Podcasts about when todd

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Best podcasts about when todd

Latest podcast episodes about when todd

Wretched Radio
04/26/2021

Wretched Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 26, 2021 14:04


Wretched Radio – Air date: 04/26/2021 Home schooling your kids can often turn pharisaical. Have we been abusing the Law with our kids? How have you been doing balancing the law/gospel distinction? Somebody really disagrees with Todd? When Todd is wrong, he really does want to know. Download Now (right click and save) Subscribe to […] The post 04/26/2021 appeared first on Wretched.

The Marketing Secrets Show
The Bootstrapped Manifesto

The Marketing Secrets Show

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 14, 2021 8:41


Why be an entrepreneur? Hit me up on IG! @russellbrunson Text Me! 208-231-3797 Join my newsletter at marketingsecrets.com ---Transcript--- What's up everybody? This is Russell Brunson. Welcome back to the Marketing Secrets Podcast. Excited to be here with you guys today. Today we'll be talking about what I call the Bootstrapped Manifesto. Something I read from Jason Fried, who was one of the co-founders of Basecamp, and it is amazing. I want to share with you guys today when we get back from the intro. All right. So it's not a secret. Some of you guys know that not now, but in the future I'm writing a book called Bootstrapped. I bought the domain name, bootstrapped.com. We have a new award coming out of Funnel Hacking Live. I can't tell you a lot about other than it's the Bootstrapped Entrepreneur of the Year Award and a bunch of other things. I'm obsessed with bootstrapping. In fact, we bootstrapped ClickFunnels from zero to where it is today. It's an amazing story that we love to talk about and brag about. I think I have a place in my heart for all businesses who bootstrap. That thought, that concept, things keep coming out of my mind because I'm so excited about writing the book and it's going to be the ClickFunnels story, how we bootstrapped ClickFunnels. I want to turn bootstrapped.com into TechCrunch, but TechCrunch for people who didn't cheat and take on money. I'm just looking for things tied around bootstrapping and starting businesses and everything. Today actually, yeah today, Jason Fried, he's one of the co-founders of Basecamp, wrote an article on his blog that is insane. I read it, and I literally just messaged Todd. I said, "This is like the title, Liberty for Bootstrapped and Bootstrapping." It is amazing. If you don't know Jason ... There's two co-founders of Basecamp. It's interesting. It's very similar to the two co-founders of ClickFunnels. One is named DHH. That's his nickname, I don't know, it's David something. Anyway, he is the Todd of base camp. He's a hardcore coder. And then Jason is like the marketing dude for Basecamp, which is like me. I feel like he's a kindred spirit. I had a chance to interview him once, man, almost a decade ago when he wrote the book, Rework, which is one of my favorite books of all time. But he's just amazing. I digress. I want to share with you this article from him. I'm just going to read it to you. I'll probably mess up my reading, but it is ... When I read it, I was like, "Yes, this is why we bootstrap. This is why we're entrepreneurs." So he wrote this article on April 8, 2021, which is the day that I'm recording this. The title was, Why to be an Entrepreneur. He said, "Earlier this week, I caught up with a friend and fellow CEO over lunch. We are in entirely different industries, but as we usually do, we talk a little shop. We've both been at the wheel for a while and we both built lasting businesses without any outside capital. One of the topics we slid into is why to be an entrepreneur, not why sort of or why kind or why sometimes, but why really? If you had to boil it down, what's the one reason? When all the liquid's gone, what does entrepreneurship reduce to? For me it's this. You get to do things that no one else would give you permission to do. That's it. At least that's how I see it. I don't ask anyone's permission, seek anyone's permission or be granted anyone's permission. It ain't about getting rich. That's a crapshoot with terrible odds. It ain't about power influence. If you happen into those things, maybe they're a bonus. Although maybe they're not. And it's not just about doing the things you want to do or freedom. That definition skips the details. It's too broad. This is really about doing things that someone else wouldn't let you do if you had to ask. That's the one thing you get to do no matter what. It's about doing things that doesn't make sense. They don't fit into the obvious frameworks. They don't add up, line up or seem like they'll even hold up. It's those things, the unusual, the unjustifiable, the downright fun, regardless of what happens. That made me want to be an entrepreneur and to stay one too. Once those things go away, I'm out. There are millions of people better suited to follow your rules than me. But of course, this is a very specific breed of entrepreneurship. It's a bootstrapped one. It's one without a board of directors. It's one without an oversight body. It's one where no decks have to be developed and distributed around the table. One where you don't have to pitch something to someone else who's got something riding on your success. One where your gut is the only thing that's going to get punched if you're wrong. This is the fun in it for me. It's obviously a privilege, but more so an obligation. We must do things at Basecamp that no one else would let us do. If we don't, we aren't living up to the opportunity we have, the position we put ourselves in, the decisions we made to be this way and to stay this way. We must launch stuff that no one else would approve, name things in a way that would never fly if they had to go through a committee, stand for things that seem like you put yourself at odds with the bigger bottom line. We must leave money on the table because someone else will grab it all. We must. We must make things that could only come from us. It doesn't make them better or worse, it just makes them ours. And hopefully if you like what we're up to, then they're yours too. That's the reason." Oh, I read that. I was just like, "Oh my gosh, so many good quotes. So many things that should be on a T-shirt." So many things that I probably will be putting out a T-shirt maybe at Funnel Hacking Live or something. One of them, "There are a million people better suited to follow your rules than me." How cool is that? Talking about there's no board of directors, there's no one with an oversight. Every time you have an idea for something you want to create, you don't have to make a slide deck and send it to your board of directors. You don't have to pitch somebody every time you want to do something. You just get to do what you think is right. That's the power of entrepreneurship, of being bootstrapped. When Todd sent me this article, he said, "This is why VCs are the anti-entrepreneurship black hole. Ask your VC overlords for permission constantly. That's literally what it is. I have so many friends who've taken on money, who have VC backing, and they can't do anything. In fact, we had one partner we were trying to work with. They had a really cool software company. And we wanted to acquire and we didn't want to pay any money for it. We just wanted to take it over because they're struggling. They're not profitable. They're losing money. It's something that if we introduced to ClickFunnels community would blow up overnight. It's such a cool tool and so powerful. The founder, the entrepreneur, the owner was so excited and he understood and he said, "Yes. If you give me this salary and do this and this, I will give you a 100%. I'll let you guys take over the company, and I'll get paid a salary to keep doing it. You guys will blow it up and I'll get a profit share." It was such a good deal for him. It was amazing. Then he had to take it to his board, the investors who'd given money to the business and all the board members were like, "Why would you do that? It doesn't make any sense? He's like, "These guys are the greatest marketers of all time. They have a customer list of millions and millions people who would buy our software." You just try to explain to them everything. They're like, "It doesn't make sense. We're not going to let these guys just take over control of the company without giving us any money." They wouldn't do it. Unfortunately for him, in tears, he had called us and was just like, "I know this is the best deal for me and for the company and for the future, but I can't do it because the backers, the people who gave me money said no, and it's up to them." The VC overlords were not giving permission. That was the thing. If you want to be an entrepreneur, you have to protect yourself from that black hole, from taking on money where now people own your creativity. They own your ideas. They own everything. Where they can tell you yes or no, and you can't create. Anyway, I just wanted to read that to you because first off, Jason Fried is the man. Second off, This is like a manifesto for us bootstrapped entrepreneurs. I hope that you enjoyed it. I hope you loved it. With that said, thank you guys for listening. If you did enjoy this one, please take a screenshot on your phone, post it on Facebook, Instagram, or any of the places you post stuff and please tag me. I love seeing that you're actually listening to these things and you enjoy it. If you did get anything from this, please share this podcast with other people, other people who are like me and you who are bootstrapped entrepreneurs who are trying to take over the world. Thank you. I'll talk to you all again soon. Bye everybody.

Perry and Shawna Mornings
When Faith Is Forbidden

Perry and Shawna Mornings

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 25, 2021 27:05


Today Todd Nettleton joins Perry and Shawna.  Todd works with Voice of the Martyrs.  He has traveled the world to gather stories from persecuted Christians.  And these compelling stories are in his new devotional:  When Faith Is Forbidden:  40 Days On The Frontlines With Persecuted Christians.  Today’s show will inspire you to pray for your persecuted brothers and sisters and to follow in their foots steps to proclaim Jesus.  So, first Todd shares about some of the perils of his journeys, which includes flying on a plane that really shouldn’t have been called a plane in Uzbekistan and then being stopped at a checkpoint in Iraq where he genuinely thought he would be shot.  And Perry shares about his friend Carl who while sharing Jesus in Iraq, was robbed at gunpoint.  In desperation he cried: “Lord, what am I doing here??”  And God’s answer to Carl was a wake-up call for him and will be for you.  Then we hear about sister Tong.  When Todd asked her about her time in a Chinese prison for her faith she said:  It was a wonderful time.”  Wait, what? Next, Todd shares about pastor Akiel who when asked to reach out to Muslim refugees said, “No way!”  But God said, “Yes way!” And because he obeyed, he was able to witness the wonders of Jesus in a Muslim family.  Next, we hear about Iman, a believer from Muslim background who was thrown in jail for his faith.  He was taken out of solitary confinement and was able to mix it up with 100 other prisoners.  This was not a good idea for those who threw Iman into prison!  Then, Todd shares why it’s good news that persecution is on the rise.  We also talk about Iran, which has the fastest growing church in the world!  Next, we find out how to come alongside our persecuted brothers and sisters.  And finally, the story of John Chau, a young man who was martyred in 2018 and a call to pray for the hostile people he tried to reach.  Please share today’s show! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Mississippi Moments Podcast
MSM 684 Hiram P. Todd - Advances in Agriculture, Education, and Healthcare

Mississippi Moments Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 18, 2021 12:34


1972 - Hiram Todd grew up on his family’s Newton County farm in the 1880s. In this episode, he describes how they grew their own food and raised cotton for cash. After graduating high school, Todd decided to pursue a career in education. He taught school in Ellisville, Crystal Springs and Hattiesburg before moving to Natchez to accept a position with Stanton College, a private academy. After eight years, Todd began selling insurance for Penn Mutual and John Hancock, eventually moving into farm appraisals and loan brokerage. After World War I, a boom in the cotton market led to risky land speculation in the Delta. Todd recalls how easy credit brought many Mississippians to financial ruin when the market bubble burst in 1920. Todd discusses the challenges that Mississippians faced in those days, including the awful effects of chronic and communicable diseases. When Todd was young, outbreaks of malaria, typhoid, and yellow fever were common in Mississippi. He remembers how advances in medicine and public health brought these diseases under control. In 1941, Todd went to work for the Mississippi State Experiment Station. He reflects on how their research led to advances in agriculture and tree farming. PHOTO: extension.msstate.edu

Sex Chat for Christian Wives
35 Gifts for Your Marriage

Sex Chat for Christian Wives

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 24, 2020 21:08


Bonny, Chris, Gaye, and J have a list of gifts that can help you learn, love, and laugh in your marriage! Sponsor Click to visit the website and shop! Also sponsored by Share the Soap. Learn more about their romance set! From the Bible What does God have to say about gift-giving? A gift opens the way and ushers the giver into the presence of the great. - Proverbs 18:16 On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. - Matthew 2:1 Gift List All links below are affiliate links that earn us a commission when you use them to do your shopping. LEARN Pillow Talk (J. Parker) Intimacy Ignited (Pintus & Dillow) Tabletopics Couples: Questions to Start Great Conversations Sex Chat for Christian Wives webinar bundle Knowing Her Sexually Webinar bundle (for husbands) The Gift of Sex (Penner) Enjoy! The Gift of Sexual Pleasure for Women (Penner) Rethinking Sexuality; God's Design and Why It Matters (Slattery) Online Marriage Retreat (Coupon Code for 10% off; enter PARKER10, apply, then check out) Online Affair Recovery Course: Journey to Restoration (Use Coupon Code SW5 for $5 off and to track sales for Bonny :) ). Sex Position Cards LOVE Sliquid Naturals – Soul Coconut Oil Intimate Moisturizer Liberator Wedge Pillow Nadine Black Lace Babydoll from Honoring Intimates Married Dance vibrator pilot program Married Dance penis ring pilot program Doc Johnson Good Head Deep Throat Spray HandiPop Edible Hand Job Massage Gel Liberator Throw Partner Multifun Vibrator Stocking Stuffers: Tingly Lip Balm & "Gum Job" Oral Candy Teeth Covers Whisper Sensual Essential Oil Blend Cozy Cotton Weighted Blanket LAUGH Aqua Love Notes Waterproof Notepad (last year) Play Pens Dark & Milk Chocolate Body Pens 2 Pack Cookie Sutra with “stallion style” cookie cutter Sock Monkey Kama Sutra Dick Van Dyke series Picnic Backpack for 2 Ancestry DNA test How I Survived game Black Light Glow-in-the-dark Body Paint Cinnamon & Ylang Ylang Foam Bath Check out our 2019 list in Episode 72: The Ultimate Sexy Gift Guide. Just for Our Listeners It's Christmas Eve, and Grace still hasn't seen a present under the Christmas tree from her husband. When Todd announces there is no present coming, she feels snubbed, not realizing that he's got a different surprise planned. But is his gift what she really wants? Or even what she needs? Inspirational Short Story, 4000 words. FREE through January 1, 2021, with coupon code WIVES And Don't Forget Our Resources Christmas Coupons for Him - Hot, Holy & Humorous Christmas Gift Coupons for Her - Hot, Holy & Humorous Behind Closed Doors: Five Marriage Stories by J. Parker Intimacy Revealed: 52 Devotions to Enhance Sex in Marriage by J. Parker Hot, Holy, and Humorous: Sex in Marriage by God's Design by J. Parker Beatitudes in the Bedroom: Embracing the Blessings for Your Marriage Bed by J. Parker Breathe. Relax. Enjoy. How to Use Essential Oils to Increase Your Sensual Energy by Gaye Christmus Calm. Healthy. Happy. - 17 Simple Ways to Slow Down, Feel Great, and Create Your Best Life as a Woman, Wife, and Mom by Gaye Christmus Fit. Strong. Healthy. The Busy Woman's 30-Minute Guide to Making Time for Exercise by Gaye Christmus Quick. Healthy. Delicious. Simple Meal Solutions for Busy Moms and Hungry Families by Gaye Christmus Unlock Your Libido: 52-Week Sex Drive Transformation by Bonny Logsdon Burns Virgin Bride Guidebook: Wedding Night Answers by Bonny Logsdon Burns Honeycomb & Spice Community, hosted by Chris Taylor Intimacy Mentoring, from Chris Taylor KHS (Knowing Her Sexually) Community for husbands, hosted by Chris Taylor and J. Parker Higher Desire Wives Community, hosted by J. Parker Visit our website: forchristianwives.com

Born to Impact
Risk vs Security in Life Part I, Feat. Todd Abrams, with Joel Marion – BTI 82

Born to Impact

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 26, 2020 67:35


Get ready for an energetic conversation with Todd Abrams. Todd Abrams is the founder and CEO of Icon Meals; one of the largest ready-to-eat prepared meal and high-protein snack providers in the United States. He is also the founder of “DadBod: The Business of Being a Dad”, a passion project where Todd has a global vision of holding all dads to the highest standards and not allowing any dads to settle for less than their best. Todd is a Men’s IFBB Pro Men’s Physique competitor and has competed among some of the best athletes in the world in the division over his pro career. Prior to Icon Meals, Todd founded Layer Technology which became a pioneer in dedicated web hosting, cloud computing, PCI compliance and cyber security. It grew to over 200 employees before being acquired in 2014. As an entrepreneur, Todd and Icon Meals have been featured all over the media including multiple write-ups in Forbes and Entrepreneur Magazine. Even more than that Todd is a loyal husband, a loving father of three incredible children, an amazing friend and an all around stellar human being living out a Born To Impact life firsthand. In this 2-part episode, we discuss:   -When Todd knew working on the factory line wasn’t for him -The importance of delivering value and developing relationships in business -Why you don’t have to know everything about your industry before you get started -How Todd intentionally strengthens his marriage -Why hiring coaches and mentors will accelerate your results   And so much more.   Todd’s story will inspire you, encourage you, and pull you even closer to living the life you were born to live ... don't miss it. Even more, be sure to subscribe to the Born to Impact podcast to ensure you get notified as new episodes release each week!  After listening, connect with Todd on Instagram @ToddAbrams and pick up a bag of protein popcorn at iconmeals.com

Antonio Garcia
Mystery Puzzle

Antonio Garcia

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 14, 2020 10:28


When Todd receives a puzzle game outside his door, he soon realizes that the story may be real and so are the consequences.Become a Patron:https://www.patreon.com/AntonioGarciaBooksBuy a Signed Copy of my Novel, "Sins of the Fathers"https://checkout.square.site/buy/QWQKEIP7BQA4UA4TIIC7EMOVBuy a Signed Copy of my Book, "Short Stories from the Mind of a Madman Vol.1"https://checkout.square.site/buy/4TC7XHK3JQNFWVS2OZHSGGHOFollow me:Website: www.AntonioGarciaBooks.comYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWHn3JpeNthjb1j0xaFR3wQReddit: https://www.reddit.com/user/AntonioGarciaBooksFacebook: www.Facebook.com/AntonioGarciaBooksInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/antoniogarciabooksiTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/antonio-garcia/id1363811128Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/43JIkxxFY9nEvtqyuBGu9qRSS Feed for your Favorite Podcast App:https://www.spreaker.com/show/2351084/episodes/feed

Antonio Garcia
Mystery Puzzle

Antonio Garcia

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 14, 2020 10:28


When Todd receives a puzzle game outside his door, he soon realizes that the story may be real and so are the consequences. Become a Patron: https://www.patreon.com/AntonioGarciaBooks Buy a Signed Copy of my Novel, "Sins of the Fathers" https://checkout.square.site/buy/QWQKEIP7BQA4UA4TIIC7EMOV Buy a Signed Copy of my Book, "Short Stories from the Mind of a Madman Vol.1" https://checkout.square.site/buy/4TC7XHK3JQNFWVS2OZHSGGHO Follow me: Website: www.AntonioGarciaBooks.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWHn3JpeNthjb1j0xaFR3wQ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/user/AntonioGarciaBooks Facebook: www.Facebook.com/AntonioGarciaBooks Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/antoniogarciabooks iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/antonio-garcia/id1363811128 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/43JIkxxFY9nEvtqyuBGu9q RSS Feed for your Favorite Podcast App: https://www.spreaker.com/show/2351084/episodes/feed

The Sales Evangelist
TSE 1302: How To Partner With Resellers To Experienced Repeatable Sales Growth

The Sales Evangelist

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 12, 2020 28:57


How To Partner With Resellers To Experienced Repeatable Sales Growth   Sales is not just about growing your customer base but also about partnerships with a variety of people. If you want repeatable sales growth, these partnerships include businesses, other salespeople, and resellers.     Todd Rychecky is the VP of Sales  Americas in Latin America and has been with the company for the past 12 and a half years. Todd got into sales in 1991, when he was studying was pre-med in college but didn't get in. As a result, he joined the sales force when he was 23 years old and made a huge move from Nebraska to Dallas where he worked for Whitmire Distribution, a drug wholesale company. Later on, the company was acquired by Cardinal Health and Todd continued to work for them, traveling by car, calling on hospital pharmacies, home infusion, retails stores, and retail chains.    Todd never imagined he'd be in sales but his college roommate was very passionate about becoming a salesman and Todd was intrigued by someone who knew they wanted to be in sales. When Todd started his career, he had the chance to work for a sales manager who he still says is one of the best salesmen he's ever seen. They traveled from hospital to hospital and Todd clearly remembers his sales manager's sense of urgency. In addition to that, he was also knowledgeable and credible and always conducted business with a big smile on his face.  With this complete package, Todd saw it was hard for anyone to say no.    Starting the sales journey  Once Todd was on his own, he made his first road trip in a new company car, a car phone that cost 75 cents a minute, and an AT&T calling card. Back then, you could cold call the pharmaceutical companies without setting up an appointment, especially true in rural areas. Fast forward to today and Todd is running the Sales for the Americas. What has contributed to his success is that working for OpenGear, a startup in Australia. They originally had five employees so initially,  Todd had to do everything himself, handling inbound calls and the online chat. He knew that the company needed to win new customers so he was able to practice a variety of styles and approaches in every task and through each customer.  People would often be impressed when they found out they were speaking to the VP of Sales. What they didn't know was it was just Todd.    Todd's focus is now on the sales team, the partner channels, executing the sales playbook, their selling strategies, and scaling new talents and resources.    Create your playbook The first thing you need in order to win is a playbook that you know how to execute. Todd loves to use basketball as an illustration. When you have the ball and there are four guys standing under the basket with their hands open wide, you need to pass the ball. Teammates are important to win the game and it's also important to stay in your lane. If your job is calling end-users then you call on the end-users. If your job is channel management, then manage the channel.    If everyone on the team can execute a playbook then you and the team will win regardless of what you're selling. Accountability is critical as well because if team members are not accountable, then nothing gets accomplished. Without accountability, it's difficult to count on one another.    Building the right culture  Everyone on the team should understand the culture and help to support it. Sales leaders must take the lead in building a good culture within the sales team. Other members will eventually see the benefits of having a good culture and follow from the sales leader setting an example. The goal of a sales leader is to create an environment that makes the team want to follow.    Communication is critical to building a good culture within a team.  Todd and his team are using phone calls, email, texting, and setting up Zoom meetings. Despite the pandemic, there really is no excuse for you not to be able to communicate with the rest of your team.    Buyer's journey Todd has noticed a change in the buyer's journey, especially from today's technology. Because of the internet, buyers are already 60% of the way to making their decision by the time they get to you. Open Gear is today's number one brand in its industry. That means they already have 50% of the market share. People who come to buy, already know their name, they know the company's good track record, and they've already checked the competition. Usually, their buyers have already made the decision and want to move on to the next step.   As the sales advisor,  meet your customer where they are. If they're already 60% of the way to buying then help them with the last 40% of the journey by tailoring presentations to where they are.  For example, if Todd sees the buyer is almost ready to buy, he asks about their budget so he knows the appropriate products to suggest.    There's no hit and run in sales A common mistake that salespeople make is they win a deal and cut loose. They move on to look for the next win too soon. If you're not getting new customers, you need to do what Todd calls WDH or go wider, deeper, higher with your customer base.   Other big businesses also apply this principle, including Volkswagen. They have several business units under their business units. It's a matter of widening your reach within your reach.  You can ask your existing clients who else could benefit from your products and services within their organization. You'll be surprised at how many people your client can introduce you to.   The idea of reselling Todd and his team promote the idea of reselling. They started with a few partners and they have grown to hundreds in numbers. They also have two large distributors in a variety of places including Greenville and these distributors now do the processing for them.  This has greatly streamlined the process. Resellers are critical in the business because it is one of the best ways to scale a company.   Todd believes that reselling works for any industry. Having more salespeople working for you extends your reach. You do need to build relationships through trust and that means being available.    Todd's final piece of advice is If you want people to work for you, you need to make them believe they can achieve anything that you ask them to do.    “How To Partner With Resellers To Experienced Repeatable Sales Growth” episode resources  Reach out to Todd Rychecky via his LinkedIn account.  If you are interested in more sales stories, you can talk to Donald directly. Reach him via these channels: LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook about any sales concerns.  This episode is brought to you in part by Crmble, the easy-peasy CRM for Trello that helps you manage your contacts and leads without investing in complicated solutions, sync all your data, manage custom fields, and get powerful reporting on your sales. Try Crmble now for free at www.crmble.com/tse. This course is also brought to you in part by TSE Certified Sales Training Program. It's a course designed to help new and struggling sellers to master the fundamentals of sales and close more deals. It will help them elevate their sales game. Sign up now and get the first two modules for free! You can go and visit www.thesalesevangelist.com/closemoredeals also call us at (561) 570-5077.  We'd love for you to join us for our next episodes so tune in on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Stitcher, and Spotify. You can also leave comments, suggestions, and ratings to every episode you listen to.  You can also read more about sales or listen to audiobooks on Audible and explore this huge online library. Register now to get a free book and a 30-day free trial.  Audio provided by Free SFX and Bensound. Other songs used in the episodes are as follows: The Organ Grinder written by Bradley Jay Hill, performed by Bright Seed, and Produced by Brightseed and Hill.

Scaling Up Business Podcast
210: Todd Palmer — The Power of Asking for Help

Scaling Up Business Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 3, 2020 48:13


As the world changes and you’re busy focusing on what new tools to use, business models, pivots you have to do in your business, there is another thing you might want to pay attention to: yourself. Today’s guest helps ask some key questions on how you can evolve and grow during these critical pivots.   Todd Palmer is a collaborative business advisor and CEO of Extraordinary Advisors. He went from being a struggling entrepreneur with $600,000 in debt to making it in the INC. 5000 (A total of six times!) as one of America’s fastest-growing companies. Todd is also the author of the popular book, The Job Search Process.   Todd learned at an early age that he could only depend on himself and that the path of entrepreneurship was the only real way for him to make it. But because of the way he was wired, his business got so paralyzed and so dependent on him and he was the main factor as to why his company had bottleneck and growth issues.   Todd was stuck. He didn’t know where to go from here and despite business doing relevant okay, he was broke. The only option at the time to get out of this and his intense imposter syndrome was to hire a coach. He knew there was no way he could fail or quit. He was backed into a corner.   When Todd came up with his list of core values for the company, everything changed. He began hiring for the DNA and not for the resume. His company began thriving because of it.   Interview Links: Extraordinaryadvisors.com Todd on LinkedIn Todd on Twitter   Resources: Scaling Up Workshop: Interested in attending one of our workshops? We have a few $100 discounts for our loyal podcast listeners!Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshop: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Summits (Select Bill Gallagher as your coach during registration for a discount.) Bill on YouTube  

Watch What Crappens
RHOA & Shahs: When Hello Freezes Over

Watch What Crappens

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 21, 2020 67:01


On this episode, we're recapping the season finale of Real Housewives of Atlanta and the latest installment of Shahs of Sunset. First up, it's Kandi's baby shower! When Todd snubs Mama Joyce, there will be hell to pay. Sort of. Then on Shahs, Reza and MJ take baby steps towards rebuilding their friendship, one forehead at a time. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Antonio Garcia
Scarecrow

Antonio Garcia

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 5, 2020 10:57


When Todd returns home, years after he witnessed a Scarecrow come to life and take his friend, he must team up with an old hermit to kill the creature once and for all.Become a Patron:https://www.patreon.com/HanshiAntonioGarciaBuy Signed Copy of "Sins of the Fathers"http://www.antoniogarciabooks.com/buy-sof.htmlFollow me:Website: www.AntonioGarciaBooks.comYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWHn3JpeNthjb1j0xaFR3wQReddit: https://www.reddit.com/user/AntonioGarciaBooksFacebook: www.Facebook.com/AntonioGarciaBooksInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/antoniogarciabooksiTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/antonio-garcia/id1363811128Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/43JIkxxFY9nEvtqyuBGu9qRSS Feed for your Favorite Podcast App:https://www.spreaker.com/show/2351084/episodes/feed

Antonio Garcia
Scarecrow

Antonio Garcia

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 4, 2020 10:57


When Todd returns home, years after he witnessed a Scarecrow come to life and take his friend, he must team up with an old hermit to kill the creature once and for all. Become a Patron: https://www.patreon.com/HanshiAntonioGarcia Buy Signed Copy of "Sins of the Fathers" http://www.antoniogarciabooks.com/buy-sof.html Follow me: Website: www.AntonioGarciaBooks.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWHn3JpeNthjb1j0xaFR3wQ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/user/AntonioGarciaBooks Facebook: www.Facebook.com/AntonioGarciaBooks Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/antoniogarciabooks iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/antonio-garcia/id1363811128 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/43JIkxxFY9nEvtqyuBGu9q RSS Feed for your Favorite Podcast App: https://www.spreaker.com/show/2351084/episodes/feed

Devil We Know Podcast
Ep. 21 Todd Mullis

Devil We Know Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 27, 2019 38:11


A farmer works all day to provide for his family; soon after, he discovers his wife is cheating on him. When she decides she’s going to leave him, she suddenly turns up dead with a corn rake in her back. When Todd, the husband, tells her to go to hell over the 911 call, questions about Todd and his motives start to rise. Learn about the way Todd and Amy Mullis lived their lives in separate paranoias, and how a jury came to convict him of murder.Written by David YoungSound Engineer: Chaes Gray from Gray Multimedia Devilweknowpodcast.comPatreon: https://www.patreon.com/DevilweknowpodcastTwitter: https://twitter.com/devilweknowpodFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/devilweknowpodcast/SOURCES:Alberto Luperon from Law & Crimehttps://lawandcrime.com/live-trials/live-trials-current/todd-mullis/prosecutor-confronts-todd-mullis-asks-if-he-called-his-dying-wife-a-cheating-whore-during-911-call/https://lawandcrime.com/live-trials/live-trials-current/todd-mullis/this-was-todd-mulliss-best-attempt-to-explain-away-shady-web-searches-on-his-ipad/Janelle Tucker of KMCH Mix Radiohttps://kmch.com/blog/2019/09/18/son-testifies-at-mullis-murder-trial/https://kmch.com/blog/2019/09/18/frasher-called-to-testify-at-mullis-murder-trial/Chris Harris of People Magazinehttps://people.com/crime/iowa-wife-warned-friends-her-husband-might-kill-her-before-she-was-found-impaled-with-farm-tool/Leonard Muller Funeral Home and Crematoryhttps://www.leonard-mullerfh.com/notices/Amy-MullisErik Hogstrom of the Manchester Presshttps://www.manchesterpress.com/news/dubuque-murder-trial-field-manager-testifies-about-affair-with-woman/article_2f51b567-0da5-514e-8cca-f90f1bcfdcbc.htmlhttps://www.manchesterpress.com/news/update-dubuque-murder-trial-woman-stabbed-by-corn-rake-at/article_12763b1b-46d9-55a4-98a0-f0075e28e9d0.html#tncms-source=article-nav-nextAshley Scott of KWWL Newshttps://kwwl.com/news/2019/09/18/witness-testimony-mullis-marriage/Dorian Geiger of Oxygenhttps://www.oxygen.com/crime-time/todd-mullis-trial-murder-wife-amy-rake-hog-farm-iowaAntonia Noori Farzan of the Washington Posthttps://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/09/18/todd-mullis-murder-trial-corn-rake-iowa/The Des Moines Register and Associated Presshttps://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/crime-and-courts/2019/09/23/iowa-corn-rake-killing-husband-convicted-murder/2423119001/

Comin' At Ya
Episode 271 - Four Headed Beast!!! / FMK

Comin' At Ya

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 25, 2019 95:38


True Believers, this was an awesome fun show and hopefully we will have a regular four man booth type feel! I love the energy of having everyone in the room and honestly this was such a great episode for me. I really feel like everyone is melding into a group now. When Todd left it really messed me up. I still miss Todd and the energy and vibe that he brought to the show. Maybe one day we can all do one big mega show... anyways I hope y'all dig this one. Have a great weekend! - Kevin HTH Youtube Video: https://www.youtube.com/user/deathsdoorman1 Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/CominAtYaPodcast website: http://www.cominatyapodcast.com/ You can contact Kevin on twitter: @KCutt215 and @CominAtYaPod                     You can contact The Kidd on twitter: @Dynamokidd

Dynasty Leadership Podcast
EP034: Using Social Media to Recruit New Talent

Dynasty Leadership Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 4, 2019 38:22


Todd Schroeder is the CEO of Aeration Industries International. When Todd took over the role, the company had just been acquired and was going through some transitions. Todd created a “why not” culture, balancing empathy and empowerment with high expectations, which resulted in Aeration becoming the employer of choice. Krista Ramirez briefly joins us on the show to discuss her role in recruiting new talent for Aeration.   Key Takeaways: [2:20] How did Todd first get started? [3:45] Todd gives a little bit of history behind Aeration and how they got started. [5:50] Todd knew he had to build a culture around people and innovation. [6:25] What did Todd look for when it came to hiring new talent? [8:40] Todd brought earlier adopters in his team to help with the social media recruiting process. [9:45] Krista jumps on to explain her recruiting process. [11:00] Todd explains they were actively looking for good candidates on LinkedIn. [14:30] What kinds of roles was Krista recruiting for? [17:20] Before hiring someone new, Todd would do a team interview with the new candidate. [19:00] How many people have Todd and his team hired over the years? [22:50] Todd was very diligent and aware of the kind of culture he wanted to build, and in turn, the team and company prospered from it. [25:55] What results did Todd see when the company focused on the people? [28:50] What lessons did Todd learn along the way? [30:50] Krista shares her thoughts on what she wished she had done differently. [32:40] Todd offers advice on how you can get started recruiting on social media.   Mentioned in This Episode: Dynastylc.com Aireo2.com Todd on LinkedIn Krista on LinkedIn

Idiots With Opinions
Pedos, Pee, and Pond Swords | S2E8

Idiots With Opinions

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 16, 2018 34:44


The terrific duo is back on an adventure to find the ancient Incan voodoo box. When Todd is possessed by that stupid spirit from "Suicide Squad" what will Tuscan do to save the Idiots With Opinion(TM) Franchise? Find out on the gripping mid season premiere of these rambling idiots podcast of nonsense!

Building Infinite Red
Business Successes and Failures

Building Infinite Red

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 12, 2018 39:44


In this episode of Building Infinite Red, Jamon, Ken, and Todd answer a question from the podcast channel in the Infinite Red Slack Community about what they have learned and observed from businesses over the years who have succeeded or failed. Episode Transcript CHRIS MARTIN: We had someone reach out on the podcast channel with an idea for an episode. He said: "You three must have watched a lot of businesses starting up/establishing themselves and subsequently succeeding or failing. What have you learned or observed from those businesses? In your view, what made them successful or otherwise?" KEN MILLER: That is a great question. The first thing I would say is no one, literally no one can predict which company is going to succeed, especially like in a big way. The startups that we have been part of in our careers or, have worked for as clients, the ones that are trying to hit it big, there's no one who can predict that. That said, we do see mistakes, we do see things that will hinder success or prevent it. One of the big ones I would say is having the wrong amount of money. That doesn't necessarily mean having to little although, that's by far the most common version, but sometimes having too much. I've seen startups that had so much money that they just wasted it and never had any discipline, and they crashed and burned. So, having too much money surprisingly, can be a problem. Having too little is much more common, you don't hear about it as much, because they tend to fizzle in a very quiet way. There's a fairly frequent thing that we will encounter which is the self-funded entrepreneur who comes to us and says, "Hey, can you do this for $50,000?" The answer is almost always no. Any interesting app is likely to be more than $50,000. But more than that, if your only source of funding is your own life savings, or yours and your parents' life savings, that's a big red flag. Because it means that you have no room to move or develop or anything. If all you have is $50,000 to spend, and it's your life savings, and you want to build the business. I'm not saying don't do it. But what I am saying is you need to use that $50,000 to validate your idea more than you need to build an app or a website or whatever it is that you're looking for. That can take a lot of forms, right? But take that $50,000, quit your job if you have a job, go interview customers, go do things that don't cost money that let you validate your idea. And then you can go find people who can help you. We are famously bootstrapped here, and the reason that we're able to do that is because consulting is a very easy thing to do the first one. Because it's just you, and you go out and get a contract and you grow from there. A lot of businesses, that's not true. And if you need investors, because your idea has enough going on that you have to build something, then use the money you have to start that process rather than blow it all on an app that then can't grow because you've run out of money, Todd. TODD WERTH: If the kind of business you want to build is $10,000 to actually build it, and then $50,000 is a great amount of money because then you can build it and iterate on it and have extra funds. The problem is something like an app that typically costs $100,000 or more is not only do you need the initial cost of it, you need all the capital to run that business and modifying and really adapt it to what you find the market actually wants. That being said, there's nothing wrong with starting out bootstrapping. However, it is a little bit of a red flag if you haven't convinced anyone other than your mother to give you money for your idea, because if you can't convince one person, it's going to be hard to convince all the users to give you money to use for said business. JAMON HOLMGREN: To play off of what Ken said earlier, I think that a lot of it is you want enough money that you're not making decisions based on fear, basing it on desperation. But you also don't want to be in a position where you just don't care. Where who cares if you blow this money because it's not your money and whatever. You need to have some level of skin in the game, so to speak. KEN: Yeah, I would say that the ideal that we look for is whatever budget we think we need to build the most focused version of your app, we would love to see that you have two, three times that total somewhere. Not because we want to spend it for you, but because you're going to need it for something. And it's a measure of your health as a startup. Even more ideal than that is, you have that much in hand, and you know what you're going to do to get more when you need it. JAMON: Moving beyond the financial side of it. Another thing that I've observed in my 13 years of doing consulting work is when the stakeholder, generally speaking, the founder CEO, but not always, feels that they have all of the answers already. And they just need to build this thing. Just get someone to build it, get someone to design it, build it, put it out there and the money will flow. That's extremely rare. Very, very rare. TODD: I bet it doesn't exist at all. JAMON: I would tend to agree. One of the things that we say, as we're going through the sales process with a particular new client is, if your app does not change during the process, if what you conceive of as being this app at the very beginning does not change, then that's probably a failure. You're probably not listening to your clients, you're probably not ... Or your customers, or your users. You're probably not listening to the experts you're surrounding yourself with, which would hopefully include us. We've been through this quite a few times, and if you're not willing to say, "Hey, I don't know everything. I need to learn some of these things. Then that's a problem. Of course, conversely, we do expect people to bring some level of expertise in the domain that we're talking about. So, you should have some ... I'm not going to go and just start a business making farming equipment or something. I've never run a farm, I don't have any clue what it would take. So, having no experience whatsoever in the domain can be an issue as well, and you're not going to be able to just rely on other people to fill in all of those gaps. But, I think that there has to be a happy medium where you do have some domain expertise, you have some things in mind, you have a framework to make these decisions. We also understand that you don't know everything, and that you're going to need to gather information and evolve your view of what the app is going to be during the process. TODD: Another one that's very common, you see it right up front with people. Either they're telling you their story about their business, or I've worked with them, or whatever, is they don't really care that much. They act like they do, but they don't really. Meaning, they put a few hours in a week or a month or something, and they show up every once in a while. You get this a lot with people who are extremely wealthy maybe. It's a side thing for them, they're playing around and they just don't really care. It's pretty true that the person who cares about your business the most is you. There will be no one who cares about it more than you. So, if that's not true, there's a big problem. That being said, a lot of successful people don't have a lot of funding, maybe they bootstrap it at the beginning. They don't take for granted they know everything. They asked for help. They try to learn. They accept the fact that they're going to have to be salespeople and finance people, and operations people and everything. Even if something applies to a particular person that we've already mentioned or are going to mention more, they may have other features that totally overwhelm that meaning. If you're particularly a good salesperson, you can be pretty bad at business and still be successful. That's just a fact. If your idea's so compelling that even though you're a horrible salesperson, when people hear it, they're like, "I want to give you money for this, because it sounds amazing." Then that person knows enough to hire someone who can execute well like us, Infinite Red. I'm not good like Jamon is with the plugs ... those people can be very successful as well. KEN: To flip this around to a more positive script. To some degree, we approach the clients that we take like an investor would to some degree. An investor is going to do more due diligence than we would obviously, but we're looking for: Do they have adequate access to capital? Do they have a high degree of commitment? Do the founders get along? Are people in agreement about what the vision is if there's more than one person involved? By the way, we have plenty of projects projects with established companies and it's totally different. Because then, a budget is a budget, et cetera, et cetera. This is talking startups. These are all things basically like, if you have all of those pieces, and a deep understanding of, and relationship with their target customer. If you have all of those, then it's between you and the market. That's ... you have all of the tools that you need at that point to succeed or fail on the merits of the idea. It is very hard to predict what's going to happen with the market. And that's the part that no matter how good you are, you might still fail. The commitment helps. You hear the word pivot applied to startups because what happens is, they have all the other pieces; they have access to capital, they have a committed founding team, they are working very hard. What the market tells them is that their idea is wrong basically. The thing that they thought that they wanted to build, turns out, they misunderstood the market, the market changed, something happened, and then they're like, "But as we were deep in the muck of figuring that out, we saw this other thing and we're going to run at that now." TODD: You'll find your subconscious as very creative and very strong and very secretive. What I mean by that is, if subconsciously, a person knows that their business model and their revenue model doesn't actually work or they fear it doesn't work. They haven't actually looked into it, they'll come up with super creative ways to get away from or not do those plans. When you ask them for it, they can either avoid it, sometimes become hostile. Whatever secret fears you have, sometimes just sabotage yourself by avoiding those particular things. If you find that you're just very anxious about doing a business plan, you don't know why. It may be because your subconscious thinks that if you did it, you're going to realize that even best case scenario, this business does not make money. JAMON: That's why one of the questions we ask during the sales process is, what are your biggest fears with this process? Because it tends to let them come up with the answers to that without us being hostile about it, or anything like that. We're on their side, we're trying to solve those problems as much as we can. I had a client back in the ClearSight days. We did a bunch of work for him, and he was this incredible engineer. Came up with just some amazing stuff. But he loved to invent. He wasn't super big on running the business. He didn't really enjoy a lot of the parts of running a business. He brought onboard a series of CEOs to run the business over a period of many years. At one point, it just became obvious to me that that this was really hurting his business. Because all he wanted to do was work on the product, and he didn't want to necessarily work on the business itself. The stuff he was building was amazing. It was awesome. I really loved it. And he was a very good person. He always paid his bills to us, always appreciated us, but that blind spot, I think it really hurt him. TODD: Yeah, that gentlemen, I don't know who you're referring to, but that gentleman needs to accept the fact that a business person is super important, and they need to find theirs to be a co-founder with them. JAMON: I think a big part of that is just seeing it as a business and not just the product itself, which actually is a big failing of a lot of people that think of building apps, they think of the app. They think of the product, they don't think about the business itself. It's hard because business, there's a lot to it. We're doing a whole podcast series on it right now. There's a lot to talk about, and there's a lot to learn, and there's stuff we're still learning. It's definitely having a characteristic of thinking more holistically about the whole business and being willing to just dive in and learn things that you haven't done before. All of those types of things, but that's a positive characteristic. There are a few other negative characteristics that I've seen over the years. One actually is, over-confidence and over-optimism. Now, I tend to be a very optimistic person. I'm very confident. TODD: Are you talking about me Jamon? JAMON: Sometimes. TODD: I'm very optimistic that you're insulting me right now. JAMON: But then again, sometimes it's me, and Todd has to ground me. Now, Ken's always grounding both of us at the same time like an anchor in some ways. TODD: That was mean. That was very mean. JAMON: We're dragging this thing ... No, I'm joking. There's one gentleman that we worked for a long time ago, and he was very optimistic that the funding was going to come through. So, he had us do a whole lot of work. The funding didn't come through, and that put us in a tough position. That was a lesson that we had to learn, but it certainly put him in an even worse position, because now he owes his vendors money, and it's not ready to go yet. So, the Elon Musk sort of thing. Although he seems to have access to bottomless levels of cash. KEN: Elon Musk has easily inherited the reality distortion field from Steve Jobs. JAMON: Yes, exactly. KEN: And put it to shame to be honest. JAMON: Right. That sort of thing can kill you if you're not Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. KEN: Yeah, and actually, anybody who comes in acting like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk, which usually means being an asshole and playing fast and loose with the facts, which is not what I'm saying that Jobs and Musk are doing. I'm saying that that's what the people who think that they're right tend to do. That is a massive red flag. TODD: They're pale clones of the original, and probably only cloning the worst parts. A couple of quick hits here. One is, if you don't like your customers, or worse, you hate your customers, huge problem. Your business provides value to customers. If you hate your customers, or loathe them or don't want to interact with them, and you'd be like well, "Todd, that's ridiculous, who would do that?" You would be surprised how many businesses hate their customers. That's a problem, you really should look for customers that you enjoy servicing, you enjoy providing value to, it gives you a lot of personal, and the company and a lot of gratification for sure. The second one is, when you describe your product or your business to someone, if they think it's awesome, and it's really good, and when can they get their hands on it, that's, that's a good sign. Anything below that from mild praise to praise means they really think your product sucks. Especially, if you know those people. So, take mild praise as this is horrible. So, really find something that where, when you're leaving the discussion, they're very interested in how they can get their hands on this thing and when. KEN: Related to that. I would say, if you're a startup ... Well, okay two things. Back up. One, what kind of business are you? Are you a startup? By startup, that means you think there's a large opportunity, and you've got to get to it fast before somebody else does. Maybe it's winner take all. You're aiming to be a big thing. It doesn't necessarily have to be like unicorn big, but it's big. In which case, you need to optimize for hitting that and failing relatively quickly if you're not going to. Versus a lifestyle company, where you want to make a long term sustainable thing, you probably want to bootstrap. TODD: Like us. KEN: If your ultimate idea is not subject to bootstrapping. It's not something that you have to get to in the next year or two, or you're going to miss it. Then find the idea you can bootstrap that's more practical. Do that first, and then work on the big thing. But those two strategies are different. They require very different mindsets. They require different ways of capitalizing. The worst thing that can happen to a startup by the way, is not failure. Outright failure in a startup is not the outcome anybody wants, but once it's gone, you're free, and you can do the next one or something else. The worst outcome is kind of success. Where it makes just enough to keep going, and you never know whether to pull the plug. I've seen a couple of those. That is the worst outcome for a startup in my opinion. JAMON: I worked with a startup many years ago that it was actually a success. I'd like to talk about that one a little bit. The founder, I think he had a lot of the characteristics that an ideal founder would have. He was a very nice guy, but also very driven. He was really great to work with. Everybody that worked on this project really loved it, which was good because you'd get their best work and they would really go out of their way to try to make his product a success. It was very much a niche market. It had to do with transportation, and he was really, really great at identifying the problem that people had, these transportation companies, and solving one very specific but very painful problem that was hard to solve. You couldn't just do it in house. If you did it in house, you would inevitably fail, and you would have a real problem on your hands. Almost everybody has this issue. He had us build a web application that mimicked a spreadsheet that he'd been solving this problem with. He'd already gone through the manual labor of figuring out a lot of the issues and doing this almost on a notepad in a way, as a consultant for these transportation companies. He had figured out his business model, and then he had us build a web app. He wasn't afraid to spend money if we said, "Hey, we need to beef up this section of the web app." He would he would totally be cool with it. He wouldn't spend money willy nilly, but if we said it was important, then he would budget the money for it and he would do it. He was also very good at networking and getting out there and talking to his customers. He would come back and say, "Hey, I've got this customer, it's a big, huge company you've heard of, and they're having a problem with this part of the application, and this is how I think we should fix it." He actually spent the time to figure out how we worked and the language that we needed from him to solve these problems. He would also very much listen to that feedback that we would give him. He now works for a big company. They hired him specifically for this expertise. They have a lot of trucks on the road, and a lot of different jurisdictions that they're rolling through, and they need to have their ducks in a row. The application itself is, I believe, he's either sold it, or is in process of selling it, exiting. That was a very good experience. It was something that I learned a lot from. One thing that's for sure, is that founder put in a ton of work, learning from his customers, learning all of the domain expertise that he needed in order to be the expert in this particular field. That was very instructive. He was not lazy, he was very much a go getter, but also willing to listen to us. TODD: Yeah, I think developing partnerships with either your partners, your team your vendors is hugely important. And what I mean by partnership, it sounds like corporate speak or whatever, but what it means is not adversarial. Meaning, one of the things was working with lawyers, bless their heart, as clients, in my experience is they're trained to always start everything adversarial. That can work to a point. But really, if you work as a partner, meaning, you're looking out for your partner's best interest, and they're looking out for your best interest, and then you're looking out for your own best interest, and vice versa. Then you tend to get the best results. If you're trying to compete with them, or one-up them or nickel and dime or whatever, it's not going to do that. KEN: If you want to start a business, don't be discouraged by anything what we're saying. Because you can go into it the wrong way, and end up someplace fine, if you're committed. When Todd and I started, we were going to build an app. I had a little money in the bank so I could quit my job. It didn't work. Let's be perfectly honest. We built a really nice app that 300 people in the world really, really loved. They still occasionally email us. TODD: We did get a number six in the Apple Health and Fitness category above Nike by the way. KEN: Yeah, that was- TODD: For whatever that's worth. KEN: That was a little bit of a fluke. TODD: Which is nothing. KEN: But in any case, it didn't work. We started to take on clients, but we were out of money, and we were looking at, what's going to happen next. I realized that I was like, I will break IRAs. I'll break my 401Ks, I will sell my stock in order to keep this going. That was the point where I knew I was committed for real. It's like until you have a moment like that, you and everyone around you can have some doubts legitimately about whether you're actually committed. But once you're like, I will put everything on the line if I have to. Not that I wanted to, unfortunately, I didn't have to. But when you make that transition in your head, that you're willing to do whatever it takes to make it succeed, then your odds go way up. Because if you are smart enough to be able to manage things so that you can keep trying, and you have the drive to keep trying even after a failure, then you're doing pretty well at that point. JAMON: I'm kind of scanning through a list of old clients and I think that of the ones that failed ... I had a lot of existing businesses. They already had business models that were working and things like that. I did a lot of work for existing businesses. But the startups that failed, I think the commonality from what I'm seeing in this list that I'm scrolling through, is that they didn't really have a business model that worked. They didn't really have something that they could point to and say, "Yeah, this is what people need, and this is what they're willing to pay for it, and yes, that will sustain not only paying for this app, but also, my salary and salary of the staff, everything." That was actually I think one of the biggest issues. The ones that did succeed had a fairly compelling and simple and straightforward business model. There are a few that they would have 14 different ways that they would make money on this, shave a little percentage off of this, and a little bit off of that, and we're going to make a little bit here, or they'd have astronomical user numbers that we're going to be impossible to hit in order to make these numbers work. That was a fairly common thing. And that's something that I think that if you're moving into a business, you need to be able to sit down and look up, and do a realistic projection of how am I going to appeal to these people? How am I going to get sale number one for one thing? Then, what kind of dollars are we looking at? Is this going to sustain us? TODD: I have a positive story. None of this is a secret. I wasn't under NDA or anything. I actually, this is circa 2008. I don't know 2007, 2008 something like that. I interviewed at Airbnb. At that time, they were in their apartment in San Francisco. There was the two founders, and a couple other people working there. They had one engineer working on their system, but he was going to school, and he wasn't full-time. They were interviewing me for basically one of the first full-time engineering positions. I did not take that job. I actually took a job with Ken instead. So, thank you for that Ken. But what was cool about it is a couple things, I knew they were going to be extremely successful for multiple reasons. One, the two young gentlemen in there, they were like 24 at the time, I was quite a bit older then. Were very impressive people. They were trained industrial designers. They had actually started their business by actually doing it. They did the Airbnb model with their own apartment, and they had some success. But more than that, when they showed me their pitch deck, it was good and compelling. But they had a great customer acquisition plan. Their plan was very specific. The DNC, the Democratic National Convention was happening in Denver that year. It's very common to know that if you have to get housing early, and they completely run out of housing, because the size of the event, and the size of Denver ... I believe it was Denver. Their whole thing was okay, we know that this periodic thing happens. We know for a fact that they run out of tons of housing, and we know for a fact that there's a lot of young people who go to the political conventions because they're more idealistic in the parties. They were going to do their huge push, and they're planning on putting all their wood behind that arrow to get Airbnb set up and operating and making money at that venue. As we all know, because we've probably all used Airbnb, or least know about it, they were very successful in their company. Now, they did some more nefarious marketing things later, but just sitting down ... And by the way, when you interview at a very small startup like that as an engineer in the Bay Area, they tend to pitch to you because it's hard to get engineers, and they want to convince you that their startup's going to make it. I did walk away feeling like yeah, although I didn't particularly want to join their company because at the time, I didn't want to be on a tiny team. I wanted to be on a bigger team, and it would have just been a team of me and this one gentleman who was working part-time from the East Coast. But I did walk away knowing for sure that these people were going to make it because they had all their ducks in a row. JAMON: Existing businesses tend to have maybe a little better success with startups. They may not blow the lid off of things, but they're going to have a little better sense for some of the pitfalls that can come along. I worked for a company, I was doing their website. This is way early when I was first started. They were selling, I think they were auto parts or something. Something along those lines, it has been a long time. But they decided they were going to get into re-manufactured parts, and they wanted to sell those online, not just new parts. They did a lot of things really well. That was one of our more successful projects. I think it's still running to this day. What we had to do was make sure that mechanics who were, and still are fairly non-technical, not super computer savvy clientele, that they can jump on to this website, find what they needed, order it very quickly, and be done with it. We also optimized for SEO and things like that. But this company was owned by an older couple. They worked together, husband and wife. They were really great to work with, they really had a keen eye for business, how they were going to make money with this, how they're going to reach their customers. They just didn't know the online part of it. And that's where they brought us in, and they were very good about listening to what we had to offer. We also built a back office system for them so that they could monitor all of the orders coming in, provide customized quotes where they needed to, and fill the orders. When we started this project, they said, we see the writing on the wall for our current business, which was aging as far as how they were ... Like anything retail, or online orders is going to get sucked up by Amazon and these other big companies, right? So, they needed to provide something that Amazon wasn't going to be able to do as easily. After the project, and after it had been going for a while, the owner called me up and he said, "Hey, I think this saved our business. I think this really helped." It was bringing in tens of thousands of dollars per month in revenue, and probably approaching hundreds of thousands. They just had this idea they were willing to explore a little bit into a territory that they weren't very used to. But they also were very much thinking in terms of dollars and cents, business model, marketing, all those other aspects of the business. That was good for me to see, because I could see that yeah, you can create something out of nothing, essentially. As long as you're willing to put the work in, and have a complete business from start to finish, you don't skip any other steps. TODD: I would like to ask Ken. Ken worked for a photo which later was bought by Kodak. And then Kodak destroyed it through pure stupidity, but I would love to hear least from your perspective if you feel that's a good story Ken about your experiences at Ofoto? KEN: I wasn't around at Ofoto when it started by the way. It had already been bought when I joined them. Anything I know about the early stages is lore, it's second hand. But they were always a very sensible company, and I liked that. That was one of the things that I liked when I joined them, which is that you know at the end of the day, they sold photos. TODD: Could you tell our younger audience who Ofoto was? KEN: Ofoto was one of the first generation of online photo sharing sites. JAMON: That's O-F-O-T-O. KEN: O-F-O-T-O. It was a great name, by the way. It was an amazing name that Kodak just threw away. TODD: What did Kodak call it by the way once they bought it? KEN: Kodak Easy Share Gallery. TODD: That rolls off the tongue. Ofoto was so hard to remember. KEN: Yeah. TODD: Kodak Easy Share Gallery. It's just amazing. KEN: I heard a lot of stories about that. There was a lot of amazing people there. But boy, were they a case study in how to throw away a century of legacy. Anyway, but they were very sensible, right? So, A, they could offer all the photo sharing stuff for free because they sold prints, and that was when people still cared about prints. Eventually, people stopped caring very much about prints, but their primary competitor who for a long time was never bought by anybody was Shutterfly, and they're still around. I think they bought the assets of Kodak Easy Share Gallery when Kodak quit. That's what I liked about it at the time when I joined them was like, their business model was extremely straightforward. They sold prints at a healthy markup, they had a great operation, there was two teams. There was the site team, which was the user facing, the sharing and all that, and there was the lab team. Which is this elaborate system that controlled the printers and the workflow for the people who operated them. It was great. I loved Ofoto. TODD: Ken, you also worked for the company Yammer, who later got bought by Microsoft? Can you tell us a little bit more about that? KEN: Yeah. Yammer is actually a great example of a pivot. It was a spinoff of an internal project at, I think it was called Geni.com. So David Sacks, one of the PayPal mafia, along with Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel, and all those kind of people. He was the primary founder and CEO. It was a spinoff of Geni that made this internal Twitter-like tool just for internal communication. And we're like, "Hey, this is actually a pretty good idea. It's got some legs." So, it turned into Yammer. They cared a lot about culture and productivity and how to make a team work and they thought about it constantly, which I always admired. But one of the interesting things that I would say is that, the things that you as a programmer, all the good habits you have as a programmer, if you become an entrepreneur and you're building something new, I'm not saying throw them out. But I am saying your first problem isn't having a scaling problem. Your first problem is to find your market fit, and clean codes, scalability. All that stuff doesn't matter if it doesn't work. It doesn't matter if you don't get there. The code base when I got to it, and I'm sure all the people here will agree to this, was challenging, shall we say, right? But at that point, it didn't matter as much, because they had the further investment, then they got bought by Microsoft. They had the resources to fix that problem, now that they had a product market fit. Until they had that product market fit, they just worked like hell. They just blasted that thing out. Honestly, I think for that kind of startup, for a big a startup, that's probably the right way to do it. Blast the thing out, go as fast as you can, and then when you've got success and money, then you bring people on who can come in, be code grownups and figure it out. The lesson from that one is focus. It's very tempting when programmers become entrepreneurs to be like, now that I get to like make this Greenfield app, I'm going to make sure that it's just really beautiful and wonderful. You know what, that doesn't matter. If you're being so aggressive that you're constantly fixing your own mistakes, and that kind of thing. Then you need to slow down a little bit. But the lesson is, be laser focused on the one thing that is the most important to you right now. That was a hard lesson for me to learn, but I think it was a good one to learn. Anyway, go ahead. JAMON: I was just going to say, we've had to apply that to our own business for sure. It's easy to get distracted by all the other things that are possible out there. But making sure that we're laser focused and have all of our ducks in a row, and have a business model, and marketing, and are talking to our clients. One of the things that we did when we actually hired a consultant to go out and talk to a bunch of our clients and ask a bunch of questions, was why haven't we done this before? We tell our clients to do this, but we hadn't done it up to that point. It was a no brainer, face palm moment. Like, oh man, we really should have been doing this. TODD: Yeah, that highlights a point, you can make mistakes, you can do exactly opposite what we said you can. If you just keep on keeping on, it'll be okay. It is hard to keep on keeping on. The less mistakes you make, the easier it is to keep on keeping on, but that is really the only secret. KEN: The takeaway from some of these negative stories, by the way, is that you'll see statistics like, nine out of 10 businesses fail, or 19 out of 20 are ... I don't know about the statistics are. But it's something like. Some large number of businesses will fail within the first couple of years. If you have the things that we talked about—commitment, knowledge of your market, access to capital—your odds are way, way better. Because all of those statistics include all these weird cases that we've seen in our careers. Don't be discouraged. If you're the type who really, really believes that you need to be an entrepreneur, keep at it. Because these are all solvable issues. JAMON: I think one of the things that I've seen from a lot of companies that don't have much of a chance of making it, is they're just looking for a formula that works. Rather than doing the difficult work of identifying what it is that you have a unique perspective and advantage on and then building a business around that.

INVESTTHIS
#INVESTTHIS EP 18: Turning a $30K Initial Investment Into a $15MM Portfolio

INVESTTHIS

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 28, 2018 32:00


Discover how Todd Dexheimer, a former teacher and now principal of Venture D Properties (http://www.venturedproperties.com/about-us/) , became an agile multi-family investor with a booming business. When Todd realized that teaching wasn’t something he wanted to do for the rest of his life, he looked into real estate investing and never turned back. He started out with two houses and one rental property and grew his business from there. Learn how he made this transition, his unique method to ensure a 95% return on his investment for 1-4 family units, as well as how he obtains maximum profit for any venture. And you don’t want to miss why his goal of having a portfolio worth of $200MM in the next nine years, has nothing to do with being rich! Tip of the Day: If you’re not struggling or failing; then you’re not growing! -Todd Dexheimer Tweet This

Building Infinite Red
Hiring & Maximizing Your Team

Building Infinite Red

Play Episode Listen Later May 17, 2018 34:45


We are discussing all of the considerations that go into hiring and maximizing your team: from culture fit and making sure that people are enjoying their work, to what it means to be a leader and why the best leaders bring out the best in each person, not for the sake of the company, but for the betterment of their lives. Episode Transcript CHRIS MARTIN: Where do you start this process of hiring and maximizing your team? TODD WERTH: Hello, Chris. This is Todd, CEO and founder of Infinite Red, for those who don't recognize my voice. It's a super important question. We run the company as a Council of Elders. The three founders all have equal power and equal responsibilities, but we all choose various parts of the company that we focus on. And one of my main focuses is the team, so this topic's very interesting to me. I would start out defining our opinions on what different roles of management, leadership, coaching are, so people have kind of a frame reference. There is management, but that's a purely logistical thing. For example, we're a consulting company, and we have a lot of projects, usually six to eight projects going on at once. And we have to schedule those. So, that means putting blocks into holes on the schedule, figuring out resources, that kind of stuff. That is management. There's no real leadership going on there. There's certainly no coaching. I mean, there's some, of course; it's not a perfect science. But those kind of tasks are management, in my opinion. We manage what's necessary, but we don't manage what's not necessary to manage or what would be better served by being a coach, to use a sports analogy, or being a leader. That's kind of the primary thing. We can talk about later what bad leaders do. One of the things they do—just to highlight what I just said—is they only manage; they never lead, and they never coach. And then we have leadership and coaching. Could be the same thing, but I'm gonna break those up just a little bit. A coach's job is to find the best teammates that they can at the time with the resources that they have, and put people in the jobs that they're best at and maximize those people. Coaches don't say things like, "All players suck. I'm losing because you can't find good players," because it's literally their job to find those players and to maximize them and to put them in the best spot possible. That's what I consider coaching. Leadership is everything else. Leadership is you're leading, and you're guiding people to where they'll be most effective. You're guiding people through problems. You're the first one on the battlefield, in my opinion, and you're the last one on the battlefield. You lead by example. It's everything else that goes in, all the soft skills of helping a group of people accomplish tasks and goals. JAMON HOLMGREN: Yeah, thanks, Todd. This is Jamon, founder and COO of Infinite Red. I think one of the key aspects of maximizing your team comes down to trusting them and providing the right level of support. So, a lot of companies will put in place restrictive policies that are more along the lines of trying to kind of shoehorn their employees into behavior that they want to see. And we take a very different approach here. We're very resistant to putting in place policies. We may give some guidelines that are more along the lines of ideas of how you might approach something, but we rely more on trusting them to make the right call, and if they don't make the right call, to respond the right way. And we can provide support for them if they need help, if they need encouragement, if they need course correction, whatever, we can do that in a supportive way and not so much in a management way. And that's what Todd's talking about when he's talking about the leadership. But, yeah, it's about trusting your team. And it's about putting them in places where they can succeed and not putting them in places where they're not well suited, finding the right path for them. You can put someone in place as, let's say, a programmer. And if they're struggling, you can just sort of like flog them. You know, not literally, but just sort of put a bunch of pressure on them to get their job done faster. And that's how a lot of bad leaders approach maximizing their team. From our standpoint, it's a very different approach. It's more of an open approach. It's about trying to find what they're really good at, and then letting them go, letting them do their thing. There are many examples within Infinite Red, which we can talk about, where people have taken the initiative and done things that are outside of their normal job description, but which they're interested in and which they're good at. And that is more where we see the maximization of the talent that we have. CHRIS: How do you hire for culture fit within Infinite Red? KEN MILLER: Ken Miller, CTO and founder. I would say the easiest way is always a referral. Always, right? I bet everybody's gonna tell you that. The hardest, almost impossible way, is just an interview of somebody off the street. One thing we've kind of done that's sort of in between is we've hired freelancers. So, from time to time, we have more work than our core team can handle, and we'll bring on a freelancer or two. And on a couple of different occasions, we've liked them so much we're like, "Hey, do you want a job?" And that's worked pretty well. TODD: It's actually pretty difficult to hire for anything, much less culture fit. I am still dubious that getting a bunch of resumes, doing interviews, and choosing one of those people is any better than randomly picking someone. I'm sure people have done studies, and it's probably better, but sometimes it doesn't feel like it's better. What we are particularly good at is we have a strong culture, and we have a strong idea of what our culture is. And we have a strong idea on what attributes that our people to have. We let a lot of our team interview. For instance, Chris here, when he was interviewed ... I don't know how many interviews he had, but it's probably like 10. We let anyone on our team -- and we're a team of 26 people -- interview everyone if they want to. We try to get a lot of people to interview them. Different people are looking for different things. For example, I am solely looking for culture fit. I assume that the people that came before me, like Jamon or Ken, if it's a technical position, already interviewed them for technical stuff. I assume by the time it gets to me that they're qualified for the job. So, I really just chitchat with them and try to see if they're a cultural fit. JAMON: Yeah, and one of the dangers with trying to hire specifically only for culture fit is that you can end up with a monoculture, and that can be a problem. And so that's something that we watch for. When Todd's talking about cultural fit, it's very much more about specific values that are kindness and helpfulness and things like that that are more about humanity and the type of person that they are, more so than maybe a specific culture, and I think that term probably needs to be defined a little better as we go through here. KEN: No rock stars. JAMON: That's right. TODD: Or ninjas or unicorns. KEN: No, yeah. No rock stars or ninjas. CHRIS: What about gurus? TODD: No gurus. KEN: Well, we'd have to see about a guru. I don't know, we'll see. TODD: Yeah, so just real quick, our main cultural fits, the soft stuff, is supportive, kindness. I would say even creative would be one of mine now. JAMON: Absolutely. It doesn't matter whether they're a technical person or not, creative is absolutely one of our values ... Todd, you've talked about ... What was that that you sometimes say about creativity? TODD: I do believe very strongly that the company and day-to-day work life should be fun, and as little stress as possible. And the reason I say that is the most creative and the best work comes out when you're having fun. Like, I like to joke around a lot. People sometimes say, "This is more of a serious matter, don't joke." I don't agree. If someone's doing brain surgery on me, the doctor, I want him to be having a great day, feeling good, making bad, inappropriate jokes about my tiny brain, that kind of stuff. Because you know what, when you're in that mood and you're having fun and you're in that mode, you do your best work. I can think of almost no place where that's not true. I don't know if that's what you're talking about, Jamon, but when you're having fun, you're being creative. When you're being creative, you're solving problems with more than just pure nose against the grindstone. JAMON: Yeah. And some of the other attributes that we evaluate on are productivity, leadership, being pleasant, being a good communicator; those are all soft skills. And it's kind of interesting because I sometimes get questions on Twitter, "What do you look for in a developer?" And my answers are usually probably more soft skill than people would expect. I'm not necessarily looking for hard technical skills. That's not what we value as much. KEN: It's always been very important to me that we make the work fun, that we find people that enjoy what they do, find as many as ways as possible to make them juggle. It's not always possible. Different clients are going to be different ways. Different projects are gonna be different ways, but as much as possible make the actual work fun as opposed to, what a lot of startups I've seen do, which is a lot of booze and free food to numb the pain of the work that you're doing. That's a very, very, very strongly held view for me. TODD: It only takes about a week to build culture at a company because that's how long it takes to get the ping pong table delivered. (laughter) KEN: And we have to deliver a ping pong table to every single employee's wing and we have this elaborate system for simulating the trajectory of the ping pong so you like hit the ping pong ball and you kind of measure where it went- JAMON: That's what we spend our time on. KEN: You have somebody send you the ... That's a lot of work. TODD: That's a typical startup. JAMON: We put together a presentation for a change in some of our strategy and showed it to the team when we're all together in one location last fall. And one of the things we had was this sort of like seven points that we were looking for, and I actually pulled it up on my computer so I can remember what they were. It's creativity, productivity, quality of work, communication skills, being a pleasure to work with, consistency, and leadership. Now not everybody is great at all those things obviously. Some people are more strong in the communication side of things. Some are more productive. Some are really, really great at quality. It's a mixture of those things that makes Infinite Red. But that's what Todd's really talking about when he's saying that he optimizes for the culture fit, what he looks for, the things that they do well. And all the technical stuff, I mean, it's important but people can learn the technical side of things. KEN: The reason that we don't focus as much on raw technical skills ... I wouldn't agree at all that we don't focus on it. We definitely want people who can do hard things. It's just that the world of software development began its life in a world where humans had to contort themselves into the world of the machine very heavily. You had to really, really intimately know how the machine worked, and that was a pretty rare skill; people who could kind of form the mental model that they needed to in order to work on these old machines. Steadily, over the decades, the slider between the machine and the human has gotten closer and closer and closer to the human side where your job is not as much to mind meld with the machine, it's to really to intimately understand the human's problem and translate it into the high level languages that we use now for the kind of software that we do, application-level software. Like, we're not writing operating systems or databases. We're not writing Google-scale, massive data-crunching applications, that kind of thing. For things where the human factors even all the way down to the technical level are the most important. So like manageability, that's a human factor even though it's highly technical. Having people with the soft and social skills who can also think in the abstract where you need to to be a programmer or in the way that you need to be a designer as well in this sort of breaking problems down in your mind. We've seen many more project go awry because of soft skills than because of hard skills. JAMON: Yeah, I agree with that. There's a line at which, of course, all of our people have to be competent in their jobs, whether technically on the engineering side or on the designer side. TODD: Yeah, I think it's a lot easier to test if someone who you are looking at to be on your team, whether they have technical skills, it's a lot easier to look at someone's portfolio and see that they're a great artist on the design side. These kind of real, tangible things. The reason we're not talking about it as much is not because it's not important or that we don't have these great skilled people, because we do, it's just a lot easier to determine that part. And by time, it gets to us determining if they're in our culture, we've already assessed that they have these skills. I feel like that doesn't give us a competitive advantage to figure out the easy things that everyone can figure out. So I don't want to give the impression that we just don't care about them, we totally do. The soft skills or the cultural fit is where I think you can have a competitive advantage and where you can as a coach part of your job, select the best players for your particular team. It's a sports analogy. I don't know why I'm using all these sports analogies. I'm not even a sports person. (laughter) JAMON: The truth is that as far as hiring is concerned, I wouldn't say that we're necessarily great at it. And that's not to say that we've hired a bunch of people that aren't good, they're really great. I think in some ways maybe that reflects more of our ability to intuit what will work well and what doesn't. But I think that you get good at something by doing it a lot. And we haven't actually hired a ton. We've purposely have kept the team small. KEN: I don't know if there's a sweet spot some place. I feel like being very small it's harder to do hiring because as Jamon says you don't get a lot of practice. Being large, I think it's also hard to do hiring because you have to have so many layers of filters that you get lots of false negatives and false positives just by virtue of the scale. But like, I wanna believe that there's this place in the middle, but I don't even know if I believe that. Hiring is just hard. There's no silver bullet. JAMON: There's also the turnover is a factor in this too. And we really don't have turnover. Pretty much everybody that we started from 2015 has stuck around until today and that's something that we're very proud of. That may change at one point, but we're very proud of that fact. It does mean that we don't hire to replace, like we haven't. And we only hire to grow and we're growing very slowly. CHRIS: Jamon, that brings up a really interesting point in which, when Infinite Red merged from two separate companies into what it is today, there were two different cultures where, as a team, you had to learn new personalities and learn how to work with new people so how did that change this dynamic? JAMON: Yeah, from my perspective, it was ... It actually kinda floors me how well it went considering what we had to deal with. At ClearSight, we were a ... That was my previous company that I started in 2005. We had a long history, so some people had worked with me for a very long time. I mean, I hired everybody as a brand new junior. I mean, I didn't hire hardly anybody who had experience. We were not remote as we discussed in our previous episode. We were not remote at the time. And we had a different business model the way that we worked at ClearSight versus Infinite Red, LLC, which was Todd and Ken's company at the time, they were very senior-heavy. They had all seniors. In fact, I think almost everybody at Infinite Red, LLC was older than me, and I was the oldest person at ClearSight. So that was an interesting aspect. TODD: There was a lot of Metamucil at Infinite Red. (laughter) CHRIS: This episode of Building Infinite Red is brought to you by Metamucil. Get your fiber in today. (laughter) KEN: You have to keep that in. JAMON: Yes. So that was an interesting aspect because it was very different. We were in Vancouver, Washington area most of us and they were down in the bay area, a little different style there. It was just different vibe in the two companies, but it went really well, and that's something I think we should talk about. TODD: I'll not paint as a rosy picture as Jamon did. It did end up very well through a whole lot of effort and going forward. I do want to interject real quick on the last thing. One of the qualities we look for, and it also plays into Jamon's comment about monoculture, I consider us a little band of misfits, and that's on purpose. And we're misfits in a variety of different ways all over the spectrum. I won't go into different ones, but we have a wide variety of misfits, and I think that's a very important part of our culture, which I enjoy very much. KEN: We're the island of misfit toys. TODD: Correct, except for we're not toys and we're not ... KEN: Yeah, there's no island and we're not toys, but otherwise, we're a totally the island of misfit toys. TODD: Exactly. CHRIS: This episode brought to you by competing metaphors. Metaphors; the things that we compete against. (laughter) TODD: Yeah, the culture was quite a bit different. We put a lot of effort and this is a team effort as well as a leadership effort for sure, and it took a while, but the end results I do agree with Jamon, it came out really well. Obviously, we didn't have anyone quit, which is fantastic, which is a major accomplishment. And, of course, the two cultures changed each other, and we came out as a third culture. JAMON: Yeah, totally. TODD: Which was very hard, but very exciting. KEN: One of the things that happened when we merged was Vancouver, Washington is for the Pacific Northwest anyway, a relatively kind of conservative area. And obviously, we were here in the Bay Area, which is not a conservative area, and we were a little worried about that. Like we were a little concerned like, "How's that gonna play out?" JAMON: Especially during the time that it was, 2015, all of the stuff that was happening back then. KEN: Yeah, and I think that we managed it pretty well in the sense that I think we set standards for how you interact with your colleagues. We created special Slack rooms. People wanted to argue about politics, they can go and argue about politics in certain places and it was pretty much banned anywhere else, saying like, "You know, if you want to talk about these hot button topics, that's fine. Here's the ground rules, right? Like, you're always respectful, and you do it over there where people who don't want to have to interact with that don't." And that's worked pretty well. I don't go to those channels, and I don't really see it come up very much. And people generally ... Like, we will see people who we know have completely different viewpoints working together great and having a great working relationship and having mutual respect, and that is sort of the core value that we brought to that. And I think that's also the core anecdote to any of the monoculture concerns if you set the grounds rules that like, "Hey, you can disagree, but like this is how you can disagree. When you're at work, this is the way you that can disagree." Part of the reason we wanna grow slowly is so that as people come in with their different perspectives, which we really value and we want people to be able to share their perspectives, they abide by these rules about how we get along and make something together. CHRIS: Is this an instance where policy is actually a good thing where you're setting-* KEN: Yes. CHRIS: -maybe rules of engagement for how people should interact in certain arenas? KEN: I mean, it's the exception that proves the rule a little bit. It's not that we don't have policies; it's that we don't want to manage by policy all over the place, right? It's sort of like, "Here's a few ... Here's the constitution, right? Here's a few rules about you interact with each other," but then the rest is like common decency. **CHRIS: Todd, you mentioned something in the Slack channel in preparation for this episode about the question, "what do engineers and designers care about?" And you included some fun things, but the question I have is what do engineers and designers care about and are they similar things or are they different things? TODD: The short answer in my opinion is, no, I find engineers and designers to be very similar. A lot of people think of engineering as math. I think of engineering, and I'm an engineer myself, as much more creativity, at least the kind of engineering we do, than more like mathematics and that kind of stuff. To answer that question, what do they care about? I would love to actually hear Ken talk about what engineers really care about as opposed to maybe some other professions, what they care about. And I'm referring to stuff like money- KEN: You mean, like what would motivate them? Is that what you're asking? TODD: Correct, yeah. KEN: So I always said that like you have basically three levers to pull when you're hiring. One is money, which is not as important to engineers as you might think. I think it's important that they feel that it's fair, but I've seen very few engineers ever be motivated by more money than the fair baseline. I mean, everyone wants more money, right? Don't get me wrong, right? Everyone would like as much as they can get, pretty much. All else being equal. But all else isn't equal. And so lever number two is interesting work. That's a really big one for some engineers. Not as big for some other people, but for some people that's a huge lever, and you could like throw money at them, but if you have to work on a finance system or something that they just don't happen to find interesting, they're gonna be like, "I'll pass." I was always that way. I think most engineers frankly are that way or they'd be working at hedge funds. And the third lever is lifestyle. How close are they to work, like do you have the ping pong table if that's what you care about, do they give you free food if that's something you care about, and for us obviously, the remote work piece is the big giant pillar of our working environment. JAMON: You know, it's gonna be hard for us to compete with Google or Microsoft or something just purely on amenities and dollars and things like that, but when our engineers maybe look around, they have lots of choices. They're great engineers and they have a lot of options, but they look around and they say, "Well, they're not remote work. They don't have this particular culture. They don't put a high emphasis on it." Maybe some of them do have remote work programs, but they're not a core part and piece. And so that's something that we lean very heavily on and the lifestyle part of it where families are part of what we do. If I have my 4-year-old daughter bust in and wave at the sales lead on the video call, that's fine. That's just a part of how we work. KEN: And a huge part of our mission, I think, is that returning people to their families and communities so that they don't have to live in San Francisco Bay area or New York or wherever. They don't have to come in to commute. They can live in the town where they grew up. They can live rurally. We have a number of people that live rurally. They can live nomadically. We have one guy who lives nomadically. That's the closest thing I think we have to like a real mission, like a guiding star for like what we want to see in the world. And it's been central to our belief in remote work, that people's living situation should be based on their personal life and not on their professional life. TODD: It's not just our remote work. We respect people as humans, more importantly as adult humans. I personally have an aversion to people controlling my time. KEN: Well, controlling for no reason, right? Controlling just to control. TODD: We don't own people's time. We don't own people's location. In my opinion, that stops being acceptable after childhood. Now, of course, if you have a responsibility and you've agreed to those responsibilities and you have a responsibility to show up at a meeting at a particular time, that's different. But we don't control people's time or place and I think time is actually a very important part to lifestyle which I agree with Ken, our team especially finds very important. JAMON: So the title of this episode is I think Maximizing Your Team or something along those lines, and when I look at the word "maximizing", we even thought about changing the title when we were first starting this, but because it feels a little bit off in some ways to our core values. It just occurred to me why. We do believe that we should maximize our team, but not in a way that is purely Infinite Red serving. It's more about maximizing them personally, their particular lives. So we give up some productivity in order to maximize their flexibility. We give up some high bandwidth situations so that they can live remotely in other cities. We give up some things that maybe if we were strictly optimizing for maximum productivity would be better in certain cases. And although, even some of those are arguable. I think we'll probably talk about those in future episodes, but maximizing them is more about maximizing them as people and not just as employees. TODD: I'm really glad you brought that up because, yeah, the title's a little weird to me as well. But our job is to lead people towards their best version of their work self. Obviously, everything we're talking about is an ideal and nothing's perfect. But I used to ice skate, for example, and some coaches would just tell me everything's great all the time. Those coaches didn't care. Their job literally is to help me improve. So if I'm doing everything wonderful, then that's not helping me improve. I take the same approach with people and my job is to, in a supportive and kind way, as often as I can given my time help people improve. Well, a couple things for that. One is you want to find the right places for people. Getting angry at a dog because it doesn't climb a tree as well as you wish it would is stupid. You can take a dog and push it towards the best version of a dog, but you can't make a dog a cat. I know, I've tried. (laughter) I'm just kidding. And that's super important. I think a lot of leaders ... Let's call these people managers just to be derogatory. (laughter) A lot of managers will try to make dogs into cats and they complain to all their manager buddies over their cheap beer that employees all suck. And I've said this in a previous podcast, I'll say it again, employees don't suck, you suck. You're a bad manager. Just stop trying to make dogs into cats and try to optimize, make it the best dog that is possible given the time and the particular point of the path that that particular person is on. I don't know why I'm calling the team dogs, I'm sorry about that. I love you, team. KEN: I was gonna say, this is probably the reason we don't have any ambitions to become a very large company because, frankly, once you're at a certain scale, it becomes impossible to do what we're talking about. Like the company needs people to fill particular sized round holes, and they will expect people to shave off their corners in order to fit into the round holes. That's just reality. I don't even think that there's anything wrong with that exactly and some people thrive in that sort of environment, but we try to look at, yeah, what's the best version of this person and like how can they fit into our team rather than doing it the other way around? JAMON: And because of that we tend to hire a little more generalists than maybe a large company would where you can afford to hire a bunch of specialists that only do one thing. Even though we hire generalists, we're still looking for their particular set of properties, what they're good at. TODD: Also, from a leadership standpoint, a leader enjoys working with people who have issues to work on. A manager, which once again I'm using as a derogatory term here, only wants the good people that they can be lazy about and just works. But think about that for a fact. Like I want to be a painter where all the canvas I get already have the paint on them. I want to be a house builder where when I show up to the work site, the house is built. Your job is to literally to help people improve in their work and to help them be the most efficient and the most creative and the most fulfilled that they can be. Why would you complain about team members who have problems? That's literally your job. Team members who are awesome, they don't need me. We have them and that's great, and I still try to help them move forward, but, of course, the further along one's path to their ideal craftsperson or whatever, the less they need you. And, in that case, its more just morale and that kind of support. But what makes me excited as a leader is the people who have quite a few issues to deal with and how to creatively come up with a way to help them deal with that. CHRIS: You're kind of hinting at it, Todd. And I think there's this underlying thread that in order to maximize your team, it's really about being a leader not a manager. So what are some of the ways that people can approach building a team? What does it look like to be a leader? TODD: One, care. Two, work hard. Three, who knows? Four, profit. KEN: That's basically it. I wish there was like a nice summary, a nice silver bullet going, "Hey. Be a leader trying to this one weird trick." The CEO at a startup that I was at for many years where I built a team, he was like, "You know, I don't know what your magic is." I'm like, "There's no magic. I just care." And it can be exhausting at an intense startup. It can be emotionally, physically, super draining to do that really well. I had to rest like to the point like I went and took just a regular engineer job for a couple of years because it took a lot out of me, and so the hard part is not how do you be a great leader. That is, you care and you pay attention. The hard part is how do you be a great leader sustainably over time without it destroying you. And I think having co-founders really helps with that. This is what I've definitely discovered. JAMON: I agree. Some of my most draining weeks have been working on team issues, working on developing people and kind of working through all of that. It's something that you're not really trained at as a software engineer. You end up being, in some ways, kind of a psychologist or something along those lines where you're having to think about a lot of issues and melding personalities and competing priorities and all of those things. I actually talked to my brother-in-law last night and one of the things he mentioned about his job is he went from doing some kind of individual contributor type work to managing a team. And he actually built the team. It was a design team. And he said that it took years off his life doing that because it's not something that came natural to him. And he is the type that absolutely cares. Like he is a very kindhearted, very nice person, and he really cares. And because of that, it was absolutely draining. So I think it's across industries, across disciplines that sort of leadership is ... It's hard. It's not easy to do, so that would definitely up on my list of things that tire me out in a given week. TODD: One thing I want to interject real quick before I go on to my next point, never confuse kindness with weakness. That's a pet peeve of mine. It's sometimes the kindest thing to do is grab their hand and yank them forcefully out of the traffic of oncoming cars. Secondly, I don't ... I guess this is why one of my focuses is team, it doesn't drain me that much to be honest. I really enjoy it. Any day where I'm only interacting with our team as opposed to worrying about business problems or maybe interacting with outside people is a good day for me to be honest. I feel good about that. As far as what does it mean to care and what does it mean to work hard? Well, one, get to know your team. If you can't say your team member's spouse's name whether it's a wife or their husband or whatnot, that's a problem. One of my goals is for us to all to be in a meeting with someone from the outside, and I can go around the table and introduce every single person, know about them, talk a little bit about them. That's huge; just simply knowing people. Also, the other thing that's super, super important ... And, gosh, we could make three podcasts out of this to be honest in my perspective. But one of the things that's super important is when someone does have a problem or they make a mistake or something like that, they feel comfortable coming to you. I had some person recently come to me and say, "Look, I overslept. I missed my alarm and I missed a meeting." It was a client meeting, and that's one of the things that is kind of no-no here at Infinite Red. But they came to me and said, "I just wanted to let you know so you heard it from me first." That's awesome. Well, in this case, I didn't actually say much to be honest because they already knew what they did. They brought it to my attention. Like the end result was done by them. My real job was making them feel comfortable to come and tell me that. If you can have people tell you when they did something wrong instead of hiding it, that's a gold star day for you as a leader in my opinion. That's hard to do, but you have to make people feel comfortable. When they make a mistake, you almost celebrate the mistake because mistakes are what we learn, and you don't beat them up for it but you are firm, fair and kind in response to it. KEN: And on the subject of mistakes, we make tons of them. What we're expressing is our goals and our practice. Just like engineering or design or any of the tasks that our team does, this is our ideals. Sometimes we fall down, and we try to sort of notice and correct. I'd much rather have a system that's built on that feedback loop than on one that is built on never making a mistake. That's part of our kind of our ethos of resiliency that we hope that we are instilling in our employees by embracing ourselves. TODD: Yeah, we make lots of mistakes. One of the things I tell clients is, "Look, we're human. We make mistakes. I would ask you not to judge us on the mistakes that we make. I would ask you to judge us on the speed and the effort we make in correcting those mistakes because that is something we can control. We can't control this being perfect. We're not." And I think the same applies to our team, and hopefully if the team feels it applies to us because I would imagine we make more mistakes than most.

Way of Champions Podcast
#41 Continuing the Legacy of Johan Cruyff with TOVO Academy and Cruyff Institute Founder, Todd Beane

Way of Champions Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 26, 2017 74:30


    What would it be like to spend 14 years working alongside and learning from one of the greatest coaches of all time – Johan Cruyff? We asked Todd Beane that question and more in our most recent podcast. Download it now.   Bio Todd graduated from Dartmouth College in 1986 with a B.A. in English Literature. Upon graduation, he was awarded a Rotary Scholarship to attend the University of Sussex in England. Todd concluded his formal studies at Stanford University where he earned a M.A. in Education and a Secondary Teaching Credential. As an athlete, Todd played NCAA Division I soccer at Dartmouth College before playing professional soccer in the USISL. As a coach, he was awarded a US Soccer Federation “A” License, coaching both collegiately and professionally. He has served on the faculty of Johns Hopkins University as Director of the Native Vision Program and later as Director of the Cloud Forest School in Costa Rica.   Subscribe to the Way of Champions Podcast on iTunes   Show Notes 6:15 An American in Spain teaching Dutch Football 12:00 What was it like learning alongside Johan Cruyff? 16:40 When Todd and Johan flipped the organizational chart of Ajax upside down 20:15 The value of values in youth sports 24:55 The birth of TOVO Academy 28:35 With what we know about learning, why do we continue to teach sport the wrong way? 44:45 Coaching clinics should start with the WHY first before we teach the X’s and O’s 52:00 Without the art of educating and child advocacy, all I know about football would be lost 54:25 Todd discusses all the things that happen before a player can execute a skill 70:00 Todd’s book recommendations       Get in Touch Website: TOVO Academy Twitter: _ToddBeane Blog: Todd's Blog (This is a great resource) Email: tb@tovoacademy.com   If you are enjoying our podcast, please help us out and leave a review on iTunes. How to leave an iTunes rating or review for a podcast from your iPhone or iPad   Launch Apple’s Podcast app. Tap the Search tab. Enter the name Way of Champions. Tap the blue Search key at the bottom right. Tap the album art for the Way of Champions podcast. Tap the Reviews tab. Tap Write a Review at the bottom. Thanks so much, every review helps us to spread this message!

EM Weekly's Podcast
EP 6 EM Weekly Enhancing Your Exercises and Drills

EM Weekly's Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 27, 2017 30:48


Todd De Voe is a former Navy EOD team member and master instructor. After getting out of the Navy Todd found himself working in emergency management in the training and exercise side of the house. With years of experience Todd now is a consultant and has developed training programs around the world.  When Todd is not travling the world teaching and training, he enjoys woodworking. Check out his woodwork as well in the links below. Links https://www.linkedin.com/in/todddevoe/ twdevoe@gmail.com http://www.twistedaspenconsulting.com https://sites.google.com/twistedaspenwoodworks.com/home

Adventure Rider Radio Motorcycle Podcast. Travel Adventures, Bike Tech Tips
How Connections Make the Best Motorcycle Adventure Stories

Adventure Rider Radio Motorcycle Podcast. Travel Adventures, Bike Tech Tips

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 9, 2017 75:58


Sharing stories about connections and kindness through their motorcycle travel experiences, Sam Manicom, Todd Blubaugh and Leon Logothetis tell some inspiring, feel good anecdotes that make us realize how important it is to reach out to people wherever you go. Both for what you receive and for what you give.  Travel Changes Us, and We Come Away Different People We've often heard from those who travel on a motorcycle about how it's the people they met who made all the difference in their experience. That people are basically the same all over the country or the world. And how being on a motorcycle makes it so much easier to connect with others. When we are so 'out there', open and perhaps vulnerable, we often form connections, which lead to friendships, emotional healing, acts of kindness, conquering fears, building trust, growing confidence, and so much, much more. Travel changes us, and we often come away different people.  Sam Manicom: The Importance of Connections Sam Manicom, is a renowned motorcycle adventurer, speaker and the author of four books. He's been to many places around the world, has experienced different cultures and met a lot of people while on his travels. He has a wealth of information that he shares with our listeners as a frequent guest on Adventure Rider Radio and as a regular co-host on ARR RAW. And Sam knows the value of connecting with people, how simple gestures or conversations can lead to life changing experiences or open your eyes to different perspectives. And he knows that connections can make the story. Website: www.sam-manicom.com Leon Logothetis: The Kindness Diaries You may know Leon Logothetis, world adventurer and philanthropist, from The Kindness Diaries, book and TV show. Or perhaps you've met or seen him on his travels as he rode his yellow vintage motorcycle with a sidecar around the world. In his documented pursuit of kindness, Leon shares how human connections make anything possible, and how sharing with others tells a good story. The Kindness Diaries book is available through Amazon.com, and other major outlets, go to his website at http://www.leonlogothetis.com/books/ for more information. The Kindness Diaries TV Show is now available on Netflix. Facebook:  http://www.leonlogothetis.com/ Website: http://www.leonlogothetis.com/ Todd Blubaugh: Too Far Gone After Todd Blubaugh, motorcycle builder and photographer, experienced a major upset in his life, he set out on a trip from Seattle to New York City. He spent six months on the road, connecting with riders in the motorcycle culture, making personal discoveries and recording his journey through word and photography. When Todd came back from his adventure, he wrote a book full of telling and inspirational photos, with a unique concept of personalization that pulls you in to his story. Todd's book, Too Far Gone, is available on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Too-Far-Gone-Todd-Blubaugh/dp/1584236213 and through Ginko Press http://gingkopress.com/shop/too-far-gone/. This Week’s Show Sponsors: Support the show sponsors that help bring ADVENTURE RIDER RADIO to you. More information about contacting our sponsors can be found here. Max BMW Motorcycles Bestrest Products Green Chile Adventure Gear Aerostich TourUSA IMS Products Some music on this episode by Jason Shaw at www.audionautix.com     See more of our best motorcycle podcasts at www.adventureriderradio.com

Hosting Your Home - Airbnb host stories
HYH-25 Airbnb Can Mean Whole Houses, too

Hosting Your Home - Airbnb host stories

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 28, 2016 38:24


Debi Hertert of Hosting Your Home talks with Todd Brandewie, owner of a whole-house rental near Dayton, Ohio.  At the time, Debi and her family were renting Todd’s house for a family reunion. Todd is a single dad and lives in his house with his four-year old son.  Several nights per month, Todd and his son move to Todd’s dad’s house, or Todd’s RV, in order to rent out his Dayton house.  When Todd got divorced and found himself unable to pay the mortgage, his mom suggested Airbnb.  That suggestion saved Todd’s house and has given him a new outlook on life.   [editor's note]: Many municipalities restrict short-term rentals of whole houses, concerned about depleting the stock of long-term rentals.  Todd's is one of many examples in which homeowners would not choose to share their space as long-term rentals, because it does not fit their family living situations. As communities try to estimate the impact that Airbnb and similar platforms have on long-term rentals, they often rely on unreliable data "scraped" from short-term rental sites, and assume that houses like Todd's would be available for long-term rental if the short-term options were legislatively removed.    It is misleading to count such houses as impacting the long term rental market. A common example is an owner who wants to have space always available for their family who come visit.  We are supportive of protecting long-term rentals through good legislation, such as requiring the owner or long-term tenant to live in the home most of the year. Regulators should become aware of these types of sensible uses and make sensible rules. SHOW NOTES: Debi introduces Todd Brandewie and his mother, who is also an Airbnb host and got Todd started.   Deb talks about how well the house is working for her family.  When he rents out his own house, Todd vacates to his dad’s, or to his camper which is at his dad’s, or travels out of town.  He does a lot of cleaning himself, but does have a housekeeper who helps, and even his friends help if necessary!  He really understands how important cleanliness is in vacation rentals. Deb asks Todd how he manages moving out of his house and back.  She tells him this is the first time she has stayed in an Airbnb of this “model” where the owner lives there but leaves when they have guests.   Todd talks about the number of nights he likes to book and it covering his mortgage and some utility bills.  When Deb asks Todd to “Tell us your story”, Todd talks about thinking people would never come to Dayton, Ohio, but realizes now that there are many reasons people travel, and tourism is only a part of it. Most of his guests are coming to see family.  The family focus led Debi to recommend listing on ClanVenture, another vacation rental platform.  Access to the Airbnb platform has allowed  Todd  to keep his house after his divorce.  He shares custody of his four-year old son. Todd told all his neighbors what was going on when he started renting.  Most of his neighbors don’t even know what Airbnb even is. He said he gets lots of guests who are new to Airbnb, with no reviews.  Deb asked if Todd is worried about anything in his house getting wrecked or taken, and Todd said he doesn’t really worry  about anything in the house. Todd described his one bad experience, which was a group of dog show people who were not respectful of his property.  Followed by asking Debi for any suggestions for  improvements.  She mentioned pillows – the need for choice.  4 per bed, two soft, two firm. They talked about mattresses, and Debi told Todd and his mom about Tuft and Needle, the mattress company that has a promotional program and a waiting list for a free mattress for Superhosts.  There was a discussion about sheets, using white for everything so can bleach, getting the little black cosmetics washcloths; Todd gets frustrated about people leaving lights on all the time, and benefits of changing out to LEDs.  He expresses his gratitude that  Airbnb has allowed him and his son to keep their home. Deb asks Todd about some memorable guests.  He joked about people leaving wine and beer, but then said several people from the Lion King cast rented his house for 28 days and invited him over for a party with the whole cast, and how fun that was. And they gave him 4 front row tickets to the show!     Links: Todd’s house: https://airbnb.com/rooms/12264444 Clanventure:  https://clanventure.com/ Tuft and Needle:  https://goo.gl/PSrHHX  

5 Things That Changed Your Life
Episode 06 - Todd Masterson

5 Things That Changed Your Life

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 10, 2016 59:11


Todd discusses 5 things that changed his life: How he struggles with his age every day Receiving a large inheritance and wasting it Going on strike from the TV series, Fashion Police, and how it was the completely wrong decision Always feeling like he’s being left behind by friends When Todd came out of the closet while studying abroad in London. About Todd: Todd is a comedian, writer, and producer from West Hollywood, CA. Named one of Culture Stocked’s “Gay Comedians To Watch In 2016,” he's written for film and television icons including Joan Rivers and James Franco. His most recent work includes producing season 7 of the hit reality show RuPaul’s Drag Race on LogoTV. Catch Todd doing his stand up comedy at various stops up and down the West Coast beginning in September 2016. Follow Todd: Follow Todd on Twitter and Instagram at Todd Masterson.

Bill McAnally Racing
BMR Access Show 8/9: Evergreen Preview Featuring Todd Gilliland, Special Guest Chase Briscoe

Bill McAnally Racing

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 10, 2016 31:22


Bill McAnally Racing Access Show is back this week with your preview for this weekend's NASCAR K&N Pro Series West race from Evergreen Speedway in Washington. Joining the show to preview the NAPA Auto Parts 150 will be ur featured interview of the week, Todd Gilliland. When Todd joins the show we'll talk about his back to back West Series wins and being back atop the standings. Also joining this week's episode will be special guest Chase Briscoe from the ARCA Racing Series. Chase made his first 3 NASCAR K&N Pro Series West starts for BMR back in 2013 and has currently found success in the ARCA Racing Series leading the championship standings with 4 race wins. We'll talk to Chase about his current run of success and about the starts he made for Bill McAnally Racing when he joins us on the show. All that and more on this week's edition of BMR Access!

You Must Remember This
69: MGM Stories Part 14: Elizabeth Taylor, The MGM Years

You Must Remember This

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 15, 2015 47:45


Elizabeth Taylor grew up on the MGM lot, spending 18 years as what she referred to as “MGM chattel.” The last four years of that 18 year sentence were arguably the most interesting. From 1956-1960, she made a run of really interesting films including Giant, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Butterfield 8, and she met the “love of her life”, Mike Todd, and turned him into her third husband. When Todd died a year later Liz sought comfort in the arms of Todd’s friend - and Debbie Reynolds’ husband — Eddie Fisher. Taylor capped off the decade by almost dying, winning her first Oscar, and breaking free from MGM to become the highest paid actress up to that time. This episode is brought to you by Harry's. Make every morning he shaves feel like a Holiday. Harry’s will give you $5 off your first order with code REMEMBER. Free shipping for the Holidays ends on December 10th, so act now. Harrys.com enter code REMEMBER. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

AGP (Amanda Gilliam Presents)
EPISODE 35 - AGP (Amanda Gilliam Presents)

AGP (Amanda Gilliam Presents)

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 1, 2015


On this episode of AGP, I welcome back Todd Beistel. Todd Beistel is known as the artist of the critically acclaimed independent miniseries THE HORROR SHOW (Broken Icon Comics) now available on Comixology and Amazon. Prior to that, Todd was co-creator and artist of the ongoing webcomic YURI: GYPSY HUNTER (One-Lap Studios) as well as Lost Souls (Hunter Productions) and EYE OF THE PROBE (Probe Studios). When Todd isn't drawing comics, he can be found in his studio creating motivational posters depicting pop culture icons in stained-glass inspired paintings and fulfilling commission requests. Todd will joining us again to talk about the third installment of The Horror Show, his latest endeavors at conventions, and the death of the man, the myth, the legend Wes Craven. So please join us Tuesday September 1st at 7pm EST for all of this and so much more.

The BRAND New You Show - A Personal Branding and Digital Branding podcast
Todd Lohenry - Thought Leadership and Online Reputation

The BRAND New You Show - A Personal Branding and Digital Branding podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 13, 2015 46:50


Todd Lohenry | Online Reputation | Thought Leadership Show Notes: http://ryanrhoten.com/toddstips On today's show I welcome back to the show Todd Lohenry from toddlohenry.com. Todd's first appearance on the podcast where we discussed thought leadership and online reputation management at a strategic level can be found HERE. A thought leader himself , Todd's passion is helping thinkers become thought leaders in their own right using a process he calls the elevation workflow. When Todd was last on we walked through each of the nine steps in his elevation workflow at a higher more strategic level This time we're going to dive a little deeper and talk about the tools and apps Todd uses to help facilitate and execute the elevation workflow process. Contemplate Consider your avatar and how you can be in strategic alignment with your audience. This will help you speak their language and meet their expectations. Tools to help determine your avatar's language: Google search, Google Trends, and Google Adwords keyword planner. TIP: During a basic Google search scroll to the bottom of the page. There you will find additional more niche keywords and phrases suggested by Google. Consume & Curate The tools and applications used during the consume and curate steps can be the same. Todd uses them to divide content into four buckets; sites (website), searches (Google searches), sources (current thought leaders you follow) and someday maybe information. Todd looks to RSS content readers to help both consume and curate content. He recommends the following RSS readers; Digg, Feedspot, Feedly and Inoreader. Todd's favorite is Inoreader. He created an easy to follow video on how to use inoreader which you can find on YouTube. If you're interested in Inoreader Todd recommends a One Note document created by Marjolein Hoekstra. I reviewed the document and can tell you it is very comprehensive. You can find Marjolein at CleverClogs.org Create Todd recommends the self-hosted version of WordPress, which is WordPress.org. I put together a step-by-step video to show you exactly how to this. You can have a website up and running in as little as 5 minutes. Todd discussed in detail how you can use a WordPress plugin called Jetpack to send a simple email which will post directly to your site as a blog post. If you can send an email, you can start building your online reputation. Other tools include Microsoft's OneNote and Word. Both give you word precessing power and spell checking capabilities. Another tool Todd recommends for Mac users is an application from Red Sweater called MarsEdit. I personally use an application called DeskPM. Of course you can also publish using the post area directly from your WordPress blog. The reality is there are so many options for publishing online today the only excuse you really have, is yourself. I wrote about that HERE. If you're concerned about the learning curve checkout my FREE course to help you get started with WordPress at DIY Website GUY. Collect Todd uses a freemium tool called RebelMouse. He uses this tool to pull together all of the sites and sources he follows into one page. This page can be added into your WordPress website for others who follow you to enjoy as well. This gives your audience an additional reason to come to YOU to seek information on a particular topic or niche. Connect This is where social media comes into play. Todd's advice for connecting on social media is to use exactly the number you need and one more. The choice of which social network to use should be based on where your audience hangs out. Todd does recommend however two platforms for strong consideration; Google Plus and Twitter. For Twitter Todd uses a tool called BuzzSumo to determine the information being shared in your niche and who the influencers are you should pay attention to. Google + For Google Plus Todd recommends checking out Friends Plus Me. Friends Plus Me enables you to autopost your content to other platforms after first posting to Google Plus. Using Friends Plus Me in this way allows you to focus on only one platform, specifically Google Plus for its search engine optimization value. In case you're wondering Google Plus is not dead. Todd recommends checking a book written by David Amerland titled Google Semantic Search (affiliate link) to learn more about how search works today. Todd also recommends a tool called Circloscope to help you discover everything about the people you engage with on Google Plus. Converse Todd recommends a dashboard applications like Hootsuite which allows you to pull together all of your social network signals in one place. Convert For conversion Todd didn't offer any specifics because there are so many platforms out there. I personally use two platforms to varying degrees. This site is built on a Website theme and landing page platform called Optimizepress. I highly recommend this platform for it's ability for you to create that website design you've been searching for but don't have the design skills to build yourself. Another tools I am starting to incorporate into the site is LeadPages (affiliate link). LeadPages is specifically designed to help you convert visitors to your site in subscribers. Create Community Continue your conversation with your audience by creating a community where you can have deeper, more through provoking discussions. Think about the groups features on social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Google +. WRAP The following methods are The best way to get in touch with Todd Web: toddlohenry.com/start Twitter: @toddlohenry  

Parenting Mistakes
My Little Pony Friendship is Magic

Parenting Mistakes

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 28, 2015 29:35


When Todd and Dave are together friendship is magic, tune in for our take on Ponies. Follow us on Twitter /parentmistakes

History Makers Radio
Todd Burpo

History Makers Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 11, 2011 24:50


In this interview, Leigh Hatcher speaks with Nebraska pastor Todd Burpo, author of the book Heaven is for Real. When Todd’s son Colton was 4, he suffered from an undiagnosed ruptured appendix. The book, Heaven is for Real, details Burpo's claims that during the months after emergency surgery, Colton began describing events and people it was impossible for him to have seen or met, such as his miscarried sister, whom no one had told him about, and his great grandfather who died 30 years before Colton was born. Within three weeks of its November 2010 release, the book debuted at #3 on the New York Times bestseller list. By January 2011, there were 200,000 copies in print, and the book hit #1 on the New York Times list.

Adventure Sports Podcast
Ep. 478: Connecting Veterans with the Outdoors and Each Other - Todd Crevier

Adventure Sports Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 31, 1969 52:40


When Todd got back from deployment, he had a mound of issues to work through. Divorce, drug addiction, and chronic pain all led to him really struggling with the transition to civilian life. Not to mention, not having many folks around him that understood what war was like.   A family vacation to Yellowstone National Park changed everything. Todd felt the wilderness had given him the confidence to act on his dream of connecting veterans and their families with each other by connecting them with the outdoors. Thus, New England Adventure was born. www.NewEnglandAdventures.org, www.facebook.com/NewEnglandAdventures Instagram: @new_england_adventures01     Save 20% off the best freeze-dried meals you’ll ever eat with Peak Refuel. Use the code ASP20 at checkout by visiting https://peakrefuel.com/ @peakrefuel Gear up for the 2018-2019 ski season by shopping Powder7 Ski Shop's massive selection of new and used gear at https://www.powder7.com/ @powder7 If you deal with inflammation and pain from your Adventure Sport, give Hemp Daddy's CBD oil and transdermal cream a shot. Get 10% off by using "adventure" at hempdaddys.com @hemp_daddys Support the Adventure Sports Podcast by giving as low as $1/month to our efforts to produce this show at https://www.patreon.com/AdventureSportsPodcast Call and leave us a voicemail at 812-MAIL-POD or 812-624-5763 or send an email to info@adventuresportspodcast.com