Podcasts about stephen you

361Firm Zietgiest Panel at the...Tech Summit (Feb. 25, 2025)   SUMMARY KEYWORDSAI innovation, venture capital, early-stage companies, technology revolution, market uncertainty, geopolitical shifts, consumer spending, debt management, leadership challenges, educational access, technological race, global alliances, investment strategies, productivity increases, existential risks.SPEAKERSZoe Cruz, Mark Sanor, Barbara Doran, Christopher Birne, Stephen Burke, Joe Mancini Mark Sanor  00:00I'm going to make a prediction if Eddy will give me his attention. Eddie and Maisy are doing a deal right now. That's the whole point, yeah. My prediction is that this might be one of the most educational five to six hours of your life. There are so many interesting things happening in the world. Again, we were talking this morning. It really is like a new world order. And what gives us hope is always technology, productivity and all those things, those great things. So we're going to talk about these aspects, and hopefully these are the things that we in this room can control, but we all don't know how to navigate, so we have specialists who that's what they focus on, you know, whether it's health tech or dual use. So let's all learn together. So I asked the panels a classic question, what scares and excites you, and share some insights. And I like to to do the following, and sometimes the what scares and excites you, of course, can be insightful. But by way of very quick introduction, introduce yourself, and then you'll be you about clean up. David, you'd like to clean up. Share it, you know, introduce yourself and share. Share an insight with the view of, we're in this, this very, you know, rapidly transforming world, and the rapidity is only increasing. So with that, I'm gonna, you know, I always like fund the funds, so I raise money. So a lot of people don't want to raise money for fund the funds, because you're like, you know, you don't get paid much. You have to long term journey, but the intelligence that you get from fund to fund. So I let Joe kick off, Barbara, we all, you all know from pickle ball or or CNBC, or the like. Zoe is new to us, maybe not to some of you, but she was the president of Morgan Stanley. Who else has been president of Morgan Stanley here? Not too many of us have been your perch, right? Your view, your vantage point. So and you're on to new frontiers, you'll share some of that. And everyone should know Stephen. Who does not know? Stephen Burke, has anyone has not been to our Tuesday briefing? It okay if you haven't, Olga, you haven't made it. Have you a Tuesday briefing of 361 firm? Has anyone not made it to one of them? You probably made it to 100 but it's 256 next Tuesday, our anchor man. So you'll anchor the panel. So I'm going to pass it off to you, Joe, and truly be inside tell us something we don't know.Joe Mancini  03:22Well, I'll start by just telling you what you don't know, which is who I am. My name is Joe Mancini. I'm one of the founding partners of a hybrid venture fund called front porch Venture Partners. About half our capital goes into early stage venture capital on the fund side, via kind of a classic Fund of Funds approach, and about half directly into companies at the early stage. Companies at the early stage. Super excited to be here this community as I've started to engage with it more and more. It's just a really authentic and interesting group of people. So I think it's going to be an amazing day. Is this the scares and excites? Part? Mark, or no? Mark Sanor  03:54Well, insights and or scares Excite? Yeah. I like an insightful perspective. Joe Mancini  04:01Yeah, insightful. I would say, you know, I mean, it's, obviously, it's a more dynamic world, I think, right now, than we've lived in in a very long time. It feels like every other day there's some new piece of news that's throwing us all for a loop. I focus on early stage venture. I would say I when we get to the scared and excited part, I both worry as well as I'm excited about the state of venture as an asset class and the state of early stage innovation. It's been a primary driver of the US economy for a very long period of time, and American ingenuity and innovation has put us, you know, at the top of the heap globally for a long period of time. And there's an interesting where, an interesting intersection in the asset class right now, where, you know, LPs are frustrated about liquidity, assets are being concentrated among some of the biggest managers. And meanwhile, innovation is happening globally. That's starting to put, I think, American innovation on its on its heels a little bit. So I can talk about. A more inspiring version of where I think we go from here, but that's where I sit today. Barbara Doran  05:11Hello, yeah, hi. Besides playing pickleball, and there were two women who won, by the way, will be defending next year. Anyway, I'm Barb Duran. I wear two hats. I'm here, really, on the investment Council of Penn State. I'm not staff member, volunteer. I've been on the board of Penn State for nine years, the Board of Trustees just after the Sandusky scandal was elected by the alumni, and have been on the Finance Committee ever since. So on the investment Council. And so I want to talk a little bit about the things that we do there. But also, excuse me, my other hat is I have my own firm, wealth advisory, asset management, and so I invest in public traded equities, and that's really my specialty as an independent professional, the things that excite me most really goes along with what Dan was saying are Bill Joe. Oh, jeez. Anyway, David. David anyway is really about technology. I don't think that should come as any surprise. There's lots of talk all the time about AI and what that means. We had a market sell off about three weeks ago because of deep seek. You know this Chinese competitor, potential competitor, to Nvidia and lots of other semiconductor players, but there's so much going on, and we're already starting to see the productivity increases that will come from businesses adopted it. And so far, in terms of businesses adopted, probably, you know, not even you know, only maybe 10% have really adopted, and we're not talking about the service now. So the salesforce.com but the businesses will actually implement to make their businesses run more efficiently, their sales, all that sort of thing. So that's just beginning, because everybody's looking at, how do we use it, working with consultants, etc. But there's going to be a lot more to come, and more new companies that we don't even know about yet, and that's why, like, for instance, at Penn State, we're doing we don't invest directly and anything, we're just not big enough. Our end down is maybe six to 7 billion, if you include our operating cash. So we have a great staff, but we invest in funds, you know. So that's the fund of funds who really have the expertise to dive deep. And we've been investing in in different venture capital funds that have different areas of expertise in technology. Some of them are AI. Others are other areas of technology, but AI has been a big one recently, and we're continuing to look in that space. And the publicly traded side at Penn State, we just do index is which I'm always the one speaking up like, why we should do some active managers. But for my own clients, I do a lot in technology. Like, for instance, I've own Nvidia since 2019 which had no idea it would happen as it has. But I looked up at that time, like, why did I buy it then? And it was really because they were one of the first actually using AI to help their clients run their business. And so that was, this was the beginning of and this is just the beginning, still, even despite everything that's happening on So, and I know I'm getting the look, but the things that I worry about really have to do with the current administration and the uncertainty being created by not knowing what's happening with tariffs. Is it more bark than bite? We don't know. We just had a pronouncement today about Canada and Mexico, or maybe it was late yesterday. Who knows? And also about the deportations. We don't know. Even company managements are worried about what that could mean in terms of labor shortage and the inflationary pressures there. So there's a lot we don't know. And right now, what's happened? Sure you've noticed, the last three days, we've had a market sell off, including today, in the equity market. 10 year yield has come down, and I think it's we're now having a growth scare, which we haven't seen for a while, and we'll see how that plays out. My view it's probably a buying opportunity somewhere in there, because the economy is still strong. It's consumer driven, and it's the mid to high income consumer that's driving it. And people have made trillions in the stock market. Their home prices are high, and they're employed. So despite all the noise in the frights of the last few days, I'm still, you know, optimistic on the market. Thank you. Zoe Cruz  09:09Thank you. My name is Zoe Cruz. It's actually Zoe Papa vimitrio Cruz. I was born and raised in Greece. I am what you call the American dream. Three years before I went to Harvard on a full scholarship, I didn't speak a word of English, and if it weren't a public school teacher that took an interest as to why I wasn't applying to Harvard, I probably wouldn't be here. And I joined Morgan Stanley right out of business school. It was a small investment banking boutique with 1800 people in three offices, Tokyo, London, New York. When I left in 07 it was 65,000 people. They had offices everywhere. That's a revolution. Finance was globalizing. Overnight, rates were 21% on their way to zero 30. Interest rates, the risk free rate of return for treasuries were 15% on their way to 1% as I say to people, a monkey could do what we did at Morgan Stanley, and we were not monkeys. So you have to recognize paradigm shifts. And I actually think right now we're in a massive paradigm shift. There is way too much in being spilled. Whether the Fed is going to use 25 basis points. Who cares? The world is de globalizing, fragmenting. The biggest assumption the markets are making is that we beat inflation. It's going to go back down to 2% I could be wrong, but I believe we're not going to save 2% in my lifetime. We should worry more about hyper inflation than deflation. The US government has $36 trillion worth of debt, and so for me, what I worry about is there is not enough talk about, how do you hedge your portfolio if it is a paradigm shift, and interest rates actually, the cost of capital keeps on going up, and availability of it keeps on going down. If I'm right about that assumption. A lot of your portfolio is in deep trouble, because that's the assumption most people are making. So what scares me at the moment, I'm an optimist by nature. I love you know, we are the lucky sperm club here, actually, most of us. What scares me is we are in the middle of an amazing technological revolution. But unlike what so it is amazing in the sense that when I look at the power of that thing, I downloaded all four perplexity, Gemini, grok, chat, GPT, all four of them, and I asked them the same question, all four. And by the way, they have their own biases. Just excellent. I don't need 12 research people. It's just in a second, I get the most complex answers to a question that's exciting. I mean, I can get a PhD basically, just, you know, asking that's exciting. Unlike other revolutions, you don't get the extreme risk of Elon, a brilliant man, whatever you want to think about his character. This is a brilliant man who has changed the world. Now everybody's talking the game, but he, I remember, if you look at his interviews only a few years back, he said there's a non zero possibility humanity ceases to exist. Well, that's kind of a big risk. So, so the mirror image of that exciting, exciting revolution is more of us should think about humanity is a wonderful thing, and how do you preserve us being masters of this revolution, as opposed to the other way around? Stephen Burke  13:14I'm done. First of all, I agree with most of what you said, and the stuff I don't agree with, I don't understand. So thank you, Zoe for that crash course. I worry about debt too, and I worry about debt being the current consumption of our future earnings, and we've gone way over our skis on that all over the world, and how we get that back is going to be a real problem. And the other thing I worry about is the lack of leadership that will make the hard decisions that we have to make to put the pain on the system that we have to go through to get the excesses out that we built up over the years. I also share the view that the move down in rates is going to be much more challenging the market is hoping for as investors, if we don't get our mind around that change that the last 15 years are done and we're back to a normal interest rate level on the low end of what we've historically seen, you're going to have problems valuing all your assets if we don't get that right. So I think we have to change the mindset there. I do think there's elements of this administration that are not getting credit for the positive outcomes because of the delivery on it, but if we can get digitize a lot of our government expenses, you only raise the level of trust in how our taxes are being spent, they can give you a whole different mindset towards government and deliver much better outcomes for our country, but I think it will be the same for other countries. Europe has a massive fiscal problem where their needs are far greater than their ability to spend to meet those needs, and that's not just on defense, it's on their regular day to day living. So I think the transformations that are going. On. I do think this is one of those periods where we've slowly walked into, over the last decade, big, secular, mega trends, whether it's demographics, whether it's the tech boom. You can go through the list. There's several other areas where we're seeing these mega trends. I think the anti immigration bias that we're starting to say is another worry, we're going to have a brain drain problem. We've already seen it in a lot of countries. The US cannot afford to lose the opportunity the edge that we've had in immigration, and we're on our way to doing that. So I think we're going too far in the pendulum all the time. I think we have to get back to a more moderate way of seeing how we deal with all the problems that we have. So I'll stop there more. Mark Sanor  15:42What do you think about the risk of of humanity? So arm and Sir keys on. He did this conference. He how long wasn the question of existence? Do we can, you know, sort of existential, the ultimate existential question. I'm surprised Stephen Burke  15:58they made it this far, so that's not a priority for me, but I do have four kids that it is a priority for. And I would say that I worry about our kids. I worry about the we called sending the bill to the kids table with the debt and the strains on the system, but I also worry what we've done to their future. I think their their ability to have hope is not the same that we had when we were growing up. And I think that's a real problem, because without hope and hope in our leaders, it's very hard to get out of the problems and deal with the problems Mark Sanor  16:32that we have fair enough. Well, I want to open up because I asked insights and scares and excitements, you sort of answered those questions, but did you hold back a scares and excites? Answer? I held back and excites. Okay, let's Yeah, and that Joe Mancini  16:46was really interesting. I appreciate this is a really smart crew up here. You know, like I said, I play in the early stage venture world, primarily in the US. I spend all day, every day, with fund managers and founders. I would say something that excites me with as concerned as I am about certain things, is how many founders are starting businesses right now in an AI native way. And what I mean by that is, you know that they're building these businesses now with AI tools in their pocket that are going to dramatically, I think, decrease the amount of capital needed to build a great company, right? Which means that, as an investor, there's an opportunity for great returns. Peter Walker, at carta has a great stat around the average series A employee count. Two years ago was 18. Last year was 13. It's ready to be under 10 within the next 12 months. So in terms of productivity, kind of carrying us out of this, I think there's a huge opportunity with this next set of tools, not just as a system layer for a lot of things that we do, but for founders and people who are creating and building things, and for our kids as they're creating and building things. So Mark, that's the more optimistic. So Mark Sanor  17:51do you know Esther Dyson? Does anyone know Mr. So she was we had this discussion about this time last year about companies that are the founders being an AI and the board members potentially being a is you guys have thought through that scenario, but it's they would Love to replace you too. So so it goes both ways. Joe Mancini  18:23I mean, some might as well be AI in certain cases, right? I mean, particularly at the board level, we work with a lot of boards as well, and, you know, there's some sleepy boards that might be better served being AI, right? We try to avoid those types of situations. Mark Sanor  18:39So, let's, let's open it up. Will Speaker 4  18:46First off, this was awesome. So far, I really enjoyed what you guys all said, a lot of brain power up there. We've talked a lot about, you know, uncertainty of geo politics, Global War, where interest rates are going. I'm curious, you know, from an investment perspective, it's sometimes easier to think about, what are the things that are not going to change amidst all this, and what will continue to just make sense. And I'd love to hear what you guys think about, what's not going to change, and how we could invest in slow, boring things that aren't going to change. Mark Sanor  19:18Who wants it? Zoe Cruz  19:22Great question. Sorry, yeah, it's a Mark Sanor  19:27girl he was being coached by the Pender, right? Zoe Cruz  19:30It's a great question. I'm not sure I have the answer that to the question you're asking. One thing will never change is basically, if you have short term clarity on what's going to produce cash, you know, even if inflation takes 5% of it, who cares? That's never I mean arithmetic, simple arithmetic is so good businesses, but I. Say what's also not going to change. Some of the best money I've made is after the crash, one of the best trades I've made, because I know how to read bank balance sheets in oh eight after the war fell apart, you could have bought if you had enough cash saved aside and not prematurely invested all of your portfolio and things you could have bought bill based stock at 50 cents of its book value. This is a company that was still making billions with an S every quarter. So what's not going to change is we know after major and I think we are in a paradigm shift. You don't need to be a great investor. You're going to pick up great companies. You're going to make me investments that give you a symmetry of risk reward. Most Great Investors basically have, so yes, you can lose half of your money, or you can make 100x that's a symmetry of risk reward. You should do the trade every day. I think right now, the asymmetry of risk reward is against the traditional portfolio, stocks and bonds. You know, when you can actually save there is inflation, the huge debt that the market, sovereign in particular, the US of A everyone is actually printing money, including even Germany. Basically, when there is huge debt, as I say many times, people forget there is only two ways of big debt, repudiation or inflation, we're choosing the latter, so that should guide your portfolio. Now the Argentinians don't have a reserve currency. So if you choose inflation, your currency goes down 98% Turkey 60% we are in a wonderful world of America with the reserve currency. The question is, we better be careful. I Barbara Doran  22:06just want to make a quick comment on that. We better be careful about the reserve currency, because when 22 when we used we froze central bank in Russia. You know, it suddenly woke up a lot of other central bankers to say, hey, maybe the treasuries aren't so safe after all. So it will be a long term process, but we can't take for granted. I mean, the near term, yes, will be the world's reserve currency, but over many years, and depending how it accelerated or not, by various administrative policies, current or future presidents, that is something to watch. And I share the concern over the deficit, which looks like it's going to be even higher, but what will not change? I mean, there's so many ways to answer that. One is about consumer spending. You know that Americans love to spend through thick and thin and and also market psychology, which we addressed in which Zoe said, back in it was oh nine in February, I remember looking at those bank stocks because a friend said, bar, what can I invest in, and I don't give friends ideas. But I said, if you really want to invest, because she knew nothing. I said it with Hank was bank America and city, which were like $2 stocks. I said, I don't know. The only thing I know is they're not going out of business when will return. It wasn't one, whatever it was. It was crazy. But the only thing I knew they weren't going out of business. So, Mark Sanor  23:23all right, yeah, what's Joe Mancini  23:24playing in my head, as you all are describing these situations, which I think are really good examples, is just, I mean, supply and demand, as far as I can tell, is always going to, you know, rule quite you know, rule every market and just about every transaction. So knowing where you sit in terms of, you know, where is demand, where is supply, and ultimately, where is price, right, can help you make really good decisions. Simple, but I think we go back to it all the time, Mark Sanor  23:52by the way, I'm gonna is amazing here. Of course, you stepped up. But we'll talk about pricing perfect timing, because we're gonna talk about talk about large pricing models. That's the next open AI that we've been looking at. Lots of hands were going up because you guys have asked lots of questions. I'm going to let Speaker 5  24:16Dave Thanks. So regarding rare and critical minerals, we're sort of hearing now that if you haven't already got any, gone into them, you're late, that they're not going to be very rare in a very short period of time. Do you guys have views on that? Mark Sanor  24:31I mean, Greenland and Ukraine? No views from the panel on that Speaker 2  24:40one? No, I don't know enough either. Don't forget the ocean too. Oh, Mark Sanor  24:44the ocean. We have two people in Alyssa. Where's Alyssa and Lisa on ocean research. We know so much. We spend so much more in space, not in the ocean. Chris, Christopher Birne  24:58thank you guys for your time. I guess. First, I would say, both my dad and I went to Penn State for our undergrad. So we are and I'm Greek. So CI do elada Go Blue? Yeah, oh, wow. So, I guess a lot of discussions I've had with other family offices, and I think Stephen You had mentioned this idea of, you know, a lack of leadership and its effect on making crucial decisions. You know, I think that the Obama administration was the last two year term we had for a president. And, you know, I guess you could argue that Trump is a two term president one time, separately, this political climate that we're in now and this shit, this paradigm shift politically, I think, where, you know, every four years to different president with a completely different outlook. What effect does that have? Like, kind of, some of the things you guys are discussing about the deficit and being able to make crucial decisions, Mark Sanor  25:48we do have elections every two years too, that impact Stephen Burke  25:52this. I'll start I think the I think the ping pong match of the party's policies is a terrible waste of money for the US, consumer and taxpayer. And I think we need to separate the budget out to a maintenance budget and investment budget the same way you would in a corporation, and then you would evaluate the return on your investment for like the infrastructure plan that was absolutely necessary. But you do that in a way that you actually look for an ROI the way you would in the business, and I think if we did that, the people would have a lot better response to the government spending and new government projects. So I think that's the kind of leadership that you need. You also need people to step up and say, I'm going to be a one term. Er, because what we need to do is the stuff that is the hard stuff, we're going to have to have to raise taxes and we're going to have to cut spending. You can't avoid the deficit problem that we have. You can't grow out of it. We tried that for the last 15 years, and all we did was make the debt worse. We avoided a financial crisis, but we just might have prolonged it instead of completely avoid it. Zoe Cruz  26:56I would say that we're focusing on the wrong the politics, the Democrats, Republicans. I think the Democrats pretend they care. The Republicans say they're going to do the right thing for the economy, but neither one, neither of the major parties, really focus on the one thing, the economy is no longer working for large swaths of the population. And if you read history, they pick up the pitch forks at some point. That's what's happening to me. Donald is the pitch fork saying he's a disrupter. We're going to throw a bomb. Tabula rasa. Let's start all over again. So the again, the amount of ink that's being spilled on Obama versus Donald versus at the end of the day, the reason Donald won is he had a great story line. I care. I listen to you. We've globalization eviscerated your town, your middle class America, your poor. I'm listening to you. That resonated now. What's going to happen if two years from now, he's not listening? Is what I worry society is fraying, not because Republicans did the wrong thing, or Democrats did the wrong thing. We're not focusing on fundamentally, when you have I think I read a statistic that's, again, I believe in capitalism, but we're not practicing it any longer. When you have three guys, bez, I think Zuckerberg and Elon, the three are worth more than the bottom 50% of us of a think of that statistic that's crazy. Yeah. So I think, you know, I talked to a couple of you, I think the caucuses we should have is, What is the purpose of leadership, but to actually get to our children, leave our children. I have three amazing children. I'm ashamed of the future I'm leaving them. My generation is the most self est generation of them all my dad fought in World War Two. They were starving, and here we are, my generation. I need, I want, I have to have. So I think that's what has to change, not Obama versus whatever. Barbara Doran  29:24Well, all very interesting. But I think your question was, was, really, how does it affect your investing, and how to think about it? So in a more granular, granular level, it does affect, I mean, you had leading up the election, you had the Kamala plays in the stock market. You had the Trump plays, you know, and after Trump won, then you had, you know, all his the areas, whether it was financials, materials, everything running. And so you do have to be cognizant. And of course, now, as I mentioned earlier, there's all this policy uncertainty, which certainly is, you know, impactful, because the Fed is on hold, and probably may hold a little longer to there more clarity, because they are. Worried, you know, if you deport too many people, you know could hurt labor, inflationary and tariffs and so we don't know yet. So there is uncertainty that you have to build in. Now, interestingly, there just was out yesterday, the second Consumer Confidence Report from the Conference Board, and last week with senior University of Michigan, a big drops in consumer confidence in terms of inflation expectations. But interestingly, there was quite a disparity, as we've seen in other surveys, between the Republicans and the Democrats. Democrats were much more pessimistic about it all, and Republicans, even though that number went up, they were not so very interesting. How either they're hearing separate facts or they're interpreting or focusing on different things. So this politicization that Zoe is talking about, you know, is real and is is harmful, you know, in terms of making informed decisions. Mark Sanor  30:47Question Tony, hold on one second, Speaker 7  30:55Zoe, I want to go back to something you said. I think you touched on concentration, concentration of wealth. Most people are focused on chasing the return based on what's happening in the market, and a lot of that has to do with technology. How do you, how do you properly address that concentration? Speaker 3  31:14You know, I hope this time around, it will be different. When you look at the history, when you look at, you know, this time, it's different. When you look at the history of capitalism again, the best system, on a relative basis, you have huge growth plateau, collapse, start all over again. That's how it so you look at, you know, the 1920s I'm rereading the great crash in 1929 you look at the parallels of what we constant, robber barons, concentration of wealth, gold, Gilded Age. I mean, so you look at the pattern. And my hope again is that we don't have this collapse, if people say, if you put your money in equities, you'll make money, yes, over the long decades, if you put your money in equities, right before the crash in 1929 it took you 40 years to make your money back. Let's pick or 30. So to me, I would say, right now, there's not enough, really, risk management these. How do you change the concentration of wealth? I hope it's not by, you know, I hope that those guys that there are worth trillions, don't figure out how they go to Miami to save taxes. They figure out how you actually use technology, you know. And again, Elon, to be fair, even though I think he's a deeply flawed human being, but I have enormous respect for his IQ, he started talking about again, years ago, when you listen to what he was saying, is, and that's why, by the way, they had this, you should have open AI, why he supported it. He said we should have the minimum income. I don't know if that's the right answer. But he thought about if 65% of the US economy is consumption, which means people have a job, they make money, and then they consume. That's America. So when you have all of them now say productivity, you are going to need to fire millions of people. We don't need them, and this time, it's not the machinists. It's actually the lawyers, the accountants. How does so? Again, we're not thinking about the paradigm shift. I am hugely positive about what will happen if we survive at the other the land of plenty, but I hope the transition, which was World War One, World War Two, is what transitions were this time. Hopefully it's different. Stephen Burke  34:13I would just add mark. I think the thing that's going to help the inequality is, can we use technology to make the access to education better than it is right now for the low end, because 49% of the spending in the US is done by the top 10% of earners, so they the others don't have a shot. They just don't have a shot right now. And the way our educational system works in many states, it's driven by tax revenues, particularly real estate revenues, and that is the definition of inequality. So I think we have to fix the educational access to allow them to have a shot to compete, because we're not giving them the shot to they're not starting on an even playing field to begin with. Mark Sanor  34:59So. What we haven't talked about is the global, the geopolitical Democrats and Republicans. But we're in a world, a shifting world. You talked about the dollar and in our debt loads. But how do you see, I guess, what scares and excites you on the geopolitical fronts? I I'll Stephen Burke  35:20start just the same thing inequality. You have a couple countries that are dominating all the discussions and all the influence right now, and it's the US and China, primarily, that are sucking the wind out of the air, out of the room, and they're not leaving much for the rest. And as we're carving up the world, we're creating a real problem with that. I think you have inequality on three levels. I think you have it on a country level, you have it on a corporate level, and you have it on the individual level, and we have to deal with all three of them to for this, to get it right. Zoe Cruz  35:59What I'm excited about is that it's possible to have the Chinese leadership and the US leadership meet to say, if actually humanity is what we're trying to save, maybe we work together, as opposed to because the nuclear arms race is now the technology race that the Chinese and the Americans are actually fighting so they don't lose on a technological revolution that they recognize they can lose control of. So my hope is those two guys meet and then we get to the land of plenty fast. Do Mark Sanor  36:35we have like this new, enlightened, mutual, assured technological destruction? Yeah, and that we should be enlightened, Zoe Cruz  36:43yeah? Because, I mean, I'm sure there are, there are people that are telling both Donald and she that there is a scenario we all die. I mean, there is, we all know that. And so right now, externally, at least what we are hearing and reading is what they want us to hear and read. Those two are the super powers, the unilateral whatever you call it, the world where America was the only one. Yeah, so those two guys, I think there must be at least initiating discussions Russia and all that. It's a human, horrible toll. The two leaders that need to get together, the two that count, that can change the trajectory of the world, is the Chinese and the Americans. Speaker 2  37:41Okay? And I worry long term about shifting alliances. You know, the US, it may not be seen as a reliable partner. And certainly Europe, basic leaders in the last week or so have said we've got to go it alone. And that will shift alliances all over the world. You've got Canada, Mexico, and we'll see where that shakes out. And, you know, I think longer term, it could weaken us and our ability, you know, to withstand all sorts of global pressures, the fact that we've done so well the last few years, economically, all these things, again, this is longer term. This will take time to shift, but that's what I'm concerned about. What's being set in motion now. So what? What that may lead to, and it may not be good for us. Joe Mancini  38:24I'll tell you a thing that I probably shouldn't say, that I actually wish had been a little less certain for a period of time, which is, I don't know if folks noticed the news story about a week ago that there was a 3% chance in 2032 that a meteor was gonna strike the Earth, right? And then we got a better look at the media, and we're like, Ah, it's one and a half percent. And then we started look back in history, and we're like, Oh, something hit, you know, the northern part of Russia in 1908, it wasn't that big of a deal. And now we're saying, yeah, it's probably not gonna hit. No big deal. I wish that that had stuck at three to 5% for a little while longer, right? And just tried to bring the world a little bit together around, okay, this is madness, but we have an existential threat. We can see it through a big, giant telescope. Let's get the best minds together to try to figure out what to do. Unfortunately, now it's like point 1% and we'll probably be fine. Mark Sanor  39:17All right with that. Thank you to our kick off panel. Zoe Can I ask you to stick around? Can you stick around? We're going to talk about AI and two of my panelists are not here, and I thought you might keep sharing some. There you go. It's a half an hour panel. All right. So if Thank you. Thank you so Ben and Maisie Jack is on on an airplane. Watch her. Please come up. We're going to talk about AI, and if you, if you, and maybe. Be Ben, you'll go first, introduce yourself again. Sheri, come join our 361 firm community of investors and thought leaders. We have a lot of events created by the community as we collaborate on investments and philanthropic interests. Join us. Ben. You can subscribe to various 361 events and content at https://361firm.com/subs. For reference: Web: www.361firm.com/homeOnboard as Investor: https://361.pub/shortdiagOnboard Deals 361: www.361firm.com/onbOnboard as Banker: www.361firm.com/bankersEvents: www.361firm.com/eventsContent: www.youtube.com/361firmWeekly Digests: www.361firm.com/digest

"We're back! Truth be told Stephen had covid and I had pneumonia."Well hello once again to our Ghouls and Goblins. We've been out sick for a couple of weeks (but nothing is more terrifying than that sickly death feeling, so to us it feels like we never really left) but we're back just in time for Halloween to get into the spooky spirit!To celebrate Christi has chosen highlight some local New Orleans hauntings she discovered scouring Reddit, a few of which Christi and Stephen have visited in the flesh and can confirm are 100% confirmed spooky and haunted. Because after all, what's more scary than a haunting in your own backyard? Well for starters some of these Reddit usernames which are equal parts inventive and unhinged.Quotes“I feel like I got sick because Christi was like 'I don't feel good.' Then because we talk so much I was like, 'I got to go get covid because I have to one up you!' And they you were like,' Just kidding I have pneumonia!' Oh, you still win.'” (00:36-00:48 | Stephen)“You just told me you love Temu and now you hate Temu, make up your mind. No I hate Temu because they lie to you and make you feel not special.” (11:35-11:42 | Chrisit & Stephen)“I don't want to be spooked like for realsies." (28:33-28:37 | Stephen)“These Reddit names are actually unhinged. Oh yeah, absolutely. I'm dying! Not Croatian Sensation!” (35:33-35:42 | Christi & Stephen) LinksSend us your ghost or weird stories here: beyondthenormpod@gmail.comSubscribe to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/BeyondtheNormPodcastFollow Christi on IG: www.instagram.com/christilukasiakFollow Stephen on IG: www.instagram.com/s_c_mayo Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Overview With inspiration from her own life, Kalee Boisvert has developed an easy-to-use system for women, young and old, to take control of their finances. Make Money Your Thing is an approachable guide to take women on a journey from avoidance and overwhelm to feeling comfortable and in control of their finances. This book provides simple action steps to learn the basics of money management, understand the importance of balancing the books, and embrace the uniqueness of your own personal situation. The end result is women feeling good about where their finances are right now, and building a solid foundation for where you want to go in the future. When money is your “thing” you can feel completely at ease about making it work for you– Book YouTube https://youtu.be/vWXdJt5G6PM Transcript Stephen: So today on Discover Wordsmiths, I want to welcome Kaylee. Kaylee, how are you doing Kalee: today? I'm doing well. Thank you so much for having me. Stephen: Yeah, this is great. And we, right before we started, I mentioned I don't get a lot of nonfiction, so I'm excited about this. Yay. All right. So before we get started talking about your book tell us a little bit about you, where you're from, and some of the things you like to do besides writing. Kalee: I am from Calgary, Alberta, Canada. And a little bit about me. What else? Sorry. Stephen: jUst some of the things you like to do besides writing. Okay. Kalee: Other than writing, I love reading. I am a big bookworm. So I think. By nature, it was destined to write a book, but I love reading and I've discovered how easy it is to read off my phone. Now I have a one year old and so I can't really have books out because he has a tendency of ripping pages. So he's at that. That very destructive stage. So I read on my phone, but I find it so easy that I can read on the go all the time. So I'm reading way more books and book talk has actually gotten me a lot more interested in some of the books that are on there and are popular. So for a book talk and all that, but I do love reading. I love like my guilty pleasures, like real housewives watching the real housewives of everywhere, those shows. And then I'm also always really busy with my kids. I'm a single mom. I have a nine year old and a one year old. Like hobbies include going to the park and things like that. Stephen: Nice. Okay. And so with all that going on young kids and busy why did you want to write a book? Kalee: Silly me. Yeah. I think it's because of how much I love books in general. So I'd always wanted to write a book. I've read books like, and just like love, like I see authors and people who write books is just, to me, they're like celebrities. I think it's so amazing because it's a long, challenging endeavor to write a book. Stephen: You probably realized that way more when you actually wrote one. Kalee: Exactly. Exactly. And I. kept receiving the message like I started writing stories when I was young when your teacher would ask you to write a, couple page story and mine would go on for 20, 30 pages and that was like grade four. And because I was like, how do you develop A story in two pages. So for me, it was like this very elaborate the character development and everything But the teachers you could tell didn't even read it and i'm assuming it's because they had a lot of grading to do and I It went beyond the assigned work. So in their defense, I'm sure that was what was behind it. But in my mind, I was seeing it as, Oh, maybe I'm not a good writer. That's the messaging I took to believe. So then I decided maybe I wasn't meant to write. But it was like a few years back. I was just sitting in my office and I said out loud. I really want to write something because it just had all come back and it just, I don't know. It was just like, I was pondering this has always been a goal of mine. And a colleague happened to be walking by and he's Oh,

Get ready to unlock the secrets of Amazon-selling success as we welcome back, Stephen Diaz of the Rainmaker Family. Together with his wife, they have woven a thriving community of dedicated e-commerce sellers. Today's deep-dive episode is crammed with innovative strategies, specially designed for those venturing into Amazon's realm for the first time. Prepare to learn how to rake in thousands of dollars per month by creating videos for other people's products, and finding good products to promote with the help of tools such as the Helium 10 Chrome extension Demand Analyzer. We also walk you through the Amazon influencer program and how you can be a part of it without having to be the 'face' of video content. Buckle up as we guide you through the entire process of recording, uploading, and creating eye-catching thumbnails for your videos. Be ready to learn how to craft compelling titles and get a handful of tips to produce successful video reviews. We also brainstorm creative ideas for video reviews that go beyond the confines of your home. Stephen sheds light on his experiences and the advantages of participating in high-ticket mastermind events, highlighting how investing in yourself can dramatically influence your success in the e-commerce world. In our journey through this episode, Stephen imparts priceless insights into the keys to entrepreneurial success. We touch on the importance of focus, mindset, and budgeting in e-commerce. In the end, we delve into the strategies that work best for family-oriented businesses on Amazon, like how to utilize Amazon Associates and affiliate links to connect to other products in your shop. Whether you're a novice or a seasoned seller, this episode promises you strategies and insights to skyrocket your business to new heights. Tune in, and get ready to get some creative ideas on how you can build capital for Amazon FBA selling. In episode 495 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Stephen discuss: 01:57 - The Maldives Honeymoon Strategy Helped The Rainmaker Community 03:51 - How To Build Capital For An Amazon FBA Business 07:14 - Making 6-Figures As An Amazon Affiliate 08:43 - Difference Between Amazon Associates And Affiliates 11:17  - Different Kinds Of Videos You Can Make 17:15 - Why Joining Masterminds Are Important 21:18 - Inspiring Stories From Stephen's Community 31:18 - What Does It Take To Succeed In This Business? 36:49 - How To Get More Information Of Stephen's Community 40:20 - Stephen's 60-Second Tip ► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/video Transcript Bradley Sutton: Today we've got somebody back on the show who's got one of the most successful communities out there in the Amazon world and he's going to talk about what's been working for them, including how some can make thousands of dollars a month on doing videos for other people's products. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Are you browsing a Shopify Walmart, Etsy, alibaba or Pintu? Are you browsing a Shopify Walmart, Etsy, Alibaba or Pinterest page and maybe you see a cool product that you want to get some more data on? Well, while you're on those pages, you can actually use the Helium 10 Chrome extension Demand Analyzer to get instant data about what's happening on Amazon for those keywords on these other websites. Or maybe you want to then follow up and get an actual supplier quote from a company on Alibaba.com in order to see if you can get this product produced. You can do that also with the Helium 10 Demand Analyzer. Both of these are part of the Helium 10 Chrome extension, which you can download for free at h10.me forward slash extension.   Bradley Sutton: Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That's a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world, and we're bringing back somebody who, along with his wife, has helped more serious sellers than almost anybody else out there. Stephen, how's it going, man? Welcome back.   Stephen: What's up, Bradley man? Anytime I get to hang out with you is awesome. I know Chelsea's usually sitting right by my side, but today she's 100% mom. So she's being 100% mom, today I'm being 100% podcaster Love it. And that's how we do it.   Bradley Sutton: And in your honor, you know, I'm actually wearing the shirt that you guys gave me the Maldives shirt. I believe this came from Merch by Amazon, like what? Two, three years ago. I think, you guys, it might have been either during the pandemic or before the pandemic. That's how long.   Stephen: I've had this shirt. Well, the Maldives strategy impacted our community so much that I was like we got to give back and I didn't know Bradley's T-shirt size, so I think I sent you like six Amazon merch shirts.   Bradley Sutton: It was great. I gave one to each of my family who were all those sizes, and then I took the biggest one for myself.   Stephen: Perfect man, that's good. Well, that's that that technique is still making ripples, man Like it's. It's very cool. And title density, all that stuff we love it in Rainmaker. So yeah, I'm excited.   Bradley Sutton: Speaking of which, it is now two 10pm on Wednesday, in 28 hours I'm hopping on the plane to go to Maldives. To record episode 500. So the latest iteration of it.   Stephen: There we go. Dang man, I need to get out to the Maldives now. Like I was every time they're out there. Yeah, they got a great kids club, you know so so you know, do you go to the same place every time?   Bradley Sutton: I either go to the Waldorf Astoria or the Conrad. They're both Hillson properties, so I can use my points for it for either one, but I don't know if you're a Hilton or a Marriott person, but they got good Marriott properties out there too, okay, Anyways, let's get into some strategy. Let's just start. You know like we usually say this at the end, but we'll, we'll go and do some strategies at the end, but every time you've been on the show you've always, you know, come with some like kind of unique, uh, unique stuff. So like back in. By the way, guys, if you want to get their full backstory uh, I wrote down here or I didn't write down, I don't do much of work here. Mel, my assistant, is one who does the work here. He put in a episode of 198 guys. So episode all the way back in 198, we're about to film 500. That just shows you where, how far we've come. But 198 was their first time you can get their their backstory there. And then they came back in episode 318. So way back in episode 198, they were talking about uh doing sales on Facebook, uh market places, and then they gave some updates on that in episode uh 318 and talking about Facebook groups. And so I think the latest thing that you guys have been doing you know, especially for those who at the beginning might not be able to have enough money to to, to, to start private label, to invest, uh talk about what is one of the ways that people can can build some capital or what, what, what your community has been doing, yeah, I mean we see all different levels, you know, and and, and we really do specialize, you know, in the Rainmaker family, helping moms, and so a lot of moms like they are just like, uh, honestly, they've tried a lot of other stuff, you know, and so they're hesitant to go go big on Amazon at the first.   Stephen: So so helping them create the money to do the thing is definitely something that's in our specialty. So I would say, lately, there's a handful of strategies. Right now we definitely have a subset of our community doing the influencer strategy on Amazon. Um, and when you hear that word, I think people think, like you know, I don't know, taking pictures of your coffee at the coffee shop and like having your face all over social media, um, but the Amazon influencer program, anyone can do and you can actually do it without putting your face in the videos, which is kind of nice. And so, honestly, like, uh, this opportunity was brought to me by a guy, john, he was doing it and he kind of came to our community. I was like, hey, I'll do this for you guys. Like he was just looking for more products to review. But if any of your listeners are unfamiliar with it, basically how it works is when you go to the Amazon listing right, you see the photos. There's always like these, like videos related to the item or sometimes there. If you have a video, it'll be like the second video that plays after your video, and those are like these Amazon influencer videos and if someone watches that video and then buys the product, that influencer will get a commission on the sale, which is really crazy. So, um, you know, you've probably heard of the Amazon associate program or affiliate program where I signed up for that.   Bradley Sutton: Just, I was trying to let you just check if I can get some, um, you know, see some different data points. I was curious if, like Amazon, affiliates have different data points. So I signed up and I was just like I already shoot me or my family is going to get some of them. I might as well just make a link and and get some. You know, get some stuff. But yeah, I signed up for that one, but not the influencer. So what's the difference between the two?   Stephen: So, yeah, you have to sign up as a Amazon associate or affiliate first, and then you can apply for the influencer program. So it is an application only, uh, to get into it. But, um, uh, it's fairly easy to get in. You just need to have an audience somewhere of some sort, and then you can use TikTok, instagram, facebook. I mean, we have people even just use a Facebook page and they'll they'll run ads to the page for a little bit to just gain some audience. Uh and then they'll apply right. And so the the Amazon influencer program. Once you're in, they basically allow you to like, upload videos of of products you're reviewing, but the catch is you don't have to have bought the product on Amazon, so, like it doesn't have to be your past purchases, it can be literally any product that's on Amazon.   Bradley Sutton: So if they get approved for this, like, are they seeing something different on product pages or something that's like an extra button of of how they can upload or how they different?   Stephen: just like seller central is its own thing, the influencer or the associate program has his own dashboard you can log into. Kind of KDP, like Amazon, keeps all these things separate, you think they just link them all. Yeah, um, it's like you log into your associates dashboard. You kind of click over to the influencer page and influencers. You may see people do this on Instagram where they actually have like a storefront where it's like my favorite Amazon things and it'll be like my house hacks my favorite clothes and those are like that's one way to do it. But this kind of video side of the Amazon influencer program is really the lucrative one. And the guy I heard it from, john, he was doing six figures with this. Like that was his full time business. He did have a YouTube channel. He was reviewing tech gear and things like that, but he would just like get reached out from brands at this point. He's kind of got a name for himself and I think he was doing like over 200,000 and just Amazon money.   Bradley Sutton: Is it all on commission? Or also he'll get like a flat fee from some of the store owners to create videos.   Stephen: Sometimes they are getting like a, like a bounty, like that, but a lot of it is just commission. Yeah, he's getting commissions through affiliates so he's doing super high volume. That's like I don't know a ton of people doing those types of numbers. Yeah, but that got us interested. You know, chelsea signed up for it and she was around the house shooting stuff. So basically, what you do is just go around your house and you just review every item in your house and like it doesn't have like again, you didn't have to buy it on Amazon, it just has to be on Amazon. Yeah, so you just be like you know, uh, hey, this, I have a Apple mouse on my desk. You're like, let me tell you about this Apple mouse and you just do a review of it. But the types of reviews that work really well are just authentic reviews. If you're super polished and like, let me tell you, it looks like too professional, people don't trust it, right. So you want to just like do it like a casual, like honestly, a lot of our reviews are cell phone, they're vertical and we're shooting away from us and just like pointing and like it's like voiceover, just like like you would like your unboxing something. Yeah, show your friend and so, yeah, you just go around your house and like review everything right and you have to submit the videos. They do have to get approved by Amazon, but once they're approved, they live on that page. You know of the Amazon listing and a percentage of people will click on them, watch them and you'll get commissions and sometimes they actually go up in the carousel too.   Bradley Sutton: I think you know Norm Ferrari was showing you this.   Stephen: Videos will go up in the carousel.   Bradley Sutton: Yeah, yeah.   Stephen: Huh, it's crazy. So and then if?   Bradley Sutton: they click it in the carousel and buy it, they still get credit then. Yep, of course.   Stephen: Yeah, you get a commission. Yeah, yeah, all right, I'm a how I do that.   Bradley Sutton: I'm going to have to look into that. I always like it's fun, man, it's fun.   Stephen: It's fun thinking about like, okay, what's the most expensive thing in my house, because again, you're making such a small percentage, right? Yeah, you either want super high volume or you want expensive and helium 10 super helpful because you can go. Okay, how much volume is this product doing? Right, so if you have, like I remember we were reviewing stash your bags. They're like those ziploc bag alternatives, like they're like made of silicone oh, reusable ziploc bags basically. But there's like a thousand stash your bag listings, right, because it's like a wholesale product that'll up your wholesale. So I use helium 10 to figure out which one has the most sales because, like you can't tell which blue stash your bag I bought it could be on any of these listings, right? Yeah, I use helium 10 to figure out which listing has the highest volume, right, but also has the least amount of influencers hopping on there and making videos. So that increases the chances and that that one video would make it's like 10 to $15 a day. You know it's not like crazy, but imagine you have a hundred videos, a thousand videos, you know, that are that are doing those types of numbers Like it's. It's incredible.   Bradley Sutton: So, yeah, and so you record it with your phone and then what you? You upload it with the or you send it to your computer and then you upload it in that.   Stephen: Yeah you can upload it. Yeah, I always send to my computer, upload it. You can do a thumbnail. So if you're, you know you know anything about internet, you know you gotta have a catchy thumbnail sometimes. But I was super lazy about it because Chelsea would reshoot them and I would upload them. So I'd do the catchy title and the thumbnail. Oh, that was my specialty. So the key thing with the titles, you don't really want to tell people if you like the product or not. You want to be like five things. I wish I knew before I bought this. Right, there's like no idea.   Bradley Sutton: You have no idea if, like, do you have any that that you could like tell me you'll look at right now, and then I could like show people how it looks, or just an example of one.   Stephen: I'll shout out a friend's brand, kingsloo. Yeah, he sells a slim fit wallet and we did a video on that one and yeah, it's just a super simple video.   Bradley Sutton: $109 for a wallet.   Stephen: Good grief, I know Gucci. Yeah, he sells mostly off Amazon. He's more of a DTC but we've helped him get on Amazon and oh five videos here. I bet a bunch of our Rainmakers have done it now, and then I think you click on that like five videos underneath there and you should see like Heather's on there and Chelsea's on there. Yeah, there you go.   Bradley Sutton: Wait, well, that's, that's their video. Yeah.   Stephen: So click on, here we go, honest, awesome.   Bradley Sutton: So so when you said the, the, the thumbnail like this is the thumbnail that they chose. They just chose a random part of it. Oh, I did that. So like oh, you did this.   Stephen: Honestly like I was super lazy. So I would just screenshot and make an arrow, like I put an arrow and like it kind of like makes you think I'm talking about some specific thing, but it's just a catchy way to kind of. And then you just make it vertical, just like this. Wait, here's I didn't know it wasn't.   Bradley Sutton: Oh yeah, hear your voice in this thing. There, there we go. Okay, wow, I think. Yeah, this is one of those. I was one of the good ones.   Stephen: Heather did this one.   Bradley Sutton: She's in our community.   Stephen: She's really helped us pioneer this kind of influencer thing. She created a mini course on it. Yeah, super casual, right, like it's not like really polished. Of course, if you're doing like a DSLR camera or like the new iPhone, people want like the Marcus Brown. You know they want the Polish video, right, but we're just all the stuff around your house you can just pick, hey, you know, you can just go and get a bunch of stuff, all the stuff around your house, you can just pick. Hey, this is my honest opinion on this thing.   Bradley Sutton: And you just don't know what account could be multiple people Like. Could I have my kids do videos on my account and stuff too?   Stephen: Yeah, I'm just not like the kids, so like if you're going to have a kid, you got to have you in it as well.   Bradley Sutton: like a minor or they have to be 18. My kids are over 18.   Stephen: So yeah okay, then they could do it. Yeah, I mean one of the best side hustles, I feel like for a college kid like so so easy to do. You just need a cell phone, you just need time Maybe. I mean, we would batch like four or five videos a day and Chelsea would do some, I would do some, and we named our account like like family. So it was kind of like both of us, um and man, you can stack. I mean we, we did. Well, our goal was like to do 30, 30 videos. You know, just to get it started, I would say if someone's listening to this, they want to do this. I would commit to doing like 30 or a hundred videos to really see the effect of it. And then you can chill out and kind of just let that passive income come in and then just grow it as you want. And uh, I mentioned this before the call. But eventually you will run out of stuff to review right In your house and that's a good problem to have. Yeah, then you can start going to friends houses. You can start. You know, I mean you could even book an Airbnb and review everything in that house. I mean I've even this is really funny, but like I even reviewed something at a park one time, like that's someone else had like a stroller Cause like strollers are expensive and so like I just took a video of a stroller from far away. If someone else is trying, I wasn't showing their kids or anything like that, but I was like zooming in on my phone and I did a voiceover over it later, just talking through some of the benefits and things I was just reading on the listing, you know. So again it can get really creative with it. Um, of course we're not trying to manipulate sales or anything like that. Uh, like not trying to say something, that's not true. But I always go to the listing and I look at the reviews. Use helium 10 and you can analyze all the reviews and figure out what are the big questions people have. What are making what's, what are they loving about the product, what are they wanting to buy or what is what's drawing them to buying this product, that type of thing, and you can hit some of those things. Um, you can even throw all that into chat GPT and be like hey, write me a 30 second video review script and just literally read it.   Bradley Sutton: I'm going to. I'm going to try this, but but not not to throw water on the fire here. But this is something that later on, I predict Amazon is going to change, because, just knowing the way Amazon operates because, yeah, somebody's going to do a lawsuit or something, because theoretically, nobody's going to do a video, that's going to talk bad about it because that.   Stephen: You know, like the whole purpose.   Bradley Sutton: You know, if you're an Amazon influence, you're trying to make money. You know, unless Amazon puts something in there where if you do a negative video but that's still real that somehow you still get some kickbacks, somebody's, somebody somewhere is going to do some kind of lawsuit just because this is such a country.   Stephen: I do in a million videos or something like that.   Bradley Sutton: Yeah, but either way, guys, that's why you got to get on this now. Yeah, what they are doing, which is nice, now you can include two products in the video.   Stephen: I wouldn't recommend it when your first game started, but you can do comparison videos, which I do like where you're like. Hey, are you thinking about buying this?   Bradley Sutton: or this.   Stephen: That's good. Let me tell you about the pros and cons.   Bradley Sutton: And in the video. Does the video show up on both listing? It shows up on both, yeah.   Stephen: You can tag two products in the video. But if you do it right at the beginning, amazon typically won't approve it and they are getting stricter on who gets approved into the program and you have to submit three videos when you first start and they approve or deny those and so if they deny them you can try again, like I think it's three times. If you deny it three times, then it's kind of like you got to try open up a new account or something.   Bradley Sutton: Basically, yeah, Now, are you also? Is this the only thing you're doing under your influencers account? Or are you also maintaining, like a YouTube or Instagram where you're sending deals to? We actually are doing that.   Stephen: You know, like we've had an Amazon Associated Account for I mean since probably 20, probably before I was even an Amazon seller. So we, you know I'm always recommending stuff, even when we are back when we were wedding photographers. People are always like what camera are you using? So we have an Associated Account. And then Chelsea has, she uses the influencer page for her Instagram. So she has like her favorite things on there. You know, here's the kids toys we love, and you know that type of thing. So you definitely like Amazon wants you to be legit, like they don't want you just like do it just for the influence of videos. So and that's a better long-term strategy to is like, have a YouTube channel, have a Instagram, make a tick tock that's like you know Favorite mom finds or something like that and just like, post your videos cross, post them when you're I mean you already recorded, I'm right, yeah, post them on Facebook, post them on tick tock as well, and that's gonna not only drive more traffic to Amazon but it's gonna make you look more legit, you know. So, yeah, you could really make this a business model again. Amazon could change things. Sure, it is a new wear program, but you could definitely ride this thing for the next year or two, I bet, and it makes some good cash from it.   Bradley Sutton: Nice, all right, let's switch gears a little bit, come something completely different. Um sure, I noticed that sometimes you go to like these, you know, like masterminds for, like entrepreneurs, and, and you know you met like Saddam and and come off from a yeah, that's right, he went up there and stuff yeah and and I, I I haven't been to one, but but a lot of these you know, if I'm not mistaken, you know Some of them cost thousands, some of them tens of thousands of dollars to go to. And then so somebody you know, like me, on the outside Looking in might be like, you know, like hey, we all know about, hey, invest in yourself and this and that, but what is it about events that that has people coming out of these things and say you know what? It was worth $1000, like, like. Are you really getting that kind of value out of like these, these, these mastermind kind of events that you go to?   Stephen: Yeah, I mean, I'll use that example. You know, amz, one step. I met those guys through mastermind and I mean for us, like I would say, you want to get in a mastermind of people? Like there's different masterminds for different reasons, right? So oftentimes that mastermind was going to was probably less for the Amazon business and more for the coaching business, right? Yeah, so we teach people how to do Amazon and so meeting people at those masterminds, like those guys, that was awesome, because I was like, hey, we got a big launch coming up like what do you want to throw in, you know? And so they threw in like an awesome bonus for our people that, like people can only get through our work, like for being in Our world, and if that helps.   Bradley Sutton: I use them, by the way, too, for a lot of my photography, and oh man.   Stephen: Yeah, so like if that helps a handful more people come in our program, like that, that so the networking itself.   Bradley Sutton: Like like that you know they weren't the organizers of the event. But the people you meet can give you invaluable thing.   Stephen: Okay, yeah yeah, like we met another guy who does like LLC creation and all like the legal entity stuff which, like our people need all the time, you know. So not one relationship basically paid for the match.   Bradley Sutton: And that's a good point, because now it's like you know, it's not like you couldn't Google to find companies that do this kind of stuff, but but you know, you don't know if how legit they are, but you know somebody who is Gonna invest in themselves and pay a huge money to actually be at that place. It's almost like pre vetting them. Yeah, yeah, a little bit in itself.   Stephen: I'm gonna do a lot of conferences, right, and like conferences you get a lot of gold out of, but it's like usually a lot of time frame, right, like are there three, four days, and then there might be like one or two. Like man, that nugget Added six figures, added a million dollars on the business, like that. One thing I found in these higher ticket masterminds like we're in, we're in a 50k mastermind or 60k mastermind, like it's just like it's so much more compressed because of who's in the room and like who's paying to be in the room, that like you're in the lunch line, you know, like to get your like potato salad and someone drops an idea on you. That's like, oh my god, that's like that was a million dollar idea, you know. So, and I think it's the connections of like everyone who's paying there like to be in the room. They have a lot of awesome connections to you know. So that network effect. I think like, yeah, like sometimes masterminds are more teaching and training and like you know, but, but the best ones I've been in are more relational and it's just like how can we build partnerships? How can we leverage each other's resources? How can we work together? How to serve our people at a higher level. So that's where I found the value. And just there's something about getting in person with people. You know you do it all the time, you know. It's just like it's different than zoom, right yeah.   Bradley Sutton: Yeah for sure, all right guys. So that's something you know. Regardless of what field you're in, you know there's always different masterminds that that can help you, you know, grow as a person, as a you know there's inspirational stuff and or or as a business, if you're entrepreneur, I mean even a helium tent as a mastermind. So so you know the helium 10 elite program. You know people can meet. You know can meet other high-level sellers. So if you think that some of you guys want to look into, look at h10.me forward slash elite. But on the other hand, I think there's a couple masterminds like non-amazon masterminds I was thinking of mainly for me might want to. You know, look into, maybe I can see if helium 10 can help me out with the With the bill because some of these are pretty expensive, but that's interesting. Always bet on yourself, always improve yourself and sometimes it takes takes money to do that. Going back to the your community now, any cool stories. You know, every year there's always cool stories coming out your community. I remember the one Person who I was doing some demo a couple years ago about it's right football product or something, and then I was just like making a joke, like man, if I this would probably be totally something that I would, I would sell and then she ended up selling it made you know thousands of dollars on it. But any other cool like rags to riches stories or just just something inspiring that you could share with audience man it's.   Stephen: I love our community because we've really like Encourages, community of celebration. I think like it's really easy and like even the Amazon space or really any entrepreneur space, to get in a Competitive mode where it's like, oh, other people winning means like I'm not right and kind of like you think about yourself and you. You either try to like one up somebody you know or you try to like kind of Downgrade their success or like I don't know makes it. People can like oftentimes in the early days of their entrepreneurship journey, go to kind of like almost like I'm not enough, thinking Like I was, like oh, like dang, like it's like you can get in just lack mindset. So we've really tried to overcome that because really when we're helping people in our program, we're helping bring them out of poverty mindset right Into abundant thinking, and not just financially but in all the areas. So when they do have the money, when they are making the money, they don't just let those old mindsets hold them back still, you know. And so we found the way you celebrate other people really shows a lot about that mindset you developed. And so we just like kind of our community is just a thing, like when someone is winning big or small, they post it in the group and like everyone just goes crazy over it. You know, and it's just a really cool like contagious momentum and we had one the other day that I just I loved because she said, like she was posting, I think she had done like her first like $3,000 day on Amazon. She had, you know, was doing about $10,000 weeks at that point in her business. But she said, like you know, when she started the program she was in product research for like so long. You know, like you kind of get stuck in that analysis, paralysis, and she was just getting discouraged and she said she'd always come to the group and just look at the wins every night and she would just like when she was feeling discouraged she'd go look at everyone else's wins and she just be like this is gonna be me, this is gonna be me, this is gonna be me. So it's so cool to see her, like it was probably a year after she started posting the screenshot and being like now I get to be the person you know that like encourages you and like if you're in the dumps, right now and you're feeling discouraged, like here.   Bradley Sutton: It is, you know, and like, which I think is the reason why, yeah, you should be part of a community. You know, sometimes like if that person was trying on their own, I would say odds are they might have just given up because they weren't getting that inspiration. You know from other people. You know nine out of 10 times that person who's stuck in the analysis paralysis they just go ahead and give up. You know perhaps, but being part of a community you could see, you know other people succeed and it inspires you to move on. So I think that's important.   Stephen: Yeah, it's incredible man and I. That's what gets me fired up. I mean, yes, it's cool when we have a student make $40,000 in a day on it. Like we've had these crazy like people like crush huge numbers. Again, it's not the normal, sure. But what gets me more excited is the people that, like you know, we got flowers in the mail from someone who said, like I was depressed, I was suicidal, like I was, I had no hope in life, and then I found this, you know, and this community, plus the training, plus the mindset, like it gave me hope again. Like that, yeah, that's like beyond the money. So we kind of sometimes joke, we're kind of like you know, amazon's kind of the front, you know it's like, yes, we're teaching Amazon, but like entrepreneurship in general, I think is one of the biggest transformational, like vehicles that you can ever like go on. It's like it's like a roller coaster ride that like changes your life right, yeah, and I love it for that. That it's like who it makes you in the process. It's so powerful. So we love celebrating those. We call those the bubble over benefits. Like it's cool when people hit the numbers and make the money, but the bubble over benefits of like I retired my husband or you know, I was able to quit this job. That was soul sucking. Or I got hope again Like that is so crazy, so Right.   Bradley Sutton: Now you know we can talk Amazon strategy all day long and stuff. But you know somebody like you who's dealt with so many sellers. You know and you help people, not just on the Amazon strategy but like you know mindset and you already handle a lot of that with a community and helping people. When we talked about the benefits of community, but what? are some other things that you see is is like the difference between those who succeed, and again, success doesn't mean a certain revenue figure. You know success is very subjective, but from those who succeed to those who you know end up, you know failing and giving up, because all the people in your community. They're given the same resources. You know they all have helium 10, you know they all, they all have you guys, they all have the same. You know training and stuff, but you know not. The fact of the matter is no program or no, anybody has a hundred percent success rate. So what are some of the things that that success or that not success? What are some of the things that differentiate the successes from the failures?   Stephen: Totally. Yeah, we try to reverse engineer this because we basically have this thing called the 10K payday guarantee, and so to claim the 10K payday guarantee, which basically the short statement is, if you don't make $10,000, we'll pay you $10,000. But there's a ton of terms and conditions. So it's an action-based guarantee and we basically took our most successful students and we reverse engineer what they did and we put it in the guarantee. So, if you want to qualify for the guarantee, do this, this, this, this, and it's just like a checklist of all the stuff you got to do. And so I'd say the biggest thing is focus. Focus is a big one, especially for mom, especially for parents. Like you only have so many, so much time, right, and so we call this nutrients. Like you only have so much nutrients to put into your garden. If you're trying to do Amazon, you're also trying to day trade. You're also trying to, like, do this other Airbnb side, hustle over here. You're putting in just a tiny bit of nutrients. You're gonna grow like a lot of tiny pumpkins, right. But if you cut off a lot of pumpkins and you put all the nutrients into one, you're gonna grow like the award-winning pumpkin, right? There's a book called, I think, the Pumpkin, the Pumpkin I don't know something about pumpkins, where that came from and it's written by the guy who wrote profit first. But he talks about just like you just focus, right, and so that's a big one. We see, just I mean, they're like you know, bradley, like there's a thousand ways to make money on the internet, right, and so we really train people on like put blinders on for like nine months, like a year, like just give this thing your all for that amount of time. And whatever Facebook ad you see, don't click it. You know, just like do this thing. So I think that's a big one. We see people try to do too much and then they just go slower because of that or they get derailed into something else. The second thing I'd see we see a lot is really and we had a PhD neuropsychologist come into our group and really start training on this because she was talking about she works with like six and seven figure entrepreneurs on mindset and just the science behind like training your mind to go beyond where you're comfortable. And you know our body I'm gonna like not say this as sciencey as she would, but like you know, our body is like running a thousand automations at once, like I'm moving my hands, I'm breathing, I'm talking, I'm looking at you, I'm blinking. Like our body is designed, our brain is designed to automate those things because, like, if we had to think about all that, it would like destroy us, right? And so anytime you're doing something, really frequently your brain goes into really an automation and it's to keep you, come to us, keep you safe, just keep you. You know all these things. So when we stretch people into entrepreneurship or like hey, go spend $5,000 on inventory, right, like it's something that is like way beyond their current thinking sometimes. And so the brain will go whoa, chill, stop, slow down. Like hold on, I'm stuck. Like I'm stuck, I'm overwhelmed. These are actually, like we reframe them, as green flags that you're actually on the right track, cause we see people posting the group. I'm overwhelmed, I'm stuck. Right, we're like, oh, this is awesome. This means that we're stretching you this way, right, cause your brain is trying to keep you here, but that same thinking will keep you there. If you want to go here and have this amazing business, you gotta stretch and take this step here, you know. So we've kind of helped reframe the mindset thing. So when people are getting stuck. They know that it's a green flag and then they also know to reach out, cause we have a lot of different ways to support people. So that's the thing we see is people get stuck and then they don't reach out. They ghost us, you know, like we can't show up at their house and do that type of thing, yeah, and then I would say, so I said, focus getting stuck and not reaching out. And then I would say, like I would say PBC definitely has gotten way harder in this last season. And so I think, not having not going after, like I would say, either going after two low search volume products because they are on a kind of tight budget so they're going to have to really low search volume products, or going for, like way too high search volume products and not anticipating how much budget it takes to really rank and maintain rank on those search terms, you know. So it's like finding that middle ground, and so we've started to more train on that like kind of even budget training, of like hey, if you have this much devoted for your business, like spend this much on inventory, right, and leave this much for buffer room and leave this much for something you don't even know about yet, you know, because what we find is sometimes people stretch their budget on the first product so far, like you got 10,000, they spend all of it on inventory and then they have no buffer room to like keep it going, and then they got it, and then, if it is going, they got a reorder and then they're stuck right. So, training on that buffer. So just for people listening, if you're like I'm doing Amazon, I got this type of budget going in. I think, padding that budget right After you're not going all in on your inventory, you have budget room. I mean, you did this with that project. You launched a ton of products for like was it $5,000?   Bradley Sutton: Yeah, so I don't know. 12 products for 5,000 project 5K. Do you have any?   Stephen: budgeting rules. I'm just curious, selfishly, because we've been kind of developing it, but like even for that, did you have any budgeting rules, like how much of that budget you'd spend on one product?   Bradley Sutton: No, like I just wanted to see how many. My budget was 5K total, like including, you know, launching and stuff. I was like, all right, what in the world can I do with? This was my challenge. And then I was like all right, a lot of them were like straws and then I launched a brand around that like stuff that had to even do with like straws and parties and stuff.   Stephen: Is there just low cost to?   Bradley Sutton: make. Was that what it was? Yeah, just low cost to make. It kind of sucks that now that there's no Amazon, small and light. So actually I started losing some money on those products in the last few weeks that Amazon took away that program, but I mean, my goodness, like I discontinued some of them. They weren't all home runs, you can't be 12 out of 12. But still, like there are some products. I think I started that thing like four, three, four, five years, no, four years ago, and I'm still selling, you know, some. Like you know, I'm even bringing back one I'm going to do a little case study on it that it was really popular around Christmas time and I haven't sold it in, like you know, two years and so it's been dead. And I just ordered, you know, some new ones to see if I can get some traction. But yeah, the budget is. It was definitely critical. But you know, I tell people like, just because, like you can do it, this is not advisable because you know nobody can make a living off of products that are retailing for like $7, $8, which is what you have to do when you're trying to get products that your cost is less than a dollar, which it was for unit, yeah, so, yeah, yeah.   Stephen: So we're encouraging people, like we kind of we kind of ask them what their budget is and then we kind of encourage them to stretch it a little bit and whether you're leveraging financing or, honestly, like we've seen a handful of people do partnerships, where you just are getting an inventory investor and that sounds fancy, but I mean that means like a friend or a family member who has heard about Amazon but doesn't really want to do the work, and so we found a lot of people doing that and, honestly, I would, I would. One of the easiest things to do is go to go to someone who has an audience too, like, if you can go to someone like you know, you're listening to the show, you have that one friend who has like an Instagram following. Go to her and go hey, I'm learning about e-commerce, I'm launching this product. Would you ever have interest in launching a product for your audience, you know, and then like, develop it with them, and then, basically, you do all the work, you do all the sourcing and then you get a percentage of the sales you know and that that's a no risk way to get into it. Or someone else is fronting the money for the inventory. They already have the audience, not only the Amazon data of the traffic there, but they already are going to promote it and that audience loves them. Buy anything they shall, you know, talk about. So that's another way we've seen people do it, where they are basically making it rain for someone else and then they're making a percentage of that and that's making their own pot and now they have their own money. Actually, that that that wallet brand Kingsloo, one of our Rainmakers, went through our challenge and she got hired by that company, oh wow, and she built their Amazon brand. I mean, they were, they were doing about eight figures like 10 to 12 million on just Shopify with that product. You know, just Facebook had to Shopify and they weren't even on Amazon. But when we looked at the helium 10 data, it was like people searching their brand on Amazon right, yeah, you'll see the Facebook guy and come over, and so she built it out and like, built a I mean they did a million dollars on just like the Amazon channel. And then we recently worked with them because I'm a good good friends with Josh and we re-did his listing cause he was just ranked on his brand keywords, like you know, but he wasn't on slim wallet for men or any of these like big keywords, and so we reworked it. Maldives launched it again and it like basically I don't know exactly but it it almost doubled or tripled his Amazon sales Like he was doing. He was doing. I remember him saying me screenshots of like right after the launch and it was like he's doing. He was doing I think 8,000 or something like that a day and he went up to like 25,000, 30,000. And this was like Q4 last year. So I don't know what his numbers are now, but it's crazy Like there's so many Shopify owners should just like they're cranking on Shopify but they have no idea about Amazon or they have false beliefs about Amazon. That's a whole nother market. If you're trying to get into Amazon, be an Amazon account manager for people on Shopify. When you have those Shopify ads for, like those DTC products, go look on Amazon. If they're not on Amazon or they're on Amazon and their listing is terrible, like there's an opportunity there and it's hard to like work that type of deal sometimes, but if you can like, that's incredible.   Bradley Sutton: Yeah, yeah. So your program, you know, before we get to the last couple of strategies you might have, I was just looking at your website. It says you've had over 12,000 moms go through the program there. So if somebody is interested in it, is that like a prerequisite? They need to be a stay at home or working mom or what kind of a requirements do they have?   Stephen: You know you just need to be motherly. No, that can be anybody. When we started, like you know, this is definitely a strategy for Amazon too. Like you want to have a niche, you know you want to, like, really focus on one person. So we, when we looked at our top case studies with our training, it was moms, and so we really made the program for moms when we first started. And when we first started was a lot of stay at home moms. Now it's a lot of working moms, a lot of corporate moms and it's a lot of non moms as well. So really we're just family first and so we're not going to tell you to just hustle your life away or going to tell you like, hey, build this business, but do in a way that protects your family, protects your marriage and all those things. So if you have a family mindset, you can definitely check us out. Yeah, and how can they do that? I'd say go to the. Go to rainmakerfamily.com. Rainmakerfamilycom that's like our, our branded website. You can find our social media there. We have a challenge, seven day challenge. You can get to there. That's what I was talking about. Like we've had people go through that and even just that launch, launch products, and you'll see, you'll see Bradley in there on a bonus day.   Bradley Sutton: If you make it like this is one of the few. Actually no, this is the only community that almost every other week I do a, I do a call with them because you know your community is one of the best out there and so I wanted to make sure that you know I give back because you guys are doing some great stuff and really great community. Like I was just set the Amazon. Accelerate in Seattle and met some Rainmakers that came up took some pictures so that was. that was cool too, so all right so yeah, rainmakerfamily.com. Guys, if you want to, you know, check out the program Now. What's a couple of you know could be Amazon, anything else, e-commerce or some strategies you can leave us with today.   Stephen: Man, I feel like I'm trying to remember the ones I said last time, you know. So, like, I think the one we've been geeking out on again we're still testing this but really is, how can we increase the average cart value on Amazon? Right On Shopify? Like you can have upsells, downsells, cross-sells, like you, you know you can have that funnel, but on Amazon it's just harder to do that. And I feel like I saw Amazon testing this for a season, like they had like a way you could like, oh, add this other thing on there, but I haven't seen it recently. And so what we've been doing is using inserts, basically upsell because, like again, not everyone's going to take an upsell on that, but if you make it really attractive and in alignment with your product, a percentage of people will click through on that thing and a percentage of those people will buy. And so the best way to do this with Amazon, honestly, is like doing a high ticket upsell of some sort. So imagine you're selling, like I don't know, a dog whistle for training, right? Like having an insert that says, like you know, get our free guide on blah, blah, blah, and that free guide leads to a dog training course that's $297. So, like I love pairing information products with physical products because you've already kind of like, spent money to acquire that customer, so to say, right, you pay the PVC, you got them, you know you, you sold them a $15 whistle. If you could Not even make money there, but then a percentage of people buy the $297 course right on the back end, then it increases your margins like crazy and you can spend more than anyone else on that product because you don't need to make money on the product. Actually, you know money in the back end from a percentage of the people that come through. So the tricky part is figuring out, like what's really in alignment with that product, that's that solves problems that that person is buying the product for, right. So yeah, every product Usually solves some sort of problem, right? It's like I, my kid is biting the rail on the crib. We, I, so like he, buy the crib rail bumper, right, like that was one of our, am our Rainmaker products. So like, what other problems does that parent? Half right as it with a two-year-old? So you just start thinking like how could I serve that person at the highest level? How could I? How could I give more value than anyone else in this industry? Right, and yet you could do other physical products, but those take time and and the best thing I would honestly do is give them something for free that you're gonna get, sir, contact information, and then you can ask more question about it, and then you can develop something for them that serves them at a high level, or you can develop future products for them, you know. So I know a lot of people take people from an insert to like a free download or something like that. But I'm kind of thinking through, like, how can we take them to Something that is actually an offer? Right, it's like it may be a free thing at first, it has to be catch it, don't? You can't just say, like, buy my thousand dollar course yeah, no, I mean her and have people click it. Like it has to be like something that truly is like oh wow, I'm gonna scan this QR code or click this link or whatever. And so, yeah, we, we another thing, our Rainmakers doing just like if you know, we're talking about Amazon Associates, as they will link to their other Products in their shop using affiliate links on the insert. So like, and they will even do this for other people's products in our community. So this is really cool. Like, oh, Rainmakers, if, like, they have a baby product, they'll go post in our group who else has baby products? And they'll find like three or four other products and they'll say basically, like, check out, check out our you know, check out our friends, and it's like three other products, but they're using affiliate links. So even if you're just making a couple dollars on that, it's increasing. I mean, you might spend a couple dollars to get the customer on PPC. So it's just this idea of like how could we steward those sales more? Um, Alex Hermosi said like if you could get one more sale ever and it had to lead to like every other sale in your business, like how would you change the customer experience you know, and like what, what does that delivery look like? Right, if you start thinking that way, like how could this one sale lead to every sale, it starts making you think a little differently of like how can you Serve someone out of Super High Level and invite them into kind of a deeper relationship with your business?   Bradley Sutton: Yeah, you know so yeah, interesting, all right, well, that's, that's a. That's a good one. I'm I know my memories bad, but I'm almost 99% sure we did not talk about that before, so that's new stuff, all right, well, steven, thank you so much for joining us again. Again, congratulations on all the success and and look forward to you know, always, you know being around there for your, your community, more and and hopefully we get to a link up. It's been a while since we've seen each other in person, so hopefully we get to link up at one of these events coming up. You know you need to make your own like, like big, like kind of like get away or event.   Stephen: We're gonna go to Cancun. You want to come? I'm down, I'm down. Yeah, I'll send you down. I'll send you to work.   Bradley Sutton: Put me to work, I'll, I'll serve, I'll serve, I'll serve the meals there. I'll do whatever you want, I just want to hang out with your communities.   Stephen: I love that. Thanks, thanks a lot.   Bradley Sutton: Please get give my regards to the family, and we'll be seeing you soon, all right.

We are thrilled to announce the third session of our new Incubator Program. If you have a business idea that involves a web or mobile app, we encourage you to apply to our eight-week program. We'll help you validate your market opportunity, experiment with messaging and product ideas, and move forward with confidence toward an MVP. Learn more and apply at tbot.io/incubator. We look forward to seeing your application in our inbox! __ Co-host Will Larry interviews Stephen Hanson, the Director of Mobile Development at thoughtbot. The two explore the complexities of mobile app development, focusing on the advantages and disadvantages of React Native and Flutter. Stephen, who initially started as a full-stack web developer specializing in Enterprise Java, discusses React Native's cost-effectiveness and the convenience of having a unified codebase for iOS and Android platforms. However, he notes that Flutter might be a more suitable choice for high-performance needs. Both hosts emphasize the nuances of the mobile ecosystem, covering topics like in-app purchases, push notifications, and the strict guidelines set by app stores like Apple's. They agree that a comprehensive understanding of these aspects is crucial for an entire development team, including designers and project managers. Additionally, Stephen shares that the driving force behind his career is the opportunity to create apps that enhance people's lives. Stephen wraps up the discussion by detailing thoughtbot's goals of improving mobile development practices within the company and the broader developer community. __ React Native (https://reactnative.dev/) Flutter (https://flutter.dev/) Follow Stephen Hanson on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/hansonsteve/). Visit his website: shanson.co (https://shanson.co/). Follow thoughtbot on X (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of Giant Robots! Transcript: WILL: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Will Larry. And with me today is Stephen Hanson, Director of Mobile Development here at thoughtbot. Stephen, thank you for joining me. STEPHEN: Hi, Will. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. WILL: Yeah. I'm excited to talk about mobile development. But before we get started, tell us a little bit about who Stephen Hanson is: your personal life. STEPHEN: You know this because we often talk about our families when we get together. But I have two young kids, two and four years old. When you say personal life to anybody who has young kids, that's what we're talking about. [laughter] WILL: Yes. STEPHEN: So, they're keeping me busy but in the best way. WILL: Yeah, definitely. And I totally understand that. So, I know we talk about this often, but you like to woodwork. You like to work with your hands like most of us in tech. Like, we think so much with our head and mental that we try to find something to do physically, and yours is woodworking. Tell me a little bit about that. STEPHEN: Yeah. I think it's exactly what you said. I think working on a computer all day, you know, many years ago, I was like, what's something I can do with my hands, right? Something a little more physical. So yeah, fine woodworking has been a hobby of mine for quite a few years. And we were even chatting the other day about, you know, I'm trying to take time during the day to sneak out to the garage for 15 minutes, you know, during my lunch break or whatever to just get that mental reset and just work on something. WILL: Yeah. I know that you built your office that you work out of. I've been wanting to ask you, one, how did you do it? Two, how did you have the confidence to do it [laughter] to make sure that it was going to...how can I say this? I would be afraid that would it still be standing [laughter] after a little bit? [laughs] STEPHEN: Yeah, to be honest, that was definitely a fear. Yeah, I built my office in 2020, you know, COVID hit. All of a sudden, I was working fully remote. And we had another kid on the way. You know, we didn't have space in the house. So, I was like, what am I going to do? [laughs] I was already doing woodworking, but I didn't have any construction or carpentry experience. So, yeah, I definitely had the confidence issue. And I think, you know, I was just like, I don't know, let's just give it a try. [laughter] That's really all I can say. I didn't have the skills yet. But I watched a lot of YouTube and read a lot of [laughs] forums or, you know, just found info wherever I could, so...[laughs] WILL: Yep. And it's still standing today, correct? [laughs] STEPHEN: Correct. Yeah. [laughs] No, I'm just sitting in, like, a pile of rubble right now. [laughter] WILL: That's awesome, yeah. It's kind of like development sometimes for me. Like, you just got to take that leap sometimes, so... STEPHEN: You do, right? It's like, you know, fake it till you make it. [laughter] WILL: Yep. That's awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So, tell us a little bit about how did you get started in development in general? And then, how did you get started in React Native? STEPHEN: Yeah. So, I started out as a full-stack web developer. So, I didn't initially set out and say, "I'm going to build mobile apps," right? And I started out in 2011. I was working in Enterprise Java. I worked for American Airlines for a couple of years, and then I did enterprise consulting. I eventually made my way to, like, Rails and front-end development. And around 2016, 2017, I was freelancing. And eventually, clients started asking me to build mobile apps. [chuckles] WILL: [inaudible 04:16] STEPHEN: And I didn't know how to build mobile apps. So, I did what any web developer would do who doesn't build apps, and I used web technology. So, those first couple of apps that I built were hybrid apps. I used Ionic. And those are, you know, web apps that you package in a Native Wrapper. So, developing these apps, I literally developed them in a browser, right? And they're web apps. [laughs] And that was my first experience building apps. Even if they were web-based, I still had to work with the native app stores and learn, you know, app review guidelines and implement some native functionality, even though it was through, like, the Ionic wrappers. You know, people kind of trash on hybrid apps, and sometimes for good reason. But that wasn't a bad first experience for me or outcome, honestly. The clients were happy. They had apps in the app stores that were working for a pretty reasonable development cost. So yeah, that was my first experience in mobile. The end result isn't something I'd be necessarily proud of today. [laughs] WILL: I think that's all devs. [laughs] STEPHEN: Yeah, you know, [laughter] yeah, I -- WILL: Looking back at their work, yeah. [laughs] STEPHEN: I was talking about that. I could look back to something I built a month ago. [laughs] WILL: Yes. [laughter] STEPHEN: You don't have to go back far. [laughter] WILL: Yeah, so true [laughs]. You started working with the client when you were freelancing. So, how did you go from the hybrid web apps to actually saying, okay, I want to change, and I want to go all in on React Native? STEPHEN: React Native came out around that same time I was building those hybrid apps. So, the hybrid apps were 2016, 2017. React Native came out in 2015. So it was out, but it was still pretty new. And I was really interested in React Native right from the beginning, but I was also a little intimidated by it [chuckles]. So, when those first clients came to me for mobile apps, I didn't feel confident enough to say, "Yes, I can build you a React Native app." But a year or two later, I was working for another client on their Rails app. And I was building an API for their new React Native app. You know, I was really interested in React Native. So I said, "Hey, [chuckles] why don't I help out on the app side, too?" And they were like, "Sure, that sounds great." So that was kind of where I got my foot in the door with React Native. And then more opportunities like that just kept popping up over the next year. So, I got to work on a couple of other React Native apps. And like we talked about, I just started calling myself a React Native developer [laughs]. The rest is history. WILL: Yep. So true. We'll touch more on that later. But what would you say to a client who is trying to figure out if they should build native versus React Native? STEPHEN: There's a few things to consider when making that decision. But I think, usually, what I've seen is it comes down to budget and user experience. The bottom line is React Native is going to be a lot cheaper. You're basically building one app instead of two, right? Most of your code in a React Native app is going to be in JavaScript, and you can reuse all of that code across Android and iOS. If you're building a native app, you're just building two completely separate apps. So, it's just going to be cheaper to build that React Native app, and a lot of times, that's what it comes down to. For most companies, it can be really hard to justify that extra cost of building a completely native app for each platform. But then the question is when we talk about how can you justify the cost? Well, what would justify the cost, right? [laughs] I think probably the biggest trade-off when you build a React Native app versus a purely native app is there is a little bit of a performance penalty by building in React Native versus native. So, I think apps that will need to have a very flashy cutting-edge experience with lots of user-driven animation and effects, you know, when you get into that domain, I think that's where we see pure native starting to make more sense. But most apps and users would never feel that performance penalty of React Native. So, for most apps, that's not really something that enters into the equation. WILL: I want to dig into something you said. You were talking about if you do go native, you usually have to build an iOS and an Android separately. But with React Native, you could do it together. So, for someone who's maybe never done either one of them, can you kind of dig into, like, what does that look like? So, when you say I have to build an iOS and an Android portion versus I can do one codebase for React Native, can you walk us through kind of what that looks like, just a sample feature? STEPHEN: When I say React Native is a single codebase and, you know, native apps, you're building two apps, the way React Native works is you're basically building a React app. So, all of your business logic is going to be in React. And when your React code renders some UI, that gets translated into native UI. But your business logic is still going to be living in that JavaScript React app. So, one, when I say performance penalty, that's what I'm talking about is: there's a little bit of a performance penalty communicating back and forth between your JavaScript thread and the native system thread. But when we talk about one codebase versus two, that's what a React Native app looks like. You basically are working on a React app. It's one codebase with one set of business logic. And when you say, "Show a modal on the screen," that gets translated into a native Android modal or a native iOS modal, but in your code, you're just saying, "Show a modal." [laughs] So, you're just writing that one time. So yeah, a React Native project is just one codebase. Now, one thing that we haven't really touched on is in a React Native app, you do have the ability to drop down into native code. So, you have access to the native Android project and the native iOS project in your React Native app. So, you can write completely native code if you want to. But the appeal of React Native is you don't have to, you know, unless you get into one of those situations where you need to do something native that isn't supported out of the box with React Native or by an existing third-party library, or you want to have a very performant, very interactive part of your app. Maybe there's a reason you want to do that in native. You know, you do have that option in a React Native app of dropping down into that native code level. But to contrast that with a purely native project, you will have two completely separate codebases, one for Android and one for iOS. You'll have a development team for Android and a development team for iOS, you know, typically with different skill sets. The Android project will be Java, Kotlin. And your iOS project is swift. So, just in every sense, you really have two different projects when you're working on a purely native app. WILL: Okay, yeah, that makes sense. So like, for React Native, that show modal is just however many lines to show that one modal, and it does it for iOS and Android. But when you talk about native, you're saying that; however, iOS says to show that modal, you have to do it that way. But then Android, you also have to do it the Android way. And one developer, unless they know both of them, may not be able to handle both for those cases, correct? STEPHEN: Yeah, exactly. React Native abstracts away those underlying platforms. So, you really just need to know React Native for most cases. Though, there's definitely a benefit of knowing the underlying platforms. WILL: Definitely. Especially, like you touched on if you wanted to go into that native portion to add in a feature. You know, for example, I know we both worked on a project where we had a scanning app. And we had to tap into that native portion and React Native in order to get the scanning app to work, correct? STEPHEN: Yeah, that's right. We had to support some barcode scanning devices and hook into those barcode scanning frameworks that were proprietary [chuckles] to those devices. So yeah, we had to build native modules for Android and iOS to support those. WILL: Gotcha. Okay. I want to touch back on something you said earlier about the flashy experiences. You said sometimes you may not see it or whatever, but sometimes, if you want that flashy experience, it's better to go the native route. Can you explain that a little bit more? STEPHEN: So yeah, it's kind of what I was touching on a second ago. You know, in a React Native app, you have the JavaScript thread that is always running and coordinating UI changes with business logic. So, you've got your business logic in JavaScript. You've got the UI in native. And those need to be coordinated to interact. So, that's kind of where that performance penalty can happen. You know, again, most apps and users would never feel this penalty. I've never been, like, using my phone and been like, oh, this is a React Native app; I can feel it, you know. [laughs] It's not something that typically enters the picture for most apps that we work on. But there are certain types of apps that might be more important, you know, highly interactive games or things that just need to have that extra flashiness and interactive flashiness specifically, where it could make sense to build that natively. Another interesting thing in the React Native space is React Native recently re-architected their rendering engine to be written in C++ and be more efficient. So, this performance overhead might be a little bit less of a trade-off. They've re-architected the way that React Native JavaScript talks to the native layer, which might make this even less of an issue going forward. WILL: I looked it up for the podcast. But do you know some of the companies that we probably are familiar with, like they built apps on React Native? Can you name a couple? STEPHEN: Yeah, I was recently looking at this, too. And, you know, the big one is Facebook, right? Facebook built React Native. So, they're the sponsor of that project. So, Facebook and Facebook Messenger, I believe those apps are built with React Native. I don't know if the entire apps are or not [chuckles]. Do you know by chance? [laughs] WILL: React Native on their website says, "Hey, we're going to showcase these apps that they're built in React Native." So, I'm guessing a huge portion of it was built in React Native, so... STEPHEN: Yeah. That's a good point. Yeah, you're right. They're showcasing it there. So yeah, you know, other ones, you know, lots of brands, Shopify, looks like PlayStation. I'm looking at the list now on the React Native website: Pinterest, Flipkart, Discord, Walmart, Tesla, Coinbase, Mercari. Yeah, I mean, it's just a lot of big-name apps built in React Native, including quite a few that we've [laughs] that we've built. [laughter] MID-ROLL AD: Are you an entrepreneur or start-up founder looking to gain confidence in the way forward for your idea? At thoughtbot, we know you're tight on time and investment, which is why we've created targeted 1-hour remote workshops to help you develop a concrete plan for your product's next steps. Over four interactive sessions, we work with you on research, product design sprint, critical path, and presentation prep so that you and your team are better equipped with the skills and knowledge for success. Find out how we can help you move the needle at tbot.io/entrepreneurs. WILL: If I'm absolutely sold on getting that flashy experience, is native the only route to go? STEPHEN: I think until pretty recently, that would have been your option [laughs]. But Flutter has been picking up a little bit of momentum. So, Flutter is developed by Google. And it's kind of a challenger in that React Native space. It kind of has the same write once, run anywhere, you know, philosophy as React Native. You have one codebase. But they tout kind of being a more performant option than React Native. So, it compiles down to native ARM or Intel code, which can give better performance without, you know, not needing that JavaScript bridge kind of handling that communication between the UI and the business logic. WILL: So, when would you use Flutter versus React Native? STEPHEN: I kind of keep going back to, like, you know, we talk about the performance overhead of a React Native app. I don't think that's even on the map for the vast majority of apps. Like, this isn't a performance penalty that you can typically feel. So, looking at Flutter versus React Native, React Native has several advantages. I think the biggest one is it's React. So, every team has React developers already on the team, pretty much nowadays. So, you know, if you've got an organization that says, "Oh, we need to build a mobile app," they probably already have a team of React developers somewhere working on their web app [laughs]. So, there's a big benefit of kind of centralizing their team around that technology. You know, you can have a little bit of cross-pollination between web and mobile, which can be really nice. I think, similarly, it's a lot easier to find and hire React or React Native developers right now than it is to find and hire Flutter developers. So, Flutter is written in Dart, and it has its own front-end framework. So, this isn't necessarily a technology that you're going to have on your existing team. Like, I've never worked with Dart, personally. It's not nearly as common as React developers. You know, that, to me, is going to be a big downside. You know, the talent pool is a lot smaller for Flutter/Dart developers. Also, the ecosystem with Flutter being newer, it's not as established. It doesn't have as large of an ecosystem as React Native. So, for those reasons, I think React Native is still, at least for us, like, it's usually where we would steer a client over Flutter, unless they're in that category of, like, they're really going for something, you know, groundbreaking. And, you know, the choice is either, you know, they've ruled out React Native. They need to get that native performance, and maybe they could achieve that with Flutter, and maybe Flutter would be a good option then. WILL: Okay. You mentioned that—and I agree with you—like, you probably have some React devs on your team somewhere. Most companies does. So, say if I am bought in, I'm going all in on React Native, and I have React web developers on my team. Is that an easy transition for those developers, or what does that transition look like? STEPHEN: Yeah, this is something...I think you and I have talked about this a lot because we both transitioned from React Web to React Native. And, you know, it wasn't all that easy, right? [laughs] WILL: No, it was not [laughter] at all. [laughter] STEPHEN: So yeah, you know, it is a fallacy to say, "Hey, we've got a React team, you know, let's just start tomorrow on building an app, and it'll be smooth sailing. And, you know, no one needs to learn anything, and we'll be good to go," right? [laughs] So, you know, what I always say is a React web developer can successfully work on a React Native app. But I don't think they have the skills yet to lead that initiative because there's just so much to the mobile ecosystem that needs to be learned. And really, you know, my first couple of React Native apps, I wasn't the lead developer. There was somebody on those projects who really knew that space better than I did. And that was really helpful for me to have. How about you? What about your first, like, React Native project? What did that look like? WILL: It was at another company, and the exact words paraphrasing was, "You know React, so you can easily work on React Native." And so, I got on the project. And I really struggled, to be honest with you, because there's a lot of things that I didn't know: in-app purchases, push notifications, how to deal with Apple store, Android store, deploying to those stores. Like all of those things, navigation is totally different than React navigations and routes. It was a lot. It was a lot more than they led on to what it was. Eventually, I caught on. It took me a while. I needed to work with some more senior React Native developers, and I was able to really pick it up. But yeah, it was tough. I'll be honest: I struggled for a while because I went in feeling like I should have known all those things because that's the way it was conveyed to me. Now that I look back on it I was like, there's no way I could have known those things. It's just a different language. So, I had to get in there and learn it. And I even...I'm trying to think I've learned a couple of new languages. But it's almost like learning a new language just with, you know, the, like I mentioned, the in-app purchases, push notifications. It's just totally different. STEPHEN: Yeah, that's been my experience also. I think the challenges weren't, like, coding [laughs] because, you know, building a React Native app is coding in React. The challenges that I faced were, like you said, it's just the mobile ecosystem and learning all the intricacies, the functionality that users have come to expect in mobile apps, you know, like password manager, integration, and background execution modes, and deep linking strategies, all that kind of stuff. You know, if you don't know what questions to ask or what features to be thinking of, it's just really hard. And [laughs] I think it's more than just the developer needing to know that too. I think anytime it comes, you know, down to building an app, the whole team needs to have that mobile background. It's just a completely different platform than building for the web, right? So like, product owners, project managers, designers, developers all need that context so we can be prioritizing the right features and building a UI that matches the patterns that people have come to expect in a mobile app. And then, of course, developing those apps using the, you know, the proper native modules. WILL: Yeah, definitely. And I [chuckles]...you mentioned that it's mostly on, like, the mobile side. I don't know the best way to say that. But, like, I can tell you, when I first got onto the React Native project, there were numerous features that I could implement, and to a certain point to where I had to go that mobile. So, like, I was like, oh yeah, I can learn these new components that's in React Native. Okay, I got it to work. It's finished. You know, my PM would be like, "Well, it's not completely finished because you have to deploy it." And I was like, oh, I have no idea what I'm doing now. Like, I just know [laughs]...I know up to this point. STEPHEN: [laughs] WILL: But anything over that, I'm like, yeah, I have no idea. STEPHEN: Especially with consulting, right? With consulting, you need even more expertise, right? The clients are counting on you to build their app. And that's where, you know, having that deep, deep familiarity where you can say to a client, "This is how we're going to do the deployment process, you know, and I need, you know, X, Y, and Z to help set it up. And here are the deliverables, and here's when we'll have it," that kind of thing. Like, it really takes it up a whole nother notch what you need to know. WILL: Definitely, yeah. Because I think compared to mobile, I feel like web development can almost be like the Wild Wild West. And what I mean by that is, like, there's no rules for you to push out a website in web. Like, you know, you build it. You push it out. It can be out there, you know. Whoever is hosting it, unless you go against their rules, maybe, but their rules are very relaxed and stuff like that. Mobile, there's a totally different set of rules. Because, like, I was laughing not too long ago. There was rumors that Elon Musk was going to remove the blocking feature on Twitter [chuckles]. And it was funny because all the mobile devs they came out. And if you're a mobile dev, you know this. Apple is very strict. STEPHEN: [laughs] WILL: If this is a social media app that you're building, you have to have that blocking feature, which I agree it needs to be there. But it's funny, like, all the mobile devs was like, yeah, that's not going to work. Good luck [chuckles]. Good luck being an app again. STEPHEN: Yeah, [laughs] good luck. WILL: Like, they're going to kick it off. And yeah, they're very big on kicking it off if it doesn't follow those rules and things like that. So yeah, for React Native, you have to learn those rules, or, like I said, they won't approve it. They won't push it out to their store. STEPHEN: Yep, exactly. Yeah. I feel like the new one at every client project; I have to say, "We have to offer a way to delete your account in the app," because [laughs] that's a new one that launched last year, and I think has just started being enforced more recently. Like, all those little gotcha rules, you know, like, if you don't know about that, then you're going to go to submit your app to the stores, and you're going to get rejected every single time. [laughs]. WILL: And they're not shy about rejecting you [laughs]. STEPHEN: Yeah. But I would say, like, a lot of the rules, I'm like, yes, this is amazing that we have these rules, you know. It does help keep the community safer like things like blocking. But then there's the other rules of, like, Apple's like, hey, you've got to use our payment system and pay us 30% of every sale. WILL: Yes [laughs]. STEPHEN: I was, like, you know, there's some evil stuff happening there, too. WILL: I totally agree. And we ran into that issue. We had an app that used Stripe. And we actually had to remove it in order to use in-app purchases because...I forgot the rules around it, but it was essentially for digital content. I think it's what it was. And so, we had to use Apple's in-app purchases. So yeah, I totally agree with you on that. STEPHEN: Yeah. I feel like I've been a part of so many apps where we're, like, reading those rules. And we're like, okay, you know, it's like, we're watching a live stream of birds. WILL: [laughs] STEPHEN: You know, like, the birds aren't digital [laughter], you know. It's like, [laughs] where does this fall in the rule? [laughs] WILL: Yes [laughs]. I've done that, too [laughter]. Yep. It's almost like, you know, I feel like lawyers, okay, like, is this what this rule is, or the law what is written, or does this fall underneath that? So yeah, totally, totally agree. STEPHEN: Yep [laughs]. WILL: So, you've been here a couple of years at thoughtbot. What has been your experience building React Natives here for clients at thoughtbot? STEPHEN: Yeah, yeah. I've been at thoughtbot for about five years now. And I have been building React Native apps that whole time. And, I mean, I started at thoughtbot a little more in the full-stack space, web development, and have transitioned to where I'm mostly only building React Native mobile apps now. It's been a great experience. I think that React Native is really a sweet spot of; we're able to build these apps really efficiently and much less expensively than when we're doing pure native. And the end product is a really good app. So, it's been a great experience, you know, React Native is really...it has a really nice development experience. You know, it's the JavaScript React ecosystem. And we use TypeScript, and we have a really good developer experience with it. And then we're building apps that clients are really happy with and with a good budget. So, I think it's kind of that, you know, like, win-win-win kind of scenario where everybody is happy. And yeah, I don't see it going anywhere. And I think we're going to be building React Native apps for quite a while to come. WILL: Yeah, I totally agree with that. Where do you see React Native and mobile dev going here at thoughtbot in the next six months or even the next year? What are your goals for the mobile team? STEPHEN: We've got a couple of goals. One of them is around kind of what we've talked about with the mobile space in general. This isn't really specific to React Native, but it can be. But, consulting in the mobile space is challenging because there's a lot of mobile-specific domain knowledge that a team really needs to have. So, that's something that we've started looking into is, like, how do we build up our resources internally and then, hopefully, externally as well to help guide us on our projects and ensure that we have, like, you know, we are developing apps consistently and efficiently every time? So, that's something we're looking into is, like resources to help our teams—not just developers, but project managers, designers, and developers—help us navigate the mobile space. Okay, you're going to do push notifications. Here's the library we use. Here's things to think about, and interactions to think about, and iOS-specific functionality that we could support, and Android-specific functionality that we can support. You know, you're going to do deep linking; do you want to use universal links, or do you want to use a different strategy, a scheme-based link? So, basically, building up that set of resources so that our teams are all able to consult and build efficiently and consistently across the board. So, that's kind of goal number one. And then, goal number two is to kind of bring some of that out into the community a little bit more. So, thoughtbot is very well known in the Rails space for all of the open-source content we've put out and blog posts, and courses, and books. I mean, there's just so much on the Rails side that thoughtbot has done. And we're just a little bit less mature on the React Native side in terms of what we've put out there. So, that's kind of the second goal is giving back, helping others kind of do that same thing. I feel like we have developed our practices internally, and we're building some great apps. And it's kind of time to contribute back a little bit more. WILL: Awesome. I'm looking forward to reaching those goals. If you can go back and give yourself advice, what would you tell yourself? STEPHEN: I would maybe say, read the documentation [laughs]. I don't know when I got into mobile; I think I just jumped in. And, you know, we've talked about some of the mobile-specific domain, and not knowing what you don't know, and app review guidelines. I feel like early on, I just responded to challenges as they came up, as opposed to just digging into, you know, Apple's documentation and Android's documentation and just really understanding the underlying operating systems in stores. That's probably a piece of advice. If I could go back, I would just start at the documentation, you know, go to developer.apple.com and read about all of the underlying APIs of StoreKit and, you know, associated domains and all of these sorts of things. Just learn 'em, and then you know 'em. [laughs]. So, maybe that could have saved me some heartache if I just was a little more intentional about, okay, I'm getting into app development. I'm going to set aside some time and just really learn this stuff, as opposed to kind of where I had one foot in the door, one foot out of the door for a while. And I think that kept me from just sitting down and really going deep. WILL: That's really good advice. Just read the documentation. And that's not just Apple. STEPHEN: [laughs] WILL: That's a lot of departments, sections of my life. So, yes, I like that. [laughter] STEPHEN: I actually...that's something I did early in my career. So, I started as an Enterprise Java developer in 2011, and I was using the Spring framework. I downloaded the entire PDF. It was, like, 250 pages, the documentation [laughs]. And I remember just being on, like, airplane flights, and I just read the documentation, just cover to cover. That served me so well. I was, like, the expert, you know [laughs]. I don't always do it, but when I do, I'm like, oh yeah, why didn't I do that sooner? [laughs] WILL: Yeah, totally agree. I like that. What is the wind in your sails? What motivates Stephen? STEPHEN: Like, I think what attracted me to software development is just being able to build stuff, you know, probably the same thing that attracted me to woodworking. So, I think what motivates me is that prospect of, hey, I'm building an app that people are going to use, and it's going to make their life better. So, that's really what gets me up and gets me motivated. It's less so the actual coding, to be honest. It's really the prospect of, like, hey, I'm building something. WILL: Awesome. Yeah. Is there anything that you would like to promote? STEPHEN: If you're interested in building a mobile app, come talk to us. We'd love to build your mobile app. Go to thoughtbot.com/hire-us; I believe hire-us. We would love to talk to you about your mobile project. So, don't hesitate to reach out. We'd love to hear about what you're interested in building. WILL: Awesome. Well, Stephen, it was great to chat with you. It's always great to chat with you about mobile development and just personal life things. So, I really appreciate you being on the podcast today. STEPHEN: Thanks for having me, Will. It was a lot of fun. Always good talking with you. WILL: You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have any questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. You can find me on Twitter @will23larry. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com. Special Guest: Stephen Hanson.

Overview Ben joins us from New Jersey where he goes to college. Ben may be young and isn't known, but he is an experienced author with several books under his belt already with many planned in the future. Ben has also talked with an author, Sue Bentley, that he admires and got her permission to use some of the animals names from her book in his book. Listen to what Ben shares about his books and his advice for writing. Book Favorites Website http://benlevinauthor.com/ YouTube https://youtu.be/OGYibEJBE8Q Transcript Stephen: today on Discovered Wordsmiths, I want to welcome Ben Levine. Ben, good morning. How are you doing Levin? Let me rewind and back that up. I'm messing this all up today. Alright, so today on Discover Wordsmith, let me welcome Ben Levin. Ben, how are you doing today? Good morning. I'm doing all right. Ben: Thank you, Stefan. And you, Stephen: You're doing all right. As long as I keep getting things correct instead of messing things up on what we're talking about. Sorry. That's okay. All right. So Ben tell us a little bit about who you are, where you live, what you like to do, some things you outside of writing. I'm currently going Ben: to college at Fairleigh Dickinson University, and I am, I live in Mottville, New Jersey. In addition to writing, I like to read, relax, sometimes go on walks and do active stuff, even though I don't do it as often as I'd like. Stephen: Gotcha. And being in school that keeps you pretty busy. Anyway. Yeah, I remember. Yeah, it's a fun time. Good time. You like to read, we're gonna talk a little bit about some of your favorite books and stuff later, but what are you studying in college? Creative writing. Okay. It fits right in. How's that going? You enjoying it? Yes. Yeah. We'll assume you're doing well 'cause I don't want you to embarrass yourself if you're not. So we'll just say, Ben, I'm glad you're doing so well in college. That's good. But let, we're gonna talk about that too, also a little bit about what it's like to write while still in school. And you started writing before college, so we'll talk a little bit about that too. Let's talk about your latest books. You've got several books out in a series. Tell us a little bit about that. You mean about Nellie's friends? Nellie's friends? Yes. Ben: What exactly do you want to know Stephen: about it? Sorry. Tell us what the series is about. What it is it's about healthy. Is it mystery? Little bit of it's a. Ben: Okay. It's a kid series, a little girl series about a girl named Nelly who moves to Illinois from New York. And after she leaves all her friends behind her favorite hobby becomes making new ones. Each book is about a new friend she makes and the adventure they have together. Stephen: Okay, nice. So why did you wanna write a series of books about a girl who's trying to make friends? Ben: The idea initially came to me in fourth grade, a time when I was obsessed with things stereotypically meant for girls, like dolls and girl books, and part of me wanted to explore this interest more. Okay. And Nelly's friend seemed like the right way to do it. Stephen: Nice. Okay. You know what are you using any of these books for part of your schoolwork, creative writing, or is this all on the side? All on the side. Okay. So are you picking up some things in college that are helping with the writing? Or are you Yes. Okay. Like what have you learned in school that's helped with your latest writing? I have to think. Okay. Yeah. Sorry. Throwing 'em at you, you're not ready for, got it. Ben: I've never really thought of it that way but I'm almost certain I've learned Stephen: something. Yeah. I hope, yeah. You're spending a lot of time and money there, so I hope they're giving you something right. That's true. How many books do you have in the series right now? Ben: Published or in general

REMASTERED & OPTIMIZED - Series 3 Episode 8 (Dec. 20, 2003) of The Ricky Gervais Show on XFM, the tin pot radio station we all know and love. **ALL-NEW Never-Before-Heard BIT at (0:00)** Our brilliant trio together again! Ricky “I want the king who stands astride them like the Archangel of Metal" Gervais; Stephen “You love Maiden don't you. They're a friend of yours.” Merchant; and, while Karl Pilkington is in Lanza Grotty, we have special guest, Ian “I brought in Metal Christmas, is that alright?” Camfield. THIS TRACK HAS BEEN OPTIMIZED FOR AUDIO. File updated Nov. 1, 2023.

REMASTERED & OPTIMIZED - Series 3 Episode 4 (Nov. 22, 2003) of The Ricky Gervais Show on XFM, the tin pot radio station we all know and love. **ALL-NEW Never-Before-Heard BITS at (16:22) & (34:38)** Our brilliant trio together again! Ricky “Ivan the Crafty, at most! Ivan the jealous, you know, Ivan the spoiled brat" Gervais; Stephen “You're gonna go down in history like with Vlad the Impaler!” Merchant; and the eminent, Karl “Um, d'ya' know – Ivor the Terrible?” Pilkington. THIS TRACK HAS BEEN OPTIMIZED FOR AUDIO. File updated Nov. 1, 2023.

Overview Joanna Vander Vlugt is an author and illustrator. Her motorcycle illustrations have been purchased world-wide and her Woman Empowered motorcycle art series has been featured in on-line art and motorcycle magazines. In 2006 her short mysteries Egyptian Queen and The Parrot and Wild Mushroom Stuffing were published in the Crime Writers of Canada mystery anthologies. Her personal essay, No Beatles Reunion was published in the Dropped Threads 3: Beyond the Small Circle anthology. The Unravelling, her debut novel, featuring the sister duo, Jade and Sage, was a Canadian Book Club Awards finalist as well as its sequel, Dealer's Child. She is currently working on book three in the series. Joanna is proud of her podcast JCV Art Studio and the many artists and authors she's interviewed. Joanna's novels, art and podcast can be found at jcvartstudio.net. Her Book https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09DCF49Z8?storeType=ebooks&qid=1672775288&sr=8-2&linkCode=li2&tag=discoveredwordsmiths-20&linkId=3c81edd393db2055ed3512b5753885bb&language=en_US&ref_=as_li_ss_il Website jcvartstudio.net Favorites https://www.amazon.com/War-Widow-Billie-Walker-Novel-ebook/dp/B07ZY84RCR?crid=2L9OE6QS581TY&keywords=tara+moss&qid=1672775674&sprefix=tara+moss%2Caps%2C114&sr=8-2&linkCode=li2&tag=discoveredwordsmiths-20&linkId=56267903b417ab968d5b00630313278a&language=en_US&ref_=as_li_ss_il Munro's Books (munrobooks.com) YouTube https://youtu.be/IunNEcu8pQ8 Transcript today on Discovered word Smiths. I wanna welcome Joanna. Joanna. How are you doing today? I'm doing Joanna: pretty good. We're getting some snow, so I may be out shoveling a little Stephen: later, right? Hopefully not in the middle of the podcast. That'd be an interesting . We were talking a little bit before we got started. Why don't you tell everybody a little bit about yourself, where you live and some of the things you like to do besides writing. Okay. Joanna: I live on Vancouver Island. So for the Your American audience, if you think of Seattle and I, we've actually, we've , I'm thinking of snow. We have been to Disneyland and I just remember now when we were, it was around Christmas time. I am totally going off on a tangent here, but go for it. Okay, love it. So I remember we were driving back. Going through Oregon and there was this snowstorm and we made it through. We have a little Honda element, but anyways, back on track. So if you go north to Seattle, to Vancouver, there is a ferry you can hop on and that takes you to Vancouver Island. And it's the. Biggest island on the west coast. Okay. Okay. So that's where I'm coming from. Stephen: You, you keep saying Vancouver Island and all I can picture right now is Christmas Island. I just, it's like somebody needs to make the whole island Christmas Island. That's where everybody's destination for December. It sounds like a tourist thing to make . Joanna: After. The pandemic. Everyone was coming to our island and I thought this island's gonna sink. Like all of you guys go home, , right? There's other parts of Canada to, to visit. But anyways, I was born and raised on Vancouver Island. I'm called a an island girl. Okay. And yeah, I've worked in the prosecutor's office and actually the office of the police complaint commission. Which deals with complaints. We have municipal police force, so we do have the R C M P, which everyone identifies with the red surge and all of that. But we also have, yeah. But we also have municipal police departments too. And so if anyone had a complaint with regards to the municipal police departments, that would come to the office of the police complaint commissioner. Okay. And I've. Drawn upon my experience working in the prosecutor's office as a legal assistant and police complaint commissioner's office and writing my novels in my thriller novels. So that's what I like to do. And if I'm not writing, I like jogging.

Overview Edward has been editor for a series of sci-fi novels that include short stories from popular authors. He decided it made sense to do a podcast to talk with these authors. YouTube Transcript [00:00:50] Stephen: Let's move on to some authors. And we're going to talk about podcasting, which I think is great because obviously we both do it. But before we do that, you've been [00:01:00] writing for quite a while. What can you think of that you did at one time when you started that you're doing different now that you've changed or learned from [00:01:09] Edward: not that much has changed from very beginning of the way I wrote, I've always done a full first. And then gone back and revised, I guess what's changed. The most of course is the use of computers. When I started, I was composing my first one, because it was done as a school thing is, is handwritten. But I quickly stopped doing that cause I had terrible handwriting. Uh, as soon as I started typing everything and I've always done a full first draft, I go back to the beginning. I revise it once, twice. And then I send it off and I, that has not changed in all these years. The only difference now is that I write it on the computer, go back and revise it on the computer two or three times. And then I send it off. I don't use beta readers. I've never had anybody. I show it to the first person who sees it after me as an editor. And yeah, that's nothing has changed [00:02:00] really. [00:02:02] Stephen: You don't, if you have a good process, it doesn't mean you have to do the newest, greatest thing that's going on or change what you're doing. If [00:02:11] Edward: one of the great things about my podcast is asking basically that same question to all these other authors and you find out that everybody does it differently and there is no one way to write. [00:02:21] Stephen: Yeah, I've heard that a lot. Also the most people use word, what do you use? What do you use the right with software services? [00:02:30] Edward: I downloaded Scrivener cause I'd heard good things about it. And I have yet to use it. I don't want to learn how to do all that stuff. I just want to type, and of course, word itself has its own foibles and things, but that's what I use. And it mainly because it's a standard for submitting manuscripts and stuff is word. So when I first started on computers, it was Commodore 60 fours. There was a word processor called paperclip. And it was very good, except it just wrapped. It [00:03:00] didn't have, it was just, it just kept typing it. We get to the end and then you'd get returned to make a new paragraph. And it was limited to 499 lines of text per file. And as a result that turned out to be about nine to 10 pages in actual manuscript format and all the books I wrote on paperclip have chapter. How about nine or 10 pages? I started trading myself to write chapters that were the same length as the files I could fit onto a paperclip. And that may have carried over. That still seems to be, oh, I feel like I'm about at the end of a chapter. If I look it's typically, oh, that's about 10 pages. So I think I've got it in my head back in counter 64 days, I [00:03:37] Stephen: used a speed script, which was a type in from compute. But you actually had that, enter it by hand. That's totally foreign to the kids nowadays. Let me [00:03:47] Edward: tell you that. I do quite a bit of that actually with the same magazine, with my Commodore 64 typing in programs, and you make a typo and you had to go back and find out what it was. Yeah. [00:03:57] Stephen: That was good training as a programmer. [00:04:00] You had to. That was really rough. [00:04:03] Edward: I, I also, I learned basic back in those days and I, with the Commodore 64, it had that music. I wrote a complete music entry program in basic of where you could, I think it was like a four, four digit code, which told you the pitch and the duration,

Overview Diane lives in Los Angeles and is a teacher, though she used to live in Ohio and had her book published by KSU press. Her work, teaching, and book focus on the Inklings - the famous writer's group that C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were a part of. She has insights into the group that anyone interested in these writers - or a writer interested in the group - will find fascinating. She has discovered writing and connected them to show the changes to the manuscripts because of the feedback from the other writers. Her book https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1606352768/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1606352768&linkCode=as2&tag=saschneider-20&linkId=f6fe0fde093fad3698d1cbccc607d44e YouTube https://youtu.be/BMh3u6zCqqg Transcript [00:01:53] Stephen: that was JP and Christine from the serial fiction show. Great podcast. Whether you are a writer or a reader, they [00:02:00] have a separate. Show for each one of you. So if you're would like to get into serial fiction as a writer or a read some of the serial fiction available, they've got something for you. Wonderful podcast check. In today's episode, I'm really excited to welcome Diane glider. You may not recognize her name, which is why we have this podcast to introduce you to people. You may not recognize, but I was very excited to talk Diane, because she is a professor that has studied and written several books on the inklings, which was the group writer group formed by several people, including CS Lewis and JRR token. And she talks a lot about. The group, how they influence each other, the benefits of how they influence each other. It's a great conversation. Had really fun talking to her. What really got me interested in her book. It's called Bandersnatch, but I was introduced to it through J thorn in his mastermind group. And he. Lives here [00:03:00] in Ohio. So that gave me some interest. If another Ohio author was interested in it, but also Diane printed the book through Kent state press, which I live eight miles away from. So it has a lot of Ohio connections. So I figured I'd add to that list. By interviewing Diane from me, she is not from, not in Ohio, she's out in California, but this is a really great interview, really fun time talking to her, learned a whole lot and had a whole lot of things to think about afterwards. So enjoy the interview and I hope it gives you a lot to think about also here's Diane. [00:03:37] Diane: My desire in writing Bandersnatch was to get outside of just the people who are. Familiar with Lewis and Tolkien, and really reach out to creative people of all stripes and to encourage that collaborative way of working. [00:03:50] Stephen: Yeah. So let's officially get started and feel free. If you have something really exciting and fun to share, jump in, I try and keep it casual [00:04:00] conversation as much as possible. So it's not just back and forth questions and answers. All right, Diana. Welcome to discovered wordsmith. I'm very excited to have you here today. How are you? [00:04:10] Diane: I'm doing great. What a privilege it is to talk with you. I'm really excited about today's conversation. [00:04:16] Stephen: You used to live in Ohio. So right now we've got gray skies in Northeast Ohio. So that's what you're missing. I [00:04:22] Diane: don't know that I'm missing Ohio weather, to be honest. So I grew up in outside of Cleveland and went to school at bowling green state university. So I've got lots of strong ties there, but I have to say living in the Los Angeles area. The weather's a little bit nicer. I just have to say [00:04:38] Stephen: I, and I would counter that with, I lived in San Diego for awhile and the weather got boring to me. I missed having rain. I missed having snow. And so honestly I like changes in weather. I take, after my grandfather, when a storm would come up, he'd grab a beer and a lawn chair and go sit in the yard a...

Overview Jimmy likes to do wood working and has built a sauna and a writer's cabin. Some of his writing deals with woodworking and he's been working on various projects. Like many creatives, he plays music and devoted a large part of his life to playing music. That is, until he started to go deaf in his early 20's. This led him back to writing. Luckily, his hearing returned and he now employs his writing skills to songwriting along with writing non-fiction, fiction, and working with wood. His Book https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B082HBZSM1/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B082HBZSM1&linkCode=as2&tag=saschneider-20&linkId=da3544627ffc3a01d8b53f359a74a8f4 Website https://www.jressien.com/ His Favorites https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0679743464/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0679743464&linkCode=as2&tag=saschneider-20&linkId=f7309b1eabacd334c4b86bcf7a5c52f6 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0765319640/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0765319640&linkCode=as2&tag=saschneider-20&linkId=efecccf489587169a283e8e905245247 Favorite Bookstore https://www.powells.com/ YouTube https://youtu.be/RdTzT6Cq98Q Transcript [00:00:44] Stephen: Hey, welcome to episode 80 of discovered wordsmith. This is a great episode. I've got Jimmy SCN on here. Really fun. Talk with him. He said a few things that kind of blew my mind. So listen up. There's some really. The divergence of [00:01:00] knowledge from Jimmy. But I really had a great time with this interview before we do that. [00:01:04] Stephen: You may have noticed I've been doing some shout outs and promos of some friends and their podcasts and services. So let me play one for you. You've. The last couple of weeks this is from Emma Desi. She runs a podcast called turning readers into writers. So for all you readers out there, if you've been thinking of writing a book, this is where to go check out Emma's podcast, check out our services, see what she has to offer. [00:01:29] Stephen: So here's how. [00:01:32] Jimmy: Hi, I'm Emma Desi. And I host turning readers into writers, a podcast for first time novelists each week I interviewed debut authors, editors, publishers, and even number one best sellers who help you find the time and confidence to write your own first. Together. We'll keep you inspired, motivated, and educated on all things, writing, editing, and publishing. [00:01:59] Jimmy: So head on [00:02:00] over to Emma desi.com, where you'll find everything you need to know to start and finish your novel. I'll see you in. [00:02:09] Stephen: All right. So Emma runs a great podcast along with some other friends of mine. I've listed some recommendations on my website of podcasts. You really should go listen to, in fact, I'm sending us a Bloomingdale message out right now, telling you all to go listen to it. [00:02:22] Stephen: You don't have a choice. So if you believe that, then just go do it. And we'll all be good. But anyway, before we go too much further, let's go listen to our interview. Jimmy here, you. Okay, Jimmy, welcome to discovered wordsmith podcast. It's great to see you on a day. That is not Saturday. [00:02:40] Jimmy: Yeah. Thanks. It's an honor to be on your show, Steven. [00:02:44] Stephen: Cool. Great. All right. You know what? I know a little bit about you, but most everybody else doesn't. So tell us a little bit about Jimmy, where you live and some of the things you like to do that aren't writing. [00:02:55] Jimmy: Yeah. I live in the Columbia river Gorge. It's basically the. [00:03:00] Land along the river, separating Oregon and Washington about an hour. [00:03:05] Jimmy: East of Portland is a really beautiful area. And we'd recently, we moved here a few years ago and I built a house on some land. So that's where we live. And when I'm not writing, I am mostly building things.

RDJ Overview WARNING: there may be some offensive spoken words in this episode Jennifer had problems with a solo play and had it censored. This also affected her book and she changed the name. We discuss this situation and why she decided to handle it the way she did. YouTube https://youtu.be/xciXh3sFspU Transcript We're back, boom, part two, the B episode for authors delving into that. Jennifer, is this your first book, the year of the, what is that your first book? [00:35:38] Jennifer: It's my first novel. It is not my first book. So my first book was published in 2014 and it was a collection of poetry. And it was published as like an offshoot of trying to get your, of the slut published which is now year of the what? Because. It was based on my one woman show where I basically chose five poems, five racy poems that I had written, and I created a story arc around these five poems. There is some poetry in year of the, what, there are a few of the poems in the book, but when I was trying to pitch that to some different publishers, one gentlemen that I came across, I just, I wanted to have a backup because I always knew that I wanted to have a collection of my poetry published as well. And this is like coming on. Like the height of 50 shades of gray being the biggest book in the world. So it's erotic poetry and the book is called oral sex oral with an a, because I think I'm clever and probably is meant to be listened to and write a loud. So it's called oral sex, naughty notes for levers. So that was my first book. And it's not available anymore. I got a little disheartened through the process, so it was available on Amazon for a couple of years. And then I took it down and decided to go forward with a year of the slut, full force on my own without partnering with anybody. [00:37:17] Stephen: You said you're working on a SQL. So what are some things through this process that you have learned that you're doing different now than you did when you started, [00:37:26] Jennifer: I'm utilizing more help? Yes. So the first time around, I guess I was a little cocky because the play had done well and I had won an award for it. So when I wrote my first draft of the book. Oh. And also because an agent had said, oh, write that book and I'll wreck you. So I took things for granted in the sense that like I sent the manuscript to him without sending it to a proofreader or an editor first, because I was like he said he was going to wrap it. I'll just send it to him when it's done. I'm like, no, honey no. That's not how it works, but you don't know what you don't know. I was so green and I was so naive about the literary world. Like why did I know? I didn't need an editor for my play. That's what my director was for to tell me what worked and what didn't and what jokes were funny and which ones were terrible. Yeah over the course of all the rejections, so I first started, I just sent it to five girlfriends, five of my squad who were avid readers and who had an interest in books. One was a journalist, one was a teacher, one was a English professor. One was my sister-in-law one was my best friend. And I just sent it to that group and took for granted that they all thought it was great and their excitement, and didn't seek professional help, which I should have. So yeah, so this time around definitely like working with a writing coach to help me with story structure and working with those people as I go, as opposed to being set in my way. And then pushing back with an editor again. You know the direction they're trying to push me in. So having those conversations prior to him having three drafts already written and rewritten, so things like that. [00:39:20] Stephen: Oh, good. That's part of it though is learning. And I think there's a lot of authors that have heard some of the same advice, but disregard it and end up learning the same thing.

Clip Overview Tyler talks about pantsing vs plotting and how his technique has changed over his decade of writing. He found that working with a partner made it almost necessary to have to plot. He likes to use Trello. https://trello.com/ Stay tuned until the end to hear some hair metal discussion. YouTube https://youtu.be/rwgZrJAWcgA Transcript [00:00:48] Stephen: Tyler. Welcome back. Second half mark. I mark these as the B podcast. I don't know if that helps anybody, but it helps me. It looks like you haven't moved, so that's wonderful. [00:00:58] TW Piperbrook: I love it. Yeah, I'm still in my [00:01:00] dungeon down here. This is my music room. Like the basement, my little man cave. You can't see it, but I've got my electronic drum set here and all my guitars and basses and all that stuff. [00:01:10] Stephen: Great. That's cool. Yeah. I played bass. I talked to a lot of authors that also play music. That seems to be a thing. [00:01:17] TW Piperbrook: Yeah. Yeah, it is. I think it's all the artistic stuff. [00:01:20] Stephen: You've been doing this for eight and a half years. What have you learned that you're doing different now than you did clear back when you started? [00:01:28] TW Piperbrook: Yeah, I think maybe as we said in part a there just looking on general terms I guess I've maybe grown thicker skin for things, as far as like feedback and reviews and stuff like that. And I, I think you're always learning you're learning about your process. Ideal you're reading. I make reading a part of my day if I can. So always reading and learning new words and new ways to plot things and all that stuff. Yeah, I guess I've learned that I'm always gonna make mistakes, but ideally, and hopefully I'm getting better at my craft, but who knows? And that's not really for me to decide, but that's the goal, right? So this is to try to get [00:02:00] better and yeah, you fall and you get back. [00:02:02] Stephen: Yeah, absolutely. And that's, I've heard many times the successful people are just the ones that kept writing that wrote that next book and got them out. Not just the one. I'm, I haven't been doing this forever, but I've already talked to enough authors. That they get a book out and they're like, yeah, it didn't really do anything. So I stopped doing it. I knew a guy that spent, took off, put working, spent four years writing without working his wife, supported them with kids. And it's going to be the best book ever. And then he basically said I don't want to use an editor because I don't think they'll understand what I'm trying to do. And it's man. Gotcha. And, I think he sold 20 copies or something like that total. Yeah, just keep going, keep writing, do more learn. [00:02:51] TW Piperbrook: I agree with, yeah. Yeah. And I guess to your point, like I've had a couple of different editors over the last batch of years. Each one will teach you so much. Cause they're all, they [00:03:00] all have their unique skill sets. And so I guess I'm always looking for somebody to beat me up a little more, as I say, because I've got an editor now that's really beating me up. And I like it when I see like a whole bunch of red on the word document and the comments and track changes. I say, this is great. This is stuff I can learn because like I always say I've used the tech editor in the past to like a military guy. I always say, I'd rather you beat me up. Then the reviewers beat me up. So let me have it and let me try to get better, [00:03:27] Stephen: yeah. That's why I don't push my stuff a lot on family, because they don't want to say anything and hurt your feelings. And I'm like, but you're missing the point. I'd rather you tell me this socks, then have it, get out there and don't sell anything. And I feel like discouraged. And that's a hard thing though. A family, I don't think understands very often. [00:03:46] TW Piperbrook: Yeah.

As the CEO, you love LEVERAGE!There is no more highly leveraged step in your patient process than THE WORKSHOP!One a patient goes to workshop, every visit gets easier...If a patient does not go to workshop – every subsequent visit gets harder. The purpose of the workshop is to:1. Challenge and shape the attendee's belief system2. Equip them to get BETTER RESULTS FASTER3. Recruit them to the Mission You must create the space and time to make this happen...If you do – you will create long term, happy patients who want chiropractic care.Otherwise, you'll be dragging people along until they quit.Losing patients is off-purpose and bad for business.Listen-in and discover the keys to powerful workshops. What We Covered: 00:37 – Dr. Pete and Dr. Stephen introduce today's topic, Turning Believers Into Understanders at the Better Results Faster Workshop03:15 – Dr. Pete and Dr. Stephen analyze three scenarios they have observed regarding the workshop05:01 – Dr. Pete and Dr. Stephen detail the process of converting believers into understanders by leveraging the workshop06:53 – Dr. Pete and Dr. Stephen take a moment to promote Innate Radiology08:59 – Dr. Pete and Dr. Stephen discuss the paradigm shift that is necessary within the workshop17:15 – Dr. Pete and Dr. Stephen stress the importance of Table Talk22:01 – Dr. Pete and Dr. Stephen talk about the inherent value of the workshop and why it must be important to you and your team26:53 – Dr. Pete and Dr. Stephen take a moment to promote Atlas Digital & The Remarkable Retention Immersion30:43 – Dr. Pete and Dr. Stephen talk about the importance of showing up and sharing your heart and head EPISODE QUOTES “We talk about how the patients have a life of possibility and a life of probability ahead of them. The same is true of practices.” (02:55) (Dr. Pete)“You've heard us say that conversion's emotional and retention's intellectual. People start care based on how they feel. Do they feel heard? Do they feel like they're in the right place? Do they feel you're gonna help them get what they want? That's why people start care. But people stay under care based on what they know.” (04:27) (Dr. Stephen)“Understanders are like helium balloons. You can gather them up and you can carry an infinite number of them. So, we want to take the believer and turn them into an understander. And the workshop is really the pivot point.” (06:24) (Dr. Pete)“We have to understand that we are living in an outside-in world. The paradigm is outside-in. It's an allopathic way of thinking. It just is the way that it is. It's where people are at now. And so, we first have to identify that there is a paradigm.” (10:58) (Dr. Pete)“Workshop drives Table Talk. And if you don't do workshop, Table Talk is hard.” (17:35) (Dr. Stephen)“You have to be so deliberate and so intention. And remember, remarkable does not imply perfect. My workshop was never perfect. So, don't shoulder that burden. This is not about being perfect. This is about you showing up and sharing your heart and your head. It's about showing up and being the person that moves a room.” (30:43) (Dr. Stephen) LINKS MENTIONED Dr. Stephen's LinkedInDr. Peter's LinkedInThe Remarkable CEO WebsiteDr. Stephen's Book – The Remarkable Practice: The Definitive Guide to Build a Thriving Chiropractic BusinessChiro Match Makers WebsiteSchedule a Brainstorming call with Dr. PeteJoin us for the US Retention Immersion. Register Now!

How a sip of espresso at a piazza in Italy transformed the coffee industry in North America. It seems obvious now.  But trust me.  This idea was crazy.  Learn just how crazy it was.  You may need to go to Italy for inspiration. David Young: Welcome to the Empire Builders Podcast, teaching business owners, the not-so-secret techniques that took famous businesses from mom and pop to major brands. Stephen Sample is a marketing consultant, story collector, and storyteller. I'm Stephen's sidekick and business partner, Dave Young. Before we get into today's episode, a word from our sponsor, which is well it's us. But, we're highlighting ads we've written and produced for our clients. So, here's one of those... [No Bull RV Ad] David Young: Stephen, my notes say, Starbucks today. Now, I don't know. Are we heading to Starbucks? We're going to do the drive through? I've got credit on my Starbucks card. What do you want? Stephen: Five buck lattes. Here we come. David Young: All right. Stephen: You know, the thing that's interesting about Starbucks and we're going to go back to the early days of Starbucks because one of the problems is Starbucks business seems obvious today, but I'm going to tell you, if Howard Schultz back in the early days, came into your office pitching you to invest in Starbucks. You'd probably tell him to get the hell out of your office. So, Starbucks was founded in 71 and Howard Schultz bought it in 1980. At that time, I'm not sure whether it was four or six stores, but it was just a couple of stores in the Seattle area. Today, they have over 30,000 locations. They're doing $25 billion in revenue. They are everywhere, right? And in fact, they've had such an impact on the coffee business. It's even changed how McDonald's, McDonald's, it's created the McCafe's in response to what's going on with Starbucks. Stephen: But, here's the thing, let's go back to the early days, because one of the things we're often talking about in the Empire Builders Podcast is how you got to do things that are bold and different if you want to build an empire. Copying everybody else? Fine, you can get a little bit of growth, but you aren't going to change the world. You aren't going to change your industry and you aren't going to become a billion dollar business doing that. So, let's go back to the early days of Starbucks. And if you want to learn more about the Starbucks story, I recommend reading the book, Pour Your Heart Into It, which is written by Howard Schultz. It's a fascinating story about this business, but here's the thing, if we go back into the early 80's, late 70's, early 80's, the belief in the coffee business was coffee sales were declining overall. Believe it or not, you look at a Starbucks today and look how many young people are in it. Stephen: The demographics for coffee back then were old people, were dying off. The coffee business was dying with its consumer. Coffee prices were declining. A cup of Joe is what coffee was and it was drunk in diners with those linoleum counters and people smoking and the tacky, you remember the tacky little metal trim that was screwed in and some surly waitress. They were located in Seattle and the Seattle economy was poor, was abysmal. Boeing, the largest employer was struggling and laying people off right, left and center. Schultz was in the coffee business and he had just returned from a trip to Italy where he experienced Italian coffee and cafes. And he said, this seems like a good idea for the United States. What I'm going to do is I'm going to charge a premium price for coffee. Remember, coffee prices are declining, the local economy's the shits, your consumers dying off, and I'm going to charge a premium price for my coffee and I'm... Stephen: And I believe the reason why coffee is dying is because we have a crappy product and a terrible experience. And I'm going to change that. I'm going to charge $5. Prices are declining,

00:37 – Dr. Pete and Dr. Stephen introduce today's topic, The Replatients Gap06:23 – Dr. Pete and Dr. Stephen stress the importance of tracking your metrics and stats08:49 – Dr. Pete and Dr. Stephen take a moment to promote Innate Radiology13:13 – Dr. Pete and Dr. Stephen talk about the critical role compliance plays21:38 – Dr. Pete and Dr. Stephen take a moment to promote Atlas and Perfect Patients23:28 – Dr. Pete and Dr. Stephen talk about the Desperation Cycle26:44 – Dr. Pete and Dr. Stephen share a helpful resource, The Remarkable Vault28:54 – Dr. Pete and Dr. Stephen invite listeners to join them in their upcoming Conversion ImmersionsEPISODE QUOTES“We break this down into fuel, air and spark. We talked about it how your new patients coming in is the fuel. The marketing is the spark and the money is the air. If you want to get your business going and growing, you have to have the fuel, the air and the spark. And that's how you ignite the fire.” (02:17) (Dr. Pete)“When you start talking about metrics, you can't master what you don't measure. To grow your business, you've gotta know your business, which means you've got to know your numbers.” (11:08) (Dr. Stephen)“You're in the compliance business. As soon as you recognize that, compliance leads to everything you want. Compliance means following the doctor's recommendations for care. And compliance to the doctor's recommendations for care leads to better health outcomes for your patients.” (13:18) (Dr. Stephen)“You have to have a standard with which you operate. Like you said, doctor's recommendations. What is that? It's a standard. Standard of what? Standard of care. We're not telling you what it should be. We're saying you need to have one. Why? It's right for the patient, for you, for your CAs and for your team.” (15:56) (Dr. Pete)“When you're in a desperation energy, it's actually hard for you to be kind. It's very hard to be loving. It's hard to be generous. When you're in a Desperation Cycle, what ends up happening is it's a vicious cycle and you have to break free of that.” (24:29) (Dr. Stephen/Pete)LINKS MENTIONEDDr. Stephen's LinkedInDr. Peter's LinkedInThe Remarkable CEO WebsiteDr. Stephen's Book – The Remarkable Practice: The Definitive Guide to Build a Thriving Chiropractic BusinessChiro Match Makers WebsiteSchedule a Brainstorming call with Dr. PeteLearn more about the Remarkable Vault hereJoin us for the US Conversion Immersion. Register Now!

Phil’s guest on this episode of the IT Career Energizer podcast is Stephen Woolston.  Stephen is a program and service delivery consultant with an extensive background in IT infrastructure.  He holds a first-class computer science degree from Nottingham University and started his career working on mainframe systems at Norwich Union. He is also a professional coach, helping people to become happier and more successful in what they do. In this episode, Phil and Stephen Woolston discuss how to quickly adapt your approach to problem-solving, in an ever-changing landscape, by using radical adaptability and positive direction-finding. How to quickly adapt to new environments, find and fix more problems effectively. As well as the importance of having confidence in your abilities. KEY TAKEAWAYS: (3.04) TOP CAREER TIP Develop radical adaptability and a positive direction finder. You need to have the ability to drop into any commercial environment and quickly figure out what is happening and how to move things in the right direction. During the podcast, Stephen explains, what he means by radical adaptability and positive direction-finding. As well as how you can develop those skills. (5.23) WORST CAREER MOMENT Stephen was once an operational planner, responsible for the governance of approving renewal costs. When he started, he was handed a cost schedule that he assumed covered everything. Unfortunately, a big expense had been left off that schedule. From this experience, Stephen learned it is not enough to simply check your work. You also need to be on the lookout for mistakes that have slipped through the net. The experience taught him that no colleague can produce flawless work every time. (9.46) CAREER HIGHLIGHT For Stephen, the highlight of his career was taking a leading role in Norwich Union´s Unix systems management. At the time, Unix was in its infancy. So, Stephen had to develop backup, recovery, monitoring and alert systems because they were not really available elsewhere. (12.56) THE FUTURE OF CAREERS IN I.T The fact that there are always new problems to solve is exciting. But it is also a huge challenge. You have to constantly be learning new things to keep up. Something that will also be the case in the future. (15.12) THE REVEAL What first attracted you to a career in I.T.?– As a child, Stephen liked sci-fi, so a career in IT was a natural choice. What’s the best career advice you received?– Every day you are creating your career. Things are constantly changing so you need to regularly review the direction you are going in. What’s the worst career advice you received?– Get into one big, rich and powerful company and stay there. What would you do if you started your career now?– Stephen would network more and do so from the very start. What’s your number one non-technical skill?– Communication skills, if yours are good you can work anywhere on any project you want. How do you keep your own career energized?– By seeking opportunities to work in new environments. What do you do away from technology? – To relax, Stephen listens to movie soundtrack music and spends a lot of his downtime coaching others. (19.40) FINAL CAREER TIP Have confidence in your abilities, don´t worry that you don´t know everything. Nobody understands a technology or subject completely. Tech moves too fast for that to be possible. No firm is running perfect systems. There is no shortage of things to fix or update, so you will always be able to contribute something important. BEST MOMENTS (3.26) – Stephen- “You cannot fit the client's problem to your solution, you have to fit your solution to the client's problem.” (7.03) – Stephen- “If there is an error somewhere, find it before it finds you.” (12.44) – Stephen- “With every evolution, we solve old problems, and we create new ones. They're the ones we need to focus on.” (14.14) – Stephen- “Develop adaptability and positive direction-finding skills to meet the new challenges in IT.” (17.36) – Stephen- “Good communication skills enable you to solve many more problems and work with far more people.” (20.17) – Stephen- “Have confidence in your abilities. Don´t worry that you might not know everything about everything.”  ABOUT THE HOST – PHIL BURGESS Phil Burgess is an independent IT consultant who has spent the last 20 years helping organisations to design, develop and implement software solutions.  Phil has always had an interest in helping others to develop and advance their careers.  And in 2017 Phil started the I.T. Career Energizer podcast to try to help as many people as possible to learn from the career advice and experiences of those that have been, and still are, on that same career journey.   CONTACT THE HOST – PHIL BURGESS Phil can be contacted through the following Social Media platforms: Twitter: https://twitter.com/philtechcareer LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/philburgess Facebook: https://facebook.com/philtechcareer Instagram: https://instagram.com/philtechcareer Website: https://itcareerenergizer.com/contact Phil is also reachable by email at phil@itcareerenergizer.comand via the podcast’s website, https://itcareerenergizer.com Join the I.T. Career Energizer Community on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/groups/ITCareerEnergizer   ABOUT THE GUEST – STEPHEN WOOLSTON Stephen Woolston is a program and service delivery consultant with an extensive background in IT infrastructure. He holds a first-class computer science degree from Nottingham University and started his career working on mainframe systems at Norwich Union. He is also a professional coach, helping people to become happier and more successful in what they do. CONTACT THE GUEST – STEPHEN WOOLSTON Stephen Woolston can be contacted through the following Social Media platforms: Twitter: https://twitter.com/woolers LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephenwoolston/ Website: https://theswcoaching.com

Alex Charfen is one of the very select few coaches I continually plug into...    I have wanted to get this individual on here for quite some time, and Alex Charfen has been one of the reasons why my stuff is blowing up so much.    I have learned that I need to listen to less people, and I'm very, very picky on those that I choose to dive deeply with…   So for marketing and sales, I've really dove deep with Russell, (obviously) and you all know that.    For systems and business systems, I've dove very deeply with Alex Charfen... he's the other coach that I pay a lot to and listen to as well.    ...and I have other various ones that are very carefully selected... and I don't listen to ANYBODY else!    I'm extremely careful about the content that I consume - so that I can spend most of my time just moving, rather than gathering MORE information…   ... which I don't think many of us need more of.    So anyway, I'm excited for you guys to understand more of why Alex Charfen, for me, has been so key…   So I asked him to come on the show and to teach a little bit more about the systems that all businesses need, regardless of whatever you're in.    A lot of these are the systems that a brand new entrepreneur needs when they finally get that revenue coming in.    ...and then there are systems that he creates for those who have an existing business and are ready to scale.    Alex answers the questions…     How do you know if you should be scaling or not?        What are the five reasons why most companies fail to scale?     If you guys like this interview, please reach out to him, (he did not need to do this) and say “Thank You!”    At the very end, we have a special little thing for you, and so we're excited!    Boom, what's going on everyone? This is Steve Larsen, welcome back to Sales Funnel Radio - we're really excited to have you guys here.    I'm with one of my good friends, who's become an amazing friend and definitely a mentor... I would call and consider him a brother as well.    I want to introduce everybody to Alex Charfen.   Before I really bring Alex on, I just want you all to understand, Alex Charfen was one of the guys that helped me understand why I am who I am... and that, it’s okay… and helped me lean into that.    I talk to you a lot about leaning into your obstacles, leaning into those things that have been crappy in your life…    … because they end up becoming your superpower.    You all know my story of going to the first Funnel Hacking Live, Alex Charfen was one of the first speakers, and I took so many notes…    I ran back home, I showed my wife and she goes "That's why you act the way you do?" And I was like "YES, it's because of this guy!”    He had a crazy deep gravelly voice and I loved it. He was the man!" ...and I'm so excited to bring him on the show here:   Guys, please welcome Alex Charfen, “How you doing, man?”   ALEX: Steve, it is so good to be here with you, man. Thank you, and I echo your sentiments completely, and I consider you a brother as well, man.   STEVE: Oh thank you so much, thank you so much.    You know it was like two weeks ago;  me and my wife were chatting about your material and going on through it, and she goes "Oh yeah, I have to remember this is how your brain kind of works."    I was like, "Really naturally, yeah! You should really know that" so we'll go back through your stuff.   You know, I've got that Capitalist Pig shirt that I wear all the time, but I really want one that just says, "Charfen will explain," or something like that, you know what I mean?    That should be the next shirt…   So much of what I do in this world just is NOT explainable without you.   ALEX: Yeah, it's unique, you know, Stephen…    I think when you characterize it that way, so much of what you do is different than what anybody in the world would ever expect... and that's what I've found from the day I met you.    I think I walked up to you and said something like:    "Hey man, I think we should talk. You're a really unique entrepreneur and I don't think you understand just how unique."   STEVE: I remember you said that.   ALEX: Or something like that.   STEVE: Yeah I remember, and I felt like, you know in the Matrix when he's talking to that lady with the spoon bend... I felt like I was talking to her, and I was like:    "What does he see in me? What are you looking at?" You know, and "Please dissect me!"    So anyway, I really am pumped for you to be here and just massive incredible love.    You have to understand, your name; it's NOT just a noun, it’s a verb in my vocabulary.    People are like "How did you do that?” "I just Charfenized it, baby!"    I say ‘Charfenation’ all the time.    I was hanging out with the other ‘Charfenites.’    I'm going over the ‘Charfenation.’    "How did you do that?" “Oh, I ‘Charfenized’ it, baby!”   Anyways, you're very much a verb in my vocabulary, and with my family... so it's really quite an honor to have you on, it really is.   ALEX: Thank you Stephen, it's an honor to be here man, this is awesome.   STEVE: This is really cool. Well hey, I wanna just start right out and just, I wanted to ask…    My audience has heard a lot about you. I've talked about you a lot because there’s so much that ‘veI learned.   Just recently, I was going through some of my old notes, from two years ago, from one of your events, and I was like "Gosh, you're so right, this is so cool!"    It really has created additional leverage for what I'm trying to do.   It works, it's real, and I want everyone to listen to this and listen to what Alex has to say here.   Understand that *this* is how I've been doing what I’m doing.   I learned marketing and a lot of sales from Russell... but how to have a life, systemize, and make my business an asset from Alex Charfen.    So, anyway, could you just tell us how you got into this? 'Cause I know you weren't always…   I mean I call  it entrepreneurial optimization, I mean it's really what you do - it's not just the systems, but like:    I'm wearing glasses now   I'm drinking more water than I ever have in my life    I'm doing all sorts of stuff I never would do, because of you    How did you get into this?   ALEX: - You know Stephen, I think if the question is, "How did I become an entrepreneur?”    I didn't find entrepreneurship, it found me.    This was really the only thing I ever felt comfortable doing in my life.    Ever since I was a little kid, I was always the kid that was different than everybody else, crazy socially awkward, like what you see today…    I don't try to be socially awkward, it's just natural.    I was always different than the other kids   I didn't really get along   I had trouble in school   All the systems in the world told me I was broken.    … and then, when I was eight years old, my family went through kind of a financial downturn; my father lost a company.    He didn't go bankrupt, but he went really close, and to make money for the family we were selling stuff in a swap meet on the weekends.    I remember going to the swap meet for the first time and standing behind a folding card table, and a woman walked up, and I sold her a pen that had an LCD clock in it…    (Like that was big time for 1981 or whatever or '78 or '79, or whatever it was).   Stephen I can remember thinking at that moment, "Holy crap, I'm good at this. This is something I'm NOT terrible at."    … because up until that point, I really hadn't found anything where it was like, "Hey, that was good."  It was always’ "Almost got it, kid. You don't suck as bad as you did yesterday."    I was the kid who consistently got *MOST IMPROVED* all the time, 'cause it's the award you give to ‘the kid who sucked the worst!’   And when that woman walked up, it was like "Hey, this is something I can do over and over again."    And the more that I worked with my Dad, and the more that I experienced business, I loved it.   The world is so random, but when you get into the world of business there are rules.   …. there's an outcome.    People are in it together, and you actually have to work together to accomplish and achieve.   …  if everybody cares about the outcome, it'll happen.    And so *this* is where I feel comfortable.    You know, it's funny, when I was a kid I used to create businesses, create business plans,  write out time cards and all this other stuff, and as an adult, I thought that was like ‘the weirdest thing.’    I would reflect back and think like, "Man, I was such a weird kid."    Now, that's exactly what my daughters do.    My daughter this morning was at the kitchen table for three hours writing out a schematic for a water park she wants to build one day.   STEVE: Wow!   ALEX: And you are who you are, and I think, from the very beginning, this is who I've been.   STEVE: That's amazing, and when did you decide to make a business around this and go actually help other entrepreneurs, like myself, who need these systems?   ALEX: Well, the business that I have today, we started…    So let me give you a little brief history.   So in my twenties, I was a consultant, and you know, a lot of people ask about that.    I did some consulting at a very high level at the Fortune 500 level...    I built a very large business that almost killed me.    And so I can tell the story really good...    I can give you all the highlights and make it sound great:   $250,000,000 company   I've worked with Fuji and TDK and Memorex and Logitech, and all international business.    Or I can tell you the other side of that coin…    I had a $250,000,000 company   I made less than $2,000,000 a year    my margins were razor thin   I had a bleeding ulcer   I was probably over 300 pounds    STEVE: Wow.   ALEX: And so when I got out of that business, I wanted to do something completely different.    So in my early thirties, I got into real estate, and we were taken out by the real estate market in 2007.    Cadey and I introduced our first information product, and that's how we got into this world.   We created a product called the Certified Distressed Property Expert Designation.    In 2007 we were bankrupt, we introduced our product at the end of the year:  In 2008 we did $500,000 in sales   The next year we did $7,000,000   The next year we did $10,000,000   Over the course of the life of that product, we did about $70,000,000    We went from bankruptcy to liquid millionaires in a year.    In 2013, the US Treasury came to our office and did a broadcast with us, where they said that, according to their research…    Our company had pulled forward the foreclosure crisis five to seven years   ….so it was intense.   STEVE: Oh, yeah...   ALEX: Really intense!   And what happened was, right around 2011…    A lot of our clients who were buying our product wanted help growing their business; so I took all of the stuff that I used to use as a consultant; the systems and structure Cadey and I used to run our business, and we started training it.    And so since 2011, we've been training it in classes/ courses.   In 2017, we started the products that we have today. So now we have :   An entry-level coaching program called Billionaire Code Accelerator - for people who are doing over 300k a year   A high-level coaching program called The Billionaire Code Grow and Scale - for people doing over 3,000,000 a year.    STEVE: That's awesome! That's so cool.   ALEX: Yeah it is the most fun I've ever had, Stephen…   It's like every day, I wake up and here's what I get to do:    I get to play in this playground with game-changing entrepreneurs that are starting businesses that are doing things that are just unreal.    ...and our systems, our structures are kind of the backbone for how they're doing things.    So on a daily basis, me and everyone on my team, wake up knowing that we are helping the game-changers change the world, and we recruit people who want to do that…    We recruit for people who are passionate about our mission…   Everyone on my team feels like their life's mission is being fulfilled through being in this business right now.    It's the greatest thing I've ever done.   STEVE: That's incredible, and I can tell everyone else who's listening and watching this now, it's exactly as he says it.    I think I've been to three of your events now, and they have just been life-changing.    I go through and it gives structure to the idea, but then, also, how I behave against the idea. So I can actually go in and breathe; I can live.    I watched my Dad create this awesome company when I was a young boy, but it took him too.   But everyone does that, it's super natural - so you to go in and…    Remove the entrepreneur   Create systems    Create processes and procedures, and people that actually push forward their vision even further.   ... it's incredible.    I know it's not magical, but it feels magical, to me! I'm like "Oh my gosh!"    I've actually had a tab open with your course open for like the last month and I'll just dive into another video, and I'm like "Oh my gosh! Back to the drawing board, that was so good!"    And I go back to it again and again and again... it's just always up, everybody who's listening to me, it's always up.    That's really what's teaching me how to run a company, rather than ‘me’ being the company, and I've loved that.    *Just so powerful*    I wanted to ask you kind of a key question here, and it's a question that I get asked a lot...    People come through my programs, I'll help them make money. They go and make a lot of cash, and it's awesome... but then after that, like what do you do?   What are the first systems that you find that new entrepreneurs with a sizeable amount of cash should actually go create first?    What are those first few moves?   ALEX: You know I think I definitely want to share a couple of systems Stephen, but first, I want to just share a thought process. ..and this is a tough thought process for most entrepreneurs to take on, and it's interesting 'cause I've watched you go through this shift too, right? '   Cause at the beginning, (and I just want everyone to know)...    When I met Stephen Larsen, he was ready to take on the entire world solo!   STEVE: Yeah.   ALEX: Like all alone, right?    And here's the thought process…    After you start making money, the next thing to ask yourself is:    How do I sustain this?    How do I make it real?    How do I make it last a long time?   How do I make it so that I'm not the only driver here?   when you get to the point where the momentum you're creating on your own isn't enough, and believe me, we all get there...    Like I know that if you're watching me, watching Stephen, you're one of those entrepreneurs... and in the back of your mind, you have this crazy voice that has always told you:    You're meant for more   You're gonna do more   You're gonna change the world   You're gonna make a massive impact   ... and if you've always felt that, then there's a shift you have to make in your thinking.    Because here's the issue for people like us; I call it the Entrepreneurs Dilemma.    For people like us…    We need far more help than the average person to reach our full destination, but any request for help or support that we have to make, leaves us feeling vulnerable and exposed.    Stephen, you with me?   STEVE: Yes, yes, yes, yes, 100%!   ALEX: And so here's the shift…   We have to realize that if we're gonna change the world, that is a group activity, and leadership's a contact sport.    So we have to wake up to the fact that when we start to:    Build a team   Create a structure   Pour into the people around us    Invest in those people   Make them important   Build relationships with them   …. we will build the company that we have always wanted.    That's the only way it's ever been done.  The myth of the solopreneur who's changed the world is a myth - it's a joke.   STEVE: So true   ALEX: It's one of the most damaging things out there in the entrepreneurial world today.    Because the fact is…    Show me anyone that looks like they changed the world on their own, and I will show you a massive team behind them.   STEVE: So true!    There's this idea that gets pushed around now, and it's like, “I'm gonna go and be this person that does all this stuff. I'm the gift to the world...”   ...and it's like “Okay….” but you can't do that on your own.    In the last six months, I have begun to experience and feel burn-out.   ALEX: Yeah.   STEVE: I have never in my life experienced that, and it's been hard.  The only way I've been able to create leverage is by listening to what you say and create those teams.   ALEX: Yeah. Well then, Stephen, that's the thing…    Here's the deal I want everybody to understand this:   If you're an entrepreneur, you have a job, and that job is to…    Stay out of burn-out   Lower pressure and noise in your life   Increase the protection and support that you have around you.    Because if you don't work with that equation to constantly lower the noise and increase the support, lower the noise, increase the support…    Here's what ends up happening…     You are in an equation that doesn't work.    … and it's not like anyone can come and argue against me here because this is like gravity.    This is like you know the facts of life, this is like taxes. We're all gonna pay 'em. There's no way to argue against this, you're going to lose.    And so in that situation, as an entrepreneur, you have to be really cautious about doing too much yourself, and about loading yourself up, because here's our instinct…    (You know you have this, I have this, we all have it.)    If there's something to be done, the first thought we have is, “How do I just get it done without telling anyone else,” right? Oh yeah!   STEVE: Yeah   ALEX: And it's like "I'm gonna conquer!"   STEVE: Freedom baby!   ALEX: We forget that humans are tribal animals, man.    We are all terrible at most things. Let's get real…    If you're good at a lot of things then you have a liability because you're not gonna be able to choose what you shouldn't do.    I'm very fortunate, I suck at most everything, and that's like an honest reality.    Anyone on my team will tell you like "Oh man, don't let Alex fill out a form, use the calendar, "send emails. We keep him out of all of our systems."    Seriously my team actually knows when I have a password for a system and they monitor me using it, 'cause I'm so bad at that stuff.    But on that same token, I know what I'm good at.    I'm good at vision    I'm good at where we're gonna go   I'm good at putting the frameworks together    I'm good at assembling a team   … and by doing those things, we can grow a massive organization and have a massive impact.   So for every entrepreneur, the key is to figure out what you're good at and do that to the exception of everything else   ... and it's the hardest thing you'll ever do as an entrepreneur.    Here's why…   The second you start doing that you feel like you're being egotistical. You feel like you're being self-serving.    But here's the fact:    When you drive your business to get easier for you it will grow like crazy.   But driving your business to get easier for you will feel like you're doing the wrong thing.    It happens all the time.   There's a discussion right now on our Facebook group, one of the CEOs in our group made a post, and I'm paraphrasing, but she said something like :   "As I offload and reduce discomfort and get a team around me, I'm feeling less and less significant, am I doing this right?"   And my answer was "Yes! You're absolutely doing this right. That's exactly how it's gonna feel!"    Because we need to attach significance to the total contribution, NOT to your day-to-day activities.   STEVE: Mmmm, that's powerful.    You know it's funny I was It reminds me of …   You know when I first got to ClickFunnels, it was just he and I. There wasn't like a copywriter, a videographer... it was just he and I!    So we did every single role in getting these funnels out, occasionally there was an exception where he'd go "Oh someone's really good at X, Y, and Z,"  but then, by the time I left...   ALEX: - Probably design or something… but everything else was you guys?   STEVE: Yeah, yeah, yeah, right! I knew enough Indesign and Photoshop, I was the one doing it most of the time... and doing first copy rounds, and it like, it was nuts!    But by the time I left, it was funny because he had started implementing these types of things.    I remember watching him during these funnel launches just laying on the floor, bored out of his mind.    I've never seen him like that in my life, and he was almost going to a state of depression. He was like "I'm not needed in my own thing now. Ah no-one needs me anymore."    It's a funny thing to realize, we're just the orchestrators. We don't play all the instruments.   ALEX: We shouldn't, we shouldn't.    And so, you know, back to your question about what systems should an entrepreneur start looking at?   Now, I'm gonna talk high level, and I wanna share...    You and I are really close friends, and I wanna share the most critical content we have for entrepreneurs with your group.   STEVE: I appreciate that.   ALEX: This is what we normally share internally once somebody joins our program…    We share the five things that keep companies from scaling.    The reality is, there are really five things that keep companies that should scale, from scaling.    And here's what I mean ‘companies that should scale…’    You know, if you go talk to most consultants, venture capitalists, investment bankers, accountants, lawyers, whatever, they'll give you this laundry list of why companies don't scale:    They didn't have enough money   They didn't have the right people   They didn't do all of these things   The reality is, if you look at most companies that should scale, there are five clear reasons why they don't…    So let me share them with you, but let me give you this caveat…    Here's what I mean by "should scale..."    If you've got a market    If you're capable of selling   If you could do more    If you know you're leaving money on the table   …. you should be scaling.   If those things aren't there for you right now, go resolve that and then start scaling.  Far too many people try and scale before they actually have all the steps in place.    Then you just build infrastructure that does nothing.   So let me tell you what the five things are...    #1: So number one, first and foremost, absolutely most crucial, is…      Most businesses don't have any type of strategic plan.     So as a result, there's no go-forward strategy, and here's what happens in a business when you don't have a go-forward strategy.    If you don't know where you're going, neither does your team   ... neither does anybody around you   And so you will, by virtue of math, become the biggest bottleneck in the company.    Here's why…    If there's no forward plan where all of us can point at and go get it and help you chase it down, every time we want to know what to do we have to ask you, and we have to go to you... and it's a death of a thousand paper cuts.    You're literally in a place where you're:    Telling people what to do   Checking that it got done   Telling them what to do again.    And if you've ever been in that situation as an entrepreneur, you know that somebody only has to ask you twice before you're ready to flip out and lose it.    Am I right Stephen?   STEVE: Yeah, yeah, usually once.   ALEX: Once, right, right, but by the second time you're like "Are you kidding me?"    And so the way we get past that is we create a clear strategic plan, we share it with our entire team…   ... and if the team knows where they're going, here's what happens.    I want you to understand something about the people coming to work for you.  If you're in a small business, you're hiring entrepreneurs.   I know that there's this saying in the market, "You're either an entrepreneur or you work for one."    I call complete and total BS - don't even bring that crap around me.   STEVE: Yeah!   ALEX:    Every person on my team is an incredibly talented, hyper-motivated, world-changing entrepreneur, they just choose to be part of a team.   And so you're gonna hire entrepreneurs, and the way you keep entrepreneurs absolutely and totally focused and excited, is you show them what they're hunting, you give them the kill.    You say:    Here's our plan   This is what we're doing   This is how you win.    And if you hire the right people, they will walk over hot glass to get to that destination for you.   STEVE: Yeah.   ALEX: But if they don't know where it is, you're gonna demotivate them and completely de-leverage them.    So number one, you have to have a strategic plan.    In my experience, less than 1% of businesses do. Also, less than 1% of businesses ever hit $100,000,000. In fact only 3% ever hit 1,000,000.   STEVE: Jesus. ALEX: So when you look at that, it's not 1% of businesses that hit 100,000,000, 0.01% of businesses ever hit 100,000,000,  and the reason is...    Most businesses don't know where they're going.    And Stephen, by you having the tools to build a strategic plan in your business, hasn't it changed how you approach things?   STEVE: Oh gosh, you guys remember when I tell you those stories of I left my job...    I created 200 grand of revenue really quick but there were no systems   I was the…    Support guy    Fulfillment guy   Sales guy.    I did every role, and I voluntarily, very painfully, had to turn down revenue to go build these structures.    And I want you all to know, it was Alex Charfen's stuff that helped me go in and actually set those systems in place... and so, please understand my affinity for this man and what he does.   About halfway through the year, I was only at like 300 - 400 grand, which is pretty good, but that last huge sprint came in because of the things that Alex Charfen and his team were teaching me.    All those planning things that I use, and all the things that I've just lightly mentioned, they've all come from Alex Charfen, and it helped scale me.   ALEX: That's awesome Stephen... Man, that makes me so proud.   This is so cool! Like there's only one Stephen Larsen in the world, and I told you that the first day I met you…    I'm like, "Dude you are completely and totally unique and I think I can help you build the company you really want."   STEVE: Yeah, you said   ALEX: And for us to be sitting here, and for you to say that, I got chills Stephen, that's so awesome. Thank you, man!   STEVE: Oh man, I'm so jazzed about what we do, but it's because of what you teach I'm like "I can do it... "    The first time I ever saw Stephen at an event, I did not leave the event until I'd cornered him and told him what I needed to tell him... because I knew you were gonna be exactly that type of person.    ...and here's why it's so important to me, Stephen.    I could tell the first time I saw you,  that you were gonna have a massive effect on the world.    But here's what I know about entrepreneurs; you're gonna have the biggest effect on the people closest to you - the people who are most proximal, your team.   And when I see an entrepreneur like you Stephen, I'm like:    "Man, if that guy builds a team he's gonna change hundreds of lives internally in his company. They're gonna change millions of lives externally, and I know those hundreds of people will build your legacy."    And when I see somebody like you, I'm like, “Man! That is the path, let me show you how to do this.”    The fact that it's working, is like, “Ah, it makes me so excited every day.”    This is why I get up out of bed every morning and do what I do.     STEVE: Ah, it's so fun man, feeling's mutual. You walked up, it was from that FHAT event that you were at.   ALEX: Ah ha.   STEVE: And you walked up and said, "There's a huge company in you and I don't think you know it, and I'm gonna help you pull it out of you."    I remember when you said that, I was so scared. I was like, "There's no way that this is real! I know who you are, are you kidding me?"    It freaked me out, and I had to own my own vision for a while. It actually took me a while to practice that.    Anyway, so much has gone on in mental clarity and development from what you've taught, not just these systems and things around, it's really cool.   ALEX: - So let's give the second one, Stephen   STEVE: Yeah, sorry, sorry.    ALEX: oh don't apologize, shit I love this part.    So first you have a strategic plan…    #2: Second, the thing that you need to have is      A system to communicate that plan.        Let me tell you something about us as entrepreneurs…    We think we're good communicators, but we're lying to ourselves.    The fact is, we are haphazard and emotional, and we're pumped one second and we're not the next, and we're all over the place…    Here's what happens…    When we have a team that has to deal with a personality like ours, and there's NOT a system for communication, it's random and haphazard and overwhelming... and it comes from all angles, and they're waiting for word from on high. Here's the fact, if you're the entrepreneur in charge, you're the MOST important person in the building all the time.    You're the most important person on the team, in the tribe, in the group, and they're all waiting to see what you say.    And if they're waiting for days and nothing's happened, they start thinking:    Is something wrong?    Did something go bad?    Did we do something wrong?    So you need a system.   As an example:    My team knows every Monday at 4:00, we're all gonna be on a weekly meeting together.  They also know every day at 9:27 a.m. we're gonna be on a daily huddle, and I'll be there.    They know that once a month we're gonna have a meeting where we show our strategic plan.    They know once a month we're gonna have a meeting where they all get the results.    So they all know when they're gonna communicate with me and how.    From the first day you're on our team there's a system that  controls how you hear from me.    Not just me pumping stuff out there haphazardly.    As a result, my team knows they're gonna hear from me, they trust it and here's what happens.    I set the expectations, I meet the expectations, we create trust. I create trust with my team every time I do that.    And here's the fact:   If your team trusts you, you get way more out of them.   If your team trusts you, they will do more for you.    If your team trusts you, you'll get discretionary effort   ... which means when they're driving, when they're showering, when they're doing something else, they're gonna be thinking about your business.  Why?    ...because it gives them momentum.    So if you have a strategic plan and a system to communicate it, you're ahead of 99% of companies out there.   And Stephen, same thing for you with the system, the structure?    Like…    We all fight structure, but once you put it in place, isn't it incredible?   STEVE: Oh, it's amazing! Stuff's getting done right now, that we set in place once. and then, I'll be like "Oh, podcast episode just launched,!Oh, what day is it? Oh, that's sweet! Everyone just put it out, all right, cool!"   ALEX: Right, I remember when I started getting messages like, "Hey, I love the new podcast!" And I'm like "Oh, we put a podcast out? Nice!"       STEVE: I didn't do that, what are you talking about?   ALEX: So you have  #1: a strategic plan, then #2: a system to communicate.    #3: Here's the third one, now this is BIG, really big, and most business owners just, they don't look at this ever and it's the biggest struggle is, or one of the biggest struggles is;      You have to have a system to consistently document the right processes in your business.     And by documentation, I mean having:    A flowchart   A process document   A checklist   Something that shows you how the important things in your business are done over and over again.    For example:    If you walk into a McDonald's, and you look above the fry cooker, there is a process to cook fries above that fry cooker.    Anything that happens in that McDonald's, there's a process for literally every single thing, including:    Unlocking the door   Turning off the alarm   Sweeping the floor   That's why there's a consistent experience at McDonald's; I'm not saying it's a good experience, I'm saying it's consistent.   In most businesses, in most entrepreneurial businesses, there's no process.    In fact, it's even scarier than that...    The process lives either in the owner's head or in an individual's head - so you lose a person, you lose the company.    You lose a person, you lose a big chunk of what you're doing.   STEVE: Hmm.   ALEX: So you have to have a system in a business to consistently evaluate what processes are in the company, and then on a monthly and weekly basis document the right ones.    The way that I would suggest you start, is you look at your customer experience:    What is the customer experience in your company?   What process documentation do you have to back it up to make sure that is completely consistent?    If you do that, you're gonna beat most people out there...   99% of entrepreneurial companies have little to nothing documented in any type of process.   STEVE: They're just shooting in random spots 24/7.   ALEX: Or they're doing stuff like, "Here's how we do our customer on-boarding…”    I trained Suzy   Suzy trained Annie   Annie trained Bob     John does it now   ...and you're like "Oh, cool! Let's go and see what John's doing?"    Well, John's doing nothing close to what Suzy and Bob and everybody else was originally doing, and so you have these degrading processes in your business.    And here's what happens…    When you look at entrepreneurial businesses, they tend to…    Go up in revenue   Come back down in revenue   Go up in revenue   Come back down.    If you're inside those companies, hundreds of times like I have been, here's what I can tell you…    Revenue goes up as the process is working, and then when it breaks, it comes back down.    *PERIOD*    That's why businesses don't continue to go forward - there are processes breaking in the business.    Whether it's marketing, sales, delivery, whatever it is there's a process breaking.    When you document your proceses, you make them bulletproof.    So in our business, we actually use:    Lucidchart Flowcharts   Sheets in Google Sheets    A new product called Process Street  -  a distributed, automated process document system, which is incredible.    So we have all of our processes in Process Street, and we have a distributed team around the world.   We have somebody in Ireland who can do their part of the process, as soon as they hit the last button it transfers to somebody here in the US who can do their part of the process.   STEVE: That's awesome.   ALEX:    Documenting your processes + Putting them in place = Game-changing   STEVE: Holy cow, okay I wrote that down.    I'm taking tons of notes so everyone knows, I hope they are as well…. And I'm not sharing! ;-) Process.st is the company, and we are so happy with it because... Stephen, here's what I want everyone to know,...   Cadey and I have had five businesses get over $10,000,000 a year, and all five of them ran them with paper checklists.   This is the first time we have automated checklists in Process Street.    The last information products business that we had, we literally had three-ring binders that we would carry around the office and check stuff off.    Having a three-ring binder with a process was so much better than having somebody trying to do it from memory.    Now with Process Street, we can distribute that three-ring binder, and I can get reporting on who's doing what.   STEVE: That's amazing.    Yeah, I've actually seen the three-ring binder and I've thought, "Holy crap, that really is how he's doing it.”    You would teach it and then I watched you actually do it.. 'cause you would record your stand up meeting calls in the morning   ALEX: Yeah.   STEVE: And I was, "Oh my gosh, that's so cool! I'm NOT doing that, interesting."    Then I’d go back and take notes and start it.   ALEX: And then implement.    Well, and you know, there's this phrase in the entrepreneurial world. Ah... I kind of get a little triggered, right!   STEVE: Let it out, baby!   ALEX: You know the thing that people say from stage:   "Here's what I want all of you to know. All you have to do is stop working in your business and start working on your business."    And I'm always like:    "Oh, good, thanks. Thanks for solving it all for us dude, that was awesome. You just solved all my problems with that really cliched BS thing that everybody tells entrepreneurs."     When I was in my twenties, my instant thought was like, "How do I get on stage to punch that guy in the face?"    And my then my second thought was like, "What a load of crap!  If I don't work in the business nobody's answering the phones, sucker."    Like, what's going on here? I don't know how to make that change.    And so the way you make that change is…    Working on the business means documenting processes.    By making it:    Clear   Repeatable   Real   And so you have…    A strategic plan that everyone understands   A communication system everyone knows is gonna happen    A system for documenting processes so everyone can repeat what's going on with your clients   #4: The next step,(and this is BIG), is..    A consistent system for identifying, documenting, and then prioritizing the right project in the business.   STEVE: Ah, this changed my life. *HARDCORE*   ALEX: Whoa, Stephen, you know how game-changing this is because, here's the problem in most businesses…    Projects are selected emotionally.    Period, I can't tell you that they're done any other way - they're emotional.    You go to an event and somebody says "I'm doing this thing," and then, the next day, you're doing that thing.    You listen to a podcast or you hear a webinar, and the person says "Hey, I added this thing to my business," and the next day, you're trying to do that thing.    In our business, if I have a really great idea that I want to implement today…    If I'm like, "Man, this is a really high sense of urgency, we should get this implemented."    It'll probably be somewhere around 45 days, and I'm totally okay with that.    That's the timing it should be in my business.    Now if there's an emergency we're gonna fix it that day, but if I'm like, "Hey, I see an opportunity here with something," it's probably a 45-day event…    Why?    I have a team and a structure, and a plan, and we have a system that's moving forward. We're already hitting our numbers, why would I mess with anything?    I actually protect what's going on in the business   I add things gently   I add things carefully   I make sure my team's into it too    I make sure we have consensus    In just in the last 60 days, we've gone from two million recurring to two point three million recurring,   STEVE: That's awesome!   ALEX: So why would I mess with what we're doing?   STEVE: Yeah.   ALEX: Yeah, so when somebody's like "Hey Alex, I got this "great idea for your business." I'm like "Awesome, get in line."    And we'll put it into our system to see if we want to actually do this…   Because the fact is…    If you're getting sold as an entrepreneur on what your next project should be, you're probably in the wrong place.    STEVE: Yeah, that's fascinating. I really agree with that.    It was your planning system for figuring out which projects, I still do it.    Top of every three months and it has guided everything we do.    And while I do follow a few rabbits and I'm practicing bringing it back in, we still largely follow the plan as to what the business needs, and that's ‘grow and scale’ rather than this impulse of like:    "Yeah, oh shiny object, shiny object, "that looks good, that looks good!"    And it's been that discipline, that's the other thing that's always up is my waterfall...   ALEX: Yeah, yeah, always! I mean mine's up right now. I mean I could share it right now.   And the reason is I always have my strategic plan pulled up in front of me, I'm looking at it every single day.    I'm asking myself:   Is the team doing what we need to do here?   How do I support people more?    How do I help them do this more?   Because when you look at our strategic plan, here's what it's made up of.    Our one-year outcomes   Our client-centric mission - which is our Superbowl, our hall of fame, the long term   The 90-day projects we're focusing on right now    What we're doing this month to hit those targets . So that waterfall of long term, to one year, to 90 days, to 30 days, I can see it all on one document and it tells me EXACTLY where I should be supporting the team and what we're getting done.    And so here's what happens…   I went to an event a couple of weeks ago, and I had an idea that was like "Oh man, we have to do this."    Then I come back to the office, I look at the waterfall and I'm like "What do I want to kill in order to do this thing over here?"    And you know what the evaluation was? *NOTHING* I'm not going to take anything off this, that would be crazy.   There's no way I'm gonna go to my team and say, "Hey guys, in addition to all the other stuff you're committed to, here's a hot potato."    I just backed down and I waited till the next time we had a planning meeting and I said, "Hey, there's this thing I think we should do."    We evaluated it   It went into the system   It went into the plan    There is very little knee-jerk reaction in our company because we are going so fast in a forward direction, that for me to challenge that in any way it has to be game-changing at a different level - so it rarely even happens.   STEVE: Yeah, black-ops right? Call them black-ops?   ALEX: Black-ops.   STEVE: No black-ops!   ALEX: No black-ops, baby!  If it's NOT on the plan, you don't do it... or it's black-ops.    And usually, the biggest creators of black-ops are guys like Stephen and I.    So my team has an open license to tell me if I'm doing black-ops.    They will actually call me out in a huddle, in a meeting, they'll be like "Ah, this sounds like black-ops," and then we'll make a note, we'll put it in a parking lot and do it later.    STEVE: Oh, that's so cool, okay.   ALEX: Yeah,  that's one of the most important things you can do when you have a team Stephen…    You train your team to criticize you and then you congratulate them when they do.   STEVE: That's really cool, then they have a license to actually flex their brain instead of feeling like they're in a box.   ALEX: Absolutely. You know I heard a story once about Larry Page, who runs Google,   He was in a meeting and he really strongly stated a point. and one of the team members got emotional about it and started yelling at him.    She was like, "I think you're wrong and this is why you're wrong," and Page was smiling…   Afterward, she asked somebody "Hey why was he smiling?"    ‘Cause she backed him down, and he actually said "You know what, I think this deserves more investigation. Let's do this."    She walked out and she was shaking and all adrenalized up, she had just yelled at the CEO of Google, like, “What the heck's gonna happen to me?”   She turned to somebody next to her, and was like "He was smiling, is that because he's gonna come down hard on me?"    And the person was like, "No, he was smiling because you confronted him, he loves it, he wants it.”    He knows that if people aren't confronting him, he's in a bad place.   So I look at it in my team and I'm like, "Hey, if my team's not challenging me a little bit, then we're all just marching behind a duck."    You know, I don't wanna have ducklings behind me. I want people who are saying:    Hey, this might work   This might not work   We might have a better idea   So you give your team license to criticize and license to call you on stuff.   STEVE:  Gosh, I love that.   #5: So here's the fifth one...    So we have:    Strategic plan   Communication system   Selecting and documenting the right processes   Selecting and achieving the right projects,   ….and then, this is *BIG*   Finding the right people     It's NOT just finding the right people, its…    Evaluating the company   Understanding what the company needs right now    What can you offload that is going to create the most momentum, not just for you, but for the team, for everything that you're doing together?    What is the position that you need to put in place next - so that the company moves forward the fastest?    And unfortunately, just like everything else I've named, planning, projects, process, all of those... people also become emotional.    An entrepreneur wakes up one morning and says, "I'm doing too much, I'm gonna hire an assistant."    Then they have the assistant sit next to them for three weeks, and they wonder why this doesn't work out?    It's because you had the thought to get help, (which by the way I congratulate you on), but there was no process there to actually make it work.    And so here's the process you need…   Evaluate what's going on in the company   Understand what the company needs   Turn it into a job description    Then you use it to recruit   You do tons of interviewing   You drive it until you have three people that you can select from    You hire one of them and then you do at least a 90-day onboarding, high-intensity onboarding.    When I'm onboarding an executive team member, I meet with them every day for the first month, three times a week for the second month, and two times a week for the third month.    People tell me, "Hey man, doesn't that "feel like overkill?"    I'm like:    You don't understand what it means to have an executive team. Your job is to build relationships with those people.    You want to know how you build relationships?    There's one commodity that builds relationships. One!    *TIME* - that's it.    And so when I'm onboarding, when I'm bringing somebody on, (whether it's on my executive team or anywhere in the business), somebody is doing that high-intensity onboarding with them…    Up close and personal every single day for the first 30 days making sure we have no drift.    And so, when you have a system to select the right people, bring them on and then onboard them the right way…    Here's what you avoid, (and Stephen this is like, Ah, this statistic drives me crazy)...    In corporate America, I know because I used to be a consultant there.    In corporate America, they would say things like, "Well we just hired so-and-so in that position so they'll probably be productive in four to six months."   The first time I heard that I was like "Did he just say four to six months? Does he mean four to six days, or does he really mean four to six months?"    Because in my business, even way back then), if I had to wait four months for somebody to be productive I would have been, “They're gone”!   STEVE: Yeah, yeah, they're gone!   ALEX: And so in our business, we actually have this experience right now.    We recently brought on somebody else, a new person to help us in marketing, and with our onboarding process, he was actually achieving products within the first five days of his first week.   STEVE: That's so cool!   ALEX: And that's how it should be.    You want somebody to come in, be effective and start contributing and creating momentum.    Because here's what will happen…    As an entrepreneur, if you're wired anything like I am, (and I know Stephen is), if you have somebody on your team that starts to feel like they're not carrying their own weight, you won't sleep.    You won't sleep, it will rip you apart, Stephen am I right?   STEVE: Yeah! ALEX: It will destroy you…    And so here's the question though…   Are they not carrying their own weight because:   They're lazy? They don't want to?   They aren't the right person?    Or is it because it's not clear what they’re doing?   STEVE: They have no idea what they're doing. They don't have confidence...I didn't help them!    ALEX: Right, 'cause here's the thing.    Your team needs three things in order to ultimately be effective and to be the type of team you want.    And here's what I mean by that…    As an entrepreneur here's what you want, you want a team that just does stuff and asks permission later.    You want a team that achieves and lets you know how things worked out.    That's it!  I just know this is how entrepreneurs work.    You want people who make really good decisions.    You want people who move things forward.    You want people who don't stand around waiting for stuff.    And if you want to have a team that actually moves things forward as an entrepreneur…    You gotta spend the time with them and let 'em know what your ethos is, and let 'em know how you make decisions…   That's how you duplicate decision making.   STEVE: Hm, gosh I love that. Okay, so…   Strategic plan   System to communicate   System to document processes that can be shared inside the whole biz    Documenting projects and the ones you're gonna work on   Finding the right people   ...and I actually personally just went through your onboarding training and it's so awesome!    'Cause it goes through and it's like this, you basically create a runway for 'em, right?   And if they don't land, don't worry you've got parachutes and there are jumpy cords all over the place...   - you're doing everything you can to help 'em win fast and lots of small tiny wins that build that confidence, and I was like:    "That is brilliant. 'Cause that is not the way you're taught anywhere else.”   ALEX: So Stephen, check this out, man.    We recently fell out of the lucky tree on recruiting and we hired this guy named Greg Duby and he is, ah, amazing.    He's like, he's just one of the most exciting guys I've ever worked with because he's so solid and so centered, and just so good at what he does.    Greg is a former nuclear propulsion tech in the Navy, so you know what that is, that's the guy who rides the bomb around in the submarine, okay?   STEVE: Yeah, that's amazing!   ALEX: Yeah, you have to have advanced degrees in Physics, advanced degrees in Math.   He's literally a rocket scientist.    So he worked in the Navy, then he worked at NASA, then he worked for some of the larger consulting firms out there…    I mean, he's done incredible stuff in his career.    He's just one of the most solid people I've ever worked with, and within about two or three weeks into our company, in one of our daily huddles, we said, "Who got caught being awesome?"    It's where we call each other out, and he said:    You know, I just wanna call this company out for being awesome.   “ I've been here for three weeks, I've never had an experience like this getting on-boarded anywhere...    I'm up and running, I'm excited. I feel like I'm really part of the team. I feel like I've worked here forever and I'm three weeks in."    And this is somebody who worked at some of the best consulting firms in the world, NASA and the Navy!    And our little tiny company has impressed him so much because we did onboarding because he knew what he was supposed to do.    And as a result, Greg, I think we're about three months in with him, and dude, there are projects that I thought were gonna take a year or two that are getting done this week.   STEVE: That's so cool!   ALEX: It's crazy.   STEVE: It's just a completely different way to do it. One thing I hated in the military, I love the military, but you know, some things that are rough and that is that there are no clear guidelines on how to win ahead of time.   The way you're instructed is by hitting barriers and then you get punished for it, and you're like:    "Just tell me ahead of time and I wouldn't do it! But all right, let's do more push-ups."    Anyway...   ALEX: Something tells me you did a lot of push-ups, Steve!   STEVE: I just want to say thank you so much for being on here.    I asked for 30 minutes and you just completely over-delivered, and I just really want to say thank you to you.    My audience already knows very well of you.    Where can people go to learn more about you but specifically also get your help inside the business?   ALEX: So the best place to learn more about us is to go to our podcast.    I publish a podcast four days a week, which is essentially a one-on-one conversation with an entrepreneur growing a business.    And the way that I create each one of those episodes is when a question or issue comes up in our coaching groups, I create an episode around it, we distribute it to the group.    But then also we distribute it to anybody who's listening, so you can get the same coaching that I'm giving my high-level clients right on our podcast…    It's called Momentum for the Entrepreneurial Personality Type, and you can check it out at momentumpodcast.com.    And then, if you want to understand more about our products, about our coaching groups you can go to our website charfen.com, but better is to just reach out to me or to one of my team members through Facebook.    The easiest thing, is just reach out to me, and I'll connect you with the right person in our company, and we'll go through a process with you to help you understand if we can help you.    You know Stephen, we're pretty neat, we don't sell everybody. We actually get on the phone with a lot of people who we sell later, but we won't sell you unless it's time.    We know exactly what solutions we provide, and if you have those issues and they link up, then we'll work together... but we go through a personal inventory in order to help you do that.    So if anybody's interested in getting on a call with a member of my team, you can also shortcut the entire process by going to billionairecode.com…    Answer a few questions and you can just set up a call link and you'll be on a call with one of my team members and they'll help you qualify and understand where you are.    And just so you know, we don't do sales calls, they are all consulting calls.    When you get on a call with my team, you won't ever feel like you're being sold, you'll feel like you're being helped.   STEVE: Which is exactly what I have felt when I started doing that as well.    Just so you all know he's very serious about that - that's very real.    I always feel like I'm being helped by anyone on his team.    ...and come to find out later, "Oh that was the sales guy!"    ...You know what I mean?    They dare to go in and actually they want to change the world and they're very serious about it.    So thank you so much, appreciate it.    Check out Billionaire Code.    The Momentum podcast is a goldmine, it is one of those gems on the internet that is actually worth all of your time and attention.    Thanks so much for being on here, Alex, I really appreciate you and love you, and thank you for being on here.   ALEX: Stephen, dude, this has been an honor.    I hope to be able to get invited back again, and as a Sales Funnel Radio listener, this is really cool. I appreciate you, man!   STEVE: Thanks, I appreciate it!    Hey, awesome episode right?    Hey, once I figured out the simple patterns and formulas that make this game work, I had a new problem…    Back when I eventually left my job and launched my personal business, I sold about $200,000 of product in around three months-ish…    And while I thought I was King Kong, a new problem started.    I was the business, there weren't any systems...   I was support   I was fulfillment    I was the one in charge of getting the ads around   I was the sales department    I was the marketing department    And I knew I wouldn't survive it alone…    Better yet, I knew I'd never seen a rich solopreneur.    This game takes a team.    Contrast that to now, and my company does tons of stuff that I don't know how to do...    What changed?    His name is Alex Charfen, check him out at charfenrocks.com.     So I usually don't bring tons of people on Sales Funnel Radio, but you should know that his programs, combined with my marketing skills, are why my business is killing it in revenue today, and NOT killing me personally.    Alex Charfen's programs and training have been life-changing for me and my family... and taught me who I really am and what I'm meant to be.    So when you're ready to build an actual business, an actual asset and NOT just make this another job…    When you're ready to keep the role of entrepreneur but learn the role of CEO, go get started with Alex Charfen at charfenrocks.com. That's C-H-A-R-F-E-N rocks.com.

Boom! What's going on everyone? It's Steve Larsen, and this is Sales Funnel Radio.   Today, I'm gonna teach you guys why branding comes second.   I've spent the last four years learning from the most brilliant marketers today, and now I've left my nine to five to take the plunge and build my million dollar business.   The real question is, how will I do it without VC funding or debt, completely from scratch? This podcast is here to give you the answer.   Join me and follow along as I learn, apply, and share marketing strategies to grow my online business using only today's best internet sales funnels.   My name is Steve Larsen, and welcome to Sales Funnel Radio.   Alright you guys, I know that I'm probably gonna ruffle some feathers with this episode. I totally get that. I totally understand. I'm not trying to, but I  feel so strongly about this that if someone gets offended like, “Hmm... Okay! You know, alright... sounds good!”   So it was about six years ago, I had the unique opportunity of going and pitching some actual investors to invest in a business plan that I'd written. Now, this is before I ever had considered the fact that maybe VC funding wasn't always the best route... depending on what you were doing.   Maybe I didn't need to get funding. Maybe I didn't need to give up ownership in a company just to get it going, right?   And what was interesting is.... that was before I learned about any of this stuff.   I've always been very active in this sphere though... And so I was doing what I thought was best.   So what I did is... I remember we went and we wrote, I think it was like a 30-page business plan for the real estate space. It was with a buddy of mine, and he and I (as well as a few others), we came up with this plan.   It was this really cool real estate strategy. His dad was a kind of a real estate mogul, kind of. He was taking us under his wing a little bit, and he was showing us some cool, neat ways to (I think it was storage units) off-set costs with these clever strategies.   And it was cool - it was really cool.   Anyway, so we were excited about it; we're like, "Sweet! What if we just asked for the amount of investment that it would cost for us to go get a down payment on one of these properties? Let's just try it."   And cool enough, the professor we were doing this class with was facilitating the whole process. So the professor went and he actually grabbed these investors, so we did it in front of a live panel of investors.   We had a cool and unique opportunity of going in, and we did the exact process that you see on Shark Tank...without as much drama.   There was no slow motion, and there wasn't any slow-mo 'staring at each other looks' before anyone said anything - like on CNBC. But it was still awesome.   I remember we sat there, and we got to watch as each group would present their business plan; how much they believed their company was worth, give a percentage of the company away in exchange for an investment amount. Then watch them as they would defend why that was an awesome idea, and why they should get the cash, and why they had great numbers. You know, things like that.   It was really, really cool and I learned a lot and understood how all of that works. And it's really helped me even in my funnel building, funny enough. Even though I don't go that route.   So what was interesting is like, as I started doing that stuff they told us, "Hey, if somebody goes in and it truly is amazing - they will actually invest." And I was like, "Sweet, alright!"   Well, we get up there, and we start talking and stuff like that, and I remember that there were these different elements in creating this. It was like a 30-page business plan. It was very, very professional looking. We did everything from a SWOT analysis, (if you guys know what that is). All the standard stuff that you're supposed to do when creating a business plan and analyzing a market.  Which is 100% different than I do it now. Anyway, very fascinating...   I don't think any of us got any kind of investment. We did really well all of one of us. It was awesome in front of that board. Anyway, none of us got any kind of investment or anything like that. But we did that actually multiple times because of what I had studied.   I actually really do appreciate the college I went to on all this stuff. They did a great job for what they had, right? No one really teaches direct response marketing. That's kind of something you have to go learn on your own, you know what I mean? There's not like a major for that. No one's teaching that stuff, you know what I'm saying. For what they had it was awesome, I get it...   There were multiple occasions though where we pitched. I wrote a ton of business plans in college. And they were all very, very similar. We would go in and we would - there was a format we were following, and then we would go, and we would present it, whether it was just a professor or kinda like a dummy panel or a real panel. We did that many times, multiple times.   I started getting good at defending ideas back and forth for that. And when we actually started doing it for real... Colton and I, sitting over there, we actually went - we did it with a business that he and I were doing. We ended up winning the business competition in our college, and they sent us off to another college to go do it. We totally didn't win, but it was a good experience. It was a bunch of fun, and we learned a lot.   Now you say, "Stephen, what does that have to do with branding?" Well, there was always a moment in creating these business plans where you're like," Crap, I got this idea. What represents my idea? We need a logo. What's our slogan? What's our mission statement? What's this, what's that?" And we would spend so much time on those things that it actually ended up being a distraction of what actually caused value in that company. I see so much of the same pattern now...   The reason why I have such a war against branding is because it doesn't matter for a long time. It really doesn't.   Most of the time when I go, and I start creating something like a brand, man I go to a site, and I will buy a little logo that I think looks cool. I'll switch the colors around, so it looks somewhat okay, and in 15 minutes I have a logo! I do that all the time.   There's only like three or four logos I've ever had professionally created. But it's not until there's cash raining that I even think about that stuff.   What's interesting about that is that issue of branding comes up very frequently. In fact, you can see this on Shark Tank all the time. There was a lady I was watching, it was on Shark Tank. She came up, and she had the product there in front of her. I love watching Shark Tank. She had the product there in front of her.   She had a beautiful display... an amazing display with her stuff. There was the slogan; "This is what we're gonna do that's different." And cool, that was awesome... But then here comes the dreaded question they always ask, "Now, tell us what your numbers are." They go, "Well, we just started this three months ago." And you always see the faces.  You're like, "Oh, crap!" I'm sure they just add those in because of straight drama. They never invest in them. And it's because it's not worth anything.   And you hear the way entrepreneurs who are brand new defend their products. And they always, well not always, but a lot of times their defense comes back to things like branding: "Well we got a great logo. We got a great color scheme. We got a great..."   It's not uncommon to hear that kind of a phrase when somebody's defending their idea. "Well we got the logo done, we got the... " This has happened many times.   I told you guys it took me about 17 tries to really get a business right. Many of those early 17 tries before I knew what I was doing, I would spend literally two or three days looking through different logos trying to figure out which one was the best to represent the company, rather than, "How do we sell the thing?" Totally different question! It's so funny how different it is.   There's so many stories that are running through my head about this topic. Recently, somebody reached out, and they said, "You know what, Stephen? You could do a lot better if your personal branding was better. I'm a personal branding expert." I was like, "Cool. I REALLY don't care!" And they're like, "What are you talking about?" This like a year ago, and I was like, "I REALLY don't care. Personal branding doesn't mean a thing to me for a while." And they're like, "No, the personal branding is what represents you." I was like, "No, my products represent me. My stories represent me. My podcast represents me. My branding does not."   I just barely got this backdrop. We just barely got these sweet intros and outros.  Does branding matter? Yes. But not for a long time. Not for a while.   You can go back listen to Russell Brunson's courses. You can go back and see lots of guys courses that are out there, and they all say the same thing.   This is when branding actually matters. If you got hot traffic, warm traffic, cold traffic. Branding tends to matter more to hot traffic. Hot and warm, kind of in that realm. When you get to a warm/ cold - that kind of scenario -where people don't know who you are anyway, it really doesn't matter as much as we wish it did. It's the reason why I build the pages, and just kind of like, "Alright, let's ship it."   We went through, and we grabbed the top 100 funnels that are converting the most in ClickFunnels. For the most part, they're all pretty butt-ugly funnels. I mean like really! And almost all of them. It was like 95 of the 100 - absolutely not design pretty. Absolutely not. Does this make sense what I am saying? Does this make sense what I'm trying to say with this whole thing?   I've been geeking out on an author lately. He's become one of my favorite authors. His name is Christopher Lochhead. I think that's how you say his last name. Anyway, he talks about how, for a small 'e' entrepreneur, branding comes so far down the road. In fact, actually, let me grab the quote right here; it's super awesome. I read this on a plane. I like to either read or write on a plane.   Anyway, he says' "Quite bluntly, branding, in the absence of category creation is bs." He doesn't say "BS...", He says "Quite bluntly though, branding in the absence of category creation is bs." He says, "Categories make brands." Categories make brands.   Branding comes after category creation.   If you are like, "Hey, you know what, I'm gonna go into..." I don't know, think about anything where there's super high competitive. Let's say you're gonna go into the BizOp space. Let's say you're gonna sell wealth. And let's say you're gonna go sell real estate. And let's say in order for you to be successful in real estate, you're like, "I'm gonna become a real estate agent." Does that make sense?   You're gonna be wealthy because you're gonna go into real estate and you're gonna go into real estate by becoming a real estate agent - sweet.   Now, if you are doing literally the exact same thing as everybody else, why on earth are you going to make a brand? That's not going to set you apart very well. What sets you apart is figuring out how to be different than everyone else.   I'm not saying branding different. I'm saying what are you physically doing differently to collect leads than every other agent? What are you physically doing differently to close leads that's different than every other agent? What are you physically doing that's different to follow up, to up-sell... if you do up-sell? Does that make sense?   Then think about branding, right? You don't have a freaking business. Why would you spend money on something like a brand? Do you know what I mean?   There have been multiple times where I'll go in, and I'm not going to name names, but start looking, kay. And you go in, and these people have these beautiful personal brands... And I can't figure out what the heck they sell? Start diving in deeply, and you find out they don't even have a product yet. But man, they have spent five thousand dollars hiring the great people to make them look awesome. And I'm like, "Sweet! That is a lot of smoke and mirrors."   Again, I'm not trying to throw rocks, but I don't really care if you feel it because I'm so forward on this topic. Categories make brands.   It's kind of like in the book, Expert Secrets The idea is not to choose a niche. The idea is to create a niche. Another word for a niche is "market" or "category."   Go create a market that doesn't exist. Go create a category that's never existed before. Do something, come up with a category that truly is unique. And the way you move people into that category is by using what I've called the purple offer.   You use elements from the red - so there's a place of security for them (and you) 'cause it's like it's proven. But then you lace in these other things from this category that's never existed before... from things that have never existed before, and you start moving them this way.   There's a super cool... I think it was another Shark Tank thing. These guys were like mechanical engineers. They were extremely smart. I think they had gotten at their least Masters or Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering or something like that. I think the company's called Pop Cards.   I have one over there. I got one for my wife for her birthday. They're super cool.   What they figured out is that they could use cool machine lasering and stuff like that to create these 3D pop-up cards. And people are like, "Why did you get that much education to create a card company?" That's a good question, right? Why would you ask that? You look at these things and they're gorgeous. It's absolutely, it's breathtaking.   You open these things up, and it's extremely intricate. A lot of math involved in what they've done. Anyway, super, super cool what they've done. They created something that's never been done before. "NOW let's think about branding!" Does that make sense? So it's in that order that I like to do it.   First create the category that's never existed before, now the brand.   Music even, I was just talking about this with Russell yesterday. There is a band I really, really like. I've followed their music for years. I found out that he likes a song from them too. I was like, "What's up, that's really cool.” And I messaged him and said the reason why they're so big and so popular, (their name is Odezsa). The reason they are so popular, and they're such a big deal is because they kind of created a category of music that's never existed before - so they were the obvious owner of it. Then they made branding.   You look at all their branded stuff and it's amazing, it's incredible. But they didn't have any of that branding before they launched. It doesn't matter. What matters is figuring out which category, which niche, which market you can create to be the first in... and then next go to the branding.   So anyways, without saying the same thing over and over again, that's the main point of this podcast. That's the reason why when somebody's like, "What should my logo be?" I'm like, "I don't freakin’ care." I will never have a business card. I don't understand them. Why do I need a business card? Why do I need these little tiny things, unless it is part of a little marketing campaign - that I've done...   Last year at Funnel Hacking Live, I made my dad business cards... but with a QR code that was his bait. They scanned the QR code and got his cool free bait, and it started them into the funnel. That makes sense right? But just a freaking name and email... Man, they could get on my Facebook profile.   Anyway, so that's my whole beef with it. When someone's like, "Oh, man, this page, you could design it better. You could do this over here." I'm like, "You know what? This page gets 65% opt-in rate. I don't really care to touch it."  And I know it's NOT because of how it looks that it's converting. Guys,  I'm trying to clear the smoke on my opinions on this topic 'cause several people have reached in asking about it. It's not a personal attack or anything, but literally from a sales or marketing standpoint. Marketing is NOT branding. It's not.   Marketing is the act of changing beliefs with the intent for a purchase to happen. That's all marketing is. I'm changing someone's beliefs with the intent for them to make a purchase. That's what marketing is. Branding is NOT marketing, it's not. Facebook ads are not marketing. They can be part of it, just like branding can be part of marketing, but it's NOT marketing.   I'm trying to get clear on these definitions with people. I actually might do a definitions podcast here soon - which I think would be really, really cool. Just so that you see where I operate from and why my stuff is working. I know the three or four terms that I focus on that make the money flow. And when I take my eye away from 'em, and I start looking at things like branding - that's when my money usually starts decreasing.   For all the hot traffic, for all the follow-up sales, for repeat purchases - branding can start to matter more for sure. Absolutely. People will want that kind of professional feel depending on what you are doing. They want to know that it was created with intent - that it's not haphazard. But when it comes down to a lot of my front-end stuff... That's why I didn't upgrade the podcast for a long time.  Do you know what I mean? It didn't matter, it didn't matter for a long time.   Recently, I've gone through, and we've done a pretty strong rebranding of a lot of my front end stuff. We've got chatbots in place now. Everything's tied together. A lot of value ladder steps, I'm getting them into place in both businesses, especially in one of them - where it's a lot more automation - I'm going in, and I'm creating systems and processes to remove me.   Now it's time to think about branding.   Now, it's time to think about creating more of that feeling and that experience as well. We're upgrading the package that we ship out to people when they buy products. The actual physical box, we've got logos we put on it rather than just a normal envelope. For a while, a normal envelope was fine.   People will act like branding is like this lock-gate for them to make money. It's not, and it's not the reason someone's not buying from you. It's not.   Go back to the sales message. Go back to the fundamentals. Do I have a sales message that's compelling? Do I have an offer that over-delivers both to the customer and my wallet? Because you don't have to compete on price when you have a good offer.   And then when those are all confirming that they're great and the cash is coming in... when you can go do all the tweaks you want to on the funnel  - and it's still working. You got cool sustainable traffic. Then think about a little rebrand and branding itself.   So anyway guys, I hope that's helpful to you. And hopefully, it clarifies a little bit about why I look at things that I do. When I'm building a page, I'll kind of make it, so the layout makes it easy to consume the text - so you can see more of the sales message. But that doesn't have anything to do really with colors. It really doesn't.   Thanks, guys so much. Hopefully, that makes sense to you, guys? Remember categories make brands. Branding in the absence of category creation and in the absence of niche or market creation is bs. It's a waste of time. It's not the reason why things convert.   All right guys thank you so much.   Hopefully, you guys enjoyed the episode and we'll see you in the next one, bye. Woohoo! Hey, thanks for listening.   Hey, many of you don't actually know that I made my first money online as an affiliate marketer. If you want to know how I funded my entire company without using any of my own money EVER, you can learn to do the same for FREE at affiliateoutrage.com.

Haha, what's up, guys? This is Steve Larsen.   This is Sales Funnel Radio, and before we cue the intro here, I want you to know, this episode for me was really special.   I interview an incredible entrepreneur. Her name is Natalie Hodson. She's fantastic. I love learning and studying from her.   She's gonna talk about some things that went on kinda crazy in her life, and how to leverage the crazy things inside of your life for your audience - particularly around the subject of vulnerability.   So this is how to be vulnerable without looking like you're weak, right? And for a lot of guys, that's super important.   For a lot of selling in general, that's super important - the purpose is not to look like you're weak.   So anyways, let's cue the intro here. I hope you guys enjoy it, and if you have liked this, please reach out to her and say thank you. She puts some really amazing things out.   Thanks, guys, so much, and see you on the episode.   I've spent the last four years learning from the most brilliant marketers today, and now I've left my nine to five to take the plunge and build my million-dollar business.   The real question is, how will I do it without VC funding or debt, completely from scratch? This podcast is here to give you the answer.   Join me and follow along as I learn, apply, and share marketing strategies to grow my online business using only today's best internet sales funnels.   My name is Steve Larsen, and welcome to Sales Funnel Radio. What's going on, everyone?   Hey, it's Steve Larsen, and I'm really excited to have you here today.   Stephen: I have someone that I've been trying to get on the podcast for a very long time - because I just think the world of her. It's been super amazing to get to know this person. Anyways, I'm excited about it.   The first time that I got to hear this story,  it was heart-wrenching for me to see, not just everything that had happened, but the inspiration that it's causing in other people's lives.   The way it's changing other people's lives is a huge deal.   It was fascinating for me to see that this is real, you know, this is a big deal.   I already knew that, but just to continue to watch it in application... I was like, "Gosh, the thousands and thousands and thousands of lives that it's changed."   It's my incredible honor and privilege to have you on the show. Guys, I wanna welcome Natalie Hodson. How are you doing?   Natalie - Hey, thank you so much, Stephen. That was an amazing intro.   Stephen - I mean it.   Natalie -  I'm so excited to be here too. I've watched your stuff, and I've binge listened to all your podcasts. Your advice has helped me so much, so it's like a win-win. I'm excited - you're excited. It's awesome.   Stephen - Oh, I appreciate it. Thank you very much.  I know a lot of people may not know about you yet, and frankly, it's just a matter of time... I think everyone's gonna know who you are.   Natalie - Aw, thank you.   Stephen - Could you tell us a little bit about your story, and kind of the background, 'cause it's inspiring, and...   Natalie - Yeah.   Stephen - There's obviously funnels in there, but that's a vehicle for this whole thing. You're changing people's lives, and I'd love you to grace my audience with that... that'd be great.   Natalie - Totally. Well, there's a long version and a short version. I'll try to keep it towards the short version, but I tend to be long-winded.   So at any point, if you're like, "Natalie, take it this direction," you know...   Stephen - We have happy ears.   Natalie - So I'm in the fitness space. But I always say that I accidentally fell into the fitness industry because I was a history major in school. I didn't know:   #1: That there even was a fitness industry   #2: That I ever wanted to be a part of it.   After I had my son, I gained 70 pounds when I was pregnant with him. I was like big, out here. He was a 10-pound baby.   Stephen - 70 pounds?   Natalie - Yeah, I was really big. And after I had him, I remember feeling lost. I remember looking in the mirror and feeling like, "I don't even recognize myself... I just wanted to feel like myself again," and it wasn't even so much about the weight. I just didn't feel like me.   So I started a blog, and honestly, it was like an online journal - just as a way to keep me accountable for my fitness stuff.   I didn't tell a single person that I knew in real life, because I was embarrassed.  I didn't want the people I knew to know what I was struggling.   This was when Pinterest very first got started, about eight years ago.  I just started sharing...   I like to cook, so I started sharing healthy recipes, and I started putting them on Pinterest.   And honestly, if you look at my first pins back then, they were taken with a flip phone, just awful photos, but luckily for me, now people are taking gorgeous pictures for me.   So I started to get a lot of traffic to my website.   Stephen - You were just kinda documenting what you were doing?   Natalie - I was just documenting what I was doing and sharing.   This was right when Facebook groups weren't even a thing, and I started a Facebook group with this training program I was doing. I started sharing my ups and my downs, just because I felt like it was a safe space.   I was really vulnerable and telling, you know, my struggles; like I got called out of the gym daycare again - just like real struggles, you know?   I was struggling with all this stuff. And so, I did that 12-week program, and had awesome results, and got some recognition from bodybuilding.com.   I was getting a lot of traffic to my site. So I was like, man, if I'm getting traffic, I might as well monetize it. So I got certified as a personal trainer and started writing - I wrote a couple of ebooks.  I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't how to write an ebook. I just kind of figured it out as I went.   Stephen - Yeah.   Natalie - And then, I started recognizing, basically, like, long story short, what happened is one day...   I was at an event, and this girl came up to me. And she's like, "I love following your stuff! I could never do what you do, because I have stretched skin after I had my babies, and I could never look like you."   I got really confused in the moment, 'cause I was like, "What are you talking about? I have tons of stretched skin."   And then I started realizing that, I don't share that. I have all these beautiful professional photos where I stand up straight, and I angle myself just right so you can't see it, right?   Stephen - Right, yeah.   Natalie - Posture and perfect looking. I started realizing, like, "Holy crap," in my head, I look down, and I'm like, "Oh, yeah, I have stretched skin, whatever," but I wasn't like, showing that to anybody else.   And so, that night, I pulled out my camera, and I filmed this video,  just saying to people, "Look, I recognize that I've never shown you... this is what that looks like."   People talk about that a lot, but this was six years ago, and really, nobody was talking about it.   I remember the first time I posted that video, my hand was shaking. I thought I was gonna lose every follower I had. But I was like, "I know that if I'm struggling with this, other people are too."   Stephen - Yeah.   Natalie - And I posted it, and I shut my computer down. I wouldn't look at it, 'cause I was like, "everybody's gonna hate this."   When I opened it up an hour later, there were just thousands of comments, and that video went kind of viral.   Then I started realizing that the more I talked about things that felt scary or uncomfortable, it was actually more of like a magnet. People started to feel like, "Whoa, she gets me. Whoa, she's talking about things that I think in my head, but nobody's really talking about."   And then what happened is it started to  heal broken parts of me too - because I started to realize that those fears and insecurities weren't even real. It was just the story that I was telling myself.   So the more I talked about my story, the less power it had over me.   And so, total side note here, fast forward to right now... 'cause this was years ago... but I feel like I worked through all that body image stuff kind of on accident.   Stephen - Sure.   Natalie - I was being vulnerable, and it's crazy, 'cause right now, I'm going through a very similar process. I'm trying to do a lot of self-work. Learning to be perfectly imperfect with the body stuff - I feel like I did that, and I'm okay with it.   Stephen - “Perfectly imperfect” - that's cool.   Natalie - Yeah, and now it's like, "Okay, how can I...?" I've always struggled with this idea of perfection, and now with relationships, I'm trying to recognize that it's okay to not be perfect in relationships. That when you work through the hard stuff, when you talk about the hard stuff, it actually...   So anyways, I'll turn back now. I skipped a big chunk in there, but...   Stephen - No, that's fascinating what you just said... We will come back to that.   Natalie - Okay.   Stephen - Keep going, 'cause there's this whole spot... I'm like, "This is so cool."   Natalie -  I might not have the right words for it, because I'm just starting to figure it out. It's what I was talking to my friend Yara about last night.   Stephen - Yeah.   Natalie - So, anyways, I built this big audience, all organically. I had about 400,000 followers, but I wasn't really monetizing it.   I was selling ebooks and making decent, good money, probably  around six figures as a stay at home mom - so it was good. Like, it was awesome, and I was enjoying it. I was writing.   And then I went through a divorce. And then it got really scary, because I was like, "All right, I don't have child support, I don't have alimony.  I have to figure this out."   Stephen - Right.   Natalie - And it just so happened... like, you know, I swear, a lot of times, things fall in place when they're supposed to, or you meet people when you're supposed to.   Stephen - Right.   Natalie - It just so happened that... I don't know actually what happened. I don't know if my name got thrown around in a mastermind or something, but all of a sudden, I got emails or phone calls from eight different people wanting to build a funnel for me in ClickFunnels, and all this stuff.   I was like, "What? what is a funnel? What is this?" And so, I started researching and googling, and I kept seeing this name, Russell Brunson.   It's so embarrassing now 'cause I know what a good, honest, genuine hard-working guy Russell is... but honestly, at first, I was like, "Is this a scam? Why are people promising me the world, and like telling me they can..."   Usually, if somebody tells you something that's too good to be true - it is, right?     ...And they're like, "With that audience, you can make all this money." And I was so skeptical.   But the embarrassing part is, Russell wrestled in college with my cousin, and we live like just right down the street from each other. So we had all these mutual friends.   Stephen - Right.   Natalie - I messaged him on Facebook, and basically just... I mean, I didn't say, "Is your company a scam?"... but that's basically... I mean it was rude!   And now that I know who Russell is, I'm like so embarrassed, and I'm so grateful he didn't just say, "See ya, I'm never talking to you again."   So I started finding out about ClickFunnels, and then I read his DotCom Secrets book, and I was like, "What?"   'Cause  I'd built this big audience, but never in my life had I even spent a dime on Facebook ads.   So, I started reading his book, and I was like, "What? These are real secrets. Why is he sharing this?"   Stephen - Yeah.   Natalie - Look, this is my original notepad.   Stephen - What?   Natalie - That's crazy. I was organizing my office, and it happened to be sitting here.   So what I did, this was cool. I pulled out this notepad, and as I went through the book, I started saying, "How can I apply that to my business?" Like, five variables of successful campaigns:   Step one, who are your competitors? And I started writing down who are my actual competitors? This is cool. Blast from the past.   Stephen - That's so cool. I just found mine the other day.   Natalie - No way!   Stephen - Yeah, it's just right over here - the exact same thing. I was just showing it to somebody else. But, yeah, I found mine. It's like going way back.  "I remember the first time I realized this!" This is a huge deal.   Natalie -  I was mind-blown, and I was like, "What?" And so, I started implementing it, and I was like, "This works!"   I brought somebody on to help me with building the funnel at the beginning. Now we've since split ways...   So we launched the funnel. So, okay,  this story's getting very long, so we'll wrap it up, but...   Stephen - No, it's awesome. Super valuable.   Natalie - Okay, so, basically, at that point, I was like, "Hey, my back's against the wall. I need to figure out, how am I gonna monetize what I have here?"   So what I did was, I looked at my Google Analytics on my website.  I was like, my audience is telling me what they're interested in through my analytics, right? So, I took my five most popular blog posts, and I said, okay, I'm gonna make an offer around each of these.   Stephen - Wow.   Natalie - So the first one was this weird word called Diastasis Recti. Which is basically ab separation.   When you're pregnant, your abs can separate to make room for the baby, and in about two-thirds of women, they don't always come back together the right way. So it can cause you to look pregnant, even if you're eating right or exercising. It can cause you to have like just core weakness.   The other post was this thing called Pelvic Floor Dysfunction, which in layman's terms means like, if you laugh, cough, sneeze, jump on a trampoline, exercise too hard, a lot of times, women, after they have babies, will pee their pants a little bit.   Stephen - Right.   Natalie - And so it just so happened that one of my good friends from college had just gotten her Ph.D. in this specific area.   So, I reached out to her, and I was like, "Hey, Monique, I am getting a massive amount of traffic to this blog post. Do you think we could do something together?"   And that's when she told me. She's like, "Oh my gosh, Natalie, the peeing your pants stuff doesn't have to happen! Just 'cause it's common, and happens to so many women it doesn't mean that it's normal or healthy. It can be improved."   And I was really skeptical again at first. I was like, "Yeah, right!" I was like, "Yeah, I've had two 10-pound babies." I got kind of defensive.   Stephen - Your kids were 10 pounds?   Natalie - Yeah, both of 'em. Isn't that crazy?   Stephen - Oh my gosh. Our first two were five and a half.   Natalie - Oh, wow.   Stephen - We have little kids.   Natalie - Yeah, and I had 'em at home too, with midwives, yeah.   Stephen - Oh my gosh.   Natalie - It was crazy. So crazy.   Stephen - Amazing.   Natalie - So, long story short, last year, it was November of last year,  I talked to her. It was that first conversation. And it's funny, 'cause we have the Facebook messages still with the date.   And I said, "Hey, do you think we can write a program helping women?"   Because she put me through a program, and it totally worked.  I knew that if I'm struggling with this, other women must be too.     We started talking about it on Thanksgiving. We began writing it at Christmas. We launched on January 31st.   It was like, a month, a month, a month.   Stephen - Yeah.   Natalie - And we launched it through ClickFunnels, and within four months, we'd sold a million dollars of this $37 ebook.   Stephen - Do the math on that, people.   Natalie - Yeah.   Stephen - How many people? That's crazy.   Natalie - Yeah, it was really crazy. We don't sell the physical version, but this is the physical version, and it's just an ebook. I mean, there's nothing super fancy about it. It's kind of text, parts of it are kind of textbooky.   Stephen - Yeah.   Natalie - I partnered with the doctor to write that. I'm glad I did because she has the credibility, and I have the connection, so it's kind of like a one-two punch.   Stephen - I love that, yeah.   Natalie - I don't think I could have created that program 100% on my own, because when you're talking about the body and anatomy - there are so many things that I wasn't qualified to talk about, but anyways.   So then, it was this whirlwind of like, "Holy crap." Before this, it was just me in front of my computer answering emails.   Then all of a sudden, it's like, "whoa," we have this big company and this big machine, and I need to learn how to hire people and scale and be a CEO of a company instead of just like, a little solopreneur.   Last year was a real whirlwind of a year. I had to learn how to be tough with business. I had to learn the value and the importance of contracts and of not let people take advantage of you.   I had to grow and scale - and create value. I mean, just everything was...   Conceptually, I knew what I needed to do, but applying it was kind of a whirlwind.   I still feel like we're still... we'll always be working on our businesses, but...   So, that was the world's longest answer to "How you got started," but that's how I got involved in the ClickFunnels community.   The one thing I will say is; if anybody is watching this and is skeptical, "I understand," 'cause I felt the exact same way.   But if you just do what Stephen teaches, what Russell teaches it works. It really, really works! It's not scammy.   If you have a good product and a good message to give to the world, follow the system and don't try to change it, and it will work. That's all I did.   I didn't do anything fancy, other than I came up with the idea and the program...  I just did what you guys say to do, and it worked.   Stephen - That's so cool. That's so awesome.   Natalie - Yeah.   Stephen - That's so awesome. Yeah, sometimes people look at it. I had a buddy who looked at it once, and he's like, "That looks like it's scammy," - you know, the same kind of thing. I'm like, "Ah, no, we actually end up delivering more value than if you don't do it this way."   Natalie - Yes, 100% agreed.   Stephen - Fascinating.   Natalie - Yeah.   Stephen - You gave a speech at Funnel Hacking Live which was incredible.  I was so excited. I think we were sitting in the front row, or something like that, I was pumped.   I was like, "Yeah, Natalie's next!" You gave a speech about vulnerability. And you talked about some of the ways you build in vulnerability - and this isn't a weakness.   Natalie - Yeah.   Stephen - Right, but how do you find the strength to be vulnerable?   I guess, first of all, can you tell us what it means to be vulnerable?   You're such an... I don't know if you wanna call it vulnerability secrets, vulnerability expert, or hacks? Whatever, like, but you're really good at doing this in a way that doesn't come across, you know...   It seems like most people are like, "I'm not gonna be vulnerable 'cause it means I'm weak."   Natalie - No, it's not.  I get that, 'cause I felt that way for a long, long time.   So first off, I think a lot of times, especially if you're talking to guys, they will hear the word vulnerable, and they'll be like, "I'm a man. I am not vulnerable," right? And I get that.   So, another way of saying "be vulnerable" is just "be real," right?   Look at Russell. He shares the ups and the downs, and because he shares the downs, you wanna champion and root for him on the ups.   If somebody only shares the good times, then you don't connect as much.   It's almost like we naturally, as humans, have a tendency to...   If you think somebody is only always doing good, it's harder to wanna cheer for them and root for them, you know?   Stephen - "Yeah, the cards are always in that guy's favor... are you kidding?"   Natalie - Yeah, exactly. And so, you know, when it comes to being vulnerable, it's not about crying all the time, and it's not even about being vulnerable all the time.   If you look at my content, 80 to 90% of it is just really good quality content, and then occasionally, I'll add some real honest truth or raw moments into what I share. And what it does is it brings, this isn't my phrase... it from an author named Brene Brown, her books changed my life.   *Natalie looks for books* I don't have them here, but "Daring Greatly" and "Rising Strong" literally, personally and professionally, changed my life.   Brenee is a shame and vulnerability researcher. She teaches that vulnerability is the ultimate human connector because vulnerability and shame cannot survive together.   And so the more vulnerable you are, the less shame can survive, and the less power that story has over you.   And so, you know, we all have moments that we feel embarrassed to talk about, or we think that people will judge us, or we feel ashamed, and what's crazy.   I've found that the more you talk about the hard stuff:   #1: The less shame you feel talking about it, and you start to feel more comfortable with it   #2: People start to open up to you and say, "oh my gosh, me too. I didn't think anybody experienced that."   And so what happens is it creates a different level of trust with your audience.   However, there's a fine line between being vulnerable to get sales and actually being vulnerable, right? That's kind of hard to teach. And so, you know, I didn't start this off saying, "I'm gonna be vulnerable so I can build a big audience and make all this money."   I genuinely have a heart to help people, and selfishly, it helped me along the way, too, because it made me feel less insecure about these things.   People always say, "Okay I get it in theory, it makes sense to be vulnerable, but how do you actually do that without coming across as that crazy person on Facebook that puts all their drama there?"   Stephen - Always crying, the person like, "Oh, crap, unfollow."   Natalie - Yeah, and you're just like, Where's the popcorn. Let's watch their drama unfold." And so I kind of have this four-step system that I didn't mean to create. It's just how I naturally write, but it works really well.   The first thing that I do is #1, remember that you don't always have to share your vulnerable moments in the moment.   Stephen - Yeah.   Natalie - So, if you haven't worked through something and you're still feeling very fragile about it - it's okay to wait to share. Because, I've made that mistake before.   If you get criticism back and you haven't really worked through it yet, that criticism can be shattering to your confidence.   And so, one of the tricks that I have...   For a long time, I struggled, 'cause when you're going through the vulnerable stage when you're really sad or excited or happy or embarrassed or feeling ashamed when you're in the moment, the feelings feel very real...   But sometimes it's hard to sit in front of your computer later and remember the real emotion that you felt during that moment.   So one of the things that I do now, a trick that I have, is I'll pull out my phone and pull up the notes section when I'm in that moment feeling, you know, small or hurt or scared or whatever the feeling is, right? It can be good or bad.   And I'll just shorthand write out the raw feelings. Not like full paragraphs, but, now I have this big catalog of feelings, so if I want to tell a story that relates to this, that relates to body image, or that relates to whatever,  I have all these raw emotions to draw on.   I'm not faking vulnerability. It's my real stuff.  It's my real moments that I can draw from and turn into actual stories.   Another tip: A little family joke is that I'm really bad at analogies, and my family calls them "Natalogies" because a lot of times, like, you know...   The whole crux of expert secrets, is you have to be able to do epiphany bridges and analogies. And my analogies do not make sense half of the time.   I'll say them, and people are like, "that didn't make sense?" I'm just not good at them.   I hope someday, I can learn to be better at analogies. So what I try to do instead is just pull on these stories that I have - and kind of weave it together instead - 'cause my "it's kind of likes" never actually make sense.   So that's like my trick, you know how Russell talks about in the soap opera sequences, to start with the drama - to start with the most dramatic point, and then you tell the back story...   In my posts, a lot of times, I do that.   I start with like the hurt, the pain. Whatever you're feeling, the run moment, start with that, 'cause then people will automatically be like, "Whoa. She's talking about something nobody talks about."   And then what I do is I, and this is just my style. Everybody will find their own style.   But my step number two is to show myself some grace. Remind myself "perfectly imperfect, it's okay," or,  just show yourself some grace, and in some words, type that out.   Then the third step is to try to remind myself of a time when this has happened before and I worked through it -  or when somebody else has gone through something like this and worked through it.   Stephen - Right.   Natalie - And then the fourth step is; I always finish up on a positive note.   So like, either how I worked through it - if this is a past experience, or if I don't know how to work through it, I share what my plan is to try to work through it, even if you fail trying, right?   So what it does is it puts people, like, when you're, when you start with the raw stuff, it makes people feel like, “whoa, like, that could be me, because I've felt that exact same way.”   And then you're giving yourself grace, and you're teaching other people how to show, how to give themselves grace if they're in the same shoes, and then when you talk about how you work through it.   It's like, somebody else could look at you, look at your situation and say, “Whoa, I'm in that situation too, and if she can work through it, I probably can, too.”   And so, I think that's why a lot of my content has gone really viral, is because I make it relatable by sharing, it's not fake. I mean, they're the real moments, and then I come up with like a positive, and it's not.   Stephen - End with hope at the end.   Natalie - It ends with hope, yeah, but it's not like, talking down to somebody.   It's not like, you have to do x, y, and z, or I'm so perfect on my high horse here.   It's more like, we're in this together. We're all in the arena, and we've all fallen down. Let's dust off our knees, and this is how I'm gonna try to stand up. I might get knocked back again, but like, this is what I'm trying.   I don't know if that makes sense at all, but I think that's why... there's an underlying subtleness of talking down to somebody or being on the same playing field and championing everybody to come up together.   I don't know if I have the language to always describe how I do it, but that's kind of the feeling behind it.   I have written and deleted and written and deleted, 'cause I'm like,“This feels like I know everything,” or you know, I'm like talking down, and I never want that to come across that way.   Stephen - Right. Absolutely, and you know, you know what it reminded me of is so like, you know, we always tell people, like, start publishing before you have a big following.   Natalie - Mmhmm.   Stephen - So that you can bring them with you and you become the expert in front of them.   Natalie - Exactly.   Stephen - Rather than become an expert and then start publishing, 'cause it's so less believable.   You've done the same thing with the vulnerability, which is fascinating. Like, yes, start it. Don't be afraid to talk about the low moments, not that it always needs to be low, and it probably shouldn't always be, but you know...   Natalie - Totally.   Stephen - But being open about what's actually going on and doing it in front of 'em rises everyone together. That's fascinating.   Natalie - Well, and what's crazy is that it never gets... well, it's always a process, right?   So, what's weird is that eight years ago, for me to talk about the body image stuff, it was so hard for me, 'cause that's where I was. I was in that phase of my life where I was really struggling with that, right?   And so, I did the work, and I went through the process unintentionally.   I didn't know I was doing the work at the time. I was just being vulnerable. I was sharing.   So what's cool is that, fast forward to now, I don't really have all of those body image insecurities that I had then, and I think it's honestly because I was willing to talk about it in the moment.   Now, fast forward to today, and the issues that I'm struggling with are different.   I'm a different person than I was eight years ago, right?   So when I built my audience with talking about the body image stuff, now, it's like, "okay, I don't feel like I have to talk about that as much, 'cause I've not grown past it," - that's not the right word, but  it's not my main focus anymore. And now it's...   Like, okay, you know, I went through a divorce, and I haven't really talked about that very much publicly.   But now it's like, "Okay, now I'm sitting in this moment where  I'm at a crossroads." Am I gonna do what has worked for me in the past and be vulnerable and open up and share these things that feel uncomfortable to me again, right?   It's not the body image stuff anymore. Now it's personal development and relationships and the struggles that I've had with my business.   Like, it's always changing.   So vulnerability is never like, you just learn how to be vulnerable and you've got it. Like, it's always easy.   It is easier for me to be vulnerable on the body image stuff, but now it's shifted to "how can I grow?"   And the only hope I have is that I know that it worked with the body stuff. So  I'm hoping that five years down the road, I can look back and say, "Okay, I was scared to be vulnerable.  I was scared to talk about these things, but it got me into this confident, comfortable zone because I shared."   Stephen - No, totally, totally. Like, I went through a lot of the exact same, you know, it's funny because I feel like it's the emotion that binds people.   While I haven't gone through a divorce, there are other times where I felt really vulnerable as well. And so whilst that person may not have gone through a divorce, if we didn't have the same experiences, we did have the same emotions, and being able to expose the emotion, I feel like, is what binds people. I think it's interesting what you said.   Anyway, quirks, the little quirks that you have or the little vulnerabilities you have, that's your superpower. That's the reason people follow you. They don't follow you because of pure perfection 24/7. That actually annoys people after a while. But you actually get personal healing along the way. Like that's so, that's so amazing.   Could you tell us a little bit... I mean, this is Sales Funnel Radio, and you're talking about your sales funnel. Like, what does this have to do with sales funnels? Why does it matter? 'Cause it totally does, but just for everyone else, you know.   Natalie - Well, it 100% matters because the thing that I've learned is although I'm not the best trainer in the world. Like, I will be the first to admit that. Yes, I'm a personal trainer, but like, people don't buy my programs because....   I mean there are probably people that can talk science better than I can. I stumble over my words. I have mild dyslexia, and I mix up scientific terms all the time. But the reason people follow me and the reason people buy my programs, the reason we were able to sell so many of this book, is because of the connection.   I owned a company called Dollar Workout Club a couple of years ago, and we would film our workouts, and we never cut the cameras. And we would always be joking and be like, "guys, if you're at home you can relate to the doorbell ringing or whatever, right?" And it was very relatable.   Stephen - Yeah.   Natalie - Well, in one of the workouts, I happened to be wearing gray shorts, and Drew, the only guy, the other trainer, wrote the workout, and it was all jumping exercises, right?   So, we're doing the jumping, and I'm like, "Oh, crap." I could tell I was like, peeing my pants a little bit, right?   It was so embarrassing.  I'm wearing gray shorts and you can see this little tiny spot, then by the end, my whole butt was just... it was so gross. It's just covered in pee. At the end, I'm trying to stretch and turn sideways so you can't see.   Anyways, I could have never shared that, and I didn't for a while. I was really embarrassed about it. But we have that footage. So then when I went to go create this program, I could take screenshots from that video. I could take the actual video and put it in my funnel.   So what happened is people were like, "Whoa, this woman actually peed her pants." Like, this is embarrassing. I mean, truth be told, this program almost didn't come out, 'cause I had to have a heart-to-heart with myself really, and say, "okay, Natalie, are you willing to tell the whole world that you used to pee your pants," you know?   Stephen - Yeah.   Natalie - But what happens is then you can put those real stories in your funnel. You can put the photos. And it's kind of like instead of social proof this is your real story and your real-life proof.   "Whoa, this woman understands me and this woman gets me." Because the truth is that real change, like, I can give you the best meal plan and the best workout program in the whole world, but it's not gonna have a lasting, long-term effect until you make that internal change and have that belief in yourself.   I feel like that is my gift, is helping people see their value and their power. And so, you know...   Stephen - People kind of have an identity shift with the vulnerability that you have, almost. That's fascinating.   Natalie - 100%. And so that's the psychology behind it.  I think that when you are willing to be real vulnerable, not fake vulnerable... If you're willing to be real vulnerable, people can relate to that. And once people relate to it, they begin to trust you, and then once they trust you, they'll buy from you.   My biggest fear is that when people listen to me talk about this, they're gonna be like, "Oh, I see dollar signs. I'm just gonna like, figure out how I can be vulnerable." But the truth is, people are smart. Your customers are smart, and they will smell out fake vulnerability.   Stephen - Right.   Natalie - And so.   Stephen - Yeah.   Natalie - The biggest thing... If you're sitting there and you're thinking, "There's no way I could ever talk about this," then you're on the right path. That's how you know it's real vulnerability.   If you seriously feel nervous to share it and talk about it, and you think: “Everybody will think I'm a fraud. Everybody will think I'm a bad parent." Everybody will think I'm a bad husband or wife. Nobody's gonna find me attractive."   All of these things, these stories that we tell ourselves that you feel if you start talking about, people are gonna think you're terrible... Guess what? That's the real good stuff that you need to be talking about and sharing if you wanna create real connection and live a wholehearted life.   Stephen - Totally believe that yeah. 'Cause I struggled. Anyway, when you got up, and you were speaking about that on stage, I was like, "Man, I know, I feel ya, holy crap."   I had like, zero confidence. So rather than choose not to be active and do this game, I just called out my fear publicly, and that became a theme for a little bit.   It was like, "Look, guys, I don't really wanna be doing this, although I got something cool to show you, all right?"   And for a while, that was the theme of it. And then as I grew up and healed, (I like how you said that) I passed certain things in front of the audience.   Then it was like, "Whoa, I've gotta wait for this new episode," or "what's he doing now?" And it was crazy, crazy. That was worth more than me putting hundreds of episodes out of just the best content ever.   Natalie - Yeah.   Stephen - It was crazy, crazy what that did.   So, what would you say is, like...   So you tell people, go ahead and start recording down things that are going on in the moment. Don't feel the pressure to go ahead and say it in the moment, which I totally agree with. I don't know if I can handle that.   Natalie - Well, and it can be whatever platform you like the most, right? Mine happened to be Facebook, but some people are better at YouTube, or some people are better at podcasting or Instagram.   There's not one that's better or worse. Just find what feels the easiest for you and start there.   Stephen - Yeah.   Natalie - I will say too...   So, one of the downsides of being vulnerable is, and I don't let this scare you from being vulnerable, but it does happen. It still happens to me.   So when you're open and transparent about your life, for some reason, and I get it. We're that way with celebrities, right?   You're like, "I wanna know why they broke up." And both sides of the story; people feel like they know every aspect of your life. And I do share a lot, but I don't share everything.   And so what can happen is that you get harsh people on the internet. And we all get that anyways. Even just last night.   I get mean from people messages every day pretty much.   Luckily, I have my team now to kind of shield me from it, just 'cause it's like silly.   Stephen - I have to do the same, yeah.   Natalie - Yeah, just 'cause it's hard for me to continue to be vulnerable if I'm always reading the negative messages.   Stephen - Yeah, I'm the same.   Natalie - But one woman was like, "You are so different from how you used to be. You used to share your progress photos, and now you just talk about your life."   The truth is, we all change and grow as people, right? And so for me, posting an ab selfie now, I don't get validation or fulfillment. I don't need that like I did six years ago. So, yeah, if you look at my feed, I don't post as much like, like, body image stuff, because I'm kind of like in a different space.   And so what will happen is that as you're transparently sharing what you're focused on in your life, sometimes, you will get people that you don't attract anymore.   Like, they're still in a different area, and they want to follow people that are in that area, and that's okay.   What I've had to learn is that the number-one thing when you get mean people on the internet, and it took me a long time to figure this out, is that it's so much more about them and what they're personally struggling with than it is about you, you know?   Stephen - Yeah.   Natalie - Okay, so, for example, my peach tree. So we had a big wind storm. I'm sure you saw it 'cause we live in the same town.   So, this tree that I've nurtured for two years, finally had some fruit coming off of it, well the storm completely broke the tree, and I was really sad. I posted about it on my Insta Story, and she wrote back, and she was calling me all these mean names, and she's like, "To think that your biggest worry right now is that your peach tree died. My mom just died, and my brother is sick."     And I realize she's hurting because of that, and she's lashing out at me, right?   So it's a reflection of her. It's not a reflection of me. And so that was the hardest thing I had to learn, being open and vulnerable in the online space, is that you will get critics.   I always say it's like the people in the peanut gallery out there who aren't, like...   I'll listen to criticism from people who are in the arena with me, right, people who are battling and fighting and trying and working hard, but if it's just a critic out in the peanut gallery that isn't there fighting along with me, then their opinion doesn't matter.   It's probably more about them than me.   Stephen - You're better than I am, then. There are times I just, I don't know.   Natalie - Well, I did block her.   Stephen - I like to fight with 'em sometimes. And I shouldn't, and I'm growing past that, and there's me being vulnerable. I like to stir the pot sometimes when it's already brewing.   Natalie - You should talk about that, Stephen. So you should talk about it-  not just like the fun, "I said this, and he said that" but the real issues, "why did that trigger you?" And what's the story behind that insecurity?   Those are the things that people love. Not just the story, but going deeper into the feeling or the "why" behind it - you know?   Stephen - Yeah.   Natalie - I don't know.   Stephen - I told you, yeah, some of it's going on right now still with some other people. Like, it comes in waves. I don't know if that happens for you too.   Natalie - Yes.   Stephen - It's like the criticism goes down, whoa, and then it goes away, and you're like, everything rocks, and then you try something big again, and everyone's like, "whoa!" Not everyone, but there's like, anyway, the talking heads, as I call them, come on out. It's the armchair quarterbacks.   Natalie - Uh-huh, 100%.   Stephen - Yeah, I told you, and I've been planning on doing that. Funny you say that. I just haven't quite formulated how to do it yet, so.   Natalie - Yeah.   Stephen - It's top of mind.   I wanna thank you for being on here with everyone, and guys, Sales Funnel Radio, we're talking about vulnerability.   This is everything, especially if you are the attractive character in your own business - which I hope that you are, and you choose to be.   This is not a tiny subject. It's something that you will not have the choice to go around. You will address it whether it's through haters or your own personal growth. You're gonna get it.   So, please, please go follow Natalie. Natalie, where should people go to follow you?   Natalie - My website is nataliehodson.com, or Facebook is Natalie Hodson Official. Instagram is nataliehodson1   Stephen - Cool.   Natalie - If anybody has any questions, you know, you can leave 'em, and I'll keep checking 'em. I'll answer them and stuff.   The books that I talked about are Brene Brown's Daring Greatly and Rising Strong.  I think they're books every single human being on this planet should listen to.   I call the books magic, 'cause I've listened to them probably six times now, and every time, I need to hear a different piece. I gain something different from them every time, you know? They're good books.   Stephen - I wrote it down. I'm excited. I'm gonna go get them right after this.   Natalie - Cool.   Stephen - That's awesome. Everyone, guys, thank you so much.   Please reach out to Natalie and say thank you and go follow her, and watch her practice what she preaches on this stuff. It's fantastic and amazing - and that lets her audience open up as well.   So Natalie, thank you so much for being on, and it's been a pleasure.   Natalie - Yeah, you're so welcome.   Stephen - Woohoo, hey, thanks for listening.   Hey, many don't know that I actually made my first money online as an affiliate marketer.   If you wanna know how I funded my entire company without using any of my own money ever, you can learn to do the same for free at affiliateoutrage.com.

Joining Lizzie and Stephen in the studio this week was Jessica Cunningham. Jessica told us all about her new projects, her time on The Apprentice, the latest drama with Sir Alan Sugar and how she would vote for Boris Johnson! Also in the studio was beautiful couple Shereece and Cameron from MTV’s new reality show, True Love or True Lies – does their relationship stand up to the test of a grilling from Lizzie and Stephen? You’ll have to listen to find out!

          We add new content daily! Listen on iTunes: iTunes.ExitcoachRadio.com . See the Index for more on this Topic or by this Guest. Transcript:  Stephen: You know, there's a lot of factors that impact value. The business, you have internal factors about the company itself, as well as, on the other end, maximizing value through properly handling the sale process. When I say internal factors, I include addressing areas such as customer or vendor concentration. And, you know, buyer's will really have concerns about that. Another major concern is share-holder or employee dependency that will really effect value. So, I could talk for hours on the topic of what factors impact value, or how you can build value, but really, it all comes down to how predictable and sustainable are the sales and earnings looking ahead into the future? Need to work ON your business? Start with a free assessment at www.BizGrowth123.com

Episode Description: In this episode, Christopher Schnese, Carson Patrick, and Stephen Miller review Interstellar. Directed by Christopher Nolan. With Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain. A team of explorers travel through a wormhole in an attempt to find a potentially habitable planet that will sustain humanity. Show Notes Hosts: • Christopher Schnese with Carson Patrick and Stephen Miller Featured Review: • Interstellar The Verdict: • Carson: You should probably see it, but I don't think it is good. • Stephen: You should probably see it, but I don't think it is good. • Christopher: You should probably see it, but I don't think it is good. Music for this Episode: • Interstellar (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) Contact the show: • email: fans@thespoilerwarning.com • voicemail: 1 (760) 575-4879

Episode Description: In this episode, Christopher Schnese, Carson Patrick, and Stephen Miller review Interstellar. Directed by Christopher Nolan. With Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain. A team of explorers travel through a wormhole in an attempt to find a potentially habitable planet that will sustain humanity. Show Notes Hosts: • Christopher Schnese with Carson Patrick and Stephen Miller Featured Review: • Interstellar The Verdict: • Carson: You should probably see it, but I don't think it is good. • Stephen: You should probably see it, but I don't think it is good. • Christopher: You should probably see it, but I don't think it is good. Music for this Episode: • Interstellar (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) Contact the show: • email: fans@thespoilerwarning.com • voicemail: 1 (760) 575-4879