Podcasts about tom oh

Tom MacWright is a prolific contributor in the geospatial open source community. He made geojson.io, Mapbox Studio, and was the lead developer on the OpenStreetMap editor. He's currently on the team at Val Town. In 2021 he bootstrapped a solo business and created the Placemark mapping application. He acquired customers and found steady growth but after spending two years on the project he decided it was financially unsustainable. He open sourced the code and shut down the business. In this interview Tom speaks candidly about why geospatial is difficult, chasing technical rabbit holes, the mental impact of bootstrapping, and his struggles to grow a customer base. If you're interested in geospatial or the good and bad of running a solo business I think you'll enjoy this conversation with Tom. Related Links Tom's blog Placemark Play Placemark GitHub Placemark archive geojson.io Valtown Datawrapper (Visualization tool) Geospatial Companies mentioned Mapbox ArcGIS QGIS Carto -- Transcript You can help correct transcripts on GitHub. [00:00:00] Introduction Jeremy: Today I'm talking to Tom MacWright. He worked at Mapbox as a, a very early employee. He's had a lot of experience in the geospatial community, the open source community. One of his most recent projects was a mapping project called Placemark he started and ran on his own. So I wanted to talk to Tom about his experience going solo and, eventually having to, shut that down. Tom, thanks for agreeing to chat today. Tom: Yeah, thanks for having me. [00:00:32] Tools and Open Source at Mapbox Jeremy: So maybe to give everyone some context on, what your background was before you started Placemark. Um, let's talk a little bit about your experience at, at Mapbox. What did you work on there and, and what would you say are like the big things you learned from that experience? Tom: Yeah, so if you include the time that I was at Development Seed, which essentially turned into Mapbox, I kind of signed the paper to get fired from Development Seed and hired at Mapbox within the same 20 seconds. Uh, I was there for eight and a half years. so it was a lifetime in tech years. and the company really evolved from, uh, working for Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International and the World Bank and doing these small, little like micro websites to the point at which I left it. It had. Raised a lot of money, had a lot of employees. I think it was 350 or so when I left. and yeah, just expanded into a lot of different, uh, try trying to own more and more of the mapping stack. but yeah, I was kind of really focused on the creative and tooling side of it. that's kind of where I see a lot of the, the fun and programming is making these tools where, uh, they can give people the same kind of fun like interaction loop that programming has where you, you know, you do a little bit of math and you see the result and you're able to just play with, uh, what you're working on, letting people have that in other domains. so it was really cool to figure out how to get A map design tool where somebody changes the background color and it just automatically changes that in your browser. and it covered like data editing. It covered, um, map styling and we did, uh, three different versions of that tool over the years. and then Mapbox is also a company that was, it came from, kind of people who are working on the Howard Dean campaign. And so it was pretty ideological and part of the ideology was being pretty hardcore about open source. we hired a lot of people who were working on open source projects before and basically just paid them to work on the open source projects, uh, for their whole time there. And during my time there, I just tried to make as much of my work, uh, open as possible, which was, you know, at the time it was, it was pretty great. I think in the long term it's been, o open source has changed a lot. but during the time that we were there, we both kind of, helped things like leaflet and mapnik and openstreetmap, uh, but also made like some larger contributions to the open source world. yeah, that, that's kind of like the, the internal company facing side. And also like what I try to create as like a more of a, uh, enduring work. I think the open source stuff will hopefully have more of a, a long term, uh, benefit. [00:03:40] How open source has changed (value capture by large companies) Jeremy: When I was working on a project that needed offline maps, um, we couldn't use Google Maps or any of the, the other publicly available, cloud APIs. So yeah, we actually used a, a tool, called Tile Mill that I, I hadn't known that you'd worked on, but recently found out you did. So that actually let us pull in OpenStreetMap data and then use this style, uh, language called carto to, to basically let us choose what the colors would be and how the different, uh, the roads and the buildings would look. What's kind of interesting to me is that it being open source really let us, um, build something we otherwise wouldn't have been able to do. But like, at the same time, we also didn't pay Mapbox any money. (laughs) So I'm, I'm kind of curious, like, if it's changed, like what the thinking was in terms of, you know, we pay for people to build all these things. We make it open source. but then people may just not ever pay us, you know, for all these things we did. Tom: Yeah. Yeah. I think that the main thing that's changed since the era of tilemill is, the dominance of cloud platforms. Like back then, I think, uh, Mapbox was still using, we were using like a little bit of AWS but people were still just on like VPSs and, uh, configuring things in cPanel and sometimes even running their own servers. And the, the danger of people using the product for free was such a small thing for us. especially when tile Mill was also funded by the Knight Foundation, so, you know, that at least paid half of my salary for, or, well, sorry, probably, yeah, maybe half of my salary for the first year that I was there and half of three other people's salaries. but that, yeah, so like when we built Tile Mill, a few companies have really like built on those same tools. Uh, there's a company called Carto coincidentally, they had the same name as Carto CSS, and they built on a lot of the same stack they built on mapnik. Um, and it was, was... I mean, I'm not gonna say that it was all like, you know, sunshine and roses, but it was never a thing that we talked about in terms of like this being a brutal competition between us and these other startups. Mapbox eventually closed source some stuff. they made it a source available license. and eventually Mapbox Studio was a closed source product. Um, and that was actually a decision that I advocated for. And that's mostly just because at one point, Esri, Microsoft, Amazon, all had whitelisted versions of Mapbox code, which, uh, hurts a little bit on a personal level and also makes it pretty hard to think about. working almost like it. You don't want to go to your scrappy open source company and do unpaid labor for Amazon. Uh, you know, Bezos can afford to pay for the labor himself. that's just kind of my personal, uh, that I'm obviously, I haven't worked there in a long time, so I'm not speaking for the company, but that's kind of how it felt like. and it yeah, kind of changed the arithmetic of open source in this way that. It made it less fun and, more risky, um, for people I think. [00:07:11] Don't worry about the small free users Jeremy: Yeah. So it sounds like the thinking was if someone on a small team or an individual, they took the open source software and they used it for their own projects, that was fine. Like you expected that and didn't worry about it. It's more that when these really large organizations like a, a Microsoft comes in and, just like you said, white labels the software, and doesn't really contribute significantly back. That's, that's when it, the, the thinking sort of shifted. Tom: Yeah, like a lot of the people who can't pay full price in USD to use your product are great users and they're doing cool stuff. Like when I was working on Placemark and when I was like selling. The theme for my blog, I would get emails from like some kid in India and it's like, you know, you're selling this for a hundred dollars, which is a ton of money. And like, you know, why, why should I care? Why shouldn't I like, just send them the zip file for free? it's like nothing to me and a lot to them. and mapping tools are really, really expensive. So the fact that Mapbox was able to create a free alternative when, you know, ArcGIS was $500 a month sometimes, um, depending on your license, obviously. That's, that's good. You're always gonna find a way for, like, your salespeople are gonna find a way to charge the big companies a lot of money. They're great at that. Um, and that's what matters really for your, for the revenue. [00:08:44] ESRI to Google Maps with little in-between Jeremy: That's a a good point too about like the, my impression of the, the mapping space, and maybe this has changed more recently, but you had the, probably the biggest player Esri, who's selling things at enterprise prices and then there were, or there are like a few open source options. but they feel like the, the barrier to entry feels a little high. And so, and then I guess you have stuff like Google Maps, right? That's, um, that's very accessible, but it's pretty limited, so. There's this big gap, it feels like right between the, the Esri and the, the Google Maps and open source. It's, it's sort of like, there's almost like there's no sweet spot. guess May, maybe it's just because people's uses are so different, but I'm, I'm not sure, um, what makes maps so unique in that way Tom: Yeah, I have come to understand what Esri and QGIS do as like an extension of what CAD is like. And if you've used CAD software recently, it's just as crazy and as expensive and as powerful. and it's really hard to capture like the people who are motivated enough to make a map but don't want to go down the whole rabbit hole. I think that was one of the hardest things about Placemark was trying to be in the middle of those things and half of the people were mystified by the complexity and half the people wanted more complexity. Uh, and I just couldn't figure out how to get it to the right in between spot. [00:10:25] Placemark and its origins in geojson.io Jeremy: Yeah. So let's, let's talk a little bit about Placemark then, in terms of from its start. What was your, your goal with Placemark and, and what was the product itself? Tom: So the seed of the idea for Placemark, uh, is this website called geojson.io, uh, which is still around. And, Chris Fong (correction -- Whong) at, at Mapbox is still, uh, developing it. And that had become pretty useful for a lot of people who I knew in the industry who were in this position of managing geospatial data but not wanting to boot up ArcGIS uh, geojson.io is based on, I just tweeted, I was like, why? Why is there not a thing where you can edit data on a map and have a GeoJSON representation and just go Back and forth between the two really easily. and it started with that, and then it kind of grew to be a little bit more powerful. And then it was just a tool that was useful for everyone. And my theory was just that I wanted that to be more useful. And I knew just like anything else that you build and you work on for a long time, you know exactly how it could be so much better. And, uh, all the things that you would do better if you did it again. And I was, uh, you know, hoping that there was something where like if you make that more powerful and you make it something that's like so essential that somebody's using every day, then maybe there's some some value in that. And so Placemark kind of started as being like, oh, this is the thing where if you're tasking a satellite and you need a bounding box on a specific city, this is the easiest way to do that. Um, and it grew a little bit into being like a tool for collaborating because people were collaborating on it. And I thought that that would be, you know, an interesting thing to support. but yeah, I think it, it like tried to be in that middle of like, not exactly Google my Maps and certainly a lot, uh, simpler than, uh, QGIS or ArcGIS Jeremy: something I noticed, so I've actually used geojson.io as well when I was first learning how to put stuff on a map and learning that GeoJSON was a format that a lot of things were using, it was actually really helpful to, to be able to draw, uh, polygons and see, okay, this is how the JSO looks and all that stuff. And it was. Like just very simple. I think there's something like very powerful about, websites or applications like that where it, it does this one thing and when you go there, you're like, oh, okay, I, I, I know what I'm doing and it's, it's, uh, you know, it's gonna help me do the, this very specific thing I'm trying to do. [00:13:16] Placemark use cases (Farming, Transportation, Interior mapping, Satellite viewsheds) Jeremy: I think with Placemark, so, one question I would have is, you gave an example of, uh, someone, I think you said for a satellite, they're, are they drawing the, the area? What, what was the area specifically for? Tom: the area of interest, the area where they want the, uh, to point the camera. Jeremy: so yeah, with, with Placemark, I mean, were there, what were some of the specific customers or use cases you had in mind? 'cause that's, that's something about. Um, placemark as a product I noticed was it's sort of like, here's this thing where you can draw polygons put markers and there's all these like things you can do, but I think unless you already have the specific use case, it's not super clear, who uses it for what. So maybe you could give some examples of what you had in mind. Tom: I didn't have much in mind, but I can tell you what people, what some people used it for. so some of the more interesting uses of it, a bunch of, uh, farming oriented use cases, uh, especially like indoor and small scale farming. Um, there were some people who, uh, essentially had a bunch of flower farms and had polygons on the map, and they wanted to, uh, mark the ones that had mites or needed to be watered, other things that could spread in a geometric way. And so it's pretty important to have that geospatial component to it. and then a few places were using it for basically transportation planning. Um, so drawing out routes of where buses would go, uh, in Luxembourg. And, then there was also a little bit of like, kind of interesting, planning of what to buy more or less. Uh, so something of like, do we want to buy this tract of land or do we wanna buy this tract of land or do we wanna buy access to this one high speed internet cable or this other high speed internet cable? and yeah, a lot of those things were kind of like emergent use cases. Um, there's a lot of people who were doing either architecture or internal or in interior mapping essentially. Jeremy: Interior, you mean, inside of a building Tom: yeah. yeah. Jeremy: Hmm. Okay. Tom: Which I don't think it was the best tool for. Uh, but you know, people used it for that. Jeremy: Interesting. Yeah. I guess, would people normally use some kind of a CAD tool for that, or Tom: Yeah. Uh, there's CAD tools and there are a few, uh, companies that do just, there's a company that just does interior maps especially of airports, and that's their whole business model. Um, but it's, it's kind of an interesting, uh, problem because most CAD architecture work is done with like a local coordinate system, and you have like very good resolution of everything, and then you eventually place it in geo geospatial space. Uh, but if you do it all in latitude and longitude, you know, you're, you're moving a door and it's moving the 10th or 12th decimal point, and eventually you have some precision problems. Jeremy: So it's almost like if you start with latitude and longitude, it's hard to go the other way. Right? you have to start more specific and then you can move it into the, the geospatial, uh, area. Tom: Yeah. Uh, that's kind of why we have local projections for towns is that you can do a lot of work just in that local projection. And the numbers are kind of small 'cause your town's small, relatively. Jeremy: yeah, those are kind of interesting. So it sounds like just anytime somebody wants to, like you gave the example of transportation planning or you want to visually see where things are, like your crops or things like that, and that, that kind of makes sense. I mean, I think if you just think about paper maps, if somebody wants to sketch something out and, and sort of track the layout of something, this could serve the same purpose but be editable. and like you said, I think it's also. Collaborative so you can have multiple people editing the same, um, map. that makes sense. I think something that I believe I saw on your website is you said though that it was, it's like an editing tool, but it's not necessarily a visualization tool. Uh, I'm kind of curious what you, what you meant by that. [00:17:39] An editing tool that allows you to export data not a visualization tool Tom: Yeah, I, when you say a map, I think there's, people can interpret that as everything from raw data to satellite imagery and raster data. and then a lot of it is like, can I use this to make a choropleth map of the voter turnout in our, in my country? and that placemark did a little bit, but I think that it was, it was never going to be the, the thing that it did super well. and so, yeah, and also like the, the two things kind of, don't mesh all that well. Like if you have a scale point map and you have that kind of visualization of it and then you're editing the points at the same time and you're dragging around these like gigantic points because this point means a lot of population, it just doesn't really make that much sense. There are probably ways to square that circle and have different views, but, uh, I felt like for visualizations, I mean partly I just think data wrapper is kind of great and uh, I had already worked for observable at that point, which is also, which I think also does like great visualization work. Jeremy: Would that be the case of somebody could make a map inside a placemark and then they would take the GeoJSON and then import that into another visualization tool? Is that what you were kind of imagining people would do? Tom: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Jeremy: And I could see from the customer's perspective, a lot of them, they may have that end, uh, visualization in mind. So they might look for a tool that kind of just does both. Right. Tom: Yeah. Yeah. Certain people definitely, wanted that. And yeah, it was an interesting direction to go down. I think that market was going to be a lot different than the people who wanted to manage and edit data. And also, I, one thing that I had in mind a lot, uh, was if Placemark didn't work out, how much would people be burned? and I think if I, if I built it in a way that like everyone was heavily relying on the API and embeds, people would be suffer a lot more, if I eventually had to shut it down. every API that you release is really a, a long-term commitment. And instead for me, like guilt wise, having a product where you can easily export everything that you ever did in any format that you want was like the least lock in, kind of. Jeremy: Yeah. And I imagine the, the scope of the project too, you're making it much smaller if you, if you stick to that editing experience and not try to do everything. Tom: Yeah. Yeah. I, the scope was already pretty big. as you can tell from the open source project, it's, it's bigger than I wish it was. the whole time I was really hoping that I could figure out some niche that was much more compact. there's, I forget the name, but there's somebody who has a, an application that's very similar to Placemark in. Technical terms, but is just a hundred percent focused on planning septic systems. And I'm just like, if I just did this just for septic systems, like would that be a much, would that be 10,000 lines of code instead of 40,000 lines of code? And it would be able to perfectly serve those customers. but you know, that I didn't do enough experimentation to figure that out. Um, I, that's, I think one thing that I wish I had done a lot more was, pivot and do experiments. Jeremy: that septic example, do you know if it's a, a business in and of itself where it can actually support one person or a staff of people? Or is it, is that market just too small? Tom: I think it's still a solo bootstrapped project. yeah. And it's, it's so hard to tell whether a company's doing well or not. I could ask the person over DM. [00:21:58] Built the base technology before going public Jeremy: So when you were first starting. placemark. You were, you were doing it as a solo, developer. A solo entrepreneur, reallyyou worked on it for quite a while, I think before you announced, right? Like maybe a year or so? Tom: Yeah, yeah. Almost, almost a year, I think, maybe, maybe 10 months in the dark. Jeremy: I think that there's, there was a lot of overlap between the different directions that I would eventually go in and. So just building a collaborative editor that can edit map data fairly quickly and checks all the boxes of being able to import and export things, um, that is, was a lot of work. and I mean also I, I was, uh, freelancing during part of it, so it wasn't a hundred percent of my time. Tom: But that, that core, I think even now if I were to build something similar, I would probably still use that work. because that, whether you're doing the septic planning application or you're doing a general purpose kind of map editor or some kind of social application, a lot of that stuff will be in common. Um, and so I wanted to really get, like, to figure out that problem space and get a few solutions that I could live with. Jeremy: The base. libraries or technologies you were gonna pick to get the map and have the collaborative aspect. Those are all things you wanted to get settled first. And then you figured, okay, once I have this base, then I can go find the, you know, the, the, the customers or, or find the specifics of what I'm gonna build. Tom: Yeah, exactly. Jeremy: I I think you had said that going forward when you're gonna work on another project, you would probably still start the same way. [00:23:51] Geospatial is a tough industry, no public companies Tom: if I was working on a project in the geospatial space, I would probably heavily reference the work that I already did here. but I don't know if I'll go back to, to maps again. It's a tough industry. Jeremy: Is it because of the, the customer base? Is it because like people don't really understand the market in terms of who actually needs the maps? I'm kind of curious what you feel makes it tough. Tom: I think, well there are no, there are no public mapping companies. Esri is I think one of the 10 largest private companies in the us. but it's not like any of these geospatial companies have ever been like a pure play. And I think that makes it hard. I think maps are just, they're kind of like fonts in a way in which they are this. Very deep well of complexity, which is absolutely fascinating. If you're in it, it's enough fun and engineering to spend an entire career just working on that stuff. And then once you're out of it, you talk to somebody and you're just like, oh, I work on this thing. And they're like, oh, that you Google maps. Um, or, you know, I work at a font type like a, you know, a type factory and it's like, oh, do you make, uh, you know, courier in, uh, word. It's really infrastructure, uh, that we mostly take for granted, which is, that's, that means it's good in some ways. but at the same time, I, it's hard to really find a niche in which the mapping component is that, that is that useful. A lot of the companies that are kind of mapping companies. Like, I think you could say that like Strava and Palantir are kind of geospatial companies, both of them. but Strava is a fitness company and Palantir is a military company. so if you're, uh, a mapping expert, you kind of have to figure out what, how it ties into the real world, how it ties into the business world and revenue. And then maps might be 50% of the solution or 75% of the solution, but it's probably not going to be, this is the company that makes mapping software. Jeremy: Yeah, it's more like, I have this product that I'm gonna sell and it happens to have a map as a part of it. versus I'm going to sell you, tools that, uh, you know, help you make your own map. That seems like a, a harder, harder sell. Tom: yeah. And especially pro tools like the. The idea of people being both invested in terms of paying and invested in terms of wanting to learn the tool. That's, uh, that's a lot to ask out of people. [00:26:49] Knowing the market is tough but going for it anyways Jeremy: I think the things we had just talked about, about mapping being a tough industry and about there being like the low end is taken care of by Google, the high end is taken care of by Esri with ArcGIS. Uh, I think you mentioned in a blog post that when you started Placemark you, you, you knew all this from the start. So I'm kind of curious, like, knowing that, what made you decide like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go for it and, you know, do it anyways. Tom: uh, I, well, I think that having seen, I, like I am a co-founder of val.town now, and every company that I've worked for, I've been pretty early enough to see how the sausage is made and the sausage is made with chaos. Like every company doesn't know what it's doing and is in an impossible fight against some Goliath figure. And the product that succeeds, if it ever does succeed, is something that you did not think of two or three years in advance. so I looked at this, I looked at the odds, and I was like, oh, these are the typical odds, you know, maybe someday I'll see something where it's, uh, it's an obvious open blue water market opportunity. But I think for the, for the most part, I was expecting to grind. Uh, you know, like even, even if, uh, the odds were worse, I probably would've still done it. I think I, I learned a lot. I should have done a lot more marketing and business and, but I have, I have no regrets about, you know, taking, taking a one try at solving a very hard to solve problem. Jeremy: Yeah, that's a good point in that the, the odds, like you said, are already stacked against you. but sometimes you just gotta try it and see how it goes, Tom: Yeah. And I had the, like I was at a time where I was very aware of how my life was set up. I was like, I could do a startup right now and kind of burn money for a little while and have enough time to work on it, and I would not be abandoning an infant child or, you know, like all of the things that, all the life responsibilities that I will have in the near future. Um. So, you know, uh, the, the time was then, I guess, [00:29:23] Being a solo developer Jeremy: And comparing it to your time at Mapbox and the other startups and, and I suppose now at val.town, when you were working on Placemark, you're the sole developer, you're in charge of everything. how did that feel? Did you enjoy that experience or was it more like, I, I really wish I had other people to, you know, to kind of go through this with, Tom: Uh, around the end I started to chat with people who, like might be co-founders and I even entertained some chats with, uh, venture capital people. I am fine with the, the day to day of working on stuff alone of making a lot of decisions. That's what I have done in a lot of companies anyway. when you're building the prototype or turning a prototype into something that can be in production, I think that having, uh, having other people there, It would've been better for my mentality in terms of not feeling like it was my thing. Um, you know, like feeling detached enough from the product to really see its flaws and really be open to, taking more radical shifts in approach. whereas when it's just you, you know, it's like you and the customers and your email inbox and, uh, your conscience and your existential dread. Uh, and you know, it's not like a co-founder or, uh, somebody to work with is gonna solve all of that stuff for you, but, uh, it probably would've been maybe a little bit better. I don't know. but then again, like I've also seen those kinds of relationships blow up a lot. and I wanted to kind of figure out what I was doing before, adding more people, more complexity, more money into the situation. But maybe you, maybe doing that at the beginning is kind of the same, you know, like you, other people are down for the same kind of risk that you are. Jeremy: I'm sure it's always different trade offs. I mean, I, I think there probably is a power to being able to unilaterally say like, Hey, this is, this is what I wanna do, so I'm gonna do it. Tom: Yeah. [00:31:52] Spending too much time on multiplayer without a business case Jeremy: You mentioned how there were certain flaws or things you may not have seen because you were so in it. Looking back, what, what were some of those things? Tom: I think that, uh, probably the, I I don't think that most technical decisions are all that important, um, that it never seems like the thing that means life or death for companies. And, you know, Facebook is still on PHP, they've fought, fixed, the problem with, with money. but I think I got rabbit holed into a few things where if I had like a business co-founder, then they would've grilled me about like, why are we spending? The, the main thing that comes to mind, uh, is real time multiplayer, real time. It was a fascinating problem and I was so ready to think about that all the time and try to solve it. And I think that took up a lot of my time and energy. And in the long term, most people are not editing a map. At the same time, seeing the cursors move around is a really fun party trick, and it's great for marketing, but I think that if I were to take a real look at that, that was, that was a mistake. Especially when the trade off was things that actually mattered. Like the amount of time, the amount, the amount of data that the, that could be handled at. At the same time, I could have figured out ways to upload a one gigabyte or two gigabyte or three gigabyte shape file and for it to just work in that same time, whereas real time made it harder to solve that problem, which was a lot closer to what, Paying customers cared about and where people's expectations were? Jeremy: When you were working on this realtime collaborative functionality, was this before the product was public? Was this something you, built from the start? Tom: Yeah. I built the whole thing without it and then added it in. Not as like a rewrite, but like as a, as a big change to a lot of stuff. Jeremy: Yeah, I, I could totally see how that could happen because you are trying to envision people using this product, and you think of something like Google Docs, right? It's very powerful to be typing in a document and see the other cursors and, um, see other people typing. So, I could see how you, you would make that leap and say like, oh, the map should, should do that too. Yeah. [00:34:29] Financial pressures of bootstrapping, high COL, and healthcare Tom: Yeah. Yeah. Um, and, you know, Figma is very cool. Like the, it's, it's amazing. It's an amazing thing. But the Figma was in the dark for way longer than I was, and uh, Evan is a lot smarter than I was. Jeremy: He probably had a big bag of money too. Right. Tom: Yeah. Jeremy: I, I don't actually know the history of Figma, but I'm assuming it's, um, it's VC funded, right? Tom: Uh, yeah, they're, they're kind of famous for just having, I don't think they raised that much in the beginning, but they just didn't hire very much and it was just like the two co-founders, or two or three people and they just kept building for long time. I feel like it's like well over three years. Jeremy: Oh wow. Okay. I think like in your case, I, I saw a comment from you where you were saying, this was your sole source of income and you gotta pay for your health insurance, and so you have no outside investments. So, the pressures are, are very different I think. Tom: Yeah. Yeah. And that's really something to on, to appreciate about venture capital. It gives you the. Slack in your, in your budget to make some mistakes and not freak out about it. and sadly, the rent is not going down anytime soon in, in Brooklyn, and the health insurance is not going down anytime soon. I think it's, it's kind of brutal to like leave a job and then realize that like, you know, to, to be admitted to a hospital, you have to pay $500 a month. Jeremy: I'm, I'm sure that was like, shocking, right? The first time you had to pay for it yourself. Tom: Yeah. And it's not even good. Uh, we need to fix this like that. If there's anything that we could do to fix entrepreneurship in this country, it's just like, make it possible to do this without already being wealthy. Um, it was, it was a constant stress. [00:36:29] Growth and customers Jeremy: As you worked on it, and maybe especially as you, after you had shipped, was there a period where. You know, things were going really well in terms of customers and you felt like, okay, this is really gonna work. Tom: I was, so, like, I basically started out by dropping, I think $5,000 in the business bank account. And I was like, if I break even soon, then I'll be happy. And I broke even in the first month. And that was amazing. I mean, the costs were low and everything, but I was really happy to just be at that point and that like, it never went down. I think that probably somebody with more, uh, determination would've kept going after, after I had stopped. but yeah, like, and also The people who used Placemark, who I actually chatted with, and, uh, all that stuff, they were awesome. I wish that there were more of them. but like a lot of the customers were doing cool stuff. They were supportive. They gave me really informative feedback. Um, and that felt really good. but there was never a point at which like the, uh, the growth scale looked like, oh, we're going to hit a point at which this will be a sustainable business within a year. I think it, according to the growth when I left it, it would've been like maybe three years until I would've been, able to pay my rent and health insurance and, live a comfortable life in, in New York. Jeremy: So when you mentioned you broke even that was like the expenses into the business, but not for actually like rent and health insurance and food and all that. Okay. Okay. can you say like roughly how much was coming in or how many customers you had? Tom: Uh, yeah, the revenue initially I think was, uh, 1500 MRR, and eventually it was like 4,000 or so. Jeremy: And the growth was pretty steady. [00:38:37] Bootstrapping vs fundraising Tom: Um, so yeah, I mean, the numbers where you're just like, maybe I could have kept going. but it's, the other weird thing about VCs is just that I think I have this rich understanding of like, if you're, if you're running a business that will be stressful, but be able to pay your bills and you're in control of it, versus running a startup where you might make life changing money and then not have to run a business again. It's like the latter is kind of better. Uh, if stress affects you a lot, and if you're not really wedded to being super independent. so yeah, I don't know between the two ways of like living your life, I, I have some appreciation for, for both. doing what Placemark entailed if I was living cheaply in a, in a cheap city and it didn't stress me out all the time, would've been a pretty good deal. Um, but doing it in Brooklyn with all the stress was not it, it wasn't affecting my life in positive ways and I, I wanted to, you know, go see shows at night with my friends and not worry about the servers going down. Jeremy: Even putting the money aside, I think that's being the only person responsible for the app, right? Probably feels like you can't really take a vacation. Right. Tom: Yeah, I did take a vacation during it. Like I went to visit my partner who was in, uh, Germany at the time, and we were like on a boat, uh, between Germany, across the lake to Switzerland, and like the servers went down and I opened up my laptop and fixed the servers. It's just like, that is, it's a sacrifice that people make, but it is hard. Jeremy: There's, there's on call, but usually it's not just you 24 7. Tom: Yeah. If you don't pick up somebody else [00:40:28] Financial stress and framing money spent as an investment Jeremy: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I guess at what point, because I'm trying to think. You started in 2021 and then maybe wrapped up, was it sometime in 2024? Tom: Uh, I took a job in, uh, I, I mean I joined val.town in the early 2023 and then wrapped up in November, 2023. Jeremy: At what point did you really start feeling the, the stress? Like I, I imagine maybe when you first started out, you said you were doing consulting and stuff, so, um, probably things were okay, but once you kind of shifted away from that, is that kind of when the, the, the worries about money started coming in? Tom: Yeah. Um, I think maybe it was like six or eight months, um, in. Just that I felt like I wasn't finding, uh, like a, a way to grow the product without adding lots of complexity to it. and being a solo founder, the idea of succeeding, but having built like this hulking mess of a product felt just as bad as not succeeding. like ideally it would be something that I could really be happy maintaining for the long term. Uh, but I was just seeing like, oh, maybe I could succeed by adding every feature in QGIS and that's just not, not a, not something that I wanted to commit to. but yeah, I don't, I don't know. I've been, uh, do you know, uh, Ramit Sethie he's like a, Jeremy: I don't. Tom: an internet money guy. He's less scummy than the rest of them, but still, I. an internet money guy. Um, but he does adjust a lot of stuff about like, money psychology. And that has made me realize that a lot of what I thought at the time and even think now is kind of a rational, you know, like, I think one of the main things that I would do differently is just set a budget for Placemark. Like if I had just set away, like, you know, enough money to live on for a year and put that in, like the, this is for Placemark bucket, then it would've felt better to me then having it all be ad hoc, month to month, feeling like you're burning money instead of investing money in a thing. but yeah, nobody told me, uh, how to, how to think about it then. Uh, yeah, you only get experience by experiencing it. Jeremy: You're just seeing your, your bank account shrinking and there's this, psychological toll, right? Where you're not, you're not used to that feeling and it, it probably feels like something's wrong, Tom: Yeah, yeah. I'm, I think it, I'm really impressed by people who can say, oh, I invested, uh, you know, 50 or a hundred thousand dollars into this business and was comfortable with that risk. And like, maybe it works out, maybe it doesn't. Maybe you just like threw a lot of money down into that. and the people, I think with the healthy, productive, uh, relationship with it. Do think of it as like, oh, I, I paid for kind of a bet on a risk. and that's, that's what I was doing anyway. You know, like I was paying my rent and my health insurance and spending all my time working on the product instead of paying, uh, freelance work. but if you don't frame it that way, it doesn't feel like an investment. It feels like you're making a risky gamble. Jeremy: Yeah. And I think that makes sense to, to actually, I think, like you were saying, have a separate account or a separate thing set aside where you are like, this is, this is this money for this purpose. And like you said, look at it as an investment, which with regular investments can go down. Tom: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Jeremy: Yeah [00:44:26] In hindsight might have raised money or tried smaller bets Jeremy: Were there, there other things, whether technical or or business wise, that, that if you were to to do it again, you would do differently? Tom: I go back and forth on whether I should have raised venture capital. there are, there's kind of a, an assumption in venture capital that once you're on it, you have to go the whole way. You have to become a billion dollar company, uh, or at least really tell people that you're going to be a billion dollar company and I am not. yeah, I, I don't know. I've seen, I've seen other companies in my space, or like our friends of my current company who are not really targeting that, or ones who were, and then they had somewhere in between the billion dollar and the very small outcome. Uh, and that's a little bit of a point in the favor of accepting a big pile of money from the venture capitalists. I'm also a little bit biased right now because val.town has one investor and he's like the, the best venture capitalist that I have ever met. Big fan. don't quote me on that. If he sacks me in like a year, we'll see. Um, but uh, yeah, there, I, I think that I understand more why people take that approach. or I've understood more why people take like the venture capital but not taking $300 million from SoftBank approach. yeah, and I don't know, I think that, trying a lot of things also seems really appealing. Uh, people who do the same kind of. of Maybe 10 months, but they build four or five different products or three different products instead of just one. I think that, that feels, feels like a good idea to me. Jeremy: And in doing that, would that be more of a, like as a solo entrepreneur or you, you're thinking you would take investment and then say, I'm gonna try all these things with, with your money. Tom: Oh, I've seen both. I, that I, yeah, one friend's company has pivoted like four times between very different ideas and yeah, it, it's one way to do it, but I think in the long term, I would want to do that as a solo developer and try to figure out, you know, something. but yeah, I, I think, uh, so much of it is mindset, that even then if I was working on like three different projects, I think I. My qualifications for something being worth, really adopting and spending all my time doing, you just have to accept, uh, a lot of hits and a lot of misses and a lot of like keeping things alive and finding out how to turn them into something. I am really inspired by my friends who like started around the same time that I did and they're not that much further in terms of revenue and they're like still, still doing it because that is what they want to do in life. and if you develop the whole ecosystem and mindset around it, I think that's somewhere that people can stay and, and be happy. just trying to find, trying to find a company that they own and control and they like. Jeremy: While, while making the the expenses work. Tom: Yeah. Yeah. that's the, that's the hard part, like freelancing on the side also. I probably could have kept that up. I liked my freelance clients. I would probably still work with them as well. but I kind of just wanted the, I wanted the focus, I wanted the motivation of, of being without a net. Jeremy: Yeah, I mean, energy wise, do you think that that would've worked? I mean, I imagine that Placemark took a lot of your time when you were working full time, so you're trying to balance, you know, clients and all your customers and everything you're doing with the software. It just feels like it might be a lot. Tom: Yeah. Yeah. Maybe with different freelance clients. I, I loved my freelance clients because I, after. leaving config. I, I wanted to work on climate change stuff and so I was working for climate change foundations and that is not the way to max out your paycheck. It's the way to feel good about your conscience. And so I still feel great about those projects, but in the future, yeah, I would probably just work for, uh, you know, a hedge fund or something. [00:49:02] Marketing to developers but not potential customers Jeremy: I think something you mentioned in one of your posts is that you maybe could have spent more time or had a different approach with marketing. Maybe you could kind of say what you did do and then what maybe worked and what didn't. Tom: Yeah. So I like my sweet spot is writing documentation and blog posts and technical stuff. And so I did a lot of that and a lot of that like worked in a way that didn't matter. I am at this point, weirdly good at writing stuff that gets on Hacker News. I've written a lot of stuff that's gotten to the top of Hacker News and unfortunately, writing about your technical approach and your geospatial project for handling errors, uh, in your JavaScript code is not really a way to get customers. and I think doing a lot of documentation was also great, but it was also, I think that the, the thing that was missing is the thing that I think Mapbox does fairly well now, in which the homepage really pushes you toward use cases immediately. and I should have been saying to each customer who had anything compelling as a use case, like, let's write an article about you and what you're doing, and here's how you use this in your industry. and that probably would've also been like a good, a good way to figure out which of those verticals was the one that was most worth spending all the time on. yeah. So it, it was, it was a lot of good marketing to nerds. and it could have been better in terms of marketing to actual customers and to people who are making the buying decisions. Jeremy: Yeah. Looking at the, the Placemark blog, I can definitely see how as a developer, a lot of the posts are appealing to me, right? It's about how you worked on a technical challenge or decisions you made, but maybe less so to somebody who they wanna. Draw a map to manage their crops. They're like, I don't care about any of this. Right. Tom: Yeah, like the Mapbox blog used to be, just all that stuff as well. We would write about designing protocol buffer layouts, and it was amazing for hiring and amazing for getting nerds in the door. But now it's just, Toyota is launching with, Mapbox Maps or something like that. And that's, that's what you, you should do if you're trying to sell a product. Jeremy: Yeah. And I think the, the sort of technical aspect, it makes sense too. If you're venture funded and you are looking to hire, right? You wanna build your team and you just want to increase like, the amount of stuff you're building and not worrying so much about, am I gonna have a paycheck next Tom: Yeah. Yeah. I, I just kind of do it because it's fun, which is not the right reason to do it, but, Yeah, I mean, I still write my blog mostly just because it's, it's a fun thing to do, but it's not the best way to, um, to run a business. Jeremy: Yeah. Well, the fun part is important too though. Tom: Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's maybe the whole thing. May, that's maybe the most important thing, but you can't do it if you don't do the, the money part. [00:52:35] Most customers came from existing audience Jeremy: Right. So the people who did find you, was it mostly word of mouth from people who did identify with the technical posts, or were there places that surprised you, that people found you? Tom: Uh, a lot of it was people who were familiar with the Mapbox ecosystem or with, with me. and then eventually, yeah, a few of the users came in through, um, through Hacker News, but it was mostly, mostly word of mouth also. The geospatial community is like fairly tight and it's, and it's not too hard to be the person who writes the article about some geospatial challenge that everyone finds. Jeremy: Hmm. Okay. Yeah, that's a good point about like being in that community, especially since you've done so much work in geospatial and in open source that you have this little, this built-in audience, I guess. Tom: yeah. Which I appreciate. It makes me nervous, but yeah. [00:53:43] Val.town marketing to developers Jeremy: Comparing that to something like val.town, how is val.town marketing? How is it finding users? 'cause from what I can tell, it's, it's getting a lot of, uh, a lot of people coming in, right? Tom: Yeah. Uh, well, right now our, our kind of target user, or the user that we think of is a hobbyist, is somebody who's, sometimes a pro developer or somebody, sometimes just somebody who's really interested in the field. And so writing these things that are just about, you know, programming, does super well. Uh, but it, we have exactly the same problem and that that is kind of being revamped as we speak. uh, we hired somebody who actually knows marketing and has a good sense for it. And so a lot of that stuff is shifting to show you what you can do with val.town because it, it suffers from the same problem as well. It's an empty text field in which you can type, type script, code, and it runs. And knowing what you can do with that or what you should do with that is, is hard if you don't have a grasp of TypeScript and web applications. so pretty soon we'll have pages which are like, here's how to connect linear and GitHub with OW Town, or, you know, two nouns connect them, for all of those companies and to do automations and all these like concrete applications. I think that's, you have to do it. You have to figure it out. Jeremy: Just briefly for someone who hasn't heard of val.town, like what, what does it do? Tom: Uh, val.town is a social website, so it has comments and likes and all of that stuff. but it's for writing these little snippets of TypeScript and JavaScript code that run. So a lot of them are websites, some of them are automations, so they receive emails or send emails or connect one service to another. And yeah, it's, it's like combining some aspects of, GitHub or like a code platform, uh, but with the assumption that every time that you save, everything's instantly deployed. Jeremy: So it's maybe a little bit like, um, like a glitch, I guess? Tom: Uh, yeah. Yeah, it takes a lot of experience, a lot of, uh, inspiration from Glitch. Jeremy: And I, I think, like you had mentioned, you enjoy writing the, the technical blog posts and the documentation. And so at least with val.town, your audience is developers versus, the geospatial community who probably largely doesn't care about, TypeScript and the, the different technical decisions there. Tom: Yeah, it, it makes it easier, that's for sure. The customer is, is me. [00:56:30] Shifting from solo to in-person teams Jeremy: Nice. Yeah. Looking at, you know, you, you worked as a, a solo developer for Placemark, and then now you've got a team of, is it like maybe five Tom: Uh, it is seven at the moment. Jeremy: Seven people. Okay. Are you all in person or is it, remote Tom: We all sit around two tables in Brooklyn. It's very nice. Jeremy: So how did that feel? Like shifting from, I'm in, I don't know if you worked from home while you were working on Placemark or if you were in coworking spaces, but you're, you're shifting from I'm like in my own head space doing everything myself to, to, I'm in a room with all these people and we're like working on this thing together. I'm kind of curious like how that felt for you. Tom: Yeah, it's been a big difference. And I think that I was just talking with, um, one, one of our, well an engineer at, at val.town about how everyone kind of had, had been working remote for obvious pandemic world reasons. And this kind of privilege of just being around the same table, if that's what you like is, a huge difference in terms of, I just remember having to. Trick myself into going on a walk around the block because I would get into such a dark mental head space of working on the same project for eight hours straight and skipping lunch. and now there's a little bit more structure. yeah, it's, it's been, it's been a overall, an improvement. Some days I wish that I could go on a run at noon 'cause that's the warmest time of the day. but, uh, overall, like it makes things so much easier. just reading the emotions in people's faces when they're telling you stuff and being able to, uh, not get into discussions that you don't need to get into because you can talk and just like understand each other very quickly. It's, it's very nice. I don't wanna force everyone to do it, you know, but it it for the people who want it, they, they, uh, really enjoy it. Jeremy: Yeah. I think if you have the right set of people, it's definitely more enjoyable. And um, if you don't, maybe not so Tom: Yeah, we haven't hired any, like, extremely loud chewers yet or anything like that, but yeah, maybe my story will change. Jeremy: No, no one microwaving fish. Tom: No, there's, uh, yeah, thankfully the microwave is outside of the office. Jeremy: Do you live close to the office? Tom: Yeah. Yeah. Like most of the team is within a 20 or 30 minute walk of the office and it's very fortunate. I think there's been something of a mass migration to New York. A lot of us didn't live in New York before four years ago, and now all of us do. it's, it's, uh, it's very comfortable to be here. Jeremy: I think that makes, uh, such a big difference. 'cause I think the majority of people, at least within the US you know, you're, you're getting in your car, you're sitting in traffic. and I know people who, during the pandemic, they actually moved further, right? Because they went, oh, like, uh, I don't need to come into the office. but yeah, if you are close enough where you can walk, yeah, I think that makes a big difference. Tom: Oh yeah. If I had to drive to work, I think my blood pressure would be so much higher. Uh, especially in New York. Oh, I feel so bad for the people who have to drive, whereas I'm just walking with, you know, a bagel in hand, enjoying listening to the birds. Jeremy: Yeah. Yeah. well now they have, what is it, the congestion pricing in Tom: Yeah. Yeah. We're all in Brooklyn, so it doesn't affect us that much, but it's supposedly, it's, it's working great. Um, yeah. I hope we can keep it. Jeremy: I've never driven in New York and I, I wouldn't want to Tom: Yeah. It's only for the brave or the crazy. [01:00:37] The value of public writing and work Jeremy: I think that's probably a good place to, to wrap up, but is there any other thoughts you had or things you wanted to mention? Tom: No, I've just, uh, thank you so much. This has been, this has been a lot of fun. You're, you're very good at this as well. I feel like it's, uh, Jeremy: Thank you Tom: It's not easy to, to steer a conversation in a way that makes awkward people sound, uh, normal. Jeremy: I wouldn't say that, but um, what's been actually pretty helpful to me is, you have such a body of work, I guess I would say, in terms of your blogging and, just the amount that you write and the long history of projects that, that there's, you know, there's a lot to talk about and I'm sure it helps, helps your thought process as well. Tom: Yeah. I, I've been lucky to have a lot of jobs where people, where companies were like, cool with publishing everything, you know? so a lot of what I've done is, uh, is public. it's, it's, uh, I'm very, very thankful for like, early on that being a big part of company culture. Jeremy: And you can definitely tell, I think for people who look at the Placemark blog posts or, or now your, your val.town blog posts, like there's, there's a clear difference when somebody like is very intentional and, um, you know, it's good at writing versus you're doing it because, um, it's your corporate responsibility or whatever, like people can tell. Yeah. Tom: Yeah. You can't fake being interested. so you gotta work on things that are interesting. Jeremy: Tom, thanks again for, for agreeing to chat. This was fun. Tom: Yeah thank you so much.

We are always looking for new, revolutionary property management tools and strategies that benefit property managers, owners, tenants, and vendors. In today's episode, property management growth expert Jason Hull sits down with Tom and Diego from a new company called Calvary to discuss how property management entrepreneurs can improve maintenance processes at NO COST.  You'll Learn [01:35] Innovating in the property management industry [08:30] Improving maintenance at no cost to the property manager [17:26] What kinds of businesses does this work for? [21:26] The biggest maintenance challenges [27:28] How do I implement this? Tweetables “You show what you can do and then you build trust.” “It all goes back to systems, SOPs, and training individuals.” “The one piece that's not scalable in a business is depth and depth is where the magic happens.” “If you want to scale your business, you have to do the things that are unscalable.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] Tom: It's a true win for everybody. It really is.  [00:00:02] Jason: And you guys don't charge the property manager... anything?  [00:00:06] Tom: Nothing.  [00:00:08] Jason: Welcome DoorGrowers to the DoorGrowShow. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing in business and life, and you're open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrower. DoorGrower property managers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. [00:00:33] Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it. You think they're crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management business owners and their businesses. [00:00:52] We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now let's get into the show.  [00:01:10] So today I'm hanging out with Tom and Diego Alatorre? All right. I got it. Sort of. All right. And Tom Van Waelem. Yes. Perfect. You guys are stressing me out with these last names, man. These are not easy. All right. So it's good to have you both on the show. So Diego and Tom have this cool idea and business called Calvary. And we'll get into that in a minute. [00:01:34] And our topic today is how to improve maintenance processes at no cost ever. And this is something really unique. And I was like pretty surprised when they originally shared this idea with me, their business. And so we'll get into that, but first let's get into some background between the two of you, how did you get into property management? [00:01:56] And I think this will also help, you know, qualify you to the audience. So they go, "all right. Should I trust these guys with some maintenance stuff?  [00:02:03] Diego: So actually I could go ahead and get started and tell you a little bit about my background story. Yeah. It's actually really interesting, Jason, this was looking at your podcast and I saw that you did an interview with Pete Neubig. Pete Neubig was the owner of Empire. [00:02:21] Sorry, I'm a little bit, I'm a little bit nervous. It's the first time I'm doing a podcast. And he was talking about in your podcast that he hired four individuals, right? One of those four individuals that he hired, I was one of them. I started at the very bottom. I started as an assistant to a property manager. And from there working at Empire, I started to learn that maintenance was a very big struggle. Most issues pretty much happened because of maintenance, right? Escalations, billing problems, you name it. And from that point on I became a maintenance coordinator. [00:02:58] I started to take a really big like at maintenance. And I started to understand and build processes and start to, you know, find solutions on how to handle maintenance. So, and it really helped me because once Empire merged with a bigger property management company, I was able to utilize those same processes, that same structure and we were able to implement it at a very big property management company that had over 9,000 homes at the time. [00:03:30] And so after we implemented that, it really helped that company grow because we were able to rebuild the entire company you know, and scale it. Maintenance was one of those things that was hindering that company from growing and in less than two years that company went from 9,000 doors to over 18,000 homes. [00:03:51] And so after that, first I was headhunted by a couple of property management companies that knew what I was able to do when it came to, you know, to maintenance. And so that's when I decided to start working at Austin investors, I was able to do the same exact thing, which was implement you know, the maintenance knowledge, the processes, SOPs systems, and we had a lot of success. [00:04:18] We were able to help Austin investors grow as well, and we were able to solidify the maintenance department. It was actually during that time that I was at a conference with over 100 plus property management companies, and they were talking about their maintenance struggles and their maintenance issues and why they couldn't figure out how to handle it, you know, from you know, vendor relations growing from 100 doors to 500 doors and then how to handle maintenance, you know, once you have 1000 doors and so on. And that's when I realized that I had a lot of these answers that could help them. With these maintenance struggles, right? So after noticing those particular struggles, that's when I realized that we could help multiple property management companies, you know, and that was actually the same exact time that Tom approached me with the business proposition, and his business proposition it went very well with the idea of helping multiple property management companies. So Tom, my business partner he'll tell you a little bit more about, you know, himself and how we started our relationship. But yeah, that's  [00:05:32] pretty much it.  [00:05:33] Jason: So Tom, what did you think when you heard about some of the stuff that Diego had been accomplishing? [00:05:39] Tom: Yeah, crazy. I mean, when I approached him, I was a roofing salesman at the time, and I was knocking door to door. There was just a big hailstorm that hit Austin and the surrounding areas. And I was knocking doors, you know, helping people get insurance involved so they don't have to pay it out of pocket. [00:05:55] And I reached out to Diego with the hopes of, you know, landing, you know, a lot of inspections very easily without having to bother people knocking on the actual doors. So I reached out to Diego and I was like, "Hey, listen I would love to inspect all of your roofs because I believe that we can save your homeowners a lot of money just simply by inspecting them. If I find that if the homeowner doesn't want to continue, that's fine. At least the homeowner will know what the situation is with their roof." [00:06:19] Diego said, "wow, great. I've never heard about that. Let's do it." So we did the project, inspected 600 homes myself, and then after the project, we saved homeowners a lot. [00:06:29] We replaced about 60 or 70 roofs. So that's a lot of money that we saved because insurance claims, they have an expiration date, usually depending on the insurance company. And anyway, after that project, I reached out to Diego and I was like, "hey, what do you think? Do you think other property management companies would do this? Or are you the only one who was willing to do this? Because it was a lot of work." Right.  [00:06:52] And he was like, "yeah, I think they would, but," he said, "you're forgetting about all the other trades." [00:06:58] I was like, "what do you mean?" I was like, "yeah, roofing is only about 10 percent of all the work orders. So you're forgetting about all this." [00:07:06] And he said, "listen, I've been thinking about the same thing, and I believe that there's a way for us to provide excellent maintenance to all property management companies and we can figure out a way for us to do it for them for free." [00:07:20] I was like, "well, look, if we partner with multiple property management companies, and we get so much work, we can leverage that volume with our techs. So we reduce our technicians that we work with, we reduce their marketing and sales costs, and then they give us a percentage, which is much less than the marketing and sales costs. So the vendor wins, the homeowner wins because they don't get marked up, the property management company, of course, wins because they don't have to pay for payroll, and we win. [00:07:52] So everybody really wins. And also of course, the tenant wins because with our systems and our really well trained people. We can actually provide great service, faster and arounds and all of that.  [00:08:03] Jason: All right. So I think we need like a break sound effect. Everybody listening is like, "wait, whoa, what'd you just say?" [00:08:10] Like, that's like, sounds crazy. Could you take us back through that and help us make this make sense? So, cause you're talking a little crazy here. Like you can make maintenance more affordable and like, and do it and it would be free for them. And so let's break down the business model. So how does this work for a property manager? [00:08:34] Tom: All right. So when we partner with a property management company we basically. We can plug into their org chart wherever they'd like. So, for example, we work with big companies and we plug in underneath their maintenance coordinator, right? So that maintenance coordinator, they have about three, four hundred properties that they manage. [00:08:55] We just plug in there, they become our supervisor, and we provide the maintenance coordinators, we provide the vendor network, we provide everything. So we handle the work orders from start to finish. And whoever is supervising us within the company is also the liaison with the higher up. [00:09:13] Okay. Does that make sense? So for the smaller companies, for example, we would report to property managers. If a property manager is currently handling all of their maintenance themselves, they can just leverage our team. We have a specialized team with following the right processes. They leverage us and they just supervise us. [00:09:31] They send us the work and they become a supervisor. It eliminates 90 percent of their work. Yeah, sure. You know, sometimes there's an escalation. It's still maintenance, but at least we can handle most of it. They get daily updates. Everything runs very smooth.  [00:09:46] Jason: Okay. So the property managers listening are like, "yeah, but how's this free?" [00:09:50] Like explain that again, like take us through, how is it possible for this to be free? Because they know you want to make money. This is a business. Yes. So how is it free? And if it's free, then are the maintenance costs being marked up. Expressly high, right? And so this there, there's got to be a catch is what they're thinking. [00:10:10] Tom: Yeah, so there's no catch. So the way it works is with our vendors. We send them a lot of work. That work means that they have less cost on marketing and sales department. Usually that's about 25 to 30 percent of their revenue.  [00:10:25] Jason: Yeah. So let's explain this. So like, if you're a vendor, you have to spend a lot of time trying to market. [00:10:32] You're doing door flyers. You're like putting out mailers. You're like, they're wasting a ton of money. I get this stuff in the mail and it just goes right in the trash, right? They are going out on bids constantly trying to give quotes and none of this is making them money. This is all an expense. [00:10:49] So they're spending like a third of their revenue just to try and get customers. Exactly. Yes, sir. Yeah, exactly. And so vendors, you're able to basically eliminate that expense.  [00:11:02] Tom: Yes, correct. We cut it more than in half.  [00:11:04] Jason: Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So that's a big savings for them. They're not having to go out on bids. They're not having to like waste time. With the property management company, they're not having to deal with a lot of headaches and garbage. They just have work. And that's really what they want to spend their time doing is just doing the work. So this sounds like a selling point for these vendors and an incentive for them to work with you over maybe other, like through you rather than directly with property managers or rather out in the marketplace with random homeowners. [00:11:35] Tom: That is exactly. [00:11:36] Diego: Exactly. And the really unique thing about this, Jason, is that it doesn't just save them money, right? And we don't just get you know, the flat rate or we don't just mark up. We actually save the owner's money. Why? Because these vendors, they're so happy with the amount of work that we're sending them, that they also provide the best rates in the market. [00:12:02] Which are usually way below average. You know why? Because they want to be your number one go to technician, you know, they want you to send as much work as possible. And so they're pretty much booked up. You know, most of the vendors that we utilize, they're pretty much booked up. [00:12:19] And so they don't want to lose that relationship with you, which, you know, allows us to get better pricing for the owners, because that means we'll continue to get more work, you know, we'll continue to get more business, which also allows the vendors that we work with to expand as well. [00:12:37] We've had multiple vendors that started working with us in Austin and they have expanded to Houston, San Antonio, Dallas. And, you know, it's really a win scenario for everyone because vendors save money, owners save money, and property management companies don't have to pay any money when it comes to handling maintenance. [00:12:58] You know, they just have to have someone that oversees us.  [00:13:01] Tom: And I also would like to add in terms of pricing. So for example, because we handle so much volume, we actually have access to very good priced GE appliances. So the homeowners will pay around 15 to 25 percent less on appliances. That's black on white proof. You can check our price versus the store and then also Goodman HVAC units. We have extremely good pricing on a regular unit for 2400 square foot home. We save a homeowner easily 1500 to 2,500 dollars, depending on who we compared with. But those are things that we can actually prove black and white that we say.  [00:13:42] Jason: Yeah, awesome. So they're getting better rates on maintenance. They're not having to spend any money on doing that. They get discounted rates on appliances because of your buying power and they get discounted rates on HVAC.  [00:13:57] Tom: Yes, sir. It's really a win. It's a true win for everybody. It really is. And it works.  [00:14:03] Jason: Yeah, and you guys don't charge the property manager... anything?  [00:14:09] Tom: Nothing. Nothing. No. So because we have such a efficient processes we can provide a maintenance coordinator, a maintenance manager, a regional manager, we have vendor onboarding, we have a tenant success, and quality control. We have everything in place to function as a full maintenance department. And again, we just plug in right where you want it underneath a property manager, maintenance manager, maintenance coordinator. It doesn't matter. We just report and that person becomes the liaison to the directors. [00:14:42] Jason: Got it. So you guys can be the entire maintenance department for a small manager. If a big company already has. Some things going that they really like and some team members that they really value, then you guys can just plug in and be the pieces that they still need.  [00:14:57] Tom: Yeah, that's important to state. We don't want you to fire people. [00:15:02] That's not our goal. What our goal is, though, is now those people who are already in place, they can focus on tenant relationships. That is word to mouth right there. Same thing with the homeowners. Now you're going to grow your business because you provide a better service and you do not have to scale as fast. [00:15:20] So even without firing somebody, you just keep those people. They give a better service. Now you grow, but you don't have to hire as fast.  [00:15:30] Jason: The one piece that's not scalable in a business is depth and depth is where the magic happens. I always say to my clients, if you want to scale your business, you have to do the things that are unscalable and being able to spend more time talking directly with the owners, connecting with them, letting them know what's going on in maintenance, making them feel calm and that you've got things handled. [00:15:54] Yeah. That interaction is what's going to retain those clients. I mean, the number one reason people leave property management companies and go find somebody else is communication. It's lack of communication. So you can increase the communication level significantly. So you keep these clients forever and Calvary can handle all the maintenance, correct? [00:16:15] This sounds like such a good idea. Why has nobody thought of this before? Why is no one else doing this?  [00:16:22] Tom: Honestly, I think because it's hard. Maintenance is hard. And then not only that, yeah, I don't know if in maintenance, I guess you have to be a specific type of person, right to be able to handle that. And then you need to match that with entrepreneurship. Right. And most people, I think they have not seen the disconnect it's. Within the culture, all maintenance is handled inside the company. So I think, I don't know if like, a third company maintenance team has not come across. [00:16:57] Also, all of our competitors, they charge. They charge. Why? Because they can. You know, we want to provide value. We don't have to charge. We can. We don't have to. Our service is worth the extra cost, but we don't want to. You know, we want the smaller companies and bigger companies just to be able to grow without an extra cost. [00:17:17] And of course, by doing this it's smart business wise because now, you know, we can get our foot in the door more easily. So it lowers the barrier to entry.  [00:17:25] Jason: Okay. So, how small is too small of a company to work with you? Some people listening are like, "man, this sounds like a great thing. Like, I don't really like maintenance. [00:17:34] I don't have a maintenance coordinator yet. I would love to work with them." What's too small?  [00:17:38] Tom: Honestly, I don't think there is a too small. And the reason one caveat though, if we are already active in the market.  [00:17:46] Jason: And that's the next question then is there's certain markets you mentioned, you know, around Austin, Texas, et cetera, which markets are you in currently? [00:17:54] And what does it take for you to go into a new market? Like, so it's an option for people.  [00:18:01] Tom: So we're currently in all Texas markets. So Austin, San Antonio, Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth. We are very active in Denver, Colorado Springs. We have Tucson, Charlotte, North Carolina, Detroit. So those are the markets that we're already active in, so it's easy to just add a smaller PM company because we don't need to set up the whole vendor network right. We're constantly tackling new markets, by the way. But if we are in a market if you are a property manager looking, you're watching this and you're in a market that we are not in, we need about three weeks. [00:18:36] Jason: Yeah. Okay. That's it. So three weeks and how many units for a new market for it to make sense for you?  [00:18:42] Tom: I think 250 would be the minimum.  [00:18:45] Jason: Yes. Okay. Yeah. Got it. All right. So a property manager in a new market, if they've got at least 250 units. That could be it. If there's smaller ones, maybe they get together with their NARPM buddies and they're like, "Hey, let's get this." [00:18:57] And they add up to 250. That could work.  [00:19:00] Tom: Yeah. But also whenever we open a new market, for example, 250 would not be profitable for us. So then we just focus on these markets as well. So we have our sales team now has more to do.  [00:19:10] Jason: So then you start to like build that market up. Correct. Got it. And that builds up the business there and that allows you to get the discounts and do all the good juicy stuff that you guys do. [00:19:21] All right. Okay. Got it. Okay, cool. So you guys, this product sounds like a no brainer. And so you guys must be pretty busy rolling out to new markets.  [00:19:30] Tom: Yeah, we are. I mean, we started business when Diego? On October 21st, 2022, we received our first work order and now we're in what 12 markets already. [00:19:41] Jason: And it must you know, it sounds like Diego is a pretty sharp operator. So like the systemization of being able to do these rollouts is probably pretty tight.  [00:19:49] Tom: Oh, yeah. You go.  [00:19:51] Diego: Yeah. So it's actually one of the things that I wanted to mention, Jason cause Pete Neubig actually, you know, mentioned it in his podcast as well. [00:19:59] It all goes back to systems, SOPs and training individuals. You know what I mean? Because. A lot of people focus on churn when it comes to owner churn or you know, tenants leaving and so on. Right. But not that many people focus on you know, your maintenance coordinator churn or your internal churn. [00:20:20] And so that's one of the things that we like to focus on, you know, you want to train individuals correctly. You don't just want to, you know, let their hand go and roam free and figure out things on their own. You want to take time to, you know, to teach them, to train them, for them to understand the guidelines, the SOPs, the structure, so that whenever we do fit in with a new property management company, [00:20:46] they're ready to go. They understand the business, they understand the concept, they understand what is needed of them to make that maintenance department better. Because at the end of the day, that's what we want. We want to help property management companies grow. And so we can grow alongside them. And because that's what allows us to, you know, to continue to grow. [00:21:07] And so it all goes back to that. Yeah, exactly.  [00:21:10] Jason: So Diego, you know, having seen inside probably several lots of property management companies, maintenance issues and problems and having, you know, and being able to brilliantly do it really effectively and seeing that contrast, what are the biggest challenges that you're seeing or the biggest mistakes property managers are making when it comes to maintenance? And I think this is valuable because it helps people to understand how your brain works and how what you do at Calvary is a bit different than what they're doing.  [00:21:39] Diego: I think it's a couple of things, but let me pick the top that come to mind I would say vendor relations. Vendor relationships are so important because what ends up happening is if you tarnish vendor relationships, what ends up happening, you don't have good, reliable vendors that you can count on, you know, that will provide the best service, the best pricing possible. And so I feel like. In this industry, a lot of companies have treated vendors poorly, you know, and we notice it constantly when we go to new markets they usually mention like, "Hey, I don't want to work with a property management company." And then, you know, you ask them why, and it's usually because of that. You know, building that relationship is very important because they're part of your group, they're part of your network, and once they see that they're super, super reliable. They give you the best pricing, the best service possible, and so on. I would say that's number one. [00:22:40] Jason: And before we move on from that one, like, this is really interesting because what we hear a lot in the industry is people complaining about their vendors. Like property managers are always complaining about their vendors saying they're the problem. They're unreliable and having such a negative perception of the vendors and they might be creating it. Like maybe the property managers are the ones creating this problem. They're like, but maybe they're not like paying them on time, or maybe they're not like being responsive in communication, or maybe they're treating them poorly if there's like an issue or a mistake or a challenge, right. Yeah. Putting them into a bidding war. Yeah. None of them want to be doing that. Right. It's a big waste of their time.  [00:23:20] Diego: Yeah. Yeah, pretty much. I'm not saying all of them, you know, all property management companies do that, but I would say most do have that, you know, that they feel like they're entitled to get the best service instead of working together to, to build that relationship, to get the best service to have reliable individuals.  [00:23:40] Jason: What's the next thing that you noticed in contrast between, you know, the property managers that are ineffective with maintenance and dealing with issues versus how you do things at Calvary?  [00:23:50] Diego: Yeah. So I think it goes back to the maintenance coordinators or property managers, right? [00:23:56] Everybody is kind of doing their own thing. Right. So I've gone to different property management companies, and they're like, "Oh, no, I do things like this because this is the way to go. This is how I've been doing it for so long." But if you have five property managers, or if you have five maintenance coordinators. [00:24:14] They're all doing their own thing. They're not all working as a group, you know, towards the same direction. Which goes back to the structure, it goes back to the ESO piece. And so I feel like not that many companies understand maintenance entirely and so everybody's kind of doing a little bit different things, which is not scalable, you know. You can't have five individuals working, you know, differently because then what's going to happen is you're going to have people frustrated saying, "Hey, but this person said I could do this, but now you're telling me I can't do this and so on." [00:24:51] So I think it also goes, you know, that's one of the biggest things that I've seen going into different markets, different companies everybody's doing their own thing and so.  [00:25:01] Jason: So there's a lack of consistency and yeah, I could see how that'd be frustrating for vendors too. If like a company had like five property managers, like bugging them portfolio style and all of them are different. [00:25:12] One of them might be a jerk to the vendors and the other one might be cool. Yeah, it could be messy.  [00:25:17] Diego: Yeah, and then last but not least, numbers, KPIs, they never lie. And so if you have maintenance service requests that are taking too long, well, tenants are going to be frustrated. [00:25:32] Owners are also going to be frustrated. Why? Because most of the time, especially for small property management companies, the tenant has the owner's phone number most of the time, or, you know, I've seen that happen many times. So what they will do is they will reach out to the owner and they'll be like, "hey, they're lagging on this. They're not taking care of this. Hey, I'm having an issue with this." And so if you don't take care of things in a timely manner, it's always going to affect your business. I've seen where, you know, some clients they're okay with taking 14, 15 days to handle a maintenance request. And that's a big no no. [00:26:09] You know, you want things taken care of in less than five days. That should always be the goal. If it's an emergency, you want to handle it same day, you know, or at least mitigate the issue that same day so that the tenant is happy. So that they trust in the service that you're providing, and that will allow you to, you know, to dictate how you run your maintenance department and how tenants are trustworthy of your services. [00:26:36] And then, of course, you know, owners are also going to be happy with the services that you're providing, since you're not going to have that many escalations, that many issues, or that many problems that surface.  [00:26:46] Jason: So, yeah, it seems like kind of a snowball effect that when you start to be inconsistent, you don't have a quick enough turnaround time on maintenance. [00:26:54] You've got, you know, all these challenges that it starts to then. Turn it into escalations, more conversations, owners might even be getting involved. And so it starts to get messy. And that complexity then takes over the business because then something that should have taken maybe an hour is now taking three hours of manpower and time in the business. [00:27:16] And so then it's like the business owner is trying to run a race and they're shooting themselves in the feet, right? So things are just like snowballing and getting worse and worse. And then they're like, this is chaos. This is crazy. Yeah. So, all right. So those that are dealing with these challenges, they're like, maintenance is tough, like vendors are tough. [00:27:35] Like all of these are problems and they don't have all this stuff dialed in. Or maybe they've got things pretty well dialed in, but they're like, "Hey man, maybe I could save some money on. You know, team, or I could just improve and get my team focused on higher level tasks of like communicating with people, more depth and retaining clients longer." [00:27:53] What. What would be the first step? How do they connect with you?  [00:27:57] Diego: So they can pretty much, you know, reach out. We could set up a meeting where we can go ahead and explain, you know, go a little bit further in depth with their particular property management company, you know, how many homes they have and so on. [00:28:12] And then if they do sign up with us, in 7 days, we'll have a plan ready to go for them that will dictate exactly, you know, what is needed and what we're going to be implementing within those 7 days so that we're ready to hit the ground running.  [00:28:26] Jason: Yeah, that's pretty awesome. And so what's kind of the onboarding process like, like for those that would be getting started? What would, what's sort of the experience?  [00:28:36] Tom: So we have a two week process. So it starts by sending over the contract so they can read it over. [00:28:42] It starts by also getting all of the data of the current of the units they currently have, their history, the history of the work orders. Also, their current vendors are very important. We understand that property management companies, most of them have already built solid relationships with those vendors. [00:28:59] We don't want them to push them out. No, actually what we're going to do is we're going to contact those vendors. We're going to propose our proposal. And we're going to tell them like, "Hey, you will get more work, you know, by also getting work from other property management companies." So, yes, so we can use the same vendors as well. [00:29:18] So we collect all of the data, then we analyze the data. We implement everything into our software. There's something we actually haven't touched on, but we have found that Rentvine is a really, I mean, the best software out there. And we're also providing that for free to our clients. So we can I mean, we can work with any software, but if we do not have one, we can work with Rentvine. [00:29:44] Anyway, so that is also part of that onboarding process. Maybe it's like, "okay what software do you use? Do you want to switch to Rentvine?" And then over the second week, we start implementing. We have a few meetings where we discuss all the final, like who like the communication with the billing department. [00:30:01] Who's going to take care of that? Is that going to be the liaison? Is that going to be somebody of ours? So, yeah, it's a two week process. We have everything dialed down from a launch date, minus 14 days to launch date.  [00:30:13] Jason: And the reason you like Rentvine, do they have a pretty good maintenance system?  [00:30:18] Tom: Yeah, the communication is excellent. [00:30:21] The communication can be logged with timestamps, but more importantly as well, it aligns very well with bookkeeping. The bookkeeping is really solid in there and it just works.  [00:30:32] Jason: So, what about those that have different maintenance tools, like maybe they've been using Latchel and they've got them handling the phones, or maybe they've been using Property Meld and they're using that text based communication system, these things that they need to keep, are these things that you would work with? [00:30:49] Like this sends a whole nother level of complexity I would imagine to your business.  [00:30:54] Tom: Yeah, no, it actually, I mean, it works. So we started, so to get our foot in the door in the industry, we actually started as a vendor, right? So we, our systems work with any software. So it does work. It adds complexity, yes. But if we assign a certain maintenance coordinator to a certain account, they get used to that very fast. So it does work.  [00:31:15] Jason: Got it. So you can work with whatever tools that they do have. And if not, you've got some good ideas for them to get their maintenance systems dialed in well.  [00:31:24] Tom: Correct. [00:31:24] Diego: Yeah. Correct. And then, so that actually brings up a really good topic. So we can help them save money because most property management companies, they utilize, for example, Property Meld. Right. And that's an external tool to their actual software, which is usually Appfolio. And so they usually pay extra for per property for Property Meld, if they switch over to Rentvine instead of Property Meld, then we pay for that and it's, you know, it's completely free for them. So that means they save money there as well and pretty much Rentvine can do what Property Meld does. And one of the reasons why people choose Property Meld is because of the communication and Rentvine has a very good communication factor built into it. But it goes a little bit further when it comes to the, like, Tom mentioned the billing processes, because vendors can go ahead and submit the bills there and you can break down all of the information there, which fits in perfectly to the tool that the property manager is using. [00:32:27] So it allows us to have a very robust system that allows property managers, you know, to save money by choosing to work with us.  [00:32:35] Tom: So. Yeah.  [00:32:37] Jason: The more you share, the more stupid people might feel for not working with you.  [00:32:43] Tom: I have one more, 24- 7 maintenance. Okay. Say that again. 24- 7 maintenance. [00:32:49] So rather than paying an external company for a call center to, you know, receive phone calls from tenants. Yeah, we actually have a night crew that will pick up the phone and also dispatch those work orders for work orders, of course, that are dispatchable at night, right? For certain emergencies. So we have a team working around the clock. [00:33:10] The night team is a little bit smaller, but it's around the clock.  [00:33:13] Jason: That's amazing. So, yeah, because I know there's companies that are using Appfolio, they're using Property Meld, they're using maybe Latchel or EZ Repair H otline or something to do the calls. And these are all stacking as expenses in the business. [00:33:30] And then they're also having to coordinate all of the maintenance and go and source and find all the vendors. And you're saying, "we'll just take over all of this for you and it'll not cost you anything." Exactly. It worked. It worked. So, all right. So, a lot of people might be thinking this sounds too good to be true. [00:33:51] So let's say I sign up with these guys and I switch all my stuff over to using them and then I don't like it or there's something like they're afraid, right? This is their fear. And I've given everything to them. Are they going to have some benefits still? Like, will they have better processes? [00:34:09] Will they know what's going on? Like, like how do we lower this risk for those that are like concerned about handing over a piece of their business to somebody else and then what if it isn't good? Like, that's their fear.  [00:34:23] Tom: Yeah. So, part of our marketing strategy and part of our vision and mission is to share all of our information. [00:34:30] So, we're not going to keep everything to ourselves. We're actually in the process of writing a book, which will be finished very soon, on how we actually do the maintenance. So, it's one thing saying, "oh, we know how to do it." It's another thing showing it and that's what we're going to do. So we have the processes, we can share that with the teams, you know, if we're hopping on a call, we can share what that is, but also to make it available to the public, we've written a book, it's almost finished, which holds all of our processes in a story form, which then is connected to presentations and actually implementable knowledge. So if they don't want to work with us, fine. We will still teach you how to do it. That also means that, you know...  [00:35:11] Jason: like you're open sourcing your product.  [00:35:14] Tom: It is the 2023 way of marketing, right? You show what you can do and then you build trust. So, but that's really, and you know, it's also to help people. Many property management companies might not want to do this and that's totally fine, you know, but we can still help those people.  [00:35:31] Jason: Cool Well, I mean if things go well for you guys, which sounds like it will because it's a pretty sharp product If there might be the day when people are wanting Calvary doing the maintenance and not local property managers handling it. [00:35:46] So that's our vision. Awesome guys. I think this sounds like a no brainer. It sounds like a really awesome product. I'm really excited to see what you guys do. And I'm sure there's several that are interested in just once they hear this podcast episode, they'll be interested in giving you guys a shot.because maintenance is one of the biggest complaints we hear about in the industry. It's usually the first big challenge they all need to solve. And it sounds like you guys have got the product where it's solved and they can just get some Calvary and everything's going to be better. So, yeah.  [00:36:19] Tom: So our website is cavalry.works. That is cavalry, C A V A L R Y dot W O R K S, because cavalry works.  [00:36:29] Jason: Got it. Okay, cool. So check it out, everybody. So anything else you want to say before we end the show today?  [00:36:37] Tom: Yeah. Thank you for the opportunity to come and present us. It was our first podcast. I hope we did a good job. [00:36:43] Jason: Diego's camera's a little crazy, but it kept us on our toes. So I'm really impressed with you two. I know we met earlier and chatted and I was like this like, it sounds like such a crazy good business model. And I think it's possible because of the expertise that you both have and that you're able to bring to the table and excited to see about that. [00:37:05] When that book comes out, maybe we'll have you come on again and plug that book. That'd be really cool. And then man, Diego, I'd love to have you come and maybe present to some of our clients in our mastermind, just about maintenance because everybody has this challenge and I think it'd be really cool. [00:37:20] So. All right. Well, looking forward to hanging out a little bit more with y'all and seeing what you guys accomplished. So, thanks for being on the DoorGrow show.  [00:37:30] Thank you, Jason. [00:37:32] All right. Cool. So if you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, grow your business and you are struggling with getting more business and getting more doors, we can help you with that. [00:37:45] And we are really good at helping people grow. One of our clients, brand new, zero doors went through our rapid revamp class that we teach in our mastermind had zero doors and then after we cleaned up to the front end of his business, he started working on adding doors part time, like maybe 2 to 3 hours a day and then he was able to add and break the hundred door barrier. He was able to add a hundred doors in six months, and he was doing this part time. That would be impossible with advertising. That would be impossible with going and buying cold leads from doing SEO or pay per click or content marketing or social media marketing. [00:38:22] We gave him the right strategies. He went and took action. And he spent less time doing it than most people do. And he was able to add than most people do trying to grow their business. He was able to add a hundred doors in six months. That was what our client, Kent, who we just recently had on our podcast episode. [00:38:39] And if Kent can do it, you can do it too. And our clients can add a hundred to 200 doors every year, organically, just by using our strategies. If you have a really good full time BDM, we can help you add two to four hundred doors a year, organically. And then, we can also get you the right processes, and the right systems and things dialed in, so that you can become infinitely scalable, and then you can start to do acquisitions. [00:39:06] And you will make a lot more money off their doors, than the person you're buying them from was. So anyway, reach out to us at DoorGrow. You can check us out at DoorGrow. com and join our free Facebook group. You can get access to that. We have some free gifts for you by joining our community, go to DoorGrow club. com. This is just for property management, entrepreneurs, property management, business owners. Join that community. If you're starting a property management company, join that community. If you have an established company, join that community. People are helping people out in that group. It's an awesome community. [00:39:37] And our hope is that you will get so much value from the free stuff that we put out there and from our free content and our podcasts that you will want to join our mastermind, get beyond the paywall and see the amazing stuff that we're helping companies do and be part of an even more amazing community, our mastermind. [00:39:56] So until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye everyone. [00:39:59] you just listened to the #DoorGrowShow. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet in the DoorGrowClub. Join your fellow DoorGrow Hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead content, social direct mail, and they still struggle to grow!  [00:40:25] At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge: getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. 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What would it look like if you could harness the energy of a conference and convert it into effectiveness? What would it feel like to be your own boss in the voiceover industry? Our esteemed guest, Tom Dheere, joins us as we unravel the answers to these thought-provoking questions. We share valuable insights on setting the right objectives, maximizing conference experiences, and the commitment required to become a full-time voice actor. Plus, we examine the liberating perspective of entrepreneurial freedom offered by the voiceover industry. 0:00:01 - Anne Hey everyone, welcome to the VO Boss podcast and the real boss series. I'm your host, Anne Ganguzza and I am so happy to bring to this series Mr Tom Dheere. Thank you so much, tom, for joining me on this.   0:00:15 - Tom Yay, thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited about this. This is going to be great.   0:00:19 - Anne Oh, tom, first of all, it was so awesome to see you at the One Voice conference.   0:00:25 - Tom Yes, likewise.   0:00:27 - Anne I know we just had. You were just a guest on my podcast and, lo and behold, like two times I see you within the span of a month or two, which is really incredible, right?   Sometimes we have to go to conferences to just meet in person so whew, I was exhausting that conference, but super motivating, and I know a lot of people who went to that conference are all revved up and ready to go, motivated, inspired. We took amazing classes and so I think it's a good time to talk about. You know, what do we do with all that amazing energy that we just absorbed in that conference? Because I'm revved up, I'm motivated, ready to go. What can we do to, I guess, keep ourselves or keep the momentum going, tom?   0:01:16 - Tom That is a fantastic question and I know you've been presented at dozens and dozens of conferences over the past 10 years, and so have I, and we go and we meet wonderful people and we present and we also attend workshops and panels and we learn a lot and we get to commiserate with our peers, voice actors and coaches and other producers and stuff like that. And then there's this glow.   0:01:42 - Anne There is a glow. It's wonderful glow. There is a glow.   0:01:46 - Tom And then you go home and then for the vast majority of people that go to these conferences, it's like whew.   0:01:53 - Anne And then life sets in right. I have laundry to do. Yeah, family, yeah, right Bills and auditions and stuff like that.   0:02:02 - Tom So it's great. Conferences are great for, obviously for education. They're great for networking, they're great for renewal of purpose, refocus, re-energizing. The trick is how to take all that positive energy and inspiration and revved up-ed-ness and coming, taking it home with you and turning it into effectiveness. Because the positive attitude, while great it can only get you so far, it's not going to get you home. You're going to run out of that momentum and now there's work to be done.   0:02:37 - Anne Interesting, tom. Before we went to the conference, I think somebody had actually created a note sheet of like here are the I guess the talks that I want to go to, here are my goals, or here's what I got out of it, and I thought it was a really great way for people who like that type of thing and they take a lot of notes to write down your objectives. What are you hoping to get from that? And then what do you hope to do once you get, maybe once you get home, to put those lessons learned in place? And so I think that maybe everything should start even before we go to the conference in terms of writing things down and what is it that you hope to get out of this conference. And I'm a big planner, so I am a big proponent of yeah, you guys should plan out what sessions you want to go to, look at the schedule multiple times and just see how you can get the most out of the money that you've spent on that ticket of yours.   0:03:33 - Tom Yeah, absolutely, and different people at different points in their voiceover journey go to different conferences for different reasons, if it's. I've never been one to been one to one before, and I just want to. I haven't even produced a demo yet. I just want to see what this universe is like.   0:03:47 - Anne Great.   0:03:48 - Tom If it's, this is my 15th conference. I've had all these demos done, I've gotten all this work. What am I going to get out of it this time? Or some people go because they specifically want to meet you, or they want to meet another coach or demo producer to see, I want to get in the same room with this person and see if we click because I may want to work with you as a coach or a demo producer. Um, you know, and some go purely as presenters and you know, and then they, you know, do their stuff and then they get out of there and yeah, which is which is which is cool too.   0:04:19 - Anne I think there's such a, there's such a momentum to be gained by just joining forces with like-minded people and, just you know, renewing um relationships, and that just keeps you going, because it's so isolating sometimes just what we do and yeah and I will tell you, though, that the other day I was I don't even know what it was that made me think of it, but I I think I was getting ready to, you know, start.   I had a full day of students, and I said, I don't know what made me think about, oh god, what if I had to go to work for somebody?   um, you know, back in my days of corporate and I'm like I I could never do that again. So boss is out there. This is just a little segue. If you, if, if you know that this is what you want to do and you end up pursuing it full time, I don't say rush into it with your, you know, with your eyes closed. But, um and Tom, we can talk lots of strategies about that, but once you make that decision to go full time, I don't do you know anybody who's actually gone back because they've been unhappy being their own boss um, I know lots of people who have gone back to a regular job because they just couldn't book enough right they needed the money.   0:05:24 - Tom Yeah, exactly, it was purely financially, like I've been trying this and I just, I just can't get enough work to sustain myself and they've come gone back. Um, I can't think of anyone specifically, but I'm sure there are people out there, because there are people who just like to be told what to do, because then they don't have to think about it and there's a level of security in that and I totally that's sympathize with that.   0:05:45 - Anne I'm not one of those people, I can't. I don't, I don't think I could, I could not go back to taking now, I think, now I can take. I can take instructions from my client. Sure, I can be directed um, and then I want to get paid and be done with it. I think that's really it's. It's an interesting. It's an interesting, it's a different dynamic, because that's a, that's a, that's a business to business thing where you and the clients are on equal footing there's no high. There's no hierarchy.   0:06:10 - Tom It's it's you and the client trying to make this finished, great finished product, which is, you know, the audio files that you're gonna send to them or their, their source connecting you through. But with what? When it's a, I am in charge of you and. I'm telling you what to do, and this is when you can go to the bathroom and stuff like that it's like ah, I don't know if I could.   0:06:29 - Anne I don't know, I don't think I could go back to that it makes me think of okay, it's similar to I know I just went off on that on that weird tangent, but that happens sometime, bosses, sorry, um, but it was just a weird like. It just came to me. I was like I could not work for somebody now, so I will do everything in my power to make my business so that I do not have to do that. I think that also was leading into that.   But I think isn't that similar to, let's say, I, I pay my money, I get my ticket, I go to a conference, I take these classes, I'm inspired for a new genre, I'm inspired to work with a new coach, and then we come back and, oops, we're by ourselves, right. So now, yeah, it's very similar to what now, you know, we're gonna be talking about is we've got to take the reins and we've got to do the work and it's, it's now up to us, and we're not necessarily having that coach or that director saying, okay, do this, do this, do this. Now we've got all of this energy and this motivation. How do we cement that and you know, and and start to just really move forward on that?   0:07:27 - Tom right. The trick is if you want to be the vo boss you need to learn how to be your own boss. Yeah, yeah, you know it's empowering to like be the boss. Yeah, I'm a tough boss. I'll tell you that my boss is a jerk my boss, I would say my boss is a bastard oh, I just said that oh. I had another word in mind, but I didn't use it.   0:07:49 - Anne I'm not sure if we'll bleep that out, but yeah woo, I'll tell you what. I've never worked for a harder boss, but isn't that true?   0:07:57 - Tom yeah, yeah, I'm hard on ourselves. I'm pretty real, I'm I'm often pretty relentless and I have to be because I have this bad habit.   0:08:05 - Anne It's called eating and and having a roof over my head, yes, and not living in a cardboard box, yes, yeah, you know.   0:08:14 - Tom So yeah, the motivation is like there's no net yeah, you know what I mean. If I don't audition for this, there's a 100 chance that I'm not gonna book it well, yeah, and I think that's what propels me for sure you know what I mean to get work done, I mean right the fact that I need right.   0:08:30 - Anne I need to be able to pay the mortgage right, and that's the, and that's a.   0:08:33 - Tom That's a great point, anne, is that different people need to find different motivations. To stay motivated when you are alone in your booth talking to yourself? You know, so that's a big part of you know I talk about effectiveness. There's a difference between talent and effectiveness. There's a lot of talented aspiring voice actors out there with interesting voices but like I have an interesting pen, it doesn't make me an author, you know.   0:09:02 - Anne I own a wrench. It doesn't make me a plumber, so having talent, voice doesn't make me effective. Yeah absolutely.   0:09:11 - Tom You know, because no one's going to get discovered, you're not going to get your big break. It doesn't really work that way.   0:09:16 - Anne It's what you do with that pen that matters. It's what you do with that voice that matters.   0:09:20 - Tom Exactly and consistently. Yes, absolutely so when you get home from that conference and you've got all that positive attitude. That's great If you can bottle it and put it on a shelf for later.   0:09:30 - Anne That's great.   0:09:31 - Tom But when you get home, it's about what can I do to be effective today, tomorrow, next week, month, quarter year, two years, five years? And I'm not necessarily talking about writing a business plan, which is something I do do as the, as the video strategist, but it's about how do I think about myself to stay motivated. How do I think about and understand the voiceover industry? So there's a reality, because that's the other thing and, as you know, people coming into the industry have no idea what the industry is. They just have this odd preconceived notion of what it is. Oh yeah, I talk interesting. I got to just get an agent and then they'll just throw Saxa cash at me.   0:10:10 - Anne Exactly and I think, yeah, you don't know what you don't know right.   0:10:13 - Tom You don't know what you don't know.   0:10:15 - Anne And especially not only that is it a new industry for a lot of people, but it's also the fact that there's a lot of people who are very unhappy in their current job situation and get out of that work for somebody else, but then working for yourself is a whole different animal and that really is, I think, where the double it's.   The double whammy comes in for those people new to the industry, because not only are they trying to acquire the skills to be a good talent, but now they also have to have good business skills as well, and they're not used to working for themselves or having to go out and market themselves and get work and all those hats that they've got to put on.   0:10:58 - Tom Yeah, I had a maybe 15 years ago here in New York City. I had a 10 minute meet up with an agent I don't remember which one but he said tell me about yourself. And I talked about all the things I do. He's like, wow, you got a lot of hats.   And I'm like, yeah he's like but you only have one head and I'm like, yeah, so you kind of to be an effective voice actor, you need to kind of be the Dr Seuss Bartholomew in 1001 hats and have all those hats stacked up on. Some of them, some of them, you can take on and put on and take off, but a bunch of them you have to have stacked on your head at the same time, because there is no job description for being a voice actor.   I mean, there is, but nobody knows what it is, until you get here and it's like unlocking these doors and you know, moving these hedges aside and going oh, I need to do, I have to do that. You know it's like. It's almost like a maze, which is the logo of the VO strategist. Now that I think about it helping you navigate the voice over the industry, absolutely. So, navigating the maze of what it means to be an effective voice actor, and staying motivated at the same time. Because, yes, invoicing.   0:12:08 - Anne Staying, staying motivated when you're doing something like accounting.   0:12:12 - Tom Like for me.   0:12:12 - Anne I mean, well, I'm not. I mean, there are some people who love accounting, right, so there's accounting for me. How do there you go See for me? I'm like, oh God, actually I will tell you, tom. So for me, staying motivated while I have an S corp, right, and an S corp is creating all of this paperwork for me and for me, I can't, god it's, and it's just like I need to, either just, you know, be educated about, you know, the entire S corp thing, or I outsource, right. So I think if I had to do all that paperwork and try to understand it all and to stay motivated, it would be very, very difficult for that to happen, and it may discourage me from wanting to have a voiceover business because of this paperwork that I continually have to supply to the government, to you know, support this business, but I, you know, for me one of my solutions is to outsource that right.   And make sure that I have somebody that I trust and can go to if I have any questions, that can handle that aspect for me. So if I'll, I know, constantly get mail, mail, snail mail saying you need to provide this information, or you owe us this amount of money, or you need to prepay this or you know whatever that is, and so I literally will just be like, oh my gosh, this is a lot of paperwork. So I will literally scan that in and send that to my accountant, which, by the way, I will say to the to to my dying day, I will say my accountant was my very best investment for this business. I just I can't. I can't do the numbers.   0:13:45 - Tom Right, well, and that's that's a very important point, and is that if you're getting into the voiceover industry, obviously you need to understand what does that entail on you know soft skills, hard skills, hardware, software, marketing, money and all that stuff, and you need to know, you need to have an understanding of what your S corp is, or what this is, where that is, and then you can decide okay, this is a skill I need to just understand, but I'll outsource it and this is a skill like, for example, using your DAW.   0:14:14 - Anne You have to know how to use your DAW.   0:14:17 - Tom You need to know how to audition and you need to know how to record and clean up and save and, you know, deliver audio file. Some stuff is non-negotiable. You know what I mean.   0:14:27 - Anne But managing your S corp, you know right, that's another thing.   0:14:31 - Tom Or if you're an audio book narrator or a long form e-learning narrator, do you want to hire an audio, an audio engineer, to clean up your clean up your audio or do you want to do that, Do it yourself? Or do you say do it yourself first to understand how it works and why it works and then outsource it? And I'm sure some of your bosses are thinking I don't have that money. To outsource yes, I don't have the money to outsource.   0:14:54 - Anne You need to invest your money to make the money. That's what I always start by saying invest the money to make the money, but and maybe not try to put yourself wholeheartedly into the business until you do have money that you can invest, because that would be, from any perspective, any business. You have to have some investment money.   0:15:15 - Tom I mean it's not just voiceover, just some.   0:15:17 - Anne for some reason it became this like oh, we just talking to a microphone, how easy is that. I don't need to have any money or be prepared, or maybe I just got to buy a mic.   And that, I think, is where, where in the problem lies, where then you start to have, you know, predators in the industry that will sell that dream and people who will get taken for that dream and without the realization that, yeah, they have to put things in place and make investments to do that. So let's, let's kind of go back to we've gone to a conference and we've gotten motivated, and even it doesn't have to be a physical conference, it could be a virtual, online, you know, workshop or whatnot. I just went to a workshop called Unstoppable you. It was a Tony Robbins thing, which was all about the motivation, all about the motivation.   But yeah, now that you've, now that you're motivated, you've got to do the work and you've got to maybe take a look at the hard like really take a look at the the hard questions and and then make concrete steps to move forward. So it's like I can ask the hard questions. I can maybe, I can maybe get through the answers and they might make me cry, some of them Right, they right and so I can do that, but now I have to actually do the hard part, which is moving forward. So what, what would be the first thing you would recommend? Let's say, somebody that comes back from a conference or, you know, a workshop or whatever, and maybe a meeting with a coach and they're they're inspired, they're motivated. What's the first thing that you would have them do?   0:16:46 - Tom The first thing that I would have them do is write down in severe detail what they're perfect.   0:16:51 - Anne Severe detail, not just detail. Severe detail, severe detail.   0:16:55 - Tom What their perfect voiceover day looks like.   0:16:58 - Anne Oh, okay, okay. Follow me with just work with me for a second.   0:17:02 - Tom What time of day are you waking up? What time zone are you in when you wake up? Are you waking up in a house, a cabin, a condo, a space station?   a bunker, a submarine Like? Where are you waking up when it's time to start doing voiceover? Does the limo pick you up? Are you walking downstairs into the basement? Are you getting on a bicycle to go downtown? Are you going into your backyard to your custom built booth? Are you going into the attic? Are you taking a bus or a train? And then, when you get there, what are? What kind of? What kind of bookings are you doing? What genres or subgenres of voiceover? One or more? How much are you getting paid? Obviously, we all want to get paid as much as possible, but what is that actual number that you need to cover all of your voiceover expenses, all of your personal expenses? Manage your debt, save for retirement, save for that college education for your kids, save for that car and have enough to have a little fun.   0:18:01 - Anne And this is before. You're a working talent, right, this is still a, really, if you're just new to the industry and you want to get into it and you're let's say, you're in the process with a coach and you're making demos.   You want to project what genres? First of all, if you're working with a coach, you should probably have a genre in mind already yes, right, and with a genre specific coach. So you kind of know where you want to go. But putting that down, right, even if you're not actually doing the work as you were mentioning okay, this is the work, I'm going to be doing these auditions, even if you don't have audition opportunities yet and you're still just working. Put down that on the list because you want to make sure that you have the space for it and the time for it. Right, right, right. And then the goal, steps, the steps.   0:18:42 - Tom Right, exactly. And once you have that perfect day realized, written down in severe detail, you walk that backwards to the day to the moment that you're writing that list. What are you missing between right now and that perfect voiceover day? What money, how much money do you need? What training do you need? What tools do you need? What marketing acumen do you need? All of the things big and small, knowledge, hardware, software, tangible, intangible mindset to get you where you are and figure out what are you missing and what you need to do to fill those gaps. So when you come home from a conference, all motivated, try to figure out what the practical application of all the wonderful information that you just collected is. We go to all these workshops and listen to all these panels and take all these notes and some of the knowledge is immediately actionable and others are, for you know, I took this genre workshop. I'm gonna keep these notes and maybe I'll be ready for it in a year or two.   And so on and so forth. Organize, organize everything, because you need to figure out how actionable and practical everything that you need is to do to get you to that perfect voiceover day and use the glow and energy and momentum of the conference that you just got home from to kind of build that foundation, build that scaffolding, create that structure. So, when you get back into the day to day grind of trying to build or develop or nurture your voiceover business, you have effective systems of thought and effective systems of execution.   0:20:23 - Anne And let me interject also what I think is important is, of course, yes, you took that workshop on animation or whatever promo, imaging, whatever it is, you know, medical narration, I say because I just did that, love it or corporate.   I think that you always have to keep your eye on the market. I gosh, I feel like sometimes we become so blinded by our own like performance because we're like, oh, I want to get really good at animation or I want to get really good at, you know, whatever commercial or corporate. But I think we always have to keep our eye on the marketplace because if there's not a demand or if the demand is not as big and I'm always telling this to my students about corporate, it's a huge market, is a huge opportunity there Versus animation. Not that there isn't a huge opportunity there, but there's less of an opportunity there than there is in corporate. There's more of an opportunity in e-learning than there is in even I would say, promo, promo, of course. Right, documentary. Everybody that comes to me for narration says I want to do documentaries and I'm like well, how many documentaries do you think there are at any given time? Do you know?   0:21:32 - Tom what I mean yeah.   0:21:33 - Anne Compared to the 30.4 million registered companies that have a product or service to sell that need a corporate narrator.   0:21:40 - Tom And need human resources videos and need orientation videos and need compliance videos Right.   0:21:45 - Anne And I think that that is something that we really need to take into consideration at all points in our business, because that will affect right when you're talking about here's where I am. Here are the here's my perfect day, here's where I want to be, I want to be animating, I want to be doing animations on television or whatever that is, or I want to have a national commercial spot. That's all well and good. However, I think that you also have to take in account what is the market for that? Is there okay? Are you going to be able? And I used to think erroneously back in the beginning, before I realized what the market was oh, I just need a commercial a day, right? Or you know, oh, wouldn't that be nice.   Oh yeah, tom, we're talking about real talk, right? Real bosses. Well, okay, I don't know anybody that gets a commercial a day, except for people who are maybe on rosters for serious exam or they're doing, and that's usually for lower pay. But if you're thinking like, oh, if I got a national spot, even one a week, right, I mean, unless you're in it, voice for a campaign. I mean, I love how you laugh, that's the perfect way.   0:22:46 - Tom Well, I laugh because I thought I had to sound like James Earl Jones.   0:22:47 - Anne Right, I mean yeah, and so like that is. You know you have to understand what's realistic for the, for the industry too, when you're jotting these down. So any education that you can get on that right. Listen to podcasts like Vio Boss. I mean, we've been doing this for six years, right, talking about markets and business. And, tom, you've been doing gosh. How many years have you been doing business consulting?   0:23:10 - Tom and strategizing Over 10 years.   0:23:12 - Anne Yeah, over 10 years and specifically in our industry, and so, like guys, I mean, look, I'm not saying of course you should come to us, but I mean we've been doing this for a long time, we've watched the market evolve and so that's why I want to point it out and say that this is so important for us to have in consideration in our, in our step by step process of here's where we are, here's where we want to be. Now, if I want to be, you know, a commercial, you know Vio artist, well, maybe I want to think about another genre as well, to add in, to supplement those days when I don't get the national campaign every day. And I'm not trying to crush your dreams, guys, that's just not, that's just not it. But you know we're. This is a dose of reality, right, tom?   This is our whole series is based on let's talk real yeah.   0:23:57 - Tom The reality is is that you may be. You may be good at something you don't like, and you may not be good at something you do like.   A lot of people are drawn to the industry because they love cartoons and video games, and a lot of them may not be good at it, but they may find out that they are good at corporate or e-learning, which is a far more to your point, stable form of voiceover income, because, when it comes to effectiveness, the bottom line of effectiveness as a voice actor is you're able to make money. You're able to develop a revenue stream.   0:24:28 - Anne Develop any revenue stream that you need to make. Yeah, develop any revenue stream.   0:24:32 - Tom you can in any genre, whether you like it or not, and I always say all genres of voiceover is storytelling. I get my storytelling jollies out of any voiceover genre.   0:24:44 - Anne I don't care Teaching statistics right or you're narrating corporate responsibility or HR policies. You are absolutely a character and you are acting, and so that is a requirement, that is, I mean, baseline requirement, especially now when we talked about this in our last podcast. It is such a requirement for us to be the actors that we are called to be, I mean, and that includes all genres. So, yes, and that's the reality, that's the real talk.   0:25:14 - Tom Yes.   0:25:15 - Anne The real talk is you've got to invest in yourself, in developing those skills and getting good coaching, and not just taking acting classes. I know everybody would say take an acting class, and I think that's wonderful too, but you've also got to take acting classes as they pertain to voiceover as well.   0:25:32 - Tom Yes, there's a crossover. I mean, I always say improv classes are extremely important because it gives you the ability to make strong decisions quickly while you're narrating your copy. But to an end, compliment stuff like that, and there's like there are people who do improv for voiceover and acting specifically for voiceover. It's a very specific skill.   0:25:54 - Anne There's very specific muscles that you need to flex, Absolutely, absolutely To be to do voiceover as opposed to on camera or as opposed to theater. I'm all about teaching the acting for narration and, by the way, tom, I miss you. I don't see you. Did you turn your camera off by any chance?   0:26:09 - Tom No, I'm still here.   0:26:11 - Anne Oh, I don't see you how interesting. That's that's. Do you see yourself?   0:26:16 - Tom I do.   0:26:17 - Anne Oh, okay. Well, I'm just going to assume.   0:26:19 - Tom Okay.   0:26:20 - Anne I'm going to assume that it just kind of blipped off. But you know, hey guys, technology Riverside, hopefully we'll have your, we'll have your video anyways.   0:26:30 - Tom Okay.   0:26:30 - Anne Absolutely, so, okay, so, so what a great conversation. So now you're back. Okay, so that's interesting. So now we've taken our, we've come back from the conference, we're motivated, we're, we've written down our, our perfect voiceover day, right and so, and then we've worked backwards to the steps. And so what would be next after that, tom, how do do we need to? We probably need to take time to evaluate whether we've accomplished those steps right, absolutely.   Once we've written them down and we've and we've developed our to-do list. Now we've got to go back, maybe in a week or so or in a you know at the end of the day and say did I accomplish my tasks?   0:27:07 - Tom Yes, self-evaluation and self-reflection is one of the most important skill sets to be an effective voice actor. Because you don't have. Unless you're part of my mentorship program or you're mentoring with Ann, you are working in a vacuum. You need to develop the ability to metacognate, which is the ability to stand outside of thank you, the ability to stand outside of yourself. Look at yourself objectively and say did I do what I assigned to my assigned for myself? Did I do it? Well, if I didn't do it, why didn't I do it? Was there a logistical problem? Was a financial problem? Was there a motivational problem? You know and find out why, why you do what you do, how you tick, and there's a time to be kind to yourself and there's a kind, there's a time to be tough on yourself. You know.   0:27:56 - Anne And so taking I think I've always tough on myself, but you're right, yeah.   0:27:59 - Tom You have to be able to. You have to be able to do both, because we're all human. We all have different energy levels and emotional states that fluctuate constantly throughout the day, week, month, year, decade, and we need to be accommodating for that. Oh, mercury's in retrograde today, so I'm not going to get my invoicing done, or what were you?   0:28:18 - Anne know oh, technology sucks, technology sucks. You know what I mean?   0:28:21 - Tom Oh, great retrograde, yeah, you know but if you find yourself making excuses for yourself about why you're not doing things, then you are not being effective.   0:28:28 - Anne Because I have an, I have an action for it. That's a whole another podcast right there.   0:28:32 - Tom Yeah, I have my action plan right here and I don't check off every single box. I get about 80% of my action plan stuff done every month, dating back to 2006. And sometimes it's-.   0:28:42 - Anne Do you have records from back then? Do you do you have a-.   0:28:45 - Tom I have a binder right here with every single one of these. So January 2006-. I love it Was my first printed one and I've done 12 a year since 2006 and it's in this binder right over here.   0:28:54 - Anne It does not surprise me that you love numbers too. I love numbers, right, yeah, see, and so that I feel goes along with.   Now I'm not so much, although I will. I will share my book is out there, but I have my to-do list that I love to cross things off on and I have my planner where I like to write my goals down. I'm not always as good as I propose to be, but, yeah, I think that's super important. But, wow, what a great conversation. I want to talk to you more, in more detail, about a lot of these steps because I think they're super important in our series. So, tom, thank you so so much for joining me for our first, our first in a series of real bosses.   0:29:35 - Tom Yeah.   0:29:36 - Anne So, guys, if you, I have a simple mission for you, but one that has big impact 100 voices, one hour, $10,000. Four times a year. Do you want to know what I'm talking about? Visit 100voiceswhocareorg to find out more and to join us. And big shout out to our sponsor, ipdtl. We love IPDTL. We love connecting with bosses like Tom and myself. Find out more at IPDTLcom. Bosses, have an amazing week and be real bosses. We'll see you next week. Bye, bye.   Transcribed by https://podium.page

In this episode, Anne is joined by special guest Tom Dheere, the Vo Strategist. With over 25 years of experience, Tom knows how to ride the waves of ever-changing technology and market shifts. Discover the secrets to driving traffic to your website through social media, blogging, and top-notch content to keep you ahead of the pack. They share how old-school tactics like cold calling and email marketing might not be cutting it anymore. Boost your confidence with Tom's killer advice on negotiating rates like a BOSS and flipping your approach to snag the rates you truly deserve. Plus, we unveil the controversial truth about Fiverr and how this billion-dollar beast can actually help you charge industry-standard rates… Transcript 0:00:01 - Anne Hey, hey everyone, Welcome to the VO Boss podcast. I'm your host, Anne Ganguzza, and today I am excited to welcome voiceover business and marketing consultant and VO strategist, Tom Dheere, to the show. As a voice actor with over 25 years of experience, Tom brings a wealth of voiceover knowledge to the table In his one-on-one strategy sessions, diagnostic sessions those sound interesting and his mentorship program, As well as speaker appearances at industry conferences. Tom, I am so excited to have you here today. Thanks for joining me.    0:00:34 - Tom Thanks for having me. It's always a pleasure to chat with you, Anne.    0:00:37 - Anne Tom, you know it's chaotic out there.    I'll tell you what there's disruption, There's, I say, mass panic, and I think that today more than ever, as entrepreneurs and business owners, we need a strategy more than ever. So I am super duper glad that we are here talking to you about that. So let's get a feel for your take on the industry, because you've been in the industry for gosh over 25 years and I'm sure you've seen it evolve, kind of like myself. Talk a little bit about your experience in this industry and how it's evolved over the years.    0:01:20 - Tom Okay, well, i decided I wanted to be a voice actor in 1994, so I was a graduate school dropout, so I got my. I decided in late 94, got most of my. I got my training in my voiceover demo in 95, which is a cassette tape. I still have it here in the drawer. And then when I got that demo, my coach gave me a little certificate and gave me a stack of Xerox copies of production company listings and said you know, start your good, your cold calling good luck. Because in 1995, there was I mean there was an internet and some websites, but there was no.    0:01:57 - Anne Yeah, there was no social media.    0:01:59 - Tom There was no online casting sites, there was no home recording, there was no digital delivery of audio files, there was no phone patch, there was ISDN. But like, who had that besides? like the, the, the rate, you know the major TV networks, you know. So you had to buy cold called and I called, called for a year until I got my first gig, so until I joined voice 123 in 2006,. That was pretty much, that was pretty much the only way to do it, and also I was going into New York city once a week. Voiceover is unlimited and you'd pay whatever was $35 for a 10 minute meet.    Meet up with a casting director or an agent or a manager which is how I got my, my first manager, who I still have to this day, 17, 18 years later. So my cassette turned into a CD which I was duplicating, burning you know. Oh God, the my post office hated my guts.    0:03:04 - Anne Now mail. Yes, cause.    0:03:06 - Tom I had a long a lawn bag of padded mailers and they'd be like, oh geez, here comes Tom again and like, all right, everybody just gets to the side and just tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick you know cause?    0:03:15 - Anne I was just constantly sending it out, yeah, and then that evolved into MP threes. So let's, let's, let's start. I think that there's, there's something, there's a parallel here, a disruption right. Some disruption in the industry right. So it evolved from a tape into a CD, into today, which is all digital right.    0:03:36 - Tom Right And then and then pay a voice bank and voicescom and voice 123 disrupted the voiceover again, again and you know, and now AI is disrupting the voiceover industry. But this is what I say and all my students.    0:03:52 - Anne A pattern Tom. A pattern Tom. Yes, there is a pattern throughout the years, so I don't think that disruption is going to stop anytime soon.    0:04:00 - Tom No, it's going to keep going, and what I like to say is that when the light bulb was invented, it disrupted the candle making industry and nobody cared about the candle makers, except for the candle makers.    0:04:13 - Anne People were saying Oh good I can.    0:04:15 - Tom I can read a book at night without my house burning down. Like that's where everybody was coming from. It's like okay. So the candle makers had a choice They could go to Congress to try to get light bulbs outlawed, they could go la, la, la, la la which a lot of voice actors have been doing especially literally today, this week, on the voiceover groups. Or they could adjust to their candle making industry to accommodate certain parts of the light bulb industry, or they could convert their candle making factory into a light bulb making factory.    So, you can either fight it, ignore it, adapt to it or embrace it. And the voice actors that are going to still be standing for lack of a better term on the other side of AI and whatever the next disruption is, the ones that are adapting, evolving learning, growing, operating from a position of abundance as opposed to a position of scarcity, and not shouting at the rain. They're the ones that are still going to have a viable voiceover career. Yeah.    0:05:08 - Anne Yeah, i'll tell you, it has really it has really wreaked havoc, and I think that you know, gosh, you know, and I've been following it and following it And you know, two years ago on the VO Bus podcast, i mean, i think that you and I can both agree to do due diligence and educate yourself on, you know, evolving technologies or disruptive technologies that can affect your business, and that is so very important that we, you know, truly educate ourselves. And I had done a series of interviews, of which I'm still doing periodically, with you know, large companies, people that are working in synthetic voices, ai companies to kind of get to ask those tough questions like Hey, what's happening here? And are you, you know, is there transparency? You know, what are your ethics? You know, do you have, you know, objectives in terms of protecting?    you know, voices as you go, and I think it's been an educational journey for not just me as a business owner and a voice artist, but for the AI companies as well. I think we are all learning and evolving with technology as we go, and I've had experience doing that myself, you know, working in technology for over 20 years, and I still consider myself working in technology. So, in terms of you know your, your students and and your clients. What is your? what is your biggest tip now for, let's say, people coming into the industry, how to get a handle on this industry and be successful.    0:06:43 - Tom Do as much research as you possibly can. Work with professional coaches who are boots on the ground blue collar voice actors as well like who are actively engaged in the voiceover industry. That's not to say that there's not genre coaches out there, like Mary Lynn Wissner, for example, who is not a voice actor but is an amazing coach.    There are only a handful of people like that, as you know and but people who are actively, who have to continue to grow and evolve with the industry to maintain relevance in the industry And be better than the AIs on a storytelling level as quickly as you possibly can.    0:07:23 - Anne Yeah.    0:07:24 - Tom Because they are getting better and better almost daily. Are they going to completely take over the entire voiceover industry? No, Are they going to. you know, take away a percentage of certain jobs of certain genres, mostly for entry level voice actors Yes, yeah. The trick is how do you get good enough that, when you're starting your voiceover journey, that you're already better than the AIs, so you can kind of leap over?    that hurdle and be a human narrator as quickly as possible. That's going to be the challenge. What I think that means is the people that are more naturally talented, the people who have theater training, the people who have on-camera film and TV training, improv training, those people coming into the industry which are all parts of what defines a better actor are going to have a better chance than people just coming at it from other sectors. Frankly, i mean, a registered nurse has every right to stop being a nurse and try to do medical narration for a living, and I encourage that. I've trained people like that, you've trained people like that over the years, but it's going to get harder and harder if they don't have natural storytelling billing, natural storytelling ability, or they haven't been trained in non-voiceover storytelling. So get as many acting classes as you can under your belt. Get as many improv classes under your belt so you can learn how to make strong choices quickly, which is a key to being a good narrator. Understand the technology and maybe get your voice cloned as quickly as possible.    0:09:05 - Anne That's very interesting. I'm finding that I do have some people, because I did the series and I've been investigating and educating myself with AI companies for the past few years, i've had people ask me, and not all of them want to shout the rafters saying, oh, i'm out there trying to figure out how to get my voice cloned or how to get a synthetic voice. But what's interesting is that synthetic voice, the companies that are creating synthetic voices. They're also evolving and changing on a daily basis, and so it's really important that, as voice actors, you keep up with that, and I'm always a big proponent of if you have a business, you want to understand the market in which you're selling And so part of that market. If the market is changing. And, tom, as a business person, you're all about researching and looking at the market as it evolves over the years. And where do you see the market heading in terms of voiceover casting? Where are we going to be able to get these jobs, or where can voiceover talent find work? And I know that's the golden question, right.    People like they expect a five-minute answer from me. Where can I get voiceover work? But where do you see that evolving and heading as we move on in the future?    0:10:27 - Tom That's a great question, Anne. There will still always be a place for needing agents, managers and casting directors for high end work, class A national commercials, high end video games and cartoons, high end promo, high end in show narration. I don't think that's ever. I don't think that's ever going to change. Casting sites are going to continue to be as relevant as ever and is still the the most effective way for new voice actors to onboard into the industry. Because you can. All you need is a credit card and you could just join the casting site and start auditioning immediately.    The interesting part is going to be the direct marketing part which. I learned the hard way when all of my direct marketing strategies, which worked like gangbusters in 2013, 14, 15, 16, all of a sudden stopped working because, so many of those production companies recording studios that I had worked with through direct marketing strategies have moved to online casting sites just because it's easier for them to curate a roster, manage talent, manage projects.    So, um, ai is going to take a chunk out of online casting sites. It's going to take a chunk out of direct marketing clients the low end stuff and stuff that would never normally get like there's audio books out there that will never get produced unless it's an AI voice.    0:11:51 - Anne It's going to do it out of interest or ergonomics or just sure, whatever that sure whatever the rights holder can, um, can afford.    0:11:57 - Tom So you also new students, when it comes to this kind of strategies, need to figure out what. How does what a success look like for them, Which genres do they want to be successful in And which portals do they need to access to become successful in said genres? So if you want to be on the next Pixar film or be in the next fallout video game, you need to get a lot of training, you need to get a top notch demo, you need to get high end agents and you're going to eventually need to join SAG-AFTRA. That's not. That's not changing for everybody else. You know the pendulum is going to swing, stuff's going to move or stuff's going to move around, but you're still going to need you're still going to need the aforementioned good training, good demo good website, good home recording.    Um, and the ability to keep up with industry's trends by reading blogs, watching podcasts like this um, working with coaches like, like you and me. Um, it's going to what, what percentage of what genre is going to get lost and where you're going to need to go for each of it. I mean, who can? who can say, but if you have, if, if online casting sites stigmatize you, get over it get in there develop your skills develop your auditioning skills.    0:13:10 - Anne That was it. That was the nugget of the day. That was awesome Sound right of the day. Yeah.    0:13:14 - Tom Because online casting sites like I'm. I know because I'm on voice 123. I audition every day and I regularly see clients that are posting casting notices that I used to work with five, six, seven, eight, 10 years ago, who won't take my phone calls anymore because they're on casting sites. That's the only way they'll talk to me And I'm totally fine with that, because you said you got to go where the buyers are. you got to go where the market is going. That's where they are. That's where you need to be.    0:13:41 - Anne I think there's something to say If we just tell every boss out there, you know, first of all, um, be a boss, right And understand that you really have to stop. And I think, take a uh, uh, take a look at the bigger picture. The bigger picture is we're providing a product, uh, to a market, the market. You have to evolve with the market. It's not about you know, uh, oh, my gosh, it's, it's, it's you know your voice over business and your craft and your and your art, which I completely, yes, it is. But honestly, you know, at the end of the day, right, i want to pay my mortgage, right, and if I want to have a business, it always amazes me, tom, how you know you go to conferences and I know you know when, when, cause I used to, i used to teach business classes as well. Whenever you go to see which classes fill up first, it's always the performance classes, it's always the cartoon and video game.    Always those because, well, okay, so they're fine, they they allow the creativity. But, honestly, you know, beyond the fun and the creativity in the booth, you've got to be able to run a business that will make a profit. If you want to write, if you want to do this as a business and you want and you're serious about it I mean, if it's you know, if it's a hobby, that's a difference, that's a different podcast. Sure, you know, and I think that you know what you offer, you know, to people as a, a VO strategist or even just a business strategist, is invaluable. And I truly think, bosses out there, you've got to step back.    Um, and yes, of course you know, create the product that the market is demanding Right, and and also know how to run your business right. And so I love your story that you know the people that used to take your calls no longer will take your calls. You know your calls and now you have to work with them on the platform, and mostly because it's easy and more convenient And I will be the first person to ask any of you bosses out there if you're using any form of AI to do anything. Let's say, create a blog post or, you know, maybe play around and change your headshot And you're using the technology to make your jobs better, more efficient, then you cannot be the person that gets upset if you're not, let's say, evolving along with the synthetic voice aspect of it.    0:16:06 - Tom You know, absolutely.    0:16:08 - Anne I mean. So, as we talk to peer to peer, i think, or pay to play platforms, i think online casting is absolutely. What about Tom? let's talk about what about your website, your online platform, your online storefront? What do you think about that in terms of being able to market your business?    0:16:29 - Tom Okay, it's funny because people coming into the industry, you know most of them realize they need some kind of training and then they realize, oh, i need to record from home. You know I need a demo. And then almost all of them think, well, i need some kind of website. But they don't know why they need a website. They don't know how to build a website and they don't know what is necessary to create an effective website. What I tell my students is that no one is gonna find your website nobody.    There are literally tens of thousands of voice actor websites out there. The odds of them typing in some stuff on Google, bing, yahoo and finding you is virtually impossible. I mean, tomdeercom is over 20 years old and I've been blogging for 14 years, so I've got really good SEO and I rarely get found on it. Anyway, the point is, your job as a voice actor is to drive traffic to your website, and you do that by being on social media, blogging, creating a presence, creating conversations, creating quality content to get them to notice you. And then there's email marketing and cold calling, which I'm sure you realize that they don't work a fraction as well as they used to, because why should they answer the phone of some voice actor trying to talk about themselves, when they're just gonna go to an online casting site to cast their next project. They're already more than halfway down the sales funnel anyway on an online casting site, as opposed to trying to get them into the sales funnel through cold calling and all that.    So driving traffic to your website is extremely important, and then get them to do the most important thing, which is download your demos.    0:18:12 - Anne Everything else, is irrelevant Or click it back. I mean, everything else is secondary to downloading the demo. Right, yeah, but now downloading the demo? now we've got there's the fear. There's now there's some fear that if we allow our audio, you know, freely out there and I, you know I have podcast, you have podcast. Anybody can download this podcast I've been doing it for six years and potentially turn it into a voice.    0:18:40 - Tom Okay, Look everybody. I've been doing this for 25 years. I have done thousands and thousands of voiceover projects. I've probably done tens of thousands of auditions over the years, I guarantee my voice has been cloned without my knowledge many times over.    I guarantee that auditions that I have you, that I have done, has been used for broadcast without my consent or without compensation. Every website that exists is going to get hacked at some point. None of our data is safe, it's just not. All you can do is do the best you can to mitigate your risk. try to be secure. I can't worry about submitting my demo and worrying about it getting cloned.    I mean if I, if I was worried about that, i wouldn't have a career. I would. I'd be quadruple bolting the door and hiding in the bathtub. There's just nothing you can do about it. So don't worry about don't worry about that. Put the demo out there. I mean because the the the odds of it happening are extremely slim, but the longer you're here, the more likely it's going to happen. It's just you know well.    0:19:45 - Anne Tom, i mean, i think I think really again, we we talk about that bad actors, um, which is so interesting in our industry. Now, the term bad actor, right. Had I not really delved in deep to talking to people outside of my own industry, i would not have known what the bad actor meant. Um, outside of, like the literal meaning of it, right, but the bad actors meaning those companies, right, or those people that may take advantage, unfair advantage, um, with the in in clone voices, without permission, create deep fakes, all of those things. There's always that possibility And I had such an interesting conversation the other day with Shyamala Praga, who is very well known in the AI industry.    Um, regarding, you know, laws and regulations and and instead of being reactive which is what we typically are right, reactive, something bad happens and then a law or you know some sort of policy is is established that then, you know, takes care of it. Um, really trying to again educate all of us, not just in our industry but everywhere, that, um, these things could potentially happen and we need to protect ourselves from bad things. Um, you know, what are your thoughts about? I mean, i, like, i really love your, your, your perspective on you can't be worrying about that all the time, but are there any steps that you would recommend to to, let's say, to protect um or to be cautious about that? I mean, i certainly am not going to make my demo not downloadable because I want it to be convenient for people to listen and buy.    0:21:20 - Tom You have to have it. It has to be downloadable because, when it comes to your direct marketing strategies and driving traffic to your website, the odds of them having a voiceover project for you right now, at the time that you have marketed to them successfully and they've actually gone to your website to review your demos, the odds of them actually having a gig for you is infinitesimally small. I can count, i think, on two fingers in 25 years that that's actually happened. Representation and online casting insights are for opportunities now. Direct marketing, driving traffic to your website is for opportunities.    later They're not going to remember you once they leave that website of yours You need to have. They need to walk away with the demo, so they stick it in a folder somewhere in their cloud or on their desktop, so when an opportunity comes along that you may be right, for your demo was right there for them to review, or if again another thing that I always like- to say is that, no matter what in a marketplace and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, there are I will pay for things that make my life easier and make my life more convenient.    0:22:25 - Anne So, for example, i hate, i always use this my lipstick. So my lipstick is reliable, dependable, stays on all day, i don't have to put it on again And I you know I use that as an example product. I pay a lot of money for this lipstick. Now I certainly feel that no matter. Look AI, you know pay to play sites, you know driving down, you know rates. I no matter what. If somebody likes and gangooza right and likes her product, they're going to pay the money and they're going to remember me and they're going to buy it again and again. I'd love to hear your thoughts.    0:22:58 - Tom You go to a department store and there's five pairs of shoes on on the shelf and four of them cost, you know, $75 and one of them cost $800.    Everybody immediately goes and looks at oh, what's this? What's the value of this? Why is it worth $800? Well, if they says it's worth $800, then clearly it must be worth $800. So I will happily spend $800 on this pair of shoes. So most people coming into the voiceover industry are broke and perceive themselves as an employee or a starving artist. They are already immediately devaluing themselves and training voice seekers to devalue them.    So it's a systems of, it's a systems of thought problem. And I'm not going to sit here and blow sunshine up everybody's butt and say you're special, you're wonderful, you're, you're going to. All your dreams are going to come true, because that's not what the VOStratigist does. This VOStratigist does not sell dreams. The VOStratigist sells reality.    My job is to give you objective data so you can set, you can make informed decisions about your voiceover career. But you want to do everything you can to set yourself up for success And the first step one is mindset. Know your worth. Know your worth based on your pure talent, know your worth based on your training, know your worth based on your experience. And know your worth based on what the industry standards are.    Sag After over here GVAA over there, Know what your worth is and comport yourself And it's maybe it's a little fake it till you make it. I don't. I'm not sure you can do that. Having confidence and being confident in your training and your talent and your understanding of the rates, That should empower you to make sure that people aren't buying stuff from you that are shopping in the wrong aisle.    0:24:56 - Anne And also, i would say, as a as a talent just coming in, i don't think you can expect to get into or to become a top tier you know, professional without making an investment. I mean, that's the other thing too. I cannot tell you how many people they'll be like. You know, i really need coaching, but I just I don't have any. You know, they don't have the budget they don't have And, and so in reality, there has to be those things in place. You can't expect to go in and make a ton of money without investing in yourself and investing in that, in that coaching that's going to help you to be the most human voice actor that you can be.    0:25:37 - Tom Patience is one of the most important skills that you need to have as a new voice actor. Everyone wants to start talking for money as quickly as possible and using their funny cartoon voices that their dentist told them is hilarious And that's all. That's all great, but if you can't afford the training yet, build a budget create a savings plan.    be patient, find community theaters or summer theater programs that have free acting and improv training, and develop your foundation of storytelling skills while you're saving money to work with a professional coach like Anne, or work with a VO strategist you know a business marketing consultant like me. There's a ton of things that you can do. But if you dive in when you're not ready or you go with the first demo coach that you can afford and submit to that demo to those agents for the first time, it's not gonna go well.    It's not gonna go well. So I'll never tell anybody not to pursue their dreams, but I will tell everybody to be smart about pursuing their dreams by having. This is what I like to say no matter what you're doing in life, do it with both hands and on a flat surface. Be smart about it, i learned that when I tried to open an Amazon box with a pair of open scissors like this, which we've all done, Oh, yeah, yeah, not yeah. Both hands flat surface.    0:26:58 - Anne Very guilty of that. So then, let me talk a little. let's talk a little bit about rates, because what is your best advice for those actors who might be struggling to find work at their desired rates when you know there is this perceived? you know, race to the bottom, with technology disrupting What, how can they pivot their approach to succeed and get rates that they deserved?    0:27:21 - Tom Learn how to negotiate. And it's not like a Middle East Bazaar where you're haggling over the price of, you know, a goat or something.    It's just the better that you can understand the rate structure of voiceover on a session level and on a usage level, the better, the more empowered you are to educate your clients or potential clients, because for so many casting notices that I see, or so many emails hey, i found you on Google, whatever they've never cast a voiceover in their life.    They haven't the faintest idea what the ergonomics are, what project management is involved or what the rate structure is. Being experienced it's not necessarily a correlation between being professional and experienced. You don't have to be experienced to be professional To understand there is a rate structure. I understand what the rate structure is and I'm able to articulate it to somebody who has no idea how the voiceover industry works. The more that you can do that, the more empowered you are to get industry standard rates and the more empowered you are to educate voice seekers to value you and not let them use cheap rates. Well, i paid this guy five bucks. I'm gonna leverage it to get you to pay you five bucks where you say no, you don't do that You gotta think long term.    You have to value yourself and your fellow voice actors, because every time you accept a ratty rate, you're making it harder for everybody else. Every time you accept an industry standard rate, you're making it easier for everybody else.    0:28:51 - Anne Now, but okay. So then here's the question. Yes, i agree that there should be the thought process about the industry as a whole. However, you will always have those voice actors that it is their business, right? I'm a big proponent of saying mind your own business. That means, don't worry about how other people get their business. In that respect, though, do you know what I'm saying? I truly believe I want people to understand their worth in order to make a bold and take the challenge to actually negotiate that worth with a potential client. So, speaking of five bucks, i know that you had talked to me a little bit about an experiment that you had conducted using the online pay to play the F word, fiverr.    And I personally, i'm one of those people that thinks we need to talk about this because it is a viable marketplace in the well viable it exists in our industry. Let's put it that way you may not agree with it and you may not feel that it values your worth, but what were your findings? What do you think about Fiverr?    0:29:58 - Tom Okay, it had been coming up so much in conversations with my students, with my fellow voice actors, fellow coaches, producers, panelists at conferences And, like I said, my job as a video strategist is to collect objective data so I can help my students make thoughtful, informed decisions about how to move their voiceover business forward. Fiverr is real, it is here. It's a billion dollar company. There are thousands and thousands of voice actors on it. So I needed to understand what exactly it is, why it is and how it works. So I created an account, I followed the tutorials, i looked at YouTube videos, i built a profile and then you build what are called gigs And a gig is basically broken down by genre.    I will narrate I'm an American voice actor who will narrate your explainer video or e-learning module or whatever And then what you do is you build the rate, but you're breaking it down bit by bit. So This is what really fascinated me about it is if someone said to you and I've got an explainer video, how much do you charge? and you probably charge what? 400, 500, whatever sometime around there But if you actually broke down by dollar, how much it costs for you to record the video, how much it costs to edit the video, to clean up, process, format, save, deliver. Do retakes give you permission to use the video in a certain way on a certain platform? if you chop up that $400 into all those little individual things, that's basically what you're doing on Fiverr. So it could say base price $5, but then if you add deliver as a wave file, deliver it within 24 hours you know, we'll only get two retakes.    Mvp, I'll move you up to the front of the line, If you, then if you go da-da-da-da, then the total can be $400. It can be an industry standard rate. Fiverr saying oh, we get everything's for five bucks.    0:32:05 - Anne It's more of a marketing position than anything else. And if you think about that in reality, right, if they're going for that market for the people who don't right, who don't have a lot of money to spend and they want to go for lower priced, saying Fiverr and marketing themselves as Fiverr, get affordable, then absolutely I mean as a business they built for a market where there was a hole And yeah, and now of course, because they have so many voice artists on it right.    that increases their SEO value, which increases, you know, ease, convenience, of use, and so that's what makes them you know the force that they are in the industry.    0:32:49 - Tom Right. So there's three levels on Fiverr And if you earn a certain amount of money and a certain amount of timing, get a certain amount of ratings in a certain amount of time, then you go to the next level and then the top level and the people at the top level charge industry standard rates and they do fine. The trick is kind of punching through that membrane from the first level to the second, in the second to the third. I feel like that's where it can be challenging.    0:33:12 - Anne Yeah, and I feel like you'd have to work that, because I think you have to earn that right, you have to get so many ratings, and I feel like you'd have to actually work the platform for a bit so that you could get up the ratings, so that you could climb up the ladder, so that you could charge industry rates. But, although not impossible, it's a very interesting concept. And because we are talking about it, bosses, doesn't necessarily mean we are condoning that platform, i mean. But if you look at it from a business standpoint, it absolutely, you know it covered a hole in the market and logically I can see how that works.    I absolutely can see how that works Now, do I love that? it makes voiceover seem cheap? No, not at all. And I think to each and everyone out there, it is up to you to make that decision whether you want your brand associated with that brand, because that's a whole other way of doing business, right? So, again, you're almost working for the platform And then that platform represents your brand versus, let's say, for me, i've always been let's do it myself, and you know, seo for me.    I've been online for years and it's worked in my favor And I've built up a great clientele list And I'm very fortunate that I'm able to continue on that. And while I am a member of a lot of pay to place, i don't have time to actually audition. And you know, for me, email marketing well, it's probably not quite as effective. Well, it's hard to say. I still believe that there's effectiveness in email marketing if you've got the right message and you have the right subject line, because people have less and less of an attention span. But it's one of the reasons why I built the VO Boss Blast. It was a way to help direct market talent, so that they didn't, you know, and I basically started it for myself. Isn't that like every company.    0:35:05 - Tom Right, if you create a product you want, help You do it to serve your needs.    0:35:09 - Anne I did it because I was like I don't have time. I want to do the podcast, i want to do VOPs, i want to be you know, i'm coaching, so I don't have a ton of time, so let me just create a direct marketing product that I can use. And then, of course, i shared that.    0:35:24 - Tom I do want to say for the record I have not booked anything on Fiverr. I set up my gig, i made adjustments to my rates because you're supposed to refresh it and try to feed the algorithm. I couldn't. I also did the same exercise on Upwork and it worked similarly and I got the same results. I could not. I could not book anything. I guess that just means I'm not a particularly good voice actor.    0:35:47 - Anne No, I think it's because you didn't have 100% of your right time to really devote to it. I mean, that's what. I think That's a part of it.    0:35:55 - Tom And the other thing is understanding the economies of the voice seekers, absolutely.    0:35:59 - Anne Diversify the economies and understanding of you know, money and how it works, of the country of origin of the voice actor too, absolutely, and Tom, i'll be the first one to say I mean, we've been in this business a long time. If you were on Voice 123 in 2006, right, you remember? Freelancer.    0:36:17 - Tom Oh, i was on Freelancer. Oh good, so was I. And Elanzen and Guru, yeah, i was on all of them.    0:36:22 - Anne So all of those evolved into Fiverr.    Really, that's really it was that it was like who could bid the lowest right? And I will tell you that, as a you know, entering into the online space, i mean that's where I did get some jobs. Now, did I take jobs that were probably not what I was worth? Yeah, I did, i did, but I learned quickly, you know, and it was a tough, it was a tight, it was frustrating because it was always people under bidding And so you get that type of client, but what you do is you learn about where those clients right, those are the clients that don't value your product Not necessarily you but they don't value the product enough to pay the price right.    0:37:01 - Tom They want to pay the cheapest, the biggest of the pain they are.    0:37:04 - Anne Exactly, exactly So. Wow, what a great conversation, tom. This has been so wonderful and enlightening for the bosses out there. I'm quite sure, tom, how can people get in touch with you and work with you?    0:37:17 - Tom Oh, go to vostrategistcom. I encourage you to book a free 15 minute consult. We can talk about any part of the voiceover industry that you want. I also have a video shop where I've got closing in on 30 different videos covering everything in the voiceover industry, from time management to workflow to genre exploration to managing your finances. I also have a great mentorship program where you can do 30 minute check-ins with me once a week, once a month or twice a month. It also gives you access to some of those videos for free. But, yeah, book a session with me, free session with me at vostrategistcom, and I'd love to chat with you.    0:37:50 - Anne Good stuff, tom. Yeah, bosses, today more than ever we need a strategy for moving forward in our business. So go to it, tom. Thank you again. I would like to talk to you bosses about. As individuals, you know, it can seem difficult to make a huge impact, but as a group, we can contribute to the growth of our communities in ways that we never thought possible. Visit 100voiceswhocareorg to learn how And a big shout out to our sponsor, ipdtl You too can connect in network like bosses like Tom and myself. Find out more at IPDTLcom. You guys have an amazing week and we'll see you next week. Bye-bye.    Transcribed by https://podium.page

C'est ma soeur. Elle est infirmière. Mary : Tu viens d'où, Pedro ? Pedro : Je suis chilien. Je viens de Concepción. Mary : Et c'est une ville agréable ? Pedro : Oh, oui ! C'est une ville très sympa. Il y a une université, l'Université de Concepción. Elle est grande : il y a même un parc. C'estune université prestigieuse dans le pays. Regarde : j'ai une photo de moi avec ma famille dans le parc de l'université. Mary : Ah, oui ! C'est très joli. Qui est-ce sur la photo ? Pedro : Elle, c'est ma sœur. Elle est infirmière. À côté, c'est son copain. Il est musicien. Il est sympa. Tom : Oh, mon dieu! C'est Pedro, là? Mary : C'est vrai? C'est toi sur la photo ? Pedro : Ha ha, oui, c'est moi : j'avais les cheveux longs quand j'étais étudiant !

About TomTom enjoys being a bridge between people and technology. When he's not thinking about ways to make enterprise demos less boring, Tom enjoys spending time with his wife and dogs, reading, and gaming with friends.Links Referenced: LaunchDarkly: https://launchdarkly.com Heidi Waterhouse Twitter: https://twitter.com/wiredferret TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Couchbase Capella Database-as-a-Service is flexible, full-featured and fully managed with built in access via key-value, SQL, and full-text search. Flexible JSON documents aligned to your applications and workloads. Build faster with blazing fast in-memory performance and automated replication and scaling while reducing cost. Capella has the best price performance of any fully managed document database. Visit couchbase.com/screaminginthecloud to try Capella today for free and be up and running in three minutes with no credit card required. Couchbase Capella: make your data sing.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Revelo. Revelo is the Spanish word of the day, and its spelled R-E-V-E-L-O. It means “I reveal.” Now, have you tried to hire an engineer lately? I assure you it is significantly harder than it sounds. One of the things that Revelo has recognized is something I've been talking about for a while, specifically that while talent is evenly distributed, opportunity is absolutely not. They're exposing a new talent pool to, basically, those of us without a presence in Latin America via their platform. It's the largest tech talent marketplace in Latin America with over a million engineers in their network, which includes—but isn't limited to—talent in Mexico, Costa Rica, Brazil, and Argentina. Now, not only do they wind up spreading all of their talent on English ability, as well as you know, their engineering skills, but they go significantly beyond that. Some of the folks on their platform are hands down the most talented engineers that I've ever spoken to. Let's also not forget that Latin America has high time zone overlap with what we have here in the United States, so you can hire full-time remote engineers who share most of the workday as your team. It's an end-to-end talent service, so you can find and hire engineers in Central and South America without having to worry about, frankly, the colossal pain of cross-border payroll and benefits and compliance because Revelo handles all of it. If you're hiring engineers, check out revelo.io/screaming to get 20% off your first three months. That's R-E-V-E-L-O dot I-O slash screaming.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Today's promoted episode is brought to us by our friends at LaunchDarkly. And it's always interesting when there's a promoted guest episode because they generally tend to send someone who has a story to tell in different ways.Sometimes they send me customers of theirs. Other times they send me executives. And for this episode, they have sent me Tom Totenberg, who's a senior solutions engineer at LaunchDarkly. Tom, thank you for drawing the short straw. It's appreciated.Tom: [laugh]. Anytime. Thank you so much for having me, Corey.Corey: So, you're a senior solutions engineer, which in many different companies is interpreted differently, but one of the recurring themes tends to pop up is often that is a different way of saying sales engineer because if you say sales, everyone hisses and recoils when you enter the conversation. Is that your experience or do you see your role radically differently?Tom: Well, I used to be one of those people who did recoil when I heard the word sales. I was raised in a family where you didn't talk about finances, you know? That's considered to be faux pas, and when you hear the word sales, you immediately think of a car lot. But what I came to realize is that, especially when we talk about cloud software or any sort of community where you start to run into the same people at conferences over and over and over again, turns out the good salespeople are the ones who actually try to form relationships and try to solve problems. And I realized that oh, I like to work with those people. It's pretty exciting. It's nice to be aspirational about what people can do and bring in the technical chops to see if you can actually make it happen. So, that's where I fit in.Corey: The way that I've always approached it has been rather different. Because before I got into tech, I worked in sales a bunch of times and coming up from the—I guess, clawing your way up doing telesales was a polite way of describing—back in the days before there were strong regulations against it, calling people at dinner to sell them credit cards. And what's worse is I was surprisingly effective at it for a kid who, like, you grew up in a family where we didn't talk about money. And it's easy to judge an industry by its worst examples. Another one of these would be recruiting, for example.When everyone talks about how terrible third-party recruiters are because they're referring to the ridiculous spray-and-pray model of just blasting out emails to everything that hold still long enough that meets a keyword. And yeah, I've also met some recruiters that are transformative as far as the conversations you have with them go. But some of that with sales. It's, “Oh, well, you can't be any fun to talk to because I had a really bad experience buying a used car once and my credit was in the toilet.”Tom: Yeah, exactly. And you know, I have a similar experience with recruiters coming to LaunchDarkly. So, not even talking about the product; I was a skeptic, I was happy where I was, but then as I started talking to more and more people here, I'm assuming you've read the book Accelerate; you probably had a hand in influencing part of it.Corey: I can neither confirm nor deny because stealing glory is something I only do very intentionally.Tom: Oh okay, excellent. Well, I will intentionally let you have some of that glory for you then. But as I was reading that book, it reminded me again of part of why I joined LaunchDarkly. I was a skeptic, and they convinced me through everyone that I talked to just what a nice place it is, and the great culture, it's safe to fail, it's safe to try stuff and build stuff. And then if it fails, that's okay. This is the place where that can happen, and we want to be able to continue to grow and try something new.That's again, getting back to the solutions engineer, sales engineer part of it, how can we effectively convey this message and teach people about what it is that we do—LaunchDarkly or not—in a way that makes them excited to see the possibilities of it? So yeah, it's really great when you get to work with those type of people, and it absolutely shouldn't be influenced by the worst of them. Sometimes you need to find the right ones to give you a chance and get in the door to start having those conversations so you can make good decisions on your own, not just try to buy whatever someone's—whatever their initiative is or whatever their priority is, right?Corey: Once upon a time when I first discovered LaunchDarkly, it was pretty easy to describe what you folks did. Feature flags. For longtime listeners of the show, and I mean very longtime listeners of the show, your colleague Heidi Waterhouse was guest number one. So, I've been talking to you folks about a variety of different things in a variety of different ways. But yeah, “LaunchDarkly. Oh, you do feature flags.”And over time that message has changed somewhat into something I have a little bit of difficulty to be perfectly honest with you in pinning down. At the moment we're recording this, if I pull up launchdarkly.com, it says, “Fundamentally change how you deliver software. Innovate faster, deploy fearlessly, and make each release a masterpiece.”And I look at the last release I pushed out, which wound up basically fixing a couple of typos there, and it's like, “Well, shit. Is it going to make me sign my work because I'm kind of embarrassed by a lot of it.” So, it's aspirational, I get it, but it also somehow [occludes 00:05:32] a little bit of meaning. What is it you'd say it is you do here.Tom: Oh, Office Space. Wonderful. Good reference. And also, to take about 30 seconds back, Heidi Waterhouse, what a wonderful human. wiredferret on Twitter. Please, please go look her up. She's got just always such wonderful things to say. So—Corey: If you don't like Heidi Waterhouse, it is a near certainty it is because you've not yet met her. She's wonderful.Tom: Exactly. Yes, she is. So, what is it we'd say we do here? Well, when people think about feature flags—or at this point now, ‘feature management,' which is a broader scope—that's the term that we're using now, it's really talking about that last bit of software delivery, the last mile, the last leg, whatever your—you know, when you're pushing the button, and it's going to production. So, you know, a feature flag, if you ask someone five or ten years ago, they might say, oh, it's a fancy if statement controlled by a config file or controlled by a database.But with a sort of modern architecture, with global delivery, instant response time or fraction of a second response time, it's a lot more fundamental than that. That's why the word fundamental is there: Because it comes down to psychological safety. It comes down to feeling good about your life every day. So, whether it is that you're fixing a couple typos, or if you're radically changing some backend functionality, and trying out some new sort of search algorithm, a new API route that you're not sure if it's going to work at scale, honestly, you shouldn't have to stay up at night, you shouldn't have to think about deploying on a weekend because you should be able to deploy half-baked code to production safely, you should be able to do all of that. And that's honestly what we're all about.Now, there's some extra elements to it: Feedback loops, experimentation, metrics to make sure that your releases are doing well and doing what you anticipated that they would do, but really, that's what it comes down to is just feeling good about your work and making sure that if there is a fire, it's a small fire, and the entire audience isn't going to get part of the splash zone, right? We're making it just a little safer. Does that answer your question? Is that what you're getting at? Or am I still just speaking in the lingo?Corey: That gets it a lot closer. One of the breakthrough moments—of course I picked it up from one of Heidi's talks—is feature flag seems like a front end developer thing, yadda, yadda, yadda. And she said historically, yeah, in some ways, in some cases, that's how it started. But think about it this way. Think about separating out configuration from your deploy process. And what would that mean? What would that entail?And I look at my current things that I have put out there, and there is no staging environment, my feature branches main, and what would that change? In my case, basically nothing. But that's okay. Because I'm an irresponsible lunatic who should not be allowed near anything expensive, which is why I'm better at stateless things because I know better than to take my aura near things like databases.Tom: Yeah. So, I don't know how old you are Corey. But back—Corey: I'm in my mid-30s, which—Tom: Hey—Corey: —enrages my spouse who's slightly older. Because I'm turning 40 in July, but it's like, during the pandemic, as it has for many of us, the middle has expanded.Tom: There you go. Right. Exa—[laugh] exactly. Can neither confirm nor deny. You can only see me from about the mid-torso up, so, you know, you're not going to see whether I've expanded.But when we were in school doing group projects, we didn't have Google Docs. We couldn't see what other people were working on. You'd say, “Hey, we've got to write this paper. Corey, you take the first section, I'll take the second section, and we'll go and write and we'll try to squish it back together afterward.” And it's always a huge pain in the ass, right? It's terrible. Nobody likes group projects.And so the old method of Gitflow, where we're creating these feature branches and trying to squish them back later, and you work on that, and you work on this thing, and we can't see what each other are doing, it all comes down to context switching. It is time away from work that you care about, time away from exciting or productive work that you actually get to see what you're doing and put it into production, try it out. Nobody wants to deal with all the extra administrative overhead. And so yeah, for you, when you've got your own trunk-based development—you know, it's all just main—that's okay. When we're talking about teams of 40, 50, 100, 1000 suddenly becomes a really big deal if you were to start to split off and get away from trunk-based development because there's so much extra work that goes into trying to squish all that work back together, right? So, nobody wants to do all the extra stuff that surrounds getting software out there.Corey: It's toil. It feels consistently like it is never standardized so you always have to wind up rolling your own CI/CD thing for whatever it is. And forget between jobs; between different repositories and building things out, it's, “Oh, great. I get to reinvent the wheel some more.” It's frustrating.Tom: [laugh]. It's either that or find somebody else's wheel that they put together and see if you can figure out where all those spokes lead off to. “Is this secure? I don't know.”Corey: How much stuff do you have running in your personal stuff that has more or less been copied around for a decade or so? During the pandemic, I finally decided, all right, you know what I'm doing? That's right, being productive. We should fix that. I'm going to go ahead and redo my shell config—my zshrc—from scratch because, you know, 15 years of technical debt later, a lot of the things I used to really need it to do don't really apply anymore.Let's make it prettier, and let's make it faster. And that was great and all, but just looking through it, it was almost like going back in time for weird shell aliases that I don't need anymore. It's, well, that was super handy when I ran a Ruby production environment, but I haven't done that in seven years, and I haven't been in this specific scenario that one existed for since 2011. So maybe, maybe I can turn that one off.Tom: Yeah, maybe. Maybe we can get rid of that one. I mean, when's the last time you ran npm install on something you were going to try out here and paid attention to the warnings that came up afterward? “Hey, this one's deprecated. That one's deprecated.” Well, let's see if it works first, and then we'll worry about that later.Corey: Exactly. Security problems? Whatever. It's a Lambda function. What do I care?Tom: Yeah, it's fine. [laugh]. Exactly. Yeah. So, a lot of this is hypothetical for someone in my position, too, because I didn't ever get formal training as a software developer. I can copy and paste from Stack Overflow with the best of them and there's all sorts of resources out there, but really the people that we're talking to are the ones who actually live that day in, day out.And so I try to step into their shoes and try to feel that pain. But it's tough. Like, you have to be able to speak both languages and try to relate to people to see what are they actually running into, and is that something that we can help with? I don't know.Corey: The way that I tend to think about these things—and maybe it's accurate, and maybe it's not—it's just, no one shows up hoping to do a terrible job at work today, but we are constrained by a whole bunch of things that are imposed upon us. In some of the more mature environments, some of that is processes there for damn good reasons. “Well, why can't I just push everything I come up with to production?” “It's because we're a bank, genius. How about you think a little bit before you open your mouth?”Other times, it's because well, I have to go and fight with the CI/CD system, and I'm just going to go ahead and patch this one-line change into production. Better processes, better structure have made that a lot more… they've made it a lot easier to be able to do things the right way. But I would say we're nowhere near its final form, yet. There's so much yak-shaving that has to go into building out anything that it's frustrating, on some level, just all of the stuff you have to do, just to get the scaffolding in place to write nonsense. I mean, back when they announced Lambda functions it was, “In the future, the only code you'll write is business logic.”Yeah, well, I use a crap-ton of Lambda here and it feels like most of the code I write is gluing all of the weird formats and interchanges together in different APIs. Not a lot of business logic in that; and awful lot of JSON finickiness.Tom: Yeah, I'm with you. And especially at scale, I still have a hard time wrapping my mind around how all of that extra translation is possibly going to give the same sort of performance and same sort of long-term usability, as opposed to something that just natively speaks the same language end-to-end. So yeah, I agree, there's still some evolution, some standardization that still needs to happen because otherwise we're going to end up with a lot of cruft at various points in the code to, just like you said, translate and make sure we're speaking the same language.Getting back to process though, I spent a good chunk of my career working with companies that are, I would say, a little more conservative, and talking to things like automotive companies, or medical device manufacturers. Very security-conscious, compliant places. And so agile is a four-letter word for them, right, [laugh] where we're going faster automatically means we're being dangerous because what would the change control board say? And so there's absolutely a mental shift that needs to happen on the business side. And developers are fighting this cultural battle, just to try to say, hey, it's better if we can make small iterative changes, there is less risk if we can make small, more iterative changes, and convincing people who have never been exposed to software or know the ins and outs of what it takes to get something from my laptop to the cloud or production or you know, wherever, then that's a battle that needs to be fought before you can even start thinking about the tooling. Living in the Midwest, there's still a lot of people having that conversation.Corey: So, you are clearly deep in the weeds of building and deploying things into production. You're clearly deep into the world of explaining various solutions to different folks, and clearly you have the obvious background for this. You majored in music. Specifically, you got a master's in it. So, other than the obvious parallel of you continue to sing for your supper, how do you get from there to here?Tom: Luck and [laugh]. Natural curiosity. Corey, right now you are sitting on the desk that is also housing my PC gaming computer, right? I've been building computers just to play video games since I was a teenager. And that natural curiosity really came in handy because when I—like many people—realize that oh, no, the career choice that I made when I was 18 ended up being not the career choice that I wanted to pursue for the rest of my life, you have to be able to make a pivot, right, and start to apply some of the knowledge that you got towards some other industries.So, like many folks who are now solutions engineers, there's no degree for solutions engineering, you can't go to school for it; everyone comes from somewhere else. And so in my case, that just happened to be music theory, which was all pedagogy and teaching and breaking down big complex pieces of music into one node at a time, doing analysis, figuring out what's going on underneath the hood. And all of those are transferable skills that go over to software, right? You open up some giant wall of spaghetti code and you have to start following the path and breaking it down because every piece is easy one note at a time, every bit of code—in theory—is easy one line at a time, or one function at a time, one variable at a time. You can continue to break it down further and further, right?So, it's all just taking the transferable skills that you may not see how they get transferred, but then bringing them over to share your unique perspective, because of your background, to wherever it is you're going. In my case, it was tech support, then training, and then solutions engineering.Corey: There's a lot to be said for blending different disciplines. I think that there was, uh, the naughts at least, and possibly into the teens, there was a bias for hiring people who look alike. And no, I'm not referring to the folks who are the white dudes you and I clearly present as but the people with a similar background of, “Oh, you went to these specific schools”—as long as they're Stanford—“And you majored in a narrow list of things”—as long as they're all computer science. And then you wind up going into the following type of role because this is the pedigree we expect and everything, soup to nuts, is aligned around that background and experience. Where you would find people who would be working in the industry for ten years, and they would bomb the interview because it turns out that most of us don't spend our days implementing quicksort on whiteboards or doing other algorithmic-based problems.We're mostly pushing pixels around a screen hoping to make ourselves slightly happier than we were. Here we are. And that becomes a strange world; it becomes a really, really weird moment, and I don't know what the answer is for fixing any of that.Tom: Yeah, well, if you're not already familiar with a quote, you should be, which is that—and I'm going to paraphrase here—but, “Diverse backgrounds lead to diversity in thought,” right? And that presents additional opportunities, additional angles to solve whatever problems you're encountering. And so you're right, you know, we shouldn't be looking for people who have the specific background that we are looking for. How it's described in Accelerate? Can you tell that I read it recently?Which we should be looking for capabilities, right? Are you capable? Do you have the capacity to do the problem-solving, the logic? And of course, some education or experience to prove that, but are you the sort of person who will be able to tackle this challenge? It doesn't matter, right, if you've handled that specific thing before because if you've handled that specific thing before, you're probably going to implement it the same way, again, even if that's not the appropriate solution, this time.So, scrap that and say, let's find the right people, let's find people who can come up with creative solutions to the problems that we're facing. Think about ways to approach it that haven't been done before. Of course don't throw out everything with the—you know, the bathwater out with a baby or whatever that is, but come in with some fresh perspectives and get it done.Corey: I really wish that there was more of an acceptance for that. I think we're getting there. I really do, but it takes time. And it does pay dividends. I mean, that's something I want to talk to you about.I love the sound of my own voice. I wouldn't have two podcasts if I didn't. The counterargument, though, is that there's an awful lot of things that get, you know, challenging, especially when, unlike in a conference setting, it's most people consider it rude to get up and walk out halfway through. When we're talking and presenting information to people during a pandemic situation, well, that changes a lot. What do you do to retain people's interest?Tom: Sure. So, Covid really did a number on anyone who needs to present information or teach. I mean, just ask the millions of elementary, middle school, and high schoolers out there, even the college kids. Everyone who's still getting their education suddenly had to switch to remote learning.Same thing in the professional world. If you are doing trainings, if you're doing implementation, if you're doing demos, if you're trying to convey information to a new audience, it is so easy to get distracted at the computer. I know this firsthand. I'm one of those people where if I'm sitting in an airport lobby and there's a TV on my eyes are glued to that screen. That's me. I have a hard time looking away.And the same thing happens to anyone who's on the receiving end of any sort of information sharing, right? You got Slack blowing you up, you've got email that's pinging you, and that's bound to be more interesting than whatever the person on the screen is saying. And so I felt that very acutely in my job. And there's a couple of good strategies around it, right, which is, we need to be able to make things interactive. We shouldn't be monologuing like I am doing to you right now, Corey.We shouldn't be [laugh] just going off on tangents that are completely irrelevant to whoever's listening. And there's ways to make it more interactive. I don't know if you are familiar, or how much you've watched Twitch, but in my mind, the same sorts of techniques, the same sorts of interactivity that Twitch streamers are doing, we should absolutely be bringing that to the business world. If they can keep the attention of 12-year-olds for hours at a time, why can we not capture the attention of business professionals for an hour-long meeting, right? There's all sorts of techniques and learnings that we can do there.Corey: The problem I keep running into is, if you go stumbling down that pathway into the Twitch streaming model, I found it awkward the few experiments I've made with it because unless I have a whole presentation ready to go and I'm monologuing the whole time, the interactive part with the delay built in and a lot of ‘um' and ‘ah' and waiting and not really knowing how it's going to play out and going seat of the pants, it gets a little challenging in some respects.Tom: Yeah, that's fair. Sometimes it can be challenging. It's risky, but it's also higher reward. Because if you are monologuing the entire time, who's to say that halfway through the content that you are presenting is content that they want to actually hear, right? Obviously, we need to start from some sort of fundamental place and set the stage, say this is the agenda, but at some point, we need to get feedback—similar to software development—we need to know if the direction that we're going is the direction they also want to go.Otherwise, we start diverging at minute 10 and by minute 60, we have presented nothing at all that they actually want to see or want to learn about. So, it's so critical to get that sort of feedback and be able to incorporate it in some way, right? Whether that way is something that you're prepared to directly address. Or if it's something that says, “Hey, we're not on the same page. Let's make sure this is actually a good use of time instead of [laugh] me pretending and listening to myself talk and not taking you into account.” That's critical, right? And that is just as important, even if it feels worse in the moment.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at ChaosSearch. You could run Elasticsearch or Elastic Cloud—or OpenSearch as they're calling it now—or a self-hosted ELK stack. But why? ChaosSearch gives you the same API you've come to know and tolerate, along with unlimited data retention and no data movement. Just throw your data into S3 and proceed from there as you would expect. This is great for IT operations folks, for app performance monitoring, cybersecurity. If you're using Elasticsearch, consider not running Elasticsearch. They're also available now in the AWS marketplace if you'd prefer not to go direct and have half of whatever you pay them count towards your EDB commitment. Discover what companies like Equifax, Armor Security, and Blackboard already have. To learn more, visit chaossearch.io and tell them I sent you just so you can see them facepalm, yet again.Corey: From where I sit, one of the many, many, many problems confronting us is that there's this belief that everyone is like we are. I think that's something fundamental, where we all learn in different ways. I have never been, for example—this sounds heretical sitting here saying it, but why not—I'm not a big podcast person; I don't listen to them very often, just because it's such a different way of consuming information. I think there are strong accessibility reasons for there to be transcripts of podcasts. That's why every 300-and-however-many-odd episodes that this one winds up being the sequence in, every single one of them has a transcript attached to it done by a human.And there's a reason for that. Not just the accessibility wins which are obvious, but the fact that I can absorb that information way more quickly if I need to review something, or consume that. And I assume other people are like me, they're not. Other people prefer to listen to things than to read them, or to watch a video instead of listening, or to build something themselves, or to go through a formal curriculum in order to learn something. I mean, I'm sitting here with an eighth-grade education, myself. I take a different view to how I go about learning things.And it works for me, but assuming that other people learn the same way that I do will be awesome for a small minority of people and disastrous for everyone else. So, maybe—just a thought here—we shouldn't pattern society after what works for me.Tom: Absolutely. There is a multiple intelligence theory out there, something they teach you when you're going to be a teacher, which is that people learn in different ways. You don't judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree. We all learn in different ways and getting back to what we were talking about presenting effectively, there needs to be multiple approaches to how those people can consume information. I know we're not recording video, but for everyone listening to this, I am waving my hands all over the place because I am a highly visual learner, but you must be able to accept that other people are relying more on the auditory experience, other people need to be able to read that—like you said with the accessibility—or even get their hands on it and interact with it in some way.Whether that is Ctrl-F-ing your way through the transcript—or Command-F I'm sorry, Mac users [laugh]; I am also on a Mac—but we need to make sure that the information is ready to be consumed in some way that allows people to be successful. It's ridiculous to think that everyone is wired to be able to sit in front of a computer or in a little cubicle for eight hours a day, five days a week, and be able to retain concentration and productivity that entire time. Absolutely not. We should be recording everything, allowing people to come back and consume it in small chunks, consume it in different formats, consume it in the way that is most effective to them. And the onus for that is on the person presenting, it is not on the consumer.Corey: I make it a point to make what I am doing accessible to the people I am trying to reach, not to me. And sometimes I'm slacking, for example, we're not recording video today, so whenever it looks like I'm not paying attention to you and staring off to the side, like, oh, God, he's boring. No. I have the same thing mirrored on both of my screens; I just prefer to look at the thing that is large and easy to read, rather than the teleprompter, which is a nine-inch screen that is about four feet in front of my face. It's one of those easier for me type of things.On video, it looks completely off, so I don't do it, but I'm oh good, I get to take the luxury of not having to be presentable on camera in quite the same way. But when I'm doing a video scenario, I absolutely make it a point to not do that because it is off-putting to the people I'm trying to reach. In this case, I'm not trying to reach you; I already have. This is a promoted guest episode you're trying to reach the audience, and I believe from what I can tell, you're succeeding, so please keep at it.Tom: Oh, you bet. Well, thank you. You know this already, but this is the very first podcast I've ever been a guest on. So, thank you also for making it such a welcoming place. For what it's worth, I was not offended and didn't think you weren't listening. Obviously, we're having a great time here.But yeah, it's something that especially in the software space, people need to be aware of because everyone's job is—[laugh]. Whether you like it or not, here's a controversial statement: Everyone's job is sales. Are you selling your good ideas for your product, to your boss, to your product manager? Are you able to communicate with marketing to effectively say, “Hey, this is what, in tech support, I'm seeing. This is what people are coming to me with. This is what they care about.”You are always selling your own performance to your boss, to your customers, to other departments where you work, to your spouse, to everybody you interact with. We're all selling ourselves all the time. And all of that is really just communication. It's really just making sure you're able to meet people where they are and, effectively, bridge your point of view with theirs to make sure that we're on the same page and, you know, we're able to communicate well. That's so especially important now that we're all remote.Corey: Just so you don't think this is too friendly of a place, let's go ahead and finish out the episode with a personal attack. Before you wound up working at LaunchDarkly. You were at Perforce. What's up with that? I mean, that seems like an awfully big company to cater to its single customer, who is of course J. Paul Reed.Tom: [laugh]. Yeah. Well, Perforce is a wonderful place. I have nothing but love for Perforce, but it is a very different landscape than LaunchDarkly, certainly. When I joined Perforce, I was supporting product called Helix ALM, which, they're still headquartered—Perforce is headquartered here in Minneapolis. I just saw some Perforce folks last week. It truly is a great place, and it is the place that introduced me to so many DevOps concepts.But that's a fair statement. Perforce has been around for a while. It has grown by acquisition over the past several years, and they are putting together new offerings by mixing old offerings together in a way that satisfies more modern needs, things like virtual production, and game development, and trying to package this up in a way that you can then have a game development environment in a box, right? So, there's a lot of things to be said for that, but it very much is a different landscape than a smaller cloud-native company. Which it's its own learning curve, let me tell you, but truly, yeah, to your Perforce, there's a lot more complexity to the products themselves because they've been around for a little bit longer.Solid, solid products, but there's a lot going on there. And it's a lot harder to learn them right upfront. As opposed to something like LaunchDarkly, which seems simple on the surface and you can get started with some of the easy concepts in implementation in, like, an hour, but then as you start digging deeper, whoof, suddenly, there's a lot more complexity hidden underneath the surface than just in terms of how this is set up, and some of those edge cases.Corey: I have to say for the backstory, for those who are unfamiliar, is I live about four miles away from J. Paul Reed, who is a known entity in reliability engineering, in the DevOps space, has been for a long time. So, to meet him, of course I had to fly to Israel. And he was keynoting DevOpsDays Tel Aviv. And I had not encountered him before, and it was this is awesome, I loved his talk, it was fun.And then I gave a talk a little while later called, “Terrible Ideas in Git.” And he's sitting there just glaring at me, holding his water bottle that is a branded Perforce thing, and it's like, “Do you work there?” He's like, “No. I just love Perforce.” It's like, “Congratulations. Having used it, I think you might be the only one.”I kid. I kid. It was great and a lot of different things. It was not quite what I needed when I needed it to but that's okay. It's gotten better and everyone else is not me, as we've discussed; people have different use cases. And that started a very long-running joke that J. Paul Reed is the entirety of the Perforce customer base.Tom: [laugh]. Yeah. And to your point, there's definitely use cases—you're talking about Perforce Version Control or Helix Core.Corey: Back in those days, I don't believe it was differentiated.Tom: It was just called Perforce. Exactly right. But yeah, as Perforce has gotten bigger, now there's different product lines; you name it. But yeah, some of those modern scalable problems, being able to handle giant binary files, being able to do automatic edge replication for globally distributed teams so that when your team in APAC comes online, they're not having to spend the first two hours of their day just getting the most recent changes from the team in the Americas and Europe. Those are problems that Perforce is absolutely solving that are out there, but it's not problems that everybody faces and you know, there's just like everybody else, we're navigating the landscape and trying to find out where the product actually fits and how it needs to evolve.Corey: And I really do wish you well on it. I think there's going to be an awful lot of—Tom: Mm-hm.Corey: —future stories where there is this integration. And you'd say, “Oh, well, what are you wishing me well for? I don't work there anymore.” But yeah, but isn't that kind of we're talking about, on some level, of building out things that are easy, that are more streamlined, that are opinionated in the right ways, I suppose. And honestly, that's the thing that I found so compelling about LaunchDarkly. I have a hard time imagining I would build anything for production use that didn't feature it these days if I were, you know, better at computers?Tom: Sure. Yeah. [laugh]. Well, we do have our opinions on how some things should work, right? Where the data is exposed because with any feature flagging system or feature management—LaunchDarkly included—you've got a set of rules, i.e. who should see this, where is it turned on? Where is it turned off? Who in your audience or user base should be able to see these features? That's the rules engine side of it.And on the other side, you've got the context to decide, well, you know, I'm Corey, I'm logging in, I'm in my mid-30s. And I know all this information about Corey, and those rules need to then be able to determine whether something should be on or off or which experience Corey gets. So, we are very opinionated over the architecture, right, and where that evaluation actually happens and how that data is exposed or where that's exposed. Because those two halves need to meet and both halves have the potential to be extremely sensitive. If I'm targeting based off of a list of 10,000 of my premium users' email addresses, I should not be exposing that list of 10,000 email addresses to a web browser or a mobile phone.That's highly insecure. And inefficient; that's a large amount of text to send, over 10,000 email addresses. And so when we're thinking about things like page load times, and people being able to push F12 to inspect the page, absolutely not, we shouldn't be exposing that there. At the same time, it's a scary prospect to say, “Hey, I'm going to send personal information about Corey over to some third-party service, some edge worker that's going to decide whether Corey should see a feature or not.” So, there's definitely architectural considerations of different use cases, but that's something that we think through all the time and make sure is secure.There's a reason—I'm going to put on my sales engineer hat here—which is to say that there is a reason that the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services is our sponsor for FedRAMP moderate certification, in process right now, expected to be completed mid-2022. I don't know. But anybody who is unfamiliar with that, if you've ever had to go through high trust certification, you know, any of these compliances to make your regulators happy, you know that FedRAMP is so incredibly stringent. And that comes down to evaluating where are we exposing the data? Who gets to see that? Is security built in and innate into the architecture? Is that something that's been thought through?I have went so far afield from the original point that you made, but I agree, right? We've got to be opinionated about some things while still providing the freedom to use it in a way that is actually useful to you and [laugh] and we're not, you know, putting up guardrails, that mean that you've got such a narrow set of use cases.Corey: I'd like to hope—maybe I'm wrong on this—that it gets easier the more that we wind up doing these things because I don't think that it necessarily has been easy enough for an awful lot of us.Tom: When you say ‘it,' what do you mean?Corey: All of it. That's the best part, I suppose the easy parts of working on computers, which I guess might be typing if you learn it early enough.Tom: Sure. [laugh] yeah. Mario Teaches Typing, or Starcraft taught me how to type quickly. You can't type slowly or else your expansion is going to get destroyed. No, so for someone who got their formal education in music or for someone with an eighth-grade education, I agree there needs to be resources out there.And there are. Not every single StackOverflow post with a question that's been asked has the response, “That's a dumb question.” There are some out there. There's definitely a community or a group of folks who think that there is a correct way to do things and that if you're asking a question, that it's a dumb question. It really isn't. It's getting back to the diverse backgrounds and diverse schools of thought that are coming in.We don't know where someone is coming from that led them to that question without the context, and so we need to continue providing resources to folks to make it easy to self-enable and continue abstracting away the machine code parts of it in friendlier and friendlier ways. I love that there are services like Squarespace out there now, right, that allow anybody to make a website. You don't have to have a degree in computer science to spin something up and share it with the world on the web. We're going to continue to see that type of abstraction, that type of on-ramp for folks, and I'm excited to be part of it.Corey: I really look forward to it. I'm curious to see what happens next for you, especially as you continue—‘you' being the corporate ‘you' here; that's like the understood ‘you' are the royal ‘you.' This is the corporate ‘you'—continue to refine the story of what it is LaunchDarkly does, where you start, where you stop, and how that winds up playing out.Tom: Yeah, you bet. Well, in the meantime, I'm going to continue to play with things like GitHub Copilot, see how much I can autofill, and see which paths that takes me down?Corey: Oh, I've been using it for a while. It's great. Just tab-complete my entire life. It's amazing.Tom: Oh, yeah. Absolutely.Corey: [unintelligible 00:36:08] other people's secrets start working, great, that makes my AWS bill way lower when I use someone else's keys. But that's neither here nor there.Tom: Yeah, exactly. That's a next step of doing that npm install or, you know, bringing in somebody else's [laugh] tools that they've already made. Yeah, just a couple weeks ago, I was playing around with it, and I typed in two lines: I imported the LaunchDarkly SDK and the configuration for the LaunchDarkly SDK, and then I just let it autofill, whatever it wanted. It came out with about 100 lines of something or other. [laugh]. And not all of it made sense, but hey, I saw where the thought process was. It was pretty cool to see.Corey: I really want to thank you for spending as much time and energy as you have talking about how you see the world and where you folks are going. If people want to learn more. Where's the best place to find you?Tom: At launchdarkly.com. Of course, any other various different booths, DevOpsDays, we're at re:Invent, we're at QCon right now. We're at all sorts of places, so come stop by, say hi, get a demo. Maybe we'll talk.Corey: Excellent. We will be tossing links to that into the [show notes 00:37:09]. Thanks so much for your time. I really appreciate it.Tom: Corey, Thank you.Corey: Tom Totenberg, senior solutions engineer at LaunchDarkly. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry and insulting comment, and then I'll sing it to you.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

HELP SUPPORT NEW EPISODES! Patreon:  https://www.patreon.com/19Nocturne Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/a_d_infinitum   Next month (May 2022) will be one of the following (contact us through twitter or facebook or email to vote!): A.  Deadeye Kid prequel B.  Fatal Girl, season 2, episode 1 C.  Something else entirely Ko-fi votes count for every dollar donated!!!   TALK THE TALK Written by Julie Hoverson, sound mixing by Neil Gowland CAST Lydia Farnsworth - Julie Hoverson Thomas Farnsworth - JD Lauriat (Haunted House Flippers) Alice White - Shannon Perry (OZ-9) Phone - Pete Lutz (Narada Radio) Judge - Russell Gold Foreman - Jay Langejeans D.A. - Kerr Lordygan Guard - Jimmy Robbins Couch - Chris Hart Elevator - Cary Michael Ayers Lighter - Richard Hand Lamp - Boyd Barrett Sink - Blythe Renay Gun - Thomas Rippert Closet - Joe Griffin WHISPERS Erin Suminsby James C. Taylor Ruya Telhami Julie Hoverson David S. Dear Fiona Thraille   ***************************************************************     TALK THE TALK Cast: Olivia Lydia Farnsworth Thomas Farnsworth Alice White Judge Foreman D.A. Guard Phone Couch Elevator C Lighter Lamp Sink Gun Closet MUSIC OLIVIA Why, it's a courtroom, can't you tell? Where else would you find... a murderer? Scene 1. LYDIA [condescending, replying to a question] Lydia Farnsworth - Everyone here knows that. ... Yes, yes. ... I killed him. It was self-defense. He was planning to kill me. ... [hesitant, lying] An anonymous phone call. [narrating] Of course I can't say who told me - everyone would think I was utterly insane. When it started, Icouldn't even understand it, much less believe - how could I convince anyone else? MUSIC Scene 2. STING LYDIA [narrating] I know I am a joke. An older woman, rich and prominent, married to a much younger - well, a youngerman. And I'm not THAT old - 40 isn't really, and everyone says I look more like 35. But he looks 29 - which he is - so ... tongues will wag. SOUND Tom screams, long, distant and echoey. LYDIA Oh, that was later. Tom almost never screams. TOM [screams, but happily] Hey! SOUND ROULETTE WHEEL. TOM Didja see that? Boy oh boy, if I could bottle that! LYDIA [purring] You're a lucky man. TOM [interested] We-e-ell.... I guess I am. Hey Kitten, wanna help make a rich man poor again? MUSIC Scene 3. UNDER LYDIA [narrating] It was that moment that I fell for him. He didn't know who I was, but he wanted to give me a treat. I kept it up for a while, pretending to be just another secretary on vacation, not letting on. I felt so guilty, letting him pay for all those dinners, the gifts... TOM Kitten, this necklace is just aching to be around your neck. Hear it? [silly voice] Hey lady, take me home, I love you.... LYDIA [narrating, suddenly struck by something] Oh. [beat] No, no - never mind. TOM Don't you know that everything has a voice? Listen to the wind - it calls your name to me, telling me I gotta keep hold of you. Whattaya say, Kitten? Wanna make it permanent? MUSIC UNDER LYDIA [narrating, shaken] Yes, he DID say things like that - perhaps that was why... [beat] Tom worked late a lot - particularly after I told him I was - we were - wealthy. It was like he felt he had to make up for something. He never even introduced me to his family - just said he grew up dirt poor. I think he was ... ashamed. TOM [filter] Sorry, Kitten, but I gotta really burn some oil on this one. You understand, right? LYDIA Of course. [narrating] What else could I say, it was so sweet of him to worry. To want to make me proud. Scene 4. SOUND Candlestick phone hangs up. Footsteps walk away. PHONE [Male voice, filter] He's cheating on ya. LYDIA [panicked, slightly distant] What? Who? PHONE [filter] The husband. Tom. He calls HER all the time when you're out. You want her number? LYDIA Who is this? Where are you? PHONE [filter] Right over here, where I always am. LYDIA [getting more agitated] I don't see anyone! Is this some kind of game? SOUND Footsteps, hesitant, then dashing about. PHONE [filter] I wanted to show my appreciation, see, for not throwing me over when the new model came out - LYDIA What? Where are you? SOUND Door opens. LYDIA [muffled slightly] Hello? Where...? PHONE [filter] No one understands a classic any more. SOUND Door slams. LYDIA [sobbing] This is not funny! I don't know who you are, but you can just get out! PHONE [filter, very close] I'm right here. Look down. LYDIA [quavering] Wha-a-at? [relieved] Oh, the line must still be open. SOUND Candlestick phone picked up, taken off the hook, tap of cradle. LYDIA [loudly] This is not funny, whoever you are. I don't... SOUND Dial tone - continues in background until stated. LYDIA What...? PHONE [filter] I'm not ON your phone, lady. ... I AM your phone. SOUND Clatter of phone hitting floor, dial tone continues, but distant. PHONE [filter] Hey! I'm trying to help you here! LYDIA Nooo! SOUND Phone is kicked across floor. SOUND Dial tone stops. LYDIA [breathing hard] SOUND hesitant footsteps, continuing. PHONE [Unintelligible, distant whisper] LYDIA [whispered] How can you be talking? PHONE [whispered, wavering] Closer, come closer. LYDIA I'm... I'm sorry I kicked you. PHONE [moans, slightly closer] LYDIA Are you ... all right? PHONE [whispering] I gotta ... you need to hear this. SOUND Phone picked up from floor. LYDIA Yes, I'm listening. PHONE [shouting] Don't DO that! SOUND Phone hits floor again. MUSIC UNDER LYDIA [narrating, matter of fact] I felt so bad. But it wasn't hurt. They really built those old phones to last. And what it toldme...! PHONE Sunset 1-1-9-7. I don't know who she is, but what he says to her - whoo-wee. Scene 5. LYDIA [narrating] But how could I tell anyone? My PHONE spoke to me? I told THEM I got an anonymous call. And of course, the phone never used a name, so it wasn't precisely a LIE... TOM Kitten, I'm home! LYDIA Oh, yes. Tom. The phone line lothario. [calling away] Darling, was it a good meeting? TOM The best. [SOUND: KISS] Not better than coming home, though. LYDIA [neutral] Of course. TOM Oh, you're not mad, are you kitten? It's important that I do my time at the office, don't you see? Show everyone - show you - that I'm not just a... a... PHONE Gold digger. LYDIA What? TOM You know, a social climber. PHONE Gi-go-lo. LYDIA Did you hear that? TOM What? If it's the Joneses and their idiot record player again... LYDIA No. It's nothing. LYDIA [narrating] It wasn't nothing, of course. Soon, other supposedly inanimate objects began to have their little piece to say... Scene 6. SOUND water running SINK [cheery] Almost out of soap! And my drain will clog if you don't stop him from washing down his coffee grounds! LYDIA Him? SINK [significant, like a hint] Him. LYDIA [narrating] After the initial shock wore off, it was so EASY to listen. SOUND Click of light being turned on. LAMP [high squeaky voice] On! Better? LYDIA [startled] What? LAMP Are you going to read? Knit maybe? HE likes the dark. Especially when she's here. SOUND Light switched off. LAMP [voice now low] Off. Yep. Just like that. LYDIA [narrating] At first I thought I was crazy, but then I realized - if I was crazy, how could I know all the things they were telling me? SOUND plumping up pillows COUCH [seedy voice, out the corner of the mouth] I know who she is. SOUND Plumping stops, Lydiasits on couch. COUCH Hey, I didn't ask you to sit on me! LYDIA Oh! Who is she? COUCH I would recognize her from behind better, if you catch my drift... LYDIA You mean she actually sat on you - I mean on MY COUCH? COUCH You don't have to rub it in. LYDIA [narrating] I had to have it out with her. I COULDN'T just let this - this farce - go on, right under my nose and behind my back! PHONE Sunset 1-1-9-7? You got it. SOUND Phone dials. LYDIA What'll I say? PHONE I could tell you what HE says... SOUND Phone picks up. LYDIA Shut up! ALICE [filter] Well! SOUND Slams phone down. LYDIA This is hopeless. How can I find a person from her phone number? PHONE All you need is a good story. COUCH [off mike] I know a couple of good stories... PHONE & LYDIA Shut UP! LAMP [high squeaky voice] You tell 'em! Scene 7. SOUND Phone is dialed. Picked up. ALICE [filter] Hello? LYDIA [brisk, but clearly reading] Telegram for Sunset 1-1-9-7 - May I have your name please? ALICE [filter] White. Alice White. [concerned] A telegram? LYDIA Good. Miss White, can you confirm your address, in case we need to forward a copy to your home? ALICE [filter] What's the message? LYDIA I have to confirm your address, miss. The message is marked urgent. ALICE [filter, more worried] 24 Topham drive, floor 6. Now what-? SOUND phone hangs up. LYDIA & PHONE collapse into giggles. COUCH & LAMP laugh too. SINK [far off mike] What? What's so funny? MUSIC Scene 8. UNDER LYDIA [narrating] I went. I had to. I needed to see this cuckoo's egg. Alice White. What a name - plebian, that's what I call it. Strictly middle class. AND the elevator was broken in her building. SOUND Buzzer, door opens. LYDIA Alice- ALICE [friendly] -- White. And you? LYDIA [narrating] She was horrible. Horribly perfect - buttermilk complexion, flaxen hair... She should have been a dairymaid in one of those travel posters for Holland or Sweden - one of those places with dirndls and windmills and tulips. ALICE Can I help you? LYDIA [narrating] At least I had my story straight this time - my phone is VERY handy with a lie. [to Alice] I am here seeking donations to the Mid-Town Orphanage. Can you spare anything? [Narrating] From the looks of her - the threadbare, out of fashion dress, the tatty carpet in the hall, she was sure to laugh in my face- ALICE Oh, gosh... [going away] I'm sure I've got something. Hmm... here! [coming back] Can you maybe use this? LYDIA [numb] A lighter? ALICE I think it's real gold, and I don't smoke. I couldn't think what to do with it. LYDIA Won't... your husband... be annoyed? ALICE [giggles] Got none. Not yet. It was sort of a present - kind of like for emergency money, but I'd feel bad just selling it or throwing it out, but this sounds like a real good cause. LYDIA [narrating] I walked away with the gold lighter in my hand - the gold lighter I GAVE him for our honeymoon... LIGHTER [British accent] I say, don't I know you? LYDIA [narrating] I waited until we were alone. [to lighter, whispered] How did you get THERE? LIGHTER [whispering] Oh, this is jolly exciting, just like Scotland Yard... LYDIA Answer me! LIGHTER If you must take that tone! Young Thomas gifted me to her. I see almost as much of him here as I ever saw in his flat. LYDIA MY flat. LIGHTER Oh, like that is it? Well well well... MUSIC Scene 9. UNDER LYDIA [narrating] It was all true. And she was so darned NICE I couldn't even hate her. Just HIM. I felt like a character in a bad drama - the cheated wife. So alone... But I wasn't alone, you see. I had all of THEM. SOUND Door shuts, footsteps. LYDIA [off mike] Dear? Are you home? SOUND phone hanging up. TOM [on mike] You bet, Kitten! LYDIA Oh, good. I was afraid you'd forgotten-- PHONE You asked me to let you know if anything interesting happened? LYDIA ...our anniversary? PHONE He was just talking to ... HER. TOM Now what kind of a husband would that make me? PHONE A heel. [admonishing] On your anniversary. LYDIA [shaky] I need to ... to powder my... SOUND footsteps running away TOM Hunh. Women. PHONE You can say that again. SOUND door slams. NEW SCENE_9.5 LYDIA [crying] Oh, Tom! CLOSET Psst, over here. LYDIA What? Over where, Who is--? CLOSET I'm the one with the suits hanging in my rear, whaddaya think? LYDIA [sighs] Oh. [sniffs] SOUND footsteps LYDIA [weakly] Yes? CLOSET Check the top shelf. [annoyed] On his side! SOUND door opens. Boxes shift. Something metal is picked up. LYDIA A gun? When did Tom get a gun? TOM [off mike, muffled] Kitten, honey? We need to get shuffling. Are you powdered enough yet? LYDIA [calling] Almost! [whispered] When? Tell me! CLOSET What am I, a calendar? I don't know dates from donuts. LYDIA [frustrated noise] CLOSET But what I DO know is that that piece of hardware wasn't in me until... yesterday. LYDIA Yesterday? TOM [muffled, off mike] Kitten? I'm coming in! LYDIA Don't you dare! SOUND doorknob rattles, Lydia's running footsteps, door slams shut. LYDIA I'm - I'm wrapping your present, darling. You've got to give me a moment. TOM [pleased] Ohhhh. All right, I can wait. I hope it's a lighter - I've only been hinting ever since I lost that great one you gave me before. SOUND Gun cocks. LYDIA [muttered] I should give him the same one - see how he laughs at that. SOUND Footsteps back to closet. Boxes shift. LYDIA I think it was ... [grunt of effort] about there. GUN HEY!!! What are you, crazy? Never leave me lying around cocked! I could go off! MUSIC Scene 10. STING LYDIA [narrating] I thought about it for a long time. About the gun. About what it meant - being in Tom's closet and all. And I wondered if he could possibly be planning what I might think he was planning.... Even if he did intend to kill me, could I do something about it? Get him before he got me? I LOVED Tom. And he'd always been so sweet... PHONE Yeah, yeah, that's what they all say. What you need is gumption, sweetheart. LYDIA Just because he's cheating doesn't mean he's planning to ... to-- PHONE To buy a gun? Too late. What else do you think he's NOT planning to do? LYDIA He wouldn't - couldn't - hurt me. Any more than I could hurt him-- SOUND door opens TOM Oh, hi! [puzzled] Hello? Kitten, who're you talking to? LYDIA [easily] Just the phone, dear. SOUND short smooch. LYDIA [narrating] I was getting rather good at lying. Almost as good as the phone - now, THERE was a champion. I guess it came from hearing all those lies... All the time. TOM [talking on phone] Bob? Listen, it's me, Tom Farnsworth. Yes, from Farnsworth & Wilson. Now, we need to talk... PHONE [over Tom, whispered] Funny, Bob's usually a fella's name... LYDIA [reacts] PHONE He's getting worse. You need to DO something. TOM [continues under Phone] Yes, that's right - tomorrow for lunch. ... Dinner instead? I think I can... Let me just check. [to Lydia] Kitten, can you spare me for dinner tomorrow? Big client... LYDIA [long beat] Of course. Dear. I have someone I really need to talk to anyway. [narrating] The next night, I knew where to find him. Unfortunately, I couldn't take any of my ... friends ... with me - except the lighter, and that accent was getting on my nerves. LIGHTER I say! Scene 11. LYDIA [snorts] But when you're like me, there's always someone around to answer questions... ELEVATOR ...about five minutes ago? Yeah, I know the guy. He's a regular. Sometimes I even take him up. LYDIA Are you working today? ELEVATOR [huffy] Whaddaya mean? I'm always working! LYDIA But the sign... ELEVATOR The super puts the sign up to save electricity - cheapskate. Now, if youknow how to run me up... LYDIA [deflated] I'm not sure... ELEVATOR Step in, it's pretty much automatic. SOUND elevator gate slides open ELEVATOR See the button there.... MUSIC UNDER LYDIA It's funny how every THING I ever talked to wanted to be so helpful, when all the people around me weren't. The elevator even gave me a little tip... ELEVATOR That little knob right there - that's what keeps the door shut when I'm not around. The spring pushes it out - and then, when I come up, it gets pushed in, and voila...! You don't want the door comin' open up here when I'm in the basement, eh? LYDIA Oh, no. SOUND DISTANT BELL. ELEVATOR Whoops! That's me. Would ya' get the door? I gotta go, sweetheart. LYDIA Oh? Oh, certainly. SOUND ELEVATOR DOOR CLOSES. LYDIA I crept down the hall, ever so quiet. SOUND door opens TOM [off] ...right back - just need - [on mike] Oh. Lydia. LYDIA [deep breath] You needn't worry. I'm leaving. SOUND Sharp footsteps TOM Lydia. Kitten. It's not what you think! SOUND Tom's footsteps rush to catch up to her. LYDIA Stay away from me, Tom. TOM Just stop! LYDIA [reacts as Tom grabs her] Uh! Let go of me! SOUND Slight struggle. Lydia's footsteps running. LYDIA I had only one chance...I ran for the elevator. But the gate wouldn't open! I pushed and pushed-- SOUND Elevator door opens. Lydia's footsteps stop, Tom's footsteps catch up. TOM Let me-- LYDIA No! Let go! [sound of exertion, pushing him away] SOUND Tom's footsteps stagger, then... LYDIA Oh, no! It's NOT--! TOM [screams as he did at beginning] LYDIA And that was that. I tried to stop him from going over. At least I think I did, but it WAS my fault. ALICE [coming on mike, breathless] What...? Where's Tom? You're that lady-- LYDIA Tom? He's MY husband! How dare you-- ALICE [panicking] What have you done to Tom? Where's my brother? MUSIC Scene 12. UNDER LYDIA [narrating] And that's why I'm here. If he was cheating on me, I would have fought harder. Could have gotten away. But the look on that girl's face... My own sister-in-law. TOM [screams again] LYDIA Yes, and poor Tom. SOUND Gavel hits twice D.A. Your name please? LYDIA [condescending] Lydia Farnsworth - Everyone here knows that. D.A. And you are testifying in your own behalf of your own free will? LYDIA [testy] Yes, yes. D.A. You are on trial for the murder of your husband, Tom Farns- LYDIA I killed him. It was self-defense. I thought he was planning to kill me. D.A. What led you to think your husband had such designs? LYDIA [hesitant, lying] An anonymous phone call. [narrating] I suppose I could have admitted everything, made a plea for mercy on the grounds of insanity, but I-- TOM [screams again] LYDIA [narrating] I simply couldn't get Tom out of my head. I don't know how all these murderers do it, just kill people and walk away. SOUND Gavel bangs JUDGE Has the jury reached a verdict? FOREMAN We find the defendant ... guilty. LYDIA [resigned] I was relieved, actually. I believed I could face anything, since I would never really be alone. Even the judge's gavel had a kind word. ...Though not the judge. JUDGE For your heinous crimes, I hereby sentence you to death. CROWD [Reaction, gasps] MUSIC Scene 13. STING LYDIA I suppose it was only right - and I really had no reason to go on living, without [SOUND: same scream] Tom. Funny how I look back and see how badly mistaken we all were. It's far too easy to blow things right out of proportion. SOUND footsteps, cutlery set on plate. GUARD You done with that? LYDIA Yes, thank you. It was ... surprisingly tasty. GUARD It's time, then. Come on. SOUND jail door opens, footsteps slowly walk. VOICES [Whispers begin comforting at the start, build.] LYDIA [whispered] Thank you. Thank you all so much. GUARD What? LYDIA Nothing. [narrating] Everything is so encouraging, telling me how brave I am. I'm not brave, really, just ... just tired. GUARD Stop. SOUND KEYS JINGLE. LYDIA Such a relief, really. And then... I'll be with Tom. SOUND LOCK UNLOCKS. Scene 14. WHISPERS [fade out] LYDIA I didn't notice it immediately. My mind was miles away, thinking about how I would make it up to him - he'd certainly understand, about how it was really an accident and all. SOUND SQUEAKY DOORKNOB TURNS. LYDIA But the voices were gone. Even when I closed my eyes and concentrated, there was nothing. It left me feeling ... very ... alone. Oh, well, it wouldn't be for long. SOUND [DISTANT, OFF MIKE] PHONE RINGS. GUARD Stay here. LYDIA What? Of course. I've nowhere to go. SOUND FOOTSTEPS, phone picked up LYDIA Once I rejoined Tom, everything would be all right. I wouldn't NEED them - my friends - any more. Just him. GUARD [behind and under Lydia] Yeah? Who? LYDIA That's why I let it get this far. Fired my lawyer. Made no defense. Admitted everything. GUARD [behind and under] Uh-huh? Got it. LYDIA Just to bring me to this moment. And I wasn't afraid - no matter what this room, this horrible room, might have to say, I was ready. SOUND FOOTSTEPS COME BACK LYDIA And it wouldn't take long. Not long at all, they say. And then, [happy sigh] Tom. GUARD Come on. SOUND KEYS JINGLE LYDIA Well, it's about time. Isn't everyone waiting? GUARD [beat] Not any more, lady. SOUND LOCKING DOOR LYDIA You're an idiot. Open this door. GUARD I may be an idiot, but you're a loon. [beat] That was the governor. You've been commuted. Come on back... LYDIA [gasp, then sharp] Don't talk nonsense. [plaintive, ending in a wail] No! I can't be left all alone! You simply have to kill me! MUSIC  

Investing $50,000 in real estate can go a long way toward creating a diversified rental property portfolio that generates strong cash flow, provided that you do it right. Today we are asking each other the question how we would invest this amount of cash. In this episode, Tom, Emil and Michael share how they would invest $50,000 in real estate if they were just starting out, and if they know what they know now. --- Transcript Before we jump into the episode, here's a quick disclaimer about our content. The Remote Real Estate Investor podcast is for informational purposes only, and is not intended as investment advice. The views, opinions and strategies of both the hosts and the guests are their own and should not be considered as guidance from Roofstock. Make sure to always run your own numbers, make your own independent decisions and seek investment advice from licensed professionals.   Emil: Hey, everyone, welcome back for another episode of the Remote Real Estate Investor. My name is Emil Shour and today I'm joined by…   Tom: Tom Schneider   Michael: and Michael Albaum.   Emil: And on today's episode, we're going to be talking about how each of us would invest $50,000 in real estate, and we're gonna frame it as what we would do with that 50k when we were first starting out, versus how we would approach it now, so let's hop into this episode.   Well, I can't ask what's on your guys's mind? Because we just went through that so, huh… Hmm. You know, I used to have this boss that every every meeting every week, he would come in and just ask some random question to avoid the like, so how's everyone doing? That was like, it's a good way to kind of start a meeting, get like really random answers from people.   Tom: You got an example of one?   Emil: He would honestly as a really weird, he's like a weird dude. But like funny, weird. Yeah, probably not suitable for this show. The ones I remember.   Michael: There was a my, my wife loves David Sedaris. And he does a masterclass and he talks about comedy. And one of the questions he loves asking people was, so when was the last time you touched a monkey? He asked him on this and they were like, oh my gosh, like, can you smell it on me, I was working with him earlier at the zoo today? And he was like, no way and it led to him like being able to go play with the monkeys at the zoo. Like and that's why you should always ask random questions.   Emil: He had asked like 400 people, and they all I never spoke to him again, but that one person…   Michael: The one was a big one.   Emil: Then he finally got to meet a monkey at the zoo.   Michael: Yeah…   Tom: Bad news man, getting a baby monkey and then growing up a lot of sad stories about …like ripping arms off. Anyways, sorry…   Michael: That's a… go hard left fast…   Tom: Yeah.   Emil: All right with that we're gonna hop in and talk about real estate. So the topic today is how do you invest 50k? I think this will be interesting. If Michael ever gets it together here.   Michael: Oh man…   Emil: How would you invest 50k If you know what you know, now, but you're just starting out. So take yourself back to you have your current mind, you're going back to when you first started. So how would you invest 50k? And then we'll talk about you're at where you're at currently, you're 50 grand, you want to invest in real estate? What do you guys? What are we all doing? So who wants to kick off? Going back to the past with 50k?   Tom: So, Tom's gonna go first. I would… So me with real estate investing, I really enjoy real estate investing, but I also really enjoy the kind of passive nature of it, more probably more than Michael and Emil, I think they're like, way more active. So I think this is going to be a good diverse range of responses to this question. So what I would probably do so I'd say there's there's two options, right For me, as I also really like single family off of multifamily, just a little bit less to do plus less turns plus XYZ. What I, I would see this as two options, I can either go to, to pick buy two properties in more kind of class C markets, not not as in like, negative, but like smaller markets, right? Talking about like, maybe Birmingham or buy or like Memphis?     Emil: We'll call it Tier 3, it's classy…   Tom: Sure, sure. Sure. Sure. So the my options would be to that or to buy one property in like a Class B area, you know, maybe a, you know, Atlanta, Raleigh, you know, Dallas, one of those guys and where I am right now, if I had 50k, I'm still trying to deploy as much capital out there. I would get debt for sure. I would, I would max out my debt on it. You know, I … we know well, being conscious of not getting over my tips, making sure that my income could support my debt coverage. But I would probably, I'd probably got two properties in one of those smaller markets. But you know, I might have a old fishing pole in the water on some of those larger markets. If something were to come up, I'd cast a wider net, you know, it's a busier acquisition time. So that's why we deployed by SFR, I would look at those smaller markets max, loan to value most of it… That is what I would do, went a little bit long didn't it… Ehmm, yeah. Done…   Michael: Love it. Would you buy… Would you buy both in the same market? Do you think it would use spread them out? Peanut butter spread, as they say…   Tom: I would probably buy them in the same market. Again, like so important to that to develop a thesis when investing in me is a little bit less overhead. So just using a single property manager, you know, doing that work and finding the right property manager, maybe having them help me out on the acquisition side, as far as evaluating neighborhoods and whatnot. So yes, it's a market. Good question, Michael.   Michael: Love it, love it, love it.   Emil: So, Michael, what would you do?   Michael: I think I'm taking that 50,000 and like Tom gonna go get some debt. But I am probably going to go buy a multifamily building, something a little bit bigger that I could, you know, really, really scale with. And it's probably going to be a little more turnkey, because having done the whole multifamily value, add thing, it can often be a lot more expensive than first anticipated. So something that's, you know, relatively easy, stable. That's why you may go to but in close second, what I'm also going to be considering is going and using a 15%, down DSCR loan and going to go purchase a short term rental, which would probably be a single family out in one of those vacation markets that are out there. But I think it can be a really, really, really great use of cash to generate quick income to then go to buy additional properties.     Emil: Michael, for anyone who doesn't know, what is a stable multifamily property, what does that look like?   Michael: Yeah, it's something that has, it's really good question. First off, it's something that has probably already been rehabbed, either extensively or lightly, doesn't have a whole lot of deferred maintenance, rent is probably going to be pretty close to at market rent. So I'm not going to feel the need to, to get new tenants in place when their leases are expiring, because they're already up at market rent. Just something that has been taken care of, or well maintained. Doesn't need a whole lot of CapEx.   Tom: Short term rentals are interesting. How do you find your overhead as an owner relative to your multifamily single family versus long term versus short term rental? Do you find it pretty similar? I would imagine that there's obviously range like there's variants with each of them, but just general ality generally speaking…   Michael: Yeah, it's a big range and it so depends on like my older vintage multifamily, it's gonna be a little bit even less than some of the expense ratio on that just because that has a lot more maintenance, regular, recurring maintenance type issues. On newer single families, comparing across the board to long term versus short term, short term is definitely more expensive from an expense ratio standpoint. But the income generated is still stronger. And so from a cash on cash return, it's it's still performing quite quite well.   Tom: I bought this as a metric, number of times you as an owner, you have to like make a decision or get involved.   Michael: Oh, see, short term versus long term?   Tom: Yeah, yeah, I would think I mean, I would assume short term rental, like there's a little bit more overhead as an owner. Is that wrong?   Michael: Yeah, I don't think that that's, I would say that there is more on the front end. So like we were involved in the decorations and decision making process around what amenities to include, but from a day to day…   Tom: … FF&E and OS&E those are some acronyms, Michael…     Michael: What's a OS&E?   Tom: Oh, OS&E is operating supplies in equipment, and FF&E is furniture, fixtures and equipment.   Michael: Ahhh!   Tom: No big deal, just drop an acronym…   Emil: A unit count into, what's going on here?   Michael: Yeh, sounds like an accounting term.   Tom: I know about luxury man.   Michael: You're just steeped in luxury. But no, I would say other than that. It's pretty much about as hands off as as long term if not more. So. I've really I've made very few decisions, I've been involved in very few of the conversations, we're looking at converting the garage into additional space so that of course, there's a lot more involvement in but that would be the same as if I was doing some kind of rehab work on a long term rental.   Tom: I heard a great story a description of short term rentals as comparing them to fire trucks and that they're constantly getting turned and washed like a fire truck has been around but oh, it gets it gets a fresh wash every time it goes out. So like while you might think it's a you know, getting beat up a lot it perhaps it is but it's it's getting a lot of Washington. It's like a fire truck. I don't know. I like that.   Michael: Yeah, I think I mean, I think so and it's getting eyes in it every turn. So the festering kind of long term deferred maintenance stuff tends to not be again, for my experience as big of an issue because there's people constantly putting eyes on stuff. And if there's an issue you'll hear about it immediately. Like these tenants are going to tell you because they're paying good money to be in these places. Hey, this is an issue you need to fix it.   Emil: Are you is your short term rental being professionally managed, do you have a property manager?   Michael: Yes, yeah, I'm a full service property manager, I definitely pay for it. But I'm not. I'm not at the point where I can set, you know, neither myself or my wife or I are at the point where we have enough time to be able to learn how to do that remotely for this particular property. And you know, if anyone listening is interested in learning more about short term rentals, we did a podcast episode with Avery Carl, which was a phenomenal episode, in my opinion, where she talks all about the short term rental market, and short term rentals in general and things you need to be aware of, if you're going to get involved in this space.   Tom: Did you pencil… Emil needs to give his answer, but just really last question I have on that… Did you pencil it as a longer term rental as well, just to like, see what…   Michael: I did. And it doesn't work. And so I had to always take in the opinion that it has to work as both because if something changes, I don't want to be stuck holding the bag. And after extra chatting with Avery about the short term rental market, this is out in the Smokies. She was like yeah, but the thing of it is, is the regulations aren't going to change out there. Like it is such a through and through short term vacation rental market, that she is not concerned with it being the next Santa Monica or Santa Monica, city regulators come in and say I can't do Airbnb, because it's always been short term rentals. So that's given me a lot more comfort to say, okay, I'm okay, kind of taking that leap of having it only makes sense as a vacation rental?   Emil: Well, I had one final question. I asked Michael about the third party property manager because I, what I really want to know is how does your time commitment with a third, like you have property management and on a long term and a short term? How does your monthly time commitment in terms of speaking with your property manager being involved? Like how, how much more time is it with the short term compared to long term, if any?   Michael: You know, I have probably spent less time with the short term manager than I have with long term management. I was so impressed by this company, they've been awesome and they're just like really good at what they do. And I think that universally speaking, that's kind of what I would expect in the long term world as well, I have my that one of the best property managers I have is up in Alaska, I hear from him, like once a quarter, unless we're just calling to check, you know, checkup and chew the fact sort of thing. So if a property manager is good at their job, you really shouldn't hear from them, in order for you to make decisions, they could update you and tell you what's going on and this and that. But from a decision making standpoint, if I have to hear from you and talk to you regularly, like it's probably not going very well. Right Emil how would you spend in those 50 G's?       Emil: For me, if I'm just starting out, and I want to invest in real estate, I'm, I like single family as a first starting point. And we can debate this later on a showdown. I think single family is a good way to get started, I think having one tenant, one unit to worry about just a lot less hectic. And so I'd start with a single family, I would want to do a tier two city, somewhere where the climate isn't so severe, right? Like I have properties in Indianapolis and every winter, I'm like, man, our pipes gonna freeze and explode. You know, you hear all those stories. Usually, if you have a tenant who's there, like they're running the water, and that doesn't happen. But you know, if you have a turn in the winner, always think that could happen. So I choose something with a little bit less harsh climate, just because it's going to keep everything solid for a little bit longer. And I'd probably just use it on one property to get something a little bit better, ewe just talked about on a different episode, six things we wouldn't do, again, six mistakes and for me it was buying a really cheap property on the… in the beginning, I get something a little bit nicer, less headache, you know, newer build, that's just going to be an easy learning process for me, because the first one isn't going to be the make or break. It's really you're just like learning how to deal with real estate how to deal with the property manager all this stuff. So having it be something that's going to be better long term is what I would prioritize.   Michael: Are you okay, accepting less cash flow?   Emil: I wasn't in the beginning and on the other end of it now, yes, you should like it's not going to be a huge difference. You think it will be and you know, excel math will tell you different but it's a different story. I think when you get into it.   Michael: How much cash flow, how small of a cash flow are you willing to accept and still consider it cashflow positive?   Emil: For me like even like if you're being conservative, right, like not going oh, best case scenario, right? You're ending up with like at least $50 of cash flow a month right? I think that's a good place to be at least obviously, I…   Tom: Got to beat inflation, got to beat inflation.   Michael: Beat it back with a stick…   Emil: We don't, you know, we're just talking about cash flow and again, these this isn't going to be a make or break for you. You're trying to learn and you're trying to grow. You also have equity building right in a better property that's going to be more dollar like appreciation. 10% appreciation on something that's $250,000 Verse $100,000, you're gonna make more than that equity anyway, right? It's appreciating, it's a higher appreciation.   Michael: So you're sticking to one, one property… One more expensive property?   Emil: Yes, yeah.   Michael: Alright.   Emil: Not even just expensive to be expensive just better quote like a turnkey, nicely done property that I'm not going to have a ton of headache right out the gate.   Michael: Well, there you have it, ladies and gentlemen.   Tom: It's been a few seconds on zero scape, just installed some fake turf on my backyard. It's killer man.   Michael: Is it good?   Tom: Yeah, yeah. And then like if leaves come on it you get the power washer. And just like my my own little zen…   Michael: What about dog puppies?   Tom: That's a thing. But you know, that's where the power washer. And also that's where gates like preventing the dog to go out there. Come in…   Emil: Anyway, anyways, you could also have a dog like mine who we have we have turf in the backyard too. It's like turf in concrete. And he is afraid of it doesn't like walking on turf. So he makes us take him out in the front yard where there's real grass to go. So that's fun.   Tom: He is natural… Michael: Some… double apply.   Emil: He's a purist. He's got a good taste.   Tom: Good for him.   Michael: So Tom, are you saving some of that 50,000, so you can install zero scaping in this investment property?   Tom: Yeah, probably. I mean, the right warranties are in place with the Zero Escape. You're like basically making money when you install it, so…   Michael: Are you, are you working on zero escape installation side hustle?   Tom: I am yeah, I got a, I got a, I got some, I got some hints.   Michael: You need a guy, I got a guy…   Emil: Probably not that awesome on a rental property. Like the ROI on that is, is not great.   Tom: Nooo, problem.   Michael: Depends on who is paying this utilities though…   Emil: Yeah…   Michael: If you include these utilities in your bill…   Emil: It's your tenant.   Tom: Oh…There could be markets Emil, before you jump the gun. There could be markets with it makes a ton of sense, Las Vegas, Arizona…   Emil: I prefer talking generalities, we're not getting into nuance on this on this podcast, sorry…   Michael: I thought you only spoken absolutes.   Emil: That's it, that's it…   Michael: Now you're speaking in generalities. Man pick one Emil.   Tom: Yeah.   Emil: Ehmm, absolute is what I met. It's not... Moving on. Alright, what do we do with $50,000 now? If $50,000 is now, in your investing career, what are you guys doing? You're not a beginner, you're at your stage now, so what's next?   Tom: I am making the transition to getting some multifamily, you know, I don't know, I don't actually know short term, Michael's got me hyped up on some learn a lot more about short term, I don't know. I'm all over the place right now. This is what I'm gonna do, this is what I am gonna do actually, I'm going to set up a coaching session with Michael and we're going to go through some options and get to the root of it. I swear to God, that's like the real answer, right.   Emil: That is actually a very solid strategy. Alright, Michael 50,000, I feel like I know where you're, where you're putting money, but if 50,000, where's it going?   Michael: Yeah. Now in today's world, I'm probably splitting that. Truth be told I'm probably do you like for sure a short term rental 50% down DSCR loan, and then I'll probably wait half or two thirds and then I'm taking the other half and I'll probably park it in a syndication to be perfectly honest and just kind of enjoy the passivity that syndications provide. It's, we've been doing a lot of podcasts recently and had a lot of passive investment experts on talking about benefits, pros cons of passive investing, and I'm like, huh at this stage of my career, it's definitely sounds interesting. My back's already, you know, a little tired from from caring so much. So I'm ready to slow down a little bit and just kind of enjoy the fruits of the labor.   Emil: Nice, yeah. I'm sagging into what I'd do, I'm right there with you. So I like that I have nowhere near the amount of units like you, right that I own directly, I have six units. I think that's perfect for me and where I'm at right now, I would put $50,000 honestly, either in a REIT or yeah, in a in a private deal or something like that. Something where I'm going to be completely passive. Just given we've got two little kids, we got the six units again, that we own directly and that takes off takes up enough time and you know, business I started a year ago that's taking up a lot of time as well and attention. So I'd be looking for something passive to pocket.   Michael: I love the fact that Emil, you mentioned that you have like little kids and so you're kind of at this stage in your life where the active hands on direct investment isn't a great fit for you. But that could easily change and so you go park your money and one of these indications. Hopefully it doubles or better in a couple years' time and then you get it back and you get to decide okay, well what I want to do next I want to continue the passive route now maybe the kids a little bit older, you have more time on your hands to do something else. So I love it. I think it's, it's such a good point that there's like seasonality to this whole investing thing.   Emil: Yeah, it's not like, I'm done direct investing. It's, I'm done direct investing right now. Like, we have what we have, we're good, we're not getting rid of those and it's time for a different strategy. But you know, life changes, maybe you have a windfall, whatever, and you're like, now I'm bored. And I want to go do something more challenging and I'm gonna go do some, some value add stuff myself, maybe even like, in a market closer to me, or what did you know there are just so many different ways you can take this and it's not like those strategies you start with is going to be the strategy you end with.   Michael: Mike drop Emil out.   Emil: Don't listen to me, I don't know what I'm talking about.   Michael: That's great, man. I love it, I love it… Should we get out of here?   Emil: Yeah, let's do it.   So thanks, everybody, appreciate you tuning in for another episode, hope you got some value out of this one. And as always, please leave us a review or subscribe if you're watching on YouTube. We love seeing that number go up, it boosts your ego and it keeps us coming back every week. So we'll catch you all in the next one. Happy investing.   Michael: Happy investing.  

Ep 9 - Theory Bites 2: Youth Liberation & The First PrisonWe've got another short Theory Bites! First we discuss Youth Liberation - (I)An-ok Ta Chai, 2004, and then First Prison - William Gillis, 2018 Case Closed / Detective Conan (video)Flanders' Parents (video)Dead Poets Society Dad (video - was that last episode?)Rutger Bregman Real Life Lord of the Flies (article)Angelica's Last Stand (paywalled video)When schools become The Lord of the Rings (tweet) https://www.worksintheorypodcast.com Twitter: @workstheorypodInstagram: works.in.theory Produced, edited, and transcribed by Allyson https://www.forestfreeter.comTheme song by http://woulg.com/Transcript:Works in TheoryTheory Bites: Youth Liberation and The First PrisonElysha: [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to another Works In Theory - Theory Bites. I am Elysha here from Works In Theory Podcast, and I am here with Tom-Tom: Tom!Elysha: And Nate. Nate: I'm Nate. Elysha: Yes. I don't know why we wanted folks to say their own names, but I did. And they did it. And I love that. So thank you. Nate: Yeah.Elysha: We're going to try and smush two articles together today for this one bite. So this is big bite or two small bites. Both of these articles came from the anarchist library dot org. Which is sort of a loosely moderated library, archive of different anarchist texts. And I wanted to mention that because they're a great resource. If you're interested in browsing around for yourself,Tom: But you shouldn't have to, our podcast is all you need. So don't worry too much [00:01:00] about that.Elysha: Yeah, but just, just so that, you know, the tool is out there, you don't need it. You don't need you. Didn't, it's fine. But like it's, anarchist library dot org, and I just really wanted to mention it for these two texts because, the authors of these, you may not have heard of in the same way that you've heard of Emma Goldman.So we've got two pieces here. I'm really not sure what order we're going to do them in, but we've got one by William Gillis, which is called The First Prison and one by (I)An-ok Ta Chai, which is called Youth Liberation. Nate: So I say, let's start with the youth liberation piece. Both because it's written earlier it's from 2004 versus the other one is from 2018. And because it's a little shorter.Tom: Yeah. So the the premise of this one, the kind of question that I think I took out of it was we treat adults as infallible and self-sufficient children are incapable. But like, is that true? And are we just conditioning children for subservience to the state capitalism, other forms of control? Or [00:02:00] should we treat them with mutual respect and treat it like any other issue, any other anarchist position?And it's similar to the Goldman piece, but I think it's it's got some distinctions. For one thing, I think it's a little more extreme.Nate: Yeah, for sure. Yeah. In fact, you keep saying children, but the author actually would prefer that we say kids.Tom: Oh, you're right!Nate: Yeah, they bring up the fact that children sort of has like a connotation of like "childish", of like, "less developed" you know, just like built right into it. And even though the piece is called Youth Liberation, they said youth tends to refer to teenagers, which is, you know, generally correct.And so what they're talking about as a, gerontocracy like just an overall system of like hierarchy in which adults have domination over kids. Elysha: The piece kind of opens up, asking the question of: how are people in society treated? And you can tell a lot about society based on how they treat their children and they're elderly. And I feel like we're kind of at like, [00:03:00] an era of reckoning with that, at least around here, we had so much trouble with like care homes for elderly people through the pandemic and schools brought up their absolute array of challenges as well.And you know, not all of those are specifically rooted in like how we treat children, but kind of they are. And the idea that yeah - what we're talking about here, that kids are entirely dependent on those structures and require that control that like you have to go to school, you have to decide every aspect of their lives and it needs to be within the structure.Maybe our, all of our lives would be a lot easier if we were a little easier on like those early years. Nate: Yeah, definitely. And you know, you bring up this idea that kids according to our society, like need to be controlled need to like, not be able to make their own decisions because they're dependent, you know? The other says it's an often [00:04:00] unspoken notion that adults are omniscient or infallible or not dependent on help and support while kids are.Which of course is not true. Right? Like adults make mistakes all the time, just like kids do. But we don't base any sort of specific hierarchy over adults that way, like, I thought this was kind of interesting food for thought. The other says:"It all becomes apparent if one reflects on how it proposition to systematically dominate people who are physically ill, injured, ignorant ill-informed, or intoxicated, all of which are also temporary conditions like childhood that would be universally laughed at and dismissed."I guess the idea here is the same arguments that say kids, you need to be dominated. Could also be used to say that injured, ignorant or intoxicated people need to be dominated because, you know, they can make stupid mistakes or they are not infallible or omniscient. But of course we wouldn't say that it's right for those people to be dominated. Tom: Yeah. If we didn't let intoxicated people have free will, we wouldn't have much of a government, [00:05:00] I think. Elysha: Or a lot of art. Tom: That's true too.Nate: It's interesting you bring bec ause we talked about this a little bit offline, but when I was reading this part about the idea that we wouldn't let adults who are, you know, in some way in capable of making their own decisions, we wouldn't let them be dominated.That's actually not exactly true. You know, and I brought up the, the whole Free Britney thing with Britney Spears and her conservatorship. Like the whole idea behind that is that she is not, you know, for whatever reason able to make her own decisions. And therefore, like there are other people who are legally able to dominate her and make decisions for her. The whole Free Britney Movement is the idea that we recognize that's wrong, that she is able to make her own decisions and she should be allowed to make mistakes just like anybody else. But it's all premised on this idea that she's somehow more childlike, you know? And that brings in this idea that, that like, well, why is, why is that accepted for children? You know, I think a lot of the arguments for Free Britney would use [00:06:00] language like, "Well, she's an adult. She can make her own decisions." But like children can make their own decisions too.Tom: Yeah. And like, this comes up a lot with acting, especially where, like children are often taken advantage of by parents and by agents or whatever. They work them a lot and make a lot of money off with the kids and the kids don't see any of it. And usually end up kind of wrecking their lives because it's very traumatic to kind of like have that duality of life where you're seen as a superstar that doesn't make any money and has no will.Nate: Yeah, exactly. It's hard to imagine that these kids would be any worse off if they were allowed to make decisions themselves.Elysha: No doubt. Tom: I have a quote here:"The domination of kids breaks the wills of people and inserts authoritarian programming, so that they can later reproduce situations such as the state capitalism and gerontocracy when they get older themselves."Nate: Yeah. A hundred percent and yeah. So I don't know how you, you all feel about this. Like how much you agree with the idea of youth liberation. You [00:07:00] know, I think I do agree with it and it's broad terms. I don't think I agree with everything we were going to talk about in both of these pieces. One point that the author makes towards the end, which I think is salient and worth keeping in mind is that like these kinds of things that seem really natural, these like hierarchies that seem really natural are like exactly the type of things that as anarchists we should be questioning. Cause every hierarchy at some point was considered natural.Tom: They say:"Youth liberation is not a new idea, a lot of people have written about it and articulated it in different ways. There are already a number of people out there practicing, or at least trying to practice autonomy, respecting ways of relating with kids. With this being the case, it only makes sense for anarchists to have youth liberation fully integrated with the rest of the anarchist perspective, gerontocracy needs to be right up there with capitalism, the state patriarchy and white supremacy as institutions of social control that as anarchists, we aim to destroy."Elysha: Can we spend this into a discussion of one of those other institutions of social control - the piece by William Gillis that we're reading is [00:08:00] called The First PrisonNate: I think it's time to move on to that one.Elysha: One of the main points that we wanted to highlight is the idea that adult supremacy, gerontocracy, paints itself as a kind of meritocracy, you're only denied political agency because you don't yet have mental agency, but there is no mechanism, not a single one under adults who primacy whereby a six year old might prove qualifications to obtain their freedom and equal status.So in this world that we live in, there's nothing a kid can do to prove to you that they deserve to make whichever decision is that you're withholding from them. The only way to do that to gain that freedom is to graduate away from childhood turn 18, turn 14, turn 16, turn 21, whatever the arbitrary number is that all of a sudden means that yes, we can finally make those decisions for ourselves out of nowhere.And this is probably like tying back into some of the other conversations we've had [00:09:00] of not being given the tools of like critical thinking and like that decision making, like that first taste of freedom is like, just when your ID says that you are old enough.Nate: Yeah, or well, and Gillis says in his mind, it's actually that you, the reason the teenagers are given autonomy is simply because they're now big enough to fight back. They're big enough to beat up their parents. Elysha: They can band together for resistance and physically overwhelmed their masters. Would you say, would William Gillis say. Nate: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Which is interesting, you know, like, and this. Did give me pause. You know, when you think about it, like it is obviously, if you were to try to explain youth liberation to somebody who'd never heard about it, I think one of their first responses would be something like, "well, you know, kids just aren't smart enough or aren't mature enough to make their own decisions."And then, you know, if you come back, could a child do to prove to you, they were mature enough? Like, would you accept some proof from a six-year-old that they were mature enough to make their own decisions? And, you know, I certainly can't that go, [00:10:00] but that would be so.Tom: That's one of the, I think the major premises in this article is about, you know, if you were suddenly transformed into a child, it's a very like Detective Conan, anime sort of premise of like, if you were a kid, would you suddenly be able to convince people that you know enough to do things without them controlling your life and - probably not, but I don't know. I found it interesting that as time went on, we went from a hundred years ago to, you know, 2004 to now 2018 in this one, it has gotten more and more - I mean, like of course we have cherry picked, we just gotten three articles, but - it just got more extreme sounding. Maybe it's something to be extreme about. Like, it's been a hundred years since Goldman wrote, you know, about the child and its enemies. And we're still basically dealing with the same question: at what point do we treat children like people or sorry, kids. I keep doing that.I honestly think that (I)An-ok Ta C hai made [00:11:00] a pretty good point, that we use children as a derogatory kind of word. So I've been really trying to think about like, should I, maybe I should exercise that from my vocabulary and just say kids.Elysha: Yeah. I'm probably not gonna like fight people over it, but I think it's definitely worth considering just because of how powerful, like the words that we use and their connotations are. Right. The idea of like childish and all those negatives. But it sort of painting the idea of like lacking that autonomy, lacking the good sense to be able to make decisions. And that is "childish," like trying to separate those from the young human individuals in question. Nate: From the kids. Yeah. Yeah, totally. And actually I think Gillis even sort of expands on that a little and, and adds a little bit more weight to that argument. He points out that like all hierarchy is like, whether it be white supremacy, patriarchy, et cetera, like they're all sort of premised on this analogy of the oppressed class [00:12:00] as childish, you know, as more childlike than the oppressor class.So, it's built into the very language of all hierarchies.Elysha: We talk about, you know, what is the root of like injustice in our society. And there is not one that is how it got to be. It gets to be so pervasive. Like just all the different layers that we all get fucked around in the world. And like, yes, absolutely age is one of those.And gerontocracy is one of those right alongside, obviously with different historical weights, of you white supremacy and the other ones that you mentioned, patriarchy.Tom: Yeah, there's a quote in this piece that says:"Every hierarchy, every abuse, every act of domination that seeks to justify or excuse itself, appeals through analogy to the rule of adults over children. We're all indoctrinated from birth in ways of, "Because I said so." The flags of supposed experience, benevolence, and familial obligation are are the first of many paraded through our lives to celebrate the suppression of our agency, the dismissal of our desires, the reduction of our personhood. Our whole [00:13:00] world is caught in a cycle of abuse, largely unexamined and unnamed. And at its root lies our dehumanization of children." Nate: And I think that sort of brings it back to what I mentioned earlier about this sort of like seeming natural, this like hierarchy of adults over children seeming natural. Opponents of this idea of youth liberation might point to like non-human animals, and be like, well, look like every, every species has adults or at least mammals have adults that in birds have adults that take care of children or that are like in charge of children.And I think that, like, that kind of puts me in the mind of, of Bookchin's argument: the hierarchy is different than having different roles. So like, yes adult bird has to feed and teaches children how to fly, but in no sense, does a dominate the baby birds, does it like tell the baby birds what to do.And so I think that we can use that notion of hierarchy as being like, sort of like a systemic thing an institutionalized thing to dispense with the idea that somehow the [00:14:00] hierarchy of adults over children is natural.Tom: Yeah, but appeals to nature- they don't do it for me. So like, even, even if you're able to be like, yeah, but the mama bear, I don't know, puts their cubs to bed at 8:00 PM. I'd be like, I don't care. Like mama bear, can't speak. I need to talk to humans about human things. This also is a pretty I think contentious essay when we talked about it, we were a little, like, some of this maybe is, is advocating for a position, but not giving a lot of evidence as to why I think. And for instance, there was a point in it about the cool aunt and I think we all had kind of, some questions about that. I don't actually have anything written. Does anyone have anything written about.Nate: Well, Hey, let me let me find the quote here so we can give the listeners some context. Gillis says:" The cool aunt, the preschool teacher functioning as an aid relief worker to come briefly to take selfies with you as a prop. They're not co-conspirators, they're the incomplete flotsam, the corpses of children who tried to make it over the finish line intact. Incomplete insurgents into adulthood were worn [00:15:00] down and forgot that mission. They're not undercover children, but the warped remains. Poorly formed adults perhaps, but adults still."He's talking about, people who try to give children more agency, I guess, or try to like respect children more. Yeah. That's not cutting it for Gillis. But like you said, Tom, I'm not exactly clear on why. Elysha: Yeah. Or like what, the alternative is that Gillis wants from us. Nate: Yeah, what would be a complete insurgent or an undercover child. Elysha: Cause there is definitely a gap there that needs to be bridged. Because like we are told like we've been talking about here, like all of these experiences in childhood. Lead us to then reproduce that gerontocracy that same like hierarchy of adults over children.And, you know, the idea here that even the cool aunt, who's trying to show up for you. Like they're still not doing it. And I get like the impulse to be combative at [00:16:00] that, but it doesn't really provide any sort of like, ideas of like how we can make that better. It's just "this sucks." And like, "they're not here for you and no one's coming to free you."Tom: Is the only real solution here that this cool aunt, or this person should like take you from your parents and be like "here's a hundred dollars on a car, have fun. Your life begins now." Like, what is, what is the what is it, the inclination, what are we supposed to do with that feeling? It paints a good picture of, you know, there's the uncle that smokes weed or whatever. And they're cool. They're not real strict and they're not whatever, but at the end of the day you have to go back to your parents. And so I guess they're not liberating enough, so, but I don't know what it would be. And maybe Gillis is just pointing out that these things exist and they're not contradictory to what I'm saying.Nate: Yeah, for sure. And you know, maybe it has something to do with, like, if we're [00:17:00] taking, Gillis' worldview at its word. Because it's so systemic because like we live in a adult supremacist society, a gerontocracy like adults can never be totally complicit because they can always if push comes to shove, resort to ordering children around.But yeah, like, I don't know, that's it just seems like a bleak picture. Like can there not be a John Brown of adults for children? I don't know. So what do you all think about this idea of youth liberation and everything we've read in these two essays and the Goldman piece? Tom: I think it's really gotten me to think a lot about it. Of course I don't have children, so it's hard. I can't put anything to practice. I can only be the cool uncle or whatever which I've been trying to be. My, my partner is doing better than me, even there you know, telling their brother stop yelling at your kids.But I don't know, the main issues I see with this is that it's kind of like a chicken and the egg thing of like, well, how do we get to a point of youth liberation without fundamentally changing all of society? [00:18:00] But how do we fundamentally change all of society without changing now that you're liberating you with? Right. Nate: Yeah, definitely. You know, and I think, I, I agree with you in that, like it's given me a lot to think about. And as I mentioned, when we were talking about the first piece, I think that we should be questioning things that seem natural, hierarchies that seem natural. And I think that there's definitely an amount of adult supremacy in our society.Maybe the answer is something that we talked about in the Dewey episode. That idea that like adults have had more experience and that can guide children while still letting children make the decisions themselves. I don't think it's oppressive to stop somebody from touching a hot stove, right?Elysha: Something that I've been thinking about a little bit is so, near me, there is a Land Back camp. Some of the local indigenous folks have come together and reclaimed some land. There's just so much that they are learning and some of it they are sharing. I heard a really wonderful [00:19:00] conversation about the ways that youth leadership emerges in their land back camp and how really, it feels like it comes down to just giving everyone involved the space to be themselves and just, you know, treating everyone as humans, treating kids as humans because they are, and they have agency and they have ideas and they have passions.A lot of like beauty and like new ceremony and stuff, has come out of teenagers who have proposed ideas for action to everyone and like just the power that comes out of that. I think that Indigenous resistance movements like from what I've noticed, like they do a great job of centering youth as the future. Nate: And just like acknowledging that I good ideas can come from youth, right. You know, there may be some things we know better than kids, just because we've been around longer. But in a sense, this is like that old thing of like, deferring to the boot maker in [00:20:00] the topic of boots.Right? To tell a kid that doesn't know that a hot stove is going to burn them, not to touch a stove isn't being oppressive. Just like plumber is not oppressing me when he tells me how to do something with my plumbing. And what we just have to be careful not to. Turn that into an idea where we always know better than kids in every circumstance, but like you were saying, Elysha acknowledged that kids can teach us things too.Elysha: And there are definitely things that can come with experience. If we're specifically talking about this Land Back camp experience, there are youth there that probably don't know a lot of the traditional, like land skills, like, building shelter and like keeping fire and that kind of thing.That all needs to be taught as well. You're not oppressing people by sharing what, you know, in that way. It's kind of just how building those relationships work. Tom: You know, I was trying to think of like, when did we show respect to kids? When do we treat them as adults? And it's usually when they do something for, I'm going to say [00:21:00] capitalism? Like, you know, they invent something, they, make some progress, some invention or some science thing. I understand that science is not directly capitalistic inherently, but it's kind of like it's in service to it right now. And so, much of what we see of kids as being like, you know, good work is usually you're doing, you know, something that we expect from adults.Nate: Or like,, I don't know, on a more positive example, like Gretta Thunberg.Elysha: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Tom: Which once, once that started you know, kind of bucking against the system, she got a lot less play time. Right?Nate: Definitely. And even that though, like, and this is something that Gillis points out when he talks about "how would you be able to prove yourself?" If a kid somehow like does prove to be incredibly intelligent, skips a bunch of grades and goes to college as a kid, you know, it's like, they're just treated as like precocious, but like, it's not like they get autonomy.It's not like their parents don't get to make decisions. Tom: There's a [00:22:00] really great episode of Rugrats if you've ever seen that that show or that episode where angelica starts a lemondate stand, but like as a capitalist and then the workers basically rise up unionize, start their own stand, like make it a worker co-op. It's really incredible.Speaking of kids working, that's a very dangerous topic maybe to bring up. But I think it's, you know, it's not in any of these pieces, but it's something I think we talked a little bit about and I've been just thinking about it a bunch.When can kids work? What is child labor? We don't bat an eye at Bob's Burgers really, cause it's a family affair, and it's a cartoon. But like that's allowed, right? Like kids can work for their family. I think under the normal age of legally working.Nate: Yeah. And so it like brings up this question of like, would youth autonomy, would youth liberation mean that like kids were free to be wage slaves? But I think, you know, we talked about this a bit offline. I think that, like, what's interesting about that is it sort of like brings up the [00:23:00] libertarian argument of the, you know, the sort of lie that when you become a wage slave, like you're somehow entering into like, like you're, you're choosing to enter into a contract. That you're like, you know, like making a free choice to, to become an employee. It's sort of reinforced by the idea that we don't let kids do it. Well, kids can't become wage slaves because that's a mutually agreed upon contract. And only like adults who are able to make those sort of decisions can become wage slaves.But maybe the answer is just that all work is exploitative, whether it's with adults or with children.Elysha: There's a lot of work that we do that's not really considered work though. Like if we're talking, talking about like, what does it mean for kids to work? We were talking about this a little bit too, and I don't know if it gets too spirally, but like what qualifies as work and what work is appropriate for kids? Tom: And like, I can see if, if you take out the, the need to make money to survive, that opens up a lot more of the dialogue- how do we [00:24:00] determine what's appropriate? And it's kind of interesting because he would still end up with, you know, the parents would probably have some amount of a say over what kind of jobs or what kind of work that a kid would do.But you'd also wouldn't require it, right? It would be a lot easier to figure out, I think those kinds of thorny areas of, you know, what is appropriate, what is not, because it would just be kind of obvious. It'd be like, well, look, this is very difficult work. It's dangerous, children shouldn't be doing it. You shouldn't make your children do it. There's no reason to do it because we don't need money. You know, you're not doing it for a profit or whatever. So it just takes away a lot of those incentives to make people do stupid, bad things at an earlier age.Nate: Yeah, the idea being that is wrong to make kids work because it's wrong to exploit them, to force them to do something they don't want to do. But then like, it's okay to exploit adults. It's okay to force adults to do something they don't want to do, but maybe, we just shouldn't be forcing anyone to do anything they don't want to do.Tom: Thinking about, you know, the inverse of this, what happens with [00:25:00] youth liberation and the common conception I think of what that looks like is something like Flanders parentsin The Simpsons where it's just like, "we've tried nothing, we're all out of ideas."Like they don't know how to raise their child, they don't do anything. And I think that can be something that can be done, but I don't know, like where, what is the middle ground? Is it actually true? Like as someone, without kids, I don't know what it would be like to not punish children or to punish children.Right. Like, I don't know the actual material consequences of what happens when I make a decision based around my own personal belief system or whatever. Like does it play out? And that's the thing that I think is missing from these essays, maybe. And I don't have a clear understanding of what it is. And that's, I think again, like what the Dewey book was trying to get at was more structure around that.Nate: Yeah. So you're saying the popular conception would be, well, if we don't force kids to do stuff that just kinda like run wild and [00:26:00] be like terrible little brats or something.Tom: Yeah, Yeah.Nate: Again, like with us not having kids talk to say whether that's true or not, but, I think that, especially like in the Goldman piece, she talked about, well, no, like children are humans who can come to their own conclusions of what's good and bad.And, you know, I think that these authors would, would say that that's not the case that letting kids do what they want is not going to lead to total chaos. And like you said,in Dewey, he says we can guide kids and use our experience to suggest to them what might be the best experiences to have.But that doesn't necessarily have to be the same thing as forcing them to do what we want them to do.Tom: Yeah, not to answer my own question, but there was that Lord of the Flies article, which I'll link in the show notes, but where, you know, a lot of people look at Lord of the Flies as an example of what would happen if kids could do whatever they wanted. And that it would just be like just terrible tribal chaos, basically.When really it just ends up being like trying to do the right thing, do the best thing as you can. Nate: Yeah. And she was saying something like, you have to [00:27:00] basically this argument that we've been talking about, that you have to like force rules on kids or else it's going to be Lord of the Rings/Lord of the Flies.Tom: But always trying to steal your precious.Nate: Yes.Elysha: It was a bad tweet, but we could link that in the show notes too. Tom: Yeah, I'm good. Elysha: All right. Well, we did it. Thanks for making your way through another Theory Bites with Works In Theory Podcast, and we will be back when we're back! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

With the holidays upon us, we share our recommendations for 7 books that will make excellent holiday gifts.  --- Transcript   Tom: Greetings, and welcome to The Remote Real Estate Investor. On this episode, we're coming into holiday season and with holiday season, it's gift giving. So we're going to talk about on this episode, our favorite books that we have read to help us with our investing career. And we're gonna talk about why we like them some highlights over them. And this could be something you give to yourself or give to a friend. All right, let's do it. How is everybody doing today?   Michael: Stuffed still from Turkey and pie.   Tom: Nice. Lowkey he goes, just go to family stuff.   Michael: Yeah, we just stay put. My wife and I we had a friend in town. We adopted a friend as part of our family. So had something at the house hung out. It was great,   Tom: Nice, Emil?   Emil: We had some family over in the backyard. It was windy and cold that night in Los Angeles, which is rare. So everyone was in cold turkey and mashed potatoes by the time we brought it to their table. But you know, it was good times.   Tom: Yeah, Pierre?   Pierre: So I just went down to visit family had Thanksgiving with my mom and my sister. And then you know, got out and hiked at Big Sur and had a grand old time.   Michael: Nooiice.   Tom: Nice, it was beautiful out.   Pierre: It was gorgeous. Yeah, it was beautiful.   Michael: Tom, would you get up to man? Tom: Oh, lowkey. Little mother in law, Thanksgiving dinner, very lucky. Usually with the holidays. I'm like, my parents are local. And my wife's parents were like bouncing from house to house. But to limit the exposure, we just did one house and it's kind of mellow, kind of mellow like that. But let's go ahead and jump right into it. So on today's episode, as we mentioned, it's going to be the books episode. So this could be used as a gift for yourself, for somebody who you think might get value out of it. But let's go and start with Michael. Michael, what is the book that you're bringing to the table to talk about first?   Michael: The book that I'm gonna bring to the table talking about first is a classic. It's been talked about for years and years. And I think so many real estate investors have gotten so much value out of it. And that's Robert Kiyosaki Rich Dad, Poor Dad.   Tom: Hmm.   Michael: And so he's a pretty prevalent author. He's written numerous books, but this is the one that I kind of set me off on my path to real estate investing. And it's funny, I always say that it it kind of summarized what I had always known and kind of thought was true, but put it really nicely into a packaged sentence in Word format, because I'd always have these jumbled ideas in my head. And then I read this book, and I was like, Oh, yeah, like, that's what I've been trying to say, for all this time. And it's a super easy read. It's not complicated. It's more of a mindset book and a mindset shift book. And it's super straightforward, very easy read very simple, simple concepts.   But at its highest in its highest level, most basic level, it basically says buy assets don't buy liabilities, that's what it boils down to. And so if you can do that more times than not, you'll end up net positive, and that should be good. And so it doesn't talk about how to invest in real estate, it doesn't talk about the mechanics of what that looks like. It just talks at a high level, hey, these are some things that you should be thinking about, and different ways to be thinking about some of the things you probably already know. And so he tells the story from a child's perspective, and it was just super great read.   Tom: I bet you so many people have had their real estate awakening, like to that book, like, wait a minute, like, I want assets. I think that's been such a common I don't know in disgust talking to other people that Rich Dad, Poor Dad is just such an eye opener, because I mean, it's really easy to have the fallacy of thinking of things that are really liabilities and thinking of them as assets. You know, I don't know, cars and stuff that just that's No, no, it's not I remember I read that I was listened to as an audiobook just at a college and they were talking about real estate was one really big piece of it and systems with the other. And so I'm like, Okay, I'm gonna build my career around systems and real estate and just like, you know, ran with it.   Michael: And here you are, here I am. Yeah, it's like everybody's first. You know, they all talk about the shared experience. And yeah, like you said, so many people get started. I feel inferior. Have you guys read that book?   Pierre I have. Yeah.   Emil: What's funny is like every real estate investors Bible, I hadn't read it till like four months ago, because everyone's like, oh, rich, Dad, Poor dad's best. And it was good. I was happy I read it. I think if you've already gotten into real estate investing, it's like you said it kind of already distills why you got into it in the first place. Hundreds of people have regurgitated what has been said in it. So by the time you get if you haven't read in, you're already investing in real estate and you follow the real estate investors read blogs or whatever. You've already gotten most of those lessons. It's just getting it from the original source he's like the OG on a lot of this stuff that most real estate investors talk about. So glad I read it. Great book. More people should read it definitely changed a couple of things for me so glad I read it.   Tom: Good point. Probably more of a beginner more entry.   Michael: Yes.   Tom: Maybe you have a friend who or partner or whatever sibling Why are you buying real estate on the other side of the country? Why are you both you know, like,   Michael: Yes,   Tom: Yeah if you already like the Kool Aid taste, you don't need to drink more kool aid for this stuff.   Michael: That's right.   Emil Yeah, There's more stuff in it than just real estate investing though I think like if you're in real estate investing, and let's say you have a full time job, he talks about business and the idea of paying yourself first and all these other concepts, which those were a little bit newer for me, like I've always heard pay yourself first, but he kind of actually frames it a different way than I had originally thought pay yourself first. I won't spoil it. But I think even if you're in real estate, there's like business lessons in there. There's other lessons that a lot of people can get stuff out of.   Michael: Dig it.   Tom: Emil, you're up next.   Emil: Alright, so first book and keeping it real estate investing related. I got one rental at a time, which is by our good friend who has come on the show a couple times. Michael Zuber, it is also not a how to book but is the story of his journey. And I like that he's a working professional, which I think a lot of people listening to this show can relate. We're not very few of us, if any, you know, our full time real estate investors right now. We have a full time job. So balancing being a real estate investor and full time job and all those things. I think it was a really unique story.   I don't think you read a lot about those. You know, you hear more about someone who quit their job went into real estate full time flipping this and that, but he is a buy and hold investor hear about his 15 year journey through real estate and how he achieved financial freedom. I love it. Great book. I recommend it to a lot of people. And Michael's a really smart guy. So definitely recommend if you haven't read it, read it. If you have send it to a friend. It's one of my favorites.   Michael: It was interesting, because we had him on the podcast, before I had had a chance to read his book, or you guys had had him on he was on and you guys interviewed him a while back. And then I picked up his book. And then we had him on the podcast. And I was like, Oh, I liked the book so much better after having heard him speak and just realizing that like, Yeah, he's just a guy. He's just a dude, like super cool guy super down to earth person. He's not this high and mighty, you know, you have to do this. You have like God, like, this is my story. It worked for me, maybe I can help you too. That's great.   So I think you hit the nail on the head of nail, it's very much mindset shift. And he kind of breaks it down into a little bit more granular of like, this is what I did kind of like on a step by step basis. And it's not so overwhelming. He really did eat the elephant one bite at a time. I think when we see or hear about real estate success stories always see is that person at the mountaintop, but we don't see all the blood, sweat and tears that they left on the way up getting there. And so he kind of talked about that a little bit, which I thought was really humanizing.   Emil: Yeah, it's rare to read the full story. You know, a lot of times, it's like, you just see the guy or gal who has 200 doors. And it's like, How the heck did you get there? And this book, like really distills it all down, which is it's fun to read.     Tom: Yeah. What I liked about his book, and him is he's like an open book. So like, I think real estate can oftentimes be guilty of putting terms and acronyms and making it sound more fancy. And like pretentious than it really is. I think, Michaels Zuber does a really good job in his book and just talking to him of being really practical and giving specific actionable stuff and saying, no, it's very doable. This is what I did XYZ, and not throwing a bunch of jargon and leaving parts out and talking about it. So as an open book, I think is the best way to describe him, as well as the book and talking through his experience in a very non hoity-toity or non…   Michael: Just uses layman's terms.   Emil: It's not intimidating.   Tom: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And he's just stripped that away. So great book Emil, front of the pod.   Michael: The other thing that I like about that, before we move on is that a lot of people talk about how difficult it is to invest in California, or how hard it is to make the numbers work in California, but he did it. And so people could say like, Oh, yeah, he had a California salary. But you can take the same thing and scale it to any other part of the country. Right? If you're not investing in California, you don't need a California salary. So if you can go live in the Midwest and earn a Midwest salary, you can go invest in the Midwest and things scale, oftentimes geographically. So I think I don't know if that makes sense, or if that's material to us, but whatever.   Tom: I dig it. All right Pierre.   Pierre Sure. Yeah, I'll deviate from the whole real estate theme. And I'm going to recommend an old book here. I think this one's from 1946. And it's called Economics In One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt, not overly sophisticated not using jargon, it's very accessible. He systematically destroys 20 economic fallacies with cool calm logic and historical evidence to back it up. And the whole point of the book is to show how to feel good or do good economic policies that are meant for a specific interest group can often have adverse outcomes for the general public, hurting everybody. So it pushes back against these currents of economic thought, and showing how the inconsistency in the principles that they're derived from can cause some pretty destructive effects in practice.   So like each chapter, he just takes on one fallacy at a time and destroys it with simple language. And it's super easy to understand. And so really great entry point into reading economics. And it's fascinating to see how some of these fallacies that he was talking about back in the 1940s are still so prevalent today. And that are kind of the rallying cry of so many of the political movements today from both sides. So it's fascinating to see how on the nose this guy was back then and how relevant his arguments still Is today.   Michael: What was one of the best fallacies see debunked.   Pierre: So he starts with like the most simple ones, the broken windows fallacy, and its cousin the blessing of destruction, how different economic prosperity has come from war, and then the curse of machinery. How a lot of people are mistaken about how these labor saving devices are putting workers out of work and hurting society as a whole. He talks about like, who the tariffs actually help, and this drive for exports, and is it really beneficial. I won't dive into each of these arguments. So you can go and read it. It's a short book, it's only about 200 pages, or a little less than 200 pages, but parody prices, saving specific industries, how  prices actually work, what government price fixing, does what rent control actually does, what minimum wage laws do the function of profits and inflation and stuff like that   Tom: Two things I like, but I haven't read it. I'm adding it to my queue. But something that was written a long time ago, and still getting super high reviews, I just looked at the Goodreads. It's like the rotten tomatoes score of moving on, you guys have seen that for and it's like four plus, which I automatically like, and then also something about brevity being kind of short and concise.   Pierre: Yeah. And the version that I have the forward is by Steve Forbes, and it's recommended by Nobel laureates like Frederick Hayek and his teacher listed on Nice's the pillars of Austrian economics and the Austrian economic business cycle, the main takeaway that I have from it is just thinking about how something that might look good for a specific group right now in the short run will almost always hurt the general interest in the long run. And once we implement these policies, it's super hard to undo them. So we get stuck with these policies that are delivering the exact opposite of what its stated purpose was.   So it's really good to be able to look in and say like, oh, there's a second, third, fourth order effect of this thing. And we should be very careful before quickly adopting something that sounds pretty nice and romantic. And if you want it for free, the Mises Institute gives it away for free. If you go to mises.org economics in one lesson, type that into your search bar, they'll mail you a free copy of the book, because it's that important.   Michael: Nice.   Tom: Nice, nice. Check it out. Awesome. The next one, I'm going to do just a comment on some of these books. So about a year ago, and a little over a year ago, and preparing for Roofstock Academy and building this product out I just went on a binge and I read like I went onto Goodreads and like read every top one, just put it in my audible account and pounded through one. And this one particularly I liked a ton it is the millionaire real estate investor by Gary Kelly. It was written back in 2005. And I would say this is kind of a beginner to like middle experience. I think even if you are do have a bunch of properties, I think it's a really good way to think about it.   It appeals to a lot of different like systems thinking so just kind of I had to use four different kind of descriptors of why I like this book. One of them is it speaks to hard and soft skills. So in the beginning, it talks about mindset and goals, which is so important. If you're doing this kind of longer journey of building wealth through real estate, it's important to have the right thought in the way that you're thinking about it. Otherwise, it's over time it's hard to sustain. The other is into the more technical skills into acquisitions and ownership and, and thinking kind of system mindedly. I think it does a great job of blending those two aspects which are both really important in real estate.   The other is it is like realistic and the way that it's set it up. As I said, building wealth through real estate, I can sometimes take time and it is not the hotel ballroom, we're going to make you rich and just follow these five steps. It's very pragmatic about this is not a get rich quick and lastly related to that is it includes at the end of it a ton of use cases of people who have had success and what their journey is so kind of similar to Michael Zubers book, talking about his detailed journey. This includes a bunch of use cases of people so excellent book millionaire real estate investor by Gary Keller. Yeah, have you guys read the millionaire real estate investor?   Michael: I have but it's been a while. I don't have much colored   Emil: I just picked it up. See that? I'm pointing to it here.   Tom: Yeah, I can see the top book right there.   Pierre I do recognize it there, yeah.   Emil: I just picked it up a feeling it's been recommended enough. I'm like, Alright, I'll skim through it. Let's go.   Pierre Let's go!   Tom: Let's go. Highly recommended.     Emil: Do you guys skim through books now? Like there's certain books where I'm like, I've gotten good at just skimming through books instead of just reading them cover to cover. Curious if you guys do that?   Pierre It depends on the kind of book.   Emil: Yeah, true. Business, real estate investing those kinds of books.   Tom: Yeah,I do the audio version of skimming, which is speeding the speaker up to like 3x. And just like have a little bit of blood dripping out of my ears.   Michael: Okay, for the first time this is what you are going to do.   Emil: I listen to every podcast on 1.5 x. And if you go back down to one after listening to like a podcast for 20 minutes, it sounds like everyone's drunk or something. It's so funny.   Michael: It's like if you've been speeding on the freeway driving 90 then you go back to 65 like man, this is a snail's pace.   Tom: Yeah. All right, I got one more round of book reviews. or book recommendations this time may or may not be related to real estate. So, Mr. Michael Albaum lead us off.   Michael: Yeah. So we started a book club at the Roofstock Academy that's been going on several months now. It's been a lot of fun. So we recently read How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, which is a book that I read years ago. It's a classic book. I think it was written in the 20s 1920s. Pierre, correct me if I'm wrong.   Pierre: Yeah. Originally published in 1936. Michael   Michael: 36 awesome thanks. Yeah.    Tom: Gotta love books with staying power.   Pierre: That's right.   Michael: But uh, it's a book. And, Tom, I love that. You mentioned Gary Keller's book about soft skills and hard skills. This is a book all about soft skills. And it talks all about people skills. And that's something that's so rarely taught, and the hard skills you can learn anybody can really teach that to someone. But it's the soft skills that I think are a lot tougher to master. And so it talks about ways to be likable. And I mean, I think the title kind of sums it all up How to Win Friends and Influence People really nicely. And it's a book that you can reread over and over and over again, I intend to read it once a year, at least, as some good refresher and good tips and tricks. Just in your everyday life doesn't have to be specific to real estate investing doesn't have to be specific to business, but just in living your life as a human being. I think it offers some really great tips and nuanced ways to live a happier life and just, you know, be a more like person.   Tom: Classic one plus one, I have kind of a funny story. I've got a funny story related to this book. So I got this book in college, and I was reading it and I play football in college. And I had left the book in the training room just on accident, like icing or doing something after and I left in the training room. And this guy who was kind of like a big scary defensive lineman had took it after I'd left and was like, he took it and he was like reading He's like, Oh, this is really this is great stuff from I'm like, Yeah, good. Take it. It's all yours, man. He was a super nice guy, Matt Moil, I hope your hope you're doing well out there. I haven't talked to you in a while. But anyways, I was an early evangelist and sharing this book with some big defensive linemen. But yeah, for all the stuff that Michael said just a classic I mean, kind of similar in a way that Rich Dad Poor Dad and kind of turn people on to that this book on to personal development and sharpening the saw and all that really important stuff that pays huge dividends. So great book,   Michael: I think one of the best parts of it is that it's actionable like day one. It's easy to read, and you can just go practice the things that it's talking about, like, Oh, this works for me or Oh, this doesn't. It doesn't require you to spend money or invest in real estate or anything like that, to realize the fruits it has to offer.   Tom: Alright, Emil. Got another book?   Emil: All right, my next one, just given its end of the year, I think a lot of us are thinking 2021 goals. I don't know why Michaels laughing in the background, but I'm gonna keep it going anyway, you know, as we're thinking 2021 goals. I'm a huge believer that a lot of your goals and the things you want to achieve are just habits you need to create. I don't think they're just these like, giant monumental things that need to happen. A lot of the big stuff you see are the changes you see people make are just tiny habits they've formed in their lives just compounded over a long period of time. I think you could even say that about real estate investing a lot of different things. So the book I'm recommending is called Atomic Habits by James Clear, really practical guide on how to build good habits and break bad ones. It also has some cool tips, you know, we all have our vices, right? And he just gives you some like really practical tips on how do you make a vise feel less like a vise like, how do you do something good before you kind of indulgent advice, and I just think it has a lot of good practical tips, especially heading into the new year where people are planning their goals. So I'm probably gonna reread it heading into this month, myself.   Michael: And Neil, what's a vice for you Just out of curiosity?   Emil: Man, I don't really have any right now.   Michael: But because you read the book,   Emil: No, I can't believe I'm gonna admit this on the show. I haven't played video games in like a decade, and my brother in law got an Oculus, and I tried it out. Oh, man, it's unreal. so freaking fun. And so I couldn't help myself and I bought an Oculus. And that is going to be my vise. And so it's like, you know, what's, what's something productive you can do for 10-15 minutes before you spend some time playing Oculus. So it's got some some tips like that.   Michael: I've played on Oculus and I found myself I was sweating after I got done. So it's kind of like a workout too.   Emil: It can be there's games where you're like, doing a lot of movement and all that, which is what my wife was stoked about. So she's she's in on it too. That's gonna be my vice. That's my main one.   Michael: Right on.   Emil: I also eat a lot of sweets on the weekends. That's another vise   Michael: Just on weekends.   Emil: Yeah, I have a big sweet tooth and I just kind of limited to the weekend.   Michael: You're a stronger man than I.   Emil: Oreo fiend.   Tom: Pierre, got one more for us?   Pierre: Sure, you guys, read Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari?   Michael: Oh, it's so good.   Pierre: It's super fun book I know is on the bestseller list. But if you haven't read that that's a fun interdisciplinary historical account of human history. tracking all the different domains of human society and development and all the way up into these complex societies that we live in today. So I think that's a really fun book. I think I've read it three times. So…   Michael: That's a long one, too. Yeah,   Pierre: Yeah. But it reads itself. I mean, that is both reads itself. And he has two more and following that…   Emil: Homo Deus   Pierre Homo Deus, and then 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. But I think Sapiens is definitely his best. The other one's are kind of more speculative and preachy.   Tom: He's a big, month long, Silent Retreat, like meditation guy, he doesn't like yeah, four months, a year, every year, I think it is like two month ones at a time. He's getting those those ideas around sapiens, you know, thinking about it.   Pierre: I love books of human history. I like like, oh, the last 13 years in human history. These are the theme of books that I read a lot like Guns, Germs and Steel and things like this that I find really fascinating. But what I really love about Harare is that he pulls from so many different you know, economics, religion, nutrition, culture, and warfare and politics and like you have this really thorough interdisciplinary scoop of history. So I think that's a really fun way to look at things, how they're all interconnected, and how they all feed into the world that we live in today.   Michael: It was pretty eye opening when they were talking when he was talking about that, you know, domesticating animals Yeah. And how you know, the dogs came from wolves. And the reason that dogs are man's best friend is because all the ones that weren't man best friend, they just kill them. So they just got like, the best jeans like yeah, this was so good. Like, see ya. Eye opening.   Pierre A pretty dumb side note, but I saw this meme. It's like a wolf looking at the fire and it says like, some food scraps next to the fire. What's the worst that can happen? It's like 10,000 years later, another picture. It's like a pug and a pink hat all dressed stupidly.   Michael: So good.   Tom: So good. I'll closes out here. So I'll actually make it to just because I like that that Sapiens call, Eric Larson is an author who does like history like tracks some event like some major event, and then some like little subplots within that event. The most recent one that I read is called the splendid and the vile, and it's about Churchill's during the air raid the what's it called the German air raid during World War Two. Anyways, awesome, awesome book. He also does the Devil in the White City, which is really good as well.   But my real pick for this the last one is another kind of soft skills mindset. One, it's called the Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz, and I'm going to summarize it real quick is it's a short book it is there's four kind of key things from it as ways to live your life one is, be impeccable with your word. Don't take don't take things personally. Don't make assumptions and always do your best I think, in all aspects of your life. If you could go by those four key you know, drivers, you're gonna be, you're gonna be in good shape   Pierre I should have know you were a mystic, Tom.   Tom: I am! I'm a Sufi mystic.   Pierre: Yeah, no, that's a good book. He has another one called the Mastery of Love, which is also kind of a great little life lessons. Great little interpersonal life lessons.   Tom: Yes. Cool, guys, any final thoughts on books, the episode, all that good stuff.     Michael: I just think books can be such a great gift for people for I personally was never a big reader growing up, I would always have more fun goofing off. And then I started reading more about something I was passionate about real estate specifically, and, you know, kind of self growth, self improvement. I was like, oh, there's this whole world in books that didn't even know existed. So if you're not a big reader, to all the non big readers out there, you know, find something that you're passionate about, and try opening up a book. I think you might be pleasantly surprised.   Pierre: And if that's hard for you hit the audiobook.   Michael: Yeah, exactly.   Tom: I joke that I can't read it, but I can listen really well.   Emil: Something tells me our audience are readers.   Michael: Voracious readers.   Emil: If you're taking time out of your day to listen to podcasts like this. I think you you like learning and knowledge and I feel like we got a lot of readers.   Tom: Blinkist is another interesting website. They take nonfiction primarily and they condense it down into like, 1 10-minute spiel worth of reading. So they have I think they have like PhD students like PhD people do these. They were they break down. They have tons and tons of titles and you pay an annual subscription. We're not getting any, any any profit from Blinkest or from any of these recommendations. But yes, it's worth checking out Blinkest. It's like Cliff Notes, but like for adults for nonfiction stuff, so Blinkest.   Michael: Do they have that audio version as well?   Emil: It's primarily ausio.   Tom: But they do have a PDF versions as well.   Michael: Sweet.   Pierre: Oh, and also everyone out there. Hit us with your favorite books in the comments down below.   Tom: Yes.   Pierre: Let us hear what you guys are reading out there.   Tom: Yes. Awesome, guys. Well, on that note, I think it's a good time to close it out. All right, Happy investing.   Michael: Happy investing.   Emil: Happy investing.

In this episode, Tom and Michael chat with Matthew Whitaker from GK Houses about what it takes to have effective property management and how investors can set themselves up for successful relationships with their PMs.   --- Transcript   Michael: Hey, everyone. Welcome to another episode of The Remote Real Estate Investor. I'm Michael Albaum. And today I'm joined by Tom Schneider and Matthew Whitaker with GK Houses, Matt and GK Houses is one of our preferred property management partners at Roofstock. And so we're going to be talking to Matt today about what it's like to be a property manager. What are some things that we as investors can do to make their lives easier? And give us a little bit of insight into what a day in the life of a PM looks like. So let's get into it.   Theme Song   Michael: Matt Whitaker. Thank you so much for joining us today. Really, really appreciate you taking the time to be with us. How are you doing?   Matthew: Yeah, I'm doing great. I'm excited to be here and excited to do this with you.   Michael: Awesome. And you're down in the Southeast, right?   Matthew: I am. Yeah. I'm in Birmingham, Alabama. That's where our corporate office is and we're in eight different markets. So we're in three markets in Colorado and then we are also in Birmingham, Nashville, Atlanta, Chattanooga, and Little Rock.   Michael: Awesome. Awesome. And for those of our guests who might not know you, can you give us a little bit of background about yourself on GK houses, help everyone get to know you a bit?   Matthew: Yeah. I'd love to some, the CEO of GK houses. I started it about 13 years ago during the last recession. And during that kind of, 07, 08, 09 time when the market crashed, I owned about 30 rental houses at the time and had a hard time selling those once the market crashed. Most of those were in the low to moderate income world and the ability to sell that went away. And I started a property management company, converted all those 30 over into rentals and was able to get some of my investor buddies to also let me manage them. So I got up to about 70 houses pretty quickly, and that was kind of how I lasted through that recession through 08, 09, 2010 was by managing homes in about, we also were selling homes. So we were doing some turnkey stuff at the time, kind of original before it was very popular. And, but in 2013 we really started off focusing on the management business. And we decided at that point we managed about 250 homes right here in Birmingham. And at that point we decided that we wanted to get to 25,000 houses under management. And so we've been growing that ever since 2013. And today we manage somewhere around 26, 2,700 homes in those eight markets that I talked about earlier.   Michael: Great. And did you have any personal management experience in the real estate arena or did you go straight from owner to manager?   Matthew: I always swore I would never be a property manager or a real estate agent…   Michael: You're in good company.   Matthew: And a lot of companies did that same thing. Yeah. And so never, never say that to yourself, but now I'm a real estate agent and a property manager. And so I managed my own homes. So I had been doing it ever since I first got started, even my first house I ever bought, I still own, and I have rented it ever since. And that was a disaster story. So it's amazing that I'm in the property management business. So yes, I did have a little bit of management experience. I had been in the buying and selling business for about seven or eight years. So I was very familiar with what a manager did. I had some other third party managers that manage some homes for me for some time and found all the things that I didn't like about a property manager. And so I decided to just do it ourselves, with GK Houses.   Michael: That's great. I love that. You've got that personal experience that you did it for yourself and then went into business, helping other people do it because it just shows that you understand the business kind of from the ground up, which I think is so huge. And you're able to treat the rentals as if they were your own.   Matthew: Yeah. There's nothing that replaces knowing what it's like to have a $500 bill come through, or a $2,000 air conditioning, a replacement come through where you're expecting that cashflow to pay the mortgage. And now all of a sudden you've got to figure out some other way to pay that mortgage. So it definitely gives us empathy for our owners. And that's something that we've tried to communicate and teach to the team members that work for us is, you know, and I'll often say to them, what if on Friday you found out that I was going to pay you $500 less with your paycheck. And they, you know, that would be disappointing to them if it was a surprise. And that is the same surprise that we were calling up from time to time. And unfortunately having to deliver bad news to owners because inevitably things are going to break when an owner buys a rental house they're in business and you're going to have expenses for that business. And so we've learned a lot over the years about having reserves and making sure that you can afford to pay for the lumpy expenses that are in this business, but it still requires a bunch of empathy from our team members when they're communicating with owners and having deliver, you know, have tough conversations.   Michael: That's great.   Tom: You touched on reserves. I'd love your thoughts, Matt, on, you know, what do you think an appropriate like reserve level is?   Matthew: Yeah. If I was in new person getting into the business and I bought a foot, let's call it a fully renovated home. I would probably stay about. And obviously depending on the age or the vintage of the house, I would stay about $3,000 out. So I would keep at least $3,000 available at all times. And then as I got to a bigger portfolio, obviously the per house number would come down because you could dilute that across the portfolio. But getting started, I would say somewhere around two to $3,000, just available to make sure that it doesn't affect your lifestyle. And if you do have one of those expenses that comes through   Michael: And in that same vein, most lenders are going to require a cash reserve amount for PITI. Would you consider that a couple thousand dollars to be that same pool of the reserve bucket? Are you saying above and beyond this? The reserve?   Matthew: Yeah. I'm just talking about expenses and then capitalizable type items. I mean, I may even start as you started to build a portfolio and this is one of the reasons I always tell people don't buy one rental house. I mean, certainly try it on dip your toe in the water, but it's way easier to own 10 rental homes than it is to own one because you all these expenses start to get diluted amongst your cashflow of your portfolio. And then it doesn't become as big of a deal when you have a $500 bill come through. If you have a rental house, a $500 bill comes through, you're literally writing a check out of your back pocket. Sometimes if you have 10 rental houses and a $500 bill comes through, it's just another number on your statement. And you're just calculating your return based on that. So I think of that in excess of that, I'm just thinking of, in terms of repairs and maintenance,   Michael: Tom like you always say peanut butter spreading that across.   Tom: Peanut butter spread the risk. I love that quote yeah, 10 properties, a lot easier than one property.   Matthew: It is, and absolutely if you're not having to manage all of them, any, even if you are, obviously you're spreading that risk across multiple residents with different jobs and different industries. And if somebody invests through you, they can even do it across different markets. So 10 seems to be the magic number in my opinion.   Michael: Great   Tom: perfect segue talking about, you know, as long as you're not managing it, and let's talk in a little bit about the roles and responsibility of a third party property manager that you would hire, what are the different things that services that they would provide in the process?   Matthew: I really think the services of a property manager fall into two buckets. There is the accounting bucket and the communication bucket. And obviously under that communication comes execution, but let's talk about accounting first. Part of our operations is accounting for our homeowners. We want to make sure that the money comes in on time, that the resident's abiding by what the lease term says in terms of money paid. And so we're going to kind of hold the resident to making sure financially that house is getting taken care of. And then we're going to account for all the dollars that come in and of course paying any expenses that we need to pay out of that money that comes in. And then the other side is just operations and communication around those operations. We're obviously going to make sure that the house is taken care of. One of the interesting things, especially around small multifamily and single family.   There's a lot of logistics involved in that. I always say it's a communication challenge and a logistics problem. So it's about, you know, having a one house, one owner or one vendor, you're always communicating with somebody. So you need to be really good at communicating. And our property managers become more like air traffic controllers. They're making sure the vendor knows where to go. What time to be there has the resident's information. The resident knows that the vendor's coming. The owner knows that there's a problem at the house if it exceeds a certain amount of money. And so you're having to keep all of these people in the loop and make sure that the planes aren't running into each other while you're that. And so, again, it just boils really down to accounting and making sure that I's are dotted and T's are crossed and then operations and communications.   Michael: Matt, you said something that I want to circle back to that the owner knows if there's a problem, if it's above a certain dollar amount. So from folks who have never purchased a property, what do you mean by that? And why is that important to highlight?   Matthew: Yes. So you hire a private manager to basically take care of the problems and you don't want to know that something small has happened at your house. That's not really going to affect your lifestyle. It's just kind of brain damage for somebody to call you over a hundred dollar issue. So we have, what's called a $500 kind of threshold. And if one of our maintenance guys goes out there and he sees that this thing's going to exceed over $500, we're going to contact the owner before we do anything and provide them an estimate. But if it's below that $500, we're generally just going to take care of that issue. And then the owner's going to see that happen. You know, see that payment on their statement. You hire a property manager and you will be circled in on all the big issues, but we want to handle all the small issues. That's why we feel like you hire us is for a turnkey solution, not to have to sweat the small stuff.   Michael: Awesome. Thanks for clarifying and Matt, in your opinion, you know what separates the good from the great property managers?   Matthew: Yeah. We go back to accounting and communication again, getting the numbers right. Is so incredibly important and you'd be surprised at how many property managers get that wrong. The other, again, communicating, it's so hard in our business to communicate and trying to make sure as an owner. And of course I was in this position. So I know exactly how they feel. If you don't know what's going on, it's not like you expect the best is happening. And so you want to make sure that you're clearly in the loop and you have the confidence and the trust of your property manager, that if something bad is happening, that you're going to be well aware of it. And also communicated with what we call uncomfortable transparency, which means I'm not going to withhold information from you to make it easier to tell you or more palatable or, you know, easier on me really, because I don't want you to get mad at me.   So we want to make sure that we're giving our owners the truth. And we call that also entering into the danger and telling them, being willing to tell them exactly what's going on with their house so that they, if it is a big issue, they can make the best decision for themselves. And also try to remain as objective as possible when we're communicating, because money can be very emotional for people. And if we can kind of steer them towards the best solution, then we want to make sure that we're doing that based on our experience as a property manager, you know, we do have the benefit of, and especially in the South right now, it's getting really hot and air conditioners are breaking well. We have the benefit of knowing that air conditioners break and things we've done in the past and mistakes that we've made in the past. So, you know, when it becomes a, should I spend 600 or $700 to fix this air conditioner and it may last another couple of years or a $2,000 replacement or a $2,500 replacement. Well, we can give them kind of some objective advice based on what we've seen in the past. And then the owner can make their own decision based on that information.   Tom: That's a great example of being proactive in informing the most decision and using some of the information that you guys have as an investor. We want to get the top dollar. We want to manage the least amount of vacancy as possible. What were some things that you would advise that the owner, the investor can help achieve those?   Matthew: Yeah, the biggest expense and investor's going to have is turnover. You know, you can have a picky tenant that calls in a lot of maintenance work orders, or it feels like they're calling in a lot of maintenance work orders, but truly turnover in my opinion is the biggest expense you have. I think of it and you played football, Tom. It is like going in to score a touchdown. And instead of you throw an interception on as you're about to score, and then they run it back for a touchdown, it's like a 14 point swing that somebody moves out because, and the reason I say that is not only do you have loss of rent, so you're not having money come in, but you're also having to pay money out on deferred expenses when that happens. And so it's very important that you keep residents in homes and the way you do that is you do it through good communication with the residents.   You do that through handling maintenance work orders. One of the things we found was our residents started staying longer when we internalize maintenance because our maintenance team is not out there just fixing a problem. Our maintenance team is tasked with making the resident happy because they're a GK team member. And so if you think about kind of the change in that, if a maintenance team member thinks his job is to just fix something, well, that's a problem if ultimately in the owner's best interest is that resident staying alone time. But if the maintenance team member is out there with the idea, I want to make this resonant as happy as possible, then it makes the resident happy. It's in the owner's best interest because the resident stays a whole lot longer.   Michael: That's great.   Tom: Oftentimes decisions, especially those big decisions that you'll make with an investor it's the repair or replace, or do we want to focus on vacancy or rent growth? And I don't know, I guess one of you just elaborate a little bit on those two important decision points that can make or break deals.   Matthew: Let's talk a little bit about rent growth, because I think what I've always thought of it, the way I mentally look at it is staying a little bit behind the curve. Like I don't want to be on the bleeding edge and I don't think investors want to be on the bleeding edge of pushing grants. And I know there's some institutions out there that will actually do that for us, I think. And I like to stay a little bit behind the curve because I think it's so important that that a doesn't move out. I don't want that resident to feel like they can get a better deal somewhere else. And so what I like to do is stay a little bit behind, but definitely be in tune with rent growth and be focused on it. In our leases, we have some rent growth built in, but that also gives us the ability to go to the resident and say, Hey, you know, the owners being very generous, wants you to stay another year and has decided only to raise it 1% instead of the three to 5%, which may be in our lease or even better, they've decided not to raise rent. And because, you know, they think you're an awesome resident and normally they would raise it 5%, but they're not going to raise it at all. So it gives us the ability to even if you only raise it 1%, it gives us the ability to basically say, Hey, the owner's doing you a favor because you signed up for three or 5%.   Michael: That's great. I think, yeah, like you mentioned Tom investors where they want top dollar and you know, as much as we can push the envelope, we'd like to, but that's really great advice. Cause I think something that I chat a lot about with Academy members is when it comes to pushing rent is do the calculation, do the math for if this tenant leaves and you've got three weeks of vacancy, what does that cost versus what do you stand to make with the 10, 15, 20 bucks a month? You're going to increase the rent. The math kind of works itself out pretty clearly.   Matthew: Yeah. I would think if I'm an investor and I am on a number of rental homes, I think in terms of seven to 10 years, how can I maximize the most amount of money over that seven to 10 years? Not now. And this gets into having reserves too, because if an owner is making short term decisions is going to affect his or her longterm seven to 10 year plan then, and that's a problem. If you have reserves, you can make clear objective decisions based on how much, what the best longterm getting the most money in over that seven to 10 years. And so I think as your clients and investors operate, they need to be thinking longterm because this is a, this is not a get rich quick game. It is a consistently make good decisions over the long period so that they can over the course of owning that rental home, whether it's seven to 15 years, then they end up in a much better place.   Michael: Tom, Matt set you up so nicely for your T-ball swing. What do you like to say? Be what?   Tom: Oh, longterm greedy, be longterm greedu.   Matthew: Yeah, that's great.   Michael: Matt, I want to ask you a question about property management fees specifically around vacancy. And I get the question a lot in the Academy that says, Hey, you know what? It seems like property managers, aren't incentivized to actually keep tenants in place because of the new tenant placement fee being 50% or 75% or a hundred percent of one month's rent versus a lease renewal is typically less. So what would you say to someone that had that question?   Matthew: Yeah, I think it's a great question. You definitely don't want to incentivize your property manager to do something that's not in your best interest. And so when you're thinking about property management fees, what I would tell somebody is make sure that the fees are in line as well as you can with your incentives or with the incentives of the property manager, because you just don't want anybody to have to make this kind of moral decision that affects their income. And so what I would say is the way we look at it is we do need to make money when we're leasing, because we do a lot of work. The way we look at GK Houses is we want it to be an annuity business for our owners and for us. And the way to do that is to keep residents in homes. And that allows us to do certainly we're doing a lot of work while the residents in the house, but as soon as that resident moves out, I mean, it's like a full time job trying to get that home back on the market as quickly as possible. And so we often talk about, and we've structured our fees so that we don't want people moving out. We want to build this big annuity snowball. And so to me, you need to make sure that your property managers fees align with your interests and your interest of being an annuity. So I would say incentivize the manager to renew the lease over a leasing fee. Now the leasing fee may be higher, but what kind of work did they have to do to earn that? I would much rather earn a couple hundred dollars, 200 $5,300 renewal fee that is, that, you know, requires two to three hours worth of work versus the, you know, maybe 20 plus hours of work. I would pour it into a turn.   Michael: And can you give somebody who's listening a real high level overview of what work does go into a turn because I think that's such a great point is there is so much work that goes on into placing a new tenant, but that goes on behind the scenes. Most folks don't have any idea.   Tom: The Duck's legs under the water. That's another episode where we riffed on that for a minute. So, sorry. Yeah, go ahead.   Matthew: Well, we think about this about 60 to 90 days out. So we're trying to renew the resident almost, you know, six to eight months into their lease. We're trying to do it as quickly as possible. And so when they submit their notice and they start to move, you know, we start communication. So we communicate with the unit or, Hey, your resident is submitted. Notice just wants you to know. And then we give them an idea of what we're going to do when they move out. When the resident finally does turn in keys and moves out, we're going to do, depending on the market, we're in, we're going to do a walkthrough. And generally that happens not the same day, but within 24 or 48 business hours of that resident moving out. And we do a full writeup with pictures and it is amazing how many pictures we take, but we really feel like this is part of taking pictures, is communication with the owner.   They can see the pictures and kind of feel what the house looks like. And then one of the things that owners forget is we also have a requirement with the resident to account for their security deposit. So we have all these logistics going on and all this communication with the resident and communication with the owner, we send out a statement or an estimate, the owner that basically dumps all the expenses into three categories. One is these are the expenses we want to charge the resident for anything above normal wear and tear. So, you know, if the carpet has been lived on you can't really charge a resident for that because you expect the carpet to be lived on. But if there's a hole in the wall for some sort of misuse, or you can tell that the home has been misused there, we're going to charge that resonant for that.   And then there's a column that we say are required repairs. And so required repairs are, there's a hole in the wall and we need to fix this before the next resident moves in. You just can't leave a hole. Nobody's going to rent a house with a big hole in the wall, or then the next column is recommended. So maybe there's a room that is kind of in between. It's kind of in a gray area. May if you paint this room, it's going to run faster or you're going to rent it for more money. But if you don't paint it, then it's not going to keep us from renting. So we divide our estimate into those three columns and we'll send it to the homeowner and the homeowner will either approve the required or add on the recommended on top of that, and then approve whether the resident's security deposit. They're happy with how we account for that.   Then we have to basically do the accounting of the resident security deposit and then mail that to the resident. Now, oftentimes sometimes the resident disagrees with how we accounted for that. And the resident obviously did a move in when they, when they, and we did a move in before. So there's some time there's some kind of go back and forth between them and us on it. Was this a definitely misuse or was this like this when you moved in? And so sometimes when we inherit leases, we deal with some issues with that, but we do a really good job of a moving walk through. So we have pictures of the house before it moves in and we can easily compare those to the move out, walk through. Then once we we're done with the resident and everybody's happy there simultaneously, we're going back and forth with the owner on the work that needs to be done to get the house on the market.   And to me, owners love speed. And so that's one of the things we try to do is there is an anxiety that happens with an owner as soon as that resident moves out, that money stopped coming in and the expenses start, but it also makes an owner feel better if it gets done very quickly. So we're trying to renovate that house, turn that house as quickly as possible, and then put it back out on the market as fast as possible. And so, you know, depending on how long it takes to do the work, you know, our goal is to get that house back on the market, just literally as quickly as possible. And the only downtime being the time it takes to get the work done. We also start pre-marketing. So we try to start building some excitement. Some of our markets, we actually pre-market even when the residents about to move out, I just kinda made it hard recently with the pandemic, but you know, kind of a normal world will pre-market and we've been leasing a lot of homes.   We're starting to use some video tours. We're using a Matterport camera and we've been pre-leasing homes without people actually even walking through them. We've done a really good job with these Matterport cameras. And then again, getting it out on the market and getting as many people through it. One of the things that we found though, is if you take somebody through and the work's not done, sometimes there is a misunderstanding of what work needs to be done or what work is going to get done. And there's some disappointment from time to time. So we like to get the work done first, build the excitement, and then generally your first people through are your best opportunities to rent that house. Cause there's a, they feel that sense of urgency. And then we signed the lease and hopefully they move in as quickly as possible so that we get the rent coming back in and stop the expenses from flowing out.   Tom: I had like two questions I was going to, but you kept hitting him. I was, you know, I was gonna ask, Oh, you know, what changes have you guys made with the pandemic? And that's cool. So you guys are doing video tours and   Matthew: Yeah, we're using a Matterport camera now, which is basically you set it up in the middle of the room and it allows somebody to virtually walk through the house and it is really cool and it shows it's got a fish eye on it, fisheye camera on. It allows people to really see what it's like to live in that room. And the other thing is it's really a touchless and we're not using leasing agents as much as we did any more. Now, some areas are starting to let some leasing agents back. Colorado's allowing us to use leasing agents again, but it's still a opened the door. Let somebody go through and kind of obviously socially distancing the whole time. But we also use Rently a lot boxes on our homes, which allows a resident to check themselves in with a credit card and their ID. And they can go through the home by themselves without us having to be there.   There's some, obviously some accountability and the fact that we have a credit card and we have their ID and we know who they are, we have their cell phone number, but then we're proactively following up. So one of the things that we found in the past, we went a little too automated where we wanted somebody just never to talk to us to the point where they just leased our house without ever talking to us. But now we've found that proactively reaching out and talking to somebody on the phone, right after a showing, is that great way to get somebody comfortable enough to submit an app. And we're receiving right now, somewhere around three in some markets and somewhere around five times as many applications, part of that is pandemic driven. I think there's a move right now from multifamily to single family, just cause people don't want to be on top of everybody, but in part of it is the summer, but we're more occupied right now than we've ever been before.   Tom: That's really interesting.   Michael: Yeah. Very interesting. Matt a question. I get a lot in the Academy, especially of folks who are looking at Roofstock inspections is I've got all this repair work that needs to get done. Is this something that I have to do that I have to coordinate? Or is that going to fall on the shoulders of the PM? Are they able to assist in helping coordinate that work repair work to be done?   Matthew: I can't speak for all PMs, but I love it when we do the work in full transparency. So we do make money when we do the work as the general contractor of that work. But when I can control the process for the owner and I can control the communication and I can control what gets done and I have vendors that know how I work and I can get them in and get them out. I always think of it again, it says value and speed. I can get it done so quickly and there's not a lot of coordination and communication. If you're in a market, you could certainly try to do that because you may have the time, the drive over there. And it makes sure that the contractor is getting the work done. The biggest challenge we have is contractors and relationships with contractors. So for somebody to remotely hire a contractor and get the work done for not only cheaper, but on time and all their work done appropriately to me is just too big of a risk to take.   And what ends up happening is they end up putting the burden on the property manager to go make sure that we're gets done. So then it ends up costing them more because we're going to charge them for some of that oversight. So we just say, look, just let us handle it. And we're happy to give people an estimate to get that work done. And then we'll contract it out to the people that are vetted vendors that are insured. And if somebody falls off the proverbial roof, then they're not going to Sue you. And so we just think it's in the owner's best interest to let the PM handle that.   Michael: Great. And what would you say the most difficult part of being a property manager is what do you wake up everyday and go, Oh man,   Matthew: Not to use another football reference, but I am going to, there is no Superbowl in our world. There's no, we won the super bowl and now we can take two or three weeks off when the 31st hits and we collect a hundred percent of our rent. The first comes the next day and then all our rent's due again. And owners need to know this too. It is a thankless business. The whole point of the job is to deal with problems. And so when you're communicating with your property manager, you need to know that they are doing nothing but dealing with the exceptions, all the problems that have happened that day. And so I have a lot of empathy and sympathy for my team because it is hard. You have to keep them excited and it's hard not to get burned out. And so when an owner gets mad or a resident gets mad at them, obviously that takes an emotional toll.   And generally our PMs are not the ones that made the mistake or when something happens and listen, we're people, we're human. We try to execute as well as we can, but we are going to make mistakes. But when an owner kind of takes that out on a PM, because that's the person they see as kind of the face of the company, you know, that takes an emotional toll on people. So the whole, and when you're communicating with a resonant about not paying rent, you're talking to them about their home and the money, you know, money it's, everything emotionally is tied into this one thing that we're doing. So we have a lot of hard conversations. And so that's, what's so hard about being a PM. And I would say, that's, what's so hard about self managing too, you have the ability to be objective in an emotional situation?   Going back to the first rental house that I bought, I had a six month kind of agreement with an insurance company on a house that had burned down or somebody's house had burned down and they moved in for six months. The insurance company paid me additional money over above what I was asking. Well, the house person was living in the house. Couldn't afford the house normally. And when their house wasn't ready, they'd never moved out of my house. And so here I am self managing I'm 23 years old, and I need that money. I am very emotional about needing that money. And so I was probably the worst person to be dealing with that situation because I was overly emotional making bad decisions. Here I am. This is my first rental house I got paid for six months. Everything was great. I thought I was a real estate guru. And all of a sudden, now my resident's not paying, I'm paying a mortgage and it's not like I just have tons of money left over every month. And so I was just in an emotional place. And what I would say is, if you can't be objective, you can't treat that relationship like a business or even worse. Maybe you do have a lot of money or the ability to float things. And you allow things to go on too long because a resident may tell you a story. You know, it becomes very hard to be objective in those situations because either you're emotional about your own finances or you become emotional about the resident situation. And it really is like running a business. Well, listen, we do have a lot of sympathy and empathy for our tenants. We're very resident friendly, cause we know we want them to stay a long time. We want good residents to stay a long time, but you also have to be very objective when you're dealing with them. And, and so if somebody can't separate themselves from the situation, it becomes a lot of conflict. You know, personally, you're not going to do the right thing consistently to self manage.   Michael: I think that's such great insight into property manager, being a thankless business. You know, I personally am going to make this admission on the podcast. I don't think I've ever called my property manager wants to thank them for a full rent collection month, but I know I've called them and asked why the rent was late. So less than to everybody listening go, thank your property managers for the good stuff. Don't just highlight the bad stuff.   Matthew: And we do have some owners that are kind enough to thank us. And we do have some really great owners, but you're right. I mean, the expectation of the owner is full rent collection and no expenses. So as long as that happens,   Michael: Right, right.   Matthew: The bar is at a hundred percent.   Tom: Everybody's good.   Matthew: So anything below that is us not meeting expectations, even though, you know, it's not our house. If the toilet breaks, I've never used that toilet. Right. It wasn't you. Right. But I do understand too, that it's kind of funny, like an owner may move out of the house and then a new resident moves in and immediately owners because they are emotional about, especially a house that they lived in and owner will become very well that toll, it never broke when I was there. And I'm like, well, I don't know what to tell you.   Michael: I don't know what to tell you! Tom, You got any more questions?   Tom: Yeah. I guess, you know, kind of continuing on this theme of, you know, helping this thankless job, how would you say investors could help put their property manager in a better position to be successful?   Matthew: One of the things I would say is around communication is a lot of people want, expect like an email to go out and then an immediate email to come back and we do have RPMs or full time communicating. So we do have the ability to do that, but there are times when they need to be a little flexible about how fast we get back to people, because we do have other fires that are raging from time to time that a PM may be very focused on getting another owner's property fixed. So just having a, you know, not an unrealistic expectation around how fast we're able to get back with people. And look, we that's. One of the things that we measure is we do measure how fast we get back with people.   So we are getting back with people fairly quickly. The other thing is, again, having reserves really helps us out because it gets us into a situation where we're doing the right thing. We're playing the odds. We're placing good bets with these homes and allowing us to help you manage for the long term. So those are two things an owner can do. And then also when they do communicate with us, I know you're going to get frustrated when something happens bad and look, we're frustrated too, but know, it's every bit as hard to make that phone conversation and make that phone call and just know that the PM has been dreading calling you and telling you that there's this $500 expense or whatever it is. And so just having some empathy for that person that is making that phone call is helpful and being problem solvers together. Let's Hey, we're on the same team. We didn't cause this problem, but we're going to both fix it as teammates   Tom: Love it.   Michael: It's such a good point about around the communication timing. I was chatting with a student in the Academy. I won't say from where I was just say it rhymes with smooshmork. And they said, you know, I can't deal with this property manager. I said, what happened? He goes, well, I emailed them 20 minutes ago and have her back. I said, well, that, that might be how you're used to communicating, understand that it's different around the country. And so what I was recommending folks is just ask, when you're chatting with property managers, vetting property managers, ask them what their communication style is and ask them what a reasonable response time is, because the expectation should be set on the front end.   Matthew: Other thing I would add around communication. If you start to get up to, let's say five to 10 rental properties, what you need to is set up a regular monthly call with your property manager. We have found these calls to be so helpful. Again, getting back into being objective. You really solve problems together for the longterm. There's no emotion around it. There's no surprises when you have five to 10 rental properties and it's worth the manager spending an hour with you and kind of making sure that you're on the same page on a regular basis. It would be hard to have those calls for anybody below five houses let's say. But if you're starting to get up into five and continuing to grow, it makes sense for you to have a regular monthly call. And if you get to a point where you have 20 to 25 houses, it may be a weekly call that you would want to have. But I can't tell you how these regular calls have really helped us with our communication with owners, because you're not just hearing about the bad problems. You're also hearing, Hey, we collected this. We collected that. And you're starting to kind of get a better picture of what your portfolio is doing.   Michael: I've got to go set up weekly call. That's a really great idea.   Tom: I know. I love that as a takeaway from today's session... Yeah, I love that. That is a great idea. I really like that.   Michael: Tom, you got anything else?   Tom: That's good for me. Yeah. That's super insightful.   Michael: Love it. Awesome. Well, Matt, we've got some quick fire questions. We'd like to end our episodes with, if you don't mind, it's kind of a yes, no one answer to the other.   Matthew: All right, I'll do it. Alright.   Michael: So high rent growth or low vacancy?   Matthew: Low vacancy.   Michael: Angry resident or angry investor?   Matthew: Ooh, Whats C?. Yeah, definitely angry resident. Although none of those are fun.   Michael: Cashflow or appreciation?   Matthew: I am a cashflow guy.   Michael: Concentration or diversification?   Matthew: I am a concentration guy and I think this is an important thing too, is probably a good nugget for the people that are going to be listening to this, become an expert in an area. First, in my opinion, before you try to diversify too much, I have found that when you become an expert in one area like a Birmingham or even a neighborhood in Birmingham, then you are way more successful at buying than trying to diversify and not being an expert in one area. Sorry. That was more than one word, but..   Michael: No, that's super great insight. Super great insight. Local or remote investing?   Matthew: I think you can do both with technology today. I mean, I would hate to say one over the other because I think if you have access to all the technology that I have living in Birmingham, so it makes no sense for you living in California or in New York or wherever you're living, not to invest in Birmingham because I have the access to the exact same information as you do.   Michael: Great. Single family or multifamily.   Matthew: I'm a single family guy. I think, I think the best opportunities and the biggest opportunities to exploit what is still incredibly inefficient market is in the single family world. I think your points about like the pandemic people wanting a little bit more breathing room, like single family, really great way to go. I'm telling you, Tom we're at over 98% occupied. I've never been on. I've been doing this now almost 13 years. Never been that high and never gotten the amount of applications that were getting approved residents. Great residents are moving into our homes. It is really a good time to be in the single family world. Great turnkey or massive project. Definitely turnkey. Okay. Text message or email. I'm a text message guy. My emails, I forgot like 50,000 unread emails. That's a true story. I can, I can show you.   Michael: That's great. Last one. Olive oil or butter?   Matthew: I'm an olive oil guy.   Tom: Love it. Awesome.   Michael: Awesome. Well, Matt, thank you so much for taking the time to view with us today. If folks want to reach out to you at GK houses, you know, what's the best way someone can get in touch with you or someone on your staff?   Matthew: Yeah. I would say email me, but obviously…   Tom: The jig is up!   Michael: 50,001, right?   Matthew: Listen. The best email to email is support@gkhouses.com and we are monitoring that through a help desk type system. And then that'll get assigned to the right person in our office that can handle that. You can also look us up online and call any one of our offices. So we're a Roofstock preferred vendor in Atlanta and in Birmingham. And am I allowed to say the other two coming down?   Tom: Of course, growing markets all the time.   Matthew: So Little Rock, y'all are in Little Rock now and we're also a property manager there. And then we had a conversation with one of your team members this week about y'all are opening up in Denver, which is super exciting. So glad we're going to be a preferred vendor there too. So just y'all are growing and allowing us to grow right alongside of you. So we appreciate you so much.   Tom: Onward and upward.   Matthew: Yeah.   Tom: Thank you so much for coming on Matt.   Matthew: Yeah. Thank you for having me.   Michael: You got it, take care.   Michael: Okay. Everyone. That was our episode. Thank you so much to Matt Whitaker for coming on today. Really, really appreciate it. If y'all liked the episode, feel free to give us a rating or review wherever it is you listen to your podcast and we look forward to seeing you on the next one.  

Some of the highlights include:  Why Vodafone moved to a cloud native architecture. As Tom explains, the company was struggling to manage operations across more than 20 markets. They also needed to improve the customer experience, and foster customer loyalty.  Why their business and engineering teams were both in favor of cloud native. The benefits of deploying daily operational activities around a single cloud native platform.   An overview of where Vodavone currently is in their overall cloud native journey. Tom also explains how cloud native conversations have changed inside of the company throughout their journey, as various business units have caught on to the benefits of the cloud. Vodafaone's transition from outsourcing roughly 97 percent of their operations, to bringing 95 percent in house. Tom explains how this has improved efficiency and expedited time to market. The challenge that Vodafone faced in trying to apply legacy network security solutions to distributed and dynamic systems.  Tom's thoughts on why Vodafone's cloud native transition and modernization efforts have been crucial to their success over the last five years.  Links: Vodafone Group: https://www.vodafone.com/ Connect with Tom on LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/tom-kivlin-5b469321 The Business of Cloud Native: http://thebusinessofcloudnative.com  Tom's Twitter: https://twitter.com/tomkivlin CNCF GitHub: https://github.com/cncf CNCF Slack: https://slack.cncf.io/ Kubernetes Slack: http://slack.kubernetes.io/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native podcast, where we explore how end users talk and think about the transition to Kubernetes and cloud-native architectures.Emily: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native. I'm Emily Omier, your host, and today I am chatting with Tom Kivlin. Tom, thank you so much for joining us.Tom: You're welcome. No problem.Emily: Let's just start out with having you introduce yourself. What do you do? Where do you work, and what do you actually do during your workday?Tom: Sure. So, I'm a principal cloud orchestration architect at Vodafone Group. I work in the UK. And my day job consists of providing guidance and strategy and architectural blueprints for cloud-native platforms within Vodafone. So, that's around providing guidance to the software domains that are looking to adopt cloud-native architectures and methodologies and also to the more traditional infrastructure domains to try and help them provide their services in a more cloud-native manner to those modern teams.Emily: And what does that mean when you go into the office—or your home office, go into your dining room where your laptop is, I don't know—what do you actually do? What does an average day look like?Tom: It can vary. So, depending on the activity at the time, it could be anything from preparing a global policy that needs to go through the senior technology leadership team, to preparing some extremely detailed requirements for selection process or creating some infrastructures code, or the code artifacts for the deployment of cloud-native services, whether that's in our lab, or to help our services teams within Vodafone.Emily: Tell me a little bit more about what pain made Vodafone think about moving to cloud-native and Kubernetes.Tom: Primarily, it was the challenge of having 25 different markets, or 23 now. We launched a digital strategy to—so back in 2015, we launched a five-year strategy, which we wanted to massively increase the rollout of 4G, of converged network offerings, of improved customer experience. And we found that the traditional way of managing software was not supportive enough in our ambition. And so, having to choose cloud-native technologies, things like Kubernetes, but also the modern operating models, that was the driver: it was to improve our customer experience, and our customer-affecting KPIs, really.Emily: And when you say it wasn't supportive enough, what do you mean specifically?Tom: So, things like time to market, for example. So, if we wanted to offer a new service—so one of the things that 4G started the drive towards was a more granulated service offering to consumers, and so lots of different things could be offered. And if it took you six months to think of an idea and then have to go through—or even longer than six months to get to the point where that could be offered to customers, even if it was just a very minor feature within an existing product, then that's not going to engender customer loyalty. And so, things like the cloud-native mindset, where there's a much closer link between the engineering teams and the customer, there are much shorter periods of time between ideas coming in from the customers and then being delivered back to the customers as product features, that sort of time to market was really enabled by cloud-native technologies and mindsets.Emily: And how does having two dozen, more or less, different markets, how does that play into the decision A) to move to cloud-native in general, and managing the IT infrastructure?Tom: So, one of the things that's really driven it is trying to simplify and reuse artifacts. So, if you've got 23 markets all doing a different thing, then there's obviously a lot of duplication happening across the group, whereas if everyone's using the same technology in the same platforms—take Kubernetes as the example—everyone can write their software for that platform. Everyone can write their operational ecosystem around that platform. So, the deployment artifacts, the pipelines, the day two operational activities, they can all be based around that single cloud-native platform. And so, that enables a huge amount of efficiency from the operational side. And that in turn allows those engineering teams to focus on things that are adding value to the business and the customer instead of having to focus on fairly low-level tasks that are just keeping the lights on, if you like.Emily: What's different for each one of those markets?Tom: So, it might be something like language, it might be something as simple as that. It may be that the offerings are slightly tweaked. So, rather than, I don't know, as an example, rather than Spotify being included as a kind of add on, it might be some other service that's more relevant to that market. It may be that there are particular regulatory requirements that are specific to a market that needs to be considered within the product design and the engineering of it. And so, having a cloud-native response allows sharing and reuse of artifacts where we can, but still allows for that customization where it's required.Emily: Where would you say Vodafone is in the cloud-native journey? Do you feel like you've, mission accomplished?Tom: So, mission accomplished, as in the first step, yeah. So, we set out a goal in 2015, to get a certain number of our applications to the Cloud, and that's largely been reached, I think, especially with our customer channels, so that the kind of points of interaction with the customer, the huge number of those are cloud-native today. And things like automated customer interaction with chatbots, and the like, that's all added to the cloud-nativeness of the interaction. As part of our next iteration, we'll be looking for more cloud-native software and cloud-native platforms, and that will start extending into the network systems themselves, as well as the more digital and easily modernizable layers, if you like.Emily: What sort of business value do you feel like you're looking for as you move to the next step?Tom: So, primarily, it's going to be driven by customer satisfaction and customer affecting KPIs, like I said before. That's always what's driven the business metrics anyway. So, things like being able to support the demand of the customer. So, whether that's the new 5G services, for increased bandwidth. So, obviously, if our network systems themselves are cloud-native, then taking advantage of the auto-scaling, and the auto-healing, and the autonomic nature, then the customer experience, and the customer satisfaction will increase. Improving time to market, so again, part of 5G is that the whole notion of creating more differentiating services, and so if we can do that through the cloud-native mindset with product owners being much more closely engaged with customers, then that improves our product offerings. And we can optimize our network profitability by using cloud-native features like modern big data analytics, and even AI and automation to improve the operations of the network. At the end of the day, the business value is improved customer satisfaction, which improves our financial performance, obviously.Emily: And when you started out in 2015, who was pushing for moving to cloud-native? Was this the business saying, “Hey, how do we improve customer satisfaction?” Was it engineering saying, “Hey, here's an idea for something that could help us move faster?” Who was behind that?Tom: That's a good question. I think it's probably an element of both. It was the opposite of the push me, pull you, I guess. So, there was engineering pushing on an open door, I suppose you could say. So, Cloud was a bit of a buzzword around that time anyway, but I think it's fair to say the concepts of improved time to market, improved stability, the potential for improved security, improved automation, and repeatability, they were all relatively easy sells to product teams who want to be able to sell products to customers. And once you're able to explain what problems those concepts solve, I think it became a bit of a, like I say, pushing on an open door.Emily: Can you tell me a little bit about the process of explaining what problems these things solve? Was there anything that was getting lost in translation?Tom: Yeah. I think the biggest thing that I can recall—obviously, it's a company-wide thing. I'm never going to be aware of everything that happens—certainly, it's critical to try and understand what the target operating model is before trying to say, “Here's the technology solution to it.” So, I think some of the lessons that were learnt in the early stages were, rather than trying to say, “Here's the technology answer to a modern way of working that hasn't been agreed or adopted or even understood yet,” let's do that part first, so people understand how they need to work in this modern kind of culture. And then the technology answers then make a bit more sense to people because they're able to say, “Okay, I understand the problems that's solving now because I'm now working in that way of working.” So, that's probably the biggest learning point I would take from the previous five years.Emily: Do you feel like the conversation, how did it evolve from the first conversations over the course of the past five years, and then what's it like now?Tom: It's very different now. The concept of Cloud and cloud-native has become a given and very well understood across the business, even outside of technology. So, we talked to other business units, and they're quite comfortable in understanding the benefits of Cloud. And it's now about when they mature into cloud-native, and when they mature operating models, rather than if. And it's now talking and giving guidance about how to do it, rather than trying to sell the concept itself. So, it just feels like you're at that next stage of not having to sell the idea anymore, and more into the detail of how to implement that idea.Emily: What would you say were some of the biggest surprises? And let's start with thinking about some of the biggest surprises, not necessarily technically but organizationally, in how engineering was talking with the business, how people were working together. Was there anything about this journey that was unexpected?Tom: Not particularly. I think the biggest change that happened, which was possibly unexpected when we started, was the level of insourcing that we have undertaken to support the cloud-native operating models, the time to market, and the modern engineering teams. So, we used to be around 97 percent outsourced or something like that, in terms of building software that wasn't just vendor supplied. And for all that software now, we're more like 95 percent in-house. And so, that's quite a big change, and I think that probably surprised people that A) we needed to do it, and B) that we have done it, and relatively successfully got pretty wide-scale digital engineering functions across many markets now.Emily: And why do you think that matters?Tom: Because it gives us control of the roadmap, it gives us control of that time to market cadence, and it allows us to use the data that our teams understand and know about, and to share that with other markets. So, as I say, even though an engineering team might be in the UK, they can share what they've done, they can share the artifacts, they can share the data that's driven decisions and software activity with other markets within Vodafone. And that just improves that efficiency, again.Emily: Do you think insourcing also improves customer satisfaction KPIs?Tom: Certainly we've seen that. So, whether that's a correlation or causation is kind of for someone with more access to more data than I've got. But certainly, we've seen an increase in online sales, and our digital marketing is more data-driven. And that has happened in correlation with the in-sourcing of software engineering skillset, yeah.Emily: Do you have any specific examples that come to mind in, maybe you are able to react in a way that wouldn't have been possible if you'd been using the old system?Tom: I'm not aware of any specific examples, unfortunately.Emily: Was there anything about the move to Kubernetes, to cloud-native, that you expected to be difficult, and wasn't. So, that was easier than you expected?Tom: That's a good question. I suspect the provision of multiple clusters. Kubernetes is difficult. It's a complex system, hence why there are so many cluster management vendor offerings available. And I think we chose a couple of partners early on in the journey to help us with that, and I think that really helped, and it made Kubernetes a little less scary for the software teams who were using it. So certainly, I've heard feedback—this is anecdotal, rather than anything that's evidence-driven—actually, just being able to create clusters and deploy into them was easier than people had thought when they were learning about Kubernetes through the quick start tutorials and the like.Emily: Was there anything that sticks out as being far more difficult than expected? The more unpleasant surprises?Tom: I wouldn't necessarily call them unpleasant, but obviously there's going to be a transition period—which we're in—between the traditional data-center-centric networking and network security policies and concepts, and those that work with Cloud and cloud-native platforms like Kubernetes. And there have definitely been challenges in trying to apply the legacy approach to network security with a distributed and dynamic system like Kubernetes, where you can't give everything a static IP address or even have separate subnets within a cluster for segregation, for example. It has to be done in a different way. You can still apply the same controls, they just have to be done in a different way. So, I think that's one of a few challenges that we found that we've had to work through with different vendors, with engineering teams, and with our internal teams to try and update our guidance on how to apply those controls.Emily: And to what extent have there been organizational challenges, and how have you gotten over those?Tom: That's a tricky one to answer, really. I think it all comes down to the balance between understanding and buying into a strategy, but then applying that to application lifecycle and investment lifecycles. So, I think this is probably true for any company: just because a strategy says this is the thing to do, you got a roadmap for your portfolio of applications and services that you need to balance a limited budget. And so, that's been the biggest challenge, is to try and identify how much of each budget at various levels can be spent on strategic activity, and then for which services, and trying to keep that balance, and bearing in mind that there are lots of different things pulling on that same pot of money.Emily: And what have you learned about managing that?Tom: I think primarily that there needs to be a holistic view of strategic projects. It's quite difficult to put the onus on a local budget, to spend the money to do something strategic when the benefits are probably—and the business case is probably seen more widely than the individual budget area. But I think it differs between situations, and between markets, and what's happening. I think the primary thing is to understand the costs of the strategy upfront, and try and work those costs into whatever needs doing over the period.Emily: A slightly different question, which is, is there anything you feel like in the cloud-native journey that you're still working on solving, that you haven't really figured out yet?Tom: I'm not sure whether we haven't figured this out yet, but one of the things we're putting a lot of effort in at the moment, is the use of advanced data and analytics platforms to try and drive even more network automation, and network planning efficiencies. So, I think it was last year at Google Next, we announced a partnership with Google to make use of their data services. And there's a few projects ongoing within Vodafone to try and drive the amount of knowledge and useful information we can gather from the vast quantities of data we have about our services and the customers that use them because the more we can use that data, the more we can respond to customer need in a timely manner, whether that's reactively in terms of operational response or whether that's proactively in seeing trends that we can then meet a need that may be unsaid yet.Emily: And if you were to talk to another engineering leader who was trying to push through the open door as you were saying, what advice would you give them?Tom: The biggest bit of advice is to understand the current way of working for whichever area you're—is on the other side of the door, and understand their pain points because it's not always the same answer. So, generalizing, it may be that one area is more than happy to have a centralized global platform offering, whether that's within our data centers, or public cloud, or both. Another area, just the way it's managed, may require a more distributed model, where the services are offered on a more market specific level. And so, I think that that's the main thing, is to understand the specifics of that area that you're talking to because it will affect how you want to architect and onwardly deploy and manage that technology.Emily: It would affect not just how you want to architect the technology, but also how you want to communicate what your plan is, right?Tom: Absolutely. Yeah. So, in the first of the examples I gave, where an area might be happy with a centralized service, that probably means they're already using one. The way you would communicate that would be via that existing channel, if you like. Whereas on the flip side, that kind of channel may not exist, and therefore running the project or projects and communicating with stakeholders would be much more distributed.Emily: At Vodafone was there ever any challenge selling it, not just over to the business side, but also selling internally inside engineering teams? Or was everyone pretty gung ho to do this?Tom: No, there's always challenges. I think again, it goes back to understanding the pain points of an area and understanding why things are the kind of as they are today, which I guess is general for things outside of technology and outside of Vodafone generally is. If you understand the position of the person you're debating with, then you're more likely to reach a common understanding than if you go into it with your own point of view and being unwilling to listen. So, I think that's the main thing is just being willing to listen, to understand pain points, and to be able to react to those within a strategy. You'd hope that it's flexible enough to be able to meet a wide range of needs without needing to necessarily change the overall vision.Emily: How important do you think this cloud-native transition has been for Vodafone?Tom: I think it's been crucial. I think we couldn't have done what we've done in the last five years without it. So, there's a video that our group CTO has posted on LinkedIn recently which highlighted a few things around improved mobile KPIs, we've got 4G in 21 markets, we've got the largest 5G in Europe, and all of those improvements from time to market I've already mentioned, we simply couldn't have done that without a modernization program to move to cloud-native across a number of our systems. So, yes, that's partly a technology thing, but also, it is such a cultural thing, and having that modern way of working where you have your modern engineering teams who are closer to the customer, but they're also—the different mindset of a modern engineering company where you're not afraid to try new things, and if you fail, you learn from them. And I think that's all part of what I would class as cloud-native, and that has been, like I say, it's been crucial for us to be able to get where we have been.Emily: It's interesting to think cloud-native means if you fail, you learn from it. That's a fairly basic concept, and yet true. I can see how that is, sort of, part of being cloud-native.Tom: Yeah, it's one of those things is quite a basic thing, but I think in traditional ways of working, the focus on the availability of systems and the performance of systems can blind everyone to the possibilities outside of that particular area of focus. And it puts pressure on people at all levels to try and minimize periods of downtime or periods of low performance. And over time, people become less and less willing to be able to try new things, through fear of failing because just the way people work it's difficult to learn from those failings because it affects customers. And so, what cloud-native technologies enable because of the way things are orchestrated—things are dynamic, things are repeatable—it's very easy to try new things, and not affect all customers. Now, obviously, good software engineering practices help as well. But I think the cloud-native technologies and the ways of working really do support the whole “learn by failing” premise.Emily: Do you think it would have been possible to get the customer satisfaction KPIs that you did, without moving to cloud-native, in any other way?Tom: I think the only way you could have done is by a huge investment in people and the traditional technologies. It would have been a much more expensive and slower journey, in my opinion.Emily: Anything else that you want to add about your experience moving to cloud-native?Tom: No, I don't think so. I think one of the things—like I said before, the increase in automation, the increase in the modern technologies is just really helped with those customer affecting KPIs, and that has to be the drive for why you're doing it.Emily: All right, just a couple more questions, then. What is your can't-live-without engineering tool?Tom: Oh, that's a good question. Probably Python. I think so many people use it either as a cross-platform scripting tool to be able to automate things and get on the first step towards cloud-native, or it's such a key part of many cloud-native tools like things like Ansible and other tools, and it's used hugely within our data analytics domain to try and drive the usefulness of the data. So, yeah, that's probably the one I'd choose.Emily: And then this actually is the last question which is, how can listeners follow you or connect with you?Tom: So, I'm on Twitter at @tomkivlin. I'm also on LinkedIn. So, I'm Tom Kivlin, working for Vodafone Group. I am a member of the telecom user group within the CNCF. So, you can find them on GitHub and also in the… I think it's the CNCF or the Kubernetes Slack. And yeah, happy to share experiences and keep learning.Emily: Well, thank you so much. Again, this is Tom Kivlin, and we'll go ahead and wrap it up there. Thank you so much, Tom.Announcer: Thank you for listening to The Business of Cloud Native podcast. Keep up with the latest on the podcast at thebusinessofcloudnative.com and subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever fine podcasts are distributed. We'll see you next time.This has been HumblePod production. Stay humble.

In this Episode Tom, Michael and Emil share their systems that take the headache out of acquisitions and ownership to effectively scale up.  --- Transcript:   Tom: Greetings and welcome to the remote real estate investor. My name is Tom Schneider, and I'm here with Emil Shour and Michael Albaum. And today we're going to be talking about something that is near and dear to my heart. We're talking about building systems. We're talking about automation. We're talking about scaling. We're going to touch on these topics and a couple of specific strategies as it relates to acquisitions and ownership. All right, let's do it.   Tom: All right. Welcome back to The Remote Real Estate Investor. Before we get going today, we're going to do a quick introduction from the host a little bit about ourselves and our experience and background and all that good stuff. So, Michael, why don't you go ahead and lead us off?   Michael: Sure. So I'm Michael Albaum. I used to work in my past life as a professional fire protection engineer in the commercial property insurance industry. So everyone has to bear with me if I speak in math terms, cause I'm a reformed engineer. I've been an investor for the better part of a decade and started very traditionally with single families. And now I've found a, found my stride and niche with multifamily value, add projects out in the Midwest. And I'm also the head coach of the Roofstock Academy program and meal. Can you introduce us to yourself and your mustache?   Emil: Hey everybody. My name is Emil Shour. I work on the marketing team here at Roofstock. My fun fact is I actually bought a couple properties through Roofstock before I was ever working here. It was a big fan of what the company was doing and now lucky enough to get to help spread the word. And I own a couple single family rentals across the Southeast and Midwest.   Tom: And my name is Tom Schneider. I am the director of investor education here at Roofstock. My career has been focusing on putting technology process to scale and build systems. So this episode is particularly exciting for me is how I do this personally, with my investing. I've been in real estate investing for over the past 10 years, and I'm also a California broker.   Michael: Nice.   Emil: The only one of us who's licensed. Where do you have your license hung somewhere as a broker?   Tom: You can just hang it right around here.   Michael: Yeah. Hang it on yourself.   Tom: Hang it on myself.   Michael: The broker test. Isn't so much more work than just the agent test, right?   Tom: It is. They've made it harder when I got my broker's license, it wasn't quite as difficult, but they made the experience requirements a lot more difficult. It was kind of funny. I initially worked in acquisitions for one of the publicly traded rates and literally the day that I passed the broker test, the person who was leading our technology says, Hey Tom, we need a can-do guy to help build out a bunch of systems. And I was like, okay, cool. Let's do it. So I got my broker's license and then proceeded to never use it until I did use it when I bought my own house. So I guess it paid for itself there.   Emil: What is the difference between an agent and a broker?   Tom: I'll tell you, I should kind of have an idea on this. So an agent needs their license to be hung underneath the broker. The idea is a broker understands the business a little more and folks who are agents can eventually become a broker. If they wish to, they basically can operate on their own. So within California, you can apply for an agent or a broker. And the broker aspect of the test is a little bit harder and the requirements to get it is a little bit more difficult.   Emil: Got it. So a broker can do everything an agent can do, but an agent can't do everything a broker can do.   Tom: Yes. Yes, that's correct. That's a good way to put it.   Michael: Getting ready for my broker tests.   Emil: Awesome. I've already learned something on this episode!   Tom: Early and often, baby early and often. All right. We'll jump into some system stuff. So we have a variety of different things and we're going to have a different one of the hosts take the lead in talking about. So we're going to start with acquisitions. And Emil, why don't you lead us off on some systems, some practical systems that folks can do on their own.   Emil: It might be a little obvious, but I still think it's worth stating. Set up automated filters and alerts on the places you look for properties. If you're on Roofstock. If you guys are familiar with stock is our marketplace where people can buy and sell single family rental properties. You can go and filter by whatever meets your criteria and save that filter. So you get notifications when new properties hit the site that meet that filter requirement, same thing on other sites like Zillow or Redfin or realtor.com, wherever you're, once you've figured out your buy box. And I'll talk about that in a second. Defining it, plugging it in as a filter so you get automatic notifications cause you want to be on top of those listings, right? When they hit the site, right? It's a lot more effective than just constantly going on them and checking your listings. Even though I do that all the time anyways,   Michael: I don't know about you guys, but I constantly get notifications from Zillow and Redfin about new properties that have hit the market, but I didn't save a filter even, you know, I searched there twice or three times and now I was like, Oh great. You're super hungry for properties in that market. So I'm just getting blasted by these emails. Yeah.   Emil: Every time I look@realtor.com, like I was curious the other day about like, what do multifamily in Bakersfield sell for? And now I've just, I've been getting Bakersfield filter notifications from realtor.com. It's like, man,   Tom: What's cool about these websites and the filters, a little pro tip is you can get really granular with your filters and set up multiple filters. So what I'll do is on my inbox that I have all set up multiple inboxes and I'll set up a filter within my I'm gonna, we're gonna do filters on filters. This is a very layered,   Michael: Filter-ception   Tom: Yeah. Very meta. So within my inbox, shout out Gmail, just kidding   Emil: @Gmail, let us know if you want to sponsor us.   Michael: Yeah. I've never heard of this Gmail, but this Tom Schneider guy talked about it.   Tom: Anywho, I set up like a master folder for like incoming property leads. Right. Then within that I'll set up additional folders for each different type of either region or property type. So as new listings that meet my criteria are hitting. I have them in a nice clean folder, so, Oh, great. A new Florida property. That's a duplex in this area and I have a special folder for that. What I'll also do is oftentimes timing can be pretty important and moving quickly, instead of setting up a filter that comes just once a week or once a month, since I have this infrastructure within my Google Gmail, shout out again, I'll have it actually doing real time. So I'm not getting pinged in my main inbox if I'm working on some other stuff, but I have a way to see immediately based on whatever that criteria it's hitting that inbox. So again, the super simple paraphrase, but this isn't that complicated. I have a bunch of different inboxes within my Gmail. And then within the, my buying platforms, I'll set up many filters and many alerts and many immediate alerts. So it'll hit right into my Gmail and I'll know at that time, all right, this one looks pretty good and I can move pretty quickly. And I don't have that issue of, Oh, Property. It's already pending. Like I'm not passively looking for it. It's proactively hitting me as soon as it hits the market and I can act and jumped on it. So that was my extra tidbit on that piece of mill,   Michael: That description Tom was amazing. It gave me such a visual of kind of how you operate. And it made me reflect about how I operate. And you, I'm picturing this nice, neat cubby with nice section organizers. And mind's like just a fricking melted pizza, but it's just crap everywhere. It's, I'm so jealous. I want to be like you and I grow up and have these systems, but in place, I love that.   Tom: That's why we make a great team, Michael. That's why we make great team   Michael: Coffee-man, and melted pizza.   Emil: Oh yeah. I'm not surprised Tom is like the most organized out of all of us internally. And I'm not surprised when it comes to acquisitions. You're equally as organized with the pick and choose you pick and choose. There's definitely lots of messages. So one thing, if you're going to one of the sites we mentioned, and you're not sure how you should set your criteria, just know that it's okay to start a little wider. And then as you've looked at more and more listings, I think you'll get better at defining your buy box. I know we talk about it a lot and we say, okay, build your buy box. And sometimes it's hard to just like, know what to choose. Right. I kind of started larger. For example, I chose a couple of different markets, couple of different properties, size, like a bigger property size.   Tom: I like it. You feel that you need to shoot with a sniper. I keep using these weapon analogies, but it's okay if you're not sure to start with like a broader spray and then work your way down as you refine what you're looking for. But I'd say it's better to keep it an open, an open range, and then, then shrink that down.   Michael: Nick it down.   Emil: Yup, exactly. And also because sometimes whoever uploaded the listing, sometimes they don't include that information. Right? So if you have like really, really specific defined criteria, you may miss something where whoever listed at the seller or the agent or whatever, just didn't submit that information. It doesn't hit the filter. I've noticed that on a couple of things.   Michael:   And just a pro tip for everybody listening to, if your budget is a hundred grand on the high end, set your filter up to one 20 to include properties that are listed above that because you might offer a 100K and get it. Versus if you set your filter criteria right at your end budget, you might never have seen those properties.   Emil: Yeah great tip, go like 10, 20% above what you are actually planning on spending.   Michael: It also gives you an idea of what the next tier of property looks like. So if you did want to ultimately spend more, no. What would that buy you?   Tom: One last piece of advice on building a bike box is to think about how many properties do you practically want to evaluate at a given time? And yeah, you can control this with your buybacks by how targeted it is. So if I have a lot of time and I want to look at a lot of product properties, I'm going to have a really wide buy box. If I don't have a lot of time right now to evaluate properties, I'm going to tighten my buybacks down a little bit. So one way to think about it is to work backwards about what your kind of capacity is for evaluating effectively.   Emil: It's also, I think when you're first starting out, I think it's okay to, again, to nail this point of going a little broader, I think with time and experience and having different property types, you'll start to get an idea of like, this is the exact property I want in this exact area.   Tom: Awesome. Michael, do you wanna jump on your next acquisition system?   Michael: Yeah, absolutely. So, so much of this, in addition to searching, can be done socially kind of quote unquote. And so just talking to everybody who's willing to listen and maybe even some of those who aren't, about what it is that you're looking for. So just in everyday conversations, talk to friends, family members, people in your network about what it is you're doing and what it is you're looking to do because so many eyes are going to be better than, than just one set. So if someone then comes across a property just in their everyday life and thinks, Oh, well, I remember Tom mentioning that he was kind of looking for something like this. That can be a great deal funnel for you as well. Property managers can also be a fantastic, fantastic source of deals for you, which is pretty automatic. You just tell them, Hey, this is what I'm looking for. You, you set your filter, so to speak with them and any property that comes across their radar. Oh, Hey. Yeah. I remember, you know, Emil, I kind of managed this property for him. And he's looking for something like this. It becomes so easy. And so automatic that it's one of those things you can just kind of say it and continue saying it and then forget it. There's not a whole lot of nurturing that has to be done with those types of things, other than some, you know, reminders. And don't be the person that, Hey, have you found any properties yet? Have you found any properties? Just put it out into the universe and just kind of let it, let it bake for a bit and see.   Tom: It's like The Secret. You guys remember that book?   Pierre: I'm still waiting for that check in the mail.   Tom: It's coming! Wasn't it The Secret and then The Answer as a followup or something.   Emil: Yeah.   Tom: Incredible. Incredible marketing.   Michael: I didn't read that one. What's The Secret about?   Pierre: It's the laws attraction.   Michael: Uh, okay. Okay.   Pierre: It's when you focus on something for long enough and eventually it comes to you, essentially.   Emil: That's right. You don't have to actually do anything. Just think about it every day. Hope for it every morning, but no action required. Just think about it.   Michael: Million dollars, Million dollars! So it's interesting. So for the Academy book club, we just did Think and Grow Rich. And I thought that, you know, that was such a great title by Napoleon Hill and we read it and I thought it was really awesome and talked about a lot of kind of high level things, mindset type stuff. And it was talked about very similar type stuff. And it was, it was interesting. They're all talking about, you know, if we stand around here and talk about blue cars, we'll probably go out and see a bunch more blue cars. And it's not so much that there are more blue cars on the road. It's just that now we're cognizant of that thing. It's kind of front of mind. So it appears more often for us.   Tom: Yeah. I love that example, Michael, cause not all systems are digital or not all systems are technology, but it's, it's leveraging the people side of your network of funneling in deals through that. So at the end of the day, like a lot of real estate is a people business and nurturing that and building a system that you want and funneling them in deals is excellent.   Michael: All the real estate meetups that I went to, um, pre COVID, they all talk about they'll usually start or end with the needs and wants section. So people talk about, okay, this is what I need or is it “have and wants”   Tom: Maybe it's a “give and a take”, I think I know what you are talking about.   Michael: Yeah. You announced to the group, what it is that you have to offer to the group and then what it is that you're looking for from the group or from in general, until people say I have money and I'm looking for a deal or whatever. And so it's that those are great opportunities as well. And so again, just kind of reiterating, put it out to the world, don't be embarrassed by it. Don't be shy about it. Just make it known what it is you're looking for. Cause it's tough to help people if they haven't told you what it is that they're looking for.   Tom: Awesome. Great example. All right. So I'll touch on the last acquisition related systems slash tip slash ways to scale. And this is a special perk that we have within Roofstock Academy is that members can actually export the listings on Roofstock into Excel. And whenever you can do things evaluating a lot of deals at once, like doing it in Excel, that's a great way to do it. So I guess that the main theme is, you know, try to batch processes together. And in this particular example of being able to download all the listings in Excel, batch that whole evaluation of the whole inventory, you know, in one run where, okay, I'm filtering down to these particular property types or, Oh, I'm filtering down for this particular return. So being able to, if you can get a spreadsheet of what you're evaluating or any kind of way, being able to batch it together, do it saves time.   Michael: And for anybody that's really intimidated by Excel because I know it can often seem very intimidating. There are some really great free courses on YouTube and there are also paid courses. If you want to get more in depth with it, about how to use Excel and maybe how to do some of that batch sorting because it's a really powerful tool. So I guess we're plugging Excel and Gmail in this episode.   Emil: Shout to Google and Microsoft!   Tom: Let's continue on. We're going to go into ownership now and Emil why don't you lead us off.   Emil: Cool. All right. So the first one we're gonna be talking about is cash flow automation. So the first thing I do and you guys let me know if you do this as well. I set up auto pay on all my mortgages. I don't want to think about, did I pay this mortgage? I have to mail a check. I auto pay everything just to make it super easy. Especially when you have multiple properties automating. It is like, step number one. You guys do that as well.   Michael: Yeah, definitely. Absolutely.   Tom: Do you also impound your insurance and property taxes when you pay your mortgage payment?   Emil: I do. I know a lot of people won't because they want that capital and would rather use it throughout the year versus giving it to your lender, to hold it to whatever you like to be able to use that capital. I just don't want to have to think about like, okay, I need to come up with X amount to pay my property tax and insurance. It's kind of like duping yourself into thinking you're richer than you are.   Michael: I don't, I don't use the impound accounts. I will, if they'll give me a better rate for the mortgage. And then as soon as the loan closes, I cancel the escrow account and just pay it myself.   Tom: Sneaky move Michael.   Michael: It's something I'm considering doing just from like a meal mentioned ease of operations. It's just one less thing to think about. So it can be great either way.   Emil: Why do you not impound it?   Michael: For the exact reason you mentioned there are significant funds that are going to be paid to property taxes and insurance on an annual basis. And so I'd rather have that kind of, well, that one time hit is kind of a bummer. I'm able to use that cash. I mean, it's a significant amount such that it's usable on a monthly basis to do other stuff with. And so I just know in the back of my mind that, okay, come this time of year, I've got this big, big property tax bill that's going to be due.   Emil: Yeah. I wonder if there is something there in terms of like at a certain scale, it's a lot more money to be working with versus like, let's say you have one to five properties just for ease and it's not that much extra capital that you'd be able to do something with.   Michael: Yeah, no, that's a good point. I mean, I think everyone should think about it for themselves because even at that five property level, one to five, your property tax bill could be, you know, $25,000 if we're talking about.   Emil: Yeah, that's true. Yeah. Good point.   Tom: Just to clarify impounding your taxes insurance is if you haven't deduced this or don't already know this, it's when you pay your mortgage payment, the mortgage company will also collect a percentage of the annual taxes.   Michael: They'll take one 12th of the annual tax bill, one 12th of the annual insurance bill with your mortgage payment on a monthly basis. So that you're paying equal payments every month. You're not getting hit with your tax bill or insurance bill just at one time.   Tom: And then the mortgage company will just pay it for you. So you don't have to think about it. So, boom, that's another system. So that's a good question about, you know, do you use that money in the meantime, if you don't have to pay it for 12 months, but that could be another potential system. Alright. Emil, I broke your flow.   Emil: Finishing up there. My favorite thing is when they audit your account and you have an excess balance and they send you like a check for a couple of hundred bucks and you're like, Ooh, it's like a Christmas bonus or something. Hanukkah bonus baby. For me,   Tom: I think I might've mentioned this on another podcast. I like it, but it pisses me off. Cause I'm like, oh geez, what check am I missing? Yeah, it makes me think like, okay, this is great having this check. But I'm like, like honestly concerned that like I may have missed something in the mail because man, there's just so much junk mail as a real estate investor. The wholesalers that email you all kinds of things and like just general, getting a lot of mail. I just get really concerned that I see a check here. That's awesome. But what checks am I not seeing? Because they're buried in between a Serina and Lilly or whatever, a  catalog, that's like five pounds and 500 pages. Anyways, go ahead, please continue your answer.   Emil: No, please continue your rant. I want to hear that.   Tom: I got to build it up a little bit. I got to build it up a little bit.   Michael: Tell us more about what other junk mail you received.   Tom: We Buy Ugly Houses Houses. So many of those. Yeah. If there's any wholesalers listening, I want off your mailing lists.   Emil: Okay. So the next one, this one's probably obvious a lot of people, setting up ACH auto payment from your property manager. So they collect your rent checks. I don't even know if any property managers do this, but like sending you a check in the mail. I imagine most people already set up you raising your hand, Michael. Cause do you do that?   Michael: I used to get paper checks because my property manager was pretty old school and I said, okay, please, please, please, please, please, please, please. Can we do this and other way? Yeah, this is just not awesome anymore.   Emil: I mean, so that should be like, even part of your PM property management vetting, right? Like, do you do, do you have an online portal where you ACH payments to me? So just make sure you set that up. If it's an option, most property managers in 2020, you will have that.   Emil: Maybe Michael went to one that was established in 1925 or something.   Michael: 1833    Tom: Is this is the one in Alaska?   Michael: No, it's actually properties that I've since sold, but out in Missouri kind, of rural Missouri. And so just to expand upon this a little bit is I think we've talked about in another episode, but my property manager, there was only willing to use a certain bank or the local bank branch wasn't anything that we had locally or that I use. So they would go to this bank deposit, the rent check and then would cut me a check to my bank. It was just a whole pain in the butt kind of thing. So what we've automated is now they'll deposit the rent check and then those rent checks we'll get bill paid from that bank to my local bank where I actually do my banking and then from there and get distributed. And so if you can automate as many of those processes as possible, it becomes much easier. So ACH transfer a potentially from multiple bank accounts to multiple bank accounts,   Tom: Are you're hiding something Michael? I'm just kidding.   Michael: I don't know. You ever been to the Cayman islands?   Tom: That's interesting that a local property manager had a preferred bank that they worked with and yeah, yeah.   Michael: They're just like no Wells Fargo or B of A or union bank out there. So they're like, this is what we use. It's like cool, pony express it over to me.   Emil: Carrier pigeon that's right. So the last one in this section, we recommend I do this. I have a separate bank account for all real estate stuff. It just makes things easier, especially come tax time. I also just like having it separate cause I try to treat real estate investing like a business to have its own checking account checking account. I use Chase, it's free to set up another checking account and it's just much easier to track things going in and out and it'll make your CPA's life easier. Do you guys do that as well?   Michael: I was going to ask if you guys have separate accounts for every property?   Tom: You know, it's funny, I just got off a Roofstock Academy coaching session before we started recording this episode and we were just jumping into it with a member exactly on this topic. I don't, I use just one account for all properties. It's just, I don't know, easier. And I don't understand necessarily see the value. Not that it's a lot of overhead to have different bank accounts because you can set them up for free on so many different banks, but I just use one for all the rental properties and yourself, Michael,   Tom: I have one account per LLC. And so I've got LLCs that own multiple properties. So all that was kind of funnel into that one. Yeah. What about you, Emil?   Emil? I'm just one checking account where everything funnels into nice. Just for ease. Makes it easy.   Pierre: What would be one of the benefits of setting up an individual bank account for each property?   Tom: The benefit of setting up, if you were to set up a different bank account for each property, you know, what I like about it at a portfolio level is I just have a really tight grip on cashflow within that portfolio. If I was to do it at an individual property, man, it would be just so clear if I'm making money or losing money. You know, we have these assumptions that we use when we are acquiring properties, but ultimately, you know, when the rubber hits the road, you hope to hit those or even exceed them. But you know, by having an individual bank account for that property, you have a really immediate, transparent view into, is this property performing to how I was projecting it with the cashflow.   Michael: I was going to say, it's a really good question Pierre. I'm glad you asked it. So because I only have the one bank account set up, I think I'm echoing Tom's viewpoints and opinions that, yeah, it's very easy to see what the actual numbers are, but I found that I just keep an Excel file, very detailed document of, Hey, anytime there's an expense on a given property, I log it the date, the expense, and then the dollar amount. And so that for me, suffices as a very similar type of scenario without the headache, I would argue of having 10 different property accounts searching through which one has what I've got it all in a file for me, that's worked really, really well over the years.   Emil: And your property manager, a lot of them you'll have a portal where you'll be able to see all your rent, all the management fees they've taken, they handle a lot of the smaller maintenance. So you'll see those expenses as well. So you also have your property manager, you can lean on, that's going to keep track off a lot of this stuff. The only other thing to track outside of that would be your payments to your lender and then property taxes and insurance.   Michael: There's all kinds of miscellaneous stuff that you'll likely have to pay outside of that. So like business licenses, if you're required in that state or LLC fees, franchise tax fees in, you know, wherever you live and wherever it's registered, just misc miscellaneous stuff. And I just attach that to each property and whatever it's paid for, you know, even might have to pay a contractor, something if they're that's outside the scope of what your property manager is doing. And so having a place to document all of that, I find it to be very, very, helpful.   Emil: Yup. I also keep a detailed Excel. I don't do it every month. I do it like bi-annually.   Michael: Do you do it when you incur the expense or you do it as a reconciliation, every, you know, twice a year,   Emil: The latter I do reconciliation. It's probably not the best, but I don't know.   Pierre: Yeah. I mean, we're talking about automation,   Emil: We're telling you what to aim for. We're not necessarily saying we all do this all the time.   Michael: Do, as I say, not as I do.   Emil: Exactly. And you know, you don't have to be perfect in all these areas. We're giving people just different ideas, you know, what makes sense to automate.   Pierre: Cool   Michael: It's one of those too like, we all have bad habits that we've fallen into over the years. And now in hindsight, we'd say, man, I wish I had formed this better habit. So here's what I would do differently. And it's so hard to break those bad habits. Like it's so hard.   Tom: Getting the grove for sure.   Michael: Yup. Very true.   Emil: One other thing, we don't have it here, but I want to talk about it as well. This kind of goes back to acquisition automation, but, it goes back to the concept of paying yourself first. So a lot of us, you know, we have a full time job or we have W2, whatever it is, make sure you set up like an automatic percentage that every paycheck coming in is going towards your investing. So right now, like my process is 20% of every paycheck automatically gets taken out of my checking, put into a separate investing account. And I highly recommend people who are listening, check out a website called I will teach you to be rich by Ramit Satie he has this awesome guide. If you look up, I will teach you to be rich, personal finance guide. It shows you how to automate all this stuff, like having separate accounts for different things you're saving up for. I found that super easy and like a really good way to separate your money and like have kind of different categories and use them for separate things. So I have a separate investing savings account that automatically, you know, income coming in goes into that. So that's another automation thing I do.   Michael: Piggybacking off that a meal I've also automated paying myself first from the rental amount every month. So when we do our analyses, we see, okay, we've got the mortgage payment, property taxes, all these other expenses that may or may not actually occur on a monthly basis, but we modeled them that way. So it makes the cash flow easier to understand. And so your property is going to collect rent. They're going to take their fee and are going to give you the rest. Well, now that's a huge chunk of change, but we've still got to pay some of these other expenses. And so we all have calculated on a monthly basis what our cash flow should be. And so I will automatically set up that deduction amount from my property bank account, going to my personal bank account, if I'm planning on using that cashflow for everyday life stuff. So if it's a hundred bucks a month, I just receive rent on the 10th or whatever of the month. And then I automatically have a hundred dollars transfer into my personal account. Everything else stays in the property account to then pay all those other expenses for. And at the end of the year, you had a good year. You might have some extra dollars left over and you can pay yourself again. Or if you had a bad year, you might need to put some additional money back into that. But it's a really easy way to just start collecting money from your properties without overdoing it.   Tom: I like it. So the next operational system I'll jump on, has to do with documentation. So if you're an active investor, you will be regularly buying new properties. You will be regularly refinancing had a good episode, I guess it would be two weeks ago. Once this episode is launched on ways to take out equity, anywho, when you are going through that exercise, you're going to need the same documents again and again and again, you're going to need a copy of the current lease. You're gonna need a certificate of insurance. You're gonna need a sample mortgage payment. And what I like to do with this is to streamline this process is set up a folder structure that is secure. There's a couple of different platforms out there, Dropbox, maybe even Google drive, but you know, in a secure folder online, I'll have my relevant documents in there.And then I can use sharing functionality to give it specifically to my lender or specifically to my CPA. That way I'm not needing to constantly track down these documents that I'm going to need again and again and again, and I can safely share it with whoever needs it. So the main takeaway for this system, I guess you can call it that is, you know, don't sleep on it, just have that document structure set up a do it once and do it right and do it early and then have that available for whenever you go through one of these maneuvers, be it refinancing or taking on a new loan or going through tax time.   Michael: It's so valuable. I know for my first property, I didn't have these systems really set up in place. I thought I did and then came tax time and I was like, Oh my God. So this is going to take so long to figure this out and go back and collect all these things. So, you know, it's one of those things. It's tough to know what you're looking for until you know what to look for. So ask somebody, ask, you know, ask your CPA, ask your tax professional. Hey, I'm investing in real estate. What things you're going to need from you at the end of the year, they're going to tell you, okay, we need your 1098. We're gonna need all your expenses, property tax, receipts, all these types of things. So that way you can start that ahead of time developing and building these good habits and systems. It makes it so much easier. Come tax time.   Emil: I don't have anything else that neither does my mustache. Good job guys. Excellent.   Tom: I actually thought of this while you were talking about it. So I love the concept of paying yourself first, right? And with paying yourself first, when you get your paycheck, it's pretty straight forward, right? You take the first 10%, 20%, whatever, and either save it or spend it. However, I like to think about this with your day. So paying yourself first, the first 10% of your day, how are you guys going to pay yourself first with the first 10% of your day? And you're not allowed to say surfing,   Emil: I'll go one level up then and just say exercising. I think exercising for me has become as equally as important for my mental wellbeing for the day as it is physical. So for me, that's how I pay myself first to start the day, right?   Tom: What are you doing for exercise?   Michael: Surfing!   Emil: I wish more surfing. Having a small child will put a dent in your surfing ability and it's summer, so the waves were a little slower. I will do. I'll either go for a run or I will do a combination of like pushups pull ups. Or I also use this thing called the seven minute workout app. It's literally a seven minute workout. I don't do long workouts. I don't like, I don't know. I used to spend more time working out, but for me, it's just a matter of like doing it almost daily to just start the day right. Whether it's seven minutes or 30 minutes.   Michael: Classic Emil fashion, he stole my answer. But that's why I went first because you're going to try to take that out. So not surfing, but I like to do kite surfing and I also work out. Do you exercise in the morning? I find that getting my blood pumping helps kind of burn off that haziness in the morning. But since the meal took that already, I really liked journaling in the morning. Just even for a few minutes, a few paragraphs, just kind of what I'm thinking about. What's going on personally in my life and what my goals are. I read that book think and grow rich. And that reaffirm that journaling is a super powerful tool. I've always known it, but again, it's one of those bad habits that it's hard to break into if you're not used to doing it. So starting slow and just trying to get my thoughts out on paper outside of myself, I find it to be helpful and worthwhile. What about you Tom?   Tom: So the first 10% of my day has gotten a lot earlier with a small child. So, you know, it's, it's now like the, you know, late five's early 6:00 AM is the first 10% of my day, but excellent partnership with my wife helping out. Well, she has the lion's share for sure, but on the extra early days, all right. I'm digressing. Okay. Going on a walk. So, I mean, I guess this is exercise. Sure. Why not? So getting the baby early morning, throwing him in a little jogger or the stroller walking around the street in the morning when like everything's still quiet and the sun's just creeping up over the Hills and the fog is kind of lifting journal in my head. I dunno. So like walking around in the early morning when nothing else is going on, I know that's a fine first 10% of the day way to pay yourself first.   Michael: As the only person without a baby, just a PSA, you know, you probably shouldn't throw babies into or at anything whether it be a jogger or cribs.   Tom: Oh, they're, they're pretty durable, but yeah, for sure,   Emil: They are very durable.   Pierre: Antifragile.   Emil: Antifragile.   Tom: Antifragile! Yes, they get stronger with it. Yeah. How about yourself Pierre? Your first 10% of the day?   Pierre: I like to save my working out for the end of the day so I can have a break between my work day and the evening. So the morning is a good time for me to read.   Emil: I used to read a lot in the morning, baby killed that.   Tom: Got anything good? Any good books going?   Pierre: I'm a little bit behind with the book club, but I'm reading the book that Michael chose for the RSA book club, Never Split the Difference.   Emil: Great book.   Pierre: And this morning I read the ebook that email sent me and the article on how to write better titles for the podcast.   Emil: Got to keep the audience clicking.   Michael: Yeah, that's great. Speaking of our audience, if anybody has any thoughts, suggestions, insights, hot topics they want to hear about. Please feel free to let us know at eshour@roofstock.com, malbaum@roofstoo.com, or tom@roofstock.com.   Emil: Or hit us up on Twitter. I'm @emilshour, Michael you're @albaummichael. and Tom you are.   Tom: I am not positive… I'm @tscnheido   Michael: Freaky deaky Tom   Tom: Yea, created like whatever, 15 years ago, something like that.   Emil: I like it.   Michael: Skater dude, 27 with an eight.   Tom: Exactly. Awesome guys. Well, thank you so much for listening today. To our episode, we hope that you got some value out of it. If you liked it, please don't be shy. Please rate us. Please subscribe as a meal set. And like Michael and Emil said, reach out to us. We love to hear your feedback on future content to do and to keep driving. So, alright, happy investing.   Emil: Happy, investing.   Michael: Happy investing.    

In this Episode, Tom, Michael and Emil talk about the element of luck in real estate investing and how to put in the work to be ready to move when opportunity arises.  --- Transcript: Tom: Greetings and welcome to the remote real estate investor. In today's episode, we're going to be talking about the concept of chance luck. It goes by many names. And how does it apply to real estate investing? How can you tip the scales in your favor and what are the hosts thoughts on the different aspects of luck? All right, let's do it.   Tom: All right, guys. So today's episode, as we alluded to in the intro, we're going to be talking about the elements of luck and how it applies to real estate investing. And before we get into any specific, I'd love to hear from both you guys, a meal and Michael, are you guys lucky? What are your thoughts on luck and real estate investing at a high level and lucky that's, you know, I ask that questions in your life. And it's a interview question that a lot of companies use where they ask if an applicant is lucky and they take luck, which I think might be a theme, at least for me, in this episode of, by putting a lot of little things in your favor, it can generate luck in your favor. So anyways, Michael, you go first, go ahead and spiels your kind of thoughts on luck.   Michael: And yeah, so, you know, I thought for a long time that I was a very lucky person, things kind of seemed to go well for me overall. And then I think it was my dad who first told me that luck is just preparation, meeting opportunity. And I wholeheartedly believe in that. I think that people who are lucky or who appear lucky from the outside are probably doing a lot of things that go unnoticed. And an  analogy is like a duck treading water on the surface of like super calm. But underneath there is so much going on and the surface wouldn't look the way it did, if what was going on beneath the surface wasn't happening. So I do consider myself a lucky person, but I also think that I spend a ton of time, energy and effort preparing for the opportunities that I seem to encounter.   Tom: I love the visual, the visual just got me.   Michael: Yeah Emil, what about you?   Emil: Michael, you're such an optimist. Every time I talk to you, I'm like, I need to be more like Michael and just be just super optimistic. I'm kind of, it depends on the day you ask me, I was chatting with somebody the other day and it feels like the moments you're unlucky things just pile on, right? You have a tenant issue or things that feel like headaches and make you feel unlucky. A lot of times in real estate investing for whatever reason it is, they pile on top of each other at the same time. And then you have these mud like months go by and you're seeing your property value go up. You haven't had any tenant issues, no big maintenance costs. And you're like, man, I'm so lucky. I'm collecting passive income, not doing anything. So for me, I'm kinda, there's times where I feel super lucky and times where I feel unlucky. So I don't know.       Tom: I like that for you.   Emil: Straight answer for you.   Tom: It comes in bunches.   Michael: Yeah. When it rains, it pours. Yeah. Who's got any more platitudes to pile on.   Emil: We're getting real basic on this episode.   Michael: What about you Tom? Do you consider yourself lucky?   Tom: Yeah. I consider myself a lucky person. For sure. I think it's similar to, like you were saying, Michael it's where preparation meets opportunity. There definitely are things outside of your control where no matter what you do, like things can go up or things can go down. But as a whole, I'd say the arc tends to go towards, you know, taking care of the little things and all that stuff adds up or not taking care of the little things and all that stuff adds up and tends to bend towards whatever. I don't know how you would put it either your work ethic or just taking care of knowing where to put the work in is really important. So I, you know, yes, there is definitely some elements of chance and luck that are real, but generally speaking, I think a lot of times people create their own luck. So how I want to apply this to remote real estate investing is I've broken down categories where I think chance exists and we're going to go through all of them and talk about them. The ways that we can tip the scale in our favor and the categories I have selected. And you guys, we can add some other ones, but we're going to jump into each one is property value. So appreciation kind of like neighborhood related stuff, the tenant. So either evictions or renewing leases or the rent going up, the property condition, repairs and maintenance and acquisitions, those are going to be our four key categories. And we're just going to spend time in each category, knocking them down and onto the next one. So it makes sense, guys, let's do it. Let's do it. Alright. Property value, Emil. Why don't you lead us on this one? So let's talk about the different aspects of luck in property value.   Emil: So for me, the big one here, the luck part of it is choosing an area that appreciates, well, I think it's probably two things choosing a market that appreciates well and choosing an area within that market that seems to be appreciating is more desirable than the other parts of town. Those I would say are probably the two luck aspects. Do you guys have anything else to add on property value?   Tom: Yeah, I'd say there's, you know, with property value, a way to get above the fold of the luck is just looking at all those variables that go into appreciation and there are several of them. So crime population growth, different major economic centers. So I mean, my thought with property value is, you know, it's not throwing a dart at a board, there's doing your homework and looking at some of those key contributing factors to appreciation. You can get ahead of the curve with that.   Emil: So I have some examples of good luck and bad luck I'm gonna lead with the bad luck story. So a property I bought about two years ago out in Memphis, bought it for around 63,500 has a one, a half or two star neighborhood rating on Roofstock. I ended up holding it for about two years, decent cash flowing property, but I ended up just selling it last month, took me a couple months to sell it. And I ended up selling it for basically what I paid for. So even after two years, the market's been great across the country, took me several months to sell it and it didn't appreciate at all. And we had just made some repairs to the property. So that was an instance where I probably bought, I lean too hard on cashflow, right. And bought in a one and a half star neighborhood, so lower quality neighborhood and the property, it didn't end up appreciating as much as some of the properties I have in other markets where the neighborhood is just better and the market better as well. One of the other things I probably could have accounted for is Memphis. I learned this later, Memphis has a lot of great cash flowing properties, but there's a lot of rental properties. And it's just one of those markets that you're not going to see a lot of appreciation here. So my goal wasn't when I bought this, I didn't think I'd be selling it two years down the road and my goal wasn't appreciation. But…   Michael: Did you anticipate to see some appreciation from the property in addition to cashflow?   Emil: I mean, I think we all do, right. I think we're all cashflow and we've talked about what do we want cashflow or appreciation? We're all cashflow investors, but you start to realize that appreciation is really an amazing cherry on top. And it allows like if you hold for a small period of time, your property appreciates, you can just steam roll that, snowball that into another property. That's maybe bringing you more cashflow. So it's, I've realized it's a little shortsighted to just think about cashflow.   Tom: I think that's a good example. You know, in thinking about appreciation is it's in property value. It's luck if you close your eyes and just kind of throw a dart at the board, but if you're proactive in evaluating, what are the different underpinnings that make for appreciation, it becomes less of a luck thing. Right? So talk about an example where you would say you were lucky with appreciation and how maybe it wasn't so much luck looking at it in hindsight.   Michael: So my very first property I bought in Southern California, I had no idea what I was doing. And we talked about it in a prior episode, or we talk about our first deals. And so I had no idea what I was doing, but I knew the market a little bit just anecdotally, because I had spent time there as a kid. So I thought of my first investment, I'll just buy into their California, great, whatever I bought that house. And it's since appreciated North of a hundred thousand dollars since I've owned it, which is super, super exciting. And that was dumb luck, some would say, but that was also a little bit, a little bit of preparation meeting opportunity. And in hindsight, looking at that market, it has, it would be a five star neighborhood if was on Roofstock, the schools are all 10, 10 tens. It constantly gets rated amongst some of the best schools in the state. And it's in a small HOA association. So the neighborhood around it is maintained really well because everybody is subject to the same HOA rules, looking at that whole picture. It's obvious that that house is likely to appreciate, but I didn't have the whole picture going into it because I didn't know to look and zoom out at all these things. I just thought, Oh, here's a neighborhood that I know, and here's a house that I can afford. So I think that's a kind of prime example of luck mixed with a little bit of preparation.   Tom: I like that story in that, you know, in going through it, you were fortunate to be in that neighborhood and just to buy it, but over time it seems like that would, I think that the big arc of the story is what started as a luck thing, turned into less of a luck thing, as you have learned more about the different elements that go into appreciation like your school scores.   Michael: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I know for me that I'm able to then convert that luck into now more of a science, because I understand what's going into that. As you say, what's going into the sausage making right understand at school scores play a role that neighborhood's scores play a role that physical property attributes play a role. So those all things have been a tip in my favor and this one particular example. But now that I understand that I can go take those lessons learned and make the process repeatable in any other market.   Tom: That's great. I'm going to go ahead and flip us to the next category of tenant. And what I mean by this is vacancy is, you know, touching into evictions a little bit. And I would say that at a high level, a lucky situation with a tenant is a tenant that never moves out that always pays rent on time. That is always renewing right? Continuing the lease to keep vacancy down. And I think there is a lot of things you can do upfront to tip these scales in your favor. And I think thinking about either buying occupied or vacant, there's different things that you can do to help you out here.   Michael: Tom, what would you say are some of those things?   Tom: So let's talk about an occupied property first. So if I buy a property that is occupied and the next day I find out that the tenant is an eviction and wants to leave and whatnot. I know now knowing what I know there are some things I could have done to put the odds in my favor that that wouldn't be an issue. So you could say I'm on, I'm unlucky. Some of the things that I could do with a property that has occupied is no. What was the screening criteria for that tenant, with the seller? So was there a debt to income ratio? How was that tenant vetted before the seller brought them in? Did they talk to previous landlords? If I go into buying an occupied property without knowing some of this stuff? I think then yeah, this is definitely you're rolling the dice and getting lucky, but as an investor who wants to push the luck in their favor, getting to know what is that criteria of the occupied owner I think is really important.   Emil: I have a couple of things we can add here in terms of tipping luck in your favor. So you can find a lot of us lean on property managers to handle finding tenants, dealing with tenants. So there's some property managers who put some skin in the game when it comes to tenants, they'll do things like if the tenant requires an eviction, they will handle replacing the tenant for free. So usually most property managers charge you a new lease fee like half of a first month's rent or full month's rent. And some of them will just waive that and find you a new tenant. And they won't also take their management fee from that first month to replace them. So I think one thing you can do to tip the scales in your favor is make sure your PM has some type of skin in the game when it comes to tenant quality. So that's something I've learned over time. And I like property managers who offer that another one I'll quickly mention is it kinda has to do with the tenant it's every year lease will come up for renewal. And a lot of times people will just always want to go and get the market rate. And so I talked about an example today on Twitter, and I'll just kind of read off what it was. So let's say you want to increase your rent from a thousand dollars to 1,050, and you're not willing to be flexible. And the tenant decides to leave. So let's say you have to pay $1,500 to get the place rent ready, and you lose a month of rent finding a new tenant. So $2,500 you have to make up. Now, if you're generous and assume you'll be able to get $1,100 per month from the new tenant, that's a hundred dollars more than you were bringing in before. Right? So stick with me. I'm gonna try to bring all this together. So it'll take you 25 months to make up that $2,500 difference, right? So $1,500 for making it rent ready. And the thousand dollars of one month of lost rent. So 2,500 divided by a hundred, you have 25, takes you 25 months, more than two years to make up that small increase in rent. So another thing you can do to tip things in your favor is having some type of flexibility in making sure you don't lose tenants, right? Don't just say I'm a hundred dollars under market rent. I'm going to get 50 to $100 more per month. And if they leave, they leave, it's actually theirs. When you do the math, it's better to be a little bit under marketing. Keep that tenant in for longer. At least for me.   Tom: What I love about that example, Emil is, another element of luck is, you could say at the end of the year, you're looking at your cashflow and you're like, Oh, I was, you know, up X amount or down X amount by that exercise that you just went through in calculating out the difference of what your return would be on driving up market rent and maybe dealing with vacancy or, you know, well maybe a less market rent growth. You're being super proactive at what those end of the year cash flow is. And having that information as a tool in your arsenal when going to the table with the tenant on what the rent renewal is. So I think that's a great idea of at the end of the day, this is maximizing your cashflow. And you're doing that by being data driven and looking at the numbers on making that type of decision. So another great example,   Michael: related to that point a meal, I think that not enough people talk to their tenants and whether that's themselves personally, or through their property manager. And so when a tenant moves out, owners are often like, Oh, bummer, the tenant moved out. Now have to go through that exercise. And Neil just mentioned of turning the unit and getting the market rent if they so desire. But there's so much that you can do proactively before that tenant moves out by asking them questions, Hey, what would you like to see done to the property? Are there things that I could do as an owner or the manager can ask on your behalf to do to the property, to incentivize them to stay? And so that's really, again, some opportunity and some preparation that are meeting. And so if someone has a tenure tenant, someone might look at them and say, Oh, they're so lucky. They haven't had a vacancy in 10 years. Well, really that owner might've been talking to that tenant the whole time.   Emil: That's a great example. I like that a lot.   Tom: Be the duck legs, the duck legs,   Michael: Swim, swim stroke stroke.   Tom: The last thing I'll say on tenant before we move on to property condition and RNM is it puts yourself in the position of a tenant. So instead of just sort of blindly looking at an address and a bed count, bath count, do the Google street view, is this property on a thoroughfare? Is it going to be a place that you would want to live? I love the golden rule of putting yourself on the other side of the tenant and saying like, Oh, is this some place I'd want to live at? And one of our new and all that good stuff. And if it checks those boxes, chances are you're going to probably going to be luckier and have tenants that stay longer and renew longer and all of that good stuff. All right. Let's jump into property conditions. So this is about RNM. How can you be lucky when it comes to repairs and maintenance and costs of turn Michael, you want to lead the way?   Michael: Yeah, sure. So I think the biggest thing that you can do to be proactive and get lucky is just set expectations on the front end, give the tenant a very clean place to move into, keep it well maintained, keep it safe. There are more likely to feel a pride of ownership or rentership rather in a nice, clean, safe environment. And if you make it very clear that look, we are giving you this safe, clean place to live. We expect it to be safe and clean when, when it gets returned to us. And if you don't, these are the consequences. It's not threatening. It's just very level setting. This is what we expect of you. This is what you can expect of us. And again, someone who has a tenant move out and has a sparkling clean unit, someone might say, wow, you're so lucky. You're so lucky right at that happened. When in reality, no, you spent the time, energy and effort on the front end to set the expectation and make it very clear. Who's responsible for what.   Speaker 4: Yeah. Love it. It's building trust and being the duck legs under the water.   Michael: That's right.   Emil: Lots of duck legs, lots of duck legs.   Tom: Well, how about yourself? Any thoughts with regards to property condition and repairs and maintenance and turn costs and how do you tip luck scale into your favor?   Emil: Yes. One thing it's going, gonna kind of go off what Michael mentioned, but I think when you take over a property to set a, a good example or a new precedent, right? When you take over, let's say there's a couple of things in the inspection report that you could maybe defer, just taking care of them up front, especially if they're on the inside where the tenant they're in front of the tenant's face, right? Like holes in the wall, broken things, right. Fix those things and just clean up the place, make it more of that pride of ownership. When you take over, I think that kind of helps set the precedent for your tenants to know that this is under new management, you care, and you want this place taken care of. So it kind of goes along the lines of what, what Michael mentioned.   Michael: I just wrote down that note too, that I wanted follow up on. I'm so glad you touched on it. That it's showing, being responsive when it comes to repair requests or maintenance requests really shows that you as the owner care and thus will often incentivize the tenant to care because if you don't care as the owner, why should they care being a tenant in your property?   Emil: Yup. Tom, anything else?   Tom: So getting, building luck on property condition stuff, I would say quality is going to go a long way. And what I mean by that is you could, you know, there's always a decision when things come up repair versus replace with costs. There's a third element. I think of the quality of the work that is done. And it doesn't matter as much if you choose to repair or replace, if you do it with really bad quality. So when you're thinking about the vendors that you're using, making sure that they have a track record and a history and are reputable by sometimes you may pay a little bit more upfront to do work versus other options in doing the work. But if it's by a vendor that is reputable and does good work, a lot of times it's gonna end up being a lot cheaper because it's, you're not gonna need to go back, redo the type of work. And I know for myself, I lean on third party, property management, pretty so instilling, you know, my expectations with that, with the property managers and having a relationship and being the Duck's legs under the water and saying like, okay, Laura, who's my property manager. You know, if you're in my position, this is what I'm thinking about. I'd much rather have the quality work done. I'm willing to pay a little bit extra. What are your history of work with this vendor versus that vendor? If they're bringing me multiple bids. So really making sure that if you're going to spend money, which stinks on like repairs and maintenance, but it's really important, right? Because we need to have safe habital spots getting the work done by a, that has a really good track record of doing work. So I can measure twice cut once and just get it done with,   Michael: To piggyback on that. Tom, I also think that doing proactive steps physically to improve the property and making it more tenant proof can also tip the luck scales in our favor, such as you know, instead of cleaning the carpet or replacing the carpet, tearing it out and putting in hardwood or laminate flooring. And so that's going to reduce our costs in the long run, likely to have that stuff clean at every tenant turn, it makes the property more durable. It can often make the property more attractive. And so again, the Duck's legs being proactive on the front end, doing things that are going to increase our likelihood of success, I think is huge. When it comes to the physical property itself.   Tom: Regular inspections. That's a good one, too.   Michael: Absolutely.   Tom: Sometimes stuff can fester and it just gets way worse over time. It's if you pay for it right now and deal with it, it can be significantly cheaper versus letting it fester, especially anything that has anything to do with water, water. If it's wet, you're going to pay a lot I bet.   Michael: Did you just come up with that?   Tom: I did. Trademark.   Michael: That's really good.   Emil: What do you guys think about potential? Where can you set yourself up for bad luck with property condition? One thing I wrote down, let me know if you guys agree with this is let's say you buy a property. That's not in the best part of town. And you know, you're probably not going to get the type of tenant that takes pride in ownership and where they live. I think one thing that can set you up for failure is over renovating or making it too nice. Right? Getting stainless steel appliances, granite countertops, like making it look like a five-star neighborhood property would have when it's actually an, a one and a half or two star neighborhood. What do you guys think? Do you think there's a, that sets you up for bad luck if you over renovate or make things too nice if you're maybe not in the best part of town.   Tom: Yeah, I would say so. I would say being really cognizant of keeping it consistent with the neighborhood. I mean, there could be a situation, you know, it's not a one size fits all with everything. There could be a situation where you might be able to get a little extra boost on the rent by putting in the granite countertops in an area that's maybe a two star, but I'd say generally speaking is knowing that neighborhood and keeping it consistent, right? Cause you could be just dumping money into, you know, getting the fancy gold toilets may not be necessary. So, and this is being the duck legs, knowing the neighborhoods that you're in   Michael: I think to echo Tom's point, chatting with property, local property management and getting an idea and understanding of what's neighborhood. By that same token though, you could be the spark that ignites the dynamite, so to speak of a neighborhood changing, it's got to start somewhere. So if you're going to be that person that over rehabs, the property that could get everyone's attention and saying, wow, look at what's going on in this neighborhood money coming in, let's start also rehabbing our properties because clearly this neighborhood is changing. So that's kind of the opposite end of the spectrum is you could be the change investor.   Emil: That's a good point.   Tom: I like it. Let's jump into this next aspect of luck, which is on the acquisition side. So finding deals, buying deals who wants to start us off here talking about acquisitions and getting lucky with acquisition.   Michael: Why don't you start us off Tom?   Tom: I like it. I had some stuff in my back pocket. So I..   Michael: Always.   Tom: The biggest thing about acquisitions is always having the lights on always being up to evaluate a deal and to just beat this into the ground as being the duck underwater. I know, sorry, but here's the thing though. Like the machine doesn't turn off, right? So there's always deals coming up. That's available. And the people who are lucky are the people who are constantly looking through what is available. Now I understand life gets busy and there's times where you can put in a little bit more time or you're in more of an acquisition cycle. But even if you're not an acquisition cycle, still be constantly having your finger on the pulse and having enough dry powder available where if that screaming deal does come along, good news, you're going to be lucky and then you to buy it. And the reason you gotta be lucky is because you're constantly looking at stuff. And I feel pretty adamant about that is how you get lucky with acquisitions. It's just always knowing your market, always seeing stuff coming through, being persistent.   Michael: Yeah. To echo that. I think having your head on a swivel, even if you're not in a buying cycle, we've talked about this a lot on other episodes about kind of where we are in our own personal business, what cycle we're in. And many of us are not in a buying cycle, but absolutely keeping our eyes open our ears peeled, listening, looking for those great deals. I think in addition to knowing the market, being able to foreshadow a little bit and forecast a little bit above and beyond what you're seeing today and looking at trends and interpreting those trends to see where things are going to end up can be a huge, huge, huge advantage, and can often make people appear lucky. I bought in a neighborhood like I share with you guys numerous times in the Midwest and Northern Kentucky that has some really amazing government, local government incentives. And so I saw that and I understood the writing on the wall to mean that this area is really up and coming. And I did the homework to understand what's going on historically. And what's happening currently to then project on, where do I see this place? I'm going to go. I'm going to bet big on it. And that's seemingly proving to pay off. And so again, being the Duck's legs, you know, doing all that stuff on the front end to understand where this is going to end up.   Emil: I like that. Other things I would add here is if you are in a buying cycle, maybe you have multiple deal finders, right? So either have a couple of agents out there. You tell your PM, you're looking for a property you're on, Roofstock sending filters, get notifications. And also, I, you mentioned keeping your eye on the market, even when you're not in a buy cycle. I think that's so important because let's say you're buying a property once a year. If you buy a property, don't keep your eye on listings. Aren't keeping a temperature read on the market. You take a year off, you come back, you may have the bias you did a year ago and the market has changed the bunch. So I think keeping your eye on the market and looking at listings, seeing how quickly things are selling, how much are they selling for? I think that that just always pays whether you're buying or not.   Michael: One other thing to mention is we talk about, again, the opportunity for success and where preparation meets opportunity. I think the greatest deal of the century could come around, but if we're not prepared to execute on it, we're never gonna get it. We're never gonna seem lucky. And so being educated above and beyond understanding your market, I think is so, so, so hypercritical. And I know for me, if I had been educated prior to when I started investing, I would have been able to have invested sooner and hit even more home runs even more grand slams. So getting educated on how to purchase real estate, what that looks like, how to evaluate markets is so, so critical. I really can't stress that enough. And that's something I talk a lot about with people inside the Academy of, you know, the fact that you're here, getting educated is going to put you in such an advantageous position to be able to execute on things when they present themselves.    Emil: Well said. All right. So transitioning away from real estate investing, I'm curious to hear what you guys think is the luckiest thing that's happened to you in your life. So outside of real estate investing, what do you guys think is the luckiest thing that's happened to you?   Michael: I am going to force my wife to listen to this because meeting her is far and away, the luckiest thing that's ever happened to me in my entire life. You're welcome Claire. And thank you.   Tom: Oh, and we cannot repeat any of these ones that we have. So Emil, I'm going to leave you with a bunch of scraps.   Emil: Don't you, don't you say your kid!   Tom: Was definitely going to, I mean, people talk about the lights from the sky, getting a little bit brighter when you meet your offspring, your first child and it's real, man. I'm just love struck such a crazy life experience of meeting a child that is related to you. I'd say. And thank goodness, yeah, mom as well. But Michael already took that one and my beautiful wife. Gosh, I'm trying to think of, I could go on any other stuff. I mean, just generally speaking, I think I'm pretty lucky. Gosh, luckiest thing, luckiest thing.   Michael: I I've never heard anyone. Tom, I think say that they met their offspring, but it makes sense. Did you shake their hand?   Tom: Yes. I shook his hand, formally. Nice to meet you, sir. Tom Schneider pleasure is mine. Pleasure is mine damn glad to meet you. So yeah, I'm going to go son, meeting son, really crazy mind blowing stuff.   Emil: So awesome. So I get to be the direct that doesn't get to mention his wife or, or his baby daughter. I love them both. They are the luckiest things that have happened to me outside of those two. I'd probably say learning marketing. I mean, that is my profession and it's not what I started doing out of college. It was my third job out of college that I got into marketing. And to me, I see it as a skill that will always be there. I don't see robots or automation overtaking that I think they help marketers, but I don't see those types of things overtaking the marketer. And so for me to just have found something that I really enjoy doing that creates a good livelihood and that I think will be in demand. And I think it also just teaches you a lot about human psychology. You know, a lot of people look at marketing like ads and tools and all these things, but really it's learning how it's understanding people and how people work and what motivates them. So outside of my daughter and my wife, I'd say the luckiest thing that happened to me is learning about marketing and taking that on as a profession.   Michael: Emil, did you find marketing or did marketing find marketing find you?   Emil: Marketing found me. You know, I was, I was lost and I found my way through marketing.   Michael: That's awesome.   Emil: I was face down in a ditch somewhere. Yeah.   Michael: Marketing's like, Hey, are you okay? I can help   Emil: Marketing parted the clouds and shined its light on me.   Michael: That is lucky.   Tom: Alright. What else? Anything else? Alrighty then.   Alright, thanks for listening to today's episode, we hope you found it valuable. If you found this lucky duck episode to be valuable, please rate us on your podcast platform that you're using and feel free to reach out to us. You can reach out to us on Twitter or on Instagram. If there's any content you would like to hear, we would like to hear from you any questions, comment, and happy investing.   Michael: Happy investing   Emil: Happy investing.

90 DAY FIANCE ZIED AND REBECCA They’re in a hookah bar and someone starts staring at her because she took off her jacket. Rebecca is reminded of ex boyfriend because Zied got angry at strangers. So, they argue, it gets calmed down, and they all continue sitting next to each other…  Her eye make up is WILD. It’s jet black.  Interview: “I worry that the secrets I’m keeping in my past might push him over the edge.” Ugh these people and their secrets DARCEY AND TOM I am obsessssed with Darcey. I am obsessed with: her beauty products, her outfits, her brand names, her desperation, her eyelashes, her anxiety…  Darcey is reeling from Tom saying that he recently stopped ‘seeing several women’ for her. Umm Tom is a liar.  Darcey at the top of the stairs sees Tom “Oh look it’s like you’re waiting at the alter.” OMG SHE’S SO EMBARRASSINGGGG Darcey talks about her sister who is going to Albania to see HER fiance. They are sisters in stupidity. And yet, Darcey wants to change vacation plans to Albania to join her sister. She says it’s basically so Darcey can confirm that she and Tom are a good match.  Darcey suggests to tom they go to Albania. Tom does not want to change his plans. Yeah no duh!!!! Darcey says Albania is “nice and… mediterranean-ish.” Darcey just wants people’s approval, not the actual experiences and connection.  Darcey: Stacy and I want our guys to meet. I just want her to know I’m happy. OMG this is soooo toxic. Tom agrees. Darcey and Tom suit up for cricket. They walk down the pitch. Darcey: It’s like walking down the aisle. Tom: You never quit about the wedding thing, do you?  Darcey puts on the cricket pads and they play the best awkward music.  Tom hits a wicket. Darcey calls them midgets. Tom awkwardly falls over.  Tom tells her they’re called wickets. Darcey: Sounds like a sex term. Tom: You turn everything into a sex term. Darcey: Are we just going to cuddle forever? Tom chokes on his water.  Darcey has an interview look where she’s wearing a black sparkly dress. Her eyes are JET BLACK. Darcey in interview: I’m starting to feel insecure. Maybe I should pull back emotionally.  YES DARCEY IN EVERY ASPECT OF YOUR LIFE YOU NEED TO PULL BACK EMOTIONALLY.  ACT TWO AKINYI AND BENJAMIN We need to talk about this guy’s hair. It’s not like his just happens to be greasy. It looks intentionally greasy and then split down the middle. WHY?! Just WASH IT!!! It would look so much better!! It’s willfully greasy!  Ben has just landed in Nairobi, Kenya. Ben says “You’re my dark chocolate.” Fantastic.  AKINYI: “There’s something I haven’t told Benjamin yet.” UGHHHH HERE WE GO. Oh, she tells him immediately. That’s good. Oh they’re just going to his brother’s place. Big deal.  It’s so odd that she’s whisking him away to her brother’s like he’s being kidnapped. I do feel bad for him… this is a bit of an ambush.  OMAR AND AVERY I died when Avery said her fiance is from Syria but they can’t go to Aleppo because it’s basically levelled. It’s not funny but it’s such an insane sentence.  Avery tell us when she woke up she found out Omar let her down. He didn’t find them a sheikh to get them married or a venue. Omar is like…. It’s the weekend.  They have to get married so that Avery can go home and apply for Omar’s visa. She also hasn’t told her mom that she’s moving to Syria after they get married. I’m just not sure what there will be to do for Avery in Syria.  Avery is making a huuuuge mistake complaining to her mom about Omar. Now when they make up she will hold it against him even more forever.  Avery’s mom offers to help her find a venue. That’s really sweet.  ACT THREE ANGELA Look… I’m not spending a lot of time on her. Why is she back? They’re story feels so fake.  Angela shows her daughter SKYLA all of her sex toys for Michael.  Angela gets on a plane. The difference between how Angela looks on a plane vs Darcey…  TIM AND JENNIFER Tim creeps me out. His proportions are unsettling. Jennifer is a bit of a lunatic, yelling in front of her daughter.  They get to his apartment.  Tim gives Jennifer her gifts. This visual explains the essence of what Jennifer is in this for.  They go to dinner…  Jennifer likes his style. Tim asks if it’s too feminine for her? She says no.. then Jennifer tells us he’s not her type, but he’s a family man. You can’t find a family man in Colombia?!  Tim reveals his manicure. Jennifer calls him a pussy. Here’s the thing… it’s great that Tim has a manicure, do whatever you want, but that excess of gloss is a bit much, no?  CAESAR His title card is just him alone. Caesar is taking video of Cancun for Maria, who is invisible.  Caesar reminds us that he’s been catfishing her for 5 years. Caesar’s bag has arrived. His ring for Maria is supposed to be in there.  My favorite side character in Caesar’s story is his producer, whose questions all have the subtext of… sooo you really think she’s real, huh?  Caesar texts Maria and sees that she just checked her messages a minute ago. So he calls her. She doesn’t pick up… “Maybe hse’s getting on the plane.” Mannnn he has a theory for everything!!  Caesar swims up to a family and starts talking about Maria. He shows them Maria’s picture. The punk kids ask if he’s being catfished and laugh super hard.  OMAR AND AVERY Avery is literally dragging Omar up the street to find someone to marry them.  Omar approaches the sheikh who is wearing a sweatshirt that says ATHLETE on it.  Avery’s mother has to cover up, says it’s uncomfortable, and says “Avery hasn’t been muslim in the summer yet so we’ll see.”  Of all the secrets, Avery’s is the meanest. Her mom is going out of her way to help her, and she’s going to be like oh btw moving to Syria byeeee.  MICHAEL Michael tells his co workers that he quit his job because Angela wants to know where he is at all times, so he sends her money. That’s so weird…  TIMOTHY AND JENNIFER After dinner, Timothy asks Jennifer to stay.  Jennifer puts on her pajamas and comes out. Timothy says of course he wants to have sex with her but he’s scared of her. In his defense, the cameras are there… how is he supposed to put the moves on her.  Timothy wants to do eye masks. He hands her wipes to take off her makeup.  Tim: “Come on cuddle with me.” She turns over to her side.  OMAR AND AVERY Avery asks Omar if he plans on her moving to Syria. He said he hopes so. Omar explains that power and water are cut off all the time.  Avery says she can handle it if Omar can. Now they have to tell her mom.  AKINYI AND BENJAMIN They walk in to the apartment and Benjamin meets a bunch of sisters and in laws.  Akinyi puts a bracelet on Benjamin. She asks for her gift. Sooo uncomfortable. Well he bought a plane ticket and and an air b n b that presumably you would stay at tool. So, you’ll live.  DARCEY AND TOM Darcey says that Tom agreed to change the plans to go to Albania, but at the same time someting is off. THAT! THat’s what it is!  Tom has finally had it with Darcey being over the top. He says it feels false. Darcey is shocked. This is his version of flipping out and being like ENOUGH.  Also she’s crying. Tom doesn’t know why she needs to ask the question about how he feels if he’s been doing all of these nice things for her. It’s a classic case of expressing love differently. She needs words, he’s more of an action guy.  Tom makes a joke and easens the tension. Then Darcey makes a comment about how his pajamas always stay on. They start feeding each other. Tom eats cheesecake off her finger and she immediately sucks on her own finger.  ZIED AND REBECCA Zied combing his weird long hair is amazing.  They make peace over the night before. They head out to meet his parents.  Zied says Pyorple instead of people.  I LOVE that Rebecca has to drive him everywhere. He basically ordered a Lyft driver from overseas.  Zied wants her to hide her tattoos. She’s worried that his family doesn’t know anything about her.  Next week… Jennifer throws something very milky onto Tim.  ANGELA AND MICHAEL Angela lands in Nigeria, they’re excited to see each other. Next week, will caesar finally meet maria?  Darcy Tom Avery Omar Tim and Jennifer Ceasar Zied and Rebecca Akenyi and benjamin Angela and Michael

Slang, the youth, and good poops! #KickAssKoreans: @jennyleewrites and Andrew Lim and Tom Oh of @perillachicago

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听Joel: Hey, Tom, when you were in Thailand, did you, were you good at bargaining? You know how you have to haggle to get the price lower. Tom: Once I got started it was OK, but, oh, getting started was so difficult.Joel: What do you mean?Tom: I just knew that when I walked up to a market stall, that I'd pick up something, and if it was something that I wanted, to get it, I'd have to start fighting. I'd have to get through his argument it felt like, and I was really uncomfortable about doing that.Joel: That's the problem with me, too. I was always too nice. It's like, you know, I'd give them one price and then, they would never go for the price that I ask for so I, if the price was a 100, and I said, "OK, 50", then they would say, "Well, OK, 95", and I usually wouldn't take it much further than that.Tom: Oh, no, that's complete, I'm completely different. If I started it was because it was something that I really wanted, and I'd already had an idea of the price, so once I started that whole deal, oh it could take quite a long time. I'd, we'd chat, you know, it's a very friendly way of doing it in Thailand. We'd talk about the price. I'd do a lot of smiling. I'd pick up some other things that were similar and I'd really go for it and take a long time.Joel: I heard that the trick to it is you really need to tell them a whole story, like you can't just say, " Oh, I want the price lower", you have to say like, "Oh, well, you know, I don't have any money and I really need to get this for my family and this is the last time I'm going to be here, you know, I've run out of money, can you give me a deal on it. You can't just tell them you want a lower price. You have to give them a good reason and you have to have a dramatic story to go along with it.Tom: I've done that in the past. I've emptied out my wallet, and I've said, this is for my lunch. This is for the taxi. This is all I've got left for you. Right, and then you take a bus home. A bus is a lot cheaper than a taxi.Joel: I've also heard like you can get, usually if, as I've said before if the price is, the quoted price is 100, then you should shoot for, not a third of that but, even like, half of that. You can get it for 50, not 75.Tom: Yeah, I think the first price is always, you can always get a big reduction on that, but I remember the last time I went shopping in Thailand I was buying stuff for my mum and I'd left it really late and it was pouring down with rain and my mom wanted something, it was very specific, some silk trousers and she wanted 10 pairs to give them away to her friends, and I trolled around this big bazaar with hundreds of shops looking for this very specific product and eventually I found it and the shopkeeper only had half a dozen; I wanted more, and she said her price and I just gave her the money. I wanted to get home as quickly as possible, so I got half a dozen ties on top of the trousers because I hadn't bargained. She gave me something extra just for not trying.Joel: Are you going to Thailand over this break?Tom: I'm going at Christmas, yeah.Joel: I'm wondering if, I got really big feet, and I'm having a hard time getting shoes here. Do you know, I know you have big feet too, I'm wondering, is it possible to get big shoes?Tom: Yeah, they definitely have them. They make them there and they're all these outlets.Joel: And. they're cheap too, right?Tom: That's right.Joel: I'm wondering if you can pick me up some when you're out there, like any kind of business shoes.Tom: You want business shoes?Joel: Yeah.Tom: OK.Joel: Just black business shoes, any kind you find is fine.Tom: Lace-ups?Joel: Yeah, lace-ups are fine. And like a size 12, American.Tom: You want one pair or two pairs?Joel: Yeah, maybe two pairs, that's even better.Tom: Sure, I'll see what I can find.

今天我们学习出国旅游:预定酒店万用英语情景对话!在学习之前我先给大家送一波福利，大家听好啦！手机下载阿里巴巴官方返利“一淘”app，在搜索框输入口令“笨笨口语”，点击搜索，就可以领取我为大家准备的8元购物红包，红包在淘宝天猫购物车都能用，大家一定要去领取喔，下面进入我们今天的学习内容。预定酒店万用英语情景对话Front Desk: Royal Hotel, can I help you?皇家酒店，我能为您服务吗？Tom: Yes. I urgently need a room for tomorrow night, and do you have any vacancies?我急需一个房间要明晚住，请问你们还有空房吗？urgently：['ɜ:(r)-dʒənt-lɪ] 紧急地，急迫地vacancy：[ˈveɪ-kən-si] 空房Front Desk: Yes, we have. What kind of room would you like?还有空房。您需要什么样的房间？Tom: I'd like a suite with an ocean view, please.我想要一个可以看到海景的套房。suite: [swi:t]套房 ocean：[ˈəʊ-ʃn]海洋Front Desk: No problem, sir.没问题，先生。Tom: What is the price of the suite?价格如何？Front Desk: It is 280 US$ per night.每晚280美元。Tom: It is a little high. I'm told that your hotel is offering discount now.价格有点高。我听说你们酒店正在打折。discount：[ˈdɪs-kaʊnt] 折扣Front Desk: Yes, but the offer ended yesterday. I'm sorry.是的，但打折期昨天就结束了。很抱歉Tom:Oh, I see. Then do you have anything less expensive?我明白了。那么你们是否还有其他便宜一点的套房？Front Desk: No, sir. So far it is the least expensive suite for tomorrow night.没有了，先生。到目前为止，这是能为明晚提供的最便宜的套房。Tom:OK, I will take it. By the way, does the price include breakfast?那好吧，我就预定它了。顺便问一下，房价是否包括早餐？include：[ɪn-ˈklu:d]包括，包含Front Desk: Yes, it does. Now could I have your name, please?是的，包括早餐。现在我能请问您的尊姓大名了吗？Tom:My name is Tom Zhang.我叫汤姆，张。Front Desk: Would you kindly spell it for me?您能拼读一下吗？Tom:That is T-O-M, Z-H-A-N-G.T-O-M，Z-H-A-N-G。Front Desk: Thank you, I got it. And how long do you expect to stay?谢谢，我记下了。另外您预计在此停留多久？Tom: About three days.大约三天。Front Desk: OK. Our check-in time is after 1:00pm. And see you tomorrow.好的。我们的登记时间是在下午一点钟之后。明天见。Tom: Thank you. See you.谢谢。明天见。此处无法上传视频，关注笨笨口语微信公众号，每日笨一句1027期即可收看详细分解的句子视频

今天我们学习出国旅游:预定酒店万用英语情景对话!在学习之前我先给大家送一波福利，大家听好啦！手机下载阿里巴巴官方返利“一淘”app，在搜索框输入口令“笨笨口语”，点击搜索，就可以领取我为大家准备的8元购物红包，红包在淘宝天猫购物车都能用，大家一定要去领取喔，下面进入我们今天的学习内容。预定酒店万用英语情景对话Front Desk: Royal Hotel, can I help you?皇家酒店，我能为您服务吗？Tom: Yes. I urgently need a room for tomorrow night, and do you have any vacancies?我急需一个房间要明晚住，请问你们还有空房吗？urgently：['ɜ:(r)-dʒənt-lɪ] 紧急地，急迫地vacancy：[ˈveɪ-kən-si] 空房Front Desk: Yes, we have. What kind of room would you like?还有空房。您需要什么样的房间？Tom: I'd like a suite with an ocean view, please.我想要一个可以看到海景的套房。suite: [swi:t]套房 ocean：[ˈəʊ-ʃn]海洋Front Desk: No problem, sir.没问题，先生。Tom: What is the price of the suite?价格如何？Front Desk: It is 280 US$ per night.每晚280美元。Tom: It is a little high. I'm told that your hotel is offering discount now.价格有点高。我听说你们酒店正在打折。discount：[ˈdɪs-kaʊnt] 折扣Front Desk: Yes, but the offer ended yesterday. I'm sorry.是的，但打折期昨天就结束了。很抱歉Tom:Oh, I see. Then do you have anything less expensive?我明白了。那么你们是否还有其他便宜一点的套房？Front Desk: No, sir. So far it is the least expensive suite for tomorrow night.没有了，先生。到目前为止，这是能为明晚提供的最便宜的套房。Tom:OK, I will take it. By the way, does the price include breakfast?那好吧，我就预定它了。顺便问一下，房价是否包括早餐？include：[ɪn-ˈklu:d]包括，包含Front Desk: Yes, it does. Now could I have your name, please?是的，包括早餐。现在我能请问您的尊姓大名了吗？Tom:My name is Tom Zhang.我叫汤姆，张。Front Desk: Would you kindly spell it for me?您能拼读一下吗？Tom:That is T-O-M, Z-H-A-N-G.T-O-M，Z-H-A-N-G。Front Desk: Thank you, I got it. And how long do you expect to stay?谢谢，我记下了。另外您预计在此停留多久？Tom: About three days.大约三天。Front Desk: OK. Our check-in time is after 1:00pm. And see you tomorrow.好的。我们的登记时间是在下午一点钟之后。明天见。Tom: Thank you. See you.谢谢。明天见。

Today we talk with mega agent Tom Daves from Sacramento Califonia. Tom was previously working with Keller Williams being a top world wide agent. As a team leader he runs a large successful real estate team. Tom talks to us about his decision to move to EXP, why he did, he touches on the real estate market change, equity, growth and revenue share and explains how much of a game changer his transition has been to his life and business.  Learn More about eXp Realty - Click here to watch a quick 7 Minute Intro Video. Remember our disclaimer: The materials and content discussed within this podcast are the opinions of Kevin Cottrell and/or the guests interviewed.  This information is intended as general information only for listeners of the podcast. Listeners should conduct their own due diligence and research before making any business decisions. This podcast is produced completely independently of eXp Realty and is not endorsed, funded or otherwise supported by eXp Realty directly or indirectly.     In this episode Being Sceptical about EXP EXP in Nasdaq Market Change Why Join EXP EXP as an Exit Strategy The EXP value proposition Equity and revenue share opportunities Marketplace disruption Due Diligence  Want to Learn More about eXp Realty? If you are interested in learning more about eXp, reach out to the person who introduced you to eXp or contact Tom to inquire or ask questions. Contact Tom: Call at 855 Tom Daves. Or email at Tom@TomDavesteam.com. Links: www.EXPCloud.com Takeway The pain the other great mega agents that are coming on board and as well as the alignment with amazing team members that we have. So yeah it all came together at once. Transcription KEVIN: Welcome back to another episode of EXP explained podcast I am host Kevin Cottrell joining me today from just outside of Sacramento California is Tom Davis. He is the team lead from the Tom Dave's real estate team. If you're in that Keller Williams system you undoubtedly recognize Tom's name in his team's name. They were the number one team for several years running in the Keller Williams system nationwide and Tom runs a business on the team that does multiple hundreds of millions of dollars per year. A very very large business very successful businessman in the real estate business he's been in the business for quite some time. So when I heard that Tom had made the move from Keller Williams as a large multi hundred million dollar producing team I wanted to find out his insight on why he made the decision to join the EXP. What he shared with me, I know he's going to be insightful whether you're a team lead on a smaller team or your team lead on a large team like Tom's including expansion teams. Please stay tuned for my interview with Tom Daves. KEVIN: Welcome to the show Tom. TOM: Hey Kevin. Thank you. KEVIN: Oh I'm looking forward to our conversation. Excited to share your story and talk a little bit about the big change you made over EXP. But before we do that why don't you give us a little of your background. Obviously a lot of our listeners probably know who you are but once you get a little bit of your real estate background talk a little about your business before we dive into the big change here. TOM: No I appreciate it. Absolutely. I've actually been in the business for 40 years. Kevin I started when I was 12 at a very young age and started right away and worked with traditional real estate sales and got into management and had a couple of different Remax brokerages and also worked with Oreo's with Flip's, Blackstone private equity team so pretty much seen every single economic cycle and it's been an amazing tour so far. I'm really excited that I'm now at EXP and I always say real estate you know is very very exciting and you can go from the hype of exploitation to the depths of defeat within the same 60 seconds. So it's fun it's exciting and it's all mindset right. KEVIN: Absolutely absolutely. So I think the question and certainly for me and everyone else when you announced you were leaving Keller Williams. You were the top agent worldwide for five years so this is the question I have someone who has that big business right. It's Mission critical it's important you're the top guy at Keller Williams worldwide for five years. This is an important decision. It's a strategic decision. What led up to walk us through a little bit of the process and why EXP. TOM: Okay great. So as I briefly mentioned I think my favorite saying is Wayne Gretzky you have to skate where the puck is going to be. And I've been blessed enough to position myself in most cases ahead of the curve and I head of that economic cycle whether it was traditional Oreo Flipp's you know hooked up with Blackstone private equity sold them like 600 homes in a year and a half. And the team and don't get it wrong. You know the team was amazing and Keller Williams was amazing. I was there for 18 years. I have nothing bad to say about them. But being a top agent is not always what it's cracked up to be. Candidly the margins weren't always that good. I had some great years and I noticed over the last few years that the margins were definitely shrinking and the market is starting to crown the market is starting to change as well. And there's no doubt that the market is shifting and it's technology based cloud based you know with all of the different companies that are coming online. Zillow, Redfin, Purple bricks, Amazon and they are all engaging in real estate. There's no doubt that technology is the future of our industry. And plus the consumers that consumers want and instantaneous communication at their fingertips. So that was you know one of the main reasons was the economic model and the cloud base. I literally when I made the move and changed over to the EXP realty I cut my expenses in half which was pretty amazing. And my very first month I had a 42 percent profit margin.My first month here which was pretty awesome. Pretty excited about that. Not to mention you know the stock EXP were publicly traded company as well as the revenue share and really having an exit strategy as a leader. I always feel that we need to seek out opportunities for our talent for our organization. And one of the problems that I've always had is to keep that ceiling of opportunity far greater than what anyone could achieve if you don't you're not going to be able to keep any talent. And it was becoming a little bit of a struggle for me whereas with EXP with the three types of income the commission income the stock for building are well as well as the revenue share it really truly provides an exit strategy for myself, anyone on the team and anyone that seeks to find it with literally no capital risk which is pretty cool. And the final is to have the opportunity to partner and align myself with you know Don Yokum, Randy Bird, Brent Gove, go and Gene Frederick. I mean it's just amazing that to align yourself you are the sum total of the four or five people that you hang out with. So that's pretty cool. And there is a saying that I really like is not always the assignment it's the alignment and that's quite frankly why I made that change. It wasn't easy. It was tough. But that's why I made change and that's why some of the biggest minds in the business are going after this thing. KEVIN: The question I have for you. I'm glad you brought up the margins. And one of the things I want to talk about is and I don't know if you're involved in the early MREA early 2000s when they had everybody in Austin for those mastermind's. I used to be with Andy Allen and Aaron Lancaster and they had that one of those mammoth early teams that was doing 600 transactions a year more. And what we found was exactly what is talked about which is there's a lot of sexiness to high volume and high transaction volume but the margins can be rail thin. You're subject to market conditions changes keeping talent attracting and recruiting and all that becomes a big machine. And I found most interesting your comment about instant profitability and margin increase because really if you look at it from the standpoint of the originals called the core value proposition in the MREA book about what you should be making your numbers went from where they were which undoubtedly was a lot less to you called it 40 - 42% which is sort of the lauded number that the best of the best in that model should hope for. Now one of the realities is you know I'm from Austin you know I joined Keller Williams very you know probably pretty close to when you were involved with them as well. And you know Gene was my mentor and trained me and then I was a team leader so I was around a lot of this and that was my first observation. I'm glad you brought it up because I think the marketplace is trying to figure this out right. You know there's a couple of challenges with big teams. You touched on one which is you know like you said it's not always awesome to be the biggest guy on the block with the most volume of people and expenses because the margins can get thin. But for listeners. Here's an example of an enormous operation that suddenly had 40 percent whereas before and you don't have to tell us necessarily what it was. But I would imagine you were probably down in some pretty low numbers where you had to watch things carefully and things could go south I'm assuming. TOM: Oh absolutely. And like I mentioned the margins were definitely shrinking. Yeah I was top agent with KW And you walk across stage and get your plaque but it's all about the bottom line of the profit and it did take me a few years to learn that realized that I think the first half of my career was all about success and walking across the stage and kind of all about me. But the second half is about significance. About pouring into others adding value and the bottom line right. They get significant. KEVIN: Tom the question I have is in the traditional teams that the retention of talent sometimes is hard right. They want to go do their own thing because they can only grow to a certain capacity and income level and they don't have the buckets of revenue share. They don't have stock. And so the comments that I'm getting from guests again and again are that my environment and my team from a standpoint of wealth creation for team members is different now because I can help them and mentor them. So it's not just one bucket production in their income that comes from that they can build revenue share they can have stock. Are you looking at that in your operation as being something that you're going to basically utilize for team members as well. KEVIN: Absolutely. And I think one common mistake that real estate agents do is they don't treat their business like a business and they don't think long term. So many agents and brokers are on the real estate cycle. Good month bad month. But if we begin with the end in mind and we think long term then we'll be able to build a plan and a strategy with a vision to achieve the goals that we really want to achieve to live that big life. And that's what it's all about you know whatever that is. KEVIN: And that's true. And I've heard from guest after guest and you know Jean and I and you and and Don Yoakam and others are talking to a lot of people and the ability for people to create the different income brackets that you talked about is a game changer it just doesn't exist right there's nothing wrong with the franchise systems. They just have not created an environment where that exists in other words. I've got a key team member and they want to go off and do the next big thing, normally and quite often it is go do their own thing have their own team. Well in the EXP world what we're seeing again and again and again is they start looking at the bucket of revenue share. They start looking at let me accumulate stock the way that we can accumulate stock and so it's creating a different dynamic especially for the teams that are coming into the EXP envelope where the rainmakers and the leaders who are in these teams are saying everybody's trading everything different. They're not inclined to run off and go do their own thing or even talking about it like they were they're talking about you know hey Tom tell me how to go do this. I want your help. I want to go get revenue share and I'm assuming that was part of your equation too you know to reward talent and attract people because not only are you known throughout the system that you just came from but you're well-known enough in the industry that lots of teams are going to pay attention to what they're going to hear on this interview and what they hear from you and Don Yoakum and others which is this is a game changer isn't it. TOM: Oh it really is. And EXP just totally provides the structure and the ownership opportunity that most brokerages don't. And this structure vital to maintaining a profitable real estate business and creating additional income just being in a constant state of growth. KEVIN: Which is absolutely true. So imagine rolling back to when you were observing and you were in sort of the big franchise system and you were starting to see significant movement because it has been going on for a little over a year where we had really big movement among teams including large teams. A lot of listeners are in that same position today. And I want to kind of talk a little about due diligence and key things that if you were sitting down and having coffee with them you would want them to be thinking about in other words you were where they are before now you know what you know. And as Jay Kinder says once it's seen it can't be unseen. So let's talk about some of those things from the standpoint of putting you back in your you know "I'm the number one guy worldwide at Keller Williams. I'm seeing this happen". What are the things you know now that you'd want somebody listening to this to say if I'm a team leader for a real estate team a big production team what should they be paying attention to how should they approach this from a due diligence standpoint. TOM: That's a great question. So I would take a look at the books. Take a look at the numbers. Take a look at the economic model. Talk to others that have gone before you. And you know things that to be honest I was a little bit skeptical that I mean I just thought EXP with all of these ways of creating wealth and opportunity. It just sounded too good to be true. And I just did not believe that it was sustainable. But when the Federal Trade Commission approved EXP to go on the Nasdaq and will become publicly traded. It was a game changer for me. I'm like OK well that's it. It's a done deal. So definitely a way to go. KEVIN: The other thing that's a factor obviously the up listing on NASDAQ is huge. Right. It's a credibility thing you don't get uplifted in the Nasdaq if there are holes in your business model and things are not sustainable and you can't go essentially out in the marketplace if they look at it and go oh this is never going to work long term. Right this is not the way it works in Nasdaq. So the second thing that I think you mentioned it's important to circle back to is the fact that too many it looks too good to be true. And you know my advice always is you know there's guys like you rent go Jean-Frederic, Pat Hays Scott and Tracy Lewis, me. There's a number of people that are available to you as resources Don Yokum will be another one. And you know that's why we always before we wrap up in these interviews get the best way for contact information. Most guests will say here's how you reach me and text me and I'll be happy to talk to you because they'll be other people that are in similar situation to you regardless of how they learned about the EXP they're going to be like well "I'm skeptical too. I need to talk to somebody" and that is in my mind a key due diligence step. In other words don't sit there in an envelope either hearing the words you're in a vacuum or an envelope you don't see any outside information and looking in the envelope going this doesn't make any sense to me. It looks too good to be true and you're trying to make your decision in a vacuum. You need to talk to people that have come before you like Tom said you need to have those reference calls and that's part of the process. And so part of the reason we do the I guess interviews so you can hear in the parties like Tom's words why they did what they did. But I would imagine that in this process Tom that you didn't just do this and figured out on your own you did talk to people did you. TOM: Oh I did. Absolutely. I did a deep dive. I spoke with two different business coaches both my coaches spoke with several different people many of the agents that have already come onboard with the EXP and asked them what they would do differently. You know if there were any snags or any concerns and every single one of them told me the main mistake that they made was they should have joined sooner. KEVIN: You know I mean frankly that is the number one thing that we tell people which is even if you decide it's not for you. I mean if you're a rainmaker and a team you know whether you're similar level and scope to what Tom is or maybe you have a team that's a much smaller team. The biggest mistake you could make is being skeptical of not doing something because definitively if you waited three four or five years it's going to be a different opportunity. It's kind of like the people that were at Keller Williams When you talk to Jean-Frederic and others that got in in the early 90s and got significant profit share built up and they are at the top of the tree. It's the business opportunity with a rapidly growing business. EXP is growing faster than the franchise system ever did because of the way it structured its a cloud based brokerage. So that would be my advice too which is even if you ultimately decide to not do it take Tom's advice and dig in and talk to those people do those reference calls. Figure out if it's a good fit for you. And then dip the decision but do it sooner rather than later. Because what ends up happening is more and more of your peers and your competitors in the marketplace are going to be over and they you know look up and if you waited you know God forbid three four or five years you're going to see a lot of people coming over and I'm sure that was part of what you saw. You started see what started slowly last fall. You know and then you had like Jay Kinder or Michael Reese and some others come over and then mega team after team came over in the last 12 months. I mean it's a crazy number of teams after Jay came over in November and I'm sure it will be hard to miss that in the marketplace. TOM: Like I said many of the best minds are going to after this and also I think one of the things that was happening was my pain was increasing you know as I mentioned the margins were shrinking. Just different things were happening with the growth of the team and the numbers and you know the only way for me to keep the numbers was just to you know we closed 350 transactions last year. Okay keep these margins we need to do 450. You know let's just do more volume let's just do more deals hire more staff to crank up. And so the pain I believe was getting so great that this opportunity was a no brainer for me. You know it all kind of came to a head all at once. The pain the other great mega agents that are coming on board and as well as the alignment with amazing team members that we have. So yeah it all came together at once. KEVIN: Tom here's what I would say too is because your business is so gigantic is the top guy worldwide Keller Williams. You look and act a lot like we're also seeing. And you know this because you and Yokum are talking about it is lots and lots of independent brokers whether they're small at 30 40 50 agents 25 agents or hundreds of agents are all waking up with a similar problem what you had which is margins are thin. The industry is shifting. God forbid there is a big market shift and they're caught on the wrong side of it with EXP growing around them. And I know you're seeing it and I'm just saying this for listeners benefits what Tom saw and Tom accomplished is not unlike why the independent brokers are what Gene and I see as one of the huge trends that's going to happen in the next three years is the conversion. TOM: Oh absolutely. KEVIN: So one of the things I always like to ask is Tom before I get your contact info for listeners in case they want to reach out to you is there anything that you hoped I asked you on the podcast today that you really wanted to get out about EXP and watch what's going on over here that I didn't ask. TOM: No that's great. I think we hit the high points. KEVIN: Okay fantastic. So again I always give this preface. It doesn't matter who got you interested in the EXP Tom and Jean and I or Brent Gove or anybody you hear on these interviews is there as a reference to help you make the right decision. Tom's the same way I'm going to get his contact information as far as the best way to reach him. We're going to turn right around and send you back to whoever introduced you to the EXP that's the cultural agent's point in the same direction. So don't feel sheepish if you're a team leader on a big team and this is mission critical for you as well and you feel like Tom's e-mail shoot straight with you and he's enough of a peer that you think he's the right guy to talk to, Tom how do they reach you. TOM: Great the best way to reach me is to either call me at 855 Tom Daves. Or you can e-mail me at Tom@TomDavesteam.com. KEVIN: Okay perfect. I appreciate you coming on. And thank you so much Tom. Thanks Kevin. Have a great day.    

Front Desk: Royal Hotel, can I help you?前台：皇家酒店，我能为您服务吗？Tom: Yes. I urgently need a room for tomorrow night, and do you have any vacancies?汤姆：我急需一个房间要明晚住，请问你们还有空房吗？Front Desk: Yes, we have. What kind of room would you like?前台：还有空房。您需要什么样的房间？Tom: I'd like a suite with an ocean view, please.汤姆：我想要一个可以看到海景的套房。Front Desk: No problem, sir.前台：没问题，先生。Tom: What is the price of the suite?汤姆：价格如何？Front Desk: It is US$ 280 per night.前台：每晚280美元。Tom: It is a little high. I'm told that your hotel is offering discount now.汤姆：价格有点高。我听说你们酒店正在打折。Front Desk: Yes, but the offer ended yesterday. I'm sorry.前台：是的，但打折期昨天就结束了。很抱歉。Tom: Oh, I see. Then do you have anything less expensive?汤姆：我明白了。那么你们是否还有其他便宜一点的套房？Front Desk: No, sir. So far it is the least expensive suite for tomorrow night.前台：没有了，先生。到目前为止，这是能为明晚提供的最便宜的套房。Tom: OK, I will take it. By the way, does the price include breakfast?汤姆：那好吧，我就预定它了。顺便问一下，房价是否包括早餐？Front Desk: Yes, it does. Now could I have your name, please?前台：是的，包括早餐。现在我能请问您的尊姓大名了吗？Tom: My name is Tom Zhang.汤姆：我叫汤姆，张。Front Desk: Would you kindly spell it for me?前台：您能拼读一下吗？Tom: That is T-O-M, Z-H-A-N-G.汤姆：T-O-M，Z-H-A-N-G。Front Desk: Thank you, I got it. And how long do you expect to stay?前台：谢谢，我记下了。另外您预计住多久？Tom: About three days.汤姆：大约三天。Front Desk: OK. Our check-in time is after 1:00pm. And see you tomorrow.前台：好的。我们办理登记入住时间是在下午一点钟之后。明天见。Front Desk: Thank you. See you.汤姆：谢谢。明天见。How long do you expect to stay?您预计住多久？赞赏就是真爱赞赏是最好的美德！嘻嘻(#^.^#)长按图片识别二维码赶紧试试！

This week we travel to Clare, Michigan to learn about the trials and successes of public transportation in Rural Michigan. **Please excuse the audio quality, it was the first episode ever produced for this podcast!** We get a chance to speak with Leadership in the Clare community to learn what really matters in Clare County isn't how we get to where we're going, but who we ride with.    Announcer: This Rural Mission is brought to you by Michigan State University College of Human Medicine, Leadership in Rural Medicine Programs. The podcast is funded in part by a generous grant provided by the Herbert H and Grace A Dow Foundation. To learn more about the Leadership in Rural Medicine Programs please visit  www.msururalhealth.chm.msu. I’m your host, Julia Terhune and please stay tuned to hear more from This Rural Mission.   Music   Producer, Julia: So the rationale behind making this podcast was pretty simple for me. I started biking, back and forth from work when I have to be in the office all day. I don’t do it every day, and I definitely don’t do it when I have to be in a lot of the different communities that I serve, and I started to look around at the transportation system in my county and I started to really think about, how this system works. Not just the Dial-a-Ride and the County Connect, that’s available in my county, but also things like the bike paths. And even if I didn’t have those bike routes, I have sidewalks, I have clean, well-maintained sidewalks. And I live in this community that is urban. I think with that urban distinction a lot of those things are easier to get simply because you have more tax revenue in these urban areas.   When we talk about poverty, most of us tend to think: urban centers. (Busy City Noises) I deal with rural communities. Rural communities are some of the most underserved rural communities in the nation when we’re talking about the economy, when we’re talking about resources, when we’re talking about medical professional. Medical professionals areas are rural areas. Pretty much across the board. There are urban areas that have shortages as well, but it’s predominantly a rural issue. (Music)   When we think about resources, we first have to think about: how do people get those resources? Because many resources don’t come to people’s doorsteps. Even things like mobile food pantries, people have to go to those places to get the food that’s being offered. They have to get to the health department to get the free health services. They have to get to the dental clinic and that  requires transportation. Now, in a rural community your geography is just so vast. You know, your city centers are smaller your suburban centers are smaller, places where people are living is vastly spread out and so to get to those resources is an even greater track. Combine that with economic issues like not having adequate jobs or having unreliable transportation because of limited finances, you’ve got a huge issue. (Music) One of the counties I’ve served is Clare County, Michigan. The average income, in Clare County, is about $33,000 per year and according to the Robert Wood Johnson County Health Ranking System, they are seventy eighth out of eighty three. I’m not going to bore you with what that means, but as far as health outcomes go, that’s not good.   You know, I look to this community and there’s a lot of poverty, there’s a lot of things that maybe aren’t going so well, but there’s a lot of things that are going right. And I got to talk to some really interesting people about the public transportation system in Clare County. (Music)   Tom Pirnstill: Tom Pirnstill, I’m the Executive Director at Clare County Transit. Well, it started in 1981, we have contributed a little over three million rides in that timeframe. We cover an area of five hundred and seventy square miles, population’s about thirty thousand. They’ve developed this dial-a-ride, or demand response, where people call us up and we start building a route based on call ins. So, it’s all fairly fluid and it’s about scheduling the busses and getting people to where they need to go and then going to the next ride as they call in. We have a thousand miles of road in Clare County and only two hundred and fifty are paved.   (Music)   Julia: Out of a thousand miles, in Clare County, only two hundred and fifty miles are paved. That’s only one quarter of the roads in Clare County. That also means that a majority of people who drive everyday are not driving on paved roads. Which can take a toil on their cars. Even if it’s a new car. Dirt, gravel, sand that can be a costly repair for even someone who’s middle class and has those resources.   Julia to Tom: So, that seven hundred and fifty miles of unpaved road, that’s probably really hard on your busses.   Tom: Oh, you bet!  You bet, yeah. And they’re hundred and ten thousand dollar busses. We can replace them seven years or two hundred thousand miles , depending on the capitol that’s available from the state. I have some busses that have over three hundred thousand miles on them. You’ve got to keep them because there’s nothing coming down that we can replace the busses and then that results in higher repair bills because like you said, the roads, they’re rough.   Julia: But there’s something really interesting about the public transportation system in Clare.   Julia to Tom: What kind of relationship do your drivers have with these people? I mean you talk about having…   Tom: They love them. They love them. Most of the time, the elderly, they cook for their drivers sometimes. They bring them cookies or cakes or whatever. They know them on a first name basis. If they come to their house and they’re not out there, normally the driver will go up to the door and find out what’s going on. They’ve developed that kind of a relationship, because we care about them.   (Music)   Julia: In my experience with public transportation, I’ve separated this idea of bus and bus driver, train and train driver. I think of public transportation as those pieces of metal that take me from point a to point b.   One of the students who is involved in the Rural Community Health Program and just so you know, the Rural Community Health Program is a rural training certificate program through Michigan State University College of Human Medicine. Katie Lindauer, Just spent a year in Chicago.   Katie: I spent the last year doing research and living in Chicago before returning to my clinical years.   Julia: She used public transportation to take her everywhere that she needed to go. And she can tell you that she did not have the Clare experience when it came to public transit.   Katie: As a single woman in a big city I was instructed by pretty much every adult that I interacted with, ever ever take public transit after, like, ten PM at night. I don’t know if that is necessarily a hard and fast rule depending on where you live, you know whether you’re alone on public transit or, you know, whether people are just being really protective.  But then there are other things too, like Chicago’s public transit system is pretty expensive compared to some of the other places I’ve been. But it’s also pretty nice and it’s usually pretty safe and you learn certain train lines are safer than others.   Julia: I also got to talk to Sarah Kile. And Sarah Kile is the Executive Director of 211 Northeast Michigan. And in a nutshell, they connect people who are in need to the resources that they need. Sarah Kile is the Executive Director, like I said, and she and her team serve twenty three counties and a majority of those counties are rural counties; one of them being Clare.   Sarah: The transportation infrastructure here in Michigan needs a massive overhaul. Because we pay insurance in middle class because that’s the bill that comes and we have to pay it. But when somebody’s in poverty and they get pulled over or they get into an accident we just dig another hole for someone. It’s really just an unfortunate situation and I think, looking at communities like Galdwin, Clare we have people who can’t drive. And that public transit, as limited as it is, you know, it’s only from seven to four or seven to five during the weekdays and you have to call a day in advance, sometimes you have to call three days in advance to schedule a ride. That is a lifeline for some folks. Where they couldn’t go anywhere without it. We have people who have to schedule their infusions around the bus schedule. That just blows my mind, like, I’m just flabbergasted that something like an infusion, they have to go three times a week, or well I can’t go on the weekends because I simply don’t have transportation. That’s shocking to me.      (Music)   Julia: And with 211, the Clare County Transit Corporation and the Community Foundations in the area have started to solve problems.   Tom: Non emergency medical transportation has always been an issue following the country. I mean you have ambulances and rescue squads, they do the emergency. The non emergency things has always been an issue of people being able to afford transportation to get there.   Julia: This non emergency medical transport system was created to meet that very need that Sarah talked about.   Tom: At our transit, we did a study about five or six years ago on that very issue. Of how can we get people in Clare County to the doctors when they need to go without fear of not being able to pay for it.   (Music)   Julia: Michigan State University has been training medical doctors in rural communities for over forty years. I know that this University is doing their part to help alleviate that medical professional shortage. But even if we have enough doctors, we will still need to make sure that everybody living in these communities can get to those doctor's appointments and this non emergency medical transport is helping to break down one more of those barriers.   You know, people need to get to doctor’s appointments, people need to get to grocery stores people need to get to play practice. But people also need to be part of a community. And that’s one thing that Clare County has got down. They are a community.   Dr. Bremer has been a physician in rural communities for over thirty years.   Julia to Dr. Bremer: Now, do you ever run across individuals who have a hard time getting transportation?   Dr. Bremer: Sometimes but not always. Most of them have a relative, a friend, neighbor. And so people help each other out in the community if, you know, Mary who lives by herself and doesn’t have any kids or family around, they usually have a neighbor who will take them, kind of thing. So a lot of that kind of stuff goes on. Neighbors, friends, somebody from church will bring you or that type of thing if they can’t find transportation on their own.   Julia: He hit this idea of community right on the head.   Julia to Dr. Bremer: In the rural communities that you’ve served, what is their greatest strength?   Dr. Bremer: The greatest strength is the people in each community. That’s what the strength is. People helping each other. That’s what you’re supposed to do. Whether it’s a big community or small community. You’re supposed to look out for your neighbors, help one another, share, help each other, think about each other, don’t think about yourself all of the time, kind of thing, we’re supposed to be a community. Whether it’s a big community or small community. So, that’s what a community’s supposed to do. A community can be anywhere. It doesn’t have to be a little Clare. It can be a big Midland or a Big Lansing, whatever. Yes.   Julia: Poverty and inadequate transportation will most likely be with us, forever. But there’s something else that will always be with us, and that’s each other. And I really think that what you get out of a community is what you put into it. And places like Clare County are putting a whole lot into their communities. And I think that shows, not only in the public transportation system, but in so many other organizations and collaboratives.   (Music)   Julia: I want to thank everyone for listening to this podcast. This Rural Mission is produced by me, Julia Terhune. I’m the Assistant Director for Rural Community Health at Michigan State University College of Human Medicine, and I just want to say that I love Clare County. I also want to thank Dr. Andrea Wendling and John Whiting for your help and support with this podcast. I also want to thank Tom Pirnstill, Katie Lindauer, Sarah Kile, and Dr. Bremer for agreeing to be interviewed for this podcast. Before I go, I just want to encourage you, I want to encourage you to consider making rural your mission. And until next time, I’m Julia.   To learn more about 211, the Clare County Transit Corporation, or the Rural Community Health Program, please visit our website at www.msururalhealth.chm.msu.edu. By joining our website, you can connect with us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. You can also find out more about our musician. Music today was brought to you by Horton Creek and Byran Edgers, a local musician and Michigan native. I hope you tun in next time for more from This Rural Mission.  

Fisher opens the show following up on last week's appearance by Susan Snyder who "planted her family flag" with a personal website devoted to her family that has attracted numerous other descendants, including Fisher himself. Both Fisher and Susan were delighted to receive an email from a Cincinnati listener who ties into three ancestral couples shared by both Fisher and Susan. David Allen Lambert, Chief Genealogist for the New England Historic Genealogical Society and AmericanAncestors.org then talks about his experience at the Federation of Genealogical Societies Conference. He also shares news of the discovery of newly developed negatives of a World War I pilot killed in action in 1918. Where did the negatives come from and what do they show? David will tell you. David then jumps to the recent recognition of another aged World War II pilot who was known for more than just his military prowess. Wait until you hear what it is! Then there's word that BBC Scotland is looking for you if you had Scottish ancestors in Nova Scotia. David has all the particulars. David's Tip this week concerns a new app that allows you to snap a pic and have it go out as an old fashioned post card! He'll also have another great free guest user database from NEHGS. Next, Fisher talks to genealogical speaker, researcher, and writer Loretta Evans about "circumstantial evidence" in genealogy. How is it defined exactly and how can it help you "nail down" the line you're researching. Loretta has some great insight and advice. Fisher then visits with Bill Habermann of Tacoma, Washington. Bill has "adopted" over 1,600 people... all dead... in an overgrown local cemetery, and he's doing all he can to let you know who they are. What got Bill started on this and what has the response been? You'll love the story. Then Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com returns to talk preservation. Tom answers a listener question from South Carolina about using a national digitizing firm because no one provides the service locally. As usual, Tom has some great thoughts on protecting your most important family history assets. That's all this week on Extreme Genes, America's Family History Show!   Transcript of Episode 156 Segment 1 Episode 156 (00:30) Fisher: And welcome to Extreme Genes! This is America’s Family History Show. My name is Fisher. I am the Radio Roots Sleuth, on the program where we shake your family tree, and watch the nuts fall out. Nice to have you along today. We’ve got some great guests. First of all coming up in about eight or nine minutes we’re going to talk to Loretta Evans. And Loretta talks about the use of “circumstantial evidence” when you’re trying to put together your family tree. How do you know that it’s really good enough? What can you use it for? She’s going to have that for you coming up a little bit later on. After that, we’re going to talk to Bill Habermann he is up in the Seattle, Tacoma area, and he has adopted 1,600 people. All dead. In a cemetery! And you can do the same kind of thing. He’ll tell you what he’s doing and how he’s helping people all around the country, in fact around the world, find some of their missing relatives in the Washington State area. But right now, let me get on to Boston and my good friend David Allen Lambert. He is the Chief Genealogist for the New England Historic Genealogical Society and AmericanAncestors.org, fresh back from the Federation of Genealogical Societies conference in Springfield, Illinois. How are you David? David: I’m doing good. It’s nice to be back on the ground in Beantown. Fisher: I’ll bet. And you had a good time there? David: We had a great time. And I want to let people know who go to conferences, no matter where it is, don’t be ashamed of wearing a lot of ribbons on your badge. Fisher: Really? Yours is practically like a loin cloth when you’re out there. [Laughs] David: Well I like to say maybe a shawl. [Laughs] Fisher: [Laughs] David: I had thirty-two ribbons on it and when I went to the Federation of Genealogical Societies gala’s 40th anniversary dinner, they had trivia and they also had a scavenger hunt. Fisher: Um hmm. David: 150 points for the longest badge put us over the top! Fisher: [Laughs] David: Myself and Mary Tedesco from Genealogical Roadshow, one of our friends and guests, all won over a thousand dollars in memberships and conference registrations and meals, we’re very, very happy. Fisher: Wow! David: So, laughing my way to the bank for the longest name badge at the Federation of Genealogical Societies and I’d do it again. Fisher: [Laughs] Unbelievable. I’ve got to tell you a story. Last week we had Susan Snyder on the show and she is the lady that set up a website and we talked about it, we did the whole segment about planting your family flag basically out there for people to find you and provide you with materials, and she’s had Bible pages sent to her and things relating to her direct ancestors. Things folks sold her or gave to her. She found me because we’re related. Well we had her on the show, and then the next day she gets a nice email from a guy, a listener in Cincinnati, Ohio, who said, “Hey, we’re related to!” and so now she’s exchanging information with him and I just love the way the show brings people together. David: It’s amazing. Just last week I got a person who has an oil painting of my third great grandfather’s sister born in 1772, and he was not really sure if his family will want it. So I told him I would give her a good home. Fisher: Yeah [Laughs] great! Wow. Hopefully you get that and when you do, send us the picture. We’d all love to see it. David: Hopefully it will be in my home some day. But I don’t want to wish him to meet his maker any time soon of course. [Laughs] Fisher: Of course. Hey what do you have for us today in our Family Histoire news, David? David: Well, the exciting story that I want to start off with is actually about photographs taken a hundred years ago by Captain William Chambers of the 49th Squadron in Kent, England. He was a recognisance photographer in World War I and was shot down in 1918 at the ripe old age of twenty-one. His camera and negatives eventually were passed on to his nephew who recent had them developed. It’s amazing! There are pictures of airplanes and pilots and people that have long since passed. But it gives us another fresh view on history from World War I a century later. Fisher: That’s incredible. What a great story. David: It really is. And I want to propose a toast to the subject of this next story. Second Lieutenant Donald Stinson now aged 93, received four Bronze Stars for his service in World War II, involving bringing guns and men and flying them to the front lines in Japan during the war. But one of the things he did, which is a light hearted note, he is responsible for bringing beer. Fisher: What? [Laughs] David: Twenty thousand cases of beer to thirsty soldiers in multiple “packiruns” if you will, to Australia and New Guinea. And I think that anyone who is a veteran could probably drink to that. Fisher: Wow, that’s great! Congratulations to him. That’s like the second week in a row we’ve had a story of a World War II vet in their 90s just getting their medals now. What is going on? David: It’s about time. It really is. Well I’ll tell you, going back a little ways to the days of immigration and to the east coast, Nova Scotia, which means New Scotland was settled by many people from the Highlands. In 1773 a vessel called “The Hector” brought 189 highlanders that disembarked and were changed in Nova Scotia forever. Now, BBC in Scotland is looking for the descendants. So if your ancestor came to Nova Scotia from Scotland perhaps on the Hector in 1773, there are passenger lists that exist, contact BBC in Scotland. Just check Extreme Genes.com. Our Facebook page will have more details for you. Fisher: That’s very cool. So the people from old Scotland are looking for the descendants of the people in New Scotland, Nova Scotia, to call back home. David: To old Scotland. Fisher: Yeah. David: New Scotland, old Scotland, it gets confusing. But BBC Scotland is obviously doing a little piece on it, so put your kilt on and go and contact them. Fisher: [Laughs] David: One of the things that I really enjoy is a good tip from a listener, and one of our listeners and someone who’s been on the show is the Photo Detective Maureen Taylor. Fisher: Yes. David: While I was in Springfield, she told me about a new type of app that she uses from the app store. There’s a variety of choices to choose from but it basically allows you to send a postcard. Take a picture with your smart phone, this company, for very cheap money, will print and mail mailable postcards for you for your relatives. So the old photo postcards you might have in your family archives, you can create new ones. Fisher: How cool is that! David: It really is. So that brings me to the NEHGS guest user database of the week which harkens back to Scotland again. We now have Scotland marriages 1561 to 1910 and Scotland births and baptisms from 1564 to 1950, in conjunction with our partnership with FamilySearch.org. Well that’s all I have for this week back here in Beantown. Talk to you soon my friend! Fisher: All right, great to talk to you again as always David. We’ll talk to you again next week. This segment of our show has been brought to you from MyHeritage.com. And coming up next, we’re going to talk to a woman named Loretta Evans. And Loretta is an instructor, she’s a researcher, and she’s got some thoughts on “circumstantial evidence.” Now, we hear people talk about it in the courtroom... does circumstantial evidence really prove a case? Well, in genealogy it actually can. And she’ll give you some examples of that and give you some other thoughts coming up in three minutes on Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show. Segment 2 Episode 156 (11:10) Host: Scott Fisher with guest Loretta Evans Fisher: One of my favorite shows growing up was Perry Mason. And, Perry would get into heated battle in the courtroom with the prosecutor, Hamilton Burger. “Ham Burger” was what he was called. And they’d say, “Well, Mr Mason, that’s just circumstantial evidence!” And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. When it comes to developing your family history and your family tree, how does circumstantial evidence work in there and does it really matter? Is circumstantial evidence really evidence? It is Fisher. This is Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show and ExtremeGenes.com. And my guest today is Loretta Evans, and Loretta specializes in researching the midwestern United States, and she speaks all over the place, and she’s written articles for all the big family history magazines. And Loretta’s in Idaho Falls, Idaho. Nice to have you on the show, Loretta! Loretta: Thank you. I’m glad to be here. Fisher: You know, I’m excited about this idea of helping people understand that circumstantial evidence really is evidence, and in some cases is very, very strong evidence. So let’s just start with some simple examples of what circumstantial evidence is that we may typically use all the time, right? Loretta: Right. For example, if you have a census record, and you have someone’s age, it isn’t proof of the year they were born. It gives you an approximate year they were born. Fisher: That’s right. Loretta: But it’s sort of depends on who gave the information out. If it was the mother, and this is the child, they’re pretty sure about the age of their children. But if it was a neighbor or a grandparent, they may be a few years off. Or if somebody had a reason to lie, a lot of women lied about their age in censuses, so you can’t. Fisher: I am so glad you said that! Because it’s not something that I can easily say, Loretta! [Laughs] But it is true. For some reason, more with women than anybody else, I’m just sorry, it’s just the way it is. They get younger as they get older! Have you picked up on that? Loretta: I have. In fact, somebody told me, but it may or may not be true, that someone had done a study of British censuses and they found that the average British woman aged about seven years between the ten year census records! Fisher: [Laughs] Loretta: And you know, in a sense if you want someone’s more accurate age, find them when they’re very young or very old. Fisher: Yeah, that’s right. Loretta: And they’re more likely to be honest about it. Fisher: Yeah. [Laughs] Absolutely! Well that’s a great example of circumstantial evidence. Give us some examples though, of course, of direct evidence. Just for the sake of comparison. Loretta: Okay. For direct evidence, on a death certificate, usually the person’s name, their gender, the date they died, the place they died, those are all directly given by the doctor in charge or the person who is giving the information. You can be very comfortable about those pieces of information. Fisher: Right, as long as the people really knew what they were talking about. Loretta: Correct. But for example, the birth date on a death certificate is a little bit suspect. Fisher: Right. Loretta: If it’s a baby that dies and the mother gives the information, yeah, I’d be very comfortable with that. But I had a great grandfather who died in Cleveland, Ohio in about 1900, and I’m thinking he was living in a boarding house because they got his name wrong, they got his birth place wrong, they got his age wrong. It took us a long time to convince the city of Cleveland that he really was the same person. Fisher: [Laughs] Loretta: And that we could put a headstone on his grave. Fisher: And so what you’re saying is, for a death, a death certificate is direct evidence. But a death certificate is circumstantial as far as their birth is concerned? Loretta: That’s true. Or their parents names or their parents’ birth places, they’re wonderful clues. Fisher: Yes. Loretta: And so, if you are a researcher, you take those clues and then you try to find other documents that can prove or disprove that piece of information. And then you can be more comfortable whether it’s accurate or not. I think any evidence in genealogy is accurate until the next piece of information comes along that might prove or disprove it. Fisher: Right. Loretta: Somebody said it was like washing dishes. You’re all done, and then somebody walks in with another dirty glass. Fisher: [Laughs] Wow. That’s not very attractive at all. Loretta: [Laughs] I’m sorry. That image is, you know, you think you’re done, and then somebody gives you additional information that might even call into question what you think is accurate. Fisher: Sure. Loretta: I had two brothers. One born in 1944 and one born in 1950, and they both died at birth. And they were both born on July 12th. And in our family that was this kind of a “tender mercy.” “Oh, they had the same birth date.” And when the cemetery records came online, my older brother Ralph was listed as having been born on July 11th. Fisher: Oh boy. Loretta: And it was in the family Bible. There were no birth or death certificates because they were stillborn. They’re on the headstone. They carved it on the stone. Fisher: [Laughs] Right. Loretta: They forgot it being July 12th. And my mother didn’t really care, and my brother didn’t care, but it drove me crazy. And, I finally got my mother’s hospital records because some mortuary records didn’t exist anymore, and she was in her 90s and she just sighed and signed the permission slip. “Yes, you can release my hospital records from 1944.” Fisher: [Laughs] Loretta: Anyway, I got it from a place in California that had taken all of the records and they were sold there. Anyway, the hospital actually was in Utah. But he was born on July 11th. The headstone is wrong, our family Bible is wrong. Although they were born close to the same day it wasn’t exactly the same day. Fisher: Yeah. I’ve seen this before. We have a family Bible that gives the death date of my great, great grandfather, and even the obituary said December 26th 1875. But the death record said December 27th. And it appears that what happened was that he died at home, late in the evening on the 26th, but the doctor probably didn’t show up till after midnight, because the death time was put down as 12:30 in the morning. Or, they just didn’t recognize that it was a new day, at the point that he’d passed. Loretta: You know, that kind of thing happens. My uncle was born near midnight at home, and nobody looked at the clock until after he was born, but he could have been born before midnight. Nobody ever really knows. They chose one of the days and put it on the birth certificate. Fisher: Here’s another sample of a circumstantial situation that came up. I tracked down a third great grandmother, and I was very fortunate that somebody had actually been able to come up with a family Bible that put her in the family. And, it was from this very same area, so I was pretty confident. But still, how could I know for sure that she was the only person of that name from that area? And so, circumstantial evidence often involves eliminating other possibilities. I think you’d agree. Loretta: Oh, very definitely. You not only have to try to find evidence proving what you have, but you’ve got to look for are there any other possibilities that this could be, and can you prove or disprove those other possibilities. Fisher: And one of the things that’s really helpful now with circumstantial evidence, and when you have a case like this... DNA. And I was very fortunate that suddenly I found a person matching me in DNA who descended from the brother of the person I thought it to be, from a grandfather of the person I thought it to be, and a great grandfather of the person I thought it to be. Which I felt was very good confirming evidence of this otherwise circumstantial case. Loretta: That is excellent. Yeah. Fisher: So you put these things all together and then you get the confirmation, several times hopefully, from DNA. And then you can put together your case and you know, “Hey, wait a minute, I’ve got something here I can be confident in.” And that’s maybe at the point where you can publish it or put it online and share it with other people. I don’t know how you feel about it, Loretta. I like to put things together first of all on my own, keep it to myself, until I’m really, really confident in what I’ve got before I really share it. Because, as we know, once something goes public, if you’re wrong, it will take on a life of its own and live for years and years and years. And it’s really difficult ever to get rid of it. Loretta: Oh, that is definitely true. There are two major places where people put pedigrees. FamilySearch.org, another is Ancestry. The difference is that Ancestry keeps each person’s pedigree separate. Fisher: Yep. Loretta: Where FamilySearch combines everything. And your cousin could come along and change things in a while. So yes, you do want to be pretty comfortable with what you’re putting out there before you submit it. Because you could take two people who live in the same area, who have similar names and make them into one person, and make it very, very difficult in years to come for somebody to separate those two individuals. Fisher: Yeah, that’s the problem. So, that’s why it’s really important to work the negative side. Try to disprove that it’s the person as well as trying to prove it. And maybe get a little DNA help as well. And at the end, your circumstantial evidence can really prove your case. Loretta: One example we had about somebody walking in with another dirty glass... Fisher: [Laughs] Loretta: ...where we had a photograph that was of this woman who had died in Winter Quarters, Iowa. And, my husband and I visited a distant cousin one evening and she had another copy of the photograph. But it was a larger copy and somebody had copied the name of the photography studio as well as the image, and this picture was taken by Ottinger’s in Salt Lake City, Utah. Well, the woman couldn’t have died in Winter Quarters and had her picture taken in Ottinger’s in Salt Lake City because he wasn’t in business at that time. Fisher: Right. Loretta: And he was half a continent away. Fisher: Yeah! Loretta: And so, we concluded that it was the step grandmother rather than the grandmother that was in the picture. Fisher: Interesting. Well, there you go. Always making a few adjustments along the way, right? Loretta: Oh, absolutely. And, any genealogist who is afraid that somebody is going to disprove all the things they’ve worked so hard for isn’t really open enough to be a really good genealogist. Fisher: The experts are often wrong. And the best ones will go back and correct their own errors. Clean up their own mess and wash their own glasses, right? [Laughs] Loretta: [Laughs] There you go. Fisher: Hey, Loretta, delight to talk to you today. Loretta Evans, she’s in Idaho Falls, Idaho, talking about circumstantial evidence. Is it real? Is it good? Can you use it? The answer is yes! Thanks so much for coming on. Loretta: I’ve enjoyed it very much. Thank you. Fisher: And this segment has been brought to you by 23andMe.com DNA. And coming up next, we’ll talk to a Washington State man who has adopted 1,600 people. They’re all dead! They’re in a cemetery! He’s getting the word out about who they are, and you’re going to want to hear his story in five minutes. Segment 3 Episode 156 (24:50) Host: Scott Fisher with guest Bill Habermann Fisher: Welcome back to Extreme Genes, America's Family History Show and ExtremeGenes.com. It is Fisher here, the Radio Roots Sleuth, and part of my sleuthing has to do with tracking down people with interesting stories that I know might interest you. And this is a guy who I think is inspiring a lot of people around the country since his story broke recently in the Tacoma News Tribune. His name is Bill Habermann. And Bill, you work for a funeral company, yes? Bill: I do. Piper, Marley, Malinger and Oakwood are all tied together as one funeral home. Fisher: And yet, this all spills over into your hobby, as it turns out. You found a cemetery out in the middle of nowhere. I guess it's been grown over, and you've kind of adopted it. Tell us about this. Bill: Well, back in the 1880s when the Northern Pacific Railroad came out west and put a terminus here in Tacoma, they gave about 56 acres to the city for a cemetery. And back in those days, folks didn't want the cemeteries near the town, and so it ended up being out in the sticks, kind of. Well, then that cemetery became Old Tacoma Cemetery and was divided up into three parcels. One stayed as Old Tacoma Cemetery, or Tacoma Cemetery, somehow, and I haven't been able to find out how a portion of about eight acres became Oakwood Cemetery, and then off to the side of the two cemeteries. There are two acres that became the county's pauper cemetery. Fisher: And that kind of got overgrown and forgotten, apparently. Bill: Well, yes. And I gave tours of Oakwood several times, and people would ask me during the tour, "Well, what is that on the other side of the fence? I see a few headstones there, but it's pretty much just grass." And then I said, "Well, that's the county's cemetery which was closed in 1927, and there really aren't a lot of records around for it." Fisher: Now why is that? Bill: Well, I think back in the early days people just were not so record conscious as they are now. And either that or they wrote on a slip of paper and thought, "Well, I'll put it in the book sometime." And it didn't happen. Or the county said, "Well, it's up to the funeral homes to take care of the records because they're putting the bodies into the cemetery." They were each paid $4.50 per burial. So some of the cemetery records probably are just lost totally with the county, but I was fortunate enough to have the records for Piper Funeral Home which started here in 1908, and Malinger which started here in 1883. Fisher: They merged at one point. Bill: Well, they merged at one point, yeah. And then what I did, I just got curious and I looked up the folks who had some headstones and found some of them in our records and started putting that down. Somebody said, "Why don't you put this on FindAGrave because people might want to look up somebody." And I thought, "Oh, okay." And I started doing that and then going through all the ledgers here, I just came up with 1,600 folks that are... Fisher: Wow! 1600? Bill: Yeah. And that was at the time Karen did the article. Now I'm up to 1,626. Fisher: [Laughs] Of course. There's always progress. Now, would you find the names in the ledgers first? Or would you find the tombstones first and then try to track them down in the ledgers? Bill: Well, the initial 15 headstones or so, I looked for them in the ledgers, but then I just started with page one of the Piper book and looked through every page, a page at a time, and if I saw $4.50, that was a first give away that it was somebody that went into the pauper's cemetery. Fisher: Interesting. So it didn't mention the cemetery, it was the price that gave it away? Bill: Yeah, it's the price that always gets me to the page, right. Fisher: Oh, that's fascinating. So when did you start this project, and what has kept you going, and how often do you go there? Bill: Well, I started doing in on FindAGrave about six years ago. The people who own or are in control of the cemetery really don't want folks walking around in there, because several of the graves are sunk in pretty badly, because folks were put into wooden boxes and into concrete grave liners. So they tend to like to leave it looking a little rough, as it said in the newspaper article, so that everybody isn't cramming around in there looking for things. The headstones even are in such disarray sort of that I have not been able to figure out even the rows or the blocks or the plot numbers, like we have in our cemetery, to locate a specific person. And some of those folks might not even be anywhere near the headstone that's standing there. Fisher: Right. So the tombstone itself is the giveaway of who's in there, but you just don't know where the grave itself might be? Bill: Yes, right. Fisher: Wow. Bill: And some of them face east and west, and some of them face north and south, and some of them look like they could be in a row, but others have been marked just set kind of whacky. There are two Japanese headstones there that face no particular direction, you know, they're kind of out in the middle of nowhere. Those two fascinated me because periodically when I'd look over the fence I would see fresh flowers put on those two graves, and they're back from the early 1900s, and sometimes there would be small food offerings there also at those two graves. I haven't seen anything there for the last two years, but somebody was coming in there and still honoring their deceased family members. Fisher: That's amazing. Now, what have you learned about the people that are buried in there? Have you found some unusual or interesting stories about them? Bill: Yeah. There is one fellow that still kind of plagues me. His name is Taggart, and his story is sort of interesting in that he was a well known supposedly wealthy person here to Tacoma back in the early 1900s. And sad to say, his wife became insane and went to the hospital for the insane. While he, in the mean time, lost all his money, regained some money, lost it again, ended up living at the poor farm, and apparently he decided to try to commit suicide by cutting his throat with a straight razor. Well, the hospital saved him, but then ultimately shortly after, he died of pneumonia, which got a lot of people back in those days. Fisher: Sure. Bill: His headstone looks like a military headstone. I checked in the Civil War records and there are so many Patrick Taggards that I kind of lost track of did he really deserve a military headstone. But it's not carved in the way of any military headstones that I've ever found online. So he's kind of a curiosity for me. I really would like to get him a new headstone if he is military, but again, I almost run into a brick wall. Fisher: Sure. And that's the problem with common names, of course. So what about families? Have other families reached out to you from near and far to say, "Hey, you found my person I've been looking for!" Bill: Yes. I've gotten some thank you letters from folks, and on FindAGrave, they can correspond back and forth with me, and so they have thanked me and some folks have sent me information to add into my book. There's an infant that died I think age about three weeks, and the family didn't know whether the child was buried. They were so happy to find where the child was, and they sent me a copy of the baptism certificate for this infant. Although that's the only existing document there is, other than the fact that the child is somewhere in those two acres. Fisher: So, what about restoration of the cemetery? You're allowed in there and you're saying others are not, is there any interest in that on behalf of the owners or on the part of the owners to do this? Bill: I don't think so because it probably would be very costly, first of all, to mould the place and keep the grass looking nice, because here in summer everything turns yellow and dries up. The cemetery that they do own, Old Tacoma, is watered all the time with underground sprinklers, and they have their own wells, but I'm sure that they are not interested in spending probably thousands and thousands of dollars to make the cemetery look presentable. Fisher: You would think that people would have to adopt it, I guess, the descendants of those who are in there, if that was ever going to happen, right? Bill: Yeah. And because it's privately owned by Tacoma Cemetery, I don't think that they could even work that. It kind of would be a real conundrum. Fisher: Sure. He's Bill Habermann. He's a funeral director in Tacoma, Washington, and he has adopted his own cemetery up there and is getting the information he's finding up on FindAGrave. Bill, thank you so much for doing this! And I'm sure you're inspiring others who might want to take on the same kind of project wherever they are. Bill: I hope so. And thanks for the call! Fisher: Hey, this segment of our show has been brought to you by LegacyTree.com. And coming up next, we'll talk preservation with Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com. It's time to be getting ready for the holidays. He's got more great advice, coming up for you in three minutes on Extreme Genes, America's Family History Show. Segment 4 Episode 156 (37:10) Host: Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry Fisher: And welcome back to Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show and ExtremeGenes.com. It Is Fisher here, your Radio Roots Sleuth with my good friend Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com. He is our Preservation Authority. And Tom, good to have you back. Tom: Good to be here. Fisher: And we do have an email here from Richard Halter, and I believe it’s pronounced Sharon, South Carolina. And he said, “Fisher and Tom, I saw this ad on Facebook and my mind immediately jumped to all I’ve learned from your shows.” Now, he sent us a link to another digitizing firm that’s national. And he said, “My first thought was that they’re not going to do everything that Tom says to look for when getting your products digitized. And the same time though, I live in an area where there isn’t anything available other than big box stores which I don’t even like. Would you recommend something like this store as an option for someone who just wants to get the media digitized? I can do pictures and I’ve played with audio as well as slides and negatives and I’m getting better. I can also take video and convert it from DVD, CD and all this, as long as I can get it to the PC to work on. I’m not a professional to say the least, but I do the best I can and I’m getting better as I go. I’m a very big proponent of getting all of these memories digitized and I’d like to give people some options for things I cannot complete yet. Your loyal listener, Richard.” Tom: That’s a great email that you’ve sent us. You know, there’s a lot of things in here that are really great. I love how you want to get all your stuff digitized. You’re trying to do as much as you can which we really advocate, and then some of the things of course you can’t do. Now this place that you mentioned, I can’t really say whether they’re good or bad because I’ve asked listeners in the past, if you have good experiences with places whether they’re local or national let us know. If you have bad experiences locally or national, let us know also so that we can warn people or encourage people to go to these places. This is one that I’ve never received any information on. I’ve checked out the website, it seems legit and everything looks nice, beautiful website. They’re about the middle to high end which sometimes is good, sometimes it’s bad. Because most of the time when you see these real cheap things, you’re getting what you pay for, and it’s not very good. So they have a fair price, the price is a little higher than what we charge on our online store. But if it’s closer to you and you feel more comfortable doing it, what I would do is, always start with the smallest package kind of as a test drive and see if you’re happy with what they do. And then of course send in all your other stuff and if you’re happy let us know. Fisher: Sure. Right. And testing is a key thing. And I would imagine, aren’t there ratings involved with this somewhere online that he could check out? Tom: You know, there really should be, and I’ve thought about this before getting out there and doing some experiments with some of these different places and actually go in and give them multi-star ratings. So that’s something we’re looking at maybe in 2017, we might actually come out with a rating system. But we really need our listeners to let us know where they’ve had good experiences and bad experiences. And let us know places that they’ve used so that we can maybe start doing a rating system. I really encourage you use local places as much as you want. Use national places if you find out they’re good. You can go to shop.TMCPlace.com and get our prices. And usually if people are close to what our prices are they’re probably legit because they’re doing the right thing. If they’re way below, I say stay away. It’s not worth it. I’ve run into so much product places like that. Fisher: That’s the thing. This is not the kind of thing you really want to price shop on so much. I mean, if it’s too cheap to be true, it’s probably too cheap to be true, Tom. Tom: That is so true! [Laughs] Fisher: [Laughs] Tom: Yeah, you need to be careful. One thing that I really advocate that I think is really, really important which we have never gone into because I don’t like it. A lot of transfer places, they use high speed. So instead of like a VHS tape taking two hours to transfer, they can transfer it in 15 to 20 minutes because they’re doing it high speed which reduces your fidelity. Fisher: Of course. Tom: You know if it didn’t do that everybody would be doing it. We would do it. We could drop our prices way down. However, we wouldn’t be giving our clients the quality that they want. You know, if you’re in a situation where money is really, really tight and it’s that or nothing. It’s still scary, because I have people who come in to me and say, “Hey, we sent it to this place online that’s really cheap. We didn’t get our stuff back. Or it came back really bad. They told us our tape is bad.” And then we had to go and “undo” what the other people did. Fisher: All right. Well, what do we have coming up in the next segment here, Tom? Tom: We’re going to talk about some scanning parties we’re planning. Fisher: All right, we’ll get to that in about three minutes. This segment has been brought to you by Forever.com. And if you have a question for Tom Perry you can always write to him at AskTom@TMCPlace.com and you might get to hear your question answered on the air. From Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show. Segment 5 Episode 156 (44:20) Host: Scott Fisher with guest Tom Perry Fisher: And we are back, final segment of Extreme Genes, America's Family History Show and ExtremeGenes.com, Preservation Time with Tom Perry from TMCPlace.com. Tom, you were just talking about a scanning party you've got coming up. And let's just explain to people first of all what a scanning party is. Tom: Okay. It’s a lot of fun. It’s not a MRI or CRT or anything like that. Fisher: [Laughs] Right. Tom: What we do is, we scan your photographs. So this is where anybody can bring in one of those sterilight 16 quart shoeboxes with the lid on. Fisher: Yeah. [Laughs] Tom: And you can pack it with your 3x3 up to 8x10 non-damaged, non-mounted, loose photos, and we can scan the whole box for you for twenty five bucks. Fisher: Wow! Tom: So it's an absolute killer deal. Fisher: And fast too, right? Tom: Oh yeah! Oh yeah! It's really fast! It’s amazing! But that's why they can't be mounted or anything like that. They need to be all organized. If you have multiple sizes, just organize your sizes together. And bring your own thumb drive. And there's no additional charge. If you want, we have 16GB flash drives for only ten bucks. Fisher: Now where are you going to be doing this? Tom: The first one we are doing is November 11th and 12th in Midway, Utah. That's kind of up in the mountains, a beautiful ski resort area. Fisher: Wow! That's going to be great. Okay, so you have a location there. Tom: Right. Fisher: So people who would be in the Utah area would go where in Midway? Tom: It’s going to be at the Homestead Resort. It’s all part of the FamilyHistoryExpos.com convention that they're having, those two days which we talked about, about a month ago. So if you want to sign up for the convention, you can come in and do that. You can come in for the scanning party. It’s going to be a lot of fun. Remember, it needs to be up to 8x10 and it’s got to be in sterilight box with the lid on. No great big posters. We won't be able to do anything like that at this time. Fisher: All right, but you can do stuff that's small, very small. Tom: Oh yeah! We can go all the way down to 3x3 as long as they're in good condition. And if you have some pictures that are starting to fade and things like that, don't think, "Oh, I can't do these." No, this is a good time to do your faded ones, because we're going to stop them from fading anymore. We'll give you a digitized copy of all of them. And then whether you want to do it next week or next year or ten years from now, you'll have the high definition file that you can go in and do color correction. Or if you say, "Hey, this is over my head. I don't want to be involved in it." You can email it back to us and then we can do the color correction as well. Fisher: Now what kind of dpi are we talking about? Tom: It’s usually about 1200 dpi. Fisher: Oh that's good! Tom: Oh yeah! It’s a really high dpi. Fisher: It’s solid, yeah. So I've done this recently, of course, I've gone ahead, all of my old home movies and videos digitized. So I've got like 110 of them on disk. I don't even know what's on them all, because I didn't even know what was on the videos when I gave them to you in the first place. The joy of it, though, is I can take them one at a time, maybe one a week, right, and transfer it in some way and edit it down to just each individual thing. We'll, here's a birthday on this video, that's separate from the time we got to meet Joe DiMaggio over here or something like that. I mean, you can separate them all out. And so, with photographs, it would be much the same. You can digitize them all. And then when you get around to it, you're there. And what a great opportunity this is… Midway, Utah, November 11th? Tom: 11th and 12th, correct. Just go to FamilyHistoryExpos.com and you can sign up for the convention if you want to go to that as well. And just remember, like you just mentioned, it’s good to get this stuff done. And I've even had people tell me that they're going to go on a long trip, so they get videos, photos, all these things scanned, and then they sit in the back with the kids and put the DVD in, and they're sitting there writing notes. So when they're driving down the highway they can sit there and watch the thing, instead of watching Aladdin or something with their kids. They can say, "Oh, yeah, this is grandma." and talk to their kids. And make sure you have your iPhone or a tape recorder running, so when you're explaining all this stuff to your kids, you've got it down. And then later on you can make a slideshow with your narration for your great, great grandkids who will never know you, but they'll be able to hear your voice describing who these people are in the photos, who they are in the videos. It just makes it so nice. Fisher: Boy! What a great idea! And you know, trapping the kids, I love that! [Laughs] Tom: [Laughs] It’s great! We're going to be doing a whole bunch this next year in 2017 working with our Going Postal stores. So we're going to have a lot of fun in 2017. Fisher: All right, Tom. Thanks for dropping by. See you next week. Tom: We'll be there. Fisher: And this segment of the show has been brought to you by FamilySearch.org and RootsMagic.com. Hey, thanks again to our guest, Loretta Evans, for coming on and talking about "circumstantial evidence." Does it really add up? And to Bill Habermann from Washington State, talking about the cemetery he adopted and how you might be able to do something of the same. Hey, and don't forget, if you're going to become your family's family history expert, you need to sign up for our free newsletter, The Weekly Genie. Do it at ExtremeGenes.com or our Facebook page. Talk to you next week. And remember, as far as everyone knows, we're a nice, normal family!

Ephesians 3:16-19 (NIV) 16 I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit...

Ephesians 3:16-19 (NIV) 16 I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit...

Yehuda Katz and Tom Dale join us to talk about the road to Ember 2.0 and "Fast Boot". They share insight about why they stick to a 6 week release cycle, and why they think JS frameworks might be the future of all web apps (especially content sites). We also chat about what "indie open source" means, and exactly how much design goes into the Ember project and community. Yehuda Katz (Twitter) Tom Dale (Twitter) Tom Dale's Klout score is 66 Tilde.io Erik Bryn Yehuda at Hack Summit: "Indie OSS" HTMLBars FastBoot: Ember's Server-Side Rendering solution Tom on Shop Talk Show on Server-Side Rendering Rendr JS Yehuda's RailsConf keynote: "10 Years!" Skylight.io: Make your Rails apps faster with actionable insights Transcript: FILE NAME: The Frontside 16 - Yehuda Katz & Tom Dale Talk About Javascript DURATION: 55:59 minutes CHARLES: Everybody, welcome to Frontside the Podcast, Episode 16. We've got Brandon and Stanley here with me on the podcast and some very special guests who need no introduction, so I'll let them introduce themselves. TOM: Maybe we just start with Yehuda because he's the most famous. Are we starting by number of Twitter followers? STANLEY: Actually, Cloud score. TOM: Yeah, it's Cloud score based. YEHUDA: I think Tom has a higher Cloud score than me. BRANDON: All right, Tom. Go for it. TOM: Hey, what's up? I'm Tom. I had the idea for Ember JS in the shower. [Laughter] YEHUDA: Hey. I'm Yehuda. I work on standard stuff and Ember a lot these days, and now Rust also. TOM: Yehuda just joined the Rust core team. I don't know if you guys saw that. BRANDON: I did see that. Rust is a programming language. YEHUDA: Programming language. STANLEY: Are we going to get to talk about that later? BRANDON: Sure. TOM: We can talk about whatever you want. I'm not going to have any insights on that. YEHUDA: We'll have some insights. TOM: Yeah. I don't know if you guys ever saw the Pokemon Movie, but basically Yehuda is reenacting that with core teams. You've got to catch them all. [Laughter] BRANDON: That's great. STANLEY: That's not just the movie, Tom. That's literally everything around Pokemon. TOM: Oh, okay. STANLEY: That is the tagline. TOM: I will definitely defer. You seem like an expert here, Stanley. STANLEY: You know; I know the most important facts of all time. BRANDON: Stanley is on the Pokemon core team actually. STANLEY: I actually just made a new Pokemon that's like a guitar, a chair, and a microwave put together. BRANDON: What's it called? STANLEY: Rock-On. TOM: That is the worst Pokemon name I have ever heard. [Laughter] TOM: Oh, my gosh. BRANDON: All right, well, off to an auspicious start here. So the two of you and Leah formed the original core team for Ember. Is that fair to say or were there other people involved at that time when you kind of were switching SproutCore 2.0 to Ember? YEHUDA: I don't think I would call the original group that switched SproutCore over to Ember necessarily the core team. I would say that there was a bunch of people that were working on what was called SproutCore 2 at the time at Strobe, and it doesn't -- what we were doing there doesn't really meet my requirements for a good core team or a good Indie Open Source project. But one of the things that we did after switching over to being Ember and announcing the separate project was to make the core team more like what I would want. TOM: Well, I would say that there was never one moment where we were like, hey, let's create a core team. I think one thing that I learned from Yehuda about managing an open source project is that it is extremely important to start delegating way before you feel ready or comfortable. So there was a point early on where we were just totally overwhelmed as people started using it and people came along and were interested. And so we just gave them commit bit without really thinking about the bureaucracy of it or the structure of it. And then it definitely got to a point where it was like, "Why is there no core team yet?" because there's a ton of people with commit. So we should probably think about this a little bit more. YEHUDA: Of the people who are on the core team now, Erik, Chris, and Steph were all involved extremely early. I think Erik Bryn was the second contributor. Well, the first contributor after people working at Strobe, and Chris and Steph got involved really early because they were building an app on Ember that was very, very mobile focused. Well, it's a mobile app, and so they needed heavy performance, and we were not necessarily focusing on that, so they got involved pretty early also. BRANDON: And you gave a really awesome talk about this recently at Hack Summit. We'll throw the link to that in the show notes. I thought it was terrific, and I thought there was a lot of amazing ideas that were clearly born of painful experience. And I want to talk about that in a moment and kind of basically running and maintaining an open source project that keeps the open source ethos, I think, was kind of the thrust of the talk and keeping the Web and Open Source Indie. But before we jump into that, I wanted to get kind of a -- without going into, like, a full state of the union, there's a really lot going on in the world of Ember right now. It can be actually kind of hard for individual developers to just keep up with the news of it. There are just so many cool things happening at once. And there are a few things in particular that I wanted to get an update about. You guys are doing some really interesting stuff right now, but some things that are shipping soon: HTMLBars is actually happening. YEHUDA: It's in the beta. BRANDON: Yeah, it's in the beta, so people -- we tested it in our app already, and with one exception with, I guess, Ember list view isn't quite ready for it yet, but. YEHUDA: I think that's ready now too. BRANDON: Oh, really? TOM: Yeah, that just got updated. BRANDON: So, yeah, it was phenomenal. I mean it just works. Like, it was pretty amazing. So the benefit to users for that has been kind of already gradually been implemented where the metamorph tags in the DOM were gone. TOM: Right. BRANDON: What else can people expect to see once HTMLBars is in place? YEHUDA: So let me just reiterate a thing that you just said that maybe people weren't clear about before I let Tom a little bit about HTMLBars, which is, one of our major goals now and probably forever is to continue to update things incrementally and without breaking apps. And that's something that takes a lot of effort, so I want to reiterate it because it's probably the driving force of everything that we do, so like you said, there's a lot of news. We've been talking about a lot of stuff. We can talk for hours on it, probably. But the key thing is that a lot of times you hear there's a lot of news in a project, and it feels overwhelming. It feels like, oh, my God, if there's that much news, it probably means I'm going to have to spend the next five years catching up with all the things that are happening. And with Ember, our major goal is to make sure that all that, all those new features don't affect your app. I mean there will be a 2.0, and at 2.0 there may be some breaking changes, but even with the 2.0, all the breaking changes will land before 2.0. They'll land on the 1x brands together with deprecation warnings so you'll learn about them as you upgrade. TOM: Yeah. YEHUDA: And so I think this is the driving force of everything we're doing now. TOM: Yeah, I think, with 2.0, it's not like oh, my gosh, there's all this new stuff I have to learn. Instead, what it's going to be is us removing stuff that you probably never even learned about anyway. YEHUDA: Or that we told you in 1.10 or 1.11 to switch away from and you had plenty of releases to remove. TOM: Yeah, you'll have ample warning, and you'll definitely -- it's not going to blindside anyone. But I think this is exactly the point is we're on a six-week release cycle, and it is impossible to do big bang stuff in six weeks. Right? Think about any big software project anyone listening to this has worked on. It's hard to build a huge thing in six weeks, which maybe seems like a limitation, but actually I think we both see that as a huge strength, which is that it really forces you, as an engineer, to think about, okay, I want to move mountains. But I need to do it six weeks at a time, so how do I basically touch back down to reality as often as possible? With HTMLBars, if you think about it, it's a pretty dramatic thing, right? We're basically entirely replacing the rendering engine of this pretty large JavaScript framework, which in some sense is like trying to change the engine on a 747 mid flight. And the only way that we can get away with doing that is to do it very incrementally. And the only way we can do it without breaking people's apps, I should say, is to do it incrementally. Step one was metal-views, which removed metamorphs. But, fundamentally, all view rendering was still string concatenation. And then the next step after that was to get actual HTMLBars in with creating DOM instead of creating strings. YEHUDA: There was actually another step in between, which was to change all the -- so the internal, whenever you use a curlies and handlebars, those curlies, in the old version of the templating engine, would go and they would have ad hoc code to observe something, observe paths, and there was all this complicated code at each point where a curlies was used anywhere in the templating engine, and the new system -- and this is again behind the scenes, so it's easy for even Tom to have forgotten about it. We refactored everything internally so that it used a stream-based system so that all the parts of the templating engine don't have to know exactly how that's all structured internally. And that makes it a lot easier to do performance optimizations, but also makes it a lot easier to avoid mistakes and bugs that cropped up from time-to-time. So that was another step in the direction that was necessary to get all the way to the end. TOM: So now that's in, and I think the next step is to actually -- the next step will be now that we've got HTMLBars integrated in a backwards compatible way, the next step is introducing nice, new syntax. So just one example of this is this gives us the ability to remove the bind-attr helper. Most people that I've noticed when I'm teaching them Ember intuitively think that they should be able to do attrf equals curly, curly URL, and that doesn't work together. You have to do bind-attr. But because HTMLBars is a much smarter parser, we're able to have that context, and we can actually just dramatically simplify the whole model. BRANDON: Okay. And you also answered another question I had, which was, there are a lot of people basically talking about how they should be building apps for 2.0 friendliness, but it sounds like if they stay with the point releases, there'll be very little work involved in moving to 2.0. So you don't have to kind of like today sit and architect your app in a certain way as long as you're staying up to date with the point releases. Would you say that's relatively accurate? TOM: Yeah, I think so. 2.0 is not going to have any new features, and one feature that Teddy Zeenny is working on for the Ember Inspector, you know the Chrome and Firefox plugin for the developer tools, is adding a deprecations pane. So what we expect to happen is that people should just keep upgrading their apps on the 1x point releases and then, every upgrade, you may see one or more deprecation warnings pop up, either in the console or in this pane in the developer tools. And you just fix those at your leisure. Then when 2.0 comes out, all that will happen is that the payload size of Ember will shrink. YEHUDA: Yeah. I think another way to put all that is, when we looked at React, so we looked at React a lot as part of the run-up to 2.0 for the past, like, six months. And when we looked at React, initially we saw a programming model that actually wasn't that different from how we thought people should build Ember apps, so things like you should have data flowing down from a single point and, in Ember, that single point is the model hook in your route, and then we always thought about data flowing down. And you should have events bubbling up, and you should use actions mostly for communication. I remember Erik Bryn very, very early on said, "I think people are overusing data bindings. People should use events more." And that's when we started adding the evented system to a bunch of the parts of the framework. TOM: Actions. Actions weren't there originally … two-way bindings. YEHUDA: Well, we added actions, but we also added, like, Ember.evented. TOM: Yeah. YEHUDA: And I think we kind of knew all this, right? And so idiomatically the way that Ember 2.0 works is actually not that different from how we thought Ember 1.x should work, but I think one of the things that ended up happening is that because data bindings are so -- two-way data bindings can be very nice and clever, a lot of times people would reach for two-way data mining because it was the first thing that was sitting there. And then they would end up building somewhat complicated systems that rely on communication through two-way data mining. TOM: The syntactic sugar pushed you in that direction. YEHUDA: And so a lot of what Ember 2.0 is is about making syntactic sugar more honest about what is the right default, and that does mean that there may be applications that were heavily relying on communication, especially communication channels through two-way data bindings. And that will work much less nicely in Ember 2.0, and it might feel painful to upgrade if you're trying to be both idiomatic and upgrade to 2.0 at the same time. But I think, for most people who are using actions and were using data down through the model hook, I think a lot of it will feel very familiar, will feel very much like how you've been doing things all along. CHARLES: Cool. I actually had a question about HTMLBars landing, and that's when we upgrade our apps, everything should just work seamless. Like Brandon said, we actually did a spike of that, and it mostly seems to be the case. You said that there are no new features, but are there more, like, newer development stories around? Like, given that the templating engine or the view layer understands the DOM, what power or APIs will users have to interact with it, like to do animations or bring things in and out and stuff like that? YEHUDA: Oh, yeah. CHARLES: Is there any of that stuff planned? YEHUDA: I don't think we meant to suggest that there are no new features in number 2.0. Just that they will land in the 1x series, I think, is the point. CHARLES: Ah, right, right. I see. TOM: I think probably the biggest feature is just speed. And I think, also, what HTMLBars' architecture unlocks is the ability to better integrate with other libraries by adopting kind of a diffing approach similar to what React does with the virtual DOM. Basically, in my mind, HTMLBars is all about a bunch of infrastructure work that allows us to make the programming model feel more natural for people who are…. YEHUDA: One way to think about it is that it's the first templating engine that was ever built specifically for Ember. Handlebars templating engine before was built as a general-purpose templating engine, and we pushed it as far as it could go to be real useful for Ember. But things like bind-attr and the metamorph tags kind of crept in as necessary because the templating engine wasn't really built for this purpose, the exact purpose that Ember was designed for. And the HTMLBars engine, part of it is that it's DOM based, and part of it is that it supports diffing, and part of it is that it's faster. But I think, ultimately, it allowed us to look at a lot of areas that are annoying about using templates in Ember and make them nicer. And, yeah, so I think that it's -- TOM: I'd say it also unlocks things like we're working on server side rendering right now, and a lot of that is due to the power of HTMLBars because we can run it in so many different environments, and we can model all of these things as streams internally. It gives us a lot of flexibility about what we can do with your applications. You know, we can do things like server side render your applications even though, of course, you never designed your app for that case in mind. But because of how expressive the templating and, in fact, the entire application architecture is, and because we all agree as a community that this is how we architect our apps, it unlocks a lot more stuff. And I think there'll be more things like server side rendering in the future that we all benefit from by sharing this very declarative application structure and very declarative templating language. YEHUDA: Yeah, I mean honestly, under the hood, the fact a lot of the innovations of the templating engine are not things that any user will ever see directly because they're just implementation. And if we wanted to go around pimping things like streams or the way that the diffing algorithm works internally and the way we clone fragments and all this stuff, we could probably spend a lot of time pimping it, and maybe that would even make a lot of people, some people happy. But I think you'll see, over the next year or so, these things will all lead towards better features or to more features that will be nice, and that's how I think we'd like to roll -- TOM: I think Web components integration is a big one. YEHUDA: Ah, yeah, that's a good point. TOM: I think HTMLBars makes it very easy. And so, in terms of actual improvements coming on top of HTMLBars, the component syntax, instead of being curly, curly to indicate that you want a component, you'll be able to use just regular angle brackets, so that'll be nice. And another thing that we're really keen to get rid of is: You know how today when you're building an Ember component if you want to customize the element associated with that component, you have to say, like, tag name, class name, bindings. You guys know what I'm talking about? BRANDON: Mm-hmm. TOM: So that's kind of annoying because all of those special properties on the component class that you used to customize the element are all duplicating features that already exist in the templating language. So it's just kind of this weird bifurcation of the programming model where, if you want to customize the element for this top level, do it in JavaScript. Everything else, do it in the template. So HTMLBars will allow us to allow you to customize your component element purely in the template, and you won't have to -- basically there are far more cases now where you'll be able to get away with a component that's just a template file, and you'll reduce the number of JavaScript classes in your app. YEHUDA: Yeah, I think, from a high level, the biggest -- the high level of the internal technical improvements are largely that it allows for contextual work. So the old templating engine wouldn't necessarily know that you're inside of an attrf when you have curlies, so we would have to spit out a bunch of extra stuff and maybe make you use extra helpers. It wouldn't necessarily know that you're in image FRC or a video tag or a component. It wouldn't be able to tell if you were using a polymer component that implements the bind protocol, right? But the new templating engine basically lets us see exactly what's happening at every curly, and that just has a large number of positive effects. BRANDON: So you said something else that I felt like was a good segue into the next part of the discussion that this basically allows you to do server side rendering, which you guys are really, like, in the thick of it right now. But for me, a lot of the talk I've seen a about server side rendering comes across as a little inside baseball. There's this sort of discussion between people who are really into React because they're suddenly doing a lot of stuff with server side rendering, and they're seeing some benefits out of it. And you see this stuff kind of pop up in the JavaScript community, but I'm curious to know if you guys can explain a little bit about the benefit of server side rendering that this is a major new feature coming to Ember now. YEHUDA: I'll let Tom maybe give the full pitch, but I think one thing that I feel somewhat strongly about is that, for most people, if you don't have a system that actually gives you something that works pretty well out of the box, in other words it doesn't ask you to do a lot of the work yourself, the idea of isomorphic server side rendering where you run your same app on the client and the server, I don't think that that ends up being worth it. And if you look at a lot of apps that use Ember today, a lot of them have spent relatively little time building non-isomorphic solutions for specifically SEO that have been very, very cheap in terms of time and very, very effective. But I think there's the: I want to not have to write that, even that little bit, and I think that that you get a lot of benefits out of if you just have your framework do it. In other words, if it's not just like your framework does 20% and you do 80%. If it's your framework does 95% and you do maybe a little bit, or you have some constraints, I think that is worth something. And I think the rehydration of fast boot is worth something, although that has even more issues and even a larger percentage that most people have to do on their own. Basically, I think the TLDR for me is that I've always saw server side rendering as indeed somewhat inside baseball because, for most people historically, and I think this is even true largely about React, the solution that you're offered is the framework will do a little bit for you, and you have to go figure out a lot of the details about how to make this work for real. And I think most people just don't have the time to figure all those details out. TOM: So it's been kind of interesting to watch this play out over the last year or two because I think there's been a big split between the JavaScript application community and old school people that create content for the Web who are really keen on this idea of progressive enhancement. And so there's kind been this split. And, for me, for a long time, I personally didn't really care about this case because, in my mind, JavaScript apps were really good for what I'll call workspace apps, which is most of them are behind a login. You log in. You have these very rich interactions. You're editing something. You know, I worked on the iCloud apps. It's a feature, not a bug, that Google can't index your calendar and your email, right? So to me that was the use case for JavaScript apps. But that was until I saw content sites. Like, I remember the first time thinking, "Wow, maybe JavaScript apps are actually the future of all Web applications," was when I saw Bustle, actually. When I saw Bustle, it was just a content site. It was just news articles. And if you would've asked me, I would have said you should probably use Rails or some other server rendered framework for this. But then I saw it, and it felt just like a website. I couldn't actually tell the difference other than how damn fast it was. And I kind of had to step back and question all of my opinions about how people should be building these kinds of applications. And especially for content sites, I think that the server rendering is really important, right, because historically your user has had to download all of this JavaScript and all that JavaScript had to be downloaded and evaluated and run before they saw anything. So having the ability to bootstrap that process on the server and have the first bits that the user starts downloading not be the JavaScript payload, but be HTML and CSS, so that the first thing that they see is useful, I think that's really going to change how people build applications because you get the benefits of server rendering while still retaining the kind of interactions that you can build with something like Ember that you just can't do with Rails. YEHUDA: But again, I think people trying to do this on their own and taking maybe a half solution and then trying to figure out how to make this work reliably ends up producing things that are pretty buggy and feel pretty bad on first boot, or they end up requiring tremendous amounts of engineering resources. And it's possible that, like, huge companies can make this work. But I mostly think about startups, and startups simply do not have the engineering resources to take on the server side rendering task on their own, so this is why I think we care about it for Ember because, as Tom said before, Ember is already pushing you down a pretty conventional path, and we think -- our hope is that by having people do that conventional path and us taking charge of server side rendering will have something that works mostly out of the box for a lot of users. Again, assuming they follow some additional constraints about what you're allowed to do on the server. TOM: And I think we should be clear here because there's, as always happens, there's ambiguity in the terminology. So first is the term isomorphic app, which I don't really love that term, but I guess we better get used to it, Yehuda. YEHUDA: Yeah. TOM: But there's really a spectrum. On the one side of the spectrum you have something like Airbnb has a library for Backbone called Rendr (with no e - well, one e, but not the second e). And that kind of lets you wire up some of the server side rendering. But again, it's very, very manual. And the whole purpose of this is just to make sure that the first thing that you deliver to the browser is HTML and not JavaScript so that the user, even if they don't have JavaScript enabled or they're on a slow connection or whatever, they get something useful. But then on the other side, you have things like Meteor or Asana where the whole idea is -- and to me, I'll be honest with you. It strikes me as extremely silly, but the idea is that you're writing both your server and your client in the same code base, and then you're deploying them both. You describe it, and it sounds like this magic bullet, but it also just seems really silly to me. YEHUDA: Well, I think the fact that even the first releases of Meteor had if Meteor.isClient and if Meteor.isServer, and even the first demos had large blocks of content…. TOM: Yeah. Conditionals. Yeah. YEHUDA: Basically means that people hadn't really figured it out exactly right yet. TOM: Yeah, the point is that even if you have a client side app, your server still has a lot of responsibilities, especially around data access to the database, authorization, authentication, and so on. And putting that in the code base with your UI and your drag and drop code just does not make any sense to me. So I want to be clear to everyone listening that that is not what we're going for. The idea is not that you're writing your json API server in Ember. The point is that you're writing the same old app. In fact, we hope that you don't have to make any changes to your app. And you can deploy it, and it will do a render using the same code. It's basically like your app running in a browser on the server, and then we'll have some way of -- YEHUDA: Except not actually a browser. TOM: -- it's actually a transferring state. YEHUDA: Except, importantly, it's much, much cheaper than being an actual browser. We're not using phantom JS or a zombie or anything. TOM: Right. Conceptually a browser, but we don't want to pay the cost. Phantom JS is a source of great pain for many people, ourselves included, so we want a pure JavaScript environment. But conceptually it's a browser. YEHUDA: I think the reason I hopped in there is I just want to be clear that the goal of conceptually a browser is actually not to be a browser, but to make Ember itself internally abstract enough so that the most expensive parts of being a browser can be replicated in a cheaper way on the server. Obviously the most important part of that is the DOM. And that's the part that React worked out for server side rendering is use the virtual DOM on the server and not a real DOM, right? And that means you don't need real phantom JS and the full scope of DOM. But there's also other stuff like how your routing works and how the model hook runs and how it makes requests, how it makes "XHRs" to get the data in the first place. Right? There are a lot of details if you think about what it takes to boot up an app in the first place. For us, the goal is to go through that whole process of booting up an app all the way through, but not including the did insert element hooks in your DOM and make sure that all that stuff doesn't require -- it has really constrained and clear abstractions, right? So rendering has a render abstraction and routing has a location abstraction, and the DOM has the HTML bars, little dom, lower case dom abstraction, right? So instead of saying we're running it inside of something that pretends to be a browser, we're saying Ember doesn't actually care whether it's in a browser or not, but it has very, very clear abstractions for what it means to be a browser. BRANDON: Okay, so is there--? It sounds like it could be a little like -- is this a little ways off? It sounds like there are a lot of benefits. Like, if you see the hand rolled stuff that Discourse has done, clearly this is something that Bustle cares enough about to sponsor, this is probably a little ways off for Ember developers. Is there anything that you want people doing Ember to know right now about server side rendering in terms of how it's going to affect them or some of the technical stuff that you're learning through this or anything like that? TOM: I think we've been thinking about this particular problem for a very long time. And in fact, we've intentionally designed the architecture of Ember specifically to handle this case, even from the beginning, even like three years ago. We knew that this is something that we wanted or at least we didn't want to paint ourselves into a corner around. So I think there are two aspects of this, and one of them, I think, is pretty well bounded and pretty straightforward. The other one is definitely going to require a little bit more research. The first step is simply getting rendering happening on the server. So because we designed Ember for this case, we were actually able to get Ember as a framework booting up in node in about a day's worth of work. So a couple things have crept in. There were areas where we had been a little bit sloppy and introduced dependencies on things like document.body, jQuery, things like that. So it was about a day to kind of encapsulate those, make sure that they weren't hard requirements for booting the framework, and that was about a day's worth of work. And then, by the end of the week -- we've only been working on this for about a week now -- at the end of the week, we actually had an app booting in node and handling route requests. So in terms of progress, it's been really great. But I guess all that we're saying is that, in a week, we were able to capitalize on the last three years of work we've been doing. That's not as impressive as it sounds. YEHUDA: It was nice that there were relatively few regressions, right? TOM: Yeah. YEHUDA: That the list of things where people were accidentally doing things that assumed the browser was actually relatively small. TOM: Yeah. And the way that we did that is basically introducing an abstraction that provides your environment to you, so a node that's different than in a browser. So that's the first part is to get the app booting, and the second part is to get it rendering. I think what's really cool is that, even though HTMLBars, of course, is a DOM based rendering engine, or despite that, we still use an abstraction around DOM access. What we're going to be able to do when we start, again, in earnest tomorrow, on Monday, is basically replace that DOM helper that we used to create DOM in the browser with something that we'll be able to build up strings so that you can build up your HTML on the server and serve that to the client. That's step one: rendering. I think we'll be able to make quite quick progress on that. I would guess probably about -- I don't know if I should give timelines here. I think we're ballparking around a month before we can at least beta it, the server rendering. BRANDON: That's a little faster timeline than I had assumed. TOM: That's purely rendering. I want to make clear that that is purely for things like SEO, for Web crawlers, for curl, things like that. Then the next phase after that, and this is where it gets into the tricky bit, is being able to -- YEHUDA: Rehydration. TOM: -- is rehydration, what people call it. What we call fast boot. And with fast boot the idea is that whatever state that we use to build up your application on the server, we also transfer that state, not just the HTML, not just the output, but the state that we use to build that output is somehow seamlessly transferred from the server to the client. And the client basically just takes the HTML that we've given it and reconnects all these bindings and goes from there, so it's totally seamless to the user. YEHUDA: And I think there's some complexity there. For example, there may be some part of your page that you can't actually render on the server because it says, like, "Hello, authenticated user," with the user's name. So thinking about ways to make sure that you can mark those as needing to be rendered on the client without causing jank. There's a bunch of stuff like that where, at first glance, it seems not too bad, but I guess the high level if there's a determinism issue, right? So the goal is to make sure that roughly what you did on the server is the same thing that you do on the client because if it's too far off, then you end up having to throw -- no matter how smart our algorithm is, we're going to end up having to throw away everything and replace it again. The idea is how to structure your app, how to structure the way that you set up your app in Ember CLI so that you tend to be putting out output that's deterministic on both sides. And, like Tom said, I think state is maybe overbroad. It's mostly modeled batter, right? Making sure that the model batter that you got on the server is equivalent and transferred together with the HTML payload so that the model hooks that you have in your client will not have to go make another XHR. They'll just have the data that the server already collected, and then hopefully rerender an equivalent DOM on the clients with relatively low…. TOM: There are just a lot of tricky cases, like imagine you have a bound helper that shows relative dates, like 30 seconds ago. So you have a clock on the server, and then you have a clock on the client. How do you reconcile those two? YEHUDA: Yeah, so the good news there -- the good news with all that, without getting too much into the weeds, is that the HTMLBars' engine is already broken up between rendering the parts of your DOM that are static, that are like the hello, the text hello inside of an H1, and updating the static parts with dynamic content. And today that's purely a performance optimization, and so that we could use the same document fragment over and over again after cloning, but that will also allow us to use server rendered content where, instead of expecting to have an empty text node that is to be filling in with dynamic content, we'll have a filled in text node. And we see, in that case, Tom, that the time that is in there already is not the correct time. It's not the equivalent time, and so we'll update it. So that's sort of like the React diffing strategy. I'm less worried about, like, there's a single text node with the wrong content because I know we can deal with that. And I'm a lot -- although if it's too much changes, it will look very bad. It will look very janky. I'm more worried about, like, this entire conditional change. So you're looking at something and then, like, your sidebar swaps out for a different sidebar, which I think would be a pretty unacceptable UI. CHARLES: Obviously there are a lot of different server side environments that people use. What requirements of the server is there going to be if I'm using a Rails app or something in Python or Java or whatnot? How am I going to interface to this? TOM: Well, you definitely need a JavaScript runtime, right, because your Ember app is written in JavaScript. Unless you're planning on pouring it into Ruby or whatever, we're definitely going to require JavaScript runtime. And I think we're starting with just supporting node. But what I would like to see, and maybe you guys can write this, is a Rails gem that you can install that will install dependencies in everything and basically get set up in a production environment. YEHUDA: I think one thing people often forget is you can definitely -- you could you have a node app running. People try to embed JavaScript. They try to use, like, The Ruby Racer, and embedding JavaScript is quite a disaster. BRANDON: [Laughter] I'm sorry. I don't know if you know. Charles wrote The Ruby Racer, and it is a disaster. STANLEY: It's cool. It's a disaster. YEHUDA: So let me be clear. It's a great idea. I use it a lot, but it just fundamentally doesn't now work. Right? It fundamentally cannot -- you cannot embed two VGCs in the same process. BRANDON: Right. YEHUDA: Okay. BRANDON: This is the greatest moment in the history of our podcast. I just want to say that. CHARLES: No, I know. There's no way to collect…. YEHUDA: Yes, exactly. CHARLES: -- for example. YEHUDA: I was about to use cycles as an example. CHARLES: The APIs just don't exist. YEHUDA: Yeah, so basically cycles, so this is why. The reason why I feel strongly about this is that we use Rust for Skylight, which is our product. And we need to embed something, and I would never in a million years embed something with a garbage collector. And I think The Ruby Racer was a pretty good -- I think, for constrained cases, it works fine if you know what you're doing, but people basically tried to use it as, "Oh, I'm just going to write part of my program in JavaScript. And, by the way, both languages have closures, so good luck," basically. The Ruby Racer is cool, but I would not -- I don't think that that's the correct strategy for having long-running JavaScript programs like Ember, like complicated stuff like Ember. I think a better thing for people to do would be to figure out a simple IPC protocol so that they could run their Ember app and then have a simple way of talking over a socket or something with the node app, so booting up your Rails app will also boot up the node app. And, if necessary, and you're serving through your Rails app, you could communicate. TOM: I think, to be clear, the Ember app, even when running on the server, still talks to the database server using json, right? So it's the exact same data marshalling flow. It's just presumably it'll be a lot faster because probably your API server and your application server are in the same data…. YEHUDA: Well, at a minimum, it'll be a lot more consistent, right? TOM: Yes. YEHUDA: I think when people -- when Twitter complained about somebody from some country connecting and getting a really slow connection, the issue there was that they were downloading the app shell and then who knows how long it took to download the json payload, right? But if the json payload is coming from the same data center, then it's, by definition, going to be downed within some range, reasonable range. BRANDON: Okay. Awesome. I'd like to shift gears and spend a couple minutes talking about something that most of the questions that I had originally for this were actually answered in your talk. But I'd like to go over it just a little bit. You alluded earlier to the way that you're running Ember as an ideal, sort of your ideals, discovering your ideals about open source projects and the Indie Web. And I think it's a really important topic, and I want to ask a little bit about that because I don't think a lot of people understand this. I think, especially I see in the JavaScript community, a lot more people establishing open source projects that are corporate run and that being considered a benefit rather than a drawback. And I've seen you push back on that a little bit, and I wanted to ask you, Yehuda, about what your definition of the Indie Web is and why you specifically run the Ember project the way that you guy run it. YEHUDA: Sure. I think there are basically two parts of what it means to be Indie, and the second one sort of derives out of the first one, but I think it's -- you wouldn't necessarily arrive at it yourself, so I'll make it explicit. The first one is that you have a diversified core team. What I mean by that is essentially diverse in all the ways you could possibly think of, and things that I learned from other projects are, like, functionally diverse. So make sure that if there's a person on your team -- if there's a person around somewhere running your events or doing documentation or doing evangelism or running user groups, make sure that if there's a person who is very skilled at doing that that they are the top person on your team in charge of that. The counter, the alternative that I've seen a lot in the open source community is that the person running events essentially reports to the core team, right? There's a person who is maybe a professional event runner, and they are not in charge of events. They're in charge of coming up with ideas for events that they run by the core team, and the core team decides yes or no. The problem is the core team has no skills in doing that, so this person ends up spending huge amounts of time being frustrated trying to explain to the core team something or other, right? That would be the equivalent of somebody on the core team writing some area of code, having to come to the rest to the core team and talking about really tiny, nitty-gritty implementation details. Of course, unlike code where I think people have an intuitive sense that you're deep in the weeds of some performance thing, and I don't really understand that. In a lot of areas that are not code, code people have a very high sense of their own understanding, right? The core teams, I've seen a lot of core teams that people come and they say, well, I happen to know a lot about how people want to read docs in this country and so I'm going to help with the translation effort. All of a sudden the core team is an expert on, like, Indian documentation. And they have all these opinions that are totally unwarranted. Step one is have a functionally diverse group of people, and have people that are not necessarily hardcore coders, but are talented and professionals in their area. Have them do that work at the top level. And I spent a little time on this just now because I feel strongly that this is an area that people miss, and it's just an area that code people are too high on their own supply. They're too impressed with their own skills. They cause a lot of pain for the people who are good at areas that are not hard-core code, so that's one. Two is be diverse in terms of the set of people that own decision-making in your project, so this is what you were talking about with the company run open source, and this is something companies can do. I've seen, for example, I worked with the Rust Project, and the Rust Project originally started at Mozilla. But they've been spending tremendous amounts of effort to try to increase the set of people who are on the core team of Rust that are not working at Mozilla. And this is something that maybe takes a lot of effort once you have an established project at a company. There's all the internal company politics you have to deal with. But the reality is that if you have a project that's at one company, you're kind of at the whims and the mercies of that one company's how they do resourcing, whether they think it's important, what their actual goals are. Maybe the thing that they built the project for doesn't necessarily match what the community is doing, right? So become diverse in the companies that own it. I think projects like Rails, Postgres, Ember, increasingly Rust are good examples of this. And, of course, I mean the regular meaning of the word diverse here, just because if you become more diverse in all areas, you actually find yourself being more function diverse just because of who ends up being in what areas. You end up finding yourself having a lot better insight. You end up sitting in a room, and when there are people of diverse backgrounds, the kinds of questions that people ask. And I can only say this. This is the thing that I've noticed personally. It's not a thing that I can empirically measure. I've just noticed that the kinds of questions that people ask, when you're diverse in all kinds of ways, ends up being -- they end up being stronger, better, and they end up pushing back on the kinds of decisions that you can make as a monoculture with group think, right? The harder it is to have group think, the harder it is for everyone to sit around and say, "You know what we're going to do? We're going to rewrite everything," right? That kind of thing is hard to do when you have a lot of people with a lot of different backgrounds with a lot of different interests. So that's, I think, the higher order bit of what in the open source means is be very diversified in a lot of different ways. But there's a specific thing that I think comes out of it that is very important, which is to do the work that you're doing incrementally. Again, the reason I think that this is a derive is that if you have a lot of people with a lot of different interests with a lot of different projects, I think it becomes very difficult for you to do full on rewrites because everybody has interests, and maybe a few people are excited about doing a rewrite, but everyone else says, "Oh, my God. What about my app?" Then you have the docs guy saying, "Oh, my God. Now we have to maintain two sets of docs?" And you have the evangelism guy hearing all the pushback from the community about the rewrite. So it becomes very difficult for you to have this situation where you're not doing things incrementally. But I think, in my talk, I spend some time on what it means to do things incrementally and what the benefits are and how to adopt the six-week release cycle and all that. I talked about that in more detail because, even though I think it's a natural consequence of being diversified, it's also something that you have to think about if you want to do it well. BRANDON: Yeah. It seems to me that that would require, like it's kind of a chicken and egg deal, but to me it seems like there was a lot of discipline in switching to a six-week release cycle, and that's important. It seems, for us at least as consumers of Ember as an open source framework, that's benefited us greatly. We find the framework much, much easier to keep up with on the six-week release cycles than pretty much most other open source projects we've worked with. YEHUDA: Which is kind of like a paradox, right, because you expect that six-week release cycle means you can never keep up with it because it's always changing. But in fact, six-week release cycle means you don't have time to ever change that much. BRANDON: Well, and even for apps that go dormant for a while, we find that, okay; we'll bring it up to one. Bring it up to the next one. The upgrade path becomes extremely obvious. YEHUDA: Yep, exactly, and there's deprecation warnings, and there's ... I think people should watch my talk on this specific area because it took me 15 minutes or something to lay out the whole thing. But I think the basic idea of just doing things incremental, and incrementally has this bad sense. It's like, oh, maybe you're hunting for the local maximum or something. All I mean by incrementally is the same way that the human body replaces its cells, right? You don't do it all at once. Maybe over an extended period of time, the thing that you're looking at is completely different. But because you did it a little at a time, you were able to move the whole community together in the direction instead of people, many, many people getting left behind, which is what used to happen a lot with Rails. I think Rails has gotten better at this over time. But it used to happen, like Rails 3 came out and a lot of people were stuck on Rails 2.3. BRANDON: I think when people hear incrementally, they can think about possibly incrementally be led in circles, right? You could incrementally be every day wake up and decide to change one degree or the other. What matters is if you have a compass that's pointing somewhere. For the Ember project, that incremental stuff doesn't work unless it's pointed somewhere very clear. And you and Tom are basically the keepers of that vision. And I wanted to ask about that, what the vision of the framework is that keeps guiding everybody. Is it sort of implicit to the project? As you use it, you recognize it. Or is it something that you've explicitly outlined somewhere? YEHUDA: I'll take this for a second and then Tom can jump in. I think, fundamentally, the main vision is just we ultimately wanted to have a full stack solution that solved the majority, the vast majority of the problems that a regular person would have writing a Web app, but we knew from the beginning that if we tried to take on that whole project, I mean even Meteor, who took on that whole project, is still struggling to have to complete the vision. And they tried to sort of boil the ocean. And so, we knew from the beginning that we were going to get it wrong if we tried to do a CLI tool and a framework and a data library and all this stuff all at once. And so I think we started off with the V in MVC, basically, right at the beginning and added routing and other stuff over time. But the mission always has been to build the thing that's a full stack of what you need to build front-end tools. Tom, you can take it from there. TOM: Yeah. I think, in the JavaScript world, I think, because JavaScript for so long was treated as a toy language that people didn't do serious stuff in, it attracted a certain type of developer who is -- which is a totally legitimate opinion, but they tended to be kind of hackers who would do these one-off experiments. And because of that, the notion of convention over configuration and having shared solutions is still a somewhat surprisingly controversial opinion in the JavaScript community. And so I think the role, as you said, for Yehuda and I, is to basically be willing to stand up and take the tomatoes that get thrown at us and say, "You know what? No, there is benefit in having a shared solution, especially when it's not just one-off hackers in their basement, but when it's a team of engineers working at a company, and you have a product that you need to ship, and it needs to have good interaction. It needs to be done yesterday. Those people need tools too. People like that deserve tools." And I think that's our goal is to have a framework that will last for at least the next ten years that is willing to incorporate good ideas as they come out and as they're embedded, move the community together, as Yehuda was saying, but without chasing the hype dragon where every six months: "Throw away everything you know because the next big thing is coming out. Rewrite your apps." I see Ember as a way of kind of tempering that instinct for engineers to chase the new and shiny constantly in a way that basically we have a community that agrees together what the next big thing is, and then we start moving towards that. I think, right now, major things that we're thinking about are one server rendering, as we talked about. Getting the CLI tools in place, that's a thing that we've wanted for a long time. But as Yehuda said, we didn't want to try boiling the ocean. And then the new HTMLBars view layer, which unlocks a lot of the cool things that React is able to do around, like, DOM diffing and so on. YEHUDA: Yeah. I usually tell people -- recently, I've come to a line, which is, if you want to tell me that there's not a place for shared solutions in some area or some abstraction, I think the burden is on you, actually. I think people in the JavaScript community, and there's a small group in the Rails community that feels the same way, they assume that the burden is on the person who is trying to abstract, right? If there's a common problem that a lot of people have, they think it's your job to prove that abstraction is a good idea. I think it is your job to prove that a particular abstraction is a good idea. But I think my de facto, my default position is that if a lot of people are solving the same problem that there's a shared solution worth hunting for. And I would say the JavaScript community is really -- big chunks of the JavaScript community are pretty anti this approach. But I think it's really the only way that you could build -- like Tom said, the only way you could build projects with large teams is to have some sense of what the shared answer is and to not have it be some genius on the fourth floor somewhere that does everything. And if you want to make any changes, you have to go to them. I've seen a lot of companies that work like this, and it works fine. Anther facet of this is that pretty much every company deciding to adopt, like, Ember, Angular, React, or Backbone, whatever, they do like this "taste test," right? A taste test is like a two-week project where they see which one is faster. By definition, the taste test doesn't successfully analyze what happens over a longer period or when you have a bigger set of developers, right? It's by definition optimized for short projects with a small number of developers, and so -- TOM: And usually it's the guy on the fourth floor conducting the taste test. YEHUDA: He's either conducting it or he is actively attacking it, right? He is saying we should not -- for example, Firefox OS refused to adopt any framework for an extended period despite the complaints of many people on the Firefox OS team because of the fact that they had a religion against frameworks. They didn't like frameworks as a concept. I've heard this from large numbers of people working on the periphery of Firefox OS and many complaints, right? And so I think we, Ember, one of the things we had to learn was that we can't get away with just saying that. We can't get away with saying, oh, you'll learn. If you just use Ember for a year, you'll figure it out. We had to really improve the getting started experience. But I think, on the flipside of that, there's no way that we could ever -- even if we get to be as nice as to optimal getting started framework, getting started tool, we're always going to have benefits that are not part of that that are very difficult to see when you're doing a quick analysis. Actually, recently we've seen a lot more big companies come out and talk about the benefits of Ember for long-lived projects, and I think that helps a lot just having people testify that they used Ember for a year within a team that wasn't three people, and they found it to be productive in these specific ways. I think that's helped a lot of people feel comfortable. BRANDON: That's been my experience, certainly, as well, just seeing that increase. I think everybody should -- honestly, I believe everybody listening to this should drop what they're doing and go watch the Hack Summit talk. I thought it was phenomenal, and I think it made me think a little differently because it's a little confusing out there, like what some of the tradeoffs are in these open source projects that are run in that kind of echo chamber. And the fact that you guys work so hard to pierce the echo chamber is really cool. I know that there may be some technical questions. We don't get a chance to have you guys on the podcast very often, obviously, so I wonder if anybody has any more questions. STANLEY: Before we get back to technical questions, I just want to cut in and say I really like Yehuda's talk from Rails Conf as well. It was really eye opening for me as somebody new to the Rails community, even though Rails has been around for a while, and kind of understanding the value of shared solutions and kind of the philosophy behind that. YEHUDA: Yeah, that was definitely the first time I tried to formulate a general theory for what shared solutions look like and why they're good, and essentially why Rails hit the nail on the head with the right amount of shared solutions and where the experimentation is happening and all that stuff. STANLEY: Cool. Back to you, Charles. CHARLES: I just had a quick question I wanted, before we wrap up. I had another question about the server side rendering, kind of a general one. I know I've definitely been burned by server side rendering in the past, you know, because it's been something that people talk about on and off, it seems like, for the last five, six years. I remember when mustache first came out. The first time that I tried it, it's like, oh, I've got this templating thing that I can run inside on my Rail server, and I can run it. There's a JavaScript implementation too. One of the things that I found was I was able to get up running very quickly, but then I felt like I was eaten alive by the edge cases. It was actually -- I think it was a blog post that you wrote, Tom, where you were talking about kind of the justification for resolving, always resolving RSVP promises asynchronously. Because, to not do so, have a different context, different stack sitting on top of the resolution was like releasing Zalgo into your application. I actually, when I read that thing about promises, it actually made me harken back to my experience with server side rendering. I was like, oh, with server side rendering I was releasing Zalgo onto my client. I had a very different context. TOM: Yeah, the thing you're describing is sharing templates across two different apps, right? CHARLES: Right. TOM: The data model diverges, and then the things that you need diverge. That specifically is something that we are going to avoid. The idea isn't, oh, you can reuse your model on the server, and you reuse your templates on the server. The point is it's your app, the same exact app, same code base that you would run in the user's browser just happens to be running on the server. YEHUDA: And I think there's also -- I think there's another important point, which is that if you look at how people do SSR, I think historically people have said, "Well, I'm going to use a view layer that's very good at SSR." And then you would have this pile of hacks that was involved in booting up your app. Honestly, Ember, in the beginning, had piles of hacks used to booting up your app. I definitely remember that period. Now the view layer maybe is very good at running on the client server and, like you said, originally was just like the template. But now maybe the whole view layer is good at it. But now the process of actually booting things is a source of non-determinism. You're saying Zalgo. I'm saying non-determinism. Zalgo is a better word. CHARLES: [Laughter] YEHUDA: And Ember has definitely held off on tackling server side rendering seriously until we felt confident that we had the full stack handled. In other words that, as a framework, we had the whole lifecycle handled. Then actually, if you look at technically what we've been doing recently, a lot of it is like separating out. We have an application right now, an application only -- there's only ever one instance of it. Now we're saying, well, there could be multiple sessions. And so we're really looking at the whole lifecycle of the application and, because we own the whole lifecycle of the application, we can actually feel confident that the path that we're going through is correct, so that's one part of it. The other part of it is essentially what React figured out at a high level. I think what we're doing is equivalent, which is you don't necessarily assume that you got exactly the same thing on the client server because probably in practice there's always going to be some thing or other, like the clock case that Tom talked about, or the hello Yehuda case that I talked about before, the authentication case. What you do is you rerender the template, and you don't say if it's not exactly the same, throw it away and start over. You say parts that are the same you can keep, and parts that are different you replace. Therefore, it's not so much a whack-a-mole problem. It's more like how much replacement can I tolerate and have it not feel janky, right? So you go use it, and if you see that there's an area that's popping in and replacing, that's an area that you have to go and figure out so, first of all, it will work. Right? It will work. It will not be broken. It might feel a little bad, and that's an area for you to go and improve the Zalgoishness of your solution. In practice, in Ember, it will almost always be something weird like you're relying on a non-deterministic DOM API or something like this, or you're relying on some XHR that even though we serialized it, you're getting a push notification, and it's different, and it happens quickly, so it's janked. Right? I think the basic point of try to control everything and also only replace things that are needed will get you to a much better starting place out of the gate with Ember than you will have if you try to do the old solutions. It may turn out to be a lot of work. And if it turns out to be a lot of work regardless, then I think it will still, even with Ember, be a thing that is used by people who really need it and not so much by people who don't. But I'm hopeful that the fact that we own the whole lifecycle of your application will let it be useful for a bigger set of people than people who are desperately in need of it as a solution. BRANDON: Awesome, so I think we're going to wrap up. Is there anything you guys want to give a shout-out to or anyone? YEHUDA: Please sign up for Skylight to make your Rails apps faster. TOM: Yeah, please. Make my Christmas a merry one. YEHUDA: We didn't talk about this at all. TOM: And sign up for Skylight. YEHUDA: We didn't talk about this at all, but Tom and I, much of our day job is working on Skylight. And if you watched my talk at Hack Summit, one of the things that I advocate and I really feel it in my gut because of Skylight is I advocate spending, even if you're full time in open source, spending some time, even a day a week or two days a week, would help a lot working on something that you have to maintain over the long haul because, like I said before, maintenance over the long haul is very difficult for you to market. It's something that you have to feel in your heart. If you're working on an open source project, work on -- use it for a real thing that you spend significant time on that you have to maintain over the long haul so you could feel, in a year, whether you're practice is holding up to being maintainable. And, yes, now that I've talked about Skylight for a second, please sign up. This is how we fund our ability to do any open source. Working on Skylight has definitely been the most enjoyable thing I've done in my career so far in the sense that I've had a lot of control over it, but it's also the most harrowing in the sense that we are responsible for getting all the revenue, so please sign up. BRANDON: All right, well, thanks very much, you all, for coming on. Everybody, go sign up for Skylight. It's very cool, very beautiful, and very actionable insight for Rails apps. Tom, Yehuda, thank you so much for joining us on this. It's been super enlightening. Again, everybody, please go watch Yehuda's talk on keeping the Web Indie. And if you've got a little extra time, the Rails Conf talk on layers of abstraction is also, I found, something that changed my views on a lot of stuff as well. Thanks again, both of you all, for coming on. YEHUDA: Thanks a lot. TOM: Thank you, guys. BRANDON: All right, talk to you later. CHARLES: Thank you, guys.