Podcasts about Sop

What does the future of cancer care look like? From replacing IV chemo with oral agents to game-changing advances in bispecific and trispecific therapies, this special bonus episode dives deep into the most exciting—and practice-changing—developments from the 2025 ASCO Annual Meeting.NCODA's Kelly Brunk, PharmD, BCOP, returns from ASCO energized and ready to share his top takeaways in a candid conversation about where oncology is headed. Whether you're a clinician, pharmacist, or anyone in the cancer care ecosystem, this episode is packed with insight you don't want to miss.Bonus: Kelly also shares updates on NCODA's new Immunotherapy Hub and offers a forward-looking take on where the field is headed."The rate of change in oncology care is accelerating—and it's time for practices to be ready, not reactive." — Kelly Brunk Inside the Episode:How oral therapies are reshaping breast cancer treatmentThe evolving role of bispecifics, trispecifics, and antibody-drug conjugatesPractical considerations for implementation: protocols, access, and infrastructureThe importance of quality of life in treatment decisionsEarly use of immune checkpoint inhibitors in multiple disease statesHow AI and equity are shaping the next decade of oncology Listen now and explore what these developments mean for clinical practice—and for the patients at the center of it all. Resources mentioned:NCODA's Immunotherapy Hub – A central resource offering clinical tools, SOP examples, and support for implementing therapies like bispecifics and antibody-drug conjugates.Questions or looking to connect? Email the NCODA Clinical Team at clinical@ncoda.org

Hiring the right team is one of the biggest challenges brand owners face—especially in the early stages of growth. In this episode of Built for This, Andy Isom is joined by Michael Jordan, co-CEO of Bad Marketing, to break down a smarter hiring strategy for e-commerce and Amazon sellers.   We dive into which roles to hire first, where to find top talent outside of the usual “go hire a Filipino VA” playbook, and how to scale your Amazon or E-Commerce team globally without wasting money. If you're ready to stop doing everything yourself and start building a team that actually moves your brand forward, this episode is your blueprint.   My favorite SOP recording tool: www.loom.com   Get a free audit of your brand to see if you qualify for subsidized management here: www.weavos.io  

This week on The Art of SBA Lending, Ray Drew sits down with David Tinsley of Lenders Cooperative to unravel the shifting landscape of SBA lending and the role of technology and LSPs in shaping its future. Recorded live from the MALC conference, they dive into the buzz surrounding the unannounced new SOP and what it means for lenders. From the challenges of scaling an SBA division to the surprising dominance of AI in industry conversations, Ray and David explore how to navigate growth, manage risk, and foster innovation — "throwing the whole playbook out". They also tackle the ongoing debate of in-house operations versus leveraging Lender Service Providers (LSPs).

  Be self-controlled!Listen to what the Bible says, from 1 Peter.(click for podcast)taH sober je self-controlled. taH watchful. lIj adversary the devil, yIttaH around rur a roaring HaDI'baH, seeking 'Iv ghaH may Sop.Be sober and self-controlled. Be watchful. Your adversary the devil, walks around like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.Online BibleListen to the Word, it helps us navigate the stars and beyond.

Welcome back to Small Business School! In this week's episode of the Business Builder series, we're tackling something most entrepreneurs know they should be doing… but often avoid: building systems and procedures in your business (aka SOPs). But don't worry—this isn't about creating a stuffy, never-used operations manual. I'm walking you through how to build simple, repeatable systems that actually help you grow, without making it your full-time job. If you've ever said, “I know I need systems, but who has time?”—this one's for you.Key topics covered:What SOPs really are—and what they aren'tHow to create effective systems in just 3 minutes using the tools you already haveWhy messy, imperfect SOPs are better than perfect ones that never get usedTips for building a culture where your team creates and owns the systems tooWhether you're onboarding clients, posting content, or running payroll—this episode gives you a clear roadmap to make systems your secret weapon (without the overwhelm). Let's get your time back and start building a business that runs without you in the weeds.ChallengeA simple action step: pick one task you do regularly that you're ready to delegate. Record yourself doing it—using Loom, a voice note, or a Zoom video—and save it in an SOP folder.Mentioned in this episode: If you are running a business in Canada and you need help with all the things accounting related, but more importantly understanding the numbers I invite you to check out https://thriveaccounting.co/Staci's Links:Instagram. Website.The School for Small Business Podcast is a proud member of the Female Alliance Media. To learn more about Female Alliance Media and how they are elevating female voices or how they can support your show, visit femalealliancemedia.ca.Head over to my website https://www.stacimillard.com/ to grab your FREE copy of my Profit Playbook and receive 30 innovative ways you can add more profit to your business AND the first step towards implementing these ideas in your business!

Quaranteam – Book 1: Part 3 A New family. Based on a post by CorruptingPower, in 25 parts. Listen to the Podcast at Explicit Novels. Chapter 7 That evening, Andy and the girls decided to curl up in bed and watch some television with Niko asleep next to them. At first, Andy was worried that the volume would be high enough to wake up their newest addition, but Aisling assured him nothing was going to stir her from her slumber. Sure enough, despite the volume of the show “ a Spanish Netflix crime drama called La Casa De Papel “ Niko didn't budge an inch. Andy fell asleep with Aisling pressed up against his right side and Lauren pressed up against his left, both of their heads resting against his chest. When he'd first started sleeping with Aisling in his bed, he'd had trouble falling asleep easily. It wasn't something his body had any regular experience with, so it had to be trained. He'd had similar trepidation when Lauren joined them. But now, having had both of the girls for nearly three weeks, he'd grown comfortable with their bodies nestled against his. In the middle of the night, he was in the middle of a strange sex dream only to be woken to find Niko bobbing her head up and down on his cock, her lips latched around it firmly. Neither Lauren or Aisling had woken. Andy couldn't see Niko well in the low light of the wee hours, but her head was feverish, her mouth suctioning on his member until he popped a load against the back of her throat, a thankful, almost vulgar moan coming from the woman, as her tongue lathered over his cock to make sure no droplet remained. She was still spasming in orgasm long after he was done. Once she'd finished licking his cock clean, she crawled back up into the bed, and moved to lay against Lauren's side, folding one arm over the Aussie. Andy fell back asleep almost immediately. When dawn broke, Andy awoke to find Niko straddling his hips, his cock lodged up inside of her snatch. He often woke up with a hard on, but Ash and Lauren had agreed to let him at least wake up in the morning before having a go at him. Clearly no one had informed Niko. He didn't feel bad taking a better look at her now, her tits pressed together between her arms as her hands rest against his chest, while her hips snapped back and forth. Her skin was a deep tan, her nipples a chocolate brown, her hair a jet black. She wasn't tall, about the same height as Aisling so half a foot shorter than Andy, and a full foot shorter than Lauren. She was muscular, toned, a life of military training having kept her very in shape. His orgasm wasn't strong, but it came on quick. By this point, Andy was a little surprised he wasn't cumming dust. As soon as his orgasm hit, she fell forward against his chest, burying her face in the crook of his neck. Aisling and Lauren were both already awake, each with a hand on one of Niko's thighs affectionately. "God damn, sorry about that, sir," Niko laughed, breathy and still shaking. "2nd Lieutenant Niko RedWolf, reporting for her new life, sir. I think my head's finally clear again." "Wasn't it before?" Andy asked. She shook her head, lifting her head up enough so she could look down and smile at him, her hair threatening to spill out of her ponytail at a moment's notice. "Would you believe this is the first time it's actually registered to me what you look like, sir?" She had a mischievous smile and kind brown eyes. "They may have told me your name, but I don't think it cut through the fog. Who are you?" Andy blanched. "My name's Andy Rook. What do you mean, you don't think it cut through the fog?" Niko looked over at Lauren, who scooted a little bit to one side, so Niko could slide off of the top of him and in against his side. "I serve on the Air Force base where they were testing the vaccine, and I agreed to be a test candidate. The two men who were injected with it died immediately, but I and the other female officer seemed fine. At first. Within a few days of it, I started feeling, well, pardon my saying so, sir, but I started feeling horny all the time. The other female officer as well." Aisling smirked over at Niko. "Permission to swear freely is habitually granted in this home, 2nd Lieutenant. In fact, Andy likes a girl with a filthy mouth," she giggled, slapping his thigh. He wilted a little bit, but then nodded in confirmation to Niko. "It's true." "Duly noted, sir," Niko answered. "Anyway, they didn't know about the side effects during the early testing stages, but it started to become pretty fucking apparent to them when I would continually get all fidgety. I tried to resist as long as I could, but eventually I was jilling off in bathroom stalls every chance I could get. Within a week or two, they had an answer, and the program was born." "The Air Force developed the vaccine?" "You think those morons in private research were going to do it this fast? Hell no." Niko snuggled in, trying to get as comfortable as possible pressed up against his chest. "So they figured out that they could introduce the vaccine to men by sexual contact with a vaccinated woman, and that it seemed to help quell the insane need to fuck all the time that women given the vaccine were feeling." "If you were one of the first people to be given the vaccine, then why weren't you partnered up with someone immediately?" Lauren asked. "I wasn't fond of being subservient to a man, so I told them I wanted someone who would keep me on equal ground. But because the nature of my work with Air Force, I also needed someone who would have Top Secret level clearance." Andy's eyes widened. "I sure as hell don't have that." "No, you don't, but you'd mostly been vetted for it Your friend Phil Pak has been trying to get you to come and work with him for a long while, so they'd done all the legwork, and decided to call it good enough." "I also happen to have a mess of partners, Niko. Are you sure that's going to be okay?" "It's all been taken care of, otherwise they wouldn't have sent me here." Niko's eyes suddenly widened. "Oh my god, I haven't even introduced myself to your other partners." Aisling winked at her. "You had hard fucking to do, love. I'm Aisling Blake, I'm from Dublin originally. Everyone around here calls me Ash. I do graphic design." She shook Niko's hand, but Niko pulled her over Andy's head and pressed a kiss against Aisling's lips above him, one which Ash was perfectly happy to reciprocate. "And who's the giantess surfer behind me?" Niko said, pulling back and turning around. "Lauren Herron. I'm a personal trainer for the '49ers." "An Irish girl and an Aussie. About time you got some American blood in this mix." Andy laughed. "That's what my roommate's partner Lily said." "Where are you from, Niko?" "The Rosebud reservation in South Dakota. I'm half Lakota, one quarter Mexican and one quarter Japanese. I know, it's quite the cocktail, but we've all got stories." It was nearly noon when they all got out of bed. Niko was the youngest of all of them, only twenty two. Ash was twenty seven, Lauren thirty five and Andy himself just shy of forty. Andy was worried that Niko might consider him too old, but Niko assured him that his age was not a concern for her. As a matter of fact, she liked older men. She found younger men too emotionally volatile for her tastes. She'd actually read one of his books, but the problem was that it was "The Trouble With Were Bears," the book he was least proud of. She'd said she found the main character interesting, but the plot rather confusing. He assured her the other ones were better, and she seemed eager to read them. The fuck lust, as Niko described it, would be with the girls for the rest of their lives. The longer they went without reconnecting with Andy, the more their judgment would be compromised, the harder it would be to think clearly. They would become like junkies in need of a fix. They would be easily agitated, quick tempered and even violent if they felt it would get them back to their pusher “ Andy. When Niko had arrived at Andy's condo, she had been so out of it that even now she couldn't recall the events he related back to her. Her first memory in weeks had been being in bed with him this morning, even as she crawled atop of him. She knew that he was her mate. She wasn't sure how she knew that, but she could feel it, sense it. And when he'd had his third orgasm inside of her within less than a day, the imprinting had finally settled in and peeled back the cloud from her consciousness. While Lauren was on leave until the pandemic had receded, Niko would be working from the condo. Although she was a qualified pilot, her service in the Air Force was as a data analyst, and a secure connection was being set up on site for her to use. Until then, she had a bit of a break. It was a Saturday, and the girls decided they wanted to work on their tans. The condo had a small back yard that was fenced off. While the neighbors in the condos on either side would be able to peer down and see them, the girls had decided to sunbathe topless. Lily had even decided to join them, although she bitched about the heat, which was pushing over a hundred. Andy spent the afternoon filling Eric in on all the information he'd gotten over the last two days “ what Phil had told him, what Niko had told him, all of it. Eric, in return, had filled in Andy with what he'd learned from work over the last few weeks. While Lily, Andy and Eric all knew who Eric worked for, they'd been a little bit vague with the girls, always joking that Eric worked for a think tank that didn't do anything interesting, but soon they were going to have to fill them in. Eric worked for a company called Long Thought Research and Development, but the truth of the matter was that they were a remote analyst cell for the CIA. Long Thought handled problems that were overwhelming in the abstract and deadly in application “ they were responsible for terrorist profiling, weapons migration modeling, political theater simulations and a whole lot more. Over the last few weeks, they'd been working on building a new model, one which had Eric worried. Theoretically, every member of Long Thought was supposed to be sectioned off, working on only a singular aspect of the problem so that no one analyst could get an idea of what the simulation was intended to determine. It was supposedly to avoid confirmation bias, but Eric had considered that explanation bullshit as of late. So he'd done a little bit of data gathering from his coworkers on the sly, and come up with a working theory. The model was designed to see how the world's new normal would pan out if 37.5% of the male population of Earth died out to a pandemic. This pandemic. Niko had wandered in before the rest of the girls, while Andy and Eric stood in the kitchen, staring at one another. Then she'd offered her own information, to help talk Andy out of what he'd been thinking about. Because Andy had been thinking about going to the press. She'd explained to him that for the time being, all of the information had to remain secret, or a nationwide panic would ensue. The vaccine that the Air Force had developed was starting to be deployed to major metropolitan areas on a very specific basis. And when a mayor, a governor, a representative or a senator had put up a fuss, Niko hinted that that particular politician had been exposed to the virus and then offered a choice “ they could take the vaccine, and be mated for life to one (or in some cases many) person, or they could deny the vaccine worked, and would be allowed to die. Only one governor had chosen to decline the vaccine, and while the Air Force had respected their wishes, they didn't allow the governor to tell anyone about the vaccine and its side effects. They did allow the governor to die, though. Niko explained to the two men that there were probably only a hundred or so people in the country with the full picture of what was going on, and that was by design, because already the virus was starting to take its toll on other countries. While some countries had done excellent jobs at containing the spread of it, others were on the verge of collapse. And the CIA was debating on what countries were worth saving and which weren't. England, Ireland and Australia were already in the process of being brought up to speed about the vaccine, but the complete details were only being given to them on an as needed basis. The pairing program had been confirmed to the outside world, but the side effects of the vaccine had been kept hush hush. On some level, the Air Force was convinced that foreign governments would laugh themselves at being told that the vaccine had crazy sexual side effects until they had gotten a chance to experience them for themselves. "Shit," Andy grumbled. "The ex-journalist in me feel like I'm sitting on the story of the century here, and I can't tell anybody." Niko squeezed his hand softly. "You're a good man, Andy Rook, which is why I'm happy to be mated to you, but you have to consider the ramifications of what would happen if you revealed all of this to the public." "The whole goddamn world would explode," Eric sighed. "I know. I've seen the data. And that's not the worst of it." "What's the worst of it then?" Andy asked. "The worst of it is that we're going to have to let a billion men die off for the planet to stabilize. It's going to be the biggest culling since World War Two, and even that wasn't a drop in the bucket compared to what this is." The three stood in silence for a long time. "How does anyone make these kinds of decisions?" Andy whispered. "You don't have to. We don't have to," Niko said, wrapping an arm around him. "You can't save the whole world, Andy, but you can save us. Hell, you've already saved those two amazing women out there. And they've been so nice to me, even though I apparently fucked you at your desk before even introducing myself." She blushed a little. "I still don't remember that. Did you watch, Eric?" Eric laughed, lifting the Collins glass full of scotch to his lips. "Are you kidding? Lily would've kicked the shit out of me if I did." "Oh, I dunno," Andy chuckled. "If you asked, she might let you watch." "Well, I don't intend to ask. She already has me waking up sore most mornings." "That's just the exercise from all the fucking you're doing," Andy said. "You're out of practice, just like me, and hell, I've got three women to satisfy." "Soon to be four," Niko giggled. "I'm sure it's every man's dream." "I'm just waiting for the first big fight to occur, because I know it's coming sooner or later." "That's future Andy's problem," Niko said, turning his face down so she could kiss him for a moment. "Besides, Ash made it pretty clear just because you're tired of giving me my medicine doesn't mean you get to skimp out on your promise to her." Andy groaned playfully. "I'm going to be running dry in a few days at this rate." "Oh I wouldn't worry too much about that, Andy," Eric said with a laugh. "The fall will probably kill you." "Yeah, well, you just keep thinking, Butch," Andy countered. "That's what you're good at." "What are the cats' names?" "The Russian blue is Muninn, and the black one is Huginn." "Odd names." "It's the name for Odin's two ravens, thought and wisdom," Eric said. "We were on a Norse mythology kick when we got them as kittens." "They friendly?" "Oh sure," Andy said. "They're just getting used to this many people being in the house at one time. If you put out their food enough times, they'll start cuddling up to you any chance they get. Ash decided she was going to befriend them right after she got here, and Muninn'll hop up into her lap when she's working at the table some days and just settle there. That's why Eric built her the foot rest, so she can put her legs up and Muninn'll sit there quietly." Niko looked back and forth between the two men for a minute. "How the hell were you two single before any of us showed up?" "Women don't like nerds," Eric grumbled. Andy raised a finger, arguing the point. "No, they like nerds alright, but they don't seem to understand that nerds like aggressive women and are terrible at making the first move. So nerds don't get the love they deserve." Niko looked out into the back yard, where the girls were gathering up their things, wrapping towels around their waists. "I dunno. You two seem to have done pretty well for yourselves at this point." Andy smirked, cocking his head to one side. "Sure, but luck is like the weather. Wait a few minutes and it'll change." A storm of bad luck was, indeed, just over the horizon. Chapter 8 The next few days involved a lot of time getting settled, as Andy learned more about the girls who now shared his life. They also spent time learning about each other. Andy spent time trying to get some writing done on another Druid Gunslinger novel, and when he got into a zone, the girls made a pact not to disturb him, especially if he started typing away badly. That gave them plenty of time to dig into each other's history, and the girls began to scheme and plan. They took great fun in learning each other's turn ons and offs, and to figure out how to quell their own wild desires, to try new experiences. The girls also took an interest in reading the seven books Andy had written in the Druid Gunslinger series, with Aisling going so far as to even mock up a movie poster for one of them, which delighted Andy to no end. It was starting to become obvious that the condo wasn't designed to hold this many people, however. At night, things were fine because everyone was packed in their beds, but during the day, people were having to work around one another. Aisling and Niko set up their laptops at the dining room table, while Lauren spent much of the day either working out in the backyard, or reading in a deck chair. Andy and Eric each had their own desk, Andy's in the dining room and Eric's in the living room. Lily seemed perfectly comfortable coding in the living room on the couch. When Andy's last partner showed up, she would have to either share space in the backyard or the couch in the living room. The dining room table might fit a third workspace, but it would be a very tight fit. There had been nice surprises, however. Both Lauren and Aisling were excellent cooks, each with radically different styles. Lauren focused on healthy cooking, while Ash was the master of lush, savory cooking that threatened waistlines just from the very smell of it. The cats had taken well to their new housemates, keeping themselves entertained while everyone was working. From time to time, they would hop onto people's laps, or walk across their laptops, but for the most part, they were just happy to have people to be around who might be willing to pet them in a spare moment. But they were starting to feel the limitations of the condo, and the heat wasn't helping. They had fans running nonstop, but the condo didn't have centralized air conditioning. When it had just been the two of them, they were able to manage by closing the windows and drawing the drapes, because the condo was nicely shaded by trees. But with six people, that wasn't holding up as well. By the time it started to cool down in the evening, a light funk had started to fill the place. And there was still one more person to show up. The camaraderie between them all had helped diffuse the tension, even as they delved into each other's past. Andy had gotten to know some of Aisling's siblings, especially Dermot, who had refused to let Andy off the line the first time they'd talked until he'd promised to send him an advance reader copy of "High Noon At Stonehenge," the upcoming Druid Gunslinger book that had started Andy down this whole journey. Turning on the news every night had been hard to watch, simply because it didn't jibe with the information they had at their own fingertips. As Phil had predicted, the government was doing its best to downplay the casualties, reporting false numbers to make it sound like everything was under control. And while reports of the vaccination program were starting to get out to the masses, nobody was talking about the side effects. Why, Andy kept asking himself, why oh why was nobody talking about the side effects? They were wrapping up a day's worth of work when Niko looked over at Andy with a soft smile. Aisling and Lauren had headed upstairs a few minutes earlier. "I've sort of been monopolizing you for a few days, Andy, so Ash and Lauren have a little surprise cooked up for you while I work late tonight. I'll be up in a few hours to crawl into bed, but you should go up to your room and enjoy what they've got up their sleeves." "You okay with that?" Andy said. He'd been navigating a whirlwind of emotions since the girls had come into his life, and was doing his best to make sure nobody ever felt left out, and that everyone also got a turn being the center of attention. "Oh relax. If I wasn't, I wouldn't have said so. And I did demand a mess of attention when I got here, so it's only fair I tap out of a couple of play sessions. Gimme a kiss and then go have your fun." She tilted her head upward as he smiled and leaned down, pressing his lips against hers. He'd meant to give her a quick kiss, but she folded her hand against the back of his neck and pulled him in to make it much more intense, practically searing him with the heat. "And Lauren's going to be a little nervous, and you're going to want to go easy on her. Don't, okay? She wants what she's offering, so don't deny her that. You'll know what she wants. Give it to her." "Yes ma'am." He offered her a mock salute and she reached over and swatted his ass. "Don't be a smartass. Now get your butt upstairs." Andy shutdown his desktop and then headed up the stairs. The door to his room was closed. Eric and Lily had been in their room for about an hour already, and he could hear the sounds of moans behind their closed door. Lily and Eric both started and ended their days earlier than Andy and his girls. Whenever a door was closed in the house, the rule was that you always knocked. So there was Andy, once again, knocking on the door to his own bedroom. "Come on in, luv," Aisling said. Andy stepped into his own bedroom, and saw Aisling sitting on the corner of the bed. On her knees on the floor next to her was Lauren, with her hands folded together in front of her. She wore absolutely nothing, except for a collar attached to a leash, the end of which was in Aisling's hand. He closed the door behind himself, feeling Huginn skitter in just before he did. "So what's all this then?" "Well love," Aisling said, "Lauren has a request. A couple of requests, actually. Don't you, slut?" Lauren licked her lips nervously, not speaking, but nodding in agreement. Aisling took the leash by the midpoint and used the end to give Lauren a smack on the back like a mock lash. "I asked you a question, Lauren. Answer me." "Sorry, Mistress," Lauren said. "Yes, Master, your slut would like to make a coupla humble requests, if that's good." What Niko had told him just a few minutes rung in his ears once more before he spoke. "You may ask. Whether I'll grant them or not remains to be seen, but if you don't ask, you risk nothing, you gain nothing. Speak." "Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. The other birds and I were talkin', and Aisl, Mistress Aisling was telling' us about her first time being taken in the back, an' I wanted to have a go at it." "Taken in the back?" Aisling gave her another playful smack with the leash end. "What did I tell you, whore? Speak plainly and dirty, otherwise he's not going to know what you want." "The ass, sir. I wanna be fucked in the ass." "That's one request. What's the other?" Andy said, moving a little closer to the two women. "You've been so wonderful and kind with me, Andy, but I want to see the other side of ya. I wanna rough go at it. Pull me hair, spank my ass, pinch me nips, ride my hard, pound me hard, make it hurt. Don't break me, but take me right up to that edge." Andy reached down and pinched one of Lauren's nipples between his fingertips, his grip holding firm and clamping even tighter than he would've normally. He expected to hear a whimper of pain from Lauren, but instead, a deep throated moan poured from her, and her hips almost rutted forward. "That what you're looking for?" "Fuck yes, Master." "If you want to be fucked in the ass, Lauren, you're going to need to get my cock good and slick. Going in dry would do some damage." Aisling giggled a little bit, and reached behind her, grabbing a tube of lubricant, handing it down to Lauren. Andy peeled his shirt off and felt Lauren's hands prying his jeans open, nearly ripping them down his legs. It wasn't until she'd gotten them down there that she realized he was still wearing his shoes from having walked out to the mailbox earlier. "Oh, you useless cunt, girl," Lauren said to herself. "Forgot to get his runners off." He certainly didn't go easy on her, and she certainly seemed to enjoy herself. Niko had slipped into bed with them an hour or so later, and the four of them drifted off to sleep. But it wasn't going to be a long and restful night for Andy. There was a knock on the door in the middle of the night. Aisling and Lauren were on his left and Niko was on his right, so he only had to move past her to get to the door. He saw her stir a little when he crawled out of bed, but he was able to avoid disturbing her too much. He pulled on a pair of boxers, tugged on a t shirt and opened the door to his room to see Eric and Lily standing outside. Eric curled his fingers at Andy to come out of his room. Andy nodded and stepped out into the hallway, then followed Eric and Lily downstairs to the living room. "Andy, we," Lily started, then paused, then started again, "I need your help." "Help?" Andy said, looking over at Eric. "What kind of help can I provide? I'm a writer, for fuck sake." "My roommate, well, my former roommate, she was given the vaccine, but,” Lily motioned for Andy to sit on the couch, so he did. "Look, Jenny's a nice girl. She's a little naive, and occasionally she's a bit daft, but she's a nice girl. She wasn't prepared for this." "Prepared for what?" Andy said. "What's happening?" "They delivered her to the man who was supposed to be her partner, and he took a swing at her, said he wanted to put her in her place before he'd let her have a taste of his seed. He tried to hit her, the fucking bastard. But Jenny's been studying aikido since she was six, and she broke his arm defending herself and ran. Even as horny as she was, she wasn't going to let someone push her around. So she fled and she's in hiding, and I can't let that stand, so we need to go and get her." "Go get her? Go and get her? And do what with her?" "I don't know, alright?" Lily said, raising her voice for a second. "I'm thinking we can take her to one of my coworkers and pair them up." "Isn't the government doing match ups? Aren't they going to be pissed that she isn't with who she's supposed to be?" "Look at me, Andy," Lily said, pointing her fingertips at her eyes. "Do I look like I give a shit what the government thinks? They didn't even do a proper check on the guy they were connecting her to. They paired her up with some abusive asshole with a history of violence towards partners. That isn't going to fly, okay?" "Let's go get her, and then we can figure out what to do with her, okay?" Eric suggested. "I'm sure one of us is going to regret this," Andy said, heading back upstairs to grab his socks and shoes. Before the plague had hit, even at three in the morning, there would've been at least a few cars on the road, but now, everyone was staying at home nearly all the time, which meant the freeway felt like a ghost town. That was for the best, because despite it not raining that much in the Bay Area, tonight it was pouring like a flood was coming. And people in the Bay were terrible drivers in the rain. It wasn't a short drive, and after a bit, Andy started to get a bit nervous. "How far up into the hills are we going, Lily? We're more than half way up to San Francisco at this point." "She's up here in Hillsborough, camped out in someone's vacant house since she fled from the asshole. I'm more worried that the cops have shown up to haul her ass to jail." "Or us," Eric said., They're gonna arrest us for being out under curfew." "Quit whining, baby," Lily said to him. "Right up there, on the left, 2885." There were in a very posh neighborhood in Hillsborough, with mansions on either side of them. There was plenty of space in between the houses, something that was mostly at a premium in the Bay. "You wait here with the engine running, Andy, in case we have to bolt quickly. Eric and I will be right back with her." Lily and Eric hopped out of the car, closing the doors and heading over to the house, and left Andy to wait. A minute or so later, a helicopter flew overhead, low and with a spotlight shining down, but it was off to the side and the beam of light cut through some back yard three or four streets over. Andy wasn't sure if they were looking for Lily's friend Jenny or not, but he hoped the police had other things on their mind. The wait was nearly unbearable. After ten minutes, Eric and Lily came back out of the house, a third person between them, hanging on, covered in a blanket it looked like had probably been stolen from whatever house she'd been hiding in. Eric held open the door and Lily loaded the woman into Andy's back seat before Lily ushered the girl into the car, crawling in after her as Eric slid into the front passenger's seat. "I think the cops are close, Andy," Lily hissed at him. "Fucking drive already!" As soon as both doors slammed shut, Andy's foot was off the brake and the car was in motion. It was hard to look back behind him, but after a few blocks he had to stop at a red light and glanced over his shoulder as he had to wait, and saw a familiar face resting her head in Lily's lap. "Jesus Lily, you didn't say your roommate was Jenny Carnero!" "Who's Jenny Carnero?" Eric asked. "She's the goddamn weather forecaster for channel 2." "How the hell would you know that?" Lily asked. "Neither of you strike me as Fox News watchers." "It's the only thing they had on over at 24 Hour Fitness when I went to work out, so I saw her all the time." "It was a job, Andy," Lily said. "I also didn't expect you to hold a grudge." "It's not that, Lily," Andy sighed. "She's going to be noticed missing. It's not like she's somebody we can just keep hidden without people knowing where she is. The minute she goes into work, the guy she's supposed to be with will know where to fucking find her, and that means they'll come for her." "By that point, she'll already be imprinted on someone, so it won't fucking matter," Lily growled. "And it won't be that asshole who tried to hit her." The girl whimpered, her head squirming in Lily's lap. "Lily," she whined, "Lily, it hurts. Need cock." "Soon, Jenny, soon. It won't be long." "Not long, Now," Jenny said, her voice starting to sound almost violent. "Give cock." "Oh shit, her nose is bleeding," Eric said, his eyes back on Jenny's face. "Just pull over and Andy can fuck her." "Excuse me, but I've already got three girls, and supposedly one more on the way. Why don't you fuck her?" "Because Lily says I can't." "Andy, stop the car," Lily said. "Eric, get back here." "But you said,” "I know what I fucking said, you little shit, but I'll have to fucking learn to deal with it, won't I? Get back here and let her suck you off while Andy's driving us home." Andy brought the car to a stop at the next red light, and Lily swapped places with Eric. As soon as Eric was sitting in the back seat, Jenny was practically ripping his pants off, fishing out his cock before slamming her mouth down on it. "Lily, are you sure about this?" Eric said, nervousness apparent in his voice. "Give it to her, Eric. She and I were good friends, we will be again. It'll just be an adjustment." Andy kept his eyes pointing forward for the rest of the drive as Eric got blown in his back seat. Chapter 9 The next day Andy was struggling to figure out a plan. He'd been running it around in his head for hours, trying to see some easy way through this, but he kept coming back to the same inevitable point “ he needed Phil's help. God, he was tired of having to ask Phil for help. "You're vexed, Andy," Niko said to him, placing her hand on his shoulder. He'd been sitting at his desk, and he looked back over his shoulder to her. "How can you tell?" "You've been looking at that computer screen for almost an hour and haven't typed a word, babe," she said, leaning in to kiss him on the cheek. "That's vexed. We haven't been together long, but I recognize when you're vexed. I do the same, when I'm thinking very hard about something. I stare and I fret, while I'm vexed." "You seem rather like a badass, Niko. You sure you're going to be okay, being saddled with a square like me?" She laughed. It was a sound he was quickly learning to love, confident and yet still somehow a little cheeky. "You've been keeping this house together despite all the chaos. That doesn't seem square to me." "You know I'm like a dozen years your elder, right?" "I won't tell anyone if you won't. So how can I help? What are you vexed by?" "Last night, our little voyage out, we brought back a new girl for Eric. She's Lily's former roommate. She was supposed to be with someone else, but apparently the man she was paired up with has a history of domestic abuse, and so Lily insisted we rescue her and paired her up with Eric so no one could pull her away." "So you're trying to figure out how to tell the government about how she's paired up with someone different? What makes you think they're even going to notice?" "She's a weather reporter on one of the local news stations, so people are going to notice. I think I've got a solution, but I just hate to do it. I feel like I'm always leaning on this friend to help us out." "Oh? Someone you've told me about?" "Phil. I've mentioned him. In fact, you should probably meet Phil. I'm just tired of constantly asking him for help." "Do you really ask him for help a bunch, or does it just feel like it and you're overreacting?" she grinned. "Probably the latter, but it doesn't always feel like that." Andy grabbed his phone and loaded up the Signal messenger app. He and Phil used it to keep their communication private. “Meet up in an hour at the usual spot? Almost immediately he got a response. “Make it 2. "Okay, looks like I've got a meeting set up. Phil's been our man on the inside for this whole pandemic. He works for a company that contracts for the military, and while he can't tell us exact details about what's going on, he can help paint in some of the corners. Phil will know how to get all this sorted out." "How long have you two known each other?" "Nearly 20 years? He's good people. Why don't you come with me?" "Sure, lemme go throw some pants on." A couple hours later, Andy and Niko had headed back to the park to meet up with Phil, who didn't bring Audrey with him. He was dressed wrapped in head to toe, much like he was the last time, a mask over his face and goggles over his eyes, with a ball cap pulled down over his jet black hair. Andy was dressed much the same. Niko didn't feel the need to wear goggles, and had her hair drawn back into a ponytail. Phil kept a good distance from them, pushing his vape pen behind his mask to take a drag from it, then tugged the mask down briefly to blow out a cloud of vapor into the air. "So what's the 911 call about, Andy?" "First, let me introduce you, "2nd Lieutenant Redwolf," Phil said, cutting him off. "Mr. Marcos," Niko replied. "Didn't know your name was Phil." "I'm surprised you even remember me, Redwolf. You were pretty out of it when I sort nudged you towards Andy." Andy cocked his head. "You sent her my way?" "She's part of our tribe, Andy. Geek cred through and through, and I figured it wouldn't hurt to have her kept in the family, so I just made a connection in the system. She had decent odds to end up with you anyway, but why take a chance, right?" "Guess I owe you one then, Mr. Marcos," Niko said. Phil swiped his hand in the air. "Then I'll call in that favor to insist you never, ever call me Mr. Marcos unless we're at work. Deal?" "I can make that promise." "This what you called me about, Andy?" Phil said, finally stepping a little further back, pulling off his mask so he could just continually draw from the vape pen. "Nah. I've got a bigger problem. So Eric's picked up a runaway." Phil frowned a little bit. "How do you mean?" "So Eric's partner, Lily. She had a roommate before the whole pandemic, name of Jenny. Now apparently Jenny was set up with some guy." "That's how it works, Andy." "I get that, Phil. But it turns out the guy she was set up with was some kind of domestic abuser." "Wait, what?" Phil scowled. "That sort of thing should've shown up before he got paired up with anyone." "I dunno. Maybe it didn't get reported before, maybe this was his first time and he was trying it on. But before Jenny could get imprinted on him, he tried to take a swing at her." "Fuck. She okay?" "She's got some self-defense training, so she got away from the guy unscathed and went into hiding." "You get the guy's name?" "I can have Eric send it to you. But that's not the big concern. The big concern is that once we rescued her, she imprinted onto Eric. And she's a talking head." "Shit," Phil said, taking another drag. "News?" "Weather." Phil swiped a hand back in the air again. "Send me her name. I'll get it taken care of. Don't even trip about it. That's the least of our problems right now." "Shit getting bad, sir, I mean Phil?" Niko asked. "You have no idea." "How bad?" Andy asked. "We're looking at ten to twenty before it's all done." "Ten to twenty million people dead? Jesus!" "No, percent. We're talking ten to twenty percent of America dead, mostly men. We're guessing it'll end up around sixty million dead before the vaccine's in full effect in the middle of next year." Phil took a heavy drag, and the news hung in the air like a guillotine's blade. "The news is going to break any day now how fatal the new mutation of the virus is getting, and then everything'll be crazy. The army's going to be deployed here on US soil and martial law's going to go into effect. President Pelosi's at least been quick about it, and she's bunkered down. News hasn't broken yet, but the orange gooomba died on the operating table a couple of hours ago. Looks like milquetoast will be next in a couple of days." "Forty or fifty million men dead? That's nearly half of the male population!" Niko said. "How the hell are we going to recover from that?" "We're going to have to pair up a lot more women with the remaining men, and encourage them to have a whole shitload of kids," Phil sighed. "But even with that, it's going to be a fucking mess for a generation. Which reminds me, when you go home, I want you to start packing up your things." "Packing?" Andy asked. "What do you mean?" "I mean, start figuring out the absolute minimum you would need to take with you if you had to leave in a hurry, and then get anything that might take a few minutes packed up. Anything else, just have it at the ready." "Should I be worried?" "Nah, but it wouldn't hurt to be a little prepared." "What's happening, Phil?" "I can't tell you that yet, but the world's gonna keep on changing, and it doesn't hurt to be ready for it." "Yeah, okay." "You'll actually be very happy after it happens, man. Trust me." "If you say so." "Trust Big Daddy Phil." Andy rolled his eyes. "I trust you about as far as I can throw you, and that ain't very far." "You'll see." His watch beeped and Phil turned it up to look at it. "I gotta get back into the office. Send me Eric's new girl's name and the guy she was supposed to be hooked up with, and I'll make a few edits into the system." "You know Phil, there are days it feels like you're seriously into some black bag shit." "Only some days?" Phil said, taking one final drag off his vape pen before blowing a huge cloud up and into the air. It smelled vaguely of cinnamon buns, Andy noted. "Then I gotta up my game again. I'll see you soon, brother." He pulled his mask back up and headed back to his car. Andy and Niko watched him go, stretching out a little bit. "So you worked with Phil, huh?" Andy asked her. Her face scrunched up a little. "I was part of their security detail until I got exposed to the virus and then got quarantined. When the symptoms started to get severe, they used us as test cases for vaccinations and tried to pair us off. They were having trouble finding someone to match me with, based on my stated preferences before I got drugged." Andy smirked a little behind his mask. "I knew I wasn't exactly what you were looking for." "You're a little older than I initially wanted, Andy, but I don't have any complaints now that I'm with you. I was also a bit leery about sharing a partner with anyone, but it seems like that's going to be S O P moving forward." "S O P?" "Standard Operating Procedure. If Mr. Mar” if Phil's right about those casualty numbers, they're going to have to pair up a Lot of women to individual men. I bet you're going to get a bunch more than just the one more you're expecting." "Jesus, that's a whole lot of personalities to keep in balance," Andy grumbled. "I dunno if I'm up to that." "You don't have to do it alone, stupid head," she teased. "You've got Ash and me to help manage the cavalcade of women you're going to be saddled with. We'll try and keep everyone from killing one another and manage your time, although we're definitely going to have to continue getting you into better shape." "Lauren's started in on that, but frankly, I probably need to eat better." "And cut down on the soda. You've got a full nest to look after." "This scares the shit out of me," he sighed, leaning his back against a tree. "You know that, right?" Niko strolled over to him, a coy playfulness to her stride, as she moved close. "I know how to relax you." Andy arched an eyebrow beneath the goggles. "What, here?" "Who's going to see?" "We're in a public park, Niko!" "Ask me if I give a fuck," she said, as she dropped down to her knees, nuzzling her face against the crotch of his jeans. "Alright," he laughed, "Niko, do you give a fuh " His sentence was cut off as she pressed her mouth down along the length of his cock until the head of it was pressed against the back of her throat. She held it there for a good moment, long enough that he could feel her suppressing her gag reflex, straining back tears before she drew her head back and gasped in a deep breath of air. A playful giggle rolled from her lips, saliva dripping from them. "No sir, I fucking do not. But the faster you give me what I want, the faster we can go home," she said, moving to kiss at his balls, suckling on his nuts for a moment before moving her lips back to wrap around the head of his cock. "Now hold my hair back and fuck my face." Andy reached down and grabbed her silky ponytail with one hand, the other moving to curl his fingers against the back of her head as he pushed her face back down onto his cock. In response, she let out a wanton moan onto his cock, her hands reaching back to grab his ass, helping push her lips down to the base of his shaft, his balls pressing right against her chin. His hand holding her ponytail pulled her back, sliding her lips back to the head of his cock before pushing her face back down again, feeling her fingernails sinking into his jeans a bit more in response. He could swear he saw her hips thrusting forward beneath him, her legs spread wide, her knees almost pressed to the inside of his ankles. The pace quickened, as he thrust forward into her face while tugging her down onto each shove, whimpers that sounded delighted shivering across his skin between the sloppy sounds. He finally pulled her head back, letting her pop her head off his cock, just in case she wanted to tell him to stop, tell him she'd changed her mind, or whatever. Instead, she turned her eyes up to him. "Don't fucking stop. Fuck my face. Gimme that load of hot cum right against the back of my fucking throat. Please?" Her brown eyes were peering up at him as she licked her lips, and he could feel her struggling to try and lean even closer to him. He started to pump his cock into her mouth again, and suddenly he felt one of her hands slide away from his hips. He could see it push down the front of her jeans, and almost immediately, it came back up again and raised into the air towards his face. Her fingers were glistening, practically soaked, and he could smell her cunt on them as he leaned forward to lick them clean. Just as he did, he felt his balls draw up and his hand on the back of her head pressed her face down to the base of his cock as that orgasm shredded through him. He knew his cum was blasting into her throat, and could feel her spasming and trembling against him. It still boggled his mind, knowing that his orgasm triggered one immediately in his partner, and far more intense than he'd ever been able to bring a woman to before. His hands let go, giving Niko back control as she drew back, groaning in a carnal sound he hadn't yet grown accustomed to. Instead of pulling away, though, she started licking up, making sure to catch any loose jism or spittle from his shaft, her gaze never once leaving his, as she smirked while her tongue slathered him up. "See? Don't you feel less vexed?" He couldn't help it and started laughing, and it was infectious, because she immediately began giggling with him, even while she was lapping up the last of his spunk. "Okay, yes, you got me, I am certainly less vexed. How about you?" Niko smirked a bit, giving his cock one final lick before she pulled his boxers and jeans back up, rezipping and buttoning them up for him. "By now, you have to understand that your sperm is like a magic formula to us, your partners. It's exactly what we need and want every day. It's like giving a junkie a fix. Of course I feel better." She tugged up his shirt and kissed his stomach before pulling herself back up onto her feet. "I'd have kissed you but, "I don't mind that you just blew me, Niko," Andy chuckled. "Oh, that's not it at all. I just didn't want to share," she said with a wink, tapping one of her fingertips on his nose. "Girl's gotta keep every drop to herself any chance she can. Normally we try and pass a little of each load around, but here I get one all to myself. So I'm savoring that taste lingering on my lips. But we should get back to the house." "Fair enough." As soon as they got back to the house, Lily was waiting for them by the garage door. "Are we okay?" Niko smiled at her and gave the plump girl a huge. "Andy's got you covered, don't worry." She rubbed her spiky hair and then headed into the house, leaving the two together. "So get me the jackass's name from Jenny, and I'll get it to our friend Phil, who'll make sure it gets entered into the record that he's a domestic abuser." "Hopefully that means he won't get paired with anyone then." "Well, based on what Phil said in the Discord channel a week or so back, it's more likely they'll pair him with someone who can beat the shit out of him," Andy sighed. "Or, someone who's into that kind of thing. People are into all sorts of weird things out here." "You don't have to tell me twice," Lily said, exhaling a deep breath. "Jenny's been nuzzled up to Eric all morning, practically unwilling to let him go. I wasn't planning on sharing him with anyone, but if I have to share him with someone, I guess Jenny will be okay." Andy realized a second later, his face must have given something away. "What's with that look? You heard something else from Phil, didn't you?" "Yeah, it's pretty fucking scary out there, Lil." He shook his head then looked up. "You're probably going to be sharing Eric with quite a few other women. Men are dying left and right, and they're going to have to figure out how to keep the country afloat. That means the traditional family unit design is out the fucking window." "How bad can it really be if they're keeping it quiet?" "It's about to boil over. The estimate is we're going to lose nearly half the men in America." Her eyes looked to him as if she was waiting for the joke. When it didn't come, and the silence had hung in the air an uncomfortably long time, she finally spoke again. "Half? Fucking half? Fucking Half?" "Yeah, I can't say I'm thrilled about it either, Lily. I've got a lot of guy friends, and the idea of half of them just being fucking gone isn't exactly news I wanted to hear when I got up this morning, but I got it anyway." Andy tossed his hands up into the air. "And we can't fucking tell anyone! The news will out in a few days, but we have to be quiet about it until it is. Also, apparently we need to start packing." "Packing? What for?" "I guess we're going to be moved at some point. I guess we'll find out soon enough." Soon enough came the very next day. Andy and his usual gang of friends had a Discord channel they hung out on regularly, and they'd been using it for news on each other. And Phil poked his head in just before noon with a simple message: "@DruidGun 15 minutes." The household had spent part of the da

Hoje nós vamos falar sobre um assunto cheio de mitos, tabus e julgamentos: testosterona em mulheres. O “irmão mal compreendido” da família hormonal, que todo mundo associa só à libido, mas que influencia muito mais do que você imagina.Nesse episódio, eu compartilho o que aprendi — com estudos, com a clínica e comigo mesma — sobre o papel da testosterona na saúde da mulher: da força muscular ao cérebro, da pele ao desejo, da energia ao bem-estar emocional.Não é papo de bomba, nem de estética — é conversa honesta, baseada em ciência, experiência e, claro, consciência.Neste episódio: O papel da testosterona na “família hormonal” femininaDiferenças entre uso estético e terapêuticoEfeitos no corpo feminino: libido, energia, humor, sono, massa muscular, cogniçãoReceptores espalhados pelo corpo: o impacto além da função sexualPor que os exames hormonais nem sempre contam toda a históriaEnzimas como aromatase e 5-alfa-redutase: acne, oleosidade, queda de cabeloQuando a testosterona pode não ser indicada (SOP, alopecia, resistência à insulina)O que dizem os consensos internacionaisO uso consciente e responsável, em doses fisiológicas✨ Ouça agora e compartilhe com quem precisa dessa informação!Quero agradecer a Mahta, por patrocinar o episódio de hoje!Para quem quiser experimentar com desconto de 10%, ou somente conhecer para ajudar o podcast, vai no site https://www.mahta.bio/isabelafortes .Site do Podcast: https://isabelafortes.com.brEpisódios Relacionados: EP 60 | Despedaçada…Mas meus exames estão “normais” – Isabela FortesEP 63 | Quando começar a Terapia para menopausa e outras dúvidas hormonais – Isabela FortesEP 28 | Opções NÃO hormonais para a menopausa: alternativas à Terapia Hormonal – Isabela FortesEP 23 | Será que é menopausa? Como saber se você está ou não no climatério? – Isabela FortesEP 86 | Desacelere a Mente: Técnicas para um Sono Transformador – Isabela FortesEP 02 | Hormônios Femininos: Como entender o ciclo que impacta todos os aspectos de nossas vidas mensalmente – Isabela Fortes      EP 18 | SOS HORMÔNIOS. PQP… O que está acontecendo comigo? – Isabela Fortes  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fortes_isabela/

W czternastym odcinku Super CHARGE siadamy razem z Wami i na żywo oglądamy PlayStation State of Play 2025!

Anna Addoms, Wicked MarvelousOur guest in this episode is Anna Addoms, the insightful founder of Wicked Marvelous. Anna champions making technology, especially AI, accessible and genuinely useful for small business owners, always with a focus on reducing overwhelm and fostering authentic connections. In our chat, Anna shares her practical wisdom on how entrepreneurs can harness AI as a powerful tool without losing the essential human touch that truly matters in building lasting relationships and a thriving business.Key points discussed include:* AI as a Tool, Not a Replacement: Use AI strategically for back-office tasks, but always keep humans at the forefront of client interactions.* Guard Human Connection Fiercely: Implement AI in customer service with extreme care, ensuring transparency and easy access to human support.* Navigate AI Ethically and Practically: Stay informed about AI's capabilities and risks, using it to add value while protecting your brand and IP.Listen to the podcast to find out more.Innovabiz Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Show Notes from this episode with Anna Addoms, Wicked MarvelousThe AI Revolution: Tool, Not TyrantIt feels like just yesterday we were marveling at the dawn of AI, this "cool, shiny object" everyone was buzzing about. Fast forward to today, and we're deep in the trenches, moving beyond the mere novelty and into the serious business of practical application. The initial excitement was palpable, but now, as Anna Addoms wisely pointed out in our recent chat, we're navigating the "nitty gritty" – figuring out what AI is actually doing, whether it's truly adding value, and how to use it safely and effectively without getting lost down a "rabbit hole."Anna Addoms, with her characteristic clarity, cuts right to the chase: AI is fundamentally a tool, a multi-tool even. Think of it like a powerful chainsaw in your shed. In the right hands, with the right understanding, it can make incredibly light work of massive tasks. But if you're not careful, or if you don't really know how to wield it, you're just inviting a mess or unnecessary complexity. Our biggest goal, as entrepreneurs, should be to use AI to enhance our lives and businesses, to make things easier, and crucially, to still allow us to do what we do best: cultivate genuine human connections.Where AI Shines (and Where It Doesn't)So, where does this powerful multi-tool truly shine? Anna suggests focusing its considerable might on back-office tasks – those internal operations that often consume valuable time and energy. Picture those complex spreadsheet formulas that make your head spin; AI can whip those up in a flash. Or consider the initial drafts of long-form content, giving you a solid starting point without the blank page paralysis. The key here is using AI to shoulder a significant portion of the "heavy lifting," freeing you up for more strategic and human-centric work.But let's not get carried away. As Anna firmly reminds us, not every "low-level task can be farmed out" to AI. There are times when trying to force AI into a situation actually creates more complication than it solves. If a simple spreadsheet can organize your contact information, why complicate it by feeding it into an AI that might struggle with context? The wisdom lies in recognizing when AI is a genuine accelerator and when it's just an unnecessary detour.The Human Touch: Why Relationships Still RuleHere's where Anna's human-centered philosophy truly comes to the fore: AI should never, ever, replace genuine human connection. We've all been there – stuck in a frustrating recursive loop with a chatbot, feeling like we're talking to a brick wall. That "bad brain experience" doesn't just annoy customers; it actively "burns relationships." Anna is adamant: if you're deploying AI for customer service, there must be an immediate, clear escalation process to a real human. Without that "I wanna talk to a real human right now" button, you're essentially signing a death warrant for customer loyalty.It's not just about functionality; it's about authenticity. Anna points out the "uncanny valley" experience when AI voice technology gets too close to human, yet remains subtly "off." This creates a deep cognitive dissonance, a feeling of "something is wrong." Her advice is crystal clear: be transparency. If it's a bot, call it a bot. Don't give it a human name or picture. This ethical stance ensures trust, preventing your customers from feeling misled or, worse, "pissed off" because they couldn't escape an automated interaction.Building Your AI-Powered Personal Brand (Ethically!)Now, on a brighter note, AI can be an absolute boon for crafting and refining your personal brand's messaging. Anna herself has trained her AI to sound "exactly like me" for various content outputs – emails, sales pages, blog posts. This means she can generate initial drafts that are remarkably consistent with her unique voice and cadence. The magic, however, lies in the subsequent step: the human touch, the final edit. Anna emphasizes that she's always the "last person to see it," ensuring her "seal of approval" is on every piece of content that goes out. This blend of AI efficiency and human oversight is powerful.However, a crucial word of caution, something Anna highlighted with a stark anecdote: be incredibly mindful of data privacy and copyright when using AI tools. She shared a sobering example of authors inadvertently signing away their book copyrights by inputing their manuscripts into certain AI language models under their terms of service. It's like accidentally giving away your precious intellectual property to the public domain! Always, always read the fine print. Your content is your gold, so guard it fiercely.Mastering Your Workflow: AI as Your SOP SidekickLet's talk about a task many entrepreneurs dread: creating Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). We know we need them, especially when scaling and hiring, but the thought of documenting every little step can feel overwhelming. This is where AI truly shines as an unsung hero. As Anna explains, many new hires struggle not because they're incompetent, but because they lack clear, documented processes. You hand over a task, and then find yourself frustrated when it's not done exactly as you envisioned.Anna's practical solution? Leverage AI! She encourages entrepreneurs to use prompts that guide them step-by-step through the SOP creation process. Even better, you can feed it enough information, and it can draft the entire thing for you. This isn't about abdicating responsibility; it's about leveraging AI's ability to structure information logically, ensuring "everything starts coming back faster and exactly the way they want." It's also fantastic for critiquing existing SOPs, pointing out gaps or areas for improvement that your brain, so familiar with the process, might simply overlook.The Calendar Conundrum: Owning Your Time with (or Without) AIThe digital calendar, while a godsend for organization, can also be a silent saboteur of your precious time if not managed with an iron fist. Anna and I both share a strong sentiment about this: you must maintain boundaries around your calendar and your time. While AI scheduling tools offer undeniable convenience, there's a real danger of "abdicating ownership" of your most valuable asset. Suddenly, your days are a chaotic collage of back-to-back meetings with no breathing room, leading straight to burnout.Anna's advice echoes a hard-won truth: your time, your rules. Instead of giving people 24/7 access to your schedule, block out specific times for different types of meetings or, even better, for uninterrupted deep work. This isn't about being unapproachable; it's about being strategic and protecting your mental and physical well-being. Whether you use AI for scheduling or not, the principle remains: actively manage your calendar, don't let it manage you.Staying Savvy: Protecting Your Digital SelfIn this "wild west" of AI, staying vigilant about your digital footprint is paramount. Anna recommends a simple yet powerful defense: set up Google Alerts for your name and business. It sounds old school, but it's incredibly effective for catching any unauthorized use of your likeness or content. Knowing what's being published about you, or as you, is the first line of defense. It allows you to be proactive, as Anna herself experienced when a podcast interview went live earlier than planned.Beyond monitoring, be aware of the bigger picture. While malicious voice cloning of individuals like us isn't the prevalent issue yet (it's mostly targeting celebrities), the technology exists. The reality is, some risk is inherent when putting content on public platforms. However, understanding your rights – the ability to issue cease and desist orders and report malicious content – empowers you to act swiftly if your digital identity is ever compromised. In this evolving landscape, awareness is truly your strongest shield.Summary:Anna Addoms provided incredible insights into navigating the brave new world of AI. Her core message is simple yet profound: AI is a powerful tool, but it should always serve to enhance human connection, never replace it. She emphasized the critical need for transparency, especially when AI is client-facing, and highlighted the importance of guarding your intellectual property. Ultimately, AI offers immense potential for efficiency and automation in our businesses, but its successful implementation hinges on a clear, human-centered strategy.Reach OutYou can reach out and thank Anna by visiting her website.Links:* Website – Wicked Marvelous* Twitter – @WickedMarvelous* Linkedin* Facebook* Instagram - @wicked_marvelousCool Things About Anna* Anna grew up in Colorado in a family of entrepreneurs, right in the thick of the tech boom. She was raised around innovation and search engines, with her dad running AOL's biggest competitor during the first dot-com bubble. That's a childhood spent at the intersection of curiosity and code.* She's a creative at heart: Anna went to art school and holds a degree in English Literature. Her journey from art and literature to Silicon Valley tech startups is a delightful zigzag, not a straight line. She's proof that you can be both a techie and a creative soul.* Anna has a knack for reinvention. After burning out in the high-octane world of Silicon Valley startups (like clockwork, every 18 months!), she realized her true passion was helping others build and implement their own dreams. She's now been running her own company for over a decade, thriving on variety and new challenges.* She's a self-confessed “sponge of knowledge,” always learning, always curious. Anna's love of learning has led her down unexpected paths—from luxury travel to ad agencies to med-tech startups. She's not afraid to pivot, experiment, or start over if it means staying true to her values.Imagine being a part of a select community where you not only have access to our amazing podcast guests, but you also get a chance to transform your marketing and podcast into a growth engine with a human-centered, relationship-focused approach.That's exactly what you'll get when you join the Flywheel Nation Community.Tap into the collective wisdom of high-impact achievers, gain exclusive access to resources, and expand your network in our vibrant community.Experience accelerated growth, breakthrough insights, and powerful connections to elevate your business.ACT NOW – secure your spot and transform your journey today! Visit innovabiz.co/flywheel and get ready to experience the power of transformation.VideoThanks for reading Innovabiz Substack! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit innovabiz.substack.com/subscribe

Text us a pool question!In this conversation, Peter, Shane, and Lee discuss the significance of Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) in the context of aquatic facilities and service businesses. They emphasize the need for consistency, compliance, and the empowerment of staff through well-documented procedures. The discussion also touches on the role of technology and AI in developing SOPs, the importance of detailed procedures, and the necessity of personalizing SOPs to reflect the business's culture and values. The conversation concludes with a call to action for businesses to utilize the winter months for productivity and planning.takeawaysSOPs are essential for consistency in operations.Creating SOPs can empower staff to work independently.AI can assist in drafting SOPs but should be verified.SOPs should reflect the business's culture and values.Regular updates to SOPs are necessary due to changing regulations.Detailed procedures are crucial for compliance and safety.Utilizing technology can streamline SOP management.Winter is a productive time for businesses to develop SOPs.SOPs can enhance the professionalism of a service business.Creating a template for SOPs can save time in the future.Sound Bites"SOPs can feel like SOBs sometimes.""AI can help create a skeleton for SOPs.""Don't trust AI for dosing rates.""SOPs need to reflect your business personality.""It's important to personalize your SOPs.""Make the most of the colder months to be productive."Chapters00:00Welcome and Introductions03:00The Importance of Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs)05:57Creating Effective SOPs for Aquatic Facilities09:09Utilizing Technology and AI in SOP Development11:59Detailed Procedures and Compliance14:48Final Thoughts on SOPs and Productivity Support the showThank you so much for listening! You can find us on social media: Facebook Instagram Tik Tok Email us: talkingpools@gmail.com

Ahhh, summer. The season of sunshine, sandals… and salon owners accidentally letting their momentum nosedive into a beach chair.Look, we all need rest. But if you're treating July like a business sabbatical without the systems to back it up, Lexi's got news for you: you're about to f around and find out.

【本集由 遠見雜誌 贊助播出】 你每天都在按讚，但知道這個「小拇指」怎麼來的嗎？ 一張被遺忘的草圖、一次無心的搬家，揭開了創新背後不為人知的真相 —— 它不一定來自天才，也不靠SOP，而是許多人的偶然貢獻、集體創作。 本集帶你從一顆小小按鈕，看見創新其實就藏在混亂、意外與日常工作裡。

In this episode of Online People Talking, Jen Barkan is joined by Chesapeake Homes' superstar OSC team: Stephanie Moffett and Danielle Ross. These two powerhouses are not only crushing it on the lead front, they've also built a seamless backup system for time off, extended leave, and everything in between. Whether you're a solo OSC or working with a partner, this episode is full of practical tips to help you unplug without dropping the ball.Jen, Stephanie, and Danielle get real about the challenges of stepping away from the OSC seat and how to ensure every lead is still handled with care, even when you're not around. They share how they structured their team, developed emergency coverage plans, and even trained a temporary OSC for extended leave.Topic of Today (04:36)“Hey, I need a backup plan… what do I do with my leads when I'm on vacation?” The team dives into the most frequently asked questions about how to maintain lead coverage when stepping away. They cover:Building a backup plan from scratch
Training internal team members for coverage
Real-life examples of vacation and maternity leave handoffs
Why even managers make great backup OSCs (in a pinch)
The mental health benefits of truly unpluggingSkills Check (38:20)“You gotta check yourself before you wreck yourself.” Jen lays out your step-by-step Skills Check to help you develop your own OSC backup strategy:
1. Identify your backup. Talk with your leadership team and determine who can fill in when you're away.
2. Create a plan. Work out the logistics: call forwarding, CRM access, workflows, and lead ownership.
3. Document it. Consider drafting a short SOP for your backup plan.
4. Test it. Don't wait until vacation. Run a trial to make sure it works smoothly.
5. Really take vacation! You deserve real time off, and your leads will still be there when you return.

Diferencia entre SOP con resistencia a la insulina (SOP-RI) y SOP adrenal

Welcome to another powerful episode of the Lead with Heart Podcast, your nonprofit leadership podcast focused on heart-led strategy and sustainable growth. This week, I sit down with Stephanie Sloan, founder of JLC Systems and an expert in streamlining nonprofit operations through effective SOPs.Stephanie shares her IMPACT Method — a practical framework for evaluating workflows, preventing burnout, increasing donor and volunteer engagement, and preparing your organization for funding success. If you've ever felt like you're building the plane while flying it, this episode is your permission to pause, document, and scale with intention.In this episode:[03:05] Stephanie's background in processes and systems[05:00] Why so many nonprofits struggle with efficiency[08:14] How to create an effective SOP[13:45] The value of evaluating and documenting processes[19:31] Evaluating processes to move from a reactive to a proactive mindset[25:19] How small nonprofit teams can benefit from SOPs[27:09] Storing SOPs and the people involved in creating them[31:09] Stephanie's IMPACT method for developing organizational efficiencyRESOURCESE42: Empowering Nonprofit Leadership Development and Growth with Kristin Harrington, Partner at Lead StarNOTEWORTHY QUOTES“ This is not hard. Just take the one thing that is the most important to your staff and the most important to your mission and make sure it's documented.” - Stephanie Sloan“If we all ceased to exist tomorrow, would the mission move forward? That's the power of a well-written SOP.” – Stephanie SloanCONNECT WITH STEPHANIELinkedIn: Send Haley a suggestion or request via text HERE!My book, Sow, Grow, Lead is live on Amazon! It shares my journey of starting a nonprofit in Malawi and offers practical strategies to help nonprofit leaders turn visions into reality, and create meaningful impact As the fundraising engine of choice for over 80,000 organizations in 90+ countries, Donorbox's easy-to-use fundraising tools help you raise more money in more ways. Seamlessly embed a customizable donation form into your website that reduces donor drop-off with a 4x faster checkout, launch a crowdfunding or peer-to-peer campaign, sell event tickets, raise funds on the go with Donorbox Live™ Kiosk, and much more. Learn more at donorbox.orgCONNECT WITH HALEYHaley is a Certified Fund Raising Executive (CFRE), Stress Management Coach, and EmC trainer. She founded The Savvy Fundraiser, a nonprofit consulting and coaching business, and has experience with nonprofits in human services, homelessness, and youth sectors. Specializing in EmC, leadership, board development, and fundraising, Haley is dedicated to empowering nonprofit leaders to create thriving organizations.Instagram: @thesavvyfundraiser LinkedIn: Haley Cooper, CFREWebsite: thesavvyfundraiser.comProduced by Ideablossoms

Behind the scenes, most business chaos doesn't come from a lack of skill... it comes from messy, non-existent systems. And if your client experience feels a little scattered, your clients are feeling it too.In this guest episode, I'm joined by Mariana from Pink Ocean VS... a systems strategist, community builder, and spreadsheet-loving creative to unpack how we can create client journeys that feel seamless, supportive and straight-up satisfying.Whether you're a virtual assistant, a creative service provider, or just tired of chasing your tail between bub's nap time and Zoom calls... this is your reminder that structure can be freeing, and systems can be soul-nourishing.Here's what we cover:The difference between delivering a service... and crafting an experienceThe emotional layer that sets great brands apartWhat systems every service provider actually needsThe low-tech, high-clarity magic of mapping your journeyWhy SOPs aren't just for big businessesGrab your post-its, open your Canva whiteboard, and tune in... this one's equal parts strategy and heartDOWNLOAD Free Canva Client Journey Map: https://whitedeer.com.au/ep215ABOUT MARIANA:I'm Mariana, founder of Pink Ocean Virtual Solutions, a digital operations service for service-based business owners who are ready to clean up the backend, stop duct-taping their systems together, and get back to doing what they're great at. I specialise in CRM setups (especially Moxie), digital declutters, SOP creation, and ongoing tech VA support.CONNECT WITH MARIANAInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/pinkoceanvs/Website: https://pinkoceanvs.com.au/"The Break" Newsletter: https://pinkoceanvs.myflodesk.com/podcastMoxie fortnightly newsletter: https://pinkoceanvs.myflodesk.comWatch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/l6s55Zjk3hYRead on the Blog: https://whitedeer.com.au/ep215/WORK WITH JACQUI:// DIY Design My Biz: The best course for business owners DIYing their own brand and graphics in Canva. Learn more: https://whitedeer.com.au/diy-dmb// The Co+Creation Design Club: Design WITH the help of a professional designer in this high-touch coaching space: https://whitedeer.com.au/designclub// Design Studio: If you're after fully done-for-you design services my studio team can help! https://whitedeer.com.au/designstudio

Este episodio especial nace de una invitación de Alpina para conmemorar sus 80 años de historia. Y como toda buena historia, nos lleva a viajar por el tiempo. Vamos a hacer un recorrido por algunos de los hechos más importantes que han ocurrido en los últimos 80 años en Colombia y el mundo. Desde su creación en el valle de Sopó, Alpina ha crecido junto con grandes cambios que han pasado en la historia de la humanidad: desde el final de la Segunda Guerra Mundial hasta la era digital, pasando por hitos como el alunizaje, la caída del Muro de Berlín, el Nobel de García Márquez y la Constitución del 91. A lo largo de este tiempo, Alpina se ha convertido en una de las más famosas marcas y empresas de Colombia Notas del episodio  Este episodio fue patrocinado por Alpina, 80 años nutriendo un mañana delicioso El fin de la Segunda Guerra Mundial La Carrera Espacial en el siglo XX En el libro “Contracultura” explicamos todos los hechos de un mundo para la juventud El recibimiento del Premio Nobel de Gabriel García Márquez La Revolución Digital, uno de los grandes cambios de la historia

Your restaurant's most powerful marketing tool? The menu. In this episode, the team dives deep into one of the most overlooked yet powerful tools in your restaurant: the menu. From visual psychology and printing strategies to layout, material choices, and pricing tactics, this conversation is packed with practical tips to help you treat your menu like what it truly is—your #1 marketing and sales tool. You'll walk away with insights on font choices, color psychology, menu engineering, printing vendors, and even why leaving drink prices off the menu can increase profits. If you've ever shrugged off menu updates as an expense, this episode will change your mindset—and maybe even your margins. Key Takeaways: Your Menu Is Not an Expense—It's an Investment It's the first thing guests engage with when deciding how much to spend. A thoughtful, clean, and well-printed menu elevates perception and drives higher check averages. Design & Readability Matter Font size, layout, paper quality, and cleanliness all shape the guest's impression. Use negative space, legible fonts, and layout strategies like the Golden Triangle to drive selection. Strategic Printing Choices Use a local printer when possible—consider bartering or partnerships. Evaluate in-house printing if you need frequent updates. Menu holders, sleeves, and material durability should match your concept. Proven Profit Tips Use high-quality food photos for best-sellers (especially on laminated or in-house menus). Leave beverage prices off for pricing flexibility. Add visual cues to highlight high-margin items. Common Mistakes to Avoid Dirty or outdated menus, inconsistent updates, typos, or cluttered layouts. Overloading with too many items, especially in smaller operations. Practical Tools & Tech Use AI (like ChatGPT) to help write compelling, accurate menu descriptions. Establish an SOP for menu changes across online platforms, third-party apps, and POS systems.

Hoy vamos a hablar de un suplemento muy popular, sobre todo entre mujeres con síndrome de ovario poliquístico: el inositol. Te explicaré qué es exactamente, qué tipos existen, cómo actúa en el cuerpo, qué tipo de inositol es mejor según tu tipo de SOP, qué tienes que mirar en la etiqueta cuando lo compres y cómo y cuándo deberías tomarlo.

In this conversation on AI-powered SEO workflows, Andrew Ansley joins The Simple and Smart SEO Show to share how smart marketers are using tools like Claude, ChatGPT, and automation platforms to save time and scale without hiring.From building SOPs in under an hour to organizing AI projects for sharper output, Andrew reveals how today's marketers can combine soft skills with machine intelligence to stay competitive—without burning out.Whether you're a creative entrepreneur, solo founder, or agency owner, this episode is packed with actionable insights to help you systemize your business and let AI do the heavy lifting.

How can biotech companies grow faster, smarter, and more sustainably in a turbulent market? In this episode, host Elaine Hamm, PhD, welcomes Katrina Rogers, CEO of Katrina Rogers Consulting, for a deep dive into the operational and regulatory strategies that help biotech companies succeed—without sacrificing speed, quality, or sanity. With over 25 years of experience in drug development, manufacturing, and quality systems, Katrina offers practical, actionable advice for startups navigating everything from FDA engagement to workforce development and standard operating procedure (SOP) creation. In this episode, you'll learn: What biotech founders need to know about recent shifts in federal innovation funding and FDA operations. How to attract, retain, and empower technical talent—without getting trapped in outdated hiring models. Why starting early with documentation and SOPs can save your startup from future chaos. Whether you're scaling up or just getting started, tune in for expert insights that can help you build smarter, grow stronger, and stay resilient in today's evolving biotech ecosystem. Links: Connect with Katrina Rogers and check out Katrina Rogers Consulting and The Bullpen. Connect with Elaine Hamm, PhD, and learn about Tulane Medicine Business Development and the School of Medicine. Learn more about the Biotechnology Aptitude and Competency Exam. Check out BIO on the BAYOU and make plans to attend October 28 & 29, 2025. Learn more about BIO from the BAYOU - the podcast. Bio from the Bayou is a podcast that explores biotech innovation, business development, and healthcare outcomes in New Orleans & The Gulf South, connecting biotech companies, investors, and key opinion leaders to advance medicine, technology, and startup opportunities in the region.

This Amazon FBA shower filter business has $10M in revenue, $2.5M in EBITDA, and up to 50% recurring revenue—but will Chinese tariffs kill the deal?Business Listing - https://quietlight.com/listings/16050561/

This Amazon FBA shower filter business has $10M in revenue, $2.5M in EBITDA, and up to 50% recurring revenue—but will Chinese tariffs kill the deal?Business Listing - https://quietlight.com/listings/16050561/

Systems and processes for your roofing company, simplified into 3 easy steps. These will help you turn chaos into clarity. Especially if the idea of sitting down and writing an SOP makes you wanna poke your eyeball out with a safety pin…If you've wanted systems and processes but don't know where to start, this new video will help you scale, get your life back, and give you the freedom to actually take a vacation.P.S. Are you interested in getting systems and processes in place in your business? Join us inside where we share our winning secrets to help each other dominate in today's fast-changing and unpredictable times: https://www.rsra.org/join/=============FREE TRAINING CENTERhttps://theroofstrategist.com/free-training-centerJOIN THE ROOFING & SOLAR REFORM ALLIANCE (RSRA)https://www.rsra.org/join/ GET MY BOOKhttps://a.co/d/7tsW3Lx GET A ROOFING SALES JOBhttps://secure.rsra.org/find-a-job CONTACTEmail: help@roofstrategist.comCall/Text: 303-222-7133FOLLOW ADAM BENSMANhttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSVx5TWX-m2dl6yuUVF05Dwhttps://www.facebook.com/adam.bensman/   https://www.facebook.com/RoofStrategist/ https://www.instagram.com/roofstrategist/ https://www.tiktok.com/@roofstrategist https://www.linkedin.com/in/roofstrategist/#roofstrategist #roofsales #d2d  #solar #solarsales #roofing #roofer #canvassing #hail #wind #hurricane #sales #roofclaim #rsra #roofingandsolarreformalliance #reformers #adambensman 

If you're telling listeners to 'find your podcast anywhere,' you might as well say 'find me nowhere.' We're joined by Hall of Fame podcaster Dave Jackson who exposes the digital real estate mistake keeping your brilliant content invisible. Dave reveals why your podcast needs its own front door (not a room in Spotify's overcrowded hostel), how to build that home without becoming a reluctant web designer, and the simple tweaks that transform visitors into subscribers—and subscribers into customers. Stop surrendering your growth to platform algorithms. Get Dave's blueprint for podcast website ownership that turns content into currency.Get started with PodPage: https://PodPage.CastAhead.net

歡迎您用一杯咖啡支持我持續創作 : https://pay.soundon.fm/podcasts/a11a2120-4bc4-4fb2-813b-135bd96e5868 六個月的線上陪伴計畫報名表： https://forms.gle/HCX37hRPqFK24eh7A 「布姐的交誼廳。陪你聊人生聊職場」Line 社群 https://reurl.cc/36NWEL(密碼：love) 本集重點：3,000萬資金壓力下逆轉：藍太太因疫情與創業轉型，曾承擔3,000萬的資金壓力，靠著堅定信念與行動力重新站起來。女裝轉型包租代管：從原本女裝電商事業，轉型投入穩定現金流的包租代管市場。穩定現金流的選擇：選擇收租模式解決現金流困境，將經營風險降到最低。數字化思維拆解目標：設定30間房產目標，每間預估2萬元現金流，以終為始規劃實踐路徑。親力親為從零學起：裝修小白到自學監工與軟裝設計，藍太太親自摸透整個房產改造流程。以訂閱制邏輯經營包租：她將包租代管視為類似訂閱制的穩定收入模式，創造長期可複製的現金流。先理解再複製的管理哲學：從第一線實操建立SOP，確保後續快速擴張與團隊複製。女裝美學轉化為空間設計力：過去在女裝業多年累積的審美，完美延伸至房產空間設計。培養學員成功實踐：透過線上課程與實體加盟，已累積超過800位學員，其中超過150位實際投入房產事業。跨足知識工作者領域：成為知識工作者的「媽媽桑」，協助IP老師打造品牌與課程，開創教學與孵化新模式。 來賓 藍太太 Ruby Hung 房地產訂閱制陪跑計畫 https://class.ltthouse.com/courses/online-seminar 藍太太。她說。https://class.ltthouse.com/posts FB: 藍太太好生活 https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61554710181978

★人氣畫家貓魚大膽嘗試全新風格★★為每位媽媽大聲喊出心裡話！★★超浮誇上翻頁，來幫媽媽「翻臉」★★當媽媽，就是笑中有淚、有累、再加點小崩潰★ 媽媽別生氣，我下次一定會乖乖的。下次一定！「喔不，這下慘了！」小男孩調皮的惡作劇，不小心惹媽媽生氣了！媽媽氣到大哭，一直哭、一直哭，最後竟然……貓魚用奔放跳躍的線條和色彩，畫出媽媽們翻天覆地的內心劇場：時而穩重，時而胡鬧；時而開懷大笑，時而眼淚往肚裡吞；時而滿腔熱血，時而「不當媽媽了」！而有時疲累的媽媽，只想縮小縮小直到消失不見，這時，又是孩子們的笑容與純真的關心，讓媽媽們一下子充飽電。這是貓魚的故事，也是獻給所有媽媽的一首另類搖滾！ ★本書特色★◆ 貓魚繪本創作大突破，挑戰彩色筆全創作！◆ 親子角色大翻轉！媽媽有時也是需要被照顧的大孩子。◆ 媽媽必看：情緒偶有小失控沒關係，爆炸、躺平、休息後，滿血復活！◆ 孩子必看：必考劃重點！「生氣媽媽」的正確應對SOP。  ◆ 翻臉真的就像翻書！超浮誇上翻頁，翻出媽媽的情緒三溫暖。 ☆★☆贈書活動看這裡↓↓↓‧名額：2位‧截止：5/16週五12：00節目終將公布通關密語，請至節目臉書粉專活貼文留言回答，就有機會抽重好書喔！按我去粉專抽好書！ 

Are you confused about the difference between the SBA franchise directory and the franchise registry and what recent changes mean for your brand's growth and funding? We are diving deep into urgent changes in franchise funding, specifically around the SBA Franchise Directory, a topic you can't afford to overlook.We are joined by Edith Wiseman, President of FRANdata. Edith is breaking down everything from what FRANdata actually does, think deep dives into franchisors and franchisees, and how this information is used by lenders, suppliers, and franchisors.And most importantly, Edith is sharing the critical difference between the Franchise Registry and the SBA Franchise Directory. If you've ever mixed these two up this episode will bring you clarity. And we are digging into why the SBA disappeared and why it's back with a June 1, 2025 deadline.Edith Wiseman is the President of FRANdata, a leading franchise market research and advisory firm. With over 24 years in the industry, she transforms complex data into strategies that drive franchise growth and innovation. A trusted advisor to franchisors, lenders, and Fortune 500 companies, one franchisor said, “We couldn't have grown to 1,000 stores and beyond without her and her team.”Recognized by Entrepreneur and 1851 as a top woman in franchising, Edith has held key leadership roles within the International Franchise Association, including Board of Directors, Executive Committee, and Chair of the Supplier Forum. She continues to support industry advancement through initiatives focused on emerging brands and equitable growth, including the Ascension Initiative and the IFA Education Foundation.So, if you are confused by the upcoming SBA Franchise Directory changes and what you need to know then this episode is for you!ResourcesFranchise Directory - https://www.sba.gov/document/support-sba-franchise-directoryFranchise Registry - https://www.franchiseregistry.com/Current SBA SOP - https://www.sba.gov/document/sop-50-10-lender-development-company-loan-programsBlog updates with summary of SOP changes - https://frandata.com/blog/Connect with EdithEmail - franchiseregistry@FranData.comLinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/edith-wiseman-281b6b/Call FRANdata - 800-485-9570Website - https://frandata.com/Episode Highlights:Understanding FRANdataDistinguishing the Franchise Registry and SBA Franchise DirectorySBA franchise directory changesEligibility and certification process for SBA Franchise DirectoryGuidance for existing and emerging franchisors and the SBA DirectoryKey recent SBA and lending changesConnect with Tracy Personal LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tracy-panase/ JBF LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/jbfsale JBF Franchise System - https://jbfsalefranchise.com/ Email: podcast@jbfsale.com Connect with Shannon Personal LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/shannonwilburn/ JBF LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/jbfsale

創業是許多人的夢想，台灣同時也是世界上「老闆密度最高」的國家之一。然而，走出粉紅泡泡後，數據指出，台灣僅1%的新創公司能活過五年！Bryan邀請點拾教練培訓創辦人石罡宇，聊聊他身為企業第二代，為何選擇不接班，另闢蹊徑、走上協助創業者的教練之路。從創業夢與現實落差、二代接班心理拉鋸，到打造「綠洲學程」陪跑創業者，他用七年時間陪伴超過450位創業者尋找方向、紓解壓力、調適心態。創業，真的適合你嗎？這集節目的對談也許能讓你好好想清楚！ 相關集數 【EP263 創業毀我三觀：聊聊創業之後，顛覆我原本認知的幾個觀念】 https://youtu.be/FAwmvbe8xBE 【關於點拾教練培訓】 點拾致力於打造協助創業者讓事業更好的創業平台，透過我們的課程、服務、資源，能夠讓事業點拾成金，之所以叫作點【拾】，是因為事業成果的關鍵在於是否將所學拾起運用。 點拾最新課程：https://point10coach.com/product-category/activity/ Podcast：https://reurl.cc/NYbaE6 IG：https://reurl.cc/aeZl77 大人學課程 【P088年輕上班族必備的流程圖繪製與SOP撰寫技巧】 https://reurl.cc/GnG4Kp 本集節目音檔後製、資訊欄文案，由【聲歷其境】製作。 什麼問題想問Joe跟Bryan嗎？提問&合作信箱：podcast@ftpm.com.tw 如果你喜歡我們的節目，歡迎贊助我們：https://bit.ly/3kskVsZ 如果你喜歡這集節目，歡迎到Apple Podcast給我們五星評價，並留言給我們鼓勵！ FB｜https://www.facebook.com/darencademy/ IG｜https://www.instagram.com/da.ren.cademy/ 大人學網站｜https://www.darencademy.com/ -- Hosting provided by SoundOn

Hormonas, SOP y Endometriosis con la Dra. Laia SánchezEn este episodio de Comiendo con María hablamos de salud ginecológica desde una mirada integradora, con la doctora Laia Sánchez, ginecóloga especializada en endocrinología ginecológica, Psiconeuroinmunología (PNI) y experta en cáncer de mama. Laia, fundadora de la clínica online Almabywoman, nos acompaña para resolver muchas de las dudas que rodean al ciclo hormonal femenino, el síndrome de ovario poliquístico (SOP), la endometriosis, la fertilidad y el papel de la alimentación en todo ello. 

This week we're hanging out at HREAM in SW Michigan to continue the conversation with Hempknight Melts! Featured on #078, there's been a lot of changes in his world since then! With Nectar Of The Gods going out of business, his entire SOP has been revamped! The new branding for the jars looks great as well! And we dive into a bit more of his background as both a hashmaker and individual! This episode was a lot of fun and it's always good to see how people adapt to the changes that occur in the world! Terps N ThingsHempknight Melts - Deathstar & Rainbow Belts Live Rosin@bearmountainstudios - Baby Geraldine - 10mm Micro RBR@wave_quartz - 10mm Mini XL Gyer SlurperPurple Blazer Gang Thank you to HREAM swapmeet for allowing us the space and energy to capture this conversation!Thank you for listening and please make sure you check out all of our social medias and subscribe to our YouTube and Patreon!https://www.instagram.com/terpenetherapypodcast/https://www.patreon.com/terpenetherapypodcasthttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIuE6pg63WB2dwZ--1SgTig/featuredDisclaimer: This is an educational Podcast with comedic attributes to educate and entertain the viewer about my Life. In this video, I walked around a few places and documented my experience, and gave each location a rating. In certain parts of the Podcast, My Visual Effects team used Green Screen and CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) to simulate smoke, for comedic effect and expression. There is no real smoke in this video, and every viewer of the Podcast knows this. This is not the main focus of the video, just as a comedic expression in this larger Podcast. My special effects team works hard to make everything realistic while leaving a hint of artistic expression, to make the smoke simulations noticeably fake. This Podcast has been endorsed as educational content to educate and teach the viewer. Thank YouSupport the show

Let''s break down how to optimize your Google Business Profile (GBP) to dominate local search—starting with the one thing most law firms get wrong: category selection.Get introduced to Clipper, a browser plugin that shows you exactly which categories your top competitors are using. Plus, get my full SOP for GBP optimization—complete with tools, templates, and step-by-step instructions tailored for competitive niches like personal injury law.If you're serious about local rankings and better LSA results, this is your next move. Get access to 100s of video trainings and templates for agencies for $199: https://theblueprint.training

Is your inbox overflowing? Are you losing track of tasks, deadlines, or team updates? Whether you're solo or managing a growing team, this episode is your go-to guide for choosing the right project management tool to reduce chaos and reclaim control. Join host Melissa Franks as she walks through the most common project and task management tools used by small businesses, startups, and creative teams—including Trello, Asana, ClickUp, Monday.com, Notion, and Airtable. She breaks down the pros, cons, ideal use cases, and the one question you must ask before choosing a platform. You'll also learn: The surprising origin stories behind your favorite tools (and why that matters) How to avoid overbuying software you don't need What kind of business each tool works best for Common setup pitfalls and how to assign ownership Melissa's favorite tools for ease, cost, and team clarity Whether you're task-based, creative, or managing high-growth operations, this episode will help you simplify your workflow and set your team up for success. It's time to stop relying on email chaos and move into structured, streamlined execution. 

En este episodio te ayudamos a entender tres términos que muchas veces se usan como sinónimos, pero que en realidad tienen diferencias importantes.

Talkin' Paint Podcast: How to Document Systems in Your Detailing Business: Work Less While Growing MoreThe episode of Talkin' Paint Podcast, Gabe Fletcher discusses how documenting business systems transformed his detailing shop from chaos to consistency. He explains why putting processes on paper is crucial for growth, allowing him to reduce his work hours from 75+ to under 40 weekly while increasing revenue by 30%. Gabe shares practical documentation techniques and emphasizes that "being irreplaceable doesn't make you valuable, it makes you trapped."Timestamp:00:22 - Detailing Growth Sponsor Message01:02 - Introduction to Systems Documentation03:02 - Why Document Your Shop Systems04:29 - Where to Start With Documentation06:06 - Practical System Documentation Approach08:25 - Morning Meeting System Benefits09:37 - Quality Check Process Implementation10:22 - Client Communication Timeline11:28 - Getting Started With Documentation14:43 - Detailer OS Facebook Group InfoSchedule a Discovery CallSign Up For The Detail Shift NewsletterSubscribe to Detailing Growth on Youtube Companies mentioned in this episode: detailing growth Detailing Growth Detailers OS Detailer OS Detailer OS Magnified Growth detailing systems, documentation in detailing, improving shop efficiency, detailing business coaching, sales process for detailers, documenting processes, PPF installation guide, ceramic coating techniques, automotive detailing strategies, client communication in detailing, SOP creation for detailing, business growth in detailing, effective detailing workflows, systems implementation for detailers, reducing operational chaos, maximizing productivity in detailing, training staff in detailing, client check-in process, optimizing detailing services, detailing growth strategies

According to research from Gartner, channel partners are crucial levers of revenue generation, accounting for up to 75% of revenue income. So how can you build efficient and deeply engaged channel partner relationships to optimize channel sales? Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Win-Win podcast. I’m your host, Shawnna Sumaoang. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully. Here to discuss this topic is Jason Singh, the head of global partner marketing at Meta. Thank you for joining us. Jason, I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Jason Singh: Thank you very much for having me. So I look after partner marketing for business messaging, specifically at Meta, which is our conversational platforms around Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger. Being in B2B, marketing, sales, and marketing my entire life. We started in Australia and then moved over to Singapore and then New York about five years ago. What we do is three main things. We focus on ensuring that our partners have all the information that they need to be able to run their programs that they want to around business messaging. The second thing that we do is ensure that they have the right tools and materials. They’re able to grow their business. So that’s partner enablement, whereas where a lot of the Highspot focuses is within. And then lastly, it’s partner demand generation. So making sure that partners have the right investment from us, whether it’s time, dollars, et cetera, to be able to add fuel to their demand generation five. So those are three different programs that we have and where we focus a lot of our attention. SS: I’m excited to have you here, Jason, as a fellow marketing leader, and as you mentioned in your introduction, you have extensive experience across multitudes of regions, including Australia and Asia, and you really have a global perspective on how to bring the channel partner ecosystem to life? How has this diverse background shaped your approach to channel enablement? JS: The role that I have now is my first full-time role where I focused purely on partners previously being in and out of partner marketing and partners as a key audience over the past 15 years. But I took on this partner marketing leadership role officially about 24 months ago. And one of the things that I found out in that, firstly in the first 90 days, I think I met our top 35, 40% of our partners because I didn’t want to assume what they needed to know and the information they need to have and the formats that they needed to have it in and read rates of emails and, and downloads of contents. And I didn’t wanna assume. And so I spoke to a lot of them and it was super, super interesting that there were hardly any patterns. If you spoke with APAC partners, you would think you’d be able to put them into a category if you spoke with India partners similarly versus Latam, Spanish speaking Latam versus Brazil, North America… There weren’t really any regional patterns or trends. It was only when you looked at all partners globally, were you able to look at how partners operate and start compartmentalizing them into different groups, which would then give you a cohort to then cater around in terms of enablement, content, information, demand generation, et cetera. So I think one of the things that, having a diverse background where I. Help me to figure out is don’t assume in the first place, don’t assume more partners are the same. When I, when I was based in APAC, you would think Southeast Asia would be compartmentalized North Asia, so Japan, Korea, China could be compartmentalized and there we have these sub regions within the APAC region where we say, oh, okay, they operate the same, but it’s actually quite different. And so I think that really helped me coming into this global role because I was able to remove that assumption that we have these groupings, these cohorts, that because they’re based in certain regions, because they’ve got certain demographic attributes which are similar, but they’ll work the same way. And so instead of relying on those assumptions, what we did was just net new partner discovery, speaking with partners, getting, building really strong relationships with a lot of our great partners, and then figuring out what those groups are outside of. Demographic regional assumptions. SS: I love that you went in there unassuming and just really kind of learned what the partner ecosystem needed in today’s fast pace evolving environment. What would you say you were hearing are maybe some of the top challenges in channel partner sales and how are you addressing some of these challenges? JS: There is so much opportunity for the channel that they often struggle with. Prioritizing opportunities. If you look at any one of our partners, they partner with us somewhat exclusive, but many partners, partner with a number of other technology providers, and then within each technology provider there are end number of products of go-to market motions of incentives of programs. That they could be a part of. And within each of these standard operating procedures, there are processes, there are portals, there are hubs to sign into, passwords, usernames to remember. And then you’ve got the teams within these organizations that they need to make sure that they’re building relationships with the incumbent partner teams, the the senior leadership marketing teams like myself, et cetera. So it’s no surprise that when you speak to a partner that they’re often doing this. Inner calculation in their head around how important is this? Is this opportunity right now? Is this new product that we’re launching, A new program that we have is our H two market development fund, which we’ll launch in June. How important is this to me right now in the near future and in the long term? And how do I figure out what level of resources to invest? And that could be turning up to a meeting, that could be turning up to a webinar, or that could be. Injecting a couple hundred thousand dollars. That is, I would say by far, the most top of mind thing right now with our channel partners is. What is the actual opportunity with this thing that we’re being positioned with right now, and what do we need to do around this? SS: Yeah, absolutely. Kind of building on that, what do you believe are the key building blocks then for being able to foster really strong and effective partnerships with those channel sales teams? JS: I mean, I think I touched on that first point a little bit, so I’ll expand. Not assuming firstly and not doing groupings or categorization by those assumptions is super important because all of our partners operate probably a little bit differently to how we expect them to operate. The second bit is, I’ll speak my partner marketers lens specifically is learning about how these partners operate. You’ve gotta know who these partners are. You have to build relationships with partner marketers, salespeople, alliance managers. Marketing operations people within the partners. I’m very fortunate to have built a pretty strong relationship with probably about 40 or 50 people within our top 40, 50 partners in different partner groupings for our strategic partners, our tech partners, our service partners, where I’m starting to build a little bit more relationships now with our agency partners as well. And so I’m starting to get a really strong idea about how these partners operate. When I say how they operate, I’m talking about what are their incentives, what are their KPIs? What are the needles that they’re trying to move? Number two is how they actually work internally. So what are the processes? What are the procedures? What are the operating models? What are the systems? What are the tools that they use internally to help them get their work done? And lastly, it’s what are their expectations and what are their needs from us? What do they actually need right now? And that could be something as simple as one of the biggest things that we did. I think last year we’ll start rolling out more decks in Google Docs because we found that a lot of our partners wanted Google Docs because that’s how they operate and wanted the option of Google Docs as well as PowerPoint. And that subtle shift made, I don’t know, 10 partners to be able to work with our content from. Four days, two instantly because from Highspot, they could download that and ship it straight away, or just share organically within Highspot as opposed to having to download it, manipulating it, and then distribute it. And so you’ve really gotta invest the time and the effort to intentionally want to learn about your partners. It’s not a tick in the box of, oh hey, I can show my leadership that I met with 10 partners in Q1. It’s you being able to represent the partner voice. Across all of the different touch points that you have within the organization, whether that’s building content, building plans, talking with leadership. I would say once you get them out of email into a WhatsApp group or a WhatsApp chat, that’s where the real sort of connection happens, and that’s when you can start, like what I do now is when we’ve got a new piece of content, a new program that we’re building, I will take a screenshot of that and I’ll send it to about 12 different people from a different partners on WhatsApp just to get their input and they’ll respond very quickly within a couple hours globally, and they’ll start tell me what they like, what they don’t like, how it’ll work, how it won’t work, and that sort of instant feedback loop that I get with the partners have been cultivated over six months of getting to know them. So I won’t provide like three things that you need to do. I’ll provide, I’ll make it super simple with. The P zero thing that you need to do is build a relationship with your partners, really intentional, meaningful relationships with your partners and get to know them. SS: I think that’s fantastic advice. Jason, to shift gears a little bit, you developed a framework — Learn, Adopt, and Grow to keep channel partners engaged, kind of beyond the onboarding portion of coming on with Meta. Can you tell us more about this framework and what each of the phases entails? JS: Definitely. Before I took over partner marketing, we had a really strong content development arm, but we, we lacked a little bit in the structuring of our content and from a partner point of view. Some of the feedback that we had from our partners when I took on the role and start a meeting with them was, got too many assets on there. There’s there’s too much stuff. We don’t know where to start. One of the assumptions that we made internally actually right at the start was, oh, we need to split this by product type partners, want to know individually by products. And that’s when we sort of paused a little bit. ’cause that didn’t make a whole bunch of sense to me and a few of the other folks in my team. And we went to our partners and plus it didn’t specifically tell us this, it was very clear that partners had different levels of maturity. And within their teams there were different levels of maturity. So partner A may have a sales team that’s super advanced, but their marketing team hasn’t yet really been enabled on business messaging on WhatsApp Messenger or Instagram Direct. And so what we decided to test was how do we group our programs, our content, our materials that aligns with partner maturity. So we split these in, into three different cohorts of partners. Number one, they’re the partners that just kicked off, just finished onboarding, like you said, and, and they’re looking to learn. They’re looking to learn about the products, the platforms, the incentive, our programs, how we go to market. It’s a learn phase. And so we built this category of, of learn, and we started mapping almost, I think two years ago or 18 months ago, we started mapping all of our 101 content and then the second one is adopt. We notice that a lot of partners have at that stage now where they want to, they wanna kickstart some stuff. They wanna launch some programs. They wanna launch a sales program around WhatsApp. They wanna launch a campaign. They want to do internal education. I. Show globally around education, around meta business messaging, and this is all around how do they get from zero to one. And so that was around adoption or expansion where partners have finished that learn phase and they’ve decided they’ve onboarded and they’ve internally prioritized business messaging. Sort of the tier one things of the, what they wanna do. And so in here is a lot of sales materials, marketing materials, program materials to help them to get from zero to one and launching stuff. And so we do things like sales toolkits. We do things like partner ready campaigns, which are campaigns that marketing teams within our partners can give to their. Campaign team and you’ve got landing page designs. You’ve got social media kits, we provide Figma files, co-branded assets, everything that you need. Basically 80% of the stuff that you need to launch a marketing campaign or a sales campaign. And then lastly, we’ve got Grow. Grow is made up of a series of programs that have fairly high investment but are built purely to 10 XROI or ROI. And this is where we partner. We wanna make the programs available. All of our partners, but there’s pretty strict qualification, uh, or eligibility criteria to be part of one of these programs. But essentially these are programs where a partner’s already pretty successful. They know how to sell business mission. They know how to pick the concept and the product they’ve got runs on the board. They’ve got considerable pipeline or revenue already, and they’re looking at options for meta to help them grow this to 10 x, 50 x to a hundred x what they’re already doing. And so that’s grow. That’s when you’ve already mastered. The learn. You know all about the product, the platforms, the programs available to you. You’ve already started driving product adoption or portfolio adoption using our tools, and now you’ve got that. You’ve got a good run rate, but you’re wondering. How you can actually really blow this up. So that’s, that’s our growth phase. And we’ve probably got about 15 to 20% of our partners, I would say, are in there. I would say the lion’s share 50, 60%, 50% probably in that middle bucket. And we’ve got another maybe 15% right now in Learn. But as we expand our partner ecosystem and we open up our ecosystem to different types of partners. Marketplace partners, commerce partners, agencies, et cetera. We will see them starting at learn. We’ll see a lot more people or that waiting shift a little bit more to learn. And then over the course of six months to a year, we’ll see them starting through that process. SS: I love that framework because it really helps kind of guide them through their evolution and their journey with meta. So that’s amazing. And you know, on a similar note, you actually spoke at Highspot user conference last year and you had shared that relevance and timeliness are key to driving adoption with channel sales teams. How do you ensure these elements are really embedded into all of your programs? JS: It’s a hard one. Um, relevance for me focuses on, it’s a three-legged stool. Relevance is all about making sure that the CONT is, I would say firstly it’s format and it’s probably a little bit reversed from how. The majority. Think about it. I think about format, because again, knowing our partners, and this comes with knowing the partners, there are a hundred things that a partner could be doing in any given day. If they’ve decided in half an hour to focus on something related to partner enablement, what I look after and they open up a document and it’s not in the format that they need. So they’re expecting a one pager because I’ve called something intro to x. They’re expecting a one pager, but it’s an 80 page SOP that’s in Microsoft Word that, that they’ve gotta open up on their mobile device and look through it. They’re gonna close that window and they’re not gonna spend the time necessarily finding the thing that they want. They’re gonna shift their mind into focusing on something completely different. So format for me in terms of relevance is key. Making sure that when we launch something, it is in the format that it needs to be in. We have a really strong understanding about the length, the detail within that document. We have a really strong understanding in the time of the day and the mental mode that a part of the audience is gonna be. When they open up this document, are they looking for something really quick that they can share with something? Are they gonna be expecting something really detailed, which they can absorb and then distill for other teams? Are they gonna be looking for something on the go, on the way to a client meeting? And so format number one is, is big for me. And relevance the other legs, uh, of that stool would be. I would say I would include timeliness within that. It’s making sure that we are producing things within the right timeframe requirements of that audience. And so what I mean by that is often what you’ll see with teams is they launch things in phases. You’ll wanna enable a partner on a new product, and you’ll have this phased out over a 12 month period. Quite often that’s done based on the requirements of the internal team and not what the partner’s requirements actually are, and so you’ll almost enable them 20% to do what you want them to do because you’ve got other things coming in phase two, phase three, what we like to do is we like to build our phase one. We used to also launch in phases. We build our phase one point of view. But then we share that with the partners and say, hey, is this the MVP that you need? Like we think it’s these four materials. Do you actually need something else? And they’ll give us feedback. We do this formally, but we also do this informally through like our WhatsApp groups, as I mentioned before. And they’ll come back and say, hey, that ROI calculator that you’re building for phase three, we’d love that in phase one, which we’ve got some pipeline right now that we can accelerate to closure if we were have to show them a stronger ROI through some sort of tool. And what you’re building is perfect for us and so we will recalibrate internally to try and build an asset that’s in phase two, phase three into phase one. Or they’ll say, hey, we don’t actually need this narrative right now. We’ve built this PowerPoint deck already. We’ve got what we need. You can push that out for some other partners that may not be at the stage right now. So again, like having a good understanding of the partner, but also just sharing with the partner, having partners at the core of what you’re actually building in your development cycle is part important and part of and timeliness. And lastly, would be how you launch. So we talk about relevance in terms of making sure got the right format of the materials, the right details within each of the specific assets. We talk about timeliness. I’d say lastly, it’s how you actually launch something. We’ve had to get pretty creative about how we launch certain programs and just projects and and campaigns internally. The main reason being, as I mentioned before, partnered with a hundred things that they could be doing, and so you have to ask yourself, how do you cut through the noise? With those 101 things that partners have to think about every given day, and it could be soft launching, it could be launching with a smaller group of partners, building a case study around partner success, and then using that to launch to the other 80% of partners. But thinking a little bit more creatively around how you launch something so they can build internally. And understanding about how this particular thing is important to me right now is relevant to me right now. Versus the other a hundred things that got going on. SS: I love that approach and clearly it must be working because you guys have recently increased the number of partner organizations that are engaging with Highspot by 21%. I’d love for you to walk us through that journey. What strategies played AQ role in driving these results? JS: Yeah, I mean it’s, it’s kind of, we mentioned before around a format, format launch and, and timeliness. When I joined the team in this specific role, having worked with partners before in various roles and be being a partner to a lot of organizations previously as well, I understood the importance of a content management system. You know, we have typically you have partner managers that. Manage your top under know 10, 15, 20% of partners, but then you’ve got this medium tail and this long tail that you need to activate and you do that through documentation. We had a pretty good Highspot experience previously, but again, there was, there was little organization done around it. And so the first thing I kind of did was, you know, take off my, my partner marketing hat and put my partner hat on access Highspot and go. Let me do the top five to 10 things that a partner would need to do, and I had that list after chatting with the partners in my first 60, 90 days, and I noticed that almost every single one of the top 10 things that a partner needs to do was a real struggle in Highspot and not because of the tool, but because of how we had structured our Highspot experience. It wasn’t aligned to how partners want to actually use it. And so we focused in 2023. In the early part of 24, we predominantly focused on three things. We focused on content, making sure we did a pretty comprehensive content audit. I think we had about something like six and a half thousand different assets on Highspot, and so we did a complete content audit. We removed the stuff that we didn’t need that needed to be archived. That was just, I think it was, was three groups. It was remove, archive, update and keep. Something like that. A key thing for me on the next phase was on the user, the more of a visual experience. Ours was good. It was a little bit more out of the box and I feel we working with some of our internal brand teams, we could prove that to be a little bit more similar to some of the other partner experiences that our partners have. On some of the other portals that we have, just a partner portal, a partner center, our partner hub. And so we work to bring in some of those brand elements from Meta and WhatsApp and our different platforms into Highspot. We’re able to do that with one of our partners. And then the last thing we did was test, though we updated our content. I’m a big stickler for content naming and having a really strong naming taxonomy and nomenclature around how you name your content. And if you ask my team or the team that we work with, I’m always pushing the team. If there’s something, if there’s an asset that’s, that I feel is not named correctly, people aren’t gonna click on that. So what’s the point of even building that asset if it’s not named correctly? People need to be really understand what they’re getting themselves into when they click on an asset. And so we did our content audit. We update a lot of our content. We renamed almost every single asset once we had archived. A lot of the assets rebuilt the design of our complete Highspot experience. We had different groupings, different categories, and then again, we had partnered as part of this journey. So we tested this with partners and we said, hey, if we had this, what do you think? A lot of these were just workshops with partners moving certain things around saying, hey, if we put this here, does that work? We put this here, does that work? And then we launched, we soft launched, I think to about 20% of our partners, we saw some good results and then we, we had launched for everyone else. I mean, we saw an initial spike straight away when we launched because we’ve completely redesigned high spot and it’s great experience and you’re gonna get a lot of people organically come in and say, hey, I wonder what this is about. So we saw a spike in the first two weeks, but after that, that’s when we started. We saw the drop after the spike, and then we saw the gradual. And importantly for us, we wanted partners that don’t visit us at all to start visiting our Highspot experience. We wanted more people within our partners visiting Highspot as well. And so eventually over the six months, we started seeing like a really steady, nice, gradual ramp up. And then some of our other metrics, the time spent on HighSpot, the number of things that they’re downloading, number of things that they’re opening, so views, a lot of these started improving. The challenge now is that now we’re getting really strong adoption on Highspot. We’re starting to see teams wanting to upload more and more content on it because we’re starting to see the value of a lot of the foundational work that we’ve done. And so whilst we don’t, obviously we don’t gate content, but we do wanna make sure that everything that’s uploaded. Is super intentional and is aligned with the risk of enablement program that we have. So it’s a good problem to have. SS: Absolutely. That is a great problem to have. And so, aside from some traffic, and you did talk about a couple other key metrics, but I’d love to understand, how do you think about the metrics that you need in order to continue to measure and optimize your channel enablement strategy. JS: If you’re kind of first principles that, and think about why do we have Highspot experience in the first place to enable our partner ecosystem. We have a partner ecosystem within business messaging which is evolving and growing. We’re expanding to, if you say we have about 12 different types of partners in their ecosystem, we’ve got really strong activation with. Probably a quarter of them. And we’re now focusing on evolving our partner ecosystem into the rest. And so our partner marketing goals are always aligned to our partner ecosystem goals and our channel goals in general. And then with end partner marketing, our enablement goals are aligned with what our channel strategy is. And so right now what we’re focusing on is ensuring that as we expand our private ecosystem to new and different type of partners. When they’re ready for enablement, we start taking them into that learn phase of the learner grow model. That experience is really positive for them, and it’s almost a page turner type experience where they’re really excited to move into the next phase, or really excited to be shown a different asset or for another asset to be uploaded and email to them and say, hey, you think you’re really like this? And so really key for me is ensuring that whatever, whatever I’m doing, whatever my team’s doing, is aligned completely to a partner ecosystem strategy. SS: I love that. And do you have some wins that you might be able to share? What are some of the initial business results that you’ve seen on Highspot specifically? JS: Look, I don’t have the numbers off the top of my head, but there were two things that we wanted to do. We wanted more partners, more net new partners on it, so partners that spend zero time on it and we can see from our dashboards that we build, I wanted to see more partners on it. ’cause that for me was, and they’ve been enabled on a Highspot before. They’ve got access, they’ve got a license, they know how to use it. They’re just not using it. And so for me, that was a real win to start seeing Partner X that hasn’t visited Highspot in three months to start seeing them, oh, hey, we’ve got one person from Partner X now in Highspot last month, and now I’ve got two people. The average time they spend on the platform was 60 seconds. Now it’s three minutes. Now it’s six minutes. But that was a great personal win for me because that’s almost, for me, that was proving them wrong. Initially, they had probably visited it and not enjoyed the experience, and in their mind it was something that I didn’t really need. And so for me to be able to turn that around with that team and rebuild the experience of them to say, oh, it’s actually pretty good now, that was a really great win for me because that’s turning a detractor into an advocate, which is just, just a, a great personal goal to have. And the second thing is starting to see people, I suppose we’re seeing people spend more time on it. We’ve got a hypothesis around why they spend more time on it is because we’ve got less content on there. Now, I don’t know exactly how many assets, but it’s not, it’s not close to 6,000 anymore, but there’s less assets on there. So the discoverability is far better. They can find the assets that they want. When they go into the search field and they search for something, they don’t come up with 40 different assets. It’s 12, which is manageable. And so they’re spending more time within those assets. So now we see new partners using it and existing partners using it more and better. The two things that we focus on, we’re seeing those move up into the right, which is great. We wanna start looking into different sorts of measures of success. This year we are looking into, you know, again, as I mentioned with the part ecosystem, how do we launch to a new partner type? Which is new, and so we haven’t done that yet. On Highspot, we had a bunch of partners already enabled on business messaging through a different portal. Then when we adopted Highspot, we moved them to there. But we’re gonna start looking at things like sharing. We’ve recently started using digital sales rooms, which is something that we didn’t do last year, and we’re testing about five to six different things with digital sales rooms. That’s a really powerful feature. We haven’t figured out exactly where, where the superpower is for us to use digital sales rooms. But once our pilots are finished, we’ll probably have a hypothesis there. But yeah, I think the metric for us this year is we know our partner numbers are gonna still go up and into the right. It’s gonna slow down a little bit our growth, but we know we’re in the right direction. So our other measure for success is how do we deepen our partner’s experience with Highspot? We know we’ve only scratched the surface of what Highspot can do for us. So we’re looking into what are the other things that we need to do, and also importantly, how do we connect the Highspot experience with some of our other tools that we have, and starting to integrate it more into the partner experience that we have versus a standalone CMS, which a little bit it is of now, but I know that’s something we’re working on with your team. SS: I love that. Jason, last question for you, and I don’t think we could. Get away from talking about AI these days. It’s everywhere. And at the conference you were at last fall, I know you were excited about some of the AI innovation that we, we showcased there, but I’d love to hear from you, how are you starting to envision AI playing a role in further enhancing your channel partner enablement strategy moving forward? JS: I mean, the buzzword of the year, right? It’s a little bit hard right now. We’ve just finished our foundational rebuild of Highspot, and we’re at a really comfortable stage with what we’ve delivered to our partners and the operations around it, including, you know, governance. Measurement content, strategy, et cetera, like when a really good spot there. I think there are some operating models around AI that make sense for our partners to want to lean in towards. When you talk about enablement, which we’re at different stages of exploring, I think the most powerful one would be how do we get the right content? It comes down to timeliness and relevance as we spoken at the start. How do we get the right content to the right partner at the right time? And so that’s more generative content enablement, if you will. And that’s tough because you need, you need sort of metadata to support that. But I think if you were to ask our partners what’s the main thing that they would want from AI and channel enablement or partner enablement, it would be, hey, be really useful instead of me looking for the, the asset for you to actually know that I need this asset right now or group of assets. I think that would be the main thing that they would want. And I get it. So we’ll get to that stage at some point. But right now we’re, we’re definitely focused on maintaining our strong grassroots and foundations right now, and then looking at more sort of piecemeal. Additions to that. So things like digital sales rooms, things like making it easier for them to be able to share content with their end clients on the go, which is one of the ask that they’ve sent from us. And so those are the few things that we’re focused on this year. SS: I love it. Jason, thank you again so much for joining our podcast today. I truly appreciate you sharing your insights and experience. JS: Of course. It’s been great. Thanks a lot, Shawnna. SS: To our audience, thank you for listening to this episode of the Win-Win podcast. Be sure to tune in next time for more insights on how you can maximize enablement success with Highspot.

Would you like access to our advanced agency training for FREE? https://www.agencymastery360.com/training Are you still relying on basic ChatGPT prompts while your competitors create intelligent systems that work for them around the clock? The gap between basic AI users and strategic implementers is widening rapidly—and it could determine which agencies thrive in the coming years. Today's featured guest leads the pack for this AI revolution. Through systematic implementation of advanced automation solutions, she drove an impressive 20% productivity increase across her agency's operations. By strategically integrating AI technologies throughout their processes, she's transformed her agency's capabilities and efficiency. Additionally, she's now also helping businesses achieve these same results. Join us as we explore the exciting opportunities AI presents for businesses today and learn about her most successful tool: AI agents. We welcome back Khushbu Doshi, COO of E2M Solutions, a white label agency partner where she focuses on driving more business and creating a world-class experience for their agency community to help them grow and reach their goals. With over eight years of experience and having worked with more than 500 agencies, Khushbu dives into her recent journey exploring AI, including a significant productivity boost of 20% through automation. She also talks about AI agents, explaining how they differ from simply using tools like ChatGPT, and highlights their potential to streamline processes and enhance efficiency for agencies. In this episode, we'll discuss: Why agents are the next step in AI usage in agencies. AI-powered onboarding. Ideas to expand AI application.  Subscribe Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio The Next Evolution of AI for Agencies: From Prompt Engineering to AI Agents Most people think of AI innovation as learning to use ChatGPT and asking the right questions to get the most effective answers. While prompt engineering certainly has value, it represents only the beginning of AI's potential for agency operations. The next evolution—AI agents—offers significantly more sophisticated capabilities that can transform agency workflows. Agents are a more specialized application of artificial intelligence designed to perform specific tasks based on user-defined parameters. How is this relevant for agencies? Unlike general-purpose AI tools, which provide responses based on a broad range of inputs, AI agents can be customized to understand and execute particular functions. They can be trained to understand particular clients, recall campaign histories, apply agency-specific methodologies, and operate within defined strategic frameworks. This means that agency teams now have the ability to develop custom AI agents trained to operate according to specific requirements. The resulting tool works much better compared to just a conversation with ChatGPT. AI-Powered Employee Onboarding For agency owners interested in exploring AI agents, the process is remarkably accessible. Starting on the ChatGPT platform, users can simply select "create," name their agent, and begin training it with relevant information like branding guidelines, past success stories, and common client challenges. In her case, Khushbu also uses AI agents for onboarding new new team members dreading the prospect of reading through extensive standard operating procedure (SOP) documents. However, it's still a vital part of their training, so Khushbu thought of updating the process and making it more dynamic by training an agent to be an SOP expert. She fed it all the SOPs and instructed it to answer only the questions asked to it without searching the internet. This way, the SOPs are the agent's knowledge base, never defaulting to the web for answers. After implementing this system, Khushbu conducted a comparative test by providing new team members with both traditional SOP documentation and access to the AI agent. The new team members were fascinated by the idea of not having to go to a supervisor with their questions and maybe feeling inadequate. Instead, they can ask as many questions as they like without feeling judged. This efficiency not only saves time but also allows team members to focus on more strategic tasks rather than getting bogged down in repetitive information retrieval. Expanding AI Agent Applications in Agency Operations Quality Assurance Automation AI agents also excel in quality testing and following precise procedures consistently. You can program an agent to follow detailed checklists, ensuring that all necessary steps in a process are completed efficiently, thereby saving time and resources while maintaining high standards. Khushbu suggests implementing a fallback strategy for comprehensive quality assessment. When an agent encounters limitations in its testing capability, it should clearly document: Which items it successfully evaluated Which items it couldn't assess Specific reasons for any testing limitations This strategy delivers substantial efficiency gains even when complete automation isn't possible. If the agent can only check 300 out of a list of 500 points, it has still reduced the amount of work for the assigned employee to do by 200 points. Creating an AI Agency Within Your Agency Furthermore, you can program agents to work a specific role within your team and have several agents to communicate with each other. In this sense, you can build an AI social media team, with a CMO, strategist, tester, etc, and automate 90% of the marketing process. With AI agents generating ideas, testing concepts, producing initial drafts, and evaluating performance metrics, the human team can then focus on selecting optimal approaches, refining creative elements, and adding the distinctive perspective that differentiates the agency's work. Competitive Intelligence Automation Finally, it's also a great way to automate the research needed in your particular industry. If you want to know what your competitors are up to, just program an agent to do that research for you and present a summary of the campaigns they're running and you'll be saving a lot of time. A Wake-Up Call for AI-Reluctant Agencies Right now it seems every day there are new ways to integrate AI into your agency services and it can be as exciting as it can be overwhelming. Just remember that this technology has the potential to make your life easier in many ways, and that's how it should be used. As organizations explore the potential of AI tools, try to remain open-minded and proactive in seeking out innovative solutions. Khushbu encourages listeners to look beyond the mainstream offerings and discover the myriad of tools that can enhance their operations. By doing so, they can position themselves at the forefront of technological advancements and operational efficiency. Refusing to use AI nowadays would be like refusing to use the internet back in the late 90s. The technology is already here so there's no going back; It's only a matter of whether or not you're willing to adapt and not be left behind. Do You Want to Transform Your Agency from a Liability to an Asset? Looking to dig deeper into your agency's potential? Check out our Agency Blueprint. Designed for agency owners like you, our Agency Blueprint helps you uncover growth opportunities, tackle obstacles, and craft a customized blueprint for your agency's success.

Episodio con Natalia Díaz, nutrióloga clínica y host del pódcast de raíz, donde hablamos sobre microbiota, disbiosis intestinal, el famoso índice glucémico, hábitos para mejorar la salud digestiva, cosas a evitar en acné, resistencia a la insulina y alimentación en síndrome de ovario poliquístico. También nos contó sobre la nutrigenomica, estudios para ver cómo metabolizamos ciertos nutrientes y la dieta personalizada basada en lo que tu cuerpo necesita, suplementos en SOP y errores comunes al querer bajar de peso. La parte dos del episodio se sube en el pódcast de raíz, donde ella me entrevista a mí sobre dermatología. Espero que disfruten tanto el episodio como yo.

In this episode of In-Ear Insights, the Trust Insights podcast, Katie and Chris discuss MCP (Model Context Protocol) and agentic marketing. You’ll learn how MCP connects AI tools to automate tasks—but also why technical expertise is essential to use it effectively. You’ll discover the three layers of AI adoption, from manual prompts to fully autonomous agents, and why skipping foundational steps leads to costly mistakes. You’ll see why workflow automation (like N8N) is the bridge to agentic AI, and how to avoid falling for social media hype. Finally, you’ll get practical advice on staying ahead without drowning in tech overwhelm. Watch now to demystify AI's next big thing! Watch the video here: Can’t see anything? Watch it on YouTube here. Listen to the audio here: https://traffic.libsyn.com/inearinsights/tipodcast-what-is-mcp-agentic-ai-generative-ai.mp3 Download the MP3 audio here. Need help with your company’s data and analytics? Let us know! Join our free Slack group for marketers interested in analytics! [podcastsponsor] Machine-Generated Transcript What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode. Christopher S. Penn – 00:00 In this week’s In-Ear Insights, let’s talk about MCP—Model Context Protocol—and its applications for marketing and what it means. Katie, you said you have questions. Katie Robbert – 00:13 I do. I saw you posted in our free Slack group, Analytics for Marketers, towards the end of last week that one of the models had MCP available. When I see notifications like that, my first thought is: Is this something I need to pay attention to? Usually, you’re really good about letting me know, but I am a fully grown human who needs to be responsible for what I should be paying attention to and not just relying on the data scientist on my team. That was my first gut reaction—which is fair, because you’re a busy person. I like to keep you very busy, and you don’t always have time to let me know what I should be paying attention to. So that was problem one. Problem number two is, yes, you post things typically ahead of when they become more commonplace announcements. I saw a post this morning that I shared with you about MCP and agentic marketing processes, and how it’s going to replace your SEO if you’re doing traditional SEO. For some reason, that raised all of my insecurities and anxieties. Oh my gosh, I really am falling behind because I like to tell people about getting their foundation squared away. If I’m being really honest with myself, I think I focus on that because I feel so lost when I think about AI, agentic processes, MCP, N8N, and all these other things. So I’m like, let me focus on what I know best. But I am now in the boat where I feel like my boat is trailing behind the giant AI yacht. I’m dog-paddling to try to keep up, and I’m just not there. So help me understand a couple of things. One, what is MCP? Two, we’ve talked about agentic AI, but let’s talk about agentic marketing processes. And three, how is someone who isn’t in the weeds with AI every day supposed to not sit at their desk and cry over all of this? Those are big questions, so maybe let’s take them one at a time. All right, let’s start with: What is MCP? Christopher S. Penn – 02:36 Okay, MCP stands for Model Context Protocol. This is something initially advanced by Anthropic, the makers of Claude. It has since been adopted as a standard by OpenAI and now by Google. Sundar Pichai announced at Google Cloud Next last week that the Gemini family will adopt MCP. So what is this? It’s a way for a generative AI model to interface with other systems—a process called tool handling. MCP is a specific kind of tool. You create an MCP server that does stuff behind the scenes. It can be as simple as reading files from your disk or as complicated as using a bunch of SEO tools to optimize a page. It makes that keyword tool available in a tool like Claude Desktop. You could call the tool something like “Make a Katie Joke.” That would be the tool name. You would build an MCP server that talks to an LLM to do all these things behind the scenes. But in Claude, it would just appear as a little tool icon. You’d say, “Hey, Claude, use the Make a Katie Joke tool to make a joke that Katie would make,” and it would talk to that MCP server and kick off all these processes behind the scenes. So think of MCP as a kind of natural language API where, in a conversation with ChatGPT or Claude, you’d say, “Hey, write me some Google Ads with the Google Ads tool.” If you’ve built this tool for yourself or use one of the many free, open MCP servers available (which have data privacy issues), you can add new capabilities to generative AI that the tools don’t have on their own. The thing is, you still have to know what the tool does. You have to build it if it doesn’t exist, integrate it, and know when you should and shouldn’t use it. So as much as it may feel like you’re falling behind, believe it or not, your expertise is actually more important than ever for this. Even though we have MCP, N8N, and workflow automation, all that is software development. It still has to conform to the SDLC. You may not write code, but you better know the SDLC, or you’re going to waste a lot of time. Katie Robbert – 05:19 That’s helpful to know because, again, this may be—let me back up for a second. The information people share on social media is what they want you to see about them. They’re presenting their best selves. I understand that. I do that too as a representative of the company. That’s my job—to represent the best parts of what we do. And yet, my non-professional persona looks at what everyone else is sharing and thinks, Oh my gosh, I really am falling behind. And yet, here I am. My posts are right up there with the others. It’s like, no, I’m not. So I think that’s a little bit of the psychology of where a lot of people are feeling right now. We’re trying our best to look like we know what we’re talking about, but on a daily basis, we’re like, I have no idea what’s happening. So that’s part one. Now I understand what an MCP is. In a nutshell, it’s kind of like a connector between two systems. The commercial version is Zapier—a lot of marketers use Zapier. It’s like, how do I get my data from this place to that place? It transfers information from one system to another. Interestingly enough, I was at the animal shelter we work with yesterday, talking with the executive director. One of the problems she’s trying to solve is that she has literally hundreds of tabs in different spreadsheets of inventory at the shelter. They’re moving to a new shelter, and she’s trying to figure out where everything goes. I was describing to her a system—which doesn’t exist yet—that could include what you’re telling me is an MCP. In a very short version, I explained: We could take all your spreadsheets with all your tabs (which are basically your categories), put those into a database, and then layer generative AI on top of it with some system instructions. Your staff takes a picture of whatever’s been donated. Generative AI recognizes, Okay, that’s two bags of dog food, one thing of wet food, and some pee pads. It looks like those go in Room 121 with the other things, and it adds to the database. I was explaining this process without knowing what that connector was going to be. I said, Let me go back and talk to Chris about it. But I’m fairly certain that’s a thing that can exist. So it sounds like I was describing something I didn’t have the terminology for. Christopher S. Penn – 08:12 Exactly. Right now, here’s the thing—and this is something the LinkedIn hype crowd won’t tell you. As the average user, let me show you what the “getting started with MCP” quick start for non-technical users is. This is from Claude’s website: For Claude Desktop users, get started using MCP in Claude Desktop. First, install Claude Desktop. Second, go into the config file and edit this JSON. Katie Robbert – 08:41 You’ve already lost me. Christopher S. Penn – 08:42 Exactly. Oh, by the way, you also need Node.js on your computer for this to run properly. So when someone says MCP is the future and it’s so easy—well, yes, if you’re a technical person, that’s true. If you’re a non-technical person, this is useless because you’re not going to sit there and install Node.js just to configure a pre-built MCP server. You and your company—if you want to use these capabilities—need to have some IT resources because this is just straight-up IT. This isn’t even AI. This is just, Hey, you need these components in your kitchen before you can cook anything. As cool as MCP is (and believe me, it is very cool), it also has a very high technical bar of entry. So when you see somebody saying, Hey, this is the new AI-enabled MCP SEO, well, yes, that’s true. But what they’re not saying is, you’re probably not going to do this on your own if you’re a non-technical marketer. It’s a business ploy to say, You should hire us as your SEO firm because we’re AI-enabled and we know how to install MCP services. Like, yeah, I can do that too. I just don’t advertise it because it’s kind of a jerk move. Katie Robbert – 10:13 But I think that’s an important point to raise—not that you’re a jerk, but that a lot of us struggle with feeling like we’re not keeping up with AI because of these individuals—professionals, thought leaders, futurists, content creators—who put out this information: This is the future, this is how you’re going to do it. I can probably accurately describe agentic AI, but I couldn’t build it for you. And I think that’s where everyday marketers are struggling. Yeah, I think now I finally understand the concept, but I have no idea how to get started with the thing because there’s nothing out of the box for non-technical people. It’s all still, to your point, a lot of software development, a lot of IT. Even if it’s just installing things so you can get to the drag-and-drop, asking people to suddenly update their config file is maybe one step beyond their technical comfort zone. I just—I know the purpose of this episode is to understand more about MCP and agentic marketing, but I’m struggling to feel like I’m keeping up with being able to execute on all these things that are happening. Because every day, it’s something new, right? Christopher S. Penn – 11:54 So here’s how you get to MCP usage. First, you have to have the basics. Remember, we have the three layers we’ve talked about in the past: Done by you—You’re copy-pasting prompts. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s labor-intensive. If you’ve got a great prompt and a way of doing things that works, you’re already ahead of 95% of the crowd who’s still typing one-sentence prompts into ChatGPT. That’s step one. Done with you—How can you put that in some form of automation? We’ve talked about N8N in the past. I’ll give you an example: I put together a workflow for my newsletter where I say, Here’s my newsletter post. I want you to translate it into these four languages. It sends it to Google Gemini, then writes the updated versions back to my hard drive. This saves me about 20 minutes a week because I don’t have to copy-paste each prompt anymore. This is workflow automation. Done for you (Agentic)—To turn this into an MCP server (which makes it an agent, where I’m not part of the process at all), I’d add the MCP server node. Instead of saying, When manual start (when Chris clicks go), you’d have an MCP server that says, When a generative AI tool like Claude requests this, run the process. So, Claude would say, Hey, here’s this week’s newsletter—go make it. Claude Desktop would recognize there’s an Almost Timely Newsletter tool (an MCP server), send the request, the software would run, and when it’s done, it would send a message back to Claude saying, We’re done. That’s how MCP fits in. It takes the whole automation, puts it in a black box, and now it’s an agent. But you cannot build the agent without the workflow automation, and you cannot build the workflow automation without the standard operating procedure. If you don’t have that fundamental in place, you’re going to create garbage. Katie Robbert – 15:59 I think that’s also helpful because even just thinking about the step of translation—I’m assuming you didn’t just say, Hey, Gemini, translate this and accept whatever it gave back. You likely had to build system instructions that included, Translate it this way, then here’s how you’re going to double-check it, then here’s how you’re going to triple-check it. That to me is very helpful because you’re giving me confirmation that the foundational pieces still have to happen. And I think that’s where a lot of these content creators on social platforms talking about MCP and agentic AI are skipping that part of the conversation. Because, as we’ve said before, it’s not the fun stuff—it’s not the push-the-buttons, twist-the-knob, get-the-shiny-object part. It’s how you actually get things to work correctly. And that’s where, as a regular human, I get caught up in the hype: Oh, but they’re making it look so easy. You just do the thing. It’s like the people on social who post, Look how perfect my sourdough bread came out, but they’re not showing you the 17 loaves and five years of trial and error before this perfect loaf. Or they’re faking it with a mock background. I’m saying all this because I need that reminder—it’s all smoke and mirrors. There’s no shortcut for getting it done correctly. So when I see posts about agentic marketing systems and SEO and email marketing—You’re not even going to have to participate, and it’s going to get it right—I need that reminder that it’s all smoke and mirrors. That’s my therapy session for the morning. Christopher S. Penn – 18:33 And here’s the thing: If you have well-written standard operating procedures (SOPs) that are step-by-step, you can hand that to someone skilled at N8N to turn it into a workflow automation. But it has to be granular—Click here, then click here. That level of detail is so important. Once you have an SOP (your process), you turn it into workflow automation. Once the workflow automation works, you bolt on the MCP pieces, and now you have an agent. But here’s the danger: All these things use APIs, and APIs cost either time, money, or resources. I’m using Gemini’s free version, which Google trains on. If I was doing this for a client, I’d use the paid version (which doesn’t train), and the bills start coming in. Every API call costs money. If you don’t know what you’re doing and you haven’t perfected the process, you might end up with a five-figure server bill and wonder, What happened? Part of MCP construction and agentic AI is great development practices to make your code as efficient as possible. Otherwise, you’re going to burn a lot of money—and you may not even be cash-positive. Katie Robbert – 21:27 But look how fast it is! Look how cool it is! Christopher S. Penn – 21:36 It is cool. Katie Robbert – 21:38 Going back to the original question about MCP—I read a post this morning about agentic marketing systems using MCP and how it’s going to change the way you do SEO. It said it’s going to optimize your content, optimize for competitors, find keywords—all of which sounds really cool. But the way it was presented was like, Oh, duh, why am I not already doing this? I’m falling behind if I’m not letting the machines do my SEO for me and building these systems for my clients. This conversation has already made me feel better about where I am in terms of understanding and execution. Going back to—you still have to have those foundational pieces. Because agentic AI, MCPs, generative AI, shiny objects—it’s all just software development. Christopher S. Penn – 22:59 Exactly. It’s all software development. We’ve just gotten used to writing in natural language instead of code. The challenge with shiny objects is that the people promoting them correctly say, This is what’s possible. But at a certain point, even with agentic AI and MCP automations, it’s more efficient to go back to classical programming. N8N doesn’t scale as well as Python code. In the same way, a 3D printer is cool for making one thing at home, but if you want to make 10,000, classical injection molding is the way to go. New technology doesn’t solve old problems. Katie Robbert – 23:47 And yet, it’s going to happen. Well, I know we’re wrapping up this episode. This has been incredibly helpful and educational for me because every week there’s a new term, a new thing we’re being asked to wrap our heads around. As long as we can keep going back to It’s just software development, you still need the foundation, then I think myself and a lot of other people at my skill level are going to be like, Whew, okay, I can still breathe this week. I don’t have to panic just yet. Christopher S. Penn – 24:23 That said, at some point, we are going to have to make a training course on a system like N8N and workflow automation because it’s so valuable for the boring stuff—like keyword selection in SEO. Stay tuned for that. The best place to stay tuned for announcements from us is our free Slack group, Trust Insights AI Analytics for Marketers, where you and nearly 5,000 marketers are asking and answering each other’s questions every day about data science, analytics, and AI. Wherever you watch or listen to the show, if there’s a channel you’d rather have it on, go to trustinsights.ai/tipodcast to find us at all the places fine podcasts are served. Thanks for tuning in—I’ll talk to you on the next one! (Transcript ends with AI training permission notice.) Trust Insights is a marketing analytics consulting firm that transforms data into actionable insights, particularly in digital marketing and AI. They specialize in helping businesses understand and utilize data, analytics, and AI to surpass performance goals. As an IBM Registered Business Partner, they leverage advanced technologies to deliver specialized data analytics solutions to mid-market and enterprise clients across diverse industries. Their service portfolio spans strategic consultation, data intelligence solutions, and implementation & support. Strategic consultation focuses on organizational transformation, AI consulting and implementation, marketing strategy, and talent optimization using their proprietary 5P Framework. Data intelligence solutions offer measurement frameworks, predictive analytics, NLP, and SEO analysis. Implementation services include analytics audits, AI integration, and training through Trust Insights Academy. Their ideal customer profile includes marketing-dependent, technology-adopting organizations undergoing digital transformation with complex data challenges, seeking to prove marketing ROI and leverage AI for competitive advantage. Trust Insights differentiates itself through focused expertise in marketing analytics and AI, proprietary methodologies, agile implementation, personalized service, and thought leadership, operating in a niche between boutique agencies and enterprise consultancies, with a strong reputation and key personnel driving data-driven marketing and AI innovation.

Ready to grow your TPT business but unsure if you should hire help or improve your systems first? Janice Cook, owner of Cook Family Resources, brings her unique perspective as a project manager who works with both teacher entrepreneurs and virtual assistants to share what really works—and what doesn't—when building your team.After 12 years as a music teacher, Janice found herself in the online business world and quickly became the go-to person for managing projects when other TPT sellers needed support. Her position gives her remarkable insight into both sides of the hiring equation, seeing firsthand why some working relationships thrive while others fail miserably.We dive deep into the four essential elements you must have in place before bringing on help: clear communication channels, documented standard operating procedures, time allocated for feedback, and clarity about who's bringing the expertise to the table. Janice explains why jumping into hiring without these foundations often leads to frustration on both sides, wasted money, and the dreaded "hiring horror stories" that make entrepreneurs hesitant to delegate again.You'll discover practical advice for determining when you're truly ready to hire, how to choose the right communication systems for your team, and what questions to ask yourself before writing that job description. Janice also shares her insider perspective on finding the right match for your specific needs, whether that's through referrals, specialized freelancers, or more cost-effective solutions.Whether you're considering your first hire or looking to improve your existing team dynamics, this conversation will help you create the systems that make delegation successful, allowing your TPT business to grow in a way that's both purposeful and sustainable.Get your ticket to the Teacher Seller's Summit: https://laurenfulton.krtra.com/t/oTIxSLPqfhYfGet Janice's Free Hiring Guide: https://www.cookfamilyresources.com/hiring-guide/Check Out Janice's Book Club: https://www.cookfamilyresources.com/summer-book-club/Check Out Janice's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/teacherjaniceva/Check Out My YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/laurenfultonMy Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/laurentschappler/My Other YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@LaurenATschFree Rebranded Teacher Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/749538092194115 Support the show

I'm doing a first for my business in 2025...sharing quarterly recaps and income reports!In this first-ever quarterly income report, we'll get into how we achieved $115,655 in revenue with over $88,000 in profit while building Web Designer Pro to $346,459 in annual recurring revenue.Highlights include:• Moving course sales pages from joshhallco to webdesignerprocom, including transferring all course reviews using Senja• Launching Web Designer HQ, a centralized directory for all SOP templates, email scripts, and resources• Creating audio versions of three courses available as private podcast feeds for Pro members• Introducing Brock, an AI agent for Web Designer Pro that helps members find resources and get coaching• Planning course revamps for DNS and SEO courses plus developing a new model site• Celebrating nearly selling out the first Web Designer Pro conference with 36 out of 40 tickets sold• Breaking down revenue streams: $85,000 from Web Designer Pro memberships, $15,000 from sponsorships, $8,186 from affiliate income• Maintaining a lean business model with just $27,600 in quarterly expenses, including team costs and taxesI definitely challenge you to look at your own business numbers quarterly, even if you don't share them publicly. Take time to celebrate your wins and analyze what's working and what's not!- Josh

在太魯閣事故四週年當天，《報導者》獨家揭露，2024年12月15日19時18分，一列區間車停靠高雄內惟站時發生疏失，列車超出月台3節車廂，當下司機員未遵守SOP通報，擅自改動ATP模式逕行倒車。所幸後方區間車在美術館站等待，未釀追撞事，而台鐵公司直到5天後，收到旅客投訴展開調查才知情。 火車「開過頭」不是小問題！2005年JR西日本福知山107人死亡的超速出軌事故，導火線就是司機員停站開過頭，為了「追回誤點」而釀禍；就在5年前，台鐵已發生過一次司機開過頭未通報、自行倒車的嚴重事件，同樣的問題為何一再發生？ 今年6月23日起，台鐵將實施新票價，平均漲幅達到26.8%，相隔30年首次調漲，或許有助台鐵財務體質健全，但民眾更想知道的是，大眾運輸安全性能否同步向上提升？ 製作團隊｜詹婉如、陳思樺

Feeling like rejection is closing doors on your ground marketing efforts? What if it could be your secret weapon instead?In today's episode of the Ground Marketing Series, we're exploring the misunderstood realm of rejection, redefining it as feedback rather than failure. Through a blend of down-to-earth examples and actionable tactics, we're learning how practice owners and marketing teams can convert rejections into golden opportunities. Drawing from personal experiences, we demystify the reasons behind common rejections—from automatic no's by gatekeepers to the fear of change among decision-makers—equipping you with the insights to turn these hurdles into stepping stones.We'll unveil effective strategies like the "Coffee Drop" and "Customer Referral Play" to thaw the initial frosty interactions with potential partners. We'll dissect typical rejection types, providing countermeasures and a strategic three-step framework for cracking the "no" code. Each rejection, whether reflexive or cautious, is navigated with a value-first approach, ensuring a positive relationship. Wrapped with a real-world case study, this episode reaffirms the power of persistence and strategic finesse in transforming every negative into a partnership in ground marketing.What You'll Learn in This Episode:How to interpret rejection as feedback, not failure.The common reasons why marketing efforts meet resistance.Strategies like the "Coffee Drop" for connecting with gatekeepers.How past experiences influence current rejection responses.Techniques for maintaining relationships despite initial rejection.A step-by-step approach to counteracting different types of "no."Insights into crafting value-oriented propositions.A real-world application through a detailed corporate case study.Press play and let's learn how to turn every "no" into a strategic partnership opportunity!‍‍Learn More About the Ground Marketing Course Here:Website: https://thedentalmarketer.lpages.co/the-ground-marketing-course-open-enrollment/‍Other Mentions and Links:‍Organizations:American Marketing AssociationHarvard Business Review‍Businesses/BrandsWalmartSalesforceMcKinsey & Company‍If you want your questions answered on Monday Morning Episodes, ask me on these platforms:My Newsletter: https://thedentalmarketer.lpages.co/newsletter/The Dental Marketer Society Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2031814726927041‍Episode Transcript (Auto-Generated - Please Excuse Errors) Michael: Overcoming rejection in ground marketing.Now rejection is not failure. It's feedback. Every rejection in ground marketing is a data point that tells you something about your approach, your value proposition, or your target audience. And the biggest mistake practice owners and marketing teams make is personalizing rejection, rather than seeing it as an opportunity to adjust, refine, and improve.So let's talk about the real reasons rejection happens in ground marketing. Understanding rejection at its core removes the emotional stink and allows you to adjust strategically. So that's why we're gonna get down to the real reasons first, number one, and this one is huge. It happens all the time.Gatekeepers are trained to say no. Now this is a statistic from the Harvard Business Review. 90% of cold approaches in sales and marketing are met with an initial rejection because gatekeepers have been conditioned to filter out non-essential interactions. So they've been trained on the interactions what they need to do.And anything else besides that, they're just trained to say no, they don't wanna mess up, And a lot of the times in ground marketing, I wanna say this is like above 90%. The reason you get no is 'cause of this. Mainly because you're speaking to the wrong person first and foremost.So if you do your strategy or your script and you talk to the gatekeeper, They consider that interaction most likely a non-essential. They're like, I don't know what's happening. What do I do? This is above my pay grade. No. I think I've spoken about this in the past many times, but.I remember when I wanted to, ground market and provide a specific service and get in front of a lot of the warehouse members at a Walmart center. It's like a Walmart distribution center. It wasn't an actual Walmart. Huge, thousands of employees. And I tried getting in many times and I would ask to speak to HR, human resources.Can I speak to hr? Can I speak to hr? That's just me thinking, right? Common sense hR would tell me no. I would get their voicemail a lot and still a no. And it wasn't until I spoke to someone who was pretty awesome at HR and they said, oh, we don't handle that. We only handle the front end of Walmart, like the actual store.You wanna speak to the logistics center? Let me transfer you. They transferred me to the logistics center and then I just said, Hey, can I speak to someone there who's in charge of maybe HR or maybe they're your supervisor?They passed me to the supervisor and guess what? Within the first just ask.I said, Hey, love to see if I can provide more services. Could we do like a lunch and learn like an event for the day? You're like, yeah, sure. Come on by. We'd love to have that. It was a lot thousands of employees, but it worked. It's 'cause I was speaking to the wrong person from the get go.And you can just give up from that point on and then say, okay, you know, it doesn't work to get into the warehouse or distribution center at Walmart, but it does. It does, as long as you're speaking to the right person first and foremost. And then from that point on it continues. So here it's gatekeepers are trained to say no.And that's a good example, that gatekeeper was the wrong person, first and foremost to speak with. And at the same time, all they know is just to say no if they don't know anything else. So the solution is you wanna bypass the auto rejection by making your presence non-threatening and value driven. So instead of selling, introduce yourself in a way that benefits them immediately.This is going to disrupt their autopilot rejection and gets them to lower their guard. So number two, the lack of perceived immediate benefit. Now, this is a statistic by Salesforce research.72% of decision makers only engage in partnerships they perceive as immediately beneficial to their customers or employees. So the solution tie your offer or your approach directly to their top priorities. you're gonna have to do a little research for that. Three, fear of extra work or change.This is a statistic by the McKinsey and Company Group, and it's 85% of businesses avoid change unless it's easy to implement and requires little to no effort on their part. The solution make it effortless for them to say yes. And four, they've had a bad experience with another dentist. This is a statistic by the American Marketing Association, but 76% of businesses that reject a partnership do so because of past negative experiences with similar offers.The solution address this head on now. We're gonna dive into some scripts right now. Okay. On how to do this. So how to make businesses want to work with you without ever talking about yourself first. That's the key. You don't wanna go in there and saying, Hey, we're the new person down the street. Hey, does anybody here need a dentist?Hey, we're taking on new patients. That's all you. That's the mistake you're making already. If you are making that, you wanna walk in without ever talking about you first. so these scripts, they're gonna trigger curiosity, establish trust, and subtly make businesses feel like they owe you something reciprocity.Remember, that's one of the principles in ground marketing without ever pitching your dental practice up front. So number one, we used to do this all the time. It's the coffee drop. This is for any business with a gatekeeper. This is an in-person strategy. Okay? So the target is any business with a front desk staff.It could be gyms, daycares, retail stores, even corporate offices. And the goal is to warm up the gatekeeper, disrupt their automatic no, and create an opening for future interactions. Now the script is the first visit. You're disrupting the automatic. No. You are walking in maybe with a coffee holder and a smile or just a coffee in hand and you're saying hey, how's it going?Yeah, I know you're busy. I just wanted to see if you guys wanted some free coffee. Actually, no strings attached. We just appreciate everything you all do here and our practice does a kind eat every day for a business in our community, The gatekeeper's gonna say, oh yeah, wow.Thank you so much. I appreciate, what's your business? Where are you located? Who are you? Right? They may even say no. If they say no, that's perfectly fine. They're still gonna ask, who are you? And then who's gonna shrug casually and just say, you know, I just know that the front desk teams keep business running and I know we appreciate our front desk, and I wanted to show you that today.And continue right Now, not only do they have their guard down, but they feel, oh man, this person really understands what I'm going through. Maybe they might be having a bad day that day and you are the sunshine that just came in. But this works because gatekeepers lower their defenses. When they see that you're giving, not taking reciprocity kicks in, they feel inclined to engage.They will engage no matter what. Even if they say no, they'll say, oh wow, thank you. No, you know, I appreciate that. Thank,it'll be just as good as if you did bring in their coffee and then they associate you with positivity, making future conversations much easier. So once that happens, let's just say you just established it.You're like, okay, cool. After that, you know, you leave, you don't feel like poking the bear or anything like that. 'cause maybe they're busy, they're talking to someone, you just drop off their coffee. At least you have a second date. Now you can follow up and say, Hey, last time I was here, I meant to ask, do y'all do any events for the employees here?Remember, they associate you with positivity. Your future conversation is happening right now, and now it's easy for you to ask, Hey, do y'all do anything for your employees here? Do y'all have an employee's benefits day, a health fair? Could we do something like that? Do y'all have a employee wellness month in the newsletter?You can ask anything at this point on your next visit. Now they're sharing their business and you can strategically introduce your practice. Okay, so that's like a one-two step. That happened all the time, and it took me a while to realize it's a one-two step. I would come in all the time. Hey, I love what you guys are doing here.If you want, going to the coffee shop right next door from you. Do y'all want anything? Yeah, sure. You know, I love that. Oh my gosh. Yeah. No, no. Thank you. I appreciate it though. Okay. I just know you guys are super busy and sometimes I know our front office is like, I wish I had AFR coffee right now and I'm just thinking about you guys.So that's all. We tend to do a kind deed for a business out here every day and you're like, oh man, well, who's your front office? Where are you from? Where are you located? Right. And then you kind of continue to talk more and you can actually, at that moment, even if they say no, still. do the ask, right?Do y'all do any events for the employees here and so forth? But a lot of the times they might get busy, the phone may ring, whatever, right? Then you can just say, okay, bye room, and then they'll know. Wow. he was literally just asking me for if I wanted free coffee and that was it. That was awesome. And come back in a day or two and then say, Hey, real quick. I wanted to come by and see if you guys do any events for the employees. I meant to ask you that. I forgot. Sorry. Easy breezy. They'll be super open from that. Okay. Now number two, the customer referral play. This is for gyms, salons, and wellness centers.The target is businesses that benefit from having more customers, Make them see you as a referral source before they realize they can refer people to you. the script is, you're gonna walk in casually creating curiosity, right? You're gonna say, Hey. I've been hearing some great things about you guys.A couple of my patients have been talking about how much they love coming here, so I figured I stop in and see what the buzz is all about. they're gonna be intriguing. They're gonna say, oh, really? That's great to hear. And they might talk a little bit more, and then you say, yeah, you know, they were raving about a specific service that they provide.And then you're gonna say, I get a lot of people asking me for recommendations on places like this. So I just wanted to check it out for myself. What makes this place stand out and then you continue. Right now, that's the key right there. I get a lot of people asking me for recommendations on services or places like this.They don't know if it's just one person who asked you, or a million people who asked you. They just see, oh wow, is a referral source. They can provide me with a lot of customers or whatever. Right. This works because they now see you as a referrer first, not someone trying to sell them something.Second is curiosity builds. They want to explain why they're great, so make sure you ask what makes this place stand out. Third, they will naturally ask what you do, making it easy to bring up your practice organically without fail. A thousand percent. When you say, I get a lot of people asking me for recommendations, especially you say, A lot of our patients ask us about recommendations on places like this or your services, 1000%.They will ask you, what do you do? Or where are you located? Now you can follow up before leaving. You wanna use reciprocity to get a referral, right? You can continue to say, you know, I love what you guys are doing here. Do you have anything I can give to my patients in case they're looking for an mention of service, right?That they offer. They're gonna get you a folder filled of stuff, their business cards, and we both know those business cards that they have are just sitting in the back collecting dust, but now they have a reason to give it to you. So don't feel bad or don't feel like, oh man, just gimme one. If they wanna give you a hundred, let them give you a hundred.Don't feel bad about it. Most likely they'll give you like 10 or 20, but You could put 'em in hygiene kits if you want. You can feature a month or whatever. But that is your opportunity for the follow up ask, right? Where you're like, Hey, could I ever bring you guys any of our information as well?And then boom, they feel obligated to ask for your info in return, or they will feel obligated to take your info and return without even actually feeling obligated. It's just a nice deed, right? So that's the number two. Number three, the secret shopper play for retail and local businesses. Now the target is mainly coffee shops, retail stores, boutiques, things like that.And the goal is to make them feel like a VIP and subtly, subtly position yourself as someone who sends them customers. walk in with genuine curiosity, and then you're gonna create exclusivity. You're gonna say, Hey, you know what I was just over at. And then continue with saying, and they mention that this is the best place in town for mention a specific product or service. So now I have to see for myself how incredible this place is. And then stop there. They're gonna say, oh wow, thank you. Yeah, we love doing business with them, or we like them too, or who mentioned it over there, and you're just gonna be like, I don't remember their name.Right. And then continue with it and say, oh wow, that's great to hear. I think people love us because. Then they're gonna mention reasons too. Then you say, yeah, that makes sense. I feel like more people should know about this. Do you guys ever do collaborations with other local businesses? No. Boom. They're either gonna say, yes we do, or no, we don't.If they say, yes we do. Cool. Can I participate? And they say, no, we don't. Oh man. We always do, collaborations with other types of businesses. Would you ever be interested in doing one? Then they're gonna say yes, right? Yeah. You know, We've been thinking about it and so forth. It works because you make them feel special.They now associate you with bringing them business, and they start thinking about partnerships before you even mention your practice. So they're already thinking of partnerships. Yeah. You know what? I can definitely do a partnership. We've thought of doing a partnership, but let's make something happen.And later in the conversation you can follow up. You know, You can say, I love supporting local businesses like yours. If you ever want to do something fun together, I'd be all in. Actually, you know what? We're only picking three businesses this quarter for a free wellness initiative. Could I save you a spot?Boom, right then and there, right? If you're already creating a partnership, a collaboration, it's gonna be happening. And then once they say yes, as you're leaving, you can say, Hey, could I ever give you some of our information too, as well, right? That way you can look us up a little bit more for your customers, and then just provide them with more things.Doesn't hurt to do that. But this gives them a sense of being afraid of missing, especially if you say, we're only picking three businesses this quarter for a free wellness initiative. Should I save you a spot? Number four, the Business Insider play. This is for corporate offices and HR managers.Now, the goal is to make them feel like an exclusive insider in their own company. You are gonna walk in with an observational comment, and you're gonna use the fear of extra work to your advantage, right? You're gonna walk in and say, you know, I was just talking to someone who works here. They were raving about what a great place this is to work.So I had to stop by and see for myself, what do you guys specialize in? Boom. They're gonna say, oh, wow, that's so great to hear. You know, we really focus on boom, right? They may ask, oh, who are you speaking with? And then say, you know what? I can't think of their name right now, but likethey were super excited about it and they mentioned equality.They were super excited about it. They were really warm. They were awesome. They were.talking it up and I'm like, man, I gotta go check this place out and so forth. once they say, you know what we really focus on, and then they're gonna mention their company culture. You're gonna say, you know, that makes a lot of sense. So if someone was new here and wanted to make the most of their experience, what's the one thing they should know about this place? And then they're gonna mention their specific things about their corporation and so forth. And it works because you instantly build trust because you're not pitching anything.They see you as someone who understands their culture, and they will start seeing you as an insider, making them more likely to say yes later. Now, a follow-up move you can have later in the conversation is, I love hearing about workplaces that actually care about their employees. Do you all do any cool perks for your team?If you mention, oh my gosh, I love hearing how you guys take care of your employees and everything you've taken into consideration for them and their needs. Do y'all do anything for your team, for your employees? Do you have any cool perks? Do you do a health and wellness day? I don't know, something like that, right?But just the best thing you can say is, do you all do any cool perks for your employees, for your team? And then they're gonna let you know everything they do. Now you can do two things. You can say, oh. What, What it cost or how can I be a part of any of that? Just hand out everybody, some freebies too. And then they're gonna ask well, what do you do?And so forth, right? And then boom, it'll be easy breezy from there. So you can do that, or you can say, okay, cool. Awesome. Could we ever host something here? We have quite a bit of patience and I know a lot of your employees, have questions about some specific procedures that we offer. Then they're gonna ask, okay well, what do you do?And then you can continue and boom, you might be able to host your own event. So those are the two things you can do, right? Participate in one of their events or host your own event with them, or provide some type of perk for their team. Now, the final takeaway for this is flip rejections into wins by controlling the narrative.Most businesses reject partnerships, not because they don't need them, but because they fear extra work, competition, or wasted effort. So by using curiosity, reciprocity, and effortless value, you position yourself as an ally, not a solicitor. So remember, the key thing is give before asking, create exclusivity so they feel grateful to work with you and make your offer seem like a zero effort perk.Rather than a commitment. Now, the chapter two of this, we're gonna discuss the psychological breakdown of rejection types, right? So rejection is not a one size fits all. Each type requires a custom response. So I know what you're thinking with the scripts that you heard. You're like, oh man, I'm just gonna use that one script sometimes for all the rejections.And you cannot, right? We've discovered this the hard way. there's about three types of rejections. The ground marketing scenario number one is the reflexive, no, it's an automatic rejection. The cause is an automatic response. They're not even listening to you. An example.No, we don't allow, allow soliciting, right? You just walk in. The solution is interrupt the pattern and it works because it disrupts their automatic no response and forces them to reconsider like thecoffee drop example. You're walking in, you're giving them coffee.That's it. And then once they say no, or maybe they might say yes, right? And continue on with their day. You can come back and they're used to it. They're, oh man, you're here again. What's up? it disrupts their no, and they will be more open to you, providing more information.they're gonna ask more information about you. It's one of the best ones. Number two is the cautious, no. This one's a trust barrier. They don't fully trust your offer yet, or they don't trust you yet. the solution is remove competition from the conversation.You're not replacing their current Provider. You're adding value. So remember that. And then number three is the busy no. And that's a timing issue. They're overwhelmed and don't have the bandwidth for your offer. They say, not now. We're swamped. The solution, acknowledge their situation and ask for something quick.You respect their time, making them more receptive later. So there is a three step rejection counter attack framework that's chapter three here, right? Every rejection is an opportunity to refine your strategy. Number one, you wanna pause and acknowledge the objection, why this step is critical.Psychological insight, right? People feel validated when their concerns are acknowledged. The next thing is when you resist the urge to argue or sell, it disarms their resistance, and then you acknowledge them. Acknowledgement lowers their defenses, making them more likely to reconsider. Now, this is a statistic by the Harvard Business Review, but 67% of people are more likely to continue a conversation if.Their concerns are first validated instead of immediately countered. So let me give you an example of something wrong. The business says, we already have a dentist we refer to, and you say oh, you have them, but we're way better than them. This is wrong. You've now positioned yourself as a competitor, making them defend their existing partnership, and it puts them on the defensive.Making it less likely, they'll engage. The right response would be, oh yeah, you know, I totally get that. That's incredible. A lot of businesses I talk to say the same thing, and then you continue, right? It works because you validate their decision. They don't feel like they have to defend it. You keep the conversation open instead of shutting it down, and it makes them more willing to listen to what you have to say next.You can follow up with that sentence by saying, Hey, outta curiosity, what do your employees love most about that partnership? Boom. And you continue, The conversation. Then you find the cracks, and then you see where you can be the solution to those pain points. Now you've turned their rejection into a conversation starter.Next, you wanna pivot to a value first approach. This step is critical. When people feel they're gaining something rather than being sold something, they are far more likely to engage. If rejection doesn't come with a loss, they are more open to new possibilities. A Salesforce research statistic says 83% of people are willing to listen if they see an immediate low effort benefit.So lemme give you the wrong way to do this. The business says we're not interested. Then you say, well, let me just explain why our practice is different. That's gonna fail. They don't care about you yet. They care about what they gain. So you're trying to overcome the rejection instead of pivoting the conversation.So the right response is, if they say, we're not interested, you're gonna say totally fine. By the way, do you guys ever do anything for the employee wellness days? They're gonna say Employee wellness days, no, not really. What are you talking about? Why? They're gonna say no reason. Just have something that might be cool for your team and I I can drop it off next time if you like.This works. You shift away from your offer and make it about them. Instead, you create curiosity, making them more open to your next visit, and you frame yourself as someone bringing value, not pitching a service. Once they engage you now have a chance to build value naturally. And then the final thing is you can follow up in a non-threatening way, right?In value-driven way, 80% of sales require at least five follow-ups, yet only 8% of salespeople persist past the first rejection. Following up is key with any marketing in general. But especially with ground market, you've got to follow up. Life happens to many people, you need to follow up.The key to successful follow-ups is making them feel effortless and organic. the key mistake people make is they never follow up or they follow up to aggressively. So let me give you an example of a wrong way. Maybe you're returning in two weeks and you say, Hey, I just wanted to check back and see if you're ready To start referring patients to us, that's gonna fail you. They immediately feel like they're being sold something. and it's all about you, not about them. The right way is, Hey, I was in the area and I figured I'd drop off a few of these free hygiene kits or a few of these free travel hygiene kits for your team.Just a little something to say. Thanks for all you do, and that's it. The business is gonna say, oh wow. Thanks. That's really nice of you. You're gonna say, no problem at all. And by the way, I saw something the other day that reminded me of our last conversation. Mind if I ask you a quick question? This works because if you give them something before they're asking for anything, it feels natural, not like a sales follow up, and it creates an opportunity for a real conversation.You can follow up by saying, you know, by the way, if any of your customers ever need a good dentist, let me know. I'd be happy to take care of them. You can present them with a specific offer or a new patient exam or whatever incentive. Right now, they are offering to refer people to you, which is the key.That's what you want, and there's many, many other things we can do, right? Rejection doesn't mean never, it means not yet. The key is knowing how to change the dynamics of the interaction so that the business sees you as a valuable partner instead of a solicitor. We can leverage reciprocity, the psychology of reciprocity, and it works fantastic, right?And a way you can do this the right way is maybe you're targeting a gym that initially rejected your partnership. Now if that happens, you can say, Hey, I was grabbing some snacks from my office and figure your team could use a little fuel. I know how hard you guys work here. So I just wanted to say thanks.And then hand them over some bottled waters and protein bars. Staff is gonna say, oh wow, that's so nice of you. Thank you. You didn't have to do that. You are gonna say in a nonchalant way, it's no big deal. I love what you guys are doing here. Actually, quick question. Do you ever run into members asking about teeth grinding or jaw pain and then this is gonna work, right?Or they're cosmetics or teeth weening. Now this works because you're giving, before asking, triggering the psychological need to reciprocate. It doesn't feel salesy. Makes them more likely to engage. The question naturally transitioned into your services without being pushy. So works fantastic. You can also use tactics like scarcity and urgency as well, right?You can say, Hey, we're only selecting three businesses this quarter for our no-cost wellness initiative. I mean, I know you guys have such a great team. I love to include you. Can I save a spot for you? That's one, and there's many, many more, right, that you can adjust to in this scenario, which is gonna be done in a later episode.How we can go to businesses that maybe perhaps we messed up before we started listening to these episodes and we said, oh man, they've already told us no, they've already rejected us. They've even like kicked us out. How you can turn that around and now go into these businesses and fix it? Fix it and create strong partnerships.So that's gonna be an episode, later down the road, but it's turning around rejections, which is a lot easier than you think. Now I'm gonna give you a, case study on, rejections and how it'll work specifically with corporate office rejection, right?So there was a business that immediately rejected a proposal for an in-office dental screening.Instead of walking away the dentist, they emailed HR with a customized dental wellness month proposal focusing on how it could help employees with stress related dental issues. By the way, in the ground marketing course, we are about to drop all to do this. How to email HR with a customized dental wellness month proposal.And then in the course as well, it's gonna break down the SOP, the standard operating procedure and the system on how to effectively host a dental wellness month with a corporate office. Fantastic. I'm excited for it. It's something we've done a lot, but it's gonna be in the course coming up here probably by the time this episode drops.So we're excited for that. So if you're not a part of the ground marketing course, please feel free to go in the show notes below. Click on the first link in the show notes below to enroll into the Ground Marketing course. You'll get all these strategies and way more specific in-depth scripts and strategies, and this too, as well, the Dental Wellness Month proposal.But at the same time, you'll get a lot of these live ground marketing workshops with myself. But if you are a member of the ground Marketing course, look out for that. It's coming up right here pretty soon, so get excited. Now. The next thing is reframe the event as an exclusive benefit rather than a vendor service.And then offer a small, no pressure reduction, just a free guide in hygiene kits for employees. The results were amazing with this member HR approved the wellness initiative after seeing it framed as an employee benefit. Over 50 employees signed up for screenings within the first month, and the company now offers the dentist services as a permanent employee part.The lesson. If they reject you in person, pivot to the email and make it a tailored offer that fits their priorities. That's what was happening here. The business immediately rejected the proposal in person, but then the email is what got it, is what took it right. So a good takeaway from this episode is rejections are simply missed connections.You can turn them into opportunities by giving before asking reciprocity, right? Creating urgency and exclusivity, scarcity, finding an insider to advocate for you. You have an internal champion and reframing your offer to match their priorities. Customization. So definitely keep this in mind.These scripts are gonna be fantastic. There's more scripts that are gonna be in the ground marketing course, like general approach. I wanna refer my patients to you. I wanna support your members. I want to help your families. I love to support your customers. I wanna help your students getting them to promote you.These scripts are gonna be inside the ground marketing course as well under this, specific unit. But yeah. If you're not a part of the ground marketing course, like I said, definitely go in the show notes below. Click on the first link and see everything it has to offer. And if you are a member of the Ground Marketing course, I'm excited to talk to you in the next Live Ground Marketing workshop and look out for the Dental Wellness Month proposal, the email, and the actual SOP for that that you can start implementing and utilizing soon.Alright, in the next episode, we will be discussing leveraging community events for maximum impact. Talk to you soon.

This week on The Art of SBA Lending, Ray is laying out his own list of top 10 priorities for the SBA, several of which might shock you. But hey, if the SBA wants change, let's give em change. Joined by Ray is a panel of Art of SBA contributors: Charles Green, Jeannie Yoder, and Shane Pierson to discuss: ➡️ Changes to SBA 7a policy ➡️ Some fresh ideas that could streamline the program ➡️ How to avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater ➡️ Timeline for the new SOP that is inevitably dropping ➡️ Predictions for the SBA landscape in the next 12 months Join Ray and his expert panel as they break down each priority one by one. 

人在江湖走，哪有不車禍？阿不過如果只是小小擦撞，人都沒事還要不要叫警察？ 如果只留電話，可能一不小心就變成肇事逃逸！ 遇到車禍時「私下和解」到底有沒有法律效力？ 對方突然翻臉不認人我又該怎麼做？ 車禍超完整法律 SOP 就在這一集！ - 我看到朋友被打了，上去幫忙會不會犯法？ 有人打我，可以用力還手嗎？ 正當防衛的定義原來跟我們想像地不太一樣。 江湖在走，法律知識要有。 各位衝碰少年仔，打架（？）須知我們都放在這集了～ - 喝酒不開車、開車不喝酒 啊我騎腳踏車到底行不行？ 酒駕的規定到底有哪些？交通工具原來這麼重要！ 希望大家快樂喝酒、出入平安 follow「法白開講」 法律講予白，用台語OK！ 更多生活相關的法律，法白開講講給你聽❤️ 小額贊助支持本節目： https://open.firstory.me/user/ckudnw7fn4tqg0870axzgirva 留言告訴我你對這一集的想法： https://open.firstory.me/user/ckudnw7fn4tqg0870axzgirva/comments 法客電台現在可以在 YT 上聽了，快來追蹤我們！ https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZ2kyig0k3pEpaPmwVjJ63Gald7jiGJbl 小額贊助支持本節目： https://open.firstory.me/join/plainlaw 留言給我們： https://open.firstory.me/user/ckudnw7fn4tqg0870axzgirva/comments ✨ 加入法客電台 LINE社群，跟我們一起討論節目： https://plainlaw.tw/chatwithKC Youtube ContentID UXYVCFVE8LNLR1AJ 13XYPXYZEZWHYMIK Powered by Firstory Hosting

Madelyn Victoria helps small businesses create a marketing strategy through social media and ShowIt website design so they can turn their leads into sales.By using her knowledge and experiences, she helps her clients transform their customers into cheerleaders and take their business to the next level.Ever since she was in high school, Madelyn has always had some sort of online business or side hustle, but she was still determined to start her corporate career right after graduating from college.But things never go quite as planned.After college graduation, Madelyn decided to work several part-time jobs over the next couple of years so she could continue to test out her “side hustle,” which was Social Media Management at the time. Eventually, her business grew so much that she quit her part-time office job and went full-time.Along the way, her clients began asking for more marketing advice, and Madelyn found that she loved helping them with their marketing goals. She then pivoted, becoming a marketing strategist. She hasn't looked back and continues to grow, designing websites and taking over clients' marketing.Madelyn works as a small business marketing strategist in small-town Wetumpka, Alabama where she enjoys hiking, reading, and spending time with family.TAKEAWAYS:Prioritize the customer journey. Be intentional about it and learn how to turn clients into cheerleaders.Go the extra mile. People are so grateful when you go a step further and it means a lot to them and shows you care about their business. Make sure to paint clients as heroes and focus on that in your messaging. Find ways to serve them beyond just filling your services.RESOURCES:Visit the blog post that goes along with this episode for more resourcesLearn more about Madelyn through her websiteBook resource Unreasonable HospitalityDownload the 3 Simple Strategies to Become More Visible, Get More Customers, and Increase Your Profit GuideSnag a seat in Allison's Sell on Autopilot Masterclass, and learn how to use email marketing to sell while you sleep (or, ‘ya know…live your actual life!)CONNECT WITH ALLISON:Follow Allison on InstagramDID YOU HAVE AN 'AH-HA MOMENT' WHILE LISTENING TO THIS EPISODE?If you found value and are ready to take action from listening to this episode, head to Apple Podcasts and help us reach new audiences by giving the podcast a rating and a review. This helps us to reach more online coaches who are creating a thriving 6-figure business.Music courtesy of www.bensound.com

In stage 2, you were starting to think about small pockets of time that you could make random amounts of money because there isn't enough income to cover the expenses that you have reduced as much as possible. There may be something that has become more steady and you are making more than $600/year. This is a Schedule C on your taxes, where you submit a 1099 or claim the money earned. In 2009, I had 11 schedule C's that I eventually combined under one LLC.   Do You Like Chicken Cacciatore? I do! My mother-in-law gave me her recipe. I found I liked to bake it a little differently than her. I re-wrote her two sided index instructions, down to one side, the way I make it for my family.  I like that it's no longer stored in my brain. I just grab my instructions and make dinner, in fact anyone in my family could do the same. This is the same idea as an SOP (standard operating procedures) for your business. You should write down the process to complete the tasks for your job/household manager role. In the event there is someone new taking over one of your tasks, audit the steps to make sure it's accurate before you hand it off to the new person, child or spouse.  Passion Turned Side Hustle Now let's say I make it for my neighbors and they love it. Let's say they start to pay me to bake for them. I start making pretty good money each week cooking for them. I could also be baking my family the same meal at the same time. My invisible work I originally did for my family has become paid work that I now report to Uncle Sam through my taxes. It's important to track all of my expenses in making the meals like mileage to the grocery store, the grocery bill, portion of my gas bill for using my oven, and when I start to expand to other people the mileage for delivery. This information is added into the monthly P & L, which you can track in the Organize 365® Income & Expense Binder. If you aren't a good cook, you could babysit, clean homes, tutor, dog sit, Uber, Door Dash, bookkeeping, Fairy Godmother for a family, or direct sales **but make sure you are profitable. What do you have a passion for and you are good at? Will people pay you to do that? Be confident completing the job (that saves them time) and accept the money for a task you may do for your family for free. I suggest any side hustle you could charge at least $20/hr up to $60/hr or an amount per day like $100/day.  The Value of a Systems If unpaid work is not optimized, then you cannot add in paid work because paid work (side hustle like baking for your neighbors) will always supersede unpaid work (your personal house work and baking Chicken Cacciatore). The complete Home Organizational Bundle; Sunday Basket® for weekly checks and balance, The Paper Solution for information management, and The Productive Home Solution to set up your house to effectively serve your family for the phase of life you are in, and planning days to audit your systems. Good operating systems in place allow unexpected events to feel like speed bumps instead of falling off of a cliff. Now you are ready for stage 3. Your systems are in place, you are documenting your income and expenses, and you have freed capacity to focus on making your side hustle more profitable. Now you can bake Chicken Cacciatore for everyone! EPISODE RESOURCES: The Sunday Basket® The Paper Solution® The Productive Home Solution® Complete Home Organization Bundle Sign Up for the Organize 365® Newsletter  Did you enjoy this episode? Please leave a rating and review in your favorite podcast app. Share this episode with a friend and be sure to tag Organize 365® when you share on social media!