is Stillness in the Storms Podcast, and I help you to get through difficult times and give you a little inner peace. Before I start on that, I'd like to say thank you to my patrons: Farrell, Clint, Sheryl, Yvonne, and Maureen. Thank you, guys. Thank you for supporting what I do. And if any of you want to become a patron, head over to stevenwebb.com and there's a  link at the top to 'Patron'. Otherwise, thank you for listening to this podcast. Thank you for tuning in. How was your week then? My week has been pretty good. It's so interesting now. The world's opening up and there's so much change and there's so much frustration and there's so much anger and fear and yeah, there's a lot going on this week. There's a lot of energy, there's a lot of uncertainty and in all this uncertainty, there is this automatic out of our comfort zone. This is what we don't like, we don't like being out of our comfort zone. So I thought I'd do a podcast about comfort zone and about how we step out of it. And sometimes forcing out of our comfort zone really does help, but I just want to warn you that I'm not going to be editing my podcast in the same diligent way as I normally do. So there's going to be more 'ums' and 'ams'. There's going to be more gaps and pauses because I don't have time or the manpower or the means to be able to get it edited. I've been paralyzed from just below the neck and my fingers now been paralyzed. It takes me five times longer to do anything an able-bodied person could do. So in order for me to get the podcast out every week, I'm going to do less editing. You are warned. Comfort Zone  I was talking on my live today about my daughter. My daughter, Camber, she's now 23. And she used to play this computer game called Spy Row. And she used to play this same level for months and months and months. And it wasn't even getting through the level, it was like a pre-level running around. So you would run around on these little fields and jump in this water and over this little bridge and you would choose places to go into, to do the levels. Within each one of these levels, there were things you had to do. People you had to jump on and kill and buses you had to take out. But she wouldn't go in them and I was like getting very frustrated.  I was like, "No, Cam, you've got to go into these levels. You're never going to get forever. You'll end up getting power-ups and you can jump higher and you can do all these things."  She is like, "No, I'm good."  And I'm like, "Yeah. But we've watched you play this running around, jumping into the water and jumping out the same area for like weeks now. Please, can we see a different area?"  "No, I'm good." "Aren't you bored we're playing the same thing?" "No, I'm good."  And I really couldn't understand that. I really got quite frustrated and sometimes I got quite like, "Well, Camby, you're never going to get anywhere unless you actually just go through the door. Go on, just go do it now in front of me, I'll help you."  And I used to be quite frustrated, which is the right word. I don't want to make it any stronger because it bothered me, but not too much. It was just, I couldn't sit there and watch her for very long. And I now realize why. It was okay understanding what she wasn't doing right or what she should be doing. I never understood why. And of course, she didn't want to aspire to get hurt. She didn't want to get hurt. She didn't want to go through the fear that feeling of somebody jumping out. Now, when she was ready, she took the step. When she was ready and confident and okay to venture out, she took the step. It wasn't my business to know when she was ready.  And I want to tell you another story. Shortly after I broke my neck, I was on the spinal unit. I had just got out of bed a few weeks previously. So I'd learned to push my chair really quite badly. It was a manual wheelchair. It was an NHS one so it was a good quality because they were our permanent chairs, but it was also, they weren't lightweight. They were very much a government-issued chair and they were heavy. And because I've got no triceps in my hands that worked properly, I could not push the chair in any meaningful way. I could get the momentum to go forward, but then turning any corner or turning on the spot was incredibly difficult. To push one wheel one way or the other wheel the other way was like really hard and it must have been painful for anybody to watch us do it really slowly.  Well, a group of carers or nurses came to the spinal unit for the day and me, Alan, and Jason was asked to go in and do it a small speech, a small chat. I've never done anything like this apart from when I was at school and I wasn't really in any kind of drama class. So standing out in front of anybody, it was just something I did not do apart from telling the odd joke when I was a child in the, I suppose, greenhouse when we had a barbecue with friends. But essentially this was something new and I was terrified. I can remember the hour came, counting down. "What do you want me to talk about?" I said to like the sister on the ward. "Oh just talk about what it's like to be first injured, what it's like to be, from your perspective, of breaking your neck and things like that." I was like, "Yeah, but I don't know. I don't know." But in the end, I said, "I'll do it. I'll brave it. I'll do it."  And I would never have done it unless I had two people with me.  So it came to the time and we pushed our wheelchairs up there. The door opened and I was the third in the row. And pushing us out, it must have been an absolute comedy if it wasn't so painful for us all; completely straight face, completely serious. Jason goes in first. Now Jason, his arms were longer than his body, I swear, and they used to wave in every direction. If there was ever an orangutan in a wheelchair that was him. And then there was Alan. Alan was very serious, very subdued. And then there was me. I don't know what I was, I have no idea. I could see what they were, but I couldn't see what I was.  And Jason pushed himself in first, joking, and then Alan pushed himself in, and then it was me banging myself into the back of his chair because I wanted to get in as quickly as possible, and I didn't want to be stuck out too far either. So the balance was basically crashing into the back of his chair because once I pushed forward, I couldn't stop. And I went in there and I'm asked to turn around on the really low shag pile carpet. And I'm asked to turn up and face, it was about 30 people. And I spoke about the dangers of diving and I was terrified. I thought it went absolutely terrible. I was sweating. I was nervous. Every word I said, I swear I stuttered because I used to have a terrible stutter.  And then I left. And I was down on the ward, about 10 minutes later, I don't know, a couple of hours later, I have no idea, really, one of the nurses came down and said, "Oh, they would like a word with you." I was like, "Who?" "Oh, one of the people in the audience would like a word with you."  I was like, "Oh, okay. You have to push me because it's like, where I'm at, it'll take me like 20 minutes to get there."  So the nurse pushed me and we got up there and the lady looks up and says, "We would like to help you."  I was like, "Why?" She says, "Well, you wanted to do some kind of campaign to stop people from breaking their necks and do some kind of warning. We'd done a whip around with some money. And we thought what you said was really powerful. We thought you were amazing."  I was like, "I thought I was a bloody mess. I thought it was terrible.” It was so raw but I guess it was real. And the point of it is that there was about, I don't know, $18, which would be about 12 pounds in there and enabled me, I kinda went down with it because it was some months before when I come home but that was like 27 years ago.  Getting out of your comfort zone in stages The point of getting out of your comfort zone is you don't have to do it all at once. You don't have to go and jump metaphorically. Your comfort zone, it's fine for certain situations, but you don't have to be ready. You don't have to be so perfect and ready to leave your comfort zone. You know, just like Camber, my daughter, with that game and just like me, if I'd waited years and years and years until I was the perfect speaker, I would have done no better. If Camber had waited and waited and waited, she would have done no better on the other speeds because she would not have known what she was up against.  The thing is we have to grow our muscles by doing, we have to leave our comfort zone. We have to put on a different movie if we're a child. We have to stop redoing the same day again and again and again. And it's really difficult. It's not easy to do something different. And this is why in this time of lockdown, in this time of unrest, we fear discomfort. The greatest love you can give a child is comfort, security, love, and safety. We almost ask our children to stay safe, not to get out of their comfort zone. Don't do anything that's gonna hurt you and then when a child goes out and they do something that hurts them, we're like, "Why did you do that? Why did you climb on that?"  So, we almost want everybody and we get taught not to go out of our comfort zone.  I'm not saying run and jump. I'm not saying dive over a wall in the swimming pool as I did. I'm saying go down the road on the pushbike that you're not used to doing. I'm saying, read the book, watch the movie, learn something different. If someone's offering you an opportunity, take it and learn along the way. If you want to start up a business, you don't need to know about taxes and all the 'how to register a business', designer logo. If you want to do public speaking, you don't have to be a perfect public speaker. If you want to do Facebook Lives, if you want to start up a podcast, you don't have to have all the perfect equipment. You don't have to have the gift of the gab. You just have to start. If you want to do a podcast, just to record five minutes talking about your favorite subject. You don't have to decide your whole podcast or 120 episodes.  Failure is progress The problem is we look so far down the road and we think we cannot get there so we don't bother. Getting out of your comfort zone is not about having the perfect sharpened sword. It's about knowing that you're going to learn along the way. It's about knowing that failure is okay. Failure is learning. I can list all the times where I've put out something that's just terrible. Look back at my first Lives, look back at things I was doing three or four years ago. I was where I was and jumping out of that comfort zone has given me more confidence in recording this podcast. Every podcast, I'm slightly out of my comfort zone. Every Live, I'm slightly out of my comfort zone.  If I get too comfortable, then I'm not learning, I'm not growing. I know comfort feels good and I know fear feels terrible, but we should have fear, recognize the fear and go, "It's okay. I'm not going to go all the way. I'm just going to take a step, dip my toe in." So to speak. That's wisdom, dip your toe in, check the depth of the water. I'm joking about that and I'm laughing at the time only because I broke my neck in the swimming pool when I dived in. It was the deep end and it was lit up and it was full of water. There were so many rumors about my accident over the years, they are just funny:  "He must've been drunk." "The pool was empty." " It was the shallow end."  None of those things are true. What's true is I was a dumb ass and I was showing off; that's the truth, but that's okay. When we were younger, we haven't got a defined comfort zone so much as we have when we're older. So hopefully, my stories have helped you recognize your comfort zone, recognize the comfort zone in others.  And just think today, how much do you miss out on staying in your comfort zone? Where in your life are you just staying in your comfort zone because it feels good to you? What things have you said no to that you don't believe you had the ability or capacity to learn, to be able to grow into that role? And there are many things I've said no to and knocked back. There are these people I would like to have on this podcast. There are people I would like to interview, but I don't message them just in case they say, yes. What happens if I message like Richard Rohr and say, "Come on my podcast"? He's a brilliant Franciscan priest, that would just be an amazing conversation. What would happen if I messaged him and said, "Will you come on my podcast?"?  What would happen if he said, "Yes"?  That would mean I'll be out of my comfort zone and I'd have to grow. And now here's the problem; I'd now have to email him and ask him, don't I? if any of you know Richard Rohr, tell him I'm trying to get out of my comfort zone and I would love for him to come on my podcast. He's a genuine, such an open-hearted, warm, loving character. He taught me so much about the true self/false self, the falling upwards, the first and second half of life. Outro: But yes, comfort zone, it's hilarious. So get out of your comfort zone, head over to stevenwebb.com, and click to have a chat with me. I don't charge, it's donation-based only. And see if I can help you if maybe you have anxiety or depression as a visitor at the moment, and you're struggling with finding inner peace in this uncertain difficult time. And I get it. There isn't any shame in feeling all those things at the moment, there's no shame in feeling them anytime. So head over to https://stevenwebb.com/ click on over, become a patron, if you would like to support and get the more inside stuff of what I do. This stuff is not available elsewhere. Take care, have a wonderful day. And the website is stevenwebb.com. Bye.

James: Hey, audience and listeners. This is James Kandasamy from Achieve Wealth Through Value Add Real Estate Investing Podcast. Today I have Raj Tekchandani from the Boston area. Raj is a co-sponsor/KPGP in 650 units across Georgia, Florida, Kansas City, and Texas. Hey Raj, welcome to the show Raj: Thanks, James. Thank you for having me James:  Good. I'm happy to have you here because I want to talk about technology. You are a technology guy turned into a multifamily investor, right? Raj:  Absolutely, I can speak technology all day long James: Yeah, absolutely. So I want to make sure I give you an opportunity to explain some things that I missed out. So why don't you tell us about your story? How did you get started and how did you end up being a multifamily investor? Raj:  Sure, I will do that. So hi guys, I've been in technology for most of my career, I did Undergrad Computer Science, then I did an MBA in high-tech so purely technology-based and wanted to become the next big company founder. A lot of my jobs were mostly startups but when I realized that I'm sitting on a lot of options and not going anywhere, I said, I need to diversify and started looking into real estate investing that was not until 2012, but that was just a side gig. I still was fully devoted to my job, which was startups and it was in data analytic space and we're building a platform to connect all the data in the world together and put meaning into data, using something called a Data Lake. A lot of formal companies were using our software, financial services, but there was no real estate company using it. But anyway after I finished my five years with that company, my stocks options fully invested. I was like, okay, what is my next startup? And by this time I had started collecting my grants from the little investments I'd done. I had started investing in 2012 in one Condo in Orlando, Florida, and gradually went on to buy more because the prices were very attractive and I could see the prices going up and I said, let me just get in there, so I got in there, fortunately, had a good property manager that helped us take the worries or headache off our head and the cash flow was beautiful. So in about 2016, I said, okay, they need me to see this look and I bought actually a 15 unit multifamily near my house in Boston and I wanted to do more of that because I'd heard, you know, multifamily the whole economy is upscale. So I said, let's get into multifamily and that experience was interesting, to say the least. I had not too much knowledge about the underwritings and how to really look at expenses and that came in as a very expensive learning lesson for me in terms of multifamily. So from there on, I said, this is too much work, I can't do this. I found a good property manager and he quit and then found another one then he quit and it's like, this is too much. So I said, no passive investing is my way to do it, this whole active thing is not my thing and I'm still working full time on my job. So I started nesting passively with some investors. The first time I looked at a passive deal I was like that's too much, there are too many zeros in here, I can't do this but gradually as I understood, I took learning and took all the courses and reading blogs and podcasts and I got comfortable with investing passively and then a couple of passive investments and I was like, this is great, I have my nine condos, I have my fifteen hundred, which has now started giving me cash flow and now has passive investments. Interestingly, it was almost matching up to my startup salary. And I was like the options are great, but what if the options don't mature or do much? So I took a bet and I quit after five years of my job to do real estate full time and that's how I dig more into multifamily. But interestingly at that point, I had this idea of another startup, which didn't go too much far because I wanted to take these learning from data analytics into real estate and now that I'm doing multifamily and doing all this, I'm not seeing too many systems out there. It's still very, laborious jobs, the property management company is a lot of work on paper and even the underwriting was very painful. So I was like, what if there's an automated software machine learning data, whatever we have learned in technology to build that. So I met up with the person at MIT, Jennifer, she had done a Ph.D. in Real Estate Technologies, like Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning for Real Estate. I'm like wow this is a person that I James: Talk to right? Raj: Yeah, so I sat down with her and she went through her thesis with me. In fact, she was nice enough to explain her thesis; there are too many companies out there that are doing what I'm trying to do.  James: So what was the thesis about? Raj: The thesis was the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence in real estate  James: But is it real estate underwriting, or is it real estate analysis or--  Raj: --Real estate analysis  James: Is it for investment or is it-- Raj:  So she actually worked for MITs and Darwin program buying the advisory real estate James: Oh, okay. So they're basically looking at investing Raj: So they're looking at investing so mostly commercial real estate, eventually, from her thesis, she came into that, MITs fund. She was working there at that time. But in her research, she had looked at a lot of technology companies, right? From doing everything from sensitivity analysis to underwriting to figuring out where the locations thesis are, property management companies that are looking to do automation based on the [inaudible06:24] so a lot of machine learning in there. Actually, one of the companies that struck me at that time was in [inaudible06:33], which is what I had been thinking about, sort of how to automate underwriting and how to take all the data that's been sitting in, all these Yardi Matrix and all the places that been collecting data. How can we leverage that to say, okay, well, this is a property that I'm looking at in multifamily, this is the address and boom, we'll go and run into algorithms and come back and say red light, green light, yellow light based on all these factors and in [inaudible 07:02] was doing that, some of that, I talked to the CEO there and start using the platform. So I had some suggestions for them into building other plans and other features on the platform but at that point I said, you know what, I'm more of a user now, and they're not technologists, I want to use these technologies that are out there, I can talk about what features they need, like lease analysis. In one of the deals we went inside in the back and you're looking at 150 leases, one by one, what is matching up. There's no use of doing that, those leases should be fed into a system and outcomes, and these are the mismatches  James: The lease [inaudible 07:38] should be automated Raj: This is a tenant profile and based on this tenant profile and this property and this neighborhood, this tenant profile will be surviving through any downturn, that’s what you need to know on tenant profile I'm sure somebody will build it in there; I think [inaudible 07:55] was already thinking about doing that. Anyway, from that I said, okay, I'm going to stay as a user, I started using these technologies but then I got stuck more into the whole underwriting piece and managing the properties, finding the properties, I was like talking to brokers, now I'm talking to this and that's how I met a couple of good people through coaching programs that I said, okay, it's time to take the next step, move from passive to active, and see how the big things are done. I wanted to be closer to the action. So that's how I got into active investments James: Got it. I mean, that's a lot of things there. So I want to go a bit more in detail on that, but that's good. I mean, so right now you're a full-time real estate investor, right? Raj: Full time real estate investor. Yes. I mean always thinking of the next technology ideas James: Well, that's the problem with all these tech guys coming into real estate? I also think the same, let's automate this, and let’s create a system on this Raj:  Yeah. But I mean, I keep in touch, keep a pulse on that. So I don't know if you know about this organization called CRE tech- Commercial Real Estate Tech, middle of New York and they are looking at all these things, all kinds of who's doing what, which company is being funded. So I keep in touch with them. I'm a member of them, but just looking at ideas, someday somebody has come with a great idea that we are still a little behind than other industries in terms of use of technology James: Oh yeah. Real estate is so manual. I mean, there's not many people investing in technology and it's a bit tricky too because a lot of people component Raj: And I was told one day that, (AI) Artificial Intelligence, the biggest tool, billions of dollars are being traded in real estate based on excel spreadsheets. That is the technology of choice of all these big reads and fund managers and they're just doing Excel spreadsheets James:  Yeah. I don't know why the real estate is just so hard to automate in terms of location because even like, if you look at a street, one side of the street can be completely different valuation from the other side. And how do you tell that to the software? You can't tell them that people have different preferences going in Raj: Well, if you feel that, you can tell that by how many murders were on the left side of the street and how many murders on the right side [inaudible 10:16] I mean, I just think the crime rate, our school districts and there are so many factors you can pinpoint it. Now there's so much data being collected on all of this, right? You just have to leverage the data and every time a property gets sold, a property gets bought that data is entered into a system, right? The analysis entered into the system, even for an upgrade, all the data has been entered so you should be able to tell that if I put granite flooring in this, or I put up vinyl flooring in this, or whatever, this is the gorgeous fettuccine down the road, right? Because that's [inaudible 10:50] James:  I think that's what [inaudible 10:52] does, right? Sometimes they do a lot of underwriting, they try to predict what is the rent going to be, but I'm not sure how big they are. I know there were some people really excited about it, but some people really didn't like it. I saw it once; the tool looks good for a tacky, right? If you're a second, it looks like everything's done for you. But I don't know for me, I don't feel comfortable yet. Raj: I think there's nothing. So all that said, James, there is no equal end to be having boots on the ground. So this is what I've learned James: Well, for real estate, you have to go to the property, you have to do the cost yourself Raj: Exactly. So you'll do all, that saves you a lot of time, right, because you can do the cost, the real analysis is done when you're there and you're looking at the property because we walked away from a deal that had everything looked good on paper and technology tools and everything, because this one building down the slope, had some structural issues that we didn't know, I mean, no technology tool will tell you that turning on some like pillars that are like fake  James: Correct. There's no way to know. I mean, as I say, I love all these tools, but I don't know for me, I don't want to pay so much money for this tool unless it giving me an automated thing. Raj: That's where the progression has to happen. The more they have to get better and they have to get cheaper for that option. Otherwise, excel spreadsheets help people doing their report James: One day will, right? I mean, if you look at it right now, we need a buyer agent, we need a seller agent to do a house transaction and the reason for that is so much people touch, right? I mean, a seller needs to know that he's getting the best value for his product. Only people can see the house and decide whether it's a good house or not, right? It's a bit hard for computer AI to really say that this is a good house for this person, right? Maybe one day it will. Raj: It will. They'll cut short the time or for your needs maybe James: Correct. And I know a lot of startups were trying to do all this right there. I mean, every tech guy who was introduced into real estate in the behind them is [inaudible 12:53], oh, I can do a startup, even syndication people are trying to automate right? They're trying to rank the sponsors, they tried to give stars to sponsors and everybody is trying to do all this but as I said, it's very hard to give a star ranking to sponsor there are so many other things that are involved. I mean, one day probably, yes. But we are not there yet with the technology, the information we have so how do you feel? I mean, you and I are almost the same, right? I mean, we're always in the technology space and suddenly become real estate. Do you think you've wasted all that lifetime in tech space? Raj: No, not wasted. It's a game, it's life as it plays out, now where I am my biggest strength is my value for my time. I mean, I control my time in what I'm doing, when I was working tech job, I mean, you had management meetings on Friday afternoon. I was like an owl, now if you go look at my calendar, you'll never find a Friday afternoon open because I dropped it James: Okay. That's good. Yeah. I mean sometimes people who have studied so much in certain fields, I don't know. I do see some doctors moving from being a doctor to becoming a real estate investor. I mean, at the end of the day it's all about time, right. Time and how much [inaudible 14:13] Raj: I mean it’s time and it's what you enjoy. I mean, I also realized that a lot of what I do in real estate is marketing and I love marketing James: Nobody cares in the tech company Raj: Yeah. So when I'm even in my tech job, my last job was in marketing. So I was basically a demand generation for this data analytics back on rebuilding. So basically evangelizing technology for people that don't understand it, it's sort of marketing. So writing blogs, writing white papers, writing all this stuff, simplifying things for them. That's what I had become in my technology job also because nobody wants to hear the mumble-jumble of data lakes and medication and all that stuff. It's like, bring it down. What does it do for me? And now he's the same thing, syndication and all what does it do for me? I mean, so marketing is basically attracting the right people and getting rid of people that you don't want in your system. So that's why even in capital raise or even the deals that we do it's very important to figure out who your customers are which in our case is investors and it took me a little while, my first four deals, I was like talking to everybody and anybody like, okay, this is what we have and I was like, no, that's not me finally figured out the people who are attracted to my deals, especially are tech executives, like me that have collected a decent paycheck, they have a decent amount of wealth, they want to diversify, they're paying a lot of taxes and they are paying [inaudible 15:50] that. So they want to learn about how real estate can help them with taxes, how real estate can help them diversify, a lot of them have invested completely in the stock market, which we have done that in the past and I've lost a lot of money in stock and that's why I never want to go back to stocks anymore and I'm trying to teach the same thing through my formal education. James: Yeah. Surprisingly not many people know about real estate. I know probably all the listeners here, they will. I mean, you are already learning and listening to podcasts about real estate, you already know, but it's very surprising to know how many people don't know about real estate and don't know what passive investing. I mean, people know that you can go buy a house and give it for rental, but nobody knows that I can put the money with a sponsor who will do the work every time Raj: They know real estate investing, they don't know realistic passive investing James: Correct Raj: Yeah, passive investors have become my passion James: Yeah. I mean, that's why I wrote my book too because not to introduce real estate to passive investors, I want them to be a bit smarter. I mean, sometimes when they got introduced to real estate, they think, wow, my God this is the best thing they just follow one way of thinking, right? So Raj: You just stole my line that's what I say, because, at smart capital, we make you smarter James: Okay, good. Because I mean, first, you get introduced to passive investing, second is how you become smarter, right? So let's talk about that. I mean, you said you have done some really cool stuff for passive investors and incorporating some technologies and all that Raj: Absolutely. I mean, again, nothing was planned. It just happened over time, my first deal, when I presented to some of my friends, they said, Raj take my $50,000. I'm not going to take your $50,000. You need to sit down with me, understand what it is James: Well, that's the problem with me. I don't like just taking money. I want you to understand the deal. Cause I believe it's a good deal Raj: I actually know the four friends that I had, I bought them tandoori chicken. I said, come sit with me and I'll explain to you what it means. So I bought wine and food. I said, look at this, I'm going to tell you what it is if you understand it and if you still want to invest, that's great. I want you to understand it because I can take the money and invest it, I mean, that's not a problem, that's the easiest thing for me, but I really want you to get smarter in my sense, you know, that's why smart capital and so that small group grew into a little bigger group and I created a meet up in the Boston area on just apartment investing and teaching what it is and growly slowly And I kept it small for a number of my first year I did it in my office in a conference room. They were like 35 chairs and who can come but we kept it very educational. That was the thing. We'll take a topic, we'll discuss the topic or make sure that anybody in the room is understanding and if there is somebody else experienced in the room, they're absolutely allowed to speak up and do so, kept it very educational, very different meet ups. A lot of people said, okay, Raj's meet up is educational so we're going to go there, and then I didn't have enough space so I took a bigger space now the membership in that whole meet up has grown to 600 plus people but we now get about 60, 70, 200 people monthly and I've kept it monthly and still, we talk about educational purposes There's no come have beer, learn about network and go back. That's not it. So to answer your point in doing so right, I've internally built some systems to make sure this is a smoother process for me. So in terms of the thought leadership platform, I have my meet up, I started doing blogs consistently. Obviously I'm active on Face book, LinkedIn, and really wherever else I can post my blogs. I also to become a member of the Forbes relisted council so I can do some technology related articles there and talk about what I'm thinking. So yeah, I've done all these things and now I have in a way that I've created this CRM and systems and attracting investors who, whatever platforms that they can get onto podcasts like this and talk more about what I've done in my past and just share my experiences, that's basically it. James: So how do you decide on doing a deal? Let's say someone brings you a deal, right? How do you decide this is a good deal, I really like it. What are the things that you look for? Raj: So the first thing I like, ideal deals only very few people. I mean, as partners, right? I mean, I'm not into numbers of deals and I don't count the number of doors. I don't do that. I like to enjoy myself, I mean, to [inaudible 20:30] my life, you're going to be just chasing money and [inaudible 20:33] James: You want to be peaceful too, right. Reinvesting the right sponsor because you can make an investment any-- Raj: --People that I enjoy, I mean, the deals will have good and bad times. One of our deals is we haven't done distribution, but I will say that I'll invest that deal again. I believe so much in the team that even because I'm so close to the deal and my investor is saying, Hey Raj, we haven't distributed work. I said it'll be fine. It's just because I trust the people that I work with and I could do another deal with them. So I’m very selective about who I work with, these are people from my coaching backgrounds, I've heard them say I hear them strength and they have to be complemented with my strength. So if I'm good at finding markets and I say, what, I'm going to invest in Orlando or Kansas City or whatever markets that I have in my head because I've done some research on data on that and obviously then underwriting should make sense but my number one criteria is the people that I work with and do I add value to them and they add value to me. So I will claim I'm not a good asset manager, I've never intended to be so I will always look for a very strong asset management on the team James: Got it. So you basically look for the sponsorship and how the team complements with you as well Raj: The dealership and the numbers should make sense, but that's true for everybody. You will not invest or be participating in the deal, that doesn't make sense James: Yeah. What do you look for in a very strong sponsorship team? That you really like? I mean, what personality, integrity or--? Raj: --Integrity, number one is integrity, right? I mean, the track record is okay, but I think track record, I've seen these guys done. I mean, it was not done like 15, 20 syndications, some of them have, but some of them are still early in the stage, they have done maybe two syndications before this one, but I've seen them through the coaching classes and going through with them to on due diligence trips. So I always go and make sure that I'm on part of, once we go sign up, form a structure, I'm going to get involved with all the due diligence and all everything. So I'd sit down with them and see what their work ethic is, how passionate they are about it, and will they stay committed with me? James: Got it. Very interesting. What about, on other things, in terms of the underwriting or in terms of market analysis, have you done any; have you incorporated any technology things into analyzing that? Raj: Yeah. I mean, I do my own technology things. I mean, I haven't written software for that, but I do look at a lot of data James: What kind of data do you look for? Raj: So, I mean, a standard feature, like population growth, job growth, and median income. We will also look at STEM jobs, right? I mean, I look at if it's a technology oriented job, are there or not because I mean, in these times the properties that are doing well, are people technology, company, people working from home, right? So all of that is important as well [inaudible 23:34] James: Got it. Very interesting. So is there any proud moment throughout this real estate career that you think oh, I did that and I feel really proud about it and you can never forget about it until the end? Raj: Well, the proud moment was I'm into partner with you on my first deal. I mean, that was a very proud moment. I told you right when the first time I looked at syndication when a friend of mine presented to me, he was on the GP side, I was on the limited partner side. He says "Raj I got the deal."  And I said, "What is this? This is like 300 units. I mean, there are too many zeros. There was no freaking way." So now when I did my first deal with that number of zeros, I mean, it was not 300, it was 152 units that deal was a very proud moment for me having gone through understanding what it means and then the other proud moment was to convince some of my investors to partner alongside with me right now that I learned this and I'm sort of sharing my education. I don't even call it capital raising. I'm giving them an opportunity to participate with us. I'm doing them a favor, sometimes I feel that way and that's one way to look at it and I'm saying no, every deal of mine for my side has the same investor. The first investor is always the same, that's me. So I'm going to invest in these deals, I've done the research; I've been to the property. Now I'm presenting it to you this deal, why I like it, and you're welcome to join along, so the proud moment was to getting that achievement, right? The first one and the second one becomes easy. And then the first one was the problem James: Got it. Awesome. Can you tell our audience how to get hold of you? Raj: Absolutely. I mean, I have a website, I'm very active on Facebook, but my website is smartcapitalmgmt.com. My email is raj@smartcapitalmgmt.com. Easy to use to get to me or LinkedIn. Facebook also is there James: Awesome. Thanks so much for coming. It's so refreshing to see how someone from the tech industry moved directly into a multifamily investor. I think a lot of people do, right? But there are still tons of people who don't, right? So it's just the thought process and sometimes the desire to technologize everything, sometimes it's hard, right? Real estate-- Raj: -- Why do you want to do that? I mean, you want to enjoy what you're doing, right? If building a technology company is your passion then real estate will not be the thing, but leveraging technology to get smarter is another issue James: Got it. Awesome. Well, thanks for coming. I'm sure everybody got tons of value Raj: Thank you, James. Thanks for having me James: All right. Good

Te Whatarangi Dixon is a man with much "Mana' (The Maori word that means to have great authority, presence to command respect). Despite his relative youth at age just 30 he has twice already stared his own mortality in the face.  He was the victim of Guellain Barre Syndrome or GBS for short. Guillain-Barre ) syndrome is a rare disorder in which your body's immune system attacks your nerves. Weakness and tingling in your extremities are usually the first symptoms. These sensations can quickly spread, eventually paralysing your whole body. In its most severe form Guillain-Barre syndrome is a medical emergency and in this case is what severe and meant Te Whatarangi was months in hospital. The exact cause of Guillain-Barre syndrome is unknown. But two-thirds of patients report symptoms of an infection in the six weeks preceding. These include respiratory or a gastrointestinal infection or Zika virus. Te Whatarangi lost all control over his body and literally watched his body fail and start to die while his brain remained fully conscious. The fear, the uncertainty, not knowing if he would live or die or if he lived if he would ever have any quality of life again or be trapped in a body that no longer worked sent Te Whatarangi through a long night of the soul. But he eventually emerged. Stronger, more resilient, more empathetic and more driven that ever before. This is a comeback story of survival and of love. The importance of family and how they helped him through. Te Whatarangi is now a qualified neuro-physio and knows exactly what his patients and clients are going through. He knows the battles they face and he guides them back on the path to their goals. Heartwarming and raw this interview will inspire you and make you grateful for the blessings you have.    Te Whatarangi's greeting to you all in Maori   Ko Putauaki te māunga Ko Rangitaiki te awa Ko Mataatua te waka Ko Ngāti Awa tōku iwi Ko Te Pahipoto tōku hapū Ko Wayne Haeata tōku matua Ko Kay Mereana tōku whaea Ko Blair Te Whatarangi Dixon ahau   I have come from very humble beginnings. I am a product of my whānau (family) and I would not be the man I am today without them supporting me every step of the way. Everything that I am and everything that I strive to be is a reflection of not only myself but my whānau. I represent them and I hope to make them just as proud as I am of them. I was diagnosed with Guillain-Barre Syndrome (GBS) in 2014 and again in 2019 where only 1 in 100'000 people are diagnosed globally with a 1% chance of contracting it twice. Always an optimist and through my journey of self-discovery having faced the possibility of my own mortality, I am now proud to call myself a Neurophysiotherapist. My journey has been challenging yet unique and I wish to share my story with the world in the hope others feel inspired and to allow their light to shine.   We would like to thank our sponsors for this show: For more information on Lisa Tamati's programs, books and documentaries please visit www.lisatamati.com For Lisa's online run training coaching go to https://www.lisatamati.com/page/runni... Join hundreds of athletes from all over the world and all levels smashing their running goals while staying healthy in mind and body. Lisa's Epigenetics Testing Program https://www.lisatamati.com/page/epigenetics/ measurement and lifestyle stress data, that can all be captured from the comfort of your own home For Lisa's Mental Toughness online course visit: https://www.lisatamati.com/page/mindsetu-mindset-university/ Lisa's third book has just been released. It's titled "Relentless - How A Mother And Daughter Defied The Odds" Visit: https://relentlessbook.lisatamati.com/ for more Information ABOUT THE BOOK: When extreme endurance athlete, Lisa Tamati, was confronted with the hardest challenge of her life, she fought with everything she had. Her beloved mother, Isobel, had suffered a huge aneurysm and stroke and was left with massive brain damage; she was like a baby in a woman's body. The prognosis was dire. There was very little hope that she would ever have any quality of life again. But Lisa is a fighter and stubborn. She absolutely refused to accept the words of the medical fraternity and instead decided that she was going to get her mother back or die trying. This book tells of the horrors, despair, hope, love, and incredible experiences and insights of that journey. It shares the difficulties of going against a medical system that has major problems and limitations. Amongst the darkest times were moments of great laughter and joy. Relentless will not only take the reader on a journey from despair to hope and joy, but it also provides information on the treatments used, expert advice and key principles to overcoming obstacles and winning in all of life's challenges. It will inspire and guide anyone who wants to achieve their goals in life, overcome massive obstacles or limiting beliefs. It's for those who are facing terrible odds, for those who can't see light at the end of the tunnel. It's about courage, self-belief, and mental toughness. And it's also about vulnerability... it's real, raw, and genuine. This is not just a story about the love and dedication between a mother and a daughter. It is about beating the odds, never giving up hope, doing whatever it takes, and what it means to go 'all in'. Isobel's miraculous recovery is a true tale of what can be accomplished when love is the motivating factor and when being relentless is the only option. Here's What NY Times Best Selling author and Nobel Prize Winner Author says of The Book: "There is nothing more powerful than overcoming physical illness when doctors don't have answers and the odds are stacked against you. This is a fiercely inspiring journey of a mother and daughter that never give up. It's a powerful example for all of us." —Dr. Bill Andrews, Nobel Prize Winner, author of Curing Aging and Telomere Lengthening. "A hero is someone that refuses to let anything stand in her way, and Lisa Tamati is such an individual. Faced with the insurmountable challenge of bringing her ailing mother back to health, Lisa harnessed a deeper strength to overcome impossible odds. Her story is gritty, genuine and raw, but ultimately uplifting and endearing. If you want to harness the power of hope and conviction to overcome the obstacles in your life, Lisa's inspiring story will show you the path." —Dean Karnazes, New York Times best selling author and Extreme Endurance Athlete.   Transcript of the Podcast:   Speaker 1: (00:01) Welcome to pushing the limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential with your host, Lisa Tamati, brought to you by Lisatamati.com Speaker 2: (00:13) You're listening to pushing the limits with Lisa Tamati. Today I have a guest to Te Whatarangi Dixon from Rotorua who is an amazing young man. He's a neurophysio something I'm very interested in. But he is also a victim of the Guellain Barre Syndrome. Very hard to say. We'll call it GBS. Now this is a syndrome that's a rare disorder in which the body's immune system, attacks your nerves, weakness and tingling in the extremities are usually the first sort of symptoms and the spread right throughout his body and it can be fatal. And he was certainly in deep die trouble for many weeks in the hospital and he shares his story today and his comeback journey. It's a really interesting, I'm very interested in people who have overcome the odds in comeback. Journeys for obvious reasons. And I think this journey just really that fax has been on is incredible and why he's tackled it in the way he's coped with it. Speaker 2: (01:09) He was then gone on because of this to become a neurophysio. So he's used what was a terrible thing in his life to do something good. So it was a real honor to have him on the show. I just want to remind you before we go over and talk to te there, my book is now available on audio. It's available on ebook, on Amazon on my website every which way you can get it now. Relentless. It's also in the bookshops. I had the greatest pleasure the other day when I walked finally into a shop and there was my book. So that was a pretty exciting moment. After seven weeks on lockdown, it's finally out there. So if you're interested in getting that, the book is called relentless and you can grab it on my book, my website at lisatamati.com Right now over the to the show with Te Whatarangi Dixon. Speaker 1: (01:54) Them. Speaker 3: (01:57) Well, hi everyone. Welcome back to the sharp pushing the limits. It's fantastic to have you back again. I am sitting with Te Whatarangi Dixon all the way over in the Rotorua. How are you doing mate? Good, thank you. Good. Thank you. Super excited to have you on the show. It's really cool. We've connected through your father in law who is a lovely man, Steven who I spoke for. He is a great man. He is a lovely man. And he just said, you've got to talk to my son in law. He's so interesting and I thought, yes, he is very interesting and I want him on my show. So today I was going to hear a little bit about Whatarangi and we're going to call them facts from here on. And and now Whatarangi is a equally a neurophysio. You're just just qualifying right now, sort of in the midst of finishing things up and getting him into a new career and job. Speaker 3: (02:49) But the reason, one of the reasons I want, I want to talk to you about that, but I also want to talk to you about you've got an inspiring comeback story. Can you tell us a little bit about GBS we, we you've had GBS twice and we're trying to pronounce it before Guellain Barre Syndrome, something like that. So yeah, it's a very big word. So we'll call it GBS and can you explain what that is and your, your journey with us a little bit and a little bit who you are for status. Speaker 4: (03:22) Yep. Okay. So my story basically starts from a little town called tickle. So that's where I'm actually from and my family is, and I grew up pretty much in the Bay. TNT. I think probably people will always think that my story is interesting is because Guellain Barre Syndrome or GBS as we call it is as 100, a hundred thousand people, I think contracted, well that's the neurological condition. And then basically a textual, your peripheral nervous system. So it's quite similar. That's how I kind of describe it to people. I'm totally on the stand that getting into the technical kind of tends of things is similar to that. You miss you miss the textural central nervous system either and GBS a textual peripheral nervous system. Wow. Cause people get what that is so they can proceed. It's kind of similar but there are differences. Speaker 4: (04:20) So I had a strength called ampersand, which is what's a text basically or your motor neurons. Annual sensory neurons. You can have different trends with the tech, just primarily your motor neurons or your sensory or I think he got five different Sharon's, I'm not, can't remember specifically about each one, but yeah, those two. Yeah. I had em send, so I took an attack my motor neurons in my, in my sensory neurons. But the potential for it to recover as higher because you have a special cell called Schwann cells in your peripheral nervous system and they can regenerate over time. So that's why if you have, if I wouldn't wish it upon anybody, but basically if you had GBS your what your and you and you were able to stop it from progressing, quite possibly, even people have, it can't be fatal. Speaker 4: (05:11) But if you at the interventions from the hospital placed on you I think within three to four weeks until you sat on told JPA starts to kind of overtake your body, you'll be lucky to recovering this quite high but post four weeks and you haven't had an intervention with they call it immunoglobulin therapy or plasma faceless where they basically take our, your white blood cells and replace it with others. Wow. so basically you'll be your pasta, your, your ability to recover. That's a lot higher with your peripheral nervous system because your central nervous system are made out of oligodendrocytes and that's what they make up are once they damage, they don't rip you. Wow. So if you about a motorway system, once you've got an issue major, such a major highway, so one roads basically destroyed, it'll never be recovered. Speaker 4: (06:05) You'll be able to actually try and tap into other areas and go off road and then come back on, wow, I want to kind of destroy their part of the road and we'll never recover. Whereas Guellain Barren Syndrom, once that Schwann cell is basically damaged, if they're forced to before the damage, its ability to, to re regenerate as higher Scwh is in. This isn't the bird Swan. Swan. So S C W H. Okay. So that's a german. SCWH. Okay. So how does it manifest itself in your body? So you've got the, luckily not the central nervous system one, but more of the peripheral. How did that sort of manifest and what were the symptoms? Okay, so for me in 2014 mindset of half the thing is they don't actually fully understand why it HIPAA or like what actually causes causes a bacteria virus. Speaker 4: (07:09) We don't yet, but they understand what happens to once it starts. What's a, what's a begins to happen. So for me how they described the words, I, I basically called a guarantee Stein bug basically a month before GBS kind of started to could have been related. I go to my body, yes. So what they, what they perceive as what happens, it's an auto immune disease. So I had discussion or anti Stein nonfiction and I recovered from that. But however, what happened is you obviously when you get sick, you build up your immune cell or your immune system starts to kick in and you build get your killer T cells and then eventually you'll have resistant T-cells to action to buy down the killer T cells. Cause they've already destroyed the bug. Yep. What's happened is in my immune system, my resistant T cells to to actually hinder and stop the killer T cells from producing and actually start to generate around the body, they don't actually start to kick in. Speaker 4: (08:12) So your immune system had all these killer T cells floating around. And then I think obviously then I just got another random cold bug about a month later. And because you had these killer cells, so floating around in my body, I'm talking kind of later and I used to help you find fully understand it's important. Yeah. And so basically what's happened is my immune cell, my immune system has decided to, they've got this new bug, these qualities are the floating around. I have no idea what to do with this new bug and all of a sudden have started to just manipulate itself and then attach in a tech my, my peripheral nervous system. So phone cells instead of that classic auto immune shoot all the goodies and the baddies at the same time. Yeah. So it spawns my, my immune system starts to attack my own body. Speaker 4: (09:03) Yep. Essentially. Yeah. And so you don't, you don't know whether it's coming from there you know, that that gastrointestinal thing or not, but quite likely that that's caused that caused this reaction in the body. Obviously when you, when you're sick, obviously you get increased inflammation, which means that increases your immune system. And so it just, just helps you like a, like a, like as if you're standing in front of her train. And so basically how mine started was I just started getting pins and needles and my peripheral, like basically in my hands and my feet. Yeah. And it slowly kind of, I started basically just getting pins and needles and it started gradually kind of coming out of my arm of my legs. And then I started losing sets on my sensory kind of went, went away first. So SABIC losing sensation. Speaker 4: (09:54) And then basically as it came up through my, through my feet and into my ankles, we have a thing called proprioception. And they basically tell us it helps you understand its joints on the stand we are in relation to space. And that's that it's to dissipate and actually kind of disappear for me. So I started losing balance. It wasn't anything wrong with my brain, it's just that I couldn't get the right signals from my feet and from the white bearings, my weight bearing joints to my brain to understand and tell my body where I was. I had that with mum, but from a brain injury. Yeah. And so she didn't know who she was away. She stopped the way the world started. Special awareness because it's very hard to explain. Yeah. So this all just started happening. I don't know why, what's happening? Speaker 4: (10:43) You just kind of just randomly came on. So I started losing sensation and eventually started losing weakness in my hands. My jaw. I just knew something was wrong. I went to the doctors. The first time when I started getting pins and needles actually seeping into a physio, like some form of nerve issue of my lower back or, or something. Cause at the time I had, I had an injury, I'm a little bit. Yep. So say me, the basically nothing happened. A week later it started getting worse. Went back to my GP. He doesn't know, he didn't know what was happening. Obviously we could have the GP and had, you know, had I had signs of symptoms, they kind of live on possibly being meningitis as well. Yeah. He's sent me into, he see me in hospital, showed away basically after their next visit. Speaker 4: (11:31) So this was two weeks after that sort of started happening. A huge and obviously because he sent me diagnosed me possibly with a hypothesis of possible, possibly meningitis. I was treated for meningitis when I got there. By winter it wasn't, it wasn't I went and had my spinal taps. Yeah, spinal tap generally for meningitis in GBS cause they do present quite similar if they, if they think so. They're trying to cross the cross all the T's. We then, and then as they actually, when I went into hospital, I started getting huge migraines. I was getting migraines and I was skinning photophobia. So I've kind of actually optimized the life would just penetrate and just give me huge headaches. So I, when I was presenting what's, you know, and that's even another sign of possibly being in Jarvis and migraines. I, however, I didn't have a rash. That was, I need public one real, something they usually would get from in a data cell. We then had my spinal tap done, went for a CT scan. And then I was isolated basically because if I'm in a ditis spread it out at this point they still didn't know what I actually had. They were just going on. You know, the signs and symptoms on me, possibly heavy meningitis skins fascination and hits the spinal tap, then CT scan. Speaker 3: (12:55) Yep. Carry on. Mum's bringing in the middle of the webcast. She always does. Everybody who listens to the podcast knows this is a key ring from Mark to carry on mate. Speaker 4: (13:08) Yeah. And then and then I'll, then they for a week nothing basically improved. So all the all the drugs that they go to me throughout the time to help me try and beat meningitis were working. I was getting worse and I started losing what I'd done in relevance to that. I was actually getting really weak, but I couldn't actually convey that to them because I started getting, you know, I started losing my, my, I couldn't breathe and I started, I get to be on a ventilation also just so much pain. So I started getting hyper sensitivity. So basically cold felt like hot hot, felt like cold, a polo felt like a waste of time. I felt like I was driving into into the beat. So when I was just lying on the bed, I felt like I was getting pulled down by gravity. So [inaudible] rotation or anything kind of going out of whack, you everything just becomes imbalanced and it might, your brain can not understand or what, and it's trying to rebalance itself. And in that process that's kind of having, it's actually being detrimental to your, to your ability to kind of actually understanding the world just cause everything. Like basically if you'll need to bombard your nurse to actually understand, you know touch smells like every foot of sensation that you can basically think of. Speaker 3: (14:27) We had for granted so much and we know that this is, yeah, something's touching my right hand or I'm feeling my left hand or, Speaker 4: (14:35) And then basically third weekend I had an MRI and then the neurologist was actually away at the time. So the neurologist said that was actually from the house and told him the hospital for us. He was a white, you ever sees on a, on a spent sabbatical at another hospital. And so the neurologist from Palm smelt was coming up two or three times a week. Yep. So he came up and he basically once they won't say best, so he thought busters, a meningitis B bike. And I started and I had an Ida, my sister in law, she found a possible link to being something more neurological because I had this window of opportunity. We actually felt, you know, everything kind of normal, a little bit full for a time. And I asked Glen to kind of do some, do some assistance on me, who's my sister in law. Speaker 4: (15:25) She's now registered, now open a hospital. Wow. and she just chose a fifth year medical student at the time and she just done some systems on me and she felt my reflex is going through. I couldn't, my sensation was, was basically gone and she just went straight to straight to my consultant. My consultant got the neurologist to come in and they're all just basically look there, make straight away any new show way that ITVS basically Australian. I went straight into HDU. I was throwing spirometry, so I actually checked around my lung capacity was gone of the migraines. They organized for me to go for an MRI just to see what type of thing my body information was. And all of my, you know, all of my CRP scans, we were just through the roof. White blood cell counts were through the roof. So they knew that your, your menu system, but they couldn't, they didn't know what was happening on it. And obviously people, it's so rare you know, you, you come across that every, I don't know, once or twice in your lifetime. Speaker 4: (16:33) Okay. So now you're, you're in the, the finally worked out does it, is this thing. Yep. What sort of a battle did you have on your hands then? I was in the battle. Basically, they're trying to save my life. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. So my, my, basically my, my lungs started to shut down. I immediately went down to about 50% capacity. As soon as I went into HDU I was intubated with mechanical ventilation to the full Monte, so conscious, so my brain's still, they're not just getting migraines. Stuff's like, it's still kind of occupational life. Nothing's happening mentally. It's all just the, my physical body shutting down. I can't move. I started all like, basically I lost all control of my bowels and whatnot as well. So there was things we didn't see wise. It was just, it just, everything went away. Speaker 4: (17:29) So like a massive brain damage. Yeah, something's happened to the brain, but it's just a little bit, it's just my, my peripheral nervous system is shutting down. So I was 23. Wow. I was 20. It started 2014 and yeah, so that, that all happened aren't you baited? And they basically, they started me on what they call immunoglobulin therapy, which is basically other people's antibodies. So, and that's about $1,500 a bottle. And I had about, I don't know, I think it was a call center of over five days, three bottles a day. Sorry, I'm trying to overpower it with, with normal white blood cells. Yeah. So basically trying to combat my immune system so they're pumping and you know what white blood cells from other, basically it's basically a blood transfusion into my body to basically, it can't stop DBS, it can only spoke. Speaker 4: (18:41) So the progress of it. So like I said before, you know, these, they're four week kind of if their month window that month window to try and stop it to get possibly from being a fatal condition. So I was in the third week, halfway through the three weeks, so they just water them. And you know, I already got to the stage where basically I was a vegetable and basically I was just trying to save my life. So I was intubated, heading immunoglobulin, stuck to a wall hours days. And I was in the hospital for about three months in ICU for about a month and a half. And then I went up to just the general ward. So it was amazing. So once they open up here, but it's just a waiting game, you can't really, you can't do much, they can do something else. Speaker 4: (19:30) You can do. You just watch you just hoping that, you know, me being a young kind of 24 year old at the time, it was going to kind of, that was going to be in a box, which to me, thankfully it was. It was. Yeah. And that's very grateful. Someone under the age of basically 50, 40, 50 to get genius. Wow. cause you, have, you got, you know, I, I love diving into the body. Do you think you have a predisposition to immune and overreactive immune system? Have you even thought about functional genomics and doing some testing along that lines to see? Well, you know, I've always thought that I'd always thought about looking at basically my DNA cause but you know, when I look at my, look at my look at my family, but I look at my family history, I've got none of that in my family. No kind of history of a neurological emission. We've got you know, quite a, the only thing we probably have in my family is the Alzheimer's cancer in our family. We don't have you know, you know, really what do you call it? Systemic kind of conditions, you know, mommy and my family have died of heart attacks. I think one. Yeah. [inaudible] Speaker 3: (20:50) We've got type two diabetes, but that's not genetic. That's just, you know, your modifiable risk factors that you can change. Well there is genetic fathers did it as well. Yeah. But it would be interesting. I mean I'm just fascinated by functional genomics and looking at understanding of why your immune system would kick into overdrive and actually cause an S is this likely to happen again? Not GBS. Well, we'll get to that in a minute, but you know, for other immune responses now here on land. Yeah, I'll definitely be interested in looking at research that we can. When I'm working with the DNA company and I've had dr mincer on the say they've just opened their labs up again and it'll be a few months before I'm qualified. But I can definitely connect you this if you want to have a look at that just to, I mean it's, I think it's something that everybody should do once in their life anyway. Speaker 3: (21:49) Yeah, it's fantastic, Dan. The stain, it can definitely help you plan and prepare for your future. Not stupidly, but just preparation was, you know, you'll tell him to stay on what's happened. Like what could possibly happen for you and what, you know, change it while you can change in regards to modifying your lifestyle to be able to enjoy, enjoy your, you know, your quality of life to the full extent. And even like things like, and this is getting a bit off topic, but you know what medications you might interact with in a, in a bad way or you know what your detox pathways are like. So do you need to be super vigilant when it comes to outside toxins, that type of thing or your hormone pathways or everything like that is involved at, so it's pretty, pretty, pretty good information to have. It's like, I reckon it should be like passport. Speaker 3: (22:43) So you have it, you know, and then you take the interventions to stop problems. But back, back to give a story. So you, you, you're fighting for your life now in your, you've, you've gotten through that really bad, horrific stage. How were you mentally coping with us as a 23 year old when you started to come back to life, if you like what you've been through, this traumatic, horrific experience. Have you dealt with that? You know, I've probably, I'm a very optimistic person, just like as a put my personality. I have a very optimistic look and I'm just in life in general. It was really tough. So at the challenge me a lot I wish I knew my wife, that's, it would've been easier, definitely been easier. You know, just being, you're being 23 and I'm very much a mum mama's boy. Yeah, absolutely. Nothing wrong with that. And my mum at the time Speaker 4: (23:47) You know, after raising my brother, my sister and I her entire life as a single mother. Wow. yeah, it's off to half. Yeah. I have a lot of, a lot of things in life. She was in Spain, so she decided, you know, how all of us, we're all growing up, we're living our lives. We started our new careers and, you know, looking, you know, what's going on in our own adult lives. If you took this opportunity, you know, to actually just enjoy this and go off on another Valium sabbatical for six, seven months over in Spain, lift my lift, my stepdad, he just say, I'm going to Spain. I'm going to go off and have all that. And she was basically two months in over there, and then they'll say, great. Trip as well. You know, I tried to, we rang basically nearly ever tried to ring every night through Oh, he used to be called Viber, you know, the original kind of. Yep. I guess. And you know, I basically said to every single time, as hard as it was to me, just to say on the phone was, you know, I said, I kept on saying to mum, don't come back. I'm going to beat this. And I'm not gonna pray, I'm not going to buy as much as I probably cried a lot of the time thinking that I was going to die. Speaker 4: (25:17) Yeah. To face your own mortality though, I mean ridiculously young age you know, like how do you see that now? What's your relationship with it now? I mean it's a pretty hard thing to buddy. Others that's I think I look at it more is I don't ever look at it as a, it's a fear concept. I probably look at it as a, as an opportunity to kind of, like I said, like before we even started a podcast, that's just an opportunity to actually still learn. Even though, even though I was going through this, I was like knocking it, if I get through this, what am I going to learn from this? So that's how I actually probably got me through. A lot of it was, you know, I'm not going to let this beat me, so what can I do with my life if I, you know, not if I was going to, it's like I was spicy. Speaker 4: (26:06) I was trying to tell myself that I wasn't going to, but you know, facing, facing that possible. Yeah, it was either I have my down moments. You know, you sometimes you're probably just thinking about wanting just to give up because it was just so that was quite hard and you know, seeing my family and my family and my family just probably, which has definitely been, you know, my Maori being from a Maori family, my and my mum overseas, I'd always had someone next to me. So yeah, my aunties, my uncles, my brothers, my sisters, my Dad, they all kind of took their time out of their days to kind of one at a time, go on a roster and just be there 24, seven basically, isn't it? It's so important to have that support. Yeah. And you know, like I'm a big, I'm a very holistic kind of person. Then before MALDI back home we have a thing called all, you know, like mother that can be, and so basically in anything, so a person, an object or you know, any inanimate kind of thing. But by them being there, they actually predicting them announcing me, if that makes sense. Absolutely makes sense. You know, if I didn't have them, I don't know if I'd even be here. Being beside your loved ones and having walking with them and their dark times is just so, so, so crucial. Like very family orientated person. So yeah. Speaker 4: (27:36) And you got a good one. I didn't have them beside me. I don't think I definitely would not have probably made it on my own. Because they were actually my thyroid, my motivation to actually fight and fight cause you need to fight, you need to fight when you're in deep, deep trouble and to find that fight when you're in pain and in, in terror and fear and all the rest of it. And the reason probably why I say I would show my wife at the time was because she's actually given me that strength and power to actually on the same or separate afflictions. Yes. I never actually fully understood it and she comprehended it. So I was obviously me being a 20 young, 23, all these just think of the physical aspects of life. And I never really considered, you know, how impactful the mental side of things, the emotional side of things and the spiritual side of things. Speaker 4: (28:25) But it's actually, she really helped me also is actually trying to understand who I am, what my identity is. Wow. I shocked. Cause if I had that back then as well, you know, I definitely would. Mmm. Fully understand and actually I would have been a hell of a lot better position to actually get full without ever even thinking or considering those kinds of things I would consider and think about them, but I wouldn't have, I wouldn't, you know, consume me. Yup. Yup. If they make sense. So I'm a big believer in if you have a strong, I didn't say even cultural identity, if you understand who you are, yeah. It gets you through. So, and that's, you know, being honest to yourself, being yeah, even on the others. And just taking them one step at a time, you know, it's not going to, you need to fully appreciate it. Speaker 4: (29:17) I understand that sometimes you do need that time to just kind of look at yourself and understand who you are. Cause if we don't, then you struggle. So this has brought you wisdom beyond your years really, isn't it? Yeah. So, okay, so, so you, you were in the rehab now for over a year trying to come from this thing and what was that better like? Like was it like coming back from a stroke or a brain injury? Was it like that now? Yeah, so basically it was really weird. So for me, I actually quite enjoyed it, but obviously obviously food through. I, I enjoyed the rehab, but the time that I was in the hospital, that was the tough part. So yeah, it wasn't until I probably got past it every elevation there point where I knew I wasn't going to buy. Yeah. Basically once they, once their fear of my own mortality here to pass, I was, you know, basically they basically told me, I was like, I've been in it and now all I have to do is put the work in. Yep. So be able to give myself from where I am right now, being dependent and now becoming, you know, my independent self again. Wow. I'm still alive so I'm stoked. Speaker 4: (30:39) I'm going to fight like crazy to get better. So I'd never looked at it as being, you know, I never looked at myself as being disabled ever. Maybe sometimes I maybe shouldn't because I know I probably pushed a lot of stress and, and you know I'm on my family when I was going through it there first time cause I, you know, obviously I think we forgot to mention them. I got this last year as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is what we've got to get to yet. So, yeah. So that, you know, I wish I probably was able to be honest. If I say, you know, on, on basically my family going through a lifetime because I know how stressful it was for them to kind of see me in that position and all they wanted to do was just help me and all in all I would do was just kind of internalize it and just keep it to myself and say, no, I almost went homeless and do it myself. Speaker 4: (31:36) Right. But, you know, that was a very selfish thing. Like when I look back on it, it's a very selfish approach that I had on it, even though I know they called me it. But that's because I was only ever thinking about the physical side of things still because you were young and I was young and you know, for me, being a 23 year old, you know, the physical side of life, very, very important. And being a man, you know, you messed the and he gets challenged and it was very, very hard to kind of get through that without ever feeling like I was burdening my family. So, you know, and that way when I look at it now, I, that was the wrong approach. But yeah, so basically once I got past, they pointed at this past the point that I wasn't going to be, that wasn't going to die. I was in hospital until basically I was my, I wasn't head. I took out the mechanical ventilation and I started doing some form of physiotherapy in the hospital and then they had organized me to go to a festival or a Ferguson. I know I Speaker 3: (32:40) Tried to get mum in there, couldn't get her and sorry. Speaker 4: (32:43) I got, I don't know where I got my funding from yeah since I was three months in hospital. And my rehab basically consisted of a lot of it was orientated around my goals and what I wanted to reach back to. However, when I read what I really enjoyed about lower foods, and it's basically like a campus that's a rehabilitation campus and it's for people that are under the age of 60. So it's not a, it's not a retirement village. It's actually for people that are, wants a big goal, be there long term. They had some of them who have long term conditions and took some of them terminal to a certain extent, but they're all there for the purpose of what's in there. Try and get better. Speaker 3: (33:29) Love that. I love that. Yeah. I did try to get my mum in there. She was too old to get there and we couldn't get funding and so on. But it did feel like a place where you were going to actually do something because I must say you're a neurophysio now, so we'll get to that shortly. But I must say the physio care that we had in the hospital was nothing short of atrocious. Yeah. I could have done it in my sleep. I think they went, they'd eat the lunch. That's pretty harsh. But that's, that's how I felt. Speaker 4: (34:02) And it's, it's really hard when I think about that because they are quite restricted in a lot of what they can provide. You know, me being like going through placements in one note as well in the hospitals, they all want to change how they approach things on the hospitals. That's why they're trying to implement, you know, code rehabilitation, gems and whatnot there as well to get more involved. But at the same time it's really tough because systems at the system is built around, you know, you've got so many patients that you have to see on a ward and you've got what, 10, 2030, 30 minutes at the met with them. Speaker 3: (34:41) I must say I must, I must re repair what I just said. The ones that were came round to us on the ward during the acute phase were lovely. Awesome. Yeah. When we were later put into the rehab with mum I fought to get her back into the system to get, you know, cause they said at the beginning she's never going to do anything again. We're not going to bother basically. And I fought and after a year I got her back in for two times a week and there was atrocious. And I felt like a box ticking exercise. The ones on the ward were different. They were very passionate and really, really wanting to help. So in, and this is no indictment on any one person or thing, but there was a systemic problem and there is a systemic problem with the way that the, the things are run at least an hour, the, our hospital and the way that you are judged, I remember and don't want to take her out for the interview, but six weeks she had as a block of two times a week. Speaker 3: (35:43) And honestly what she would do in that six weeks I would have done in a day with her. The tests that they tried to put her through, she was intimidated. She felt like a school girl, so she was not interacting with them. Because they were very judging her all the time, whether she should continue in the program. And at the very end of the program, they had a big panel where they all came in to decide your fate, whether you'd be considered to continue in the program. And they, they talked to me not to hear who's sitting next to them and says she's below the level of the worst dementia patient we've ever seen. You know, she's never going to do anything and this is a waste of time. And I turned to my mom and I said, well how does that make you feel mum? Speaker 3: (36:28) And she said, you know, well I was feeling quite empowered until I came in here. Now I feel totally, you know, down before. And they just looked at me and then jaws drop cause I had never heard her speak because they had never spoken to her as a intelligent person. So she had responded because she was intimidated by that medical setting and I knew that she was a nurse. I knew she had a, you know, stuff going on and she was intelligent and she was coming back. I believed in her and I just said to them, you can stick your program up there somewhere. I'm going to bring my mum back. And I did. From that point on I was like, right there is no help. I will go and do this all myself. And that's, you know, that's, that's just that particular bunch of people in one particular place. And that's not an indictment on them all. But that was, that was quite sad. And then I had a wonderful neurophysio. So let's get onto your neurophysio cause you've gone down this path now after going through this. Was that the reason that you went and studied neurophysiology? Speaker 4: (37:35) Yeah, definitely swung my Martha sessions that go that way. Yeah. I wasn't actually through PSI. I had an amazing neurophysio and when I went, when I was at Laura, focus on the reason why I decided to go down this path though you know, it was just, she just knew how to push me in the right ways and I wanted to do that for other people. And even when I was at Laura Ferguson, I met so many amazing people that had never asked the, you know, to have a stroke, to have no image, to have Huntington's disease, to have pockets. And so, you know, they never, never, they never asked for that. And just to be able to have it's just you know, the, the, the thing I think about the most is people, there's dependent, you know, if you're, if you lose your independence, I feel that's the huge, like the biggest thing as a human, you don't read it like it, it's that old cliche of, you know, you don't know what you have until it's gone. Speaker 4: (38:36) And so basically it's a pout. Somebody that does the pendant become independent again. That's the most rewarding thing that I can even think of from from, from absolutely. When I, when people ask me why I wanted to become a pussy, I say there's three things. So one of those I knew I always wanted to help people work from a health perspective. And originally I actually wanted to become a doctor and do medicine. So they laid onto their leads onto my second reason. That was the reason why I toasted the physio and it's purely because I probably had hit the, you know, Gordon, she was amazing. I'm going to start her name out there because she is amazing. They she made me understand that being a physiotherapist you just were able to have. And there's just this natural and therapeutic relationship that you just can't have as a doctor is, you know, as a relationship proficient. Speaker 4: (39:34) Yeah. Your ability to be able to have those real deep connection with, with your patients was like, there was, that's the reason why I really got back to where I am today because of that. So, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I'm a very people person. So having that intense of kind of relationship with each other collectively, you know, having that shared goal of kind of getting to that, to that same, to that shared place where they want to, that they want to achieve. As you know, second to none. It's a bond for life really, isn't it? I can see how much you love and respect what she did for you and how much it means. And this is why it's on me to becoming a physiotherapist rather than a doctor. The complete opposite of like, I had a neurophysio too who came to our house afterwards and he was wonderful. Speaker 4: (40:31) He gave me the belief that we could do this. He gave me the basic tools so that I could work every day with here cause I couldn't afford obviously everything. But he gave me the information that I could then put that into practice on a day by day by day basis. It's really common sense. It's just being able to apply it in the right way and try to break movements down. Now how do you teach someone to, I specifically look at it in three ways, you know, narrow cause as I think of it as he got function, strategy and impairment, that's basically, that's, that's my, that's like my go to for anything basically. So you know what you wanna achieve as function, you have strategies to achieve that function and then by you have an impairment which affects the strategy to be able to perform the function. Speaker 4: (41:18) Yes. Yep. So obviously the goal is function by why you have to do a specifically time work on the impairment and then effectively your strategies should try and improve and then you start, that's how you progress to the next kind of thing. And then, then what happens is you'll be able to perform their function again. It's like a soap tech. I'm like, I'm trying to simplify it, but that's how I try and approach things. Yeah, no, that makes absolute sense to me. Yeah. That's like free three steps and there's a variety of ways of how you can integrate your treatment methods. So there's a variety of treatment methods that you can use, but that's the ultimate call it, that's the, that's the basis of it that I run by. Wow, I'm going to bring them up to see you one day, what's the next thing I can do with it? Speaker 4: (42:06) So they basically, when I funded, when I recovered, I decided to become a therapist. So I enrolled into A A T and started in 2016. Obviously because I got a dog, cause 2015 had already started because I had a bit of paper and I just kinda wanted to give them my stuff that either actual year where I just worked and just got back on it to actually get back to normality. And then I decide to go on on the intake in 2016. And AAT is now I'm gonna fly should be an, it should be an advertisement for them or something. Yeah. Yeah. They're amazing. So I love that. I love being a part of that. They invest like the way our lectures were, they all came from a clinical experience. They weren't, they were heavily based on the theory. Speaker 4: (43:02) So, you know, they, they basically, they, they pushed down a farts to be able to have a clinical reasoning. And maybe I want to think on a fetus practitioners as clinicians, I want us to be clinicians. They want, they don't want us to be bookworms and lab and just writing, research things out all the time. Cause at the end of the day, you know, our, we're providing a service and we want it to be based around real good quality service. Not just, you know, anyone go on Google and find out and do this, you know, you know, I can do that. We want it to be able to, so they've really and forced their kind of encourage and encourage that type of learning. So it was very practical. And I'm a very practical kind of person. And it's really weird, you know, obviously when I was going through my rehab with his 2014 and they're learning and become in basically going through my physiotherapy degree, I look back on when I was through my rehab and I could see all the little tricks that you said. They will create these signs and your physio you create like the games and really it's actually, it's an objective measure for being. So I didn't really realize that it was actually like a, she's, she's testing me but I didn't know that. Wow. We've got them on or big take tests in all photos just to help me with like picking up things and putting them in. But secretly she had been timing me. Speaker 4: (44:37) She had made it basically. She made a lot of things cause I'm very sport all of my sports. So she made a lot of things in the games like paying the, we you know, you just, you can be as creative as you like as a neurophysio just to get that function back. Yeah. and you know, you learn, you learn basically all the main three, which is cardio, musculoskeletal and neuro. You always remember the principles of all three. Highly effective when you come out of uni, you kind of the side, we really want to kind of stop that all like basically to down and down. And so I obviously obviously matches. Obviously neuro, I do have a miscarriage. I do like that as well. And most people do do musculoskeletal. That's like your normal, full possessive, your body. Everybody knows about. Speaker 4: (45:28) But yeah, my interest is always possibly always going to be neurons just purely from an empathetic point of view. Having that rewarding feeling of being able to help someone get from a to B and just being a part of their journey with them. Yeah. They've ever wanted to be a credited with any of the, you know, them getting there. It's because it's all in. It's just being able to share their journey with them. But it's amazing to be able to, to provide that framework for people to, to learn from and to grow from. And so I just wanna like wrap up in a few minutes, but I want you, you got this again. Yes. You went through this whole thing again in January this year. Speaker 4: (46:12) August last August, 2019 so I was the special 1% of the entire world to get GPS twice. Wow. That's insane. It's super, super unlucky. But this time I have my wife, yes. Father-In-Law. I can never be grateful and thankful enough for them because this time, at least they, we knew what we were dealing with and we see Australia and stuff. It was just a lot and was still very tough and I still kind of, you know, internalized a lot of things. And you know, that, that same thing that the last time when I kind of found my cell phone with regards to my, you know, challenging my masculinity and keeping things internalized, trying to get through myself instead of feeling like I'm burdening everyone else with what's going on with me. But you know, Claire and Steven definitely helped me get through that. And I should apologize to my wife because I know it's probably very, very, very tough on it. Anyone you love and when you're going through hard times, you're always going to have moments where you didn't do what you wanted to do. When you look back afterwards. I mean, I've had times like with where I've been, like Speaker 3: (47:30) Afterwards gone, shit that wasn't good behavior, you know, on my behalf and, or you think, you know, but you're just in a desperate state of exhaustion and fatigue and the grind of it all and you did things that you're not surprised of. Now, you know, in my case where you think, you know, we have yelled at her for something or you know, just gotten frustrated and gone, Oh for goodness sake, you know, and then you're like, that's Speaker 4: (48:03) Time is as much as I was plus time round. It was amazing. Effectively Steven was my head of Gordon the farm. That's, you know, we went, we went to the polls basically three times a week and we went into the hospital twice a week. And he was the one basically taking me through all of my exerciser and whatnot and you know, clearly had to obviously go to work every day. But at the end of the day, she's like my biggest inspiration, the person that I aspire to be like, cause she knows who she is. She sounds awesome. Gotta meet. He's he always makes me want to be a better person or just a better man. Yeah. She, she sees me like she, she can, she sees through me if they make sense, she feeds me. She knows me better than I did myself. Yeah, Speaker 3: (48:52) You can be, you can be real with her too. You, you are who you are and she loves you for all the, all the good, the bad and the ugly. And isn't that what it's a wonderful thing. Yeah. Speaker 4: (49:05) Well the whole my kids look, I mean to me I couldn't make it bad side loss basically up to my elbows, into my knees as time. So I still had function and my, you know, basically my, it wasn't as bad, but it was still GBS even still take like six to seven months before I can actually, he's coming out the other end of this couldn't have been on myself. Yeah. Speaker 3: (49:31) Right. We're gonna wrap up now. What's the message? You know, there's a couple of good messages that have come out of today saying like, as a, as a young Mari, you know, men, you've faced us with amazing strengths and the wisdom that you are beyond your years. I mean, what are you now, 29, 2030 29 30 turning 30 wisdom beyond your years because of what you've been through and that is going to help so many people and your career and what you, what you do. And I'm very excited as it is. I know Steven is to see where you go in life because you know the power and the money that you already have now because of what you've experienced and your openness and your thing. I just think it's fantastic. And you're going to really be empowering lots of other people going through and this is probably, you know, your life's call and you know, is to help people and to do this and to share your story. You know, I think it's important. So this is hopefully the first time you were sharing it and won't be the last, I guess Speaker 4: (50:37) My take home is search after everything that I've been through with everything and all the people that I met. And then I have my wife and Steve and everyone inclusive my family. I think the biggest thing for me will be I think I'll probably look at it at this time of the kind of leader that I want to be like. So it's really, as I said before, it's being able to understand and having their perception of others, you know, never worrying, never caring about the perception of myself. You'll never, if you, if you can understand the perception of others you want to have, you always have an empathetic point of view on my fear. You'll be able to actually stand on the feet, stand in their shoes, sorry. And then understand, tied on the stand, what they're going through and instead of a sympathetic point in life, because at a point when you can become too sympathetic in not feeling sorry for them and then that's not going to help them at all. Empathetic, sympathetic. So that's the kind of leader that I want to be like. And that's what I want to, Speaker 3: (51:41) You're well on your way to doing that and you have a lot of money. You can see it. It just comes out through the screen. So thank you very much for sharing so openly and honestly today, your journey because it is empowering to other people who are going through difficult times. And this is, you know, part of the job of the show is to educate people around, you know, health and fitness and the latest science and the latest stuff. But also to make us understand like we're all human and we all have these feelings and we can get through tough times strategies and tools to do that. And you obviously found a few along the way. So I wish you well and you know, I'm excited to see where you go mate. And any last words, any last words before? Speaker 4: (52:29) Speaker 3: (52:35) Love it. Thanks. Thanks. Bye. Speaker 1: (52:37) That's it this week for pushing the limits. Be sure to write, review and share with your friends and head over and visit Lisa and her team lisatamati.com.

Zach has the honor of having a conversation with Dr. Erin L. Thomas, Head of Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging at Upwork, about organizational equity during the COVID-19 pandemic. She graciously shares some advice regarding what organizations can do during this time to at the very least reduce harm for their black and brown employees and talks a bit about how her perspective and focuses at work have shifted as this pandemic has continued. Check the links in the show notes to connect with Dr. Thomas!Link up with Dr. Thomas on Twitter! She's also on LinkedIn. Links in order:https://bit.ly/3c0BXKhhttps://bit.ly/3c7qhFELearn more about Upwork on their website. You can view their open positions by clicking here. Links in order:https://bit.ly/2TEC8Vnhttps://bit.ly/2A5X00WFind out how the CDC suggests you wash your hands by clicking here or below.https://bit.ly/2Ug4l5KHelp food banks respond to COVID-19. Learn more at FeedingAmerica.org.https://bit.ly/2WD73UkCheck out our website.https://bit.ly/living-corporateTRANSCRIPTZach: What's up, everybody? It's Zach, and you know what? I'ma just go ahead and say it right now. It's also Emory. Emory, say something. [Emory breathes] That's just her breathing. Emory is, at the time of this recording, six weeks old. So we're here because I'm on daddy duty and my wife has to get some sleep. That's right. Husbands, help your wives, or partners rather, excuse me - not to be overly gendered on a podcast all focused on inclusion, equity and diversity. Help your partners, you know what I'm saying? Everybody, you know, they--one person can't do it all. Sometimes you gotta step in, and this podcast is great, and I love y'all, but of course I love my daughter the most. Well, I love my wife also. Let me not do any type of weird hierarchy right now live, like, a live-streaming conscience of thought on the podcast, but the point is you have responsibilities. There are things that take precedent. And look, we're in a new normal, so I'm just here. Where was I? Right, Living Corporate. So look, Living Corporate amplifies and centers black and brown voices at work. Why do I say black and brown and not, like, people of color? Because I want to be very explicit, we want to be very explicit, with what our mission is. So we aim to center and amplify black and brown identities, marginalized folks, folks on the periphery, in the workplace, and we do that how? We do that by having real talk in a corporate world. Now how do we do that? We do that by interviewing incredible leaders cut from all type of cloth. And, you know, we've had executives. We've had professors, entrepreneurs, public servants, activists, civil leaders, elected officials. We've had all types of people, artists, and today is no different. Today we have Dr. Erin L. Thomas. Dr. Thomas is the head of diversity, inclusion and belonging at Upwork where she leads diversity, inclusion and belonging, or DIBs. She leads the strategy implementation and coaching for all of Upwork. Prior to Upwork though, Dr. Thomas was a managing director at Paradigm, a diversity and inclusion strategy firm where she partnered with companies to embed DIBs into organizations through culture transformation and people development. Prior to Paradigm, Erin held positions at Grant Thornton LLP, Argonne National Laboratory developing D&I strategies, programming and metrics. Her work has been featured in Fast Company and the New York Times and recognized by Forbes, Human Rights Campaign, the National Association for Female Executives and the Equal Opportunity Magazine. She holds a PhD in social psychology, a Master of Philosophy in social psychology; a Master of Science in social psychology; and a Bachelor of Arts in psychology and international studies from Yale University. She is accredited, y'all. Okay? Don't question us, okay? We're coming to y'all. We bring y'all heat rock every single week, and the heat rock we bring is because we have guests that have heat rock. I'ma say heat rock again just so y'all get the point. Yes, I'm turnt up. Yes, it's a Tuesday. Who cares? Erin, what's up? Welcome to the show. How are you doing?Erin: I'm doing great. Thanks so much for having me. Hi, little baby Emory. I am so excited to be here, and I want to give you a number. So I'm really into, during COVID times, anchoring, you know, "How are you doing?" on a scale. 1 is, you know, "We've got to get out of here and get some more support." Like, "We're not doing well." 10 is, you know, "COVID what? COVID who?" But I think, like, if you're a 10, you also probably need some external support. Zach: Facts. [laughs]Erin: And I think today I am... I'm, like, a 7, 8. I'm very excited to be chatting with you. What's your number?Zach: That's a really good question. You know, I don't know. So it's interesting because your scale, I don't know how it accounts for, like, other things, right? So, like, I'm also here with, like, a six-week-old baby. So maybe I'm, like, a--so, like, coronavirus is not, like, at the top of my mind because I'm trying to focus on keeping this thing that looks like me alive. Maybe I'm, like, a--I'd probably say I'm, like, a 7, 8. Like, I'm pretty good. I'm happy, right? Like, I mean, life is good. The new Drake album--well, not the album, but a little collection of loosies came out recently that was very good, that I enjoyed. You know, my favorite shows are still coming on. I've caught up on some anime. So I'm keeping myself well-distracted.Erin: [laughs] That's good. I think distracted is good. I think--I don't know, I think in the beginning days of all of this it felt, for me at least, a little weird to compartmentalize, or I felt a little guilty, but I actually think that's incredibly healthy, you know, to find moments of just pleasure and delight. That's all we got, right? That's all we got.Zach: I mean, this--the reality is that before this pandemic, like, I was already a homebody. Now, people at work--like, people who know me from work would--they may not know that, because, like, in person, like, I'm a fairly gregarious guy. But, like, you know, people are complex, right? I think, like, we create a lot of these terms and things that aren't really academic or scientific just to kind of better compartmentalize people, like, "You're an extrovert, you're an introvert." It's like, "I mean, I enjoy people, but I also enjoy being alone." Like, I enjoy being at home, being with my wife and now my kid. Like, I'm fine with that. But I'm glad, I'm glad that you're excited. I'm excited and in a good place as well. You know, this would be interesting to do again, like, if our numbers were wildly different, right? So, like, you're a 7, 8, I'm a 7, 8, but if I was, like, a 2, then, like, I wonder how the dynamics of this discussion would look, especially considering what we're talking about.Dr. Thomas: Yeah. I mean, I think then--and this has happened to me at work, right? Like, I come in low and someone else is high or vice versa. I think then that's the--I mean, that's the point of it, right? It's a moment of pause to figure out what do you need to put aside or do you need to get off this call or how can I support you and give that person who's lower an opportunity to either just share or not or articulate more. I just think it's a great window into "How can we work together towards whatever it is that we need to achieve?" And if now's not the time, fair. You know? We gotta go and come back together when we're both in the right space. I think that happens all the time, we just don't often put numbers to it, right?Zach: I agree, I agree. So look, that actually is a really good segue for us to get into this. Like, this pandemic, it continues to expose and exacerbate all types of inequities, from social to governmental and of course workplace, just all across the board, and I'll tell you, frankly it just feels overwhelming for me to think about holistically, let alone try to address, and so I'm really curious about just, like, considering your role with Upwork, I'd love to hear how your perspective and focuses have shifted as this pandemic has continued, and considering your level within Upwork and, like, the organizational power that you wield by way of your level, I'd love to hear about how power and influence has shaped your praxis.Dr. Thomas: Yeah. Whoo, this could take the whole hour, which, you know, happy, happy to unpack it for that long, 'cause it's deep. It's deep and very real. Like, the quickest answer for me is not that much has actually changed about the objectives that we set out to achieve for this year. How we go about them certainly has had to stay agile and nimble, but in the work that I do that's always the case. I always like to be super responsive to context and not get so [prescriptive?] about how we execute but to kind of keep our eyes on the prize, and so from my personal vantage point, I--especially during the beginning days of this--have never felt more critical than I do right now. You know, I think there's so many external conversations and great thought leaders who have articulated this better, what this crisis has really done, like most crises, is magnify fractures, gaps, inequities, that already existed, and so I've used this really as an opening to accelerate my platform and the work that I'm doing for marginalized folks at our company. So just to dig into it, you know, I did a couple of tactical things once it became clear to me that, you know, "This is serious. This is not the flu. This is gonna change everyone's lives forever," and I don't think that's an overstatement. So once that reality sort of set in, the first thing I did was I revisited these operating principles that I had crafted when I started at Upwork. So I joined the company in December of 2019. I'm only about weeks in, and there's been a lot of change since then, internally and obviously externally, but as a team of one and as the first DIB leader in our organization, I thought it was really important for me to just get anchored on what [?] and, you know, use that decision framework for really [advertising?] how I [fell?] in my role. I think, especially when a role like this is new or especially when someone comes in with a multi-disciplinary background [or] a very strategic lens, folks don't necessarily know what the role is and they kind of fill in their own blanks and make their own stories. So that was important to me, and I revisited those once we started quarantining just to make sure that they were evergreen and [stood up?] in this crisis, and they did, thankfully, and I can put [?] on my name. There's only four, and everything we do is, you know, it's systemic, so #1 is account for the systems and structures we're operating in, and that's, you know, systems and structures within our company and certainly externally as well. So that's #1, definitely holds true today. #2 is everything we do is tailored to the most specific population or the most specific point in the employee experience as possible, and so it kind of goes back to how you introduce the podcast, which is it's basically about centering. We have to get specific. We have to get articulate and discrete about what problem we're trying to solve or what opportunity we're trying to seize, and certainly during public times that's been really critical, and I think that principle holds up. The third is active. So I really wanted to mark that for myself and for others. You know, there's no passive way to do this work. Like, we're gonna have to change some things, and, you know, I think that's intuitive, but also [?] to declare. And then the fourth thing which is super critical for me, and this is where I see a lot of DIBs or DEI, whatever acronym you want to use, professionals flounder a little bit, is being pragmatic and being compelling and cohesive and telling, you know, one story that folks can get behind that also makes sense in the context of the day-to-day decisions and work that they're doing, and I think too often DIBs work kind of exists in a bit of a vacuum, right? It's a little bit of a tag-along or an extra-curricular, and I think that's the piece, you know, during corona times, that I've had to really get critical, even more so with myself, about "[?]," right? Like, do people have the capacity for this new thing or this new structure or this new effort and just really kind of giving grace to the folks who have to carry forward on the strategies, who have to, you know, change their behaviors, because it's a lot to ask even in the best of times, and I want to push and, again, lean into this comfort, but also be gracious with the fact that folks are dealing with a lot right now. So that's one of the things I did, was just, like, double-check on the way that we're going about this work. So relevant during this time. Another thing was just re-prioritizing some of those actual objectives. There were just, like, a couple that, even before corona, were nicer to have, but now it's clear that this is not the year to be working on the frills. It's really--we gotta stick to the essentials in terms of our strategic goals. And then the last thing I'll quickly say is I actually really leveraged the fact that it seems like most folks are becoming kind of armchair experts in academiology these days, right? Like, I'm learning more, more about viruses and how they spread, and I think there's some really interesting--and if I thought about it hard enough there could be a poem out of this, but, you know, I think there's some really interesting overlays between what we're seeing with the virus [Emory makes some noise] and how I think about people and the fact that--hey, Emory! The fact that we are all connected, we're all inter-dependent, and we need to center the most vulnerable. I think, as a society, that's becoming more and more clear, just with the true facts that are coming out from COVID, but it also I think has been what activists and DIBs practitioners have been saying for, you know, decades, and so I think, at least in my company, it sort of seems like there's this window of opportunity to seize on this understanding of centering and equity and disproportionate impact that folks are getting externally and [?] that same framework and understanding through the work that I do internally. I just think folks are grasping it a little bit more easily now than they might have been before this. So that, for me, has been exciting.Zach: That's awesome. And yes, hello, Emory. But no, you're absolutely right. [laughs] You know, what I find curious about this time, or intriguing even, is that because of the real impacts that this pandemic is having with folks that look like us and that don't look like us and the frustrations that come along with that, it's creating avenues for people to have even more frank conversations and to really kind of, like, get past some of the jargon and, like, these super long monologues about whatever and really get into, "No, how can we actually create impact and change and help? Because there are people who actively need help," and I think that's--and I try to be, like, a silver lining type of person, so, like, that's--so I would say that is something that is a positive out of all of this. I do think also, to your point around DEI practitioners, I do think that there's a bit of a gap when it comes to, "Okay, how do we transition from--" And I've talked about this with some other folks in the past. I think we're now doing a decent job of, like, talking about the historicity of oppression, or we'll talk about systemic inequities in, like, these very, like, high level systems that almost seem--like, we speak about them almost, like, in the abstract, right? So we'll say, like, "Well, you know, black men, they have disproportionate--they're targeted by police and da-da-da," and it's like, "Okay, that's true," and I'm not being dismissive of that. "Let's talk a little bit more about the systemic inequities in your workplace though," right? Like, "How can we transition these conversations to be a bit more practical and targeted to the reality of your employees?" And, like, that's--and I get why, you know, there's a variety of reasons why we don't necessarily have those conversations when I don't think we necessarily know how, but then two, like, it's increasingly uncomfortable to have conversations about actual power in your workplace, because then we start looking at individuals, right?Dr. Thomas: Yeah. I mean, it's hard, or maybe impossible, not to take, you know, a conversation about power and privilege personally, but at the same time I think where I've seen the most effective work, where I've done the most effective work, is where we actually sort of meet somewhere in the middle. It's about what roles or positions do we hold, how are those products of a greater societal system, and given the seat we're in--it's not really about us. I think it's really about the position. But given that we fill it, you know, what is our responsibility? To disrupt things that before now we weren't aware, you know, we were products of, or now that we are we realize we have a bit of an urgency to leave a legacy or leave things better than where we found them, and I think that's where the activation can happen. That's where we can get [?] without guilting people, right? Without making them defensive. I think it's just the reality of, "Oh, this is all by design, and we're sort of products of this greater architecture. So now what are we gonna do about it?" And if we're not gonna do anything, that's fine too, but then we should stop talking about it. Right? So, like, that's fine. I don't--[laughs] I want to be clear that I don't judge or begrudge that. It's fine. You know, companies and leaders can make those choices, but then stop talking about it. That's where--right?Zach: Yes. That's my rub too. At a certain point it's like, "Look, I'm tired of us talking about diversity being our strength and there not being anybody that looks like me that actually has any type of authority or power." You know, "I'm tired of us always--" Like, not shoehorning in, because no disrespect. We talk about gender in these very, like, binary, exclusionary ways without being intersectional at all with race or sexual identity. We talk about sexual identity in these binary ways without including race. We ignore any race trans identities, particularly trans black female identities. So, like, if we're gonna do this, let's do it. If we're not gonna do it, let's not. It's 2020. Rona or no rona, let's just--let's just be honest. [both laugh]Dr. Thomas: I agree. I mean, you know, that's where folks get disillusioned. That's where, you know, when the word doesn't match the deed, it reads as inauthentic because it frankly is, and I think most companies or leaders within them would be honestly better served to talk a little less about diversity, about inclusion, about equity, [then keep on?], or to raise--you know, raise the bar for themselves, but this weird in-between is just not working, right? It's not working. It's frustrating the folks who are most impacted. And then we see the results, which is very minimal quantitative gains when it comes to actual representation within the workforce. So these things all [?] together. They all relate, so yeah.Zach: They do. Now this is me going off the chart, but it just popped in my--not popped in my head, 'cause I think about it a lot, but we didn't talk about it for this interview. We gotta have you back, Erin, 'cause I really want to talk about in group, out group dynamics and the pressures that marginalized people in positions of authority have to, like, toe the line in that regard or how much they push against to then create inclusive workplaces for people who look like them. 'Cause, like--no, and I recognize that's a big topic, but, like, I just want to say this 'cause it's on the top of my heart and my mind. Like, I've noticed--and I've had these conversations, like, with black folks, like, off the record, right? So, like, in consulting, you know, there's all these different tracks of leadership, and, you know, the highest up is typically managing director or partner, and I've talked to some black partners who I really respect and everything, and I'm like, "Look, how many of you do you meet?" 'Cause the people that I talk to, like, they're with it. Like, they're conscious. They genuinely care. They try to use their access, power and privilege, relative power and privilege, to help other folks that look like them--and I'm talking, like, two people, right? [both laugh] And I asked them like, "Yo, what's going on? Like, why are the rest of y'all a bunch of Clarence Thomases up here? Like, what is this?" And so we had this whole frank discussion about it, but I really want to have you back on, because, like--I don't know. I feel like you and I could have that conversation, but I want to have it because, like--and I had this very... it was not uncomfortable. Wait, let's pause. Everybody stop, everybody. Y'all should know by now. This is, like--we're a couple hundred episodes in, hundreds of episodes in actually of Living Corporate. Y'all know I enjoy awkward conversations, so this exchange I'm about to explain to y'all was not awkward for me. It was awkward for them, okay? It was not awkward for me. So, you know, I had this conversation, and--[Emory makes noise] Oh, goodness, my daughter is loud. Hey, y'all. Y'all, check it out. Y'all hear these vocals by Emory. Don't play. No labels, but, you know, we'll make a SoundCloud soon. So anyway, I was talking to this person and I was like, "Look, the reality is the folks in power only let a certain amount of us in these spaces, okay, and when you see us in these spaces high up, like, to find somebody that looks like us in those spaces who genuinely care, who are not closing doors behind and who are speaking truth to power--" Again, I'm not asking you to come show up in a Kunta Kinte shirt. I'm just saying if you could just--[Dr. Thomas laughs] Okay? If you could just, you know, act like you're black, act like you recognize, you know, experiences. To find those types of people, it's like finding a unicorn with gold teeth, you know what I mean? It's crazy. Dr. Thomas: Yeah, and it's hard for me to speak to personally simply because my role is diversity, right? [both laugh] I'm not here as a [?] professional, I am a diversity expert and researcher. So that's, I guess, a privilege if you will that I hold as a leader in my company, and I recognize that. It was true in my last role too. I was in a consulting firm, and I was on the leadership team, but we were a diversity consulting firm, right? And so even in there you see some of that where, yeah, I had to really reconcile with the fact that I was doing this work and certainly had more latitude to, you know, speak that truth to power than I would if I were in another profession, and at the same time even I find myself vigilant, of course, and protective, of course, of how much is too much, you know? Where do I strike that balance of advocating in ways that people can hear versus that active, you know, operating principle that I called out earlier, you know, [?] folks that healthy discomfort. It's tough. It's a whole level of calculus that I have become I think decent at. I think also though I always--and, you know, we should talk about this another time because we can go real deep into this, right? I always view this dance of, like, on the one hand, any professional--especially any leader--is context switching and code switching all the time, right? Like, that is effective leadership, right? That's effective, but yet when you're a person of color, when you are black--which I can speak to--when you're brown, I think it creates some compunction of, like, "How much of this is playing the game that anyone would play and how much of this is selling out?" And I don't have an answer. I think everyone has their own barometer for that, but it's something I challenge myself on all the time. Like, "What of this feels like me and what of this feels like I'm becoming complicit in something that I don't subscribe to?" And, you know, sometimes I can't really codify when I'm feeling uncomfortable, but I know what I'm feeling, and that's when I have to really check myself and really examine if how I'm showing up or what I'm sharing or advocating is really serving my key audience, which is our marginalized folks at our company.Zach: Yo, so thank you for real. Sound Man, put a little round of applause in here for Erin answering this question off the fly, 'cause we did a pre-production. This was not part of the questions, but it was just something on top of my mind. Thank you so much. Now, look, let's get into this though, because we're just now really at the top of the conversation we planned on having. So look, at the time of us recording this, over 32 million folks have applied for unemployment benefits. At the same time, many companies are trying to retain their employees and keep them engaged in new working environments. I mean, there's even a lot of unofficial conversations happening on companies having pressure to not let go of too many minority employees in the name of just optics and potential legal ramifications. I'm curious, can we talk about this dynamic [?] where tensions may be, particularly for black and brown employees.Dr. Thomas: Sure. I mean, when I hear this question I'm really thinking about it as what are black and brown workers maybe thinking, feeling, [?] with individually if they are still employed, and I think I've seen both--at Upwork it's certainly [?] as well, 'cause obviously I consume research, I consume, you know, thought leadership externally, and I think there's a picture that's sort of forming for me in my head, which is there's a range I think of emotional reactions for folks who are still employed, and I think at its best folks are feeling really grateful of course. Right? It's sort of--going back to operating on a scale of 1 to 10, it's, like, yeah, a very compartmentalized 1 to 10, but, like, we're grateful for the blessings we have, and I think certainly that is true for folks who are in jobs with fair pay and fair benefits. They want to give their all to their employers because their circumstances could be so much worse. And I think especially in, you know, people work, in mission-driven organizations and purposeful organizations, that's incredibly true, you know? I'm seeing more and more come out, for instance, among mental health professionals who are burning out 'cause they're just giving it all. And I think, you know, in normal times it's hard to strike that balance of taking care of others versus yourself, and I think especially now, if folks are lucky to still have some semblance of job security, they're giving a lot, and they're very grateful. I think, towards the more extreme ends of this spectrum of reactions, I'm also seeing certainly some guilt, some comparative guilt, you know, around--there are folks out there who are on the front lines, who are essential workers, who have lost their jobs, and so "Maybe I'm not feeling great about what I'm doing or where I am, but, like, how could I complain?" Right? Like, "How can I explain when--maybe things aren't ideal, but I have so much," and so that's where I start to get--yeah, I get a little nervous about that, but I understand it, right? Like, you won't want to rock the boat right now when employment is so precarious. I think there is, you know, on this extreme end of the spectrum, a bit of grief happening, just--obviously black and brown folks are more likely to have people around them succumbing to this virus, falling ill, being unemployed themselves, and so, you know, folks are at work but breathing different losses that some of their counterparts may not be breathing as directly. And then there's backdrop of fear. Like, even if you feel secure in your job for now, this whole situation is obviously unprecedented. We don't know what will happen to the economy, we don't know what will happen to our companies. And again, the research shows that black and brown folks, and women, are the first to get furloughed, to get laid off, to your point, and we know in secure times black and brown folks are more heavily scrutinized, and I think folks who are still working feel a microscope that may or may not be on them, but it's impossible not to be vigilant about if you're gonna make it out of here with the job you went into this crisis with and if that job is actually the right job for you or if you're feeling beholden to, you know, a vulnerable time in your life. I think it's a very confusing time, but it all goes back to what we were talking about earlier, which is that it's just magnifying some of the sentiments that folks are always feeling. I think there's an overlay of, like, true uncertainty that is pressing, but I think folks are really trying to just get through the day, trying to keep the jobs they have, and, you know, trying not to encounter some of the secondary traumas that come when you lose that job, that security that you have in place. So I'm seeing a whole swirl of things, and the way they look to me basically is people are tired. They are exhausted. They are burning out and, you know, I think they're taking care of themselves a little less than they used to because it feels a little risky to do that.Zach: You segued really well into my next question about, like, black and brown employees and their experience, and it's funny because I was talking to a colleague about this, talking to a workplace colleague about, like, my own experiences, and I was telling him about, like, you know, "I've had some stresses because I've had some friends who almost fell victim to COVID-19," and, you know, they recovered, you know, but I also have acquaintances whose family members have passed, right? So you're right, like, what's on my mind and the stresses and the drama is--just what's on my mind is different throughout the day, or maybe it's just a little more real. Let me not say that other folks--'cause there have been white folks dying from the coronavirus too. So it's like, you know, not about trying to dismiss one to uplift the other. It's just like, "Okay, this is real for you, and it's even more real for me." And so I'm curious, like, you know, can we talk a little bit about what organizations can do during this time to at the very least reduce harm for their black and brown employees?Dr. Thomas: For sure. I think, you know, first I want to say 1. thank goodness for your friends who have recovered, and 2. I'm very sorry for the losses that are close to you, and to your point, I'm sorry for that for everybody. This is--you know, the backdrop to all of this is just... it's really hard to fathom honestly. It's hard for me to, like, wrap my head around the devastation this has caused, and it's just--it's so painful, and I'm sorry that everyone is going through this in some way, 'cause everyone is affected and is going to be in some way by the physical toll that this is taking on people. To that point, you know, I think there's a few things that orgs can do kind of from the top down. I think there's also things certainly that any individual colleague or manager can do for the folks around them, but I'll talk about this on a couple of levels. Sidebar, I always think of the Nick Jonas song "Levels" whenever I'm thinking about how to approach this work. Zach: Now, hold on, what is the Nick Jonas song--'cause see, the only song I know by Nick Jonas is that "I still get jealous--" You know what I'm saying? "[continues singing]."Dr. Thomas: It's about--I'm trying to think of how it goes. It's about "love has levels." "Levels, levels." I don't know the words.Zach: Come on, Erin. Come on. I hear you with the vocals.Dr. Thomas: I know. I gotta find it, but I like him, and I know he has a song called Levels, and I always think about it. It's like, "Oh, levels, take me higher--" I don't know. Levels take me higher. I don't know. It's a terrible song.Zach: It's a terrible song? Okay. Did he have a black choir in the background? [both laugh] Yo, when Nick Jonas came out there, boy, he came out there and they was like, "I still get jealoous." I was like, "What is going on? Jesus ain't got nothing to do with this." I mean, he's a jealous guy. Anyway, moving forward... [both laughing] Dr. Thomas: I'm gonna have to find it, I'm gonna have to sing it and just send you a little audio clip, 'cause I can't even remember the tune, 'cause it's not a memorable song. Love you, Nick.Zach: Okay. [laughs]Dr. Thomas: You know? From the top down, companies, and really I'm talking about leaders, people leaders, diversity leaders, can take care to do a few things. One is--and I saw this during the earlier days of people sheltering in place. I think it's leveled out maybe a bit, at least from my vantage point, but in the beginning there was a lot of corporate messaging--and I think you even see this still in commercials--of, you know, "We're all in this together," and on its face, cool, cool, cool. Like, right, you want to build camaraderie, you want to cohere folks around a shared sense of community, but if you beat that drum a little too long, especially within your company, I think it can kind of err to the side of being colorblind, right, and really minimizing the disproportionate strain that there actually is on employees of color and on black and brown folks. So I think striking that balance of certainly we're all in this together, and also there are distinct experiences that we know folks are grappling with. It's an important sort of dual approach to make sure that your folks who are black and brown know that they're seen, know that they're recognized for their unique experiences through this and the unique impacts that they're encountering. So that's one thing, just sort of take that multicultural lens to those company communications that you're sending out. I think another thing is, you know, wherever you can creating space for employees to uncover and share more about their specific experiences. So, you know, we did this back in April at Upwork. We partnered with Michelle Kim, who I know is a friend of the pod.Zach: Come on. What's up, Michelle J. Kim? Shout-out to Awaken Co. What's up? [imitating air horns]Dr. Thomas: [joins in, Zach laughs] She's awesome, and we sort of co-facilitated I think a 75-minute conversation with leaders of our Asian ERG(s)--and this is before the data about [?] were coming out with regards to black and brown folks, and the conversation was mostly around--in terms of the media--anti-Asian bias and discrimination and racism, so we seized on the timeliness of that conversation and built out, you know, a virtual forum for our employees to share what they were concerned about, what they were hearing in their day-to-day lives and interactions, and to scale out from that, from those stories to give more context to, you know, why are we seeing this, what is this. This is not unique to this moment in time. This is, you know, a pattern repeating, and really come from a place of urgency to educate our folks a little bit more about historical context and why it matters now and certainly what they can do to disrupt and call out bias in themselves and discriminations they're seeing externally. A third thing is certainly around mental health and benefits and resources to aid folks, you know, who are experiencing trauma and grief. And I don't think this just has to be if you've lost someone close to me. I think in general folks are really struggling obviously with anxiety and insomnia, and there's data coming in on that, and so making sure that your company has the right level and amount of bereavement and [leave?] policies, but also just coaching and support with your EAP if you have one or your [?] and getting them at least to a basic level [?] of providing that 1:1 support for folks and hopefully referring them out to medical providers if they need, you know, more professional coaching. And then the last thing, you know, is related to what you were saying about terminations and lay-offs and all that. Every company should be auditing the decisions they're making this time when it comes to furloughs and risks, making sure that they're looking at that through an equity lens, making sure that they're not just focusing on people's kind of positions in the company or tenure, because black and brown folks tend to sit lower in the org and tend to be earlier in their tenure, so really taking a performance-based approach to that analysis can be helpful in getting out of that sort of hamster wheel of, you know, first in first out when it comes to black and brown folks. So those are, you know, top-down, structural considerations that companies can be taking every day. I think on the ground, peers and managers can be doing some of what we've already role modeled in this conversation. Check in with people, my goodness. Just think about who you haven't spoken to in a while. Think about who you might normally pass at, you know, the water cooler or the coffee station, and if you haven't chatted with that person 1:1 in a minute, you know, Slack them, ping them, whatever you've got in terms of internal messaging systems, call them, pick up the phone and check in. Just see how people are doing, and make sure you create, you know, space to actually hear their answer and to actually respond. So, you know, as opposed to the normal "How's it going?" Like, really ask the question and really wait for the answer and be with that person with whatever they share, you know? I think it's really about those personal connections that we probably took for granted when we were back in an office setting, for those of us who were in offices, and that are harder to actualize now, right? Like, we're all home. We're all behind screens, and so there is no organic water cooler conversation. That means we have to make a little bit more effort to reach out to folks and to show them that we care about them, that we're connected to them and that we're a resource, or that the company has resources, for them whenever they need.Zach: I love it, I love it. Now, Erin, you know that we're about real talk in a corporate world like I said at the top of the show. For the executive leader to this and perhaps rolling their eyes or maybe, like, speed listening and being like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know this. Yeah, yeah, yeah," like, you know, just kind of being dismissive as to the gravity of this and why this matters. Why should folks have an inclusive and equitable lens during this time, and then what's the potential fallout in your mind if they don't?Dr. Thomas: I have so many reactions to this question. I think, first, if someone's rolling their eyes to this, which... yeah, could be true, I'll just, like, emphatically say that's not my key audience. Like, I'm just not--you know, I'm really not, and I'm just not. That's not my sweet spot. There were times earlier in my career where that was, where I found it fun to really push the business case for equity, business case for diversity. I am not interested in that anymore, and thankfully I'm in an org where I don't have to do that. Like, kudos to those of you who are doing that. Frankly, for me personally, that's ineffective, right? You know, people do not make decisions based on facts or data. So, you know, I could stand here and talk about the research that's been done. You know, Great Place to Work just did a study around [?], right, and they showed that those who focused on inclusion did better during the recession and saw more returns. So, like, I could share all those stats and all that, but it doesn't matter. Like, if you're rolling your eyes, if you are asking why or if, like, it's probably not gonna happen for you. Just call it, you know--because you can Google it, you can ask Siri, you can ask Jeeves, you can do whatever you want to do, but, like--Zach: [laughing] Not ask Jeeves.Dr. Thomas: [laughing] You can go back to Jeeves if you have to, but my point is that this is not how people make decisions. People make decisions emotionally. They do what they want to do and then they rationalize it later. That is a fact. Zach: That is a fact.Dr. Thomas: You know, it is. And that's science. [laughs] And so if you're not in any way emotionally inclined to care, nothing I say, no data point is gonna make you care. So I think that's one thing. Like, I am impatient and frankly, especially with, you know, decades of research that I think has really caught on in industry, we're just past the point of denying the value proposition of diversity. I think it wastes calories. I think it distracts from the meaningful question, which is, like, how we can go about it during this time or, you know, what we should be prioritizing. I think those are fair questions, but if you're, for whatever strange reason, listening to this podcast and rolling your eyes, like, I don't have time for it. I just don't. I don't. And already that was too much time explaining how I don't have time for it. So that's my quick reaction to that. [both laughing] I think those who are kind of, you know, struggling with how to go about this or where to maybe invest less or more, that's incredibly fair. I think that is incredibly challenging. So what I would say there is just--it goes back to what we talking about earlier. I mean, this is life and death, right? It does not get more real in terms of a call to action than this moment in time, and I think every leader should sit themselves down and critically examine what legacy they want to leave, you know? This is the time for companies to demonstrate what living values, living their values actually looks like. It's their time to pressure test, you know, different mantras that companies love to share around, you know, authentic selves at work, or "Bring your whole selves to work," because you saying--it goes back to what we were talking about earlier. You're saying those things... well, here's your moment. Here's your moment to [know?] what it really means, and that's true at the company level, it's true at that personal level. Hopefully you're inclined to want to dig more deeply into what actualizing on your commitments actually could mean right now, and I think that's the place to get really serious about where are the potential gaps between what you're saying and doing. And as we said earlier, you know, if you realize "Huh, even in these most dire circumstances, we're maybe not really ready to make the investment that we might need to actually move the needle or create the environment that our people need." Okay. That's a tough conclusion to come to, but okay.Zach: That's responsible though, right?Dr. Thomas: Right. Yeah. I mean, and then okay, well, then you have to communicate that back, but if you have been talking a game for a while and are realizing you want to step it up, that's amazing, and I think from there what you can be doing is really leveraging external leaders--I mean, there's a lot of information, tools that are free. You could certainly and should be always leveraging your internal employees or workers however they want to be leveraged to help you reveal your blind spots. But this is it. Like, this is the moment, and hopefully orgs will really step it up and leave a footprint that I think can last for generations. You know, what companies do now I think is going to reset how people see them in the public light, how people see them as an employer of choice or not, and so it's a critical kind of come to Jesus moment hopefully for leaders and orgs to double down or to de-emphasize the things that we've been talking about for a while.Zach: Yo. Man, I mean this has just been an incredible conversation. I would be remiss not to drop a Flex bomb right here, and then also some air horns, put 'em in right here. Okay, there we go. Erin, before we let you go--before Emory and I, excuse me, let you go, any parting words or shout-outs? I know you've been dropping wild gems this entire time, but I just want to give you one last--you know, where they can find you, what you're excited about with Upwork, anything. Give you time to plug.Dr. Thomas: Oh, goodness. Okay, I did not prepare for this. I have so many people to thank. I would say find me on Twitter. That's it. Please don't try to find me on LinkedIn. I don't respond on LinkedIn. Real talk. It's just too cluttered. So ErinLThomasPhD is my Twitter handle. I would say check out Upwork. I have been a lot of places. I have led diversity within two other organizations before now. I've been an expert consultant. I've seen a lot of what companies are doing, and I wouldn't be at Upwork if I weren't rabidly passionate about what we're doing and about all of the magic ingredients that attracted me to our company. So I'd love for folks to check us out. Come work with us. We're a great, amazing, purposeful company doing great work, with cool leaders like me, so come on through.Zach: I mean, this is the best ad I could imagine. [both laugh] All right, y'all, you know what it is. We're having real talk in a corporate world. I'm saying it, like, three times this time, but you know we amplify and center marginalized, underappreciated, underrepresented, undersupported, underestimated voices at work, and look, you can check us out anywhere, okay? Look, we're all over Barack Obama's internet. You just Google Living Corporate, okay? We're gonna pop up. We're there, okay? We're all over. Check us out on Twitter @LivingCorp_Pod, @LivingCorporate on Instagram. Shoot, if you old school and you're like, "Nah, Zach. I gotta go in the browser and type in the domain like a true OG," then I'ma say, "Okay, cool," and I'ma tell you www.living-corporate.com, please say the dash, or livingcorporate.co, livingcorporate.us, livingcorporate.tv, livingcorporate.org, livingcorporate.net. We got all of the Living Corporates except livingcorporate.com, so if you type in livingcorporate.com and Living Corporate does not pop up do not be mad at me, 'cause I told you already we don't got that one. We got all the other livingcorporates, or living-corporate.com--please say the dash, all right? You can also email us at livingcorporatepodcast@gmail.com. You can also DM us, okay? DMs are wide open. We are not afraid of the random DM. Just hit us up. We'll make sure we hit you back. If you have a listener letter, you know, you could submit it right there. We'll answer it on the show. We got a decent number. We try to get to a critical mass so we can answer a few, and then we kind of make that an episode. Just so y'all you know. It's, like, a peek behind the curtain. Until next time, y'all. This has been Zach, and you've been listenimg to Dr. Erin Thomas of Upwork. Me and Emory are gonna catch y'all later. Emory, you got anything to say? [Emory's silent] Nope? All right, y'all. Peace.

What role should LinkedIn play in your overall paid advertising strategy, and how can use it to drive highly qualified leads for your business? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Modern Media Advertising Director Anthony Blatner shares his LinkedIn advertising strategies. From how LinkedIn should be used in combination with other channels as part of a holistic paid advertising strategy, to what ad formats perform best and how to work with your sales team to ensure any leads you get are being followed up with, Anthony covers everything he does to help Modern Media's clients get killer results from LinkedIn. Highlights from my conversation with Anthony include: LinkedIn is great for targeting niche audiences at scale. The cost per click on LinkedIn is higher than it is on other platforms, so it's important that you have a strategy for following up on any leads you get from LinkedIn. In Anthony's experience, LinkedIn ads work well for company's with a customer lifetime value of $10,000 or more. Whereas the cost per click on Facebook is generally around $2, on LinkedIn, it starts at $4.50 and goes up from there. LinkedIn is best for top of the funnel advertising, where you can attract a new audience and then retarget and nurture that audience on other, less expensive platforms. Anthony has found that LinkedIn lead forms work well for his clients. They tend to have a higher conversion rate because prospects don't have to leave LinkedIn to convert, but when you use a lead form, you sacrifice the ability to cookie a contact.  If you are concerned about GDPR compliance, there are a number of ways to use lead forms to secure explicit consent and stay GDPR compliant. Another LinkedIn ad format that works well are newsfeed ads. Whereas on Facebook, video works well for this format, Anthony recommends using images on LinkedIn because you are being charged by the click and not the impression (which is how Facebook works). There is a new LinkedIn ad format that uses chatbot-like functionality called conversation ads that is also worth checking out. Anthony says sponsored InMail can be an effective way to get more conversions for ads that are already tested and proving successful in the newsfeed. With many marketers cutting their ad spend due to budget restrictions relating to COVID, Anthony says the cost per click on LinkedIn is down 30 to 40 percent. He recommends setting a maximum cost per click when advertising on LinkedIn, and then playing around with lowering that number to see how little you can spend and still see results. If you are doing LinkedIn ads and not seeing great results, it is most likely due to your targeting. Anthony recommends that you go back and revisit your targeting strategy to see if that helps.  The minimum number of emails you can target on LinkedIn is 300. Resources from this episode: Visit the Modern Media website Connect with Anthony on LinkedIn Contact Anthony by email at anthony@modernmedia.io  Listen to the podcast to learn how the top LinkedIn ads experts are using the platform to drive leads, and how can, too. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth and today my guest is Anthony Blatner who is the advertising director at Modern Media. Welcome Anthony. Anthony Blatner (Guest): Hey Kathleen. Thanks for having me on the show. Anthony and Kathleen recording this episode. Kathleen: Yeah, I'm looking forward to getting into it with you today, talking about some LinkedIn ads. But before we start, can you please tell my listeners a little bit about yourself and about modern media and about really just how you wound up doing what you're doing today? About Anthony Blatner and Modern Media Anthony: Yeah, absolutely. So modern media, we are a LinkedIn ads focused agency. We do a lot of B2B lead generation and all of our focuses on LinkedIn ads. The way that I got to being here is I actually come at it from the tech and software development world. I originally started my career working at IBM, working on their consulting teams, working on big eCommerce stores. Really enjoyed that, got to travel around a lot. I live in Austin, Texas and I also got involved with the startup community while I was here and ended up falling in love with that. So after a few years at IBM, I spun off to start my own mobile app development consulting company who would build mobile apps for for a variety of other companies, a lot of startups, some other like larger tech companies that we would partner with. And when I was doing that, I saw that we were building all these apps and like some of these companies would actually have startups with build an app and launch and like do very well. And we had a number of clients that went on to get acquired or like Stallard technology. And then we also work with some bigger partners who may have already had a customer network and they launched their app and it goes up to that customer network and does very well out of the gates. Then you would have other companies who would spend all this time and money developing app their software and then they would launch it and without a good marketing plan in place, it would just sit on the app store. No one would download it. And you'd see how much time and effort these teams are putting into this. And without, you know, without that marketing plan afterwards, then it was just, you know, it was dead in the water. So I saw it, I saw the need for it and then we naturally got pulled into doing it, helping out with a lot of those. So from doing marketing for my own agency and for a lot of clients I ended up just really loving the marketing that I was doing, so a few years ago, transitioned to focusing solely on marketing. So now Modern Media focuses on marketing. B2B lead-generation solely using LinkedIn ads. Kathleen: I love how focused you guys are because I mean, I come from an agency background. I owned an agency for 11 years and you know, I think that's the big conversation in the agency community, right? Like it's easy to try to be all things to all people, especially when you're chasing dollars. But there's really something to be said for niching down and becoming, you know, the best expert in the world on the thing that you want to do, you know, and focus on. So I think that's great. Anthony: No, it wasn't easy to get here. You know, it's a lot of trial and error along the way to where getting into the marketing. A lot of the apps that we started by marketing, no, sometimes we did start with like Facebook ads and Google ads. So like I've, I've done a lot of all of that kind of advertising over the years. And just with my background and with the type of clientele we had, LinkedIn was just repeatedly becoming the best platform to market them on. So we had done a lot of Facebook, done a lot of Google. I'll tell you a story of probably the first one that really stuck out for me. They were, they were, this was a company that we were taking on to do marketing. They were at big data, but they are the big data platform. They sell their tools made for enterprise companies. It's like thousands of dollars a year. They were doing the traditional Facebook and Google marketing. But as we audited their account and looked at their lead list, a lot of the leads that were coming in from Google were like people looking for jobs, searching for jobs or students looking for research. And they were, you know, they were following best practices for keywords and negatives and all that stuff, but you still get a lot of leads coming in. And then on Facebook it'd be a lot of people who are maybe clicking on the ad cause it had like a pretty picture in it or something that was attention grabbing. But a lot of those leads that were signing up were just not good fits. Their sales team was complaining that they were wasting a lot of time calling out these people and they just weren't qualified to buy. They didn't have the budgets to buy the software. So we took him over to LinkedIn and you know, targeted like CTOs, data scientists at specific types of companies who would be had the, their platform was made for a few different industries. So chose those industries, chose companies I think like a hundred people and above and just right out the gates. Those leads that were signing up were like the perfect fit for them and they're just like, this is night and day. Like the clear differentiator there. And since then it's just been like, I'm just an advocate of LinkedIn now for, for B2B for these industries that that's our focus now. Who is LinkedIn advertising right for? Kathleen: That's great. Now I feel like when people think about online advertising, they have a lot of choices these days. You mentioned a number of platforms just, and you know, in the last few minutes I guess my first question for you is really who is LinkedIn advertising right for and where does it fit within that big mix of different options? Anthony: That is a good question. That is a very important question to ask. So it's not, it isn't a good fit for everybody. I'll tell you a few things about it is LinkedIn is great for targeting niche decision makers at scale. It is a more expensive ads platform to use than a lot of the other ones out there. So it's good for companies that have the resources to go work those leads that they acquire. It's going to be more expensive to acquire those leads than like most other channels. So, you know, they're higher value leads need to work them when people are signing up. It is more expensive to acquire them. So you, your offer, your LTV for your customers should be high enough to make sense. What we'd like to see is an LTV of about 10k for that ROI to make sense. You know, if your sales and marketing engine is very honed in, you can be less than that and still make an ROI. But that's a good rule of thumb. If you're on Facebook ads, you can get CPCs under a buck, you know, they might be a dollar to $2 on average. On LinkedIn the minimum is about $4.50 in the US so right out of the gate, that's their floor and you're just going up from there. And if you're targeting CEO's only, you know, that's gonna be even higher than that. So just be prepared for higher acquisition costs. And that leads to how it fits in with the ecosystem. LinkedIn is great for starting the conversation and for acquiring very high quality traffic. Once you acquire it, you know, you want to then nurture it on other cheaper channels or more cost efficient channels. So once somebody signs up to be a lead, you know, follow up over email, outbound calling oftentimes we retarget with Facebook and Google ads. So we acquired traffic on LinkedIn and then well, retarget on Facebook and Google because it's a lot cheaper. And you know, retarget those ads, retarget those leads to, we're doing lead generation on LinkedIn, and then retargeting them to maybe book a call on Facebook or Google. Kathleen: Got it. So it sounds like from what you're saying, focused lists you know, not kind of throwing a bunch of darts at the wall and hoping one sticks. It's like if you know exactly who you want to target and you have some good targeting parameters around whether that's job title, what have you, and then the budget to be able to support a larger, potentially larger per lead ad spend the team in place to follow up on those leads. And then really from an expectation standpoint, using it at the top of the funnel. Understanding LinkedIn ad formats Kathleen: So then knowing that if somebody is listening and they're thinking, okay, check, check, check, you know, all of these things I have, can you talk a little bit about LinkedIn ad formats and what you find performs really well? So like, what do you need to have in order to advertise effectively on LinkedIn? Anthony: Yeah, so a few things. So approaching the LinkedIn campaign is a few things and I'll kind of tell you about our most common campaign we'll do for people is a lead generation campaign on LinkedIn using lead magnets. So a lead magnet is some asset of value that your target market would be interested in. So a guide, a PDF, a checklist or something like that. Linkedin, like I said, this is starting a conversation with somebody, your target market. So offering people guides and easy downloadables is the best way to start the conversation to get them interested. Most, you know, unless you're a major brand, most people have not heard about your company. So leading with like buy now or contact us isn't gonna do as well. We're gonna have a much higher cost per lead. So on LinkedIn use lead magnets to start. As far as ad formats, we do often use the LinkedIn lead forms. They will auto-populate with the person's information. So the lead form is a little form when you click on the ad that'll open up right inside of LinkedIn, just like a Facebook lead form. They work very similarly. But on LinkedIn you can auto fill that with information from the user's profile and it comes with information from your profile. While you know on Facebook it's usually personal email addresses. In LinkedIn you do get number of personal email addresses, but you also get like work email addresses as well. I find that data quality is very high coming off of LinkedIn. And we also often use like job title and company name so we know who are these leads that are signing up. Or using the LinkedIn profile. You are also going to look up those leads afterwards and you know that that gives you a lot, a lot more richer information about your lead. So you can see, okay, who is this person, where do they work? And understand, you know, understand where your leads are coming from. Usually, you're setting those targeting criteria up front. So you know, people coming into your campaign are going to be part of that audience. But our average campaign or our most helpful one is, is using the LinkedIn lead forms, your lead generation offering a lead magnets to, to your audience. Kathleen: So this is an interesting topic to me because I've heard this, that lead forms are more effective than trying to get somebody to like go to your website and convert. But I guess my question is really if you're using a lead form, What are you sacrificing? I use HubSpot and so I can't, if I use a lead form, I can't cookie somebody. If I can't cookie them, then I am giving up the ability to see all that rich data about their behavior on my site, et cetera and things like that. But then you had mentioned also using LinkedIn leads or ads rather to then retarget those people on other platforms. Can you do that if you're using a lead form? Because at that point, you're not having a tracking pixel firing on your website. Anthony: Right. At that point we retarget based on the email. Kathleen: Okay. So if, but if there... Anthony: You lose some data you know, that is, it is different than going to the landing page and opting in. So we do often use both, but most common is using the lead forms. The conversion rate is just much higher. Typically using the lead forms the quantity you're going to get is going to make sense. You will see a lower conversion rate for pushing people to your landing page. But I do say, you know, there are times where maybe you don't have the sales team available to call all those leads. So it is more important for you to get fewer, more higher intent leads. And then at that point maybe a landing page is a better one for you to use. Because we do have accounts where like, you know, if they have a large budget they can be driving a lot of leads through there. And if you don't have the sales team to contact all those leads, like, Hey, I'd rather have higher intent leads. So landing page opt ins would then be better with them. LinkedIn ads and GDPR compliance Kathleen: Yeah. Now the other question I have about lead forms is, it relates to GDPR. So if you're driving somebody to your site, you have a lot of control. If you're trying to be GDPR compliant, you have a lot of control over how you structure, you know, your opt-ins and your GDPR language, et cetera. I don't have a lot of experience with LinkedIn lead forms. So can you talk a little bit about, if somebody is trying to adhere to GDPR, can they use LinkedIn lead forms and if so, what kind of control do you have over being able to document that opt-in? Anthony: Yeah good question. So we haven't seen too many issues with that on LinkedIn. Two things with lead form that you can include is number one, you were actually required to include a link to the company's privacy policy. So usually you use the privacy policy which will cover, you know, all those terms. You can also include a little blurb at the bottom of the lead form. Anything else that you want to make clear to the user as they're signing up. So those two inputs as far as that we usually get involved, you know, we're, we'll use the privacy policy from the company. And any other information on the lead form that needs to be, Kathleen: So am I correct that there's no explicit checkbox built in that would say, for example, I agree to receive other communications from company X, Anthony: You can add a custom checkbox to do that. Kathleen: You can, okay. Okay. So that would presumably then solve that issue if somebody was really being strict about how they complied with GDPR? Yeah. Great. When should you use a LinkedIn lead form? Kathleen: So yes, there's this trade off then with lead ads and it sounds like it's important to understand your goals. What I'm hearing, or at least what I'm taking away from what you said, is that if your intent is to really have a laser focus on your certain market or your leads that you want to attract and, and your goal if they do convert is to really follow up with a phone call from your sales team, then it doesn't really matter if you're driving them to your website and having them fill out a form because the goal is to get the sales team call them and or, and, or reach out by email. And so, you know, having a lead form would make sense there. But then it sounds like if your goal is to either put them into, you know, a full funnel nurturing sequence where you're retargeting on Facebook or something or where you're going to do mass emails then maybe it might make sense to not use a lead form and instead to direct them to a form on your site. Is that accurate, would you say? Anthony: Yeah, we've got the best results that we see are when we, when we use lead forms to drive the higher volume of leads and then the client usually has a sales team who's on top of those leads right away calling them, you know, it's like they say like the five minute after submission rules, like the best practice, you know, contact them soon afterwards. But five minutes is very fast. But if it, Hey, if you're on top of your leads, call them right away. Like, that's where we should have the best results. The sales team do work those leads. If someone signed up, they've indicated interest and if you position your lead magnet the right way, then they should be very open to like a sales conversation or at least that introductory like discovery. Hey, how can we help you in conversation Kathleen: Do you give your clients any coaching as far as how to follow up on those leads? Because I think the one thing I've noticed is that there can, there's the potential for a big mismatch. Like somebody fills out a form on LinkedIn to get a white paper there. They might not be expecting to get a phone call. So how do you advise your clients to follow up? Anthony: Yes, good question. So LinkedIn is great for starting the conversation. It is top of funnel. Be aware that these leads, this is probably the first time that they're seeing your company, they probably opted in to get your lead magnet. So yeah, I kind of joke about the five minute rule thing. I would say that it's very fast to contact them at the point where they have just for the first time seeing your logo and heard about your company. They probably haven't even come to it, had time to read that lead magnet yet. So I, you know, I don't say within five minutes, contact them soon. But you know, some of it is like you want that lead magnet to help do some of the education and warming up with them. It might take a little bit of time for somebody to receive that email, to click through to read it or to receive that email and then go read it. And then yeah, follow up with them, have them on an email sequence, follow up with them shortly after that and then have the retargeting funnel in place. So that's you know, if they sign up via email, if they click through and pixel them, then you can retarget them with ads afterwards. So we do recommend like a multi-channel approach afterwards as many touch points as you can, you know, shortly afterwards, while while it is still top of mind for them. And then there's a lot that goes into the lead magnet strategy as far as, you know, how do I pick the best asset? How do I create the best asset that's going to work here? For companies and brands and topics, services, that's they are, that are, it's like the levels of awareness thing pyramid. If they are not very aware of what your solution is and you work that you want to focus on their pain points and make the topic about them. If they are more aware, maybe if you are a well known brand and maybe you can make the topic about yourself if there's something that they're interested in. So for lower levels of awareness, keep in mind that this is the part of the first time the senior company. So that call, the way I coach people about that call is that needs to be very introductory, very discovery. How can we help you get focused? Other LinkedIn ad formats Kathleen: Yeah, that makes sense. Now we talked a lot about lead ads. Can you talk through what are some of the other ad format options on LinkedIn and for each of them, you know, when would you use it and, and how does it generally perform? Anthony: Sure. so the next, so as far as specific ad units in the newsfeed, so that's a sponsored content and you have image ads and you have a video ad there, you also carousel ads. And they work just like Facebook carousel ads essentially. We actually start with image ads most of the time. So I know, you know, on Facebook everyone's about video and like video performance better on LinkedIn to start, we often, we always start with, we almost always start with image ads in the beginning because we find on LinkedIn you're usually paying per click. Whereas on Facebook, usually paying costs, CPM by impression. So on LinkedIn you want to reduce the chance of any irrelevant clicks to your ads. So that in one way that is don't be misleading. You know, on Facebook people tend to be very curiosity invoking of like drawing the click in. That could be flashy videos, that could be vague copy that's just curiosity invoking. On LinkedIn you want to be very direct about what's what it is you're offering, who you are, who you're targeting because you don't want people to just curiosity click, okay, Kathleen: You're paying for that. Yeah, that's an expensive click. Especially when five bucks is your minimum. You could have bought yourself a latte at Starbucks. Anthony: So, we're usually starting with image ads because you can instantly, somebody can consume images rather than watching a video. We usually find, to start, videos tend to be flashy and like eye catching and they draw the click more often. So in the beginning we see images perform better. And then once you prove your audience, which audience you should be split testing a number of audiences, once you prove which audience is the best, which ad angle, which imagery is the best, then we can then go turn that into a video or create a video similar to that. And then, at that point we do see often video can outperform images. So in in the newsfeed you have images, video next format that we most commonly use is probably sponsored InMail. Sponsored InMail can be great. It can be expensive as well. So it's mostly InMail charges you per send. I think the minimum 5 cents per send. It doesn't sound like a lot, but it is a lot when you add it up over the size of an audience. Sponsored InMail is great because we do see very high open rates of those messages. Keep in mind a lot of people that are opening those are probably just clearing out the notification. So the offers that work best in sponsored InMail are the ones that are like the, if you have a very appealing offer. So usually we'll start by testing in the newsfeed and if an ad does very well there, then we will take that and go turn into a sponsored InMail ad. Because if it's performing really well in the newsfeed then that means the offer's proven and that we can go take and put in as much with InMail. Sponsored InMail, you know, it's a one, it seems like a one on one conversation and if it's like, if it feels like a personal offer that you're making to somebody usually, you know, sometimes offer a free consultation there or like free gifts there are, do, do better. But it's, it's a good ad format to try out. Next, Linkedin just released conversation ads, which are kind of the next evolution of sponsored email ads. This gets more to be more chat bot like so we do see LinkedIn does follow. It's tends to follow Facebook and a lot of different ways. And you know, we've seen how Facebook has evolved with the last few years. We've seen Facebook Lives, we've seen chat bots and stuff like that. Linkedin is kind of following along the same steps. Kathleen: So can you actually explain how that would work? Cause I haven't seen that at all. I'm super curious about it. The chatbots. Anthony: So it's not, it's not a chatbot, but I think LinkedIn's on their way to getting more towards this. But conversation ads, you will create a chat flow. So instead of just a sponsored InMail message that you send to somebody, it is similar to that. You send the message, but then they have a few options that they can choose from and you can create a, a tree from there. So that if somebody clicks on option a, you know, essentially you can offer them multiple different things in the app. So the reason why we've seen performance improve from it, because you can offer people, you can make multiple offers, Kathleen: Right? It's like a choose your own adventure kind of a thing. Now, does that appear as a direct message in their inbox or how does that appear? Anthony: Yes. Kathleen: Interesting. I haven't seen that. I'm going to have to now search for it, find it in the wild. So, so many different options. Who is finding success with LinkedIn ads? Kathleen: I know you work with a lot of clients. Can you share any examples of, you know, campaigns or companies that you've worked with who are using LinkedIn ads really successfully? Anthony: Sure. so right now, well, just in general the HR space always does very well on LinkedIn. So I'd say for any space, any campaigns that I would highlight, like it's probably gonna be an HR campaign. The biggest categories on LinkedIn are like, I think IT is number one. And I think HR is number two, and then it's like the rest of the tech software world and then like financial services. So if you're in one of those categories, those are the biggest audiences. So those are probably gonna be great campaigns for LinkedIn. I'm always surprised when somebody gives me a very niche audience to target how many people I'm able to find on LinkedIn. So, and pretty much any niche decision maker, any niche B2B targeting, go scope out what the audience sizes. And I'm always surprised how many people I can find in the different niches. But to highlight any campaigns, HR, I'd say just in the last, especially in the last couple months since we've all been quarantined and at home, the HR category has been very active on LinkedIn. So not only have ad prices gone way down the last few weeks, they're down about like 30 to 40% in a lot of cases. Kathleen: Now, I've heard that. I've heard that also for Facebook. And is that on LinkedIn? Is that because basically so many companies have cut their marketing spend and so the demand side if you will, has gone down Anthony: Exactly. LinkedIn is an auction, just like Facebook. Kathleen: Yup. Okay. Anthony: So less, well, it's a combination of less advertisers and then also more eyeballs. Supply and demand there where we're all stuck at home. So everyone's spending a lot more time online. Kathleen: Yeah, I've heard, I've heard a ton of people say they're spending way more time on LinkedIn these days. How to structure your bidding strategy for LinkedIn ads Anthony: A random tip is I always recommend bidding max CPC. Do not use auto-bid on LinkedIn because you just, you say go spend wherever you want it and LinkedIn will go whatever it wants. Set max CPCs for most of your campaigns. We've noticed that we can drop that max CPC all the way down, nearly all the way down to the floor. Each audience in each geography has its own floor so go test in the tool and see what yours is, but we dropped it nearly down to the floor for a lot of campaigns and I'm seeing cost per lead improve a lot. Kathleen: Wow. That's awesome. Okay, so sorry, I interrupted you. You were talking about examples and you talked about HR. Any particular campaigns that you can think of that have done really well lately? Examples of successful LinkedIn ad campaigns Anthony: Yeah, so there's two very specific HR ones I'm thinking about right now that, especially in the last few weeks, that they've done very well. I mentioned how like lead magnet strategy is very important. They both release lead magnets that speak to kind of what's going on right now, how to hire in tough times and how to support your people during tough times. And, you know, COVID messaging might be getting stale now, but especially over the last couple of months, it's been performing super well. So where they were traditionally between a 40 to $60 cost per lead, they're down below $30 per lead. And then the other campaign, they were a little bit more cause they were targeting a higher level of HR people. And they're down below 50 bucks per lead. So yeah, we've seen lead costs like almost cut in half in a lot of cases. And just like HR activities, you know, through the roof. So those ones have done really well. Attracting high quality leads on LinkedIn Kathleen: And then would you say the quality of the leads - I know you mentioned doing almost the opposite approach from Facebook where you're trying not to be click baity cause you're paying by the click. And I'm interested specifically, because you talked about one example that was targeting very senior level people. That's an audience that's usually really hard to get in front of. So can you talk a little bit about what your experience has been if somebody is going after like a C level audience, what are some good tips for being successful with that on LinkedIn? Anthony: Absolutely. That's why you use LinkedIn. Cause a lot of these upper level people, there's just no other place or way to target them without, without buying an email list. Yeah, there's no other place. Linkedin is the best place with that kind of data at scale. And LinkedIn's always the first place that people update their profile when they get a new job or get a promotion. So it's very high quality data and that's the only place, a lot of times, you'll see these people. As far as targeting goes, the LinkedIn audience approach is the opposite of Facebook, I guess. Again, with Facebook you give it, you know, you tend to give it a big audience and you let the AI algorithm go find the best people for you and that audience. On LinkedIn you want to do the opposite because, because you are paying cost per click, you want to exclude any irrelevant ones. So you want to be very niche, very laser focused on who you want to target. As far as lead quality goes, you know, you're setting up your targeting in the beginning. What are the job titles I want, what are the functions with the seniorities? So if you're not getting those leads, the right leads coming through your funnel, go back to your targeting and tweak that up. You don't usually have a problem with lead quality. The quality is always clients. It's always funny, like a client that has run Facebook ads in the past and like, we'll have like our lead tracker set up and they'll see the job titles and company names coming in and they're just like, perfect, perfect, perfect. And sometimes we'll get feedback of like, Oh, this title was a little bit off maybe because you said this, so let's go add this exclusion and then we'll go work that back in. But, well, yeah you know, if your leads that come through on LinkedIn aren't a great fit, then just tweak your targeting a little bit. But you can set the specific job titles in specific industries and company size you want. So lead quality is usually awesome. What is the minimum audience size for a LinkedIn ad? Kathleen: Yeah. now one of the things I've always been interested in and I feel like it's changed, what is the minimum audience size that you can target on LinkedIn because there are some crazy opportunities with LinkedIn ads. I love the idea of you're submitting a proposal to do something for a company and how few people can you target in that company with your ad? Anthony: 300 is the minimum. It Is a little bit bigger of a minimum than Facebook. I want to say Facebook is a hundred for a minimum. So in two cases is yes, it is hard to be that laser targeted in some cases. It's also a challenge when you want to retarget cause if you are building a lead list, you're gonna have to wait until you have at least 300 leads to go retarget them using the email method. So maybe a simple alternative that is go connect with those people on LinkedIn and send them a message via your chat. Anthony's tips for anyone getting started with LinkedIn ads Kathleen: Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Well, what tips do you have if somebody is listening and they're thinking they want to get started with LinkedIn ads? Is there anything you wish you knew that would have helped you avoid some mistakes? Anthony: Hmm. Anything that I wish I knew. So I have a number of tips that I usually talk about, so I'll give some of those. Well I'd say the biggest thing I wish, like even if I would have told myself this a year ago I probably wouldn't have listened, is don't ask for too much information from your lead in the beginning. You know, you're starting the conversation. They don't have any reason to trust you yet. Keep it as minimal as possible. And that's going to maximize your conversion rate. You know, I go check out a lot of their ads just because I'm always interested to see, what are they advertising? What are they asking for? What does the lead form look like? I opened some of these companies' lead forms. I'm just like, you have seven imports.Is anybody submitting this form? Questions and stuff like that. I'm like, I should reach out to you and be like, Hey, I know your cost per lead is terrible. Do you want some help? That's the biggest thing is these people don't know you. They don't have any reason to trust you yet. Only ask for the information you need, which is usually like email address to send them the guide and then continue the conversation from there. Various other tips. I'd say the image thing is a big one. We get a lot of people who wanted to just have a folder of videos and like let's use these. Let's start with images first and then get those converting and then move to video afterwards. Some other tips are I mentioned the don't auto-bid. Start with max CPC and bid low and then crank it up slowly until you find the sweet spot. Short and direct copy usually works the best. So now on Facebook, a lot of people write these long copy and a lot of emojis and stuff like that. Short copy tends to do best. Keep it shorter than about 150 characters and won't trigger the "see more" button. Most people don't click the "see more" button. I'm kind of, I advocate in both cases where you want your CTA, you want it to be standalone above the "see more". If somebody doesn't click the "see more" it should still be just as appealing. But for the people that do click the "see more", here's a tip that clicking the "see more" button does not charge you. So there's no harm in having more copy than the rest of your ad for the people that do click that "see more" button. So split test both short and long. I do say, I will say we do see shorter, usually performs better. But there is usually no downside to having more copy there. Kathleen: And then with images, I know Facebook has a limitation of how much copy can you have on your image? Are there any limitations like that in LinkedIn? Anthony: Nope. Actually we use a lot more copy and images. Kathleen: Okay. And then the other thing I've heard with Facebook is that you should have a very active page where you're posting often to sort of like warm up your audience, which I think is interesting cause I feel like nobody ever sees any Facebook page posts, but that's a different conversation for another time. So do you ever, what kind of advice do you give people regarding their LinkedIn company page? Not their ads, but the page itself as far as how that should be used to support a good LinkedIn ad strategy? Anthony: Yeah, good question. So you want to have the basics covered. LinkedIn company pages people tend to have more, more connections and more followers on their personal page. So I'd say put most of your focus there, but you know, if you are running a company page, you should have that company page fully filled out. It should look nice and professional and polished and it should have some activity on there. If you were gonna go hire a social media person to manage your profile, I'd say have them manage your personal profile because you'll have more activity there. Because you have more connections in your personal than typically a company page. But have all the information filled out, have good imagery there, have all your links filled out. And then, to bring back the lead magnets again, a lot of times in the headline or in the about section of the body copy, I recommend putting that called to action there. Download our guide. And while that link won't be explicitly clickable, we do see a lot of people will copy and paste it. Make it a simple URL. Mydomain.com/guide and then they'll go there and get it. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: That makes sense. Great. Well, shifting gears I have two questions. I always ask my guests and I'd love to hear what you have to say. First one is, is there a particular company or individual that you think is really killing it right now with inbound marketing? Anthony: So the company that has been advertising to me the most is outreach.io. So they're a pretty well known company out there, but they just, they must spend a lot on their ads because every time I log into LinkedIn I see them there and I'm always like, that's a good ad. I like that ad. So I'd say that they do a very good job. I think I've probably signed up for a few of their lead magnets because I always scope out what other people are doing. Their content's good and their ads are good quality. And if I was to give people any tip, it's you can go see the ads run by any LinkedIn page out there just like you can on Facebook by going to that company page. On the left hand side, on desktop, there's a little navigation bar on the bottom it says ads and it'll show you those, the ads being run by that company page. So for whatever your industry is, go scope out what your competitors are doing and maybe similar offerings are new. Kathleen: That's a great suggestion. Second question, marketers tend to have a common pain point, which is that so much is changing so quickly. LinkedIn is a great example. I feel like just when you feel like, you know how it works, something big changes and it's, you know, you almost have to start over. How do you personally stay up to date and keep yourself educated about Anthony: In the world of digital marketing? For LinkedIn specifically? I'd say I see there's not much content out there about LinkedIn ads. So the surprising thing, like as I've learned this over the years there's so much out there about, about Facebook and Google ads, like the huge communities and stuff like that, of courses, everything. There's not much about LinkedIn ads. So I've gotten the most by joining a number of different groups and like asking questions to people there and like, and like, just like working one on one with other people who are active advertisers. Kathleen: Any particular groups that come to mind? Anthony: LinkedIn Official Advertisers, a group on LinkedIn. That's a group on LinkedIn. Yeah. I have a small one that I started recently. It's called, this is on Facebook, LinkedIn advertising strategies. Kathleen: And you said that is or is not on Facebook? Anthony: That is on Facebook. Yeah. Okay. Got it. LinkedIn groups overall are still, Kathleen: Yeah, they've kind of like died on the vine a little bit. Anthony: I hope that they put more effort or like, you know, improve them because I think there's a lot of potential. Like we've seen how Facebook has put so much focus on groups and how they've been, like a number of groups that I'm in are super active and super valuable. I hope that it does the same there. Kathleen: So yeah, I was going to ask you about that. It's funny, I'm glad you brought it up cause it is, it used to be so great and then it just, was it just, Ugh. I mean I don't spend any time in LinkedIn groups these days, but I used to spend a ton. How to connect with Anthony Kathleen: So okay, well we're coming to the top of our time. So if somebody is interested in learning more or they want to reach out to you and ask a question, what is the best way for them to connect with you? Anthony: So the best way to connect with me is on LinkedIn. I think I'm the only Anthony Blatner on there. So go look me up. Connect with me and send me a little message in the add now and the add connection requests because we all get tons of them. You can find me at my email is anthony@modernmedia.io and then our website's modernmedia.io. If you're looking to learn more about LinkedIn ads or understand strategy, I have tried to put out a lot of content as I've learned over the past few years, knowing that there's not much out there. I've tried to put out more content to share with others. So we have a number of blog posts about funnel strategy, lead generation strategy and then specifically LinkedIn ads, tips and best practices. We got one about lead magnets and then we have one about all the tips around copy and creative. What works the best. You know what to do next... Kathleen: Awesome. Well, I'll put those links in the show notes so that people can go check that out. And if you're listening and you have learned something new today, which I certainly have, head to Apple Podcasts and please consider leaving the podcast a five star review. That's how other folks find us. And if you know somebody else who's doing amazing inbound marketing work, tweet me @workmommywork, because I would love to make them my next guest. Thank you so much, Anthony. This was great. Anthony: Thanks for having me.

The Women’s Heritage Sourcebook: Bringing Homesteading to Everyday LifeBy Ashley Moore, Lauren Malloy, and Emma Rollin Moore Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.Emma Rollin Moore: Hello, everyone. My name is Emma Rollin Moore, and I am the author of The Women's Heritage Sourcebook and my two coauthors are Lauren Malloy and Ashley Moore.Suzy Chase: For more Cookery by the Book and to see what recipes I made out of this cookbook, head on over to Cookery by the Book on Instagram. Now, for my quarantine question round, where are you living?Emma Rollin Moore: I'm living in Santa Barbara, California.Suzy Chase: What restaurant are you dreaming of going to after the quarantine?Emma Rollin Moore: I hope this is okay, but I'm actually dreaming of a progressive where I go to get cocktails from this craft cocktail place called Shaker Mill, and then some yuca frites from a cuban restaurant, and then heading to Corazon Cocina in the projects for this like fresh farmer's market salad. See, I even know what I want. A farmer's market salad in an ahi tartare.Suzy Chase: So at home, what dish is getting you through this?Emma Rollin Moore: For us, what gets us through is we have a sourdough pizza night every Friday night, and that was a steady constant before the quarantine. So I really see how important that steady drumbeat of a rhythm is really helpful for our family, especially our kids. They look forward to diving in and helping me make sourdough and coming up with different topping ideas and things like that. So I'd really say that the sourdough pizza specifically is really getting us through.Suzy Chase: Now, on with the show. So given what's going on in the world right now, I think on some level women are feeling inspired to be more self-sufficient. I'm thinking a lot about local ingredients and home-cooked meals. How did the idea of women's heritage come to life, and how did you and your partners meet?Emma Rollin Moore: I absolutely agree with you. I think when entire food systems are shut down and we're asked to stay home, I think we naturally feel inspired to create, especially in the kitchen and in the garden. And for Lauren, Ashley, and myself, we came together creating Women's Heritage with the idea that we're just three momma friends and we actually took a trip with our families to the High Sierras in California a couple of winters back, and we actually caught ourselves in a snow storm. It's kind of funny. We were actually in lockdown then, and I had brought my sourdough bread for everyone to enjoy and Ashley was learning more and more about herbalism and brought some herbal tinctures and Lauren just has this deep knowledge of animal husbandry and so we just started chatting about how we wanted to learn from each other, how I wanted to learn more about the herbs that Ashley was growing and making tinctures from and Lauren wanted to learn more about how to make sourdough bread. Even though I grew up on a dairy farm, I had never kept chickens before so I actually was really interested in learning from Lauren about chicken-keeping. Really the idea of Women's Heritage was born then when we had this idea that when we get back, why don't we just put it out there to our friends and family members? If anyone's interested, let's put a class together, and so our first class was on sourdough bread baking. And I remember we came up with the name, I think in the High Sierras and put an Instagram flash website really quickly together. We put it out there to our friends on Instagram and I want to say an hour or two hours later, the class was sold out.Suzy Chase: Oh, wow.Emma Rollin Moore: And then our next class, we had Ashley do a herbal medicine basket, and Lauren also taught how to milk a cow and then I taught everyone how to make cheese from the cow milk. But along the way, we just started to realize the importance of our community and ourselves, how we were really yearning to connect back to our roots and learn and make and do things altogether with each other and separately too. But really, really the idea of learning from each other.Suzy Chase: Yeah, because what I took away from Women's Heritage is it's more about interdependence than independence.Emma Rollin Moore: Yes, absolutely. I think that's the heart of how I function and it's the heart of how Ashley, Lauren and myself and at the heart of Women's Heritage. It's really about the idea in this fast paced world, I think that sometimes we're told that we can do it all, and I don't think it's about doing it all. It's thinking about, "What are you passionate about? What do you want to bring yourself, your family? How can you connect back to your roots in those ways?" And then also how liberating to know that you don't have to do it all? So maybe you learn how to can, but you say, "Oh God, I don't ever want to can." So then you find a friend who will can for you, or you decide you make it fun and do a canning together. Like you have an apricot tree that's going gangbusters and you decide that you're going to make apricot jam together. I think the idea is learning and creating and making with each other. And then also if you don't have those tools nor do you want to, that you're more informed about making more sustainable choices for yourself and your family. So for example, if growing all your food which that seems daunting for even me, I can't possibly grow all my own food for our family. That would be something that would be overwhelming. So I have a nice little garden, but I also believe in supporting our farmer's market, joining a CSA and just knowing where food comes from.Suzy Chase: What does the term homestead mean to you and to Women's Heritage?Emma Rollin Moore: That's a really good question. I think that for someone who grew up on a dairy farm, which I did, but now lives in the city, I think that homesteading for myself, but also what is also at the heart of Women's Heritage means making things from scratch, growing what you can, finding it fresh from the farmer's market, or joining a CSA. And then also knowing where you can get what you need from others around you, who are also makers and doers. I think that is at the essence of who we are, but it's also at the essence of how I also function too.Suzy Chase: So part of your approach to cooking includes fermentation.Emma Rollin Moore: Yes.Suzy Chase: What are your favorite foods to ferment, and what are the health benefits?Emma Rollin Moore: So, I would say my favorite foods to ferment is definitely kimchi. I love the flavor punch and profile of it. I absolutely love to ferment sourdough bread. There's something so special about taking out a fresh loaf of bread from the oven and enjoying it. And then I've recently gotten into making my own tempeh, and that was something that I was really intimidated by, but there is nothing more enjoyable and taste worthy than making your own tempeh. So right now those are my favorite go-to's. Kefir, the sourdough bread, the Tempe and then I would also say just a really nice kombucha is also really nice when it's in the warmer months and you're wanting something effervescent. And then when it comes to health benefits, I think that the benefits on our gut are so incredible. So we're actually pre-digesting the food. This is a great example for this is sourdough bread. It also can be a detoxifier. For example, oxalic acid and fatty acid can get broken down with fermentation. That's a definite reason why we might soak or sprout grains. There's a nutrient enhancement that happens. So fermentation can add nutrients. Almost all ferments have elevated B vitamins. And I think one of the most profound benefits of fermentation is really the live bacteria themselves. So not every ferment has living bacteria. For example, bread, beer and wine. This is filtered out, chocolate, coffee, canned sauerkraut. But when we eat fermented foods that haven't been heated or processed after fermentation, you're ingesting that healthy bacteria and people buy pills for this at the store.Suzy Chase: You've made all these daunting recipes sound so easy like your homemade ricotta.Emma Rollin Moore: Thank you. Yeah.Suzy Chase: It's just four ingredients. Can you walk us through this recipe?Emma Rollin Moore: Yeah. And I have to say, that's why I am so passionate about the book and the recipes is that I really think it's doable for everyone. And so, I think if you're interested in diving into homesteading make this homemade ricotta because it is so good. And all you're doing is adding three and a half cups of whole milk, a half a cup of heavy cream, and just a half a teaspoon of sea salt. You're just putting all of that in a little sauce pan, heating the milk to 165 degrees, and then you're removing it from the heat and then you add the lemon juice. You stir it once or twice, you let the pot sit undisturbed. Then you line a colander with a few layers of cheese cloth, and then you can eat that yummy cheese that forms because you're just catching those curds really and letting the whey release, and you can eat it right away or you can refrigerate it. It is easier obviously to just go buy that at the store, but it definitely is rewarding.Suzy Chase: So, what's a shrub?Emma Rollin Moore: Oh yeah. That's a really good question. It's a drinking ... Yeah. I get this all the time. People are like, "What is a shrub? Is it something you grow?" But a shrub is a drinking vinegar and it actually includes vinegar, fruits, and sugar. And once the drinking vinegar then is made, and then you can add Bali water, or you can add a bit of alcohol or some bitters to spice it up. It's really one of our first forms of soda. If you wanted to make a shrub, you would really have equal part that vinegar, fruit and sugar.Suzy Chase: Something changes in my brain when I'm in nature whether it be swimming in the ocean, which I really miss right now or touching the bark of the tree in the woods. Talk a bit about slowing down and being present in nature.Emma Rollin Moore: I just think it's good for the soul. It's good for the mind. It's good for the body. It's good for the spirit. Even if you live in the city where you just have a porch, but you're putting your hands in the soil and growing some tomatoes in pots this summer. But there is something even more so about getting outside in nature. And there's definite research and doctors are prescribing forest bathing now. And I really think that's also at the heart of the Women's Heritage Sourcebook, it's just that idea of how nature and getting out and experiencing nature in those ways I think can be really nourishing for our soul. And that we actually really do yearn for that when it's taken away. I think like anything it's about a balance. When we have a lot of technology, I think a really great counterbalance is this idea that we can get outside, even if we're not making and doing but we're just looking from a foraging standpoint to just go on a hike and be able to know what is growing and just breathe and breathe in the air.Suzy Chase: Your hens give you plenty of eggs. I found we've been eating so many eggs during the quarantine. And the other day..Emma Rollin Moore: Yes, we have too.Suzy Chase: It's crazy.Emma Rollin Moore: Yeah.Suzy Chase: So the other day I made your recipe for Mini Herb And Cheese Frittatas on page 189. Can you describe this recipe?Emma Rollin Moore: So, I love this recipe because it's one of those things where it's also something that kids can easily do this at any age. You could decide that you're going to not have the kids crack the eggs, or you can. Once you've whisked the eggs with the milk and the cheese and the herbs and any add on's, just eight to 10 minutes at 350 degrees Fahrenheit, and you have a really lovely egg dish. I'm a really big advocate of eggs and breakfast for dinner. That's savory. It's great to have these on hand, even as snacks.Suzy Chase: Now, for my segment called My Favorite Cookbook. What is your all time favorite cookbook and why?Emma Rollin Moore: This probably gets said a lot, but for me, Alice Waters, The Art of Simple Food. I remember getting that book early on and it's just so much about slow food and knowing where food comes from and cooking fresh seasonal honest ingredients. And it's just inspired me in my life and how I've chosen to cook and raise my family and inspire other people to also cook and to shop at farmer's markets and know where food come from.Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media and your store?Emma Rollin Moore: Find us at Women's Heritage on Instagram and it's @Womens_Heritage. And then you can also find our store at Heritage Goods And Supply on Instagram as well. And I would just say that our store really was a product of us teaching classes and having other people teach classes and there's definitely a desire for people that wanted to know where they could get their bread cooking baskets and their herbal supplies.Suzy Chase: So this cookbook shows us how to achieve comfort through self-reliance. Thanks so much, Emma, for coming on Cookery By The Book podcast.Emma Rollin Moore: Thank you so much for having me, Suzy.Outro: Subscribe over on cookerybythebook.com. And thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery By The Book.

In this special series on careers in oncology, guest host Dr. Miriam Knoll, radiation oncologist at the John Theurer Cancer Center at Hackensack Meridian Health, interviews a wide range of oncologists who discuss their greatest challenges and the decisions that have shaped their careers. In this episode, we hear from Dr. Vinay Prasad, hematologist-oncologist, author, and associate professor of medicine at the University of California San Francisco, and host of the podcast, Plenary Session.  (This podcast was recorded while Dr. Prasad was at the Oregon Health & Science University School of Medicine).    TRANSCRIPT   Dr. Miriam Knoll: Welcome to the ASCO Daily News podcast. I'm Dr. Miriam Knoll, and I'm delighted to be the Daily News guest host for a special podcast series that explores the full spectrum of oncology careers.   Dr. Miriam Knoll: I'm an early career radiation oncologist. And in this series, I will bring you interviews with a wide range of oncologists to hear about their diverse experiences, their greatest challenges, and the unforgettable moments that have shaped and continue to shape their careers. In today's episode, I'm so excited to welcome my friend and colleague, Dr. Vinay Prasad, a medical oncologist and associate professor of medicine at the Oregon Health and Science University School of Medicine.   Dr. Miriam Knoll: He's also an author and host of the podcast, Plenary Session. Dr. Prasad and I report no conflicts of interest relevant to this podcast. Full disclosures relating to all Daily News podcasts can be found in our Episode pages. Dr. Prasad, welcome.   Dr. Vinay Prasad: Thank you so much, Miriam, for having me. It's a pleasure to be here with you.   Dr. Miriam Knoll: Amazing. So my first question is, I wanted to ask you when you first started off as an early career oncologists. And actually, you still are an early career oncologist. Would that be fair to say?   Dr. Vinay Prasad: I guess. I hope so. But I'm five years in the job. So take it for what it is.   Dr. Miriam Knoll: I guess it depends on the exact definition.   Dr. Vinay Prasad: Yes.   Dr. Miriam Knoll: But when you actually started in your first year, you already had a large following on social media. And you were very vocal then, and now, about how we should improve cancer care and cancer research. And you're the host of the very popular podcast, Plenary Session, which I was actually interviewing on about a year ago.   Dr. Vinay Prasad: Yes, you were a lovely guest. Yes.   Dr. Miriam Knoll: Thank you. And so my question is, did you ever consider then, and now, how social media could impact your early career?   Dr. Vinay Prasad: That's a great question. I guess I would say I didn't consider then. It has been a total surprise.   Dr. Vinay Prasad: And just to give you a little bit of background, I started on faculty in 2015. So it's my fifth year as a faculty member, and it's my first job out of fellowship. So listeners will decide if that's early or mid-career.   Dr. Vinay Prasad: But I went back and I looked at it. One of the first things I did as a faculty member was we did a paper that came out in JAMA Internal Medicine about financial conflicts of interest for doctors on Twitter, medical oncologists on Twitter. And in doing that project, we kind of based it off my Twitter account at the time. And it might surprise you to know that, at that time when I started, I had about 1,000 followers.   Dr. Vinay Prasad: So I think that's some following, but I don't know if that would be considered a large following. And from there to five years later, it really has kind of grown. And it surprised me that people are interested in the kinds of issues that I want to discuss, which are very technical issues about drug development, clinical trials, and medical evidence.   Dr. Vinay Prasad: And it kind of led me to think about doing something else, reaching out to people. And that led to the podcast, Plenary Session. And I guess I would say, the honest reason why I started making a podcast was, because I, myself, really enjoy listening to podcasts. I have a lengthy commute, and I listen to all sorts of shows. And I really do like shows that are done by technical experts, which also try to reach a broad audience.   Dr. Vinay Prasad: So shows that you know don't dumb things down, but also try to be accessible and engaging. And I thought that there will be some opportunity to do that in oncology. And we've been doing the show now for over a year, and it's been great.   Dr. Miriam Knoll: So would it be fair to say that you got involved in social media and continued to do it, because you were excited about it, and found it really interesting, and enjoyed it?   Dr. Vinay Prasad: I guess, I would say, yes. It's a mix of emotions, as you'll know from being on it. When I started, I think being-- the reason I opened a Twitter account-- and I'm not a social media type, and I don't have a Facebook page, and I'm not on Instagram.   Dr. Vinay Prasad: The reason I created a Twitter account was because somebody assigned it to me in a class. I was taking my MPH degree. And I think I spent a year or two years just kind of being a lurker, just kind of seeing what people are saying, and not even checking it all that frequently.   Dr. Vinay Prasad: But I kind of got pulled out of my shell, drawn into it a little bit, when one day a paper we had published, I noticed a bunch of academics were discussing it. And they were a little bit critical about some things, which I thought were an unfair criticism. And that's kind of what pulled me out, out of the shadows, and into the arena of the discussion on social media.   Dr. Miriam Knoll: Wow, that's a great story. Would you say that social media has helped your career?   Dr. Vinay Prasad: That's a good question. I think it is a double-edged sword. It has certainly helped in many ways, which is that you're invited to give a lecture, or go talk to somebody.   Dr. Vinay Prasad: It's led to a collaboration with people with whom I never would have worked with. We published papers. So there are all these ways in which it connects you to this community of oncologists. So that's all the plus side of it.   Dr. Vinay Prasad: I think the minus side of it is people think of me as a social media person, and maybe for better or worse, they think of me as somebody who does that kind of stuff. But that may mean that they're likely to ignore that I do a lot of academic work too, and published a few hundred papers, and have two peer review books in the academic literature. And so I think it can be used as a tool to disparage or trivialize something you're doing. And so I think that's why it kind of cuts both ways.   Dr. Miriam Knoll:  That's very interesting. I hadn't thought about it that way. But I wonder if that's an impression that someone who is not involved in social media would have, and not something that someone who is involved would think.   Because I can't imagine anyone thinking that about you. But then again, maybe that person who would think that has never been on Twitter before, so doesn't actually know what it's about. You know?   Dr. Vinay Prasad: I agree. I think there a lot of people who aren't on Twitter who have misconceptions about it. But I'll just give you one good example, which is Bob Califf, who is the former Commissioner of the FDA, a senior cardiologist; he just wrote an editorial in a cardiology journal critical of the Kardashians, he calls it, which are people who have far more Twitter followers than they have cumulative career citations.   Dr. Vinay Prasad: And I guess even though I've published a lot of papers, I'm in that camp. Because cumulative career citations only accrue on the order of decades, and Twitter followers come much more rapidly. And so the whole Kardashian index, I think, is a term that people have created to disparage and criticize the changing power dynamics that have happened through social media. It's a fictitious invented scale that accomplishes that goal.   Dr. Miriam Knoll: Yeah. Well, I think this is a discussion that we should definitely continue. But I just have so many other questions to ask you about jobs. But before we go to the next question, I just want to make sure that you and I clarify that we don't think that's the case, right?   Dr. Vinay Prasad: Yeah. And I think the benefits certainly outweigh any negative ideas that someone who has no idea about anything about social media may think about it.   Dr. Vinay Prasad: Social media, it's-- what all scientists want, what all you know academics want, is for their ideas and the work they're doing to reach the broadest and most receptive audience. And this is just a tool, perhaps the most powerful tool we have, that accomplishes that goal. And so anyone who's sort of anti-social media I think is missing the printing press of the modern age. And in retrospect, they're not going to do so well in the history books.   Dr. Miriam Knoll:  I could not agree more. And I think also that some of the hesitation that people have to using it is because their only exposure to social media is the Kardashians. So they haven't met people like you who are sharing real data and thought-provoking information that they can't find anywhere else. So it's even beyond the typical printing press, because you can share information that there's really no other platform for.   Dr. Vinay Prasad: That's a great point, yeah.   Dr. Miriam Knoll:  Tell me about the process of changing jobs and academic centers. Because, congratulations, I heard that you're going to be switching over to UCSF. So I'd love to hear about that transition for you.   Dr. Vinay Prasad: Oh, thank you. Yeah, I guess I'm still in the midst of it, because I haven't finished packing my desk here, but it's imminent. It's going to be happening in the next eight weeks or so.   Dr. Vinay Prasad: I guess I would say that the biggest question that faces a researcher is-- actually, let me pause. Let me actually start by something that somebody told me. When I took my first academic job, I had a very senior faculty member at the NCI, where I did my fellowship, pulled me aside and say, congratulations on your job. That's a great five-year job.   Dr. Vinay Prasad: And I said, excuse me? What do you mean, a five-year job? And he said, think about the first academic job as-- not in everybody, but in many people-- people work in that job four or five years, and they end up making a switch. And it won't surprise me if you're one of those people.   Dr. Vinay Prasad: And I thought it wouldn't happen to me-- absolutely not the case. It's not going to happen to me. I didn't see that in my future.   Dr. Vinay Prasad: But nevertheless, five years later, this person's words rang really true. And I guess I would say that the process of switching jobs or thinking about that has to do with you really want-- you really reach a point where you have a clear sense of what you want to do, what you aspire to do, and what you hope to do in the future, what you're good at doing, and you also know what you're not good at doing. I think that comes out in the first few years of a job.   Dr. Vinay Prasad: And that's a time where you might think to yourself, you want to be at a place where your goals and the central goal of the organization or the institution are really aligned. And you see opportunity for growth, opportunity for collaboration, you see that what you do is going to be really valued and respected. And so at the end of the day, what I want to do is oncology policy work, work that aligns cancer medicine with I think patients' best interests. I also enjoy teaching and working with trainees. And I really felt like UCSF is a place with just such a strong, strong history of doing all those things-- a huge policy group, a really strong program of education, and really strong training in epidemiology and bio statistics, which is the department that I'm joining.   Dr. Miriam Knoll: So you shared with us what the mindset would be for switching jobs. What about the nitty-gritty? Is it generally someone reaches out to you, you reach out to someone else? What advice would you have to other early career or even at any point in someone's career? And how does that work?   Dr. Vinay Prasad: I think that's a great question. I guess I'd say, the nitty-gritty is when you in your mind start to open your mind up to the possibility of looking for another job. So for me, I don't even-- my mind was not even open to that for the first 3 and 1/2, four years even.   Dr. Vinay Prasad: Then I think you start taking a look at job post websites. You start looking on institutional websites. You start listening to word of mouth, what different divisions or groups are looking for. And you get wind of jobs here or there.   Dr. Vinay Prasad: And I think it's reasonable that, even if you're not super serious about leaving, to go on some interviews. You don't know what's out there unless you go look. And it's a long process.   Dr. Vinay Prasad: In my case, it was like over, I don't know, maybe about a year from-- maybe over a year-- from my first toe in the water to actually committing to make the move. And so I think it is kind of a slow process. But in my mind, the mental attitude to consider it is the first step.   Dr. Vinay Prasad: And then the logistics of it is just to keep an eye open. But nobody approached me in this particular situation. Although, I'm aware, and I've heard, that there are people who get approached with job offers, but that wasn't my case.   Dr. Miriam Knoll: That's really, really great advice. So thank you for that. Can you tell us about your second book, which I've already preordered on Amazon?   Dr. Vinay Prasad: Thanks.   Dr. Miriam Knoll:  What advice can you give our listeners about the process of writing a book and becoming a published author?   Dr. Vinay Prasad: So you're referring to the book, called Malignant.   Dr. Miriam Knoll: Yes, Malignant.   Dr. Vinay Prasad: And I learned a lesson from the first book, Ending Medical Reversal, which needs a punchier title. So Malignant is really everything I know about cancer policy in one book. I guess, let me separate the two again-- so the process of doing the book and the reason why you might want to write a book. So I guess, let me take the process one.   Dr. Vinay Prasad: The process is, it's a long process to write a book. And you'll see when you read this book, and you'll read something in the chapter that I've written, and it says, "at the time of this writing, 2017," and you're going to say, boy, it's 2020 now. But that's really how long the process takes. It takes several years.   Dr. Vinay Prasad: The process of writing a book is you have to, I think, first, have a clear idea of what you want to talk about, what you want to write. Second, you've got to draft a proposal, which is very different than a book itself. It's kind of a succinct summary of what you hope to do.   Dr. Vinay Prasad: Third, you have to find an agent, which can take on the order of years. And then the fourth thing is you have to sell the book to a publisher, which can take on the order of years again. And then you've got to write it, which is the most important, but often the shortest period of time. And then you got to edit it, and proof it, and all those sorts of steps.   Dr. Vinay Prasad: And in my case, I have a publisher that is a peer review publisher. So this book is peer reviewed in triplicate, which adds, just like an academic article, all that back and forth peer review. So it's time-consuming. So that's the process of how to do it, and it takes, I think, a long time.   Dr. Vinay Prasad: But let me talk about the reason why to do it. I think you write a book when you have something to say that you just can't say more succinctly. And in my case, for years we've been working on so many different spaces that seem like they're not interconnected.   Dr. Vinay Prasad: So we then work on financial conflict of interest. We'd done work on how the FDA approves drugs with the use of surrogate endpoints, the control arms of clinical trials, crossover. We have done work on the cost of cancer drugs, and how Medicare reimburses for it.   Dr. Vinay Prasad: And so it seems like these are projects all across cancer medicine, but they're like intertwined braids, and they tie together. And when you twist them all together, I think you start to see the full story of why the system is set up the way it is, and how so much cancer policy fails, I think, people with cancer. And so me writing the book was a recognition that I was never going to persuade people. I was never going to get people to see this whole tapestry until I got all the strands and tried to weave them together in front of you.   Dr. Vinay Prasad: And so that was why I wrote the book. And I guess I would say, when you want to talk about writing a book, I think you have to realize that a book is an intermediary endpoint. It's a surrogate endpoint of itself.   Dr. Vinay Prasad: The goal of the book is so that there are people out there who will read this, and I think it'll change the way they see cancer medicine. That's the goal. And the book is just a vehicle to do it.   Dr. Miriam Knoll: I cannot wait to read it. And I'm hearing you speak, and it's echoing a conversation that you had on Plenary Session. It was a few weeks ago. I forget which episode it was.   Dr. Miriam Knoll: But it was about careerism, and the idea that you write papers because you have something that you want to say, not because you want to write papers.   Dr. Vinay Prasad: Right, that's an important thing, yeah. I'm a vocal critic of this careerism movement that I see all around me. Dr. Miriam Knoll:  Do you think that it's a new movement?   Dr. Vinay Prasad: I think it's been-- I guess I'm so new myself. I don't know if it's always been there. But I think it's been amplified in a way that is unprecedented. And it's amplified, I think, in part-- social media, of course, a double-edged sword. It also amplifies careerism.   Dr. Vinay Prasad: And just for your listeners' sake, let me separate the two things. So there are the things you want to do in life, and there is the things you do for your career. And to me, careerism is advice about careers.   Dr. Vinay Prasad: That is, how can I give more lectures? How can I have more followers? How can I sit on panels? How can I be a consultant for pharmaceutical companies? How can I network? How can I be successful?   Dr. Vinay Prasad: Those are all sort of the arbitrary brass rings that people chase. And I think that they're all misguided. Because the more and more you talk about how to achieve those goals, you miss the entire purpose of the whole enterprise, which is, what do you want to accomplish? What issues matter to you? What topics interests you? What skills do you uniquely bring to them? Is your work accurate or truthful? Does your work matter? Is this what you want to do with your life? Those are the real questions, I think, that define our career. You have to think, what are you passionate about, and what can you do that others can't do? And then you just do it. Dr. Vinay Prasad: And if along the way you get these rewards of you give lectures, you get the invited consultancies, you get all that stuff, so be it. But if you don't get it, you shouldn't feel bad at all if what you're doing is what you really want to do. And if what you're wanting to do is challenging, I think, the status quo, then don't be surprised if you don't get it, you get some pushback. But I think that's something worth taking on, that's worth fighting for, if what you're doing is what you believe you ought to do with your career and your life.   Dr. Miriam Knoll:  I totally agree with you. And I think that people who really understand that are less likely to separate their life into their work life, and their life life, and their personal life. Because it's all one thing. Dr. Miriam Knoll: You do it all, all of it-- family, hobbies, career. You do it all, because you feel strongly about it, because that's what you want to do. So there's no reason to separate them.   Dr. Vinay Prasad: I love the way you put that, because that's what I'm trying to say, yeah. You feel strongly about it, and that's why you do it. And that's what you want in a career.   Dr. Vinay Prasad: You and I, we pursued the career of medicine, and we're really lucky to do it. Because we're some of the few people, I think, who get to do something day in and day out that doesn't feel like work. It feels like a joy. It feels like the thing that you want to do, you want to get out of bed and do, and that's a tremendous privilege in this world.   Dr. Vinay Prasad: And the more you chase the brass rings, and the less you forget about what you want to do with the brief time we have on this planet, I think the more you're prone to burn out, the more you'll want to separate things. And I think recognizing that, if you chase what you really want to do, those things will naturally fall into place.   Dr. Miriam Knoll: And that was one of the goals of my doing this podcast series, was to allow people that have-- people like yourself-- who are excelling in many different ways of being an oncologist and are passionate about it, and being able to share the ways that being an oncologist can be fulfilling in many different ways from each other. And it's very personal. So I want to ask you another more personal career question, which is, what is the best career advice that you remember that you've been given?   Dr. Vinay Prasad: I guess I would say that the best career advice came to me from a wise man, who is a professor at University of Chicago, Adam Cifu. And he's a kind guy, because I think he's tweeted out a slide he calls "Career Advice," and he's put this out on the internet for all people to see. And here's his career advice.   Dr. Vinay Prasad: Choose the job that promises the best set of colleagues. Choose the better job over the higher paying one. Be honest with yourself about whether you'll be happy with the demands of the job and the level of acuity of the patients.   Dr. Vinay Prasad: Don't trust that your new employers will change the job they offer you to fit your desires. Early in your career, say yes to everything. Later in your career, say no to everything except the things you really want to do. And beware of promotions that take you away from doing what you love. And he has a few others.   Dr. Vinay Prasad: But the reason that really speaks to me is that the theme of everything he's saying is that it's not about the money. It's not about-- it's not about the title. It's not about the promotion. It's about making sure that what you want to do and the job you're signing up for are a good fit.   Dr. Vinay Prasad: And a lot of fit and a lot of job satisfaction is who you surround yourself with, and what are the sort of tasks you are facing. And I think that's the core of his career advice. And I think it's very wise.   Dr. Miriam Knoll: What was the worst career advice you've ever been given?   Dr. Vinay Prasad: Well, I guess I would say the worst career advice I've been given is-- I guess it wasn't to me. It was directed broadly. But I saw it on Twitter recently, and I ended up writing a column in Medscape about it. And it was something like, oncology is a small world. Don't make enemies, is the advice.   Dr. Vinay Prasad: And I guess the reason it's stuck with me was, at first glance, I see that that is incredibly reasonable. It's a small world. There are so few of us in oncology. We all know each other after a period of time.   Dr. Vinay Prasad: Don't make enemies. Try to avoid conflict. But I think the reason it really started to trouble me, the more I thought about it, was that we are in the midst of a crisis in our profession.   Dr. Vinay Prasad: We have more drug approvals than ever, but more of the drugs we have that come to market are drugs that we don't know if they make people live longer or live better. The prices of our drugs are the most they've ever been. The dollar amounts that expert oncologists are taking home from consulting fees from pharmaceutical companies is the highest it's ever been.   Dr. Vinay Prasad: The experts who are conflicted are the ones who write the guidelines. The guidelines often recommend drugs based on weak evidence. Those weak evidence guidelines are tied to CMS and mandate Medicare reimburse for drugs without negotiation.   Dr. Vinay Prasad: Many of the academic papers have flaws. Many are ghost written. Many have medical writers. So what I want to say is that we live in a time where the entire cancer system, in so many ways, is misaligned towards corporate profits over the best interests of patients. And if you really, as a junior person, enter the field with this mantra, that above all else don't make enemies, you're never going to do what it takes to fix this ship, to realign the ship, to correct the serious deficiencies that plague our patients. You're never going to be able to do what we need you to do if you enter this thinking, I don't want to ever have anyone dislike me. You're going to be a part of the problem, not the solution. And so I think that's the worst advice.   Dr. Vinay Prasad: The right advice is, you're not in this business to make friends. You're in this business to do what's best for people. And 30 years sounds like a long time when you start your career. But five years goes by like a flash, and 25 years will go by like a flash too. And before it all ends, the system will just be as entrenched and flawed as it was when you started.   Dr. Vinay Prasad: So if you don't do everything you can every day you can, you're squandering your opportunity. And that's an opportunity that I think when we swore that oath to be a doctor, we swore an oath to do what's best for patients. And so I think that that's bad advice. The right advice is, do what needs to be done, and let people feel how they feel about it.   Dr. Miriam Knoll:  And I know that we could continue talking about this for hours and hours. And I know you have amazing advice to give, and I really appreciate your time. So my last question for today is, what advice do you have for trainees and early career oncologists?   Dr. Vinay Prasad: I guess my advice would echo those last comments, which is, you're entering oncology at one of the most exciting times. There's a lot going on. You need to do your best to stay up with oncology in an independent and thoughtful way.   Dr. Vinay Prasad: You've got to read papers yourself. You've got to critically appraise them yourself. You've got to see what the discussions are, the debates are. You've going to make your own decisions.   Dr. Vinay Prasad: And when you see the system fail your patients, you've got to be an advocate. You've got to speak out. And I think we need your voice more than ever. So that's the advice I'd leave them with, which is, it's OK to make enemies, if what you're doing is the right thing.   Dr. Miriam Knoll: Dr. Prasad, thank you so much for this insightful discussion. And thanks so much to our listeners, for you guys, for joining us for this episode of the ASCO Daily News podcast. We'd love to have your feedback, as always. So please, drop us a line at DailyNews@ASCO.org. And of course, don't forget to rate and review us on Apple Podcast.   The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. This is not a substitute for professional medical care and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of individual conditions. Guests on this podcast express their own opinions, experience, and conclusions. The mention of any product, service, organization, activity, or therapy should not be construed as an ASCO endorsement.    

What do high growth companies with savvy marketing teams do to drive traffic growth? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Directive Consulting founder Garrett Mehrguth shares what his team does to help companies like Allstate and Cisco boost traffic even after all of the low hanging marketing and SEO fruit has been picked. TL;DR, It all starts with product marketing, SEO and a focus on bottom of the funnel, high intent leads. Garrett shares the specific strategies his team at Directive uses to get results for their clients, as well as his advice for startups that want to do it right from the beginning. Highlights from my conversation with Garrett include: Garrett says that everything Directive does is based on the belief that your brand is more important than your website. What that means is that when someone with high purchase intent is searching online for a solution, you need to make sure you're discoverable. He says that sometimes your marketing metrics have an inverse correlation with your financial metrics, meaning that if you focus on the top of the funnel, you might generate a lot of traffic, but you won't get as many high intent leads as you would if you focus on the bottom of the funnel (which generally results in less traffic). Garrett's advice is to track CAC (cost to acquire a customer) and LTV (lifetime value) and use that to determine whether you are paying a reasonable cost per demo, opportunity or proposal -- NOT cost per lead. For many companies, the best place to focus their initial marketing efforts is on ranking on review sites. Done well, this can allow a lesser known, newer market entrant to unseat an incumbent player very quickly. You can pay review sites to conduct review generation campaigns on your behalf, and Garrett says it is absolutely worth it to spend that money. Another strategy that works well is to use LinkedIn ads for awareness raising. Garrett says that leads that come through LinkedIn are not high intent, so you shouldn't spend a lot on a cost per impression basis. Instead, he and his team "trick" LinkedIn by advertising on a cost per click basis. Not many people click the ads, so LinkedIn accelerates their placement in the feed and they get seen by a lot of people. In terms of content, Garrett believes the traditional approach to pillar content and topic clusters promoted by HubSpot is wrong. Instead, he uses that same content and creates product pages as pillars, which he then uses to link to from blogs that address bottom of the funnel topics. Garrett builds authority for product pages by guest blogging (where he can control anchor text and backlinks) and doing podcast guest interviews. He says that where its tough to get your subject matter experts to create written content, you should invest more heavily in podcast guest interviews. Garrett's advice for companies right now is to double down on online advertising. Because so many companies have shut down or pulled their online ads back, prices are down and it is easier to get found. Resources from this episode: Check out the Directive Consulting website Follow Garrett on Twitter at @gmehrguth Connect with Garrett on LinkedIn Email garrett at gmehrguth[at]directiveconsulting[dot]com Listen to the podcast to get specific strategies for combining product marketing and SEO to generate more qualified bottom of the funnel leads.   Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth. And this week my guest is Garrett Mehrguth from Directive. Welcome Garrett. Garrett Mehrguth (Guest): Thanks for having me. Glad to be here. And yeah, excited to chat about search. Garrett and Kathleen recording this episode. Kathleen: Yeah, I love, I love getting into nerdy marketing topics, so I'm really excited about this. Before we dive in though, can you please tell my audience a little bit about yourself and your story and also Directive? About Garrett and Directive Garrett: I'd love to. I did my degree in three years in economics and I wanted to do my masters in a year. I was playing soccer. I thought I was going to go pro, be like a pro soccer player. I hurt my knee, and that kind of reset a lot of that stuff. And so I said, "Hey, you know, maybe I could try this consulting thing." I applied to Boston, Bain and McKinsey. I'm not sure about Deloitte, but kind of the big ones and instantly got this auto-response. In the application process, I knew I was doomed because you go to their portal and the university I attended was not one of the options. I was like, "They do not tell you that before they take your money." So from there I was like, "You know what? I'll just build my own agency and they'll have to acquire me." I don't know why. That's how I thought, and was just like where I went. I had no tangible skills, so there was that problem. I have this belief system that perception is reality and I knew that people perceived I knew the internet and so I figured I should learn it. So I started to try to learn how to do WordPress sites. And then I got this little shwarma shop in East LA. I was on my little moped. I had a 78 Peugeot 103. I was going around town on that thing and I essentially got the client. It was really, really small. I don't even remember because I was so bad at this point that I didn't put the amount in the contract. I still have the contract, but I don't remember the amount. It's probably like 200 bucks. I did that for 30 days, came back on the 30th day to get the check. He said come back tomorrow. The whole place was boarded up. So that was our first client. I was selling $5 social media calendars on Fiverr and I was just hustling and doing all this stuff. And then I got a hookah shop and the hookah shop asked me to build them a website and then I did that. It was okay. Looking back at, it wasn't the best website. And then he wanted to rank number one for hookah shop and all that stuff. I said, "All right, I'll try." I've never done it before. So I went online, read everything on Search Engine Land, Moz, WordStream, Search Engine Journal, teaching myself kind of SEO and PPC. I ranked him number one and all of a sudden you got all these people in a shop and it was completely dead before. I was like, "This is kind of cool." So, one of my best friends who's my roommate said, "Hey, don't go to law school. You know, come join this company with me. We'll be millionaires" or whatever he said. I was paying him $3 an hour at this point. So we kind of just started from there and now we get to work with really large enterprise accounts and mid market companies, mostly SaaS, doing SEO and PPC still. So pretty fun. Kathleen: Great. Now one of the things that I think is interesting about the perspective that you bring -- and we've had lots of people on the podcast talk about SEO and PPC,  I was interested to chat with you because you do have these bigger clients and I think there are pros and cons to that, right? The pro -- having owned an agency myself -- the pro of having big clients is they've got big budgets. They've got teams to support getting work done. They are generally very savvy. One of the -- I don't know if I would call it a con -- but the tough thing about accounts like that is very often, they've already done all of the basic things that they should be doing. They're sharp, they know their stuff, they have their act together, so being able to really show results and traction requires taking things to a much more advanced level. As I think you were saying when we first started talking, you've already squeezed most of the juice out of that orange. So how are you finding those opportunities for the last few drops? You had some interesting thoughts on that and I'm really interested to hear what you have to say and to get into that technical level of detail with you. What do top SEOs do to prevent traffic from plateauing? Garrett: Let's do it Kathleen. So first and foremost, it's such a blessing because I got lucky. Everyone gets lucky, I think, in business to get somewhere. I had no capital. I started this thing with 20 bucks. We have no debt. We have no anything, right? I think we got Allstate when I was like 23 to 25 years old. And we've had them ever since. Right? So there's little moments like that. Or, we did the global SEO for Cisco when I was 26, I think. So like, you get these little moments and they really help you. And obviously you have to deliver, right? And then you can scale that. But one of the things that I think allowed us to be successful regardless of who we were working with, whether it was a Series A startup who was trying to go to the moon, or a mid-market SaaS firm that was trying to go after the market leader, or the market leader, right? You have these kind of three groups to work with and they all need to slow down and reframe how they approach the idea of search. And that's what I think Directive is really special at, is taking a moment to say, how does your customer discover the products or services you sell, and how can we rethink our approach? So here's what we do. We have two kinds of fundamental beliefs. First and foremost, if you can eat enough humility as an SEO and say that my brand is more important than my website, you become an incredibly powerful and creative marketer. So our first fundamental belief at Directive is your brand is more important than your website. What that means tactically is that when someone searches at the bottom of the funnel and has the strongest purchase intent, you need to make sure you're discoverable. Now, the old adage was, you need your website to rank, but see something has changed in consumer behavior. I call this the Yelp and the Amazon effect. See, consumers got trained at the transactional level that even before we spend $3 on a lollipop or on a breakfast burrito, we're going to look on Yelp to see the reviews. Well, guess what? Before we buy quarter million dollar software, we definitely look at reviews. See, Google caught onto this and they started to change the types of websites that they were showing when there was bottom of funnel purchase intent for SaaS. That's G2, Capterra, Software Advice, PC Mag. It goes down for days and hours, right? There's all these review sites. Well if you search your primary keyword, let's say "ERP software", and you layer it with "top", "best" or "reviews" or "comparisons", you have purchase intent. Also your most expensive cost per click and Google ads, all the sites are review sites. That's because Microsoft Dynamics has no SEO. That's not because Oracle has no authority or content. That's because Google is choosing to show these types of websites. So if we take that fundamental approach that our brand is more important than our website, we can be hyper successful. Kathleen: Yeah, that makes sense. And I've noticed that, too, with reviews. Over the years I've spoken with some other review sites that you mentioned. They've pitched me when I've been at different places and it's really fascinating to just do those searches. And you're right, if you do it -- if you search those terms -- those are the sites that will absolutely come up first. So when you consider that you need to appear on review sites, how do you go about tackling that? Because it's not as simple as just claiming your presence and setting up your profile. You can still get lost in the sea of companies that have done that. How to leverage review sites to drive traffic Garrett: The first step we want to do is we want to take another fundamental hypothesis and understand it, which is that sometimes your marketing metrics have an inverse correlation to your financial metrics. And it becomes very, very, very dangerous for SaaS firms. So here's what I mean. Most agencies have this belief that in order to generate more MQLs for the demand gen team at a SaaS organization, they need to essentially increase the amount of keywords they rank for. They need to start going to top of funnel and they need to generate more leads. So what happens when organizations pursue what I call a "breadth approach" is they start to experience what's called in economics diminishing marginal returns. In other words, their marketing KPIs improve. So let's say you're trying to go for "top ERP software", but you just have a Google ad running. Instead of saying, "How can I show up more often when there's purchase intent?" and going with depth -- and so essentially expanding search impression share in Google ads for your primary terms that have purchase intent and then ranking on individual review sites through their cost per click models, and then evaluating all of that at a cost per demo level, not cost per lead level, and then doing financial allocation, right? That's what we do here. We focus first on demand capturing before pivoting to demand generation. So we go to the bottom of the funnel and say, "Cool. When there's purchase intent, we're going to show up as often as possible and as many places as possible before we try to show up for more terms." So this allows us to experience increasing marginal returns for our clients in the first two quarters and get buy-in. See, what most people do, is they start to go with their Gartner report and they start to leverage that, which isn't an intrinsically a bad idea. But when they start to essentially go after informational intent and go to the top of funnel, they start to lower their cost per lead, they start to increase conversion rate and they think they're winning. But if you're a savvy growth operator in SaaS, you know, like for example, I convert at 60% on lead gen ads on LinkedIn. Okay, target market giving me their information -- 60%. I get that all the way down to $17 a week. Yet that is 17 X more expensive than buying that same lead from ZoomInfo, and I have no greater purchase intent than someone essentially downloading an asset or me buying them from ZoomInfo. So now I'm paying 17 X on a cost per lead. And so that's the diminishing part where your marketing numbers look better, but your revenue doesn't increase because you have horrible CAC-LTV on top of funnel versus bottom of funnel. And so that's kind of the other approach, is putting everything through an LTV-CAC model and then focusing on bottom of funnel first. Start at the bottom of the funnel and capture high intent leads Kathleen: So let's, let's dig into that a little bit. So you talked about starting at the bottom of the funnel and going really deep to capture high intent leads for very specific terms. If I came to you and I said, "All right, let's go. I want to do that," can you walk me through what that looks like? You mentioned showing up as often as possible for that one, high intent term. Garrett: Yeah. So first we're going to do what's called category defining. So we need to find your category. One of the most difficult problems in SaaS, as most people approach it, is they want to create their own category or they exist as a subset of an existing category. You have a lot of experience in cybersecurity, correct? Kathleen: Yep. Garrett: We do a lot there as well. So like we've been working with SentinelOne for a long time and other large players in that space. Now that's endpoint protection, right? People know they need a security solution, they don't always intrinsically know they need an endpoint solution. Right? So how do you generate demand and increase MQLs if you're in a new category? Okay, so first we do what's called category definement. And what we'd like to do is not only position you in endpoint, but position you in the security software category and then do hyper product differentiation through like product naming conventions and positioning, so that your CTO or whoever that person is who's your audience, they're searching and when they go to security software, we want them to show up above the fold with your brand as endpoint protection and then essentially drive awareness from the greater category to our subset or our pain solving product. So that's kind of first step is define that category. Then we ask ourselves, are we above the fold? So on Capterra, when you land on that, do you have to scroll for a couple hours to find you? How many reviews do the top five have versus you? That gives us a review target. Then we'll help you and say, "Here's how we've seen other clients go about getting reviews and here's the strategy you could pursue." Now we have a competitive amount of reviews on all of our categories. Kathleen: Let me ask you a question about that real quick. Most of those review sites have, uh, call them packages that you can purchase where they will, you know, you give them your list of clients, they'll email them, offer them an Amazon gift card or something along those lines to get reviews. And so essentially there's a cost per acquisition model that you can use. Do you find in most cases that that's worth doing, or do you work with your clients to develop their own outreach and review generation campaigns? Garrett: That's totally worth doing. I think there's nothing more important than other people advocating for your product, especially with how consumer behavior has changed at the B2B and B2C level. So no, that's critically important. Now, what we need to be able to do here though, is we need to be able to measure everything on a cost per opportunity, cost per demo, cost per proposal -- whatever you want to call it -- level, not a cost per lead. What we've found across over 350 SaaS companies that we've worked with over the last five years is that the cost per lead between Google Ads, Capterra, G2, Software Advice, et cetera, has a really, like it's not that different, maybe 15 to 30% range between each. But then I found that third party review sites have a 230% lower cost per opportunity. And so what we do, like, we got hired a couple of years ago by a publicly traded sales compensation software company and within one quarter we increased their demos by over 300% by only pivoting budget. That's the craziest part of all this, is most people are still evaluating their demand generation at an MQL level, not at an opportunity level. And so the biggest, easiest thing you can do is go one step further and look at opportunity. And then the furthest step that we've now actually evolved to as an agency is putting all our clients in LTV-CAC models, and then looking at activation rate. So not cost per trial but trial activations, right? So how well people are going from trial to demo, or demo to close rate, and then we're evaluating channels by close rate or by trial activation rate. And when we start to do that, that's hugely powerful for for financial allocation. How can you use intent data to drive traffic and revenue? Kathleen: Yeah, that makes sense. Now one of the other questions I had as I was listening to you talk about this, you talked about intent and bottom of the funnel and a lot of those platforms that you mentioned, in addition to being able to purchase a package and drive reviews, now they're selling their own intent data. Are you also working with intent data and taking it and creating ABM or audience match campaigns around that for your clients? Garrett: Yeah, so you can do a lot of that stuff. I think we, like most people, are using that engagement data or enriching stuff with Bombora for sales dev. Right now, if you do traditional ABM with account based advertising, so let's say Radius, Terminus, DemandBase, Madison Logic, Listen Loop, I mean we use Terminus personally internally. Now the reason is, is we need to be able to do cookie-based targeting, not IP-based targeting. Because, for example, right now, if you're trying to run IP-based targeting campaigns during COVID, you're not reaching any of your audience. Kathleen: Oh, you are preaching to the choir, because the product that we sell incorporates IP obfuscation. So anybody using our products, you couldn't target them by IP. I think it's going to happen more and more, and more people are going to use tools like that. Garrett: Yeah. I think to answer your question, yes, we are doing bi-directional syncs from HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot or Salesforce into our ad platforms. But you still have a really poor match rate because people are using personal emails on social because they don't want to get fired from their company and their LinkedIn goes down. So, essentially what happens is, your match rate is really poor on social because the only one who still has firmographics after the whole Cambridge analytical debacle, -- because you've got Axiom data in Facebook and you can be really powerful there. Twitter has always been crap, but essentially GDN is terrible right now unless you're doing managed placements, you're actually going in a search engine results page and then searching keywords and then finding every site that ranks in the top five for your keyword that uses GDN and then doing targeted URL placements That works because it comes off as a native ad. But then other than LinkedIn, it's not working. But then LinkedIn fails because there's no purchase intent and the CPA is too high. And so what we're finding is the way we're doing LinkedIn is awareness, with text ads and spotlight ads. And that's actually working. But there's a lot of nuance in all that for sure. How to use LinkedIn ads to raise brand awareness Kathleen: So then you're generating awareness on LinkedIn and are you hoping effectively that that'll get somebody to go to the client's website? Then, you can retarget them on other platforms? Garrett: We're actually being a little bit humbler than that because I don't think I can control my user. And what I mean by that is, the click through rate is crap on LinkedIn. In fact, it's so bad for spotlight and text ads and we've tricked it and we've figured out a game. So we run brand campaigns for our clients and for ourselves based on what I call "clarity." It's this concept of saying what you do and who you do it for, and being humble enough to know that you have to get your message across without the click. So what we do is we actually do it on a cost per click level on LinkedIn and we're able to deliver because nobody clicks. What happens is LinkedIn accelerates our impressions and gives us a much lower CPM when I do CPC, than when I do CPM on LinkedIn. And then we personify everything. This is the biggest trick to LinkedIn. So you take your primary asset, let's say "The Ultimate Guide to Demand Generation", and then you turn it into "The VP's Guide to Demand Generation", "The CMO's Guide to Demand Generation", and "The Marketing Manager's Guide to Demand Generation." All you have to do is change the cover page and then run lead gen ads and we're converting at over 50% across the board. So there's that route. And then the awareness campaigns and the text ads and spotlight ads, you're on a CPC level and then you focus on what you do and who you do it for, and then you personify that. You put that all together and you have really, really cool awareness campaigns. And then I say, spend as much money as you're willing to never stop losing. And if you take that approach and you say, "Look, are you willing to spend $5,000 a month until you die and not know what it does for you?" Because I'll tell you right now, I can target your exact audience to perfection and deliver your message to them till you've decided you're done with this organization. "Are you okay 'wasting' five grand a month so that every person in your audience on LinkedIn knows who you are?" Yeah. The trick is to not get results. Because what happens is, people go into it thinking they'll get results and they pause before they ever could have gotten results through a brand campaign. And so when you take the other approach, it works really well. Kathleen: Yeah. That's a really interesting way to think about it. I would love to be a fly on the wall as you have those conversations with clients to be like, you know, "You're going to spend all this money and I'm not going to show you any quantifiable results from it, but you're going to have to believe that the results are there." It's like playing the long game and having faith. Garrett: Yeah. Do you believe that this is your exact persona on LinkedIn? Here's your exact title, firmographic, industry, size of account, revenue...do you believe that? Yes. Do you believe that your message is valuable enough to communicate it to them on a consistent basis? Yes. Cool. How much does your company spend on snacks? Kathleen: Give up the jelly beans and advertise on LinkedIn! Garrett: Yeah. Honestly, it's the frappuccino a day is the kind of the joke I make. What's your coffee budget? Cool. Could you spend that on this and never stop it? And it usually gets some pretty good buy-in. How to optimize your website for traffic Kathleen: That's a really interesting way to think about it. Do you do anything with your clients in terms of what they should be doing on their own site to support all of this? You talked about how it's not necessarily about everybody getting to your website, and how the brand is more important, but I would think that there are still some things they need to be doing on the site to provide supportive content and other assets that you can then use to go out and have success on these other platforms. Garrett: Yeah, that's a relative statement to shock people to think differently. It's not that your website's not important. It's that your brand truly is more important than your website. You really have to understand your brand is more important than it was. Now your website is obviously critical, so what you need to be able to do is communicate who you are and who you're for and what you do for them. We do custom landing pages here. We have a really strong conversion rate optimization team. And so all that review site stuff I'm telling you about, we're split testing two custom landing pages with messaging, calls to action and what I like to call psychological friction tests. So the biggest issue right now in all of SaaS that they could change if they listened to this, is changing their call to action. Almost universally it's "request a demo." There is nothing more psychologically friction than "request a demo." Every time I speak to an audience, and I get to speak about 30 to 40 times a year at conferences, I love to ask, who here likes to do a demo? Who here likes to have a day of demos? Nobody raises their hand. Kathleen: That's like saying, "Who here likes to sit through an hour long webinar?" Garrett: Yeah, and so when I ask them, I said, what if you did something really simple? What if you change it from request a demo to watch demo video? You still gated it. You still sent that lead to sales development or your account executives, but you are asking yourself, can I give my visitor something of equal or greater value to what they're giving me? That's the number one question with calls to action and demand generation is, am I giving someone something of greater value than they're giving me? When someone requests a demo, they fill out a form and nothing happens and it says "Someone from our team will contact you in 24 hours." You're not doing it. So what we always do, and we can take clients universally from around 2 to 3%, to over 10% conversion rates by simply doing watch demo video. And then all we do is have a form that says "Fill this out and we're going to give you a five minute demo video so that you can have a better educated sales conversation when we follow up." Close rates go up, activation goes up, sales development teams are begging for these leads because they're having product conversations, not like "who we are and these lame 30 minute intro slides" to finally get to price. It works universally, exceptionally well. So that's what we do on the website level. But when it comes to content, and I think that's kind of where you're headed with this, is like what do you do with that content engine? Are you familiar with HubSpot's pillar content approach that everybody's following? I think it's a bad approach, financially. The reason I believe it's a bad approach financially, it's due to what I was communicating earlier. HubSpot's approach is you take a really, really beautiful strong asset, and then you lead to that asset with other types of content clusters that support that and you essentially do lead generation through that asset. I say, do that same thing but with features. Here's an example. We do our own SaaS products at Directive to make sure that we're not just full of crap. Not enough people do that. We rank in the top five for all our keywords. We actually spend a ton of money on PPC and we try to actually test everything and our hypotheses on ourselves. What we're doing right now is, we have an educational product called Institute. This teaches our clients and we give to our clients free of charge because we believe that education drives adoption. As consultants, you don't need to only make recommendations, you need clients to adopt them, right? And so we need to educate them as to why. So we educate them on SEO, PPC, et cetera. We sell it to the market for $39 a month. It teaches people how we do what we do, all our templates, our approach, et cetera. We have 40 lessons. So I'm asking myself, at a $39 a month product, my CPA, my cost per lead is too high to do a ton of paid acquisition. So how can I drive organic leads from my product? So here's my strategy and I'll share with your audience because hopefully it can help them. I'm taking the top five to 10 keywords for every one of my lesson pages. So, "how to do Google ads" or "how to do keyword research for PPC", okay? So then I put "keyword research for PPC" into a keyword research tool. Now I take the top five questions people ask around that. Now I'm going to use entity tools like Clearscope or Content Harmony or something like that to really understand what I need to write here to rank. So then I write five articles all around that one lesson. Then, above the fold on all five articles, I link to that lesson and say "Want to learn how to do it with video?" and come up with an offer that resonates with where they're at in intent. In other words, they intend to learn this. That's why they're searching it. I can satisfy that intent with my product feature, AKA my lesson. And now I also create a content cluster. So all of these content pieces around this topic are internally linking back to my lesson page, which I'm trying to rank at the bottom of the funnel. And so I'm using middle and top of funnel content with lead gen assets all internally linking and with magnets essentially generating leads for my product. So instead of trying to generate informational intent leads, I'm trying to generate purchase intent leads. So their hypothesis of what they want to do with content clusters works for HubSpot. The issue is that getting someone from informational intent to purchase intent is incredibly long and most marketing people won't survive their tenure if they're only focused on driving informational intent leads. So we try to pivot everything to purchase intent. Does that make sense? Kathleen: Yeah. So it sounds like what you're saying, if I understand correctly, is basically the product page on your site effectively as the pillar. Garrett: Yup. Turning product pages into content pillars Kathleen: The same exact approach applies only you're not writing a 4,000 word guide. You're creating the product page. Garrett: Yeah. You just audit all the competitors in the industry to say, "Okay, how many words do I need on my product page to rank? How many internal links do I need? How many referring domains do I need?" And then you say, "Cool, now I'm going to create the entity, the topical understanding to Google that we're the best answer to the questions people have related to the product we sell." And then when you do that whole approach, you're amazing at what you can do when driving MQLs and demos at the bottom of funnel. What should your SEO strategy look like if you're just getting started? Kathleen: So one of the things we talked about when when you and I first chatted about this was that, you work with a lot of big companies and they're coming to you and saying, "We're already doing a lot right. How can you take us to the next level?" But then there is this other school of thought that, if you have, let's say a startup or a new company or a company launching a new product, they have this opportunity to do it right from the beginning -- to greenfield it. Paint a picture for me of what that looks like. You're starting a new company and you want to really ace it out of the gates. Garrett: First and foremost, I'm going to look at all the review sites and ask myself how many reviews I need to be perceived as a market leader. It's the coolest thing in the world, right? Because someone searches now "top whatever software" you sell, and a review site shows up. You don't actually have to be the best! You might not be because you've only been in the game for a couple of months. But if you can get the reviews there, you look like you're the best and that's 99.9% of marketing. So first and foremost, we're going to position ourselves to be discoverable. When there's purchase intent, we're going to focus on demand capture, okay? Because to rank our website as a new organization, we don't have the authority, link profile or content, and investing in all those things takes a large financial upfront investment and has a long runway -- probably two years to build that organic engine. So if you have a 24 month runway to build your organic engine and you need MQLs now, the easiest thing to do is paid SEO. Now with that being said, we don't want to wait two years to try to rank because now we have another two years to get there, right? So we need to start from the beginning to try to position ourselves organically, to lower our cost per acquisition and have a better CAC-LTV ratio. So what do we do? We are going to say, when someone searches for your product or your features, we're going to try to create as much bottom of funnel content as possible. So not only a product page, but a feature page and solution pages. These are saying when someone has pain that your product solves and they go to discover that, can we show up? Perfect. Next what we're going to do is, we're going to start with our link building. So one of the things I had to do at Directive is, before we niched into SaaS, we were niched into just B2B. We had a lot of like manufacturers like Pelican Cases and stuff like that. So we had a lot of B2B players as well. So I couldn't rank for the keyword "B2B SEO", but I wanted to. I didn't have enough authority. My site wasn't large enough. It just wasn't going to happen. So what I did is I went on Search Engine Journal and I wrote, or Search Engine Land, I think it was, a fresh perspective on B2B SEO. In other words, I used someone else's site to rank for my keyword and they control the narrative. So with a startup, what you're gonna want to do is, you're going to go on CIO or Tech Crunch and instead of just bragging about how much money you raised, you're going to want to actually try to position yourself for what your buyer journey is like. We're going to leverage these other third party sites to do what's called guest posting to then rank exceptionally well for these top of funnel queries while internally linking from those guest posts back to our bottom of funnel pages we already built so that we can once again increase our rankings for purchase intent. So you can actually win at the bottom of funnel faster than people realize because nobody's product pages naturally build links. So if you do a really aggressive link building strategy early, using guest posting where you can control the anchor text and the destination URL to point to bottom of funnel pages, you can grow. And so then from that guest posting for bottom of funnel, now we'll focus on those products, kind of clusters we were talking about and our blog strategy, as well as Google ads review sites. And next thing you know, you're 24 months later, you might have one of the best imagine engines in the whole entire industry because you did it right. How to get executives and subject matter experts to create content Kathleen: Love it. One of the pieces of pushback I hear often, especially when you're a startup and you don't have a huge team where often your CEO or your CTO are the primary thought leaders and they're busy, I hear a lot of "Oh, we don't have the time to do all that writing." Any tips for how you can get the goods out of their heads and onto paper in a way that's efficient and scalable? Garrett: Yeah, the most scalable, best link building and PR you can possibly do is exactly what I'm doing right now. Podcasts. There's zero preparation for the thought leader. It takes exponentially less time and you have a much more engaged audience than an article. The best part is, when you guest post and you pitch a guest post, your success rate isn't always as high because not everybody accepts guest posts. Not everybody cares what you have to say. Sometimes editors are busy. On the flip side, the entire podcast content medium is guest dependent. So Kathleen's job is to secure interesting, engaging hosts for her audience. And so when you pitch Kathleen, you're going to have a much higher success rate than if you pitched Kathleen blog articles because now Kathleen has to edit your blog. She might not agree with your opinions because blogs aren't intrinsically the same format as podcasts. They're not op-ed like podcasts are. And so the best thing SaaS companies can do right now is link-building via podcast, hands down highest success rate, most scalable, easiest ended up. Kathleen: I totally agree, but I will say please, for the love of all that is Holy, take two minutes and learn something about the podcast and what it's about and tailor your pitch. I get pitched a lot, by a lot of podcast booking agents. Generally they're pretty good at doing their homework. But I can't tell you how often I get pitched from people who are like, "So-and-so built his real estate empire and can talk about earning money and like changing your life." And I write back and I'm like, "What does this have to do with inbound marketing? This person sounds like an amazing entrepreneur, but that's not what my podcast is about." Garrett: I'd say we have over a 75% success rate. So I'd give your audience some tips on how they can pitch. Get their name right. I know it sounds simple. Write a subject line that doesn't stink. Everything should be about how you make the podcast host's life easier and better for their audience. What I mean by that is there's a really important word when you do outbound or pitching. You say, "I am emailing you because", and that quickly allows someone to know why. And then you hit them with why the audience cares, not about yourself. So a lot of people like to say, "Hey, you know, my client, uh, built his agency from one to $10 million, you know, would love to be a guest on your show. He's been featured by Forbes, Tech Crunch, in the Inc 5,000." And then the podcast host goes, "Who cares?" Right? Compared to saying, "I'm emailing you because I'd love to talk with your audience about a topic that I know they care about, that I happen to be an expert in. Here's three different topics I think your audience might be interested in. Do any of these resonate with you?" Ideally, you want your podcast host to just say "Yes, this one". And then that's all the preparation required and you're good to go and it works. Kathleen: Yeah, I totally agree. At the last two companies I've been in, it's been a part of my strategy to get my CEO as a guest on podcasts. It's so much easier than trying to get them to write blogs. I think there's a human connection element of, you hear the person's voice, you get to know their personality, that that draws you in so much more than written content can do. So there's that aspect of it too. Garrett's advice Kathleen: Well, any other last words of advice that you think my listeners should know about related to this topic? Garrett: I guess one of the blessings we have with our portfolio is we have a lot of first party data. So I guess some encouragement. Since March 1st I wanted to look at what happened across our portfolio. Spend is down 24%, but conversions are down only 18% because click through rates are up, CPCs are down and conversion rates are up. So here's the really cool part about cost per click advertising is that it scales with demand and doesn't create waste. In fact, at a unit economic level, your advertising is actually more efficient now than it was before. Is volume down? Yes. But also auction competitiveness is down. See, all CPC advertising and all channels is based on an auction. It's based on inventory. It's like an economic model. Supply and demand. Well, because fewer advertisers are advertising right now, you're actually able to satisfy the existing demand that does still exist for whatever product or service you sell at a lower rate and you will have better efficiency and effectiveness in your advertising right now than you did before. That's just at the ad level. It's not necessarily the close rate level or at the volume level. But just at the actual cost per click and cost per acquisition level, it's actually much more efficient right now to advertise, which is kind of cool. That's across over $1 million in spend. Kathleen: That makes sense. So don't give up your ad budget altogether. Garrett: Just to meet demand. But remember your ad budget will do that intrinsically. So as long as you're not spending a ton on display and CPM type stuff, you're going to find a ton of efficiency on CPC because fewer people are advertising, thus lowering your cost per click, and there are some people out there buying and you want to make sure you're discoverable to those people. So it's a kind of a cool way to still win right now. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: Absolutely. All right, well switching gears, I have two questions I always ask all of my guests and I'd love to hear what you have to say about these. The first is, this podcast is all about inbound marketing. Is there a particular company or individual that you think is really killing it right now with inbound who my listeners could go check out as an example? Garrett: I mean, HubSpot's a monster at this. They still are. I know. And everybody knows that. Kathleen: I'm going to make you tell me someone besides HubSpot though. Garrett: I know, I know, I know. The thing is, it's a lot harder now to move somebody out of a top 10 ranking. And so you see a lot of people pivoting away from that old school, gated content theory of inbound. And so that's why off the top of my head, I can't think of someone who's like doing that part of it exceptionally well because the game's kinda changed.  Kathleen: Who do you think is killing it with marketing right now in general? Garrett: I always like what is Zoom is doing? Because I liked what they did with like offline advertising and I think that's so cool. I think they're really creative in the sense of thinking about how to position themselves. I love the organizations that are investing heavily in podcast ads. For myself, that's one of my highest performing channels is niche-based podcast ads. I advertise on almost all the SEO or PPC podcasts that I can find because it works exceptionally well at a low CPM. I like the D2C stuff. I think the D2C people are kicking B2B butt. Like Baboon to the Moon. I love their branding. I think if B2B had a little bit more boldness like this... Kathleen: Yeah. What did they, I've never heard of them. I'll have to check them out. Garrett: So yeah, if you want to see somebody who I think is brilliant and actually has a brand opinion and stance and is hyper creative and out there -- Baboon to the Moon. Drift gets way too much credit for it because I don't actually think they're that good at it from a branding standpoint. They just have a free product so it's a lot easier to act like you're doing really good at it. They like try to take the human side of positioning. I think Baboon is doing something really cool because they're taking a hyper creative approach and it's like they're on acid. It's like a goldfish on a human's body using their product, but it's brilliant because they are so consistent with it in their messaging, copy, and creative that it actually creates a brand theme that I don't recognize in B2B. I think B2B organizations need to do a better job creating a brand theme. Like for us at Directive, we're trying to do a lot of people in our branding, but instead of just doing people in our branding, we're also like labeling them with their titles and their names so that it's so people know it's not a stock photo. So we're trying to bring it to life. We can obviously do it a lot better. We're not nearly as creative as that, but I think if B2B looks at the direct to consumer brands that are doing so well right now, at the end of the day it's very similar if you have a self onboarding SaaS company to a D2C product. It's very still transactional. And so if you can take your self onboarding, your trial-based SaaS company, and do that, and take that DDC stuff, and build that brand guide and just be really bold and crazy and ambitious with it, I think it'll pay off. Kathleen: Yeah, that's, and you need to have leaders within the company that are willing to take a risk and be different. There's a lot of sameness in general in marketing and I think when everybody else is going right and you go left, there's a lot of opportunity there. Garrett: Oh, a trillion percent. It's hard to get that buy in. I mean, I don't know anyone in my portfolio is actually doing it. That's why I'm in my head trying to think. It just starts at the top. You just need a CEO and a board that supports a bold new direction, not just verbally, but actually, and really actually sees it all the way through, especially when they get that first negative feedback or whatever from someone who doesn't like it. Kathleen: Yeah. There are going to be people who don't like it, that's for sure. Garrett: B2B is terrified of making anyone feel anything. That's truth, right? They're terrified of if someone doesn't like something. And the point is, the worst marketing is marketing for everybody. And so if you can be bold enough to have people hate you or like you, that's when you actually have marketing. Kathleen: I totally agree with you. All right. Second question. The biggest pain point I hear from marketers is that trying to stay on top of the changing landscape of digital marketing is like drinking from a fire hose. And so I'm curious how you personally stay up to date and educate yourself on all of that. Garrett: I think it's actually less important to stay up to date with things than people think, and here's why. Most marketers don't have a fundamental belief and a hypothesis of how they approach generating revenue for an organization. What's allowed myself and my organization to be successful is we have a fundamental belief that you need to make a brand discoverable at the bottom of the funnel regardless of channel. Now, the beauty of that is that it doesn't matter if digital marketing changes. See in 1997 when Google first came out, what was the whole point? People came to people and said, "Hey, I want to show up on this new search engine. How do I do it?" And the answer was, "Well, you need a website." See, the new answer is, "Well, you need reviews for your brand and you need to be positioned." As long as you don't get married to Capterra and G2, but get married to the idea of showing up when someone has purchase intent for what you sell, everything can change without changing anything because your fundamental belief is that you need to be discoverable when there's purchase intent. And so my encouragement to people is ground yourself in a fundamental belief of what you actually believe. It's such a critical part of marketing. If you want to make a ton of money in marketing, you need to actually have opinions. And you actually have to have beliefs and a hypothesis. You have to also be willing to adjust those, but you need to have them. And so I think if people have a real belief system and fundamental approach and then say we want to be essentially discoverable when there's purchase intent, that allows you to just naturally adjust whatever happens in the market because all you're doing is maintaining your belief. And that's, I think, what's so important for marketers, is to get away from this idea of, "Oh, what could I try? What new trick or hack can I try in a channel?" to say, "How can I essentially take my belief of discoverability and apply it to all my chanels?" When you do that, it allows you to stay really even keeled and focus on your customers. Kathleen: Yeah, and I would add to that, the best marketers I know in many cases are not actually marketers. You're a great example. You studied economics. The best marketers I know tend to be the most avid students of human behavior. People who understand people make great marketers because they're focused on the things that are timeless. It really doesn't matter what Google does with an algorithm because, honestly, Google is just trying to solve for people, right? So if you're focused on people and how they behave and how they buy, none of the bells and whistles matter. Garrett: Take that same person and then they learn financial modeling. Now you have the best CMOs in the world. People who have a really authentic, true belief of understanding of people and how they buy, and then they also understand financials? You put those two people together -- those are the CMOs of the Fortune 500. How to connect with Garrett Kathleen: Amen. I could go on and on about that. If somebody is listening and wants to learn more about some of this or has a question and wants to get in touch with y ou, what is the best way for them to connect with you online? Garrett: I'm active on Twitter. I'm @gmehrguth. So first initial, last name. I'm active on LinkedIn. Shoot me an email, it's just initial last name at Directive consulting. I'd love the chat and help anyone who has questions around demand gen. I'm pretty active on there trying to share all of our data and different tactics and things that we're doing. Almost daily I shared a new tactic or approach and a thread for essentially how SaaS markers can generate revenue. So if you're interested in that, feel free to follow and engage. Kathleen: Great. And I'll put all those links to Garett's social profiles and his email in the show notes. So head there to check that out if you want to connect with him. You know what to do next... Kathleen: If you're listening and you liked what you heard or you learn something new, I would greatly appreciate it if you would head to Apple podcasts or the platform of your choice and leave the podcast a five star review. We talked a lot about reviews in this interview and we know how important they are, and they are equally as important for podcasts as they are for products. So take a minute and do that. That would mean a lot. And if you know somebody who's doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me @workmommywork because I would love to make them my next interview. That's it for this week. Thank you so much, Garrett. Garrett: Well, thank you Kathleen. Glad to be here.

Meet Ian Reynolds Ian Reynolds is a Partner and Chief Solutions Architect at Zibtek, a software development firm focused on helping businesses of all sizes in the US solve their core problems with software. They empower entrepreneurs, growth companies, enterprises and visionary firms to achieve greater profitability and efficiency, valuation and ultimate success by building the right tools through custom software. What is it that your company is doing to innovate and stay on top of the latest technologies? We have a select group of engineers who are just looking at a sort of smattering of the biggest and sort of most available trends and technology, mostly AI and these sorts of things. Just dedicated research to see if they can come up with any sort of projects that are going to be interesting, going to solve problems for our clients that we can then turn around and present research. We see the market going this way, here is something that we really feel will be of benefit to you and hopefully, of course, a benefit to us internally as we sort of provide services to the workplace. Can you talk a little bit about the types of clients that you help? There are three major categories that we serve. The first category is small businesses in the United States, which accounts for 90% of those firms as maybe 20 to 25% of our business. And these are folks who either have an idea or have a need for a piece of software that doesn't exist, and they're sort of bringing something new to market. Then we have midsize businesses, which account for the majority of our business. And they don't necessarily have that team in house that can solve that complex engineering problem that they have, that would resolve the core issue in their business or would basically allow them to focus more on operations. And of course, we have enterprise clients like Google and Adobe, that we serve, and we're building and supporting enterprise projects for them in house. And those are those are much more structured. Can you describe the process of building custom software and how a company goes about doing that? So building custom software is very much like building a house, you have to have a plan. You also have to have certain access to certain things. So we start with really sitting down the client understanding their needs. We had people come to us with literally just napkins where they have an idea. And so we have to take that translate that into a formal or textual document. We then go into a design and architecture phase, where we're actually reviewing the technologies that would be best fit for the solution. And then we're designing it. Sometimes we'll do a discovery phase, that's a couple weeks to really kind of test and make sure build what is called like a POC a proof of concept to see if this can be done. We then go into principal engineering where we pair a team that has built something before together. And then depending on the nature of the project, you have QA teams to make sure that the quality is sort of meeting our standards. Can you help our listeners by sharing your one of your favorite or most successful networking stories that you've had? I was actually revisiting a college campus. We were doing some recruiting. And I had bumped into a colleague that had basically made a pretty wild transition in their career and we just caught up very briefly. That conversation sparked a chain of referrals, which I found out later, where I had just sort of talked about what I was doing. And I took rather a sort of unconventional career path, started a chain of conversations on that person side. And then I find out years later, that they had actually come into also my circle of work, doing engineering, largely because of this conversation that I had with him. How do you stay in front of or nurture your networking community that you've established? I've taken an approach of trying to write very thoughtful pieces. And share those directly with a group of individuals, to a select group. I'll send it to people that I feel would be most relevant for just to share my thoughts on a topic. And what I find is real engagement, rather than sort of community or social engagement. It generates real conversations and lends itself to deeper, more meaningful, more thoughtful discussion about certain topics. And it's a lot more work I'll say that, but I would say it has generated much deeper sort of friendships. What advice would you offer that business professional who's looking to grow their network? My advice would be determine what type of communication you're comfortable doing. Then try to leverage that and get really, really good at that one type of communication, that one type of network communication that you prefer, and do that do that on steroids. And if you can, do it consistently. It'll work better than trying to be a man for all seasons. Digital networking or traditional networking – which do you find more value in? I'd say the, the digital networking is much more valuable. And I'd say by and large, because we have an increased sort of transaction philosophy in society with the use of technology people are out and about and they can be anywhere when they're working. And so it's much more, I guess, kind of consumable to present yourself digitally, than I think it is to even go to or be present at some of these networking events. If you could go back to your 20 year old self would you tell yourself to do more of less of or differently with regards to your professional career? If I could go back in time, I would probably tell myself to start a business sooner than later. Working in a professional environment was helpful, but not necessary. You can learn pretty much everything you want to learn if you just kind of jump feet first into the problem, and sort of make the problem your own and want to go consume the material. We've all heard of the six degrees of separation, who would be the one person that you'd love to connect with? And do you think you could do it within the six degree? it would probably be the Seth Klarman at Baupost Group. He's an individual investor guy living in Boston and totally unrelated to the field that I'm in. But he wrote a book that is no longer in print. And just a pretty interesting guy. He's got a unique perspective on the market, and has a long term view of where things are going. So I'd love to have chat with him if it could ever be arranged. Any final word of advice for our listeners with regards to growing and supporting your network? Being personal being yourself is the most valuable thing that I have done and the most valuable thing I would encourage people to do and be comfortable in your skin. Just be comfortable with who you are. Be a little goofy be a little nerdy. That's me. And just put yourself out there. How to connect with Ian: Email: hello@zibtek.com Website: https://www.zibtek.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ianjhreynolds/

Dr. Hayes interviews Dr. Trevor Powles his involvement with translational medicine in the UK and early bisphosphonate. Conflict of Interest: Dr. Powles has not reported any conflicts of interest to ASCO.   TRANSCRIPT The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. This is not a substitute for professional medical care and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of individual conditions. Guests on this podcast express their own opinions, experience, and conclusions. The mention of any product, service, organization, activity, or therapy should not be construed as an ASCO endorsement.   Welcome to JCO's Cancer Stories-- The Art of Oncology brought to you by the ASCO Podcast Network, a collection of nine programs covering a range of educational and scientific content and offering enriching insight into the role of cancer care. You can find all the shows, including this one, at podcast.asco.org. Welcome to Cancer Stories. I'm Dr. Daniel Hayes. I'm a medical oncologist, and I'm a translational researcher at the University of Michigan Rogel Cancer Center in Ann Arbor. And I'm also the past president of the American Society of Clinical Oncology. Today I am privileged to be your host for a series of podcast interviews with the founders of our field-- today in particular Dr. Trevor Powles. Over the last 40 years, I've been fortunate to have been trained, mentored, and inspired by many of these pioneers. It's my hope that through these conversations all of us can be equally inspired by gaining an appreciation of the courage, the vision, and frankly the scientific understanding that these men and women who established the field of clinical cancer care over the last seven decades. By understanding how we got to the present and what we now consider, quote, "normal," end of quote. I hate using quotes, but in oncology I think we can also imagine our work together towards a better future for our patients and their families during and after cancer treatment. As I've noted today, I'm really honored to have as my guest on this podcast Professor Trevor Powles. He's really generally considered one of the true pioneers in breast oncology. Dr. Powles was raised in London, where he went to medical school. He trained in medicine and surgery at St. Bartholomew's Hospital and associated affiliates, graduating from medical school in 1964. He went on to obtain a PhD at the Institute of Cancer Research. He directed his thesis towards hypoglycemia and bone metastasis. Following his PhD, he then completed specialist training in medical oncology at the Royal Marsden and further pursued training in endocrinology with Professor Philip Bundy, [? who was ?] then Chief of endocrinology at Yale before moving to the UK. Dr. Powles remained at the Royal Marsden hospital during the bulk of his distinguished medical career, first as head of the Marsden breast cancer unit, and ultimately is the founding chairman of the Committee for Clinical Research for the entire Royal Marsden. After he retired-- which again requires [INAUDIBLE]-- at the age of 65, Doctor Powles has served on staff at the Cancer Center at London Parkside. Dr. Powles has authored hundreds of peer reviewed papers. He's mentor of many of the leaders in breast college around the world, which we will discuss in a second. And he's really won too many awards and honors from me to list here, but they include the coveted William McGuire Award presented annually at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium-- and by the way, so have two of his mentees, Professors Mitch Dowsett and Ian Smith. And he's also won the Nancy Brinker Award. Many of you know Miss Brinker founded the Komen for the Cure Foundation. And perhaps what is perplexing to those of us in the colonies, in 2002 he and his twin brother Ray were named Commanders of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, or CBE for short-- which of course is one of the highest honors one can obtain in the UK-- for their work in breast in Trevor's case, and haematologic cancers in Ray's case. Trevor, I know that a lot of your work also was done with a variety of other contributors, including Dr. John Kanis, Dr. Eugene McCloskey, and of course Sandy Patterson [? period. ?] You've always been quite generous in pointing out that they had a lot to do with your own contributions, and we appreciate that as well. Dr. Powles, welcome to our program. Thank you very much, and thank you for those kind words. Yeah. Actually, I interviewed someone a few weeks ago, and he said, "Geez, that sounded like my mother wrote that." [LAUGHTER] I have a number of questions for you, and I want to start out-- your research and your background was really in endocrinology of the 1960s. And that was a particularly exciting time for endocrinology with the discovery of the hormones not more than 20 years before that, and then the increasing knowledge of understanding of [? the ?] peptides steroid hormone receptors. What made you veer off from that field into oncology in general and breast cancer specifically? When I was working at the Hammersmith Hospital doing my endocrinology [INAUDIBLE] endocrinology there. And one of the conditions we would be looking at would be hypercalcemia with hyperparathyroidism. And hypercalcemia was occurring very commonly in the breast cancer patients in the oncology and the radiotherapy department. [? And ?] to begin with, we thought this would just be another paraendocrine-type syndrome, and that was the thing that really fired my interest. From there, I then wanted to do my PhD to look more into what was causing the hypercalcemia with breast cancer, and that started the whole path of finding out about bone metastases, what they were doing, how they were causing the hypercalcemia, and the path just continued and continued. Most of your work-- I'm going to get to some of the other things you've done-- has been endocrine therapy, endocrine processes, and the bone metastasis, which is really endocrinology. In the United States about that time, most of the excitement in the 60s was around chemotherapy. Was it difficult for you to stick with the endocrine approach? No, it wasn't really. When I first started, all of in the endocrine treatment was ablative treatment. And I knew that from when I was doing my endocrinology is that the hypophysectomy, adrenalectomy, oophorectomy, those were the early days for chemotherapy at using combination chemotherapy and metastatic disease. [INAUDIBLE] and endocrine therapies were far better treatments from the chemotherapy. And although I was doing chemotherapy because we started with single agents then combination treatments-- and there was a lot of chemotherapy going on at that time at the milestone for haematological cancers, lymphoma, teratomas, et cetera-- I was able to do that, but I really focused on the endocrine side. And coming back to the hypercalcemia, the one thing that really impressed me was when I was originally doing my endocrinology was that rapid response you could get to the hypercalcemia by ablative endocrine therapy for oophorectomy, or adrenalectomy, or hypophysectomy. And that was really the thing that started all of the research I did in bone. It started on my PhD with in vitro work. We set up bone assays, I went to Cambridge to [INAUDIBLE] very famous scientist Cambridge to teach us how to do the bone assays for in vitro bone assays. We also set up the animal model with breast cancer. We were able to show that breast cancers could cause bone breakdown and osteolysis in vitro. We could find that we could block that by using drugs like aspirin, and that got us very interested in cross [? demandings. ?] We could then go into the animal experiments. And when we had a rat model using breast cancer that we knew from our assays caused bone breakdown in vitro, and when we did that in the animals by injecting into the aorta we could get bone metastases [? and ?] soft tissue tumor. When we gave aspirin, we could completely prevent the bone metastases-- quite dramatic experiments. And that was what really fired me into getting into the oncology, getting into the endocrine treatment in oncology because of my background in endocrinology. And that has stayed ever since. So what was the timing there? This is the late 60s? My PhD was 1970 to '73. I was at the Hammersmith from '67 to '69, and then I went to [? Barts ?] to endocrinology, and then I came back and then with Bondy in the Marsden, and then I got on the staff of the Marsden as a senior lecturer in 1975. So what you just described to me sounds like translational science. That word wasn't coined until probably 20 years later. Was it unique where you were to be taking things from the lab straight out to the clinic? And where there obstacles to doing that? No, there weren't. The thing that was good about that was we were doing the laboratory work based on what we'd seen, what I'd seen in the endocrinology with the hypercalcemia and the bone metastases, and responding to endocrine therapy. I then was in the PhD, doing the PhD, and then I was able to translate that into the clinic once I then became a consultant. So the main work I was doing when I was first a consultant, the research work, was actually looking at hypercalcemia bone metastases in patients. We had a surprise because when we took the aspirin into patients, we could see no effect at all even though we'd had very dramatic effects in vitro and in vivo. And it was only when the bisphosphonates came through that we were able to then use those, because at this stage we knew it was working on osteoclasts. And it was only when we started to get the bisphosphonates that we really got into the dimension of first of all, being able to treat the hypercalcemia, then being able to switch off the bone metastases, bone pain, and bone fractures with bisphosphonates. And then take it into the adjuvant, I was then able to take it into the adjuvant scene and set up the first adjuvant bisphosphonate trial. So I'd gone right from in vitro, I continued the path right the way through to clinical work. And then what happened was that if we did the bisphosphonate trial and we got the result of just like that had happened in the rats-- it stopped the development of bone metastases and it stopped the hypercalcemia in the rats, but didn't affect the soft tissue. So in the humans, we had exactly the same result where we were able to reduce bone metastases, not have an impact on soft tissue or other disease, and improve mortality. And so we've gone right the way through. It's a story that's extraordinary from my point of view, because I was able to follow the whole path all the way through. And you're absolutely right. That is a really good example of translational research where you hang in there until you get the answer. What's the history behind transferring the bisphosphonates from prevention of osteoporosis in cancer? Now they're widely used as well as denosumab. In fact, it's malpractice not to use them in a patient with bone metastasis. How did you make that leap where you're standing next to somebody who was treating osteoporosis, and you said, "I wonder if that should work?" And how did you get hold of the drug? There's got to be a history behind it. Well, we were looking. We were looking for [? anti-osteodiscitis ?] agents [INAUDIBLE] the aspirin didn't work but [INAUDIBLE] worked so we knew for no reasons at all that it would prevent, stop hypercalcemia. And so we were going down that path, and two really important people in the way the path was going. One was Herbie Fleisch, and Herbie Fleisch [? had ?] suddenly produced bisphosphonates. It was a terrific story if anybody was interested in bone, because it was an agent that clearly was working on osteoclasts, and that was the target we were after. We knew at that stage that the cancer cells had to activate osteoclasts in order to cause the bone breakdown and develop in bone. And the second person who was key was Craig Mundie, who again I met. And I went over to the Boston Dental Hospital several times, and I met Craig and the others there, and that was linking up with being able to see the story that they were developing where tumor cells were activating osteoclasts that were then causing bone breakdown that was then producing growth factors to activate the cancer. So it became a really preferential site for bone metastases to develop because of the interaction between the cancer cells and the osteoclasts. So then there's Herbie Fleisch in Switzerland. I had a few skis with him. He was a very good skiier. But the spin off was that bisphosphonates were going to be the thing that we really [INAUDIBLE] to be looking at. And then we tried four different bisphosphonates. Five foot was a guy in Amsterdam who had APD that was actually the forerunner for [INAUDIBLE]. And the one that worked best for us was clodronate, which we got originally from Finland. And we set up the bone trials. We had to go through three stages. We had to-- first of all, before we could use adjuvant, we had to show that it worked in metastatic bone disease. And it did. It reduced what's called skeletal related events-- that's fracture, hypercalcemia, pain-- requirements of radiotherapy. We then did a trial for phase 3 trial of using clodronate for patients who had metastatic disease but who didn't have bone metastases. And we could reduce the risk of them getting bone metastases. And then we had the justification for doing the-- So let me interrupt you for a minute. Now you're about 1983 or '4 I think when that was probably? Is that right? It was-- yes, it would be. With the adjuvant trial, we would have started in '86. I think. That's the window of time. And then in that trial, we didn't get the results from that until I think it was 1997 when we did the first analysis, and that we were able to then show in that randomized-- it was placebo controlled as well-- we were able to show a reduction in bone metastases and improved survival. And then we did a subsequent analysis in 2006. So we've got longer term data. Back then where other bisphosphonate trials were going on, adjuvant bisphosphonate trails going on, and then we had the meta analysis in 2015, Oxford meta analysis, which I was involved with Rob Coleman. And we did the analysis there, which confirmed that we could reduce bone metastases and improve survival with adjuvant bisphosphonates. So the story that starts from a test tube, so to speak. Oh, there's one other very interesting experiment we [INAUDIBLE] that's never been repeated. Right at the beginning, we were able to show that doing co-cultures-- you're reminding me of things now-- doing co-cultures of the bone assay with human breast tumors I'd get from the Marsden while I was at the institute. We'd have fresh human tumors, and we would do a co-culture and some of them could cause the complete breakdown of the bone assay, and others would not have osteoporosis. And we did a follow up of those patients-- it was only about 30 patients, I think-- and we did a follow up of those patients, and those who had the most bone breakdown in vitro [? with ?] [? those ?] patients who were then going to get the bone metastases. That was a real incentive to show that link that we were getting. So we knew something was going on there. And that experiment was going on in 1971. And in 2015 with the meta analysis of bone mets and mortality. So that's a long story. That's the story. Let me say that this entire story reiterates the phrase that, "On the shoulders of giants we all stand." You look at the number of people you've laid out who led to this story, which is still ongoing. It's actually fascinating. I want to return just a minute to your work with endocrine therapy of breast cancer and your work with tamoxifen. But first of all, a lot of young people listen to this. 'Cause I came in the field just as surgical ablation of many of the origins of estrogen was going away. Can you talk about what it was like to take care of the patients who were having hypophysectomies and adrenalectomies and oopherectomies? I recall thinking, "I'm an endocrinologist here. I'm not a medical oncologist," as a first year fellow taking care of Addison's disease and other things. There are two things about ablative endocrine therapy. The first was that the responses could be very dramatic, and it was quite a high response rate. There was something [INAUDIBLE]-- don't forget we weren't basing it on ER. ER came later, and then [INAUDIBLE]. Even not based on ER, we were getting 30% to 40% response rates, particularly in bone. The second thing is the management of the patients. The hypophysectomies were relatively easy, because I'd already got experience of patients who got pituitary failure from my endocrinology, and that's much it easier to manage. But the adrenalectomies are much more difficult because you can get very acute glucocorticoid symptoms if you're not getting cortisol, whereas in hypophysectomies it's a relatively slow process. And they were much more difficult to look after. But the thing that was important about it was the fact that although we were doing it, these patients were getting hypercalcemia [INAUDIBLE]. You could have a patient who was hypercalcemia, you do ablative surgery, within 48 hours the calcium is back to normal. In fact, it will go hypoglycemic sometimes on bone hungry [INAUDIBLE] thing. And from a clinical point of view, it was some of the best responses we ever saw even up to this time. Now one of the things that came out of that was that we had one patient-- I can say a name because he's long since dead and [INAUDIBLE] anyway-- her name was Mrs. Pottinger. It's engraved in my mind forever. And she had bone metastases, and she was not particularly well and also had some heart problem. And she was due to have adrenalectomy, and she wasn't well enough for adrenalectomy. And so what I did is I'd used [INAUDIBLE] when I was at the Hammersmith as part of treating Cushing's disease. And so I'd already knew about medical treatment for-- so I then decided that we would do-- and I think it must have been the first patient. I had to get permission from [INAUDIBLE], and I still got the letter I wrote to the medical director of [INAUDIBLE] then saying could we use [INAUDIBLE]. So what we do is the basis was in order to get her well enough to have her adrenalectomy, and she did exactly the same as she would have done if we'd done adrenalectomy. Within 24 to 48 hours, she's getting better, the pain's going, the calcium's down. So she then refused to have an adrenalectomy. There's no way she is going to have it. She said, "No I'll continue with the [INAUDIBLE]." And she continued on [INAUDIBLE] for over a year before she died. And that started a whole new thing. [? Ian ?] [? Smith ?] was my registrar at the time. And so we decided we'd do a phase 2 trial. We did a Phase 2 trial of [INAUDIBLE] on the understanding we were doing a medical adrenalectomy. And that started the whole story that we were doing using [INAUDIBLE], because a [INAUDIBLE] came over, I had various other people come, and what we found was the story was. It wasn't the medical adrenalectomy by blocking postmenopausal estrogen. And then we went down the pathway of doing various, about three or four different aromatase inhibitors with Mitch doing all of endocrinology. It's a wonderful time. We had Adrian Harris, Charlie [INAUDIBLE]-- [COUGHING]. [INAUDIBLE]. [INTERPOSING VOICES] That's a parade of stars. Were you talking across the Atlantic a lot during that time with Dick [? Stanton, ?] and Angela Brody, and the other two who were also-- Yes. Angela Brody was the one who got us a source for [INAUDIBLE]. That was the phase 2. Charlie led on that on the phase 2. That was Angela getting us to do that and linked him with Mitch. And Dick Stanton, yes it was a lot of collaborative work with Donald MacDonald. And a lot of the endocrinologists I knew. So that was how that whole story rolled. That's an amazing library. Let me take you back now to your childhood. I know you and your identical twin, Ray-- by the way for the listeners, if you Google either Trevor or Ray Powles, you'll see pictures of the two of them standing together. And I challenge you to tell who's who. [LAUGHTER] Anyway-- Well I could. I could tell the difference. Yeah I know you can tell the difference. I know that you were both young boys in London during World War II. Tell me about the experience then, and how your mother moved you. Obviously, we were very young. My father was in the Navy abroad, so my mother was alone and was looking after my older brother David, who was four or five years older than us. And I can remember the bombing. I can remember quite a lot about it, surprisingly. We were evacuated up into the north of England 1943, 1944, something like that. And we were there for I think something like six months. And it was an incredible story. I went back to see-- I hadn't been back-- I went back to see-- I was up in the north of England, and I suddenly thought I'll go over. We were at a place called Stockton. And so I was five when we left-- four, four years old when we left. And I had no idea. I knew it was Stockton, and I knew the name of the house was the Priory, and I had a faint recollection of the door. And then I went up to Stockton, and I found the house we were in. And I knocked on the door, and it was a major-- a colonel-- Colonel Brown and his sister who lived there. And the sister was still alive, and she must have been about 90. [INAUDIBLE]. And she looked at me and she said, "You're one of the twins." [LAUGHTER] So we had a chat. [INTERPOSING VOICES] At the time, did you think of this as being frightening, or was it just a great adventure for a young boy? Yeah, I wasn't unaware of danger. My house was bombed down the road flattened and presumably a lot of people died, but I was unaware of danger as such. We had a shelter-- it's something called a [INAUDIBLE] shelter, I think it was called-- that was half buried with corrugated iron as the top thing. And if the siren went, I can remember that we would have to go out and get into the shelter. And we could hear the V-1s very, very-- I can still remember. You can hear the V-1s coming over. It made a hum-- [HUMMING] --like that. And it's gradually getting louder and louder, and then it would stop, and then it would just fall out of the sky at an angle. It would go down at about 45 degrees. So if you could hear the [? stop ?] overhead, you weren't going to be hit. But if you could hear the [? stop ?] coming towards you, there was a chance you were going to get hit. I can remember that. Everybody was sitting listening to where these bombs were cutting out their engine. So that's one of the things I can remember. And I can remember the V-2. It was a huge bang if one went off. I know that you and Ray both also developed tuberculosis as young boys. What was the background behind that, and how were you treated? Yeah, Ray-- we'd just finished school. And we weren't sure what we were going to do, and Ray had developed [INAUDIBLE], which again didn't mean anything to me. He coughed up a couple of times or [INAUDIBLE] of blood. And the next thing he's carted off and he's got tuberculosis, and he's been taken down to a sanatorium down near the Thames out along the marshes sort of thing. And he's there for six months. And during that six months, I can't see him and everything, and I thought, "Well, you know I'd like to do medicine. I think this is rather a good thing." So what I did, I then applied for medical school and got a place. And then Ray gets better, and he then applies to medical school, and he gets a place as well. The dean said to Ray when he saw it, he said, "Haven't we seen you here before?" And Ray said, "No, it's my twin brother." And he then says, "Did we accept him?" And Ray said, "Yes." And then he said, "Pity." [LAUGHTER] And it was the end of the interview. The next thing, he's in as well. [LAUGHTER] And then I get TB, because it's about an 80% chance you get it if an identical twin's had it. And I was in the hospital for three months. So we were both back a year. I would have been a year ahead of Ray, but in fact then suddenly we're both back a year. And it was quite an interesting year for me, because I only had one subject to do. So I was able to do some reading, things like Darwin and that sort of stuff. And then we just carried on. And you were treated with streptomycin in those days? [INAUDIBLE]. You had 50 grams of strep. Yeah, yeah. Sounds like you used that as a springboard to change the practice of medicine. So in every cloud there's a silver lining. The one thing I want to bring up-- I remember several years ago at one of the San Antonio meetings, and you and Dr. [? Bernie ?] Fisher were the bait. And he did all but call for you to be arrested and locked up because your study was negative, and of course the [? PL1 ?] one was positive. And you very graciously responded to that, "You know, Dr. Fisher, I didn't start this trial up to be negative." [LAUGHTER] That was a great response. My goodness did I not admire him. The reason I did the trial is-- again, this is a funny story. I did a lot of horse riding, as you know. And what I did is after the 1985 first meta analysis, Oxford meta analysis, that was the first one to show that chemotherapy worked for the [INAUDIBLE] and other trials that chemotherapies show the reduction. And it showed that tamoxifen worked. That was the first meeting where I was really convinced that both those were positive effects. Up till then, it was one trial and you couldn't be sure if it was going to be reproduced all the like. And that was the 1985 meta analysis meeting in Oxford. And then I came back home, and I got on my horse, and I rode for a week. I took the horse down to the South Downs. The South Downs is a long, expansive country, and it took me five days, I think it was, of riding to get across from one side to the other where I'd stop in a pub. I had to go down the week before and plan out exactly what I was going to do. So I've got five days on a horseback thinking, and that was where I thought, "Well, where do we go from here?" You might say, well, let's do bigger and better chemo or the like, right? And you might say endocrine therapy, let's do more tamoxifen, or different doses, or [INAUDIBLE] down those paths. So I said, "But if you really want to do something different, the two things you could do would be for chemotherapy is why not give it before surgery?" That was the time when I really thought neoadjuvant chemotherapy was where we ought to be going, because then we could see that they're responding or not et cetera. But tamoxifen, if it weren't for adjuvant therapy, then it should work for prevention. We had a clinic at the Marsden that I took over because somebody was leaving-- which was a family history clinic, and they all had very strong family histories three or four relatives, et cetera, et cetera. And I took over this clinic, and I thought to myself we could do a prevention trial here with tamoxifen. We'll do a pilot. What happened at the Marsden they just had a ethics committee set up, one of the first in the world. This is in 1985. And it had never met, it had only passed the trials to be done. And so the first meeting of the ethics committee at the Marsden was to discuss the prevention, because it was such a awful thing to do. Do you know what I mean? And but after two or three goes, I got it through the ethics committee mainly because a colleague of mine who was the head of medicine then was Tim McIlwain. He pushed it through because he said "Look, it makes so much sense." And we did a [INAUDIBLE] and we had an agreement that we could do 250 patients randomized, then go to 500. And then we had a national meeting to discuss setting up the national program. And so it was a feasibility trial actually looking to see what the toxicity was or whether it was acceptable to do it. And we had such a spin off from that, because tamoxifen at that stage was supposed to be a pure anti estrogen. And we were screening all the tissues, we were doing bones that [INAUDIBLE] from the clotting factors. Everything. Cholesterol. We were doing, measuring everything in pre and post menopausal women. And everywhere we looked, tamoxifen wasn't acting as an anti estrogen. It was acting as an estrogen effect, so much so that at the Think Tank-- I presented it at the Think Tank, and I said, "Look these aren't [INAUDIBLE] tamoxifen and anti estrogen at all." And I thought Mark, dear old Mark Lippert, was going to have an epilepsy, which 'cause it's correct because it is an anti estrogen breast cancer effect. But that was the first time. So then in the paper I wrote, I called it a selective anti estrogen. But I didn't coin [INAUDIBLE], but I did coin the expression, the first published thing of a selective anti estrogen. I remember that paper. [INAUDIBLE]. I remember that. So I want to finish up with just-- Let me just finish up one thing. Can I just finish up one thing? [INTERPOSING VOICES] Because it links into [INAUDIBLE]. So after Think Tank presented it possibly as an estrogen. And what was happening is we've got a bell shaped curve that was very narrow. So we were on the estrogen side as opposed to the anti estrogen side, right? And that was what was happening in the normal tissues. So I had a slides that said, "Tamoxifen is not an anti estrogen." You probably remember if you were there. You were there. We go out on the boat, and we get stranded out of the boat in the mist-- the one you've mentioned about where you and I and Mark, et cetera-- when we're approaching the time after about four hours when we're thinking about meeting our maker, Mark says to me, "I've really got to have a word with you about this anti estrogen." Well one other thing-- and this is going to be more my talking than yours. I really just touched on the surface of your contributions to the field, but I think probably the greatest is your mentoring history. And you've already hit on a few of these, but I travel extensively and I'm struck by the number of times I've been in some remote area-- or at least remote to me-- and corner of the world, and somebody-- it's usually my host-- volunteers that he or she trained at the Royal Marsden with Trevor Powles. And I think it's one of the things you should be most proud of all the many things you've done. And I want to know that you set up a system that was opening and inviting and also somehow funded to support people to come from all over the world. What made you do that? How did you do that in the first place? It's hard to do. Certain people came to me, which was very nice. We did have funds. I would be able to get funding even at that stage. There are many more hurdles for getting funding now than there were then. And the other thing about it was the fact that I find that people-- many times we've [INAUDIBLE] [? mentioning ?] things-- but one of the things I really did [? let ?] is let people have the run of doing things as opposed to me doing it maybe with the assistant. And that was very rewarding for me in terms of results and [INAUDIBLE], 'cause people were very motivated to do it, people like you, and Charlie, and the others. So in some senses, I think it was the fact I was looking for the results we wanted to get rather than anything else. That's probably the basis of it, and therefore people came who ere good. And I'm very lucky I had very, very good people come. So just to go through the list briefly-- Ian Smith, Mitch Dowsett, Troy [? Kohns, ?] Adrian Harris, Paul Goss, who am I leaving out? Anyway, it's a who's who of breast cancer, especially endocrinology and breast cancer. And they all came out of your brilliance. So we owe you not just for what you've done, but who you've trained to do even more. Very kind of you to say that, but in fact they get the credit because if you look through my publication lists you can see.     Actually, I left out Steven Johnston, of course, who is-- Steve. Yeah, Steve. Yeah. OK, we've run out of time. I very much appreciate the fact that you've taken time to come on and do that for us. I'm sure our listeners will be thrilled by the stories you've told-- at least I always am-- and it's great to hear most of them again. And I hope sometime we can even do this again. So thank you for all you've done, thank you for all the people you've trained, and thank you for taking time to do this today. Well, thank you so much for asking me.   Until next time, thank you for listening to this JCO's Cancer Story-- The Art of Oncology podcast. If you enjoyed what you heard today, don't forget to give us a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. While you're there, be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. JCO's Cancer Stories-- The Art of Oncology podcast is just one of ASCO's many podcasts. You can find all the shows at podcast.asco.org.

Meet Brian Weaver Brian serves as CEO of Torch.AI and has more than 20 years of experience leading mission driven high growth technology focused companies. Torch.AI helps leading organizations leverage artificial intelligence in a unique way via proprietary enterprise data management software solution. Today Torch.AI supports clients like H&R Block with fraud detection and mitigation. And the US Department of Defense with machine learning enabled background investigations for all federal employees, supporting the determination of an individual's trustworthiness and security credentialing. So how did you end up starting your first company? So I was sort of a serial entrepreneur even an employee. I got out of college and I conned to this guy to hire me, no experience, I was the youngest employee that they'd hired a company called the Kansas City Star. I had a normal day job and I've always considered myself someone that really enjoyed working with others and trying to solve problems for others and in a business development or sales capacity as a 21 year old kid, but I always had kind of this curiosity and this bit of a creative spark. And so I then left that job and actually followed the guy that had hired me right out of college. And I was a manager over a whole group of people. But the way my first business started, I actually got in trouble at that job. I NASCAR came to Kansas City. We did a great job on NASCAR’s project. And it went very well. But my employer didn’t like it and I was written up for the project. So I went actually went to the NASCAR guys that had had the project and asked would you guys be willing to hire me? And I'll start my own company, and you can be customer number one, and they agreed. What has been one of your biggest lessons that you've learned as an entrepreneur? So in order to grow and actually in order to build a real business that’s financially viable where you can have resources and innovation as a function of the business and actually solve problems for big companies and even maybe make a difference in your community, you have to have a little bit of a different attitude because it's a living, breathing thing. And you ultimately need to figure out very quickly how to put to build teams. And you might be as a business owner or an entrepreneur, you might be like the hero CEO type, where you've got a lot of charisma, you can make a sale and you can kind of keep the thing going. But the real measure of success is can you build an organization that is sort of independent from you and that skill set or character trait? Can you share it with our listeners, one of your most successful or favorite networking experiences that you've had? I think the way most people network is like a complete waste of time. So I think I'm a good I'm a good candidate to help share some information. I think your relationships and your reputation are everything. I find that the way I do it is maybe a little different. I don't like going to a networking type of events. I've never been wanting to join a chamber of commerce or another organization. I always approach it is that I am looking for opportunity. I have a desperate need to solve a problem. So I'd say number one, I'm self-aware of what I need as a human being. And believe it or not, I think that that's directly applicable to your success. I think the more you know who you are and are comfortable in your own skin, the easier this whole thing will be because you won't be asking yourself to do something that you're just not naturally inclined to do. If you could go back to your 20 year old self, what would you tell yourself to do more of, less of, or differently with regards to your professional career? I think it would be don't stress so much. It's easy to say and I just think I'm wired to sort of be hyper motivated and sort of driven by fear. The wisdom that I found doing this for over two decades and having failures and great successes and the whole bit is that actually the journey is super fun if you can just be open and relaxed. The bad times aren't as bad as you think they are. And you don't realize it and you can't even understand it until you're way past it. And you can kind of reflect on it. I found that meditation is really helpful with that. Have you done any of that? I totally have. And the problem for me is my brain is always on and it is a curse. I am a frustrated creative type. My brain is on overdrive all the time and that's my challenge with meditation. And I think what I figured out is how I can slow down and be contemplated is to garden. Any final word or advice for our listeners with regards to growing and supporting your network? Just be brave and try and do something big with your life and with your company. We have purpose. Our company has purpose and I can live my life with that purpose. And I think the more you find that whether it's a mission for your customer, whether it's a mission for your family, whether it's whether it's just being deliberate about how you live your life. Whether that's eating, sleeping, exercising, you know, whatever it happens to be how that manifests feel for you. Absolutely try and find it. How to connect with Brian: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/briangweaver/

Since we’re all stuck at home, here's some cooking advice to help you through. Chef Mark Allison has three boys.. one of whom was diagnosed with type 1 as a baby. He has tips and tricks for us.. starting with: just get started. Mark teaches healthy cooking but isn’t above eating smores with his three sons. Check out Stacey's new book: The World's Worst Diabetes Mom! Mark currently works with the Cabarrus County Health Alliance teaching needed home cooking skills. He’s been the Director of Culinary Nutrition for the Dole Nutrition Institute and he spent many years teaching classical chefs at the Dean of Culinary Arts Education at Johnson & Wales University in Charlotte. Join the Diabetes Connections Facebook Group! Mark has a new book out Let's Be Smart About Diabetes: A cookbook to help control blood sugar while getting the family back around the kitchen table In Tell Me Something Good – a lot of mac and cheese and a lot of help for someone who has always been giving it. Talk about paying it forward… and back. Sign up for our newsletter here ----- Use this link to get one free download and one free month of Audible, available to Diabetes Connections listeners! ----- Get the App and listen to Diabetes Connections wherever you go! Click here for iPhone      Click here for Android Episode Transcript (Rough transcription, has not been edited) Stacey Simms  0:00 Diabetes Connections is brought to you by one drop created for people with diabetes by people who have diabetes by real good foods, real food you feel good about eating and by dexcom take control of your diabetes and live life to the fullest with dexcom.   Unknown Speaker  0:20 This is diabetes connections with Stacey Sims.   Stacey Simms  0:26 This week, how are you eating these days? Some kitchen and cooking advice to help us through Chef Mark Allison knows his way around the kitchen with a family he has three boys one of whom was diagnosed with type one as a baby. As a professional chef teacher. He says just get started   Chef Mark Allison  0:45 getting in that kitchen and making something over the next 30 or 40 minutes and then sitting down eating the food but actually having a conversation instead of everybody upstairs playing Xbox or some kind of games. You're actually in one room. Communicate it and you make them so think that hopefully everybody's going to enjoy.   Stacey Simms  1:03 You'll hear Mark's unique story. He and his wife moved to Alaska for an international program back in 1999. And their 14 month old son was diagnosed shortly after that in Tell me something good. A little bit of help for someone who's been giving a lot of it, talk about paying it forward and back, and a lot of mac and cheese. This podcast is not intended as medical advice. If you have those kinds of questions, please contact your health care provider. Welcome to another week of diabetes connections we aim to educate and inspire by sharing stories of connection and in this time, it is so important to stay connected. On this week's show. We are not going to be talking specifically about the corona virus. Rather, this is a show that will maybe inspire you or help you to get in the kitchen at this time when we are all first in our house and I don't know about you, but I've been Looking more than ever, but maybe to look at things a little bit differently, get your kids involved, try something new. I was so excited to talk to Mark Ellis. And we've known each other for a long time. And I've been trying to get him on the show. And it's just one of those. You know, the beauty is in the timing sometimes, because maybe this episode will kind of give you a fun day and some fun ideas to try at a time when boy, we do need a little bit of fun, and a little bit of inspiration. So there will be more information about Mark's cookbook. Let's be smart about diabetes a little bit later on. And I would urge you if you're not already in the Facebook group to please join that it is diabetes connections, the group because I'm going to be putting some of the recipes and notes that he gave me into the Facebook group, I cannot put them in the show notes. It's just a format thing. So I apologize for that. They will not be on the episode homepage, but they will be in posts in the Facebook group. So head on over there to that. And just another quick note before we get started. Thank you to everybody who continues to buy my book, the world's First diabetes mom, if you need a laugh in these times, maybe it's there for you. I've heard from people who are really enjoying it right now who have the audio book to who maybe didn't have time to listen before, although I mostly listen to audiobooks in my car. So my audio book and podcasts consumption, frankly, is way down right now. Because I'm at home, I'm not commuting. I'm not driving anywhere. But I do listen when I clean and do laundry and stuff like that. So maybe that's it. But thanks again, the world's worst diabetes mom is available at Amazon. It is in paperback, Kindle and audiobook. You could also buy it over at diabetes, connections calm but frankly, Amazon's probably the easiest right now. And I was so happy to be involved in the children with diabetes virtual conference that happened recently. I bet you can still find that online. I was able to take my world's worst diabetes mom presentation for them. Of course, as you know, like many of you, I was planning to go to lots of diabetes conferences in the last month and this spring and it's all on hold right now. So a little bit of online goodness. For you, I will also link up the children with diabetes conference which had tons of presentations in it. I think it's going to be a real resource going forward for a lot of people so I'm thrilled that they did that. All right Mark Ellison coming up in just a moment but first diabetes Connections is brought to you by real good foods. We got a sample of the real good foods ice cream. They sent it to us a Benny and I did a Facebook Live. I think it's almost three weeks ago now. Wow. About what we thought our reactions and I gotta tell you, I have been enjoying the real good ice cream since then. It is so delicious. It is a lower sugar ice cream that tastes like ice cream. You have probably had ice creams that are lower carb that tastes kind of chunky and chalky. And there isn't none of that I sat down. I shouldn't say this. I ate almost the entire pint of the mint chocolate chip. I stopped myself but it was going there. So check them out. You can find out more at really good foods calm. They ship. Yes, they're the grocery store for you. Right now I know a lot of you and us included group looking at home delivery, and you can find all of their stuff online. They'll deliver it for you some great shipping deals as well. Just go to diabetes, connections comm and click on the real good foods logo.   My guest this week is a terrific chef, who as you know here teaches healthy cooking, but isn't above eating s'mores with his three sons. Mark Allison works with the cabarrus County Health Alliance, a local county to me here in North Carolina teaching needed home cooking skills. He has been the director of culinary nutrition for the dole nutrition Institute, and he spent many years teaching classical chefs as the Dean of culinary arts education at Johnson and Wales University here in Charlotte. Yes, Johnson Wales does have a campus here in Charlotte. One of Mark's sons was diagnosed with type one as a baby and his wife was diagnosed with stage four cancer in 2008. Now she did pass away But as you'll hear it His wife was able to live longer than anybody expected her to, which he says really made him a believer in the power of a plant based diet to fight disease and prolong life. Mark has a new book out called Let's be smart about diabetes, a cookbook to help control blood sugar while getting the family back around the kitchen table. We are putting recipes in the Facebook group, as I said, and of course links in the show notes. Here's my talk with Chef Mark. Allison. Mark, thank you so much for making some time for me. I know you've got all your boys home. And while we're not, I guess we're not doing much these days. It still seems like the time is filling up. But thanks for being here. I appreciate it.   Chef Mark Allison  6:40 They see You're very welcome. And it's a pleasure to be on your show. Thank you very much.   Stacey Simms  6:43 I'm excited to talk to you. We've known each other for a long time. I was thinking I think we met possibly the Johnson and Wales cooking competition of some kind where I was an extremely unqualified judge.   Chef Mark Allison  6:59 The good old days here In the good old days, Yes, I remember you there and you were totally qualified for the position to be church exceptionally well because I enjoy eating.   Stacey Simms  7:11 So there you go   Chef Mark Allison  7:12 to nature, you know, in my opinion chef is fitted very nicely into my lifestyle, because I love to eat. I love it.   Stacey Simms  7:19 Well, you know, I want to pick your brain as long as we have you to talk about how to try to eat well, as long as you know, we're all stuck at home. But let's talk about let's talk about diabetes. First, let's get your story out because I know everyone already hearing you knows that you are your native to North Carolina. That's a beautiful Southern accent that you   Chef Mark Allison  7:37 see I was born in Charleston, South Carolina. People get that mixed up all the time. I'm actually from a little town called at Newcastle upon Tyne which is in the northeast of England. And I grew up there and the place where the usually state calls from Newcastle on Newcastle brown ale on Newcastle soccer club whether the three things that people read knowing you're comfortable, but that's where I was born. I moved to South Wales and lived in South Wales for 10 years, traveled all over Europe and in 2004 landed in Charleston, South Carolina, lived there for yet then moved up to Charlotte and I've been in Charlotte now 15 years and absolutely love living in Charles. That's great.   Stacey Simms  8:20 All right, so but your your diabetes story your son's really starts in Alaska. Can you tell us that   Chef Mark Allison  8:26 I was one of 30 people fit by the Fulbright teachers Experience Program, which is a program that started after world war two to get the world together through education. And teachers apply and they are asked to go to different countries around the world. And I was asked to go to America and I thought Yes, this is going to be fabulous. being brought up in the 70s in the 80s. On Starsky and Hutch and streets of San Francisco. I naturally thought I was going to California, but I would have 500 teachers that apply to come to Europe, there was only one chef and he did not live in California. He actually lived in Anchorage, Alaska. And we actually turned down the position first because my wife said we are not taking a two year old and an eight month to Alaska. So we turned it down. And then Glen, the teacher rang me over to him and said, Look, can you do me a favor? This is the fourth year I have applied. And my daughter has won a four year scholarship at Oxford University and this is her last year. Can you please take the position so we can be with her for the last year that is in the UK. So we decided to move over that and we actually had an absolute fabulous year. But while we were living there, Matthew, my youngest son at the time, who was it month when we arrived, when you go to the age of 14 months, he became ill, and we took him to the doctors and the doctor said he just had a bad case of the flu, he'd be okay. And about a week later, he had lost a tremendous amount of weight. He was drinking a lot of fluids and just happened to be Tom My brother on the forum that weekend who is a type one diabetic and has been since the age of 15 years old. And he said, I think he may be a type one take him back to the doctor's. So we took Matthew back. And we had a young doctor, she was lovely lady. But she said, there's no way as a type one diabetic it normally it's going to be about seven or eight years old. He's only 14 months. And she just said, No, I'm not testing as blood. So of course, my wife who was there, like any mother has said, well, we're not leaving your office until you actually test his blood. So there was a bit of a standoff for about 30 minutes. And then she tested this blood and within 30 minutes, Matthew is in intensive care and he was there for the next seven years. And his blood sugar's were so far through the roof that we were told that we had left her office and went to him more than likely would have been in a coma that night. So we were exceptionally lucky. And the doctor from that stage could not do enough for us as he was at his bedside every day. And as you know, Life changes. So we decided to look at food as sort of medicine and changed all our eating habits for Matthew. So from the age of 14 month, Matthew has been on a really healthy diet, you know, just turned 22 in December, and he's in great shape, but he's at college at the minute, and he's doing exceptionally well. But that's where it all started back in 1999.   Stacey Simms  11:24 And I think it's worth repeating for people who are you who have children who are newer diagnosed or maybe have been newer diagnosed themselves. There really was this thinking because the same thing happened to us, Ben, he wasn't yet two years old. And they said, Yeah, under the age of two, it's Yeah, it'd be type one. There was this thinking and I don't know if it's just that they're getting better at it or there are more cases and infants and babies, but it has changed a lot thanks to people like you push an educated Oh my goodness.   Chef Mark Allison  11:51 You know, it is frightening. Because you've got your doctor and you just think they've got all the answers. And but something like Type One Diabetes is you know, in Now it's becoming more and more people become more and more aware. I remember when my brother was diagnosed that he was in hospital for six months because they were unsure of actually what it was. And the unfortunate thing for my brother, he was 15 at the time, so he was nearly an adult in England. And he was actually on a cancer Ward for six months, and was frightening with him was he was watching people that were dying around him. And unfortunately, that marked him for life. He is now nearly 60 and he's in good shape and he's healthy. But he still remembers them times where people were actually dying around them because they thought he didn't have diabetes for 30 years cancer at the time, but times have changed and I think it's a lot more easy to diagnose now. And we've got great doctors, people like that more fonder. Well, it's just amazing. I think now we can rely on the medical professionals to diagnose a lot quicker than what was said 20 years ago.   Stacey Simms  12:58 And when you're Your son and your brother must have had some interesting conversations about not only the difference of diagnosis, but the difference of treatments. I mean, I'm so your brother is doing well, because I can't imagine.   Chef Mark Allison  13:11 Well, my I can remember my mother have sterilized his syringe and needles every night. Because the other days, whether we're like the one inch long needles, and you could reuse them, and the syringe was reused, and he was getting injected twice a day, now he's on the pen. So you've worked a lot better for him, but I can remember those days and the previous thing, and testing was blurred and then cleaning the syringe and countless cops. It was a difficult time for my mother. I know that.   Stacey Simms  13:44 I feel you never want to say we're lucky with diabetes because it still stinks. Yeah, but also to make me grateful for insulin pumps and pens. My good.   Chef Mark Allison  13:54 Yeah, my back muscles just changed over to a new pump. The Omni pod and you know, he He's been on the pump for at least the last 12 years and what a difference others made. You know, we as parents, I'm sure you have the same feel a lot easier that he's on something that basically regulates everything. And as long as he tests his blood, he knows when he's either going to go low, go high. And these instruments these days are just amazing.   Stacey Simms  14:21 It really is. I feel really grateful. Yeah, let's jump in and let's talk about food. Because not only are you a renowned chef and a you know, an educator of other chefs, but now you work to educate the public which I just think is absolutely amazing because we need all the help we can get mark, as you well know. First of all, let me let you explain what it is that you do you work for the Harris County Health Alliance, which is a nearby you know, county to mine here in the Charlotte, North Carolina area. What do you do right now in terms of teaching the public   right back to mark answering Question, but first getting diabetes supplies is a pain. Not only the ordering and the picking up but also the arguing with insurance over what they say you need and what you really need. Make it easy with one drop. They offer personalized tester plants. Plus you get a Bluetooth glucose meter test strips lancets and your very own certified diabetes coach. Subscribe today to get test strips for less than $20 a month delivered right to your door. No prescriptions or co pays required. One less thing to worry about. not that surprising when you learn that the founder of one drop lubes with type one, they get it one drop, gorgeous gear supplies delivered to your door 24 seven access to your certified diabetes coach learn more go to diabetes connections comm and click on the one drop logo. Now back to mark and he is answering my question about teaching people the very basics.   Chef Mark Allison  15:55 I have a wonderful job and it's funny how I started the shop at 16 and I printed with French cuisine, and lots of thoughts, sugar and salt, and nobody counted calories or anything. And now I've went closer to being a healthy chef. And I tried to teach people how to improve their diets. So I work for the cabarrus Health Alliance, which is based in kannapolis. And my job is a fascinating job. And the fact that I go out to the general public, I go to schools and hospitals and churches, and I also do cooking classes at the cabarrus Health Alliance, and I try to teach people how to cook because if you think about it, Stacy, cooking is a life skill, but nobody knows how to cook these days. What I noticed just last week, when the food stores were out of canned goods and frozen goods, actually the produce section was still full. And my advice to anybody, especially at this time with the corona virus is eat healthy by eating as many fruits and vegetables as you possibly can because they're just packed full of vitamins, minerals and phytochemicals. So my job at the Cabal ourselves Lyons is basically trying to teach people how to cook and choose better food choices, and not so much processed food, not so much food that is packed with fat, sugar, salt, and try to get a healthy balance. You know, it doesn't all have to be healthy. But if you do choose healthy options, you'll feel better. Your health will improve and it'll fight off viruses.   Stacey Simms  17:23 So when we're all stuck at home and we have this mentality, which is this is very unique, obviously. Yeah, I mean unprecedented. But now that we're stuck at home, what would your advice be? Because I did the same thing I'll be honest with you when I went to the grocery store a couple of days ago, I picked up you know, some apples some oranges, but I wasn't I was thinking hunker down. Yeah, I bypassed a lot of the fresh fruits and vegetables now that it seems and again we're as we're recording this, it seems like the grocery stores are gonna be fine. There's no problem with supply. What What would you suggest we do next time we go to the store,   Chef Mark Allison  17:54 I would look at the air fresh produce and you know, start by Picking the fruits and vegetables that you like to eat. And then why not try something different? Something that you've seen before. But though you know what, I wonder what that tastes like, give it a try. You'll be amazed, I normally teach this in class where we'll have like a surprise ingredient. And part of the classes, everybody's going to try everything I make. And I might have a fresh fruit or vegetable and I chop it up and I pass it around. And it's amazing that nine times out of 10 everybody likes it. We've got these preconceived notions that we'll look at something think No, I don't think I like that for actually when you put it in your mouth and try it more than likely you're going to try something new and it's going to be interesting, then you're going to enjoy the test. So I would go around the fresh produce section and try something new, try something different. And I found the best way so especially with having three boys, if I wouldn't try something new with them. I normally just make a smoothie or soup because you can easily add something new and disguise it and they don't even know that they're in and then we told them that believe in something new. See, you know what, that wasn't too bad. Let's try it again. So I think it's all about experiment. And we've got the ideal time that you've just said, There. See, we're all cooped up at home. Why not get in the kitchen with the boys or girls, or family members and make something delicious to eat tonight? I've got to be honest, people tell me when they asked what I do for a living, I say, well, I've never worked a day in my life because I love what I do, which is I love food, and I love to cook. But our sound, it's the best way to make new friends. It's the best way to keep the family together, getting in that kitchen and making something over the next 30 or 40 minutes and then sitting down eating the food but actually having a conversation. Instead of everybody upstairs playing Xbox or some kind of games. You actually in one room communicate and you're making something that hopefully everybody's going to enjoy.   Stacey Simms  19:50 Alright, a lot of people listening are gonna say, Well, sure that sounds great. But I never learned to cook. I'm afraid to cook. My Stuff always comes out. Terrible. How can you start adults who really did not learn the skill?   Chef Mark Allison  20:05 You know what I was very lucky because when all my friends chose to do woodwork and metalwork, I was doing home economics. And as you can imagine, back in the 70s and 80s, that didn't go down too well with a lot of the guys, but you know what my thinking was, they see one instead of being locked up in a room with 19, sweaty guys, I was in an air conditioned room with 19 girls. And it worked out pretty good, because I found out very quickly two things. Everybody likes people who can cook and it's the best way to make friends. So I understand that a lot of people don't know how to cook. But actually, you can go online now and on YouTube, and you can learn practically any technique that you need. And I'll tell people all you really need to start with is a chopping board and a knife, and then find a recipe that you've always wanted to try. And you can easily download any recipe now from online or watch a YouTube video and cooking There's one of the simplest things you can ever learn. It's all about temperature control. It's either gonna be hot or cold. And if you can control the temperature you can make and eat anything you like. Wow.   Stacey Simms  21:11 Do you remember I'll put you on the spot here. Do you remember what you first taught your boys to make when they were little I pictured them standing on stools in the kitchen, you know, learning from dad,   Chef Mark Allison  21:21 and properly. And this isn't exactly healthy. And actually, we did this last night, we were sitting in the backyard having a fire pit and we all had smalls. So I'm guessing probably smalls are probably one of the very first recipes. I taught my boys. But I also taught them something very important. It's all about moderation. Whatever you make, have it in moderation. But my three boys all know how to cook, obviously, because they've been brought up by a chef. I tell people when I'm at work, I'll text my boys and be the dishwasher, prepare the vegetables, set the kitchen table, and then when I get home, all that's done, and then we get in the kitchen together and we cook dinner That night, but if I forget the text one day, believe it or not today, see, I get home and nothing has been done because boys are boys.   Stacey Simms  22:08 Oh, yeah, I've been there with both of my kids boys and girls. Yeah. Oh yeah, but you didn't send the text that's funny but I'm you know, it's good to know you're human. I think it's always more fun to know with the s'mores, right that you know, yeah. And food and it's fun to learn. And then you can use those skills. I don't know what quite what skills are making but you have to control the temperature.   Chef Mark Allison  22:33 Don't right. Yeah, that was our main skill. I think   Stacey Simms  22:36 that's an important one in the kitchen.   Chef Mark Allison  22:38 people. People ask me all the time, how do you make a healthy dessert mock and I'll say there's no such thing as a healthy dessert. So just enjoy whatever you're going to eat but have a smaller portion.   Stacey Simms  22:50 You're not free and substitutes and things like that.   Chef Mark Allison  22:53 I don't use any sugar free ingredients if I'm going to make something and add sugar and the sugar because normally Even if you make an a cake and asks for half a cup of sugar, when you consider that cake is going to divide a divided into eight or 10 portions, that half cup of sugar comes down to practically nothing. So I'd rather use the ingredients that are meant to be in a certain food items, then start trying to guess, well, if I put sugar free, I mean, it's going to work out the same because I'd rather just enjoy it the way it's meant to be, then try to mess around with it. That's the same with all these gluten free products and low in sugar products. You know, you're taking out one thing, but you're adding something else processed. And to me, you're far better off eating ingredients that you know, are ingredients that are more healthy than something that is a preservative or an additive or colorant.   Unknown Speaker  23:49 So tell us about your cookbook that you have out right   Chef Mark Allison  23:52 now. I brought out let's be smart about diabetes a few months ago and that actually started 2008 but that was the same year my wife was diagnosed with stage four cancer. So the book was shelved. And then when my wife passed away in 2015, I was approached by the American diabetic association to publish the book. And so they, they bought the rights to the book, but then they held on to it for two years. And then unfortunately, they laid off most of their editorial stuff, and said they were only going to publish well known authors, which I was not one of them. So they give me the full rights back. And so I just published that about six months ago. And it's all family recipes that we've used over the last 20 years with Matthew, all the recipes, believe makes a car very easy to use. You know, most of them take between 10 and 20 minutes, and the all healthiest there's nothing outrageous. I'm not asking anybody to buy superfoods. I don't believe in superfoods. I believe in it, eat an apple, that's probably the best food you can eat or a banana or if you had broccoli or cabbage. They don't have to be super foods. They're just packed Anyway with healthy vitamins and minerals and phytochemicals. So it's all based on practicality and what you can actually buy in your local store. And so this is packed full of soups and breakfast ideas, snacks, lunches, and meals for the kids and sort of healthy desserts.   Stacey Simms  25:17 I'd love to ask you and I, we didn't discuss this in advance, but would it be possible to grab a recipe or two from the book that you think might help people who are you know, stuck at home right now? Maybe dollar level or something that would keep and we could post that for the podcast audience?   Chef Mark Allison  25:32 Yeah, please do. Just choose whatever recipe you think is suitable. There's over 150 recipes in the book to choose from, and like I said, very easy to put together. And this could be the ideal time to grab a cookbook and try some of the recipes.   Stacey Simms  25:45 No doubt. All right. How do you stand on we've talked about you know, going to the produce section trying to buy fresh whenever possible. Where do you stand on canned and frozen ingredients?   Chef Mark Allison  25:55 Yeah, I'm a firm believer in fresh wood. If if you've got no option, then throw would be my next choice and then can't but if you're going to buy canned fruits or vegetables, make sure that they haven't got any added sugar.   Unknown Speaker  26:07 Yeah, you know what I saw in the supermarket recently forget added sugar. They were packed in Splenda, their sugar substitute in the quote for juice.   Chef Mark Allison  26:16 Yeah. Well, you know what people have got to make their own minds up on if they're going to use artificial sweeteners or not. I personally don't so you know, it's a choice you've got to make. But to tell the truth, if I've got the opportunity I always buy fresh because fresh normally isn't seasonal. So if you can buy seasonal fruits and vegetables, then they've got the best nutrient dense properties within them. They haven't been touched. Make sure that you wash your fruits and vegetables when you get them home and either eat them raw or add them to some kind of soup or lunch or dinner item. And to me that's the best way to keep yourself healthy. I'm a firm believer and my boys follow this practice as well. If you have half your plate, fruits and veggies But then you know, it's going to go too far wrong from being healthy and the idea with that's great advice.   Stacey Simms  27:05 Yeah, back to the the canned fruit though I gotta be honest with you and you don't have to you don't have to take a stand. But I was appalled to see canned fruit with Splenda added because the big packaging was like, you know, low in sugar, and I thought, Oh, good. Water or something. And I turned it over to look at the label. I was like Splenda, how much processing you have to go through to add that and I was like, uh, so I put that back. But in these, I know, people are worried right now, and many people may have purchased more canned and frozen goods than you ever really do. Looking at me. So we're all looking to try to do the best we can.   Chef Mark Allison  27:38 Yeah. And it's baby steps. It's baby steps. You know, you can kind of just turn your diet upside down because it's not gonna work. And I tell most people start with breakfast and just eat something healthier at breakfast and that's the ideal time to have a smoothie, you know, and you can Pocket full of vegetables, you know, cut back on the fruit so much, but ask or kale to smoothie out blueberries, but look at your your breakfast first and just change your breakfast for about a month, and then work on your lunch. And then finally work on your dinner. So, you know, if you just start slow, then your body becomes adjusted to it and you'll feel a lot more healthier.   Stacey Simms  28:17 What's your favorite movie?   Chef Mark Allison  28:18 Actually, when I used to be the director of culinary nutrition for the dog food company, I came up with a smoothie that obviously included bananas. It had almond milk, bananas and coffee. And that was a coffee fix up and the number of people that complimented that smoothie was unbelievable. But my favorite smoothies as always got blueberries and because blueberries are one of the best fruits you can eat for your memory as you get older and talk about with blueberries and spinach I use gave a banana and I use almond milk and a handful of almonds. And that saves me all the way through to lunch.   Stacey Simms  28:55 I liked spinach, mango and Domino.   Chef Mark Allison  28:58 That's Like mangoes my favorite fruit. Ah,   Stacey Simms  29:02 I'll tell you what, I use the frozen mango because it keeps it cold and gives it that exactly feel. But I was a big I was very reluctant to put anything green in a smoothie. I thought it was disgusting. I really did. I really did. And finally my husband convinced me and it's delicious. I'm shocked shocked. Yeah,   Chef Mark Allison  29:25 you can get your best and fishy and all that as spinach has got more protein than the average piece of meat weird for weird. So if you put four ounces of spinach in your smoothie, then that's got actually more protein than four ounces of beef. So probably I hit it right yeah. Spinach and spinach is one of the best foods in the world you can eat that as well as kale.   Stacey Simms  29:47 Yeah I'm still I'm not around to kale but maybe I'll try it all if I could. Finish I can try to   Chef Mark Allison  29:55 kill you can get away with in smoothie and solid j the like it are you doing   Stacey Simms  30:00 Exactly. All right, well, that's a great idea. Um, and then I know you said start with breakfast, move on to, and then ultimately do your dinners. But I have to ask for people who are listening who have younger kids, easy suggestions for dinners that the kids can help with? Is there anything that comes to mind that you did with your boys,   Chef Mark Allison  30:17 you know, you can always make your own chicken nuggets, that easy to make. In fact, there's a recipe in the book for that. But start with things that they actually like. And then just all the some of the ingredients to more healthy ingredients. Because most of the things you can buy in fast food outlets, or and most restaurants, you can replicate at home and make them a lot more healthier. It's just like anything. If you want to learn something, you'll take the time to learn. And to me, the good thing about coupon is it's a social event that actually gets people together. And it's a great way when my wife passed away five years ago, that was one of the things I insisted with my boys that every night we went in the kitchen now five years on We do exactly the same thing they were, they can't wait to get in the kitchen, see what we're going to eat that night. And usually they choose one of the evening meals during the week. And then we'll all muck in together all your sleeves up, we'll all cook together. And then again, I said, we actually sit down at the kitchen table and spend the next 30 to 90 minutes just having a conversation, which is fabulous. It's the highlight of my day.   Stacey Simms  31:22 I'll tell you what, it really is an amazing thing when you can get everybody away from their electronics sitting at the table. You know, we set we did that too. We set the table every night. Yeah. Even if we're bringing in, we do bring in occasionally, you know, it goes on the table, it comes out of the takeout.   Chef Mark Allison  31:39 What is social experience food is this food is one of the one things that will bring people together. And even if it doesn't turn out great. You can all have a laugh about it. And just try it again the next day. You know, nobody's gonna have a fight over a burnt pancake. You know, they you're just gonna laugh about it and say, You know what, I'm gonna cry better tomorrow.   Stacey Simms  31:58 You know, I'm glad to hear you say that because I I've been there many times. Before I let you go, you know, your life has been so interesting to be touched by type one diabetes in your family. And then of course, you've had that unbelievable experience with cancer and losing your wife and I'm so sorry, Mark, but now working with people who are honestly dependent on you to teach them better ways to manage health, whether it is diabetes, or trying to avoid complications from other illnesses. And I'm curious, you know, when you do meet with these people having, as you said, you started with, you know, French cuisine, fancy restaurants fancy chefs, now you're meeting with people who may not even understand how to fry an egg. You What was   Chef Mark Allison  32:39 that been like? Interesting.   Before, before I took this job, I was a culinary instructor for 20 years, so I could have dealt with a lot of people and different learning needs. And it all always comes back to the basics. If you can pick up the basics of anything that You'll be successful. So when you consider, I'm now working for the health department and I didn't realize these stocks until I actually started working for the health department. But 85% of all chronic diseases such as heart disease, type two diabetes, obviously not type one, and cancer are food related. And we live in an epidemic at the minute with the rise of type two diabetes, and the continuing rise of heart disease and cancer. And if people just realize that food is so important to prevent heart disease and cancer and type two diabetes, but also it's so important once you've got one of these diseases, to actually improve your immune system by eating healthy food, and the healthiest foods on the planet are fruits and vegetables, nuts, seeds, beans, seeds, and lean proteins and lean dairies. You've got to look at your food supply, try not to eat so much processed food because that's where all the additives are. That's where they put in the colorings the preservatives. You can't buy a loaf of bread that was moldy in a day. And now, you know that loaf of bread will stand there without gathering more for a week to two weeks. Now that isn't good. You know, actually, I just had fresh bread last night. I couldn't get any bread at the store yesterday. So I decided to get the flour out and I had some dry yeast. And making bread is so easy, it took less than five minutes. But just look at the food that you generally eat. And just try to you know, when you consider the rising costs of health insurance, every year, it goes up and up. And you will know because I know with Matthew's insulin and equipment for his pump, it just gets more and more expensive for free and, but if you're healthy, then look at that as being a lifesaver for you, as far as money is concerned, because if you can stay healthy and off prescription medication, you're gonna literally save thousands of dollars every year, and your life is gonna live longer, and you're going to enjoy life more. So A lot of it's all about prevention. But if you do have an illness, then really look at your diet, because the food, it's food is not medicine, but it can help in a way that will make you feel good about yourself and make you lose weight. And it'll keep you alive a lot longer if you pick the right food choices. And the right food choices are eat more fruits and vegetable.   Stacey Simms  35:22 Well, I really appreciate you spending some time with us. It's just always wonderful to talk with you. I'm glad your boys are doing well. Everybody's home now.   Chef Mark Allison  35:29 Everybody, so yeah, everybody. So James got led over school for the next two weeks, possibly more, who knows? Matthews at college, but he's at home at the minute and he's just doing everything online. And then unfortunately, my son who works in a restaurant, he just got laid off yesterday. But you know what, things could be a lot worse. We've just got to knuckle down and stay healthy and hopefully this virus hopefully will be gone in two or three weeks in the golf fleet. The nation can get back to normal. Yes, I hope so, too.   Stacey Simms  35:59 Mark, thank you so much for joining me, we will link up all the information about the book, we'll see how I can go about posting a recipe or two. And I'm just wishing you and your boys All the best. Thank you so much for talking with me.   Chef Mark Allison  36:10 Thank you for having me on the show and you and your family stay safe and stay healthy. And hopefully we'll catch you up with another diabetic conference.   Stacey Simms  36:19 Yeah, hopefully down the road and everything is rescheduled. I think the best thing is gonna be it's gonna be a very busy fall, I think.   Chef Mark Allison  36:25 I think   Unknown Speaker  36:32 you're listening to diabetes connections with Stacey Sims.   Stacey Simms  36:38 Lots more information at the episode homepage. And of course, as I mentioned, we'll put some of the recipes and other information Mark was very generous and giving me an excerpt from the book. I will put that in the Facebook group, diabetes connections, the group, I don't care what he says I am not trying to kill smoothie. I've been there done that. But for somebody like me, having a green smoothie is a big step. I do eat a lot of vegetables. But I never thought I'd like smoothie. But like I said, the spinach smoothie was great. So he just like he said, one new thing, one new thing. Try it, see if you like it. You know, I've tried to teach my kids, although my husband is a really good cook, and he's done a much better job of teaching the kids actual cooking skills, but I try to teach them that mistakes are okay, which is coming out of my mouth. I just realized that just sounds like everything else I say with diabetes. But I mean, it's my philosophy of cooking too, because I make a ton of mistakes and everything somehow tastes good. I mean, sure, I've burned things. The first book I wrote was, I can't cook but I know someone who can. Actually Mark has a recipe. That book is a wonderful recipe. The conceit of that book is that I can't cook so I went and asked all of my restaurant and Chef friends for recipes. And it was a big book for charity for jdrf. And it was a lot of fun, but I did write a whole bunch of kitchen disaster stories into that book. Yeah, I think my life philosophy is make all the mistakes. Hey, it's working out so far. Up next, tell me something good. But first diabetes Connections is brought to you by dexcom. We have been Using the dexcom g six since it came out almost two years ago is that possible? It is just amazing. The dexcom g six is FDA permitted for no finger sticks for calibration and diabetes treatment decisions. You do that to our warm up and then the number just pops up if you like us have used x come for a long time before that. It's really wild to see the number just kind of self populate. You just have to do a lot more finger sticks for calibration. We've been using the dexcom for a long time. It was six years this past December and it just keeps getting better. The G six has longer sensor were 10 days and the new sensor applicator is so much easier to use. And of course the alerts and alarms we can set them how we want if your glucose alerts and readings from the G six do not match symptoms or expectations. Use a blood glucose meter to make diabetes treatment decisions. To learn more, go to diabetes connections comm and click on that dexcom logo   and tell me something good this week. If you saw this post on social media you might have thought Stacy, you're telling me something good backgrounds are usually blue. Why was this one orange? Well, that's because my friends It featured mac and cheese. So let me tell you about Ty Gibbs. Ty is a swimmer at Henderson State University in Arkansas. He was diagnosed in 2017. It was actually very serious. He was being rushed to the hospital at the time. He was in intensive care. He spent time in the ICU, but his mom Cheryl says as he was rushed into the ICU, he was just starving. And he kept asking for mac and cheese over and over again every year since we celebrate with a ton of mac and cheese. So this tells me something good on social media the photo if you saw it was his teammates and friends celebrating his diversity with seven pounds of mac and cheese and a cake. You want to talk about a carb explosion? No, of course the celebration took place weeks ago. I believe this has And very early in March or maybe it was even in late February when they actually celebrated it before the social distancing was taking effect. But I really appreciate Cheryl sharing this story. I love the idea of celebrating with a mac and cheese. That would be something for my daughter more so than my son. When the kids are left to lane. They were asked to empty their dorm rooms of food. They weren't ordered to it was a food drive for people in New Orleans. And a lot of these kids like my daughter, most kids into lane are from far away. So a lot of them were jumping on planes or getting out of there and going long distances and didn't want to pack up everything in their dorm room. So the school organized a big food drive. And I tell you all this because my daughter donated her mac and cheese. I know she had other junk in her room that she didn't share with me but oh my gosh, she's definitely the mac and cheese lover in the family. So thanks, Ty and congratulations on your dire versary hopefully next year we can celebrate again we'll send you some mac and cheese to our other Tell me something good comes from Laura Bilodeau. A familiar name to many of you. She is the powerhouse, behind the friends for life conferences and so much more with children with diabetes. But recently, Laura found herself in the unusual situation of asking for help. She has connected thousands of people over the years. It's no exaggeration, the friends for life conference is 20 years old. And the children with diabetes organization is older than that. And I'm telling you, they have connected so many people to each other, for help for education for inspiration for friendships, including me, I've made so many friends there. But her son actually needed to help her adult son doesn't live with them, but with everything that was going on, came back home to Michigan a couple of weeks ago, and they were having trouble with diabetes supplies. They had been I'm not going to go through all the details. But like many of us, you know, they had insurance issues, somebody wasn't following through. The supply wasn't coming when it was supposed to come. And so they turn to the diabetes community for help. And as we always do, People reached out and so she posted a great picture about two weeks ago now almost that Mike Hoskins who's also been on the show is a great writer over a diabetes mine and his wife Susie. They met for coffee although they met you can see the picture. They're six feet apart each Zingerman's coffee roastery which was still open for takeout and this picture looks great. I bet that's a terrific coffee place. I'd love to check it out if I'm ever in town there but of course the big deal was that Michael was able to help her with the supplies that she needed. Is your community doing that we're having a lot of that here in the Charlotte area where people are just reaching out I already no surprise gave insulin to a friend of mine who's got an adult son who does not have insurance and is really struggling right now. So we were able to donate to them. I've got friends who had you know my Omni pod PDM knocked out and you know, they're going to get us a new one but does anybody have one in the meantime? Anybody spare sensor, little things like that goes such a long way. You know, I mean, they say little things. They They're really not when you come to rely on this stuff day to day could we go without except for the insulin? Of course, we would do finger pokes, we would use shots. But you know, you don't want to be without this technology once you have it. So way to go. Mike Hoskins way to go Laura Bilodeau, because it's tough to ask for help, especially when you've always been in the position of providing it. I'm so glad everybody got what they needed. All right, tell me something good. It's the best segment of the show each week. Tell me what you got. You can send it in Stacy at diabetes connections calm posted in the Facebook group. Or if I see it like I did, Laura, I'll just get your permission to share your story. But I really love when you send them in. So keep them coming and tell me something good.   Not too much to say here before I let you go. I do apologize for sort of the weirdness of the schedule. I always pride myself on every week the consistency of getting the show out there on Tuesdays and then those mini episodes I was doing on Thursdays foot, gosh, I feel I bet you feel the same. It's almost like time has been Meaning right now. Right? what day of the week? Is it? am I eating breakfast? Am I having cocktails? You know, it's just a crazy time right now. So I am giving myself the grace to put out episodes when they make sense. I am listening to podcasts right now when I am listening, that are entertaining and distract me. I'm listening to a lot of my Game of Thrones podcasts, a lot of my history podcasts, a lot of podcasts that make me laugh. So I'm not that concerned about getting my news up to date from podcasts. I hope an episode like this, you know, gave you 40 minutes or 50 minutes. I honestly don't know where that's going to come out to yet of distraction entertainment, something good to think about and a feeling that you're not alone. As we go forward in these weeks, I'm not sure just like everything else. I'm not sure what the podcast production schedule is gonna look like. Of course, I have my sponsors and I will do what is responsible and we'll get those episodes out. But I really liked connecting on zoom calls, Facebook Live, other things like that. So as with everything else after this is over We'll see what the podcast landscape looks like, right? I mean, who knows? I hope to keep doing this, but we shall see. We'll see where you all are. It's gonna be a long, long time before things go back to quote normal. And I don't know what that's going to look like. I do hope and expect that we will be in it together as we have been as the diabetes community always is. So please let me hear from you. Tell me what's on your mind. And I really appreciate you tuning in. As always, thank you to my editor john Pugh kennis of audio editing solutions. JOHN, I hope you're staying safe in Philadelphia and doing well and that your kids are alright as well. And thank you, as always for listening. Stay safe. I'll see you soon and more now than ever before. Be kind to yourself.   Unknown Speaker  45:50 Diabetes Connections is a production of Stacey Sims media. All rights reserved. All rounds avenged.   Transcribed by https://otter.ai

How did Chili Piper grow to become one of the hottest new sales software providers, and what would the team do differently if they had to start all over again? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Chili Piper Founder and CEO Nicolas Vandenberghe shares the story of growing his company, from his early days bootstrapping, to what he is doing now that he has secured venture capital funding, and what he would do differently if he had to start over again today. One of the biggest things Nicolas would change is his approach to marketing. Listen to the podcast to learn why he would have started investing in marketing much earlier than he actually did, and how he thinks that would have changed the company's growth trajectory. Highlights from my conversation with Nicolas include: Nicolas started Chili Piper to help solve the problem of companies not booking meetings with interested inbound leads. The solution he developed helps his customer double their bookings. Nicolas credits his early success to achieving product-market fit quickly. The company gained traction in the US market by using what it calls the "bullseye" strategy, which involved targeting highly influential customers to establish social proof. This strategy was successful in helping Chili Piper bootstrap its initial growth. Now that the company has secured venture capital funding and Nicolas needs to scale it, he wishes he had made a larger investment in marketing earlier. Chili Piper calls the category in which it plays "buyer enablement" and is focused on creating products that are so good, buyers will demand to switch to them. This is how Nicolas believes they will unseat the incumbent providers, like Microsoft and Google, that their prospective customers currently rely on.  Resources from this episode: Visit the Chili Piper website Listen to the podcast to learn why startups should invest in marketing early, and how even an unknown startup can take on the industry giants. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm Kathleen Booth and I'm your host, and this week my guest is Nicolas Vandenberghe, who's the CEO and co-founder of Chili Piper. Welcome, Nicolas. Nicolas Vandenberghe (Guest): Thanks. I'm happy to be here. Nicolas and Kathleen recording this episode. Kathleen: I’m excited to have you here. I've been sort of watching you and your company for a few years now and I have a personal passion for startups. It's something that I've invested a lot of my time in, and I really especially love following startups that bootstrap for some of their time and find success, so I'm really excited to talk to you about that, and how you fueled your growth, and what the company does. About Nicolas Vandenberghe and Chili Piper Kathleen: So let's actually start out, if you would, by having you tell my guests a little bit more about yourself, your background and story, because that's pretty interesting as well, and Chili Piper and what the company does. Nicolas: Sure. I'm originally French, as I'm sure everybody will guess. I came to the US in the mid '90s. I went to Stanford Business School with the idea of traveling the world, and when I was there I met Steve Jobs. He was invited to our class. He sat on the floor. At that time he was CEO of Next, going next to nowhere. It was an amazing experience and I thought, "That's what I want to be when I grow up. I want to be like him, doing tech companies." And so I proceeded to do that and I've done several startups, not quite as successful as Apple, I must say, but enough success to be happy and done three different startups. I also had spent a lot of time in sales, so I funded my studies. I say that I sold newspapers in the streets of Paris. It's a true story. I am very proud of it because I outsold everybody else; this newspaper that sold more than anybody else. So I have a passion for sales and more recently I got to know the world of sales is going to be completely changed. Digital is going to have a big influence and it hasn't happened yet. Right now we are still at the stage where records have been put in place. That's what you call CRM. But it's a different role for crossing the chasm and I make a distinction between a system of records and system of action. The system of action is what should be used to do your job, and that is yet to be invented. So that is the business of Chili Pepper is to say we're going to be the company that will bring central revenue to the scene. Kathleen: I love that, and it's one of the reasons I was excited to talk to you. I've been working in marketing and actually sales, I've been in sales roles as well for a long time, and technology and tech stacks have become an increasingly important part of the daily lives of anybody who's in marketing or sales. It might just be me, but I feel like on the marketing side, there have been just substantial advancements in making the technology a lot more user friendly, but on the sales side, maybe not as much, for the most part. You see that with CRMs and systems of records as you referred to them. Things like salesforce.com. Everyone I talk with kind of both loves it and hates it, and the problem with these platforms, if they're not user friendly, is they don't get used. Your tech stack is only as good as the decisions of the person who is meant to be using it. If they choose to use something else, then it's garbage in and garbage out. So that's my little rant but what I like about- Nicolas: You're absolutely right, and still to this day the service is so bad that these days you have companies saying, "If you don't put your data in Salesforce, I won't pay your commission." It's like threats and punishments to use the software. I mean, imagine if I had to tell my kids, "If you don't use your iPhone, I won't give you any candies." Kathleen: Yeah, it's ridiculous. Nicolas: Right. That's right. Kathleen: It's ridiculous that we're in that position. Yeah. Nicolas: That's why I'm trying to change the system. An introduction to Chili Piper Kathleen: I read an interesting article that said that today every individual, marketer, and salesperson is their own CIO because of this exact problem. Because as a company, you can choose to put software in place but every individual person on that team is going to decide what software they're actually going to use. If there's friction in the process, they're going to find a way around it. It's sort of like water. When water hits an obstacle, it goes around it and carves a new river. And I think that's what people do with software. So tell me a little bit about exactly the problems that Chili Piper solves for because you mentioned that it's great for revenue teams, but what exactly does it do? Nicolas: Yeah, so I started the company to help sales people, and we accidentally stumbled into inbound process. It's something relevant to this podcast. What's happening is we started with helping people schedule their meetings. So especially with complex situations where there's a big SDR team booking a lot of meetings for a big company team, which they should book with the routing being fair with a round robin distribution. So that's how we get started. And I was talking to some of our customers and saying, "What's your job?" and they say, "I am an inbound SDR, and what do you do?" "Some people come to the website, marketing people spend a lot of money to bring them to the website. There's a form to request a demo or talk to somebody. I submit the form and my job is to call them and to book that meeting." I said, "How is that going for you?" and they said, "It's going great. We're converting at 40%." To which I said, "Wait a minute, you're telling me that out of a hundred people who want to have a meeting, only 40 of them get a meeting? Because somewhere they got lost?" That seems completely crazy to me but it seems to be accepted in the industry. That's what it is. You have a 40% conversion rate inbound, you're doing great. I didn't even have the... beat yourself up! I don't want to touch it. I'm 40% right. Thinking like it would be the ultimate achievement. So we decided to build a solution for that and what we did is a small piece of JavaScript that companies put in their webpage, in their form, and when the form is submitted, we get the data from the form. We can augment the data with solutions like ZoomInfo and Clearbit, these kinds of data sources. And in real time, based on this data, we need to find the right rep who should handle that prospect. We can dial the rep and dial the prospect and connect them in real time or we can retrieve the calendar and show options of the prospect and book a time. So instead of saying, "Thank you I need to call you," say, "Just pick a time that works for you," they pick a time they're all set. That seems obvious, but we are the first - and only to this day - company doing it. When I launched it I said, "That seems too obvious to be true. I must be missing something." It turned out I wasn't. All of our customers doubled their conversion rates. We had people at 80% conversion, a lot of people at 70% conversion. We had a company that was at 23% and went up 55% which is a very high volume. So it just works. It was just a matter of innovating, coming up with a new way to do things. The reason why it stayed at that level for so long is because we were just at the junction between the marketing and sales. So marketing thought we were bringing a good job bringing a lot of leads. Sales thought we were doing a good job filling up the leads. The reference point was outbound, right, so all these companies you reach, you convert maybe 10% percent of meetings. In inbound we were getting 40%; that looked good. That was a disconnect, so we're putting that all together with all inbound solutions to do this, handle it very efficiently and improve conversion rates. Kathleen: It's really genius and it's funny how you mentioned that nobody thought of it sooner. You know, it makes me think of an experience that I recently had as a buyer, and I should preface this in saying that you referred to this under the umbrella of buyer enablement because I do think it's all about giving the buyer choices and allowing them to choose the path that they want to take, and not then putting things in their way. It makes me think of, I was recently looking to vet agencies that do pay-per-click marketing and I went on to a website of a particular agency who I will not name and they had sort of like a quiz that they needed me to fill out instead of a contact us form, and I get the logic behind it so I filled out the quiz even though I was sort of annoyed. I just wanted to talk to somebody and then at the end of the quiz, it was like, "We'll get in touch with you to set up a meeting," and I thought, "Well, no." Now I really want to talk to somebody and there was no way for me to go to any kind of a contact form or find any phone number. It's interesting. By the time they emailed me to set up the meeting, I had already found somebody else that I was really happy with. So there's like a perfect example of how the 60% of people who can fill out a form, who say they want to talk to you and then don't actually turn into a viable, bottom of the funnel lead/opportunity, because you've allowed that time in between to be filled with another solution, or they've talked themselves out of purchasing, which I'm sure happens a lot. But it's frustrating. It's frustrating as a buyer. Nicolas: It's crazy, it's crazy. Something similar happened to me. I submitted a form to talk to somebody at LinkedIn. At the time, it was a while back, I wanted to buy a license of their solution, and you had to talk to a sales person, so I submitted the form and they said, "Somebody is going to call you," and to my knowledge, nobody did call me. It turned out that two weeks later, it's not that somebody did call me the next day, but it was a 408 number and I got my setting that it go straight to voicemail, because I didn't know the number, and so I never knew that somebody had called. And it doesn't make sense these days. So with our solution, a company has the option to connect in real time. We even have what we call real time video. So if you... it's used a lot by companies for their in-app solutions, so if they're the free service, or paid service, somebody wants to talk to somebody, the most efficient in-app format for conversation is Zoom Video, because you can see each other, you can share your screen you can really engage with others. We have a real time Zoom Video connection, where you can submit a form and say, "I need to talk to somebody," boom, so here is your Zoom Video link and you're connected to somebody over Zoom. So, that's such a better experience for the potential buyer to be in real time connected to Zoom Video as opposed to waiting and wondering when they're going to be reached out to. Kathleen: I want to make sure I understand. Are you telling me... I get that you guys through this JavaScript code can do this on a website, but you're saying that in-app, somebody can also use Chili Piper and immediately spin up a Zoom conversation with... Nicolas: That's right. Kathleen: That's a game changer. I mean, just like when you talk about trial to customer conversions and adoption and eliminating those friction points early in experience... that's amazing. I did not realize that it did that, which is very very cool. Nicolas: Yeah. I think we need to market it a little bit better. Kathleen: Well, there you go, we're talking about it on the podcast. When should startups invest in marketing? Kathleen: One of the things I am fascinated by is your earlier story with the company, when it first started, because, as I mentioned, I work with a lot of start-ups. I am a head of marketing for a start-up right now, and the conversation always revolves around, in those early days, before you have really deep pockets or VCs have thrown a lot of money at you, what should the approach to marketing be? I feel like there's really two schools of thought from the founders I've met. Either they believe in throwing all their money and resources at sales and having an entirely sales led organization and they defer marketing until after they get a lot of investment money, or they really really believe in marketing and make an early investment in content and building out their top of the funnel, etc. And that's a bit more of a long game but it's a leap of faith so I'm sure there's an in between but I seem to talk to those two people who fall in those two courts. So I'd love to hear what your experience was, because you were successful in your early days bootstrapping. Nicolas: That's a great way to put it, and I will say that I think the right approach is to do the second, the all in, in marketing. I mistakenly did the first and went to sales, so I'm here to exemplify the mistake. We did something right at the beginning -- the strategy that I call the "Bull's eye." When we came up with the first product -- and the first product was around handoff between teams, so distributing between SDRs and account executives -- we had a company come to us and say, "I have this problem, can you solve it for us?" And so the product market fit was easy because somebody came and said, "I have this problem", and we check if other companies have this problem, and we finally did, and so there was no question of having an idea and- Kathleen: I was going to say, because that's the danger of having that one customer who's the squeaky wheel and you build out a product just for them only to find out nobody else wants it. Nicolas: Right, right, so the worst part of that, we actually went to SaaStr. Only SaaS companies, and I went around and said, "Do you have that problem?", "Yes", "Do you have that problem?", "Yes", so more than half had that problem. Then we did something that was inspired by the fashion industry and namely I was exposed to, in the early 2000s, Louis Vuitton, the luxury brand, built their business in the U.S. They targeted the most influential people in the world, the celebrities, so they were not so well known in the U.S. except for a few people. They went to famous actresses and got them free bags and free jewels, so these actresses were photographed. That was the center of the bull's eye. From there, they went to what they call socialites. In every city there are people who are more visible than others. They're social, they're visible. They targeted these people, and from there they extended it. So it was a top down, concentric circle. That worked really well and we did the same and thought, "Okay, which companies are the most influential in our space?" Obviously it's not Beyonce that helps you sell software. It's companies like Square, Greenhouse in New York, Segment in the bay area -- the companies that people look up to and say, "These guys know what they're doing when it comes to sales and marketing." So we targeted these companies. It may have taken longer to get the business from them, but once got the business, other companies came to us and that built our early inbound flow from these companies saying, "Hey I booked with Discover Org," "I booked with Discover Org, that was awesome, that was the same experience," "I booked with Segment and it was great, I just did one yesterday. That was a good experience." So that's what did well to get started to build the foundations. And back to your question from there, what we should have done was build the marketing and expand it, our content and case studies. Instead, what we did is extend our sales team, so that worked. Every rep paid for themselves. We were able to bootstrap. We passed two million without funding. It worked well but now two years later we think, "Well we have to build these foundations," because if you want to grow to the hundreds of millions in revenues, you can not do it without a strong brand, and a strong marketing presence, so we waited too long to build marketing foundations at the outset. Kathleen: This is such an interesting conversation to me and I appreciate your candor in saying you would have done it differently, but I think if somebody is listening they might be thinking, "He says that but they were successful," and so I'm curious what you think would have been different had you started marketing earlier? Would there have been a different outcome or would it have been the pace that would have changed? Nicolas: I expect that we would have grown faster. We typically double over a year, and  expect that we would have done even better than that. You have to think, the number one problem for us starters is product market fit. If our customers more than double their conversion, they have a return investment that is massive. That's obviously the first place to get to, but once we have that then the question becomes, how fast can I go and what's the most effective way to go so for all you listeners, you can bypass the product market fit. The question we're addressing now is how to go from there and the marketing investment is more leverage, so for the same investment, you're able to serve more people. Initially it doesn't work, but when it does work then you have more leverage right there. A piece of content can reach 20,000 viewers. A rep can not be in touch with 20,000 viewers at the same amount of time. That's the leverage you need to get and how you're able to grow at 3x or 4x instead of 2x because you get this leverage from marketing, that's big. We just hired a CMO a few months back, and we're putting all these things in place. That's why I say, we'll see if it all happens, but I have a lot of trust in our CMO and his team to make it happen. I can see he is already putting in the information and I can see how it makes sense. About the "bullseye" strategy Kathleen: Well I definitely think you have a good team, I did a little bit of stalking on LinkedIn to see who was on your marketing team and it looks like a really qualified group of people so I'm sure you're going to see fantastic results from that. I want to go back to something you said earlier, about the bullseye strategy. That's interesting to me because you talked about how Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy used that to bring Louis Vuitton into the US. I've seen it also with one of the people that I sort of idolize who is Sara Blakely, who is the founder of Spanx, she did the same thing. She sent products to Oprah and other people like that. In some respects, that can be really risky, and those are examples of product companies, but if you're sending product to somebody you don't really know, if they're going to do anything with it, if they're going to evangelize it... In your case it was going after really high value accounts. While it's one thing to say, "We're going to do this, we're going to land the biggest fish in the industry," it's another thing to make it happen. So, I am curious, did you have another approach, or what did you do in those early days that you were able to get those meetings, especially as a company, at the time, that these other companies haven't heard of. Nicolas: Yeah, it's actually not so much high value accounts we went after, it's highly visible accounts. It's a strong difference. You get a lot more licences from selling to, say, I am thinking of an example, HP, than you get from selling to Segment. Both are costumers actually, and HP came much later, so we got a lot of licenses. Equal industries, these days. Marketers look up to Segment to what they should do much more than HP, HP is known for other things. The target was not so much larger deals, it was very much who do people look up to. It turned out that you think that, "Well how did you get about getting these costumers," people look up to these companies because they are forward thinking, and because they are forward thinking, they are interested in trying new tech. I remember Segment had this French guy, Gillaume Cabane, and there was this discussion and he pushed back and I said “Hey Guillaume, you're super, and on the leading edge. Surely if I am right, you don't want to have missed it." He said, " Okay, fine we'll do an AB test", and boom, we did an AB test, he went across 61%, it was super successful. He led a team that was known in the industry as forward thinking because he would try new things. That helped us, because we would go to companies that would try new things, because they would implement these practices, and to implement these practices you have to take some risks. You have to go and squeeze new solutions, you have to explore, you have to be willing to try new things. So that's how we did it, and more practically, since...we implemented, and immediately, I did most of this in person. I actually went to events, meet ups and met in person in the early days. It's not really scalable, but in the early days that's the best way to do it. Nobody knows who you are, if you email campaigned people will ignore it, so you have to go in person and engage in person, and try. Once you get a few reference accounts, of course the game changes, and you can go online. How Chili Piper gets customer success stories Kathleen: Well, it definitely seems to be working because, I think, when Chili Piper came on my radar screen, I actually heard Udi Ledergore from Gong talking about some of the results they have gotten. I am curious, you're going after these highly visible accounts, they're having some success. Do you have a particular way of approaching them and asking that they talk about those success stories? Nicolas: Yes, Udi is a great guy and Gong is definitely one of the visible accounts that we love. We do case studies. We have a case study with Gong, it's on our website. We have one with Grow. We have one with Segment. So we definitely package it as success. Then we ask them to share with other companies in the community. Often you have questions in the community say, what should I use, partner with them? That's something we could have done better, but we did pay attention to make sure that these champions would serve as references and would talk about us through case studies, and other type of discussions. How Chili Piper is approaching marketing today Kathleen: Now, you got your first round of funding last spring, was it April of 2019? Nicolas: Yeah. Kathleen: Since then, you've gone on to hire some folks for the marketing team, you mentioned you have a new CMO, and I saw a few other roles. How big is the marketing team today? Nicolas: We just hired....It's four people now. Kathleen: Okay. As you think about looking forward, what is your approach to marketing, what are you looking for in the year ahead? Are there particular things that the company is focused on in terms of building its brand, its content, etc.? Nicolas: Yes. When we took money last year, we were cash positive, so we didn't need the money from the existing business. What we wanted to do was to invest in product development because we developed the new IDs that we thought were mature enough to bring to market, or to start building. I should preface with that our inbound solution is growing. Of course we want to keep growing the business. We're about to launch a very bold take on inbox, so we're taking on Microsoft, Outlook and Gmail. With the new inbox, the difference is a collaborative inbox. The idea that revenue teams will be able to, we syndicate account-related emails across email boxes, so if you take a common account, you can see everything being discussed within the account, directly in the inbox. Let's just say an account, let's say Gong, so if it's just for Gong, I'll see every email that's been sent to Gong, every meeting with Gong directly into my box from everybody. Then I can chat, comment on it, so ask somebody, "Hey, what did you do, say, when you talk to him at that meeting?" It's a collaborative inbox. We think it's exactly the type of approach that sales and revenue teams need, especially the account manager, or CS. We need to know whether that's happened before. We're about to launch that, and back to your question, we have this marketing team of four, what do we expect from the year? Well we have this dual mission of building the business around our solution. As you pointed out, not everybody knows about everything we do, like the in-app solution. And start to position that new product line around our inbox, our collaborative inbox and revenue teams. It's a lot to do. We are going to invest in content because we see that, obviously content marketing stuff works well, but in case there are lot of questions from companies, a lot of the things we do are new, leading edge, the idea of specializing revenue teams... What should the account managers do, what should the CS, costumer success do, how should the head off be done, how to be the best account manager of the best CS? We are fortunate to have a lot of customers who are very smart and have great ideas, so we can bring these ideas, write them up and bring this content. That's a big piece of what you're going to do in the future to lead the change... We said earlier on in the podcast, I'm a big believer that sales and revenues are going to be completely transformed with a new set of tools, so we want to make sure that we evangelize that. How Gong is building the "buyer enablement" category Kathleen: Now, it's interesting to me, because you coined this term buyer enablement and a lot of what you're doing, as you explained rightfully, is new. It's something that hasn't been done before. This inbox, totally different than what anybody has constructed. You know some of the functionality that you have in your initial tools, totally different. I am selfishly going to ask you this because I am fascinated by the topic of category creation. So, as a smaller company, you're thinking about this concept of buyer enablement. I assume you're also talking to analysts, companies like Gartner or Forrester, what have you? How do you look at that, because everything I've read, and I've researched, and seen about category creation, it's an incredibly difficult play. But if you can pull it off, it can be huge. But it's not a quick thing to build a category. I just would love to hear your thinking about that, and how much of your strategy revolves around that term, buyer enablement, which you're really coining and introducing into the market, versus drafting off of existing searches and things like that. Nicolas: I'm smiling because I had a long discussion with our CMO yesterday about the category creation and the role of analysts. You have to think that an analyst is not going to come up with an innovation that's in your category currently. An analyst is not going to say that, "the new way of doing inbox is collaborative inbox, and this is the new category, and players come play in my new category." Kathleen: Right. Nicolas: Their job is to observe where the market is going and say, "Oh there is something new happening there, it's real," and, "I'm going to call this category, I'm going to explain it within there." That's typically useful in crossing the chasm when you're moving to mainstream. When you move to mainstream, you need this clear explanation of what it is about, but when you build a category you're not at that stage, moving to mainstream, you're at the other stage, the early state. Our focus is to provide a solution to an existing problem. It's going to sound boring, but the fact that this problem is big enough that it's worthy enough of being labeled its own category is unintentional. We think that sales people should have better tools, and we think that inbox and calendar, we are also going to launch Chili Calendar, should be specialized for them. Because it works, we're going to solve the problem, and we're going to help them coverup their revenues better. Hopefully someday Forrester, one of our costumers is Forrester, will call that a new category, will put us in the right quadrant. It works the other way. Once we’ve done it, they'll say, "This is what's happening and we'll do it," so for now we focus on the solving the problem. It's not as hard as it seems in a sense to create a category because if the problem is real, you're going to have real movement in the market. A great example, that has happened recently, is sales engagement. Sales engagement is actually, in effect, is synonymous with sales development, it's the tool for sales development. Their job is to prospect and to engage the initial engagement. A bunch of companies can request tools early on in to us, CalTAP and Yesware, they were doing templates. Then SalesLoft and Outreach which came with a better way to do it, which was cadences, multi-touch cadences, it's the right tool for this team. They did that tool. Then they got a lot of costumers, high growth. Somebody, I'm not sure who, called it sales engagement. They thought, "Oh, that makes sense, I like it," and then the category was born, but it didn't come the other way around, it didn't come the other way around. So buyer involvement is a term we've used because we strongly believe that the focus has switched on the buyer, and that's what we do with our inbound solutions. You can't let your buyer wait two hours or two days to get that. It’s a focus, but it’s more of a philosophy. We don't expect that somebody is going to come up and call this category buyer enablement. Some day the category will be called, and as a mission, we hope that we'll be in the right quadrant when that happens. Kathleen: I think that's the right way to look at it, because everything I've seen is that even if an analyst sees it as a new category, they're not going to spend the time to coin it as such until there is more than one player in it. You can't have a category with only one company, at least in the eyes in most analyst firms. Nicolas: Yeah. How to unseat the incumbent solution provider? Kathleen: I think you're right. Last question, and then we'll kind of move into the wrap up. The thing that you're talking about doing, especially some of these new products around inbox start to get into the territory of taking on very well entrenched existing tools. If I'm an enterprise level sales person, I have an inbox already, well I mean if I am anybody these days I have an inbox. Nicolas: Yeah. Kathleen: Often, in these larger organizations, it's generally Outlook, it's Gmail, and these platform, Google, Microsoft, have their tentacles into just about every aspect of the business. So, how are you accounting for the fact that there is going to be an incumbent product in everyone's hand already, and does what you're building play with these other things, or how does that work, because that would seem very daunting? Nicolas: That is a great question and it's for sure that the feedback we're getting from a lot of people, especially in the investing communities, are people who've never switched from our product, they get so attached to our product. Kathleen: Well I don't know about that, Outlook is like SalesForce, people love to hate it. Nicolas: You must be a Mac person because it doesn't work very... But the world has changed. Kathleen: Yeah. Nicolas: People adopt new tools much faster than they ever did. You see this on the iPhone, the level reduction, but look at Slack. There was email, there were also a bunch of messaging solutions like Skype and PICCHAT, but they came up with a better one, and people switched must faster than they used to. It's up to us to come with a solution where the benefit is so obvious, it's a better way to do it, that people will switch intimidatingly. That is much less of a risk than the investing communities sees, because people do switch. If in the inbox, this company called Superhuman that launched, say took after the inbox, and they've been successful. Now there are so many new apps that users are accustomed trying new apps, changing new apps, and if it's better, they will do it. The job is to do something that is obviously better, and that's the challenge. If we do, then companies will switch, and usually will switch. Kathleen: You just said something interesting, and this is my follow up question. Users might switch. This goes back to how we started the whole conversation about every person being their own CIO, because, especially in larger enterprise, I could see a sales rep saying, "Oh, I want to use this." But at the end of the day if you want to get enterprise adoption, particularly for something like inbox, isn't the CIO, or the head of IT the key decision maker in that process. Which is a different audience than maybe you've dealt with in the past so- Nicolas: Yeah, yeah, but there are two privileged citizens in the world, software developers and sales people. The software developer or sales person say, "I want that tool, nobody gets on their way," because you don't want to mess up your software development and you don't want to mess up your sales. The reason for that is because obviously the software developers build the product, and you want to make them happy, but sales people, they bring the revenues. If they say the tool is going to help them, then it's very measurable. That's the thing that's beautiful with our inbound solutions, that Chili Piper for the work sites. When conversion rates double, it's directly twice as much pipeline from inbound, the return investment is very easy to calculate. It's not the feel good solution where you think, "Oh. That is helpful." No, you have twice as much pipeline, and that's easy. So, same thing. When we launch our inbox, you're going to see shorter sales cycles and higher conversion rates. I mean obviously it will be more subtle, I don't expect that it will double conversion rates. It will be a few points, but it's a few points on your total revenue. So if you can increase 5% your revenue, then the company making $200,000,000, that's 10 million, we'll charge less than 10 million. Kathleen: Yeah. Nicolas: We'll all make money. Kathleen: Well I think you're probably right about software developers and sales people. I am just waiting for the day when the marketer becomes the privileged citizen as well. I have a feeling I shouldn't hold my breath. Nicolas: You're right, marketers on a budget also, but for some reason, they struggle a bit more. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: Yeah, yes. This is the path we choose though. Well, all right, so... Shifting gears, there are two question that I ask all of my guests and I would love to have what you have to say about these things. One is the core of what we talk about in this podcast, is inbound marketing. Is there a particular company or individual that you really think is killing it right now with inbound marketing? Nicolas: Well, I am going to be boring and name the king, and the king is HubSpot. They've nailed inbound marketing. To a large extent, they've been so good that they've been able to hide the weaknesses of their product. It took the longest time to... But now they have a reasonably good marketing product, a reasonably poor sales product. They've written the book on it, and I think all the other companies that are doing well... A lot of companies have spun off of HubSpot and are doing well. In the case of Drift, they take the playbook, they replicate it, and it works for them. That's definitely the company I would mention. Kathleen: Okay. Well I've definitely heard those names, HubSpot and Drift, a lot on this podcast. The second question is, the biggest complaint I hear from marketers, or the biggest pain point I should say is that digital marketing is changing so quickly, mostly driven by technology. They feel like it's trying to drink from a fire hose to keep up with everything and to stay on top of latest developments. How do you personally stay on top of things? Nicolas: On top of all marketing and technology, all the tools are there? Kathleen: Right. Marketing, but also you're kind of in that sales and marketing technology space. Are there particular blogs, or podcasts, or people you follow? How do you stay up to date? Nicolas: Of course, since we're in the space, we want to know what's going on at anytime, so it's almost our job to stay open. I do that with all the tech, I was looking at whatever tools can help us. We have this concept of decision memo, so whenever we look at the particular piece... For example, I want to train my salespeople better right now. The first reflex we have in the company, at Chili Piper, is to say, "Is there a piece of software that could help us do that," and of course we’re biased, because we are software developers, but that's how we do it. That's the answer to your question, we go outbound looking for solutions. There'll be different places where we can find good advice. Podcasts are a great one, yours in particular. We listen to what other people do, say, and you learn a lot more from podcasts because people leave more practical description of what happens. Look at the vendor talk, often abstract. Then there are also online communities where people discuss the best tools, and we pay attention. Then we do, we take, random demos. Right now we are in the process of taking tons of demos from Learning Management Systems, for this particular solution. We have tech savvy people in the operation, that also makes a big difference. I see companies that don't invest in operations, or don't put the right people in operations, and they're held back by that choice. It's a super important opinion that all companies over sites get tech savvy strong people in their operations. These people are able to bring in new technology. Kathleen: Yeah. I think that makes a particularly big difference in the early days, when everyone has to be willing to roll their sleeves up, and not just strategize but do a lot of the work as well, and understanding how to use technology is very powerful for that. How to connect with Nicolas Kathleen: Well, we are coming to the top of the hour, so I wanted to make sure I ask you, if somebody wants to learn more about Chili Piper or reach out and connect with you online, what's the best way for them to do that. Nicolas: That is to come to our website, because we use our own tools. Chili Piper is a play on word, chili pepper, Piper as in pipeline, so it's C H I L I, Piper, Chili Piper, and if you request a meeting with us you'll see our technology in action. It will pop up for you so you will be able to book it. Kathleen: Great, I'll put that link in the show notes. Also, I didn't tell you I was going to do this, I also want to give just a small plug for Gipsy Time, which is another company that you are involved in founding. I just submitted my request to get in on the early access, it looks really cool, because one of my biggest problems is I have a million tabs open on my computer at any given time, plus Slack, plus inboxes, and it's super distracting, and it looks to me like you're solving that. Is that right? Nicolas: Thank you, I am really delighted to hear that. Yes, yes, it's a typical case of solving your own problem. I have ADHD, I have a focus problem, and these to-do lists, they keep accumulating tasks, and I needed to manage a way to do that. On the side, I did this other company, Gipsy Time, to help people focus. It's not about capturing the task in the long to-do list, it's about getting it done. We have the distraction blocking, where you can block, close all your tabs, and reopen them when you're finished. Make sure how much time you spend on something, make sure you spend the right amount of time. Did I tell you... When you requested that... Invited, it's very promising and it's helped me a lot in getting more done. You know what to do next... Kathleen: Well, I need it for sure, so I can't wait to get my invitation. Well, thank you so much for joining me this week, this has been so much fun, if you are listening, and you like what you heard, please head over to Apple Podcasts, and consider leaving in the podcast a five star review, that's how we get in front of new listeners. And, of course, if you know somebody else who is doing kick-ass inbound work tweet me @workmommywork, because I would love to make them my next interview. Thank you so much Nicolas, this was a ton of fun. Nicolas: Thank you, great fun, yes.

Hey this is Angie Monroe of the warrior divas show broadcasting live each Tuesday 11 am Central from globe life park in Arlington, Texas login to hear real talk with real women that will empower and equip you to make a more powerful impact in the world each Tuesday 11 am Central on fishbowl Radio Network Hello, and welcome to warrior divas real talk for real women. I am your host Angie Leigh Monroe, our show is specifically that was right I said specifically, incorrectly because I too can mess up from time to time. It is specifically designed for our divas;  divas is an acronym for Destin inspired victorious accountable sisters. And we will be bringing guests on our show who will help in our mission to equip and empower a global community of women change agents as we make a positive impact in the world we live in. When we started divas impact four years ago, we quip that we wanted to change the way women think and speak about themselves and others. As we've progressed, so has our thinking and out of our intentions, we want to talk about things that are impacting women. So this means we talk about faith, family, fitness, finance, food and a lot of other words that don't begin with f. So today we welcome Laurie Vaughn speaks of lbs consulting loriann speaks is an expert in the area of speaker and author support. She amplifies the visibility of authors, speakers and messengers. While they do what they love. Speak. laurieann has helped spearhead multiple best selling book campaigns, editing proofing, through to launch and social media marketing to help authors create buzz and momentum throughout social media platforms and increase their Message worldwide loriann and her team have made it their mission to empower speakers to deliver their message by handling the rest of the details. Prior to starting their own company loriann had over 15 years of professional experience supporting a top 100 thought leader as she built her businesses. Welcome to the show. loriann Thanks so much, Angie. It's a pleasure to be here. Well, I personally know what a busy busy lady you are. And you've had some major projects you're working on for some of my friends, and you've done some work for me as well. But before we get into all that, what I want to visit with you about who you are and how you got here today, is that all right. Yeah, totally cool. Yeah. I love that. So if you can just kind of give us a backstory. You. You said you work for a thought leader for 15 years. I'm sure there's things you did before that. I know you're a mom. So you're one What are some of the things that kind of led you to where you are today? Well, great, yeah. Yes, I am no spring chicken. I've probably had four different careers in my lifetime. I started off in my teens and 20s being so politically involved and got my degrees in political science and economics and wanted to be in politics. Thank goodness and thank God up above that he had other plans for me, and I am not there now. So I did that. And then I became a recruiter. And when the when 911 happened, my recruiting business went to hell in a handbasket. So, I started working for this thought leader, and I was hurt for all intents purposes, girl Friday. office manager, you know, gatekeeper. And I spent 15 years learning the business of speakers and authors. And so, but really, once I had children my focus, you know, I, like I said, I started off wanting to be, like President of the United States, you know, the first woman president of the United States. Then I had children. And I realized, Oh, this is, this is what I'm good at. This is what I love. And so, when you talk about where was I, and how have I gotten here, once I had children, the business kind of went as a means to an end instead of being you know, the end all and beall and being a mom was the number one thing in my life. And, and so, you know, I did I I worked at A regular job so I could be mom and Girl Scout leader and room mom and, and be able to do all the things that I wanted to do as a mom. I love that. Sorry. I said I love that. Yeah, you know, and I and I wouldn't have traded it for the world. You know. I'm kind of glad that I never really got into the whole corporate america thing. But what got me now to owning my own company, though, is that back in December of 2017, I was laid off, my boss decided to sell our company, and I knew it was coming. But But I decided I was just going to stay until the end because she needed me. And and, and so and I knew there wasn't going to be much difference between hitting the the, you know, employment market at 59 or at 60. I was pretty bad. You know, they're not going to be doing well and I and I just sat there and went, Okay, let's just see this through to the end. And once I was laid off, it became very clear to me that once again, corporate america wasn't going to be my, you know, my journey. I must have sent out 100 different resumes and never got a call, never got a call. And so I knew if I was going to continue to work, I better start my own company. And I did and I'm so glad I did. So glad I did. Well, I love the part that you said, you know, you saw the writing on the wall you saw she was retiring, stepping away and and but you stayed until the end. I think there's so much that's lost in that finishing well, moment. You know, you you worked with this woman side by side, you served her. You served her well over the 15 years, but you also finished Well, we With her and and that's got to be a sense of accomplishment that many people miss out on today. A lot of people see the writing on the wall and they're like I'm getting out while the getting out good button right. But it's finishing well that that right there is a good wealth of information for people to grab ahold of because we've been in a couple of situations when we've been with a church that was closing its doors or a company that's closing its doors, in that finishing Well, it feels like kind of like you put your kid to bed at night, you know, you kind of you kind of made sure that from the time they rose till the time they went to bed, everything was taken care of and they were they were handled in the best way possible. And it's the closing of a chapter in in celebration of that chapter as well. Exactly in and you know, it's a karma thing as well. And it was important to support her through this process because it wasn't necessarily something she was all that jazz to do, but knew that she needed to just get out from under the actual company aspect. And just go back to being Bev and you know, and enjoying her life with her husband of 44 years. So. So I was supportive. And that's kind of the way I am with my clients now. And it is a common thing because Beth has probably introduced me and referred me to at least 1520 of our friends. Wow, over the last two and a half years, so it's it. I think you get what you get. Right? I think that's really the way life boils down. Is yet you get what you give. So I agree wholeheartedly. Good. Yeah. Well, one of the things that We've talked about whenever you and I have been on the phone before, was that you kind of not use that nurturing that you use with your children with with your thought leader that you support it with all the with all the companies you've been with, you've used that nurturing aspect of yourself. It's not a part of your DNA, it is your whole DNA. That's, that's the part that I love about you is you, you see the potential and the possibilities in in people. And you want to call that out and you want to help support that and, and push push them and challenge them. But you do it in a way that is very impactful. And I want to commend you for that while I have you on the air because you don't get to tell people that very often where they actually slow down and listen to it, say it. Well, thank you. Thank you. I have really You know, when I started the company, I wouldn't say that I was passionate about what I was doing, until I really realized how much mentoring was involved because I was now working with a lot of what I call newbies. Right? And I love mentoring. That's, that's what I'm all about. And once I embraced that, and realized, this is what I can be doing for so many people, that's when I got passionate about what I was doing. Well, I think one of the other remarks that comes to mind is something that Michael Hyatt has said before, you know, people go out and I'm gonna have you share a little more specifically about the business you started here in a minute, but Michael Hyatt commented one time and I've kind of hung my hat on it is don't go out and look for people to help you get where you're going that haven't been there you go and you look for people. To help you get where you're going that have already been there, whether it's an assistant, a coach, a mentor, whatever it is, a lot of times people go okay well I can't afford a virtual assistant a high paying virtual assistant so I'm just going to get some little girl off the street help her have her help her out, help me out, you know it's a helping each other out type of Jerry Maguire moment helped me show you the money type thing. But they're not equipped. They they haven't been where you're wanting to go and Michael Hyatt says if you want to be a fortune 500 company you need a coach that has been a leader in the fortune 500 into industry if you want to, or you need an administrative assistant that has served as a role in a fortune 500 company, you need a a support system that has been where you want to go and and i think that's beautiful because you said you work with speakers and authors and and messengers and, and those are the people that you've already served and served in a high capacity. And so you can serve your clients so much better because you've already been there done that saying that you know what to expect even before they expect it, you know how to talk them off the roof. All of that. So, so yeah, tell us tell us a little bit more about the company you started what you do, and, and what type of company it is. Well, we are a virtual assistance company, but we literally specialize in speakers, authors and podcasters. So those are our clients. Although many of the the things that I talk about and have like a, a white paper on how to increase your speaking business, if you've got a small business that you need to raise your visibility. A lot of the things that are on that list can be used for small businesses as well. But what we do is we help the speakers and authors raise their presence in social media, help them write that book and get it to bestseller status. help them find more stages. And, and, and for those that are very much established, and they've gotten to the point where they're on the stages, but they just don't have the time to deal with all the, you know, logistics and administrative stuff. Right? I was gonna say a dirty word. You know, to deal with all that we take that off their plate, and we'll handle the the business side of it, and make sure that all the T's are crossed and the i's are dotted, so that they can go out on the road, do their speeches and know everything's being taken care of. Well, I think it's, you know, one of those things that when people say Alright, I've spoken at all these places, I want to have my own event. I don't think they understand fully what all that entails. But you've put those on for people before. So, you know, having somebody like you quote unquote, in their back pocket is is a huge benefit, I'm sure. Well, yeah, there is a lot involved. And, and just knowing how to negotiate with the the venue is important, because and finding the right venue for you and your budget. So, yeah, I've been involved in in all that. But yes, there's a lot of little pieces. And I find that the creatives, which is the community that I serve, have some amazing, great ideas, but they don't know how to bring that to fruition. And that's why I come in, I'm sort of their Yin to their Yang. You know, I will reverse engineer their idea to figure out how to get there. I used an analogy explaining what to do the other day to somebody I said, when you have that picture, perfect image of what you want. She's the puzzle maker out of it. She comes in, she takes the pieces apart, and puts it in a way that you can pick your pieces together as you need, whether you're an inside to the outside or an outside to the inside person, she helps put that picture together for you. So she takes your full picture, she breaks it down into bite sized pieces, so you can put it together the way you need to put it together. And they're like, oh, okay, you know, they're like, because I can't see how to get where I'm going from looking at the big picture. I'm like, that's why you need someone with a strategy mindset, which is what you have you and it comes so natural to you. You don't get ruffled whenever one thing's not going right because you're already expecting it to not go Hopefully I've planned it out properly and nothing does go wrong. But you know, life happens and and things do go wrong. And as I tell my client, no one in the audience knows that something's wrong. Exactly like when you get married, and you know, something will go wrong, but nobody will really even notice it. You know, just go with the flow. Have a great day, do your message. And we'll make sure that everything runs smoothly. So, you know, that's and I'm pretty even keeled. I don't I don't have extreme highs or lows. So, so I can keep it together and, and make sure everything works. You know, well, even in a in a kind of, you know, emergency situation. What is that old commercial? Never let them see you sweat. Yeah, those are the people you want in your corner is the ones that never let you see like Let them see you sweat. So I know, yesterday I got a notification, I have a large organization that I'm a part of. And we have two annual or two meetings a year that we do training for new new people that have joined our organization. And we have people come from all around the world. And they ended up after some major thought in listening to research and listening to the guests and everything. They decided to postpone this one and just resume in August. And, you know, there's there's definitely some some challenges when you have a big event. I mean, we're expecting 3000 people coming. And we're now postponing this event that's supposed to happen in two weeks. And now And so, one of the things that I realized and A lot of people don't is how many how this affects a trickle effect across so many parts, like I heard today, you know, on the news they were talking about, well the event will be fine because the event has insurance and that's true the event has an entrance has an insurance policy most events have insurance policies and if you're doing an event without an insurance policy, shame on you. But um, most events have insurance policy, but the the hotel that it was being held at the servers that were there, the transportation to him from the airport, the airport, so you know, we're dealing right now, in this time and age with this thing called the corona virus. And I've got a friend that's in Italy that owns a bed and breakfast who's totally impacted by this because she's in the we're all the study abroad students are at. So although all of them have been sent home, and so the parents aren't coming to visit the kids, the kids aren't there. There's a lot that's going on. And if I were an event organizer, even though I knew I had insurance, I think I'd be freaking out right now. Do you have anybody that you're hearing that about? Well, I mean, Justin there in Texas, I know that South by Southwest was canceled, yo. And I mean, and that's millions and millions of dollars to the local, you know, economy, right. lost. So yes, this is this is definitely causing some major troubles. The, you know, the things that the conferences that I know of right now that are in our industry are still happening, because they tend to be us centric, right. So those are still going on. But yeah, I'm also a member of the meeting planners International, so I know it Hitting big time to a lot of people. And Damn, I wish I had zoom. Zoom is doing magnificently over these last couple of weeks, right? Because companies are just making them now virtual meetings. And so you know, things can we can, we can flip things around. And and as I said, you know if something goes wrong, we'll fix it. You know, if something like this happens, and we can't have a live event, so let's have a virtual event, we can do it. Well, and that's part of what we've been talking about here lately is bringing in some people in doing virtual summit with people because we can get their messages out, we can band together stronger. You know, part of what we do is dig services help promote and empower other women and doing a virtual summit and in people like well, I want to be in a room with a bunch of girlfriends. I'm like right now, you know, Or, or invite your closest friends over to your house to watch the summit together. You know, there's a lot of different ways that we can think through this and do this a little bit better. But I know I sprung that question on you and it wasn't one that we had talked about discussing, but I figured it was right there in the middle of what we're doing right now. And you know, it needed to be addressed. I heard somebody the other day telling me that they were doing an event and they had like 1000 tickets sold. It was an outdoor event in April here in Texas. And I was like, okay, so you know, what's your what what insurance agent did you use for your event planning because I know a few that are in that industry. He goes, I don't have event insurance. I'm like you What? You're talking tornado season. You're talking rainy season. You're talking you just you chose the month in Texas that you just don't do that without an insurance policy. He was like, What? I had no idea so had him on the phone with an insurance agent ASAP you know? Oh, Lord better be glad you were there. Yeah, I'm coming. I'm coming in for dummies event in April as well. Yeah, I'll be I'll be there in Texas. Yeah. In in April, in that semi neighboring town, so I will be there as well. So excited about that. So now, you said that you worked with it was Bev right. The thought leader you worked with Yeah, Beverly, Kay, she, she Beverly Kay. She's amazing in the area of career development, employee engagement and retention, and her books, which Okay, so I don't know if you know this statistics, but most business books, the average sales are like 6000 over the period of their lifespan. Bev's love lose them has sold over a million copies? Well, yeah. And what we do did is that from her books, there were workshops created that were then sold to fortune 1000 companies. So we only worked with companies of 10,000 or more employees. Wow. But yeah, yeah. So it was a, it was a nice, nice, you know, but as you know, anytime you have a company and people that you are now responsible for, it's a headache. And at 75, she said, Okay, I'm kind of done with that whole aspect. She still speaks, but there was just no need for a full time in person and so, so and I totally understood that and I kept telling her because she was, she was feeling very upset that, you know, she was gonna let me go and I said, Beth, you do not owe me a job. You know, it's okay. It's over. Kay, right. And I'm so glad that it was so positive because, as I said, she has referred me to a number of different people that I work with now. And, and I'm having much more fun because instead of one author that I knew inside and out and all her, you know, her, her her speak, so to speak, and write, you know, so it did get kind of boring. You know, work can get can be boring if you're not totally engaged. Well, now I get to work with so many different authors that I've learned from each one. And it's something different each day. So I am enjoying this fourth chapter in my life. So, you know, I mean, how many women at 62 can say, Hey, I am enjoying the heck out of working? Well, I think it's great, you know, how you speak above and how she she you know, Caring for you. It's evident that she inspired you, as well. Who were some of the other women that have been in your life that have inspired you? Well, you know, in my actual life, I mean, my mom was amazing and just really stoic. So I think I get my even keel from her. Every client I have. And I'd say probably 90% of my clients are women. Every client I have really does, you know, inspire me because I love each of their messages, and they're important. And so they inspire me to want to get them, you know, more and more visibility, because what they're talking about is important. If we're talking about you know, like, someone that's famous, my my role model, and don't laugh at me, okay? My role model is actually Dolly Parton. Oh, wow, that woman. Not only is she self deprecating, I mean, she's not full of herself, right? She's self deprecating. She is one of the most brilliant businesswoman. She has. She has a music book have over three 4000 songs that other people have sung. So, I mean, she's rolling in it, but she is also giving back. Like, like no other. Do you realize that Dolly Parton is like the number one book distributor in the world? Because she makes sure that every child that that writes to her will get a book every month from date of birth to the age of five when they enter school. Wow. I had just recently heard about her love for books and what she was doing, but I did not know that little tidbit. I believe, I believe the statistics are that she has given away over a billion books. Wow. Yeah. I mean, I hear those stories. And you know, I am small potatoes. But I hear those stories and I just think, oh, wow, Lord, can I just win the lottery and just have fun giving it away? Because that would just to me, that would make me happy. Right would make me happy. Right. So I just I just totally love Dolly Parton. I'm in love with Dolly Parton. Well, you and my husband so my husband has said that his one concert he wants to go to he wants to see he is super in love with Dolly Parton. You know, and we're, you know, we're still in our 40s and he's like, I don't know what it is. She's just she's so so engaging and so real. And doesn't take herself too seriously. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so giving and I have never heard word one that's negative about Dolly Parton from anybody. And damn if I could look like that and still wear those heels that 80 I think she's close to 80 you know, and if it's gonna go Holy moly, really look great. Right. And you know, we've been watching we watched that heartstrings that she had on Netflix not too long ago and have watched a couple of specials that she's had on. And, and I guess the part that I appreciate is in a world where we're faced with so many fake people are people faking it till they make it? She is just real and genuine and authentic and makes you feel even through the TV like you're her best friend right there in the room whether, yeah, exactly. And she'll tell you a lot of her his fate. Yeah, she'll say a lot of you a lot of mistake, but my heart isn't. Yeah. Yeah. So, I know, I know I'm one of the people that you've inspired. So tell me about some of the people that you hope to inspire and you know what what would you like your legacy to be? You know, years from now whenever people think of you, you know, a year 510 however many years from now when they think of you what is what are some things you want them to, to say are you hope that they have felt from you? Well, on a personal basis, you know, that I was a great mom and Grammy and, and a good and a great friend, you know. I hope that people see me as you know, being giving and, and and there to help whenever is necessary. But on a business level, I would love people to realize it's never too late to go out and start your own company. You know, when they when they started saying, you know, retire at 60 or 65, we were only living till 67 or 68. Right? Well, my mom is 91 years old. Wow, I had no intention of sitting on my tush for the next 30 years. You know, I mean, the thought is just repulsive. I need to be out and about doing stuff. So I'd really love to inspire people to say, you know what, I have this amazing idea and I'm going to start a company because you don't have to go into hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. I went into no debt, no debt. I literally started my company in my home office with a laptop and my telephone. That's it, right? I didn't even have a printer when I started. Do now but you know, it's like you can start with with being something really small with this gig economy the way that it is, you can you can do a project by project type basis, do a good job, get a referral, right? And just build it that way. Right now, I would say 95% of my business comes from referrals. So, you know, I don't have to go into hundreds of thousands of dollars of marketing and all that fun stuff. Seeing as though it's really not my thing to be in front of the camera, but I i will say I do love doing the podcasts and radio shows. I always have a face for radio, but but, you know, I like to just let people know, don't just because you're over 60 does not mean we need to, you know, crawl into a ball and say we're done. We still have another good chapter or two in our, in our book. Well, and we, it's whether you start a business, whether you start a nonprofit, whether you just start a group of friends that are hanging out together, get out and do stuff with people, engage with people, pay it forward, go to the schools and read the little kids. You know, there's so much that we could be doing. My husband's been working in the plumbing industry for 30 years, his body's starting to give out so he's starting to think about what are some ways he can reinvent himself? Cool. So let's, um, let's ask you this, out of the people that you're working with now, how have they inspired you to grow your business or shift your business? We talked a little bit about the niche market of what bad ad, you know, right? I know being a verb, you can say I'm a virtual assistant and everybody wants to go Okay, here's billing. Here's this. Here's that and yeah, but you said very specifically who you work with did Beth, help you do that or the clients that you started drawing in because of your personality and and what you were good at? Well, I knew that my niece was the speaking, you know, author industry because that's where my superpowers lie. And that's what I know. So I knew that that was my niche. I didn't know really that much about podcasting, but realized that that is the media of the future, and is growing leaps and bounds. And so I embraced that whole, you know, community and what an amazing community in the podcasting world is. But my, my offerings have changed. When I first started, I thought it was going to be the administrative, you know, all administrative kind of work. And I found that that's not necessary. What especially new authors were looking for. Now, I'm not a booking agent, I don't go and find, you know, paid speaking gigs as, as the only thing that I do, and if that's all that they want, I am now referring people to a couple of booking agents that I like, right? But, but my offerings have kind of changed. And what I've realized is that there are a great number of people who have been in corporate America for 20 or 25 years, who have a story and or a method of doing something that they want to now go into consulting and be a speaker and write their own book. And so I found that my mentoring in that area is really where I'm moving towards I have other women. And that's actually another aspect of what's important to me is I hire other women who have been marginalized, such as myself, who at 60 have amazing skill sets still to offer my clients. And yet, I also have a number of young moms who don't necessarily want to work a 40 hour week, because they want to be stay at home moms, but especially here in Los Angeles, you need that extra income to make ends meet. So that I have a number of young moms that helped me with the research and data entry and things along that line that honestly, I don't want to do anymore, right. But it gives them an income to help their family out. So that's like my back end mission within the company or who I hire and why I like I really try to take on those people that quote unquote, aren't hireable because they're not willing to put in the hours of corporate, you know, work that's necessary, that kind of thing. So, so that kind of what I'm about. Well, and I think it goes hand in hand with a lot of what I'm seeing in the women's marketplace for working nowadays. There's the our riveter, that makes the purses, it's the military spouses that make the purses and they know that military spouses get transported all the time. They get MCs to move, and it's hard to find a job and then because your spouse may be deployed, you've got to have a job that will be flexible with you being mom and dad to your kids while while your spouse is deployed. So they have a business model that they have components of their purses are put together and made by these male spouses and then they come back to the warehouse to be put together. And so and there's an virtual, another virtual assistant company out there that that engages male spouses to, to work for them as well. And then you've got more and more Abby, even, even our government here, then partly because of the corona virus has been testing out more and more people working from home doing it remotely. And, and so we got to stop thinking about, you know, butts and seats in the office and start thinking about how we can still be productive and make an impact for what we need to do. There are jobs out there. There are a lot of scam jobs out there big market of right now. But there are jobs, there's ways to serve people and there's a way to serve your own bottom line. If you're just willing to look forward, I know when we started my company several years ago, I started doing social media for companies and I worked with nonprofits and businesses and everything. But then whenever I got tired of doing the social media stuff, I'd say, you kind of evolved, you start working on what you what you really love, and you, you kind of evolve and you start realizing that that part while you It was fun, and it brought in money. It's not where you want to hang your hat now, because you've grown, you've evolved. And so I brought in another mom that had just had a baby. She kind of wanted to stay home with him for a while, got her trained up, and then she kept getting more and more training, and she rolled out into her own business, and great and even from there, she's now her child's in school, and she's gone on to work for a corporate company and this is what she's doing. It wasn't something that she went to school for. She took four years of college for did all this she had real hands on OJT to learn this skill test it be able to show what all she was able to accomplish on her own. And she never worked in an office she was home for her kids she worked everything around her kids schedule you know there were a few times she'd be on a conference call video call whatever and in the background her son's you know, coloring the wall with a marker or pouring cereal places that happens. Yes, she was there. I think you need to be realistic about whether you're capable of being a virtual person, right? Um, some aren't that great at and staying on task. If if you're the kind of you know, squirrel kind of person, that might not be the way to go. Believe it or not, I was actual a Virtual Employee back in 1991. Wow. Before there was such a thing, because I had been a recruiter and got married, had my kids and decided I wanted to stay at home. And, and my boss tracked me down after, like 10 years, and tracked me down and said, I just started this new company, I really want you to come on board. And I said, Well, okay, as long as I can do it from home, and he knew what I was capable of and said, okay, right. And I owe him so much because I was able to help support my family, and yet still could be the room mom, the Girl Scout leader and everything else like that. So it, you know, through the years, I understand and I know that I have the capability to stay totally focused and on task and, you know, not go down and turn on the TV or anything along that lines. It's like I am at work. And then I'm not right. Although I'm not as good as the and not Oh, I I literally last night, I got up and I did some, some tweets and stuff for a client at like 930 at night so that I could get it all loaded up. And, you know, make her happy. So, you know, it's like, I'm not that great at not staying at work, but but I'm working on that. Yeah, I totally get it my husband, you know, owning a plumbing business. It's a 24 seven on call for commercial emergencies. He works a lot. So when works, I try and work. And in that way when he's not working, we can actually go to dinner or we can go and do some of these other things. So I have set working hours during the day that take phone calls and do appointments. But if he's working outside of those normal working hours, I'll work so that maybe I don't have to have those. You know, if I've got free time with him, I can go to breakfast or I can go to lunch or dinner or we can go shopping for the kids. So my schedule looks a little hinky yet because it's not the norm of what everybody else sees. But, you know, it's it's also something that works for us. And it's, it's this is when we're, we're connected with people. This is when we're working with people. I had somebody messaged me last week. Hey, can we get on a call today? I'm like, Nope. Not today. You know, as I say, not today, Satan. But you know, yes, we can get on it. Call it just won't be today, it may be next week into next week before I can get on a call with you. And that's because I'm trying to be diligent of my time and not just block out the time for appointments and calls with people, but also block up the time to work on the projects can work on the tasks. And I think that's part of the discipline you're talking about of having the right mindset to do the job, you know, exactly. I know, I'm being pushed and challenged on writing, and I've blocked out my writing time for my books and, and I'm working on that and it's set up as an appointment. It's an appointment with myself in my laptop, and that's where I will be there. Yes. So no, no temptations. So we're about to take a break here in a couple of minutes. And when we do, it'll just be a quick short break. But when we come back, we're going to talk about some of the victories you've had. We've had, we may have touched on some of them, but we now There's women that are challenged with what life's facing them or what they're facing in life right now, or maybe they faced it years ago and they just haven't been able to get past something that keeps holding them back. And we like to hear those stories of victory from women that have kind of weathered the storms and come out on the other side. Just as a way to shine a spotlight into those dark splay spaces and let them know that we see them there. And you know, I may not be able to reach out to somebody and help them out of the dark space they're in but maybe you have the key that can unlock that dark space. So we're going to talk about that when we come back from this break. All right, we are back with Laurie and speak says we are talking more about her starting a business at the age of 60. We'll throw that out there. I hate telling women's age on the air but I love the story behind it. So That's That in itself, you know, people start talking about wanting to wind their business down at the age of 40 or 50 or 60 in your revenue up so, to me that sounds like a huge victory, but what are some other victories you've had in your life personally, professionally? You know, what are some of the I don't I don't want to assume that you just arrived and everything was perfect. Oh, gosh, no. Well, you know, it's interesting because Andrew, you know, I'm a big girl. And and so you know, life life in Los Angeles where everyone is a thinks they need to be a Barbie. I never really quite fit in. But and so hold on a second. I'm losing you. Are you Is everything okay? Can you hear me? Yes. Okay. It filter dummy. I so apologize, but Maybe it was God saying quit talking about being fat Laureen but you know, I mean, that was a hard road and I have some some major situations of being picked on. And I'll be honest with you, it took me until I was 50 to embrace the fact that this is the size that I am, this is the size that I am going to be. And I'm not going to change for anyone else. And I if I could teach the girls out there to love themselves. You know, so that they don't go through all the trials and tribulations of not thinking you're good enough. Because you're big is so, so important to me to get that message out. Love yourself the way that you are and and you'll find out that people will gravitate towards you because you become much more sure of yourself. unconfident and unfortunately, like I said, it took me to my 50s before I said, I'm done with this, you know, this is me Get over it. So, you know, that was that was part of my growing up and and maturing and you know, I guess another victory over the stuff when when bad things happen you know I went through a divorce and and and I still have yet to to remarry i mean you know there have been a couple of really nice men in my life but I I realized and here's something that I could do it myself that I didn't need a man to give me my worth, or to take care of me financially. I was capable doing it myself. Now, that doesn't mean that I wouldn't love to have a partner in life. But I realized I didn't need it. So I wasn't going to settle. Right? For someone that wasn't right for me. And I think too many of us women, you know, think that we have to have that man in our life. And and I say no at bros, embrace your powers yourself. Especially if it's a it's not a healthy relationship. So I guess those are really, I kind of have had a great life with you. I mean, I've been very lucky. So, you know, so and I'm the type of person that I have always looked at the glass half full, and I focus on the positives. And so that's what's really important when I went through the divorce My reaction was, okay. I don't want someone that doesn't want to be with me. Go Go. It's okay. But I have friends that to this day still can't stand my assessment. I let it go ages ago right ages ago. Let it go. If I can fix something, I fix it. I kind of tease sometimes I say I'm a guy with boobs. Because I am that type of person that if I, I want to fix it for you. I'm not one that just wants to listen and go all. Okay, I hear ya. Now I want to fix it. Right? I'm so much more like a guy in that way. But if I can't fix it, I let it go. And I won't. I won't sit there and and, you know, let it fester in my life. If there's nothing I can do about it. I don't have control. I let it go and I put it in God's hands. That's all good. Well, I think I think you touched on something there you know your your divorce, there may be people that are more devastated for you than you were actually devastated in the divorce. And a few years ago, I was doing a training down in San Antonio and we were having people do a life map. And on this life map, we had them put everything that was positive in their life above a line, write it on this big poster board, everything that they had encountered negatively in their life, they wrote below the line. And there were two women at the same table. And they both had divorce on there's one handed above the line, one headed below the line. The one that headed above the line said she had been set free from a very toxic relationship. The one the below the line was just totally devastated that her marriage had ended and basically her life had stalled out from that point in her life. And she just wasn't living and so It was beautiful watching that one that the divorce was freeing for her to be able to speak life and freedom into this other woman. And you know it their their experiences in the moment were very different. But the the ability to help that one that was stuck in the darkness come out of it was so beautiful to watch. And they spent weeks and months talking with each other and encouraging each other and empowering each other. Through that it was more one sided for a while. But then after that, while they they became really good friends and started doing some workshops for women that were going through divorce, and it said it in their work. Their theme was it doesn't matter how you're viewing your divorce, this workshop is for women to help you move on to the next chapter, you know, and it was it was a great thing that they did and and i don't know that they do those workshops. anymore but it was it was two polar opposite views of how one in one thing can impact a person. And exactly, you know, I know I've had this conversation with another friend of mine when I had my sexual assault, she had a sexual assault as well. Well, our reactions were two totally different reactions to it, you know, and, and, but it doesn't mean that we can't help somebody I can help somebody that had the opposite reaction I had she can help somebody that had the opposite reaction she had as we talk about it and open it up and peel back the layers of of what it all is but it goes back to more of what you you shared about loving yourself. You know, you have to do that first. Well, you know, there's this great gal Allison Donaghy, who is a podcaster. Her with Dominic No thinking, and she is all about taking yourself out of a victim state and into a freedom state. And part of that is just, you know, letting it go and understanding what your part in the situation was. You know, I mean, when I went through the divorce, and he cheated to get out, you know, but, you know, it was his fault, right? But no, there there, you know, there were things that after 15 years of marriage, you know, life got you know, we were all wrapped up and I was wrapped up in the kids with kids, kids. And and so, you know, I didn't probably give him the attention that he wanted. I will own that part. Right. Not that it was not this is doing right. But I will own that part, that maybe I was being the best wife either. And so, so I loved her framing of being able to get out of the victim state and into the freedom state because of the fact you can see where you own it, and then let it go. Right, right. And that's what we need to do is you need to just let it go. Let it go and move on. And I know that it's easier said than done. But, you know, and depending, especially depending on the situation, you know, an assault is is completely different than a divorce. Although it is and it isn't, if you think about it, right, because you can still be a victim either way, right? But, but it's like, move, you gotta let it go and move on. Because otherwise they're still having that control over you. Well, you know, I we when I left working at the church I was at before I started my business. We had this I worked in the business office, we had this thing that used to happen where there was stuff that was bought for our offices and they were bought specifically for our style or our look or or whatever the decor person that came in that decorated our offices decorated it towards our style. So when we left we had we normally had the option to ask to purchase or you know, because they would be redecorating it for the next person. So I went nice specifically asked for the chair that I had. It's kind of like the chair I'm sitting in today kind of an area on type chair. And it was very ergonomically correct. And I'd had the chair for five years it was kind of it had some issues with it, but it was molded to my but you know, to be honest, I liked that. I liked that chair. And my boss. I went to him and st if I could have the chair and he goes well as long as so and so approves that I have no problem with it. So it's getting close to the day that I'm leaving the company and everything and he comes back to me. He goes, if you're gonna get that chair I need, you know, we're getting your final paycheck and all that stuff lined out. I need to know what price you were told on it from, you know, whatever the facilities department was, and that asset I was told no. And the look on my boss's face because it was his boss that told me no, the look of my boss's face was just pure shock. Because in the five years I'd been there, nobody had told me no before. And he just looked at me and started and he goes, No, seriously, I'm like, I'm, I'm serious. Todd told me no, he's like, No, he didn't tell it's never told, you know. And, and for me, it was kind of like, Alright, now I have a right to be offended because I Even even Josh thinks it's wrong that I'm offended that that Todd told me now that he said no. And, you know, it wasn't a big offense. I'm using this kind of tongue in cheek because it's a funny story. I mean, Todd even came to me one day, I'm training my replacement, and I've got her staying there. And Todd comes running down the hall with this phone and he's got the old Groucho Marx song. It doesn't matter what you say how you phrase it, anyway, I'm against it. And he's playing that and I'm like, Pastor Todd, please meet my replacement. You know, I'm introducing Rosie's trash talking me it was a great moment. But this this business of mystery was kind of taking up an offense for me. I'm like, I don't know what the deal is. I'm not offended. It just shocked me and, and then that moment I went from dealing with my own shock to now I'm dealing with his feelings about this and you A lot of times when we tell somebody we're getting a divorce, or we've been fired, or, you know, we've been assaulted or whatever the tragic moment that comes up, we don't even get a chance to deal with our own emotions first and foremost, because we're constantly dealing with other people's emotions about what happened to us. So what I what I like is you keep saying, Let it go move on, you've got friends that were offended, but you're not letting them impact how you feel, or how your own you're feeling about yourself. Because you're like, it's done. It's over with I've moved on we say girl with long hair, because that's what we were called when we were in the military. I mean guy with long hair. That's what we were when we were in the military. We're just dudes with long hair. So you know, the not letting other people's thoughts come in and keep you stuck. Is it Something that I picked up in what you said you know those people can be offended and be mad at your ex and never want to speak to him again or, and that's fine. That's their feelings and their emotions. But you know, it doesn't disqualify you who you are what you were called to be how great you are and, and you know, it doesn't define anything else about you. It doesn't allow you to I tell people it's okay to park your boat there for a little bit but don't build a mansion around it. Oh, I like that. I like that. So I love that analogy. Yeah, if you need to go go to the gym, punch a couple of punching bags, do some kickboxing whatever, get it out of your system, and then move on. And in. Too often we're hearing that these people are parking their boats and building a mansion and and they've now got land attached to this. This thing that is become a problem in their life and You know, they'll never break the boundaries of that land because they're just, they're too hung up and what has happened to them that they can't see the rest of the world out there that's there for them at the moment and look at you, you're touching so many lives through the people that you serve. You know, every time one of those speakers you work with goes out and speaks or does a podcast or does whatever it is that they're doing. That's one of your touch points. Every time they're writing a book and putting a book out. That's one of your touch points. It may not be your voice, it may not be your thing, but you've touched it, and it's a an extension of what you've done and and all because you didn't sit back and go, Oh, well. He said I wasn't worth it. Or, you know, yeah, you're you're doing it or, you know, you say the face for radio jokingly and all that self deprecating thing, but you've got a voice that needs to be heard and needs to be shared and It doesn't matter what means it gets out there. It doesn't matter what you look like it needs to be heard. And you're not letting any of it stop you. So right, good job. Right. Thanks. Yeah, no, I think we need to embrace our own superpowers and embrace your worst. And, and unfortunately, it does take some of us longer than others. And I would love to see, you know, women, younger women having that confidence from the get go. And I think that's actually one of the things I'm probably most proud of is my daughter, who, up until about a year and a half ago was bigger than I still had the most self assured, amazing personality. You know, that just nothing stopped her. Right and Yet, you know, she was bigger than I. And I swear people are just getting mean more mean and more mean or meaner and meaner. I don't know, which is the correct way. But over the last year and a half though, she has lost 140 pounds. Wow. So wait, yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, you know, because she is so determined and so sure of herself, that when she finally made the decision, because she had had a couple kids and want to be there for them. Right, right. She made that decision and stuck to it. But, but it wasn't based on just the her luck. It was based on her health. So you know, just just having your own power is important. And you need to embrace that. Sounds like she's got some tenacity for my mama. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think so. I think We are we are very, we are very similar people. You know, we don't take a lot of stuff from people, right. I edited there too. But yeah, you know, we are, I have raised some real self assured women. And I have an amazing son, who also has a very self assured wife, who he supports and they support each other. I think, you know, as you say, what are some of the victories the victories are that all three of my kids are amazing adults who are happily married, and their spouses are amazing. And what more can I ask? They're happy, you know, and they, and they're giving me grandbabies. in Erie, we're done. I'm so upset. I'm not gonna have any more babies. Yeah, well, my, my two grandkids just turned six this week. So this weekend, so yeah, and I'm not called Grameen diva is my grandma name. So Oh, I love it. I love it. I love it. I love though. They, they definitely call me Davis. So I love that. But, um, so, in the middle of that, you know, what I love? What I kind of heard between the lines is, you know, your daughter with that transition and her outer appearance. You know, a lot of times people look at, you know, people that are overweight like myself, and they think that they're not strong that they're not self assured. Now we can walk in the room and prove them wrong, but first glance there, they're not gonna think that right off the bat. And so, one of the things that I've realized even through my my transformation of Losing weight, and still not near my goal weight yet, but in my transformation of losing weight is people do start looking at you differently. They do start thinking about you differently. And the thing is, is it's hard to explain that I never thought differently about myself. You just did. Right. Right. Exactly. Exactly. And yet, it's, it's also important to as long as you're healthy, right, right. To to accept yourself. Right. And so, so that's, that, to me is very important. You know, one of the things that always irritated me is that fat slob seemed to go together, right? Well, you will never, ever see me out in public. not totally put together. Every You know, there is no And, you know, dressed appropriately. And, you know, it's just so I have that in and of myself is just like, you may call me fat. But you will never call me a slob. Right? Right? Because that's, that's fine. I'm a big girl, too bad. Get over it. This is me. At this point. If I lost weight, it'd just be hanging skin. So I don't really care. It's like, no way. It's like, I'm healthy. You know, I'm not on any meds. I'm all good. So. So it's like, move on. Let's get on to the business. And I think I come across with a level of confidence that most people don't really, you know, stop and think, well, I don't want to work with her. She's sad. Right? Right. Well, it has. What's important is our brain. Exactly in it and it's one of those. One of those comments somebody made the comment what was it about it? A year ago, there was an event A friend of mine was on and they had only seen her headshots and if you look at her headshots, you think she's fairly skinny. You know very always put together. All of that right? Well then they invited her because they listened to her on a podcast how great she was an invited or to speak at an event and then they were it was a health and wellness event that she was speaking at. And she's got these amazing clients all over the West Coast and she's ran several multi million dollar businesses and and all in the skincare business and Health and Wellness Business, but she's not the model size. She's not skinny. She's not what everybody puts in when she showed up at the event. They were offended because of her size. Nice started being ugly to her. And oh my gosh. And she was like, wait a minute you listen to my podcasts, you heard the wealth of information I have. And they're like, Yeah, but the way you're you talked about on your podcast and what you're dealing with, don't seem to match up and she goes, show me where and they couldn't show her where what she was saying didn't match up with what she had promoted. It just they had a instant flip in their head as to what they had envisioned and what they had hoped to see. And of course, every other person up there look like canon Barbie, you know? And yeah, I'm like, but this is real life. This is gonna get the people that you want to help to get to Ken and Barbie status or whatever you want to call it. Yeah, but well, and and I mean, she's being real. Oh, yeah, exactly. at that. Yeah. That's just ridiculous. really ridiculous. And, and, and hopefully she stuck to her, you know, her principal, and she told him she wouldn't. She told him she would not worry about speaking from their stage. So that day, she really didn't need to speak from their stage, she would just take her check and go home. Oh, good for her. And they're like, well, if you're not speaking, we don't want to, we're not gonna pay you and she goes, No, we have a contract. You can just pay me and I will leave that way. You don't have to be disgusted by my appearance, and they're like, we never used the word disgusted and she's like, but she did in a not so kind way, you know, she, she was very firm. She's a businesswoman. So she is very good and strong and confident because they weren't seeing her the way she saw herself. Mm hmm. And I think I think that's, that's something that we have to be mindful of. We may think That we're, you know, strong and powerful and mighty. But we also realize that maybe not everybody sees us the way we see ourselves. And sometimes we just have to remove ourselves from their presence because it'll never be realized. And sadly, but the other side can also be true. You could see a beautiful girl who you think has it all together? And she does not think at all highly of herself. Exactly. So, you know, it's like, so love thyself, right, right. Know thyself. Well, I think we're all in whether you're gorgeous or not gorgeous or fat or skinny, or purple or brown or whatever. You're all beautiful, because God made you that way. So well, the way I look at it, and I do Do you know, it's one of those things that you you look at it and you go, Okay, I have been at the place where I believe the things people said negatively about me more moreso than then I should have, but then I evolved and then I started realizing that as long as I keep harping on those negative things, I will never see the positive things. So then I started shifting my thought process and and there will still be days. I'll go in Angie Lee Monroe, what were you thinking in? And I give myself that talk or, you know, come on, girl, get it together. Yeah. My husband I were talking I've had a couple of low memory things here lately that I'm just like, Okay, what in the world is going on with me? And, you know, it may it starts to make you think, Okay, well, I'm just not got it together. I'm just not this. I'm just not that. But really what it is, is you're not taking time to put margin and to allow room to breathe. It's what it is. And so in doing that, I had To be hold myself a little more accountable to how much I was putting on my plate, how much I was expecting of others how much I was expecting of myself. And I'm just gonna lead into our next little segment because what I know about you is when it comes to helping people reach their professional goals, your great accountability partner, I mean, you are the way you phrase things as you phrase things to set people up for success. So you were working on a project for me last summer and you're like, Okay, I'm going to get this to you by such and such time. How much time do you need to review it so we could set up a call? It was so there wasn't just a deadline on you. There was a deadline on me as well. And, and many people seem to blur the line between politeness and accountability. So, you know, I've told the story before my friend that never really wanted to hold me accountable for working out The gym because she didn't want to be held accountable for working out in the gym. But when we were in the office space together, she was phenomenal at it. I've had people I've given permission to, to speak into my life and say, you know, hold me accountable for doing things on certain dates and times and be consistent. But then they don't because they know that I'm a strong individual person. And I know that I know I should be doing it. But just because I know I should go to the gym and eat healthy every day doesn't mean that I necessarily do. And I've given permission to somebody to speak into my life to hold me accountable in those areas. And they don't, because they're afraid it's not polite to speak into that. Then we have a problem. So yeah, well with Yeah, with my clients. It really is. That's what they've asked me to do. And I'm not only holding them accountable, but I'm making the business accountable. As I told you earlier, you know, mentoring has really been my passion. And I think my clients all know that if I call them on something, or if I tell them, you know, you really should think about this, you know, going forward, they know it comes from a place of love, and a place of trying to make them better. So, you know, I don't think I've ever really gotten, you know, negative negative with anyone. But, you know, I will, I will say, Wait, stop you, we need to look at this. Right. And I think they know that, that when I push back or when I hold them accountable, it's only for their own good. Yeah. And and, and that's one of the things that people don't realize is if you're asking somebody to hold you accountable, or you're holding somebody accountable, you've been given a treasure in that moment. You've been given insight you've been given authority you've been given You know, I get tickled at people going, Well, I just want to be an authority figure, I just want to have a voice into this area. And so, you know, I'll test out with people. I'm like, Okay, well, I'm gonna give you permission to challenge me in this area. And then they don't brilliant. And then they don't. And, I mean, the ones that do are awesome at it at all times, you know, and then I'll go, I'll kind of push back with them on in a joking way of, well, this was a test it was only a test. Like, no, not by, you know, I'll have some they'll go Nope, not buying it. If you you wouldn't have come up with that thought if you really didn't want to do it or, you know, so they'll, they'll push back and then there's the ones that, you know, you tell them to challenge you in an area and they just never hear from them again. Yeah, well, yeah. So you just say you sit there and you go, Okay, got it. Move on. right on to another accountability partner. I think we've all kind of been in now. masterminds and and, and what not nice still, to this day have a number of masterminds that I'm involved in, in an effort to learn more, and have myself grow as well as helping my other mastermind attendees. So, yeah, going forward. It's not only just the accountability function, but that have you thought about type function rail to give you another aspect that you may never have even looked at? And so I'm a big believer in the whole mastermind system. Well, whenever you're looking at your accountability partners, whether you're being the accountability partner, you're you're looking for somebody to be an accountability partner. And, you know, what are some of the boundaries that you look for? With accountability partners, do you set up phone calls? Do you set up appointments with them? What does having an accountability partner in your life look like? Yeah, well I have mentors which are those that are ahead of me in the business game that I tend to think that you know that we're such a virtual world. My meetings with them are usually zoom meetings. So that I get that one on one I can see what's landing and what's not. And or, you know, we can have a real you know, face to face. This is what's happening. What do I do now kind of thing? Because I will I'll be the first to admit, I don't know everything about everything. Amen. No, I am, I am. I am not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. So I believe in listening to everyone and although there are times when I can be a bit of an intellectual snob and I really am trying to work on that I have learned in my life that I can learn from anybody. And we need to take people's feedback and live in it for a sec. And either Okay, I see where she's coming from, you know, and and go with it or not. Yeah. And just as I tell my clients, well, here's what I think you should do, but it is still your voice, your message, your social media, whatever, it's still up to you. So here's what I think. But, you know, it is still you that is out there. And it's your presence so well, I think Yeah, I'm in a number of masterminds. I think I have the I think I know the answer you're gonna give to this but I'm gonna ask it anyway because I think the question needs to be asked and answered in a more in your face way, but when you have people that come to you. And we'll just use me as an example, say I come to you. And I'm wanting you to hold me accountable in these areas. And I'm just not pulling my weight in that relationship. And but you can see so much more potential for me that I'm really giving towards the effort that I'm asking you to hold me accountable for. So my question to you is this. Do you keep pushing them and challenging them? Or do you find a way to basically tell them or tell yourself to let it go until they're ready to come to that realization? Oh, yeah, I'll have all sort of have a come to Jesus with them. But if they still aren't getting it, I'll say, you know what, I'm here whenever you're ready to level up or to scale your business or whatever it may be. I'm here when you're when you're ready, but I cannot Be the one that cares the most about getting you to the next level, right? it you have to have that burning desire, you know, to actually make it come to fruition, if you are not passionate and have that burning desire, it's not gonna work anyway. Right? Even if I have the burning desire, right, right, you have to have it. So, I usually, you know, I do let it go in a way that I let them know why. Because you don't seem to be ready. Now I just had something pop in my head, you know, and it's, it's a wondering question. So I'm just gonna put it out there for those that are listening and those that are listening either live or to the, to the recording. You know, I want to ask myself this question and then also, as the audience are those that let me figure out how we're going phrase that those that are asking for you to hold them accountable and are not giving back the full weight of what she is so so you so let's just say I expect more from Susie q out here than she's actually

It's time for your weekly dose of inspiration and strategy from the Advanced Freelancing podcast. Before I kick off today's episode, if you love this show and listen every week, please hop on over to iTunes and consider leaving the show a review. It helps other people interested in similar content be able to find this show and benefit from all of the great tips that you have already heard. Today's guest wants you to consider one question. What if you could determine who in your audience is your best client in 180 seconds? Juliet Clark is a dynamic and sought after speaker and podcaster, who has spent the last 20 years helping authors, coaches, speakers, and small businesses all over the world build expert platforms. She created a platform building tool that assesses audience obstacles, generates leads, and qualifies leads for businesses. And she says her simple technology can be used from the stage, on social media, and at workshops to create conversations that build long term relationships. She's also the host of the Promote, Profit, and Publish podcast which helps entrepreneurs understand how to use great tools in the coaching and small business spaces. So we're going to be talking all about lead generation, lead qualification, and how to make that process easier for you. This is a hot topic for a lot of freelancers. Juliet’s story on how she became so knowledgeable about lead qualification and lead gen. So I'm out of college. I started out in traditional publishing. And I went on to work in advertising on a couple billion dollar accounts Chiat Day. And from there I went to being a stay at home mom and lasted two weeks. It was really hard. That is a hard job. And so I decided that I could balance my time between there and real estate. And the one thing that I carried through all of those was that you had to prequalify before you worked with people. And you also had to build a really solid Avatar and test and validate that avatar over and over and talk to those people. So, in 2007, I was going through a divorce and I wrote my first book. It was a mystery novel. I killed my ex husband in it. It was very cathartic. But the “what” came from that experience, besides not having to wear a felony orange jumpsuit, because it was metaphorically killing him in a book was that. When I went to publish my first book, I found a self publishing model that was horrendous. It did not serve authors at all. So I started my own company and then within that we had entrepreneurs bringing us a book. And they had written the book because their products and services weren't selling. And someone told them that, “You know, the book is the answer. It's why nobody knows you.” And I kind of said, “No, that's not it. Yeah, this is going to be another failed product.” So we developed, we worked with it, I found a platform that I really loved, and we started developing assessment marketing that was also lead generation. And as we got better and better over time with it, we put components in with it that were also qualification. So that when the people are working with the assessments, they're actually pre qualifying themselves for your business. I think that is such an important thing to consider that you have lead qualification processes built in when people are coming to you. Both with they are landing on your website, your landing pages, they're finding you some other way, but also when you're doing outreach with them. Where do you think most people get things wrong with lead qualification? So my there's a couple of things. My experience when I was in real estate was there was always a couple guys in the office who'd be like, “I have 60 leads.” And they never closed anything. And I had a really great team of people, we were selling about 60 houses a year. And we pre qualified everybody. It was such a huge difference in what we closed every year. So I think that pre pre qualification, we go out and we collect leads, but we don't really find out how interested they are. So that's one of the one of the things. The other thing is, it's easy for you to explain what you do and develop a product. But if you don't validate it first and know who that audience is, you can't replicate it for lead generation. So you have to be able to not only build that avatar, but also validate it. How would you recommend that somebody validate it if they're like brand new to starting their business? How do you figure out that this idea you have, this service or product has legs? So this is the second time I've had to answer this today. One of the things, and I know with freelancers, they work with a lot of coaches, authors, speakers,  and small businesses. And unfortunately, that business model is what I call “Bootstrap to Bankruptcy”. Because there are all these things that you need to be successful and one of them is not validating that product. So that's actually what we use the assessments for. We tell people that are brand new, like we're your first stop, you have an idea. Let's get you out on a stage or networking or wherever it is. Let's create this based on success principles and let them tell you if it's a valid product and if they would pay me money for it. Because you get a lot of lip service about, “Oh, I really love that.” And then nobody will pay anything for it. So I'd rather see you spend a couple thousand dollars and validate, then go out and hire that book coach and an online marketing coach and all of those things that are going to cost you anywhere from $10 to $100,000. I'd rather see you validate first. I see this a lot too with other authors. So I also do some freelance public relations work for nonfiction business book authors.  And it drives me crazy how many of them come to me and say, “I published my book three months ago, and it's not selling at all.” And I'm like, “Why are we waiting until three months after the book is launched to think about these kinds of things? Did anyone even want to read that book to begin with? And how much opportunity we've lost by you spending a year two years of your life working on this thing?” And then it's the parts of it like did it ever have legs to begin with? Was it ever validated? And then also, how can we make sure that that follow through comes all the way through the process, right? We can't just stop when you created the product. You have to build in your customer service.  And you have to build in your marketing. All those pieces have to be in place. I think a lot of people do struggle with lead qualification, too. Especially when you're doing something like cold outreach.  That's something a lot of freelancers do. They say I want to work with Procter and Gamble, or whatever. So they go do their research. They dig for hours to try to find the CMOS email address, write this custom pitch, and get in there. Then they forget about that lead qualification process just because it was a big name or a cool company. They still might not be your right client. So can you talk a little bit about, especially on a phone call, because that's usually the next step for a lot of freelancers, what information can you be asking for or listening for on a phone call to determine if a lead is not the right fit? So you've done your base level of investigation about this company or person, you think there's possibility to work together. How do I make sure about that before we sign a contract? So a lot of what we do inside of enrollment conversations is really talking to them about what's worked, what isn't working, what have you tried to get it to work, and really diving into that? The reasons for those conversations, even though they seem a little invasive, is you're going to find out a couple things. And they may not actually verbalize those things.You have to get really good at listening. So to give you an example, when someone comes to us, we ask those kinds of questions. And we might find out that they're blaming it on somebody else they worked with. But when you really get down to it and do some heavy listening and dig, dig, dig, you'll find out that the person you're talking to didn't take action. They didn't follow through. And so you're really listening for those patterns when they're telling you about those experiences. Because they will tell you a lot. You'll find out if you have an action person or a blame person.  You don't want that blame person at all. That's so true. I think it's equally important to be listening to hear the right things and logging away those red flags that come up in those early conversations. Because just like you were talking about, one thing I always tell freelancers is it's a bad sign if you're on the sales call, and they say, “I've hired 15 other freelancers before and no one could do the job right.” There is only one common denominator in those projects. And it was the person who didn't give good directions, didn't pay on time, or whatever it is that the client has done. So do you have tips for making that lead generation process faster for freelancers or any type of business owner? So that's actually what we use that assessment for, in depth, is we set the success principles of what we do and then you measure, as the potential client, where you're at in that. So we know not only how much help you need, but also you have an understanding coming into the call about how much help you need. Because sometimes I find that when we're pre qualifying, people don't realize how much help they actually need. They think they're doing better than they actually are. And for anybody, a freelancer, a business, that is a big red flag because their expectations may be much higher of what you're going to do for them than what you actually commit to do for them. It's definitely important to know where they're at and where they want to go. I use a loose form of pre qualification for the freelancers that I coach. I layout in the sales page this is the type of person I work with. These are the types of things we work on. And then I require that they do a brief phone call with me just to make sure that we're a fit beforehand. But I'm imagining that using something like a form where you ask questions could help pre qualify people to see if they're the right fit. But what do you do with the people where you read it  and you say, “Hmm, this isn't the right fit” or you look at their information they've emailed to you? Let's say you got a lead through your website that says, “I want to hire you to do these freelance services.” But you can tell it's not a fit for you and they didn't really pass your pre qualification test. Where do they go from there? How do you respond to that professionally? Juliet’s response to this sticky situation. Usually, I try to be a connector.  I will go back and explain to them, “Look, this is not really an area where we work well and I can see you need help here. I know somebody.” And then I give them a name and number and tell them they should contact them and see if they can help them a little bit better. That doesn't mean that you're giving bad leads to someone else. But you genuinely may not be the person to do that work. And most of the time, when we're referring, we're making a little bit of referral fee off of it as well. So it's not a total loss. But here's the thing about it, when you do something like that, and we just have this conversation in integrity, people come back and they send people to you. Because now they fully understand what you do. And they understand that you just didn't take their money and not deliver for the sake of taking their money. And that's huge when you're doing something like this. I think one thing that you might never know is the people who land on your lead qualification page who look at it and just in looking at it, realize that you two are not a fit and they don't even fill it out. So it's also doing a lot of that work for you. But people can self opt out and go, “This is like five questions long and I'm too busy to answer five questions.” If you're too busy to do that, we're never going to get anywhere on the project.   Anything else in that lead generation process can definitely help people realize “This is right for me.  This isn't right for me.” Now, one thing I see all the time, not so much in the freelance world, but in other businesses is this idea of buying leads. Now is that something that's still relevant? I mean, I would think it's worth the extra time to find your own leads and then pre qualify them. But then every so often, I do see people selling these lead generation services where they'll promise you a list of  X many companies. Juliet on buying leads. So here's the deal. Business is all about relationships. And that is one of the things when you and I initially talked that I told you in this click world out there, what we've developed, is for relationship building.  So when you go out and buy a lead, there are three different kinds of traffic out in the world. There is cold traffic, medium traffic, and hot traffic. Hot traffic is when you have referred somebody to me and you vouched for me. You really need this person.  That medium traffic is somebody who kind of knows you, following you trying to figure out what you're doing, and you're nurturing them. Those cold leads, they didn't ask to become a lead, for the most part. Or if you're in digital, they click and they don't really know you. A lot of times they've just clicked a click. So those people are really, really hard when you buy leads. And a lot of times when you go out and buy those, they're spam. So they're actually ticked off that you're like, “Where did you get my name?” So now you have no chance of building rapport and relationships. You should always go out and develop your own leads because you're the face of your business. You're the person that they're looking at.  Are you credible? Do you follow through and do what you say you're going to do? If I tell you when you hand me your card that I'm going to call you this afternoon, do I call you this afternoon? There's all of these things that they're evaluating that make it necessary for you to generate and pre qualify your own leads. It's such a great point, because I think so many people are looking for that magic bullet. The easy answer of, “Oh, well just give me a list of 10 or 50 companies that I can pitch.” And I always say that your odds of success are going to be so much higher if you make your own list of 10 companies you would like to work with and then do the research to see if on your initial review, they meet your lead qualification. It's just going to be so much more effective. The other thing I always wonder about those lead gen companies too is let's say they have a list of 50 companies, but 2000 people have bought that list of it, right? So now those people are really pissed off on that lead list because they're like, “Man, everyone under the sun is emailing me and I never asked for this information to come to me.” And that's such a great point because Juliet has a lot of clients who are trying to get into corporate workshops. And they think, “Okay, every corporation needs me.” Do you have any idea how many times a day that HR person is hounded for a workshop to come in? So the best thing you can do if you want to get into those places, is go to some place where you can network with those people. The fact is, if I am going to an event, and I want to meet the speakers or I want to do business with those people who have been vouched for that probably could use my services, I reached out to them on LinkedIn. And I say, “Hey, we're going to the blah blah blah event. I can't wait to see you speak.” And then walk up at the event, introduce yourself, “Hey, I reached out on LinkedIn.” And then talk to them. But here's the bigger tip. Sit next to them at the event because inevitably when you're sitting next to people conversation starts. Sit at their table or wherever, because that's where it all begins. That's where you get to make your first impression instead of an email or a solicitation phone call. Get out of the house and go network with those people that you really want to grab their business. And you may find out at those like, “Oh my gosh, that person's horrible. I really don't want to work there.” That tip about LinkedIn is so important because our email inboxes can get cluttered. But you can always do follow up on LinkedIn.  You can do initial outreach on LinkedIn. And then if you sit next to that speaker at that networking event, and they post about having spoken, you remind them of who you are by commenting on that on their social media. You say, “Hey, you did a great job. It was great to meet you.” You want to keep staying in their world. And I think that that is really, really important. So let's talk about the beginner person who's just starting out realizing that they need to have a better process for capturing incoming leads, what would you say would be the first step that they need to take? Where I'm going with this is a lot of freelancers go, “Oh, I can't launch my business yet. Because I don't have my website.” A website that has no traffic to it is so useless. So just skip it. I always just tell them that they don't need that unless they have this massive following and they have massive traffic already. Then yes, let's optimize your website and make sure there's a place on there for people to hire you. But I would think it's probably not set up your website. I'm wondering if there's something else people can do to sort of be lead friendly. Juliet explains how people can be lead friendly. How about a landing page? It costs about $50 to put up the landing page. You add a little about yourself, your services, and let's set an appointment. So you can send people to that landing page. Also get out and start developing content. Let's say that you and I had a conversation or we were going back and forth on LinkedIn a little and you expressed an area you were having a little bit of trouble and you may not hire me today. But wouldn't it be amazing if I served you by saying, “You know what, Laura? I wrote an article about this topic. Can I share it with you?” Then  leave the link and and just kind of start developing from there. You're showing them your value instead of telling them how valuable you are.  And how many times do we see people doing the opposite? It is rampant on Facebook and LinkedIn. “Help! I'm launching a podcast. Does anyone have any good resources?” And inevitably 10 people respond. “Hi, I'm a Podcast Producer here. Here's my services page, go check it out.” And it's like, I don't know who you are, you know what I mean? If you were the person that left me the link that said, “Hey, here's this great resource I found, or I took this course. I read this book. I listened to this podcast and it was awesome.” And continue to build that relationship. I feel like we're interacting as to humans, rather than you just see me as somebody who can be pitched. And I think that that's really important. I always laugh how many people seem to think that it's as easy as, you send a pitch or you get on a sales, contract sign, you've got the money, the company is in the person. It still goes back to relationships. We live in a digital world. And digital technology enables us to do all that other stuff faster, but we still have to go back to relationships at the end of the day. Juliet’s upcoming book. So this spring, I have a book called coming out it's actually called “Pitch Slapped”, because that's what I feel like when I go and you do that to me. Especially those people who are on LinkedIn, you connect with them and they say, “Hey, I've got this brand new program. Would you like it?” And it's like, “No, I don't even know who you are.” And half the time they haven't even done the research to see what it is you do. I've had people pitch me investment banking stuff. I'm like, “Did you even look at my profile? Like, I don't need investment banking. I'm not looking to have venture capital.” My favorite though is that people who are subtly insulting with their pitch where they're like, “I know how hard it is to work out.” You're like, “Oh my gosh, you're calling me out on my fitness or my nutrition.”  Not only have I been “pitch slapped” as Juliet says, but now there's like this undercurrent of like you have flagged me as your ideal lead because you think I need extra help. Juliet’s pet peeve. My pet peeve is men who email who tech. You go through Facebook Messenger and they say, “Hey, I have this great new meetup. I help women manage their money.” It's like when your husband tries to teach you how to play golf and tells you everything wrong. And you're not inspired by that. You want to hit him over the head with the club. It's so crazy that and this all goes back to that same topic of the proper lead qualification. Does this person want to hear your message? Are you reaching out in the most effective way to do it? Because maybe you do have some incredible supplement that burns fat, but there's a nicer way to go about it, or there's a more appropriate way to make sure that whoever you're targeting is the ideal person to hear that message. I might be willing to hear that at a networking event where they're just talking about their own experience using it. I actually have a rule that if someone does that to me on LinkedIn, I just remove the connection immediately. If the first message is,  “Hi! I sell XYZ. Here's the link to buy it. I'd love to help you.” I'm like, “Okay, remove connection.” Because there is no connection between us because you didn't take the time to even get to know me or spend that time Juliet shares a story. So I love to share this story. Someone did that to me. They wrote me a birthday message and this was like in 2016.  It was really nice message, “Hey, Happy Birthday. You deserve all the best in life. I’d love to help you get healthier in your next year.” And they signed it. So I wrote back, “Thank you.” Then here came the sales pitch. That would have been okay except 2017, they sent the exact same message. In 2018, I was at an event and the owner of this MLM said, “You know, my people are having a little problem with marketing. Do you think you can come in and talk to us?” And I said, “Oh my gosh, I have this great thing on social media. And guess what? I've got this messenger inside of my presentation that is what your guy keeps sending me every single year.” And he's like, “No way.” I was like, “Yeah, I use you guys as an example, in my presentation.” You don't want to be the bad example that someone is using to say what not to do, right? In my mind, it wouldn't take that much more effort for them to send you a personalized message that at least varies it up every year. He could log in a spreadsheet, pitched her in 2017 and didn't go anywhere. So let me not do that. Juliet pointed out that inside messenger, when you get that message, you can see the message above that's identical from the previous year. So vary it up. That's another good point. Because when you're doing this outreach to prospective clients, you want to vary it up. One of my most hated things with follow up is when a freelancer sends a pitch and then they respond to that message when no one answers and says, “Hey, just following up on this.” Don’t do that.  Give the person a reason to read your message that they might not have seen initially. Always add a little bit of personalization. And that goes back to that human connection. When you see someone else in your space or in another space who is doing things well and owns their expertise, go look at how they do it. You want to learn how to make great email newsletters, get go sign up for somebody list that has a 40% open rate and a high close rate. You want to learn about lead generation and pre qualifying go look at how Juliet has set up her own pre qualification on the quiz. So you can always take lessons from other people who are doing things right. Thanks for tuning in for another episode of the advanced freelancing podcast. For more freelance advice, get a copy of my book Start Your Own Freelance Writing Business—available now! Buy it from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, and more. Connect with Juliet: Quiz: leadlogicquiz.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julietdillonclark/ Podcast: Promote,Profit,Publish http://superbrandpublishing.com/how-to-subscribe-rate-our-podcast-5-stars-on-itunes/ Facebook Community: https://www.Platformbuilders.com Websites: http://www.superbrandpublishing.com Call to Action: http://promoteprofitpublishquiz.com

Hello, and welcome back to the lead generation for financial services podcast. This week we have got an old friend, Jodie Stevenson. Almost a year ago when we had our first podcast interview and that went to be the number one downloaded episode of last year.For every enquiry, she gets the leads, CRM, check for notifications and will schedule a chat with her client. And to make sure that she's on top of everything she uses a blank sheet of paper and knows exactly the template and just writes everything and gets it organised. She does that for every client until she runs out of paper. Recently she bought a notepad by Rocket Book. It is reusable, can automatically scan, upload to dropbox, digitally file, and then wipe clean and use again. And again.And if you happen to look for something like a file created 6 months ago, Rocket Book can easily find it for you and locates it in your dropbox file.Cost is £34.99. They've done microwavable one as well where you write in it and put it in the microwave and it will erase everything. It's a huge impact environmentally and it helps save a lot of waste.Transcription:Alex: Hello there, welcome back. And we've got an old friend with us. This week, we're catching up with Jodie Stevenson and it was pretty much a year to the date that we had our first podcast interview. And it went on to be the number one downloaded episode of last year, and of all time, so people talk about her a lot, actually, when they've, I think it's one of the kind of the earlier episodes that people sort of pick up on because it's one of the first mortgage brokers that we interviewed, and they've come on to become the most popular episodes. So I really enjoyed catching up with Jodie. So let's dive straight in. Hello, and welcome back to the lead generation for financial services podcast and I can't quite believe it's been a whole year since we last caught up with the one and only Jodie Stevenson. How's it going?Jodie: Thank God it's one and only. I can hear my mom saying that, thank God.Alex: We were just saying, how was it? You were like, no, it's nobody You know, it could have been a year but it has.Jodie: But then we were talking about things like, what things have had like you're like, a quarter of a person that you were then you were last year.Alex: We haven't got a video either away. But yeah.Jodie: Now you're super skinny. Don't worry, though. I'm still fat and consistent for the world. got consistent and but yeah, no, it's, that's great. There's actually been a lot of things that have really happened. So if you actually like, pile up the achievements that both of us have had in the last year. Actually, that makes sense. It's probably like a decade's worth of achievement. So yeah.Alex: It's funny, isn't it? Because you like them day by day, week or week, month or month thing you know, I haven't really done a lot. I've really improved a lot if anyone needs to literally think about doing a 360 and see Oh, this time last year I was doing this, you know, what.Jodie: Yeah, exactly. Well, I mean, I taught a human to walk this year, which is, technically he taught himself. I'm taking the credit. And if he was walking funny, I wouldn't be taking any other credit for it. But like, yeah, like he's actually like, he's doing the real things. Like he's really doing things this year. Like he's, he's learning words. And oddly, he's learned the word jacket. It's one of his jackets, he calls me Jodie instead of mom, which is awesome. Yeah, so shouts Daddy, and Jodie, I'm like, thank you very much.Alex: Excellent, excellent show you love that. Because I remember obviously we had theWow, it's just a sad thing. Obviously, we had the dogs barking.Jodie: Oh yeah, Thrasher and Baker. Oh yeah, yeah. Oh, that happened in a bowl we got em. So they went to live with another Basset and Mum, basically, because we were part of a really good dog network. And so they went to live with this lady who's got like four others and they are just they are so happy. I don't even think the fact they're like maybe because yeah, they live on a farm now and there are loads of dogs there and they absolutely love it. And so yeah, that was a yeah, that was sad but i think i think we could be kind of at the point with you could hear how chaotic it was in the background. They were just like, they were just like, let's go for a walk. Let's go here and I was like no. And so yeah,Alex: It is. Yeah, having a child, a human is a lot I wouldn't have been able to do with pets.Jodie: Yeah, but pets that I had created my own problem with the pets because it was too small of a house, too big of dogs, and not enough boundaries between anyone you know, the dog slept in bed with me and it just wasn't, you know, it was a recipe for disaster. And luckily they've gone somewhere where they are even further mollycoddled than they were with me. So they're there, they're even better off now. I think that's really it's a really big lesson as an adult when you make a decision that's going to hurt you and only hurt you, but it's going to help someone else. So the dogs were going to be better off. I was going to be sad. And I had to make that decision and be like, Okay, well, I guess I'll just be sad then because they're gonna be happier. Real adult learning. So yeah, it was super sad like I was gutted about it, but I think it was the right thing for them.Alex: I know, absolutely. Do you know what I was just looking up while you're telling me that, so I thought I better just check because I knew yours was a very popular sewed for a while it was the second most downloaded? But you want to know something quite exciting that it was the number one downloaded episode of all time.Jodie: Really? That's amazing. That's awesome. Yeah, you know, it's my dulcet tones. It's my lovely calming accent that ASMR of mortgage advisers.Alex: Say well, I would like to say part of the credit of doing something super exciting with the title of like a mortgage broker generating their own leads doing blah, blah, blah, blah. So I'd like to take a little bit of credit for that.Jodie: That's okay. You can.Alex: I'll take 30% of the credit. Jodie: Yeah. Alex: That's the number one so you'd be there. So David Thompson. So Gary was seventh, and then you don't talk to a second, Me and Tom doing an episode were third. We should have been first you know, that's an absolute disgrace. You got ash, Ash ball and fourth. So what was interesting actually the top, the top five are not if you take out me and Tom, the top five are all brokers. Jodie: Okay, cool. Alex: So now, you know we've had a lot of marketing experts on dishing out marketing advice. One thing I've learned over this year is that actually getting people like yourself and hearing your stories is what people are interested in. Jodie: Yeah, what do you know what though it's something that I found throughout my life and we had at the bank, we have people who would come and work for us. And you were like, university graduates and they'd come in on a graduate course or something, they'd come straight into management. And the rest of the bank was just like, nope, don't I don't want to know anything this person's got to say because you haven't lived this life. You haven't come from the ground up. And this, you know, it puts there's a lot in it. There really is I can sit there and say, Look, I know how to market for mortgage advisers because I am a mortgage advisor. Alex: Yeah.Jodie: I'm marking all myself. And this works rather than someone you know, just coming in and saying, This is what and we could probably be doing exactly the same thing. Alex: Yeah., no, absolutely, absolutely. I think it's, it's being it's easy to put someone to be like, um, you know, Jodie is a broker she's doing that what you know, why can't I and then maybe they think if there's someone who's not worked in it, and it's easy for them? Yeah. It's just easier to make a connection with people that are like you. So. Yeah, that's awesome. And then you had you, as supposed you are the only one as well that we got on that was doing Google Ads themselves. I don't think I spoke to any of the brokers that have been doing Google Ads themselves so are you still on your radar? He's still doing that. Is that anything else overtaking it, or Is that still the number one.Jodie: Now, I mean, I obviously had a baby. So there was a period of time where I wound it down. And I've continued to supply leads. So I still had a handful of loyal clients who just kind of kept buying from me over that period, but I stopped taking any of my leads. And so for about six months, I kind of just backed off from it, and then came back in sort of the back end of last year, I think a little one's gone to nursery now. So yeah, I'm kind of back in it now. And, and it's, it's a blend again. So obviously the network that I'm with b2b, they provide me with leads. And, and I also have my Google AdWords, which, and they're just two very different types of leads. And they all have different conversion rates, and they all work but I don't think you should ever turn a lead source away and you know, if If you can, as long as you are meticulously recording how many times you did everything to in that lead, you know, did I pick the phone up and dial them? How many times did I literally put my hand to my phone? And because then you can figure out how much putting your hand on a phone makes you might be 74 P. But, we can take it right back to that.Alex: Absolutely. I think I saw there was someone a broker showing me their screen and it was like one of their self-employed brokers had only logged two calls. They were saying that this I've not been able to get out as person but it was like two calls a week apart both before 5 pm. And it was like they were I can't remember how long after it was the lead initially dropped. But it was they were reporting it but not doing enough. And I think there's a case of people not being as meticulous as you are with that. I'm not chasing it enough.Jodie: Wow. I would as always, I'm going to be going against the grain here. No, I don't have the needs. I didn't do it, man, I don't do it. Look, if you want a mortgage, I'm going to touch. Here's my number. I if they put in an inquiry, I mean I would the b2b, b2b have their own structure, which is you know that you make an X number of calls, and we have a system that sends them texts, etc. And those ones, you know, that's, that's James's method, and I use that. But for my own needs I when the lead lands, I try within 10 minutes and firing them it's straight off the bat. So I go straight in and I call him because speed stones and it always will and a lot of the times they answer the phone and go oh, oh, didn't expect you to ring me that fast. And I'm like, exactly. I give them a ring straight away. And the chances are they are still sat by the computer. And so they get that one call and then and then I'm never in the zone. And then if they don't answer, I send them a text and I say, Hey, it's me from this company. I'm bringing about your mortgage when good, that's all I do. That's it. I can't find them again. Nope, I bring them at the moment and then I send them a text and that's it.Alex: Do you mind sharing what percentage of contact right there is like what percentage of like, no contact is that you know.Jodie: my contact rate is I have this down the other day I've actually I'm mentoring someone at the moment. So I'm more in my own KPIs than I ever have.Alex: While you're looking at apps are gonna it's like two very different things going on because If you are buying leads or if you're marketing in a way that you're not building any rapport you've you've only got that quick window because they'll forget about you. But if you're marketing and people know you quite well and they've bought into already then you can wait. So I don't think everyone I always think older minute coders are always like you say within 10 minutes.Jodie: Oh, I love that.Alex: Yeah, well little phrase for you.Jodie: YeahAlex: While you're looking at apps are gonna it's like two very different things going on because If you are buying leads or if you're marketing in a way that you're not building any rapport you've you've only got that quick window because they'll forget about you. But if you're marketing and people know you quite well and they've bought into already then you can wait. So I don't think everyone I always think minute older minute coders are always like you say within 10 minutes so I love that. Well, little phrase for you. Yeah. It because it literally is because they'll because if they because there's a lot of things that are important to people at that moment, like mortgages, especially protection that is important at the minute and then once the laptop gets close, I will it was important 10 minutes ago it's not important now because this is happening. So you miss if you miss that window, I think you're missing out. A big one. But it just depends on a case by a case like how well are you have you? Like, do people know you for that one thing and they've already decided that only gonna deal with you.Jodie: No, my leads have no idea who I am mainly, my leads are very much advertised on an in a cold no company we are a company, we can find you the things you would like as your details to have a call and, and so yeah, just give them a ring or give them a quick call. And then I'll send them a text and send them an email. So send them a text and an email. And if they don't come back to me, you didn't want it that much.Alex: Yeah, I wonder though, I'd be so interested to see the numbers like because you're you've got personality, definitely. If people got to know you a little bit beforeJodie: I leave a voicemail, I do leave a voicemail. So maybe that's why I get a lot of callbacks and I get a lot of texts back.Alex: And I think people prefer to communicate in the text.Jodie: 100% of the day. I do.Alex: Yeah, I think my big thing for us this year is to give the end-user the person that wants the mortgage, give them as wide of options as possible to communicate. And not just say, it's only a callback, you have to have a goal, but it's like, how do you prefer to us to get back to that email? Whatsapp? Facebook Messenger? Jodie: Yeah.Alex: Text, phone, and then let them just I think there's a lot of leads being missed, because people are going through and there, and there, yeah, I need a mortgage or I need advice. I've got this situation, and then the only they'll fill all the details out, and the only option is a callback and they'll sort of agree to it and then they'll think but whereas if it's something like WhatsApp, then they don't have to set that timeout to have a call because no one wants to be sold to and the broker can go away if they've done a fact find on the website. If you've collected all that information, why maybe go back to them with something and then build-up to the call.Alex: Yeah, exactly. I something like I think it's a month ago. And I needed to do something with my energy supplier. And I logged in and there was like to write live chat or like live chat, but I always forget it's open. You know, when you open it, and then you just walk off, just forget you have live chat open.Jodie: I’m so confident. I'm terrible with it. So, it clicks on this live chat thing. And it was like, Oh, do you want to just Whatsapp? I was like, Oh, yeah. So Whatsapp. And it just opened a WhatsApp chat with my provider. And then they just kind of got back to me throughout the day. Alex: Yeah. So as a broker, like whether you've got advisors working for you or not, and some people don't want to give them Oh, by the way, you can get a prepaid SIM and you can have WhatsApp away. So you can have all your WhatsApp communications open on a browser window to the on as you and it's so much more organized than email as well when I'm doing a whole sort of project on facilitating WhatsApp Web for clients. We've been looking at WhatsApp chatbot as well, which is not as good as the Facebook Messenger stuff. But again, if people want to do it, we're on it because if we can get as much info on if someone and then the only thing is one, someone said their network won't allow WhatsApp communication despite it being the safest. And I could say I covered which network it was where they were like they ban any communication whatsoever knowing that WhatsApp is more secure than email. That's bonkers. But either way Yeah, that's definitely on our mind because I think a lot of people just don't want to have a phone call.Alex: See, very I'm sort of taking over this episode. So what so what else? So are you doing more of the commercial stuff on your ads before? Exactly it was commercial mortgages pretty much that you were doing last year my rightJodie: Yeah, yup. So my advert saw more commercials but I do get a lot of isolettes through it as well. And yeah, but mostly it's battleaxe for so it's a limited company and Alex: That does seem to be a very popular minute obviously with all the sort of tax changes and stuff. Yeah. How are you finding it like demand this from this time last year to now the B-word is kind of semi sorted is that affected anything or our market like?Jodie: I would say that pre-Christmas which normally December is my salon and the month where I don't do anything, and January is just like I'm continuing to not do much. Outrageous this December was, I mean, right up until Christmas Eve I was still dealing with clients and taking and taking upset on Christmas Eve. Crazy.Alex: We saw one on Christmas Day.Jodie: No..Alex: One every Christmas Day, there’s always one.Jodie: I don't even think I'll pick my phone up on Christmas day it's just yeahAlex: Yeah everyone's different so people get bored and they're like but yeah I mean I was cooking on Christmas Day literally in a second but yeah that that did happen.Jodie: yeah now I've been really busy and really really busy and very much and that's kind of what my year is about this year is understanding how to manage the famine and the feast know get tons of leads in and when you're very quiet and then you know talking to me building it all up and then they kind of all slowly come back in and then you end up with like if anything you end up with too many inquiries because then you've gone too many people coming back and it's kind of I'm trying to figure out what that nice even let's take this many leads a day constantly rather than taking you to know 40 leads a day for two weeks, nothing for another three weeks. So that's what my plan is this year is to find my sweet spot.Alex: of literally the number of leads per week per day. Jodie: Yeah, yeah.Alex: And what was taking the most time for you, when you're sort of dealing with inquiries? Where could it like, Is it like,Jodie: what's that? Sorry, packaging cases? And okay, so that's always the most time-consuming part. And in any mortgage, getting the leads is fine, cuz everything's automatic. And it's also CRM, and it's perfect. And the notification comes through on my phone, I click a button and get it's great. And, but then once and I have a chat with a client, and that's fine, and I don't. Do you follow me on Instagram? Alex: Yeah. Jodie: And did you see the space paper that I got delivered yesterday?Alex: Oh, God doesn't know if I've been on the last couple of days.Jodie: So whenever I get an inquiry, I have a blank sheet of paper. And I know exactly the template of my fact find a blank sheet of paper and I just write, write all and it's all organized, you know, left side for Mr Right side to miss it, and it kind of all ends up looking like a fact find. And so I do that sheet of paper for every client, and then I write on that until really, I've run out of paper and it becomes a client file. And then I take paper, clip it in, and then they become a file. And yeah, well, that is pretty, you can imagine I've got like 60 notebooks piled up next, which is crazy. And so I've actually bought a notepad by rocket book. And it's a reusable notepad. Alex: What. Jodie: Yeah, so you write in it. And then you get your phone, you get the rocket dog app, you scan it over, and it uploads it into Dropbox into a file, wherever you can put file names on it, and everything, and then just wipe the page clean and start again.Alex: Oh my God.Jodie: It's like actual paper and so yeah, that I'm hoping that's gonna save me a bunch of time because now it's got handwriting detection as well. So all my notes now get uploaded into a file. So when a client rings me back in six months time and says hey you know Mr Donovan, I can just open my rocket dog file and go Donovan and it will find that note pad that page of my notepad and go that's that client it might just say Donovan, ah avoid you know, but it will be and that'll be on the new anywhere I am. I can just click it'll be in my Dropbox and I can just search for that name anywhere I don't need my notepads anymore. And because it will all be on this. This Dropbox so I thinkAlex: Then 34.99 I'm just on the road getting a rocket book. Why not? Not mega expensive.Jodie: Yeah, and the efforts are hilarious. I mean, you'll really enjoy him. It's just two guys in there like, they're just having a blast making these books clearly they've done a microwavable one as well where you write in it and then put it in the microwave, and it just erases everything. And but that has a shelf life. And, and something I'm really conscious of at the minute is the impact that I'm having, you know, environmentally. There's a lot of paper in my job. So I'm kind of wherever I can, I'm avoiding a paper. Because everything else in my life pretty much I know I doesn't really have minimal impact with most of the things I use are usable things in most of my life but then in this just reams and reams of paper that I'm printing, I feel terrible.Alex: It's literally my desk at the minute. I've got these A3 papers where we spent sort of between Christmas and New Year like coming up with different ideas days for campaigns and what can be doing better and I've literally got a flood of these A3 bits of paper that I could have done in this. If they do an A3 version. I'm all over, I might get the small one anyway because I do use it like my notebooks.Jodie: What size is a4? So A3 is quite bigger than A4Alex: Yeah.Jodie: I think A4 is probably the biggest that they do but you could open both pages because it's 32 pages.Alex: YeahJodie: Maybe you could open both and just have it on there but you know if you do it small and then just blow it up.Alex: Yeah, well, it's my birthday coming up and the misses were like, what can I want I can kind of get you sort of you never want anything and anything you want you but I could just send you this thing.Jodie: Do it because honestly, I was saying that is such a good present for people. And it's the last one is the one I got and it when it gets delivered. It looks like a bag of space food because it comes in the old space bag. I feel very modern, very.Alex: Yeah. I love it with these things I always get annoyed that I didn't invent it myself.Jodie: Yeah, my dad, my dad has invented everything before anyone else did. And, every time a product comes out, he'll remind me of the conversation we've had four years ago where he invented that and he's right, you know, we have and I say, well, maybe it should actually do one of those.Alex: Yeah. Oh well, I used to work at an agency and this guy called Kazu came like a freelance designer and he just comes in, he sort of lives in our office. We used to work together and our old boss used to say that he invented Facebook before Facebook Like all the time.Jodie: Oh, I bet he didAlex: It’s in his head, but then never did the difference. Zuckerberg did something about it. That's the…Jodie: I think I invented iPhones and I definitely think I did. I had all the passion for an iPhone, in my mind. Alex: Yeah. Jodie: But it just was the translation that I just, you know, probably by the time they came, you know, when I'm thinking of and they were probably 10 years in development anyway. Alex: Yeah, exactly. Jodie: So though they'll be imprinted in our fingers soon.Alex: Really? Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So, other than digital notebooks, what else is new?Jodie: So yeah, my digital notebook is very new. I'm mentoring somebody.Alex: I was gonna say you mentioned it earlier. Yeah.Jodie: I believe she found me on your podcast.Alex: Well, do you know that happens a lot. This podcast doesn't cost me a lot of money. It cost me time. I don't make anything from it. But I seem to have made like other people. Like some really good so there's like, lots of like, pretty much every guest I've had on saying so and got in touch. We'd like to do this. Amazing. That's great. It's brilliant that I always find it bonkers that people actually listen. And they still listen. And people actually do stuff out of it. So that is.Jodie: I probably get one or two messages a month that say, Hey, I heard your podcast episode. And I'd love to have a chat with you about what you do. I'd love to buy some leads off. Alex: Amazing. Jodie: Yeah. One or two a month at least.Alex: Well, I was just looking at when I looked at your episode stats, I was like, Oh, this has had eight downloads in the last week. And I was like, well, that's like one at one a, obviously, more than one a day and it was over a year old. Least not being advertised. People are picking it out. So yeah, I mean, that is amazing. Amazing to hear. And then I say I didn't get anything out of it. I mean, we get inquiries all the time. I don't ask everyone where they come from. But that's cool. So how's that mentoring? Say what's in terms of the minute you mentoring them on, are they on like everything or just marketing? Just Google Or literally the whole, the whole.Jodie: So initially it was a marketing job really, that she just wanted something to learn. And as we kind of got talking, it just kind of organically became, we were both in a really similar position actually in our lives and her kind of wants to be in the same sustainable situation that I'm in where we can have our children and be the mums that we want to be and run a business that we want to run without having to sell Aloe Vera. Or, you know, these ridiculous shapes that people sell or anything like that. It's just a true Korea and true business. Alex: Yeah. Jodie: And which is lovely to see that people look at me and think, you know, that that's an aspirational and Korea, which is, you know, it's great. So she approached me and I said, Look, you know, I'd love to expand outwards and as well not just physically but potentially for my business. Well, but yeah, let's, you know, let's, let's do it and let's just kind of cobble through it together. And so that's kind of where we're at. She's taken a leap of faith on me and I have to leap of faith on her and we're just trying to figure out how that works. And so that's where we're at. I'm kind of guiding her through how I set up myself. And then we would slowly integrate her into her own being our own broker. And eventually, she's just been doing it a few months now. We've had Christmas, so it's been a little, you know, nonstarter over Christmas, but she's doing amazing, she's got 10s of thousands of pounds in the pipeline, which is crazy. And you know, not all of that is going to go anywhere. But you know, even if I think we've said like, you know, roughly she probably roughly banks to bank seven grand. And I would say, out of everything that she's had through, which is just gorgeous in it, you know, take this leap into like a totally new field and then get in a big pipeline like that. AndAlex: What I love about 99% of the brokers 99.99% brokers I know and speak to also just get as much satisfaction out of like, genuinely helping people as well and they and they and they get rewarded for it. It's like what it's like, I'm almost jealous of the rewards that you guys get from helping people as well as what you get in return. It feels quite a unique kind of job that it's kind of a must to be satisfying.Jodie: Yeah, it really is and do they want and I needed it as well. I really needed it because I started to doubt my own hipe last year and you know, when you have a kid you lose your identity completely for a period of time. And I came back and was like, right i mean obviously I have my group that was on your podcast which is still it still exists but it's just because I didn't know how to help these people and you know they were all asking me and I was like I don't know just how do I do this I'm a parent and how do I do it? How do I do it? And I know me and you know conversations about that and definitely minute old minute cold is, you know, plays on my mind with these people. And so when this really naturally just progressed into something and mentor wise, I was really happy because I was like, Okay, I can do this. And, and I can help and even if all I do is just give her the tools and then send her on her way and Alex: Yeah.Jodie: Because it is, I'm growing as a person, whilst I'm helping her grow as a person. And, and it might be that she goes off and does it without, you know without me in the future and that's, that's fine. And it's just something that I think I've, I've needed to do and it's a big learning for me as well.Alex: I think as well as you learn from teaching as well, she always won't feel giving advice to someone else to do something you sort of like, I find that when we're trying to I always feel like I'm looking at stuff more. So I'm not trying to help myself, I'm trying to help other people as well. So it gives me that extra edge so we've obviously got we've got the pressure of clients that pay us and we've got we've got to deliver for them otherwise we lose them and you know, lose house and family can't eat and things like that, but also that extra edge of wanting to help other people that what they do well or not And affect me, but it always finds, since doing the podcast and doing videos and things like that, that it gives it I've probably pushed myself to learn more to help share that kind of accent.Jodie: Yeah, exactly, exactly. I mean, I, I would have, I would have said I was very, you know, very efficient at my job. And I knew I knew exactly what to do, but actually, I just knew exactly what to not do. I knew what to avoid. I knew what I knew. And I knew I knew how to avoid the stuff I didn't know. And with this new, new starter, she's kind of expanded and been like, Oh, well, I'm looking at loads of stuff over here. And I'm like, Oh, no, I don't play in that court. But what I have to do now, so I've, you know, started doing that as well and funnily and, you know, growth, growth is, it's up and down and sideways. It's everywhere because I've had a really great opportunity as well as my father in law and my mother in law and Actually, I've started on the path to working for me as well. And right, so they're going to become mortgage brokers and buy their own rights, which is lovely. But also my dad is coming to work for me as well. And he's had a background like you had a family that had worked in. He's got some experience in it. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Right. Yes. So he was a senior financial adviser for the bank that I worked for. And my sister was an advisor as well. And she's had a baby and she's going back to work in January, self-employed as well, which is lovely. And so we're all kind of doing it self employed. But yeah, my dad's come in to work with me as well. Which is great because he's the guy who kind of coached me and made me the person that I am. And now I kind of get to give a little bit back to him, but he loves me and he's going to help me from above and you No, it's going to, it's going to go everywhere. And it's going to be really nice. And it's going to build a really nice little company.Alex: Family literally a family business literallyJodie: Literally a family business. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, my partner Matt, and he's always been like a rock in my company anyway. And when I have these, you know, packaging nightmares where I've got just, you know, reams and reams and reams of applications that I've got to fill in. He's just incredible. You just get straight on the computer and he's like, scans him in and, and does it all for me anyway, so I've always had him helping me. And even if sometimes it's just he just goes out with our thoughts. Leave Hello. Yeah.Alex: Yeah. Jodie: And so it's always been great and hands-on, but it's so nice that we're getting everyone else is kind of getting involved in it as well. And it's fantastic. Yes, it's lovely. It's quite a nice little family that we've got now. Really a family.Alex: Really Yeah. And I think just going back to what you said about Like growth being up down sideways my business mental talks about competitive with like climbing Everest is like the night before they go to sleep they climb up and then they have to climb back down again to like a climatized so it's always talking about the growth of that you're up and then you've got sometimes you've got to go back down to be able to push forwards again parallel so it's nobody can build a business with cute like continued growth will kill you.Jodie: Yeah absolutely. Isn't linear it's not you know.Alex: Yeah it's a graph, this graph should have these peaks where you drop down and then you that gives you the ability to then push back up again. So yes one thing is you always want like a month I always want growth, growth, growth, but the one thing he thought he taught me about was that it is normal and healthy to have no backs and I'm pushing on from there.Jodie: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it's amazing what you can really beat yourself up on mean on AdWords I can, I can have a week where I look at my fingers and you know, they're costing me three times as much as they did on, you know, the month before and I will really panic. And I'll go Stop, stop the ads. And you know, it's just your instinct is to stop at that point but no, no, you need to stop because there's a reason why they're coming through at this. You know, it's because people really really want it or people you know, there's a lot of competition or whatever, but it always evens out. It always evens out over the course of a year and you always end up at the same cost per click. So there's a reason it's an average, you know, you're gonna have some weeks where it's half of your normal one that you just can't look in like that you've got to set boundaries and be like, I'm only gonna, I'm only gonna worry about it. If over the course of three months, my average cost is going up and then I'll worry andAlex: Yeah.Jodie: But even then don't leave it another three months.Alex: Yeah, exactly. Is that easy? Again, because when we do it like that with Google Ads absolute minefield in terms of like, we've got one company where the cost per click can range from like quid to four quid depending on the time of day and when other people are bidding and things like that. Jodie: Yeah.Alex: There are so many sorts of and it's difficult when if there are brokers with a small budget as well, those impacts will be felt bigger than one whether someone's spending like 50 grand a month compared some of the spending 500 pounds those ups and downs have felt much bigger with the smaller budgets definitely.Jodie: Absolutely.Alex: Have you ever kind of looked at the thought about SEO being on page one top of page one for those keywords bidding on.Jodie: You mean organically?Alex: Yeah, organically. Yeah. Is it ever like, do you have SEO remorse as in like this time last year, if there was an if you knew what to do, there was a plan in place, and you could have executed it and by now a year later, you could have been position one.Jodie: I don't know, I've never really, I've never really seen the benefit of you know what, I am the person who scrolls past the ads and goes to the organic number one result, but I feel like that's the same as buying an ad anyway now, because people just strategically do things to make themselves the number one result, but it's not. It's not really, you know when you go shopping online, and it organizes things, you know, and you can do it from price low to high or whatever, whatever the default is never price low to high, its price, whatever is gonna make me the company more money. And they do it that way. So it's, you know, I don't necessarily believe personally, that the value of being number one, organically has the value that it used to. I think it just means that you're very good at SEO.Alex: Oh, yeah. Jodie: Just means you're good at getting number one on Google. Alex: Yeah, absolutely. What we find with a lot of our clients, the reduction in the cost to acquire a new client if they're getting free traffic from Google is is is the biggest one the biggest factors inJodie: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. In that sense, yes, definitely that it would be a cheaper option. But just for me, I feel like I didn't know that my audience is ready.Alex: What you’re doing now is work and I don't want your eye off the ball. So there's a lot of things in life like, don't if you've got something that is working, that's profitable unless you're obviously like, where you were their way or now. You don't want to change it. Yeah, I was just kind of interesting. If we're, if because you're getting those leads from Google, whether that was on your mind.Jodie: It is nice to know, it would definitely be nice to know. And, and, and I certainly, I certainly would be open to looking at it and seeing But I'm still in the same position that I was in before, which I know is always your favourite thing to hear from me. I don't need any more leads at the minute. I have to turn the machine off frequently. Alex: If you if we were to talk this time next year, and you didn't have to have the machine on at all, and they were all just coming in.Jodie: Oh, yeah. Yeah. be great.Alex: Yeah. So that was my I have a question. I should have asked that beginning. But ya know, it's interesting. And that's where a lot of we have all kinds of ads running literally, bar, no bar, none. All of them but they were the ones that are getting those. We work on SEO for all of our clients because of getting that free trial. And Google's great because it's people are like, well, like we said earlier about catching them within that 10 minutes. They're in the zone. Jodie: Yeah.Alex: Like Facebook, LinkedIn once you're there when they are in the zone and it's They haven't made the decision to go out and look for something. Yes. You've got to be even quicker with the social ads to get them But yeah, I think we're finding Google gives the best quality and if you can get it free so obviously it reduced like the possibilities cray LAUGHINGJodie: You had a podcast with Joe Mani.Alex: The thing I haven't asked because it's we have your name is coming up on my thing is Joe Mani but Joe Mani is that a self-inflicted?Jodie: Yeah hundred per cent you know what? funny because it's difficult to nickname my name because it isn't really you can't really other than Steve Oh, yeah, all coffee bit. Oh calling me like, which I don't like Joe Go. Yeah, exactly. So it has to be something. So after a while, it just became, I just used to put myself on board, you know, couldn't fit Jody on it. So I'd write j and then we'll do like $1 sign. So I was. So yeah, it's definitely a self-made Monica and that does not need to stick. Nobody knew that nickname mom. But just to go back to what you said about LinkedIn, and LinkedIn, such a funny little place at the minute. And I mean, I've turned my notifications off because it's too much, people, I don't know who in their right mind thinks that anyone is going to read a near eight paragraph-long message from a brand new connection. Either like, Hey, how are you insert name here, comma, I would really like to talk to you about insert profession here. Let me tell you a little bit about what it is that I do. It was 25 paragraphs about it and I'm like Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I just never read it.Alex: I agreed at the no who's speaking to a guy the other day. And they're kind of like an agency that does that can't that I outreach but in a very different way. And he was like talking about getting them to strike up a conversation like asking a question or something to start a conversation rather than just doing a whole sales blurb is like running up to someone in the street and just shouting about your business for like, 10 minutes.Jodie: Yeah, exactly. And I way prefer, like, I've had a lot of impact on a lot of my favourite messages on LinkedIn, or people who've listened to your podcast, and they will message me with something. And, and I'll, it always makes me laugh. It'll always be something funny in the message. It'll be like, Hey, I heard you on the podcast. And then they'll just say something hilarious. Along the lines, I think because I give a sense of like and look for a laugh. And they'll always always have a laugh. And even if all we do is just say, uh, you know, I'll say thank you very much. And I'll see Say that I mean, uh, you know, I mean a deadly baffle for number one. So please be free to download it 400 times.Alex: As much as we've done it. Jodie: Yeah, exactly, exactly. I'll send you all your five pounds in a minute. So we're at and, but well, you know, we'll have a laugh and we'll have fun and that's what I think that's what LinkedIn should be is a place to find like-minded business people to do business with. And to Hulu, and not to get too caught up on being everyone's cup of tea. Alex: Exactly, that's Yeah, if you're vanilla, like the, someone was asking me about, Tony, have you seen Gary Vaynerchuk?Jodie: Yeah, I love Gary Vaynerchuk.Alex: Yeah, but he is Marmite, you know. That's why if he was vanilla and trying to get everyone to like him, he wouldn't have the following that he has. So Jodie: Yeah.Alex: Pretty extreme example, obviously. But yeah. Like being yourself is.Jodie: Yeah, I'm a marmite well, hundred percent a marmite. And people literally do like me or they do not like me. And it's and you know what, I used to really struggle with that but now I'm just like, that's fine. There are plenty more people in the world and I like to be alone. I like to warm people up a bit I am a little bit of a troll by nature and I do like to sort of tickle people a bit, particularly on LinkedIn. And somebody put something at Christmas. I hate the boastful nature of Christmas. And I don't think people talk about the presence that golfing kids run said. And so I was on LinkedIn at some point. And this guy was like, What do you get the guy who has everything, and I think I responded with haemorrhoid cream. And if you say you've got everything, have you got a spare tenner?Alex: Yeah, brilliant.Jodie: Yeah. You know, I like to sort of make fun of people a bit but I think Yeah, LinkedIn has got to change to become a bit more. I think you've got to be aggressive with who you let in your circle on LinkedIn.Alex: Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I've really filtered.Jodie: Yeah, remove connections, remove connections. Yeah. Are you within a geographical distance of me that we can do business if not remove connection?Alex: Absolutely. I think it is a great platform and I'm slowly being marmite like I don't I put a photo on I think was yesterday and I've got I got bought two notepads for Christmas one says the Archbishop of Canterbury and the other thought of this as a warning Bantam merchant, proper cringe but I just took a photo and said I've got a really important meeting with a top dog Fs company but which notepad I never would have done that before because it's like, oh, I should be professional or not have a but then I think I've made more a double business got more friends out of LinkedIn and connections from being myself and not worrying about not being too professional or worrying about or not worried about anything actually other than just being sad.Jodie: Just don't do it. It's, you've got to you've just got to be yourself. I mean, you really have to just be yourself. My favourite people in the financial industry are you. I can smell I can sniff out a metalhead in a crowded room. I just know him. I know the people who you know they've got like a slipknot tattoo, I just know it. And I like a Rolodex of metal you know metal aficionados who are in the financial industry, and that's one that they're my people. So I love those people. And but then also people who, who have a criminally, you know, offensive sense of humour. That's, that's Matt der max. People so if I find a particularly funny person who also listens to, you know the same sort of music as me, you know that's a relationship for us. So if you're out there and you want to be my BDM please message me on LinkedIn and if you want to talk slipknot and deals let's do it let's I'm in the market for it.Alex: I'm really looking forward to someone opening a message or connection requests or doing some sort of reference or, or something like if you get that please do a screenshot and send.Jodie: I will put it on a T-shirt. Promise. Alex: Yeah, brilliant. We have been chatting for 50 of your English minutes Wow. Wow, it was like three.Jodie: It really does. Alex: What have we not discussed?Jodie: I think pretty much it and we've done exactly what I've been taught not to do there with it. We haven't done politics or what is it politics and religion not covered? That's good.Alex: We could do that next year. Yeah. Jodie: Okay. Yeah, definitely.Alex: It's so good to catch up with you. I can't believe it's been a year. It. It's absolutely bonkers. Yeah. And it's great that people are still listening to your original one. Still getting in touch with you. I can't believe I've been involved in something that makes that happen. I find that bonkers.Jodie: It's not the first situation that's gone viral for me. And I'm sure it won't be the last. Alex: Yeah, what was, go on spill it.Jodie: I'm not going to give you my medical records. No, I'm joking. And no, I put a few in. I often go viral actually. And I did it. I did a bit of a famous post about mediums A while ago and my disdain for the role of BDM. Right. I've always said, I stand by it. I don't think it's a role that that is relevant. I don't think it's a helpful role. For mortgage advisors when it's one person I think it's unfair on the person. I used to hate BDM but now I hate whoever makes a BDM do their job. I hate them. It's and it's not sustainable. It's not sustainable. You just need a call center that deals with those. But yeah, I did them almost like an X factor of BDMs. Once I put up that I don't like BDMsms and I refuse to use them. I actually completely refuse to use them now. I did have a few people who were like, let me prove you wrong Let me prove you right like so and so and a few of them did. Yeah, pretty much funny Penny Paul. But yeah, I got I ended up with quite a few connections through that who appreciated my angle which is Look, I want to know now the answer to my question, not seven o'clock at night when you've got home from I've been 16 coffees all day when you finally Got to read your emails. Like, the deal is with someone else at that point. It's, you know, it's crazy. But yeah, that was another thing that went a bit viral as well.Alex: Fantastic. So, if people haven't heard the first episode I'm following you know, I'm following you on Instagram. Jodie: Yeah.Alex: Where? Where? Where is that? Where's the BDM slugging going on?Jodie: Oh, it's on LinkedIn. Oh yeah, LinkedIn it's a really old post now I think and what it did it did get some traction and but yeah, you can find it on LinkedIn my Instagram is not a professional arena in any capacity it's just me but maybe yeah, maybe that's what I should do. Maybe I should start an Instagram for work. ItAlex: It should be one on one in one on the same.Jodie: Do you think?Alex: I think people buy from people.Jodie: I still talk a lot as a business on my Instagram, I just it's not like a business Instagram.Alex: I do not use my company Facebook page, my company LinkedIn, my company anything is all via me. And I get more out of it.Jodie: Yeah, I think I think that's the I think it's the way to go. And I do definitely talk about I always throw, you know, one or two posts a month up on my stories. Just saying no, don't forget, don't get life insurance. Don't forget mortgages don't get addressed. And, and I always get a couple of leads off of that. And even sometimes it's just people saying, Oh, I'm really interested. And we just have a chat. And then I'll come back to me a little later and we'll talk about it but yeah, yeah, I think you're right. I think you should keep it all as one brand.Alex: Nice. Love it. Awesome. I can't believe we're with them. I think we need to do it closer than a year. We need to catch up when I need to kind of get you drunk. You belong to one of our events as well so people can meet you in real life.Jodie: Wow definitely, definitely. I would love to do that and get the winter over with so I can come out as my winter cocoon. And yeah, but definitely Yeah, just invite me along I think you went to Did you go to u printer?Alex: Yeah, yeah it didn't just go It was on the stage.Jodie: Exactly. I think I need to go.Alex: It is an amazing event.Jodie: Yeah.Alex: Really good. Jodie: I should definitely make it to some sort of physical social interaction at some point in my life and stop the piano. Avoid at the end of the phone.Alex: We've got our events in March there's gonna be a load of brokers there in the lovely Peterborough March the 26th. I will send you a link.Jodie: March is pretty clear for me. So where I could probably squeeze you in. I’ll try my best.Alex: I will. Fantastic, awesome. All right, cool. Well, let's do that let's meet properly in March.Jodie: Yeah. Alex: Let's speak again soon. And I'm loving that you get in the family involved and things are growing and I like your partner helping you out with every I was like visualizing oh no exactly what it's like having a kid ourselves. But yeah sounds like it sounds amazing and I'm glad everything's still going really well for you.Jodie: Yes Yeah it's great. It's all a learning curve and to sayAlex: Oh god yeah Jodie: We’ll see, you never know listen if you know God but this is me on record now all of you all my family members are as fireable as anyone else and I like my coffee with sugar in it.Alex: I'm going to use that clip to promote this episode.Jodie: I love it.Alex: Fantastic. What an amazing note to leave on. Thank you so much for spending your time with us again, as amazing. And let's see if you can be the number one episode of 2020 as well. That'd be pretty cool. All right, thanks very much. Bye-bye.Jodie: See you later. Bye.Alex: And there we have it. There's my chat with Jody Stevenson. It is so good. catching up with her. And it sounds like businesses growing was great that she's kind of getting people involved now it's becoming a proper family business. So that is awesome. So she's got a lot of work to do to see if we can get her as the number one download episode of 2020. We'll see we've had a lot of amazing ones. some incredible ones coming up too as well. So don't forget our event, March 26. Only a few weeks away now I literally got a couple of tickets left. It'd be great to see you there. If you need any more information, go to the lead engineer, click on the conference tab, or details, their agendas all kind of finalize all speakers are on there. We've got loads going on. I will see you next time.

Lilly Diabetes announced they were getting into the pump and pen business almost two years ago. How’s it going? We get an update from Marie Schiller, Vice President of Product Development for Connected Care and Insulins at Eli Lilly – Connected Care is what they’re calling this platform of pumps and pens – now to be integrated with Dexcom. Check out Stacey's new book: The World's Worst Diabetes Mom! We’ll also have a bit of an update on some other pump companies’ plans for the near future.. bolus from your phone?! In TMSG a big fish, a hula hoop winner and a chance meeting over a foot? Join the Diabetes Connections Facebook Group! This podcast is not intended as medical advice. If you have those kinds of questions, please contact your health care provider. Sign up for our newsletter here ----- Use this link to get one free download and one free month of Audible, available to Diabetes Connections listeners! ----- Get the App and listen to Diabetes Connections wherever you go! Click here for iPhone      Click here for Android Episode Transcript:   Stacey Simms  0:00 Diabetes Connections is brought to you by One Drop created for people with diabetes by people who have diabetes by Real Good Foods, real food, you feel good about eating, and by Dexcom take control of your diabetes and live life to the fullest with Dexcom.   Announcer  0:21 This is diabetes connections with Stacey Simms.   Stacey Simms  0:27 This week, Eli Lilly announced they were getting into the pump and pen business almost two years ago. How's it going? We get an update. And of course I asked about price and access.   Marie Schiller  0:38 Look, we're not here for the sake of having this innovation sit on a shelf somewhere, not why I'm here. It's not why others are here. And so it is really important for us to be laser focused on how people act. So   Stacey Simms  0:53 that's Marie Schiller, Vice President of Product Development for connected care and insulins at Lilly We'll also have a bit of an update on some other pump companies plans for the near future. Well, let's sing from your phone in Tell me something good a big fish, a hula hoop winner, and a chance meeting over a foot. This podcast is not intended as medical advice. If you have those kinds of questions, please contact your health care provider.   Welcome to another week of the show. I am your host Stacey Simms, so glad to have you along for another week. As always, we aim to educate and inspire by sharing stories of connection. My son was diagnosed 13 years ago with Type One Diabetes. My husband lives with type two. I do not have diabetes, but I have a background in broadcasting. And that's how you get the podcast. I'm excited to catch up with Lilly. I know a lot of people don't want to hear anything from them until they address the price of insulin. And I do understand that I want to be sensitive to that. And I definitely asked Marie all about that. Even though she has nothing to do with the price of insulin but she doesn't work at Lilly and this system. I can't be really separated from that, let's be honest. But I also think I have a responsibility to share what's going on in terms of diabetes technology, and Lilly plans to be a big player in this space. So that's what the interview is all about. We'll be talking about their system. We'll be talking about their partnership with Dexcom and other things as they move forward. Before we get to that, I want to thank Kerri Sparling and the folks at children with diabetes. We replayed the interview that Kerri did with me this was on their YouTube channel and then last week in the kind of the mini episode although it wasn't really a mini we replayed the audio from that interview. It's always a little weird for me to be on the other side of the microphone, but it's always a lot of fun to I bring it up not to hammer on the interview again, if you wanted to see it or listen, you know, you know where to find it and I will link it up in this episode. But because they are doing a contest. The contest is open until March 20. And to enter you do have to email them so I will link that As well, it's over on the children with diabetes a website. But all of these links will be in the episode homepage. They're giving away a paperback of the world's worst diabetes mom and the audio version. So I'd love for you to go and enter and find out more on their websites. Speaking of the book, I am having such a blast on the book tour that I'm doing this year. You know, we'll see how it goes. Obviously there are some health scares out there right now. And I'm not sure that all the events are going to stay as scheduled for right now. They're all on the books that's on the website as well. And if you're interested in the world's worst diabetes mom, that's an easy place to find out more but I have to share with you that I got a great note from a woman in Australia who listens to the show and you know, has read my book she bought it you can get it on Amazon really in so many countries now print on demand is absolutely amazing. And she got it in Australia and she reached out to me because her local group wants to do a bulk order. So we are doing that. And if you have a situation like that where you would like a little large number of books for your group. please reach out to me directly. You don't have to just buy it on Amazon for the full retail price. I am happy to work with you. My publisher has given me some ways to do this. That really makes sense. It's an amazing thing to think about people all over the world reading the world's worst diabetes mom. It didn't say America's worst diabetes mom. So I guess I have to stand by that now. All right. We will have the interview with Marie Shiller from Lilly coming up in just a moment. But first let me tell you about Real Good Foods Diabetes Connections is brought to you by them. Have you tried their cauliflower crust Margarita pizza. They have a full size and a personal size as well. So yummy. It is low carb high protein real simple ingredients. And you know you gotta be careful because some cauliflower crust pizzas are made with corn starch. You know rice flowers, processed grains. And if you're looking for something that is 100% grain free and gluten free, this is what you're looking for. I love how Real Good Foods keeps creating Eating new products, they keep coming out with new yummy foods for us. It's the kind of thing where you as soon as you don't feel like cooking, sometimes you want the convenience. And when you go for convenience, you really don't want to sacrifice nutrition, right? I mean, you don't want to just pull out some junk food. I love Real Good Foods, it tastes terrific. And the people behind them are solid. They get involved in our community. They listen to what we have to say. It's really nice, find out more, go to diabetes, connections comm and click on the Real Good Foods logo.   My guest this week is Marie Schiller Vice President of Product Development for connected care and insolence at Lilly. Two years ago, I was part of a group of writers and reporters from the diabetes community invited to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to take a look at Lilly's entrance into the pump and pen market to give feedback on those plans and to hear from their partners. We did an episode back then and I'll link up what I and others wrote at the time. No pictures still of what they show. Very briefly that day, they showed us kind of the prototype, but it is a tiny pump. It's kind of like a fat little disc. It's much smaller than an omni pod pod. It's maybe about the size of the tee sport that tandem is coming out with. I'm actually going to talk more about that after this interview a pump update from tandem some news from Omni pod. We'll get to that after this interview, but I'll put up some photos of the T sport, but this is thinner than that the Lilly pump is just a small thin disc. It is tubed. So the idea is that you can stick it to your body or use longer tubing and put it in your pocket. We do talk about that. It'll fit in the palm of your hand very easily. Of course we do talk about the price of insulin, and what that means for access of anything coming from Philly. So here's my interview with Marie Schiller. Marie thanks for talking to me. I'm excited to catch up. It's been about almost two years since we've MIT in Cambridge, thanks for coming on the show.   Marie Schiller  7:02 Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be back.   Stacey Simms  7:05 All right, so give us the update. I know we're going to talk about the partnership with Dexcom and some other things that Lilly is working on. But when we last left this episode, the last time we talked at least in person, you over talking about the device that Lilly had been working on, can you give us an update on that   Marie Schiller  7:25 I can and maybe to be helpful Stacy just to remind the audience of what we've been working on. So Lilly has a personalized diabetes management system that is incorporating inform delivery devices, software and analytics. And obviously that will be combined with glucose data and other contextual information in order to hopefully to improve diabetes management. We have two parts of that system. So we obviously have a pen based platform where we'll be using our refill disposable insulin pen, with data coming in from glucose monitoring devices and be able to combine that with different elements of care in that platform. And then the pump based platform, which would be a hybrid closed loop system, integrating the the pump itself in with a continuous glucose monitoring and an algorithm as well. So that's the journey we started on. I think we were we had not just kicked off the program when we last talked a couple years ago, but it was certainly early in the development program. It's been a frankly, an awesome couple of years is advancing both of those areas we had started I know when we last talked, but with the development agreement with Dexcom, which we have continued to advance our relationship with Dexcom and now have entered into a global commercialization agreement with them. We continued our clinical trials with the pump based system we'll be talking about Some of the first clinical data will be shared this coming February at the the conference in Madrid at TCU. And on the connected pen side we have, so we secured a supplemental drug approval for the pen that will be compatible with the personalized diabetes management system. And we're in the midst of working with the FDA on the other components of the system that we will need to bring forward and launch the entirety of that integrated solution.   Stacey Simms  9:35 So there's a lot of moving parts, there are a lot of different things going on. You mentioned the clinical trials, and let's kind of take this step by step. I'm sure you can share the information ahead of the release. But what were you looking for this was for the pump system. Was this a safety trial? Was this an outcome trial? Can you share any information   Marie Schiller  9:55 for you know, I won't go into any details that we will be sharing at the conference, but As has been seen with other products going through on that hybrid closed loop system, we are focused on showing that the system is functioning accurately. So we are looking at that first stage looking at different you know, stress situations with the system making sure the system is responding as we would expect it to respond. And obviously as part of that is the safety of the system.   Stacey Simms  10:27 So, as we're talking about this system, what's so intriguing about it to me is that it is a pump, but it acts more like a pod. At least it did when I last saw it or I saw a mock up of it even so is it still that way it's very teeny tiny, but it it acts as a tube pump with a very small tube that goes into a traditional inset Is that still the hardware?   Marie Schiller  10:47 It is so we what we like to call it is that is a hybrid system meeting on the days that you want to carry it and put it in your pocket or wherever is your choice of carrying it. You could use a standard length infusion set or a long infusion set, whatever your preference, but on days that you wanted to wear it, and adhere it to your body, you could do that. And so it would still work with a standard catheter infusion set, but you would obviously be using a shorter tube in that instance, if you choose to wear it on those days.   Stacey Simms  11:24 You know, it's funny, Marie, I've I didn't ask this when I first saw it two years ago, and I keep thinking about it, because now tandem has a I don't know where they are in their development stage. They have the T sport which sounds very similar that they're hoping to come out with. How do you actually were these tubes, tiny tubes, pumps, the hybrid pumps on the body? Did they just kind of dangle from the tube? Do you stick them to your skin? Does it work?   Marie Schiller  11:47 Yeah, I can't comment on tandem. It's a great question though. Stacey, you know, obviously with our so there's an adhesive component where you are wearing the pump. It's not obviously on the infusion set right? But ours is where you would be adhering to the pump itself.   Stacey Simms  12:04 And my frustration was I thought you're gonna say I can't tell you anything. But that's great. There's like a sticky on the pump and it sticks to your skin. does it stick to the body? Like a? Is it like a Dexcom? sticky? Or is it like the ever since which is more like what I call a color forms? Remember those color forms? You could take them on and off and on and off? Is it more like that? Or is it once it's stuck to your skin? Then you kinda have to pry it off.   Marie Schiller  12:34 Yeah, I may, at this point, just pull back a little bit because I think I may be going down. I may be going down the rabbit hole as if I'm trying. I feel like I'm going to be playing a game of charades as I try to walk you through how the system works. And it may be more confusing than helpful. So yeah, as I mentioned that you have the ability to wear it and there's an adhesive system and we'll leave it at that.   Stacey Simms  12:59 All right. But it's very interesting. So then my next question is, do you know if Lilly is going to be developing new infusion sets? And I asked this because I've shared for years and years, and I'm not the only one, that I really think that the traditional infusion sets are the weak link of any pump. They're just not great. And I'm always hoping that somebody is going to come up with a better one. Any chance, this is part of your plan?   Marie Schiller  13:24 as we've talked about, look, we are looking at all components of the system. Right. And so we are starting with our core system, we're looking at all aspects of the system. I would say, you know, it's hard for me to say yes or no, on that side. I think we're looking at the need in the marketplace. Right. I think on that infusion set side. I'd be curious to sort of hear your experience with that. I think in in some of the research we've seen, it's different sort of aspects where people would say they'd like improvement. Clearly. Extended wear is something that we're hearing a lot I know jdrf and others Groups are focused on that. But what areas are high on your list   Stacey Simms  14:03 that they work better, that that you can push more insulin through them that they don't get kinked and they don't get occluded. And they don't need to know that they're, they're not as damaging to the skin that they're not as painful that I feel I could go on and on. But truly, I really think they're the weak link of pumping and you know that they even what was the one from BD for a while like it had a better flow, it didn't just float the bottom of the canula even to be able to rotate it there was one you used to be able to spin you know, that would go with that would turn you know, there's there's so much so sure, I'll be in a focus group anytime or recall me.   Marie Schiller  14:38 I'm taking furious notes here to make sure I get all of this feedback because this is exactly what we need to hear, you know, and exactly what we're excited about. I think we just continue to feel that there are so much room for improvement on these systems. Albeit we've made a ton of progress today. But these are all of the nuances right then each of us I deal with every day and why, you know, the more innovation the better and space where we can continue to look at all of these elements and make progress.   Stacey Simms  15:09 So let's talk about the pen system too, because that's very useful and very fascinating. The pen is, as you had already said, It is not just an insulin pen, it is part of a connected system. Can you talk a little bit about what that means? We've mentioned Dexcom. already. I assume you use your phone. You can see where you've been it recommends dosing, that kind of thing.   Right back to my talk with Marie but first One Drop is diabetes management for the 21st century. One Drop was designed by people with diabetes for people with diabetes. One Drops glucose meter looks nothing like a medical device. It is sleek, compact, and seamlessly integrates with the award winning One Drop mobile app, sync all your other health apps to One Drop to keep track of the big picture and easily see health trends. And with a One Drop subscription you get unlimited test strips. lancets delivered right to your door. Every One Drop plan also includes access to your own certified diabetes coach have questions but don't feel like waiting for your next doctor visit your personal coach is always there to help go to diabetes connections calm and click on the One Drop logo to learn more. Now back to Marie answering my question on what a connected system means and whether the pins help keep track of dosing   as we expect.   Marie Schiller  16:28 It does so as we mentioned, it's based on the the quick pen platform is is a core component of it. So if you look at the quick pen platform that we offer in forums and we have our current basic lar influence and humor log both in the half unit one unit and two units, and then we have our ultra rapid insulin that's under review today. So as in and I don't know what's your son ever on 10 before you move to pump,   Stacey Simms  16:58 he was actually uncertain Because the dosing was so teeny tiny, and they didn't even have half units, but he was on quarter units. But we have since we use pens a lot, because it's a backup for him. If he gets to fly and feels like his infusion set isn't working, he'll take a shot. And he is also a little unusual in that we use. We use a long acting shot with the pump. So he does use a pen every day.   Marie Schiller  17:25 Okay, well, then you're familiar with it. And I can share with you that I was a pumper for years. And now I'm back to two shots, as we all sort of go through those journeys, but what I was going to describe is when you're taking those informs, especially as you know, you're taking the long acting in the short acting. There are just some basic elements that we still don't have today, right? You're running out the door, you're trying to get your son to school or I'm trying to get to work that I did I just take that shot or not again, remember right and just some of the most the simplest aspects of being able to be like up there. If I took that dose, right, and being able to have that check in place, but there are, you know, as you move down that level of sophistication, most people on informer fire some level of glucose testing, whether that is blood glucose monitoring, or as we're doing with the continuous glucose monitors. So the idea is, is that you would have the informed data from the pen, you would have your glucose data, whether that's blood glucose or CGM data, and you would take that in integrate them into this diabetes management system that depending on what you want, is how you would interact with that system. So some would have a preference of saying, you know, when I'm doing okay, or my regimen maybe easier, I don't need as much variation. So, for me, it's a place that I can capture that data and not have to go to different places to get that data for others having some different elements of support in that system. will be beneficial, right? If you think about things on the Faisal influence side for people with type two diabetes faisel, type tration as you get started on the insulin, or maybe after I'm on insulin for a couple years, how do I make sure I'm optimizing? Right? You can go through sort of that journey and see all of these different places where how we can do better than we're doing today. And I'm honing in on the glucose data and the informed data. So we all know I sometimes say life gets in the way right exercise and food you know, all those things that are pretty standard, but for a lot of us can make the road pretty bumpy as we're out there. So you know, over time being able to get the system smarter and smarter with that exercise data and then learning system. So, you know, we all talk about the algorithms that are out today are very much rule based systems right if my glucose is going up by default Like take this action and then be informed is delivered in the future. It may be well for Marie, her level is going up at x rate. And that's, that's not good for Marie versus for Stacey, that might be okay. Because I've trended back and looked at that data and say, you know, we're going to predict that she won't get to an elevated level as an example. Right. So if you start thinking about the personalization of these algorithms over time, it will not be day one, as we all know, it's going to take a lot more research and beta for us to be able to continue to get to that ideal state.   Stacey Simms  20:41 So I'm trying to read between the lines. So the plan sounds like it is to launch with a more let's call it a more static algorithm. Like we just started using control IQ from tandem which is a hybrid closed loop software system. It is a great system for us so far, but it doesn't learn anything. It's probably If This Then That, but it doesn't learn my size. Okay, it's not personalized. So I assuming you're kind of saying that Lilly will launch in a similar way, but the idea would be to eventually get to a learning algorithm.   Marie Schiller  21:11 Yes, I think that's a fair statement.   Stacey Simms  21:14 All right. So let's talk about the announcement that you're gonna be working with Dexcom. Just if you could spend a minute talking about what that means. It's not exclusive as I read the release that y'all sent over. So it sounds pretty interesting. Let's start with what it means first to work with Dexcom are they making? Sometimes there's, I hear special transmitters for certain things, certain software for certain things. Is this a Lilly Dexcom? Original?   Marie Schiller  21:39 no meaning we are basing it off of the transmitter that Dexcom has. So we will be compatible with the G six and we'll continue to work with Dexcom in our development arrangement as they continue to iterate and we continue to iterate to make sure we've got access to each other's latest technologies right because the last thing any of us want to do in these collaborations is to be behind in generation integration, right? I mean, that's what was happening and some of the first generation systems, right, you got people still on, I think it was what g4, and they'd want to be moving to the G six, and there was no way to do those updates, or the G five. So we've established our development, work with them and ability to make sure that we can continue to be running in parallel, as each of our platforms evolve over time. So it will be based on their latest transmitter based on our latest pump in our latest pen, and be able to integrate the the CGM data from Dexcom system into the diabetes management system, where some of the functionality that I talked about before could be available.   Stacey Simms  22:53 So I'm always trying to read between the lines You'll have to forgive me but when I see a press release that says non exclusive, I'm always thinking, you know I don't know of too many, or any pump systems. Gosh, it's so funny to say that Marie, because there's really only a couple in the US. But I don't know if I hear we hear a lot about interoperability, but it isn't here. Yeah. So my question, I guess, is when I see now exclusive, I'm thinking, Okay, are you do you have an eye to working with other CGM companies? And is that practical in the short term? When we all know FDA approvals, things like that, you really kind of have to stick with one system, at least so far, to get it through?   Marie Schiller  23:29 Yeah, you know, it's an interesting way you sort of posed the question, I think, let me say big picture and then sort of dive down to where we are right now. You know, at the end of the day, we believe having access to sort of the latest and greatest technologies is really important, right. I mentioned even with dex comm that we want to be on the same innovation curve that they're on. So people using our system can have access to that. It's really important that all of us, keep pushing For this innovation, right, and the way that you do that is to make sure that I have the ability to integrate other technologies into my system. And I think both of us hold that premise that keeping as a non exclusive allows both of our team to be able to, you know, have access, or have our users of our system have access, I should say to the latest and greatest technology. We have started our program with the XCOM and are really excited about the progress. But we think it's important to make sure that we will have the opportunity to bring different technologies in for different users, even on the systems available today. Right. There are differences in the system, and people are choosing different platforms because of that. Sure.   Stacey Simms  24:51 Yeah, it's really interesting. I mean, I keep hearing about interoperability, which I know is going to come someday but my interpretation of that which is I always call it the Mr. Potato Head. system is not the realistic system. So I try to temper my expectations but why not? Come on? I want to mix and match as much as possible. Why not?   Marie Schiller  25:10 I don't know. Did you like playing Mr. Potato? I was never a huge fan.   Stacey Simms  25:16 It's a it's an easier thing to explain, right? Why can't I use the lead Ray? With the tandem pump? Why can't I use a Dexcom with a barefoot pen? Why can't right i mean if it works better for me and my skin and my kid and my like, why can't I and I, I get it. But at the same time, I really hope that someday we're working towards that, hey, look, it could be worse for you. They could make us play operation or perfection or something terrible like that.   Marie Schiller  25:39 Those are worse. Yeah. But you know it, baby. I think there are a lot of people were having that sort of turnkey solution is, you know, where it's all comes in on and I just understand it and it's all designed to work together. They prefer that and other people would would like that choice, right. So I think we're gonna probably see both of those emerge over time. And the FDA to be fair, has opened the door to that event, right? I mean, they're trying hard to separate the approval of each of the components. We saw that with the ACE ban. We've seen that with IC GM, and now with AI controller that can pass. So, you know, I think, at least from the FDA perspective, they've worked hard to try to enable some of that.   Stacey Simms  26:25 I agree. Alright, so from interpretability. Let's talk about the proprietary aspect of this. Because I think when a company like Lilly, that makes insulin gets involved with the hardware in which the insulin goes, a lot of questions come up, and you mentioned the quick pen. So can you just confirm again and correct me if I'm wrong? Will other insolence be able to be used in either of these systems pen or pump?   Marie Schiller  26:52 Yes. So on the pen side, the system is being built around our quick pen platform. So it will be a system that work with really insulin on the pump side of the equation. In addition, we'll have a first generation that will be a patient built component, but over time, that may shift as well. So on the life cycle plan for that pump, we're looking at the ability to have Lilly insulin in that system, as well.   Stacey Simms  27:27 Okay, so to be clear, and not say, not putting a judgement on this, but just to be clear with the idea is that this would be a proprietary pump, that Lilly would make the pump and Lilly would want its own insulin. We've been human lock used in the pump.   Marie Schiller  27:38 Yeah, I think the system is being designed around Lilly's insulin.   Stacey Simms  27:43 Alright. So you know, we've Marie, we've known each other for a while now and I know you know, this question is coming, but I think it has to be asked in a day and age where people are so angry about the pricing of insulin. Why should we get excited about systems like this when people are worried about But affording the stuff that goes in the hardware, let alone affording the hardware, whatever it is, and how great it is. There's a lot of concerns about cost. I know it's not your department, but I can't have you on and not ask about it. Can you comment on that?   Marie Schiller  28:14 And no and not and I appreciate you asking it. And you have no need for a while as well. So I appreciate the service candid question. Look, you know, and I've said this before, and I'll say it again, you know, we are committed to be able to let people with diabetes, access our medicines, and in the future, disconnected diabetes system that will include sort of the pen based system and the pump and other components. I know you'll be frustrated at this next part of it. But I can't fit here in sort of the position I'm in and where we all want this platform to be any, you know, give you any speculation of the details of how that will happen, or how that reimbursement will be in the marketplace. It just wouldn't be fair to you or your user's to speculate on that, except to say that we are 100% committed to making sure that that access is available. Look, we're not here for the sake of having this innovation sit on a shelf somewhere, not why I'm here. It's not why others are here. And so it is really important for us to be laser focused on how people access the system.   Stacey Simms  29:24 And I mentioned in the introduction, but you live with Type One Diabetes, I definitely have another question for you. But it just occurred to me, are you allowed to even say this, have you tried this system? Like, are you in the trial? Can you trial your own? unprepared?   Marie Schiller  29:38 I sure how to answer that. I have no, I'm not in the trial, but I can give you that answer. So I am not in the clinical trials that have occurred today.   Stacey Simms  29:50 I'll tell you as a person who doesn't have diabetes, obviously, you know, it's just something that I always wonder about when I talk to researchers or clinicians or I know there's there's obviously rules for clinical trials. But you've got to think, alright, I want to try this on myself. I know a lot of people have done that. Okay. So the real question I wanted to ask   Marie Schiller  30:05 is okay, I can't wait. I can't wait. That's why there's no, we're pushing hard to justice available. I, I'm waiting, like out there to make sure that I get this.   Stacey Simms  30:18 Alright, so I've got a difficult question. So my real question about living with type one is difficult is it right now to work at Lilly, when people are so angry, and a lot of that is directed? We've seen protests separately headquarters, you know, and again, it's not you, you're not in the price department. Even if there is one. This is not something I know you can control. But is it difficult and frustrating for you to see the problem, frankly, with insulin pricing at all of the insulin companies?   Marie Schiller  30:46 And the answer to that they see and I think we may have talked about this, either the last time on the phone or when I saw you it's like how do you not feel the pain in you know from people, right? I mean, this dishes, dish issues difficult issues people are dealing with. So of course, you know, what I would say is is that worse from, you know, being here? You know, I look at what we're trying to do. And And And again, I'm not the person to sort of comment on this, but it's a priority for Lilly. And I'm really proud that Lilly has made it a priority to make sure that access is there.   Stacey Simms  31:25 Going back to two devices that we've been talking about. I always hate to ask about timelines, but I always have to ask about timelines. Can you give us a goal timeline here? Is there any indication of when it might be submitted to the pen or the pumping, which will kind of go in first?   Marie Schiller  31:42 Yes. So let's talk about the pen first. So as I mentioned, and you can see on the FDA site the supplemental approval for the pen has gone through. We are working with the agency on the other components of the systems. We are not giving an update right now. on the timeline for that system, but we expect to be giving updates over the next couple of months on the pump. As I mentioned, we'll be sharing the first clinical data and our signaling that we're still over the next couple of years hoping to get that system to market   Stacey Simms  32:16 where we thank you so much for joining me. I know it's a difficult conversation to have when you've got, you know, a lot of things about to come out and then other things that I'm asking that aren't really your department. But I appreciate your frankness. Before I let you go as a person who lives with type one, what is it like to work in the diabetes sphere? I mean, I think part of me would be kind of tired, like my whole day is diabetes. My whole life has diabetes, but it's got to be exciting as well. What's   Marie Schiller  32:41 it like? It's an interesting question. For me. I just don't know any different facing effects? The answer is, I don't know my kids would probably answer the same way. I don't know what I would do with myself if I wasn't doing this all day. My weekends are spent so much in the diabetes space as well. It's just something that that is it's just a part of me, right? so much a part of all of us who are living in this space. And I'm impressed every day by all of the people working so hard to make these advancements. And it's amazing, right? As you've seen, we're actually getting some of these solutions out and reading about the improvements that are there. And I'm excited and want to keep staying focused on doing what I can to get these products out and having my team man. I mean, everybody here is just so passionate about what we're trying to do to make these advancements. So it's, um, I know it's a it's like one of those questions someone would ask what would you do if you worked with your spouse? You know? I don't wanna say I love my diabetes so much because I'm not sure I'd answer that way. Am I cursed my diabetes maybe as much as I do other things in life, but it's data reason that probably keeps That's all motivated if we know how much better we can make life.   Stacey Simms  34:03 Well, thank you so much for spending some time with me. I really appreciate and I hope we get a snapshot of the devices soon enough, Marie thanks again.   Announcer  34:15 You're listening to diabetes connections with Stacey Simms.   Stacey Simms  34:21 Of course, more information at diabetes connections.com. I always link up a lot more info at the episode homepage and a transcript. I'll be interested to see how this episode is received. As I mentioned at the start of the show, there are some people who do not want to hear anything from Lilly, if it's not about lowering the price of insulin. And I respect that I hear that I know that there's a lot of anger in our community and a lot of frustration at all the insulin makers and you know, I do share a lot of that, but I would be curious to think if we should not be following the other technology advances that are coming out of these companies, because I'll be honest with you, I said this two years ago, I think Lilly is seeing the writing on the wall. That the price of insulin is going to be mandated to come down in the next few years. And they are, they don't wanna lose money. They want to find other ways to continue to be competitive. And I certainly don't think that insulin will be free. But I do think that going into the pen and pump business is a move on their part with an eye on the price of insulin coming down. Look, I'm not an economist. I'm baby way off base. But that is something that makes sense to me. up next Tell me something good. And then a little bit later on. I want to talk about some other pump companies and news that came out recently, diabetes Connections is brought to you by Dexcom. Do you know about Dexcom clarity, it is their diabetes management software. And for a long time, I just thought it was something or endo used. You can use it though both on the desktop or as an app on your phone. It's an easy way to keep track of the big picture. I check it about once a week. It really helps spinny and me dial back and see longer term trends and helps us not overreact to what happened for just one day or just whenever Our the overlay reports help with context of Benny's glucose levels and patterns. You can even share the reports with your care team, which makes appointments a lot more productive for managing diabetes is not easy, but I feel like we have one of the very best CGM systems working for us Find out more at diabetes connections dot com and click on the Dexcom logo.   I love the Tell me something good stories this week. Honestly, I love them every week, but I got a bunch that are so fun to share. And one that frankly is pretty important. Alright, so first, Candace says my son was just diagnosed January 23. This year with a hospital stay. By February 13. He was dancing away and winning a hula hoop contest at his first school dance since diagnosis. He's 11 and he was so proud of his accomplishment winning the contest. And we as parents were so happy that his diagnosis wasn't holding him back. That is so cool. I didn't Kansas for a picture shockingly, an 11 year old did not want pictures of him hula hooping to be displayed. I'm actually not sure if she had any, but we respect that we hear it. I just think it's fantastic that he did it and that he's doing so well. This soon after diagnosis way to go Candace! Alison said this is a tiny thing. But today my child was type one went to get her foot x rayed her shirt, rode up and showed her Dexcom and the text said, Hey, do you have diabetes? I do too. Then she pulled out her pump. It was super cool. Allison says her child was diagnosed in early December. I think that's great. Is there anything better than that diabetes in the wild citing, right? You know, you're with people who get it. It's just so great. And then this one you may have seen on social media. I posted a picture of Isabella with her fish, not her pet fish a fish she caught. Isabella is nine years old and she loves fishing with her dad and boy she beaming in this photo with a fish that's like as big as she is. Her mother, Heather says she was diagnosed with type one at age four. Again, she's nine. Heather says, I will tell you this little girl is amazing. Her dad got diagnosed with lupus almost four years ago. He is on dialysis. We are on a kidney transplant list. I'm currently trying to be his donor. And a lot goes into that. This is her and her daddy's favorite thing to do. They live life to the fullest, and nothing stops them. Heather, thank you so much for sharing this story for letting us share the picture of Isabella, you guys are carrying a heavy load right now. And I'm so glad to hear that you're finding enjoyment in things like this. It's kind of trite. As I'm hearing these words, leave my mouth. I mean, there's really not much to say when you're in a situation like that. But I'm happy to share your story. And I hope you keep us posted. Let us know what's going on. And definitely send more fish pictures. I would love to see that I really would even if we don't share them. You can definitely send them our way are posted the Facebook group. Our final Tell me something good is a little bit of a different story. It's more of an news story. But this is really important. And I think very good news. Beyond type one announced that they are collaborating with the National Association of School nurses to raise awareness of the warning signs of type one diabetes. So this is a new collaboration that means that 10s of thousands of school nurses around the country are going to get these awareness materials from beyond type one, if you haven't seen these we did in North Carolina push a few years ago. And they're just simple and straightforward. And they tell you the signs, and they talk about what to look for. I don't think those of us in the community had any idea what DK a was what it looked like, how deadly it could be, you know, before we our children were diagnosed, right? How would you know? So this education campaign is absolutely going to save lives. Huge thanks to be on type one. And a big thanks to the Helmsley Charitable Trust which is funding it. I will keep you posted. I will put up links in the show notes on how you can get involved because you know ordinary people state to state are getting involved. We sit around my dining room table here outside of Charlotte, North Carolina and stuffing envelopes and sent them out really can make a difference. Tell me something good happens every week around here. Give me your stories post in the Facebook group, email me Stacey at diabetes dash connections dot com. I would really love to hear from you. We got to get the good news out in our community. Tell me something good.   All right. We're getting a little long here. But I wanted to bring you some news from the other pump companies. I know I don't usually do a news update this far down in the show, but because I put the coronavirus episode out a little early. There was some news I was going to put into that episode that has gotten pushed here. Let me get right to it. We had an earnings call from tandem. And the really interesting bits from that were that the T sport hybrid patch pump is now expected later this year, possibly probably early 2021. The CEO of tandem says they plan to file with the FDA for t sport approval. This summer with a new mobile app, which means you'll be able to bolus from your smartphone. So apparently, they're going to submit this in two different ways two different filings. One would be a separate handheld device, right like a dummy phone or a dummy controller of some kind that you'd bolus from. I'm dummy and that it doesn't do anything else but control the pump. But the other filing would be remote bulleting by the smartphone app. And apparently the CEO said they will not launch t sport until both have been okayed by the FDA. So you would have the option of using your phone or of using the singular let's call it singular controller rather than the dummy controller. So that's really exciting. I'm gonna post some pictures diabetes mine posted this update and posted some pictures of the tee sport. It is a little patch pump that can be worn on the body or it has a tube so it can be put in your pocket again. I don't know how it sticks to the body. Did you hear me talking to Maria about that? Is it reusable? Like ever since or is it like a dexcom to rip it off or a pumping set. So we'll find out more about these things as they go forward. But that was some really interesting news from tandem. The other bit of news comes from Insulet. They are in the middle of clinical trials for horizon, they had hoped to be filing for that approval. This summer horizon is the hybrid closed loop for the Omni pod. They did have a software issue. That means they are pausing the pivotal study, and it's going to delay things, not really sure how long, of course, they're really hoping that it won't be too long, you know, maybe a month or so. But they are now pushing the anticipated launch of horizon to early 2021. And I know there's a lot of disappointment because people really want this system. I will say to you that tandem had a similar issue with their software during the last pivotal trial for control IQ. It was very quickly fixed. I don't think it affected the timeline that much. Maybe it was just a month, but it still hit its goal of the end of the year. So hopefully Omni pod insolate can get back on this and get back to their timeline but I will link to More information on that, because I know these things just cannot come to market soon enough. tank you for staying with me. This was a long bit after the interview and I appreciate it, but I wanted to get some information out there. I really appreciate you listening. There's a lot going on right now. All right, I'm gonna stop right here and thank my editor John Bukenas from audio editing solutions. If you have an audio project, I highly recommend john, you know, if he puts up with me, and my rambling that he can do wonders for you. All kidding aside, john is great. I love working with him. He never asked me to say anything in the show. But he really is such a strong part of what makes this podcast successful. And boy, is he nice to me and doesn't leave in all of my papers. So thank you, john. And thank you so much for listening. I'm Stacey Simms. I will see you back here next week.   Benny  43:55 Diabetes Connections is a production of Stacey Simms media. All right. reserved all wrongs avenged   Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Sometimes we find ourselves faced with difficult choices. I see people stuck with their decisions that they've made and they feel like they have to live with it their entire life. So I'd like to challenge you, choose not to become your wrong decisions. What does it mean by "Becoming Your Wrong Decisions?" I see people living their whole life, the decisions that they made for themselves were wrong. For example, they think that in order to get quality lifestyle, they need to go to college, spend four years to get a bachelor's degree and later find out that they didn't like the jobs they're in to. So you can choose to stay there and make everybody's life miserable around you by not enjoying your work or you're going to say I made a wrong decision and I will change my subject by going to College again and choose to have a career in different profession or may be practice that profession as a volunteer first to see if that's what you want. So many people think that they need to have University education in order to get a good job but you know what this is back to networking what we talk about it in our program. If you like any profession that you want to practice then reach out to those professionals and find out from them what do they like about their profession and what do they absolutely hate? One of the best things you can do in this case is to take advice from people you admire. But you don't have to completely follow their path but take the part of the advice that resonates with you. So I give you a challenge this week, where are places in your life that you've made wrong decisions in your life that you're still living with it and how can you fix that? To learn more about "Becoming Your Wrong Decision", Watch my Facebook Live Video here. Remember, if you need my help to fix your mindset and building your Real Estate Portfolio, reach out to me at edna@ednakeep.com Edna

BE SURE TO SEE THE SHOWNOTES AND LISTEN TO THIS EPISODE HERE. Eve: [00:00:14] Hi there, thanks so much for joining me today for the latest episode of Impact Real Estate Investing.  My guest today is Ommeed Sathe. Ommeed is Vice President of Impact Investments in Prudential Financial’s Office of Corporate Social Responsibility.  His unit manages a portfolio of $1 billion in impact investments. That’s a big number and it doesn’t seem like Ommeed is slowing down. Ommeed grew up in a family who felt public service, through work or volunteerism, “was fundamental.” And that has clearly rubbed off. Be sure to go to evepicker.com to find out more about Ommeed on the show notes page for this episode. And be sure to sign up for my newsletter so you can access information about impact real estate investing and get the latest news about the exciting projects on my crowdfunding platform, SmallChange.   Eve: [00:01:42] Well hello Ommeed, thanks for taking the time to talk to me today.   Ommeed Sathe: Absolutely, Eve, it's a real pleasure to be with you.   Eve: Well, that's great. So I wanted to start with your title, Vice President of Impact Investments at Prudential. What does that mean?   Ommeed: [00:01:59] Yeah, so I head up the company’s impact investing activities, and that's obviously one of those terms that kind of sounds OK, but it doesn't really necessarily clearly translate. But what it is, for us, is it's a portfolio of investments we've made that are trying to have both a financial and a social impact. And so they are genuine investments that try to make money, but we invest them exclusively in projects that we think have outsize social investments and in particular in the types of projects that our company and traditional capital markets wouldn't do otherwise.   So, they're really meant not to be sort of a subset of what the company was doing already, but to be a portfolio, to be used to be catalytic and differentiated and to invest in places we wouldn't be investing otherwise and in projects we wouldn't be looking at otherwise.   Eve: [00:02:51] So how big is the portfolio?   Ommeed: [00:02:53] At the moment, it's, it's about a billion dollars.   Eve: [00:02:57] Wow, that's pretty big. Can you give us some examples of the things you've invested in?   Ommeed: [00:03:02] We have sort of two halves of the portfolio. One is around very physical types of projects, affordable housing. We've made a lot of investments in our hometown of Newark in big transformative developments and redevelopments. And then we also do some interesting work around new ways of doing agriculture, new ways of sort of growing and feeding the planet. And that's sort of on the physical side of the work. And on the other side of the portfolio is investments in really interesting social purpose businesses. And those have been largely focused on financial inclusion. And then on education and how do we re-skill and retrain the labor force?   Eve: [00:03:42] That's pretty great. How would you define impact in real estate? How does Prudential define it? Like, both of you?   Ommeed: [00:03:50] Yes. So, this is actually a really fascinating question. So, I think there's probably three ways to think about it. You can think about it just sort of on the the most, I'd say, straightforward which is, you know, units of affordable housing, square feet of redevelopment, square feet of the building, and if it's a LEED platinum. Your, sort of, the physical characteristics of the development very much sort of very clear outputs of sort of what the real estate is. I think the second way to think about it is what's sort of the community level and at the residents’ level. And so how are residents’ lives being impacted and living in certain places? How are services? What's the quality and satisfaction of tenants? So very sort of a consumer impact as well as in looking at sort of the communities in which this real estate is. So, are these places where investment wasn't being made and after you make these investments, does more investment come in? Are those investments leading to good outcomes or is it just catalyzing sort of unhealthy gentrification? Those are a couple of dimensions. And then I think the third and both, sort of, most qualitative and trickiest maybe to sort of measure, but something that really drives us is, is this work in any way catalytic? Does it change the trajectory of what a market is going towards? Does it prove that a new way or a new type of housing or new type of sort of investment strategy that could work thing be replicated in other places?   Eve: [00:05:18] That last one must be more of a hope than a metric that you can measure.   Ommeed: [00:05:23] That's right, it's true that it's nothing than more of a hope. But I'll give you some examples, maybe that last one, because I think it kind of brings it to life.   So, you know, one of the things that we've been looking at and I think we've done with the great sort of sort of architectural firms is how do you say we take lots that have been deemed substandard, often sort of ineligible even for development and develop really creative structures and housing and building models that can sort of create value on land that is otherwise essentially worthless. And are there ways to sort of replicate that and make that go to other places? Because it's interesting, right? Like, you know, with land getting so expensive and all the prime development sites gone. If you're trying to get more affordable housing into sort of affluent markets, sometimes figuring out really creative design solutions for substandard or non-standard lots is one way to do that. Another thing that we've done sort of I think has been really catalytic. We worked with some colleagues down in Washington, D.C. They had recently passed a new ordinance that required much higher levels of stormwater retention. And a lot of our city's stormwater is actually a sort of surprisingly under-appreciated problem. Enormous source of pollution, flooding. And so, cities are starting to try to grapple with how they do this better.   [00:06:37] And so D.C. passed this ordinance requiring much higher levels of stormwater capture. You know, one of the few ways you can do that on a development is you can either sort of build in essentially bladders in the basement to capture water or green roofs on the roof. But what DC did that was really interesting was they permitted people to fill some of their obligation by making improvements to green infrastructure in other parts of the city. And so we helped fund a bunch of improvements to green infrastructure and you got essentially tradeable stormwater credits. And so this was a version of sort of what people talk about wanting to try to do with carbon by creating tax and trade mechanisms and, but done at the local level around a whole novel problem with stormwater. And so that's sort of an example of something that I think we helped build the first green infrastructure products and create the first tradable stormwater credits. And we think that solution is really interesting. And we also think other cities will see that, and potentially try re-create a similar solution.   Eve: [00:07:35] That is catalytic. So, you know, when you were talking about unusable lots, I was thinking about an article I read recently about the downsizing of some freeways and the land that that might free up. For, you know, development use. I think that's a really interesting thesis in this time when we're starting to see autonomous vehicles and a lot of people who don't want to own cars. It's really interesting to think about where land is available, right?   Ommeed: [00:08:04] I think it is. And it's still strange to me, actually, because there's a sort of funny meme, right, that what will happen in Silicon Valley finally invents a technology that allows us to build the second story. And, you know, I think that spirit is kind of true even in New York City. You go around and see so many easy and obvious potential sites that you could build on. Sites that are being used for car dealerships, parking lots, abandoned, your public assets, you know, right of ways. And it's amazing just how much of that land is there when you start to look. And it does feel like some of the lowest hanging fruit, in terms of how do we find opportunities to create more affordable products. Again, it may not be the best location in the city, but it's certainly habitable and buildable and safe. And I think it's been really interesting. We worked with this great architecture firm down in New Orleans the Office of John Tate, and they've done really interesting stuff thinking about how to do that.   Eve: [00:09:02] Yes. Yeah, I know Jonathan really well. He was, he actually did the first crowdfunding offering with us.   Ommeed: Oh, there you go, it's a small world.   Eve: It was one of his Starter Homes on an odd lot. Pretty fascinating times. Do you have metrics that you've developed to test against projects that come to you?   Ommeed: [00:09:23] We do. There's a couple of ways, and I think goes back to sort of thinking about the different impacts, you're capturing metrics for things like the number of affordable housing units, the square feet of, extra, square feet of Y that's fairly straightforward to capture. You know, I heard this quote the other day. I thought it sort of kind of interesting. We can grind to a fine dust that we can easily ascertain. And yet sometimes in doing that, we don't really measure what's most important. And I think the things that are most important are somewhat, by their nature, more ambiguous. And so some of this is actually the process of asking those questions. So, I'll give you an example with affordable housing. You know, we know it's desperately needed and in many affluent communities. And yet a lot of times where affordable housing gets built isn't necessarily the, you know, the most affluent areas. Is that a good or a bad thing? Right. You know, it's not a question that can be answered with a single metric, because it matters in terms of looking at the public education system and saying, OK, you know, are there good education resources or are there community resources? You know, there's research by Raj Chetty that sort of speaks to just how relevant place really is the social and economic mobility.   [00:10:27] And that data is not. It's really interesting and compelling, but it's certainly not black or white, in terms of its implications. And so one of the things I do think we're trying to do a better job and actually think is something that's so under-appreciated in real estate is really to survey tenant residents and try to get data from the people who live in buildings,  about their lives getting better, what's happening actually as a result of being in this complex here, because I think some of these questions are important questions, but they're not solvable with the data we have. And yet, you know, every other sector of our economy, it's you know, if you could buy shoes from Zappos, every one of those companies is has a net promoter score and wonders what it is and as careful about it and uses that as a leading indicator of telling you whether something's working. And yet in real estate and I don't know about you, but no landlord has ever, no only one I should say, has ever asked me, like, was I happy.   Eve: Yeah, yeah, interesting.   Ommeed: And it's striking, the one landlord that did ask me that question was absolutely, no surprise, the single best landlord I ever had.   Eve: Often landlords are pretty scared of the tenants.   Ommeed: [00:11:32] And it's funny, I do think one of the trends we're seeing that I think is a really interesting trend, is that as far as people I see and real estate are really moving in this direction, that so much of real estate development used to be about the physical development of the assets, actually getting the things built and getting it through entitlements and through reviews and all of that. And so, the field really focused on the physical construction and not the management and hospitality.   But you just look at sort of food halls or even kind of we-work and co-working spaces. All of those models are fundamental, about taking spaces that exist and thinking about how do we manage them better, how do we program them better? How do we get more stuff out of the same space? More and more, I think real estate is actually moving to hospitality. That if you think about hotels, right, with hotels, you think about brands and you think about your experience. You don't really think about hotels and associate them with the physical structure. To some extent, everything you see and experience is on the inside.   Eve: [00:12:31] Yes. So, you know, I interviewed someone a couple of weeks ago you might be interested in them in Amsterdam. He has a spin-off, an architect who spun off a company called Superlofts. You can find it on my website.   And it's very interesting because he creates a community before he, before they even start designing the building. They start meeting with groups of people who want to buy these little condominiums and talk to them about the needs, the dreams. Almost, he said like a video - what would you like a day in your life to look like? And when they have a group of like-minded people together they will start to kind of design the physical space around them. It was fascinating.   Ommeed: That sounds amazing.   Eve: Really fascinating, beautiful architecture as well. So I think there's a lot of really interesting innovation going on. So, why Prudential? That might be surprising to some people.   Ommeed: [00:13:25] Yeah, it is, I mean, it's sometimes surprising to me as well. My connection to Prudential's at a couple of levels. One, before I joined the company, I was in New Orleans working after Hurricane Katrina. And in that role, I led redevelopment for the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority. And we were tasked with trying to really catalyze neighborhood-based redevelopment in the wake of the storm. And in doing that, in that role, got to work with just about every kind of capital source around the country, philanthropic, government, private sector. And we were trying to coalesce all of that capital around really important, really transformative projects. And Pru is just one of the best people we worked with. And in that experience, and it really shaped for me how different the access to capital is by place. So I'd come from working in New York largely in the boom times ahead of the financial crisis, working on often quite foolish projects with unimaginably easy access to capital. And even if they'd worked, relatively low returns and then going to New Orleans and having really vital projects with great returns, but just in a place where there was almost no capital available. And seeing how important it was to have sort of, you know, investments and capital to try to move away from a very limited set of places which have kind of capital they need for reinvestment.   [00:14:45] You know, I think a lot of people who are urbanists, I'm sure this will sort of resonate, you know they've grown up in New York, San Francisco, D.C., Boston, you know real estate we call the sexy 7, right, The 7 kind of big, urban markets where capital is unbelievably plentiful. And that's not really reflective of what it's like to work in most urban communities around this country. You know, in most urban communities, even good projects have a hard time finding financing. And it's even harder for projects that are really sort of aspirational at a social level because a lot of those projects are often coming from entrepreneurs or untested, who have limited ability to manage pre-development. The work that you described in terms of sort of crowdfunding and some of that I think is a really interesting angle to bringing capital into those markets. But another is sort of getting institutional money like Prudential to have dedicated programs that really start to look in these non-traditional markets and opportunities.   Eve: [00:15:41] Right. So I've done a lot of real estate development like that in Pittsburgh, which is a city that was in pretty bad shape when I started doing the work I did and I relied heavily on public funds and the mayor's office and the Urban Redevelopment Authority to fill that role. But I imagine that many cities don't have those sorts of resources for developers. And I also think those funds have dried up a little. So that makes Prudential's role perhaps even more important.   [00:16:07] Yeah. No, it does. And I think we're trying to push ourselves to get even more early stage with our investments. You know, I think some of the stuff we've done in Newark has actually been very large projects and in some other markets we've been able to do projects which are 50 to 100 million dollar kind of projects where we'll be investing 10 or 20 million at a time. But where I think the real need is to have, you know, institutions like us really push to do more in pre-development to do more with sort of, you know, young and minority development firms and to really try to continue to push earlier, because the earlier you get, the more you see that acute lack of capital. You know, when you really get into the machinery of real estate, you see why and how access to capital is such a profound differentiator. It's not really the project economics that blow things up. You know, what we see is people get stuck in pre-development.   Eve: Yes.   Ommeed: [00:16:57] You know, they get stuck having, you know, bought land and thinking it would take them a year to get permits. And now it's two years and they don't have money to make the payment on an acquisition loan or they've got to pay for another X, Y, Z of permitting or entitlement costs. And they just can't get the project to the finish line. Typically, you know, the most underserved markets are often also the ones that are actually most difficult to operate in because they don't have some of the robust public sectors like you saw, even saw in Pittsburgh, right, and so you couple those challenges and we really do see it as being a pretty acute need to solve.   Eve: [00:17:32] Prudential would actually go in at such an early stage of pre-development stage? That's pretty unusual.   Ommeed: [00:17:38] I want to be clear we haven't done it yet, and I think it's sort of where we want to get to. You know, as we see it, adding a part of this is just the evolution of the real estate market. When we started this program seven or eight years ago, I'd say, it was really just not a lot of capital flowing in. Like, take a town like Newark, there was almost no equity capital to support redevelopment. And it really felt like even our financing at the project level was pretty transformative. Fast forward to where we are today, I'd say, if you can get a project to being at a closing even in Newark, there's a lot of sources that'll provide equity capital now, but it's the money to support the pre-development and planning, entitlement, that stage of the work that's really very, very scarce. Because that money's so scarce, it means that the people who do big projects are going to look can be and have a certain set of values and approaches and people with new ideas and real creativity won't be able to be even having a seat at the table.   Eve: [00:18:36] So a billion dollars now. What's what's the goal for this portfolio?   Ommeed: [00:18:40] There's a couple of ways you can go, right? Like most people in financial services, you get to a billion and then you want to get to 10 billion. And bigger is just better. Actually, I think given sort of our mandate to be catalytic and creative, we're trying to actually push to some extent to the opposite. So, not to necessarily get the portfolio bigger, but actually try to push earlier down the risk spectrum and really push ourselves to be more catalytic and more transformative and more creative rather than build to be bigger. Because I actually think this is sort of in my experience, once something gets bigger, it actually gets more vanilla, more predictable and usually if it makes sense, there will be lots of people who'd be willing to invest.   Eve: [00:19:23] Got it. That's really fascinating. What percentage of the total Prudential portfolio is the impact portfolio?   Ommeed: [00:19:32] Good question. I'd say there's two ways to think about that. Right, so when you're an insurance company, you have a tremendous amount of assets. But somewhere in the neighborhood for Prudential, you know, five hundred billion dollars of assets, let's say. But that's not really a very accurate measure because the way insurance companies are regulated, ninety five percent of what they do has to be in very safe, predictable bonds and rated kind of loans. And so, the portfolio we manage is essentially 5 percent of the company’s risk appetite.   Eve: [00:20:06] OK. Well, I know a little bit about the work in Newark through Jonathan Tate. I'd love to hear a little bit more about that. I think what you're doing there is tackling quite a big problem and quite a big project by the sounds of it.   Ommeed: [00:20:19] Yes. You know, so Prudential's been headquartered here in Newark for the better part of a hundred and forty years, and obviously, the city of Newark has gone through many, sort of evolutions during that time. I think what's interesting, right, is that you can sort of contrast what we're doing now with maybe what people did 30 or 40 years ago. There was obviously a fairly disruptive and difficult period of urban unrest, and the riots and a lot of people fled the city, a lot of companies left the city and there was sort of a cycle of disinvestment for many, many years. And we've done this really interesting research, actually, you know, Newark, pre the civil unrest had more urban renewal than anywhere in the country.   [00:20:58] And you can watch these videos and they are just heart wrenching because the helicopter shots of the city. And it looks like Berlin after World War Two. And yet the voice-over on the video is so proud of what they've done.   Eve: Ooh.   [00:21:14] They state literally there's been more, you know, more of urban renewal per person in New York than anywhere else in the country. And this was Newark 1950, and you see actually sort of the devastating impact of that cycle in the community. But you can really see some of that and that's sort of just a random aside. But in the sort of reaction after the civil unrest, a lot of the investment that was made, was made and things like if you've ever been to Newark there's something called the Gateway Center, which is like the Renaissance Center in Detroit. Towers, skybridges connected to transit, you know, kind of fortress style orientation to the urban environment. Instead of doing that, what we decided to try to do sort in this most recent cycle and look, you know, Pru had a role in building those gateway complexes in the 70s and so this is by no means, you know, a story that doesn't sort of involve us.   [00:23:02] But in the most recent sort of time when a company had a choice around building a new tower, rather than build it near any of the train stations or in any of the sort of locations that would have been most accessible to commuters, we built that tower literally in sort of the heart of the city. Now it's on Broad Street, which was aptly named, it's the broadest street in downtown. It's on the side of what used to be a sort of a former shopping strip. So, it's a center where all the department stores and movie theaters used to be in downtown. In building that tower, we also made, I think, a really critical decision with the team I run, to not only just build something for ourselves but to start to invest in all of the sort of transformative developments in and around that location. And the most important of those was an old department store called the Hanes Department Store, which during its heyday was a department store that would have competed with Saks. It had a four-story grand atrium like the Grand Magasin in Paris. People would come up and have these amazing memories of putting on white gloves and dressing up and going to this department store.   [00:23:08] There was the Maple Room and the Pine Room and, you know, we just, it was this incredible legacy experience and actually even had a really interesting role as one of the first places where integration happened in the city. Shopping was actually one of those areas where integration was sort of, one of the first places to happen. So, really a pretty legendary history, but had been closed for 25 years and the building itself had completely fallen apart and we made it sort of our passion project to redevelop that building. And we were able to do it in this incredibly complicated, mixed use way. So, the first floor is retail, which is both big box retail and neighborhood retail. The second floor is offices. Third and fourth floors are housing. 40 percent of the housing was set aside for affordable housing. The retail mix is everything from fintech companies and co-working to really cutting-edge nonprofits. And then, maybe the sort of cherry that made it both the most difficult project I've ever worked on but also the best, was Rutgers University brought in all of their arts and design program into that building and did it in this way that I think is really unprecedented where, first of all there's no separate entrance for the university, the public can go into those spaces. But even intermixed in the Rutgers space are private galleries and a rotating space, right in the front of their space for, you know, kind of community serviing arts nonprofits. They essentially have like six month displays where they can come in and sort of gain visibility and access to resources. And so it's been a real labor of love. And it's physically, that building, plus the Prudential Tower plus Military Park, plus some other things we were doing, started to re-knit together parts of the downtown. So we followed that up with another half a dozen investments that I think are sort of all, again trying to sort of replicate that playbook of mixed income, mixed use development with a mix of both sort of national needed amenities and community serving retail and office tenants that both sort of try to draw exciting new things, but also, you know, cater to some of our legacy businesses.   Eve: [00:25:13] Yeah, so common theme I'm hearing from a lot of people now is that part of the process of keeping a community whole is to provide space, a community hub, space in some way or another for a community to feel that it belongs while improvements are going on around them. Does that make sense?   Ommeed: [00:25:32] Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that we had in that building is we, we sort of restored this grand atrium and the grand atrium is actually sort of open to the public year around. And so it becomes this place where you see people, especially in winter here right like, it serves almost like, you know, the function of a town town commons and we sort of made it kind of connect both sides of the building so this is a really kind of interesting passageway.   Eve: [00:25:56] That sounds lovely, I'd love to see it. Perhaps this question is redundant, but I'm going to ask it anyway. Do you think socially responsible real estate is necessary in today's development landscape?   Ommeed: [00:26:07] I do. And it's got a place to play at a lot of different levels. So I think if you look at sort of the institutional level, I think given some interesting things where people are starting to sort of demand that portfolios be LEED certified and have certain environmental obligations, and I think that's something that sort of very both important and do-able at the very sort of macro level for real estate. But then I also think, with what we're facing as a country between the challenges around affordable housing, just radical inequity, and then honestly, we haven't built a lot of housing in this current boom. It's one of the most sort of striking things that's happened is that we haven't built enough housing, we haven't created enough units, and that's driving up the price for everyone. And I do think we, we need capital to be creative and thoughtful about how do you get more going on in places where it's not and get it to a density in a scale that actually starts to bend the cost curve?   Eve: Yes.   Ommeed: [00:26:59] You know, one of the things that, you know, we get asked a lot is sort of, you know, this gentrification question.   Eve: That's a big one.   Ommeed: [00:27:06] And again, I think that that question, it's so much shaped by people's experience in cities like D.C., Boston, New York, cities that are going through these incredible economic booms but have also hardly permitted any housing. If you look at New York, New York City I think last year permitted as much housing as Jersey City. That's one city of eight million people, another three hundred thousand during, you know, year 10 of an economic boom. And so, you know, historically, when we've had economic booms, we've been able to produce a lot of housing. And the thing that's really striking right now, we're just not doing that as a country. And so what's happening is because there's no real housing production and because we've really reduced, for reasons that no one really quite fully understands, geographic mobility, so people aren't moving like they used to, the jobs that are being created and the wealth that's being created in certain places in many cases is all being swallowed back up by people's rent.   Eve: [00:27:59] Interesting.   Ommeed: [00:28:00] The cost of living. And so, you know, I think we are really as a society, not doing what we need to do in terms of connecting people to economic growth.   Eve: [00:28:09] Do you have any ideas about that? I talked to an architect in Australia who's kind of plugging away building affordable, sustainable buildings and making sure that the first buyers are city-serving civil servants who need to be close in. People are taking it from every angle.   Ommeed: [00:28:29] There's no silver bullet. Sure, I do think one of the things that we have to rethink from a design perspective is density.   You go to a city like Vancouver, I mean, I think there's really different ways in which density can be expressed at the street level. And people's experience, you know, people are very poor at actually gauging how dense something is. So, one of those things is I think actually becoming comfortable saying like, you know, we do want to sort of start to think about infill and densification and how do we do that? I do think some of the stuff that's happening on the West Coast about accessory dwelling units and trying to come up not with sort of solutions that, you know, are project solutions, but are actually these kind of decentralized solutions, making it much more easy for people to add a unit, or what Minneapolis did with eliminating single family zoning.   Eve: Yeah.   [00:29:19] I think it's really, really interesting. A few other things we've seen that we're really excited by - in Texas and Colorado and a few other places, we've seen this interesting move to take assets that were built in say the 1970s and 80s as large market-rate rental and kind of reverse convert those to affordable housing. And the way that works is that basically in exchange for really substantial tax abatements, buyers go ahead and dedicate a portion of those units to being affordable and they end up working out roughly the same to what it would be if they bought those buildings and invested lots into to aesthetic renovations and tried to remarket them as luxury. So, these are essentially perfectly lovely units built except with carpet and cherry wood that rather than ripping all that out and trying to convert them into luxury housing, you leave them like they are and convert them into good quality, you know, mixed income developments.   Eve: Yeah, yeah, yeah.   Ommeed: [00:30:16] I think some of the reverse conversions are really interesting too, as another theme as to how we can get affordability on scale.   Eve: [00:30:22] You know, in Melbourne, Australia, years ago, I was really fascinated, there was, the zoning department implemented densification along major roads where there was infrastructure. It's actually a really sprawly city. And so, what they permitted was much higher density buildings, housing, along roads that had bus and train tram. It's been really interesting watching it unfold, you know you can really see the physical spaces changing. But it's a really smart move to take existing infrastructure in a very big city, which is going to be very expensive to increase, and find a way to create density around it. I thought that was pretty smart.   Ommeed: [00:31:06] Yeah, it does sound like a really elegant solution.   Eve: [00:31:09] There's another neighborhood there that I know has now put an overlay district in place where they are not permitting anymore parking spaces moving forward. They're really trying to eliminate them completely. It's a very dense, mixed-use neighborhood, very close to the central business district. So, they're making some pretty bold moves with zoning to try and handle what is sort of a rapid sprawl.   And of course, that means if you can live close in and you can have a smaller unit and you don't need a car because you've got access to infrastructure and it's more affordable. Right.   Ommeed: [00:31:42] Right. You know, it's interesting, I question required parking. Most of the development we've done has has either had minimal or no parking associated with it because the zoning codes here were permissive and it's a real driver of, as you said, you know, you can create more units, you can reduce the cost. Parking minimums are, I think, a hidden and really destructive part of many zoning codes.   Eve: [00:32:05] They've been very destructive, not just for housing, but even when you think about retail strip malls with seas of parking in front of them which are really all about parking minimums.   So are there any other current trends in real estate development that you think are important?   Ommeed: [00:32:19] We've talked about a lot and it's not so much a real estate trend, but this decline in human mobility and our declining mobility rates, I think is just one of those fascinating social trends that I think has implications for place and how we do things that I don't think we fully quite grapple with. I do also think that, you know, we're entering an increasingly dark age for retail.   Eve: Yes, we are.   Ommeed: [00:32:44] You know, there's aesthetic implications to that but it's hard to imagine true vibrant urban places without vibrant retail corridors. And so trying to figure out sort of what else can we do on ground floors? We see this problem in Newark, almost every square foot of retail we've had has had to be filled by a food and beverages. And even then, after a while, you reach saturation. So, what can you do with spaces that actually are interesting and inviting, and, you know, if you are pessimistic on the future retail?   Eve: [00:33:14] This is a dilemma, because other countries we're not really, not really seeing the demise of retail in the same way. It's really a shame for us. Right. It's very difficult.   Ommeed: Very difficult.   Eve: You also engage the community, right, in your work in Newark?   Ommeed: [00:33:30] We do. One of the things that's been interesting in Newark is that I think there's this big cadre of, you know, of what people would call sort of anchor institutions, and that have been a nice kind of vehicle to sort of get all of those different institutions to really try to, sort of, really think differently about this community engagement and not sort of recreate what happened in the 1950s and 60s in terms of just sort of having this kind of urban renewal from the top down.I think part of what we've tried to do in insurance in the beginning is, in finding a way to sort of help smaller infill neighborhood based projects, you actually get to interact with people in community and get just an insight, at a much more human level, into what's sort of driving people and what needs there are felt. I think wherever you can, trying to sort of really, I think encourage transparency.   [00:34:21] We've, you know, we've been really fortunate, I think, to have good leadership at the Mayoral level in Newark and I think they have really forced and encouraged that same kind of community convening, but also done it in a way that, I think, you know, too often those meetings are either sort of lip service or not willing to sort of push back on these issues, let's say, around gentrification. And what I think the Mayor has done a really good job of here is both coming up with good policies around inclusion and local hiring, but also signing up for the fact that, look, inclusive growth also means we have to be able to grow and do things the right way and that if you look at a city like Newark, almost everything we've built has been vacant buildings are vacant lots.   [00:35:04] You know, there's still a long arch before you get into displacement. And actually, if you're adding units of affordability and doing that, you can be constructive in taking the edge off of those pressures.And so I think there's been a really good set of conversations that aren't trying to sort of demonize either side, but trying to get to a pretty reasonable resolution. So, we've been fortunate here.   Eve: [00:35:28] So I'm going to just ask a wrap-up question. Where do you think the future of real estate impact investing lies for the country? It's really just a little blip right now. Right?   Ommeed: [00:35:39] Hmm. I think it can be two things at the same time. I do think there's a real role for institutional capital in pushing more investment into things like affordable housing preservation and sustainable large scale development and I think that's largely about sort of preserving existing assets and upgrading existing assets and I think that's one scenario that impact real estate can do. And then I think there's a need for the kind of catalytic capital that we have to really push money into the places where there's just very little capital availability. I think you could see two, sort of very different approaches, depending on sort of the type of capital of the scale and the places they go, but both are needed.   Eve: [00:36:23] Well, it sounds like a fascinating job you have and probably most people listening to this, are very surprised that Prudential is kind of taking a lead in this and I'm looking forward to seeing what else you invest in. It sounds pretty fabulous.   Ommeed: [00:37:37] Well, thank you. I'm so excited to go look at sort of some of the examples you mentioned.   Eve: Ok, we'll talk again soon, OK?   Ommeed: Thanks.   Eve: That was Ommeed Sathe. For Ommeed, investing is more than a way to make money. It’s a way to make a difference. His portfolio at Prudential has already supported the creation of well over 1,000 housing, 250 hotel rooms and plenty of retail space in Newark.  But most importantly while other funds aspire to reach 10 billion dollars once the 1 billion hurdle has passed, Ommeed's aspirations differ. Rather than go bigger he'd like go riskier - with untested developers and untested ideas in untested neighborhoods. You can find out more about impact real estate investing and access the show notes for today’s episode at my website, evepicker.com.  While you’re there sign up for my newsletter to find out more about how to make money in real estate and while building better cities.   Thank you so much for spending your time with me today, and thank you Ommeed, for sharing your thoughts with me.   We’ll talk again soon, but for now, this is Eve Picker signing off to go make some change.

Jeffrey Giullian, MD, is passionate about his new—as of Jan. 1, 2020—role as chief medical officer (CMO) for DaVita Kidney Care. Listen to this podcast, in which Halie Peddle interviews Dr. Giullian on his priorities and vision as CMO for DaVita. He gives us some personal background on why he pursued a career as a physician, specifically in the field of nephrology, and what originally brought him to DaVita. Dr. Giullian also discusses his views on kidney care-related innovation and how kidney care is leading all of health care in the shift from volume- to value-based care. Listen and read more DaVita Medical Insights here. Podcast Transcript: Halie Peddle: 00:33 Hello, everyone. This is Halie Peddle with the DaVita Medical Insights Podcast. Today we're joined by Dr. Jeff Giullian, newly announced chief medical officer for DaVita Kidney Care. Dr. G., Thank you so much for joining us. This is our first opportunity to sit down with you since you started your new role. I'm excited for our listeners to get to know you even better and hear your thoughts on innovation in the field of nephrology. Dr. Giullian: 00:57 Well, thanks Halie. I'm really excited to be here and share some of my passion for taking care of patients with kidney disease. Halie Peddle: 01:03 Great. Well, let's dive right in. Lots to talk about today. I want to start off just a little bit more personal. Would love to hear what made you decide to pursue a career as a physician? Dr. Giullian: 01:16 That's a good question. Believe it or not. Growing up I was going to be a lawyer. Don't tell any of our lawyer colleagues. They won't believe it. Freshman year in high school, I got a chance to shadow some lawyers. And I have to tell you, I realized that day, the law was not for me. I didn't really understand what they were doing, and it really didn't appeal to me. Dr. Giullian: 01:36 And right after that I had some biology classes where we were actually doing anatomy and physiology, and somehow it just clicked. The timing was right. And finally I found something that I could really sort of sink my teeth into from a passion standpoint. And that was the human body, the physiology of the human body. And from that point on I was dedicated to becoming a physician. Halie Peddle: 01:56 And of all the fields you could have chosen, what made you choose nephrology? Dr. Giullian: 02:00 Yeah, that's another, I think, funny story, or one at least I like to tell. When I was a medical student, nephrology was the last possible thing that I enjoyed doing. It wasn't something that I particularly understood very well. It wasn't something that really captured my heart or my interest. And turns out that the very first month of internship, I was given a chance to spend about five weeks with a couple of nephrologists. And by given a chance, I went kicking and screaming. It was the elective that was given to me, not the elective that I asked for. It turns out I absolutely fell in love with the physicians I was working with, the patients that they were taking care of, the pathology and the physiology that goes along with kidney disease. And I was hooked from that point forward. Halie Peddle: 02:46 And then tell me what brought you to DaVita? Dr. Giullian: 02:48 So I was in clinical practice here in Denver. My wife and I, we're both from Colorado. We're both natives. I met her while I was in school in Nashville. She and I were, I was in training at Vanderbilt, and she was on faculty at Vanderbilt. And we had every intention of staying at Vanderbilt and staying on faculty. In fact, I was going to practice transplant nephrology and general nephrology there. Dr. Giullian: 03:12 And then fortunately we had a little gift that arrived, my daughter, and we realized very quickly that if we didn't want to spend every vacation flying home from Nashville back to Denver to see all the grandparents, if we actually wanted to take trips on vacation, we'd be better served coming home and being in Denver. And so I came home, and I went into practice here in Denver. Practiced nephrology, general nephrology and transplant nephrology, just about 15 minutes south of downtown. Loved it. Loved every minute of it. Loved my patients. And during that time became more involved with DaVita, doing some work as the group medical director where I helped other medical directors in the center part of the country with clinical outcomes. Dr. Giullian: 03:59 And as I got more and more involved with DaVita and started spending more time at DaVita and a little bit less time with my practice, it became evident that I needed to choose one or the other. And so when I had the opportunity to come to DaVita full time, just about four years ago, I jumped at it. Halie Peddle: 04:14 And now as chief medical officer, what aspect of the role are you most excited about? Dr. Giullian: 04:19 Gosh, there are so many aspects. I'm really pinching myself every day that I get to wake up and really serve our physician partners, serve our village, and most importantly serve our patients as chief medical officer. Dr. Giullian: 04:33 And really, I have three big priorities. The first one is holistic care for our patients. And what that means is providing kidney care wherever patients are on the entire spectrum, whether they have early CKD, more advanced CKD, whether they're considering dialysis because they've advanced to the point that their kidneys are not working any longer, or they're on dialysis, or they're waiting for a transplant, or have gotten a transplant. That's really my number one goal is to provide holistic care to that entire group of people. Dr. Giullian: 05:01 The second is to really double down on the foundation that my predecessor Allen Nissenson put into place, which is a focus on patient safety, clinical quality and patient experience. Dr. Giullian: 05:12 And then the third is forging a future of innovation so that we can in time truly reduce the global burden of kidney disease. Halie Peddle: 05:19 There's tremendous innovation in our field right now and as we look to the future. So I'd love to ask the next couple of questions on that topic. So how would you say DaVita defines innovation? Dr. Giullian: 05:31 Well, for DaVita, continuous improvement is in our DNA, and innovation, I think, takes continuous improvement, really to the next dimension. DaVita pushes for what health care can be, not necessarily what it is right now. And that's especially true around transforming the care that we provide to improve quality of life for our current patients and certainly for our future patients as well. So in that context, I think innovation takes forms. And we are driving innovation by improving care delivery, by developing cutting edge technology, and by advancing new models of care. Dr. Giullian: 06:06 We've also really focused heavily on the science of implementation. So this is a discipline of science that focuses on applying research findings and evidence based interventions to routine clinical practice. And this is really part of how we innovate. And the bottom line is we are committed to helping patients manage their kidney disease, really at all stages from, from early on as I mentioned, so that we can delay the progression of their disease, and to those that are later on so that we can ultimately, if they do need dialysis, we can help them in that transition. We can provide them the greatest possible health during all of that. And importantly, we can help them seek a kidney transplant. Dr. Giullian: 06:46 So really regardless of where somebody is on that continuum, I think that at DaVita, and certainly within the office of the chief medical officer, we really embrace our patient's unique lifestyle needs. And we've developed a patient centric care model. And this is all, I believe, due to the innovation that has been put in place. And we believe in offering the right treatment for the right patient at the right time. Halie Peddle: 07:08 And for a patient with kidney disease today, how do you see innovation showing up for them? Dr. Giullian: 07:13 Yeah, so that's a good question. As I think about sort of my own patients, patients that I've cared for in my career, I think it really comes down to giving each individual the best possible experience and the best chance for improving their health. And so I think patients want to know that they are cared about as well as being cared for. And that's really something that I've tried to incorporate into my clinical practice back when I was in practice. Dr. Giullian: 07:38 So for anybody helping care for patients that have a chronic disease, whether that's kidney disease or anything, it means providing holistic care, care for really the whole being. And that's greater than just kidney care for us. It also means helping them with the healthy lifestyle, helping them stay out of the hospital, fewer days in the hospital. At least the way I think about it means more moments at home with their family and with their loved ones. Dr. Giullian: 08:04 And so, we live in an era now where we can personalize care. We no longer are confined to sort of a one size fits all treatment options. We can really help optimize care for any individual. And so I think that's what innovation looks like to our patients. Halie Peddle: 08:20 Yeah. And now if we want to look just a little bit broader at the nephrology community as a whole, what do you think the focus is right now in terms of innovation? Dr. Giullian: 08:30 The kidney community as a whole has focused on improving safety, decreasing hospital admissions, reducing mortality rates through implementation science, which I mentioned earlier, and specifically by leveraging data from the entire population. Research has demonstrated ways that we can implement quality improvement activities really at scale. And I think this is what the community has been focused on as a whole, and we are all to transform the patient experience, provide broader access to care, improve outcomes, and ultimately reduce costs. That's how we provide value. Dr. Giullian: 09:04 The constraining factor has really been reimbursement, which has been stagnant for more than a half a decade. And the dialysis industry, as an example, provides onsite social work. It provides insurance counseling, care coordination, gosh, you name it, nutritional counseling and a lot more to help provide holistic care of patients. But the ability to innovate, at least in the past, has been constrained by regulations, and to some extent, reimbursement has not kept up with the increasing needs of our patients. Dr. Giullian: 09:34 Fortunately, I would say that the kidney community has achieved very high levels of health equity. And this is really due to a tremendous amount of work by members of industry and the community as a whole. And that's health equity and access to safe, effective treatments and continuing, I think the entire community is looking towards new models of care to do even more for kidney patients. Dr. Giullian: 09:58 DaVita believes strongly, and I certainly believe strongly, in equitable access to care from early CKD identification all the way to nephrology care and ultimately to access to kidney transplants. Halie Peddle: 10:10 So it seems like innovation at an industry level, and even as we look at it from a DaVita standpoint today, it's focused not only on that full continuum of care but also how that shows up day to day. But when we look to the future, 20 years from now, what big innovations do you think could change the way that care looks like? Dr. Giullian: 10:30 Boy, it's so exciting to think about 20 years from now because I think the landscape for kidney patients will look very different than it looks today. And I was recently remembering that I saw my very first kidney patient as a medical student just a little over 20 years ago. I will probably retire, God willing, sometime in approximately 20 years. So I'm in the middle of my career, and what I can say is that I think things will look very different in the year 2040 than they look in the year 2020. That will include things between now and then like wearable dialysis devices, implantable devices that can go inside the body and work like a kidney, but that are not necessarily biologic. They're technology based. And there will certainly be new options for kidney transplants as well. So I think over the next 15 to 20 years or 25 years, we will see a complete revolution in the way that patients with kidney disease are cared for. And I'm hoping that we will even begin to see the beginnings of regenerative medicine, the ability to actually go in and do things to repair kidney damage for those patients that have chronic kidney disease so that they don't progress on to needing dialysis. Halie Peddle: 11:41 Very exciting. And I want to switch gears just a little bit, and I'd love your thoughts on this, Dr. G. Many people within the health care community are talking about kidney care because it's thought to be the tip of the spear when it comes to value-based care. Why do you think kidney care is leading this conversation? Dr. Giullian: 11:59 Well, first off I think it's worth mentioning first and foremost that it's really an exciting time to be part of the kidney care community. There's a lot of attention on us now that we didn't necessarily have in the past. In fact, I would say never in my career have I seen so much emphasis on finding new ways to care for really what I think of as one of the most vulnerable patient populations in our country. So I'm excited. Kidney care in general is leading all of health care in the shift from volume to value-based care and reducing care fragmentation by compensating providers for really improved clinical access, clinical outcomes, quality of life, patient related outcomes rather than just the number of services that are rendered or the number of treatments that are given. Dr. Giullian: 12:44 Kidney care providers continue to prove that the drive towards integrated care inspires innovation and the delivery of better outcomes compared to what's called the traditional fee-for-service models. So for health systems, for payers, for providers, this means moving to the value-based reimbursement models and managing risk. And it's really about managing what we call outlier populations. Patients that don't necessarily fit in the "norm" from a clinical standpoint. And those can be small in number, but they tend to be very high in acuity, and they tend to be high in cost. And patients with kidney disease often fall into these categories. Dr. Giullian: 13:27 And so what we're focused on, and what the entire community is focused on right now, is managing the total cost of care for these patients. And I would say this is where DaVita and our partner nephrologists are really in the best position to manage the total cost of care for patients and improve their clinical outcomes. And this is true for patients with advanced stage chronic kidney disease. It's also true for those patients with end stage kidney disease. I think value-based care enables the delivery of holistic care across the entire continuum. And this results in patients staying healthy longer and avoiding hospitalizations. And for me as a clinician first, first and foremost, this is really what we want to achieve on behalf of our patients. Halie Peddle: 14:08 Dr. G., thanks for joining us again today and sharing more on your clinical vision for DaVita. Dr. Giullian: 14:13 Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. Halie Peddle: 14:15 Listeners, thank you for tuning in and be sure to check out other DaVita Medical Insights episodes for more kidney care educational podcasts. You can also find additional kidney care thought leadership and industry news by following @DaVitaDoc on Twitter.

Stewardship is a big part of it, but so is luck. In today’s episode, we sit down with Rene Ancinas, president, CEO, and fourth-generation family member of Port Blakely, about how the company’s vision to leave the world better than how they found it, plus a few fortunate circumstances, have kept them going for over 150 years.  Episode transcript: Hi, I'm Kathleen Farris, and this is Very Different Roles, a podcast featuring conversations with family-owned business members, leaders, and advisors. Today we'll be talking with René Ancinas, Chief Executive Officer, fourth generation of Port Blakely. René, welcome to the show!   René Ancinas   Thanks for having me.   Kathleen Farris   You're welcome. We're glad that you took time out. We know you've got to be really busy up there with all those trees. So, we'll start today, René, to talk about, really, Port Blakely's success and the longevity that's allowed your family business to really continue, and of thriving in carrying your family values, your wealth, forward over the last 150 years. So if you can talk a little bit about your history and your family business and what you do for them.   René Ancinas   Sure, I'd be happy to do that. So, Port Blakely is actually a little over 150 years. It was founded in 1864 in the Puget Sound in Seattle. And it was not founded by an Eddy family member; it was actually founded by a gentleman named William Renton, who was kind of an icon in early pioneering history in Seattle. He had been a merchant marine; he had been an orphan, and like a lot of people at that time, he came west with that pioneering spirit and wanted to start something.   René Ancinas   He actually started in the milling business. He started a couple of different ventures which were not successful. One, he had started the company in a bad location with lots of high winds and notoriously bad Seattle weather.   Kathleen Farris   Probably hard for trees.   René Ancinas   Yeah, exactly. And then he... No, he was only in the mill business.   Kathleen Farris   Oh, got it, okay.   René Ancinas   This was before what we know today as sustainable forestry, which is a whole different world.   Kathleen Farris   Okay.   René Ancinas   Then he tried it again, and there was actually a boiler explosion and he lost his eye, and so he had this great eyepatch for the rest of his life. He went to the Bay Area to recover, and then he came back a third time and he found this great harbor on Bainbridge Island, which was sheltered and deep, and that's when the company really started and he really got going. So early on it was shipbuilding; it was the largest mill west of the Mississippi, one of the first to have electricity. And the family lore and the company lore is that it burned down at least two times. That was kind of the nature of it.   René Ancinas   But our family company came across from... They started in Bangor, Maine in the 18th century. They had been in the lumber business, like a lot of other families. They had gone, like a lot of business family members for a lot of different companies... Weyerhaeuser and everybody else... They migrated to the Midwest. Our family went to Michigan; we had operations there for the second generation, and different kinds of things. There was lumber milling, but the family member there was also in banking and dry goods. And then the next generation came west, like a lot of other folks, and they bought the company in 1903.   René Ancinas   Our family bought the company from the founders' estate in 1903, and at that point it was a mill, and over a period of time, Renton had also stockpiled some of his savings into forests. So back in the early days of big tree harvesting... A lot of people will have seen those famous pictures of the giant trees and... steam engines and people standing on these giant saws and all that kind of stuff. At that time, it was easiest to harvest closer to the water in Puget Sound and they would float and raft these logs around, which is why the mill worked on an island. But he was smart: he started buying forest land inland from there, figuring that at some point that was going to be valuable.   René Ancinas   And some of that forest land formed the beginnings of... When my family came on board, they made a good stab at the mill company. They got into shipbuilding during the first World War, but the forests were always in the background. And roundabout 1930 or so was when the family really focused on forestry and sustainable forestry, and that's the legacy that our family now... So we're fifth generation as of 1903, but if you count back to Maine it's probably a couple more.   Kathleen Farris   Wow. Okay, so-   René Ancinas   Yeah. It's a really interesting history, obviously. I could talk about it for a long time. And when you're part of western pioneering culture like we are, there's a lot of salty and interesting characters back there.   Kathleen Farris   I love the stories and the innovation piece, though, going all the way back to the 1800s. I'm curious to hear your perspective on, when they decided to innovate... Maybe they didn't know that they were innovators back then. You know, like when electricity was created, right? What is your perspective on that? Have you been told stories about, how did they get to the point? Was it a bunch of people around a table? Were they out on the mill? I'm just curious to hear your perspective of how it continued to carry forward, especially way back when.   René Ancinas   You know, that's a really good question, because modern management theory is just that: it's modern. There wasn't a lot of these things that you could go and read about how to solve these problems back in 1880 or whatever, and it was really kind of a scrappy perseverance entrepreneurship, and just... a fair bit of luck, I imagine.   René Ancinas   But I think at the time, they were dealing with the transcontinental railroad, and they realized that they had a mill on an island, and now the mill's going to be on the mainland, and so they tried to figure out how to raft lumber off to be closer to the railroad. The electricity was another thing. I don't know all the origins of that, but I think the mindset of people who were trying to build businesses in the wild west at the time had to have been very, very creative.   René Ancinas   And that DNA is definitely still part of the company, even though... I mean, there's a similar DNA that, over a couple of generations, you pick up roots and you move west each time for new business opportunities. It takes a certain mindset, and I think that our family members had a similar one, because when they got out here and they realized that they mill probably wasn't the best business, they pivoted pretty quickly into shipbuilding and partnering with other family members.   René Ancinas   And then after the first World War, when that really declined they had to pivot again, and then, with my great-grandfather, they spent quite a bit of time looking into forest genetics, and he ended up founding the Institute of Forest Genetics in Placerville to really study long term bug resistance, fire resistance, genetics, to figure out ways that forestry... to be sustainable. But it was really... Like I said, it took a certain mindset to pivot that many times.   Kathleen Farris   Yeah, and to really, the perseverance piece, I think, is fascinating, especially going back then again to the modern management time. How did they come together and keep the company going, the family business going forward and looking at everything that they needed to think about. Who would have thought they were thinking about, back then, what's going to impact the tree, because if there is something that impacts it of course it's not going to grow, right?   René Ancinas   Right.   Kathleen Farris   And then it dies off, like other businesses do. So yeah, I love the stories, which is a great part of having people like you come on our show, so our families can hear about, you know, how did you continue to innovate? And what I love, too, is what you were talking about the communication piece, because a lot of our families, that's a huge issue. And for some it's a positive, right? They're, "This is an opportunity for improvement!" And others are like, "Oh, no. Uncle this and that." So what I love about your company's vision is... and I read this... that it's to cultivate a healthy world, to leave things better than you found them, including your family. So I'd love to hear your perspective: where did that come from, and how do you continue to carry that forward as the CEO?   René Ancinas   Yeah. Well, it's a really interesting one, because I think what we learned after 150 years is that each generation has to drive its own vision within that context. If I think about those stories I just told, I'm fairly certain, although I... I would bet that they weren't talking about long term vision so much as, "How do we survive the Great Depression?" Or, "How do I survive the fact the mill just burned down a second time?"   Kathleen Farris   "How do I feed my family?"   René Ancinas   "How do I feed my family and take care of all these people that I've got employed?"   Kathleen Farris   Right.   René Ancinas   And so, some of those aren't a lot different, but in a lot of ways, we are in a very different world than we were then, and forestry in particular has gone through major revolutions and innovation and different mindsets in terms of its role in society. I mean, it used to be really, really frowned upon as the dark beasts of industrial extraction.   Kathleen Farris   Interesting.   René Ancinas   We all know about the timber wars and the [inaudible 00:09:17] and the redwood trees in California, but really more and more it's become a lot of the answer to climate crisis, because sustainable forestry really has so many benefits.   René Ancinas   And so to go back to your question, with my coming on as the next CEO and now having generations four and five engaged in the company... and also a different, I would say, demographic in our employees... We have more diversity in the employee workforce than we ever did. We have millennials and Gen X-ers and a whole variety of different folks... It was really important in 2013 or '14 as we were setting our next 30 year vision for the company, to say, "How do we make sure that our company is relevant and is impactful and aligned with a very mission-driven employee workforce?"   René Ancinas   There's people who are called to work in natural resources, just like in my old... My experience and my background is in the arts and music. But there's a real interesting commonality: people are very driven to work in nature. And so work has to be meaningful and impactful, so what we did in 2013 and '14 within the company is, we really revisited our vision for the next 30 years. And what really came away from that is that there needs to be a meaningful and impactful work environment. And part of that, and what drew all our employees and made this company, I think, special, was that our employees and our family felt it was important to take care of each others. Employees to family and family to employees.   René Ancinas   But also, because we work at a very large landscape level, the environmental impact and the impact that we have on rural communities and the communities where we operate was also very important. And so that vision... long answer to a good question... [inaudible 00:11:19] healthy world, really encompasses all that. It's that we want to leave things... This is kind of a classic example of stewardship, and we define it as exponential stewardship, which is, we want to leave everything better than we found it. Not just the company and the family members, just the employees, their families, the community, and the environment.   Kathleen Farris   Yeah, I love that. I mean, that's... In our family at home, we talk about that a lot, of, how do we leave each space better off than when we arrived? No matter what it is.   René Ancinas   Right. People who've grown up on farms or ranches, they've often heard that. There's, I think, another axiom... My grandfather was a cattle rancher, and we always learned that you leave the gate the way you found it.   Kathleen Farris   Yup.   René Ancinas   Of course, unless it's broken, and then you're supposed to fix it. Right?   Kathleen Farris   Yeah.   René Ancinas   So.   Kathleen Farris   Yeah, my family had a ranch. We did have cattle, and that's absolutely true. My dad would always say, "Hey, did you take the wire and close it?" It was before we had regular locks on it; it was literally the twine that kept it shut. So yeah, I loved that.   Kathleen Farris   Well, you know what I would like to do is kind of shift a little bit from the humans, but really talk about the governance piece. Because I know this is so important when you're looking at professionalizing and moving from generation to generation and how... especially from your perspective as a CEO, you come into this, you're in the G4, G5 transition, and governance is a huge part of helping our families continue to move forward. And when there's not governance in place, that's a different outcome and a different discussion, but can you talk a little bit about how your family business has used governance to move your family forward, and then maybe talk a little bit about the roles of your board and your family council? I think our families would love to hear that.   René Ancinas   Sure. Yeah, that's a big one. And certainly, in a cousin consortium as we are, and a fifth generation, we have about... plus or minus 140 what I would call stakeholders, about 85 shareholders... Well, first at the high level, we have a board of directors; we have 11 members on our board, which is large, and I'll explain why in a minute. But we have six independent professional board directors and five family members. And that's part of the reason that we have a larger board, is that we also operate by... We like to choose the best practices that might come from professional public company boards without a lot of the extras that, for us, you don't need at a private company.   Kathleen Farris   Sure, sure.   René Ancinas   So we have audit committee, we have a compensation committee, and we have a nominating and governance committee, so we have three committees and then a full board.   Kathleen Farris   Are the six directors family members, or are they elected from companies outside of your family?   René Ancinas   Of the 11 directors, all directors are elected by the shareholders. They're nominated by the board and elected by the shareholders. We're a limited partnership, so we have a slightly different [inaudible 00:14:36] structure; we have limited partner units and we have shareholder units that elect the board.   René Ancinas   But the reason we have 11 is that we wanted to make sure we have leadership on all those committees by independent, professional directors. And that family directors don't necessarily lead committees, but they actually play a very important role in communication about shareholder interests and needs. Not all directors have the same fiduciary responsibility. We also pay all board members the same-   Kathleen Farris   Oh, okay. So they get a stipend?   René Ancinas   Yeah. They get a stipend, a meeting fee, and then committee chairs get a little bit of extra for that leadership role. And then we also have a lead independent director, because my role is also CEO and Chairman of the Board, and we felt it was important because of the many hats that I wear, that there's always a lead independent director. That was something that we chose.   Kathleen Farris   That's great.   René Ancinas   Yeah. And of course, we have a family council, which can be anywhere from seven to nine, and they represent all branches of the family assembly for us that's defined as everybody 15 years and older, whether they own a share or not.   Kathleen Farris   Oh, okay. So that they can all have a voice. Okay, that's great.   René Ancinas   Yeah. So they all have a one-to-one voice on big, broad things. The shareholders and unit holders obviously have a vote by ownership.   Kathleen Farris   Sure, okay.   René Ancinas   So that's kind of the structure. The family council is sort of a constituent representative; they're educating, they're identifying issues and concerns and raising them. They're not necessarily communicating information about how the business is doing, but they're communicating to the business, "We think you should be communicating more about this topic," so we don't want to have the family council in a role where they are trying to translate business performance. This, again, goes back to, that's the business' responsibility.   Kathleen Farris   Yeah. Watch your swim lane. My favorite thing: watch your swim lane.   René Ancinas   Yeah.   Kathleen Farris   Let me help you stay in it, yeah.   René Ancinas   We talk a lot about that. So that's kind of the structure; I would say the goals of the governance structure are really about making sure that there is alignment and that there is a clear voice that we understand what the current owners need and want, but also we want to have future owners bought in so that when they inherit ownership or when they become owners, that they feel like they've had a say. And there's some complexity into that; make sure everybody knows who's coming from which...   Kathleen Farris   Which perspective.   René Ancinas   ... point of view. Right.   Kathleen Farris   Sure.   René Ancinas   But really, it's about alignment. And when we founded our whole governance structure back in around 1999, we spent a lot of time with John Davis and Cambridge Advisors... It was called Cambridge Advisors to Family Enterprise... and they really instilled in us an important concept, which was to keep the family in the business and the business in the family, there has to be a lot of pride and trust. And a lot of people will be familiar with that. So a lot of our governance structure, our programs, are all to make sure that we're building pride and trust in the company.   Kathleen Farris   So I think that's a really great topic to dig a little deeper in. So, pride. Some people are naturally going to have it, right? What advice would you give other CEOs like yourself if they're coming in and they have a landscape that maybe everybody doesn't have as much pride as you'd like them to. How would you look at engaging them? What advice would you have to share with our families?   René Ancinas   Yeah. Well, obviously they're going to proud of the company if the company is performing well. And so professional management and financial performance is really important. They're going to be proud... It can be subjective. For us, it was identifying, what would make the family proud? And that goes back to values, or is the company's values in alignment with what the family expects from the company?   Kathleen Farris   Sure.   René Ancinas   And if not, how do we reconcile that? So pride also has to do, I think, with... And we've had a lot of discussions over the years. You don't want the education of the family about the company to be an indoctrination, but you do want to make sure that you are sharing the stories about the company and what's the employee hat as the CEO. And usually it's even better to have not the family member CEO, but other employees come forward and talk about what they're doing and be really transparent about it, because you can't help but see how proud they are to work for the company and what we do, and that translates to the family. And then it builds over time. So this is a constant thing.   Kathleen Farris   It's kind of like a positive virus.   René Ancinas   Right, yeah.   Kathleen Farris   Yeah.   René Ancinas   And the trust comes with that. So the more they feel like they're hearing the whole story, not just the filtered, rose-colored lens-   Kathleen Farris   Yeah, "Everything's beautiful. We never have any problems."   René Ancinas   Yeah, which is natural when you're really proud of what you're doing-   Kathleen Farris   Yeah, that's true.   René Ancinas   ... but you have to be open and transparent about where you're maybe not succeeding, and that builds trust, and then that builds pride, too. So.   Kathleen Farris   Yeah, that's a really good point. Because I was with a family yesterday and one of my questions to their leadership team is, if you're going to go out onto the floor and share with the employees... which, about 40 of them were related of the 250... the "why" growth matters. Like, why are we continuing to grow? What was their answer? And the question was, we don't know.   René Ancinas   Wow.   Kathleen Farris   Right, yeah. So then back to... What I loved what you said earlier is, you took the time to plan a 30 year vision. I'm going to be honest: I had none of my families say that. Not that that's a bad thing, but good for you guys. How did you go down that path? I think I'd love to hear a little bit more about that. What was that process like? I mean, I've done vision work where we've done five years, 10 years, and then re-engineered back to figure out, how did we get to that. You know, here's the steps we took to get to that 10 year. But what does a 30 year process look like? Because I'm sure that because of that, and things you've done in the past, that's why your family is past the 150 mark.   René Ancinas   Well, that's an interesting... I should be clear: the vision that we did... And this presents, I think, a whole nother thing that's good for family companies to talk about. The vision that we're talking about, that we did, was the company's vision, that the employees in the company did. And we definitely included the family members, but this one was driven by what we know as a company and of what our employees felt strong about knowing our company and what their... based on what they believed the family would be proud of and that would do the right thing by the family, what is our company's vision? Which we shared with the family.   René Ancinas   The family, back when we were creating our governance structure as part of our constitution, the family also created a vision for the company, which was part of the constitution, and that they created for our family assembly. It doesn't maybe fall into what most people that might be listening would think of as a vision statement, but it had a lot of these same concepts of, we want to company to perform well, we want the company to take care of our employees and our communities, and that kind of thing. They were more statements.   René Ancinas   So what's interesting about all this is that family companies are not static, so just as you've done work in one of the circles, whether it's the company or the owners or the family, then you have to go back to the other one and keep building on it. So the family assembly now, through the family council, is revisiting the values over this couple of years, and that will likely lead to conversation about refreshing the family's vision for the company. And what we did do is, when we shared the vision for the company that the employees and staff came up with, there was a lot of excitement in the family. So it was really a test of, are we in alignment? And I think we got a lot of strong endorsements of that.   Kathleen Farris   Oh, okay. Good.   René Ancinas   But there's a separate conversation that needs to have as ownership transitions over time: do the next generation of owners share the same goals for the company as the previous generation? So it's never static. That's part of the stewardship of family governance, too.   Kathleen Farris   Yeah, I think that's a really good point, because like you shared earlier, each generation drive its own vision. And if your millennial generation is the "save the earth"... not saying that all of your generations aren't, but they have a different perspective of how they'd like to leave the space better off than when they arrived, so I think that's great that you continue to bring everybody together and really talk about what's working and their vision for the future. And some of our families have dozens of family members who work in the family business, and I understand that you guys have too. So I'd love to hear, what's the impact that you believe this has had on Port Blakely, especially what I read about binding the 140 members of the family closer to the company.   René Ancinas   Yeah. It's a really... When I joined the company, there were four of us. There was, my predecessor, the CEO, myself, and then the president of our forestry operations, because we have three operating divisions. We had four at the time, but three operating divisions. And his son had been working the company for many years, and so now it's his son Mike and I are the only two family members working in the company. But I would say that... I can say that from my experience...   René Ancinas   I have a couple of experiences. Before I was ever involved in this company, my parents had... I grew up in the mountains of Northern California in Squaw Valley, and my parents had ski shops. And very unrelated, but at the same time, there was something about an owner-occupied business. So they had special programs for ski racers to trade in equipment when nobody else had that kind of thing, because ski racing was a very expensive sport. They had fundraisers for ski education foundations; they did all this stuff. They had barbecues on Fridays for their employees in the parking lot; they did all kinds of stuff. And so there was a feel to having an owner-occupied business that I grew up with that I put in my memory bank.   Kathleen Farris   Sure.   René Ancinas   I would say that that same thing applies to having family members in a company when it's working well. When I came on board, I had a lot of employees say, "We are so happy to know that there's family leadership coming into the company. We were worried this may not happen," because I think it gives them a sense of continuity and that those values will continue.   René Ancinas   Now, the opposite side is that there's always a tension between that and it not becoming an entitlement, where as a family member you just assume you're going to work in the company, regardless of whether your qualified or dedicated. Because I think we've all studied and seen things, examples when that happens; unfortunately, the toxicity is kind of a multiplier. It's very de-motivating to the other staff.   Kathleen Farris   It just gets carried through the family business, for sure.   René Ancinas   Right.   Kathleen Farris   Yeah.   René Ancinas   So it's a balancing act. You have to be clear. One of the first things we worked on back in, I'd say '99 and 2000 was clarifying the expectations of family members and family employment. And we're going back to it in the next year to revisit it, because it's been 20 years since we looked at it.   Kathleen Farris   Oh, okay.   René Ancinas   Really make sure it's still relevant.   Kathleen Farris   So I know some of our families have shared that they have such a... I'll say "nonflexible policy," to where sometimes their family member is the best candidate, but because they're governance says "I can't give it to you out the gate if you, family member, don't interview as well as an outsider." So I'd love to hear your perspective on that, or how do you make sure that the entitlement doesn't happen, but that you don't lose a really good family member who could add total value? That's such a... That could be a morale issue altogether, of... You know, Susie is the new CFO, but really John really needed to be it because of where their skill sets align strategically with the family goals. So I would love to hear your thoughts on that.   René Ancinas   Yeah, I think one of the things that happens... It falls into the realm of entitlement and clear expectations... A lot of this can be subjective. So what I mean by that is, as long as you set expectations before you reach that really critical decision point, and you've thought through all the ramifications, then you're going to mitigate some of that concern. Where I think family businesses get into trouble in large and small incidents is when they reach that critical decision where there's a potential conflict and a mixture of professionalism hats: entitlement, experience, hopes and dreams and loyalties, is it gets very emotionally muddy, and that's where things go south.   Kathleen Farris   Right.   René Ancinas   So for example, we looked at a lot of different... And I wouldn't say we have this all perfect, but when we did our family employment policy, we looked at a lot of different models, and our general philosophy was that we felt that it was more important to have family members engaged in the company and working for the company than not. I know companies that don't want to have any family members as employees, except maybe the CEO, but we felt that it was important, that that was a good thing, as long as there were certain requirements. And so we said they must have a college degree; it's highly recommended that they work outside the company for a number of years, and they have to be qualified for the job and go through the same process anybody else does.   René Ancinas   I would say that in terms of our general hiring practices, we wouldn't outweigh any one part of the hiring process more than another. So if we really know the person and they didn't have the greatest interview, I'd say we probably wouldn't be that black and white about it, but it would require a lot of discussion, because any time you hire a family member, it's going to telegraph to the rest of the staff more so than it would anybody else.   Kathleen Farris   So true.   René Ancinas   Just to be aware of that is important.   Kathleen Farris   It reminds me of the can from when I was little... you know, the two cans and the wire. It's so quick. It just permeates, whether it's positive or negative, right? That's... I think that's... I mean, it does happen in other companies that are not family-run, but in fam-   René Ancinas   Well, especially if the can on the other end is in front of a giant megaphone over a stadium.   Kathleen Farris   I was going to say! In family-owned businesses, it is the megaphone.   René Ancinas   Yeah.   Kathleen Farris   Yeah, exponentially going through from one person to the next, so. You know, and too, I think... and shifting a little bit to the DNA that your founder... and I thank you again for sharing the story. I wish our podcast could be way longer, but when you come next time we'll have you on a panel or be our keynote. But the DNA that the founder created for Port Blakely, can you talk a little bit about how, in your role, you continue? Are there one or two things that you think about, "This is what I need to make sure is top of mind, to make sure those values continue to carry forward"? Because I think, just based on everything I've read and what I've learned from you and your staff is, it really has allowed your family to carry the wealth and the values forward in such a positive way, where some families, their founder is nonexistent in anything that they still do. So can you share a little bit about that, your perspective?   René Ancinas   Yeah. I thought about that... I've thought about that a number of times, because we're in this unique situation where our "founders," or our family founders, came from Michigan and bought this existing company, and they didn't start it from scratch.   Kathleen Farris   Right.   René Ancinas   The same mindset that brought them west, that same sort of pioneering, entrepreneurial mindset, was the same mindset that the actual founder of the company, William Renton, had when he came out from Bangor, Maine, all the way to [inaudible 00:31:26]. So I would say that... and then the way I've looked at it is, any company that lasts 150 years is very unlikely to be doing exactly what it did at the beginning and doing it the same way. So the way I look at it is, when I put the bundle of those three together in the history of the company, I really look at the DNA as one of being adaptable...   Kathleen Farris   Great, yeah, I love that.   René Ancinas   Creative. You know, a lot of perseverance and engagement. So when you're a founder and you're starting something, it is as much your life as it is your work; you're never not thinking about what you're doing. And there is a certain quality in our company where it is what people chose to do with their life; it's not an avocation; it's really a career that they're passionate about. And like I said, they're mission-driven. So we have that same dedication, perseverance, creativity; it's just maybe for different reasons in a different era.   Kathleen Farris   Yeah. That's great.   René Ancinas   Does that make sense?   Kathleen Farris   Yeah, totally made sense, because I think about some of the families who, they struggle with that and they can't figure out how to move to the next space because it gets in the way and it gets super muddy, instead of them being adaptable and flexible and... you know, you're right; if a family business started 100 years ago, they've changed. That's why they're 100 years old, right?   René Ancinas   Right.   Kathleen Farris   They still have a fabric of things that they do, and especially if they got governance in place out the gate, which doesn't always happen, right? Then it gets into these issues where family members sue each other, and then married in, and all of those things that just get kind of weird. But yeah, I really appreciate that. That's really helpful.   Kathleen Farris   So let's talk a little bit about... I learned about your Eddy Academy and your Leadership Academy, and I think our families that are looking at, how do we continue to educate the next generation, a lot of families are looking at that. Maybe they have no programs in place at all, and maybe they have a little bit. Do you want to talk a little bit about yours and how they've helped bring up the next generation?   René Ancinas   Yeah. Well, it's a really remarkable thing, because I grew up very distant from the company, and I used to come to shareholder meetings because I was forced to and had to wear a coat and tie and come to Seattle and sit in a smoke-filled room and... They were just very unpleasant, alienating experiences, and I can't imagine... It's hard to believe how much it's transformed, but I think...   René Ancinas   We've developed a lot of programs in the last 20 years for engagement. It's not just those; obviously we have an annual shareholder meeting, and annual meeting, which is as much a family reunion as anything else, but we have investor phone calls regular; we've had, from time to time, road shows where we do investor briefings with investors.   Kathleen Farris   Oh, okay.   René Ancinas   When we do shareholder meetings, we'll have guest speakers, or we'll go on field tours, or we'll do stuff to help people both have fun and engage in the company. I think the programs that you're talking about, the Eddy Academy and also then we developed a Leadership Academy, those are really based on a few things. One was, we want to make sure that everybody can come to the annual meeting, regardless of where they are in their stage of their life. So if they have kids and they're not coming, why not have a place where they can bring their kids and leave them? And if they're going to do that, with the mindset that we're trying to develop relationships between, sometimes, distant cousins at this point...   Kathleen Farris   Sure. Building a bridge?   René Ancinas   Building bridges, but also remembering that they're also business partners. And so at some point, those five-year-olds are going to be... if all goes well, knock on wood...   Kathleen Farris   They'll be shareholders.   René Ancinas   They'll be shareholders, and they'll be business partners. And so the more that they're looking to each other and they know each other and have a relationship, the more there's going to be glue.   Kathleen Farris   That's true.   René Ancinas   And then we also want to make sure that they understand and appreciate what this family company has provided all of us. And so there's a combination of fun activities, light activities around what the company is about. The Eddy Academy kids and their cohorts, the age ranges shift as generations are moving through.   Kathleen Farris   Sure.   René Ancinas   So as some of those little kids got into their preteens and teens, we realized, "Okay, we can't just send them to daycare; now we have to do other stuff."   Kathleen Farris   Right. Get some programming.   René Ancinas   Exactly.   Kathleen Farris   Yeah.   René Ancinas   So, and we've had a couple of educators in our family council over the years who have been really good at this, and so now with the Leadership Academy is a combination of traditional leadership development, and then some of the older kids that are in college or high school or just out of college, we've started doing every few years a national outdoor leadership program, NOLS program, where they actually go for a week into the outdoors, and it's a very powerful program that has been designed in collaboration with NOLS, and then they come to the annual shareholder meeting and share their experience there. And then we've developed internship programs, so it really tries to run the gamut from when they're little kids to owners.   Kathleen Farris   Sounds immersive.   René Ancinas   Yeah, and then we also have programs where any owner who wants to come and spend three days at the company, we have different curriculums where they can do a Port Blakely experience; they can go work in the woods for three days, or they can... There's a whole gamut of things they can do.   Kathleen Farris   Yeah. I think if I had to pick one of those, I would do that. Can I go with the trees?   René Ancinas   Yeah. It's a lot of hard work.   Kathleen Farris   Yeah. Yeah. Great. So, in your role, I'm sure there's been lots of growing opportunity for you, and so I'd love to hear, what's one or two unique challenges that you feel that you've faced, and how did you overcome them, and then was there anything that really surprised you in your role?   René Ancinas   Oh, wow. That's a... saving the good questions for near the end here. [inaudible 00:37:36]   Kathleen Farris   Of course. Welcome to Drucker.   René Ancinas   For me, it was a unique experience because I did not have a deep management background; I had been working in internet e-commerce, and before that I was trained as a musician, but I had been involved in the company to help establish that family governance program, so there was... As my predecessor said, people have the capacity to learn the business skills and tools, and we can get that, but having the understanding of how the family works and the trust in the family is the harder things to have. And so what the family company needed at that time, he felt, was more of that.   René Ancinas   Now, I think one of the things I learned from him is, companies and families will need different types of leaders and different leadership skills at different times, based on where they are. It's not... I think one of the main things I learned is, a lot of people think the CEO leadership role is something you see on TV, that every leader who works at that level is this brilliant entrepreneur who is smarter than anybody in the room...   Kathleen Farris   Yeah, they get up differently, they get dressed differently, yeah.   René Ancinas   Yeah, and frankly, they're usually middle aged white men, and the whole thing. There's this whole-   Kathleen Farris   Yeah. Totally untrue, but okay, yes.   René Ancinas   Totally untrue and based on a lot of bias. Now, I can't say that's true of everybody, but that's sort of the iconic CEO. What really happens, and what I've learned through meeting other CEOs is, there's a huge range of different personality types, and one of the things that I also learned is, you have to be yourself, recognize your weaknesses. You'll hear this a lot: surround yourself with people who don't think like you.   Kathleen Farris   I agree.   René Ancinas   Prop up your weaknesses or blind spots, and create a culture where you can have open dialogue. So it's not all top-down; it's really a collaborative effort.   Kathleen Farris   You get an A+. It's so true, though, because your role... It's kind of like we tell our students that work with us: everybody does get up the same way. We each have our roles in whatever company we work for, and you've got to make the best of it. And then, what education do you need? And the reflection piece is huge, and for families, I think that's it too: how do we continue to help them look inside and innovate themselves while they're innovating their own company? And for some families, the founder was the right leader; now passing the baton to G2, G3, or G4, you know, it's a huge failure rate. That next leader that's coming in might need to be totally different style of leader to carry the family business forward. And so I love how you shared that; I think it's extremely helpful for our CEOs and other people to hear.   Kathleen Farris   So what's the best advice you ever got?   René Ancinas   Oh my gosh. I think it probably is that, don't try to be something you're not. Know thyself, be yourself, and just be ready that you're never going to make everybody happy, but as long as you're genuine, you're real, you're authentic, you're caring, and you move things forward, the pride and the trust will be there. But you can't force somebody to be somebody they're not.   Kathleen Farris   Yeah, that's true. That authenticity is really true, especially in family businesses, because business is a family and a family is a business; they're all intertwined. That's great.   Kathleen Farris   Do you have a favorite book? Is there one book that you would recommend to family business leaders like yourself that they might want to read?   René Ancinas   That is a really tough question. I've read a lot of books on-   Kathleen Farris   I figured that.   René Ancinas   ... family business and leadership. You know, I did put a little bit of thought into this, and there's a few books that I would suggest. Early on, it was really helpful for us as a family to read through the generation to generation book.   Kathleen Farris   Oh, right, sure.   René Ancinas   I think a lot of people have read that as the three circle model. I consider John Davis a friend and a mentor for many years, and he and his firm have helped us through many, many things. But I find a lot of the writings he's done really, really helpful and insightful, generally speaking. We've also used a fair bit of the Family Business Consulting Group's pamphlets on a whole variety of topics. We used it a lot in succession planning; we've used books around... I think there's one called Financing Transitions that explains a lot of the really interesting concepts of patient capital, and some of the strategic advantages that family companies have. And then I'm a big culture person myself, so I'm a big believer in the writings of Feffer; I think he was at Stanford on culture-driven organizations.   René Ancinas   And I can't help but give a plug to our friend Mr. Drucker, because one of the early things that I think my mom sent to me very early on was an article about management as a liberal art, and I still have that dog-eared article copy in one of my notebooks, and I go back to it over and over again. I think the concept of management as a liberal art is a really, really important one.   Kathleen Farris   Yeah. That's a great story, and it came from your mom?   René Ancinas   Yeah.   Kathleen Farris   Wow. That's great. Yeah, I think those are absolutely great resources for our families to think about, because again, there's not a lot of research out there; there's not a lot of books for family business leaders, and I think these are extremely helpful. Thanks for sharing them.   Kathleen Farris   If you could go back in time and ask your founder for advice, given everything you've learned so far, what question would you ask?   René Ancinas   Wow. Boy, that would be a really interesting coffee. So I'm going to assume the founder-   Kathleen Farris   You could make it up. It could be a bunch of questions. Go ahead.   René Ancinas   Oh yeah, yeah. I'm going to assume the founder from a perspective of a family enterprise, versus William Renton.   Kathleen Farris   Yeah, great.   René Ancinas   I guess it would be... It's not so much advice, but I really would like to know what... and these were really siblings, so there were three brothers and a sister, and one of the brothers and the sister stayed in Michigan and the other two brothers came out west as a family enterprise together. I guess I would ask my great-grandfather and his older brother, what was their 30-year vision for the company, back in 1903?   Kathleen Farris   Great question.   René Ancinas   Why come to Seattle from Michigan in 1903; why this company; why here, and what were their hopes and dreams? I don't think we ever had a chance to hear that story.   Kathleen Farris   Yeah, that's a great question.   René Ancinas   Because like I said, I assume that they were just trying to survive, and they certainly had the means to come and buy the company, so they weren't suffering financially; they had the ability to do it, but they didn't have to.   Kathleen Farris   Yeah, the why behind it is always interesting to hear about how they got to that point of, this is the why. This is why that matters to us. Yeah, that's a great question.   Kathleen Farris   Well, I think this is a great place for us to end. Thank you for coming on the show today, and I'd like to close with asking you, why was it important to you today to come on the show and share your story? You could have been doing a lot of other things besides this, but why share your story? Why is that important to you?   René Ancinas   Yeah. Well, I guess I think family businesses, family enterprises, are a very special thing. As I say often to people, they're a whole different kind of animal. And no two are the same; the solutions that all of us are searching for are not the same; you can't find them in a textbook.   Kathleen Farris   It's true.   René Ancinas   And so anything that any family company can do to share with each other what we've learned, I think is helpful. And I'm the same way, so I am often listening to others talk about it and what I can learn from them. So I think it's really just about contributing to the conversation to help other family companies as much as our own.   Kathleen Farris   I love that. Great. Contributing to the conversation. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show today. I really appreciate it. This is Kathleen Farris, and you've been listening to Very Different Roles, recorded live in Studio B3 at Claremont Graduate University in conjunction with the Drucker School Global Family Business Institute.  

Michael Myers sits down to tell us his story of starting Distillery 291. He had a booming photography career, but while living in NY during the events of 9/11, it made him want something else. He found out early on that he liked whiskey, so like most of us who start off with something new, he researched and used his skills from a past farm life to make it a reality. Michael actually built his very first still on a tight budget and ended up using some of his photography equipment to create the still. From these humble beginnings, his whiskey has gone off to win many different awards and they are now expanding even further, creating a whiskey that is Aspen stave finished and authentic to Colorado. Show Partners: The University of Louisville has an online Distilled Spirits Business Certificate that focuses on the business side of the spirits industry. Learn more at uofl.me/bourbonpursuit. In 2013, Joe Beatrice launched Barrell Craft Spirits without a distillery or defied conventional wisdom. To this day, his team sources and blends exceptional barrels from established producers and bottles at cask strength. Learn more at BarrellBourbon.com. Receive $25 off your first order at RackHouse Whiskey Club with code "Pursuit". Visit RackhouseWhiskeyClub.com. Distillery 291 is an award winning, small batch whiskey distillery located in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Learn more at Distillery291.com. Show Notes: Maker's Mark Solar Panels: https://www.wlky.com/article/makers-mark-now-powering-rickhouses-with-help-of-500-solar-panels/31017612 Beverage Daily Article: https://www.beveragedaily.com/Article/2020/02/17/Alcohol-s-three-tier-system-slows-ecommerce-and-dates-the-industry Why Does Whiskey Taste Like Whiskey: https://www.thedailybeast.com/why-does-whiskey-taste-like-whiskey-an-excerpt-from-lew-brysons-new-book-whiskey-master-class Rate Our Podcast: https://ratethispodcast.com/bourbon This week’s Above the Char with Fred Minnick talks about blended whiskey. When were you first introduced to bourbon? Where are you from? How long where you in Savannah? Let's talk about your background in photography. Which more enjoyable, photography or whiskey making? Tell us about your experience with 9/11. How were your first attempts at making whiskey? Did you lean on any outside consultants? Tell us about building and designing your still. How much did it cost to build your still? What was your end goal when you first started? Tell us about your barrels. What was going through your mind when you first started? Did your photography career fund the whiskey business? Tell us about your awards. What is the operation like today? Was it daunting coming to Kentucky with your bourbon? Did you experience growing pains? What do you want our listeners to leave with about 291? 0:00 To be the best you have to learn from the best local in the surrounding regions are home to many of the most storied companies and innovative startups in the distilled spirits industry. And there's no better place to learn the business of the distilled spirits industry. Then from a university located in its Epicenter, the University of Louisville has partnered with industry experts to offer the distilled spirits business certificate, a six course program designed to accelerate your success in this booming industry. Oh, it's all online. get signed up to make your next career move at U of l.me slash bourbon pursuit. 0:36 Michael Myers Michael Michael Myers got it. 0:40 We didn't want to say anything but I'm sure you get all the time people like Michael Myers especially down like Halloween coming up and studly yo Yeah, never 0:48 your 0:50 damn life. 0:52 And my first name is Jason. Believe it or not, he shouldn't be though. Oh my gosh. 1:07 This is Episode 242 of bourbon pursuit. I'm Kenny. And if you're ready for your bourbon whiskey and overall spirits news, it's about time we get to it. According to the US securities regulation charges in its 2014 and 2015 fiscal years biagio North America pressure distributors to buy excess inventory in order to meet internal sales targets in the face of declining markets, and now is hit with a $5 million dollar fine from the SEC, johnnie Walker's owner Diaz you failed to disclose the excess stocks to investors creating a misleading impression that the audio and the audio North America were able to achieve their sales targets through normal customer man according to the SEC. Now without admitting or denying the SEC findings, Dr. Gao has agreed to pay a $5 million penalty and agreed to cease and desist from any further 2:00 violations. The SEC has accepted the offer. Lexapro distillers is paying homage to the past by relaunching an old bourbon. The Davis county Kentucky straight bourbon is being released in three varieties. The Nashville is a mix of weeded bourbon and rye mash Bill said it liver a sweet and spicy taste. There will be the original a Cabernet Sauvignon finish in a French oak finish. Davis county distilling company was the first to release the bourbon, and the brand dates back to 1874 and was one of the few distilleries to survive prohibition. 2:34 Maker's Mark has added more than 500 solar panels to its facility. In Loretto to power its Rick houses, and it's done through a partnership with the Kentucky utilities company. The 560 panels will provide energy for security, lighting, barrel elevators and office spaces in the brick houses. However, I'm curious if there's actually office space at a brick house. If it's true, I don't know if it's a good or bad thing because 3:00 You've been sequestered to sitting in a wreck house every day might get a little bit lonely, almost like Milton then as red stapler in the basement from the office space. But I guess it smells like bourbon, which is better than a basement so you got that going for you. All right, well back to the topic. The new solar array first began producing power for Maker's Mark in early February, and is expected to produce about 268,000 kilowatt hours per year. e commerce analytics company profit, tiro said that online alcohol sales could explode from anywhere to seven to $15 billion in the next few years, noting that e commerce is making an impact on just about every industry imaginable. And alcohol looks to be the next sector to be disrupted by the continued shift to digital. However, as we've been saying on this podcast time and time again, the three tier system is slowing this down and is dating the industry and an article by beverage daily calm. It looks at platforms such as drizzly go, puff and thirsty 4:00 brands can catch on and partner. It also goes into detail on how these brands can differentiate themselves and not be paired next to other brands that could be either cheaper or delivered in a shorter time period. You can read more with the link to beverage daily calm in our show notes. Last week at the inaugural us distilled spirits conference, Mitch McConnell offered no relief with the ongoing tariff dispute for American and foreign whiskey. The European Union is a key market export for Kentucky bourbon, and it imposed 25% tariffs on us whiskey in 2018. In response to us tariffs that Trump enacted on imported steel and aluminum. Now, late last year, the US left a 25% tariff on imports of single malt Irish and Scotch whisky liquors, and that also affected global companies like brown Forman and biagio that import these products to the US. Now I common excuses that the US whiskey industry has just been collateral damage in Trump's trade disputes. 5:00 And Chris Walker, President and CEO of the spirits council said that the industry hasn't lost hope and that the levees will be removed. And now there's even more coverage that the chief executives of the Scotch whisky Association and the distilled spirits Council of the United States are calling on the UK and US governments to urgently find a negotiated solution to unrelated trade disputes and remove all terrorists on distilled spirits. Have you ever wondered, why does whiskey taste like whiskey? Well, when we nose and taste bourbon, we get leather, caramel dried fruits, but it was never made with any of that. And a new article by Lou Bryson at The Daily Beast, he explores every step of the process and how flavors are derived with grains like rye and their spice in his character. Why using the same Nashville at two different distilleries will result in two different very whiskies. And then there's 5:55 an organic compound formed by bacteria that's found in Water Agency 6:00 And is responsible for that musty or earthy smell like some lake water, but can also be found in whiskey too. There's more talk about stills barrels, proofing and more and you can read all this with a link to the Daily Beast in our show notes. For today's podcast, Michael Myers tells a story of the starting distillery to 91 he had a career in photography in the events of 911 made him want to do something else. So like anything most of us want to venture into you research and research and research. Michael actually built his very first still on a tight budget ended up even using some his photography equipment in the still itself. The distillery has grown but that original still is used as as doubler today, from these humble beginnings, his whiskey has gone off to win many different awards, and now they're expanding into more and more states. The distillery is expanding itself and he's creating a whiskey that is asked when the state finished that he feels his 7:00 authentic to Colorado. We're currently doing our 2020 bourbon pursuit audience survey. So we want to know more about you, our listeners. So if you've got 30 seconds to spare, please visit bourbon pursuit.com slash 2020 survey. It really it only takes 30 seconds. We appreciate the time. Are it Showtime, here's Joe from barrel bourbon. And then you've got Fred minich with above the char 7:28 it's Joe from barrel bourbon. In 2013. I launched barrel craft spirits without a distillery and defied conventional wisdom. To this day My team and I sourcing blend exceptional barrels from established producers and bottle a cast strength. Find out more at barrel bourbon calm. 7:44 I'm Fred MiniK. And this is above the char. As I put the bullseye upon my lips for the first time, I could feel it tingling upon the bottom of my lip and the top. Once it hit my tongue it just overwhelm my palate with flavor 8:00 drenching down the bottom of my jaw line, tingling the sides of my tongue tingling the top of my palate. Just feel warming me all the way down. And you know what? It's not a bourbon. And it's not a rye. It's a blend of straights. It's a blend of straight rye whiskey and straight bourbon and it is motherfucking delicious. Right now I'm putting it as one of my contenders for whiskies of the year. You can see my full review on it on my YouTube page. But this, this whiskey and all the barrel releases and all these other blends that we have seen come out in recent years from from high West and barrel and numerous other you know, blending houses that are really doing a great job right now. They really are shaking up our traditions in American whiskey. You see the term blend used to be a really dirty word and American whiskey 9:00 ski and it all goes back to the 1800s when Canadian blenders were infiltrating the straight whiskey scene and undercutting the Kentucky bourbon distillers and putting their Canadian blends on the market and you know what consumers really, really liked them. And so it begins there and the Canadian whiskey distillers were trying to block the bottle and Bond Act of 1897. Of course, they were unsuccessful. The Canadian whiskey distillers also rise up again after prohibition, and they actually ironically tried to put bottled and bond on their label. Now, what's interesting is that the US government ended up terrifying their their whiskey to block them from using bottled and bond so that basically stopped them from using bottled and bond. But at that same time, American distillers did not have a lot of stocks from their left over from prohibition. So they actually had to use blends and 10:00 cells to get their brands out onto the market. And so you would see neutral grain spirit being added to, say, a four year old bourbon that had just been distilled a couple of few years ago. And that really kind of like people were like, ah, I really like blends, but this is all I got. And the straight bourbon distillers were just kind of reluctantly doing it, but they had to and so you couple that what they would later call rocket whiskey with the the the blended whiskey from from Canada, and you had distillers in the 1950s not even allowing the the word blend being used in their distilling house, and that's where the words mingle and marrying or born. And for every decade after that the Kentucky distillers especially, would call out blend as a dirty word and would not let people say putting two barrels to 11:00 Together was blending that was mingling. And so that's where those words come from is because people were never wanted to use the word blend in Kentucky distilleries. Now fast forward to 2020. You have a lot of new blood in the industry, a lot of new blood that does not care about old terms or old ways. They just want to put out great whiskey. And I got to tell you some of the more exciting whiskies that I have tasted in the past five years, our blends of straight whiskies. They are absolutely fantastic. But you will never, ever hear me say those words around the great Jimmy Russell. If you ask him, blend is still a dirty word. And that's this week's above the char. Hey, make sure you're checking out my new podcast the Fred Minix show where I interview musicians 12:00 And I pair whiskeys to their palate. I'm having a blast and coming up I've got an American Idol winner on the show. Until next week cheers 12:12 Welcome back to another episode of bourbon pursuit the official podcast of bourbon. Kinney and Ryan here in our official recording studio, which is deemed Kenny's basement. Yes, yeah. Where we shoot everything. Whiskey quickies the podcast unit Hey but you know we started get everything together we got lights we got cameras we got everything happened in here so it's fun for especially people that are either watching on YouTube or on Facebook or something like that and you want to get something different than just something audio only at least get a fancy background. Yeah, unfortunately for our guests, when they show up, they're like, damn it what you're in a house, like a recording studio. are gonna be we'll get another one of these days. One of these days. One of these days we'll get there you know, as much cooler sailors whiskey, I'm sure But well, we'll get the studio there one of these days. We'll get some sound panels and everything like that. That makes us feel a little bit more legit 13:00 But you know, today I'm really excited about our guests because this is a distillery that, you know, we've heard about, you know, we've read about it before and bourbon and banter and everything like that. He's even been a guest with Fred MiniK on his show on Youtube before and so now something in common. You know, Fred's the mutual connection here right here we go and then and so being able to have him on the show kind of talk about their stories stuff like that is you know, pretty exciting because anybody that isn't watching on TV he brought to find whiskeys for us to sit on here. So we got their their bourbon and their rye, which you might be hearing us sipping up throughout the show. Yes, and it's very highly decorated bottle. So tons of awards. And I just had it for the first time and I can see why. For a distiller this young, it seems like some pretty good, juicy got here. So I'm excited to hear the story and dive into how it got to this ball. 13:53 See, they put stickers on Oh, yeah, absolutely. So let's go ahead and introduce our guest. So today we have Michael Myers. 14:00 Michael is the founding distiller and CEO of distillery to 91 out of Colorado Springs. So Michael, welcome to the show. Thank you very much. Glad to be here. Well, good. So you know, before we, you know, talk about the whiskey and the distillery let's kind of let's rewind the hands of time here kind of talk about your first introduction to bourbon or spirits or anything like that. Yeah, so the it's funny. The first time I drank whiskey that I remember was, we always have those stories, too. Yeah, I 14:31 was I was 18 and turn just turned 18 that day and went to a local bar with friend He must have been in Canada or something. 14:41 Now in Georgia, 14:43 close 18 That all changed but I went to bar and wanted to drink a whiskey and ordered Yukon jack, which was sort of the whiskey at the time. Sweet and now it's really not I mean, I think it's GNS what's 15:00 Some natural flavorings and stuff, but you would know better now I know konjac is a new one on me. It's from Canada. 15:08 That you said Yeah. And it's Yeah, it's a liquid. Gotcha now and so yeah with my friend Todd Hawkins and we had a lot of fun and drank you know, a shot of it and 15:23 and then probably the next time I mean, I was drinking jack jack daniels, as well later and then college. One of my worst experiences was super bowl and I had bought some really nice Crown Royal, moving up in the world and 15:40 and drank not a fifth but maybe 375 of that throughout the Super Bowl and just got so sick and actually woke up the next morning was like, I love whiskey. I am going to the bar and forcing myself to drink more whiskey so that I don't have that issue. 16:00 Where I can't smell that ever again. And so I did that day I got up that afternoon went to the bar and that first shot of whiskey was rough. can imagine you can even like try to like get a bloody or bloody married Atlanta your way in here though. No hair, the dog, and it was great. And now I make it. Yeah, that's one hell of a story. I know. That's like the most badass story I've ever heard. There's no way that I mean, I remember back in college and stuff like that. There was no way I get up after feeling hungover after a bad night and be like, I'm going for a gator, right? Like coconut water. I'm like, What can I do to feel better? I mean, back then everybody was drinking like Pedialyte, they would actually go and buy like, I'm guilty of that. There you go. It doesn't work. I think my times way before video. 16:48 Were salty. I was in Savannah, Georgia. They just kept drinking. 16:53 I was like, yeah, definitely different time we're searching for pedia lightnings like it just bring it up for us. 17:00 right now. 17:02 So let's kind of talk about more of like your history and stuff like that. So you were in Savannah, how long were you in Savannah? So I was in Savannah for school. I'm born and raised Georgia. With my summers spent in California. My mom lived out there since I was six. And so I went to about two different Yeah, ends of the spectrum, Georgia and California really different because we raised Tennessee walking horses, so and in middle school, we had 11 acres inside the perimeter and then moved out to Alpharetta with 70 acres and another 80 so we had horses and cows and all kinds of stuff. And I was given a camera when I was 15. My mom gave it to me and picked it up and never looked back. And so I went to Savannah College of Art and Design, believe it or not, that's where 291 comes from for me. So I my dorm room was 291 and after I moved in there I went school and learned in history. 18:00 class that the very first photo gallery ever was gallery 291 was in New York in 1907. And so I'm like, meant to be a photographer. And that's where 291 came from, which is my brand name. And that just those three numbers just have just stuck with you for forever. Yeah, as a I was a fashion beauty photographer for over 27 years and like for models are young ones. Yeah, very cool. Yeah. Mainly makeup beauty stuff, like Revlon. Clairol? Yeah, I still only know this because my wife's a cosmetology 18:33 Tiffany and company but I did shoot for this old house and Forbes FBI and what kind of cameras us Michael Jordan a Canon What do you know I shot with a Pentax six, seven, and it's a it's it's looks like a 18:49 35 millimeter that's on steroids. And so the negative is six millimeters by seven. So that's that's pretty big, almost playing card but a little smaller than that. 19:00 You guys are speaking a different language to me. I've tried, like, I've dabbled in a lot of things in photography. It was like one of them and it lasted for like two months. So I like it though. But it's collecting dust. Nice. Now just like iPhone, you know, I bought it right. That's everybody asked, Do you still do that? And I'm like, I have an iPhone. I mean, it's, it's in my pocket. It's all branded. I mean, it's, it looks like a phone. I'll show it to you afterwards. Yeah, that's what the sake is. Most people. You know, I remember when I had my first kid and, and they said, like, Oh, you've got to go out. You've got to buy an awesome camera. And, you know, here's your here's your cannons, your DSLRs. And I'm like, 19:37 I don't know if I'm going to be lugging this thing around with me everywhere we go. I just don't know if I'm gonna do it. But I remember I did look into it. I just never pulled the trigger on it. Yeah, yeah. good reason. Yeah. 19:47 I mean, if you're going to shoot, you might need it a better one. But family stuff. It's always been best. The camera in your hand or the camera in your pocket, because you'll get the image. It doesn't matter if it's hype. 20:00 quality or not putting you at least have the moment. Yeah. And that's what matters. I'm probably not gonna make it poster size when I was shooting. I'd be so focused on like getting a shot that I would forget the moment, you know, not being in the moment. That's why I was like, just doing my iPhone, but right. We're not here talking about cameras. No, no, but I want to hear a little bit more about the photography and like, because that seems like it was a pretty mean 20 years as you said that you were doing that right. 27 Yeah, yeah, I mean, so, so kind of talk about you've got to have some, at least some pretty funny stories or something good from those days, too. So I shot Angelina Jolie when she was 15. I have that picture on my 14 year old was. 20:39 And when she was 16. I shot her a couple of times. Some of my last clients were the Olsen twins. shot down. 20:46 Shot. 20:48 Like geeking out right now. She's like an Olsen twins. Yeah, so I had a really great career. It was still a struggle. It was you know, a lot of work and living in New York. 21:00 Not easy raising a family there and you know being a freelancer so as about to say so like the the dynamic of photography and freelancing versus making whiskey, like what Be honest what's more enjoyable now 21:16 making whiskey and how do you merge the tape? 21:20 I built my still out of photograph your plates. Okay. So a photograph of your plate is a flat copper plate you chemically edge an image in, you put ink on the plate, you put a piece of paper with it, run it through a press and you get an ink photograph. So I took those seven copper plates of different images from my life and water jet cut them took them and rolled them through a roller so that curve and then had a guy TIG weld it together. And that was that was my original still 45 gallon still. I had a 21:53 cask for the thump kegger doubler and I built a stripping still out of a 22:00 55 gallon gallon stainless drum. So you built this all yourself? I did. How do you do that? Like YouTube or something? Yes. I grew up on a farm I can build. Okay. I'm a redneck. Yeah. 22:15 And yeah, I mean, my story's intertwined with New York and 911 and then building this still. And the process of distillation reminds me the dark room. So that's where 291 came from, for the brand name for me, but I built that still and that still is the thump keg to my 300 gallons still that I built had built in Colorado Springs. So these these guys department of defense contractors, and they built things like titanium ball valve that's like 10 inches across four new killer sub, you know, valves and and nickel plate press not plate but nickel press rings for proposal. 23:00 tubes. And they're like, we like whiskey. Do you need a bigger still? And I'm like, Yeah, great. Sharon so gave them my plans and they built 300 gallons still that looks identical to mine. And the funny thing was, there's a little bit of pressure in a still like five pounds, but not much, but they were engineers. I went to art school. And they didn't believe me that it didn't need to be that thick. So they built it out of plate copper. So it is thick and heavy, but it's beautiful. It works really well too. So kind of talk about that, because you kind of intrigued me right there because I remember reading a little bit something about 911 and that happening and you couldn't get back to your apartment or something like that. And you kind of just had to move the family for a little bit kind of talk about that time. Yeah, so 911 we live three blocks from the World Trade Center. We lived on the corner of Warren and West Side Highway. And I was on granted and Dwayne with my son on my shoulders when the first plane flew over my older son 24:00 So they were four and five, my oldest son was in, in our building in ps 89, which is on the second floor, we lived on the 25th floor, and we had just dropped him off. My wife and I and my son walk into his class or his school, and that's when the first plane flew over. And so yeah, so everything that day was a crazy day, needless to say, spent the night on North more. 24:27 And then with seven families and then couldn't get back in our apartment, went to Long Island. Long story short, moved to Colorado for about nine months. I commuted move back to New York, was there a couple of years and it wasn't good for my family. So I said we'd move back you're still doing photography at this time? Yeah, I got to do in photography. And so we moved back and I commuted another four years full time, and then was just trying to figure out something else to do and still, like wrote some TV, worked on some movie stuff. 25:00 And just nothing really panning out. And I shot a vanity fair job in New York in August 2010 and on the way home read an article about the guy that created Sailor Jerry and Hendrix shin and he, you know, created an idea and branded it and all that somebody else made the juice form and I came back thinking wow, I could brand a whiskey you know, and and talk to a friend of mine, Mike Bristol, Bristol brewing. And he said, get your license and I'll try and help and so and then somebody else said why don't you try and make it because you can always hire somebody if you can't. And I'm like, they make it in the woods of Georgia. It can't be that hard. 25:41 And so I decided to build my still moved into 300 square feet. Got my DSP distilled spirit plant permit in April with I got it in four weeks from when I applied, which is amazing time. That's right takes us for 26:00 TTP doesn't move that fast anymore. And so I was in 300 square feet. I could make 60 gallons a month of Finnish whiskey that was working my butt off that was you know, 17 hour days seven days a week. Wow for talking about those like first attempts at making whiskey what's it like what do you do going into like are you reading a manual? Or how like are you just like going off like I'll travel knowledge and what will you do that? Yeah, he's got a he's got a landline to somebody with some some overalls on be like, No, you gotta tweak. You gotta move this. Yeah, so I'd never brewed beer. And I'd never distilled until I started this in my first distillation true. Finished distillation was September 11 2011. 26:42 My still the guy, TIG welding it together finished it after it took him all summer to get started on it. finished it September 9, and so I waited for that to remake that anniversary. And yeah, during that time, I read YouTube blogged everything. I 27:00 Heard about how you make whiskey. And and it is funny. The one thing that I do say is I watched popcorn Sutton's documentary, the original one. And in there, there's a point where he talks about taking, he takes a stick and the worms there. And he puts the stick in the end of it and lets it balance. And he says, if the whiskey is thicker than the stick coming off, it's fighting whiskey. So from that I learned you need to run it really slow to make really good whiskey. And there's other things that I learned books, I read things, and I love to cook and I love the dark room. And so I really feel that was like my home brewing experience. Putting those two things together to get to make whiskey. So are there any other like outsiders or consultants that you leaned on to kind of pick their brains or kind of guide you along? Or is it totally just you? Totally me? That's cool. How did you know you weren't gonna like blow up the place? Like, you know, just, I don't know, you know, there's a lot of pressure on 28:00 Nice other like five pounds pressure but yeah run high. That seems like a lot of back and happen. I knew that it was an open system so as long as you don't plug the system you're good and and as long as you keep cooling the steam coming off the still, you're okay but if that water stops 28:21 that can be a problem. Yeah, there was one point where that happened for me and it was a mess and 28:29 I think there was a room full of 160 proof steam all wrapped around me and I was just like, okay, let's calm down. slow this down. Yeah, and I just I read a lot I paid attention to what how it was supposed to work and and did it that way. The funny thing is, is I steam heated everything. So I put a steam coil in my mash tun that also was my stripping still with a different top on it and a column and then my finish still had a steam code. 29:00 illinit and I bought a home steam unit for steam shower. And I first time I hit the button that came on, it was all hooked up. I'd like to say we're like close from 29:11 anywhere. Close. That's funny. 29:15 And so I hit the button, went to take notes for a little bit about an hour later the day turned off. And I'm like, What? walked over there looked at everything. It was heat hot and push the button and came back on. I'm like, great, literally an hour later cut off again. And I was like, Damn, it's a home steam unit. It's got an automatic off on it. So literally for the next two and a half years. 29:42 Every run from 29:45 finish run stripping to mashing then I had to reset that button every 45 minutes. Gosh, that's awesome. It sounds terrible. 29:56 So I'd run home cooked dinner. That's like the great bootstrapping story. 30:00 Like somebody just like going in and just giving it their all and like figuring it out. I don't know. It's pretty cool. That's right. And I'd go home cooked dinner, come back, push the button, go home eat dinner, go to the liquor store and make a sale come back push the button go back to another store to settle alarm on your phone. 30:18 Reset, Steve, I know 45 minutes pretty good now. 30:24 Somebody goes up how the wind take their 45 minutes. Don't worry, I got that. I got 30:30 I mean, that's that's it isn't it is impressive story of being able to go and learn and actually build it yourself. You know, it's like, it's like most of the people that you know, you say like, Oh, you wanna write a book on something? Or if you're if you want to learn something, right, write the book on it or do whatever it is to actually learn how to do it from the inside out. And, you know, you could go to moonshine you and you can learn and look and be able to like look at it but mean you you really like dope the pieces that actually made this all together. I did and moonshine you wasn't around at that time. 31:00 And there wasn't a lot It was mainly have gone if it was already just done it yourself. 31:06 That's an interesting question. I probably wouldn't have. So when I went to buy a still, that's why I built my own Vendome had a 55 gallon or 50 gallons still, that was like $50,000 I'm like, I don't have that money. I've never made this stuff. How What? So I, 31:25 I decided to build my own. So that probably the same with 31:30 moonshine, you probably would have been expensive. I wasn't sure. You know. Yeah. So just, you know, just wing it. Looking at your best, right, I guess then talk a little bit more about because I think one thing that's interesting here was you're talking about your copper plates that you use that you you took and then if I understood correctly, you said you rolled it out thin enough that you could then kind of form it and build your still so didn't roll it out. It was fairly thin copper. It is then copper. I mean, it's it's rigid. 32:00 But you roll it just to curve it to put the curve in it. So 32:05 that's why you roll it not not squeezing the copper out. But the etchings are still on the still you can see them when you go and take a tour. It's pretty amazing. But yeah, I just 32:19 researched it. Not everybody can take weld copper, and I found a man that was an amazing welder. Another God guy that could could take weld copper and did really nice job with it. So and talk about the design a little because I know we've had we've had Vendome on the show before. And you know, they they talk about all the crazy designs and you go You mean you go to anywhere like you see the different steel boxes, you see the different ways that people are putting it I mean, it could be a spatial issue could be a bunch of different ways. But you know, unless you're doing a copper pot still everybody more it's a column still but everybody's is a little bit different, a little bit unique. So kind of talk about how you came to the design of what yours was. 33:00 Going to be so mine's a copper pot still, there's no plates in it at all. The only sort of plate is the thumb keg. So that kind of works as a what plates do and still. And that design I found on the web. Somebody had built one and I was like, that's really cool. And I designed it more how I needed it. But the the design of the still, there's a secret behind that. I figured it out. 33:29 I'm a visual person and I just I found a few stills that I liked and came up with a concept and idea and how, what the sizes should be and drew it out. So I had in high school I had 11 quarters of mechanical drafting. So I'm not great at it now because it's that's a long time ago, but I can draw that like AutoCAD or before was AutoCAD. Like pencil and paper. 33:58 T square Yeah. 34:00 Exactly with a maybe a compass compass. Exactly. tractor. Exactly. And that's what I did. I drew it out, I bought a drawing board, which is a piece of soft wood, thick, you know board and I bought paper and drew it out. I still have those drawings of it. I actually drew a limbic still first. And it's a really beautiful drawing, but I never went that direction. I went with the pot still. So how about you said vinden was 50,000 How much was your homemade $500? Wow. The cost savings? Yeah. All the parts I you know, I sourced all of it. That's not with my time in it or anything like that. But sure, yeah. Where'd you get all the parts like Craigslist or? Pretty much? No. Granger, actually. Okay. 34:46 A lot of parts on there. They have more stuff than you'll ever know. Yeah. You're like, do you have this and like, yeah, and I'm like, What? You'll have that too. So yeah. Craigslist would be a better story though. I know. 34:59 In search of 35:01 Such of a doubler misconnection where's my doubler? Yeah, so I guess um, you know so we're talking right now about making your still and making white dog and and kind of talk about what was that next progression of it so he's shown us the the picture of it right now so yeah, that's it is it's an exact replica of your of your original. It's really cool. Oh, that's awesome. That's really cool. So making white dog here at the very beginning so were you were you thinking like okay like I'm gonna make whiskey I'm gonna make bourbon or was it just like, what was the kind of like your end goal that you had in mind. So I set out to 91 Colorado whiskey, I set out to make a Western whiskey whiskey that you would walk into a bar and a Western asked for, you know, whiskey, walk up, the bartender finds a Western whiskey for you. So mine is a Colorado whiskey and it's big, bold and beautiful, like the state of Colorado. Okay, so 35:58 and they slam the bottle down. It'd be too 36:00 91 and you know, get to drink it and you have a deal afterwards. Yeah, exactly. And so I love rye whiskey before I made my own Thomas handy was my favorite. So both these my rye and my bourbon are my original recipes. The bourbon is changed slightly. It's 80% corn 19% modify 1% malt barley. It started out at 20 mile rye, and that's because Mike Bristol had a bag of corn 50 pound bag of corn, and it was over a weekend I wanted mashin. So I went to the homebrew shop and bought I was looking for a ride. They only had Ryan mall. I'm like great, I need them all to convert. So I did that mashed in and ran that. I ran that on a very small I stripped it and then ran it on a very small Olympic still. And that was truly my first distillation ever. And then the next distillation and I have all these notes written down with the dates on it and everything. 37:00 The next Captain's log. Yeah. Yeah, the ttv you have to a lot, you know, and I didn't I didn't have any money. I wasn't doing any, you know, computer stuff. So I was handwriting notes in the notebook. And they're funny to go through because I talked about, you know what I'm doing distillation, but I also talked about my son's running cross country that day, or an event I was going to or what was going on in my life throughout these days. So it's kind of cool to look back. It's all chicken scratch scribbled scratched out spellings wrong, you know, all that good stuff we need to do today. Like why the fuck is this? 37:40 What the hell is wrong with this mash? Yeah. Or, Oh, that smells like throw up. That is not good. Yeah. But that is gold because you can always look back on that and be like, this is where I started and always kind of bring you back to that. That is awesome. Yeah. And we go back to it actually. There's another mash in there. That is a 38:00 Special release comes out, usually in October. It's called bad guy. And that was my third recipe. And we we went back a couple of years ago because the newer bad guy wasn't tasting the same as the old bad guy and so we went back and read the recipe in the directions and 38:21 bad guy came from so I did as a single barrel for restaurant and I had done this mash to try I hadn't experimented so I was going to experiment and bad guys a four grain we did bourbon and when it came up still I was like, that is really good white dog. I mean, was sweet, amazing. And I put it in a in a tank and was waiting and was supposed to have already mashed in for this other one for the restaurant. And I got behind and I needed the cash and so I was like, you know I got the that one in the in the tank over there. I'll just 39:00 Cell it so I called him to come hammer the bong it's done, put it in there hammered the button. He was talking to his son on the phone who was like four. He's like, what should I call it? And his son goes bad guy. 39:12 And I was like, Oh, damn, and 39:16 so he he year later, when the whiskey was coming out of the barrel, I'm like, what are we gonna name it? And he goes, I don't know. And I'm and I had written on the barrel bad guy, so I didn't forget. And I'm like, you gotta call it bad guy. We got to call it bad guy. And he's like, No, I don't know. And then I talked him into it finally. And so that's why it's bad guy bourbon to 91 bad guy bourbon, very cool store grand weeded bourbon, you have a lot of cool stories. 39:46 Just sit back and listen, not just keep talking. I'll shut up. 39:50 I mean, kind of talk about that a little bit as as you were, you know, how much do you producing and what kind of you know at that time like what kind of barrels you putting them in like a 40:00 Talk about that process to 40:05 with the careers of master distiller spanning almost 50 years, as well as Kentucky bourbon Hall of Famer and having over 100 million people taste his products. Steve nalli is a legend of bourbon who for years made Maker's Mark with expertise and precision. His latest project is with Bardstown bourbon company, a state of the art distillery in the heart of the bourbon capital of the world. They're known for the popular fusion series, however, they're adding something new in 2020 with a release named the prisoner. It starts as a nine year old Tennessee bourbon that is in finished in the prisoner wine companies French oak barrels for 18 months. The good news is you don't have to wait till next year to try it. Steve and the team at Bardstown bourbon company have teamed up with rack house whiskey club rack house whiskey club is a whiskey a month club on a mission to uncover the best flavors and stories that craft distilleries across the US have to offer. Their December box features a full size bottle of Bardstown suffusion series and a 200 milliliter bottle of the prisoner. There's also some cool merch 41:00 side. And as always with this membership shipping is free. Get your hands on some early release Bardstown bourbon by signing up at rack house whiskey club.com use code pursuit for $25 off your first box 41:15 How much do you producing and what kind of you know at that time like what kind of barrels you putting them in like kind of talk about that process too. So the barrel mill, I found them online somehow and they were fairly new out of Avon, Minnesota. And so I called them they would FedEx me a barrel. So I'm like that works. You know, everybody else wants to sell you a palette 41:38 palette. 41:40 There's a funny story about palette too. And so I just bought a barrel and would fill it up and and I had a few barrels in that 300 square foot space. And I'd harvest it and hand bottle and label it and go out and sell it. So the very beginning here kind of talk about what's your because I remember you said you were doing would you say 42:00 50 6060 gallons in a week, right is my month, a month, a month. And that took that took, you know, six. So my fermentation tanks were 55 gallon Pepsi, you know, plastic drums with the top cut off. And so it would take, I'd mashin six. So I could do two matches in a day. So that's three days, I could strip two in a day. So that's three days of stripping, and it would yield about 3540 gallons of low wines and at 35% or so and then I'd finish on it and it would I end up with like 15 gallons. And so in a you know, in a month period, I had 60 gallons to put in barrels. So I mean talk about it, like as we talked to, we talked a big boys right and they're pumping out that in 20 minutes, right? I mean, 42:54 yeah. So kind of talk about you know, like, you know, where where did you kind of see yourself 43:00 Like, were you like, this is awesome. Like, this is fun. I'm having fun with this, or you like I'm in, I'm in over my head, like kind of talk about what was going through your mind at that time. It was amazing. So when it first came out still and I tasted it, and I had a friend that was a bartender, phenomenal bartender, Nate Windham, and he would taste it. And he's like, Damn, that's really good white dog. And so he had a couple of cocktails that he was using some white dog that was on the, on the shelf at the time. And he just started trading out with my white dog and my fresh. And I always say if, if it came off, and it had been a grind to figure out the recipe, and it wasn't that good coming off, it would have been, it would have been a lot harder. But when it was that good, and Nate was already making cocktails with it, it was like, all right, this is working, and I could taste it and tell. And so but I mean, the whole process, you know, you've got to make those tale cuts and that's, that's the art of distillation. And I didn't know anything and so 44:00 That was made me nervous, you know, what are you going to do how you're going to do this? And so 44:06 in my processes of photographers solving problems, you know, the, the head cut is easy, it's a percentage, or you can taste the difference really quickly. It also drops improved quite a bit at head cut, and then you got ethanol coming off and then tail it's like where do you stop as a distiller the art of distilling, where do you stop and so when it started dropping and proof, I decided to take you know, a quart mason jar and and collect it every 10 proof and then go back, you know, I had the main amount of ethanol but here I had tails coming off. And I just decided started tasting them and deciding where, how much I would put back into, you know, the ethanol that had already come off. 44:56 And so that's that's how I figured out my cut. 45:00 Yeah, and we got to make sure you pick up the cuts cuz well that should make you go blind if you get it wrong. That's the that's the head cut. There you go okay. acetone, methanol and all that that comes off first loser, high, high alcohols that have a low boiling point. So were you like cash flow in this with your photographer photography? What the photographer you're you've only had one port right now get it I'll spit it out. Get it out your photography, photography career was it paying for your gosh what can I say that photography career? I just did it 45:38 photogra man 45:41 was your photography career was this kind of fuel in this baby or were you just like out on your you know on your own trying to make this work. I know my photography was not. I did do a design job for for charity. They were trying to save 46:00 The hospital from being sold to large corporation. And so they had this whole campaign they wanted. And so I designed and did commercials and did all kinds of stuff for it. So it paid me really well. So I use that money to start to 91. Gotcha. And to go back to the original distillation and all that, you know, when I started making to 91 I wanted to be Colorado and kind of branded and so it we haven't talked about that, but it's 291 Colorado bourbon or 291, Colorado rye whiskey, and it's Aspen state finished. So I take toasted pieces Aspen, pop the bung on the barrel, put the Aspen in the oak barrel, and for the last few weeks, we finish it on Aspen. admins are the trees that guys may turn yellow, but they don't lose their leaves. Is that right? No, they they lose. Okay, they've turned yellow and red. They're really beautiful. Yeah. 47:00 Why we only Aspen reference I knows we the dumbing down. Oh, yeah, yeah. So talking about City College. 47:07 So the way I figured that out was I wanted to ask been on the label I, I took some aspirin, toasted it, put it in a mason jar with some Finnish whiskey and was riding to Boulder with a friend that was about a two hour drive. And I just shook the mason jar. And when I got up to Boulder I had, you know, some of the original and then what it tasted like on Aspen and I'm like, that's good. And so that's where that came from. That's awesome. Yeah. Very cool. What's what is it about Aspen that's different from Oak that kind of gives it some different. It's there. So for me it it pushes common notes to maple and it adds a little spice to it and a little smoke. This rye has a beautiful color on it by the way too. I need to try the wrap the porcelain arriving on the nose on the rise really good. I love it. So it's one on 1.7 48:00 proof. 48:01 The bourbon was 100 proof 48:04 and how long you, you agencies and what type and how big of the containers and everything like that. Let's get let's get into it for that was all there. It's all secret. Yep. Oh gosh, man. Guess we had to go on a tour to find out. 48:21 So it's American oak barrels deep charred. We age a year to two years. Right now, you know the ride that you're talking about in 2018 one world's best ride from whisky magazine. It also won America's best in 2016 from World whiskey magazine. And then that's an interesting thing that in that 300 square foot space, my barrel number two of this rye got 94 points from Jim Murray's whiskey Bible. Congratulation. Thank you and and we have seven liquid gold from Jim Murray. 49:00 six different recipes. So it's been so Jim Murray's a fan of you. Yeah, I'm a fan of his He's great. His tasting notes are amazing. I don't know if you've ever read any we haven't had him on the show yet. We'll get him on we'll get him there probably much more elaborate than ours. I'm like tastes like smores are 49:19 or always try relating to our breakfast cereal you know like cocoa Chris for Count chocula I don't notice that you do you do a lot of cereals Don't you know I get a lot of cereal like when you're a kid. You get a lot of those cereal notes with it with the milk one of our Bourbons has a it's a char high rye. It has a cherry fund up 49:41 to it. It says it says he's that one now. You know fun dips that powdery my kids so it's like dry. And so the high proof of it make its cherry but it dries out just like fund up it's really funny. So yeah, you can find my my distill. 50:00 Eric jet had one whiskey and he's like, you know, it's like that. That dusty old Poncho and team was like, What are you talking about? And what were you on at that time? It's not your grandma's attic you know there is a note sometimes that dryness Yeah, you know that musty old basement. musty old isn't good but yeah dusties not so bad. Because it's the dryness part have tasted like, like you talked about cherry funded like grape Kool aids like, you know, the manufacturer grape flavors, you know, like, I get, like, come out a lot. Yeah, a lot. Talk about today's operation. So, so you're you're you're the founding distiller sounds like you're not distilling anymore, but kind of talk a little bit more about, you know, what the size of the operation is the people if you're still doing you know, 60 gallons in a month or if you're if you're if you progress so kind of talk about that. Yeah, I wouldn't be here if I 50:55 guess I don't like only bottles. 50:59 Well, that was interesting. 51:00 Same thing was like 2016 when I sent whiskey magazine, they needed two bottles and I had to pay money and and I was like, I don't have that much whiskey. So that's why it took me a while to start putting in awards. But all my tanks, the 55 gallon drums, the fermentation tanks, my stripping still. I mean, yeah 55 gallon drums have all moved up to 1500 gallons, including the stripping still. I showed you that picture has the 300 gallon finished still in it. All the whiskey still goes across the original still as the thump keg. we distill twice a week, and we're producing about 240 finished gallons a week right now. We're working on some barrel financing to add the first of the year that will move up to producing five days a week. And we are right now. I've been in 7500 Square Feet for six years. Wow. 52:00 That's hard to believe. 52:02 And we are moving within a year we will be in a campus with 28,000 square feet, four different buildings. One will be a distillation building the other one will be fermentation, barrel storage and then tasting room. So you just you're looking at it like this. Let's keep investing into this growing and bigger and bigger and bigger. Yeah, I mean, we did 20 609 liter cases last year. Sold and and we've produced the year before 20 609 liter cases. And so we're selling everything we make. 95% of it is in Colorado. We just opened Kentucky this week. We're in 27 Kroger stores in Kentucky and it's going really well. But we could sell more if we had it and that's what we're working on. But we still the quality we are. It does not come out of the barrel until it's ready. 53:00 What's it like coming to Kentucky is it like coming to Kentucky to play basketball you know like we got faced the Wildcats when you're coming to Kentucky you don't face all the big boys environment is that daunting or you like Bring it on. 53:14 I don't know that it's daunting. The community's amazing. And that's the great thing. Everybody I meet is incredibly helpful. Even Fred MiniK he's he's the one that helped Kroger. So by introducing me to, to the buyer, and you know nothing about this rod tasted very familiar. Not had it at Fred's office. He goes, this is the next big distillery 53:40 because the smoking is that or reminds me of when I had it. So anyway, side note. 53:46 Yeah, so it's been amazing. I mean, at the one of the awards thing, Jeff Barnett, one master distiller jack daniels, Master distiller and I went up to talk 54:00 Cuz you want to say hello, you know, right oh my god, and he was the nicest man and we got talking, and he's from Jackson, Tennessee where my brother lives that's a surgeon. And we had a family farm in Shelbyville, which is which flat Creek, Tennessee, which was seven miles from jack daniels, seven miles to deckle. So I told him that and we really hit it off. And then my brother was doing a charity didn't know I had met Jeff, but knew he was from Jackson and reached out to him to do a tasting of the charity. And because he was from Jackson, he did it. And my brother called me and said, You know, that's who's coming. And I was like, Oh, I just met him. And he's like, wow. And so I went with my brother's friend, our partner that had a twin prop plane, and we flew from Jackson to tullahoma and picked up Jeff, and literally when I walked off the plane, he was walking up on the tarmac, and he's like, hey, Michael, how's it going? And I mean, I hadn't met him once in person, but he knew 55:00 who I was and was, it was amazing and we've become friends. I texted him all the time. I'm going to go see him tomorrow. The first time I went to jack, you know, shortly after that charity, he said, Come down, I'll show you around and and he put me in his personal truck. And he said, What do you want to see? He said, whatever you want to see, I'll show you anything. And that's amazing. And there's gonna be respect because Jeff's had everything he's awesome as to but you gotta check company like jack daniels get every resource imaginable to you whereas you kind of had no resources and made it work. So there's got to be something that you both can learn from each other. I yes. And he's alluded to that and is very respectful that I make a Colorado whiskey and and you know, that's the thing. I love Kentucky bourbon, I love Tennessee whiskey. I love all kinds of scotch Irish whiskey, but I'm not looking to make a Kentucky bourbon and Colorado. My bourbon my whiskey, my rye are to be done. 56:00 Different big bold, beautiful of my brand there's a few names but one's rugged refined rebellious, we also hard made the Colorado way. And then another tagline is 56:15 write it like you stole it, drink it like you own it. Nice like it. So, you know that's what I set out to do this and and it's been amazing 56:25 i mean i think it's it's had a pretty warm reception right and congratulations for coming to Kentucky you know this is it's a it's a big step this nationals feet. Definitely, definitely. And not only that is you know, talking to you about the progression of where it is or where it was to what it is today. It's everything comes with with growing pains too, right? Yeah, definitely. Yeah. So kind of talk about at least Did you have a specific time of growing here that you're like, Okay, like, I wish was just me and the 60 gallons. 56:57 So, the one thing about being a photographer 57:00 Consistently you have to build teams of people especially doing fashion. So hair makeup, you know stylist, model, all that kind of stuff location that was helpful for me in in growing this and finding people that could help me grow it. So I have a team of about 13 people right now. It's an amazing team they do phenomenal work. But yeah, there were there were times and there's still times you know, I'm bootstrapping it. So there's tight times with money there's tight times with barrels not being ordered. panic, you know, bottle panic, you know things like that when I first started that was something I wanted to mention earlier about a palette to get not this bottle but my original bottle which is similar this but this one came along when I could buy 30,000 or promise I'd buy 30 Yeah, promise but this one I could buy a pallet of and my mom had given me a cooler and at some point and enjoy 58:00 Grant is an ounce of gold. And thank you for explaining that because I was about to say I have no idea what you're talking Yeah, it's a South African coin. And so I was making whiskey in that 300 gallon I needed a bottle they were they give me a better price if I bought a pallet or or to buy the bottle I had to buy a pallet and gold was up expensive than and I literally took that Cougar and cashed it in and bought a pallet of bottles 58:28 and was able to put them in that 300 square foot space I built I built shelves and made it where you know they weren't really in the way and it was kind of crazy but so there are growing pains. I mean you know i the most nervous I've been that I can remember is working on this move for this. You know 20,000 square feet. It's It's big. We We won't renovate it and build it out beautiful with for production line facility. 59:00 We're going to move in with what we have now and grow it like I did from the 300 to the 7500 square foot that worked really well. But we have a our model is a ramp. I mean, it's a it's a steep curve. And so we have a lot to get done in the next four years with making whiskey and, you know, there there are growing pains. It is not easy. There hasn't been a day where I was like, Oh my god, I'm not going to the distillery I give up. I'm done from day one to now. There's never that's never crossed my mind. Yeah, that's awesome. At least that means you're loving it. Yeah, I guess it. You don't have to think of the Olsen twins and they still need me. Right? 59:43 Yeah, that's a funny thing. I broke out a box of Polaroids. So, back in the day before digital, you were doing light test and stuff you used a Polaroid back on the camera. So you would take the picture of strobes go off and you pull the Polaroid Wait a minute, and then 1:00:00 like pushing that button every 40 and you peel it and you'd look at light so I have I kept most of those Polaroids I've got boxes of them and I opened one up the other day and there's some just really beautiful pictures in it showed it to a friend and they were like oh my god you got to start shooting again I'm like I don't know that that's happening but I did reach out to a hairdresser friend and a couple of them at the time with the Polaroids and posted on Instagram with it and hadn't talked to them in years 10 years and they're like what's up and it was really great makes me want to maybe try one day and who knows but not union at the distillery was like oh here's a great you know all your photography client car I got a photography clients and you know, bring them to your distillery like wonder now party this party There we go. But these you can get bottle shots done on the cheap, right you can do those. That's the funny thing. I don't shoot my bottle. Really you don't don't okay jars while you're here. 1:01:00 I shoot on with the iPhone for like in situation but to set them up and shoot them. I mean I can do it no problem but I'm a little too close to the product and also it's a different frame of mind and to get in that frame of mind it would take me a few days or week I'm working with the bottles and stuff to get the light and and it's just easier to for me to pick somebody and go I like his pictures and I can direct what I want from there and so that Yeah, I you know you coming from a photography background and you know, we're all kind of like doing a lot of stuff with whiskey and and I remember I talked to somebody about doing bottle photography and I'm like you charge what like to take a picture of bottle i mean it's it's something that I had no idea that even existed before then so it's a it's it's a really cool that you kind of have you can blend a lot of these worlds together and you know how to direct and stuff like that because I'd be like, I don't know a river in the background like you tell me what looks cool. 1:02:00 Yeah, and I have a business partner in New York. Or we were in a retouching company, Russ gun lack. And he, he still retouches. He's an amazing retoucher. And so I sent him stuff all the time. I mean, funny things, but I send him bottle shots and, and I can direct him and I can I can take a bottle, you know, if it was shot in the same light and have him put it like five bottles in one picture very easily and stuff like that. So I understand how to do that. So that's where I, you know, I can direct it and get it done on the cheap. I mean, everybody else that would cost them a ton of money. 1:02:41 But But I did, we were at a tasting and there was an airplane behind me and had a callsign number on the side of it. It's old, you know, World War Two type plane with that block number. And I took a iPhone picture of it and send it to Russ text it to him and said can you change that to 291 1:03:00 Literally 30 minutes later it came back to me on my phone and it was perfect. I'm like Yep, there you go awesome and posted it and people like out to 91 and I also did it this summer on a bowl. The brand on a bull somebody It was like 301 and I asked him to do 299 on it and they're like, I didn't see that bowl with that brand. 1:03:21 It's really funny. That's good to know people I guess. So I guess kind of last question before we start wrapping this up is you know, you've you said 95% in Colorado, you're growing to Kentucky I'm sure that you've got plans to even go beyond their kind of talk about you know, one last thing that you want to kind of leave listeners with as they are looking at another or walk in the store. They see your bottle and then maybe they hear this like what's one thing you want to leave them with? I want them to enjoy my whiskey. There's the funny thing I I drink my whiskey neat. It's rare. I drink it on the rocks, but I I also in the summer, or when I feel like it I drink my bourbon with 1:04:00 Mountain Dew. I drink my ride with lemonade and my only person I know it does as my dad. It makes it it's amazing drink and it's a nice drink summer drink. Yeah, and I want to drink bourbon. I also drink. I don't drink vodka Bloody Marys. I drink rye Bloody Marys. And those are phenomenal. But I want somebody to try my whiskey. I wanted to take them back to Western days and enjoy it and it it's an unapologetic whiskey. It's it's a big bold whiskey, and 1:04:33 I'm really proud of it. The other thing that we didn't talk about is the cage that's on there. So when I was young, there was a the cork and cage cage holds the cork and when I was young, I'd watch TBS in the morning and saturday morning cartoons and then if it rained, the later it got old movies Come on. And there was an old movie where they were transporting nitroglycerin in a wagon, and they had wired all the bottles in 1:05:00 So it wouldn't bounce. And when I started making high proof whiskey, I'm like, we got to wire the cork on. And so that's where that cage comes from. Gotcha. Gotcha. Now we know there's a story to everything. Really. There is my watch. Yeah. My watch is my dad's watch. And every time I shake it down, it reminds me of home. Yeah, go. Cool. Very cool. Well, Michael, thank you again for coming over here coming on the show. And of course, sharing your whiskey with us. I think it's an incredible story of what you've built and the team that's building this and you know, the direction it's going as well. I think everybody's pretty excited for really the future of what this is going to entail for you. Thank you. Same here, Kenny and Ryan. very appreciated to be on the show. And yeah, that's, you know, we have experimental batch called the E. We love to experiment. I love making my whiskey. I love selling it. I love giving it away to people to try it. tastings and even people I meet give them a bottle. 1:06:00 Cuz they'll share it. And I love that. So I really appreciate today. Thank you guys. Absolutely Yeah, no, thank you for coming. It was a true inspiration. I mean, most companies we have on air even if they're new they go out and get big time investments or you know, get a lot of cash flow to back them up and like to hear somebody just go source parts from Craigslist, not kidding. But, uh, just, you know, just wanting to do something and find a way to like, make it happen is like, It's so inspiring to me. I think it's a very cool story and I'm excited for the brand. It's, gosh, the rise awesome. I love the really good things like thanks so much. But uh, yeah, it's, um, it was a pleasure talking to you and hearing all your stories, for sure. I'd be a part of it. Absolutely. And so make sure you follow distiller to 91 on all the social medias. give a shout out as well as your address where people can go and visit 1647 South 200 Street, Colorado Springs, Colorado. And o

This bit of trucker slang is just a basic reminder to drive safely. So I'd like to take the time to tell all of you out there to take care of yourselves! It's rough out there, and it could get rougher, but don't fret, because you're pretty damn dope. If what you need is some ska music, here it is, but if you need something more, go out and get it. There's no shame in asking for help, for your state of mind, or for your new favorite ska band. There are helpers everywhere and they're easy to find. 00:00 - Bite Me Bambi - Hot Lava (Hot Lava '20) 03:25 - Malambo Ska Band feat. Hugo Lobo - Racist Friend (Racist Friend '20) 07:26 - the Skluttz - Stand Our Ground (Confidence is Key '20) 10:49 - Hans Gruber and the Die Hards - Is Today Worth Waking Up for? (Hans Gruber and the Die Hards 2 '19) 13:19 - Cheatin' at Solitaire - Don't Wanna be Miserable (Audrey '20) 15:55 - Skalapper - Depressed Feeling (find a new world '10) 19:23 - the Upstarts - So Sharp (the Upstarts '07) Visit the website at http://www.23Ska.com to find links to band websites and songs featured in this episode. Find & follow the show on: Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/23minofSka/ Twitter - https://twitter.com/23minofSka Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/23minofska/ Stitcher - https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/23min-of-ska?refid=stpr If you'd like to submit your band for a future show email: submissions@23ska.com Any other questions or comments, please email: podcast@23ska.com There's a lot of great ska vinyl out there, so head over to our partners in crime at http://www.GrandpasCasino.com Also check out our sister podcast the Ska After Party at http://www.SkaAfterParty.com Session : Eightteen // Episode : 398 // Airdate : February 27th, 2020

In my last two Carfagno Cleaning updates, I shared the story of Doug Floro and how a seed turned into an opportunity. I started this week by completing his house cleaning proposal with 6 options and hit send! Like I always say, you never know! Right after the proposal, I wrote, published, and repurposed (to social media) a new cleaning newsletter.I also sent out my monthly invoices and something amazing happened. One of my office clients asked if I would be willing to bill ahead for 6 months instead of one. That was an easy answer... "YES!" I read three things into this request:They are very satisfied with my service to book me for 6 months.6-month billing protects them against a price increase and locks me in for 6 months at a time.Their company is so financially responsible, they are paying 6 months in advance. This is the type of company that is mega stable and a wonderful client to have!Now, let's get to the meat of this week's episode. In 18 Gutter Balls, I shared the story of my infamous bowling game of 12 when I was 12. My 83-year-old Pop-Pop still heckles me about that day! The final question I posed was this. "Have you learned yet?" I was doing the same thing, over-and-over again, and expecting a different result. This is the definition of insanity by the late, great Albert Einstein. I was guilty of it that day with my engraved bowling ball and now I get to answer the question.I shared a detailed account of how to wrap up your year in review. It's called Think Week. I have followed this process every year and even published the podcast episode ahead of my 2019 version. Let me get real and transparent. "I haven't learned yet, Pop-Pop." I started to do Think Week by reflecting of my 2019 goals and comparing them to what I accomplished. I achieved about 67%. Not bad. But I dug deeper and saw something that demanded explanation. So I pulled out my 2018 notebook for Think Week and saw the same pattern. To make matters worse, I pulled out every year back to 2012. This revealed that I have been a broken record.I've been doing the same thing over and over and over, expecting my end-of-year results to change. But at the end of each year, I threw a 6 instead of a strike (using the bowling analogy). Some years, I did throw a gutter ball. Here's what I realized. I am a dreamer, an optimist. I love working on my passion projects and I've always had one. Early on, it was an Amway business with Teresa. Then it was writing a novel for dads to read to their kids, followed by coaching & consulting cleaning company owners. The mistake I repeated was setting my SMART goals to grow my passionate side-hustle, while setting the mark for my main business for "just enough". Whether I was an engineer or a solo cleaning owner, I have not set SMART growth goals to raise our level of income past 'just making it' to 'prospering'. I chose to set my SMART growth goals on my side-hustle, that I WANTED to do, yet had no proof of concept! My optimism kicked in as well because I made many assumptions that weren't realistic or attainable. So I'd complete a year with the same main business income and a side income that barely increased. But I was happy and rationalized that I did good because I loved doing it.Read the rest of this article at the Solo Cleaning School website

Summary: Today's podcast is an oldie but goodie.  A podcast we first released in May 2019 was so popular we decided to share it again! In this episode, we take you on a journey of how self-service has woven its way into so many of our daily activities from paying for gas to checking in for a flight and really what are the consumer expectations for these types of offerings.  Resources: Chart your Path for Retail Growth - Connect with our Retail Experts here Blog: Retail Self-Service: Today, it's WAY more than self-checkout  Transcription: Amy Lombardo:                Hello again, this is Amy Lombardo, your host for this episode of Commerce Now. In today's episode we're joined by Matt Redwood who is the head of self service checkout for Diebold Nixdorf's retail division. And today we'll discuss how self- service has woven its way into so many of our daily activities from paying for gas to checking into a flight and really what are the consumer expectations for these types of offerings. So hi, Matt and welcome to COMMERCE NOW. Matt Redwood:                Thank you for having me. Amy Lombardo:                Always a pleasure to talk to our friends in the retail division. So Matt, let's talk a little bit about your background first. Can you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself? Matt Redwood:                Absolutely. So as you said, my title is head of self service for Diebold Nixdorf. Been in the company about 15 months now. It was brand new position within the company and DN saw the need to put more focus on the self-service checkout. So look after the self-service checkout business for Europe, Middle East and Africa. I've been in and around self-service my whole career. I've been in retail for a nearly 10 years.  So, I've worked with multiple different retailers all across the globe on their self-service strategy. But also that self-service implementations to make sure they're deploying the right solution into the right place. Amy Lombardo:                Very good. So Matt, what I wanted to do was start at a very high level and talk about some macro trends that are shaping the retail industry because you can't get away with reading any headline of any major industry publication these days without seeing something about self-service in there. So can you talk a little bit about some of those macro trends that are shaping the retail industry today? Matt Redwood:                Sure. So self-service in the form that we see at most grocery stores has been around for 15 years, which you know in the retail landscape is a long time. But it's taken a long time I think for retailers really to understand self-service checkout to get to a position that deploying it in the right way and of course for the consumers to adopt it in the right way. I think we're really at a tipping point now where from a consumer perspective is, there's self-service in every part of our life. Whether you go to the gas station, whether you go to the train station on the app or you go to the grocery, there is a self-service option and what we see in our data is that consumers really now see it as point of convenience for them. They see the benefits of self-service checkout and they've moved past the point of not only wanting it but they actually now dictate it to retain it. Matt Redwood:                So we have a lot of retail customers that come and want to work with us purely because that's [00:02:30] amazing that stores are actually demanding it. I think when self-service initially came on the scene and a lot of retailers saw it as a great way to strip costs out of that store. And so a lot of retailers, particularly in grocery, really went for very very high density self-service checkout deployment. They stripped a lot of stuff out of their stores but what they came to realize that actually they saw a bit of a drop in the consumer experience within their stores and I think the assumption was that they put self-service checkout and they remove staff, customers will use it and everything will be fine. But actually what happened is that had a detrimental effect on the consumer experience in the store because there weren't staff to help where consumers really valued the experience within the store. Matt Redwood:                So what other retailers now do is actually, it's not about a reduction in staff, it's about a redistribution in staff. Amy Lombardo:                Right. Matt Redwood:                If you take tasks that were normally done by the system and you give it to the customer to do, that frees up that member of staff to then be in other areas of the store to make sure that customers can find products, or the shelves are well stocked, they're well priced. So actually getting the experience right or getting the efficiency right at the self-service checkout as a knock on effect on the customer experience all the way right back through the store. Amy Lombardo:                Right. So Matt, can you explain how consumer's knowledge and their comfort level is shifting in terms of how consumers are engaging with the self-service technology today versus maybe what they did when retailers first started introducing it many years ago? Matt Redwood:                Sure. So I think there's really a perception shift with self-service checkout that's happened over recent years. I think when self-service was first introduced to stores, there was a bit of negativity and a bit of push back from consumers because they saw it as a replacement of the members of staff within the store, especially very loyal consumers that went to the same store every single week to do their shopping. They built a reputation with the member of staff. The thought of that member of staff being taken away and replaced by a machine was hit with a lot of negativity from consumers. The shift that's really happened over the last couple of years is consumers value the choice, the choice to check out or to interact with a brand, a retailer in the way that they want. Matt Redwood:                So now what we see a lot of retailers doing is focusing on giving consumers as many channels to shop within their stores or checkout within their stores as possible. So the role of the assistant has changed completely from just a member of staff and the checkout to really kind of a customer experience manager within the store. So the tasks that would normally be done by an assistant at a point of sale system will now be done by the consumer either on a mobile device or self-service checkout or a kiosk. Matt Redwood:                And that frees up that member of staff to actually deliver the right level of customer experience within that store. So I think the perceptional shift has been away from that machine is taking a member of staff's job to actually that machine is an option for me to check out of the store and it's freed up the member of staff to deliver a better customer experience somewhere else in the store where I wouldn't normally get it. Amy Lombardo:                So Matt, I wanted to comment on what you just said because I think about how when I go to my local grocery store and I use self-checkout all the time, maybe because I'm a control freak and I like to see what I'm actually scanning and paying for. I let my kids do it sometimes, but then I hear time and time again, you'll see certain generations that come up and they say, I don't want to use this, this takes longer. And there's always a problem with it. And I'm just wondering is that a perception issue? Is it a training issue? You know, can you comment on that a little bit in terms of maybe just generational preferences and using self-service? Matt Redwood:                Sure. I always say to retailers, deploying self-service checkout is not as simple as deploying a point of sale solution because innately it's a change in so many processes in your store. So we really refer to self-service checkout as a business change solution because it enables retailers A. To make their stores more efficient and but also B. Delivering a much, much better customer experience to their consumers. But the byproduct of that is because of the interaction is so different between the brand and the consumer, that retailer has to change so many processes in their stores for self-service to really be efficient and work well. Matt Redwood:                So things like cash management, how they staff their stores, how the staff interact with the customers, how their customers interact with them as a brand, all changes. So there's a huge amount of operational shift that has to happen. So I'd say a big part of getting self-service right is how you operationalize it. Ultimately it puts a lot more onus on the staff to deliver a better customer experience because you're taking away so much human interaction within the store. But when [00:07:30] staff do interact with consumers, it's that much more important that they deliver a much, much better service. So I think it's probably a combination of not just the technology but how you staff the stores, how you operationalize your stores. It all comes together to really deliver the right customer experience. Amy Lombardo:                Got It. And so in self-checkout or really varying ways to shop, it goes beyond just self-checkout. So there's smart phones, there's handheld scanning devices in the stores, [00:08:00] all of these different types of self service options. How have these changed the way consumers engage with brands? Matt Redwood:                Well, I think it's giving consumers a lot more choice in terms of how they do interact with the brand. If you think about a customer journey of a grocery shopper five years ago, they'd make the decision that they want to go shopping and that may be influenced by family or what they're going to eat tonight, what they have in the fridge. [00:08:30] They'd make the choice to go to the store. They'd shop that store, they'd pick their products, they'd go to the checkout, they'd check out and they'd leave. Matt Redwood:                Now what we're seeing is the customer journey is actually a lot more cyclical and yeah, retailers really have to focus on the digital journey. So how do I influence that consumer when they're away from my store, when they're away from my brand? So yeah, while they're watching type TV, how do I influence them to actually shop at my store, rather go to a competitor store and then how do I drive that consumer into that store [00:09:00] and enrich that customer journey when they get there? Matt Redwood:                So give them the choice to shop your brand in the way that they want. Once they get to your store, enable them to shop the store in the way that they want, but put the right technology in there to enrich that consumer experience. Apply the right level of staffing to the store as well to supplement that technology journey. Allow them to check out in the way that they want. I think now more than ever we're seeing retailers really put the most amount of choice in that technology [00:09:30] that consumers can use to interact with a brand than ever before. Matt Redwood:                But then it doesn't stop when they leave the store. Once they left the store, how do I influence that consumer to come back my store and actually driving the consumer into the store and actually making sure they come back is as a bigger part of the customer journey as the in store piece. So just giving the consumer a good in store experience isn't enough anymore. You've really got to enrich the consumer experience all the way around the circle. Amy Lombardo:                [00:10:00] Do we see custom retail apps tied into self service options? So I think of Target for example, and I have their cartwheel app and I always get special discounts given to me just through the app. And then a lot of times then it's for the ease of self service. So do we see that customized apps maybe have any type of leverage on how self-service is used? Matt Redwood:                Yeah, absolutely. So [00:10:30] when you think about a mobile app, and more than ever, every single consumer has a mobile, a piece of technology that allows them to effectively never go to a store again. But what retailers can do with that app is they can actually influence that consumer come to that particular brand or that particular store. And as you said that may be through personalized adverts, it could be through promotions or through a loyalty system. But ultimately that's an amazing tool for retailers to, I wouldn't say target [00:11:00] specific consumers, but definitely engage with consumers when they're away from that store or make sure they come into their store. And then really the use case flips because if you take the online second screening type of example of, I want to buy a TV. I might go into a store and look at TVs, but there I'll be using my mobile phone to second screen. And actually I'm researching prices all the time. Matt Redwood:                So I'm now a professional shopper because I'm price matching as I'm going through the consumer journey. So it's really important that [00:11:30] retailers don't shy away from mobile. They actually embrace it because consumers don't like to be forced down a particular path. They want choice and they want clarity as well. Clarity of what they're buying. Clarity of pricing. So really retailers have to accept that every consumer has that mobile device and really put a lot of focus on using that to enrich the in store experience. Matt Redwood:                Of course., as well, consumers could apply the application to allow them to actually shop the store. So scanning products and [00:12:00] actually use it as the checkout. So yeah, self-service checkout then becomes a supplement to a mobile application because it allows them to finalize the journey within the store, potentially pay cash or pay card or get help from an assistant or coupons or loyalty. So really the self-service checkout on the mobile device shouldn't be seen as competing technologies. They really supplement each other. Amy Lombardo:                That's an interesting way of looking at it. So when a retailer is ready to make the shift to self-service or they need to modify their existing plan, something's not working right, maybe they are ready to add on some new functionality. What's your advice on how that retailer begins? And I ask you this because I go back to one of your initial comments here was the over simplification of self-service solution. So you can't just set it and forget it. So you know, talk to us a little bit about some of those advice pieces. Matt Redwood:                [00:13:00] Absolutely. So really important, as I said previously, not to consider self-service checkout as another point of sale solution. And as you said, which I'm going to use actually set and forget. We don't want any sets and forgets because it's not a guarantee that our consumer is going to use that device. So if anyone wants any help with that process, we have some great advisory services where we work with retailers specifically on identifying the right solution to put into their stores A. For what they're trying to achieve as a [00:13:30] business but B. For their consumers. So staff from a data point of view work out what the trading profiles of your store are. Work out what you're trying to achieve by putting self-service checkout at the store. Is it efficiency, is it customer experience or is it just because everyone else is doing it or your biggest competitor is doing it? Matt Redwood:                That's quite an important [inaudible 00:13:51] to start from. And then I think really focused on the customer journey. So why do your shoppers shop at your store and what kind of customer experience are they [00:14:00] expecting? If you can nail those three points, then you can really identify what type of self-service checkout to put into your store. But then more importantly, how you operationalize it within your store. Matt Redwood:                So the landscape that we see now with retailers, particularly with retailers that are quite far advanced down the self-service checkout journey, they're not just putting one type of self-service checkout in to a store, they're putting three, four, five different types of self-service into a store and really focusing that particular solution [00:14:30] at a particular customer demographic. A. It delivers them the best operational efficiencies but it also delivers the best customer experience for their consumer, because it gives them the choice. So I would say focus on the operations and focus on getting the right solution for your stores and for your customers and then operationalize it in the right way. Amy Lombardo:                That was a good way of listing it out here for our listeners. So you talked about some of these new industries or just [00:15:00] the fact that retailers want to get on board if they're not there with self-service. Can you talk a little bit about maybe some of the unexpected types of industries that you're seeing? Because we all know of the grocery model or the C-store that it's pretty easy to grab something quickly, pay and go. But what are some of those like unexpected industries? Matt Redwood:                Sure. Self-service has been around for almost 15 years in the grocery industry, but for the first time I think retailers outside of grocery are starting [00:15:30] to sit up and notice self-service checkout as a way of enabling them to deliver the right in-store experience. So we're talking to fashion retailers, the petrol retailers, the GM retailers, the DIY retailers. Ultimately there should be no bounds to self-service checkout. The same person that shops in a grocery store is going to be the same person that goes to the DIY store on a Saturday because they're renovating the house or goes to the petrol convenience store because they want to buy petrol for their car [00:16:00] or takes their family shopping and goes through a fashion retailer. It's the same consumer. So I think we as a supplier to the industry really need to realize that actually every consumer is the same whatever shopping type their shopping in. And so if a consumer is demanding self-service in a grocery environment, why wouldn't they expect it in any other shopping environment? Amy Lombardo:                I think it makes our lives much easier and it gives you that piece of empowerment and control your shopping experience a little bit. If you're making the list [00:16:30] and you're checking your coupons, why shouldn't you just be able to finish the transaction as well? But maybe that's just me. Matt Redwood:                I completely agree. Amy Lombardo:                So Matt, I think this is a good place to wrap up our discussion today and I thank you for joining us here and sharing your insights. And to our listeners out there, if you're interested in more information on self service and retail, go to dieboltnixdorf.com/retailgrowth or click on the link in the podcast show notes. Until next time, please keep checking back on iTunes or however [00:17:00] you listen to podcasts for new topics on COMMERCE NOW.  

How did Jostle more than double its traffic, revenue, and staff size almost entirely through inbound marketing? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Jostle VP of Marketing & Growth Dustin Tysick shares the company's approach to "co-creation," and why working closely with the sales and customer success teams has helped Jostle's marketing team create a strategy and content that consistently drives leads. Dustin gets into specifics around how to solicit feedback, and how to balance the input you're getting with the need to move fast and make decisions. This is actionable advice that can be applied by any marketer in any setting to get better results and secure buy in.    Highlights from my conversation with Dustin include: Jostle is an intranet company. Dustin joined the company five years ago and was the only marketing person. Today, he heads up a marketing team of six. Dustin defines co-creation as "getting people together who have different points of view at different angles in order to contribute to a problem and solve it in a better and faster way." Until a year and half ago, Jostle's inbound marketing growth was 100% fueled by inbound marketing. Jostle's top of the funnel growth came from creating content that answered their customers' and prospects' questions. In the past year, the company has doubled its organic traffic using a pillar content and topic cluster approach. At the heart of Jostle's strategy is co-creation - specifically, involving representatives of the sales and marketing teams in the early brainstorms around content. In addition, they had a deliberate strategy of using the exact words that customers use in their own marketing. Dustin has found that the best way to get meaningful feedback from the customer success and sales teams is to do it through one on one meetings. One successful campaign that Jostle ran that was the product of co-creation involved  the production of an explainer video. All marketing copy that Jostle creates must pass the "BS test" which involves reading the copy out loud to see if it sounds natural, and then determining whether someone with a completely non-technical background could understand it. One of the biggest challenges for the project owner is to balance listening to everyone's input with making decisions. At the end of the day, the process is not about reaching consensus. With the feedback collected, Dustin's team creates draft copy for the company's marketing campaigns and then meets with designers who sketch out, conceptually, what a design would look like. In the time since Dustin joined Jostle, the company has growth from 25 to 75 employees, and all of that growth has been driven by inbound. In the last year, Dustin and his team have shifted their focus from generating leads for sales to creating sales opportunities. As a result the percentage of marketing-influenced closed won revenue has increased considerably. Resources from this episode: Visit the Jostle website Listen to Jostle's People at Work podcast Connect with Dustin on LinkedIn Listen to the podcast to learn how Dustin has grown Jostle by collaborating with the company's sales team on its marketing strategy and content. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth and today my guest is Dustin Tysick who is the VP of Marketing and Growth at Jostle. Welcome Dustin. Dustin Tysick (Guest): Hey, thanks for having me. I'm really looking forward to this conversation. Dustin and Kathleen recording this episode. Kathleen: Yeah, thanks for traveling in through the driving snow to get here. You guys are in Vancouver and I know you had a rare snow storm. Dustin: Yeah, for sure. Yesterday I woke up and saw it was going to be a two hour delay and camped out from home. But I made the trek today to get to the microphone, and yeah, I'm looking forward to this. Kathleen: I have to admit, as old as I get, I still feel like a kid every time there's a snow day because I'm like, "Yes, I get to stay in my pajamas an hour longer." It's like that never gets old. Dustin: Yeah, no totally. I love the first day or two of snow and then I just hope for the rain. Kathleen: Yeah, then you get cabin fever. Dustin: Yeah, exactly. But no, it was actually awesome staying home. It was a nice little break. Went out, built a snowman with my son. It was a good time overall. Kathleen: That's great. Well, I am super excited to chat with you. For those who are listening and they may not be familiar with Jostle or with you, can you tell my listeners a little bit about yourself and your story, what Jostle is and how you came to be doing what you're doing today? About Dustin Tysick and Jostle Dustin: Cool. Yes. I'll start with Jostle. So we're in a space that people often don't love. We're in the intranet space, which is kind of like a "ugh" word sometimes and we want to change that. So basically what we do is old intranet, is you build a bunch of pages, you build a website essentially. We've decided to build a platform to solve that communication problem and organize that chaos in a nice way. We're based in Vancouver. There's about 75 of us here. Yeah, it's just a lot of fun tackling that giant communication problem. On my end, I often say I'm a converted sales guy who's in marketing now. So I worked in sales for six years actually selling educational technologies to universities across Canada. Quickly realized I was doing marketing stuff in my sales role. So this was like eight years ago when I was doing mail merges and that sort of stuff and automating some sequences. So decided to go switch career path, go back to marketing. So I went ahead and did that and made the jump and kind of been growing in that career ever since. Kathleen: I love how you describe yourself because I always talk about myself as a recovering entrepreneur because I owned a business for 11 years. I sort of came from that and got back into marketing. So we all make our way here somehow or another. Dustin: Yeah, exactly. There's very few people who come out of high school and they're like, "I want to go into marketing." So yeah, we all end up here. Kathleen: Yeah. Now you guys, so you're head of growth and the company is growing considerably. I had originally connected with you because I was out there looking for people who are getting great results from inbound marketing and one of the things you talked about when we first connected was this concept of co-creation and using co-creation for your strategy and your content, et cetera. So maybe you could just start by talking a little bit about Jostle's growth to kind of set the stage and then we could go into co-creation. Jostle's growth story Dustin: Yeah, no, definitely. So when I started at Jostle, it's almost five years ago, which is kind of crazy to say, especially working in tech. Kathleen: That's actually really impressive because I think the stat is the average tenure for marketing leaders is two years. It's pretty short. Dustin: Yeah, definitely. I had the benefit here of starting as ... At the time I started I was the only marketing person for a bit. So co-creation was limited then, right? It was me going out there, getting stuff done as quickly as I could often on my own kind of in a hacky way throwing things together because that's what you have to do at that stage, right? As we grow in teams, six people now on the marketing side, everyone has their own large projects, we've really had to develop a way to co-create and share ideas and work together and get feedback from people without just slowing down to a grinding halt. I think that's a struggle most companies get to when they grow, right? You need process, but how much process is too much process? Kathleen: Yeah. Administrative overload. There's definitely a big risk there. Dustin: Yeah, absolutely. Kathleen: So when you talk about co-creation, what do you mean? Can you kind of define that for me? Dustin: For sure. So the concept here at least, since we were more development heavy at the start and it was a smaller marketing and sales team, it kind of developed there and spawned there. So co-creation is getting people together who have different points of view at different angles in order to contribute to a problem and solve it in a better and faster way is kind of the easy way to explain it. "Co-creation is getting people together who have different points of view at different angles in order to contribute to a problem and solve it in a better and faster way" So the dev example is, you need a design person to look at usability. You need a backend person to look if it's possible and you need a front end person to kind of make it happen and give feedback. Without one of those you either get something that's really ugly and works well or something that looks great and doesn't work at all. So it kind of started from there. Kathleen: Awesome. How does that manifest in a marketing sense? Dustin: Yeah. On the marketing side it's quite a bit different. So take my marketing team for example. I have someone who runs product marketing, someone who runs customer marketing. I have an SDR on my team. So those people need to call from other people in the company to get feedback. So product marketing working on an island on their own coming up with their ideas is going to fail. They need to bring in development sales, customer success, bring them all together to get the concept down while also not making this into this never ending loop of feedback that we don't get anything done. Jostle's inbound marketing strategy Kathleen: Got it. So let's back up. Inbound marketing, you guys are getting really good results from that. Can you maybe talk broadly about what your strategy looks like and who you guys are targeting? Who's your audience? Dustin: Yeah, so we've, up until about a year and a half ago, we're actually entirely inbound. We just hired our first SDR last week. So we're kind of brand new to that space. The reason we've always been inbound is we don't sell to VPs of Marketing at tech companies, right? We don't have that tiny target market where outbound's great. So we've purposely kind of cast this wide net and relied on content and the problems we solve to draw people in to find us, right? So we've had a lot of success from general content marketing and showing up on Google for problems that people are looking for. Like how do I solve internal communications? What questions do I ask my CEO? Those aren't related to an intranet, but the people who are looking to solve that problem are the people we want to be aware of us. So that's been our approach to cast this giant net and bring people in. Kathleen: Did you identify those topics from audience research or where did that all come from? Dustin: Yeah, part of it was from audience research and seeing in those first few years who found us and who bought and breaking that out into different personas. So as I said, it's not like a VP of Marketing is the person who buys us. It could be them, it could be someone in HR, it could be a senior leader. So our approach was to actually map those out, figure out which problems they likely want to solve and what they're searching for in their day-to-day, and then write to those topics in a way that's easy to understand and relatable. Top of the funnel traffic growth Kathleen: Got it. So that's very top of the funnel. What did your top of the funnel growth look like from that? Dustin: Yeah, so take it to the very top, top of the funnel when it comes to views. In the past year, once we've really started ramping up the blog, we have managed to double our traffic there in the past year, and it really is taking that topic cluster approach to figure out what we write about. The days of keyword stuffing and just repeating it over and over, it's dead. It's been dead. So really trying to own three or four topics and write extensively of them has really helped us drive that, which in turn has driven more content downloads, more subscribers, more people following us. Kathleen: Got it. So you have your topic clusters, you've got the blog traffic increasing and then where does co-creation come into the development of that strategy? Dustin: Yeah, so on that strategy, a big part of it is just getting feedback from customer success and from sales on what those problems they're hearing day-to-day. So customer success is a big one there, right? Marketing is often one step removed from the customer. We sit in on calls sometimes, but in order to really understand what problems our platform's solving and what problems our customer needs help with, we have to talk to them. So that's kind of why we added a customer marketing person on my team is to bridge that gap so that we can work together and sort things out. How Jostle's marketing team gets feedback from sales and customer success Kathleen: Now how exactly do you get that feedback? I would love to get into the nitty gritty details. Do you have like a Slack channel or do they send you an email? What does that look like? Dustin: Yeah, so it depends a lot on the scope of a project. For a smaller one, it often is, so we use our own product for instant messaging. So we have our discussions where people can use and that's for a very simple thing. For a more in depth project, we like to take the "zoom in, zoom out" approach is what I call it. So at the concept creation stage of "Hey, what do we want this webpage to say or what is the purpose of this page and what is the result we want," we actually bring in a pretty large group with varied interests from different departments and seek feedback. So we do that. Then the project owner zooms in and works on their own, develops the copy because the last thing you want is 12 people in a Google Doc hammering away at copy. It just destroys the entire message. So for a large project we do take that approach where its "zoom in, zoom out," have a check in and get review with the larger group and keep doing that until you get to the point where we're ready to put it live. Kathleen: Now that's on a project-by-project basis. Do you have any continuous feedback loops where as these customer-facing folks are talking to people, I hear something in a conversation, do you have a way of capturing those things on the fly? Dustin: Yeah. So we use our own platform for a lot of that actually and we have different discussions set up for different things. So say we launch a new feature and we're figuring out how to promote it on the website and how we want to write about it. That will have its own discussion where success can pop in and say, "Hey, I just had this interesting call. They mentioned this. This is the language they used and that resonated with me." So then we would adapt that language and put it on the website. So it's not just our marketing speeds being thrown at them, right? We're trying to use the language of the customer. Kathleen: Great. So you guys are using Jostle for that obviously. You're drinking your own Kool-aid, but if somebody is listening and they don't have that, they could use their SharePoint or their Slack instance or their Microsoft Teams or what have you and do the same thing, correct? Dustin: Yeah, absolutely. Anything where it's a two-way dialogue and it's dynamic. I think those are the key. A static page that people update and add content to, probably not the best approach, but a searchable conversation like a Slack channel totally works as well. Sustaining buy-in from sales and customer success Kathleen: Now, I've worked in places where we have systems like that set up, but one of the biggest challenges I've run into in the past is for lack of a better way of putting it, declining returns. Meaning we all sit down in a room and we say, "This is what we're going to do." Then when people start actually having those conversations, they don't follow through or over time participation declines. Do you have any tips or tricks on how to keep that momentum going and getting that feedback happening on a regular basis? Dustin: Yeah, so one thing we've found, especially with slightly larger project that really helps is having one-off personal check-ins with people is often a better approach than those giant team meetings where people get distracted by their phone or they get distracted by a laptop or the introvert doesn't talk. So we really task our project owner with, yeah, you're going to have a kickoff, yeah, maybe you have a concept review, but take the time to go grab a coffee with someone on that team you want to talk to and get feedback. It's a bit more casual, but often that's when the nuggets you really want come out is in that one-to-one communication. Kathleen: And do you do the same thing with your sales team? Dustin: Yeah, absolutely. That's something we try to do, especially when we're writing for the core website, homepage, the product page, feature pages, that sort of stuff. It's something we really try to do with sales. It's one thing, everyone can search call reports in Salesforce or search notes, but it's not the same as having someone relay the story to you. It's an entirely different thing. Kathleen: Yeah. The way you engage with your sales team, is there any difference between how you work with them and how you work with your customer success people? Dustin: No, it's actually pretty similar how we would do that. We ideally want our website pages to speak to both customers and potential leads, right? Your customers are going to end up on your website. That's how they're going to decide if they want to buy or add something new, so you need to address that. But it's a balancing act. It's kind of tough. Examples of successful Jostle campaigns Kathleen: Yeah. So you've got this top of the funnel strategy and then you begin to build out campaigns around that for conversions. Can you share some examples of campaigns you've run that have been successful that have gone through this co-creation process and maybe the before and after? Were there any big "aha" moments that you had as a result of working this way with your team? Dustin: Yeah, so one that was pretty successful and we're actually redoing an updating right now was when we first started really adding video to our strategy, which was 2016-ish. We started focusing on that and we went through this giant project with sales, success, us, senior leadership here to figure out, okay, if someone doesn't want to browse through a bunch of pages on our website, how can we simplify that journey and how can we tell our story in a succinct way that ultimately leads to a demo or to a trial? So we went through that process and created an explainer video that then flowed into a product tour and hit on all the key points we wanted to hit and then had a CTA built into the video to book a demo or have a trial. That is the ideal journey I want every customer to go through on my website if they have the time. We were able to do that in video, and month over month that continues to bring in conversions for sales that turn into real customers. I think the reason it's successful is because we crafted that message using feedback from multiple people. Bringing an idea from concept to execution Kathleen: Great. So when you go into that, do you have draft messaging that you're proposing and then it gets adjusted or do you just start from scratch and is it really like a brainstorm? Dustin: Yeah, so often we do have that brainstorm. Frequently that is with marketing to start and then when we bring in the larger group it's at a concept stage. So I've made the mistake of bringing in the script or bringing in a finished page and it's a nightmare. People start tearing it apart, it goes off the rails. So we purposely keep it point form, why are we doing this, what do we want out of it and what are the three things we need to communicate and really keep it that simple at the initial stage and get that feedback from everyone then. Then whoever's in charge goes off and creates the script while doing check-ins and while keeping people along for the ride. Kathleen: Okay. I want to go back to that for a second because I think we just touched on something really important. So you have a meeting. Let's say it's your meeting with sales and customer success about campaign A. Number one, who gets invited to that meeting? Dustin: Yeah. So we will usually pull both someone who's kind of the leader of the team I guess, as well as someone on the team so you get both perspectives. Senior leadership often has one kind of looking from high above view, which is incredibly valuable, but you need someone who's actually on the ground talking to people every day. So we like to have a mix of both. Kathleen: Okay, and then what does the agenda look like? Dustin: Yeah, for sure. So often it is someone from our team or someone from design depending on what stage we're at really walking through the how and the why. So the approach I've actually taken is, when we're creating a page or creating a concept, you have the how, the why and kind of a "BS test," as in, when do we know this has turned into marketing gobbledy goop and won't resonate with customers? We hold ourselves to that and we review it as the meeting progresses and in future meetings. So the agenda often is going over that to set the context and then working through what is the purpose and what are the three key things we want to target. We try to keep it to that rather than let's come up with a list of 20 things this page needs to do because then you get in the weeds and it just fails miserably. Passing the BS test Kathleen: Yeah. All right, I have two questions on that. Number one is can you give me an example of the BS test cause I love that and I think marketers do that a lot. We get wrapped up in our own way of talking about things. So what would be an example of something that sounded BS-y and how do you identify that and call it out? Dustin: Yeah, so for a lot of web pages that can be as simple as "read this out loud and do you sound like a human" is a very simple test that we use with most of our copy even for blog articles and that sort of thing, right? People read a website or read a blog and they have the voice in their head reading it. If it sounds like a robot or an infomercial, it's not going to resonate. So that's one common test that we use for sure. The other one is just a simple note to remind ourselves to check for jargon. Would your sister who has no clue what you do actually understand what we're talking about here? So those are two nice easy ones that we use. Managing feedback meetings Kathleen: Those are great tests. I'm just picturing one of these meetings in my head and I think if it was not run well you still would run the risk of having all these people around the table, different ideas, different opinions. You have some people who are loud mouths. Dustin: Yeah, totally. Kathleen: Some who are quiet. How do you manage that and herd the cats and get something valuable out of it? Dustin: Yeah, I think the key to that is having an understanding that there's still a project owner, right? This person's not trying to get consensus and trying to ram every idea into what we're doing. So you need to make people feel heard and you need to actually listen to them. That's key number one. All feedback is valuable. Are you going to use it all? No. So part of it comes down to really training the project owner to take that approach and be comfortable with that. You brought up a really good point though with some people are going to dominate the conversation. It's how it is. So we often also have a discussion tied to it that where afterwards people can add their thoughts through instant message or if we notice someone's really quiet in the meeting, take that time after, just stop them in the kitchen and say, "Hey, what did you think?" Try to get feedback that way. Oftentimes that person has the best idea, they just didn't want to speak up. Kathleen: Yeah, definitely. Some of those introverts have great contributions to make. Dustin: Yeah. Absolutely. Kathleen: You can tease it out. So you have this meeting, you walk away, you go back and your team works on the copy for example for a webpage. Dustin: Yeah. Kathleen: Then does it then go back or what's next? Avoiding the "too many cooks" problem Dustin: Yeah. So at that point, so we've made the mistake there of then going back and walking through the copy either in-person or through Google doc. It was a mistake. We shouldn't have done that. We learned pretty quickly you get a bunch of people editing and suggesting words on the fly and that's not a good use of any time. We hire a content marketers so they can write cause they write better than a lot of us, so let them write. So what we often do then is we pair the marketer with a designer in the case of a webpage. They go ahead and basically do a mockup of, "Hey, here's the flow we're thinking." Then we actually go into a design review at that point of okay, this is what we wanted to get across quickly. Does this design do that? We don't tweak the copy at that point too much. Which comes first, copy or design? Kathleen: So you create your copy before you create the design? Dustin: Yeah, I know that's kind of backwards, right? Kathleen: Well, actually I don't have an opinion either way, but I ask because this is a debate that I've had with so many people and I don't really know what I think. I think sometimes it can work one way and sometimes it works another. I probably lean more towards having some design elements figured out, some global elements, but then having the copy so that you can understand what the design needs to reflect in it, if you will. It's very chicken and eggy. Dustin: No, it totally is. We've made the mistake of going too far in one direction and handing them all the copy. Writers are going to write. They're going to write too much and it's not going to translate on a webpage, so we end up with a wall of text. So the thing that's helped us a lot there actually is bringing the designer in at the concept review. So when we have the concepts and kind of rough ideas of maybe the headers we're going to use throughout the page, design then starts doing initial mockups there in conjunction with the content person. So they actually work back and forth and they're often okay with, "Hey, this isn't the final copy, but it's roughly going to be this length. Can we work on this?" And then we get both done in conjunction because the design's going to inspire the copy and vice versa, right? Kathleen: Yeah. I recently worked on a website redesign project, not for the company I'm with now, but for a previous one and I worked with somebody who's freelance, who's amazing. I've worked with her before and she has a great system. It's actually pretty rudimentary but effective where she creates these tables in Microsoft, it's Microsoft Word or Google Docs, whatever you use. The table's somewhat approximate the modules on the page. What I like about that, and you then plot the copy and the things in there. What I liked about that was you know you get these problems with copywriting for website pages. For example, if you have a three column grid and you're saying like, "we do this, this and this" and it goes left to right. If you write a lot more for column three than column one it looks funny. So even just spatially being able to see look, our stuff that we wrote is taking up the same amount of space, it's those little things that can really be the devil in the details later down the road if you don't approach it correctly. Dustin: Yeah, I 100% agree with that. The other benefit there is people read websites differently, right? I am absolutely a scanner. I will read the headlines and dive in if I care. Often we write assuming everyone's going to read every single word. Maybe not the best approach, so I think having that design constraint, like you said, can actually help to really map out the hierarchy so it's an easy way to read and then get the right amount of content. Jostle's most successful campaigns Kathleen: Yeah. So I'd love to hear just some examples of what are some of the assets or campaigns that are performing really well for you guys? Dustin: Yeah, so I mentioned the product tour is one that has worked really well. Another one that has worked, I wouldn't really call it a campaign, but we've had a lot of success with our podcast personally. It's not a lead gen channel, right? People look at it like that sometimes and you're going to be disappointed. It's not going to bring in as much as paid search. But we've had a lot of success there with just having conversations with people who probably wouldn't talk to us otherwise. Kathleen: That's why I'm talking to you because I have a podcast. It's exactly the same thing. Yeah. Dustin: Yeah. So we've got a ton of value out of that, right? We're getting senior HR leaders or authors who are thought leaders in this space. Part of it selfishly is, yeah, we get exposure to their audience and that part's great. The other part of it though, is just that's really interesting content for our people. It's not just us spewing out our worldview. It's bringing in outside views in an engaging way and kind of being along with them for their commute or when they're on a run. There's something personal about that that I think builds a really strong audience. Kathleen: Yeah, it is. The network that you build and the relationships that you got through podcasting is incredible if you have an interview style podcast. That's one of the things I've really come to appreciate in the last two years of doing mine is I always tell people like, yeah, I get to talk to people who would otherwise probably never take my call. Dustin: Yeah, 100%. Kathleen: So good advice. Dustin: Yeah, and it's just adding another medium. Not everyone's going to take the time to sit there and read, so we've really taken this approach of branching out and providing audio, video, written long form, short form options for people to digest and read. Whereas maybe back in the day you would just create a 20 page book and assume it would work for all of us, for everyone. So really pivoting away from that has helped. Jostle's growth Kathleen: Great. What does Jostle's growth look like over the last five years that you've been there? Dustin: Yeah, so when I started we were right around 30 people I want to say. Marketing was, well, there were a couple of people in marketing when I hired and then there was a bunch of transition. I was the only one here. So we were a very, very small team. Now we're about 75 people. In my time here, revenues went up many different multiples. It's grown quite fast, which is really nice and I'm quite proud of that because we're competing with some of the big guns like Microsoft and Facebook and those guys, which I personally love. It's a lot of fun. They have more fire power than me so I got to be a little scrappy and figure out how to do things. But yeah, that's what our growth has looked like. It has been driven by inbound, like I said, and for the most part it will continue to be. Kathleen: And can you talk at all about how your funnel has grown, like visitors, leads, et cetera? Dustin: Yeah, absolutely. So the way I look at our funnel, you have to pick where you're going to grow and kind of focus on that. Traditionally we've started at the lead perspective. We managed to grow leads a lot. Like in the first two years we tripled the amount of leads per month, which was great. But I'll admit, I focused on that metrics and I neglected, hey, are we actually converting these people? Are we getting them to book? Are we losing them? So this past year my goal has really been I don't care how many leads we get, I care how many opportunities we generate longterm for sales. And making that shift has helped us actually grow in that area and really up that conversion where we're not paying for things or not spending our time on things that aren't generating results longterm. Dustin's advice for other marketers Kathleen: That's great. That's great. Well, in terms of takeaways for somebody who's listening and they have, most organizations have folks in sales and customer success. Anything you would recommend as far as improving the way marketing works with those teams and any lessons you learned the hard way? Dustin: Yeah, I think one is you need a process but you need it to be flexible and you need to let your people own it. So everyone has checklist people on their team who they say, "I want a flow chart. I want to know exactly what to do at exactly what stage." So you need to provide that, but you also need to train them on it's okay to use your judgment. We trust you. Maybe you're going to screw this up the first couple of times. I definitely did. So learn as you go and kind of give them that leeway. The other one is you can really go off the rails with this co-creation approach if you don't have a rough idea of timeline at the end and a rough idea of what stage you're at and how quickly it's going to progress. I've made the mistake personally of we get stuck in refining the copy over and over and over and incrementally we're not gaining anything. We're tweaking words that won't have much of an impact. So yeah, I think figure out where you want to get, work backwards and map out the process and bring in the people you need and you'll get better quality stuff faster. Kathleen: Yeah, and that's sort of "done is better than perfect" because I feel like that's where I am with one website project I'm working on right now is it's taking way too long because I'm trying to get it perfect and I just need to launch it. I can always iterate. Dustin: Yeah, absolutely. So that's our number one rule with this actually, is if it's not broken and it's okay quality, it's good enough. Get it out there, learn from it and kind of keep going and tied to that like share early is another important concept. We've had new people who have done this, and I did this when I started, you spent days and days crafting this thing that you think is perfect and then it gets torn apart and you start from scratch and that's discouraging and a nightmare. So come up with your idea, get it out early and work iteratively. Kathleen: That's so great, and how do you guys share? Dustin: Yeah, so it often is through that initial meeting where we share the concept and then I personally get the most value out of those one-to-one check-ins where I will pull someone aside often out of the blue, not a scheduled meeting and just say, "Hey, I need 10 minutes. Can I get your feedback," and share that way as you go. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: Got it. All right. Shifting gears, there's a couple of questions I always ask all my guests and I would love to know your thoughts on this. The first is we're all about inbound marketing on this podcast. Is there a particular company or individual that you think is really killing it right now with inbound? Dustin: Yeah, so there's actually two I want to mention if that's okay. Kathleen: Yeah, the more the better. Dustin: Yeah. So the first one who I thinks doing really well is Vidyard. They do a nice job of putting out content that's going to get shared. So their Christmas video, their personalized Christmas video. I don't know if people have seen that. Kathleen: It's so good. Dustin: Yeah, and that got a lot of traction. It got a ton of eyeballs because it's interesting and it's fun. So they do a great job of that. The other one is actually a person who's more on the sales side is Josh Braun who shares a lot of great content on LinkedIn. I signed up for a couple of things with him. His emails to move you down the funnel are better than most marketing emails I get. So definitely a sales guy, but from an inbound non-pushy perspective, he's excellent at the copy he writes. Kathleen: Oh, that's a good one to check out. And then Vidyard. So shout out to Tyler Lessard, who's the head of marketing there who does an amazing job. Definitely go look at those. I totally agree. I don't know Josh Braun, but I know Vidyard, so I'm definitely going to be checking Josh out. Second question, I always hear marketers saying that they're overwhelmed because things change so quickly in the world of digital marketing and they can barely keep up. So how do you personally stay educated up to date? Dustin: Yeah, so part of it, you probably get this response a lot, is from my network and having those conversations with people who are struggling with the same things I'm struggling with. But personally I have a long commute so I get a lot of value out of a variety of podcasts. It's kind of my go-to learning approach. It's just how my brain absorbs stuff. So the traditional ones that work well, our Marketing Over Coffee is a nice one. Copyblogger has a really good podcast on fundamental writing, but I find I get a ton of value out of non-marketing podcasts that make me think and then do things better. So A16Z by Andreessen Horowitz is great. I learn a ton from there, as well as How I Built This is another one that seeing how people have kind of grown things from nothing informs marketing because that's how they grew up. So I get a lot out of both of those. Kathleen: Yeah, absolutely. Those are good ones. I love podcasts also, but I'm also biased because you know, clearly, clearly the podcasting medium is one that's comfortable to me. Dustin: Yeah, same here. I'm a little biased as well. How to connect with Dustin Kathleen: Now, and that actually brings me to my next question, which is if somebody has a question for you or wants to connect and learn more about either Jostle or how you're doing your marketing, what's the best way for them to connect with you online? Dustin: Yeah, definitely. So they can connect on LinkedIn. Send me a message there. If they want to learn more about Jostle, the website's jostle.me, so they can head over there and take a look. Since we're on a podcast, I'm going to plug my podcast if that's okay. Kathleen: No, I was going to ask you to say the name of it because that was at my segue was the podcast. Dustin: Yeah. So we have a podcast called People At Work that we do at Jostle and it's basically focusing on people who are solving work problems in an interesting and effective way and kind of getting their thoughts on it. It's quite conversational. So yeah, check that out. You know what to do next... Kathleen: Awesome. We will definitely check those out and I will put the links for Dustin's LinkedIn and the People At Work Podcast into the show notes. So head there to check that out if you want to look into any of those things. And if you're listening and you liked what you heard or you learned something new, I would love it if you would head to Apple Podcasts and leave the podcast a five star review. That's how we get in front of new listeners. If you know somebody else who's doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me @workmommywork because I would love to make them my next interview. Thank you so much, Dustin. Dustin: Yeah, thank you, Kathleen. That was fun. Kathleen: This was fun.

Can you believe we're just a couple of episodes away from hitting 100 on the Advanced Freelancing, and previously known as Better Biz Academy podcast? I'm very excited to chat with today's guest, Rachel Richards. She really has an amazing and inspiring story that I'd love for you to hear. The reason that I wanted to have Rachel on the show is because she is really a master at passive income and has so much excellent insight she can share with us about how to get started with this. This topic comes up a lot. And that's why I felt like we needed to cover this on the show. A lot of people get confused by the whole process of setting up your passive income streams.  Is it really passive? How do you make all of that work for you? Rachel has an amazing background. She graduated in only three years at age 20 without debt. She used to be a financial advisor and published her first book in 2017 over 12,000 copies of it. So she quit her full time job at age 27 in August 2019, and is retired now living off of $10,000 a month in passive income. So she has five rental properties with 35 units total, royalties from her books, royalties from her print on demand business, and her passive income which ranges between 10 to 12k a month.  She has more than replaced her full time income allowing her to retire early, to speak professionally, travel and pursue her interests. And she talks a lot in her books about passive income, aggressive retirement and “money, honey” about savings buckets investing, and how to get started with passive income and different streams. Now, my interview with her is great. There's lots of excellent information. I want to call your attention to one of the comments that she makes towards the end of the interview about how to leverage the fact that you've worked in different positions or even done different freelance gigs to figure out what you do and don't like. This comes up from time to time with some of my one on one coaching clients who have this dream of being a freelancer, and then once they're in the thick of it realize they actually hate it. One of my one on one coaching clients, for example, it took her doing several freelance writing gigs for her to say, ”I don't want to do this anymore.”  And so we've had to step back and figure out what is the service or consulting that she can offer that's going to light her up because freelance writing isn't it. This is why it's so powerful that you start your freelance business and dip your toes in the water of side income and passive income prospects starting small because you might not like what you do.  Maybe owning rental units isn't right for you because you hate it.  And maybe publishing books, you love the writing part, but being an author is at least 50% marketing and maybe you don't like that. So figuring out what suits you from your background as well as knowing your own personality can really help you go in the right direction when it comes to building in different types of freelance services or passive income. If you love this episode, please drop me a line at info@betterbizacademy.com. I'd also love it if you left the show a review on Apple iTunes. Thanks again for tuning in. And we're almost to Episode 100, where I will be recapping my top 10 favorite episodes from the show. It's time for another episode of the Advanced Freelancing podcast. And today we're talking about a topic that comes up all the time with freelancers who have scaled their business to the point where they're relatively successful.  They're fully booked or close to fully booked and it's time to start thinking about expanding. Another common issue that a lot of freelancers run into is, ”Okay, I'm only making money when I sit at my computer and work for my clients.  Which means if I'm sick, if I take vacation, or if there's some other reason I can't work, no income is coming in.”  And that's why I'm so excited about my guest today, Rachel Richards.  We are going to be talking all about passive income. And she is the queen of passive income. I'd love to kick off by hearing about one of the things that jumped out from Rachel’s bio.  And that is that she graduated with no debt. I know that that's so rare. These days, most of us, myself included, we graduate with tons of debt.  And it almost feels like you're going to be paying it off the rest of your life. So I'd love to know how Rachel made that transition and paid and graduated with no debt. Rachel’s take for graduating without debt. It's definitely a tough thing to accomplish, especially with the crazy cost of college these days. But I do have a couple tips. So the first thing I did is I started thinking ahead when I was in high school, in terms of what scholarships I could apply for. So that got me motivated to do really well in high school.  I was academically doing really well. I had a great GPA. I was also getting involved in as many clubs and everything as I could. And that helped me to earn scholarships to pay for school. So I went to a Centre College which is a private liberal arts school here in Kentucky.  And it costs over $40,000 a year. That's a ton of money. So with the scholarships that I was able to earn, I had a really big academic scholarship and I also had a piano scholarship. That helped me out a lot. But I was able to cover $30,000 out of the $40,000 in scholarships. Another tip I would say is that I took a lot of AP classes in high school.  And I actually ended up graduating in only three years. So when I went into Centre, I was going in as a second semester freshman and almost a sophomore. I was able to graduate a year early, which saves me that entire year's worth of tuition. And then finally, the most important tip I would give is that, when I was in high school looking at this enormous expense, I was starting to feel really discouraged and afraid. I had this really big fear of going into debt. And I was discouraged because, at the time, I was working at American Eagle and I was making paychecks that were maybe $200 per week. I knew that to make $10,000 a year to cover that gap and be able to pay for my tuition that American Eagle just wasn't going to cut it. No matter how many hours I worked, I wasn't going to be able to afford that $10,000. So I looked into other jobs and I actually ended up selling Cutco cutlery.  So it's not an MLM let me just say that first because I know there's a lot of MLM hate out there these days, but it's not an MLM. It's a direct sales company. And the reason I loved it so much is because it was the first time I was in a job where the harder I worked, the more money I made. I knew I could outwork anybody. I could work all day long and make a ton of money. So it really got me motivated and I was able to earn a lot of money from commission. So I worked hard that first summer before entering college. And I was able to make $10,000 that summer. So I was basically paying my way through school. Even though my parents were less than thrilled about the idea of me selling sharp objects to their family and friends. That's what I did. And I did it successfully. So those are kind of my three tips. That's the way I was able to pay for school. There's so much good information there. And I love the idea of taking as many AP classes as you can. I also know people who in college would take community college classes over the summer to get ahead.  If there's certain things you have to take, like intro to biology or a math class, why take that as part of your traditional education at an expensive college? Why not just make that be something you take for much cheaper at a community college?  Knock it out of the way.  You could even do that the summer before you go to college. I think that's super important.  We have a fair amount in common there because I went to a private women's college in Virginia. And our price tag was not as bad as yours, but it was $32,000. And it was the same thing. It was like we had after scholarships, we had a shortfall of like, $2,000 a year and my mom and I were like, “Okay, there's a way we can make this work.”  And when I got one more scholarship to cover that, then I was able to keep my work, study money to buy groceries or little things that I might need throughout the semester. But I love that idea of kind of speeding up your time in college.  It's so expensive.  Even if you're getting great rates at an in state school, it's still expensive. And if you can cut that one year off, maybe put in a little bit of extra work, and prepare for it in high school with those AP classes, that’s a great way to save a lot of money and graduate with very little or no debt at all. So Rachel is like the queen of passive income. Why don't you give us a little bit of a brief introduction? How did you get into generating passive income streams? Rachel’s take on passive income. For those listening, just to kind of define what passive income is. And I know this sounds too good to be true, but passive income is money that is earned with little to no ongoing work. So I'm sure you're familiar with JK Rowling. She is the author who wrote the Harry Potter series 25 years ago. She did all the hard work and the writing back then. And today, she's still making millions of dollars from the Harry Potter series. So that's passive income. It takes time to create, but once it's in place, it takes little to no ongoing work in order to maintain that income. And that's why it's so beautiful. Why I think that’s helpful. That's very helpful because I think one of the things that bothers me about the term passive income, is that people are always asking me about it.  And they're like, “What are your passive income streams?” And I have a side business. We sell all my old lesson plans from my teaching days. We have over 250 lesson plans for sale on Teachers Pay Teachers. In a sense, it's passive, because I spendless than an hour a month even looking at it. But that being said, we do put some work into it.  We pin pins on Pinterest. And so it'll be interesting to hear more about what your passive income streams are, and if they are truly passive.  But I was just curious, how did you get into them? I mean, obviously, he previously worked as a financial advisor and had more of a traditional job. How did you branch out into these passive income streams? Rachel branches out into her passive income streams. So a few years ago, as I was learning about this amazing concept of passive income, I had this epiphany that once your passive income exceeds your living expenses, you're retired. And I just mean retired in the sense of being financially independent and not having to go to work anymore. So that's what my husband and I started working towards. We actually started in 2017. And it only took us about two and a half years to build up enough passive income to retire. So in 2017, the first thing we did is we had always wanted to invest in real estate. We always knew that real estate was a really great tool for building long term wealth. And it wasn't even necessarily at the time. I didn't even think I put together the dots of creating the passive income, but it was just something we always wanted to do. So in January of 2017, we bought our first duplex. We live in Louisville, Kentucky, so it's a low cost of living area and it's a great area to invest in. And the duplex we bought, we got a crazy good deal on. It was $100,000. So we put we only had to put about $20,000 in for the down payment. And it was immediately generating $500 per month in profit and profitable cash flow. That's after expenses. So that was such a great income stream for us. We immediately took that money, saved, and reinvested it so that we could afford to save up enough money for the next down payment for the next rental property. Now rental property, I'll hear something people that will say, “Wow, that's so passive and amazing.” And I'll hear some people that say, ”No, rental properties are not passive at all.” I think it's definitely in the passive category and that you're not having to work a 40 hour week to maintain it. Within a passive income, though, there's a wide spectrum.  Some things are completely passive. And some things are less passive. I personally think it really depends on whether you have a property manager or not.  So in my book, when I'm talking about how to create passive income, I always say invest in real estate, get rental properties, but make sure you have a property manager.  Otherwise, it's not going to be as passive as you want it to be. So that's kind of the first income stream we started with. And then later on in 2017, I launched my first best selling book “Money, Honey”. I was generating royalty income off of that as well. So we had these two passive income streams, rental income and royalty income, and we focused on growing those as much as we possibly could for the next few years. Fast forward to today, we now own over 35 rental units in Louisville, Kentucky. And I just launched my second best selling book. So I think last year, at some point last year, we hit this $10,000 per month mark, where we were making $10,000 a month in passive income.   Which was more than enough to cover our expenses. So that's when we were able to call ourselves retired. And that's when I quit my job. I love the distinction between different ways you can define passive. You can decide how passive really is this and the more you can build in the right structure from the beginning, the easier it is. And that was something I did too with my side business of selling lesson plans. I really didn't want to maintain this every month. I don't want to deal with the customer service questions if someone has problems with the download. So from the beginning, I had all these lessons and I hired a virtual assistant and said, “Hey, are you comfortable with this?  It's going to take you less than five hours a month to deal with all of this, but I don't really want to be part of it.” I just wanted it to be there and be running on the side. And it's really nice to have that because I never have to get involved in any of that administrative stuff. But money's being generated every month. So I have two questions following up on that. So the rental property thing is so interesting. I think we hear this a lot from people who are very wealthy and very successful financially. You've got to invest in real estate. So my first question is, how did you get that initial money for that down payment of your first property? Did that come from personal savings? Was that another passive income stream that paid for the down payment? Rachel shares where her initial investment money came from. Yeah, so that came from personal savings. And I'll talk a little bit about how I did that. But then we'll also talk about the ways that people can invest in real estate without having a large chunk of money. So don't let that stop you. I was in a situation where I graduated without debt. My husband also graduated without debt because he was in the military. So he used his benefits to pay for school. And then we both had pretty lucrative careers. I have always been a financially frugal person.  As a former financial advisor, I knew how to manage my money well. So, we didn't have debt. I was managing my money. Well, we were both making good money and didn't have kids, which is a pretty big expense. So we were just able to save pretty aggressively. I graduated from college when I was 20. And then I invested in my first rental property when I was 24. So, after four years, or I think it probably took less time, we had more than enough money for the down payment on the first rental property. The big difference… I was just curious, it's obviously quite a big difference, going from having one property where you're getting your feet wet, figuring out how this works. And now you have 35 rental properties. How do you keep all of that straight? I'm sure you have a property manager for each one. But how do you monitor all the logistics with those different rental properties? Rachel gets real on logistics. Yeah, so we did have property managers for a while. We're between them now, because the last people didn't work out. But just to clarify, we have 35 rental units, not property. So we have five buildings.  Three of them are apartment buildings where it's 11 or 12 units in each building. But it is a lot to manage. It's a lot of work when you don't have a property manager, especially when you get to like 25-30 units, then it's really it's a lot of work. And you can't really call it passive anymore.  Which is why you really have to start out knowing that you're going to have a property manager in mind. But in terms of how to keep everything straight. I am a luckily an Excel wizard.  And I love Excel spreadsheets. So I keep everything very organized in terms of the finances, the tenants, the payments, and the maintenance.  We have a pretty good system in place that helps us be a lot more efficient. Perfect system for a financial whiz. That's really amazing. And it sounds like it might be the perfect fit for someone who's already a financial whiz or virtual assistant who's really good with spreadsheets and numbers.  It's going to leverage your existing skill set. Now, I love the fact that you've written books. A lot of people assume that books are the fast track to passive income. I know when I published my first book, which was done through the traditional publishing process, a lot of people have this vision of what it means to write and sell books.  But it still takes a lot of work to market a book.  And I know that most books that are published never sell more than 250 copies. Obviously, you are a major exception to that and are seeing continued success with multiple books. What are your recommendations for someone who's thinking about writing a book and really wants to get traction on Amazon or on any of the other platforms where books are sold? Rachel’s recommendations when writing a book. I think you made a great point about over the long run you still do have to market your book. So when you're thinking about passive income, you really need to consider how passive do I want it to be? Because there are things you can certainly outsource.  You can hire a social media manager.  You can outsource or whatnot. And if you choose not to do things like going on the radio or the TV or doing or you know doing podcast interviews, then you can certainly make it a lot more passive. So everyone that's trying to create a passive income stream really just needs to think from the beginning. How passive do I want this to be? And what can I outsource to make it more passive? Now books specifically… Yes, the statistics say that most books sell 250 copies. So to have launched a book that's been so successful is still just shocking to me. My first book “Money, Honey” has now sold over 15,000 copies. And my second book, “Passive Income, Aggressive Retirement” has already sold over 3000 copies. And I just launched it a couple months ago. I think there's a lot to be said for doing market research. I could write a book about cooking and launch it.   There are thousands of other cookbooks or books about cooking out there. So how could mine be different? And it's the same thing or maybe even more competitive in the financial industry. There's thousands of books about money and finance out there. So why on earth would somebody want to read mine over somebody else's? If you can't answer that question, then your book won't be successful. You have to be able to articulate what is the unique value that I am bringing.  What's different about my book that nobody else can find in another book? So for example, in “Money, Honey”, I had this epiphany. That people my age, female millennials, were coming to me all the time for financial advice.  My family and friends would come to me.  And I loved helping them. And at some point, I began to wonder why they're not taking advantage of some of these websites or books that are out there or trying to learn? And then what I realized is that a lot of finance books are dry, boring, complex, and intimidating. So then I thought to myself, “Well, how can I make this subject sassy and fun and simple?” So that's what I did with “Money, Honey”. It's sassy and humorous. It's really, really easy to read. It's a quick read. And it has resonated so much with female millennials. So it really hit a nerve with them. It’s really taken off because of that. It’s just spread like wildfire. Basically, through word of mouth. I haven't done any paid advertising. I know a lot of people have a dream of writing a book. That's amazing. And I think a lot of people have this dream of writing a book. I believe that a lot of people, most people do, have at least one good book in them that they could write. But we all know many people who say, “Oh, yeah, I want to write a book. I've always wanted to write a book.” And then it never happens. I know one of the biggest challenges is when you have a full plate.  Obviously, Rachel had other things going on in her life.  She was working on all of these different rental properties and having that happening at the same time as writing a book. What tips do you have for someone who's busy? I mean, a lot of my audience, they're freelancers who are successful. So they've probably got a close to fully booked or fully booked schedule.  And a lot of people start off with the best of intentions and motivation, but lose that energy. So what recommendations do you have for people who think they might want to write a book and somehow need to find a way to fit that around their existing business and obligations? Rachel’s recommendations for writing a book. Yeah, that's a great question. And I totally agree. I think everyone has at least one book in them. So I get really excited when I can help people with this topic. But I would say I have two tips. The first one is to set aside time at the beginning of every day.  Because if you wait until after work, or after whatever activity you have planned, the further you go along in your day, the less likely you are to actually sit down and set aside those 10 or 20 minutes to start writing. When I was writing my first book “Money, Honey”, I was employed full time.  And I was investing in real estate. We all have crazy schedules. We're all busy. So it's just about prioritizing that time and making sure you do it first thing in the morning before things start getting in your way. And then the second tip... So one day, I sat down and I decided I'm going to track how I spend my time in 15 minute intervals for two days in a row. So literally every 15 minutes, I would write down what did I do the last 15 minutes? And yes, it was kind of tedious to do that and kind of a pain for two days. But man was that eye opening. It's sort of like doing a budget for where your time is going and where you want it to go or not. And what I realized after two days is that I was saying that I was the busiest person in the world. I couldn't possibly take another appointment. I didn't have any time to do anything. Once I saw how I was spending my time, and this is embarrassing to admit, but I realized I was spending three or four hours per day on social media, or watching TV. Most times we don't have any perspective. You don't really know where your time is going until you actually sit down and track it. So I think that's an eye opening exercise. Anyone can do that and really easily figure out where am I wasting my time and where can I free up time so I can spend it writing my book or researching book ideas. It's so powerful to be able to track your time. That's something I also recommend to business owners who are thinking that they might not need to outsource anything to a virtual assistant or a subcontractor. Because you think that you're being productive and doing all of these things. But when you track your time, you realize how much of your time you're spending on silly things like answering the same questions in an email over and over again or formatting a blog post and WordPress. And that might not be the best use of your time. I think any of the tedious nature of keeping track of that is more than balanced out by the fact that it really calls your attention to what are you doing with your time. Because you'll find yourself being more mindful.  You’ll say, “Hey, I wasted the last 15 minutes. How did I go down this rabbit hole on Instagram scrolling?”  Now you're going to be more mindful for the future time periods that you're tracking even within that day and it can really help open your eyes. I also really support our advice of writing first thing in the day. Being a full time freelance writer for seven years, if I used up all of my writing energy and creativity on things for my clients, there was absolutely no way that I was even typing one word on my books at night. And so it had to be that first priority. The first thing you work on every day. And I think sometimes people set these big, crazy goals that you can't really accomplish like, “Well, I'm going to add 5000 words to my book this Saturday.” Wouldn't it just be easier if you said you're going to do like 1000 words every morning, Monday through Friday? Don't set these giant, enormous goals that put so much pressure on you and feel like such a letdown if you fail. If you miss Tuesday morning’s 1,000 word writing session, you still got at least 4000 words towards your book. That's much more effective than putting this pressure on. I'm going to spend the whole day writing Saturday and I'll get 5000 words. And you get zero and that disappointment is crushing because then it's like, “Well, I guess I have to wait to get another week until my next Saturday to write.” So breaking it down into that morning activity is really important. So we've talked about two different types of passive income streams, books and rental properties. Are there other recommendations for passive income or side income streams that you can recommend for people who have online business savvy and skills? Rachel’s other passive income recommendations. Yes, absolutely. And this kind of gets into the meat of my newest book, “Passive Income, Aggressive Retirement”. In that book, I talk about 28 different passive income models. And anyone can do it. Passive income either takes money or time or sometimes both to create. So you really have to start with asking yourself, do I have more time? Or do I have more money that I can put into building this passive income stream? Royalty income is a really big category of passive income. So that includes what we talked about launching and writing a book. But it could also include launching a course. It could include something called print on demand platforms where you're earning royalties off of products that you sell without having to touch the products, without having any inventory. A print on demand platform. There's also passive income that would fall into the e-commerce or advertising category. So that could be affiliate marketing, blogs, or offering some type of membership. And again, you have to be careful about the way you set this up. Because when you start a blog, it could either be not passive at all, it could be completely active. Or if you build it the right way, and outsource the writing and content creation, then it can be passive. That's something that Bobby Hoyts did. He's the founder of the Millennial Money Man, the website and the blog. And he has a really large community and online classes that he offers. I actually interviewed him for my book as well as a ton of other different subject matter experts. But yeah, there's tons of ideas out there. So I would encourage people to research, get started, and don't hold yourself back because you don't think that you can do it or that you have the right skill set. Excellent advice. Now how long do you think it takes to really get traction with passive income streams? And does that vary based on the different type of income stream you're pursuing? Yes, it definitely varies. And, for example, portfolio income is probably the only passive income that's truly 100% passive.  It literally doesn't require any work. And when I say portfolio income, I mean investing it in investments that are earning dividends or producing income for you. So when you decide you're going to, you have to have a large amount of money to do this. But the good thing is, it doesn't really require any time. You just invest the money and then it's generating income for you. So that's something that has no time requirement in the beginning and it can generate passive income immediately. Of course, you need to have a ton of money to do it. So you kind of have to  pick your battles there. There are other income streams like writing a book. Of course that's going to take months of researching and outlining, writing the book, and putting together a marketing plan. And then to actually launch it and sustain the success long term requires marketing and having a really great strategy. So for example, for my first book “Money, Honey”, I started writing it in January of 2017. And I launched it in September of 2017. So it's about nine months. But I was also working full time. And I also quit for four months in the middle of that because I was convinced that my book was awful and it was going to be an embarrassment. So I quit writing for four full months. And if not for that, I really think I could have launched it within four or five months. In my first book, or in my first month of lunch, I made about $500 or $600. And then I quickly grew that income stream to over $1,000 per month within the first few months. But you have to account for all the time it took to launch the book in the first place. And then another example would be real estate investing. You do need some money for that. It doesn't have to be a ton of money. Then you're gonna have to spend time just finding the right property and doing the research. And sometimes you'll get lucky and the right property will appear out of thin air and you'll make an offer and everything will happen really fast. But it's something I always say you have to be really patient with. Because it could take months to find the right property. I think it took us nine months of searching before we found our first duplex and closed on it. So you just have to be patient, you have to put the work in in the beginning so that you can then enjoy the fruits of your labor later. That's perfect advice. Because I think a lot of people hear these great stories about somebody like you who's very successful with passive income streams. And of course that started smaller and you were willing to invest the time and wait for the right thing. So it wasn't like you said, “Okay, I'm going to create online courses. I'm going to write books. And I'm going to buy rental property. I'm going to try all the things all at once and it should be successful in 90 days or less.” That's not how it works. But you started off with a lot of motivation. And then you continued to tweak and improve things as you went. I think that's so important for anyone thinking about passive income. It might be a slow build, but the long term payoff is really something that can be worth it. So it sounds like you've built a lot of your financial knowledge and your gold around your previous career as a financial advisor. So what strategies or advice did you take with you when you left that career? And which ones did you leave behind? I was a financial advisor at first very early on in my career. And then the last few years, I was actually a finance analyst. But there were a lot of things that I learned as a financial advisor. And one of the things I actually learned just kind of on a more personal note. The reason I went into financial advising is because I had this awesome sales experience selling Cutco knives. And then I also wanted to help people invest their money. So I thought it was going to be the perfect career for me. It turns out that when I actually got into that job, I realized it was a lot cold calling and prospecting. And although I could be really good at that, if I forced myself to be, it was just draining and exhausting, and it didn't come naturally to me. So it probably took longer than it should have for me to realize this wasn't the career for me. And I really needed to make a change. It's hard because when you're a millennial or a recent grad, and you're trying to navigate your way through  the job market, you don't want to have all these short stints on your resume. Because they say that looks bad to an employer. But at the same time, there's time to do that early in your early in your career where it's really not going to hurt you. So you really have to give yourself the opportunity to work at a few different jobs and see, what do you not like about this job? What do you like about this job?  That way, you can really figure out what you want your long term career to be. So that's kind of my takeaway, just from a career and personal perspective.  I think that most people can manage their money and invest on their own. Yes, they will have to do some learning and some reading. But I think that we really overcomplicate the subject of investing. We make it way harder and more intimidating than it needs to be. And in reality, investing can be a super simple activity. I would also say to educate yourself if you do choose to use a financial advisor. I think that's great because it's better to invest with a financial advisor than not to invest at all, but make sure that you're aware of how financial advisors are paid. Some financial advisors are paid based off commissions. That means that they are not incentivized in the correct way and they're not acting as your fiduciary. But other financial advisors are fee only financial advisors.  So they're being paid a fee of the total percent of assets they have under management. That means that if they grow your money successfully, they will get paid more. So those incentives are lined up the exact way they need to be lined up for them to be their fiduciary. So if you are going to work with a financial advisor, just make sure you understand how they're paid, how they're incentivized, and whether they are truly acting in your best interest. That is such excellent advice. I've heard a lot of the same. And I think a lot of people are scared about how you get started with investing knowing that there are a lot of brokers and advisors out there who have the reverse incentive to make a lot of transactions and move things around so that they can collect a fee every time that happens. And as someone who might not be educated on how all that works, it's hard to tell that balance of are these moves really benefiting me? Or is this being done more for the benefit of the advisor? So you mentioned that everyone should do a little bit of research about getting started with that. And as far as investing, do you have some recommendations of some books or some resources that you love for total beginners? Yes, I would give my book “Money, Honey”, a five star review.  But I'll give some more resources. But in my book “Money, Honey”, I do talk about how to invest. And I include screenshots and everything. Because one of the questions that would get from my friends was, “Okay, but how do I physically buy the stock? Like what do I do?” So I have screenshots of literally how to set up an investment account, a discount brokerage account, and how to trade and how to buy your first stocks and some advice on how to do that. Some other really great books. I've read tons of finance books over the years. I love “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” by Robert Kiyosaki. Another really great book is “I Will Teach You to Be Rich” by Ramat Sethi. I don't know if I'm saying that correctly. And that's not so much about investing as it is just about practical money hacks and things you can do to just easily save yourself some money. And for those of you who are interested in getting Rachel's books… If you have Kindle Unlimited, both of them are available through the Kindle unlimited program, which I really recommend if you don't have Kindle unlimited is well worth the monthly cost that you pay to be able to have up to 10 titles out at a time. I've already added both of her books to my downloads. So no excuses to not at least start with Rachel's books. So my kind of last wrap up question for you is, how do you balance the fact that passive income can vary from one month to another? How do you balance that when you've got multiple things that can change every month? That's a great question. And something my husband and I were really careful to do when we were working towards early retirement is, you know, if your living expenses are $5,000 per month, and your passive income is $5,000 per month, yes, you're technically retired.  You've covered your expenses. But that leaves you no room in case you don't make as much income as you thought or in case your expenses are more than you thought. Or if you just want to continually be saving money, which we did. Then we kind of really re-evaluate it. And we said, “Well, for our living expenses are $5,000 a month, and we want our passive income to be $10,000 a month.” So that's an enormous margin of error or buffer room. Most months, we're able to still save a lot of money. But that means that if our passive income is only $7,000 or $8,000, which is a lot less than what it should be, or what we would think it would be, that means we're still more than offsetting our expenses. So when you're kind of projecting out and planning out how to achieve this, I would just basically do it based on the worst case scenario. So in your worst month, if your passive income is only x, is it still enough to cover your expenses? And if not, then you need to work on getting your passive income higher or reducing your expenses. That's perfect advice. So aside from getting your books, which are available on Amazon, where else can people go to learn more about you and all of the great work that you're doing? Anyone can follow me on social media. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter if you just search Money Honey Rachel. You can follow me. And you can message me there. Both of my books are available on ebook and paperback. And my newest book “Passive Income, Aggressive Retirement is” available on audiobook. And “Money, Honey” audio book is about to come out any day now. So definitely follow me! Don't hesitate to reach out because I love to help people with this stuff. Well, it's really been a pleasure to get to interview Rachel. I know I've learned a lot and I can't wait to read her books. Thanks for tuning in for another episode of the advanced freelancing podcast. For more freelance advice, get a copy of my book Start Your Own Freelance Writing Business—available now! Buy it from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, and more.

Welcome!   We are going to hit a number of topics today from the world of Technology. Primaries and Caucuses are underway and with that always comes the topic of technology and security and it is no different this year.  Apps are being developed and brought to market without being fully tested.  Extensions are being created that have ulterior purposes and are being downloaded by thousands and even more, on Tech Talk With Craig Peterson today on WGAN.  It is a busy show -- so stay tuned. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Related Articles: Four States Use A Flaw Filled Mobile Voting App  Iranian Hackers Exploit VPNs Worldwide IT Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity Exacerbated by Coronavirus  Be Careful of Extensions on Chrome - Many found to Upload Your Private Data.  Sharp Increase in Exposed Records by Third-Party Applications Automotive Apps originally designed for Personal Owners cause headaches for rental agencies. 1.77 Billion  - That is how much Businesses lost last year to Business Email Compromises  Encrypted Communications for the Masses --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Hey, welcome, everybody. Craig Peterson here on WGAN. And we're live on Facebook. And we, of course, can be found over my website as well Craig Peterson, calm. We got a lot of topics for today's show. But we're going to start with the one that is really on everybody's minds right now is we see more of these primary elections beginning to come up, and we see problems. Well, I don't know, or are they problems or features? I guess they are problems with some of the election technology that has been used over in Iowa. New Hampshire's technology was rather straightforward as the Secretary of State in New Hampshire says, and it's hard to hack a pencil, although they're not using pencils. In New Hampshire. They are using felt pens, which are hard to hack as well. And these cards can like the cardboard that you would have in the back of a shirt when you purchase it. It's that type of cardboard that is not shiny or glossy, and then it goes through an optical reader that scans the ballot and places it in the bottom of that machine. An election official stands there to make sure that the balance legitimate. That you are not trying to stuff the ballot box, and that machine counts your vote. Now the unfortunate thing is those machines are kind of old in most states, some of them, I think maybe all of them are still running Windows XP, but there's no easy way to get it the operating system. It's never connected to a network. Even though some of these machines that have been examined and have patch levels zero or in other words, no patches of Windows XP, which is quite surprising when you get down to it. That is a big problem in many many cases. In New Hampshire, the primary went pretty well. Of course this weekend, the next one coming up, which is in Nevada. The Nevada caucuses. I don't know what to believe anymore because I've heard both sides of this. One that voting in Nevada is using the same technology that was used over in Iowa, which to me would be just a shocker and a whole big dismayed because it was just so terrible. As I've said on the radio before, in fact, this week when I was on with Ken and Matt, I think it was, might have been with Jim, I'm trying to remember who it was, which show. I pointed out how in when we're looking at some of this technology, we all well, not all of us, but some of us love the latest greatest technology. I'm one of those guys that like to stick with something that I know works and explore current technologies and newer things. But so many times we get just bamboozled as taxpayers because the people that are in control of the purse strings, they like the latest coolest stuff. They buy equipment from people they know hence the app and iOS. Former Hillary Clinton staffers ran the company chosen for use in Iowa, and I don't know how much vetting they did. We do know that the code wasn't checked. Homeland Security had offered. We also had offers coming in from Federal Investigation Bureaus and from several security companies saying, Hey, listen, we'd be glad to have a look at this. It was all closed source. It wasn't open-source where you can have a look at that software and say, yes, indeed, everything's legit. That is excellent software. People can find bugs in it. If they find a bug, they can report it, and it can get fixed, right? There are so many different things that they could have done when we're talking about trying to make this secure. I see Mary just joined us here on the Facebook Live and which is cool. She and I have worked several elections in the pas,t and we've been monitoring them. I have a son that's been one of these election officials. You know, part-time people that get pulled in to watch the voter checklist and things in New Hampshire, you have to have an ID to vote, which is weird, you know. I liked the way we did it here, Maine's doing the same thing. Most New England states are in fact as northern New England are doing the same thing where we have a felt pen, we have a piece of paper, we mark it down on that piece of paper, and we can then count it later on. If there's a problem, right? You can just go to that paper that sits in the closet, pull out the stack, bring it with you. And once you've done that, you can have a bunch of people sit around and think about Florida 20 years ago and what happened there with the hanging chads. They at least had a physical card they could look at although you know pregnant chats, hanging chads got to be quite the mess. So now we're getting concerned because of this new voting app that's out there. It's called Votz. V-O-T-Z is how they spell it. It's not the same one that was used the caucuses in Iowa. The app that the Democratic Party was using was trying to take the tabulations that were made by the people who were at all of these different precincts and figure out what the vote tallies were and then supposedly put it into the app and it gets sent up. This vote app that we're talking about right now goes a few steps beyond that. They want military personnel, and people are overseas to use it when they can't necessarily vote when they want to vote. It's, you know, panacea, maybe it's something we can get to in someday, but four states are going to use it this year. It has not undergone the trials that really should have gone down. And it's using a buzzword that I think got people's attention. And they're saying, Oh yeah, this is going to be safe because it's using this buzzword called blockchain technology. Blockchain technology is what used behind various cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin and some of the others, to help secure the transaction. So the whole log is it signed each record inside the register is signed. Just because it has blockchain doesn't mean it's secure and doesn't make it properly designed. I've got a quote here in this article from MIT, is computer science artificial intelligence lab saying the whole thing is sloppy. It looks sloppy. It's in Georgetown Law. It's awe-inspiring. They were able to find such a pervasive set of vulnerabilities, said Matt Blaze and election security expert and computer science professor at Georgetown Law School. But we should also remember it's ultimately unsurprising that they would be able to do so because of every expert has warned against Internet voting as being vulnerable to flaws exactly like this goes on. The University of Michigan here Alex Halderman, saying that it makes vote seemed like a sham. So it is a sham. I think I think it's a real problem. But we're going to do it anyways and four states, including West Virginia, this year is going to be a mass. We've already seen what happened in Iowa. We saw excellent voting happen in New Hampshire. We're not sure what's happening this weekend in Nevada, then Super Tuesday is right on the heels. Some of these states are using these voting apps. Some of them are using the apps used in caucuses. I think thank goodness there aren't very many caucuses in the country. And we'll see, but one thing is guaranteed, and that is it will be quite the debacle. It is going to end up being a problem for everybody involved because they didn't vet this technology. Now, I reported on this a couple of weeks ago, this $10 million grant set aside by the Department of Defense grant, ultimately, and it was to design a voting machine that would be secure. A voting machine that we could trust. I think that's just wonderful. It hasn't really been tested yet. They brought it last year to one of these conferences like Black Hat and Defcon. They brought it out there. Every year there is a voting machine village where they have all kinds of voting machines there. They are asking people to go ahead and try and hack into the voting machines. We had a 15-year old that was able to hack a voting machine right there, and they compromised every voting machine except for the device under development on this $10 million contract. Now, that might seem impressive, and that might be kind of encouraging to some of us. I think it kind of is in some ways. However, the reason they did not hack it was it didn't work. They were not able to get it online and did not get it online until Sunday, which was the last day of the conference. And so no one got to test it out. But that was last year. Let's get them a little real a little bit under their belt, a little water under that bridge sometime, and they will be able to do it. And you know, I think they'll be able to do it ultimately, but I still will be the biggest proponent of a pencil and a piece of paper or a felt tip pen. The software, By the way, those votes VOATz software is being used in Denver, parts of Oregon, Utah and Washington State, we'll see what happens. West Virginia, as I said, is going to use it. But for disabled voters, the federal government requires all states to have electronic voting machines that can be used by disabled voters. I know here where I live in New Hampshire, we have a thing I don't know they might have passed. Now they're kind of getting old. Twins, twin women, and one of them was pretty much deaf, and the other one was pretty much blind. So they were able to help each other out in a massive way, which is kind of cool and get right down to it. But what they did is they kind of both helped each other to vote, but we all have in every precinct people who are there who can help people with disabilities. I don't like this requirement to have electronic voting machines. But the MIT researchers, these other researchers all agree with me. I'm very concerned about the Android phone and Android as a platform for people to use. I don't know if you are if you're using Android, you know, I'm always saying use iPhones much, much more secure. But I also am not looking at an iOS as being the problem. Cure-all for some of the voting machines. Anyhow, we are live on Facebook, as I'm putting the show together and shout out to everybody who is on there and asking questions. I appreciate it. And I will go back in and answer questions for anybody a little bit later on who has them, and I want you to stick around. I will be back here after the commercial break. We're going to be talking more about the latest in technology. We're going to be getting into these Iranian hackers that have been hacking VPN. If you think your VPN is safe. We've got another thing coming. So we're going to shut this one down. And we will be right back. Thanks for joining us, of course, Craig Peterson dot com. Hello, everybody. Welcome back. Craig Peterson here on WGAN and affiliates. You'll find me online at Craig peterson.com. And, of course, online at Facebook. I'm doing this Live on Facebook, and also out at YouTube. And we're going to talk right now about VPN. So hopefully, you have some understanding of them. But some exciting statistics came up this week from our friends in government. The FBI has been warning us a lot lately about what's been happening over in Iran what they've been doing, and we don't have kinetic war. In other words, we're not shooting at each other, which is a good thing, right? But Iranian hackers have been right at the forefront of trying to hack into our systems, and they've been relatively successful. I have a few clients that are in the defense industry, because we do, of course, the higher security stuff, right. And they have been under constant attack from Iran for about six, eight weeks now ever since the last little tussle with Iran might have been longer than that. And we're seeing sustained efforts to hack into them. Well, now we're getting a report from our friends over at ZD net here about Iranian hackers targeting these VPN services. So I thought I'd start by kind of explaining to everybody a little bit more about VPN services, what they are, what they offer. And because I'm hearing ads about this all the time, and frankly, it's driving me crazy, because the ads are telling me that Yeah, Craig you need a VPN because it's the only way you're going to be safe. It's the only way you're going to be secure in your day. You've got companies out there that used to be known for anti-virus, which of course nowadays we know antivirus software is zero percent effective against the latest hacks that are out there. So antivirus software companies are trying to figure out what's another way that we can make some money because people are starting to realize that this is a scam. And it's been a scam for a lot of years. You know, antivirus worked pretty well 15 years ago. It doesn't work at all today, as I just mentioned for the latest now malware nastiness that's out there. So some of these companies one that comes to mind. It was purchased not too long ago by another anti-malware company is running a lot of ads. They're saying this we need our VPN you need our credit watch. They've tied in, with one of these companies that watch your credit looking for transactions, it might be a bad guy, and I'm a little concerned because here's what usually is going on in the VPN industry. Running a good VPN is expensive. When you are using a VPN, all of your data, depending on what type of a VPN, how it's employed is encrypted from point to point. We're talking about the right ones and not those that you hear the ads for when you're using those types of VPNs. Your data is transmitted up to the VPN service provider. Then once it gets there, it is sent out to the internet. So let's say you're trying to go to my site, Craig Peterson, dot com. If you're using a VPN, your web browser is going to ask the VPN server Hey, can I get the Craig Peterson dot com? What's the best way to do it? How can I get there, and the VPN server will say Hold on a second. I'll get that page for you. Then the VPN server goes out to Craig Peterson dot com gets the page and sends it back to you. Now, that would be a caching or proxy VPN server. And some of them will just pass packets through. But the big concern I have is twofold. One of them is this whole Iran thing, and we'll get into that in just a minute. Because it isn't only Iran. But the other one remembers if something is free, or if it's inexpensive, who's the product? You the product! And since you're the product, what do you think they're making money off of selling your personal information, that's how they make their money. And that is a big problem as far as I'm concerned. So what some of these VPN services are doing is they are tracking you online. Some of them go the next step, and they're actually acting as full proxies, and they are sometimes acting as a man in the middle attacks. They're injecting things into your data stream that you weren't expecting. So where you think you're getting the VPN to have some security, and to have some privacy. Some of these VPN services are the exact opposite. They are reducing your privacy because what they're doing now is taking your data and selling it to the highest bidder that's out there, right. So I think that's a problem. And if you think it's a problem, maybe you shouldn't use some of these cheap VPN services. And I haven't gotten any I actually like, okay, I've heard advertisements on these radio stations, my shows airing on and I've checked them out, and I'm not comfortable with any of them. And the only VPNs I use or VPNs that I run, but remember, your data still has to hit the internet at some point. Remember, you're using one of these VPN services. versus your data is going to the VPN service provider. And at that point, it hits the internet. So it's now out on the internet. Well, if you're trying to make sure your data doesn't get on the internet, and people aren't hacking you, you've lost because your information does have to get to the internet. How are Internet Service Providers supposed to get to your bank? How are they supposed to get to my website? How did they suppose to get to Facebook or Google or YouTube? They have to go over the whole internet as well. If you're using one of these services, and they're going out to the internet. What do you think is a bigger target you at home, using the internet via your cable company or your telco or maybe your smart device. Is that one device a big target, or do you think that perhaps its the VPN service providers that are the bigger target, right? I'm not sure I need an answer because it's kind of a rhetorical question. The most significant marks out there when it comes to VPNs are these VPN service providers. And we're seeing warnings out there right now that Iranian hackers have targeted pulse secure, which has VPN software that they sell to businesses, shown to be insecure. Pulse Secure for the net. Another example of one of these security companies, right that has a VPN service, Palo Alto Networks, a company I have never used and never recommended either. I haven't recommended any of these companies to anybody ever. We've gone up against Palo Alto Networks in some proposals and contracts and, and they won them because of all the whiz-bang, not because they were the best of the safest, and so So there you go, Paul secure Fortinet, Palo Alto, and Citrix VPN are now being used to provide a back door into larger companies. So if you're a business person, I'm going to put these right now into this channel so that you can look it up for you or business and seeing and write this in as a comment over here in the Facebook Live that you can find online. Yes, go to Craig Peterson, calm slash Facebook. It'll take you to my Facebook channel. But there's the list of them. It is from an article that's out there on ZDnet. I think they have been publishing some great information lately. I've been using them in a number of my alerts that I send out as part of my Saturday morning emails. But some of these attacks have happened according to this firm called clear sky that Iranian hackers have targeted companies. From the IT telecommunications, oil, gas, aviation government and security sectors, why because that's where all the real money is. The particular report is dispelling frankly, the notion that it's their Russian and Chinese hackers or maybe North Korean because the Iranian hackers don't know what they're doing right. I've heard that before all Iran, don't worry about it. They know what they're doing. When in fact, yes, within hours of being disclosed, the Iranian hackers were right in there. It's terrifying. So keep an eye out. I look. Again, online at Craig Peterson, calm you'll find this article, and a whole lot more. Make sure you ask your IT department if you're using any of these VPN services or software. And by the way, in most of these cases, you can get patches to fix it. When we come back. We're going to be talking about Coronavirus and the new challenges right here on WGAN. Hey, welcome back Craig Peterson here WGAN and online at Craig Peterson dot com, of course, on Facebook as well. I am live on Facebook, and you can ask questions there you can watch this whole show as it unfurls, and you will find me there. You can ask questions almost anytime. We try and keep you up to date on what is happening out there in the world of technology. Well, you might not have thought of coronavirus as anything more than just a piece of nastiness, right. The virus I know some people are saying well you know we haven't had as many deaths from the Coronavirus, also known as covin-19. I was trying to remember the name little earlier. We haven't had as many deaths from that as we have from our regular flu virus every year. Right now is the peak of flu season in the northeast and Anyways, and in many parts of the country, and what is there to worry about, right? Is it going to hit us? It seems to be slowing down. We don't have a whole lot of information from our socialist friends in China. Like most socialist governments, they play things very close to the chest. They don't want people to know what's happening, including their citizens. But we have some new fears now, and this is a great little article that I have found over on dark reading. It's pointing out some of the security challenges that we're facing, because of the whole Coronavirus thing. Everybody's heard about it, everybody's scared of it. And when you get right down to it, you're watching me right now listening to me talking about the Coronavirus because it is an exciting thing to understand. The CDC has not only maps of where the Coronaviruses hitting right now, but the CDC also has information about general flu viruses this time of year. There are outbreaks of different diseases, what's happening where CDC.gov now I've seen some fake stuff like CDC, dash gov.org, just all kinds of fake sites. With phishing, we've got to make sure that all of our employees, family, friends, know not to click on any of those links. Don't click on them. However, people do and when you click on them, who knows what's going to happen, you might be downloading malware, you might just be confirming this is a valid email address for more and future spamming, right there might be a lot of different things that it can do to you. Don't do that. The next one I think that that's very interesting is something most businesses have not addressed. What would happen if maybe covid-19, or something else, actually becomes a pandemic? What if it is not even a pandemic. What if you have an office with five or ten people in it and everybody comes down with the flu or cold? At the same time? Have you prepared for a business continuity challenge? And it isn't just what might happen if you're sick. It might also be a little bit further than that. What might happen if the business burns down? Or there's flooding, or no one can get into the office for a day or two because of some natural disaster? Maybe, it's just a really nasty ice storm like we had here? What a decade ago, where there were portions of New England that had no power for six weeks, in the middle of winter. That's a very, very big deal. What would your business do? Most people will haven't had a good hard look at business continuity, just in general, although we really should. And when we've got the cyber attackers coming after us, it also brings to mind what would happen if they got through, and let's say it was a version of ransomware that encrypted all of your data or deleted all of your data and demanded a ransom. Are you going to be able to handle that? Right? It's a big question. Will you be able to continue with your IT people, whether they're outsourced or in-house? How about your security operations people? It could be a huge problem. Let's move it up-scale because I know we've got a lot of people listening, who have more substantial companies. Maybe a 200 person company, perhaps something more prominent and it would be interesting to know you can just drop it in the channel like to know a little bit. But if you've got to hundred people working in one building and it's a contagious virus that's getting spread, the odds are pretty darn good, that 10 to 15% of your workforce is going to get nailed with that bug. Okay. Here's an example from the article. If it's by the way, if it's something that might be pandemic, there's an excellent chance the government's going to quarantine everybody anyways, whether the people get sick or not. Okay, and what's that going to do to your business? It is a consultant over Accenture working in Mexico City during the h1 in one virus spread ten years ago. They were saying that the current quarantine protocols are 14 days. So think about that. What happens if your business if your employees are out for 14 days if you've got a large outsource facility. Your security management, any facility, with a large number of people and you probably don't want to bring 100 people together and put them in a small room unless you-yourself have evidence that none of them have been affected. The second part of the challenges they may not be able to get there even want to get there. Now, this is the business continuity side. Can your business continue if there is a spread of these types of diseases, this could be huge? Some Indian companies have reported, according to dark reading, they've reported disruptions because of stoppages and shipments from China. They've got 45,000 Plus Now I don't know what the number is confirmed infections over 1000 deaths. So if you part of your supply chain now is affected, in this case with the Covid-19. Of course, most businesses are worried about the supply chain from China. There's supply chain manufacturing the low-cost components from China to Indonesia and all kinds of places in Southeast Asia what happens if that goes away too? If you have parts being made anywhere in the world, keep in mind that businesses are starting to move if they haven't already. Then with all of the phishing that's going on, It can get to be a very big problem. Proof point and Cisco Talos have reported messages purporting to provide tips for virus protection. They appeared to be sent not only by official government organizations but by the own businesses itself, upper management. So there's an example of spearfishing going after a specific company, and the messages get used to stealing credentials drop malware like mo tap, and in lures specifically targeting manufacturing and shipping industries. The nano core remote access software, these are back doors, like the kind I've talked about on the show that we have found in business and that is before backdoors get put in there by China or that Iran now has become a big player in all of this. So very, very big problems. Hey, if you have joined me on Facebook for the Facebook Live Welcome, welcome. I appreciate the comments, like seeing the thumbs up, so please do give that to me. Otherwise, you can find me online at Craig Peterson dot com. I post all of everything we talked about every week, right there Craig Peterson dot com and I started sharing videos and, and other things as well on YouTube and a little bit more on Facebook. When we come back after the break, we've got more to discuss. Next up. We're going to talk about these 500 Chrome extensions that have been secretly uploading people's information. How's that for a scary thing? So stick around because we'll be right back. If you are on Facebook Live. We're going to end this Facebook Live and start another one with our new topic in about five minutes on the radio. We'll be back even quicker than that. So stick around. Hold on one sec. Here we go, everybody. Welcome. Welcome Craig Peterson here on WGAN and elsewhere. Of course, also on Facebook, Facebook live is where you'll find me there. Just go to Craig Peterson dot com slash Facebook. You can sign up for my weekly newsletter, where I make sure you have all of the latest news, everything that you need to know. And right now we're going to talk about everybody's favorite browser while except for mine. One of the companies that we use goes by the name of Duo and what they have recently found out about our friends over at Google and Chrome. If you are a big follower of mine, and you've attended some of my pop-up training, I do quite a few of them. Those are always free and, and I have some tutorials as well. I talk a lot about extensions because there are quite several extensions that can be fantastic. And I use them all of the time. If I were to bring up my browser here, you would see a whole bunch of extensions that I use continually. I use them to block certain advertising types, and I use them to prevent various kinds of malware. I have some extensions that use artificial intelligence to figure out what is this page trying to do? Because we've got things like pop-unders, where it opened something up, and it has little timer was saved for an hour, and then it pops up to this big scary message that you need to update windows or update something now Because it's out of date, and there are hackers out there that are trying to get you. And that's called, by the way, scareware. But it comes through your browser, and you have no idea. So some of these extensions that I use are specifically designed to look at the source code on the page, look at not just the HTML, obviously, but look at the JavaScript or so much stuff is hidden. So it pulls in all these pieces of JavaScript. Usually, they're removed in from multiple sites and assembles them has a look at them, and will even change them based on what it finds. Now, those are beneficial extensions. Then on the other side, there are these toolbar extensions. I don't know if you've used these before, man, these used to be all of the rages, and I still see them installed in people's computers. And these toolbar extensions give you a little bit of extra something sooner, just a call right in These extensions going to track you when you're online and shopping and tell you where the best deal is? Well, yeah, it's following you, right? It knows that you're on a shopping site because you give that extension access to all of your browsing history. Then it knows what you're looking at up the site and knows what you are searching. Because so many of these extensions come with their little search bar up top right. Yahoo was one of the big guys out there in this browser bar extension business. And every last one of them at the very least, despite you. Now, that's bad, right that it's bad enough. But now we're looking at this same mo wait a minute here. We have now uncovered 500 Chrome extensions that have been secretly uploading the private data from millions of users. Huge deal. An article in Ars Technica, if you are over on the Facebook Live, you'll see the article, right there has a direct link to it. But this is very bad. It was just discovered on Thursday here. It's been just about just over a week. And we found out from these guys, that what had happened is that these website extensions had more than 1.7 million installations. It was an independent researcher who worked with Cisco's own Duo Security. And they found all of these things. They then reported it privately to Google and the researchers and found 71. Google looked at what the researchers had seen, and how those extensions were coded up and how they we're behaving. Then Google found an additional 430 extensions. And Google has removed all known extensions that were doing this. So that's the right side of it. But that's the known extensions. Those are the extensions that we're doing something that looks suspicious that Google and the security researchers could identify. In this case, reported here, the Chrome extension creators and specifically made extensions that obfuscated the underlying advertising functionality from users. Now it did say advertising in this quote because here's another thing that they do. If you visit a website, and you have an extension installed, that has access to the websites that you're visiting, here's what they've been doing. They look for ads from their customers, so you've got a bad guy, Inc. Okay. And then what better guy he does is he goes out and says, Hey, listen, I can get you 1000 collects of thousand new views of your page, just pay me up. Then what they'll do is they will play some ads for you. These are pay-per-click ads. Every time someone clicks on an ad, they have to pay, right, and some of these ads are cheap at five cents. You don't see that too much anymore. Some of them are $500 for a single click. That money then goes to Google, who then shares it with whoever had the website where the click originated. Okay, so it's a pretty lucrative business if you as a bad guy that could guarantee clicks on these expensive websites That is what they're doing with some of these extensions. They are watching the pages you're visiting to look for an ad from one of these sites that they get some money fro, but now they can have your browser click on the ad unbeknownst to you. Your browser now clicks on that ad. They make some money because they have the fake ads that are up so all kinds of nastiness. The other side of this is let's say the bad guys want their competitors to stop advertising online. Let's say they make cups, and I make this glass. Other companies out there that make a blue glass kind of like this. They find out what are the ads this other blue glass company is running. They have their little extensions out there. They hire these people that only extension to then clicks on the competitor's ads automatically for them. The competitor might have a five hundred dollar a day limit with Facebook ads, and all of a sudden now that five hundred whatever it is they're spending where they've put a cap on it, right? So whatever it is they're spending is being 100% wasted, because you don't even see the ad. There are so many ways that the bad guys are using these extensions. It is a maze of redirects, malware, and more. Some of these plugins will do Bitcoin mining or other types of blockchain cryptocurrency mining out there. Man, there's just all kinds of them hardcoded control servers, which by the way, I've got another tutorial coming out telling you how to stop your computer from going on to some of these command and control servers. And that's going to be phenomenal for you. So keep an eye out for that coming up in a couple of weeks. Many the redirections because they're using redirections, as well as part of this, go to ads for products or Macy's, Dell, Best Buy large volume of ad content, as many as 30 redirects, the deliberate concealment of most ads from end-users and the use of the ad redirect streams to send infected browsers to malware and phishing sites. It goes on the bottom line, beware of extensions, but I also want you to be aware of apps, right? What are the apps that you are using? What are those apps providing you with? Now I'm talking about apps that are on your smartphone or on your tablet, maybe some programs that are on your computers. Okay, they're out there? What are those apps Are those apps something that you need? Many of them spy on you, which is another dangerous thing. They're stealing your data. They're taking the information they're sending to the bad guys. Right? It just goes on and on. So make sure you don't do that it is dangerous stuff. All right, I am doing this radio show on Facebook Live. If you want to follow me on Facebook, it's easy enough to do Craig Peterson comm slash Facebook. And if you are not a Facebook fan, and there are a lot of reasons not to be a Facebook fan, then you can also see a lot of these videos up on YouTube. I do YouTube lives, as well. You'll find that at Craig Peterson comm slash YouTube. And of course, you're listening on the radio, and you're going to find me on pretty much every streaming service that's out there. So I want to quickly ask a question - which browser do you use? If I say create a poll? What's going to happen here? Oh, there it is. I'm going to publish it right now. I see. Okay. All right. So far it's showing up. I should have clicked this a little bit earlier. So Facebook Live, you have a poll. Do you prefer Google Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge, or Opera? And I personally use Firefox and Opera, Google Chrome and edge I don't trust particular Google Chrome, however, There are times when you have to use one of those two browsers, because your company might be using a website that's specifically programmed to only work with that particular browser. There. There might be other reasons, but let me know. Click on it there. If you are not watching me on facebook right now Facebook Live, go ahead and answer that poll. I'd really like to know or just drop me an email me at Craig Peterson calm. Let me know what your favorite browser is and why. And make sure that you delete every extension you don't need. Every app you don't use and don't need. We've got to cut back because it just presents such a broad attack surface to the bad guys. All right. Okay, so let's see end of this segment. When we come back, we of course, have a whole lot more to talk about. We're going to talk about third party breaches, what's been happening. It's increased sharply in 2019. If you are a business person, this is for you. Your listening to Craig Peterson WGAN and online at Craig Peterson dot com hello everybody welcome back Craig Peterson here on WGAN or also on Facebook Live if you have any questions, by all means drop them right here into the channel can always ask me a question to online anytime. Just email me and he had Craig Peterson calm more than happy to respond. You might have to have a little bit of patients I do try and get back ASAP. But if someone or my staff is not noticing or final notice Don't feel bad. It's not as though we hate you. But we do try and answer every question that comes our way just me at Craig peterson.com. We're going to talk right now about third party risks whether you are a small business or a little large business, this is a huge deal. very huge deal. And it's also a huge deal if you are an individual, because you are dealing with everything from Cloud services through a milk delivery company. All of these are third party services provided by third party companies. And many of them have information about us. And I've heard from so many businesses lately, that are now required under the new federal standards, the CMC standards, that they don't think that they really apply to them because they're not a primary government contractor. It's they don't have a whole lot or any personally identifiable information. You know, why? Why would you come after me? I just don't matter in the whole big scheme of things. So it's not something that I should have to worry about. When the law is clear, they do have to worry about it, but they're still not worried about it. And I think the biggest reason is because people just don't understand the risks involved. You're using Google spreadsheets, for instance, Google docs for me, you know, Microsoft Word replacement. And, and Google also has kind of a PowerPoint thing called Google Sheets, I think it is, or slides, Google Slides that you can use in order to put the presentation together. And even to show a presentation. It's, it's really rather cool stuff all the way around. But this is an example of a third party vendor. We already know that Google is looking at all of those documents and trying to figure out what a can use from that and in order to sell us stuff, right or do seller information to third parties. And in that's obviously a bit of an issue. But when we're talking about these smaller businesses that might be selling to Another government contractor that might be selling to Raytheon who's selling to the Department of Defense, just as an example. They wonder, why does it matter? That I'm really secure, because I'm making something that's completely passive. It's not as though I'm making the software that controls a missile in flight. Right? It is not doing any of those sort of things. So why should it matter? And I think that it's a good question, but here's why it matters. There were some huge hacks of the Department of Defense last year, and those hacks a good 50% of them came from their vendors. We're talking about a third party risk. That third party that vendor you're using, whether it's Google Docs and Dr. Mike, you might be using a version of Dropbox as Just a regular end user version might be using an unsecured or improperly secured as your instance or Amazon Web Services instance. You could be using any of those types of things. And guess what's going to happen if you're using those. All of those people who have your data could be used as a way into your computer's think for a minute. We spoke earlier today about these 500 plus Google Chrome extensions that were leaking your data there, the data is actually being stolen by third parties because of those. If you have software installed that's being used to manage your supply chain, and that supply chain software is tied into this third party vendor. Your network is is is exposed Now you may have tried to tighten it down, I might be as tight as could possibly be. And there's no problem here. But if you're like an average business, none of that is true. None of that is true at all. All of your data is potentially accessible by the third party. So some interesting stats that came out. And I again, I have this up on my website. I will post let me post this right now here in the Facebook Live channel. Okay. It's in there now to you can see that right at the end of my comment. They're showing that there were about 43% of businesses this last year 44% were, in fact, attacked and hacked via third party breaches. So in other words, the bad guys did not come in directly This wasn't a phishing attack attack necessarily directly against them. This wasn't a ransomware attack directly against them. It was against a third party. So it was a vendor who might have had all of their customer information they might have had to how to manufacture certain things. It could be all kinds of different types of information. And that information was then used against them. That's a very big deal. Think about billing. Think about your, your employees and their paychecks, their w 210 99. Since you send out all of these things to target so we talked earlier about these VPN services that are right now huge, they're huge attack vector. Now this number is up by the way 35% over the last two years. The number of records exposed in the breaches skyrocketed. Almost 300% last year, the cost of the breaches have gone up substantially as well. And you're going to find all of this up on my website, Craig peterson.com. But that's huge. So 44% of all firms that were surveyed had experienced a significant data breach caused by third party vendor. And remember, these are firms that know that they were breached. So let's look at an IBM study. This IBM study says it takes an average of 197 days for a company to identify that they have had a data breach almost 200 days to even identify even know that they had a breach and another 69 days to contain it. Fat is inexcusable. In excuse inexcusable, it really is. You know, so many people have fallen through victim to vendors that say, hey, we've got the solution for you Don't worry about it. This is this is going to be so easy, not a big deal. We'll take care of it for you and they don't that's the only explanation I can come up with here. For what 265 ish days, from the time a breach occurs to the time that they've contained it. 265 days, that's two thirds of a year. Now I believe me I'm this is not I'm not trying to sell you our services here. Okay. If you want to buy him great. I just want to let you guys know 250 days on average to contain it with what we do on average. It is this from this. From the time it happens to the time is discovered to the time it's contain. So from the very beginning of a breach to the time it's contained. With us, it's typically six hours. That's why I say this is in excusable, if you're a company with 200 employees with 1000 employees, and you're not using the right stuff. Whose fault is it? And I gotta tell you another number that I've seen before when when I was one of the FBI infragard programs that I ran, I had an expert on, and he was talking about breaches, and you know how many months it takes to discover and then to try and close the hole. If you take less than 30 days to stop the breach, on average, you save $1 million, a million dollars. So think about that when you're thinking about the cost of security. If you are slightly bigger company, you have a few hundred employees up into thousands of employees. And you can shave that whole massive number of 250 days, down to 30 days or less, you've saved yourselves a million bucks. So the million dollars that you might spend on security and by the way, it takes you quite a bit to spend a million dollars to even to get the kind of security I was just talking about, with the six hour to recovery stuff. A million bucks goes a long way now and that's plus, by the way, you know, all of your other costs, the loss of reputation that you get, so you're going to lose clients, you're not going to pick them up, you're not gonna be able to charge as much as you could before. People aren't going to trust you. All this is happening because of these third party breaches. So keep that in mind next time. You are auditing your business, right? You've got auditors and think about all of the people downstream from you who maybe you should be paying some attention to, because they have data that you might find to be sensitive. They might be used as a conduit to break into your systems as well as have their systems breached. Okay. So I know many companies now that are, are auditing their providers, their upstream downstream partners, for very, very good reason. So if you want to find out more, let me know just email me at Craig peterson.com. Be glad to punch in the right direction. You can find this particular order article over and dark reading and it's written by Jay v. JOHN, and you can find it as well at Craig Peterson calm Of course I post all of that stuff online. And if you have my newsletter, you get that Every Saturday morning, links to it there too. So stick around. We'll be right back. We got a lot more to talk about here. In this last hour of the show. We're going to talk about a rental car risk you might not be aware of. So stick around. Hey, welcome back. Craig Peterson here WGAN and and elsewhere. We are live on Facebook Live as well. out on YouTube. You can find me and Craig Peterson calm. And of course, listen to my podcasts on pretty much any platform out there. podcast platforms from one platform. I just been doing this for too long. I guess this is the problem. They've all found me. Oh no. So this is a great little article from our friends over at Ars Technica. I don't know if you're familiar with it. It's one of those websites that I follow fairly closely because they have so many great things out there. But this one is talking about the rental cars and I want you to think about cars for a moment because well, I like cars. Hopefully you do too. But what are the problems that we're seeing today that are actually caused by this latest, newest, most wonderful technology? And there are a lot of them frankly. And some of them have to do shoes me with our phones, right? We plug our phones into the cars, the cars will automatically say, Okay, I want the contacts, people will just blindly say okay, go ahead and upload the contacts. And all of your contacts are uploaded, and now the car has them and the next driver comes in I love doing this comes into the car and scrolls through all of the phones and sees all of the contacts people have their home addresses in their status home. So you just look up home on the on the cars GPS and and just some poor fool who uploaded all of his contacts into the car, right use seen that before a music downloads, just all kinds of stuff. So I'm always careful, I never let the car upload my contacts you were probably kind of conscious about that as well. If you're not making sure that that doesn't happen right to the car doesn't have your contacts. You You might also do what I do, which is after I'm done with the car, I go into the Bluetooth settings and disconnect my phone or with Apple Car Play. I make sure my phone is disconnected. Excuse me. So those are all things I think that most people would know about and think about. Well, here's the problem that we're starting to see today. These cars are getting smarter and smarter and have more and more features on them, don't they? So there there's been some research here. Ars Technica did a little dive into it as well. And this Dan Goodin ended up writing an article about This where he found that the previous driver to his car could start and stop the engine lock and unlock the doors and track the location of the vehicle because you remember again these cars are designed by my guys right and gals obviously but by guys who are not thinking about all of the use cases for the car you know man I had such a fight of one of my my eldest sons who works with me he's he's one of the employees and works with a company that is fire jumpers certified for not fire jumper as in the fire department, although he does have a firefighting certificate including tight spaces on ships, but he's a fire jumper for security when something bad happens. Or please, please have us design the network before something bad happens. He gets some old us all of those. Well. We have all of Our clients emails run through a set of high end filters provided by Cisco. So all of the emails coming in our filters, look at it, and they are phenomenal. They have cut my email, I was 5000 emails a day. And now I'm down to about 100 hundred and 50 emails a day just by the Cisco filters. So and by the way, I have, I think, in the last year had maybe one false positive, maybe one it's just these things are so smart the way they work, right? They're not just looking for keywords or other things are really looking at behavior. Because Cisco sees so much of the internet, right? Cisco runs the internet backbone, but then they see so much of that traffic plus they see so much of the email traffic they can, they can just be phenomenal. So we have all of our customers emails running through our data center and it's properly secure. Of course, and running through these special Cisco email filters. And then we take those emails and we forward them on to our customers mail servers. Well, one of the services that is used by quite a few of our customers, because it's inexpensive, relatively speaking, is the Microsoft Office 365. Now, there's a lot of levels of old 3065. It's their cloud services, right? But that's cloud is in the cloud, right? And we're not going to get into that right now. But they have a whole bunch of services. And Microsoft had an internal grey list against our Cisco email host that was doing all of the filtering. And Microsoft, you know, they said, Well, you know, we can figure it out. It took us 24 hours to escalate it to people who knew what they were even talking about. We showed them their own tech article on this problem. them inside Microsoft with Office 365. And said, Here's your problem. You guys know about it, you have defined it, here it is. And yet, you know, they they start you with the people that say is a computer powered on type, right? Just so, so, so frustrating to me. Well, the problem here is that the Microsoft software did not consider all their software designers did not consider all of the uses usage cases. In this case, the Microsoft software people thought, Well, people using Office 365 they're just going to be real small businesses and they are going to have you know, dozen through 1000 email accounts maybe. And so the usage patterns are going to be consistent, etc, etc. That's not true in a case like us, where all of the emails coming in from all over the internet. To to us for all of our customers, including their deal D contractor customers, right? The people, the customers that have it are compliant, have PCI that have legal compliance issues, accounting compliance issues, right. So they all come to us where they are heavily heavily filtered. And then therefore it on to Microsoft. Well, that's not a usage case they thought of when they design the software. So we were fighting with them. We had thousands of messages queued up So the good news is, we didn't lose any of the email. We kept it our systems noticed right away that Microsoft was misbehaving, which they do frequently. And and then we got on the horn with Microsoft, we went the level two right away and then level three No, I'm air quoting levels two and three, because they're not real levels two and three, not by our standards. By the time you get to level three or somebody like me that or Steve, the fire jumper, somebody that really knows What's going on? Right? That's not the case of Microsoft. Anyhow, the problem in Ars Technica is found here is that these cars are designed with the idea that there is a single owner. Now there might be multiple drivers to the vehicle, but there's a single owner, right? She owns the Mustang. She drives it, but you know, the old man drives every once in a while the kids might drive it once in a while as well. Well, in this case, they looked at a Ford Explorer. And October last year, they put an article in about a guy that was able to remotely start, stop, lock, unlock and track a Ford Explorer that he had rented and returned five months earlier. And they're saying now something almost identical has happened again to the same enterprise rental car customers. customer. Four days after returning a Ford Mustang, the Ford pass app installed on the phone continues to give them control of the car. So here we have a usage case where the car is being rented, it was not part of the original design considerations. And the rental car company, in this case enterprise, and maybe it's just one unit of enterprise, I don't know. But enterprise is not properly clearing or resetting, whatever they have to do to that car after somebody has rented it. So it's a real problem. And it's something we need to be cautious of. Because it's, it's not even something we can necessarily do anything about. But personally, I would go into the menu on the console on the control system, you know, the entertainment system, and I wipe out every phone that's in there, just so that something like this can happen to me, right? But that's what I would do and that's what I advise you to do as well. Okay, stick around. When we get back. We're going to talk about a new FBI report that's talking about what happened to this $1.7 billion right here. Stick around. Craig Peterson and WGAN and live on Facebook. Hey, welcome back everybody, Craig Peterson here WGAN and and elsewhere. Hopefully you're able to join me on facebook live this week and we spend some time talking about the articles and answering questions for everybody. And of course you'll find that online right now kind of all over the place, make sure you get my weekly newsletter. It'll keep you up to date on all the latest security topics and some of the cooler new technology out there that I think is or maybe isn't ready for prime time. Going to have a cool guests next week too. I I used to do a lot of guests. I had like a dozen a show back when I had a three hour show. But next week we're gonna talk with a buddy of mine Mine, who is actually fairly well known, he's written a book about sugar. And you probably know if you've been listening to me for a while, not all that long. But a while you know that I have been very conscious about my health and doing the intermittent fasting thing and stuff. And so we'll talk to him about what he has found. You might remember I did the Atkins thing some years ago, but we'll be talking with him a little bit about that, too. I'm sure next week, so Barry Friedman will be my guest. And I will probably be next week. We've got to figure out the calendars first. No, I hate it when that happens. Sorry about that little bit of a coughing fit. Okay, so let's get into the article right now. And this has to do with email compromise. Now we all have email accounts, right? You got them. I got them, whether they're on Google Shame on you, or if they are Microsoft Office 365. Okay, depends on which level you have. Or if you host them yourself, which is what we've been doing for decades now for ourselves and our clients. I like that because they have more control. I don't have the problems like we had with Microsoft this week with Office 365 for some of our clients. But when you have email, there's a certain type of exposure that you have. We talked earlier about this whole problem with the coven 19 with the corona virus, and how they're using it right now to get you to click on links and phishing attacks. click on links in SMS. Those are called smishing. To get you to do something that ultimately you shouldn't do because they're using it to download nastiness. And it can be nastiness in the form of ransomware he'd be nastiness in the form of software that being installed on your computer to use your computer's resources, maybe as part of a denial of service attack, maybe to attack other people and other computers that are out there, right? It's all pretty darn evil. Well, the FBI put together some numbers because there's this thing called a business email compromise. That's only part of the problem. Because it isn't just business email, that can be a problem here. It's also our personal emails. So we're finding on the personal side that people are getting emails that are again from bad guys, but what they're trying to do is get you to go a little bit further. So a lot of them for instance, are based around dating sites. So people looking for companionship, they might be out on one of these websites and and they meet somebody.g more coughing meet somebody and as they've met that person, they kind of go back and forth and how are you? Oh my we have so much in common and they're trying to scam you. That is a very, very big and prevalent thing right now. Because so many people are just trying to find somebody that they can love someone they can spend some time with. And enjoy company and you know how I get that pardon my French but this is a real tough time in the world. There's so many people that are so ostracize that are blocked off from other people that are just looking for something anything right? Doesn't have to be love. As I said it can just be companionship. So the FBI has been warning about that. And then we've got these business email attacks, that what's happening here is oftentimes it's spearfishing. They're going After the owner of a company, and and frankly some of these dating things are spearfishing, too, because they know that somebody who's a little bit older might have some money that they can get out. Yeah. And they'll ask you Hey listen, I my uncle cousin has this medical bill and and we really need the money can I get $10,000 from you and people, people are sending it in the business email account account. It's a little bit different. So here's another article from our friends over dark reading this up on my website as well. But it's same back in 2013 scams often started with the spoofing of a CEO or CFO his email account, fraudsters send emails appearing to come from these execs to convince employees to send wire transfers to fake accounts. Now we know that within the last six months, this has gone to the next level. We're there we are using computers to imitate the bosses voice and they've been able to take millions anyhow the article goes on. Since then business email compromise has evolved to include the compromise a personal and vendor emails, spoofed lawyer email account and request for W two data. Of course, taxis and everybody. This is a big one w two right now the IRS is warning about that. Attackers often target the real estate sector and or make requests for expensive gift cards. In 2019. The Internet crime center saw an increase in business email compromised complaints related to the diversion of payroll money. So the attackers send a fake email to human resources or payroll department requesting an update to a specific employees direct deposit information. This is really really big and you look at these numbers. We're talking about 1.7 billion in losses. That's absolutely huge amounts of money. The in 2019, they had a half a million complaints come in costing organizations three and a half billion dollars overall. That's up almost $3 billion from 2018. absolutely huge. So we have to be very, very careful. There are some reports out there email fraud and entity deception trends that are out there about the attackers what they're doing rise in hybrid attacks, which a victim receives an email making a request, and simultaneously receives a text message from a spoof number designed to seem to seem like the same person saying they just sent an email. It is highly targeted and also highly effective. So you got to be careful of all of this. We have to be careful of all of this and for business people, we have to be particularly careful about all of this government, government agencies. Did you see what happened with in Atlanta in the last year, how they got nailed multiple times. And it was ransomware. Getting in some of it was some business email compromises. We've had cities all over the country who have fallen victim to the business email compromise, and they have wire money to vendors that just don't exist, etc, etc. We have to be very careful. So how do you avoid this? First of all, don't send money to people that you really don't know. You know, you I'm thinking about those of us that are looking for companionship, friendship, maybe for a new lover, somebody that we can spend the rest of our lives with. Don't send them money really don't no matter how bad that sob story is. And then if we're business people be doubly careful. Verify everything via the phone. So the boss tells you that they need to move some money into another account. Call the boss you have their number, don't call the number in the email. If you are getting contact in HR from an employee's saying, hey, I want you to start direct deposited into my new account, here's the account number. Call back and verify it. Right That's always the case. You know, a police officer pulls you over the side of the road. You have a good chance that it's really police officer because they're an unmarked car. They have the blue lights going. They have a police officers uniform on. You just don't know even in that case. So be extra-extra cautious out there. Man. When we come back, we've got one more article for the day again, believe that it's gone so fast. We're going to talk about the most secure messaging app out there. Hi You can get it how you can use it. So stick around. You're listening to Craig Peterson and wg AN. And of course, Facebook Live in YouTube Live. Man, we're going overboard this week. Stick around because we'll be right back. Hey, welcome back, Craig Peters, Melanie or w g. N. and online Of course, we're doing a Facebook Live even as we speak, having a little fun there as the chuckles we're all about. Hey, I appreciate you guys joining me and I know that your time is valuable, and I don't want to waste one minute of it. So I'd love to get your feedback. What do you think of this show? What are the good parts, the bad parts? What do you want to see more of? What do you want to see less of let me know just email me and eat at Craig Peters. on.com. I'd really appreciate it and make sure that you are on my email list so that you get every week the latest in technology news. With a course in emphasis, as always from me on security, and what you can and should be doing for security in your home, and in your business, you know, I really focusing on business, because that's what I've been doing for so many years. You know, most businesses aren't in the cyber security business. And so they're trying to make their widgets provide their service, etc. And they're just left hanging when it comes to the security side cyber security. And I know that's true of you guys, too, who are in smaller businesses, even larger businesses and home users. But the answers the solutions are always the same, although you don't have as much money to spend so you're not going to be as well protected. Right? Do you also, hopefully don't have as many assets at risk. I know a lot of people who are high net worth individuals who come to me in order to get things secured, but as as a whole Most of the time is business Zilla. So I kind of aim at that. And then every month is well, we have a list of the top security vulnerabilities that there are patches out for telling you, hey, you need to update this software or that software. There's various vulnerabilities that you have to take care of immediately. Another coughing fit, man, hope this isn't assigned to something coming down with something. Here's the vulnerabilities you have to t

Catharine Arnston is the founder and CEO of a company called Energybits which produces some of the world's best Spirulina and Chlorella products.   Catharine has a 30-year career as an international Attache for the Canadian and British Governments, publisher of an international magazine and founder of three startups. But in 2009 when her younger sister was diagnosed with breast cancer and advised by her oncologist to change her diet to an alkaline one because it would help her heal, Catharine put her career on hold to help her sister. In the process, she discovered algae, the most alkaline, nutrient-dense plant in the world that no one seemed to know about. Catharine knew algage would be a game-changer for the world if she could just help people understand it and so she founded her company Energybits.   Algae s a multi-billion dollar crop in Asia where it has been used for decades. Algae is endorsed by NASA and the UN as the most nutritionally dense food in the world. There are over 100,000 studies documenting its benefits, some of which include increased energy, improved focus, strengthened immune system, reduced inflammation, removal of toxins, enhanced longevity, improved sports performance, removal of hunger and revitalized skin and hair health. All this from a 4 billion-year-old, single-cell organism that has forty vitamins and minerals, the highest concentration f prten n the world, ne calres and one ingredient. The only thing wrong with algae is that it is virtually unknown outside of Asia.    This podcast interview is set to help change that in our corner of the world By the end of this interview you will be rushing out to get yours.   Workout Fuel Give your body the protein and micro-nutrients it needs to perform without sugar or artificial sweeteners. The Perfect Travel Food Bits are easy to pack and eat on the run. Whether you travel by plane, train or automotive, Bits have your back. Daily Greens in One Minute Making sure your family eats veggies doesn't need to be a struggle. Think of Bits as your daily greens insurance! plate No More Hangry Spirulina is a cultivated algae that has been consumed for thousands of years by the indigenous peoples in Mexico and Africa. It has the highest concentration of protein on earth - triple that of steak - as well as the second-highest concentration of an Essential Fatty Acid called GLA (second only to mother's milk). Spirulina is loaded with antioxidants and unique phytonutrients like phycocyanin and SOD. Chlorella algae are harvested in freshwater tanks and have been used for over fifty years in Asia. It has a remarkable ability to help remove toxins and help build the immune system. All naturally. Chlorella contains over 40 nutrients, including all the B vitamins, iron, zinc, and many minerals. It offers so many benefits we would never have enough room here to list them all. "When it comes to nutrient density for omnivores, vegans, vegetarians and anyone looking to optimize their diet with dense quantities of protein, amino acids, fatty acids, DHA, antioxidants and more, you simply cannot beat chlorella and spirulina. But not all algae is created equal, which is why I swear by ENERGYbits® as my go-to algae source, bar none." LAND Algae produces 100x more protein than cattle and creates zero waste. This efficient nutrition protects our land. AIR Algae provides over 80% of earth's oxygen and even removes CO2. Thanks to algae, we breath deeper and better. Ohmmm. WATER Water is a precious resource. Algae farming uses 20% less fresh water than  WORRY-FREE SOURCING SAFE. Energy bits grow their algae outdoors in carefully monitored fresh water tanks fed by triple-filtered spring mountain water. You can't find a water source or algae that is purer or cleaner. PURE. Energy bits use sound vibrations to crack our chlorella, passing the chlorella through a sound chamber. Most chlorella companies use an older technique to crack the chlorella. They tumble it with glass beads that leak lead into the chlorella.   If you live in the USA or Canada use the code Lisa at checkout for a 20% discount at www.energybits.com. If you are in Australia you can order from www.eatcleanlivedirty.com.au  but the discount code won't apply.   We are hoping in future to bring this product to our NZ customers so stay tuned.      We would like to thank our sponsors for this show:   www.vielight.com   Makers of Photobiomodulation devices that stimulate the brains mitocondria, the power houses of your brains energy, through infrared light to optimise your brain function.  To get 10% off your order use the code: TAMATI at www.vielight.com     For more information on Lisa Tamati's programs, books and documentaries please visit www.lisatamati.com    For Lisa's online run training coaching go to https://www.lisatamati.com/page/runningpage/ Join hundreds of athletes from all over the world and all levels smashing their running goals while staying healthy in mind and body.   Lisa's Epigenetics Testing Program https://www.lisatamati.com/page/epigenetics/ Get The User Manual For Your Specific Genes Which foods should you eat, and which ones should you avoid? When, and how often should you be eating? What type of exercise does your body respond best to, and when is it best to exercise? Discover the social interactions that will energize you and uncover your natural gifts and talents. These are just some of the questions you'll uncover the answers to in the Lisa Tamati Epigenetics Testing Program along with many others. There's a good reason why epigenetics is being hailed as the "future of personalized health", as it unlocks the user manual you'll wish you'd been born with!  No more guesswork. The program, developed by an international team of independent doctors, researchers, and technology programmers for over 15 years, uses a powerful epigenetics analysis platform informed by 100% evidenced-based medical research. The platform uses over 500 algorithms and 10,000 data points per user, to analyze body measurement and lifestyle stress data, that can all be captured from the comfort of your own home   For Lisa's Mental Toughness online course visit:  https://www.lisatamati.com/page/mindsetuniversity/ Develop mental strength, emotional resilience, leadership skills and a never quit mentality - Helping you to reach your full potential and break free of those limiting beliefs.    For Lisa's free weekly Podcast "Pushing the Limits" subscribe on iTunes or your favorite podcast app or visit the website  https://www.lisatamati.com/page/podcast/     Transcript of The Podcast     Speaker 1: (00:01) Welcome to pushing the limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential with your host, Lisa Tamati, brought to you by www.LisaTamati.com. Speaker 2: (00:13) If your brain is not functioning at its best, and check out what the team at www.veilight.com do now, be like producers, photo biomodulation devices. Your brain function depends largely on the health of the energy sources of the brain cells. In other words, the mitochondria and research has shown that stimulating your brain with near infrared light revitalizes mitochondria. I use these devices daily for both my own optimal brain function and also for other age related decline issues and also for my mum's brain rehabilitation after her aneurism and stroke. So check out what the team do at www.veilight.com. That's V I E L I G H T .com and use the code Tamati at checkout to get 10% off any of their devices. Pushing The limits this week. I have a wonderful guest, uh, who you're about to hear from Catherine Ernston of www.Energybits.com. Now, Catherine is the CEO and founder of a company that deals with spirulina and chlorella. Speaker 2: (01:18) Doesn't sound very interesting, but I can assure you this interview will have your mind blown as to how beneficial spirulina and chlorella are for your health. Um, and we will do a really deep dive. There's um, did you know that spirulina has 64% protein, that it has over 40 vitamins and minerals, that it is backed by the United Nations and by NASA they use it for astronauts in outer space. It is an eco-friendly crop. It's got over 100,000 studies done on it, showing the different benefits of these, uh, blue green algae. Um, and the founder, Katherine Amston, got into this through her sister having breast cancer. And through that she decided she wanted to help her sister and started to look at the plant based diet. She started to look at what alkalizing diets were all about and she stumbled across Algie and found out just how powerful it is. Speaker 2: (02:21) And so for the past decade, Katherine has been on a mission to let them world know just how important the nutrients I'm involved with a spirulina and chlorella. So it's a really, really interesting conversation. Make sure you stay to the end. Right. I just want to remind you too, I have my book, we'll link this coming out and just a couple of weeks time from the time of this podcast. It's the story of bringing my mum back after a major aneurism and left her with massive brain damage and hardly any higher function left. And we were told that she would never do anything again and that she wouldn't be with us long at stage. My mum had no ability to speak to communicate. She had no memory. She had no ability to control any bodily function, so the lights were on and no one was home. And this is a book about the desperate search for answers and looking outside the box and everything, the protocols, the therapies, the doctors, the research that I did, uh, and the work that I've done with her over the past four years to now have it back to full health again. Speaker 2: (03:25) So it's really heartwarming and amazing book. I've spent two years in writing this book and I really hope it's going to help thousands and thousands, if not millions of people. If I had my way, there's so many people suffering out there from brain injuries who need to know. Um, and this is not just for strokes or aneurysms, but across the board, all different types of brain dysfunction, whether it be Alzheimer's, dementia, strokes, uh, concussions, uh, aneurisms, all of these things. Um, this is a real good book if you facing any of those things, but also for anyone who wants to know about mindset and mental toughness and overcoming massive challenges when the odds are stacked against you, um, and who hasn't faced situations like that. If you're a human, you sort of get check these things at life. So I'd really love you to go over and check that book out. Speaker 2: (04:15) It's on my website now available for preorder at www.lisatamati.com hit the shop button and that will take you through to my shop with my books and my jewelry collection. So make sure you check that out. If you do that now you would also get access to mindset you, which is my online mental toughness and emotional resilience course, uh, that's valued at $275. You'll get that for free if you order the book before it launches on the 11th of March, but only up until then. Okay. So make sure you go and do that now. Um, and I really appreciate that right guys over to Catherine Amston Speaker 3: (04:53) well, hi everybody. Welcome to the show. Once again, it's wonderful to have your loyalty back with us for another exciting episode of pushing the limits. Today, I have the amazing Kathryn Anson with me. How are you doing Catherine? I am a well and wildly excited for being here. Now, Katherine has been traveling for the last couple of weeks, then conferences, so and so have I. So we're both sitting here very tired but very passionate about what we do. So Catherine is in Canada, sorry. She is a Canadian but she's living in Boston. Um, and she is the founder and CEO of a company called ENERGYbits, uh, which, uh, is a company that deals with spirulina and chlorella. So we'll start there. Katherine, can you tell us a little bit of your background and why you ended up down the spirulina and chlorella? I know algae who knew algae could become the love of my life? Speaker 3: (05:51) Uh, well I, you know, I started with a traditional career. I have an MBA, was doing international business, blah, blah, blah. And then my younger sister in Canada in Toronto, uh, developed breast cancer. And fortunately her oncologist advised her to change her diet to an alkaline one because they said it would help her with her healing process. She was going to do the chemo, but they didn't tell her what it was or why it worked. So she called me. Cause of course I love my sister, but also I'm just a really good researcher. I probably should have been a scientist. I said I have no idea what I'll go on a diet is, but you know, I know how to get on the internet and we'll figure this out. And it turned out to be mostly a plant based diet because of the phytonutrients and mostly the chlorophyll that helped build your immune system. Speaker 3: (06:34) And so when you're doing chemo, having a strong immune system is critical. I mean it's important at anytime, but certainly when you're doing chemo. So she did change her diet. She did heal from her, uh, breast cancer and 10 years later she's still cancer-free. And in the process of helping her with her research, I read about 10 books on plant based nutrition. Now this is 10 years ago, nobody was talking about plant based nutrition then as they are now, it's mainstream now. And I was like this outlier and I said, I was crazy, blah blah blah. But I just saw the science. I said, no, this is, this is important stuff. Somebody should tell the rest of the world that, well I have no nutrition background, but I saw what it did for my sister. I know I can help other people. I'm going to give it a shot. Speaker 3: (07:16) I have no idea how I'm going to do it, what kind of education I'm going to get. But I gave up my 25 year corporate career for a year for a health coaching certificate. But you know, gave me a little bit of science. Um, after I graduated, I taught nutrition for a year at corporations and hospitals anywhere who would let me in, cause I put a curriculum together and to try to teach people how to, you know, to incorporate more greens into their diet. And I learned two important lessons from that. One is that everybody knows they do need to eat more greens and to most people either don't like them or it's too much work or their kids or their husbands won't eat them. So they're, they're stuck. So I thought, okay, if I'm going to help people get healthier, prevent all these chronic illnesses or recover from them, I've got to find something that's green, fast, easy, doesn't require any work. Speaker 3: (08:11) And back to the internet. I went and I started digging around trying different things and I found the algae. Now I found it for my sister originally but hadn't really dug deep into it. So I dug deep and I was like, Alison wanted landfall in the rabbit hole because I found out that algae is the most nutrient dense fit in the world. It's the most alkaline fluid in the world. It's the most studied food in the world. There are 100,000 studies documenting the various athletics, um, physical, mental, any aspect of algae. It pulls out toxins, you name it, but there's 100,000 studies. And the problem is this knowledge hasn't gotten out of the scientific community and into the consumer world, but it has an Asia where it's a multibillion dollar industry and they've been using it for 50 years. And you know, in Japan, they don't take supplements. Speaker 3: (09:03) They just take chlorella, algae every day. And I point out to people that in Japan they have some of the best longevity, the lowest cancer rates, the best skin and hair. And I think a lot, you know, some of it is I attribute to the algae. So when I started seeing how powerful algae was and how easy it was to take, cause you could just swallow it and you're done. Um, and you know, it's endorsed by the United nations as the answer to world hunger is adores by nationals, the most nutrient dense food in the world. And they feed as the astronauts. I thought, okay, that's it. I'm spending the rest of my life to help people understand algae because I think it's the last chance we have to get nutrients into our bodies at the same time. By the way, we're also helping the environment because it's ecofriendly sustainable and we can talk about all that as well. So it's been a very exciting, challenging ride because everyone in my family and my friends thought I was off my rocker, but, um, but I, and I was on a show called shark tank. I don't know if you're familiar. Yeah. And, um, they made fun of me of course. And they said, we don't think you're in love with being an entrepreneur. You're just in love with algae. And I said, well, you're right. I am in love with algae and if you knew as much as I did about algae, you wouldn't love it. Speaker 3: (10:15) Oh man. There I am. 10 years later, uh, I feel algae is my, my, uh, super child that I'm, I'm helping to coax into the world. Uh, and it's about to be discovered in a big way. In fact, um, here in America there's a, um, uh, fast, uh, food. It's healthy food. It's called sweet greens, very, very healthy chain. They've got a hundred, a hundred and some stores. And just today they announced that their, um, their, their biggest effort this year is they're going to create a kelp salad bowl. Kelp is, they said, wow. You know, 2020 is the year of Kelp. And of course, kelp is part of the algae story. It's all part of the same family. So it's like, okay, we're getting closer. I have to stop you there because you need five minutes. You've just given us a condensed version of 10 years and there's a number of areas we can go down the list. Speaker 3: (11:09) So, uh, we talking, so algae, so the blue green algae, we're talking spirulina in chlorella and in particular, right? We talking spirulina being one of the most perfect foods on the planet, the most nutrient dense. Is that correct? Yes. So, um, I'll step back a little bit cause it really helps me, it took me a while to figure this out. So I'm eager to share the simplicity of it. It's like anything, once you know how to do something, it's easy. But until then it's a big mystery, right? So algae is just another food group. You know, we have fruits and we have vegetables. algae is a its own food group and it subdivides into two subgroups. So let's take fruits for example. Um, you might have bananas and apples as two subgroups. Well, within algae you have, um, seaweed or kelp and micro algae. Speaker 3: (12:02) And then taking the analogy of the fruits with apples, there's different types of apples. There's granny Smith apples, there's delicious apples. Well within the micro algae category, there are two main types. There's blue green and green, and one blue green algae is spirulina and one green algae is chlorella. Now these two are really the only two that are harvested as a crop. So it's number one to point out that algae, spirulina and chlorella are not a supplement. They are a food crop. And also equally important is they are not grown in the ocean. They are grown and cultivated in fresh water. It's called a hydroponic. A lot of lot of farmers grow hydroponic salad and tomatoes. algae is the same way. It's just grown in fresh water. Now I mentioned this because there are thousands and thousands and thousands of other strains of blue, green and green algae all growing in oceans, lakes, swamps, warming pools, your aquarium. Speaker 3: (13:08) And those are all poisonous and toxic. So if anyone is listening to this and they, and they go online and they read about toxic blue green algae, yes. That if it came from the ocean, not spirulina or chlorella, they are not toxic. And the reason why is cause algae will absorb whatever's in the water. So if it's in a contaminated water supply, of course it's going to be toxic. And I spent, I've spent a lot of years making sure that because we sell our products from doctors and functional medicine and wellness clinics, so they needed to be sure ours was pure and clean. So we do third-party lab tests here in the United States by an FDA approved lab. We even test for neurotoxins. Well, I think I'm the only company, algae company in the world that proves that there are no neurotoxins that are algae. Speaker 3: (13:58) So I just mentioned this because people will go to the internet and they'll start Googling algae and they'll find some information about toxins and then there'll be panicked. And I want to assure you there is no, there are no toxins. Certainly not an R spirulina or chlorella because we grow them very carefully and monitor them and test them, but they're grown in fresh water. It's a crop, not a supplement. Gotcha. And now if we go into the breakdown of, of the spirulina in the, um, chlorella or as far as the, the, it's, it's packed with protein. It's packed with um, pretty much everything to sustain. When I, when I started looking into it, I'm going, well we actually, we don't need to eat anymore. We can just say spirulina. That's true. She didn't live forever on spirit and although the only nutrient it does not have is vitamin C, which is really interesting. Speaker 3: (14:55) But other than that, or not much vitamin D, but other than that, in fact I'm the one and I should put a press release about it. I would about this. I know, I noticed, I saw it years ago, I saw a chart that identified all the nutrients in mother's breast milk, especially all the amino acids. Yes. Gosh, that looks awfully familiar. And sure enough, I checked our amino acid profile in spirulina. Exactly the same aminos. Exactly the same portions. So, and that helped explain to me why in Japan if babies are born and they cannot digest mother's breast milk, the only thing that keeps them alive is spirulina and water in it. Now I understand it's because the nutrient profile is very similar to two mother's breast milk. But of course, everyone knows mother's breast milk is the perfect food after the age of two, it's a little tough to get right. Speaker 3: (15:44) And actually I was just, I've just been reading a study on um, uh, brace, smoke and its anticancer properties with the, uh, what is it? The LBM and the, the, Oh, there's the name of it. One of the, and I wonder if part of it is cause it say well, you know. Yeah. Um, so, uh, and we can talk to, I would like to explain to your listeners the difference between the two allergies because they, they do completely different things in your body. But just while you're talking about the cancer thing, um, as I mentioned, spirulina is a blue green algae and chlorella is a green algae. And the rate, the reason why they're called that is because spirulina has two pigments in it. The one that everybody knows is chlorophyll, which is a green pigment and that, and chlorella only has the green, but spirulina has another pigment in it that's blue and it's called phycocyanin. Speaker 3: (16:34) Now, the interesting, and we won't dwell too much on this, but the interesting thing about phycocyanin as it relates to cancer, is that it has what's called anti-angiogenesis properties. I know that's a mouthful, but basically what it means is that when there are cancers or tumors, they find a way to literally hijack the blood vessels to reroute them to feed the cancer or the tumor. And there are different nutrients that will stop that process. Cause that process where they hijack the blood vessels is called angiogenesis. And so something that's anti angiogenesis stops that process. And this pigment called phycocyanin has been proven to be able to do that. Well, if you have a blood cancer, obviously it's not going to help because there's no cancer or tumor. Everything else, it's, it's very powerful. So, um, but aside from that, spirulina is generally known as an energizing algae, um, and it has the highest concentration of protein as you mentioned in the world. Speaker 3: (17:39) Now, this is why in 1974 the United nations had a global conference on spirulina and, and endorsed it and it, and still does as the answer to world hunger because it has three times the amount of protein in it that animal protein. And of course it's a crop that you can grow. So it still is the answer to world hunger. And if I can get my company growing and we get to be as big as I want it to be like, believe me, that will be one of the things that I try to help accomplish in my lifetime is to teach other people in other lands to grow this, to feed their, you know, their countries and yeah, people. But so, so the reason why spirulina is so energizing, number one is it has all this protein and the proteins already in amino acid form, which means your body as an athlete, you know this, you have your, you already doesn't have to break down the protein to get access to it. Speaker 3: (18:34) And what's even cooler is that, and most people don't know this, but spirulina is technically a bacteria. It does not have a cellulous wall. So the reason why this is important, particularly for athletes is because again, there's nothing for your body to break down to get access to the protein and the other Koreans. So it's absorbed virtually instantly. And uh, so normally do you get all the aminos? It's loaded with B vitamins, which convert the glucose into energy. And it also has the highest concentration of iron in the world. Iron carries oxygen in your blood. It helps my body. I know. It helps your body. Yeah. Oh yeah. It's pretty cool. I can, I can go even geekier on the oxygen today cause I've got, you know, like a lot of athletes have anemia, like problems since runners, amino acids are a part of, you know, the, the things that I get my all my athletes on so that they can get access to it. Speaker 3: (19:32) So anything that, um, and, and since listening to you on, um, our mutual friend boomer, uh, Edison's podcasts, I've had my husband now who's training for an ultra marathon in four weeks time. I'm tasting this Berliner and his regime as it was for us, for his training, um, and finding fantastic results. And I've never, I never made the connection before between, okay. You know, I knew about spirulina, I knew the basics, but I didn't understand it could actually be the perfect food for endurance athletes. It is the perfect, we in fact field, so many Olympic athletes during the associate winter Olympics that I sent two of my team over to Sochi and because I'm Canadian and we were getting known by the Canadian Olympic teams, we had full access to the Canadian Olympic village and I had a previous Olympic athlete on my U S team here. And so we got complete access to the us Olympic village as well. So it was pretty, it was pretty cool. Speaker 3: (20:32) Uh, athletes who competed in that winter Olympics were metaled and they publicly, uh, I have declared, you know, the, you know, congratulate us for helping them get there. So it was, it was a pretty low, yeah, we interested to tastes of it more, uh, with your products and the, um, in the, in the super long distance. And endurance's which is my background and we train a lot of experts in that area. So how would, what sort of results you could get if you were doing like mega long distances? Cause uh, digestive issues are a major problem for ultra endurance athletes like GI pain. Um, jeez, because all your bloods in your muscles of course, when that's right in your yeah, it's not doing well as far as, so the big problem comes in, how do you get enough energy in while you're running for two days, three days, whatever the rice is. Speaker 3: (21:24) Um, and this could be a perfect solution for a whole, well, April, it is the perfect solution. And in fact, I used to speak at triathlon clubs about this and they used to at first nail me because they said, well, I don't believe how anything with one calorie per tablet can give me energy. So I had to do the deep dive in the science and I have all the answers. Why not only that, I have anecdotal evidence because I can give you a list of, you know, 20 ultra runners who were run a hundred miles only on our algae and water. That's it. Nothing else. Wow. And to your point about the, um, anemia, um, I've learned for a long time, there's something called the foot strike. There's something about when the athlete's foot hits of Ash halt, it causes the iron to dissipate. And it's a real problem for, for Addie. Speaker 3: (22:18) Yeah. Yeah. That's Brenner's, Vimeo, yadda. Well, this is my answer. I'm really excited because I have to have constant, um, like iron infusions. Um, Oh, Oh, Oh. And my, my, and I'm not alone in this problem. There are a lot of female athletes especially, um, who are always at the bottom means, and of course their performances in and P because you can't carry enough blood and enough oxygen and, okay. Well we'll, we'll get you hooked up with some our cause. So, so the, uh, so the spirulina, you also have to be sure you take enough of it. We'd say we recommend 30 tablets for someone who's going on a run. Oh wow. Okay. So you know, if you only take three or four or you can, if you're just a mild runner, you know, he can take three, four. But if you're going to do a, you know, more than three or four miles, we suggest the full 30 tablets and there is never, this is why the athletes love it. Speaker 3: (23:11) Not only do they get the energy, it's steady energy. It's not a rush. It's not a crash. It's just steady. It's not just physical, it's mental. Because you also know as you fatigue, the first thing that goes is your focus, but you never get stomach distress because it literally gets absorbed into your bloodstream before it hits your, your GI track. It's that because there's no, you know, selling as well. Yeah. Yeah. The protein is already in aminos and all the other, um, the iron and the B vitamins and they make it three. Everything is attached to the amino. Everything just gets absorbed so quickly. It's, it's, um, it's amazing. So it's also got a mega three. So does it have B12 or is the B12 missing? Yes, it does have. B12. Um, and I'm, I have to admit, I'm on the fence. I don't promote the B12 because I honestly don't know whether it's functioning as a B12, but it's there. Speaker 3: (24:07) Cause we do the, you know, the lab test and it does have a mega three, so it's a sustainable source of, of Omega three. And it's also vegan of course. excuse me. So, uh, it's, uh, it has things like boron, which helped with your, your, uh, mental focus in the telomeres, um, and helps with coordination. So there's, I have a document I'll send you that itemizes about 20 different reasons why spirulina is the perfect fuel in every single possible way. Um, so it's, yeah, it's, it's, it's super excited to try have half of our athletes and I've always seen what being like my husband obviously not dosing him up enough. I think I need to get more. Yeah. Well and, and you just, um, and so when you go on the long runs and then every, you know, hour, a couple hours, when you're starting to feel a little fatigued, take another 10 or 15 you'll, it's like anything, you kind of have to play around with it and see what works for your body. Speaker 3: (25:05) But in general, spirulina is that energizing algae helps with your physical energy, your mental focus. It satisfies hunger. So we have a lot of people who are biohackers keto, paleo who use it for intermittent fasting because it is ketogenic. It does not decrease your ketones or both. We've had a test that I was just at a Quito conference where I, I saw boomer, uh, and, and so it's very in embrace it also a lot of people when they're on the keto diet or they're not eating many greens cause they don't want the carbs. Uh, so this answers your solution cause there's zero carbs but it has the highest concentration of chlorophyll in the world, but you need to maintain your health. So it's truly the perfect food. And, um, as I say, spirulina, I will say it doesn't taste very good. So people either swallow it or put it into a smoothie. So that's your best way to, it's totally chewable. I, I do eat mine, but you know, it's my company and it's sort of like my dropped, so to sneak. So don't feel we, in fact, we have these sassy stickers that we send, we give out at particular, you know, some only select events, but then the sticker says it's okay to swallow. Speaker 3: (26:25) We have a sense of humor, right. Probably not as bad as much nutrients as both of those things. Well, you know, there is so much nutrition that um, even if you take five a day, it's probably more nutrition than your body is getting an entire week. It's that crazy. Yeah. So between protein and the 40 vitamins and minerals and all the B vitamins and the Omega threes, it's off the charts, the antioxidants and we, it really, it's off. The antioxidants was an interesting one. So it helps. So it can help your LDL your cholesterol, LDL and your triglyceride profile too, can't it? Yes. Yes. oxidation. I understand. So it can help reduce the oxidation effect that, yeah. Yep. Absolutely. And while we've had people who, who have the first normal blood pressure reading after even two days of taking the spirulina, it's that fast. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty, Oh, all drug free. Speaker 3: (27:23) Noninvasive, just nutrient dense mother nature at her best. It's, it's pretty cool. Ready, simple answer. Like, so some of them were like a brain injury, like my mother. Um, what sort of like dosages would you say for here? Like if I had not been giving her enough? Probably. Um, and is it safe to go to a higher amount because it is only a food, isn't it? Yes, it, I tell people, well, you can't, you can't overdose on salad. Um, so we sell single servings of her of 30 tablets. And originally we were telling everybody to take 30 tablets a day or 30 tablets before a workout. Um, that's because we were working initially with elite athletes and that's how many it took for them to feel the improvements. But now we're really working with a lot of consumers who are very nutrient deprived. So any small amount will will make a difference. So we're suggesting three or four or five a day, but you know, feel free to take 30. And I personally have about a hundred a day and half for the last eight years. So, so there's no bloody good. Speaker 3: (28:28) You would be surprised how old I am. Um, so for my age, I do look very young. I was in LA recently and I took a sub, a train, a rapid train. I was in a suburb and taking the train to, into LA and um, seniors could ride for 35 cents and I qualified as a senior. I'm a senior now. Why? To go just and, and I'm very much like into the, like I'm, I'm, I'm getting old too. I'm 51 at the moment and I'm like, I want to age like a superstar. I don't want to give the normal aging things. I'm like, Oh no, it's not. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not aging gracefully and nor should you and I'm way over, I'm way over that. So, uh, so obviously you're doing something right. So blue, green algae. Speaker 3: (29:28) So chlorella. So, and also by the way, fear Lena was the first life on earth almost 4 billion years ago. Chlorella developed about a billion years afterwards. And it does belong to the plant kingdom, although technically it is not a plant. It's a sea vegetable because it doesn't have any phytates or um, any of the anti-nutrients that you know, that, um, can cause some problems with people. So it's, it's its own little category. So chlorella, unlike spirulina, does not give you energy, but what it does is it build your immune system and pulls out toxins. So it helps you cover from anything. It helps you recover from any kind of illness. In fact, it prevents them. Uh, and it does this in a number of ways. First of all, it has the highest concentration of chlorophyll in the world. Remember, that's what got my sister her. The oncologist advised her to change her diet to an alkaline one because of the chlorophyll which builds your immune system. Speaker 3: (30:27) Chlorophyll is a fat-based pigment. And why that's important is because your health starts at the cellular level. So it's the cell walls and the mitochondria. Now if the cell walls are not healthy and they need healthy fats to be healthy, um, that causes, um, disruption in your homeostasis and nutrients can't get in and toxins can't get out. So chlorophyll, you know that people always say how greens are cleansing. Well, this is what's cleansing about it. It's the chlorophyll that heals the cell walls. So did you can get in and toxins can get out and at the toxins. And if neither of that is happening, your mitochondria is suffer, your ATP is lower. You start to get rogue cells that don't communicate that which lead to cancer cells and it's a downward spiral from there. So chlorophyll is very important to maintaining your health. And there is nothing in the world that has more chlorophyll than chlorella. Speaker 3: (31:22) It even has 25 times more chlorophyll than liquid chlorophyll because liquid chlorophyll is made from alfalfa sprouts. It has a, I think 200 times more chlorophyll in spinach, a thousand times more than you know, cabbage. And I have this all on a chart from the Linus Pauling Institute showing all the different concentrations. Um, so, so chlorophyll very, very important. But in chlorella. Second, chlorella has never, I said spirulina has no celly. This wall with chlorella has the hardest in the entire plant. Kingdom is that hard cell wall that attaches to toxins and pulls them out. So oppose that led mercury. Aluminum athletes use it after any kind of sport because it pulls out lactic acid so your muscles aren't sore the next day. Um, people use it for, um, after drinking wine, beer or anything because it attaches to the alcohol. Well, the, the chemicals, the toxins that are released by the alcohol and pulls them out. Speaker 3: (32:21) So you are sober in an hour and a half and you never have a hangover. Seriously. I know. It's crazy. Good old chlorella. So it pulls out toxins. We have customers who use it to pull out excess chemotherapy after their treatments. You need to wait two days after your treatment because it will identify the chemotherapy as a toxin. And we want you to be sure to get your treatment and then pull it out. But they used it at a Chernobyl Hiroshima Fukushima, because in Asia, they all know that chlorella is the only thing that pulls out radiation. So in fact, after the Fukushima disaster seven years ago, the entire Asian supply of chlorella was bought up and there was nothing available for two months because it takes a month, bro and a month to dry and all that sort of stuff. So, um, so it's been documented, um, all around the world for pulling out toxins. Speaker 3: (33:15) We work with, um, a biological dentist who use it to, um, when they pull up, um, AMA grams because of course it's mercury and they use it for themselves as well as their patients. Cause of course they're inhaling the fumes from the feet. Wow. Chlorella also has the highest concentration of RNA and DNA in the world, which is important as you age because this will help your, your own RNA DNA to grow back healthier. It has something called chlorella growth factor, which speeds up the growth of yourselves. So if you injure yourself or have surgery that combined with the RNA and DNA and all the other stuff, you heal literally half the time. It's unbelievable. It's really unbelievable. Chlorella also has the daily requirement of a vitamin called vitamin K too. Now, listeners aren't familiar with K two. It's a very important vitamin only discovered 25 years ago. Speaker 3: (34:08) Um, they attribute a lot of heart, a heart disease and Alzheimer's to too much calcium in your blood vessels or your brain wrinkles in your skin from too much calcium. Um, uh, kidney stones. How much calcium, cause we're all taking calcium and we're all taking of calcium going into the softest. It's absorbed in the wrong places. Zorba in your bones. So what's happening is gathering in your soft tissue like your blood vessels, your brains and only K2 will activate the two proteins that move it out of soft tissue and put it into your bones. So at the same time, it prevents osteoporosis, which is a classic problem for, for women. Um, and the only places you can get K2 from naturally from food is grass fed animal protein. I know you guys have a lot of grass fed animals in New Zealand. Um, there's a disc called natto, which is a Japanese dish, which is really slimy and nobody likes to eat it. Speaker 3: (35:06) But I found out I did lab test. It's also in the algae, there's twice as much in the chlorella as there is in the spirulina. So it has your daily requirement of K2 in the chlorella. I mentioned this because, Oh, in general, I want people to understand that spirulina is an energizing algae and chlorella is a wellness and health and detox algae. It's a wellness LG. So if you want to recover from anything or prevent any illness, chlorella is your answer. Um, and spirulina will always give you energy and help keep you focus. So there's two of them. Yeah, I didn't understand that distinction. And I mean I've hooked into the, the um, vitamin D Kate in K2 and vitamin a, um, combination to get the calcium out of the soft tissues and then to the bones where it shouldn't be. Yeah. I didn't realize that the K2 was incorrect. Speaker 3: (35:59) So that's a real, yes. Well, I think I'm the only one that I think I'm the only one that knows that as I'm this closet researcher and I'll be, cause I need to know the answers. I need to know why this works so well because nobody else has explained algae the way that I explained it. And I could only, as you know, you only become um, you become a good teacher when you have dug deep into complex matters and then you, you find a way to simplify them for people. So I was, I needed to go through the complexity and now, I mean simplify them for people so they don't have to, but I have the research in case they want the backstory so they know that it's all legitimate and documented and all that sort of stuff. So I'm pretty amazing. And so in people, when people ask me when to take the algae, well you could take either of them alone, together with food instead of food morning, noon, night. Speaker 3: (36:57) However, in most cases people want energy in the morning and during the day, maybe before a workout, before an important meeting or a school or whatever. So take your spirit, you know, whenever you want energy and take your chlorella at anytime you want to eat it. Uh, but certainly at nighttime, because if you've done a workout, it will pull up the lactic acid. If you've had any wine or cocktails, they'll pull the alcohol out. Um, it helps your, your body goes through detox cycle when you sleep anyways. So this Patil is facilitates the detox. Speaking of which, uh, about the brain health. You know, when you're sleeping, your brain has a lymphatic system of its own. What? And so the important, one of the many important reasons for getting a deep sleep is it will not activate. And unless you're in that, I think Delta, whatever, again, number one sleep pattern. Speaker 3: (37:49) So, so it washes your brain. And so while it's cleaning out these talks as it's pulling out things like aluminum that caused things like Alzheimer's. So if you have the chlorella in your system while you're sleeping, it will facilitate that cleansing process, not only of your body, but of your brain. I mean it's going to happen anyways. But the true, you know, street washing, if you want to say of your brain occurs when you're sleeping, yes. Go. So it's important to have the chlorella when you're sleeping. I think every single person in the world should be taking chlorella every single day because, um, I was reading, there's something like 280 chemicals in America that have been released since world war II and about 200 of them, of the 200 have been tested. So there's, we're surrounded in our, in our air, in our clothing, and you've got to get those things out, uh, and were there also buried in ourselves. Speaker 3: (38:42) So, um, until you get rid of them, they're just going to cause silent damage and inflammation. So it's in all of us is adding to the aging, you know, we, we, we have in this society, we have this belief that aging is inevitable, but you know, like there's so many aspects to it. And if we tackle them one by one, I'm sure you know, if you're a divest Bree fan or not, I don't know. But yeah, not attacking all the different pillars of aging and you know, one of them being like this sort of stuff, getting into this stuff, getting the right nutrients and the right amounts at the right times and understanding we don't have to age like how our grandparents aged or even our parents age, you know, we've got a chance at it in this day and age that we can change our, uh, you know, the time that we are going to be healthy for and the time that we going to live for. Speaker 3: (39:33) And you and I being, you know, North of, uh, 40, both have a vested interest in making this crackly. Yeah. Well, um, the other good thing about chlorella is it actually tastes pretty good. So, um, particularly if you put a little sea salt on it or eat it with the best is if you eat it with macadamia nuts, which is great because macadamia nuts are loved by the keto community. And when you eat macadamia nuts and chlorella are at least ours, it tastes like you're eating potato chips. I swear to God, it is unbelievable. And so if you can learn to like my tastes pretty good with almonds as well, or banana chips or coconut chips or whatever, but the macadamia and the chlorella and a little bit of sea salt is the magic just snack guys. And not only is it a healthy snack, it's truly a healing snack. Speaker 3: (40:27) You can be pulling out toxins and you can be building your RNA and DNA and you can be cleansing yourselves at the same time. I mean it's, that's why I call it efficient nutrition. It can do all of these things so effectively in such small quantities like nothing else in the world. So it's pretty funny. I'm now starting to see why you are so passionate about, Oh, I know with all that responsibility to share this. So funny. You know like you, you with your sister starting off of the studio. I've been on a journey with my mom and ma and my own health as well. And you just like, you get the answers and this is why I do this podcast and you're like, I want to share this one. Everybody knows this. I go like dog. And so you like this, what we try to give your knowledge to, to people and to share it and, and you just can't have a big enough impact fast enough. Speaker 3: (41:20) I know, you know. Well, I'm so glad you know that podcasts have developed because people like you, um, have an audience that is eager to learn. I'm eager to, I'm eager to educate, but you know, the average person on the street doesn't want to learn. They want to go home and eat their crappy food and watch TV. You know, I don't even know. I haven't had a TV in 10 years. And it's like, why would you watch television when you can learn about the science of things that are going to change people's lives? I mean, seriously. Here may, I'm sitting on the plane in between conferences and I'm either listening to a recording from some scientific lecture or, or I'm, uh, reading something and every moment is filled with stuffing things in my brain. And sometimes it gets to the point where I have to actually stop and go, no, I am going to just watch a movie or something because the brain fried. But I'm like, uh, time is short and I've got so much to cram in there. Keeps popping out the other side. I know that, right. Speaker 3: (42:25) Well that is shining in that. And I'm so grateful to folks like you and also other vendors who are trying their best to get products to the community that wants to preserve their health or, or encourage their families to preserve their health. Because we're so surrounded with sugar and carbs and toxins and, uh, we have to be proactive too and take charge of our lives because nobody else is gonna do it for us. And ICP, all the people with walkers. And I'm thinking, that's not going to be me. So, yeah. And, and, and, and that's, we've, we've lived, we've grown up in a world where you were told, the doctor knows everything you're like of doctor is God and what they say goes in and, and this nothing, nothing. He gets doctors. Um, but we cannot give up a responsibility for our own health to somebody else because that busy, they've got a hundreds of patients, they've got 10 minutes to see you. Speaker 3: (43:23) They are definitely influenced by the pharmaceutical companies. You cannot rely on that as being the only place that you get your information to ask to be responsible. And we live in a day and age where we can be responsible, we can go, we can't access the studies we can. And not everyone's a science news like we are. Um, but you can still find some really good information even on a surface level. Um, and this is why it's important that people take ownership of their own health in ways we even eat better, get connected with nature, you know, understand what these rhythms in our bodies so that we can optimize it. Well, it's a, it's a great time because, um, uh, you know, I'm also a Reiki healer and I've just, I've been interested in nature all my life and, and it's, and I do yoga and I also do high intensity workouts and it's not woo woo. Speaker 3: (44:15) Like, it's just, you start to understand that we're all connected and if you treat your body, uh, holistically and the environment holistically, you will just feel better and you'll be more loving and you'll just, everything will work better. So anyways, I truly believe algae is part of that solution. Also from an environmental perspective because you know there are a lot of the oceans are being overfished for their fish oil. The algae. Where do you think the fish get the Omega three from? They get it from algae. They only can, yeah, that's where it comes from. So go to the bottom, the original source of the mega three, get it from the algae yourself. By the way, almost all um, fish oil goes rancid in the PR and the production basis three a day and the Omega three and algae never goes rancid. Speaking of which, our bags, we have to put an expiry date on it. Speaker 3: (45:07) So it's usually two or three years out, which is pretty long and its own right. But technically it never goes bad cause it's just a dried vegetable. And you could keep this for 10 years and open it up and still be fine. Absolutely fine. So mom, and that's because algae is a unique, um, as I said, it's not really a plant. Um, I read recently a group from national geographic went up to the Antarctic and they took a chunk of ice that was carbon dated to almost 4 billion years old. And they took it back lab. Yeah. And they, some of it in a Petri dish cause they saw some algae was attached to the ice and they, and they put on it and the LG started growing like over 300 years old and starts growing again because LG never dies. It just goes dormant. Isn't that crazy? It's amazing. So if we ate the LG thin, perhaps we won't ever die. It would be great to have people taking it because I'm going to live forever. So I need friends who are going to be with me, take my allergies. I'll have someone to hang out with. Speaker 3: (46:11) You got to have that attitude at least. So we can't lie. We can, we can do me and Dave Asprey will be the last one standing and stuff. And with the chlorella, I, um, I remember you saying on boomers podcast that it does have a hard cellular wall. So the way that it's broken down that cellular wall so that you can digest it as a human, um, has implications from where you should get your core hours. Yes. Well, thank you for mentioning that. So I, um, first of all, the whole, um, LG industry has started with chlorella in Japan and there's a company called sun chlorella that started this all but 50 years ago. And I'm very grateful to them because it took them 10 years to figure out how to grow chlorella for mass consumption. And they, and they, that they're the ones that found out that you had to crack the cell wall because it is so hard. Speaker 3: (47:06) Um, and if it wasn't cracked, your body would not be able to absorb the nutrients. So, uh, it still will pull out toxins, but you won't get any of the nutrients. So they developed and patented a technique called dynamo, which, um, virtually the entire industry uses, uh, chlorella industry because of course, spirulina has no cell wall. Um, and they, they tumble the chlorella with glass beads. Now what happens is the glass heats up and there was always concerned that led from the glass leaked into the chlorella and they always declined and said, no, that didn't happen. Didn't happen. But, um, about 10 years ago, just when I was starting the company, the state of California tested their chlorella and did find it had excess amounts of lead in it. So they said, well, you can either stop selling here or put a warning on your package, which is what they did. Speaker 3: (47:55) So by sun, chlorella and America, you'll see a warning on the package. But the bigger problem is it's not just them that uses this technique. It's virtually an entire chlorella industry. So when I started the company 10 years ago, I, I heard that this was a potential problem. And I said, there's got to be another way to crack the Corolla. We've got to find some, but some other way. And there was a new technique that had just come out and that's what we use. It's um, you pass the chlorella through a sound chamber and it's the vibrations that crack LA chlorella. It's very similar to how an opera singers voice can crack a class. So it's the vibrations that are cracking the cell wall. I told this to somebody recently and they said, Oh well your, your chlorella has good vibrations. Yes. Yeah, we're all, we're all buy, buy, buy, buy, buy bations cause I'm also a regular so I owe all about energy and I if you haven't, if your listeners are not familiar with dr Joe Dispenza, um, yeah, yeah. I would encourage you, cause DePaulo him as well is incredible. And we sent him some product actually recently. My dream is to have our stuff at his seminars. I hope to go to one soon. He's, he's, he is, he's unbelievable. Unbelievable. He, he has between him and algae, I think we can, we, we have a future, we have a future and maybe add in a couple of others. Like I'm Dr. Bruce Lipton and divest and yeah. Speaker 3: (49:30) Yeah. Oh man, those guys, I, I'm so grateful to them. I've been reading their books for 20 years and I'm now getting to learn even more. And it all makes sense when you start to read about these different techniques and what everyone's doing. It all starts to make sense. So, and this is an exciting age to live in and I, we're getting off track, but the science is catching up with the Woodward community community where it was considered, you know, these, some of these things were considered like Reiki and like other things. Then it was a bit off the beaten track and no science. And now the science is actually proving a lot of the Eastern rights and things and you know, Chinese medicine, Ayurveda, medicine, um, course, you know, acupuncture, all of those things. And now I've got scientific backing that they are actually, um, and this is a really interesting convergence now and that's what I loved about Dr. Bruce Lipton's work toe was he actually managed as a, as a molecular biologist to connect the spiritual world. Speaker 3: (50:30) Even with the cellular bio, you know, biology and epigenetics. It was a visit and sign book there. The biology of life. I love that, that book. Um, and to see it all coming together. And I think as we get into quantum physics and things that are coming up down the road, I think, wow, you know, there's into the quantum realm, it's going to probe. A lot of these things have real value in real science behind it. Well, and as a small segue, that's one of many reasons why I'm in love with algae. Cause I tell people, Hey, before algae earth was just water and gas, there was not anything living on earth 4 billion years ago. Now I don't know why spirulina showed up, but it did. It's a single cell organism. And after, and it releases, oxygen was growing. So after a billion years, it released enough oxygen that other life forms could, could grow, which brought chlorella, which then brought more oxygen to earth, which allowed more life forms. Speaker 3: (51:31) And then eventually we had life in the ocean. And then we had terrestrial life. And then the old, only 800 million years ago did life. Humans show up. But there's gotta be, I think there's something mystical about allergy because it was the first single cell life on earth. Um, and it's still here and it's, you know, they would prove that it's got something about it. It doesn't die. It doesn't, you know, it's, it's been around a long time. They might be something more to it even then than the size of it. Right, right. So I, I'm Kiffin I know you're, you're, you're extremely tired and busy. Um, I'm gonna wrap it up there in a moment, but I, I just wanted to talk about where people can get your product and make sure that they're getting a good quality supplements. And, um, Catherine's been doing this way obviously for a very long time. Speaker 3: (52:24) A new company is energy buts.com. Um, and so anybody who's in America, Canada, we're asked you ship to, or we don't ship internationally, although ironically, we stopped shipping to New Zealand and Australia and we have a, um, a distributor who has a lovely couple, uh, Chris and Fria, they have a website called, uh, eat clean, live dirty.com. Dot. A U and they sell our products through their website, the eat clean live durney.com dot. A U. But if you buy, if you live anywhere other than a event that's usable and for Australia, you can buy from our website energy bits.com and we ship internationally into Canada, obviously throughout the U S uh, and when you shop on our website and use the discount code, Lisa L I S a could be uppercase or lowercase, it doesn't matter. Then you get 20% off your purchase and it works on everything all the time. But that's only on our website. Not that you need energy, but unfortunately Kiwis and Aussies, you have to just support the um, uh, eight clean lifts, dirty a website and you don't get the discount. But if you do, if you live in the States or Canada or anywhere else, you can get a 20% discount. So that's a really, really con thing. Thank you very much Catherine for that. Speaker 3: (53:52) And I'll, and it's very concentrated, so it's very high quality. If you also live in the United States, you can purchase from Amazon. We sell everything on Amazon, no discount codes work. And also on Amazon, we sell little pouches that have 30 tablets. On our website. You can only buy large bags that have a thousand tablets or boxes that have single single servings. But on Amazon you can buy for a $4 single serving and tested out if you'd like before you met to a large bag. And um, I'd also encourage people to come and visit us on Instagram. Our handle is at energy beds. Same with Facebook, it's in it at energy bits, um, or Twitter. And if you come to our website, you'll see we have two brands of spirulina. One is called energy beds, but we have a second brand of spirulina called beauty beds because it also builds your skin and hair health. Speaker 3: (54:41) And we wanted something that would be appropriate for spas and a little bit more girly, but it's exactly the same product, just different packaging. And then the chlorella we talked about, that's called recovery. That's, and then we have a fourth product called vitality bits, which is 50% spirulina, 50% chlorella in general, particularly if you're an athlete. We encourage you to buy them separately because you want to split, you know, load up on the spirulina before your workout and during your workout or run. And then you want to take the chlorella afterwards and then, or if maybe you had a little extra to drink extra chlorella or maybe you've got, you're sick and you're detoxing extra chlorella. But that way you have more control over the two different allergies cause they do completely different things in your body. That's important distinction because I didn't understand that really. Speaker 3: (55:30) So that's, that's really good. So endurance athletes, go and get your spirulina and chlorella and do it separately and have the S the spirulina before your workouts, the Corella after or in the evenings to you repeat it. So www.ENERGYbits.com I'll put the show notes. Of course you can get on my website, at least@tammany.com on the podcast, under the podcast button. We would have this all available for you. Um, and if you want to reach out to Katherine, can they reach you somewhere or just by your website? Yeah, they can. The customer carrot energy bits.com. I've written about a hundred papers on different aspects of LG white helps with different things. I'll send you a ton of stuff, Lisa, and you can put, you can post things. I'll send you a PowerPoint about widescreen for athletes. Um, yeah, like I said, we were, we were a sports nutrition product when we first started because the runners discovered us and then they told everybody else and that was that. And we'll, we'll keep spreading that word to the runners down on Stan, the sins of the world. So Katherine, thank you very much for your time today. I really appreciate it. I know you're super busy lady. Um, wonderful that we're connected. I'm sure we'll stay connected. Um, so yeah, all the best with your big mission in life to solve world hunger. And I tell people we're tiny but mighty and you will be too when you do geology. Fantastic. Speaker 1: (56:53) That's it this week for pushing the limits. Be sure to write, review and share with your friends and head over and visit Lisa and her team at www.lisatamati.com.  

James:  Hi, audience and listeners, this is James Kandasamy from Achieve Wealth True Value Add Real Estate Investing Podcast. Today I have Scott Meyers, who's one of the leading authority in self-storage investing education so I'm happy to have him here. Scott owns almost more than 2 million square feet in self-storage space and across 7500 units and is based out of Indianapolis, right. So hey, Scott, welcome to the show.   Scott:  Hey, James. Thanks for having me. How are you?   James:  Good, very good. Thanks for coming on. I really like to focus on multiple different asset classes. I mean, I'm a multifamily guy but I'm also a strong believer in the operator of any asset class, right. So if you find the right operator, even on the least popular asset class if you find the right operator, and you know you can definitely make money out of it. Because there are some people who are really specialized in the asset class and you are one of them in self-storage. So I want to go deep into the self-storage spaces, one of my two favorites, right, other than multifamily even though I don't really do self-storage.   But I really like it just because of the asset class and some of the research that I did on my own in terms of like, past 15 years trend, right. So self-storage never went down on recession. That's not data from any book or any papers but I did my own IRR report data, which is Integra Realty Resources reports. Is that correct, 15 years?   Scott:  That's correct.   James:  Okay, good. Even though it was a bit hard to really collect that data, because it is a bit sprinkle, it's not like a huge asset class subsidies, not a huge asset class like warehouse, industrial, multifamily. It is an asset class but it's more of a specialized asset class. So, Scott, you want to tell our audience something that I would have missed out about you?   Scott:  Wow. Well, again I got started in the business the way that many folks do by investing in single-family homes and that is considered the easy entrance into real estate. And then get into multifamily investing in office buildings, warehouses, cold storage, parking lots and so, yes, I too have liked and invested in multiple asset classes in real estate.   But when we landed on self-storage you know, the beauty of self-storage is well no tenants, no toilets and trash. And although I made a lot of money in single-family homes and apartments, you know you got to slug it out and get to that place where you can like yourself and like where we got to where we had property management companies handling that.   And you get to that, you know, to the scale in which that changes but that's kind of a tough row to hoe but once we get into self-storage, not having those challenges, and then also when somebody doesn't pay you, you lock them out because the law allows you to do that we have lien laws versus eviction laws. And if they still don't pay, then you sell their stuff off to recoup your money.   And so, you know, those factors combined then we made that shift in 2005 to sell off our houses in our apartments and focus solely on self-storage. And that makes up 99% of our portfolio now.   James:  So what happened in 2005? Why was like hey, dumping all the other asset classes, self-storage is the way to go? What was that transition? What triggered that? What was that aha moment?   Scott:  Yeah, when I bought my first self-storage facility, that's when I got into the business, I've been investing since 1993. And we had about 100 houses, about 400 apartments and yeah, just wasn't, you know, it didn't have the passive income that I wanted to nor the freedom at that level.   And I begin looking into self-storage and once we bought our first one, that one just, you know, by every measure outperformed the rest of our asset classes in terms of dollar per square foot and just less management and headache and time and everything else. And so that is the time we started investing and everything else and then went on from there and growing to where we are now.   James:  So in 2005 that is like three years, well it's not three years. It's like one to two years before the peak of the market, right, everybody was happy with buying houses. There was a lot of equity being built, I'm sure the houses doing crazy. But I'm not sure, what was the state of self-storage at that time? Was it a hot asset class that the equities appreciating or was like a diamond in the rough at that time that you think that I want to do this?   Scott:  Yeah, you know, it was still considered the stepchild of commercial real estate or all of the real estate at that point, it just, you know, it wasn't sexy. There's still a lot of folks that just, they don't like it because it is a niche, they don't understand it or you know, it's just a bunch of garages or sheds, you know, put out in a field that's how people look at it.   So, you know, at that time when I began looking into it, I was just looking for an asset class that was much simpler with less competition and then I could see was on the upswing. And so just when I started just digging into the industry and looking at the statistics on it, it was pretty incredible. Again, in many ways outperformed all other forms of real estate and other asset classes, including the ones that I was heavily invested in.   So I think maybe because of the lack of information also, there was more intrigued on my end you know. There wasn't a whole lot of folks that I knew that were investing in it. There wasn't a lot of, there wasn't anybody. You know we have an education company now that was born out of me looking into this business at that point. And, you know, along the way, we begin teaching people.   And now my second company, our education company is the largest education company teaching people about investing in self-storage. And so I think that's part of it, it was just kind of one of those unknowns. It was an untapped opportunity that many investors weren't familiar with or looking into. And so, you know, those are the types of things that I personally seek out.   And so from that standpoint, once I dug in, looked at the numbers and then bought and began operating my first facility, you know, that I realized that you know, this is the road to go down. And, you know, yes, money was inexpensive, it was cheap at that time. The market was good and banks were lending on all types of asset classes. But self-storage, I found was even easier because of the fact that, as you just mentioned, it doesn't go down in a recession. It's recession-proof and inflation-proof.   When things are bad in this country and people are downsizing and businesses are downsizing, self-storage actually benefits from that. So you know, every recession that we've gone through, since the 70s, self-storage has benefited more than any other real estate asset class because of the nature of the business and what happens during the recession.   James:  Got it. So coming back to that 2005 when you started, you said you did some research and you found some statistics. Can we go into that statistics and dissect a bit? What was that aha moment that --? It's very hard to always find a new asset class, right, like right now we are in 2020, right.   It's very hard for me to say this asset class is untapped, right, unless I know someone is doing it, nobody knows about it and all that. So I want to go back to your thought process and what was the data that you were available to you, the aha moment, the statistics that made you say I want to go and try out this or do this?   Scott:  Yeah. So you look at, there was a study that was done by the Multifamily Rental Housing Commission, I believe is the name of it at the time. It's been a while since I've been out of that. And then they looked at all the various asset classes in rental real estate. And now they've looked at that the number of houses that were available out there in the marketplace and there were roughly 13 million, you know, again, give or take.   It's always changing apartment or excuse me, single-family rental units out there across the country that investors are investing in and everybody's investing in it. There were roughly 16 million apartment rental units; individually units not complex and individual units and there were multiple people that are obviously investing including myself in multifamily.   And I can go into any room and ask the people to raise their hands, who are investing in single-family rentals in any investment club that I was involved in or speaking at. And you know, 80% of the hands of the room would go up if they're investing in houses, for apartments less than that but still a number of them. And then I asked how many people are investing in self-storage; nobody.   I was like, the only person at the time, you know, investing or nobody really looking into it. Yet, there are 24 million rental units in self-storage compared to 16 million in apartments and 13 million houses at the time. So I couldn't find anybody that was out there was investing in it or looking into it. Banks absolutely love self-storage because it has the lowest loan default rate. It was like it's a fraction of the default rate for single-family houses and apartment complexes.   So, you know, at the time, both pre-recession in that 2005 and 2006 timeframe, the savings loans, credit unions, smaller banks, they all wanted self-storage to add to their portfolio because they were portfolio lenders. They were packaging these up and selling them off to Wall Street. And they were strong and they knew that they performed very well and they wanted them on their balance sheet when the next recession hit.   Then little did we know, it did hit and then 2008 and 2009, I still have banks that were clamoring for self-storage deals because self-storage was going, you know, absolutely, you know, the hockey stick as it does during a recession, doing extremely well, leasing up, outperforming everything else. While the values of apartments and single-family houses were all going down into the toilet.   So for those reasons, you know that's why I began looking into it. And that's the reason why we continue to do so during the recession. And, again, never say never but this is where I'm staying. I can't find myself investing in anything else at this point.   James:  Yeah, it's an awesome discovery that you did in 2005. Because I mean, up until even like until four or five years ago, I didn't think so self-storage is a well-known asset class. I mean, now, I think there's a lot of people who know somebody. I mean, you are teaching and there is a lot more podcast and people are trying to jump into right so. I mean, am I right? Like four, five years ago, I don't think so self-storage just --   Scott:  Yeah, I think well, I think our organization has a little something to do with that, our educational organization. But outside of that, I mean, it's Wall Street and you just look at the stats. I mean, you start looking at the asset classes and comparison from you know, the REITs down to the institutional investors, year after year, consistently, self-storage just outperforms all of the commercial real estates. I mean, the numbers don't lie. And so yeah, self-storage is coming to mainstream and there's a lot of folks that are wanting to get in on because it's performing so well.   James:  Yeah. I mean I know one of the biggest things that I realized about self-storage is you know, it's easy to manage, there's a value add because there's a lot of "mom and pop", am I right? But you buy from "mom and pop" and you make it nice, you put Uhaul and you make it a big business and after that, you probably want to sell it to the REITs. I don't know whether that's a summary of the usual business plans.   Scott:  That's the business model James. In the beginning, you know, there was a lot more "mom and pop" facilities than there are today. But yeah, the beginning when we were starting out, looking at smaller facilities but ones that are still able to be managed by a person or a management company and so yeah, exactly that.   The "mom and pops" that, you know, they just took their hands off the wheel or they fell behind in terms of technology or the marketing or even just, you know, the best business practices in the industry you know. They've been doing well and making a whole bunch of money, you know, without trying very hard. And then we could come in and see the potential and the opportunity in the facilities. And we would buy it when they're ready to sell at a fair price and then we would take it up to the next level.   So you know everything we've done has been 'value add' in terms of turning the management around, leasing of vacant units, adding profit centers and then adding more square footage. If we can build more buildings on that existing site or buy land next door or across the street, we would do that. And then you know, so now fast forward to the future, still looking at ‘value add’.   “Mom and pops” if we can but they could also be now conversions looking into other buildings to buy and convert to self-storage and then developing from the ground up. But yeah, everything we do has been ‘value add’ to make money for ourselves and our are investors. So again, just like your model.   James:  Yeah, absolutely. And how do you I mean, self-storage is very dependent on demand or supply of an area, right? So let's walk through that process of underwriting a self-storage facility that has already been built. Well, and later we go into developing right. So let's walk through the process. Let's say today I drive by a place here in Austin, Texas, I saw self-storage for sale, right. How do I first I mean, without talking about numbers, how do I analyze the location of it?   Scott:  So yeah, beyond the numbers itself, the only way to build value in these is to lease them up. And if you can't lease it up because the market isn't good then it doesn't do any good to buy it. There's, you know, we look at the supply index that's what we call it in our industry and that just matches up the amount of self-storage at square footage in a market.   James:  Where do you get data?   Scott:  Well, there are a couple of different ways. There is software out there that we can buy. And there's a couple of companies that we buy their data from and they'll draw a three-mile ring or radius on that site and give you that information.   Prior to that, we were still doing on our own with Google Earth Pro, looking at the facilities that are around it. And then we go to ezri.com or we can go to the local city data, the local websites for the chamber and find out the population and then we do the math, pretty simple math. In five minutes, we can find out what the supply index looks like.   So depending upon the market it roughly falls into right around seven square feet per person is considered equilibrium in a marketplace. So if we find that there are only four square feet of self-storage per person, it's an undersupplied or underserved market. If we're at 10 you know, we're going to go check those facilities and shop them and see, you know, are they full or do they have you know, a number of units available?   Some markets have a little high demand depending upon, you know, if there's a lot of apartments, a lot of condos, track housing, colleges or, you know, transitional type town military, there's going to be a greater demand. So those supply index numbers may vary a little bit. But ultimately, you know, we're kind of landing on somewhere right around that seven square foot per person that way we know whether it's either undersupplied or potentially oversupplied in a market.   James:  So how do you determine that? I mean, because the other drawback to self-storage is it's very easy to develop, right? So let's say you found that facility, you found like so for 4% per square feet, right, but how do you make sure that someone else is not building in that area in the next one year after you buy it? How do you analyze that these new supplies potentially may not be coming?   Scott:  Right. Well, first of all, it is a little more difficult to guard against that in Texas because you guys down there, you're the wild wild west. Boards approve everything, anything, and everything.   James:  Yeah, we are business-friendly,   Scott:  Extremely business-friendly. So, well, you know, other developers, for the most part, you know, they're pretty savvy and they're not going to go in and build it without doing that same homework. And so you know we look to see what permits are coming down the pike. And so we're always keeping an eye on that throughout the process.   You know, as soon as we secure land or a building, if we're going to convert it then up goes the sign, it says 'the future home of'. So, you know, even if other developers are looking around that market at self-storage, you know, they may potentially ward them off or if they see, you know, the zoning and the permits and how many square feet that we're going to buy, they're doing their calculations.   And if our project, the addition of 100,000 square feet will bring the market up to seven square foot per person, then you know, the smart developer isn't going to go through all that risk and the trouble of coming into market and then their facility is going to be struggling during lease-up and potentially be in an oversupply situation.   Now that's in a perfect world, right. So we still need to guard against and if we do see that some people are sniffing around then we may approach them and just kind of warn them against that. There are some times when these developers, you know, usually they don't have private equity behind them or a bank or, you know, the need to go through a feasibility study or go in front of a lender to build their business model. Because if nobody's checking, I can't stop stupidity if somebody just has cash, they decided to build something.   But for the most part, again, you know, there are savvy developers like ourselves that aren't going to take a chance, they do the same bit of homework. And, you know, much like if I were to go into and find that same thing, we found a perfect spot, you know, the perfect building to convert. But in our due diligence, we found that there's, you know, a Uhaul facility coming up or public storage or extra space or even a national or regional player, that's going to build 80,000 square foot, I'm not going to think that I'm better or that we're going to beat him to the market. That's stupid.   We're going to shoot ourselves in the foot. We won't get the returns that we want. We'll have equity partners that are disgusted and we have banks that will either be disgusted if we go through with it or they won't give us a loan in the first place. So so there's natural, you know, there are some natural barriers called intelligent developers all looking at the same time, you know, to keep that from happening.   So again, that's in a perfect world. But there are you know, there is from time to time where you do have some folks in a market that are entering and make it extremely competitive and difficult on everyone.   James:  Yeah, so there is no like one, well, it's a bit hard to really predict that right, who's gonna build what right? If you're under contract, sometimes you just wouldn't know whether they're going to build one.   Scott:  Sometimes you wouldn't, that's why you know, again, even prior to closing I mean, that's one of our steps. Before we go to the closing table the day before we're looking at, you know, the zoning board and the office to see if any permits have been pulled or if there's anything going on that we didn't know about.   James:  Got it. And sometimes it is also like your facility may not have certain features that the developers say hey, can bring in that feature plus whatever you have, right, like cold storage, right. Sometimes you probably buying a deal which is just normal storage but somebody else might come and say I want to do normal storage plus cold storage which makes mine more attractive, right, that can be a bit dangerous too, right?   Scott:  Absolutely, well, it could be dangerous but also if anything that may help because there's you know, a place in the marketplace for non-temperature controlled, you know, less expensive storage, single-story without all the amenities. There's always a place for that, the folks are looking to store something inexpensively.   And even if another facility developer comes in and builds a facility that is, you know, three-story and is all temperature-controlled, and you know, security and you know, everything all the bells and whistles, a class A facility, there are people that are will only store their things in that facility. And so, you know, that does help to ward off an oversupply situation because there are somewhat segments of the population.   But it's not exactly what you think the way you stated it where people are going to say well, I don't want to store my stuff over here in this non-temperature control, I want to put it over here. They don't need to pay double, you know, to just store some of their junk, I mean, their treasures.   James:  Their treasures, exactly.   Scott:  So there are the degrees of treasures and that'll dictate that you know the budget as to where they'll put their items. Does that make sense?   James:  Yeah, it makes sense. Yeah, I think that's one of the biggest risks I would say right in self-storage. Like for example, a mobile home park. A lot of people do not want a mobile home park in their city. So that's a high barrier to permits to build a mobile home park, right. Whereas apartments and self-storage always have you know, the supply things. I mean, in any asset class, there's there's always a supply concern.   Scott:  At the end of the day, it's a ''gotcha in any form of real estate, you just got to do your due diligence, period.   James:  Yeah, correct. The other thing on self-storage that I found out that, it's not as easy, is just a different way of financing it, right. You don't get a lot of [unclear19:42] concern compared to apartments. I mean, there's pros and cons in both, right, so do you do recourse loans or do you non-recourse? Does it matter really?   Scott:  Well, of course, we don't like, you know, if we don't have to do recourse, we'd rather not. Again, the good news with self-storage is we find a lot more non-recourse funding available out there just because the asset class is less risky. The loan default rate is the lowest compared to all other forms of commercial real estate. So there are a lot more lenders that are willing to do non-recourse just because the asset class doesn't fail very often.   James:  Okay. I was thinking maybe, the sources that I got were a lot of recourse. But I think anything at lower leverage, you should be able to get non-recourse so is that common for you?   Scott:  Sure, yeah.   James:  Okay, got it. Yeah, okay that's interesting. And what about in 2005, I want to go back to 2005. You discovered an asset class that not many people discover, right? So, if one of our listeners want to recreate your success, they have to discover that asset class right. So you found this self-storage, how did you do your underwriting? Because there's no one there to teach you how to underwrite this investment, right, that asset class, right?   Scott:  Well, so it started with, you know, the Excel spreadsheet that I used to underwrite my apartment complexes, you know. So at the end of the day, it's still commercial real estate and you --   James:  Absolutely.   Scott:  Income minus expenses and NOI and a cap rate. So then what I had to do is I spent time with the consultants in the industry who does feasibility studies and paid him to spend time, a day with him to not only visit the facilities that he owned; those that he managed for somebody else but then also spent a fair amount of time underwriting and understanding.   You know understanding all the line item expenses in a self storage facility and how to account for that and what those industry averages are just to be able to see, you know, in a self-storage facility when I look into it. "Hey, is this above or below average? Or, you know feed me a line here? Is this you know, truly the expense or where should I be as a baseline?" So, and again, as you know, you know, underwriting for any asset class apartments, self-storage, mobile home parks, you know, there are an art and a science to it.   James:  Absolutely.   Scott:  Here's the underwriting for the lenders and the industry averages but everyone is different. And then you also have to, you know, we look at three sets of numbers you know. Here's where it is right now. You know, we stress that NOI and send that back with our offer to the seller, then there are our 30 days, you know, here's what's gonna look like the day that we buy it or 30 days after we make some changes. And then here's what's gonna look like in one year from now. And then obviously, our projections after that.   So when I look at those three numbers for an acquisition, you know, that's going to tell me where you know, we are going to land in a purchase price and what this facility is going to look like. And then obviously, in five years hopefully, there's a large value add down the road. But learning it is, you know, again, like anything else, I hired experts, I paid those folks and then did a lot on the road, a lot of facilities. And then you just kind of begin to build up that experiential math and your mind, you know, when you begin to start looking at these saying what it's going to look like.   James:  Was it easy to get deals in 2005, 2006?   Scott:  Easier than than it is now, cats out of the bag. It's a hot asset class, there's a lot of competition. And right now, I mean, from where we're sitting right now, at the time of this podcast, you know, there's, we've had a bull run, interest rates have been low. And so if those sellers and cap rates are low, so if those sellers are in a position to you know, sell for whatever reason; to retire or if they just had built value in it, they were going to trade in, trade up you know. They've sold off in the past few years because we are at the top of the market.   So the ones that are out there, and there are still opportunities out there, don't get me wrong. You just need to look a little harder and look at the value to be created in the future, not just immediately. And there are other folks out, you know,  competitors, there are other folks that have sent letters and mailers and knock on their door as well asking them to sell their self-storage facility.   So, but you know, at the end of the day, I'll say this to you and your listeners the same as I do to our students at our events; "Hard work wins in the end". And you know just going out to and no offense against LoopNet or any other websites out there. But just going to LoopNet and doing a few searches and then giving up is not a strategy.   You do need to send the mailers out, you need to knock on doors, do Google searches, you know, get your own database and work it and continue to contact the folks in your market. You know until they tell you to stop or they sell you your facility or they die, one of the three. But if you keep after it, you'll find deals. Our students are finding deals, we're finding deals all the time. Not as easily as 2005, as you mentioned but they're out there.   James:  Do you buy deals from, I mean, not you. I mean, common people buy deals through brokers as well on self-storage?   Scott:  Of course, yeah, the large brokerage firms, you know, all the players. Most of the large ones have a self-storage division or an arm to them. And then there are other commercial brokers that specialize in industrial and in storage. And then there's also I mean, you find from time to time, we've looked all over the place in our search for facilities and so you'll see them listed by business brokers as well.   Because there's a lot of "mom and pop" owners that when they're getting ready to sell, they look at their facility, not as commercial real estate but they look at it as they're selling their business and so they may list it themselves on one of the small business for sale websites or contact a small business broker. And they'll put it on one of the small business brokerage websites as well. So a number of avenues and places to be able to look for self storage that comes available for sale.   James:  Got it. What about the depreciation and tax benefits in self-storage? How does that play out compared to like apartments?   Scott:  Yeah, cost segregation is our friend. We apply cost segregation immediately to these projects, especially when we're buying into building them and so. You know everything else is the same and applies, same for tax purposes with the added benefit of, you know, we can write so much off in cost segregation because of the way that they're built; from the walls, the doors, you name it, the lion's share of the facility can be written off using cost segregation. So it's very advantageous.   But also going into these projects, it's much easier because self-storage really started out as a land play and kind of a land bank where, you know, years ago back in the 50s and 60s, people would put up these storage buildings. Buy five acres way out on the edge of town, even beyond the path of progress, build some buildings and rent them out to pay for the property taxes until all the growth came that way. And then they would knock them down and sell them off to somebody else or build something else.   Well, now, self-storage is the highest and best use, but when we go to buy these, we will buy them with two separate purchase agreements; one for the land and then one for the business and the buildings. So from that standpoint, we can lower our tax basis when we go into these projects because the assessor's office recognizes that it is a land bank. These are buildings that can be taken down and the business, it's only a single-use, you know, when you have a storage facility, you see all those doors and it's one use, that's it.   So it's really easy to go in with to purchase agreements and then also win that battle or the negotiation with a tax assessor as to the reason why that we have an assessment for the land and the building separately.   James:  Interesting. What about your funding sources? I mean, I'm not sure whether, I am presuming you do syndication nowadays, right?   Scott:  Right.   James:  So did you guys do that in 2005?   Scott:  No, we didn't. That was our partners and you know a few folks that would come alongside us that had some retirement funds and they would be partners in the deals. We did do some [unclear27:11], some syndications but just with the family, you know, true family, you know, friends and family at that point, just one or two people.   But at that time, we were still using local lenders, credit unions savings and loans, community banks, 75% LTV and then we would bring the down payment or our partners would or we would do a lot of seller financing. Those "mom and pops", the owners they would have built these years ago or bought them years ago and they paid it down and paid it off and they didn't want to pay capital gains taxes.   And so they would stay in the deal and sometimes, you know, stay in for the amount of the down payment. And then we would just bring a small amount to the closing table and layer that on top of a 75% or 80% LTV loan. These days, we're using mostly the SBA for underlying debt but also still credit unions and local banks. But then yes, syndicating the rest of the funds and setting up a Reg D filings, five or six days and five or six years time to layer the money on top of an SBA loan or traditional lender.   James:  Got it. And how did the negotiation terms have changed from 2005 to now? I mean, in terms of like, how many days you have for due diligence, you know? How many day one hard money? How is it then and how is it now?   Scott:  I don't think that has changed too much, James, maybe we asked for a little bit more. And so we're getting a little bit longer time frames just because we were too afraid to ask back then. But pretty standard, I mean, we tried the traditional existing facility should be up and down in 90 days. So you know, we give them 10 days to give us their books and records maybe two weeks. At the end of 30 days, we'll have our discovery period and look and then we may have another 30 days once we have our financing in place for them to do third parties and then closing another 30 days later.   Again, we can get up and down in 90 days sometimes less than that. Now if we're doing an SBA loan, they just it takes longer and just flat out takes longer. And so we start at 90 days, then we asked for an extension for till 120 or sometimes 120 and extension to 250 days just because that process lasts a little bit longer and for raising private equity. We'd like to have a little longer runway to be able to do so. So as long as the seller agrees to that, then you know those timeframes are a little bit longer with the SBA.   James:  Wow, that's awesome. I mean, in the apartment world we are seeing day one hard money you know, five days due diligence and the potential of you making mistakes is very high, right?   Scott:  We just won't do it. I won't put ourselves in that position. You know, you take away all leverage and ability to perform and yeah, we would just --   James:  Yeah. And then it's a one year lease and I mean, just pros and cons and everything but it's just become so hard now. The sellers and brokers asking for more crazy terms nowadays, right so happy to know that in self-storage is not that bad yet, hopefully, it never got there. But --   Scott:  But some are, I mean, we've got some crazy, you know, terms and we just, you know, they want to see proof of funds and say, well, we got to get a deal first. I can't, you know, no lender is going to prove anything until we have a contract and I can't take anything to my private equity partners until we know paying for and do some due diligence.   And so, you know, things like that are just, that's some of the ridiculous things that we just will always deal with. But we just can't perform under those terms. And so, you know, we've got terminology that we use to combat that and then also our relationships and then our track record performance that they shouldn't have to worry. And you know, our money will go hard when we're done with due diligence, we'll make it short.   But you know, we got to take a look under the hood, not going to give you $100,000 non-refundable, you know, deposit on this thing without a chance of looking at your books and records and inspecting the property so.   James:  Yeah, you'll be surprised to see how many people are paying like half a million dollars without looking at the property right now for an apartment.   Scott:  Well, what is the difference between if I give you $1 for earnest money or if I give you a million dollars for earnest money and the purchase price is 1,000,001? At the end of due diligence, if there's something I don't like and your numbers are fudged then I'm getting it all back, whether it's $1 or a million bucks. So I don't know why everybody is still making a big deal out of this, you know, that large earnest money deposits just doesn't make any sense. It's all coming back.   James:  Yeah, I think it's just the way the market is so hot right now.   Scott:  I know, and we have people out if you have the ability to do that, then you know, they know that you're a serious borrower or buyer if you have that money, so I get it, but yeah.   James:  It just put a lot more on a risky side, right.   Scott:  Right, yeah.   James:  And how do you do your offerings? Is it liked deal' or you do a fund basis kind of thing?   Scott:  Yeah, we don't have a fund yet James, we're heading towards that. I think when you know when we see signs of the market are going to turn and there's more opportunity to buy existing facilities where you know, that owner hasn't done a good job and it's time to refinance at higher interest rates and lower LTVs, we'll look to do a funder. Right now everything is a single asset, single entity LLC, we do a capital raise for each project right now.   James:  What is the average raise that you're doing? I mean, I'm sure it depends on the size.   Scott:  It does, I'd say we're probably falling in that $3 million mark or so, you know, as low as 500,000 but most of them and others are 3.5 million, 3.7 million. So I'd say yeah, somewhere around the $3 million mark is what we're raising.   James:  Do you see a lot of passive investors interested in investing in self-storage?   Scott:  Oh, my gosh, more than we can supply deals for. I mean, they're just like investors, you know, if they're just doing it passively. Everybody wants a piece of self-storage right now. So we're just trying to supply the deals to them.   James:  What would you advise to a passive investor who's looking at a deal, right, a genetic deal? What are the steps that a passive investor should take to analyze that deal at a very high level for passive investing?   Scott:  Yeah, well, I think they need to learn about the asset class. First of all, so you know, however way, shape or form they can do to educate themselves in the market space and understanding self-storage is helpful. But, again in the beginning stages, you know, they need to look at the sponsor, and, you know, what is the sponsors' experience level? And have they successfully purchased, created value and exited? And you know, did they hit their marks in terms of the projections that they had made to, you know, their investors in that project or those projects? You know, how well did they perform? Do they always fall short? Did they exceed the projections going into those? Are they still untested? This is their first deal or they bought and they're building value, but they haven't exited and created any value for their folks. So I think that's probably the main thing is you need to vet your sponsors very well.   James:  Got it. Yeah. I mean, I agree. I mean, the operators and the sponsor are the biggest factors in any deal, right.   Scott:  They are the factor.   James:  They are the factor, correct. They are the investment return is I guess.   Scott:  Correct, yeah.   James:  So that's awesome. So what would you tell a newbie who wants to start in self-storage investing as an active sponsor?   Scott:  As a sponsor as the primary?   James:  Yeah.   Scott:  Again, go out and learn the business, have somebody come alongside you, or at the very least, you know, check your underwriting and your due diligence in self-storage is maybe even more so important to look at the market and the supply index that we discussed. You know, if you're a value add investor and you're looking to take a facility from 60% occupancy up to 85% occupancy, you need to be sure that you can do so.   Because if you shop the competition all around in a five-mile radius and they're all at 60%, then guess what, the market is stabilized and so is your facility, you're not going anywhere. So you need to look into the market, make sure that you can raise occupancy, raise rates or there's the growth coming or some compelling reason that allows you to hit your marks if you're going to create value in it.   But then get real good at underwriting and get some help or assistance or even hire somebody to look over those numbers because, in commercial real estate, you know a $10,000 mistake in underwriting is a is more than $100,000 mistake in valuation at today's cap rates, it's more like $120,000. And it's really easy in a five million dollars deal to miss $10,000 in expenses and, you know, just shoot yourself in the foot to the tune of $120,000 or more.   So give me a good at that side and then yeah, hit the ground running with a property management company, if you can or make sure you hire a rockstar manager to manage the facility. Do not hire the gal at Great Clips because she's nice and you like the way she cuts your hair. That person is not the person to manage your $1 million investment. You wouldn't put her in charge of a $1 million stock portfolio, this is no different.   So you know, do your due diligence and then make sure that you're managing that asset once you buy it to the best of your ability, evaluate it. So I mean, there are lots of others, but those are the main.   James:  How critical is asset management in self-storage?   Scott:  Well, so we're on the same page. I mean, there's property management which encompasses the marketing and the bookkeeping of the asset itself. There's the onsite payroll, the person behind the counter. You know we look at asset management as managing the investor or the overall investment, meaning the private equity piece. And so, we take that very seriously.   And we didn't do such a good job of that in the beginning. And we didn't realize how much our investors wanted to be communicated to by sending out the regular reports. And we thought that monthly reports of the performance and our quarterly webinar was enough and they want more than that. And K1s on time, obviously but just you know, timely and over communication to our investors is key. Getting those K1 out on time but then in an organized fashion.   You know, we've now taken it to the next level and last year, we have a portal that we built out a portal so you know, we look like the big guys. I guess we're getting as big as the big guys now. But you know, we have, you know, we look like Fairway Capital when you log into our portal or, you know, Realty Mogul or, you know, [unclear37:02] Fundrise. The reporting and the information that we have is every bit as good as the big guy.   So never underestimate that or else, you know, you'll spend a lot of time answering questions from them with phone calls and emails that you wouldn't have to do that if you just communicate with them regularly. And they'll keep coming back to you as long as you perform and you've been easy to work with and communicate with them and they will invest in your next deal and your next and your next.   James:  Yeah, I have a portal as well and my investors love it too, centralized and all that. The other asset management part that I'm pretty well versed in [unclear37:39] the strategy to increase the rent, to keep on making sure that they are having the business plan being executed. For example, in your case, you need to get a Uhaul company service agreement. I mean, how complicated is that business plan execution?   Scott:  It's key. That's another layer that we've added. You know, it's one thing to vet the property management companies in the interview and make sure that you get a great property management company in place to manage the facility for you. But at the end of the day, you and I both know nobody cares one percent as much about your facility and your apartment more than you. So for that degree, we've added a layer we've added another person who manages the management company and it may sound like overkill or redundancy.   But, you know, here's the plan and they're meeting with the property management company on a monthly basis saying you know, here's what we set out to do to make this thing perform. So what have you done to add attended insurance program and have you raised rates by this percent and how is the revenue been affected, what's the marketing plan this month? And is it in line with this quarter? So you know, we don't just, it's not a set it and forget it business by any stretch. Yeah, we need to manage management companies and drive the performance and then drive the value.   James:  Got it. And at a high level, what is stabilize the self-storage cap rate that's being sold on the market right now?   Scott:  It all depends, you know, Class A, Class B, Class C and you know, and what market you're in. But, you know, gosh, when everything was hot and you know, two years ago the Class A institutional-grade facility so they were selling a below a 4% cap rate, I think those have now stabilized on closer to five, five and a half percent cap rate.   The projects that we're looking to produce to the REITs or to the national players to buy their Class A facilities and, you know, we're looking at an exit strategy of six. We certainly could push to get a little bit lower than that but, you know, that's how we're those are trading. Class B; seven, seven and a half cap rate and then Class C, obviously, depending upon the, you know, occupancy in the market and how rural it is, you know, seven and a half and above.   James:  And is it based on your built for the classes?   Scott:  I mean, all things considered, yeah, there's, you know, first-generation whether has climate control. You know, what's the market; is it rural? You know, rental rates, how is it managed; is it big enough to be managed by a management company, is big enough to be managed by a REIT? You know the security system in place regular, you know what is the rental rate history; has it been spiking, population spiking in the market? You know the path of progress, you know all those things so.   It's not only where it is today and where it's been but also the upside in it as well. And what we have seen James is these things perform, you know, we put still more blinders on in self-storage than we do with apartments or some of the other asset classes when we look at as a performing asset. Let's look at the underlying you know, where we're going to take it, it doesn't have to be beautiful.   You know, we can get these Class B facilities that are operating very, very well and traded a cap rate that is closer to the class a facility is more of the institutional-grade just because it's so predictable. And you know, we know what's going to happen in the marketplace and if it's a high barrier to entry, it's going to be a, you know, solid investment that we can hang our head on without too many variables.   We have in an apartment, housing, you know, dental offices, mobile home parks, there's always going to be something that's going to be bright and shiny, nicer and people want to live there or they want to 'office' out of the nicer places. And so you'll see the, you know, first-generation or older generation get affected by that. Self-storage, it's largely excluded from that phenomenon.   James:  Got it. Well, awesome, Scott. So why don't you tell our audience how to get hold of you and your education platforms, of course.   Scott:  Yell really loud right now. selfstorageinvesting.com is the way to get in touch with me. And there are lots of free resources on the industry if you're looking to get into it or just learn more about it on the passive end. You know that is the best place and the best resource to start.   James:  Okay, awesome. Well, thanks for coming on to the show.   Scott:  My pleasure James.   James:  You are the only guy I think, yeah, you're the only one who has talked about self-storage in this show. And I like to focus on a lot of asset classes even though we have a lot more multifamily, really like talking about the different asset classes, how is your return? Because I believe as I said, you know, there's potential in all asset classes as long as you find the right operator in that asset class who is the best class in that asset class. So, thanks for coming in.   Scott:  My pleasure, James. Thank you.

James: Hi audience and listeners, this is James Kandasamy from Achieve Wealth through Value at Real Estate Investing podcasts, where we bring in a high quality commercial real estate operator to be interviewed. Last week we had Todd [00:19unclear] from Midwestern States. He's killing it in that area where he focuses a lot on buying multifamily in that area. And imagine he started buying Mobile Home Park and ski resorts and later on ended up in multifamily; so you want to check out that episode. This week we have Joseph Bramante from TRIAC real estate partners who are based out of Houston and they buy deals in Corpus Christi, Houston and Victoria. And Joseph owns and controls almost 600 units on his own and it's another 300 to 400 units as a fee manage. Hey Joseph, welcome to the show.  Joseph:       Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for having me. James:        So very happy to have you here and thanks for coming on the show. I want to go deep into what are the deals type that you're buying and can you give a brief introduction on when did you get started and the sequence of purchases that lead up to current 600 units and another three, 400 fee managed properties?  Joseph:       Yeah. So I got my start in 2011 I bought a 26 unit apartment complex. I was still working in corporate America. I was an engineer for Exxon at the time working overseas. I actually lived in Papua, New Guinea when I got my start. So we were living in a compound in Papua, New Guinea. Had more money than any 24 year old should have. And got the bright idea to buy multifamily and there's more to the story, but to keep it short, we decided to buy apartment complex and we found the property, bought it and did basically almost everything wrong that you could do on your first acquisition. And we spent the next three years fire learning how heavy value add multifamily works. The one good thing we did on my first deal was he bought it in a great location. It's really close to the Galleria and over a three year period, we lease the whole property down, did a $30,000 per unit renovation and at least it back up and doubled the rents, which my mentors at the time were telling me, sell the property, take a loss, you are not qualified to do this. And for the most part they were correct. But nonetheless we did it. We got double all of our money back over 200% returns. And obviously the mentors didn't really like that so much when I didn't take her advice and not only did it lose money, but doubled my money. And then that was kind of my flag in the sand to the rest of; I was at Parva, I joined a real estate group at that time between purchasing and selling, purchasing and refinancing that property, still own it today. And use that success and that track record as small as it was to raise capital and buy more value ideals. And over the next four years, we bought almost a deal per year. Sold one deal and was really just kind of laying the foundation for our owner management stuff. Because owner manager is really, [03:44unclear] is really involved and I know people would try to make it sound like it's really simple. And I see these guys that are growing these massive portfolios almost overnight. But there's a lot of foundation work that you have to build in order to really even grow that. I mean, there's a big difference between going from a hundred units to a thousand units and you look at the amount of managers and staff you've got to have just to run that back office. So for us, we've been just kind of going slow and methodical up until about 2016. And then at that point I formed my company Triarc. It was consistent of myself and my two partners, Carrie and Debra. These two ladies were, they have 30 years of prime manager experience each and they were the backbone to all of the properties that we had purchased prior. They were key in that lease down and lease up and the success of that first property. And really kind of taught me from a property management perspective what I can and cannot do with the property. And the good thing is that you hear everybody buying local.  So we're local and you're local in Austin, so I'm sure you see this all the time. You get these out of town buyers coming in and they're buying properties that everybody else who's local has passed on for a reason; and I'm sure the data might seem great, but there's a reason that nobody local is buying that property because they know that outside of the data there's the whole cultural and just what is that sub-market that will take years to turn. But anyway, they've helped me avoid a lot of pitfalls and most, like all the properties we bought except for one, which we've sold have been phenomenal properties. So anyway, 2016, my company, we merged together formed Triarc and then in 2019, just last year in January, we'd made the decision because we have all this expertise in property to go ahead and start growing the fee management. Because in 2016 we merged, they were a standalone property management company. They had over 2000 units and they had started as part of the merger process, started letting go a clients and we're going mostly owner managed. But then in 2019 as I mentioned, we decided, you know what, maybe that's the wrong path. Let's grow the fee managers, let's grow both from both ends and so just in the last 12...for an owner this month, and we took over another one in Lufkin last month. So we've had tremendous growth. We've got 250 units on the fee manage side that we're taking over. So we've decided we're going to grow the fee managed side and that way we've got plenty of fee income coming in and we're not going to be rushed on the owner management side. Because the worst thing you can do and you know, this is to have financial; it costs money to run a company and to have those financial constraints force you into buying a deal that maybe you don't want to buy or probably shouldn't be pressured into buying. But for us, on the fee managed side that's where as allowing us to grow Triarch exponentially faster and you're always going to be able to grow fee managed companies a lot faster than owner managed. James:        We're going very deep into that. But I want to get back to your beginning part itself. I mean, you gave us a lot of information here, so I want to really dissect it one by one. So you're originally from Papua, New Guinea? Joseph:       No, no, no, no, no, not from Papua. I was working in Papua, New Guinea. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, Google, Papua, New Guinea. You would know, it's an awesome place. You know, I lived there for two years working in a compound and it was basically like living inside of a national geographic magazine. Like everything you'd see in those magazines I saw; I saw people in tribal outfits and I saw bows and arrows and I saw tribal wars between one tribe and another. I saw some pretty nasty stuff as well. It's pretty gruesome stuff, but nonetheless it was a heck of an experience and certainly learned a lot as well working for Exxon. James:        Yeah. Oh, working for Exxon. Okay, good. Yeah, I mean, well I come from Malaysia, so I know near Borneo and I've been to Borneo and it's a lot of beautiful forests. Joseph:       My business manager was from Malaysia.  James:        Oh cool. Joseph:       Yeah, yeah. James:        Yeah. All that oil producing countries. So let me get into the timing of your start and the market that you started, right. You started in Houston. I believe even when I started in 2013 with one of my single family; Houston was like the top market. Right? I mean much, much better than Dallas. Right. I mean, right now it talks about Dallas and Austin, but at that time Houston was like the top market for past few years. And how was the situation when you're buying your first deal? I mean so you were working full time as an engineer in Exxon and then how did you make that transition to, Hey, let's buy multifamily. I know you said you had an investment club that you learned some things, but how was your mindset shift from being an employee to now I want to be into a real estate investor. Joseph:       Actually first, so I'm going to get to that question. But first though, so I told you I had a big announcement so I want to go and get the big announcement before, if that's okay because I know this story I'm about to tell you like the back of my hand, I've given it a couple of hundred times. But the big announcement for us, everybody knows, so we track real estate partners. It's actually two companies. It’s Triarc properties, which is our owner management side and Triarc Living, which is our fee management side. And then  effective today we're launching a third company, Triarc Construction which is going to be our renovation side of the business; as we're going to talk about, we've been pretty heavy on the value add side, we're pretty good at this. Right now we've got a 40,000 per unit renovation underway, which is just a monster renovation. And part of what we feel is missing in the market, especially when it comes to the construction side, is a kind of turnkey approach to multifamily renovation. You've got a lot of these operators who can see rightly so that there needs to be at renovation, some value add improvement. But they don't fully understand how to, I mean, aside from the physical calculation of what it's going to cost, they don't understand the execution side of, okay, I've calculated what it's going to cost, but there's this whole other side of, okay, now I've got to implement and execute it. And how do I do that? And so what we offer as far as a service from the construction side is not only can we build it for you and we can do the renovation but we're able to tie that with our management company. And so you've got a seamless communication between the team that's managing the property and a team that's renovating it so that you have the highest probability chance of a successful at your value add.  Because I've seen; my first deal, we lost $80,000 on the carried interest alone because we execute it poorly and yet we still made over 200% returns. So we were successful in spite of ourselves. But on deals these days that are so tight, you really have to have very good communication between the operating team and the renovating team. And those days and weeks that go in between your meetings, assuming that you're having them, can really make a big difference; if something is missed and if you don't have a more seamless communication it can really cost you a lot of money as far as the innovation. Triarch construction is strictly veered for the Houston market for now. So if anybody is out there doing renovations, definitely get in touch with us. So we're definitely excited to be rolling that and offering that service. So anyway, there's my big news.  James:        Oh, awesome. Thanks for the news. So let's get back to the question on 2011. Joseph:       So the big adjustment for me now, part of the backstory for me is I was working overseas and the best thing that ever happened to me was getting laid off from my job at Exxon and like six months after buying that first property because, well there's a saying that I've heard and we both know that the guy that came from, Mr. Del Walmsley, I'll give him credit where credit is due, but he used to tell me this thing that said what gets in the way of a good life is a great life. And I had had a really good life. And so I had this property that it wasn't really been paying attention to because my monthly income was huge. And so I just wasn't giving attention to it; anyway, lost that income. And so suddenly I started really paying attention to that complex and it wasn't doing so hot. So I took about six months off and all I did was I joined a real estate group, Lifestyles Unlimited, we can say good things or you can say bad things. But nonetheless I joined them and they did help me get over. They were a great, I would say stepping stone. I don't want to, I'm not endorsing anybody to join them now or I'm not saying don't join them. I'm just saying for me they were a good stepping stone. At the time, 2011 they didn't have all these podcasts, I had books and what got me to get into the industry was, since you asked, I just read books. I read six books and the first book I read were just contrasting single family versus multifamily. And the thesis of the book or the summary was single-family is great percentage wise will always kick ass compared to multifamily, but volume wise it's not there. So if you have the money, go straight to multifamily. I had the money, I went straight to multifamily. A couple more books, I read one on analysis and basically just self-taught myself Real estate or multifamily. Plus I'm an engineer by trade. I was managing about a billion dollars in costs for Exxon. So I was pretty good at this numbers thing. So I felt, and I was also 25, 24, 25. So I had little bit of a ego to me. I thought I was invincible. So I went and bought that first property, it was me and a friend; we went 50/50 on the deal. So how I got introduced, read books, got into it. And then what I realized was that I was like a master at the 30,000 foot level because I've read these books, but when you get down to the day to day of what's going on, I mean those books they didn't tell me how to do a due diligence, and I'm sure maybe there's books now that'll teach you. And I know for sure there's podcasts, there are so many resources now compared to when I got started. That, I mean you just, I feel like people these days, investors now have such a huge advantage to getting in the market but the only advantage that we had in 2011 was the housing crash had just happened. We were buying stuff, bought my first one at $25,000 a door, which is another reason why everybody thought that [15:52unclear] thousand per door renovation was crazy because I was spending more on the rehab that I did on the purchase price. Just imagine that and now it's worth over 130,000 a door. So it worked out well for me, but that's how I got in and then I actually didn't go right away. Nobody goes full real estate, you don't go 100% into multifamily on your first deal. As far as like, being able to sustain yourself especially for me, I was a high income earner and that's the hardest thing to replace a high income with multifamily, takes a long time versus and I'm not saying this to be insulting at all, so please, but if you're starting from a lower income, it's a lot easier to replace that lower income versus if you already have a good, strong six figure salary, that's going to be harder to replace that on a regular basis that you can depend on in multifamily, you got to buy a couple of deals.  And so what I do, I worked; I had a day job just like everybody else. I had to support myself for about another year bought two more deals and then refinanced the first. And then finally I had enough at least on the; when I refinanced and got double my money back from the first deal. Plus I had some residual ongoing cash flow from two deals that we just bought. That's when I made the decision, go ahead and exit, go full time because I had a pretty big reserve built up and I felt comfortable and we're on a good track. We're above...But I know some people are buying faster and slower. That's was just how we did it. James:        But even when you started, you started the deep value add, where deals that you had to put in $30,000 a door, $40,000 a door.  Joseph:       I don't want to pretend like, it wasn't intentional when I bought that first deal, it was supposed to be a three [17:54inaudible]. So that was the other side of the story.  James:        And also what was it you said? It was supposed to be three thousand? Joseph:       Three thousand, three zero, zero, zero.  James:        And then it went to 30,000? Joseph:       30,000. So I missed the mark by just a little bit there. That was my first deal... James:        Thanks for being honest because I think that's very important for... Joseph:       Absolutely. I think... James:        Because there's a huge chance of you making mistakes, no matter, you know, you have a mentor, no matter you have a club behind you can still make a mistake. Right?  Joseph:       The thing that worries me with everything, with the SCC 506C and all these, and making it so easy to raise money publicly as you got so many people were trying to fake the funk, so to speak, which is fine if you're applying for a job and you're trying to make your resume sound like you did more than you did, but here you're raising money. That's people's money that you could potentially lose. And that's not cool. And so I think with us, like we're very honest and say, yeah, I screwed up the first couple, the first deal and we were off on my third deal that we sold for almost a 200% return; I projected a 300% return. So I learned a lot in the way. It's very hard to get the connections right. And multifamily and you know this, because you're a CCIM. Multifamily is one of the hardest classes of real estate to underwrite, harder than office, harder than retail. Because you've got so many tenants [19:24unclear] parts. That's you should really do it and do it well. It's challenging. James:        Yeah. I think what you're saying is it's hard to underwrite and after that, execute the business plan based on the underwriting. Right? So... Joseph:       Yeah, oh yeah.  James:        But I want to really go into this. How did we have so much data between 3000 and 30,000 because I think it's a good learning that someone else can take in? So let's go deep into that. How did you think it was 3000 and how did it become $30,000 per door? Joseph:       Because our broker, I think he's retired right now. James:        He's safe now then. Joseph:       I don't want to call his name out. But anyway he was a crazy, crazy guy. Had like nine cats and was posting cat. He was literally posting cat, it was a weird thing. But anyway, on his broker memorandum said 3000 per door. So we're like, oh he would know he's a broker. Why would he lie to us? And I don't think he lied to us. I mean I don't think any broker lies to you. I think they just don't know. And so we put 3000 a door. We're living in Papua, New Guinea. We're 24 years old. What do we know? James:        Okay, got it. So you're bought it from out of country then, sight unseen? Joseph:       Sight unseen, I didn't see the property until two months after I owned it. James:        So you probably had too much money to put into this kind of deal without seeing it. Okay. I mean it's okay.  Joseph:       I bought that property like somebody would buy a rental house. It wasn't, I just knew. And the reason I bought it was because all my managers, all they talked about was like, oh, just either they did some vacation, they bought some hot stock or they bought real estate. So I wanted to kind of show them up and be like, I bought an apartment complex. James:        So, and how many units was that Joseph?  Joseph:       26 units.    James:        26 units. Okay.  Joseph:       25,000 a door.  James:        So how did you, 25,000 a door in 2011, which I think probably a market rate at that time in Houston, if I'm not mistaken. Joseph:       If I had a time machine I'd go back, things you don't know. Like who would have thought prices would have escalated this fast. And that's the other thing that worries me. Like since we're talking about us being honest with what's going on, I'd say equal parts of my success have been from underwriting and from just riding the market, they say a rising tide raises all ships. We've been on just the most phenomenal bull run of the real estate market as the cap rates have been getting compressed more and more. But now you're starting to see them kind of plateau. And so now if you want to get returns, you truly need to generate those returns through a proper execution of the investment. You're not going to be able to bank on cap rate compression when you exit five years from now, if anything you've got cap rate expansion, it's fighting against you. That makes it really hard to get returns these days. James:        Yeah. So coming back to this 3000 to $30,000 difference, so once you landed in Houston and you visited the property, is that when you realized that the cost is a lot or you just [22:33unclear]? Joseph:       No. So the realization, here's when the realization happened, we were four units into the rehab on 26 units. That puts us at like 85%... James:        And you had a third party property management company? Joseph:       My third party property manager, again, I'm bringing behind the ears. I don't know what I'm doing. I hired a single family property manager who was making his first attempt at multifamily on our deal. So we had the blind leading the blind. He didn't know what the heck he was doing. He was a bit kind of a conflict of interest because he kept trying to push his own construction company to do the rehab, which was a luxury construction company that did single family which was anyway, so he's doing this rehab, he is the property manager and the construction manager for what we're going on. Because again we're still living in Papua, New Guinea. So by the time I come back and realize what's going on, we're four units completely down to the studs. And then we are doing our AC permit because you got to do a permit to install ACs. And as part of that, oh actually no, I don't know if you needed to, anyway, he was trying to do everything by the book, which I'm not saying don't do it by the book, do it by the book. But obviously you want to try and save money if you can. So he was doing everything by the book. We did a permit. Part of that permit was environmental, which any real estate syndicator now knows you get an environmental, it's just a check the box thing. It wasn't for us, it wasn't required in our closing, we never did environmental, so it came, we did the environmental came back hot for asbestos. It's funny because it was basically like 30 days. We got notified the property had asbestos. I lost my job. And then in addition to that, the insurance that we had purchased was fraudulent insurance. So we didn't actually have insurance. So yeah, I was in a pretty bad spot.  And then that's when I joined the real estate group and met my partners and the solution to that situation, which is a kind of a rare situation. Well not rare, but sometimes you come into these situations where you can just throw money at the problem to fix it. And so that's what we did. We just, we're like, look, if we sell the property now that we know that it has asbestos and we're four units down, that we can't touch and bring them back online. So I'd have to sell it at 85% occupied. I'm going to take a loss. So I can either take a loss or I can roll the dice, do this massive 30,000 per year renovation because the neighbors behind me, the house values behind us were over almost a million bucks. So we were in a very affluent area. So we rolled the dice and I had my 401k from after my job at Exxon and cashed the whole thing out when all in on that deal. And did a lot of praying. We knew at that time though, I felt a lot more confident with what we were doing. We knew the numbers, we knew the market, it was just now, I was learning a lot on execution with everything that needs to happen for a major renovation. We're now doing our third major renovation where you're doing almost down to the studs and backups. So it's, yeah, I learned a lot on the first one. Second we did a phenomenal job. And this third one, we're just knocking it out of the park. James:        Got it. Well it's very interesting that the experience you went through on the first one, I'm sure it stuck with you on the next few deals because now you know you shouldn't do certain things. You must do certain process and checklist and make sure that you go to; was that a normal bank loan? Because you know, usually the [26:36unclear]? Joseph:       Man you're asking all kinds of great questions. Our bank was internet bank of USA. James:        Internet Bank of USA, I haven't heard about that. Joseph:       Yeah, we thought they were a joke bank. We're like, is this one of these scams? Because coincidentally there was a group called ABC Funding that was based out of London that was trying to get us to wire them money so they would, it's kind of like these Nigerian Prince things, very convincing. We almost did it. But we finally figured out they were a fraud. But you know, there's a lot of, you know, it's so easy to lose money in real estate. Everybody is trying to rip you off. So... James:        No, but who gave you the funding? I know there's some group out of London trying to get you money, but finally, who gave you the funding? Joseph:       We bought the property with Bank of Internet USA, which is also part of the story here. They had, banks annually will request what is your occupancy, your financials, what is your personal financials? And I just gotten the letter from them like a week before we closed on our refinance to pay them out and start a construction job. Because if we hadn't taken the actions we did at exactly the time we did, they would have known that your guarantor is unemployed with no income, your property is negative cash flowing and you've got asbestos and they probably would try to foreclose on me. Like we were like that close to being in a pickle. But anyway, the bank that did the refi and the rehab for us was a local bank. They're no longer around. They're called First Victoria. They were purchased by Prosperity Bank. James:        Got it. Got it. Wow. All the things that can go wrong went wrong in that deal I guess. Joseph:       Yeah, and that's why I see these guys that are trying to buy deals out of state, these heavy value add deals. And I'm like, it's, it's a lot of work. Like you've got to be there like the one we're doing right now, I was just there this morning. Like you've got to be there on a, if not every week, twice a week, just to keep tabs of what's going on. Especially in the beginning because in the beginning when you're doing your test units and you're trying to see how you want everything it gets pretty crazy. Because that's when you're still setting, you can set things on paper, but then you go from, okay, you've set your budgets too alright, let's actually get in there and tear the wall down. Let's see what's in there. Find any change orders; so we just closed on a 220 units last September. We purchased it for about 75 a door, 4.8 cap rate going in and we're spending almost 40,000 a unit on the rehab and we're going to exit at about an eight cap. So it's a short term deal, about four years in and out through this rehab, increased the rents about $450. James:        So how did you come up with the $40,000 rehab? That seems to be huge. Joseph:       $40,000?   James:        Yeah.  Joseph:       Yeah. Well for us, this deal was pretty simple in regards to coming up with the scope. Part of the challenge on a lot of deals is, okay, where am I going to spend the money to upgrade so that you're not overspending and you're not being wasteful and just spending money in an area doesn't do anything for the value. Because it's very easy to do that. You can buy all new doors on something doesn't mean you can increase the rent $100. So for us there was the neighboring property that had been renovated, it was just finishing its renovation. And they did the exact same thing. The building was identical; it's the same architect and everything. They were near identical twins. So it was like, when we sent our GC there. We said, okay, do that, copy that. So he went through, he came up with a scope to do that and that's how we came up with about $40,000 a year. James:        So $40,000 is including the exterior, I guess, right?  Joseph:       What's that? James:        It's including the exterior renovations?  Joseph:       Interior. Exterior. So high level, we've done all new roofs, replacing about half the ACs, all the windows, which is very expensive. All new plumbing. Also very expensive. Adding washer and dryers, gutting the kitchens, all new kitchens, all new appliances, all new floors. We are redoing the floor plan and the kitchen to add the washer and dryer. So we're knocking down, we've knocked down a wall, made the bedroom bigger. So we've completely changed the floor plan of about 50% of the units. We've got, because those are the ones we're in. Now when we get to the other 50% we'll see what we're going to do to those units. What else are we doing? James:        So yeah, that makes a lot more sense because you are doing growth. We are doing, changing the floor plan as well, right? So that makes a lot of sense. Joseph:       Redoing the office, we're actually also building two additional units. They got this giant, one of the properties, it's three properties, it's a portfolio of three and they're all in the same street. One of the three, it used to be unofficially used as a senior living. And so it had this warehouse type building that was a used I guess as the recreation room slash cafeteria. And now it's just vacant. It's just sitting there vacant. So we're going to, at the completion of our project, the last thing we're going to do is go into that building and gut it and create two units out of it from nothing. So that's going to be expensive addition about 50,000 per unit just for those.  James:        And what kind of financing are you doing on this? Is it like a [32:35unclear]?   Joseph:       So we've got bridge debt on it. We use a group called LaSalle; I think they're out of California, great group. They've been really good to us, so yeah.  James:        Got it. Yeah, that's like a huge change, $40,000 a door. So you need to be really skilled in controlling expense and making sure you get the value that you want. Joseph:       We've proven the up side already because again, the neighboring property, we actually, when we did our proforma, our rents we budget them at $100 below theirs. So just to be on the safe side and even that was a 2.2 equity, multiple 23% IRR. So if we actually hit their rents, it's going to be even higher than that. So it's going to be a very, very good project. So we had a lot of confidence going into it that we know the rehab, we know the scope and we know the rents. So then truly it's, we just kind of make sure we execute this amazingly. And we were off to a great start. Sorry I had to interrupt you. We were off to a great start, but then you never know what's going to happen. And so for us, on a morning and then by that evening, I don't know if you recall, Houston got this massive rain, it wasn't a hurricane, but it was a really heavy rain and anybody who's in the Houston area knows that it has an issue with flooding. So this property first of all, luckily we closed it, we put flood insurance on it. It didn't have it before, but we'd put it on just in case because it's Houston and you never know. I've had properties that are in a flood zone that didn't flood for Harvey and I've had ones that are not in a flood zone, that have got almost flooded. So anyway, we just go ahead and we put flood insurance on most properties we buy these days. We did on that one by the afternoon of when we closed, 22 units had about it inch to two inches of water in them on one of our properties. So we had to rip the sheet rock up to the studs, oh sorry, up 18 inches, vacate 22 units. So right out of the gate, you know, we had this plan, okay; we're going to start the rehab on January one. We're going to spend the next couple of months getting everything in order. We weren't able to do that. So in September when we closed, I think the 19th, the next day we're working on relocating [34:58unclear] help them out with their belongings and then stripping down the units. So the good news of all that, we did get a claim out of it. We've got paid really well on those units, so those units will actually be profitable right out of the gate, extra contingency so to speak. James:        So let's say, I mean out of this $40,000 per door, a budget that you have for this latest deal. Let's say your budget got cut into half, $20,000 a door, right? For this 220 units deal, what would you prioritize in terms of value add? I'm trying to find out what is the most valuable value add that you want to do to at least come back to [35:44unclear] Joseph:       So part of the reason why it was so expensive is that we had so many items that we're deferred with a lot of deferred maintenance. And the problem with deferred maintenance is it doesn't, there's no value there. You're resident, like there's no value and residents are not going to pay you because the roof is new. They should but they're not going to. So for us we had, I don't have the figures, but off the top of my head, I know like the roof was about a thousand a unit. Actually, hold on, let me pull up. I know the plumbing was about 5,000 a unit. And plumbing people will say, oh, there's no value in plumbing. And that's why nobody ever does it. But there is value, if you want somebody to move out quickly then put them in a unit that has very low water pressure and I can almost guarantee they're not going to renew their lease because if they can't take a shower in the morning, it could be the most beautiful unit that they ever seen. But if they can't take a shower in the morning, they're not going to renew. So for the roofs, yeah, we were like 850 a unit on the roots and so we had all these different items that made up that. So that property, I couldn't truly tell you, if I only had $20,000, I wouldn't have bought, I only had 20,000 per unit. I wouldn't have bought the property. James:        So let's say you already buy it and now you are stuck with it. Now you have $20,000... Joseph:       The only way that that property works at that price, is you go big, you got to do a massive renovation. Otherwise I would've had to pay $20,000 less per unit to make it work.  James:        Okay. Interesting. And what about the interior unit rehab? What are the rehab that usually prioritize to get the highest rent bump? Joseph:       So for the interior, let me think, kitchens are big, kitchens sell and we were actually playing around with this one. We're trying to do a combination of like a, I don't know if you've seen convection microwave ovens because we've got some efficiency units. And so we've got like six of them that instead of putting a full appliance set that we're going to go and put just a microwave convention oven, so that two burner stove just a two burner glass top deal. And then the fridge and now that'll be it. They won't have any oven; they'll just have that microwave that also has convection. And so that's what we're playing with there. But I guess, I think again, kitchens are huge, having really good fixtures and a good design. And so everything flows. We've got a professional designer that we're using for the whole thing. We're not doing any of it or ourselves and having all of that kind of flow and have a good look to it as well. So I think if you spend money on the kitchens, you'll be okay because that's where they're at a lot of the time. People spend a lot of time in the kitchen. And then bathrooms as well. So we're doing all new bathrooms, new tile surrounds, and new tubs. And then also for us, one that's going to really hold you back on the money is really tried to do add washer and dryers, especially when you're going to these new units. And for us, like if you don't have the space like we have 650 square feet on most of these one bedrooms we're doing and what we're doing is a stackable front loader. Front loaders are more expensive. Yes. But we're appealing to a higher profile. Our rents are hold on; I'll tell you what the price per square foot is on them. They are $1.70, so we're getting crazy high rents. And so part of our pitch is appliances. We've got really nice appliances as well. And that includes the washer and dryer. We're not giving them some cheap, front some cheap top loader with the agitator in the middle of that destroys your clothes; people like to have nice appliances. So I think make sure you get washer and dryer and if you don't have space, just be aware that you can stack front loader on top of each other and it takes up next to nothing. James:        Got it. So your strategy is to really spend a lot of money per door and get the highest maximum rent that you can. Joseph:       It's not really a strategy. I mean, it's just a skill set that we know how to do; it's just like knowing what techniques you need to apply on a certain property given the scenario in order to make it successful. If I could have had a 200% return and spent much less then I would have spent much less. I'm not recommending that everybody go and spend $40,000 a unit on every property. I think that's, I was telling our new partner on the construction side, we may never see a $40,000 per unit property again. I mean, I never thought I'd see a $30,000 per unit and that's been the case. Most of our deals have been $10,000 per unit and less. I would say because there's so much education out there from like people like yourself and who owners know now that they can resurface the counters, they can redo the floors, they can do a lot of this. And so it's very rare that you're going to pick up a property that's untouched. And that was part of the story on this one. It was untouched, which it really shouldn't have been considering who the previous owner was. It really should have been previously renovated. But that's another story. James:        Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean I've done like $10,000 per unit, per door renovation. And I thought that was a lot because we had like a stainless steel, we had crown molding. We had exterior, interior painting. Really like all, I mean not a new roof, but everything else was changed. It looks really, really nice and I just can't imagine $40,000. Joseph:       You find value in the crown molding? James:        Not anymore. I think in the beginning we had the budget, we really liked the way it looks, but I don't think it's really catered for. Joseph:       Yeah, we don't do it. One of the things we're doing here that's again, it's expensive, but we're scraping off the popcorn ceiling. So you've got smooth ceilings. It's the modern look. We're also going with black windows, we had $150,000 change order because we went from when we went from white vinyl windows to black, now we can all agree that material wise there was zero additional costs that that vendor incurred. Other than that, they're now black and black is more trendy now and popular. So now they increased the price 150 grand. But we installed several of them now and they look amazing. James:        I have never seen a black window.  Joseph:       Ah, super cool.  James:        You must be a new trendsetter. So I need to come and visit your property. Joseph:       When you drive by the property you look, you can't help but notice. I feel like vinyl windows, the white ones, they're nice. And if that's what you can afford, great. But it's going to date your property to an older style. And you know, with what we were doing, it's all about style. And so we had to kind of go the extra mile and be the coolest kind of hip property. We've rebranded the whole thing. It was Candlelight. Now it's called the Melrose. I go in for this kind of South beach kind of, not South beach. What do you call it? The California kind of beach, Laguna Beach kind of theme. So it's going to be really cool. Palm Springs. James:        And what is the price difference between the black and the white? Joseph:       It was about 150 grand across 220 units. James:        Okay. Okay. Do you know like price per window difference? Joseph:       Not off the top of my head. James:        Okay. Okay. That's fine. That's fine. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean I that's something new that I've never seen Joseph:       Because it's going to depend on some units have more windows than others, but I can just average it. You just do one 150 over 220 units wherever that comes out to. James:        Okay. Joseph why don't you tell our audience how to get hold of you and your company? Joseph:       Yes. So the best way is just shoot an email to info@triarcrep, T. R. I. A. R. C. R. E. P, dot com. They can also call us my direct line (281) 836-4181. Those are the best kind of ways to get in touch with them. You can also check out our website triarchrep.com, or we just moved into our first office space, which is a good feeling, a good milestone for anybody when they are growing their company. We just moved into 3,500 square feet. So we're here in Houston, we're at 290 and mangoma that intersection. So if you're an area, shoot me an email, I'd love to meet with you and we can show you our team and show you some of our properties. James:        Awesome. Awesome. Thanks for coming on the show. You added a lot of value in terms of deep value and renovations, one of the things that you guys are doing, and this is really the value, the one you guys are doing. And I just love the value add because you make a lot of money if you execute it right, and if you turn it around.  Joseph:       You can lose a lot of money too if you do it wrong.  James:        That's what I'm saying, if you execute it right, right. You need a really strong operator. To really manage the expenses, the contractor management, the turnaround process, the rent increase. That's a lot more steps than buying the cookie cutter value add deals. Right?  Joseph:       Yeah. It's not like, yeah, because most cookie cutter dealers you can manage just with your operations team turning units when as they come available. I mean, we actually have a full blown schedule for this thing that we got developed, so it's, yeah, it's a major project. Reminds me of, it gives me flashbacks of working for Exxon. We're building that project; we're approaching it with the same mentality, the same project management heavy approach.  James:        Got it. Got it. Got it. Well, thanks for coming on and I'm, you know, talk to you soon.  Joseph:       Alright. See you James. Bye.

– Karen Ng Do we mention suicide? Do we use that word? And there was a lot of reluctance. My mom's gut reaction was no. How could we tell people that she took her own life? You know how. How shameful. You know, what would people think? And it would it would. It has implications for the family that somehow it was their fault because she killed herself. And why would she do that? She comes from a good family. She had more than most people in this world and must have something to do with her family.   INTRO   Suicide is complicated and tragic.  It is intensely personal, specific to an individual.  How suicide is experienced and interpreted also differs between communities and cultures.  Today, we are going to talk to Karen.  Karen is Chinese American.  Since her sister, Karine, committed suicide two years ago, Karen has been on her own journey with grief and loss…and she feels a particular passion to speak to the stigma around mental health among Chinese Americans.  I learned so much in this episode and I am confident you will also.      This episode is on the air thanks to the sponsorship of FullStack PEO.  FullStack helps emerging companies manage their payroll and benefits.  Working with FullStack gives you peace of mind that your people are being taken care of as you grow your company.  We are also sponsored by Handle with Care Consulting.  Disruption catches managers off guard, unsure of what to do or say to help their people.  Handle with Care Consulting delivers interactive workshops that empower your people to give support when it matters most.    Karen lives in Los Angeles.  She is a recreational runner, an activity that she took up during her divorce proceedings as a sort of therapy.  She also lives with lupus, an auto-immune disease.     - Liesel Mertes Now, you're a person that has been involved in a couple of causes that are close to your heart. Tell us a little bit about some of the charitable work that you've been involved in.   - Karen Ng I started a program, a nationwide program for Lupus Support and education in New York back in 2000 and 2002. It's the first of it was the first of its kind. And it addressed the need for support and education to patients and their families of Asian-American descent who lack the kind of knowledge about how to live with a disease, a chronic disease.   Before moving to LA, she was working for the non-profit sector in New York where she worked with the Coalition of Asian American Children and Families as well as Apex, which provides mentoring for underserved youth.  This led to a public Health Degree and the launch of Cartwheel Initiative, which brought artists to Sri Lanka.  She also launched the Orphans Future Alliance, which funds orphanages in Vietnam.   - Liesel Mertes So one of the things that you wanted to discuss on the podcast was talking about your family and specifically your sister. Could you tell us a little bit more about your family, about their ethnic background, where you fit in the birth order set that?   - Karen Ng Yes, we are a Chinese-American family. My parents came over from Hong Kong when they were younger. And I am one of three sisters.  I'm the oldest. And then there's Klara and then there's Karinee. So there's Karen, Klara and Karine. We all start with the letter K, so. You can kind of see how we were made fun of when we have the three Ks.   - Liesel Mertes Yes. And were you shaped powerfully by being the oldest sister, I'm the oldest of four. And I feel like I. I feel like the oldest almost all the time.   - Karen Ng Definitely. I mean, in Chinese culture, the oldest is, is called judges and judges. Oh. Is always known to kind of take care of her siblings, right? I mean, I needed to be an example for my, my younger sister,   Karine was the youngest sister.  And Karen tells how all of the sisters were different, choosing different instruments to study and languages to learn.  And Karine had a particular flair.    - Karen Ng So she was the kind of creative artist of the family. She was just talented in so many ways. She went to New York City to pursue a career in fashion. She graduated from Parsons School of Design. She loved animals. She was the kind of saved they ran, attains a la moon, bear save the planet kind of girl. And she was a devoted mom to her. Her shiatzu was named Chewy, and she even created and launched her own business. Inspired by Chewy, it was called Central Park Pups, and it was a pet clothing company with a patent to design. She called the hit harness, so she was so full of energy. She loved themed events. She would go to the Renaissance Fair every year, get a group of people to go and dress in costume. She or Halloween was her favorite holiday. She loved parties and costumes and events to kind of show off her creative genius.   - Karen Ng She was a bargain hunter fashionista. She was incredibly resourceful. She could design centerpieces and create special effects for any occasion. She was feisty, gregarious, silly and clever. So, she was just a ball of energy.   The sisters lived in New York together for a while, their lives overlapping quite a bit.    - Karen Ng Family is the most important. Like you can you always you know, you can depend on your family. Family is the most important. So we always grew up with that kind of mentality.   – Liesel Mertes You know, for your younger sister, when did you become aware of any mental health issues that she had?   - Karen Ng So the two years or so before she died, we knew that she was troubled and depressed, she had she had been going through a lot. She had a sudden divorce. And that's why she moved to Las Vegas to start, start fresh, start anew. And she was going through a lot. Relationship wise with an abusive boyfriend. And professionally starting a new business venture with the same person. So, things were complicated and things weren't going well for her. She grew increasingly distant by not responding to texts or emails as often. Whereas before she would, just she's constantly on a phone. She's always texting. So that was different. And she had extreme mood swings. She'd lash out to suddenly the family members in public, like yelling at my mom or insulting me. And she was increasingly hostile. So, we knew that she was struggling. She would call me in tears and tell me how upset she was. I'd listen to her vent. I sent her encouragement cards and books.   - Karen Ng And we, we knew she needed help. So she, she agreed to see a therapist, but she refused, absolutely refused to take any medications. So, and this was partly, partly because my mom was very strongly against any medications for mental health conditions. And I think it relates to the misconceptions around mental health. And she was highly vocal against it. She thought it changed the person and it was highly detrimental. So she was very adamant. You do not take any medications. And so Karine was influenced and also felt the same way.   - Liesel Mertes How is that for you in support role? Did you feel like that was a good conclusion? Tell me more about it.   - Karen Ng Because if she if she would if there was something that could help her. Both my sister Klara and I knew that she might need medications to help control her, her and her mood swings. Her. Her. What was happening to her. And we were very, we found we couldn't we couldn't convince either my mom or Karine to consider that possibility.   MUSICAL TRANSITION   - Karen Ng There are three kind of brief scenes that flashed through my mind when I think about, you know, the moment or the time when I found out what happened. And these scenes get in my mind there. They're hazy on the details, but try to kind of describe the three dreams.   - Karen Ng So that day, I was on the treadmill at the gym in the middle of the day. And I you know, I normally don't interrupt my workout when I get a phone call. But I thought it was my, I saw was my mom. So I'd started pick up and she asked me if I had been able to reach Karine because she was really worried. I hadn't. But I promised her that I'd leave the gym and work on finding her. So I called my other sister, Klara, and we tried texting and calling her, but there was no response.   - Karen Ng So then the next scene in my mind is me walking back home from the gym. And I get a call from my sister Klara, who said Karine had attempted suicide. Her ex-boyfriend had found her and he had called the ambulance and they were taking her to the hospital.   - Karen Ng So immediately obvious, it was obvious that my sister and I would have to go to Vegas to see her see her in the hospital. We knew it was a serious situation, but we didn't know how serious. And I even joked that I'd, I'd punish her when I went to see her.   - Karen Ng  And then the third scene. The last scene is when I'm at home and I'm taking a shower and I'm anxious and annoyed that I have to suddenly drive to Vegas from L.A., and I get another call. And I pick up even with the shower running and Klara tells me that Karine didn't make it. And I'm like, what do you mean she didn't make it? You know, we're going to the hospital to see her now. You know, that doesn't make sense. So I did not believe her. I did not accept it. I know. I must've hung up and I was screaming in the shower. This isn't happening. I kept repeating it. This isn't happening. This isn't happening. I was yelling at the top of my lungs. I didn't care, you know, who was the apartments kind of small. So, you can kind of hear through the walls. But I was dreaming water spraying all over and I kept screaming the same three words as I was throwing things into my bag.   - Karen Ng And I said, this isn't happening. This is not happening. And as if, you know, my words could transform the reality into a dream. Because I didn't think this was happening. So what was the immediate recollection of what happened.   - Liesel Mertes  I'm so sorry. That's. This is horrible news to receive. You know about your sister. And as, as much as there are those, those three scenes of the immediate. Then there's all of the logistics and communicating with family.   - Liesel Mertes Did your mom, with her particular feelings about medication or about mental health? Was there a particular way in which she received the news of her daughter's suicide? Because it sounds like maybe there, there was some reticence or shame issues around mental health that I imagine someone's death could only magnify those in some ways that the.   - Karen Ng At first, they didn't really think of it as a mental health or issue. They thought of it as a problem. It's like a puzzle that needed to be solved. Something happened that caused her to do what she did. So, they kept replaying the details of finding out what happened that day, in the days before about what argument she got into with, you know, the ex-boyfriend didn't.   MUSICAL TRANSITION   - Karen Ng I think what is a little more relevant is the way she decided to take her own life. She actually had thought it through. And it wasn't a spur of the moment decision. She. I had learned how to connect the tailpipe or the, the way you connect to the car so that, you know, you know, you have carbon monoxide poisoning in the car. So. She had figured out a way to do it, had planned to park the car outside of a different, different house where there was no. No video, security cameras and so there were elements, there were things that suggested she had planned to do this. Even though the kind of haphazard, less like note that she scribbled off on pieces, the scratch paper, her last goodbyes were, were very brief and in wouldn't I wouldn't even call it a suicide note.   – Liesel Mertes I mean, I'm imagining you are a grieving sister. You're also the, the oldest daughter in your sibling. You know, order. And as you alluded to, the certain expectations with being the oldest, you are also the daughter to grieving parents. What kinds of things were you finding were being asked of you emotionally in that immediate aftermath? What sort of roles were you playing?   - Karen Ng When you ask that, first thing I think of is, it is being asked, well, why didn't you know? You know, how could you not know? You're the older sister. So didn't she? Didn't she tell you it was wrong? So, of course that wasn't very helpful because that me meant I failed her. And I wasn't there to. Your help her. Through her troubles. That's a hard question they have to carry. It was it wasn't a question those directly asked by people. It was more I mean, mostly my mom. Right, so I don't think, I don't think people would be that insensitive to imply you.   - Liesel Mertes Yeah, well, that brings us to something that we've discussed of the particularities of suicide within the Asian-American community. What, what were you feeling that your broader community was communicating to you, to your parents about what it meant to walk through suicide as a family?   - Karen Ng So immediately after this happened, we had to decide whether or not to disclose, you know, cause of death. In writing her obituary and kind of sharing the news, do we mention suicide? Do we use that word? And there was a lot of reluctance. My mom's gut reaction was no. How could we tell people that she took her own life? You know how. How shameful. You know, what would people think? And it would it would. It has implications for the family that somehow it was their fault because she killed herself. And why would she do that? She comes from a good family. She had more than most people in this world and must have something to do with her family. So, it took a lot of convincing to persuade my mom that being truthful about the situation was the way we needed to go. We had to face the truth and not hide.   - Karen Ng And I was so proud of my dad when he stood up at the memorial service in front of the entire crowd of family and friends and, and said that Karine died by suicide. And confronting it in your head on. You know, I I did not expect that. And suicide is just not talked about.   - Liesel Mertes I imagine that could feel profoundly lonely.   - Karen Ng And seeing a therapist, like I said, is is a sign of weakness. And there's a lack of, there there's a lack of actual culturally competent mental health services. So, when I was looking for a therapist, I really wanted someone who understood my background, you know. There's so many cultural nuances, language wise and behavior wise, that it would just take too much time to explain to a non-Asian therapists. You know, they just wouldn't get it. So, you know, it was it took me it I tried to find a, an Asian therapist, and it wasn't it wasn't that easy.   - Liesel Mertes How about within your your friends and family? Did you feel like they had language or meaningful gestures to come alongside you in a way that mattered? Like, what were they doing? Were they bringing food or they send a note?   - Karen Ng So one of the most helpful things that someone did for us in the aftermath was do a meal delivery service. I think that was a complete lifesaver. She set up a meal train where people could contribute to help pay for a meal delivery service. So every, every night or every, you know, all our dinners were, were, you know, already set up for us and not having to decide and prepare what to eat every day was so helpful. Because, you know, you have no appetite and we just eat what was put in front of us. And that was important because we needed to eat.   - Liesel Mertes Any other things that people did that felt important?   - Karen Ng Yes. Another helpful thing was somebody was a kind of like a point person to serve as the information deliver, you know, via Facebook. He, he shared the details of the memorial and other other, other helpful things, so that took the burden off of us.   - Karen Ng So it gave us our space to, to mourn and concentrate only on the relevant details of what we needed to do for the service and not to interact with, you know, so many other concerned people.   - Liesel Mertes Yeah, in the midst of that, was there anything that people said or did that even if they weren't meaning, it felt really hurtful?   - Karen Ng Well, everyone everything that was said was met well-meaning, but may not have been received that way, for example. When there's a couple phrases that really, really irked me. One was she's in a better place and no, she's not. She's dead. I just kept think issues in no place. And I don't want her there. I want her here. So that was not helpful. Yeah. And then the other one was. Everything happens for a reason. No, there's absolutely no reason why my sister is dead. Yeah.   - Liesel Mertes What are some of the things for someone who has not had a relative commit suicide that make that first year particularly hard?   - Karen Ng It's hard to even just open up the conversation about suicide. It's hard to, I have to explain what happened or will have to decide how much to share and, and in meeting new people who, who didn't know are it's also. How do you share? You know, when people ask about your family, you know, how many siblings do you have? Well, what do you say? So that was that does the hardest part in the first year. I, I struggled with whether to say, oh, I have well, I have one sister or I have two sisters. And now I, you know, I have come to the point where, I mean, I'm proud to say that I had I had two sisters, I have two sisters because I've always had two sisters my entire life. You know, I can't negate the fact that she's, she's been a part of my life for 38 years. So, I have two sisters. One of them is no longer here.   - Liesel Mertes Yeah, if what you say is one of the most common misconceptions that people have about suicide, if you you could say of only people like grasped this part of what it is to have someone commit suicide.   - Karen Ng That only people with severe mental illnesses die by suicide. Because Karine was a highly functioning, accomplished businesswoman who was a property manager, she was a property manager, a businesswoman, house fixer, upper, she. She was, you know, very productive, socially functioning adult. And she was not diagnosed with any mental illness. So, that's not a requirement. Yeah. And I know that.   - Liesel Mertes Speaking about suicide, particularly as it relates to the Asian-American community, is important to you. What would you say? And you've talked a little bit around this, but what are some of the particularly harmful assumptions within the Asian-American community about suicide? And this is, this is a.. Is it actually. When I say Asian-American, is that like too broad, too? Is it meaningful to you to talk about Chinese American? Like I'm suddenly struck that that might be the equivalent of saying to someone who's black, like, tell me about an African perspective. And then like, I'm Ghanaian, I'm not African. So, I submit that to you. Is that like an appropriate term to talk about Asian-American or?   - Karen Ng I think that it's distinct. There's a is a big distinction between Asian and Asian-American. So, yes, better to say Asian-American because ah, our experiences and, and our culture is different from being saying Asian. But you're right that it is kind of generalizing all the different ethnicity.   - Liesel Mertes Forgive me for that. I would like to speak more accurately.   - Karen Ng I mean, I. I can always speak to my Chinese. Yeah. Experience. But. Let me ask you that.   - Liesel Mertes Thank you. Thank you for your graciousness in that. As I said, I am on my own learning curve about caring well, about different nuances within that. So, thank you for your kindness and even answering about Asian-Americans. Let me ask you, what are the particular challenges within a Chinese-American community of around suicide if you think like this is a really harmful assumption that this community has?   - Karen Ng Well, I think even the word in Chinese for what mental illness is? The word is some *Chinese word*. Even that has negative implications because if you break it down, some *Chinese word* means crazy and illnesses and *Chinese word* is illness. So it's some *Chinese word*, crazy illness and some *Chinese word*. *Chinese word* means mental hospital. So it's like crazy hospital. It's like the loony bin. The, the you know, the place where a mentally deranged people go. So, it's so stigmatizing. That it prevents people, you know, from seeking help or anything to anything to do with mental illness. Kind of. In general is this no shrinking back response or. Oh, no. It's recoiling when even hearing the word no. So that that is very harmful.   - Liesel Mertes What word of insight would you give to someone who is perhaps listening and they have just recently lost someone? Specifically, if they're from a Chinese American community.   - Karen Ng Well, I would encourage them to find and speak to someone who's had the same experience or going through the same thing to. To know that they're not alone. They don't have to be going through this alone, that there are other people that this happens to other people. And defined the, you know, to find that community that. That is going to help their healing. It doesn't have to be in the Chinese community.   - Liesel Mertes Yeah. And if someone is listening and they and they think, oh, I have, you know, I've got a coworker or a friend or a family member and they're going through something similar. And I, I want to be a good friend. What should I do? I feel really awkward and I don't know what to do. What words of insight would you offer to them?   - Karen Ng Insight would. Inside would probably be that. A person's sense of time is going to be completely warped and they're going to be very just completely distracted. So, expect them to be unfocused. And if in the workplace of view, if you're only given some straightforward directions or one project at a time. That's, that's preferable because, you know, probably just concentrating on existing. And, maybe you'd be aware be. Be sensitive to, to what you're saying. In just in a general context, because I remember being hypersensitive to certain conversations, you know, just overhearing people, you know, talking about their their, their weekends about, you know, going out and partying and getting wasted and, and doing all these, you know. People's activities are just it just completely tick me off. Yeah, we start to hear things in a different light. So.   - Karen Ng So just to be sensitive. How to maybe how to help someone who's going through the same thing it would have been would have been helpful for me to know what kind of resources are out there. If someone had actually done the research and looked at local support groups or events or, or therapists, it would have made it easier for me to find that support earlier.   - Liesel Mertes Yeah. Yeah. This great point that it's, it's such additional work in the midst of grieving to have to go through the logistics and do the research on. Are there are other things that you would like to add about your story or about holding it within your community that you feel you didn't get to give voice to?   - Karen Ng The idea. I need to convey is positive mental health is critical to physical health. And I've learned that. Clearly with my lupus, because one of the triggers of lupus is stress, so we're constantly encouraged to minimize stress because it can cause inflammation.   - Karen Ng And so, the mind body connection is so powerful and, and with and also with lupus, lupus, it can be invisible. So, meaning you can look fine with the help of a little makeup maybe. And there can be but there can be inflammation in your body. So, with grief as well, you can look fine and go about doing your business, but there can be great pain happening inside.   MUSICAL TRANSITION   Here are three key take-aways after my conversation with Karen…   Our community helps to shape our reality.Karen talked about the particular challenges within a Chinese-American community:  the reluctance to seek help for depression or mental illness, the pressure to be strong.  What kind of a culture are you a part of when it comes to grief and loss?  Is it an open one that allows space for those that struggle?  Or is it one that forces people to bury their struggles?  How can you be part of co-creating a more life-affirming culture? In the aftermath of a suicide, loved ones can be unfocused and adrift.Karen talked about the importance of getting very straightforward directions, taking one project at a time.  For managers or coworkers, be aware of this element of distraction and adjust your workflow accordingly.  Perhaps this means streamlining tasks and having more regular check-ins in those first few months. There is great power and importance to listening to the experience of people that come from a background or context that is different than your own, especially if you are part of a majority culture.You will not immediately resonate with or understand their perspective…in translating cultures or navigating grief, you will most-likely make mistakes along the way.  If you make a mistake, like I did in referring to Asian-Americans instead of Chinese Americans, accept correction, apologize, and try to modify your perspective moving forwards.   Thanks again to our sponsor, FullStack PEO, the forward-thinking benefits company that serves emerging companies and to Handle with Care Consulting, training your staff to be Workplace First Responders.   OUTRO    

How does a marketer charged with helping tech companies and the blockchain industry simplify messaging and help his clients reach their audience? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Dennis Lewis of Greenlight Digital talks about the strategies he uses to market one of the most complex and misunderstood products in existence - cryptocurrency. The lessons that Dennis has learned as a marketer and cryptopreneur can help any marketer understand how to translate industry jargon or complex products and services into language and messaging that anyone can understand. In this interview, he shares his thoughts on customer research, storytelling, and striking the right balance between technical content and simple messaging. Highlights from my conversation with Dennis include: Dennis describes himself as a marketer and cryptopreneur. He says the blockchain is a decentralized bookkeeping system located all around the world, and being maintained by literally thousands and thousands of computers working synchronized. His company, Greenlight Digital, provides marketing services for technology and blockchain companies. He got into marketing blockchain when a friend of his did an initial coin offering (ICO) and asked him for marketing help. Dennis says that all marketing needs to start with the problem that a product or service solves for the customer. Unfortunately, entrepreneurs tend to fall in love with their products, and put that before understanding the customer. Dennis's mantra is "listen, think, and do" and he says that marketers should heed those three words. One of the more impactful books he's read is The Culture Code by Clotaire Rapaille. The book talks about the three brains that every human being has: the reptilian brain, the limbic brain, and the cerebral cortex. All decisions are made by the reptilian and the limbic brains. The cerebral cortex is used to justify the decision you've already made. Marketing needs to feed the reptilian and limbic brains by forming an emotional connection, and the best way to do this is through effective storytelling. There are many ways that marketers can learn more about their customers, from doing focus groups, to researching what they are saying on online forums, or even inviting a customer to coffee. The most important thing in marketing is to assure your customer that they won't look bad or be embarrassed due to their decision to buy your product. In addition to having strong messaging, your brand needs to stand for something. That is the most effective way to differentiate from the competition. Resources from this episode: Visit the Greenlight Digital website Connect with Dennis on LinkedIn Follow Dennis on Twitter Get Dennis's book Behold the Cryptopreneurs Visit the Cryptopreneurs Club Listen to the podcast to learn more about simplifying the messaging for complex products and services, and how, if done right, it can help you get better marketing results. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth and this week my guest is Dennis Lewis, who is a cryptopreneur and blockchain marketing specialist with Greenlight Digital. Welcome Dennis. Dennis Lewis (Guest): Hey Kathleen. Thank you for having me on. Dennis and Kathleen recording this episode. Kathleen: Yeah, I'm excited to have you on because I'm actually weirdly fascinated with cryptocurrency and the blockchain, but I think maybe not everyone is quite as nerdily interested in that as I am, so maybe you could just start by explaining what a cryptopreneur is. I don't know if I'm going to try to have you explain what the blockchain is because that might be biting off more than we can chew, but give my guests a sense of what it is you're working on. What is a cryptopreneur? Dennis: Sure. So, I mean, let's go ahead and try and bite off a little bit here at least so that we can give everybody kind of something to wrap their heads around. The blockchain isn't really all that complicated as it may seem. Like most technology sectors, the people in the industry tend to really kind of dive into all of the plumbing and the complications of it. Sure, we could certainly throw out a whole bunch of weird sounding words to make it sound complicated, but it's really just a bookkeeping system. It's just a way of keeping track of transactions that is decentralized. It's all around the world being maintained by literally thousands and thousands of computers working synchronized, but you know, no single point of failure. That's in a nutshell what a block chain is. It is a decentralized bookkeeping system. Kathleen: That is a great explanation and it totally ties in to what we're going to talk about today, which is a big challenge I think a lot of marketers have, particularly in these more technical industries, and that is simplifying the complex. About Dennis Lewis and Greenlight Digital Kathleen: Now before we do that, maybe you could talk a little bit about your journey. How did you wind up doing this, and what is Greenlight Digital? Dennis: Okay, sure. Well, it's funny, like all great things in life, I got into this industry just by accident. It wasn't a planned event. It wasn't enormously prepared either. A friend of mine called me up one day and said, "Hey, we're going to do this thing called an ICO where we're going to try and raise some money. We don't know anything about marketing. Can you help us?" And I knew absolutely nothing about cryptocurrency at the time or blockchain and I didn't even know what an ICO was, And like the brave soul that I am, I just rolled up my sleeves and said, "sure, let's do it." That's where the journey began with blockchain. Rolling back farther, because there's some gray hairs on my head, a long time ago I worked for IBM. I spent my whole career sort of trying to make things that most people think are complicated, make them easy to understand. And I realized that that isn't a skill that is very common. A lot of people are really good at making simple things complicated, but going the other way around it seems to be less frequent. That's why I'm excited today to talk to you about making the complex simple. As far as Greenlight Digital, that's my company. We are a boutique marketing agency. We do everything from content marketing, to social media, to working with companies on their branding and their messaging, full suite sort of marketing, mostly for tech companies and blockchain companies, although we do work with some traditional companies as well just to kind of keep us on our toes. That's pretty much what I do. I like to tell stories. Kathleen: I love it. And you really, I think, hit the nail on the head with marketing, which is that a lot of us, especially trained marketers, and this is so interesting to me, that tend to make things more complicated than they need to be. A lot of marketers really, really struggle with boiling things down and expressing the value of that thing they're trying to market in a way that is simple and easy for the audience to understand. So, this is one of the reasons I was so excited to talk to you, because if you can do it in blockchain, I feel like you could do it in anything. Dennis: You're probably right there. You know, it's funny, but in our industry, marketing is so hooked recently on all of the plumbing, all of the technical part of marketing, which is awesome and it's interesting and it is important, but I always tell my customers, it all boils down to the words on the page. If you're not making a connection with the right person, if you're not saying the right thing to the right person, you can have all the bells and whistles that you want, it's not going to work. I'll take a step back and I'll go back. I remember that when I was back in the day at IBM, I remember going to conferences with big companies that IBM, they had, they were always doing the best, and there were always 50 presentations and they were always about the new version of product X, Y, Z, and these are the new features and these are the new... This is what makes this one better than it was before. And you could look out in the audience and see people dozing away. They were literally, I think it was the best cure for insomnia that's ever been invented, it's just send them to a tech conference and they'll sleep like babies. It really got me thinking, and I guess that's sort of where all this came, the problem is that it all boils down to what problem you're solving. If you're not making something better for somebody, then your features and your benefits and your whistles and your bells and your shiny stuff, it just is irrelevant. I mean, people just don't care. You always start with the problem. You have to start with the problem, and if you don't you'll go wrong. People just won't, they'll tune out. There's so much information out there right now. Gosh, I mean, how much time do you spend staring at Google Chrome every day? You know? And how many people are competing for that time of your eyeballs? And they're smart people, right? They're there, they're good at it. And if you want to kind of get your fair share of those moments of those eyeballs, you really have to be interesting. It has to be engaging in that. It has to be, and it has to talk to that problem because otherwise, what's in it for me? Kathleen: Yeah. Now, I totally agree with you, but I feel like that's much more easily said than done. Simplifying the messaging for complex topics Kathleen: So when you think about this challenge of simplifying the complex, and let's use the stuff you're working on now with cryptocurrency and blockchain, if you're working with a new client or something, how do you tackle that? Where do you begin with that process of trying to make it simpler and easier for an audience to understand? Dennis: Sure. So one of the things I've learned is that entrepreneurs always fall in love with their products. They fall in love with what they're doing. And that's great. That's normal. It's kind of what you have to do if you're going to build something. But I always tell them, "Look, you've got to fall in love with your customer first. You've got to put yourself in their shoes." Who are you serving? Who is the person on the other side and why would they care about what you're doing? Because if you think it's going to be everybody out there is going to fall in love with your product because you have, you're mistaken. They just don't care about your product. And I mean, they'll gladly give you money if you can make the pain go away, but if you can't make the pain go away, they couldn't care less how many hours, how many people, how much sophisticated technology you throw into the basket. That's your problem, that's not theirs. I always start there. I always say, "Look, you've got to focus on the person on the other side. It's always got to be about how you're making their lives better." And that could be by delivering a pizza quicker or it could be curing cancer. It's not necessarily that problems have to be big or they can be small, it's, they have to be real. They have to be something that somebody cares about and because otherwise, why are we doing this? As a marketer, and I know you've undoubtedly come across this as well, people frown on us. They think we're manipulators, they think we're tricking people into buying stuff when it should be all completely the other way around. If you've got a product that makes things better for your client, you'd be doing them a disservice not to tell them, not to try and get them to use it, not to try and get them to have access to that solution, you'd be a bad person. Kathleen: It is sort of depressing because I have seen stats that say that people, when they rank how much they trust different types of people, I think marketers ranked down there with used car salesman for how much people trust us, which is really depressing. I would like to think that we're not quite in that category, but maybe I'm underestimating the value of used car salesman. I don't know. Dennis: You got to be at the bottom of the list. Kathleen: Right. Exactly. No, you hit on something that I really agree with that and feel quite strongly about, which is that a lot of times when people talk about marketing, they talk about trying to sell things to people and I really think that marketers are more successful when they have this mindset shift and they think of it as, we need to help people to buy as opposed to try and sell them something. We are helping them to purchase something and we're doing it because that thing genuinely solves a problem for them. I think if you can shift your mindset in that way, it produces much better marketing. Understanding your customer's pain Kathleen: So you talked about needing to understand the pain that the customer is experiencing. How do you do that? Dennis: Well, I guess that the only way to do that, is like every human being does it, is by being empathetic, it's by listening. On all my emails, I always start with, I was in the same three words and it's kind of been my slogan for years and years and years and it's, "listen, think and do." The order of the three words is very important, it always starts with listening, and that's a lesson I learned from my grandma and I could tell you a good story about how I learned that lesson. Kathleen: I'm now very curious. Is it a quick one? Can we hear it? Dennis: It's not too long, sure. My grandma was an amazing woman, she died at 101 years old and she was smart as a whip. Up until the very end, she was winning at bridge. I remember being a little boy, and I was always a talkative little boy, and I remember she sat me down in the kitchen one day, she put this mirror in my hand. She said, "Dennis, look in this mirror and tell me what you see." I said, "Grandma, it's me. I am in the mirror." And she says, "Yeah, but tell me something specific. How many mouths do you see in that mirror?" I said, "Well, I've only got one mouth." And she said, "Now how many ears do you have?" I said, "Well, there's two ears Grandma, of course." And she said, "Well God made you that way on purpose." Kathleen: I love it. Way to go grandma. Dennis: Yeah. So yeah, it's all about listening. It's all about putting yourself in the shoes of the person. And sometimes that's easier said than done, but the way I see it is, there was a really a great book, it was called The Culture Code, by this French person, Clotaire Rapaille, I don't know, I can't even pronounce his name, but really good book, the Culture Code. In the book he talks about the three brains that every human being has. There's a reptilian brain, a limbic brain, and then there's the cerebral cortex, the brain, that kind of gray mass that we all think about when we say "Brains." In the book he says that all decisions are made by the reptilian and the limbic brains. The cerebral cortex is used to justify the decision you've already made. So kind of like when you're going to go buy a car, you're going to buy the car that you want. You're going to buy the car that you secretly know that you just want that car, but you're going to sit down and you're going to study it. You're going to look at a kazillion different factors so that you can feel justified that that's the car you're going to buy. But pretty much you've already figured it out, which car you're going to buy beforehand. He talks about that in the book. And so, you've got to have an emotional connection with your audience. You have to, it can't just be, "We're faster. We're more sophisticated. We do this better. We give you a better ROI. We give you..." All that is great. You need to do that in your marketing as well because you do need to feed that cerebral brain, but you've got to make the sale down deep. You've got to grab a bit, that's why great marketing always tells great stories. Kathleen: So you start by listening, I'm assuming, when you say that, you mean listening to customers or prospective customers, is that correct? Dennis: Yeah, that's right. And that could just be go out and read, go to the forums, look at how they talk, look at what they're talking about. It doesn't have to be super sophisticated. You don't have to have spend millions doing focus groups and all that stuff, which is great I'm sure. If you've got lots of resources, go ahead and do that, there's no doubt that that's a good idea. But there's a lot of ways, we have so much information now. Sit down and have a coffee with somebody that's in your target audience and try to figure out what motivates them. Why would they be interested in something that you do? Most of the time the motivations are often completely different from the answers. You have to read between the lines. If you're selling in a corporate B2B market, you know it. One of the most important things that you have to do is make sure that people understand that they're not going to look bad by buying your product. That they're not going to be embarrassed. Their boss isn't going to get mad at them later or say, "Look at what a bad decision you made." And those are objections that are real and they're emotional and that's a big part of B2B sales is developing that security for your customer. And those are the kinds of things you've got to listen to. Turning customer research into messaging Kathleen: Yeah. So if you've done this, if you've sat down and listened to customers and you understand some of the pain they're feeling, some of the problems they're trying to solve, how do you then take that and make it actionable? Dennis: I always take notes, because usually the words that your customers use are the words you ought to be thinking about using, and then you can get creative about it. But don't, don't try to be, you know, you never want to make it. Yeah, you don't want to, you don't want to fill your head with too much stuff, but make it simple. Try to spell out that pain and then say, "Hey, and I make it go away by doing this." And when you do that, people, if they have the pain, they'll listen. And if they don't, that's okay too. Part of it is just being willing to hear "no." Go for the no. I mean, I'd much rather have a conversation with somebody who comes out and says, "Nope, I don't need this." I think that's great. That's good. I mean, a no is much better than a maybe. How Dennis markets crypto Kathleen: In a technically complex industry like crypto, let's actually use some examples. You've done marketing in this industry, what have you learned as far as what the pain is or the problem is and how have you translated that into a more simplistic way of communicating about it? Dennis: We talked a little bit about the blockchain being a bookkeeping system and when I talk to people about in the industry they come and they say, "Oh, but our blockchain is faster, it's got a more sophisticated consensus algorithm. It uses better cryptography, it's more secure." And all of this stuff. And I say, "Yeah, but why don't we talk to them about how you can use it for healthcare. Why don't we talk to the users about how you can use it to make democracy better? Why don't we talk to them about how you can use it to make social media where you're not the product instead of what it is now where we're the product being sold? Okay?" These are ways of making the technology relevant, making it personal. Of course, I want the blockchain that where, the solution to be robust and fast and better than all the rest. That's great, and you'll get to that point, but that's not how you lead the conversation, because nobody's interested in that really. I mean, that should be a given, right? I remember Warren Buffet once said that, "The only problem with technology is that pretty soon everybody in the room, all your competitors have the same technology as you." He's really good at metaphors. He said, "At the beginning you stand up on your chair and you're the tallest person in the room, and then everybody else starts standing on the chair so you've got to go find a ladder." Kathleen: That's a great metaphor. I love it. Dennis: I always try to tell customers, you have to frame it in things that are important to the people that are listening. So sure, if I'm going to be talking to investors, well of course I want to appeal to their desire to pick the winner. It's maybe not a spreadsheet of, this is going to be a 13.8% ROI compared to a 10.4, right? I mean, come on, that's silly. But if you're talking to a VC company, what do they do? They're looking for the unicorns. They're looking for the projects that have the best possibility to shine, so talk about that, go there. If you're going to talk about if your product is really good at making micropayments, well talk about how this could be used in Africa to improve the lives of people in Africa. Make it something that people could visualize, that they can see, that they can feel. Because that's where you get people engaged. Tell a story. I really believe in stories as stories are really the the oldest part of humanity is telling stories. Yeah. When you sit down with somebody, it doesn't matter how hardheaded they are. If you look them in the eyes and say, "Look, I want to tell you a story." You can just watch people's defenses drop down, because everybody loves stories. So figure out a way to put your product into a story. Kathleen: That's a great suggestion. And I like that you, I mean I think you've been very clear and the top line messaging needs to lead with the benefits, not the features of the product or the outcomes that the audience will experience or the use cases. My experience has been that, that that is very effective and especially in grabbing attention. And then at some point in the sale there does come a moment when that buyer may want more technical information, or someone on their team may want more technical information. Dennis: Oh, definitely. Balancing the simple and the complex Kathleen: How do you handle that in terms of the way you do marketing? When is the time and the place for conveying the technical specs, if you will, versus that simplistic top line messaging? How do you strike that balance? Because I think you can also be too simple and frustrate your audience if they're not getting their questions answered when they're at that evaluation stage. So I'd love to know how you think about that. Dennis: That's great. I wish I had a golden rule. I'm almost tempted to just ask you, because you probably know a lot more than me. Kathleen: Don't bet on it. Dennis: My experience over a long time in this, and it's just that, it's not anything, it's not data-driven really, it's just gut feeling, is that most of the time we dig into the details too soon. That doesn't mean that you can just not dig into the details. There is a time, but you want to know that your customer really wants it before you give it to them. I think that's the deal because otherwise, how many times have you sent a beautiful proposal with 30 pages of, you've sweated all the details, and it ends in somebody's inbox and then crickets, right? You don't hear anything back. You've given them probably too many excuses to not buy from you. So, I don't know, there's a dance there. I wish there were a one size fits all solutions, but my gut is, is that people will get the information, that's part of having publishing content and making sure it's out there. People don't talk to us very soon anymore. It used to be that you would go out and you'd take customers out for lunch and that's where you'd start the process, right? Nowadays it's completely the other way around. When somebody actually comes to have a conversation with you, they've probably done an awful lot of research about it anyway. They probably know more about you than even you realize. Kathleen: Yeah, absolutely. I know, I've always thought about that question of like, when do you share technical information? I've always liked the approach that events and conferences take when they sell you on the notion that you need to be at the conference, and then they have the convince your boss letter, where they just acknowledge. They're just right up front and they say, "We know you need to convince your boss to spend the money, so here's a letter you can just hand to them, customize it for yourself and go." And it's a very kind of explicit acknowledgement of the dynamic that happens in the purchasing process, and I've always liked the idea of translating that and taking the convince your boss approach and applying it in other ways. So for example, I've worked with a lot of cybersecurity companies on their marketing and that dynamic exists in that industry too, where you have your less technical buyer, it could be risk officer, it could be somebody at a senior level in the organization who knows they need to keep it secure and they're concerned more from sort of a boardroom level that, "We're a secure company. We're not going to be at risk." But at some point in the buying process, some sort of analyst that's lower than them in the hierarchy of the company is going to be called in and asked to vet the product, and I've always liked the idea of having a convince your analyst packet where it's like, "Just hand this to your analyst. This is everything they need." Dennis: That's a really great strategy. I like that. Kathleen: Being that up front about it. I don't know, I mean I don't have enough proof to know that it works, but it seems to work in the conference and events world, so that's why I've always been intrigued. Dennis: But I think that comes back to what we were talking about at the beginning, the, what's the problem you're solving there? The problem you're solving for your buyer, who's your champion inside that organization is, they want to look good inside. They want to look good with their boss. They don't want to be called out because they missed something that was a glaring error and they want to feel that they'll be respected and their credibility will increase because of making this deal with you. What you're doing is you're making it easier for them to do that. You're saying, "Yeah, look, I understand." You know, you're not going to go up to somebody and say, "Hey, I'm going to help you not get fired by buying my product." But you've got to have that in your head right there. That's what they're thinking. You know, am I going to is this going to help me get my year end bonus? Is it going to make me look good? Am I going to get the next promotion because I did a good job on X, Y or Z? And by keeping those human aspects in mind and having that preparation where you can say, "Okay, yeah, I know you're going to need to, this is going to have to be bedded here. I've got this whole planned out for you." Show that you've really done your homework to get the vetting materials together. And then I've always thought that making other people look good is a really great strategy, not just for selling, it's just a good strategy in life. Kathleen: Yeah, make your customer the hero. Absolutely. Dennis: Yeah, definitely. Companies that have done a great job of simplifying their messaging Kathleen: Well, do you have any examples of companies that you think do this really well? And they could be crypto companies or they could be other types of companies. I'm just curious, like, if somebody wanted to go out into the internet, and I'm springing this question on you right now, so for anyone listening, he has not had a chance to think about this in advance, but I'm just curious like when you think of companies that are really great at simplifying the complex, are there any that spring to mind? Dennis: A lot that spring to mind that aren't great, but I'm not going to go down that way. Gosh, it's a tough question. But there are companies that... It was a company that I remember we're using a software that it's a project management software and I remember that really did a pretty good job of explaining and putting the content out in a way that, I believe it was called that LaSeon I they do JIRA and stuff like that, so that kind of comes to the back of my head, but now it's been a long time so I don't know, maybe they've moved on and they do it really poorly now. Kathleen: Well, I was going to say the one example that I think of immediately, and it's funny because I always ask people on this podcast, is there a company or an individual who's really doing inbound marketing well right now, and the answer I get most commonly is Drift. I'm not sure if you're familiar with them? Dennis: Yep, mm-hmm (affirmative). Kathleen: Yeah, they're actually a company that I think does this really well. And Dave Gerhardt who has been their VP of marketing who's actually leaving, or by the time this airs will have left Drift to go somewhere else, really brilliantly did this. Because I'll never forget, I went to their conference, HYPERGROWTH, it was like either last year or a year and a half ago, something like that. What they did that was so smart was they boiled everything they do down into one word and it's fundamentally like a chat bot, live chat tool. They're now introducing other features. But you know, you could talk about this in terms of chat, right? But instead they boiled everything they do down to one word, which was "now," and they talked about how, as customers, we want our information now, we don't want to have to wait. If we have a question, we want the answer now. And really that's sort of the essence of what chat bots and live chat solve for. And I just thought it was brilliant. And somebody asked this question the other day, if you had to boil what you do down into one word, what would that one word be? And I'm still trying to figure that out. Dennis: I'm a storyteller. That would be my word. Kathleen: It's tough, right? It's tough. Dennis: It is. Kathleen: But I think, I just thought that was interesting. So for me, that's the example that I think of when I think of a company that does a really good job of simplifying the complex. Dennis: Yeah. I mean, sure. As a marketing geek, like you probably are. I just love to, watching the TV, I always liked the commercials better than the programs. Everybody gets up and leaves in the commercials, and that's when I'm sitting there looking at them like yeah, I just love it. And especially get to Christmas and- Kathleen: Oh my God, at the Super Bowl, I watched the Super Bowl only for the commercials. Dennis: Yeah, I love the way that some of the brands tell really great stories in a 32 second, or a 60 second spot. And they tell a real story and they kind of, they can reach right in there and grab you in the gut. And I think that's what, I love watching that. That's more B2C kind of companies, but I think B2B marketing should be just as fun and just as entertaining. Kathleen: Oh, I totally agree, but it's so not in most cases. And the ones who are able to do it tend to do really, really well. Stand for something in your marketing Dennis: Yeah. Because I don't know why it is. I mean, I guess I do. I know that I see this with my clients sometimes too, they're scared. It's scary to be something that not everybody else is. And I tell my customers, "Look, you can be boring, but you have to write big checks. If you can't write big checks, you cannot be boring." Because there's no other way there. You can't, you can't play it safe and shine at the same time unless you've got... If you've got the budget to pour people into your funnel nonstop and it doesn't matter, you can just keep pouring, go for it. You can be boring and you'll still make sales. But if you don't have that ability, you don't have those resources and you have to be careful, then you can't afford to be boring. You've got to be entertaining. You've got to be funny. You've got to be controversial. Kathleen: Authentic. Dennis: Authentic. Got to stand for something. And you know, hey, you, you've got to be willing to, to rub a few people the wrong way sometimes. And that's just the way it is, because otherwise, if you're too nice to everybody, you're nobody to anybody. Kathleen: And it doesn't mean... I get what you're saying, but it's interesting. I've talked to some people about this who disagree because they read it as you're being offensive or mean, and I don't think that's what this is about. I think this is just being authentically true to who you are and understanding that not everyone's going to agree with you. Dennis: Exactly. Kathleen: Instead of like, you don't need to attack anyone or name and shame or call anybody else out. It's just being true to you. Dennis: Exactly. But you know, it's being willing to be brave enough to say what you think and sometimes you even using language that is brave enough that people will understand like, "Hey, these guys, they really mean it." You can't fake it though. I mean, if you fake it, you'll get caught because have really good BS radars, right? It's easy to tell when somebody's being aggressive just to call attention to themselves, but when you know that somebody actually believes something, that's what people, they feel it. We're having this conversation about marketing, I know that people out there understand that we like this. This is fun. It's interesting. We do this for a living because we like it, because it's meaningful. I'm not ashamed of being a marketer. I like it because I think that I'm doing good. I don't take clients that I don't like, if they don't fit with who I am, then they need to find a different marketer, right? Kathleen: Oh, totally the same for me. I have to believe in not only the product I'm marketing, but the claims that I'm making as a marketer. I can't make myself do marketing if I think the claims are overinflated or BS or not true, or unsubstantial. Is that a word? Dennis: Yeah. I think it is. Kathleen: You have to be able to go to sleep at night and be happy with yourself. So I totally agree with that. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: Well, I can talk about this with you forever, but we don't have forever. So first I have two questions I always ask all my guests and I'm really curious to know what you're going to say. Earlier I talked about how one of those questions is, is there a particular company or individual that's really killing it with inbound marketing? Anyone come to mind for you? Dennis: Yeah, it's probably too simple, but HubSpot is really good at it. I mean their marketing materials are spot on. They really are good at using content to drive people to their solution. Kathleen: Yeah. And they better be because they invented the term inbound marketing, so they better be. Dennis: I guess so, right? Kathleen: And the second question is really with marketing changing so quickly, a lot of it, digital being driven by technology changes, how do you stay up to date on that changing landscape? Dennis: Oh gosh. I guess probably like everybody, you're always reading, you're always looking at stuff. I try though. I think for a long time I was suffering from the shiny penny syndrome. I would try everything new that came my way and we would test it out. I would drive my team absolutely crazy doing different stuff. I've tempered a bit that I try not to, you have to do it kind of yourself though. I learned the lesson that it really isn't that important. It's all about what you're saying and who you're saying it to. So, you know, play around, do it as best as you can, places to read. I mean, gosh, there's, there's one guy I would definitely recommend any marketers should go check out bensettle.com. Ben Settle, he's very irreverent, but he's a great marketer, a very good email marketer. You just get on his emails and listen to them. I guess that's my tip. How to connect with Dennis Kathleen: Ooh, I love that. I'm definitely going to check that out. Thank you for sharing that. Well, if someone is listening to this and they have questions or they want to learn more, is there a good way for them to connect with you online? Dennis: Sure. Dennis H. Lewis on LinkedIn, DennisHLewis on Twitter. Definitely check out my book on Amazon, Behold the Cryptopreneurs, and you can go to thecryptopreneur.club and cryptopreneurs.club and you can get the first four chapters for free. Kathleen: Oh, awesome. I love it. All right, well I will put links to all of that in the show notes, so if you're in connecting with Dennis, head to the show notes and check that out, that'll all be in there. But in the meantime, thank you Dennis. This has been great. I've really enjoyed talking with you about simplifying the complex and getting your insights on the best way to do that. Dennis: I guess the last thing to say is talk to your grandma. She probably has a good idea. You know what to do next... Kathleen: Yes. Go to the grandma's for the advice. All right, well that's it for this week. If you're listening and you learned something new, or you enjoyed this podcast, please head to Apple Podcasts and consider leaving the podcast a five star review, that is how people find us. I would really appreciate it. And if you know someone else who's doing kick ass inbound marketing work, as always, please tweet me @ workmommywork, because I would love to interview them. Thanks so much. That's it for this week.

Do you know how to leverage Social Media for Commercial Real Estate? Matthew Laborde, principal of Elifin Realty, a commercial real estate brokerage in Baton Rouge, LA, is successfully leveraging social media to create a recognizable brand and attract clients.  He worked hard and in just three years he was the 2nd largest producer in the firm! On his 27th birthday, he started his own firm, Elifin Realty.  How to Start with Social Media How do you start to use social media?  You start. When Matthew started in commercial real estate at nineteen years old, Matthew had sworn off social media.  Prior to 2018, he used social media to connect with others, and rally for a cause. He did not use social media for business.   Why use Social Media for Business? If people don’t know you are in business, how are they going to find you?  The first time you post for business is awkward. It will continue to be until you find your way.  Your goal in the beginning is to connect with people and find the people who are your fans or potential clients.   Start by connecting with others and commenting on their posts.  Get comfortable being uncomfortable. Your connections, will become your audience.  They will choose to engage with you if your post provides value for them.   Be Vulnerable Make Deeper Connections  Your audience will be compelled to pay attention if they find you are willing to be vulnerable and show more than just a highlight reel.  Matthew jumped off the vulnerable pier and into the deep end of uncomfortable when he made the decision to document his journey towards starring in a musical.  That may not sound like much unless you don’t sing, dance or act. Matthew posted pictures of him in tights, and singing in public.  To deepen his connection with his contacts and further his progression of performing in front of others, he posted a challenge for anyone, anytime to request him to sing a song in public.    What to Post Learning what to post can take time.  Just remember you are trying to connect with your contacts and provide value.  This does not have to be just information about your business. You can comment on activities in your community or comment on other people’s page if you have something that is relevant.   Matthew and Elifin utilize the different platforms to post a sample of the original post found on their website.  This is an excellent way to gain SEO ranking on your website by linking to your website utilizing your keywords. Answer questions that your customers have asked you.  Elifin has created a list of questions that clients ask, where members of the firm provide video answers.   Where to Post on Social Media How many social media platforms do you need to be on?  Matthew has limited his posting to two: Facebook and Linkedin.  If it is anything related to business, Matthew post, the post the exact same information on each Facebook & Linkedin.  Find where your clients and prospects engage on social media and post there.  Traction on Social Media How long does it take to create traction on Social Media?  When you commit to utilizing social media and you are posting regularly.   Authentic Provide value to client Keep posting Post more often You are probably thinking, “one more thing to do”, “every day”, right?  Matthew has figured out how to continue to post regularly without a lot of extra effort.   To do this, he recommends that you find a part of your day that you can create a small nugget of content you can post.  Think of the questions your clients or colleagues asked during the day and take a minute to provide an answer on video speaking to your audience.  If you read a trade journal, or something of local importance, take a minute and comment online. Over time, you will develop an identity, and people will recognize you as an expert.    Do I need to Spend Money You do NOT need to spend money to establish yourself on social media.  If you connect with others, post valuable content regularly that speaks to your audience, you do not need to spend money on ads.  Organic, original content will  BIGGEST RISK  Each week I ask my guest, “What is the Biggest Risk Real Estate Investors face?”   BIGGEST RISK: Matthew Laborde, what is the BIGGEST RISK?  Matthew: The BIGGEST RISK, so I'm going to stay on topic for this one and I'll speak to the biggest risk for business owners and agents, right. In general, especially for the, I would say the veteran agent, the more mature agent and older agent.   The older business owners not engaging in social media is a huge risk.  It's this wide open field that you might, as the veteran, you might have the capital to invest, to have to hire people to do this for you.  But if you don't believe that it can help your business, and if you don't take the time to understand it, then you're going to miss a huge opportunity and open it up for a younger generation, like myself, to come in and take market share. So I'd say that's a huge risk that you need to consider. For more go to: Facebook: Matthew Laborde Linkedin: Matthew Laborde Website: https://elifinrealty.com/

Last week, I did a short 10 minute episode on the current landscape of the influencer world and how it has recently evolved into a new marketing channel. In this episode, I interview micro influencer, Ronan O'Connor. He shares with us his passions, which are yoga, golf, and being a dad. And how his journey growing his following too close to 20,000 on Instagram by sharing all of these passions in a fun, entertaining way. He also talks about how he works with brands who ask him to share their products and services with his followers. I sought out in this episode to help you get to know Ronan so you can hear for yourself that influencers are real people and not all of them participate with brands just for the money. In our conversation, he breaks down a collaboration that he was a huge part of with multiple brands centered around a yoga event to increase exposure and engagement with males in his Boston community. It was a huge hit. The day we recorded these episodes, there was unexpectedly some extremely loud construction going on outside of my office where I normally record this podcast and I said, "I am not canceling, I'm not postponing." So I took to my closet. I had to move my Yeti mic and my computer and I guess a setting got altered so my voice doesn't sound like me as much. I don't know if you noticed, but I sure did. I didn't want you to think that I hired someone else in my place. It is me. This is episode 10, a two-part interview with @yogagolfdad, Ronan O'Connor. Hello everybody. Welcome to another episode. Thank you so much for being here today. I am excited to introduce you to Ronan O'Connor. Ronan lives in the Boston area, which is part of how we know each other from Forrester, where we worked there together years ago. He is a father, a yoga instructor, and an amateur award winning golfer. He's a five time club champion at The International, which is the longest golf course in North America. Have you ever of it? I hadn't. It's so cool. But it is a 36 hole world-class destination. So we'll hear more about that. But you'll notice immediately he's Irish. Not just from his surname, from his awesome accent. I love hearing it. Ronan has grown his Instagram following to a five figure following officially moving into the micro influencer status. Ronan, thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much, Carrie. You delighted to be on. Appreciate you having me. Good, good. So you are, but of course not limited to at all, a yoga instructor, a golfer, and a dad. I love it. How did all these cool interests begin for you? Kind of, what's your story? Yeah, no. So I mean, for me, I've always played sports right since I could walk and a lot of that was just growing up in Ireland as you mentioned. In Ireland, sports are such a big part of our culture and what we do so I played a lot of sports growing up play like rugby, football or as you call it over here, soccer and played everything, and then with golf and that, I was just getting into at a young age, golf is obviously very big there. Got into that just, actually my dad got into it later in life and I was probably eight or nine when I really got into it. And then you have to be 12 to get in as a junior member. So I did that at my dad's golf club and was just hooked every day. That was my daycare for the summer and was there pretty much every day from sunrise to sunset and yeah. And then yoga. Got into yoga, well just by chance, just a friend of mine back home in Dublin that asked me to do an eight week yoga program with him that was at the local high school when I was 15. Yeah, so did that and was really just amazed how I go in there so tired and just wrecked from rugby practice or school, from study and I come out with so much energy and just feeling amazing and being naturally on the stiffer side just from the rugby and all of that, it was just something that I really loved and then didn't continue it by any means and until much later in life. Did it sporadically at my local gyms and stuff like that, but never consistently. And then it was just so happened, before my daughter was born, moved beside a CorePower Yoga here in Boston probably three years ago now. Just over three years ago. And just got it back into the routine and was just amazed with everything that it did for me and my body and the community and just a lot of positivity that came with it. That's great. Yeah, yoga is pretty, big. And I've found, when I do it, I feel so better afterwards, but then for some reason until I really do it consistently, I don't look forward to it. But I guess that's how it is with a lot of different exercises until you start. Yeah. Because it is kind of a discipline. But then once you really get going you can improve and improve. And you're an instructor now. So can you tell us a little more about your yoga career so to speak- Yeah. And also kind of where you've taken the golf career? Yeah, of course. So for me, as I mentioned, just before my daughter was born, we moved and moved beside CorePower and was going there regularly and I just did my free week at CorePower Yoga offers a free seven days unlimited yoga to every new yogi. And so did that and just got hooked and was like this amazing because it felt like it was the best of both worlds because it was still a workout because of the heat and the sweating and you do a three to five minute core workout in the middle. So you're doing a lot of ab work. but it was still restorative, you're still stretching your body. You're still getting the mindfulness of relaxing at the end of class and just more restorative, which I think everyone needs. Especially these days with so much technology and constantly being on. So I just fell in love with it and then I wanted to learn more about it and that's how I got into the whole teacher training and did my 250 hours of teacher training, got certified and naturally just loved it. And I love being in front of people. I love helping others, I love coaching and also I like motivating people. So it was like a win-win just with teaching- Wow. Yoga in general. So yeah, it's not like you set out to be an instructor. It's just kind of evolved and it's become a huge part of your life. Yeah, yeah. No, I definitely didn't set out to be an instructor. For me, a big part of it was just learning more. I was like, "How does this work? Why do I just feel like in my zen, feel so amazing? How do I feel on top of the world during and after class?" And I wanted to learn more. And then it became more about giving back and and also there's not a lot of men in yoga. And one thing that CorePower really does a great job of is they're open to everyone, all walks of life. And then for me being a naturally stiff, bigger guy, I always felt empowered that they always give the options because at the end of the day, my body is very different than your body as an example. You may be a lot more flexible than me and whereas I might not be as flexible as you, but there's options for my body and there's options for your body and just being able to break them down. So I always tell empowered, whereas when I'd gone to other yoga studios, I never felt that way. To me, I'd have fun and I'd be laughing, but I never felt I really fit in just I couldn't do most of the poses that the teachers were asking me to do. You know what I mean? So that's the one thing that I definitely try and do in all my classes is I give everyone options to feel empowered in their bodies because I have been that body, you know what I mean? That is naturally on the more stiff side. And I know what it feels like to not be able to do certain moves. Yeah, that's not a good feeling. It's a gift to give that to people when they're there and to share the same type of lifestyle if you go regularly and choosing to make that part of your day. I remember one yoga instructor said to me once that stuck with me so much in such a good way, and I'll tell you why in a second. But she said, "Do not look to your left or your right and compare yourself to them. If you look left, right, great. But don't compare yourself to what they're doing because we're in such a comparative world." We're constantly- Yeah. Comparing ourselves. And it makes us feel bad. Yeah. And so I took that and I decided I'm going to just, painting. I've never been taught how to paint and I'm just not going to judge myself. And so I find it helps translating that. And I never would have had that if it weren't for yoga. Yeah. Not saying I'm a very good painter. Yeah. Yeah, No, I mean, but it's so true. And I talk about it myself in my classes as well, because as I mentioned, we all have very different bodies and structures and there's just, in anything, not just in yoga but in life. We all have things that we're great at and things that we're not so great at or we're not interested in and there's no right or wrong at the end of the day. And it's just feeling great in your body that you have and that you brought to your mat. And then as I experience my own practice, I notice just from showing up and taking classes on a regular basis that I was getting more flexible and then all of a sudden I could do a crow pose or pose that I couldn't do before. And it was amazing to me how it just all fits together, you know what I mean? And there's still a lot of poses, like a handstand. I can't do a handstand on my own without being assisted from another teacher or using a wall. That's just one example is because I have been very stiff upper back, thoracic spine area. So you know what I mean? It's just like anything, if you want to get it and you practice and at CorePower, as an example, there's a lot of teachers out there, just some days we're feeling tired and we don't want to do certain things. But that's another area in my classes and just in CorePower in general that they instill in us as just, it's okay if you just want to lie down or if you just want to take child's pose, you know what I mean? I it's okay that you feel tired this day. You don't have to overexert yourself and feel discomfort and just that negative feeling of not wanting to do something. And it's okay to let go. This is your 60 minutes to do you want. So I always try and make sure that I let people know and encourage people to do it. And So that's awesome. So I think a lot of people don't know, and I had never really honestly thought too much- Yeah. About it until I started following you. It's that with their golf career, how much yoga helps it and you compete in golf, right? I see you earn these huge trophies and stuff. Oh, yeah. That's so exciting. So maybe can you tell us a little bit about your golf competitions- Yeah. And kind of how yoga lends to some of your success to earn those huge trophies? Yeah. Yoga obviously is great for golf, just with the mobility and the core work. And so for me, it was a lot of my golf nowadays is local here in the Massachusetts New England area. So it's been extremely helpful and it was a natural fit just when I got into yoga is another reason why I loved it so much. Because I was never really that interested in CrossFit, as an example. I know that the competitive side of it from pushing yourself, but to me, I always tell sore and stiff and my body just felt injured. You know what I mean? Whereas the yoga, I like to free up my body and free up my mind, you know what I mean? So that's how it really helped my golf. Oh, no way. Time of 2018 I grew up playing golf with Roy Mcilroy who's a pretty famous golfer. Yeah, I don't know- Very. If your audience has heard of them. But I'm just putting his name out there. He's on the PGA tour, he's well known and while I was with him, he was up here for the Dell Technologies Championship at TPC Boston and I was just asking him, I was like, "I heard that you love going to the gym and getting a pump on before you play golf." And I was like, "Is that true?" And he was like, "Absolutely. Yeah." I mean, he said for himself, he feels very loose and likes to get stiffer and that's how he feels like he swings the best. And I was like, "Wow, I'm the complete opposite." You know what I mean? But the main thing is just feeling good. Just like why some people work out before they go to work, it's just to put your mind in a good place, releasing endorphins and you just feel in a good mood- Wow. After a good workout. And it's the exact same thing. You know what I mean? And some of my best rounds have been after I've done yoga in the morning, I can't always do, because sometimes I've early tee times and stuff. But when I have been able to get in a slower yoga class before my workout or before my golf riders, it just feels so good. You feel loose and your mind just feels, you just feel so positive. So it's something that I try and do whenever I can. And then as you mentioned in your intro, I'm at the International Golf Club in Bolton, Massachusetts. I've been there for about 10 years and I've won the club championship there. There's a lot of good people up in that club. Yeah, they even do yoga classes there now and they're doing goat yoga and that was, yeah. When I really first got into it, it was- And no one will misspell that @yogagolfdad Part of my life and it was as simple as that. It was, yeah, this is really my passion and these are my passions and just, yeah. I figured it just made sense. So you share your relationship with your adorable daughter- Sure. And your life with her as dad. It's so touching. And I know I've told you that you can drop Natalia off at my house for the weekend anytime. I'm not kidding. You come to Atlanta, you bring her and I'll take care of her. But it rolls you out as a person and it makes us feel happy and entertained quite honestly. She's just adorable. And some people purposely don't disclose their children on social media because I do believe it's a personal decision. There's no right or wrong. I'm curious how you see it and why are you open to sharing your father-daughter relationship with the world? Yeah. For me, well I love them getting her just capturing the moments and I try to be as real, as genuine and just showing people my life, you know what I mean? With my Instagram account. And yeah, I mean, you know yourself having two kids, it's something that they're just going to be kids and sometimes she'll be doing her own thing and saying- Yes. These things. And you know what I mean? I find it hilarious. You know what I mean? A lot of the stuff that I'm putting up there, I don't really overthink. I just think it's funny and we're having fun. You know what I mean? And obviously there's times when she's cranky and upset and all that. And I do respect that, you know what I mean? And as parents, sometimes we do laugh because there are times. But If I find it appropriate, I'll put it up. But for the most part, I don't overthink and I certainly know everyone has their own, it's very topical area. Some people choose not to put their kids up on social media. But for me it's not something that I'm against, and something that I think personally, I love seeing other people's kids and I find it hilarious. And just to watch them grow, even looking back at my own Instagram or with my friends Instagrams or Facebooks, seeing the kids and just being like, "Oh my God, they're growing up so fast." And for me, a lot of it, especially being in a foreign country, my life is here now in Boston and my daughter and all that, obviously. But a lot of my family and friends and all that are back home in Ireland. So just to be able to show them, this is what I'm up to and you know what I mean? This is what we're doing. So her grandparents, my parents and her auntie and uncle can see what she's up to and to see her growth, you know what I mean? And that's, I think just a part of my generation. I remember when Facebook first came out back whenever it was in 2005, 2006 and I had just started college down in South Carolina at the time. I was putting up photos of the same way. I was putting photos up of my life on Facebook because I was like- Absolutely. Oh, well this is what I'm doing as I'm in college. You know what I mean? All my friends and family are back home. That's awesome. So it's a way for me to connect with people that are not with you. You know what I mean? So it's just something that I'd been used to and it's something that I've done with my daughter. If one day she says, "Daddy no more videos." You know what I mean? If she tells me that- Oh, yeah. Then obviously I won't. But she loves it. Sometimes she'll ask me, "Daddy, take a picture. Daddy, take a picture." And I try to limit her. Obviously, I'm only putting up a tiny percentage of what we're doing and what I'm doing, you know what I mean? But there are times where she will have my phone and she'll be FaceTiming with her mom or her grandparents or whoever, you know what I mean? And then she'll be playing with the camera and she'll be fascinated by it and I don't necessarily overthink it, necessarily. Yeah. And it's all on my Instagram in particular. I love that. It's been just so much love and support. And- I always say social isn't the only way. It's one aspect of the buyer's journey, but we all know the bigger your presence is, the more people you can help and influence. But can you kind of speak to your intention behind growing your tribe? Yeah, great question. And so for me, I don't put too much thought into it. I just try and show my life and just what I'm up to and what I'm doing. I don't do it for the money, necessarily. I do have brands obviously that ask me, that reach out to me and ask me to be an influencer or send me free stuff. And I know there's some folks out there that do make good money from Instagram, but for me it's not about the money. For me, it's more just putting my life out there to the world as I mentioned earlier. And then also I use it a lot just for people here locally, whether it's my yoga students or my friends or the community. And then also just for folks in different parts of the US that I've connected with. But I used to be a little bit more regimented, but it just, for me personally, it's not how I operate. And if I'm totally honest, I noticed that I was getting way too addicted almost, to Instagram- Good for you. And a lot of these things can be very addictive- Yep. And yeah, don't get me wrong, I love Instagram and I've met so many amazing people, but I try to not get so bogged down into it because they want it to be addictive in a way. You know what I mean? Because I used to be like, "Oh I have to get my posts up." And I'd almost like stress about it. The episode that I released last week before this one- Yeah. I kind of laid the groundwork for how there used to be these huge influencers, still is, that have millions of followers. And then the micro like yourself that are above 10,000 and then now there's nano influencers that are 1,000 to 8,000, 9,000. Somewhere around there. So I'd be curious to let us know and let the audience know kind of when, in your journey, when you started getting free stuff sent to you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, for me it was a few years ago when my Instagram really started taking off. I had brands reaching out to me. And over the years, but one that sticks out for me was actually almost a year ago now, it was this time last year, they had reached out, Mindbody, not sure if you've heard of Mindbody. Yeah, so they are a CRM for the fitness industry and amazing company. And it was a girl by the name of Michelle who was the Boston manager here for Mindbody. And she had reached out to me just to help get more men using their app so you can sign up for like free fitness, free and paid classes through their app. Similar to ClassPass, if you've heard of them. And so yeah, they're looking to just get more men using in their app. And obviously I have a lot of men that follow me just from golf and with the yoga and all of that. Yeah. So that was one that with the buildup St. Patrick's day, we decided let's do a yoga event and it was a collaboration. And so we did a yoga event and then I had Proper No. Twelve whiskey. I'm not sure if you've heard of them. They are Conor McGregor's whiskey brand that he started a couple of years ago. And just being from Dublin, I was absolutely because yeah, I got them involved and because obviously men do like their whiskey. Wow. And so we made the event, it was a St. Patrick's day pregame, we called it and it was yoga, sweat, whisky. And yeah, it was a lot of fun and a lot of guys showed up. I mean, I think we had about 88 people that came- Oh, here too. To the event and there was a good 50/50 split, which is rare, especially in a yoga class, you know what I mean? It's predominantly, I would say 70%, 80% female, at least here in Boston. You know what I mean? So it was great to have more men coming out and try, there was all walks of life. There was new people to yoga and they were regulars and yeah. It was something that I was really excited about, because it's like, yeah, this is just what I'm passionate about. When a lot of the brands that have reached out to me, it's, as I mentioned, it looked like that because it was a small room so it was packed, literally, we had to move tables an all the furniture out of the room at the Revolution Hotel, it out of control. I was stressing out about it then, but we made it work and fit everyone in and yeah, it was all organically created. I just was using my Instagram to put it out there and send to everyone. Everyone's signed up, true to Mindbody app. And yeah, and I don't even know, we tried because to me it wasn't about the money, again. It was just about getting people in, getting guys, men and just people in general into yoga. I mean, I didn't want to make it all about men and so then had Lululemon involved as well. The local Lululemon here in Boston, which obviously Lululemon make clothes for men too. I wanted to attract all walks of life, not just men necessarily. You know what I mean? But yeah, to answer your question, It was all organically created and we went crazy. And then for that particular event, one of the things that I'm passionate about is connection and community. I'm being Irish, that's something that I'm naturally good at. With it be in St. Patrick's Day, it was a perfect time to be able to do. What I also did was I brought in a lot of the local teachers to the event. I brought in, I think there's five or some total. I'd say. So they were all part of getting it out to their followers too and their community and their students. You know what I mean? And so I cast a pretty big web to drive attendance and publicity for the event. Your personality. Why you chose your handle, how you've grown, you know you're really a person. You're just sharing your life and things that you're passionate about and so everybody, I just want you to know that these influencers, micro influencers, nano influencers, they're real people. And I hope people feel that. So we've run out of time, but Ronan, if you would be willing, I have so many more questions to ask that I think would really help people kind of take this to the next level. Would you be willing, I don't want to put you on the spot, but if you'd be willing I'd be able to ask the rest of the questions in another episode whenever you have time. So thank you. You're so welcome. Have a great day and we'll talk soon. Thanks for listening to the All Social Y'all podcast. For free resources and materials, head over to AllSocialY'all.com that's allsocial Y-A-L-L.com. Also, we'd love to hear from you, what subject areas would you like to hear about in future episodes? You can share that with us by dropping me a comment on our website or in Instagram @AllSocialYall.

BIGGEST RISK: Matthew Laborde, what is the BIGGEST RISK?  Matthew: The BIGGEST RISK, so I'm going to stay on topic for this one and I'll speak to the biggest risk for business owners and agents, right. In general, especially for the, I would say the veteran agent, the more mature agent and older agent.   The older business owners not engaging in social media is a huge risk.  It's this wide open field that you might, as the veteran, you might have the capital to invest, to have to hire people to do this for you.  But if you don't believe that it can help your business, and if you don't take the time to understand it, then you're going to miss a huge opportunity and open it up for a younger generation, like myself, to come in and take market share. So I'd say that's a huge risk that you need to consider.

When 11 year old Elise Sammis applied for the Food Network's Kids Baking Championship, she didn’t think twice about telling them - right up front - that she lives with type 1 diabetes. She says she wanted everyone to know in order to show that diabetes wouldn't keep her from her love of baking, or anything else. Check out Stacey's new book: The World's Worst Diabetes Mom! Turns out, there's another young woman with type 1 on the show this season! You can learn more about Naima Winston here. Stacey met Elise & her mom, Natalie, at an event in South Carolina. They spoke about the show, the stress and her diagnosis two years ago at Disney world. Join the Diabetes Connections Facebook Group! In TMSG - good news at the dentist - and it wasn’t about cavities.. and we'll share a story of a lot of spirit at Walt Disney World Marathon weekend. This podcast is not intended as medical advice. If you have those kinds of questions, please contact your health care provider. Sign up for our newsletter here ----- Use this link to get one free download and one free month of Audible, available to Diabetes Connections listeners! ----- Get the App and listen to Diabetes Connections wherever you go! Click here for iPhone      Click here for Android Episode transcript (rough transcription, please forgive grammar, spelling, punctuation) -----------Stacey Simms 0:00 Diabetes Connections is brought to you by One Drop created for people with diabetes by people who have diabetes, and by Dexcom take control of your diabetes and live life to the fullest with Dexcom. Announcer: This is diabetes connections with Stacey Simms. Stacey Simms 0:23 This week, when 11 year old Elise Sammis applied for the Food Network's kids Baking Championship. She didn't think twice about telling them right up front - she lives with Type 1 diabetes. Elise Sammis 0:36 No, that was very important to me, because I wanted like everyone to know that if you have diabetes, you can still do the things that you want to do. And it was super cool because there was another girl named Naima. She's my super good friend and she had also had type one, and she's super sweet. And we were both like, yay, we both have type one! Stacey Simms 0:52 That's right. There are two young women with T1D competing on this season of the show. I met Elise at an event recently, and I talked to her and her mom about the show the stress, enter diagnosis at Disney World in Tell me something good. Good news at the dentist and it's not about cavities and a lot of spirit at Walt Disney World marathon weekend. This podcast is not intended as medical advice. If you have those kinds of questions, please contact your health care provider. Welcome to another week of diabetes connections. I am so glad you're here. We aim to educate and inspire about type 1 diabetes by sharing stories of connection. I'm your host Stacey Simms. My son was diagnosed 13 years ago right before he turned two. The show this week is airing a little earlier than usual. Yeah, we almost always drop the interview show the longer show of the week on Tuesday. But because the Kids Baking Championship is on the Food Network on Monday nights. I thought it would just be fun to release the show with Elise on the day of her show. I love the baking shows, and we used to watch them. I feel like it was around the clock for a couple of years my daughter got into them right around the same age as Elise between the ages of like nine and 12. We've watched so many of these baking shows, we made cupcakes, we didn't ever compete. My daughter never wanted to be on TV like that. But it was great. And we certainly got a lot of comments about the cupcakes because I would post them on social media and I'll put some pictures up in the Facebook group because these were, you know, really big. I mean, they weren't beautiful, but they were sharks and cupcakes that look like popcorn and you know, all the dramatic fun stuff. And people would say all the time. Oh, it's too bad that your daughter has that hobby. What are you doing about your son? And I'm like, I'm not letting him eat 17 cupcakes, but I'm not letting her eat 17 cupcakes either. You know, it's fine with Type 1 diabetes, you just have to know exactly what you're eating. Right? It does take extra work. But now go ahead eat the cupcake. And with those memories right in the back of my mind, it was even more fun to talk to Elise and to Natalie It is always a bit dicey talking to reality show contestants. You know, we've done this before, and it is always fun. But it's not just about what they can't say because here obviously they can't talk about the show, even though it's taped weeks and weeks months ago, but because you never know they could win the whole thing. They could be off the show before this episode even airs. But I'm so thrilled that Elise is is one of two girls on the show with Type 1 diabetes and it was great to talk to her and her mom and no matter what happens on the show, she is well on her way quite a personality and really just a fun kid. All right, first Diabetes Connections is brought to you by One Drop and getting diabetes supplies is a pain and not only the ordering and the picking up, but also the arguing with insurance over what they say you need and what you really need. Make it easy with One Drop. They offer personalized test trip plans, plus you get a Bluetooth glucose meter, test strips, lancets and your very own certified diabetes coach. Subscribe today to get test strips for less than $20 a month delivered right to your door. No prescriptions or co pays required. One less thing to worry about. not that surprising when you learn the founder of One Drop lives with type one. They get it. One Drop, gorgeous gear supplies delivered to your door 24 seven access to your certified diabetes coach. learn more, go to diabetes connections dot com and click on the One Drop logo. My guests this week are Elisa Sammis and her mother Natalie. Elise is a contestant on this season's Food Network kids baking show. She was diagnosed with type one at age nine and we talked about her diagnosis. But she was already baking a lot by then. And luckily her family realized you can continue to bake and enjoy dessert even with Type 1 diabetes. Being on a big show like this is a great chance to educate and what's really fun is as we mentioned, Elise isn't doing it alone. There's another young woman on the show Naima Winston from Baltimore is her name and I will put some links and information on our episode homepage, where there is also a transcript about Elise about Naima about the show and more information. So please check that out. That's a diabetes dash connections.com. And while you're there, please note every episode from the last four years is there you may be intimidated to scroll through I get asked all the time, what's the best order? I actually think the best way to listen is either to use the search box and put in whatever interests you Disney, Dexcom, Tandem, Omnipod, right or you can search by category as well. If you click on the tab that says all episodes, you'll see another search box to the right and then filter by category. And that is a really great way to dial into what you want the categories including advocates, athletes, artists, actors, education, technology, travel, family, you know, there's a whole bunch of ways to narrow this down because we've got more than 270 episodes now Holy cow. And I really urge you to go take a stroll through and see what interests you. Quick note, this interview was done on the road, I was speaking at the JDRF chapter, the Palmetto chapter in South Carolina. So the sound quality is a little bit different than when I'm doing things in the studio. And I may be a little soft at times. I'll tell you about the technical nonsense that happened. I'll tell you about that at the end of the show. So let's get to it. Here is my interview with Elise and Natalie Sammis. Let me start with you, Natalie. How did you guys even find out about this? How do you get your kids on a show like this? Elise Sammis 6:38 Well, actually, I didn't get my kid on the show. Elise put herself on the show. Basically, we live in the south and hurricanes are prevalent. And about a year and a half ago, at least you think it was Hurricane Matthew and we got five days off of school. And so I was very bored around the house. So I looked up, like, because I like to bake and I was getting into it. So I looked up like baking competitions and I saw like form so that we could, like fill out a form so that we could try out. And so I made a video for it and I sent it into them. And after that we didn't hear until like six months later. Stacey Simms 7:23 So during that five days and your home and baking was that your first foray? Was that your first time into baking or is it something you'd always like to do? Elise Sammis 7:30 I'd pretty much always like to bake from like, I guess like when I got diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes when I was nine, it was really stressful. So it was just really like stress relieving to be able to bake and it was like creative. Stacey Simms 7:46 Alright, so we have an audience that knows about diabetes. But what you just said when I was diagnosed with type one I found it really stress relieving – that could sound strange. What were your thoughts as she was enjoying this as a younger kid? Natalie Sammis 8:06 The two background stories, I think that are important in this piece are that a I am an avid Baker. And so literally, sugar is in my blood at all times. No, I my motto is dinner is always just a means to dessert. That is my life motto since a small child. And also number two, I'm actually an RN, I have my Bachelor's of Science and nursing. So I understand the principles. I understand that Yeah, you skirt the line a little bit closer. When it comes to desserts. It is a little bit more complicated in your carb counting. But it's also it's very doable. It's not off the table. It's not something that someone should be terrified of. It's something that you can balance and put into your life. And also we realized that half the time that we bake, we don't even eat it really we are sharing it with our friends or we're posting it like on social media to feel unify with other people. People It is really, truly a creative outlet for us probably like how people feel with art, but I don't get art and I cannot eat art. So we just go with the dessert side of the world and we like it and we make friends by giving people desserts. Stacey Simms 9:15 How old were you when you were diagnosed? Elise Sammis 9:17 It was the day after my ninth birthday, and we were in Disney. And there was my birthday and my mom actually fed me a chocolate chip cookie for breakfast. Right there. So we were like noticing a lot of symptoms. I was really thirsty all the time. So then my mom took me to the urgent care clinic, the CBS for CBS. And like the MinuteClinic the MinuteClinic Yep, yep. And I got and she got a glucose meter and she thought as a UTI at first. Natalie Sammis 9:52 Right. So she took a blood sugar first and it just read error. When the very first meter read error. The nurse in me problem solving. I thought, ooh, there's something wrong with the machinery that that Wait a second, I know how to litmus test this. So I stuck my own finger, I tested my own blood sugar and it said 96 I still remember the number and my heart sunk. I knew at that moment, deep down that she had diabetes, but I didn't even then didn't want to admit it. Because, you know, that's the worst. So we went to the urgent care and the urgent care. I still remember they looked at us like we were crazy because we walked in. And Elise is holding a Diary of a Wimpy Kid book. And she's just flipping through and reading it and she has a bottle of water in one hand, because at that point, I said, You drink as much as you can. Right? Right, right. Just drink this. And I said, I think my daughter might have diabetes. They look at me, like, does she fall down? Did she pass out? Like I'm like, No, but she's drinking me. Are you from the area? No, we're on vacation at Disney. And they're like, so you stopped your Disney vacation and you think she has diabetes? I'm like, I know. I basically said tell me I'm crazy. I want to walk out of here laughing like I'm just a paranoid Mom, I just cannot in good faith just go back home after seeing the error recording and having those symptoms and I just need to know so we waited quite a while because we were not on the urgent list at that point. And even the doctor said, I think it's probably just a UTI. But he respected my wish to check your blood sugar. And at that moment, their meter read error Hi. And they said he pulled out his personal cell phone and said go directly to Orlando Children's Hospital. Stacey Simms 11:31 Do you remember any of that? I mean, nine is old enough, but sometimes things get confusing. Do you remember like, anything that your mom was saying? Or what's going on in the hospital? Elise Sammis 11:39 Well, I remember that like when I got in there. I was asking like, Is it ever going to go away and everything then I remember the turkey bacon was disgusting Natalie Sammis 11:49 They put her on this restricted carb diet. So all she could eat with like a massive amounts of turkey bacon, Elise Sammis 11:57 turkey bacon. like sugar free jello. Stacey Simms 12:03 So did you ever get back to Disney World? Natalie Sammis 12:05 Yeah, we did we After that we went to Hollywood Studios. We took it that Disney paid for us for a taxi or an Uber. I can't remember which one back to our place that we were staying in the other. My Elise is the oldest of four children. So the other kids and my husband were already at the party because we said go on without us because we had been in the hospital for about three and a half days. And we got in that taxi cab we threw our suitcases in there and we saw the next bus to Disney and we ran our little hearts out and barely caught the bus and we didn't get to do too much that day. And then we went home the next day but Disney was kind enough to give us passes to come back and when we had kind of our life under control a little bit more and we understood more about diabetes in real life. We came back probably three months later in May Elise Sammis 12:52 is a lot better experience than the last. It was a lot more fun. Okay, Stacey Simms 12:57 so after Disney World when you go home You say you figured out diabetes in a bad life? You were already enjoying baking at that point. After all that turkey bacon. Were you worried? Like that's it for baking or cupcakes? Or did your mom kind of jumped right back into it with you? Elise Sammis 13:14 Well, for about a week later, I was like, I don't even know like what I can or can't eat. And so we like kind of researched a lot. And then I was like, wait, I don't have to just not eat sugar. I can just take insulin for it. So then I was like, Well, I can still bake and stuff. And so that's I was like, yeah, you know, it's got really excited about it. Stacey Simms 13:39 That's great. So what a whirlwind diagnosis and hopefully we'll have time I want to talk a little bit more about Disney World later, but let's talk about the bacon. You send in the video. You wait six months later, what do you hear what happens? Elise Sammis 13:53 So like, I've been waiting and then another season came out, and that was like, they just didn't see it. The following, never gonna happen. And then like, six months later after that, I was on the bus and my mom called me She's like, you're not gonna believe who just called me. And I was like Harry Potter. Stacey Simms 14:14 well, she was almost 11. Elise Sammis 14:18 And then she's like, no, it's the kids baking championship people and they want to interview and I was like, Oh my gosh, yeah. So I ran home. We did a lot of Skype interviews, and I had a lot of assignments and I had to make a ton of desserts. And there's a lot of other videos I had to make for it. And there's a lot of interviews as the mom you know, please seeking I mean, this is an exciting time but at the same time it's a lot of hopes for a young woman to have Yeah, yeah. Nervous that after all of this work, she wasn't gonna get on the show. Oh, very, very guarded, I guess will be the word. Natalie Sammis 14:53 I mean, I'll backtracking when she said mom can I turn in the video and I did have to click like I agree and I help fill in. Some of the, like contact information so it was correct, because at that point, you were 10 years old when she turned in the video. And I told I still remember and people laugh at me still, at least still less than me. My caveat was sure I'll turn in this video but you need to understand that you will never hear back from them, they probably will never see it and you're never going to be on that show. And if you're okay with all those three sentences, I'm feeling okay with letting you turn this in. Because I'm more of a realist. I am Elise is a is a goal setter and a go getter and a dreamer. And she proved me wrong every time so I don't know why I keep doubting it. But I just I think I do that out of protection as a mom and so yeah, as time went on, you couldn't even the process is when they Skype, the parent in the room is not allowed to be in the room. You can't be there. They want the kids to stand on their own. They don't want some mom in the corner given them most of coaching and so I would put my ears to like the door but I have a he was four at the time. And he would be like read to me we've got this new dog that was like two months old and an idiot, so I'm literally like hearing every fifth word. And even then I'm like, oh, like so excited out of my mind that I couldn't even concentrate. So I mean, it was crazy. Just week after week, it went on for from March until June, just on and off on enough like, yes, you made it to the next step. Then we would hear crickets, crickets crickets, and you don't want to be the annoying mom. And then they not pick you because you're this weirdo psycho. So you had to play it cool. You have to kind of just wait for them. And then the next kind of like little piece of cheese would come and he would chase after that. Stacey Simms 16:34 so then this is going on for a while. When did you really start to get close? What happens? I don't know how much you can share. So don't tell us what you can't. But how do you know that? This is going to be it? Elise Sammis 16:44 Yeah. Well, we were doing all these interviews and videos and I was it just kept going. And I was like, when are they going to cut to the chase and like, actually do it. And so then we got a call in like early June. They're like, we want to fly out 15 kids, we're gonna send three home and all the other ones are going to be able to be on the show. And I was like, we're finally going to LA. Natalie Sammis 17:09 Yeah. So we knew flying out there all the way to all this work. I mean, this is now we've been up till 2am, baking things having to print that present the next day unless it's work. I mean, huge amount of work. And it's a risk. It's Stacey Simms 17:24 already going home. And then the competition, you know, Natalie Sammis 17:27 oh, yeah. So our goal was to get on the show, and knock it out the first episode. And we didn't do those things so that we can just hang our head forever. Stacey Simms 17:36 What happens when you're there? I mean, you know, kids are generally pretty friendly, I would think. I mean, you want to be friends, you're hanging out. There's got to be a lot of downtime. If you're not familiar with TV production, there's so much downtime, is it hard doing that knowing that they're not going to stay? Elise Sammis 17:52 It was super hard because like, the first day like all of them were super nice, and they're all like super friendly, and like we went to the mall, and we hung out at the pool together. And like, I didn't want any of them to go. But they had to, there was no thing in me that was like, I want so and so to get out. Yeah. Stacey Simms 18:13 So yeah, be nice if everybody could win. But that's not how the show works. Yeah. All right, what can you tell us because a couple of episodes have aired already, but when this podcast airs will probably be further down the road. So I'm curious if you can share anything about what goes on behind the scenes because I've seen the show and some of it looks very ordered. Some of it looks very chaotic. is some of that chaos planned? Or is it just you guys are really doing what you're doing? What do people really knock stuff over? Elise Sammis 18:38 Sometimes they would tell me to ask how are you doing so and so? And they really like good. And then sometimes they would say like, tell all the other bakers you have 15 minutes left. And the other stuff we would just say random things. Yeah, your mind. Natalie Sammis 18:56 Well, it was funny to that. I think there's a couple times that the cameras People I thought it was interesting. They have 13 different cameras going to get all the angles. They have one big overhead camera. And she said, anytime anyone made a mistake, you knew it, because you'd feel the crane. Whoa, hovering over you. So you didn't want the big camera to go on you. You knew that either something's on fire or going downhill fast. So no one wanted the big camera to be swooping in their direction. Stacey Simms 19:27 we haven't really talked about diabetes and the show. That was in your video, some of your audition. Yes. You mentioned it. Was there any hesitancy on your part to put that in? Was that important to you Elise Sammis 19:37 know, that was very important to me, because I wanted like everyone to know that if you have diabetes, you can still do the things that you want to do. And it was like super cool, because there was another girl named Naima. She's my super good friend and she had also had type one, and she's super sweet. And we were both like, yeah, we both have type one. Stacey Simms 19:55 I was gonna ask you about Naima because I'm obviously we're not interviewing her for the show, but I've seen her story. Well, and it was incredible to me. So far the posts have all been, oh, there's two kids with type one on the Food Network. And everybody's been saying no, no, no, you're confused this name and no, you're no, you're confused. Oh, it's really Natalie Sammis 20:12 well, well, even we were confused. But we walk in the first day and its orientation and all the sudden I'm hearing Dexcom alarms and I'm going Elise, Like what? Like, like it is because it sounds too far from us. And she should have it in your bag. And I said, Who's next column? What Where's your Dexcom? And then this other little girl pipes up and says, Oh, that's mine. And that moment, it was that instant bond of like, you have to wait, we have to. It was our first I think your first real friend like you have acquaintances that have type one, but this is the first time she connected with some one else on this kind of level who has type one and I think that's special. Stacey Simms 20:48 So you guys have kept in touch. Elise Sammis 20:50 We have a big old group chat. We all talk every day. Stacey Simms 20:54 That's cool. I wish I can ask you more but I know Yeah. Elise Sammis 21:00 Did any of the other kids talk to you about diabetes? I mean, kids don't always do that. I'm just curious. They were pretty curious. And they're like, what's on your arm? And I was like, Oh, that's my insulin pump and everything. They were super nice and they're like, they didn't really care about it. They were just super sweet. Stacey Simms 21:29 Did any of the parents because I mean my son doesn't bake and I remember when I've been parental settings for sports or there's always somebody who's like, well can you really eat that? You know, anything like that? Natalie Sammis 21:30 No one really I think because we had gotten that far. And they knew we were that serious about baking. They can't bear Yeah, there's two of us they dare not I think what we are all became like very good friends. I think it's always eye opening when you get to know other people that the little bit of understanding of what type one really means day in and day out and on vacation and we were in a very stressful situation and we were up I mean, her blood sugar would just go crazy every time she baked it every time she was on set I wouldn't even let her eat a single carb because I already knew her blood sugar would be through the roof when she's getting stressed her her levels go high and so her Dex have just been going off. I can't believe we can't hear it at the show you you are only there but it almost felt a little good to be able to just kind of explain and see what is really like it Yeah, we were up at 2am and 3am and 4am treating highs and then treating lows and this is our everyday and oh at least go change your pod or and they kind of like look at you with like huge eyes like you do this every day and you're kind of like Yeah, we do. It's all right that like what I am so proud of at least and I don't know if everyone told you this really but she did not once ever use diabetes or her blood sugar level as an excuse whenever she didn't perform how she wanted to perform or when she was stressed or other kids won certain competitions. She Never ever, ever even had that in a thought like it does not hold her back physically or mentally ever. I want to have my little mom sign like “do you know her blood sugar is 328, do you know hard it is to be thinking clearly?!” like, I just wanted to say that like you don't understand how cool she is right now. Stacey Simms 23:19 So but let me ask you because obviously diabetes did not stop you from doing this. But did anything happened during the competition where you did have to leave to change a pod? Or it Did you know, mess you up? Did anything ever happened along the way because it does happen sometimes. Elise Sammis 23:32 Thankfully, like nothing like sometimes the medical my medical person, she was super nice. She would like come over and give me some insulin but I would just keep on baking and she would like BB Stacey Simms 23:46 Yeah, so was this somebody that the show provided Natalie Sammis 23:48 that they had two medicd, so they had one assigned to Naima one assigned to Elise and I'm sure they would cover the other kids who like cut themselves to cut themselves on fire, but they were basically there to hover over The two diabetics. Stacey Simms 24:01 Did you ever catch yourself on fire? Unknown Speaker 24:02 No but someone did we had to slap it down with a giant pan. Natalie Sammis 24:07 Yeah, yeah, there's some fire soon. Yeah. Spoiler alert. Awesome. Stacey Simms 24:13 So much to ask you about the show. But I'm curious as you watch the show, the judges are a big part of it. You know, were you nervous meeting them? Was it fun? Anything stand out. I don't know what you could tell us. Elise Sammis 24:25 It was super exciting meeting them and like Valerie was super nice. And she was just like a mom like the whole time she like was very nice. That was nice. Stacey Simms 24:37 Sweet the judges of Valerie Burtonelli, who we all know from one day to time, all those great shows and then Duff is the.. he did Charm City cakes, right? Yeah. Duff Goldman. We were huge fans. My daughter is in college now. But we watched Charm City cakes a ton. He was our guy. Yes. And you said he was interesting? Elise Sammis 25:00 He really funny and like sarcastic and he was really, like nice about the judging and everything and he was really, like supportive. Stacey Simms 25:08 Maybe you can answer this. They also seem like they're taking it seriously. I mean, they're Valerie's nicer. Some it seems right to the kids, but they're straightforward. They're not telling you Good job when it wasn't right? Natalie Sammis 25:20 Yeah, well, what's actually funny on I never got to meet them. They only let the kids talk to them meet them. I saw them through like closed circuit TV with no audio feeds, because their parents had to have some sort of eye on their child, but I didn't even get to meet them. But when those kids would come back from tastings and judging things and just baking during the day, they would just say, oh, def came over and talk to me and he was funny, and oh, Valerie, like gave me a hug and I trusted the kids in that setting there. They're not the other I don't want to call it other people's judges names and other shows, but they're not harsh. They're not on kind but they are they are very, they're. Stacey Simms 26:03 Yeah. They seem to balance the fact that there weren't a kids show. Yeah. But if you're going to be good feedback, Natalie Sammis 26:07 yeah. If you're going to get that far, though, and how hard we work to get there, those kids can take it. They're not delicate flowers at this point. Stacey Simms 26:15 So of course, you can tell us how everything went in the end of the show, and you won't get in any trouble. even letting a word well done. I obviously can't ask you about the outcome. And I would never. Was it fun are you glad you did it? Elise Sammis 26:29 It was super fun. I'm so glad that I did it because it's such like a good experience. Like you got to meet so many friends. It was really like a lesson to me about patients. Because all those interviews and all the time that was like put into it. It was a lot and yet there's a lot of waiting. So that was a really good lesson for me. Do you still enjoy baking? Is that something you think about? Please do? Yes, I feel like I would always do baking is really fun. In like, it likes me be creative. Unknown Speaker 27:02 This is a good experience for your families. Natalie Sammis 27:04 It was a really good experience me and at least had a great time. We were kind of out there as buddies. And then my, my husband and the other three younger kids flew out for a couple days to visit us. And they decorated our hotel room with balloons galore and messages on the mirror of good luck. And the little kids and me, myself included this kind of trail along on her coattails and got to have this amazing experience. So it was wonderful. Stacey Simms 27:30 I have to ask you, she was three younger children. Do they know the outcome? Because I wouldn't trust my kids. No offense, I don't know your family. Unknown Speaker 27:41 No, they don't. Natalie Sammis 27:42 They even will sometimes, like try to guess and like act like it's real. They're like Oh, so and so did this and they probably did this or that and will be like, oh, whatever you want to think like we don't even validate it because the the what's the number at least that we will be sued if we let information that we Elise Sammis 27:58 will be sued 750,000 Natalie Sammis 28:00 Yeah 13 page contract saying that we will not disclose information so we didn't tell the five year olds Yeah. Stacey Simms 28:07 Anything something else exciting that you all are a part of and I guess this is pretty brand new is your clinical trial for horizon from insolent which is the hybrid closed loop system using Omnipod? So Natalie, can you share a little bit about what is being tested? Is it the full system with the phone app? Natalie Sammis 28:26 Yes, it's the full system. So it involves they gave us a brand new Dexcom transmitter that has the capabilities of obviously talking to the the Omnipod and to the new I don't do they call it a PDM Do you remember lease, I don't know. They still called the PDM. But it's basically a locked out Samsung and they provide that as well. Along with pods that look identical except for this little blue tab. That worked just the same. Also, what I really really like about this, the whole point of it is that you are able to put it in that Automatic mode they call it and with the auto mode, it's every five minutes the Omnipod index home will talk to each other and adjust the Bazell every five minutes as needed. What's cool about it too, is let's say you forgot your PDM you're locked out Samsung somewhere. Even if it has no range, if you could throw it off a cliff even for at least three days, your basal insulin would still be being adjusted because the Dexcom and Omnipod can talk to each other independently. Stacey Simms 29:29 Have you used any hybrid closed loop stuff before? Elise Sammis 29:32 No, this is our first time. Stacey Simms 29:34 All right. How many days? It's only been a couple of days. We started last Wednesday today. To 60 All right, though. Yeah. So have you seen a difference? Elise Sammis 29:42 Yes, it is crazy. Like even we went to Disney World last week, and I ate a ton of junk and everything. And I like went to sleep and it would be a little high but that's what your blood sugar does. And I went to sleep and for the night It would be like a straight line I was so amazing it was it's a big difference. Just the normal taking insulin every time you hear ringing Natalie Sammis 30:09 Yeah, it is just made me feel like less of a nag to like, oh at least check your blood sugar. Oh, I heard your alarm three times a baby. Have you looked at that like that is now silencing our neck. So I have high hopes for it and it really is giving us better control. She's in that crazy stage of life being 11 about to be 12 where it makes no sense. She goes to sleep it looks like she ate a box of Krispy Kreme Doughnuts for no reason and it's nothing but hormones and I don't know unexplained highs and lows. So already this week, it is refreshing to see so many more straight lines. I mean, there's still today we were stuck in the three hundreds for hours and that's just what it is. And but I'm really pleased so far and I'm ecstatic to be able to have it for longer than the three month trial period. Stacey Simms 30:57 All right. Before I let you go you said you have at Disney World, you ran in half marathon full marathon Natalie Sammis 31:04 on Team JDRF. The half marathon half marathon. Stacey Simms 31:07 Yep. So you went back to Disney World. You ran the team JDRF half marathon. Let me ask you first though at least what's it like for you to go back at Disney World? Do you think about diabetes you just have fun when you're there. Elise Sammis 31:18 I have like weird flashbacks kind of. Because I like like remember walking in that same spot being like, all frazzled, like what am I going to do? But then like going back and feeling like Well, I'm kind of normal now. Like, I got it under control. So like happy for me. Unknown Speaker 31:35 That's fantastic. So like, Natalie Sammis 31:37 I had some a mom, I'm going to get weepy no problem very silly. But to see it come full circle to leave Disney World that first time. And you know wonder what your future is going to be like wonder what your daughter's life is going to look like. It's kind of being scared out of your mind. And then to come back to the literally the same place in Disney. I don't know. It has some feel to it. Like, even if you had gone 20 years ago, there's something magic. There's that little spark of Disney that kind of remains the same. So it puts you right back where you were in this time to feel so much confidence. And I still remember on the half marathon, you turn a corner and run into the Magic Kingdom in the it was still dark because it's a ridiculously early marathon. But the castle was all lit up. And I had this like moment of like, Oh my goodness, we've made it so far. I am so happy where where we're at now. We're beating diabetes. I'm not being beaten by diabetes. And at that very moment, as I'm like, getting all bizarre and emotional. I look up and there's Team JDRF fans, right? They're saying that moment of like, oh, then I'm like, wait, I can't praise because I'm practice. So I stopped crying and I kept running and that was it. But yeah, it is a quite a journey, I guess, to come full circle and to go back in that way with so much support and so much like people behind you and helping you raise money for a cause, you know, to help your kid just live a happy, normal life. So it was great. Stacey Simms 33:18 Thank you both so much. I would say Best of luck, but it's all. So excited to watch. To see how this goes. I hope you'll come back and talk to us again. Thank you so much. Unknown Speaker 33:29 Thank you. Unknown Speaker 33:35 You're listening to diabetes connections with Stacey Simms. Stacey Simms 33:41 Alright, so fingers crossed for Elise and for Naima. I am taping this just after the second episode has aired. So who the heck knows what has happened since and what will happen going forward, but we will certainly be following cheering these girls on. Up next. Tell me something good but diabetes connections is brought to you by Dexcom. And you know, when Benny was very little, and his fingers would get wet, right? I'd give him a bath or we'd go in the pool. I would always notice his fingertips. And you know exactly what I mean, right? They were poked so much that they were just full of little little pinprick holes. You could see when they got wet. He is 15. Now, I don't really see his hands much anymore. But the other day, he's such a ding-a-ling. He was doing a project for school. He was using a hot glue gun and he you know, he burned himself a little bit. He's fine. He's fine. But when he came into show me I noticed again and every time I do see his hands, it just knocks me out. his fingertips look normal. We've been using Dexcom for six years now. And with every iteration, we've done fewer and fewer finger sticks, the latest generation, the Dexcom g six eliminates finger sticks for calibration and diabetes treatment decisions. Just thinking about doing 10 finger sticks a day in the past. Makes me so glad that Dexcom has helped us come so far. It's an incredible tool. If you're glucose alerts and readings from the G six do not match symptoms or expectations. Use a blood glucose meter to make diabetes treatment decisions. learn more, go to diabetes, connections calm and click on the Dexcom logo. It's time for Tell me something good. I've got two great stories one was sent to me via Facebook Messenger. The other one I saw in a Facebook group and if you've got a story for me, the easiest way is in my Facebook group at diabetes connections the group or email me let me know what's going on. What is good for you. Melissa wrote in “I have a Tell me something good. I've been listening to your podcast since maybe the summer and my four year old daughter was diagnosed March 28 2019. You are very optimistic. I haven't found a positive thing with my daughter's diabetes. Until today. It's been a horrible nine months with everything. We had our first dentist appointment Since diagnosis I've dropped a lot of ball since April, when the dental hygienist saw the pump. She knew what it was. I didn't have to explain. The conversation got direct to where we treat for Lowes, Skittles and starbursts and gummies. All bed for her teeth. When the dentist came to check, we had a discussion about the candies. He asked for her Endo's name, and he knew her. He's the pediatric chief of dentistry at the local Children's Hospital where her endo is affiliated, he texted an email to find better candies to use instead of the sticky kind. He went on to say collaborates with a lot of specialized doctors in the Children's Hospital to take better care of the kids. And he said get back to me after a discussion with the endo. I found the experience relieving that I wouldn't have to fight this battle. The dentist got it and my daughter was in good hands being cared for. I didn't think I'd ever find anything positive about our new normal. Today I did. So that's my Tell me something good.” Melissa, I'm getting emotional reading what you're saying here. Thank you. She writes for your podcast your optimism, and having somebody to tell the story to understand. Her daughter's name is Katarina, beautiful name. And she told me that it's been difficult to find care for her. You know when they're that little it can be so hard preschools, that kind of thing. But she went on to write that they have been blessed. She's been taken care of by her school nurse in an all day preschool. Her endocrinologist who they love and her mother, Melissa's mom, the grandma, who was able to watch her while the parents are at work, and now the dentist, she writes, “I didn't realize until this how lucky we have been. These are battles. I do not have to fight. Your optimism about any life with T1D is something I was envious of. I wanted some of the burden of this disease lifted off of my shoulders, and I was able to see that I have that after this visit. So I'm a little bit emotional here because of all the nice things she said and just having a place to share that with right. It's important to have people who get it and know important it is that the dentist didn't scold her and say you shouldn't be doing that. But said, Let's find a way to do this that works with Type 1 diabetes. And I think that's fantastic. But if it was a little strange for me to hear, even though I know it, I am very optimistic. I am very positive. I put these rose colored glasses on a lot and diabetes is hard. Type 1 is difficult. Being a parent of a kid with type one it's difficult to it's not all sunshine and rainbows over here. Trust me, I hope I'm open and honest about it. But at the end of the day, we've been really lucky. And I am optimistic and if you're feeling down or things are hard, no judgment, man. It is hard all around. I think I do an okay job of being honest and sharing the ups and downs. But I do know that my general outlook with type one is is an uplifting one. I hesitate to say it because I feel like it's an odd thing to say I feel like it puts me like I'm trying to be uplifting, but the truth is that's how it was presented. To us when Benny was diagnosed, and that makes all of the difference. When you're diagnosed on the very first day you meet a nurse who says, he's going to be fine. I have type one. And I have one child at home and I'm pregnant with my second and don't listen to the scary stories and don't listen to the hard stuff. It's fine. And then the next day, you pick up the phone and call three local people that you know who have kids with type one, because you've met them in your health reporting over the years, and they all say that he's gonna be great. My kids Is this my kid does that it's fine. It really changes than if you don't have those things. And I know how lucky I am to have them. So Melissa, thank you for reaching out. Thanks for a little bit of the gut check, as I like to say the rose colored glasses, but send us any good news and send us anything you want to vent. I hope you join the Facebook group. I'd love to hear more about Catarina. Our other Tell me something good this week comes from the Walt Disney World marathon weekend. That's where Natalie Sammis was when they said they were in Walt Disney World again. Very recently. She was running the half marathon. You talked about with all the jdrf people, they're getting emotional. Well, there's so much going on for that weekend. And I wanted to spotlight Julia Buckley, who's a friend of mine and I've mentioned her on the show before. She is a flight attendant and she is amazing. And she won the Spirit Award for jdrf. She ran on Team jdrf. I don't know how she does it. She flies all over the world comes home runs at Walt Disney World. She always has a smile on her face. So Julia, thank you so much for all that you do. I love some of the pictures maybe we'll throw some of those in the Facebook group as well but to everybody who ran at Walt Disney World, hats off man and now it's a fun race but it's still a lot of work. If you've got to tell me something good story, send it my way. I am so excited. We're getting more and more of these all the time or put them out on social media every week. So I'd love to hear from you tell me something good. Before I let you go, this is not a Tell me something good. This is a Tell me something embarrassing. So I mentioned the very beginning of the show that there were some technical difficulties when I recorded the interview with Elise and Natalie. And real quick, the way I taped the show, usually is that I do the interviews right from my home computer. I have a little setup little home studio. But the interviews are generally conducted via Skype, and then into my computer and then into a backup hard drive. Later on, I record this part of it like a round the interview, right and that goes right into the computer. But when I'm on the road, I don't want to slip my computer. It's only got one input for the microphone, and I had basically needed three inputs. my microphone, Natalie's mic, and Elise's mic. So I use I mentioned that hard drive. I use a recorder for all of you audio files out there, I use an H five zoom. It is a wonderful little recording device and i i only scratched the surface. I know I'm not using it to its full potential. I can plug two microphones in there. And I know I can do more with it. I could use a sound mixer or whatever. But generally when I have more than two microphones that I'm using a plug two and two Each five zoom. And then I have another recorder where I put on a lavalier mic and a little Clippy mics that you see on the evening news or maybe you've done an interview or recorded something for work and they put a little clip mic on your collar. That's a level layer mic, and I use that for myself. And here's the embarrassing part. The recorder I use when I do that is an old iPhone. And I'm not even sure how old it is. It might be a four, it might be three. It doesn't work anymore for anything else. I mean, I don't certainly have service on it. But it is a perfect dumb recorder. And it's like a tape recorder back of the day. And I had purchased over the years, these level ear mics that plugged into your phone. They're fantastic. But when you switch to the newer iPhones and you got rid of the headphone jack well guess where the lav mic plugged in. So I'm out of luck. I can't use my newer phone as a recorder if I want to use the lav mics. So we get to South Carolina. I'm setting everything up. I'm there early and speaking doing a book event before First I'm going to interview with Lisa, Natalie. So I set everything up. Everything sounds good. The stick microphones, the regular microphones, the one if you ever see pictures of me the ones that have the logos on them. Those are plugged in. They're working fine. They're a little low. I'm not really sure. I think maybe Elise was just very soft spoken. So I'm trying to adjust audio levels. I plug my stuff in, and the old phone, the editing software will not open. I use a program called twisted wave. And it's a great program. It's it's up to date, but the phone is so old. I think it was trying to update the the editing software. So I said, forget this. I'll just use my voice memo. So every phone has a voice memo app. It's fabulous for podcasting. It really works well. You can just record your voice for however long and then you email it to yourself. I have guests do this. Sometimes if it's a really short interview. I don't do it much. But you know, once or twice. I've had people do a short segment and a voice memo is great for them. So it looks like it's working. Everything's fine. We do the whole interview. voice memo is there I can hear it. It's recorded Elise Natalie are fine. I can't Email the file to myself. I can't get it off the phone. It's stuck on this old iPhone three, four. It's sitting there. It's It's wonderful. Amazingly, the microphones I was using picked up my voice enough so you heard the interview. It wasn't terrible. It probably wasn't great, I'm sure john kennis my editor worked a ton of magic on it every time he gets a file from me probably shakes his head and said, yes, this person obviously worked with a technical producer her entire radio career. So I'm now in the market for a new level ear mic, because if you know anything about audio, and you heard me say the h5 zoom, you know that you can also plug a lav mic or any kind of really smaller mic into another outlet very easily. And this whole thing could have been avoided if I had just done that. So that was my adventure. I figured we'd just soldier on right you just want the stories. You're less concerned with pristine studio sound, right? Haha. Well, look, I'm going on the road a lot this year. So I figured I better learn how to do that. And figure out how to better get it done. So stay tuned for the continuing saga of how the heck Stacy makes her lovely mix work. Alright, the next stop is not too far from me. I'm going to Raleigh the first weekend in February Raleigh, North Carolina for a jdrf type one nation summit. Then I am going to Maine the following weekend to South Portland, Maine, to talk to the main pea pods, very excited to talk to this group. And we have a very busy schedule after that. Thank you, as always, especially this week to my editor, john Drew kennis from audio editing solutions. Thank you for listening. Remember this Thursday, we do have another minisode coming out this week. I'm talking all about untethered, what that means, why we have loved it. I got a bunch of questions after I mentioned this in a couple episodes back. I talked about receiver a little bit which is a newer, long acting. So I'm going to go through untethered, what it means why it's not just for teenagers, and why we've had such good success. With it, and that is our next little mini episode. I'm Stacey Simms and I will see you back here on Thursday. Benny 46:11 Diabetes Connections is a production of Stacey Sims media. All rights reserved. All wrongs avenged Transcribed by https://otter.ai