Good Health Is Good Business Interview Transcript of Don Doster with gBehavior

Dr Dave Rearick and Stephen Cherniak had a great show with Don Doster from gBehavior. Their Good Health is Good Business show is all about corporate wellness and how a healthy workplace contributes to a healthy bottom line.

Go to their Good Health website to listen to the show or read the transcripts here - you will learn a lot about helping your company stay healthy. Thanks again to Karen Galambos with Right Type Pro for doing the transcription. 

Good Health Is Good Business

www.goodhealth.businessradiox.com

Don Doster of gBehavior

Updates on the H1N1 Flu Pandemic

Review of Self-Care Books for Corporate Environment

July 21, 2009

David Rearick: Good afternoon Steve.  How are you today?

Stephen Cherniak: Hello Dr. Dave.  Another beautiful day in Georgia.  Just gorgeous.  I feel I could be in the mountains rather than in Atlanta.

David Rearick: It's great.  Low humidity, mid-80's.

Stephen Cherniak: Great way, great feeling to get out and exercise.

David Rearick: You're right.  I did that this morning.

Stephen Cherniak: I did too.

David Rearick: I did pilates and my buns hurt.

Stephen Cherniak: That will do it.  (laughing)

David Rearick: That will do it?  Alright.  We have lots of news today.  This has been a week of news.

Stephen Cherniak: You can't go a week without something coming up in the paper or on the radio, TV.  What do you have?

David Rearick: Well, listen,  I want to start off with the H1N1 Flu.  It's back in the news and I have to admit when we go out to clients and go out to meet with HR directors, nobody seems to be picking up on this.  It's not a concern in HR departments yet and I really think they are missing the boat.

Stephen Cherniak: I totally agree with you because I saw a headline from one of my weekly newsletters that I got that says the WHO (World Health Organization) says the new flu is "unstoppable."  That's the term they used for it.

David Rearick: I have an article here that comments that the World Health Organization this week called an unprecedented speed of spread for this condition.  Rather than die down in the summer, which we would normally expect, experts have seen a peeking of the flu and what everybody is really worried about is when kids get back into school.

Stephen Cherniak: Right.

David Rearick: They are going to start spreading the stuff and this is an illness that affects the young more than the old apparently.

Stephen Cherniak: It seems to be that way.  Young people, as well as interesting too, the severely obese seem to be picking up this version of the flu rather than elderly people as well.  They're not sure why.

David Rearick: No, we've got about 265 people dead from it in the United States so far, over a million people infected and it's a major crisis in the U.K.  They have put out emergency warnings and Argentina has declared a nationwide animal health emergency Friday because they saw that this bug jumped over to pigs.

Stephen Cherniak: Also keep in mind to complicate things is that the normal seasonal flu hasn't hit yet and it will beginning in the fall, so you're going to have a double whammy of not only the swine flu, then you've got your normal seasonal flu virus that is related to killing about a quarter of a million to a half million people worldwide on top of that.  It's scary.

David Rearick: It is.  In the Wall Street Journal today there was an article that was published by Ernst & Young's research group that estimates that the flu will affect the European gross domestic product by reducing it an additional 3.5% for next year and that will bring a negative growth of almost 7.5% to the European market for 2010.

Stephen Cherniak: Well, if the WHO won't get people's attention maybe the money will.  Always seems to do that.

David Rearick: So our listeners out there, if you do not have a pandemic plan please contact us.  We will help you put one together or we will send you the information that we have on pandemic response, but it's very important that you not ignore this until the fall.

Stephen Cherniak: Agree.

David Rearick: Hey, here's another piece of news I think is interesting for our listeners.  UnitedHealth Group is going to be taking over the northeastern unit of rival insurer Health Net for the northeast.  A 450 million dollar deal, the big just keep on getting bigger.

Stephen Cherniak: Um hmm.  So it's a coup.

David Rearick: It is and UnitedHealth Plan now has about 30 million members.  It's huge.

Stephen Cherniak: Okay.

David Rearick: What else did you have for us?

Stephen Cherniak: I had an interesting article I read from the BMC Family Practice Journal, British Medical Journal.  It's a health literacy issue.  Every year they ask a group of people, patients and healthy individuals, if they're able to identify the location of their various body organs.

David Rearick: You mean like the heart, lung, kidneys?

Stephen Cherniak: Yeah, right.  So, for example, what do you think would be the percentage of people being able to identify the location of their lungs?

David Rearick: Oh, 90%.

Stephen Cherniak: Twenty-seven percent of the people were able to correctly identify the location of the lungs.  I don't get that.

David Rearick: Where do they put the lungs?

Stephen Cherniak: I don't know.  They show them pictures of a body, I've seen pictures of examples of where the organs could be located, and then they would locate the lungs in four different areas and 3/4 of the people got that wrong.

How about the heart?  What do you think?

David Rearick: Well, gosh.  The heart, maybe 75.  A lot of people put it on the wrong side of the body.

Stephen Cherniak: Fifty-six percent got it right.

David Rearick: Fifty-six percent of people don't know where their heart is.

Stephen Cherniak: Most people got the intestines right, 94%.  Eighty-five percent got the bladder right.  The stomach, less than 50% got the stomach, 27% got the kidneys.  So is this an issue?  Can lack of knowledge affect patient care?

David Rearick: Well, if you don't know where your heart is, it's pretty hard to do CPR.  I'll tell you that.  (laughing)

Stephen Cherniak: The sad thing is, from the researchers standpoint, it hasn't improved over the years.  It's been the same percentage and another sad thing is that patients being treated for a problem with that organ didn't do any better than healthy individuals.  So even though they're being treated for a lung issue or a heart issue, they didn't fare any better in knowing where their organ is.

David Rearick: Gosh, this is just a good example of health illiteracy.  People just don't know.  So how are they ever going to navigate their way through the health care system with these consumer directed health plans.

Stephen Cherniak: Well, that's the point and I think that's always been my point, is that we're in a "fix me/heal me" world and mentality and we just expect the medical system to take care of us.  And so we're ignorant of what's happening to us.  We just don't feel well and we go in and be a quiet patient and not get involved in our care and care to know anything about it.

David Rearick: And we don't have a good perception of our care either, our health.

Stephen Cherniak: Right.

David Rearick: Remember the example of the client that we have that did the HRA on 100% of their employees?  A hundred percent of the employees took the HRA and 84% of them, I think, said that they were in good to excellent health.  And then when we looked at their BMI averages, we realized that almost 90% of them were overweight.

Stephen Cherniak: Correct.

David Rearick: But until you have to go to the doctor you're healthy.

Stephen Cherniak: You're healthy.  Today everything is fine.

David Rearick: Yeah.  Listen, one more piece of news here that I think is pretty interesting.  Have you been following any of the bills that are coming out of Congress on the Health Care Reform?

Stephen Cherniak: Um hmm.

David Rearick: The one that came out recently from Congress has a clause in it that I think employers need to be aware of.  Obama has promised that if you like your health plan, you'll be able to keep it.  We've all heard that, right?

Stephen Cherniak: Right.

David Rearick: About 177 million people get their health insurance through their employer.  Sixty-two percent of those under 65 get their health insurance through their employer.  Well, a lot of people don't realize that ERISA, which allows employers that self insure, that is those that are really large enough to build their own risk pools and pay benefits directly, rather than just buy a premium from an insurance company, that ERISA in the new bill that Congress has proposed is going to be destroyed.  Goodbye to ERISA.  The house bill says that after a five year grace period all ERISA insurance offerings will have to win government approval, both by the Department of Labor and a new health choices commission.  So can you imagine every self funded employer having to go through a set of federal standards and get bureaucratic buy off on their plan design.  That is nano-management.

Stephen Cherniak: Well I'm sure legislatures have all that figured out exactly how that's going to work and it will be an easy transition.

David Rearick: Write your congressmen, please.  Can't allow that to go down.

Stephen Cherniak: What are you going to tell them?

David Rearick: Keep ERISA.

Stephen Cherniak: Keep ERISA.  Okay.  (laughing)

David Rearick: Keep ERISA.  That should be our battle cry.

Stephen Cherniak: Until next week.  Then maybe we'll do away with ERISA.

David Rearick: Alright.  Okay.  Well, we need to do a sponsor plug.

Stephen Cherniak: We do.  We have this week, we're pleased announce that the sponsor is the Benefit Advisor Network.

David Rearick: BAN.

Stephen Cherniak: BAN, as its used in the acronym.  That's an employer benefits planning group and it's the premier national credential network of independent benefit advisory and consulting companies.  What's nice about it or what's effective about BAN is that these companies use the best practice sharing, market leveraging and shared capital for investments to deliver industry leading tools, technology expertise and optimum results for their employee benefits customers.  And did you know Dave, there are only a select number of companies that can be called BAN members and partners?

David Rearick: How many are in the benefit advisors network?

Stephen Cherniak: Thirty-two.

David Rearick: Thirty-two, that's right.

Stephen Cherniak: And to find the BAN partner for your area, our listeners can go to www.benefitadvisornetwork.com and we thank them for sponsoring the show.

David Rearick: Indeed we do.  Good organization.

Alright, well that's the final word on the news for the week and we'll get right to our guest very soon.

David Rearick: Okay, we're back again and we're very pleased today to have a guest in the studio by the name of Don Doster who is president and CEO of gBehavior.  gBehavior is a company that is involved in the incentive industry and it is a leading provider of incentive programs for a wide variety of the industry as well as employers interested in incentivizing employees to do the right things through wellness.  Don, nice to have you in the studio.

Don Doster: Hey, thanks for having me here.  You guys are looking good.  I'm a little jealous about the exercise this morning.

David Rearick: Yeah Don, come on.

Don Doster: I'm going to get out there this afternoon in fact, after I leave here.  Dr. Dave, I must say I love that bow tie.

David Rearick: Thank you, our audience can't see it but I am a bow tie man.

Don Doster: You're looking good.  (laughing)

Stephen Cherniak: So Don, Dr. Dave told us, in brief, that you're an incentive based company, providing incentives.  Can you tell us a little bit more of how that works with gBehavior and maybe even how the company got started?

Don Doster: Absolutely.  Thanks again.  It's kind of an interesting name, gBehavior.  My background is in psychology, my wife is actually a clinical psychologist.  I certainly didn't get into this thinking I was going to be an incentive expert.  I got in more from a consulting perspective, specifically for manufacturing companies to reduce their Workers Comp injuries basically looking at what I call repetition of behavior, seeing whether or not there needed to be some changes that they would need to make on a day in and day out basis to decrease the probability of an accident.  Well one great way to motivate people to do that kind of behavior is through incentives.  An example of that is what we call proper protective equipment.  Many accidents are caused because people are not wearing the proper eyeglasses or proper shoes and things like that.  By incenting them and saying, "If you do this today, there's going to be a reward for you" they immediately make the change which the end result of that is decreased accidents.

So our company kind of flew along that way more in the manufacturing side than the property and casualty side for, probably, the first three years.  We came into business in March of 2003 and one of our customers that we were helping specifically in transportation, more on reducing accidents where their drivers prevent, we call those preventable accidents, asked me (he was a self insured employer which I found, Dr. Dave said earlier about ERISA, to be very interesting) and he said "Have you ever done anything in wellness?"  Well, that's kind of broad term so I didn't really understand how am I going to reduce costs.  He said "We're a self insured company so we pay our own claims."  And I said, "Give me some examples or some behaviors that would help you."  He said "One is we can't get our people to fill the HRA - health risk assessment."  I said, "How will that help you?" And he said, "Well, then we can direct people if they need coaching, if we think they might be at risk for disease management maybe we can encourage them to go through some biometric testing or get their physical and route those folks in the directions we need them to go."

I thought it was really interesting what you said earlier about people not knowing where their lungs are or where their heart is.  The same is true for emergency room visits.  Most people just think we'll go to the ER.  Well the ER is three times as expensive as going to an urgent care center.  So he said "I just want to keep my people out of the ER if they have an ear infection over the weekend, go to a doctor or go to an urgent care center."

So that's how we got started.  We didn't really know much.  This particular client was willing to work with us and what we found as we got out into the industry and looked at what are other incentive companies doing, we only found one other player in that space.  That's a huge issue.

David Rearick: What makes you different then from that other player?

Don Dostor: Well, most incentive companies are specifically focused on the reward side of things.  What we do is we're more of a consultative company which means we'll go in and look at their claims history.  For example, if you have a company where the average population is over 50, obviously their claims issues are going to be differently than maybe a call center where they are in their 20s and we will customize our program to reduce those claims in those areas.  So with that customization and actually writing a program for that company makes us very different.

The second thing that makes us really different is that we measure that, we track that.  So we can look historically, for example, how many people had a physical last year?  Out of the diabetics that were diagnosed, how many of those folks are actually compliant?  Looking at flu shots, how many people had a flu shot that year and then look at your influenza claims.  It's amazing the difference there.  So we can track results, where you've been previously and where you're going once our program comes into place.

And then the last thing, and this is kind of a strange term, we call ourselves ‘incentive-agnostic’ which from a behavioral perspective when we studied what really motivates people, we couldn't find that gift cards are more of a motivator than merchandise, or that travel is a better motivator even than fitness memberships or promotional products, so we created this world class online mall concept.  We were the first company in the country to integrate with Amazon.com.  So where a lot of incentive companies may offer 800 to 900 products, just through our Amazon connection we offer five million.  We offer any gift card that you could possibly imagine whether it be a restaurant gift card or a gas gift card or to Walmart or to Macys or wherever you want to go.  Sporting event tickets, if you want to go see a Braves game or Falcons game.  If you want to take trips, golf trips, weekend getaways or cruises, you can do that and fitness memberships.  Specifically in some of our industries, when I talked about customizing things, we do a lot in transportation, with drivers, 12 old items for their cabs are very popular, Blue Beacon truck washes.

The idea here is that the power of choice is the number one motivator and people are going to earn points on our program for doing certain wellness activities.  We want them to see value in those points.  "Gosh, I can use these for anything."

David Rearick: Now Don, you often times hear the phrase "Money is the greatest motivator".  Is that what you find?  Is it cash that really motivates the change in behavior.

Don Dostor: It's interesting you asked me that question.  What I try to tell our clients is this…if you were to survey employees in a population and ask them if they would rather have cash, or would they rather have a gift card or rather shop for something on Amazon, the answer predominantly is going to be "Give me the money.  Show me the cash."  What I try to talk to our clients about is I don't want to confuse compensation with incenting them.  The reason for that is, in a program such as wellness, over time we're going to change this wellness program.  For example, this year maybe the issue is ER visits but next year it's our health screening fair, so we may adjust those points.  What I have found historically is that if you start adjusting people's compensation, they get upset about that.  So here you set out to do something positive and in turn employees got angry about it.

The other key to that is you don't want to substitute a compensation program with a program like ours.  If you're trying to disguise compensation, employees see right through that.  We kind of see our program is something over and above what they get paid.

There's also, it's interesting Dr. Dave, years ago I was doing a program for a sizeable bank, actually in North Carolina and they couldn't get off the cash.  So we said "Why don't we do both?  Why don't we do cash and incentives?"  What was interesting was out of the gate those folks that wanted cash, their performance changed quickly.  But what was interesting, the other side, the people that were getting points had a more sustained momentum and the performance lasted longer.  Which tells me that when people get cash and taxes are taken out they spend it, they don't remember it, it doesn't have any long life span to it.  So we actually did that once before and compared the two results.

David Rearick: Now Don, one of the problems we run across when we put in a health and wellness program is the complaint that the HR department has about "This is so much work to track all this stuff and monitor who gets this point, that point, administer the rewards.  We just don't have time for that."  How do you help the HR department with that type of burden and as I recall one of the unique things about your program was that you actually communicate with the employee on a regular basis.

Don Dostor: Yeah, we're completely turn key.  Obviously we need the HR people to endorse what we're doing.  We need them to champion the program and be leaders in their organization.  But as far as tracking the program, administering the rewards, everything involved from A to Z, we do.  The way our program works is that every month, every single employee on our program is going to get a wellness statement generated by us, whether they do activity or not.  That, in and of itself, changes behavior.  Think about your frequent flyer that you get from Delta.

Stephen Cherniak: That's what I was going to say.  It's a rewards program, similar to that.

Don Dostor: Every month that communication to you reminds you A) of what you've got and B) of what you're not getting and by us doing that, and we do that, the company doesn't have to do that. It's another great communication tool.  You want to talk about engagement strategy.  Some of the things we do to really jog people's memories or to get them to take steps they wouldn't have taken before is, we will reward people for getting their wellness exams in the month that they were born.  Like my birthday is in April.  We'll start alerting those employees in February that have birthdays in April "Have you scheduled your physical yet?  Do you realize you'll get extra points if you do that?"  If they don't get their physical and May comes around "Do you realize you just lost X amount of points because you didn't get the physical?"  It's interesting, the phone will ring into our customer service office and they say "What if I get it now, can I get those points?"  The answer is "No, but you can still get the original amount, whatever that is."

Every single person with an employer is going to get a communication from us every month about how they're doing.  And then if you add to that the fact that these points build and you can redeem for anything, it's a great combination.

Steve Cherniak: So how do you verify back to the employer that this data that you're getting in, the points and such, is actually accurate.

Don Doster: That's a great question.  That was our biggest concern when we got into this…how are we going to do this.  It's easy on the property and casualty side.  They have an OSHA 300 log to monitor the accidents that they have.  So initially with self insured companies we said we've got to get it from a claims data base - D2Hawkeye or something of that nature.  That's fine but the problem with that is that it doesn't populate.  You may get your physical in February but we may not know that you did that until May.  Well that's too long after the fact.  So we actually created our own self tracking mechanism for that self reporting and people were nervous about that, but what we do is A)for example if I go get my physical I'm empowered then to go online, report that I did it, indicate that today I went to see Dr. Stuart on such and such a day, he performed a wellness exam on me and the nurse's name is this as a witness.  So we ask for a witness so we can verify it.  On top of that we actually put a claimer in there that says "If it is proven that you have fraudulently reported any information to earn points on this program, you'll be immediately terminated from the program and subject to termination from the company."  That's generally enough to get people to report honestly.  The fact that you ask for that witness signature, we have found that to be unbelievably successful because think if you're on it, you want your points.  So if you went and had your exam today, you can go back report it and boom, you've got them versus waiting two or three months.

David Rearick: I have a neighbor who flies just about constantly so he has so many frequent flyer points that frequently he will actually give me some of his because it's the only way I can go see my kids.  So, can I buy wellness points from my colleagues under your program?

Don Doster: You cannot buy wellness points.  What we do have in our program is that if you're a client and some of the employees leave your company and go somewhere else, the company never loses those points.  Whatever is not redeemed, they go back to the company and then the company has ability to give those back out to different employees.  A great example of that is giving blood.  It's amazing.  They'll use those points to say "Hey, volunteer for the Red Cross today, give blood and you can earn extra points."  So they use it as a bonus pool to give out to employees for anything.  It doesn't necessarily have to be wellness related.

Stephen Cherniak: You can't buy good health Dave.

David Rearick: Okay.

Don Doster: It's a result of choices we make on a daily basis.

David Rearick: Can't game the system, huh?

Don Doster: No.

Stephen Cherniak: Don, you mentioned in some of your literature about behavior change is a revolutionary possibility and I think you've kind of developed or told us that, but can you explain that a little bit more as to why you use this term revolutionary?

Don Doster: Well, as I mentioned a little earlier when we really started to study what's out there to affect wellness, you have a lot of wellness tools.   You have coaching, you have the HRA, you have biometric testing, you have disease management.  But what drives people to that?  What's in it for the individuals to go do that?  I wish I could sit here before you today and say "Just being healthy is the motivator to do that", but it's not.

Stephen Cherniak: We know that's not the case.

Don Doster: It's not.  And so when you look around and say what has historically really worked when we mentioned frequent flyers.  What do merchants do?  What do restaurants do to attract people?  Coupons.  Incentives.

Stephen Cherniak: Right.

Don Doster: What did the airline industry do?  They came up with a whole frequent flyer mentality and then they expanded that which was really revolutionary and that is "Hey, not only can you use your miles to get a free ticket but you can use it for anything.  You can put it on your credit cards, whatever."

Stephen Cherniak: So what can you brag about regarding implementing of your program in companies and engagement rate that they're seeing.

Don Doster: Well, what we do by driving people to that, we can look as I mentioned earlier specifically in disease management, let's say you had 264 diabetics and only 18 of them were in compliance.  Right out of the gate we'll probably get 70% of those people to finally go see their doctor and get involved just because they're earning points and they can redeem them for what they want.  HRA's, a lot of companies are going with mandatory HRA's but those that don't, we'll get 90% of the people out of the gate to do that.  Overtime we'll get the rest of them because if I’m sitting next to an employee and he's earning points or she's earning points and they're redeeming when Christmas rolls around and they outfit their family and I haven't done it, next year I'm on board.

Also, because we're tracking that information back to that individual statement, we know what you're not doing, so that gives us a great opportunity to communicate with you and find out why.  There's a lot of hesitancy out there, sometimes on fear about the employer knowing too much about me.  In our particular case we just know that you did the activity.  We don't know results.  Sometimes when we get over that hurdle with them, they're great with it.

David Rearick: I like the idea also that you're driving the individual to basically be more responsible for their health, go see their doctor, be rewarded for doing the right thing.  We have clients that this type of thing has worked so well on that our recommendation is "Hey, no reason to pay for disease management anymore.  The provider community that your employees are seeing are engaging all your diabetics, your asthmatics, you don't need to pay for a teleponic program provided by an external source when the person's personal physician is managing the disease correctly so you can save costs there."

Don Doster: Steve, I thought you asked a great question earlier about some real tangible results.  One of our customers in the south part of Georgia had trouble getting people  to participate in their health screenings, their health fairs.  Immediately upon awarding points for participating they had a couple of people, one in particular, that when they actually took this person's blood sugar they feared they were on the verge of having a stroke.  They actually right there, from the health screen, drove this person to the hospital.  So they were able to manage that situation.  So there was a huge claim right off the bat that was avoided, but more importantly, saved the employee's health.  So that's what happens.  Why did the person go to the health fair?  "Well, because I'm going to earn points and get something for my family."

Steve Cherniak: Right.  You mentioned the customization of it so you obviously can drive behavior by adding and making some activities more points than others.

Don Doster: Absolutely.

Steve Cherniak: I like that.  What can a company expect to pay for your program?

Don Doster: Generally, we find that it will range, but generally between five to ten dollars per employee per month is where it comes in.  But it's a complete pay for performance model, pay for compliance, and that's generally where we see it fall in.  Where most companies out there are a pay per employee per month regardless of results.

Dave Rearick: Explain more to our listening audience what you mean by pay for performance.

Don Doster: For example, I'll use a physical for example.  Let's say you were earning 5,000 points for a physical.  We get paid a penny a point so if the person goes and gets their physical then we would be paid $50.  If they don't get their physical they still get a statement from us every single month, but we don't get paid anything.  So, when they do the activity, they are awarded the points and at the point that they're awarded the points, we get paid.  Anybody that's not earning points, we're not getting paid.  So we're motivated with the client to get that behavior to change.

Dave Rearick: Got it.  That's very different than most compensation systems.

Steve Cherniak: Very unique concept.

Dave Rearick: You're not set to a per employee per month standard locked in fee.

Steve Cherniak: Don, one more question for you.  I'm sure the people that are listening have learned something, but specific to engagement, what have you found is the most successful engagement strategy to get members involved in health and wellness.

Don Doster: We do several different things but if I was going to tell you the number one thing, it's to get the leadership to understand the importance of it and adopt it.  This cannot look like an outside program.  It is absolutely got to look like it's something the company is driving.  If it looks like it is an outside driver, we'll still get results but we won't get the major results.  So one of the things we do early on is we meet with all the leadership.  We want to make sure they're all on the same page, they understand what this means to the company, more importantly what it means to their employees.  If they hear that from their leadership, they take it seriously.

Steve Cherniak: Great lesson.  We're well aware of and creating a culture of wellness and it starts at the top to do that.

Don, we want to thank you.  If people are interested in finding out more about your company how can they get more information.

Don Doster: Our website is www.gbehavior.com.  They can go right to the website, click on the Contact Us, it's got all the information there.  My email is ddoster@gbehavior.com and our toll free number is 888-949-0541.

Steve Cherniak: Great.

David Rearick: Stay around if you can.  We want to move into our Healthier Journal Review now where every week we take a particular topic, a vendor, a product, a service or whatever and we review it.  Today's topic is Self Care Manuals, those heavy books that we used a lot of in the 1980's that would advise our employees in self care.

Steve Cherniak: We have one in the studio here by the Mayo Clinic.  It's a self care book, a rather hefty book which talks about common problems, illnesses and emergency situations.  There's a number of them out there, the American  Institute for Preventive Medicine, Healthwise is another one, Stay Well, I believe has it's own version as well.  What's the point?  What do they hope that employees will be able to get out of it from the company's standpoint?

David Rearick: When we started in this industry this was a very common strategy to purchase these thick 2/3 inch thick paper bound books that would give employees information on how to manage minor illnesses and health information.  Statistically back then these were looked upon as very good investments because they reduced ER visits, they improved the health literacy of your population, they were relatively inexpensive normally ranging anywhere from $4 to $15 per copy and by distributing them you cut down on ER rates and a lot of other things.  Today however, I don't think they have much usage.  You know why?

Steve Cherniak: Why is that?

David Rearick: The internet.

Steve Cherniak: People can go to the internet for the same information.

David Rearick: That's right and content is free.  For the most part it's free and it's there, good content if you use a legitimate site.  In fact that ought to be a topic for a next show - what are the legitimate sites out there?

Steve Cherniak: I'll make a note.

David Rearick: How do sites get certified?

Steve Cherniak: Also nurse lines.  Lots of companies have nurse lines and basically you're calling a nurse because you need assistance, immediate assistance and that's the purpose of the book as well.  When my child has a fever what do I do?  An earache, what do I do?

David Rearick: Nicer to talk to a live person than it is to actually look it up on Page 53 in some manual.  It's been on the shelf for three or four years and probably out of date by the time you use.

Steve Cherniak: But also I'm not ready to write it off as you are Dave.  I think it does have a place or could have a place in a company's wellness program if done right, meaning not given out and saying "Here's your book, read it and we hope you use it."  Given out, but given out in the course of an orientation.  "Here's your book, this is why we're giving it out, why we think it's important and what you can benefit from it and what the company can benefit from it."  And then also doing quarterly follow up in the form of say, quizzes.  "Here's our self care guide quiz for the quarter.  If you complete it, fill it out, complete it, turn it in, you get an incentive for it."  So you're constantly reminding or making the employee having a book available for them to go back to the book, refer to it and then putting in their mindset that this is a valuable tool for us to keep around the house, keep in the office or such that we can use.

David Rearick: I like your idea but I think the same idea could be used with the internet content that's available.

Steve Cherniak: Can't argue with that.

David Rearick: I think we're just moving away from paper.  In fact, my wife made me clean out my entire library about a month ago.  She said "You know we've got books everywhere.  Let's get rid of these."

Steve Cherniak: But it's the image.

David Rearick: I know.  Now my library has got knick knacks.  The books are gone.

Steve Cherniak: But you've got your computer sitting right there in the middle of it with all the information that you need on it.

David Rearick: So where would we write online self care manuals today.

Steve Cherniak: One thing is in the future I'm hoping to have a guest of one of these companies on to talk about self care and hopefully extend the conversation a little bit more from their standpoint with it.  But right now I'd kind of put it in the middle of the spectrum.  I think there's value there, maybe from a small company that wants to make a minimal investment in the books but also make it a visible part of their program on an ongoing program with it.  So I'm not ready to give up on them.

David Rearick: So risky to be sick.

Steve Cherniak: Okay, in our wellness continuum.

David Rearick: Surely not terminal.

Steve Cherniak: Right.  Well, I think it's time to wrap up the show.

David Rearick: We're coming to the end.  We need to thank our sponsor again, the Benefit Advisors Network, for sponsoring this half hour.  We would like you, if you want to know more about the Benefit Advisors Network, to go to their website which is www.benefitadvisorsnetwork.com, learn more about the firms that are in that organization.

Steve Cherniak: And we want to thank our guest, Don Doster, president of gBehavior and for more information there go to www.gbehavior.com.

David Rearick: Do we have a challenge?

Steve Cherniak: We do have a challenge.  We'd like to try and reward our listeners and for our listeners out there if you would like to receive a copy of a Well Fit Starter Module, it's kind of a complete wellness program in a book, in a CD, giving you challenges, flyers, promotions, to earn that Starter Module, you just need to answer this question.  The question is, we talked a little bit earlier about the study of people identifying the various organs in the body, what percentage of the people were able to correctly identify the location of the heart?  So you might have to go back and listen to the show again to get that percentage, but the first person to correctly identify that by sending it either to Dr. Dave or I, will receive a copy of the Well Fit Starter Module.

David Rearick: And to reach us it's Dr. Dave at Healthy Business Radio or Stephen with a ‘ph’ at Healthy Business Radio.

Steve Cherniak: But I only have an MS.

David Rearick: I know.  Listen, we want to also let you know that last week's winner was Betsy Higginbotham of Dacula, Georgia.

END

Gravity Free Radio Interview with Scott Allen, Nostradmus of the Social Media Age

Erik Wolf interviewed Scott Allen, author of the Virtual Handshake, on his Gravity Free Radio show. Scott was one of the earliest social media advocates and he shares where he was and where he sees things going in this informative interview.  You'll also get some great tips on using social media, especially Twitter.

Thanks again to Karen Galambos at Right Type Pro for this transcription.

GRAVITY FREE RADIO!

www.gravityfreeradio.com

Eric Wolf, host

Scott Allen, guest

July 14, 2009

Erik Wolf: Good morning, Scott. How are you?

Scott Allen: Good morning, Erik. I’m doing great.

Erik Wolf: I did introduce you as the “Nostradamus of the Social Media Age”.  How does it feel?  You wrote the Virtual Handshake, how long ago was that?

Scott Allen: We actually started on the Virtual Handshake, we started writing it in December 2002, it took us quite awhile. We released an eBook, a short contained portion of the book about a year later or so.  The actual book came out in 2005, August 2005.

There were some books out about blogging by then, but it was really the first book on the business use of the broader spectrum or what has now become to be called “Social Media” including podcasting and social networking and really focused on the relationship aspect of it in the virtual world and the business strategy behind it, not just how to use the technology.

Erik Wolf: Scott, how does it feel to be right?

Scott Allen: (laughing) Well, I liken myself to…I now have a very strong sense of identification with whoever the first guy was who decided to be an auto mechanic and 95% of the world was still driving horse and buggies.    There is certainly a sense of satisfaction in that. I decided I wanted to write a trend and I got on it.  I also have learned one of the classic entrepreneurial truths, I won’t say it is mistake, but it is a entrepreneurial truth – first to market is not all it is cracked up to be.  Being the first person to market in a new product or a new sector, sometimes you can get a strong first move or advantage, but if it is going to be a fairly large marketplace, if there are going to be a lot of people offering that service or product, a lot of times there is an advantage to being the second or third player.  Being an early comer but not necessarily the first people in to the marketplace who can come in and see what is going on.

Erik Wolf: It is a lot pressure, isn’t it?

Scott Allen: Yeah, it is.  I kind of had my head down. The big companies weren’t ready to hear the message and people weren’t ready to hire speakers about this. I kind of had my head down working with some of the small business early adopters when the big wave hit.  I had also made some life decisions of my own. I was just talking the other day, I was very much enjoying the fact that I was sleeping in. I kind of cracked a joke with you, we had a little mix up about our day yesterday and I was up at 7:00 a.m. which is very unusual for me.  I was cracking the joke to you saying, “What am I going to do with this extra three hours today that I am not used to having!”

I didn’t just go crazy like some other young single folks who are able to go in and devote insane amounts of time into this business.  I am very happy with where I have ended up with it. I keep myself  busy. I have got projects that I love to work on, people I love to work with. I like my lifestyle. I could use a few more speaking engagements, but other than that I am really happy with it.

There are definitely some advantages to coming in and seeing, in any business coming in and seeing what the early adopters did and coming in and being able to make a big splash if you have the energy and the finances and the time to do it.

Erik Wolf: The last time we talked to you, we talked a lot about your experience as a writer for about.com and I know that in the time since you’ve sort of moved on from that.  I know that in addition to the Virtual Handshake and your other writing, about.com is one of those places that people really knew you and kind of developed a relationship with you. How are you using your time nowadays in the post about.com phase of the Scott Allen adventure?

Scott Allen: About.com, I was there for six years. It served a great purpose for me in terms of being able to build my reputation and also being able to get out there and help a lot of entrepreneurs.  The point, though, where the stuff that needed to be done with it and the way that it needed to be done it wasn’t in a fit with what I wanted to be doing and the way I wanted to be helping people.  We had a friendly parting of ways. My content will stay on there indefinitely. I have written some of the most popular articles on entrepreneurship on the web, they will still be up there and continue to well in the search engines.

As I said, I’ve been doing the entrepreneurial thing a long time and the longer I am in it the more and more I am interested in finding, not only the kind of projects that excite me and the people to work with that excite me, but one of the things I’ve found is that you’ve really got to choose businesses that suite your work style.  For some many entrepreneurs who are somewhere between mildly distracted and severe ADD and who are resistant to authority and to constraints, that means we have to find our own path and we have to find other like-minded people to work with.  So that is one of the things I am doing. I have some projects that I am involved with.  American Guitar Academy is one that I am heavily involved with and am helping them launch their on-line live guitar lessons. I am involved in that.

The other thing I have taken on is I’m looking at ways that I can start micro-businesses around an open entrepreneurship concept. What I am really interested to see is if essentially, for lack of a better way to describe it, is the open source model for developing software can’t be applied to developing businesses.  Obviously it is a challenge. How can the people who invest the time in it see the benefit on the back end. With software it is a little bit easier because they will be able to directly use the software that is created. That is not necessarily quite as applicable in a business.  I really think that in the current state of consciousness and state of the economy that there is a really interesting opportunity here to explore some different ways that start-ups can be done.

Erik Wolf: This to me was a really fascinating idea. We had a short exchange about this a couple of months ago, maybe it was even less than that. It was around the time that you had left about.com.  This to me was just an absolutely fascinating idea, because with all of the sharing that goes on on the web right now, and even between business owners…we will share our photos, we will share our You Tube videos, we will live blog our lunch…but in terms of actually collaborating and using the tools for mutual benefit in terms of actually learning something about your business, in terms of trying to get information from other business owners.  Like, “How do your numbers actually look?” and “How do I do this?” , these are things that we haven’t quite figured out on the web yet and I thought it was just fantastic to see that somebody was actually taking a stab at it and trying to make it happen.

Scott Allen: There is, as I said, there is a state of the collective conscious that has a certain readiness for this. With thillennials that are coming into the work force who are asking questions like, “Why does it have to be private to talk about how much money each other makes?” or “Why do the books of a private company have to be private?” or flipping it around the other way, “Do we really need to have the SEC involved in order to run a company transparently?”  So this ends up creating some interesting…when you start asking these difficult questions and stop making the pre-supposition that typically go with creating a start-up, what if we didn’t have any of this framework. Who says that just because it evolved to this over the last couple of hundred years, who said it was absolutely the best way to do it?  Innovation doesn’t usually come from one tiny little incremental step of the way it has been done. It usually comes from someone coming in and saying, “Let’s apply a whole different way of thinking about the problem.”  Maybe it is a totally new way of thinking. Maybe it is applying something from another problem space like open source software development to the problem as well.

So we start thinking about things like, “How can we compensate people, when the company doesn’t have any cash, how can we make sure that the people still see kind of compensation if and when the company is successful?”  The way that is typically done has been done has been with stock or stock options.  But who says it has to be done with stock or stock options. I have demonstrated in a couple of things in my own and have seen some other examples of placed words done contractually. You contractually agree that so and so is going to get X percentage of the net profits of the company under such time or if certain conditions are met. Guess what, if we do the whole thing by contract, the FCC and all the regulatory commissions, all the stuff about ownership, all that crap goes away.  It is simply a matter of contractual agreement. You write your contractual agreement that everything is done under binding arbitration and you don’t ever even have to involve the courts. When you know you don’t have to involve the courts, all of a sudden you start looking at radical, significant changes in reducing your overhead and reducing your risk on the legal side of things.

Erik Wolf: In terms of testing this or rolling it out, what is the next step for you? Are you looking for beta companies?  Is there a way that people can get involved if they want to be part of the open source business experiment?

Scott Allen: What I am doing right now is I am doing exactly what you should do with any start-up.  I am first of all doing some market research to see what is out there.  This is one of the things I just want to see happen. If I went out there and said that somebody was already doing this then I would just leave it alone and participate and throw my projects into that.  So far I have not found that. I have found bits and pieces of it, I have found parts of it.  I have found a great site called “Key Work” that is really great at helping put the teams together and helping people who want to do this kind of work find each other.  It is missing the part after that of how do I now structure a business that supports these kinds of concepts and these kinds of ideas.  I don’t necessarily want to create a company that provides every single thing ourselves, but I do want to create a one-stop resource shop for people who want to do this kind of business so they know where to go and what tools they can use and make things like legal document templates and contract templates and those things available to everybody.

One project that is going on is checking up on things that are out there. Plus, I have a couple of good people I have been fortunate enough to find. I have an old friend from Houston, who is an attorney, who is a small business attorney, he is absolutely enthralled by the concept of helping me wrestle with some of the legal challenges that this presents.  At this point, it is doing the research and seeing what the potential opportunity is there.

Meanwhile, of course I don’t have funding to sit there and drop $100,000 on this thing to make it happen overnight. So I’ve got to keep my other business ventures going so in an exact life imitates business, my situation is very much the situation that I am trying to help solve for people.  I have to keep making a living with other things and other projects while doing this too. I can’t just throw myself full time into this, as much as I might like to.

Erik Wolf: Of course, you are also drinking your own Kool Aid and telling us all about it.

Scott Allen: The site and the business itself is its own first example.

Erik Wolf: It is a really exciting idea and something that I am personally really excited to see develop. We see just so many clients that don’t know where to start, what to do and there are so many people that just seem to give up a little too early just because it is so hard to the get information and it so hard to find that support group amongst your peers.

I am going to change gears for just a second, Scott before we let you go.  You said something interesting on Twitter a couple of weeks ago. You said, “I’ve come to the conclusion”, I’m now paraphrasing… but you said, “I’ve come to the conclusion that I need more Twitter followers. I need a lot of Twitter followers.”  Explain that, please share what your thinking there was and where you see the benefits.

Scott Allen: A little quick context for that is that I am known as a social media consultant.  I have particularly been in the business to business space and have emphasized everything about authenticity and transparency and having conversations and all of that good stuff.  I still absolutely feel that way.  Here is the thing…Twitter is an interesting communications tool. That is what it is, Twitter is not a community, Twitter is a communications tool.  It can be used for one to one messaging and private conversations, it can be used to have a conversation with one person and have a few people listening on it.  It is also a broadcast medium.  It is all of these things depending upon how you try to use it.

There are a few things I discovered.  Basically, what really drove this for me is that I have been mostly involved in the business to business arena and I got involved with a business to consumer project and kind of tried to do a soft launch to see what response was off of my own personal network, which at the time was 4,300 people, all achieved “organically”.  My response rate was, in a word “disappointing”. In terms of the response I got on Twitter to my announcement about this. So I went to a couple of my friends who had much, much larger following accounts, on order of magnitude, like 10 times as many followers as I did, they have added them through proactive following techniques.  Proactive – you follow people and they follow back.  What happened was that I found out that as a percentage response rate, their percentage response was about half what mine was.  Half.  Their total follower account was 10 times, net result five times better raw responses.

Erik Wolf: Which follows the study that Mashable just published about the response rates to Twitter announcements based on follower counts. They talk so much about the fact that your percentage goes way, way down but of course you have so many more people that you are talking to that the response is still better.

Scott Allen: Bingo!  That is just counting the first wave response. When you multiple, when you take that out to two to three degrees of separation with re-Tweets, it ended up actually being significantly higher than that.  Because the five times better rate at the first level but a 25 times better response rate at the second level.  It actually ended up being about 12.  So, the point is that if I wanted to use this as a channel for promoting a broad business to consumer kind of thing, if I want to work those into my conversation then I needed to do that.

Basically, the celebrities have arrived at Twitter.  Nine months ago you could be on the front page of Twitterholic, which tracks the most followed people on Twitter with under 100,000 followers.   Now, you’ll be somewhere in the 300-400s if you have that many followers.  Twitter’s own behavior is promoting that, because Twitter for free, to promote the fact that they have celebrities is making them look good. When you join Twitter, they say here are some suggested followers, Ashton Kutcher, CNN Breaking News, The Real Shaq, MC Hammer.  So, Twitter is, sort of, the worst offender at doing this, at creating these Twitter celebrities.

That fact of the matter is that there is still are a lot of tools out there that figure your Twitter follower account as part of how they give you some kind of score, like Twitter Grader, there are several authority based Twitter search tools.  The fact of the matter is that if you have a higher follower count, you are going to present higher in these things.  I don’t care a thing about my follower count for its own sake. I am not trying to brag about my follower account. I am not trying to say that I have 27,000 followers makes me more authoritative than someone with 270.

Erik Wolf: I’m impressed you are still taking to me, Scott!

Scott Allen: (laughing) What I am saying is the reality that the way that Twitter verse has evolved is that if you want to use it for any kind of mass media, for any kind of larger, broader audience then go ahead and do so.  The thing is it doesn’t preclude you being conversational.  That is the mistake a lot of people make.  I still follow the same guidelines that most of the social  media people are saying, that only 1/20 of your Tweets should be overtly self-promotional. I have conversations one on one with people and I reply to direct messages that are truly directed at me. I reply to conversations and everything else. I still use it in the same way. I do have to use some filters, because I obviously can’t read a stream of 25,000 people and everything they post.  So I have sort of funnels. I have the social media people who I follow.  I have the Austin people I follow, I try to keep up with people locally. I have my VIP group of about 30 people who I count as close friends, who I really want to see and make sure I see everything they have to say. I use tools, I use TweetDeck to help filter those out.  Every once in awhile a I take a dip in the big stream and anyone with half a brain knows that if I am following 25,000 I am not reading every single thing that they write.

Erik Wolf: Although, it would have given you something to do with your three hours yesterday.

Scott Allen: (laughing) It is a reflection of reality. You manage your attention. I am sitting here spending half an hour on the phone with you. I can’t spend half hour on the phone with everybody I know. How often could I do that?  We are selective about how much time and how much attention we spend with people, depending upon how well we know them.  All I am doing is letting Twitter, instead of being a little small box, I am using some tools to give me those little small boxes and a lighter attention at the broader level.  The people who like what I have to say, they end up moving down the funnel.

Case in point, the very first day that I bit the bullet and said, “Alright, I am going to go on this high following scheme.”  The very first day I did that I focused on people in Austin and I followed 1,000 people in Austin in one day.  I kicked it off in the morning. I read all the direct messages I get back. A lot of them are junk, cause they are auto-welcome messages that are spam. But one person said, “Hey, great to meet another Austinite.”  I said, “I am trying to follow more people so that I could keep up with what was going on in town.”  She said, “Hey, I’m having a get together at my place this afternoon. I do a little monthly thing for some of my friends who I am also connected with on social media.”  That day I got an invitation to go to a Happy Hour with a bunch of people who were Twitter users and social media users but they were not hanging out with the social media people. They were not the people who come to social media clubs and social media breakfasts and all these other things. They weren’t tech people, at all. They were very light, casual users of this stuff.  It was a totally different circle of people. I have already gotten one client and two perspective clients out of the people that I’ve met by going to that Happy Hour three times.

This kind of strategy absolutely can work if you are focused and thoughtful about who it is that you are adding and following. Like niche marketing, if you focus where it is and the kind of people you are adding it just gives you more opportunities.

Erik Wolf: We are running out of time with you, but I have one more question on this very quickly. You did grow your base, really significantly in a very short period of time.  I think it has only been a couple of weeks since I noticed that you posted that Tweet about increasing your follower base.  Since then you have just blown up.  How many man hours has it taken you to get from, you have increased about five times or more?

Scott Allen: I have gone from 4,300 followers to about 27,000-28,000 since April 1^st or May 1^st. In terms of man hours, that is the great thing, it actually only takes me an adding session, using the tools that I use, it takes me only 10-15 minutes of my time. I do that 3-4 times a week. Call it an hour a week, total.

Erik Wolf: Excellent.

Scott Allen: If you don’t want to move as fast as I do, there are automated tools that you can actually set up and forget and they will add them for you.  There is a really great one called…Twollow.com. What Twollow does is that you can put in a set of keywords and it will automatically follow people who are tweeting those keywords for you, every day.  On the free account it will add about 10-20 people a day for you. If you pay a little premium, you can have it add a lot more for you. The idea, of course, is that you follow those people. You yourself should be tweeting about the things that you are looking for people to follow about. If they come back, if they are automatically following and they come back and look and they see that you are also tweeting about ‘green living’ or ‘social entrepreneurship’, or whatever it is, then odds are very good that they will turn around and follow you back.

Erik Wolf: It is part of maintaining the genuineness of what you are supposed to be doing out there as opposed to just blasting something out. It does keep it more real if you are targeting the people that you are going after.

Scott Allen: In general, in social media automating something that you would do by hand anyway, is not inauthentic.

Erik Wolf: The automatic direct message. That’s something that people do because they don’t really feel like direct messaging every single person that follows them.

Scott Allen: The Auto DMs, I am getting a lot of them. I did a breakdown of this and I would say that the numbers I ended up was about 80% of them are either out and out spam, or so blatantly self-promotional that they are just offensive, over 80%.   About 15% are just kind of innocuous and don’t really accomplish anything – “Thanks for following me, I look forward to getting to know you.”  If we just eliminated the 80% that are blatantly spam and self-promotional I don’t think people would be nearly as offended by them.  But, about 15% are just kind of innocuous and don’t accomplish anything. About 5% actually either make me laugh, make me think or make me want to contact the person or go to their website. In every case, it is brilliant copywriting.  It is something out of the ordinary that really stands out, really brands them and is really engaging.

If we could get it to where everyone was like that 5%, I don’t think people would have nearly such a negative feeling of auto welcome messages. I had to turn mine off. I actually had significantly better response from people with mine when I had an Auto DM message. I had to turn mine off, though because there is a limit to how many DMs you can send a day.

Erik Wolf: That’s interesting.

Scott Allen: If I followed and then those people follow back and then I Auto DM them, I outrun my DM limit.

Erik Wolf: I wouldn’t have actually known that.  I have never run into my Direct Message quota.

Scott Allen: I was surprised too. I decided it was more important for me to do the mass following than for me to be able to have my Auto DMs.   I did a split test.  This is the thing, people can sit there and pontificate all they want.  I did a split test of no message versus sending my Auto DM message.  I found out that when I have an Auto DM message I actually only had one negative response from somebody, ever.

Erik Wolf: Really?

Scott Allen: Once that came up and I talked to some people, a couple of other people have said, “Yeah, I didn’t really like getting the Auto DM.” I actually only had one person out of thousands who actually said, “Don’t Auto DM me. That’s really offensive.”  But what I found was that when I didn’t have an Auto DM that was engaging and authentic and the kind of thing that I would send somebody if I had time to do it all manually, I found out that the number of new followers who actually then engaged in conversation was actually 16 times higher than if I gave no response.  16 times higher that people actually came and started engaging me with either a DM back to me or app messages or re-Tweets or something like that.

Erik Wolf: Well, Scott, you’ve been breaking all the rules, all the things that people tell us not to do.  We definitely appreciate your insight.

Before we let you go, can we trouble you for some free advice for our listeners?

Scott Allen: Absolutely.  In general or do you have a specific thing in mind?

Erik Wolf: Anything you want. Whatever you feel like pontificating on for a minute or so.

Scott Allen: There are two things that go hand in hand, and they kind of go off of what I was just talking about.  One is don’t, I’m not going to say ‘ignore the gurus’ and I’m not going to say ‘ignore the experts’, but I am going to say if you have a gut feeling or just what they are saying doesn’t fit right with you then, by all means, feel free to try your own thing.  But test it. That is the thing. It was the thing I did with my Auto DM. It was not that I just went the other way, I tested it and I showed that, yes the response rate is better, I have higher engagement with an Auto DM than not. My point is that you can break the rules, as long as you track what you are doing. If what you are doing is working then it doesn’t matter if it breaks the rules.

The other thing that kind of goes along with that is about social media engagement. One of the things I see is that I see a lot of social media experts talk about your social media engagement has to be steady.  There needs to be some degree of steadiness. Obviously, you don’t want to have something where you’ve created a blog and then there is not a post on it for three months.  But, this idea that you have to be doing three posts a day to Twitter and five posts a week to your blog and that everything has to be a constant stream everywhere, is BS.  Because, that is inauthentic. What is authentic is to publish when you have something to say.

The other thing is that the little hidden subconscious thing. Here is what happens when I don’t post on Twitter for about a week…when I don’t post on Twitter for about a week, it is because I am working on something. It is because I am actually doing something.  Social media silence doesn’t mean that you dropped off the face of the Earth. It means you are actually doing some real work.  When you come back from that, people are happy to see you. I get missed, people miss me when I am gone for a week, when I am not posting actively. I think the value of that is that there is a law of supply and demand. If people like what you have to say, then there is no harm in actually shortening the supply of it because then people are that much  more interested and engaged when you come back. The thing is that you have been off and working and you then have something to talk about.  Not only that, you reinforce that you do actually do work too and you are not just a virtual social butterfly out there on Twitter, Facebook and blogs all day long.

Don’t feel the pressure, don’t let people pressure you into feeling like you’ve got to keep this constant stream of output going on 17 different channels at once. It is absolutely okay to go off and get focused and get a big project done and come back and then talk about it.  People will be happy to see you when you show back up.

Erik Wolf: Scott, thank you so much for everything. Thank you for joining us again. We really enjoyed having you on always.  We’ll talk to you again soon.

Show of the Week: Sandy Springs Rotary on Atlanta Business Radio

Each week I'm going to start transcribing (well actually my friends at Right Type Pro are going to transcribe) my favorite show for that week and then I'll post it here. This week I'm sharing a show we recently did that featured the Sandy Springs Rotary and spotlights some of the great work they do in the community.

Atlanta Business Radio

www.atlantabusinessradio.com

Sandy Springs Rotary Special

Host: Amy Otto

Guests:  Eric Stotts, Justin Daniels, Fran Farias and Bill Snellings

July 1, 2009

Amy Otto:

Good morning and welcome to the Atlanta Business Radio Show.  I'm Amy Otto and my goodness, this morning I'm joined by Eric Stotts.  It's kind of weird not to have Lee Kantor as my co-host.

Eric Stotts:

Very strange I'm sure.

Amy Otto:

I don't know that I can do it without him.  This is a first time for me Eric.  You're very special.  After 100 shows, I now have a new co-host for the day.

Eric Stotts:

I feel very special.

Amy Otto:

One hundred shows.  We had our anniversary a couple of weeks ago, and out of 100 shows I counted it up, we had over 438 guests come through our station.

Eric Stotts:

Amazing.

Amy Otto:

In the seats you're sitting in now.  Although we have upgraded our studio a time or two, it's amazing all the business owners that we have with us.  I'm excited about our show today because Eric when you came to me and were telling me about the Rotary Club, I didn't really know much about it.  It's a very rich organization with a lot of tradition, so I'm excited about our show today to learn more about Rotary, learn more about the four businesses that represent the Rotary today and also just to have a little round table discussion and inform our listeners to how Rotary may help their business and kind of give them a snapshot of what its all about.

Eric Stotts:

That sounds great.

Amy Otto:

So let's get started.  This morning we have with us Bill Snellings from Snellings Walters Insurance Agency.  Welcome.

Bill Snellings:

Thank you.

Amy Otto:

We also have Justin Daniels. Justin is, goodness, he's got a wealth of knowledge in a lot of things.  We'll let him tell us more about that in a little bit.  Welcome.

Justin Daniels:

Thank you.

Amy Otto:

And Fran who is with State Farm.  Welcome to the Atlanta Business Radio Show.

Fran Farias:

Thank you.

Amy Otto:

And Eric, tell us what your business is.

Eric Stotts:

I work for Advantec.  It's a professional HR organization and typically we work with businesses who are quite frankly frustrated with the growing number of things cutting into their profitability.  Typically we find they are people or employment related.  Going into the Rotary organization has given me a wonderful foray into meeting folks like Bill who was my sponsor into the Sandy Springs Rotary and just building those relationships and fostering those networking partnerships has really helped all of our businesses.

Amy Otto:

Wonderful.  So Bill you've been in Sandy Springs and in the area a long time it sounds like.

Bill Snellings:

Oh yeah, I'm an old Atlanta guy.  I grew up in Atlanta and I've been living with my family in Sandy Springs for 25 years so it's very much home to me.  Our business has been in the Sandy Springs area, of course in Atlanta for 56 years, but in the Sandy Springs area for 17 years.  It’s very much home to me and that's why the Sandy Springs Rotary Club was a natural in terms of joining a group that does so much good work in our community and in and around Sandy Springs.

Amy Otto:

Now Justin, tell me what is it that you do.  I know you're with a law firm, maybe give us a snapshot of your business and then we'll go around and talk again a little bit more about how Rotary impacts your business.

Justin Daniels:

Sure.  My business is I am an attorney.  I represent either serial entrepreneurs or emerging middle market companies.  My areas of expertise are corporate and commercial real estate law.  Since my office is in Sandy Springs I am involved in several activities that are in Sandy Springs, one of which is the Rotary.  And I'm involved in Rotary because the immediate past president Bill Holden, and of course Bill Snellings, suggested that I get involved.  I've enjoyed the people that I've met in Rotary and what our mission stands for.  So I've been a member now for a year and now I am the Director of Community Service.

Amy Otto:

Now Fran, again you're business is very relationship driven as well.  It sounds like you have a rich history in the Sandy Springs area.  Tell us a little bit about your business.  I understand a lot of times when people think of State Farm they only think of one type of insurance.  I understand there is financial services and other things that go along with that.  Give us a little overview of it.

Fran Farias:

Thank you Amy.  I'm Fran Farias and I have been in the Sandy Springs area since 1980.  I've seen a lot of changes that have happened and my association with State Farm began in 1990, so I'm approaching my twentieth year.  I've seen a lot of changes not only in Sandy Springs but also with State Farm.  You're right, we did start off with auto and home and life and health, but about ten years ago branched into banking and financial services.  So I wear a mortgage broker hat, an insurance hat, as well as a registered rep hat.

Amy Otto:

That's a lot of hats.

Fran Farias:

It is.

Amy Otto:

One thing I do notice about all four businesses is that they're very much relationship driven.  Nobody is going to trust you with their finances or their insurance or their life or their legal matters if they don't have a relationship with you.  Can ya'll just give me a little bit of a briefing on how the relationships develop at Rotary Club, or maybe we should even just back up and talk about the richness of it and the founding of it and then we can dovetail into the relationship part.  So Bill, I understand you're a past president, right?

Bill Snellings:

Yes, yes.

Amy Otto:

What does that mean?  Are you elected?

Bill Snellings:

Well, yes.  You kind of volunteer.  Our club in Sandy Springs has been around since 1973.  Rotary, as an organization, has been around almost 100 years and was founded by three men in Chicago.  Fran, Chicago?  Where were they?

Fran Farias:

Yes.  It was actually Paul Harris.  Paul Harris was the founder and he approached three other business leaders in the community of Chicago saying "What can we do?" in 1905 and saying "How can we help our community?"  It started out, one person was an attorney and another one was, well I don't recall all the…but Paul Harris was an attorney, that was for sure.  They created this relationship.  They moved from one office to another and that rotation kind of triggered the name of "Rotary".

Amy Otto:

Okay.  So I understand with over 32,000 Rotary Clubs around the globe there's more than 1,200,000 men and women that belong to Rotary.  That's huge.  I also didn't realize it was international.  I've got to be honest, I actually thought it was all men.

Bill Snellings:

That changed a long time ago.

Amy Otto:

Did it?

Bill Snellings:

Yeah, Rotary was men only until the early '70s.

Amy Otto:

Fran, aren't you so glad they let us in?

Fran Farias:

That's true.  And it was actually in the late 1980's that women in the Atlanta area started moving into Rotary and so it was certainly a target area for me.  My father was in another service organization and it's really been a part of my whole lifestyle of being involved in service relationships and so forth.

Amy Otto:

So you've touched on service.  Can one of you please address just how they go about service in the community?  Rotary is geographically divided, correct?

Eric Stotts:

That's correct.  In Georgia we're in District 6900, or at least in Sandy Springs.  For instance, Fran is at the District level and she heads up community projects all throughout the District.  So a lot of the clubs, about 100 of them, roll up to Fran and look to her for guidance and leadership for community service opportunities for Rotary International projects, and really to provide best practices information to how to utilize the club's funds the best way on a domestic and international basis.

You asked about international projects.  Rotary takes on, I think the first international project we really took on was to eradicate polio.  At this point we're about 99%, polio has almost vanished but there are still some pockets in Africa, for instance, that are very difficult to reach.  But through the long arms of Rotary, and through our 1,000,000+ members we're able to go into those localized rural areas in Africa, for instance, to immunize children at a young age which is when polio really sets in.  So that was really one of the first initiatives on an international scale.

Amy Otto:

Okay.  Justin, can you maybe give us a snapshot of some of the service projects you've been involved in?

Justin Daniels:

Certainly.  In the past year I'd say one of the biggest facets of what we do is community literacy.  A lot of people may not realize that with the public schools we have around there's a lot of kids there who are at risk for reading.  So some of the programs that we do, we have a big program, it's the Dictionary Project for Kids.  So we'll go around to several of the local schools and we'll provide the kids there in the elementary schools with a dictionary, which for some of them is the first book they get.  It has the Rotary 4 Way Test and we go around to the different schools and we give that to them.

Another program we're going to have this year, which is a first time program, is the First Foundation where we're going to provide books to kids and families so that the parents, it may be the first books they have, can read to kids from zero to five years old.  So the idea is that if you have parents reading to you at night as a child that you're going to grow up and you're going to enjoy reading.  Once again that goes toward literacy.

I think for me personally I participated in the Graduation Coach Program where people like myself will go into the school and talk to kids who are at risk for reading and math to explain to them why math is important or why reading is important.  Like a guy will be playing his little PlayStation and I'll be like "Do you know how they write the software?" and he's like "No."  I'm like "It's because of coding and math.  That's why you want to have math.  Wouldn't you like to write one of these games someday."  The kid is like "Oh yeah, I can see why understanding math or reading might be important."

Amy Otto:

That's an interesting project and I think that reading in our schools is probably down a lot given the test scores in Georgia.  To have supplemental programs like yourself going into schools sounds like a valuable asset.  Fran, what are some of the other programs that you can shed light on that might be going on right now on the service end?

Fran Farias:

Just to piggy back off of what Justin was saying, the Dictionary Project that was started four or five years ago in Sandy Springs goes out to each one of the third graders.  Two years ago we started with the Words of Government that was a spin off of that which really became an educational opportunity.  It was during the election so kids got involved.  The Spalding Elementary School in Sandy Springs was the first school to pilot that.  I think we're going to into a second school this year, I believe.  Justin, is that right?

Justin Daniels:

Um-hmm.

Fran Farias:

To expand off of that, and Eric mentioned that I was the District Director for Service Projects with our 77 clubs in District 6900, our focus this year is primarily on water and sanitation, it's on literacy and education, maternal and child health, also economic and community development, as well as hunger.  So whether it's local projects, also partnering with international projects.  It’s a great opportunity to meet people all over the world.

I was in California last week visiting my daughter and stopped in at the Orinda Rotary Club and of course it's a club of 60 years.  Sandy Springs is 37 or 38 so it's interesting to see the things that they do.  We all do a lot of the same things but there's some other things that you pick up new ideas and that's really what it's all going to be about.

I will also spin off with one other thing that our District Governor this year is wanting to host a District Projects Fair which will be in Columbus in August.  It's an opportunity for all the Rotarians to see some new ideas, bring it back to their community, share.  This Dictionary Project is something that spread across the whole state now as well as the country.  I'm going to give up the mike a minute.

Amy Otto:

Bill, I would love to know, you've been in Rotary quite some time.  Walk us through maybe a memorable service project that you've been involved in.

Bill Snellings:

I've been in Rotary for ten years and several different ones.  One night I spent the night with about 60 foreign students on the floor at North Springs High School.  That was one of my first Rotary events because our club, we sponsor a student every year from a foreign country to learn about the U.S. and to go college.  We pay for that and then the other clubs around our District also sponsor students and so we end up with 70 or 80 foreign students in the U.S. for a year, ages 18 to 21.  So I spent the night on the floor in the gym with these 80 children.  They didn't sleep at all by the way.

Amy Otto:

And what about you?

Bill Snellings:

No.  (laughing)

Amy Otto:

Not so much?

Bill Snellings:

Not so much.  They played basketball all night.  But other things, meaningful things.  Tutoring a 9 year old girl from Africa whose parents don't speak English, for an hour and a half over at High Point Elementary School the past few months ago was very meaningful to me.  It was a simple little thing but it was so neat to watch this little girl read English because she didn't have anybody at home to help with that.

Amy Otto:

Right, I bet that was special.  And what is your contact with someone like that in the tutoring program?  How often are you with them?

Bill Snellings:

Well, you don't really tutor the same child each time.  We volunteer for a couple of hours and this is going on every week.  Actually, the Sandy Springs Mission has a bus and they bring the kids at risk after school actually over to a church where this goes on for a few hours.  Then the bus takes them back to the Sandy Springs Mission.  The Sandy Springs Mission, also by the way, is a huge project for our club and we have a lot of involvement with them, here again, heavily about literacy because these children, getting these kids reading and especially as they get older, that means they graduate from high school, and if they graduate from high school they don't go to jail.  If you look at the percentage of youth or young adults in jail today, the numbers that didn't finish high school is huge.  So something in our community that we work on very hard is this literacy issue that Justin was talking about a few minutes ago.

Amy Otto:

How do ya'll decide on these projects?  Is there a governing body?  Do you just sit around and think about what would be good in the community or are these projects offered from another level to the local Sandy Springs level?  Anybody have an answer for that?

Bill Snellings:

It's local.  The president and the board decides.  We look at the leadership of Rotary International and the theme of the organization from the top down and they usually create a theme and then we try to follow.  But it really comes down to our club and our leadership deciding on which projects we want to do based on the money that we've raised and what we have to spend.  A lot of them are ongoing year after year.  Literacy is something that just continues.  We meet projects that repeat year to year and then we add and take away some.

Amy Otto:

Eric, is there an acceptance process if one of our listeners is interested in the Rotary?  I mean, what do you have to do?

Eric Stotts:

Well, really we are about right around 70 members.  We are certainly looking for top prospects who are civic or business leaders inside the Sandy Springs community preferably, but they can really reside in any community, especially if they work here.   A lot of times, like I was sponsored by Bill and we're recommended for membership.  There are certain classifications of businesses within each Rotary Club, but I would say it's a fairly easy process to get involved.  If someone comes with the, I would say, proper mindset of Service  Before  Self, which is our motto, and they would like to give back to the community, I would say it's a very easy process.  So what we like to do is invite them to come to two meetings, then there is a vote to induct them or sponsor them into the membership, and basically they jump right in and get involved with service.

Amy Otto:

How many hours a week do ya'll feel that you might spend on Rotary?  Maybe we should say how many hours a month?  It sounds like you could get really involved.  Fran, maybe this one is directed at you.

Fran Farias:

Well, it certainly is.  I have three passions:  one is my work and my family and Rotary.  Well, maybe four - church and choir and so forth.  But you're right.  You can spend a lot of time.  I spend probably 10 to 20% of every day dealing with something to do with Rotary.

Amy Otto:

Wow.

Fran Farias:

Now that scares off a lot of people and it shouldn't because again it's where your passion is.  I see so many different things that can be accomplished there so I don't have just one focus, even though International was the real key that brought me to the table.  I like the diversity of the members and that's what Eric was talking about.  Our membership is limited to 10 percent of each particular field so you have attorneys, you have insurance people, you have mortgage people, you have HR folks.  You have all the different types and they bring on a very interesting mix of how they do business and what you can learn from each other, whether serving on projects or just sitting at fairs and sharing Rotary.

Amy Otto:

Interesting.  So Justin, in the time you've been with the Rotary, have you made business relationships?  Have you fostered things that have actually helped your business through service?

Justin Daniels:

Well, I think since I've been in Rotary, obviously I think there is a business networking component to it, but I mainly got involved in it because I wanted to be more involved in the community and I liked the message of the organization.  The business networking part, sure, there is a big component of that.  I mean I sit in the room with people who I know very well through business and through Rotary, but the primary focus of what I was looking to do is I wanted to be involved in an organization, do good things in the community.  To kind of talk about the question you asked before about how much involvement, last year I was simply a member and I participated in some projects.  You come to our weekly meeting which is about an hour, but it's once a week.   But this year, now that I'm on the board and I'm Director of Community Service, now I'm learning skills such as I have to manage 10 projects, a budget of $15,000, I have to make sure that the people below me are doing what they need to be doing and the projects are getting done.  What I would suggest is that these are skills that as an attorney sometimes I'm used to micromanaging because I feel responsible for what I do and it's required that I get out of my comfort zone and learn some other skills of delegating, having a budget, things that I may not get in my job, but will make me better at it.  I think there are skills such as that that you can get from doing things like Rotary that you don't ordinarily get.  It's an opportunity for people to see you in a different capacity and that's how you make a lot of long term friendships and business relationships.

Amy Otto:

Absolutely.  Definitely a lot of value in that.  Eric, how about you?  How much time are you spending on Rotary?

Eric Stotts:

I spend two to three hours a week, I would say, depending on the level of service projects going on at one particular time.  I'm also the Club photographer.

Amy Otto:

Hence the photos.

Fran Farias:

And a very good one at that.

Eric Stotts:

That has actually turned out to be a godsend because I've met a number of members through a number of different events and I'm always encouraged to participate in the after hour events or the community service events or anything relating to Rotary and it's afforded me the possibility to meet a lot of different members.  That's what Rotary is all about, giving back to the community, building long term friendships really, and if it turns into business great, but if doesn't I don't think that's the primary purpose of everybody's attendance.

Amy Otto:

Sure, sure.  It doesn't appear to be.  I mean everybody that comes to Rotary, their heart is really about the service and about their community.

Fran, one more question for you.  You've been doing this a long time and it's obviously a passion of yours, can you maybe walk us through the leadership course?  You can be just a member, right, or if you aspire to be more and to get your feet wet in other areas, how does that work?

Fran Farias:

Sure.  As Bill mentioned earlier, he said the opportunity is the word volunteer.  Anytime you're involved in a service organization you've got to be able to step up and the only time that we say when you join Rotary that you can say “No" is when you join.  After that you're always supposed to say "Yes", at what level is what one person is able to do.  I've been involved in community service, vocational service, international service, hosted the international student, I did have the opportunity of bypassing Treasurer and Secretary because I said I was not going to do that.  So I skipped over to Vice President and later on President and that was several years ago.  After that you're always kind of encouraged to be involved in the district level and worked on several foundation committees, and this year was selected to be a District Director.

We're encouraging members…this has been going on for about five years, the Rotary Leadership Institute, and I've just completed my certification as a discussion leader.  It's an opportunity for Rotarians, no matter how many years they've been in Rotary, you can always learn something.  There's three levels, or three different courses that you can get involved in.  Of course that just provides you a lot more information so we're going to encourage our members, not only those that are aspiring to be President, but also others that are interested to learn more about Rotary and how to serve.

Amy Otto:

Great.  Bill, any of our listeners that this is resonating with them, they think I want to get involved in my community or I would love to do more service, where do they start?

Bill Snellings:

The website is a great place to start.  Just the Rotary International website and from there you could go to our website and/or find a Rotary club close to where you live and work.  There are many, many clubs around metro Atlanta of all sizes.  We have 70 members, there are clubs that have 15 members and clubs that have 400 members.  So you need to find one that suits your style and size.  There are clubs that meet at lunch, there are clubs that meet for breakfast, there are those that meet for supper, so there's lots to choose from.

Fran Farias:

Give our website.

Eric Stotts:

Our website is www.sandyspringsrotary.org.  So please, if you're interested in coming by on a Monday at noon to just have a bite to eat, learn more about Rotary, just go to our website, click on Contact Us or show up at Hammond Glen on Monday afternoons at noon, and we'd love to have you for lunch.

Amy Otto:

That sounds great.  I might have to check that out.

Eric Stotts:

Please do.

Fran Farias:

We don't have anyone from radio by the way.  (laughing)

Amy Otto:

You don't have anyone from radio?  Hmm, I might have to check that out.

Fran Farias:

And that's that the diversity.

Amy Otto:

So if I come to a meeting it's just a check it out meeting, right?

Eric Stotts:

It's a free lunch on us.

Amy Otto:

Can't beat that.

Eric Stotts:

Can't beat it.

Amy Otto:

Sounds like a win/win.

Eric Stotts:
There is such a thing as a free lunch.

Amy Otto:

And it also sounds like a great way too to focus your service efforts.  I mean there are so many people looking to get involved and it can be fragmented where you're doing a little service here, a little service there.  It would be nice to have it all under one umbrella and have those that are like minded working with you.

Justin Daniels:

One thing I would say from a new member's perspective is you are allowed to be as involved as you want to be and Rotary is one of the most well oiled machines or well organized organizations that I've ever been a part of.  It's phenomenal when you look on to a domestic and even local level, but when you get into the international projects, the level of impact we have to small rural communities in Uganda or Venezuela or South America or anywhere else; where we are actually purifying water for villages to allow them to live and have a sustainable life.  It's truly remarkable.

Fran Farias:

And just to piggy back on that, our Rotary Foundation, which the powerhouse that is behind that, we're nonpolitical, we're nonreligious, so we can get beyond those borders.  We can do the polio projects, we can do the clean water projects, we can do all these things and they welcome us.  Rotarians around the world in 163 countries, and how many of them are there in the United Nations, and we do partner a lot with the United Nations.  That also is a factor.

Amy Otto:

Any final thoughts?  Justin?

Justin Daniels:

I would just add one other thing.  I think like any other organization, you get out of it what you put into it.  Really the rewarding part is obviously we meet every week for lunch, but the real value in what we do is really getting involved in the service projects, the Literacy, the Coach for Kids, and getting out in the community because that's really where our organization is rewarding for the members who are a part of it.

Amy Otto:

Terrific.  Bill, any final thoughts from you?

Bill Snellings:

Well, I can only say that the ten years that I've been involved have been very meaningful to me.  I wanted, like Justin talked about, to join something that did something in the community and this has been a wonderful experience.  When they asked me to be President a couple of years ago, I agreed and what was so gratifying is the fact that Fran said a few minutes ago is when you ask people to do various projects, they say "Yes."  I'm in a business where I have 35 employees where you tell people what to do.  In this organization you're asking people to do on their own time because it's the right thing to do.  Like Justin said a little while ago, developing the skills of dealing with volunteers is a new skill set and a wonderful one that I've gotten better at.  It's been a great, great time for me.

Amy Otto:

Wonderful.  I hate to say this Eric but we are out of time.

Eric Stotts:

It flew by.  So I guess we'll see you and Lee on Monday.

Amy Otto:

Yes.  You know Mondays are good for me too.  That's usually my office day so by noon I'm ready to get out and have lunch and be with folks and learn more about service.

Eric Stotts:

Fabulous.

Amy Otto:

Thank you all for sharing your experiences with us today and the Rotary experience especially because we would love to have some of our listeners engage in this community service and the Rotary Club.

Thanks for being with us today.  Until next week I'm Amy Otto with the Atlanta Business Radio Show.