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2 episodes with your it
2 episodes with your it
2 episodes with your it
Ian Gottesman is CEO of a coalition of 200+ NGOs and 20 major IT companies working together to improve cybersecurity for the nonprofit sector (NGO ISAC). He has decades of experience in executive roles in nonprofit cybersecurity in a variety of organizations.In these challenging times for the nonprofit sector generally, many nonprofits are taking a harder look at their cybersecurity policies to better protect their organization and staff. Community IT recommends getting to a foundational level of basic cybersecurity, and you can download our free Cybersecurity Readiness for Nonprofits Playbook to learn what that means and how to put those basics in place. Three cybersecurity basics to think about: manage your identity, patch your hardware and software, and look out for phishing – train your staff. You will get 80% protection from just doing those three low cost things – why would you want to get 0%?When your cybersecurity basics are in place, Ian recommends strengthening your nonprofit data retention policy and compliance as your first next step. Again, this is low cost in terms of your budget, but will have costs to your organization in terms of staff time and energy. So let this challenging moment motivate your team to take on a sorting-and-retaining-or-deleting project.Some Key Takeaways:Cybersecurity Basics are not difficult and protect you from 80% of hacks.Manage your identity. Accounts must be protected, your staff should be verifying they are who is supposed to be logging in.Patch your hardware and software. The easiest way to do this is reboot – log out, restart, and log back in periodically. Your IT provider or internal IT staff should be patching as part of your cybersecurity strategy.Look out for phishing – train your staff. More than 90% of attacks start out tricking a user into clicking a link. For more information on anti-phishing training, check out this webinar on Cybersecurity Awareness Training Tips.Cybercrimes are crimes.Don't feel that you were responsible for your own victimization. Clicking on links happens. Huge companies fall for scams. Encourage a culture of openness and sharing around cybersecurity best practices and incident response planning.Make sure your nonprofit culture embraces a team approach to cybersecurity, and that everyone on your staff knows to tell someone when they see something suspicious or make a mistake, and who to tell. Holding cybercriminals accountable in every country should be a bigger goal for our governments and our laws. Nonprofit Data Retention Policy is a valuable project now.Remind your staff not to put in writing in any device or app something they would not want to be public about your organizationCreating and monitoring compliance with a nonprofit data retention policy does not require expensive tools but it does require the time and energy of your staff. Avoiding unnecessary reputational risks is worth it. Make sure your nonprofit data retention policy covers emails and messaging in addition to documents and files. _______________________________Start a conversation :) Register to attend a webinar in real time, and find all past transcripts at https://communityit.com/webinars/ email Carolyn at cwoodard@communityit.com on LinkedIn Thanks for listening.
Sarfraz Shaikh Starting in marketing and communications at OneMesa, Sarfraz Shaikh transitioned to IT leadership through initiative and problem-solving. Now serving as Director of IT, he oversees technology across four distinct business units, bringing a unique blend of communication skills and technical expertise to the role. Your IT strategies silently suffocate growth, here is why....
What do you need to do now to track your inventory? Why do you need to track inventory - and why isn't there a killer app for that yet?A significant number of clients come to Community IT without any inventory tracking at all. Besides being a financial risk this is a clear security risk - especially if you have no system in place to off-board staff who leave your nonprofit but keep their laptop and access to private files and business subscriptions.Why is it so hard to track inventory if you are a smaller organization (under 100 staff)? Listen to CEO Johan Hammerstrom share the three categories of inventory you need to track, and where that information probably lives at your nonprofit. With a little prioritization now, you can ensure your organization is protected from bad actors and can account for all your laptops. Johan shares these IT inventory tips to help our community avoid headaches and security risks. Some Key IT Inventory Tips:There is no perfect software or app to track inventory for smaller organizations. You will have to track it yourself, it cannot easily be delegated and philosophically probably shouldn't be outsourced. A spreadsheet can work for smaller organizations.Three categories of inventory you need to track:Equipment as an asset that the organization has purchased. Need to track it as part of financial accounting. Usually tracked by finance team.Who has that equipment been assigned to? Which laptop went to which staff member? This can also be tracked by the finance or HR team, or the IT team.Who is logged in to that computer? Who is the end user and which apps and licenses are they using (that the organization is paying for). Where is it located, how is it logged into the internet, who is the last person to log in to it? Your IT team will be able to track this. You should cross reference these three categories and reconcile them periodically.You need a standard process for off-boarding staff and recovering equipment from them/deactivating their subscriptions and access. Managing subscriptions is a related issue, and is equally important for your nonprofit to track, both for financial reasons (paying for subscriptions that are not being used, or paying for individual subscriptions when an enterprise subscription would be easier/cheaper/have more features) and for cybersecurity reasons. _______________________________Start a conversation :) Register to attend a webinar in real time, and find all past transcripts at https://communityit.com/webinars/ email Carolyn at cwoodard@communityit.com on LinkedIn Thanks for listening.
Every parent knows, It takes a village to raise a child. Each of the adults in the child's life, relatives, teachers, coaches, brings a different perspective. The same is true for your business. No matter how smart you are or how much you know about your business, there are gaps in your skill-set. Your business village should be filled with smart, talented subject matter experts to help you fill in the gaps. If you are running a small business your village won't be comprised of employees, but an advisory board comprised of professionals, who provide information and guidance in their areas of expertise. Who Do You Need in Your Business Village? (On your advisory board) Your Attorney Your attorney's primary objective is to protect you and your business from risk. As you start you business your attorney can advise you on the right structure for your business and submit appropriate state and federal documents. As you business grows turn to your attorney for a range of legal documents such as contracts, non-disclosure agreements, and non-compete agreements with employees. An attorney who is familiar with your business makes the process of creating new documents much more efficient because you won't have to start each review by explaining what your business is about. Your Accountant There are bookkeepers, financial accountants and tax accountants. Which do you need? Well that depends on your comfort level with the numbers of your business. A bookkeeper keeps your day to day operations on track, paying bills and invoicing clients. A financial accountant is someone who can provide guidance not just bookkeeping assistance. Your accountant should prepare financial reports on a monthly basis and review key numbers with you. Your accountant should be able to help you predict if you have enough cash to meet future obligations and growth goals. A tax accountant does more than just prepare your tax returns, understanding your business, he/she can help you make decisions about when to invest, when to pull back, and how to avoid paying more than you should in taxes each year. Your Banker The worst time to establish a banking relationship is when you need money. As you start your business get to know your local business banker. He/she will advise you on the types of accounts you will need, develop a cash management strategy, and secure funding when you need it. Your Financial Planner For many small business owners, the business is your retirement plan. The question is will this be enough? Don't guess. A good financial planner will look at both your personal and business finances to make sure you have what you need when you are ready to walk away from the business. Your IT and Marketing Support Sure, you can manage your computers and software on your own. You can post content on social media and call it marketing, but just like every other element of your business, you need to stop and ask yourself, should you? Is this the best use of your time, and do you really have the expertise to manage those roles in house. If not, it is time to add these professionals to your team. In both cases, the industry is changing rapidly. You need people on your advisory board who understand both the trends and your business objectives. Lean on them to make the right suggestions about where and when to invest so you can focus on growing your business. Build Your Business Village Sure you may own your own business, but you don't have to do it all on your own. Start building your village today. Don't try to do it all at once. Find someone in one of these categories and enlist their aid in filling the other slots on your advisory board. If you've enjoyed this conversation sign up for a weekly newsletter get links to episodes you might have missed and other resources for your business https://morethanafewwords.com/avoid-fomo/
IT Setup & Cybersecurity w/ Luciano Aguayo of Redgear AZ TRT S05 EP07 (222) 2-18-2024 What We Learned This Week RedGear provides turnkey IT solutions for clients. Outsource IT to shift liability IT often an afterthought, when it should be a major priority - lifestyle of tech in a business Data is lifeblood of a company, need security Cybersecurity is just one part, need to monitor physical location, who has access, email, etc Guest: Luciano Aguayo of Redgear https://redgear.com/ Luciano Aguayo is a Texas native, and an active member and contributor to the Southwest Technology community. His professional career spans a diverse industry portfolio and has held various titles and certifications at the senior engineering and senior management levels. Luciano specializes in designing and implementing turnkey complex infrastructure solutions. For the past 20 years Luciano has designed and implemented numerous infrastructures for regional and local school districts, has a diverse portfolio of local and international businesses, including the federal government, and key Southwest landmarks and attractions. After several years in the private sector and after building a loyal customer base, Luciano launched RedGear in 2016. RedGear is a regional business to business technology solutions company. Since its inception, RedGear has quickly grown to 4 locations, 50+ employees, and recently opened a regional office in Phoenix, Arizona. Luciano remains active in the technology industry helping oversee the portfolio of one of Southwest's largest developers. He also is an active member of El Paso Community College ITSC Advisory Committee He also owns and operates El Paso's newest carrier neutral datacenter. He brings effective and proven leadership and mentoring qualities and has an eye for detail when managing projects. He has a passion for technology, giving back to the community, and mentoring the future generations of Engineers. 20+ years experience in: Cisco CCNP Routing and Switching, Cisco Nexus Datacenter, CCNP Voice, CCDA, Cisco Security, Cisco WLAN, Cisco Unified Communications (VoIP), Citrix CCA, Citrix Xen Desktop, Citrix XenApp, MCSE, MCSA, Operating Systems Troubleshooting, Hardware/Software Troubleshooting, Advanced Windows Server Configuration and Troubleshooting, VM Ware, Enterprise Design, Implementation, solutions, IT Consulting, and much more. RedGear RedGear provides professional technology services, equipment, and consulting in the Southwest US region. Our entire culture is built around supporting business infrastructures, while building relationships and delivering an exceptional customer service experience and always keeping our customers best interest a top priority. We've built our success by reputation, quality of work, professionalism, and always being there for clients every step of the way whenever they need us. Our services, certifications, experience, and expertise cover the entire spectrum of Information Technology that no other regional technology service provider can match. We manage all aspects of Technology so the customer can focus on running their business. Our company vision is based on delivering premier customer service by employing and retaining top talent that believes in our mission, we work hard to provide trusted, honest, immediate, and excellent IT services to every client, no matter how big or small. No more wondering what kind of support you will receive. Our staff is certified in numerous fields, to offer the upmost reliable support. Our experience is vast covering all sizes of organizations and industries. Notes: Seg 2 Redgear IT company responsible for security of their clients. IT is a lifestyle. RedGear value proposition is turkey solutions. They are your smart friend to help with tech. Support IT for small businesses. They also have larger enterprise type clients. They act as a consultant, and can screen for a CTO or a CIO for a company. IT should be a priority of companies yet, it is often an afterthought. Need to understand how to secure an IT room, not just in software, but also the actual room itself. Who has access? RedGear works in the tech and security industry which is the backbone of all organizations and compliance. People hire RedGear to outsource and shift liability. IT in its simplest form is anything that you plug into the wall and connect to the Internet. It can also mean security. Trust of your IT provider, and keeping business contingency. Question, businesses always have to answer is how long can they stay down with an interruption and survive. Plus what is their plan for data retention. IT can be about network, connections, computers, hardware, and the actual Physical IT room. Can also deal in cyber security and password resets. IT has both software as well as hardware like servers and programming applications. Luciano has 20+ years of experience working in IT and technology. Information Technology not always the priority of many companies but it really should be. Need a plan going forward to manage security and data in all businesses. You have to determine what's going to be your budget based on the size of the business. Not uncommon to outsource to companies like RedGear. Also need to think about the physical aspects of IT, like is your room secure? What type of energy your BTU air conditioner usage are you using? Who has control, how cool is it. Who has access to the room? What is your electrical circuit set up? Do you have redundancy? Or electrical circuit separate and dedicated to the IT. What is your data or cloud storage like? Seg 3 IT is the backbone of many organizations and should be a priority. Need to hire trustworthy people, as well as outsource IT to trustworthy companies. There's no perfect set up. Unfortunately, security breaches are more question of When, and not if. One of the worst stories about IT Luciano ever heard of was the janitor storage closet was the same as the IT room. Another issue with a lot of IT rooms is they don't have good cooling. IT should be a separate room with good security. You want to also have video security and badge access. Physical access of an IT room is very underrated. Security is the biggest threat to the end-user. You have to know when a breach happens. How did it happen? It could be software but often it's actually the employees as a threat. They need to pay attention to what is going on and types of emails they get. Also, sometimes security breaches are an inside job. Companies need to test and educate their staff about IT. Once Malware gets in to the system it can take over accounts and send email as the person. Phishing scams unfortunately are still very popular with emails. Good email security typically will filter out malicious emails. Then you waitlist your contact, so you know who it's OK to email. All these need to examine emails. Seg 4 IT reviews & monitors compliance, so a company must determine a budget. Data is the gold of companies now. Data contains the companies processes, industry secrets, and private employee and customer info. It is crucial to have a backup of company data, typically onsite and secured, plus offsite in the cloud. You'll always want to build in redundancy and have backup servers for data. Good IT set up will have disaster recovery. As for the physical set up and protecting data, you want to be aware of how your sprinkler system is set up. You always have to guard against disgruntled employees, who could steal or delete company data. Your IT provider needs to know the industry and have good experience to engineer the proper solution. RedGear has worked with some top level clients, including the DEA in Washington DC on a federal level. Their cyber security needs to be top-of-the-line. It is not in common for the average big company to deal with corporate attacks where hackers try to steal data, and then even hold it hostage for ransom. Common practice nowadays is for a business to have cyber security liability insurance. The application for the insurance will ask about the physical environment and the set up of the IT and data. The medical industry has updated cyber and HIPAA compliance. It is essential to have good IT, hospitals and any major medical office. RedGear is your IT smart friends. They will always give you recommendations of good better and best. Seg 1. – Related IT Clips from: Phishing, Malware & Cybersecurity - Try Not to Get Pwned - BRT S02 EP47 (94) 11-21-2021 What We Learned This Week: Have I been Pwned? Means have I been breached / hacked – did someone hack my email or website Phishing – most common type of email threat, like when you receive a strange email with a link – Do Not Open – DELETE (and alert other office staff of the email) Ramsonware – hack your website, or data – hold it hostage for an extortion ‘ransom' payment Dark Web – where stolen data, & info is being bought & sold VPN Connections – direct and secure Guests: Vince Matteo, Seven Layer Networks, Inc. https://sevenlayers.com/ There are many different types of cyber attacks from a password breach, website hack to email phishing scams. Vince Matteo of Seven Layers (.com) gives advice on what to be on the lookout for, tips for protection, and some reference sites for more info. We discuss Email Phishing scams, spearphishing attack, password breaches, website hacks, data breaches, ramsonware, software and VPNs. Full Show: HERE Cybersecurity, Disruption, Blockchain & Terrorism w Ari Redbord of TRM Labs - BRT S02 EP31 (78) 8-1-2021 What We Learned This Week Cybersecurity is extremely important industry for national security TRM Labs startup in cyber-security, monitors blockchain OFAC - Gov't administers economic and trade sanctions Ransomeware – specific breach, takeover of a computer system, holds data hostage Programatic Money Laundering – bad guys create new addresses, create ‘shell' companies Guest: Ari Redbord, Head of Legal and Government Affairs w/ TRM Labs https://www.linkedin.com/in/ari-redbord-4054381b4/ https://www.trmlabs.com/post/trm-labs-appoints-ari-redbord-as-head-of-legal-government-affairs Ari is formerly a US Attorney, and worked in the Treasury Department, now advises the Government on cybersecurity, and Blockchain. Cybersecurity is a fast growing and extremely important industry for national security, and corporate interests. There are Nation States acting as bad players in the cyber realm and targeting the US Government and US business. We discuss the advancements in technology on cyber crime, blockchain, crypto, and online fraud. How is the FBI dealing with Ransomware, and other cyber attacks on prime targets like the Colonial Pipeline, or other big corps. What Regulations are coming in banking, and Fintech, with KYC (Know Your Customer), plus the big banks like JP Morgan Chase and Goldman are on board. What the blockchain ledger can help solve in security, to monitor criminal activity in real time with the help of crypto exchanges like Coinbase. Lastly, what TRM Labs does for clients, how they advise, operate, and who they work with. Notes: TRM Labs – blockchain security biz, works with law enforcement and businesses. Financial exchanges and Regulators. Monitor cyber-security - TRM – startup, 3 yrs old, Ari joined 2021. Monitor risk in crypto currency. Full Show: HERE Best of Biotech from AZ Bio & Life Sciences to Jellatech: HERE Biotech Shows: HERE AZ Tech Council Shows: https://brt-show.libsyn.com/size/5/?search=az+tech+council *Includes Best of AZ Tech Council show from 2/12/2023 ‘Best Of' Topic: https://brt-show.libsyn.com/category/Best+of+BRT Thanks for Listening. Please Subscribe to the BRT Podcast. AZ Tech Roundtable 2.0 with Matt Battaglia The show where Entrepreneurs, Top Executives, Founders, and Investors come to share insights about the future of business. AZ TRT 2.0 looks at the new trends in business, & how classic industries are evolving. 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The race is on to set the mood for today's episode, which is about competition. I'm going to talk about competition because I've had a few suggestions that maybe I should talk a little bit about some business strategies. Maybe at some point, we'll talk about finances, P& L, balance sheet, estimating. But in this episode, I want to talk a little bit about sales and we will talk more about sales in future episodes. But I think today what I want to do is talk about. competition, and how, how you speak about your competition. Do you speak about your competitors? When do you speak about your competitors? Should you speak about your competitors? Because, uh, you know, in the landscape industry, there's oftentimes not a lot of sales training and the way that a lot of us handle. Our competition isn't always very strategic. It's oftentimes unprofessional. Yet, Um, we tend to, when I say we, my observation is that a lot of you get tied up thinking too much about your competitors, which also affects the way you price and market your company, your products, your services, et cetera. So today I'm going to dig into how to speak about your competition, how to frame your competition, and how to position yourself and your competitors in this episode. If you are an irrigation professional, old or new, who designs, installs, or maintains high-end residential, commercial, or municipal properties, and you want to use technology to improve your business, to get a leg up on your competition, even if you're an old school irrigator from the days of hydraulic systems, this show is for you. Okay, here we go. So I think I'm going to use just my own personal experience, um, helping to build the baseline company, uh, specifically because, you know, way back in the day when, when I was first introduced to baseline, which was. 2004 or 2005, they, they didn't, they didn't have any salespeople. It was just the founders, a couple of engineering, manufacturing people, and a, you know, sort of receptionist, uh, accountant, a bookkeeper, if you will. That was it. There were like five people, you know, and then, and then we, we grew the company. But, uh, at one point there, nobody knew who Baseline was. Nobody knew really amazing emerging technology. Nobody knew who the company was. So the various sales situations, that I was a part of, there was only competition because nobody knew, who I was. And I'm going to try to make a couple of analogies as we go through this, but I want to start by saying there's a difference between being the existing leader in the space, the biggest. competitors versus being the incumbent small, let's call it startup company, whether that's a manufacturing, a distributor or retailer, a contractor, whenever you're starting out, you're kind of that smaller emerging player. So depending on who you are, when you're listening to this, you know, keep this in mind because there might be some strategies that you want to deploy. If you are the small and emerging, and there might be some cautionary words if you are the biggest players. So when I say the biggest players, let's just say Rain Bird, Toro Hunter. Transcribed Uh, for instance, in, in our industry, or if it, as it relates to contractors, you know, maintenance contractors, perhaps Brightview is a big player. And then, you know, Joe's, uh, Joe's landscape maintenance that's starting up is the, is the incumbent. So just keep that in mind as we go through this. But I want to start by saying that in the most general sense, I tend to, and I guess me, my, my thought is to, when you talk about your competition, try to talk about them without naming them or naming their particular product or their particular company. If you have to talk about your competitors, you don't have to talk about them by name. And there are a couple of reasons why this is beneficial. And instead of talking about them by name, I think it's better to look at kind of the entire landscape. Uh, and if you are a startup tech company bringing, let's say some new estimating software or design software to market, you might be, you might be addressing the entire United States or perhaps the entire world. And if that's the case, what you want to do is, is look at that entire. market and then put your competitors, put the existing competitors into buckets and there's some real benefit to this. So put your, put your competitors into buckets. And again, if you're, if you're servicing the entire country, you want to look at the entire landscape of the United States. If you're serving a local market, you want to create, uh, your, your buckets based on that local market. So, I'll point out that these buckets may not exist. You, get to create the buckets. And You want to create buckets that frame your product exactly where, or your service, your business, your company, you want to use buckets that frame your business exactly where you want to be positioned and by positioning, by, by creating these buckets exactly where you want to position your, you are also creating, uh, you're framing your competitors into those buckets. This is not what your competitor thinks they are. This is where you get to say, you get to create these buckets and you get to educate your, your, your, your customer about the market, about the buckets, what the different, um, you know, the full landscape looks like without talking by the competitor by name or their feature by name. You're just kind of giving the lay of the land. Companies that are like type A, and companies that are like type B. And so let me give you an example of what I would do. Um, at baseline, so instead of speaking about the competition, what I would do is I would create buckets that would speak to baseline's kind of core benefit while also kind of planting the seed so that if the customer were to speak with, let's say, Rainbird, Rainbird would not have the capability that I just positioned. Even though I didn't say Rainbird, I would create a bucket and position Rainbird in that bucket or I would create a bucket and position Baseline into this amazing bucket so that if they were to speak with Rainbird, Rainbird wouldn't have that particular feature. So something like this You know back, let's say around 2010 I would say something like one of Baseline's core benefits is that We are a technology company, and because of this, we focus a hundred percent on modern web architecture, modern web performance, right? And, and building a technology platform that plays nicely with modern web performance. Your IT department and an example of this would be our web-based interface. You can access baseline software Using any web browser. There's no software to purchase no software to load on your machine or update and We consider this to be the new standard Okay? So there's the bucket. The new standard that I created, that I framed, which is modern web platform, web based interface. And the reason that I would say this is because at the time, 2010, Baseline was the only company So instead of saying something like, Yeah, we have a web based interface. Instead, I would position it as a technology company with modern web architecture. We consider this to be the new standard in the industry. Okay? Now, by saying that, you know, plant the seed that That web based platform is the future web based platform is the new standard so that if the if that client happened to go talk to a competitor and have a discussion about web based platforms, the competitor would not be able to wouldn't wouldn't have that doesn't have that capability, which, you know, puts them in that in that bucket. We'll talk about how what we what we also kind of call that. But how I like to think of that is that you create the narrative. You get to, you know, tell the story, paint the picture, create the narrative of what the market looks like, what the region looks like, what the, you know, how irrigation is performed in your city, your market, you get to create that narrative. So your customer doesn't create their own story or their own narrative. So I would say something like, you know, we, this was, you know, me and my baseline days, we are different than traditional. Irrigation manufacturers that major in plastic manufacturing for blank reason. We are different than legacy manufacturers that major in blank. Okay. Because. You know, who wants to be considered if you're buying a piece of technology, do you want to be, you want to, do you want to be framed as a legacy company or a traditional company? So those are kind of two buckets that I would create. Never mentioned the competitor by name, but I, but I would just create those buckets. And say we are different than legacy companies. We are different than traditional companies. Sometimes I would mention by name, but you can do that if you are the smaller company. We'll talk about that in a second. You can name the competitor sometimes if you are the smaller company, because if Rainbird is, you're not trying, they already know. They're probably going to have a conversation if, if you're a commercial maintenance company, likely in a, in a metro area, likely your customer may have a discussion, let's say with Brightview. And again, I'm, I'm just using names that might be, that you might be able to relate to. It's likely that they're going to have a conversation with Brightview. So you could say something like, we are different than traditional companies like Brightview. Because blank, now you've framed Brightview as a traditional company, or you could say something like, we are different than legacy companies like Brightview because blank. Again, I may seem like I'm picking on Brightview. I'm not. I'm just naming them because there are only a few sort of large national companies that might be in every local area. So if you are working at Brightview, please don't take this personally. I'm just just using it figuratively. But it doesn't also, it doesn't always work the other way around, okay? So, if you are Brightview, if you are Rainbird, if you are SiteOne, Ewing, et cetera, and you are the, let's say the... current market leader. And again, I'm not saying Rainbird's the market leader, but technically, yeah, they kind of are, right. They're one of the market leaders. If you are the market leader, I think it is rarely an advantage to specifically naming competitors. So there was nothing better for me in the early days and for Baseline in the early days, nothing better than if one of the larger leaders like Rainbird, Toro, Hunter, even Rainmaster, Kalsense, you know, and Tukor for that matter. There was nothing better than if they would name Baseline. And the reason is because nobody knew who Baseline was. So, if a larger competitor were to bring up Baseline in the conversation, all of a sudden, it's like they, they immediately legitimize Baseline. Not legitimizing the features and the capability, but by naming the company, they legitimize the fact that Baseline's large enough to be a part of the conversation. Okay? So, if you're the larger company, if you're the market leader, it's rarely to your advantage to name the smaller incumbent. And this, and I'm not going to name names, but there are existing examples of this, even in the irrigation industry that I see regularly from larger technology companies that are the market leaders naming smaller incumbents. And it is, it does nothing but legitimize them, bring them into the conversation. And if your customer did not know who they were. Now they know who they are and if you name them, they probably should go do their due diligence and talk to them because if they're legitimate enough for the market leader to be aware and add to the conversation, then your customer probably needs to go have a conversation and so you just did yourself a disservice by mentioning them and bringing them into the conversation. So that's kind of like I would say the untold Untold rule is that if you are the bigger company, don't bring in, don't bring in your smaller, the, the small guys. Okay. Um, let's see, what should we, where should we go next with this? I think that this also relates to something that we see called a kill sheet and a kill sheet. You, you've probably seen, um, let's just say sprinkler manufacturer, a, you know, creates a kill sheet for their new rotor. And in this kill sheet, you see a list of features from their rotor. And then you see, you know, competitor one, competitor two, competitor three, and you see this like a, you know, comparison. Uh, feature, feature comparison, it's known as a kill sheet and there's a couple of reasons why I don't particularly like kill sheets. Number one, because it brings competitors into the conversation that may not have been in the conversation already and legitimizes them. But it also helps bring up this phrase that I, that I love to use, and that is in the sales process. Of course, don't answer questions that haven't been asked. A lot of times we want to assume our customer, our prospect is going to ask us something. And so you see a lot of salespeople that just love to talk and they start, they start answering questions that the customer hasn't even asked. And oftentimes it's leading them down a path that they weren't going to go down before. And I think this is a great, you know, the kill sheet is a great example of that. You're answering, you're answering questions that the customer hasn't even asked. So it really serves, it really serves little purpose unless the customer specifically came in. You know, searching for, you know, this exact difference. So you might be able to now, as I think about this, you might be able to have like a landing page, right? If somebody goes to Google and they search, you know, Rainbird 5, 000. Versus Hunter PGP, right? You may not want to, I would not recommend you ever have that conversation with a prospect unless they ask. And if they ask, you don't necessarily have to show. But if they search that on Google, okay, maybe you want to have a landing page that talks about that, those differences, but that would be kind of the only, the only time I would recommend having that, that kill sheet or, you know, in your local area, if you think people are searching. You know, Contractor A versus Contractor B. So, in other words, let's say you're a salesperson for some fictitious company called Complete Irrigation. I wouldn't recommend you say something like, you may have heard of Advanced Irrigation because they are new, they're advertising a lot in this local area, but they don't do Blank. Don't say that. If you are the larger company, i. e. complete irrigation, don't say something like, you may have heard of advanced irrigation because they are the, they are new and they're advertising a lot. Don't mention the competition, especially when they're smaller. All right. So don't mention the competition if they're smaller. Don't answer questions that, that haven't been asked. And I would say if you are asked about the competition, it doesn't mean you have to provide an answer. Okay. This is where strategy comes in. Just because someone asks you a question doesn't mean you have to provide an answer to that question. Number one, you could reply with another question. Number two, you get to respond any way that you, any way that you want to. So what I would do if, if someone asks you about. Uh, your competitor, go back to your positioning buckets, you know, instead of answering the question exactly, uh, find a bucket to put them in, you know, that, that way it can help you avoid the question. So if they, if somebody were to ask me something, you know, specific about Rainbird, I would, you know, I might say something like, well, you know, the way that legacy companies handle that feature is blank. Okay. You get to, you get to reposition them, which also positions you. Okay. So I may have gotten a little off track. I hope, I hope not. But I think that in summary here, you know, competition is, how do I say this? Competition is kind of made up. It's always there. It's never going to go away. How you relate to the competitor is up to you. Okay, so that's why there are no competitors. The only competitor is you. You are your own biggest competitor. I guess those might be some of my final words. You are your own biggest competitor. And I think that in summary, again, if you're the larger company, it will not help for you to name your smaller competitors, even if they happen to be, you know, The cute, the cute girl, AKA the pretty girl at the dance. It doesn't mean you have to talk about them. Don't talk about the new smaller competitors. And remember that you get to control the narrative. It's your narrative. You get to position. yourself, your company, your, your product, your service. And you also get to position your competitors by educating your customer about the entire landscape and placing competitors into certain buckets without mentioning them by name. So never miss an opportunity to position your competitors, paint the picture of the market. Position your competitors accordingly. And as a result, I think your competitors will only be left to. React and that's what you want to do. You want to seem like you are, you know, the entire market, you've created these buckets, you've framed up the competition into certain buckets and, and then your competitor will only be left to react. So I think, uh, yeah, this, this could be the one of the first. First episodes I've done with sales strategies, and I think the sale is easy if the positioning is done Properly so yeah take that for what it's worth think of think of creating buckets positioning framing And then the sale just becomes easy after that and and some of this is unlimited again You just use your creative use creativity to create buckets that frame up your company Even if you are the, um, your company is the oldest in your market area, even if your company is not using technology, even if your company, you know, is not, if your company is not keeping up with the times, you still get to create new buckets to position your competitors and frame yourself in the way that you want to be framed in a way that you know your, what your customers are looking for. Thank you as always for listening. Really appreciate you guys. Really appreciate those who, uh, reach out to me. Thank you, Michelle from Canada for connecting with me this week. Great to talk to you and, uh, if you haven't already follow, subscribe, share this podcast with a, with a colleague or a friend. And, uh, it kind of feels good to have 143 episodes, so if you've only listened to a couple, you know, dig back into the archives, find something else to listen to, and I would always love to have a suggestion if you have something that you'd like me to talk about or do some research on or bring on a guest, reach out any time. So thanks so much guys, we'll catch you next week on another episode. Bye bye.
Increasingly, the work of the registrar relies on technology. Having a vibrant and positive working relationship with your Information Technology (IT) services division–whatever it's called at your institution!--is vital to working efficiently and effectively. In this episode we talk to two IT leaders about the way their divisions run, what makes them tick, and what keeps them up at night. This wide-ranging discussion is not limited to the student side of their work, but is intended to shed some light on all of the other things IT divisions do as part of their support for the institution. Key Takeaways:Building strong relationships with your information technology division is crucial to the success of your work in the registrar's office. Involving IT early and often in your strategic planning will go a long way to avoid problems with resource allocation and expectation management. IT divisions are tasked with enormous responsibilities across institutions. Support of the student systems is one aspect of what they do, and recognizing that they have significant other areas of responsibility can help ease frustrations and encourage collaboration. Technology will continue to change at an increasing rate. It's critical to get comfortable with change as a constant and not get too attached to one specific way of doing something. Your IT division is there to help but it must be a true partnership. Hosts:Doug McKenna, University RegistrarGeorge Mason Universitycmckenn@gmu.edu Sarah Reed, University RegistrarUniversity of California - Berkeleysjr@berkeley.edu Guests:Kemal Badur, Chief Technology Officer University of ChicagoEd Clark, Chief Information Officer California State UniversityReferences and Additional Information:Leadership and ManagementTechnological Knowledge
Dayna and Debi sit down for an important conversation about keeping all your software up to date and current. This is not just your Dentrix software, but all 3rd party software that integrates with your practice. Your IT company might not be installing all necessary updates so it is up to you to double check. I know passwords are a pain in the (you know what) and Debi dives into why we need to embrace them. For more information on this topic or to reach out to Debi to schedule your assessment, go to https://www.dkcarr.com/
Intro: Sometimes the little guy just doesn't cut it.Let Me Run This By You: Time's a wastin' - giddyup, beggars and choosers.Interview: We talk to star of Parks and Recreation, Easter Sunday, and Barry - Rodney To about Chicago, Marquette University, Lane Tech, getting discovered while pursuing a Chemistry degree, The Blues Brothers, Dürrenmatt's The Physicists, playing children well into adulthood, interning at Milwaukee Rep, Lifeline Theatre, Steppenwolf, doing live industrials for Arthur Anderson, Asian American actors and their representation in the media, IAMA Theatre Company, Kate Burton, and faking a Singaporean accent.FULL TRANSCRIPT (UNEDITED):1 (8s):I'm Jen Bosworth RAMIREZ2 (10s):And I'm Gina Pulice.1 (11s):We went to theater school together. We survived it, but we didn't quite understand2 (15s):It. 20 years later, we're digging deep talking to our guests about their experiences and trying to make sense of it all.1 (21s):We survived theater school and you will too. Are we famous yet?2 (30s):How's your, how's your eighties decor going for your1 (35s):New house? Okay, well we closed yesterday. Well,2 (39s):Congratulations.1 (40s):Thank you. House buying is so weird. Like we close, we funded yesterday, but we can't record till today because my lender like totally dropped the ball. So like, here's the thing. Sometimes when you wanna support like a small, I mean small, I don't know, like a small bank, like I really liked the guy who is the mortgage guy and he has his own bank and all these things. I don't even, how know how this shit works. It's like, but anyway, they were so like, it was a real debacle. It was a real, real Shannon situation about how they, anyway, my money was in the bank in escrow on Friday.1 (1m 20s):Their money that they're lending us, which we're paying in fucking fuck load of interest on is they couldn't get it together. And I was like, Oh no.2 (1m 29s):They're like, We have to look through the couch cushions,1 (1m 31s):Right? That's what it felt like, Gina. It felt like these motherfuckers were like, Oh shit, we didn't actually think this was gonna happen or something. And so I talked to escrow, my friend Fran and escrow, you know, I make friends with the, with the older ladies and, and she was like, I don't wanna talk bad about your lender, but like, whoa. And I was like, Fran, Fran, I had to really lay down the law yesterday and I needed my office mate, Eileen to be witness to when I did because I didn't really wanna get too crazy, but I also needed to get a little crazy. And I was like, Listen, what you're asking for, and it was true, does not exist. They needed one. It was, it was like being in the, in the show severance mixed with the show succession, mixed with, it was like all the shows where you're just like, No, no, what you're asking for doesn't exist and you wanna document to look a certain way.1 (2m 25s):And Chase Bank doesn't do a document that way. And she's like, Well she said, I don't CH bank at Chase, so I don't know. And I said, Listen, I don't care where you bank ma'am, I don't care. But this is Chase Bank. It happens to be a very popular bank. So I'm assuming other people have checking accounts that you deal with at Chase. What I'm telling, she wanted me to get up and go to Chase Bank in person and get a printout of a certain statement period with an http on the bottom. She didn't know what she was talking about. She didn't know what she was talking about. And she was like, 18, 18. And I said, Oh ma'am, if you could get this loan funded in the next, cuz we have to do it by 11, that would be really, really dope.1 (3m 6s):I'm gonna hang up now before I say something very bad. And then I hung up.2 (3m 10s):Right, Right. Yeah. Oh my God, I know. It's the worst kind of help. And regarding like wanting to support smaller businesses, I what, that is such a horrible sadness. There's, there's no sadness. Like the sadness of really investing in the little guy and having it. That was my experience. My big experience with that was going, having a midwife, you know, with my first child. And I really, I was in that whole thing of that, that time was like, oh, birth is too medicalized. And you know, even though my husband was a doctor, like fuck the fuck the medical establishment we're just, but but didn't wanna, like, I didn't wanna go, as my daughter would say, I didn't wanna be one of those people who, what did she say?2 (3m 52s):You know, one of those people who carry rocks to make them feel better.1 (3m 57s):That's amazing. Super.2 (4m 0s):So I didn't wanna go so far as to be one of those rock carrying people to have the birth at my house, but at the same time I really wanted to have this midwife and then there was a problem and she wasn't equipped to deal with it. And it was,1 (4m 11s):I was there,2 (4m 13s):Fyi. Yes, you were1 (4m 15s):The first one, right? For your first one.2 (4m 16s):The first one.1 (4m 18s):Here's the thing you're talking about this, I don't even remember her ass. What I, she, I don't remember nothing about her. If you had told me you didn't have one, I'd be like, Yeah, you didn't have one. I remember the problem and I remember them having to get the big, the big doctor and I remember a lot of blood and I remember thinking, Oh thank God there's this doctor they got from down the hall to come or wherever the hell they were and take care of this problem because this gene is gonna bleed out right here. And none of us know what to do.2 (4m 50s):Yes. I will never forget the look on your face. You and Erin looking at each other trying to do that thing where you're like, It's fine, it's fine. But you're such a bad liar that, that I could, I just took one look at you. I'm like, Oh my God, I'm gonna fucking bleed out right here. And Aaron's going, No, no, no, it's cool, it's cool, it's cool. And then of course he was born on July 25th and all residents start their residency on July 1st. So you know, you really don't wanna have a baby or have surgery in July cuz you're getting at a teaching hospital cuz you're getting a lot of residents. And this woman comes in as I'm bleeding and everything is going crazy and I haven't even had a chance to hold my baby yet. And she comes up to me and she says, Oh cuz the, the midwife ran out of lidocaine. There was no lidocaine.2 (5m 30s):That's right. They were trying to sew me up without lidocaine. And so this nurse comes in, she puts her hand on my shoulder, she says, Hi, I'm Dr. Woo and I'm, and I said, Dr. W do you have any lidocaine? I need some lidocaine stat right up in there. Gimme some lidocaine baby. And she had to call her boss. You know who I could tell when he came in, of course he was a man and I could tell when he came in, he looks at my midwife and is like, Oh, this is what you did here. I see we have to come in and clean up. But sometimes that's the case. Sometimes it's really just true that, you know, it's that the, that the bigger kind of like more corporate option is better cuz it just works better.1 (6m 8s):Well, and they've done this before, like there is, they've done the job before in a way, and they've seen the problems. They know how to troubleshoot in a way because they just have the fucking experience. Now you could say that getting that experience is like super fucked up and patriarchal and, and all the isms, it's, and you'd be right, but when you are bleeding to death or when you know you are in a big financial negotiation that could go south at any moment and lead to not having a ho like a all feeling lost. You want someone who knows how to fucking troubleshoot, dude. Like, come on. And I, you know, and it is sad, it's heartbreaking when you like, fuck man.1 (6m 50s):I really wanted this, like Dr. Altman always said, and I have an update on Dr. Altman, my favorite psychiatrist mentor of mine. But he always said like, well when I was going through med titration, when they put this dingling at Highland Park Hospital, who tried her best but put me on lithium thinking I was bipolar and then I was and all the meds, right? All the meds. And he's like, well they could've worked2 (7m 15s):It could've worked it1 (7m 17s):All's. And I was like, you are right. So like, it could've worked, it could've gone differently, but it just didn't. So it's like, yeah, it's better to look at it like that because, or else it's just infuriating that it didn't work in the first place, Right? Like, you're like, well fucker, Well they tried.2 (7m 35s):Yeah. I use that all the time that it could have worked. Things that I got through you from Dr. Altman, you know, my husband is having like some major, you know, growth moments. Like come like those moments where all the puzzle pieces become clear and you go, Okay, my childhood isn't what I thought it was and this person has got this and this person has got that. Yes. You know? And, and whenever he's doing the thing that we all do, which is like lamenting the life, the family he wish he had had, I always say like, well, as Dr. Almond says, it could have worked. Yes, these parents could have been just fine for you if you were a different person, but you're you.2 (8m 16s):And so, and they're them and it wasn't a good match. And like that happens sometimes.1 (8m 21s):And I think it's really good with kids maybe too. Cause it's like, listen, like, like I say to my niece, like it could, this could have been whatever it is the thing or my nephew too that worked and like that you loved volleyball or that you loved this. Like you are just looking, and I think it's all about titration, right? Like it's all about figuring out where we fit in, where we belong, where we don't. And it's a fucking process, which is what he was saying and like, and that you don't, we don't get it right the first time. Even in medicine, even in it's maybe especially in medicine, maybe in especially in relationships, like, so it, it also opens the door for like, possibility, right? That like, it's an experiment and like, we don't know, even doctors don't know, Hey, run this by you, Miles did of course.1 (9m 14s):And done. What about you? What about you?2 (9m 17s):I'm gonna do it after this, after we're done recording today, I'm gonna go over and I always like to take one of my kids so they, you know, see that this is the process and you have to do it and it's everybody's responsibilities to do it. That doesn't mean that I didn't get all angry at my own party this week. You know, my mom has a great expression. I think it's her expression. She says it. In any case, all politics is local, right? Like where it really, where the really meets the road is what's happening in your backyard. And like, I have a lot of problems with my town,1 (9m 52s):So Right.2 (9m 53s):They don't wanna have, you know, they voted down this measure to put a a, like a sober living place, wanted to take up residence here. Couldn't think of a greater idea. Nobody wanted it. You know, it's a lot of nis not in my backyarders over here. And it really drives me crazy. And in the, in the paper this week, there was a big scandal because there's this particular like committee in our town, Okay. That was in charge of, there was gonna be this, what is it, like a prize maybe or an honor or not a scholarship Okay. But something where they were gonna have to name it.2 (10m 33s):Okay. And they were, you know, really looking around for names. They were trying to think up what names would be appropriate. And somebody put forward the name of this person who is already kind of a named figure in our town. Like, we had this beautiful fountain, it's named after him. He was, he was a somewhat of a big guy, you know, he was an architect, whatever. Sure. So this name gets put forward in this woman who's on this committee says, I don't think this is a great time to name something after an old white man. Now, to me couldn't be a more reasonable thing in the world to say everybody's calling for her resignation. And these, you know, the thing that I hate the most about, not just conservatives, but it seems like it's especially conservatives.2 (11m 20s):I hate this saying. And I remember, I think I've said this before on the podcast, I remember hearing some black activists saying a lot of white, you know, a lot of racism perpetrated by white people is like founded on pretending. Pretending like you don't see color pretending like, you know, saying things like, Oh, well why would you have had that experience, you know, walking down our street at night? Like, or why would you have had that difficulty getting that job? I don't understand. And pretending like they don't know that this person just got1 (11m 51s):That job because of2 (11m 52s):The color biscuit and that kind kind of a thing. So of course the way that people are coming down on this woman is to say, Well, I don't know about you, but I was taught that we have to look beyond race and we have to recognize the person before the color of their skin. And if you can't be, you know, representing the needs of white men, then I just don't really think that you, there's a place on this council. And of course, you know, somebody who I know and have in the past really respected was quoted in this article as saying, Oh, somebody who considers himself like a staunch liberal. Yeah. I mean, I just really can't think of any people of note from our town who weren't white men.2 (12m 34s):Sure. And this motherfucker let himself be quoted in our newspaper as saying this. Now maybe he feels fine about it. Maybe he doesn't think there's anything wrong with it. But I I I think it's completely, completely disgusting. Of course. So then I went and I just did this research of like all the people who have lived in our town historically, they're not just white men. We, there's other people to choose from. Needless1 (12m 58s):To say. Yeah. Well also, like, it's so interesting. I mean, it's just that that quote just is so problematic on so many levels. It like goes so deep. But like the other thing is like, maybe they miss, the only thing I can think of is that dude, did they miss the second half of your quote? Which was, and that's a problem. Like, like if, if you can't, if you can't finish that quote with, you know, I can't really think of like anyone of note in our being or anyone being recognized in our town in this way that wasn't a white dude and that's really crazy. We should really reevaluate how we're doing things here.1 (13m 39s):Period. You're so2 (13m 41s):To offer, you're so, you're so sweet to offer him this benefit of the doubt. Of course I don't offer that to him because this is a person who, you know, there's been a few people in my life who I've had the opportunity to, you know, know what they say privately and then know what they say publicly. Right? And I, and I know this, you know, I know this person personally. And no, it doesn't surprise me at all that, that that would've been the entirety of the quote. It would've been taken out of context. Now it might have been, and I don't know, and I'm not, I'm not gonna call him up to ask him, but you know, at a minimum you go on the local Facebook page and say, I was misquoting.1 (14m 20s):No, no, yeah. Chances are that this, this person just said this. And actually the true crime is not realizing if, if, if that's the case, that they, that that statement is problematic. So that's really fucked up. And also, like, think of all the native people that were on that land, on our land. Like, you're gonna tell me that just because you haven't done, they haven't done the research. They don't think that a native person from the northeast did something of greatness. Shut up, man. Excellent. Before it was rich.2 (14m 56s):Excellent point, Excellent point. Maybe when I write to my letter to the editor, maybe I'll quote you on that because Yeah, yeah. It's like, it's so, it's just, and I'm, by the way, I'm, I have been, I'm sure I'm still am guilty of the same thing too, of just being the laziness of like, well, I don't know, we'd love to, you know, hire a person of color, but none have applied. I mean, I have definitely said things like that and I just understand differently now I understand. No, no, no, they're not gonna be at the top of the pile of resumes that you're gonna get because historically these people haven't felt like there's a place for them at your table. So what you have to do is go above and beyond and say, we are specifically recruiting people of color for this position. I understand.1 (15m 35s):And how about even like, do some research online and find out who those people are and try to like, hire them away from wherever they are to and make them a great offer. You know what I mean? Like all those things. Well,2 (15m 48s):This experience did cause me to go on my little Wikipedia and look up, you know, people who have lived here and I was really like, surprised to learn how many people have known. Now it's true to say that, you know, when, when you're just looking up a list of famous people, it is gonna mostly be white men because that's who mostly, you know, sort of, she made, made history, made the news, whatever. But yeah, one of the very first things that come up, comes up when you look it up my town on Wikipedia, is that the fact that this was the Ramapo tribe that lived here. You know, this is who we took the land away from. I was also surprised to that.1 (16m 29s):I've never,2 (16m 30s):Yeah, Yeah. It was also interesting to learn, supposedly according to this, how many people of live here currently, including people like Harvey Firestein, who I have, I've never seen around town, but God I would really love to. And like some other, you know, sort of famous people. But anyway, That's1 (16m 50s):So cool.2 (16m 51s):Yeah. So, so I will be voting after this and I really, I don't have a great feeling about the election, but I'm, you know, I'm just like, what can you do? You can just sort of go forward and, you know, stick to your values. Yeah. I mean,1 (17m 7s):The thing is, stick to your values, move forward. And like my aunt, happy birthday, Tia, it's her birthday today, and she is like super depressed that, you know, she, she said, what she says is like, fascism is really, today is the day that we really something about fascism, it's like really dire and like really, Okay. So my, it's so interesting that I think boomers feel really bad because they had it so good, even though it wasn't really good, there was an illusion of goodness. Right? So I, I am depressed. But here's the thing, and I was, I was gonna bring this up to you.1 (17m 47s):It's like I, I had an experience last night where I went to this theater and saw the small theater, which I really wanna do my solo show in which is this famous theater called The Hayworth, which is, they show silent movies and all, but there's now it's like an improv sort of venue and, and it's really cute and throwbacky. But anyway, I went there and I just was thinking like, as I was watching these performers, like, oh, it is not even that, Like, it's literally that I spent 45 years thinking that I was worse than everybody else, right? And so now that I don't really think that, I actually don't have that much time left to accomplish what I would like to accomplish. So I, I spent all this time feeling like I couldn't do what she's doing.1 (18m 29s):I can't do what he's doing, can't do what theirs doing. They're, they are doing because I'm not good enough. Like literally. And now I'm like, Oh my God, I'm good enough. I have things to say. I really wanna leave a legacy. And literally the clock is ticking. Now, I'm not saying I'm running around like a nut, but what I'm saying is like, I, I, I do feel that I literally don't have the time left to participate in half-assed measures of art or whatever we're gonna do. We gotta make it purposeful because I w i, I spent all this time getting ready 45 years to not hate myself. And now the clock is ticking, I donate myself and there are things to do.1 (19m 13s):That's literally how I feel. So then when I see art or something where I'm like, Why are you using your platform this way? What are you talking about? What are you saying? Oh no, I can't, I even now I know why people leave movies early, plays early if it is, and some, for me anyway, like some people probably just assholes and like the, the person on stage doesn't look cute and they're out or whatever, but, or they're having panic attacks like I used to and I have to leave. But like, mostly I understand where it's like this is wasting my, my time, time I could be using to sort of plant seeds that may do something to be of service.1 (19m 53s):So I'm gonna jet and good luck to you. But yeah, it's the first, I just really feel like time is of the essence. And I always thought that was such a stupid thing that old people said, which was, you know, time is our most precious commodity. And I was always like, that is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. And now I'm like, oh shit. Yeah, it's really true Dude.2 (20m 15s):Yeah. Yeah. I actually had an experience some that I relate to with that, which is that, you know, I, I volunteered to be part of this festival of one act and you know, the thing we were supposed to do is read all of the submissions and then pick our top three. And then they were gonna do this rank order thing where they're attempting to put each director with one of their top three choices. Well, I read, it was like 10 plays I read them and I, I didn't have three, three ch choices. There was only one play that I felt frankly was worth my time.2 (20m 56s):And I felt really uncomfortable about having that feeling. And I was doing all of the like, who do you think you are? And you know, it's, you haven't directed something in three years and beggars can't be choosers in the whole thing. And I just thought, you know, I know what I'm gonna do if I don't stand up for whatever it is I think I can do here is I'm gonna resent the thing that I get, you know, pitted with and then I'm gonna do something self-destructive or I'm gonna kind of like blow up the relationship and I don't wanna do that. So I spend a lot of time thinking about how I was gonna write this email back saying basically like, I don't have three choices. I only have one choice. And I understand if you don't want to give that to me that this, I might not be a good fit for you.2 (21m 37s):You know? But I really, I really kind of sweated over it because when you don't, you know, when you're a very, if I was an extremely established theater director, you know, I wouldn't have thought twice about it. But I'm not, I'm trying to be established here and I, you know, so my, my, my go-to has always been well having opinions and choices and stuff like that is for people who, you know, have more than you do or have more to offer than you do. And it doesn't always work out that when you kind of say, This is me and take me or leave me. It doesn't always work out. But in this case it doesn't. They gave me my first choice. And so I'm, I'm happy about that, but there's a lot.2 (22m 18s):Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, there's a lot that just goes into the, it's all just work I have to do on myself. Like, I have this, a way of thinking about things is like, I have to do this work with this other person or I have to convince them why it has nothing to do with that. It's just that I have to do this.1 (22m 34s):Well that's what I'm realizing, like Gina, Absolutely. And good for you for like, coming at it from a place of like, okay, like this might not work, but I have to do it to see and put it out there and it may not work and they may say, go fuck yourself. But the alternative one is resentment, but also is like, hmm, not doing anybody else any favors either. If you aren't saying like, I actually don't have three choices here, I'm not gonna do justice. And I also, it brings me to my other thing, which I thought was so full of shit, which is so true. It's like most things are just not, it's about not being a right fit. It's not about you're bad and I'm good, I'm good and you're bad.1 (23m 15s):It's like, this is not a good match. And I, I think it just takes what it takes to learn that it is a not, it's about a matching situation. So like you knew that like those other two wouldn't be good matches and you wouldn't do a service to them or yourself. And it's not, And also like this thing about beggars can't be choosers. I fucking think it's so dumb because like most of us are beggars all the time and, and we, we settle for garbage. And it doesn't, like, I feel like we can, like beggars should be more choosy. And I also feel like, I'm not saying not be humble, but like, fuck you if you take away our choices, like we have to have choices.1 (23m 57s):That's the thing. It's like beggars have choices, whatever you call a beggar, we still have choices. Like how we're gonna interact and how and how we're gonna send emails and shit. I'm just like,2 (24m 9s):Yeah. Plus that whole phrase is so like, in a way rooted in this kind of like terrible supremacy structure that we're trying to fight against, which is like, we wanna tell, of course we wanna tell beggars that they can't be choosers cuz we just, we don't wanna think about them as people who have the same agency in life as we do.1 (24m 25s):Sure. And now I've started saying to people when I have this conversation about like, about unhoused, people like having tent encampments and I get it, like, you're going to school, you're walking your kid to Montessori and there's a fucking tent encampment in your front yard. You did not pay for that. You did not sign up for that. You are, I get it. And also my question is, what are we gonna do when the tents outnumber the people in homes? Because then it's a real fucking problem. So like, how are we gonna do that? You think it's uncomfortable? I think it's uncomfortable to walk by a tent encampment as I'm on my way to a coffee date with someone or whatever.1 (25m 8s):That's uncomfortable. But what are we gonna do when, like in India, the, the quote slums or whatever people, you know, whatever people choose to call it, outnumber the goddamn people in the towers. Then we, then it's gonna be a different problem.2 (25m 35s):Today on the podcast, we were talking to Rodney Toe. Rodney is an actor, you know him from Parks and Recreation, Barry good girls Rosewood. He was in a film this summer called Easter Sunday. Anyway, he's a delight. He's also a professor of theater at USC and he's charming and wonderful and we know you are going to love listening to him as much as we loved talking to him. So please enjoy our conversation with Rodney Toe.3 (26m 8s):Can you hear me? Can you hear me okay?2 (26m 11s):Yes, you sound great. You sound1 (26m 13s):Happy. No echo. You have beautiful art behind you. We can't ask for a2 (26m 17s):Better Easter Sunday. We were just talking about Easter Sunday, so we're gonna have to ask you Oh sure about it, Beth. But first I have to say congratulations, Rodney tell you survive theater school.3 (26m 28s):Oh, thank you. Yes, I did. I sure did. Was2 (26m 31s):It usc? Did you go to3 (26m 32s):Usc? No, I, I'm a professor. I'm currently a professor at usc. So1 (26m 36s):We just assumed you went there, but where did you go3 (26m 38s):To No, no, no, no, no. I, that, that came about like in a roundabout way, but no, I, I totally, I went, went to Marquette University. Oh, in Milwaukee?1 (26m 46s):In Milwaukee. Oh my gosh. Yeah. So3 (26m 48s):Everybody's reaction, everybody's reactions like, well1 (26m 53s):I actually love Mil, I'm from Chicago and Evanston you do and then you are,3 (26m 58s):Yeah, born and raised north side. My family's still there. What1 (27m 1s):The hell? How did I not know this? Yeah, I'm from Evanston, but lived in Rogers Park and went to, we went to DePaul.3 (27m 7s):Well I hear the park. Yes, yes. Born and raised. My family's still there. I am a Chicago, I'm an undying Chicago and through and through. Yeah.1 (27m 15s):Wait a minute. So, so, okay, okay, okay. So you grew up on the north, you grew up in, on the north side.3 (27m 20s):Yeah, I grew up in, I, I grew up and I went to Lane Tech. Oh1 (27m 24s):My gosh, that's where my niece goes right this very minute. She goes, Yeah,3 (27m 28s):It's1 (27m 28s):Quite the school. I dunno how it was when you went, but it went through a hard time and now it's like one of these3 (27m 34s):Go, I mean when I went it was, it was still considered a magnet school. And I I, you know, I think like in like it went maybe through a period of like, sort of like shifting, but then it's like now it's an incredible school. I'm September 17th is apparently Rodney to day at Lane 10. No, Yeah, it just happened. I mean it's, it's silly. It's Easter significance. No, cause of Easter Sunday they did like a bunch of, you know, I do a lot of advocacy for the Asian American for Asian-American representation. So sort like all together1 (28m 4s):That movie had broke so many, broke so many barriers and was, I mean it was a phenomenal, and also I just feel like it's so obviously so needed. Duh. When people say like, more representation is needed, I'm like, okay, no shit Sherlock. But it's true. It bears repeat again. Cause it still is true that we need more representation. But I am fascinated. Ok, so you went to Lane Tech and were you like, I'm gonna be a famous actor, comedian? No, what,3 (28m 34s):What anything about it? Didn't I, you know, it's called Lane Tech for a reason, right? It's a technical school. Correct. So like we didn't, you know, it didn't, I mean there were arts, but I, it never really, you know, it was one of those things that were like, you know, I guess like when you were a kid, it's all like, hey, you wanna learn how to like macrame. But there were theater arts in my, in my high school, but it wasn't like,1 (28m 54s):In fact, my mother did macrame. And let me tell you something, it has come back in style. And the shit she made, we could be selling for $199 at Urban Outfitters right now. I'm just,3 (29m 4s):Oh yeah, it's trendy now. Yeah. It's like, yeah, it's in style.1 (29m 7s):Anyway, side note, side note. Okay, so you were like, I'm not doing, there was no performing at Lane Tech. There was no like out there, there,3 (29m 13s):There was, and there was, but it wasn't, again, you know, in terms of representation, there was nothing that like, I mean there was nothing that that showed me any kind of like longevity in, in, you know, it didn't even really occur to me that this was a business that people sort of like, you know, pursued for themselves. So it wasn't until I went to Marquette that I discovered theater. And so it was one of those things that like, I was like, oh, there's something here. So it wasn't like, it wasn't fostered since I was a kid.1 (29m 43s):This,2 (29m 44s):And this is my favorite type of origin story because it means, you know, like there are people who grow up in LA or their, their parents are in the industry. And then, so it's always a question like, am I gonna go into this industry? But, but people like you and like me and like Boz, who, there's no artist in our family, you know,3 (30m 4s):You2 (30m 4s):Just have to come to it on your own. So I would love to hear this story about finding it at Marquette.3 (30m 10s):So like the, this, I, I've told this story several times, but the short version of it is, so I went to college for chemistry. And so again, because I came from, you know, that that was just sort of the path that, that particularly, you know, an Asian American follows. It's a very sort of stem, regimented sort of culture. And when I went to Marquette, my first, my sort of my first like quarter there, it was overwhelming, you know, I mean, college was, was a big transition for me. I was away from home and I, I was overwhelmed with all of the STEM courses that I was taking, the GE courses. And I, I went to my advisor and at the time, you know, this is pre-internet, like he, we sat down, I sat down with him and he pulled out the catalog.3 (30m 52s):Oh yeah, the catalog, right? I1 (30m 54s):Remember the catalog. Oh yeah.3 (30m 56s):And so he was like, let's take a class that has nothing to do with your major. Oh,1 (30m 60s):I love this. I love this advisor. I love this advisor. Do you know, can he you say his name3 (31m 7s):At the, was it Daniel? Dr. Daniel t Hayworth. I mean, it's been a while I went to college with Dahmer was arrested. So that's been a1 (31m 15s):While. Okay. Yeah's, same with us. Same with me. Yeah.3 (31m 18s):Yeah. So like, I think it was Daniel Daniel Hayworth. Yeah. Cuz he was a, he was a chemistry professor as well. So he opened up, he opened up the, the thing in the, the catalog and it said acting for non-majors. And I remember thinking, that sounds easy, let's do that. And then I went to the class, I got in and he, he, he was able to squeeze me in because already it was already in the earl middle of the semester. And so I, the, the, the, the teacher for that class was a Jesuit priest. His name is Father Gerald Walling. And you know, God rest his soul. And he, his claim to fame was he had like two or three lines on Blues Brothers, the movie.1 (31m 59s):Amazing. I mean like great to fame to have Yes. Get shot in Chicago. Yeah. And if you're a Jesuit priest that's not an actor by trade, like that is like huge. Like most people would like die to have two to three lines on Blues Brothers that are working anyway. So, Okay, so you're, so he, so how was that class?3 (32m 19s):So I took the class and he, after like the first week he asked me, Hey is, and it was at 8:00 AM like typical, like one of those like classes that I was like, Oh my gosh, I'm gonna go in here miserable. Yeah. But he said to me early on, he said, Do you have any interest in doing this professionally? And I said, no. And he's like, and he, he said, and he said, I was like, You're hilarious. You know,1 (32m 43s):You're a hilarious Jesuit.3 (32m 45s):Yeah. I'm like, Good luck with God. He, he then he was directing, he was directing the university production of, and he asked me to audition for it. And I was, I don't even know what an audition was. That's amazing. So like, it was one of those things that I didn't really know how to do it. I didn't know much about it. And so he's like, Can you come in and audition for it? And I did and I got it and it was, it was Monts the physicist,1 (33m 12s):What the fuck is that?3 (33m 14s):Oh man, I love that play. It's Amont, it's the same, you know, it's the same. He's, you know, Exactly. It's really, it's one of those like sort of rarely done plays and it's about fictitious Albert Einstein, the real, lemme see if I, it's been so long since I recall this play. The real, So Isaac Newton and what was the other Mobius? A fictitious, So the real, I'm sorry, The real Albert Einstein, The real, the real Albert Einstein, the real Isaac Isaac New and a fake, a fictitious play scientist named Mobius.3 (33m 55s):And they were, they were all in, in a mental institution. And I1 (33m 60s):Think that I have this play and my shelves and I just have never read it before. Okay, so3 (34m 4s):Who did you play? It's extraordinary. Extraordinary. And so I played, I played a child like I did up until my mid thirties. I played a child who had like one line, and I remember it took, it took place in Germany, I believe. And I remember he's like, Do you have a German accent? I was like, No. You're1 (34m 20s):Like, I I literally am doing chemistry 90.3 (34m 23s):Yeah. I was all like, you're hilarious. Yeah. Only children do accents, You know what I mean? Like, it was totally, I was like, whatever's happening, I don't even know what's happening. And, and then I made up a European accent. I mean, I, I, I pulled it on my ass. I was like, sure, don't even remember it. But I was like, one of,1 (34m 39s):I love when people, like, recently Gina showed me a video of her in college with an accent. Let me tell you something, anytime anyone does an accent, I'm like, go for it. I think that it's so3 (34m 51s):Great. Yeah. I've got stories about, about, I mean, I'm Asian, right? So like, I mean it's been one of those things that all my life I've had to sort of navigate people being like, Hey, try this on for Verizon. I was like, Oh gosh. And you know, anyway, I can go on forever. But I did that, I had a line and then somebody saw me in the production with one line and said, Hey, this is at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater, somebody from the Milwaukee Repertory Theater. It's huge1 (35m 18s):Theater. Fyi. Right,3 (35m 20s):Right. Again, it's, it's to this day. And so they asked if I would intern, if I would be considered interning while I was in school. And I said, I didn't even know what that was. So I met with them. And when I walked into that theater, it was one of those, it's one of the biggest, most extraordinary music theaters in the wor in the country. Right. Won the regional, Tony and I, again, I had no frame of reverence for it. So walking in, it was like this magical place. And so I started, I started interning right, right off the bat. And it was one of those like life changing experiences. I, I mean, to this day, the best acting I think I've ever seen, you know, face to face has been on that stage. It's, you know, many of those actors are still, I'm still in touch with to this day.3 (36m 3s):Some of them have passed away. However, it was the best training, right? I mean, I got thrown into the deep end. It was like working with some of the greats who never, no one ever knew. Right. So it really, it was really a wonderful experience. And that's when I sort of, you know, that's when I was like, Oh, I actually can do this for a living. So it was,1 (36m 21s):Oh yeah, Milwaukee rep. I've seen some amazing stuff there. And also what would've been great is, yeah, we like, I mean there's so many things that would've been great at DePaul at the theater school, but one of them would've been, Hey, there's all these regional theaters, like if you wanna make some dough, it was either like, you are gonna be doing storefront and Die of Hunger, or you're gonna be a star. Hilarious was no like, what about Milwaukee Rep? What about the Guthrie? Like all the things3 (36m 50s):Gut, Yeah. Never1 (36m 51s):Told at least. Or I didn't listen or I was like in a blackout drunk state. But like, I just feel like hilarious. I just feel like that is so amazing that you got to do that. So then, Wait, did you change3 (37m 2s):Your It wasn't, I did. I eventually did. Yes. So I have both. And so now it was one of those, like, it was, it was harrowing, but eventually, I mean, I did nothing with my chemistry degree. Nothing. Like literally nothing. That's,2 (37m 16s):Most people do nothing with their theater degree. So, so it all evens out. Wait, I have a question. Now. This is a question that would be difficult for me to answer. So I wouldn't fault to you if it's difficult for you. What do you think it was in you that this person saw and said, have you ever considered doing this professionally? I mean, just trying to be really objective about the, the asce the essence of you that you bring to the table. Always. How, what did that person identify, do you think, if you3 (37m 44s):Had to guess? You know, I'd like to say it was talent. I'd love to be that person and be like, you know, they recognized in me in one line that ordinary artist was going to emerge into the universe and play children into his thirties. I, I wish I could. It was that, I mean, honestly, I looked different than everybody else on that's a white school and Milwaukee rep, you know, God, forgive me for saying this, but it was a sensibly all white institution.1 (38m 12s):Super white. Super white. Yeah.3 (38m 14s):So in comes this little Asian guy who like they thought might have had potential and also is Asian. And I checked off a lot of boxes for them. And you know what I could easily say, like I, I could easily sort of, when, if you asked me like 20 years ago, I was like, Oh, I was talented, but now I'm like, no, I made my way in because of, because I, I checked boxes for people and, and1 (38m 37s):Talented,3 (38m 38s):You couldn't,1 (38m 39s):You3 (38m 39s):Couldn't have done it if you didn't have talent to thank you. And I can, I can, you know, whatever, I can own that now. But the, but the reality is like, I made it in and that's how I got in. And I'm okay with that. And I'm not saying that it's not taking anything away from talent, but the reality is it's like you gotta get in on the inside to work your way out. And if I didn't have that exposure early on, I certainly wouldn't have had the regional career that I did for a little while. You know? So like that credit, like you, like you said Jen, it's like, it's a, it's a huge credit. So like I would not have made it in any other way. Right. And I certainly,1 (39m 12s):Yeah, I just am like noticing also like my reaction to, Yeah, it's interesting too as other humans in this industry or any industry, it's like, it's like we have had to, especially those of us that are, you know, I'm 47 and like those of us who have made it in or sort of in for, in my, I'm just speaking for myself. Like I, I sort of, right, It could have been fucked up reasons or weird reasons that we got in the door or even filling someone's need or fantasy. But then it's like what we do with it once we're in the room, that really, really matters. And I think that yeah, regardless of how you ended up in Milwaukee rep, like I think it's smart and like I really like the idea of saying okay, like that's probably why I was there.1 (39m 58s):I checked, I've checked boxes, but Okay. But that's why a lot of people are a lot of places. And so like, let's, let's, let's, you could stop there and be like, that is some fucked up shit. Fuck them. Or you could say, Wait a second, I'm gonna still have a fucking career and be a dope actor. Okay, so you're there, you're, you're still, you graduate from Marquette with a double major, I'm assuming, right? Chemistry and, and was it theater, straight up theater or what was your degree?3 (40m 23s):It's, well, no, no, it's called, it's, it's, it's the, at the time it's called, they didn't have a theater degree. Right. It was called the, you graduated with a degree in Communications. Communications,1 (40m 32s):Right? Yes. Okay, okay. Yeah. My, my niece likes to say Tia, all the people in communications at UCLA are the dumbest people. I'm like, No, no, no, no, no. That would've been me. And she's like, Well, anyway, so okay, so, so you graduate and what happens? What happens to you?3 (40m 54s):So, you know, I, I went from there. I went to, I got my equity card pretty ear pretty early cuz I went for my, I think it was my final between my, the summer, my junior year and my senior year I went to, because of the Milwaukee rep, I got asked to do summer stock at, at ppa, which is the Pacific Conservatory, the performing Arts, which is kind of like an Urda contract out in the West Co on the west coast. And so I was able to get credits there, which got me my equity card very quickly after, during that time I didn't get it at the institution, but I got like enough, you know, whatever credit that I was able to get my equity card. And again, at the time I was like, eh, what are the equity? I didn't even know know what that was really.3 (41m 34s):I don't know if anybody truly knows it when they're, when they're younger. So I had it and I went, right, I had my card and I went right to Chicago because family's there. So I was in Chicago. I did a couple of shows, I did one at at Lifeline at the time. I did one at North. Yeah. So it was nice to sort of go back and, and, and, and then I, you know, right then I, it's my favorite story, one of my favorite stories. I, I got my, my my SAG card and my after card in Chicago that summer, because at the time the union was separate. That's how old I am. And I got my SAG card doing a Tenax commercial, and I got my after card doing, I'm not sure if they're still there.3 (42m 18s):I think they are actually. It is a company called Break Breakthrough Services and they did it live industrial. Oh yeah.1 (42m 24s):They, I think they still wait live. How does that work? Yeah,3 (42m 29s):Exactly. So it's a lot of like those training, you know, you see it a lot, like the people do it, like corporate training stuff. Right. So they used, at the time it was really new. So like they used a lot of actors and they paid well.1 (42m 42s):Well, I did an Arthur Anderson one that like paid my rent3 (42m 45s):Long time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So exactly when Arthur Anderson was still a, I think I did one too. So like, they,1 (42m 53s):Rodney,3 (42m 55s):Were you in St. Charles, Illinois?1 (42m 57s):I don't know. I had to take the Amtrak. It could have been,3 (42m 59s):Yeah. In St. Charles. Right? That's where they were centered. Yes. Yeah.1 (43m 2s):Okay, go ahead. Go ahead. So you, okay, so you got your, I know our world. Do you live, Where do you live?3 (43m 8s):I'm in, I'm in LA right now. This is my home. Yeah.1 (43m 11s):Okay. Well I'm coming to your home. Okay, great. I'm in Pasadena right now. Okay. Anyway, go ahead. Oh yeah.3 (43m 17s):Okay. So we, yeah, I went to Chicago, got my cards, and then was there for, you know, a hot minute and then I moved to New York. Okay.1 (43m 25s):Wait, wait, wait. Moved. Did you have, what years were you working in Chicago? Like were we still, were Gina and I in school? What, what, what years were that were you were like, Tampa, a man Chicago.3 (43m 35s):I did God bless that commercial. Yeah, it was so good. I did, let's see here, I grad, I was there in 90, let's see, 97,1 (43m 47s):We were there. Well, Gina was graduating and I, I was, yeah. Anyway, we were there.3 (43m 52s):And then I moved to New York in 98 and then I moved to New in 98. So1 (43m 55s):You were only in Chicago a hot minute? Yeah, yeah, yeah.3 (43m 57s):Okay. Yeah. But then I came back, I came back in 2004 five to do a show at Victory Gardens. Oh. And then I did a show at Victory Gardens, and then I did a workshop at Stepin Wolf. So it was nice. Look at1 (44m 12s):Victory Gardens. Victory Gardens. That was a whole,3 (44m 15s):I'm sorry, what was that?1 (44m 16s):R i p, Victory Gardens.3 (44m 17s):Oh, yeah. I mean, well I was there pre-K. Yeah. And so, but it was, yeah, r i p I mean, r i it was truly one of the most magnificent, magnificent shows that I've been part, but I mean,1 (44m 30s):Okay, so wait, wait, wait. Okay, so why New York? Why weren't you like, I'm gonna bust out and go to LA and be a superstar on,3 (44m 38s):It's all about representation. I mean, I didn't see at the time, and you know, if you think about it, like there were people on television, but, you know, in terms of like the, the, the, it wasn't pervasive. It was like sort of every once in a while I'll turn on my TV and I'll see like Dante Bosco or I'll see like, you know what I mean? But it wasn't like I saw like, you know, I wasn't flooded with the image of an Asian American making it. However, at the time, you know, it was already Asian Americans were starting to sort of like flood the theater world, right? So I started, you know, through James c and, and Lisa Taro in Chicago, and like, people who are like, who are still friends of mine to this day, Asian American actors, they were doing theater. And so I was like, you know what, I'm gonna do theater. And so I, it was just one of those, like, I went to, and I already had these credits.3 (45m 19s):I had my equity card, I had some credits. My natural proclivity was then to go to, to, to first theater in New York. So it wasn't, I didn't even think about LA it wasn't like, oh, let me, let me like think about doing television and film. So I went1 (45m 32s):To York. I just feel like in LA it's so interesting. As an actor, writing is a little different, but as an actor, it, most of us, if we plan to go to LA as actors, we're gonna fail. I just feel like you have to end up here as an actor by accident because you do something else that you love and that people like, and then they're like, I just, it's not the most welcoming. Right. Medium film and tv. So like, it's so hard. So I think by accident is really sort of the only way, or if you're just already famous for something else, but like, anyway, So you're in New York. Did you, did you love it? Wait, can I,2 (46m 9s):Can I hang on Buzz, Can I do a timeout? Because I've been wanting to ask this just a little bit back to, you know, your undergrad experience. Did you wanna be, did you love chemistry or did you just do that because Oh, you did, Okay. So it wasn't, it wasn't like, oh, finally I found something that I, like you liked chemistry.3 (46m 29s):Yeah. To this day, to this day, I still like, it's still very much like, you know, the, the, the values of a stem field is still very much in how I teach, unfortunately. Right? Like, I'm very empirical. I, I, I need to know an, I need to have answers. Like, you know, it tends to, sometimes it tends to be a lot of it, like, you know, you know, sort of heady and I'm like, and now I need, I need, I'm pragmatic that way. I need to understand like why, Right? That2 (46m 53s):Doesn't seem unfortunate to me. That seems actually really fortunate because A, you're not the only artist who likes to think. I mean, you know, what about DaVinci? Like, a lot of people like to think about art in a, in a, I mean it's really, they're, they're, they're really kind of married art and science.3 (47m 8s):Yeah. They really are people. I, I think people would, It's so funny. Like people don't see it as such, but you're absolutely right. I agree. It's so more, Yeah. There's so much more in common.1 (47m 18s):The other thing that I'm glad Gina brought that up is cuz I'm questioning like, okay, so like, I don't know about at Marquette, but like at DePaul we had like, we had, like, we had these systems of, you got warnings if you, you weren't doing great and I bet like you probably didn't have the cut system cause that just is okay, good. But okay.3 (47m 36s):Well we were, we remember we were, we weren't a conservatory, right? So we were very much a, a liberal programming.1 (47m 42s):Yeah, I love it. Oh God, how I longed for that later, right? But anyway, so what would've helped is if someone with an empirical, like someone with more a stem mind sat down with me and said, okay, like, here are the things that aren't working in a practical way for you, and here are the things that you can do to fix it. Instead, it was literally this nebulous thing where my warning said, You're not living up to your star power now that's not actually a note. So that, that, that Rick Murphy gave me, and I don't, to this day, I'm like, that is actually, so I would love if I had someone like you, not that you'd be in that system, but like this to say like, okay, like here's the reasons why.1 (48m 25s):Like there was no why we were doing anything. It was like, you just do this in order to make it. And I said, Okay, I'll do it. But I was like, what the hell? Why are we doing this? That's,3 (48m 35s):That's like going to a doctor and a doctor being like, you're sick. You know what I mean? And you're like, but can, that's why I'm here is for you to help me get to the root of it and figure it out. Right. Being like, you're,1 (48m 46s):I think they didn't know, Here's the thing, I don't think it, it3 (48m 50s):Was because they're in.1 (48m 51s):Yeah. I I don't think it was because they were, I mean, they could have been rude in all the things. I literally, now that I'm 47, looking back on that experience, I'm like, Oh, these teachers didn't fucking know what they were, how to talk. And3 (49m 3s):This is how I came. Yeah, yeah. Which is how I came back to usc. So like that's,1 (49m 7s):Anyway, continue your New York adventure. I just wanted to know.3 (49m 11s):No, no, no. New York is was great. New York is New York was wonderful. I love it. I still love it. I I literally just got back with it. That's why, remember I was texting you, emailing you guys. I I just got back, Yes. The night before. Some amazing things. My husband would move back in a heartbeat if I, if I like texted him right now. And I was like, Hey, like let's move back. The house would be packed and we'd, he'd be ready to go. He loves, we both love it. You know, Am I in love with New York? I, that, that remains to be seen. I mean, you know, as I get older that life is, it's a hard life and I, I love it when there's no responsibilities when you can like, skip around and have tea and you know, walk around Central Park and like see shows.3 (49m 53s):But you know, that's obviously not the real, the reality of the day to day in New York. So I miss it. I love it. I've been back for work many times, but I, I I don't know that the life is there for me anymore. Right. I mean, you know, six fuller walkups. Oh no. Oh no. I just, yeah, I1 (50m 11s):Just like constantly sweating in Manhattan. Like I can't navigate, It's like a lot of rock walking really fast and3 (50m 20s):Yeah. And no one's wearing masks right now. I just, I just came back and I saw six shows when I was there. No one's wearing masks. It's like unnerving. And again, like, you know, you know, not throwing politics in it. I was like, you guys, like, how are you okay with it? I'm just like, how are you not unnerved by the fact that we're cramped in worse than an airplane? And everyone's like coughing around you and we're sitting here for three hours watching Death of a Salesman. I mean, like, how was that1 (50m 43s):Of an2 (50m 45s):Yeah know?3 (50m 46s):I mean,2 (50m 47s):So what about the, so at some point you, you pretty much, I mean, you don't do theater anymore, right? You transition to doing3 (50m 55s):Oh, I know, I do. Very much so, very much. I'm also the associate, Yeah. I'm the associate artistic director of, I am a theater company, so like I'm, I'm very much theater's. I will never let go. It's, it's just one of those things I will never as, as wonderful as television and film has been. It's, it's also like theater's, you know? It's the, it's my own, it's my first child. Yeah.2 (51m 19s):Yeah.1 (51m 20s):We have guests like Tina Parker was like that, right? Wasn't,2 (51m 23s):Yeah. Well a lot of, a lot of people. It's also Tina Wong said the same thing.3 (51m 26s):He and I are different. She's part, we're in the same theater company. So Yeah. Tina's.2 (51m 30s):That's right. That's right. That's right. Okay, now I'm remembering what that connection was. So I have a question too about like, when I love it, like I said, when people have no idea anything related to performing arts, and then they get kind of thrust into it. So was there any moment in sort of discovering all this where you were able to make sense of, or flesh out like the person that you were before you came to this? Like a lot of people have the experience of, of doing a first drama class in high school and saying, Oh my God, these are my people. And never knowing that their people existed. Right. Did you have anything like that where you felt like coming into this performing sphere validated or brought some to fullness?2 (52m 14s):Something about you that previously you hadn't been able to explore?3 (52m 18s):Yeah. I mean, coming out, you know what I mean? Like, it was the first time that people talk, you know? Of course, you know, you know, I was born to, you know, like was God, I said I was born this way. But that being said, like again, in the world in which I grew up in, in Chicago and Lane Tech, it's, and, and the, you know, the technical high school and, and just the, the, the, I grew up in a community of immigrants. It's not like it was laid out on the table for one to talk about all the time. Right. It wasn't, and even though I may have thought that in my head again, it wasn't like, it was like something that was in the universe and in the, in the air that I breathed. So I would say that like when I got to the theater, it was the first time, you know, the theater, you guys we're, we're theater kids, right?3 (53m 2s):We know like every, everything's dramatic. Everything's laid, you know, out to, you know, for everyone. Everyone's dramas laid out for everyone. A the, and you know, part of it was like sexuality and talking about it and being like, and having just like, just being like talking about somebody's like ethnic background. And so it was the first time that I learned how to talk about it. Even to even just like how you even des you know, you know how you even describe somebody, right? And how somebody like, cuz that again, it's not, it wasn't like, it wasn't language that I had for myself. So I developed the language and how to speak about people. So that's my first thing about theater that I was like, oh, thank God.3 (53m 43s):You know? And then, you know, even talking about, you know, like queer, like queer was such a crazy insult back when I was a kid. And then now all of a sudden queer is now this embraced sort of like, badge of honor, Right? And so like, it was just like that and understanding like Asian and Asian American breaking that down, right? And being Filipino very specifically breaking that down, that all came about from me being in theater. And so like, I, I'm, I owe my, my life to it if you, and, and because I've, yeah, I didn't, you know, it's so funny how the title of this is I Survived Theater School for me. It's, Yes, Yes.3 (54m 23s):And I also, it also allowed theater also gave, allowed me to survive. Yes.2 (54m 31s):Theater helped you survive. Yes. That's beautiful. So in this, in the, in this spectrum or the arc, whatever you wanna call it, of representation and adequate representation and you know, in all of our lifetimes, we're probably never gonna achieve what we think is sort of like a perfect representation in media. But like in the long arc of things, how, how do you feel Hollywood and theater are doing now in terms of representation of, of specifically maybe Filipino, but Asian American people. How, how do you think we're doing?3 (55m 3s):I think we, you know, I think that there's, there's certainly a shift. You know, obviously it, we'd like it to be quicker than faster than, than it has been. But that being said, there's certainly a shift. Look, I'm being, I'll be the first person to say there are many more opportunities that are available that weren't there when I started in this, in this business, people are starting to like diversify casts. And you know, I saw Haiti's Town, it was extraordinary, by the way. I saw six shows in New York in the span of six days out of, and this was not conscious of me. This is not something I was doing consciously. Out of the six shows, I saw every single show had 90% people of color.3 (55m 43s):And it wasn't, and I wasn't conscientious of it. I wasn't like, I'm going to go see the shows that like, it just happened that all I saw Hamilton, I saw K-pop, I saw, you know, a death of a Salesman I saw. And they all were people of color and it was beautiful. So there's definitely a shift. That said, I, for me, it's never, this may sound strange, it's not the people in front of the camera or on stage that I have a problem with. Like, that to me is a bandaid. And this is me speaking like an old person, right? I need, it needs to change from the top down. And for me, that's what where the shift needs to happen for me. Like all the people at top, the, the, the people who run the thing that needs to change. And until that changes, then I can expect to starter from1 (56m 25s):The low. It's so interesting cuz like, I, I, I feel like that is, that is, we're at a point where we'd love to like the bandaid thing. Like really people really think that's gonna work. It never holds. Like that's the thing about a bandaid. The longer the shit is on, it'll fall off eventually. And then you still have the fucking wound. So like, I, I, I, and what I'm also seeing, and I don't know if you guys are seeing it, but what I'm seeing is that like, so people got scared and they fucking started to promote execs within the company of color and othered folks and then didn't train them. And now are like, Oh, well we gave you a shot and you failed, so let's get the white kid back in that live, you know, my uncle's kid back in to, to be the assistant.1 (57m 6s):And I'm3 (57m 7s):Like, no people up for success is a huge thing. Yeah. They need to set people up for success. Yes, yes, for sure.2 (57m 12s):Yeah. So it's, it's performative right now. We're still in the performative phase of1 (57m 16s):Our, you3 (57m 17s):Know, I would say it feels, it, it can feel performative. I I'm, I'm definitely have been. I've experienced people who do get it, you know what I mean? It's just, Sunday's a perfect example of somebody who does get it. But that being said, like again, it needs to, we need more of those people who get it with a capital I like, you know, up at the top. Cause again, otherwise it's just performative, like you said. So it's,1 (57m 38s):Does it make you wanna be an exec and be at the top and making choices? Yeah,3 (57m 42s):You know, I've always, people have asked me, you know, people have asked me what is the next thing for me. I'd love to show run. I've, I just, again, this is the, this is the stem part of me, right? Like, of us, like is I'm great at putting out fires, I just have been that person. I'm good with people, I'm, I'm, you know, and I've, I, you know, it's, it's, it's just one of those things that like I, I see is a, is a natural fit. But until that happens, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm also, you know, a professor is very much a version of show learning. So I've been doing that every day.1 (58m 14s):We talk about how, cause you've mentioned it several times about playing children into your thirties. So a lot, we have never had anyone on the show that I'm aware of that has had that sort of thing or talked about that thing. They may have had it. Mostly it's the opposite of like, those of us who like, I'll speak for myself, like in college, were playing old people at age, you know, 16 because I was a plus size Latina lady. And like that's what what went down. So tell me what, what that's what that journey has been like for you. I'm just really curious mostly, cuz you mentioned it a couple times, so it must be something that is part of your psyche. Like what's that about? Like what the, I mean obviously you look quote young, but there's other stuff that goes into that.1 (58m 57s):So how has that been for you and to not be, It sounds like you're coming out of that.3 (59m 1s):Yeah, I mean, look, all my life I've always been, you know, I mean I'm, I'm 5, 5 6 on a good day and I've always just been, I've always just looked young. Like, I mean, I mean, and I don't mean that like, oh I look young. Like I don't mean that in any sort of self-aggrandizing way. I literally just am one of those and you're built, like me, my one of my dear friends Ko, God rest his soul, he was always like, Rodney, you're like a little man look, looks, you're like a man that looks like a boy. And I was like that, that's hilarious. Like, and look, I for growing up little in, in high school and, and it, it was one of those things that I was always like, you know, like I was always chummy with people, but I was never sort of like, like there's a look, let's face it.3 (59m 45s):Like we're, we're a a a body conscious society and when you're, whatever it is, you can't help. There's implicit bias, right? Implicit bias, right. Supremacy at it's most insidious. And so I am not all my life, I was like always trying to, you know, the Napoleon complex of always trying to sort of be like, prove that I was older than I was.1 (1h 0m 6s):How did you do it? How did you do, how were you, what kind of techniques did you use? For3 (1h 0m 10s):Me, it wasn't even my technique. It was about doing everything and anything I possibly could. I mean, I was like president or vice president, I a gajillion different clubs. So it1 (1h 0m 18s):Was doing, it was doing, it was not like appearance. Okay, okay. So you3 (1h 0m 23s):Was actually yeah, I couldn't do anything about this. Yeah.1 (1h 0m 25s):Right. So yeah, but like people try, you know, like people will do all kinds of things to their body to try to, But for you, it sounds like your way to combat that was to be a doer, like a super3 (1h 0m 36s):Duer. And I certainly, I certainly like worked out by the time I got to college I was like working out hardcore to try and masculinize like, or you know, this. And, and eventually I did a gig that sort of shifted that mentality for me. But that being said, I think the thing that really, that the thing that, that for me was the big sort of change in all of this was just honestly just maturity. At some point I was like, you know what? I can't do anything about my age. I can't do anything about my height, nor do I want to. And when that shifted for me, like it just ironically, that's when like the maturity set in, right? That's when people started to recognize me as an adult.3 (1h 1m 17s):It's when I got got rid of all of that, that this, this notion of what it is I need to do in order for people to give me some sort of authority or gimme some sort of like, to l
Every parent knows, It takes a village to raise a child. Each of the adults in the child's life, relatives, teachers, coaches, brings a different perspective. The same is true for your business. No matter how smart you are or how much you know about your business, there are gaps in your skill-set. Your business village should be filled with smart, talented subject matter experts to help you fill in the gaps. If you are running a small business your village won't be comprised of employees, but an advisory board comprised of professionals, who provide information and guidance in their areas of expertise. Who Do You Need in Your Business Village? (On your advisory board) Your Attorney Your attorney's primary objective is to protect you and your business from risk. As you start you business your attorney can advise you on the right structure for your business and submit appropriate state and federal documents. As you business grows turn to your attorney for a range of legal documents such as contracts, non-disclosure agreements, and non-compete agreements with employees. An attorney who is familiar with your business makes the process of creating new documents much more efficient because you won't have to start each review by explaining what your business is about. Your Accountant There are bookkeepers, financial accountants and tax accountants. Which do you need? Well that depends on your comfort level with the numbers of your business. A bookkeeper keeps your day to day operations on track, paying bills and invoicing clients. A financial accountant is someone who can provide guidance not just bookkeeping assistance. Your accountant should prepare financial reports on a monthly basis and review key numbers with you. Your accountant should be able to help you predict if you have enough cash to meet future obligations and growth goals. A tax accountant does more than just prepare your tax returns, understanding your business, he/she can help you make decisions about when to invest, when to pull back, and how to avoid paying more than you should in taxes each year. Your Banker The worst time to establish a banking relationship is when you need money. As you start your business get to know your local business banker. He/she will advise you on the types of accounts you will need, develop a cash management strategy, and secure funding when you need it. Your Financial Planner For many small business owners, the business is your retirement plan. The question is will this be enough? Don't guess. A good financial planner will look at both your personal and business finances to make sure you have what you need when you are ready to walk away from the business. Your IT and Marketing Support Sure, you can manage your computers and software on your own. You can post content on social media and call it marketing, but just like every other element of your business, you need to stop and ask yourself, should you? Is this the best use of your time, and do you really have the expertise to manage those roles in house. If not, it is time to add these professionals to your team. In both cases, the industry is changing rapidly. You need people on your advisory board who understand both the trends and your business objectives. Lean on them to make the right suggestions about where and when to invest so you can focus on growing your business. Build Your Business Village Sure you may own your own business, but you don't have to do it all on your own. Start building your village today. Don't try to do it all at once. Find someone in one of these categories and enlist their aid in filling the other slots on your advisory board.
B2B E-Commerce Integrated: The untold perspective of IT leaders
Your IT best practices and business standard operating procedures may change slowly, but the labor market changes fast. This edition of the Tech Talk is all about capturing legacy knowledge at businesses that are still in the midst of their digital transformation. Listen in to hear how some of the best IT leaders globally are moving away from analog processes with loose worksheets and documents, and are leveraging tools to grow their knowledge base.YouTube | LinkedIn | Twitter | Sana Commerce resources
Your IT department spends too much time troubleshooting home networks—throwing virtual darts, trying to hit the target of the problem—because home networks are IT's biggest blind spot. In this episode of The Upload with ControlUp, Eugenia and Jeff discuss the problems with supporting work-from-home networks and how ControlUp gives IT line of sight into both physical endpoint devices, like laptops and desktops, as well as Citrix, Horizon, and Azure (AVD) virtual desktops
Learn the latest on sophisticated schemes targeting businesses like yours and what you can do to protect yourself. Melissa Jay Murphy 00:06 Hello, everyone, welcome to the Title Now Pop-up webinar. I'm Melissa Murphy with The Fund and I am relaunching these webinars after taking a fairly significant break. So, thank you for tuning in. Because it's been several months since I hosted a webinar, I thought that I would make sure that all of you know we also have a podcast I feel very modern and with it. The podcast is also called Title Now and I generally push the audio from these webinars to the podcast and will be doing that with today's presentation. The podcast is available through all of the typical channels so sign up and take advantage of all the great content that we have in the podcast. So, what are we talking about today? We're talking about cyber fraud and why cyber fraud because it is the number one threat to our industry. It's the number one threat to your business. Despite that reality I fear that so many people in the closing business have heard about cyber fraud over and over and over again and I know I nag about cyber fraud over and over again. You've become sort of resigned to it. You've made minimal gestures toward protecting yourself perhaps setting up some procedures you've made minimal efforts to really keep up to date with what's going on out there in the world of cyber fraud. You're basically rolling the dice on whether you will be the next victim and honestly in today's market, unless you have $400,000 or $500,000 set aside in your rainy-day fund, you are really taking a chance. So, I feel like because this threat to our industry has evolved over the past year. Things have changed and in who's behind this and how they're, what their business plan is, what their workflow model is. And those changes are not good for us. The criminals have figured out that preying on our industry is pretty darn lucrative and apparently not that hard. So, I thought it was a great time to revisit this topic give you an opportunity to learn more about who is behind this crime, how they view our industry and how they have identified our weak points and how they can get in. We have two gentlemen with us today that are on the frontlines of this war and yes, it's a war. They're going to share their knowledge, expertise, and advice on what the industry and you need to understand and what you need to do to address this threat. So first, I have with me, Tom Cronkright. Tom's an attorney in Michigan, but much more importantly than that Tom is in a closing business. He has a title agency Sun Title, it's a high-volume agency, and he also has a company CertifID, that's in the business of safeguarding money in real estate deals and through this process through this life experience, Tom has become one of the real estate industry's leading experts on cyber fraud and he is committed to solving the largest problem in real estate. And he's so good at this, that the Secret Service has partnered with him. We have Steven Dougherty here from the Secret Service. And as you can see from his impressive background, he's with the Global Investigations Operation Center for the Secret Service. Tom and Steven, let's get started. What's happening in the world of cyber fraud, business email fraud? What do we need to know? Tom Cronkright 4:28 Steven, I'll let you take this but Melissa, thanks for taking the time and just spreading more and more awareness on this topic. You do such a nice job, appreciate the tee up. But Steven, why don't we read you in we've had a very very active year and a half together and as far as combating BEC, or business email compromise and wire fraud. But as Melissa mentioned, a little bit more background but I'm a wire fraud victim as well. So as an attorney, title agent, I've been through this process. Unfortunately, in 2015, it cost me nearly $200,000 and ended up in a high-profile federal trial down in Tampa. So, when Melissa mentioned that I've become a subject matter expert, I just paid a lot of tuition in this realm that these are courses I did not want to take. As a title agent or lawyer, I don't remember a cyber fraud and money laundering class in law school. I remember tax and corporations secure transactions, but that's it. Steven, you could be read the group into what we're seeing at a high level and how that starts to work its way down into the real estate. Steven Dougherty 05:40 Yes, where I sit in a very unique position here. I'm at Secret Service headquarters in Washington DC. I'm in a desk here called our business email compromised mission desk, in which my unit gets in pretty much real time aggregative incidences cyber enabled financial fraud affecting every industry. These guys are threat actors are targeting every industry out there where financial transactions are taking place. You know, every industry has it, but where's it most visible? It's most visible in the real estate sector. So, they've really turned their sights on the real estate sector for the past several years and they continue to focus on it because there's so many different transactions involved in real estate transactions. You have your closing, you have your mortgage payoff, you have your earnest money deposit. All of these things are being targeted by our threat actors, and it is driven by one thing. The intersection of what I call contemporaneous and privileged information between your buyer and seller, your real estate and closing attorney they will be the only the ones you would think would have the information like the Closing Disclosure, mortgage payoff documents, anything involving the transaction, but that gets intercepted by our bad actors. And then they weaponize that against you. To get you to redirect transfers of funds, send a payment somewhere you shouldn't stuff like that. Tom Cronkright 7:03 Steven when you say that they're visible. What do you mean that real estate transactions are uniquely visible? Steven Dougherty 07:10 Just the information is out there, due to the real estate sector types of reporting information. Tom, you know, you and I have talked about this a lot about how much of open-source information is available for us to go get or for our threat actors to go find. They can use that, piece it together and then uses that to do a very, very targeted attack. That's so specific that fools even the most complex or educated individuals to spend their money. Tom Cronkright 7:38 Yeah, what we've seen I want to layer on it mostly, if you don't mind. I went two minutes on this because I think the framework of where we are right now creates unique vulnerabilities than when I was hit in 2015 as an agent. So, if we think about the multiple listing service, all of our real estate partners that feed us deals that we're codependent on have an obligation to post up activity on the MLS. That MLS has contracts with Zillow and Trulia and a realtor typically for money to syndicate or buy that data in real time. So, what's interesting is real estate, being now the largest asset of people's lives, and there's not a close second given appreciation. I don't know if you guys saw the NICU from ALTA this morning, but home prices went up another 15% last year. That not only is that the largest asset of people's lives, it's the most visible transaction that we have in the United States. Car purchasing and other high value assets those are happening between, you know, kind of behind the curtain but not real estate. Because of the open market process that a listing agent has to conduct to get highest best use or highest best value for a property and then the fraudster just mine these deal boards. Say “Oh, looks like Norma is listing her house” and “Steve is listing his house” and listing you know, my whatever it happens to be. And then through phishing strategies, these real estate agents have the security of a dumpster essentially, on a super warm day. And they're just exposing us and I'm just going to say it because look, not every time but let's just say in most cases, and then we don't know that all the information that Steven is saying contemporaneous and privileged is being scraped and analyzed overseas, to then trick a homebuyer. And again, let's talk about homeownership right now. There is no inventory. We fell below 1 million listings last month there are more licensed real estate agents in the country than there are homes for sale for the first time that they've been tracking inventory levels. Run the math. By about a few 100,000, we have 3,800 licensed real estate agents in Greater Grand Rapids. This morning we had 900 listings. So, what does it take to buy a parked property? I've got an employee right now at CertifID. She missed out on three offers. She's been through 12 homes she was high fiving me last night almost crying in a text. “Oh my gosh, we got one right.” They’re going to do anything they can to close that. When they get to the end three weeks from now and are asked to transfer money, if they're not set up for success, that buyer anxiety and that buyer fatigue, at a time when we need them more protected, I would argue creates more vulnerability because look I'm not going through that process again. So, I'm going to do whatever you need. If you're saying I don't need to bring a check anymore and I’ve got a wire funds. Tell me where to send that wire. Steven, I think you'll agree we saw that over and over and over and continue to every week that we're involved in recovery efforts. Steven Dougherty 10:56 Yes. Talking to you touch on some really good points. So, let's talk about how these compromises are actually occurring. How are they actually getting in and getting this information out? What they do is through multiple different means either through already having your password for your email account that's already on the dark web through a data breach compromise. You guys actually go to a website Have I been pwned? https://haveibeenpwned.com They've been your email address and see if that email address was involved in any of the large-scale data breach compromises. They'll take that information, find your old password, try to use that to log into your account. That's one way to do it. Another way they'll attack is through a targeted phishing email, where they'll send you an email with a document to click on for some reason. You click on it because you think you're supposed it brings you to a web page. You type in your email address and password and boom are bad actors now your email address and password. And once they have that information, they go in and they log into your email account. They only log in one time. Generally, what they do is they'll go to your settings, and they'll set up an email rule to auto forward out any email you receive. So, you get an email from your client or homebuyer saying, “Hey, I've been told to close yeah, these are the details I have. What do you have?” Now our threat actor has all that information. That's how they get it. They only log in once, they setup the email rule, and the emails are built around that. Melissa Jay Murphy 12:29 Steven, I'd had a question on the chat for you. Oh, Tom already responded to the question. He is spot on. So, we have put in the chat the website that you go to see whether or not your email has been compromised and is out there on the dark web. https://haveibeenpwned.com So that's all. Steven Dougherty 12:50 Yeah, essentially, essentially, it's a website that conglomerates a bunch of different data breaches, and you know, going back for years, so your email address was involved in one of these. It will ping that and show you. That's why it's important to really keep your passwords updated, use new passwords, and don't repeat passwords. These threat actors, they just see that information, and they just start trying it in different places and they get lucky. Tom Cronkright 13:20 Steven let's stay on email accounts because they just seem to be the genesis of all things bad when they're compromised. Not only complex password, but can you speak a little bit about the importance of email settings and analyzing email settings. I think if this industry is ever going to set up Lunch and Learns this year is training our referral partners to identify whether their email accounts have been breached. This is one way but within the email account have rules been set up where their email account is being monitored in real time. They just don't know it and how you prevent it. Steven Dougherty 13:58 So essentially, like I said, these guys log into your email account just once, they go into your settings and they set up a setting or filter to auto forward out of all your emails that way and it’s not only that, they're deleting everything that gets auto forwarded out. They can tailor it to be very specific that you'd have it say you know, any email that uses the word “wire” or “account” or “payment”. I want you to filter that out to another email account and then delete it. So, it is very targeted with that. What we recommend and what you really should be doing along with changing your passwords very regularly, as you change your password every time go in and check those settings and make sure no unauthorized settings have been set up. You can also actually automate that through different your IT groups if you have them. Your IT groups can even, especially if you're using suite like Office 365, can be set up a way to monitor all email rules that are set up on your system to prevent unauthorized roles being set up. So that's one thing is very important. You guys got to check on that just as much as you can get your password. If you do review your rules, you will be able to see the rules set up. Most of the time, these are set out as user generated rules that you can see in those settings. Pretty easy to do. Particularly in Outlook go up to the gear on the right, click that drop it down, go to Settings, go to rules and alerts if anything's been set up there. Tom Cronkright 15:56 Yeah, I mean specifically any forwarding rules, any autodelete rules, any rules that scan for keywords in emails, all of those you can see either in Outlook 365 version or a desktop or native environment. Also in Google, Yahoo. All the different platforms have essentially these rule settings. The challenge is if the rule is set up, you could change your password every single day. The fraudster is still moving that communication into other accounts. So, you just got to make sure you kick him out of that. Then you reset the password and then you enable two factor or what's called multifactor authentication. Multifactor authentication is an additional security setting. So, you have your username, you have your password. We use a complex password manager here at our all of our organizations. That is LastPass. (https://www.lastpass.com) In a complex password manager you create this super secure master password and then for every site that you link for your email accounts, they create some ridiculous password that like you'd never know it. When you enable multifactor, multifactor is one more layer of security that provides a unique code each and every time that you send in a request to access the account. This adds a little bit more friction. But again, we're balancing friction with user security and data security. As attorneys the bar for us is always higher. There's no difference in court when we're standing up and someone's on the other side saying “Let me get this straight. You didn't check a box of multifactor that could have prevented this whole thing because this seems to be the proximate cause of where we're landing here.” Either your IOLTA account or escrow account was drained. Or I've got a consumer facing the loss of life savings. So that's just the brutal truth of it guys. Then using secure email, judges really don't understand secure email, but secure email is essentially a rail that provides security layer between one server and another server. So, you're sending the email on more secure basis. What we're talking about is making sure that that destination point isn't compromised. Because if the destination point is compromised, secured email doesn't do any good at all. Okay, the secure email secures it in transit, not what they call “at rest.” So, you got to do both. Melissa Jay Murphy 18:03 So, it seems to me that these additional safeguards and procedures are all a result of the increasing sophistication and increasing numbers of attempts. So, you know, I just don't think this is somebody in a gray hoodie in a Starbucks anymore. So, who is it that's behind this now because hasn't that change? Steven Dougherty 19:13 She's stole my line or she stole our favorite line. The line is that these are not your lone wolf hackers sitting in their grandma's basement drinking Mountain Dew and eating Cheetos, their favorite lives. That's what people think when they think you know, computer hackers, cyber fraud. But no, it's definitely not these guys operate what I refer to as the enterprise business model. It's a top-down business with a C suite and all set up with people below them to work these very complex organizations. They are transnational organized crime organizations. With the C suite you have your CEOs, then they call themselves that Mr. CEO, Mr. Chairman, and they're the ones that are kind of dictate how they want to do their attacks. Then they realize okay, I need somebody to pull off my phishing attack. So, they'll go hire somebody to do that. Then they're gonna be like, “Alright, cool, the phishing attacks good. I have the good information. I know when this transaction is going to be done, and I'm going to redirect it.” So now it's redirecting to another bank account. So now they need the launder that money. They need to get that money to themselves to do that they go and set up a sort of financial director wing. That is this expansive network of global money mules that just constantly are transmitting money back and forth. This problem has gotten really bad. We're seeing a lot of money mules actually be picked from some romance scams prior. So, they are unwitting money mules. They don't know what they're doing. They're just told by someone they met online, that they're going to receive money and help them for construction project or something like that. Then afford those funds on. It is a sprawling network of money mules here. It gets even more granular you have sort of an admin team that helps maintain spoof domains that they need to carry out their attacks or monitor, maintain email addresses or pull off other types of fraud such as unemployment, insurance fraud, even ransomware is tied into this now to kind of bolster up the organization. So, you really have a robust organization you're dealing with here, and they're very complex. They're very efficient, and as they make more money from these frauds, they only get better. Now they can afford more money mules. They get afford better malware. So, it's just momentum that they've developed and it's a momentous problem. Melissa Jay Murphy 20:51 I know that they're targeting title agents because title agents are receiving and sending money, but the source of most wire diversions and claims that I am seeing amongst Fund Members involve that mortgage payoff and they're intercepting the mortgage payoff when it's being sent to the title agent? Are they sort of hoping that there's an easier way that they can get to that mortgage information and scale it up? Do you think that that's on the horizon? Steven Dougherty 21:37 Yes. Or it may have already happened, in some instances where they're getting in and they're getting pure information fed to them before it reaches its destination. Tom and I are seeing something very similar. We can't speak about specifics, but Tom if you want to touch on it. Tom Cronkright 21:55 You're exactly right. Melissa, I ran a statistic. The average open mortgage balance at the beginning of this month was just over $299,000 across the country. Okay, we haven't seen those levels ever. Again, that's because of the accelerated increase in home prices. So, a few years ago, mortgage payoff fraud really was I'm sitting in the real estate agent’s account. I'm seeing the closing attorney send over the mortgage payoff between the client they're sitting somewhere and they're obtaining the original copy of the mortgage payoff. They're taking that PDF, they're using software to doctor that up and then spoofing typically, the loan servicer or the lender saying, “Hey, we had to make a correction. Here's an updated payoff.” So, they're we're using it as kind of an updated payoff scam. But what they're realizing now is to say, “Wait a second, what if we could distribute your original payoff into the email system of the party requesting it, and it's fraudulent from the beginning, like the first one has been tampered with?” So, we saw this early on in the Nashville area mid-summer. And then we just saw in the state of Texas, where the fraudsters again appear to have compromised the electronic fax account of the title company or title companies using the fax to receive mortgage paths. Look, I'm in the industry, 98% of these come over by “fax”, but it's not the fax of days passed because that was a machine that telephonically printed out something on a piece of paper. We said we can't do that anymore. We need the fax to be converted to a PDF and an email and then have that sent into our general stream of communication. So, they figured out I call it the note of distribution. They figured out that to your point well that's that's a great phrasing. We can compromise these at scale. If we could get access to the eFax, GFI FaxMaker. It doesn't matter guys, but if they get in there, they can reroute traffic from the originating servicer where the payoffs being sent from, doctor that up, and push it right through the same rail down in the email. Fascinating scam, and we've seen them do it unfortunately at scale as recently as a couple of weeks ago. Melissa Jay Murphy 24:44 What I hear you saying is that in those situations, it doesn't matter if the criminal has put email forwarding rules in my account, or not, because they're in there before it even gets to me. So, they're not even diverting any information from my account. They, you know, they've moved on to a much more sophisticated scheme. Tom Cronkright 25:16 That's 100%, right. If you look at what 80% by definition of our disbursement obligations, sit at the mortgage payoff. We can't adequately insure it. The most insurance you're going to get is 250,000 per and that's assuming you did 15 things and a COVID test and a blood test to show them that you did everything to mitigate the insurance company's risk, which if you did that, you wouldn't have the fraud. And I think the other thing that we're seeing is, you just simply can't trust mortgage payoffs that are coming from in either direction from the fax right now, from a closing attorney that you relied upon to gather that because you're the dispersing agent, not the rep representing the seller. And if you don't mind, I'll touch on this. It comes down to essentially three things. One you have codified somewhere a trusted list of mortgage payoff information. Treasury templates are the best way to do it. That's stored on your bank server wall. So, you start to set up the wire. You type in Bank of America and all of a sudden, a bunch of known trusted accounts pop up, you compare it to what you have, you release the wire. Some people do that on spreadsheets. I've seen people that have had folders of PDFs that check, check and date. However, you do it, history can be a very, very good guide on what is true versus things that are not true. When it comes to mortgage payoffs. Calling to verify any new account information is even harder than it was before. It’s hard enough to get them to initiate the payoff. It's even harder right now to confirm just general bank account information for a wire but you have to do it or you just send a check, add some per diem, send a check but that's why it's important to get the mortgage payoff early in the process. Let's just think about mortgage payoff risk. Unless I'm sorry, this is going to breach some underwriting standard. The risk only goes down because the worst case is they made another payment. So, let's just get it out in the open. Let's get it before the fraudster has visibility to it. We can always ask for an update or they'll settle that out with the borrower at the end if for some reason they're radio silent on the verification. Know that we're in the process and we will be launching at CertifID an insured mortgage payoff database for spring market. So, we're in the process of analyzing over 300,000 trusted mortgage payoff records right now. We'll be piloting this in the next two weeks with a group and then we'll be launching this out. This is the number one threat. This is the threat guy that keeps me up at night. Because I know that any loan, commercial, there the table stakes could get large very quick where I'm out of business as a Title Agency in one single wire. We were involved last year in a 22 and a half million dollar, about $21 million commercial payoff wire recovery that landed in the money mule’s account. One wire that would have been lights out. Steven Dougherty 28:28 So, if these do happen to you, and there's a very good chance that it may just due to the threat landscape that's out there. The one thing that's extremely important here, time is money. If you discover this, you need to report it as quickly as you possibly can. There are numerous ways to report it. You can report it through any secret service field office, you can just Google “secretservice.gov and field offices.” You guys I believe are all in Florida, right for the most part. So, while our Orlando Tampa and Miami offices are all very active, very good offices, you can reach out directly to them. Or you can also go to FBI’s IC3, the IC3.gov. www.ic3.gov It’s the Internet Crime Complaint Center. You can also report it there. I'll put the link to the Secret Service field offices in the chat here in a second. But time is money, Tom, I mean, you know you get live streams of victims to you, and you get them to me and how fast have you seen money move within hours. So, we need to stress that time is money. Tom Cronkright 29:27 Yeah, what used to be touted as you know, 72 to 96 hours with the advent of cryptocurrency and just the sophistication. So, what happens in most cases is that when fraudulent wiring instructions are sent, they are typically sent from somewhere overseas. They're sent from the syndicate running the fraud play, but domestically, they have a series of money mules that either know what they're doing or wrapped up in something they're not even aware of that take money in and then quickly move it out. They can withdraw it in cashier's checks. They can withdraw it in cash. They can buy gift cards. Most insidious is that they move into crypto wallets. Then those wallets move and then they move out into other fiat currencies in different countries, and they can move those funds while the Federal Reserve is closed. So, as we're trying to digitize and make it more convenient, these rails of moving money, that are we would look at as kind of nontraditional, it's just a superhighway for them to launder funds and almost completely avoid detection. So, if you're two or three days in, and you haven't triggered a response from federal law enforcement and notified the banks, I mean the to your points Steven we've seen money move within hours. But we've also had instances where the money was in the bank branch. We notified the bank through our efforts, and they were stopped cold. I love stories like that. But it's harder. It's harder to reclaim the money after it's been stolen because they understand the gravity of how quickly they have to move the funds. Melissa Jay Murphy 31:13 So let me go back and let's try to make this really clear to our audience. The moment that you realize that either a mortgage payoff has been diverted or perhaps the sellers’ proceeds have been diverted. You contact a secret service field office, you email the IC3 website and file a notification. You must I assume contact your sending bank and the receiving bank and who do you ask to speak to at both the sending bank and the receiving bank? Tom Cronkright 31:59 So, before you answer, Steven, here's the point of this. What he's about to say needs to be done in advance. These relationships in this pathway needs to be groomed before you have an incident because what we found is that when crisis hits, people freeze and you're burning daylight, that could mean the difference between something coming back and everything being lost. So, I didn't need to step on you there Steven, but what we're about to say is do not wait. This playbook should be set in the organization before there's an incident. Steven Dougherty 32:41 The way I prioritize it is first you should actually contact your financial institution that sent the wire. They generally will on your behalf send a wire recall or a swift message that it was due to a fraudulent means or compromise. If you contact the receiving bank directly if you're not a client for them, oftentimes they won't help you because you're not their client or customer. That's just a caveat. But immediately contact your financial institution and tell them what happens and see if they can put a wire recall in. The next step is to contact federal law enforcement or local law enforcement really whatever you're comfortable with. But what Tom's point was great is you need to have an incident response plan in place before these happen. You need to know who to call to help you. Local law enforcement can help with this. State law enforcement to help and federal law enforcement. So, it's whoever you're comfortable with who you developed a relationship with. You can just Google obviously I provide the Secret Service field offices link you can also Google FBI field offices. HSI Homeland Security also plays in this space. IC3.gov is just a place to report that these happened. Even if there's an attempt, report and attempt. Even if you stop it, please report it to the IC3.gov because what that does is it now gives us meat to go after because there's still the bank account that was used to divert the funds, or the spoofed emails used to send the attack email. We can go add to that as well. So please, the biggest steps are to have an instant response plan in place where you know who to contact and how, and two report everything you can wherever you see because not only does it protect yourself it protects the entire community. Tom Cronkright 34:24 Yeah, well, what I've what I've been most surprised by when I'm most surprised, but one of the surprising things Steven I've involved in well over 100 recoveries last year for 35 to 36 million victims. And I say that because each one has a little uniqueness to it. One thing that seems to be bubbling up is if you're banking with a credit union or a community bank, maybe a smaller regional bank. You might be surprised, and you don't want to be surprised when you're going through it, that they don't have a fraud desk, they don't have somebody that understands how to send an alert through the Fed wire system or notify the receiving bank which is typically a money center bank. So, it's leaving a small bank. I mean, 9 times out of 10 it's hitting one of the big guys, because of the coordination they have globally. So, if they don't have their own incident wire fraud communication, all those channels. I mean, I had to educate bank presidents on what an indemnification and hold harmless looks like going to a money center bank, to allow the funds to come back to a victim. It's surprises me as a lawyer. So just don't be surprised. You run this. Sit down with your banker and make sure you know exactly who to call and the information that they will that will require. If they in turn, have the rails set up to protect you and get the documentation that the receiving bank is going to need to put a suspension on the account, freeze the movement of money, and hopefully work that back to you or your customer. And Melissa, it's worth noting it's not just the disbursement wires, yes, those were a direct hit to the closing attorneys. But it's the risks that buyers face when the closing attorney is spoofed. They haven't been educated. They haven't been engaged on this issue. They haven't received wiring instructions. And all of a sudden at the closing table we realize that there's no certified check in hand because their life savings was wired a few days ago. And I'm going to say this it does not matter to tell the people we don't receive wired we only receive certified checks. We have seen time and time again. The fraudster redirecting through communication the requirement that “Nope, can't have a check now because I've got an OMICRON outbreak or something's going on. I need your wire and I need your wire today.” It's just we've seen it unfortunately. Melissa Jay Murphy 37:05 It does seem to me that reverting to what we call the old-fashioned way of conducting business has some role here, has some advantages here. Some of the questions on the chat or have to deal with these new fax systems that do come straight to your computer versus more of a phone line that's sitting on the desk behind you. But is it better to use an old-fashioned fax machine to send and receive things? The problem is a buyer, the normal consumer, out there doesn’t have a fax machine sitting on their desk if they have a fax number? It's something tied to their computer, but certainly for the purpose of receiving a payoff from a lender. An old-fashioned fax machine seems like it might give you some level of protection. Then in dealing with for example, buyers that need information about where to send their cash due at closing. I don't know what the average homeownership is now, but you know, it's five to seven years, maybe. People don't do this on a daily basis the way we do and so they're not sophisticated and educated about this cyber fraud and rather than communicating with them via email it seems like a reliable form of communication is the good old-fashioned phone. Do you agree? Is that something real practical piece of advice? Steven Dougherty 39:01 You know for customers; this is not a muscle memory transaction for them. Just to put it out there, everybody puts disclaimers at the bottom of their email saying, “wire fraud is real.” Well, guess what? People don't read anything below your signature line in your email. They read the content. That's it, they're not reading and paying attention to that. So, you really have to engage your clients and customers on a very sort of vigorous basis. Tom, you agree that you should do it upfront and throughout the entire process. Let them know, this is the process, and fraud exists, this is how we combat it. Tom Cronkright 39:44 We didn't create this threat. The threat is not going away. It's only getting worse. So, what do we do in response? My argument has been to the industry, to my staff, to our community here in West Michigan primarily is that this isn't going to happen on our watch. And if it does happen, we as transaction participants as advisors, lending, real estate, title and closing that we've done everything we could. We met the standard of care as is being defined in the courts, unfortunately, federal and state as to what success looks like for a consumer to be protected. The challenge is we're not driving them to the bank. We're not over their shoulder when they're opening online banking. A lot of them are banking with an eBank and there's no bank branches. That's the other realization with this economy we're in. We're not in a good fun state. So, I don't have to take wires and if I put my title owner hat on, I don't have to take wires in for cash to close. Now don't have to send wires out, pursuant to the state of Michigan. But what I need to do is educate the consumer that this thread is out there. They can strike at any point and we're going to set you up for success. So, the first thing we do is when we issue the title commitment, we send our wiring instructions along with a wire fraud notice to every consumer. We send it through CertifID. You may even say I'm going to send it through secure email; however, you send it just make sure that you have confirmation that they're the ones that actually received it. Because in a vacuum you can say “Look, no wires only checks. Got it great. We'll see you at closing” and then they get tricked after and it's simply not enough. The other thing that we've done is educate them of the closing scheduled. “Hey, remember if you are going to wire only those instructions that were sent earlier can be trusted.” With regard to enrolling the real estate agents and the referral partners. This is the key. This is where you can multiply the message and multiply this yourself in this conversation because guess who they trust? They trust the real estate agent because they're typically the one driving the traffic. You're being fed off them. Everyone is kind of beholden or codependent on the real estate agent. There's an opportunity there that at the agency formation, this knowledge transfer takes place. So, through notices, we've provided what we call a “day zero document” that our real estate agents put in Dotloop and DocuSign that we have the customer sign because they might start working with a buyer six weeks ago trying to find houses. We've been involved in wire fraud recoveries where the purchase agreement wasn't even countersigned by the seller in the entire cash to close amount was wired to a fraudster by the buyer. Purchase Agreement wasn't even consummated yet. That's how early they can get approached. So, educating the real estate agent, you know, showing them what you're doing to protect the consumer to protect them, and then getting them as part of the lexicon of how they do their business. Wire fraud becomes this conversational piece, not something that we hide behind or act like it's not happening. That in my opinion, is how you drive sustainable engagement. You can't do it all yourself. Melissa Jay Murphy 43:16 Interesting. I think thiss has been an incredible source of information. So, thank you to Tom and Steven. I think that we might have raised some questions that we have not been able to answer and those have been reflected in the chat. So, what I am going to try to do along with my team is look at the issues and questions created by the chat. Review the information that Tom and Steven have shared with us. Try to make some organizational sense to it and try to push something out to Fund Members to update them on the best way to deal with this. Nothing about what you do when you realize there's been a crime is really different than what's on our website right now, Fund Members. We have the IC3 website. The Secret Service connection is something that's a little bit new. And so, we're definitely going to add that kind of information to our webpage. https://www.thefund.com/information-center/information-security.aspx Steven, so thank you for that. Steven Dougherty 44:35 On that website, you can actually go back to do investigations. And there's actually numerous pieces, there's PDFs, there's documents that help prepare for a cyber incident and give updated information on cyber stuff that you can definitely pull down and link to on your website. www.ic3.gov Melissa Jay Murphy 44:54 We will definitely look into that. So, with that I am going to thank Tom and Steven again. I'm going to thank all of you 190 people that participated in this webinar. Thank you so much for your time and attention. Don't forget we're going to push this out on the podcast. And so that's another way you can listen to this webinar again in the information. We will make sense of the comments and information that has been posted in the chats and push that out to you. And as I always do when I wrap up one of these is thank you above all, thank you for your support of The Fund.
In this episode, we dive into Getting It Means Growing Through It. Sometimes you get some IT in your life and we often don't know what to do with IT. God wants whatever your IT is in your life. He will take your IT and make it beautiful. Your IT is for your story and your IT is purposed in your life. Tune in to hear what God has to say about your IT! --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app
It is no argument that modernizing at any institution is a learning curve. In this month's Top of Mind podcast episode: "From Butler to Enabler: How IT Services Empower Teaching and Learning," Alison Robinson, associate vice president and deputy CIO of the Division of Information and Technology Services at California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo, joins host, Elizabeth Farrell in discussing this curve; specifically, the role technology teams play in enabling teaching and learning. For Robinson, enabling and supporting mean two different things, and the difference represents that change in modernizing your IT organization. Your IT department can serve as either a butler—you need a tool, and I'll bring a tool—or as a partner—specializing in service management.
YOUR IT! UPWARDS AND ONWARD! YOUR DETERMINATION WILL SEE US THROUGH. Dr Barbara Jennison --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/dr-barbara-jennison/message
Night Listeners -We are back to our old ways with a solid mix thrashy punk, bedroom electronics, and eastern Iowa doom.Iowa Basement Tapes has its own archive of Iowa music. Be sure to check out iowabasementtapes.bandcamp.com and download any of the releases for free. If you would like to contribute any music please send an email to kristianday@gmail.com.Hear us every Thursday at 9PM on 98.9FM KFMG – Des Moines and every Friday at 11PM on 90.3FM KWIT – Sioux City & 90.7FM KOJI – Okoboji. If you miss the show please subscribe to the broadcast archives: https://apple.co/2MzdH5eFind me on twitter @kristianmday#trustkristiandayDie Mutts - "We Know" / Destroy You (Des Moines)Zap Tura - "Echo Space" single (Des Moines)Pitch Black Manor - "One Way Out" / Night Creeps (Quad Cities)Closet Witch - "June 11th, 2006" / Melification (Quad Cities)Dredge - "The Weightless Can Only Ascend" / Fossils and Ghosts (Dubuque)Captain 3 Leg - "Tag, Your It!" / Incident at Ape Canyon (Ottumwa)Captain 3 Leg - "Do It Tomorrow" / Incident at Ape Canyon (Ottumwa)Captain 3 Leg - "Show Sitter" / Incident at Ape Canyon (Ottumwa)Alex Body - "5" / Jazz Menu (Iowa City)Overcrest - "Aeriform" (Cedar Rapids)Nalani Proctor - "Voorhees" (Keokuk)Jimmy's In the Basement - "A Grave for Lilly" / Devil Pudding (Ottumwa)Stickdog - "Evolultion" / Human (Iowa City)Captan 3 Leeg - "Breeding Platform" / Incident at Ape Canyon (Ottumwa)When Bitter Spring Sleeps - "Dungeonkrawler" / Dungeon Metal (Cedar Rapids)
Have you ever wondered why some people have that magnetic presence, and whatever they do ends up getting 10x more results than everyone around them? Well, I can tell you it's not some magic potion they've taken, nor does it mean you have to work extra hard to reinvent the wheel to get magnetic X factor results. You do need clarity, a little brainstorming, and the confidence to own what makes you and your methods unique. In this episode, I will help you uncover what makes you unique so you can figure out your X factor and skyrocket your business with ease and stop selling with force. I talk about why so many people struggle to figure out their X factor, what makes up your X factor, and why you might be too close to see what your X factor is. I'm also sharing easy-to-understand examples of doubling down on your X factor, and I'll provide you (as always) with actionable steps to help you get clarity and really own your stuff. In this episode, we cover… Why there is no magical secret to having an X factor How to choose, own and highlight your X factor Two reasons why you might be struggling to figure out your X factor How to pull out your X factor How to figure out what about you stand out the most “Your IT factor is something powerful about yourself and or your brand that you need to highlight. It's not a secret, and it's not magical. It's not hidden.” - Amanda Kolbye ‘It's simply about choosing, owning, highlighting. It's about positioning and owning where you naturally thrive and how you deliver.” - Amanda Kolbye “It's about you choosing that thing that you want to highlight and really claim to be your own, and start to build that magnetic energy.' - Amanda Kolbye “In order to be magnetic and really own your X factor, we want it to feel natural. We want it to look natural, we want it to flow, we want it to be this magnetic, thriving energy that just so naturally exudes you and what you're about and why people want to come to you.” - Amanda Kolbye Thanks for listening, and if you like what you've heard, feel free to share this episode with your friends! There are so many amazing women waiting to discover the Laptop Lifestyle, and I'd love you to help me spread the word. Don't forget to screenshot this episode and share it on your Insta stories to win a free coaching call with me! Resources and links mentioned in this episode: Come hang out with me on Instagram or in the Laptop Lifestyle Entrepreneur Facebook Community! Head over to AmandaKolbye.com for more business tips and resources for the traveling entrepreneurs. Subscribe and Listen to The Laptop Lifestyle Podcast Review the Laptop Lifestyle Podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts The Laptop Lifestyle Bootcamp is opening soon for enrollment! Get on the waitlist right here! Join the waitlist for the $5k Accelerator right here! My NEW YouTube Channel has launched, and you can find the first episode right here. Check out The Content Kit Mini-Course to get my foolproof system for creating, storing, and organizing your content so you can stop feeling overwhelmed! The Instagram Business Blueprint is a great tool for advanced Instagram marketing and sales if you're ready to level up your IG game!
Join CTO Matthew Eshleman for the walk-through release of our newly updated 2021 Cybersecurity for Nonprofits Playbook.Is your nonprofit prepared? Learn the Community IT approach to cybersecurity and how to implement the changes you need to protect your organization.Matt shares advice on security improvements that provide protection against the most common attacks. You will also learn about staff training, cyber insurance, and why you need written IT documentation and governance policies.This Playbook gives you a structure to understand cybersecurity risks. Matt’s presentation gives you tips you can put in place quickly and train your staff on immediately. You can download the new Playbook for free here.This webinar is appropriate for nonprofit executives, managers, accounting, development, and nonprofit IT personnel – and as with all our webinars, it is appropriate for a varied audience.Community IT is proudly vendor-agnostic and our webinars cover a range of topics and discussions. Webinars are never a sales pitch, always a way to share our knowledge with our community.Completely Revised in 2021Community IT Innovators is pleased to announce the release of the completely revised 2021 Cybersecurity Readiness for Nonprofits: Community IT Innovators Playbook. This valuable nonprofit guideline is now available online for viewing and sharing.Whether hiring a Managed Service Provider (MSP) or using an in-house IT Department, organizations need to establish a good foundation of updated systems, regular backups, good user training including passwords and crisis management, and effective security policies that can evolve with the organization.Included in this Playbook is the eight-step Community IT Innovators framework—a multi-layered approach to cybersecurity.New in this addition:· Updated framework to include nonprofits implementing a foundational level of cybersecurity (the “must haves,”) proactive (including “nice to haves,”) or optimized levels.· Inclusion of general cost estimate comparisons—cybersecurity practices can be low-cost and be effective, and we show you how to save budget and where to judiciously spend your budget.· Updated links to evolving cybersecurity concerns regarding remote work and remote learning.· Updated information on the evolving sector of cybersecurity liability insurance and how to educate yourself on what your policy covers.Our goal is to give nonprofits a playbook to organize their response to increasing cybersecurity risks, in language accessible to any nonprofit executive, decision maker, or IT staff who implement security. Cybersecurity is a critical component of the IT services at any nonprofit organization. Your IT security should work for your organization and not against it; ask your IT Provider, Managed Services Provider (MSP) or IT Department about using this playbook as you create your IT Security documentation.Author Matthew Eshleman is Community IT’s cybersecurity expert.
Welcome once again to the #RunPainFree podcast. Today, Coach Jessica Marie Rose Leggio gives you the low down on your IT Band. If you thought it was just at the side of your quads and you could stretch it out, listen up, rascal – you've got a lot to learn! HERE'S WHERE YOUR IT BAND IS… Your IT band starts just below your knee. Place your hand beneath the back of your knee and grab it. Where your thumb rests is a tiny bone that protrudes out. That, my friend, is where your IT band inserts in your tibia. The IT Band goes from your knee up the outside of your quad and hamstring and then up to your hip before fanning out and covering 80% of each glute. It then crosses your lumbar, your T-spine, and attaches to your opposite shoulder. In sum, it covers the majority of your body. Why your IT band is super important as a runner. Your IT Band dictates your ability to move like a human being. As we keep hammering at #RunPainFree, running is an essential human function (aka walking) with velocity to the extreme. The IT Band's job is to see if your body is moving in dysfunction. If you are moving in some freak-a-saurus sort of way, it's going to lock you up. That's its job, to lock you up and save you from yourself. DO YOU EVEN FOAM ROLL? Runner's in the know foam roll. Runners who think they are in the know only foam roll their legs. But let's set the record straight, them runners are damn fools; that isn't how fascia works! Fascia is all over your body. It's what connects our bones, our joints, and our muscles together. It holds us together as human beings, hence the term connective tissue. The IT band is also the densest section of fascia on your body. When you only foam roll a portion of fascia, the parts you ignored get worse. If you are foam rolling and not going right up to the joint, you are in for some problems. Here's why: wherever the joint is, the fascia gets taught. Why, you may ask? Simply put, the fascia's job is to restrict your joint from moving improperly. To get to the root cause of your injury, you have to foam-roll everything. When you do this, you'll know where your body is in pain, where it's not, where it's knotted, where it's smooth, where you didn't realize you had aches or pains. That's why foam rolling is the gateway to understanding your body. When you have sticky-stuck joints, your fascia gets tauter to protect you from moving. Now that you've heard the explanation, are you surprised you are in pain? Are you surprised when we say you need to listen to your body and stop moving in that funky way! Where not saying fly James Brown funky, where saying fly-infested garbage funky! If you push through the pain, take Advil, get braces, get shots, get all that business, you, my friend, have taken a one-way ticket to the hurt locker. The only person who can let you is you, but you've got to work it. Sidebar: We have an episode on shortcomings of quick fixes to manage injury pain: How to overcome your fear of getting injured. That pain was merely your body giving you feedback that you have a dysfunctional movement pattern and you need to address it. If you push through it, the hurt locker walls will only close in on your further and further. But the good news is, it doesn't have to be this way. You can reset your dysfunctional movement pattern by releasing restrictions at that joint. You're probably thinking, OK, foam rolling, but what else? Good question, but that takes an expert to solve. Our catch-all advice via the podcast is simply foam roll everything. But our hot tip with your IT band is to take your time foam rolling. In the beginning, it's going to hurt because you're loosening up the restriction on a fundamental mobility structure. Whenever you release your funky dysfunctional muscles, it's going to hurt. It's going to be sore. But just like a kidney stone, the pain will soon pass. Sidebar: Hit up #RunPainFree to get a free consultation from an expert who can identify the root cause of your injury! THE IMPORTANCE OF RUNNER'S TORQUE. As we established throughout our podcast episodes, most runner's talk is nonsense. Be it a new shoe, fad diets, or killer workouts, But runner's torque, on the other hand, is the bee's knees. Why? Because your right knee is directly connected to your left shoulder, and your left knee is directly related to your right shoulder via the IT band. If you see somebody running without torque, aka the stiff Frankenstein runners, that is a clear sign of a local IT band across their T-spine. When you run without moving and twisting your upper body, you create dysfunctional hips. When the upper body isn't moving, while the hips are, you create torn hip labarums. YOUR IT BAND IS CRUCIAL FOR YOUR POWER AS A RUNNER. The power of a runner is in the arch of their foot and their torque. If you don't have those two things, that's indicative that something is going awry. When you're restricted at the lower part of your IT band, your push-off is as limp as overcooked spaghetti – you want it al-dente! If you have a lame push-off, you're not using your foot, and you're deconditioning the power in your arch, which (god forbid) coupled with a stability sneaker disallows your foot to move, limiting ankle flexion and extension. THE CONNECTION BETWEEN YOUR IT BAND AND YOUR HIPS. The IT Band's most fibrous point is where it crosses the hips, and guess where your hips are; it's below your butt. Yeah, newsflash: Your hip joint is below your butt. When you stand up and put your hands on your hips, that isn't your hips; it's your iliac crest. Your hips and your back are the two most important structures in your body in terms of mobility. Do you think it is a coincidence that your IT band is extremely fibrous in those areas? No, as we stated earlier, it is there to protect those structures! KNEE PAIN AND YOUR IT BAND. Knee pain is the first sign that there's a bigger problem at play. But rest assured, it's the easiest thing to fix and the fastest way to identify the root cause of your injury. But the caveat is, if you don't jump on it quickly wise, it's also the fastest way to get a nasty injury. Knee pain and shin splints go together like two peas in a pod. Why? They result from you not extending your stride because your IT band has restricted your knee to hip function. Consequently, your glute won't fire. When your glute isn't firing, the hamstring does the glute's job and acts as a stabilizing muscle. Sounds good; your hamstring is taking one for the team. But guess what, when the hamstring doesn't do its job of extending, it results in many problems. ACHILLES AND HAMSTRING PROBLEMS Your Achilles goes way up to your booty, right beneath your glutes. So if anything is wrong up there, the muscular representation of hip dysfunction is hamstring problems. When your hamstring is in dysfunction, your IT Band puts it spidey-senses to work and restricts your movement. So then you find yourself in a whole new world of trouble. We are going to bullet point Coach Jessica's comment here (because there's a lot, and it is all useful) IT band and hamstring dysfunction can lead to: · short striding · toe striking · shin splint · tight calves · knee pain · overdeveloped quads · pelvic tilt · lower back pain · tight psoas · groin pain · restricted hips This smorgasbord of injuries is all because of your poor neglected IT band. Learn to respect it, and thank it for protecting you from yourself. Once you release your IT band and you get the proper muscles firing, you are on the path to running pain-free. TAKE AWAY LESSON You can't stretch out tissue. If anybody told you to stretch out your IT Band, please walk away and never see that person again. The tissue is tension and needs to be pressed out. And muscle is "tightness," and it needs to be stretched out. Foam rolling is the gateway to allowing your muscles and joints to start to move and tell you what they can or can't do. When you address that, you can condition a new mobility pattern. There's a rhythmic dance the body does underneath those cute run outfits you put on each run, and you should pay more attention to that than your color combinations. TIMESTAMPS 01:12 Here's where your IT Band is… 03:32 Do you even foam roll? 10:14 The Importance of runner's torque 12:41 Your IT band is crucial for your power as a runner 14:17 The connection between your IT Band and your hips 20:00 Knee pain and your IT band 24:47 Take away lesson KEY LEARNING POINTS · Your IT band's job is to protect you from moving dysfunctionally. If your IT band is jacked, you are will likely encounter many more injuries · Your IT band starts at the back of your knee and ends on the opposite shoulder; it is not just on your outer quads! · You can't stretch your IT band; you need to foam roll it! MENTIONED LINKS Get an Assessment With Jessica: https://www.runpainfreenow.com. Resources & Programs To Recover From Injury: https://www.runpainfreeacademy.com #RunPainFree Bootcamp: https://www.runpainfreebootcamp.com/ Podcast: How to overcome your free of getting injured. Thanks so much for tuning in this week. We hope the nuggets of information help you deepen your understanding of your IT band's function and the intricate role it plays in allowing you to run! Have some feedback you'd like to share? Please leave a note in the comments section below! If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with your friends. Don't forget to subscribe to the show on iTunes to get automatic episode updates for our "#RunPainFree Podcast!" And, finally, please take a minute to leave us an honest review and rating on iTunes. They help us out with the show's ranking, and I make it a point to read every single one of the reviews we get. Keep running and keep learning!
Make no mistake: Your IT employees are much more than a help desk. Author and IT executive leader Chris Laping explains how a popular restaurant chain worked to leverage and nurture this valuable human asset –– and why all companies will benefit from this approach.
Your IT guy installed a security firewall and antivirus software on your network, so you’re set, right?Wrong. These are useful security tools, but they’re not fool-proof. The idea that you can build a fence around your network is outdated. Today, threats find their way through even the best defenses. Your best option is to detect threats early and stop them in their tracks.That requires a 24/7 Security Operations Center. In this episode of Cybersecurity Simplified, we’ll explain what a Security Operations Center is and why you need one.
Our Nifty Thrifty FB Live is full of businesses we love in our group. Reuben Kamp of Darkhorse Tech, Jim Gerson and Dan Hall of Carestack are all joining us today. Darkhorse Tech works for 615 dental offices and growing to provide IT support for practices all over the country. Carestack is a completely cloud-based practice management platform. They use technology to provide touchless solutions for dental offices. The second group of clients is people who know they can do better and come to eliminate using multiple services. If I switch platforms, will I lose all of my data? You will not lose your data, but it does take some effort. Your IT team can help simplify the process. Can someone who does IT as a side gig install this? It's not a good plan, especially considering the information that is being transferred. What percentage of practices are changing platforms as an existing practice? About 90% of their new customers are converting to a new platform because they realize they can find multiple solutions in a single product. It's not just changing products, it involves unlinking all of your third party vendor add-ons. Those fees really start to add up, where Carestack includes many of the services you would use in a single monthly price. Why is Carestack different? Think about when you used to get cable, internet, phone, etc as separate bills, but advancements have bundled them together. Older platforms were created before the internet or cloud-based systems were used. These systems require third-party services to be bolted on to their platform to get what you want out of your services. If you go with cloud-based software do you fire your IT guy? It lowers the demand for them because you don't need a backup system unless it includes 3D images, but the IT system does so much more. Subscription fatigue, too many platforms, or simplifying your process is a great reason to switch. What does team training look like? Each office gets an implementation manager along with a Carestack University that you can monitor progress. Each user has training in the roles they have in the office. The training is lifetime use, so you can use it with all new hires going forward. What do I need to have to switch to cloud-based? Everything from phones, cameras, x-ray sensors, printers, and practice management systems are all covered by IT. Ransomware, Firewalls, and secure emails are other tasks that an IT company will handle for you. Let us lower the barrier to changing your service by giving a SUPER Nifty Deal! How long does it take to reach someone at Carestack for issues? Their average is 23-28 seconds. Your account manager will help you integrate new services. Carestack is month-to-month because they have no doubt that you will love their service. Nifty Deal: Carestack- 50% off a one-time implementation fee- $600 (normally $1200) First 3 months of service FREE (starting at a $1794 value) Darkhorse add on- Free Darkhorse Tech service of $300/ month for 6 months, a FREE Hardware Firewall ($695 Value) for a total savings of $2595 Walkthrough the demo for an additional gift To get this deal: Go to https://meetings.hubspot.com/carestack-dan/website-demo-request and mention Nifty Thrifty Dentists
Marian LaSalle and Lady Lou are taking a ‘dive deep’ into ‘Making IT Happen;’ whatever the IT is. They understand we all have wants and desires, and, we all have different ways of making our dreams come true. So, is there a SECRET to all this? Marian and Lady Lou say a resounding “YES!” Join them and find out some clever and creative ways to make YOUR ‘IT’ happen! ~~~~~~~ Contact Marian LaSalle: ~ Live Stream Show Producer ~ Digital Marketing Trainer ~ Mastermind Host ~ Podcaster ~ Show Host, & YouTube Content Creator https://NaturalCuriosity.Life Mastermind Group - Sign up today for Marian’s Mastermind group. This group is not like the traditional Mastermind. Yes, we share and support each other, BUT, the BIG difference is that Marian finds and teaches different software her members need to grow their businesses. Click here - https://NaturalCuriosity.Life ~~~~~~~ Contact Lady Lou Dewey: ~ Podcaster ~ Show Co-Host, Creator of Custom Interviews with Lady Lou – https://www.patreon.com/thebabyboomerbabe & YouTube Content Creator – https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRaMIOP_zp77fK6zNSZKxRg ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Our time together is full of fun and laughter as we talk about topics based on RESETTING our lives, living happier and healthier, increasing our prosperity, love, and our outlook on life. We invite you to join us every day! You may ‘listen’ to all our Shows on your favorite Podcast platform under ‘Natural Curiosity.’ YES! You can take us with you everywhere you go! Please ‘JOIN’ our Natural Curiosity Group on Facebook. You can find all our links on our website – NaturalCuriosity.Life. P.S. A favor, please… By SUBSCRIBING you are helping us reach more people who may really need to hear our messages on inspiration, hope, self-improvement, having fun, and togetherness. And, you may click on the little bell on YT to receive ‘notifications’ of our LIVE SHOWS in your e-mail Inbox. Thanks. P.P.S. You may help us even MORE by SHARING our videos & audios with your Social Media Friends. Look for the SHARE button under the video. Please ‘be nice’ and give us a vote --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/naturalcuriosity/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/naturalcuriosity/support
COVID for Computers COVID for computers, it's coming. It's triple C. COVID for computers is coming, think about that. Where do our electronics come from? This is going to be a bit of a speculative episode more than anything else, but most of our electronics are made in China. We've already seen cases where there's been back doors and hack abilities where people's using automated doorbells, where you click on it and they can see your face. Hackers have been able to go in and spy on these children and the parents weren't even aware there was some weirdo looking at them. Multiple devices that people take for granted on their home networks such as their smart TVs, smart fridges, smart door locks, smart anything on your network, even your smart phone is a way for you to get broken into. Learn more why working from home is dangerous at dorksdelivered.com.au Be Aware Working From Home is Dangerous Don't fall victim. Your home network previously would not have been an issue if your home network was broken into and you lost your home data. Sure, the kids couldn't print off their assignment for school and a couple of inconveniences with being able to check on Facebook and things like that, but for the most part it wasn't that big of an issue. Now it is. Every new device that you add to your network gives you an extra door that's going to be opened for people to get into your network and that's a big issue when you're bringing home intellectual property and data that you might be dealing in confidence with on your work PC's. It just takes that old iPhone or iPad that you handed down to the kids to play Candy Crush on, to not have the latest updates to be vulnerable. Or they download a funny app that gives access to that device which can then talk over your entire network. Minimise Devices That Can Listen In It's kind of like being at a party. If you're at a party with a mate, I'm going to call you your name, which we'll call your name, Dash PC, and then I'm going to call the other friend Router. If it's just your name and the router talking at this party, no one else can really listen in on what you're saying. But if we add a couple of other people to the party and we call them smart light, smart phone, smart doll, smart TV, any of these other devices, all of a sudden you realise you've got dozens and dozens of these devices and you're not in a better position for having them. When you, your name, Dash PC, goes to talk to the router, we get a problem. All those other devices, even if you're just whispering something to the router, can hear what you're saying. Security is Paramount So if your PC decides to send something over the internet for work that has some level of sensitivity and when you go to send that information over the internet, you don't want anyone else to listen to it, you need to make sure that your PC is in a very, very secure environment. When you have any of these devices that you might have bought from Bunnings or Aldi or even straight off eBay that give you more flexibility in what you're doing in your business and in your home, you need to make sure these devices have been checked out for their integrity. Your IT companies would probably look over your work network and see if there's any traffic that's doing things that are a bit odd, such as spying in and prying on what you're doing. But I damn well sure bet that they're not doing that on your home network. Remember IT Companies Are Reactive Now that we've got businesses with hundreds of employees or more and then they're all working from home and they haven't had the chance to really set these systems up properly. They're doing them in a half assed way because IT companies as a generalisation are reactive, and that's why we position ourselves as the company that's not reactive, which means we've got plenty of time on our hands at the moment because all of our customers are well prepared. Thank you customers. Thank you Team Talks. And the problem that you had though is when other companies set these up, any of your devices at home can then interfere and listen in on what you're doing with your work PC's and the hardware and software that monitor this is quite expensive so they won't be set up on the home PC's. The Final Word I urge you to make sure that you're connecting in through a VPN and what's called a VLAN. Make sure you're connecting in through a VLAN. If you are not, it means that it just takes one dodgy file that your daughter downloads and all of a sudden you have disaster and doom. Think about that and let me know if you need any help. We're happy to help for free in this COVID crisis. All we ask is that you jump across to the Go Fund Me page where we're funding the Royal Brisbane Women's Hospital to find a cure for COVID-19. If you've enjoyed this, please let me know and I look forward to seeing some feedback. Stay good.
• Entrepreneur says for success, businesses should integrate their information technology strategy with their business strategy • “Your IT strategy is your business strategy” Total recorded time (TRT) 16:51 Subscribe to the CVBT Executive Newsletter here: https://tinyurl.com/syqft9z Most business owners know their business strategy. And they may suspect that those “IT guys” know the information technology strategy. But long-time IT expert John Farhat says a company's IT strategy ought not be separate. “Your IT strategy is your business strategy,” says Mr, Farhat, founder of Farhat Services Company Inc., of Columbus, Ohio. With decades of experience behind him, Mr. Farhat advises clients on how to integrate IT into the fabric of a company, including being prepared for cyber criminals. “Anything online could potentially be compromised,” he warns. “What I see quite a bit is security companies coming in and doing threat penetration testing. That's great. Absolutely necessary. But that does not protect from all vulnerabilities.” Aand this is where integration of IT into the fabric of a company's business strategy is important, he says. In the case of a data breach, recovery will require more than just plugging the data leak. It will often require the work of marketing, legal, public relations and more,” Mr. Farhat says. “It's not like we're running two steps ahead of the bad guys. On a good day we're running half a step behind them” he says. John Farhat expands on his ideas in today's CVBT Audio Interview Podcast.
Welcome to Episode 10! As I'm recording this, the UK is heading into its second week of lock down due to the CoronaVirus. Many of you will have been advised to work from home now and your teams are remote! It was frantic all of last week - getting people access to companies' IT networks, ensuring everyone had the right equipment, setting up conference calls, and also pondering how on earth you would stay engaged with your teams. I was privileged to attend a 2 day conference for business leaders - which initially was planned to be in Paris, but at the last minute it was set up as a virtual conference using Zoom technology. And it worked a treat! On the first day, Fabienne Fredrikson of Boldheart Business took the attendees through 7 steps how to Pivot Your Business. And with her permission, I'm using her 7 steps (The Titles only) adapted to the corporate Contact Center life you are finding yourself in today. Lets go: Step 1: Pivot Your Facts You see - the news is full of information, right or wrong, plus all there is on TV, the Radio, Social Media - Covid-19. And to make matters worse, the so called facts don't match! You know the scenario from your daily reports, reflecting yesterday's performance. You look at the numbers and know they are wrong. So you go and dig until you find what's right. I'd invite you to do the same with the facts around Covid-19. Find a source you trust. And work from that source only. Ditch everything else! I can recommend the worldometers.info webpage - where you can get facts around spread of the virus per country - and you can see when it peaked, when it started to decline and how the infection rate performs in relation to the death rate. Really it is the same principle as if you look at last month's call performance vs. February 2019 call performance. You know what to look out for and then you can take action! Of course there is a high probability that your March 2020 stats are totally out of line, compared to last year - but because you know, you have an explanation and you can act. Going back to the crisis - the evidence on worldometers.info shows that New Cases in China are declining day by day. This gives hope that also in our countries the development of the pandemic will change. Step 2: Pivot Your Health Now as you are working from home, you have got the perfect opportunity to eat healthily! Remember the excuses you had so far? Too busy in the office? Dashing out for a Latte and ready made sandwich or soup? Not only can you prepare your foods the night before, you can make a conscious decision what to eat! Alkaline foods to support your immune system! And if you can't cook - now is the perfect time to learn! I'd recommend Jamie Olivers ‘Superfood Family Classics Cookbook'. Easy, straightforward and incredibly healthy! Step 3: Pivot your Mindset There are a number of ways to look at how you can stay positive - or at least try to see beyond the current crisis. One article I found helpful was by Jeff Van Clute “A message from the Coronavirus” - You find the link in the show notes. Jeff talks about the gifts that the the virus presents; Slowing down humanity's frenetic activities Activating networks of cooperation Spreading helpful DNA Upgrading humanity's immune system Creating the conditions for peace and well-being Saving lives, especially over the long term, by strengthening the web of life Listen, it doesn't mean that you have to be all singing and dancing everyday! But remember - you can definitely influence your thoughts. Step 4: Pivot your resources Well - in the corporate setting, our resources are people, technology, processes, procedures. Those who know me are aware that I work with my clients using LEAP: Lead People - Execute Process - Amplify Profit - In that Order! This means you do have to put more time into leading people! Just over 50% (53.6%) of professionals in the UK say that they feel lonely at the workplace! So now - as we all work from home, this figure is most likely to spring up significantly. Reasons for feeling lonely at work: 44.4% feel they have nothing in common with their colleagues. 26.5% don't have good work friends 21.7% say they feel lonely because their colleagues are a lot younger than them. Other reasons are: Working in an office on their own (20.6%), having to eat lunch alone (18.2%), working with other colleagues (11.1%), or not being invited to work socials (6.4%). Loneliness negatively impacts on performance. And now more than ever it is your responsibility to engage with your workforce. I invite you to go back to Episode 06 - How to set yourself up for a successful day in the Office and to Episode 08 - How to help your team member to be successful in their career. In both episodes you will find downloadable resources in PDF format, that will help you to engage with your team members as you would do in the office! Use technology such as Zoom or Teams or Skype for Business to hold your team huddles, your one to one's and your coaching sessions. Engaging with your employees is vital in this moment and time! Step 5: Pivot your time As a matter of principle - I work off of 90 day plans (quarterly execution plans) with bi-weekly sprints. That means I allow myself to focus 14 days on implementation or execution of one task that aids my project to be completed in 90 days. I use a project plan and I execute against the milestones. You might say - well that doesn't work for me, I'm not a project Manager! Believe me - it works. Cut your elephant in pieces! Although you are now working from home - you still have to deliver results. And a plan is there to help you get these results. But now is also the time where you can go and read all these books you wanted to read. Or learn the language you wanted to learn for ages. Now is the time to get fit - use the daily exercise allowance to get out of the house! There are a lot of activities, you now have got no excuse not to do something! 6 Pivot your Marketing I can hear you - I work in corporate, I don't do marketing! Hear, hear - let's look at Wikipedia; Marketing is the study and management of exchange relationships.[1][2] It is the business process of identifying, anticipating and satisfying customers' needs and wants. Because marketing is used to attract customers, it is one of the primary components of business management and commerce.[3] Marketers can direct product to other businesses (B2B marketing) or directly to consumers (B2C marketing). Therefore - marketing is actually a relationship building exercise with your customer. Your customer could be your HR department. Your IT department, your L&D department. It could be the client you are serving, if you work in outsourcing. I have a habit of calling my key contacts once a month, normally on a Friday. Just asking how they are doing, engaging in conversation around industry news, performance or simply their daily life. Give it a try! 7 - Pivot your Career We all do it from time to time - looking at what else is out there. Very often we do this when we think 'the grass is greener across the fence'. We look for new jobs when we are frustrated, or feel we have reached the glass ceiling - and have nowhere to go. Through the current crisis a lot of people have lost jobs they absolutely loved. Some have lost jobs they hated. Others are still in jobs - but are not clear why they do what they do! So I invite you to self find your reason for Being; What do I love? What am I good at What can I be paid for? What does the world need? Maybe you always wanted to change career completely? Now is the time to do the research and find out! Maybe speak to a career coach? So many career coaches are offering their services just now pro bona. Maybe you always wanted to progress and understand 6Sigma? Or take an excel course? If you have linkedIn - check out their learning department - it's great! So - what is it going to be for you? Seven areas where you can pivot in - pick at least two! Resources: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/china https://jeffvanderclute.com/articles/a-message-from-the-coronavirus/ https://www.cv-library.co.uk/recruitment-insight/brits-suffer-loneliness-workplace/ https://rutzconsulting.com/podcasts/opex-006-how-to-set-yourself-up-for-a-successful-day-in-the-office/ https://rutzconsulting.com/podcasts/episode-8-how-to-help-your-team-member-to-be-successful-in-their-career/ https://boldheart.com Our OpEx Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/582396082326472/?source_id=1807833562816621 SEO: My Podcast is produced by: https://www.unavoided.com
Michael G Rogers is the author of the bestselling teamwork book "You Are the Team" (over 20,000 sold), and has a new book, "Do You Care to Lead." He is also an Inc. Top 100 Leadership Speaker and our special guest on Do you CARE to Lead? You can learn from Michael that if you truly serve you unlock magical things with your team Care about your people and they will care about their work. How to take “Rocket” rides and not “Subway” rides with your team. Learn about the S.O.N.I.C. model and how applying it can truly propel your leadership impact. Find out Michael's top leadership hacks! Join our Leadership Hacker Tribe and connect with us: Twitter Instagram Facebook LinkedIn (Steve) LinkedIn (The Leadership Hacker) Music: " Upbeat Party " by Scott Holmes courtesy of the Free Music Archive FMA ----more---- TRANSCRIPT The Leadership Hacker Podcast: Episode 4 Michael G Rogers – Do You Care to lead? [Start 00:00:00] [Music Playing] Introduction Steve Rush: Some call me Steve, dad, husband or friend. Others might call me boss, coach or mentor. Today you can call me The Leadership Hacker. Thanks for listening in. I really appreciate it. My job as the leadership hacker is to hack into the minds, experiences, habits and learning of great leaders, C-Suite executives, authors and development experts so that I can assist you developing your understanding and awareness of leadership. I am Steve Rush and I am your host today. I am the author of Leadership Cake. I am a transformation consultant and leadership coach. I cannot wait to start sharing all things leadership with you. On today's show, we are joined by the founder of one of the best blog on leadership in the world, teamworkandleadership.com and best-selling author of two best-selling books. Michael G Rogers. We will get to talk to Michael shortly, but first it is The Leadership Hacker News. The Leadership Hacker News Steve Rush: It is life Jim, but not as we know it. Now that is a phrase Star Trek fans would know all too well. But it's something we can all now also associate with; given that, COVID-19 pandemic has swept the planet. Depending on your worldview, some would say the reaction to the Coronavirus is an overreaction, others may say the end of the world is near, and whenever your worldview the world and the businesses that we lead has changed forever. If ever there is a need for leadership, that time is now. Here is my top three hacks on how to lead through this crisis. Number 1 - Stay steadfast and calm. I coined the phrase the “Leadership Barometer” and we all have one. This is where that metaphorical storm that we have to face in as leaders means others look to us to see how we're reacting so they can judge and how also to react in those situations. It is our responsibility to project a sense of calmness and surety, and that falls very much in the leadership space. Leaders who serve others can help their teams remain focus and productive even in the face of uncertainty. And as a leader, they will be watching you like a hawk to be true to yourself, to acknowledge their concerns and yours and help them assess the threats and emotions so you can guide them logically to effective solutions. Number 2 - Communication. In times of crisis - communicate like you've never communicated before. Gossip and rumour will spread like wildfire in your workplace, especially in the absence of any official communication. As soon as you know stuff communicated promptly and factually and if you don't know, then say so because if you don't you will have a another virus in your business and it will be the communication virus on top of what you already have to deal with. As the myths and the legends, start to form and misinformation would disseminate through your business and things will be tough to deal with. Number 3 - Keep the wheels turning. Do whatever it takes to engage your teams and keep them busy at this time. It is important to take advantage of technology like virtual meeting platforms like Zoom or WebEx or anything else that is a collaboration tool, that will help keep your people connected when they're less connected and isolated. Could also be a time to pivot your proposition and innovate and try new ways of thinking and new emerging technologies in crisis can also bring people together in adversity. So use this time well to forge deeper, more meaningful relationships with colleagues, friends and families. Perfect opportunity to learn about your leadership style and how you have dealt with the situation or not, as the case may be. One thing you do have to avoid, and that's doing nothing. It is now time for us to lead like never before, intentions is not enough. Action is what is required. That is a leadership hacker news. If you have, any emerging stories or news articles that you think would be useful to share on the show. Please get in touch though our social media sites. Start of Interview Steve Rush: Our very special guest today is Michael G. Rogers. His first book, “You Are The Team”, sold over 20000 copies and his new book “Do You Care to Lead?” has just been published by Wiley. He is also an avid blogger. Michael, welcome to the show. Michael: Yeah. Thank you, Steve. Glad to be here. Steve Rush: So I will be useful for our guest to know, Michael that your career actually has been born as a very successful executive, having led some senior roles in Fortune 50 companies. You come from a place of experience rather than theory, too. Tell us a little about how you ended up here? Michael: Yeah, sure, I started off in the learning. Well, actually, almost all my corporate career was in learning and performance, corporate training that area and I quickly moved it up into leadership positions there and took an interest in leadership. I had a particular leader that was a strong, strong mentor to me, still is actually. An inspiration behind the two books that I have written. He is the one that got me interested in doing leadership workshops and, you know, be a part of learning performance. I had that opportunity to do a little bit of that. And it really just got me super jazzed about leadership. I started reading a lot; I started speaking more and more. I started doing some development with teams on the side while I was working and started getting asked more and more to do deep dive kind of team development with senior leadership teams. I mean, it just was a lot of fun for me. I have been blogging for about 13, 14 years. I believe now. And that was kind of a strong catalyst behind the writing of the two books as well. Steve Rush: So, Michael, what was it really sparked that interest and desire in you to want to lead and help others? Michael: Yeah, I mean, that leader I had talked about, his name is David Ferris. He was just such a strong mentor to me and he was like the perfect model of leadership. Again, and so inspiring, and the way that he led me, the way that I watched him lead teams, people were fiercely loyal to this guy and they still love him even, you know, years later. Having the opportunity to have conversations with him about what made a great leader because of our relationship in terms of him mentoring me, it was really what sparked a lot of it for me. I decided to leave corporate about three years ago and do something else. I have always known I wanted to write a book, but it was not something was on my mind when I left corporate to try to do something else. I want to get it a different industry, do something around that. I started writing the first book and it came out really well. When I started promoting it, it started selling really well. I said, I will take this and do this full time. Go around, speak, and write. I love it. I am a passionate, passionate about team development, leadership and speaking and writing. I mean, I really, really, Steve, love what I do. Steve Rush: Michael, in the time that we got to know and that's incredibly evident, passion and energy comes through rapidly and in the time that you start to write You Are The Team. What was it that cause you to have the team focus around leadership? Michael: Yeah, so I had been doing some team development on the side. I had read Patrick Lencioni book, ‘The Five Dysfunctions of a Team”, and if any of your listeners out there have not read that book, to me it is the Bible on teamwork. Steve Rush: Right! Michael: At least in terms of teamwork and relationships, which, you know, that is what teams are. I mean, fundamentally, at their core, they are about relationships. He just does a phenomenal job at talking about relationships, but I decide to focus a little bit differently. The book You Are The Team is about relationships, but it's also about commitment and it's about stepping up and committing to the team. And so a lot of people ask me all, why you title it, You Are The Team. You know, Mike, there is no I in team. I know that technically, there is no I but figuratively there is, and it always starts with you. Teams don't just magically come together because you create a team and you say, okay, go out and conquer. Teams have to first commit and connect and this book is based on six values of commitment and connection. I had not at the time seen any books out there that had focused just on teammates, the person. There is a lot of books have focused on leaders and how to lead teams, but nobody was focusing just on the teammate. There is an opportunity here. There is a little of a niche here and I really feel that teams are only as successful as every person's commitment on the team and their own success, towards the team. You know, great teams are made up of great teammates, so that was really the reason why I wrote the book. Steve Rush: Michael, how would you define team? In my work, I find myself often speaking to leaders who are in a team in a board environment, but are also leading teams. How do you square that activity through the team that you serve verses the team that you lead? Michael: Yeah, well, there is different types of teams, right? There is a lot of different types of teams. I mean, one of the exercise I do quite often is I ask people to talk about the greatest team that they have ever belonged to. That could be a family team. It could have been a team that, you report into, it is a team that reports to you, because even as a leader, you are still lead a team. You are still a teammate on that team to some degree. You know, there's volunteer teams, athletic teams, lots of different types of teams. To me, the definition of a team is a group of people that come together for a common cause that want to do something extraordinary together. That is how I would define team. I mean, that is like how I define leadership. I mean, to me, leadership is only leadership when people make a choice to follow you. If nobody wants to follow you then you fail to be a leader and a team fails to be a team, if they are not accomplishing extraordinary things. Every team has the potential to do that with the right ingredients. Steve Rush: So what do you think it is then Michael? Create that connectivity that emotional closeness that brings teams together? Michael: One of them and this is the same for leaders Steve is service. It is such a simple concept, we think about it and we talk about it, but we really never act upon it. I think there are so many opportunities around us. If we have this mind-set of putting others first to be selfless instead of being selfish, which I think a lot of us naturally that is just kind of how we are wired is to be more about us, but when we're more about them, when we're more about others, when we are putting other people first. We begin to serve others and I know of no faster way to create connection on teams than to have teams begin to serve each other. It is the same of leadership. I know of no other much…faster way to unlock your leadership than to serve the people that you lead. Not just doing your job, not just saying, hey, I have an open door policy. I am going to be with you once a month or whatever. I am talking about above and beyond. I am talking about really thinking and putting others first because it is completely magical on teams and it is completely magical and leadership as well. That is one big part in terms of connection. That is to me the fastest way you can create connection. Steve Rush: Sure and that also builds trust, doesn't it? Michael: Oh yeah for sure. Because a couple of things happen when you serve. First of all, it shows that you care and when people know you care, they're more likely to trust you. But when we spend time with people outside of what we normally do and service opportunities allows us to do that, many times we get to know people and the more you get to know people. Well, the more you trust the people, so, yeah, from both of those perspectives. You are absolutely right it does build trust. Trust that is part of the product of a connection, trust is built through action. Steve Rush: So, Michael, if I am a team leader or a manager. I am struggling with consistent performance, so I have a big differential performance in my team. On the left hand side, I have my high performers on the right hand side over here. I have the people who are just taking up space and a bunch of people in the middle of the steady eddies. So how do you manage to pull that dichotomy together when coming to leading team performance? Michael: Yes, I love that question, Steve. In my second book, Do You Care to Lead? I talk about five different classifications of employees and I call them all stars. They are all stars because I think all people have the potential to become great, but you as a leader, you need to act, and I think this is where a lot of leaders fail to act with their teams. You have got to either people moving people up, over or off, and the fourth option is never a choice, which is to do nothing. Unfortunately, that is what a lot of leaders do. They just hope the problems will go away, but I really believe you should be spending ninety nine percent of your time or more on proactively nurturing people and trying to move them up. If you look at these five classifications of employees, I have what I call rock stars and we all know what the rock stars are. These are the folks that just get it done and then some. They are just amazing performers; we wish we had a whole team like them. They are innovative they are creative. They really are truly rock stars, and then you have your rising stars. Your rising stars are rock stars; they just don't have the experience yet and with the experience, they will become rock stars, but they are rock stars in what they do currently. They just don't have the experience yet, and then you have what you referred to steady eddies or I call study stars or middle stars. These are the folks that will meet expectations but not necessarily exceed expectations. Then you have your falling stars and we know who these people are. We wish they would just leave, and we kind of hope that at some point they will. We just fail to act to move them up, and again, leadership is a nurturing process. And people on your team are watching you. They know who is moving up and who is not. You are going to have trust issues on your team if you are not proactively nurturing people. The fifth star is what I call deceiving stars. Deceiving stars are falling stars in rock star clothing. In other words, they are bringing the morale of your team down. Everybody on your team struggles with these people. They are the people that hoard information. They don't collaborate great, they take the credit for it for everything, but you as a leader, see them as a rock star. Until you do something with these folks, they will continue to drag some of the morale down. I have lots of stories I can share on that that particular area but your role as a leader and your team is watching you is to continually, again, you owe this to your team to, continually nurture it. I said, ninety nine percent or more, your time is spent on finding ways to move these people up. If you can't move them up, then you may have to make the difficult decisions to move them over or move them off. Moving over does not mean that you take your problem and give it to somebody else. You make sure that you find the right seat or the right bus for them to be on, and then of course, moving them office is really difficult. I mean, anytime you have to let somebody go fire somebody that is a hard thing. If you are doing it from a place of your heart, then it is the right thing for you. It is the right thing for that person, the right thing for the organization and your team. Steve Rush: You are right, and as difficult as that might be. Your new book, Do You Care To Lead? We talked about earlier is now available across the globe. You've created some really practical approaches and focus on the philosophy of care and how transform performance and people, tell us a bit about that? Michael: I will, and you know, I was thinking this morning it is interesting you asked that question because I was thinking this morning that really the two books are linked in terms of the word care. I really feel if teams will practice what I call my six Be's of being an effective teammate, they will care more about those on their team. Caring is an important characteristic on teams because as you talked about trust and connection, I mean, caring is a product of that as well. So it is, but yeah in the second book, Do You Care To Lead? I come from a place of putting more caring into leadership. If I ask any leader whether they care about their people, they are going to say, yeah, I definitely care about my people. I had a leader once that if somebody had asked him if he felt I cared about him, I am pretty sure he would have said yes, but the reality is I didn't feel that way. And there was a recent Gallup Survey done where four out of ten people strongly agreed with the statement that no one at work, including their supervisor, cared about them. That means six out of ten people don't feel cared about, which is a startling number if you think about it. Where leaders feel like people know they care about them. People don't feel, you know, the majority of people don't feel like they're being cared about. I go back to this leader that I had. You know, we would have regular one on ones. And I'm sure he thought by having those one on ones and by telling me that he was grooming me for his position and he was giving me some opportunity, it put me in a new senior kind of role to expose me to more of the business, to give me this opportunity. I am sure he thought from his perspective that he was showing he cared. To a small degree, it did, but here is the thing. He never spent time nurturing me. He did not develop me. He did not spend time helping me understand what his expectations are, what my new role was. Here is a resource. Here is your tools. These are all things that show that you care, let alone the fact that when we did meet, he never asked me about me. He never asked me about my family. He never showed vulnerability himself. I would ask him, for example, about his family, but he would never ask me about mine. But when I asked about his family, he never opened up. He never opened up about mistakes that he had made or directions we had taken that we should have done differently. He did not feel real human to me, and so all of those types of things I talk about in the book around, you know, do you care to lead? Which is really about two questions. You know, first of all, do you want to lead? Because a lot of people are put in positions of leadership because they're just better technically or because they want to make their parents proud or their wife or their husband proud or power or more money or whatever it might be. But do you really want to lead people? Because if you don't want to lead people, it's going to be pretty difficult for you to care about people, and that really is the main question around the book is do you really, really, truly care about the people you lead? It makes an impact. It makes a difference on loyalty as well as results. Steve Rush: Sure, in your book to help people come to grips with how to help people on that journey. You come up with five strategies serve, open up, nurture, inspire and commit. And I thought it be useful just to explore with our listeners a little bit about what lies behind each. Michael: Well, absolutely. And this is what I call to Steve, my sonic approach leadership. It's an acronym that just fits really nicely, truly propels your leadership if you'll do these five things. So Serve as I talked a little bit about that already. It is the quickest way to unlock your leadership, and there is lots of research that shows that when you serve others. There is scientific things that are happening. You know, there is these great chemicals in our body, neurochemicals in our body that are throwing a party when we serve others. In fact, when not only when we serve others, but when we just watch others serving others or when we anticipate service or we think about the service, these neurochemicals start to get released in our body, they feel really good. One of those neurochemicals is oxytocin, which is the same chemicals it is released when a mother is feeding her baby. It is a connection chemical, and that is why when I talk about service and connection, the quickest way for us to connect with others is to serve others. That is what is happening, and so and there's more I could go into around the magic and the science around it, because it starts with you as a leader and creating a culture of selfless service on your team and your organization starts with you as well. But it starts with you because of this connection chemical and the law of reciprocity in which people want to turn back and give back to you, and the law of multiplicity, which says that if one person is served. Not only do they want to reciprocate that service to you, but they also want to serve up to three to nine more people. There is a great story in the book that I tell about a CEO and owner I think the business become fairly large. She had made the choice to create a service program and it changed everything. It changed how people feel. It changed the morale of the organization. It changed how their customers looked at them and the referrals they started getting. They started getting bigger and better referrals from customers and clients because of just the way that they treated their clients, which came all from just this idea that this leader had around creating a culture of service. It is just, truly absolutely magical in your leadership, so, yeah, that is the first one service. Steve Rush: And that is amazing because it then becomes infectious. Not only are we triggering that neurotransmitter and those happy chemicals into a delightful space, but also becomes infectious for those people around us and it creates a self-perpetuation of that energy. We end up with a double bubble of winds. Michael: Absolutely. Yeah, that is a double bubble. I like that. I should have put that in the book. Steve Rush: When you talk about opening up as leaders. Is this about showing humility, some more of the human us? Michael: Yes, being invulnerable and really the concept is something called psychological safety. It really is kind of a hot term right now. Vulnerability is a hot term right now in leadership. A lot of people realize now as a leader, it's important for you to come across as human. But a big reason why that's important to open up is so that you create the psychological safety. There was a graduate researcher by the name of Amy Edmondson. I think at Harvard University who had decided she want to study what made teams effective. She studied medical teams, and you would think that the medical teams that were most effective were the ones that have fewer errors. But she found out that it was actually the teams that made the most errors that were the most effective, and it wasn't that they made more errors. It is just that they acknowledged those errors more readily. As a result, she said this team had psychological safety. She is the one that coined it, psychological safety. People felt that they could talk openly about their mistakes. They could learn from their mistakes quicker because they were talking about those mistakes and acknowledging those mistakes. But people only acknowledge admit mistakes when they feel safe in doing so. A lot of people hide their mistakes, so creating psychological safety on teams is about creating an environment where people feel like they can raise their ideas, perspectives. They can disagree with people on the team. They feel like, again, they can humbly say, you know, I made a mistake. Or they can say this is a wrong direction that we are going or hey, you are better at this than I am. As a leader, that is your responsibility to build that on your teams, and I talk more extensively about that, in the book, how you do that. But it definitely starts with you as a leader. You want to be vulnerable yourself. Sara Blakely is the founder of Spanx Company. She is a wildly successful female entrepreneur. A billion dollar company, and she talks about when she was growing up and this is so interesting, I love this. She said that when she was growing up, her father would ask them at the dinner table what they had failed at that day. And if nobody could come up with something that they had failed at, he would seem almost disappointed. He wanted them to talk about their failures because he knew it was the quickest way for them to become successful, and at her company Spanx, she created what she calls the whoops moment. Where they as a company talk about their mistakes openly as well and how they are learning from their mistakes. She shared hers as well; again, it starts with her. That is how the culture is created. You can't just say as a leader, I want everybody to be open. I want everybody to tell us when you make a mistake, but you are not willing to admit your own. That does not fly because you have not built the trust necessary. And there's some other things you need to put in place that, again, I talk about in the book, but that's a main one is for you personally to be more vulnerable. Steve Rush: And leading by example is where it starts the whole psychological say because it easily be eroded if people in responsibility and leaders don't practice that safety themselves, right? Michael: You are right. Steve Rush: How do you describe nurture, Michael? Michael: Nurture is the opportunity for you to realize that people are different, they have different needs, and you have to spend proactively time on moving people up, over and off, and the fourth option, as I said before, never an option, which is to do nothing. Nurturing is about not being a cookie cutter manager as well. I had a director that reported to me one time who was an absolute cookie cutter manager. She loved performance management. Performance management, to me kind of has a bad connotation. I get it in theory, how it should work and I think it can work as long as you don't cookie, cut it. She was really good at getting people if they did A, B would happen, if they did B, C would happened. She did not take an account individual people; she was really good at firing people. She did that quite a bit more than any other leader I knew. We had a lot of conversations about this. Try to help her to think more about people personally. Is like if I took an avocado tree, for example, and planted that tree in the mounds of Utah and avocado tree would not do well, it would not thrive. It need to be in the climate and the soil of Southern California where I grew up. If I took an apple tree and we have apple trees in my backyard here, I took an apple tree and planted it in the desert of Southern California. It would not do very well there either it would not thrive. And that's because each tree needs different nurturing, different sunlight, different climates, different soil, different care and people do as well. I mean, if you think a tree is complex, think about people. We need to be spending actively, proactively time with people and developing them again, moving them up over or off, never exercising that fourth option, which is to do nothing. We have to proactively be nurturing people. Steve Rush: I love that tree metaphor. Thanks for sharing that, Michael. The I, when it comes to inspire. Leaders would with tell us, for sure. It is my responsibility to inspire and motivate my teams. Yet, some people really struggle with that. What do you think the reason is that they do? Michael: I think many times it is because they forget about what I call the where, why and how. The where is where are you taking people? If I have you, Steve, in a rowboat in the middle of dense, heavy fog on a lake somewhere, and I'm telling you and the team to keep rowing, but you have no idea where you're going. But I just keep shouting, we got to keep rowing, guys. We got to keep rowing, you are saying where are we going? And you don't see land, You don't see any hint of where we're going. How long are you going to continue to roll? You know, you are eventually going to lose your motivation to row. In fact, maybe half of the team will row and half won't and you'll just keep going in circles. So letting people know clearly, where you are taking them is the difference between teams that kind of flounder and teams that are wildly successful. They know where they are heading. Also important is to know the why. Why are we going there? If you are not clear on the why - people are going to have no desire to get up in the morning and try to go to the where, but if you can put that why in, it becomes more intrinsically motivating. People wake up and they want to come to work or they want to be a part of this team and succeed because you have been very clear on what that “why” is. Then there is the “how”, and the how is you know, the strategic planning, the goal setting, all that other stuff. One of the things we often forget about in, goal setting or strategic planning is we do a really good job with an organization. We say, okay, here is our strategic plan. I like teams to consider how to create a strategy or having a strategic plan as well. I call these success lines so people have goals. As a leader, you are helping them because you are nurturing them, finding out what goals are best for them this year and having a success line. Being able to clearly demonstrate in your team's strategic plan and your goals and your individual goals, how they line up ultimately to the overall goal of the organization and success. What is the successful impact look like? And we have to talk more about that. The achievement of a goal itself, the completion of goal is not the achievement of a goal. The achievement of a goal is the successful completion of a goal and oftentimes we talk about the goal being completed, but we don't spend much time talking about what success look like for the goal. Because that is really all to me. What we should be measuring, not just the fact we checked it off and so that where, why and how and I've got a number of other things I talk about in there, like celebration, recognition, rewards, upping your expectations of people. People will perform at the level that you expect and thanking people. I mean, these are telling stories. These are always you can inspire. But first and foremost, foundationally, the where, why and how you've got to be clear on that as a leader. Steve Rush: It is a really neat principle of the whole “success lines”, I like that. It gives people the opportunity to visualize where they are going and how they going to get. Then, of course, for those people who are less visual. It gives them the context in that journey. So things that they have to do, the activities of all of the journey, and of course if we don't have that, they start making up their own stories and fill in their own versions of events. Right? Michael: Right. Yeah, absolutely. Steve Rush: The fifth one, “C” for commit. How does that underpinning the other strategy? Michael: So you as a leader have to be all in. I think what happens a lot of times with leadership is it's like the shoemaker. The shoemaker makes shoes for everybody else except himself. As a leader, I think oftentimes we are really good at giving others development opportunities, but we don't spend much time on our own. You I think, you know, it is important at the end of the book that I talk about your commitment to this process. Your IT listener's audience out there. Maybe you have heard this story others probably have not. It is like the story of the pig and the chicken. They were walking down Main Street one morning and the chicken and pig had noticed a brand new restaurant that it opened up that was serving breakfast. The chicken turned to the pig and said we ought to open up a restaurant someday that serves breakfast. The pig says that is a great idea. What shall we serve? And the chicken says, ham and eggs, of course, the pig says, well, that's great, except you're just making a contribution, I am making a full commitment. I like to tell leaders that you have to be the ham and the ham and eggs. And I'm talking about the fact that you have to give your life for it, but you do have to sacrifice a lot, you have to be all in! As the story goes with Cortez, you have to burn the ships. Your people have to know you are all in your committed. You are moving forward. If you don't have the commitment to these things, it becomes like any other book, any other workshop, any other opportunity. It is just spray and pray. You know, a lot of times the books they spray what they have to say and pray that you retain it. But until you commit, until you apply the things that you've learned. It ultimately does not become anything of value. It is just another book. It is just another concept. It is just another workshop. You have to be fully committed. You have to be ham and eggs. Steve Rush: That is neat, and Michael, I just wanted to say, I think you have definitely been the ham when it comes to helping people on their leadership journey. We come to the part of the show where I am going into your mind Michael, so that you can share your leadership ideas and tips with others. So, were would you like to start? Michael: Yeah, so I will give you some specifics around three of the ones that I kind of talked about already. The first one by far, I mean, to me, the most important one is to care about your people and really is the basis of what we have talked about, right. Because if you care about your people, they are going to care about their work. They need to know you care, when people know you care. They tend to be more loyal to you. As a result, they are going to want to do anything that you desire of them to do to become phenomenal as an individual, as a team, as an organization. They are going to be willing to take what I call rocket rides with you, not subway rides. Subway riders, same place every single day. You can get from A to B, but you very rarely get from A to Z. Leaders who care about people take their people on rocket rides. They get to Z, they go to places they have never been. They are inspiring. They are not boring like subway rides. Just really, truly show that you care about people. The second is to be open. People want leaders now more than ever that are human. We talked about this before, how openness leads to trust and creates, you know, lots of benefits to teams. But your ability to say, hey, you know what? Here is something that happened in my life that was difficult, that was challenging. Is a key to helping you feel like or people to feel like you are more human. Just sharing things and I'm not ask you to share your deepest, darkest secrets, although if it's appropriate, you can't have had leaders that have done that, that have had amazing results. I actually share one story in the book like that about a leader who talked about an alcoholic father and opened up about that, and everybody knew who this guy was. They knew who his father was but that openness did just create miracles on the team. Just be human, open up, and be vulnerable. Then third is to nurture. And I've got a grid, if you go to doyoucaretolead.com, you can actually download a grid there that you can proactively classify people into those five star categories. That to me is a big hack; you have to be spending time proactively either moving people up over or off, and that tools a great tool. It is a great hack, I believe, anyways, for leaders to use. Steve Rush: In the spirit of opening up Michael, this part this show is call Hack to Attack. This would be were something's not quite worked out as you planned or it went wrong but know you have used that learning as a useful activity and a useful tool for your work and your life. So what is your hack to attack? Michael: My hack to attack and something that happened to me early on in my career, I won't give you a specific example, but I will demonstrate something that I learned from this in a way again, it goes back to caring, which is my number one hack. A big failure that I had as a leader initially was that I was afraid of conflict. I did not want to have difficult conversations with people. I know a lot of your listeners can probably relate to that. Those are some of the most difficult things we do, as a leader is to tell somebody that, you know, they need to improve or else, but I learned early on that courage is not the absence of fear, but it's caring about something more than what you fear. I learned this from an experience I had when my children were younger. I have eight children. I know, that is a lot of children. One wife, we have been married 30-plus years, happily married 30-plus years. I have a lot of experiences I can draw on that family, and this is one of them. My four-year-old daughter at the time, my 2-year-old son, Kelly and Jeff, who were playing in our living room. We lived in a fairly small house at the time. So they weren't very far from us, but Jeff had fallen asleep on the couch, and Kelly, our 4 year old, had come in and a bit of a panic telling us that he had fallen asleep and she was really worried about the fact that he was in the dark, because they were afraid of the dark. We, you know, as parents just kind of brush her off a little bit, unfortunately. I will tell you two different lessons I learned from this, but we kind of brushed her off and told her it was okay. Don't worry about it, Kelly he is fine. You know, there is no such things as monsters, and she went on her way and she was just really obedient. She is still like that today; she is just a good kid. After a few minutes, my wife decided, go check on her, and she did. She rounded the corner. She saw Kelly lying over her brother, protecting him from the things that she feared most. She had these tears streaming down her eyes, and I learned a couple things from that. One is that, you know, people all of us have difficult moments. And it does matter if you're 4 year old or a 30 year old, 40 year old, 80 year old. I mean, we all have our own challenges. We all have those things that we fear, and so empathy is really important. That is important thing for all leaders, right. But the second thing I learned, is what I quoted you before, is that courage is not the absence of fear. It is about caring about something more than what you fear. As a leader, what I learned as I continue to grow and develop my own leadership is that the more I cared about those that I lead, the less it became about me and the more it came about them and the more it became about them, the easier it was for me to do those difficult things. Still hard, but I was more willing to do it because just like Kelly, I cared more about them than I cared about the things that I feared. Steve Rush: And it is a great story and is course, proof that parents can learn from their kids, too. Michael: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I have learned a lot of lessons through my kids. Steve Rush: And I am sure many more stories to tell. So finally, I would like to ask you Michael, if you were able to do a bit of time travel, go back and bump into your 21-year-old self, what would be the one bit of advice you would give Michael at 21? Michael: Yes, so what I would do it is I would definitely serve more. I would serve; I would be a lot more selfless. I would be less concerned about myself like I was at twenty-one than I was about others. I would be much more concerned with others and what they needed. I would be focused on being a servant. This is something that we are learning more and more about in the leadership world, how to be an effective servant. I think we are far from practicing on a regular basis, but my 21-year-old self-leadership position, instead of I would do less telling, I would do more serving. Definitely, that is what I would do. Steve Rush: So, folks listening to this Michael who want to get a little bit more closer to the work you do at the moment. Where would you like to send them? Michael: Thank you for asking, Steve. You can go to my website michaelgrogers.com. Michael G as in Gary, Glenn, Garth. rogers.com, michaelgrogers.com. You can also go to my blog. I have a lot of content out there because like I said; I have been blogging for 13/14 years, something like that. I have multiple interesting articles that might be of interest to your audience. That is teamworkandleadership.com and if you go to doyoucaretolead.com, I have some bonuses out there. If you get the book that, you might be interested in as well. Steve Rush: Leadership Hackers love a bonus. Thanks for that, Michael it goes without saying you have been a true servant to us today. It has been delightful speaking with you. Super lessons and models for our listeners to take away with. Thanks for being on The Leadership Hacker Podcast. Michael: Yeah. Thank you, Steve. I was happy to be here, and it has been a lot of fun. Closing Steve Rush: I genuinely want to say heartfelt thanks for taking time out of your day to listen in too. We do this in the service of helping others, and spreading the word of leadership. Without you listening in, there would be no show. So please subscribe now if you have not done so already. Share this podcast with your communities, network, and help us develop a community and a tribe of leadership hackers. Finally, if you would like me to work with your senior team, your leadership community, keynote an event, or you would like to sponsor an episode. Please connect with us, by our social media. And you can do that by following and liking our pages on Twitter and Facebook our handle their @leadershiphacker. Instagram you can find us there @the_leadership_hacker and at YouTube, we are just Leadership Hacker, so that is me signing off. I am Steve Rush and I have been the leadership hacker. [End 00:43:42] Care about your people and they will care about their work. Order Michael's new book, “Do You Care to Lead?” Click Here Also, order Michael's bestselling book, “You Are the Team” Click Here. Exclusive BONUSES when you order “Do You Care to Lead?” today! CLICK HERE http://www.michaelgrogers.com www.teamworkandleadership.com
Your IT guy isn't always providing consultative advice that is in your best interest. Discover why your IT guy may be looking out for his own bottom line over yours. Also discover why your bottom line and his bottom line should align and how you can foster a better relationship with your IT team.
Onboarding staff. Some people cringe, and some people love it. No one should really love staff turnover and onboarding staff. It's normally a hellish process. The reason you have the three-month trial probation is that you need to train them up in that three months, and then if you don't, you're kind of stuck with them, and it's a terrible feeling. What we're going to be talking about today is making your onboarding processes is more refined so that it isn't a task that you won't hate doing. Before You Begin the Process Straight from the get-go, I do a certain process to find someone on SEEK. We do some very tricky things on SEEK to try and find people. What we do in our industry, it's very important to have a high level of attention to detail, and you want to make sure that the people that you're getting are fully reading the SEEK post. How we make this happen is by writing a page or page and a half long job post. We make sure it's excessive. Throughout the post, we write just once or twice, "If you do not email through to," the email address that we use, so employment@yourcompanyname or whatever it is, "Do not email through to this address, you will not be considered for the job." This is important to do in order to whittle down your applicants. A lot of people just apply to 100 jobs and think someone will say yes. If they're not going to go to the trouble to actually contact you, you shouldn't be going to the trouble to read through what ends up being literally hundreds of emails. The Next Step You've now got a bunch of people that have emailed through to you. You can use different tools such as Zapier and other integration tools that let you send an email back to them. We send out a few basic questions, such as, "Do you have your driver's licence? How long have you been in XYZ industry? What would you say is your primary, secondary, and tertiary interests in working with us?" By doing this you then get all this great data that you can then export into Excel, Google Sheets or whatever it is that you're using to be able to look at which candidates you find most appropriate. The onboarding process for a new staff member hasn't even properly started yet, but it has already become well more refined in only a few hours of work. Documentation is High Priority Documentation, documentation, documentation. It's so important. Whoever's in current job roles, and I mean everyone in your company, needs to start writing down the processes of what they do on their day-to-day. It can be anything from replacing the coffee filters to offboarding old hardware, or an old client, or any sort of thing. Anything and everything should be documented. Absolutely everything. We started doing this process, and within six months, we had more than 150 knowledge base articles on how to do things throughout our business. It builds quickly, and it is an expensive process if you're doing it properly. Time to Onboard Once you've got all that down pat, the onboarding becomes really easy. You look at the tasks that they need to focus on mostly, and you look at the different systems that they need to have logins into. If your IT company's half-decent, they will be able to integrate all of the different logins and passwords that you use into a single portal. This means there will be one password for everyone to remember, and that also means that there's one place for everything to be deactivated. That is just as important. You want to make offboarding as easy as onboarding too. No one wants to spend their day going through 670 password changes over a 12-hour period with three staff members to change everything to make sure they no longer have access. Integrate all your systems together so that you can click the on and the off button very quickly and easily. It makes your whole setup more secure. First Steps The onboarding process is a two-person step. You have one person that's going to be setting up all the different accounts and the procedures. That's the internal onboarding process for that new staff member. You then have the tasks that that new staff member needs to do once they've been onboarded. Maybe it's learning the different systems, learning the different utilities and tools, or learning where the bathroom is. Any of these things can be documented and they can view them if they have access to a portal. Your IT company should be able to jump in and help you set up so that you are on top of it. Use the Documentation to Your Advantage Everything becomes more straightforward with great documentation. The best bit about using a great-quality documentation setup is the value of your business goes through the roof. You have something tangible where you can show, "This is how this works." It means you can have key performance indicators (KPIs) that allow you to measure what people are doing and what people aren't. If they're not abiding by the exact instructions and processes that you've described, and they're going off the rails and doing it in a different way, you can easily issue a warning. You have the procedural documentation there that they're able to follow and make sure they're doing the right things. If you need more IT support to be able to do something like this, call out to them. See what they say. You shouldn't be spending all your time doing this. You need to have processes in place so it's nice and quick. The Final Word Your time as a business owner is valuable. I think it is the most valuable in the company. People are looking up to you, and you need to have time available to them. If you're too busy doing other stuff, you will not be focusing on the right things. Being able to document everything, even if the onboarding at the early stages is taking a little bit longer, means that it's a task that you don't have to do in the future. Document, script, automate, integrate. That's what you need to remember to do, and that is what's going to push you above and beyond your competitors and have you have a tangible, saleable asset when it comes down to selling your business. Stay good!
Tech behind the Trends on The Element Podcast | Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Your IT resources are increasingly moving to the Edge in the form of sensors and networking. You may already be dealing with the new challenge of this IoT revolution – what to do with all that new data? It’s too slow and expensive to send to the cloud or the datacenter and back. Meanwhile, you have to manage & monitor the all those new sensors. Having trouble keeping up with all this new complexity? You’re not alone, and the solution may be accelerating adoption of AI.
Coroner Talk™ | Death Investigation Training | Police and Law Enforcement
Co-Hosted Training The Death Investigation Training Academy will gladly host most all of our offered courses at your agency. Co-Hosted training is often referred to as “free training”. In a Co-Hosted seminar, DITA requests that an agency supply a meeting facility, coffee, tea, and their hospitality in exchange for free seats in the training. DITA and the hosting agency will market the class to surrounding agencies and DITA will handle all student registration. DITA will then contract with our accredited instructors and supply all audio/visual equipment. This saves you the expense of time and travel for your personnel and the personnel in your region. Training packages and details are negotiated on a per-request basis. Discounts and tuition credits are available for staff of hosting agencies. Please contact us directly for quotes and package information. What DITA Provides: Assisted marketing to regional agencies On-Site national coordinator to support the training All student material including class roster, manual & handouts, and completion certificates We handle student registration and payments Accredited instructors What Hosting Agency Provides Training Facility for 30+ students Audio/Video Equipment Notifying surrounding agencies of the scheduled training Benefits of Co-Hosting 2 free seats in training of 10 or more paying attendees 5 free seats for 20 or more paying attendees Saving in time and expense of travel and per diem expenses Acknowledgment on all marketing material Recognition as a leader in state certified training Virtual Classroom Bringing high quality, hyper-focused training, to your agency through the power of the internet. Capable of streaming around the world in real time saving you time and money without sacrificing quality and accreditation. Why Chose this option A virtual classroom is a great option for in-service training. The virtual classroom allows you to have quality instructors and topics without the added cost of travel and lodging. Plus, it opens the opportunity for shorter training sessions of up to 4 hours. How it Works Your agency hosts the training by providing a training room equipped with high-speed internet, monitor and/or projector, web camera, and audio. If you can Skype from the room it can become a virtual classroom. Your students see the instructor on the monitor or projected onto the screen and the instructor can see the students through your webcam. Students can see and hear what is being presented – both in lecture and presentation slides or video. Interaction can take place between students and the instructor just like a Skype or facetime call, so questions can be asked and answered in real time. Technical Issues Basic technical needs are low, again not much different than a skype or facetime call. However, you will need to ensure high-speed internet is present and not overburdened during the training session. It is recommended someone with a good understanding of the equipment be present and can work directly with our producer during setup and if any issues occur during the stream. In most instances, the stream will be through the zoom.us platform streaming a broadcast from Wirecast studio. This will require you to download the zoom application onto your system. There is no cost or danger in this download and it can be removed after the class session. When dealing with the internet we have all come to expect perfection and we get it most of the time. However, and usually when its most important, things happen and speeds slow down or are interrupted. Therefore, it is best to have someone present that can get the system reconnected and running should a problem occur. A second connection will be established prior to starting the live feed in case issues arise. This second connection will allow our producer and your onsite tech to communicate outside of the internet being used for steaming. This connection, in most cases, will be cell phone calls and text messages which can be done without the internet. Firewalls Another issue to consider is your agencies firewall if you are hosting the training within your facility. Some government facilities have strict firewall protection and would not allow for a live stream to be sent through. Your IT professional can answer and/or test this for you and our producer is available to test the set up any time prior to scheduling a training. Accreditation Courses taught through virtual classroom can receive accredited continuing education credits for the students through Missouri POST and ABMDI if certain obligations are met. Primarily we would have to have someone in supervision within your agency in the classroom during the training that can ensure the continued presence of students. Also, a sign-in roster would have to be signed by all students and confirmed by the person of authority on site. This roster would then need to be emailed to our academy and certificates would be sent to the agency. Cost Cost of virtual classroom training is at a fraction of traditional on-site training. In most instances training, will be $125 dollars plus $80 per training hour. For example, if an agency wanted a 3-hour training on Injury and Wound Identification and Documentation. The course would cost $125 plus $240 for a total of $365. With 10 students present that would only be $36.50 per student, for three hours of accredited training. Cost is calculated based upon the number of accredited training hours, not actual streaming hours. Instructors consider 15-30 minutes after the presentation for additional questions or conversation that is included in the session cost. Additional Costs and Options Fees are based upon an average of 20 students. In as much as the number of students’ present does not affect cost, the certification and back-end work is affected. So, any training that would require our agency to issue more than 25 certificates would be billed at $1 (one dollar) per certificate. Books and Manuals Some courses have the option of having a workbook or reference book that goes along with the course. These books are optional and can be purchased prior to the training session in any amount requested. Where to Begin The first set is to contact our academy and get the conversation started. We will help you decide on tailored training topics to fit your needs and work with you on the technical issues. It’s a simple and painless process that we will walk you through step by step. You can email us through the contact link in the top menu bar, or call us at 888-556-0177.
There are over 2600 difference VoIP offerings out in the marketplace today. Not since the early 90's has there been such an influx of vendors, manufacturers and service companies crowded to provide a technology. Voice over IP should be treated as data. Protecting that network of traffic is every bit as important. Your IT service integrator should understand routing and firewalling, security and traffic inspection BETTER than they understand Voice. The importance is paramount to your security while making use of one of the 21st centuries greatest inventions.
รู้ไหมว่าซู่ชิงคิดอย่างไรกับฉายา ‘นางฟ้าไอที’... แล้วทำไมซู่ชิงยอมตกลงเป็นคู่เดตงานพรอมกับคนที่เธอไม่ชอบเลย... และทายซิว่า ในวันนี้ ซู่ชิงผู้เป็นคนทำทีวี ดูทีวีหรือเน็ตฟลิกซ์มากกว่ากัน... Time index00.10 Introduction02.18 We need to talk about ‘Your IT angel status’11.39 We need to talk about ‘Your Life in USA’20.32 We need to talk about ‘Your TV career’26.16 What’s Your Take On (เรื่องการจัดงานแต่งงาน และเรื่องการดูดวง)35.34 What If (พลังพิเศษอะไรที่ซู่ชิงอยากได้) อ่าน shownotes ได้ที่ thestandard.co/podcast/weneedtotalk06
Santa Monica California! County by County State by State Country by Country Cannabis Broadcast Live from the Pacific Coast!
READ MY LIPS' akaRadioRed goes beyond the typical blah-blah-yada-yada canned interview, engaging multiple guests in spontaneous conversations. Inger Pols, author of Finally Make It Happen. What’s Your “It”? and Editor of the New England Health Advisory, was a successful marketing exec with degrees from Yale University and Columbia Business School. Then she adopted an undernourished 4-year-old boy from Kazakhstan and a 3-year-old girl from Siberia. To help them get healthy, Inger studied nutrition and dietary theory, and eliminated her son’s allergies, migraines and bronchitis. Today they are happy, healthy, vibrant teenagers. Do YOU have a goal, a dream or a lingering to-do list you want to do or know you should do, but just can't make it happen? Inger says that's because you're going about it all wrong; it’s time to learn the right way to make lasting change. www.IngerPols.com Larry M. Jacobson is determined to break the cycle of financial illiteracy in the U.S. Larry's desire to succeed led him to achieve a 22-year career as a music executive and to receive an MBA and Doctor of Education degree from Pepperdine University. He is now a stock options and wealth instructor for Online Trading Academy. His book, Demystifying Successs: Success Tools and Secrets They Don't Teach You in High School, is a groundbreaking strategic guide for young adults 16-25 and beyond. Larry inspires and empowers readers to pursue their life goals and achieve the success they desire. This is the book Larry wishes someone had given him in high school! www.DemystifyingSuccess.com
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