Podcasts about steve first

Steve First is an actor, writer, and comedian known for his roles across TV, film, and stage. He gained recognition starring in the Gold Spot commercials for Orange and as a supporting actor in Little Britain. As his alter-ego Lenny Beige, he created and starred in numerous TV shows and live performances. Steve's acting credits span popular shows like Holby City, Friday Night Dinner, and The Serpent Queen, as well as films such as Disobedience and Walk Like a Panther.

Monday 3/27/23 Hour 1 - Steve says this is the first time a Final Four team impacted by NIL, and Steve says the first Final Four game this weekend will have low ratings.

Full show - Tuesday - Houseguest from hell - Preparing for Halloween - Best horror movie - T. Hack has a controversial job offer for Steve - First comes marriage, then comes love

CinemaCon attendees were treated to the first screening of the long-awaited Tom Cruise sequel. But was it worth the wait...and the hype?

This week, the panel begins by breaking down just what makes HBO's pandemic series Station Eleven so successful with Slate's senior managing producer of podcasts and co-host of Slate's Working podcast, June Thomas. Next, the panel appreciates the legacy that writer Joan Didion left behind. Finally, the panel rehashes the 2021 edition of Slate's Movie Club (including Dana's list of the year's best films) while discussing the future of film. In Slate Plus, the panel responds to Parul Sehgal's article “The Case Against the Trauma Plot” in the New Yorker. Email us at culturefest@slate.com. Endorsements Dana: The magical work of Swedish stop-motion animator Niki Lindroth von Bahr. Four of her animated shorts can be found on the Criterion Channel, but you can find one—The Burden—on Amazon Prime. Julia: A recipe for Italian rainbow cookies adapted by Bon Appétit from Rich Torrisi and Mario Carbone (of popular eateries Carbone and Torrisi Italian Specialties). Steve: First, his monster music playlist of mellow deep cuts, which includes work from Rickie Lee Jones' great ‘81 album Pirates, particularly the song “Living It Up.” Second: Susan Tallman's criticism for the New York Review of Books as a whole, but particularly  her recent review of Jasper Johns titled “The House That Johns Built,” inspired by a Johns catalog titled Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror. Podcast production by Asha Saluja. Production assistance by Nadira Goffe. Outro music is Freak Out! by Zorro. Slate Plus members get ad-free podcasts, a bonus segment in each episode of the Culture Gabfest, full access to Slate's journalism on Slate.com, and more. Sign up now at slate.com/cultureplus. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, the panel begins by breaking down just what makes HBO's pandemic series Station Eleven so successful with Slate's senior managing producer of podcasts and co-host of Slate's Working podcast, June Thomas. Next, the panel appreciates the legacy that writer Joan Didion left behind. Finally, the panel rehashes the 2021 edition of Slate's Movie Club (including Dana's list of the year's best films) while discussing the future of film. In Slate Plus, the panel responds to Parul Sehgal's article “The Case Against the Trauma Plot” in the New Yorker. Email us at culturefest@slate.com. Endorsements Dana: The magical work of Swedish stop-motion animator Niki Lindroth von Bahr. Four of her animated shorts can be found on the Criterion Channel, but you can find one—The Burden—on Amazon Prime. Julia: A recipe for Italian rainbow cookies adapted by Bon Appétit from Rich Torrisi and Mario Carbone (of popular eateries Carbone and Torrisi Italian Specialties). Steve: First, his monster music playlist of mellow deep cuts, which includes work from Rickie Lee Jones' great ‘81 album Pirates, particularly the song “Living It Up.” Second: Susan Tallman's criticism for the New York Review of Books as a whole, but particularly  her recent review of Jasper Johns titled “The House That Johns Built,” inspired by a Johns catalog titled Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror. Podcast production by Asha Saluja. Production assistance by Nadira Goffe. Outro music is Freak Out! by Zorro. Slate Plus members get ad-free podcasts, a bonus segment in each episode of the Culture Gabfest, full access to Slate's journalism on Slate.com, and more. Sign up now at slate.com/cultureplus. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, the panel begins by breaking down just what makes HBO's pandemic series Station Eleven so successful with Slate's senior managing producer of podcasts and co-host of Slate's Working podcast, June Thomas. Next, the panel appreciates the legacy that writer Joan Didion left behind. Finally, the panel rehashes the 2021 edition of Slate's Movie Club (including Dana's list of the year's best films) while discussing the future of film. In Slate Plus, the panel responds to Parul Sehgal's article “The Case Against the Trauma Plot” in the New Yorker. Email us at culturefest@slate.com. Endorsements Dana: The magical work of Swedish stop-motion animator Niki Lindroth von Bahr. Four of her animated shorts can be found on the Criterion Channel, but you can find one—The Burden—on Amazon Prime. Julia: A recipe for Italian rainbow cookies adapted by Bon Appétit from Rich Torrisi and Mario Carbone (of popular eateries Carbone and Torrisi Italian Specialties). Steve: First, his monster music playlist of mellow deep cuts, which includes work from Rickie Lee Jones' great ‘81 album Pirates, particularly the song “Living It Up.” Second: Susan Tallman's criticism for the New York Review of Books as a whole, but particularly  her recent review of Jasper Johns titled “The House That Johns Built,” inspired by a Johns catalog titled Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror. Podcast production by Asha Saluja. Production assistance by Nadira Goffe. Outro music is Freak Out! by Zorro. Slate Plus members get ad-free podcasts, a bonus segment in each episode of the Culture Gabfest, full access to Slate's journalism on Slate.com, and more. Sign up now at slate.com/cultureplus. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, Steve and Dana are joined by writer extraordinaire Karen Han. First, the panel discusses Rebecca Hall's adaptation of Nella Larsen's novel, Passing. Next, the panel dives into The Shrink Next Door. Finally, the panel talks about People's 2021 Sexiest Man Alive, Paul Rudd. In Slate Plus, the panel answers a classic time travel question. Email us at culturefest@slate.com. Endorsements Dana: Rebecca Hall's amazing performance in the 2016 film Christine, about news reporter Christine Chubbuck.  Karen: Swedish artist Agnes's new album Magic Still Exists. Specifically her song “Here Comes the Night.” Steve: First, the entire discography of Devonté Hynes aka Blood Orange—more recently, his work on the soundtrack for Passing. Second, Nick Lowe and Daryl Hall doing a marvelous acoustic version of Lowe's hit from the ‘70s “Cruel to Be Kind.” Podcast production by Cameron Drews. Production assistance by Nadira Goffe. Outro music is “Edge of Life” by OTE. Slate Plus members get ad-free podcasts, a bonus segment in each episode of the Culture Gabfest, full access to Slate's journalism on Slate.com, and more. Sign up now at slate.com/cultureplus. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, Steve and Dana are joined by writer extraordinaire Karen Han. First, the panel discusses Rebecca Hall's adaptation of Nella Larsen's novel, Passing. Next, the panel dives into The Shrink Next Door. Finally, the panel talks about People's 2021 Sexiest Man Alive, Paul Rudd. In Slate Plus, the panel answers a classic time travel question. Email us at culturefest@slate.com. Endorsements Dana: Rebecca Hall's amazing performance in the 2016 film Christine, about news reporter Christine Chubbuck.  Karen: Swedish artist Agnes's new album Magic Still Exists. Specifically her song “Here Comes the Night.” Steve: First, the entire discography of Devonté Hynes aka Blood Orange—more recently, his work on the soundtrack for Passing. Second, Nick Lowe and Daryl Hall doing a marvelous acoustic version of Lowe's hit from the ‘70s “Cruel to Be Kind.” Podcast production by Cameron Drews. Production assistance by Nadira Goffe. Outro music is “Edge of Life” by OTE. Slate Plus members get ad-free podcasts, a bonus segment in each episode of the Culture Gabfest, full access to Slate's journalism on Slate.com, and more. Sign up now at slate.com/cultureplus. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, Steve and Dana are joined by writer extraordinaire Karen Han. First, the panel discusses Rebecca Hall's adaptation of Nella Larsen's novel, Passing. Next, the panel dives into The Shrink Next Door. Finally, the panel talks about People's 2021 Sexiest Man Alive, Paul Rudd. In Slate Plus, the panel answers a classic time travel question. Email us at culturefest@slate.com. Endorsements Dana: Rebecca Hall's amazing performance in the 2016 film Christine, about news reporter Christine Chubbuck.  Karen: Swedish artist Agnes's new album Magic Still Exists. Specifically her song “Here Comes the Night.” Steve: First, the entire discography of Devonté Hynes aka Blood Orange—more recently, his work on the soundtrack for Passing. Second, Nick Lowe and Daryl Hall doing a marvelous acoustic version of Lowe's hit from the ‘70s “Cruel to Be Kind.” Podcast production by Cameron Drews. Production assistance by Nadira Goffe. Outro music is “Edge of Life” by OTE. Slate Plus members get ad-free podcasts, a bonus segment in each episode of the Culture Gabfest, full access to Slate's journalism on Slate.com, and more. Sign up now at slate.com/cultureplus. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, Steve and Dana are joined by Slate's music critic Carl Wilson. First, the panel reviews Edgar Wright's newest psychological horror film Last Night in Soho—which Dana reviewed for Slate. Next, the panel discusses the newest album in over 40 years from the legendary Swedish music group ABBA, titled Voyage. Finally, the panel is joined by host of Slate's Hit Parade podcast (and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame voter!) Chris Molanphy to discuss this year's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees and the institution at large. In Slate Plus, the panel discusses music they like to listen to while working. You can find Dana's playlist of music to work and write to here, Steve's here, and Carl's here. Email us at culturefest@slate.com. Endorsements Dana: The LA Times has been doing an incredible job of covering the ever-developing story of the tragic shooting on the set of the Alec Baldwin film, Rust. The story, which points to many bigger problems, including issues with labor relations in the entertainment industry at large. “The Day Alec Baldwin Shot Halyna Hutchins and Joel Souza” chronologically accounts the events of the entire day, written by three different reporters: Meg James, Amy Kaufman, and Julia Wick. Carl: First, the great late-80s rock musician Billy Bragg's newest album The Million Things That Never Happened in which he reflects on aging, isolation, change, and being challenged ideologically by younger generations. This is specifically true of the track, “Mid-Century Modern.” Second, the new music historiography novel from Kelefa Sanneh (who, in the 2000s, wrote the great central piece on rockism for the New York Times), Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres, which is a celebration of what happens when you stay within a tradition. Steve: First, the ‘80s singer-songwriter Marshall Crenshaw's live cover of ABBA's song “Knowing Me, Knowing You.” Second, yet another Swedish indie band: The Amazing. Podcast production by Cameron Drews. Production assistance by Nadira Goffe. Outro music is “Lonely Calling” by Arc De Soleil. Slate Plus members get ad-free podcasts, a bonus segment in each episode of the Culture Gabfest, full access to Slate's journalism on Slate.com, and more. Sign up now at slate.com/cultureplus. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, Steve and Dana are joined by Slate's music critic Carl Wilson. First, the panel reviews Edgar Wright's newest psychological horror film Last Night in Soho—which Dana reviewed for Slate. Next, the panel discusses the newest album in over 40 years from the legendary Swedish music group ABBA, titled Voyage. Finally, the panel is joined by host of Slate's Hit Parade podcast (and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame voter!) Chris Molanphy to discuss this year's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees and the institution at large. In Slate Plus, the panel discusses music they like to listen to while working. You can find Dana's playlist of music to work and write to here, Steve's here, and Carl's here. Email us at culturefest@slate.com. Endorsements Dana: The LA Times has been doing an incredible job of covering the ever-developing story of the tragic shooting on the set of the Alec Baldwin film, Rust. The story, which points to many bigger problems, including issues with labor relations in the entertainment industry at large. “The Day Alec Baldwin Shot Halyna Hutchins and Joel Souza” chronologically accounts the events of the entire day, written by three different reporters: Meg James, Amy Kaufman, and Julia Wick. Carl: First, the great late-80s rock musician Billy Bragg's newest album The Million Things That Never Happened in which he reflects on aging, isolation, change, and being challenged ideologically by younger generations. This is specifically true of the track, “Mid-Century Modern.” Second, the new music historiography novel from Kelefa Sanneh (who, in the 2000s, wrote the great central piece on rockism for the New York Times), Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres, which is a celebration of what happens when you stay within a tradition. Steve: First, the ‘80s singer-songwriter Marshall Crenshaw's live cover of ABBA's song “Knowing Me, Knowing You.” Second, yet another Swedish indie band: The Amazing. Podcast production by Cameron Drews. Production assistance by Nadira Goffe. Outro music is “Lonely Calling” by Arc De Soleil. Slate Plus members get ad-free podcasts, a bonus segment in each episode of the Culture Gabfest, full access to Slate's journalism on Slate.com, and more. Sign up now at slate.com/cultureplus. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, Steve and Dana are joined by Slate's music critic Carl Wilson. First, the panel reviews Edgar Wright's newest psychological horror film Last Night in Soho—which Dana reviewed for Slate. Next, the panel discusses the newest album in over 40 years from the legendary Swedish music group ABBA, titled Voyage. Finally, the panel is joined by host of Slate's Hit Parade podcast (and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame voter!) Chris Molanphy to discuss this year's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees and the institution at large. In Slate Plus, the panel discusses music they like to listen to while working. You can find Dana's playlist of music to work and write to here, Steve's here, and Carl's here. Email us at culturefest@slate.com. Endorsements Dana: The LA Times has been doing an incredible job of covering the ever-developing story of the tragic shooting on the set of the Alec Baldwin film, Rust. The story, which points to many bigger problems, including issues with labor relations in the entertainment industry at large. “The Day Alec Baldwin Shot Halyna Hutchins and Joel Souza” chronologically accounts the events of the entire day, written by three different reporters: Meg James, Amy Kaufman, and Julia Wick. Carl: First, the great late-80s rock musician Billy Bragg's newest album The Million Things That Never Happened in which he reflects on aging, isolation, change, and being challenged ideologically by younger generations. This is specifically true of the track, “Mid-Century Modern.” Second, the new music historiography novel from Kelefa Sanneh (who, in the 2000s, wrote the great central piece on rockism for the New York Times), Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres, which is a celebration of what happens when you stay within a tradition. Steve: First, the ‘80s singer-songwriter Marshall Crenshaw's live cover of ABBA's song “Knowing Me, Knowing You.” Second, yet another Swedish indie band: The Amazing. Podcast production by Cameron Drews. Production assistance by Nadira Goffe. Outro music is “Lonely Calling” by Arc De Soleil. Slate Plus members get ad-free podcasts, a bonus segment in each episode of the Culture Gabfest, full access to Slate's journalism on Slate.com, and more. Sign up now at slate.com/cultureplus. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, Steve and Dana are joined by Karen Han. First, Slate's music critic Carl Wilson chimes in to discuss Todd Haynes's new The Velvet Underground documentary, which he wrote beautifully about for Slate. Next, the panel (minus Dana) is joined by Slate staff writer Rebecca Onion to review Mike Flanagan's newest Netflix horror series, Midnight Mass—which she also wrote lovingly about. Finally, the panel (minus Dana) is joined by Vulture senior editor and host of the Good One podcast, Jesse David Fox, to discuss the Dave Chappelle controversy. In Slate Plus, the panel discusses media they loved when they were younger that they have since outgrown. Email us at culturefest@slate.com. Endorsements Dana: The book equivalent of Todd Haynes's documentary, the first oral history Dana ever read and still one of the best she's ever read to this day: Edie: American Girl by Jean Stein and George Plimpton. The oral history tells the story of actress and model Edie Sedgwick completely through testimony from people that were there, without any interstitial material.  Karen: New World, the Korean crime drama film from Park Hoon-jung that stars Squid Game's Lee Jung-jae. The film features Lee as an undercover cop who is tasked with infiltrating the mob, but ends up caught between two worlds. It also stars a slew of great Korean actors including Hwang Jung-min and Song Ji-hyo.  Steve: First, Netflix's series The Chestnut Man, a dark, taught crime drama which takes place in Copenhagen. Then, a whole genre of YouTube videos taking you from raw audio of rehearsal to mastertape of Elvis's songs, including “And The Grass Won't Pay No Mind”—though, Neil Diamond's version of that one is better. Podcast production by Cameron Drews. Production assistance by Nadira Goffe. Outro music is “I'll Be Your Mirror” by The Velvet Underground. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Questions I asked Steve: First job out of school? What are the last 3 books you've read? Our experiences and the people we meet in our careers shape us. Could you share one or two experiences in your career that really contributed to who you are today? Reflect on your first boss. What did that person do well, not so well, how was the relationship, and the Impact on you? Of all the things you know, which do you feel could potentially be the leading expert on? What is the most challenging part of being a business coach? Is there a particular capability that is better executed inside the company or outside the company as far as coaching goes? What role does coaching have within a department of a business? Can a manager be a coach of their people or does the coaching role need to be "outsourced"? You are an entrepreneur and an employee, correct? As a high-level employee, what does your boss need to be able to do in order to manage you most effectively? What have you learned about leadership and brand building in your coaching roles for various businesses? What is the most common aspect of marketing that you see companies missing or applying poorly to their business? What is your favorite movie? Any book recommendations? How can people connect with you?

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My guest today is Steve Schildwachter, former CMO of Museum of the Bible. Steve started his career working at advertising agencies before moving to the client side. In the interview we explore that transition, and his later transition from for-profit to non-profit.This is the free edition of Marketing BS. Premium subscribers get access to part 2 of Steve's interview tomorrow where we dive into marketing a non-profit museum (and twice the content every week).You can also listen to these interviews in your podcast player of choice: Apple, Sticher, TuneIn, Overcast , Spotify. Private Feed (for premium episodes).Today's essay is sponsored byTurn your audience into a businessIndependent content creators are generating more than $2M per year using this open source, customizable publishing platform. All of the features you need to launch a new blog, newsletter and membership site are built-in — with proper SEO, a clean editor and paid subscriptions with 0% fees.TranscriptEdward: This is Marketing BS. My guest is Steve Schildwachter. Today, we cover Steve's career and path to CMO, Leo Burnett, DMB&B, FCB Global, rVue, and BrightStar. Steve was, until recently, the CMO of Museum of the Bible, and I'm excited to have him here. Steve, by 2013, you'd risen in the ranks of advertising agencies to become an Executive Vice President at FCB. You oversaw brands like Raid, Pledge, and Windex but then you left to join the client-side as a CMO of rVue. Why did you do that?Steve: First of all, Ed, thank you very much for having me on the show today. It's a great honor to be here. I pretty much came to the end of the road in the advertising agency business. The business had changed a lot during the time that I was there, having started at Leo Burnett, brief time at DMB&B, and then many years at FCB. Very, very valuable experiences, I wouldn't trade them for anything. During that time however, the advertising agency business has become much more commoditized. There are a number of pieces to that but it became apparent to me that if I needed to innovate, I needed, at least for me, to go somewhere else. I had been keeping my eye for a long time on the media technology startup sector, a lot of exciting things happening there. When an opportunity came up to make that jump, I did it. Edward: Why did they hire you? At that point, you had no experience on the client-side, you always used to do advertising. Why take a risk to bring you on as a CMO?Steve: It was not that big of a risk for a couple of reasons. It was probably more of a risk for me because I was leaping into something that at that time was completely unknown for me. It was essentially an advertising concept, rVue was a media technology company that networked together about 150+ digital out of home networks. The clients for rVue were effectively advertising agencies and their clients who were trying to decide how to divide their media budgets. It was definitely a world that I understood very, very well. In that sense, it was a pretty natural transition. The other thing was that at least one of the participants was very known to me. I was being brought in as part of a new management team. The CEO who was hired is somebody that I had worked with in the past. Another is a Chief Technology Officer who I've met for the first time but we jived very quickly as a leadership team. We had a great experience there for a couple of years. Edward: What important skills did you take with you from your ad agency work into that job?Steve: I would say for sure, the knowledge of the change in media landscape. One of the things that I had made a point of in my last several years at FCB was to stay on top of the media portion.FCB at the time was running the few agencies that still had a media department inside. They had a separate media agency, all the agencies had split off, Leo Burnett, we got Starcom, and all the other ones out there. But FCB, even though we had a media buying partner within our holding company, we still have a media department inside because we had to be on top of that for our clients. The media landscape, having stayed on top of that was a skill that was very required for me going into that job.Edward: What skills were you missing? What did you not have that you had to develop on that job?Steve: That's a great question. I would say two things come to mind. One is I needed to get back into a ninja action figure stance like I was when I was coming up as an Account Executive, because in a startup, you don't have all of the supporting functions around you that you have at a large company like an ad agency or any large company. I found that I was pretty comfortable with that. I had always been doing my own PowerPoint presentations and that type of thing. Making travel arrangements for myself was not hard but it was something time-consuming that I never had to do before. You think differently, you have to renew in a startup. There's very few people in the company, you have to completely change the way that you work and the way that you're productive. That was one thing that I was missing. Another thing was understanding and really appreciating the sales function. There were some things that I knew about it intuitively. As an advertising person, I would try to understand who I was approaching and make sure that I was bringing something that was relevant to them versus relevant to me. But having had to hire a sales staff, manage them, and keep track of them was completely new to me. It was a great learning experience. Edward: Steve, I want to go back a little bit and talk about the path that got you there. I'm a big believer that the experiences we have when we're 12–14 affect our entire lives. What were you passionate about at that age?Steve: I was passionate about a lot of things. I was passionate about baseball, I was passionate about different things that interested me. But from a professional development standpoint, let's say it was really writing and communication. I had a teacher when I was around that age who saw that I had an ability to write, an ability to communicate, and he nurtured that. It was really a foundational experience for me. It taught me that writing, for me at least, is fun, it's something that I like to do. It led me to some insights about how communication works, what makes communication effective. I couldn't possibly learn all those lessons at the age of 14, but I learned to appreciate them. I was always that kid, even in college, who would much rather write a 10-page paper than take a Bluebook task because I liked the process of writing.Edward: What about that teacher experience, the fact that you had somebody who could develop you that way, did that affect your later career at all?Steve: Yes, definitely it did, it taught the importance of mentorship. Not just that teacher, I was surrounded by teachers. I had two uncles and one aunt who were teachers, and I talked to them a lot about what do you do, what is your experience, what is that like? I very nearly went into that as a career. It was one of the things I was thinking about doing was going into teaching. Eventually, I ended up choosing advertising and marketing. I don't regret that at all, but along the way, that appreciation for teaching has stimulated my curiosity and made me a self-learner. It has also inspired me at certain times to take somebody aside, somebody that I'm managing or somebody that I'm working with that there's maybe a requirement or an opportunity to teach them on the job and coach them along. I've mentored a lot of people through the process and it's really, really fun to see them now in leadership positions later. That's very, very satisfying. Edward: I want to jump ahead a bit, you're at FCB for about three years and then you moved to Latin America. What drove that decision?Steve: That was a really wonderful confluence of personal and professional. My first job at FCB was actually with a below the line division they had at the time. I got hired there to work on the Wendy's hamburger account because I had previous experience in the same category with another brand. I had a great time there and everything but meanwhile, the so-called main agency for Cone & Belding was taking on the global business of S.C. Johnson and they realized they needed somebody to run the Latin America division. I speak Spanish and my bosses observed that while I was in this first role that I adopted my oldest child who's now 25, she's from Paraguay. My second child is from Venezuela, we did those two adoptions. They thought, well, we need somebody to run the Latin America portion of this global account, maybe Steve is the guy. I took that role and moved to Buenos Aires as a result.Edward: How did that affect you? If you hadn't done that, how would your career be different today?Steve: I have to tell you, not only what I lament not having done, I lament having come back after just a few years. The reason I didn't stay down there was because the Argentine economy collapsed. There was this so-called Tango Effect that essentially made it necessary for us to come back because the currency collapsed and there was not much happening there. To your question, what it did do for me is it completely opened my horizons in terms of how I interacted with people, how I conducted myself as a global executive. Having to speak a language in a foreign culture, be a part of that culture on a day-to-day basis, and just deal with all the people that you deal with is an incredibly mind-opening experience. Most Americans don't have that opportunity. I say this not as a criticism or an insular country because we're very self-sufficient or very large or within practically our own continent. Not many people would get the opportunity so I feel very blessed to have worked abroad. It opened my eyes in so many ways, helped me be a better colleague, and also helped me be a better listener to people. You have to listen harder when you're listening in a second language, trying to understand. Then you have to start saying, oh, they think about this completely different than I've ever thought about it before. That really helps you to be, like they say, a better colleague but also maybe more innovative.Edward: That's an interesting thing too as an agency. When you're at an agency, you're a step removed from the business. In fact, as a business person in general, you're a step removed from the business from what your consumers are experiencing. You often have to really work to figure out how your consumers feel about your product. In an agency, you're a step removed from that because you're dealing with the business, who then deals with the consumer. How do you go about understanding a business when you're a step removed like that in your agency?Steve: Somebody that I respect very much is the head of CMO recruiting at Spencer Stuart, told me that he thinks that advertising agency executives have a leg up because of all the different kinds of businesses that they're exposed to. If you think about it, I spent probably half my career in franchise brands, half of it in consumer-packaged goods with the smothering of some other things. But you're exposed to all these different experiences and all these different ways of working that help you see the possibilities of how things can be. I would also say that working in an agency, if you do your job right, you can be as close to the consumer, if not closer than your clients. One of the things that clients always told me is they said, wow, we really appreciate how you get into the milieu of the clients, you talk to clients. Of course, we conduct the research on their behalf so that's a little hygienic sometimes. Just going to the store on a Saturday, seeing what products are moving, asking people why they buy what they buy, and just getting a sense of the category is something that any good advertising agency person should be doing, or at least that historically was the case in the places where I worked. Edward: You got pretty deep. When you were working with S.C. Johnson, you filed your own patent.Steve: That was a funny story because I learned more about entomology and pesticides than I ever imagined that I would know. That's not something I ever imagined at age 12 and 13 is that I would be an expert at bugs and how to kill them. It was really interesting to me.My client, S.C. Johnson, had the largest private entomology lab in North America so you could go there, you could work with the scientists, you can understand. It was necessary because the kind of advertising they were doing at that time at least required powerful demonstrations of efficacy. Before, I went to my Creative Director and said, here's what we're trying to sell, I had the very understanding of why should people buy it. Working in the lab with the scientists would help me understand what worked and what didn't. In the process of that, I got friendly with a number of scientists and I brought to one of them this observation. In South America, consumers down the trade in some of the more outlined retail locations were buying some of our more expensive products that frankly didn't sell well. One of them was a little cardboard square that you would put in a device, like an electric air freshener, but it was an electric mosquito repeller that people would use at night. These were more expensive than most people in that socioeconomic level could afford, so what they would do is they would cut them in order to get more use out of the ones that they bought. We thought, maybe there's a way that we can dosify them a little bit and make them perforated or segmentable so that people could get more use out of it. We essentially created a new kind of skew that could only be distributed down the trade and it basically facilitated the consumer behavior that we already observed. We applied for a patent on that and got it.Edward: I want to jump ahead a little bit. You left rVue to join Bright Care as CMO, but then about two years in, you just kept the CMO title but your job role expanded dramatically. Can you talk a little bit about that?Steve: BrightStar Care is a great company. I would say that is definitely to me the most superior brand in that home health care category right now. It's a very entrepreneurial atmosphere, and I had some good success in my first couple of years with marketing and things related to marketing. I was asked by my boss to take on some other things. I found myself, like at rVue, I was back in charge of some sales teams and everything so I was still learning some of that. My boss was very patient with me on that score. I was assigned to a lot of different things just based on the success that I had in the first couple of years in marketing. Edward: Then what happened? You take on all these additional responsibilities. How do you divide your time now between your old responsibilities and these new ones, and still achieve what you want to achieve?Steve: It was really challenging because as I said, a very entrepreneurial environment, a lot of things happening very quickly. It's a much bigger company than a startup but behaves like a startup, and that's a good thing. That company in particular, the founder and CEO has an unbelievable work ethic, strong accountability. I loved it, but it was a challenge. I would say anybody who goes through a similar transformation at a company, expanding their responsibilities, needs to make sure that they have strong lieutenants in charge of each of the areas that they're overseeing. Someone that they can be accountable to, someone they can rely on, and not incidentally somebody who's going to push you as a manager. Lieutenants should be coming to you and saying I think we need to be doing this, I think we need to innovate in this area.Edward: Steve, what were the biggest failure points in your career? Where did things not go as expected?Steve: On what we were just discussing, I think it was a mistake for me to accept one of the roles that I had. To me, the very soul of BrightStar's point of difference is its registered nurses. There was a department that had orders of registered nurses who would liaise with the nurses of each of our franchises. They were excellent, they were amazing in gerontology, they were amazing at working with clients and everything, but fundamentally, their role was not so much commercial as it was operational. If I could've turned down one department in retrospect, it would've been that one. I loved them, I thought they were excellent, but it was just not something that I had the wherewithal to manage. I would say that's something where I probably should've said, are we sure about this, I'm not sure if maybe that's something that I should take on. Edward: How did that learning affect later in your career, if at all? Did it change your perspective on taking on responsibilities in other places along the way? Steve: Yes. I'd still consider myself somebody who wants to contribute in any way that my contributions would be welcome. I'm definitely not somebody who goes out to seek, build an empire, expand, and everything. The responsibilities that I was given at BrightStar were not ones that I asked for, but I am willing to help out. That hasn't changed. If I'm ever in this situation like that going forward, I'm going to be a lot more discriminating and just really think through, is this something that I can succeed at, is this something that's good for the organization to have me oversee?Edward: Steve, what are your productivity tricks? What do you do to be productive that most people don't do?Steve: There are a number of things. Years ago, I did what a lot of people did at the time, I read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. That helped codify for me a lot of things I was somewhat doing naturally, but I really got focused on those things that we call big rocks. You've heard this analogy before. You've got a container full of big rocks, sand, some gravel, and this type of thing. The big rocks represent those priorities that are most important that are going to move the ball downfield for the organization. You got to focus on those first because if you focus on all the less meaningful stuff that's the sand, you'll fill up your container with things that now don't allow you to fit in the big rocks. You always start with that.I would say that I went through a period where I got way too fascinated with planning ahead like that. What I've learned more recently is to leverage coincidences, things that happen. Call them coincidences, call them happenstance, call them divine appointments, whatever you wish. Things will pop up and you have to have the awareness in the moment, and the full vision in order to be able to take advantage of those things when they arise. There may be something that comes up and you think, wow, this is a quick easy win, if I jump on this right now, I can really do something great for the organization so let's get a team together and address it.Planning ahead is great, but you've also got to be willing to look for those coincidences when they come up.Edward: How do you differentiate between a coincidence that's an opportunity you should jump on, and a coincidence that's a distraction from the plan that you were trying to work on?Steve: This I will mention in not a positive but not a negative way, just a more discriminating way. This Art of War by Sun Tzu, it was a thing years ago to quote that book. I would say take a step back, look at all the different maxims listed on that book. What it's really about is fortune favors the prepared. You have to have a certain ripeness about you and a certain handle on what all's going on in order to succeed. It's not about doing something machiavellian like under-cutting a competitor or that type of thing, it's just paying attention a lot and being aware of what's happening around you. That's how you distinguish one coincidence, a coincidence that's productive versus a coincidence that is a distraction. If you've got a sense of what's going on, you can make those judgments right in the moment and be able to decide, yes, this is something I should chase for a day, or no, this is something I should just let go.Edward: Thank you, Steve. We're going to wrap it with that and we'll come back tomorrow to talk about your experience at the Museum of the Bible.Steve: Thanks so much, Ed. Great speaking with you. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit marketingbs.substack.com

Welcome! Good morning, everybody. I was on with Steve Fornier this morning who was sitting in for Jim Polito. We discussed what the James Dyson Foundation is providing to families to interest their kids in Engineering and what the Business world will look like post-COVID. So, here we go with Steve Fornier For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com ---  Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Craig So what we did is we took the opportunity with her to say, Okay, well, let's do it. Let's make here's a recipe with feeds four people. So now we need to feed six people. So at the age of about five or six, she was doing fractions in her head. Hey, we went through a few more tips this morning. And Mr. Jim Polito is out. So Steve Fornier is sitting in for him. And I managed to work murder Hornets into this morning's interview, so here we go. Steve Welcome back to the Jim Polito show. It is Steve Fornier here in Springfield in for Jim this morning. And again, I a guy that I think is just such a valuable resource at a time like this. Craig Peterson joins us, our tech talk guru Craig. Good morning. How are you doing, sir? Craig Good morning, doing well. Steve First of all, Craig, I want to say thank you for your contributions, and I know that you also gave our radio stations a bunch of tech talk tips that we can use that we can run here on the stations. And I think that's so valuable. So I want to say thank you for providing us with that stuff. Craig Oh, you're welcome. Yeah, it took a long time. Those little features are about a minute and a half to two minutes long talking about the tech stuff. Steve How do you boil it down to just something that's just a minute or two long? That's my entire job, Craig is spitting 40 seconds worth of stuff into a 30-second spot. So I hear you that. Craig Today is National Teacher Appreciation Day, which I think is so important. And you have some cool resources for parents to help the kids out. Can you tell us a little bit about it? Craig Yeah, this one is just totally cool. I don't know if you know, but my wife and I have eight kids, and we homeschooled them. Steve Your baseball team. Craig Yeah, yeah, right. Oh, you know from Canada, so it's closer to a hockey team. But anyway, the whole time up to college in fact, now they've gone on to get advanced degrees. But what you have to do with your kids is look at their interests. We had a young daughter, I think she was about five or six years old, and she loved to cook she loves to bake. And so what we did is we took the opportunity with her to say, Okay, well, let's do it. Let's make here's a recipe with seeds for people. So now we need to feed six people. So at the age of about five or six, she was doing fractions in her head. She was multiplying fractions dividing fractions because she loved to cook—somebody like you, Steve, who loves sports. If you have a little boy or girl that's interested in baseball, teach them how to figure out the statistics. And which stats are better? Is it better to bat a 300 or 400? And what does that mean? You take those opportunities, and that's what Dyson has come up with James Dyson's foundation. He is the guy that makes those vacuum cleaners that are kind of cool some high tech fans and other things. His foundation has put together this list of about two dozen different challenges for kids. And the idea behind it is to get them interested and expose them to engineering concepts. You know, they have some simple things like can you skewer a balloon that's inflated without poping it? How about taking a nail electroplating it? How can you cover it in copper? Well, how would you do that? And then a classic I remember when I was a little kid is plugging a clock into a potato making a potato battery. So all of these things are designed as challenges specifically for kids. They're ideal in the home or the classroom. And the whole idea is to get kids excited about engineering. Steve Yeah, into just give them something to do right to let them put down the fortnight controller and, and be productive. You know, while we're all sitting around. Craig Yeah, I think that might be a difficult one for some people because so many of these video games are very, very addicting, and the whole science behind them is fascinating. But this is great. So I'm going to we'll get them outside. They'll get them in the kitchen. They'll get them doing some things. So just search online right now you'll be able to find it. It's the James Dyson Foundation spelled D Y S O N. Steve By the way, I learned Craig thanks to Final Jeopardy earlier this week. Maybe that Dyson also invented the wheelbarrow. So how about that? What is who is Dyson? Cool there? We're talking with Greg Peterson, and I do have sort of an off the radar question. I wanted to fire at you towards the end. So stay on alert for that, Greg, but can you tell us a little bit about telecommuting. Post COVID-19, it's going to be a little different. How can you tell us out? Craig Yeah, we're seeing some fascinating numbers starting to come out right now most businesses have got some sort of telecommuting in place now. Many of them have been looking at how do I secure it now? How do I make it more efficient, make it faster for people? What we're starting to see from these C-levels and the executive offices, who are trying to figure out what's it going to look like, is that they are serious about moving out of the big cities. So I think you're going to see a lot of the businesses moving from a Boston, for instance. Closer to Western or Springfield, smaller cities, and even smaller towns, some of these corporate buildings in Chicago are already emptying. We've seen the same thing in Detroit for many years. So post COVID-19, we're going to see that many of their employees have ten times more than pre-COVID-19. Ten times more employees about 40% or maybe more will be working from home on a long term basis. Steve Whether or not they want to. I mean, like yes, some people don't want to be stuck in the house all day with their family and some businesses. Craig Some businesses still have their people getting together? What I'm thinking is that we are going to see more people working from home, but it's not going to be five days a week. They may be working from home four days a week or three days a week and going into the office once or twice, but that's going to happen. It is going to have a devastating impact on real estate, the business real estate out there, frankly. But we're going to see just a dramatic a giant increase from January and people working from home on Craigslist, anything. Steve Like I don't know how to say this is the impact that COVID-19 is having in the big cities? Is that a part of it too, because it just seems like, you know, the cities that are being hit the hardest. New York City, Boston, you know, major metropolitan cities, is that a part of it too, just keeping your employees safe, and, you know, understanding the threat that there isn't a big city. Craig So that's a massive part of it. Most of the major corporations are not planning any sort of travel even until the probably next year 2021. And when you're looking at the big cities, it is a considerable risk. You know, as a business, we can't afford to lose some of our best talents, and when Many companies have been placed strategies that say hey listen, you guys cannot be on the same airplane traveling somewhere you cannot be in this location together. And because of what we've seen with COVID-19, there are a lot of businesses that are being Steve all just a whole lot more cautious about having people in one place. I talk to business people who are saying that for them in reality. It has been a big wake up call because having everyone in the office but spreading these germs, even for the flu for instance, but when you've got something like this virus we have today where we don't know what's going to happen, having them all in one office and sharing it the big problem. I have a client who is an HVAC contractor, and they are starting to install air handling units that have ultraviolet light inside of them. They have heavy HEPA filters that put into them all in an effort for businesses to be able to keep the offices safe so that they are not spreading disease in the office. It's going to be a whole new world. Steve Yeah, sure is. We're talking with Craig Peterson, our tech guru and Craig, I do have a question sort of out of the left-field that I think you can help with solve security questions. It is today's world from the eyes of a hacker, these security questions, just don't cut it for me, like, what is your dad's but what is your mom's maiden name? Like? I feel like that's very easy to find on the internet. If you're a hacker, what you know what street did you grow up on? Well, we can figure that out pretty easily on the Yellow Pages calm. Um, I'm to the point now where it's I'm answering questions like, you know, what's your dog's name and I'm answering like purple because I Hope they will get it. Is that the best approach to just sort of lie on all these questions? Craig Yeah, it is, you know, in this day and age of murder Hornets, we have to be extra cautious. But yeah, what I've done for the last 30-40 years. I got my first job ever. I wrote some computer software used for magazine distribution stuff. I came to realize that hey, they are tracking us. So always since then, I have been making up the answers to all of those questions, just wholly random words. And I have been using one password, which is a password manager, to a great one. It's the one I recommend to everybody. There are other password managers out there, but it'll generate passwords for you. It'll store notes securely, etc. So you're doing the right thing, Steve, every website that I go to, that's asking those security Questions. I have it either one password randomly pick words for me, or I just make up something that's completely nonsensical. And sometimes, when you get on with the tech support or PII or help desk people, and they ask one of those questions, they chuckle. They ask, what's that? What's that all about? Now, there is a line. You cannot erase the lease not supposed to lie on certain types of applications. So if it's financial information, if it's government-related stuff, you can undoubtedly make top answers to those recovery questions. But you can't just totally lie about who you are. But I have dozens and dozens of identities, Steve that I use on just random websites. They don't need to know who I am. So I only use some made-up identity, and sometimes I'm a guy, sometimes I'm female, you know, different ages, everything else because they don't need to know that. I don't want the hacker To be able to examine my life on LinkedIn or my website or Facebook and come up with the answers. Steve Yeah, no, that that was my thought is how simple it is. Especially if you have if you're not like a private thing, if you don't have a personal Twitter or a private Facebook, you know, you're opening yourself up to getting that information, the hackers getting that information, and then then you know, they're in. So very interesting. I appreciate that. I have been fighting that battle with the security question thing now. Craig Well, that's not right. Now that's a $15 billion industry, sending out those phishing emails and trying to figure out what someone's information is and using that to do spearfishing. It's all part of business email compromise, which the FBI says I'm more than $15 billion industry right now. Steve Wow. That's crazy. Craig, this is excellent stuff, folks. And if you want more from Craig, you can do that. We'll go with the name, Jim, for consistency, but you can do text, the name Jim, to this number. Craig to 855 385 5553. So let's just text and Jim to 855 385 5553. Steve And as always good stuff, Craig, if you want more information on those different activities for the kids, again, you will find it at Dyson is the name of the company. Likewise, if you get in touch with Craig, he's more than willing to help out. And like I said, Craig, we appreciate you, especially this time. It's valuable stuff. And we understand it. So thanks again. Craig All right, take care. Bye-Bye, guys. Steve Thank you. Thank you. There goes everybody, Craig Peterson. And great stuff. Craig I've been sort of mulling over the security question thing for a while that just like what street did you grow up on? That's specific information to come up with if you're a hacker, it's just to me it just seems way too easy. So yeah, what street did you grow up on honeysuckle? It's not honeysuckle, but that's what I'm, you know, whatever. You're right. Just make sure you write them all down somewhere. And then I'll use the one password it can have secure notes. Don't forget it. All right, everybody. Hey, thanks for reaching out to me yesterday. Text Me Me at Craig Peterson dot com. I appreciate that. I got a couple of excellent comments. I think I might be onto something here through something that's going to help you guys out. So anyhow, have a great day. I expect I'll be back tomorrow if I have a decent interview on WGAN as well. Bye-bye Transcribed by https://otter.ai ---  More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Kyle & Sean run Steve First through the Five (5) questions.

Sean & Kyle are joined by Steve First to talk woodworking.

How did Steve Sheinkopf and the team at Yale Appliance use blogging to grow the company's website traffic from 30,000 visits a month to one million visits a month while increasing revenues by 350%? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Yale Appliance and Lighting CEO Steve Sheinkopf shares his company's journey from a small Boston-based lighting and appliance store that relied heavily on advertising for business, to the world's most trafficked appliance website and a business in the process of adding its third store. Central to Yale's success was Steve himself, who blogged five times a week in the early day's of the company's content marketing efforts and continues to create key blog posts to this day. Highlights from my conversation with Steve include: Yale Appliance is the most trafficked appliance website in the world Steve started blogging in 2007 and at the time, Yale Appliance was spending around three quarters of a million dollars on radio ads. From 2007 to 2011, Steve blogged five times a week, but despite the volume of content he was publishing he wasn't seeing any results.  In 2011, Yale was getting 30,000 visitors a month to its website and today, it gets close to a million a month - all due to the shift that Steve and his team made in the way they undertake content marketing. Yale doesn't talk about itself on its blog - it talks about statistics and facts relating to its products, and that is what makes readers trust them. Steve says blogging is all about building domain authority and to that requires a sustained and consistent effort when it comes to content creation. Steve sees blogging as a core competency of his business at Yale and as such believes strongly that it shouldn't be outsourced. Steve still writes blogs for Yale, but today, the company's sales people blog as well. The company tracks the ROI of its content marketing efforts and can show, using data from HubSpot, that views of its blog and buyers guide have driven millions of dollars in business. Steve writes all of the posts relating to reliability, "best of" lists, and articles detailing problems that frequently occur with certain brands. One of the biggest benefits of Yale's content marketing efforts is that the leads it generates are very high intent. His team can see the content they've consumed on the website and it shows exactly what they are interested in. The average appliance store in 10 years has gained probably 15 to 20% in revenue. We've, increased our revenue probably 350% in the same time. 37 about 122 million in a 10 year period. So that certainly plays a part of that in terms of stores. We've gone from one store to we're adding our third in November which will be our biggest store. The average appliance store in 10 years has gained approximately 15 to 20% in revenue. In that time, Yale has increased its revenue by 350%, from 37 to about 122 million in a 10 year period. They have also gone from one store to adding their third in November which will be the company's biggest store. Resources from this episode: Visit the Yale Appliance and Lighting Website Follow Steve on Twitter Connect with Steve on LinkedIn Email Steve at steve.sheinkopf@yaleappliance.com  Listen to the podcast to get learn how Steve Sheinkopf and the team at Yale Appliance and Lighting used content to drive traffic, leads and sales. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth and this week my guest is Steve Sheinkopf who is the CEO of Yale Appliance and Lighting. Welcome, Steve. Steve Sheinkopf (Guest): Good to be here Kathleen. How are you? Steve and Kathleen recording this episode. Kathleen: I'm great. I am excited to have you on and I can't wait to dig into our topic. But, not everybody who's listening may know who you are, so can you just tell my listeners a little bit about yourself and your business? About Steve Sheinkopf and Yale Appliance and Lighting Steve: Sure. We're a 97 year old appliance company located in Boston Massachusetts. We sell appliances, lights, we do a lot of service work, and our company's powered by really content marketing and not advertising. That's pretty much what we do. We sell all brands of different appliances, from Sub-Zero down to Samsung and we compete against pretty much 60 Brick and mortar competitors in a 20 mile area plus Online plus Amazon, Wayfair and all the people, Home Depot, that sort of thing. Kathleen: You're being very humble and so I'm going to toot your horn for you because this is like a David and Goliath story. You guys do compete against 800 pound gorillas with huge budgets. If I understand correctly you also in some respects, at least for content and search engine share, you compete against the manufacturers of the appliances that you sell. So on paper this story shouldn't be possible which is what I love about it. But you guys have one of the most trafficked, if not the most traffic to appliance websites in the world. Correct? Steve: Yeah. I think so. Kathleen: It's amazing. So all right, for people who are listening, I have been bugging Steve and his team to try and get one of them on this podcast for about two years now because I first started hearing this story of Yale Appliance a couple of years back. It was before I joined IMPACT I had heard about it from Marcus Sheridan, who plays a role in the story. And then I had the opportunity to get to know these guys better through IMPACT and all along I've just been so impressed. The reason, and it is a classic content marketing story, and I say classic because it's the things we're all told to do. Only you guys actually went and did them which is the big differentiator. But the reason I was so excited to have you particularly on is that most of my guests are marketers and they're already drinking the Kool-Aid. The biggest challenge they tend to have, is getting the C-suite not only to buy-in, but my gosh for them The Holy Grail is to actually participate in the process. And you've been doing this all along. So that's really what I want to talk about. But let's kind of rewind the clock if you would and start back from when you first began. I've heard the story a couple of times but I'm sure everybody hasn't. So maybe you could just tell the tale of how did you guys first travel down this path? Because you're a 90 year old company and you were not always the most trafficked website for appliances in the world. How Yale Appliance discovered content marketing Steve: Oh, clearly not, clearly not. It's a long story but really it starts in 2004. I went to this thing called The In-Planet and it was absolute genius. There's a bunch of it was I think Boston visors or the Bain or McKinsey guys, they were talking about the future of marketing and they were talking about how digital one day overtake outbound and to prepare for it, it wasn't happening yet. And they said. "The least you can do is get on the whole review side, that reviews are going to play a big part of how people are going to purchase from your company." So that's the first thing we did is we got on with all the yelpers and instead of berating them for giving you bad views, we looked inside ourselves to say. " Maybe we're really disappointing people organically." So we started in 2007 blogging. And at the same time it was doubling down on radio. We did a lot of radio at that time I think it was the final number was somewhere around three quarters of a million dollars. And we doubled down during the recession and the more we advertise it was like diminishing returns. I used to ask the phone people anybody called them radio ads. When we started doing it in 2000 it was popular by 2010 no one really seemed interested. So we started blogging in 2007. It was 2011 when I met Marcus Sheridan and I thought it was going to teach Marcus something. The first conversation we have, everybody loves Marcus. He's like a folksy guy and back if we rewind the clock in 2011, at that time I was blogging every day but I wasn't blogging by keyword. I wasn't- Why the CEO of Yale Appliance dedicated himself to blogging Kathleen: Now you yourself were blogging? Steve: Yeah, I was. Kathleen: I just want to clarify that. Steve: I did that five days a week. Kathleen: That's amazing. Did you publish, was it five blogs or was it? Steve: Five posts a week. Kathleen: That's great. Steve: Well it's great when it's good stuff, not so great. And it was well-meaning, but it wasn't... Even when it answered the question I never titled it right, I didn't met a tag it. So our first conversation was just absolute beat down. It was pretty bad, but he was right. At that time we have 30,000 people a month going into our site, which on paper doesn't seem bad but we started blogging strategically and now we expect a million visitors a month, we were busy and somewhere out six, 700,000, we're not. And with that comes certainly more leads, more traffic, more business and that's what this is about. And I can't believe that, I can't believe. But if you were to say to a CEO, look we're going to start this program that's not going to be effective in six months, then you probably not going get much buy-in on the C-suite. But if you say to somebody, I'm going to reduce ad spend to zero and increase revenues disproportionately to your market share - I mean, what does the bottom line look like? And it's a great learning tool and it creates trust and it creates distrust for your competitors that aren't doing this. They're selling products that maybe they shouldn't be. That's a pretty compelling case so if you structure like that, I think people get more buy-in from the people that need to buy in to say this is a revenue expense game and it's what, how people really want to consume stuff. Because nobody really wants to listen to me say how great I am. In fact, we never talk about ourselves. We talk about statistics and facts and helping people make purchases because you go to all these content marketing seminars they talk about trust and that's how you really trying to do. If they trust you and your pricing is good and your execution which is the back half of what I really work on is are we executing to, what our value proposition is? Because blogging without execution is just bad. Work on execution first then blog. So that's the whole story. Kathleen: You raise a really interesting point and I've been in this inbound or content marketing game a long time. I had an agency for 11 years. Something that you said really struck me because you talked about if you say to a CEO, we're going to create blogs and you're not going to see any results for six months, that is what I would say the disproportionate percentage of people in this space say it when somebody says, how long will it take for me to get results? Which everybody wants to know, right? Because that's what it's all about is the results people will always answer with, well it takes time. Six months to a year you'll start to see something. And while there are aspects of content marketing that that is true for, there are also aspects of it that that is absolutely not true. Where you can see some sorts of results right away. And I think you're right when you set that expectation that's going take a while. That's not exactly the best way to sell it. Steve: Well, I mean, blogging is about domain authority. Strictly we use words to cover up what we really mean and you don't become an authority figure with one or two posts. You need to show over a long period of time that you know what you're doing, whether it's getting a client, business, life, whatever it is. You don't become an authority with one good post. That said, if you write about something that's brand new that nobody else's, you could probably rank high pretty quickly. Kathleen: Oh, for sure. Yeah. I've always said that the best moments in my content marketing career have been when I googled a question and didn't find an answer for it and I was like, ha ha, I'm right that answer. So what I'm curious about is you actually were convinced even before you met Marcus, that just that blogging in and of itself had value now obviously there was a better way to do it. Why you should insource content creation Kathleen: But what I'm really interested in understanding from you is when you first had this realization that hey, we might need to blog as part of our corporate strategy. What was it that convinced you personally to write? Because I think most of the CEOs I know who have that Aha moment and realized blogging is important. Their first thought is, I'm going to assign that to somebody or we're going to outsource it. Very few think I'm going to do it. Steve: Well, it's like anything else. You want to outsource things that either you're not good at or someone can do cheaper. If you want something to be a core competency you have to do it yourself, right? You can't be good at something, outsource it and then hope it gets better. Right? If you want it to be a core competency where every year, like every month, every week, every, if you're part of it and you're interested in it and intrigues you and it touches the customer it's important. That's something you don't outsource. So it's a matter of I think people that are outsourcing, the losing the whole kind of how do we get better? How do we read, what are customers asking and how are we better solve the problem? Goes into merchandising, it goes into everything we do, what lines we sell, what lines we don't sell. Because we have the finger on the pulse of what we think the customer reacts to. But you're never going to get good at it... Let's forget about if we call it something else, like social media or writing or customer outreach. If you're outsourcing it as a methodology, nobody's going to know your business better than you do. And it doesn't matter which content conference we go to whether it's Impact or Inbound or HubSpot or whatever those. Anybody that's outsourcing with writers from whatever, what Fiverr from Indiana they're just not getting the results they could if they did it themselves and treat it like a crucial pillar of our business of ,your business which it could be, which it should be. Who creates content at Yale Appliance Kathleen: Now in the beginning you were writing five articles a week. What does that look like today? Are you still actively writing or are there other folks in the company that are primarily doing it? Steve: Well, it really depends, but the sales people. Sales people write blogs to varying degrees. I still edit most of them and I still write the important ones. And again, some of the ones I've written have, there are two that are over 2 million, 20 million views. But forget about the views, we have a report that shows people that go into our buyers guide from blogs and how much money we derive from that on a monthly, yearly basis. It's certainly well worth doing financially to do that, be part of it. And again my time spent at the CEO and culture and metrics and enforcing standards, after that really social outreach which I can reach a whole market of people by writing a blog. It's just so worth my time I think. Kathleen: And you mentioned that you write the important posts and that there are certain posts that really take off. What are the topics that you feel like best come from you? Steve: Well, the ones that resonate are the ones that are reliability posts that we were ranked manufacturers based on a service in the first year. I think some industry problem ones, are best from me, I think some of the comparisons other people can do. Again, when you look at blogging, if you want to figure out if your sales people know what they're talking about, you read their blogs. And if they can't tell you what the five best gas range tops are and in a blog they probably won't be able to sell if the customer comes into the store. So is a good learning tool for new people to just read Wiskott-Aldrich. So the time to get a new person up is much quicker. But I write reliability, best and problems ones. Kathleen: Were you always just really comfortable with writing? Is that a format that you gravitate to? Steve: Not initially, I realized the value of it but if you look at what I wrote back in 2007 versus what we write now, it's much better, much different. And that's true of anything. Everyone always says. "I'm an awful writer." Everybody is awful. This saying that every expert starts as a beginner. If you stick with it and you write three articles a week every week, if you're new, by the time one year rolls around, you've written 152 articles. That's enough for authority, but you're going to be much better after a year than you are in the beginning. Everything you do that you practice you work hard on you're going to get better at. Whether it's blogging or anything else in business. Kathleen: Now, do you find that you've gotten faster also? Steve: Yes. I think in blogs now. I've been doing it for since 2007 .I think in blog posts like comparisons and invest because I've been doing it for that long. Kathleen: How long does it take you to produce a blog? Steve: Me? Kathleen: Yeah. Steve: I can produce a blog in probably a couple of hours. The ROI of Yale's content marketing efforts Kathleen: That's great. I think it's interesting because a lot of CEOs would hear a couple of hours and think there's no way. My time is too valuable for that. So you mentioned that you guys have systems put in place to track how he is this content turns into revenue. Can you give me a sense of what that looks like and what that's produced? I don't even know if you can get it down to like what is a blog worth? I'm sure each of them is worth a different amount, but I'd love to understand better what kind of ROI you're seeing. Steve: Well, let's forget the fact that basically the path to purchase goes to the Internet. It has since probably 2005. Alright? So but the way we do, we use a very crude metric. I have Google analytics where I can... that our time on site jumps when you talk about a blog posts really, time on site pages views equal to consumers. But we can talk about store visits, but in terms of share revenue the number that we look at over a 12 month period is anybody that's downloaded a buyer's guide. So let's say you download a buyer's Guide and get 20th. If you come into the store buy with that same email address, we track them and let's just say your friend, partners, significant other, spouse buys under theirs, that's not tracked. So just from the people that download buyers guide, they buy it comes out to be about a million or a million and half per month in revenue. Yeah, that's just that not including... What we tried to do when you look at when anybody looks at Google analytics, typically Marcus said for his pool company, once they hit pages 30, his conversion goes up. For us I think it's seven minutes or 10 and a half pages and blogs play a big part of that. You want to get trust and then you want to execute. And that's kind of how businesses and the blogging is in marketing is half that or say a third of it, the sales and execution, delivery, install, all that stuff has to be in order for this to work. Certainly the articles have to be good, but the delivery experience, the installation experience and the service experience of what we do, which is our differentiating factors have to be as good if not better. Kathleen: So this has had a major implication for your overall business. Obviously it's not just revenue, clearly you're getting a lot of traffic and that's turning into business for you. But can you talk a little bit about some of the new directions that you're thinking of heading in as a result of this? What Yale's success with content marketing has meant for its business Steve: What we've been able to do certainly on the revenue side. The average appliance store in 10 years has gained probably 15 to 20% in revenue. We've, increased our revenue probably 350% in the same time. 37 about 122 million in a 10 year period. So that certainly plays a part of that in terms of stores. We've gone from one store to we're adding our third in November which will be our biggest store. But really what we've done is we've taken that 2% that we normally two or 3%, we normally take in marketing and we put it in customer touchpoints and really the customer touchpoints, are systems and people. We've been able to keep good people because instead of blowing it on $3 million worth of say, Glow Buds or radio spots or something, we have a better medical, we have 401k matching. To me that's... You market to your people first and those people market to your customers. So we've been able to take that wasted spend and put it into areas that people really appreciate. And that's people, systems, displays, warehousing, all that stuff, that's the other half of it. Is to take that money you would have spent and put it where people really want it. The first thing during the recession when we change management, first thing I said is we're going to answer the phone, right? We're going to answer the phone and we're going to be good on the execution side. And we put our money towards that rather than putting money on marketing. And it wouldn't take off if we didn't have some kind of social profile, which that whole blogging is a part of really, if blogging is a core competence that helps people come into the stores and then it's the execution side. It's two parts to this it's not just blogging that drives the revenue. It's the execution that keeps the revenue. Kathleen: It's funny because there's lots of buzz that I hear at least that we could be due for another recession sometime in the next couple of years. When you think about the evolution of the company and how you've done marketing and consider that there is this prospect that we may get hit again with another recession. How do you think the company will fare given your new marketing approach? Because it's very different than what you did the last time around. Steve: I think we'll do a lot better again because one of the things is we're not wasting money. We all know that outbound marketing is a negative ROI deal. I think as long as you understand who your customer is and you're straight and transparent with them, I think you have a leg up over people who do not do that. And that's pretty much everybody in our space. There's some people that are doing it, some people that are doing well, but they don't understand the whole execution side. Kathleen: Now the other thing that I think is interesting is historically you've been a local business. You're in the Boston area and well that's a big local market. It's still a local market and now you're getting all this traffic. I have to imagine a considerable amount of that traffic is not from the Boston area. Some people might hear that and think, well that's great that you have more traffic, but it's not really, that's not valuable traffic because they're not going to be able to walk in the door and buy from you. How do you look at that? Steve: Oh that's very true. 88% of our traffic we cannot sell to. Because delivering an appliance it's not like delivering Sharmane tissues.Especially in Boston because we got brownstones and walk-ups you need very specialized delivery people. That's why we pay the delivery people well because we're not spending it on marketing. But the worst thing you can do is ruin your reputation by not execute. It's a fair question a lot of this traffic is not really valid traffic. Let's take a million people say that we got last month on the blog or 800,000 or whatever it was, say it's 800,000 we'll minimize that means 12% of 800,000 in your market. How many people... We write to a specific audience. So how many people? 12% of a million or 800,000 it's still a lot of people that's still you're writing to 70,000 people. They're not reading your blog because they want to get to something else. It's still a significant amount of people in the market. There's no way to hit, it's like the old days they talked about radio ads. It's like they sold it to you. There's 100,000 home owners but only 2% of them are in the market and only 2% of those will listen to ad. The people that are clicking on a blog posts are showing intent, right? So those are 70,000 people showing you intent because they're clicking on something. It's not like the old radio or TV metrics. So that's still a lot of people looking to buy from you. Kathleen: Do you ever foresee that there might be an opportunity for you to somehow monetize that other 80%? Steve: No, unless we're directly involved in the actual fulfillment of the order. I don't want to be involved. If we look at... There's a lot of really good online appliance stores that have really good interfaces. They put their money on the front end, but if you look at the reviews on Yelp or Google, they're so bad and over time that'll catch up to you. Right? Because really, the one thing that I always tell the people in the marketing department is don't forget that your consumer and the path to purchase is okay, you'll read a blog everyone talks about what's the one thing, it's all about attribution. You'll read a blog post, you'll go online and you're mobile, you'll sit on your tablet, but somewhere down the line you're going to read reviews before you decide to purchase from that company or not. And you don't want everybody loves Impact because you guys do good work. But if you had a two star reputation on like Yelp or Google, we wouldn't be having this discussion. Right. So, I'm willing to... First of all, there's enough business in a local market. I want more, it's cheaper in, and easier and better to be in the Boston market. Than being partly in Boston, in somewhere in L.A. which is actually our biggest market for the blog, New York. I think it's better logistically to stay where you are. Kathleen: I was going to say maybe someday you'll have... You have three stores now maybe you'll someday have 30. Steve: The way it works from a business standpoint, this goes a little bit back to blogging is you have a warehouse. You want to maximize that warehouse, then in a third store you need a bigger warehouse and you want to maximize that warehouse and then you run stores up that warehouse, that's where it becomes the most efficient to do business. Going to L.A and having logistics there and hiring and hiring service people in a whole new network is much more difficult. Steve's advice to other CEOs Kathleen: It's a good problem to have too much traffic and more than you can sell to. I want to go back to this issue of most CEOs don't necessarily see the justification for being personally involved in this. If somebody is listening and they are a Content Manager or the Head of Marketing and they're passionate about creating content for the company and they want the CEO to be involved, As a CEO yourself, do you have any advice for the best way for that person to approach the CEO and get them excited about taking part in this process? Steve: It's like we said in the beginning, there aren't too many opportunities to increase your brand in the profile of that brand. There's not too many ways to create trust and there's not too many ways to raise revenue and reduce expenses at the same time. What is your bottom line look like by raising revenue and reducing expenses? And that's really my job is to... We used to be happy if we reduced expenses by 30, 50, 60,000. Well now we're talking about reducing expenses at our level 700, a million, $2 million in increasing the top line revenues by since we'll be doing it anywhere from eight to 15% a year in a highly competitive market. There aren't too many opportunities to do that. In fact, there aren't any opportunities to do that. And if you're a CEO and your other face of the brand of the company and it comes from you and you're answering people's questions and handling people's problems, that goes a long way in building your brand there. If it isn't that, what else would you be doing? I could sit there and run the warehouse, but there are people that run the warehouse better than me. I could sit on Ops, the people that run operations better than me. It's important for a CEO to understand the metrics of success in the company, but terms of really the overall of really the fundamentals of a P&L we have revenues, we have expenses. If you raise one and lower the other one, that's what we're paid to do. And this is a unique opportunity to do it. Now, do you have to do it to my extreme? No, clearly not. I got involved 12 years ago but if you were to do a post or two a week and maybe handle a couple of dicey problems and show that you have kind of deep seated knowledge of the industry. Especially if you're selling services, which many people do and you show that you handled that problem, a person with that problem is probably going to give you due consideration. Right. That's the way it works. Kathleen: It's very interesting that you brought up the thing about personal brand because that's something that I've been giving a lot of thought to lately. There are so many companies creating content now. You were fortunate or had the incredible foresight to start doing this very early when this wasn't as ubiquitous. I just went to HubSpot's Inbound event there were 26,000 people there who are all drinking the Kool-Aid of content marketing. And you look at crowds like that and you think, wow, all these people are bought in. It's getting harder to stand out and I really believe that one very effective way to stand out is through personal branding. Because anybody can kind of copy generic content, but you can't copy a personal brand that is inherently individual. So I'm curious in your experience for you personally, aside from the business results, what have you experienced as you've put your personal brand behind the content? Like has that resulted in anything for you? Steve: First of all let's not give me so much credit. I ran out of money. I didn't have a choice. Most good content marketers will tell you during the recession, we all ran out at doe. That's why- Kathleen: I owned a business in the recession. And I can definitely second that. That's why I started blogging too. I was like, I have all this time and no money. I'll write. Steve: Exactly. I could've just as easily destroyed a 90 year old company, which I was very close to doing. That's it I'm not really interested in my own personal brand. Really having gone through the recession as both of us have, it's more important for the company to have a strong balance sheet than it is for me to build a personal brand. And personal branding is, brands are like sponges. They can't they get everything, they keep everything that's good and bad about the brand. And the fact that my personal brand, your personal brand impact Yale, we don't know own the brands anyway. It's what's being said out there that really shapes what the brand is. Kathleen: Don't they say that your brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room? Steve: Your brand is what other people say. We've lost control of our brand when the Internet became popular. So, really personal branding... I think people appreciate I still answer most of the questions on the blog and I think people appreciate the fact that it's not me I'm not building my personal brand. I think a lot of people need help they're not getting in other places. And what I do is just, I give them the what to do and how to do it. And it's not about building a personal brand at all. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: So interesting. I love your story and it's unbelievable what you guys have done. We don't have too much more time, so I want to make sure before we wrap up that I asked you the two questions I ask all of my guests. The first one being we're all about inbound marketing on this podcast. Is there a particular company or individual that you know, who you think is really killing it with inbound marketing right now? Steve: Obviously great adversary Marcus Sheridan his killing it. I think back to our first conversation, there were two thoughts and went through my head as A. I need to do this B. I want him to eat his words. And you know the funny thing is it's like I want it to be better than him. But it never worked out that way because he was on other things it's almost like you go into the battlefield and you get a note from guys saying. "Hey, the land is yours and by the way I love what you're doing and all the rest of it, but I'm busy taking over France or whatever." His journey into his personal brand of videos is really compelling and I think his role with the pool company. I think they do a great job. The person that I liked the most in this space is a Crystal Cornea and what she did at Block Imaging I thought was fantastic. She made buying refurbs cool. She made people in that company feel cool writing about it. For me, I tell people it's good to do because it's good for your personal brand that I shouldn't control your brand. But she made it cool to do that. I've kind of lost touch with Block and what they've done since but I know she's left and she works as a consultant for other people, but I really love the way she goes about it. She's very inclusive and she did a great job with Block. Kathleen: Yeah, she's really impressive and you know, Marcus is, you're right. I interviewed him I think he was my first episode of this year. And the thing that I love about Marcus and you totally hit the nail on the head. He's constantly evolving. And the reason to me is that he's such a student of human nature, which is what makes him great at content marketing. He is not a marketer. He is a student of human nature. And so that is what led him to realize that, hey, we just have to answer people's questions. Right. This isn't super scientific it's almost once you tell somebody they sh they're like, Duh. But it took somebody who wasn't a marketer to figure it out. And somebody who's a keen observer of people. And that's the same thing that he's doing with video. He's a very keen observer of people and how they interact and communicate and so it makes them incredibly successful. Steve: Oh yeah. I think I the fundamentals to content marketing is the same fundamentals of everything else is. A. Do know what you're doing? B. Can you communicate it? And that'll come if you know what you're doing and C. And this is the really important part, this is like the C-level stuff is, are you executed once you've said that? And those three, if you put those three together, you have some special. Kathleen: And I always say also, can you get out of your own way? Because often marketers are their own worst enemies and they take their human hat off and put their marketing hat on and they write like robots and it's just, it's interesting. Steve: So they write and a lot more people are starting to write for search engines and that's troubling too. And they can't basically answer the question. There's so many people that... Everyone talks about tips, hacks, it's got to be 2000 words now or whatever it is. But the person that answers the question that best will get ranked because Google's not stupid they'll give the best experience wins. And if you can answer the question on a 1,000 words and is more compelling than the person writing 2000 words and you'll win. Kathleen: Right. The only correct answer to how long does an article need to be is as long as is required to answer the question. Second question is, the world of digital marketing is changing really quickly. And obviously your a CEO, you're not wearing the marketing hat in the company, but you're somebody who is keenly aware of marketing. How do you stay up to date and make sure that you're not falling behind the times with marketing? Steve: That's a great question now that I'm in Boston now I've commuted to stores. I actually have a commute. So I podcast a lot and there's some good marketing podcast. Patel has a very good one, Tony Robbins has a good one, some of the paid search guys have good ones. There's five or six, I'll listen to I'll read blog post and then I'll go to some conferences. Impact has become important over the last couple of years.Certainly HubSpot, we've been going to HubSpot they used to have it at the, at the Hilton hotel and [Copley 00:37:51] two rooms. When I was there initially I think it was 400 people in two tracks. And RF, which is the Retail Foundation in January they put a good one in New York, such marketing conferences and other one I'll go to like four or five conferences a year. If there's a good class I'll do that, Linkedin learning is apart, Social Media Examiner, they have to get some good stuff too. So it's a constant because everything changes and you want to be on top of that certainly. Kathleen: It Can be very tough to keep up with but I do think it's a matter of picking your five or six sources that you really love and just sticking with those and you've got anything else on top of it. That's gravy. Steve: The one thing is it's you can only be especially if you're a small team and I think this is geared more to a small business maybe, but you've got a small team or if you're a single person, like me and Pat were initially. You can only be very good in it one or two aspects. You can't be great at blogging, great at Instagram, great at Pinterest, great at Google ads. You can't be great at like there are 10 things that you can be really great in marketing that can move the needle, but pick one or two. That A. Figured out where customers are and you learned Google analytics for that. And two figure out what your passions are. If your passions with photography, like I'm not, Instagram would be a good one for you, Pinterest would be a good one for you. Wherever you think you can really dominate a certain aspect, rather be just mediocre at everything. You do not need to everything you needed to one or two things really, really well. Kathleen: Right. That's the old Jack of all trades, master of none problem. Right? Steve: Very true. How to connect with Steve Kathleen: This has been so great if somebody wants to learn more about Yale Appliance or connect with you, what's the best way for them to do that? Steve: I don't really know. Kathleen: Visit your website I would assume, right? Steve: Yeah. I'm on Twitter I guess like everybody else. I've got 3000 followers. I have no idea who they are. Certainly LinkedIn, my email address, you can certainly give steve.sheinkopf@yaleappliance.com. This community it's been really good to me and I'm happy to really answer any questions that anybody has. About marketing or inbound marketing or anything else. So email, Linkedin. My name is Steve Sheinkopf obviously, Twitter that type of stuff. I'll get back to you eventually. Kathleen: Great. Well, I will put the links to all those things in the short notes. And of course you already said that you answer all the questions on the blog. So I would think that people could go there and if they have questions about appliances, they know who to ask. You know what to do next... Kathleen: And if you're listening and you learnt something new, or you liked what you heard, of course, please leave the podcast a five star review on Apple Podcasts. That's how we get funds. And if you know somebody else who's doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me @workmommywork, because I would love to interview them. That's it for this week. Thanks Steve. Steve: Alright. Thank you Kathleen.

  Once you get clear on what you want as an entrepreneur, the rest is a lot of learnable formulas that you DO NOT have to be pro at...   Every once in a while when an interview is just so awesome, I ask:   “ Do you mind if I repost this on Sales Funnel Radio?”   ... and usually, they're very excited about that.   This interview was with Marian Esanu from the High Ticket Client Acquisition podcast.   Sometimes the right questions get me to teach something in a way that I haven't taught before.   Shout out to you, Marian, this was a great interview.   I’ve pulled out the BEST bits where Marian asks me about what I look for when I am trying to decide what to sell.    We talk about the whole red ocean analytics thing, (which by the way is a huge focus of the last OfferMind).   The next OfferMind is coming up September 2nd-3rd.     They’ll be a bunch of really cool speakers coming in and Russell's keynoting.   But back to the formulas…   Marian asks me:   What do you look for when you decide whether or not you should enter into a market. What do you look for when you're deciding what to sell? How do figure out what hooks to use?    You have to understand like I can close my eyes, and I can see the whole formula…   It's all a big pattern to me.    I know the formulas that cause success at each part of the value ladder. I know the formulas before we even choose or start brainstorming an offer to promote.    That should be really encouraging to everybody because that's what I teach:    That's the point of my OfferLab program That's the purpose of EVERYTHING I do...   The offer is part of the sales message. The sales message is part of the offer. They're separate, but they're combined in their purpose. They're equal but different.   FINDING YOUR VOICE   Marian:  What's your thought on somebody starting publishing for the first time? How do you find your voice?    Do you just talk about stuff that you're good at, even if you don't know if people are gonna respond to it? What do you think about that?   Steve: That is one of the most frequent questions. It’s also one of the questions where the answer is NOT inspiring.    We created this event called the Funnel Hackathon Event. We called it the FHAT event.   Russell's inner circle was there; these people were paying 25 - 50 grand to be in the room. The room was filled with very rich, very successful, smart people.   I had gone through the previous 12 years of Russell's content to organize it.    I thought through like,  “Hey, in order to know this, you really need to do that. In order to know this, you really need to do that.”    … and I put it in a digestible way...  and we launched the original Two Comma Club coaching program from that.    We decided to test the material against the inner circle, so it was a BIG event for me.   Russell was gonna teach, and so I was excited to see how he was gonna do it.    I was walking to the event room side-by-side with Russell, and he turns to me and goes, “Stephen, dude, do you want to introduce me on stage?”    Immediately, I was like, “No.”    I was so scared, like... there's no way.    I'm very formula oriented, and I was like, “What's the formula dude? What's the script? How do I MC? How do I bring somebody in?”   ...and Russell starts laughing. He's like, “Dude, no wait, wait. Okay, settle down.” I was freaking out, so he took me back out of the room, and we went to this little side conference room.    Russell said:   “Stephen, I got to tell you something... It’s impressive how well you model me... that's very rare, but dude, it’s time for you to find your own voice. Stop asking how would Russell Brunson introduce somebody on stage. How would YOU introduce somebody on stage?”   I focus so much on modeling success, it sounds stupid saying it, but it was the first time in my life where I found my voice.   It was the first time in my life that Steve Larsen was born on stage.   I was already podcasting... because I was listening to what he was saying... but Steve Larsen started becoming born on my podcast. Around episode 70 or 80, I felt it….   I started doing it the way I would do it.    I feel like a lot of the model's we follow will get you to 80%.   They'll jumpstart you and help shortcut decades, lots of pain and money that you otherwise would have to spend, but eventually the whole find your voice thing, in my opinion, is very unteachable.   I believe that there are things in this business that we can design, but there are other things that we have to discover... and your voice is one of them.    So you can follow some scripts and blueprints for a while, and then after a while, it's like: “Okay, how would you say it? Just okay say it that way.”   Marian: Got it. So it's more like practice, practice, practice, and then it would just come out at some point? Got it, awesome, and that's a hell of a story.   Steve: It's funny, man. It was sooo depressing for me to hear that. I was like, “Just tell me the script, dude. I want safety in the script.”   Marian: All right, awesome man. I think that will really help a lot of people that are listening to or watching this.    Now let's take it a step further, and let's say somebody has started to find their voice and find their message, and you know, model it and design it, and all that stuff…   The next part in there would be the offer, and that's where your entire expertise and all of these things come in, right?   Steve: Yeah.   THE BUSINESS OF PROBLEM SOLVING   Marian: What do you think is the next step would be, let’s say we're talking about a coach, a consultant, to design the best offer?   What do you think they lack... and how they can start looking at that process as being one of the most important?   I know you preach a lot on making sure that you work on your sales message and your sales process before you build your:    Product Course Anything that you want to build   What's your process so that somebody can implement that for themselves?   Steve: That's a very good question. It's interesting...   I believe the sales message and the offer are actually one and the same. They're very separate roles, but I don't think you can have a sales message without an offer, and vice versa.    There's no offer without a sales message. They support each other, but they're very different roles.    If you're gonna go create an offer, and let's say you're a coach or a consultant, or something like that…   I'm sure you've heard the saying that CEOs read a book a week…   So for a while, I was just consuming. consuming, consuming, because that's what successful people do, therefore I will do the same…   After about two years, I started asking myself questions like:   “I'm doing what successful people do, why am I still broke?”   ...and I realized several things.   #1: For the first time in my life, I started realizing the difference between marketing and sales and that they're very different.    Marketing changes people's beliefs so that they can buy something. That's what a sales message does. The act of selling is just presenting an offer and overcoming objections.   ...they work in tandem, but they are very distinct things.   So if somebody's trying to come up with an offer, you shouldn't be behaving as a CEO.    CEO's are in the business of running and tweaking systems. Entrepreneurs are in the business of solving problems.    If you're trying to come up with an offer for the first time, you’ve got to put on the entrepreneur hat and get rid of all the mainstream CEO junk. You're not a CEO, so stop acting like one.   I don't read a book a week. I'm NOT saying that you shouldn't learn, but…   I learn with the intent to solve problems. That's what entrepreneurs are in the business of doing.   So if you think about the way a customer is experiencing your product…   The Winter Olympics was a while ago, right. (Crap, it wasn't a while ago, it was like a year ago. Nevermind, time is going fast.)    So, for example:   If I'm gonna go be an Olympic skier, every single opportunity that's out there is guarded by a whole bunch of problems that you can't see…   My dad really wanted to go be an Olympic skier... if he’d the opportunity to be an Olympic skier, there's a whole bunch of follow-up problems that you have to solve.   Problems that you never knew you had to solve until you were given that opportunity.    Follow me for a second... I know I'm kind of going all over the place, let me tie it with a little bow in a second...   Marian: No, I get it.   Steve: Yeah, this is a HUGE deal to realize... I think most people that are in the business of selling anything, any kind of entrepreneurship, any kind of business… we forget this.   Your product is an opportunity, and there's a whole bunch of problems that you have to solve that show up after someone buys.   So, if I have the opportunity to become an Olympic skier, now that the opportunity's in front of me, I have to solve problems that weren't there before I had the opportunity:   Who's my coach gonna be? What kind of skis am I gonna use? Which mountains am I gonna practice on? Are my times fast enough? Did I study my competition enough?    Do you know what I mean?   Marion: Yep.   Steve: It happens to us when we buy any kind of product in our life. I'm trying to find something on my desk here. Okay, this gum...   SELLING GUM   There are follow-up problems that somebody has after they buy this gum that they did not have until they bought it. It's the same thing if you are a coach or a consultant…   When somebody buys your main product, there's a bunch of follow-up problems that you now have to solve that were NOT on your table ahead of time.    Like ClickFunnels, right?   It wasn't until I bought ClickFunnels that I realized:   I should learn how to write copy I should probably learn how to drive traffic   ...I didn't have that problem before I bought it, right? I didn't have that problem ahead of time.    You have to realize that every product you sell is a gift both to the buyer and to you.    For example:   When you sell gum, (or something else), there's a bunch of follow-up problems…   This is the easiest way to create an offer ever.   You ask: “What are the follow-up problems that my product creates for somebody after they buy it?”    Then you see what the majority are and you solve those problems with additional products. I just give those away for free when they buy the first thing.    Back to gum…   What kind of issues would somebody have?   Maybe they want more flavors They want teeth whitening Bad breath in general…   So you could go interview oral health doctors…   … and include that interview, (which is a digital thing, takes nothing to fulfill), with the original product that you sell and all these things that you go stack on there.    That's one of the easiest ways to create an offer ever. I hope that made sense?   Marian: Oh, it does.   Steve:    I figure out what the follow-up problems are, create a product to solve them and give them away for free with the original product.    Marian: That's INSANE!   I don't think I ever thought about the whole offer creation process the way that you said it.    That can be applied to any kind of industry regardless of what you sell, as long as you charge people for something, they'll have a question that they didn't have before they bought it.    I hope everybody's taking notes.   Steve: It drives me nuts when people are like, “...but in my industry’s different.” I'm like, “No, it's not. Do you sell anything? Sweet!”   Marian: Even if you sell a commodity, people will still have questions. Even if it's a t-shirt, “How can I wash this t-shirt so it's not getting all crappy?”   Steve: Exactly, yeah. “We'll give you a cool free PDF that shows cool fashion things to wear with the shirt when you buy.”    You're like, “Oh man, you just increased value without dropping the price.”    So there are a few ways to compete in this world...   If I’ve got a bunch of other people that are selling something similar to me:   Drop the price... that's one way to increase value. Don't drop the price and charge a little bit extra, but add more value... because price and value are not the same thing.    So I'm gonna bump the value up with mostly digital products that take nothing for me to fulfill, and boost the value like crazy.   Now I can sell for a premium, rather than fight to be the lowest price for what I sell.    That's terrible, it's a terrible way to do business.   Marian: That's super powerful.    I hope everybody's literally just taking this part here. This is worth a lot of money. Awesome, I love that.    CAMPAIGNS ARE DYING   So I listened to one of your episodes. I don't remember the name of it now, but you stressed a lot on this matter.    You have a different way of approaching a campaign. A campaign for you is NOT just driving traffic to a funnel, it's a whole different thing put on steroids.   Can you, can you talk about that? Because I really think that this can help a lot of our listeners.   Steve: Yeah, I think the term campaign is something that's actually dying. It's a dying art.    Before social media existed, all these marketers that were out there, how did they get such fast, big sales?   If you buy an ad on YouTube, or Facebook they call it a campaign.  I think what's killing it.   From a direct response marketer's viewpoint, ads are just part of a campaign. It's NOT the campaign itself. A campaign is pressure building up to a certain point.    One of my favorite things to go do if you're podcasting or publishing... (which is one of the easiest ways to get clients for life, it's ridiculous. It will change your life if you just publish), is to create episodes that lead up to an event.   So in the episodes, I'm like, “Hey, in two months from now, this cool thing is happening, and by the way here's a whole bunch of stories that are gonna break your beliefs.”   ... I'm not gonna say that, but that's what's happening.    I'm dripping out those pieces of content, and at the end of all of them, I'm saying, “Hey, go to this page and register so you guys get early bird access...  on the waiting list... or whatever.”   You build up all the pressure for this date, it's kind of what Hollywood does for movies.    THE HOLLYWOOD LAUNCH   Q: How much money do you think Hollywood would make if you didn't hear about the movie until the day it’s actually released?   A: They wouldn't make that much money.   They are masters at creating pressure to a date. They create pressure, “Here it comes... on this date, oh my gosh!” right?   ...and then tons of sales come in all over the place. Then they drive more ads… it's very much more like that. Ads are part of that…   A marketer, at the core, is an event thrower... meaning they build pressure to a certain date, and then using scarcity and urgency... and remove access to it after while to get a second bump in sales.   A campaign is much more, I don't even know what the word is….   Marian: Making them hungry for your product before it's launched, I guess?   Steve: Yeah, in my mind, there are two types of campaigns that I use:   #1: There's Launch Campaign for if I'm gonna introduce something to the market for the first time. There are several strategies for building pressure, noise, getting a big list and shoving them all to a certain date, so that there's lots of pressure out there.    #2: There's Evergreen Campaigns (it's my own definition), it is things like turning on Facebook ads, where I'm just gonna be tweaking the numbers, stuff like that…   You miss out on so much money if you start a funnel or a podcast.. and then just turn on ads.   Build Pressure!   ...I use the two campaigns together.    I build a launch campaign and build all this pressure, pressure, pressure, and because I have a podcast, I'll launch to my own audience. When they buy, I take all that money, (I don't take profit), I dump it right back into my Evergreen Campaign. So I never put a dollar of my own in my business because of that strategy.    That's how I launch everything. I launch with a lot of pressure and then I take that cash roll it into my ads... and now my customers are paying for my ads.   Marian: That's super smart, and I really love the way that you explained things, and the way that you put it out there to the public. It's super smart.    You are one of most in-demand funnel builders, so everything that you say, people will think, “Oh, I'll go and implement it,” but you have a complete in-depth process of things to do before you even touch your laptop to build a funnel.   Steve: Yeah.   Marian: And I think a lot of people would miss a lot of that stuff. Can you debate a little bit on that process? I know we're getting close to wrapping things up here.   Steve: That's fine. Yeah, I think the biggest issue, and I did the same thing, you know.  I can't blame anybody for doing this... but when I first got ClickFunnels, the first thing I did... (and this is what I did for a while), was log in and build the funnel…   ClickFunnels makes it so easy on the tech side to do stuff, it's attractive and it's sexy, and most people jump right to that…   They say, “Hey, let me go build this sweet thing.”   So they build it, this is literally how I did it.    I remember one of the first funnels, I built a free plus shipping thing, selling a CD. I wanted to have a free plus shipping thing, so I went and I rebuilt all of Russell Brunson's Dot Com Secrets book funnel…   I said, “What should I tell them on this page?”   I went through, and I came up with something to sell on that page.    I went to the next page, what should I sell on this page? What should I sell on this page?    Then after I had all the products in there, I was like, “How should I sell this?”   ...and I went and I wrote the sales message, and I put it all in there.   THAT is the exact opposite order to where you find success.   People need to get out of the mindset of testing products. You don't really test products. You test sales messages.    The role of the sales message is to cause the desire for purchase. The product just fulfills on the promise that your sales message made.    That's all the product does.    The product should be amazing, but you really don’t need to test a product. It's NOT about that.    What causes the purchase, is the sales message itself.    So, I gather all this data from my competitors in the red ocean. I want something that's crazy competitive... and then I'm gonna take all that data and craft my sales message for those people alone.    The worst thing ever is when someone walks up and they're like, “Stephen, I built this sweet thing, who should I sell it to?” I'm like, “Ah that is like square one. You jumped to 99…”   FINDING THE WHO   First, you start with the who. It's all about the who and understanding:   Where they are? What do they want? What they don't want? Their current desires? What they've already been buying to try and solve their problems? (So you don't go make that and it's a step backward in a customer journey)   You understand MORE about where these people are, and that creates your sales message.    You go test that to those people specifically, and then once people are buying, then I go create the product to fulfill on.    Super safe, completely the opposite order than what college taught me. A different way of thinking about it. Completely different than mainstream entrepreneurship out there.   Marian: I get it 100%. Julie Stoian shared the same type of thing... we were talking about an online course, and she broke it down in the same exact steps. So I can see why for sure.    Now you talk a lot about the red ocean, the blue ocean, and then you created something in the middle, the purple ocean.   I know, a lot of people will say, “Well, my industry's too crowded. I got to compete on price. I don't know how to build an offer, whatever… How are they starting?”   Let's say they do what you say, they start publishing, they find their voice, they create an offer, they create a sales message, all together. Are they testing that offer to the red ocean... and then they try to build their own type of blue ocean out of that? What's the best way to do that?   Steve: That's a lot of strategies involved in that.   Marian: Just the big picture.   THE BLOODY RED OCEAN   Steve: So this red ocean concept. You think back in the day where Al Gore created the internet, he didn't. He did NOT create the internet. But he claims he did.    ...but you think about when the internet became publicly available for everybody in 1991…   There was one internet service provider, that's it. You know? Straight up monopoly. You couldn't get the internet anywhere else.    Then suddenly, all these other tech companies say: “Look at that, and they're like we could be an internet provider,”   ...and someone else comes in, somebody else comes in, somebody else comes in.    They start driving the price down because of competition.    We actually want that. I want to have the most ridiculous red highly competitive, bloody ocean that is out there. I want it to be very bloody. I want it to be soooo competitive…   Because when it is competitive, it's actual security. If the market of internet service providers is lasting long enough, what's cool about that is that in order for the market to survive, they have to start learning how to create new customers.    They have to make customers out of people who are not planning on being customers. That is not easy, and most markets don't survive that.    Most of us would not go into the beanie babies accessories market. You know or Pogs or Kmart or Sears, all these things that are dying….they didn't learn how to make customers out of people who were NOT planning to be customers.   It's easy when a new thing comes out, they collect the easy people off the top who’d buy just because they're looking to buy something.    It’s hard after those people have dried up, for a market to move from customer collection to customer creation. That is challenging. Most markets die because of that.    I actually want a highly red ocean.    I want a lot of competition... because it's a sign that the market is surviving and growing.    Not all markets are red.  I want one that's red.   I want to be able to go in, (hopefully, this isn't too deep), and look at this really, really, really red, red ocean, and learn how to take a step out of it, and build a sales message that goes directly back into it.   ...because they figured out how to create customers.    It means I don't have to learn how to create customers. I just sell to those people and my sales message pulls people over to me.    I don't have to create customers, I just have to collect them. It's very, it's kind of a different way of thinking. I don't know. Hopefully, it makes sense but like,   Marian: It does.   Steve: I've coached 10x of thousands of people in this now, and the thing that's scary is they go do all this work, they create all these funnels, they make all the sales messages, they're making all the things that we tell them to go do…   BUT…   They go and they plug them into a market that's dying, and when the market leaves, they now have to go back to square one... the who.    “Crap, my who dried up. I don't know where they went.”   The market left. The market died... and so they have to find a NEW who and go back to square one to create a new sales message and make sure that offers something that's sexy and fulfills…   ...and make sure the funnel is something that is attractive for that market... and it's terrible, it sucks!   It's where the entrepreneur in this game, (especially online), feel like their wheels are spinning... it's because they chose the wrong who.   So I go in and say:   Let's choose something that's insanely competitive Figure out how to throw rocks into it Talk to those who are only in pain…   I'm NOT gonna talk to somebody in there and try to sell them if they're like a massive diehard, right. They're like, “I believe this stuff, this is my thing,” right?    That's like watching the Superbowl with opposing fans in the same room: “Well, this team's better, no that team's better.” No one wins, right! It's that exact same thing…   99% of sales copy that's written out there by somebody that's brand new, they're speaking to somebody in the red ocean who's a die hard. It's a dumb argument.   I don't speak to them at all. I find a market that's really, really, really red, and then I only talk to those people in there who are feeling pain and hate the market they're in. They just don't know anything different...   That’s a very easy person they go sell.   Marion: That's something that a lot of people just don't talk about…   You hear everybody being like, “Oh, I'm afraid to get into that market because it's so crowded. I'm not gonna be able to survive,” but no, you just said the opposite:   “No, go there because you don't need to create customers.. all of them  are over there, and it's so much easier for you to get them out.”    Awesome man, you’re literally just spitting fire here.   Last question before we wrap things up in here…   You're one of the few people that I know, (especially in this online game), that has two completely different audiences. You manage both of them so well in a way that you never like…    I don't know I mean like correct me if I'm wrong, but it's very rare when you cross-promote between the two... maybe I'm wrong, I don't know?   But I just, I'm so amazed by the fact that... I don't know how big both of them are, I know this one that I'm in, it's pretty large.   Steve: A little big.   Marian: Yeah. So then how do you manage to keep them you know not necessarily from a technical standpoint, but because you have to create offers for both of them.    You have to publish to both of them. How do you manage your time and your strategy behind that?   Steve: First of all I would just caveat everything right there by just saying please don't try that. It actually was NOT on purpose, but it worked for a few specific reasons…   So one of them is the MLM space, and when you think about that, the reason I went into that is because of the exact same principal I was just talking about. Like, that's an insanely red competitive ocean.   There was a lot of opinions around that industry, which is good. I actually want that. I don't want anything that's too blue. I want a lot of red... because then what I did, (and this is the reason why it sells so well, and why I don't actually have to manage it that much)...   This is one of the easiest ways to create a sales message, create hooks, create podcast content, is you become the anti-red in your messaging.   ...and my headlines in that space are:   How I'm auto recruiting a downline of big producers without my friends and family even knowing I'm in MLM.   ... and they're like what?    The whole industry is built around attacking your friends and family, and so when they read that headline, it is the anti-red... and because of that, it's talkable.    We drive ads, but on the ClickFunnels page, when everyone's like, “Who does MLM funnels?” Like, everyone says my stuff. I'm not doing any of that, and the reason is that I'm so strongly anti-red.   I'm like, “Yeah, do the MLM thing, but don't you dare do it in the way they're teaching you...” and who does that speak to?   It speaks to people who are doing it, who are in pain and hate it.   They just don't know another way.    Exactly as I was just saying. So it's talkable, and they do a lot of my selling for me because it's word of mouth.    It's very easy... because no one's doing that,  and then they can go, “Oh my gosh, have you seen this guy?”   I'm very careful about what I sell, NOT based on the product... I'm careful based on the sales message and how abrupt it is in the red ocean.    That's one of the biggest keys and one of the biggest misconceptions.    For years, I walked around asking myself the question, “What should I sell? What should I sell?”   … it's like paralysis.   If you're listening or watching this now, and you're like, “I don't know what to sell... I don't know what to do?” … the reason's that you're starting with the wrong question.    Instead of asking, “What do I sell?” … You ask, “Who should I sell?” And “Who do I want to sell? Who’s my dream customer?”... what should I sell gets really easy... because you just solve their problems and become the anti-red in your sales message.   It’s waaay easier after you do a little research like that.    Thanks so much for listening. Please remember to rate and subscribe.    Hey,    I know this game can take a few tries to get the money flowing, especially the first time, right? And that can suck.    I also know from experience how frustrating it can be to know your business is just a few tweaks away from your next big payday, but you don't know what tweaks to make.   I've felt completely paralyzed by that in the past, and it sucks.    I've been blessed to work with thousands of new and successful businesses over the last three years, and two things have really shocked me.    #1: I began noticing the pattern to success is vastly the same, but everyone's spot on the path is obviously different.    #2: I've been shocked and overwhelmed by the number of people asking for my help, my systems, and funnels in their business.    Well, until now I've never had a system or product in my own business to help you build yours.    Now, I'm finally able to be public about all this...    If you'd like my help to build your offer or sales message funnel and even your content machine, go to myofferlab.com.   The path to online and offline success is 80 percent the same regardless of the product, price point or industry, and it works if you're new or already a killer in business.    You can get more details on how to get my personal attention and frameworks in your own business by going to myofferlab.com   In-person classes are limited to 60 people each, and frankly, I can only do about two of these a year. Get more details, and even jump on the phone with us for free at myofferlab.com

On this weeks show join Steve and Eric as they talk about their favorite Sentimental Wrestling memories and items! Plus some of our listeners share their favorites! Also: -Why 1991 is a favorite for both Eric and Steve -First live events -Wrestling magazines at the grocery store -The Undertaker Hasbro! And a whole lot more!

Big Dog leaves early to be on First Take live with his boy Stephen A. Smith. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://news.iheart.com/podcast-advertisers

WOM EP13 John & Steve First of the Year Show. This week John and Steve go Revless as Walt had to take the night off. We kick the show off with the latest happenings in world of motorcycling Then we move onto Behind the Bars where we cover the latest trends, new bikes and other cool stuff. Instead of having a guest on with us this week, we spend time covering another part of the Give A Shift report. Then it’s onto Between the Lines where John discusses this week’s safety tip. Of course there’s our Weekly Trivia Question and a whole lot more. So grab yourself a hot cup of coffee and join us or download the show and take it with you, as we bring you another fun and informative show. For more about the World of Motorcycling please visit www.worldofmotorcycling.com

NEWS EAA AirVenture 2017 Breaks Records Small Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (drones) Mid-Air Collision Study NATS Drone Assist b4ufly Jet passed within 10 minutes of where North Korean missile test landed, official says Teenager opens emergency door of taxiing plane and slides down wing after it lands at San Francisco airport Dramatic moment hero pilot saved 127 people in risky landing FEEDBACK Rebecca - Proposal Pilot style... [1:11:09] Peter - APG App [1:14:07] Louisiana Steve - Helicopter Thief [1:15:44] Mike - ATL STARs [1:19:48] Mrs. Nev - Audio Feedback [1:25:41] Miami Hick - On duty commute to work [1:29:27] Adam - Civil Air Patrol Cadets at EAA Airventure [1:32:11] Ross - UPDATE Family seating with a child [1:35:42] Jonathan - Career/Loan Advice? [1:40:50] Miami Hick - Cure for APG Syndrome! [1:46:04] Plane Tails - The No 9 Combuster [1:49:15] Liz - Plane hits caribou while trying to land at Deadhorse Airport [2:17:52] Kevski - Live ATC Joe [2:21:34] Don - Wingnuts! [2:29:21] Steve - First feedback, and Aviation Geek Fest Meetup Suggestion [2:32:21] VIDEO Audible.com Trial Membership Offer - Get your free audio book today! Give me your review in iTunes! I'm "airlinepilotguy" on Facebook, and "airlinepilotguy" on Twitter. feedback@airlinepilotguy.com airlinepilotguy.com ATC audio from http://LiveATC.net Intro/Outro music by Tim Brown, BrownHouseMedia, iStockphoto.com Copyright © AirlinePilotGuy 2017, All Rights Reserved

How did 2 such different people become what can only be roughly called good friends? And what’s up with the song lyrics? Join Charlie and Steve as they flashback to that first time they met. Also journey back to Ellis Island to celebrate a family reunion of another sort.

In this episode we sit down with Centricity Music General Manager, Steve Ford. Steve talks about his history in the music biz, the importance of working your way up, winging it and having balance in the industry. .fca_eoi_form p { width: auto; }#fca_eoi_form_269 input{max-width:9999px;}#fca_eoi_form_269 *{box-sizing:border-box;}#fca_eoi_form_269 div.fca_eoi_form_text_element,#fca_eoi_form_269 input.fca_eoi_form_input_element,#fca_eoi_form_269 input.fca_eoi_form_button_element{display:block;margin:0;padding:0;line-height:normal;font-size:14px;letter-spacing:normal;word-spacing:normal;text-indent:0;text-shadow:none;text-decoration:none;text-transform:none;white-space:normal;width:inherit;height:inherit;background-image:none;border:none;border-radius:0;box-shadow:none;box-sizing:border-box;transition:none;outline:none;-webkit-transition:none;-webkit-appearance:none;-moz-appearance:none;color:#000;font-family:"Open Sans", sans-serif;font-weight:normal;transition:background 350ms linear;}#fca_eoi_form_269 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a:hover{color:#8f8f8f !important;} www.fullcirclemusic.orgFCM007_-_Relationships_with_Steve_FordDuration: 00:50:21You're listening to The Full Circle Music Show. The why of the music biz.Chris: Welcome back to the Full Circle Music Show, it’s Chris Murphy and I'm sitting right beside Seth Mosley. How are you buddy?Seth: I'm good man. It's a busy week, lots of good stuff going on over here at the studio. And I’m excited to take just a few minutes out of our schedule to talk to one of our favorite people in the industry, Mister Steve Ford.Steve has been a guy that I've known for a long time, was one of the people that I met moving to Nashville in the music business. And we've talked to a lot of people on the creative side so far but we haven't yet talked to anybody on the label side. So, you think of the guy that sits in a dark room with a suit in a corner office, that's this guy! Except for not, he actually sits in a what is a pretty awesome office, he's the general manager of a label company called Centricity Music; has been pretty massively successful in the past couple of years and really since they opened. But, he's a really great leader and speaks to what they look for in a good producer, in a good artist, in a good team member at their label.So, if you're wanting to get involved in the music industry, this is a great episode to listened to. I learned a ton and I think you will too.Chris: You know, being a podcast junky, it's nice to meet a fellow podcast enthusiast as well. We had some great conversations in the episode but also talked a lot about our favorite podcasts on and off the mic. He's just a great guy, great to get to know him and I really appreciate Seth you setting this up. Another great interview and I can't wait to listen to it.Seth: And you can check out his company at centricitymusic.com. They have a lot of great artists that I think you'll dig.Audio clip commencesHey podcast listeners, something is coming February 1st 2016. Have you ever thought about a career in song writing or music production? We have created a couple courses with you guys in mind. We've been getting a lot of feedback on people wanting to know more about how to become a song worker; how to become a professional music producer or engineer. These courses were designed to answer some of those questions. Go to fullcirclemusic.org and sign up there for more information.Audio clip endsChris: You were saying earlier before we started rolling that you were a podcast guy.Steve: Oh yeah, big podcast guy.Chris: And, you've heard this podcast before?Steve: Yeah. I've listened to the first three.Chris: Okay. So, can I ask you to go out on a limb and give us a grade so far?Steve: You know what? I'd give them a solid B+. I want them longer. That's my thing; I want to go into the background. I want to hear when you did Brown Banishers which is funny because I've worked a lot with Brown but you didn't get past Amy Grant.Seth: Sure.Steve: I mean, this is the guy who worked with from everybody from Third Day to Mercy Me to Why Heart, he's done everybody like come one there are stories there. I tell people I'm on the corporate side because of Brown Banisher because of how he worked. I was an engineer in LA for ten years and he would come out and mix records with us, it was at a little place called Mama Joes and I would see him on the phone going, “Happy birthday sweetie.” Later knowing that it was Ellie; missed her first walk and all of these other things. And when my daughter was born, I was like, I can't do this. I needed a life and so I started praying and Peter York calls. So it’s because of him so it's fun to hear some his stories. I did a lot of records win Jack Joseph Puig and–Seth: And you were engineering at the time?Steve: Yeah. I was an engineer at LA.Seth: And at the time that was really engineering?Steve: Oh my gosh.Seth: You were cutting tape and…Steve: Yeah! I've cut a lot of two inch tape, quarter inch tape, half inch–Seth: Stuff that I hope to never do.Steve: You don't have to, Jericho does it for you.[Laughter] Seth: I don't know if Jericho has ever cut tape? In school he did.Steve: Now, I feel really old.Chris: Is that kind of like when you're in a biology class and not in any other time of your life will you need to dissect a frog but you just have to do it for the experience of it. Is that what it's become cutting tape?Steve: I don't know if you have to do it even that. It's sort of like this legend of starting a fire with flint, you know? It's sort of like, “Yeah. I used to cut tape.”[Laughter] Seth: I mean there's probably a resurgence. I would imagine knowing the process of what coffee has become and how artists.Steve: Yeah.Seth: I think there's a big thing in maybe it's the millennial generation or whatever it is but I think people are drawn back to slower, older more hands on processes it seems like than just pushing the button or going through the drive through–Steve: And somethings, don't you think, in some things its like just give me the button. Give me the filter on Instagram.Seth: That is true! That's true but then you've got the whole wave of people roasting their own coffee beans now and then they're grinding the with a hand grinder, and then they're putting in a… And, I'm saying this because we have like three artists that we work with; that come in and they bring their whole coffee apparatus.Steve: And they measure how much coffee goes in, weigh it?Chris: Yeah.Steve: My son has one of those has a scale that weighs, how much coffee goes in. Oh yeah just …Chris: Yeah, I thought you were going to say some of the artists that you work with, they actually bring their own barista in the studio because–Steve: I'm sure that will happen.Seth: That’s kind of a prerequisite to be in a band. There has to be at least one barista.Steve: True.Seth: In the band.Steve: There has to be one business guy in every band and one guy who can make great coffee.Seth: And then the guy who can actually play the instruments.Steve: Yeah. Then the artist.[Laughter]Chris: And then the fourth guy on base who just knows how to shape everybody's beards. He's more of a grooming guy.Seth: And sometime there's a drummer.[Laughter] Steve: You don't need a drummer; there are machines for that now.[Laughter] Seth: Yeah. I mean, just take us through a little bit of your journey, you started in L.A.?Steve: I was born and raised in L.A.; read an article when I was 14 years old about this guy named Sir George Martin. And I was like, “What? You can do that for a living?”Seth: Who is George Martin?Steve: He produced this little band called the Beatles, probably never heard of…most 20 year olds haven't heard of them so…Chris: And then isn't true that he went on from there to write The Game of Thrones?Steve: Did he? I'm not a Game of Throne person–Chris: Okay that's R.R. Martin, sorry.Steve: Wrong one. But I mean, you read about these guys and you sort of open a door into a new world that you didn't know existed. And so, I was 18 years old, junior out of high school walked into the recording studios and started from there.Seth: So, you didn't wait to have some sort of a college thing to get internships?Steve: My mom was like Reeds parents which was like, “That’s a nice hobby but let's make sure you have a backup plan, a plan B.” And so, I still went to school, I still went to college did all of that. Don't ask me my grade point average because I was going home at 4 o'clock in the morning, waking up at 8 to crawl into my first class, it was terrible. But yeah, my first job in the recording studio, I was making $500 a month from 6 o'clock to 3 o'clock in the morning.Seth: Living in L.A?Steve: Living in L.A.Seth: And that probably paid for a tenth of the rent?Steve: Maybe.Chris: Or, just the gas to get around?Steve: But I loved every second of it. And then from there you sort of work your way up. So, I did that… Like I said earlier my daughter was born and I was like an engineer’s life is a hard life in LA especially. Those were the days when you'd pay $1,500 a day block booking a studio; you booked a studio and you're paying $1,500 if your there six hours or eight there 24 hours. And a lot of them stayed 24 hours, and you just have next, next, next, next.Chris: And you've got to be the first guy there.Steve: First guy there, last guy out, yeah. You're sitting there winding tables at 6 o'clock in the morning going, “I just want to go home.”Chris: When the bug caught you, from that point until the time that you walked into that first studio and got a job, what skills were you harnessing?Steve: None.Chris: Just reading liner notes?Steve: Yeah. Lying in the floor, reading and going, there's one in North Hall and I'd write it down on a piece of paper because I grew up in the San Fernando Valley and start looking for them. Hey man that where Bill [inaudible 8:50] studio is or whatever the studio was and start. There wasn't really a whole lot you can do to prepare for it. It's no like in high school you go, “I wonder what class…”  I was in all the choirs and all the music stuff and that didn't prepare you for it. Probably the greatest skills for a studio engineer especially a starting one is being attentive, being hungry, being prepared and that depends on who you're working with.When you working together with somebody so well, I'm sure you and your team, they know what you want in advance and plugin something in before you even have to ask, that’s just working together. I've told a lot of wannabe engineers who want to go to some of these very expensive schools, don’t do it. Take that money, live on it for two years and go give yourself away for free for two years. You learn more two years in a studio than you will however long you go to one of the expensive ones.Chris: Yeah.Steve: It's just doing it. Just aligning the tape machine which is once again, it's like starting fire with flint again, knowing the lines taped but you learn by doing that.Chris: Absolutely.Steve: You learn by making a lot of mistakes. I recorded a lot of bad drum sounds.[Laughter] It just happened and then you go, “Oh if I do this, its better.” And 10,000 hours man, it takes 10,000 hours.Chris: Again, I think that it's not that schooling is necessarily a bad thing but the way that you learn in life versus the way that you learn in a classroom is different because for the most part, a classroom will deduct points for the stakes and if you’re in the–Steve: That's true. Good point.Chris: Yeah. I heard that -actually going back to our love of podcasts here- I heard Tim Farris on his podcast talking about the fact that he was going to go to, was considering something like Princeton or Harvard or something to go get his MBA. And he thought instead of doing that -or maybe this was advice given to him and he took it- instead of taking that couple hundred thousand dollars worth of whatever I needed to go get my MBA. I'm going to invest that in myself, very similar to what you're saying. And I'm going to use that to live on so that way I can go and I can intern for that company that I would never be able to if the money mattered that much. Because once you get out of school its like, “Oo I've got to go do something with this.” But if you've got the money set aside to go get the MBA anyway, it goes a long way to really feeling free to not have to pay that rent or pay that car payment that you could really dive in.Steve: And most people never use their college education for what they use. I had a meteorologist specialist. She had a degree in meteorology for TV and she was my marketing assistant. And you go, “I want to see what you spent four years doing versus what's your grade point average or what's you major.” I don't care about that stuff.Seth: So to fast forward to today, you are general manager of a very successful record label. When you got to hire somebody to your team, do you even say, “Hey, send in your resume. Where did you go to college?” Or does that not even cross your mind?Steve: I do want to see that. Four years in college gives me the impression that they follow through, they finish. You’ve said it before, finishing is such a hard art in today's world. To have somebody who finished is very valuable. Do I care about your grade point average? No. Do I even care about your major? No. Because if you have the right work ethic and the right heart, I can train you to do other things but I want to see how hard you're willing to work.Seth: So, a college degree still carries some weight but maybe it doesn't carry the weight that people think it does in terms of having the training because you kind of have to relearn it all when you get out into the real world.Steve: Exactly. Most college students that I see haven't learned anything that’s a really good use at a record label. My last five hires at Centricity have all come from internships. Now, I've had a lot of bad interns. I've wanted to fire a couple of interns, that's pretty bad when you want to fire somebody who works for free.Seth: What defines a good intern and what defines a bad intern?Steve: A bad intern sits on Facebook until you give them something to do and then they do exactly just to the letter of the law of what you asked them to do, hand it in to you and then get back on Facebook. A great intern does what you do and says, “Hey and I thought about this. And what about this more?” You give them to go to D and they go to G; then you give them to G and they go to S. I have a girl in my office, I asked her to do one thing and she says “Oh by the way while I was thinking about it I did these other three things that will help you out.” That type of proactivity and thinking ahead is so incredibly valuable. Like having somebody patching in your compressor before you ask for it. They know where you're going so fast that they're working ahead of you. And for all of those out there, that's old school once again patch bays.[Laughter]Seth: We have a small patch bay, we have two patch bays actually so we're probably on the old school end of things.Chris: It looks very cool though. It's looks kind of old science fiction movie.Steve: Spaghetti.[Laughter] Seth: It's like a telephone operator kind of thing. I heard a thing on…man, we keep talking about podcast, we're all just podcasts nerds, dude. I think that’s what we do for a living is listen to podcasts. And I heard one last night, they did a study of millennials; if you had a dream job, pick out of these choices what would be your dream job. Number one was the president; number two was a senator; number three was a successful athlete; number four foreign diplomat; five was a CEO of Apple; and then the last choice was the personal assistant to a famous actor or athlete. And 45% I think picked that one, hands down.Steve: They have no idea what that job looks like.Seth: They don't but it also speaks to they don't want to take the responsibility. Like, when you're that person, when you're the boss, they want to have a boss and maybe you can speak to a little bit to that but I feel like when you were talking about the internships, the ones who go above and beyond are the ones who are willing to take some responsibility and say, “Here's an idea” and just put it out there. How many interns would you have to get, to get that one good one?Steve: Probably 10 to 15.Seth: 10 to 15 to 1?Steve: Yeah, to 1. I think that’s what it is.Chris: Wow.Steve: Yeah, that's what it is. And I heard you, I think we had the conversation, there's such a different work ethic in today's young adults. And part of it is my fault, I'm a parent of a young adult they've been given everything in their whole life, they haven't had to work for anything. You want that iPhone! Here's that iPhone. You want that? Here's that. The art and the craft of working, the labor of getting something is a lost art, I think.Seth: So, would you go back and do those things differently?Steve: For my kids? My kids had to work.[Laughter]Seth: So, you weren't saying from my experience, you weren't–Steve: I’m saying that personally and much more of…[Laughter]What we made our kids do is like when they wanted that $100 American girl doll is you buy half, we’ll buy half. And all of a sudden they're digging out rocks in the backyard at $1 a bucket out of the garden. Because you want to give your kids what the value of work is and that's that doll at the end.In our world, I sat with an intern once and he was irritating everybody in the office. He's that guy who only asks questions because he wanted to tell you how much he knew. An intern needs to be quite and listen because there's a lot of information that flows around… And then they find the person that they can go to and go, what did that mean when he said this? So, what did that mean or… Come to me! I've told everyone in my internship, feel free to come to me and say, what does it mean when you said that? Versus this guy would come to you and tell you everything he knew. So, I was sitting him down one day and going,  “Man, you're irritating everybody. The whole office wants to prove you wrong.”Seth: You literally said that?Steve: I said that to him and later on, “I know I do that. I'm just trying to figure out where I fit and trying to find a job make $100, $120,000 a year and start in the music industry.” And I said, “You're in the wrong industry, man.”Seth: Go into finance!Steve: Go into finance, or go be an architect somewhere I guess or something. It was just about wanting to make as much money as his dad did, now! This generation wants to start where their parents have gotten to right now. I've seen it with artists, I've seen it with interns–Chris: They don't want a drop in their lifestyle that they've become accustomed to.Seth: A luxury once had, becomes a necessity.Steve and Chris: Ooohh.Steve: Very nice.Seth: And I'm very guilty of that. You fly first class once and you feel like a swine by sitting in coach.[Laughter] Steve: I've flown private jets twice in my whole life, in my whole career both times sort of accidentally. And man, once you do a private jet and you don't have to go through security and you’re just like, “Oh, I want that.” I say this all the time about artists. The worst thing you can do for an artist is start them touring in a bus because that's the expectation and then you know what happens? Is they got on the bus and they’re, “This isn't a very nice bus.” There are people in vans like when you were out in a van, to be on a bus, to be able to sleep horizontally would be the greatest thing ever and just because you started at this place and then you get into private jets. Everybody needs to start their first tour in a Silverado truck and then the next one to a bigger–Seth: Graduate to a suburban!Steve: A suburban would be great, then a 15 passenger old church van that you bought for $5,000 that the left side of the speakers don't work. And then, you work your way into a [inaudible 19:58] van and then into a bus. Then you're grateful for everything that's better along the way.Seth: It's more about the process than anything.Steve: Yeah.Seth: And getting there.Steve: A wise manager once said, his job is to make his artists life better every year, just a little bit better. I'm like, that's a good goal. That's a good goal to have.Seth: It is. So, your transition, we shipped about 20 years–Steve: We skipped through it very fast.[Laughter] Your transition from doing that 6pm to 3 in the morning thing in LA, you had your baby…Steve: Yep. My wife and I were praying at that point going, “God, please give us some sane clients or open another door.” And I just worked probably two months before with Peter York–Seth: And for those out there listening, was this at a record label you got your first…Steve: I was working with Peter in the studio and he called me up and said, “Hey, are you interested in A&R?” And I started in A&R in Sparrow…what's that 87, 88? Right around there and we were still in Chatsworth, California, spent time out there with him. So, I’ve been at Sparrow, moved from Sparrow to Star Songs and then back to Sparrow when they came up. Started in A&R worked my way into the marketing side, artist development side… So, yes back to Sparrow went to  Mer and worked my way up to Vice President at marketing at Mer, was general manager at [inaudible 21:34], general manager at SRI and now general manager at Centricity.Chris: Wow.Steve: It's been a long journey. If you’d ask me to 25 or 30 years ago, were you going to be general manager at Record Label? I would have laughed in your face.[Laughter]Chris: Because you didn't think it was attainable or because you didn't want have this job?Steve: That was not the path I was on. I thought, I was going to be producing records and engineering records.  Jack Pueg is still mixing great great records out there and I thought I was going to follow that path. God had something very different in mind which makes me laugh going I was talking to [inaudible 22:09] this morning and I can't believe I’ve been doing this, this long. When you're now an industry veteran it means that you've been around a long time.Seth: But I don't think looking back and I don’t want to put words in your mouth but you don't strike me as one of those people that's looking back and feeling like you’re working in the corporate side of the industry because you never made it on the creative side.Steve: No, no.Seth: You don't strike me as that at all.Steve: I made that decision for my family. What's funny is I've learned more about engineering and more about mixing and more about mastering being on the corporate side of what we're trying accomplish and why trying to do what we're doing. I learned so much about that. And for the first year or so, I was mad at God going, “Why did I just spend 9, 10 years in studios, in dark rooms working long hours if this is where you wanted me?” But realize, every day of my life in the last 27 years in the corporate side I've used information I learned in the studio. Sometimes we can't ask God why until you're 20 years down and you go, “oh I get it.”It's the path he puts us on, he brings people in and out of your life. I remember a girl over at Sparrow she was an accountant, that was her thing she loved accounting and God put me with her to learn that whole budgeting, it was only like for four months and then we were separated again but once again she changed my perspective and my life for the next 20 years. So, you don't know if these people that are coming in and out of your life are for a short period of how they're going to impact you.But yeah, I've sort of worked my way, I was one of the strange guys everybody wants to be in A&R. I started in A&R and left to got to marketing and then got back into it as I moved back up into the but everybody wants to be an A&R guy, hang out in the studios and have dinner with the artists which is not what an A&R guy does.Chris: Well it's the perception out there–Steve: Yeah, exactly, that's what they think.Chris: Just like you saying the artist is going to be in private jets.Seth: And for honestly if somebody's out there, can you break down what exactly what it is A&R. What is that? What is that job?Steve: A&R, we [inaudible 24:27] airports and restaurants which is [inaudible 24:28].[Laughter]It’s artist and repertoire. It’s basically looking for artist, finding people that have a seedling of something. Sometimes you don’t know what it is. We’ve all got our standards of what we feel like will lead to success. But finding that, nurturing it, grooming it, it’s sort of the mustard seed put into the ground, pat around and hopefully something really great grows out of it. Sometimes the plants don’t live, sometimes they give up. But it basically the music made by the A&R guy, we have one of the best in the industry in Centricity. When he’s done, when the music is done, he hands the baton over to me, and I go everywhere from there. But it’s his job to make sure we have hits, we have songs that work for live or work on the radio, an artist that’s got uniqueness to him that fits differently than everything else in the market place and sometimes it’s just plain old dumb luck. We’ve got all those where we’re like, “We though this person had everything they needed, was need for success and it didn’t work, and this one over here it’s that seedling and it’s just growing like crazy.Seth: Yeah, sometimes you don’t know or probably more often than not, I would think.Steve: How many songs have you worked on and said, “Man, that’s the hit.” I have a memory of I will eat my shoe if this is not [inaudible 26:04][Laughter] I believe you owe me a shoe eaten.Seth: I’m wearing Nikes right now. I have a feeling that this material is not organic.Chris: I was going to say, whatever you choose make sure its biodegradable.Steve: I was going to send you a shoe after one particular sock.[Laughter]We’ve all got them dude.Seth: Oh yeah, totally. I think more often than not and it’s honestly becoming a theme on this show is, we’re all just kind of winging it we’re all just guessing. So, my question to that is, I mean, it sounds like there’s a lot of responsibility placed on the shoulders of an A&R person. They’re the one that’s finding and nurturing talent and ultimately seeing what songs make it on records.I think a lot of people listening in our podcast audience, we have a lot of producers and writers and people outside of the music industry but then there are also probably some people who are just wanting to get in on the music business side and people who maybe want to be in music marketing or be in music management or maybe do what you’re doing someday, run a record label. You said what you look for interns, what qualifies a person to be an A&R person?Steve: Wow. Interesting. There are a few A&R guys you should interview. A great A&R person is able to inspire an artist beyond what they’ve every thought they could do. A great A&R person knows how to get a good song to a great song. We’re no longer in a society that good is not good enough, it has to be great. A great A&R guy can go, “You know what? There are seedlings, there are moments in here that are really great.” But you’re missing the mark I these two or three places. And then, coming in and sitting side by side with a producer like you and making sure that… I think that I’m a big movie buff and A&R guy is sort of like an executive producer on a movie where you put the team together and then sort of let the team go make the music. So, it’s the right producer for the right, for the right song and for the right artists and then let them shine where they go. It’s very much putting the pieces together. They’re not usually playing the music, they’re not [inaudible 28:34] musicians, they have to have a really good song sense and I think one of the skills an A&R guy has to know is, it’s not about them. They’ve got to know their audience, know what they’re making for because all of us have a tendency to gravitate towards music that’s on the fringe because we listen to so much stuff that all of the stuff in the middle starts mucking up. There’s a big muck in the middle. So, “you know what I like? I like this thing way over here or way over there.” Where a normal consumer listens to 10 records a year, the middle is the sweet spot for them. So, an A&R guy that understands who he’s trying to record for is very important.Seth: That’s very good. And, you said that they have to have a great song sense, that is even a sticky situation because why is one person’s song sense better than the other? Is that determined by track record? And, if you’ve never done A&R before, how do you prove that, hey I know a hit when I hear one?Steve: You know what? Our history of…John Mays is a 25 years somebody took a chance on him 27 years ago and said “You’re a great musician on the road, let me bring you in here.” Part is the relationship, you know, can they sit and hang with an artist? You know, you’ve been in these mediums. Where it’s like can you move an artist from A to Z while making the artist think it’s their move? As a producer it’s the same skill set of can you get an artist to bend without knowing that they’re bending? Or being able to move–Seth: All the artists out there, they just had a–Steve: I know they had a convulsion.[Laughter]And all the producer are like, yeah![Laughter]But that’s part of it, of like how do you get a song… because you don’t want to tell an artist, “You know what? This song sucks.” You just want to say, “Let’s work on the chorus. The chorus isn’t paying off hard enough, let’s make it lift better. Let’s make it shine.” Whatever it may be, moving them away from, “I love this, this is my baby. It’s beautiful.” To let’s keep working on this song.Seth: So, it sounds like it maybe starts with who they are as a person. Are they a good hang? Are they a servant? And then, the music kind of just follows and that taste follows.Steve: Our young A&R guy over there, he went through our radio department so he was listening to radio hits, radio hits, radio hits. And part of it is… There’s marketing guy named Roy Williams, I went to a seminar with him and he said he has a friend that works at General Market Record Label to pick all the singles and I’m like, “How did you learn this?” And the guy basically said, “Since I was five years old, every week I’d get my allowance and I would go buy the number one song in America.” And so for his whole life, he poured into himself hits. This is what a hit sounds like, this is what a hit sounds like, this is what a hit sounds like.Seth: That’s pretty good wisdom, right there.Steve: And so, at a certain point you go, you got to know our music, you got to listen to our music, you got to know what a hit sounds like. I’ve heard a lot of kids come though “I hate listening to Christian radio.” Then why do you listen to Christian music? How many people in country music go, “[inaudible 32:11] but I hate country music.” Get out! You’re not going to succeed.[Laughter]But they almost wear it as a banner that I hate Christian music in our market place. We have an open concept office and I’ll try to listen to two hours of Christian radio every day in my office. And if I’m listening to it, everybody in my office is listening to it too; more for this is what a hit sounds like, this is what radio sounds lie. If you’re trying to meet a need at radio and you don’t know what they’re playing, how can you meet the need? So…I digress, sorry.Seth: No, that’s gold. That’s all gold.Steve: I think you nailed it in your earlier podcast when you said, this is a servant industry. It really is. And in my life, it took me a lot of time to figure out what my calling was. I knew I wasn’t an artist but God, what does that mean? And I was walking through Exodus with my kids when they were very young and hit Exodus 17 where God say to Moses, they’re out of Egypt heading towards the Promised Land and they hit the Analcites, God calls Moses up to the hill top; arms up in the air he wins, arms down they lose. But what never caught to me until I was reading it, Moses took two people along with him Aaron and Hur and I love to say I am the Hur in the Moses’ life. It’s my job, what Hur was up there to do is to hold Moses’ arms up, that’s all he did. When Moses was weak, when Moses needed help, Hur held his hands up. That’s my calling be a servant, be there to hold your hands up. Some people know Aaron “Aaron, you know, Moses’ little brother.” No one knows who Hur is. If you’re okay standing, holding someone’s arms up and no one recognizes, you are created to be in the music industry. Because you’re not in to be the rock stars; we’re in the back of the room with our arms folded, looking at the person on stage going, “Yeah. I was there to hold their arms up.”Chris: That’s wise. One of my favorite movies is That Thing You Do, I don’t know if any of you have seen that.Steve: Yeah. I’m the guy that goes, “You look great in black.”[Laughter]Chris: Has anyone told you that?Steve: Yeah.Chris: But, one of my favorite characters in the movie, and they’re filled with them. Anybody out there that hasn’t seen it, it’s a great movie.Steve: Please, go see it.Chris: But there’s Horus who’s basically the A&R guy that sees them in–Steve: In the camper-[Laughter]Chris: Yeah, he lives in a camper and he’s essentially the A&R guy. But he sees them in a performance at an Italian restaurant or something and comes and buys their album and get’s them to sign a little deal. And then at the end, when they get signed to a major label and they’re going out to play these state fairs, Horus leaves and the main character drummer of the band says, “We don’t want you to leave.” And he goes, “My [inaudible 35:27] is done. I’ve done what I’m supposed to do.” And then move on to the next thing and so he wasn’t meant to ride that out the whole movie; he’s there for a specific piece to move it from A to C. He’s the B part of it, the Hur of that story so to speak.Steve: Nowadays, you’d call them just production deals. You start working with an unknown artist who has a little bit of talent, you start developing them and then you start shopping them to record labels. And then you go, my job here is done. They then take the baton and now try to make to a national artist. If you make 2 out of 20, 3 out of 20, you’re in great shape. You’re a hall of fame baseball player if you hit 3 out of 10. And you’re a hall of fame A&R guy if 3 out of your 10 are hit artists.It’s a cycle, you have the young artist going up; you have the artist at their peak; and then you have some that are on their way down. And you’ve got to keep that circle going because any artist that’s been at the top is going to be past its peak and slowly work its way down, and you got to have the new artist coming up behind to grow into. So it’s a continual cycle of in the music industry. The circle of life in music would be that.Chris: I had a mentor –Scott [inaudible 36:48] if you’re listening I’m about to talk about you- but he always talked about how life in the ministry or in a career is kind of like looking at life or the people that you interact is like a watching a parade go by. There are things that are right in front of you, there are things that you just saw, and there are things that are coming down. And to really appreciate what is happening in the parade you have to absorb it all. And so there’s a little bit of grabbing from each of those in order to get the full experience of it all.Steve: And the bigger what’s right in front of you, the bigger those artists are in front of you, sometimes you don’t have time to look behind and develop what’s behind and what happens is with a lot of these record labels and I’ve been at these where, man they’ve got the big, and they slowly slipping. The [inaudible 37:32] slowly start getting past their prime and they haven’t developed anything behind them and then you’re in trouble because you’ve got this machine you’ve got to feed and you haven’t created for the future, it’s only for the present.And so, every A&R guy wants to sing but some of the big labels, the big artists, the A’s are so big that’s all they’re paying attention to. We’ve all seen it, we’ve all seen artists where we say, “Man, they’re amazing” but they got lost in the shuffle and that’s the sadness. We forget that we’re playing with people’s lives, especially on the record label side their dreams.I signed this band at a label and they were 18 years old when I signed them and 21 years old when I had to drop them. So, their dreams had come true and shattered by the time they were 21. And it’s just hard when you start thinking about that stuff.Chris: That’s true. And if you think about it there are some people that are fortunate enough to have a full career in the music industry and there are some people that have a three year window kind of like a profession sports guy or those things. There’s a window and the once you pass it, yeah but the guy is only 24 and the band is only 21. What’s coming up for them?Steve: You know what, I think it’s a catalyst of those people leaving or burning out, is balance. You guys have said it; I can walk through a record label at 8 o’clock at night and I can tell you which employees will be gone in a year because they have nothing to put back into themselves. The music industry is a take industry, it just continues squeezing and it just wants more and more and more. If you have one they want five; if you have five we want ten; if we have ten we want twenty, and it’s never enough. My poor radio team goes, “Hey we got number one.” And I’m like, “Great. How do we keep it on number one for another week?” It’s never enough and so you continue squeezing out what this industry does, if you don’t have a ministry, if you don’t have a relationship, if you don’t have friends that give back to you that don’t care what you do  for a living and basically go, “Yeah, yeah. You do music, how are you?” You know, if there aren’t nursing students at the college that you got to that are your friends, you’re going to burn out.  Because there’s nothing giving back, there’s no one pouring into you. Sooner or later the candle ends, there’s no more fuel and it juts burns out.So, I try to keep my staff saying, I want you to go to concerts and date people and go home at 6 o’clock and have a life. Because if you don’t have a life you have nothing to come back when you come back tomo

Options Bootcamp 55: Going Naked in IRAs Basic Training: Using Options in an IRA Account. Can you trade options in a retirement account? What are the limitations? What strategies can you utilize? What are the benefits of writing covered straddle vs calls?  What is a stock replacement strategy? When should someone consider this strategy? Using options as an investment tool. What are any other investment strategy?   Mail Call: Listener questions and comments     Question from Hector - Can I still trade mini options or are they no longer available? Question from Neil Cerone - What are the most common mistakes you see from “stock guys” who try to become “options guys?” Question from Steve: First off, I love ALL the shows. They fill my daily commute with wit AND wisdom. Thanks! Also, better late than never, it was great meeting you all at Benny's Chophouse back in Sept. I am one of the Lobster and Meatballs trainees (thanks to your shows). I had the pleasure of sitting right next to you and across from Uncle Mike as we devoured steaks on The Greasy Meatballs tab. That would be Extra pleasure as Sebastian was paying for them!  However, I gotta tell you that you blew it big time the other day when trying to describe why a Leap Call Diagonal is called the "Fig Leaf". Brian named it the "Fig Leaf" because you are "kinda covered but not exactly" due to the curves in the profit graph. I think that makes perfect sense and is pretty funny to boot. Finally, on a side note I would love to hear Uncle Mike explain what is and what is not considered holding in the NFL. It boggles my mind to see play after play of inconsistent enforcement. I understand if that's out of scope, but what the hell I thought I would ask anyways.  It is not too often you meet a Pro Lineman. Best regards - Steve aka "Hawkeye".

Options Bootcamp 55: Going Naked in IRAs Basic Training: Using Options in an IRA Account. Can you trade options in a retirement account? What are the limitations? What strategies can you utilize? What are the benefits of writing covered straddle vs calls? What is a stock replacement strategy? When should someone consider this strategy? Using options as an investment tool. What are any other investment strategy? Mail Call: Listener questions and comments Question from Hector - Can I still trade mini options or are they no longer available? Question from Neil Cerone - What are the most common mistakes you see from "stock guys" who try to become "options guys?" Question from Steve: First off, I love ALL the shows. They fill my daily commute with wit AND wisdom. Thanks! Also, better late than never, it was great meeting you all at Benny’s Chophouse back in Sept. I am one of the Lobster and Meatballs trainees (thanks to your shows). I had the pleasure of sitting right next to you and across from Uncle Mike as we devoured steaks on The Greasy Meatballs tab. That would be Extra pleasure as Sebastian was paying for them! However, I gotta tell you that you blew it big time the other day when trying to describe why a Leap Call Diagonal is called the "Fig Leaf". Brian named it the "Fig Leaf" because you are "kinda covered but not exactly" due to the curves in the profit graph. I think that makes perfect sense and is pretty funny to boot. Finally, on a side note I would love to hear Uncle Mike explain what is and what is not considered holding in the NFL. It boggles my mind to see play after play of inconsistent enforcement. I understand if that’s out of scope, but what the hell I thought I would ask anyways. It is not too often you meet a Pro Lineman. Best regards - Steve aka "Hawkeye".