Podcasts about what russ

ESPN's Albert Breer reporting that the New Orleans Saints will prioritize free agent safety Marcus Williams in Free Agency. Why the safety is so important to the Saints defense and Dennis Allen, what it means for other defenders like Trey Hendrickson and Sheldon Rankins who are also on expiring deals and who between them and quarterback Jameis Winston get the next priority. What happens if Drew Brees decides to return? What would happen with the salary cap, the team's direction, and more? We discuss the potential but also why it's so highly unlikely a return can happen from the salary, team, and even Drew Brees's perspective. Your questions from Twitter include a trade proposal that sends a young, star offensive lineman to Seattle for quarterback Russell Wilson. What Russ's number would be if Wil Lutz wouldn't give up #3, and a realistic statline for Jameis Winston if he is indeed the starter for next season. Follow Ross on Twitter @RossJacksonNOLA Support Us By Supporting Our Sponsors! Built Bar Built Bar is a protein bar that tastes like a candy bar. Go to builtbar.com and use promo code “LOCKEDON,” and you’ll get 20% off your next order. BetOnline AG There is only 1 place that has you covered and 1 place we trust. Betonline.ag! Sign up today for a free account at betonline.ag and use that promocode: LOCKEDON for your 50% welcome bonus. Rock Auto Amazing selection. Reliably low prices. All the parts your car will ever need. Visit RockAuto.com and tell them Locked On sent you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For those who have watched Meet Joe Black, Russ Harrison reminds me of Anthony Hopkins’ character, William Parrish — a man who has led an exemplary life of courage, honor, integrity, success and caring. He IS the Evolved Caveman. From the first time I met him, when I was struck by his gentle nature and intelligence, I wanted to know more about him. After graduating from USC, Russ left behind his wife and 5-week-old son to become a Platoon Leader in Vietnam as an Officer in the U.S. Marine Corps. His experiences in Vietnam, where he was shot twice and led a platoon of tanks, would forever shape his future. After Vietnam, Russ worked for Ross Perot’s EDS, was the youngest ever VP at Bank of America, was founding President of American Airlines’ Information Technology subsidiary, and has served as CEO of companies in the IT and medical device technologies fields. He has taught leadership development to Generals, Top Gun pilots and in Admirals. Now he serves on boards and presents to CEOs on the concept of quiet confidence. In this interview, we talk about topics such as… • The life-changing lessons Russ learned in the Marines • How Russ went from being in the middle of the Man Box Culture to evolving past it. • Where Russ found his quiet confidence and where you can find yours. • What Russ taught Generals and Admirals about leadership development. • What lessons Russ learned over his 40 years of running companies about how to lead people. • Russ' definition of success and happiness. Believe me, this is one of my favorite interviews. Ever. You don’t want to miss this one! Check us out on Google Play and give us a Like and Subscribe! https://play.google.com/music/listen#/ps/Imo4l6pgrbmeklxvec6pgwzxnz4 If you like what you've heard, support us by subscribing, leaving reviews on Apple podcasts. Every review helps to get the message out! Please share the podcast with friends and colleagues. Follow Dr. John Schinnerer on | Instagram | Instagram.com/@TheEvolvedCaveman | Facebook | Facebook.com/Anger.Management.Expert | Twitter | Twitter.com/@JohnSchin | LinkedIn | Linkedin.com/in/DrJohnSchinnerer Or join the email list by visiting: GuideToSelf.com Please visit our YouTube channel and remember to Like & Subscribe! https://www.youtube.com/user/jschinnerer Editing/Mixing/Mastering by: Brian Donat of B/Line Studios www.BLineStudios.com Music by: Zak Gay http://otonamimusic.com/

Sal's Investment Syndicate: Click for Sal's Syndicate Page If you’ve used an Amazon Kindle you’ve used tech pioneered by Russ Wilcox and co-founders at E Ink. Russ is now a VC who remembers well the trials of being a founder and is a deep well useful knowledge about building startups. I learned a lot. Highlights include: brief bio of Russ Wilcox the founding story of E Ink the mistake of focusing on a financing strategy rather than product development burning $2 million per month but clients hated the product Golden Lesson for Founders: don’t kill your company by sticking to an unrealistically high valuation; propping up valuation is self-delusion beware liquidation preferences (jargon-free explanation) comparison of VC funding to debt Pillar is a seed-stage VC firm founded by people who have started companies Pillar’s “phantom partners” are 22 startup CEOs who put money into the fund and roll up their sleeves to help Write checks of $1 to $2 million in rounds of $3 to $4 million Put in a lot of time and energy to support founders Emotional support is provided by the Pillar CEO investors Cool Portfolio Company: Kula Bio which has a really clever way to make earth-friendly fertilizer Cool Portfolio Company: Higharc creates 3D plans for your home without needing an architect Russ Wilcox’s wisdom on platform technologies Sal talks about his portfolio company Akili Interactive that has a game to treat ADHD in children and invites accredited investors to join his syndicate at https://www.angelinvestboston.com/our-syndicates What Russ learned from his post-exit world tour with his family Golden Lesson for Founders: look for a co-founder first

Matt Waldman's RSP Cast debuts an ongoing podcast series with former NFL scout and CFL scouting director Russ Lande where they discuss specific evaluation topics and cover players who got their attention.  I'm pleased to announce Scout Talk with Russ Lande (@RussLande on Twitter)—a third podcast series in the RSP Cast family that I believe rounds out the type of football coverage we aspire to deliver at the Rookie Scouting Portfolio. Russ is a former scout with the Rams and Browns and recently the scouting director for the Montreal Alouettes. For several years, Lande and his GM, Jr. team were responsible for the scouting reports for the Sporting News annual draft guide and NFL.com.  Also, check out Russ' site at russlande.com Every other week, Russ and I will cover topics related to player evaluation and share players that have caught our eye. We had a blast covering a variety of topics: The value of good preparation as a scout that occurs before your watch or interview a player, coach, or team. The way good preparation can give the mind space to operate intuitively. What Russ and I learned from our evaluations of Brandon Weeden and Dak Prescott. Why Ohio State wide receiver Austin Mack and Iowa left tackle Tristan Wirfs caught Russ's eye. Why LSU safety Grant Delpit and Liberty wide receiver Antonio Gandy-Golden caught mine. Where the Senior Bowl can help scouts determine a player's emotional resilience and confidence--an important part of succeeding in a performance profession like football. If you came to the RSP to learn more about scouting, player evaluation, and current prospects, you're going to thoroughly enjoy this episode and the promise of episodes to come. Let us know what you think! For the most in-depth analysis of offensive skill players available (QB, RB, WR, and TE), pre-order the 2020  Rookie Scouting Portfolio for a discounted price of $19.95 during the early-bird period of Thursday, December 5th through Friday, December 27th.   If you’re a fantasy owner and interested in purchasing past publications for $9.95 each, the 2012-2019 RSPs also have a Post-Draft Add-on that's included at no additional charge.   Best, yet, 10 percent of every sale is set aside until the RSP has reached its annual goal of donating $5,000 Darkness to Light to combat sexual abuse. 

A New Approach to Decision Making for Nonprofits with Jim Dygert Interview Transcript Hugh Ballou: Greetings, it's Hugh Ballou and Russell Dennis. Russell, good day to you, sir. Russell Dennis: Happy Tuesday, the last Tuesday of August. Welcome to The Nonprofit Exchange. We have a brilliant financial mind here today in the form of young Jim Dygert. He is going to talk to us about money, something some of us get a little uncomfortable with, but we always have to keep in mind. Hugh: Oh, Jim Dygert. Tell us about yourself please. Jim Dygert: Good day. I began a journey after college with a little operation called the U.S. Treasury Department. I scored very high in some adaptation skills that I had, which allowed me to move into what they call a systems analyst. As a systems analyst, I am looking for not only the repeated process steps inside of an organization or an activity, but I am also looking for the aberrations that are caused when things don't work right. With that, I was advanced to be an examiner for the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which is a division of the U.S. Treasury. They're charged with establishing the solvency and liquidity of our entire national banking system. When I was doing my work there, we were doing the things that ultimately are now considered stress test. The ability for a financial institution tor any organization to behave according to its mandate, its vision, and its mission, and its purpose such that it becomes sustainable. I learned the term “sustainability” long before it was applied to the green world of sustainable businesses beyond economics. I learned it from the standpoint of what we call triple bottom line and the ability for an operation to not only create cash flow in those organizations that do create cash flow, or to serve and store the cash flow so that it might be provided to it in the world efforts and the arena of, say, nonprofits, where there may be a grant or sponsors or contributors that are allowing those funds to be available to pursue a particular goal and vision or mission. In that process of learning systems dynamics and systems analysis and procedural process steps and mapping of flow of work force behaviors, ultimately in the last 15 or 20 years, the industry that's applied to, I wanna say consulting, but not really, the work I do is not really consulting. It does give consul, and it does give a procedural step. We actually have built a non-technology-based, non-IT-based, non-software-based procedural process steps for risk mitigation. In effect, the decision-making skills that any organization needs to go through, whomever is stewarding the direction of that organization, needs to have a tool set for discerning and determining what are the best decisions to make. Now there is a lot of prior work we all say that we stand on the shoulders of giants who came before us. There is a lot of prior work in this industry. But no one has taken the position that we have, that we create what we call a mirror and complement to the chart of activities or the chart of accounts that is associated with financial statements. I think you'll agree, and your audience is probably familiar with, financial statements. Whether it's a personal solopreneur that needs to have a financial statement and does have one, or an enterprise or organization, whether they are for profit or whether they are not for profit, those financial statements are often the story that is told of the history of that organization's activities. To be able to read that story is much like reading a language. Understanding the nuances of how those outcomes came to exist is the story which we dive into. We give the real practical, actionable, practitionable events that allows the decision-maker, again, whether it's a solopreneur or all the way through to a larger organization. We have worked with very large organizations with more than 2,000 employees. The process works because it does what we would call- it goes beyond business process management. Some people may have heard of things like Adjul or Balanced Score Card or Sig Sigma or a whole arena of disciplines that approach and help to describe the inter-working relationships that go on inside of an organization because an organization is a living, breathing entity. It goes and lives in essence beyond the work force. It creates it. Hopefully it does. Whether it's a proprietor who built something and some day steps away, because they have sold it or it grew up, we have worked with employee stock option programs where employees have purchased the operations that were created by an original founder. We have worked on mergers and acquisitions where a company is going to be absorbed by someone else or merges, and there is a cultural clash that goes on between them. Oftentimes, cultural clashes are merely an outcome of not sufficient information and not sufficient communications. There is a whole arena of work in that environment. We encapsulate that. We encapsulate financial literacy and mastery of financial statements, and we encapsulate this entire process of organizational behavior and created a mirror and complement to the chart of accounts that mirrors and complements what we call a chart of activities. When we do that, we get a true line of sight between the behavior inside the organization and the financial outcomes it produces. From there, we can create performance and projections. Hugh: Russell, what is that spark in your interest? You work in the financial area. What kind of interest does that spark by you? Russell: One of the keys to being able to make money in nonprofits is to tie a story to it. Money tells a story. As you said, it has a language of its own, and people can tie- I like that statement: chart of activities. It's COA. In painting a picture for people that support you, it's important to be able to talk about how what they're contributing is making a difference or an impact in the lives of other people. Being able to follow that activity is important. As we teach here at SynerVision, the money should be tied to the plans. All of those numbers mean something. All of it has a place, as all of your activities have a place and should have a place. Unpack that a little bit for us. People will sit there and look at a chart of accounts and think of a budget. What is a good example of an account that becomes activity? If you were to take a certain set of items off of that chart of activities and relate it to a chart of accounts, what would those things be, and what kind of story would they tell? Jim: Sure, that is exactly what the process begins to do. We actually map those, and we end up with a value creation map. The value creation map is indicative of the collection of activities. It is not just usually a single person or a single node that ends up impacting the financial direction of the organization. Either the past, or if we intend to change its future. We are actually looking at that collection of things that may drive the results we are looking for. For instance, we may have in a nonprofit as you say the source of funds coming from an outside environment. We don't have to have operational activities to drive source of funds the way a product or service company does. But we still have an activity that might be needed to raise funds or to maintain funds or to continuously create an additional flow of funds. That behavior activity, as a group of things that are done, end up being the driving factors that will of course show up instead of income like a for-profit company, it will show up in the direct revenue sourcing. Russell: This sounds like an interesting hybrid between a spreadsheet and a value proposition map, for example. Jim: Exactly. You're capturing the concept of what this is. The process is rather definitive. We define the exact ways in which things are done in order to solicit and create the organizational alignment because as we all know, whether it's a for-profit or nonprofit organization, if we don't have alignment of vision, purpose, and mission, we don't have the right contribution of human energy in order to get the things accomplished we need to, whether it's run a particular campaign or do a particular event or maintain the back office in some way. We go through a process that first aligns people. Secondly, through that alignment process, there is a dissection or depiction by the individual parties of what are the value creation activities inside the organization that create a thrilled and delighted customer? We can use the term analogy “customer” in any vernacular we like. Who is our customer in this? Who is our customer in that? When we go through that process, we are looking for the hand-ups and hand-offs of the things that are going on, the action steps, the behaviors and activities that then can be mapped and charted and now because of that grouping and analysis work, we can find out what impact it has. If it's on traditional financial statements or a nonprofit's financial statement, now we can begin to tie that together. We have actually redefined what is called a KPI. People have heard of that: key performance indicator. When the KPIs were first identified and created, they had a very significant and purposeful meaning. Over the years, KPIs have slipped a little bit. The integrity of what a KPI is has been lost and is a minutiae almost inside of so many other disciplines. Sometimes today in a manufacturing world, a KPI company might be how many widgets we produce today, this week, or this month, or this quarter. Or how many cartons did we ship off the loading dock. Those are certainly performance indicators, but they are not what we call keyperformance indicators, and they are not master measures of what kinds of things are being done inside the organization. When I say how things are being done, not just what is being done. When we apply the process steps to which we derive key performance indicators, first of all, we are looking for an operational data point, something that we can demonstrably describe in an operational statement, and how is that measured against a financial data point, and that data point may show up in the financial statements. Once we have those two, now we are looking for discernment as to whether it's historic activities are in line with where we want to take the direction of the organization, or they may not be, and what changes do we need to make in order to impact the future growth of the organization? There are some similarities in for-profits and nonprofits. Not always. But in some for-profit businesses, they have a board of directors. The board of directors may be implementing operational directives that the chief executive officer or a hired president may need to have as a mandate to move forward to directionalize the growth of that organization. It's coming from the board. Similarly, nonprofits may have an operating manager or an ED or a managing director that is stewarding the direction of the organization, but they may also have a board that has some mandates to what the outcomes we are looking for are. As the decision-maker and the go-to process person, the president or the managing director, they have to make decisions regularly on what is the direction that the organization is going in. Is it consistent with the mandate? And it changes. Hugh: Russell opened up a good topic. I'm sorry, I thought that was a period, it was a comma. He opened up this fascinating topic, this channel. You have delved into the data. It is almost like a three-dimensional way of looking at a static document. I find that there is remarkable similarities in entrepreneurs, whether they are working for a for-profit or for-purpose enterprise. Virtually, the board of directors has financial oversight responsibility. Financial oversight and governance are the two big ones. Russell's area of work is high-performance nonprofits that generate money. My work overlaps with that. Our work overlaps each other. It's how we generate the culture of high performance. Jim, what occurs to me as you are explaining this, is the similarity is the people running the organization don't really understand the numbers and what they mean. There is a fundamental lack of understanding of the balance sheet and the P&L budget and they don't really know what a cash flow projection could be used for. They also don't realize the metrics you are putting on the plate. You are measuring what we do, how we do it, but we also need to measure the results of what we are doing. That is the real meat. Speak in that direction a little bit. You are creating a whole new picture. We named this interview – I took the liberties in saying it's “a new systems approach of financial decision-making for nonprofits.” What you are opening up is a whole new paradigm of how we, the governance of this organization, make effective financial decisions. Jim: Correct. Because it's not just financial decisions. We have non-financial outcomes as well. That may be job satisfaction, enjoyment in what we do, the contribution of time and talent, besides the treasure people may be giving to a nonprofit or a for-purpose business activity. We are looking at that holistic approach from an operations- how does the grease move between the wheels? If we called the money the cash flow, the grease that moves between the wheels, how does it get there? Where does it go? How is it used? What decisions processes do we have to go through in order to implement change and/or growth and/or strategies that we wouldn't otherwise be able to project forward without the understanding of how much grease there is, where it comes from, and where is it best used? Because this is a decision process tool to help discern the activities inside the organization that will drive the organization to where its intended destination is. A lot of budget process steps are analysis work to discern how much did we do last year, what is our deviation differences between the few years before and where we want to go? We set goals as dreams, as visions, as desires. We begin to move there. We don't have the tools to stay on track. We don't want that train to jump the track. We have to lay down the track in a way that is consistent with the activities of the past and consistent with our intended outcomes and set the mile posts and the signs on the track ahead to ensure that it stays on the track. If it starts to get off the track, which happens, how do we know it's getting off the track before we derail it? Long before we have derailed it so that we can make sure we are staying on track and staying focused with our vision and purpose. You had it right, Hugh. This is like a three-dimensional view of a single-dimension financial statement. When a business operator looks at their financial statements, oftentimes, the individual who is running that organization or that entity has a little depth into it, has a second level view into it. But until that second-level view can be catalyzed and articulated to the other members of the organization, such that the other members have full unanimity and an understanding of what is happening inside the organization with the value creation activities that create a thrilled and delighted customer, all those things that begin to manifest and create the organization as an entity, that is your second level of depth. Your third level of depth is once that takes place, we need a loop back system. We need a way in which those activities are not only understood, but they are inculcated into a system in a way in which those behavior traits begin to manifest by everyone inside the organization. The deeper we take it through a work force environment, the more sustainable results that we can end up achieving. Believe me, the beauty of this is it's not particularly hard or difficult. It's not tech, and it's not software. These are process activities that can take a very limited amount of time when we implement them in the strategy we have created. Hugh: Tag on that a minute that was a direction I was hoping to go. As you explained it, I am melting down here. This looks like it's really hard. For Russell, it's a piece of cake. For me, it sounds hard. Can you give- This is one thing you can implement without breaking a sweat. Jim: I will use an example where a chief financial officer or president of a company, a for-purpose organization, has a viewpoint of the operational activities of that endeavor. We begin to do a process map and let them unpack that tacit amount, that information we have in their head. How do we do this? How do we operate? When that is done, we usually go to the next key performer inside the organization. In a for-profit, sometimes that is a controller or a CPA or the CFO. We get their alignment. We get their vision of it. Once we get unanimity between the two, then we can begin to move that out into the next realm of responsibilities: senior teams, the core teams of a for-purpose organization. As that begins to become a real map, a real value creation activity map, now we begin to tie those things into, in their case, their financial statement, whatever that financial statement is. The system, we have used it for early-stage start-up organizations that are less than three years in operations, and it does have tremendous value, and we can get alignment. The best use of what we have accomplished is in larger organizations that have been established for a period of time and have a lot of working modules. There is a theory of domains that say in an ordered and in an unordered states. Ordered states are things like simple and complementary. Unordered are things like chaos and complex. We work in that world of simple and complexity. Because of that, every organization has intended activities. Therefore, we have a loop. Once we know there is intended activities, we have a loop. When we have a loop, we can define the elements that support that loop. If I can bring it back down to that working relationship for you to understand, Hugh, it is simply diagnosing the activities inside the organization. Looking for systems that are created. Some of the best activity that we have applied this to is there is a thing called the theory of constraints. If you constrain a volume of water and constrict it, you are going to reduce the amount of flow the water has. You may increase the speed, but potentially you are restricting that. When we applied this process using the theory of constraints, we are applying it to the aberrations in the system. Remember I said something about my background as a systems analyst of aberrations in systems. That is what we look for. When we apply it to an organization, we are looking for those things that just don't connect well, the things we call disconnects and strengths and problematic areas. The things that keep people staying up late at night, those little worrisome areas that say, “I wish I could fix this.” This process begins to unpack and peel back the activities that create the process which are the intended outcomes. We define those unintended outcomes that are the consequences. Then we can reapply the same process to discern what are the intended outcomes we want and giving us the gauge point that behavior statement, data point, on top of a financial data point. Now we can begin to monitor and make sure the activities are what carry forward. We are a big believer in organizations should run under what we call non-directive leadership. We have gone through the development stage in organizations where directive leadership is command control, rank and file, orderly activities. I am not saying that's being replaced. There is still a lot of need for the process steps that that has been built on. But in today's environment, to become nimble and to be able to adept itself as a living entity in an environment that is also changing, the better you can encapsulate your living environment and ensure you are in command and control of that environment, means you can be nimble. Command and control in that sense means that you have diversified some authority and moved that authority down through the rank and file so that decisions can be made by people who have the responsibilities and then need the authority to make those decisions. We look at non-directive leadership in that the hierarchy of work force, be it up through managers and presidents, is all about red light, green light, or yellow light projects. The projects are being brought from the lower level and brought in as saying we believe this is a better way to accomplish what we intend to accomplish. Here is how we propose to change what we have happening to improve that process. Senior personnel will either then red light the process because it is not acceptable for whatever reasons, yellow light it with exceptions being like “I'll green light it once you have these answers. We have to look at the system elsewhere and see where we have some aberrations that might take place,” or green light it, “You did a great job. We don't see anywhere wrong with this. We have checked, and we believe you have a solution to a problem and this is the way to mitigate it. Our blessings. Implement this process.” Hugh: Russell, you are contemplating some of these themes. What is brewing in that good-looking shiny head of yours? Russell: A lot of people are jealous of my naturally curly hair, but we will save that for another episode. What I am thinking, because that is the third piece of building what I call a high-performance nonprofit, is staying on track. Having good tools to measure is critical. I am going to ask you about how you get around some of this overwhelm because as you talked about, these things can look overwhelming, especially to somebody who is in a small nonprofit. What I look to do, and I remember meeting a young man by the name of Brendan Brouchard who talked about creating tools. His theory was that they should be easy to access, understand, and use. I have some things that are not necessarily scientific, but it gives nonprofit leaders ways to measure things, just like a profile of a donor or a customer, very basic things. I find that with tools, if the tools kind of flow into the work that people are already doing, it becomes easier for them to actually access them and use them. I think there is a bit of resistance. I know you are working with larger systems. I can't imagine how much you see. What I was going to ask you was because a lot of people, their eyes will glaze over. How do you break down this need in a way that people sort of get it and convince them that it's really in their best interest to use it? There is that human resistance to things that look like they will take more effort than the benefits produced. How do you work around that? What are some good ways to talk to people, especially nonprofit leaders about the importance of this and some things they can do that don't look so large and overwhelming? Jim: Good point. Here's as simple as it can be. When we look at an organization, any kind, no matter its size or purpose, there are four major activities. We get all caught up in all kinds of strategy sessions, but there are four activities. There is sourcing and discerning who our client is, whatever that client is, for-purpose or for-profit. There is servicing and ensuring that that client, prospect, customer is cared for. There is research and development. Then there is back office. Our proposition in the way we have designed and created this simply follows those four arenas. When you look at your whole existence, and you discern yourself in those environments, now, yes, we can get into all kinds of permutations and chart of accounts and 300 line items and financial statements that come off as reams of data because it is a big organization. If we really step back and look at it and say what we are doing here, why are we doing this, what are those elements or arenas that say if we could encapsulate and roll up all those charts of accounts into categorical arenas, those are the four arenas we would find. It is possible to have other minor arenas. But our contention is that is not the focus and motivation of what the organization was intended to accomplish. It may have grown into some of those other arenas along the way. They can be carved out or pushed away or sold. Maybe they developed so deeply that it was a great idea, and it's time for it to carve out or to break away and become its own existence. We'd have to nurture it and support it along the way. But when we look at those, at the aberrations and not the real content, we now are putting them in the right perspective, and we can stay focused on the right content in the right context so that we can actually create operational behavior. Intended organizational, operational behavior for intended outcomes. Russell: This is all very exciting stuff. Because you can get lost in the weeds with software and tools and what's out there. When you are working with people, what would you say is the primary deliverable they get that they can take and use to, once this system is built, keep themselves on track? Jim: Perfect. Well asked. If we hold onto those four arenas, and you simply look at each of those arenas and give yourself four or five activities in each of those arenas that constitute the major activities of that arena, what are the most dominant things that go on in that arena? Whether it's sourcing or profiling or understanding what our client perspective is, or whether it's the supporting and product and service delivery, or whether it's R&D, or back office, if we looked at five or six major activities inside that organization, they will be able to map out for themselves. This could be a six-person organization. It doesn't have to be 6,000. This can be a very small or ongoing activity. Once they begin to find that, now you are really fine-tuning who is doing the things. How many hats does somebody have to wear to get these done in a small organization? When we get into bigger ones, we are just carving them out and breaking them down deeper. We look at the chunk-it-up to the top. Look at it from that 10,000-foot view and simply understand the mechanics of what is going on. When you get those mechanics down, you can actually create a map. We call that the value creation map. Those are the four or six things in each arena that are done to make a thrilled and delighted customer. Russell: That is brilliant. At what point do they have a number of items in those four arenas, is an organization in danger of losing its effectiveness? Is there an optimum number of activities under each area? I'm certain probably that there are certain things that are most important to each one. What would you say an optimum number is in terms of the effective span of control and efficiency? Jim: I don't know there is an absolute way to discern that because different things do different things. For us to look at things, whether it is a 6,000-employee organization or 60, we still maintain there is probably an optimum number to define for yourself. A master measure of defining, this is what we call, that leads to the KPI, that master measure is the pinnacle of activities, whether it encompasses several thousand people or just a few people underneath it. We do look for an optimum. When we build a chart of activities, we are looking for just 20-22 activities. That's it. That constitute well over 98% of the activities inside the organization. Russell: I was just thinking about those KPIs. They are different for everybody, for every industry. Those KPIs, with a nonprofit, your donor, your funding sources, there are a lot of other people that help define what those are. The people that get your services. A lot of definition and customization. Jim: We also believe a KPI is something that expires over time. When we build a KPI, we are building the data point for the problem, the theory of constraints. We are building a data point over a financial outcome point. We are looking to improve that KPI to the point where the problem has been negated. It's not a problem anymore. It's gone away. Or another problem becomes more prevalent and more important. We rotate KPIs over time in having a history base of what those KPI measures are and maintaining an index of those. Now we have assessment tools of what we have done over time and what the process steps of the organization have been. It literally builds the generic environment that allows the organization to thrive and survive over time and be nimble moving into its future. Hugh: For some people who aren't familiar with KPIs, give us an example of what some typical KPIs might be. As a group, we are looking at a staff, board, committees, volunteers in a for-purpose enterprise. As we look at the KPIs and the measurability of our processes and outcomes, it would seem that would be a way to engage the culture in a performance standard they have not otherwise envisioned. Jim: Sure. Let's use something that has typically been done, and is probably done regularly still, in a for-purpose organization. Let's say they do something called a fundraiser. They are doing an activity. I don't care if it's a 5k run or a pie-eating contest. They have done this before. They know what they are likely to redo again this next season. They are planning for it. In their planning steps, they begin to find out how many people do we have to do this, how many people do we have to do that, how many things do we have to do. The KPI in that activity would be something more along the lines of do we have the punch list created for what we need to accomplish? Surprisingly enough, that simple activity is usually where most of our consult ends up being and mentoring being when someone is failing at an activity. Are you doing the basic block and tackling? If we can now say we need to have an overall planning strategy that constitutes the punch list necessary that defines all the activities before we go in and assign activities, we need to make sure we have a reconcilable document effectively that says now we know how many we are going to assign for this and for that. Now we have a better predictability of the results happening the way we had intended. Now we can define that against the outcome which is how much did we accrue that day or weekend or five-day event? That seems rudimentary. But it does give you an idea that we are looking at a facts of activities. Not the who, not necessarily the what, but about the how. Are we defining the how clearly enough that we can answer it so that we can provide the who that ends up coming out to be the what? In a for-profit business, it could be as simple, and in a for-purpose business, let's say we are not having good success in driving traffic to our website, and we don't have a good conversion rate. People are not hitting our landing page; it's not doing well. Do we have an overall master plan that includes the process steps associated with all the right things necessary to make that work? Or did we just venture into it with a hope, a wish, a dream, a desire to have this outcome? It might sound like tediousness, but we are not talking about the actual things that need to be done. We are talking about defining what needs to be done. Once you define what needs to be done, now you can have the measurement tool to say are we doing that? Hugh: Let's connect the dots. What Russ and I are good at is creating the strategy and a strategic plan, what we call in SynerVision a solution map. It's fundamentally the same. Where do you want to be, and how are you going to get there? Subsets of that, we have milestones that have price tags on them. We have to generate funding for those. We have a marketing channel – we have to let people know what we are doing so they will fund us. The people who attend our events, the people we want on our board or committees, know what we are doing. We are coming to the last ten minutes here. Give a short answer here, and then we will have a wrap and you will get the final tip before we cut loose this interview today. How do we connect all those different parts? Jim: How do we connect them? That was the question. Hugh: Your tool providing, is it a way to take what we think we want to do on paper, what we actually want to do, and integrating it. Does your process help us connect those dots? Jim: Yeah. In that we are looking at the actual activities that are being performed today. A little bit of what you were describing was a proactive going-to-do thing. Did I garner that a little bit when you said if you looked at the strategy, we want this to happen so we have to budget for it? We are applying it in the realm of is that activity working now? Because if it is, that is how we are applying our systematic approach. If it's not working now, that becomes hypothetical. It only allows us to accept the framework, but we don't have the loopback in the financial outcomes yet. In our environment, for what we are doing, we have to have the loop back. It's a quad-loop activity instead of a dual loop or a triple loop. By the time we get done, we have to have that connectability between operations and the outcomes. Hugh: That's missing often, isn't it? Jim: If it's an ongoing organization, it's there. If it is an early-stage start-up or brand new or doesn't have enough history to it, it is extremely difficult to tie this together. We can do theory, and we can get people to understand. They can adapt the process steps that allows for the alignment to take place. That vision forward, that alignment that goes on. That's good. But in order to create the line of sight reconcilement to the financial statements, if there is none that exists, or it's too early stage, we don't have that history yet. Russell: That's why I built that four steps to performing a high-performance nonprofit course because you have to start somewhere. You have to begin where you are. By having some tools that you can take and start tracking certain things, you can build that history. It's important to build that history. If you are talking about a start-up and you have probably come across some that are looking at raising large amounts of money, it's critical to have that system in place, I would think. Jim: It's about the source and use of funds. If we go back to that value map, and we go back to 20-22 activities within those four arenas, anybody can do that. Start-ups can do it. Early-stage developments can do it. Ongoing activities that haven't had a huge history yet, anybody can do that. When you step back and look at and get real about if this is what we are doing here, now that you can begin to do that, you will channel the activities, that precious time, and that precious talent that is wanting to support that idea, concept, or project that is being launched, now can devote their attentions to the right things and minimize those things that might be important but are not critical. Now we can spend energy and time in the right things. Hugh: Russell, I bet you're thinking what I'm thinking is that these things are highlighting some of the things that donors want to know about. Russell: When somebody comes to you, somebody may be listening here, and we hope people get listening here get value out of it. That's why we do this work. It's very important. When somebody approaches you and says, Okay, well, I think I understand in theory why I need this. Where do I start? Where is it that you tell them to start? Or you begin the process so that they can move in the direction of implementing this system. Jim: Again, working from the inside out, we start with the chief steward of the organization. Whoever is the responsible party for making the focused decisions of what to do here. We interview them and have them unpack that story that is that chart of activities, those 20-22 activities inside those four areas. Once we unpack that, we begin to hone it a bit. More importantly, since we are not really ever talking to people who are solopreneurs, someone who has a few people around them, we begin to go to the next responsible party. Without the answers provided by the first, we allow them to do the process maps themselves. Then we begin to get the alignment. When we get the alignment, now we begin to say where is our energy and time? As that system begins to manifest out into larger circles, from that alignment process, once we have alignment, we can begin to make measure. Depending on what we are measuring against, whether it's the history of the story and the financials or whether it's what our intended outcomes are, now we can at least begin to apply it. Hugh: A lot of good intentions. This backs it out with some tracking. I think this is an energy field where people understand what's going on, and it begins to build the collaborative energy in the organization. Your website is Management Operating Systems, MOSUpgrade.com. Spell out the word “upgrade.” People can find out more there and contact you at that site. *Sponsor message from Rock Paper Simple and SynerVision Leadership* Jim, what do you want to leave people with today? Jim: Because of the nature of your questions, I know you wanted me to simplify this. I believe we have. I may not have explained it quite that well, from the standpoint of it's very, a professional can do things that look so simple. When we take a look at your organizational activities, we really do look at the complexity of every organization, but we simplify it. If I can leave one message behind, it is that this ain't so hard. This ain't so hard. As I said, we built it on the shoulders of giants. There is a lot of research and data behind this that proves the process and theory. We have some practical demonstrations of outcomes that have worked for some good-sized organizations. MOSUpgrade, which is Management Operating Systems, Upgrade.com. You can find me there listed as one of the team members. We do have an organization to implement this with some specialized talents. Directly, people can contact me easily on JimDygert@zoho.com. Love to be able to walk some people through this. Our real challenge is to find people who have a real desire to impact and are having some difficulty making that happen. Hugh: Russell, let's say goodbye. Russell: Jim, it's been a pleasure. Thank you very much. It's always important to measure what you're doing. It's not rocket science. Contact Jim. Go to SynerVisionLeadership.org or RussellDennis.com, and there are tools for you to do all of these things. Many thanks again. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dreams, Teams, and Funding Themes Danna Olivo Shares Her Secrets of Success Danna Olivo is a Business Growth Sequencing Strategist and CEO of MarketAtomy, LLC. Her passion is working with small first stage entrepreneurs to ensure that they start out on the right foot and stay on the path to financial freedom. Known as the Business Birthing Specialist, Danna understands the intricacies involved in starting and running a successful business. Her efforts extend beyond the initial strategic planning process on into the implementation and monitoring phase. As an intricate component ingrained into her client's business structure, she works diligently to keep her client's accountable and on track to fulfilling their success goals. A graduate of the University of Central Florida's College of Business, Danna holds degrees in both Marketing and Management Information Systems (MIS). She brings more than 35 years of strategic planning experience in business, marketing and business development both nationally and internationally. Danna is not only a professional business growth strategist but has worked as an International Strategist within the country of Brazil, is a public speaker and #1 Best Selling Author on Amazon with “Success From The Heart” and “Journey To The Stage.” Her newest book “MarketAtomy: What To Expect When Expecting A Business” is now available through Amazon on Kindle. You can find out more about Danna Olivo at http://www.marketatomy.com   Here's the Transcript   Hugh Ballou: Greetings to the Nonprofit Exchange. We do this live every Tuesday at 2:00 EST. Today, Russ is with me as always. Russ, how are you today? Russell: Greetings. Happy Tuesday, everyone. Hugh: Russ is in Denver, and I'm in Virginia. I'm getting ready to move into a new home. Moving is one of my most favorite things. It's right below setting myself on fire or teaching middle school. It's in close competition, but I am moving this week. My life is full of excitement. Russ and I see each other at least once a week and talk in between. Thank you for being a faithful co-host in this series of interviews with thought leaders. We certainly have one that you and I both know. We are talking about some of the themes that we have talked about in the past, but we are on the verge of launching the third pillar of SynerVision Leadership Foundation. We have a pillar that supports clergy and all the religious organizations, like churches and synagogues, and the para-church organizations. And we have a leg that is all these social benefit community charities; we call them nonprofits, but it is the other tax-exempt type of organizations. Now the third leg is for early-stage entrepreneurs. There is a lot of struggle with early-stage nonprofits and businesses around the topic of getting your grounding and getting your funding. Today's guest is a dear friend of ours, Danna Olivo. Danna, welcome. Danna Olivo: Hi, Hugh. Hi, Russell. Hugh: Danna, you and I have known each other for a number of years. We participate in some activities together. You have actually spent a day at one of my live events. You were not at the one where Russ was a co-presenter, but you were at one where Shannon Gronich was a co-presenter. You're familiar with the methodology of SynerVision Leadership Foundation. I'm familiar in concept with the brilliant work you do. You came to me a couple weeks ago and said, “Hugh,” and you came with another friend of ours who is a funding expert, “let's build a system, a program for those people early-stage who are struggling.” We are talking about the future now. This is what's going to happen under the umbrella of SynerVision Leadership Foundation. Danna, welcome to the Nonprofit Exchange. Danna: Thank you, Hugh. I am real excited about this new program that we're talking about launching. You know as well as I do that there is a gap out in the marketplace that is just not being met. And we really need to touch on that and help them. We make it so easy for entrepreneurs to start a business here in the U.S, but we don't make it easy for them to grow a business in the United States. Hugh: They can start a business, but they lack the- We can teach them how to drive a car, but they need to put gas in it so it runs. That is the world of funding. Before we dig in, we are going to keep people in suspense for a minute. Before we dig into the topics for today, give our listeners some background about you. What's your superwoman power? What's brought you here? You could probably talk the whole podcast about your experiences. But capsule what's brought you here and your primary passion for what we're doing together. Danna: My company's name is MarketAtomy; it's marketing anatomy. I have had so many clients that were coming to me that were new entrepreneurs, and they had a good product or service they had started their business on. But what happened was they got into business and there were no customers coming through the door. They couldn't figure out how to bring those customers through the door. In an effort to teach them the infrastructure that needed to be in place around that product or service is where MarketAtomy was born. The way I do that is by explaining to them graphically through the human body that the heart of your business is your why. Why are your customers going to come to you? Why are your patrons going to visit you over the competition? The brain is your how. That is your structure. That is your systems, the methodologies, everything that runs the business. But in the human body, can the heart operate without the brain? And vice versa? No. You need both the heart and the brain in order to grow your business and bring those customers through the door by pushing your message out through the veins of the body to your market, which is the human body. It's a real simple concept. My vision for MarketAtomy is to teach this to every single entrepreneur out there wanting to start their business. Ultimately, make a dent in the number of failed businesses out there in the world. Hugh: I want to highlight what you're saying and move it into the nonprofit sector. We teach nonprofits (we're using the word because people understand it), we teach tax-exempt charities how to install business principles in their organization because it's truly a tax-exempt business. We have more rules from the IRS for how we manage money. Basically, we have to create profit to fund the work that we're doing. We need to attract those customers or stakeholders or donors or volunteers. There is not a whole lot of difference in how we attract those. How about you? Danna: No. there isn't. For the most part, you hear about nonprofits always trying to raise funds, and they are going to the for-profit corporations to help them through donations and things like that. What about the for-profit side? Is there a way, or there is a way, where they can rely on nonprofits that are going to help them build credibility in their company? Reach out and expand their market. There is a synergy there between the nonprofits and the for-profits by partnering, and that's what we call cause marketing. Hugh: Yeah, absolutely. I am going to use the words “business” and “charity” because it's simpler for my brain not to have so many “p” words in there. Danna: Business and charity works good with me. Hugh: I want to cut through the chatter and get down to the brass tack. You've done a brilliant thing like we've done a brilliant thing. We have put synergy and vision together and got SynerVision, which is the synergy of the common vision. You put market anatomy together, and that comes up with a new concept. Plus you can go get a URL nobody has. Danna: That's true. Got it. Done it. Hugh: I want to set the context for what we're going to talk about later. I want to delve into some of your expertise. People tell us they learn important things they can utilize day to day in their charities. Our primary listening audience are those people who are executive directors or clergy, and they are trying to make their way through all this stuff they don't understand. We want them to understand some business principles. People tell us if there is some very useful information. We have tens of thousands of people who view these videos and listen to the podcast. Knowing you, you will give us some nuggets for the interview. We are launching a program underneath SynerVision Leadership Foundation for early-stage entrepreneurs, whether they are running a business or a charity, to get that strategy and to have access to early-stage funding, which is a trap for a lot of people. They get stuck right there. We will talk about that later on in the interview. As we start this, I have SynerVision International, which is a business. I work with business leaders. I have SynerVision Leadership Foundation, which is a 501(c)3 charity. There has to be a clear line as far as how the cash flows from one to the other; there are strict rules. There is tax rules for everybody, but there is more strict rules with a charity. Russ knows about this. He has had years with the IRS. We attempt to stay out of prison and not get in trouble and pay penalties because we try to uphold those rules. They are there for a really good reason. We can attract funding that is philanthropic funding, but there are eight streams of revenue there. There are a lot of ways we can attract funding. You work with people in a business and a charity. Sometimes you have people that have both like me. You started talking a little bit about the two of those working together. What else would you like to share about how somebody could have an entity, two totally separate entities, two checking accounts, two different leaderships—you have to have a board with a charity. Just because you founded it doesn't mean you get to say anything. You have to have real clear principles because the board is in charge of governance and the funding piece, the disbursement, the financial accountability. If people have both, you advocate to people to have both. If so, how do you manage that? Danna: First of all, yes, whether you are a business or a charity, I think you should have a board of directors. On the business side, it could be an advisory board, depending on where you're going. Yes, you need somebody that is holding you accountable to what your culture is, what your vision is, what your mission is. It's the same thing on the charity side. If you have a nonprofit and a business, I would say it would be beneficial to have two different boards because there is two different mindsets going there. Hugh: Let's let the expert weigh in. Russ, we're getting in your territory here. Do you want to weigh in here? Russell: Good to see everyone. Having separate accountability structures is pretty critical because in essence you have different things that you're doing. One of the terms by the way that I have seen is lack of social profit entities. That might be better terminology to talk about what you're doing. Structurally, you need to keep things separate because if you get into a situation where your profit-making business has unrelated activity going on and the nonprofit is conceived as bringing in revenue from activity that is not related to its primary cause, you could create a taxable income situation. You don't want to do that. You definitely don't want to- The whole purpose of having a nonprofit is not paying tax. That is a big part of it. Danna: I think the other thing to keep in mind- The most critical thing to think about is whether you have both a nonprofit and a for-profit arm, there are two separate businesses. You have to operate them as two separate businesses. They have their own licenses. Everything is operated separately. For that reason, I would say, you do need two boards. Hugh: We talk about an arm and an arm, but really they are two distinctly different entities. What Russ was referring to is IRS has this thing called unrelated business income. If you are bringing in lots of money and it's not related to your mission, then that is really taxable income, no matter if it's a business or a charity. You could argue that I would rather pay tax on more money, but you want to keep your accounting really clean and keep really good records. There is some synergies between the two. There is lots of examples in the marketplace where people do business work here, but then they give away or have a greatly reduced price for those charities. For instance, Russ and I work with organizations through SynerVision Leadership Foundation either for free through opportunities or at a drastically reduced cost because that is the philanthropic calling for SynerVision. We offer people who can't afford it goods and services, and that is why we are tax-exempt. On the business side, I work with business leaders who jolly well have the income and should be paying for it. They get value for that. Let's talk about some of your background. What would you say are your areas of expertise? You have used the word “strategist” and “business plan.” We use business plans. Danna: I call it the life of hard knocks. Believe me. I've got my degrees, I've got this, I've got that, but I'm sorry. It's life. It's life experience that has taught me a great deal of what I know. It comes out in the way that I talk and the way that I teach. I don't teach at a level of a professor or anything like that. I am right there at the level of the entrepreneur, and I think that's what benefits me. I've had two failed businesses. I'll be up front. This is my third business, and it's a success. I'm glad. But we are still growing it. Through those two failed businesses, I learned very early on what I was missing, which is what I'm bringing to the table now. I did not have that business experience. Even though I was a marketer, I did not have that strategic experience on how to develop a strategy to take a product to market, to take a business to market. I did not have those. I just jumped right in, which is what a lot of business owners do. They have a good product or service. They jump into business, and before they know it, they have robbed themselves of their 401k, they have mortgaged their homes to the hilt, they have exhausted their savings, and now they are continuously putting money into a sinking ship, so to say, only because they don't have that knowledge base. They don't have the skills. Short of going back to school, which is what I did for four years and got my degrees, short of going back to school, they really have no other options. They have linda.com. They have other e-learning academies out there, but if you don't know where to start, if you don't know what questions to be asking, they're not going to help you. I am introducing the MarketAtomy e-learning environment at the end of this year, and it will have the actual structure just like going back to school. If you want to learn about doing a market analysis, you have to know who your customer is, who your competitors are in order to do it. They will have to go and make sure they understand that. That is what we are trying to do. Hugh: That is what we are going to do. Danna: Yes, exactly. Oh yes. We are, Hugh. Okay. I am so glad I have you in my corner now. Hugh: You got me cornered, didn't you say. You could say that same thing about people starting charities. I have met people that have exhausted all their money. I have one yesterday that put a lot of money into the charity because they believe in it. I put money into my charity. Danna: I've done it. Hugh: It's going the wrong way, and I'm not taking money out. I don't take a salary form SynerVision. It's a concept that I've rallied a lot of people around. We are moving into phase two of development, which is 2018 is going to be a substantial year for the work we are doing. What you don't yet know is that the gentleman on the other end of this call, the other host, has some good programs that will be valuable to you as well around funding. He is an expert in a number of areas. He is more than a pretty-looking guy; he is smart. Danna: That's great. I'm telling you, I need all the help. I will be the first one to tell you I have big, big visions, just like you, Hugh. But I can't implement them, and I need those people in my corner, which is why I reached out to you and Money Miners. It's why I reach out and surround myself with those experts to make my vision a reality. Hugh: Russ, did you capture that? Number one thing in leadership is to delegate, to bring people on your team. What do you think of that? Russell: I think that's the way to go. At least, that's what we have been telling people. We drink our own Kool-Aid. If we're not drinking the Kool-Aid, then we are not going to get anybody else to do it. Danna: My brain is too small to absorb everything, I'm sorry. Hugh: My vision to you is that you have a big brain and a big heart and lots of really good content. You have great passion for what you do. What we preach in SynerVision, and you just did it, too, is we can do more if we run together. Down in your neck of the woods there was a NASCAR race in Daytona. When they draft, they go faster, and they use less fuel. Both cars. Three cars. It's like a train. You can be much more efficient. We are creating our own draft here. You didn't know I was a redneck and a race fan. Danna: My daughter is a big redneck race fan. I hear it all. Hugh: That's me. We're creating this vortex of energy. Focusing on the road ahead. Talk about some of your programs that you already have that you offer people and how you are going to repurpose those for business and for charities. Danna: I mentioned the e-learning academy that we are developing. We are beta-launching at the end of December. That will fill that self-help avenue that needs to be filled. Then there is still do-it-with-you services because we are a firm believer that you do it with your business owners than for. They need to understand. There are two areas that I have found with the services that I offer where my clients struggle the most. One is clarity. Vision clarity, market clarity, all of that. I have introduced a five-stage clarification process. It's mind-mapping. I will actually take them and clarify all of the components and find those gaps that they are missing. The other area of focus that I have found is even more prevalent is the financing side and funding side. Hugh, you and I know from going to CEO Space there are a lot of business owners that go in thinking that they can just pull together their business plans and just go and present before investors. But what they don't realize is the amount of work that has to go into these packages. Not only that, but they also need to be answering the questions these investors ask. They are not putting themselves in the minds of the investors. That is the other side that we are helping them with by first educating them on the front end and getting their companies credit-worthy so that they can go for these larger dollars on the back end to help them grow. Hugh: That's really critical. You get your own house in shape. Russ, what are you hearing over there? What's brewing in your mind? Russell: What's brewing in my mind is getting that message out there of what value you are bringing, the problem you solve. You got to do it in the language of people who are writing the checks. It's language. If you don't have the right language or you are talking to the wrong people, this is a component that has been challenging over the years for me. I have found myself a lot of times talking to the wrong people. You really have to have tools in place to measure what you're doing. What people measure, and this is what makes social profit so maddening, because you do have dollars and cents, but there are other things that are important to people. It's finding out and having systems to go find out what's important to people so that you can deliver that. It's really asking questions and tapping into their own genius. A lot of these have genius under their own roof that they're not leveraging. That's another story with over- and under-functioning leaders. That's another path that we're not going to go down today. Danna: You're absolutely right. I know I'm preaching to the choir here. I spent six years in Albuquerque, and I was working in the children's department of Hoffmantown, one of the largest churches in the United States. Charles Lowry was the pastor there. Pastor Charles had a business side to the business as well, where he had a men's group, and he would travel the country and teach men entrepreneurs the concept of business in the Christian sense of the word. Where I came out of this is understanding that even in a church environment, it's a business. It needs to be run like a business. I got that from Hoffmantown. You have all of these smaller churches that crop up, and their memberships, their patrons are giving their dollars to these churches that don't have a procedure, a system in place. They are not being good stewards of the dollars that are being brought into the church. Those are the kind of things that we need to teach. Hugh: To be fair with our listeners, we are in concept stage with this. But we all see a huge importance. We are going to resources. Danna, this dovetails with what Russ and I have been working on with some of the other thought leaders you know in creating a portal with both live and virtual events. It's going to be initially under the umbrella of SynerVision Leadership Foundation, and we will go after some philanthropic funding for that. We're actually going to put our money where our mouth is basically. People may be listening to this podcast way into another year. If you're listening to this podcast in 2018, you will see this launch. If you go to synervisionleadership.org, there will certainly be a section on the site that talks about this collaborative entity. We have kicked around names. Let's leave that for later. We'll name it something special, but it will be a project right now. It's a tax-exempt project to empower early-stage thought leaders who really can't afford it. Danna, in the communities where we do the work, it's part of reemploying the work force. Reactivating the military, there are 49,000 homeless vets, and there are a whole lot in homes who are wandering around. There are people who have come out of prison and need a leg up. There are small churches and charities that don't have the vision you just talked about. Part of what we are going to have to do is narrow down our first target. There is plenty of work. No matter if we started in Orlando, Denver, or Virginia, it doesn't matter, we could have plenty of work if people were willing. Let's talk about that piece for a minute. I would like Russ to weigh in, too. Danna, when you see a charity or a small business and there is really a lot missing, what is the biggest barrier to getting that message across? Is it their own lack of self-awareness? What is the barrier for them not coming forward and being open to receiving the assistance that you offer? Danna: I will put into context. You and I met during CEO Space with a certain gentleman that I had put you in touch with. Great ideas. They always have great ideas, and their heart is there. But first of all, they approach it unprofessionally in the sense that they are not protecting themselves. This was the first thing I identified with this gentleman. He is already getting sponsorship dollars and things like that from the public and the community, but he's not protecting his organization. As those funds come in, they're not being funneled correctly or monitor correctly. The first thing I find out is they jump in without a plan for protecting or being good stewards of the dollars that are coming into the organization. I think the other thing is they jump in because they don't have the funding and they're wearing way too many hats, so the project never really gets off the ground because they're thinking they have to do it all themselves. This is in business; this isn't just nonprofits and charity work. They think they have to do it all themselves to save money, but in actuality, energy is money. If they are spending all their energy doing a whole crapload of little things, they're not getting anything done. They're not making money. They're not able to get what they need. I think the first thing that I would say that- it's a matter of we have to clarify. What is that vision? What is the strategy to reaching that end vision? At the same time, showing them that you have a huge responsibility as a charity, as a nonprofit, you have a huge responsibility because it's not just your money that you're using and that you have to hold accountable. You want to make sure that you are able to report back to your donors how you've managed their money. Hugh: In case of a grant, it's crucial. You won't get another grant. They might ask for the money back if you have not demonstrated the proper fiduciary oversight and good stewardship, as you put it, which is a really good term. Danna: That's why what you bring, Hugh, on the strategy side for nonprofits is just amazing. They really need this. There are so many people with such big hearts, but they don't know how to do this. Hugh: Russ, you heard it right here. I'm amazing. Russell: I have been trying to tell him that for quite a while. Now I'm glad he hasn't gone to that. Danna: We'll keep him grounded, but we can always lift him up. Russell: All of us behind the scenes know all about it. In looking at and addressing that question, there are a number of things that might prevent people from actually doing something different. Sometimes it's resource-based. Other times, it's people that I've come across that are doing things that have been in the leadership role. They look at things, and they're not comfortable getting outside of what they're used to doing. Maybe looking at what they need from a person side, from a human capital type. This is a big thing because when investors or funders or donors of any type write you a check, they're betting on your team, not necessarily just on you. If people are unable or don't have the right collaborative partners, or they don't have people that are willing to collaborate, they become starved for people to actually implement. Ideas are great, but it's in that implementation that people actually need support. They may not know they need that support, or they may not feel like they have a trusted source for that support. Danna: Exactly. One of the other things is, and I'm so glad I have you in my corner, Hugh, is I learned the other day: The word “foundation,” so many nonprofits will set up a foundation but they don't realize the legal implications of having a foundation and having the money from that foundation be designated to other charities rather than just their own. Hugh: In our case, it's in-kind services. A dollar goes to SynerVision, it goes to other charities in the form of in-kind support, like those of us on this call. It's money in a different form. Danna: That was just a lesson I learned this week. Hugh: Russ, the example that she used, without giving names, it's okay if he's listening. It's a funny story. A colleague of mine, we were talking about CEO Space. It's a business growth conference that all of us met at. Danna: A collaborative environment, yeah. Hugh: Teaching cooperative capitalism. We take it a step up in collaboration. We all know that it works. A friend of mine, Ed from there, we got with Ken Courtright and talked about… It was actually David. They've both been on this podcast. David and I got with Ken for some advice on critiquing a thing we were launching. Next thing I know, without names, he is talking about us on his podcast. He used Ed's name because Ed had some sage advice, as he always does. I'm honored when somebody says, This is a guy, and this is what they need, and this is our conversation. I knew it was me, but he protected my identity. The person you're talking about has a huge vision. They're bought in 100%. They have passion for it, and they're going for it, no matter what. It's a classic case of somebody getting the cart before the horse. They're jumping in and not having the systems in place. Russ, there are some dangers from the auditing side, from the tax side of not having the records and not having a board that manages the cash flow. Are there some dangers people need to look out for as we are early-stage putting good systems in place from your standpoint in your years working with the Internal Revenue Service? Russell: You definitely want to have good internal controls. How does money flow in and out? Who tracks the money? Who actually handles it? Who tracks it? The people that handle it and the people that are tracking it should be different. When you are talking about large amounts of money and large purchases, you need solid fiscal policies to determine how purchases are made. There are a lot of opportunities for funds to walk out of the door unbeknownst to the management if you don't have very stringent internal controls in place. Separation of duties, that's always a big one. If you're dealing with government monies, you need to be aware of different things that you need to do to comply, especially federal monies under the Office of Management and Budget. There are a lot of pitfalls you can fall into. Of course, we already talked about unrelated business revenue. There are endless places you could end up stepping on a landmine from a tax perspective because the code is so complicated. I think that with a charity, one thing that is often overlooked is whether or not you are registered to collect donations or what you're registered to collect. Are you registered in all places that you're actually going to receive funds? That's one that flies under the radar frequently. Hugh: Those are good words. Russ and I have seen this, and I'm sure you have seen that people think because they have a good product on the business side or really good intentions on the other side, money is going to jump their way in the bank. It doesn't happen that way. Danna: No, I'll tell you a perfect example. I was at a conference three weeks ago. We were in a mastermind session. We were talking about the financing side. When the question came up, two of the individuals, they were new entrepreneurs, said, “I'm incorporated. I don't need to use my personal credit because now I am protected under the veil of incorporation.” My explanation to them is: That is absolutely true. You are protected. But consider it this way. Your LLC or corporation that you set up is another individual. It's an individual that has absolutely no credit. You are wanting to launch your business and be able to get bank credit and financing and things like that. If you have no credit, chances are you're not going to get any financing. That's where you need to bring in your personal financing, your personal credit, to kick-start your business and then at a later date, you can take yourself off of that and everything else is put into the corporate veil. But you do need your personal credit, which is where we run into issues. Hugh: We want to be careful with charities. They don't want to put anything in there of theirs because you can't get it back out. We want to create a firewall there. But you speak a really good track to lay down here. We must have personal disciplines with our leadership, with our funding, and with our behaviors. If we are going to be effective leaders, we got to get our own house in order as well. Danna: That's exactly it. That's part of what we are going to be doing with this summit. Hugh: Great. This is part one of a two-part conversation. Part two will be early in 2018 that we will do a formal announcement with the tracks and the programs. We do see a need. What I will create is a forum of SynerVision, an information forum, where you and I will collaborate on the questions. People can come and weigh in on their top issues. If they are starting a small business or a religious institution or community charity or a cause-based organization, any of those tax-exempt, or membership organization, 501(c)6, if they are starting one of those entities, what do they think their biggest needs are? We will have people in the conversation. I'm envisioning—and I didn't check this out with you, but I am going to blurt it out anyway. I'm envisioning a combination of things. The online learning, but also some live webinars. I am also envisioning some group processes. I find that when I have people, especially at a place we talked about, CEO Space—Danna, you saw it and Russell, you saw it on the SynerVision Leadership Empowerment Symposium—when I am helping one person think through their issues, other people are listening, and everybody is learning from that example. There is group learning that we haven't talked about, but I think you and I have had similar experiences in that area. What are your thoughts on that? Danna: I definitely agree. Masterminding is what we're talking about here. When you think about it, it's definitely one of the hot topics right now. That is one of the best ways to learn from other successful thought leaders. I know that's how I've learned. We've got some mutual friends who are very big thought leaders, and they are holding their own masterminds. Don Ward is one of them. We can't help but learn from others. Hugh: Absolutely. Danna: We can't help but learn from others. Why reinvent the wheel and struggle if there are people out there willing to give us this help that we need? That is exactly what CEO Space is. You go there in a collaborative environment and you get the information you need. I just came off of Women's Prosperity Network, which is a nation-wide organization. This is another one that is very collaborative, what they call cooperative, I think. Women, more and more women are starting businesses. This is a very fast-moving market right now. Hugh: My wife and I took some time over the weekend and went down the route to Staunton in Virginia. It's a really well-kept downtown, both in character and architecture. People were downtown. Business after business was young, female entrepreneurs. I just rejoiced in that. Everyone was a niche, and it was creative, and there was passion behind it. We are in the women's era. It's time to leave the old white guys behind. We messed it up; it's time for a new era. Danna: It's amazing how many men have come in and joined the WPN, the Women's Prosperity Network, because they like that interaction with the women. They like that comradery. I grew up in the architectural/engineering/construction market. In that market, I spent 35 years. Everything was so closely held to the chest. Don't say this, don't say that. We don't want the competition to hear this. I just kept telling them, “Guys, get over it. They already know what's going on. Get over it. Don't be afraid. Just stay a step ahead of them.” Women just have a way of cooperating and helping and lifting each other up. If more and more people did that, we would be a lot farther along than where we are right now. Hugh: We can make up for lost time. I totally agree with you. Women are very collaborative. At this point in history of recording, it's time for the small business sector and the charity sector to set a new bar. We have conflict in the government and with football of all places, and people are divided over common issues where we ought to be united for those. We will not go into politics today. Danna: Thank you. Hugh: There is another channel and example that we are called to be. I want to do a Round Robin here. I want to start with Russ because we need to give the better-looking guy some attention, some airtime. Russ always has these great sound bites, but he has also got some really good contributions. When he speaks, people listen. Russ, two things. Do you have some comments about what Danna has brought up or questions for her? Then tell us about your next live event for your charity work and your program for funding that you have. First with Danna, and then talk about the two things that you have, or others you want to share. Russell: I think that everything is relationship-based. This is the thing that we are coming around to. It's all about relationships. The way that men operate, we're more linear in our thought process and more results-oriented. Women are more relationship-based. What we're finding out is that if you want to build partnerships and joint ventures, you are going to have people that resonate with you. If you're going to get people to collaborate with you in any project, it's all about relationships. You have to have good relationships. People aren't just looking for the fast buck, the quick transaction. They're not going there. That's not going to work for people. It's all about relationships. We really need to change that. The other thing is in looking at churches, I have been working with my own envisioning project. Whatever we're doing, the key is to raise our level of consciousness. This is what we're finding out with today's environment. We're shouting at each other. We're at a point in time where if we are going to succeed, it doesn't matter what area you're talking about. If you're talking about your spiritual or economic situation, your business, we have to raise our level of consciousness to be more effective, to help more people. That's my view on that. As for right now, I am working on some new material with a group called Algorithms for Success. I've done some training with them. We're actually strategizing on some of my online programs. I am working on different modulized programs for fundraising and board development. We're working on rolling out a series of things for 2018 as well as the book Four Steps to Building a High-Performance Nonprofit. I have been working on that for a while; I have not gotten all the interviews I want, but we are going to be launching that online program that I am in the process of revising. That is taking me through the fundamental steps of building a strategy. It's a 22-point strategy framework that Hugh and David Gruder actually developed a success map. As far as questions for you, what benefits do you think could be realized from cross-sector partnerships? What are the big wins you see businesses getting through this collaboration? What are some of the wins for the nonprofits as well? Danna: Wow. The reason I reached out to Hugh for this program that we're talking about is because one of the benefits is with the target market that I go after, small businesses that are generally under $500,000 annual revenue or less, a lot of times they can't afford my services. Much to the chagrin of my husband, I would love to give my services away. But his comment is, “Honey, I'm sorry, but we gotta make money. I don't want to be working at a j-o-b all my life.” It's two-sided. In an effort to find a way for them to be able to afford the services that they need, there is grant money out there. That's what we want to go after. I'm not familiar with nonprofits, and I know that I need a nonprofit. That's why I reached out to Hugh Ballou. I knew I needed a nonprofit leg to help on the sponsorship side so we could go for sponsorship dollars for these events we are doing, and also for the grant money to help those business owners that qualify to get the education and the resources that they need. That is one of the reasons where I see for-profits and nonprofits can coordinate. The other thing is by businesses partnering with nonprofits, you get that credibility factor. By building in that credibility factor, your clients look at a higher standard for you. Not necessarily at a higher standard, but they become advocates because they know you're doing good for the community. You're doing good for society, and they want to promote you because of that. So you get the credibility aspect. You get the market outreach. You get the dollars. There is so much value and benefit that comes from a business partnering with a nonprofit. You have to figure out how to make that work and not try and do it all yourself. Russell: That's critical. Hugh: Russ, you're so right. Let's capture that. What I find over and over again is we help small business owners, especially solopreneurs, learn how to do things and then try to bring in team members. With a charity, it's imperative that you start with a team. That's the biggest problem leaders have in the charity/church world. The leader wants to do it all, but really you must engage the board for governance, for fiduciary oversight, and for support, their arms and legs. Lots of really good stuff here. We are coming to the last stretch of our time here. Danna, we got a lot more to talk about. We need to do some heavy lifting. Right now, you are waiting for me to get a document back to you. I am starting to get a clearer vision of the potential. Our problem is going to be to scale it to what we can handle to begin with. I know the energy field here is really good. Russ, where do people go for your stuff that you talked about? Your book and your online program, your website. Where do people go to find that? Russell: For the four steps to building a high-performance nonprofit, you go to bit.ly/fourstepshpnpo. I will drop that in the chat box so that people can see it. If you'd like to have a talk with me, I do discovery sessions with folks. You can go to bit.ly/bookruss to get on my calendar, and we will have a discovery session about whatever concerns you. I am in the process of having people rebuild my website, so I'll have free offerings. I have a donor series and some board series things that people will be able to tap into once my website rebuild is done. I'm working on some other courses and writing articles. All of that stuff will be available to everyone out there. Hugh: I want to know when you sleep. Do you sleep? Russell: I sleep quite a bit, maybe more than I should. I'm finding as more time passes by, I sleep a little bit more. The real opportunity, I think, in this is to get people talking to one another. This thought crossed my mind. I was thinking of asking Danna: What is the high point, the one single thought that needs to be conveyed to people on both sides, for-profit and nonprofit? What would you say is the single thread that needs to run through their minds when they are debating about whether or not they should collaborate? Hugh: I'm going to let her think about that a minute. That's a great question. You took the words right out of my mouth. Danna, think about that for a minute. We need to think about profit in our charities. That is the gas that is going to help us fully achieve our mission and vision. Thenonprofitexchange.org is the place you can view this video a few hours after we stop here. I will put the links for Russell's website and Danna's website. You will already be on the SynerVision website when you go to thenonprofitexchange.org. That will take you to SynerVision for this Tuesday program. Danna, we are going to let you close us out with Russell's question that you have been pondering on. Your website is… Danna: Marketatomy.com. It is also being revised, so there may be a little bit of Greek in there right now. Just ignore it. Hugh: We have to stop here. Danna, will you leave that closing thought for us? Danna: Russell, correct me if I'm wrong. You sked me what is the one thing that should be considered when thinking about collaborating with a nonprofit or a for-profit. First, you need to be clear in your messaging. You need to be clear in what you want so that you can communicate it clearly, and then also synergy. For instance, me teaming with Hugh, he is a strategist. We have the same processes and things like that, so that creates that synergy. Does that answer your question? Russell: That does. Synergy is all about synergy and alignment. Danna: Alignment, yep. Hugh: That was my inspiration for combining vision and synergy. It's the synergy we get from the common vision, which is our trademark. Danna Olivo from Orlando, Florida, thank you for sharing your wisdom and your time. Russell, thank you for your friendship and support. Thank you both for being here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. Joe White is a nationally know, Author, speaker and business consultant. Joe has a true entrepreneurial spirit and it has allowed him to join the ranks of those entrepreneurs who can boast that they have never worked a 9 to 5 job throughout their adult life. His professional experience has quite varied Dr. White has sharpened his skills in several capacities. From serving as CEO and COO of million dollar companies, to speaking on stages across the country. In 2001 he started a real estate investment company buying and selling houses through out North Carolina. In 2005 he took to the stages across the country selling his Real Estate Course “How to Make 5,000 to 10,000 a month wholesaling real estate”. The course taught the successful strategies he learned and developed on buying and selling properties with little to no money down while running his company. During the 2005 lecture tour, he was asked to be the keynote speaker at the 2005 graduation of the Breakthrough Bible College in Temple Hills, Maryland. Where he was bestowed with an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters during the graduation. Sault after for his advise and insight by business start ups, celebrates and large corporations. For over 20 years he has served the entrepreneur community. Launching events like The Triad Entrepreneur Pitch Tank the number one business event in the Triad area of NC, serving on boards such as Benaiah Holdings Group a OTC publicly traded venture capital firm and serving as the NC reparative for CEO Space International, the business conference ranked #1 in the world by Forbes and Inc. magazine as” the conference entrepreneurs can't afford to miss. Dr. White is also the co-author of The Best selling book Concrete Jungle Success Strategies for the Real World, which also features best selling author and star of the movie The Secret Bob Proctor. Dr. Joe White is currently avalible for business consulting, real estate investing coaching and speaking engagements nationally and internationally. With topics ranging from Business Strategy, Goal Setting, Real estate Investing and Entrepreneurship. To Book Dr. Joe White or get more information email admin@drjoewhite.com or visit www.drjoewhite.com   Here's the Transcript of the Interview Hugh Ballou: Welcome, everybody. The Nonprofit Exchange is about goals today. I am attending a conference and have a little bit of noise in the background. While our guest today, Joe White, is speaking, I will be muting myself so there is no noise in the background. I have known Dr. Joe White for a number of years. He is an expert in real estate. He is also an expert in leadership and goal-setting, among other things. About a year or so ago, I asked him to participate in my Nonprofit Leadership Empowerment Symposium and teach the module on goal-setting. He was so good it was better than me doing it. I invited him to come on the Nonprofit Exchange and talk about goal-setting. Joe, we have shared one of your books, the anthology, but I believe you have a book that is more about goals. Feel free to talk about that book. Joe White, welcome to the Nonprofit Exchange. Joe: Thank you, Hugh. It is good to se you again. Hugh: We have our co-host Russell Dennis who is having some technical issues, but he will be on here to ask you some really hard questions later. He is streaming it live to Facebook. Dr. White, would you tell us about yourself, especially your background working with leaders and setting goals? Joe: Hugh, one of the things I always tell people that is unique about me is I am a person who has never had a job in my adult life. In not having a job or set occupation or set system, I pretty much had to figure out goals and systems and things like that at a very early age. What made me make that decision was when I had my first kid. I was thinking to myself without an college education, What can I do to mak sure my first daughter had the type of life I felt like she deserved? I knew entrepreneurship and business would be what I needed to do. I quickly started reading. I still to this day go through about four books a week. I study everything from business to entrepreneurship to real estate to religion to spirituality. I use all of that information and put it into different systems I use to help myself and my clients. I have been doing that since the age of 16, 17. I always had some way of making income that I would create myself just basically out of my head. I did real estate for a number of years. I took every course you could probably think of, every boot camp, workshop. Quickly made a million dollars in real estate. Switched from real estate to mental health for a while. Then I started doing speaking, consulting, and things like that, working with clients around the world, helping them be better in the areas of entrepreneurship and real estate investment. Hugh: That's more than I had previously known about you. Joe: It's something a little different. Hugh: Absolutely. That is why I invited you on today so we could learn some more about these different areas of expertise. Let's talk about this topic of goals. Everybody writes goals. Very few people accomplish goals. I wanted to hone in on this particular piece because I have seen you teach this before. Why have you gravitated to this as one of the topics that you teach? Joe: I think that one of the things I feel like I am known for is making things simple for entrepreneurs and businesspeople because every business has its own language. If you were to go to Spain or Mexico and you didn't speak Spanish, you couldn't get a lot accomplished. What I try to do is make things simple. One of the first steps I think everybody needs to learn is how to set proper goals: the foundation of which everything in your business and your life is built upon. I feel like that was the best place to start. I read Think and Grow Rich when I was 14 years old. I have been setting goals ever since. I always learn something new. I am constantly studying. It is not like I learned about goals then and I stopped. I constantly study it. What I did was simplified the major techniques of goal-setting so that the average person could understand. Hugh: I have seen you present a short lesson on this. Are you prepared to give us Joe White's overview of setting and achieving goals? Joe: I am. Hugh: Well, I am going to be all ears. I am going to listen for a little bit. Russell has been known to take notes and come back with a really hard question, so be prepared. Joe: I'm ready for you, Russ. So Hugh, what I will tell you is the system that I use for goal-setting, I call GPS. Just like you have a GPS in your car or on your phone, the purpose of the GPS is to guide you from one point to the destination you are looking to go to. I feel like GPS was the appropriate title for what I consider to be my goal-setting system. That stands for when I do that. When I say GPS, in this particular case, GPS stands for Goals, Purpose, Steps. Sometimes I interchange “system” with “steps” because sometimes we go through the steps, and sometimes we put a system in place in order to get what we actually need to get. What is a goal? It's something you want to achieve in your life, in your business, in your personal life, or wherever it is. Most people die within five years after retiring. The reason why they die is because if we are not growing, we are dying. If you lose your purpose for life, what I am saying is you are probably going to die shortly after. Now, some people, if they retire, they will switch to something else, whether it's taking care of their grandkids or going to another part-time job. But if we are not constantly working toward something, it's like there is no reason to live. Goals are that important to our life. What we focus on is what we get. That is why it's important to find things that we have to focus on for achievement. What really makes us happy—and it's hard to define happiness—is seeing progress. Something about progress in human beings makes us happy or feel fulfilled. If you think about it, why I say that, I'll give you an example. When we are growing up, most of the time in the house where we live, our mom would mark with a marker over your head how tall you were. You just couldn't wait every month to see if you had grown. I used to be that small, and now I'm this tall. I was three feet, and now I'm four feet. We would get happy or excited to see that we had grown an inch or two inches and see how tall we got. That was progression. That was a way of measuring progression. We didn't understand that was almost like goals because a lot of people will say, “I can't wait to get as tall as Dad or my brother.” We were really setting goals. We were using the notches on the door or on the wall as a way of measuring that and showing progression. That is basically what I'm talking about when I'm talking about GPS. Let's set a goal. Let's measure the goal. Let's put a system in place for getting that goal and knowing if we are on track or off track. The other thing that I love to tell people about is what's called goal alignment. This is what I really talked a lot about, Hugh, at your event. Most people understand the basics of goals. What they don't understand is there has to be a balance to goals. You just can't have a goal to make a million dollars and not have other goals. I will give you some examples and tell you what I'm talking about. I set goals in every major area of my life. Just like a car has to be aligned, if you drive a car and the car is not aligned, when you start to go fast, the car will start to shake. If you go off the road, you could crash. Something bad could happen because you are going fast and you haven't aligned the car. The same thing happens in our life when we don't align our goals. You have to set goals in all the major areas of your life, not just in the financial area or the weight loss area. You have to set goals in your physical area. The reason why that is important, and I will give you examples on how goal alignment works in each of those areas, is if I don't set a physical goal to exercise and take care of my health and go to the doctor and get checkups, if I am working on these financial goals and my business goals, and I get sick or have a heart attack or something else, all of those goals now crash. Then my #1 focus will have to be on my health, so I have to have health goals. In my spiritual life, I have to have spiritual goals because a lot of times that is where fulfillment comes in, that is where balance comes in. My family life: if I don't take care of my kids, there are so many people who are wealthy who have problems with their kids where their kids are on drugs or whatever is happening. The kids are getting in trouble. When that comes up, now you have to take your focus off the business and money and build those kids. They are in trouble because you didn't make taking care of your kids or teaching your kids part of your goals. Part of my goals are physical and spiritual and family and friends. I don't know about you, but I know we have all had a situation with a friend where we say, “I really need to call this person,” and then something happens. The friend passes, God forbid, and you feel really bad because you feel like you didn't call that friend or family member before they passed. We have to have goals in the friend area. We have to have goals in the spouse area. How many people do you know who have been successful in business, and then they get a divorce and lose it all or lose half or lose the focus? Now later on they are regretting it, “I am enjoying the money, but I wish I had a better relationship with my wife or my kids.” There has to be goals in every single area of your life. You have to look at where these different areas are, where these different roles and responsibilities lie. I am a father, I am a son, and I am a business owner. You have to set goals for each of those. If you don't, what happens is you are going to have a crash in another area that will take away from you achieving those goals. That is what goal alignment is, and that is why that balance is super important. A lot of people don't think about that when they think about goals. The next thing is the P. Do you have a question, Hugh? Hugh: This is good stuff. You got my attention when you said people die five years after they retire. That is why Russ and I never retire. We keep pushing the inevitable later and later. This is so good. People set goals without the realization of what is the benefit. How is it going to benefit me in my life? You talked about that a little bit. Go ahead. This is extremely valuable stuff. Before you end, I want to focus on personal goals and corporate goals. We are leading a charity, church, or synagogue, so those are organizational goals. Very often, we don't write personal goals. Then compare the two. Let me not interrupt you any more. This is really good stuff. They can comment. Russ, is your audio working yet? I don't know if his audio is working yet. Are you there? Russell Dennis: I'm going to try. Can you hear me again? Hugh: Yes. Glad you're here. Just know, Joe, that he is capturing sound bites in his brilliant way. He will have a chance to come back with questions. Russ, if it's okay, we'll let him finish his presentation part, and then I'd like to throw it to you for a few questions, if that works for you. Russell: That will work. Hugh: All right, Joe, go on. Joe: Those are called areas of management. Everybody has two main areas of management, which are the personal areas of management and your business areas of management. Each of those areas has to be aligned. You want to balance out your business area. What are the key elements in business that make you successful and set goals in those areas? What are the key elements you need for your personal life? Set goals in those areas. I used to think, I only need a business goal or a sales goal or a money goal. But I quickly learned I had to balance all those areas in business and personal. Going to the P in GPS, the P stands for purpose. It is your why. I can tell you about setting all these goals, but it doesn't make a difference if you don't have a why. The why is the gas in the tank of the car. It's what makes things go. If I tell you, “Don't touch the stove,” we would tell little kids not to touch the stove, the first thing they say is, “Why?” “Because it's hot.” Maybe they don't understand at first, but the moment they touch the stove, they quickly understand that it's hot. That is the motivation, the why. Why don't we run red lights? Why does everybody stop at a red light? Because you will get a ticket. That motivates us not to do it. We have to understand with anything we're doing what's our why. Why are we doing this? What feeling, reward, are we going to get from actually achieving that goal? That is going to be the motivation for us to act. If we don't understand that why, we often don't achieve the goal. One of the most average, normal goals that everyone wants to set is how to lose weight. The problem becomes a lot of times the why isn't strong enough. The why isn't more powerful than the ice cream sundae. Sometimes we have to do a deep dive within ourselves and figure out why we want it. Sometimes it's not important enough to us. We're okay with where we are. Sometimes people don't go after that goal. We definitely want to build a strong why. The S is Steps or System. If you remember before there was GPS, everyone would pretty much have a map. We would get these maps from the gas station. How we would gauge if we took a trip to Winston-Salem, where I live, to Orlando, Florida, where Hugh is now, is we would look at the map and see the different cities along the way. I would see in an hour and a half I would be in Charlotte. Then I'll be in Georgia. Then I'll be in Jacksonville. Then I'll be in Orlando. That was a way of us gauging we were going in the right direction. Sometimes when my GPS screws up and it sets me on the wrong road, it will reroute me back the right way. That happens to us sometimes, too, when we are doing goals. We start going the wrong direction, and we have to reroute ourselves to go back in the right direction. I'm saying all that to say if we have a goal to lose 30 pounds, we want to plan stops along the way. We want to say, “Okay, in one month I am going to lose ten pounds. Month two I am going to lose pounds. Month three I am going to lose ten pounds.” When we gauge or check, we know we are headed in the right direction. If we're not, we know we need to do something different. We need to exercise more or diet more or whatever it is we need to do. But that is just a way of gauging if we are going in the right direction. The other thing is systems. A lot of times you don't have to think of everything yourself. There are systems already in place created by other people that allow you to just plug and play. I am a big fan of systems. I listen to Dave Ramsay and use his budgeting system. There are different dieting systems. If you think about a company like McDonald's, every Big Mac at every McDonald's tastes the same way. That is because they have a system in place to make it the same no matter where you go. There are systems in every area of life that you can plug and play that will help you get the result you are looking for. Again, that goes back to that why. If you don't have a strong enough why, you don't move forward in the systems and actually do the things you are supposed to do. Questions, Russ? Russell: Good day. Thanks for joining us. Can you guys hear me okay? Hugh: We can. Russell: Excellent. I love the GPS. It's really a good direction. We rely on these for our cars. We rely on them to keep us going the way that we're going. It's important to put the right information in the GPS, so the why is really critical. How long have you been using the GPS system, and what sort of success have you had with the people you work with in explaining this system? It certainly sounds like something that people, once they hear about it, get. Joe: I have been using it for five years. I use it a lot of times on projects. I have a lot of clients I work with. Some are celebrity clients. I am working on projects, whether they are movies, television shows, major real estate projects, or projects for hedge funds. Pretty much, even though they are all big strategic projects, some are small or some are up to ten million, the premise is till the same. There is a goal they want at the end: if it is a movie, to get the movie made; if it's a TV show, to get the season filmed; if it is a real estate project, to raise the money in order to buy the land. It's the same process, GPS. I have used that process with major clients to regular people. Russell: Do you find that people who work with this system enjoy using it? Whether the results they have gotten using the GPS system as opposed to what they have tried before. Joe: What I find is that people like things they can relate to something else. What helps us understand something is when we can say, “Okay, this is sort of like this.” When you can say, “Okay, I get it because I can think of a map and destinations and directions. It's pretty simple.” The current project I am working on is for a large television show with a celebrity who has been on TV for years. We use the system for funding and getting the project done. We had great results and raised half a million dollars. I am using the system now with a former NBA player. He is raising five million dollars, and we have had great progress. We are still in the middle of it. I have used it for myself for years. I used it also on my kids. I don't tell my kids what to do anymore because they are all in college, but I coached them. This is one of the things I coached them on. What are your goals? What type of grade do you want to get in this class? How many hours do you ned to put in? How much do you need to study? What do you need to study in? Things of that nature. I am working on my daughter now who is taking the bar. We are using GPS to get her prepared for the bar. Her goal is to pass the bar and start to practice law. So far, we are having great success with her as well. Russell: The thing with this system that makes it so beautiful is that it's simple. But it can be deceptively simple because of the concept. Have you found people that stumble with it or just stumble grasping the simplicity of it and applying it to their goals? Joe: I think that goes back to that why piece. Most things to do with success are easy anyway. We all pretty much know what we need to do. If we need to lose weight, we know that we need to move more and eat less. What stops us from doing that is not having a strong enough why. You want something that you shouldn't have more than you want the results that you want. I don't think it's so hard; I think the discipline comes into anything you want to achieve. Anything you really want, there is an element of discipline. I always think about people who pray but never take any action. There is a funny story I heard about a woman who wanted to win the lottery. She would get up every single morning for a year and say, “God, please let me win the lottery today. I hope I win that million dollars.” She kept doing it for a year. By the end of the time, He said, “Listen, lady, I need some help. At least buy a ticket.” Often that's what I find a lot of people do. They don't buy a ticket. Russell: When people come to you, they probably have gotten to know who you are. When people come to you, where do they typically find themselves? Is a typical person that comes to you someone who is already a high performance person, or do you get people who are stuck personally and professionally looking for solutions? Joe: I think a lot of people find me when they have vision confusion. They have a vision of something they want, but it's almost like they don't know how to get it. I do believe a good coach doesn't really give you the answers, but a coach pulls the answers out of you that are already there but you just don't believe that those are the answers. With anybody I work with, from celebrities to my kids, I find they all have the same similar issues. They know the answers; you just have to pull them out of them. Russell: Okay. I think people have an inherent genius and they get blocked. You talked about the word “belief.” I think that's critical because I have had blockages. It's really a matter of what I believe would actually happen. So when you meet a person and they are in that place and it is clear to you that the belief is the problem, how do you approach getting them on track? Seeing the possibilities when they are stuck? Joe: I think that there is something I use called the power of questions. Anytime there is something wrong, pray first. Then if you sit down with a piece of yellow paper and write the numbers 1-50, I say to write 50 ways to make this happen. Let's look at the top three ways you come up with and read those top three ways every day. There is something, too, about the subconscious mind. That is when we go back to reading Think and Grow Rich. Normally I fall asleep with it playing on my audiobook, and I will wake up and play it again. Building that subconscious mind, that self-confidence, doing affirmations, redoing it every single day to build your confidence and faith in yourself, and then going back to those solutions that you know you should use and implement them. I was seeing something on Facebook the other day: Motivation gets you in the game; execution keeps you there. Russell: It is about executing. It is about taking action. For me, I have had to act my way out of these blockages more than anything else. Once you get somebody to believe, do you start on the small scale, or do you just say we are going to go into this at full speed? Do you start at a small scale and build small victories? Or does that approach vary from person to person? Joe: I think it varies from person to person because different people need different things. I have had celebrities that you would think would be much further ahead than the average person, and they really aren't. Everybody has different strengths and weaknesses. Most people do a SWAT. What are your strengths and weaknesses? We talk about that. We need to look at if we need to strengthen the strengths or the weaknesses first. That is normally where the first place I start is. Are you the right person to be doing certain things? There are some things you maybe shouldn't do. Maybe if you are bad at accounting or bad at money, instead of getting stronger at budgeting, maybe you need to bring in someone who is already strong at that, a CFO or something like that, to handle that particular issue. Everybody we deal with a little bit differently. Russell: Okay. I think it's probably better to work from your strengths. Sometimes we can burn a lot of energy working on weaknesses. Do you find that that is a big part of the roadblock? Too much focus on the weakness. Joe: Most definitely. Recently, I was doing a lot of studying on how to do Wordpress to do my own website development. I felt myself spending so much time on that. I said, “You know what? The time I am spending on trying to learn this, I could have hired somebody and been doing something that actually matters that makes me money.” It's not that it's not important, and I like to be able to update it; I've got that part. Some of the design, it's not a good use of my time to learn how to do all of that. I think we all have to look at what things we should remove from our day or remove that we don't do. There's something I call the time-money equation. Is this the time I'm spending off the money I will make doing the major things that I do? If it's not, I don't need to do it. That may be cleaning the house, cutting the grass, washing the car, whatever it is. The majority of our time needs to be spent on what h most important things for me to do to make progress. Russell: That's a good way to measure. Does the time spent actually pay for itself? Does it pay for itself? Everybody has got a little bit of a different value. Do you tend to move people toward monitoring value? Is it personal core values? How do you help people prioritize that cost and that value, that time spent? Joe: I think there are different currencies. Sometimes we only speak of money as currency. Time is a currency. Health is a currency. So I think we have to look at what the most important currency is. Do you want to free up your time so you can work on the other areas that we talked about with your goals, keeping that system in balance? Now I am going to stop doing the things that I'm not good at. I'm going to outsource them. I am going to focus on freeing up the currency that is time so I can spend it with my family, friends, wife, or whomever, so I can achieve the goals in those other areas we talked about that are important. There are all kinds of currencies. I don't want to think money is the only currency. Some people's goals are not to make lots of money; they want to make enough money to be comfortable but to have enough time to spend with their family and enjoy life. There is a balance we all have to find. Russell: I believe that people just don't have money for the sake of having money. What are the things that money are going to allow me to do? That might mean spending more time with family. That might mean vacationing. That might mean providing help or actually spending time working on a cause that is important to them. It's a little bit different for everyone, I believe. As a group, I know you work with people from many different walks of life. Do you find that people who are what I call difference-makers—my friend Wendy Lipton-Dibner says they are people with the heart space. They are either faith-based or working with a charity. Do you mind that these folks are more conflicted than folks that work in the corporate area, or are the problems universal, regardless of the type of profession a person takes on? Joe: I think they're universal. There may be the different currencies they are looking for. But I think it's universal what they're actually looking for. Some people in the heart space are looking to make a difference in as many lives as possible. Other people are looking to make money, and maybe they use that money to make a difference. It depends on the individual. Russell: How common is it when a person is sort of stuck professionally for it to be a personal heart space type of manner? Do you find that most of the blockages, regardless of what they are, can be traced to personal confusion or blockage? Joe: I think sometimes we want to repeat the same act but the show has moved on. What I mean by that is things change. When you look at commercials that have the ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, you will start to see a big change in fashion, but also the energy, how everybody looks. I think every ten years, the world changes. If you don't change in that ten-year space with the world, you will often get left behind. Then you're stuck because you're still trying to use what worked in that ten years in this ten years. I look at some of the changes that are coming up, and I see a lot of people who are stuck. We have a system where they are doing self-driving trucks. In the next six years, they are probably going to get rid of 60-70% of truck drivers. We get self-driving cars. We have screens on restaurants that are going to be taking orders. If you are still trying to drive a truck, and 70% of the work is gone, then of course you are going to be stuck. I think what happens to people that we are not adapting. One of the blogs I am working on writing right now is what would happen if you got fired today? It's one of the reasons I am really big on entrepreneurship and why I love working with entrepreneurs. There is not the job security that we used to have. So many jobs are going overseas, technology. I think that we have to adapt with the times. We have to always be growing. Going back to when we were talking about how when people don't grow, they die. I think that there are a lot of people I come across who haven't read a book since high school. They spend all their time either working or watching TV. Hugh: Russ, those are really good questions. I was going to encourage you to make them harder and harder. What Russ and I know to be true, and I have discovered this about Joe a while back, is that we in SynerVision—Russ is one of the WayFinders in SynerVision—reframe a consultant to be a WayFinder, but we also reframe strategies that aren't working. I would want to know from Joe a couple of things. Russ, maybe you had a couple more and I interrupted you. I'm sorry if you do. But may I ask two right here? Russell: Go for it. Hugh: It's piggybacking on what you are setting up so well. What are some of the things people do that are wrong that hurt them? What are some of the worst practices? You are giving us some best practices. What are some of the things that people should avoid doing? Russ, I will give it to you, and then you can take us out. We are in the last 15 minutes of the interview, so I will let you do a wrap, if you will. Joe: I would say number one is not being consistent. Sometimes you have the start/stop issue. They start something, they do it for a week or two, and they stop. If you start losing weight and working out, then you stop, of course your body will go back to where it was before, and then you are starting over. When they start over, they get discouraged or they can't find that same why that actually motivated them the first time. The other thing is to listen to people who don't have their best interest at heart. A lot of times, what happens is when you start to make progress in your life, that makes people around you who aren't making progress uncomfortable. If you can do it, then they have to look at themselves and say, “Why aren't I doing that?” It's much easier to stomp on your dreams or tell you you shouldn't be wasting your time losing weight than it is to actually do something themselves. I think that when we are starting to make change, we have to start to be friendly but not familiar. What I mean by that, even with family, sometimes we have to distance ourselves, or just show up at the Thanksgiving dinner but maybe in between that we don't talk as much because we are working on our goals. We don't need anything to taint that process or contaminate it. We need to stay focused on it and we need to stay consistent. Russell: Some people won't lift you up. It's hard to leave people behind. I think that's kind of a common problem. If I change, I am going to start losing people. That becomes a personal challenge that creates an inner conflict. One of our running jokes that I have with Hugh is that when I am standing in a room and I look up and realize that I'm the smartest guy in there, I run like hell and find myself another room because there is that disconnect. I know the work you do has a way to build accountability as part of that system. Do you find that a lot of people make commitments to others they don't make to themselves? In those instances, how do you help them work around that? Joe: I deal with that all the time. As a matter of fact, a coach is almost like a paid accountability partner. What I find a lot of people, and I'm guilty of this, too, is we will keep promises to others, but we won't keep them to ourselves. When you don't keep promises to yourself, that is actually what starts to kill your self-esteem and your confidence. Now you don't have confidence in your own word. If you kept breaking promises to your kids, eventually they won't believe what you say. If you do that to yourself on a constant basis, say I'm going to lose weight or I am going to make $10,000 and it doesn't happen over a period of time, you actually lose confidence in yourself. Whether you feel it or not, it's actually happening. What I believe you should do is either make a public declaration, like going on Facebook and saying I am going to do this by this time, because normally people will say something about it. Or you have an accountability partner who checks in with you once a week, and you tell them what you did toward your goal that week; maybe you do the same thing for them. Or you pay somebody to be accountable to. When I had a trainer, I felt like he was trying to kill me. I don't know if he had life insurance on me or what was going on. He would ask me every single week, “Let me see your food journal. What did you eat?” That accountability does help. Russell: I have an accountability coach. Wonderful guy. Hugh knows him. He has become a very good friend: Ryan Roy. The name of his business is Justify or Just Do It. His reasons are results. I think there is a level of comfort that comes from finding a reason why something didn't happen. Sometimes what we do doesn't work, but do you find that you come across a lot of people that would rather be in that comfort zone than actually really looking at results? Is excuse-making something that happens frequently? Joe: I think we all do that at times. We make an excuse as a way of keeping ourselves comfortable, but it's not getting us closer to our goals. I think that one of the reasons we have to measure constantly is when we measure something, there is no way we can deny that we are not getting results. The other thing is sometimes you have to come up with multiple ways of measuring. I go back to losing weight because it's something we can all relate to. I know I want to do it. But I realize that sometimes I would work out super hard, eat right for a whole week, and I wouldn't lose one single pound. What could happen is I would get discouraged, say this isn't working, and go eat the ice cream sundae. Then I start realizing, You know what? Maybe what I have to do is measure inches, too. I have to take a tape measure and measure the inches in the areas I want to lose because maybe I'm not losing pounds but inches of fat. Or maybe I'm gaining muscle. One of the things to prevent being discouraged or getting in the zone like feeling something isn't working is we have to find multiple ways to measure if we are making progress. There are multiple ways to see the growth. Russell: One of the things that Ryan has said to me is it took me a while to wrap my mind around the idea of celebrating small things. It doesn't matter how small. It's celebrate. That's what I like about your GPS system because you are talking about pulling things apart. That's what we try to advocate. Pull things apart. Take the larger goal. Pull it apart. Get smaller, more manageable. These little things add up to success. You get momentum. What are some of the ways that you help people build that momentum so that they are actually moving forward and are looking at things that can be measured? Joe: I think that any time you start a goal, you need a springboard. You need a way to have at least a small succession in a short period of time so the motivation stays high for you to continue. I go back to losing weight. It may be that you have a week where there is a cleanse or a fast. It's a little simpler to do, and it gets off three to four pounds. All of a sudden, you kickstart everything. When I am teaching real estate, I give my students a kickstart course, which is a simple course with four to five simple instructions that allows you to go out and see progress instantly so you are motivated to continue. Russell: That's it. Sometimes it's hard. We have to look back. That's the beauty and importance of making instant win. When somebody hasn't been doing things, they start working with you and they're not stuck, but you go a week and they are just on fire. You talk to them a few days or a week later, and they don't just have a list, they start off with a list of three things. The next time you talk to them they have War and Peace in front of them. How do you help them manage that process? Does it go from one thing to the extreme to the other? They're enthusiastic; you don't want to dampen that. But how do you reel that in as it were to keep somebody from overextending themselves? Joe: That's the catch. When we were first talking about GPS, we talked about setting goals in multiple areas of your life. They have to crash sometimes. Something happens in the personal life because you didn't set a goal in that area. All of a sudden, you can't focus on the business life. Or something is happening physically because you didn't set goals in that area. That is why those crashes come up. If you align, that doesn't happen as often. What I mean by that is if you think about a lot of pro athletes who didn't study finance, all of a sudden they get a contract with millions of dollars. Life starts to go fast, and now you see all those other issues. They didn't focus on their spirituality, so issues come up. They didn't focus on learning their financial piece about money, so now they start having money problems. When they leave the NBA or NFL, they're broke. They didn't align everything, so when life starts to go fast, a crash happens. We have to balance out all those areas in our life and set goals in those individual areas from financial to physical to spiritual to family to spouse to home to auto. When I have my system in place, I have home, auto, style, fashion, everything because there has to be a balance in there that all of these things are important to my life. If I neglect them, there will be a consequence at some point in time. That's the crash: the consequences from not actually balancing everything out. It's simple, but it's complicated. It's simple because all you have to do is sit down with a piece of paper and say, “What do I want in my physical life? What do I want my health to be like? What do I want my relationship with my creator to be like? What do I want my relationship to be like with my kids? Am I once a week going to take my kids on a date?” Sometimes couples do date night; what about your kids? Have a date night with your kids where you are going to take two hours once a week to spend with each kid because you are going to have two to three kids and not know them as individuals. You have to have that individual time as well. Or what about your spouse? After being in a relationship for so many years, you start to be more like roommates than lovers. There is no romance. That's because you didn't set a goal for that to happen. You didn't focus on that, so it didn't come to fruition. I saw Hugh on his birthday, and he was out on a date with his wife at a concert. Go, Hugh! That's GPS in the works. It worked. Keeping the juices going. Russell: I'm just wondering if he said to her, “Honey, you should probably drive because I've had a little bit. Because of my age and mental condition, I've forgotten my way to the theater.” She probably said, “Turn on the GPS.” Joe: That's probably exactly what happened. Hugh: My wife taught me harassment is a form of affection. I'm getting some of that now. Russell: I only torture people I love. Speaking of people that we love… What happened to me is I said I was going to do some things. Your family may hear some of these grand ideas and schemes and go, “Ah yeah, there he goes again.” There could be a little skepticism from those who are close to us. It's easy for a bachelor like me, but if you get somebody that is married and they have a family, sometimes that natural resistance that we have within ourselves, it comes from people around us. What are some ways you help people address that? That is very real. There is a lot of pressure with children, spouse, and other obligations. Joe: I believe every new ideal is born drowning. When you first come up with something in the first few minutes, the moment that you come up with it, it's best not to share it. It's better to fully develop it. Someone could say something negative, and it automatically starts to kill that dream because you haven't fully completed a vision. If you are going to share that idea, don't share it with anybody who is going to say something negative right away. Go to your support system. Go to your mastermind. Go to the people who are going to tell you how to make it happen, not the people who are going to tell you what could happen if you start to move in that way. I always believe if I come up with a great idea, I don't even want to share it. If I come up with a new book idea, there are certain people I am not going to share it with, except for a Hugh or a Russ who are going to say, “Joe, you should do this with that,” and they start pouring into that idea, breathing life into it, giving me positive feedback. Russell: That's important. Use the support systems that are available and keep it moving. Hugh? Hugh: I have a contrasting perspective on that. Sorry there are people being loud around me. My A of SMART goals is accountable. I find there is power in sharing it. I find motivation in like you said, Joe, when you write a goal and people go, “Let me connect you with some people. I can help you with that.” That is one powerful way of motivating ourselves with our goals, by sharing it. Another one is what Russ brought up, sharing it and people go, “You're going to do what?” I call that motivation. Watch me! There is a twist on that piece. I think you can win. We are coming up to our last five minutes here. Russ, do you have any more questions? Or do you want to let Joe do a final tip or piece of advice for people? Russell: There is a lot. I could spend all day asking questions. But I would really love for Joe to put a nice bow on it and talk to people because they face all of these doubts. As I said before, their system is deceptively simple in the concept of its intent. Taking that initial step, taking that initial step no matter how overwhelmed you are. I would love to have you talk to people about how they can do that, how they can fight that fear and move through that. Joe: Going through the system like you said is really simple. Figure out what you want in your goal. Hugh spoke briefly about SMART goals. You could easily, and I'll be happy to put a link up to a SMART goal sheet people can use. SMART goals is that the goal should be specific, measurable- What is the A, Hugh? I forgot. Hugh: Accountable. Joe: He said it before. Accountable. The goal should be realistic and time-sensitive. I will put up some SMART goal sheets on my website that you can use when setting your goals. I like to keep things simple, and that is why I came up with GPS. Know your goal, know why you want that goal, and know the steps to getting there. Simple steps. If it's five steps or ten steps, whatever the steps are. One of my goals is to help 100 people make $10,000 in real estate investing. To anyone who is on the actual podcast, if they will go to drjoewhite.com/freegift, I am going to put up the SMART goal sheets. I will give them a book on actual goal setting, and I will give them my free real estate kickstart course. That is quite a bit of stuff. Drjoewhite.com/freegift. They can have all of that stuff if they go there. Russell: I put that link up in the chat. That's great stuff. That's wonderful. Hugh: We'll make sure that link is in the notes for the podcast and on the page for the Nonprofit Exchange at thenonprofitexchange.org. We will put those links on that page. Russell: Yeah, I've got it in the chat here. This is wonderful stuff, Joe. I love your system. I am going to go have a look at that. Love to talk to you a little bit further. Joe: Most definitely, Russ. I am here to help anybody I can. I enjoy helping. I think service is super important. I want to serve and be a servant and help in any way I possibly can. We all have some things we want to achieve. We all want to be better. I would just say to everybody that now is the time. If not now, when? That is what I always ask people. Russell: Now is the time. Hugh? Hugh: Time is now. The time is now. Russ, those were really good questions. Joe, I teach goals, but like I said earlier in the broadcast, Joe did this module in my workshop in Raleigh. He did a better job than I do teaching my modules. I wanted to have him here to do that. When Russ does a module, he does a better job than me. One way I look really good is surround yourself better than you are, which is what Russ talked about earlier. Joe, thank you so much for being a guest today. Russ, thank you for being my co-host in this and crafting such great questions. Joe, we will put your information on the podcast and on the site. Thank you for the offer and the free gift for people. Joe: Thank you, Hugh. Have a great trip and a great time in Florida. Hugh: I'm loving it. Thank you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is a special episode of Odyssey and Muse. This is going to be the first of possibly many little in-between-isodes where we check in with people that are about to embark on or are in the middle of an adventure around the world. In this episode I talk with Russ McCoy of Man Bike World. He was the second person I interviewed for this podcast, episode 2, and he is the first repeat guest. “It’s 2,745 miles from Banff, Canada to Antelope Wells, New Mexico.” Russ has been on two big Bicycle tours and he is about to leave on his third in a few days. But this time he’s changing it up. He will be riding down the Great Divide mountain bike trail and spending a lot of time off-road for the first time. In this conversation, we talk about the differences in mountain biking verses his previous street tours, we dig into his anxieties, which include bear attacks, his philosophy on wearing helmets, last minute bicycle setup changes, and how he plans to update his blog along the way. “When bears are around, never eat at your camp.” We’re planning to catch up with him again when he’s halfway through the 2,745 mile journey, so make sure to check back for updates. If you want to hear more shows like this, rate us on iTunes and let us know. - - - - - 3 Key Takeaways The Great Divide mountain bike trail is a 2,745 mile run from Banff, Canada to Antelope Wells, New Mexico. 85% of which is unpaved forest road. When traveling through bear country, never eat at your camp, never store food in your tent, which includes gum and toothpaste, and hang your food in a tree. There are sections of the Great Divide trail where you need to be able to carry or collect enough water for 4 to 5 days. Take water purification tablets, a filter and a way to carry 10 liters of water. - - - - - Show Notes (Man Bike World Pt. 1) Introduction to the Great Divide mountain bike trail [01:04] Review of Russ’s past bicycle tours [02:06] Explaining in detail, the Great Divide tour [06:03] The challenges of the tour [08:04] What makes Russ anxious about this tour [11:30] Last minute bicycle setup changes [16:05] DaBrim and the great helmet debate [20:33] What drives Russ to embark on these tours [25:01] Pros and cons of solo touring [26:31] What Russ is looking forward to the most on this tour and his blogging strategy [29:22]